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So today, I would like to talk with you about bionics, which is the popular term for the science of replacing part of a living organism with a mechatronic device, or a robot. It is essentially the stuff of life meets machine. And specifically, I'd like to talk with you about how bionics is evolving for people with arm amputations. This is our motivation. Arm amputation causes a huge disability. I mean, the functional impairment is clear. Our hands are amazing instruments. And when you lose one, far less both, it's a lot harder to do the things we physically need to do. There's also a huge emotional impact. And actually, I spend as much of my time in clinic dealing with the emotional adjustment of patients as with the physical disability. And finally, there's a profound social impact. We talk with our hands. We greet with our hands. And we interact with the physical world with our hands. And when they're missing, it's a barrier. Arm amputation is usually caused by trauma, with things like industrial accidents, motor vehicle collisions or, very poignantly, war. There are also some children who are born without arms, called congenital limb deficiency. Unfortunately, we don't do great with upper-limb prosthetics. There are two general types. They're called body-powered prostheses, which were invented just after the Civil War, refined in World War I and World War II. Here you see a patent for an arm in 1912. It's not a lot different than the one you see on my patient. They work by harnessing shoulder power. So when you squish your shoulders, they pull on a bicycle cable. And that bicycle cable can open or close a hand or a hook or bend an elbow. And we still use them commonly, because they're very robust and relatively simple devices. The state of the art is what we call myoelectric prostheses. These are motorized devices that are controlled by little electrical signals from your muscle. Every time you contract a muscle, it emits a little electricity that you can record with antennae or electrodes and use that to operate the motorized prosthesis. They work pretty well for people who have just lost their hand, because your hand muscles are still there. You squeeze your hand, these muscles contract. You open it, these muscles contract. So it's intuitive, and it works pretty well. Well how about with higher levels of amputation? Now you've lost your arm above the elbow. You're missing not only these muscles, but your hand and your elbow too. What do you do? Well our patients have to use very code-y systems of using just their arm muscles to operate robotic limbs. We have robotic limbs. There are several available on the market, and here you see a few. They contain just a hand that will open and close, a wrist rotator and an elbow. There's no other functions. If they did, how would we tell them what to do? We built our own arm at the Rehab Institute of Chicago where we've added some wrist flexion and shoulder joints to get up to six motors, or six degrees of freedom. And we've had the opportunity to work with some very advanced arms that were funded by the U.S. military, using these prototypes, that had up to 10 different degrees of freedom including movable hands. But at the end of the day, how do we tell these robotic arms what to do? How do we control them? Well we need a neural interface, a way to connect to our nervous system or our thought processes so that it's intuitive, it's natural, like for you and I. Well the body works by starting a motor command in your brain, going down your spinal cord, out the nerves and to your periphery. And your sensation's the exact opposite. You touch yourself, there's a stimulus that comes up those very same nerves back up to your brain. When you lose your arm, that nervous system still works. Those nerves can put out command signals. And if I tap the nerve ending on a World War II vet, he'll still feel his missing hand. So you might say, let's go to the brain and put something in the brain to record signals, or in the end of the peripheral nerve and record them there. And these are very exciting research areas, but it's really, really hard. You have to put in hundreds of microscopic wires to record from little tiny individual neurons -- ordinary fibers that put out tiny signals that are microvolts. And it's just too hard to use now and for my patients today. So we developed a different approach. We're using a biological amplifier to amplify these nerve signals -- muscles. Muscles will amplify the nerve signals about a thousand-fold, so that we can record them from on top of the skin, like you saw earlier. So our approach is something we call targeted reinnervation. Imagine, with somebody who's lost their whole arm, we still have four major nerves that go down your arm. And we take the nerve away from your chest muscle and let these nerves grow into it. Now you think, "Close hand," and a little section of your chest contracts. You think, "Bend elbow," a different section contracts. And we can use electrodes or antennae to pick that up and tell the arm to move. That's the idea. So this is the first man that we tried it on. His name is Jesse Sullivan. He's just a saint of a man -- 54-year-old lineman who touched the wrong wire and had both of his arms burnt so badly they had to be amputated at the shoulder. Jesse came to us at the RIC to be fit with these state-of-the-art devices, and here you see them. I'm still using that old technology with a bicycle cable on his right side. And he picks which joint he wants to move with those chin switches. On the left side he's got a modern motorized prosthesis with those three joints, and he operates little pads in his shoulder that he touches to make the arm go. And Jesse's a good crane operator, and he did okay by our standards. He also required a revision surgery on his chest. And that gave us the opportunity to do targeted reinnervation. So my colleague, Dr. Greg Dumanian, did the surgery. First, we cut away the nerve to his own muscle, then we took the arm nerves and just kind of had them shift down onto his chest and closed him up. And after about three months, the nerves grew in a little bit and we could get a twitch. And after six months, the nerves grew in well, and you could see strong contractions. And this is what it looks like. This is what happens when Jesse thinks open and close his hand, or bend or straighten your elbow. You can see the movements on his chest, and those little hash marks are where we put our antennae, or electrodes. And I challenge anybody in the room to make their chest go like this. His brain is thinking about his arm. He has not learned how to do this with the chest. There is not a learning process. That's why it's intuitive. So here's Jesse in our first little test with him. On the left-hand side, you see his original prosthesis, and he's using those switches to move little blocks from one box to the other. He's had that arm for about 20 months, so he's pretty good with it. On the right side, two months after we fit him with his targeted reinnervation prosthesis -- which, by the way, is the same physical arm, just programmed a little different -- you can see that he's much faster and much smoother as he moves these little blocks. And we're only able to use three of the signals at this time. Then we had one of those little surprises in science. So we're all motivated to get motor commands to drive robotic arms. And after a few months, you touch Jesse on his chest, and he felt his missing hand. His hand sensation grew into his chest again probably because we had also taken away a lot of fat, so the skin was right down to the muscle and deinnervated, if you would, his skin. So you touch Jesse here, he feels his thumb; you touch it here, he feels his pinky. He feels light touch down to one gram of force. He feels hot, cold, sharp, dull, all in his missing hand, or both his hand and his chest, but he can attend to either. So this is really exciting for us, because now we have a portal, a portal, or a way to potentially give back sensation, so that he might feel what he touches with his prosthetic hand. Imagine sensors in the hand coming up and pressing on this new hand skin. So it was very exciting. We've also gone on with what was initially our primary population of people with above-the-elbow amputations. And here we deinnervate, or cut the nerve away, just from little segments of muscle and leave others alone that give us our up-down signals and two others that will give us a hand open and close signal. This was one of our first patients, Chris. You see him with his original device on the left there after eight months of use, and on the right, it is two months. He's about four or five times as fast with this simple little performance metric. All right. So one of the best parts of my job is working with really great patients who are also our research collaborators. And we're fortunate today to have Amanda Kitts come and join us. Please welcome Amanda Kitts. (Applause) So Amanda, would you please tell us how you lost your arm? Amanda Kitts: Sure. In 2006, I had a car accident. And I was driving home from work, and a truck was coming the opposite direction, came over into my lane, ran over the top of my car and his axle tore my arm off. Todd Kuiken: Okay, so after your amputation, you healed up. And you've got one of these conventional arms. Can you tell us how it worked? AK: Well, it was a little difficult, because all I had to work with was a bicep and a tricep. So for the simple little things like picking something up, I would have to bend my elbow, and then I would have to cocontract to get it to change modes. When I did that, I had to use my bicep to get the hand to close, use my tricep to get it to open, cocontract again to get the elbow to work again. TK: So it was a little slow? AK: A little slow, and it was just hard to work. You had to concentrate a whole lot. TK: Okay, so I think about nine months later that you had the targeted reinnervation surgery, took six more months to have all the reinnervation. Then we fit her with a prosthesis. And how did that work for you? AK: It works good. I was able to use my elbow and my hand simultaneously. I could work them just by my thoughts. So I didn't have to do any of the cocontracting and all that. TK: A little faster? AK: A little faster. And much more easy, much more natural. TK: Okay, this was my goal. For 20 years, my goal was to let somebody [be] able to use their elbow and hand in an intuitive way and at the same time. And we now have over 50 patients around the world who have had this surgery, including over a dozen of our wounded warriors in the U.S. armed services. The success rate of the nerve transfers is very high. It's like 96 percent. Because we're putting a big fat nerve onto a little piece of muscle. And it provides intuitive control. Our functional testing, those little tests, all show that they're a lot quicker and a lot easier. And the most important thing is our patients have appreciated it. So that was all very exciting. But we want to do better. There's a lot of information in those nerve signals, and we wanted to get more. You can move each finger. You can move your thumb, your wrist. Can we get more out of it? So we did some experiments where we saturated our poor patients with zillions of electrodes and then had them try to do two dozen different tasks -- from wiggling a finger to moving a whole arm to reaching for something -- and recorded this data. And then we used some algorithms that are a lot like speech recognition algorithms, called pattern recognition. See. (Laughter) And here you can see, on Jesse's chest, when he just tried to do three different things, you can see three different patterns. But I can't put in an electrode and say, "Go there." So we collaborated with our colleagues in University of New Brunswick, came up with this algorithm control, which Amanda can now demonstrate. AK: So I have the elbow that goes up and down. I have the wrist rotation that goes -- and it can go all the way around. And I have the wrist flexion and extension. And I also have the hand closed and open. TK: Thank you, Amanda. Now this is a research arm, but it's made out of commercial components from here down and a few that I've borrowed from around the world. It's about seven pounds, which is probably about what my arm would weigh if I lost it right here. Obviously, that's heavy for Amanda. And in fact, it feels even heavier, because it's not glued on the same. She's carrying all the weight through harnesses. So the exciting part isn't so much the mechatronics, but the control. So we've developed a small microcomputer that is blinking somewhere behind her back and is operating this all by the way she trains it to use her individual muscle signals. So Amanda, when you first started using this arm, how long did it take to use it? AK: It took just about probably three to four hours to get it to train. I had to hook it up to a computer, so I couldn't just train it anywhere. So if it stopped working, I just had to take it off. So now it's able to train with just this little piece on the back. I can wear it around. If it stops working for some reason, I can retrain it. Takes about a minute. TK: So we're really excited, because now we're getting to a clinically practical device. And that's where our goal is -- to have something clinically pragmatic to wear. We've also had Amanda able to use some of our more advanced arms that I showed you earlier. Here's Amanda using an arm made by DEKA Research Corporation. And I believe Dean Kamen presented it at TED a few years ago. So Amanda, you can see, has really good control. It's all the pattern recognition. And it now has a hand that can do different grasps. What we do is have the patient go all the way open and think, "What hand grasp pattern do I want?" It goes into that mode, and then you can do up to five or six different hand grasps with this hand. Amanda, how many were you able to do with the DEKA arm? AK: I was able to get four. I had the key grip, I had a chuck grip, I had a power grasp and I had a fine pinch. But my favorite one was just when the hand was open, because I work with kids, and so all the time you're clapping and singing, so I was able to do that again, which was really good. TK: That hand's not so good for clapping. AK: Can't clap with this one. TK: All right. So that's exciting on where we may go with the better mechatronics, if we make them good enough to put out on the market and use in a field trial. I want you to watch closely. (Video) Claudia: Oooooh! TK: That's Claudia, and that was the first time she got to feel sensation through her prosthetic. She had a little sensor at the end of her prosthesis that then she rubbed over different surfaces, and she could feel different textures of sandpaper, different grits, ribbon cable, as it pushed on her reinnervated hand skin. She said that when she just ran it across the table, it felt like her finger was rocking. So that's an exciting laboratory experiment on how to give back, potentially, some skin sensation. But here's another video that shows some of our challenges. This is Jesse, and he's squeezing a foam toy. And the harder he squeezes -- you see a little black thing in the middle that's pushing on his skin proportional to how hard he squeezes. But look at all the electrodes around it. I've got a real estate problem. You're supposed to put a bunch of these things on there, but our little motor's making all kinds of noise right next to my electrodes. So we're really challenged on what we're doing there. The future is bright. We're excited about where we are and a lot of things we want to do. So for example, one is to get rid of my real estate problem and get better signals. We want to develop these little tiny capsules about the size of a piece of risotto that we can put into the muscles and telemeter out the EMG signals, so that it's not worrying about electrode contact. And we can have the real estate open to try more sensation feedback. We want to build a better arm. This arm -- they're always made for the 50th percentile male -- which means they're too big for five-eighths of the world. So rather than a super strong or super fast arm, we're making an arm that is -- we're starting with, the 25th percentile female -- that will have a hand that wraps around, opens all the way, two degrees of freedom in the wrist and an elbow. So it'll be the smallest and lightest and the smartest arm ever made. Once we can do it that small, it's a lot easier making them bigger. So those are just some of our goals. And we really appreciate you all being here today. I'd like to tell you a little bit about the dark side, with yesterday's theme. So Amanda came jet-lagged, she's using the arm, and everything goes wrong. There was a computer spook, a broken wire, a converter that sparked. We took out a whole circuit in the hotel and just about put on the fire alarm. And none of those problems could I have dealt with, but I have a really bright research team. And thankfully Dr. Annie Simon was with us and worked really hard yesterday to fix it. That's science. And fortunately, it worked today. So thank you very much. (Applause)

Do you worry about what is going to kill you? Heart disease, cancer, a car accident? Most of us worry about things we can't control, like war, terrorism, the tragic earthquake that just occurred in Haiti. But what really threatens humanity? A few years ago, Professor Vaclav Smil tried to calculate the probability of sudden disasters large enough to change history. He called these, "massively fatal discontinuities," meaning that they could kill up to 100 million people in the next 50 years. He looked at the odds of another world war, of a massive volcanic eruption, even of an asteroid hitting the Earth. But he placed the likelihood of one such event above all others at close to 100 percent, and that is a severe flu pandemic. Now, you might think of flu as just a really bad cold, but it can be a death sentence. Every year, 36,000 people in the United States die of seasonal flu. In the developing world, the data is much sketchier but the death toll is almost certainly higher. You know, the problem is if this virus occasionally mutates so dramatically, it essentially is a new virus and then we get a pandemic. In 1918, a new virus appeared that killed some 50 to 100 million people. It spread like wildfire and some died within hours of developing symptoms. Are we safer today? Well, we seem to have dodged the deadly pandemic this year that most of us feared, but this threat could reappear at any time. The good news is that we're at a moment in time when science, technology, globalization is converging to create an unprecedented possibility: the possibility to make history by preventing infectious diseases that still account for one-fifth of all deaths and countless misery on Earth. We can do this. We're already preventing millions of deaths with existing vaccines, and if we get these to more people, we can certainly save more lives. But with new or better vaccines for malaria, TB, HIV, pneumonia, diarrhea, flu, we could end suffering that has been on the Earth since the beginning of time. So, I'm here to trumpet vaccines for you. But first, I have to explain why they're important because vaccines, the power of them, is really like a whisper. When they work, they can make history, but after a while you can barely hear them. Now, some of us are old enough to have a small, circular scar on our arms from an inoculation we received as children. But when was the last time you worried about smallpox, a disease that killed half a billion people last century and no longer is with us? Or polio? How many of you remember the iron lung? We don't see scenes like this anymore because of vaccines. Now, it's interesting because there are 30-odd diseases that can be treated with vaccines now, but we're still threatened by things like HIV and flu. Why is that? Well, here's the dirty little secret. Until recently, we haven't had to know exactly how a vaccine worked. We knew they worked through old-fashioned trial and error. You took a pathogen, you modified it, you injected it into a person or an animal and you saw what happened. This worked well for most pathogens, somewhat well for crafty bugs like flu, but not at all for HIV, for which humans have no natural immunity. So let's explore how vaccines work. They basically create a cache of weapons for your immune system which you can deploy when needed. Now, when you get a viral infection, what normally happens is it takes days or weeks for your body to fight back at full strength, and that might be too late. When you're pre-immunized, what happens is you have forces in your body pre-trained to recognize and defeat specific foes. So that's really how vaccines work. Now, let's take a look at a video that we're debuting at TED, for the first time, on how an effective HIV vaccine might work. (Music) Narrator: A vaccine trains the body in advance how to recognize and neutralize a specific invader. After HIV penetrates the body's mucosal barriers, it infects immune cells to replicate. The invader draws the attention of the immune system's front-line troops. Dendritic cells, or macrophages, capture the virus and display pieces of it. Memory cells generated by the HIV vaccine are activated when they learn HIV is present from the front-line troops. These memory cells immediately deploy the exact weapons needed. Memory B cells turn into plasma cells, which produce wave after wave of the specific antibodies that latch onto HIV to prevent it from infecting cells, while squadrons of killer T cells seek out and destroy cells that are already HIV infected. The virus is defeated. Without a vaccine, these responses would have taken more than a week. By that time, the battle against HIV would already have been lost. Seth Berkley: Really cool video, isn't it? The antibodies you just saw in this video, in action, are the ones that make most vaccines work. So the real question then is: How do we ensure that your body makes the exact ones that we need to protect against flu and HIV? The principal challenge for both of these viruses is that they're always changing. So let's take a look at the flu virus. In this rendering of the flu virus, these different colored spikes are what it uses to infect you. And also, what the antibodies use is a handle to essentially grab and neutralize the virus. When these mutate, they change their shape, and the antibodies don't know what they're looking at anymore. So that's why every year you can catch a slightly different strain of flu. It's also why in the spring, we have to make a best guess at which three strains are going to prevail the next year, put those into a single vaccine and rush those into production for the fall. Even worse, the most common influenza -- influenza A -- also infects animals that live in close proximity to humans, and they can recombine in those particular animals. In addition, wild aquatic birds carry all known strains of influenza. So, you've got this situation: In 2003, we had an H5N1 virus that jumped from birds into humans in a few isolated cases with an apparent mortality rate of 70 percent. Now luckily, that particular virus, although very scary at the time, did not transmit from person to person very easily. This year's H1N1 threat was actually a human, avian, swine mixture that arose in Mexico. It was easily transmitted, but, luckily, was pretty mild. And so, in a sense, our luck is holding out, but you know, another wild bird could fly over at anytime. Now let's take a look at HIV. As variable as flu is, HIV makes flu look like the Rock of Gibraltar. The virus that causes AIDS is the trickiest pathogen scientists have ever confronted. It mutates furiously, it has decoys to evade the immune system, it attacks the very cells that are trying to fight it and it quickly hides itself in your genome. Here's a slide looking at the genetic variation of flu and comparing that to HIV, a much wilder target. In the video a moment ago, you saw fleets of new viruses launching from infected cells. Now realize that in a recently infected person, there are millions of these ships; each one is just slightly different. Finding a weapon that recognizes and sinks all of them makes the job that much harder. Now, in the 27 years since HIV was identified as the cause of AIDS, we've developed more drugs to treat HIV than all other viruses put together. These drugs aren't cures, but they represent a huge triumph of science because they take away the automatic death sentence from a diagnosis of HIV, at least for those who can access them. The vaccine effort though is really quite different. Large companies moved away from it because they thought the science was so difficult and vaccines were seen as poor business. Many thought that it was just impossible to make an AIDS vaccine, but today, evidence tells us otherwise. In September, we had surprising but exciting findings from a clinical trial that took place in Thailand. For the first time, we saw an AIDS vaccine work in humans -- albeit, quite modestly -- and that particular vaccine was made almost a decade ago. Newer concepts and early testing now show even greater promise in the best of our animal models. But in the past few months, researchers have also isolated several new broadly neutralizing antibodies from the blood of an HIV infected individual. Now, what does this mean? We saw earlier that HIV is highly variable, that a broad neutralizing antibody latches on and disables multiple variations of the virus. If you take these and you put them in the best of our monkey models, they provide full protection from infection. In addition, these researchers found a new site on HIV where the antibodies can grab onto, and what's so special about this spot is that it changes very little as the virus mutates. It's like, as many times as the virus changes its clothes, it's still wearing the same socks, and now our job is to make sure we get the body to really hate those socks. So what we've got is a situation. The Thai results tell us we can make an AIDS vaccine, and the antibody findings tell us how we might do that. This strategy, working backwards from an antibody to create a vaccine candidate, has never been done before in vaccine research. It's called retro-vaccinology, and its implications extend way beyond that of just HIV. So think of it this way. We've got these new antibodies we've identified, and we know that they latch onto many, many variations of the virus. We know that they have to latch onto a specific part, so if we can figure out the precise structure of that part, present that through a vaccine, what we hope is we can prompt your immune system to make these matching antibodies. And that would create a universal HIV vaccine. Now, it sounds easier than it is because the structure actually looks more like this blue antibody diagram attached to its yellow binding site, and as you can imagine, these three-dimensional structures are much harder to work on. And if you guys have ideas to help us solve this, we'd love to hear about it. But, you know, the research that has occurred from HIV now has really helped with innovation with other diseases. So for instance, a biotechnology company has now found broadly neutralizing antibodies to influenza, as well as a new antibody target on the flu virus. They're currently making a cocktail -- an antibody cocktail -- that can be used to treat severe, overwhelming cases of flu. In the longer term, what they can do is use these tools of retro-vaccinology to make a preventive flu vaccine. Now, retro-vaccinology is just one technique within the ambit of so-called rational vaccine design. Let me give you another example. We talked about before the H and N spikes on the surface of the flu virus. Notice these other, smaller protuberances. These are largely hidden from the immune system. Now it turns out that these spots also don't change much when the virus mutates. If you can cripple these with specific antibodies, you could cripple all versions of the flu. So far, animal tests indicate that such a vaccine could prevent severe disease, although you might get a mild case. So if this works in humans, what we're talking about is a universal flu vaccine, one that doesn't need to change every year and would remove the threat of death. We really could think of flu, then, as just a bad cold. Of course, the best vaccine imaginable is only valuable to the extent we get it to everyone who needs it. So to do that, we have to combine smart vaccine design with smart production methods and, of course, smart delivery methods. So I want you to think back a few months ago. In June, the World Health Organization declared the first global flu pandemic in 41 years. The U.S. government promised 150 million doses of vaccine by October 15th for the flu peak. Vaccines were promised to developing countries. Hundreds of millions of dollars were spent and flowed to accelerating vaccine manufacturing. So what happened? Well, we first figured out how to make flu vaccines, how to produce them, in the early 1940s. It was a slow, cumbersome process that depended on chicken eggs, millions of living chicken eggs. Viruses only grow in living things, and so it turned out that, for flu, chicken eggs worked really well. For most strains, you could get one to two doses of vaccine per egg. Luckily for us, we live in an era of breathtaking biomedical advances. So today, we get our flu vaccines from ... chicken eggs, (Laughter) hundreds of millions of chicken eggs. Almost nothing has changed. The system is reliable but the problem is you never know how well a strain is going to grow. This year's swine flu strain grew very poorly in early production: basically .6 doses per egg. So, here's an alarming thought. What if that wild bird flies by again? You could see an avian strain that would infect the poultry flocks, and then we would have no eggs for our vaccines. So, Dan [Barber], if you want billions of chicken pellets for your fish farm, I know where to get them. So right now, the world can produce about 350 million doses of flu vaccine for the three strains, and we can up that to about 1.2 billion doses if we want to target a single variant like swine flu. But this assumes that our factories are humming because, in 2004, the U.S. supply was cut in half by contamination at one single plant. And the process still takes more than half a year. So are we better prepared than we were in 1918? Well, with the new technologies emerging now, I hope we can say definitively, "Yes." Imagine we could produce enough flu vaccine for everyone in the entire world for less than half of what we're currently spending now in the United States. With a range of new technologies, we could. Here's an example: A company I'm engaged with has found a specific piece of the H spike of flu that sparks the immune system. If you lop this off and attach it to the tail of a different bacterium, which creates a vigorous immune response, they've created a very powerful flu fighter. This vaccine is so small it can be grown in a common bacteria, E. coli. Now, as you know, bacteria reproduce quickly -- it's like making yogurt -- and so we could produce enough swine origin flu for the entire world in a few factories, in a few weeks, with no eggs, for a fraction of the cost of current methods. (Applause) So here's a comparison of several of these new vaccine technologies. And, aside from the radically increased production and huge cost savings -- for example, the E. coli method I just talked about -- look at the time saved: this would be lives saved. The developing world, mostly left out of the current response, sees the potential of these alternate technologies and they're leapfrogging the West. India, Mexico and others are already making experimental flu vaccines, and they may be the first place we see these vaccines in use. Because these technologies are so efficient and relatively cheap, billions of people can have access to lifesaving vaccines if we can figure out how to deliver them. Now think of where this leads us. New infectious diseases appear or reappear every few years. Some day, perhaps soon, we'll have a virus that is going to threaten all of us. Will we be quick enough to react before millions die? Luckily, this year's flu was relatively mild. I say, "luckily" in part because virtually no one in the developing world was vaccinated. So if we have the political and financial foresight to sustain our investments, we will master these and new tools of vaccinology, and with these tools we can produce enough vaccine for everyone at low cost and ensure healthy productive lives. No longer must flu have to kill half a million people a year. No longer does AIDS need to kill two million a year. No longer do the poor and vulnerable need to be threatened by infectious diseases, or indeed, anybody. Instead of having Vaclav Smil's "massively fatal discontinuity" of life, we can ensure the continuity of life. What the world needs now are these new vaccines, and we can make it happen. Thank you very much. (Applause) Chris Anderson: Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. So, the science is changing. In your mind, Seth -- I mean, you must dream about this -- what is the kind of time scale on, let's start with HIV, for a game-changing vaccine that's actually out there and usable? SB: The game change can come at any time, because the problem we have now is we've shown we can get a vaccine to work in humans; we just need a better one. And with these types of antibodies, we know humans can make them. So, if we can figure out how to do that, then we have the vaccine, and what's interesting is there already is some evidence that we're beginning to crack that problem. So, the challenge is full speed ahead. CA: In your gut, do you think it's probably going to be at least another five years? SB: You know, everybody says it's 10 years, but it's been 10 years every 10 years. So I hate to put a timeline on scientific innovation, but the investments that have occurred are now paying dividends. CA: And that's the same with universal flu vaccine, the same kind of thing? SB: I think flu is different. I think what happened with flu is we've got a bunch -- I just showed some of this -- a bunch of really cool and useful technologies that are ready to go now. They look good. The problem has been that, what we did is we invested in traditional technologies because that's what we were comfortable with. You also can use adjuvants, which are chemicals you mix. That's what Europe is doing, so we could have diluted out our supply of flu and made more available, but, going back to what Michael Specter said, the anti-vaccine crowd didn't really want that to happen. CA: And malaria's even further behind? SB: No, malaria, there is a candidate that actually showed efficacy in an earlier trial and is currently in phase three trials now. It probably isn't the perfect vaccine, but it's moving along. CA: Seth, most of us do work where every month, we produce something; we get that kind of gratification. You've been slaving away at this for more than a decade, and I salute you and your colleagues for what you do. The world needs people like you. Thank you. SB: Thank you. (Applause)

Okay, this morning I'm speaking on the question of corruption. And corruption is defined as the abuse of a position of trust for the benefit of yourself -- or, in the case of our context, your friends, your family or your financiers. Okay? Friends, family and financiers. But we need to understand what we understand about corruption, and we need to understand that we have been miseducated about it, and we have to admit that. We have to have the courage to admit that to start changing how we deal with it. The first thing is that the big myth, number one, is that in fact it's not really a crime. When we get together with friends and family and we discuss crime in our country, crime in Belmont or crime in Diego or crime in Marabella, nobody's speaking about corruption. That's the honest truth. When the Commissioner of Police comes on TV to talk about crime, he isn't speaking about corruption. And we know for sure when the Minister of National Security is speaking about crime, he's not talking about corruption either. The point I'm making is that it is a crime. It is an economic crime, because we're involving the looting of taxpayers' money. Public and private corruption is a reality. As somebody who comes from the private sector, I can tell you there's a massive amount of corruption in the private sector that has nothing to do with government. The same bribes and backhanders and things that take place under the table, it all takes place in the private sector. Today, I'm focusing on public sector corruption, which the private sector also participates in. The second important myth to understand -- because we have to destroy these myths, dismantle them and destroy them and ridicule them -- the second important myth to understand is the one that says that in fact corruption is only a small problem -- if it is a problem, it's only a small problem, that in fact it's only a little 10 or 15 percent, it's been going on forever, it probably will continue forever, and there's no point passing any laws, because there's little we can do about it. And I want to demonstrate that that, too, is a dangerous myth, very dangerous. It's a piece of public mischief. And I want to speak a little bit, take us back about 30 years. We're coming out today from Trinidad and Tobago, a resource-rich, small Caribbean country, and in the early 1970s we had a massive increase in the country's wealth, and that increase was caused by the increase in world oil prices. We call them petrodollars. The treasury was bursting with money. And it's ironic, because we're standing today in the Central Bank. You see, history's rich in irony. We're standing today in the Central Bank, and the Central Bank is responsible for a lot of the things I'm going to be speaking about. Okay? We're talking about irresponsibility in public office. We're speaking about the fact that across the terrace, the next tower is the Ministry of Finance, and there's a lot of connection with us today, so we're speaking within your temple today. Okay? (Applause) The first thing I want to talk about is that when all of this money flowed into our country about 40 years ago, we embarked, the government of the day embarked on a series of government-to-government arrangements to have rapidly develop the country. And some of the largest projects in the country were being constructed through government-to-government arrangements with some of the leading countries in the world, the United States and Britain and France and so on and so on. As I said, even this building we're standing in -- that's one of the ironies -- this building was part of that series of complexes, what they called the Twin Towers. It became so outrageous, the whole situation, that in fact a commission of inquiry was appointed, and it reported in 1982, 30 years ago it reported -- the Ballah Report -- 30 years ago, and immediately the government-to-government arrangements were stopped. The then-Prime Minister went to Parliament to give a budget speech, and he said some things that I'll never forget. They went right in here. I was a young man at the time. It went right into my heart. And he said that, in fact — Let me see if this thing works. Are we getting a, yeah?— That's what he told us. He told us that, in fact, two out of every three dollars of our petrodollars that we spent, the taxpayers' money, was wasted or stolen. So the 10 or 15 percent is pure mischief. As we say, it's a nancy-story. Forget it. That's for little children. We are big people, and we're trying to deal with what's happening in our society. Okay? This is the size of the problem. Okay? Two thirds of the money stolen or wasted. That was 30 years ago. 1982 was Ballah. So what has changed? I don't like to bring up embarrassing secrets to an international audience, but I have to. Four months ago, we suffered a constitutional outrage in this country. We call it the Section 34 fiasco, the Section 34 fiasco, a suspicious piece of law, and I'm going to say it like it is, a suspicious piece of law was passed at a suspicious time to free some suspects. (Laughter) And it was called, those people are called the Piarco Airport accused. I'm going to have my own lexicon speaking here today. They are the Piarco Airport accused. It was a constitutional outrage of the first order, and I have labeled it the Plot to Pervert Parliament. Our highest institution in our country was perverted. We are dealing with perverts here of an economic and financial nature. Do you get how serious this problem is? There was massive protest. A lot of us in this room took part in the protest in different forms. Most importantly, the American embassy complained, so Parliament was swiftly reconvened, and the law was reversed, it was repealed. That's the word lawyers use. It was repealed. But the point is that Parliament was outwitted in the whole course of events, because what really happened is that, because of the suspicious passage of that law, the law was actually passed into effect on the weekend we celebrated our 50th anniversary of independence, our jubilee of independence. So that is the kind of outrage of the thing. It was kind of a nasty way to get maturation, but we got it, because we all understood it, and for the first time that I could remember, there were mass protests against this corruption. And that gave me a lot of hope. Okay? Those of us who are, sometimes you feel like you're a little bit on your own doing some of this work. That passage of the law and the repeal of the law fortified the case of the Piarco Airport accused. So it was one of those really superior double bluff kind of things that took place. But what were they accused of? What was it that they were accused of? I'm being a bit mysterious for those of you out there. What were they accused of? We were trying to build, or reconstruct largely, an airport that had grown outdated. The entire project cost about 1.6 billion dollars, Trinidad and Tobago dollars, and in fact, we had a lot of bid-rigging and suspicious activity, corrupt activity took place. And to get an idea of what it consisted of, and to put it in context in relationship to this whole second myth about it being no big thing, we can look at this second slide here. And what we have here -- I am not saying so, this is the Director of Public Prosecutions in a written statement. He said so. And he's telling us that for the $1.6 billion cost of the project, one billion dollars has been traced to offshore bank accounts. One billion dollars of our taxpayers' money has been located in offshore bank accounts. Being the kind of suspicious person I am, I am outraged at that, and I'm going to pause here, I'm going to pause now and again and bring in different things. I'm going to pause here and bring in something I saw in November last year at Wall Street. I was at Zuccotti Park. It was autumn. It was cool. It was damp. It was getting dark. And I was walking around with the protesters looking at the One Wall Street, Occupy Wall Street movement walking around. And there was a lady with a sign, a very simple sign, a kind of battered-looking blonde lady, and the sign was made out of Bristol board, as we say in these parts, and it was made with a marker. And what it said on that sign hit me right in the center. It said, "If you're not outraged, you haven't been paying attention." If you're not outraged by all of this, you haven't been paying attention. So listen up, because we're getting into even deeper waters. My brain started thinking. Well, what if -- because I'm suspicious like that. I read a lot of spy novels and stuff. What if -- (Laughter) But to make it in these wrongs, you have to read a lot of spy novels and follow some of that stuff, right? (Laughter) But what if this wasn't the first time? What if this is just the first time that the so-and-sos had been caught? What if it had happened before? How would I find out? Now, the previous two examples I gave were to do with construction sector corruption, okay? And I have the privilege at this time to lead the Joint Consultative Council, which is a not-for-profit. We're at jcc.org.tt, and we have the -- we are the leaders in the struggle to produce a new public procurement system about how public money is transacted. So those of you interested in finding out more about it, or joining us or signing up on any of our petitions, please get involved. But I'm going to segue to another thing that relates, because one of my private campaigns I've been conducting for over three and a half years is for transparency and accountability around the bailout of CL Financial. CL Financial is the Caribbean's largest ever conglomerate, okay? And without getting into all of the details, it is said to have collapsed — I'm using my words very carefully — it's said to have collapsed in January of '09, which is just coming up to nearly four years. In an unprecedented fit of generosity -- and you have to be very suspicious about these people -- in an unprecedented — and I'm using that word carefully — unprecedented fit of generosity, the government of the day signed, made a written commitment, to repay all of the creditors. And I can tell you without fear of contradiction that hasn't happened anywhere else on the planet. Let's understand, because we lack context. People are telling us it's just like Wall Street. It's not just like Wall Street. Trinidad and Tobago is like a place with different laws of physics or biology or something. It's not just like anywhere. (Applause) It's not just like anywhere. It's not just like anywhere. Here is here, and out there is out there. Okay? I'm serious now. Listen. They've had bailouts on Wall Street. They've had bailouts in London. They've had bailouts in Europe. In Africa, they've had bailouts. In Nigeria, six of the major commercial banks collapsed at the same time as ours, eh? It's interesting to parallel how the Nigerian experience has -- how they've treated it, and they've treated it very well compared to us. Nowhere on the planet have all the creditors been bailed out in excess of what their statutory entitlements were. Only here. So what was the reason for the generosity? Is our government that generous? And maybe they are. Let's look at it. Let's look into it. So I started digging and writing and so and so on, and that work can be found, my personal work can be found at AfraRaymond.com, which is my name. It's a not-for-profit blog that I run. Not as popular as some of the other people, but there you go. (Laughter) But the point is that the bitter experience of Section 34, that plot to pervert Parliament, that bitter experience that took place in August, when we were supposed to be celebrating our independence, going into September, forced me to check myself and recalculate my bearings, and to go back into some of the work, some of the stuff I'd written and some of the exchanges I'd had with the officials to see what was really what. As we say in Trinidad and Tobago, who is who and what is what? Okay? We want to try to recalculate. And I made a Freedom of Information application in May this year to the Ministry of Finance. The Ministry of Finance is the next tower over. This is the other context. The Ministry of Finance, we are told, is subject to the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act. I'm going to take you through a worked example of whether that's really so. The Central Bank in which we stand this morning is immune from the provisions of the Freedom of Information Act. So in fact, you can't ask them anything, and they don't have to answer anything. That is the law since 1999. So I plunged into this struggle, and I asked four questions. And I'll relate the questions to you in the short form with the reply, so you could understand, as I said, where we are. Here is not like anywhere else. Question number one: I asked to see the accounts of CL Financial, and if you can't show me the accounts -- the Minister of Finance is making statements, passing new laws and giving speeches and so on. What are the figures he's relying on? It's like that joke: I want whatever he's drinking. And they wrote back and said to me, well what do you really mean? So they hit my question with a question. Second point: I want to see who are the creditors of the group who have been repaid? Let me pause here to point out to you all that 24 billion dollars of our money has been spent on this. That is about three and a half billion U.S. dollars coming out of a small -- we used to be resource-rich -- Caribbean country. Okay? And I asked the question, who was getting that three and a half billion dollars? And I want to pause again to bring up context, because context helps us to get clarity understanding this thing. There's a particular individual who is in the government now. The name of the person doesn't matter. And that person made a career out of using the Freedom of Information Act to advance his political cause. Okay? His name isn't important. I wouldn't dignify it. I'm on a point. The point is, that person made a career out of using the Freedom of Information Act to advance his cause. And the most famous case was what we came to call the Secret Scholarship Scandal, where in fact there was about 60 million dollars in government money that had been dispersed in a series of scholarships, and the scholarships hadn't been advertised, and so and so on and so on. And he was able to get the court, using that act of Parliament, Freedom of Information Act, to release the information, and I thought that was excellent. Fantastic. But you see, the question is this: If it's right and proper for us to use the Freedom of Information Act and to use the court to force a disclosure about 60 million dollars in public money, it must be right and proper for us to force a disclosure about 24 billion dollars. You see? But the Ministry of Finance, the Permanent Secretary of the Ministry of Finance, wrote me and said to me, that information is exempt too. You see? This is what we're dealing with, okay? The third thing I will tell you is that I also asked for the directors of CL Financial, whether in fact they were making filings under our Integrity in Public Life Act. We have an Integrity in Public Life Act as part of our framework supposed to safeguard the nation's interest. And public officials are supposed to file to say what it is they have in terms of assets and liabilities. And of course I've since discovered that they're not filing, and in fact the Minister of Finance has not even asked them to file. So here we have it. We have a situation where the basic safeguards of integrity and accountability and transparency have all been discarded. I've asked the question in the legal and required fashion. It's been ignored. The sort of thing that motivated us around Section 34, we need to continue to work on that. We can't forget it. I have defined this as the single largest expenditure in the country's history. It's also the single largest example of public corruption according to this equation. And this is my reality check. Where you have an expenditure of public money and it is without accountability and it's without transparency, it will always be equal to corruption, whether you're in Russia or Nigeria or Alaska, it will always be equal to corruption, and that is what we are dealing with here. I'm going to continue the work to press on, to get some resolution of those matters at the Ministry of Finance. If it is I have to go to court personally, I will do that. We will continue to press on. We will continue to work within JCC. But I want to step back from the Trinidad and Tobago context and bring something new to the table in terms of an international example. We had the journalist [Heather] Brooke speaking about her battle against government corruption, and she introduced me to this website, Alaveteli.com. And Alaveteli.com is a way for us to have an open database for Freedom of Information applications, and speak with each other. I could see what you're applying for. You could see what I applied for and what replies I got. We can work on it together. We need to build a collective database and a collective understanding of where we are to go to the next point. We need to increase the consciousness. The final thing I want to say is in relation to this one, which is a lovely website from India called IPaidABribe.com. They have international branches, and it's important for us to tune into this one. IPaidABribe.com is really important, a good one to log on to and see. I'm going to pause there. I'm going to ask you for your courage. Discard the first myth; it is a crime. Discard the second myth; it is a big thing. It's a huge problem. It's an economic crime. And let us continue working together to betterment in this situation, stability and sustainability in our society. Thank you.

I coined my own definition of success in 1934, when I was teaching at a high school in South Bend, Indiana, being a little bit disappointed, and [disillusioned] perhaps, by the way parents of the youngsters in my English classes expected their youngsters to get an A or a B. They thought a C was all right for the neighbors' children, because they were all average. But they weren't satisfied when their own -- it would make the teacher feel that they had failed, or the youngster had failed. And that's not right. The good Lord in his infinite wisdom didn't create us all equal as far as intelligence is concerned, any more than we're equal for size, appearance. Not everybody could earn an A or a B, and I didn't like that way of judging, and I did know how the alumni of various schools back in the '30s judged coaches and athletic teams. If you won them all, you were considered to be reasonably successful -- not completely. Because I found out -- we had a number of years at UCLA where we didn't lose a game. But it seemed that we didn't win each individual game by the margin that some of our alumni had predicted -- (Laughter) And quite frequently I really felt that they had backed up their predictions in a more materialistic manner. (Laughter) But that was true back in the 30s, so I understood that. But I didn't like it, I didn't agree with it. I wanted to come up with something I hoped could make me a better teacher, and give the youngsters under my supervision, be it in athletics or the English classroom, something to which to aspire, other than just a higher mark in the classroom, or more points in some athletic contest. I thought about that for quite a spell, and I wanted to come up with my own definition. I thought that might help. And I knew how Mr. Webster defined it, as the accumulation of material possessions or the attainment of a position of power or prestige, or something of that sort, worthy accomplishments perhaps, but in my opinion, not necessarily indicative of success. So I wanted to come up with something of my own. And I recalled -- I was raised on a small farm in Southern Indiana, and Dad tried to teach me and my brothers that you should never try to be better than someone else. I'm sure at the time he did that, I didn't -- it didn't -- well, somewhere, I guess in the hidden recesses of the mind, it popped out years later. Never try to be better than someone else, always learn from others. Never cease trying to be the best you can be -- that's under your control. If you get too engrossed and involved and concerned in regard to the things over which you have no control, it will adversely affect the things over which you have control. Then I ran across this simple verse that said, "At God's footstool to confess, a poor soul knelt, and bowed his head. 'I failed!' he cried. The Master said, 'Thou didst thy best, that is success.'" From those things, and one other perhaps, I coined my own definition of success, which is: Peace of mind attained only through self-satisfaction in knowing you made the effort to do the best of which you're capable. I believe that's true. If you make the effort to do the best of which you're capable, trying to improve the situation that exists for you, I think that's success, and I don't think others can judge that; it's like character and reputation -- your reputation is what you're perceived to be; your character is what you really are. And I think that character is much more important than what you are perceived to be. You'd hope they'd both be good, but they won't necessarily be the same. Well, that was my idea that I was going to try to get across to the youngsters. I ran across other things. I love to teach, and it was mentioned by the previous speaker that I enjoy poetry, and I dabble in it a bit, and love it. There are some things that helped me, I think, be better than I would have been. I know I'm not what I ought to be, what I should be, but I think I'm better than I would have been if I hadn't run across certain things. One was just a little verse that said, "No written word, no spoken plea can teach our youth what they should be; nor all the books on all the shelves -- it's what the teachers are themselves." That made an impression on me in the 1930s. And I tried to use that more or less in my teaching, whether it be in sports, or whether it be in the English classroom. I love poetry and always had an interest in that somehow. Maybe it's because Dad used to read to us at night, by coal oil lamp -- we didn't have electricity in our farm home. And Dad would read poetry to us. So I always liked it. And about the same time I ran across this one verse, I ran across another one. Someone asked a lady teacher why she taught, and after some time, she said she wanted to think about that. Then she came up and said, "They ask me why I teach, and I reply, 'Where could I find such splendid company?' There sits a statesman, strong, unbiased, wise; another Daniel Webster, silver-tongued. A doctor sits beside him, whose quick, steady hand may mend a bone, or stem the life-blood's flow. And there a builder; upward rise the arch of a church he builds, wherein that minister may speak the word of God, and lead a stumbling soul to touch the Christ. And all about, a gathering of teachers, farmers, merchants, laborers -- those who work and vote and build and plan and pray into a great tomorrow. And I may say, I may not see the church, or hear the word, or eat the food their hands may grow, but yet again I may; And later I may say, I knew him once, and he was weak, or strong, or bold or proud or gay. I knew him once, but then he was a boy. They ask me why I teach and I reply, 'Where could I find such splendid company?'" And I believe the teaching profession -- it's true, you have so many youngsters, and I've got to think of my youngsters at UCLA -- 30-some attorneys, 11 dentists and doctors, many, many teachers and other professions. And that gives you a great deal of pleasure, to see them go on. I always tried to make the youngsters feel that they're there to get an education, number one; basketball was second, because it was paying their way, and they do need a little time for social activities, but you let social activities take a little precedence over the other two, and you're not going to have any very long. So that was the idea that I tried to get across to the youngsters under my supervision. I had three rules, pretty much, that I stuck with practically all the time. I'd learned these prior to coming to UCLA, and I decided they were very important. One was "Never be late." Later on I said certain things -- the players, if we were leaving for somewhere, had to be neat and clean. There was a time when I made them wear jackets and shirts and ties. Then I saw our chancellor coming to school in denims and turtlenecks, and thought, it's not right for me to keep this other [rule] so I let them just -- they had to be neat and clean. I had one of my greatest players that you probably heard of, Bill Walton. He came to catch the bus; we were leaving for somewhere to play. And he wasn't clean and neat, so I wouldn't let him go. He couldn't get on the bus, he had to go home and get cleaned up to get to the airport. So I was a stickler for that. I believed in that. I believe in time; very important. I believe you should be on time, but I felt at practice, for example -- we start on time, we close on time. The youngsters didn't have to feel that we were going to keep them over. When I speak at coaching clinics, I often tell young coaches -- and at coaching clinics, more or less, they'll be the younger coaches getting in the profession. Most of them are young, you know, and probably newly-married. And I tell them, "Don't run practices late, because you'll go home in a bad mood, and that's not good, for a young married man to go home in a bad mood. When you get older, it doesn't make any difference, but --" (Laughter) So I did believe: on time. I believe starting on time, and I believe closing on time. And another one I had was, not one word of profanity. One word of profanity, and you are out of here for the day. If I see it in a game, you're going to come out and sit on the bench. And the third one was, never criticize a teammate. I didn't want that. I used to tell them I was paid to do that. That's my job. I'm paid to do it. Pitifully poor, but I am paid to do it. Not like the coaches today, for gracious sakes, no. It's a little different than it was in my day. Those were three things that I stuck with pretty closely all the time. And those actually came from my dad. That's what he tried to teach me and my brothers at one time. I came up with a pyramid eventually, that I don't have the time to go on that. But that helped me, I think, become a better teacher. It's something like this: And I had blocks in the pyramid, and the cornerstones being industriousness and enthusiasm, working hard and enjoying what you're doing, coming up to the apex, according to my definition of success. And right at the top, faith and patience. And I say to you, in whatever you're doing, you must be patient. You have to have patience to -- we want things to happen. We talk about our youth being impatient a lot, and they are. They want to change everything. They think all change is progress. And we get a little older -- we sort of let things go. And we forget there is no progress without change. So you must have patience, and I believe that we must have faith. I believe that we must believe, truly believe. Not just give it word service, believe that things will work out as they should, providing we do what we should. I think our tendency is to hope things will turn out the way we want them to much of the time, but we don't do the things that are necessary to make those things become reality. I worked on this for some 14 years, and I think it helped me become a better teacher. But it all revolved around that original definition of success. You know, a number of years ago, there was a Major League Baseball umpire by the name of George Moriarty. He spelled Moriarty with only one 'i'. I'd never seen that before, but he did. Big league baseball players -- they're very perceptive about those things, and they noticed he had only one 'i' in his name. You'd be surprised how many also told him that that was one more than he had in his head at various times. (Laughter) But he wrote something where I think he did what I tried to do in this pyramid. He called it "The Road Ahead, or the Road Behind." He said, "Sometimes I think the Fates must grin as we denounce them and insist the only reason we can't win, is the Fates themselves have missed. Yet there lives on the ancient claim: we win or lose within ourselves. The shining trophies on our shelves can never win tomorrow's game. You and I know deeper down, there's always a chance to win the crown. But when we fail to give our best, we simply haven't met the test, of giving all and saving none until the game is really won; of showing what is meant by grit; of playing through when others quit; of playing through, not letting up. It's bearing down that wins the cup. Of dreaming there's a goal ahead; of hoping when our dreams are dead; of praying when our hopes have fled; yet losing, not afraid to fall, if, bravely, we have given all. For who can ask more of a man than giving all within his span. Giving all, it seems to me, is not so far from victory. And so the Fates are seldom wrong, no matter how they twist and wind. It's you and I who make our fates -- we open up or close the gates on the road ahead or the road behind." Reminds me of another set of threes that my dad tried to get across to us: Don't whine. Don't complain. Don't make excuses. Just get out there, and whatever you're doing, do it to the best of your ability. And no one can do more than that. I tried to get across, too, that -- my opponents will tell you -- you never heard me mention winning. Never mention winning. My idea is that you can lose when you outscore somebody in a game, and you can win when you're outscored. I've felt that way on certain occasions, at various times. And I just wanted them to be able to hold their head up after a game. I used to say that when a game is over, and you see somebody that didn't know the outcome, I hope they couldn't tell by your actions whether you outscored an opponent or the opponent outscored you. That's what really matters: if you make an effort to do the best you can regularly, the results will be about what they should be. Not necessarily what you'd want them to be but they'll be about what they should; only you will know whether you can do that. And that's what I wanted from them more than anything else. And as time went by, and I learned more about other things, I think it worked a little better, as far as the results. But I wanted the score of a game to be the byproduct of these other things, and not the end itself. I believe it was one great philosopher who said -- no, no -- Cervantes. Cervantes said, "The journey is better than the end." And I like that. I think that it is -- it's getting there. Sometimes when you get there, there's almost a let down. But it's the getting there that's the fun. As a basketball coach at UCLA, I liked our practices to be the journey, and the game would be the end, the end result. I liked to go up and sit in the stands and watch the players play, and see whether I'd done a decent job during the week. There again, it's getting the players to get that self-satisfaction, in knowing that they'd made the effort to do the best of which they are capable. Sometimes I'm asked who was the best player I had, or the best teams. I can never answer that. As far as the individuals are concerned -- I was asked one time about that, and they said, "Suppose that you, in some way, could make the perfect player. What would you want?" And I said, "Well, I'd want one that knew why he was at UCLA: to get an education, he was a good student, really knew why he was there in the first place. But I'd want one that could play, too. I'd want one to realize that defense usually wins championships, and who would work hard on defense. But I'd want one who would play offense, too. I'd want him to be unselfish, and look for the pass first and not shoot all the time. And I'd want one that could pass and would pass. (Laughter) I've had some that could and wouldn't, and I've had some that would and could. (Laughter) So, yeah, I'd want that. And I wanted them to be able to shoot from the outside. I wanted them to be good inside too. (Laughter) I'd want them to be able to rebound well at both ends, too. Why not just take someone like Keith Wilkes and let it go at that. He had the qualifications. Not the only one, but he was one that I used in that particular category, because I think he made the effort to become the best. There was a couple. I mention in my book, "They Call Me Coach," two players that gave me great satisfaction, that came as close as I think anyone I ever had to reach their full potential: one was Conrad Burke, and one was Doug McIntosh. When I saw them as freshmen, on our freshmen team -- freshmen couldn't play varsity when I taught. I thought, "Oh gracious, if these two players, either one of them" -- they were different years, but I thought about each one at the time he was there -- "Oh, if he ever makes the varsity, our varsity must be pretty miserable, if he's good enough to make it." And you know, one of them was a starting player for a season and a half. The other one, his next year, played 32 minutes in a national championship game, Did a tremendous job for us. The next year, he was a starting player on the national championship team, and here I thought he'd never play a minute, when he was -- so those are the things that give you great joy, and great satisfaction to see. Neither one of those youngsters could shoot very well. But they had outstanding shooting percentages, because they didn't force it. And neither one could jump very well, but they kept good position, and so they did well rebounding. They remembered that every shot that's taken, they assumed would be missed. I've had too many stand around and wait to see if it's missed, then they go and it's too late, somebody else is in there ahead of them. They weren't very quick, but they played good position, kept in good balance. And so they played pretty good defense for us. So they had qualities that -- they came close to -- as close to reaching possibly their full potential as any players I ever had. So I consider them to be as successful as Lewis Alcindor or Bill Walton, or many of the others that we had; there were some outstanding players. Have I rambled enough? I was told that when he makes his appearance, I was supposed to shut up. (Laughter) (Applause)

If you really want to understand the problem that we're facing with the oceans, you have to think about the biology at the same time you think about the physics. We can't solve the problems unless we start studying the ocean in a very much more interdisciplinary way. So I'm going to demonstrate that through discussion of some of the climate change things that are going on in the ocean. We'll look at sea level rise. We'll look at ocean warming. And then the last thing on the list there, ocean acidification -- if you were to ask me, you know, "What do you worry about the most? What frightens you?" for me, it's ocean acidification. And this has come onto the stage pretty recently. So I will spend a little time at the end. I was in Copenhagen in December like a number of you in this room. And I think we all found it, simultaneously, an eye-opening and a very frustrating experience. I sat in this large negotiation hall, at one point, for three or four hours, without hearing the word "oceans" one time. It really wasn't on the radar screen. The nations that brought it up when we had the speeches of the national leaders -- it tended to be the leaders of the small island states, the low-lying island states. And by this weird quirk of alphabetical order of the nations, a lot of the low-lying states, like Kiribati and Nauru, they were seated at the very end of these immensely long rows. You know, they were marginalized in the negotiation room. One of the problems is coming up with the right target. It's not clear what the target should be. And how can you figure out how to fix something if you don't have a clear target? Now, you've heard about "two degrees": that we should limit temperature rise to no more than two degrees. But there's not a lot of science behind that number. We've also talked about concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. Should it be 450? Should it be 400? There's not a lot of science behind that one either. Most of the science that is behind these numbers, these potential targets, is based on studies on land. And I would say, for the people that work in the ocean and think about what the targets should be, we would argue that they must be much lower. You know, from an oceanic perspective, 450 is way too high. Now there's compelling evidence that it really needs to be 350. We are, right now, at 390 parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere. We're not going to put the brakes on in time to stop at 450, so we've got to accept we're going to do an overshoot, and the discussion as we go forward has to focus on how far the overshoot goes and what's the pathway back to 350. Now, why is this so complicated? Why don't we know some of these things a little bit better? Well, the problem is that we've got very complicated forces in the climate system. There's all kinds of natural causes of climate change. There's air-sea interactions. Here in Galapagos, we're affected by El Ninos and La Nina. But the entire planet warms up when there's a big El Nino. Volcanoes eject aerosols into the atmosphere. That changes our climate. The ocean contains most of the exchangeable heat on the planet. So anything that influences how ocean surface waters mix with the deep water changes the ocean of the planet. And we know the solar output's not constant through time. So those are all natural causes of climate change. And then we have the human-induced causes of climate change as well. We're changing the characteristics of the surface of the land, the reflectivity. We inject our own aerosols into the atmosphere, and we have trace gases, and not just carbon dioxide -- it's methane, ozone, oxides of sulfur and nitrogen. So here's the thing. It sounds like a simple question. Is CO2 produced by man's activities causing the planet to warm up? But to answer that question, to make a clear attribution to carbon dioxide, you have to know something about all of these other agents of change. But the fact is we do know a lot about all of those things. You know, thousands of scientists have been working on understanding all of these man-made causes and the natural causes. And we've got it worked out, and we can say, "Yes, CO2 is causing the planet to warm up now." Now, we have many ways to study natural variability. I'll show you a few examples of this now. This is the ship that I spent the last three months on in the Antarctic. It's a scientific drilling vessel. We go out for months at a time and drill into the sea bed to recover sediments that tell us stories of climate change, right. Like one of the ways to understand our greenhouse future is to drill down in time to the last period where we had CO2 double what it is today. And so that's what we've done with this ship. This was -- this is south of the Antarctic Circle. It looks downright tropical there. One day where we had calm seas and sun, which was the reason I could get off the ship. Most of the time it looked like this. We had a waves up to 50 ft. and winds averaging about 40 knots for most of the voyage and up to 70 or 80 knots. So that trip just ended, and I can't show you too many results from that right now, but we'll go back one more year, to another drilling expedition I've been involved in. This was led by Ross Powell and Tim Naish. It's the ANDRILL project. And we made the very first bore hole through the largest floating ice shelf on the planet. This is a crazy thing, this big drill rig wrapped in a blanket to keep everybody warm, drilling at temperatures of minus 40. And we drilled in the Ross Sea. That's the Ross Sea Ice Shelf on the right there. So, this huge floating ice shelf the size of Alaska comes from West Antarctica. Now, West Antarctica is the part of the continent where the ice is grounded on sea floor as much as 2,000 meters deep. So that ice sheet is partly floating, and it's exposed to the ocean, to the ocean heat. This is the part of Antarctica that we worry about. Because it's partly floating, you can imagine, is sea level rises a little bit, the ice lifts off the bed, and then it can break off and float north. When that ice melts, sea level rises by six meters. So we drill back in time to see how often that's happened, and exactly how fast that ice can melt. Here's the cartoon on the left there. We drilled through a hundred meters of floating ice shelf then through 900 meters of water and then 1,300 meters into the sea floor. So it's the deepest geological bore hole ever drilled. It took about 10 years to put this project together. And here's what we found. Now, there's 40 scientists working on this project, and people are doing all kinds of really complicated and expensive analyses. But it turns out, you know, the thing that told the best story was this simple visual description. You know, we saw this in the core samples as they came up. We saw these alternations between sediments that look like this -- there's gravel and cobbles in there and a bunch of sand. That's the kind of material in the deep sea. It can only get there if it's carried out by ice. So we know there's an ice shelf overhead. And that alternates with a sediment that looks like this. This is absolutely beautiful stuff. This sediment is 100 percent made up of the shells of microscopic plants. And these plants need sunlight, so we know when we find that sediment there's no ice overhead. And we saw about 35 alternations between open water and ice-covered water, between gravels and these plant sediments. So what that means is, what it tells us is that the Ross Sea region, this ice shelf, melted back and formed anew about 35 times. And this is in the past four million years. This was completely unexpected. Nobody imagined that the West Antarctic Ice Sheet was this dynamic. In fact, the lore for many years has been, "The ice formed many tens of millions of years ago, and it's been there ever since." And now we know that in our recent past it melted back and formed again, and sea level went up and down, six meters at a time. What caused it? Well, we're pretty sure that it's very small changes in the amount of sunlight reaching Antarctica, just caused by natural changes in the orbit of the Earth. But here's the key thing: you know, the other thing we found out is that the ice sheet passed a threshold, that the planet warmed up enough -- and the number's about one degree to one and a half degrees Centigrade -- the planet warmed up enough that it became ... that ice sheet became very dynamic and was very easily melted. And you know what? We've actually changed the temperature in the last century just the right amount. So many of us are convinced now that West Antarctica, the West Antarctic Ice Sheet, is starting to melt. We do expect to see a sea-level rise on the order of one to two meters by the end of this century. And it could be larger than that. This is a serious consequence for nations like Kiribati, you know, where the average elevation is about a little over a meter above sea level. Okay, the second story takes place here in Galapagos. This is a bleached coral, coral that died during the 1982-'83 El Nino. This is from Champion Island. It's about a meter tall Pavona clavus colony. And it's covered with algae. That's what happens. When these things die, immediately, organisms come in and encrust and live on that dead surface. And so, when a coral colony is killed by an El Nino event, it leaves this indelible record. You can go then and study corals and figure out how often do you see this. So one of the things thought of in the '80s was to go back and take cores of coral heads throughout the Galapagos and find out how often was there a devastating event. And just so you know, 1982-'83, that El Nino killed 95 percent of all the corals here in Galapagos. Then there was similar mortality in '97-'98. And what we found after drilling back in time two to 400 years was that these were unique events. We saw no other mass mortality events. So these events in our recent past really are unique. So they're either just truly monster El Ninos, or they're just very strong El Ninos that occurred against a backdrop of global warming. Either case, it's bad news for the corals of the Galapagos Islands. Here's how we sample the corals. This is actually Easter Island. Look at this monster. This coral is eight meters tall, right. And it been growing for about 600 years. Now, Sylvia Earle turned me on to this exact same coral. And she was diving here with John Lauret -- I think it was 1994 -- and collected a little nugget and sent it to me. And we started working on it, and we figured out we could tell the temperature of the ancient ocean from analyzing a coral like this. So we have a diamond drill. We're not killing the colony; we're taking a small core sample out of the top. The core comes up as these cylindrical tubes of limestone. And that material then we take back to the lab and analyze it. You can see some of the coral cores there on the right. So we've done that all over the Eastern Pacific. We're starting to do it in the Western Pacific as well. I'll take you back here to the Galapagos Islands. And we've been working at this fascinating uplift here in Urbina Bay. That the place where, during an earthquake in 1954, this marine terrace was lifted up out of the ocean very quickly, and it was lifted up about six to seven meters. And so now you can walk through a coral reef without getting wet. If you go on the ground there, it looks like this, and this is the grandaddy coral. It's 11 meters in diameter, and we know that it started growing in the year 1584. Imagine that. And that coral was growing happily in those shallow waters, until 1954, when the earthquake happened. Now the reason we know it's 1584 is that these corals have growth bands. When you cut them, slice those cores in half and x-ray them, you see these light and dark bands. Each one of those is a year. We know these corals grow about a centimeter and a half a year. And we just count on down to the bottom. Then their other attribute is that they have this great chemistry. We can analyze the carbonate that makes up the coral, and there's a whole bunch of things we can do. But in this case, we measured the different isotopes of oxygen. Their ratio tells us the water temperature. In this example here, we had monitored this reef in Galapagos with temperature recorders, so we know the temperature of the water the coral's growing in. Then after we harvest a coral, we measure this ratio, and now you can see, those curves match perfectly. In this case, at these islands, you know, corals are instrumental-quality recorders of change in the water. And of course, our thermometers only take us back 50 years or so here. The coral can take us back hundreds and thousands of years. So, what we do: we've merged a lot of different data sets. It's not just my group; there's maybe 30 groups worldwide doing this. But we get these instrumental- and near-instrumental-quality records of temperature change that go back hundreds of years, and we put them together. Here's a synthetic diagram. There's a whole family of curves here. But what's happening: we're looking at the last thousand years of temperature on the planet. And there's five or six different compilations there, But each one of those compilations reflects input from hundreds of these kinds of records from corals. We do similar things with ice cores. We work with tree rings. And that's how we discover what is truly natural and how different is the last century, right? And I chose this one because it's complicated and messy looking, right. This is as messy as it gets. You can see there's some signals there. Some of the records show lower temperatures than others. Some of them show greater variability. But they all tell us what the natural variability is. Some of them are from the northern hemisphere; some are from the entire globe. But here's what we can say: what's natural in the last thousand years is that the planet was cooling down. It was cooling down until about 1900 or so. And there is natural variability caused by the Sun, caused by El Ninos. A century-scale, decadal-scale variability, and we know the magnitude; it's about two-tenths to four-tenths of a degree Centigrade. But then at the very end is where we have the instrumental record in black. And there's the temperature up there in 2009. You know, we've warmed the globe about a degree Centigrade in the last century, and there's nothing in the natural part of that record that resembles what we've seen in the last century. You know, that's the strength of our argument, that we are doing something that's truly different. So I'll close with a short discussion of ocean acidification. I like it as a component of global change to talk about, because, even if you are a hard-bitten global warming skeptic, and I talk to that community fairly often, you cannot deny the simple physics of CO2 dissolving in the ocean. You know, we're pumping out lots of CO2 into the atmosphere, from fossil fuels, from cement production. Right now, about a third of that carbon dioxide is dissolving straight into the sea, right? And as it does so, it makes the ocean more acidic. So, you cannot argue with that. That is what's happening right now, and it's a very different issue than the global warming issue. It has many consequences. There's consequences for carbonate organisms. There are many organisms that build their shells out of calcium carbonate -- plants and animals both. The main framework material of coral reefs is calcium carbonate. That material is more soluble in acidic fluid. So one of the things we're seeing is organisms are having to spend more metabolic energy to build and maintain their shells. At some point, as this transience, as this CO2 uptake in the ocean continues, that material's actually going to start to dissolve. And on coral reefs, where some of the main framework organisms disappear, we will see a major loss of marine biodiversity. But it's not just the carbonate producers that are affected. There's many physiological processes that are influenced by the acidity of the ocean. So many reactions involving enzymes and proteins are sensitive to the acid content of the ocean. So, all of these things -- greater metabolic demands, reduced reproductive success, changes in respiration and metabolism. You know, these are things that we have good physiological reasons to expect to see stressed caused by this transience. So we figured out some pretty interesting ways to track CO2 levels in the atmosphere, going back millions of years. We used to do it just with ice cores, but in this case, we're going back 20 million years. And we take samples of the sediment, and it tells us the CO2 level of the ocean, and therefore the CO2 level of the atmosphere. And here's the thing: you have to go back about 15 million years to find a time when CO2 levels were about what they are today. You have to go back about 30 million years to find a time when CO2 levels were double what they are today. Now, what that means is that all of the organisms that live in the sea have evolved in this chemostatted ocean, with CO2 levels lower than they are today. That's the reason that they're not able to respond or adapt to this rapid acidification that's going on right now. So, Charlie Veron came up with this statement last year: "The prospect of ocean acidification may well be the most serious of all of the predicted outcomes of anthropogenic CO2 release." And I think that may very well be true, so I'll close with this. You know, we do need the protected areas, absolutely, but for the sake of the oceans, we have to cap or limit CO2 emissions as soon as possible. Thank you very much. (Applause)

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

Good morning. How are you? It's been great, hasn't it? I've been blown away by the whole thing. In fact, I'm leaving. (Laughter) There have been three themes, haven't there, running through the conference, which are relevant to what I want to talk about. One is the extraordinary evidence of human creativity in all of the presentations that we've had and in all of the people here. Just the variety of it and the range of it. The second is that it's put us in a place where we have no idea what's going to happen, in terms of the future. No idea how this may play out. I have an interest in education -- actually, what I find is everybody has an interest in education. Don't you? I find this very interesting. If you're at a dinner party, and you say you work in education -- actually, you're not often at dinner parties, frankly, if you work in education. (Laughter) You're not asked. And you're never asked back, curiously. That's strange to me. But if you are, and you say to somebody, you know, they say, "What do you do?" and you say you work in education, you can see the blood run from their face. They're like, "Oh my God," you know, "Why me? My one night out all week." (Laughter) But if you ask about their education, they pin you to the wall. Because it's one of those things that goes deep with people, am I right? Like religion, and money and other things. I have a big interest in education, and I think we all do. We have a huge vested interest in it, partly because it's education that's meant to take us into this future that we can't grasp. If you think of it, children starting school this year will be retiring in 2065. Nobody has a clue -- despite all the expertise that's been on parade for the past four days -- what the world will look like in five years' time. And yet we're meant to be educating them for it. So the unpredictability, I think, is extraordinary. And the third part of this is that we've all agreed, nonetheless, on the really extraordinary capacities that children have -- their capacities for innovation. I mean, Sirena last night was a marvel, wasn't she? Just seeing what she could do. And she's exceptional, but I think she's not, so to speak, exceptional in the whole of childhood. What you have there is a person of extraordinary dedication who found a talent. And my contention is, all kids have tremendous talents. And we squander them, pretty ruthlessly. So I want to talk about education and I want to talk about creativity. My contention is that creativity now is as important in education as literacy, and we should treat it with the same status. (Applause) Thank you. That was it, by the way. Thank you very much. (Laughter) So, 15 minutes left. Well, I was born ... no. (Laughter) I heard a great story recently -- I love telling it -- of a little girl who was in a drawing lesson. She was six and she was at the back, drawing, and the teacher said this little girl hardly ever paid attention, and in this drawing lesson she did. The teacher was fascinated and she went over to her and she said, "What are you drawing?" And the girl said, "I'm drawing a picture of God." And the teacher said, "But nobody knows what God looks like." And the girl said, "They will in a minute." (Laughter) When my son was four in England -- actually he was four everywhere, to be honest. (Laughter) If we're being strict about it, wherever he went, he was four that year. He was in the Nativity play. Do you remember the story? No, it was big. It was a big story. Mel Gibson did the sequel. You may have seen it: "Nativity II." But James got the part of Joseph, which we were thrilled about. We considered this to be one of the lead parts. We had the place crammed full of agents in T-shirts: "James Robinson IS Joseph!" (Laughter) He didn't have to speak, but you know the bit where the three kings come in. They come in bearing gifts, and they bring gold, frankincense and myrhh. This really happened. We were sitting there and I think they just went out of sequence, because we talked to the little boy afterward and we said, "You OK with that?" And he said, "Yeah, why? Was that wrong?" They just switched, that was it. Anyway, the three boys came in -- four-year-olds with tea towels on their heads -- and they put these boxes down, and the first boy said, "I bring you gold." And the second boy said, "I bring you myrhh." And the third boy said, "Frank sent this." (Laughter) What these things have in common is that kids will take a chance. If they don't know, they'll have a go. Am I right? They're not frightened of being wrong. Now, I don't mean to say that being wrong is the same thing as being creative. What we do know is, if you're not prepared to be wrong, you'll never come up with anything original -- if you're not prepared to be wrong. And by the time they get to be adults, most kids have lost that capacity. They have become frightened of being wrong. And we run our companies like this, by the way. We stigmatize mistakes. And we're now running national education systems where mistakes are the worst thing you can make. And the result is that we are educating people out of their creative capacities. Picasso once said this -- he said that all children are born artists. The problem is to remain an artist as we grow up. I believe this passionately, that we don't grow into creativity, we grow out of it. Or rather, we get educated out if it. So why is this? I lived in Stratford-on-Avon until about five years ago. In fact, we moved from Stratford to Los Angeles. So you can imagine what a seamless transition that was. (Laughter) Actually, we lived in a place called Snitterfield, just outside Stratford, which is where Shakespeare's father was born. Are you struck by a new thought? I was. You don't think of Shakespeare having a father, do you? Do you? Because you don't think of Shakespeare being a child, do you? Shakespeare being seven? I never thought of it. I mean, he was seven at some point. He was in somebody's English class, wasn't he? How annoying would that be? (Laughter) "Must try harder." Being sent to bed by his dad, you know, to Shakespeare, "Go to bed, now," to William Shakespeare, "and put the pencil down. And stop speaking like that. It's confusing everybody." (Laughter) Anyway, we moved from Stratford to Los Angeles, and I just want to say a word about the transition, actually. My son didn't want to come. I've got two kids. He's 21 now; my daughter's 16. He didn't want to come to Los Angeles. He loved it, but he had a girlfriend in England. This was the love of his life, Sarah. He'd known her for a month. Mind you, they'd had their fourth anniversary, because it's a long time when you're 16. Anyway, he was really upset on the plane, and he said, "I'll never find another girl like Sarah." And we were rather pleased about that, frankly, because she was the main reason we were leaving the country. (Laughter) But something strikes you when you move to America and when you travel around the world: Every education system on earth has the same hierarchy of subjects. Every one. Doesn't matter where you go. You'd think it would be otherwise, but it isn't. At the top are mathematics and languages, then the humanities, and the bottom are the arts. Everywhere on Earth. And in pretty much every system too, there's a hierarchy within the arts. Art and music are normally given a higher status in schools than drama and dance. There isn't an education system on the planet that teaches dance everyday to children the way we teach them mathematics. Why? Why not? I think this is rather important. I think math is very important, but so is dance. Children dance all the time if they're allowed to, we all do. We all have bodies, don't we? Did I miss a meeting? (Laughter) Truthfully, what happens is, as children grow up, we start to educate them progressively from the waist up. And then we focus on their heads. And slightly to one side. If you were to visit education, as an alien, and say "What's it for, public education?" I think you'd have to conclude -- if you look at the output, who really succeeds by this, who does everything that they should, who gets all the brownie points, who are the winners -- I think you'd have to conclude the whole purpose of public education throughout the world is to produce university professors. Isn't it? They're the people who come out the top. And I used to be one, so there. (Laughter) And I like university professors, but you know, we shouldn't hold them up as the high-water mark of all human achievement. They're just a form of life, another form of life. But they're rather curious, and I say this out of affection for them. There's something curious about professors in my experience -- not all of them, but typically -- they live in their heads. They live up there, and slightly to one side. They're disembodied, you know, in a kind of literal way. They look upon their body as a form of transport for their heads, don't they? (Laughter) It's a way of getting their head to meetings. If you want real evidence of out-of-body experiences, by the way, get yourself along to a residential conference of senior academics, and pop into the discotheque on the final night. (Laughter) And there you will see it -- grown men and women writhing uncontrollably, off the beat, waiting until it ends so they can go home and write a paper about it. Now our education system is predicated on the idea of academic ability. And there's a reason. The whole system was invented -- around the world, there were no public systems of education, really, before the 19th century. They all came into being to meet the needs of industrialism. So the hierarchy is rooted on two ideas. Number one, that the most useful subjects for work are at the top. So you were probably steered benignly away from things at school when you were a kid, things you liked, on the grounds that you would never get a job doing that. Is that right? Don't do music, you're not going to be a musician; don't do art, you won't be an artist. Benign advice -- now, profoundly mistaken. The whole world is engulfed in a revolution. And the second is academic ability, which has really come to dominate our view of intelligence, because the universities designed the system in their image. If you think of it, the whole system of public education around the world is a protracted process of university entrance. And the consequence is that many highly talented, brilliant, creative people think they're not, because the thing they were good at at school wasn't valued, or was actually stigmatized. And I think we can't afford to go on that way. In the next 30 years, according to UNESCO, more people worldwide will be graduating through education than since the beginning of history. More people, and it's the combination of all the things we've talked about -- technology and its transformation effect on work, and demography and the huge explosion in population. Suddenly, degrees aren't worth anything. Isn't that true? When I was a student, if you had a degree, you had a job. If you didn't have a job it's because you didn't want one. And I didn't want one, frankly. (Laughter) But now kids with degrees are often heading home to carry on playing video games, because you need an MA where the previous job required a BA, and now you need a PhD for the other. It's a process of academic inflation. And it indicates the whole structure of education is shifting beneath our feet. We need to radically rethink our view of intelligence. We know three things about intelligence. One, it's diverse. We think about the world in all the ways that we experience it. We think visually, we think in sound, we think kinesthetically. We think in abstract terms, we think in movement. Secondly, intelligence is dynamic. If you look at the interactions of a human brain, as we heard yesterday from a number of presentations, intelligence is wonderfully interactive. The brain isn't divided into compartments. In fact, creativity -- which I define as the process of having original ideas that have value -- more often than not comes about through the interaction of different disciplinary ways of seeing things. The brain is intentionally -- by the way, there's a shaft of nerves that joins the two halves of the brain called the corpus callosum. It's thicker in women. Following off from Helen yesterday, I think this is probably why women are better at multi-tasking. Because you are, aren't you? There's a raft of research, but I know it from my personal life. If my wife is cooking a meal at home -- which is not often, thankfully. (Laughter) But you know, she's doing -- no, she's good at some things -- but if she's cooking, you know, she's dealing with people on the phone, she's talking to the kids, she's painting the ceiling, she's doing open-heart surgery over here. If I'm cooking, the door is shut, the kids are out, the phone's on the hook, if she comes in I get annoyed. I say, "Terry, please, I'm trying to fry an egg in here. Give me a break." (Laughter) Actually, you know that old philosophical thing, if a tree falls in a forest and nobody hears it, did it happen? Remember that old chestnut? I saw a great t-shirt really recently which said, "If a man speaks his mind in a forest, and no woman hears him, is he still wrong?" (Laughter) And the third thing about intelligence is, it's distinct. I'm doing a new book at the moment called "Epiphany," which is based on a series of interviews with people about how they discovered their talent. I'm fascinated by how people got to be there. It's really prompted by a conversation I had with a wonderful woman who maybe most people have never heard of; she's called Gillian Lynne -- have you heard of her? Some have. She's a choreographer and everybody knows her work. She did "Cats" and "Phantom of the Opera." She's wonderful. I used to be on the board of the Royal Ballet in England, as you can see. Anyway, Gillian and I had lunch one day and I said, "Gillian, how'd you get to be a dancer?" And she said it was interesting; when she was at school, she was really hopeless. And the school, in the '30s, wrote to her parents and said, "We think Gillian has a learning disorder." She couldn't concentrate; she was fidgeting. I think now they'd say she had ADHD. Wouldn't you? But this was the 1930s, and ADHD hadn't been invented at this point. It wasn't an available condition. (Laughter) People weren't aware they could have that. Anyway, she went to see this specialist. So, this oak-paneled room, and she was there with her mother, and she was led and sat on this chair at the end, and she sat on her hands for 20 minutes while this man talked to her mother about all the problems Gillian was having at school. And at the end of it -- because she was disturbing people; her homework was always late; and so on, little kid of eight -- in the end, the doctor went and sat next to Gillian and said, "Gillian, I've listened to all these things that your mother's told me, and I need to speak to her privately." He said, "Wait here. We'll be back; we won't be very long," and they went and left her. But as they went out the room, he turned on the radio that was sitting on his desk. And when they got out the room, he said to her mother, "Just stand and watch her." And the minute they left the room, she said, she was on her feet, moving to the music. And they watched for a few minutes and he turned to her mother and said, "Mrs. Lynne, Gillian isn't sick; she's a dancer. Take her to a dance school." I said, "What happened?" She said, "She did. I can't tell you how wonderful it was. We walked in this room and it was full of people like me. People who couldn't sit still. People who had to move to think." Who had to move to think. They did ballet; they did tap; they did jazz; they did modern; they did contemporary. She was eventually auditioned for the Royal Ballet School; she became a soloist; she had a wonderful career at the Royal Ballet. She eventually graduated from the Royal Ballet School and founded her own company -- the Gillian Lynne Dance Company -- met Andrew Lloyd Weber. She's been responsible for some of the most successful musical theater productions in history; she's given pleasure to millions; and she's a multi-millionaire. Somebody else might have put her on medication and told her to calm down. Now, I think ... (Applause) What I think it comes to is this: Al Gore spoke the other night about ecology and the revolution that was triggered by Rachel Carson. I believe our only hope for the future is to adopt a new conception of human ecology, one in which we start to reconstitute our conception of the richness of human capacity. Our education system has mined our minds in the way that we strip-mine the earth: for a particular commodity. And for the future, it won't serve us. We have to rethink the fundamental principles on which we're educating our children. There was a wonderful quote by Jonas Salk, who said, "If all the insects were to disappear from the earth, within 50 years all life on Earth would end. If all human beings disappeared from the earth, within 50 years all forms of life would flourish." And he's right. What TED celebrates is the gift of the human imagination. We have to be careful now that we use this gift wisely and that we avert some of the scenarios that we've talked about. And the only way we'll do it is by seeing our creative capacities for the richness they are and seeing our children for the hope that they are. And our task is to educate their whole being, so they can face this future. By the way -- we may not see this future, but they will. And our job is to help them make something of it. Thank you very much.

Good morning. How are you? It's been great, hasn't it? I've been blown away by the whole thing. In fact, I'm leaving. (Laughter) There have been three themes, haven't there, running through the conference, which are relevant to what I want to talk about. One is the extraordinary evidence of human creativity in all of the presentations that we've had and in all of the people here. Just the variety of it and the range of it. The second is that it's put us in a place where we have no idea what's going to happen, in terms of the future. No idea how this may play out. I have an interest in education -- actually, what I find is everybody has an interest in education. Don't you? I find this very interesting. If you're at a dinner party, and you say you work in education -- actually, you're not often at dinner parties, frankly, if you work in education. (Laughter) You're not asked. And you're never asked back, curiously. That's strange to me. But if you are, and you say to somebody, you know, they say, "What do you do?" and you say you work in education, you can see the blood run from their face. They're like, "Oh my God," you know, "Why me? My one night out all week." (Laughter) But if you ask about their education, they pin you to the wall. Because it's one of those things that goes deep with people, am I right? Like religion, and money and other things. I have a big interest in education, and I think we all do. We have a huge vested interest in it, partly because it's education that's meant to take us into this future that we can't grasp. If you think of it, children starting school this year will be retiring in 2065. Nobody has a clue -- despite all the expertise that's been on parade for the past four days -- what the world will look like in five years' time. And yet we're meant to be educating them for it. So the unpredictability, I think, is extraordinary. And the third part of this is that we've all agreed, nonetheless, on the really extraordinary capacities that children have -- their capacities for innovation. I mean, Sirena last night was a marvel, wasn't she? Just seeing what she could do. And she's exceptional, but I think she's not, so to speak, exceptional in the whole of childhood. What you have there is a person of extraordinary dedication who found a talent. And my contention is, all kids have tremendous talents. And we squander them, pretty ruthlessly. So I want to talk about education and I want to talk about creativity. My contention is that creativity now is as important in education as literacy, and we should treat it with the same status. (Applause) Thank you. That was it, by the way. Thank you very much. (Laughter) So, 15 minutes left. Well, I was born ... no. (Laughter) I heard a great story recently -- I love telling it -- of a little girl who was in a drawing lesson. She was six and she was at the back, drawing, and the teacher said this little girl hardly ever paid attention, and in this drawing lesson she did. The teacher was fascinated and she went over to her and she said, "What are you drawing?" And the girl said, "I'm drawing a picture of God." And the teacher said, "But nobody knows what God looks like." And the girl said, "They will in a minute." (Laughter) When my son was four in England -- actually he was four everywhere, to be honest. (Laughter) If we're being strict about it, wherever he went, he was four that year. He was in the Nativity play. Do you remember the story? No, it was big. It was a big story. Mel Gibson did the sequel. You may have seen it: "Nativity II." But James got the part of Joseph, which we were thrilled about. We considered this to be one of the lead parts. We had the place crammed full of agents in T-shirts: "James Robinson IS Joseph!" (Laughter) He didn't have to speak, but you know the bit where the three kings come in. They come in bearing gifts, and they bring gold, frankincense and myrrh. This really happened. We were sitting there and I think they just went out of sequence, because we talked to the little boy afterward and we said, "You OK with that?" And he said, "Yeah, why? Was that wrong?" They just switched, that was it. Anyway, the three boys came in -- four-year-olds with tea towels on their heads -- and they put these boxes down, and the first boy said, "I bring you gold." And the second boy said, "I bring you myrrh." And the third boy said, "Frank sent this." (Laughter) What these things have in common is that kids will take a chance. If they don't know, they'll have a go. Am I right? They're not frightened of being wrong. Now, I don't mean to say that being wrong is the same thing as being creative. What we do know is, if you're not prepared to be wrong, you'll never come up with anything original -- if you're not prepared to be wrong. And by the time they get to be adults, most kids have lost that capacity. They have become frightened of being wrong. And we run our companies like this, by the way. We stigmatize mistakes. And we're now running national education systems where mistakes are the worst thing you can make. And the result is that we are educating people out of their creative capacities. Picasso once said this -- he said that all children are born artists. The problem is to remain an artist as we grow up. I believe this passionately, that we don't grow into creativity, we grow out of it. Or rather, we get educated out if it. So why is this? I lived in Stratford-on-Avon until about five years ago. In fact, we moved from Stratford to Los Angeles. So you can imagine what a seamless transition that was. (Laughter) Actually, we lived in a place called Snitterfield, just outside Stratford, which is where Shakespeare's father was born. Are you struck by a new thought? I was. You don't think of Shakespeare having a father, do you? Do you? Because you don't think of Shakespeare being a child, do you? Shakespeare being seven? I never thought of it. I mean, he was seven at some point. He was in somebody's English class, wasn't he? How annoying would that be? (Laughter) "Must try harder." Being sent to bed by his dad, you know, to Shakespeare, "Go to bed, now," to William Shakespeare, "and put the pencil down. And stop speaking like that. It's confusing everybody." (Laughter) Anyway, we moved from Stratford to Los Angeles, and I just want to say a word about the transition, actually. My son didn't want to come. I've got two kids. He's 21 now; my daughter's 16. He didn't want to come to Los Angeles. He loved it, but he had a girlfriend in England. This was the love of his life, Sarah. He'd known her for a month. Mind you, they'd had their fourth anniversary, because it's a long time when you're 16. Anyway, he was really upset on the plane, and he said, "I'll never find another girl like Sarah." And we were rather pleased about that, frankly, because she was the main reason we were leaving the country. (Laughter) But something strikes you when you move to America and when you travel around the world: Every education system on earth has the same hierarchy of subjects. Every one. Doesn't matter where you go. You'd think it would be otherwise, but it isn't. At the top are mathematics and languages, then the humanities, and the bottom are the arts. Everywhere on Earth. And in pretty much every system too, there's a hierarchy within the arts. Art and music are normally given a higher status in schools than drama and dance. There isn't an education system on the planet that teaches dance everyday to children the way we teach them mathematics. Why? Why not? I think this is rather important. I think math is very important, but so is dance. Children dance all the time if they're allowed to, we all do. We all have bodies, don't we? Did I miss a meeting? (Laughter) Truthfully, what happens is, as children grow up, we start to educate them progressively from the waist up. And then we focus on their heads. And slightly to one side. If you were to visit education, as an alien, and say "What's it for, public education?" I think you'd have to conclude -- if you look at the output, who really succeeds by this, who does everything that they should, who gets all the brownie points, who are the winners -- I think you'd have to conclude the whole purpose of public education throughout the world is to produce university professors. Isn't it? They're the people who come out the top. And I used to be one, so there. (Laughter) And I like university professors, but you know, we shouldn't hold them up as the high-water mark of all human achievement. They're just a form of life, another form of life. But they're rather curious, and I say this out of affection for them. There's something curious about professors in my experience -- not all of them, but typically -- they live in their heads. They live up there, and slightly to one side. They're disembodied, you know, in a kind of literal way. They look upon their body as a form of transport for their heads, don't they? (Laughter) It's a way of getting their head to meetings. If you want real evidence of out-of-body experiences, by the way, get yourself along to a residential conference of senior academics, and pop into the discotheque on the final night. (Laughter) And there you will see it -- grown men and women writhing uncontrollably, off the beat, waiting until it ends so they can go home and write a paper about it. Now our education system is predicated on the idea of academic ability. And there's a reason. The whole system was invented -- around the world, there were no public systems of education, really, before the 19th century. They all came into being to meet the needs of industrialism. So the hierarchy is rooted on two ideas. Number one, that the most useful subjects for work are at the top. So you were probably steered benignly away from things at school when you were a kid, things you liked, on the grounds that you would never get a job doing that. Is that right? Don't do music, you're not going to be a musician; don't do art, you won't be an artist. Benign advice -- now, profoundly mistaken. The whole world is engulfed in a revolution. And the second is academic ability, which has really come to dominate our view of intelligence, because the universities designed the system in their image. If you think of it, the whole system of public education around the world is a protracted process of university entrance. And the consequence is that many highly talented, brilliant, creative people think they're not, because the thing they were good at at school wasn't valued, or was actually stigmatized. And I think we can't afford to go on that way. In the next 30 years, according to UNESCO, more people worldwide will be graduating through education than since the beginning of history. More people, and it's the combination of all the things we've talked about -- technology and its transformation effect on work, and demography and the huge explosion in population. Suddenly, degrees aren't worth anything. Isn't that true? When I was a student, if you had a degree, you had a job. If you didn't have a job it's because you didn't want one. And I didn't want one, frankly. (Laughter) But now kids with degrees are often heading home to carry on playing video games, because you need an MA where the previous job required a BA, and now you need a PhD for the other. It's a process of academic inflation. And it indicates the whole structure of education is shifting beneath our feet. We need to radically rethink our view of intelligence. We know three things about intelligence. One, it's diverse. We think about the world in all the ways that we experience it. We think visually, we think in sound, we think kinesthetically. We think in abstract terms, we think in movement. Secondly, intelligence is dynamic. If you look at the interactions of a human brain, as we heard yesterday from a number of presentations, intelligence is wonderfully interactive. The brain isn't divided into compartments. In fact, creativity -- which I define as the process of having original ideas that have value -- more often than not comes about through the interaction of different disciplinary ways of seeing things. The brain is intentionally -- by the way, there's a shaft of nerves that joins the two halves of the brain called the corpus callosum. It's thicker in women. Following off from Helen yesterday, I think this is probably why women are better at multi-tasking. Because you are, aren't you? There's a raft of research, but I know it from my personal life. If my wife is cooking a meal at home -- which is not often, thankfully. (Laughter) But you know, she's doing -- no, she's good at some things -- but if she's cooking, you know, she's dealing with people on the phone, she's talking to the kids, she's painting the ceiling, she's doing open-heart surgery over here. If I'm cooking, the door is shut, the kids are out, the phone's on the hook, if she comes in I get annoyed. I say, "Terry, please, I'm trying to fry an egg in here. Give me a break." (Laughter) Actually, you know that old philosophical thing, if a tree falls in a forest and nobody hears it, did it happen? Remember that old chestnut? I saw a great t-shirt really recently which said, "If a man speaks his mind in a forest, and no woman hears him, is he still wrong?" (Laughter) And the third thing about intelligence is, it's distinct. I'm doing a new book at the moment called "Epiphany," which is based on a series of interviews with people about how they discovered their talent. I'm fascinated by how people got to be there. It's really prompted by a conversation I had with a wonderful woman who maybe most people have never heard of; she's called Gillian Lynne -- have you heard of her? Some have. She's a choreographer and everybody knows her work. She did "Cats" and "Phantom of the Opera." She's wonderful. I used to be on the board of the Royal Ballet in England, as you can see. Anyway, Gillian and I had lunch one day and I said, "Gillian, how'd you get to be a dancer?" And she said it was interesting; when she was at school, she was really hopeless. And the school, in the '30s, wrote to her parents and said, "We think Gillian has a learning disorder." She couldn't concentrate; she was fidgeting. I think now they'd say she had ADHD. Wouldn't you? But this was the 1930s, and ADHD hadn't been invented at this point. It wasn't an available condition. (Laughter) People weren't aware they could have that. Anyway, she went to see this specialist. So, this oak-paneled room, and she was there with her mother, and she was led and sat on this chair at the end, and she sat on her hands for 20 minutes while this man talked to her mother about all the problems Gillian was having at school. And at the end of it -- because she was disturbing people; her homework was always late; and so on, little kid of eight -- in the end, the doctor went and sat next to Gillian and said, "Gillian, I've listened to all these things that your mother's told me, and I need to speak to her privately." He said, "Wait here. We'll be back; we won't be very long," and they went and left her. But as they went out the room, he turned on the radio that was sitting on his desk. And when they got out the room, he said to her mother, "Just stand and watch her." And the minute they left the room, she said, she was on her feet, moving to the music. And they watched for a few minutes and he turned to her mother and said, "Mrs. Lynne, Gillian isn't sick; she's a dancer. Take her to a dance school." I said, "What happened?" She said, "She did. I can't tell you how wonderful it was. We walked in this room and it was full of people like me. People who couldn't sit still. People who had to move to think." Who had to move to think. They did ballet; they did tap; they did jazz; they did modern; they did contemporary. She was eventually auditioned for the Royal Ballet School; she became a soloist; she had a wonderful career at the Royal Ballet. She eventually graduated from the Royal Ballet School and founded her own company -- the Gillian Lynne Dance Company -- met Andrew Lloyd Weber. She's been responsible for some of the most successful musical theater productions in history; she's given pleasure to millions; and she's a multi-millionaire. Somebody else might have put her on medication and told her to calm down. Now, I think ... (Applause) What I think it comes to is this: Al Gore spoke the other night about ecology and the revolution that was triggered by Rachel Carson. I believe our only hope for the future is to adopt a new conception of human ecology, one in which we start to reconstitute our conception of the richness of human capacity. Our education system has mined our minds in the way that we strip-mine the earth: for a particular commodity. And for the future, it won't serve us. We have to rethink the fundamental principles on which we're educating our children. There was a wonderful quote by Jonas Salk, who said, "If all the insects were to disappear from the earth, within 50 years all life on Earth would end. If all human beings disappeared from the earth, within 50 years all forms of life would flourish." And he's right. What TED celebrates is the gift of the human imagination. We have to be careful now that we use this gift wisely and that we avert some of the scenarios that we've talked about. And the only way we'll do it is by seeing our creative capacities for the richness they are and seeing our children for the hope that they are. And our task is to educate their whole being, so they can face this future. By the way -- we may not see this future, but they will. And our job is to help them make something of it. Thank you very much.

So I've had the great privilege of traveling to some incredible places, photographing these distant landscapes and remote cultures all over the world. I love my job. But people think it's this string of epiphanies and sunrises and rainbows, when in reality, it looks more something like this. (Laughter) This is my office. We can't afford the fanciest places to stay at night, so we tend to sleep a lot outdoors. As long as we can stay dry, that's a bonus. We also can't afford the fanciest restaurants. So we tend to eat whatever's on the local menu. And if you're in the Ecuadorian Páramo, you're going to eat a large rodent called a cuy. (Laughter) But what makes our experiences perhaps a little bit different and a little more unique than that of the average person is that we have this gnawing thing in the back of our mind that even in our darkest moments, and those times of despair, we think, "Hey, there might be an image to be made here, there might be a story to be told." And why is storytelling important? Well, it helps us to connect with our cultural and our natural heritage. And in the Southeast, there's an alarming disconnect between the public and the natural areas that allow us to be here in the first place. We're visual creatures, so we use what we see to teach us what we know. Now the majority of us aren't going to willingly go way down to a swamp. So how can we still expect those same people to then advocate on behalf of their protection? We can't. So my job, then, is to use photography as a communication tool, to help bridge the gap between the science and the aesthetics, to get people talking, to get them thinking, and to hopefully, ultimately, get them caring. I started doing this 15 years ago right here in Gainesville, right here in my backyard. And I fell in love with adventure and discovery, going to explore all these different places that were just minutes from my front doorstep. There are a lot of beautiful places to find. Despite all these years that have passed, I still see the world through the eyes of a child and I try to incorporate that sense of wonderment and that sense of curiosity into my photography as often as I can. And we're pretty lucky because here in the South, we're still blessed with a relatively blank canvas that we can fill with the most fanciful adventures and incredible experiences. It's just a matter of how far our imagination will take us. See, a lot of people look at this and they say, "Oh yeah, wow, that's a pretty tree." But I don't just see a tree -- I look at this and I see opportunity. I see an entire weekend. Because when I was a kid, these were the types of images that got me off the sofa and dared me to explore, dared me to go find the woods and put my head underwater and see what we have. And folks, I've been photographing all over the world and I promise you, what we have here in the South, what we have in the Sunshine State, rivals anything else that I've seen. But yet our tourism industry is busy promoting all the wrong things. Before most kids are 12, they'll have been to Disney World more times than they've been in a canoe or camping under a starry sky. And I have nothing against Disney or Mickey; I used to go there, too. But they're missing out on those fundamental connections that create a real sense of pride and ownership for the place that they call home. And this is compounded by the issue that the landscapes that define our natural heritage and fuel our aquifer for our drinking water have been deemed as scary and dangerous and spooky. When our ancestors first came here, they warned, "Stay out of these areas, they're haunted. They're full of evil spirits and ghosts." I don't know where they came up with that idea. But it's actually led to a very real disconnect, a very real negative mentality that has kept the public disinterested, silent, and ultimately, our environment at risk. We're a state that's surrounded and defined by water, and yet for centuries, swamps and wetlands have been regarded as these obstacles to overcome. And so we've treated them as these second-class ecosystems, because they have very little monetary value and of course, they're known to harbor alligators and snakes -- which, I'll admit, these aren't the most cuddly of ambassadors. (Laughter) So it became assumed, then, that the only good swamp was a drained swamp. And in fact, draining a swamp to make way for agriculture and development was considered the very essence of conservation not too long ago. But now we're backpedaling, because the more we come to learn about these sodden landscapes, the more secrets we're starting to unlock about interspecies relationships and the connectivity of habitats, watersheds and flyways. Take this bird, for example: this is the prothonotary warbler. I love this bird because it's a swamp bird, through and through, a swamp bird. They nest and they mate and they breed in these old-growth swamps in these flooded forests. And so after the spring, after they raise their young, they then fly thousand of miles over the Gulf of Mexico into Central and South America. And then after the winter, the spring rolls around and they come back. They fly thousands of miles over the Gulf of Mexico. And where do they go? Where do they land? Right back in the same tree. That's nuts. This is a bird the size of a tennis ball -- I mean, that's crazy! I used a GPS to get here today, and this is my hometown. (Laughter) It's crazy. So what happens, then, when this bird flies over the Gulf of Mexico into Central America for the winter and then the spring rolls around and it flies back, and it comes back to this: a freshly sodded golf course? This is a narrative that's all too commonly unraveling here in this state. And this is a natural process that's occurred for thousands of years and we're just now learning about it. So you can imagine all else we have to learn about these landscapes if we just preserve them first. Now despite all this rich life that abounds in these swamps, they still have a bad name. Many people feel uncomfortable with the idea of wading into Florida's blackwater. I can understand that. But what I loved about growing up in the Sunshine State is that for so many of us, we live with this latent but very palpable fear that when we put our toes into the water, there might be something much more ancient and much more adapted than we are. Knowing that you're not top dog is a welcomed discomfort, I think. How often in this modern and urban and digital age do you actually get the chance to feel vulnerable, or consider that the world may not have been made for just us? So for the last decade, I began seeking out these areas where the concrete yields to forest and the pines turn to cypress, and I viewed all these mosquitoes and reptiles, all these discomforts, as affirmations that I'd found true wilderness, and I embrace them wholly. Now as a conservation photographer obsessed with blackwater, it's only fitting that I'd eventually end up in the most famous swamp of all: the Everglades. Growing up here in North Central Florida, it always had these enchanted names, places like Loxahatchee and Fakahatchee, Corkscrew, Big Cypress. I started what turned into a five-year project to hopefully reintroduce the Everglades in a new light, in a more inspired light. But I knew this would be a tall order, because here you have an area that's roughly a third the size the state of Florida, it's huge. And when I say Everglades, most people are like, "Oh, yeah, the national park." But the Everglades is not just a park; it's an entire watershed, starting with the Kissimmee chain of lakes in the north, and then as the rains would fall in the summer, these downpours would flow into Lake Okeechobee, and Lake Okeechobee would fill up and it would overflow its banks and spill southward, ever slowly, with the topography, and get into the river of grass, the Sawgrass Prairies, before meting into the cypress slews, until going further south into the mangrove swamps, and then finally -- finally -- reaching Florida Bay, the emerald gem of the Everglades, the great estuary, the 850 square-mile estuary. So sure, the national park is the southern end of this system, but all the things that make it unique are these inputs that come in, the fresh water that starts 100 miles north. So no manner of these political or invisible boundaries protect the park from polluted water or insufficient water. And unfortunately, that's precisely what we've done. Over the last 60 years, we have drained, we have dammed, we have dredged the Everglades to where now only one third of the water that used to reach the bay now reaches the bay today. So this story is not all sunshine and rainbows, unfortunately. For better or for worse, the story of the Everglades is intrinsically tied to the peaks and the valleys of mankind's relationship with the natural world. But I'll show you these beautiful pictures, because it gets you on board. And while I have your attention, I can tell you the real story. It's that we're taking this, and we're trading it for this, at an alarming rate. And what's lost on so many people is the sheer scale of which we're discussing. Because the Everglades is not just responsible for the drinking water for 7 million Floridians; today it also provides the agricultural fields for the year-round tomatoes and oranges for over 300 million Americans. And it's that same seasonal pulse of water in the summer that built the river of grass 6,000 years ago. Ironically, today, it's also responsible for the over half a million acres of the endless river of sugarcane. These are the same fields that are responsible for dumping exceedingly high levels of fertilizers into the watershed, forever changing the system. But in order for you to not just understand how this system works, but to also get personally connected to it, I decided to break the story down into several different narratives. And I wanted that story to start in Lake Okeechobee, the beating heart of the Everglade system. And to do that, I picked an ambassador, an iconic species. This is the Everglade snail kite. It's a great bird, and they used to nest in the thousands, thousands in the northern Everglades. And then they've gone down to about 400 nesting pairs today. And why is that? Well, it's because they eat one source of food, an apple snail, about the size of a ping-pong ball, an aquatic gastropod. So as we started damming up the Everglades, as we started diking Lake Okeechobee and draining the wetlands, we lost the habitat for the snail. And thus, the population of the kites declined. And so, I wanted a photo that would not only communicate this relationship between wetland, snail and bird, but I also wanted a photo that would communicate how incredible this relationship was, and how very important it is that they've come to depend on each other, this healthy wetland and this bird. And to do that, I brainstormed this idea. I started sketching out these plans to make a photo, and I sent it to the wildlife biologist down in Okeechobee -- this is an endangered bird, so it takes special permission to do. So I built this submerged platform that would hold snails just right under the water. And I spent months planning this crazy idea. And I took this platform down to Lake Okeechobee and I spent over a week in the water, wading waist-deep, 9-hour shifts from dawn until dusk, to get one image that I thought might communicate this. And here's the day that it finally worked: [Video: (Mac Stone narrating) After setting up the platform, I look off and I see a kite coming over the cattails. And I see him scanning and searching. And he gets right over the trap, and I see that he's seen it. And he beelines, he goes straight for the trap. And in that moment, all those months of planning, waiting, all the sunburn, mosquito bites -- suddenly, they're all worth it. (Mac Stone in film) Oh my gosh, I can't believe it!] You can believe how excited I was when that happened. But what the idea was, is that for someone who's never seen this bird and has no reason to care about it, these photos, these new perspectives, will help shed a little new light on just one species that makes this watershed so incredible, so valuable, so important. Now, I know I can't come here to Gainesville and talk to you about animals in the Everglades without talking about gators. I love gators, I grew up loving gators. My parents always said I had an unhealthy relationship with gators. But what I like about them is, they're like the freshwater equivalent of sharks. They're feared, they're hated, and they are tragically misunderstood. Because these are a unique species, they're not just apex predators. In the Everglades, they are the very architects of the Everglades, because as the water drops down in the winter during the dry season, they start excavating these holes called gator holes. And they do this because as the water drops down, they'll be able to stay wet and they'll be able to forage. And now this isn't just affecting them, other animals also depend on this relationship, so they become a keystone species as well. So how do you make an apex predator, an ancient reptile, at once look like it dominates the system, but at the same time, look vulnerable? Well, you wade into a pit of about 120 of them, then you hope that you've made the right decision. (Laughter) I still have all my fingers, it's cool. But I understand, I know I'm not going to rally you guys, I'm not going to rally the troops to "Save the Everglades for the gators!" It won't happen because they're so ubiquitous, we see them now, they're one of the great conservation success stories of the US. But there is one species in the Everglades that no matter who you are, you can't help but love, too, and that's the roseate spoonbill. These birds are great, but they've had a really tough time in the Everglades, because they started out with thousands of nesting pairs in Florida Bay, and at the turn of the 20th century, they got down to two -- two nesting pairs. And why? That's because women thought they looked better on their hats then they did flying in the sky. Then we banned the plume trade, and their numbers started rebounding. And as their numbers started rebounding, scientists began to pay attention, they started studying these birds. And what they found out is that these birds' behavior is intrinsically tied to the annual draw-down cycle of water in the Everglades, the thing that defines the Everglades watershed. What they found out is that these birds started nesting in the winter as the water drew down, because they're tactile feeders, so they have to touch whatever they eat. And so they wait for these concentrated pools of fish to be able to feed enough to feed their young. So these birds became the very icon of the Everglades -- an indicator species of the overall health of the system. And just as their numbers were rebounding in the mid-20th century -- shooting up to 900, 1,000, 1,100, 1,200 -- just as that started happening, we started draining the southern Everglades. And we stopped two-thirds of that water from moving south. And it had drastic consequences. And just as those numbers started reaching their peak, unfortunately, today, the real spoonbill story, the real photo of what it looks like is more something like this. And we're down to less than 70 nesting pairs in Florida Bay today, because we've disrupted the system so much. So all these different organizations are shouting, they're screaming, "The Everglades is fragile! It's fragile!" It is not. It is resilient. Because despite all we've taken, despite all we've done and we've drained and we've dammed and we've dredged it, pieces of it are still here, waiting to be put back together. And this is what I've loved about South Florida, that in one place, you have this unstoppable force of mankind meeting the immovable object of tropical nature. And it's at this new frontier that we are forced with a new appraisal. What is wilderness worth? What is the value of biodiversity, or our drinking water? And fortunately, after decades of debate, we're finally starting to act on those questions. We're slowly undertaking these projects to bring more freshwater back to the bay. But it's up to us as citizens, as residents, as stewards to hold our elected officials to their promises. What can you do to help? It's so easy. Just get outside, get out there. Take your friends out, take your kids out, take your family out. Hire a fishing guide. Show the state that protecting wilderness not only makes ecological sense, but economic sense as well. It's a lot of fun, just do it -- put your feet in the water. The swamp will change you, I promise. Over the years, we've been so generous with these other landscapes around the country, cloaking them with this American pride, places that we now consider to define us: Grand Canyon, Yosemite, Yellowstone. And we use these parks and these natural areas as beacons and as cultural compasses. And sadly, the Everglades is very commonly left out of that conversation. But I believe it's every bit as iconic and emblematic of who we are as a country as any of these other wildernesses. It's just a different kind of wild. But I'm encouraged, because maybe we're finally starting to come around, because what was once deemed this swampy wasteland, today is a World Heritage site. It's a wetland of international importance. And we've come a long way in the last 60 years. And as the world's largest and most ambitious wetland restoration project, the international spotlight is on us in the Sunshine State. Because if we can heal this system, it's going to become an icon for wetland restoration all over the world. But it's up to us to decide which legacy we want to attach our flag to. They say that the Everglades is our greatest test. If we pass it, we get to keep the planet. I love that quote, because it's a challenge, it's a prod. Can we do it? Will we do it? We have to, we must. But the Everglades is not just a test. It's also a gift, and ultimately, our responsibility. Thank you. (Applause)

I do want to test this question we're all interested in: Does extinction have to be forever? I'm focused on two projects I want to tell you about. One is the Thylacine Project. The other one is the Lazarus Project, and that's focused on the gastric brooding frog. And it would be a fair question to ask, well, why have we focused on these two animals? Well, point number one, each of them represents a unique family of its own. We've lost a whole family. That's a big chunk of the global genome gone. I'd like it back. The second reason is that we killed these things. In the case of the thylacine, regrettably, we shot every one that we saw. We slaughtered them. In the case of the gastric brooding frog, we may have "fungicided" it to death. There's a dreadful fungus that's sort of moving through the world that's called the chytrid fungus, and it's nailing frogs all over the world. We think that's probably what got this frog, and humans are spreading this fungus. And this introduces a very important ethical point, and I think you will have heard this many times when this topic comes up. What I think is important is that, if it's clear that we exterminated these species, then I think we not only have a moral obligation to see what we can do about it, but I think we've got a moral imperative to try to do something, if we can. Okay. Let me talk to you about the Lazarus Project. It's a frog. And you think, frog. Yeah, but this was not just any frog. Unlike a normal frog, which lays its eggs in the water and goes away and wishes its froglets well, this frog swallowed its fertilized eggs, swallowed them into the stomach where it should be having food, didn't digest the eggs, and turned its stomach into a uterus. In the stomach, the eggs went on to develop into tadpoles, and in the stomach, the tadpoles went on to develop into frogs, and they grew in the stomach until eventually the poor old frog was at risk of bursting apart. It has a little cough and a hiccup, and out comes sprays of little frogs. Now, when biologists saw this, they were agog. They thought, this is incredible. No animal, let alone a frog, has been known to do this, to change one organ in the body into another. And you can imagine the medical world went nuts over this as well. If we could understand how that frog is managing the way its tummy works, is there information here that we need to understand or could usefully use to help ourselves? Now, I'm not suggesting we want to raise our babies in our stomach, but I am suggesting it's possible we might want to manage gastric secretion in the gut. And just as everybody got excited about it, bang! It was extinct. I called up my friend, Professor Mike Tyler in the University of Adelaide. He was the last person who had this frog, a colony of these things, in his lab. And I said, "Mike, by any chance -- " this was 30 or 40 years ago — "by any chance had you kept any frozen tissue of this frog?" And he thought about it, and he went to his deep freezer, minus 20 degrees centigrade, and he poured through everything in the freezer, and there in the bottom was a jar and it contained tissues of these frogs. This was very exciting, but there was no reason why we should expect that this would work, because this tissue had not had any antifreeze put in it, cryoprotectants, to look after it when it was frozen. And normally, when water freezes, as you know, it expands, and the same thing happens in a cell. If you freeze tissues, the water expands, damages or bursts the cell walls. Well, we looked at the tissue under the microscope. It actually didn't look bad. The cell walls looked intact. So we thought, let's give it a go. What we did is something called somatic cell nuclear transplantation. We took the eggs of a related species, a living frog, and we inactivated the nucleus of the egg. We used ultraviolet radiation to do that. And then we took the dead nucleus from the dead tissue of the extinct frog and we inserted those nuclei into that egg. Now by rights, this is kind of like a cloning project, like what produced Dolly, but it's actually very different, because Dolly was live sheep into live sheep cells. That was a miracle, but it was workable. What we're trying to do is take a dead nucleus from an extinct species and put it into a completely different species and expect that to work. Well, we had no real reason to expect it would, and we tried hundreds and hundreds of these. And just last February, the last time we did these trials, I saw a miracle starting to happen. What we found was, most of these eggs didn't work, but then suddenly one of them began to divide. That was so exciting. And then the egg divided again. And then again. And pretty soon, we had early stage embryos with hundreds of cells forming those. We even DNA tested some of these cells, and the DNA of the extinct frog is in those cells. So we're very excited. This is not a tadpole. It's not a frog. But it's a long way along the journey to producing, or bringing back, an extinct species. And this is news. We haven't announced this publicly before. We're excited. We've got to get past this point. We now want this ball of cells to start to gastrulate, to turn in so that it will produce the other tissues. It'll go on and produce a tadpole and then a frog. Watch this space. I think we're going to have this frog hopping glad to be back in the world again. Thank you. (Applause) We haven't done it yet, but keep those applause ready. The second project I want to talk to you about is the Thylacine Project. The thylacine looks a bit, to most people, like a dog, or maybe like a tiger, because it has stripes. But it's not related to any of those. It's a marsupial. It raised its young in a pouch, like a koala or a kangaroo would do, and it has a long history, a long, fascinating history, that goes back 25 million years. But it's also a tragic history. The first one that we see occurs in the ancient rainforests of Australia about 25 million years ago, and the National Geographic Society is helping us to explore these fossil deposits. This is Riversleigh. In those fossil rocks are some amazing animals. We found marsupial lions. We found carnivorous kangaroos. It's not what you usually think about as a kangaroo, but these are meat-eating kangaroos. We found the biggest bird in the world, bigger than that thing that was in Madagascar, and it too was a flesh-eater. It was a giant, weird duck. And crocodiles were not behaving at that time either. You think of crocodiles as doing their ugly thing, sitting in a pool of water. These crocodiles were actually out on the land and they were even climbing trees and jumping on prey on the ground. We had, in Australia, drop crocs. They really do exist. But what they were dropping on was not only other weird animals but also thylacines. There were five different kinds of thylacines in those ancient forests, and they ranged from great big ones to middle-sized ones to one that was about the size of a chihuahua. Paris Hilton would have been able to carry one of these things around in a little handbag, until a drop croc landed on her. At any rate, it was a fascinating place, but unfortunately, Australia didn't stay this way. Climate change has affected the world for a long period of time, and gradually, the forests disappeared, the country began to dry out, and the number of kinds of thylacines began to decline, until by five million years ago, only one left. By 10,000 years ago, they had disappeared from New Guinea, and unfortunately by 4,000 years ago, somebodies, we don't know who this was, introduced dingoes -- this is a very archaic kind of a dog — into Australia. And as you can see, dingoes are very similar in their body form to thylacines. That similarity meant they probably competed. They were eating the same kinds of foods. It's even possible that aborigines were keeping some of these dingoes as pets, and therefore they may have had an advantage in the battle for survival. All we know is, soon after the dingoes were brought in, thylacines were extinct in the Australian mainland, and after that they only survived in Tasmania. Then, unfortunately, the next sad part of the thylacine story is that Europeans arrived in 1788, and they brought with them the things they valued, and that included sheep. They took one look at the thylacine in Tasmania, and they thought, hang on, this is not going to work. That guy is going to eat all our sheep. That was not what happened, actually. Wild dogs did eat a few of the sheep, but the thylacine got a bad rap. But immediately, the government said, that's it, let's get rid of them, and they paid people to slaughter every one that they saw. By the early 1930s, 3,000 to 4,000 thylacines had been murdered. It was a disaster, and they were about to hit the wall. Have a look at this bit of film footage. It makes me very sad, because, while, it's a fascinating animal, and it's amazing to think that we had the technology to film it before it actually plunged off that cliff of extinction, we didn't, unfortunately, at this same time, have a molecule of concern about the welfare for this species. These are photos of the last surviving thylacine, Benjamin, who was in the Beaumaris Zoo in Hobart. To add insult to injury, having swept this species nearly off the table, this animal, when it died of neglect, the keepers didn't let it into the hutch on a cold night in Hobart. It died of exposure, and in the morning, when they found the body of Benjamin, they still cared so little for this animal that they threw the body in the dump. Does it have to stay this way? In 1990, I was in the Australian Museum. I was fascinated by thylacines. I've always been obsessed with these animals. And I was studying skulls, trying to figure out their relationships to other sorts of animals, and I saw this jar, and here, in the jar, was a little girl thylacine pup, perhaps six months old. The guy who had found it and killed the mother had pickled the pup and they pickled it in alcohol. I'm a paleontologist, but I still knew alcohol was a DNA preservative. But this was 1990, and I asked my geneticist friends, couldn't we think about going into this pup and extracting DNA, if it's there, and then somewhere down the line in the future, we'll use this DNA to bring the thylacine back? The geneticists laughed. But this was six years before Dolly. Cloning was science fiction. It had not happened. But then suddenly cloning did happen. And I thought, when I became director of the Australian Museum, I'm going to give this a go. I put a team together. We went into that pup to see what was in there, and we did find thylacine DNA. It was a eureka moment. We were very excited. Unfortunately, we also found a lot of human DNA. Every old curator who'd been in that museum had seen this wonderful specimen, put their hand in the jar, pulled it out and thought, "Wow, look at that," plop, dropped it back in the jar, contaminating this specimen. And that was a worry. If the goal here was to get the DNA out and use the DNA down the track to try to bring a thylacine back, what we didn't want happening when the information was shoved into the machine and the wheel turned around and the lights flashed, was to have a wizened old horrible curator pop out the other end of the machine. (Laughter) It would've kept the curator very happy, but it wasn't going to keep us happy. So we went back to these specimens and we started digging around, and particularly we looked into the teeth of skulls, hard parts where humans had not been able to get their fingers, and we found much better quality DNA. We found nuclear mitochondrial genes. It's there. So we got it. Okay. What could we do with this stuff? Well, George Church in his book, "Regenesis," has mentioned many of the techniques that are rapidly advancing to work with fragmented DNA. We would hope that we'll be able to get that DNA back into a viable form, and then, much like we've done with the Lazarus Project, get that stuff into an egg of a host species. It has to be a different species. What could it be? Why couldn't it be a Tasmanian devil? They're related distantly to thylacines. And then the Tasmanian devil is going to pop a thylacine out the south end. Critics of this project say, hang on. Thylacine, Tasmanian devil? That's going to hurt. No, it's not. These are marsupials. They give birth to babies that are the size of a jelly bean. That Tasmanian devil's not even going to know it gave birth. It is, shortly, going to think it's got the ugliest Tasmanian devil baby in the world, so maybe it'll need some help to keep it going. Andrew Pask and his colleagues have demonstrated this might not be a waste of time. And it's sort of in the future, we haven't got there yet, but it's the kind of thing we want to think about. They took some of this same pickled thylacine DNA and they spliced it into a mouse genome, but they put a tag on it so that anything that this thylacine DNA produced would appear blue-green in the mouse baby. In other words, if thylacine tissues were being produced by the thylacine DNA, it would be able to be recognized. When the baby popped up, it was filled with blue-green tissues. And that tells us if we can get that genome back together, get it into a live cell, it's going to produce thylacine stuff. Is this a risk? You've taken the bits of one animal and you've mixed them into the cell of a different kind of an animal. Are we going to get a Frankenstein? You know, some kind of weird hybrid chimera? And the answer is no. If the only nuclear DNA that goes into this hybrid cell is thylacine DNA, that's the only thing that can pop out the other end of the devil. Okay, if we can do this, could we put it back? This is a key question for everybody. Does it have to stay in a laboratory, or could we put it back where it belongs? Could we put it back in the throne of the king of beasts in Tasmania where it belongs, restore that ecosystem? Or has Tasmania changed so much that that's no longer possible? I've been to Tasmania. I've been to many of the areas where the thylacines were common. I've even spoken to people, like Peter Carter here, who when I spoke to him was 90 years old, but in 1926, this man and his father and his brother caught thylacines. They trapped them. And it just, when I spoke to this man, I was looking in his eyes and thinking, behind those eyes is a brain that has memories of what thylacines feel like, what they smelled like, what they sounded like. He led them around on a rope. He has personal experiences that I would give my left leg to have in my head. We'd all love to have this sort of thing happen. Anyway, I asked Peter, by any chance, could he take us back to where he caught those thylacines. My interest was in whether the environment had changed. He thought hard. I mean, it was nearly 80 years before this that he'd been at this hut. At any rate, he led us down this bush track, and there, right where he remembered, was the hut, and tears came into his eyes. He looked at the hut. We went inside. There were the wooden boards on the sides of the hut where he and his father and his brother had slept at night. And he told me, as it all was flooding back in memories. He said, "I remember the thylacines going around the hut wondering what was inside," and he said they made sounds like "Yip! Yip! Yip!" All of these are parts of his life and what he remembers. And the key question for me was to ask Peter, has it changed? And he said no. The southern beech forests surrounded his hut just like it was when he was there in 1926. The grasslands were sweeping away. That's classic thylacine habitat. And the animals in those areas were the same that were there when the thylacine was around. So could we put it back? Yes. Is that all we would do? And this is an interesting question. Sometimes you might be able to put it back, but is that the safest way to make sure it never goes extinct again, and I don't think so. I think gradually, as we see species all around the world, it's kind of a mantra that wildlife is increasingly not safe in the wild. We'd love to think it is, but we know it isn't. We need other parallel strategies coming online. And this one interests me. Some of the thylacines that were being turned into zoos, sanctuaries, even at the museums, had collar marks on the neck. They were being kept as pets, and we know a lot of bush tales and memories of people who had them as pets, and they say they were wonderful, friendly. This particular one came in out of the forest to lick this boy and curled up around the fireplace to go to sleep. A wild animal. And I'd like to ask the question, all of -- we need to think about this. If it had not been illegal to keep these thylacines as pets then, would the thylacine be extinct now? And I'm positive it wouldn't. We need to think about this in today's world. Could it be that getting animals close to us so that we value them, maybe they won't go extinct? And this is such a critical issue for us, because if we don't do that, we're going to watch more of these animals plunge off the precipice. As far as I'm concerned, this is why we're trying to do these kinds of de-extinction projects. We are trying to restore that balance of nature that we have upset. Thank you. (Applause)

Okay, now I don't want to alarm anybody in this room, but it's just come to my attention that the person to your right is a liar. (Laughter) Also, the person to your left is a liar. Also the person sitting in your very seats is a liar. We're all liars. What I'm going to do today is I'm going to show you what the research says about why we're all liars, how you can become a liespotter and why you might want to go the extra mile and go from liespotting to truth seeking, and ultimately to trust building. Now, speaking of trust, ever since I wrote this book, "Liespotting," no one wants to meet me in person anymore, no, no, no, no, no. They say, "It's okay, we'll email you." (Laughter) I can't even get a coffee date at Starbucks. My husband's like, "Honey, deception? Maybe you could have focused on cooking. How about French cooking?" So before I get started, what I'm going to do is I'm going to clarify my goal for you, which is not to teach a game of Gotcha. Liespotters aren't those nitpicky kids, those kids in the back of the room that are shouting, "Gotcha! Gotcha! Your eyebrow twitched. You flared your nostril. I watch that TV show 'Lie To Me.' I know you're lying." No, liespotters are armed with scientific knowledge of how to spot deception. They use it to get to the truth, and they do what mature leaders do everyday; they have difficult conversations with difficult people, sometimes during very difficult times. And they start up that path by accepting a core proposition, and that proposition is the following: Lying is a cooperative act. Think about it, a lie has no power whatsoever by its mere utterance. Its power emerges when someone else agrees to believe the lie. So I know it may sound like tough love, but look, if at some point you got lied to, it's because you agreed to get lied to. Truth number one about lying: Lying's a cooperative act. Now not all lies are harmful. Sometimes we're willing participants in deception for the sake of social dignity, maybe to keep a secret that should be kept secret, secret. We say, "Nice song." "Honey, you don't look fat in that, no." Or we say, favorite of the digiratti, "You know, I just fished that email out of my Spam folder. So sorry." But there are times when we are unwilling participants in deception. And that can have dramatic costs for us. Last year saw 997 billion dollars in corporate fraud alone in the United States. That's an eyelash under a trillion dollars. That's seven percent of revenues. Deception can cost billions. Think Enron, Madoff, the mortgage crisis. Or in the case of double agents and traitors, like Robert Hanssen or Aldrich Ames, lies can betray our country, they can compromise our security, they can undermine democracy, they can cause the deaths of those that defend us. Deception is actually serious business. This con man, Henry Oberlander, he was such an effective con man, British authorities say he could have undermined the entire banking system of the Western world. And you can't find this guy on Google; you can't find him anywhere. He was interviewed once, and he said the following. He said, "Look, I've got one rule." And this was Henry's rule, he said, "Look, everyone is willing to give you something. They're ready to give you something for whatever it is they're hungry for." And that's the crux of it. If you don't want to be deceived, you have to know, what is it that you're hungry for? And we all kind of hate to admit it. We wish we were better husbands, better wives, smarter, more powerful, taller, richer -- the list goes on. Lying is an attempt to bridge that gap, to connect our wishes and our fantasies about who we wish we were, how we wish we could be, with what we're really like. And boy are we willing to fill in those gaps in our lives with lies. On a given day, studies show that you may be lied to anywhere from 10 to 200 times. Now granted, many of those are white lies. But in another study, it showed that strangers lied three times within the first 10 minutes of meeting each other. (Laughter) Now when we first hear this data, we recoil. We can't believe how prevalent lying is. We're essentially against lying. But if you look more closely, the plot actually thickens. We lie more to strangers than we lie to coworkers. Extroverts lie more than introverts. Men lie eight times more about themselves than they do other people. Women lie more to protect other people. If you're an average married couple, you're going to lie to your spouse in one out of every 10 interactions. Now, you may think that's bad. If you're unmarried, that number drops to three. Lying's complex. It's woven into the fabric of our daily and our business lives. We're deeply ambivalent about the truth. We parse it out on an as-needed basis, sometimes for very good reasons, other times just because we don't understand the gaps in our lives. That's truth number two about lying. We're against lying, but we're covertly for it in ways that our society has sanctioned for centuries and centuries and centuries. It's as old as breathing. It's part of our culture, it's part of our history. Think Dante, Shakespeare, the Bible, News of the World. (Laughter) Lying has evolutionary value to us as a species. Researchers have long known that the more intelligent the species, the larger the neocortex, the more likely it is to be deceptive. Now you might remember Koko. Does anybody remember Koko the gorilla who was taught sign language? Koko was taught to communicate via sign language. Here's Koko with her kitten. It's her cute little, fluffy pet kitten. Koko once blamed her pet kitten for ripping a sink out of the wall. (Laughter) We're hardwired to become leaders of the pack. It's starts really, really early. How early? Well babies will fake a cry, pause, wait to see who's coming and then go right back to crying. One-year-olds learn concealment. (Laughter) Two-year-olds bluff. Five-year-olds lie outright. They manipulate via flattery. Nine-year-olds, masters of the cover-up. By the time you enter college, you're going to lie to your mom in one out of every five interactions. By the time we enter this work world and we're breadwinners, we enter a world that is just cluttered with Spam, fake digital friends, partisan media, ingenious identity thieves, world-class Ponzi schemers, a deception epidemic -- in short, what one author calls a post-truth society. It's been very confusing for a long time now. What do you do? Well, there are steps we can take to navigate our way through the morass. Trained liespotters get to the truth 90 percent of the time. The rest of us, we're only 54 percent accurate. Why is it so easy to learn? There are good liars and bad liars. There are no real original liars. We all make the same mistakes. We all use the same techniques. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to show you two patterns of deception. And then we're going to look at the hot spots and see if we can find them ourselves. We're going to start with speech. (Video) Bill Clinton: I want you to listen to me. I'm going to say this again. I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky. I never told anybody to lie, not a single time, never. And these allegations are false. And I need to go back to work for the American people. Thank you. (Applause) Pamela Meyer: Okay, what were the telltale signs? Well first we heard what's known as a non-contracted denial. Studies show that people who are overdetermined in their denial will resort to formal rather than informal language. We also heard distancing language: "that woman." We know that liars will unconsciously distance themselves from their subject, using language as their tool. Now if Bill Clinton had said, "Well, to tell you the truth ..." or Richard Nixon's favorite, "In all candor ..." he would have been a dead giveaway for any liespotter that knows that qualifying language, as it's called, qualifying language like that, further discredits the subject. Now if he had repeated the question in its entirety, or if he had peppered his account with a little too much detail -- and we're all really glad he didn't do that -- he would have further discredited himself. Freud had it right. Freud said, look, there's much more to it than speech: "No mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips." And we all do it no matter how powerful you are. We all chatter with our fingertips. I'm going to show you Dominique Strauss-Kahn with Obama who's chattering with his fingertips. (Laughter) Now this brings us to our next pattern, which is body language. With body language, here's what you've got to do. You've really got to just throw your assumptions out the door. Let the science temper your knowledge a little bit. Because we think liars fidget all the time. Well guess what, they're known to freeze their upper bodies when they're lying. We think liars won't look you in the eyes. Well guess what, they look you in the eyes a little too much just to compensate for that myth. We think warmth and smiles convey honesty, sincerity. But a trained liespotter can spot a fake smile a mile away. Can you all spot the fake smile here? You can consciously contract the muscles in your cheeks. But the real smile's in the eyes, the crow's feet of the eyes. They cannot be consciously contracted, especially if you overdid the Botox. Don't overdo the Botox; nobody will think you're honest. Now we're going to look at the hot spots. Can you tell what's happening in a conversation? Can you start to find the hot spots to see the discrepancies between someone's words and someone's actions? Now, I know it seems really obvious, but when you're having a conversation with someone you suspect of deception, attitude is by far the most overlooked but telling of indicators. An honest person is going to be cooperative. They're going to show they're on your side. They're going to be enthusiastic. They're going to be willing and helpful to getting you to the truth. They're going to be willing to brainstorm, name suspects, provide details. They're going to say, "Hey, maybe it was those guys in payroll that forged those checks." They're going to be infuriated if they sense they're wrongly accused throughout the entire course of the interview, not just in flashes; they'll be infuriated throughout the entire course of the interview. And if you ask someone honest what should happen to whomever did forge those checks, an honest person is much more likely to recommend strict rather than lenient punishment. Now let's say you're having that exact same conversation with someone deceptive. That person may be withdrawn, look down, lower their voice, pause, be kind of herky-jerky. Ask a deceptive person to tell their story, they're going to pepper it with way too much detail in all kinds of irrelevant places. And then they're going to tell their story in strict chronological order. And what a trained interrogator does is they come in and in very subtle ways over the course of several hours, they will ask that person to tell that story backwards, and then they'll watch them squirm, and track which questions produce the highest volume of deceptive tells. Why do they do that? Well, we all do the same thing. We rehearse our words, but we rarely rehearse our gestures. We say "yes," we shake our heads "no." We tell very convincing stories, we slightly shrug our shoulders. We commit terrible crimes, and we smile at the delight in getting away with it. Now, that smile is known in the trade as "duping delight." And we're going to see that in several videos moving forward, but we're going to start -- for those of you who don't know him, this is presidential candidate John Edwards who shocked America by fathering a child out of wedlock. We're going to see him talk about getting a paternity test. See now if you can spot him saying, "yes" while shaking his head "no," slightly shrugging his shoulders. (Video) John Edwards: I'd be happy to participate in one. I know that it's not possible that this child could be mine, because of the timing of events. So I know it's not possible. Happy to take a paternity test, and would love to see it happen. Interviewer: Are you going to do that soon? Is there somebody -- JE: Well, I'm only one side. I'm only one side of the test. But I'm happy to participate in one. PM: Okay, those head shakes are much easier to spot once you know to look for them. There are going to be times when someone makes one expression while masking another that just kind of leaks through in a flash. Murderers are known to leak sadness. Your new joint venture partner might shake your hand, celebrate, go out to dinner with you and then leak an expression of anger. And we're not all going to become facial expression experts overnight here, but there's one I can teach you that's very dangerous and it's easy to learn, and that's the expression of contempt. Now with anger, you've got two people on an even playing field. It's still somewhat of a healthy relationship. But when anger turns to contempt, you've been dismissed. It's associated with moral superiority. And for that reason, it's very, very hard to recover from. Here's what it looks like. It's marked by one lip corner pulled up and in. It's the only asymmetrical expression. And in the presence of contempt, whether or not deception follows -- and it doesn't always follow -- look the other way, go the other direction, reconsider the deal, say, "No thank you. I'm not coming up for just one more nightcap. Thank you." Science has surfaced many, many more indicators. We know, for example, we know liars will shift their blink rate, point their feet towards an exit. They will take barrier objects and put them between themselves and the person that is interviewing them. They'll alter their vocal tone, often making their vocal tone much lower. Now here's the deal. These behaviors are just behaviors. They're not proof of deception. They're red flags. We're human beings. We make deceptive flailing gestures all over the place all day long. They don't mean anything in and of themselves. But when you see clusters of them, that's your signal. Look, listen, probe, ask some hard questions, get out of that very comfortable mode of knowing, walk into curiosity mode, ask more questions, have a little dignity, treat the person you're talking to with rapport. Don't try to be like those folks on "Law & Order" and those other TV shows that pummel their subjects into submission. Don't be too aggressive, it doesn't work. Now, we've talked a little bit about how to talk to someone who's lying and how to spot a lie. And as I promised, we're now going to look at what the truth looks like. But I'm going to show you two videos, two mothers -- one is lying, one is telling the truth. And these were surfaced by researcher David Matsumoto in California. And I think they're an excellent example of what the truth looks like. This mother, Diane Downs, shot her kids at close range, drove them to the hospital while they bled all over the car, claimed a scraggy-haired stranger did it. And you'll see when you see the video, she can't even pretend to be an agonizing mother. What you want to look for here is an incredible discrepancy between horrific events that she describes and her very, very cool demeanor. And if you look closely, you'll see duping delight throughout this video. (Video) Diane Downs: At night when I close my eyes, I can see Christie reaching her hand out to me while I'm driving, and the blood just kept coming out of her mouth. And that -- maybe it'll fade too with time -- but I don't think so. That bothers me the most. PM: Now I'm going to show you a video of an actual grieving mother, Erin Runnion, confronting her daughter's murderer and torturer in court. Here you're going to see no false emotion, just the authentic expression of a mother's agony. (Video) Erin Runnion: I wrote this statement on the third anniversary of the night you took my baby, and you hurt her, and you crushed her, you terrified her until her heart stopped. And she fought, and I know she fought you. But I know she looked at you with those amazing brown eyes, and you still wanted to kill her. And I don't understand it, and I never will. PM: Okay, there's no doubting the veracity of those emotions. Now the technology around what the truth looks like is progressing on, the science of it. We know, for example, that we now have specialized eye trackers and infrared brain scans, MRI's that can decode the signals that our bodies send out when we're trying to be deceptive. And these technologies are going to be marketed to all of us as panaceas for deceit, and they will prove incredibly useful some day. But you've got to ask yourself in the meantime: Who do you want on your side of the meeting, someone who's trained in getting to the truth or some guy who's going to drag a 400-pound electroencephalogram through the door? Liespotters rely on human tools. They know, as someone once said, "Character's who you are in the dark." And what's kind of interesting is that today, we have so little darkness. Our world is lit up 24 hours a day. It's transparent with blogs and social networks broadcasting the buzz of a whole new generation of people that have made a choice to live their lives in public. It's a much more noisy world. So one challenge we have is to remember, oversharing, that's not honesty. Our manic tweeting and texting can blind us to the fact that the subtleties of human decency -- character integrity -- that's still what matters, that's always what's going to matter. So in this much noisier world, it might make sense for us to be just a little bit more explicit about our moral code. When you combine the science of recognizing deception with the art of looking, listening, you exempt yourself from collaborating in a lie. You start up that path of being just a little bit more explicit, because you signal to everyone around you, you say, "Hey, my world, our world, it's going to be an honest one. My world is going to be one where truth is strengthened and falsehood is recognized and marginalized." And when you do that, the ground around you starts to shift just a little bit. And that's the truth. Thank you. (Applause)

I will start by posing a little bit of a challenge: the challenge of dealing with data, data that we have to deal with in medical situations. It's really a huge challenge for us. And this is our beast of burden -- this is a Computer Tomography machine, a CT machine. It's a fantastic device. It uses X-rays, X-ray beams, that are rotating very fast around the human body. It takes about 30 seconds to go through the whole machine and is generating enormous amounts of information that comes out of the machine. So this is a fantastic machine that we can use for improving health care, but as I said, it's also a challenge for us. And the challenge is really found in this picture here. It's the medical data explosion that we're having right now. We're facing this problem. And let me step back in time. Let's go back a few years in time and see what happened back then. These machines that came out -- they started coming in the 1970s -- they would scan human bodies, and they would generate about 100 images of the human body. And I've taken the liberty, just for clarity, to translate that to data slices. That would correspond to about 50 megabytes of data, which is small when you think about the data we can handle today just on normal mobile devices. If you translate that to phone books, it's about one meter of phone books in the pile. Looking at what we're doing today with these machines that we have, we can, just in a few seconds, get 24,000 images out of a body, and that would correspond to about 20 gigabytes of data, or 800 phone books, and the pile would then be 200 meters of phone books. What's about to happen -- and we're seeing this; it's beginning -- a technology trend that's happening right now is that we're starting to look at time-resolved situations as well. So we're getting the dynamics out of the body as well. And just assume that we will be collecting data during five seconds, and that would correspond to one terabyte of data -- that's 800,000 books and 16 kilometers of phone books. That's one patient, one data set. And this is what we have to deal with. So this is really the enormous challenge that we have. And already today -- this is 25,000 images. Imagine the days when we had radiologists doing this. They would put up 25,000 images, they would go like this, "25,0000, okay, okay. There is the problem." They can't do that anymore. That's impossible. So we have to do something that's a little bit more intelligent than doing this. So what we do is that we put all these slices together. Imagine that you slice your body in all these directions, and then you try to put the slices back together again into a pile of data, into a block of data. So this is really what we're doing. So this gigabyte or terabyte of data, we're putting it into this block. But of course, the block of data just contains the amount of X-ray that's been absorbed in each point in the human body. So what we need to do is to figure out a way of looking at the things we do want to look at and make things transparent that we don't want to look at. So transforming the data set into something that looks like this. And this is a challenge. This is a huge challenge for us to do that. Using computers, even though they're getting faster and better all the time, it's a challenge to deal with gigabytes of data, terabytes of data and extracting the relevant information. I want to look at the heart. I want to look at the blood vessels. I want to look at the liver. Maybe even find a tumor, in some cases. So this is where this little dear comes into play. This is my daughter. This is as of 9 a.m. this morning. She's playing a computer game. She's only two years old, and she's having a blast. So she's really the driving force behind the development of graphics-processing units. As long as kids are playing computer games, graphics is getting better and better and better. So please go back home, tell your kids to play more games, because that's what I need. So what's inside of this machine is what enables me to do the things that I'm doing with the medical data. So really what I'm doing is using these fantastic little devices. And you know, going back maybe 10 years in time when I got the funding to buy my first graphics computer -- it was a huge machine. It was cabinets of processors and storage and everything. I paid about one million dollars for that machine. That machine is, today, about as fast as my iPhone. So every month there are new graphics cards coming out, and here is a few of the latest ones from the vendors -- NVIDIA, ATI, Intel is out there as well. And you know, for a few hundred bucks you can get these things and put them into your computer, and you can do fantastic things with these graphics cards. So this is really what's enabling us to deal with the explosion of data in medicine, together with some really nifty work in terms of algorithms -- compressing data, extracting the relevant information that people are doing research on. So I'm going to show you a few examples of what we can do. This is a data set that was captured using a CT scanner. You can see that this is a full data [set]. It's a woman. You can see the hair. You can see the individual structures of the woman. You can see that there is [a] scattering of X-rays on the teeth, the metal in the teeth. That's where those artifacts are coming from. But fully interactively on standard graphics cards on a normal computer, I can just put in a clip plane. And of course all the data is inside, so I can start rotating, I can look at it from different angles, and I can see that this woman had a problem. She had a bleeding up in the brain, and that's been fixed with a little stent, a metal clamp that's tightening up the vessel. And just by changing the functions, then I can decide what's going to be transparent and what's going to be visible. I can look at the skull structure, and I can see that, okay, this is where they opened up the skull on this woman, and that's where they went in. So these are fantastic images. They're really high resolution, and they're really showing us what we can do with standard graphics cards today. Now we have really made use of this, and we have tried to squeeze a lot of data into the system. And one of the applications that we've been working on -- and this has gotten a little bit of traction worldwide -- is the application of virtual autopsies. So again, looking at very, very large data sets, and you saw those full-body scans that we can do. We're just pushing the body through the whole CT scanner, and just in a few seconds we can get a full-body data set. So this is from a virtual autopsy. And you can see how I'm gradually peeling off. First you saw the body bag that the body came in, then I'm peeling off the skin -- you can see the muscles -- and eventually you can see the bone structure of this woman. Now at this point, I would also like to emphasize that, with the greatest respect for the people that I'm now going to show -- I'm going to show you a few cases of virtual autopsies -- so it's with great respect for the people that have died under violent circumstances that I'm showing these pictures to you. In the forensic case -- and this is something that ... there's been approximately 400 cases so far just in the part of Sweden that I come from that has been undergoing virtual autopsies in the past four years. So this will be the typical workflow situation. The police will decide -- in the evening, when there's a case coming in -- they will decide, okay, is this a case where we need to do an autopsy? So in the morning, in between six and seven in the morning, the body is then transported inside of the body bag to our center and is being scanned through one of the CT scanners. And then the radiologist, together with the pathologist and sometimes the forensic scientist, looks at the data that's coming out, and they have a joint session. And then they decide what to do in the real physical autopsy after that. Now looking at a few cases, here's one of the first cases that we had. You can really see the details of the data set. It's very high-resolution, and it's our algorithms that allow us to zoom in on all the details. And again, it's fully interactive, so you can rotate and you can look at things in real time on these systems here. Without saying too much about this case, this is a traffic accident, a drunk driver hit a woman. And it's very, very easy to see the damages on the bone structure. And the cause of death is the broken neck. And this women also ended up under the car, so she's quite badly beaten up by this injury. Here's another case, a knifing. And this is also again showing us what we can do. It's very easy to look at metal artifacts that we can show inside of the body. You can also see some of the artifacts from the teeth -- that's actually the filling of the teeth -- but because I've set the functions to show me metal and make everything else transparent. Here's another violent case. This really didn't kill the person. The person was killed by stabs in the heart, but they just deposited the knife by putting it through one of the eyeballs. Here's another case. It's very interesting for us to be able to look at things like knife stabbings. Here you can see that knife went through the heart. It's very easy to see how air has been leaking from one part to another part, which is difficult to do in a normal, standard, physical autopsy. So it really, really helps the criminal investigation to establish the cause of death, and in some cases also directing the investigation in the right direction to find out who the killer really was. Here's another case that I think is interesting. Here you can see a bullet that has lodged just next to the spine on this person. And what we've done is that we've turned the bullet into a light source, so that bullet is actually shining, and it makes it really easy to find these fragments. During a physical autopsy, if you actually have to dig through the body to find these fragments, that's actually quite hard to do. One of the things that I'm really, really happy to be able to show you here today is our virtual autopsy table. It's a touch device that we have developed based on these algorithms, using standard graphics GPUs. It actually looks like this, just to give you a feeling for what it looks like. It really just works like a huge iPhone. So we've implemented all the gestures you can do on the table, and you can think of it as an enormous touch interface. So if you were thinking of buying an iPad, forget about it. This is what you want instead. Steve, I hope you're listening to this, all right. So it's a very nice little device. So if you have the opportunity, please try it out. It's really a hands-on experience. So it gained some traction, and we're trying to roll this out and trying to use it for educational purposes, but also, perhaps in the future, in a more clinical situation. There's a YouTube video that you can download and look at this, if you want to convey the information to other people about virtual autopsies. Okay, now that we're talking about touch, let me move on to really "touching" data. And this is a bit of science fiction now, so we're moving into really the future. This is not really what the medical doctors are using right now, but I hope they will in the future. So what you're seeing on the left is a touch device. It's a little mechanical pen that has very, very fast step motors inside of the pen. And so I can generate a force feedback. So when I virtually touch data, it will generate forces in the pen, so I get a feedback. So in this particular situation, it's a scan of a living person. I have this pen, and I look at the data, and I move the pen towards the head, and all of a sudden I feel resistance. So I can feel the skin. If I push a little bit harder, I'll go through the skin, and I can feel the bone structure inside. If I push even harder, I'll go through the bone structure, especially close to the ear where the bone is very soft. And then I can feel the brain inside, and this will be the slushy like this. So this is really nice. And to take that even further, this is a heart. And this is also due to these fantastic new scanners, that just in 0.3 seconds, I can scan the whole heart, and I can do that with time resolution. So just looking at this heart, I can play back a video here. And this is Karljohan, one of my graduate students who's been working on this project. And he's sitting there in front of the Haptic device, the force feedback system, and he's moving his pen towards the heart, and the heart is now beating in front of him, so he can see how the heart is beating. He's taken the pen, and he's moving it towards the heart, and he's putting it on the heart, and then he feels the heartbeats from the real living patient. Then he can examine how the heart is moving. He can go inside, push inside of the heart, and really feel how the valves are moving. And this, I think, is really the future for heart surgeons. I mean it's probably the wet dream for a heart surgeon to be able to go inside of the patient's heart before you actually do surgery, and do that with high-quality resolution data. So this is really neat. Now we're going even further into science fiction. And we heard a little bit about functional MRI. Now this is really an interesting project. MRI is using magnetic fields and radio frequencies to scan the brain, or any part of the body. So what we're really getting out of this is information of the structure of the brain, but we can also measure the difference in magnetic properties of blood that's oxygenated and blood that's depleted of oxygen. That means that it's possible to map out the activity of the brain. So this is something that we've been working on. And you just saw Motts the research engineer, there, going into the MRI system, and he was wearing goggles. So he could actually see things in the goggles. So I could present things to him while he's in the scanner. And this is a little bit freaky, because what Motts is seeing is actually this. He's seeing his own brain. So Motts is doing something here, and probably he is going like this with his right hand, because the left side is activated on the motor cortex. And then he can see that at the same time. These visualizations are brand new. And this is something that we've been researching for a little while. This is another sequence of Motts' brain. And here we asked Motts to calculate backwards from 100. So he's going "100, 97, 94." And then he's going backwards. And you can see how the little math processor is working up here in his brain and is lighting up the whole brain. Well this is fantastic. We can do this in real time. We can investigate things. We can tell him to do things. You can also see that his visual cortex is activated in the back of the head, because that's where he's seeing, he's seeing his own brain. And he's also hearing our instructions when we tell him to do things. The signal is really deep inside of the brain as well, and it's shining through, because all of the data is inside this volume. And in just a second here you will see -- okay, here. Motts, now move your left foot. So he's going like this. For 20 seconds he's going like that, and all of a sudden it lights up up here. So we've got motor cortex activation up there. So this is really, really nice, and I think this is a great tool. And connecting also with the previous talk here, this is something that we could use as a tool to really understand how the neurons are working, how the brain is working, and we can do this with very, very high visual quality and very fast resolution. Now we're also having a bit of fun at the center. So this is a CAT scan -- Computer Aided Tomography. So this is a lion from the local zoo outside of Norrkoping in Kolmarden, Elsa. So she came to the center, and they sedated her and then put her straight into the scanner. And then, of course, I get the whole data set from the lion. And I can do very nice images like this. I can peel off the layer of the lion. I can look inside of it. And we've been experimenting with this. And I think this is a great application for the future of this technology, because there's very little known about the animal anatomy. What's known out there for veterinarians is kind of basic information. We can scan all sorts of things, all sorts of animals. The only problem is to fit it into the machine. So here's a bear. It was kind of hard to get it in. And the bear is a cuddly, friendly animal. And here it is. Here is the nose of the bear. And you might want to cuddle this one, until you change the functions and look at this. So be aware of the bear. So with that, I'd like to thank all the people who have helped me to generate these images. It's a huge effort that goes into doing this, gathering the data and developing the algorithms, writing all the software. So, some very talented people. My motto is always, I only hire people that are smarter than I am and most of these are smarter than I am. So thank you very much. (Applause)

I'm not quite sure whether I really want to see a snare drum at nine o'clock or so in the morning. But anyway, it's just great to see such a full theater, and really I must thank Herbie Hancock and his colleagues for such a great presentation. (Applause) One of the interesting things, of course, is the combination of that raw hand on the instrument and technology, and of course what he said about listening to our young people. Of course, my job is all about listening, and my aim, really, is to teach the world to listen. That's my only real aim in life. And it sounds quite simple, but actually it's quite a big, big job. Because you know, when you look at a piece of music -- for example, if I just open my little motorbike bag -- we have here, hopefully, a piece of music that is full of little black dots on the page. And, you know, we open it up and I read the music. So technically, I can actually read this. I will follow the instructions, the tempo markings, the dynamics. I will do exactly as I'm told. And so therefore, because time is short, if I just play you literally the first maybe two lines or so. It's very straightforward. There's nothing too difficult about the piece. But here I'm being told that the piece of music is very quick. I'm being told where to play on the drum. I'm being told which part of the stick to use. And I'm being told the dynamic. And I'm also being told that the drum is without snares. Snares on, snares off. So therefore, if I translate this piece of music, we have this idea. (Music) And so on. My career would probably last about five years. However, what I have to do as a musician is do everything that is not on the music. Everything that there isn't time to learn from a teacher, or to talk about, even, from a teacher. But it's the things that you notice when you're not actually with your instrument that in fact become so interesting, and that you want to explore through this tiny, tiny surface of a drum. So there, we experience the translation. Now we'll experience the interpretation. (Music) (Applause) Now my career may last a little longer! But in a way, you know, it's the same if I look at you and I see a nice bright young lady with a pink top on. I see that you're clutching a teddy bear, etc., etc. So I get a basic idea as to what you might be about, what you might like, what you might do as a profession, etc., etc. However, that's just, you know, the initial idea I may have that we all get when we actually look, and we try to interpret, but actually it's so unbelievably shallow. In the same way, I look at the music; I get a basic idea; I wonder what technically might be hard, or, you know, what I want to do. Just the basic feeling. However, that is simply not enough. And I think what Herbie said -- please listen, listen. We have to listen to ourselves, first of all. If I play, for example, holding the stick -- where literally I do not let go of the stick -- you'll experience quite a lot of shock coming up through the arm. And you feel really quite -- believe it or not -- detached from the instrument and from the stick, even though I'm actually holding the stick quite tightly. By holding it tightly, I feel strangely more detached. If I just simply let go and allow my hand, my arm, to be more of a support system, suddenly I have more dynamic with less effort. Much more. And I just feel, at last, one with the stick and one with the drum. And I'm doing far, far less. So in the same way that I need time with this instrument, I need time with people in order to interpret them. Not just translate them, but interpret them. If, for example, I play just a few bars of a piece of music for which I think of myself as a technician -- that is, someone who is basically a percussion player ... (Music) And so on. If I think of myself as a musician ... (Music) And so on. There is a little bit of a difference there that is worth just -- (Applause) -- thinking about. And I remember when I was 12 years old, and I started playing tympani and percussion, and my teacher said, "Well, how are we going to do this? You know, music is about listening." And I said, "Yes, I agree with that. So what's the problem?" And he said, "Well, how are you going to hear this? How are you going to hear that?" And I said, "Well, how do you hear it?" He said, "Well, I think I hear it through here." And I said, "Well, I think I do too -- but I also hear it through my hands, through my arms, cheekbones, my scalp, my tummy, my chest, my legs and so on." And so we began our lessons every single time tuning drums -- in particular, the kettle drums, or tympani -- to such a narrow pitch interval, so something like ... that of a difference. Then gradually ... and gradually ... and it's amazing that when you do open your body up, and open your hand up to allow the vibration to come through, that in fact the tiny, tiny difference ... can be felt with just the tiniest part of your finger, there. And so what we would do is that I would put my hands on the wall of the music room, and together we would "listen" to the sounds of the instruments, and really try to connect with those sounds far, far more broadly than simply depending on the ear. Because of course, the ear is, I mean, subject to all sorts of things. The room we happen to be in, the amplification, the quality of the instrument, the type of sticks ... etc., etc. They're all different. Same amount of weight, but different sound colors. And that's basically what we are. We're just human beings, but we all have our own little sound colors, as it were, that make up these extraordinary personalities and characters and interests and things. And as I grew older, I then auditioned for the Royal Academy of Music in London, and they said, "Well, no, we won't accept you, because we haven't a clue, you know, of the future of a so-called 'deaf' musician." And I just couldn't quite accept that. And so therefore, I said to them, "Well, look, if you refuse -- if you refuse me through those reasons, as opposed to the ability to perform and to understand and love the art of creating sound -- then we have to think very, very hard about the people you do actually accept." And as a result -- once we got over a little hurdle, and having to audition twice -- they accepted me. And not only that -- what had happened was that it changed the whole role of the music institutions throughout the United Kingdom. Under no circumstances were they to refuse any application whatsoever on the basis of whether someone had no arms, no legs -- they could still perhaps play a wind instrument if it was supported on a stand. No circumstances at all were used to refuse any entry. And every single entry had to be listened to, experienced and then based on the musical ability -- then that person could either enter or not. So therefore, this in turn meant that there was an extremely interesting bunch of students who arrived in these various music institutions. And I have to say, many of them now in the professional orchestras throughout the world. The interesting thing about this as well, though -- (Applause) -- is quite simply that not only were people connected with sound -- which is basically all of us, and we well know that music really is our daily medicine. I say "music," but actually I mean "sound." Because you know, some of the extraordinary things I've experienced as a musician, when you may have a 15-year-old lad who has got the most incredible challenges, who may not be able to control his movements, who may be deaf, who may be blind, etc., etc. -- suddenly, if that young lad sits close to this instrument, and perhaps even lies underneath the marimba, and you play something that's so incredibly organ-like, almost -- I don't really have the right sticks, perhaps -- but something like this. Let me change. (Music) Something that's so unbelievably simple -- but he would be experiencing something that I wouldn't be, because I'm on top of the sound. I have the sound coming this way. He would have the sound coming through the resonators. If there were no resonators on here, we would have ... (Music) So he would have a fullness of sound that those of you in the front few rows wouldn't experience, those of you in the back few rows wouldn't experience either. Every single one of us, depending on where we're sitting, will experience this sound quite, quite differently. And of course, being the participator of the sound, and that is starting from the idea of what type of sound I want to produce -- for example, this sound. Can you hear anything? Exactly. Because I'm not even touching it. But yet, we get the sensation of something happening. In the same way that when I see tree moves, then I imagine that tree making a rustling sound. Do you see what I mean? Whatever the eye sees, then there's always sound happening. So there's always, always that huge -- I mean, just this kaleidoscope of things to draw from. So all of my performances are based on entirely what I experience, and not by learning a piece of music, putting on someone else's interpretation of it, buying all the CDs possible of that particular piece of music, and so on and so forth. Because that isn't giving me enough of something that is so raw and so basic, and something that I can fully experience the journey of. So it may be that, in certain halls, this dynamic may well work. (Music) It may be that in other halls, they're simply not going to experience that at all and so therefore, my level of soft, gentle playing may have to be ... (Music) Do you see what I mean? So, because of this explosion in access to sound, especially through the deaf community, this has not only affected how music institutions, how schools for the deaf treat sound -- and not just as a means of therapy -- although of course, being a participator of music, that definitely is the case as well. But it's meant that acousticians have had to really think about the types of halls they put together. There are so few halls in this world that actually have very good acoustics, dare I say. But by that I mean where you can absolutely do anything you imagine. The tiniest, softest, softest sound to something that is so broad, so huge, so incredible! There's always something -- it may sound good up there, may not be so good there. May be great there, but terrible up there. Maybe terrible over there, but not too bad there, etc., etc. So to find an actual hall is incredible -- for which you can play exactly what you imagine, without it being cosmetically enhanced. And so therefore, acousticians are actually in conversation with people who are hearing impaired, and who are participators of sound. And this is quite interesting. I cannot, you know, give you any detail as far as what is actually happening with those halls, but it's just the fact that they are going to a group of people for whom so many years we've been saying, "Well, how on Earth can they experience music? You know, they're deaf." We just -- we go like that, and we imagine that that's what deafness is about. Or we go like that, and we imagine that's what blindness is about. If we see someone in a wheelchair, we assume they cannot walk. It may be that they can walk three, four, five steps. That, to them, means they can walk. In a year's time, it could be two extra steps. In another year's time, three extra steps. Those are hugely important aspects to think about. So when we do listen to each other, it's unbelievably important for us to really test our listening skills, to really use our bodies as a resonating chamber, to stop the judgment. For me, as a musician who deals with 99 percent of new music, it's very easy for me to say, "Oh yes, I like that piece. Oh no, I don't like that piece." And so on. And you know, I just find that I have to give those pieces of music real time. It may be that the chemistry isn't quite right between myself and that particular piece of music, but that doesn't mean I have the right to say it's a bad piece of music. And you know, it's just one of the great things about being a musician, is that it is so unbelievably fluid. So there are no rules, no right, no wrong, this way, that way. If I asked you to clap -- maybe I can do this. If I can just say, "Please clap and create the sound of thunder." I'm assuming we've all experienced thunder. Now, I don't mean just the sound; I mean really listen to that thunder within yourselves. And please try to create that through your clapping. Try. Just -- please try. (Applause) Very good! Snow. Snow. Have you ever heard snow? Audience: No. Evelyn Glennie: Well then, stop clapping. (Laughter) Try again. Try again. Snow. See, you're awake. Rain. Not bad. Not bad. You know, the interesting thing here, though, is that I asked a group of kids not so long ago exactly the same question. Now -- great imagination, thank you very much. However, not one of you got out of your seats to think, "Right! How can I clap? OK, maybe ... (Claps) Maybe I can use my jewelry to create extra sounds. Maybe I can use the other parts of my body to create extra sounds." Not a single one of you thought about clapping in a slightly different way other than sitting in your seats there and using two hands. In the same way that when we listen to music, we assume that it's all being fed through here. This is how we experience music. Of course it's not. We experience thunder -- thunder, thunder. Think, think, think. Listen, listen, listen. Now -- what can we do with thunder? I remember my teacher. When I first started, my very first lesson, I was all prepared with sticks, ready to go. And instead of him saying, "OK, Evelyn, please, feet slightly apart, arms at a more-or-less 90 degree angle, sticks in a more-or-less V shape, keep this amount of space here, etc. Please keep your back straight, etc., etc., etc." -- where I was probably just going to end up absolutely rigid, frozen, and I would not be able to strike the drum, because I was thinking of so many other things -- he said, "Evelyn, take this drum away for seven days, and I'll see you next week." So, heavens! What was I to do? I no longer required the sticks; I wasn't allowed to have these sticks. I had to basically look at this particular drum, see how it was made, what these little lugs did, what the snares did. Turned it upside down, experimented with the shell, experimented with the head. Experimented with my body, experimented with jewelry, experimented with all sorts of things. And of course, I returned with all sorts of bruises and things like that -- but nevertheless, it was such an unbelievable experience, because then, where on Earth are you going to experience that in a piece of music? Where on Earth are you going to experience that in a study book? So we never, ever dealt with actual study books. So for example, one of the things that we learn when we are dealing with being a percussion player, as opposed to a musician, is basically straightforward single stroke rolls. Like that. And then we get a little faster and a little faster and a little faster. And so on and so forth. What does this piece require? Single stroke rolls. So why can't I then do that whilst learning a piece of music? And that's exactly what he did. And interestingly, the older I became, and when I became a full-time student at a so called "music institution," all of that went out of the window. We had to study from study books. And constantly, the question, "Well, why? Why? What is this relating to? I need to play a piece of music." "Oh, well, this will help your control!" "Well, how? Why do I need to learn that? I need to relate it to a piece of music. You know. I need to say something. "Why am I practicing paradiddles? Is it just literally for control, for hand-stick control? Why am I doing that? I need to have the reason, and the reason has to be by saying something through the music." And by saying something through music, which basically is sound, we then can reach all sorts of things to all sorts of people. But I don't want to take responsibility of your emotional baggage. That's up to you, when you walk through a hall. Because that then determines what and how we listen to certain things. I may feel sorrowful, or happy, or exhilarated, or angry when I play certain pieces of music, but I'm not necessarily wanting you to feel exactly the same thing. So please, the next time you go to a concert, just allow your body to open up, allow your body to be this resonating chamber. Be aware that you're not going to experience the same thing as the performer is. The performer is in the worst possible position for the actual sound, because they're hearing the contact of the stick on the drum, or the mallet on the bit of wood, or the bow on the string, etc., or the breath that's creating the sound from wind and brass. They're experiencing that rawness there. But yet they're experiencing something so unbelievably pure, which is before the sound is actually happening. Please take note of the life of the sound after the actual initial strike, or breath, is being pulled. Just experience the whole journey of that sound in the same way that I wished I'd experienced the whole journey of this particular conference, rather than just arriving last night. But I hope maybe we can share one or two things as the day progresses. But thank you very much for having me! (Applause)

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

Sadly, in the next 18 minutes when I do our chat, four Americans that are alive will be dead through the food that they eat. My name's Jamie Oliver. I'm 34 years old. I'm from Essex in England and for the last seven years I've worked fairly tirelessly to save lives in my own way. I'm not a doctor; I'm a chef, I don't have expensive equipment or medicine. I use information, education. I profoundly believe that the power of food has a primal place in our homes that binds us to the best bits of life. We have an awful, awful reality right now. America, you're at the top of your game. This is one of the most unhealthy countries in the world. Can I please just see a raise of hands for how many of you have children in this room today? Put your hands up. You can continue to put your hands up, aunties and uncles as well. Most of you. OK. We, the adults of the last four generations, have blessed our children with the destiny of a shorter lifespan than their own parents. Your child will live a life ten years younger than you because of the landscape of food that we've built around them. Two-thirds of this room, today, in America, are statistically overweight or obese. You lot, you're all right, but we'll get you eventually, don't worry. (Laughter) The statistics of bad health are clear, very clear. We spend our lives being paranoid about death, murder, homicide, you name it; it's on the front page of every paper, CNN. Look at homicide at the bottom, for God's sake. Right? (Laughter) (Applause) Every single one of those in the red is a diet-related disease. Any doctor, any specialist will tell you that. Fact: diet-related disease is the biggest killer in the United States, right now, here today. This is a global problem. It's a catastrophe. It's sweeping the world. England is right behind you, as usual. (Laughter) I know they were close, but not that close. We need a revolution. Mexico, Australia, Germany, India, China, all have massive problems of obesity and bad health. Think about smoking. It costs way less than obesity now. Obesity costs you Americans 10 percent of your health-care bills, 150 billion dollars a year. In 10 years, it's set to double: 300 billion dollars a year. Let's be honest, guys, you haven't got that cash. (Laughter) I came here to start a food revolution that I so profoundly believe in. We need it. The time is now. We're in a tipping-point moment. I've been doing this for seven years. I've been trying in America for seven years. Now is the time when it's ripe -- ripe for the picking. I went to the eye of the storm. I went to West Virginia, the most unhealthy state in America. Or it was last year. We've got a new one this year, but we'll work on that next season. (Laughter) Huntington, West Virginia. Beautiful town. I wanted to put heart and soul and people, your public, around the statistics that we've become so used to. I want to introduce you to some of the people that I care about: your public, your children. I want to show a picture of my friend Brittany. She's 16 years old. She's got six years to live because of the food that she's eaten. She's the third generation of Americans that hasn't grown up within a food environment where they've been taught to cook at home or in school, or her mom, or her mom's mom. She has six years to live. She's eating her liver to death. Stacy, the Edwards family. This is a normal family, guys. Stacy does her best, but she's third-generation as well; she was never taught to cook at home or at school. The family's obese. Justin here, 12 years old, he's 350 pounds. He gets bullied, for God's sake. The daughter there, Katie, she's four years old. She's obese before she even gets to primary school. Marissa, she's all right, she's one of your lot. But you know what? Her father, who was obese, died in her arms, And then the second most important man in her life, her uncle, died of obesity, and now her step-dad is obese. You see, the thing is, obesity and diet-related disease doesn't just hurt the people that have it; it's all of their friends, families, brothers, sisters. Pastor Steve: an inspirational man, one of my early allies in Huntington, West Virginia. He's at the sharp knife-edge of this problem. He has to bury the people, OK? And he's fed up with it. He's fed up with burying his friends, his family, his community. Come winter, three times as many people die. He's sick of it. This is preventable disease. Waste of life. By the way, this is what they get buried in. We're not geared up to do this. Can't even get them out the door, and I'm being serious. Can't even get them there. Forklift. OK, I see it as a triangle, OK? This is our landscape of food. I need you to understand it. You've probably heard all this before. Over the last 30 years, what's happened that's ripped the heart out of this country? Let's be frank and honest. Well, modern-day life. Let's start with the Main Street. Fast food has taken over the whole country; we know that. The big brands are some of the most important powers, powerful powers, in this country. (Sighs) Supermarkets as well. Big companies. Big companies. Thirty years ago, most of the food was largely local and largely fresh. Now it's largely processed and full of all sorts of additives, extra ingredients, and you know the rest of the story. Portion size is obviously a massive, massive problem. Labeling is a massive problem. The labeling in this country is a disgrace. The industry wants to self-police themselves. What, in this kind of climate? They don't deserve it. How can you say something is low-fat when it's full of so much sugar? Home. The biggest problem with the home is that used to be the heart of passing on food culture, what made our society. That is not happening anymore. And you know, as we go to work and as life changes, and as life always evolves, we kind of have to look at it holistically -- step back for a moment, and re-address the balance. It hasn't happened for 30 years, OK? I want to show you a situation that is very normal right now; the Edwards family. (Video) Jamie Oliver: Let's have a talk. This stuff goes through you and your family's body every week. And I need you to know that this is going to kill your children early. How are you feeling? Stacy: Just feeling really sad and depressed right now. But, you know, I want my kids to succeed in life and this isn't going to get them there. But I'm killing them. JO: Yes you are. You are. But we can stop that. Normal. Let's get on schools, something that I'm fairly much a specialist in. OK, school. What is school? Who invented it? What's the purpose of school? School was always invented to arm us with the tools to make us creative, do wonderful things, make us earn a living, etc., etc. You know, it's been kind of in this sort of tight box for a long, long time, OK? But we haven't really evolved it to deal with the health catastrophes of America, OK? School food is something that most kids -- 31 million a day, actually -- have twice a day, more than often, breakfast and lunch, 180 days of the year. So you could say that school food is quite important, really, judging the circumstances. (Laughter) Before I crack into my rant, which I'm sure you're waiting for -- (Laughter) I need to say one thing, and it's so important in, hopefully, the magic that happens and unfolds in the next three months. The lunch ladies, the lunch cooks of America -- I offer myself as their ambassador. I'm not slagging them off. They're doing the best they can do. They're doing their best. But they're doing what they're told, and what they're being told to do is wrong. The system is highly run by accountants; there's not enough, or any, food-knowledgeable people in the business. There's a problem: If you're not a food expert, and you've got tight budgets and it's getting tighter, then you can't be creative, you can't duck and dive and write different things around things. If you're an accountant, and a box-ticker, the only thing you can do in these circumstances is buy cheaper shit. Now, the reality is, the food that your kids get every day is fast food, it's highly processed, there's not enough fresh food in there at all. You know, the amount of additives, E numbers, ingredients you wouldn't believe -- there's not enough veggies at all. French fries are considered a vegetable. Pizza for breakfast. They don't even get crockery. Knives and forks? No, they're too dangerous. They have scissors in the classroom, but knives and forks? No. And the way I look at it is: If you don't have knives and forks in your school, you're purely endorsing, from a state level, fast food, because it's handheld. And yes, by the way, it is fast food: It's sloppy Joes, it's burgers, it's wieners, it's pizzas, it's all of that stuff. (Sighs) Ten percent of what we spend on health care, as I said earlier, is on obesity, and it's going to double. We're not teaching our kids. There's no statutory right to teach kids about food, elementary or secondary school, OK? We don't teach kids about food, right? And this is a little clip from an elementary school, which is very common in England. (Video) Who knows what this is? Child: Potatoes. Jamie Oliver: Potato? So, you think these are potatoes? Do you know what that is? Do you know what that is? Child: Broccoli? JO: What about this? Our good old friend. Child: Celery. JO: No. What do you think this is? Child: Onion. JO: Onion? No. JO: Immediately you get a really clear sense of "Do the kids know anything about where food comes from?" Who knows what that is? Child: Uh, pear? JO: What do you think this is? Child: I don't know. JO: If the kids don't know what stuff is, then they will never eat it. (Laughter) JO: Normal. England and America, England and America. Guess what fixed that. Two one-hour sessions. We've got to start teaching our kids about food in schools, period. (Applause) I want to tell you about something that kind of epitomizes the trouble that we're in, guys, OK? I want to talk about something so basic as milk. Every kid has the right to milk at school. Your kids will be having milk at school, breakfast and lunch, right? They'll be having two bottles, OK? And most kids do. But milk ain't good enough anymore. Don't get me wrong, I support milk -- but someone at the milk board probably paid a lot of money for some geezer to work out that if you put loads of flavorings, colorings and sugar in milk, more kids will drink it. Yeah. Obviously now that's going to catch on the apple board is going to work out that if they make toffee apples they'll eat more as well. Do you know what I mean? For me, there isn't any need to flavor the milk. Okay? There's sugar in everything. I know the ins and outs of those ingredients. It's in everything. Even the milk hasn't escaped the kind of modern-day problems. There's our milk. There's our carton. In that is nearly as much sugar as one of your favorite cans of fizzy pop, and they are having two a day. So, let me just show you. We've got one kid, here -- having, you know, eight tablespoons of sugar a day. You know, there's your week. There's your month. And I've taken the liberty of putting in just the five years of elementary school sugar, just from milk. Now, I don't know about you guys, but judging the circumstances, right, any judge in the whole world, would look at the statistics and the evidence, and they would find any government of old guilty of child abuse. That's my belief. (Applause) (Applause ends) Now, if I came up here, and I wish I could come up here today and hang a cure for AIDS or cancer, you'd be fighting and scrambling to get to me. This, all this bad news, is preventable. That's the good news. It's very, very preventable. So, let's just think about, we got a problem here, we need to reboot. Okay so, in my world, what do we need to do? Here is the thing, right, it cannot just come from one source. To reboot and make real tangible change, real change, so that I could look you in the white of the eyes and say, "In 10 years' time, the history of your children's lives, happiness -- and let's not forget, you're clever if you eat well, you know you're going to live longer -- all of that stuff, it will look different. OK?" So, supermarkets. Where else do you shop so religiously? Week in, week out. How much money do you spend, in your life, in a supermarket? Love them. They just sell us what we want. All right. They owe us to put a food ambassador in every major supermarket. They need to help us shop. They need to show us how to cook quick, tasty, seasonal meals for people that are busy. This is not expensive. It is done in some, and it needs to be done across the board in America soon, and quick. The big brands, you know, the food brands, need to put food education at the heart of their businesses. I know, easier said than done. It's the future. It's the only way. Fast food. With the fast-food industry you know, it's very competitive. I've had loads of secret papers and dealings with fast food restaurants. I know how they do it. I mean, basically they've weaned us on to these hits of sugar, salt and fat, and x, y, and z, and everyone loves them, right? So, these guys are going to be part of the solution. But we need to get the government to work with all of the fast food purveyors and the restaurant industry, and over a five, six, seven year period wean of us off the extreme amounts of fat, sugar and all the other non-food ingredients. Now, also, back to the sort of big brands: labeling, I said earlier, is an absolute farce and has got to be sorted. OK, school. Obviously, in schools, we owe it to them to make sure those 180 days of the year, from that little precious age of four, until 18, 20, 24, whatever, they need to be cooked proper, fresh food from local growers on site, OK? There needs to be a new standard of fresh, proper food for your children, yeah? (Applause) Under the circumstances, it's profoundly important that every single American child leaves school knowing how to cook 10 recipes that will save their life. Life skills. (Applause) That means that they can be students, young parents, and be able to sort of duck and dive around the basics of cooking, no matter what recession hits them next time. If you can cook, recession money doesn't matter. If you can cook, time doesn't matter. The workplace, we haven't really talked about it. You know, it's now time for corporate responsibility to really look at what they feed or make available to their staff. The staff are the moms and dads of America's children. Marissa, her father died in her hand, I think she'd be quite happy if corporate America could start feeding their staff properly. Definitely they shouldn't be left out. Let's go back to the home. Now, look, if we do all this stuff, and we can, it's so achievable. You can care and be commercial. Absolutely. But the home needs to start passing on cooking again, for sure. For sure, pass it on as a philosophy. And for me, it's quite romantic, but it's about if one person teaches three people how to cook something, and they teach three of their mates, that only has to repeat itself 25 times, and that's the whole population of America. Romantic, yes, but most importantly, it's about trying to get people to realize that every one of your individual efforts makes a difference. We've got to put back what's been lost. Huntington's Kitchen. Huntington, where I made this program, we've got this prime-time program that hopefully will inspire people to really get on this change. I truly believe that change will happen. Huntington's Kitchen. I work with a community. I worked in the schools. I found local sustainable funding to get every single school in the area from the junk, onto the fresh food: six-and-a-half grand per school. (Applause) That's all it takes, six-and-a-half grand per school. The Kitchen is 25 grand a month. Okay? This can do 5,000 people a year, which is 10 percent of their population, and it's people on people. You know, it's local cooks teaching local people. It's free cooking lessons, guys, in the Main Street. This is real, tangible change, real, tangible change. Around America, if we just look back now, there is plenty of wonderful things going on. There is plenty of beautiful things going on. There are angels around America doing great things in schools -- farm-to-school set-ups, garden set-ups, education -- there are amazing people doing this already. The problem is they all want to roll out what they're doing to the next school, but there's no cash. We need to recognize the experts and the angels quickly, identify them, and allow them to easily find the resource to keep rolling out what they're already doing, and doing well. Businesses of America need to support Mrs. Obama to do the things that she wants to do. (Applause) And look, I know it's weird having an English person standing here before you talking about all this. All I can say is: I care. I'm a father, and I love this country. And I believe truly, actually, that if change can be made in this country, beautiful things will happen around the world. If America does it, other people will follow. It's incredibly important. (Audience) Yeah! (Applause) When I was in Huntington, trying to get a few things to work when they weren't, I thought "If I had a magic wand, what would I do?" And I thought, "You know what? I'd just love to be put in front of some of the most amazing movers and shakers in America." And a month later, TED phoned me up and gave me this award. I'm here. So, my wish. Dyslexic, so I'm a bit slow. My wish is for you to help a strong, sustainable movement to educate every child about food, to inspire families to cook again, and to empower people everywhere to fight obesity. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause continues)

Okay, now I don't want to alarm anybody in this room, but it's just come to my attention that the person to your right is a liar. (Laughter) Also, the person to your left is a liar. Also the person sitting in your very seats is a liar. We're all liars. What I'm going to do today is I'm going to show you what the research says about why we're all liars, how you can become a liespotter and why you might want to go the extra mile and go from liespotting to truth seeking, and ultimately to trust building. Now speaking of trust, ever since I wrote this book, "Liespotting," no one wants to meet me in person anymore, no, no, no, no, no. They say, "It's okay, we'll email you." (Laughter) I can't even get a coffee date at Starbucks. My husband's like, "Honey, deception? Maybe you could have focused on cooking. How about French cooking?" So before I get started, what I'm going to do is I'm going to clarify my goal for you, which is not to teach a game of Gotcha. Liespotters aren't those nitpicky kids, those kids in the back of the room that are shouting, "Gotcha! Gotcha! Your eyebrow twitched. You flared your nostril. I watch that TV show 'Lie To Me.' I know you're lying." No, liespotters are armed with scientific knowledge of how to spot deception. They use it to get to the truth, and they do what mature leaders do everyday; they have difficult conversations with difficult people, sometimes during very difficult times. And they start up that path by accepting a core proposition, and that proposition is the following: Lying is a cooperative act. Think about it, a lie has no power whatsoever by its mere utterance. Its power emerges when someone else agrees to believe the lie. So I know it may sound like tough love, but look, if at some point you got lied to, it's because you agreed to get lied to. Truth number one about lying: Lying's a cooperative act. Now not all lies are harmful. Sometimes we're willing participants in deception for the sake of social dignity, maybe to keep a secret that should be kept secret, secret. We say, "Nice song." "Honey, you don't look fat in that, no." Or we say, favorite of the digiratti, "You know, I just fished that email out of my spam folder. So sorry." But there are times when we are unwilling participants in deception. And that can have dramatic costs for us. Last year saw 997 billion dollars in corporate fraud alone in the United States. That's an eyelash under a trillion dollars. That's seven percent of revenues. Deception can cost billions. Think Enron, Madoff, the mortgage crisis. Or in the case of double agents and traitors, like Robert Hanssen or Aldrich Ames, lies can betray our country, they can compromise our security, they can undermine democracy, they can cause the deaths of those that defend us. Deception is actually serious business. This con man, Henry Oberlander, he was such an effective con man British authorities say he could have undermined the entire banking system of the Western world. And you can't find this guy on Google; you can't find him anywhere. He was interviewed once, and he said the following. He said, "Look, I've got one rule." And this was Henry's rule, he said, "Look, everyone is willing to give you something. They're ready to give you something for whatever it is they're hungry for." And that's the crux of it. If you don't want to be deceived, you have to know, what is it that you're hungry for? And we all kind of hate to admit it. We wish we were better husbands, better wives, smarter, more powerful, taller, richer -- the list goes on. Lying is an attempt to bridge that gap, to connect our wishes and our fantasies about who we wish we were, how we wish we could be, with what we're really like. And boy are we willing to fill in those gaps in our lives with lies. On a given day, studies show that you may be lied to anywhere from 10 to 200 times. Now granted, many of those are white lies. But in another study, it showed that strangers lied three times within the first 10 minutes of meeting each other. (Laughter) Now when we first hear this data, we recoil. We can't believe how prevalent lying is. We're essentially against lying. But if you look more closely, the plot actually thickens. We lie more to strangers than we lie to coworkers. Extroverts lie more than introverts. Men lie eight times more about themselves than they do other people. Women lie more to protect other people. If you're an average married couple, you're going to lie to your spouse in one out of every 10 interactions. Now you may think that's bad. It you're unmarried, that number drops to three. Lying's complex. It's woven into the fabric of our daily and our business lives. We're deeply ambivalent about the truth. We parse it out on an as-needed basis, sometimes for very good reasons, other times just because we don't understand the gaps in our lives. That's truth number two about lying. We're against lying, but we're covertly for it in ways that our society has sanctioned for centuries and centuries and centuries. It's as old as breathing. It's part of our culture, it's part of our history. Think Dante, Shakespeare, the Bible, News of the World. (Laughter) Lying has evolutionary value to us as a species. Researchers have long known that the more intelligent the species, the larger the neocortex, the more likely it is to be deceptive. Now you might remember Koko. Does anybody remember Koko the gorilla who was taught sign language? Koko was taught to communicate via sign language. Here's Koko with her kitten. It's her cute little, fluffy pet kitten. Koko once blamed her pet kitten for ripping a sink out of the wall. (Laughter) We're hardwired to become leaders of the pack. It's starts really, really early. How early? Well babies will fake a cry, pause, wait to see who's coming and then go right back to crying. One-year-olds learn concealment. (Laughter) Two-year-olds bluff. Five-year-olds lie outright. They manipulate via flattery. Nine-year-olds, masters of the cover up. By the time you enter college, you're going to lie to your mom in one out of every five interactions. By the time we enter this work world and we're breadwinners, we enter a world that is just cluttered with spam, fake digital friends, partisan media, ingenious identity thieves, world-class Ponzi schemers, a deception epidemic -- in short, what one author calls a post-truth society. It's been very confusing for a long time now. What do you do? Well there are steps we can take to navigate our way through the morass. Trained liespotters get to the truth 90 percent of the time. The rest of us, we're only 54 percent accurate. Why is it so easy to learn? There are good liars and there are bad liars. There are no real original liars. We all make the same mistakes. We all use the same techniques. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to show you two patterns of deception. And then we're going to look at the hot spots and see if we can find them ourselves. We're going to start with speech. (Video) Bill Clinton: I want you to listen to me. I'm going to say this again. I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky. I never told anybody to lie, not a single time, never. And these allegations are false. And I need to go back to work for the American people. Thank you. Pamela Meyer: Okay, what were the telltale signs? Well first we heard what's known as a non-contracted denial. Studies show that people who are overdetermined in their denial will resort to formal rather than informal language. We also heard distancing language: "that woman." We know that liars will unconsciously distance themselves from their subject using language as their tool. Now if Bill Clinton had said, "Well, to tell you the truth ... " or Richard Nixon's favorite, "In all candor ... " he would have been a dead giveaway for any liespotter than knows that qualifying language, as it's called, qualifying language like that, further discredits the subject. Now if he had repeated the question in its entirety, or if he had peppered his account with a little too much detail -- and we're all really glad he didn't do that -- he would have further discredited himself. Freud had it right. Freud said, look, there's much more to it than speech: "No mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips." And we all do it no matter how powerful you are. We all chatter with our fingertips. I'm going to show you Dominique Strauss-Kahn with Obama who's chattering with his fingertips. (Laughter) Now this brings us to our next pattern, which is body language. With body language, here's what you've got to do. You've really got to just throw your assumptions out the door. Let the science temper your knowledge a little bit. Because we think liars fidget all the time. Well guess what, they're known to freeze their upper bodies when they're lying. We think liars won't look you in the eyes. Well guess what, they look you in the eyes a little too much just to compensate for that myth. We think warmth and smiles convey honesty, sincerity. But a trained liespotter can spot a fake smile a mile away. Can you all spot the fake smile here? You can consciously contract the muscles in your cheeks. But the real smile's in the eyes, the crow's feet of the eyes. They cannot be consciously contracted, especially if you overdid the Botox. Don't overdo the Botox; nobody will think you're honest. Now we're going to look at the hot spots. Can you tell what's happening in a conversation? Can you start to find the hot spots to see the discrepancies between someone's words and someone's actions? Now I know it seems really obvious, but when you're having a conversation with someone you suspect of deception, attitude is by far the most overlooked but telling of indicators. An honest person is going to be cooperative. They're going to show they're on your side. They're going to be enthusiastic. They're going to be willing and helpful to getting you to the truth. They're going to be willing to brainstorm, name suspects, provide details. They're going to say, "Hey, maybe it was those guys in payroll that forged those checks." They're going to be infuriated if they sense they're wrongly accused throughout the entire course of the interview, not just in flashes; they'll be infuriated throughout the entire course of the interview. And if you ask someone honest what should happen to whomever did forge those checks, an honest person is much more likely to recommend strict rather than lenient punishment. Now let's say you're having that exact same conversation with someone deceptive. That person may be withdrawn, look down, lower their voice, pause, be kind of herky-jerky. Ask a deceptive person to tell their story, they're going to pepper it with way too much detail in all kinds of irrelevant places. And then they're going to tell their story in strict chronological order. And what a trained interrogator does is they come in and in very subtle ways over the course of several hours, they will ask that person to tell that story backwards, and then they'll watch them squirm, and track which questions produce the highest volume of deceptive tells. Why do they do that? Well we all do the same thing. We rehearse our words, but we rarely rehearse our gestures. We say "yes," we shake our heads "no." We tell very convincing stories, we slightly shrug our shoulders. We commit terrible crimes, and we smile at the delight in getting away with it. Now that smile is known in the trade as "duping delight." And we're going to see that in several videos moving forward, but we're going to start -- for those of you who don't know him, this is presidential candidate John Edwards who shocked America by fathering a child out of wedlock. We're going to see him talk about getting a paternity test. See now if you can spot him saying, "yes" while shaking his head "no," slightly shrugging his shoulders. (Video) John Edwards: I'd be happy to participate in one. I know that it's not possible that this child could be mine, because of the timing of events. So I know it's not possible. Happy to take a paternity test, and would love to see it happen. Interviewer: Are you going to do that soon? Is there somebody -- JE: Well, I'm only one side. I'm only one side of the test. But I'm happy to participate in one. PM: Okay, those head shakes are much easier to spot once you know to look for them. There're going to be times when someone makes one expression while masking another that just kind of leaks through in a flash. Murderers are known to leak sadness. Your new joint venture partner might shake your hand, celebrate, go out to dinner with you and then leak an expression of anger. And we're not all going to become facial expression experts overnight here, but there's one I can teach you that's very dangerous, and it's easy to learn, and that's the expression of contempt. Now with anger, you've got two people on an even playing field. It's still somewhat of a healthy relationship. But when anger turns to contempt, you've been dismissed. It's associated with moral superiority. And for that reason, it's very, very hard to recover from. Here's what it looks like. It's marked by one lip corner pulled up and in. It's the only asymmetrical expression. And in the presence of contempt, whether or not deception follows -- and it doesn't always follow -- look the other way, go the other direction, reconsider the deal, say, "No thank you. I'm not coming up for just one more nightcap. Thank you." Science has surfaced many, many more indicators. We know, for example, we know liars will shift their blink rate, point their feet towards an exit. They will take barrier objects and put them between themselves and the person that is interviewing them. They'll alter their vocal tone, often making their vocal tone much lower. Now here's the deal. These behaviors are just behaviors. They're not proof of deception. They're red flags. We're human beings. We make deceptive flailing gestures all over the place all day long. They don't mean anything in and of themselves. But when you see clusters of them, that's your signal. Look, listen, probe, ask some hard questions, get out of that very comfortable mode of knowing, walk into curiosity mode, ask more questions, have a little dignity, treat the person you're talking to with rapport. Don't try to be like those folks on "Law & Order" and those other TV shows that pummel their subjects into submission. Don't be too aggressive, it doesn't work. Now we've talked a little bit about how to talk to someone who's lying and how to spot a lie. And as I promised, we're now going to look at what the truth looks like. But I'm going to show you two videos, two mothers -- one is lying, one is telling the truth. And these were surfaced by researcher David Matsumoto in California. And I think they're an excellent example of what the truth looks like. This mother, Diane Downs, shot her kids at close range, drove them to the hospital while they bled all over the car, claimed a scraggy-haired stranger did it. And you'll see when you see the video, she can't even pretend to be an agonizing mother. What you want to look for here is an incredible discrepancy between horrific events that she describes and her very, very cool demeanor. And if you look closely, you'll see duping delight throughout this video. (Video) Diane Downs: At night when I close my eyes, I can see Christie reaching her hand out to me while I'm driving, and the blood just kept coming out of her mouth. And that -- maybe it'll fade too with time -- but I don't think so. That bothers me the most. PM: Now I'm going to show you a video of an actual grieving mother, Erin Runnion, confronting her daughter's murderer and torturer in court. Here you're going to see no false emotion, just the authentic expression of a mother's agony. (Video) Erin Runnion: I wrote this statement on the third anniversary of the night you took my baby, and you hurt her, and you crushed her, you terrified her until her heart stopped. And she fought, and I know she fought you. But I know she looked at you with those amazing brown eyes, and you still wanted to kill her. And I don't understand it, and I never will. PM: Okay, there's no doubting the veracity of those emotions. Now the technology around what the truth looks like is progressing on, the science of it. We know for example that we now have specialized eye trackers and infrared brain scans, MRI's that can decode the signals that our bodies send out when we're trying to be deceptive. And these technologies are going to be marketed to all of us as panaceas for deceit, and they will prove incredibly useful some day. But you've got to ask yourself in the meantime: Who do you want on your side of the meeting, someone who's trained in getting to the truth or some guy who's going to drag a 400-pound electroencephalogram through the door? Liespotters rely on human tools. They know, as someone once said, "Character's who you are in the dark." And what's kind of interesting is that today we have so little darkness. Our world is lit up 24 hours a day. It's transparent with blogs and social networks broadcasting the buzz of a whole new generation of people that have made a choice to live their lives in public. It's a much more noisy world. So one challenge we have is to remember, oversharing, that's not honesty. Our manic tweeting and texting can blind us to the fact that the subtleties of human decency -- character integrity -- that's still what matters, that's always what's going to matter. So in this much noisier world, it might make sense for us to be just a little bit more explicit about our moral code. When you combine the science of recognizing deception with the art of looking, listening, you exempt yourself from collaborating in a lie. You start up that path of being just a little bit more explicit, because you signal to everyone around you, you say, "Hey, my world, our world, it's going to be an honest one. My world is going to be one where truth is strengthened and falsehood is recognized and marginalized." And when you do that, the ground around you starts to shift just a little bit. And that's the truth. Thank you. (Applause)

Okay, now I don't want to alarm anybody in this room, but it's just come to my attention that the person to your right is a liar. (Laughter) Also, the person to your left is a liar. Also the person sitting in your very seats is a liar. We're all liars. What I'm going to do today is I'm going to show you what the research says about why we're all liars, how you can become a liespotter and why you might want to go the extra mile and go from liespotting to truth seeking, and ultimately to trust building. Now speaking of trust, ever since I wrote this book, "Liespotting," no one wants to meet me in person anymore, no, no, no, no, no. They say, "It's okay, we'll email you." (Laughter) I can't even get a coffee date at Starbucks. My husband's like, "Honey, deception? Maybe you could have focused on cooking. How about French cooking?" So before I get started, what I'm going to do is I'm going to clarify my goal for you, which is not to teach a game of Gotcha. Liespotters aren't those nitpicky kids, those kids in the back of the room that are shouting, "Gotcha! Gotcha! Your eyebrow twitched. You flared your nostril. I watch that TV show 'Lie To Me.' I know you're lying." No, liespotters are armed with scientific knowledge of how to spot deception. They use it to get to the truth, and they do what mature leaders do everyday; they have difficult conversations with difficult people, sometimes during very difficult times. And they start up that path by accepting a core proposition, and that proposition is the following: Lying is a cooperative act. Think about it, a lie has no power whatsoever by its mere utterance. Its power emerges when someone else agrees to believe the lie. So I know it may sound like tough love, but look, if at some point you got lied to, it's because you agreed to get lied to. Truth number one about lying: Lying's a cooperative act. Now not all lies are harmful. Sometimes we're willing participants in deception for the sake of social dignity, maybe to keep a secret that should be kept secret, secret. We say, "Nice song." "Honey, you don't look fat in that, no." Or we say, favorite of the digiratti, "You know, I just fished that email out of my spam folder. So sorry." But there are times when we are unwilling participants in deception. And that can have dramatic costs for us. Last year saw 997 billion dollars in corporate fraud alone in the United States. That's an eyelash under a trillion dollars. That's seven percent of revenues. Deception can cost billions. Think Enron, Madoff, the mortgage crisis. Or in the case of double agents and traitors, like Robert Hanssen or Aldrich Ames, lies can betray our country, they can compromise our security, they can undermine democracy, they can cause the deaths of those that defend us. Deception is actually serious business. This con man, Henry Oberlander, he was such an effective con man British authorities say he could have undermined the entire banking system of the Western world. And you can't find this guy on Google; you can't find him anywhere. He was interviewed once, and he said the following. He said, "Look, I've got one rule." And this was Henry's rule, he said, "Look, everyone is willing to give you something. They're ready to give you something for whatever it is they're hungry for." And that's the crux of it. If you don't want to be deceived, you have to know, what is it that you're hungry for? And we all kind of hate to admit it. We wish we were better husbands, better wives, smarter, more powerful, taller, richer -- the list goes on. Lying is an attempt to bridge that gap, to connect our wishes and our fantasies about who we wish we were, how we wish we could be, with what we're really like. And boy are we willing to fill in those gaps in our lives with lies. On a given day, studies show that you may be lied to anywhere from 10 to 200 times. Now granted, many of those are white lies. But in another study, it showed that strangers lied three times within the first 10 minutes of meeting each other. (Laughter) Now when we first hear this data, we recoil. We can't believe how prevalent lying is. We're essentially against lying. But if you look more closely, the plot actually thickens. We lie more to strangers than we lie to coworkers. Extroverts lie more than introverts. Men lie eight times more about themselves than they do other people. Women lie more to protect other people. If you're an average married couple, you're going to lie to your spouse in one out of every 10 interactions. Now you may think that's bad. If you're unmarried, that number drops to three. Lying's complex. It's woven into the fabric of our daily and our business lives. We're deeply ambivalent about the truth. We parse it out on an as-needed basis, sometimes for very good reasons, other times just because we don't understand the gaps in our lives. That's truth number two about lying. We're against lying, but we're covertly for it in ways that our society has sanctioned for centuries and centuries and centuries. It's as old as breathing. It's part of our culture, it's part of our history. Think Dante, Shakespeare, the Bible, News of the World. (Laughter) Lying has evolutionary value to us as a species. Researchers have long known that the more intelligent the species, the larger the neocortex, the more likely it is to be deceptive. Now you might remember Koko. Does anybody remember Koko the gorilla who was taught sign language? Koko was taught to communicate via sign language. Here's Koko with her kitten. It's her cute little, fluffy pet kitten. Koko once blamed her pet kitten for ripping a sink out of the wall. (Laughter) We're hardwired to become leaders of the pack. It's starts really, really early. How early? Well babies will fake a cry, pause, wait to see who's coming and then go right back to crying. One-year-olds learn concealment. (Laughter) Two-year-olds bluff. Five-year-olds lie outright. They manipulate via flattery. Nine-year-olds, masters of the cover up. By the time you enter college, you're going to lie to your mom in one out of every five interactions. By the time we enter this work world and we're breadwinners, we enter a world that is just cluttered with spam, fake digital friends, partisan media, ingenious identity thieves, world-class Ponzi schemers, a deception epidemic -- in short, what one author calls a post-truth society. It's been very confusing for a long time now. What do you do? Well there are steps we can take to navigate our way through the morass. Trained liespotters get to the truth 90 percent of the time. The rest of us, we're only 54 percent accurate. Why is it so easy to learn? There are good liars and there are bad liars. There are no real original liars. We all make the same mistakes. We all use the same techniques. So what I'm going to do is I'm going to show you two patterns of deception. And then we're going to look at the hot spots and see if we can find them ourselves. We're going to start with speech. (Video) Bill Clinton: I want you to listen to me. I'm going to say this again. I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky. I never told anybody to lie, not a single time, never. And these allegations are false. And I need to go back to work for the American people. Thank you. Pamela Meyer: Okay, what were the telltale signs? Well first we heard what's known as a non-contracted denial. Studies show that people who are overdetermined in their denial will resort to formal rather than informal language. We also heard distancing language: "that woman." We know that liars will unconsciously distance themselves from their subject using language as their tool. Now if Bill Clinton had said, "Well, to tell you the truth ... " or Richard Nixon's favorite, "In all candor ... " he would have been a dead giveaway for any liespotter than knows that qualifying language, as it's called, qualifying language like that, further discredits the subject. Now if he had repeated the question in its entirety, or if he had peppered his account with a little too much detail -- and we're all really glad he didn't do that -- he would have further discredited himself. Freud had it right. Freud said, look, there's much more to it than speech: "No mortal can keep a secret. If his lips are silent, he chatters with his fingertips." And we all do it no matter how powerful you are. We all chatter with our fingertips. I'm going to show you Dominique Strauss-Kahn with Obama who's chattering with his fingertips. (Laughter) Now this brings us to our next pattern, which is body language. With body language, here's what you've got to do. You've really got to just throw your assumptions out the door. Let the science temper your knowledge a little bit. Because we think liars fidget all the time. Well guess what, they're known to freeze their upper bodies when they're lying. We think liars won't look you in the eyes. Well guess what, they look you in the eyes a little too much just to compensate for that myth. We think warmth and smiles convey honesty, sincerity. But a trained liespotter can spot a fake smile a mile away. Can you all spot the fake smile here? You can consciously contract the muscles in your cheeks. But the real smile's in the eyes, the crow's feet of the eyes. They cannot be consciously contracted, especially if you overdid the Botox. Don't overdo the Botox; nobody will think you're honest. Now we're going to look at the hot spots. Can you tell what's happening in a conversation? Can you start to find the hot spots to see the discrepancies between someone's words and someone's actions? Now I know it seems really obvious, but when you're having a conversation with someone you suspect of deception, attitude is by far the most overlooked but telling of indicators. An honest person is going to be cooperative. They're going to show they're on your side. They're going to be enthusiastic. They're going to be willing and helpful to getting you to the truth. They're going to be willing to brainstorm, name suspects, provide details. They're going to say, "Hey, maybe it was those guys in payroll that forged those checks." They're going to be infuriated if they sense they're wrongly accused throughout the entire course of the interview, not just in flashes; they'll be infuriated throughout the entire course of the interview. And if you ask someone honest what should happen to whomever did forge those checks, an honest person is much more likely to recommend strict rather than lenient punishment. Now let's say you're having that exact same conversation with someone deceptive. That person may be withdrawn, look down, lower their voice, pause, be kind of herky-jerky. Ask a deceptive person to tell their story, they're going to pepper it with way too much detail in all kinds of irrelevant places. And then they're going to tell their story in strict chronological order. And what a trained interrogator does is they come in and in very subtle ways over the course of several hours, they will ask that person to tell that story backwards, and then they'll watch them squirm, and track which questions produce the highest volume of deceptive tells. Why do they do that? Well we all do the same thing. We rehearse our words, but we rarely rehearse our gestures. We say "yes," we shake our heads "no." We tell very convincing stories, we slightly shrug our shoulders. We commit terrible crimes, and we smile at the delight in getting away with it. Now that smile is known in the trade as "duping delight." And we're going to see that in several videos moving forward, but we're going to start -- for those of you who don't know him, this is presidential candidate John Edwards who shocked America by fathering a child out of wedlock. We're going to see him talk about getting a paternity test. See now if you can spot him saying, "yes" while shaking his head "no," slightly shrugging his shoulders. (Video) John Edwards: I'd be happy to participate in one. I know that it's not possible that this child could be mine, because of the timing of events. So I know it's not possible. Happy to take a paternity test, and would love to see it happen. Interviewer: Are you going to do that soon? Is there somebody -- JE: Well, I'm only one side. I'm only one side of the test. But I'm happy to participate in one. PM: Okay, those head shakes are much easier to spot once you know to look for them. There're going to be times when someone makes one expression while masking another that just kind of leaks through in a flash. Murderers are known to leak sadness. Your new joint venture partner might shake your hand, celebrate, go out to dinner with you and then leak an expression of anger. And we're not all going to become facial expression experts overnight here, but there's one I can teach you that's very dangerous, and it's easy to learn, and that's the expression of contempt. Now with anger, you've got two people on an even playing field. It's still somewhat of a healthy relationship. But when anger turns to contempt, you've been dismissed. It's associated with moral superiority. And for that reason, it's very, very hard to recover from. Here's what it looks like. It's marked by one lip corner pulled up and in. It's the only asymmetrical expression. And in the presence of contempt, whether or not deception follows -- and it doesn't always follow -- look the other way, go the other direction, reconsider the deal, say, "No thank you. I'm not coming up for just one more nightcap. Thank you." Science has surfaced many, many more indicators. We know, for example, we know liars will shift their blink rate, point their feet towards an exit. They will take barrier objects and put them between themselves and the person that is interviewing them. They'll alter their vocal tone, often making their vocal tone much lower. Now here's the deal. These behaviors are just behaviors. They're not proof of deception. They're red flags. We're human beings. We make deceptive flailing gestures all over the place all day long. They don't mean anything in and of themselves. But when you see clusters of them, that's your signal. Look, listen, probe, ask some hard questions, get out of that very comfortable mode of knowing, walk into curiosity mode, ask more questions, have a little dignity, treat the person you're talking to with rapport. Don't try to be like those folks on "Law & Order" and those other TV shows that pummel their subjects into submission. Don't be too aggressive, it doesn't work. Now we've talked a little bit about how to talk to someone who's lying and how to spot a lie. And as I promised, we're now going to look at what the truth looks like. But I'm going to show you two videos, two mothers -- one is lying, one is telling the truth. And these were surfaced by researcher David Matsumoto in California. And I think they're an excellent example of what the truth looks like. This mother, Diane Downs, shot her kids at close range, drove them to the hospital while they bled all over the car, claimed a scraggy-haired stranger did it. And you'll see when you see the video, she can't even pretend to be an agonizing mother. What you want to look for here is an incredible discrepancy between horrific events that she describes and her very, very cool demeanor. And if you look closely, you'll see duping delight throughout this video. (Video) Diane Downs: At night when I close my eyes, I can see Christie reaching her hand out to me while I'm driving, and the blood just kept coming out of her mouth. And that -- maybe it'll fade too with time -- but I don't think so. That bothers me the most. PM: Now I'm going to show you a video of an actual grieving mother, Erin Runnion, confronting her daughter's murderer and torturer in court. Here you're going to see no false emotion, just the authentic expression of a mother's agony. (Video) Erin Runnion: I wrote this statement on the third anniversary of the night you took my baby, and you hurt her, and you crushed her, you terrified her until her heart stopped. And she fought, and I know she fought you. But I know she looked at you with those amazing brown eyes, and you still wanted to kill her. And I don't understand it, and I never will. PM: Okay, there's no doubting the veracity of those emotions. Now the technology around what the truth looks like is progressing on, the science of it. We know for example that we now have specialized eye trackers and infrared brain scans, MRI's that can decode the signals that our bodies send out when we're trying to be deceptive. And these technologies are going to be marketed to all of us as panaceas for deceit, and they will prove incredibly useful some day. But you've got to ask yourself in the meantime: Who do you want on your side of the meeting, someone who's trained in getting to the truth or some guy who's going to drag a 400-pound electroencephalogram through the door? Liespotters rely on human tools. They know, as someone once said, "Character's who you are in the dark." And what's kind of interesting is that today we have so little darkness. Our world is lit up 24 hours a day. It's transparent with blogs and social networks broadcasting the buzz of a whole new generation of people that have made a choice to live their lives in public. It's a much more noisy world. So one challenge we have is to remember, oversharing, that's not honesty. Our manic tweeting and texting can blind us to the fact that the subtleties of human decency -- character integrity -- that's still what matters, that's always what's going to matter. So in this much noisier world, it might make sense for us to be just a little bit more explicit about our moral code. When you combine the science of recognizing deception with the art of looking, listening, you exempt yourself from collaborating in a lie. You start up that path of being just a little bit more explicit, because you signal to everyone around you, you say, "Hey, my world, our world, it's going to be an honest one. My world is going to be one where truth is strengthened and falsehood is recognized and marginalized." And when you do that, the ground around you starts to shift just a little bit. And that's the truth. Thank you. (Applause)

So since I was here last in '06, we discovered that global climate change is turning out to be a pretty serious issue, so we covered that fairly extensively in Skeptic magazine. We investigate all kinds of scientific and quasi-scientific controversies, but it turns out we don't have to worry about any of this because the world's going to end in 2012. Another update: You will recall I introduced you guys to the Quadro Tracker. It's like a water dowsing device. It's just a hollow piece of plastic with an antenna that swivels around. And you walk around, and it points to things. Like if you're looking for marijuana in students' lockers, it'll point right to somebody. Oh, sorry. (Laughter) This particular one that was given to me finds golf balls, especially if you're at a golf course and you check under enough bushes. Well, under the category of "What's the harm of silly stuff like this?" this device, the ADE 651, was sold to the Iraqi government for 40,000 dollars apiece. It's just like this one, completely worthless, in which it allegedly worked by "electrostatic magnetic ion attraction," which translates to "pseudoscientific baloney" -- would be the nice word -- in which you string together a bunch of words that sound good, but it does absolutely nothing. In this case, at trespass points, allowing people to go through because your little tracker device said they were okay, actually cost lives. So there is a danger to pseudoscience, in believing in this sort of thing. So what I want to talk about today is belief. I want to believe, and you do too. And in fact, I think my thesis here is that belief is the natural state of things. It is the default option. We just believe. We believe all sorts of things. Belief is natural; disbelief, skepticism, science, is not natural. It's more difficult. It's uncomfortable to not believe things. So like Fox Mulder on "X-Files," who wants to believe in UFOs? Well, we all do, and the reason for that is because we have a belief engine in our brains. Essentially, we are pattern-seeking primates. We connect the dots: A is connected to B; B is connected to C. And sometimes A really is connected to B, and that's called association learning. We find patterns, we make those connections, whether it's Pavlov's dog here associating the sound of the bell with the food, and then he salivates to the sound of the bell, or whether it's a Skinnerian rat, in which he's having an association between his behavior and a reward for it, and therefore he repeats the behavior. In fact, what Skinner discovered is that, if you put a pigeon in a box like this, and he has to press one of these two keys, and he tries to figure out what the pattern is, and you give him a little reward in the hopper box there -- if you just randomly assign rewards such that there is no pattern, they will figure out any kind of pattern. And whatever they were doing just before they got the reward, they repeat that particular pattern. Sometimes it was even spinning around twice counterclockwise, once clockwise and peck the key twice. And that's called superstition, and that, I'm afraid, we will always have with us. I call this process "patternicity" -- that is, the tendency to find meaningful patterns in both meaningful and meaningless noise. When we do this process, we make two types of errors. A Type I error, or false positive, is believing a pattern is real when it's not. Our second type of error is a false negative. A Type II error is not believing a pattern is real when it is. So let's do a thought experiment. You are a hominid three million years ago walking on the plains of Africa. Your name is Lucy, okay? And you hear a rustle in the grass. Is it a dangerous predator, or is it just the wind? Your next decision could be the most important one of your life. Well, if you think that the rustle in the grass is a dangerous predator and it turns out it's just the wind, you've made an error in cognition, made a Type I error, false positive. But no harm. You just move away. You're more cautious. You're more vigilant. On the other hand, if you believe that the rustle in the grass is just the wind, and it turns out it's a dangerous predator, you're lunch. You've just won a Darwin award. You've been taken out of the gene pool. Now the problem here is that patternicities will occur whenever the cost of making a Type I error is less than the cost of making a Type II error. This is the only equation in the talk by the way. We have a pattern detection problem that is assessing the difference between a Type I and a Type II error is highly problematic, especially in split-second, life-and-death situations. So the default position is just: Believe all patterns are real -- All rustles in the grass are dangerous predators and not just the wind. And so I think that we evolved ... there was a natural selection for the propensity for our belief engines, our pattern-seeking brain processes, to always find meaningful patterns and infuse them with these sort of predatory or intentional agencies that I'll come back to. So for example, what do you see here? It's a horse head, that's right. It looks like a horse. It must be a horse. That's a pattern. And is it really a horse? Or is it more like a frog? See, our pattern detection device, which appears to be located in the anterior cingulate cortex -- it's our little detection device there -- can be easily fooled, and this is the problem. For example, what do you see here? Yes, of course, it's a cow. Once I prime the brain -- it's called cognitive priming -- once I prime the brain to see it, it pops back out again even without the pattern that I've imposed on it. And what do you see here? Some people see a Dalmatian dog. Yes, there it is. And there's the prime. So when I go back without the prime, your brain already has the model so you can see it again. What do you see here? Planet Saturn. Yes, that's good. How about here? Just shout out anything you see. That's a good audience, Chris. Because there's nothing in this. Well, allegedly there's nothing. This is an experiment done by Jennifer Whitson at U.T. Austin on corporate environments and whether feelings of uncertainty and out of control makes people see illusory patterns. That is, almost everybody sees the planet Saturn. People that are put in a condition of feeling out of control are more likely to see something in this, which is allegedly patternless. In other words, the propensity to find these patterns goes up when there's a lack of control. For example, baseball players are notoriously superstitious when they're batting, but not so much when they're fielding. Because fielders are successful 90 to 95 percent of the time. The best batters fail seven out of 10 times. So their superstitions, their patternicities, are all associated with feelings of lack of control and so forth. What do you see in this particular one here, in this field? Anybody see an object there? There actually is something here, but it's degraded. While you're thinking about that, this was an experiment done by Susan Blackmore, a psychologist in England, who showed subjects this degraded image and then ran a correlation between their scores on an ESP test: How much did they believe in the paranormal, supernatural, angels and so forth. And those who scored high on the ESP scale, tended to not only see more patterns in the degraded images but incorrect patterns. Here is what you show subjects. The fish is degraded 20 percent, 50 percent and then the one I showed you, 70 percent. A similar experiment was done by another [Swiss] psychologist named Peter Brugger, who found significantly more meaningful patterns were perceived on the right hemisphere, via the left visual field, than the left hemisphere. So if you present subjects the images such that it's going to end up on the right hemisphere instead of the left, then they're more likely to see patterns than if you put it on the left hemisphere. Our right hemisphere appears to be where a lot of this patternicity occurs. So what we're trying to do is bore into the brain to see where all this happens. Brugger and his colleague, Christine Mohr, gave subjects L-DOPA. L-DOPA's a drug, as you know, given for treating Parkinson's disease, which is related to a decrease in dopamine. L-DOPA increases dopamine. An increase of dopamine caused subjects to see more patterns than those that did not receive the dopamine. So dopamine appears to be the drug associated with patternicity. In fact, neuroleptic drugs that are used to eliminate psychotic behavior, things like paranoia, delusions and hallucinations, these are patternicities. They're incorrect patterns. They're false positives. They're Type I errors. And if you give them drugs that are dopamine antagonists, they go away. That is, you decrease the amount of dopamine, and their tendency to see patterns like that decreases. On the other hand, amphetamines like cocaine are dopamine agonists. They increase the amount of dopamine. So you're more likely to feel in a euphoric state, creativity, find more patterns. In fact, I saw Robin Williams recently talk about how he thought he was much funnier when he was doing cocaine, when he had that issue, than now. So perhaps more dopamine is related to more creativity. Dopamine, I think, changes our signal-to-noise ratio. That is, how accurate we are in finding patterns. If it's too low, you're more likely to make too many Type II errors. You miss the real patterns. You don't want to be too skeptical. If you're too skeptical, you'll miss the really interesting good ideas. Just right, you're creative, and yet you don't fall for too much baloney. Too high and maybe you see patterns everywhere. Every time somebody looks at you, you think people are staring at you. You think people are talking about you. And if you go too far on that, that's just simply labeled as madness. It's a distinction perhaps we might make between two Nobel laureates, Richard Feynman and John Nash. One sees maybe just the right number of patterns to win a Nobel Prize. The other one also, but maybe too many patterns. And we then call that schizophrenia. So the signal-to-noise ratio then presents us with a pattern-detection problem. And of course you all know exactly what this is, right? And what pattern do you see here? Again, I'm putting your anterior cingulate cortex to the test here, causing you conflicting pattern detections. You know, of course, this is Via Uno shoes. These are sandals. Pretty sexy feet, I must say. Maybe a little Photoshopped. And of course, the ambiguous figures that seem to flip-flop back and forth. It turns out what you're thinking about a lot influences what you tend to see. And you see the lamp here, I know. Because the lights on here. Of course, thanks to the environmentalist movement we're all sensitive to the plight of marine mammals. So what you see in this particular ambiguous figure is, of course, the dolphins, right? You see a dolphin here, and there's a dolphin, and there's a dolphin. That's a dolphin tail there, guys. (Laughter) If we can give you conflicting data, again, your ACC is going to be going into hyperdrive. If you look down here, it's fine. If you look up here, then you get conflicting data. And then we have to flip the image for you to see that it's a set up. The impossible crate illusion. It's easy to fool the brain in 2D. So you say, "Aw, come on Shermer, anybody can do that in a Psych 101 text with an illusion like that." Well here's the late, great Jerry Andrus' "impossible crate" illusion in 3D, in which Jerry is standing inside the impossible crate. And he was kind enough to post this and give us the reveal. Of course, camera angle is everything. The photographer is over there, and this board appears to overlap with this one, and this one with that one, and so on. But even when I take it away, the illusion is so powerful because of how are brains are wired to find those certain kinds of patterns. This is a fairly new one that throws us off because of the conflicting patterns of comparing this angle with that angle. In fact, it's the exact same picture side by side. So what you're doing is comparing that angle instead of with this one, but with that one. And so your brain is fooled. Yet again, your pattern detection devices are fooled. Faces are easy to see because we have an additional evolved facial recognition software in our temporal lobes. Here's some faces on the side of a rock. I'm actually not even sure if this is -- this might be Photoshopped. But anyway, the point is still made. Now which one of these looks odd to you? In a quick reaction, which one looks odd? The one on the left. Okay. So I'll rotate it so it'll be the one on the right. And you are correct. A fairly famous illusion -- it was first done with Margaret Thatcher. Now, they trade up the politicians every time. Well, why is this happening? Well, we know exactly where it happens, in the temporal lobe, right across, sort of above your ear there, in a little structure called the fusiform gyrus. And there's two types of cells that do this, that record facial features either globally, or specifically these large, rapid-firing cells, first look at the general face. So you recognize Obama immediately. And then you notice something quite a little bit odd about the eyes and the mouth. Especially when they're upside down, you're engaging that general facial recognition software there. Now I said back in our little thought experiment, you're a hominid walking on the plains of Africa. Is it just the wind or a dangerous predator? What's the difference between those? Well, the wind is inanimate; the dangerous predator is an intentional agent. And I call this process agenticity. That is the tendency to infuse patterns with meaning, intention and agency, often invisible beings from the top down. This is an idea that we got from a fellow TEDster here, Dan Dennett, who talked about taking the intentional stance. So it's a type of that expanded to explain, I think, a lot of different things: souls, spirits, ghosts, gods, demons, angels, aliens, intelligent designers, government conspiracists and all manner of invisible agents with power and intention, are believed to haunt our world and control our lives. I think it's the basis of animism and polytheism and monotheism. It's the belief that aliens are somehow more advanced than us, more moral than us, and the narratives always are that they're coming here to save us and rescue us from on high. The intelligent designer's always portrayed as this super intelligent, moral being that comes down to design life. Even the idea that government can rescue us -- that's no longer the wave of the future, but that is, I think, a type of agenticity: projecting somebody up there, big and powerful, will come rescue us. And this is also, I think, the basis of conspiracy theories. There's somebody hiding behind there pulling the strings, whether it's the Illuminati or the Bilderbergers. But this is a pattern detection problem, isn't it? Some patterns are real and some are not. Was JFK assassinated by a conspiracy or by a lone assassin? Well, if you go there -- there's people there on any given day -- like when I went there, here -- showing me where the different shooters were. My favorite one was he was in the manhole. And he popped out at the last second, took that shot. But of course, Lincoln was assassinated by a conspiracy. So we can't just uniformly dismiss all patterns like that. Because, let's face it, some patterns are real. Some conspiracies really are true. Explains a lot, maybe. And 9/11 has a conspiracy theory. It is a conspiracy. We did a whole issue on it. Nineteen members of Al Queda plotting to fly planes into buildings constitutes a conspiracy. But that's not what the "9/11 truthers" think. They think it was an inside job by the Bush administration. Well, that's a whole other lecture. You know how we know that 9/11 was not orchestrated by the Bush administration? Because it worked. (Laughter) (Applause) So we are natural-born dualists. Our agenticity process comes from the fact that we can enjoy movies like these. Because we can imagine, in essence, continuing on. We know that if you stimulate the temporal lobe, you can produce a feeling of out-of-body experiences, near-death experiences, which you can do by just touching an electrode to the temporal lobe there. Or you can do it through loss of consciousness, by accelerating in a centrifuge. You get a hypoxia, or a lower oxygen. And the brain then senses that there's an out-of-body experience. You can use -- which I did, went out and did -- Michael Persinger's God Helmet, that bombards your temporal lobes with electromagnetic waves. And you get a sense of out-of-body experience. So I'm going to end here with a short video clip that sort of brings all this together. It's just a minute and a half. It ties together all this into the power of expectation and the power of belief. Go ahead and roll it. Narrator: This is the venue they chose for their fake auditions for an advert for lip balm. Woman: We're hoping we can use part of this in a national commercial, right? And this is test on some lip balms that we have over here. And these are our models who are going to help us, Roger and Matt. And we have our own lip balm, and we have a leading brand. Would you have any problem kissing our models to test it? Girl: No. Woman: You wouldn't? (Girl: No.) Woman: You'd think that was fine. Girl: That would be fine. (Woman: Okay.) So this is a blind test. I'm going to ask you to go ahead and put a blindfold on. Kay, now can you see anything? (Girl: No.) Pull it so you can't even see down. (Girl: Okay.) Woman: It's completely blind now, right? Girl: Yes. (Woman: Okay.) Now, what I'm going to be looking for in this test is how it protects your lips, the texture, right, and maybe if you can discern any flavor or not. Girl: Okay. (Woman: Have you ever done a kissing test before?) Girl: No. Woman: Take a step here. Okay, now I'm going to ask you to pucker up. Pucker up big and lean in just a little bit, okay? (Music) (Laughter) (Laughter) Woman: Okay. And, Jennifer, how did that feel? Jennifer: Good. (Laughter) Girl: Oh my God! (Laughter) Michael Shermer: Thank you very much. Thank you. Thanks.

Every day we face issues like climate change or the safety of vaccines where we have to answer questions whose answers rely heavily on scientific information. Scientists tell us that the world is warming. Scientists tell us that vaccines are safe. But how do we know if they are right? Why should be believe the science? The fact is, many of us actually don't believe the science. Public opinion polls consistently show that significant proportions of the American people don't believe the climate is warming due to human activities, don't think that there is evolution by natural selection, and aren't persuaded by the safety of vaccines. So why should we believe the science? Well, scientists don't like talking about science as a matter of belief. In fact, they would contrast science with faith, and they would say belief is the domain of faith. And faith is a separate thing apart and distinct from science. Indeed they would say religion is based on faith or maybe the calculus of Pascal's wager. Blaise Pascal was a 17th-century mathematician who tried to bring scientific reasoning to the question of whether or not he should believe in God, and his wager went like this: Well, if God doesn't exist but I decide to believe in him nothing much is really lost. Maybe a few hours on Sunday. (Laughter) But if he does exist and I don't believe in him, then I'm in deep trouble. And so Pascal said, we'd better believe in God. Or as one of my college professors said, "He clutched for the handrail of faith." He made that leap of faith leaving science and rationalism behind. Now the fact is though, for most of us, most scientific claims are a leap of faith. We can't really judge scientific claims for ourselves in most cases. And indeed this is actually true for most scientists as well outside of their own specialties. So if you think about it, a geologist can't tell you whether a vaccine is safe. Most chemists are not experts in evolutionary theory. A physicist cannot tell you, despite the claims of some of them, whether or not tobacco causes cancer. So, if even scientists themselves have to make a leap of faith outside their own fields, then why do they accept the claims of other scientists? Why do they believe each other's claims? And should we believe those claims? So what I'd like to argue is yes, we should, but not for the reason that most of us think. Most of us were taught in school that the reason we should believe in science is because of the scientific method. We were taught that scientists follow a method and that this method guarantees the truth of their claims. The method that most of us were taught in school, we can call it the textbook method, is the hypothetical deductive method. According to the standard model, the textbook model, scientists develop hypotheses, they deduce the consequences of those hypotheses, and then they go out into the world and they say, "Okay, well are those consequences true?" Can we observe them taking place in the natural world? And if they are true, then the scientists say, "Great, we know the hypothesis is correct." So there are many famous examples in the history of science of scientists doing exactly this. One of the most famous examples comes from the work of Albert Einstein. When Einstein developed the theory of general relativity, one of the consequences of his theory was that space-time wasn't just an empty void but that it actually had a fabric. And that that fabric was bent in the presence of massive objects like the sun. So if this theory were true then it meant that light as it passed the sun should actually be bent around it. That was a pretty startling prediction and it took a few years before scientists were able to test it but they did test it in 1919, and lo and behold it turned out to be true. Starlight actually does bend as it travels around the sun. This was a huge confirmation of the theory. It was considered proof of the truth of this radical new idea, and it was written up in many newspapers around the globe. Now, sometimes this theory or this model is referred to as the deductive-nomological model, mainly because academics like to make things complicated. But also because in the ideal case, it's about laws. So nomological means having to do with laws. And in the ideal case, the hypothesis isn't just an idea: ideally, it is a law of nature. Why does it matter that it is a law of nature? Because if it is a law, it can't be broken. If it's a law then it will always be true in all times and all places no matter what the circumstances are. And all of you know of at least one example of a famous law: Einstein's famous equation, E=MC2, which tells us what the relationship is between energy and mass. And that relationship is true no matter what. Now, it turns out, though, that there are several problems with this model. The main problem is that it's wrong. It's just not true. (Laughter) And I'm going to talk about three reasons why it's wrong. So the first reason is a logical reason. It's the problem of the fallacy of affirming the consequent. So that's another fancy, academic way of saying that false theories can make true predictions. So just because the prediction comes true doesn't actually logically prove that the theory is correct. And I have a good example of that too, again from the history of science. This is a picture of the Ptolemaic universe with the Earth at the center of the universe and the sun and the planets going around it. The Ptolemaic model was believed by many very smart people for many centuries. Well, why? Well the answer is because it made lots of predictions that came true. The Ptolemaic system enabled astronomers to make accurate predictions of the motions of the planet, in fact more accurate predictions at first than the Copernican theory which we now would say is true. So that's one problem with the textbook model. A second problem is a practical problem, and it's the problem of auxiliary hypotheses. Auxiliary hypotheses are assumptions that scientists are making that they may or may not even be aware that they're making. So an important example of this comes from the Copernican model, which ultimately replaced the Ptolemaic system. So when Nicolaus Copernicus said, actually the Earth is not the center of the universe, the sun is the center of the solar system, the Earth moves around the sun. Scientists said, well okay, Nicolaus, if that's true we ought to be able to detect the motion of the Earth around the sun. And so this slide here illustrates a concept known as stellar parallax. And astronomers said, if the Earth is moving and we look at a prominent star, let's say, Sirius -- well I know I'm in Manhattan so you guys can't see the stars, but imagine you're out in the country, imagine you chose that rural life — and we look at a star in December, we see that star against the backdrop of distant stars. If we now make the same observation six months later when the Earth has moved to this position in June, we look at that same star and we see it against a different backdrop. That difference, that angular difference, is the stellar parallax. So this is a prediction that the Copernican model makes. Astronomers looked for the stellar parallax and they found nothing, nothing at all. And many people argued that this proved that the Copernican model was false. So what happened? Well, in hindsight we can say that astronomers were making two auxiliary hypotheses, both of which we would now say were incorrect. The first was an assumption about the size of the Earth's orbit. Astronomers were assuming that the Earth's orbit was large relative to the distance to the stars. Today we would draw the picture more like this, this comes from NASA, and you see the Earth's orbit is actually quite small. In fact, it's actually much smaller even than shown here. The stellar parallax therefore, is very small and actually very hard to detect. And that leads to the second reason why the prediction didn't work, because scientists were also assuming that the telescopes they had were sensitive enough to detect the parallax. And that turned out not to be true. It wasn't until the 19th century that scientists were able to detect the stellar parallax. So, there's a third problem as well. The third problem is simply a factual problem, that a lot of science doesn't fit the textbook model. A lot of science isn't deductive at all, it's actually inductive. And by that we mean that scientists don't necessarily start with theories and hypotheses, often they just start with observations of stuff going on in the world. And the most famous example of that is one of the most famous scientists who ever lived, Charles Darwin. When Darwin went out as a young man on the voyage of the Beagle, he didn't have a hypothesis, he didn't have a theory. He just knew that he wanted to have a career as a scientist and he started to collect data. Mainly he knew that he hated medicine because the sight of blood made him sick so he had to have an alternative career path. So he started collecting data. And he collected many things, including his famous finches. When he collected these finches, he threw them in a bag and he had no idea what they meant. Many years later back in London, Darwin looked at his data again and began to develop an explanation, and that explanation was the theory of natural selection. Besides inductive science, scientists also often participate in modeling. One of the things scientists want to do in life is to explain the causes of things. And how do we do that? Well, one way you can do it is to build a model that tests an idea. So this is a picture of Henry Cadell, who was a Scottish geologist in the 19th century. You can tell he's Scottish because he's wearing a deerstalker cap and Wellington boots. (Laughter) And Cadell wanted to answer the question, how are mountains formed? And one of the things he had observed is that if you look at mountains like the Appalachians, you often find that the rocks in them are folded, and they're folded in a particular way, which suggested to him that they were actually being compressed from the side. And this idea would later play a major role in discussions of continental drift. So he built this model, this crazy contraption with levers and wood, and here's his wheelbarrow, buckets, a big sledgehammer. I don't know why he's got the Wellington boots. Maybe it's going to rain. And he created this physical model in order to demonstrate that you could, in fact, create patterns in rocks, or at least, in this case, in mud, that looked a lot like mountains if you compressed them from the side. So it was an argument about the cause of mountains. Nowadays, most scientists prefer to work inside, so they don't build physical models so much as to make computer simulations. But a computer simulation is a kind of a model. It's a model that's made with mathematics, and like the physical models of the 19th century, it's very important for thinking about causes. So one of the big questions to do with climate change, we have tremendous amounts of evidence that the Earth is warming up. This slide here, the black line shows the measurements that scientists have taken for the last 150 years showing that the Earth's temperature has steadily increased, and you can see in particular that in the last 50 years there's been this dramatic increase of nearly one degree centigrade, or almost two degrees Fahrenheit. So what, though, is driving that change? How can we know what's causing the observed warming? Well, scientists can model it using a computer simulation. So this diagram illustrates a computer simulation that has looked at all the different factors that we know can influence the Earth's climate, so sulfate particles from air pollution, volcanic dust from volcanic eruptions, changes in solar radiation, and, of course, greenhouse gases. And they asked the question, what set of variables put into a model will reproduce what we actually see in real life? So here is the real life in black. Here's the model in this light gray, and the answer is a model that includes, it's the answer E on that SAT, all of the above. The only way you can reproduce the observed temperature measurements is with all of these things put together, including greenhouse gases, and in particular you can see that the increase in greenhouse gases tracks this very dramatic increase in temperature over the last 50 years. And so this is why climate scientists say it's not just that we know that climate change is happening, we know that greenhouse gases are a major part of the reason why. So now because there all these different things that scientists do, the philosopher Paul Feyerabend famously said, "The only principle in science that doesn't inhibit progress is: anything goes." Now this quotation has often been taken out of context, because Feyerabend was not actually saying that in science anything goes. What he was saying was, actually the full quotation is, "If you press me to say what is the method of science, I would have to say: anything goes." What he was trying to say is that scientists do a lot of different things. Scientists are creative. But then this pushes the question back: If scientists don't use a single method, then how do they decide what's right and what's wrong? And who judges? And the answer is, scientists judge, and they judge by judging evidence. Scientists collect evidence in many different ways, but however they collect it, they have to subject it to scrutiny. And this led the sociologist Robert Merton to focus on this question of how scientists scrutinize data and evidence, and he said they do it in a way he called "organized skepticism." And by that he meant it's organized because they do it collectively, they do it as a group, and skepticism, because they do it from a position of distrust. That is to say, the burden of proof is on the person with a novel claim. And in this sense, science is intrinsically conservative. It's quite hard to persuade the scientific community to say, "Yes, we know something, this is true." So despite the popularity of the concept of paradigm shifts, what we find is that actually, really major changes in scientific thinking are relatively rare in the history of science. So finally that brings us to one more idea: If scientists judge evidence collectively, this has led historians to focus on the question of consensus, and to say that at the end of the day, what science is, what scientific knowledge is, is the consensus of the scientific experts who through this process of organized scrutiny, collective scrutiny, have judged the evidence and come to a conclusion about it, either yea or nay. So we can think of scientific knowledge as a consensus of experts. We can also think of science as being a kind of a jury, except it's a very special kind of jury. It's not a jury of your peers, it's a jury of geeks. It's a jury of men and women with Ph.D.s, and unlike a conventional jury, which has only two choices, guilty or not guilty, the scientific jury actually has a number of choices. Scientists can say yes, something's true. Scientists can say no, it's false. Or, they can say, well it might be true but we need to work more and collect more evidence. Or, they can say it might be true, but we don't know how to answer the question and we're going to put it aside and maybe we'll come back to it later. That's what scientists call "intractable." But this leads us to one final problem: If science is what scientists say it is, then isn't that just an appeal to authority? And weren't we all taught in school that the appeal to authority is a logical fallacy? Well, here's the paradox of modern science, the paradox of the conclusion I think historians and philosophers and sociologists have come to, that actually science is the appeal to authority, but it's not the authority of the individual, no matter how smart that individual is, like Plato or Socrates or Einstein. It's the authority of the collective community. You can think of it is a kind of wisdom of the crowd, but a very special kind of crowd. Science does appeal to authority, but it's not based on any individual, no matter how smart that individual may be. It's based on the collective wisdom, the collective knowledge, the collective work, of all of the scientists who have worked on a particular problem. Scientists have a kind of culture of collective distrust, this "show me" culture, illustrated by this nice woman here showing her colleagues her evidence. Of course, these people don't really look like scientists, because they're much too happy. (Laughter) Okay, so that brings me to my final point. Most of us get up in the morning. Most of us trust our cars. Well, see, now I'm thinking, I'm in Manhattan, this is a bad analogy, but most Americans who don't live in Manhattan get up in the morning and get in their cars and turn on that ignition, and their cars work, and they work incredibly well. The modern automobile hardly ever breaks down. So why is that? Why do cars work so well? It's not because of the genius of Henry Ford or Karl Benz or even Elon Musk. It's because the modern automobile is the product of more than 100 years of work by hundreds and thousands and tens of thousands of people. The modern automobile is the product of the collected work and wisdom and experience of every man and woman who has ever worked on a car, and the reliability of the technology is the result of that accumulated effort. We benefit not just from the genius of Benz and Ford and Musk but from the collective intelligence and hard work of all of the people who have worked on the modern car. And the same is true of science, only science is even older. Our basis for trust in science is actually the same as our basis in trust in technology, and the same as our basis for trust in anything, namely, experience. But it shouldn't be blind trust any more than we would have blind trust in anything. Our trust in science, like science itself, should be based on evidence, and that means that scientists have to become better communicators. They have to explain to us not just what they know but how they know it, and it means that we have to become better listeners. Thank you very much. (Applause)

I think we have to do something about a piece of the culture of medicine that has to change. And I think it starts with one physician, and that's me. And maybe I've been around long enough that I can afford to give away some of my false prestige to be able to do that. Before I actually begin the meat of my talk, let's begin with a bit of baseball. Hey, why not? We're near the end, we're getting close to the World Series. We all love baseball, don't we? (Laughter) Baseball is filled with some amazing statistics. And there's hundreds of them. "Moneyball" is about to come out, and it's all about statistics and using statistics to build a great baseball team. I'm going to focus on one stat that I hope a lot of you have heard of. It's called batting average. So we talk about a 300, a batter who bats 300. That means that ballplayer batted safely, hit safely three times out of 10 at bats. That means hit the ball into the outfield, it dropped, it didn't get caught, and whoever tried to throw it to first base didn't get there in time and the runner was safe. Three times out of 10. Do you know what they call a 300 hitter in Major League Baseball? Good, really good, maybe an all-star. Do you know what they call a 400 baseball hitter? That's somebody who hit, by the way, four times safely out of every 10. Legendary -- as in Ted Williams legendary -- the last Major League Baseball player to hit over 400 during a regular season. Now let's take this back into my world of medicine where I'm a lot more comfortable, or perhaps a bit less comfortable after what I'm going to talk to you about. Suppose you have appendicitis and you're referred to a surgeon who's batting 400 on appendectomies. (Laughter) Somehow this isn't working out, is it? Now suppose you live in a certain part of a certain remote place and you have a loved one who has blockages in two coronary arteries and your family doctor refers that loved one to a cardiologist who's batting 200 on angioplasties. But, but, you know what? She's doing a lot better this year. She's on the comeback trail. And she's hitting a 257. Somehow this isn't working. But I'm going to ask you a question. What do you think a batting average for a cardiac surgeon or a nurse practitioner or an orthopedic surgeon, an OBGYN, a paramedic is supposed to be? 1,000, very good. Now truth of the matter is, nobody knows in all of medicine what a good surgeon or physician or paramedic is supposed to bat. What we do though is we send each one of them, including myself, out into the world with the admonition, be perfect. Never ever, ever make a mistake, but you worry about the details, about how that's going to happen. And that was the message that I absorbed when I was in med school. I was an obsessive compulsive student. In high school, a classmate once said that Brian Goldman would study for a blood test. (Laughter) And so I did. And I studied in my little garret at the nurses' residence at Toronto General Hospital, not far from here. And I memorized everything. I memorized in my anatomy class the origins and exertions of every muscle, every branch of every artery that came off the aorta, differential diagnoses obscure and common. I even knew the differential diagnosis in how to classify renal tubular acidosis. And all the while, I was amassing more and more knowledge. And I did well, I graduated with honors, cum laude. And I came out of medical school with the impression that if I memorized everything and knew everything, or as much as possible, as close to everything as possible, that it would immunize me against making mistakes. And it worked for a while, until I met Mrs. Drucker. I was a resident at a teaching hospital here in Toronto when Mrs. Drucker was brought to the emergency department of the hospital where I was working. At the time I was assigned to the cardiology service on a cardiology rotation. And it was my job, when the emergency staff called for a cardiology consult, to see that patient in emerg. and to report back to my attending. And I saw Mrs. Drucker, and she was breathless. And when I listened to her, she was making a wheezy sound. And when I listened to her chest with a stethoscope, I could hear crackly sounds on both sides that told me that she was in congestive heart failure. This is a condition in which the heart fails, and instead of being able to pump all the blood forward, some of the blood backs up into the lung, the lungs fill up with blood, and that's why you have shortness of breath. And that wasn't a difficult diagnosis to make. I made it and I set to work treating her. I gave her aspirin. I gave her medications to relieve the strain on her heart. I gave her medications that we call diuretics, water pills, to get her to pee out the access fluid. And over the course of the next hour and a half or two, she started to feel better. And I felt really good. And that's when I made my first mistake; I sent her home. Actually, I made two more mistakes. I sent her home without speaking to my attending. I didn't pick up the phone and do what I was supposed to do, which was call my attending and run the story by him so he would have a chance to see her for himself. And he knew her, he would have been able to furnish additional information about her. Maybe I did it for a good reason. Maybe I didn't want to be a high-maintenance resident. Maybe I wanted to be so successful and so able to take responsibility that I would do so and I would be able to take care of my attending's patients without even having to contact him. The second mistake that I made was worse. In sending her home, I disregarded a little voice deep down inside that was trying to tell me, "Goldman, not a good idea. Don't do this." In fact, so lacking in confidence was I that I actually asked the nurse who was looking after Mrs. Drucker, "Do you think it's okay if she goes home?" And the nurse thought about it and said very matter-of-factly, "Yeah, I think she'll do okay." I can remember that like it was yesterday. So I signed the discharge papers, and an ambulance came, paramedics came to take her home. And I went back to my work on the wards. All the rest of that day, that afternoon, I had this kind of gnawing feeling inside my stomach. But I carried on with my work. And at the end of the day, I packed up to leave the hospital and walked to the parking lot to take my car and drive home when I did something that I don't usually do. I walked through the emergency department on my way home. And it was there that another nurse, not the nurse who was looking after Mrs. Drucker before, but another nurse, said three words to me that are the three words that most emergency physicians I know dread. Others in medicine dread them as well, but there's something particular about emergency medicine because we see patients so fleetingly. The three words are: Do you remember? "Do you remember that patient you sent home?" the other nurse asked matter-of-factly. "Well she's back," in just that tone of voice. Well she was back all right. She was back and near death. About an hour after she had arrived home, after I'd sent her home, she collapsed and her family called 911 and the paramedics brought her back to the emergency department where she had a blood pressure of 50, which is in severe shock. And she was barely breathing and she was blue. And the emerg. staff pulled out all the stops. They gave her medications to raise her blood pressure. They put her on a ventilator. And I was shocked and shaken to the core. And I went through this roller coaster, because after they stabilized her, she went to the intensive care unit, and I hoped against hope that she would recover. And over the next two or three days, it was clear that she was never going to wake up. She had irreversible brain damage. And the family gathered. And over the course of the next eight or nine days, they resigned themselves to what was happening. And at about the nine day mark, they let her go -- Mrs. Drucker, a wife, a mother and a grandmother. They say you never forget the names of those who die. And that was my first time to be acquainted with that. Over the next few weeks, I beat myself up and I experienced for the first time the unhealthy shame that exists in our culture of medicine -- where I felt alone, isolated, not feeling the healthy kind of shame that you feel, because you can't talk about it with your colleagues. You know that healthy kind, when you betray a secret that a best friend made you promise never to reveal and then you get busted and then your best friend confronts you and you have terrible discussions, but at the end of it all that sick feeling guides you and you say, I'll never make that mistake again. And you make amends and you never make that mistake again. That's the kind of shame that is a teacher. The unhealthy shame I'm talking about is the one that makes you so sick inside. It's the one that says, not that what you did was bad, but that you are bad. And it was what I was feeling. And it wasn't because of my attending; he was a doll. He talked to the family, and I'm quite sure that he smoothed things over and made sure that I didn't get sued. And I kept asking myself these questions. Why didn't I ask my attending? Why did I send her home? And then at my worst moments: Why did I make such a stupid mistake? Why did I go into medicine? Slowly but surely, it lifted. I began to feel a bit better. And on a cloudy day, there was a crack in the clouds and the sun started to come out and I wondered, maybe I could feel better again. And I made myself a bargain that if only I redouble my efforts to be perfect and never make another mistake again, please make the voices stop. And they did. And I went back to work. And then it happened again. Two years later I was an attending in the emergency department at a community hospital just north of Toronto, and I saw a 25 year-old man with a sore throat. It was busy, I was in a bit of a hurry. He kept pointing here. I looked at his throat, it was a little bit pink. And I gave him a prescription for penicillin and sent him on his way. And even as he was walking out the door, he was still sort of pointing to his throat. And two days later I came to do my next emergency shift, and that's when my chief asked to speak to me quietly in her office. And she said the three words: Do you remember? "Do you remember that patient you saw with the sore throat?" Well it turns out, he didn't have a strep throat. He had a potentially life-threatening condition called epiglottitis. You can Google it, but it's an infection, not of the throat, but of the upper airway, and it can actually cause the airway to close. And fortunately he didn't die. He was placed on intravenous antibiotics and he recovered after a few days. And I went through the same period of shame and recriminations and felt cleansed and went back to work, until it happened again and again and again. Twice in one emergency shift, I missed appendicitis. Now that takes some doing, especially when you work in a hospital that at the time saw but 14 people a night. Now in both cases, I didn't send them home and I don't think there was any gap in their care. One I thought had a kidney stone. I ordered a kidney X-ray. When it turned out to be normal, my colleague who was doing a reassessment of the patient noticed some tenderness in the right lower quadrant and called the surgeons. The other one had a lot of diarrhea. I ordered some fluids to rehydrate him and asked my colleague to reassess him. And he did and when he noticed some tenderness in the right lower quadrant, called the surgeons. In both cases, they had their operations and they did okay. But each time, they were gnawing at me, eating at me. And I'd like to be able to say to you that my worst mistakes only happened in the first five years of practice as many of my colleagues say, which is total B.S. (Laughter) Some of my doozies have been in the last five years. Alone, ashamed and unsupported. Here's the problem: If I can't come clean and talk about my mistakes, if I can't find the still-small voice that tells me what really happened, how can I share it with my colleagues? How can I teach them about what I did so that they don't do the same thing? If I were to walk into a room -- like right now, I have no idea what you think of me. When was the last time you heard somebody talk about failure after failure after failure? Oh yeah, you go to a cocktail party and you might hear about some other doctor, but you're not going to hear somebody talking about their own mistakes. If I were to walk into a room filled with my colleages and ask for their support right now and start to tell what I've just told you right now, I probably wouldn't get through two of those stories before they would start to get really uncomfortable, somebody would crack a joke, they'd change the subject and we would move on. And in fact, if I knew and my colleagues knew that one of my orthopedic colleagues took off the wrong leg in my hospital, believe me, I'd have trouble making eye contact with that person. That's the system that we have. It's a complete denial of mistakes. It's a system in which there are two kinds of physicians -- those who make mistakes and those who don't, those who can't handle sleep deprivation and those who can, those who have lousy outcomes and those who have great outcomes. And it's almost like an ideological reaction, like the antibodies begin to attack that person. And we have this idea that if we drive the people who make mistakes out of medicine, what will we be left with, but a safe system. But there are two problems with that. In my 20 years or so of medical broadcasting and journalism, I've made a personal study of medical malpractice and medical errors to learn everything I can, from one of the first articles I wrote for the Toronto Star to my show "White Coat, Black Art." And what I've learned is that errors are absolutely ubiquitous. We work in a system where errors happen every day, where one in 10 medications are either the wrong medication given in hospital or at the wrong dosage, where hospital-acquired infections are getting more and more numerous, causing havoc and death. In this country, as many as 24,000 Canadians die of preventable medical errors. In the United States, the Institute of Medicine pegged it at 100,000. In both cases, these are gross underestimates, because we really aren't ferreting out the problem as we should. And here's the thing. In a hospital system where medical knowledge is doubling every two or three years, we can't keep up with it. Sleep deprivation is absolutely pervasive. We can't get rid of it. We have our cognitive biases, so that I can take a perfect history on a patient with chest pain. Now take the same patient with chest pain, make them moist and garrulous and put a little bit of alcohol on their breath, and suddenly my history is laced with contempt. I don't take the same history. I'm not a robot; I don't do things the same way each time. And my patients aren't cars; they don't tell me their symptoms in the same way each time. Given all of that, mistakes are inevitable. So if you take the system, as I was taught, and weed out all the error-prone health professionals, well there won't be anybody left. And you know that business about people not wanting to talk about their worst cases? On my show, on "White Coat, Black Art," I made it a habit of saying, "Here's my worst mistake," I would say to everybody from paramedics to the chief of cardiac surgery, "Here's my worst mistake," blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, "What about yours?" and I would point the microphone towards them. And their pupils would dilate, they would recoil, then they would look down and swallow hard and start to tell me their stories. They want to tell their stories. They want to share their stories. They want to be able to say, "Look, don't make the same mistake I did." What they need is an environment to be able to do that. What they need is a redefined medical culture. And it starts with one physician at a time. The redefined physician is human, knows she's human, accepts it, isn't proud of making mistakes, but strives to learn one thing from what happened that she can teach to somebody else. She shares her experience with others. She's supportive when other people talk about their mistakes. And she points out other people's mistakes, not in a gotcha way, but in a loving, supportive way so that everybody can benefit. And she works in a culture of medicine that acknowledges that human beings run the system, and when human beings run the system, they will make mistakes from time to time. So the system is evolving to create backups that make it easier to detect those mistakes that humans inevitably make and also fosters in a loving, supportive way places where everybody who is observing in the health care system can actually point out things that could be potential mistakes and is rewarded for doing so, and especially people like me, when we do make mistakes, we're rewarded for coming clean. My name is Brian Goldman. I am a redefined physician. I'm human. I make mistakes. I'm sorry about that, but I strive to learn one thing that I can pass on to other people. I still don't know what you think of me, but I can live with that. And let me close with three words of my own: I do remember. (Applause)

I'm going to talk to you about some stuff that's in this book of mine that I hope will resonate with other things you've already heard, and I'll try to make some connections myself, in case you missed them. But I want to start with what I call the "official dogma." The official dogma of what? The official dogma of all Western industrial societies. And the official dogma runs like this: if we are interested in maximizing the welfare of our citizens, the way to do that is to maximize individual freedom. The reason for this is both that freedom is in and of itself good, valuable, worthwhile, essential to being human. And because if people have freedom, then each of us can act on our own to do the things that will maximize our welfare, and no one has to decide on our behalf. The way to maximize freedom is to maximize choice. The more choice people have, the more freedom they have, and the more freedom they have, the more welfare they have. This, I think, is so deeply embedded in the water supply that it wouldn't occur to anyone to question it. And it's also deeply embedded in our lives. I'll give you some examples of what modern progress has made possible for us. This is my supermarket. Not such a big one. I want to say just a word about salad dressing. 175 salad dressings in my supermarket, if you don't count the 10 extra-virgin olive oils and 12 balsamic vinegars you could buy to make a very large number of your own salad dressings, in the off-chance that none of the 175 the store has on offer suit you. So this is what the supermarket is like. And then you go to the consumer electronics store to set up a stereo system -- speakers, CD player, tape player, tuner, amplifier -- and in this one single consumer electronics store, there are that many stereo systems. We can construct six-and-a-half-million different stereo systems out of the components that are on offer in one store. You've got to admit that's a lot of choice. In other domains -- the world of communications. There was a time, when I was a boy, when you could get any kind of telephone service you wanted, as long as it came from Ma Bell. You rented your phone. You didn't buy it. One consequence of that, by the way, is that the phone never broke. And those days are gone. We now have an almost unlimited variety of phones, especially in the world of cell phones. These are cell phones of the future. My favorite is the middle one -- the MP3 player, nose hair trimmer, and crème brûlée torch. (Laughter) And if by some chance you haven't seen that in your store yet, you can rest assured that one day soon, you will. And what this does is it leads people to walk into their stores asking this question. And do you know what the answer to this question now is? The answer is "no." It is not possible to buy a cell phone that doesn't do too much. So, in other aspects of life that are much more significant than buying things, the same explosion of choice is true. Health care. It is no longer the case in the United States that you go to the doctor, and the doctor tells you what to do. Instead, you go to the doctor, and the doctor tells you, "Well, we could do A, or we could do B. A has these benefits, and these risks. B has these benefits, and these risks. What do you want to do?" And you say, "Doc, what should I do?" And the doc says, "A has these benefits and risks, and B has these benefits and risks. What do you want to do?" And you say, "If you were me, Doc, what would you do?" And the doc says, "But I'm not you." And the result is -- we call it "patient autonomy," which makes it sound like a good thing, but it really is a shifting of the burden and the responsibility for decision-making from somebody who knows something -- namely, the doctor -- to somebody who knows nothing and is almost certainly sick and thus not in the best shape to be making decisions -- namely, the patient. There's enormous marketing of prescription drugs to people like you and me, which, if you think about it, makes no sense at all, since we can't buy them. Why do they market to us if we can't buy them? The answer is that they expect us to call our doctors the next morning and ask for our prescriptions to be changed. Something as dramatic as our identity has now become a matter of choice, as this slide is meant to indicate. We don't inherit an identity; we get to invent it. And we get to re-invent ourselves as often as we like. And that means that every day, when you wake up in the morning, you have to decide what kind of person you want to be. With respect to marriage and family, there was a time when the default assumption that almost everyone had is that you got married as soon as you could, and then you started having kids as soon as you could. The only real choice was who, not when, and not what you did after. Nowadays, everything is very much up for grabs. I teach wonderfully intelligent students, and I assign 20 percent less work than I used to. And it's not because they're less smart, and it's not because they're less diligent. It's because they are preoccupied, asking themselves, "Should I get married or not? Should I get married now? Should I get married later? Should I have kids first, or a career first?" All of these are consuming questions. And they're going to answer these questions, whether or not it means not doing all the work I assign and not getting a good grade in my courses. And indeed they should. These are important questions to answer. Work -- we are blessed, as Carl was pointing out, with the technology that enables us to work every minute of every day from any place on the planet -- except the Randolph Hotel. (Laughter) (Applause) There is one corner, by the way, that I'm not going to tell anybody about, where the WiFi actually works. I'm not telling you about it because I want to use it. So what this means, this incredible freedom of choice we have with respect to work, is that we have to make a decision, again and again and again, about whether we should or shouldn't be working. We can go to watch our kid play soccer, and we have our cell phone on one hip, and our Blackberry on our other hip, and our laptop, presumably, on our laps. And even if they're all shut off, every minute that we're watching our kid mutilate a soccer game, we are also asking ourselves, "Should I answer this cell phone call? Should I respond to this email? Should I draft this letter?" And even if the answer to the question is "no," it's certainly going to make the experience of your kid's soccer game very different than it would've been. So everywhere we look, big things and small things, material things and lifestyle things, life is a matter of choice. And the world we used to live in looked like this. [Well, actually, they are written in stone.] That is to say, there were some choices, but not everything was a matter of choice. And the world we now live in looks like this. [The Ten Commandments DYI Kit] And the question is, is this good news, or bad news? And the answer is, "yes." (Laughter) We all know what's good about it, so I'm going to talk about what's bad about it. All of this choice has two effects, two negative effects on people. One effect, paradoxically, is that it produces paralysis, rather than liberation. With so many options to choose from, people find it very difficult to choose at all. I'll give you one very dramatic example of this: a study that was done of investments in voluntary retirement plans. A colleague of mine got access to investment records from Vanguard, the gigantic mutual-fund company of about a million employees and about 2,000 different workplaces. And what she found is that for every 10 mutual funds the employer offered, rate of participation went down two percent. You offer 50 funds -- 10 percent fewer employees participate than if you only offer five. Why? Because with 50 funds to choose from, it's so damn hard to decide which fund to choose, that you'll just put it off until tomorrow. And then tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, and of course tomorrow never comes. Understand that not only does this mean that people are going to have to eat dog food when they retire because they don't have enough money put away, it also means that making the decision is so hard that they pass up significant matching money from the employer. By not participating, they are passing up as much as 5,000 dollars a year from the employer, who would happily match their contribution. So paralysis is a consequence of having too many choices. And I think it makes the world look like this. [And lastly, for all eternity, French, bleu cheese, or ranch?] (Laughter) You really want to get the decision right if it's for all eternity, right? You don't want to pick the wrong mutual fund, or the wrong salad dressing. So that's one effect. The second effect is that even if we manage to overcome the paralysis and make a choice, we end up less satisfied with the result of the choice than we would be if we had fewer options to choose from. And there are several reasons for this. One of them is that with a lot of different salad dressings to choose from, if you buy one, and it's not perfect -- and what salad dressing is? -- it's easy to imagine you could have made a different choice that would have been better. And what happens is this imagined alternative induces you to regret the decision you made, and this regret subtracts from the satisfaction you get out of the decision you made, even if it was a good decision. The more options there are, the easier it is to regret anything at all that is disappointing about the option that you chose. Second, what economists call "opportunity costs." Dan Gilbert made a big point this morning of talking about how much the way in which we value things depends on what we compare them to. Well, when there are lots of alternatives to consider, it is easy to imagine the attractive features of alternatives that you reject that make you less satisfied with the alternative that you've chosen. Here's an example. [I can't stop thinking about those other available parking spaces on W 85th street] Sorry if you're not New Yorkers. Here's what you're supposed to be thinking. Here's this couple on the Hamptons. Very expensive real estate. Gorgeous beach. Beautiful day. They have it all to themselves. What could be better? "Well, damn it," this guy is thinking, "It's August. Everybody in my Manhattan neighborhood is away. I could be parking right in front of my building." And he spends two weeks nagged by the idea that he is missing the opportunity, day after day, to have a great parking space. Opportunity costs subtract from the satisfaction we get out of what we choose, even when what we choose is terrific. And the more options there are to consider, the more attractive features of these options are going to be reflected by us as opportunity costs. Here's another example. (Laughter) Now this cartoon makes a lot of points. It makes points about living in the moment as well, and probably about doing things slowly. But one point it makes is that whenever you're choosing one thing, you're choosing not to do other things that may have lots of attractive features, and it's going to make what you're doing less attractive. Third: escalation of expectations. This hit me when I went to replace my jeans. I wear jeans almost all the time. There was a time when jeans came in one flavor, and you bought them, and they fit like crap, they were incredibly uncomfortable, if you wore them and washed them enough times, they started to feel OK. I went to replace my jeans after years of wearing these old ones, and I said, "I want a pair of jeans. Here's my size." And the shopkeeper said, "Do you want slim fit, easy fit, relaxed fit? You want button fly or zipper fly? You want stonewashed or acid-washed? Do you want them distressed? You want boot cut, tapered, blah blah." On and on he went. My jaw dropped. And after I recovered, I said, "I want the kind that used to be the only kind." (Laughter) He had no idea what that was, (Laughter) so I spent an hour trying on all these damn jeans, and I walked out of the store -- truth! -- with the best-fitting jeans I had ever had. I did better. All this choice made it possible for me to do better. But -- I felt worse. Why? I wrote a whole book to try to explain this to myself. The reason -- (Laughter) The reason I felt worse is that, with all of these options available, my expectations about how good a pair of jeans should be went up. I had very low, no particular expectations when they only came in one flavor. When they came in 100 flavors, damn it, one of them should've been perfect. And what I got was good, but it wasn't perfect. And so I compared what I got to what I expected, and what I got was disappointing in comparison to what I expected. Adding options to people's lives can't help but increase the expectations people have about how good those options will be. And what that's going to produce is less satisfaction with results, even when they're good results. Nobody in the world of marketing knows this. [It all looks so great. I can't wait to be disappointed.] Because if they did, you wouldn't all know what this was about. The truth is more like this. [Everything was better back when everything was worse] The reason that everything was better back when everything was worse is that when everything was worse, it was actually possible for people to have experiences that were a pleasant surprise. Nowadays, the world we live in -- we affluent, industrialized citizens, with perfection the expectation -- the best you can ever hope for is that stuff is as good as you expect it to be. You will never be pleasantly surprised because your expectations, my expectations, have gone through the roof. The secret to happiness -- this is what you all came for -- the secret to happiness is low expectations. (Laughter) [You'll do] (Applause) (Laughter) I want to say -- just a little autobiographical moment -- that I actually am married to a wife, and she's really quite wonderful. I couldn't have done better. I didn't settle. But settling isn't always such a bad thing. Finally -- One consequence of buying a bad-fitting pair of jeans when there is only one kind to buy is that when you are dissatisfied, and you ask why, who's responsible, the answer is clear: the world is responsible. What could you do? When there are hundreds of different styles of jeans available, and you buy one that is disappointing, and you ask why, who's responsible? It is equally clear that the answer to the question is "you." You could have done better. With a hundred different kinds of jeans on display, there is no excuse for failure. And so when people make decisions, and even though the results of the decisions are good, they feel disappointed about them; they blame themselves. Clinical depression has exploded in the industrial world in the last generation. I believe a significant -- not the only, but a significant -- contributor to this explosion of depression, and also suicide, is that people have experiences that are disappointing because their standards are so high, and then when they have to explain these experiences to themselves, they think they're at fault. And so the net result is that we do better in general, objectively, and we feel worse. So let me remind you. This is the official dogma, the one that we all take to be true, and it's all false. It is not true. There's no question that some choice is better than none, but it doesn't follow from that that more choice is better than some choice. There's some magical amount. I don't know what it is. I'm pretty confident that we have long since passed the point where options improve our welfare. Now, as a policy matter -- I'm almost done -- as a policy matter, the thing to think about is this: what enables all of this choice in industrial societies is material affluence. There are lots of places in the world, and we have heard about several of them, where their problem is not that they have too much choice. Their problem is that they have too little. So the stuff I'm talking about is the peculiar problem of modern, affluent, Western societies. And what is so frustrating and infuriating is this: Steve Levitt talked to you yesterday about how these expensive and difficult-to-install child seats don't help. It's a waste of money. What I'm telling you is that these expensive, complicated choices -- it's not simply that they don't help. They actually hurt. They actually make us worse off. If some of what enables people in our societies to make all of the choices we make were shifted to societies in which people have too few options, not only would those people's lives be improved, but ours would be improved also, which is what economists call a "Pareto-improving move." Income redistribution will make everyone better off -- not just poor people -- because of how all this excess choice plagues us. So to conclude. [You can be anything you want to be -- no limits] You're supposed to read this cartoon, and, being a sophisticated person, say, "Ah! What does this fish know? You know, nothing is possible in this fishbowl." Impoverished imagination, a myopic view of the world -- and that's the way I read it at first. The more I thought about it, however, the more I came to the view that this fish knows something. Because the truth of the matter is that if you shatter the fishbowl so that everything is possible, you don't have freedom. You have paralysis. If you shatter this fishbowl so that everything is possible, you decrease satisfaction. You increase paralysis, and you decrease satisfaction. Everybody needs a fishbowl. This one is almost certainly too limited -- perhaps even for the fish, certainly for us. But the absence of some metaphorical fishbowl is a recipe for misery, and, I suspect, disaster. Thank you very much. (Applause)

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

This is a lot of ones and zeros. It's what we call binary information. This is how computers talk. It's how they store information. It's how computers think. It's how computers do everything it is that computers do. I'm a cybersecurity researcher, which means my job is to sit down with this information and try to make sense of it, to try to understand what all the ones and zeroes mean. Unfortunately for me, we're not just talking about the ones and zeros I have on the screen here. We're not just talking about a few pages of ones and zeros. We're talking about billions and billions of ones and zeros, more than anyone could possibly comprehend. Now, as exciting as that sounds, when I first started doing cyber — (Laughter) — when I first started doing cyber, I wasn't sure that sifting through ones and zeros was what I wanted to do with the rest of my life, because in my mind, cyber was keeping viruses off of my grandma's computer, it was keeping people's Myspace pages from being hacked, and maybe, maybe on my most glorious day, it was keeping someone's credit card information from being stolen. Those are important things, but that's not how I wanted to spend my life. But after 30 minutes of work as a defense contractor, I soon found out that my idea of cyber was a little bit off. In fact, in terms of national security, keeping viruses off of my grandma's computer was surprisingly low on their priority list. And the reason for that is cyber is so much bigger than any one of those things. Cyber is an integral part of all of our lives, because computers are an integral part of all of our lives, even if you don't own a computer. Computers control everything in your car, from your GPS to your airbags. They control your phone. They're the reason you can call 911 and get someone on the other line. They control our nation's entire infrastructure. They're the reason you have electricity, heat, clean water, food. Computers control our military equipment, everything from missile silos to satellites to nuclear defense networks. All of these things are made possible because of computers, and therefore because of cyber, and when something goes wrong, cyber can make all of these things impossible. But that's where I step in. A big part of my job is defending all of these things, keeping them working, but once in a while, part of my job is to break one of these things, because cyber isn't just about defense, it's also about offense. We're entering an age where we talk about cyberweapons. In fact, so great is the potential for cyber offense that cyber is considered a new domain of warfare. Warfare. It's not necessarily a bad thing. On the one hand, it means we have whole new front on which we need to defend ourselves, but on the other hand, it means we have a whole new way to attack, a whole new way to stop evil people from doing evil things. So let's consider an example of this that's completely theoretical. Suppose a terrorist wants to blow up a building, and he wants to do this again and again in the future. So he doesn't want to be in that building when it explodes. He's going to use a cell phone as a remote detonator. Now, it used to be the only way we had to stop this terrorist was with a hail of bullets and a car chase, but that's not necessarily true anymore. We're entering an age where we can stop him with the press of a button from 1,000 miles away, because whether he knew it or not, as soon as he decided to use his cell phone, he stepped into the realm of cyber. A well-crafted cyber attack could break into his phone, disable the overvoltage protections on his battery, drastically overload the circuit, cause the battery to overheat, and explode. No more phone, no more detonator, maybe no more terrorist, all with the press of a button from a thousand miles away. So how does this work? It all comes back to those ones and zeros. Binary information makes your phone work, and used correctly, it can make your phone explode. So when you start to look at cyber from this perspective, spending your life sifting through binary information starts to seem kind of exciting. But here's the catch: This is hard, really, really hard, and here's why. Think about everything you have on your cell phone. You've got the pictures you've taken. You've got the music you listen to. You've got your contacts list, your email, and probably 500 apps you've never used in your entire life, and behind all of this is the software, the code, that controls your phone, and somewhere, buried inside of that code, is a tiny piece that controls your battery, and that's what I'm really after, but all of this, just a bunch of ones and zeros, and it's all just mixed together. In cyber, we call this finding a needle in a stack of needles, because everything pretty much looks alike. I'm looking for one key piece, but it just blends in with everything else. So let's step back from this theoretical situation of making a terrorist's phone explode, and look at something that actually happened to me. Pretty much no matter what I do, my job always starts with sitting down with a whole bunch of binary information, and I'm always looking for one key piece to do something specific. In this case, I was looking for a very advanced, very high-tech piece of code that I knew I could hack, but it was somewhere buried inside of a billion ones and zeroes. Unfortunately for me, I didn't know quite what I was looking for. I didn't know quite what it would look like, which makes finding it really, really hard. When I have to do that, what I have to do is basically look at various pieces of this binary information, try to decipher each piece, and see if it might be what I'm after. So after a while, I thought I had found the piece I was looking for. I thought maybe this was it. It seemed to be about right, but I couldn't quite tell. I couldn't tell what those ones and zeros represented. So I spent some time trying to put this together, but wasn't having a whole lot of luck, and finally I decided, I'm going to get through this, I'm going to come in on a weekend, and I'm not going to leave until I figure out what this represents. So that's what I did. I came in on a Saturday morning, and about 10 hours in, I sort of had all the pieces to the puzzle. I just didn't know how they fit together. I didn't know what these ones and zeros meant. At the 15-hour mark, I started to get a better picture of what was there, but I had a creeping suspicion that what I was looking at was not at all related to what I was looking for. By 20 hours, the pieces started to come together very slowly — (Laughter) — and I was pretty sure I was going down the wrong path at this point, but I wasn't going to give up. After 30 hours in the lab, I figured out exactly what I was looking at, and I was right, it wasn't what I was looking for. I spent 30 hours piecing together the ones and zeros that formed a picture of a kitten. (Laughter) I wasted 30 hours of my life searching for this kitten that had nothing at all to do with what I was trying to accomplish. So I was frustrated, I was exhausted. After 30 hours in the lab, I probably smelled horrible. But instead of just going home and calling it quits, I took a step back and asked myself, what went wrong here? How could I make such a stupid mistake? I'm really pretty good at this. I do this for a living. So what happened? Well I thought, when you're looking at information at this level, it's so easy to lose track of what you're doing. It's easy to not see the forest through the trees. It's easy to go down the wrong rabbit hole and waste a tremendous amount of time doing the wrong thing. But I had this epiphany. We were looking at the data completely incorrectly since day one. This is how computers think, ones and zeros. It's not how people think, but we've been trying to adapt our minds to think more like computers so that we can understand this information. Instead of trying to make our minds fit the problem, we should have been making the problem fit our minds, because our brains have a tremendous potential for analyzing huge amounts of information, just not like this. So what if we could unlock that potential just by translating this to the right kind of information? So with these ideas in mind, I sprinted out of my basement lab at work to my basement lab at home, which looked pretty much the same. The main difference is, at work, I'm surrounded by cyber materials, and cyber seemed to be the problem in this situation. At home, I'm surrounded by everything else I've ever learned. So I poured through every book I could find, every idea I'd ever encountered, to see how could we translate a problem from one domain to something completely different? The biggest question was, what do we want to translate it to? What do our brains do perfectly naturally that we could exploit? My answer was vision. We have a tremendous capability to analyze visual information. We can combine color gradients, depth cues, all sorts of these different signals into one coherent picture of the world around us. That's incredible. So if we could find a way to translate these binary patterns to visual signals, we could really unlock the power of our brains to process this stuff. So I started looking at the binary information, and I asked myself, what do I do when I first encounter something like this? And the very first thing I want to do, the very first question I want to answer, is what is this? I don't care what it does, how it works. All I want to know is, what is this? And the way I can figure that out is by looking at chunks, sequential chunks of binary information, and I look at the relationships between those chunks. When I gather up enough of these sequences, I begin to get an idea of exactly what this information must be. So let's go back to that blow up the terrorist's phone situation. This is what English text looks like at a binary level. This is what your contacts list would look like if I were examining it. It's really hard to analyze this at this level, but if we take those same binary chunks that I would be trying to find, and instead translate that to a visual representation, translate those relationships, this is what we get. This is what English text looks like from a visual abstraction perspective. All of a sudden, it shows us all the same information that was in the ones and zeros, but show us it in an entirely different way, a way that we can immediately comprehend. We can instantly see all of the patterns here. It takes me seconds to pick out patterns here, but hours, days, to pick them out in ones and zeros. It takes minutes for anybody to learn what these patterns represent here, but years of experience in cyber to learn what those same patterns represent in ones and zeros. So this piece is caused by lower case letters followed by lower case letters inside of that contact list. This is upper case by upper case, upper case by lower case, lower case by upper case. This is caused by spaces. This is caused by carriage returns. We can go through every little detail of the binary information in seconds, as opposed to weeks, months, at this level. This is what an image looks like from your cell phone. But this is what it looks like in a visual abstraction. This is what your music looks like, but here's its visual abstraction. Most importantly for me, this is what the code on your cell phone looks like. This is what I'm after in the end, but this is its visual abstraction. If I can find this, I can't make the phone explode. I could spend weeks trying to find this in ones and zeros, but it takes me seconds to pick out a visual abstraction like this. One of those most remarkable parts about all of this is it gives us an entirely new way to understand new information, stuff that we haven't seen before. So I know what English looks like at a binary level, and I know what its visual abstraction looks like, but I've never seen Russian binary in my entire life. It would take me weeks just to figure out what I was looking at from raw ones and zeros, but because our brains can instantly pick up and recognize these subtle patterns inside of these visual abstractions, we can unconsciously apply those in new situations. So this is what Russian looks like in a visual abstraction. Because I know what one language looks like, I can recognize other languages even when I'm not familiar with them. This is what a photograph looks like, but this is what clip art looks like. This is what the code on your phone looks like, but this is what the code on your computer looks like. Our brains can pick up on these patterns in ways that we never could have from looking at raw ones and zeros. But we've really only scratched the surface of what we can do with this approach. We've only begun to unlock the capabilities of our minds to process visual information. If we take those same concepts and translate them into three dimensions instead, we find entirely new ways of making sense of information. In seconds, we can pick out every pattern here. we can see the cross associated with code. We can see cubes associated with text. We can even pick up the tiniest visual artifacts. Things that would take us weeks, months to find in ones and zeroes, are immediately apparent in some sort of visual abstraction, and as we continue to go through this and throw more and more information at it, what we find is that we're capable of processing billions of ones and zeros in a matter of seconds just by using our brain's built-in ability to analyze patterns. So this is really nice and helpful, but all this tells me is what I'm looking at. So at this point, based on visual patterns, I can find the code on the phone. But that's not enough to blow up a battery. The next thing I need to find is the code that controls the battery, but we're back to the needle in a stack of needles problem. That code looks pretty much like all the other code on that system. So I might not be able to find the code that controls the battery, but there's a lot of things that are very similar to that. You have code that controls your screen, that controls your buttons, that controls your microphones, so even if I can't find the code for the battery, I bet I can find one of those things. So the next step in my binary analysis process is to look at pieces of information that are similar to each other. It's really, really hard to do at a binary level, but if we translate those similarities to a visual abstraction instead, I don't even have to sift through the raw data. All I have to do is wait for the image to light up to see when I'm at similar pieces. I follow these strands of similarity like a trail of bread crumbs to find exactly what I'm looking for. So at this point in the process, I've located the code responsible for controlling your battery, but that's still not enough to blow up a phone. The last piece of the puzzle is understanding how that code controls your battery. For this, I need to identify very subtle, very detailed relationships within that binary information, another very hard thing to do when looking at ones and zeros. But if we translate that information into a physical representation, we can sit back and let our visual cortex do all the hard work. It can find all the detailed patterns, all the important pieces, for us. It can find out exactly how the pieces of that code work together to control that battery. All of this can be done in a matter of hours, whereas the same process would have taken months in the past. This is all well and good in a theoretical blow up a terrorist's phone situation. I wanted to find out if this would really work in the work I do every day. So I was playing around with these same concepts with some of the data I've looked at in the past, and yet again, I was trying to find a very detailed, specific piece of code inside of a massive piece of binary information. So I looked at it at this level, thinking I was looking at the right thing, only to see this doesn't have the connectivity I would have expected for the code I was looking for. In fact, I'm not really sure what this is, but when I stepped back a level and looked at the similarities within the code I saw, this doesn't have similarities like any code that exists out there. I can't even be looking at code. In fact, from this perspective, I could tell, this isn't code. This is an image of some sort. And from here, I can see, it's not just an image, this is a photograph. Now that I know it's a photograph, I've got dozens of other binary translation techniques to visualize and understand that information, so in a matter of seconds, we can take this information, shove it through a dozen other visual translation techniques in order to find out exactly what we were looking at. I saw — (Laughter) — it was that darn kitten again. All this is enabled because we were able to find a way to translate a very hard problem to something our brains do very naturally. So what does this mean? Well, for kittens, it means no more hiding in ones and zeros. For me, it means no more wasted weekends. For cyber, it means we have a radical new way to tackle the most impossible problems. It means we have a new weapon in the evolving theater of cyber warfare, but for all of us, it means that cyber engineers now have the ability to become first responders in emergency situations. When seconds count, we've unlocked the means to stop the bad guys. Thank you. (Applause)

How do you observe something you can't see? This is the basic question of somebody who's interested in finding and studying black holes. Because black holes are objects whose pull of gravity is so intense that nothing can escape it, not even light, so you can't see it directly. So, my story today about black holes is about one particular black hole. I'm interested in finding whether or not there is a really massive, what we like to call "supermassive" black hole at the center of our galaxy. And the reason this is interesting is that it gives us an opportunity to prove whether or not these exotic objects really exist. And second, it gives us the opportunity to understand how these supermassive black holes interact with their environment, and to understand how they affect the formation and evolution of the galaxies which they reside in. So, to begin with, we need to understand what a black hole is so we can understand the proof of a black hole. So, what is a black hole? Well, in many ways a black hole is an incredibly simple object, because there are only three characteristics that you can describe: the mass, the spin, and the charge. And I'm going to only talk about the mass. So, in that sense, it's a very simple object. But in another sense, it's an incredibly complicated object that we need relatively exotic physics to describe, and in some sense represents the breakdown of our physical understanding of the universe. But today, the way I want you to understand a black hole, for the proof of a black hole, is to think of it as an object whose mass is confined to zero volume. So, despite the fact that I'm going to talk to you about an object that's supermassive, and I'm going to get to what that really means in a moment, it has no finite size. So, this is a little tricky. But fortunately there is a finite size that you can see, and that's known as the Schwarzschild radius. And that's named after the guy who recognized why it was such an important radius. This is a virtual radius, not reality; the black hole has no size. So why is it so important? It's important because it tells us that any object can become a black hole. That means you, your neighbor, your cellphone, the auditorium can become a black hole if you can figure out how to compress it down to the size of the Schwarzschild radius. At that point, what's going to happen? At that point gravity wins. Gravity wins over all other known forces. And the object is forced to continue to collapse to an infinitely small object. And then it's a black hole. So, if I were to compress the Earth down to the size of a sugar cube, it would become a black hole, because the size of a sugar cube is its Schwarzschild radius. Now, the key here is to figure out what that Schwarzschild radius is. And it turns out that it's actually pretty simple to figure out. It depends only on the mass of the object. Bigger objects have bigger Schwarzschild radii. Smaller objects have smaller Schwarzschild radii. So, if I were to take the sun and compress it down to the scale of the University of Oxford, it would become a black hole. So, now we know what a Schwarzschild radius is. And it's actually quite a useful concept, because it tells us not only when a black hole will form, but it also gives us the key elements for the proof of a black hole. I only need two things. I need to understand the mass of the object I'm claiming is a black hole, and what its Schwarzschild radius is. And since the mass determines the Schwarzschild radius, there is actually only one thing I really need to know. So, my job in convincing you that there is a black hole is to show that there is some object that's confined to within its Schwarzschild radius. And your job today is to be skeptical. Okay, so, I'm going to talk about no ordinary black hole; I'm going to talk about supermassive black holes. So, I wanted to say a few words about what an ordinary black hole is, as if there could be such a thing as an ordinary black hole. An ordinary black hole is thought to be the end state of a really massive star's life. So, if a star starts its life off with much more mass than the mass of the Sun, it's going to end its life by exploding and leaving behind these beautiful supernova remnants that we see here. And inside that supernova remnant is going to be a little black hole that has a mass roughly three times the mass of the Sun. On an astronomical scale that's a very small black hole. Now, what I want to talk about are the supermassive black holes. And the supermassive black holes are thought to reside at the center of galaxies. And this beautiful picture taken with the Hubble Space Telescope shows you that galaxies come in all shapes and sizes. There are big ones. There are little ones. Almost every object in that picture there is a galaxy. And there is a very nice spiral up in the upper left. And there are a hundred billion stars in that galaxy, just to give you a sense of scale. And all the light that we see from a typical galaxy, which is the kind of galaxies that we're seeing here, comes from the light from the stars. So, we see the galaxy because of the star light. Now, there are a few relatively exotic galaxies. I like to call these the prima donna of the galaxy world, because they are kind of show offs. And we call them active galactic nuclei. And we call them that because their nucleus, or their center, are very active. So, at the center there, that's actually where most of the starlight comes out from. And yet, what we actually see is light that can't be explained by the starlight. It's way more energetic. In fact, in a few examples it's like the ones that we're seeing here. There are also jets emanating out from the center. Again, a source of energy that's very difficult to explain if you just think that galaxies are composed of stars. So, what people have thought is that perhaps there are supermassive black holes which matter is falling on to. So, you can't see the black hole itself, but you can convert the gravitational energy of the black hole into the light we see. So, there is the thought that maybe supermassive black holes exist at the center of galaxies. But it's a kind of indirect argument. Nonetheless, it's given rise to the notion that maybe it's not just these prima donnas that have these supermassive black holes, but rather all galaxies might harbor these supermassive black holes at their centers. And if that's the case -- and this is an example of a normal galaxy; what we see is the star light. And if there is a supermassive black hole, what we need to assume is that it's a black hole on a diet. Because that is the way to suppress the energetic phenomena that we see in active galactic nuclei. If we're going to look for these stealth black holes at the center of galaxies, the best place to look is in our own galaxy, our Milky Way. And this is a wide field picture taken of the center of the Milky Way. And what we see is a line of stars. And that is because we live in a galaxy which has a flattened, disk-like structure. And we live in the middle of it, so when we look towards the center, we see this plane which defines the plane of the galaxy, or line that defines the plane of the galaxy. Now, the advantage of studying our own galaxy is it's simply the closest example of the center of a galaxy that we're ever going to have, because the next closest galaxy is 100 times further away. So, we can see far more detail in our galaxy than anyplace else. And as you'll see in a moment, the ability to see detail is key to this experiment. So, how do astronomers prove that there is a lot of mass inside a small volume? Which is the job that I have to show you today. And the tool that we use is to watch the way stars orbit the black hole. Stars will orbit the black hole in the very same way that planets orbit the sun. It's the gravitational pull that makes these things orbit. If there were no massive objects these things would go flying off, or at least go at a much slower rate because all that determines how they go around is how much mass is inside its orbit. So, this is great, because remember my job is to show there is a lot of mass inside a small volume. So, if I know how fast it goes around, I know the mass. And if I know the scale of the orbit I know the radius. So, I want to see the stars that are as close to the center of the galaxy as possible. Because I want to show there is a mass inside as small a region as possible. So, this means that I want to see a lot of detail. And that's the reason that for this experiment we've used the world's largest telescope. This is the Keck observatory. It hosts two telescopes with a mirror 10 meters, which is roughly the diameter of a tennis court. Now, this is wonderful, because the campaign promise of large telescopes is that is that the bigger the telescope, the smaller the detail that we can see. But it turns out these telescopes, or any telescope on the ground has had a little bit of a challenge living up to this campaign promise. And that is because of the atmosphere. Atmosphere is great for us; it allows us to survive here on Earth. But it's relatively challenging for astronomers who want to look through the atmosphere to astronomical sources. So, to give you a sense of what this is like, it's actually like looking at a pebble at the bottom of a stream. Looking at the pebble on the bottom of the stream, the stream is continuously moving and turbulent, and that makes it very difficult to see the pebble on the bottom of the stream. Very much in the same way, it's very difficult to see astronomical sources, because of the atmosphere that's continuously moving by. So, I've spent a lot of my career working on ways to correct for the atmosphere, to give us a cleaner view. And that buys us about a factor of 20. And I think all of you can agree that if you can figure out how to improve life by a factor of 20, you've probably improved your lifestyle by a lot, say your salary, you'd notice, or your kids, you'd notice. And this animation here shows you one example of the techniques that we use, called adaptive optics. You're seeing an animation that goes between an example of what you would see if you don't use this technique -- in other words, just a picture that shows the stars -- and the box is centered on the center of the galaxy, where we think the black hole is. So, without this technology you can't see the stars. With this technology all of a sudden you can see it. This technology works by introducing a mirror into the telescope optics system that's continuously changing to counteract what the atmosphere is doing to you. So, it's kind of like very fancy eyeglasses for your telescope. Now, in the next few slides I'm just going to focus on that little square there. So, we're only going to look at the stars inside that small square, although we've looked at all of them. So, I want to see how these things have moved. And over the course of this experiment, these stars have moved a tremendous amount. So, we've been doing this experiment for 15 years, and we see the stars go all the way around. Now, most astronomers have a favorite star, and mine today is a star that's labeled up there, SO-2. Absolutely my favorite star in the world. And that's because it goes around in only 15 years. And to give you a sense of how short that is, the sun takes 200 million years to go around the center of the galaxy. Stars that we knew about before, that were as close to the center of the galaxy as possible, take 500 years. And this one, this one goes around in a human lifetime. That's kind of profound, in a way. But it's the key to this experiment. The orbit tells me how much mass is inside a very small radius. So, next we see a picture here that shows you before this experiment the size to which we could confine the mass of the center of the galaxy. What we knew before is that there was four million times the mass of the sun inside that circle. And as you can see, there was a lot of other stuff inside that circle. You can see a lot of stars. So, there was actually lots of alternatives to the idea that there was a supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy, because you could put a lot of stuff in there. But with this experiment, we've confined that same mass to a much smaller volume that's 10,000 times smaller. And because of that, we've been able to show that there is a supermassive black hole there. To give you a sense of how small that size is, that's the size of our solar system. So, we're cramming four million times the mass of the sun into that small volume. Now, truth in advertising. Right? I have told you my job is to get it down to the Schwarzchild radius. And the truth is, I'm not quite there. But we actually have no alternative today to explaining this concentration of mass. And, in fact, it's the best evidence we have to date for not only existence of a supermassive black hole at the center of our own galaxy, but any in our universe. So, what next? I actually think this is about as good as we're going to do with today's technology, so let's move on with the problem. So, what I want to tell you, very briefly, is a few examples of the excitement of what we can do today at the center of the galaxy, now that we know that there is, or at least we believe, that there is a supermassive black hole there. And the fun phase of this experiment is, while we've tested some of our ideas about the consequences of a supermassive black hole being at the center of our galaxy, almost every single one has been inconsistent with what we actually see. And that's the fun. So, let me give you the two examples. You can ask, "What do you expect for the old stars, stars that have been around the center of the galaxy for a long time, they've had plenty of time to interact with the black hole." What you expect there is that old stars should be very clustered around the black hole. You should see a lot of old stars next to that black hole. Likewise, for the young stars, or in contrast, the young stars, they just should not be there. A black hole does not make a kind neighbor to a stellar nursery. To get a star to form, you need a big ball of gas and dust to collapse. And it's a very fragile entity. And what does the big black hole do? It strips that gas cloud apart. It pulls much stronger on one side than the other and the cloud is stripped apart. In fact, we anticipated that star formation shouldn't proceed in that environment. So, you shouldn't see young stars. So, what do we see? Using observations that are not the ones I've shown you today, we can actually figure out which ones are old and which ones are young. The old ones are red. The young ones are blue. And the yellow ones, we don't know yet. So, you can already see the surprise. There is a dearth of old stars. There is an abundance of young stars, so it's the exact opposite of the prediction. So, this is the fun part. And in fact, today, this is what we're trying to figure out, this mystery of how do you get -- how do you resolve this contradiction. So, in fact, my graduate students are, at this very moment, today, at the telescope, in Hawaii, making observations to get us hopefully to the next stage, where we can address this question of why are there so many young stars, and so few old stars. To make further progress we really need to look at the orbits of stars that are much further away. To do that we'll probably need much more sophisticated technology than we have today. Because, in truth, while I said we're correcting for the Earth's atmosphere, we actually only correct for half the errors that are introduced. We do this by shooting a laser up into the atmosphere, and what we think we can do is if we shine a few more that we can correct the rest. So this is what we hope to do in the next few years. And on a much longer time scale, what we hope to do is build even larger telescopes, because, remember, bigger is better in astronomy. So, we want to build a 30 meter telescope. And with this telescope we should be able to see stars that are even closer to the center of the galaxy. And we hope to be able to test some of Einstein's theories of general relativity, some ideas in cosmology about how galaxies form. So, we think the future of this experiment is quite exciting. So, in conclusion, I'm going to show you an animation that basically shows you how these orbits have been moving, in three dimensions. And I hope, if nothing else, I've convinced you that, one, we do in fact have a supermassive black hole at the center of the galaxy. And this means that these things do exist in our universe, and we have to contend with this, we have to explain how you can get these objects in our physical world. Second, we've been able to look at that interaction of how supermassive black holes interact, and understand, maybe, the role in which they play in shaping what galaxies are, and how they work. And last but not least, none of this would have happened without the advent of the tremendous progress that's been made on the technology front. And we think that this is a field that is moving incredibly fast, and holds a lot in store for the future. Thanks very much. (Applause)

My favorite topic is shortcuts. The master of shortcuts -- it's, of course, nature. But I will demonstrate different ways to get rid of difficulties and go to the point, to find an answer probably much quicker than Arthur did. So, first, we violate the common sense, the logic. All of you, if you hold your hand like this, 90 degrees -- all of you. Not you. All of you, right? Palm up. If you do this, the common, the logic says you must turn the wrist. Do you agree? Good. But I will first teach you a method, how you can do it without moving the wrist, and then the shortcut. You can do it immediately, right? Hold the hand like this, palm up. Don't move the wrist. The wrist is -- I doesn't speak very many, but I do the best, what I are. Right-molded you say, with iron? That was a joke, actually, and I -- OK. Hold the hand palm up. Do this, don't move the wrist. Over the heart, don't move the wrist. Forward, don't move the wrist. Up, don't move the wrist. Over the heart, don't move the wrist. And forward. Yeah. Now -- (Laughter) -- logic, logically, you have got to this position from this, without moving the wrist. (Laughter) Now, the shortcut. (Laughter) But it was six moves. Now with one move. I start here, palm down, you can follow. And then look at me. Yeah! (Laughter) One move. OK. So, that was the warming up. Now, I need an assistant. I talked to a nice girl before, Zoe. She has left. No! A big hand. (Applause) Good. Nice. And you can sit over there. One item here was water, right? And I will give my tribute to water. I think it's enough with water for me. The other guys can talk about -- cheers. (Laughter) Beer has about -- there's a lot of water in beer. (Laughter) So, now I will demonstrate different ways of memorizing, control cards and so on. And I think I'll take off this one. I work with a special method to do it, quick. I work with precision -- oh, sorry -- control and a very powerful ... memory system, right? (Laughter) So, if -- I have studied the poker. I like to gamble. Officially, I don't gamble but ... So, if we are -- if we have five person, and I will do a five-handed poker game. Now I will interact. So a different person all the time, so not the same person can answer. So we have an agreement. Which one shall have a good poker hand? Which number? One, two, three, four or five? (Audience: Three.) Lennart Green: Three -- good. And here, I had a mat here to make it a little -- the critical moment is -- sorry. If a card shark gathers the cards together, immediately when he -- before he deals the card. Now, so I think, number three, I have arranged them in a full house. (Laughter) With queens and -- it's OK -- queens and tens. That's a challenge. I like this. I will explain later. One, two, three, four, five. I start with three queens. So here you see the contrast when I treat the cards. And two tens. Yeah. Thank you. (Applause) But also the other hand is good, if all the other guys have good hands too. So these guys have actually a stronger hand -- three aces and two kings. This guy beats them with four of a kind, or deuce -- deuce. No reaction? That with even -- OK, and this. These look in order, I'm probably -- hopefully -- yeah. Three, four, five, six, seven and ... But, of course, I will have the winning hand. Ten, jack, queen, king, ace. Yeah. So, good. (Laughter) So the hand that looks so good from the beginning, number three, at the end was actually the lowest hand. Such life. Right? So, please mix them. Now, if you are interested, I will demonstrate some underground techniques. Yes? I work with kind of estimation, shuffle tracking -- ah, good. Impressive. Thank you. (Laughter) So, first, the first term is estimation. Here, I can estimate exactly how many cards are put between my royal flush. Of course, I can count the cards, but this is much quicker. Right? You agree. So here I have, actually -- I know exactly where the cards are. So here, I can make a bet, and this is actually one of the points where I get my money. So here: 10, jack, queen, king, ace. OK. (Applause) Next is a term -- I do it quick. I call this stealing. So here, I think I know about where the cards are. I will spread the cards and you'll say stop, when I point to them, right. Point, say stop. Zoe: Stop. LG: Here -- you see some are missing? And that's the stealing cards, which I did. (Laughter) OK. Now, another term called shuffle tracking. Shuffle tracking means I keep track of the cards, even if another person shuffles. This is a little risky. So -- because if you look, now, I can still see it. You agree? But if you square -- square, and shuffle, and then a cut. So here, to follow my cards, I must look at the shuffle from the begin -- ah, we are started together. It's OK, it's OK. Come to -- no, no, no, no. I'm joking, yeah? Any style -- yeah, good. Here I have to calculate, but actually, I don't like to calculate. I work direct with the right brain. If you pass the left brain, you have to take care of logic and common sense. Direct in the right brain, that's much better. And so -- (Laughter) -- Arthur Benjamin did a little of the same thing. And if you work with, in the right atmosphere, with humor, you have -- that's the password to the cosmic bank of knowledge, where you can find any solution of any problem. OK. Now, I drop the cards, and you say stop anyway, right? Not at the last card. Zoe: Stop. LG: Yeah. When I'm sober, I do this much quicker, but we will check. (Laughter) Ah, not in order, it -- that was a mistake. No, I'm kidding. (Applause) No, now and then I put in a mistake, just to emphasize how difficult it is. Right? Yeah, last night I forgot that. That was a mistake. But now I'm glad I remember it. So, this deck is bought here. Sorry. I have a little pad to make it a little softer. This deck is bought here in America. It's called "Bicycle." And this deck is very flexible, but not so many people know, if you check, if you press at the right spots, you see how thin and flexible this deck is, right? Now, you can carry this in your wallet, so ... You don't see it, make no reaction? (Laughter) So, but here, and -- is the camera getting too much? No. (Laughter) Yeah? (Audience: It's getting too much.) LG: Pardon? But then, when we will have it back, you do this. But not too much. Then you have to push it down again. Here, please. If you push these heaps -- everyone see -- push them together so they are really interlaced, right? Yeah, good. Perfect. Just push them through, good. Thank you. And then, I will demonstrate a thing from Russian satellite, stealen -- stolen, probably copied from America but we will see. Here -- shortcuts. I talk about shortcuts. Now I go very quick through the deck and try to find some pattern. The new chaos theory is already old, right? But you know, I think you are familiar with fractals -- the Mandelbrot spirals and all these things. And it's much easier to memorize cards in a pattern way, and not concentrate. If you concentrate and calculate, then you go to -- then it's the left brain. But if you just look and talk in another language ... Yeah, great. I think I have it. So now, different persons, older, tap. Please name any card, anyone. (Audience: Jack of spades.) LG: Jack of spades. Jack of spades. I think jack of spades is number 12 from the top. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 11, 12. Yes, right. So -- oh, jack of spades. You said spades? (Audience: Yes.) LG: Ah. My fault. Don't applaud, this was clubs. So, jack of spades. I think ... 23 -- 24, sorry, 24. One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10, 11, 12, 13, 14, 15, 16, 17, 18, 19, 20, 21, 22, 23 -- ah, 25, yes. It's the last. Now, I do it quicker, better. OK. Another person. Oh, I forgot, I shouldn't shuffle but I think -- (Laughter) -- actually, my technique is to peek, all the time. When I lift the heap, I peek. You see, yeah, perfect. Three, four, five, six. Then I calculate -- yeah, good. (Laughter) Another person, another card. (Audience: Seven of diamonds.) LG: Seven of diamonds. Perfect, my favorite, yeah, seven. So I will do it quick, very quick, but in slow motion, so you can follow. (Laughter) Seven of? (Audience: Diamonds.) LG: Diamonds, good. I start here. Good, thank you. (Applause) The thing I did -- I peeked. I know where the card were, then I chose it. So another person, another card. (Laughter) Another person. (Audience: Ten of diamonds.) LG: Pardon? (Audience: Ten of diamonds.) LG: Ten of diamonds, yeah. I think I do it the same way. I like to, so I know where it is. Ten of diamonds. But now I do it the regular speed, right? Ten of diamonds. Good. Maybe you will cut? Lift. Excellent. So, thank you. Another person, another card. (Audience: Five of clubs.) LG: Pardon? (Audience: Five of clubs.) LG: Five of clubs. It's not the same person, even if it's the same spot. We can take some over there later. So now, I will drop the cards. And you'll say stop, anywhere. Got it? Five of clubs. Not the last. Yes, that's difficult to find a card here. (Laughter) We do it again. The person who said five of clubs say stop, when the cards are in the air, right? (Audience: Stop.) LG: Very good. OK. (Applause) OK, I had to use a little force there. I think we save five of clubs. And now a card with a contrast of five of clubs. (Audience: Queen of hearts.) LG: Queen of hearts, yeah. Excellent. I love that card. Here, I will do the most difficult thing. For example, you are sitting in Las Vegas, and you're betting, and you let the other guys peek this card by mistake. Feel, it's just the regular, one card. And now, when I lift this card, it shall be your card. What was your card? (Audience: Queen of hearts.) LG: Queen of? Queen of hearts. So that's a tough challenge, right? So here, I grab -- you know this? Five of clubs ... and queen of hearts. Yes! This is a tough one, because here I must take advantage of -- I switch it with the five of clubs. So, now a false count. Which card shall I use? Queen or five? Zoe: The queen. LG: Queen, yes. So, I use the queen, and here's five of clubs. The false count -- and the number one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight -- you say the same card all the time. Eight, nine, 10. This is a kind of optical deal, right? When I put one card at a table -- look, it's not one card. It's -- look, it's a bunch of cards that gives this impression. Yeah. Now some hard stuff. I think we keep the queen here, yes. Now, to the satellites things. This -- oh sorry, don't look at the beam. My fault. (Laughter) This is high-frequency laser, and it's enough with a fraction of a second to destroy the retina completely. Right, sorry, my -- I should have mentioned that, yeah. But you can relax, because it takes half an hour before it works, so you have plenty of time to see my whole performance. (Laughter) Now, I put the laser here, and -- now, when I deal the cards in the laser, I know where they are but -- yes? Did the camera got it? No? They didn't? What happened? (Audience: It disappeared.) LG: OK, I'll take another group. Do the cameras see the cards now? No? (Audience: No, they're all gone.) LG: But you see the hand. Ah, good, good, good. But now. So now, that was the reason, right? You see the cards? Yes. (Laughter) Yeah, good. Now -- (Laughter) -- one guy laughed. So now, to find the queen, do it this way: take back the other one, take back the queen. (Laughter) Yeah, interesting, but a little dangerous. (Laughter) I liked it. Now, a little more difficult. Name -- anyone, name, please, any suit. (Audience: Spades.) LG: Spades? Spades, good. So here, here I have to peek, lots of cards. I think there are lots of -- I don't know how many -- but 10, 15 spades in a deck, at least, right? (Laughter) So every time I lift the heap, I peek, right. Then I arrange them so I can get them quick. Perfect, excellent. So I start with the ace -- yeah, ace. Ah, yeah -- spades? Same mistake as before, right? So -- I arrange the spades -- the clubs. I try to do this right here. First, I take the spades. You see, I don't work with prestige, so always do mistakes. It doesn't matter to me. And now and then, I get some extra sympathy points, right? One, two, three, four -- yes, the camera got it? Five, six, seven, eight -- ah -- nine, 10, the jack, jack of spades, queen of -- I like that laugh, yeah! Good. Queen. (Laughter) Wait, wait, wait -- please take any card. Grab any one. Quick, quick, good. And we switch this to the king. Ace of diamonds. And now, look, ace of diamonds will guide. So I find ... king of spades. There was the place. And here is king of spades, correct? Yeah? OK. (Applause) Now, a little more difficult thing. Maybe you think I have the cards in order already, so you help me to shuffle again. Another suit, please. (Audience: Armani.) LG: Pardon? (Audience: Armani.) (Laughter) LG: It was after the blindfold. I like this guy, yeah. OK. That should be my end effect, but OK. Armani -- who said Armani? You? I drop the cards and you -- which size? Which size? It's a piece of cake. I like challenges. Which size? (Audience: Extra large.) LG: Extra large, OK. Say stop. (Audience: Stop.) (Laughter) LG: Yeah, Armani. OK. (Applause) Ah, this is tough. OK, a suit. I had clubs before, spades. Another suit. (Audience: Diamonds.) LG: Diamonds, perfect. So, in this case, I try to locate diamonds. I look at the cards, and OK. We try. Yeah. You help me. If I drop the card face up, like this, you reverse it. Zoe: OK. LG: OK, now. Do with both hands, and quick. Yes, good, good. (Laughter) I think we have it now. Yeah, good, good. So here, diamonds, hearts -- no, diamonds. Good, good. Stop. Do you see the pattern? No? Now? Yes, yes, OK. I work with pattern. Oh sorry, I dropped one. Maybe it's important -- yeah -- nine of diamonds, OK. So now -- I always ask, why do I put myself in this position? I have to figure out so many outs, when I miss some cards, but I love it. So now, I will do it. I will try to find the diamonds, but I will do it the hard way. It's too easy to do it right away, right? I think I will do it ... blindfolded. At this distance, it works immediately. Aargh! (Laughter) Duct tape. I look -- shake the cards, so I don't. Go ahead. Yeah, good. I like the empathy. Empathy. But it was -- did you hear? It was women's voice. Hear the guy -- yeah, more, more, more. (Laughter) Yeah, good. Yeah. You can take the nostril too, because some guys think -- (Laughter) -- some guys think I can peek through the nostril, so do more. Go, go. Right? Good. Satisfied? Looks good, like Batman. Ow! (Laughter) No, with dignity and elegance, right? But I like her, yeah. I said, be a little tough. And it was OK. One more? The last. OK. All right. Now you must agree that I'm -- I must rely on other senses, right? I work with vibration. So, what was the card? Diamonds. Ah, I memorized hearts. So now I have to improvise again. Maybe I'll stand up. Half. Diamonds -- I'll start with ace of diamonds. Just kidding, warming up -- king of hearts. (Laughter) And I give you a diamonds, so they -- so you put them here, in a nice row, right. And you can see, yeah? Good. Ace of diamonds, yes? Zoe: Yeah. LG: Good. Good. Two -- (Applause) -- thank you. I never ever miss two. This is interesting. Always I've found two, but the wrong color. Spades, sorry. And the deck is a gift to you after, so let the skepticals here, in this, examine them, right? Remind me. It's a gift. Two -- and it was two of spades, right? Sorry, two of diamonds. I'll do it quick now. Three -- three of diamonds. Yes! Four -- I like challenges, yes. Yeah, good. Chris Anderson: You're peeking. LG: Pardon? CA: You're peeking. You just got to -- this is a request from the lady in the back. (Laughter) Okay. Try that. LG: Yeah. Also listen. OK, now. This is maybe a little tough. We will try. Yes? Good? (Laughter) OK. So, how many cards? Five? Zoe: Four. LG: Four. Is five the next card? Zoe: Five of diamonds, yeah. LG: It's not here? Zoe: It's not there. LG: Oh. So here, all the cards are face down -- you agree? (Audience: Yes.) LG: Yes? You see that in the screen? And this is face up, and it's not at the bottom here. So next card will be -- was it five? Zoe: Five. LG: Yeah -- I will reverse it face up here. Yes? Zoe: Yeah. LG: Six -- six with the thumb. Seven. Yeah, I do this. I know where it is, because I peeked before and then I do this. Right? Eight. If -- and then nine, right? Yeah. Yesterday -- the day before yesterday, I was in Vegas, and I used this actually. Nine? Yeah? Correct? No? Yes! Ah, good, good. Ten -- once again, I love this Jonny Wayne move. Yeah. Jack -- you [unclear] with Jack? Jack of diamonds, correct? (Audience: No.) LG: Yes? And queen! Queen, with misdirection. Misdirection. (Applause) Yeah? And then, king, after exactly five seconds. Yeah. Five. Five seconds. One, two, three, four -- mmm! Check it. Yes? CA: King of diamonds. LG: Ah! Good. Oh. Touch me, feel -- ah, ah, you know! CA: Ladies and gentlemen, Lennart Green! LG: Okay, thank you.

Do we live in a borderless world? Before you answer that, have a look at this map. Contemporary political map shows that we have over 200 countries in the world today. That's probably more than at any time in centuries. Now, many of you will object. For you this would be a more appropriate map. You could call it TEDistan. In TEDistan, there are no borders, just connected spaces and unconnected spaces. Most of you probably reside in one of the 40 dots on this screen, of the many more that represent 90 percent of the world economy. But let's talk about the 90 percent of the world population that will never leave the place in which they were born. For them, nations, countries, boundaries, borders still matter a great deal, and often violently. Now here at TED, we're solving some of the great riddles of science and mysteries of the universe. Well here is a fundamental problem we have not solved: our basic political geography. How do we distribute ourselves around the world? Now this is important, because border conflicts justify so much of the world's military-industrial complex. Border conflicts can derail so much of the progress that we hope to achieve here. So I think we need a deeper understanding of how people, money, power, religion, culture, technology interact to change the map of the world. And we can try to anticipate those changes, and shape them in a more constructive direction. So we're going to look at some maps of the past, the present and some maps you haven't seen in order to get a sense of where things are going. Let's start with the world of 1945. 1945 there were just 100 countries in the world. After World War II, Europe was devastated, but still held large overseas colonies: French West Africa, British East Africa, South Asia, and so forth. Then over the late '40s, '50s, '60s, '70s and '80s, waves of decolonization took place. Over 50 new countries were born. You can see that Africa has been fragmented. India, Pakistan, Bangladesh, South East Asian nations created. Then came the end of the Cold War. The end of the Cold War and the disintegration of the Soviet Union. You had the creation of new states in Eastern Europe, the former Yugoslav republics and the Balkans, and the 'stans of central Asia. Today we have 200 countries in the world. The entire planet is covered by sovereign, independent nation-states. Does that mean that someone's gain has to be someone else's loss? Let's zoom in on one of the most strategic areas of the world, Eastern Eurasia. As you can see on this map, Russia is still the largest country in the world. And as you know, China is the most populous. And they share a lengthy land border. What you don't see on this map is that most of Russia's 150 million people are concentrated in its western provinces and areas that are close to Europe. And only 30 million people are in its eastern areas. In fact, the World Bank predicts that Russia's population is declining towards about 120 million people And there is another thing that you don't see on this map. Stalin, Khrushchev and other Soviet leaders forced Russians out to the far east to be in gulags, labor camps, nuclear cities, whatever the case was. But as oil prices rose, Russian governments have invested in infrastructure to unite the country, east and west. But nothing has more perversely impacted Russia's demographic distribution, because the people in the east, who never wanted to be there anyway, have gotten on those trains and roads and gone back to the west. As a result, in the Russian far east today, which is twice the size of India, you have exactly six million Russians. So let's get a sense of what is happening in this part of the world. We can start with Mongolia, or as some call it, Mine-golia. Why do they call it that? Because in Mine-golia, Chinese firms operate and own most of the mines -- copper, zinc, gold -- and they truck the resources south and east into mainland China. China isn't conquering Mongolia. It's buying it. Colonies were once conquered. Today countries are bought. So let's apply this principle to Siberia. Siberia most of you probably think of as a cold, desolate, unlivable place. But in fact, with global warming and rising temperatures, all of a sudden you have vast wheat fields and agribusiness, and grain being produced in Siberia. But who is it going to feed? Well, just on the other side of the Amo River, in the Heilongjiang and Harbin provinces of China, you have over 100 million people. That's larger than the entire population of Russia. Every single year, for at least a decade or more, [60,000] of them have been voting with their feet, crossing, moving north and inhabiting this desolate terrain. They set up their own bazaars and medical clinics. They've taken over the timber industry and been shipping the lumber east, back into China. Again, like Mongolia, China isn't conquering Russia. It's just leasing it. That's what I call globalization Chinese style. Now maybe this is what the map of the region might look like in 10 to 20 years. But hold on. This map is 700 years old. This is the map of the Yuan Dynasty, led by Kublai Khan, the grandson of Genghis Khan. So history doesn't necessarily repeat itself, but it does rhyme. This is just to give you a taste of what's happening in this part of the world. Again, globalization Chinese style. Because globalization opens up all kinds of ways for us to undermine and change the way we think about political geography. So, the history of East Asia in fact, people don't think about nations and borders. They think more in terms of empires and hierarchies, usually Chinese or Japanese. Well it's China's turn again. So let's look at how China is re-establishing that hierarchy in the far East. It starts with the global hubs. Remember the 40 dots on the nighttime map that show the hubs of the global economy? East Asia today has more of those global hubs than any other region in the world. Tokyo, Seoul, Beijing, Shanghai, Hong Kong, Singapore and Sidney. These are the filters and funnels of global capital. Trillions of dollars a year are being brought into the region, so much of it being invested into China. Then there is trade. These vectors and arrows represent ever stronger trade relationships that China has with every country in the region. Specifically, it targets Japan and Korea and Australia, countries that are strong allies of the United States. Australia, for example, is heavily dependent on exporting iron ore and natural gas to China. For poorer countries, China reduces tariffs so that Laos and Cambodia can sell their goods more cheaply and become dependent on exporting to China as well. And now many of you have been reading in the news how people are looking to China to lead the rebound, the economic rebound, not just in Asia, but potentially for the world. The Asian free trade zone, almost free trade zone, that's emerging now has a greater trade volume than trade across the Pacific. So China is becoming the anchor of the economy in the region. Another pillar of this strategy is diplomacy. China has signed military agreements with many countries in the region. It has become the hub of diplomatic institutions such as the East Asian Community. Some of these organizations don't even have the United States as a member. There is a treaty of nonaggression between countries, such that if there were a conflict between China and the United States, most countries vow to just sit it out, including American allies like Korea and Australia. Another pillar of the strategy, like Russia, is demographic. China exports business people, nannies, students, teachers to teach Chinese around the region, to intermarry and to occupy ever greater commanding heights of the economies. Already ethnic Chinese people in Malaysia, Thailand and Indonesia are the real key factors and drivers in the economies there. Chinese pride is resurgent in the region as a result. Singapore, for example, used to ban Chinese language education. Now it encourages it. If you add it all up what do you get? Well, if you remember before World War II, Japan had a vision for a greater Japanese co-prosperity sphere. What's emerging today is what you might call a greater Chinese co-prosperity sphere. So no matter what the lines on the map tell you in terms of nations and borders, what you really have emerging in the far east are national cultures, but in a much more fluid, imperial zone. All of this is happening without firing a shot. That's most certainly not the case in the Middle East where countries are still very uncomfortable in the borders left behind by European colonialists. So what can we do to think about borders differently in this part of the world? What lines on the map should we focus on? What I want to present to you is what I call state building, day by day. Let's start with Iraq. Six years after the U.S. invasion of Iraq, the country still exists more on a map than it does in reality. Oil used to be one of the forces holding Iraq together; now it is the most significant cause of the country's disintegration. The reason is Kurdistan. The Kurds for 3,000 years have been waging a struggle for independence, and now is their chance to finally have it. These are pipeline routes, which emerge from Kurdistan, which is an oil-rich region. And today, if you go to Kurdistan, you'll see that Kurdish Peshmerga guerillas are squaring off against the Sunni Iraqi army. But what are they guarding? Is it really a border on the map? No. It's the pipelines. If the Kurds can control their pipelines, they can set the terms of their own statehood. Now should we be upset about this, about the potential disintegration of Iraq? I don't believe we should. Iraq will still be the second largest oil producer in the world, behind Saudi Arabia. And we'll have a chance to solve a 3,000 year old dispute. Now remember Kurdistan is landlocked. It has no choice but to behave. In order to profit from its oil it has to export it through Turkey or Syria, and other countries, and Iraq itself. And therefore it has to have amicable relations with them. Now lets look at a perennial conflict in the region. That is, of course, in Palestine. Palestine is something of a cartographic anomaly because it's two parts Palestinian, one part Israel. 30 years of rose garden diplomacy have not delivered us peace in this conflict. What might? I believe that what might solve the problem is infrastructure. Today donors are spending billions of dollars on this. These two arrows are an arc, an arc of commuter railroads and other infrastructure that link the West Bank and Gaza. If Gaza can have a functioning port and be linked to the West Bank, you can have a viable Palestinian state, Palestinian economy. That, I believe, is going to bring peace to this particular conflict. The lesson from Kurdistan and from Palestine is that independence alone, without infrastructure, is futile. Now what might this entire region look like if in fact we focus on other lines on the map besides borders, when the insecurities might abate? The last time that was the case was actually a century ago, during the Ottoman Empire. This is the Hejaz Railway. The Hejaz Railway ran from Istanbul to Medina via Damascus. It even had an offshoot running to Haifa in what is today Israel, on the Mediterranean Sea. But today the Hejaz Railway lies in tatters, ruins. If we were to focus on reconstructing these curvy lines on the map, infrastructure, that cross the straight lines, the borders, I believe the Middle East would be a far more peaceful region. Now let's look at another part of the world, the former Soviet Republics of Central Asia, the 'stans. These countries' borders originate from Stalin's decrees. He purposely did not want these countries to make sense. He wanted ethnicities to mingle in ways that would allow him to divide and rule. Fortunately for them, most of their oil and gas resources were discovered after the Soviet Union collapsed. Now I know some of you may be thinking, "Oil, oil, oil. Why is it all he's talking about is oil?" Well, there is a big difference in the way we used to talk about oil and the way we're talking about it now. Before it was, how do we control their oil? Now it's their oil for their own purposes. And I assure you it's every bit as important to them as it might have been to colonizers and imperialists. Here are just some of the pipeline projections and possibilities and scenarios and routes that are being mapped out for the next several decades. A great deal of them. For a number of countries in this part of the world, having pipelines is the ticket to becoming part of the global economy and for having some meaning besides the borders that they are not loyal to themselves. Just take Azerbaijan. Azerbaijan was a forgotten corner of the Caucuses, but now with the Baku-Tbilisi-Ceyhan pipeline into Turkey, it has rebranded itself as the frontier of the west. Then there is Turkmenistan, which most people think of as a frozen basket case. But now it's contributing gas across the Caspian Sea to provide for Europe, and even a potentially Turkmen- Afghan-Pakistan-India pipeline as well. Then there is Kazakhstan, which didn't even have a name before. It was more considered South Siberia during the Soviet Union. Today most people recognize Kazakhstan as an emerging geopolitical player. Why? Because it has shrewdly designed pipelines to flow across the Caspian, north through Russia, and even east to China. More pipelines means more silk roads, instead of the Great Game. The Great Game connotes dominance of one over the other. Silk road connotes independence and mutual trust. The more pipelines we have, the more silk roads we'll have, and the less of a dominant Great Game competition we'll have in the 21st century. Now let's look at the only part of the world that really has brought down its borders, and how that has enhanced its strength. And that is, of course, Europe. The European Union began as just the coal and steel community of six countries, and their main purpose was really to keep the rehabilitation of Germany to happen in a peaceful way. But then eventually it grew into 12 countries, and those are the 12 stars on the European flag. The E.U. also became a currency block, and is now the most powerful trade block in the entire world. On average, the E.U. has grown by one country per year since the end of the Cold War. In fact most of that happened on just one day. In 2004, 15 new countries joined the E.U. and now you have what most people consider a zone of peace spanning 27 countries and 450 million people. So what is next? What is the future of the European Union? Well in light blue, you see the zones or the regions that are at least two-thirds or more dependent on the European Union for trade and investment. What does that tell us? Trade and investment tell us that Europe is putting its money where its mouth is. Even if these regions aren't part of the E.U., they are becoming part of its sphere of influence. Just take the Balkans. Croatia, Serbia Bosnia, they're not members of the E.U. yet. But you can get on a German ICE train and make it almost to Albania. In Bosnia you use the Euro currency already, and that's the only currency they're probably ever going to have. So, looking at other parts of Europe's periphery, such as North Africa. On average, every year or two, a new oil or gas pipeline opens up under the Mediterranean, connecting North Africa to Europe. That not only helps Europe diminish its reliance on Russia for energy, but if you travel to North Africa today, you'll hear more and more people saying that they don't really think of their region as the Middle East. So in other words, I believe that President Sarkozy of France is right when he talks about a Mediterranean union. Now let's look at Turkey and the Caucasus. I mentioned Azerbaijan before. That corridor of Turkey and the Caucasus has become the conduit for 20 percent of Europe's energy supply. So does Turkey really have to be a member of the European Union? I don't think it does. I think it's already part of a Euro-Turkish superpower. So what's next? Where are we going to see borders change and new countries born? Well, South Central Asia, South West Asia is a very good place to start. Eight years after the U.S. invaded Afghanistan there is still a tremendous amount of instability. Pakistan and Afghanistan are still so fragile that neither of them have dealt constructively with the problem of Pashtun nationalism. This is the flag that flies in the minds of 20 million Pashtuns who live on both sides of the Afghan and Pakistan border. Let's not neglect the insurgency just to the south, Balochistan. Two weeks ago, Balochi rebels attacked a Pakistani military garrison, and this was the flag that they raised over it. The post-colonial entropy that is happening around the world is accelerating, and I expect more such changes to occur in the map as the states fragment. Of course, we can't forget Africa. 53 countries, and by far the most number of suspiciously straight lines on the map. If we were to look at all of Africa we could most certainly acknowledge far more, tribal divisions and so forth. But let's just look at Sudan, the second-largest country in Africa. It has three ongoing civil wars, the genocide in Darfur, which you all know about, the civil war in the east of the country, and south Sudan. South Sudan is going to be having a referendum in 2011 in which it is very likely to vote itself independence. Now let's go up to the Arctic Circle. There is a great race on for energy resources under the Arctic seabed. Who will win? Canada? Russia? The United States? Actually Greenland. Several weeks ago Greenland's [60,000] people voted themselves self-governance rights from Denmark. So Denmark is about to get a whole lot smaller. What is the lesson from all of this? Geopolitics is a very unsentimental discipline. It's constantly morphing and changing the world, like climate change. And like our relationship with the ecosystem we're always searching for equilibrium in how we divide ourselves across the planet. Now we fear changes on the map. We fear civil wars, death tolls, having to learn the names of new countries. But I believe that the inertia of the existing borders that we have today is far worse and far more violent. The question is how do we change those borders, and what lines do we focus on? I believe we focus on the lines that cross borders, the infrastructure lines. Then we'll wind up with the world we want, a borderless one. Thank you. (Applause)

I coined my own definition of success in 1934, when I was teaching at a high school in South Bend, Indiana, being a little bit disappointed, and delusioned perhaps, by the way parents of the youngsters in my English classes expected their youngsters to get an A or a B. They thought a C was all right for the neighbors' children, because the neighbors children are all average. But they weren't satisfied when their own -- would make the teacher feel that they had failed, or the youngster had failed. And that's not right. The good Lord in his infinite wisdom didn't create us all equal as far as intelligence is concerned, any more than we're equal for size, appearance. Not everybody could earn an A or a B, and I didn't like that way of judging it. And I did know how the alumni of various schools back in the 30s judged coaches and athletic teams. If you won them all, you were considered to be reasonably successful -- not completely. Because I found out -- we had a number of years at UCLA where we didn't lose a game. But it seemed that we didn't win each individual game by the margin that some of our alumni had predicted and quite frequently I -- (Laughter) -- quite frequently I really felt that they had backed up their predictions in a more materialistic manner. But that was true back in the 30s, so I understood that. But I didn't like it. And I didn't agree with it. And I wanted to come up with something that I hoped could make me a better teacher, and give the youngsters under my supervision -- whether it be in athletics or in the English classroom -- something to which to aspire, other than just a higher mark in the classroom, or more points in some athletic contest. I thought about that for quite a spell, and I wanted to come up with my own definition. I thought that might help. And I knew how Mr. Webster defined it: as the accumulation of material possessions or the attainment of a position of power or prestige, or something of that sort -- worthy accomplishments perhaps, but in my opinion not necessarily indicative of success. So I wanted to come up with something of my own. And I recalled -- I was raised on a small farm in Southern Indiana and Dad tried to teach me and my brothers that you should never try to be better than someone else. I'm sure at the time he did that, I didn't -- it didn't -- well, somewhere, I guess in the hidden recesses of mind, it popped out years later. Never try to be better than someone else, always learn from others. Never cease trying to be the best you can be -- that's under your control. If you get too engrossed and involved and concerned in regard to the things over which you have no control, it will adversely affect the things over which you have control. Then I ran across this simple verse that said, "At God's footstool to confess, a poor soul knelt, and bowed his head. 'I failed!' He cried. The Master said, 'Thou didst thy best, that is success.'" From those things, and one other perhaps, I coined my own definition of success, which is: peace of mind attained only through self-satisfaction in knowing you made the effort to do the best of which you're capable. I believe that's true. If you make the effort to do the best of which you're capable, to try and improve the situation that exists for you, I think that's success. And I don't think others can judge that. I think it's like character and reputation. Your reputation is what you are perceived to be; your character is what you really are. And I think that character is much more important than what you are perceived to be. You'd hope they'd both be good, but they won't necessarily be the same. Well, that was my idea that I was going to try to get across to the youngsters. I ran across other things. I love to teach, and it was mentioned by the previous speaker that I enjoy poetry, and I dabble in it a bit, and love it. There are some things that helped me, I think, be better than I would have been. I know I'm not what I ought to be, not what I should be. But I think I'm better than I would have been if I hadn't run across certain things. One was just a little verse that said, "No written word, no spoken plea can teach our youth what they should be. Nor all the books on all the shelves -- it's what the teachers are themselves." That made an impression on me in the 1930s. And I tried to use that more or less in my teaching, whether it be in sports, or whether it be in the English classroom. I love poetry and always had an interest in that somehow. Maybe it's because Dad used to read to us at night. Coal oil lamp -- we didn't have electricity in our farm home. And Dad would read poetry to us. So I always liked it. And about the same time I ran across this one verse, I ran across another one. Someone asked a lady teacher why she taught. And she -- after some time, she said she wanted to think about that. Then she came up and said, "They ask me why I teach and I reply, 'Where could I find such splendid company?' There sits a statesman, strong, unbiased, wise; another Daniel Webster, silver-tongued. A doctor sits beside him, whose quick steady hand may mend a bone, or stem the life-blood's flow. And there a builder. Upward rise the arch of a church he builds, wherein that minister may speak the word of God and lead a stumbling soul to touch the Christ. And all about a gathering of teachers, farmers, merchants, laborers: those who work and vote and build and plan and pray into a great tomorrow. And I may say, I may not see the church, or hear the word or eat the food their hands may grow. But yet again I may. And later I may say, I knew him once, and he was weak, or strong, or bold or proud or gay. I knew him once, but then he was a boy. They ask me why I teach and I reply, 'Where could I find such splendid company?'" And I believe the teaching profession -- it's true, you have so many youngsters. And I've got to think of my youngsters at UCLA -- 30-some attorneys, 11 dentists and doctors, many, many teachers and other professions. And that gives you a great deal of pleasure, to see them go on. I always tried to make the youngsters feel that they're there to get an education, number one. Basketball was second, because it was paying their way, and they do need a little time for social activities, but you let social activities take a little precedence over the other two and you're not going to have any very long. So that was the ideas that I tried to get across to the youngsters under my supervision. I had three rules, pretty much, that I stuck with practically all the time. I'd learned these prior to coming to UCLA, and I decided they were very important. One was -- never be late. Never be late. Later on I said certain things -- I had -- players, if we're leaving for somewhere, had to be neat and clean. There was a time when I made them wear jackets and shirts and ties. Then I saw our chancellor coming to school in denims and turtlenecks, and I thought, not right for me to keep this other. So I let them -- just they had to be neat and clean. I had one of my greatest players that you probably heard of, Bill Walton. He came to catch the bus; we were leaving for somewhere to play. And he wasn't clean and neat, so I wouldn't let him go. He couldn't get on the bus. He had to go home and get cleaned up to get to the airport. So I was a stickler for that. I believed in that. I believe in time -- very important. I believe you should be on time. But I felt at practice, for example, we start on time, we close on time. The youngsters didn't have to feel that we were going to keep them over. When I speak at coaching clinics, I often tell young coaches -- and at coaching clinics, more or less, they'll be the younger coaches getting in the profession. Most of them are young, you know, and probably newly married. And I tell them, "Don't run practices late. Because you'll go home in a bad mood. And that's not good, for a young married man to go home in a bad mood. When you get older, it doesn't make any difference." But -- (Laughter) So I did believe on time. I believe starting on time, and I believe closing on time. And another one I had was, not one word of profanity. One word of profanity, and you are out of here for the day. If I see it in a game, you're going to come out and sit on the bench. And the third one was, never criticize a teammate. I didn't want that. I used to tell them I was paid to do that. That's my job. I'm paid to do it. Pitifully poor, but I am paid to do it. Not like the coaches today, for gracious sakes, no. It's a little different than it was in my day. Those were three things that I stuck with pretty closely all the time. And those actually came from my dad. That's what he tried to teach me and my brothers at one time. I came up with a pyramid eventually, that I don't have the time to go on that. But that helped me, I think, become a better teacher. It's something like this: And I had blocks in the pyramid, and the cornerstones being industriousness and enthusiasm, working hard and enjoying what you're doing, coming up to the apex according to my definition of success. And right at the top -- faith and patience. And I say to you, in whatever you're doing, you must be patient. You have to have patience to -- we want things to happen. We talk about our youth being impatient a lot. And they are. They want to change everything. They think all change is progress. And we get a little older -- we sort of let things go. And we forget there is no progress without change. So you must have patience. And I believe that we must have faith. I believe that we must believe, truly believe. Not just give it word service; believe that things will work out as they should, providing we do what we should. I think our tendency is to hope that things will turn out the way we want them to much of the time. But we don't do the things that are necessary to make those things become reality. I worked on this for some 14 years, and I think it helped me become a better teacher. But it all revolved around that original definition of success. You know a number of years ago, there was a Major League Baseball umpire by the name of George Moriarty. He spelled Moriarty with only one 'i'. I'd never seen that before, but he did. Big league baseball players -- they're very perceptive about those things, and they noticed he had only one 'i' in his name. You'd be surprised how many also told him that that was one more than he had in his head at various times. (Laughter) But he wrote something that I think he did while I tried to do in this pyramid. He called it "The Road Ahead, or the Road Behind." "Sometimes I think the Fates must grin as we denounce them and insist the only reason we can't win, is the Fates themselves that miss. Yet there lives on the ancient claim: we win or lose within ourselves. The shining trophies on our shelves can never win tomorrow's game. You and I know deeper down, there's always a chance to win the crown. But when we fail to give our best, we simply haven't met the test, of giving all and saving none until the game is really won; of showing what is meant by grit; of playing through when others quit; of playing through, not letting up. It's bearing down that wins the cup. Of dreaming there's a goal ahead; of hoping when our dreams are dead; of praying when our hopes have fled. Yet losing, not afraid to fall, if bravely we have given all. For who can ask more of a man than giving all within his span. Giving all, it seems to me, is not so far from victory. And so the fates are seldom wrong, no matter how they twist and wind. It's you and I who make our fates -- we open up or close the gates on the road ahead or the road behind." Reminds me of another set of threes that my dad tried to get across to us. Don't whine. Don't complain. Don't make excuses. Just get out there, and whatever you're doing, do it to the best of your ability. And no one can do more than that. I tried to get across, too, that -- my opponents don't tell you -- you never heard me mention winning. Never mention winning. My idea is that you can lose when you outscore somebody in a game. And you can win when you're outscored. I've felt that way on certain occasions, at various times. And I just wanted them to be able to hold their head up after a game. I used to say that when a game is over, and you see somebody that didn't know the outcome, I hope they couldn't tell by your actions whether you outscored an opponent or the opponent outscored you. That's what really matters: if you make effort to do the best you can regularly, the results will be about what they should be. Not necessary to what you would want them to be, but they will be about what they should, and only you will know whether you can do that. And that's what I wanted from them more than anything else. And as time went by, and I learned more about other things, I think it worked a little better, as far as the results. But I wanted the score of a game to be the byproduct of these other things, and not the end itself. I believe it was -- one great philosopher said -- no, no, Cervantes. Cervantes said, "The journey is better than the end." And I like that. I think that is -- it's getting there. Sometimes when you get there, there's almost a letdown. But there's getting there that's the fun. I liked our -- as a basketball coach at UCLA I liked our practices to be the journey, and the game would be the end. The end result. I'd like to go up and sit in the stands and watch the players play, and see whether I'd done a decent job during the week. There again, it's getting the players to get that self-satisfaction, in knowing that they'd made the effort to do the best of which they are capable. Sometimes I'm asked who was the best player I had, or the best teams. I can never answer that, as far as the individuals are concerned. I was asked one time about that, and they said, "Suppose that you in some way could make the perfect player. What would you want?" And I said, "Well, I'd want one that knew why he was at UCLA: to get an education, he was a good student, really knew why he was there in the first place. But I'd want one that could play, too. I'd want one to realize that defense usually wins championships, and would work hard on defense. But I'd want one that would play offense too. I'd want him to be unselfish, and look for the pass first and not shoot all the time. And I'd want one that could pass and would pass. (Laughter) I've had some that could and wouldn't, and I've had some that would and couldn't. (Laughter) I wanted them to be able to shoot from the outside. I wanted them to be good inside too. (Laughter) I'd want them to be able to rebound well at both ends, too. And why not just take someone like Keith Wilkes and let it go at that. He had the qualifications. Not the only one, but he was one that I used in that particular category, because I think he made the effort to become the best [unclear]. I mention in my book, "They Call Me Coach." Two players that gave me great satisfaction; that came as close as I think anyone I ever had to reach their full potential: one was Conrad Burke. And one was Doug McIntosh. When I saw them as freshmen, on our freshmen team -- we didn't have -- freshmen couldn't play varsity when I taught. And I thought, "Oh gracious, if these two players, either one of them" -- they were different years, but I thought about each one at the time he was there -- "Oh, if he ever makes the varsity, our varsity must be pretty miserable, if he's good enough to make it." And you know one of them was a starting player for a season and a half. The other was -- his next year, he played 32 minutes in a national championship game, did a tremendous job for us. And the next year, he was a starting player on the national championship team. And here I thought he'd never play a minute, when he was -- so those are the things that give you great joy, and great satisfaction to see one. Neither one of those youngsters could shoot very well. But they had outstanding shooting percentages, because they didn't force it. And neither one could jump very well, but they got -- kept good position, and so they did well rebounding. They remembered that every shot that is taken, they assumed would be missed. I've had too many that stand around and wait to see if it's missed, then they go and it's too late. Somebody else is in there ahead of them. And they weren't very quick, but they played good position, kept in good balance. And so they played pretty good defense for us. So they had qualities that -- they came close to -- as close to reaching possibly their full potential as any players I ever had. So I consider them to be as successful as Lewis Alcindor or Bill Walton, or many of the others that we had, There was some outstanding -- some outstanding players. Have I rambled enough? I was told that when he makes his appearance, I was supposed to shut up. (Laughter) (Applause)

I'm going to talk about your mindset. Does your mindset correspond to my dataset? (Laughter) If not, one or the other needs upgrading, isn't it? When I talk to my students about global issues, and I listen to them in the coffee break, they always talk about "we" and "them." And when they come back into the lecture room I ask them, "What do you mean with "we" and "them"? "Oh, it's very easy. It's the western world and it's the developing world," they say. "We learned it in college." And what is the definition then? "The definition? Everyone knows," they say. But then you know, I press them like this. So one girl said, very cleverly, "It's very easy. Western world is a long life in a small family. Developing world is a short life in a large family." And I like that definition, because it enabled me to transfer their mindset into the dataset. And here you have the dataset. So, you can see that what we have on this axis here is size of family. One, two, three, four, five children per woman on this axis. And here, length of life, life expectancy, 30, 40, 50. Exactly what the students said was their concept about the world. And really this is about the bedroom. Whether the man and woman decide to have small family, and take care of their kids, and how long they will live. It's about the bathroom and the kitchen. If you have soap, water and food, you know, you can live long. And the students were right. It wasn't that the world consisted -- the world consisted here, of one set of countries over here, which had large families and short life. Developing world. And we had one set of countries up there which was the western world. They had small families and long life. And you are going to see here the amazing thing that has happened in the world during my lifetime. Then the developing countries applied soap and water, vaccination. And all the developing world started to apply family planning. And partly to USA who help to provide technical advice and investment. And you see all the world moves over to a two child family, and a life with 60 to 70 years. But some countries remain back in this area here. And you can see we still have Afghanistan down here. We have Liberia. We have Congo. So we have countries living there. So the problem I had is that the worldview that my students had corresponds to reality in the world the year their teachers were born. (Laughter) (Applause) And we, in fact, when we have played this over the world. I was at the Global Health Conference here in Washington last week, and I could see the wrong concept even active people in United States had, that they didn't realize the improvement of Mexico there, and China, in relation to United States. Look here when I move them forward. Here we go. They catch up. There's Mexico. It's on par with United States in these two social dimensions. There was less than five percent of the specialists in Global Health that was aware of this. This great nation, Mexico, has the problem that arms are coming from North, across the borders, so they had to stop that, because they have this strange relationship to the United States, you know. But if I would change this axis here, I would instead put income per person. Income per person. I can put that here. And we will then see a completely different picture. By the way, I'm teaching you how to use our website, Gapminder World, while I'm correcting this, because this is a free utility on the net. And when I now finally got it right, I can go back 200 years in history. And I can find United States up there. And I can let the other countries be shown. And now I have income per person on this axis. And United States only had some, one, two thousand dollars at that time. And the life expectancy was 35 to 40 years, on par with Afghanistan today. And what has happened in the world, I will show now. This is instead of studying history for one year at university. You can watch me for one minute now and you'll see the whole thing. (Laughter) You can see how the brown bubbles, which is west Europe, and the yellow one, which is the United States, they get richer and richer and also start to get healthier and healthier. And this is now 100 years ago, where the rest of the world remains behind. Here we come. And that was the influenza. That's why we are so scared about flu, isn't it? It's still remembered. The fall of life expectancy. And then we come up. Not until independence started. Look here You have China over there, you have India over there, and this is what has happened. Did you note there, that we have Mexico up there? Mexico is not at all on par with the United States, but they are quite close. And especially, it's interesting to see China and the United States during 200 years, because I have my oldest son now working for Google, after Google acquired this software. Because in fact, this is child labor. My son and his wife sat in a closet for many years and developed this. And my youngest son, who studied Chinese in Beijing. So they come in with the two perspectives I have, you know? And my son, youngest son who studied in Beijing, in China, he got a long-term perspective. Whereas when my oldest son, who works for Google, he should develop by quarter, or by half-year. Or Google is quite generous, so he can have one or two years to go. But in China they look generation after generation because they remember the very embarrassing period, for 100 years, when they went backwards. And then they would remember the first part of last century, which was really bad, and we could go by this so-called Great Leap Forward. But this was 1963. Mao Tse-Tung eventually brought health to China, and then he died, and then Deng Xiaoping started this amazing move forward. Isn't it strange to see that the United States first grew the economy, and then gradually got rich? Whereas China could get healthy much earlier, because they applied the knowledge of education, nutrition, and then also benefits of penicillin and vaccines and family planning. And Asia could have social development before they got the economic development. So to me, as a public health professor, it's not strange that all these countries grow so fast now. Because what you see here, what you see here is the flat world of Thomas Friedman, isn't it. It's not really, really flat. But the middle income countries -- and this is where I suggest to my students, stop using the concept "developing world." Because after all, talking about the developing world is like having two chapters in the history of the United States. The last chapter is about present, and president Obama, and the other is about the past, where you cover everything from Washington to Eisenhower. Because Washington to Eisenhower, that is what we find in the developing world. We could actually go to Mayflower to Eisenhower, and that would be put together into a developing world, which is rightly growing its cities in a very amazing way, which have great entrepreneurs, but also have the collapsing countries. So, how could we make better sense about this? Well, one way of trying is to see whether we could look at income distribution. This is the income distribution of peoples in the world, from $1. This is where you have food to eat. These people go to bed hungry. And this is the number of people. This is $10, whether you have a public or a private health service system. This is where you can provide health service for your family and school for your children, and this is OECD countries: Green, Latin America, East Europe. This is East Asia, and the light blue there is South Asia. And this is how the world changed. It changed like this. Can you see how it's growing? And how hundreds of millions and billions is coming out of poverty in Asia? And it goes over here? And I come now, into projections, but I have to stop at the door of Lehman Brothers there, you know, because -- (Laughter) that's where the projections are not valid any longer. Probably the world will do this. and then it will continue forward like this. But more or less, this is what will happen, and we have a world which cannot be looked upon as divided. We have the high income countries here, with the United States as a leading power; we have the emerging economies in the middle, which provide a lot of the funding for the bailout; and we have the low income countries here. Yeah, this is a fact that from where the money comes, they have been saving, you know, over the last decade. And here we have the low income countries where entrepreneurs are. And here we have the countries in collapse and war, like Afghanistan, Somalia, parts of Congo, Darfur. We have all this at the same time. That's why it's so problematic to describe what has happened in the developing world. Because it's so different, what has happened there. And that's why I suggest a slightly different approach of what you would call it. And you have huge differences within countries also. I heard that your departments here were by regions. Here you have Sub-Saharan Africa, South Asia, East Asia, Arab states, East Europe, Latin America, and OECD. And on this axis, GDP. And on this, heath, child survival, and it doesn't come as a surprise that Africa south of Sahara is at the bottom. But when I split it, when I split it into country bubbles, the size of the bubbles here is the population. Then you see Sierra Leone and Mauritius, completely different. There is such a difference within Sub-Saharan Africa. And I can split the others. Here is the South Asian, Arab world. Now all your different departments. East Europe, Latin America, and OECD countries. And here were are. We have a continuum in the world. We cannot put it into two parts. It is Mayflower down here. It is Washington here, building, building countries. It's Lincoln here, advancing them. It's Eisenhower bringing modernity into the countries. And then it's United States today, up here. And we have countries all this way. Now, this is the important thing of understanding how the world has changed. At this point I decided to make a pause. (Laughter) And it is my task, on behalf of the rest of the world, to convey a thanks to the U.S. taxpayers, for Demographic Health Survey. Many are not aware of -- no, this is not a joke. This is very serious. It is due to USA's continuous sponsoring during 25 years of the very good methodology for measuring child mortality that we have a grasp of what's happening in the world. (Applause) And it is U.S. government at its best, without advocacy, providing facts, that it's useful for the society. And providing data free of charge on the internet, for the world to use. Thank you very much. Quite the opposite of the World Bank, who compiled data with government money, tax money, and then they sell it to add a little profit, in a very inefficient, Gutenberg way. (Applause) But the people doing that at the World Bank are among the best in the world. And they are highly skilled professionals. It's just that we would like to upgrade our international agencies to deal with the world in the modern way, as we do. And when it comes to free data and transparency, United States of America is one of the best. And that doesn't come easy from the mouth of a Swedish public health professor. (Laughter) And I'm not paid to come here, no. I would like to show you what happens with the data, what we can show with this data. Look here. This is the world. With income down there and child mortality. And what has happened in the world? Since 1950, during the last 50 years we have had a fall in child mortality. And it is the DHS that makes it possible to know this. And we had an increase in income. And the blue former developing countries are mixing up with the former industrialized western world. We have a continuum. But we still have, of course, Congo, up there. We still have as poor countries as we have had, always, in history. And that's the bottom billion, where we've heard today about a completely new approach to do it. And how fast has this happened? Well, MDG 4. The United States has not been so eager to use MDG 4. But you have been the main sponsor that has enabled us to measure it, because it's the only child mortality that we can measure. And we used to say that it should fall four percent per year. Let's see what Sweden has done. We used to boast about fast social progress. That's where we were, 1900. 1900, Sweden was there. Same child mortality as Bangladesh had, 1990, though they had lower income. They started very well. They used the aid well. They vaccinated the kids. They get better water. And they reduced child mortality, with an amazing 4.7 percent per year. They beat Sweden. I run Sweden the same 16 year period. Second round, it's Sweden, 1916, against Egypt, 1990. Here we go. Once again the USA is part of the reason here. They get safe water, they get food for the poor, and they get malaria eradicated. 5.5 percent. They are faster than the millennium development goal. And third chance for Sweden, against Brazil here. Brazil here has amazing social improvement over the last 16 years, and they go faster than Sweden. This means that the world is converging. The middle income countries, the emerging economy, they are catching up. They are moving to cities, where they also get better assistance for that. Well the Swedish students protest at this point. They say, "This is not fair, because these countries had vaccines and antibiotics that were not available for Sweden. We have to do real-time competition." Okay. I give you Singapore, the year I was born. Singapore had twice the child mortality of Sweden. It's the most tropical country in the world, a marshland on the equator. And here we go. It took a little time for them to get independent. But then they started to grow their economy. And they made the social investment. They got away malaria. They got a magnificent health system that beat both the U.S. and Sweden. We never thought it would happen that they would win over Sweden! (Applause) All these green countries are achieving millennium development goals. These yellow are just about to be doing this. These red are the countries that doesn't do it, and the policy has to be improved. Not simplistic extrapolation. We have to really find a way of supporting those countries in a better way. We have to respect the middle income countries on what they are doing. And we have to fact-base the whole way we look at the world. This is dollar per person. This is HIV in the countries. The blue is Africa. The size of the bubbles is how many are HIV affected. You see the tragedy in South Africa there. About 20 percent of the adult population are infected. And in spite of them having quite a high income, they have a huge number of HIV infected. But you also see that there are African countries down here. There is no such thing as an HIV epidemic in Africa. There's a number, five to 10 countries in Africa that has the same level as Sweden and United States. And there are others who are extremely high. And I will show you that what has happened in one of the best countries, with the most vibrant economy in Africa and a good governance, Botswana. They have a very high level. It's coming down. But now it's not falling, because there, with help from PEPFAR, it's working with treatment. And people are not dying. And you can see it's not that easy, that it is war which caused this. Because here, in Congo, there is war. And here, in Zambia, there is peace. And it's not the economy. Richer country has a little higher. If I split Tanzania in its income, the richer 20 percent in Tanzania has more HIV than the poorest one. And it's really different within each country. Look at the provinces of Kenya. They are very different. And this is the situation you see. It's not deep poverty. It's the special situation, probably of concurrent sexual partnership among part of the heterosexual population in some countries, or some parts of countries, in south and eastern Africa. Don't make it Africa. Don't make it a race issue. Make it a local issue. And do prevention at each place, in the way it can be done there. So to just end up, there are things of suffering in the one billion poorest, which we don't know. Those who live beyond the cellphone, those who have yet to see a computer, those who have no electricity at home. This is the disease, Konzo, I spent 20 years elucidating in Africa. It's caused by fast processing of toxic cassava root in famine situation. It's similar to the pellagra epidemic in Mississippi in the '30s. It's similar to other nutritional diseases. It will never affect a rich person. We have seen it here in Mozambique. This is the epidemic in Mozambique. This is an epidemic in northern Tanzania. You never heard about the disease. But it's much more than Ebola that has been affected by this disease. Cause crippling throughout the world. And over the last two years, 2,000 people has been crippled in the southern tip of Bandundu region. That used to be the illegal diamond trade, from the UNITA-dominated area in Angola. That has now disappeared, and they are now in great economic problem. And one week ago, for the first time, there were four lines on the Internet. Don't get confused of the progress of the emerging economies and the great capacity of people in the middle income countries and in peaceful low income countries. There is still mystery in one billion. And we have to have more concepts than just developing countries and developing world. We need a new mindset. The world is converging, but -- but -- but not the bottom billion. They are still as poor as they've ever been. It's not sustainable, and it will not happen around one superpower. But you will remain one of the most important superpowers, and the most hopeful superpower, for the time to be. And this institution will have a very crucial role, not for United States, but for the world. So you have a very bad name, State Department. This is not the State Department. It's the World Department. And we have a high hope in you. Thank you very much. (Applause)

When I was nine years old, I went off to summer camp for the first time. And my mother packed me a suitcase full of books, which to me seemed like a perfectly natural thing to do. Because in my family, reading was the primary group activity. And this might sound antisocial to you, but for us it was really just a different way of being social. You have the animal warmth of your family sitting right next to you, but you are also free to go roaming around the adventureland inside your own mind. And I had this idea that camp was going to be just like this, but better. (Laughter) I had a vision of 10 girls sitting in a cabin cozily reading books in their matching nightgowns. (Laughter) Camp was more like a keg party without any alcohol. And on the very first day, our counselor gathered us all together and she taught us a cheer that she said we would be doing every day for the rest of the summer to instill camp spirit. And it went like this: "R-O-W-D-I-E, that's the way we spell rowdie. Rowdie, rowdie, let's get rowdie." (Laughter) Yeah. So I couldn't figure out for the life of me why we were supposed to be so rowdy, or why we had to spell this word incorrectly. (Laughter) But I recited a cheer. I recited a cheer along with everybody else. I did my best. And I just waited for the time that I could go off and read my books. But the first time that I took my book out of my suitcase, the coolest girl in the bunk came up to me and she asked me, "Why are you being so mellow?" -- mellow, of course, being the exact opposite of R-O-W-D-I-E. And then the second time I tried it, the counselor came up to me with a concerned expression on her face and she repeated the point about camp spirit and said we should all work very hard to be outgoing. And so I put my books away, back in their suitcase, and I put them under my bed, and there they stayed for the rest of the summer. And I felt kind of guilty about this. I felt as if the books needed me somehow, and they were calling out to me and I was forsaking them. But I did forsake them and I didn't open that suitcase again until I was back home with my family at the end of the summer. Now, I tell you this story about summer camp. I could have told you 50 others just like it -- all the times that I got the message that somehow my quiet and introverted style of being was not necessarily the right way to go, that I should be trying to pass as more of an extrovert. And I always sensed deep down that this was wrong and that introverts were pretty excellent just as they were. But for years I denied this intuition, and so I became a Wall Street lawyer, of all things, instead of the writer that I had always longed to be -- partly because I needed to prove to myself that I could be bold and assertive too. And I was always going off to crowded bars when I really would have preferred to just have a nice dinner with friends. And I made these self-negating choices so reflexively, that I wasn't even aware that I was making them. Now this is what many introverts do, and it's our loss for sure, but it is also our colleagues' loss and our communities' loss. And at the risk of sounding grandiose, it is the world's loss. Because when it comes to creativity and to leadership, we need introverts doing what they do best. A third to a half of the population are introverts -- a third to a half. So that's one out of every two or three people you know. So even if you're an extrovert yourself, I'm talking about your coworkers and your spouses and your children and the person sitting next to you right now -- all of them subject to this bias that is pretty deep and real in our society. We all internalize it from a very early age without even having a language for what we're doing. Now, to see the bias clearly, you need to understand what introversion is. It's different from being shy. Shyness is about fear of social judgment. Introversion is more about, how do you respond to stimulation, including social stimulation. So extroverts really crave large amounts of stimulation, whereas introverts feel at their most alive and their most switched-on and their most capable when they're in quieter, more low-key environments. Not all the time -- these things aren't absolute -- but a lot of the time. So the key then to maximizing our talents is for us all to put ourselves in the zone of stimulation that is right for us. But now here's where the bias comes in. Our most important institutions, our schools and our workplaces, they are designed mostly for extroverts and for extroverts' need for lots of stimulation. And also we have this belief system right now that I call the new groupthink, which holds that all creativity and all productivity comes from a very oddly gregarious place. So if you picture the typical classroom nowadays: When I was going to school, we sat in rows. We sat in rows of desks like this, and we did most of our work pretty autonomously. But nowadays, your typical classroom has pods of desks -- four or five or six or seven kids all facing each other. And kids are working in countless group assignments. Even in subjects like math and creative writing, which you think would depend on solo flights of thought, kids are now expected to act as committee members. And for the kids who prefer to go off by themselves or just to work alone, those kids are seen as outliers often or, worse, as problem cases. And the vast majority of teachers reports believing that the ideal student is an extrovert as opposed to an introvert, even though introverts actually get better grades and are more knowledgeable, according to research. (Laughter) Okay, same thing is true in our workplaces. Now, most of us work in open plan offices, without walls, where we are subject to the constant noise and gaze of our coworkers. And when it comes to leadership, introverts are routinely passed over for leadership positions, even though introverts tend to be very careful, much less likely to take outsize risks -- which is something we might all favor nowadays. And interesting research by Adam Grant at the Wharton School has found that introverted leaders often deliver better outcomes than extroverts do, because when they are managing proactive employees, they're much more likely to let those employees run with their ideas, whereas an extrovert can, quite unwittingly, get so excited about things that they're putting their own stamp on things, and other people's ideas might not as easily then bubble up to the surface. Now in fact, some of our transformative leaders in history have been introverts. I'll give you some examples. Eleanor Roosevelt, Rosa Parks, Gandhi -- all these peopled described themselves as quiet and soft-spoken and even shy. And they all took the spotlight, even though every bone in their bodies was telling them not to. And this turns out to have a special power all its own, because people could feel that these leaders were at the helm not because they enjoyed directing others and not out of the pleasure of being looked at; they were there because they had no choice, because they were driven to do what they thought was right. Now I think at this point it's important for me to say that I actually love extroverts. I always like to say some of my best friends are extroverts, including my beloved husband. And we all fall at different points, of course, along the introvert/extrovert spectrum. Even Carl Jung, the psychologist who first popularized these terms, said that there's no such thing as a pure introvert or a pure extrovert. He said that such a man would be in a lunatic asylum, if he existed at all. And some people fall smack in the middle of the introvert/extrovert spectrum, and we call these people ambiverts. And I often think that they have the best of all worlds. But many of us do recognize ourselves as one type or the other. And what I'm saying is that culturally, we need a much better balance. We need more of a yin and yang between these two types. This is especially important when it comes to creativity and to productivity, because when psychologists look at the lives of the most creative people, what they find are people who are very good at exchanging ideas and advancing ideas, but who also have a serious streak of introversion in them. And this is because solitude is a crucial ingredient often to creativity. So Darwin, he took long walks alone in the woods and emphatically turned down dinner-party invitations. Theodor Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss, he dreamed up many of his amazing creations in a lonely bell tower office that he had in the back of his house in La Jolla, California. And he was actually afraid to meet the young children who read his books for fear that they were expecting him this kind of jolly Santa Claus-like figure and would be disappointed with his more reserved persona. Steve Wozniak invented the first Apple computer sitting alone in his cubicle in Hewlett-Packard where he was working at the time. And he says that he never would have become such an expert in the first place had he not been too introverted to leave the house when he was growing up. Now, of course, this does not mean that we should all stop collaborating -- and case in point, is Steve Wozniak famously coming together with Steve Jobs to start Apple Computer -- but it does mean that solitude matters and that for some people it is the air that they breathe. And in fact, we have known for centuries about the transcendent power of solitude. It's only recently that we've strangely begun to forget it. If you look at most of the world's major religions, you will find seekers -- Moses, Jesus, Buddha, Muhammad -- seekers who are going off by themselves alone to the wilderness, where they then have profound epiphanies and revelations that they then bring back to the rest of the community. So, no wilderness, no revelations. This is no surprise, though, if you look at the insights of contemporary psychology. It turns out that we can't even be in a group of people without instinctively mirroring, mimicking their opinions. Even about seemingly personal and visceral things like who you're attracted to, you will start aping the beliefs of the people around you without even realizing that that's what you're doing. And groups famously follow the opinions of the most dominant or charismatic person in the room, even though there's zero correlation between being the best talker and having the best ideas -- I mean zero. So -- (Laughter) You might be following the person with the best ideas, but you might not. And do you really want to leave it up to chance? Much better for everybody to go off by themselves, generate their own ideas freed from the distortions of group dynamics, and then come together as a team to talk them through in a well-managed environment and take it from there. Now if all this is true, then why are we getting it so wrong? Why are we setting up our schools this way, and our workplaces? And why are we making these introverts feel so guilty about wanting to just go off by themselves some of the time? One answer lies deep in our cultural history. Western societies, and in particular the U.S., have always favored the man of action over the "man" of contemplation. But in America's early days, we lived in what historians call a culture of character, where we still, at that point, valued people for their inner selves and their moral rectitude. And if you look at the self-help books from this era, they all had titles with things like "Character, the Grandest Thing in the World." And they featured role models like Abraham Lincoln, who was praised for being modest and unassuming. Ralph Waldo Emerson called him "A man who does not offend by superiority." But then we hit the 20th century, and we entered a new culture that historians call the culture of personality. What happened is we had evolved an agricultural economy to a world of big business. And so suddenly people are moving from small towns to the cities. And instead of working alongside people they've known all their lives, now they are having to prove themselves in a crowd of strangers. So, quite understandably, qualities like magnetism and charisma suddenly come to seem really important. And sure enough, the self-help books change to meet these new needs and they start to have names like "How to Win Friends and Influence People." And they feature as their role models really great salesmen. So that's the world we're living in today. That's our cultural inheritance. Now none of this is to say that social skills are unimportant, and I'm also not calling for the abolishing of teamwork at all. The same religions who send their sages off to lonely mountain tops also teach us love and trust. And the problems that we are facing today in fields like science and in economics are so vast and so complex that we are going to need armies of people coming together to solve them working together. But I am saying that the more freedom that we give introverts to be themselves, the more likely that they are to come up with their own unique solutions to these problems. So now I'd like to share with you what's in my suitcase today. Guess what? Books. I have a suitcase full of books. Here's Margaret Atwood, "Cat's Eye." Here's a novel by Milan Kundera. And here's "The Guide for the Perplexed" by Maimonides. But these are not exactly my books. I brought these books with me because they were written by my grandfather's favorite authors. My grandfather was a rabbi and he was a widower who lived alone in a small apartment in Brooklyn that was my favorite place in the world when I was growing up, partly because it was filled with his very gentle, very courtly presence and partly because it was filled with books. I mean literally every table, every chair in this apartment had yielded its original function to now serve as a surface for swaying stacks of books. Just like the rest of my family, my grandfather's favorite thing to do in the whole world was to read. But he also loved his congregation, and you could feel this love in the sermons that he gave every week for the 62 years that he was a rabbi. He would takes the fruits of each week's reading and he would weave these intricate tapestries of ancient and humanist thought. And people would come from all over to hear him speak. But here's the thing about my grandfather. Underneath this ceremonial role, he was really modest and really introverted -- so much so that when he delivered these sermons, he had trouble making eye contact with the very same congregation that he had been speaking to for 62 years. And even away from the podium, when you called him to say hello, he would often end the conversation prematurely for fear that he was taking up too much of your time. But when he died at the age of 94, the police had to close down the streets of his neighborhood to accommodate the crowd of people who came out to mourn him. And so these days I try to learn from my grandfather's example in my own way. So I just published a book about introversion, and it took me about seven years to write. And for me, that seven years was like total bliss, because I was reading, I was writing, I was thinking, I was researching. It was my version of my grandfather's hours of the day alone in his library. But now all of a sudden my job is very different, and my job is to be out here talking about it, talking about introversion. (Laughter) And that's a lot harder for me, because as honored as I am to be here with all of you right now, this is not my natural milieu. So I prepared for moments like these as best I could. I spent the last year practicing public speaking every chance I could get. And I call this my "year of speaking dangerously." (Laughter) And that actually helped a lot. But I'll tell you, what helps even more is my sense, my belief, my hope that when it comes to our attitudes to introversion and to quiet and to solitude, we truly are poised on the brink on dramatic change. I mean, we are. And so I am going to leave you now with three calls for action for those who share this vision. Number one: Stop the madness for constant group work. Just stop it. (Laughter) Thank you. (Applause) And I want to be clear about what I'm saying, because I deeply believe our offices should be encouraging casual, chatty cafe-style types of interactions -- you know, the kind where people come together and serendipitously have an exchange of ideas. That is great. It's great for introverts and it's great for extroverts. But we need much more privacy and much more freedom and much more autonomy at work. School, same thing. We need to be teaching kids to work together, for sure, but we also need to be teaching them how to work on their own. This is especially important for extroverted children too. They need to work on their own because that is where deep thought comes from in part. Okay, number two: Go to the wilderness. Be like Buddha, have your own revelations. I'm not saying that we all have to now go off and build our own cabins in the woods and never talk to each other again, but I am saying that we could all stand to unplug and get inside our own heads a little more often. Number three: Take a good look at what's inside your own suitcase and why you put it there. So extroverts, maybe your suitcases are also full of books. Or maybe they're full of champagne glasses or skydiving equipment. Whatever it is, I hope you take these things out every chance you get and grace us with your energy and your joy. But introverts, you being you, you probably have the impulse to guard very carefully what's inside your own suitcase. And that's okay. But occasionally, just occasionally, I hope you will open up your suitcases for other people to see, because the world needs you and it needs the things you carry. So I wish you the best of all possible journeys and the courage to speak softly. Thank you very much. (Applause) Thank you. Thank you. (Applause)

I grew up in Northern Ireland, right up in the very, very north end of it there, where it's absolutely freezing cold. This was me running around in the back garden mid-summer. (Laughter) I couldn't pick a career. In Ireland the obvious choice is the military, but to be honest it actually kind of sucks. (Laughter) My mother wanted me to be a dentist. But the problem was that people kept blowing everything up. So I actually went to school in Belfast, which was where all the action happened. And this was a pretty common sight. The school I went to was pretty boring. They forced us to learn things like Latin. The school teachers weren't having much fun, the sports were very dirty or very painful. So I cleverly chose rowing, which I got very good at. And I was actually rowing for my school here until this fateful day, and I flipped over right in front of the entire school. And that was the finishing post right there. (Laughter) So this was extremely embarrassing. But our school at that time got a grant from the government, and they got an incredible computer -- the research machine 3DZ -- and they left the programming manuals lying around. And so students like myself with nothing to do, we would learn how to program it. Also around this time, at home, this was the computer that people were buying. It was called the Sinclair ZX80. This was a 1K computer, and you'd buy your programs on cassette tape. Actually I'm just going to pause for one second, because I heard that there's a prerequisite to speak here at TED -- you had to have a picture of yourself from the old days with big hair. So I brought a picture with big hair. (Laughter). I just want to get that out of the way. So after the Sinclair ZX80 came along the very cleverly named Sinclair ZX81. (Laughter) And -- you see the picture at the bottom? There's a picture of a guy doing homework with his son. That's what they thought they had built it for. The reality is we got the programming manual and we started making games for it. We were programming in BASIC, which is a pretty awful language for games, so we ended up learning Assembly language so we could really take control of the hardware. This is the guy that invented it, Sir Clive Sinclair, and he's showing his machine. You had this same thing in America, it was called the Timex Sinclair1000. To play a game in those days you had to have an imagination to believe that you were really playing "Battlestar Galactica." The graphics were just horrible. You had to have an even better imagination to play this game, "Death Rider." But of course the scientists couldn't help themselves. They started making their own video games. This is one of my favorite ones here, where they have rabbit breeding, so males choose the lucky rabbit. It was around this time we went from 1K to 16K, which was quite the leap. And if you're wondering how much 16K is, this eBay logo here is 16K. And in that amount of memory someone programmed a full flight simulation program. And that's what it looked like. I spent ages flying this flight simulator, and I honestly believed I could fly airplanes by the end of it. Here's Clive Sinclair now launching his color computer. He's recognized as being the father of video games in Europe. He's a multi-millionaire, and I think that's why he's smiling in this photograph. So I went on for the next 20 years or so making a lot of different games. Some of the highlights were things like "The Terminator," "Aladdin," the "Teenage Mutant Hero Turtles." Because I was from the United Kingdom, they thought the word ninja was a little too mean for children, so they decided to call it hero instead. I personally preferred the Spanish version, which was "Tortugas Ninja." That was much better. (Laughter) Then the last game I did was based on trying to get the video game industry and Hollywood to actually work together on something -- instead of licensing from each other, to actually work. Now, Chris did ask me to bring some statistics with me, so I've done that. The video game industry in 2005 became a 29 billion dollar business. It grows every year. Last year was the biggest year. By 2008, we're going to kick the butt of the music industry. By 2010, we're going to hit 42 billion. 43 percent of gamers are female. So there's a lot more female gamers than people are really aware. The average age of gamers? Well, obviously it's for children, right? Well, no, actually it's 30 years old. And interestingly, the people who buy the most games are 37. So 37 is our target audience. All video games are violent. Of course the newspapers love to beat on this. But 83 percent of games don't have any mature content whatsoever, so it's just not true. Online gaming statistics. I brought some stuff on "World of Warcraft." It's 5.5 million players. It makes about 80 million bucks a month in subscriptions. It costs 50 bucks just to install it on your computer, making the publisher about another 275 million. The game costs about 80 million dollars to make, so basically it pays for itself in about a month. A player in a game called "Project Entropia" actually bought his own island for 26,500 dollars. You have to remember that this is not a real island. He didn't actually buy anything, just some data. But he got great terms on it. This purchase included mining and hunting rights, ownership of all land on the island, and a castle with no furniture included. (Laughter) This market is now estimated at over 800 million dollars annually. And what's interesting about it is the market was actually created by the gamers themselves. They found clever ways to trade items and to sell their accounts to each other so that they could make money while they were playing their games. I dove onto eBay a couple of days ago just to see what was gong on, typed in World of Warcraft, got 6,000 items. I liked this one the best: a level 60 Warlock with lots of epics for 174,000 dollars. It's like that guy obviously had some pain while making it. So as far as popularity of games, what do you think these people are doing here? It turns out they're actually in Hollywood Bowl in Los Angeles listening to the L.A. Philharmonic playing video game music. That's what the show looks like. You would expect it to be cheesy, but it's not. It's very, very epic and a very beautiful concert. And the people that went there absolutely loved it. What do you think these people are doing? They're actually bringing their computers so they can play games against each other. And this is happening in every city around the world. This is happening in your local cities too, you're probably just not aware of it. Now, Chris told me that you had a timeline video a few years ago here just to show how video game graphics have been improving. I wanted to update that video and give you a new look at it. But what I want you to do is to try to understand it. We're on this curve, and the graphics are getting so ridiculously better. And I'm going to show you up to maybe 2007. But I want you to try and think about what games could look like 10 years from now. So we're going to start that video. Video: Throughout human history people have played games. As man's intellect and technology have evolved so too have the games he plays. (Music) (Applause) David Perry: The thing again I want you to think about is, don't look at these graphics and think of that's the way it is. Think about that's where we are right now, and the curve that we're on means that this is going to continue to get better. This is an example of the kind of graphics you need to be able to draw if you wanted to get a job in the video game industry today. You need to be really an incredible artist. And once we get enough of those guys, we're going to want more fantasy artists that can create places we've never been to before, or characters that we've just never seen before. So the obvious thing for me to talk about today is graphics and audio. But if you were to go to a game developers conference, what they're all talking about is emotion, purpose, meaning, understanding and feeling. You'll hear about talks like, can a video game make you cry? And these are the kind of topics we really actually care about. I came across a student who's absolutely excellent at expressing himself, and this student agreed that he would not show his video to anybody until you here at TED had seen it. So I'd like to play this video. So this is a student's opinion on what his experience of games are. Video: I, like many of you, live somewhere between reality and video games. Some part of me -- a true living, breathing person -- has become programmed, electronic and virtual. The boundary of my brain that divides real from fantasy has finally begun to crumble. I'm a video game addict and this is my story. (Music) In the year of my birth the Nintendo Entertainment System also went into development. I played in the backyard, learned to read, and even ate some of my vegetables. Most of my childhood was spent playing with Legos. But as was the case for most of my generation, I spent a lot of time in front of the TV. Mr. Rogers, Walt Disney, Nick Junior, and roughly half a million commercials have undoubtedly left their mark on me. When my parents bought my sister and I our first Nintendo, whatever inherent addictive quality this early interactive electronic entertainment possessed quickly took hold of me. At some point something clicked. (Music) With the combination of simple, interactive stories and the warmth of the TV set, my simple 16-bit Nintendo became more than just an escape. It became an alternate existence, my virtual reality. (Music) I'm a video game addict, and it's not because of a certain number of hours I have spent playing, or nights I have gone without sleep to finish the next level. It is because I have had life-altering experiences in virtual space, and video games had begun to erode my own understanding of what is real and what is not. I'm addicted, because even though I know I'm losing my grip on reality, I still crave more. (Music) From an early age I learned to invest myself emotionally in what unfolded before me on screen. Today, after 20 years of watching TV geared to make me emotional, even a decent insurance commercial can bring tears to my eyes. I am just one of a new generation that is growing up. A generation who may experience much more meaning through video games than they will through the real world. Video games are nearing an evolutionary leap, a point where game worlds will look and feel just as real as the films we see in theatres, or the news we watch on TV. And while my sense of free will in these virtual worlds may still be limited, what I do learn applies to my real life. Play enough video games and eventually you will really believe you can snowboard, fly a plane, drive a nine-second quarter mile, or kill a man. I know I can. Unlike any pop culture phenomenon before it, video games actually allow us to become part of the machine. They allow us to sublimate into the culture of interactive, downloaded, streaming, HD reality. We are interacting with our entertainment. I have come to expect this level of interaction. Without it, the problems faced in the real world -- poverty, war, disease and genocide -- lack the levity they should. Their importance blends into the sensationalized drama of prime time TV. But the beauty of video games today lies not in the lifelike graphics, the vibrating joysticks or virtual surround sound. It lies in that these games are beginning to make me emotional. I have fought in wars, feared for my own survival, watched my cohorts die on beaches and woods that look and feel more real than any textbook or any news story. The people who create these games are smart. They know what makes me scared, excited, panicked, proud or sad. Then they use these emotions to dimensionalize the worlds they create. A well-designed video game will seamlessly weave the user into the fabric of the virtual experience. As one becomes more experienced the awareness of physical control melts away. I know what I want and I do it. No buttons to push, no triggers to pull, just me and the game. My fate and the fate of the world around me lie inside my hands. I know violent video games make my mother worry. What troubles me is not that video game violence is becoming more and more like real life violence, but that real life violence is starting to look more and more like a video game. (Music) These are all troubles outside of myself. I, however, have a problem very close to home. Something has happened to my brain. (Music) Perhaps there is a single part of our brain that holds all of our gut instincts, the things we know to do before we even think. While some of these instincts may be innate, most are learned, and all of them are hardwired into our brains. These instincts are essential for survival in both real and virtual worlds. Only in recent years has the technology behind video games allowed for a true overlap in stimuli. As gamers we are now living by the same laws of physics in the same cities and doing many of the same things we once did in real life, only virtually. Consider this -- my real life car has about 25,000 miles on it. In all my driving games, I've driven a total of 31,459 miles. To some degree I've learned how to drive from the game. The sensory cues are very similar. It's a funny feeling when you have spent more time doing something on the TV than you have in real life. When I am driving down a road at sunset all I can think is, this is almost as beautiful as my games are. For my virtual worlds are perfect. More beautiful and rich than the real world around us. I'm not sure what the implications of my experience are, but the potential for using realistic video game stimuli in repetition on a vast number of loyal participants is frightening to me. Today I believe Big Brother would find much more success brainwashing the masses with video games rather than just simply TVs. Video games are fun, engaging, and leave your brain completely vulnerable to re-programming. But maybe brainwashing isn't always bad. Imagine a game that teaches us to respect each other, or helps us to understand the problems we're all facing in the real world. There is a potential to do good as well. It is critical, as these virtual worlds continue to mirror the real world we live in, that game developers realize that they have tremendous responsibilities before them. I'm not sure what the future of video games holds for our civilization. But as virtual and real world experiences increasingly overlap there is a greater and greater potential for other people to feel the same way I do. What I have only recently come to realize is that beyond the graphics, sound, game play and emotion it is the power to break down reality that is so fascinating and addictive to me. I know that I am losing my grip. Part of me is just waiting to let go. I know though, that no matter how amazing video games may become, or how flat the real world may seem to us, that we must stay aware of what our games are teaching us and how they leave us feeling when we finally do unplug. (Applause) DP: Wow. (Applause) I found that video very, very thought provoking, and that's why I wanted to bring it here for you guys to see. And what was interesting about it is the obvious choice for me to talk about was graphics and audio. But as you heard, Michael talked about all these other elements as well. Video games give an awful lot of other things too, and that's why people get so addicted. The most important one being fun. The name of this track is "The Magic To Come." Who is that going to come from? Is it going to come from the best directors in the world as we thought it probably would? I don't think so. I think it's going to come from the children who are growing up now that aren't stuck with all of the stuff that we remember from the past. They're going to do it their way, using the tools that we've created. The same with students or highly creative people, writers and people like that. As far as colleges go, there's about 350 colleges around the world teaching video game courses. That means there's literally thousands of new ideas. Some of the ideas are really dreadful and some of them are great. There's nothing worse than having to listen to someone try and pitch you a really bad video game idea. (Laughter) Chris Anderson: You're off, you're off. That's it. He's out of time. DP: I've just got a little tiny bit more if you'll indulge me. CA: Go ahead. I'm going to stay right here though. (Laughter) DP: This is just a cool shot, because this is students coming to school after class. The school is closed; they're coming back at midnight because they want to pitch their video game ideas. I'm sitting at the front of the class, and they're actually pitching their ideas. So it's hard to get students to come back to class, but it is possible. This is my daughter, her name's Emma, she's 17 months old. And I've been asking myself, what is Emma going to experience in the video game world? And as I've shown here, we have the audience. She's never going to know a world where you can't press a button and have millions of people ready to play. You know, we have the technology. She's never going to know a world where the graphics just aren't stunning and really immersive. And as the student video showed, we can impact and move. She's never going to know a world where video games aren't incredibly emotional and will probably make her cry. I just hope she likes video games. (Laughter) So, my closing thought. Games on the surface seem simple entertainment, but for those that like to look a little deeper, the new paradigm of video games could open entirely new frontiers to creative minds that like to think big. Where better to challenge those minds than here at TED? Thank you. Chris Anderson: David Perry. That was awesome.

I want to take you back basically to my hometown, and to a picture of my hometown of the week that "Emergence" came out. And it's a picture we've seen several times. Basically, "Emergence" was published on 9/11. I live right there in the West Village, so the plume was luckily blowing west, away from us. We had a two-and-a-half-day-old baby in the house that was ours -- we hadn't taken it from somebody else. (Laughter) And one of the thoughts that I had dealing with these two separate emergences of a book and a baby, and having this event happen so close -- that my first thought, when I was still kind of in the apartment looking out at it all or walking out on the street and looking out on it just in front of our building, was that I'd made a terrible miscalculation in the book that I'd just written. Because so much of that book was a celebration of the power and creative potential of density, of largely urban density, of connecting people and putting them together in one place, and putting them on sidewalks together and having them share ideas and share physical space together. And it seemed to me looking at that -- that tower burning and then falling, those towers burning and falling -- that in fact, one of the lessons here was that density kills. And that of all the technologies that were exploited to make that carnage come into being, probably the single group of technologies that cost the most lives were those that enable 50,000 people to live in two buildings 110 stories above the ground. If they hadn't been crowded -- you compare the loss of life at the Pentagon to the Twin Towers, and you can see that very powerfully. And so I started to think, well, you know, density, density -- I'm not sure if, you know, this was the right call. And I kind of ruminated on that for a couple of days. And then about two days later, the wind started to change a little bit, and you could sense that the air was not healthy. And so even though there were no cars still in the West Village where we lived, my wife sent me out to buy a, you know, a large air filter at the Bed Bath and Beyond, which was located about 20 blocks away, north. And so I went out. And obviously I'm physically a very strong person, as you can tell -- (Laughter) -- so I wasn't worried about carrying this thing 20 blocks. And I walked out, and this really miraculous thing happened to me as I was walking north to buy this air filter, which was that the streets were completely alive with people. There was an incredible -- it was, you know, a beautiful day, as it was for about a week after, and the West Village had never seemed more lively. I walked up along Hudson Street -- where Jane Jacobs had lived and written her great book that so influenced what I was writing in "Emergence" -- past the White Horse Tavern, that great old bar where Dylan Thomas drank himself to death, and the Bleecker Street playground was filled with kids. And all the people who lived in the neighborhood, who owned restaurants and bars in the neighborhood, were all out there -- had them all open. People were out. There were no cars, so it seemed even better, in some ways. And it was a beautiful urban day, and the incredible thing about it was that the city was working. The city was there. All the things that make a great city successful and all the things that make a great city stimulating -- they were all on display there on those streets. And I thought, well, this is the power of a city. I mean, the power of the city -- we talked about cities as being centralized in space, but what makes them so strong most of the time is they're decentralized in function. They don't have a center executive branch that you can take out and cause the whole thing to fail. If they did, it probably was right there at Ground Zero. I mean, you know, the emergency bunker was right there, was destroyed by the attacks, and obviously the damage done to the building and the lives. But nonetheless, just 20 blocks north, two days later, the city had never looked more alive. If you'd gone into the minds of the people, well, you would have seen a lot of trauma, and you would have seen a lot of heartache, and you would have seen a lot of things that would take a long time to recover. But the system itself of this city was thriving. So I took heart in seeing that. So I wanted to talk a little bit about the reasons why that works so well, and how some of those reasons kind of map on to where the Web is going right now. The question that I found myself asking to people when I was talking about the book afterwards is -- when you've talked about emergent behavior, when you've talked about collective intelligence, the best way to get people to kind of wrap their heads around that is to ask, who builds a neighborhood? Who decides that Soho should have this personality and that the Latin Quarter should have this personality? Well, there are some kind of executive decisions, but mostly the answer is -- everybody and nobody. Everybody contributes a little bit. No single person is really the ultimate actor behind the personality of a neighborhood. Same thing to the question of, who was keeping the streets alive post-9/11 in my neighborhood? Well, it was the whole city. The whole system kind of working on it, and everybody contributing a small little part. And this is increasingly what we're starting to see on the Web in a bunch of interesting ways -- most of which weren't around, actually, except in very experimental things, when I was writing "Emergence" and when the book came out. So it's been a very optimistic time, I think, and I want to just talk about a few of those things. I think that there is effectively a new kind of model of interactivity that's starting to emerge online right now. And the old one looked like this. This is not the future King of England, although it looks like it. It's some guy, it's a GeoCities homepage of some guy that I found online who's interested, if you look at the bottom, in soccer and Jesus and Garth Brooks and Clint Beckham and "my hometown" -- those are his links. But nothing really says this model of interactivity -- which was so exciting and captures the real, the Web Zeitgeist of 1995 -- than "Click here for a picture of my dog." That is -- you know, there's no sentence that kind of conjures up that period better than that, I think, which is that you suddenly have the power to put up a picture of your dog and link to it, and somebody reading the page has the power to click on that link or not click on that link. And, you know, I don't want to belittle that. That, in a sense -- to reference what Jeff was talking about yesterday -- that was, in a sense, the kind of interface electricity that powered a lot of the explosion of interest in the Web: that you could put up a link, and somebody could click on it, and it could take you anywhere you wanted to go. But it's still a very one-to-one kind of relationship. There's one person putting up the link, and there's another person on the other end trying to decide whether to click on it or not. The new model is much more like this, and we've already seen a couple of references to this. This is what happens when you search "Steven Johnson" on Google. About two months ago, I had the great breakthrough -- one of my great, kind of shining achievements -- which is that my website finally became a top result for "Steven Johnson." There's some theoretical physicist at MIT named Steven Johnson who has dropped two spots, I'm happy to say. (Laughter) And, you know, I mean, I'll look at a couple of things like this, but Google is obviously the greatest technology ever invented for navel gazing. It's just that there are so many other people in your navel when you gaze. Because effectively, what's happening here, what's creating this page, obviously -- and we all know this, but it's worth just thinking about it -- is not some person deciding that I am the number one answer for Steven Johnson, but rather somehow the entire web of people putting up pages and deciding to link to my page or not link to it, and Google just sitting there and running the numbers. So there's this collective decision-making that's going on. This page is effectively, collectively authored by the Web, and Google is just helping us kind of to put the authorship in one kind of coherent place. Now, they're more innovative -- well, Google's pretty innovative -- but there are some new twists on this. There's this incredibly interesting new site -- Technorati -- that's filled with lots of little widgets that are expanding on these. And these are looking in the blog world and the world of weblogs. He's analyzed basically all the weblogs out there that he's tracking. And he's tracking how many other weblogs linked to those weblogs, and so you have kind of an authority -- a weblog that has a lot of links to it is more authoritative than a weblog that has few links to it. And so at any given time, on any given page on the Web, actually, you can say, what does the weblog community think about this page? And you can get a list. This is what they think about my site; it's ranked by blog authority. You can also rank it by the latest posts. So when I was talking in "Emergence," I talked about the limitations of the one-way linking architecture that, basically, you could link to somebody else but they wouldn't necessarily know that you were pointing to them. And that was one of the reasons why the web wasn't quite as emergent as it could be because you needed two-way linking, you needed that kind of feedback mechanism to be able to really do interesting things. Well, something like Technorati is supplying that. Now what's interesting here is that this is a quote from Dave Weinberger, where he talks about everything being purposive in the Web -- there's nothing artificial. He has this line where he says, you know, you're going to put up a link there, if you see a link, somebody decided to put it there. And he says, the link to one site didn't just grow on the other page "like a tree fungus." And in fact, I think that's not entirely true anymore. I could put up a feed of all those links generated by Technorati on the right-hand side of my page, and they would change as the overall ecology of the Web changes. That little list there would change. I wouldn't really be directly in control of it. So it's much closer, in a way, to a data fungus, in a sense, wrapped around that page, than it is to a deliberate link that I've placed there. Now, what you're having here is basically a global brain that you're able to do lots of kind of experiments on to see what it's thinking. And there are all these interesting tools. Google does the Google Zeitgeist, which looks at search requests to test what's going on, what people are interested in, and they publish it with lots of fun graphs. And I'm saying a lot of nice things about Google, so I'll be I'll be saying one little critical thing. There's a problem with the Google Zeitgeist, which is it often comes back with news that a lot of people are searching for Britney Spears pictures, which is not necessarily news. The Columbia blows up, suddenly there are a lot of searches on Columbia. Well, you know, we should expect to see that. That's not necessarily something we didn't know already. So the key thing in terms of these new tools that are kind of plumbing the depths of the global brain, that are sending kind of trace dyes through that whole bloodstream -- the question is, are you finding out something new? And one of the things that I experimented with is this thing called Google Share which is basically, you take an abstract term, and you search Google for that term, and then you search the results that you get back for somebody's name. So basically, the number of pages that mention this term, that also mention this page, the percentage of those pages is that person's Google Share of that term. So you can do kind of interesting contests. Like for instance, this is a Google Share of the TED Conference. So Richard Saul Wurman has about a 15 percent Google Share of the TED conference. Our good friend Chris has about a six percent -- but with a bullet, I might add. (Laughter) But the interesting thing is, you can broaden the search a little bit. And it turns out, actually, that 42 percent is the Mola mola fish. I had no idea. No, that's not true. (Laughter) I made that up because I just wanted to put up a slide of the Mola mola fish. (Laughter) I also did -- and I don't want to start a little fight in the next panel -- but I did a Google Share analysis of evolution and natural selection. So right here -- now this is a big category, you have smaller percentages, so this is 0.7 percent -- Dan Dennett, who'll be speaking shortly. Right below him, 0.5 percent, Steven Pinker. So Dennett's in the lead a little bit there. But what's interesting is you can then broaden the search and actually see interesting things and get a sense of what else is out there. So Gary Bauer is not too far behind -- has slightly different theories about evolution and natural selection. And right behind him is L. Ron Hubbard. So -- (Laughter) you can see we're in the ascot, which is always good. And by the way, Chris, that would've been a really good panel, I think, right there. (Laughter) Hubbard apparently started to reach, but besides that, I think it would be good next year. Another quick thing -- this is a slightly different thing, but this analysis some of you may have seen. It just came out. This is bursty words, looking at the historical record of State of the Union Addresses. So these are words that suddenly start to appear out of nowhere, so they're kind of, you know, memes that start taking off, that didn't have a lot of historical precedent before. So the first one is -- these are the bursty words around 1860s -- slaves, emancipation, slavery, rebellion, Kansas. That's Britney Spears. I mean, you know, OK, interesting. They're talking about slavery in 1860. 1935 -- relief, depression, recovery banks. And OK, I didn't learn anything new there as well -- that's pretty obvious. 1985, right at the center of the Reagan years -- that's, we're, there's, we've, it's. (Laughter) Now, there's one way to interpret this, which is to say that "emancipation" and "depression" and "recovery" all have a lot of syllables. So you know, you can actually download -- it's hard to remember those. But seriously, actually, what you can see there, in a way that would be very hard to detect otherwise, is Reagan reinventing the political language of the country and shifting to a much more intimate, much more folksy, much more telegenic -- contracting all those verbs. You know, 20 years before it was still, "Ask not what you can do," but with Reagan, it's, "that's where, there's Nancy and I," that kind of language. And so something we kind of knew, but you didn't actually notice syntactically what he was doing. I'll go very quickly. The question now -- and this is the really interesting question -- is, what kind of higher-level shape is emerging right now in the overall Web ecosystem -- and particularly in the ecosystem of the blogs because they are really kind of at the cutting edge. And I think what happens there will also happen in the wider system. Now there was a very interesting article by Clay Shirky that got a lot of attention about a month ago, and this is basically the distribution of links on the web to all these various different blogs. It follows a power law, so that there are a few extremely well-linked to, popular blogs, and a long tail of blogs with very few links. So 20 percent of the blogs get 80 percent of the links. Now this is a very interesting thing. It's caused a lot of controversy because people thought that this was the ultimate kind of one man, one modem democracy, where anybody can get out there and get their voice heard. And so the question is, "Why is this happening?" It's not being imposed by fiat from above. It's an emergent property of the blogosphere right now. Now, what's great about it is that people are working on -- within seconds of Clay publishing this piece, people started working on changing the underlying rules of the system so that a different shape would start appearing. And basically, the shape appears largely because of a kind of a first-mover advantage. if you're the first site there, everybody links to you. If you're the second site there, most people link to you. And so very quickly you can accumulate a bunch of links, and it makes it more likely for newcomers to link to you in the future, and then you get this kind of shape. And so what Dave Sifry at Technorati started working on, literally as Shirky started -- after he published his piece -- was something that basically just gave a new kind of priority to newcomers. And he started looking at interesting newcomers that don't have a lot of links, that suddenly get a bunch of links in the last 24 hours. So in a sense, bursty weblogs coming from new voices. So he's working on a tool right there that can actually change the overall system. And it creates a kind of planned emergence. You're not totally in control, but you're changing the underlying rules in interesting ways because you have an end result which is maybe a more democratic spread of voices. So the most amazing thing about this -- and I'll end on this note -- is, most emergent systems, most self-organizing systems are not made up of component parts that are capable of looking at the overall pattern and changing their behavior based on whether they like the pattern or not. So the most wonderful thing, I think, about this whole debate about power laws and software that could change it is the fact that we're having the conversation. I hope it continues here. Thanks a lot.

The old story about climate protection is that it's costly, or it would have been done already. So government needs to make us do something painful to fix it. The new story about climate protection is that it's not costly, but profitable. This was a simple sign error, because it's cheaper to save fuel than to buy fuel, as is well known to companies that do it all the time -- for example, Dupont, SD micro electronics. Many other firms -- IBM -- are reducing their energy intensity routinely six percent a year by fixing up their plants, and they get their money back in two or three years. That's called a profit. Now, similarly, the old story about oil is that if we wanted to save very much of it, it would be expensive, or we would have done it already, because markets are essentially perfect. If, of course, that were true, there would be no innovation, and nobody could make any money. But the new story about oil is the government doesn't have to force us to do painful things to get off oil -- not just incrementally, but completely -- quite the contrary. The United States, for example, can completely eliminate its use of oil and rejuvenate the economy at the same time, led by business for profit, because it's so much cheaper to save and substitute for the oil than to keep on buying it. This process will also be catalyzed by the military for its own reasons of combat effectiveness and preventing conflict, particularly over oil. This thesis is set out in a book called "Winning the Oil Endgame" that four colleagues and I wrote and have posted for free at Oilendgame.com -- about 170,000 downloads so far. And it was co-sponsored by the Pentagon -- it's independent, it's peer-reviewed and all of the backup calculations are transparently posted for your perusal. Now, a bit of economic history, I think, may be helpful here. Around 1850, one of the biggest U.S. industries was whaling. And whale oil lit practically every building. But in the nine years before Drake struck oil, in 1859, at least five-sixths of that whale oil-illuminating market disappeared, thanks to fatal competitors, chiefly oil and gas made from coal, to which the whalers had not been paying attention. So, very unexpectedly, they ran out of customers before they ran out of whales. The remnant whale populations were saved by technological innovators and profit-maximizing capitalists. (Laughter) And it's funny -- it feels a bit like this now for oil. We've been spending the last few decades accumulating a very powerful backlog of technologies for saving and substituting for oil, and no one had bothered to add them up before. So when we did, we found some very surprising things. Now, there are two big reasons to be concerned about oil. Both national competitiveness and national security are at risk. On the competitiveness front, we all know that Toyota has more market cap than the big three put together. And serious competition from Europe, from Korea, and next is China, which will soon be a major net exporter of cars. How long do you think it will take before you can drive home your new wally-badged Shanghai automotive super-efficient car? Maybe a decade, according to my friends in Detroit. China has an energy policy based on radical energy efficiency and leap-frog technology. They're not going to export your uncle's Buick. And after that comes India. The point here is, these cars are going to be made super efficient. The question is, who will make them? Will we in the United States continue to import efficient cars to replace foreign oil, or will we make efficient cars and import neither the oil nor the cars? That seems to make more sense. The more we keep on using the oil, particularly the imported oil, the more we face a very obvious array of problems. Our analysis assumes that they all cost nothing, but nothing is not the right number. It could well be enough to double the oil price, for example. And one of the worst of these is what it does to our standing in the world if other countries think that everything we do is about oil, if we have to treat countries that have oil differently than countries that don't have oil. And our military get quite unhappy with having to stand guard on pipelines in Far-off-istan when what they actually signed up for was to protect American citizens. They don't like fighting over oil, they don't like being in the sands and they don't like where the oil money goes and what sort of instability it creates. Now, in order to avoid these problems, whatever you think they're worth, it's actually not that complicated. We can save half the oil by using it more efficiently, at a cost of 12 dollars per saved barrel. And then we can replace the other half with a combination of advanced bio-fuels and safe natural gas. And that costs on average under 18 dollars a barrel. And compared with the official forecast, that oil will cost 26 dollars a barrel in 2025, which is half of what we've been paying lately, that will save 70 billion dollars a year, starting quite soon. Now, in order to do this we need to invest about 180 billion dollars: half of it to retool the car, truck and plane industries; half of it to build the advanced bio-fuel industry. In the process, we will gain about a million good jobs, mainly rural. And protect another million jobs now at risk, mainly in auto-making. And we'll also get returns over 150 billion dollars a year. So that's a very handsome return. It's financeable in the private capital market. But if you want it for the reasons I just mentioned, to happen sooner and with higher confidence, then -- and also to expand choice and manage risk -- then you might like some light-handed public policies that support rather than distorting or opposing the business logic. And these policies work fine without taxes, subsidies or mandates. They make a little net money for the treasury. They have a broad trans-ideological appeal, and because we want them actually to happen, we figured out ways to do them that do not require much, if any, federal legislation, and can, indeed, be done administratively or at a state level. Just to illustrate what to do about the nub of the problem, namely, light vehicles, here are four ultra-light carbon-composite concept cars with low drag, and all but the one at the upper left have hybrid drive. You can sort of have it all with these things. For example, this Opel two-seater does 155 miles an hour at 94 miles a gallon. This muscle car from Toyota: 408 horsepower in an ultra-light that does zero to 60 in well under four seconds, and still gets 32 miles a gallon. I'll say more later about this. And in the upper left, a pioneering effort 14 years ago by GM -- 84 miles a gallon without even using a hybrid, in a four-seater. Well, saving that fuel, 69 percent of the fuel in light vehicles costs about 57 cents per saved gallon. But it's even a better deal for heavy trucks, where you save a similar amount at 25 cents a gallon, with better aerodynamics and tires and engines, and so on, and taking out weight so you can put it into payload. So you can double efficiency with a 60 percent internal rate of return. Then you can go even further, almost tripling efficiency with some operational improvements, double the big haulers' margins. And we intend to use those numbers to create demand pull, and flip the market. In the airplane business, it's again a similar story where the first 20 percent fuel saving is free, as Boeing is now demonstrating in its new Dreamliner. But then the next generation of planes saves about half. Again, much cheaper than buying the fuel. And if you go over the next 15 years or so to a blended-wing body, kind of a flying wing with internal engines, then you get about a factor three efficiency improvement at comparable or lower cost. Let me focus a minute on the light vehicles, the cars and light trucks, because we all know the most about those; probably everybody here drives one. And yet we may not realize that in a standard sedan, of all the fuel energy you feed into the car, seven-eighths never gets to the wheels; it's lost first in the engine, idling at zero miles a gallon, the power train and accessories. So then of the energy that does get to the wheels, only an eighth of it, half of that, goes to heat the tires on the road, or to heat the air the car pushes aside. And only this little bit, only six percent actually ends up accelerating the car and then heating the brakes when you stop. In fact, since 95 percent of the weight you're moving is the car not the driver, less than one percent of the fuel energy ends up moving the driver. This is not very gratifying after more than a century of devoted engineering effort. (Laughter) (Applause) Moreover, three-fourths of the fuel use is caused by the weight of the car. And it's obvious from the diagram that every unit of energy you save at the wheels is going to avoid wasting another seven units of energy getting that energy to the wheels. So there's huge leverage for making the car a lot lighter. And the reason this has not been very seriously examined before is there was a common assumption in the industry that -- well, then it might not be safe if you got whacked by a heavy car, and it would cost a lot more to make, because the only way we know how to make cars much lighter was to use expensive light metals like aluminum and magnesium. But these objections are now vanishing through advances in materials. For example, we use a lot of carbon-fiber composites in sporting goods. And it turns out that these are quite remarkable for safety. Here's a handmade McLaren SLR carbon car that got t-boned by a Golf. The Golf was totaled. The McLaren just popped off and scratched the side panel. They'll pop it back on and fix the scratch later. But if this McLaren were to run into a wall at 65 miles an hour, the entire crash energy would be absorbed by a couple of woven carbon-fiber composite cones, weighing a total of 15 pounds, hidden in the front end. Because these materials could actually absorb six to 12 times as much energy per pound as steel, and do so a lot more smoothly. And this means we've just cracked the conundrum of safety and weight. We could make cars bigger, which is protective, but make them light. Whereas if we made them heavy, they'd be both hostile and inefficient. And when you make them light in the right way, that can be simpler and cheaper to make. You can end up saving money, and lives, and oil, all at the same time. I showed here two years ago a little bit about a design of your basic, uncompromised, quintupled-efficiency suburban-assault vehicle -- (Laughter) -- and this is a complete virtual design that is production-costed manufacturable. And the process needed to make it is actually coming toward the market quite nicely. We figured out a kind of a digital inkjet printer for this very stiff, strong, carbon-composite material, and then ways to thermoform it, because it's a combination of carbon and nylon, into whatever complex shapes you want, like the one just shown at the auto show by one of the tier-one suppliers. And the manufacturing you can do this way gets radically simplified. Because the auto body has only, say, 14 parts, instead of 100, 150. Each one is formed by one fairly cheap die set, instead of four expensive ones for stamping steel. Each of the parts can be easily lifted with no hoist. They snap together like a kid's toy. So you got rid of the body shop. And if you want, you can lay color in the mold, and get rid of the paint shop. Those are the two hardest and costliest parts of making a car. So you end up with at least two-fifths lower capital intensity than the leanest plant in the industry, which GM has in Lansing. The plant also gets smaller. Now, when you go through a similar analysis for every way we use oil, including buildings, industry, feedstocks and so on, you find that of the 28 million barrels a day the government says we will need in 2025, well, about eight of that can be removed by efficiency by then, with another seven still being saved as the vehicle stocks turn over, at an average cost of only 12 bucks a barrel, instead of 26 for buying the oil. And then another six can be made robustly, competitively, from cellulosic ethanol and a little bio-diesel, without interfering at all with the water or land needs of crop production. There is a huge amount of gas to be saved, about half the projected gas at about an eighth of its price. And here are some no-brainer substitutions of it, with lots left over. So much, in fact, that after you've handled the domestic oil forecast from areas already approved, you have only this little bit left, and let's see how we can meet that, because there's a pretty flexible menu of ways. We could, of course, buy more efficiency. Maybe you ought to buy efficiency at 26 bucks instead of 12. Or wait to capture the second half of it. Or we could, of course, just get this little bit by continuing to import some Canadian and Mexican oil, or the ethanol the Brazilians would love to sell us. But they'll sell it to Japan and China instead, because we have tariff barriers to protect our corn farmers, and they don't. Or we could use the saved gas directly to cover all of this balance, or if we used it as hydrogen, which is more profitable and efficient, we'd get rid of the domestic oil too. And that doesn't even count, for example, that available land in the Dakotas can cost effectively make enough wind power to run every highway vehicle in the country. So we have lots of options. And the choice of menu and timing is quite flexible. Now, to make this happen quicker and with higher confidence, there is a few ways government could help. For example, fee-bates, a combination of a fee and a rebate in any size class of vehicle you want, can increase the price of inefficient vehicles and correspondingly pay you a rebate for efficient vehicles. You're not paid to change size class. You are paid to pick efficiency within a size class, in a way equivalent to looking at all fourteen years of life-cycle fuel savings rather than just the first two or three. This expands choice rapidly in the market, and actually makes more money for automakers as well. I'd like to deal with the lack of affordable personal mobility in this country by making it very cheaply possible for low-income families to get efficient, reliable, warranted new cars that they could otherwise never get. And for each car so financed, scrap almost one clunker, preferably the dirtiest ones. This creates a new million-car-a-year market for Detroit from customers they weren't going to get otherwise, because they weren't creditworthy and could never afford a new car. And Detroit will make money on every unit. It turns out that if, say, African-American and white households had the same car ownership, it would cut employment disparity about in half by providing better access to job opportunities. So this is a huge social win, too. Governments buy hundreds of thousands of cars a year. There are smart ways to buy them and to aggregate that purchasing power to bring very efficient vehicles into the market faster. And we could even do an X Prize-style golden carrot that's worth stretching further for. For example, a billion-dollar prize for the first U.S. automaker to sell 200,000 really advanced vehicles, like some you saw earlier. Then the legacy airlines can't afford to buy the efficient new planes they desperately need to cut their fuel bills, but if you felt philosophically you wanted to do anything about that, there are ways to finance it. And at the same time to scrap inefficient old planes, so that if they were otherwise to come back in the air, they would waste more oil, and block the uptake of efficient, new planes. Those part inefficient planes are worth more to society dead than alive. We ought to take them out back and shoot them, and put bounty hunters after them. Then there's an important military role. That in creating the move to high-volume, low-cost commercial production of these kinds of materials, or for that matter, ultra-light steels that are a good backup technology, the military can do the trick it did in turning DARPAnet into the Internet. Just turn it over to the private sector, and we have an Internet. The same for GPS. The same for the modern semi-conductor industry. That is, military science and technology that they need can create the advanced materials-industrial cluster that transforms its civilian economy and gets the country off oil, which would be a huge contribution to eliminating conflict over oil and advancing national and global security. Then we need to retool the car industry and do retraining, and shift the convergence of the energy and ag-value chains to shift faster from hydrocarbons to carbohydrates, and get out of our own way in other ways. And make the transition to more efficient vehicles go faster. But here's how the whole thing fits together. Instead of official forecasts of oil use and oil imports going forever up, they can turn down with the 12 dollars a barrel efficiency, down steeply by adding the supply-side substitutions at 18 bucks, all implemented at slower rates than we've done before when we paid attention. And if we start adding tranches of hydrogen in there, we are rapidly off imports and completely off oil in the 2040s. And the one thing I'd like to point out here is that we've done this before. In this eight-year period, 1977 to 85, when we last paid attention, the economy grew 27 percent, oil use fell 17 percent, oil imports fell 50 percent, oil imports from the Persian Gulf fell 87 percent. They would have been gone if we'd kept that up one more year. Well, that was with very old technologies and delivery methods. We could rerun that play a lot better now. And yet what we proved then is the U.S. has more market power than OPEC. Ours is on the demand side. We are the Saudi Arabia of "nega-barrels." (Laughter) We can use less oil faster than they can conveniently sell less oil. (Applause) Whatever your reason for wanting to do this, whether you're concerned about national security or price volatility -- (Laughter) -- or jobs, or the planet, or your grand-kids, it seems to me that this is an oil endgame that we should all be playing to win. Please download your copy, and thank you very much. (Applause)

When I was nine years old I went off to summer camp for the first time. And my mother packed me a suitcase full of books, which to me seemed like a perfectly natural thing to do. Because in my family, reading was the primary group activity. And this might sound antisocial to you, but for us it was really just a different way of being social. You have the animal warmth of your family sitting right next to you, but you are also free to go roaming around the adventureland inside your own mind. And I had this idea that camp was going to be just like this, but better. (Laughter) I had a vision of 10 girls sitting in a cabin cozily reading books in their matching nightgowns. (Laughter) Camp was more like a keg party without any alcohol. And on the very first day our counselor gathered us all together and she taught us a cheer that she said we would be doing every day for the rest of the summer to instill camp spirit. And it went like this: "R-O-W-D-I-E, that's the way we spell rowdie. Rowdie, rowdie, let's get rowdie." Yeah. So I couldn't figure out for the life of me why we were supposed to be so rowdy, or why we had to spell this word incorrectly. (Laughter) But I recited a cheer. I recited a cheer along with everybody else. I did my best. And I just waited for the time that I could go off and read my books. But the first time that I took my book out of my suitcase, the coolest girl in the bunk came up to me and she asked me, "Why are you being so mellow?" -- mellow, of course, being the exact opposite of R-O-W-D-I-E. And then the second time I tried it, the counselor came up to me with a concerned expression on her face and she repeated the point about camp spirit and said we should all work very hard to be outgoing. And so I put my books away, back in their suitcase, and I put them under my bed, and there they stayed for the rest of the summer. And I felt kind of guilty about this. I felt as if the books needed me somehow, and they were calling out to me and I was forsaking them. But I did forsake them and I didn't open that suitcase again until I was back home with my family at the end of the summer. Now, I tell you this story about summer camp. I could have told you 50 others just like it -- all the times that I got the message that somehow my quiet and introverted style of being was not necessarily the right way to go, that I should be trying to pass as more of an extrovert. And I always sensed deep down that this was wrong and that introverts were pretty excellent just as they were. But for years I denied this intuition, and so I became a Wall Street lawyer, of all things, instead of the writer that I had always longed to be -- partly because I needed to prove to myself that I could be bold and assertive too. And I was always going off to crowded bars when I really would have preferred to just have a nice dinner with friends. And I made these self-negating choices so reflexively, that I wasn't even aware that I was making them. Now this is what many introverts do, and it's our loss for sure, but it is also our colleagues' loss and our communities' loss. And at the risk of sounding grandiose, it is the world's loss. Because when it comes to creativity and to leadership, we need introverts doing what they do best. A third to a half of the population are introverts -- a third to a half. So that's one out of every two or three people you know. So even if you're an extrovert yourself, I'm talking about your coworkers and your spouses and your children and the person sitting next to you right now -- all of them subject to this bias that is pretty deep and real in our society. We all internalize it from a very early age without even having a language for what we're doing. Now to see the bias clearly you need to understand what introversion is. It's different from being shy. Shyness is about fear of social judgment. Introversion is more about, how do you respond to stimulation, including social stimulation. So extroverts really crave large amounts of stimulation, whereas introverts feel at their most alive and their most switched-on and their most capable when they're in quieter, more low-key environments. Not all the time -- these things aren't absolute -- but a lot of the time. So the key then to maximizing our talents is for us all to put ourselves in the zone of stimulation that is right for us. But now here's where the bias comes in. Our most important institutions, our schools and our workplaces, they are designed mostly for extroverts and for extroverts' need for lots of stimulation. And also we have this belief system right now that I call the new groupthink, which holds that all creativity and all productivity comes from a very oddly gregarious place. So if you picture the typical classroom nowadays: When I was going to school, we sat in rows. We sat in rows of desks like this, and we did most of our work pretty autonomously. But nowadays, your typical classroom has pods of desks -- four or five or six or seven kids all facing each other. And kids are working in countless group assignments. Even in subjects like math and creative writing, which you think would depend on solo flights of thought, kids are now expected to act as committee members. And for the kids who prefer to go off by themselves or just to work alone, those kids are seen as outliers often or, worse, as problem cases. And the vast majority of teachers reports believing that the ideal student is an extrovert as opposed to an introvert, even though introverts actually get better grades and are more knowledgeable, according to research. (Laughter) Okay, same thing is true in our workplaces. Now, most of us work in open plan offices, without walls, where we are subject to the constant noise and gaze of our coworkers. And when it comes to leadership, introverts are routinely passed over for leadership positions, even though introverts tend to be very careful, much less likely to take outsize risks -- which is something we might all favor nowadays. And interesting research by Adam Grant at the Wharton School has found that introverted leaders often deliver better outcomes than extroverts do, because when they are managing proactive employees, they're much more likely to let those employees run with their ideas, whereas an extrovert can, quite unwittingly, get so excited about things that they're putting their own stamp on things, and other people's ideas might not as easily then bubble up to the surface. Now in fact, some of our transformative leaders in history have been introverts. I'll give you some examples. Eleanor Roosevelt, Rosa Parks, Gandhi -- all these peopled described themselves as quiet and soft-spoken and even shy. And they all took the spotlight, even though every bone in their bodies was telling them not to. And this turns out to have a special power all its own, because people could feel that these leaders were at the helm, not because they enjoyed directing others and not out of the pleasure of being looked at; they were there because they had no choice, because they were driven to do what they thought was right. Now I think at this point it's important for me to say that I actually love extroverts. I always like to say some of my best friends are extroverts, including my beloved husband. And we all fall at different points, of course, along the introvert/extrovert spectrum. Even Carl Jung, the psychologist who first popularized these terms, said that there's no such thing as a pure introvert or a pure extrovert. He said that such a man would be in a lunatic asylum, if he existed at all. And some people fall smack in the middle of the introvert/extrovert spectrum, and we call these people ambiverts. And I often think that they have the best of all worlds. But many of us do recognize ourselves as one type or the other. And what I'm saying is that culturally we need a much better balance. We need more of a yin and yang between these two types. This is especially important when it comes to creativity and to productivity, because when psychologists look at the lives of the most creative people, what they find are people who are very good at exchanging ideas and advancing ideas, but who also have a serious streak of introversion in them. And this is because solitude is a crucial ingredient often to creativity. So Darwin, he took long walks alone in the woods and emphatically turned down dinner party invitations. Theodor Geisel, better known as Dr. Seuss, he dreamed up many of his amazing creations in a lonely bell tower office that he had in the back of his house in La Jolla, California. And he was actually afraid to meet the young children who read his books for fear that they were expecting him this kind of jolly Santa Claus-like figure and would be disappointed with his more reserved persona. Steve Wozniak invented the first Apple computer sitting alone in his cubical in Hewlett-Packard where he was working at the time. And he says that he never would have become such an expert in the first place had he not been too introverted to leave the house when he was growing up. Now of course, this does not mean that we should all stop collaborating -- and case in point, is Steve Wozniak famously coming together with Steve Jobs to start Apple Computer -- but it does mean that solitude matters and that for some people it is the air that they breathe. And in fact, we have known for centuries about the transcendent power of solitude. It's only recently that we've strangely begun to forget it. If you look at most of the world's major religions, you will find seekers -- Moses, Jesus, Buddha, Muhammad -- seekers who are going off by themselves alone to the wilderness where they then have profound epiphanies and revelations that they then bring back to the rest of the community. So no wilderness, no revelations. This is no surprise though if you look at the insights of contemporary psychology. It turns out that we can't even be in a group of people without instinctively mirroring, mimicking their opinions. Even about seemingly personal and visceral things like who you're attracted to, you will start aping the beliefs of the people around you without even realizing that that's what you're doing. And groups famously follow the opinions of the most dominant or charismatic person in the room, even though there's zero correlation between being the best talker and having the best ideas -- I mean zero. So ... (Laughter) You might be following the person with the best ideas, but you might not. And do you really want to leave it up to chance? Much better for everybody to go off by themselves, generate their own ideas freed from the distortions of group dynamics, and then come together as a team to talk them through in a well-managed environment and take it from there. Now if all this is true, then why are we getting it so wrong? Why are we setting up our schools this way and our workplaces? And why are we making these introverts feel so guilty about wanting to just go off by themselves some of the time? One answer lies deep in our cultural history. Western societies, and in particular the U.S., have always favored the man of action over the man of contemplation and "man" of contemplation. But in America's early days, we lived in what historians call a culture of character, where we still, at that point, valued people for their inner selves and their moral rectitude. And if you look at the self-help books from this era, they all had titles with things like "Character, the Grandest Thing in the World." And they featured role models like Abraham Lincoln who was praised for being modest and unassuming. Ralph Waldo Emerson called him "A man who does not offend by superiority." But then we hit the 20th century and we entered a new culture that historians call the culture of personality. What happened is we had evolved an agricultural economy to a world of big business. And so suddenly people are moving from small towns to the cities. And instead of working alongside people they've known all their lives, now they are having to prove themselves in a crowd of strangers. So, quite understandably, qualities like magnetism and charisma suddenly come to seem really important. And sure enough, the self-help books change to meet these new needs and they start to have names like "How to Win Friends and Influence People." And they feature as their role models really great salesmen. So that's the world we're living in today. That's our cultural inheritance. Now none of this is to say that social skills are unimportant, and I'm also not calling for the abolishing of teamwork at all. The same religions who send their sages off to lonely mountain tops also teach us love and trust. And the problems that we are facing today in fields like science and in economics are so vast and so complex that we are going to need armies of people coming together to solve them working together. But I am saying that the more freedom that we give introverts to be themselves, the more likely that they are to come up with their own unique solutions to these problems. So now I'd like to share with you what's in my suitcase today. Guess what? Books. I have a suitcase full of books. Here's Margaret Atwood, "Cat's Eye." Here's a novel by Milan Kundera. And here's "The Guide for the Perplexed" by Maimonides. But these are not exactly my books. I brought these books with me because they were written by my grandfather's favorite authors. My grandfather was a rabbi and he was a widower who lived alone in a small apartment in Brooklyn that was my favorite place in the world when I was growing up, partly because it was filled with his very gentle, very courtly presence and partly because it was filled with books. I mean literally every table, every chair in this apartment had yielded its original function to now serve as a surface for swaying stacks of books. Just like the rest of my family, my grandfather's favorite thing to do in the whole world was to read. But he also loved his congregation, and you could feel this love in the sermons that he gave every week for the 62 years that he was a rabbi. He would takes the fruits of each week's reading and he would weave these intricate tapestries of ancient and humanist thought. And people would come from all over to hear him speak. But here's the thing about my grandfather. Underneath this ceremonial role, he was really modest and really introverted -- so much so that when he delivered these sermons, he had trouble making eye contact with the very same congregation that he had been speaking to for 62 years. And even away from the podium, when you called him to say hello, he would often end the conversation prematurely for fear that he was taking up too much of your time. But when he died at the age of 94, the police had to close down the streets of his neighborhood to accommodate the crowd of people who came out to mourn him. And so these days I try to learn from my grandfather's example in my own way. So I just published a book about introversion, and it took me about seven years to write. And for me, that seven years was like total bliss, because I was reading, I was writing, I was thinking, I was researching. It was my version of my grandfather's hours of the day alone in his library. But now all of a sudden my job is very different, and my job is to be out here talking about it, talking about introversion. (Laughter) And that's a lot harder for me, because as honored as I am to be here with all of you right now, this is not my natural milieu. So I prepared for moments like these as best I could. I spent the last year practicing public speaking every chance I could get. And I call this my "year of speaking dangerously." (Laughter) And that actually helped a lot. But I'll tell you, what helps even more is my sense, my belief, my hope that when it comes to our attitudes to introversion and to quiet and to solitude, we truly are poised on the brink on dramatic change. I mean, we are. And so I am going to leave you now with three calls for action for those who share this vision. Number one: Stop the madness for constant group work. Just stop it. (Laughter) Thank you. (Applause) And I want to be clear about what I'm saying, because I deeply believe our offices should be encouraging casual, chatty cafe-style types of interactions -- you know, the kind where people come together and serendipitously have an exchange of ideas. That is great. It's great for introverts and it's great for extroverts. But we need much more privacy and much more freedom and much more autonomy at work. School, same thing. We need to be teaching kids to work together, for sure, but we also need to be teaching them how to work on their own. This is especially important for extroverted children too. They need to work on their own because that is where deep thought comes from in part. Okay, number two: Go to the wilderness. Be like Buddha, have your own revelations. I'm not saying that we all have to now go off and build our own cabins in the woods and never talk to each other again, but I am saying that we could all stand to unplug and get inside our own heads a little more often. Number three: Take a good look at what's inside your own suitcase and why you put it there. So extroverts, maybe your suitcases are also full of books. Or maybe they're full of champagne glasses or skydiving equipment. Whatever it is, I hope you take these things out every chance you get and grace us with your energy and your joy. But introverts, you being you, you probably have the impulse to guard very carefully what's inside your own suitcase. And that's okay. But occasionally, just occasionally, I hope you will open up your suitcases for other people to see, because the world needs you and it needs the things you carry. So I wish you the best of all possible journeys and the courage to speak softly. Thank you very much. (Applause) Thank you. Thank you. (Applause)

(Music) ♪ It's all there in gospels ♪ ♪A Magdalene girl comes to pay her respects ♪ ♪ But her mind is awhirl ♪ ♪ When she finds the tomb empty ♪ ♪ Straw had been rolled ♪ ♪ Not a sign of a corpse ♪ ♪ In the dark and the cold ♪ ♪ When she reaches the door ♪ ♪ Sees an unholy sight ♪ ♪ There's a solitary figure and a halo of light ♪ ♪ He just carries on floating past Calvary Hill ♪ ♪ In an Almighty hurry ♪ ♪ Aye, but she might catch him still ♪ ♪ Tell me where are you gone, Lord ♪ ♪ And why in such haste? ♪ ♪ Oh don't hinder me, woman ♪ ♪ I've no time to waste ♪ ♪ For they're launching a boat on the morrow at noon ♪ ♪ And I have to be there before daybreak ♪ ♪ Oh I cannot be missing ♪ ♪ The lads'll expect me ♪ ♪ Why else would the Good Lord Himself resurrect me? ♪ ♪ For nothing'll stop me. I have to prevail ♪ ♪ Through the teeth of this tempest ♪ ♪ In the mouth of a gale ♪ ♪ May the angels protect me ♪ ♪ If all else should fail ♪ ♪ And the last ship sails ♪ ♪ Oh the roar of the chains ♪ ♪ And the cracking of timbers ♪ ♪ The noise at the end of the world in your ears ♪ ♪ As a mountain of steel makes its way to the sea ♪ ♪ And the last ship sails ♪ So I was born and raised in the shadow of a shipyard in a little town on the northeast coast of England. Some of my earliest memories are of giant ships blocking the end of my street, as well as the sun, for a lot of the year. Every morning as a child, I'd watch thousands of men walk down that hill to work in the shipyard. I'd watch those same men walking back home every night. It has to be said, the shipyard was not the most pleasant place to live next door to, or indeed work in. The shipyard was noisy, dangerous, highly toxic, with an appalling health and safety record. Despite that, the men and women who worked on those ships were extraordinarily proud of the work they did, and justifiably so. Some of the largest vessels ever constructed on planet Earth were built right at the end of my street. My grandfather had been a shipwright, and as a child, as there were few other jobs in the town, I would wonder with some anxiety whether that would be my destiny too. I was fairly determined that it wouldn't be. I had other dreams, not necessarily practical ones, but at the age of eight, I was bequeathed a guitar. It was a battered old thing with five rusty strings, and was out of tune, but quickly I learned to play it and realized that I'd found a friend for life, an accomplice, a co-conspirator in my plan to escape from this surreal industrial landscape. Well, they say if you dream something hard enough, it will come to pass. Either that, or I was extremely lucky, but this was my dream. I dreamt I would leave this town, and just like those ships, once they were launched, I'd never come back. I dreamt I'd become a writer of songs, that I would sing those songs to vast numbers of people all over the world, that I would be paid extravagant amounts of money, that I'd become famous, that I'd marry a beautiful woman, have children, raise a family, buy a big house in the country, keep dogs, grow wine, have rooms full of Grammy Awards, platinum discs, and what have you. So far, so good, right? (Laughter) And then one day, the songs stopped coming, and while you've suffered from periods of writer's block before, albeit briefly, this is something chronic. Day after day, you face a blank page, and nothing's coming. And those days turned to weeks, and weeks to months, and pretty soon those months have turned into years with very little to show for your efforts. No songs. So you start asking yourself questions. What have I done to offend the gods that they would abandon me so? Is the gift of songwriting taken away as easily as it seems to have been bestowed? Or perhaps there's a more -- a deeper psychological reason. It was always a Faustian pact anyway. You're rewarded for revealing your innermost thoughts, your private emotions on the page for the entertainment of others, for the analysis, the scrutiny of others, and perhaps you've given enough of your privacy away. And yet, if you look at your work, could it be argued that your best work wasn't about you at all, it was about somebody else? Did your best work occur when you sidestepped your own ego and you stopped telling your story, but told someone else's story, someone perhaps without a voice, where empathetically, you stood in his shoes for a while or saw the world through his eyes? Well they say, write what you know. If you can't write about yourself anymore, then who do you write about? So it's ironic that the landscape I'd worked so hard to escape from, and the community that I'd more or less abandoned and exiled myself from should be the very landscape, the very community I would have to return to to find my missing muse. And as soon as I did that, as soon as I decided to honor the community I came from and tell their story, that the songs started to come thick and fast. I've described it as a kind of projectile vomiting, a torrent of ideas, of characters, of voices, of verses, couplets, entire songs almost formed whole, materialized in front of me as if they'd been bottled up inside me for many, many years. One of the first things I wrote was just a list of names of people I'd known, and they become characters in a kind of three-dimensional drama, where they explain who they are, what they do, their hopes and their fears for the future. This is Jackie White. He's the foreman of the shipyard. My name is Jackie White, and I'm foreman of the yard, and you don't mess with Jackie on this quayside. I'm as hard as iron plate, woe betide you if you're late when we have to push a boat out on the spring tide. Now you can die and hope for heaven, but you need to work your shift, and I'd expect you all to back us to the hilt, for if St. Peter at his gate were to ask you why you're late, why, you tell him that you had to get a ship built. We build battleships and cruisers for Her Majesty the Queen, supertankers for Onassis, and all the classes in between, We built the greatest ship in tonnage what the world has ever seen ♪ And the only life worth knowing is in the shipyard ♪ ♪ Steel in the stockyard, iron in the soul ♪ ♪ Would conjure up a ship ♪ ♪ Where there used to be a hull ♪ ♪ And we don't know what we'll do ♪ ♪ If this yard gets sold ♪ ♪ For the only life worth knowing is in the shipyard ♪ (Applause) So having decided to write about other people instead of myself, a further irony is that sometimes you reveal more about yourself than you'd ever intended. This song is called "Dead Man's Boots," which is an expression which describes how difficult it is to get a job; in other words, you'd only get a job in the shipyard if somebody else died. Or perhaps your father could finagle you an apprenticeship at the age of 15. But sometimes a father's love can be misconstrued as controlling, and conversely, the scope of his son's ambition can seem like some pie-in-the-sky fantasy. (Music) ♪ You see these work boots in my hands ♪ ♪ They'll probably fit you now, my son ♪ ♪ Take them, they're a gift from me ♪ ♪ Why don't you try them on? ♪ ♪ It would do your old man good to see ♪ ♪ You walking in these boots one day ♪ ♪ And take your place among the men ♪ ♪ Who work upon the slipway ♪ ♪ These dead man's boots, though they're old and curled ♪ ♪ When a fellow needs a job and a place in the world ♪ ♪ And it's time for a man to put down roots ♪ ♪ And walk to the river in his old man's boots ♪ ♪ He said, "I'm dying, son, and asking ♪ ♪ That you do one final thing for me ♪ ♪ You're barely but a sapling, and you think that you're a tree ♪ ♪ If you need a seed to prosper ♪ ♪ You must first put down some roots ♪ ♪ Just one foot then the other in ♪ ♪ These dead man's boots" ♪ ♪ These dead man's boots, though they're old and curled ♪ ♪ When a fellow needs a job and a place in the world ♪ ♪ And it's time for a man to put down roots ♪ ♪ And walk to the river in his old man's boots ♪ ♪ I said, "Why in the hell would I do that? ♪ ♪ Why would I agree?" ♪ ♪ When his hand was all that I'd received ♪ ♪ As far as I remember ♪ ♪ It's not as if he'd spoiled me with his kindness ♪ ♪ Up to then, you see ♪ ♪ I'd a plan of my own and I'd quit this place ♪ ♪ When I came of age September ♪ ♪ These dead man's boots know their way down the hill ♪ ♪ They could walk there themselves, and they probably will ♪ ♪ I've plenty of choices, I've plenty other routes ♪ ♪ And you'll never see me walking in these dead man's boots ♪ ♪ What was it made him think ♪ ♪ I'd be happy ending up like him ♪ ♪ When he'd hardly got two halfpennies left ♪ ♪ Or a broken pot to piss in? ♪ ♪ He wanted this same thing for me ♪ ♪ Was that his final wish? ♪ ♪ He said, "What the hell are you gonna do?" ♪ ♪ I said, "Anything but this!" ♪ ♪ These dead man's boots know their way down the hill ♪ ♪ They can walk there themselves and they probably will ♪ ♪ But they won't walk with me ‘cause I'm off the other way ♪ ♪ I've had it up to here, I'm gonna have my say ♪ ♪ When all you've got left is that cross on the wall ♪ ♪ I want nothing from you, I want nothing at all ♪ ♪ Not a pension, nor a pittance, when your whole life is through ♪ ♪ Get this through your head, I'm nothing like you ♪ ♪ I'm done with all the arguments, there'll be no more disputes ♪ ♪ And you'll die before you see me in your dead man's boots ♪ (Applause) Thank you. So whenever they'd launch a big ship, they would invite some dignitary up from London on the train to make a speech, break a bottle of champagne over the bows, launch it down the slipway into the river and out to sea. Occasionally on a really important ship, they'd get a member of the royal family to come, Duke of Edinburgh, Princess Anne or somebody. And you have to remember, it wasn't that long ago that the royal family in England were considered to have magical healing powers. Sick children were held up in crowds to try and touch the cloak of the king or the queen to cure them of some terrible disease. It wasn't like that in my day, but we still got very excited. So it's a launch day, it's a Saturday, and my mother has dressed me up in my Sunday best. I'm not very happy with her. All the kids are out in the street, and we have little Union Jacks to wave, and at the top of the hill, there's a motorcycle cortege appears. In the middle of the motorcycles, there's a big, black Rolls-Royce. Inside the Rolls-Royce is the Queen Mother. This is a big deal. So the procession is moving at a stately pace down my street, and as it approaches my house, I start to wave my flag vigorously, and there is the Queen Mother. I see her, and she seems to see me. She acknowledges me. She waves, and she smiles. And I wave my flag even more vigorously. We're having a moment, me and the Queen Mother. She's acknowledged me. And then she's gone. Well, I wasn't cured of anything. It was the opposite, actually. I was infected. I was infected with an idea. I don't belong in this street. I don't want to live in that house. I don't want to end up in that shipyard. I want to be in that car. (Laughter) I want a bigger life. I want a life beyond this town. I want a life that's out of the ordinary. It's my right. It's my right as much as hers. And so here I am at TED, I suppose to tell that story, and I think it's appropriate to say the obvious that there's a symbiotic and intrinsic link between storytelling and community, between community and art, between community and science and technology, between community and economics. It's my belief that abstract economic theory that denies the needs of community or denies the contribution that community makes to economy is shortsighted, cruel and untenable. (Applause) The fact is, whether you're a rock star or whether you're a welder in a shipyard, or a tribesman in the upper Amazon, or the queen of England, at the end of the day, we're all in the same boat. ♪ Aye, the footmen are frantic in their indignation ♪ ♪ You see the queen's took a taxi herself to the station ♪ ♪ Where the porters, surprised by her lack of royal baggage ♪ ♪ Bustle her and three corgis to the rear of the carriage ♪ ♪ For the train it is crammed with all Europe's nobility ♪ ♪ And there's none of them famous for their compatibility ♪ ♪ There's a fight over seats ♪ ♪ "I beg pardon, Your Grace ♪ ♪ But you'll find that one's mine, so get back in your place!" ♪ ♪ "Aye, but where are they going?" ♪ ♪ All the porters debate ♪ ♪ "Why they're going to Newcastle and they daren't be late ♪ ♪ For they're launching a boat on the Tyne at high tide ♪ ♪ And they've come from all over, from far and from wide" ♪ ♪ There's the old Dalai Lama ♪ ♪ And the pontiff of Rome ♪ ♪ Every palace in Europe, and there's nay bugger home ♪ ♪ There's the Duchess of Cornwall and the loyal Prince of Wales ♪ ♪ Looking crushed and uncomfortable in his top hat and tails ♪ ♪ Well, they haven't got tickets ♪ ♪ Come now, it's just a detail ♪ ♪ There was no time to purchase and one simply has to prevail ♪ ♪ For we'll get to the shipyards or we'll end up in jail! ♪ ♪ When the last ship sails ♪ ♪ Oh the roar of the chains ♪ ♪ And the cracking of timbers ♪ ♪ The noise at the end of the world in your ears ♪ ♪ As a mountain of steel makes its way to the sea ♪ ♪ And the last ship sails ♪ ♪ And whatever you'd promised ♪ ♪ Whatever you've done ♪ ♪ And whatever the station in life you've become ♪ ♪ In the name of the Father, in the name of the Son ♪ ♪ And no matter the weave of this life that you've spun ♪ ♪ On the Earth or in Heaven or under the Sun ♪ ♪ When the last ship sails ♪ ♪ Oh the roar of the chains ♪ ♪ And the cracking of timbers ♪ ♪ The noise at the end of the world in your ears ♪ ♪ As a mountain of steel makes its way to the sea ♪ ♪ And the last ship sails ♪ Thanks very much for listening to my song. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. Okay, you have to join in if you know it. (Music) (Applause) ♪ Just a castaway ♪ ♪ An island lost at sea, oh ♪ ♪ Another lonely day ♪ ♪ With no one here but me, oh ♪ ♪ More loneliness than any man could bear ♪ ♪ Rescue me before I fall into despair ♪ ♪ I'll send an S.O.S. to the world ♪ ♪ I'll send an S.O.S. to the world ♪ ♪ I hope that someone gets my ♪ ♪ I hope that someone gets my ♪ ♪ I hope that someone gets my ♪ ♪ Message in a bottle ♪ ♪ Message in a bottle ♪ ♪ A year has passed since I wrote my note ♪ ♪ I should have known this right from the start ♪ ♪ Only hope can keep me together ♪ ♪ Love can mend your life ♪ ♪ but love can break your heart ♪ ♪ I'll send an S.O.S. to the world ♪ ♪ I'll send an S.O.S. to the world ♪ ♪ I hope that someone gets my ♪ ♪ I hope that someone gets my ♪ ♪ I hope that someone gets my ♪ ♪ Message in a bottle ♪ ♪ Message in a bottle ♪ ♪ Message in a bottle ♪ ♪ Message in a bottle ♪ ♪ Walked out this morning ♪ ♪ I don't believe what I saw ♪ ♪ A hundred billion bottles ♪ ♪ Washed up on the shore ♪ ♪ Seems I'm not alone in being alone ♪ ♪ A hundred billion castaways ♪ ♪ Looking for a home ♪ ♪ I'll send an S.O.S. to the world ♪ ♪ I'll send an S.O.S. to the world ♪ ♪ I hope that someone gets my ♪ ♪ I hope that someone gets my ♪ ♪ I hope that someone gets my ♪ ♪ Message in a bottle ♪ ♪ Message in a bottle ♪ ♪ Message in a bottle ♪ ♪ Message in a bottle ♪ So I'm going to ask you to sing after me, okay, the next part. It's very easy. Sing in unison. Here we go. ♪ Sending out an S.O.S. ♪ Come on now. Audience: ♪ Sending out an S.O.S. ♪ Sting: ♪ Sending out an S.O.S. ♪ Audience: ♪ Sending out an S.O.S. ♪ Sting: ♪ I'm sending out an S.O.S. ♪ Audience: ♪ Sending out an S.O.S. ♪ Sting: ♪ Sending out an S.O.S. ♪ Audience: ♪ Sending out an S.O.S. ♪ Sting: ♪ Sending out ♪ ♪ Sending out an S.O.S. ♪ ♪ Sending out an S.O.S. ♪ ♪ Sending out an S.O.S. ♪ ♪ Sending out an S.O.S. ♪ ♪ Yoooooooo ♪ Thank you, TED. Goodnight. (Applause)

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

I'm almost like a crazy evangelical. I've always known that the age of design is upon us, almost like a rapture. If the day is sunny, I think, "Oh, the gods have had a good design day." Or, I go to a show and I see a beautiful piece by an artist, particularly beautiful, I say he's so good because he clearly looked to design to understand what he needed to do. So I really do believe that design is the highest form of creative expression. That's why I'm talking to you today about the age of design, and the age of design is the age in which design is still cute furniture, is still posters, is still fast cars, what you see at MoMA today. But in truth, what I really would like to explain to the public and to the audiences of MoMA is that the most interesting chairs are the ones that are actually made by a robot, like this beautiful chair by Dirk Vander Kooij, where a robot deposits a toothpaste-like slur of recycled refrigerator parts, as if he were a big candy, and makes a chair out of it. Or good design is digital fonts that we use all the time and that become part of our identity. I want people to understand that design is so much more than cute chairs, that it is first and foremost everything that is around us in our life. And it's interesting how so much of what we're talking about tonight is not simply design but interaction design. And in fact, interaction design is what I've been trying to insert in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art for a few years, starting not very timidly but just pointedly with works, for instance, by Martin Wattenberg -- the way a machine plays chess with itself, that you see here, or Lisa Strausfeld and her partners, the Sugar interface for One Laptop Per Child, Toshio Iwai's Tenori-On musical instruments, and Philip Worthington's Shadow Monsters, and John Maeda's Reactive Books, and also Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar's I Want You To Want Me. These were some of the first acquisitions that really introduced the idea of interaction design to the public. But more recently, I've been trying really to go even deeper into interaction design with examples that are emotionally really suggestive and that really explain interaction design at a level that is almost undeniable. The Wind Map, by Wattenberg and Fernanda Viégas, I don't know if you've ever seen it -- it's really fantastic. It looks at the territory of the United States as if it were a wheat field that is procured by the winds and that is really giving you a pictorial image of what's going on with the winds in the United States. But also, more recently, we started acquiring video games, and that's where all hell broke loose in a really interesting way. (Laughter) There are still people that believe that there's a high and there's a low. And that's really what I find so intriguing about the reactions that we've had to the anointment of video games in the MoMA collection. We've -- No, first of all, New York Magazine always gets it. I love them. So we are in the right quadrant. We are in the Highbrow -- that's daring, that's courageous -- and Brilliant, which is great. Timidly, we've been higher on the diagonal in other situations, but it's okay. It's good. It's good. It's good. (Laughter) But here comes the art critic. Oh, that was fantastic. So the first was Jonathan Jones from The Guardian. "Sorry, MoMA, video games are not art." Did I ever say they were art? I was talking about interaction design. Excuse me. "Exhibiting Pac-Man and Tetris alongside Picasso and Van Gogh" -- They're two floors away. (Laughter) — "will mean game over for any real understanding of art." I'm bringing in the end of the world. You know? We were talking about the rapture? It's coming. And Jonathan Jones is making it happen. So the same Guardian rebuts, "Are video games art: the debate that shouldn't be. Last week, Guardian art critic blah blah suggested that games cannot qualify as art. But is he right? And does it matter?" Thank you. Does it matter? You know, it's like once again there's this whole problem of design being often misunderstood for art, or the idea that is so diffuse that designers want to aspire to, would like to be called, artists. No. Designers aspire to be really great designers. Thank you very much. And that's more than enough. So my knight in shining armor, John Maeda, without any prompt, came out with this big declaration on why video games belong in the MoMA. And that was fantastic. And I thought that was it. But then there was another wonderfully pretentious article that came out in The New Republic, so pretentious, by Liel Leibovitz, and it said, "MoMA has mistaken video games for art." Again. "The museum is putting Pac-Man alongside Picasso." Again. "That misses the point." Excuse me. You're missing the point. And here, look, the above question is put bluntly: "Are video games art? No. Video games aren't art because they are quite thoroughly something else: code." Oh, so Picasso is not art because it's oil paint. Right? So it's so fantastic to see how these feathers that were ruffled, and these reactions, were so vehement. And you know what? The International Cat Video Film Festival didn't have that much of a reaction. (Laughter) I think this was truly fantastic. We were talking about dancing ponies, but I was really jealous of the Walker Arts Center for putting up this festival, because it's very, very wonderful. And there's this Flaubert quote that I love: "I have always tried to live in an ivory tower, but a tide of shit is beating at its walls, threatening to undermine it." I consider myself the tide of shit. (Laughter) (Applause) You know, we have to go through that. Even in the 1930s, my colleagues that were trying to put together an abstract art show had all of these works stopped by the customs officers that decided they were not art. So it's happened before, and it will happen in the future, but right now I can tell you that I am so, so proud to be able to call Pac-Man part of the MoMA collection. And the same with, for instance, Tetris, original version, the Soviet one. And you know, the amount of work -- yeah, Alexey Pajitnov was working for the Soviet government and that's how he developed Tetris, and Alexey himself reconstructed the whole game and even gave us a simulation of the cathode ray tube that makes it look slightly bombed. And it's fantastic. So behind these acquisitions is an enormous amount of work, because we're still the Museum of Modern Art, so even when we tackle popular culture, we tackle it as a form of interaction design and as something that has to go into the collection at MoMA, therefore, has to be researched. So to get to choosing Eric Chahi's wonderful Another World, amongst others, we put together a panel of experts, and we worked on this acquisition, and it's mostly myself and Kate Carmody and Paul Galloway. We worked on it for a year and a half. So many people helped us — designers of games, you might know Jamin Warren and his collaborators at Kill Screen magazine, and you know, Kevin Slavin. You name it. We bugged everybody, because we knew that we were ignorant. We were not real gamers enough, so we had to really talk to them. And so we decided, of course, to have Sim City 2000, not the other Sim City, that one in particular, so the criteria that we developed along the way were really strong, and were not only criteria of selection. They were also criteria of exhibition and of preservation. That's what makes this acquisition more than a little game or a little joke. It's truly a way to think of how to preserve and show artifacts that will more and more become part of our lives in the future. We live today, as you know very well, not in the digital, not in the physical, but in the kind of minestrone that our mind makes of the two. And that's really where interaction lies, and that's the importance of interaction. And in order to explain interaction, we need to really bring people in and make them realize how interaction is part of their lives. So when I talk about it, I don't talk only about video games, which are in a way the purest form of interaction, unadulterated by any kind of function or finality. I also talk about the MetroCard vending machine, which I consider a masterpiece of interaction. I mean, that interface is beautiful. It looks like a burly MTA guy coming out of the tunnel. You know, with your mitt you can actually paw the MetroCard, and I talk about how bad ATM machines usually are. So I let people understand that it's up to them to know how to judge interaction so as to know when it's good or when it's bad. So when I show The Sims, I try to make people really feel what it meant to have an interaction with The Sims, not only the fun but also the responsibility that came with the Tamagotchi. You know, video games can be truly deep even when they're completely mindless. I'm sure that all of you know Katamari Damacy. It's about rolling a ball and picking up as many objects as you can in a finite amount of time and hopefully you'll be able to make it into a planet. I've never made it into a planet, but that's it. Or, you know, Vib-Ribbon was not distributed here in the United States. It was a PlayStation game, but mostly for Japan. And it was one of the first video games in which you could choose your own music. So you would put into the PlayStation, you would put your own CD, and then the game would change alongside your music. So really fantastic. Not to mention Eve Online. Eve Online is an artificial universe, if you wish, but one of the diplomats that was killed in Benghazi, not Ambassador Stevens, but one of his collaborators, was a really big shot in Eve Online, so here you have a diplomat in the real world that spends his time in Eve Online to kind of test, maybe, all of his ideas about diplomacy and about universe-building, and to the point that the first announcement of the bombing was actually given on Eve Online, and after his death, several parts of the universe were named after him. And I was just recently at the Eve Online fan festival in Reykjavík that was quite amazing. I mean, we're talking about an experience that of course can seem weird to many, but that is very educational. Of course, there are games that are even more educational. Dwarf Fortress is like the holy grail of this kind of massive multiplayer online game, and in fact the two Adams brothers were in Reykjavík, and they were greeted by a standing ovation by all the Eve Online fans. It was amazing to see. And it's a beautiful game. So you start seeing here that the aesthetics that are so important to a museum collection like MoMA's are kept alive also by the selection of these games. And you know, Valve -- you know, Portal -- is an example of a video game in which you have a certain type of violence which also leads me to talk about one of the biggest issues that we had to discuss when we acquired the video games, what to do with violence. Right? We had to make decisions. At MoMA, interestingly, there's a lot of violence depicted in the art part of the collection, but when I came to MoMA 19 years ago, and as an Italian, I said, "You know what, we need a Beretta." And I was told, "No. No guns in the design collection." And I was like, "Why?" Interestingly, I learned that it's considered that in design and in the design collection, what you see is what you get. So when you see a gun, it's an instrument for killing in the design collection. If it's in the art collection, it might be a critique of the killing instrument. So it's very interesting. But we are acquiring our critical dimension also in design, so maybe one day we'll be able to acquire also the guns. But here, in this particular case, we decided, you know, with Kate and Paul, that we would have no gratuitous violence. So we have Portal because you shoot walls in order to create new spaces. We have Street Fighter II, because martial arts are good. (Laughter) But we don't have GTA because, maybe it's my own reflection, I've never been able to do anything but crashing cars and shooting prostitutes and pimps. So it was not very constructive. (Laughter) So, I'm making fun of it, but we discussed this for so many days. You have no idea. And to this day, I am ambivalent, but when you have instead games like Flow, there's no doubt. It's like, it's about serenity and it's about sublime. It's about experiencing what it means to be a sea creature. Then we have a few also side-scrollers -- classical ones. So it's quite a hefty collection. And right now, we started with the first 14, but we have several that are coming up, and the reason why we haven't acquired them yet is because you don't acquire just the game. You acquire the relationship with the company. What we want, what we aspire to, is the code. It's very hard to get, of course. But that's what would enable us to preserve the video games for a really long time, and that's what museums do. They also preserve artifacts for posterity. In absence of the code, because, you know, video game companies are not very forthcoming in some cases, in absence of that, we acquire the relationship with the company. We're going to stay with them forever. They're not going to get rid of us. And one day, we'll get that code. (Laughter) But I want to explain to you the criteria that we chose for interaction design. Aesthetics are really important. And I'm showing you Core War here, which is an early game that takes advantage aesthetically of the limitations of the processor. So the kind of interferences that you see here that look like beautiful barriers in the game are actually a consequence of the processor's limitedness, which is fantastic. So aesthetics is always important. And so is space, the spatial aspect of games. You know, I feel that the best video games are the ones that have really savvy architects that are behind them, and if they're not architects, bona fide trained in architecture, they have that feeling. But the spatial evolution in video games is extremely important. Time. The way we experience time in video games, as in other forms of interaction design, is really quite amazing. It can be real time or it can be the time within the game, as is in Animal Crossing, where seasons follow each other at their own pace. So time, space, aesthetics, and then, most important, behavior. The real core issue of interaction design is behavior. Designers that deal with interaction design behaviors that go to influence the rest of our lives. They're not just limited to our interaction with the screen. In this case, I'm showing you Marble Madness, which is a beautiful game in which the controller is a big sphere that vibrates with you, so you have a sphere that's moving in this landscape, and the sphere, the controller itself, gives you a sense of the movement. In a way, you can see how video games are the purest aspect of interaction design and are very useful to explain what interaction is. We don't want to show the video games with the paraphernalia. No arcade nostalgia. If anything, we want to show the code, and here you see Ben Fry's distellamap of Pac-Man, of the Pac-Man code. So the way we acquired the games is very interesting and very unorthodox. You see them here displayed alongside other examples of design, furniture and other parts, but there's no paraphernalia, no nostalagia, only the screen and a little shelf with the controllers. The controllers are, of course, part of the experience, so you cannot do away with it. But interestingly, this choice was not condemned too vehemently by gamers. I was afraid that they would kill us, and instead they understood, especially when I told them that I was trying to apply the same stratagem that Philip Johnson applied in 1934 when he wanted to make people understand the importance of design, and he took propeller blades and pieces of machinery and in the MoMA galleries he put them on white pedestals against white walls, as if they were Brancusi sculptures. He created this strange distance, this shock, that made people realize how gorgeous formally, and also important functionally, design pieces were. I would like to do the same with video games. By getting rid of the sticky carpets and the cigarette butts and everything else that we might remember from our childhood, I want people to understand that those are important forms of design. And in a way, the video games, the fonts and everything else lead us to make people understand a wider meaning for design. One of my dream acquisitions, which has been on hold for a few years but now will come back on the front burner, is a 747. I would like to acquire it, but without owning it. I don't want it to be at MoMA and possessed by MoMA. I want it to keep flying. So it's an acquisition where MoMA makes an arrangement with an airline and keeps the Boeing 747 flying. And the same with the "@" sign that we acquired a few years ago. It was the first example of an acquisition of something that is in the public domain. And what I say to people, it's almost as if a butterfly were flying by and we captured the shadow on the wall, and just we're showing the shadow. So in a way, we're showing a manifestation of something that is truly important and that is part of our identity but that nobody can have. And it's too long to explain the acquisition, but if you want to go on the MoMA blog, there's a long post where I explain why it's such a great example of design. Along the way, I've had to burn a few chairs. You know? I've had to do away with a few concepts of design past. But I see that people are coming along, that the audiences, paradoxically, are much more responsive and much more understanding of this expansion of design than some of my colleagues are. Design is truly everywhere, and design is as important as anything, and I'm so glad that, because of its diversity and because of its centrality to our lives, many more people are coming to it as a profession, as a passion, and as, very simply, part of their own culture. Thank you very much. (Applause)

So I have a strange career. I know it because people come up to me, like colleagues, and say, "Chris, you have a strange career." (Laughter) And I can see their point, because I started my career as a theoretical nuclear physicist. And I was thinking about quarks and gluons and heavy ion collisions, and I was only 14 years old. No, no, I wasn't 14 years old. But after that, I actually had my own lab in the computational neuroscience department, and I wasn't doing any neuroscience. Later, I would work on evolutionary genetics, and I would work on systems biology. But I'm going to tell you about something else today. I'm going to tell you about how I learned something about life. And I was actually a rocket scientist. I wasn't really a rocket scientist, but I was working at the Jet Propulsion Laboratory in sunny California where it's warm; whereas now I'm in the mid-West, and it's cold. But it was an exciting experience. One day a NASA manager comes into my office, sits down and says, "Can you please tell us, how do we look for life outside Earth?" And that came as a surprise to me, because I was actually hired to work on quantum computation. Yet, I had a very good answer. I said, "I have no idea." And he told me, "Biosignatures, we need to look for a biosignature." And I said, "What is that?" And he said, "It's any measurable phenomenon that allows us to indicate the presence of life." And I said, "Really? Because isn't that easy? I mean, we have life. Can't you apply a definition, like for example, a Supreme Court-like definition of life?" And then I thought about it a little bit, and I said, "Well, is it really that easy? Because, yes, if you see something like this, then all right, fine, I'm going to call it life -- no doubt about it. But here's something." And he goes, "Right, that's life too. I know that." Except, if you think life is also defined by things that die, you're not in luck with this thing, because that's actually a very strange organism. It grows up into the adult stage like that and then goes through a Benjamin Button phase, and actually goes backwards and backwards until it's like a little embryo again, and then actually grows back up, and back down and back up -- sort of yo-yo -- and it never dies. So it's actually life, but it's actually not as we thought life would be. And then you see something like that. And he was like, "My God, what kind of a life form is that?" Anyone know? It's actually not life, it's a crystal. So once you start looking and looking at smaller and smaller things -- so this particular person wrote a whole article and said, "Hey, these are bacteria." Except, if you look a little bit closer, you see, in fact, that this thing is way too small to be anything like that. So he was convinced, but, in fact, most people aren't. And then, of course, NASA also had a big announcement, and President Clinton gave a press conference, about this amazing discovery of life in a Martian meteorite. Except that nowadays, it's heavily disputed. If you take the lesson of all these pictures, then you realize, well actually maybe it's not that easy. Maybe I do need a definition of life in order to make that kind of distinction. So can life be defined? Well how would you go about it? Well of course, you'd go to Encyclopedia Britannica and open at L. No, of course you don't do that; you put it somewhere in Google. And then you might get something. And what you might get -- and anything that actually refers to things that we are used to, you throw away. And then you might come up with something like this. And it says something complicated with lots and lots of concepts. Who on Earth would write something as convoluted and complex and inane? Oh, it's actually a really, really, important set of concepts. So I'm highlighting just a few words and saying definitions like that rely on things that are not based on amino acids or leaves or anything that we are used to, but in fact on processes only. And if you take a look at that, this was actually in a book that I wrote that deals with artificial life. And that explains why that NASA manager was actually in my office to begin with. Because the idea was that, with concepts like that, maybe we can actually manufacture a form of life. And so if you go and ask yourself, "What on Earth is artificial life?", let me give you a whirlwind tour of how all this stuff came about. And it started out quite a while ago when someone wrote one of the first successful computer viruses. And for those of you who aren't old enough, you have no idea how this infection was working -- namely, through these floppy disks. But the interesting thing about these computer virus infections was that, if you look at the rate at which the infection worked, they show this spiky behavior that you're used to from a flu virus. And it is in fact due to this arms race between hackers and operating system designers that things go back and forth. And the result is kind of a tree of life of these viruses, a phylogeny that looks very much like the type of life that we're used to, at least on the viral level. So is that life? Not as far as I'm concerned. Why? Because these things don't evolve by themselves. In fact, they have hackers writing them. But the idea was taken very quickly a little bit further when a scientist working at the Scientific Institute decided, "Why don't we try to package these little viruses in artificial worlds inside of the computer and let them evolve?" And this was Steen Rasmussen. And he designed this system, but it really didn't work, because his viruses were constantly destroying each other. But there was another scientist who had been watching this, an ecologist. And he went home and says, "I know how to fix this." And he wrote the Tierra system, and, in my book, is in fact one of the first truly artificial living systems -- except for the fact that these programs didn't really grow in complexity. So having seen this work, worked a little bit on this, this is where I came in. And I decided to create a system that has all the properties that are necessary to see the evolution of complexity, more and more complex problems constantly evolving. And of course, since I really don't know how to write code, I had help in this. I had two undergraduate students at California Institute of Technology that worked with me. That's Charles Offria on the left, Titus Brown on the right. They are now actually respectable professors at Michigan State University, but I can assure you, back in the day, we were not a respectable team. And I'm really happy that no photo survives of the three of us anywhere close together. But what is this system like? Well I can't really go into the details, but what you see here is some of the entrails. But what I wanted to focus on is this type of population structure. There's about 10,000 programs sitting here. And all different strains are colored in different colors. And as you see here, there are groups that are growing on top of each other, because they are spreading. Any time there is a program that's better at surviving in this world, due to whatever mutation it has acquired, it is going to spread over the others and drive the others to extinction. So I'm going to show you a movie where you're going to see that kind of dynamic. And these kinds of experiments are started with programs that we wrote ourselves. We write our own stuff, replicate it, and are very proud of ourselves. And we put them in, and what you see immediately is that there are waves and waves of innovation. By the way, this is highly accelerated, so it's like a thousand generations a second. But immediately the system goes like, "What kind of dumb piece of code was this? This can be improved upon in so many ways so quickly." So you see waves of new types taking over the other types. And this type of activity goes on for quite awhile, until the main easy things have been acquired by these programs. And then you see sort of like a stasis coming on where the system essentially waits for a new type of innovation, like this one, which is going to spread over all the other innovations that were before and is erasing the genes that it had before, until a new type of higher level of complexity has been achieved. And this process goes on and on and on. So what we see here is a system that lives in very much the way we're used to life [going.] But what the NASA people had asked me really was, "Do these guys have a biosignature? Can we measure this type of life? Because if we can, maybe we have a chance of actually discovering life somewhere else without being biased by things like amino acids." So I said, "Well, perhaps we should construct a biosignature based on life as a universal process. In fact, it should perhaps make use of the concepts that I developed just in order to sort of capture what a simple living system might be." And the thing I came up with -- I have to first give you an introduction about the idea, and maybe that would be a meaning detector, rather than a life detector. And the way we would do that -- I would like to find out how I can distinguish text that was written by a million monkeys, as opposed to text that [is] in our books. And I would like to do it in such a way that I don't actually have to be able to read the language, because I'm sure I won't be able to. As long as I know that there's some sort of alphabet. So here would be a frequency plot of how often you find each of the 26 letters of the alphabet in a text written by random monkeys. And obviously each of these letters comes off about roughly equally frequent. But if you now look at the same distribution in English texts, it looks like that. And I'm telling you, this is very robust across English texts. And if I look at French texts, it looks a little bit different, or Italian or German. They all have their own type of frequency distribution, but it's robust. It doesn't matter whether it writes about politics or about science. It doesn't matter whether it's a poem or whether it's a mathematical text. It's a robust signature, and it's very stable. As long as our books are written in English -- because people are rewriting them and recopying them -- it's going to be there. So that inspired me to think about, well, what if I try to use this idea in order, not to detect random texts from texts with meaning, but rather detect the fact that there is meaning in the biomolecules that make up life. But first I have to ask: what are these building blocks, like the alphabet, elements that I showed you? Well it turns out, we have many different alternatives for such a set of building blocks. We could use amino acids, we could use nucleic acids, carboxylic acids, fatty acids. In fact, chemistry's extremely rich, and our body uses a lot of them. So that we actually, to test this idea, first took a look at amino acids and some other carboxylic acids. And here's the result. Here is, in fact, what you get if you, for example, look at the distribution of amino acids on a comet or in interstellar space or, in fact, in a laboratory, where you made very sure that in your primordial soup that there is not living stuff in there. What you find is mostly glycine and then alanine and there's some trace elements of the other ones. That is also very robust -- what you find in systems like Earth where there are amino acids, but there is no life. But suppose you take some dirt and dig through it and then put it into these spectrometers, because there's bacteria all over the place; or you take water anywhere on Earth, because it's teaming with life, and you make the same analysis; the spectrum looks completely different. Of course, there is still glycine and alanine, but in fact, there are these heavy elements, these heavy amino acids, that are being produced because these are valuable to the organism. And some other ones that are not used in the set of 20, they will not appear at all in any type of concentration. So this also turns out to be extremely robust. It doesn't matter what kind of sediment you're using to grind up, whether it's bacteria or any other plants or animals. Anywhere there's life, you're going to have this distribution, as opposed to that distribution. And it is detectable not just in amino acids. Now you could ask: well, what about these Avidians? The Avidians being the denizens of this computer world where they are perfectly happy replicating and growing in complexity. So this is the distribution that you get if, in fact, there is no life. They have about 28 of these instructions. And if you have a system where they're being replaced one by the other, it's like the monkeys writing on a typewriter. Each of these instructions appears with roughly the equal frequency. But if you now take a set of replicating guys like in the video that you saw, it looks like this. So there are some instructions that are extremely valuable to these organisms, and their frequency is going to be high. And there's actually some instructions that you only use once, if ever. So they are either poisonous or really should be used at less of a level than random. In this case, the frequency is lower. And so now we can see, is that really a robust signature? I can tell you indeed it is, because this type of spectrum, just like what you've seen in books, and just like what you've seen in amino acids, it doesn't really matter how you change the environment, it's very robust; it's going to reflect the environment. So I'm going to show you now a little experiment that we did. And I have to explain to you, the top of this graph shows you that frequency distribution that I talked about. Here, in fact, that's the lifeless environment where each instruction occurs at an equal frequency. And below there, I show, in fact, the mutation rate in the environment. And I'm starting this at a mutation rate that is so high that, even if you would drop a replicating program that would otherwise happily grow up to fill the entire world, if you drop it in, it gets mutated to death immediately. So there is no life possible at that type of mutation rate. But then I'm going to slowly turn down the heat, so to speak, and then there's this viability threshold where now it would be possible for a replicator to actually live. And indeed, we're going to be dropping these guys into that soup all the time. So let's see what that looks like. So first, nothing, nothing, nothing. Too hot, too hot. Now the viability threshold is reached, and the frequency distribution has dramatically changed and, in fact, stabilizes. And now what I did there is, I was being nasty, I just turned up the heat again and again. And of course, it reaches the viability threshold. And I'm just showing this to you again because it's so nice. You hit the viability threshold. The distribution changes to "alive!" And then, once you hit the threshold where the mutation rate is so high that you cannot self-reproduce, you cannot copy the information forward to your offspring without making so many mistakes that your ability to replicate vanishes. And then that signature is lost. What do we learn from that? Well, I think we learn a number of things from that. One of them is, if we are able to think about life in abstract terms -- and we're not talking about things like plants, and we're not talking about amino acids, and we're not talking about bacteria, but we think in terms of processes -- then we could start to think about life, not as something that is so special to Earth, but that, in fact, could exist anywhere. Because it really only has to do with these concepts of information, of storing information within physical substrates -- anything: bits, nucleic acids, anything that's an alphabet -- and make sure that there's some process so that this information can be stored for much longer than you would expect the time scales for the deterioration of information. And if you can do that, then you have life. So the first thing that we learn is that it is possible to define life in terms of processes alone, without referring at all to the type of things that we hold dear, as far as the type of life on Earth is. And that in a sense removes us again, like all of our scientific discoveries, or many of them -- it's this continuous dethroning of man -- of how we think we're special because we're alive. Well we can make life. We can make life in the computer. Granted, it's limited, but we have learned what it takes in order to actually construct it. And once we have that, then it is not such a difficult task anymore to say, if we understand the fundamental processes that do not refer to any particular substrate, then we can go out and try other worlds, figure out what kind of chemical alphabets might there be, figure enough about the normal chemistry, the geochemistry of the planet, so that we know what this distribution would look like in the absence of life, and then look for large deviations from this -- this thing sticking out, which says, "This chemical really shouldn't be there." Now we don't know that there's life then, but we could say, "Well at least I'm going to have to take a look very precisely at this chemical and see where it comes from." And that might be our chance of actually discovering life when we cannot visibly see it. And so that's really the only take-home message that I have for you. Life can be less mysterious than we make it out to be when we try to think about how it would be on other planets. And if we remove the mystery of life, then I think it is a little bit easier for us to think about how we live, and how perhaps we're not as special as we always think we are. And I'm going to leave you with that. And thank you very much. (Applause)

My title: "Queerer than we can suppose: the strangeness of science." "Queerer than we can suppose" comes from J.B.S. Haldane, the famous biologist, who said, "Now, my own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose. I suspect that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of, or can be dreamed of, in any philosophy." Richard Feynman compared the accuracy of quantum theories -- experimental predictions -- to specifying the width of North America to within one hair's breadth of accuracy. This means that quantum theory has got to be, in some sense, true. Yet the assumptions that quantum theory needs to make in order to deliver those predictions are so mysterious that even Feynman himself was moved to remark, "If you think you understand quantum theory, you don't understand quantum theory." It's so queer that physicists resort to one or another paradoxical interpretation of it. David Deutsch, who's talking here, in "The Fabric of Reality," embraces the many-worlds interpretation of quantum theory, because the worst that you can say about it is that it's preposterously wasteful. It postulates a vast and rapidly growing number of universes existing in parallel, mutually undetectable, except through the narrow porthole of quantum mechanical experiments. And that's Richard Feynman. The biologist Lewis Wolpert believes that the queerness of modern physics is just an extreme example. Science, as opposed to technology, does violence to common sense. Every time you drink a glass of water, he points out, the odds are that you will imbibe at least one molecule that passed through the bladder of Oliver Cromwell. (Laughter) It's just elementary probability theory. (Laughter) The number of molecules per glassful is hugely greater than the number of glassfuls, or bladdersful, in the world. And of course, there's nothing special about Cromwell or bladders -- you have just breathed in a nitrogen atom that passed through the right lung of the third iguanodon to the left of the tall cycad tree. "Queerer than we can suppose." What is it that makes us capable of supposing anything, and does this tell us anything about what we can suppose? Are there things about the universe that will be forever beyond our grasp, but not beyond the grasp of some superior intelligence? Are there things about the universe that are, in principle, ungraspable by any mind, however superior? The history of science has been one long series of violent brainstorms, as successive generations have come to terms with increasing levels of queerness in the universe. We're now so used to the idea that the Earth spins, rather than the Sun moves across the sky, it's hard for us to realize what a shattering mental revolution that must have been. After all, it seems obvious that the Earth is large and motionless, the Sun, small and mobile. But it's worth recalling Wittgenstein's remark on the subject: "Tell me," he asked a friend, "why do people always say it was natural for man to assume that the Sun went 'round the Earth, rather than that the Earth was rotating?" And his friend replied, "Well, obviously, because it just looks as though the Sun is going round the Earth." Wittgenstein replied, "Well, what would it have looked like if it had looked as though the Earth was rotating?" (Laughter) Science has taught us, against all intuition, that apparently solid things, like crystals and rocks, are really almost entirely composed of empty space. And the familiar illustration is the nucleus of an atom is a fly in the middle of a sports stadium, and the next atom is in the next sports stadium. So it would seem the hardest, solidest, densest rock is really almost entirely empty space, broken only by tiny particles so widely spaced they shouldn't count. Why, then, do rocks look and feel solid and hard and impenetrable? As an evolutionary biologist, I'd say this: our brains have evolved to help us survive within the orders of magnitude, of size and speed which our bodies operate at. We never evolved to navigate in the world of atoms. If we had, our brains probably would perceive rocks as full of empty space. Rocks feel hard and impenetrable to our hands, precisely because objects like rocks and hands cannot penetrate each other. It's therefore useful for our brains to construct notions like "solidity" and "impenetrability," because such notions help us to navigate our bodies through the middle-sized world in which we have to navigate. Moving to the other end of the scale, our ancestors never had to navigate through the cosmos at speeds close to the speed of light. If they had, our brains would be much better at understanding Einstein. I want to give the name "Middle World" to the medium-scaled environment in which we've evolved the ability to take act -- nothing to do with "Middle Earth" -- Middle World. (Laughter) We are evolved denizens of Middle World, and that limits what we are capable of imagining. We find it intuitively easy to grasp ideas like, when a rabbit moves at the sort of medium velocity at which rabbits and other Middle World objects move, and hits another Middle World object like a rock, it knocks itself out. May I introduce Major General Albert Stubblebine III, commander of military intelligence in 1983. "...[He] stared at his wall in Arlington, Virginia, and decided to do it. As frightening as the prospect was, he was going into the next office. He stood up and moved out from behind his desk. 'What is the atom mostly made of?' he thought, 'Space.' He started walking. 'What am I mostly made of? Atoms.' He quickened his pace, almost to a jog now. 'What is the wall mostly made of?' (Laughter) 'Atoms!' All I have to do is merge the spaces. Then, General Stubblebine banged his nose hard on the wall of his office. Stubblebine, who commanded 16,000 soldiers, was confounded by his continual failure to walk through the wall. He has no doubt that this ability will one day be a common tool in the military arsenal. Who would screw around with an army that could do that?" That's from an article in Playboy, which I was reading the other day. (Laughter) I have every reason to think it's true; I was reading Playboy because I, myself, had an article in it. (Laughter) Unaided human intuition, schooled in Middle World, finds it hard to believe Galileo when he tells us a heavy object and a light object, air friction aside, would hit the ground at the same instant. And that's because in Middle World, air friction is always there. If we'd evolved in a vacuum, we would expect them to hit the ground simultaneously. If we were bacteria, constantly buffeted by thermal movements of molecules, it would be different. But we Middle-Worlders are too big to notice Brownian motion. In the same way, our lives are dominated by gravity, but are almost oblivious to the force of surface tension. A small insect would reverse these priorities. Steve Grand -- he's the one on the left, Douglas Adams is on the right. Steve Grand, in his book, "Creation: Life and How to Make It," is positively scathing about our preoccupation with matter itself. We have this tendency to think that only solid, material things are really things at all. Waves of electromagnetic fluctuation in a vacuum seem unreal. Victorians thought the waves had to be waves in some material medium: the ether. But we find real matter comforting only because we've evolved to survive in Middle World, where matter is a useful fiction. A whirlpool, for Steve Grand, is a thing with just as much reality as a rock. In a desert plain in Tanzania, in the shadow of the volcano Ol Doinyo Lengai, there's a dune made of volcanic ash. The beautiful thing is that it moves bodily. It's what's technically known as a "barchan," and the entire dune walks across the desert in a westerly direction at a speed of about 17 meters per year. It retains its crescent shape and moves in the direction of the horns. What happens is that the wind blows the sand up the shallow slope on the other side, and then, as each sand grain hits the top of the ridge, it cascades down on the inside of the crescent, and so the whole horn-shaped dune moves. Steve Grand points out that you and I are, ourselves, more like a wave than a permanent thing. He invites us, the reader, to think of an experience from your childhood, something you remember clearly, something you can see, feel, maybe even smell, as if you were really there. After all, you really were there at the time, weren't you? How else would you remember it? But here is the bombshell: You weren't there. Not a single atom that is in your body today was there when that event took place. Matter flows from place to place and momentarily comes together to be you. Whatever you are, therefore, you are not the stuff of which you are made. If that doesn't make the hair stand up on the back of your neck, read it again until it does, because it is important. So "really" isn't a word that we should use with simple confidence. If a neutrino had a brain, which it evolved in neutrino-sized ancestors, it would say that rocks really do consist of empty space. We have brains that evolved in medium-sized ancestors which couldn't walk through rocks. "Really," for an animal, is whatever its brain needs it to be in order to assist its survival. And because different species live in different worlds, there will be a discomforting variety of "reallys." What we see of the real world is not the unvarnished world, but a model of the world, regulated and adjusted by sense data, but constructed so it's useful for dealing with the real world. The nature of the model depends on the kind of animal we are. A flying animal needs a different kind of model from a walking, climbing or swimming animal. A monkey's brain must have software capable of simulating a three-dimensional world of branches and trunks. A mole's software for constructing models of its world will be customized for underground use. A water strider's brain doesn't need 3D software at all, since it lives on the surface of the pond, in an Edwin Abbott flatland. I've speculated that bats may see color with their ears. The world model that a bat needs in order to navigate through three dimensions catching insects must be pretty similar to the world model that any flying bird -- a day-flying bird like a swallow -- needs to perform the same kind of tasks. The fact that the bat uses echoes in pitch darkness to input the current variables to its model, while the swallow uses light, is incidental. Bats, I've even suggested, use perceived hues, such as red and blue, as labels, internal labels, for some useful aspect of echoes -- perhaps the acoustic texture of surfaces, furry or smooth and so on -- in the same way as swallows or indeed, we, use those perceived hues -- redness and blueness, etc. -- to label long and short wavelengths of light. There's nothing inherent about red that makes it long wavelength. The point is that the nature of the model is governed by how it is to be used, rather than by the sensory modality involved. J.B.S. Haldane himself had something to say about animals whose world is dominated by smell. Dogs can distinguish two very similar fatty acids, extremely diluted: caprylic acid and caproic acid. The only difference, you see, is that one has an extra pair of carbon atoms in the chain. Haldane guesses that a dog would probably be able to place the acids in the order of their molecular weights by their smells, just as a man could place a number of piano wires in the order of their lengths by means of their notes. Now, there's another fatty acid, capric acid, which is just like the other two, except that it has two more carbon atoms. A dog that had never met capric acid would, perhaps, have no more trouble imagining its smell than we would have trouble imagining a trumpet, say, playing one note higher than we've heard a trumpet play before. Perhaps dogs and rhinos and other smell-oriented animals smell in color. And the argument would be exactly the same as for the bats. Middle World -- the range of sizes and speeds which we have evolved to feel intuitively comfortable with -- is a bit like the narrow range of the electromagnetic spectrum that we see as light of various colors. We're blind to all frequencies outside that, unless we use instruments to help us. Middle World is the narrow range of reality which we judge to be normal, as opposed to the queerness of the very small, the very large and the very fast. We could make a similar scale of improbabilities; nothing is totally impossible. Miracles are just events that are extremely improbable. A marble statue could wave its hand at us; the atoms that make up its crystalline structure are all vibrating back and forth anyway. Because there are so many of them, and because there's no agreement among them in their preferred direction of movement, the marble, as we see it in Middle World, stays rock steady. But the atoms in the hand could all just happen to move the same way at the same time, and again and again. In this case, the hand would move, and we'd see it waving at us in Middle World. The odds against it, of course, are so great that if you set out writing zeros at the time of the origin of the universe, you still would not have written enough zeros to this day. Evolution in Middle World has not equipped us to handle very improbable events; we don't live long enough. In the vastness of astronomical space and geological time, that which seems impossible in Middle World might turn out to be inevitable. One way to think about that is by counting planets. We don't know how many planets there are in the universe, but a good estimate is about 10 to the 20, or 100 billion billion. And that gives us a nice way to express our estimate of life's improbability. We could make some sort of landmark points along a spectrum of improbability, which might look like the electromagnetic spectrum we just looked at. If life has arisen only once on any -- life could originate once per planet, could be extremely common or it could originate once per star or once per galaxy or maybe only once in the entire universe, in which case it would have to be here. And somewhere up there would be the chance that a frog would turn into a prince, and similar magical things like that. If life has arisen on only one planet in the entire universe, that planet has to be our planet, because here we are talking about it. And that means that if we want to avail ourselves of it, we're allowed to postulate chemical events in the origin of life which have a probability as low as one in 100 billion billion. I don't think we shall have to avail ourselves of that, because I suspect that life is quite common in the universe. And when I say quite common, it could still be so rare that no one island of life ever encounters another, which is a sad thought. How shall we interpret "queerer than we can suppose?" Queerer than can in principle be supposed, or just queerer than we can suppose, given the limitations of our brain's evolutionary apprenticeship in Middle World? Could we, by training and practice, emancipate ourselves from Middle World and achieve some sort of intuitive as well as mathematical understanding of the very small and the very large? I genuinely don't know the answer. I wonder whether we might help ourselves to understand, say, quantum theory, if we brought up children to play computer games beginning in early childhood, which had a make-believe world of balls going through two slits on a screen, a world in which the strange goings-on of quantum mechanics were enlarged by the computer's make-believe, so that they became familiar on the Middle-World scale of the stream. And similarly, a relativistic computer game, in which objects on the screen manifest the Lorentz contraction, and so on, to try to get ourselves -- to get children into the way of thinking about it. I want to end by applying the idea of Middle World to our perceptions of each other. Most scientists today subscribe to a mechanistic view of the mind: we're the way we are because our brains are wired up as they are, our hormones are the way they are. We'd be different, our characters would be different, if our neuro-anatomy and our physiological chemistry were different. But we scientists are inconsistent. If we were consistent, our response to a misbehaving person, like a child-murderer, should be something like: this unit has a faulty component; it needs repairing. That's not what we say. What we say -- and I include the most austerely mechanistic among us, which is probably me -- what we say is, "Vile monster, prison is too good for you." Or worse, we seek revenge, in all probability thereby triggering the next phase in an escalating cycle of counter-revenge, which we see, of course, all over the world today. In short, when we're thinking like academics, we regard people as elaborate and complicated machines, like computers or cars. But when we revert to being human, we behave more like Basil Fawlty, who, we remember, thrashed his car to teach it a lesson, when it wouldn't start on "Gourmet Night." (Laughter) The reason we personify things like cars and computers is that just as monkeys live in an arboreal world and moles live in an underground world and water striders live in a surface tension-dominated flatland, we live in a social world. We swim through a sea of people -- a social version of Middle World. We are evolved to second-guess the behavior of others by becoming brilliant, intuitive psychologists. Treating people as machines may be scientifically and philosophically accurate, but it's a cumbersome waste of time if you want to guess what this person is going to do next. The economically useful way to model a person is to treat him as a purposeful, goal-seeking agent with pleasures and pains, desires and intentions, guilt, blame-worthiness. Personification and the imputing of intentional purpose is such a brilliantly successful way to model humans, it's hardly surprising the same modeling software often seizes control when we're trying to think about entities for which it's not appropriate, like Basil Fawlty with his car or like millions of deluded people, with the universe as a whole. (Laughter) If the universe is queerer than we can suppose, is it just because we've been naturally selected to suppose only what we needed to suppose in order to survive in the Pleistocene of Africa? Or are our brains so versatile and expandable that we can train ourselves to break out of the box of our evolution? Or finally, are there some things in the universe so queer that no philosophy of beings, however godlike, could dream them? Thank you very much. (Applause)

I'm kind of tired of talking about simplicity, actually, so I thought I'd make my life more complex, as a serious play. So, I'm going to, like, go through some slides from way back when, and walk through them to give you a sense of how I end up here. So, basically it all began with this whole idea of a computer. Who has a computer? Yeah. O.K., so, everyone has a computer. Even a mobile phone, it's a computer. And -- anyone remember this workbook, "Instant Activities for Your Apple" -- free poster in each book? This was how computing began. Don't forget: a computer came out; it had no software. You'd buy that thing, you'd bring it home, you'd plug it in, and it would do absolutely nothing at all. So, you had to program it, and there were great programming, like, tutorials, like this. I mean, this was great. It's, like, you know, Herbie the Apple II. It's such a great way to -- I mean, they should make Java books like this, and we've have no problem learning a program. But this was a great, grand time of the computer, when it was just a raw, raw, what is it? kind of an era. And, you see, this era coincided with my own childhood. I grew up in a tofu factory in Seattle. Who of you grew up in a family business, suffered the torture? Yes, yes. The torture was good. Wasn't it good torture? It was just life-changing, you know. And so, in my life, you know, I was in the tofu; it was a family business. And my mother was a kind of a designer, also. She'd make this kind of, like, wall of tofu cooking, and it would confuse the customers, because they all thought it was a restaurant. A bad sort of branding thing, or whatever. But, anyway, that's where I grew up, in this little tofu factory in Seattle, and it was kind of like this: a small room where I kind of grew up. I'm big there in that picture. That's my dad. My dad was kind of like MacGyver, really: he would invent, like, ways to make things heavy. Like back here, there's like, concrete block technology here, and he would need the concrete blocks to press the tofu, because tofu is actually kind of a liquidy type of thing, and so you have to have heavy stuff to push out the liquid and make it hard. Tofu comes out in these big batches, and my father would sort of cut them by hand. I can't tell you -- family business story: you'd understand this -- my father was the most sincere man possible. He walked into a Safeway once on a rainy day, slipped, broke his arm, rushed out: he didn't want to inconvenience Safeway. So, instead, you know, my father's, like, arm's broken for two weeks in the store, and that week -- now, those two weeks were when my older brother and I had to do everything. And that was torture, real torture. Because, you see, we'd seen my father taking the big block of tofu and cutting it, like, knife in, zap, zap, zap. We thought, wow. So, the first time I did that, I went, like, whoa! Like this. Bad blocks. But anyways, the tofu to me was kind of my origin, basically. And because working in a store was so hard, I liked going to school; it was like heaven. And I was really good at school. So, when I got to MIT, you know, as most of you who are creatives, your parents all told you not to be creative, right? So, same way, you know, I was good at art and good at math, and my father says, he's -- John's good at math. I went to MIT, did my math, but I had this wonderful opportunity, because computers had just become visual. The Apple -- Macintosh just came out; I had a Mac in hand when I went to MIT. And it was a time when a guy who, kind of, could cross the two sides -- it was a good time. And so, I remember that my first major piece of software was on a direct copy of then-Aldus PageMaker. I made a desktop publishing system way back when, and that was, kind of, my first step into figuring out how to -- oh, these two sides are kind of fun to mix. And the problem when you're younger -- for all you students out there -- is, your head gets kind of big really easy. And when I was making icons, I was, like, the icon master, and I was, like, yeah, I'm really good at this, you know. And then luckily, you know, I had the fortune of going to something called a library, and in the library I came upon this very book. I found this book. It's called, "Thoughts on Design," by a man named Paul Rand. It's a little slim volume; I'm not sure if you've seen this. It's a very nice little book. It's about this guy, Paul Rand, who was one of the greatest graphic designers, and also a great writer as well. And when I saw this man's work, I realized how bad I was at design, or whatever I called it back then, and I suddenly had a kind of career goal, kind of in hot pursuit. So I kind of switched. I went to MIT, finished. I got my masters, and then went to art school after that. And just began to design stuff, like chopstick wrappers, napkins, menus -- whatever I could get a handle on: sort of wheel-and-deal, move up in the design world, whatever. And isn't it that strange moment when you publish your design? Remember that moment -- publishing your designs? Remember that moment? It felt so good, didn't it? So, I was published, you know, so, wow, my design's in a book, you know? After that, things kind of got strange, and I got thinking about the computer, because the computer to me always, kind of, bothered me. I didn't quite get it. And Paul Rand was a kind of crusty designer, you know, a crusty designer, like a good -- kind of like a good French bread? You know, he wrote in one of his books: "A Yale student once said, 'I came here to learn how to design, not how to use a computer.' Design schools take heed." This is in the '80s, in the great clash of computer/non-computer people. A very difficult time, actually. And this to me was an important message from Rand. And so I began to sort of mess with the computer at the time. This is the first sort of play thing I did, my own serious play. I built a working version of an Adobe Illustrator-ish thing. It looks like Illustrator; it can, like, draw. It was very hard to make this, actually. It took a month to make this part. And then I thought, what if I added this feature, where I can say, this point, you can fly like a bird. You're free, kind of thing. So I could, sort of, change the kind of stability with a little control there on the dial, and I can sort of watch it flip around. And this is in 1993. And when my professors saw this, they were very upset at me. They were saying, Why's it moving? They were saying, Make it stop now. Now, I was saying, Well, that's the whole point: it's moving. And he says, Well, when's it going to stop? And I said, Never. And he said, Even worse. Stop it now. I started studying this whole idea, of like, what is this computer? It's a strange medium. It's not like print. It's not like video. It lasts forever. It's a very strange medium. So, I went off with this, and began to look for things even more. And so in Japan, I began to experiment with people. This is actually bad: human experiments. I would do these things where I'd have students become pens: there's blue pen, red pen, green pen, black pen. And someone sits down and draws a picture. They're laughing because he said, draw from the middle-right to the middle, and he kind of messed up. See, humans don't know how to take orders; the computer's so good at it. This guy figured out how to get the computer to draw with two pens at once: you know, you, pen, do this, and you, pen, do this. And so began to have multiple pens on the page -- again, hard to do with our hands. And then someone discovered this "a-ha moment" where you could use coordinate systems. We thought, ah, this is when it's going to happen. In the end, he drew a house. It was the most boring thing. It became computerish; we began to think computerish -- the X, Y system -- and so that was kind of a revelation. And after this I wanted to build a computer out of people, called a human-powered computer. So, this happened in 1993. Sound down, please. It's a computer where the people are the parts. I have behind this wall a disk drive, a CPU, a graphics card, a memory system. They're picking up a giant floppy disk made of cardboard. It's put inside the computer. And that little program's on that cardboard disk. So, she wears the disk, and reads the data off the sectors of the disk, and the computer starts up; it sort of boots up, really. And it's a sort of a working computer. And when I built this computer, I had a moment of -- what is it called? -- the epiphany where I realized that the computer's just so fast. This computer appears to be fast - she's working pretty hard, and people are running around, and we think, wow, this is happening at a fast rate. And this computer's programmed to do only one thing, which is, if you move your mouse, the mouse changes on the screen. On the computer, when you move your mouse, that arrow moves around. On this computer, if you move the mouse, it takes half an hour for the mouse cursor to change. To give you a sense of the speed, the scale: the computer is just so amazingly fast, O.K.? And so, after this I began to do experiments for different companies. This is something I did for Sony in 1996. It was three Sony "H" devices that responded to sound. So, if you talk into the mike, you'll hear some music in your headphones; if you talk in the phone, then video would happen. So, I began to experiment with industry in different ways with this kind of mixture of skills. I did this ad. I don't believe in this kind of alcohol, but I do drink sometimes. And Chanel. So, getting to do different projects. And also, one thing I realized is that I like to make things. We like to make things. It's fun to make things. And so I never developed the ability to have a staff. I have no staff; it's all kind of made by hand -- these sort of broken hands. And these hands were influenced by this man, Mr. Inami Naomi. This guy was my kind of like mentor. He was the first digital media producer in Tokyo. He's the guy that kind of discovered me, and kind of got me going in digital media. He was such an inspirational guy. I remember, like, we'd be in his studio, like, at 2 a.m., and then he'd show up from some client meeting. He'd come in and say, you know, If I am here, everything is okay. And you'd feel so much better, you know. And I'll never forget how, like, but -- I'll never forget how, like, he had a sudden situation with his -- he had an aneurysm. He went into a coma. And so, for three years he was out, and he could only blink, and so I realized at this moment, I thought, wow -- how fragile is this thing we're wearing, this body and mind we're wearing, and so I thought, How do you go for it more? How do you take that time you have left and go after it? So, Naomi was pivotal in that. And so, I began to think more carefully about the computer. This was a moment where I was thinking about, so, you have a computer program, it responds to motion -- X and Y -- and I realized that each computer program has all these images inside the program. So, if you can see here, you know, that program you're seeing in the corner, if you spread it out, it's all these things all at once. It's real simultaneity. It's nothing we're used to working with. We're so used to working in one vector. This is all at the same time. The computer lives in so many dimensions. And also, at the same time I was frustrated, because I would go to all these art and design schools everywhere, and there were these, like, "the computer lab," you know, and this is, like, in the late 1990s, and this is in Basel, a great graphic design school. And here's this, like, dirty, kind of, shoddy, kind of, dark computer room. And I began to wonder, Is this the goal? Is this what we want, you know? And also, I began to be fascinated by machines -- you know, like copy machines -- and so this is actually in Basel. I noticed how we spent so much time on making it interactive -- this is, like, a touch screen -- and I noticed how you can only touch five places, and so, "why are we wasting so much interactivity everywhere?" became a question. And also, the sound: I discovered I can make my ThinkPad pretend it's a telephone. You get it? No? O.K. And also, I discovered in Logan airport, this was, like, calling out to me. Do you hear that? It's like cows. This is at 4 a.m. at Logan. So, I was wondering, like, what is this thing in front of me, this computer thing? It didn't make any sense. So, I began to make things again. This is another series of objects made of old computers from my basement. I made -- I took my old Macintoshes and made different objects out of them from Tokyo. I began to be very disinterested in computers themselves, so I began to make paintings out of PalmPilots. I made this series of works. They're paintings I made and put a PalmPilot in the middle as a kind of display that's sort of thinking, I'm abstract art. What am I? I'm abstract. And so it keeps thinking out loud of its own abstraction. I began to be fascinated by plastic, so I spent four months making eight plastic blocks perfectly optically transparent, as a kind of release of stress. Because of that, I became interested in blue tape, so in San Francisco, at C.C., I had a whole exhibition on blue tape. I made a whole installation out of blue tape -- blue painters' tape. And at this point my wife kind of got worried about me, so I stopped doing blue tape and began to think, Well, what else is there in life? And so computers, as you know, these big computers, there are now tiny computers. They're littler computers, so the one-chip computers, I began to program one-chip computers and make objects out of P.C. boards, LEDs. I began to make LED sculptures that would live inside little boxes out of MDF. This is a series of light boxes I made for a show in Italy. Very simple boxes: you just press one button and some LED interaction occurs. This is a series of lamps I made. This is a Bento box lamp: it's sort of a plastic rice lamp; it's very friendly. I did a show in London last year made out of iPods -- I used iPods as a material. So I took 16 iPod Nanos and made a kind of a Nano fish, basically. Recently, this is for Reebok. I've done shoes for Reebok as well, as a kind of a hobby for apparel. So anyways, there are all these things you can do, but the thing I love the most is to experience, taste the world. The world is just so tasty. We think we'll go to a museum; that's where all the tastes are. No, they're all out there. So, this is, like, in front of the Eiffel Tower, really, actually, around the Louvre area. This I found, where nature had made a picture for me. This is a perfect 90-degree angle by nature. In this strange moment where, like, these things kind of appeared. We all are creative people. We have this gene defect in our mind. We can't help but stop, right? This feeling's a wonderful thing. It's the forever-always-on museum. This is from the Cape last year. I discovered that I had to find the equation of art and design, which we know as circle-triangle-square. It's everywhere on the beach, I discovered. I began to collect every instance of circle-triangle-square. I put these all back, by the way. And I also discovered how . some rocks are twins separated at birth. This is also out there, you know. I'm, like, how did this happen, kind of thing? I brought you guys together again. So, three years ago I discovered, the letters M-I-T occurring in simplicity and complexity. My alma mater, MIT, and I had this moment -- a kind of M. Night Shayamalan moment -- where I thought, Whoa! I have to do this. And I went after it with passion. However, recently this RISD opportunity kind of arose -- going to RISD -- and I couldn't reconcile this real easy, because the letters had told me, MIT forever. But I discovered in the French word raison d'être. I was, like, aha, wait a second. And there RISD appeared. And so I realized it was O.K. to go. So, I'm going to RISD, actually. Who's a RISD alum out there? RISD alums? Yeah, RISD. There we go, RISD. Woo, RISD. I'm sorry, I'm sorry, Art Center -- Art Center is good, too. RISD is kind of my new kind of passion, and I'll tell you a little bit about that. So, RISD is -- I was outside RISD, and some student wrote this on some block, and I thought, Wow, RISD wants to know what itself is. And I have no idea what RISD should be, actually, or what it wants to be, but one thing I have to tell you is that although I'm a technologist, I don't like technology very much. It's a, kind of, the qi thing, or whatever. People say, Are you going to bring RISD into the future? And I say, well, I'm going to bring the future back to RISD. There's my perspective. Because in reality, the problem isn't how to make the world more technological. It's about how to make it more humane again. And if anything, I think RISD has a strange DNA. It's a strange exuberance about materials, about the world: a fascination that I think the world needs quite very much right now. So, thank you everyone.

So I want to talk to you today about AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa. And this is a pretty well-educated audience, so I imagine you all know something about AIDS. You probably know that roughly 25 million people in Africa are infected with the virus, that AIDS is a disease of poverty, and that if we can bring Africa out of poverty, we would decrease AIDS as well. If you know something more, you probably know that Uganda, to date, is the only country in sub-Saharan Africa that has had success in combating the epidemic. Using a campaign that encouraged people to abstain, be faithful, and use condoms -- the ABC campaign -- they decreased their prevalence in the 1990s from about 15 percent to 6 percent over just a few years. If you follow policy, you probably know that a few years ago the president pledged 15 billion dollars to fight the epidemic over five years, and a lot of that money is going to go to programs that try to replicate Uganda and use behavior change to encourage people and decrease the epidemic. So today I'm going to talk about some things that you might not know about the epidemic, and I'm actually also going to challenge some of these things that you think that you do know. To do that I'm going to talk about my research as an economist on the epidemic. And I'm not really going to talk much about the economy. I'm not going to tell you about exports and prices. But I'm going to use tools and ideas that are familiar to economists to think about a problem that's more traditionally part of public health and epidemiology. And I think in that sense, this fits really nicely with this lateral thinking idea. Here I'm really using the tools of one academic discipline to think about problems of another. So we think, first and foremost, AIDS is a policy issue. And probably for most people in this room, that's how you think about it. But this talk is going to be about understanding facts about the epidemic. It's going to be about thinking about how it evolves, and how people respond to it. I think it may seem like I'm ignoring the policy stuff, which is really the most important, but I'm hoping that at the end of this talk you will conclude that we actually cannot develop effective policy unless we really understand how the epidemic works. And the first thing that I want to talk about, the first thing I think we need to understand is: how do people respond to the epidemic? So AIDS is a sexually transmitted infection, and it kills you. So this means that in a place with a lot of AIDS, there's a really significant cost of sex. If you're an uninfected man living in Botswana, where the HIV rate is 30 percent, if you have one more partner this year -- a long-term partner, girlfriend, mistress -- your chance of dying in 10 years increases by three percentage points. That is a huge effect. And so I think that we really feel like then people should have less sex. And in fact among gay men in the US we did see that kind of change in the 1980s. So if we look in this particularly high-risk sample, they're being asked, "Did you have more than one unprotected sexual partner in the last two months?" Over a period from '84 to '88, that share drops from about 85 percent to 55 percent. It's a huge change in a very short period of time. We didn't see anything like that in Africa. So we don't have quite as good data, but you can see here the share of single men having pre-marital sex, or married men having extra-marital sex, and how that changes from the early '90s to late '90s, and late '90s to early 2000s. The epidemic is getting worse. People are learning more things about it. We see almost no change in sexual behavior. These are just tiny decreases -- two percentage points -- not significant. This seems puzzling. But I'm going to argue that you shouldn't be surprised by this, and that to understand this you need to think about health the way than an economist does -- as an investment. So if you're a software engineer and you're trying to think about whether to add some new functionality to your program, it's important to think about how much it costs. It's also important to think about what the benefit is. And one part of that benefit is how much longer you think this program is going to be active. If version 10 is coming out next week, there's no point in adding more functionality into version nine. But your health decisions are the same. Every time you have a carrot instead of a cookie, every time you go to the gym instead of going to the movies, that's a costly investment in your health. But how much you want to invest is going to depend on how much longer you expect to live in the future, even if you don't make those investments. AIDS is the same kind of thing. It's costly to avoid AIDS. People really like to have sex. But, you know, it has a benefit in terms of future longevity. But life expectancy in Africa, even without AIDS, is really, really low: 40 or 50 years in a lot of places. I think it's possible, if we think about that intuition, and think about that fact, that maybe that explains some of this low behavior change. But we really need to test that. And a great way to test that is to look across areas in Africa and see: do people with more life expectancy change their sexual behavior more? And the way that I'm going to do that is, I'm going to look across areas with different levels of malaria. So malaria is a disease that kills you. It's a disease that kills a lot of adults in Africa, in addition to a lot of children. And so people who live in areas with a lot of malaria are going to have lower life expectancy than people who live in areas with limited malaria. So one way to test to see whether we can explain some of this behavior change by differences in life expectancy is to look and see is there more behavior change in areas where there's less malaria. So that's what this figure shows you. This shows you -- in areas with low malaria, medium malaria, high malaria -- what happens to the number of sexual partners as you increase HIV prevalence. If you look at the blue line, the areas with low levels of malaria, you can see in those areas, actually, the number of sexual partners is decreasing a lot as HIV prevalence goes up. Areas with medium levels of malaria it decreases some -- it doesn't decrease as much. And areas with high levels of malaria -- actually, it's increasing a little bit, although that's not significant. This is not just through malaria. Young women who live in areas with high maternal mortality change their behavior less in response to HIV than young women who live in areas with low maternal mortality. There's another risk, and they respond less to this existing risk. So by itself, I think this tells a lot about how people behave. It tells us something about why we see limited behavior change in Africa. But it also tells us something about policy. Even if you only cared about AIDS in Africa, it might still be a good idea to invest in malaria, in combating poor indoor air quality, in improving maternal mortality rates. Because if you improve those things, then people are going to have an incentive to avoid AIDS on their own. But it also tells us something about one of these facts that we talked about before. Education campaigns, like the one that the president is focusing on in his funding, may not be enough, at least not alone. If people have no incentive to avoid AIDS on their own, even if they know everything about the disease, they still may not change their behavior. So the other thing that I think we learn here is that AIDS is not going to fix itself. People aren't changing their behavior enough to decrease the growth in the epidemic. So we're going to need to think about policy and what kind of policies might be effective. And a great way to learn about policy is to look at what worked in the past. The reason that we know that the ABC campaign was effective in Uganda is we have good data on prevalence over time. In Uganda we see the prevalence went down. We know they had this campaign. That's how we learn about what works. It's not the only place we had any interventions. Other places have tried things, so why don't we look at those places and see what happened to their prevalence? Unfortunately, there's almost no good data on HIV prevalence in the general population in Africa until about 2003. So if I asked you, "Why don't you go and find me the prevalence in Burkina Faso in 1991?" You get on Google, you Google, and you find, actually the only people tested in Burkina Faso in 1991 are STD patients and pregnant women, which is not a terribly representative group of people. Then if you poked a little more, you looked a little more at what was going on, you'd find that actually that was a pretty good year, because in some years the only people tested are IV drug users. But even worse -- some years it's only IV drug users, some years it's only pregnant women. We have no way to figure out what happened over time. We have no consistent testing. Now in the last few years, we actually have done some good testing. In Kenya, in Zambia, and a bunch of countries, there's been testing in random samples of the population. But this leaves us with a big gap in our knowledge. So I can tell you what the prevalence was in Kenya in 2003, but I can't tell you anything about 1993 or 1983. So this is a problem for policy. It was a problem for my research. And I started thinking about how else might we figure out what the prevalence of HIV was in Africa in the past. And I think that the answer is, we can look at mortality data, and we can use mortality data to figure out what the prevalence was in the past. To do this, we're going to have to rely on the fact that AIDS is a very specific kind of disease. It kills people in the prime of their lives. Not a lot of other diseases have that profile. And you can see here -- this is a graph of death rates by age in Botswana and Egypt. Botswana is a place with a lot of AIDS, Egypt is a place without a lot of AIDS. And you see they have pretty similar death rates among young kids and old people. That suggests it's pretty similar levels of development. But in this middle region, between 20 and 45, the death rates in Botswana are much, much, much higher than in Egypt. But since there are very few other diseases that kill people, we can really attribute that mortality to HIV. But because people who died this year of AIDS got it a few years ago, we can use this data on mortality to figure out what HIV prevalence was in the past. So it turns out, if you use this technique, actually your estimates of prevalence are very close to what we get from testing random samples in the population, but they're very, very different than what UNAIDS tells us the prevalences are. So this is a graph of prevalence estimated by UNAIDS, and prevalence based on the mortality data for the years in the late 1990s in nine countries in Africa. You can see, almost without exception, the UNAIDS estimates are much higher than the mortality-based estimates. UNAIDS tell us that the HIV rate in Zambia is 20 percent, and mortality estimates suggest it's only about 5 percent. And these are not trivial differences in mortality rates. So this is another way to see this. You can see that for the prevalence to be as high as UNAIDS says, we have to really see 60 deaths per 10,000 rather than 20 deaths per 10,000 in this age group. I'm going to talk a little bit in a minute about how we can use this kind of information to learn something that's going to help us think about the world. But this also tells us that one of these facts that I mentioned in the beginning may not be quite right. If you think that 25 million people are infected, if you think that the UNAIDS numbers are much too high, maybe that's more like 10 or 15 million. It doesn't mean that AIDS isn't a problem. It's a gigantic problem. But it does suggest that that number might be a little big. What I really want to do, is I want to use this new data to try to figure out what makes the HIV epidemic grow faster or slower. And I said in the beginning, I wasn't going to tell you about exports. When I started working on these projects, I was not thinking at all about economics, but eventually it kind of sucks you back in. So I am going to talk about exports and prices. And I want to talk about the relationship between economic activity, in particular export volume, and HIV infections. So obviously, as an economist, I'm deeply familiar with the fact that development, that openness to trade, is really good for developing countries. It's good for improving people's lives. But openness and inter-connectedness, it comes with a cost when we think about disease. I don't think this should be a surprise. On Wednesday, I learned from Laurie Garrett that I'm definitely going to get the bird flu, and I wouldn't be at all worried about that if we never had any contact with Asia. And HIV is actually particularly closely linked to transit. The epidemic was introduced to the US by actually one male steward on an airline flight, who got the disease in Africa and brought it back. And that was the genesis of the entire epidemic in the US. In Africa, epidemiologists have noted for a long time that truck drivers and migrants are more likely to be infected than other people. Areas with a lot of economic activity -- with a lot of roads, with a lot of urbanization -- those areas have higher prevalence than others. But that actually doesn't mean at all that if we gave people more exports, more trade, that that would increase prevalence. By using this new data, using this information about prevalence over time, we can actually test that. And so it seems to be -- fortunately, I think -- it seems to be the case that these things are positively related. More exports means more AIDS. And that effect is really big. So the data that I have suggests that if you double export volume, it will lead to a quadrupling of new HIV infections. So this has important implications both for forecasting and for policy. From a forecasting perspective, if we know where trade is likely to change, for example, because of the African Growth and Opportunities Act or other policies that encourage trade, we can actually think about which areas are likely to be heavily infected with HIV. And we can go and we can try to have pre-emptive preventive measures there. Likewise, as we're developing policies to try to encourage exports, if we know there's this externality -- this extra thing that's going to happen as we increase exports -- we can think about what the right kinds of policies are. But it also tells us something about one of these things that we think that we know. Even though it is the case that poverty is linked to AIDS, in the sense that Africa is poor and they have a lot of AIDS, it's not necessarily the case that improving poverty -- at least in the short run, that improving exports and improving development -- it's not necessarily the case that that's going to lead to a decline in HIV prevalence. So throughout this talk I've mentioned a few times the special case of Uganda, and the fact that it's the only country in sub-Saharan Africa with successful prevention. It's been widely heralded. It's been replicated in Kenya, and Tanzania, and South Africa and many other places. But now I want to actually also question that. Because it is true that there was a decline in prevalence in Uganda in the 1990s. It's true that they had an education campaign. But there was actually something else that happened in Uganda in this period. There was a big decline in coffee prices. Coffee is Uganda's major export. Their exports went down a lot in the early 1990s -- and actually that decline lines up really, really closely with this decline in new HIV infections. So you can see that both of these series -- the black line is export value, the red line is new HIV infections -- you can see they're both increasing. Starting about 1987 they're both going down a lot. And then actually they track each other a little bit on the increase later in the decade. So if you combine the intuition in this figure with some of the data that I talked about before, it suggests that somewhere between 25 percent and 50 percent of the decline in prevalence in Uganda actually would have happened even without any education campaign. But that's enormously important for policy. We're spending so much money to try to replicate this campaign. And if it was only 50 percent as effective as we think that it was, then there are all sorts of other things maybe we should be spending our money on instead. Trying to change transmission rates by treating other sexually transmitted diseases. Trying to change them by engaging in male circumcision. There are tons of other things that we should think about doing. And maybe this tells us that we should be thinking more about those things. I hope that in the last 16 minutes I've told you something that you didn't know about AIDS, and I hope that I've gotten you questioning a little bit some of the things that you did know. And I hope that I've convinced you maybe that it's important to understand things about the epidemic in order to think about policy. But more than anything, you know, I'm an academic. And when I leave here, I'm going to go back and sit in my tiny office, and my computer, and my data. And the thing that's most exciting about that is every time I think about research, there are more questions. There are more things that I think that I want to do. And what's really, really great about being here is I'm sure that the questions that you guys have are very, very different than the questions that I think up myself. And I can't wait to hear about what they are. So thank you very much.

Hello. My name is Jarrett Krosoczka, and I write and illustrate books for children for a living. So I use my imagination as my full-time job. But well before my imagination was my vocation, my imagination saved my life. When I was a kid, I loved to draw, and the most talented artist I knew was my mother, but my mother was addicted to heroin. And when your parent is a drug addict, it's kind of like Charlie Brown trying to kick the football, because as much as you want to love on that person, as much as you want to receive love from that person, every time you open your heart, you end up on your back. So throughout my childhood, my mother was incarcerated and I didn't have my father because I didn't even learn his first name until I was in the sixth grade. But I had my grandparents, my maternal grandparents Joseph and Shirley, who adopted me just before my third birthday and took me in as their own, after they had already raised five children. So two people who grew up in the Great Depression, there in the very, very early '80s took on a new kid. I was the Cousin Oliver of the sitcom of the Krosoczka family, the new kid who came out of nowhere. And I would like to say that life was totally easy with them. They each smoked two packs a day, each, nonfiltered, and by the time I was six, I could order a Southern Comfort Manhattan, dry with a twist, rocks on the side, the ice on the side so you could fit more liquor in the drink. But they loved the hell out of me. They loved me so much. And they supported my creative efforts, because my grandfather was a self-made man. He ran and worked in a factory. My grandmother was a homemaker. But here was this kid who loved Transformers and Snoopy and the Ninja Turtles, and the characters that I read about, I fell in love with, and they became my friends. So my best friends in life were the characters I read about in books. I went to Gates Lane Elementary School in Worcester, Massachusetts, and I had wonderful teachers there, most notably in first grade Mrs. Alisch. And I just, I can just remember the love that she offered us as her students. When I was in the third grade, a monumental event happened. An author visited our school, Jack Gantos. A published author of books came to talk to us about what he did for a living. And afterwards, we all went back to our classrooms and we drew our own renditions of his main character, Rotten Ralph. And suddenly the author appeared in our doorway, and I remember him sort of sauntering down the aisles, going from kid to kid looking at the desks, not saying a word. But he stopped next to my desk, and he tapped on my desk, and he said, "Nice cat." (Laughter) And he wandered away. Two words that made a colossal difference in my life. When I was in the third grade, I wrote a book for the first time, "The Owl Who Thought He Was The Best Flyer." (Laughter) We had to write our own Greek myth, our own creation story, so I wrote a story about an owl who challenged Hermes to a flying race, and the owl cheated, and Hermes, being a Greek god, grew angry and bitter, and turned the owl into a moon, so the owl had to live the rest of his life as a moon while he watched his family and friends play at night. Yeah. (Laughter) My book had a title page. I was clearly worried about my intellectual property when I was eight. (Laughter) And it was a story that was told with words and pictures, exactly what I do now for a living, and I sometimes let the words have the stage on their own, and sometimes I allowed the pictures to work on their own to tell the story. My favorite page is the "About the author" page. (Laughter) So I learned to write about myself in third person at a young age. So I love that last sentence: "He liked making this book." And I liked making that book because I loved using my imagination, and that's what writing is. Writing is using your imagination on paper, and I do get so scared because I travel to so many schools now and that seems like such a foreign concept to kids, that writing would be using your imagination on paper, if they're allowed to even write now within the school hours. So I loved writing so much that I'd come home from school, and I would take out pieces of paper, and I would staple them together, and I would fill those blank pages with words and pictures just because I loved using my imagination. And so these characters would become my friends. There was an egg, a tomato, a head of lettuce and a pumpkin, and they all lived in this refrigerator city, and in one of their adventures they went to a haunted house that was filled with so many dangers like an evil blender who tried to chop them up, an evil toaster who tried to kidnap the bread couple, and an evil microwave who tried to melt their friend who was a stick of butter. (Laughter) And I'd make my own comics too, and this was another way for me to tell stories, through words and through pictures. Now when I was in sixth grade, the public funding all but eliminated the arts budgets in the Worcester public school system. I went from having art once a week to twice a month to once a month to not at all. And my grandfather, he was a wise man, and he saw that as a problem, because he knew that was, like, the one thing I had. I didn't play sports. I had art. So he walked into my room one evening, and he sat on the edge of my bed, and he said, "Jarrett, it's up to you, but if you'd like to, we'd like to send you to the classes at the Worcester Art Museum." And I was so thrilled. So from sixth through 12th grade, once, twice, sometimes three times a week, I would take classes at the art museum, and I was surrounded by other kids who loved to draw, other kids who shared a similar passion. Now my publishing career began when I designed the cover for my eighth grade yearbook, and if you're wondering about the style of dress I put our mascot in, I was really into Bell Biv DeVoe and MC Hammer and Vanilla Ice at the time. (Laughter) And to this day, I still can do karaoke to "Ice, Ice Baby" without looking at the screen. Don't tempt me, because I will do it. So I get shipped off to private school, K through eight, public schools, but for some reason my grandfather was upset that somebody at the local high school had been stabbed and killed, so he didn't want me to go there. He wanted me to go to a private school, and he gave me an option. You can go to Holy Name, which is coed, or St. John's, which is all boys. Very wise man, because he knew I would, I felt like I was making the decision on my own, and he knew I wouldn't choose St. John's, so I went to Holy Name High School, which was a tough transition because, like I said, I didn't play sports, and it was very focused on sports, but I took solace in Mr. Shilale's art room. And I just flourished here. I just couldn't wait to get to that classroom every day. So how did I make friends? I drew funny pictures of my teachers -- (Laughter) -- and I passed them around. Well, in English class, in ninth grade, my friend John, who was sitting next to me, laughed a little bit too hard. Mr. Greenwood was not pleased. (Laughter) He instantly saw that I was the cause of the commotion, and for the first time in my life, I was sent to the hall, and I thought, "Oh no, I'm doomed. My grandfather's just going to kill me." And he came out to the hallway and he said, "Let me see the paper." And I thought, "Oh no. He thinks it's a note." And so I took this picture, and I handed it to him. And we sat in silence for that brief moment, and he said to me, "You're really talented." (Laughter) "You're really good. You know, the school newspaper needs a new cartoonist, and you should be the cartoonist. Just stop drawing in my class." So my parents never found out about it. I didn't get in trouble. I was introduced to Mrs. Casey, who ran the school newspaper, and I was for three and a half years the cartoonist for my school paper, handling such heavy issues as, seniors are mean, freshmen are nerds, the prom bill is so expensive. I can't believe how much it costs to go to the prom. And I took the headmaster to task and then I also wrote an ongoing story about a boy named Wesley who was unlucky in love, and I just swore up and down that this wasn't about me, but all these years later it was totally me. But it was so cool because I could write these stories, I could come up with these ideas, and they'd be published in the school paper, and people who I didn't know could read them. And I loved that thought, of being able to share my ideas through the printed page. On my 14th birthday, my grandfather and my grandmother gave me the best birthday present ever: a drafting table that I have worked on ever since. Here I am, 20 years later, and I still work on this table every day. On the evening of my 14th birthday, I was given this table, and we had Chinese food. And this was my fortune: "You will be successful in your work." I taped it to the top left hand of my table, and as you can see, it's still there. Now I never really asked my grandparents for anything. Well, two things: Rusty, who was a great hamster and lived a great long life when I was in fourth grade. (Laughter) And a video camera. I just wanted a video camera. And after begging and pleading for Christmas, I got a second-hand video camera, and I instantly started making my own animations on my own, and all throughout high school I made my own animations. I convinced my 10th grade English teacher to allow me to do my book report on Stephen King's "Misery" as an animated short. (Laughter) And I kept making comics. I kept making comics, and at the Worcester Art Museum, I was given the greatest piece of advice by any educator I was ever given. Mark Lynch, he's an amazing teacher and he's still a dear friend of mine, and I was 14 or 15, and I walked into his comic book class halfway through the course, and I was so excited, I was beaming. I had this book that was how to draw comics in the Marvel way, and it taught me how to draw superheroes, how to draw a woman, how to draw muscles just the way they were supposed to be if I were to ever draw for X-Men or Spiderman. And all the color just drained from his face, and he looked at me, and he said, "Forget everything you learned." And I didn't understand. He said, "You have a great style. Celebrate your own style. Don't draw the way you're being told to draw. Draw the way you're drawing and keep at it, because you're really good." Now when I was a teenager, I was angsty as any teenager was, but after 17 years of having a mother who was in and out of my life like a yo-yo and a father who was faceless, I was angry. And when I was 17, I met my father for the first time, upon which I learned I had a brother and sister I had never known about. And on the day I met my father for the first time, I was rejected from the Rhode Island School of Design, my one and only choice for college. But it was around this time I went to Camp Sunshine to volunteer a week and working with the most amazing kids, kids with leukemia, and this kid Eric changed my life. Eric didn't live to see his sixth birthday, and Eric lives with me every day. So after this experience, my art teacher, Mr. Shilale, he brought in these picture books, and I thought, "Picture books for kids!" and I started writing books for young readers when I was a senior in high school. Well, I eventually got to the Rhode Island School of Design. I transferred to RISD as a sophomore, and it was there that I took every course that I could on writing, and it was there that I wrote a story about a giant orange slug who wanted to be friends with this kid. The kid had no patience for him. And I sent this book out to a dozen publishers and it was rejected every single time, but I was also involved with the Hole in the Wall Gang Camp, an amazing camp for kids with all sorts of critical illnesses, and it's those kids at the camp that read my stories, and I read to them, and I saw that they responded to my work. I graduated from RISD. My grandparents were very proud, and I moved to Boston, and I set up shop. I set up a studio and I tried to get published. I would send out my books. I would send out hundreds of postcards to editors and art directors, but they would go unanswered. And my grandfather would call me every week, and he would say, "Jarrett, how's it going? Do you have a job yet?" Because he had just invested a significant amount of money in my college education. And I said, "Yes, I have a job. I write and illustrate children's books." And he said, "Well, who pays you for that?" And I said, "No one, no one, no one just yet. But I know it's going to happen." Now, I used to work the weekends at the Hole in the Wall off-season programming to make some extra money as I was trying to get my feet off the ground, and this kid who was just this really hyper kid, I started calling him "Monkey Boy," and I went home and wrote a book called "Good Night, Monkey Boy." And I sent out one last batch of postcards. And I received an email from an editor at Random House with a subject line, "Nice work!" Exclamation point. "Dear Jarrett, I received your postcard. I liked your art, so I went to your website and I'm wondering if you ever tried writing any of your own stories, because I really like your art and it looks like there are some stories that go with them. Please let me know if you're ever in New York City." And this was from an editor at Random House Children's Books. So the next week I "happened" to be in New York. (Laughter) And I met with this editor, and I left New York for a contract for my first book, "Good Night, Monkey Boy," which was published on June 12, 2001. And my local paper celebrated the news. The local bookstore made a big deal of it. They sold out of all of their books. My friend described it as a wake, but happy, because everyone I ever knew was there in line to see me, but I wasn't dead. I was just signing books. My grandparents, they were in the middle of it. They were so happy. They couldn't have been more proud. Mrs. Alisch was there. Mr. Shilale was there. Mrs. Casey was there. Mrs. Alisch cut in front of the line and said, "I taught him how to read." (Laughter) And then something happened that changed my life. I got my first piece of significant fan mail, where this kid loved Monkey Boy so much that he wanted to have a Monkey Boy birthday cake. For a two-year-old, that is like a tattoo. (Laughter) You know? You only get one birthday per year. And for him, it's only his second. And I got this picture, and I thought, "This picture is going to live within his consciousness for his entire life. He will forever have this photo in his family photo albums." So that photo, since that moment, is framed in front of me while I've worked on all of my books. I have 10 picture books out. "Punk Farm," "Baghead," "Ollie the Purple Elephant." I just finished the ninth book in the "Lunch Lady" series, which is a graphic novel series about a lunch lady who fights crime. I'm expecting the release of a chapter book called "Platypus Police Squad: The Frog Who Croaked." And I travel the country visiting countless schools, letting lots of kids know that they draw great cats. And I meet Bagheads. Lunch ladies treat me really well. And I got to see my name in lights because kids put my name in lights. Twice now, the "Lunch Lady" series has won the Children's Choice Book of the Year in the third or fourth grade category, and those winners were displayed on a jumbotron screen in Times Square. "Punk Farm" and "Lunch Lady" are in development to be movies, so I am a movie producer and I really do think, thanks to that video camera I was given in ninth grade. I've seen people have "Punk Farm" birthday parties, people have dressed up as "Punk Farm" for Halloween, a "Punk Farm" baby room, which makes me a little nervous for the child's well-being in the long term. And I get the most amazing fan mail, and I get the most amazing projects, and the biggest moment for me came last Halloween. The doorbell rang and it was a trick-or-treater dressed as my character. It was so cool. Now my grandparents are no longer living, so to honor them, I started a scholarship at the Worcester Art Museum for kids who are in difficult situations but whose caretakers can't afford the classes. And it displayed the work from my first 10 years of publishing, and you know who was there to celebrate? Mrs. Alisch. I said, "Mrs. Alisch, how are you?" And she responded with, "I'm here." (Laughter) That's true. You are alive, and that's pretty good right now. So the biggest moment for me, though, my most important job now is I am a dad myself, and I have two beautiful daughters, and my goal is to surround them by inspiration, by the books that are in every single room of our house to the murals I painted in their rooms to the moments for creativity where you find, in quiet times, by making faces on the patio to letting her sit in the very desk that I've sat in for the past 20 years. Thank you. (Applause)

As you pointed out, every time you come here, you learn something. This morning, the world's experts from I guess three or four different companies on building seats, I think concluded that ultimately, the solution is, people shouldn't sit down. I could have told them that. (Laughter) Yesterday, the automotive guys gave us some new insights. They pointed out that, I believe it was between 30 and 50 years from today, they will be steering cars by wire, without all that mechanical stuff. (Laughter) That's reassuring. (Applause) They then pointed out that there'd be, sort of, the other controls by wire, to get rid of all that mechanical stuff. That's pretty good, but why not get rid of the wires? Then you don't need anything to control the car, except thinking about it. I would love to talk about the technology, and sometime, in what's past the 15 minutes, I'll be happy to talk to all the techno-geeks around here about what's in here. But if I had one thing to say about this, before we get to first, it would be that from the time we started building this, the big idea wasn't the technology. It really was a big idea in technology when we started applying it in the iBOT for the disabled community. The big idea here is, I think, a new piece of a solution to a fairly big problem in transportation. And maybe to put that in perspective: there's so much data on this, I'll be happy to give it to you in different forms. You never know what strikes the fancy of whom, but everybody is perfectly willing to believe the car changed the world. And Henry Ford, just about 100 years ago, started cranking out Model Ts. What I don't think most people think about is the context of how technology is applied. For instance, in that time, 91 percent of America lived either on farms or in small towns. So, the car -- the horseless carriage that replaced the horse and carriage -- was a big deal; it went twice as fast as a horse and carriage. It was half as long. And it was an environmental improvement, because, for instance, in 1903 they outlawed horses and buggies in downtown Manhattan, because you can imagine what the roads look like when you have a million horses, and a million of them urinating and doing other things, and the typhoid and other problems created were almost unimaginable. So the car was the clean environmental alternative to a horse and buggy. It also was a way for people to get from their farm to a farm, or their farm to a town, or from a town to a city. It all made sense, with 91 percent of the people living there. By the 1950s, we started connecting all the towns together with what a lot of people claim is the eighth wonder of the world, the highway system. And it is certainly a wonder. And by the way, as I take shots at old technologies, I want to assure everybody, and particularly the automotive industry -- who's been very supportive of us -- that I don't think this in any way competes with airplanes, or cars. But think about where the world is today. 50 percent of the global population now lives in cities. That's 3.2 billion people. We've solved all the transportation problems that have changed the world to get it to where we are today. 500 years ago, sailing ships started getting reliable enough; we found a new continent. 150 years ago, locomotives got efficient enough, steam power, that we turned the continent into a country. Over the last hundred years, we started building cars, and then over the 50 years we've connected every city to every other city in an extraordinarily efficient way, and we have a very high standard of living as a consequence of that. But during that entire process, more and more people have been born, and more and more people are moving to cities. China alone is going to move four to six hundred million people into cities in the next decade and a half. And so, nobody, I think, would argue that airplanes, in the last 50 years, have turned the continent and the country now into a neighborhood. And if you just look at how technology has been applied, we've solved all the long-range, high-speed, high-volume, large-weight problems of moving things around. Nobody would want to give them up. And I certainly wouldn't want to give up my airplane, or my helicopter, or my Humvee, or my Porsche. I love them all. I don't keep any of them in my living room. The fact is, the last mile is the problem, and half the world now lives in dense cities. And people spend, depending on who they are, between 90 and 95 percent of their energy getting around on foot. I think there's -- I don't know what data would impress you, but how about, 43 percent of the refined fuel produced in the world is consumed by cars in metropolitan areas in the United States. Three million people die every year in cities due to bad air, and almost all particulate pollution on this planet is produced by transportation devices, particularly sitting in cities. And again, I say that not to attack any industry, I think -- I really do -- I love my airplane, and cars on highways moving 60 miles an hour are extraordinarily efficient, both from an engineering point of view, an energy consumption point of view, and a utility point of view. And we all love our cars, and I do. The problem is, you get into the city and you want to go four blocks, it's neither fun nor efficient nor productive. It's not sustainable. If -- in China, in the year 1998, 417 million people used bicycles; 1.7 million people used cars. If five percent of that population became, quote, middle class, and wanted to go the way we've gone in the last hundred years at the same time that 50 percent of their population are moving into cities of the size and density of Manhattan, every six weeks -- it isn't sustainable environmentally; it isn't sustainable economically -- there just ain't enough oil -- and it's not sustainable politically. I mean, what are we fighting over right now? We can make it complicated, but what's the world fighting over right now? So it seemed to me that somebody had to work on that last mile, and it was dumb luck. We were working on iBOTs, but once we made this, we instantly decided it could be a great alternative to jet skis. You don't need the water. Or snowmobiles. You don't need the snow. Or skiing. It's just fun, and people love to move around doing fun things. And every one of those industries, by the way -- just golf carts alone is a multi-billion-dollar industry. But rather than go license this off, which is what we normally do, it seemed to me that if we put all our effort not into the technology, but into an understanding of a world that's solved all its other problems, but has somehow come to accept that cities -- which, right back from ancient Greece on, were meant to walk around, cities that were architected and built for people -- now have a footprint that, while we've solved every other transportation problem -- and it's like Moore's law. I mean, look at the time it took to cross a continent in a Conestoga wagon, then on a railroad, then an airplane. Every other form of transportation's been improved. In 5,000 years, we've gone backwards in getting around cities. They've gotten bigger; they're spread out. The most expensive real estate on this planet in every city -- Wilshire Boulevard, or Fifth Avenue, or Tokyo, or Paris -- the most expensive real estate is their downtowns. 65 percent of the landmass of our cities are parked cars. The 20 largest cities in the world. So you wonder, what if cities could give to their pedestrians what we take for granted as we now go between cities? What if you could make them fun, attractive, clean, environmentally friendly? What if it would make it a little bit more palatable to have access via this, as that last link to mass transit, to get out to your cars so we can all live in the suburbs and use our cars the way we want, and then have our cities energized again? We thought it would be really neat to do that, and one of the problems we really were worried about is: how do we get legal on the sidewalk? Because technically I've got motors; I've got wheels -- I'm a motor vehicle. I don't look like a motor vehicle. I have the same footprint as a pedestrian; I have the same unique capability to deal with other pedestrians in a crowded space. I took this down to Ground Zero, and knocked my way through crowds for an hour. I'm a pedestrian. But the law typically lags technology by a generation or two, and if we get told we don't belong on the sidewalk, we have two choices. We're a recreational vehicle that doesn't really matter, and I don't spend my time doing that kind of stuff. Or maybe we should be out in the street in front of a Greyhound bus or a vehicle. We've been so concerned about that, we went to the Postmaster General of the United States, as the first person we ever showed on the outside, and said, "Put your people on it. Everybody trusts their postman. And they belong on the sidewalks, and they'll use it seriously." He agreed. We went to a number of police departments that want their police officers back in the neighborhood on the beat, carrying 70 pounds of stuff. They love it. And I can't believe a policeman is going to give themselves a ticket. (Laughter) So we've been working really, really hard, but we knew that the technology would not be as hard to develop as an attitude about what's important, and how to apply the technology. We went out and we found some visionary people with enough money to let us design and build these things, and in hopefully enough time to get them accepted. So, I'm happy, really, I am happy to talk about this technology as much as you want. And yes, it's really fun, and yes, you should all go out and try it. But if I could ask you to do one thing, it's not to think about it as a piece of technology, but just imagine that, although we all understand somehow that it's reasonable that we use our 4,000-pound machine, which can go 60 miles an hour, that can bring you everywhere you want to go, and somehow it's also what we used for the last mile, and it's broken, and it doesn't work. One of the more exciting things that occurred to us about why it might get accepted, happened out here in California. A few weeks ago, after we launched it, we were here with a news crew on Venice Beach, zipping up and back, and he's marveling at the technology, and meanwhile bicycles are zipping by, and skateboarders are zipping by, and a little old lady -- I mean, if you looked in the dictionary, a little old lady -- came by me -- and now that I'm on this, I'm the height of a normal adult now -- and she just stops, and the camera is there, and she looks up at me and says, "Can I try that?" And what was I -- you know, how are you going to say anything? And so I said, "Sure." So I get off, and she gets on, and with a little bit of the usual, ah, then she turns around, and she goes about 20 feet, and she turns back around, and she's all smiles. And she comes back to me and she stops, and she says, "Finally, they made something for us." And the camera is looking down at her. I'm thinking, "Wow, that was great -- (Laughter) -- please lady, don't say another word." (Laughter) And the camera is down at her, and this guy has to put the microphone in her face, said, "What do you mean by that?" And I figured, "It's all over now," and she looks up and she says, "Well," she's still watching these guys go; she says, "I can't ride a bike," no, she says, "I can't use a skateboard, and I've never used roller blades," she knew them by name; she says, "And it's been 50 years since I rode a bicycle." Then she looks up, she's looking up, and she says, "And I'm 81 years old, and I don't drive a car anymore. I still have to get to the store, and I can't carry a lot of things." And it suddenly occurred to me, that among my many fears, were not just that the bureaucracy and the regulators and the legislators might not get it -- it was that, fundamentally, you believe there's pressure among the people not to invade the most precious little bit of space left, the sidewalks in these cities. When you look at the 36 inches of legal requirement for sidewalk, then the eight foot for the parked car, then the three lanes, and then the other eight feet -- it's -- that little piece is all that's there. But she looks up and says this, and it occurs to me, well, kids aren't going to mind these things, and they don't vote, and business people and then young adults aren't going to mind these things -- they're pretty cool -- so I guess subliminally I was worried that it's the older population that's going to worry. So, having seen this, and having worried about it for eight years, the first thing I do is pick up my phone and ask our marketing and regulatory guys, call AARP, get an appointment right away. We've got to show them this thing. And they took it to Washington; they showed them; and they're going to be involved now, watching how these things get absorbed in a number of cities, like Atlanta, where we're doing trials to see if it really can, in fact, help re-energize their downtown. (Applause) The bottom line is, whether you believe the United Nations, or any of the other think tanks -- in the next 20 years, all human population growth on this planet will be in cities. In Asia alone, it will be over a billion people. They learned to start with cell phones. They didn't have to take the 100-year trip we took. They start at the top of the technology food chain. We've got to start building cities and human environments where a 150-pound person can go a couple of miles in a dense, rich, green-space environment, without being in a 4,000-pound machine to do it. Cars were not meant for parallel parking; they're wonderful machines to go between cities, but just think about it: we've solved all the long-range, high-speed problems. The Greeks went from the theater of Dionysus to the Parthenon in their sandals. You do it in your sneakers. Not much has changed. If this thing goes only three times as fast as walking -- three times -- a 30-minute walk becomes 10 minutes. Your choice, when living in a city, if it's now 10 minutes -- because at 30 minutes you want an alternative, whether it's a bus, a train -- we've got to build an infrastructure -- a light rail -- or you're going to keep parking those cars. But if you could put a pin in most cities, and imagine how far you could, if you had the time, walk in one half-hour, it's the city. If you could make it fun, and make it eight or 10 minutes, you can't find your car, un-park your car, move your car, re-park your car and go somewhere; you can't get to a cab or a subway. We could change the way people allocate their resources, the way this planet uses its energy, make it more fun. And we're hoping to some extent history will say we were right. That's Segway. This is a Stirling cycle engine; this had been confused by a lot of things we're doing. This little beast, right now, is producing a few hundred watts of electricity. Yes, it could be attached to this, and yes, on a kilogram of propane, you could drive from New York to Boston if you so choose. Perhaps more interesting about this little engine is it'll burn any fuel, because some of you might be skeptical about the capability of this to have an impact, where most of the world you can't simply plug into your 120-volt outlet. We've been working on this, actually, as an alternative energy source, starting way back with Johnson & Johnson, to run an iBOT, because the best batteries you could get -- 10 watt-hours per kilogram in lead, 20 watt-hours per kilogram nickel-cadmium, 40 watt-hours per kilogram in nickel-metal hydride, 60 watt-hours per kilogram in lithium, 8,750 watt-hours of energy in every kilogram of propane or gasoline -- which is why nobody drives electric cars. But, in any event, if you can burn it with the same efficiency -- because it's external combustion -- as your kitchen stove, if you can burn any fuel, it turns out to be pretty neat. It makes just enough electricity to, for instance, do this, which at night is enough electricity, in the rest of the world, as Mr. Holly -- Dr. Holly -- pointed out, can run computers and a light bulb. But more interestingly, the thermodynamics of this say, you're never going to get more than 20 percent efficiency. It doesn't matter much -- it says if you get 200 watts of electricity, you'll get 700 or 800 watts of heat. If you wanted to boil water and re-condense it at a rate of 10 gallons an hour, it takes about 25, a little over 25.3 kilowatt -- 25,000 watts of continuous power -- to do it. That's so much energy, you couldn't afford to desalinate or clean water in this country that way. Certainly, in the rest of the world, your choice is to devastate the place, turning everything that will burn into heat, or drink the water that's available. The number one cause of death on this planet among humans is bad water. Depending on whose numbers you believe, it's between 60 and 85,000 people per day. We don't need sophisticated heart transplants around the world. We need water. And women shouldn't have to spend four hours a day looking for it, or watching their kids die. We figured out how to put a vapor-compression distiller on this thing, with a counter-flow heat exchanger to take the waste heat, then using a little bit of the electricity control that process, and for 450 watts, which is a little more than half of its waste heat, it will make 10 gallons an hour of distilled water from anything that comes into it to cool it. So if we put this box on here in a few years, could we have a solution to transportation, electricity, and communication, and maybe drinkable water in a sustainable package that weighs 60 pounds? I don't know, but we'll try it. I better shut up. (Applause)

I'm a gamer, so I like to have goals. I like special missions and secret objectives. So here's my special mission for this talk: I'm going to try to increase the life span of every single person in this room by seven and a half minutes. Literally, you will live seven and a half minutes longer than you would have otherwise, just because you watched this talk. Some of you are looking a little bit skeptical. That's okay, because check it out -- I have math to prove that it is possible. It won't make much sense now. I'll explain it all later, just pay attention to the number at the bottom: +7.68245837 minutes. That will be my gift to you if I'm successful in my mission. Now, you have a secret mission too. Your mission is to figure out how you want to spend your extra seven and a half minutes. And I think you should do something unusual with them, because these are bonus minutes. You weren't going to have them anyway. Now, because I'm a game designer, you might be thinking to yourself, I know what she wants us to do with those minutes, she wants us to spend them playing games. Now this is a totally reasonable assumption, given that I have made quite a habit of encouraging people to spend more time playing games. For example, in my first TED Talk, I did propose that we should spend 21 billion hours a week, as a planet, playing video games. Now, 21 billion hours, it's a lot of time. It's so much time, in fact, that the number one unsolicited comment that I have heard from people all over the world since I gave that talk, is this: Jane, games are great and all, but on your deathbed, are you really going to wish you spent more time playing Angry Birds? (Laughter) This idea is so pervasive -- that games are a waste of time that we will come to regret -- that I hear it literally everywhere I go. For example, true story: Just a few weeks ago, this cab driver, upon finding out that a friend and I were in town for a game developers' conference, turned around and said -- and I quote -- "I hate games. Waste of life. Imagine getting to the end of your life and regretting all that time." Now, I want to take this problem seriously. I want games to be a force for good in the world. I don't want gamers to regret the time they spent playing, time that I encouraged them to spend. So I have been thinking about this question a lot lately. When we're on our deathbeds, will we regret the time we spent playing games? Now, this may surprise you, but it turns out there is actually some scientific research on this question. It's true. Hospice workers, the people who take care of us at the end of our lives, recently issued a report on the most frequently expressed regrets that people say when they are literally on their deathbeds. And that's what I want to share with you today -- the top five regrets of the dying. Number one: I wish I hadn't worked so hard. Number two: I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends. Number three: I wish I had let myself be happier. Number four: I wish I'd had the courage to express my true self. And number five: I wish I'd lived a life true to my dreams, instead of what others expected of me. Now, as far as I know, no one ever told one of the hospice workers, "I wish I'd spent more time playing video games," but when I hear these top five regrets of the dying, I can't help but hear five deep human cravings that games actually help us fulfill. For example, I wish I hadn't worked so hard. For many people, this means, I wish I'd spent more time with my family, with my kids when they were growing up. Well, we know that playing games together has tremendous family benefits. A recent study from Brigham Young University School of Family Life reported that parents who spend more time playing video games with their kids have much stronger real-life relationships with them. "I wish I'd stayed in touch with my friends." Hundreds of millions of people use social games like FarmVille or Words With Friends to stay in daily contact with real-life friends and family. A recent study from the University of Michigan showed that these games are incredibly powerful relationship-management tools. They help us stay connected with people in our social network that we would otherwise grow distant from, if we weren't playing games together. "I wish I'd let myself be happier." Well, here I can't help but think of the groundbreaking clinical trials recently conducted at East Carolina University that showed that online games can outperform pharmaceuticals for treating clinical anxiety and depression. Just 30 minutes of online game play a day was enough to create dramatic boosts in mood and long-term increases in happiness. "I wish I'd had the courage to express my true self." Well, avatars are a way to express our true selves, our most heroic, idealized version of who we might become. You can see that in this alter ego portrait by Robbie Cooper of a gamer with his avatar. And Stanford University has been doing research for five years now to document how playing a game with an idealized avatar changes how we think and act in real life, making us more courageous, more ambitious, more committed to our goals. "I wish I'd led a life true to my dreams, and not what others expected of me." Are games doing this yet? I'm not sure, so I've left a Super Mario question mark. We're going to come back to this one. But in the meantime, perhaps you're wondering, who is this game designer to be talking to us about deathbed regrets? And it's true, I've never worked in a hospice, I've never been on my deathbed. But recently I did spend three months in bed, wanting to die. Really wanting to die. Now let me tell you that story. It started two years ago, when I hit my head and got a concussion. The concussion didn't heal properly, and after 30 days, I was left with symptoms like nonstop headaches, nausea, vertigo, memory loss, mental fog. My doctor told me that in order to heal my brain, I had to rest it. So I had to avoid everything that triggered my symptoms. For me that meant no reading, no writing, no video games, no work or email, no running, no alcohol, no caffeine. In other words -- and I think you see where this is going -- no reason to live. (Laughter) Of course it's meant to be funny, but in all seriousness, suicidal ideation is quite common with traumatic brain injuries. It happens to one in three, and it happened to me. My brain started telling me, "Jane, you want to die." It said, "You're never going to get better." It said, "The pain will never end." And these voices became so persistent and so persuasive that I started to legitimately fear for my life, which is the time that I said to myself after 34 days -- and I will never forget this moment -- I said, "I am either going to kill myself or I'm going to turn this into a game." Now, why a game? I knew from researching the psychology of games for more than a decade that when we play a game -- and this is in the scientific literature -- we tackle tough challenges with more creativity, more determination, more optimism, and we're more likely to reach out to others for help. I wanted to bring these gamer traits to my real-life challenge, so I created a role-playing recovery game called Jane the Concussion Slayer. Now this became my new secret identity, and the first thing I did as a slayer was call my twin sister -- I have an identical twin sister named Kelly -- and tell her, "I'm playing a game to heal my brain, and I want you to play with me." This was an easier way to ask for help. She became my first ally in the game, my husband Kiyash joined next, and together we identified and battled the bad guys. Now this was anything that could trigger my symptoms and therefore slow down the healing process, things like bright lights and crowded spaces. We also collected and activated power-ups. This was anything I could do on even my worst day to feel just a little bit good, just a little bit productive. Things like cuddling my dog for 10 minutes, or getting out of bed and walking around the block just once. Now the game was that simple: Adopt a secret identity, recruit your allies, battle the bad guys, activate the power-ups. But even with a game so simple, within just a couple days of starting to play, that fog of depression and anxiety went away. It just vanished. It felt like a miracle. Now it wasn't a miracle cure for the headaches or the cognitive symptoms. That lasted for more than a year, and it was the hardest year of my life by far. But even when I still had the symptoms, even while I was still in pain, I stopped suffering. Now what happened next with the game surprised me. I put up some blog posts and videos online, explaining how to play. But not everybody has a concussion, obviously, not everyone wants to be "the slayer," so I renamed the game SuperBetter. And soon, I started hearing from people all over the world who were adopting their own secret identity, recruiting their own allies, and they were getting "super better," facing challenges like cancer and chronic pain, depression and Crohn's disease. Even people were playing it for terminal diagnoses like ALS. And I could tell from their messages and their videos that the game was helping them in the same ways that it helped me. They talked about feeling stronger and braver. They talked about feeling better understood by their friends and family. And they even talked about feeling happier, even though they were in pain, even though they were tackling the toughest challenge of their lives. Now at the time, I'm thinking to myself, what is going on here? I mean, how could a game so trivial intervene so powerfully in such serious, and in some cases life-and-death, circumstances? I mean, if it hadn't worked for me, there's no way I would have believed it was possible. Well, it turns out there's some science here, too. Some people get stronger and happier after a traumatic event. And that's what was happening to us. The game was helping us experience what scientists call post-traumatic growth, which is not something we usually hear about. We usually hear about post-traumatic stress disorder. But scientists now know that a traumatic event doesn't doom us to suffer indefinitely. Instead, we can use it as a springboard to unleash our best qualities and lead happier lives. Here are the top five things that people with post-traumatic growth say: "My priorities have changed." "I'm not afraid to do what makes me happy." "I feel closer to my friends and family." "I understand myself better. I know who I really am now." "I have a new sense of meaning and purpose in my life." "I'm better able to focus on my goals and dreams." Now, does this sound familiar? It should, because the top five traits of post-traumatic growth are essentially the direct opposite of the top five regrets of the dying. Now this is interesting, right? It seems that somehow, a traumatic event can unlock our ability to lead a life with fewer regrets. But how does it work? How do you get from trauma to growth? Or better yet, is there a way to get all the benefits of post-traumatic growth without the trauma, without having to hit your head in the first place? That would be good, right? I wanted to understand the phenomenon better, so I devoured the scientific literature, and here's what I learned. There are four kinds of strength, or resilience, that contribute to post-traumatic growth, and there are scientifically validated activities that you can do every day to build up these four kinds of resilience, and you don't need a trauma to do it. I could tell you what these four types of strength are, but I'd rather you experience them firsthand. I'd rather we all start building them up together right now. Here's what we're going to do. We'll play a quick game together. This is where you earn the seven and a half minutes of bonus life that I promised you earlier. All you have to do is successfully complete the first four SuperBetter quests. And I feel like you can do it. I have confidence in you. So, everybody ready? This is your first quest. Here we go. Pick one: Stand up and take three steps, or make your hands into fists, raise them over your head as high as you can for five seconds, go! All right, I like the people doing both. You are overachievers. Very good. (Laughter) Well done, everyone. That is worth +1 physical resilience, which means that your body can withstand more stress and heal itself faster. We know from the research that the number one thing you can do to boost your physical resilience is to not sit still. That's all it takes. Every single second that you are not sitting still, you are actively improving the health of your heart, and your lungs and brains. Everybody ready for your next quest? I want you to snap your fingers exactly 50 times, or count backwards from 100 by seven, like this: 100, 93... Go! (Snapping) Don't give up. (Snapping) Don't let the people counting down from 100 interfere with your counting to 50. (Snapping) (Laughter) Nice. Wow. That's the first time I've ever seen that. Bonus physical resilience. Well done, everyone. Now that's worth +1 mental resilience, which means you have more mental focus, more discipline, determination and willpower. We know from the scientific research that willpower actually works like a muscle. It gets stronger the more you exercise it. So tackling a tiny challenge without giving up, even one as absurd as snapping your fingers exactly 50 times or counting backwards from 100 by seven is actually a scientifically validated way to boost your willpower. So good job. Quest number three. Pick one: Because of the room, fate's really determined this for you, but here are the two options. If you're inside, find a window and look out of it. If you're outside, find a window and look in. Or do a quick YouTube or Google image search for "baby [your favorite animal.]" Do it on your phones, or just shout out some baby animals, and I'll put them on the screen. So, what do we want to see? Sloth, giraffe, elephant, snake. Okay, let's see what we got. Baby dolphin and baby llamas. Everybody look. Got that? Okay, one more. Baby elephant. (Audience) Oh! We're clapping for that? That's amazing. (Laughter) All right, what we're just feeling there is plus-one emotional resilience, which means you have the ability to provoke powerful, positive emotions like curiosity or love, which we feel looking at baby animals, when you need them most. Here's a secret from the scientific literature for you. If you can manage to experience three positive emotions for every one negative emotion over the course of an hour, a day, a week, you dramatically improve your health and your ability to successfully tackle any problem you're facing. And this is called the three-to-one positive emotion ratio. It's my favorite SuperBetter trick, so keep it up. All right, pick one, last quest: Shake someone's hand for six seconds, or send someone a quick thank you by text, email, Facebook or Twitter. Go! (Chatting) Looking good, looking good. Nice, nice. Keep it up. I love it! All right, everybody, that is +1 social resilience, which means you actually get more strength from your friends, your neighbors, your family, your community. Now, a great way to boost social resilience is gratitude. Touch is even better. Here's one more secret for you: Shaking someone's hand for six seconds dramatically raises the level of oxytocin in your bloodstream, now that's the trust hormone. That means that all of you who just shook hands are biochemically primed to like and want to help each other. This will linger during the break, so take advantage of the networking opportunities. (Laughter) Well, you have successfully completed your four quests, let's see if I've successfully completed my mission to give you seven and a half minutes of bonus life. Now I get to share one more little bit of science with you. It turns out that people who regularly boost these four types of resilience -- physical, mental, emotional and social -- live 10 years longer than everyone else. So this is true. If you are regularly achieving the three-to-one positive emotion ratio, if you are never sitting still for more than an hour at a time, if you are reaching out to one person you care about every single day, if you are tackling tiny goals to boost your willpower, you will live 10 years longer than everyone else, and here's where that math I showed you earlier comes in. So, the average life expectancy in the U.S. and the U.K. is 78.1 years, but we know from more than 1,000 peer-reviewed scientific studies that you can add 10 years of life by boosting your four types of resilience. So every single year that you are boosting your four types of resilience, you're actually earning .128 more years of life or 46 more days of life, or 67,298 more minutes of life, which means every single day, you are earning 184 minutes of life, or every single hour that you are boosting your four types of resilience, like we just did together, you are earning 7.68245837 more minutes of life. Congratulations, those seven and a half minutes are all yours. You totally earned them. Yeah! (Applause) Awesome. Wait, wait, wait. You still have your special mission, your secret mission. How are you going to spend these minutes of bonus life? Well, here's my suggestion. These seven and a half bonus minutes are kind of like genie's wishes. You can use your first wish to wish for a million more wishes. Pretty clever, right? So, if you spend these seven and a half minutes today doing something that makes you happy, or that gets you physically active, or puts you in touch with someone you care about, or even just tackling a tiny challenge, you're going to boost your resilience, so you're going to earn more minutes. And the good news is, you can keep going like that. Every hour of the day, every day of your life, all the way to your deathbed, which will now be 10 years later than it would have otherwise. And when you get there, more than likely, you will not have any of those top five regrets, because you will have built up the strength and resilience to lead a life truer to your dreams. And with 10 extra years, you might even have enough time to play a few more games. Thank you. (Applause)

So, people argue vigorously about the definition of life. They ask if it should have reproduction in it, or metabolism, or evolution. And I don't know the answer to that, so I'm not going to tell you. I will say that life involves computation. So this is a computer program. Booted up in a cell, the program would execute, and it could result in this person; or with a small change, it could result in this person; or another small change, this person; or with a larger change, this dog, or this tree, or this whale. So now, if you take this metaphor [of] genome as program seriously, you have to consider that Chris Anderson is a computer-fabricated artifact, as is Jim Watson, Craig Venter, as are all of us. And in convincing yourself that this metaphor is true, there are lots of similarities between genetic programs and computer programs that could help to convince you. But one, to me, that's most compelling is the peculiar sensitivity to small changes that can make large changes in biological development -- the output. A small mutation can take a two-wing fly and make it a four-wing fly. Or it could take a fly and put legs where its antennae should be. Or if you're familiar with "The Princess Bride," it could create a six-fingered man. Now, a hallmark of computer programs is just this kind of sensitivity to small changes. If your bank account's one dollar, and you flip a single bit, you could end up with a thousand dollars. So these small changes are things that I think that -- they indicate to us that a complicated computation in development is underlying these amplified, large changes. So now, all of this indicates that there are molecular programs underlying biology, and it shows the power of molecular programs -- biology does. And what I want to do is write molecular programs, potentially to build technology. And there are a lot of people doing this, a lot of synthetic biologists doing this, like Craig Venter. And they concentrate on using cells. They're cell-oriented. So my friends, molecular programmers, and I have a sort of biomolecule-centric approach. We're interested in using DNA, RNA and protein, and building new languages for building things from the bottom up, using biomolecules, potentially having nothing to do with biology. So, these are all the machines in a cell. There's a camera. There's the solar panels of the cell, some switches that turn your genes on and off, the girders of the cell, motors that move your muscles. My little group of molecular programmers are trying to refashion all of these parts from DNA. We're not DNA zealots, but DNA is the cheapest, easiest to understand and easy to program material to do this. And as other things become easier to use -- maybe protein -- we'll work with those. If we succeed, what will molecular programming look like? You're going to sit in front of your computer. You're going to design something like a cell phone, and in a high-level language, you'll describe that cell phone. Then you're going to have a compiler that's going to take that description and it's going to turn it into actual molecules that can be sent to a synthesizer and that synthesizer will pack those molecules into a seed. And what happens if you water and feed that seed appropriately, is it will do a developmental computation, a molecular computation, and it'll build an electronic computer. And if I haven't revealed my prejudices already, I think that life has been about molecular computers building electrochemical computers, building electronic computers, which together with electrochemical computers will build new molecular computers, which will build new electronic computers, and so forth. And if you buy all of this, and you think life is about computation, as I do, then you look at big questions through the eyes of a computer scientist. So one big question is, how does a baby know when to stop growing? And for molecular programming, the question is how does your cell phone know when to stop growing? (Laughter) Or how does a computer program know when to stop running? Or more to the point, how do you know if a program will ever stop? There are other questions like this, too. One of them is Craig Venter's question. Turns out I think he's actually a computer scientist. He asked, how big is the minimal genome that will give me a functioning microorganism? How few genes can I use? This is exactly analogous to the question, what's the smallest program I can write that will act exactly like Microsoft Word? (Laughter) And just as he's writing, you know, bacteria that will be smaller, he's writing genomes that will work, we could write smaller programs that would do what Microsoft Word does. But for molecular programming, our question is, how many molecules do we need to put in that seed to get a cell phone? What's the smallest number we can get away with? Now, these are big questions in computer science. These are all complexity questions, and computer science tells us that these are very hard questions. Almost -- many of them are impossible. But for some tasks, we can start to answer them. So, I'm going to start asking those questions for the DNA structures I'm going to talk about next. So, this is normal DNA, what you think of as normal DNA. It's double-stranded, it's a double helix, has the As, Ts, Cs and Gs that pair to hold the strands together. And I'm going to draw it like this sometimes, just so I don't scare you. We want to look at individual strands and not think about the double helix. When we synthesize it, it comes single-stranded, so we can take the blue strand in one tube and make an orange strand in the other tube, and they're floppy when they're single-stranded. You mix them together and they make a rigid double helix. Now for the last 25 years, Ned Seeman and a bunch of his descendants have worked very hard and made beautiful three-dimensional structures using this kind of reaction of DNA strands coming together. But a lot of their approaches, though elegant, take a long time. They can take a couple of years, or it can be difficult to design. So I came up with a new method a couple of years ago I call DNA origami that's so easy you could do it at home in your kitchen and design the stuff on a laptop. But to do it, you need a long, single strand of DNA, which is technically very difficult to get. So, you can go to a natural source. You can look in this computer-fabricated artifact, and he's got a double-stranded genome -- that's no good. You look in his intestines. There are billions of bacteria. They're no good either. Double strand again, but inside them, they're infected with a virus that has a nice, long, single-stranded genome that we can fold like a piece of paper. And here's how we do it. This is part of that genome. We add a bunch of short, synthetic DNAs that I call staples. Each one has a left half that binds the long strand in one place, and a right half that binds it in a different place, and brings the long strand together like this. The net action of many of these on that long strand is to fold it into something like a rectangle. Now, we can't actually take a movie of this process, but Shawn Douglas at Harvard has made a nice visualization for us that begins with a long strand and has some short strands in it. And what happens is that we mix these strands together. We heat them up, we add a little bit of salt, we heat them up to almost boiling and cool them down, and as we cool them down, the short strands bind the long strands and start to form structure. And you can see a little bit of double helix forming there. When you look at DNA origami, you can see that what it really is, even though you think it's complicated, is a bunch of double helices that are parallel to each other, and they're held together by places where short strands go along one helix and then jump to another one. So there's a strand that goes like this, goes along one helix and binds -- it jumps to another helix and comes back. That holds the long strand like this. Now, to show that we could make any shape or pattern that we wanted, I tried to make this shape. I wanted to fold DNA into something that goes up over the eye, down the nose, up the nose, around the forehead, back down and end in a little loop like this. And so, I thought, if this could work, anything could work. So I had the computer program design the short staples to do this. I ordered them; they came by FedEx. I mixed them up, heated them, cooled them down, and I got 50 billion little smiley faces floating around in a single drop of water. And each one of these is just one-thousandth the width of a human hair, OK? So, they're all floating around in solution, and to look at them, you have to get them on a surface where they stick. So, you pour them out onto a surface and they start to stick to that surface, and we take a picture using an atomic-force microscope. It's got a needle, like a record needle, that goes back and forth over the surface, bumps up and down, and feels the height of the first surface. It feels the DNA origami. There's the atomic-force microscope working and you can see that the landing's a little rough. When you zoom in, they've got, you know, weak jaws that flip over their heads and some of their noses get punched out, but it's pretty good. You can zoom in and even see the extra little loop, this little nano-goatee. Now, what's great about this is anybody can do this. And so, I got this in the mail about a year after I did this, unsolicited. Anyone know what this is? What is it? It's China, right? So, what happened is, a graduate student in China, Lulu Qian, did a great job. She wrote all her own software to design and built this DNA origami, a beautiful rendition of China, which even has Taiwan, and you can see it's sort of on the world's shortest leash, right? (Laughter) So, this works really well and you can make patterns as well as shapes, OK? And you can make a map of the Americas and spell DNA with DNA. And what's really neat about it -- well, actually, this all looks like nano-artwork, but it turns out that nano-artwork is just what you need to make nano-circuits. So, you can put circuit components on the staples, like a light bulb and a light switch. Let the thing assemble, and you'll get some kind of a circuit. And then you can maybe wash the DNA away and have the circuit left over. So, this is what some colleagues of mine at Caltech did. They took a DNA origami, organized some carbon nano-tubes, made a little switch, you see here, wired it up, tested it and showed that it is indeed a switch. Now, this is just a single switch and you need half a billion for a computer, so we have a long way to go. But this is very promising because the origami can organize parts just one-tenth the size of those in a normal computer. So it's very promising for making small computers. Now, I want to get back to that compiler. The DNA origami is a proof that that compiler actually works. So, you start with something in the computer. You get a high-level description of the computer program, a high-level description of the origami. You can compile it to molecules, send it to a synthesizer, and it actually works. And it turns out that a company has made a nice program that's much better than my code, which was kind of ugly, and will allow us to do this in a nice, visual, computer-aided design way. So, now you can say, all right, why isn't DNA origami the end of the story? You have your molecular compiler, you can do whatever you want. The fact is that it does not scale. So if you want to build a human from DNA origami, the problem is, you need a long strand that's 10 trillion trillion bases long. That's three light years' worth of DNA, so we're not going to do this. We're going to turn to another technology, called algorithmic self-assembly of tiles. It was started by Erik Winfree, and what it does, it has tiles that are a hundredth the size of a DNA origami. You zoom in, there are just four DNA strands and they have little single-stranded bits on them that can bind to other tiles, if they match. And we like to draw these tiles as little squares. And if you look at their sticky ends, these little DNA bits, you can see that they actually form a checkerboard pattern. So, these tiles would make a complicated, self-assembling checkerboard. And the point of this, if you didn't catch that, is that tiles are a kind of molecular program and they can output patterns. And a really amazing part of this is that any computer program can be translated into one of these tile programs -- specifically, counting. So, you can come up with a set of tiles that when they come together, form a little binary counter rather than a checkerboard. So you can read off binary numbers five, six and seven. And in order to get these kinds of computations started right, you need some kind of input, a kind of seed. You can use DNA origami for that. You can encode the number 32 in the right-hand side of a DNA origami, and when you add those tiles that count, they will start to count -- they will read that 32 and they'll stop at 32. So, what we've done is we've figured out a way to have a molecular program know when to stop going. It knows when to stop growing because it can count. It knows how big it is. So, that answers that sort of first question I was talking about. It doesn't tell us how babies do it, however. So now, we can use this counting to try and get at much bigger things than DNA origami could otherwise. Here's the DNA origami, and what we can do is we can write 32 on both edges of the DNA origami, and we can now use our watering can and water with tiles, and we can start growing tiles off of that and create a square. The counter serves as a template to fill in a square in the middle of this thing. So, what we've done is we've succeeded in making something much bigger than a DNA origami by combining DNA origami with tiles. And the neat thing about it is, is that it's also reprogrammable. You can just change a couple of the DNA strands in this binary representation and you'll get 96 rather than 32. And if you do that, the origami's the same size, but the resulting square that you get is three times bigger. So, this sort of recapitulates what I was telling you about development. You have a very sensitive computer program where small changes -- single, tiny, little mutations -- can take something that made one size square and make something very much bigger. Now, this -- using counting to compute and build these kinds of things by this kind of developmental process is something that also has bearing on Craig Venter's question. So, you can ask, how many DNA strands are required to build a square of a given size? If we wanted to make a square of size 10, 100 or 1,000, if we used DNA origami alone, we would require a number of DNA strands that's the square of the size of that square; so we'd need 100, 10,000 or a million DNA strands. That's really not affordable. But if we use a little computation -- we use origami, plus some tiles that count -- then we can get away with using 100, 200 or 300 DNA strands. And so we can exponentially reduce the number of DNA strands we use, if we use counting, if we use a little bit of computation. And so computation is some very powerful way to reduce the number of molecules you need to build something, to reduce the size of the genome that you're building. And finally, I'm going to get back to that sort of crazy idea about computers building computers. If you look at the square that you build with the origami and some counters growing off it, the pattern that it has is exactly the pattern that you need to make a memory. So if you affix some wires and switches to those tiles -- rather than to the staple strands, you affix them to the tiles -- then they'll self-assemble the somewhat complicated circuits, the demultiplexer circuits, that you need to address this memory. So you can actually make a complicated circuit using a little bit of computation. It's a molecular computer building an electronic computer. Now, you ask me, how far have we gotten down this path? Experimentally, this is what we've done in the last year. Here is a DNA origami rectangle, and here are some tiles growing from it. And you can see how they count. One, two, three, four, five, six, nine, 10, 11, 12, 17. So it's got some errors, but at least it counts up. (Laughter) So, it turns out we actually had this idea nine years ago, and that's about the time constant for how long it takes to do these kinds of things, so I think we made a lot of progress. We've got ideas about how to fix these errors. And I think in the next five or 10 years, we'll make the kind of squares that I described and maybe even get to some of those self-assembled circuits. So now, what do I want you to take away from this talk? I want you to remember that to create life's very diverse and complex forms, life uses computation to do that. And the computations that it uses, they're molecular computations, and in order to understand this and get a better handle on it, as Feynman said, you know, we need to build something to understand it. And so we are going to use molecules and refashion this thing, rebuild everything from the bottom up, using DNA in ways that nature never intended, using DNA origami, and DNA origami to seed this algorithmic self-assembly. You know, so this is all very cool, but what I'd like you to take from the talk, hopefully from some of those big questions, is that this molecular programming isn't just about making gadgets. It's not just making about -- it's making self-assembled cell phones and circuits. What it's really about is taking computer science and looking at big questions in a new light, asking new versions of those big questions and trying to understand how biology can make such amazing things. Thank you. (Applause)

Actually, I come from Britain, but I've been living in Maldives for 26 years now. So, that's home really. The Maldives, as I'm sure you're aware, are a chain of islands off the southwest coast of India here. Capital, Malé, where I live. Actually, sitting here today in Mysore, we're closer to Malé than we are to Delhi, for example. If you're in IT, India, obviously, is the place to be at the moment. But if you're a marine biologist, Maldives is not such a bad place to be. And it has been my home these years. For those of you who've been there, fantastic coral reefs, fantastic diving, fantastic snorkeling. I spend as much of my time as possible investigating the marine life. I study fish, also the bigger things, whales and dolphins. This is a blue whale. We have blue whales in the waters around here, off Maldives, around the waters of India. You can see them off Kerala. And, in fact, we're very lucky in this region. One of the best places in the world to see blue whales is here in this region. In Sri Lanka, if you go down to the south coast of Sri Lanka, during the northeast monsoon season, you can see blue whales very, very easily. It's probably the best place in the world to see them. Now, when I talk about the northeast monsoon season, I'm sure many of you here know exactly what I mean, but perhaps some of you are not quite so sure. I need to explain a little bit about monsoons. Now, monsoon, the root of the word "monsoon" comes from the word "season." So, it's just a season. And there are two seasons in most of South Asia. And in the summer India heats up, gets very hot. Hot air rises, and air is drawn in off the sea to replace it. And the way it works is, it comes from the southwest. It comes off the ocean here and is drawn up towards India. So it comes from the southwest. It's a southwest monsoon. Picks up moisture as it crosses the ocean. That's what brings the monsoon rain. And then in the winter things cool down. High pressure builds over India. And the whole system goes into reverse. So, the wind is now coming from the northeast out of India, across the Indian Ocean, this way towards Africa. Keep that in mind. Now, I'm a marine biologist, but I'm actually a bit of an old fashioned naturalist, I suppose. I'm interested in all sorts of things, almost everything that moves, including dragonflies. And I'm actually going to talk, this afternoon, about dragonflies. This is a very beautiful species, it's called the Oriental Scarlet. And one thing you need to know about dragonflies, one important thing, is that they lay their eggs in fresh water. They need fresh water to breed. They lay the eggs into fresh water. Little larvae hatch out in fresh water. They feed on other little things. They feed on mosquito larvae. So, they're very important. They control mosquito larvae, among other things. And they grow and grow by stages. And they climb out of the water, burst out, as the adult which we see. And typically, there is a lot of variation, but if you have a dragonfly with, say, a one year life cycle, which is quite typical, the larva, living in the fresh water, lives for 10 or 11 months. And then the adult, which comes after, lives for one or two months. So it's essentially a freshwater animal. It really does need fresh water. Now, the particular species of dragonfly I want to talk about is this one, because most dragonflies, like the one we've just seen, when the adult is there for its brief one or two months of life, it doesn't go very far. It can't travel very far. A few kilometers, maybe, is quite typical. They are very good fliers, but they don't go too far. But this guy is an exception. And this is called the Globe Skimmer, or Wandering Glider. And, as the name might suggest, it is found pretty much around the world. It lives throughout the tropics, the Americas, Africa, Asia, Australia, into the Pacific. And it wanders far and wide. We know that much about it. But it really hasn't been studied very much. It's a rather mediocre looking dragonfly. If you're going to study dragonflies, you want to study those really bright beautiful ones, like that red one. Or the really rare ones, the endemic endangered ones. This is, it seems a bit dull you know. It's sort of dull-colored. And it's fairly common. And it occurs everywhere -- you know, why bother? But if you take that attitude, you're actually missing something rather special. Because this dragonfly has a rather amazing story to tell. And I feel very privileged to have stumbled across it living in the Maldives. When I first went to the Maldives, dead keen on diving, spent as much of my time as I could in and under the water. Didn't notice any dragonflies; maybe they were there, maybe they weren't. Didn't notice them. But after some time, after some months, one day as I was going out and about, suddenly I noticed hundreds of dragonflies, hundreds of dragonflies. Something like this, these are all this species Globe Skimmer. I didn't know at the time, but I know now, they're Globe Skimmers, hundreds of them. And they were there for some time. And then they were gone. And I didn't think anything more of it until the following year, when it happened again, and then the year after that, and then the year after that. And I was a bit slow, I didn't really take too much notice. But I asked some Maldivian friends and colleagues, and yes they come every year. And I asked people about them and yes, they knew, but they didn't know anything, where they came from, or anything. And again I didn't think too much of it. But slowly it began to dawn on me that something rather special was happening. Because dragonflies need fresh water to breed. And the Maldives, and I'm sure some of you have been there -- so here is home. So, Maldives, beautiful place. (Laughter) It's built entirely of coral reefs. And on top of the coral reefs are sand banks. Average height, about that much above sea level. So, global warming, sea level rise, it's a real serious issue. But I'm not going to talk about that. Another important point of these sand banks is that when it rains, the rainwater soaks down into the soil. So, it's gone. So, it stays under the soil. The trees can put their roots into it. Humans can dig holes and make a well. But dragonflies -- a bit tricky. There is no surface fresh water. There are no ponds, streams, rivers, lakes, nothing like that. So, why is it that every year millions of dragonflies, millions, millions of dragonflies turn up? I got a little bit curious. In fact I'll stop here, because I want to ask, and there is a lot of people who, from India of course, people who grew up spending your childhood here. Those of you who are Indian or spent your childhood here, let me have a show of hands, who of you -- not yet, not yet! You're too keen. You're too keen. No. Hang on. Hang on. Wait for the go. I'll say go. Those of you who grew up in India, do you remember in your childhood, dragonflies, swarms of dragonflies? Maybe at school, maybe tying little bits of string onto them? Maybe pulling bits off? I'm not asking about that. You've only got to say, do you remember seeing lots of dragonflies. Any hands? Any hands? Yes. Thank you. Thank you. It's a widespread phenomenon throughout South Asia, including the Maldives. And I got a bit curious about it. In the Maldives -- now, in India there is plenty of water, so, dragonflies, yeah, of course. Why not? But in Maldives, no fresh water. So, what on Earth is going on? And the first thing I did was started recording when they turned up in the Maldives. And there is the answer, 21st of October. Not every year, that's the average date. So, I've been writing it down for 15 years now. You'd think they're coming from India. It's the closest place. But in October, remember, we're still in southwest monsoon, Maldives is still in the southwest monsoon. But wind is, invariably, every time, is from the west. It's going towards India, not from India. So, are these things, how are these things getting here? Are they coming from India against the wind? Seemed a bit unlikely. So, next thing I did is I got on the phone. Maldives is a long archipelago. It stretches about 500 miles, of course it's India here. I got on the phone and emailed to friends and colleagues. When do you see the dragonflies appear? And pretty soon, a picture started emerging. In Bangalore, a colleague there sent me information for three years, average, 24th of September, so late September. Down in Trivandrum, a bit later. Far north of Maldives, a bit later. Then Malé, then further south. And then the southernmost Maldives. It's pretty obvious, they're coming from India. But they are coming 400 miles across the ocean, against the wind. How on Earth are they doing that? I didn't know. The next thing I did was I started counting dragonflies. I wanted to know about their seasonality, what time of year, this is when they first arrive, but how long are they around for? Does that give any clues? So, I started a very rigorous scientific process. I had a rigorous scientific transect. I got on my bicycle, and I cycled around the island of Malé. It's about five kilometers around, counting the dragonflies as I go, trying not to bump into people as I'm looking in the trees. And they're here for a very short time, October, November, December. That's it. And then they tail off, there's a few, but that's it. October, November, December. That is not the northeast monsoon season. That's not the southwest season. That's the inter-monsoon, the time when the monsoon changes. Now, what I said was, you get the southwest monsoon going one way, and then it changes and you get the northeast monsoon going the other way. And that sort of gives the impression you've got one air mass going up and down, up and down. It doesn't work like that. What happens, actually, is there is two air masses. And there is a front between them, and the front moves. So, if you've got India here, when the front is up above India you're into the southwest monsoon. Then the front moves into the northeast monsoon. And that front in the middle is not vertical, it's at an angle. So, as it comes over towards Malé I'm standing in Malé underneath the front. I can be in the southwest monsoon. But the wind above is from the northeast monsoon. So, the dragonflies are actually coming from India on the northeast monsoon, but at an altitude at 1,000 to 2,000 meters up in the air. Incredible. These little insects, it's the same ones we see out here [in India], two inches long, five centimeters long, flying in their millions, 400 miles across the ocean, at 2,000 meters up. Quite incredible. So, I was quite pleased with myself. I thought wow, I've tracked this one, I know how they come here. Then I scratched my head a bit, and that's okay, I know how they come here, but why do they come here? What are millions of dragonflies doing, flying out over the ocean every year to their apparent doom? It doesn't make sense. There is nothing for them in Maldives. What on Earth are they doing? Well, to cut a long story short, they're actually flying right across the ocean. They're making it all the way across to East Africa. I know that because I have friends who work on fisheries' research vessels who have sent to me reports from boats out in the ocean. I know because we have reports from Seychelles, which fit in as well, down here. And I know because when you look at the rainfall, these particular insects, these Globe Skimmers breed in temporary rain water pools. Okay, they lay their eggs where the seasonal rains are, the monsoon rains. The larvae have to develop very quickly. They only take six weeks. Instead of 11 months, they're six weeks. They're up, and they're off. Now, here we have, in case you can't read at the back, the top is rainfall for India. And we're starting in June. So this is the monsoon rain. By September, October, it's drying out. Nothing for these dragonflies. There is no more seasonal rain. They've got to go hunting for seasonal rain. And they fly south. As the monsoon withdraws to the south they come down through Karnataka, into Kerala. And then they run out of land. But they are incredibly good fliers. This particular species, it can fly for thousands of kilometers. And it just keeps going. And the wind, the northeast wind swooshes it around and carries it off across the ocean to Africa, where it's raining. And they are breeding in the rains of Africa. Now, this is southeast Africa. It makes it look like there are sort of two breeding periods here. It's slightly more complicated than that. What's happening is they are breeding in the monsoon rains here. And the dragonflies you can see today outside here, on the campus, are the young of this generation. They hatched out in India. They're looking for somewhere to breed. If it rains here they'll breed. But most of them are going to carry on. And next stop, perhaps only four or five days away is going to be East Africa. The wind will swoosh them out across here. If they pass the Maldives they might go and have a look, nothing there, they'll carry on. Here, here, Kenya, East Africa, they've actually just come out of a long drought. Just last week the rains broke. The short rains broke and it's raining there now. And the dragonflies are there. I have reports from my various contacts. The dragonflies are here now. They're breeding there. When those guys, they'll lay their eggs now. They'll hatch out in six weeks. By that time the seasonal rains have moved on. It's not there, it's down here. They'll fly down here. And the clever thing is the wind is always converging to where the rain is. The rain occurs, these are summer rains. This is a summer monsoon. The sun is overhead there. Summer rains in southern Africa. The sun is overhead, maximum heating, maximum evaporation, maximum clouds, maximum rainfall, maximum opportunities for reproduction. Not only that, because you have this convection, you have this rising of the air where it's hot, air is drawn in. There's a convergence. So, wherever the rain is falling, the air is drawn towards it to replace the air that's rising. So, the little fellow that hatches out here, he gets up into the air, he is automatically carried to where the rain is falling. Lay their eggs, next generation, they come up, automatically carried to where the rain is falling. It's now back there. They come out, it's time to come back. So, in four generations, one, two, three, four and then back. A complete circuit of the Indian Ocean. This is a circuit of about 16,000 kilometers. 16,000 kilometers, four generations, mind you, for a two inch long insect. It's quite incredible. Those of you from North America will be familiar with the Monarch butterfly. Which, up until now has had the longest known insect migration. It's only half the length of this one. And this crossing here, of the ocean, is the only truly regular transoceanic crossing of any insect. A quite incredible feat. And I only stumbled on this because I was living in Malé, in Maldives for long enough for it to percolate into my brain that something rather special was going on. But dragonflies are not the only creatures that make the crossing. There is more to the story. I'm also interested in birds. And I'm familiar with this fellow. This is a rather special bird. It's a falcon. It's called the eastern red-footed falcon, obviously. But it's also called the Amur Falcon. And it's called the Amur Falcon because it breeds in Amurland. Which is an area along the Amur River, which is up here. It's the border, much of it is the border between China and Russia, up here in the far east. So, Siberia, Manchuria. And that's where it breeds. And if you're a falcon it's quite a nice place to be in the summer. But it's a pretty miserable place to be in the winter. It's, well, you can imagine. So, as any sensible bird would do, he moves south. They move south. The whole population moves south. But then the being sensible stopped. So, now they don't stop here, or even down here. No, they turn across here. They have a little refueling stop in northeastern India. They come to the latitude of about Mumbai or Goa. And then they strike out across the ocean, down to Kenya. And down here, and they winter down here [in southern Africa]. Incredible. This is the most extraordinary migration of any bird of prey. A quite incredible migration. And they are not the only one that makes the crossing. They have the most incredible journey, but several make the crossing from India to Africa. Includes this one, the hobby. This fellow is a very nice bird, this is the Pied cuckoo. Those of you from northern India will be familiar with this. It comes with the monsoons. This time of year they cross back to Africa. And this guy, the roller, a rather beautiful bird. It's known as the Eurasian Roller. In India it occurs in the northwest, so it's known as the Kashmir Roller. And these birds, what I've done is I've complied all the records, all the available records of these birds, put them together, and found out they migrate at exactly the same time as the dragonflies. They make use of exactly the same winds. They travel at exactly the same time with the same winds to make the crossing. I know they travel at the same altitude. It's known about the Amur Falcon. This guy, unfortunately, one of these met an unfortunate end. He was flying off the coast of Goa, 21 years ago, 1988. October, 1988. An Indian Navy jet was flying off Goa, bang! In the middle of the night. Fortunately, a two engine jet got back to base, and they pulled the remains of one of these [Eurasian Rollers] out. Flying at night over the Indian Ocean 2,424 meters. Same height as the dragonflies go. So, they are using the same winds. And the other thing, the other important factor for all these birds, all medium sized fellows, and this includes the next slide as well, which is a bee-eater. Bee-eaters eat bees. This one has a nice blue cheek. It's a Blue-cheeked Bee-eater. And every one of these birds that makes the crossing from India to East Africa eats insects, large insects, the size of dragonflies. Thank you very much. (Applause)

If I should have a daughter, instead of "Mom," she's going to call me "Point B," because that way she knows that no matter what happens, at least she can always find her way to me. And I'm going to paint solar systems on the backs of her hands so she has to learn the entire universe before she can say, "Oh, I know that like the back of my hand." And she's going to learn that this life will hit you hard in the face, wait for you to get back up just so it can kick you in the stomach. But getting the wind knocked out of you is the only way to remind your lungs how much they like the taste of air. There is hurt, here, that cannot be fixed by Band-Aids or poetry. So the first time she realizes that Wonder Woman isn't coming, I'll make sure she knows she doesn't have to wear the cape all by herself, because no matter how wide you stretch your fingers, your hands will always be too small to catch all the pain you want to heal. Believe me, I've tried. "And, baby," I'll tell her, don't keep your nose up in the air like that. I know that trick; I've done it a million times. You're just smelling for smoke so you can follow the trail back to a burning house, so you can find the boy who lost everything in the fire to see if you can save him. Or else find the boy who lit the fire in the first place, to see if you can change him. But I know she will anyway, so instead I'll always keep an extra supply of chocolate and rain boots nearby, because there is no heartbreak that chocolate can't fix. Okay, there's a few that chocolate can't fix. But that's what the rain boots are for, because rain will wash away everything, if you let it. I want her to look at the world through the underside of a glass-bottom boat, to look through a microscope at the galaxies that exist on the pinpoint of a human mind, because that's the way my mom taught me. That there'll be days like this. (Singing) There'll be days like this, my momma said. When you open your hands to catch and wind up with only blisters and bruises; when you step out of the phone booth and try to fly and the very people you want to save are the ones standing on your cape; when your boots will fill with rain, and you'll be up to your knees in disappointment. And those are the very days you have all the more reason to say thank you. Because there's nothing more beautiful than the way the ocean refuses to stop kissing the shoreline, no matter how many times it's sent away. You will put the wind in win some, lose some. You will put the star in starting over, and over. And no matter how many land mines erupt in a minute, be sure your mind lands on the beauty of this funny place called life. And yes, on a scale from one to over-trusting, I am pretty damn naive. But I want her to know that this world is made out of sugar. It can crumble so easily, but don't be afraid to stick your tongue out and taste it. "Baby," I'll tell her, "remember, your momma is a worrier, and your poppa is a warrior, and you are the girl with small hands and big eyes who never stops asking for more." Remember that good things come in threes and so do bad things. Always apologize when you've done something wrong, but don't you ever apologize for the way your eyes refuse to stop shining. Your voice is small, but don't ever stop singing. And when they finally hand you heartache, when they slip war and hatred under your door and offer you handouts on street-corners of cynicism and defeat, you tell them that they really ought to meet your mother. (Applause) Thank you. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) Thanks. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) All right, so I want you to take a moment, and I want you to think of three things that you know to be true. They can be about whatever you want -- technology, entertainment, design, your family, what you had for breakfast. The only rule is don't think too hard. Okay, ready? Go. Okay. So here are three things I know to be true. I know that Jean-Luc Godard was right when he said that, "A good story has a beginning, a middle and an end, although not necessarily in that order." I know that I'm incredibly nervous and excited to be up here, which is greatly inhibiting my ability to keep it cool. (Laughter) And I know that I have been waiting all week to tell this joke. (Laughter) Why was the scarecrow invited to TED? Because he was out standing in his field. (Laughter) I'm sorry. Okay, so these are three things I know to be true. But there are plenty of things I have trouble understanding. So I write poems to figure things out. Sometimes the only way I know how to work through something is by writing a poem. Sometimes I get to the end of the poem, look back and go, "Oh, that's what this is all about," and sometimes I get to the end of the poem and haven't solved anything, but at least I have a new poem out of it. Spoken-word poetry is the art of performance poetry. I tell people it involves creating poetry that doesn't just want to sit on paper, that something about it demands it be heard out loud or witnessed in person. When I was a freshman in high school, I was a live wire of nervous hormones. And I was underdeveloped and over-excitable. And despite my fear of ever being looked at for too long, I was fascinated by the idea of spoken-word poetry. I felt that my two secret loves, poetry and theater, had come together, had a baby, a baby I needed to get to know. So I decided to give it a try. My first spoken-word poem, packed with all the wisdom of a 14-year-old, was about the injustice of being seen as unfeminine. The poem was very indignant, and mainly exaggerated, but the only spoken-word poetry that I had seen up until that point was mainly indignant, so I thought that's what was expected of me. The first time that I performed, the audience of teenagers hooted and hollered their sympathy, and when I came off the stage, I was shaking. I felt this tap on my shoulder, and I turned around to see this giant girl in a hoodie sweatshirt emerge from the crowd. She was maybe eight feet tall and looked like she could beat me up with one hand, but instead she just nodded at me and said, "Hey, I really felt that. Thanks." And lightning struck. I was hooked. I discovered this bar on Manhattan's Lower East Side that hosted a weekly poetry open Mic, and my bewildered, but supportive, parents took me to soak in every ounce of spoken word that I could. I was the youngest by at least a decade, but somehow the poets at the Bowery Poetry Club didn't seem bothered by the 14-year-old wandering about. In fact, they welcomed me. And it was here, listening to these poets share their stories, that I learned that spoken-word poetry didn't have to be indignant, it could be fun or painful or serious or silly. The Bowery Poetry Club became my classroom and my home, and the poets who performed encouraged me to share my stories as well. Never mind the fact that I was 14. They told me, "Write about being 14." So I did and stood amazed every week when these brilliant, grown-up poets laughed with me and groaned their sympathy and clapped and told me, "Hey, I really felt that too." Now I can divide my spoken-word journey into three steps. Step one was the moment I said, "I can. I can do this." And that was thanks to a girl in a hoodie. Step two was the moment I said, "I will. I will continue. I love spoken word. I will keep coming back week after week." And step three began when I realized I didn't have to write indignant poems, if that's not what I was. There were things that were specific to me, and the more that I focused on those things, the weirder my poetry got, but the more that it felt like mine. It's not just the adage "Write what you know." It's about gathering up all of the knowledge and experience you've collected up to now to help you dive into the things you don't know. I use poetry to help me work through what I don't understand, but I show up to each new poem with a backpack full of everywhere else that I've been. When I got to university, I met a fellow poet who shared my belief in the magic of spoken-word poetry. And actually, Phil Kaye and I coincidentally also share the same last name. When I was in high school I had created Project V.O.I.C.E. as a way to encourage my friends to do spoken word with me. But Phil and I decided to reinvent Project V.O.I.C.E., this time changing the mission to using spoken-word poetry as a way to entertain, educate and inspire. We stayed full-time students, but in between we traveled, performing and teaching nine-year-olds to MFA candidates, from California to Indiana to India to a public high school just up the street from campus. And we saw over and over the way that spoken-word poetry cracks open locks. But it turns out sometimes, poetry can be really scary. Turns out sometimes, you have to trick teenagers into writing poetry. So I came up with lists. Everyone can write lists. And the first list that I assign is "10 Things I Know to be True." And here's what happens, you would discover it too if we all started sharing our lists out loud. At a certain point, you would realize that someone has the exact same thing, or one thing very similar, to something on your list. And then someone else has something the complete opposite of yours. Third, someone has something you've never even heard of before. Fourth, someone has something you thought you knew everything about, but they're introducing a new angle of looking at it. And I tell people that this is where great stories start from -- these four intersections of what you're passionate about and what others might be invested in. And most people respond really well to this exercise. But one of my students, a freshman named Charlotte, was not convinced. Charlotte was very good at writing lists, but she refused to write any poems. "Miss," she'd say, "I'm just not interesting. I don't have anything interesting to say." So I assigned her list after list, and one day I assigned the list "10 Things I Should Have Learned by Now." Number three on Charlotte's list was, "I should have learned not to crush on guys three times my age." I asked her what that meant, and she said, "Miss, it's kind of a long story." And I said, "Charlotte, it sounds pretty interesting to me." And so she wrote her first poem, a love poem unlike any I had ever heard before. And the poem began, "Anderson Cooper is a gorgeous man." (Laughter) "Did you see him on 60 Minutes, racing Michael Phelps in a pool -- nothing but swim trunks on -- diving in the water, determined to beat this swimming champion? After the race, he tossed his wet, cloud-white hair and said, 'You're a god.' No, Anderson, you're the god." (Laughter) (Applause) Now, I know that the number one rule to being cool is to seem unfazed, to never admit that anything scares you or impresses you or excites you. Somebody once told me it's like walking through life like this. You protect yourself from all the unexpected miseries or hurt that might show up. But I try to walk through life like this. And yes, that means catching all of those miseries and hurt, but it also means that when beautiful, amazing things just fall out of the sky, I'm ready to catch them. I use spoken word to help my students rediscover wonder, to fight their instincts to be cool and unfazed and, instead, actively pursue being engaged with what goes on around them, so that they can reinterpret and create something from it. It's not that I think that spoken-word poetry is the ideal art form. I'm always trying to find the best way to tell each story. I write musicals; I make short films alongside my poems. But I teach spoken-word poetry because it's accessible. Not everyone can read music or owns a camera, but everyone can communicate in some way, and everyone has stories that the rest of us can learn from. Plus, spoken-word poetry allows for immediate connection. It's not uncommon to feel like you're alone or that nobody understands you, but spoken word teaches that if you have the ability to express yourself and the courage to present those stories and opinions, you could be rewarded with a room full of your peers, or your community, who will listen. And maybe even a giant girl in a hoodie who will connect with what you've shared. And that is an amazing realization to have, especially when you're 14. Plus, now with YouTube, that connection's not even limited to the room we're in. I'm so lucky that there's this archive of performances that I can share with my students. It allows for even more opportunities for them to find a poet or a poem that they connect to. Once you've figured this out, it is tempting to keep writing the same poem, or keep telling the same story, over and over, once you've figured out that it will gain you applause. It's not enough to just teach that you can express yourself. You have to grow and explore and take risks and challenge yourself. And that is step three: infusing the work you're doing with the specific things that make you you, even while those things are always changing. Because step three never ends. But you don't get to start on step three, until you take step one first: "I can." I travel a lot while I'm teaching, and I don't always get to watch all of my students reach their step three, but I was very lucky with Charlotte, that I got to watch her journey unfold the way it did. I watched her realize that, by putting the things that she knows to be true into the work she's doing, she can create poems that only Charlotte can write, about eyeballs and elevators and Dora the Explorer. And I'm trying to tell stories only I can tell -- like this story. I spent a lot of time thinking about the best way to tell this story, and I wondered if the best way was going to be a PowerPoint, a short film -- And where exactly was the beginning, the middle or the end? I wondered whether I'd get to the end of this talk and finally have figured it all out, or not. And I always thought that my beginning was at the Bowery Poetry Club, but it's possible that it was much earlier. In preparing for TED, I discovered this diary page in an old journal. I think December 54th was probably supposed to be 24th. It's clear that when I was a child, I definitely walked through life like this. I think that we all did. I would like to help others rediscover that wonder -- to want to engage with it, to want to learn, to want to share what they've learned, what they've figured out to be true and what they're still figuring out. So I'd like to close with this poem. When they bombed Hiroshima, the explosion formed a mini-supernova, so every living animal, human or plant that received direct contact with the rays from that sun was instantly turned to ash. And what was left of the city soon followed. The long-lasting damage of nuclear radiation caused an entire city and its population to turn into powder. When I was born, my mom says I looked around the whole hospital room with a stare that said, "This? I've done this before." She says I have old eyes. When my Grandpa Genji died, I was only five years old, but I took my mom by the hand and told her, "Don't worry, he'll come back as a baby." And yet, for someone who's apparently done this already, I still haven't figured anything out yet. My knees still buckle every time I get on a stage. My self-confidence can be measured out in teaspoons mixed into my poetry, and it still always tastes funny in my mouth. But in Hiroshima, some people were wiped clean away, leaving only a wristwatch or a diary page. So no matter that I have inhibitions to fill all my pockets, I keep trying, hoping that one day I'll write a poem I can be proud to let sit in a museum exhibit as the only proof I existed. My parents named me Sarah, which is a biblical name. In the original story, God told Sarah she could do something impossible, and -- she laughed, because the first Sarah, she didn't know what to do with impossible. And me? Well, neither do I, but I see the impossible every day. Impossible is trying to connect in this world, trying to hold onto others while things are blowing up around you, knowing that while you're speaking, they aren't just waiting for their turn to talk -- they hear you. They feel exactly what you feel at the same time that you feel it. It's what I strive for every time I open my mouth -- that impossible connection. There's this piece of wall in Hiroshima that was completely burnt black by the radiation. But on the front step, a person who was sitting there blocked the rays from hitting the stone. The only thing left now is a permanent shadow of positive light. After the A-bomb, specialists said it would take 75 years for the radiation-damaged soil of Hiroshima City to ever grow anything again. But that spring, there were new buds popping up from the earth. When I meet you, in that moment, I'm no longer a part of your future. I start quickly becoming part of your past. But in that instant, I get to share your present. And you, you get to share mine. And that is the greatest present of all. So if you tell me I can do the impossible -- I'll probably laugh at you. I don't know if I can change the world yet, because I don't know that much about it -- and I don't know that much about reincarnation either, but if you make me laugh hard enough, sometimes I forget what century I'm in. This isn't my first time here. This isn't my last time here. These aren't the last words I'll share. But just in case, I'm trying my hardest to get it right this time around. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause)

I've been fascinated for a lifetime by the beauty, form and function of giant bluefin tuna. Bluefin are warmblooded like us. They're the largest of the tunas, the second-largest fish in the sea -- bony fish. They actually are a fish that is endothermic -- powers through the ocean with warm muscles like a mammal. That's one of our bluefin at the Monterey Bay Aquarium. You can see in its shape and its streamlined design it's powered for ocean swimming. It flies through the ocean on its pectoral fins, gets lift, powers its movements with a lunate tail. It's actually got a naked skin for most of its body, so it reduces friction with the water. This is what one of nature's finest machines. Now, bluefin were revered by Man for all of human history. For 4,000 years, we fished sustainably for this animal, and it's evidenced in the art that we see from thousands of years ago. Bluefin are in cave paintings in France. They're on coins that date back 3,000 years. This fish was revered by humankind. It was fished sustainably till all of time, except for our generation. Bluefin are pursued wherever they go -- there is a gold rush on Earth, and this is a gold rush for bluefin. There are traps that fish sustainably up until recently. And yet, the type of fishing going on today, with pens, with enormous stakes, is really wiping bluefin ecologically off the planet. Now bluefin, in general, goes to one place: Japan. Some of you may be guilty of having contributed to the demise of bluefin. They're delectable muscle, rich in fat -- absolutely taste delicious. And that's their problem; we're eating them to death. Now in the Atlantic, the story is pretty simple. Bluefin have two populations: one large, one small. The North American population is fished at about 2,000 ton. The European population and North African -- the Eastern bluefin tuna -- is fished at tremendous levels: 50,000 tons over the last decade almost every year. The result is whether you're looking at the West or the Eastern bluefin population, there's been tremendous decline on both sides, as much as 90 percent if you go back with your baseline to 1950. For that, bluefin have been given a status equivalent to tigers, to lions, to certain African elephants and to pandas. These fish have been proposed for an endangered species listing in the past two months. They were voted on and rejected just two weeks ago, despite outstanding science that shows from two committees this fish meets the criteria of CITES I. And if it's tunas you don't care about, perhaps you might be interested that international long lines and pursing chase down tunas and bycatch animals such as leatherbacks, sharks, marlin, albatross. These animals and their demise occurs in the tuna fisheries. The challenge we face is that we know very little about tuna, and everyone in the room knows what it looks like when an African lion takes down its prey. I doubt anyone has seen a giant bluefin feed. This tuna symbolizes what's the problem for all of us in the room. It's the 21st century, but we really have only just begun to really study our oceans in a deep way. Technology has come of age that's allowing us to see the Earth from space and go deep into the seas remotely. And we've got to use these technologies immediately to get a better understanding of how our ocean realm works. Most of us from the ship -- even I -- look out at the ocean and see this homogeneous sea. We don't know where the structure is. We can't tell where are the watering holes like we can on an African plain. We can't see the corridors, and we can't see what it is that brings together a tuna, a leatherback and an albatross. We're only just beginning to understand how the physical oceanography and the biological oceanography come together to create a seasonal force that actually causes the upwelling that might make a hot spot a hope spot. The reasons these challenges are great is that technically it's difficult to go to sea. It's hard to study a bluefin on its turf, the entire Pacific realm. It's really tough to get up close and personal with a mako shark and try to put a tag on it. And then imagine being Bruce Mate's team from OSU, getting up close to a blue whale and fixing a tag on the blue whale that stays, an engineering challenge we've yet to really overcome. So the story of our team, a dedicated team, is fish and chips. We basically are taking the same satellite phone parts, or the same parts that are in your computer, chips. We're putting them together in unusual ways, and this is taking us into the ocean realm like never before. And for the first time, we're able to watch the journey of a tuna beneath the ocean using light and photons to measure sunrise and sunset. Now, I've been working with tunas for over 15 years. I have the privilege of being a partner with the Monterey Bay Aquarium. We've actually taken a sliver of the ocean, put it behind glass, and we together have put bluefin tuna and yellowfin tuna on display. When the veil of bubbles lifts every morning, we can actually see a community from the Pelagic ocean, one of the only places on Earth you can see giant bluefin swim by. We can see in their beauty of form and function, their ceaseless activity. They're flying through their space, ocean space. And we can bring two million people a year into contact with this fish and show them its beauty. Behind the scenes is a working lab at Stanford University partnered with the Monterey Bay Aquarium. Here, for over 14 or 15 years, we've actually brought in both bluefin and yellowfin in captivity. We'd been studying these fish, but first we had to learn how to husbandry them. What do they like to eat? What is it that they're happy with? We go in the tanks with the tuna -- we touch their naked skin -- it's pretty amazing. It feels wonderful. And then, better yet, we've got our own version of tuna whisperers, our own Chuck Farwell, Alex Norton, who can take a big tuna and in one motion, put it into an envelope of water, so that we can actually work with the tuna and learn the techniques it takes to not injure this fish who never sees a boundary in the open sea. Jeff and Jason there, are scientists who are going to take a tuna and put it in the equivalent of a treadmill, a flume. And that tuna thinks it's going to Japan, but it's staying in place. We're actually measuring its oxygen consumption, its energy consumption. We're taking this data and building better models. And when I see that tuna -- this is my favorite view -- I begin to wonder: how did this fish solve the longitude problem before we did? So take a look at that animal. That's the closest you'll probably ever get. Now, the activities from the lab have taught us now how to go out in the open ocean. So in a program called Tag-A-Giant we've actually gone from Ireland to Canada, from Corsica to Spain. We've fished with many nations around the world in an effort to basically put electronic computers inside giant tunas. We've actually tagged 1,100 tunas. And I'm going to show you three clips, because I tagged 1,100 tunas. It's a very hard process, but it's a ballet. We bring the tuna out, we measure it. A team of fishers, captains, scientists and technicians work together to keep this animal out of the ocean for about four to five minutes. We put water over its gills, give it oxygen. And then with a lot of effort, after tagging, putting in the computer, making sure the stalk is sticking out so it senses the environment, we send this fish back into the sea. And when it goes, we're always happy. We see a flick of the tail. And from our data that gets collected, when that tag comes back, because a fisher returns it for a thousand-dollar reward, we can get tracks beneath the sea for up to five years now, on a backboned animal. Now sometimes the tunas are really large, such as this fish off Nantucket. But that's about half the size of the biggest tuna we've ever tagged. It takes a human effort, a team effort, to bring the fish in. In this case, what we're going to do is put a pop-up satellite archival tag on the tuna. This tag rides on the tuna, senses the environment around the tuna and actually will come off the fish, detach, float to the surface and send back to Earth-orbiting satellites position data estimated by math on the tag, pressure data and temperature data. And so what we get then from the pop-up satellite tag is we get away from having to have a human interaction to recapture the tag. Both the electronic tags I'm talking about are expensive. These tags have been engineered by a variety of teams in North America. They are some of our finest instruments, our new technology in the ocean today. One community in general has given more to help us than any other community. And that's the fisheries off the state of North Carolina. There are two villages, Harris and Morehead City, every winter for over a decade, held a party called Tag-A-Giant, and together, fishers worked with us to tag 800 to 900 fish. In this case, we're actually going to measure the fish. We're going to do something that in recent years we've started: take a mucus sample. Watch how shiny the skin is; you can see my reflection there. And from that mucus, we can get gene profiles, we can get information on gender, checking the pop-up tag one more time, and then it's out in the ocean. And this is my favorite. With the help of my former postdoc, Gareth Lawson, this is a gorgeous picture of a single tuna. This tuna is actually moving on a numerical ocean. The warm is the Gulf Stream, the cold up there in the Gulf of Maine. That's where the tuna wants to go -- it wants to forage on schools of herring -- but it can't get there. It's too cold. But then it warms up, and the tuna pops in, gets some fish, maybe comes back to home base, goes in again and then comes back to winter down there in North Carolina and then on to the Bahamas. And my favorite scene, three tunas going into the Gulf of Mexico. Three tunas tagged. Astronomically, we're calculating positions. They're coming together. That could be tuna sex -- and there it is. That is where the tuna spawn. So from data like this, we're able now to put the map up, and in this map you see thousands of positions generated by this decade and a half of tagging. And now we're showing that tunas on the western side go to the eastern side. So two populations of tunas -- that is, we have a Gulf population, one that we can tag -- they go to the Gulf of Mexico, I showed you that -- and a second population. Living amongst our tunas -- our North American tunas -- are European tunas that go back to the Med. On the hot spots -- the hope spots -- they're mixed populations. And so what we've done with the science is we're showing the International Commission, building new models, showing them that a two-stock no-mixing model -- to this day, used to reject the CITES treaty -- that model isn't the right model. This model, a model of overlap, is the way to move forward. So we can then predict where management places should be. Places like the Gulf of Mexico and the Mediterranean are places where the single species, the single population, can be captured. These become forthright in places we need to protect. The center of the Atlantic where the mixing is, I could imagine a policy that lets Canada and America fish, because they manage their fisheries well, they're doing a good job. But in the international realm, where fishing and overfishing has really gone wild, these are the places that we have to make hope spots in. That's the size they have to be to protect the bluefin tuna. Now in a second project called Tagging of Pacific Pelagics, we took on the planet as a team, those of us in the Census of Marine Life. And, funded primarily through Sloan Foundation and others, we were able to actually go in, in our project -- we're one of 17 field programs and begin to take on tagging large numbers of predators, not just tunas. So what we've done is actually gone up to tag salmon shark in Alaska, met salmon shark on their home territory, followed them catching salmon and then went in and figured out that, if we take a salmon and put it on a line, we can actually take up a salmon shark -- This is the cousin of the white shark -- and very carefully -- note, I say "very carefully," -- we can actually keep it calm, put a hose in its mouth, keep it off the deck and then tag it with a satellite tag. That satellite tag will now have your shark phone home and send in a message. And that shark leaping there, if you look carefully, has an antenna. It's a free swimming shark with a satellite tag jumping after salmon, sending home its data. Salmon sharks aren't the only sharks we tag. But there goes salmon sharks with this meter-level resolution on an ocean of temperature -- warm colors are warmer. Salmon sharks go down to the tropics to pup and come into Monterey. Now right next door in Monterey and up at the Farallones are a white shark team led by Scott Anderson -- there -- and Sal Jorgensen. They can throw out a target -- it's a carpet shaped like a seal -- and in will come a white shark, a curious critter that will come right up to our 16-ft. boat. It's a several thousand-pound animal. And we'll wind in the target. And we'll place an acoustic tag that says, "OMSHARK 10165," or something like that, acoustically with a ping. And then we'll put on a satellite tag that will give us the long-distance journeys with the light-based geolocation algorithms solved on the computer that's on the fish. So in this case, Sal's looking at two tags there, and there they are: the white sharks of California going off to the white shark cafe and coming back. We also tag makos with our NOAA colleagues, blue sharks. And now, together, what we can see on this ocean of color that's temperature, we can see ten-day worms of makos and salmon sharks. We have white sharks and blue sharks. For the first time, an ecoscape as large as ocean-scale, showing where the sharks go. The tuna team from TOPP has done the unthinkable: three teams tagged 1,700 tunas, bluefin, yellowfin and albacore all at the same time -- carefully rehearsed tagging programs in which we go out, pick up juvenile tunas, put in the tags that actually have the sensors, stick out the tuna and then let them go. They get returned, and when they get returned, here on a NASA numerical ocean you can see bluefin in blue go across their corridor, returning to the Western Pacific. Our team from UCSC has tagged elephant seals with tags that are glued on their heads, that come off when they slough. These elephant seals cover half an ocean, take data down to 1,800 feet -- amazing data. And then there's Scott Shaffer and our shearwaters wearing tuna tags, light-based tags, that now are going to take you from New Zealand to Monterey and back, journeys of 35,000 nautical miles we had never seen before. But now with light-based geolocation tags that are very small, we can actually see these journeys. Same thing with Laysan albatross who travel an entire ocean on a trip sometimes, up to the same zone the tunas use. You can see why they might be caught. Then there's George Schillinger and our leatherback team out of Playa Grande tagging leatherbacks that go right past where we are. And Scott Benson's team that showed that leatherbacks go from Indonesia all the way to Monterey. So what we can see on this moving ocean is we can finally see where the predators are. We can actually see how they're using ecospaces as large as an ocean. And from this information, we can begin to map the hope spots. So this is just three years of data right here -- and there's a decade of this data. We see the pulse and the seasonal activities that these animals are going on. So what we're able to do with this information is boil it down to hot spots, 4,000 deployments, a huge herculean task, 2,000 tags in an area, shown here for the first time, off the California coast, that appears to be a gathering place. And then for sort of an encore from these animals, they're helping us. They're carrying instruments that are actually taking data down to 2,000 meters. They're taking information from our planet at very critical places like Antarctica and the Poles. Those are seals from many countries being released who are sampling underneath the ice sheets and giving us temperature data of oceanographic quality on both poles. This data, when visualized, is captivating to watch. We still haven't figured out best how to visualize the data. And then, as these animals swim and give us the information that's important to climate issues, we also think it's critical to get this information to the public, to engage the public with this kind of data. We did this with the Great Turtle Race -- tagged turtles, brought in four million hits. And now with Google's Oceans, we can actually put a white shark in that ocean. And when we do and it swims, we see this magnificent bathymetry that the shark knows is there on its path as it goes from California to Hawaii. But maybe Mission Blue can fill in that ocean that we can't see. We've got the capacity, NASA has the ocean. We just need to put it together. So in conclusion, we know where Yellowstone is for North America; it's off our coast. We have the technology that's shown us where it is. What we need to think about perhaps for Mission Blue is increasing the biologging capacity. How is it that we can actually take this type of activity elsewhere? And then finally -- to basically get the message home -- maybe use live links from animals such as blue whales and white sharks. Make killer apps, if you will. A lot of people are excited when sharks actually went under the Golden Gate Bridge. Let's connect the public to this activity right on their iPhone. That way we do away with a few internet myths. So we can save the bluefin tuna. We can save the white shark. We have the science and technology. Hope is here. Yes we can. We need just to apply this capacity further in the oceans. Thank you. (Applause)

As a clergyman, you can imagine how out of place I feel. I feel like a fish out of water, or maybe an owl out of the air. (Laughter) I was preaching in San Jose some time ago, and my friend Mark Kvamme, who helped introduce me to this conference, brought several CEOs and leaders of some of the companies here in the Silicon Valley to have breakfast with me, or I with them. And I was so stimulated. And had such -- it was an eye-opening experience to hear them talk about the world that is yet to come through technology and science. I know that we're near the end of this conference, and some of you may be wondering why they have a speaker from the field of religion. Richard can answer that, because he made that decision. But some years ago I was on an elevator in Philadelphia, coming down. I was to address a conference at a hotel. And on that elevator a man said, "I hear Billy Graham is staying in this hotel." And another man looked in my direction and said, "Yes, there he is. He's on this elevator with us." And this man looked me up and down for about 10 seconds, and he said, "My, what an anticlimax!" (Laughter) I hope that you won't feel that these few moments with me is not a -- is an anticlimax, after all these tremendous talks that you've heard, and addresses, which I intend to listen to every one of them. But I was on an airplane in the east some years ago, and the man sitting across the aisle from me was the mayor of Charlotte, North Carolina. His name was John Belk. Some of you will probably know him. And there was a drunk man on there, and he got up out of his seat two or three times, and he was making everybody upset by what he was trying to do. And he was slapping the stewardess and pinching her as she went by, and everybody was upset with him. And finally, John Belk said, "Do you know who's sitting here?" And the man said, "No, who?" He said, "It's Billy Graham, the preacher." He said, "You don't say!" And he turned to me, and he said, "Put her there!" He said, "Your sermons have certainly helped me." (Laughter) And I suppose that that's true with thousands of people. (Laughter) I know that as you have been peering into the future, and as we've heard some of it here tonight, I would like to live in that age and see what is going to be. But I won't, because I'm 80 years old. This is my eightieth year, and I know that my time is brief. I have phlebitis at the moment, in both legs, and that's the reason that I had to have a little help in getting up here, because I have Parkinson's disease in addition to that, and some other problems that I won't talk about. (Laughter) But this is not the first time that we've had a technological revolution. We've had others. And there's one that I want to talk about. In one generation, the nation of the people of Israel had a tremendous and dramatic change that made them a great power in the Near East. A man by the name of David came to the throne, and King David became one of the great leaders of his generation. He was a man of tremendous leadership. He had the favor of God with him. He was a brilliant poet, philosopher, writer, soldier -- with strategies in battle and conflict that people study even today. But about two centuries before David, the Hittites had discovered the secret of smelting and processing of iron, and, slowly, that skill spread. But they wouldn't allow the Israelis to look into it, or to have any. But David changed all of that, and he introduced the Iron Age to Israel. And the Bible says that David laid up great stores of iron, and which archaeologists have found, that in present-day Palestine, there are evidences of that generation. Now, instead of crude tools made of sticks and stones, Israel now had iron plows, and sickles, and hoes and military weapons. And in the course of one generation, Israel was completely changed. The introduction of iron, in some ways, had an impact a little bit like the microchip has had on our generation. And David found that there were many problems that technology could not solve. There were many problems still left. And they're still with us, and you haven't solved them, and I haven't heard anybody here speak to that. How do we solve these three problems that I'd like to mention? The first one that David saw was human evil. Where does it come from? How do we solve it? Over again and again in the Psalms, which Gladstone said was the greatest book in the world, David describes the evils of the human race. And yet he says, "He restores my soul." Have you ever thought about what a contradiction we are? On one hand, we can probe the deepest secrets of the universe and dramatically push back the frontiers of technology, as this conference vividly demonstrates. We've seen under the sea, three miles down, or galaxies hundreds of billions of years out in the future. But on the other hand, something is wrong. Our battleships, our soldiers, are on a frontier now, almost ready to go to war with Iraq. Now, what causes this? Why do we have these wars in every generation, and in every part of the world? And revolutions? We can't get along with other people, even in our own families. We find ourselves in the paralyzing grip of self-destructive habits we can't break. Racism and injustice and violence sweep our world, bringing a tragic harvest of heartache and death. Even the most sophisticated among us seem powerless to break this cycle. I would like to see Oracle take up that, or some other technological geniuses work on this. How do we change man, so that he doesn't lie and cheat, and our newspapers are not filled with stories of fraud in business or labor or athletics or wherever? The Bible says the problem is within us, within our hearts and our souls. Our problem is that we are separated from our Creator, which we call God, and we need to have our souls restored, something only God can do. Jesus said, "For out of the heart come evil thoughts: murders, sexual immorality, theft, false testimonies, slander." The British philosopher Bertrand Russell was not a religious man, but he said, "It's in our hearts that the evil lies, and it's from our hearts that it must be plucked out." Albert Einstein -- I was just talking to someone, when I was speaking at Princeton, and I met Mr. Einstein. He didn't have a doctor's degree, because he said nobody was qualified to give him one. (Laughter) But he made this statement. He said, "It's easier to denature plutonium than to denature the evil spirit of man." And many of you, I'm sure, have thought about that and puzzled over it. You've seen people take beneficial technological advances, such as the Internet we've heard about tonight, and twist them into something corrupting. You've seen brilliant people devise computer viruses that bring down whole systems. The Oklahoma City bombing was simple technology, horribly used. The problem is not technology. The problem is the person or persons using it. King David said that he knew the depths of his own soul. He couldn't free himself from personal problems and personal evils that included murder and adultery. Yet King David sought God's forgiveness, and said, "You can restore my soul." You see, the Bible teaches that we're more than a body and a mind. We are a soul. And there's something inside of us that is beyond our understanding. That's the part of us that yearns for God, or something more than we find in technology. Your soul is that part of you that yearns for meaning in life, and which seeks for something beyond this life. It's the part of you that yearns, really, for God. I find [that] young people all over the world are searching for something. They don't know what it is. I speak at many universities, and I have many questions and answer periods, and whether it's Cambridge, or Harvard, or Oxford -- I've spoken at all of those universities. I'm going to Harvard in about three or four -- no, it's about two months from now -- to give a lecture. And I'll be asked the same questions that I was asked the last few times I've been there. And it'll be on these questions: where did I come from? Why am I here? Where am I going? What's life all about? Why am I here? Even if you have no religious belief, there are times when you wonder that there's something else. Thomas Edison also said, "When you see everything that happens in the world of science, and in the working of the universe, you cannot deny that there's a captain on the bridge." I remember once, I sat beside Mrs. Gorbachev at a White House dinner. I went to Ambassador Dobrynin, whom I knew very well. And I'd been to Russia several times under the Communists, and they'd given me marvelous freedom that I didn't expect. And I knew Mr. Dobrynin very well, and I said, "I'm going to sit beside Mrs. Gorbachev tonight. What shall I talk to her about?" And he surprised me with the answer. He said, "Talk to her about religion and philosophy. That's what she's really interested in." I was a little bit surprised, but that evening that's what we talked about, and it was a stimulating conversation. And afterward, she said, "You know, I'm an atheist, but I know that there's something up there higher than we are." The second problem that King David realized he could not solve was the problem of human suffering. Writing the oldest book in the world was Job, and he said, "Man is born unto trouble as the sparks fly upward." Yes, to be sure, science has done much to push back certain types of human suffering. But I'm -- in a few months, I'll be 80 years of age. I admit that I'm very grateful for all the medical advances that have kept me in relatively good health all these years. My doctors at the Mayo Clinic urged me not to take this trip out here to this -- to be here. I haven't given a talk in nearly four months. And when you speak as much as I do, three or four times a day, you get rusty. That's the reason I'm using this podium and using these notes. Every time you ever hear me on the television or somewhere, I'm ad-libbing. I'm not reading. I never read an address. I never read a speech or a talk or a lecture. I talk ad lib. But tonight, I've got some notes here so that if I begin to forget, which I do sometimes, I've got something I can turn to. But even here among us, most -- in the most advanced society in the world, we have poverty. We have families that self-destruct, friends that betray us. Unbearable psychological pressures bear down on us. I've never met a person in the world that didn't have a problem or a worry. Why do we suffer? It's an age-old question that we haven't answered. Yet David again and again said that he would turn to God. He said, "The Lord is my shepherd." The final problem that David knew he could not solve was death. Many commentators have said that death is the forbidden subject of our generation. Most people live as if they're never going to die. Technology projects the myth of control over our mortality. We see people on our screens. Marilyn Monroe is just as beautiful on the screen as she was in person, and our -- many young people think she's still alive. They don't know that she's dead. Or Clark Gable, or whoever it is. The old stars, they come to life. And they're -- they're just as great on that screen as they were in person. But death is inevitable. I spoke some time ago to a joint session of Congress, last year. And we were meeting in that room, the statue room. About 300 of them were there. And I said, "There's one thing that we have in common in this room, all of us together, whether Republican or Democrat, or whoever." I said, "We're all going to die. And we have that in common with all these great men of the past that are staring down at us." And it's often difficult for young people to understand that. It's difficult for them to understand that they're going to die. As the ancient writer of Ecclesiastes wrote, he said, there's every activity under heaven. There's a time to be born, and there's a time to die. I've stood at the deathbed of several famous people, whom you would know. I've talked to them. I've seen them in those agonizing moments when they were scared to death. And yet, a few years earlier, death never crossed their mind. I talked to a woman this past week whose father was a famous doctor. She said he never thought of God, never talked about God, didn't believe in God. He was an atheist. But she said, as he came to die, he sat up on the side of the bed one day, and he asked the nurse if he could see the chaplain. And he said, for the first time in his life he'd thought about the inevitable, and about God. Was there a God? A few years ago, a university student asked me, "What is the greatest surprise in your life?" And I said, "The greatest surprise in my life is the brevity of life. It passes so fast." But it does not need to have to be that way. Wernher von Braun, in the aftermath of World War II concluded, quote: "science and religion are not antagonists. On the contrary, they're sisters." He put it on a personal basis. I knew Dr. von Braun very well. And he said, "Speaking for myself, I can only say that the grandeur of the cosmos serves only to confirm a belief in the certainty of a creator." He also said, "In our search to know God, I've come to believe that the life of Jesus Christ should be the focus of our efforts and inspiration. The reality of this life and His resurrection is the hope of mankind." I've done a lot of speaking in Germany and in France, and in different parts of the world -- 105 countries it's been my privilege to speak in. And I was invited one day to visit Chancellor Adenauer, who was looked upon as sort of the founder of modern Germany, since the war. And he once -- and he said to me, he said, "Young man." He said, "Do you believe in the resurrection of Jesus Christ?" And I said, "Sir, I do." He said, "So do I." He said, "When I leave office, I'm going to spend my time writing a book on why Jesus Christ rose again, and why it's so important to believe that." In one of his plays, Alexander Solzhenitsyn depicts a man dying, who says to those gathered around his bed, "The moment when it's terrible to feel regret is when one is dying." How should one live in order not to feel regret when one is dying? Blaise Pascal asked exactly that question in seventeenth-century France. Pascal has been called the architect of modern civilization. He was a brilliant scientist at the frontiers of mathematics, even as a teenager. He is viewed by many as the founder of the probability theory, and a creator of the first model of a computer. And of course, you are all familiar with the computer language named for him. Pascal explored in depth our human dilemmas of evil, suffering and death. He was astounded at the phenomenon we've been considering: that people can achieve extraordinary heights in science, the arts and human enterprise, yet they also are full of anger, hypocrisy and have -- and self-hatreds. Pascal saw us as a remarkable mixture of genius and self-delusion. On November 23, 1654, Pascal had a profound religious experience. He wrote in his journal these words: "I submit myself, absolutely, to Jesus Christ, my redeemer." A French historian said, two centuries later, "Seldom has so mighty an intellect submitted with such humility to the authority of Jesus Christ." Pascal came to believe not only the love and the grace of God could bring us back into harmony, but he believed that his own sins and failures could be forgiven, and that when he died he would go to a place called heaven. He experienced it in a way that went beyond scientific observation and reason. It was he who penned the well-known words, "The heart has its reasons, which reason knows not of." Equally well known is Pascal's Wager. Essentially, he said this: "if you bet on God, and open yourself to his love, you lose nothing, even if you're wrong. But if instead you bet that there is no God, then you can lose it all, in this life and the life to come." For Pascal, scientific knowledge paled beside the knowledge of God. The knowledge of God was far beyond anything that ever crossed his mind. He was ready to face him when he died at the age of 39. King David lived to be 70, a long time in his era. Yet he too had to face death, and he wrote these words: "even though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for you are with me." This was David's answer to three dilemmas of evil, suffering and death. It can be yours, as well, as you seek the living God and allow him to fill your life and give you hope for the future. When I was 17 years of age, I was born and reared on a farm in North Carolina. I milked cows every morning, and I had to milk the same cows every evening when I came home from school. And there were 20 of them that I had -- that I was responsible for, and I worked on the farm and tried to keep up with my studies. I didn't make good grades in high school. I didn't make them in college, until something happened in my heart. One day, I was faced face-to-face with Christ. He said, "I am the way, the truth and the life." Can you imagine that? "I am the truth. I'm the embodiment of all truth." He was a liar. Or he was insane. Or he was what he claimed to be. Which was he? I had to make that decision. I couldn't prove it. I couldn't take it to a laboratory and experiment with it. But by faith I said, I believe him, and he came into my heart and changed my life. And now I'm ready, when I hear that call, to go into the presence of God. Thank you, and God bless all of you. (Applause) Thank you for the privilege. It was great. Richard Wurman: You did it. Thanks. (Applause)

What I am always thinking about is what this session is about, which is called simplicity. And almost, I would almost call it being simple-minded, but in the best sense of the word. I'm trying to figure out two very simple things: how to live and how to die, period. That's all I'm trying to do, all day long. And I'm also trying to have some meals, and have some snacks, and, you know, and yell at my children, and do all the normal things that keep you grounded. So, I was fortunate enough to be born a very dreamy child. My older sister was busy torturing my parents, and they were busy torturing her. I was lucky enough to be completely ignored, which is a fabulous thing, actually, I want to tell you. So, I was able to completely daydream my way through my life. And I finally daydreamed my way into NYU, at a very good time, in 1967, where I met a man who was trying to blow up the math building of NYU. And I was writing terrible poetry and knitting sweaters for him. And feminists hated us, and the whole thing was wretched from beginning to end. But I kept writing bad poetry, and he didn't blow up the math building, but he went to Cuba. But I gave him the money, because I was from Riverdale so I had more money than he did. (Laughter) And that was a good thing to help, you know, the cause. But, then he came back, and things happened, and I decided I really hated my writing, that it was awful, awful, purple prose. And I decided that I wanted to tell -- but I still wanted to tell a narrative story and I still wanted to tell my stories. So I decided that I would start to draw. How hard could that be? And so what happened was that I started just becoming an editorial illustrator through, you know, sheer whatever, sheer ignorance. And we started a studio. Well, Tibor really started the studio, called M&Co. And the premise of M&Co was, we don't know anything, but that's all right, we're going to do it anyway. And as a matter of fact, it's better not to know anything, because if you know too much, you're stymied. So, the premise in the studio was, there are no boundaries, there is no fear. And I -- and my full-time job, I landed the best job on Earth, was to daydream, and to actually come up with absurd ideas that -- fortunately, there were enough people there, and it was a team, it was a collective, it was not just me coming up with crazy ideas. But the point was that I was there as myself, as a dreamer. And so some of the things -- I mean, it was a long history of M&Co, and clearly we also needed to make some money, so we decided we would create a series of products. And some of the watches there, attempting to be beautiful and humorous -- maybe not attempting, hopefully succeeding. That to be able to talk about content, to break apart what you normally expect, to use humor and surprise, elegance and humanity in your work was really important to us. It was a very high, it was a very impersonal time in design and we wanted to say, the content is what's important, not the package, not the wrapping. You really have to be journalists, you have to be inventors, you have to use your imagination more importantly than anything. So, the good news is that I have a dog and, though I don't know if I believe in luck -- I don't know what I believe in, it's a very complicated question, but I do know that before I go away, I crank his tail seven times. So, whenever he sees a suitcase in the house, because everybody's always, you know, leaving, they're always cranking this wonderful dog's tail, and he runs to the other room. But I am able to make the transition from working for children and -- from working for adults to children, and back and forth, because, you know, I can say that I'm immature, and in a way, that's true. I don't really -- I mean, I could tell you that I didn't understand, I'm not proud of it, but I didn't understand let's say 95 percent of the talks at this conference. But I have been taking beautiful notes of drawings and I have a gorgeous onion from Murray Gell-Mann's talk. And I have a beautiful page of doodles from Jonathan Woodham's talk. So, good things come out of, you know, incomprehension -- (Laughter) -- which I will do a painting of, and then it will end up in my work. So, I'm open to the possibilities of not knowing and finding out something new. So, in writing for children, it seems simple, and it is. You have to condense a story into 32 pages, usually. And what you have to do is, you really have to edit down to what you want to say. And hopefully, you're not talking down to kids and you're not talking in such a way that you, you know, couldn't stand reading it after one time. So, I hopefully am writing, you know, books that are good for children and for adults. But the painting reflects -- I don't think differently for children than I do for adults. I try to use the same kind of imagination, the same kind of whimsy, the same kind of love of language. So, you know, and I have lots of wonderful-looking friends. This is Andrew Gatz, and he walked in through the door and I said, "You! Sit down there." You know, I take lots of photos. And the Bertoia chair in the background is my favorite chair. So, I get to put in all of the things that I love. Hopefully, a dialog between adults and children will happen on many different levels, and hopefully different kinds of humor will evolve. And the books are really journals of my life. I never -- I don't like plots. I don't know what a plot means. I can't stand the idea of anything that starts in the beginning, you know, beginning, middle and end. It really scares me, because my life is too random and too confused, and I enjoy it that way. But anyway, so we were in Venice, and this is our room. And I had this dream that I was wearing this fantastic green gown, and I was looking out the window, and it was really a beautiful thing. And so, I was able to put that into this story, which is an alphabet, and hopefully go on to something else. The letter C had other things in it. I was fortunate also, to meet the man who's sitting on the bed, though I gave him hair over here and he doesn't have hair. Well, he has some hair but -- well, he used to have hair. And with him, I was able to do a project that was really fantastic. I work for the New Yorker, and I do covers, and 9/11 happened and it was, you know, a complete and utter end of the world as we knew it. And Rick and I were on our way to a party in the Bronx, and somebody said Bronxistan, and somebody said Ferreristan, and we came up with this New Yorker cover, which we were able to -- we didn't know what we were doing. We weren't trying to be funny, we weren't trying to be -- well, we were trying to be funny actually, that's not true. We hoped we'd be funny, but we didn't know it would be a cover, and we didn't know that that image, at the moment that it happened, would be something that would be so wonderful for a lot of people. And it really became the -- I don't know, you know, it was one of those moments people started laughing at what was going on. And from, you know, Fattushis, to Taxistan to, you know, for the Fashtoonks, Botoxia, Pashmina, Khlintunisia, you know, we were able to take the city and make fun of this completely foreign, who are -- what's going on over here? Who are these people? What are these tribes? And David Remnick, who was really wonderful about it, had one problem. He didn't like Al Zheimers, because he thought it would insult people with Alzheimer's. But you know, we said, "David, who's going to know? They're not." (Laughter) So it stayed in, and it was, and, you know, it was a good thing. You know, in the course of my life, I never know what's going to happen and that's kind of the beauty part. And we were on Cape Cod, a place, obviously, of great inspiration, and I picked up this book, "The Elements of Style," at a yard sale. And I didn't -- and I'd never used it in school, because I was too busy writing poems, and flunking out, and I don't know what, sitting in cafes. But I picked it up and I started reading it and I thought, this book is amazing. I said, people should know about this book. (Laughter) So I decided it needed a few -- it needed a lift, it needed a few illustrations. And basically, I called the, you know, I convinced the White Estate, and what an intersection of like, you know, Polish Jew, you know, main WASP family. Here I am, saying, I'd like to do something to this book. And they said yes, and they left me completely alone, which was a gorgeous, wonderful thing. And I took the examples that they gave, and just did 56 paintings, basically. So, this is, I don't know if you can read this. "Well, Susan, this is a fine mess you are in." And when you're dealing with grammar, which is, you know, incredibly dry, E.B. White wrote such wonderful, whimsical -- and actually, Strunk -- and then you come to the rules and, you know, there are lots of grammar things. "Do you mind me asking a question? Do you mind my asking a question?" "Would, could, should, or would, should, could." And "would" is Coco Chanel's lover, "should" is Edith Sitwell, and "could" is an August Sander subject. And, "He noticed a large stain in the center of the rug." (Laughter) So, there's a kind of British understatement, murder-mystery theme that I really love very much. And then, "Be obscure clearly! Be wild of tongue in a way we can understand." E.B. White wrote us a number of rules, which can either paralyze you and make you loathe him for the rest of time, or you can ignore them, which I do, or you can, I don't know what, you know, eat a sandwich. So, what I did when I was painting was I started singing, because I really adore singing, and I think that music is the highest form of all art. So, I commissioned a wonderful composer, Nico Muhly, who wrote nine songs using the text, and we performed this fantastic evening of -- he wrote music for both amateurs and professionals. I played the clattering teacup and the slinky in the main reading room of the New York Public Library, where you're supposed to be very, very quiet, and it was a phenomenally wonderful event, which we hopefully will do some more. Who knows? The New York TimesSelect, the op-ed page, asked me to do a column, and they said, you can do whatever you want. So, once a month for the last year, I've been doing a column called "The Principles of Uncertainty," which, you know, I don't know who Heisenberg is, but I know I can throw that around now. You know, it's the principles of uncertainty, so, you know. I'm going to read quickly -- and probably I'm going to edit some, because I don't have that much time left -- a few of the columns. And basically, I was so, you know, it was so amusing, because I said, "Well, how much space do I have?" And they said, "Well, you know, it's the Internet." And I said, "Yes, but how much space do I have?" And they said, "It's unlimited, it's unlimited." OK. So, the first one I was very timid, and I'll begin. "How can I tell you everything that is in my heart? Impossible to begin. Enough. No. Begin with the hapless dodo." And I talk about the dodo, and how the dodo became extinct, and then I talk about Spinoza. "As the last dodo was dying, Spinoza was looking for a rational explanation for everything, called eudaemonia. And then he breathed his last, with loved ones around him, and I know that he had chicken soup also, as his last meal." I happen to know it for a fact. And then he died, and there was no more Spinoza. Extinct. And then, we don't have a stuffed Spinoza, but we do have a stuffed Pavlov's dog, and I visited him in the Museum of Hygiene in St. Petersburg, in Russia. And there he is, with this horrible electrical box on his rump in this fantastic, decrepit palace. "And I think it must have been a very, very dark day when the Bolsheviks arrived. Maybe amongst themselves they had a few good laughs, but Stalin was a paranoid man, even more than my father." (Laughter) You don't even know. "And decided his top people had to be extinctified." Which I think I made up, which is a good thing. And so, this is a chart of, you know, just a small chart, because the chart would go on forever of all the people that he killed. So, shot dead, smacked over the head, you know, thrown away. "Nabokov's family fled Russia. How could the young Nabokov, sitting innocently and elegantly in a red chair, leafing through a book and butterflies, imagine such displacement, such loss?" And then I want to tell you that this is a map. So, "My beautiful mother's family fled Russia as well. Too many pogroms. Leaving the shack, the wild blueberry woods, the geese, the River Sluch, they went to Palestine and then America." And my mother drew this map for me of the United States of America, and that is my DNA over here, because that person who I grew up with had no use for facts whatsoever. Facts were actually banished from our home. And so, if you see that Texas -- you know, Texas and California are under Canada, and that South Carolina is on top of North Carolina, this is the home that I grew up in, OK? So, it's a miracle that I'm here today. But actually, it's not. It's actually a wonderful thing. But then she says Tel Aviv and Lenin, which is the town they came from, and, "Sorry, the rest unknown, thank you." But in her lexicon, "sorry, the rest unknown, thank you" is "sorry, the rest unknown, go to hell," because she couldn't care less. (Laughter) "The Impossibility of February" is that February's a really wretched month in New York and the images for me conjure up these really awful things. Well, not so awful. I received a box in the mail and it was wrapped with newspaper and there was the picture of the man on the newspaper and he was dead. And I say, "I hope he's not really dead, just enjoying a refreshing lie-down in the snow, but the caption says he is dead." And actually, he was. I think he's dead, though I don't know, maybe he's not dead. "And this woman leans over in anguish, not about that man, but about all sad things. It happens quite often in February." There's consoling. This man is angry because somebody threw onions all over the staircase, and basically -- you know, I guess onions are a theme here. And he says, "It is impossible not to lie. It is February and not lying is impossible." And I really spend a lot of time wondering, how much truth do we tell? What is it that we're actually -- what story are we actually telling? How do we know when we are ourselves? How do we actually know that these sentences coming out of our mouths are real stories, you know, are real sentences? Or are they fake sentences that we think we ought to be saying? I'm going to quickly go through this. A quote by Bertrand Russell, "All the labor of all the ages, all the devotion, all the inspiration, all the noonday brightness of human genius are destined to extinction. So now, my friends, if that is true, and it is true, what is the point?" A complicated question. And so, you know, I talk to my friends and I go to plays where they're singing Russian songs. Oh my God, you know what? Could we have -- no, we don't have time. I taped my aunt. I taped my aunt singing a song in Russian from the -- you know, could we have it for a second? Do you have that? (Music) OK. I taped my -- my aunt used to swim in the ocean every day of the year until she was about 85. So -- and that's a song about how everybody's miserable because, you know, we're from Russia. (Laughter) I went to visit Kitty Carlisle Hart, and she is 96, and when I brought her a copy of "The Elements of Style," she said she would treasure it. And then I said -- oh, and she was talking about Moss Hart, and I said, "When you met him, you knew it was him." And she said, "I knew it was he." (Laughter) So, I was the one who should have kept the book, but it was a really wonderful moment. And she dated George Gershwin, so, you know, get out. Gershwin died at the age of 38. He's buried in the same cemetery as my husband. I don't want to talk about that now. I do want to talk -- the absolute icing on this cemetery cake is the Barricini family mausoleum nearby. I think the Barricini family should open a store there and sell chocolate. (Laughter) And I would like to run it for them. And I went to visit Louise Bourgeoise, who's also still working, and I looked at her sink, which is really amazing, and left. And then I photograph and do a painting of a sofa on the street. And a woman who lives on our street, Lolita. And then I go and have some tea. And then my Aunt Frances dies, and before she died, she tried to pay with Sweet'N Low packets for her bagel. (Laughter) And I wonder what the point is and then I know, and I see that Hy Meyerowitz, Rick Meyerowitz's father, a dry-cleaning supply salesman from the Bronx, won the Charlie Chaplin look-alike contest in 1931. That's actually Hy. And I look at a beautiful bowl of fruit, and I look at a dress that I sewed for friends of mine. And it says, "Ich habe genug," which is a Bach cantata, which I once thought meant "I've had it, I can't take it anymore, give me a break," but I was wrong. It means "I have enough." And that is utterly true. I happen to be alive, end of discussion. Thank you. (Applause)

My title: "Queerer than we can suppose: The strangeness of science." "Queerer than we can suppose" comes from J.B.S. Haldane, the famous biologist, who said, "Now, my own suspicion is that the universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose. I suspect that there are more things in heaven and earth than are dreamed of, or can be dreamed of, in any philosophy." Richard Feynman compared the accuracy of quantum theories -- experimental predictions -- to specifying the width of North America to within one hair's breadth of accuracy. This means that quantum theory has got to be in some sense true. Yet the assumptions that quantum theory needs to make in order to deliver those predictions are so mysterious that even Feynman himself was moved to remark, "If you think you understand quantum theory, you don't understand quantum theory." It's so queer that physicists resort to one or another paradoxical interpretation of it. David Deutsch, who's talking here, in "The Fabric of Reality," embraces the "many worlds" interpretation of quantum theory, because the worst that you can say about it is that it's preposterously wasteful. It postulates a vast and rapidly growing number of universes existing in parallel -- mutually undetectable except through the narrow porthole of quantum mechanical experiments. And that's Richard Feynman. The biologist Lewis Wolpert believes that the queerness of modern physics is just an extreme example. Science, as opposed to technology, does violence to common sense. Every time you drink a glass of water, he points out, the odds are that you will imbibe at least one molecule that passed through the bladder of Oliver Cromwell. (Laughter) It's just elementary probability theory. The number of molecules per glassful is hugely greater than the number of glassfuls, or bladdersful, in the world -- and, of course, there's nothing special about Cromwell or bladders. You have just breathed in a nitrogen atom that passed through the right lung of the third iguanodon to the left of the tall cycad tree. "Queerer than we can suppose." What is it that makes us capable of supposing anything, and does this tell us anything about what we can suppose? Are there things about the universe that will be forever beyond our grasp, but not beyond the grasp of some superior intelligence? Are there things about the universe that are, in principle, ungraspable by any mind, however superior? The history of science has been one long series of violent brainstorms, as successive generations have come to terms with increasing levels of queerness in the universe. We're now so used to the idea that the Earth spins -- rather than the Sun moves across the sky -- it's hard for us to realize what a shattering mental revolution that must have been. After all, it seems obvious that the Earth is large and motionless, the Sun small and mobile. But it's worth recalling Wittgenstein's remark on the subject. "Tell me," he asked a friend, "why do people always say, it was natural for man to assume that the sun went round the earth rather than that the earth was rotating?" His friend replied, "Well, obviously because it just looks as though the Sun is going round the Earth." Wittgenstein replied, "Well, what would it have looked like if it had looked as though the Earth was rotating?" (Laughter) Science has taught us, against all intuition, that apparently solid things, like crystals and rocks, are really almost entirely composed of empty space. And the familiar illustration is the nucleus of an atom is a fly in the middle of a sports stadium and the next atom is in the next sports stadium. So it would seem the hardest, solidest, densest rock is really almost entirely empty space, broken only by tiny particles so widely spaced they shouldn't count. Why, then, do rocks look and feel solid and hard and impenetrable? As an evolutionary biologist, I'd say this: our brains have evolved to help us survive within the orders of magnitude of size and speed which our bodies operate at. We never evolved to navigate in the world of atoms. If we had, our brains probably would perceive rocks as full of empty space. Rocks feel hard and impenetrable to our hands precisely because objects like rocks and hands cannot penetrate each other. It's therefore useful for our brains to construct notions like "solidity" and "impenetrability," because such notions help us to navigate our bodies through the middle-sized world in which we have to navigate. Moving to the other end of the scale, our ancestors never had to navigate through the cosmos at speeds close to the speed of light. If they had, our brains would be much better at understanding Einstein. I want to give the name "Middle World" to the medium-scaled environment in which we've evolved the ability to take act -- nothing to do with Middle Earth. Middle World. (Laughter) We are evolved denizens of Middle World, and that limits what we are capable of imagining. We find it intuitively easy to grasp ideas like, when a rabbit moves at the sort of medium velocity at which rabbits and other Middle World objects move, and hits another Middle World object, like a rock, it knocks itself out. May I introduce Major General Albert Stubblebine III, commander of military intelligence in 1983. He stared at his wall in Arlington, Virginia, and decided to do it. As frightening as the prospect was, he was going into the next office. He stood up, and moved out from behind his desk. What is the atom mostly made of? he thought. Space. He started walking. What am I mostly made of? Atoms. He quickened his pace, almost to a jog now. What is the wall mostly made of? Atoms. All I have to do is merge the spaces. Then, General Stubblebine banged his nose hard on the wall of his office. Stubblebine, who commanded 16,000 soldiers, was confounded by his continual failure to walk through the wall. He has no doubt that this ability will, one day, be a common tool in the military arsenal. Who would screw around with an army that could do that? That's from an article in Playboy, which I was reading the other day. (Laughter) I have every reason to think it's true; I was reading Playboy because I, myself, had an article in it. (Laughter) Unaided human intuition schooled in Middle World finds it hard to believe Galileo when he tells us a heavy object and a light object, air friction aside, would hit the ground at the same instant. And that's because in Middle World, air friction is always there. If we'd evolved in a vacuum, we would expect them to hit the ground simultaneously. If we were bacteria, constantly buffeted by thermal movements of molecules, it would be different, but we Middle Worlders are too big to notice Brownian motion. In the same way, our lives are dominated by gravity but are almost oblivious to the force of surface tension. A small insect would reverse these priorities. Steve Grand -- he's the one on the left, Douglas Adams is on the right -- Steve Grand, in his book, "Creation: Life and How to Make It," is positively scathing about our preoccupation with matter itself. We have this tendency to think that only solid, material things are really things at all. Waves of electromagnetic fluctuation in a vacuum seem unreal. Victorians thought the waves had to be waves in some material medium: the ether. But we find real matter comforting only because we've evolved to survive in Middle World, where matter is a useful fiction. A whirlpool, for Steve Grand, is a thing with just as much reality as a rock. In a desert plain in Tanzania, in the shadow of the volcano Ol Donyo Lengai, there's a dune made of volcanic ash. The beautiful thing is that it moves bodily. It's what's technically known as a "barchan," and the entire dune walks across the desert in a westerly direction at a speed of about 17 meters per year. It retains its crescent shape and moves in the direction of the horns. What happens is that the wind blows the sand up the shallow slope on the other side, and then, as each sand grain hits the top of the ridge, it cascades down on the inside of the crescent, and so the whole horn-shaped dune moves. Steve Grand points out that you and I are, ourselves, more like a wave than a permanent thing. He invites us, the reader, to "think of an experience from your childhood -- something you remember clearly, something you can see, feel, maybe even smell, as if you were really there. After all, you really were there at the time, weren't you? How else would you remember it? But here is the bombshell: You weren't there. Not a single atom that is in your body today was there when that event took place. Matter flows from place to place and momentarily comes together to be you. Whatever you are, therefore, you are not the stuff of which you are made. If that doesn't make the hair stand up on the back of your neck, read it again until it does, because it is important." So "really" isn't a word that we should use with simple confidence. If a neutrino had a brain, which it evolved in neutrino-sized ancestors, it would say that rocks really do consist of empty space. We have brains that evolved in medium-sized ancestors which couldn't walk through rocks. "Really," for an animal, is whatever its brain needs it to be in order to assist its survival, and because different species live in different worlds, there will be a discomforting variety of "really"s. What we see of the real world is not the unvarnished world but a model of the world, regulated and adjusted by sense data, but constructed so it's useful for dealing with the real world. The nature of the model depends on the kind of animal we are. A flying animal needs a different kind of model from a walking, climbing or swimming animal. A monkey's brain must have software capable of simulating a three-dimensional world of branches and trunks. A mole's software for constructing models of its world will be customized for underground use. A water strider's brain doesn't need 3D software at all, since it lives on the surface of the pond in an Edwin Abbott flatland. I've speculated that bats may see color with their ears. The world model that a bat needs in order to navigate through three dimensions catching insects must be pretty similar to the world model that any flying bird, a day-flying bird like a swallow, needs to perform the same kind of tasks. The fact that the bat uses echoes in pitch darkness to input the current variables to its model, while the swallow uses light, is incidental. Bats, I've even suggested, use perceived hues, such as red and blue, as labels, internal labels, for some useful aspect of echoes -- perhaps the acoustic texture of surfaces, furry or smooth and so on, in the same way as swallows or, indeed, we, use those perceived hues -- redness and blueness etc. -- to label long and short wavelengths of light. There's nothing inherent about red that makes it long wavelength. And the point is that the nature of the model is governed by how it is to be used, rather than by the sensory modality involved. J. B .S. Haldane himself had something to say about animals whose world is dominated by smell. Dogs can distinguish two very similar fatty acids, extremely diluted: caprylic acid and caproic acid. The only difference, you see, is that one has an extra pair of carbon atoms in the chain. Haldane guesses that a dog would probably be able to place the acids in the order of their molecular weights by their smells, just as a man could place a number of piano wires in the order of their lengths by means of their notes. Now, there's another fatty acid, capric acid, which is just like the other two, except that it has two more carbon atoms. A dog that had never met capric acid would, perhaps, have no more trouble imagining its smell than we would have trouble imagining a trumpet, say, playing one note higher than we've heard a trumpet play before. Perhaps dogs and rhinos and other smell-oriented animals smell in color. And the argument would be exactly the same as for the bats. Middle World -- the range of sizes and speeds which we have evolved to feel intuitively comfortable with -- is a bit like the narrow range of the electromagnetic spectrum that we see as light of various colors. We're blind to all frequencies outside that, unless we use instruments to help us. Middle World is the narrow range of reality which we judge to be normal, as opposed to the queerness of the very small, the very large and the very fast. We could make a similar scale of improbabilities; nothing is totally impossible. Miracles are just events that are extremely improbable. A marble statue could wave its hand at us; the atoms that make up its crystalline structure are all vibrating back and forth anyway. Because there are so many of them, and because there's no agreement among them in their preferred direction of movement, the marble, as we see it in Middle World, stays rock steady. But the atoms in the hand could all just happen to move the same way at the same time, and again and again. In this case, the hand would move and we'd see it waving at us in Middle World. The odds against it, of course, are so great that if you set out writing zeros at the time of the origin of the universe, you still would not have written enough zeros to this day. Evolution in Middle World has not equipped us to handle very improbable events; we don't live long enough. In the vastness of astronomical space and geological time, that which seems impossible in Middle World might turn out to be inevitable. One way to think about that is by counting planets. We don't know how many planets there are in the universe, but a good estimate is about 10 to the 20, or 100 billion billion. And that gives us a nice way to express our estimate of life's improbability. Could make some sort of landmark points along a spectrum of improbability, which might look like the electromagnetic spectrum we just looked at. If life has arisen only once on any -- if -- if life could -- I mean, life could originate once per planet, could be extremely common, or it could originate once per star, or once per galaxy or maybe only once in the entire universe, in which case it would have to be here. And somewhere up there would be the chance that a frog would turn into a prince and similar magical things like that. If life has arisen on only one planet in the entire universe, that planet has to be our planet, because here we are talking about it. And that means that if we want to avail ourselves of it, we're allowed to postulate chemical events in the origin of life which have a probability as low as one in 100 billion billion. I don't think we shall have to avail ourselves of that, because I suspect that life is quite common in the universe. And when I say quite common, it could still be so rare that no one island of life ever encounters another, which is a sad thought. How shall we interpret "queerer than we can suppose?" Queerer than can in principle be supposed, or just queerer than we can suppose, given the limitations of our brain's evolutionary apprenticeship in Middle World? Could we, by training and practice, emancipate ourselves from Middle World and achieve some sort of intuitive, as well as mathematical, understanding of the very small and the very large? I genuinely don't know the answer. I wonder whether we might help ourselves to understand, say, quantum theory, if we brought up children to play computer games, beginning in early childhood, which had a sort of make-believe world of balls going through two slits on a screen, a world in which the strange goings on of quantum mechanics were enlarged by the computer's make-believe, so that they became familiar on the Middle-World scale of the stream. And, similarly, a relativistic computer game in which objects on the screen manifest the Lorenz Contraction, and so on, to try to get ourselves into the way of thinking -- get children into the way of thinking about it. I want to end by applying the idea of Middle World to our perceptions of each other. Most scientists today subscribe to a mechanistic view of the mind: we're the way we are because our brains are wired up as they are; our hormones are the way they are. We'd be different, our characters would be different, if our neuro-anatomy and our physiological chemistry were different. But we scientists are inconsistent. If we were consistent, our response to a misbehaving person, like a child-murderer, should be something like, this unit has a faulty component; it needs repairing. That's not what we say. What we say -- and I include the most austerely mechanistic among us, which is probably me -- what we say is, "Vile monster, prison is too good for you." Or worse, we seek revenge, in all probability thereby triggering the next phase in an escalating cycle of counter-revenge, which we see, of course, all over the world today. In short, when we're thinking like academics, we regard people as elaborate and complicated machines, like computers or cars, but when we revert to being human we behave more like Basil Fawlty, who, we remember, thrashed his car to teach it a lesson when it wouldn't start on gourmet night. (Laughter) The reason we personify things like cars and computers is that just as monkeys live in an arboreal world and moles live in an underground world and water striders live in a surface tension-dominated flatland, we live in a social world. We swim through a sea of people -- a social version of Middle World. We are evolved to second-guess the behavior of others by becoming brilliant, intuitive psychologists. Treating people as machines may be scientifically and philosophically accurate, but it's a cumbersome waste of time if you want to guess what this person is going to do next. The economically useful way to model a person is to treat him as a purposeful, goal-seeking agent with pleasures and pains, desires and intentions, guilt, blame-worthiness. Personification and the imputing of intentional purpose is such a brilliantly successful way to model humans, it's hardly surprising the same modeling software often seizes control when we're trying to think about entities for which it's not appropriate, like Basil Fawlty with his car or like millions of deluded people with the universe as a whole. (Laughter) If the universe is queerer than we can suppose, is it just because we've been naturally selected to suppose only what we needed to suppose in order to survive in the Pleistocene of Africa? Or are our brains so versatile and expandable that we can train ourselves to break out of the box of our evolution? Or, finally, are there some things in the universe so queer that no philosophy of beings, however godlike, could dream them? Thank you very much.

Let me tell you, it has been a fantastic month for deception. And I'm not even talking about the American presidential race. (Laughter) We have a high-profile journalist caught for plagiarism, a young superstar writer whose book involves so many made up quotes that they've pulled it from the shelves; a New York Times exposé on fake book reviews. It's been fantastic. Now, of course, not all deception hits the news. Much of the deception is everyday. In fact, a lot of research shows that we all lie once or twice a day, as Dave suggested. So it's about 6:30 now, suggests that most of us should have lied. Let's take a look at Winnipeg. How many of you, in the last 24 hours -- think back -- have told a little fib, or a big one? How many have told a little lie out there? All right, good. These are all the liars. Make sure you pay attention to them. (Laughter) No, that looked good, it was about two thirds of you. The other third didn't lie, or perhaps forgot, or you're lying to me about your lying, which is very, very devious. (Laughter) This fits with a lot of the research, which suggests that lying is very pervasive. It's this pervasiveness, combined with the centrality to what it means to be a human, the fact that we can tell the truth or make something up, that has fascinated people throughout history. Here we have Diogenes with his lantern. Does anybody know what he was looking for? A single honest man, and he died without finding one back in Greece. And we have Confucius in the East who was really concerned with sincerity, not only that you walked the walk or talked the talk, but that you believed in what you were doing. You believed in your principles. Now my first professional encounter with deception is a little bit later than these guys, a couple thousand years. I was a customs officer for Canada back in the mid-'90s. Yeah. I was defending Canada's borders. You may think that's a weapon right there. In fact, that's a stamp. I used a stamp to defend Canada's borders. (Laughter) Very Canadian of me. I learned a lot about deception while doing my duty here in customs, one of which was that most of what I thought I knew about deception was wrong, and I'll tell you about some of that tonight. But even since just 1995, '96, the way we communicate has been completely transformed. We email, we text, we skype, we Facebook. It's insane. Almost every aspect of human communication's been changed, and of course that's had an impact on deception. Let me tell you a little bit about a couple of new deceptions we've been tracking and documenting. They're called the Butler, the Sock Puppet and the Chinese Water Army. It sounds a little bit like a weird book, but actually they're all new types of lies. Let's start with the Butlers. Here's an example of one: "On my way." Anybody ever written, "On my way?" Then you've also lied. (Laughter) We're never on our way. We're thinking about going on our way. Here's another one: "Sorry I didn't respond to you earlier. My battery was dead." Your battery wasn't dead. You weren't in a dead zone. You just didn't want to respond to that person that time. Here's the last one: You're talking to somebody, and you say, "Sorry, got work, gotta go." But really, you're just bored. You want to talk to somebody else. Each of these is about a relationship, and this is a 24/7 connected world. Once you get my cell phone number, you can literally be in touch with me 24 hours a day. And so these lies are being used by people to create a buffer, like the butler used to do, between us and the connections to everybody else. But they're very special. They use ambiguity that comes from using technology. You don't know where I am or what I'm doing or who I'm with. And they're aimed at protecting the relationships. These aren't just people being jerks. These are people that are saying, look, I don't want to talk to you now, or I didn't want to talk to you then, but I still care about you. Our relationship is still important. Now, the Sock Puppet, on the other hand, is a totally different animal. The sock puppet isn't about ambiguity, per se. It's about identity. Let me give you a very recent example, as in, like, last week. Here's R.J. Ellory, best-seller author in Britain. Here's one of his bestselling books. Here's a reviewer online, on Amazon. My favorite, by Nicodemus Jones, is, "Whatever else it might do, it will touch your soul." And of course, you might suspect that Nicodemus Jones is R.J. Ellory. He wrote very, very positive reviews about himself. Surprise, surprise. Now this Sock Puppet stuff isn't actually that new. Walt Whitman also did this back in the day, before there was Internet technology. Sock Puppet becomes interesting when we get to scale, which is the domain of the Chinese Water Army. Chinese Water Army refers to thousands of people in China that are paid small amounts of money to produce content. It could be reviews. It could be propaganda. The government hires these people, companies hire them, all over the place. In North America, we call this Astroturfing, and Astroturfing is very common now. There's a lot of concerns about it. We see this especially with product reviews, book reviews, everything from hotels to whether that toaster is a good toaster or not. Now, looking at these three reviews, or these three types of deception, you might think, wow, the Internet is really making us a deceptive species, especially when you think about the Astroturfing, where we can see deception brought up to scale. But actually, what I've been finding is very different from that. Now, let's put aside the online anonymous sex chatrooms, which I'm sure none of you have been in. I can assure you there's deception there. And let's put aside the Nigerian prince who's emailed you about getting the 43 million out of the country. (Laughter) Let's forget about that guy, too. Let's focus on the conversations between our friends and our family and our coworkers and our loved ones. Those are the conversations that really matter. What does technology do to deception with those folks? Here's a couple of studies. One of the studies we do are called diary studies, in which we ask people to record all of their conversations and all of their lies for seven days, and what we can do then is calculate how many lies took place per conversation within a medium, and the finding that we get that surprises people the most is that email is the most honest of those three media. And it really throws people for a loop because we think, well, there's no nonverbal cues, so why don't you lie more? The phone, in contrast, the most lies. Again and again and again we see the phone is the device that people lie on the most, and perhaps because of the Butler Lie ambiguities I was telling you about. This tends to be very different from what people expect. What about résumés? We did a study in which we had people apply for a job, and they could apply for a job either with a traditional paper résumé, or on LinkedIn, which is a social networking site like Facebook, but for professionals -- involves the same information as a résumé. And what we found, to many people's surprise, was that those LinkedIn résumés were more honest on the things that mattered to employers, like your responsibilities or your skills at your previous job. How about Facebook itself? You know, we always think that hey, there are these idealized versions, people are just showing the best things that happened in their lives. I've thought that many times. My friends, no way they can be that cool and have good of a life. Well, one study tested this by examining people's personalities. They had four good friends of a person judge their personality. Then they had strangers, many strangers, judge the person's personality just from Facebook, and what they found was those judgments of the personality were pretty much identical, highly correlated, meaning that Facebook profiles really do reflect our actual personality. All right, well, what about online dating? I mean, that's a pretty deceptive space. I'm sure you all have "friends" that have used online dating. (Laughter) And they would tell you about that guy that had no hair when he came, or the woman that didn't look at all like her photo. Well, we were really interested in it, and so what we did is we brought people, online daters, into the lab, and then we measured them. We got their height up against the wall, we put them on a scale, got their weight -- ladies loved that -- and then we actually got their driver's license to get their age. And what we found was very, very interesting. Here's an example of the men and the height. Along the bottom is how tall they said they were in their profile. Along the y-axis, the vertical axis, is how tall they actually were. That diagonal line is the truth line. If their dot's on it, they were telling exactly the truth. Now, as you see, most of the little dots are below the line. What it means is all the guys were lying about their height. In fact, they lied about their height about nine tenths of an inch, what we say in the lab as "strong rounding up." (Laughter) You get to 5'8" and one tenth, and boom! 5'9". But what's really important here is, look at all those dots. They are clustering pretty close to the truth. What we found was 80 percent of our participants did indeed lie on one of those dimensions, but they always lied by a little bit. One of the reasons is pretty simple. If you go to a date, a coffee date, and you're completely different than what you said, game over. Right? So people lied frequently, but they lied subtly, not too much. They were constrained. Well, what explains all these studies? What explains the fact that despite our intuitions, mine included, a lot of online communication, technologically-mediated communication, is more honest than face to face? That really is strange. How do we explain this? Well, to do that, one thing is we can look at the deception-detection literature. It's a very old literature by now, it's coming up on 50 years. It's been reviewed many times. There's been thousands of trials, hundreds of studies, and there's some really compelling findings. The first is, we're really bad at detecting deception, really bad. Fifty-four percent accuracy on average when you have to tell if somebody that just said a statement is lying or not. That's really bad. Why is it so bad? Well it has to do with Pinocchio's nose. If I were to ask you guys, what do you rely on when you're looking at somebody and you want to find out if they're lying? What cue do you pay attention to? Most of you would say that one of the cues you look at is the eyes. The eyes are the window to the soul. And you're not alone. Around the world, almost every culture, one of the top cues is eyes. But the research over the last 50 years says there's actually no reliable cue to deception, which blew me away, and it's one of the hard lessons that I learned when I was customs officer. The eyes do not tell us whether somebody's lying or not. Some situations, yes -- high stakes, maybe their pupils dilate, their pitch goes up, their body movements change a little bit, but not all the time, not for everybody, it's not reliable. Strange. The other thing is that just because you can't see me doesn't mean I'm going to lie. It's common sense, but one important finding is that we lie for a reason. We lie to protect ourselves or for our own gain or for somebody else's gain. So there are some pathological liars, but they make up a tiny portion of the population. We lie for a reason. Just because people can't see us doesn't mean we're going to necessarily lie. But I think there's actually something much more interesting and fundamental going on here. The next big thing for me, the next big idea, we can find by going way back in history to the origins of language. Most linguists agree that we started speaking somewhere between 50,000 and 100,000 years ago. That's a long time ago. A lot of humans have lived since then. We've been talking, I guess, about fires and caves and saber-toothed tigers. I don't know what they talked about, but they were doing a lot of talking, and like I said, there's a lot of humans evolving speaking, about 100 billion people in fact. What's important though is that writing only emerged about 5,000 years ago. So what that means is that all the people before there was any writing, every word that they ever said, every utterance disappeared. No trace. Evanescent. Gone. So we've been evolving to talk in a way in which there is no record. In fact, even the next big change to writing was only 500 years ago now, with the printing press, which is very recent in our past, and literacy rates remained incredibly low right up until World War II, so even the people of the last two millennia, most of the words they ever said -- poof! -- disappeared. Let's turn to now, the networked age. How many of you have recorded something today? Anybody do any writing today? Did anybody write a word? It looks like almost every single person here recorded something. In this room, right now, we've probably recorded more than almost all of human pre-ancient history. That is crazy. We're entering this amazing period of flux in human evolution where we've evolved to speak in a way in which our words disappear, but we're in an environment where we're recording everything. In fact, I think in the very near future, it's not just what we write that will be recorded, everything we do will be recorded. What does that mean? What's the next big idea from that? Well, as a social scientist, this is the most amazing thing I have ever even dreamed of. Now, I can look at all those words that used to, for millennia, disappear. I can look at lies that before were said and then gone. You remember those Astroturfing reviews that we were talking about before? Well, when they write a fake review, they have to post it somewhere, and it's left behind for us. So one thing that we did, and I'll give you an example of looking at the language, is we paid people to write some fake reviews. One of these reviews is fake. The person never was at the James Hotel. The other review is real. The person stayed there. Now, your task now is to decide which review is fake? I'll give you a moment to read through them. But I want everybody to raise their hand at some point. Remember, I study deception. I can tell if you don't raise your hand. All right, how many of you believe that A is the fake? All right. Very good. About half. And how many of you think that B is? All right. Slightly more for B. Excellent. Here's the answer. B is a fake. Well done second group. You dominated the first group. (Laughter) You're actually a little bit unusual. Every time we demonstrate this, it's usually about a 50-50 split, which fits with the research, 54 percent. Maybe people here in Winnipeg are more suspicious and better at figuring it out. Those cold, hard winters, I love it. All right, so why do I care about this? Well, what I can do now with my colleagues in computer science is we can create computer algorithms that can analyze the linguistic traces of deception. Let me highlight a couple of things here in the fake review. The first is that liars tend to think about narrative. They make up a story: Who? And what happened? And that's what happened here. Our fake reviewers talked about who they were with and what they were doing. They also used the first person singular, I, way more than the people that actually stayed there. They were inserting themselves into the hotel review, kind of trying to convince you they were there. In contrast, the people that wrote the reviews that were actually there, their bodies actually entered the physical space, they talked a lot more about spatial information. They said how big the bathroom was, or they said, you know, here's how far shopping is from the hotel. Now, you guys did pretty well. Most people perform at chance at this task. Our computer algorithm is very accurate, much more accurate than humans can be, and it's not going to be accurate all the time. This isn't a deception-detection machine to tell if your girlfriend's lying to you on text messaging. We believe that every lie now, every type of lie -- fake hotel reviews, fake shoe reviews, your girlfriend cheating on you with text messaging -- those are all different lies. They're going to have different patterns of language. But because everything's recorded now, we can look at all of those kinds of lies. Now, as I said, as a social scientist, this is wonderful. It's transformational. We're going to be able to learn so much more about human thought and expression, about everything from love to attitudes, because everything is being recorded now, but what does it mean for the average citizen? What does it mean for us in our lives? Well, let's forget deception for a bit. One of the big ideas, I believe, is that we're leaving these huge traces behind. My outbox for email is massive, and I never look at it. I write all the time, but I never look at my record, at my trace. And I think we're going to see a lot more of that, where we can reflect on who we are by looking at what we wrote, what we said, what we did. Now, if we bring it back to deception, there's a couple of take-away things here. First, lying online can be very dangerous, right? Not only are you leaving a record for yourself on your machine, but you're leaving a record on the person that you were lying to, and you're also leaving them around for me to analyze with some computer algorithms. So by all means, go ahead and do that, that's good. But when it comes to lying and what we want to do with our lives, I think we can go back to Diogenes and Confucius. And they were less concerned about whether to lie or not to lie, and more concerned about being true to the self, and I think this is really important. Now, when you are about to say or do something, we can think, do I want this to be part of my legacy, part of my personal record? Because in the digital age we live in now, in the networked age, we are all leaving a record. Thank you so much for your time, and good luck with your record. (Applause)

You've all seen lots of articles on climate change, and here's yet another New York Times article, just like every other darn one you've seen. It says all the same stuff as all the other ones you've seen. It even has the same amount of headline as all the other ones you've seen. What's unusual about this one, maybe, is that it's from 1953. And the reason I'm saying this is that you may have the idea this problem is relatively recent. That people have just sort of figured out about it, and now with Kyoto and the Governator and people beginning to actually do something, we may be on the road to a solution. The fact is -- uh-uh. We've known about this problem for 50 years, depending on how you count it. We have talked about it endlessly over the last decade or so. And we've accomplished close to zip. This is the growth rate of CO2 in the atmosphere. You've seen this in various forms, but maybe you haven't seen this one. What this shows is that the rate of growth of our emissions is accelerating. And that it's accelerating even faster than what we thought was the worst case just a few years back. So that red line there was something that a lot of skeptics said the environmentalists only put in the projections to make the projections look as bad as possible, that emissions would never grow as fast as that red line. But in fact, they're growing faster. Here's some data from actually just 10 days ago, which shows this year's minimum of the Arctic Sea ice, and it's the lowest by far. And the rate at which the Arctic Sea ice is going away is a lot quicker than models. So despite all sorts of experts like me flying around the planet and burning jet fuel, and politicians signing treaties -- in fact, you could argue the net effect of all this has been negative, because it's just consumed a lot of jet fuel. (Laughter) No, no! In terms of what we really need to do to put the brakes on this very high inertial thing -- our big economy -- we've really hardly started. Really, we're doing this, basically. Really, not very much. I don't want to depress you too much. The problem is absolutely soluble, and even soluble in a way that's reasonably cheap. Cheap meaning sort of the cost of the military, not the cost of medical care. Cheap meaning a few percent of GDP. No, this is really important to have this sense of scale. So the problem is soluble, and the way we should go about solving it is, say, dealing with electricity production, which causes something like 43-or-so percent and rising of CO2 emissions. And we could do that by perfectly sensible things like conservation, and wind power, nuclear power and coal to CO2 capture, which are all things that are ready for giant scale deployment, and work. All we lack is the action to actually spend the money to put those into place. Instead, we spend our time talking. But nevertheless, that's not what I'm going to talk to you about tonight. What I'm going to talk to you about tonight is stuff we might do if we did nothing. And it's this stuff in the middle here, which is what you do if you don't stop the emissions quickly enough. And you need to deal -- somehow break the link between human actions that change climate, and the climate change itself. And that's particularly important because, of course, while we can adapt to climate change -- and it's important to be honest here, there will be some benefits to climate change. Oh, yes, I think it's bad. I've spent my whole life working to stop it. But one of the reasons it's politically hard is there are winners and losers -- not all losers. But, of course, the natural world, polar bears. I spent time skiing across the sea ice for weeks at a time in the high Arctic. They will completely lose. And there's no adaption. So this problem is absolutely soluble. This geo-engineering idea, in it's simplest form, is basically the following. You could put signed particles, say sulfuric acid particles -- sulfates -- into the upper atmosphere, the stratosphere, where they'd reflect away sunlight and cool the planet. And I know for certain that that will work. Not that there aren't side effects, but I know for certain it will work. And the reason is, it's been done. And it was done not by us, not by me, but by nature. Here's Mount Pinatubo in the early '90s. That put a whole bunch of sulfur in the stratosphere with a sort of atomic bomb-like cloud. The result of that was pretty dramatic. After that, and some previous volcanoes we have, you see a quite dramatic cooling of the atmosphere. So this lower bar is the upper atmosphere, the stratosphere, and it heats up after these volcanoes. But you'll notice that in the upper bar, which is the lower atmosphere and the surface, it cools down because we shielded the atmosphere a little bit. There's no big mystery about it. There's lots of mystery in the details, and there's some bad side effects, like it partially destroys the ozone layer -- and I'll get to that in a minute. But it clearly cools down. And one other thing: it's fast. It's really important to say. So much of the other things that we ought to do, like slowing emissions, are intrinsically slow, because it takes time to build all the hardware we need to reduce emissions. And not only that, when you cut emissions, you don't cut concentrations, because concentrations, the amount of CO2 in the air, is the sum of emissions over time. So you can't step on the brakes very quickly. But if you do this, it's quick. And there are times you might like to do something quick. Another thing you might wonder about is, does it work? Can you shade some sunlight and effectively compensate for the added CO2, and produce a climate sort of back to what it was originally? And the answer seems to be yes. So here are the graphs you've seen lots of times before. That's what the world looks like, under one particular climate model's view, with twice the amount of CO2 in the air. The lower graph is with twice the amount of CO2 and 1.8 percent less sunlight, and you're back to the original climate. And this graph from Ken Caldeira. It's important to say came, because Ken -- at a meeting that I believe Marty Hoffart was also at in the mid-'90s -- Ken and I stood up at the back of the meeting and said, "Geo-engineering won't work." And to the person who was promoting it said, "The atmosphere's much more complicated." Gave a bunch of physical reasons why it wouldn't do a very good compensation. Ken went and ran his models, and found that it did. This topic is also old. That report that landed on President Johnson's desk when I was two years old -- 1965. That report, in fact, which had all the modern climate science -- the only thing they talked about doing was geo-engineering. It didn't even talk about cutting emissions, which is an incredible shift in our thinking about this problem. I'm not saying we shouldn't cut emissions. We should, but it made exactly this point. So, in a sense, there's not much new. The one new thing is this essay. So I should say, I guess, that since the time of that original President Johnson report, and the various reports of the U.S. National Academy -- 1977, 1982, 1990 -- people always talked about this idea. Not as something that was foolproof, but as an idea to think about. But when climate became, politically, a hot topic -- if I may make the pun -- in the last 15 years, this became so un-PC, we couldn't talk about it. It just sunk below the surface. We weren't allowed to speak about it. But in the last year, Paul Crutzen published this essay saying roughly what's all been said before: that maybe, given our very slow rate of progress in solving this problem and the uncertain impacts, we should think about things like this. He said roughly what's been said before. The big deal was he happened to have won the Nobel prize for ozone chemistry. And so people took him seriously when he said we should think about this, even though there will be some ozone impacts. And in fact, he had some ideas to make them go away. There was all sorts of press coverage, all over the world, going right down to "Dr. Strangelove Saves the Earth," from the Economist. And that got me thinking. I've worked on this topic on and off, but not so much technically. And I was actually lying in bed thinking one night. And I thought about this child's toy -- hence, the title of my talk -- and I wondered if you could use the same physics that makes that thing spin 'round in the child's radiometer, to levitate particles into the upper atmosphere and make them stay there. One of the problems with sulfates is they fall out quickly. The other problem is they're right in the ozone layer, and I'd prefer them above the ozone layer. And it turns out, I woke up the next morning, and I started to calculate this. It was very hard to calculate from first principles. I was stumped. But then I found out that there were all sorts of papers already published that addressed this topic because it happens already in the natural atmosphere. So it seems there are already fine particles that are levitated up to what we call the mesosphere, about 100 kilometers up, that already have this effect. I'll tell you very quickly how the effect works. There are a lot of fun complexities that I'd love to spend the whole evening on, but I won't. But let's say you have sunlight hitting some particle and it's unevenly heated. So the side facing the sun is warmer; the side away, cooler. Gas molecules that bounce off the warm side bounce away with some extra velocity because it's warm. And so you see a net force away from the sun. That's called the photophoretic force. There are a bunch of other versions of it that I and some collaborators have thought about how to exploit. And of course, we may be wrong -- this hasn't all been peer reviewed, we're in the middle of thinking about it -- but so far, it seems good. But it looks like we could achieve long atmospheric lifetimes -- much longer than before -- because they're levitated. We can move things out of the stratosphere into the mesosphere, in principle solving the ozone problem. I'm sure there will be other problems that arise. Finally, we could make the particles migrate to over the poles, so we could arrange the climate engineering so it really focused on the poles. Which would have minimal bad impacts in the middle of the planet, where we live, and do the maximum job of what we might need to do, which is cooling the poles in case of planetary emergency, if you like. This is a new idea that's crept up that may be, essentially, a cleverer idea than putting sulfates in. Whether this idea is right or some other idea is right, I think it's almost certain we will eventually think of cleverer things to do than just putting sulfur in. That if engineers and scientists really turned their minds to this, it's amazing how we can affect the planet. The one thing about this is it gives us extraordinary leverage. This improved science and engineering will, whether we like it or not, give us more and more leverage to affect the planet, to control the planet, to give us weather and climate control -- not because we plan it, not because we want it, just because science delivers it to us bit by bit, with better knowledge of the way the system works and better engineering tools to effect it. Now, suppose that space aliens arrived. Maybe they're going to land at the U.N. headquarters down the road here, or maybe they'll pick a smarter spot -- but suppose they arrive and they give you a box. And the box has two knobs. One knob is the knob for controlling global temperature. Maybe another knob is a knob for controlling CO2 concentrations. You might imagine that we would fight wars over that box. Because we have no way to agree about where to set the knobs. We have no global governance. And different people will have different places they want it set. Now, I don't think that's going to happen. It's not very likely. But we're building that box. The scientists and engineers of the world are building it piece by piece, in their labs. Even when they're doing it for other reasons. Even when they're thinking they're just working on protecting the environment. They have no interest in crazy ideas like engineering the whole planet. They develop science that makes it easier and easier to do. And so I guess my view on this is not that I want to do it -- I do not -- but that we should move this out of the shadows and talk about it seriously. Because sooner or later, we'll be confronted with decisions about this, and it's better if we think hard about it, even if we want to think hard about reasons why we should never do it. I'll give you two different ways to think about this problem that are the beginning of my thinking about how to think about it. But what we need is not just a few oddballs like me thinking about this. We need a broader debate. A debate that involves musicians, scientists, philosophers, writers, who get engaged with this question about climate engineering and think seriously about what its implications are. So here's one way to think about it, which is that we just do this instead of cutting emissions because it's cheaper. I guess the thing I haven't said about this is, it is absurdly cheap. It's conceivable that, say, using the sulfates method or this method I've come up with, you could create an ice age at a cost of .001 percent of GDP. It's very cheap. We have a lot of leverage. It's not a good idea, but it's just important. (Laughter) I'll tell you how big the lever is: the lever is that big. And that calculation isn't much in dispute. You might argue about the sanity of it, but the leverage is real. (Laughter) So because of this, we could deal with the problem simply by stopping reducing emissions, and just as the concentrations go up, we can increase the amount of geo-engineering. I don't think anybody takes that seriously. Because under this scenario, we walk further and further away from the current climate. We have all sorts of other problems, like ocean acidification that come from CO2 in the atmosphere, anyway. Nobody but maybe one or two very odd folks really suggest this. But here's a case which is harder to reject. Let's say that we don't do geo-engineering, we do what we ought to do, which is get serious about cutting emissions. But we don't really know how quickly we have to cut them. There's a lot of uncertainty about exactly how much climate change is too much. So let's say that we work hard, and we actually don't just tap the brakes, but we step hard on the brakes and really reduce emissions and eventually reduce concentrations. And maybe someday -- like 2075, October 23 -- we finally reach that glorious day where concentrations have peaked and are rolling down the other side. And we have global celebrations, and we've actually started to -- you know, we've seen the worst of it. But maybe on that day we also find that the Greenland ice sheet is really melting unacceptably fast, fast enough to put meters of sea level on the oceans in the next 100 years, and remove some of the biggest cities from the map. That's an absolutely possible scenario. We might decide at that point that even though geo-engineering was uncertain and morally unhappy, that it's a lot better than not geo-engineering. And that's a very different way to look at the problem. It's using this as risk control, not instead of action. It's saying that you do some geo-engineering for a little while to take the worst of the heat off, not that you'd use it as a substitute for action. But there is a problem with that view. And the problem is the following: knowledge that geo-engineering is possible makes the climate impacts look less fearsome, and that makes a weaker commitment to cutting emissions today. This is what economists call a moral hazard. And that's one of the fundamental reasons that this problem is so hard to talk about, and, in general, I think it's the underlying reason that it's been politically unacceptable to talk about this. But you don't make good policy by hiding things in a drawer. I'll leave you with three questions, and then one final quote. Should we do serious research on this topic? Should we have a national research program that looks at this? Not just at how you would do it better, but also what all the risks and downsides of it are. Right now, you have a few enthusiasts talking about it, some in a positive side, some in a negative side -- but that's a dangerous state to be in because there's very little depth of knowledge on this topic. A very small amount of money would get us some. Many of us -- maybe now me -- think we should do that. But I have a lot of reservations. My reservations are principally about the moral hazard problem, and I don't really know how we can best avoid the moral hazard. I think there is a serious problem: as you talk about this, people begin to think they don't need to work so hard to cut emissions. Another thing is, maybe we need a treaty. A treaty that decides who gets to do this. Right now we may think of a big, rich country like the U.S. doing this. But it might well be that, in fact, if China wakes up in 2030 and realizes that the climate impacts are just unacceptable, they may not be very interested in our moral conversations about how to do this, and they may just decide they'd really rather have a geo-engineered world than a non-geo-engineered world. And we'll have no international mechanism to figure out who makes the decision. So here's one last thought, which was said much, much better 25 years ago in the U.S. National Academy report than I can say today. And I think it really summarizes where we are here. That the CO2 problem, the climate problem that we've heard about, is driving lots of things -- innovations in the energy technologies that will reduce emissions -- but also, I think, inevitably, it will drive us towards thinking about climate and weather control, whether we like it or not. And it's time to begin thinking about it, even if the reason we're thinking about it is to construct arguments for why we shouldn't do it. Thank you very much.

So I want to talk today about an idea. It's a big idea. Actually, I think it'll eventually be seen as probably the single biggest idea that's emerged in the past century. It's the idea of computation. Now, of course, that idea has brought us all of the computer technology we have today and so on. But there's actually a lot more to computation than that. It's really a very deep, very powerful, very fundamental idea, whose effects we've only just begun to see. Well, I myself have spent the past 30 years of my life working on three large projects that really try to take the idea of computation seriously. So I started off at a young age as a physicist using computers as tools. Then, I started drilling down, thinking about the computations I might want to do, trying to figure out what primitives they could be built up from and how they could be automated as much as possible. Eventually, I created a whole structure based on symbolic programming and so on that let me build Mathematica. And for the past 23 years, at an increasing rate, we've been pouring more and more ideas and capabilities and so on into Mathematica, and I'm happy to say that that's led to many good things in R & D and education, lots of other areas. Well, I have to admit, actually, that I also had a very selfish reason for building Mathematica: I wanted to use it myself, a bit like Galileo got to use his telescope 400 years ago. But I wanted to look not at the astronomical universe, but at the computational universe. So we normally think of programs as being complicated things that we build for very specific purposes. But what about the space of all possible programs? Here's a representation of a really simple program. So, if we run this program, this is what we get. Very simple. So let's try changing the rule for this program a little bit. Now we get another result, still very simple. Try changing it again. You get something a little bit more complicated. But if we keep running this for a while, we find out that although the pattern we get is very intricate, it has a very regular structure. So the question is: Can anything else happen? Well, we can do a little experiment. Let's just do a little mathematical experiment, try and find out. Let's just run all possible programs of the particular type that we're looking at. They're called cellular automata. You can see a lot of diversity in the behavior here. Most of them do very simple things, but if you look along all these different pictures, at rule number 30, you start to see something interesting going on. So let's take a closer look at rule number 30 here. So here it is. We're just following this very simple rule at the bottom here, but we're getting all this amazing stuff. It's not at all what we're used to, and I must say that, when I first saw this, it came as a huge shock to my intuition. And, in fact, to understand it, I eventually had to create a whole new kind of science. (Laughter) This science is different, more general, than the mathematics-based science that we've had for the past 300 or so years. You know, it's always seemed like a big mystery: how nature, seemingly so effortlessly, manages to produce so much that seems to us so complex. Well, I think we've found its secret: It's just sampling what's out there in the computational universe and quite often getting things like Rule 30 or like this. And knowing that starts to explain a lot of long-standing mysteries in science. It also brings up new issues, though, like computational irreducibility. I mean, we're used to having science let us predict things, but something like this is fundamentally irreducible. The only way to find its outcome is, effectively, just to watch it evolve. It's connected to, what I call, the principle of computational equivalence, which tells us that even incredibly simple systems can do computations as sophisticated as anything. It doesn't take lots of technology or biological evolution to be able to do arbitrary computation; just something that happens, naturally, all over the place. Things with rules as simple as these can do it. Well, this has deep implications about the limits of science, about predictability and controllability of things like biological processes or economies, about intelligence in the universe, about questions like free will and about creating technology. You know, in working on this science for many years, I kept wondering, "What will be its first killer app?" Well, ever since I was a kid, I'd been thinking about systematizing knowledge and somehow making it computable. People like Leibniz had wondered about that too 300 years earlier. But I'd always assumed that to make progress, I'd essentially have to replicate a whole brain. Well, then I got to thinking: This scientific paradigm of mine suggests something different -- and, by the way, I've now got huge computation capabilities in Mathematica, and I'm a CEO with some worldly resources to do large, seemingly crazy, projects -- So I decided to just try to see how much of the systematic knowledge that's out there in the world we could make computable. So, it's been a big, very complex project, which I was not sure was going to work at all. But I'm happy to say it's actually going really well. And last year we were able to release the first website version of Wolfram Alpha. Its purpose is to be a serious knowledge engine that computes answers to questions. So let's give it a try. Let's start off with something really easy. Hope for the best. Very good. Okay. So far so good. (Laughter) Let's try something a little bit harder. Let's do some mathy thing, and with luck it'll work out the answer and try and tell us some interesting things things about related math. We could ask it something about the real world. Let's say -- I don't know -- what's the GDP of Spain? And it should be able to tell us that. Now we could compute something related to this, let's say ... the GDP of Spain divided by, I don't know, the -- hmmm ... let's say the revenue of Microsoft. (Laughter) The idea is that we can just type this in, this kind of question in, however we think of it. So let's try asking a question, like a health related question. So let's say we have a lab finding that ... you know, we have an LDL level of 140 for a male aged 50. So let's type that in, and now Wolfram Alpha will go and use available public health data and try and figure out what part of the population that corresponds to and so on. Or let's try asking about, I don't know, the International Space Station. And what's happening here is that Wolfram Alpha is not just looking up something; it's computing, in real time, where the International Space Station is right now at this moment, how fast it's going, and so on. So Wolfram Alpha knows about lots and lots of kinds of things. It's got, by now, pretty good coverage of everything you might find in a standard reference library. But the goal is to go much further and, very broadly, to democratize all of this knowledge, and to try and be an authoritative source in all areas. To be able to compute answers to specific questions that people have, not by searching what other people may have written down before, but by using built in knowledge to compute fresh new answers to specific questions. Now, of course, Wolfram Alpha is a monumentally huge, long-term project with lots and lots of challenges. For a start, one has to curate a zillion different sources of facts and data, and we built quite a pipeline of Mathematica automation and human domain experts for doing this. But that's just the beginning. Given raw facts or data to actually answer questions, one has to compute: one has to implement all those methods and models and algorithms and so on that science and other areas have built up over the centuries. Well, even starting from Mathematica, this is still a huge amount of work. So far, there are about 8 million lines of Mathematica code in Wolfram Alpha built by experts from many, many different fields. Well, a crucial idea of Wolfram Alpha is that you can just ask it questions using ordinary human language, which means that we've got to be able to take all those strange utterances that people type into the input field and understand them. And I must say that I thought that step might just be plain impossible. Two big things happened: First, a bunch of new ideas about linguistics that came from studying the computational universe; and second, the realization that having actual computable knowledge completely changes how one can set about understanding language. And, of course, now with Wolfram Alpha actually out in the wild, we can learn from its actual usage. And, in fact, there's been an interesting coevolution that's been going on between Wolfram Alpha and its human users, and it's really encouraging. Right now, if we look at web queries, more than 80 percent of them get handled successfully the first time. And if you look at things like the iPhone app, the fraction is considerably larger. So, I'm pretty pleased with it all. But, in many ways, we're still at the very beginning with Wolfram Alpha. I mean, everything is scaling up very nicely and we're getting more confident. You can expect to see Wolfram Alpha technology showing up in more and more places, working both with this kind of public data, like on the website, and with private knowledge for people and companies and so on. You know, I've realized that Wolfram Alpha actually gives one a whole new kind of computing that one can call knowledge-based computing, in which one's starting not just from raw computation, but from a vast amount of built-in knowledge. And when one does that, one really changes the economics of delivering computational things, whether it's on the web or elsewhere. You know, we have a fairly interesting situation right now. On the one hand, we have Mathematica, with its sort of precise, formal language and a huge network of carefully designed capabilities able to get a lot done in just a few lines. Let me show you a couple of examples here. So here's a trivial piece of Mathematica programming. Here's something where we're sort of integrating a bunch of different capabilities here. Here we'll just create, in this line, a little user interface that allows us to do something fun there. If you go on, that's a slightly more complicated program that's now doing all sorts of algorithmic things and creating user interface and so on. But it's something that is very precise stuff. It's a precise specification with a precise formal language that causes Mathematica to know what to do here. Then on the other hand, we have Wolfram Alpha, with all the messiness of the world and human language and so on built into it. So what happens when you put these things together? I think it's actually rather wonderful. With Wolfram Alpha inside Mathematica, you can, for example, make precise programs that call on real world data. Here's a real simple example. You can also just sort of give vague input and then try and have Wolfram Alpha figure out what you're talking about. Let's try this here. But actually I think the most exciting thing about this is that it really gives one the chance to democratize programming. I mean, anyone will be able to say what they want in plain language. Then, the idea is that Wolfram Alpha will be able to figure out what precise pieces of code can do what they're asking for and then show them examples that will let them pick what they need to build up bigger and bigger, precise programs. So, sometimes, Wolfram Alpha will be able to do the whole thing immediately and just give back a whole big program that you can then compute with. Here's a big website where we've been collecting lots of educational and other demonstrations about lots of kinds of things. I'll show you one example here. This is just an example of one of these computable documents. This is probably a fairly small piece of Mathematica code that's able to be run here. Okay. Let's zoom out again. So, given our new kind of science, is there a general way to use it to make technology? So, with physical materials, we're used to going around the world and discovering that particular materials are useful for particular technological purposes. Well, it turns out we can do very much the same kind of thing in the computational universe. There's an inexhaustible supply of programs out there. The challenge is to see how to harness them for human purposes. Something like Rule 30, for example, turns out to be a really good randomness generator. Other simple programs are good models for processes in the natural or social world. And, for example, Wolfram Alpha and Mathematica are actually now full of algorithms that we discovered by searching the computational universe. And, for example, this -- if we go back here -- this has become surprisingly popular among composers finding musical forms by searching the computational universe. In a sense, we can use the computational universe to get mass customized creativity. I'm hoping we can, for example, use that even to get Wolfram Alpha to routinely do invention and discovery on the fly, and to find all sorts of wonderful stuff that no engineer and no process of incremental evolution would ever come up with. Well, so, that leads to kind of an ultimate question: Could it be that someplace out there in the computational universe we might find our physical universe? Perhaps there's even some quite simple rule, some simple program for our universe. Well, the history of physics would have us believe that the rule for the universe must be pretty complicated. But in the computational universe, we've now seen how rules that are incredibly simple can produce incredibly rich and complex behavior. So could that be what's going on with our whole universe? If the rules for the universe are simple, it's kind of inevitable that they have to be very abstract and very low level; operating, for example, far below the level of space or time, which makes it hard to represent things. But in at least a large class of cases, one can think of the universe as being like some kind of network, which, when it gets big enough, behaves like continuous space in much the same way as having lots of molecules can behave like a continuous fluid. Well, then the universe has to evolve by applying little rules that progressively update this network. And each possible rule, in a sense, corresponds to a candidate universe. Actually, I haven't shown these before, but here are a few of the candidate universes that I've looked at. Some of these are hopeless universes, completely sterile, with other kinds of pathologies like no notion of space, no notion of time, no matter, other problems like that. But the exciting thing that I've found in the last few years is that you actually don't have to go very far in the computational universe before you start finding candidate universes that aren't obviously not our universe. Here's the problem: Any serious candidate for our universe is inevitably full of computational irreducibility. Which means that it is irreducibly difficult to find out how it will really behave, and whether it matches our physical universe. A few years ago, I was pretty excited to discover that there are candidate universes with incredibly simple rules that successfully reproduce special relativity, and even general relativity and gravitation, and at least give hints of quantum mechanics. So, will we find the whole of physics? I don't know for sure, but I think at this point it's sort of almost embarrassing not to at least try. Not an easy project. One's got to build a lot of technology. One's got to build a structure that's probably at least as deep as existing physics. And I'm not sure what the best way to organize the whole thing is. Build a team, open it up, offer prizes and so on. But I'll tell you, here today, that I'm committed to seeing this project done, to see if, within this decade, we can finally hold in our hands the rule for our universe and know where our universe lies in the space of all possible universes ... and be able to type into Wolfram Alpha, "the theory of the universe," and have it tell us. (Laughter) So I've been working on the idea of computation now for more than 30 years, building tools and methods and turning intellectual ideas into millions of lines of code and grist for server farms and so on. With every passing year, I realize how much more powerful the idea of computation really is. It's taken us a long way already, but there's so much more to come. From the foundations of science to the limits of technology to the very definition of the human condition, I think computation is destined to be the defining idea of our future. Thank you. (Applause) Chris Anderson: That was astonishing. Stay here. I've got a question. (Applause) So, that was, fair to say, an astonishing talk. Are you able to say in a sentence or two how this type of thinking could integrate at some point to things like string theory or the kind of things that people think of as the fundamental explanations of the universe? Stephen Wolfram: Well, the parts of physics that we kind of know to be true, things like the standard model of physics: what I'm trying to do better reproduce the standard model of physics or it's simply wrong. The things that people have tried to do in the last 25 years or so with string theory and so on have been an interesting exploration that has tried to get back to the standard model, but hasn't quite gotten there. My guess is that some great simplifications of what I'm doing may actually have considerable resonance with what's been done in string theory, but that's a complicated math thing that I don't yet know how it's going to work out. CA: Benoit Mandelbrot is in the audience. He also has shown how complexity can arise out of a simple start. Does your work relate to his? SW: I think so. I view Benoit Mandelbrot's work as one of the founding contributions to this kind of area. Benoit has been particularly interested in nested patterns, in fractals and so on, where the structure is something that's kind of tree-like, and where there's sort of a big branch that makes little branches and even smaller branches and so on. That's one of the ways that you get towards true complexity. I think things like the Rule 30 cellular automaton get us to a different level. In fact, in a very precise way, they get us to a different level because they seem to be things that are capable of complexity that's sort of as great as complexity can ever get ... I could go on about this at great length, but I won't. (Laughter) (Applause) CA: Stephen Wolfram, thank you. (Applause)

In the year 1919, a virtually unknown German mathematician, named Theodor Kaluza suggested a very bold and, in some ways, a very bizarre idea. He proposed that our universe might actually have more than the three dimensions that we are all aware of. That is in addition to left, right, back, forth and up, down, Kaluza proposed that there might be additional dimensions of space that for some reason we don't yet see. Now, when someone makes a bold and bizarre idea, sometimes that's all it is -- bold and bizarre, but it has nothing to do with the world around us. This particular idea, however -- although we don't yet know whether it's right or wrong, and at the end I'll discuss experiments which, in the next few years, may tell us whether it's right or wrong -- this idea has had a major impact on physics in the last century and continues to inform a lot of cutting-edge research. So, I'd like to tell you something about the story of these extra dimensions. So where do we go? To begin we need a little bit of back story. Go to 1907. This is a year when Einstein is basking in the glow of having discovered the special theory of relativity and decides to take on a new project, to try to understand fully the grand, pervasive force of gravity. And in that moment, there are many people around who thought that that project had already been resolved. Newton had given the world a theory of gravity in the late 1600s that works well, describes the motion of planets, the motion of the moon and so forth, the motion of apocryphal of apples falling from trees, hitting people on the head. All of that could be described using Newton's work. But Einstein realized that Newton had left something out of the story, because even Newton had written that although he understood how to calculate the effect of gravity, he'd been unable to figure out how it really works. How is it that the Sun, 93 million miles away, [that] somehow it affects the motion of the Earth? How does the Sun reach out across empty inert space and exert influence? And that is a task to which Einstein set himself -- to figure out how gravity works. And let me show you what it is that he found. So Einstein found that the medium that transmits gravity is space itself. The idea goes like this: imagine space is a substrate of all there is. Einstein said space is nice and flat, if there's no matter present. But if there is matter in the environment, such as the Sun, it causes the fabric of space to warp, to curve. And that communicates the force of gravity. Even the Earth warps space around it. Now look at the Moon. The Moon is kept in orbit, according to these ideas, because it rolls along a valley in the curved environment that the Sun and the Moon and the Earth can all create by virtue of their presence. We go to a full-frame view of this. The Earth itself is kept in orbit because it rolls along a valley in the environment that's curved because of the Sun's presence. That is this new idea about how gravity actually works. Now, this idea was tested in 1919 through astronomical observations. It really works. It describes the data. And this gained Einstein prominence around the world. And that is what got Kaluza thinking. He, like Einstein, was in search of what we call a unified theory. That's one theory that might be able to describe all of nature's forces from one set of ideas, one set of principles, one master equation, if you will. So Kaluza said to himself, Einstein has been able to describe gravity in terms of warps and curves in space -- in fact, space and time, to be more precise. Maybe I can play the same game with the other known force, which was, at that time, known as the electromagnetic force -- we know of others today, but at that time that was the only other one people were thinking about. You know, the force responsible for electricity and magnetic attraction and so forth. So Kaluza says, maybe I can play the same game and describe electromagnetic force in terms of warps and curves. That raised a question: warps and curves in what? Einstein had already used up space and time, warps and curves, to describe gravity. There didn't seem to be anything else to warp or curve. So Kaluza said, well, maybe there are more dimensions of space. He said, if I want to describe one more force, maybe I need one more dimension. So he imagined that the world had four dimensions of space, not three, and imagined that electromagnetism was warps and curves in that fourth dimension. Now here's the thing: when he wrote down the equations describing warps and curves in a universe with four space dimensions, not three, he found the old equations that Einstein had already derived in three dimensions -- those were for gravity -- but he found one more equation because of the one more dimension. And when he looked at that equation, it was none other than the equation that scientists had long known to describe the electromagnetic force. Amazing -- it just popped out. He was so excited by this realization that he ran around his house screaming, "Victory!" -- that he had found the unified theory. Now clearly, Kaluza was a man who took theory very seriously. He, in fact -- there is a story that when he wanted to learn how to swim, he read a book, a treatise on swimming -- (Laughter) -- then dove into the ocean. This is a man who would risk his life on theory. Now, but for those of us who are a little bit more practically minded, two questions immediately arise from his observation. Number one: if there are more dimensions in space, where are they? We don't seem to see them. And number two: does this theory really work in detail, when you try to apply it to the world around us? Now, the first question was answered in 1926 by a fellow named Oskar Klein. He suggested that dimensions might come in two varieties -- there might be big, easy-to-see dimensions, but there might also be tiny, curled-up dimensions, curled up so small, even though they're all around us, that we don't see them. Let me show you that one visually. So, imagine you're looking at something like a cable supporting a traffic light. It's in Manhattan. You're in Central Park -- it's kind of irrelevant -- but the cable looks one-dimensional from a distant viewpoint, but you and I all know that it does have some thickness. It's very hard to see it, though, from far away. But if we zoom in and take the perspective of, say, a little ant walking around -- little ants are so small that they can access all of the dimensions -- the long dimension, but also this clockwise, counter-clockwise direction. And I hope you appreciate this. It took so long to get these ants to do this. (Laughter) But this illustrates the fact that dimensions can be of two sorts: big and small. And the idea that maybe the big dimensions around us are the ones that we can easily see, but there might be additional dimensions curled up, sort of like the circular part of that cable, so small that they have so far remained invisible. Let me show you what that would look like. So, if we take a look, say, at space itself -- I can only show, of course, two dimensions on a screen. Some of you guys will fix that one day, but anything that's not flat on a screen is a new dimension, goes smaller, smaller, smaller, and way down in the microscopic depths of space itself, this is the idea, you could have additional curled up dimensions -- here is a little shape of a circle -- so small that we don't see them. But if you were a little ultra microscopic ant walking around, you could walk in the big dimensions that we all know about -- that's like the grid part -- but you could also access the tiny curled-up dimension that's so small that we can't see it with the naked eye or even with any of our most refined equipment. But deeply tucked into the fabric of space itself, the idea is there could be more dimensions, as we see there. Now that's an explanation about how the universe could have more dimensions than the ones that we see. But what about the second question that I asked: does the theory actually work when you try to apply it to the real world? Well, it turns out that Einstein and Kaluza and many others worked on trying to refine this framework and apply it to the physics of the universe as was understood at the time, and, in detail, it didn't work. In detail, for instance, they couldn't get the mass of the electron to work out correctly in this theory. So many people worked on it, but by the '40s, certainly by the '50s, this strange but very compelling idea of how to unify the laws of physics had gone away. Until something wonderful happened in our age. In our era, a new approach to unify the laws of physics is being pursued by physicists such as myself, many others around the world, it's called superstring theory, as you were indicating. And the wonderful thing is that superstring theory has nothing to do at first sight with this idea of extra dimensions, but when we study superstring theory, we find that it resurrects the idea in a sparkling, new form. So, let me just tell you how that goes. Superstring theory -- what is it? Well, it's a theory that tries to answer the question: what are the basic, fundamental, indivisible, uncuttable constituents making up everything in the world around us? The idea is like this. So, imagine we look at a familiar object, just a candle in a holder, and imagine that we want to figure out what it is made of. So we go on a journey deep inside the object and examine the constituents. So deep inside -- we all know, you go sufficiently far down, you have atoms. We also all know that atoms are not the end of the story. They have little electrons that swarm around a central nucleus with neutrons and protons. Even the neutrons and protons have smaller particles inside of them known as quarks. That is where conventional ideas stop. Here is the new idea of string theory. Deep inside any of these particles, there is something else. This something else is this dancing filament of energy. It looks like a vibrating string -- that's where the idea, string theory comes from. And just like the vibrating strings that you just saw in a cello can vibrate in different patterns, these can also vibrate in different patterns. They don't produce different musical notes. Rather, they produce the different particles making up the world around us. So if these ideas are correct, this is what the ultra-microscopic landscape of the universe looks like. It's built up of a huge number of these little tiny filaments of vibrating energy, vibrating in different frequencies. The different frequencies produce the different particles. The different particles are responsible for all the richness in the world around us. And there you see unification, because matter particles, electrons and quarks, radiation particles, photons, gravitons, are all built up from one entity. So matter and the forces of nature all are put together under the rubric of vibrating strings. And that's what we mean by a unified theory. Now here is the catch. When you study the mathematics of string theory, you find that it doesn't work in a universe that just has three dimensions of space. It doesn't work in a universe with four dimensions of space, nor five, nor six. Finally, you can study the equations, and show that it works only in a universe that has 10 dimensions of space and one dimension of time. It leads us right back to this idea of Kaluza and Klein -- that our world, when appropriately described, has more dimensions than the ones that we see. Now you might think about that and say, well, OK, you know, if you have extra dimensions, and they're really tightly curled up, yeah, perhaps we won't see them, if they're small enough. But if there's a little tiny civilization of green people walking around down there, and you make them small enough, and we won't see them either. That is true. One of the other predictions of string theory -- no, that's not one of the other predictions of string theory. (Laughter) But it raises the question: are we just trying to hide away these extra dimensions, or do they tell us something about the world? In the remaining time, I'd like to tell you two features of them. First is, many of us believe that these extra dimensions hold the answer to what perhaps is the deepest question in theoretical physics, theoretical science. And that question is this: when we look around the world, as scientists have done for the last hundred years, there appear to be about 20 numbers that really describe our universe. These are numbers like the mass of the particles, like electrons and quarks, the strength of gravity, the strength of the electromagnetic force -- a list of about 20 numbers that have been measured with incredible precision, but nobody has an explanation for why the numbers have the particular values that they do. Now, does string theory offer an answer? Not yet. But we believe the answer for why those numbers have the values they do may rely on the form of the extra dimensions. And the wonderful thing is, if those numbers had any other values than the known ones, the universe, as we know it, wouldn't exist. This is a deep question. Why are those numbers so finely tuned to allow stars to shine and planets to form, when we recognize that if you fiddle with those numbers -- if I had 20 dials up here and I let you come up and fiddle with those numbers, almost any fiddling makes the universe disappear. So can we explain those 20 numbers? And string theory suggests that those 20 numbers have to do with the extra dimensions. Let me show you how. So when we talk about the extra dimensions in string theory, it's not one extra dimension, as in the older ideas of Kaluza and Klein. This is what string theory says about the extra dimensions. They have a very rich, intertwined geometry. This is an example of something known as a Calabi-Yau shape -- name isn't all that important. But, as you can see, the extra dimensions fold in on themselves and intertwine in a very interesting shape, interesting structure. And the idea is that if this is what the extra dimensions look like, then the microscopic landscape of our universe all around us would look like this on the tiniest of scales. When you swing your hand, you'd be moving around these extra dimensions over and over again, but they're so small that we wouldn't know it. So what is the physical implication, though, relevant to those 20 numbers? Consider this. If you look at the instrument, a French horn, notice that the vibrations of the airstreams are affected by the shape of the instrument. Now in string theory, all the numbers are reflections of the way strings can vibrate. So just as those airstreams are affected by the twists and turns in the instrument, strings themselves will be affected by the vibrational patterns in the geometry within which they are moving. So let me bring some strings into the story. And if you watch these little fellows vibrating around -- they'll be there in a second -- right there, notice that they way they vibrate is affected by the geometry of the extra dimensions. So, if we knew exactly what the extra dimensions look like -- we don't yet, but if we did -- we should be able to calculate the allowed notes, the allowed vibrational patterns. And if we could calculate the allowed vibrational patterns, we should be able to calculate those 20 numbers. And if the answer that we get from our calculations agrees with the values of those numbers that have been determined through detailed and precise experimentation, this in many ways would be the first fundamental explanation for why the structure of the universe is the way it is. Now, the second issue that I want to finish up with is: how might we test for these extra dimensions more directly? Is this just an interesting mathematical structure that might be able to explain some previously unexplained features of the world, or can we actually test for these extra dimensions? And we think -- and this is, I think, very exciting -- that in the next five years or so we may be able to test for the existence of these extra dimensions. Here's how it goes. In CERN, Geneva, Switzerland, a machine is being built called the Large Hadron Collider. It's a machine that will send particles around a tunnel, opposite directions, near the speed of light. Every so often those particles will be aimed at each other, so there's a head-on collision. The hope is that if the collision has enough energy, it may eject some of the debris from the collision from our dimensions, forcing it to enter into the other dimensions. How would we know it? Well, we'll measure the amount of energy after the collision, compare it to the amount of energy before, and if there's less energy after the collision than before, this will be evidence that the energy has drifted away. And if it drifts away in the right pattern that we can calculate, this will be evidence that the extra dimensions are there. Let me show you that idea visually. So, imagine we have a certain kind of particle called a graviton -- that's the kind of debris we expect to be ejected out, if the extra dimensions are real. But here's how the experiment will go. You take these particles. You slam them together. You slam them together, and if we are right, some of the energy of that collision will go into debris that flies off into these extra dimensions. So this is the kind of experiment that we'll be looking at in the next five, seven to 10 years or so. And if this experiment bears fruit, if we see that kind of particle ejected by noticing that there's less energy in our dimensions than when we began, this will show that the extra dimensions are real. And to me this is a really remarkable story, and a remarkable opportunity. Going back to Newton with absolute space -- didn't provide anything but an arena, a stage in which the events of the universe take place. Einstein comes along and says, well, space and time can warp and curve -- that's what gravity is. And now string theory comes along and says, yes, gravity, quantum mechanics, electromagnetism, all together in one package, but only if the universe has more dimensions than the ones that we see. And this is an experiment that may test for them in our lifetime. Amazing possibility. Thank you very much. (Applause)

Brain magic. What's brain magic all about? Brain magic to me indicates that area of magic dealing with psychological and mind-reading effects. So unlike traditional magic, it uses the power of words, linguistic deception, non-verbal communication and various other techniques to create the illusion of a sixth sense. I'm going to show you all how easy it is to manipulate the human mind once you know how. I want everybody downstairs also to join in with me and everybody. I want everybody to put out your hands like this for me, first of all. OK, clap them together, once. OK, reverse your hands. Now, follow my actions exactly. Now about half the audience has their left hand up. Why is that? OK, swap them around, put your right hand up. Cross your hands over, so your right hand goes over, interlace your fingers like this, then make sure your right thumb is outside your left thumb -- that's very important. Yours is the other way around, so swap it around. Excellent, OK. Extend your fingers like this for me. All right. Tap them together once. OK, now, if you did not allow me to deceive your minds, you would all be able to do this. (Laughter) (Laughter ends) Now you can see how easy it is for me to manipulate the human mind, once you know how. (Laughter) Now, I remember when I was about 15, (Laughter) I read a copy of Life magazine, which detailed a story about a 75-year-old blind Russian woman who could sense printed letters -- there's still people trying to do it -- (Laughter) -- who could sense printed letters and even sense colors, just by touch. And she was completely blind. She could also read the serial numbers on bills when they were placed, face down, on a hard surface. Now, I was fascinated, but at the same time, skeptical. How could somebody read using their fingertips? You know, if you actually think about it, if somebody is totally blind -- a guy yesterday did a demonstration in one of the rooms, where people had to close their eyes and they could just hear things. And it's just a really weird thing to try and figure out. How could somebody read using their fingertips? Now earlier on, as part of a TV show that I have coming up on MTV, I attempted to give a similar demonstration of what is now known as second sight. So, let's take a look. (Video) Man: There we go. I'm going to guide you into the car. Kathryn Thomas: (Laughter) Man: You're OK, keep on going. KT: How are you? Keith Barry: Kathryn, it's Keith here. I'm going to take you to a secret location, OK? Kathryn, there was no way you could see through that blindfold. KT: OK, but don't say my name like that. KB: But you're OK? KT: Yes. KB: No way to see through it? KT: No. KB: I'll take it off. Do you want to take the rest off? Take it off, you're OK. We'll stop for a second. KT: I'm so afraid of what I'm going to see. KB: You're fine, take it off. You're OK. You're safe. Have you ever heard of second sight? KT: No. KB: Second sight is whereby a mind-control expert can see through somebody else's eyes. And I'm going to try that right now. KT: God. KB: Are you ready? Where is it? There's no way -- KT: (Beep) KT: Oh, my God! KB: Don't say anything, I'm trying to see through your eyes. I can't see. KT: There's a wall, there's a wall. KB: Look at the road, look at the road. KT: OK, OK, OK. Oh, my God! KB: Now, anything coming at all? KT: No. KB: Sure there's not? KT: No, no, I'm just still looking at the road. I'm looking at the road, all the time. I'm not taking my eyes off the road. (Beep) (Beep) (Beep) KT: Oh, my God! KB: Where are we? Where are we? We're going uphill, are we going uphill? KT: Look at the road -- (Beep) Still got that goddamn blindfold on. KB: What? KT: How are you doing this? KB: Just don't break my concentration. We're OK, though? KT: Yes. That's so weird. We're nearly there. Oh, my God! Oh, my God! KB: And I've stopped. KT: That is weird. You're like a freak-ass of nature. That was the most scary thing I've ever done in my life! (Applause) KB: Thank you. By the way, two days ago, we were going to film this down there, at the race course, and we got a guy into a car, and we got a camera man in the back, but halfway through the drive, he told me he had, I think it was a nine-millimeter, stuck to his leg. So, I stopped pretty quick, and that was it. So, do you believe it's possible to see through somebody else's eyes? That's the question. Now, most people here would automatically say no. OK, but I want you to realize some facts. I couldn't see through the blindfold. The car was not gimmicked or tricked in any way. The girl, I'd never met before, all right. So, I want you to just think about it for a moment. A lot of people try to come up with a logical solution to what just happened, all right. But because your brains are not trained in the art of deception, the solutions you come up with will, 99 percent of the time, be way off the mark. This is because magic is all about directing attention. If, for instance, I didn't want you to look at my right hand, then I don't look at it. But if I wanted you to look at my right hand, then I look at it, too. You see, it's very simple, once you know how, but very complicated in other ways. I'm going to give you some demonstrations right now. I need two people to help me out real quick. Can you come up? And let's see, down at the end, here, can you also come up, real quick? Do you mind? Yes, at the end. OK, give them a round of applause as they come up. You might want to use the stairs, there. (Applause) It's very important for everybody here to realize I haven't set anything up with you. You don't know what will happen, right? Would you mind just standing over here for a moment? Your name is? Nicole: Nicole. KB: Nicole, and? (Telephone ringing) KB: Actually, here's the thing, answer it, answer it, answer it. (Laughter) Is it a girl? Man: They've already gone. KB: OK, swap over positions. Can you stand over here? This will make it easier. Pity, I would have told them it was the ace of spades. OK, a little bit closer. (Laughter) OK, a little bit closer, come over -- they look really nervous up here. Do you believe in witchcraft? Nicole: No. KB: Voodoo? Nicole: No. KB: Things that go bump in the night? Nicole: No. KB: Besides, who's next, no, OK. I want you to just stand exactly like this for me, pull up your sleeves, if you don't mind. OK, now, I want you to be aware of all the different sensations around you, because we'll try a voodoo experiment. I want you to be aware of the sensations, but don't say anything until I ask you, and don't open your eyes until I ask you. From this point onwards, close your eyes, do not say anything, do not open them, be aware of the sensations. Yes or no, did you feel anything? Nicole: Yes. KB: You did feel that? What did you feel? Nicole: A touch on my back. KB: How many times did you feel it? Nicole: Twice. KB: Twice. OK, extend your left arm out in front of you. Extend your left arm, OK. OK, keep it there. Be aware of the sensations, don't say anything, don't open your eyes, OK. Did you feel anything, there? Nicole: Yes. KB: What did you feel? Nicole: Three -- KB: Like a tickling sensation? Nicole: Yes. KB: Can you show us where? OK, excellent. Open your eyes. I never touched you. I just touched his back, and I just touched his arm. A voodoo experiment. (Laughter) Yeah, I walk around nightclubs all night like this. (Laughter) You just take a seat over here for a second. I'm going to use you again, in a moment. Can you take a seat right over here, if you don't mind. Sit right here. Man: OK. KB: OK, take a seat. Excellent, OK. Now, what I want you to do is look directly at me, OK, just take a deep breath in through your nose, letting it out through your mouth, and relax. Allow your eyes to close, on five, four, three, two, one. Close your eyes right now. OK, now, I'm not hypnotizing you, I'm merely placing you in a heightened state of synchronicity, so our minds are along the same lines. And as you sink and drift and float into this relaxed state of mind, I'm going to take your left hand, and just place it up here. I want you to hold it there just for a moment, and I only want you to allow your hand to sink and drift and float back to the tabletop at the same rate and speed as you drift and float into this relaxed state of awareness, and allow it to go all the way down to the tabletop. That's it, all the way down, all the way down. and further, and further. Excellent. I want you to allow your hand to stick firmly to the tabletop. OK, now, allow it to stay there. OK, now, in a moment, you'll feel a certain pressure, OK, and I want you to be aware of the pressure. Just be aware of the pressure. And I only want you to allow your hand to float slowly back up from the tabletop as you feel the pressure release, but only when you feel the pressure release. Do you understand? Just answer yes or no. Man: Yes. KB: Hold it right there. And only when you feel the pressure go back, allow your hand to drift back to the tabletop, but only when you feel the pressure. (Laughter) OK, that was wonderfully done. Let's try it again. Excellent. Now that you've got the idea, let's try something even more interesting. Allow it to stick firmly to the tabletop, keep your eyes closed. Can you stand up? Just stand, stage forward. I want you to point directly at his forehead. OK. Imagine a connection between you and him. Only when you want the pressure to be released, make an upward gesture, like this, but only when you want it to be released. You can wait as long as you want, but only when you want the pressure released. OK, let's try it again. OK, now, imagine the connection, OK. Point directly at his forehead. Only when you want the pressure released, we'll try it again. OK, it worked that time, excellent. And hold it there, both of you. Only when you want the pressure to go back, make a downward gesture. You can wait as long as you want. You did it pretty quickly, but it went down, OK. Now, I want you to be aware that in a moment, when I snap my fingers, your eyes will open, again. It's OK to remember to forget, or forget to remember what happened. Most people ask you, "What the hell just happened up here?" But it's OK that even though you're not hypnotized, you will forget everything that happened. On five, four, three, two, one -- open your eyes, wide awake. Give them a round of applause, as they go back to their seats. (Applause) OK, you can go back. (Applause) I once saw a film called "The Gods Are Crazy." Has anybody here seen that film? Yeah. Remember when they threw the Coke out of the airplane, and it landed on the ground, and it didn't break? Now, see, that's because Coke bottles are solid. It's nearly impossible to break a Coke bottle. Do you want to try it? Good job. She's not taking any chances. (Laughter) You see, psychokinesis is the paranormal influence of the mind on physical events and processes. For some magicians or mentalists, sometimes the spoon will bend or melt, sometimes it will not. Sometimes the object will slide across the table, sometimes it will not. It depends on how much energy you have that day, so on and so forth. We're going to try an experiment in psychokinesis, right now. Come right over here, next to me. Excellent. Now, have a look at the Coke bottle. Make sure it is solid, there's only one hole, and it's a normal Coke bottle. And you can whack it against the table, if you want; be careful. Even though it's solid, I'm standing away. I want you to pinch right here with two fingers and your thumb. Excellent. Now, I've got a shard of glass here, OK. I want you to examine the shard of glass. Careful, it's sharp. Just hold on to it for a moment. Now, hold it out here. I want you to imagine, right now, a broken relationship from many years ago. I want you to imagine all the negative energy from that broken relationship, from that guy, being imparted into the broken piece of glass, which will represent him, OK. But I want you to take this very seriously. Stare at the glass, ignore everybody right here. In a moment, you'll feel a certain sensation, OK, and when you feel that sensation, I want you to drop the piece of glass into the bottle. Think of that guy, that ba -- that guy. (Laughter) I'm trying to be good here. OK, and when you feel the sensation -- it might take a while -- drop it into the glass. OK, drop it in. Now, imagine all that negative energy in there. Imagine his name and imagine him inside the glass. And I want you to release that negative energy by shaking it from side to side. (Burst) (Laughter) That was a lot of negative energy, built up in there. (Laughter) (Applause) I also want you to look at me and think of his name. OK, think of how many letters in the title of his name. There's five letters in the title. You didn't react to that, so it's four letters. Think of one of the letters in the title. There's a K in his name, there is a K. I knew that because my name starts with a K also, but his name doesn't start with a K, it starts with an M. Tell Mike I said hello, the next time you see him. Was that his name? Nicole: Mm-hmm. KB: OK, give her a round of applause. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) (Applause ends) I've got one more thing to share with you right now. Actually, Chris, I was going to pick you for this, but instead of picking you, can you hop up here and pick a victim for this next experiment? And it should be a male victim, that's the only thing. Chris Anderson: Oh, OK. KB: I was going to use you, but I decided I might want to come back another year. (Laughter) CA: Well, to reward him for saying "eureka," and for selecting Michael Mercil to come and talk to us -- Steve Jurvetson. KB: OK, Steve, come on up here. (Applause) CA: You knew! KB: OK, Steve, I want you to take a seat, right behind here. Excellent. Now, Steve -- oh, you can check underneath. Go ahead, I've no fancy assistants underneath there. They insist that because I was a magician, put a nice, black tablecloth on. There you are, OK. (Laughter) I've got four wooden plinths here, Steve. One, two, three and four. Now, they're all the exact same except this one obviously has a stainless steel spike sticking out of it. I want you to examine it, and make sure it's solid. Happy? Steve Jurvetson: Mmm, yes. KB: OK. Now, Steve, I'm going to stand in front of the table, When I stand in front of the table, I want you to put the cups on the plinths, in any order you want, and then mix them all up, so nobody has any idea where the spike is, all right? SJ: No one in the audience? KB: Yes, and just to help you out, I'll block them from view, so nobody can see what you're doing. I'll also look away. So, go ahead and mix them up, now. OK, and tell me when you're done. (Laughter) (Laughter) KB: You done? SJ: Almost. KB: Almost, oh. OK, you're making sure that's well hidden. Oh, we've got one here, we've got one here. (Applause) So, all right, we'll leave them like that. (Laughter) I'm going to have the last laugh, though. (Laughter) Now, Steve, you know where the spike is, but nobody else, does? Correct? But I don't want you to know either, so swivel around on your chair. They'll keep an eye on me to make sure I don't do anything funny. No, stay around, OK. Now, Steve, look back. Now you don't know where the spike is, and I don't know where it is either. Now, is there any way to see through this blindfold? SJ: Put this on? KB: No, just, is there any way to see through it? No? SJ: No, I can't see through it. KB: Excellent. Now, I'm going to put on the blindfold. Don't stack them up, OK. Give them an extra mix up. Don't move the cups, I don't want anybody to see where the spike is, but give the plinths an extra mix up, and then line them up. I'll put the blindfold on. Give them an extra mix up. No messing around this time. OK, go ahead, mix them up. My hand is at risk here. (Laughter) Tell me when you're done. SJ: Done. KB: OK, where are you? Put out your hand. Your right hand. Tell me when I'm over a cup. SJ: You're over a cup. KB: I'm over a cup, right now? SJ: Mm-hmm. KB: Now, Steve, do you think it's here? Yes or no? SJ: Oh! (Laughter) KB: I told you I'd have the last laugh. (Laughter) SJ: I don't think it's there. KB: No? Good decision. (Laughter) (Applause) (Applause ends) Now, if I go this way, is there another cup over here? SJ: Can we do the left hand? KB: Oh, no, no, no. He asked me could he do the left hand. Absolutely not. (Laughter) KB: If I go this way, is there another cup? SJ: Yes. KB: Tell me when to stop. SJ: OK. KB: There? SJ: Yes, there's one. KB: OK. Do you think it's here, yes or no? This is your decision, not mine. (Laughter) SJ: I'm going to say no. KB: Good decision. (Laughter) OK, give me both hands. Now, put them on both cups. Do you think the spike is under your left or your right hand? SJ: Neither. KB: Neither, oh, OK. But if you were to guess. (Laughter) SJ: Under my right hand. KB: Under your right hand? Now, remember, you made all the decisions all along. Psychologists, figure this out. (SJ gasps) Have a look. SJ: Oh! (Applause) KB: Thank you. (Applause ends) If anybody wants to see some sleight of hand later on, I'll be outside. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. Thank you. (Applause)

When I was president of the American Psychological Association, they tried to media-train me, and an encounter I had with CNN summarizes what I'm going to be talking about today, which is the eleventh reason to be optimistic. The editor of Discover told us 10 of them, I'm going to give you the eleventh. So they came to me -- CNN -- and they said, "Professor Seligman, would you tell us about the state of psychology today? We'd like to interview you about that." And I said, "Great." And she said, "But this is CNN, so you only get a sound bite." So I said, "Well, how many words do I get?" And she said, "Well, one." (Laughter) And cameras rolled, and she said, "Professor Seligman, what is the state of psychology today?" "Good." (Laughter) "Cut. Cut. That won't do. We'd really better give you a longer sound bite." "Well, how many words do I get this time?" "I think, well, you get two. Doctor Seligman, what is the state of psychology today?" "Not good." (Laughter) "Look, Doctor Seligman, we can see you're really not comfortable in this medium. We'd better give you a real sound bite. This time you can have three words. Professor Seligman, what is the state of psychology today?" "Not good enough." And that's what I'm going to be talking about. I want to say why psychology was good, why it was not good and how it may become, in the next 10 years, good enough. And by parallel summary, I want to say the same thing about technology, about entertainment and design, because I think the issues are very similar. So, why was psychology good? Well, for more than 60 years, psychology worked within the disease model. Ten years ago, when I was on an airplane and I introduced myself to my seatmate, and told them what I did, they'd move away from me. And because, quite rightly, they were saying psychology is about finding what's wrong with you. Spot the loony. And now, when I tell people what I do, they move toward me. And what was good about psychology, about the 30 billion dollar investment NIMH made, about working in the disease model, about what you mean by psychology, is that, 60 years ago, none of the disorders were treatable -- it was entirely smoke and mirrors. And now, 14 of the disorders are treatable, two of them actually curable. And the other thing that happened is that a science developed, a science of mental illness. That we found out that we could take fuzzy concepts -- like depression, alcoholism -- and measure them with rigor. That we could create a classification of the mental illnesses. That we could understand the causality of the mental illnesses. We could look across time at the same people -- people, for example, who were genetically vulnerable to schizophrenia -- and ask what the contribution of mothering, of genetics are, and we could isolate third variables by doing experiments on the mental illnesses. And best of all, we were able, in the last 50 years, to invent drug treatments and psychological treatments. And then we were able to test them rigorously, in random assignment, placebo controlled designs, throw out the things that didn't work, keep the things that actively did. And the conclusion of that is that psychology and psychiatry, over the last 60 years, can actually claim that we can make miserable people less miserable. And I think that's terrific. I'm proud of it. But what was not good, the consequences of that were three things. The first was moral, that psychologists and psychiatrists became victimologists, pathologizers, that our view of human nature was that if you were in trouble, bricks fell on you. And we forgot that people made choices and decisions. We forgot responsibility. That was the first cost. The second cost was that we forgot about you people. We forgot about improving normal lives. We forgot about a mission to make relatively untroubled people happier, more fulfilled, more productive. And "genius," "high-talent," became a dirty word. No one works on that. And the third problem about the disease model is, in our rush to do something about people in trouble, in our rush to do something about repairing damage, it never occurred to us to develop interventions to make people happier, positive interventions. So that was not good. And so, that's what led people like Nancy Etcoff, Dan Gilbert, Mike Csikszentmihalyi and myself to work in something I call positive psychology, which has three aims. The first is that psychology should be just as concerned with human strength as it is with weakness. It should be just as concerned with building strength as with repairing damage. It should be interested in the best things in life. And it should be just as concerned with making the lives of normal people fulfilling, and with genius, with nurturing high talent. So in the last 10 years and the hope for the future, we've seen the beginnings of a science of positive psychology, a science of what makes life worth living. It turns out that we can measure different forms of happiness. And any of you, for free, can go to that website and take the entire panoply of tests of happiness. You can ask, how do you stack up for positive emotion, for meaning, for flow, against literally tens of thousands of other people? We created the opposite of the diagnostic manual of the insanities: a classification of the strengths and virtues that looks at the sex ratio, how they're defined, how to diagnose them, what builds them and what gets in their way. We found that we could discover the causation of the positive states, the relationship between left hemispheric activity and right hemispheric activity as a cause of happiness. I've spent my life working on extremely miserable people, and I've asked the question, how do extremely miserable people differ from the rest of you? And starting about six years ago, we asked about extremely happy people. And how do they differ from the rest of us? And it turns out there's one way. They're not more religious, they're not in better shape, they don't have more money, they're not better looking, they don't have more good events and fewer bad events. The one way in which they differ: they're extremely social. They don't sit in seminars on Saturday morning. (Laughter) They don't spend time alone. Each of them is in a romantic relationship and each has a rich repertoire of friends. But watch out here. This is merely correlational data, not causal, and it's about happiness in the first Hollywood sense I'm going to talk about: happiness of ebullience and giggling and good cheer. And I'm going to suggest to you that's not nearly enough, in just a moment. We found we could begin to look at interventions over the centuries, from the Buddha to Tony Robbins. About 120 interventions have been proposed that allegedly make people happy. And we find that we've been able to manualize many of them, and we actually carry out random assignment efficacy and effectiveness studies. That is, which ones actually make people lastingly happier? In a couple of minutes, I'll tell you about some of those results. But the upshot of this is that the mission I want psychology to have, in addition to its mission of curing the mentally ill, and in addition to its mission of making miserable people less miserable, is can psychology actually make people happier? And to ask that question -- happy is not a word I use very much -- we've had to break it down into what I think is askable about happy. And I believe there are three different -- and I call them different because different interventions build them, it's possible to have one rather than the other -- three different happy lives. The first happy life is the pleasant life. This is a life in which you have as much positive emotion as you possibly can, and the skills to amplify it. The second is a life of engagement -- a life in your work, your parenting, your love, your leisure, time stops for you. That's what Aristotle was talking about. And third, the meaningful life. So I want to say a little bit about each of those lives and what we know about them. The first life is the pleasant life and it's simply, as best we can find it, it's having as many of the pleasures as you can, as much positive emotion as you can, and learning the skills -- savoring, mindfulness -- that amplify them, that stretch them over time and space. But the pleasant life has three drawbacks, and it's why positive psychology is not happy-ology and why it doesn't end here. The first drawback is that it turns out the pleasant life, your experience of positive emotion, is heritable, about 50 percent heritable, and, in fact, not very modifiable. So the different tricks that Matthieu [Ricard] and I and others know about increasing the amount of positive emotion in your life are 15 to 20 percent tricks, getting more of it. Second is that positive emotion habituates. It habituates rapidly, indeed. It's all like French vanilla ice cream, the first taste is a 100 percent; by the time you're down to the sixth taste, it's gone. And, as I said, it's not particularly malleable. And this leads to the second life. And I have to tell you about my friend, Len, to talk about why positive psychology is more than positive emotion, more than building pleasure. In two of the three great arenas of life, by the time Len was 30, Len was enormously successful. The first arena was work. By the time he was 20, he was an options trader. By the time he was 25, he was a multimillionaire and the head of an options trading company. Second, in play -- he's a national champion bridge player. But in the third great arena of life, love, Len is an abysmal failure. And the reason he was, was that Len is a cold fish. (Laughter) Len is an introvert. American women said to Len, when he dated them, "You're no fun. You don't have positive emotion. Get lost." And Len was wealthy enough to be able to afford a Park Avenue psychoanalyst, who for five years tried to find the sexual trauma that had somehow locked positive emotion inside of him. But it turned out there wasn't any sexual trauma. It turned out that -- Len grew up in Long Island and he played football and watched football, and played bridge -- Len is in the bottom five percent of what we call positive affectivities. The question is, is Len unhappy? And I want to say not. Contrary to what psychology told us about the bottom 50 percent of the human race in positive affectivity, I think Len is one of the happiest people I know. He's not consigned to the hell of unhappiness and that's because Len, like most of you, is enormously capable of flow. When he walks onto the floor of the American Exchange at 9:30 in the morning, time stops for him. And it stops till the closing bell. When the first card is played, until 10 days later, the tournament is over, time stops for Len. And this is indeed what Mike Csikszentmihalyi has been talking about, about flow. And it's distinct from pleasure in a very important way. Pleasure has raw feels: you know it's happening. It's thought and feeling. But what Mike told you yesterday -- during flow, you can't feel anything. You're one with the music. Time stops. You have intense concentration. And this is indeed the characteristic of what we think of as the good life. And we think there's a recipe for it, and it's knowing what your highest strengths are. And again, there's a valid test of what your five highest strengths are. And then re-crafting your life to use them as much as you possibly can. Re-crafting your work, your love, your play, your friendship, your parenting. Just one example. One person I worked with was a bagger at Genuardi's. Hated the job. She's working her way through college. Her highest strength was social intelligence, so she re-crafted bagging to make the encounter with her the social highlight of every customer's day. Now obviously she failed. But what she did was to take her highest strengths, and re-craft work to use them as much as possible. What you get out of that is not smiley-ness. You don't look like Debbie Reynolds. You don't giggle a lot. What you get is more absorption. So, that's the second path. The first path, positive emotion. The second path is eudaimonian flow. And the third path is meaning. This is the most venerable of the happinesses, traditionally. And meaning, in this view, consists of -- very parallel to eudaimonia -- it consists of knowing what your highest strengths are, and using them to belong to and in the service of something larger than you are. I mentioned that for all three kinds of lives, the pleasant life, the good life, the meaningful life, people are now hard at work on the question, are there things that lastingly change those lives? And the answer seems to be yes. And I'll just give you some samples of it. It's being done in a rigorous manner. It's being done in the same way that we test drugs to see what really works. So we do random assignment, placebo controlled, long-term studies of different interventions. And just to sample the kind of interventions that we find have an effect, when we teach people about the pleasant life, how to have more pleasure in your life, one of your assignments is to take the mindfulness skills, the savoring skills, and you're assigned to design a beautiful day. Next Saturday, set a day aside, design yourself a beautiful day, and use savoring and mindfulness to enhance those pleasures. And we can show in that way that the pleasant life is enhanced. Gratitude visit. I want you all to do this with me now, if you would. Close your eyes. I'd like you to remember someone who did something enormously important that changed your life in a good direction, and who you never properly thanked. The person has to be alive. OK. Now, OK, you can open your eyes. I hope all of you have such a person. Your assignment, when you're learning the gratitude visit, is to write a 300-word testimonial to that person, call them on the phone in Phoenix, ask if you can visit, don't tell them why, show up at their door, you read the testimonial -- everyone weeps when this happens. And what happens is when we test people one week later, a month later, three months later, they're both happier and less depressed. Another example is a strength date, in which we get couples to identify their highest strengths on the strengths test, and then to design an evening in which they both use their strengths, and we find this is a strengthener of relationships. And fun versus philanthropy. But it's so heartening to be in a group like this, in which so many of you have turned your lives to philanthropy. Well, my undergraduates and the people I work with haven't discovered this, so we actually have people do something altruistic and do something fun, and to contrast it. And what you find is when you do something fun, it has a square wave walk set. When you do something philanthropic to help another person, it lasts and it lasts. So those are examples of positive interventions. So, the next to last thing I want to say is we're interested in how much life satisfaction people have. And this is really what you're about. And that's our target variable. And we ask the question as a function of the three different lives, how much life satisfaction do you get? So we ask -- and we've done this in 15 replications involving thousands of people -- to what extent does the pursuit of pleasure, the pursuit of positive emotion, the pleasant life, the pursuit of engagement, time stopping for you, and the pursuit of meaning contribute to life satisfaction? And our results surprised us, but they were backward of what we thought. It turns out the pursuit of pleasure has almost no contribution to life satisfaction. The pursuit of meaning is the strongest. The pursuit of engagement is also very strong. Where pleasure matters is if you have both engagement and you have meaning, then pleasure's the whipped cream and the cherry. Which is to say, the full life -- the sum is greater than the parts, if you've got all three. Conversely, if you have none of the three, the empty life, the sum is less than the parts. And what we're asking now is does the very same relationship, physical health, morbidity, how long you live and productivity, follow the same relationship? That is, in a corporation, is productivity a function of positive emotion, engagement and meaning? Is health a function of positive engagement, of pleasure, and of meaning in life? And there is reason to think the answer to both of those may well be yes. So, Chris said that the last speaker had a chance to try to integrate what he heard, and so this was amazing for me. I've never been in a gathering like this. I've never seen speakers stretch beyond themselves so much, which was one of the remarkable things. But I found that the problems of psychology seemed to be parallel to the problems of technology, entertainment and design in the following way. We all know that technology, entertainment and design have been and can be used for destructive purposes. We also know that technology, entertainment and design can be used to relieve misery. And by the way, the distinction between relieving misery and building happiness is extremely important. I thought, when I first became a therapist 30 years ago, that if I was good enough to make someone not depressed, not anxious, not angry, that I'd make them happy. And I never found that. I found the best you could ever do was to get to zero. But they were empty. And it turns out the skills of happiness, the skills of the pleasant life, the skills of engagement, the skills of meaning, are different from the skills of relieving misery. And so, the parallel thing holds with technology, entertainment and design, I believe. That is, it is possible for these three drivers of our world to increase happiness, to increase positive emotion, and that's typically how they've been used. But once you fractionate happiness the way I do -- not just positive emotion, that's not nearly enough -- there's flow in life, and there's meaning in life. As Laura Lee told us, design, and, I believe, entertainment and technology, can be used to increase meaning engagement in life as well. So in conclusion, the eleventh reason for optimism, in addition to the space elevator, is that I think with technology, entertainment and design, we can actually increase the amount of tonnage of human happiness on the planet. And if technology can, in the next decade or two, increase the pleasant life, the good life and the meaningful life, it will be good enough. If entertainment can be diverted to also increase positive emotion, meaning, eudaimonia, it will be good enough. And if design can increase positive emotion, eudaimonia, and flow and meaning, what we're all doing together will become good enough. Thank you. (Applause)

Sadly, in the next 18 minutes when I do our chat, four Americans that are alive will be dead from the food that they eat. My name's Jamie Oliver. I'm 34 years old. I'm from Essex in England and for the last seven years I've worked fairly tirelessly to save lives in my own way. I'm not a doctor; I'm a chef, I don't have expensive equipment or medicine. I use information, education. I profoundly believe that the power of food has a primal place in our homes that binds us to the best bits of life. We have an awful, awful reality right now. America, you're at the top of your game. This is one of the most unhealthy countries in the world. Can I please just see a raise of hands for how many of you have children in this room today? Please put your hands up. Aunties, uncles, you can continue to put your hands up, aunties and uncles as well. Most of you. OK. We, the adults of the last four generations, have blessed our children with the destiny of a shorter lifespan than their own parents. Your child will live a life ten years younger than you because of the landscape of food that we've built around them. Two-thirds of this room, today, in America, are statistically overweight or obese. You lot, you're all right, but we'll get you eventually, don't worry. (Laughter) Right? The statistics of bad health are clear, very clear. We spend our lives being paranoid about death, murder, homicide, you name it; it's on the front page of every paper, CNN. Look at homicide at the bottom, for God's sake. Right? (Laughter) (Applause) Every single one of those in the red is a diet-related disease. Any doctor, any specialist will tell you that. Fact: Diet-related disease is the biggest killer in the United States, right now, here today. This is a global problem. It's a catastrophe. It's sweeping the world. England is right behind you, as usual. (Laughter) I know they were close, but not that close. We need a revolution. Mexico, Australia, Germany, India, China, all have massive problems of obesity and bad health. Think about smoking. It costs way less than obesity now. Obesity costs you Americans 10 percent of your healthcare bills, 150 billion dollars a year. In 10 years, it's set to double: 300 billion dollars a year. And let's be honest, guys, you ain't got that cash. (Laughter) I came here to start a food revolution that I so profoundly believe in. We need it. The time is now. We're in a tipping-point moment. I've been doing this for seven years. I've been trying in America for seven years. Now is the time when it's ripe -- ripe for the picking. I went to the eye of the storm. I went to West Virginia, the most unhealthy state in America. Or it was last year. We've got a new one this year, but we'll work on that next season. (Laughter) Huntington, West Virginia. Beautiful town. I wanted to put heart and soul and people, your public, around the statistics that we've become so used to. I want to introduce you to some of the people that I care about: your public, your children. I want to show a picture of my friend Brittany. She's 16 years old. She's got six years to live because of the food that she's eaten. She's the third generation of Americans that hasn't grown up within a food environment where they've been taught to cook at home or in school, or her mom, or her mom's mom. She has six years to live. She's eating her liver to death. Stacy, the Edwards family. This is a normal family, guys. Stacy does her best, but she's third-generation as well; she was never taught to cook at home or in school. The family's obese. Justin here, 12 years old, he's 350 pounds. He gets bullied, for God's sake. The daughter there, Katie, she's four years old. She's obese before she even gets to primary school. Marissa, she's all right, she's one of your lot. But you know what? Her father, who was obese, died in her arms, And then the second most important man in her life, her uncle, died of obesity, and now her step-dad is obese. You see, the thing is obesity and diet-related disease doesn't just hurt the people that have it; it's all of their friends, families, brothers, sisters. Pastor Steve: an inspirational man, one of my early allies in Huntington, West Virginia. He's at the sharp knife-edge of this problem. He has to bury the people, OK? And he's fed up with it. He's fed up with burying his friends, his family, his community. Come winter, three times as many people die. He's sick of it. This is preventable disease. Waste of life. By the way, this is what they get buried in. We're not geared up to do this. Can't even get them out the door -- and I'm being serious -- can't even get them there. Forklift. OK, I see it as a triangle, OK? This is our landscape of food. I need you to understand it. You've probably heard all this before, but let's just go back over it. Over the last 30 years, what's happened that's ripped the heart out of this country? Let's be frank and honest: Well, modern-day life. Let's start with the Main Street. Fast food has taken over the whole country; we know that. The big brands are some of the most important powers, powerful powers, in this country. Supermarkets as well. Big companies. Big companies. Thirty years ago, most of the food was largely local and largely fresh. Now it's largely processed and full of all sorts of additives, extra ingredients, and you know the rest of the story. Portion size is obviously a massive, massive problem. Labeling is a massive problem. The labeling in this country is a disgrace. They want to be self -- they want to self-police themselves. The industry wants to self-police themselves. What, in this kind of climate? They don't deserve it. How can you say something is low-fat when it's full of so much sugar? Home. The biggest problem with the home is that used to be the heart of passing on food, food culture, what made our society. That ain't happening anymore. And you know, as we go to work and as life changes, and as life always evolves, we kind of have to look at it holistically -- step back for a moment, and re-address the balance. It ain't happening, hasn't happened for 30 years, OK? I want to show you a situation that is very normal right now; the Edwards family. (Video) Jamie Oliver: Let's have a talk. This stuff goes through you and your family's body every week. And I need you to know that this is going to kill your children early. How are you feeling? Stacy: Just feeling really sad and depressed right now. But, you know, I want my kids to succeed in life and this isn't going to get them there. But I'm killing them. JO: Yes you are. You are. But we can stop that. Normal. Let's get on schools, something that I'm fairly much a specialist in. OK, school. What is school? Who invented it? What's the purpose of school? School was always invented to arm us with the tools to make us creative, do wonderful things, make us earn a living, etc., etc., etc. You know, it's been kind of in this sort of tight box for a long, long time. OK? But we haven't really evolved it to deal with the health catastrophes of America, OK? School food is something that most kids -- 31 million a day, actually -- have twice a day, more than often, breakfast and lunch, 180 days of the year. So you could say that school food is quite important, really, judging the circumstances. (Laughter) Before I crack into my rant, which I'm sure you're waiting for ... (Laughter) I need to say one thing, and it's so important in hopefully the magic that happens and unfolds in the next three months. The lunch ladies, the lunch cooks of America -- I offer myself as their ambassador. I'm not slagging them off. They're doing the best they can do. They're doing their best. But they're doing what they're told, and what they're being told to do is wrong. The system is highly run by accountants; there's not enough, or any, food-knowledgeable people in the business. There's a problem: If you're not a food expert, and you've got tight budgets and it's getting tighter, then you can't be creative, you can't duck and dive and write different things around things. If you're an accountant, and a box-ticker, the only thing you can do in these circumstances is buy cheaper shit. Now, the reality is, the food that your kids get every day is fast food, it's highly processed, there's not enough fresh food in there at all. You know, the amount of additives, E numbers, ingredients you wouldn't believe -- there's not enough veggies at all. French fries are considered a vegetable. Pizza for breakfast. They don't even get given crockery. Knives and forks? No, they're too dangerous. They have scissors in the classroom, but knives and forks? No. And the way I look at it is: If you don't have knives and forks in your school, you're purely endorsing, from a state level, fast food, because it's handheld. And yes, by the way, it is fast food: It's sloppy joes, it's burgers, it's wieners, it's pizzas, it's all of that stuff. Ten percent of what we spend on healthcare, as I said earlier, is on obesity, and it's going to double. We're not teaching our kids. There's no statutory right to teach kids about food, elementary or secondary school. OK? We don't teach kids about food. Right? And this is a little clip from an elementary school, which is very common in England. Video: Who knows what this is? Child: Potatoes. Jamie Oliver: Potato? So, you think these are potatoes? Do you know what that is? Do you know what that is? Child: Broccoli? JO: What about this? Our good old friend. Do you know what this is, honey? Child: Celery. JO: No. What do you think this is? Child: Onion. JO: Onion? No. Jamie Oliver: Immediately you get a really clear sense of: Do the kids know anything about where food comes from? Video: JO: Who knows what that is? Child: Uh, pear? JO: What do you think this is? Child: I don't know. JO: If the kids don't know what stuff is, then they will never eat it. (Laughter) JO: Normal. England and America, England and America. Guess what fixed that. Guess what fixed that: Two one-hour sessions. We've got to start teaching our kids about food in schools, period. (Applause) I want to tell you about something, I want to tell you about something that kind of epitomizes the trouble that we're in, guys. OK? I want to talk about something so basic as milk. Every kid has the right to milk at school. Your kids will be having milk at school, breakfast and lunch. Right? They'll be having two bottles. OK? And most kids do. But milk ain't good enough anymore. Because someone at the milk board, right -- and don't get me wrong, I support milk -- but someone at the milk board probably paid a lot of money for some geezer to work out that if you put loads of flavorings and colorings and sugar in milk, right, more kids will drink it. Yeah. (Claps) And obviously now that's going to catch on. The apple board is going to work out that if they make toffee apples they'll eat more apples as well. Do you know what I mean? For me, there ain't no need to flavor the milk. Okay? There's sugar in everything. I know the ins and outs of those ingredients. It's in everything. Even the milk hasn't escaped the kind of modern-day problems. There's our milk. There's our carton. In that is nearly as much sugar as one of your favorite cans of fizzy pop, and they are having two a day. So, let me just show you. We've got one kid, here, having, you know, eight tablespoons of sugar a day. You know, there's your week. There's your month. And I've taken the liberty of putting in just the five years of elementary school sugar, just from milk. Now, I don't know about you guys, but judging the circumstances, right, any judge in the whole world, would look at the statistics and the evidence, and they would find any government of old guilty of child abuse. That's my belief. (Applause) Now, if I came up here, and I wish I could come up here today and hang a cure for AIDS or cancer, you'd be fighting and scrambling to get to me. This, all this bad news, is preventable. That's the good news. It's very, very preventable. So, let's just think about, we got a problem here, we need to reboot. Okay so, in my world, what do we need to do? Here is the thing, right, it cannot just come from one source. To reboot and make real tangible change, real change, so that I could look you in the white of the eyes and say, "In 10 years time, the history of your children's lives, happiness -- and let's not forget, you're clever if you eat well, you know you're going to live longer -- all of that stuff, it will look different. OK?" So, supermarkets. Where else do you shop so religiously? Week in, week out. How much money do you spend, in your life, in a supermarket? Love them. They just sell us what we want. All right. They owe us, to put a food ambassador in every major supermarket. They need to help us shop. They need to show us how to cook quick, tasty, seasonal meals for people that are busy. This is not expensive. It is done in some, and it needs to be done across the board in America soon, and quick. The big brands, you know, the food brands, need to put food education at the heart of their businesses. I know, easier said than done. It's the future. It's the only way. Fast food. With the fast-food industry you know, it's very competitive. I've had loads of secret papers and dealings with fast food restaurants. I know how they do it. I mean basically they've weaned us on to these hits of sugar, salt and fat, and x, y, and z, and everyone loves them. Right? So, these guys are going to be part of the solution. But we need to get the government to work with all of the fast food purveyors and the restaurant industry, and over a five, six, seven year period wean of us off the extreme amounts of fat, sugar, fat and all the other non-food ingredients. Now, also, back to the sort of big brands: Labeling, I said earlier, is an absolute farce and has got to be sorted. OK, school. Obviously in schools we owe it to them to make sure those 180 days of the year, from that little precious age of four, til 18, 20, 24, whatever, they need to be cooked proper, fresh food from local growers on site. OK? There needs to be a new standard of fresh, proper food for your children. Yeah? (Applause) Under the circumstances, it's profoundly important that every single American child leaves school knowing how to cook 10 recipes that will save their life. Life skills. (Applause) That means that they can be students, young parents, and be able to sort of duck and dive around the basics of cooking, no matter what recession hits them next time. If you can cook, recession money doesn't matter. If you can cook, time doesn't matter. The workplace, we haven't really talked about it. You know, it's now time for corporate responsibility to really look at what they feed or make available to their staff. The staff are the moms and dads of America's children. Marissa, her father died in her hand, I think she'd be quite happy if corporate America could start feeding their staff properly. Definitely they shouldn't be left out. Let's go back to the home. Now, look, if we do all this stuff, and we can, it's so achievable. You can care and be commercial. Absolutely. But the home needs to start passing on cooking again, for sure. For sure, pass it on as a philosophy. And for me it's quite romantic, but it's about if one person teaches three people how to cook something, and they teach three of their mates, that only has to repeat itself 25 times, and that's the whole population of America. Romantic, yes, but most importantly, it's about trying to get people to realize that every one of your individual efforts makes a difference. We've got to put back what's been lost. Huntington's Kitchen. Huntington, where I made this program, you know, we've got this prime-time program that hopefully will inspire people to really get on this change. I truly believe that change will happen. Huntington's Kitchen. I work with a community. I worked in the schools. I found local sustainable funding to get every single school in the area, from the junk, onto the fresh food: six-and-a-half grand per school. (Applause) That's all it takes, six-and-a-half grand per school. The Kitchen is 25 grand a month. Okay? This can do 5,000 people a year, which is 10 percent of their population, and it's people on people. You know, it's local cooks teaching local people. It's free cooking lessons, guys, free cooking lessons in the Main Street. This is real, tangible change, real, tangible change. Around America, if we just look back now, there is plenty of wonderful things going on. There is plenty of beautiful things going on. There are angels around America doing great things in schools -- farm-to-school set-ups, garden set-ups, education -- there are amazing people doing this already. The problem is they all want to roll out what they're doing to the next school, and the next, but there's no cash. We need to recognize the experts and the angels quickly, identify them, and allow them to easily find the resource to keep rolling out what they're already doing, and doing well. Businesses of America need to support Mrs. Obama to do the things that she wants to do. (Applause) And look, I know it's weird having an English person standing here before you talking about all this. All I can say is: I care. I'm a father, and I love this country, and I believe truly, actually, that if change can be made in this country, beautiful things will happen around the world. If America does it, I believe other people will follow. It's incredibly important. (Applause) When I was in Huntington, trying to get a few things to work when they weren't, I thought "If I had a magic wand, what would I do?" And I thought, "You know what? I'd just love to be put in front of some of the most amazing movers and shakers in America." And a month later, TED phoned me up and gave me this award. I'm here. So, my wish. Dyslexic, so I'm a bit slow. My wish is for you to help a strong, sustainable movement to educate every child about food, to inspire families to cook again, and to empower people everywhere to fight obesity. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause)

The first question is this. Our country has two exploration programs. One is NASA, with a mission to explore the great beyond, to explore the heavens, which we all want to go to if we're lucky. And you can see we have Sputnik, and we have Saturn, and we have other manifestations of space exploration. Well, there's also another program, in another agency within our government, in ocean exploration. It's in NOAA, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. And my question is this: "why are we ignoring the oceans?" Here's the reason, or not the reason, but here's why I ask that question. If you compare NASA's annual budget to explore the heavens, that one-year budget would fund NOAA's budget to explore the oceans for 1,600 years. Why? Why are we looking up? Is it because it's heaven? And hell is down here? Is it a cultural issue? Why are people afraid of the ocean? Or do they just assume the ocean is just a dark, gloomy place that has nothing to offer? I'm going to take you on a 16-minute trip on 72 percent of the planet, so buckle up. OK. And what we're going to do is we're going to immerse ourselves in my world. And what I'm going to try -- I hope I make the following points. I'm going to make it right now in case I forget. Everything I'm going to present to you was not in my textbooks when I went to school. And most of all, it was not even in my college textbooks. I'm a geophysicist, and all my Earth science books when I was a student -- I had to give the wrong answer to get an A. We used to ridicule continental drift. It was something we laughed at. We learned of Marshall Kay's geosynclinal cycle, which is a bunch of crap. In today's context, it was a bunch of crap, but it was the law of geology, vertical tectonics. All the things we're going to walk through in our explorations and discoveries of the oceans were mostly discoveries made by accident. Mostly discoveries made by accident. We were looking for something and found something else. And everything we're going to talk about represents a one tenth of one percent glimpse, because that's all we've seen. I have a characterization. This is a characterization of what it would look like if you could remove the water. It gives you the false impression it's a map. It is not a map. In fact, I have another version at my office and I ask people, "Why are there mountains here, on this area here, but there are none over here?" And they go, "Well, gee, I don't know," saying, "Is it a fracture zone? Is it a hot spot?" No, no, that's the only place a ship's been. Most of the southern hemisphere is unexplored. We had more exploration ships down there during Captain Cook's time than now. It's amazing. All right. So we're going to immerse ourselves in the 72 percent of the planet because, you know, it's really naive to think that the Easter Bunny put all the resources on the continents. (Laughter) You know, it's just ludicrous. We are always, constantly playing the zero sum game. You know, we're going to do this, we're going to take it away from something else. I believe in just enriching the economy. And we're leaving so much on the table, 72 percent of the planet. And as I will point out later in the presentation, 50 percent of the United States of America lies beneath the sea. 50 percent of our country that we own, have all legal jurisdiction, have all rights to do whatever we want, lies beneath the sea and we have better maps of Mars than that 50 percent. Why? OK. Now, I began my explorations the hard way. Back then -- actually my first expedition was when I was 17 years old. It was 49 years ago. Do the math, I'm 66. And I went out to sea on a Scripps ship and we almost got sunk by a giant rogue wave, and I was too young to be -- you know, I thought it was great! I was a body surfer and I thought, "Wow, that was an incredible wave!" And we almost sank the ship, but I became enraptured with mounting expeditions. And over the last 49 years, I've done about 120, 121 -- I keep doing them -- expeditions. But in the early days, the only way I could get to the bottom was to crawl into a submarine, a very small submarine, and go down to the bottom. I dove in a whole series of different deep diving submersibles. Alvin and Sea Cliff and Cyana, and all the major deep submersibles we have, which are about eight. In fact, on a good day, we might have four or five human beings at the average depth of the Earth -- maybe four or five human beings out of whatever billions we've got going. And so it's very difficult to get there, if you do it physically. But I was enraptured, and in my graduate years was the dawn of plate tectonics. And we realized that the greatest mountain range on Earth lies beneath the sea. The mid-ocean ridge runs around like the seam on a baseball. This is on a Mercator projection. But if you were to put it on an equal area projection, you'd see that the mid-ocean ridge covers 23 percent of the Earth's total surface area. Almost a quarter of our planet is a single mountain range and we didn't enter it until after Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin went to the moon. So we went to the moon, played golf up there, before we went to the largest feature on our own planet. And our interest in this mountain range, as Earth scientists in those days, was not only because of its tremendous size, dominating the planet, but the role it plays in the genesis of the Earth's outer skin. Because it's along the axis of the mid-ocean ridge where the great crustal plates are separating. And like a living organism, you tear it open, it bleeds its molten blood, rises up to heal that wound from the asthenosphere, hardens, forms new tissue and moves laterally. But no one had actually gone down into the actual site of the boundary of creation as we call it -- into the Rift Valley -- until a group of seven of us crawled in our little submarines in the summer of 1973, 1974 and were the first human beings to enter the Great Rift Valley. We went down into the Rift Valley. This is all accurate except for one thing -- it's pitch black. It's absolutely pitch black, because photons cannot reach the average depth of the ocean, which is 12,000 feet. In the Rift Valley, it's 9,000 feet. Most of our planet does not feel the warmth of the sun. Most of our planet is in eternal darkness. And for that reason, you do not have photosynthesis in the deep sea. And with the absence of photosynthesis you have no plant life, and as a result, you have very little animal life living in this underworld. Or so we thought. And so in our initial explorations, we were totally focused on exploring the boundary of creation, looking at the volcanic features running along that entire 42,000 miles. Running along this entire 42,000 miles are tens of thousands of active volcanoes. Tens of thousands of active volcanoes. There are more active volcanoes beneath the sea than on land by two orders of magnitude. So, it's a phenomenally active region, it's not just a dark, boring place. It's a very alive place. And it's then being ripped open. But we were dealing with a particular scientific issue back then. We couldn't understand why you had a mountain under tension. In plate tectonic theory, we knew that if you had plates collide, it made sense: they would crush into one another, you would thicken the crust, you'd uplift it. That's why you get, you know, you get seashells up on Mount Everest. It's not a flood, it was pushed up there. We understood mountains under compression, but we could not understand why we had a mountain under tension. It should not be. Until one of my colleagues said, "It looks to me like a thermal blister, and the mid-ocean ridge must be a cooling curve." We said, "Let's go find out." We punched a bunch of heat probes. Everything made sense, except, at the axis, there was missing heat. It was missing heat. It was hot. It wasn't hot enough. So, we came up with multiple hypotheses: there's little green people down there taking it; there's all sorts of things going on. But the only logical [explanation] was that there were hot springs. So, there must be underwater hot springs. We mounted an expedition to look for the missing heat. And so we went along this mountain range, in an area along Galapagos Rift, and did we find the missing heat. It was amazing. These giant chimneys, huge giant chimneys. We went up to them with our submersible. We wanted to get a temperature probe, we stuck it in there, looked at it -- it pegged off scale. The pilot made this great observation: "That's hot." (Laughter) And then we realized our probe was made out of the same stuff -- it could have melted. But it turns out the exiting temperature was 650 degrees F, hot enough to melt lead. This is what a real one looks like, on the Juan de Fuca Ridge. What you're looking at is an incredible pipe organ of chemicals coming out of the ocean. Everything you see in this picture is commercial grade: copper, lead, silver, zinc and gold. So the Easter Bunny has put things in the ocean floor, and you have massive heavy metal deposits that we're making in this mountain range. We're making huge discoveries of large commercial-grade ore along this mountain range, but it was dwarfed by what we discovered. We discovered a profusion of life, in a world that it should not exist [in]. Giant tube worms, 10 feet tall. I remember having to use vodka -- my own vodka -- to pickle it because we don't carry formaldehyde. We went and found these incredible clam beds sitting on the barren rock. Large clams, and when we opened them, they didn't look like a clam. And when we cut them open, they didn't have the anatomy of a clam. No mouth, no gut, no digestive system. Their bodies had been totally taken over by another organism, a bacterium, that had figured out how to replicate photosynthesis in the dark, through a process we now call chemosynthesis. None of it in our textbooks. None of this in our textbooks. We did not know about this life system. We were not predicting it. We stumbled on it, looking for some missing heat. So, we wanted to accelerate this process. We wanted to get away from this silly trip, up and down on a submarine: average depth of the ocean, 12,000 feet; two and half hours to get to work in the morning; two and half hours to get to home. Five hour commute to work. Three hours of bottom time, average distance traveled -- one mile. (Laughter) On a 42,000 mile mountain range. Great job security, but not the way to go. So, I began designing a new technology of telepresence, using robotic systems to replicate myself, so I wouldn't have to cycle my vehicle system. We began to introduce that in our explorations, and we continued to make phenomenal discoveries with our new robotic technologies. Again, looking for something else, moving from one part of the mid-ocean ridge to another. The scientists were off watch and they came across incredible life forms. They came across new creatures they had not seen before. But more importantly, they discovered edifices down there that they did not understand. That did not make sense. They were not above a magma chamber. They shouldn't be there. And we called it Lost City. And Lost City was characterized by these incredible limestone formations and upside down pools. Look at that. How do you do that? That's water upside down. We went in underneath and tapped it, and we found that it had the pH of Drano. The pH of 11, and yet it had chemosynthetic bacteria living in it and at this extreme environment. And the hydrothermal vents were in an acidic environment. All the way at the other end, in an alkaline environment, at a pH of 11, life existed. So life was much more creative than we had ever thought. Again, discovered by accident. Just two years ago working off Santorini, where people are sunning themselves on the beach, unbeknownst to them in the caldera nearby, we found phenomenal hydrothermal vent systems and more life systems. This was two miles from where people go to sunbathe, and they were oblivious to the existence of this system. Again, you know, we stop at the water's edge. Recently, diving off -- in the Gulf of Mexico, finding pools of water, this time not upside down, right side up. Bingo. You'd think you're in air, until a fish swims by. You're looking at brine pools formed by salt diapirs. Near that was methane. I've never seen volcanoes of methane. Instead of belching out lava, they were belching out big, big bubbles of methane. And they were creating these volcanoes, and there were flows, not of lava, but of the mud coming out of the Earth but driven by -- I've never seen this before. Moving on, there's more than just natural history beneath the sea -- human history. Our discoveries of the Titanic. The realization that the deep sea is the largest museum on Earth. It contains more history than all of the museums on land combined. And yet we're only now penetrating it. Finding the state of preservation. We found the Bismarck in 16,000 feet. We then found the Yorktown. People always ask, "Did you find the right ship?" It said Yorktown on the stern. (Laughter) More recently, finding ancient history. How many ancient mariners have had a bad day? The number's a million. We've been discovering these along ancient trade routes, where they're not supposed to be. This shipwreck sank 100 years before the birth of Christ. This one sank carrying a prefabricated, Home Depot Roman temple. And then here's one that sank at the time of Homer, at 750 B.C. More recently, into the Black Sea, where we're exploring. Because there's no oxygen there, it's the largest reservoir of hydrogen sulfide on Earth. Shipwrecks are perfectly preserved. All their organics are perfectly preserved. We begin to excavate them. We expect to start hauling out the bodies in perfect condition with their DNA. Look at the state of preservation -- still the ad mark of a carpenter. Look at the state of those artifacts. You still see the beeswax dripping. When they dropped, they sealed it. This ship sank 1,500 years ago. Fortunately, we've been able to convince Congress. We begin to go on the Hill and lobby. And we stole recently a ship from the United States Navy. The Okeanos Explorer on its mission. Its mission is as good as you could get. Its mission is to go where no one has gone before on planet Earth. And I was looking at it yesterday, it's up in Seattle. OK. (Applause) It comes online this summer, and it begins its journey of exploration. But we have no idea what we're going find when we go out there with our technology. But certainly, it's going to be going to the unknown America. This is that part of the United States that lies beneath the sea. We own all of that blue and yet, like I say, particularly the western territorial trust, we don't have maps of them. We don't have maps of them. We have maps of Venus, but not of the western territorial trust. The way we're going to run this -- we have no idea what we're going to discover. We have no idea what we're going to discover. We're going to discover an ancient shipwreck, a Phoenician off Brazil, or a new rock formation, a new life. So, we're going to run it like an emergency hospital. We're going to connect our command center, via a high-bandwidth satellite link to a building we're building at the University of Rhode Island, called the Interspace Center. And within that, we're going to run it just like you run a nuclear submarine, blue-gold team, switching them off and on, running 24 hours a day. A discovery is made, that discovery is instantly seen in the command center a second later. But then it's connected through Internet too -- the new Internet highway that makes Internet one look like a dirt road on the information highway -- with 10 gigabits of bandwidth. We'll go into areas we have no knowledge of. It's a big blank sheet on our planet. We'll map it within hours, have the maps disseminated out to the major universities. It turns out that 90 percent of all the oceanographic intellect in this country are at 12 universities. They're all on I-2. We can then build a command center. This is a remote center at the University of Washington. She's talking to the pilot. She's 5,000 miles away, but she's assumed command. But the beauty of this, too, is we can then disseminate it to children. We can disseminate. They can follow this expedition. I've started a program -- where are you Jim? Jim Young who helped me start a program called the Jason Project. More recently, we've started a program with the Boys and Girls Clubs of America, so that we can use exploration, and the excitement of live exploration, to motivate them and excite them and then give them what they're already ready for. I would not let an adult drive my robot. You don't have enough gaming experience. But I will let a kid with no license take over control of my vehicle system. (Applause) Because we want to create -- we want to create the classroom of tomorrow. We have stiff competition and we need to motivate and it's all being done. You win or lose an engineer or a scientist by eighth grade. The game is not over -- it's over by the eighth grade, it's not beginning. We need to be not only proud of our universities. We need to be proud of our middle schools. And when we have the best middle schools in the world, we'll have the best kids pumped out of that system, let me tell you. Because this is what we want. This is what we want. This is a young lady, not watching a football game, not watching a basketball game. Watching exploration live from thousands of miles away, and it's just dawning on her what she's seeing. And when you get a jaw drop, you can inform. You can put so much information into that mind, it's in full [receiving] mode. (Applause) This, I hope, will be a future engineer or a future scientist in the battle for truth. And my final question, my final question -- why are we not looking at moving out onto the sea? Why do we have programs to build habitation on Mars, and we have programs to look at colonizing the moon, but we do not have a program looking at how we colonize our own planet? And the technology is at hand. Thank you very much. (Applause)

When my brother called me in December of 1998, he said, "The news does not look good." This is him on the screen. He'd just been diagnosed with ALS, which is a disease that the average lifespan is three years. It paralyzes you. It starts by killing the motor neurons in your spinal cord. And you go from being a healthy, robust 29-year-old male to someone that cannot breathe, cannot move, cannot speak. This has actually been, to me, a gift, because we began a journey to learn a new way of thinking about life. And even though Steven passed away three years ago we had an amazing journey as a family. We did not even -- I think adversity is not even the right word. We looked at this and we said, "We're going to do something with this in an incredibly positive way." And I want to talk today about one of the things that we decided to do, which was to think about a new way of approaching healthcare. Because, as we all know here today, it doesn't work very well. I want to talk about it in the context of a story. This is the story of my brother. But it's just a story. And I want to go beyond the story, and go to something more. "Given my status, what is the best outcome I can hope to achieve, and how do I get there?" is what we are here to do in medicine, is what everyone should do. And those questions all have variables to them. All of our statuses are different. All of our hopes and dreams, what we want to accomplish, is different, and our paths will be different, they are all stories. But it's a story until we convert it to data and so what we do, this concept we had, was to take Steven's status, "What is my status?" and go from this concept of walking, breathing, and then his hands, speak, and ultimately happiness and function. So, the first set of pathologies, they end up in the stick man on his icon, but the rest of them are really what's important here. Because Steven, despite the fact that he was paralyzed, as he was in that pool, he could not walk, he could not use his arms -- that's why he had the little floaty things on them, did you see those? -- he was happy. We were at the beach, he was raising his son, and he was productive. And we took this, and we converted it into data. But it's not a data point at that one moment in time. It is a data point of Steven in a context. Here he is in the pool. But here he is healthy, as a builder: taller, stronger, got all the women, amazing guy. Here he is walking down the aisle, but he can barely walk now, so it's impaired. And he could still hold his wife's hand, but he couldn't do buttons on his clothes, can't feed himself. And here he is, paralyzed completely, unable to breathe and move, over this time journey. These stories of his life, converted to data. He renovated my carriage house when he was completely paralyzed, and unable to speak, and unable to breathe, and he won an award for a historic restoration. So, here's Steven alone, sharing this story in the world. And this is the insight, the thing that we are excited about, because we have gone away from the community that we are, the fact that we really do love each other and want to care for each other. We need to give to others to be successful. So, Steven is sharing this story, but he is not alone. There are so many other people sharing their stories. Not stories in words, but stories in data and words. And we convert that information into this structure, this understanding, this ability to convert those stories into something that is computable, to which we can begin to change the way medicine is done and delivered. We did this for ALS. We can do this for depression, Parkinson's disease, HIV. These are not simple, they are not internet scalable; they require thought and processes to find the meaningful information about the disease. So, this is what it looks like when you go to the website. And I'm going to show you what Patients Like Me, the company that myself, my youngest brother and a good friend from MIT started. Here are the actual patients, there are 45,000 of them now, sharing their stories as data. Here is an M.S. patient. His name is Mike, and he is uniformly impaired on cognition, vision, walking, sensation. Those are things that are different for each M.S. patient. Each of them can have a different characteristic. You can see fibromyalgia, HIV, ALS, depression. Look at this HIV patient down here, Zinny. It's two years of this disease. All of the symptoms are not there. But he is working to keep his CD4 count high and his viral level low so he can make his life better. But you can aggregate this and you can discover things about treatments. Look at this, 2,000 people almost, on Copaxone. These are patients currently on drugs, sharing data. I love some of these, physical exercise, prayer. Anyone want to run a comparative effectiveness study on prayer against something? Let's look at prayer. What I love about this, just sort of interesting design problems. These are why people pray. Here is the schedule of how frequently they -- it's a dose. So, anyone want to see the 32 patients that pray for 60 minutes a day, and see if they're doing better, they probably are. Here they are. It's an open network, everybody is sharing. We can see it all. Or, I want to look at anxiety, because people are praying for anxiety. And here is data on 15,000 people's current anxiety, right now. How they treat it, the drugs, the components of it, their side effects, all of it in a rich environment, and you can drill down and see the individuals. This amazing data allows us to drill down and see what this drug is for -- 1,500 people on this drug, I think. Yes. I want to talk to the 58 patients down here who are taking four milligrams a day. And I want to talk to the ones of those that have been doing it for more than two years. So, you can see the duration. All open, all available. I'm going to log in. And this is my brother's profile. And this is a new version of our platform we're launching right now. This is the second generation. It's going to be in Flash. And you can see here, as this animates over, Steven's actual data against the background of all other patients, against this information. The blue band is the 50th percentile. Steven is the 75th percentile, that he has non-genetic ALS. You scroll down in this profile and you can see all of his prescription drugs, but more than that, in the new version, I can look at this interactively. Wait, poor spinal capacity. Doesn't this remind you of a great stock program? Wouldn't it be great if the technology we used to take care of ourselves was as good as the technology we use to make money? Detrol. In the side effects for his drug, integrated into that, the stem cell transplant that he had, the first in the world, shared openly for anyone who wants to see it. I love here -- the cyberkinetics implant, which was, again, the only patient's data that was online and available. You can adjust the time scale. You can adjust the symptoms. You can look at the interaction between how I treat my ALS. So, you click down on the ALS tab there. I'm taking three drugs to manage it. Some of them are experimental. I can look at my constipation, how to manage it. I can see magnesium citrate, and the side effects from that drug all integrated in the time in which they're meaningful. But I want more. I don't want to just look at this cool device, I want to take this data and make something even better. I want my brother's center of the universe and his symptoms and his drugs, and all of the things that interact among those, the side effects, to be in this beautiful data galaxy that we can look at in any way we want to understand it, so that we can take this information and go beyond just this simple model of what a record is. I don't even know what a medical record is. I want to solve a problem. I want an application. So, can I take this data -- rearrange yourself, put the symptoms in the left, the drugs across the top, tell me everything we know about Steven and everyone else, and what interacts. Years after he's had these drugs, I learned that everything he did to manage his excess saliva, including some positive side effects that came from other drugs, were making his constipation worse. And if anyone's ever had severe constipation, and you don't understand how much of an impact that has on your life -- yes, that was a pun. You're trying to manage these, and this grid is available here, and we want to understand it. No one's ever had this kind of information. So, patients have this. We're for patients. This is all about patient health care, there was no doctors on our network. This is about the patients. So, how can we take this and bring them a tool that they can go back and they can engage the medical system? And we worked hard, and we thought about it and we said, "What's something we can use all the time, that we can use in the medical care system, that everyone will understand?" So, the patients print it out, because hospitals usually block us because they believe we are a social network. It's actually the most used feature on the website. Doctors actually love this sheet, and they're actually really engaged. So, we went from this story of Steven and his history to data, and then back to paper, where we went back and engaged the medical care system. And here's another paper. This is a journal, PNAS -- I think it's the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science of the United States of America. You've seen multiple of these today, when everyone's bragging about the amazing things they've done. This is a report about a drug called lithium. Lithium, that is a drug used to treat bipolar disorder, that a group in Italy found slowed ALS down in 16 patients, and published it. Now, we'll skip the critiques of the paper. But the short story is: If you're a patient, you want to be on the blue line. You don't want to be on the red line, you want to be on the blue line. Because the blue line is a better line. The red line is way downhill, the blue line is a good line. So, you know we said -- we looked at this, and what I love also is that people always accuse these Internet sites of promoting bad medicine and having people do things irresponsibly. So, this is what happened when PNAS published this. Ten percent of the people in our system took lithium. Ten percent of the patients started taking lithium based on 16 patients of data in a bad publication. And they call the Internet irresponsible. Here's the implication of what happens. There's this one guy, named Humberto, from Brazil, who unfortunately passed away nine months ago, who said, "Hey, listen. Can you help us answer this question? Because I don't want to wait for the next trial, it's going to be years. I want to know now. Can you help us?" So, we launched some tools, we let them track their blood levels. We let them share the data and exchange it. You know, a data network. And they said, you know, "Jamie, PLM, can you guys tell us whether this works or not?" And we went around and we talked to people, and they said, "You can't run a clinical trial like this. You know? You don't have the blinding, you don't have data, it doesn't follow the scientific method. It's never going to work. You can't do it." So, I said, "Okay well we can't do that. Then we can do something harder." (Laughter) I can't say whether lithium works in all ALS patients, but I can say whether it works in Humberto. I bought a Mac about two years ago, I converted over, and I was so excited about this new feature of the time machine that came in Leopard. And we said -- because it's really cool, you can go back and you can look at the entire history of your computer, and find everything you've lost, and I loved it. And I said, "What if we built a time machine for patients, except instead of going backwards, we go forwards. Can we find out what's going to happen to you, so that you can maybe change it?" So, we did. We took all the patients like Humberto, That's the Apple background, we stole that because we didn't have time to build our own. This is a real app by the way. This is not just graphics. And you take those data, and we find the patients like him, and we bring their data together. And we bring their histories into it. And then we say, "Well how do we line them all up?" So, we line them all up so they go together around the meaningful points, integrated across everything we know about the patient. Full information, the entire course of their disease. And that's what is going to happen to Humberto, unless he does something. And he took lithium, and he went down the line. And it works almost every time. Now, the ones that it doesn't work are interesting. But almost all the time it works. It's actually scary. It's beautiful. So, we couldn't run a clinical trial, we couldn't figure it out. But we could see whether it was going to work for Humberto. And yeah, all the clinicians in the audience will talk about power and all the standard deviation. We'll do that later. But here is the answer of the mean of the patients that actually decided to take lithium. These are all the patients that started lithium. It's the Intent to Treat Curve. You can see here, the blue dots on the top, the light ones, those are the people in the study in PNAS that you wanted to be on. And the red ones are the ones, the pink ones on the bottom are the ones you didn't want to be. And the ones in the middle are all of our patients from the start of lithium at time zero, going forward, and then going backward. So, you can see we matched them perfectly, perfectly. Terrifyingly accurate matching. And going forward, you actually don't want to be a lithium patient this time. You're actually doing slightly worse -- not significantly, but slightly worse. You don't want to be a lithium patient this time. But you know, a lot of people dropped out, the trial, there is too much drop out. Can we do the even harder thing? Can we go to the patients that actually decided to stay on lithium, because they were so convinced they were getting better? We asked our control algorithm, are those 69 patients -- by the way, you'll notice that's four times the number of patients in the clinical trial -- can we look at those patients and say, "Can we match them with our time machine to the other patients that are just like them, and what happens?" Even the ones that believed they were getting better matched the controls exactly. Exactly. Those little lines? That's the power. So, we -- I can't tell you lithium doesn't work. I can't tell you that if you did it at a higher dose or if you run the study proper -- I can tell you that for those 69 people that took lithium, they didn't do any better than the people that were just like them, just like me, and that we had the power to detect that at about a quarter of the strengths reported in the initial study. We did that one year ahead of the time when the first clinical trial funded by the NIH for millions of dollars failed for futility last week, and announced it. So, remember I told you about my brother's stem cell transplant. I never really knew whether it worked. And I put 100 million cells in his cisterna magna, in his lumbar cord, and filled out the IRBs and did all this work, and I never really knew. How did I not know? I mean, I didn't know what was going to happen to him. I actually asked Tim, who is the quant in our group -- we actually searched for about a year to find someone who could do the sort of math and statistics and modeling in healthcare, couldn't find anybody. So, we went to the finance industry. And there are these guys who used to model the future of interest rates, and all that kind of stuff. And some of them were available. So, we hired one. (Laughter) We hired them, set them up, assisting at lab. I I.M. him things. That's the way I communicate with him, is like a little guy in a box. I I.M.ed Tim. I said, "Tim can you tell me whether my brother's stem cell transplant worked or not?" And he sent me this two days ago. It was that little outliers there. You see that guy that lived a long time? We have to go talk to him. Because I'd like to know what happened. Because something went different. But my brother didn't. My brother went straight down the line. It only works about 12 months. It's the first version of the time machine. First time we ever tried it. We'll try to get it better later but 12 months so far. And, you know, I look at this, and I get really emotional. You look at the patients, you can drill in all the controls, you can look at them, you can ask them. And I found a woman that had -- we found her, she was odd because she had data after she died. And her husband had come in and entered her last functional scores, because he knew how much she cared. And I am thankful. I can't believe that these people, years after my brother had died, helped me answer the question about whether an operation I did, and spent millions of dollars on years ago, worked or not. I wished it had been there when I'd done it the first time, and I'm really excited that it's here now, because the lab that I founded has some data on a drug that might work, and I'd like to show it. I'd like to show it in real time, now, and I want to do that for all of the diseases that we can do that for. I've got to thank the 45,000 people that are doing this social experiment with us. There is an amazing journey we are going on to become human again, to be part of community again, to share of ourselves, to be vulnerable, and it's very exciting. So, thank you. (Applause)

In the spirit of Jacques Cousteau, who said, "People protect what they love," I want to share with you today what I love most in the ocean, and that's the incredible number and variety of animals in it that make light. My addiction began with this strange looking diving suit called Wasp; that's not an acronym -- just somebody thought it looked like the insect. It was actually developed for use by the offshore oil industry for diving on oil rigs down to a depth of 2,000 feet. Right after I completed my Ph.D., I was lucky enough to be included with a group of scientists that was using it for the first time as a tool for ocean exploration. We trained in a tank in Port Hueneme, and then my first open ocean dive was in Santa Barbara Channel. It was an evening dive. I went down to a depth of 880 feet and turned out the lights. And the reason I turned out the lights is because I knew I would see this phenomenon of animals making light called bioluminescence. But I was totally unprepared for how much there was and how spectacular it was. I saw chains of jellyfish called siphonophores that were longer than this room, pumping out so much light that I could read the dials and gauges inside the suit without a flashlight; and puffs and billows of what looked like luminous blue smoke; and explosions of sparks that would swirl up out of the thrusters -- just like when you throw a log on a campfire and the embers swirl up off the campfire, but these were icy, blue embers. It was breathtaking. Now, usually if people are familiar with bioluminescence at all, it's these guys; it's fireflies. And there are a few other land-dwellers that can make light -- some insects, earthworms, fungi -- but in general, on land, it's really rare. In the ocean, it's the rule rather than the exception. If I go out in the open ocean environment, virtually anywhere in the world, and I drag a net from 3,000 feet to the surface, most of the animals -- in fact, in many places, 80 to 90 percent of the animals that I bring up in that net -- make light. This makes for some pretty spectacular light shows. Now I want to share with you a little video that I shot from a submersible. I first developed this technique working from a little single-person submersible called Deep Rover and then adapted it for use on the Johnson Sea-Link, which you see here. So, mounted in front of the observation sphere, there's a a three-foot diameter hoop with a screen stretched across it. And inside the sphere with me is an intensified camera that's about as sensitive as a fully dark-adapted human eye, albeit a little fuzzy. So you turn on the camera, turn out the lights. That sparkle you're seeing is not luminescence, that's just electronic noise on these super intensified cameras. You don't see luminescence until the submersible begins to move forward through the water, but as it does, animals bumping into the screen are stimulated to bioluminesce. Now, when I was first doing this, all I was trying to do was count the numbers of sources. I knew my forward speed, I knew the area, and so I could figure out how many hundreds of sources there were per cubic meter. But I started to realize that I could actually identify animals by the type of flashes they produced. And so, here, in the Gulf of Maine at 740 feet, I can name pretty much everything you're seeing there to the species level. Like those big explosions, sparks, are from a little comb jelly, and there's krill and other kinds of crustaceans, and jellyfish. There was another one of those comb jellies. And so I've worked with computer image analysis engineers to develop automatic recognition systems that can identify these animals and then extract the XYZ coordinate of the initial impact point. And we can then do the kinds of things that ecologists do on land, and do nearest neighbor distances. But you don't always have to go down to the depths of the ocean to see a light show like this. You can actually see it in surface waters. This is some shot, by Dr. Mike Latz at Scripps Institution, of a dolphin swimming through bioluminescent plankton. And this isn't someplace exotic like one of the bioluminescent bays in Puerto Rico, this was actually shot in San Diego Harbor. And sometimes you can see it even closer than that, because the heads on ships -- that's toilets, for any land lovers that are listening -- are flushed with unfiltered seawater that often has bioluminescent plankton in it. So, if you stagger into the head late at night and you're so toilet-hugging sick that you forget to turn on the light, you may think that you're having a religious experience. (Laughter) So, how does a living creature make light? Well, that was the question that 19th century French physiologist Raphael Dubois, asked about this bioluminescent clam. He ground it up and he managed to get out a couple of chemicals; one, the enzyme, he called luciferase; the substrate, he called luciferin after Lucifer the Lightbearer. That terminology has stuck, but it doesn't actually refer to specific chemicals because these chemicals come in a lot of different shapes and forms. In fact, most of the people studying bioluminescence today are focused on the chemistry, because these chemicals have proved so incredibly valuable for developing antibacterial agents, cancer fighting drugs, testing for the presence of life on Mars, detecting pollutants in our waters -- which is how we use it at ORCA. In 2008, the Nobel Prize in Chemistry was awarded for work done on a molecule called green fluorescent protein that was isolated from the bioluminescent chemistry of a jellyfish, and it's been equated to the invention of the microscope, in terms of the impact that it has had on cell biology and genetic engineering. Another thing all these molecules are telling us that, apparently, bioluminescence has evolved at least 40 times, maybe as many as 50 separate times in evolutionary history, which is a clear indication of how spectacularly important this trait is for survival. So, what is it about bioluminescence that's so important to so many animals? Well, for animals that are trying to avoid predators by staying in the darkness, light can still be very useful for the three basic things that animals have to do to survive: and that's find food, attract a mate and avoid being eaten. So, for example, this fish has a built-in headlight behind its eye that it can use for finding food or attracting a mate. And then when it's not using it, it actually can roll it down into its head just like the headlights on your Lamborghini. This fish actually has high beams. And this fish, which is one of my favorites, has three headlights on each side of its head. Now, this one is blue, and that's the color of most bioluminescence in the ocean because evolution has selected for the color that travels farthest through seawater in order to optimize communication. So, most animals make blue light, and most animals can only see blue light, but this fish is a really fascinating exception because it has two red light organs. And I have no idea why there's two, and that's something I want to solve some day -- but not only can it see blue light, but it can see red light. So it uses its red bioluminescence like a sniper's scope to be able to sneak up on animals that are blind to red light and be able to see them without being seen. It's also got a little chin barbel here with a blue luminescent lure on it that it can use to attract prey from a long way off. And a lot of animals will use their bioluminescence as a lure. This is another one of my favorite fish. This is a viperfish, and it's got a lure on the end of a long fishing rod that it arches in front of the toothy jaw that gives the viperfish its name. The teeth on this fish are so long that if they closed inside the mouth of the fish, it would actually impale its own brain. So instead, it slides in grooves on the outside of the head. This is a Christmas tree of a fish; everything on this fish lights up, it's not just that lure. It's got a built-in flashlight. It's got these jewel-like light organs on its belly that it uses for a type of camouflage that obliterates its shadow, so when it's swimming around and there's a predator looking up from below, it makes itself disappear. It's got light organs in the mouth, it's got light organs in every single scale, in the fins, in a mucus layer on the back and the belly, all used for different things -- some of which we know about, some of which we don't. And we know a little bit more about bioluminescence thanks to Pixar, and I'm very grateful to Pixar for sharing my favorite topic with so many people. I do wish, with their budget, that they might have spent just a tiny bit more money to pay a consulting fee to some poor, starving graduate student, who could have told them that those are the eyes of a fish that's been preserved in formalin. These are the eyes of a living anglerfish. So, she's got a lure that she sticks out in front of this living mousetrap of needle-sharp teeth in order to attract in some unsuspecting prey. And this one has a lure with all kinds of little interesting threads coming off it. Now we used to think that the different shape of the lure was to attract different types of prey, but then stomach content analyses on these fish done by scientists, or more likely their graduate students, have revealed that they all eat pretty much the same thing. So, now we believe that the different shape of the lure is how the male recognizes the female in the anglerfish world, because many of these males are what are known as dwarf males. This little guy has no visible means of self-support. He has no lure for attracting food and no teeth for eating it when it gets there. His only hope for existence on this planet is as a gigolo. (Laughter) He's got to find himself a babe and then he's got to latch on for life. So this little guy has found himself this babe, and you will note that he's had the good sense to attach himself in a way that he doesn't actually have to look at her. (Laughter) But he still knows a good thing when he sees it, and so he seals the relationship with an eternal kiss. His flesh fuses with her flesh, her bloodstream grows into his body, and he becomes nothing more than a little sperm sac. (Laughter) Well, this is a deep-sea version of Women's Lib. She always knows where he is, and she doesn't have to be monogamous, because some of these females come up with multiple males attached. So they can use it for finding food, for attracting mates. They use it a lot for defense, many different ways. A lot of them can release their luciferin or luferase in the water just the way a squid or an octopus will release an ink cloud. This shrimp is actually spewing light out of its mouth like a fire breathing dragon in order to blind or distract this viperfish so that the shrimp can swim away into the darkness. And there are a lot of different animals that can do this: There's jellyfish, there's squid, there's a whole lot of different crustaceans, there's even fish that can do this. This fish is called the shining tubeshoulder because it actually has a tube on its shoulder that can squirt out light. And I was luck enough to capture one of these when we were on a trawling expedition off the northwest coast of Africa for "Blue Planet," for the deep portion of "Blue Planet." And we were using a special trawling net that we were able to bring these animals up alive. So we captured one of these, and I brought it into the lab. So I'm holding it, and I'm about to touch that tube on its shoulder, and when I do, you'll see bioluminescence coming out. But to me, what's shocking is not just the amount of light, but the fact that it's not just luciferin and luciferase. For this fish, it's actually whole cells with nuclei and membranes. It's energetically very costly for this fish to do this, and we have no idea why it does it -- another one of these great mysteries that needs to be solved. Now, another form of defense is something called a burglar alarm -- same reason you have a burglar alarm on your car; the honking horn and flashing lights are meant to attract the attention of, hopefully, the police that will come and take the burglar away -- when an animal's caught in the clutches of a predator, its only hope for escape may be to attract the attention of something bigger and nastier that will attack their attacker, thereby affording them a chance for escape. This jellyfish, for example, has a spectacular bioluminescent display. This is us chasing it in the submersible. That's not luminescence, that's reflected light from the gonads. We capture it in a very special device on the front of the submersible that allows us to bring it up in really pristine condition, bring it into the lab on the ship. And then to generate the display you're about to see, all I did was touch it once per second on its nerve ring with a sharp pick that's sort of like the sharp tooth of a fish. And once this display gets going, I'm not touching it anymore. This is an unbelievable light show. It's this pinwheel of light, and I've done calculations that show that this could be seen from as much as 300 feet away by a predator. And I thought, "You know, that might actually make a pretty good lure." Because one of the things that's frustrated me as a deep-sea explorer is how many animals there probably are in the ocean that we know nothing about because of the way we explore the ocean. The primary way that we know about what lives in the ocean is we go out and drag nets behind ships. And I defy you to name any other branch of science that still depends on hundreds of year-old technology. The other primary way is we go down with submersibles and remote-operated vehicles. I've made hundreds of dives in submersibles. When I'm sitting in a submersible though, I know that I'm not unobtrusive at all -- I've got bright lights and noisy thrusters -- any animal with any sense is going to be long gone. So, I've wanted for a long time to figure out a different way to explore. And so, sometime ago, I got this idea for a camera system. It's not exactly rocket science. We call this thing Eye-in-the-Sea. And scientists have done this on land for years; we just use a color that the animals can't see and then a camera that can see that color. You can't use infrared in the sea. We use far-red light, but even that's a problem because it gets absorbed so quickly. Made an intensified camera, wanted to make this electronic jellyfish. Thing is, in science, you basically have to tell the funding agencies what you're going to discover before they'll give you the money. And I didn't know what I was going to discover, so I couldn't get the funding for this. So I kluged this together, I got the Harvey Mudd Engineering Clinic to actually do it as an undergraduate student project initially, and then I kluged funding from a whole bunch of different sources. Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute gave me time with their ROV so that I could test it and we could figure out, you know, for example, which colors of red light we had to use so that we could see the animals, but they couldn't see us -- get the electronic jellyfish working. And you can see just what a shoestring operation this really was, because we cast these 16 blue LEDs in epoxy and you can see in the epoxy mold that we used, the word Ziploc is still visible. Needless to say, when it's kluged together like this, there were a lot of trials and tribulations getting this working. But there came a moment when it all came together, and everything worked. And, remarkably, that moment got caught on film by photographer Mark Richards, who happened to be there at the precise moment that we discovered that it all came together. That's me on the left, my graduate student at the time, Erika Raymond, and Lee Fry, who was the engineer on the project. And we have this photograph posted in our lab in a place of honor with the caption: "Engineer satisfying two women at once." (Laughter) And we were very, very happy. So now we had a system that we could actually take to some place that was kind of like an oasis on the bottom of the ocean that might be patrolled by large predators. And so, the place that we took it to was this place called a Brine Pool, which is in the northern part of the Gulf of Mexico. It's a magical place. And I know this footage isn't going to look like anything to you -- we had a crummy camera at the time -- but I was ecstatic. We're at the edge of the Brine Pool, there's a fish that's swimming towards the camera. It's clearly undisturbed by us. And I had my window into the deep sea. I, for the first time, could see what animals were doing down there when we weren't down there disturbing them in some way. Four hours into the deployment, we had programmed the electronic jellyfish to come on for the first time. Eighty-six seconds after it went into its pinwheel display, we recorded this: This is a squid, over six feet long, that is so new to science, it cannot be placed in any known scientific family. I could not have asked for a better proof of concept. And based on this, I went back to the National Science Foundation and said, "This is what we will discover." And they gave me enough money to do it right, which has involved developing the world's first deep-sea webcam -- which has been installed in the Monterey Canyon for the past year -- and now, more recently, a modular form of this system, a much more mobile form that's a lot easier to launch and recover, that I hope can be used on Sylvia's "hope spots" to help explore and protect these areas, and, for me, learn more about the bioluminescence in these "hope spots." So one of these take-home messages here is, there is still a lot to explore in the oceans. And Sylvia has said that we are destroying the oceans before we even know what's in them, and she's right. So if you ever, ever get an opportunity to take a dive in a submersible, say yes -- a thousand times, yes -- and please turn out the lights. I promise, you'll love it. Thank you. (Applause)

If I should have a daughter, instead of "Mom," she's gonna call me "Point B," because that way she knows that no matter what happens, at least she can always find her way to me. And I'm going to paint solar systems on the backs of her hands so she has to learn the entire universe before she can say, "Oh, I know that like the back of my hand." And she's going to learn that this life will hit you hard in the face, wait for you to get back up just so it can kick you in the stomach. But getting the wind knocked out of you is the only way to remind your lungs how much they like the taste of air. There is hurt, here, that cannot be fixed by Band-Aids or poetry. So the first time she realizes that Wonder Woman isn't coming, I'll make sure she knows she doesn't have to wear the cape all by herself because no matter how wide you stretch your fingers, your hands will always be too small to catch all the pain you want to heal. Believe me, I've tried. "And, baby," I'll tell her, don't keep your nose up in the air like that. I know that trick; I've done it a million times. You're just smelling for smoke so you can follow the trail back to a burning house, so you can find the boy who lost everything in the fire to see if you can save him. Or else find the boy who lit the fire in the first place, to see if you can change him." But I know she will anyway, so instead I'll always keep an extra supply of chocolate and rain boots nearby, because there is no heartbreak that chocolate can't fix. Okay, there's a few heartbreaks that chocolate can't fix. But that's what the rain boots are for, because rain will wash away everything, if you let it. I want her to look at the world through the underside of a glass-bottom boat, to look through a microscope at the galaxies that exist on the pinpoint of a human mind, because that's the way my mom taught me. That there'll be days like this. ♫ There'll be days like this, my momma said. ♫ When you open your hands to catch and wind up with only blisters and bruises; when you step out of the phone booth and try to fly and the very people you want to save are the ones standing on your cape; when your boots will fill with rain, and you'll be up to your knees in disappointment. And those are the very days you have all the more reason to say thank you. Because there's nothing more beautiful than the way the ocean refuses to stop kissing the shoreline, no matter how many times it's sent away. You will put the wind in winsome, lose some. You will put the star in starting over, and over. And no matter how many land mines erupt in a minute, be sure your mind lands on the beauty of this funny place called life. And yes, on a scale from one to over-trusting, I am pretty damn naive. But I want her to know that this world is made out of sugar. It can crumble so easily, but don't be afraid to stick your tongue out and taste it. "Baby," I'll tell her, "remember, your momma is a worrier, and your poppa is a warrior, and you are the girl with small hands and big eyes who never stops asking for more." Remember that good things come in threes and so do bad things. And always apologize when you've done something wrong, but don't you ever apologize for the way your eyes refuse to stop shining. Your voice is small, but don't ever stop singing. And when they finally hand you heartache, when they slip war and hatred under your door and offer you handouts on street-corners of cynicism and defeat, you tell them that they really ought to meet your mother. Thank you. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) Thanks. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) All right, so I want you to take a moment, and I want you to think of three things that you know to be true. They can be about whatever you want -- technology, entertainment, design, your family, what you had for breakfast. The only rule is don't think too hard. Okay, ready? Go. Okay. So here are three things I know to be true. I know that Jean-Luc Godard was right when he said that, "a good story has a beginning, a middle and an end, although not necessarily in that order." I know that I'm incredibly nervous and excited to be up here, which is greatly inhibiting my ability to keep it cool. (Laughter) And I know that I have been waiting all week to tell this joke. (Laughter) Why was the scarecrow invited to TED? Because he was out standing in his field. (Laughter) I'm sorry. Okay, so these are three things I know to be true. But there are plenty of things I have trouble understanding. So I write poems to figure things out. Sometimes the only way I know how to work through something is by writing a poem. And sometimes I get to the end of the poem and look back and go, "Oh, that's what this is all about," and sometimes I get to the end of the poem and haven't solved anything, but at least I have a new poem out of it. Spoken word poetry is the art of performance poetry. I tell people it involves creating poetry that doesn't just want to sit on paper, that something about it demands it be heard out loud or witnessed in person. When I was a freshman in high school, I was a live wire of nervous hormones. And I was underdeveloped and over-excitable. And despite my fear of ever being looked at for too long, I was fascinated by the idea of spoken word poetry. I felt that my two secret loves, poetry and theatre, had come together, had a baby, a baby I needed to get to know. So I decided to give it a try. My first spoken word poem, packed with all the wisdom of a 14-year-old, was about the injustice of being seen as unfeminine. The poem was very indignant, and mainly exaggerated, but the only spoken word poetry that I had seen up until that point was mainly indignant, so I thought that that's what was expected of me. The first time that I performed, the audience of teenagers hooted and hollered their sympathy, and when I came off the stage I was shaking. I felt this tap on my shoulder, and I turned around to see this giant girl in a hoodie sweatshirt emerge from the crowd. She was maybe eight feet tall and looked like she could beat me up with one hand, but instead she just nodded at me and said, "Hey, I really felt that. Thanks." And lightning struck. I was hooked. I discovered this bar on Manhattan's Lower East Side that hosted a weekly poetry open mic, and my bewildered, but supportive, parents took me to soak in every ounce of spoken word that I could. I was the youngest by at least a decade, but somehow the poets at the Bowery Poetry Club didn't seem bothered by the 14-year-old wandering about -- if fact, they welcomed me. And it was here, listening to these poets share their stories, that I learned that spoken word poetry didn't have to be indignant, it could be fun or painful or serious or silly. The Bowery Poetry Club became my classroom and my home, and the poets who performed encouraged me to share my stories as well. Never mind the fact that I was 14 -- they told me, "Write about being 14." So I did and stood amazed every week when these brilliant, grown-up poets laughed with me and groaned their sympathy and clapped and told me, "Hey, I really felt that too." Now I can divide my spoken word journey into three steps. Step one was the moment I said, "I can. I can do this." And that was thanks to a girl in a hoodie. Step two was the moment I said, "I will. I will continue. I love spoken word. I will keep coming back week after week." And step three began when I realized that I didn't have to write poems that were indignant, if that's not what I was. There were things that were specific to me, and the more that I focused on those things, the weirder my poetry got, but the more that it felt like mine. It's not just the adage "write what you know." It's about gathering up all of the knowledge and experience you've collected up to now to help you dive into the things you don't know. I use poetry to help me work through what I don't understand, but I show up to each new poem with a backpack full of everywhere else that I've been. When I got to university, I met a fellow poet who shared my belief in the magic of spoken word poetry. And actually, Phil Kaye and I coincidentally also share the same last name. When I was in high school I had created Project V.O.I.C.E. as a way to encourage my friends to do spoken word with me. But Phil and I decided to reinvent Project V.O.I.C.E. -- this time changing the mission to using spoken word poetry as a way to entertain, educate and inspire. We stayed full-time students, but in between we traveled, performing and teaching nine-year-olds to MFA candidates, from California to Indiana to India to a public high school just up the street from campus. And we saw over and over the way that spoken word poetry cracks open locks. But it turns out sometimes, poetry can be really scary. Turns out sometimes, you have to trick teenagers into writing poetry. So I came up with lists. Everyone can write lists. And the first list that I assign is "10 Things I Know to be True." And here's what happens, and here's what you would discover too if we all started sharing our lists out loud. At a certain point, you would realize that someone has the exact same thing, or one thing very similar, to something on your list. And then someone else has something the complete opposite of yours. Third, someone has something you've never even heard of before. And fourth, someone has something you thought you knew everything about, but they're introducing a new angle of looking at it. And I tell people that this is where great stories start from -- these four intersections of what you're passionate about and what others might be invested in. And most people respond really well to this exercise. But one of my students, a freshman named Charlotte, was not convinced. Charlotte was very good at writing lists, but she refused to write any poems. "Miss," she'd say, "I'm just not interesting. I don't have anything interesting to say." So I assigned her list after list, and one day I assigned the list "10 Things I Should Have Learned by Now." Number three on Charlotte's list was, "I should have learned not to crush on guys three times my age." I asked her what that meant, and she said, "Miss, it's kind of a long story." And I said, "Charlotte, it sounds pretty interesting to me." And so she wrote her first poem, a love poem unlike any I had ever heard before. And the poem began, "Anderson Cooper is a gorgeous man." (Laughter) "Did you see him on 60 Minutes, racing Michael Phelps in a pool -- nothing but swim trunks on -- diving in the water, determined to beat this swimming champion? After the race, he tossed his wet, cloud-white hair and said, 'You're a god.' No, Anderson, you're the god." (Laughter) (Applause) Now I know that the number one rule to being cool is to seem unfazed, to never admit that anything scares you or impresses you or excites you. Somebody once told me it's like walking through life like this. You protect yourself from all the unexpected miseries or hurt that might show up. But I try to walk through life like this. And yes, that means catching all of those miseries and hurt, but it also means that when beautiful, amazing things just fall out of the sky, I'm ready to catch them. I use spoken word to help my students rediscover wonder, to fight their instincts to be cool and unfazed and, instead, actively pursue being engaged with what goes on around them, so that they can reinterpret and create something from it. It's not that I think that spoken word poetry is the ideal art form. I'm always trying to find the best way to tell each story. I write musicals; I make short films alongside my poems. But I teach spoken word poetry because it's accessible. Not everyone can read music or owns a camera, but everyone can communicate in some way, and everyone has stories that the rest of us can learn from. Plus, spoken word poetry allows for immediate connections. It's not uncommon for people to feel like they're alone or that nobody understands them, but spoken word teaches that if you have the ability to express yourself and the courage to present those stories and opinions, you could be rewarded with a room full of your peers, or your community, who will listen. And maybe even a giant girl in a hoodie will connect with what you've shared. And that is an amazing realization to have, especially when you're 14. Plus, now with YouTube, that connection's not even limited to the room we're in. I'm so lucky that there's this archive of performances that I can share with my students. It allows for even more opportunities for them to find a poet or a poem that they connect to. It is tempting -- once you've figured this out -- it is tempting to keep writing the same poem, or keep telling the same story, over and over, once you've figured out that it will gain you applause. It's not enough to just teach that you can express yourself. You have to grow and explore and take risks and challenge yourself. And that is step three: infusing the work you're doing with the specific things that make you you, even while those things are always changing. Because step three never ends. But you don't get to start on step three, until you take step one first: I can. I travel a lot while I'm teaching, and I don't always get to watch all of my students reach their step three, but I was very lucky with Charlotte, that I got to watch her journey unfold the way it did. I watched her realize that, by putting the things that she knows to be true into the work she's doing, she can create poems that only Charlotte can write -- about eyeballs and elevators and Dora the Explorer. And I'm trying to tell stories only I can tell -- like this story. I spent a lot of time thinking about the best way to tell this story, and I wondered if the best way was going to be a PowerPoint or a short film -- and where exactly was the beginning or the middle or the end? And I wondered whether I'd get to the end of this talk and finally have figured it all out, or not. And I always thought that my beginning was at the Bowery Poetry Club, but it's possible that it was much earlier. In preparing for TED, I discovered this diary page in an old journal. I think December 54th was probably supposed to be 24th. It's clear that when I was a child, I definitely walked through life like this. I think that we all did. I would like to help others rediscover that wonder -- to want to engage with it, to want to learn, to want to share what they've learned, what they've figured out to be true and what they're still figuring out. So I'd like to close with this poem. When they bombed Hiroshima, the explosion formed a mini-supernova so every living animal, human or plant that received direct contact with the rays from that sun was instantly turned to ash. And what was left of the city soon followed. The long-lasting damage of nuclear radiation caused an entire city and its population to turn into powder. When I was born, my mom says I looked around the whole hospital room with a stare that said, "This? I've done this before." She says I have old eyes. When my Grandpa Genji died, I was only five years old, but I took my mom by the hand and told her, "Don't worry, he'll come back as a baby." And yet, for someone who's apparently done this already, I still haven't figured anything out yet. My knees still buckle every time I get on a stage. My self-confidence can be measured out in teaspoons mixed into my poetry, and it still always tastes funny in my mouth. But in Hiroshima, some people were wiped clean away, leaving only a wristwatch or a diary page. So no matter that I have inhibitions to fill all my pockets, I keep trying, hoping that one day I'll write a poem I can be proud to let sit in a museum exhibit as the only proof I existed. My parents named me Sarah, which is a biblical name. In the original story, God told Sarah she could do something impossible and she laughed, because the first Sarah, she didn't know what to do with impossible. And me? Well, neither do I, but I see the impossible every day. Impossible is trying to connect in this world, trying to hold onto others while things are blowing up around you, knowing that while you're speaking, they aren't just waiting for their turn to talk -- they hear you. They feel exactly what you feel at the same time that you feel it. It's what I strive for every time I open my mouth -- that impossible connection. There's this piece of wall in Hiroshima that was completely burnt black by the radiation. But on the front step, a person who was sitting there blocked the rays from hitting the stone. The only thing left now is a permanent shadow of positive light. After the A-bomb, specialists said it would take 75 years for the radiation-damaged soil of Hiroshima City to ever grow anything again. But that spring, there were new buds popping up from the earth. When I meet you, in that moment, I'm no longer a part of your future. I start quickly becoming part of your past. But in that instant, I get to share your present. And you, you get to share mine. And that is the greatest present of all. So if you tell me I can do the impossible, I'll probably laugh at you. I don't know if I can change the world yet, because I don't know that much about it -- and I don't know that much about reincarnation either, but if you make me laugh hard enough, sometimes I forget what century I'm in. This isn't my first time here. This isn't my last time here. These aren't the last words I'll share. But just in case, I'm trying my hardest to get it right this time around. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause)

Pat Mitchell: Your first time back on the TEDWomen stage. Sheryl Sandberg: First time back. Nice to see everyone. It's always so nice to look out and see so many women. It's so not my regular experience, as I know anyone else's. PM: So when we first started talking about, maybe the subject wouldn't be social media, which we assumed it would be, but that you had very much on your mind the missing leadership positions, particularly in the sector of technology and social media. But how did that evolve for you as a thought, and end up being the TED Talk that you gave? SS: So I was really scared to get on this stage and talk about women, because I grew up in the business world, as I think so many of us did. You never talk about being a woman, because someone might notice that you're a woman, right? They might notice. Or worse, if you say "woman," people on the other end of the table think you're asking for special treatment, or complaining. Or worse, about to sue them. And so I went through -- (Laughter) Right? I went through my entire business career, and never spoke about being a woman, never spoke about it publicly. But I also had noticed that it wasn't working. I came out of college over 20 years ago, and I thought that all of my peers were men and women, all the people above me were all men, but that would change, because your generation had done such an amazing job fighting for equality, equality was now ours for the taking. And it wasn't. Because year after year, I was one of fewer and fewer, and now, often the only woman in a room. And I talked to a bunch of people about, should I give a speech at TEDWomen about women, and they said, oh no, no. It will end your business career. You cannot be a serious business executive and speak about being a woman. You'll never be taken seriously again. But fortunately, there were the few, the proud -- like you -- who told me I should give the speech, and I asked myself the question Mark Zuckerberg might -- the founder of Facebook and my boss -- asks all of us, which is, what would I do if I wasn't afraid? And the answer to what would I do if I wasn't afraid is I would get on the TED stage, and talk about women, and leadership. And I did, and survived. (Applause) PM: I would say, not only survived. I'm thinking of that moment, Sheryl, when you and I were standing backstage together, and you turned to me, and you told me a story. And I said -- very last minute -- you know, you really should share that story. SS: Oh, yeah. PM: What was that story? SS: Well, it's an important part of the journey. So I had -- TEDWomen -- the original one was in D.C. -- so I live here, so I had gotten on a plane the day before, and my daughter was three, she was clinging to my leg: "Mommy, don't go." And Pat's a friend, and so, not related to the speech I was planning on giving, which was chock full of facts and figures, and nothing personal, I told Pat the story. I said, well, I'm having a hard day. Yesterday my daughter was clinging to my leg, and "Don't go." And you looked at me and said, you have to tell that story. I said, on the TED stage? Are you kidding? I'm going to get on a stage and admit my daughter was clinging to my leg? And you said yes, because if you want to talk about getting more women into leadership roles, you have to be honest about how hard it is. And I did. And I think that's a really important part of the journey. The same thing happened when I wrote my book. I started writing the book. I wrote a first chapter, I thought it was fabulous. It was chock-full of data and figures, I had three pages on matrilineal Maasai tribes, and their sociological patterns. My husband read it and he was like, this is like eating your Wheaties. (Laughter) No one -- and I apologize to Wheaties if there's someone -- no one, no one will read this book. And I realized through the process that I had to be more honest and more open, and I had to tell my stories. My stories of still not feeling as self-confident as I should, in many situations. My first and failed marriage. Crying at work. Felling like I didn't belong there, feeling guilty to this day. And part of my journey, starting on this stage, going to "Lean In," going to the foundation, is all about being more open and honest about those challenges, so that other women can be more open and honest, and all of us can work together towards real equality. PM: I think that one of the most striking parts about the book, and in my opinion, one of the reasons it's hit such a nerve and is resonating around the world, is that you are personal in the book, and that you do make it clear that, while you've observed some things that are very important for other women to know, that you've had the same challenges that many others of us have, as you faced the hurdles and the barriers and possibly the people who don't believe the same. So talk about that process: deciding you'd go public with the private part, and then you would also put yourself in the position of something of an expert on how to resolve those challenges. SS: After I did the TED Talk, what happened was -- you know, I never really expected to write a book, I'm not an author, I'm not a writer, and it was viewed a lot, and it really started impacting people's lives. I got this great --- one of the first letters I got was from a woman who said that she was offered a really big promotion at work, and she turned it down, and she told her best friend she turned it down, and her best friend said, you really need to watch this TED Talk. And so she watched this TED Talk, and she went back the next day, she took the job, she went home, and she handed her husband the grocery list. (Laughter) And she said, I can do this. And what really mattered to me -- it wasn't only women in the corporate world, even though I did hear from a lot of them, and it did impact a lot of them, it was also people of all different circumstances. There was a doctor I met who was an attending physician at Johns Hopkins, and he said that until he saw my TED Talk, it never really occurred to him that even though half the students in his med school classes were women, they weren't speaking as much as the men as he did his rounds. So he started paying attention, and as he waited for raised hands, he realized the men's hands were up. So he started encouraging the women to raise their hands more, and it still didn't work. So he told everyone, no more hand raising, I'm cold-calling. So he could call evenly on men and women. And what he proved to himself was that the women knew the answers just as well or better, and he was able to go back to them and tell them that. And then there was the woman, stay-at-home mom, lives in a really difficult neighborhood, with not a great school, she said that TED Talk -- she's never had a corporate job, but that TED Talk inspired her to go to her school and fight for a better teacher for her child. And I guess it was part of was finding my own voice. And I realized that other women and men could find their voice through it, which is why I went from the talk to the book. PM: And in the book, you not only found your voice, which is clear and strong in the book, but you also share what you've learned -- the experiences of other people in the lessons. And that's what I'm thinking about in terms of putting yourself in a -- you became a sort of expert in how you lean in. So what did that feel like, and become like in your life? To launch not just a book, not just a best-selling, best-viewed talk, but a movement, where people began to literally describe their actions at work as, I'm leaning in. SS: I mean, I'm grateful, I'm honored, I'm happy, and it's the very beginning. So I don't know if I'm an expert, or if anyone is an expert. I certainly have done a lot of research. I have read every study, I have pored over the materials, and the lessons are very clear. Because here's what we know: What we know is that stereotypes are holding women back from leadership roles all over the world. It's so striking. "Lean In" is very global, I've been all over the world, talking about it, and -- cultures are so different. Even within our own country, to Japan, to Korea, to China, to Asia, Europe, they're so different. Except for one thing: gender. All over the world, no matter what our cultures are, we think men should be strong, assertive, aggressive, have voice; we think women should speak when spoken to, help others. Now we have, all over the world, women are called "bossy." There is a word for "bossy," for little girls, in every language there's one. It's a word that's pretty much not used for little boys, because if a little boy leads, there's no negative word for it, it's expected. But if a little girl leads, she's bossy. Now I know there aren't a lot of men here, but bear with me. If you're a man, you'll have to represent your gender. Please raise your hand if you've been told you're too aggressive at work. (Laughter) There's always a few, it runs about five percent. Okay, get ready, gentlemen. If you're a woman, please raise your hand if you've ever been told you're too aggressive at work. (Laughter) That is what audiences have said in every country in the world, and it's deeply supported by the data. Now, do we think women are more aggressive than men? Of course not. It's just that we judge them through a different lens, and a lot of the character traits that you must exhibit to perform at work, to get results, to lead, are ones that we think, in a man, he's a boss, and in a woman, she's bossy. And the good news about this is that we can change this by acknowledging it. One of the happiest moments I had in this whole journey is, after the book came out, I stood on a stage with John Chambers, the CEO of Cisco. He read the book. He stood on a stage with me, he invited me in front of his whole management team, men and women, and he said, I thought we were good at this. I thought I was good at this. And then I read this book, and I realized that we -- my company -- we have called all of our senior women too aggressive, and I'm standing on this stage, and I'm sorry. And I want you to know we're never going to do it again. PM: Can we send that to a lot of other people that we know? (Applause) SS: And so John is doing that because he believes it's good for his company, and so this kind of acknowledgement of these biases can change it. And so next time you all see someone call a little girl "bossy," you walk right up to that person, big smile, and you say, "That little girl's not bossy. That little girl has executive leadership skills." (Laughter) PM: I know that's what you're telling your daughter. SS: Absolutely. PM: And you did focus in the book -- and the reason, as you said, in writing it, was to create a dialogue about this. I mean, let's just put it out there, face the fact that women are -- in a time when we have more open doors, and more opportunities -- are still not getting to the leadership positions. So in the months that have come since the book, in which "Lean In" focused on that and said, here are some of the challenges that remain, and many of them we have to own within ourselves and look at ourselves. What has changed? Have you seen changes? SS: Well, there's certainly more dialogue, which is great. But what really matters to me, and I think all of us, is action. So everywhere I go, CEOs, they're mostly men, say to me, you're costing me so much money because all the women want to be paid as much as the men. And to them I say, I'm not sorry at all. (Laughter) At all. I mean, the women should be paid as much as the men. Everywhere I go, women tell me they ask for raises. Everywhere I go, women say they're getting better relationships with their spouses, asking for more help at home, asking for the promotions they should be getting at work, and importantly, believing it themselves. Even little things. One of the governors of one of the states told me that he didn't realize that more women were, in fact, literally sitting on the side of the room, which they are, and now he made a rule that all the women on his staff need to sit at the table. The foundation I started along with the book "Lean In" helps women, or men, start circles -- small groups, it can be 10, it can be however many you want, which meet once a month. I would have hoped that by now, we'd have about 500 circles. That would've been great. You know, 500 times roughly 10. There are over 12,000 circles in 50 countries in the world. PM: Wow, that's amazing. SS: And these are people who are meeting every single month. I met one of them, I was in Beijing. A group of women, they're all about 29 or 30, they started the first Lean In circle in Beijing, several of them grew up in very poor, rural China. These women are 29, they are told by their society that they are "left over," because they are not yet married, and the process of coming together once a month at a meeting is helping them define who they are for themselves. What they want in their careers. The kind of partners they want, if at all. I looked at them, we went around and introduced ourselves, and they all said their names and where they're from, and I said, I'm Sheryl Sandberg, and this was my dream. And I kind of just started crying. Right, which, I admit, I do. Right? I've talked about it before. But the fact that a woman so far away out in the world, who grew up in a rural village, who's being told to marry someone she doesn't want to marry, can now go meet once a month with a group of people and refuse that, and find life on her own terms. That's the kind of change we have to hope for. PM: Have you been surprised by the global nature of the message? Because I think when the book first came out, many people thought, well, this is a really important handbook for young women on their way up. They need to look at this, anticipate the barriers, and recognize them, put them out in the open, have the dialogue about it, but that it's really for women who are that. Doing that. Pursuing the corporate world. And yet the book is being read, as you say, in rural and developing countries. What part of that has surprised you, and perhaps led to a new perspective on your part? SS: The book is about self-confidence, and about equality. And it turns out, everywhere in the world, women need more self-confidence, because the world tells us we're not equal to men. Everywhere in the world, we live in a world where the men get "and," and women get "or." I've never met a man who's been asked how he does it all. (Laughter) Again, I'm going to turn to the men in the audience: Please raise your hand if you've been asked, how do you do it all? (Laughter) Men only. Women, women. Please raise your hand if you've been asked how you do it all? We assume men can do it all, slash -- have jobs and children. We assume women can't, and that's ridiculous, because the great majority of women everywhere in the world, including the United States, work full time and have children. And I think people don't fully understand how broad the message is. There is a circle that's been started for rescued sex workers in Miami. They're using "Lean In" to help people make the transition back to what would be a fair life, really rescuing them from their pimps, and using it. There are dress-for-success groups in Texas which are using the book, for women who have never been to college. And we know there are groups all the way to Ethiopia. And so these messages of equality -- of how women are told they can't have what men can have -- how we assume that leadership is for men, how we assume that voice is for men, these affect all of us, and I think they are very universal. And it's part of what TEDWomen does. It unites all of us in a cause we have to believe in, which is more women, more voice, more equality. PM: If you were invited now to make another TEDWomen talk, what would you say that is a result of this experience, for you personally, and what you've learned about women, and men, as you've made this journey? SS: I think I would say -- I tried to say this strongly, but I think I can say it more strongly -- I want to say that the status quo is not enough. That it's not good enough, that it's not changing quickly enough. Since I gave my TED Talk and published my book, another year of data came out from the U.S. Census. And you know what we found? No movement in the wage gap for women in the United States. Seventy-seven cents to the dollar. If you are a black woman, 64 cents. If you are a Latina, we're at 54 cents. Do you know when the last time those numbers went up? 2002. We are stagnating, we are stagnating in so many ways. And I think we are not really being honest about that, for so many reasons. It's so hard to talk about gender. We shy away from the word "feminist," a word I really think we need to embrace. We have to get rid of the word bossy and bring back -- (Applause) I think I would say in a louder voice, we need to get rid of the word "bossy" and bring back the word "feminist," because we need it. (Applause) PM: And we all need to do a lot more leaning in. SS: A lot more leaning in. PM: Thank you, Sheryl. Thanks for leaning in and saying yes. SS: Thank you. (Applause)

For me, this story begins about 15 years ago, when I was a hospice doctor at the University of Chicago. And I was taking care of people who were dying and their families in the South Side of Chicago. And I was observing what happened to people and their families over the course of their terminal illness. And in my lab, I was studying the widower effect, which is a very old idea in the social sciences, going back 150 years, known as "dying of a broken heart." So, when I die, my wife's risk of death can double, for instance, in the first year. And I had gone to take care of one particular patient, a woman who was dying of dementia. And in this case, unlike this couple, she was being cared for by her daughter. And the daughter was exhausted from caring for her mother. And the daughter's husband, he also was sick from his wife's exhaustion. And I was driving home one day, and I get a phone call from the husband's friend, calling me because he was depressed about what was happening to his friend. So here I get this call from this random guy that's having an experience that's being influenced by people at some social distance. And so I suddenly realized two very simple things: First, the widowhood effect was not restricted to husbands and wives. And second, it was not restricted to pairs of people. And I started to see the world in a whole new way, like pairs of people connected to each other. And then I realized that these individuals would be connected into foursomes with other pairs of people nearby. And then, in fact, these people were embedded in other sorts of relationships: marriage and spousal and friendship and other sorts of ties. And that, in fact, these connections were vast and that we were all embedded in this broad set of connections with each other. So I started to see the world in a completely new way and I became obsessed with this. I became obsessed with how it might be that we're embedded in these social networks, and how they affect our lives. So, social networks are these intricate things of beauty, and they're so elaborate and so complex and so ubiquitous, in fact, that one has to ask what purpose they serve. Why are we embedded in social networks? I mean, how do they form? How do they operate? And how do they effect us? So my first topic with respect to this, was not death, but obesity. It had become trendy to speak about the "obesity epidemic." And, along with my collaborator, James Fowler, we began to wonder whether obesity really was epidemic and could it spread from person to person like the four people I discussed earlier. So this is a slide of some of our initial results. It's 2,200 people in the year 2000. Every dot is a person. We make the dot size proportional to people's body size; so bigger dots are bigger people. In addition, if your body size, if your BMI, your body mass index, is above 30 -- if you're clinically obese -- we also colored the dots yellow. So, if you look at this image, right away you might be able to see that there are clusters of obese and non-obese people in the image. But the visual complexity is still very high. It's not obvious exactly what's going on. In addition, some questions are immediately raised: How much clustering is there? Is there more clustering than would be due to chance alone? How big are the clusters? How far do they reach? And, most importantly, what causes the clusters? So we did some mathematics to study the size of these clusters. This here shows, on the Y-axis, the increase in the probability that a person is obese given that a social contact of theirs is obese and, on the X-axis, the degrees of separation between the two people. On the far left, you see the purple line. It says that, if your friends are obese, your risk of obesity is 45 percent higher. And the next bar over, the [red] line, says if your friend's friends are obese, your risk of obesity is 25 percent higher. And then the next line over says if your friend's friend's friend, someone you probably don't even know, is obese, your risk of obesity is 10 percent higher. And it's only when you get to your friend's friend's friend's friends that there's no longer a relationship between that person's body size and your own body size. Well, what might be causing this clustering? There are at least three possibilities: One possibility is that, as I gain weight, it causes you to gain weight. A kind of induction, a kind of spread from person to person. Another possibility, very obvious, is homophily, or, birds of a feather flock together; here, I form my tie to you because you and I share a similar body size. And the last possibility is what is known as confounding, because it confounds our ability to figure out what's going on. And here, the idea is not that my weight gain is causing your weight gain, nor that I preferentially form a tie with you because you and I share the same body size, but rather that we share a common exposure to something, like a health club that makes us both lose weight at the same time. When we studied these data, we found evidence for all of these things, including for induction. And we found that if your friend becomes obese, it increases your risk of obesity by about 57 percent in the same given time period. There can be many mechanisms for this effect: One possibility is that your friends say to you something like -- you know, they adopt a behavior that spreads to you -- like, they say, "Let's go have muffins and beer," which is a terrible combination. (Laughter) But you adopt that combination, and then you start gaining weight like them. Another more subtle possibility is that they start gaining weight, and it changes your ideas of what an acceptable body size is. Here, what's spreading from person to person is not a behavior, but rather a norm: An idea is spreading. Now, headline writers had a field day with our studies. I think the headline in The New York Times was, "Are you packing it on? Blame your fat friends." (Laughter) What was interesting to us is that the European headline writers had a different take: They said, "Are your friends gaining weight? Perhaps you are to blame." (Laughter) And we thought this was a very interesting comment on America, and a kind of self-serving, "not my responsibility" kind of phenomenon. Now, I want to be very clear: We do not think our work should or could justify prejudice against people of one or another body size at all. Our next questions was: Could we actually visualize this spread? Was weight gain in one person actually spreading to weight gain in another person? And this was complicated because we needed to take into account the fact that the network structure, the architecture of the ties, was changing across time. In addition, because obesity is not a unicentric epidemic, there's not a Patient Zero of the obesity epidemic -- if we find that guy, there was a spread of obesity out from him -- it's a multicentric epidemic. Lots of people are doing things at the same time. And I'm about to show you a 30 second video animation that took me and James five years of our lives to do. So, again, every dot is a person. Every tie between them is a relationship. We're going to put this into motion now, taking daily cuts through the network for about 30 years. The dot sizes are going to grow, you're going to see a sea of yellow take over. You're going to see people be born and die -- dots will appear and disappear -- ties will form and break, marriages and divorces, friendings and defriendings. A lot of complexity, a lot is happening just in this 30-year period that includes the obesity epidemic. And, by the end, you're going to see clusters of obese and non-obese individuals within the network. Now, when looked at this, it changed the way I see things, because this thing, this network that's changing across time, it has a memory, it moves, things flow within it, it has a kind of consistency -- people can die, but it doesn't die; it still persists -- and it has a kind of resilience that allows it to persist across time. And so, I came to see these kinds of social networks as living things, as living things that we could put under a kind of microscope to study and analyze and understand. And we used a variety of techniques to do this. And we started exploring all kinds of other phenomena. We looked at smoking and drinking behavior, and voting behavior, and divorce -- which can spread -- and altruism. And, eventually, we became interested in emotions. Now, when we have emotions, we show them. Why do we show our emotions? I mean, there would be an advantage to experiencing our emotions inside, you know, anger or happiness. But we don't just experience them, we show them. And not only do we show them, but others can read them. And, not only can they read them, but they copy them. There's emotional contagion that takes place in human populations. And so this function of emotions suggests that, in addition to any other purpose they serve, they're a kind of primitive form of communication. And that, in fact, if we really want to understand human emotions, we need to think about them in this way. Now, we're accustomed to thinking about emotions in this way, in simple, sort of, brief periods of time. So, for example, I was giving this talk recently in New York City, and I said, "You know when you're on the subway and the other person across the subway car smiles at you, and you just instinctively smile back?" And they looked at me and said, "We don't do that in New York City." (Laughter) And I said, "Everywhere else in the world, that's normal human behavior." And so there's a very instinctive way in which we briefly transmit emotions to each other. And, in fact, emotional contagion can be broader still. Like we could have punctuated expressions of anger, as in riots. The question that we wanted to ask was: Could emotion spread, in a more sustained way than riots, across time and involve large numbers of people, not just this pair of individuals smiling at each other in the subway car? Maybe there's a kind of below the surface, quiet riot that animates us all the time. Maybe there are emotional stampedes that ripple through social networks. Maybe, in fact, emotions have a collective existence, not just an individual existence. And this is one of the first images we made to study this phenomenon. Again, a social network, but now we color the people yellow if they're happy and blue if they're sad and green in between. And if you look at this image, you can right away see clusters of happy and unhappy people, again, spreading to three degrees of separation. And you might form the intuition that the unhappy people occupy a different structural location within the network. There's a middle and an edge to this network, and the unhappy people seem to be located at the edges. So to invoke another metaphor, if you imagine social networks as a kind of vast fabric of humanity -- I'm connected to you and you to her, on out endlessly into the distance -- this fabric is actually like an old-fashioned American quilt, and it has patches on it: happy and unhappy patches. And whether you become happy or not depends in part on whether you occupy a happy patch. (Laughter) So, this work with emotions, which are so fundamental, then got us to thinking about: Maybe the fundamental causes of human social networks are somehow encoded in our genes. Because human social networks, whenever they are mapped, always kind of look like this: the picture of the network. But they never look like this. Why do they not look like this? Why don't we form human social networks that look like a regular lattice? Well, the striking patterns of human social networks, their ubiquity and their apparent purpose beg questions about whether we evolved to have human social networks in the first place, and whether we evolved to form networks with a particular structure. And notice first of all -- so, to understand this, though, we need to dissect network structure a little bit first -- and notice that every person in this network has exactly the same structural location as every other person. But that's not the case with real networks. So, for example, here is a real network of college students at an elite northeastern university. And now I'm highlighting a few dots. If you look here at the dots, compare node B in the upper left to node D in the far right; B has four friends coming out from him and D has six friends coming out from him. And so, those two individuals have different numbers of friends. That's very obvious, we all know that. But certain other aspects of social network structure are not so obvious. Compare node B in the upper left to node A in the lower left. Now, those people both have four friends, but A's friends all know each other, and B's friends do not. So the friend of a friend of A's is, back again, a friend of A's, whereas the friend of a friend of B's is not a friend of B's, but is farther away in the network. This is known as transitivity in networks. And, finally, compare nodes C and D: C and D both have six friends. If you talk to them, and you said, "What is your social life like?" they would say, "I've got six friends. That's my social experience." But now we, with a bird's eye view looking at this network, can see that they occupy very different social worlds. And I can cultivate that intuition in you by just asking you: Who would you rather be if a deadly germ was spreading through the network? Would you rather be C or D? You'd rather be D, on the edge of the network. And now who would you rather be if a juicy piece of gossip -- not about you -- was spreading through the network? (Laughter) Now, you would rather be C. So different structural locations have different implications for your life. And, in fact, when we did some experiments looking at this, what we found is that 46 percent of the variation in how many friends you have is explained by your genes. And this is not surprising. We know that some people are born shy and some are born gregarious. That's obvious. But we also found some non-obvious things. For instance, 47 percent in the variation in whether your friends know each other is attributable to your genes. Whether your friends know each other has not just to do with their genes, but with yours. And we think the reason for this is that some people like to introduce their friends to each other -- you know who you are -- and others of you keep them apart and don't introduce your friends to each other. And so some people knit together the networks around them, creating a kind of dense web of ties in which they're comfortably embedded. And finally, we even found that 30 percent of the variation in whether or not people are in the middle or on the edge of the network can also be attributed to their genes. So whether you find yourself in the middle or on the edge is also partially heritable. Now, what is the point of this? How does this help us understand? How does this help us figure out some of the problems that are affecting us these days? Well, the argument I'd like to make is that networks have value. They are a kind of social capital. New properties emerge because of our embeddedness in social networks, and these properties inhere in the structure of the networks, not just in the individuals within them. So think about these two common objects. They're both made of carbon, and yet one of them has carbon atoms in it that are arranged in one particular way -- on the left -- and you get graphite, which is soft and dark. But if you take the same carbon atoms and interconnect them a different way, you get diamond, which is clear and hard. And those properties of softness and hardness and darkness and clearness do not reside in the carbon atoms; they reside in the interconnections between the carbon atoms, or at least arise because of the interconnections between the carbon atoms. So, similarly, the pattern of connections among people confers upon the groups of people different properties. It is the ties between people that makes the whole greater than the sum of its parts. And so it is not just what's happening to these people -- whether they're losing weight or gaining weight, or becoming rich or becoming poor, or becoming happy or not becoming happy -- that affects us; it's also the actual architecture of the ties around us. Our experience of the world depends on the actual structure of the networks in which we're residing and on all the kinds of things that ripple and flow through the network. Now, the reason, I think, that this is the case is that human beings assemble themselves and form a kind of superorganism. Now, a superorganism is a collection of individuals which show or evince behaviors or phenomena that are not reducible to the study of individuals and that must be understood by reference to, and by studying, the collective. Like, for example, a hive of bees that's finding a new nesting site, or a flock of birds that's evading a predator, or a flock of birds that's able to pool its wisdom and navigate and find a tiny speck of an island in the middle of the Pacific, or a pack of wolves that's able to bring down larger prey. Superorganisms have properties that cannot be understood just by studying the individuals. I think understanding social networks and how they form and operate can help us understand not just health and emotions but all kinds of other phenomena -- like crime, and warfare, and economic phenomena like bank runs and market crashes and the adoption of innovation and the spread of product adoption. Now, look at this. I think we form social networks because the benefits of a connected life outweigh the costs. If I was always violent towards you or gave you misinformation or made you sad or infected you with deadly germs, you would cut the ties to me, and the network would disintegrate. So the spread of good and valuable things is required to sustain and nourish social networks. Similarly, social networks are required for the spread of good and valuable things, like love and kindness and happiness and altruism and ideas. I think, in fact, that if we realized how valuable social networks are, we'd spend a lot more time nourishing them and sustaining them, because I think social networks are fundamentally related to goodness. And what I think the world needs now is more connections. Thank you. (Applause)

Hello voicemail, my old friend. (Laughter) I've called for tech support again. I ignored my boss' warning. I called on a Monday morning. Now it's evening, and my dinner first grew cold -- and then grew mold. I'm still on hold. I'm listening to the sounds of silence. I don't think you understand. I think your phone lines are unmanned. I punched every touch tone I was told, but I still spent 18 hours on hold. It's not enough your software crashed my Mac and it constantly hangs and bombs -- it erased my ROMS! Now the Mac makes the sounds of silence. In my dreams I fantasize of wreaking vengeance on you guys. Say your motorcycle crashes. Blood comes gushing from your gashes. With your fading strength, you call 9-1-1 and you pray for a trained MD. But you get me. (Laughter) And you listen to the sounds of silence. (Applause) Thank you. Good evening and welcome to "Spot the TED Presenter Who Used to Be a Broadway Accompanist." (Laughter) OK. When I was offered the Times column six years ago, the deal was like this: you'll be sent the coolest, hottest, slickest new gadgets. Every week it'll arrive at your door. You get to try them out, play with them, evaluate them until the novelty wears out, before you have to send them back. And you'll get paid for it. You can think about it, if you want. I've always been a technology nut, and I absolutely love it. The job, though, came with one small downside. And that is: they intended to publish my email address at the end of every column. And what I've noticed is -- first of all, you get an incredible amount of email. If you ever are feeling lonely, get a New York Times column, because you will get hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of emails. And the email I'm getting a lot today is about frustration. People are feeling like things -- OK, I just had an alarm come up on my screen. Lucky you can't see it. People are feeling overwhelmed. They're feeling like it's too much technology too fast. It may be good technology, but I feel like there's not enough of a support structure. There's not enough help. There's not enough thought put into the design of it to make it easy and enjoyable to use. One time I wrote a column about my efforts to reach Dell Technical Support, and within 12 hours there were 700 messages from readers on the feedback boards on the Times website, from users saying, "Me too!" and, "Here's my tale of woe." I call it "software rage." And man, let me tell you, whoever figures out how to make money off of this frustration will -- oh, how did that get up there? Just kidding. (Laughter) OK, so why is the problem accelerating? Part of the problem is, ironically, because the industry has put so much thought into making things easier to use. I'll show you what I mean. This is what the computer interface used to look like, DOS. Over the years it's gotten easier to use. This is the original Mac operating system. Reagan was President. Madonna was still a brunette. And the entire operating system -- this is the good part -- the entire operating system fit in 211k. You couldn't put the Mac OS 10 logo in 211k! (Laughter) So the irony is that as these things became easier to use a less technical, broader audience was coming into contact with this equipment for the first time. I once had the distinct privilege of sitting in on the Apple call center for a day. The guy had a duplicate headset for me to listen to. And the calls that -- you know how they say, "Your call may be recorded for quality assurance?" Mm-Mmm. Your call may be recorded so that they can collect the funniest dumb user stories and pass them around on a CD. (Laughter) Which they do. (Laughter) And I have a copy. (Laughter) It's in your TEDGift Bag. No, no. With your voices on it! Some of the stories are just so classic, and yet so understandable. A woman called Apple to complain that her mouse was squeaking -- making a squeaking noise. And the technician said, "Well, ma'am, what do you mean your mouse is squeaking?" She says, "All I can tell you is that it squeaks louder the faster I move it across the screen." (Laughter) And the technician's like, "Ma'am, you've got the mouse up against the screen?" She goes, "Well, the message said, 'Click here to continue.'" (Laughter) Well, if you like that one, how much time have we got? Another one, a guy called -- this is absolutely true! -- his computer had crashed, and he told the technician he couldn't restart it no matter how many times he typed 11. And the technician said, "What? Why are you typing 11?" He said, "The message says, 'Error Type 11.'" (Laughter) So we must admit that some of the blame falls squarely at the feet of the users. But why is the technical overload crisis, the complexity crisis, accelerating now? In the hardware world, it's because we the consumers want everything to be smaller, smaller, smaller. So the gadgets are getting tinier and tinier but our fingers are essentially staying the same size. So it gets to be more and more of a challenge. Software is subject to another primal force: the mandate to release more and more versions. When you buy a piece of software, it's not like buying a vase or a candy bar, where you own it. It's more like joining a club where you pay dues every year. And every year, they say, "We've added more features and we'll sell it to you for $99." I know one guy who's spent $4,000 just on Photoshop over the years. And software companies make 35 percent of their revenue from just these software upgrades. I call it the Software Upgrade Paradox -- which is that if you improve a piece of software enough times, you eventually ruin it. I mean, Microsoft Word was last just a word processor in, you know, the Eisenhower administration. (Laughter) But what's the alternative? Microsoft actually did this experiment. They said, "Well, wait a minute. Everyone complains that we're adding so many features. Let's create a word processor that's just a word processor. Simple, pure, does not do web pages, is not a database." And it came out. It was called Microsoft Write. And none of you are nodding in acknowledgment because it died. It tanked. No one ever bought it. I call this the Sport Utility Principle. People like to surround themselves with unnecessary power, right? They don't need the database and the website, but they're like, "Well, I'll upgrade, because, I might, you know, I might need that someday." So the problem is: as you add more features, where are they going to go? Where are you going to stick them? You only have so many design tools. You can do buttons; you can do sliders, pop-up menus, sub-menus. But if you're not careful about how you choose, you wind up with this. (Laughter) This is an un-retouched -- this is not a joke -- un-retouched photo of Microsoft Word, the copy that you have, with all the toolbars open. You've obviously never opened all the toolbars, but all you have to type in is this little, teeny window down here. (Laughter) And we've arrived at the age of interface matrices, where there are so many features and options, you have to do two dimensions, you know: a vertical and a horizontal. You guys all complained about how Microsoft Word is always bulleting your lists and underlining your links automatically. The off switch is in there somewhere. I'm telling you, it's there! Part of the art of designing a simple, good interface, is knowing when to use which one of these features. Here is the log off dialog box for Windows 2000. There are only four choices, so why are they in a pop-up menu? It's not like the rest of the screen is so full of other components that you need to collapse the choices. They could have put them all out in view. Here's Apple's take on the exact same dialog box. (Applause) Thank you -- yes, I designed the dialog box. No, no, no. Already, we can see that Apple and Microsoft have a severely divergent approach to software design. Microsoft's approach to simplicity tends to be: let's break it down; let's just make it more steps. There are these "wizards" everywhere. And you know, there's a new version of Windows coming out this fall. If they continue at this pace, there's absolutely no telling where they might wind up. (Laughter) (Applause) "Welcome to the Type-A-Word Wizard." OK, I'll bite. Let's click "Next" to continue. (Applause) From the drop-down menu, choose the first letter you want to type. OK. (Laughter) So there is a limit that we don't want to cross. So what is the answer? How do you pack in all these features in a simple, intelligent way? I believe in consistency with possible, real-world equivalents, trashcan folder when possible, label things mostly. But I beg of the designers here to break all those rules if they violate the biggest rule of all, which is intelligence. Now what do I mean by that? I'm going to give you some examples where intelligence makes something not consistent, but it's better. If you are buying something on the web, you're supposed to put in your address and you're supposed to choose which country you're from, OK? There are 200 countries in the world. We like to think of the Internet as a global village. I'm sorry; it's not one yet. It's mainly, like, the United States, Europe and Japan. So why is United States in the "U"s? (Laughter) You have to scroll, like, seven screens-full to get to it. Now it would be inconsistent to put United States first, but it would be intelligent. This one's been touched on before, but why in God's name do you shut down a Windows PC by clicking a button called "Start?" (Laughter) Here's another pet one of mine: you have a printer. Most of the time, you want to print one copy of your document, in page order, on that printer. So why in God's name do you see this every time you print? It's like a 747 shuttle cockpit. (Laughter) And one of the buttons at the bottom, you'll notice, is not "Print." (Laughter) (Applause) Now, I'm not saying that Apple is the only company who has embraced the cult of simplicity. Palm is also, especially in the old days, wonderful about this. I actually got to speak to Palm when they were flying high in the '90s, and after the talk, I met one of the employees. He says, "Nice talk." And I said, "Thank you, what do you do here?" He said, "I'm a tap counter." I'm like, "You're a what?" He goes, "Well, Jeff Hawkins, the CEO, says, 'If any task on the Palm Pilot takes more than three taps of the stylus, it's too long, and it has to be redesigned.' So I'm the tap counter." I'm going to show you an example of a company that does not have a tap counter. This is Microsoft Word. When you want to create a new blank document in Word -- it could happen! (Laughter) -- you go up to the File menu and you choose "New." Now, what happens when you choose "New?" Do you get a new blank document? You do not. On the opposite side of the monitor, a task bar appears, and somewhere in those links -- by the way, not at the top -- somewhere in those links is a button that makes you a new document. That is a company not counting taps. You know, I don't want to just stand here and make fun of Microsoft ... Audience: Go on. David Pogue: Yes, I do. (Laughter) (Applause) The Bill Gates song! I've been a geek forever and I wrote the very first DOS. I put my software and IBM together; I got profit and they got the loss. (Laughter) I write the code that makes the whole world run. I'm gettin' royalties from everyone. Sometimes it's garbage, but the press is snowed. You buy the box; I'll sell the code. Every software company is doing Microsoft's R&D. You can't keep a good idea down these days. Even Windows is a hack. We're kind of based loosely on the Mac. So it's big, so it's slow. You've got nowhere to go. I'm not doing this for praise. I write the code that fits the world today. Big mediocrity in every way. We've entered planet domination mode. You'll have no choice; you'll buy my code. I am Bill Gates and I write the code. (Applause) But actually, I believe there are really two Microsofts. There's the old one, responsible for Windows and Office. They're dying to throw the whole thing out and start fresh, but they can't. They're locked in because so many add-ons and other company stuff locks into the old 1982 chassis. But there's also a new Microsoft that's really doing good, simple interface designs. I liked the Media Center PC. I liked the Microsoft SPOT Watch. The Wireless Watch flopped miserably in the market, but it wasn't because it wasn't simply and beautifully designed. Let's put it this way: would you pay $10 a month to have a watch that has to be recharged every night, like your cell phone, and stops working when you leave your area code? (Laughter) The signs might indicate that the complexity crunch is only going to get worse. So is there any hope? The screens are getting smaller. People are illuminating, putting manuals in the boxes. The things are coming out at a faster pace. It's funny -- when Steve Jobs came back to Apple in 1997, after 12 years away, it was the MacWorld Expo -- he came to the stage in that black turtleneck and jeans, and he sort of did this. (Raises arms) The crowd went wild, but I'm like, where have I seen this before? I had just seen the movie "Evita" -- (Laughter) -- with Madonna, and I'm like, you know what, I've got to do one about Steve Jobs. It won't be easy. You'll think I'm strange. When I try to explain why I'm back after telling the press Apple's future is black. You won't believe me. All that you see is a kid in his teens who started out in a garage with only a buddy named Woz. (Laughter) You try rhyming with garage! (Laughter) Don't cry for me, Cupertino. (Laughter) The truth is, I never left you. (Laughter) I know the ropes now, know what the tricks are. I made a fortune over at Pixar. (Laughter) Don't cry for me, Cupertino. I've still got the drive and vision. I still wear sandals in any weather. It's just that these days, they're Gucci leather. (Laughter) (Applause) Thank you. So Steve Jobs had always believed in simplicity and elegance and beauty. And the truth is, for years I was a little depressed -- because Americans obviously did not value it, because the Mac had three percent market share and Windows had 95 percent market share. People did not think it was worth putting a price on it. So I was a little depressed -- then I heard Al Gore's talk, and I realized I didn't know the meaning of depressed. (Laughter) But it turns out I was wrong, right? Because the iPod came out, and it violated every bit of common wisdom. Other products cost less. Other products had more features. They had voice recorders and FM transmitters. The other products were backed by Microsoft with an open standard, not Apple's propriety standard. But the iPod won! This is the one they wanted. The lesson was: simplicity sells. And there are signs that the industry is getting the message. This is a little company that's done very well with simplicity and elegance. (Screen displays Google's homepage) The Sonos thing -- it's catching on. I've got just a couple examples. Physically, a really cool, elegant, thinking coming along lately. When you have a digital camera, how do you get the pictures back to your computer? Well, you either haul around a USB cable or you buy a card reader and haul that around. Either one, you're going to lose. What I do is, I take out the memory card, and I fold it in half, revealing USB contacts. I just stick it in the computer, offload the pictures, put it right back in the camera. I never have to lose anything. Here's another example. Chris, you're the source of all power. Will you be my power plug? Chris Anderson: Oh yeah. DP: Hold that and don't let go. You might have seen this: this is Apple's new laptop. This is the power cord. It hooks on like this. And I'm sure every one of you has done this at some point in your lives, or one of your children. You walk along -- and I'm about to pull this onto the floor. I don't care. It's a loaner. Here we go. Whoa! It's magnetic. It doesn't pull the laptop onto the floor. (Applause) In my very last example -- I do a lot of my work using speech recognition software, and you have to be kind of quiet because the software is nervous. "Speech recognition software is really great for doing emails very quickly. Period. Like, I get hundreds of them a day. Period. And it's not just what I dictate that it writes down. Period. I also use this feature called voice macros. Period." Correct "dissuade". "Not just." Okay, this is not an ideal situation, because it's getting the echo from the hall and stuff. But the point is: I can respond to people very quickly by saying a short word and having it write out a much longer thing. So if somebody sends me a fan letter, I'll say, "Thanks for that." (Laughter) (Applause) And conversely, if somebody sends me hate mail -- which happens daily -- I say, "Piss off." (Laughter) (Applause) So that's my dirty little secret. Don't tell anyone. (Laughter) So the point is, this a really interesting story. This is version eight of this software, and do you know what they put in version eight? No new features. It's never happened before in software! The company put no new features. They just said, "We'll make the software work right." Right. Because for years people had bought this software, tried it out -- 95 percent accuracy was all they got, which means one in 20 words is wrong -- and they put it in their drawer. And the company got sick of that, so they said, "This version, we're not going to do anything but make sure it's darned accurate." And so that's what they did. This cult of doing things right is starting to spread. My final advice for those of you who are consumers of this technology: remember, if it doesn't work it's not necessarily you, OK? It could be the design of the thing you're using. Be aware in life of good design and bad design. And if you're among the people who create the stuff, easy is hard. Pre-sweat the details for your audience. Count the taps. Remember, the hard part is not deciding what features to add -- it's deciding what to leave out. And best of all, your motivation is: simplicity sells. CA: Bravo. DP: Thank you very much. CA: Hear, hear! (Applause)

Hello voicemail, my old friend. (Laughter) I've called for tech support again. I ignored my boss' warning. I called on a Monday morning. Now it's evening, and my dinner first grew cold -- and then grew mold. I'm still on hold. I'm listening to the sounds of silence. I don't think you understand. I think your phone lines are unmanned. I punched every touch tone I was told, but I still spent 18 hours on hold. It's not enough your software crashed my Mac and it constantly hangs and bombs -- it erased my ROMS! Now the Mac makes the sounds of silence. In my dreams I fantasize of wreaking vengeance on you guys. Say your motorcycle crashes. Blood comes gushing from your gashes. With your fading strength, you call 9-1-1 and you pray for a trained MD. But you get me. (Laughter) And you listen to the sounds of silence. (Applause) Thank you. Good evening and welcome to "Spot the TED Presenter Who Used to Be a Broadway Accompanist." (Laughter) OK. When I was offered the Times column six years ago, the deal was like this: you'll be sent the coolest, hottest, slickest new gadgets. Every week it'll arrive at your door. You get to try them out, play with them, evaluate them until the novelty wears out, before you have to send them back. And you'll get paid for it. You can think about it, if you want. I've always been a technology nut, and I absolutely love it. The job, though, came with one small downside. And that is: they intended to publish my email address at the end of every column. And what I've noticed is -- first of all, you get an incredible amount of email. If you ever are feeling lonely, get a New York Times column, because you will get hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of emails. And the email I'm getting a lot today is about frustration. People are feeling like things -- OK, I just had an alarm come up on my screen. Lucky you can't see it. People are feeling overwhelmed. They're feeling like it's too much technology too fast. It may be good technology, but I feel like there's not enough of a support structure. There's not enough help. There's not enough thought put into the design of it to make it easy and enjoyable to use. One time I wrote a column about my efforts to reach Dell Technical Support, and within 12 hours there were 700 messages from readers on the feedback boards on the Times website, from users saying, "Me too!" and, "Here's my tale of woe." I call it "software rage." And man, let me tell you, whoever figures out how to make money off of this frustration will -- oh, how did that get up there? Just kidding. (Laughter) OK, so why is the problem accelerating? Part of the problem is, ironically, because the industry has put so much thought into making things easier to use. I'll show you what I mean. This is what the computer interface used to look like, DOS. Over the years it's gotten easier to use. This is the original Mac operating system. Reagan was President. Madonna was still a brunette. And the entire operating system -- this is the good part -- the entire operating system fit in 211k. You couldn't put the Mac OS 10 logo in 211k! (Laughter) So the irony is that as these things became easier to use a less technical, broader audience was coming into contact with this equipment for the first time. I once had the distinct privilege of sitting in on the Apple call center for a day. The guy had a duplicate headset for me to listen to. And the calls that -- you know how they say, "Your call may be recorded for quality assurance?" Mm-Mmm. Your call may be recorded so that they can collect the funniest dumb user stories and pass them around on a CD. (Laughter) Which they do. (Laughter) And I have a copy. (Laughter) It's in your TEDGift Bag. No, no. With your voices on it! Some of the stories are just so classic, and yet so understandable. A woman called Apple to complain that her mouse was squeaking -- making a squeaking noise. And the technician said, "Well, ma'am, what do you mean your mouse is squeaking?" She says, "All I can tell you is that it squeaks louder the faster I move it across the screen." (Laughter) And the technician's like, "Ma'am, you've got the mouse up against the screen?" She goes, "Well, the message said, 'Click here to continue.'" (Laughter) Well, if you like that one, how much time have we got? Another one, a guy called -- this is absolutely true! -- his computer had crashed, and he told the technician he couldn't restart it no matter how many times he typed 11. And the technician said, "What? Why are you typing 11?" He said, "The message says, 'Error Type 11.'" (Laughter) So we must admit that some of the blame falls squarely at the feet of the users. But why is the technical overload crisis, the complexity crisis, accelerating now? In the hardware world, it's because we the consumers want everything to be smaller, smaller, smaller. So the gadgets are getting tinier and tinier but our fingers are essentially staying the same size. So it gets to be more and more of a challenge. Software is subject to another primal force: the mandate to release more and more versions. When you buy a piece of software, it's not like buying a vase or a candy bar, where you own it. It's more like joining a club where you pay dues every year. And every year, they say, "We've added more features and we'll sell it to you for $99." I know one guy who's spent $4,000 just on Photoshop over the years. And software companies make 35 percent of their revenue from just these software upgrades. I call it the Software Upgrade Paradox -- which is that if you improve a piece of software enough times, you eventually ruin it. I mean, Microsoft Word was last just a word processor in, you know, the Eisenhower administration. (Laughter) But what's the alternative? Microsoft actually did this experiment. They said, "Well, wait a minute. Everyone complains that we're adding so many features. Let's create a word processor that's just a word processor. Simple, pure, does not do web pages, is not a database." And it came out. It was called Microsoft Write. And none of you are nodding in acknowledgment because it died. It tanked. No one ever bought it. I call this the Sport Utility Principle. People like to surround themselves with unnecessary power, right? They don't need the database and the website, but they're like, "Well, I'll upgrade, because, I might, you know, I might need that someday." So the problem is: as you add more features, where are they going to go? Where are you going to stick them? You only have so many design tools. You can do buttons; you can do sliders, pop-up menus, sub-menus. But if you're not careful about how you choose, you wind up with this. (Laughter) This is an un-retouched -- this is not a joke -- un-retouched photo of Microsoft Word, the copy that you have, with all the toolbars open. You've obviously never opened all the toolbars, but all you have to type in is this little, teeny window down here. (Laughter) And we've arrived at the age of interface matrices, where there are so many features and options, you have to do two dimensions, you know: a vertical and a horizontal. You guys all complained about how Microsoft Word is always bulleting your lists and underlining your links automatically. The off switch is in there somewhere. I'm telling you, it's there! Part of the art of designing a simple, good interface, is knowing when to use which one of these features. Here is the log off dialogue box for Windows 2000. There are only four choices, so why are they in a pop-up menu? It's not like the rest of the screen is so full of other components that you need to collapse the choices. They could have put them all out in view. Here's Apple's take on the exact same dialogue box. (Applause) Thank you -- yes, I designed the dialogue box. No, no, no. Already, we can see that Apple and Microsoft have a severely divergent approach to software design. Microsoft's approach to simplicity tends to be: let's break it down; let's just make it more steps. There are these "wizards" everywhere. And you know, there's a new version of Windows coming out this fall. If they continue at this pace, there's absolutely no telling where they might wind up. (Laughter) (Applause) "Welcome to the Type-A-Word Wizard." OK, I'll bite. Let's click "Next" to continue. (Applause) From the drop-down menu, choose the first letter you want to type. OK. (Laughter) So there is a limit that we don't want to cross. So what is the answer? How do you pack in all these features in a simple, intelligent way? I believe in consistency with possible, real-world equivalents, trashcan folder when possible, label things mostly. But I beg of the designers here to break all those rules if they violate the biggest rule of all, which is intelligence. Now what do I mean by that? I'm going to give you some examples where intelligence makes something not consistent, but it's better. If you are buying something on the web, you're supposed to put in your address and you're supposed to choose which country you're from, OK? There are 200 countries in the world. We like to think of the Internet as a global village. I'm sorry; it's not one yet. It's mainly, like, the United States, Europe and Japan. So why is United States in the "U"s? (Laughter) You have to scroll, like, seven screens-full to get to it. Now it would be inconsistent to put United States first, but it would be intelligent. This one's been touched on before, but why in God's name do you shut down a Windows PC by clicking a button called "Start?" (Laughter) Here's another pet one of mine: you have a printer. Most of the time, you want to print one copy of your document, in page order, on that printer. So why in God's name do you see this every time you print? It's like a 747 shuttle cockpit. (Laughter) And one of the buttons at the bottom, you'll notice, is not "Print." (Laughter) (Applause) Now, I'm not saying that Apple is the only company who has embraced the cult of simplicity. Palm is also, especially in the old days, wonderful about this. I actually got to speak to Palm when they were flying high in the '90s, and after the talk, I met one of the employees. He says, "Nice talk." And I said, "Thank you, what do you do here?" He said, "I'm a tap counter." I'm like, "You're a what?" He goes, "Well, Jeff Hawkins, the CEO, says, 'If any task on the Palm Pilot takes more than three taps of the stylus, it's too long, and it has to be redesigned.' So I'm the tap counter." I'm going to show you an example of a company that does not have a tap counter. This is Microsoft Word. When you want to create a new blank document in Word -- it could happen! (Laughter) -- you go up to the File menu and you choose "New." Now, what happens when you choose "New?" Do you get a new blank document? You do not. On the opposite side of the monitor, a task bar appears, and somewhere in those links -- by the way, not at the top -- somewhere in those links is a button that makes you a new document. That is a company not counting taps. You know, I don't want to just stand here and make fun of Microsoft ... Audience: Go on. David Pogue: Yes, I do. (Laughter) (Applause) The Bill Gates song! I've been a geek forever and I wrote the very first DOS. I put my software and IBM together; I got profit and they got the loss. (Laughter) I write the code that makes the whole world run. I'm gettin' royalties from everyone. Sometimes it's garbage, but the press is snowed. You buy the box; I'll sell the code. Every software company is doing Microsoft's R&D. You can't keep a good idea down these days. Even Windows is a hack. We're kind of based loosely on the Mac. So it's big, so it's slow. You've got nowhere to go. I'm not doing this for praise. I write the code that fits the world today. Big mediocrity in every way. We've entered planet domination mode. You'll have no choice; you'll buy my code. I am Bill Gates and I write the code. (Applause) But actually, I believe there are really two Microsofts. There's the old one, responsible for Windows and Office. They're dying to throw the whole thing out and start fresh, but they can't. They're locked in because so many add-ons and other company stuff locks into the old 1982 chassis. But there's also a new Microsoft that's really doing good, simple interface designs. I liked the Media Center PC. I liked the Microsoft SPOT Watch. The Wireless Watch flopped miserably in the market, but it wasn't because it wasn't simply and beautifully designed. Let's put it this way: would you pay $10 a month to have a watch that has to be recharged every night, like your cell phone, and stops working when you leave your area code? (Laughter) The signs might indicate that the complexity crunch is only going to get worse. So is there any hope? The screens are getting smaller. People are illuminating, putting manuals in the boxes. The things are coming out at a faster pace. It's funny -- when Steve Jobs came back to Apple in 1997, after 12 years away, it was the MacWorld Expo -- he came to the stage in that black turtleneck and jeans, and he sort of did this. (Raises arms) The crowd went wild, but I'm like, where have I seen this before? I had just seen the movie "Evita" -- (Laughter) -- with Madonna, and I'm like, you know what, I've got to do one about Steve Jobs. It won't be easy. You'll think I'm strange. When I try to explain why I'm back after telling the press Apple's future is black. You won't believe me. All that you see is a kid in his teens who started out in a garage with only a buddy named Woz. (Laughter) You try rhyming with garage! (Laughter) Don't cry for me, Cupertino. (Laughter) The truth is, I never left you. (Laughter) I know the ropes now, know what the tricks are. I made a fortune over at Pixar. (Laughter) Don't cry for me, Cupertino. I've still got the drive and vision. I still wear sandals in any weather. It's just that these days, they're Gucci leather. (Laughter) (Applause) Thank you. So Steve Jobs had always believed in simplicity and elegance and beauty. And the truth is, for years I was a little depressed -- because Americans obviously did not value it, because the Mac had three percent market share and Windows had 95 percent market share. People did not think it was worth putting a price on it. So I was a little depressed -- then I heard Al Gore's talk, and I realized I didn't know the meaning of depressed. (Laughter) But it turns out I was wrong, right? Because the iPod came out, and it violated every bit of common wisdom. Other products cost less. Other products had more features. They had voice recorders and FM transmitters. The other products were backed by Microsoft with an open standard, not Apple's propriety standard. But the iPod won! This is the one they wanted. The lesson was: simplicity sells. And there are signs that the industry is getting the message. This is a little company that's done very well with simplicity and elegance. (Screen displays Google's homepage) The Sonos thing -- it's catching on. I've got just a couple examples. Physically, a really cool, elegant, thinking coming along lately. When you have a digital camera, how do you get the pictures back to your computer? Well, you either haul around a USB cable or you buy a card reader and haul that around. Either one, you're going to lose. What I do is, I take out the memory card, and I fold it in half, revealing USB contacts. I just stick it in the computer, offload the pictures, put it right back in the camera. I never have to lose anything. Here's another example. Chris, you're the source of all power. Will you be my power plug? Chris Anderson: Oh yeah. DP: Hold that and don't let go. You might have seen this: this is Apple's new laptop. This is the power cord. It hooks on like this. And I'm sure every one of you has done this at some point in your lives, or one of your children. You walk along -- and I'm about to pull this onto the floor. I don't care. It's a loaner. Here we go. Whoa! It's magnetic. It doesn't pull the laptop onto the floor. (Applause) In my very last example -- I do a lot of my work using speech recognition software, and you have to be kind of quiet because the software is nervous. "Speech recognition software is really great for doing emails very quickly. Period. Like, I get hundreds of them a day. Period. And it's not just what I dictate that it writes down. Period. I also use this feature called voice macros. Period." Correct "dissuade". "Not just." Okay, this is not an ideal situation, because it's getting the echo from the hall and stuff. But the point is: I can respond to people very quickly by saying a short word and having it write out a much longer thing. So if somebody sends me a fan letter, I'll say, "Thanks for that." (Laughter) (Applause) And conversely, if somebody sends me hate mail -- which happens daily -- I say, "Piss off." (Laughter) (Applause) So that's my dirty little secret. Don't tell anyone. (Laughter) So the point is, this a really interesting story. This is version eight of this software, and do you know what they put in version eight? No new features. It's never happened before in software! The company put no new features. They just said, "We'll make the software work right." Right. Because for years people had bought this software, tried it out -- 95 percent accuracy was all they got, which means one in 20 words is wrong -- and they put it in their drawer. And the company got sick of that, so they said, "This version, we're not going to do anything but make sure it's darned accurate." And so that's what they did. This cult of doing things right is starting to spread. My final advice for those of you who are consumers of this technology: remember, if it doesn't work it's not necessarily you, OK? It could be the design of the thing you're using. Be aware in life of good design and bad design. And if you're among the people who create the stuff, easy is hard. Pre-sweat the details for your audience. Count the taps. Remember, the hard part is not deciding what features to add -- it's deciding what to leave out. And best of all, your motivation is: simplicity sells. CA: Bravo. DP: Thank you very much. CA: Hear, hear! (Applause)

I don't know about you, but I haven't quite figured out exactly what technology means in my life. I've spent the past year thinking about what it really should be about. Should I be pro-technology? Should I embrace it full arms? Should I be wary? Like you, I'm very tempted by the latest thing. But at the other hand, a couple of years ago I gave up all of my possessions, sold all my technology -- except for a bicycle -- and rode across 3,000 miles on the U.S. back roads under the power of my one body, fuelled mostly by Twinkies and junk food. (Laughter) And I've since then tried to keep technology at arm's length in many ways, so it doesn't master my life. At the same time, I run a website on cool tools, where I issue a daily obsession of the latest things in technology. So I'm still perplexed about what the true meaning of technology is as it relates to humanity, as it relates to nature, as it relates to the spiritual. And I'm not even sure we know what technology is. And one definition of technology is that which is first recorded. This is the first example of the modern use of technology that I can find. It was the suggested syllabus for dealing with the Applied Arts and Science at Cambridge University in 1829. Before that, obviously, technology didn't exist. But obviously it did. I like one of the definitions that Alan Kay has for technology. He says technology is anything that was invented after you were born. (Laughter) So it sums up a lot of what we're talking about. Danny Hillis actually has an update on that -- he says technology is anything that doesn't quite work yet. (Laughter) Which also, I think, gets into a little bit of our current idea. But I was interested in another definition of technology. Something, again, that went back to something more fundamental. Something that was deeper. And as I struggled to understand that, I came up with a way of framing the question that seemed to work for me in my investigations. And I'm, this morning, going to talk about this for the first time. So this is a very rough attempt to think out loud. The question that I came up with was this question: what does technology want? And by that, I don't mean, does it want chocolate or vanilla? By what it wants, I mean, what are its inherent trends and biases? What are its tendencies over time? One way to think about this is thinking about biological organisms, which we've heard a lot about. And the trick that Richard Dawkins does, which is to say, to look at them as simply as genes, as vehicles for genes. So he's saying, what do genes want? The selfish gene. And I'm applying a similar trick to say, what if we looked at the universe in our culture through the eyes of technology? What does technology want? Obviously, this in an incomplete question, just as looking at an organism as only a gene is an incomplete way of looking at it. But it's still very, very productive. So I'm attempting to say, if we take technology's view of the world, what does it want? And I think once we ask that question we have to go back, actually, to life. Because obviously, if we keep extending the origins of technology far back, I think we come back to life at some point. So that's where I want to begin my little exploration, is in life. And like you heard from the previous speakers, we don't really know what life there is on Earth right now. We have really no idea. Craig Venter's tremendous and brilliant attempt to DNA sequence things in the ocean is great. Brian Farrell's work is all part of this agenda to try and actually discover all the species on Earth. And one of the things that we should do is just make a grid of the globe and randomly go and inspect all the places that the grid intersects, just to see what's on life. And if we did that with our little Martian probe, which we have not done on Earth, we would begin to see some incredible species. This is not on another planet. These are things that are hidden away on our planet. This is an ant that stores its colleagues' honey in its abdomen. Each one of these organisms that we've described -- that you've seen from Jamie and others, these magnificent things -- what they're doing, each one of them, is they're hacking the rules of life. I can't think of a single general principle of biology that does not have an exception somewhere by some organism. Every single thing that we can think of -- and if you heard Olivia's talk about the sexual habits, you'll realize that there isn't anything we can say that's true for all life, because every single one of them is hacking something about it. This is a solar-powered sea slug. It's a nudibranch that has incorporated chloroplast inside it to drive its energy. This is another version of that. This is a sea dragon, and the one on the bottom, the blue one, is a juvenile that has not yet swallowed the acid, has not yet taken in the brown-green algae pond scum into its body to give it energy. These are hacks, and if we looked at the general shape of the approaches to hacking life there are, current consensus, six kingdoms. Six different broad approaches: the plants, the animals, the fungi, the protests -- the little things -- the bacteria and the Archaea bacteria. The Archaeas. Those are the general approaches to life. That's one way to look at life on Earth today. But a more interesting way, the current way to take the long view, is to look at it in an evolutionary perspective. And here we have a view of evolution where rather than having evolution go over the linear time, we have it coming out from the center. So in the center is the most primitive, and this is a genealogical chart of all life on earth. This is all the same six kingdoms. You see 4,000 representative species, and you can see where we are. But what I like about this is it shows that every living organism on Earth today is equally evolved. Those fungi and bacteria are as highly evolved as humans. They've been around just as long and gone through just the same kind of trial and error to get here. But we see that each one of these is actually hacking, and has a different way of finding out how to do life. And if we take the long-term trends of life, if we begin to say, what does evolution want? There's several things that we see. One of the things about evolution is that nowhere on Earth have we ever been where we don't find life. We find life at the bottom of every long-term, long-distance drilling core into the center of rock that we bring up -- and there's bacteria in the pores of that rock. And wherever life is, it never retreats. It's ubiquitous and it wants to be more. More and more of the inert matter of the globe is being touched and animated by life. The second thing is is we see diversity. We also see specialization. We see the movement from a general-purpose cell to the more specific and specialized. And we see a drift towards complexity that's very intuitive. And actually, we have current data that does show that there is an actual drift towards complexity over time. And the last thing, I bring back this nudibranch. One of the things we see about life is that it moves from the inner to increasing sociability. And by that it means that there is more and more of life whose entire environment is other life. Like those chloroplast cells -- they're completely surrounded by other life. They never touch the inner matter. There is more and more co-evolution. And so the general, long-term trends of evolution are roughly these five: ubiquity, diversity, specialization, complexity and socialization. Now, I took that and said, OK, what are the long-term trends in technology? And again, my question is, what does technology want? And so, remarkably, I discovered that there's also a drift toward specialization. That we see there's a general hammer, and hammers become more and more specific over time. There's obviously diversity. Huge numbers of things. This is all the contents of a Japanese home. I actually had my daughter -- gave her a tally counter, and I gave her an assignment last summer to go around and count the number of species of technology in our household. And it came up with 6,000 different species of products. I did some research and found out that the King of England, Henry VIII, had only about 7,000 items in his household. And he was the King of England, and that was the entire wealth of England at the time. So we're seeing huge numbers of diversity in the kinds of things. This is a scene from Star Wars where the 3PO comes out and he sees machines making machines. How depraved! Well, this is actually what we're headed towards: world machines. And the technology is only being thrown out by other technologies. Most machines will only ever be in contact with other technology and not non-technology, or even life. And thirdly, the idea that machines are becoming biological and complex is at this point a cliche. And I'm happy to say, I was partly responsible for that cliche that machines are becoming biological, but that's pretty evident. So the major trends in technology evolution actually are the same as in biological evolution. The same drives that we see towards ubiquity, towards diversity, towards socialization, towards complexity. That is maybe not a big surprise because if we map out, say, the evolution of armor, you can actually follow a sort of an evolutionary-type cladistic tree. I suggest that, in fact, technology is the seventh kingdom of life. That its operations and how it works is so similar that we can think of it as the seventh kingdom. And so it would be sort of approximately up there, coming out of the animal kingdom. And if we were to do that, we would find out -- we could actually approach technology in this way. This is Niles Eldredge. He was the co-developer with Stephen Jay Gould of the theory of punctuated equilibrium. But as a sideline, he happens to collect cornets. He has one of the world's largest collections -- about 500 of them. And he has decided to treat them as if they were trilobites, or snails, and to do a morphological analysis, and try to derive their genealogical history over time. This is his chart, which is not quite published yet. But the most interesting aspect about this is that if you look at those red lines at the bottom, those indicate basically a parentage of a type of cornet that was no longer made. That does not happen in biology. When something is extinct, you can't have it as your parent. But that does happen in technology. And it turns out that that's so distinctive that you can actually look at this tree, and you can actually use it to determine that this is a technological system versus a biological system. In fact, this idea of resurrecting the whole idea is so important that I began to think about what happens with old technology. And it turns out that, in fact, technologies don't die. So I suggested this to an historian of science, and he said, "Well, what about, you know, come on, what about steam cars? They're not around anymore." Well actually, they are. In fact, they're so around that you can buy new parts for a Stanley steam automobile. And this is a website of a guy who's selling brand new parts for the Stanley automobile. And the thing that I liked is sort of this one-click, add-to-your-cart button -- (Laughter) -- for buying steam valves. I mean, it was just -- it was really there. And so, I began to think about, well, maybe that's just a random sample. Maybe I should do this sort of in a more conservative way. So I took the great big 1895 Montgomery Ward's catalog and I randomly went through it. And I took a page -- not quite a random page -- I took a page that was actually more difficult than others because lots of the pages are filled with things that are still being made. But I took this page and I said, how many of these things are still being made? And not antiques. I want to know how many of these things are still in production. And the answer is: all of them. All of them are still being produced. So you've got corn shellers. I don't know who needs a corn sheller. Be it corn shellers -- you've got ploughs; you've got fan mills; all these things -- and these are not, again, antiques. These are -- you can order these. You can go to the web and you can buy them now, brand-new made. So in a certain sense, technologies don't die. In fact, you can buy, for 50 bucks, a stone-age knife made exactly the same way that they were made 10,000 years ago. It's short, bone handle, 50 bucks. And in fact, what's important is that this information actually never died out. It's not just that it was resurrected. It's continued all along. And in Papua New Guinea, they were making stone axes until two decades ago, just as a course of practical matters. Even when we try to get rid of a technology, it's actually very hard. So we've all heard about the Amish giving up cars. We've heard about the Japanese giving up guns. We've heard about this and that. But I actually went back and took what I could find, the examples in history where there have been prohibitions against technology, and then I tried to find out when they came back in, because they always came back in. And it turns out that the time, the duration of when they were outlawed and prohibited, is decreasing over time. And that basically, you can delay technology, but you can't kill it. So this makes sense, because in a certain sense what culture is, is the accumulation of ideas. That's what it's for. It's so that ideas don't die out. And when we take that, we take this idea of what culture is doing and add it to what the long-term trajectory -- again, in life's evolution -- we find that each case -- each of the major transitions in life -- what they're really about is accelerating and changing the way in which evolution happens. They're actually changing the way in which ideas are generated. So all these steps in evolution are increasing, basically, the evolution of evolvability. So what's happening over time in life is that the ways in which you generate these new ideas, these new hacks, are increasing. And the real tricks are ways in which you kind of explore the way of exploring. And then what we see in the singularity, that prophesized by Kurzweil and others -- his idea that technology is accelerating evolution. It's accelerating the way in which we search for ideas. So if you have life hacking -- life means hacking, the game of survival -- then evolution is a way to extend the game by changing the rules of the game. And what technology is really about is better ways to evolve. That is what we call an "infinite game." That's the definition of "infinite game." A finite game is play to win, and an infinite game is played to keep playing. And I believe that technology is actually a cosmic force. The origins of technology was not in 1829, but was actually at the beginning of the Big Bang, and at that moment the entire huge billions of stars in the universe were compressed. The entire universe was compressed into a little quantum dot, and it was so tight in there, there was no room for any difference at all. That's the definition. There was no temperature. There was no difference whatsoever. And at the Big Bang, what it expanded was the potential for difference. So as it expands and as things expand what we have is the potential for differences, diversity, options, choices, opportunities, possibilities and freedoms. Those are all basically the same thing. And those are the things that technology brings us. That's what technology is bringing us: choices, possibilities, freedoms. That's what it's about. It's this expansion of room to make differences. And so a hammer, when we grab a hammer, that's what we're grabbing. And that's why we continue to grab technology -- because we want those things. Those things are good. Differences, freedom, choices, possibilities. And each time we make a new opportunity place, we're allowing a platform to make new ones. And I think it's really important. Because if you can imagine Mozart before the technology of the piano was invented -- what a loss to society there would be. Imagine Van Gogh being born before the technologies of cheap oil paints. Imagine Hitchcock before the technologies of film. Somewhere, today, there are millions of young children being born whose technology of self-expression has not yet been invented. We have a moral obligation to invent technology so that every person on the globe has the potential to realize their true difference. We want a trillion zillion species of one individuals. That's what technology really wants. I'm going to skip through some of the objections because I don't have answers to why there's deforestation. I don't have an answer to the fact that there seem to be bad technologies. I don't have an answer to how this impacts on our dignity, other than to suggest that maybe the seventh kingdom, because it's so close to what life is about, maybe we can bring it back and have it help us monitor life. Maybe in some ways the fact that what we're trying to do with technology is find a good home for it. It's a terrible thing to spray DDT on cotton fields, but it's a really good thing to use to eliminate millions of cases of death due to malaria in a small village. Our humanity is actually defined by technology. All the things that we think that we really like about humanity is being driven by technology. This is the infinite game. That's what we're talking about. You see, technology is a way to evolve the evolution. It's a way to explore possibilities and opportunities and create more. And it's actually a way of playing the game, of playing all the games. That's what technology wants. And so when I think about what technology wants, I think that it has to do with the fact that every person here -- and I really believe this -- every person here has an assignment. And your assignment is to spend your life discovering what your assignment is. That recursive nature is the infinite game. And if you play that well, you'll have other people involved, so even that game extends and continues even when you're gone. That is the infinite game. And what technology is is the medium in which we play that infinite game. And so I think that we should embrace technology because it is an essential part of our journey in finding out who we are. Thank you. (Applause)

If you think about the phone -- and Intel has tested a lot of the things I'm going to show you, over the last 10 years, in about 600 elderly households -- 300 in Ireland, and 300 in Portland -- trying to understand: How do we measure and monitor behavior in a medically meaningful way? And if you think about the phone, right, it's something that we can use for some incredible ways to help people actually take the right medication at the right time. We're testing these kinds of simple sensor-network technologies in the home so that any phone that a senior is already comfortable with can help them deal with their medications. And a lot of what they do is they pick up the phone, and it's our system whispering to them which pill they need to take, and they fake like they're having a conversation with a friend. And they're not embarrassed by a meds caddy that's ugly, that sits on their kitchen table and says, "I'm old. I'm frail." It's surreptitious technology that's helping them do a simple task of taking the right pill at the right time. Now, we also do some pretty amazing things with these phones. Because that moment when you answer the phone is a cognitive test every time that you do it. Think about it, all right? I'm going to answer the phone three different times. "Hello? Hey." All right? That's the first time. "Hello? Uh, hey." "Hello? Uh, who? Oh, hey." All right? Very big differences between the way I answered the phone the three times. And as we monitor phone usage by seniors over a long period of time, down to the tenths of a microsecond, that recognition moment of whether they can figure out that person on the other end is a friend and we start talking to them immediately, or they do a lot of what's called trouble talk, where they're like, "Wait, who is this? Oh." Right? Waiting for that recognition moment may be the best early indicator of the onset of dementia than anything that shows up clinically today. We call these behavioral markers. There's lots of others. Is the person going to the phone as quickly, when it rings, as they used to? Is it a hearing problem or is it a physicality problem? Has their voice gotten more quiet? We're doing a lot of work with people with Alzheimer's and particularly with Parkinson's, where that quiet voice that sometimes shows up with Parkinson's patients may be the best early indicator of Parkinson's five to 10 years before it shows up clinically. But those subtle changes in your voice over a long period of time are hard for you or your spouse to notice until it becomes so extreme and your voice has become so quiet. So, sensors are looking at that kind of voice. When you pick up the phone, how much tremor are you having, and what is that like, and what is that trend like over a period of time? Are you having more trouble dialing the phone than you used to? Is it a dexterity problem? Is it the onset of arthritis? Are you using the phone? Are you socializing less than you used to? And looking at that pattern. And what does that decline in social health mean, as a kind of a vital sign of the future? And then wow, what a radical idea, we -- except in the United States -- might be able to use this newfangled technology to actually interact with a nurse or a doctor on the other end of the line. Wow, what a great day that will be once we're allowed to actually do those kinds of things. So, these are what I would call behavioral markers. And it's the whole field that we've been trying to work on for the last 10 years at Intel. How do you put simple disruptive technologies, and the first of five phrases that I'm going to talk about in this talk? Behavioral markers matter. How do we change behavior? How do we measure changes in behavior in a meaningful way that's going to help us with prevention of disease, early onset of disease, and tracking the progression of disease over a long period of time? Now, why would Intel let me spend a lot of time and money, over the last 10 years, trying to understand the needs of seniors and start thinking about these kinds of behavioral markers? This is some of the field work that we've done. We have now lived with 1,000 elderly households in 20 countries over the last 10 years. We study people in Rochester, New York. We go live with them in the winter because what they do in the winter, and their access to healthcare, and how much they socialize, is very different than in the summer. If they have a hip fracture we go with them and we study their entire discharge experience. If they have a family member who is a key part of their care network, we fly and study them as well. So, we study the holistic health experience of 1,000 seniors over the last 10 years in 20 different countries. Why is Intel willing to fund that? It's because of the second slogan that I want to talk about. Ten years ago, when I started trying to convince Intel to let me go start looking at disruptive technologies that could help with independent living, this is what I called it: "Y2K + 10." You know, back in 2000, we were all so obsessed with paying attention to the aging of our computers, and whether or not they were going to survive the tick of the clock from 1999 to 2000, that we missed a moment that only demographers were paying attention to. It was right around New Years. And that switchover, when we had the larger number of older people on the planet, for the first time than younger people. For the first time in human history -- and barring aliens landing or some major other pandemic, that's the expectation from demographers, going forward. And 10 years ago it seemed like I had a lot of time to convince Intel to work on this. Right? Y2K + 10 was coming, the baby boomers starting to retire. Well folks, it's like we know these demographics here. This is a map of the entire world. It's like the lights are on, but nobody's home on this demographic Y2K + 10 problem. Right? I mean we sort of get it here, but we don't get it here, and we're not doing anything about it. The health reform bill is largely ignoring the realities of the age wave that's coming, and the implications for what we need to do to change not only how we pay for care, but deliver care in some radically different ways. And in fact, it's upon us. I mean you probably saw these headlines. This is Catherine Casey who is the first boomer to actually get Social Security. That actually occurred this year. She took early retirement. She was born one second after midnight in 1946. A retired school teacher, there she is with a Social Security administrator. The first boomer actually, we didn't even wait till 2011, next year. We're already starting to see early retirement occur this year. All right, so it's here. This Y2K + 10 problem is at our door. This is 50 tsunamis scheduled on the calendar, but somehow we can't sort of marshal our government and innovative forces to sort of get out in front of it and do something about it. We'll wait until it's more of a catastrophe, and react, as opposed to prepare for it. So, one of the reasons it's so challenging to prepare for this Y2K problem is, I want to argue, we have what I would call mainframe poisoning. Andy Grove, about six or seven years ago, he doesn't even know or remember this, in a Fortune Magazine article he used the phrase "mainframe healthcare," and I've been extending and expanding this. He saw it written down somewhere. He's like, "Eric that's a really cool concept." I was like, "Actually it was your idea. You said it in a Fortune Magazine article. I just extended it." You know, this is the mainframe. This mentality of traveling to and timesharing large, expensive healthcare systems actually began in 1787. This is the first general hospital in Vienna. And actually the second general hospital in Vienna, in about 1850, was where we started to build out an entire curriculum for teaching med students specialties. And it's a place in which we started developing architecture that literally divided the body, and divided care into departments and compartments. And it was reflected in our architecture, it was reflected in the way that we taught students, and this mainframe mentality persists today. Now, I'm not anti-hospital. With my own healthcare problems, I've taken drug therapies, I've traveled to this hospital and others, many, many times. But we worship the high hospital on a hill. Right? And this is mainframe healthcare. And just as 30 years ago we couldn't conceive that we would have the power of a mainframe computer that took up a room this size in our purses and on our belts, that we're carrying around in our cell phone today, and suddenly, computing, that used to be an expert driven system, it was a personal system that we all owned as part of our daily lives -- that shift from mainframe to personal computing is what we have to do for healthcare. We have to shift from this mainframe mentality of healthcare to a personal model of healthcare. We are obsessed with this way of thinking. When Intel does surveys all around the world and we say, "Quick response: healthcare." The first word that comes up is "doctor." The second that comes up is "hospital." And the third is "illness" or "sickness." Right? We are wired, in our imagination, to think about healthcare and healthcare innovation as something that goes into that place. Our entire health reform discussion right now, health I.T., when we talk with policy makers, equals "How are we going to get doctors using electronic medical records in the mainframe?" We're not thinking about how do we shift from the mainframe to the home. And the problem with this is the way we conceive healthcare. Right? This is a very reactive, crisis-driven system. We're doing 15-minute exams with patients. It's population-based. We collect a bunch of biological information in this artificial setting, and we fix them up, like Humpty-Dumpty all over again, and send them home, and hope -- we might hand them a brochure, maybe an interactive website -- that they do as asked and don't come back into the mainframe. And the problem is we can't afford it today, folks. We can't afford mainframe healthcare today to include the uninsured. And now we want to do a double-double of the age wave coming through? Business as usual in healthcare is broken and we've got to do something different. We've got to focus on the home. We've got to focus on a personal healthcare paradigm that moves care to the home. How do we be more proactive, prevention-driven? How do we collect vital signs and other kinds of information 24 by 7? How do we get a personal baseline about what's going to work for you? How do we collect not just biological data but behavioral data, psychological data, relational data, in and on and around the home? And how do we drive compliance to be a customized care plan that uses all this great technology that's around us to change our behavior? That's what we need to do for our personal health model. I want to give you a couple of examples. This is Mimi from one of our studies -- in her 90s, had to move out of her home because her family was worried about falls. Raise your hand if you had a serious fall in your household, or any of your loved ones, your parents or so forth. Right? Classic. Hip fracture often leads to institutionalization of a senior. This is what was happening to Mimi; the family was worried about it, moved her out of her own home into an assisted living facility. She tripped over her oxygen tank. Many people in this generation won't press the button, even if they have an alert call system, because they don't want to bother anybody, even though they've been paying 30 dollars a month. Boomers will press the button. Trust me. They're going to be pressing that button non-stop. Right? Mimi broke her pelvis, lay all night, all morning, finally somebody came in and found her, sent her to the hospital. They fixed her back up. She was never going to be able to move back into the assisted living. They put her into the nursing home unit. First night in the nursing home unit where she had been in the same assisted living facility, moved her from one bed to another, kind of threw her, rebroke her pelvis, sent her back to the hospital that she had just come from, no one read the chart, put her on Tylenol, which she is allergic to, broke out, got bedsores, basically, had heart problems, and died from the fall and the complications and the errors that were there. Now, the most frightening thing about this is this is my wife's grandmother. Now, I'm Eric Dishman. I speak English, I work for Intel, I make a good salary, I'm smart about falls and fall-related injuries -- it's an area of research that I work on. I have access to senators and CEOs. I can't stop this from happening. What happens if you don't have money, you don't speak English or don't have the kind of access to deal with these kinds of problems that inevitably occur? How do we actually prevent the vast majority of falls from ever occurring in the first place? Let me give you a quick example of work that we're doing to try to do exactly that. I've been wearing a little technology that we call Shimmer. It's a research platform. It has accelerometry. You can plug in a three-lead ECG. There is all kinds of sort of plug-and-play kind of Legos that you can do to capture, in the wild, in the real world, things like tremor, gait, stride length and those kinds of things. The problem is, our understanding of falls today, like Mimi, is get a survey in the mail three months after you fell, from the State, saying, "What were you doing when you fell?" That's sort of the state of the art. But with something like Shimmer, or we have something called the Magic Carpet, embedded sensors in carpet, or camera-based systems that we borrowed from sports medicine, we're starting for the first time in those 600 elderly households to collect actual kinematic motion data to understand: What are the subtle changes that are occurring that can show us that mom has become risk at falls? And most often we can do two interventions, fix the meds mix. I'm a qualitative researcher, but when I look at these data streams coming in from these homes, I can look at the data and tell you the day that some doctor prescribed them something that nobody else knew that they were on, because we see the changes in their patterns in the household. Right? These discoveries of behavioral markers, and behavioral changes are game changing, and like the discovery of the microscope because of our collecting data streams that we've actually never done before. This is an example in our TRIL Clinic in Ireland of -- actually what you're seeing is she's looking at data, in this picture, from the Magic Carpet. So, we have a little carpet that you can look at your amount of postural sway, and look at the changes in your postural sway over many months. Here's what some of this data might look like. This is actually sensor firings. These are two different subjects in our study. It's about a year's worth of data. The color represents different rooms they are in the house. This person on the left is living in their own home. This person on the right is actually living in an assisted living facility. I know this because look at how punctuated meal time is when they are no longer in their particular rooms here. Right? Now, this doesn't mean that much to you. But when we look at these cycles of data over a longer period of time -- and we're looking at everything from motion around different rooms in the house, to sort of micro-motions that Shimmer picks up, about gait and stride length -- these streams of data are starting to tell us things about behavioral patterns that we've never understood before. You can go to ORCATech.org -- it has nothing to do with whales, it's the Oregon Center for Aging and Technology -- to see more about that. The problem is, Intel is still one of the largest funders in the world of independent living technology research. I'm not bragging about how much we fund; it's how little anyone else actually pays attention to aging and funds innovation on aging, chronic disease management and independent living in the home. So, my mantra here, my fourth slogan is: 10,000 households or bust. We need to drive a national, if not international, Framingham-type heart study of independent living technologies, where we have 10,000 elderly connected households with broadband, full medical characterization, and a platform by which we can start to experiment and turn these from 20-household anecdotal studies that the universities fund, to large clinical trials that prove out the value of these technologies. So, 10,000 households or bust. These are just some of the households that we've done in the Intel studies. My fifth and final phrase: I have tried for two years, and there were moments when we were quite close, to make this healthcare reform bill be about reform from something and to something, from a mainframe model to a personal health model, or to mean something more than just a debate about the public option and how we're going to finance. It doesn't matter how we finance healthcare. We're going to figure something out for the next 10 years, and try it. No matter who pays for it, we better start doing care in a fundamentally different way and treating the home and the patient and the family member and the caregivers as part of these coordinated care teams and using disruptive technologies that are already here to do care in some pretty fundamental different ways. The president needs to stand up and say, at the end of a healthcare reform debate, "Our goal as a country is to move 50 percent of care out of institutions, clinics, hospitals and nursing homes, to the home, in 10 years." It's achievable. We should do it economically, we should do it morally, and we should do it for quality of life. But there is no goal within this health reform. It's just a mess today. So, you know, that's my last message to you. How do we set a going-to-the-moon goal of dealing with the Y2K +10 problem that's coming? It's not that innovation and technology is going to be the magic pill that cures all, but it's going to be part of the solution. And if we don't create a personal health movement, something that we're all aiming towards in reform, then we're going to move nowhere. So, I hope you'll turn this conference into that kind of movement forward. Thanks very much. (Applause)

You hear that this is the era of environment -- or biology, or information technology ... Well, it's the era of a lot of different things that we're in right now. But one thing for sure: it's the era of change. There's more change going on than ever has occurred in the history of human life on earth. And you all sort of know it, but it's hard to get it so that you really understand it. And I've tried to put together something that's a good start for this. I've tried to show in this -- though the color doesn't come out -- that what I'm concerned with is the little 50-year time bubble that you are in. You tend to be interested in a generation past, a generation future -- your parents, your kids, things you can change over the next few decades -- and this 50-year time bubble you kind of move along in. And in that 50 years, if you look at the population curve, you find the population of humans on the earth more than doubles and we're up three-and-a-half times since I was born. When you have a new baby, by the time that kid gets out of high school more people will be added than existed on earth when I was born. This is unprecedented, and it's big. Where it goes in the future is questioned. So that's the human part. Now, the human part related to animals: look at the left side of that. What I call the human portion -- humans and their livestock and pets -- versus the natural portion -- all the other wild animals and just -- these are vertebrates and all the birds, etc., in the land and air, not in the water. How does it balance? Certainly, 10,000 years ago, the civilization's beginning, the human portion was less than one tenth of one percent. Let's look at it now. You follow this curve and you see the whiter spot in the middle -- that's your 50-year time bubble. Humans, livestock and pets are now 97 percent of that integrated total mass on earth and all wild nature is three percent. We have won. The next generation doesn't even have to worry about this game -- it is over. And the biggest problem came in the last 25 years: it went from 25 percent up to that 97 percent. And this really is a sobering picture upon realizing that we, humans, are in charge of life on earth; we're like the capricious Gods of old Greek myths, kind of playing with life -- and not a great deal of wisdom injected into it. Now, the third curve is information technology. This is Moore's Law plotted here, which relates to density of information, but it has been pretty good for showing a lot of other things about information technology -- computers, their use, Internet, etc. And what's important is it just goes straight up through the top of the curve, and has no real limits to it. Now try and contrast these. This is the size of the earth going through that same -- (Laughter) -- frame. And to make it really clear, I've put all four on one graph. There's no need to see the little detailed words on it. That first one is humans-versus-nature; we've won, there's no more gain. Human population. And so if you're looking for growth industries to get into, that's not a good one -- protecting natural creatures. Human population is going up; it's going to continue for quite a while. Good business in obstetricians, morticians, and farming, housing, etc. -- they all deal with human bodies, which require being fed, transported, housed and so on. And the information technology, which connects to our brains, has no limit -- now, that is a wonderful field to be in. You're looking for growth opportunity? It's just going up through the roof. And then, the size of the Earth. Somehow making these all compatible with the Earth looks like a pretty bad industry to be involved with. So, that's the stage out of all this. I find, for reasons I don't understand, I really do have a goal. And the goal is that the world be desirable and sustainable when my kids reach my age -- and I think that's -- in other words, the next generation. I think that's a goal that we probably all share. I think it's a hopeless goal. Technologically, it's achievable; economically, it's achievable; politically, it means sort of the habits, institutions of people -- it's impossible. The institutions of the past with all their inertia are just irrelevant for the future, except they're there and we have to deal with them. I spend about 15 percent of my time trying to save the world, the other 85 percent, the usual -- and whatever else we devote ourselves to. And in that 15 percent, the main focus is on human mind, thinking skills, somehow trying to unleash kids from the straightjacket of school, which is putting information and dogma into them, get them so they really think, ask tough questions, argue about serious subjects, don't believe everything that's in the book, think broadly or creative. They can be. Our school systems are very flawed and do not reward you for the things that are important in life or for the survival of civilization; they reward you for a lot of learning and sopping up stuff. We can't go into that today because there isn't time -- it's a broad subject. One thing for sure, in the future there is an essential feature -- necessary, but not sufficient -- which is doing more with less. We've got to be doing things with more efficiency using less energy, less material. Your great-great grandparents got by on muscle power, and yet we all think there's this huge power that's essential for our lifestyle. And with all the wonderful technology we have we can do things that are much more efficient: conserve, recycle, etc. Let me just rush very quickly through things that we've done. Human-powered airplane -- Gossamer Condor sort of started me in this direction in 1976 and 77, winning the Kremer prize in aviation history, followed by the Albatross. And we began making various odd planes and creatures. Here's a giant flying replica of a pterosaur that has no tail. Trying to have it fly straight is like trying to shoot an arrow with the feathered end forward. It was a tough job, and boy it made me have a lot of respect for nature. This was the full size of the original creature. We did things on land, in the air, on water -- vehicles of all different kinds, usually with some electronics or electric power systems in them. I find they're all the same, whether its land, air or water. I'll be focusing on the air here. This is a solar-powered airplane -- 165 miles carrying a person from France to England as a symbol that solar power is going to be an important part of our future. Then we did the solar car for General Motors -- the Sunracer -- that won the race in Australia. We got a lot of people thinking about electric cars, what you could do with them. A few years later, when we suggested to GM that now is the time and we could do a thing called the Impact, they sponsored it, and here's the Impact that we developed with them on their programs. This is the demonstrator. And they put huge effort into turning it into a commercial product. With that preamble, let's show the first two-minute videotape, which shows a little airplane for surveillance and moving to a giant airplane. Narrator: A tiny airplane, the AV Pointer serves for surveillance -- in effect, a pair of roving eyeglasses. A cutting-edge example of where miniaturization can lead if the operator is remote from the vehicle. It is convenient to carry, assemble and launch by hand. Battery-powered, it is silent and rarely noticed. It sends high-resolution video pictures back to the operator. With onboard GPS, it can navigate autonomously, and it is rugged enough to self-land without damage. The modern sailplane is superbly efficient. Some can glide as flat as 60 feet forward for every foot of descent. They are powered only by the energy they can extract from the atmosphere -- an atmosphere nature stirs up by solar energy. Humans and soaring birds have found nature to be generous in providing replenishable energy. Sailplanes have flown over 1,000 miles, and the altitude record is over 50,000 feet. (Music) The Solar Challenger was made to serve as a symbol that photovoltaic cells can produce real power and will be part of the world's energy future. In 1981, it flew 163 miles from Paris to England, solely on the power of sunbeams, and established a basis for the Pathfinder. (Music) The message from all these vehicles is that ideas and technology can be harnessed to produce remarkable gains in doing more with less -- gains that can help us attain a desirable balance between technology and nature. The stakes are high as we speed toward a challenging future. Buckminster Fuller said it clearly: "there are no passengers on spaceship Earth, only crew. We, the crew, can and must do more with less -- much less." Paul MacCready: If we could have the second video, the one-minute, put in as quickly as you can, which -- this will show the Pathfinder airplane in some flights this past year in Hawaii, and will show a sequence of some of the beauty behind it after it had just flown to 71,530 feet -- higher than any propeller airplane has ever flown. It's amazing: just on the puny power of the sun -- by having a super lightweight plane, you're able to get it up there. It's part of a long-term program NASA sponsored. And we worked very closely with the whole thing being a team effort, and with wonderful results like that flight. And we're working on a bigger plane -- 220-foot span -- and an intermediate-size, one with a regenerative fuel cell that can store excess energy during the day, feed it back at night, and stay up 65,000 feet for months at a time. (Music) Ray Morgan's voice will come in here. There he's the project manager. Anything they do is certainly a team effort. He ran this program. Here's ... some things he showed as a celebration at the very end. Ray Morgan: We'd just ended a seven-month deployment of Hawaii. For those who live on the mainland, it was tough being away from home. The friendly support, the quiet confidence, congenial hospitality shown by our Hawaiian and military hosts -- (Music) this is starting -- made the experience enjoyable and unforgettable. PM: We have real-time IR scans going out through the Internet while the plane is flying. And it's exploring without polluting the stratosphere. That's its goal: the stratosphere, the blanket that really controls the radiation of the earth and permits life on earth to be the success that it is -- probing that is very important. And also we consider it as a sort of poor man's stationary satellite, because it can stay right overhead for months at a time, 2,000 times closer than the real GFC synchronous satellite. We couldn't bring one here to fly it and show you. But now let's look at the other end. In the video you saw that nine-pound or eight-pound Pointer airplane surveillance drone that Keenan has developed and just done a remarkable job. Where some have servos that have gotten down to, oh, 18 or 25 grams, his weigh one-third of a gram. And what he's going to bring out here is a surveillance drone that weighs about 2 ounces -- that includes the video camera, the batteries that run it, the telemetry, the receiver and so on. And we'll fly it, we hope, with the same success that we had last night when we did the practice. So Matt Keenan, just any time you're -- all right -- ready to let her go. But first, we're going to make sure that it's appearing on the screen, so you see what it sees. You can imagine yourself being a mouse or fly inside of it, looking out of its camera. Matt Keenan: It's switched on. PM: But now we're trying to get the video. There we go. MK: Can you bring up the house lights? PM: Yeah, the house lights and we'll see you all better and be able to fly the plane better. MK: All right, we'll try to do a few laps around and bring it back in. Here we go. (Applause) PM: The video worked right for the first few and I don't know why it -- there it goes. Oh, that was only a minute, but I think you'd be safe to have that near the end of the flight, perhaps. We get to do the classic. All right. If this hits you, it will not hurt you. (Laughter) OK. (Applause) Thank you very much. Thank you. (Applause) But now, as they say in infomercials, we have something much better for you, which we're working on: planes that are only six inches -- 15 centimeters -- in size. And Matt's plane was on the cover of Popular Science last month, showing what this can lead to. And in a while, something this size will have GPS and a video camera in it. We've had one of these fly nine miles through the air at 35 miles an hour with just a little battery in it. But there's a lot of technology going. There are just milestones along the way of some remarkable things. This one doesn't have the video in it, but you get a little feel from what it can do. OK, here we go. (Laughter) MK: Sorry. OK. (Applause) PM: If you can pass it down when you're done. Yeah, I think -- I lost a little orientation; I looked up into this light. It hit the building. And the building was poorly placed, actually. (Laughter) But you're beginning to see what can be done. We're working on projects now -- even wing-flapping things the size of hawk moths -- DARPA contracts, working with Caltech, UCLA. Where all this leads, I don't know. Is it practical? I don't know. But like any basic research, when you're really forced to do things that are way beyond existing technology, you can get there with micro-technology, nanotechnology. You can do amazing things when you realize what nature has been doing all along. As you get to these small scales, you realize we have a lot to learn from nature -- not with 747s -- but when you get down to the nature's realm, nature has 200 million years of experience. It never makes a mistake. Because if you make a mistake, you don't leave any progeny. We should have nothing but success stories from nature, for you or for birds, and we're learning a lot from its fascinating subjects. In concluding, I want to get back to the big picture and I have just two final slides to try and put it in perspective. The first I'll just read. At last, I put in three sentences and had it say what I wanted. Over billions of years on a unique sphere, chance has painted a thin covering of life -- complex, improbable, wonderful and fragile. Suddenly, we humans -- a recently arrived species, no longer subject to the checks and balances inherent in nature -- have grown in population, technology and intelligence to a position of terrible power. We now wield the paintbrush. And that's serious: we're not very bright. We're short on wisdom; we're high on technology. Where's it going to lead? Well, inspired by the sentences, I decided to wield the paintbrush. Every 25 years I do a picture. Here's the one -- tries to show that the world isn't getting any bigger. Sort of a timeline, very non-linear scale, nature rates and trilobites and dinosaurs, and eventually we saw some humans with caves ... Birds were flying overhead, after pterosaurs. And then we get to the civilization above the little TV set with a gun on it. Then traffic jams, and power systems, and some dots for digital. Where it's going to lead -- I have no idea. And so I just put robotic and natural cockroaches out there, but you can fill in whatever you want. This is not a forecast. This is a warning, and we have to think seriously about it. And that time when this is happening is not 100 years or 500 years. Things are going on this decade, next decade; it's a very short time that we have to decide what we are going to do. And if we can get some agreement on where we want the world to be -- desirable, sustainable when your kids reach your age -- I think we actually can reach it. Now, I said this was a warning, not a forecast. That was before -- I painted this before we started in on making robotic versions of hawk moths and cockroaches, and now I'm beginning to wonder seriously -- was this more of a forecast than I wanted? I personally think the surviving intelligent life form on earth is not going to be carbon-based; it's going to be silicon-based. And so where it all goes, I don't know. The one final bit of sparkle we'll put in at the very end here is an utterly impractical flight vehicle, which is a little ornithopter wing-flapping device that -- rubber-band powered -- that we'll show you. MK: 32 gram. Sorry, one gram. PM: Last night we gave it a few too many turns and it tried to bash the roof out also. It's about a gram. The tube there's hollow, about paper-thin. And if this lands on you, I assure you it will not hurt you. But if you reach out to grab it or hold it, you will destroy it. So, be gentle, just act like a wooden Indian or something. And when it comes down -- and we'll see how it goes. We consider this to be sort of the spirit of TED. (Applause) And you wonder, is it practical? And it turns out if I had not been -- (Laughter) (Applause) Unfortunately, we have some light bulb changes. We can probably get it down, but it's possible it's gone up to a greater destiny up there -- (Laughter) -- than it ever had. And I wanted to make -- (Applause) just -- (Applause) But I want to make just two points. One is, you think it's frivolous; there's nothing to it. And yet if I had not been making ornithopters like that, a little bit cruder, in 1939 -- a long, long time ago -- there wouldn't have been a Gossamer Condor, there wouldn't have been an Albatross, a Solar Challenger, there wouldn't be an Impact car, there wouldn't be a mandate on zero-emission vehicles in California. A lot of these things -- or similar -- would have happened some time, probably a decade later. I didn't realize at the time I was doing inquiry-based, hands-on things with teams, like they're trying to get in education systems. So I think that, as a symbol, it's important. And I believe that also is important. You can think of it as a sort of a symbol for learning and TED that somehow gets you thinking of technology and nature, and puts it all together in things that are -- that make this conference, I think, more important than any that's taken place in this country in this decade. Thank you. (Applause)

I'm a gamer, so I like to have goals. I like special missions and secret objectives. So here's my special mission for this talk: I'm going to try to increase the life span of every single person in this room by seven and a half minutes. Literally, you will live seven and half minutes longer than you would have otherwise, just because you watched this talk. Okay, some of you are looking a little bit skeptical. That's okay, because check it out -- I have math to prove that it is possible. And it won't make a lot of sense now. I'll explain it all later, just pay attention to the number at the bottom: plus-7.68245837 minutes that will be my gift to you if I'm successful in my mission. Now, you have a secret mission too. Your mission is to figure out how you want to spend your extra seven and a half minutes. And I think you should do something unusual with them, because these are bonus minutes. You weren't going to have them anyway. Now, because I'm a game designer, you might be thinking to yourself, I know what she wants us to do with those minutes, she wants us to spend them playing games. Now this is a totally reasonable assumption, given that I have made quite a habit of encouraging people to spend more time playing games. For example, in my first TEDTalk, I did propose that we should spend 21 billion hours a week as a planet playing video games. Now, 21 billion hours, it's a lot of time. It's so much time, in fact, that the number one unsolicited comment that I have heard from people all over the world since I gave that talk, is this: Jane, games are great and all, but on your deathbed, are you really going to wish you spent more time playing Angry Birds? This idea is so pervasive -- that games are a waste of time that we will come to regret -- that I hear it literally everywhere I go. For example, true story: Just a few weeks ago, this cab driver, upon finding out that a friend and I were in town for a game developer's conference, turned around and said -- and I quote -- "I hate games. Waste of life. Imagine getting to the end of your life and regretting all that time." Now, I want to take this problem seriously. I mean, I want games to be a force for good in the world. I don't want gamers to regret the time they spent playing, time that I encouraged them to spend. So I have been thinking about this question a lot lately. When we're on our deathbeds, will we regret the time we spent playing games? Now, this may surprise you, but it turns out there is actually some scientific research on this question. It's true. Hospice workers, the people who take care of us at the end of our lives, recently issued a report on the most frequently expressed regrets that people say when they are literally on their deathbeds. And that's what I want to share with you today -- the top five regrets of the dying. Number one: I wish I hadn't worked so hard. Number two: I wish I had stayed in touch with my friends. Number three: I wish I had let myself be happier. Number four: I wish I'd had the courage to express my true self. And number five: I wish I'd lived a life true to my dreams, instead of what others expected of me. Now, as far as I know, no one ever told one of the hospice workers, I wish I'd spent more time playing video games, but when I hear these top five regrets of the dying, I can't help but hear five deep human cravings that games actually help us fulfill. For example, I wish I hadn't worked so hard. For many people, this means, I wish I'd spent more time with my family, with my kids when they were growing up. Well, we know that playing games together has tremendous family benefits. A recent study from Brigham Young University School of Family life reported that parents who spend more time playing video games with their kids have much stronger real-life relationships with them. I wish I'd stayed in touch with my friends. Well, hundreds of millions of people use social games like FarmVille or Words With Friends to stay in daily contact with real-life friends and family. A recent study from [University of Michigan] showed that these games are incredibly powerful relationship-management tools. They help us stay connected with people in our social network that we would otherwise grow distant from, if we weren't playing games together. I wish I'd let myself be happier. Well, here I can't help but think of the groundbreaking clinical trials recently conducted at East Carolina University that showed that online games can outperform pharmaceuticals for treating clinical anxiety and depression. Just 30 minutes of online game play a day was enough to create dramatic boosts in mood and long-term increases in happiness. I wish I'd had the courage to express my true self. Well, avatars are a way to express our true selves, our most heroic, idealized version of who we might become. You can see that in this alter ego portrait by Robbie Cooper of a gamer with his avatar. And Stanford University has been doing research for five years now to document how playing a game with an idealized avatar changes how we think and act in real life, making us more courageous, more ambitious, more committed to our goals. I wish I'd led a life true to my dreams, and not what others expected of me. Are games doing this yet? I'm not sure, so I've left a question mark, a Super Mario question mark. And we're going to come back to this one. But in the mean time, perhaps you're wondering, who is this game designer to be talking to us about deathbed regrets? And it's true, I've never worked in a hospice, I've never been on my deathbed. But recently I did spend three months in bed, wanting to die. Really wanting to die. Now let me tell you that story. It started two years ago, when I hit my head and got a concussion. Now the concussion didn't heal properly, and after 30 days I was left with symptoms like nonstop headaches, nausea, vertigo, memory loss, mental fog. My doctor told me that in order to heal my brain, I had to rest it. So I had to avoid everything that triggered my symptoms. For me that meant no reading, no writing, no video games, no work or email, no running, no alcohol, no caffeine. In other words -- and I think you see where this is going -- no reason to live. Of course it's meant to be funny, but in all seriousness, suicidal ideation is quite common with traumatic brain injuries. It happens to one in three, and it happened to me. My brain started telling me, Jane, you want to die. It said, you're never going to get better. It said, the pain will never end. And these voices became so persistent and so persuasive that I started to legitimately fear for my life, which is the time that I said to myself after 34 days -- and I will never forget this moment -- I said, I am either going to kill myself or I'm going to turn this into a game. Now, why a game? I knew from researching the psychology of games for more than a decade that when we play a game -- and this is in the scientific literature -- we tackle tough challenges with more creativity, more determination, more optimism, and we're more likely to reach out to others for help. And I wanted to bring these gamer traits to my real-life challenge, so I created a role-playing recovery game called Jane the Concussion Slayer. Now this became my new secret identity, and the first thing I did as a slayer was call my twin sister -- I have an identical twin sister named Kelly -- and tell her, I'm playing a game to heal my brain, and I want you to play with me. This was an easier way to ask for help. She became my first ally in the game, my husband Kiyash joined next, and together we identified and battled the bad guys. Now this was anything that could trigger my symptoms and therefore slow down the healing process, things like bright lights and crowded spaces. We also collected and activated power-ups. This was anything I could do on even my worst day to feel just a little bit good, just a little bit productive. Things like cuddling my dog for 10 minutes, or getting out of bed and walking around the block just once. Now the game was that simple: Adopt a secret identity, recruit your allies, battle the bad guys, activate the power-ups. But even with a game so simple, within just a couple days of starting to play, that fog of depression and anxiety went away. It just vanished. It felt like a miracle. Now it wasn't a miracle cure for the headaches or the cognitive symptoms. That lasted for more than a year, and it was the hardest year of my life by far. But even when I still had the symptoms, even while I was still in pain, I stopped suffering. Now what happened next with the game surprised me. I put up some blog posts and videos online, explaining how to play. But not everybody has a concussion, obviously, not everyone wants to be "the slayer," so I renamed the game SuperBetter. And soon I started hearing from people all over the world who were adopting their own secret identity, recruiting their own allies, and they were getting "super better" facing challenges like cancer and chronic pain, depression and Crohn's disease. Even people were playing it for terminal diagnoses like ALS. And I could tell from their messages and their videos that the game was helping them in the same ways that it helped me. They talked about feeling stronger and braver. They talked about feeling better understood by their friends and family. And they even talked about feeling happier, even though they were in pain, even though they were tackling the toughest challenge of their lives. Now at the time, I'm thinking to myself, what is going on here? I mean, how could a game so trivial intervene so powerfully in such serious, and in some cases life-and-death, circumstances? I mean, if it hadn't worked for me, there's no way I would have believed it was possible. Well, it turns out there's some science here too. Some people get stronger and happier after a traumatic event. And that's what was happening to us. The game was helping us experience what scientists call post-traumatic growth, which is not something we usually hear about. We usually hear about post-traumatic stress disorder. But scientists now know that a traumatic event doesn't doom us to suffer indefinitely. Instead, we can use it as a springboard to unleash our best qualities and lead happier lives. Here are the top five things that people with post-traumatic growth say: My priorities have changed. I'm not afraid to do what makes me happy. I feel closer to my friends and family. I understand myself better. I know who I really am now. I have a new sense of meaning and purpose in my life. I'm better able to focus on my goals and dreams. Now, does this sound familiar? It should, because the top five traits of post-traumatic growth are essentially the direct opposite of the top five regrets of the dying. Now this is interesting, right? It seems that somehow, a traumatic event can unlock our ability to lead a life with fewer regrets. But how does it work? How do you get from trauma to growth? Or better yet, is there a way to get all the benefits of post-traumatic growth without the trauma, without having to hit your head in the first place? That would be good, right? I wanted to understand the phenomenon better, so I devoured the scientific literature, and here's what I learned. There are four kinds of strength, or resilience, that contribute to post-traumatic growth, and there are scientifically validated activities that you can do every day to build up these four kinds of resilience, and you don't need a trauma to do it. Now, I could tell you what these four types of strength are, but I'd rather you experience them firsthand. I'd rather we all start building them up together right now. So here's what we're going to do. We're going to play a quick game together. This is where you earn those seven and a half minutes of bonus life that I promised you earlier. All you have to do is successfully complete the first four SuperBetter quests. And I feel like you can do it. I have confidence in you. So, everybody ready? This is your first quest. Here we go. Pick one: Stand up and take three steps, or make your hands into fists, raise them over your head as high as you can for five seconds. Go! All right, I like the people doing both. You are overachievers. Very good. (Laughter) Well done, everyone. Now that is worth plus-one physical resilience, which means that your body can withstand more stress and heal itself faster. Now we know from the research that the number one thing you can do to boost your physical resilience is to not sit still. That's all it takes. Every single second that you are not sitting still, you are actively improving the health of your heart, and your lungs and brains. Everybody ready for your next quest? I want you to snap your fingers exactly 50 times, or count backwards from 100 by seven, like this: 100, 93 ... Go! (Snapping) Don't give up. (Snapping) Don't let the people counting down from 100 interfere with your counting to 50. (Laughter) Nice. Wow. That's the first time I've ever seen that. Bonus physical resilience. Well done, everyone. Now that's worth plus-one mental resilience, which means you have more mental focus, more discipline, determination and willpower. We know from the scientific research that willpower actually works like a muscle. It gets stronger the more you exercise it. So tackling a tiny challenge without giving up, even one as absurd as snapping your fingers exactly 50 times or counting backwards from 100 by seven is actually a scientifically validated way to boost your willpower. So good job. Quest number three. Pick one: Now because of the room we're in, fate's really determined this for you, but here are the two options. If you're inside, find a window and look out of it. If you're outside, find a window and look in. Or do a quick YouTube or Google image search for "baby [your favorite animal.]" Now, you could do this on your phones, or you could just shout out some baby animals, I'm going to find some and put them on the screen for us. So, what do we want to see? Sloth, giraffe, elephant, snake. Okay, let's see what we got. Baby dolphin and baby llamas. Everybody look. Got that? Okay, one more. Baby elephant. We're clapping for that? That's amazing. All right, now what we're just feeling there is plus-one emotional resilience, which means you have the ability to provoke powerful, positive emotions like curiosity or love, which we feel when we look at baby animals, when you need them most. And here's a secret from the scientific literature for you. If you can manage to experience three positive emotions for every one negative emotion over the course of an hour, a day, a week, you dramatically improve your health and your ability to successfully tackle any problem you're facing. And this is called the three-to-one positive emotion ratio. It's my favorite SuperBetter trick, so keep it up. All right, pick one, last quest: Shake someone's hand for six seconds, or send someone a quick thank you by text, email, Facebook or Twitter. Go! (Chatting) Looking good, looking good. Nice, nice. Keep it up. I love it! All right, everybody, that is plus-one social resilience, which means you actually get more strength from your friends, your neighbors, your family, your community. Now, a great way to boost social resilience is gratitude. Touch is even better. Here's one more secret for you: Shaking someone's hand for six seconds dramatically raises the level of oxytocin in your bloodstream, now that's the trust hormone. That means that all of you who just shook hands are biochemically primed to like and want to help each other. This will linger during the break, so take advantage of the networking opportunities. (Laughter) Okay, well you have successfully completed your four quests, so let's see if I've successfully completed my mission to give you seven and a half minutes of bonus life. And here's where I get to share one more little bit of science with you. It turns out that people who regularly boost these four types of resilience -- physical, mental, emotional and social -- live 10 years longer than everyone else. So this is true. If you are regularly achieving the three-to-one positive emotion ratio, if you are never sitting still for more than an hour at a time, if you are reaching out to one person you care about every single day, if you are tackling tiny goals to boost your willpower, you will live 10 years longer than everyone else, and here's where that math I showed you earlier comes in. So, the average life expectancy in the U.S. and the U.K. is 78.1 years, but we know from more than 1,000 peer-reviewed scientific studies that you can add 10 years of life to that by boosting your four types of resilience. So every single year that you are boosting your four types of resilience, you're actually earning .128 more years of life or 46 more days of life, or 67,298 more minutes of life, which means every single day, you are earning 184 minutes of life, or every single hour that you are boosting your four types of resilience, like we just did together, you are earning 7.68245837 more minutes of life. Congratulations, those seven and a half minutes are all yours. You totally earned them. (Applause) Yeah! Awesome. Wait, wait, wait. You still have your special mission, your secret mission. How are you going to spend these seven and a half minutes of bonus life? Well, here's my suggestion. These seven and a half bonus minutes are kind of like genie's wishes. You can use your first wish to wish for a million more wishes. Pretty clever, right? So, if you spend these seven and a half minutes today doing something that makes you happy, or that gets you physically active, or puts you in touch with someone you care about, or even just tackling a tiny challenge, you are going to boost your resilience, so you're going to earn more minutes. And the good news is, you can keep going like that. Every hour of the day, every day of your life, all the way to your deathbed, which will now be 10 years later than it would have otherwise. And when you get there, more than likely, you will not have any of those top five regrets, because you will have built up the strength and resilience to lead a life truer to your dreams. And with 10 extra years, you might even have enough time to play a few more games. Thank you. (Applause)

I'm going to talk about a technology that we're developing at Oxford now, that we think is going to change the way that computer games and Hollywood movies are being made. That technology is simulating humans. It's simulated humans with a simulated body and a simulated nervous system to control that body. Now, before I talk more about that technology, let's have a quick look at what human characters look like at the moment in computer games. This is a clip from a game called "Grand Theft Auto 3." We already saw that briefly yesterday. And what you can see is -- it is actually a very good game. It's one of the most successful games of all time. But what you'll see is that all the animations in this game are very repetitive. They pretty much look the same. I've made him run into a wall here, over and over again. And you can see he looks always the same. The reason for that is that these characters are actually not real characters. They are a graphical visualization of a character. To produce these animations, an animator at a studio has to anticipate what's going to happen in the actual game, and then has to animate that particular sequence. So, he or she sits down, animates it, and tries to anticipate what's going to happen, and then these particular animations are just played back at appropriate times in the computer game. Now, the result of that is that you can't have real interactivity. All you have is animations that are played back at more or less the appropriate times. It also means that games aren't really going to be as surprising as they could be, because you only get out of it, at least in terms of the character, what you actually put into it. There's no real emergence there. And thirdly, as I said, most of the animations are very repetitive because of that. Now, the only way to get around that is to actually simulate the human body and to simulate that bit of the nervous system of the brain that controls that body. And maybe, if I could have you for a quick demonstration to show what the difference is -- because, I mean, it's very, very trivial. If I push Chris a bit, like this, for example, he'll react to it. If I push him from a different angle, he'll react to it differently, and that's because he has a physical body, and because he has the motor skills to control that body. It's a very trivial thing. It's not something you get in computer games at the moment, at all. Thank you very much. Chris Anderson: That's it? Torsten Reil: That's it, yes. So, that's what we're trying to simulate -- not Chris specifically, I should say, but humans in general. Now, we started working on this a while ago at Oxford University, and we tried to start very simply. What we tried to do was teach a stick figure how to walk. That stick figure is physically stimulated. You can see it here on the screen. So, it's subject to gravity, has joints, etc. If you just run the simulation, it will just collapse, like this. The tricky bit is now to put an AI controller in it that actually makes it work. And for that, we use the neural network, which we based on that part of the nervous system that we have in our spine that controls walking in humans. It's called the central pattern generator. So, we simulated that as well, and then the really tricky bit is to teach that network how to walk. For that we used artificial evolution -- genetic algorithms. We heard about those already yesterday, and I suppose that most of you are familiar with that already. But, just briefly, the concept is that you create a large number of different individuals -- neural networks, in this case -- all of which are random at the beginning. You hook these up -- in this case, to the virtual muscles of that two-legged creature here -- and hope that it does something interesting. At the beginning, they're all going to be very boring. Most of them won't move at all, but some of them might make a tiny step. Those are then selected by the algorithm, reproduced with mutation and recombinations to introduce sex as well. And you repeat that process over and over again, until you have something that walks -- in this case, in a straight line, like this. So that was the idea behind this. When we started this, I set up the simulation one evening. It took about three to four hours to run the simulation. I got up the next morning, went to the computer and looked at the results, and was hoping for something that walked in a straight line, like I've just demonstrated, and this is what I got instead. (Laughter) So, it was back to the drawing board for us. We did get it to work eventually, after tweaking a bit here and there. And this is an example of a successful evolutionary run. So, what you'll see in a moment is a very simple biped that's learning how to walk using artificial evolution. At the beginning, it can't walk at all, but it will get better and better over time. So, this is the one that can't walk at all. (Laughter) Now, after five generations of applying evolutionary process, the genetic algorithm is getting a tiny bit better. (Laughter) Generation 10 and it'll take a few steps more -- still not quite there. But now, after generation 20, it actually walks in a straight line without falling over. That was the real breakthrough for us. It was, academically, quite a challenging project, and once we had reached that stage, we were quite confident that we could try and do other things as well with this approach -- actually simulating the body and simulating that part of the nervous system that controls it. Now, at this stage, it also became clear that this could be very exciting for things like computer games or online worlds. What you see here is the character standing there, and there's an obstacle that we put in its way. And what you see is, it's going to fall over the obstacle. Now, the interesting bit is, if I move the obstacle a tiny bit to the right, which is what I'm doing now, here, it will fall over it in a completely different way. And again, if you move the obstacle a tiny bit, it'll again fall differently. (Laughter) Now, what you see, by the way, at the top there, are some of the neural activations being fed into the virtual muscles. Okay. That's the video. Thanks. Now, this might look kind of trivial, but it's actually very important because this is not something you get at the moment in any interactive or any virtual worlds. Now, at this stage, we decided to start a company and move this further, because obviously this was just a very simple, blocky biped. What we really wanted was a full human body. So we started the company. We hired a team of physicists, software engineers and biologists to work on this, and the first thing we had to work on was to create the human body, basically. It's got to be relatively fast, so you can run it on a normal machine, but it's got to be accurate enough, so it looks good enough, basically. So we put quite a bit of biomechanical knowledge into this thing, and tried to make it as realistic as possible. What you see here on the screen right now is a very simple visualization of that body. I should add that it's very simple to add things like hair, clothes, etc., but what we've done here is use a very simple visualization, so you can concentrate on the movement. Now, what I'm going to do right now, in a moment, is just push this character a tiny bit and we'll see what happens. Nothing really interesting, basically. It falls over, but it falls over like a rag doll, basically. The reason for that is that there's no intelligence in it. It becomes interesting when you put artificial intelligence into it. So, this character now has motor skills in the upper body -- nothing in the legs yet, in this particular one. But what it will do -- I'm going to push it again. It will realize autonomously that it's being pushed. It's going to stick out its hands. It's going to turn around into the fall, and try and catch the fall. So that's what you see here. Now, it gets really interesting if you then add the AI for the lower part of the body as well. So here, we've got the same character. I'm going to push it a bit harder now, harder than I just pushed Chris. But what you'll see is -- it's going to receive a push now from the left. What you see is it takes steps backwards, it tries to counter-balance, it tries to look at the place where it thinks it's going to land. I'll show you this again. And then, finally hits the floor. Now, this becomes really exciting when you push that character in different directions, again, just as I've done. That's something that you cannot do right now. At the moment, you only have empty computer graphics in games. What this is now is a real simulation. That's what I want to show you now. So, here's the same character with the same behavior I've just shown you, but now I'm just going to push it from different directions. First, starting with a push from the right. This is all slow motion, by the way, so we can see what's going on. Now, the angle will have changed a tiny bit, so you can see that the reaction is different. Again, a push, now this time from the front. And you see it falls differently. And now from the left -- and it falls differently. That was really exciting for us to see that. That was the first time we've seen that. This is the first time the public sees this as well, because we have been in stealth mode. I haven't shown this to anybody yet. Now, just a fun thing: what happens if you put that character -- this is now a wooden version of it, but it's got the same AI in it -- but if you put that character on a slippery surface, like ice. We just did that for a laugh, just to see what happens. (Laughter) And this is what happens. (Laughter) (Applause) It's nothing we had to do about this. We just took this character that I just talked about, put it on a slippery surface, and this is what you get out of it. And that's a really fascinating thing about this approach. Now, when we went to film studios and games developers and showed them that technology, we got a very good response. And what they said was, the first thing they need immediately is virtual stuntmen. Because stunts are obviously very dangerous, they're very expensive, and there are a lot of stunt scenes that you cannot do, obviously, because you can't really allow the stuntman to be seriously hurt. So, they wanted to have a digital version of a stuntman and that's what we've been working on for the past few months. And that's our first product that we're going to release in a couple of weeks. So, here are just a few very simple scenes of the guy just being kicked. That's what people want. That's what we're giving them. (Laughter) You can see, it's always reacting. This is not a dead body. This is a body who basically, in this particular case, feels the force and tries to protect its head. Only, I think it's quite a big blow again. You feel kind of sorry for that thing, and we've seen it so many times now that we don't really care any more. (Laughter) There are much worse videos than this, by the way, which I have taken out, but ... Now, here's another one. What people wanted as a behavior was to have an explosion, a strong force applied to the character, and have the character react to it in midair. So that you don't have a character that looks limp, but actually a character that you can use in an action film straight away, that looks kind of alive in midair as well. So this character is going to be hit by a force, it's going to realize it's in the air, and it's going to try and, well, stick out its arm in the direction where it's landing. That's one angle; here's another angle. We now think that the realism we're achieving with this is good enough to be used in films. And let's just have a look at a slightly different visualization. This is something I just got last night from an animation studio in London, who are using our software and experimenting with it right now. So this is exactly the same behavior that you saw, but in a slightly better rendered version. So if you look at the character carefully, you see there are lots of body movements going on, none of which you have to animate like in the old days. Animators had to actually animate them. This is all happening automatically in the simulation. This is a slightly different angle, and again a slow motion version of this. This is incredibly quick. This is happening in real time. You can run this simulation in real time, in front of your eyes, change it, if you want to, and you get the animation straight out of it. At the moment, doing something like this by hand would take you probably a couple of days. This is another behavior they requested. I'm not quite sure why, but we've done it anyway. It's a very simple behavior that shows you the power of this approach. In this case, the character's hands are fixed to a particular point in space, and all we've told the character to do is to struggle. And it looks organic. It looks realistic. You feel kind of sorry for the guy. It's even worse -- and that is another video I just got last night -- if you render that a bit more realistically. Now, I'm showing this to you just to show you how organic it actually can feel, how realistic it can look. And this is all a physical simulation of the body, using AI to drive virtual muscles in that body. Now, one thing which we did for a laugh was to create a slightly more complex stunt scene, and one of the most famous stunts is the one where James Bond jumps off a dam in Switzerland and then is caught by a bungee. Got a very short clip here. Yes, you can just about see it here. In this case, they were using a real stunt man. It was a very dangerous stunt. It was just voted, I think in the Sunday Times, as one of the most impressive stunts. Now, we've just tried and -- looked at our character and asked ourselves, "Can we do that ourselves as well?" Can we use the physical simulation of the character, use artificial intelligence, put that artificial intelligence into the character, drive virtual muscles, simulate the way he jumps off the dam, and then skydive afterwards, and have him caught by a bungee afterwards? We did that. It took about altogether just two hours, pretty much, to create the simulation. And that's what it looks like, here. Now, this could do with a bit more work. It's still very early stages, and we pretty much just did this for a laugh, just to see what we'd get out of it. But what we found over the past few months is that this approach -- that we're pretty much standard upon -- is incredibly powerful. We are ourselves surprised what you actually get out of the simulations. There's very often very surprising behavior that you didn't predict before. There's so many things we can do with this right now. The first thing, as I said, is going to be virtual stuntmen. Several studios are using this software now to produce virtual stuntmen, and they're going to hit the screen quite soon, actually, for some major productions. The second thing is video games. With this technology, video games will look different and they will feel very different. For the first time, you'll have actors that really feel very interactive, that have real bodies that really react. I think that's going to be incredibly exciting. Probably starting with sports games, which are going to become much more interactive. But I particularly am really excited about using this technology in online worlds, like there, for example, that Tom Melcher has shown us. The degree of interactivity you're going to get is totally different, I think, from what you're getting right now. A third thing we are looking at and very interested in is simulation. We've been approached by several simulation companies, but one project we're particularly excited about, which we're starting next month, is to use our technology -- and in particular, the walking technology -- to help aid surgeons who work on children with cerebral palsy, to predict the outcome of operations on these children. As you probably know, it's very difficult to predict what the outcome of an operation is if you try and correct the gait. The classic quote is, I think, it's unpredictable at best, is what people think right now, is the outcome. Now, what we want to do with our software is allow our surgeons to have a tool. We're going to simulate the gait of a particular child and the surgeon can then work on that simulation and try out different ways to improve that gait, before he actually commits to an actual surgery. That's one project we're particularly excited about, and that's going to start next month. Just finally, this is only just the beginning. We can only do several behaviors right now. The AI isn't good enough to simulate a full human body. The body yes, but not all the motor skills that we have. And, I think, we're only there if we can have something like ballet dancing. Right now, we don't have that but I'm very sure that we will be able to do that at some stage. We do have one unintentional dancer actually, the last thing I'm going to show you. This was an AI contour that was produced and evolved -- half-evolved, I should say -- to produce balance, basically. So, you kick the guy and the guy's supposed to counter-balance. That's what we thought was going to come out of this. But this is what emerged out of it, in the end. (Music) Bizarrely, this thing doesn't have a head. I'm not quite sure why. So, this was not something we actually put in there. He just started to create that dance himself. He's actually a better dancer than I am, I have to say. And what you see after a while -- I think he even goes into a climax right at the end. And I think -- there you go. (Laughter) So, that all happened automatically. We didn't put that in there. That's just the simulation creating this itself, basically. So it's just -- (Applause) Thanks. Not quite John Travolta yet, but we're working on that as well, so thanks very much for your time. Thanks. (Applause) CA: Incredible. That was really incredible. TR: Thanks.

What's happening in genomics, and how this revolution is about to change everything we know about the world, life, ourselves, and how we think about them. If you saw 2001: A Space Odyssey, and you heard the boom, boom, boom, boom, and you saw the monolith, you know, that was Arthur C. Clarke's representation that we were at a seminal moment in the evolution of our species. In this case, it was picking up bones and creating a tool, using it as a tool, which meant that apes just, sort of, running around and eating and doing each other figured out they can make things if they used a tool. And that moved us to the next level. And, you know, we in the last 30 years in particular have seen this acceleration in knowledge and technology, and technology has bred more knowledge and given us tools. And we've seen many seminal moments. We've seen the creation of small computers in the '70s and early '80s, and who would have thought back then that every single person would not have just one computer but probably 20, in your home, and in not just your P.C. but in every device -- in your washing machine, your cell phone. You're walking around; your car has 12 microprocessors. Then we go along and create the Internet and connect the world together; we flatten the world. We've seen so much change, and we've given ourselves these tools now -- these high-powered tools -- that are allowing us to turn the lens inward into something that is common to all of us, and that is a genome. How's your genome today? Have you thought about it lately? Heard about it, at least? You probably hear about genomes these days. I thought I'd take a moment to tell you what a genome is. It's, sort of, like if you ask people, Well, what is a megabyte or megabit? And what is broadband? People never want to say, I really don't understand. So, I will tell you right off of the bat. You've heard of DNA; you probably studied a little bit in biology. A genome is really a description for all of the DNA that is in a living organism. And one thing that is common to all of life is DNA. It doesn't matter whether you're a yeast; it doesn't matter whether you're a mouse; doesn't matter whether you're a fly; we all have DNA. The DNA is organized in words, call them: genes and chromosomes. And when Watson and Crick in the '50s first decoded this beautiful double helix that we know as the DNA molecule -- very long, complicated molecule -- we then started on this journey to understand that inside of that DNA is a language that determines the characteristics, our traits, what we inherit, what diseases we may get. We've also along the way discovered that this is a very old molecule, that all of the DNA in your body has been around forever, since the beginning of us, of us as creatures. There is a historical archive. Living in your genome is the history of our species, and you as an individual human being, where you're from, going back thousands and thousands and thousands of years, and that's now starting to be understood. But also, the genome is really the instruction manual. It is the program. It is the code of life. It is what makes you function; it is what makes every organism function. DNA is a very elegant molecule. It's long and it's complicated. Really all you have to know about it is that there's four letters: A, T, C, G; they represent the name of a chemical. And with these four letters, you can create a language: a language that can describe anything, and very complicated things. You know, they are generally put together in pairs, creating a word or what we call base pairs. And you would, you know, when you think about it, four letters, or the representation of four things, makes us work. And that may not sound very intuitive, but let me flip over to something else you know about, and that's computers. Look at this screen here and, you know, you see pictures and you see words, but really all there are are ones and zeros. The language of technology is binary; you've probably heard that at some point in time. Everything that happens in digital is converted, or a representation, of a one and a zero. So, when you're listening to iTunes and your favorite music, that's really just a bunch of ones and zeros playing very quickly. When you're seeing these pictures, it's all ones and zeros, and when you're talking on your telephone, your cell phone, and it's going over the network, your voice is all being turned into ones and zeros and magically whizzed around. And look at all the complex things and wonderful things we've been able to create with just a one and a zero. Well, now you ramp that up to four, and you have a lot of complexity, a lot of ways to describe mechanisms. So, let's talk about what that means. So, if you look at a human genome, they consist of 3.2 billion of these base pairs. That's a lot. And they mix up in all different fashions, and that makes you a human being. If you convert that to binary, just to give you a little bit of sizing, we're actually smaller than the program Microsoft Office. It's not really all that much data. I will also tell you we're at least as buggy. (Laughter) This here is a bug in my genome that I have struggled with for a long, long time. When you get sick, it is a bug in your genome. In fact, many, many diseases we have struggled with for a long time, like cancer, we haven't been able to cure because we just don't understand how it works at the genomic level. We are starting to understand that. So, up to this point we tried to fix it by using what I call shit-against-the-wall pharmacology, which means, well, let's just throw chemicals at it, and maybe it's going to make it work. But if you really understand why does a cell go from normal cell to cancer? What is the code? What are the exact instructions that are making it do that? then you can go about the process of trying to fix it and figure it out. So, for your next dinner over a great bottle of wine, here's a few factoids for you. We actually have about 24,000 genes that do things. We have about a hundred, 120,000 others that don't appear to function every day, but represent this archival history of how we used to work as a species going back tens of thousands of years. You might also be interested in knowing that a mouse has about the same amount of genes. They recently sequenced Pinot Noir, and it also has about 30,000 genes, so the number of genes you have may not necessarily represent the complexity or the evolutionary order of any particular species. Now, look around: just look next to your neighbor, look forward, look backward. We all look pretty different. A lot of very handsome and pretty people here, skinny, chubby, different races, cultures. We are all 99.9% genetically equal. It is one one-hundredth of one percent of genetic material that makes the difference between any one of us. That's a tiny amount of material, but the way that ultimately expresses itself is what makes changes in humans and in all species. So, we are now able to read genomes. The first human genome took 10 years, three billion dollars. It was done by Dr. Craig Venter. And then James Watson's -- one of the co-founders of DNA -- genome was done for two million dollars, and in just two months. And if you think about the computer industry and how we've gone from big computers to little ones and how they get more powerful and faster all the time, the same thing is happening with gene sequencing now: we are on the cusp of being able to sequence human genomes for about 5,000 dollars in about an hour or a half-hour; you will see that happen in the next five years. And what that means is, you are going to walk around with your own personal genome on a smart card. It will be here. And when you buy medicine, you won't be buying a drug that's used for everybody. You will give your genome to the pharmacist, and your drug will be made for you and it will work much better than the ones that were -- you won't have side effects. All those side effects, you know, oily residue and, you know, whatever they say in those commercials: forget about that. They're going to make all that stuff go away. What does a genome look like? Well, there it is. It is a long, long series of these base pairs. If you saw the genome for a mouse or for a human it would look no different than this, but what scientists are doing now is they're understanding what these do and what they mean. Because what Nature is doing is double-clicking all the time. In other words, the first couple of sentences here, assuming this is a grape plant: make a root, make a branch, create a blossom. In a human being, down in here it could be: make blood cells, start cancer. For me it may be: every calorie you consume, you conserve, because I come from a very cold climate. For my wife: eat three times as much and you never put on any weight. It's all hidden in this code, and it's starting to be understood at breakneck pace. So, what can we do with genomes now that we can read them, now that we're starting to have the book of life? Well, there's many things. Some are exciting. Some people will find very scary. I will tell you a couple of things that will probably make you want to projectile puke on me, but that's okay. So, you know, we now can learn the history of organisms. You can do a very simple test: scrape your cheek; send it off. You can find out where your relatives come from; you can do your genealogy going back thousands of years. We can understand functionality. This is really important. We can understand, for example, why we create plaque in our arteries, what creates the starchiness inside of a grain, why does yeast metabolize sugar and produce carbon dioxide. We can also look at, at a grander scale, what creates problems, what creates disease, and how we may be able to fix them. Because we can understand this, we can fix them, make better organisms. Most importantly, what we're learning is that Nature has provided us a spectacular toolbox. The toolbox exists. An architect far better and smarter than us has given us that toolbox, and we now have the ability to use it. We are now not just reading genomes; we are writing them. This company, Synthetic Genomics, I'm involved with, created the first full synthetic genome for a little bug, a very primitive creature called Mycoplasma genitalium. If you have a UTI, you've probably -- or ever had a UTI -- you've come in contact with this little bug. Very simple -- only has about 246 genes -- but we were able to completely synthesize that genome. Now, you have the genome and you say to yourself, So, if I plug this synthetic genome -- if I pull the old one out and plug it in -- does it just boot up and live? Well, guess what. It does. Not only does it do that; if you took the genome -- that synthetic genome -- and you plugged it into a different critter, like yeast, you now turn that yeast into Mycoplasma. It's, sort of, like booting up a PC with a Mac O.S. software. Well, actually, you could do it the other way. So, you know, by being able to write a genome and plug it into an organism, the software, if you will, changes the hardware. And this is extremely profound. So, last year the French and Italians announced they got together and they went ahead and they sequenced Pinot Noir. The genomic sequence now exists for the entire Pinot Noir organism, and they identified, once again, about 29,000 genes. They have discovered pathways that create flavors, although it's very important to understand that those compounds that it's cranking out have to match a receptor in our genome, in our tongue, for us to understand and interpret those flavors. They've also discovered that there's a heck of a lot of activity going on producing aroma as well. They've identified areas of vulnerability to disease. They now are understanding, and the work is going on, exactly how this plant works, and we have the capability to know, to read that entire code and understand how it ticks. So, then what do you do? Knowing that we can read it, knowing that we can write it, change it, maybe write its genome from scratch. So, what do you do? Well, one thing you could do is what some people might call Franken-Noir. (Laughter) We can build a better vine. By the way, just so you know: you get stressed out about genetically modified organisms; there is not one single vine in this valley or anywhere that is not genetically modified. They're not grown from seeds; they're grafted into root stock; they would not exist in nature on their own. So, don't worry about, don't stress about that stuff. We've been doing this forever. So, we could, you know, focus on disease resistance; we can go for higher yields without necessarily having dramatic farming techniques to do it, or costs. We could conceivably expand the climate window: we could make Pinot Noir grow maybe in Long Island, God forbid. (Laughter) We could produce better flavors and aromas. You want a little more raspberry, a little more chocolate here or there? All of these things could conceivably be done, and I will tell you I'd pretty much bet that it will be done. But there's an ecosystem here. In other words, we're not, sort of, unique little organisms running around; we are part of a big ecosystem. In fact -- I'm sorry to inform you -- that inside of your digestive tract is about 10 pounds of microbes which you're circulating through your body quite a bit. Our ocean's teaming with microbes; in fact, when Craig Venter went and sequenced the microbes in the ocean, in the first three months tripled the known species on the planet by discovering all-new microbes in the first 20 feet of water. We now understand that those microbes have more impact on our climate and regulating CO2 and oxygen than plants do, which we always thought oxygenate the atmosphere. We find microbial life in every part of the planet: in ice, in coal, in rocks, in volcanic vents; it's an amazing thing. But we've also discovered, when it comes to plants, in plants, as much as we understand and are starting to understand their genomes, it is the ecosystem around them, it is the microbes that live in their root systems, that have just as much impact on the character of those plants as the metabolic pathways of the plants themselves. If you take a closer look at a root system, you will find there are many, many, many diverse microbial colonies. This is not big news to viticulturists; they have been, you know, concerned with water and fertilization. And, again, this is, sort of, my notion of shit-against-the-wall pharmacology: you know certain fertilizers make the plant more healthy so you put more in. You don't necessarily know with granularity exactly what organisms are providing what flavors and what characteristics. We can start to figure that out. We all talk about terroir; we worship terroir; we say, Wow, is my terroir great! It's so special. I've got this piece of land and it creates terroir like you wouldn't believe. Well, you know, we really, we argue and debate about it -- we say it's climate, it's soil, it's this. Well, guess what? We can figure out what the heck terroir is. It's in there, waiting to be sequenced. There are thousands of microbes there. They're easy to sequence: unlike a human, they, you know, have a thousand, two thousand genes; we can figure out what they are. All we have to do is go around and sample, dig into the ground, find those bugs, sequence them, correlate them to the kinds of characteristics we like and don't like -- that's just a big database -- and then fertilize. And then we understand what is terroir. So, some people will say, Oh, my God, are we playing God? Are we now, if we engineer organisms, are we playing God? And, you know, people would always ask James Watson -- he's not always the most politically correct guy ... (Laughter) ... and they would say, "Are, you know, are you playing God?" And he had the best answer I ever heard to this question: "Well, somebody has to." (Laughter) I consider myself a very spiritual person, and without, you know, the organized religion part, and I will tell you: I don't believe there's anything unnatural. I don't believe that chemicals are unnatural. I told you I'm going to make some of you puke. It's very simple: we don't invent molecules, compounds. They're here. They're in the universe. We reorganize things, we change them around, but we don't make anything unnatural. Now, we can create bad impacts -- we can poison ourselves; we can poison the Earth -- but that's just a natural outcome of a mistake we made. So, what's happening today is, Nature is presenting us with a toolbox, and we find that this toolbox is very extensive. There are microbes out there that actually make gasoline, believe it or not. There are microbes, you know -- go back to yeast. These are chemical factories; the most sophisticated chemical factories are provided by Nature, and we now can use those. There also is a set of rules. Nature will not allow you to -- we could engineer a grape plant, but guess what. We can't make the grape plant produce babies. Nature has put a set of rules out there. We can work within the rules; we can't break the rules; we're just learning what the rules are. I just ask the question, if you could cure all disease -- if you could make disease go away, because we understand how it actually works, if we could end hunger by being able to create nutritious, healthy plants that grow in very hard-to-grow environments, if we could create clean and plentiful energy -- we, right in the labs at Synthetic Genomics, have single-celled organisms that are taking carbon dioxide and producing a molecule very similar to gasoline. So, carbon dioxide -- the stuff we want to get rid of -- not sugar, not anything. Carbon dioxide, a little bit of sunlight, you end up with a lipid that is highly refined. We could solve our energy problems; we can reduce CO2,; we could clean up our oceans; we could make better wine. If we could, would we? Well, you know, I think the answer is very simple: working with Nature, working with this tool set that we now understand, is the next step in humankind's evolution. And all I can tell you is, stay healthy for 20 years. If you can stay healthy for 20 years, you'll see 150, maybe 300. Thank you.

When I'm starting talks like this, I usually do a whole spiel about sustainability because a lot of people out there don't know what that is. This is a crowd that does know what it is, so I'll like just do like the 60-second crib-note version. Right? So just bear with me. We'll go real fast, you know? Fill in the blanks. So, you know, sustainability, small planet. Right? Picture a little Earth, circling around the sun. You know, about a million years ago, a bunch of monkeys fell out of trees, got a little clever, harnessed fire, invented the printing press, made, you know, luggage with wheels on it. And, you know, built the society that we now live in. Unfortunately, while this society is, without a doubt, the most prosperous and dynamic the world has ever created, it's got some major, major flaws. One of them is that every society has an ecological footprint. It has an amount of impact on the planet that's measurable. How much stuff goes through your life, how much waste is left behind you. And we, at the moment, in our society, have a really dramatically unsustainable level of this. We're using up about five planets. If everybody on the planet lived the way we did, we'd need between five, six, seven, some people even say 10 planets to make it. Clearly we don't have 10 planets. Again, you know, mental, visual, 10 planets, one planet, 10 planets, one planet. Right? We don't have that. So that's one problem. The second problem is that the planet that we have is being used in wildly unfair ways. Right? North Americans, such as myself, you know, we're basically sort of wallowing, gluttonous hogs, and we're eating all sorts of stuff. And, you know, then you get all the way down to people who live in the Asia-Pacific region, or even more, Africa. And people simply do not have enough to survive. This is producing all sorts of tensions, all sorts of dynamics that are deeply disturbing. And there's more and more people on the way. Right? So, this is what the planet's going to look like in 20 years. It's going to be a pretty crowded place, at least eight billion people. So to make matters even more difficult, it's a very young planet. A third of the people on this planet are kids. And those kids are growing up in a completely different way than their parents did, no matter where they live. They've been exposed to this idea of our society, of our prosperity. And they may not want to live exactly like us. They may not want to be Americans, or Brits, or Germans, or South Africans, but they want their own version of a life which is more prosperous, and more dynamic, and more, you know, enjoyable. And all of these things combine to create an enormous amount of torque on the planet. And if we cannot figure out a way to deal with that torque, we are going to find ourselves more and more and more quickly facing situations which are simply unthinkable. Everybody in this room has heard the worst-case scenarios. I don't need to go into that. But I will ask the question, what's the alternative? And I would say that, at the moment, the alternative is unimaginable. You know, so on the one hand we have the unthinkable; on the other hand we have the unimaginable. We don't know yet how to build a society which is environmentally sustainable, which is shareable with everybody on the planet, which promotes stability and democracy and human rights, and which is achievable in the time-frame necessary to make it through the challenges we face. We don't know how to do this yet. So what's Worldchanging? Well, Worldchanging you might think of as being a bit of a news service for the unimaginable future. You know, what we're out there doing is looking for examples of tools, models and ideas, which, if widely adopted, would change the game. A lot of times, when I do a talk like this, I talk about things that everybody in this room I'm sure has already heard of, but most people haven't. So I thought today I'd do something a little different, and talk about what we're looking for, rather than saying, you know, rather than giving you tried-and-true examples. Talk about the kinds of things we're scoping out. Give you a little peek into our editorial notebook. And given that I have 13 minutes to do this, this is going to go kind of quick. So, I don't know, just stick with me. Right? So, first of all, what are we looking for? Bright Green city. One of the biggest levers that we have in the developed world for changing the impact that we have on the planet is changing the way that we live in cities. We're already an urban planet; that's especially true in the developed world. And people who live in cities in the developed world tend to be very prosperous, and thus use a lot of stuff. If we can change the dynamic, by first of all creating cities that are denser and more livable ... Here, for example, is Vancouver, which if you haven't been there, you ought to go for a visit. It's a fabulous city. And they are doing density, new density, better than probably anybody else on the planet right now. They're actually managing to talk North Americans out of driving cars, which is a pretty great thing. So you have density. You also have growth management. You leave aside what is natural to be natural. This is in Portland. That is an actual development. That land there will remain pasture in perpetuity. They've bounded the city with a line. Nature, city. Nothing changes. Once you do those things, you can start making all sorts of investments. You can start doing things like, you know, transit systems that actually work to transport people, in effective and reasonably comfortable manners. You can also start to change what you build. This is the Beddington Zero Energy Development in London, which is one of the greenest buildings in the world. It's a fabulous place. We're able to now build buildings that generate all their own electricity, that recycle much of their water, that are much more comfortable than standard buildings, use all-natural light, etc., and, over time, cost less. Green roofs. Bill McDonough covered that last night, so I won't dwell on that too much. But once you also have people living in close proximity to each other, one of the things you can do is -- as information technologies develop -- you can start to have smart places. You can start to know where things are. When you know where things are, it becomes easier to share them. When you share them, you end up using less. So one great example is car-share clubs, which are really starting to take off in the U.S., have already taken off in many places in Europe, and are a great example. If you're somebody who drives, you know, one day a week, do you really need your own car? Another thing that information technology lets us do is start figuring out how to use less stuff by knowing, and by monitoring, the amount we're actually using. So, here's a power cord which glows brighter the more energy that you use, which I think is a pretty cool concept, although I think it ought to work the other way around, that it gets brighter the more you don't use. But, you know, there may even be a simpler approach. We could just re-label things. This light switch that reads, on the one hand, flashfloods, and on the other hand, off. How we build things can change as well. This is a bio-morphic building. It takes its inspiration in form from life. Many of these buildings are incredibly beautiful, and also much more effective. This is an example of bio-mimicry, which is something we're really starting to look a lot more for. In this case, you have a shell design which was used to create a new kind of exhaust fan, which is greatly more effective. There's a lot of this stuff happening; it's really pretty remarkable. I encourage you to look on Worldchanging if you're into it. We're starting to cover this more and more. There's also neo-biological design, where more and more we're actually using life itself and the processes of life to become part of our industry. So this, for example, is hydrogen-generating algae. So we have a model in potential, an emerging model that we're looking for of how to take the cities most of us live in, and turn them into Bright Green cities. But unfortunately, most of the people on the planet don't live in the cites we live in. They live in the emerging megacities of the developing world. And there's a statistic I often like to use, which is that we're adding a city of Seattle every four days, a city the size of Seattle to the planet every four days. I was giving a talk about two months ago, and this guy, who'd done some work with the U.N., came up to me and was really flustered, and he said, look, you've got that totally wrong; it's totally wrong. It's every seven days. So, we're adding a city the size of Seattle every seven days, and most of those cities look more like this than the city that you or I live in. Most of those cites are growing incredibly quickly. They don't have existing infrastructure; they have enormous numbers of people who are struggling with poverty, and enormous numbers of people are trying to figure out how to do things in new ways. So what do we need in order to make developing nation megacities into Bright Green megacities? Well, the first thing we need is, we need leapfrogging. And this is one of the things that we are looking for everywhere. The idea behind leapfrogging is that if you are a person, or a country, who is stuck in a situation where you don't have the tools and technologies that you need, there's no reason for you to invest in last generation's technologies. Right? That you're much better off, almost universally, looking for a low-cost or locally applicable version of the newest technology. One place we're all familiar with seeing this is with cell phones. Right? All throughout the developing world, people are going directly to cell phones, skipping the whole landline stage. If there are landlines in many developing world cities, they're usually pretty crappy systems that break down a lot and cost enormous amounts of money. So I rather like this picture here. I particularly like the Ganesh in the background, talking on the cell phone. So what we have, increasingly, is cell phones just permeating out through society. We've heard all about this here this week, so I won't say too much more than that, other than to say what is true for cell phones is true for all sorts of technologies. The second thing is tools for collaboration, be they systems of collaboration, or intellectual property systems which encourage collaboration. Right? When you have free ability for people to freely work together and innovate, you get different kinds of solutions. And those solutions are accessible in a different way to people who don't have capital. Right? So, you know, we have open source software, we have Creative Commons and other kinds of Copyleft solutions. And those things lead to things like this. This is a Telecentro in Sao Paulo. This is a pretty remarkable program using free and open source software, cheap, sort of hacked-together machines, and basically sort of abandoned buildings -- has put together a bunch of community centers where people can come in, get high-speed internet access, learn computer programming skills for free. And a quarter-million people every year use these now in Sao Paulo. And those quarter-million people are some of the poorest people in Sao Paolo. I particularly like the little Linux penguin in the back. (Laughter) So one of the things that that's leading to is a sort of southern cultural explosion. And one of the things we're really, really interested in at Worldchanging is the ways in which the south is re-identifying itself, and re-categorizing itself in ways that have less and less to do with most of us in this room. So it's not, you know, Bollywood isn't just answering Hollywood. Right? You know, Brazilian music scene isn't just answering the major labels. It's doing something new. There's new things happening. There's interplay between them. And, you know, you get amazing things. Like, I don't know if any of you have seen the movie "City of God?" Yeah, it's a fabulous movie if you haven't seen it. And it's all about this question, in a very artistic and indirect kind of way. You have other radical examples where the ability to use cultural tools is spreading out. These are people who have just been visited by the Internet bookmobile in Uganda. And who are waving their first books in the air, which, I just think that's a pretty cool picture. You know? So you also have the ability for people to start coming together and acting on their own behalf in political and civic ways, in ways that haven't happened before. And as we heard last night, as we've heard earlier this week, are absolutely, fundamentally vital to the ability to craft new solutions, is we've got to craft new political realities. And I would personally say that we have to craft new political realities, not only in places like India, Afghanistan, Kenya, Pakistan, what have you, but here at home as well. Another world is possible. And sort of the big motto of the anti-globalization movement. Right? We tweak that a lot. We talk about how another world isn't just possible; another world's here. That it's not just that we have to sort of imagine there being a different, vague possibility out there, but we need to start acting a little bit more on that possibility. We need to start doing things like Lula, President of Brazil. How many people knew of Lula before today? OK, so, much, much better than the average crowd, I can tell you that. So Lula, he's full of problems, full of contradictions, but one of the things that he's doing is, he is putting forward an idea of how we engage in international relations that completely shifts the balance from the standard sort of north-south dialogue into a whole new way of global collaboration. I would keep your eye on this fellow. Another example of this sort of second superpower thing is the rise of these games that are what we call "serious play." We're looking a lot at this. This is spreading everywhere. This is from "A Force More Powerful." It's a little screenshot. "A Force More Powerful" is a video game that, while you're playing it, it teaches you how to engage in non-violent insurrection and regime change. (Laughter) Here's another one. This is from a game called "Food Force," which is a game that teaches children how to run a refugee camp. These things are all contributing in a very dynamic way to a huge rise in, especially in the developing world, in people's interest in and passion for democracy. We get so little news about the developing world that we often forget that there are literally millions of people out there struggling to change things to be fairer, freer, more democratic, less corrupt. And, you know, we don't hear those stories enough. But it's happening all over the place, and these tools are part of what's making it possible. Now when you add all those things together, when you add together leapfrogging and new kinds of tools, you know, second superpower stuff, etc., what do you get? Well, very quickly, you get a Bright Green future for the developing world. You get, for example, green power spread throughout the world. You get -- this is a building in Hyderabad, India. It's the greenest building in the world. You get grassroots solutions, things that work for people who have no capital or limited access. You get barefoot solar engineers carrying solar panels into the remote mountains. You get access to distance medicine. These are Indian nurses learning how to use PDAs to access databases that have information that they don't have access to at home in a distant manner. You get new tools for people in the developing world. These are LED lights that help the roughly billion people out there, for whom nightfall means darkness, to have a new means of operating. These are refrigerators that require no electricity; they're pot within a pot design. And you get water solutions. Water's one of the most pressing problems. Here's a design for harvesting rainwater that's super cheap and available to people in the developing world. Here's a design for distilling water using sunlight. Here's a fog-catcher, which, if you live in a moist, jungle-like area, will distill water from the air that's clean and drinkable. Here's a way of transporting water. I just love this, you know -- I mean carrying water is such a drag, and somebody just came up with the idea of well, what if you rolled it. Right? I mean, that's a great design. This is a fabulous invention, LifeStraw. Basically you can suck any water through this and it will become drinkable by the time it hits your lips. So, you know, people who are in desperate straits can get this. This is one of my favorite Worldchanging kinds of things ever. This is a merry-go-round invented by the company Roundabout, which pumps water as kids play. You know? Seriously -- give that one a hand, it's pretty great. And the same thing is true for people who are in absolute crisis. Right? We're expecting to have upwards of 200 million refugees by the year 2020 because of climate change and political instability. How do we help people like that? Well, there's all sorts of amazing new humanitarian designs that are being developed in collaborative ways all across the planet. Some of those designs include models for acting, such as new models for village instruction in the middle of refugee camps. New models for pedagogy for the displaced. And we have new tools. This is one of my absolute favorite things anywhere. Does anyone know what this is? Audience: It detects landmines. Alex Steffen: Exactly, this is a landmine-detecting flower. If you are living in one of the places where the roughly half-billion unaccounted for mines are scattered, you can fling these seeds out into the field. And as they grow up, they will grow up around the mines, their roots will detect the chemicals in them, and where the flowers turn red you don't step. Yeah, so seeds that could save your life. You know? (Applause) I also love it because it seems to me that the example, the tools we use to change the world, ought to be beautiful in themselves. You know, that it's not just enough to survive. We've got to make something better than what we've got. And I think that we will. Just to wrap up, in the immortal words of H.G. Wells, I think that better things are on the way. I think that, in fact, that "all of the past is but the beginning of a beginning. All that the human mind has accomplished is but the dream before the awakening." I hope that that turns out to be true. The people in this room have given me more confidence than ever that it will. Thank you very much. (Applause)

It is a thrill to be here at a conference that's devoted to "Inspired by Nature" -- you can imagine. And I'm also thrilled to be in the foreplay section. Did you notice this section is foreplay? Because I get to talk about one of my favorite critters, which is the Western Grebe. You haven't lived until you've seen these guys do their courtship dance. I was on Bowman Lake in Glacier National Park, which is a long, skinny lake with sort of mountains upside down in it, and my partner and I have a rowing shell. And so we were rowing, and one of these Western Grebes came along. And what they do for their courtship dance is, they go together, the two of them, the two mates, and they begin to run underwater. They paddle faster, and faster, and faster, until they're going so fast that they literally lift up out of the water, and they're standing upright, sort of paddling the top of the water. And one of these Grebes came along while we were rowing. And so we're in a skull, and we're moving really, really quickly. And this Grebe, I think, sort of, mistaked us for a prospect, and started to run along the water next to us, in a courtship dance -- for miles. It would stop, and then start, and then stop, and then start. Now that is foreplay. (Laughter) I came this close to changing species at that moment. Obviously, life can teach us something in the entertainment section. Life has a lot to teach us. But what I'd like to talk about today is what life might teach us in technology and in design. What's happened since the book came out -- the book was mainly about research in biomimicry -- and what's happened since then is architects, designers, engineers -- people who make our world -- have started to call and say, we want a biologist to sit at the design table to help us, in real time, become inspired. Or -- and this is the fun part for me -- we want you to take us out into the natural world. We'll come with a design challenge and we find the champion adapters in the natural world, who might inspire us. So this is a picture from a Galapagos trip that we took with some wastewater treatment engineers; they purify wastewater. And some of them were very resistant, actually, to being there. What they said to us at first was, you know, we already do biomimicry. We use bacteria to clean our water. And we said, well, that's not exactly being inspired by nature. That's bioprocessing, you know; that's bio-assisted technology: using an organism to do your wastewater treatment is an old, old technology called "domestication." This is learning something, learning an idea, from an organism and then applying it. And so they still weren't getting it. So we went for a walk on the beach and I said, well, give me one of your big problems. Give me a design challenge, sustainability speed bump, that's keeping you from being sustainable. And they said scaling, which is the build-up of minerals inside of pipes. And they said, you know what happens is, mineral -- just like at your house -- mineral builds up. And then the aperture closes, and we have to flush the pipes with toxins, or we have to dig them up. So if we had some way to stop this scaling -- and so I picked up some shells on the beach. And I asked them, what is scaling? What's inside your pipes? And they said, calcium carbonate. And I said, that's what this is; this is calcium carbonate. And they didn't know that. They didn't know that what a seashell is, it's templated by proteins, and then ions from the seawater crystallize in place to create a shell. So the same sort of a process, without the proteins, is happening on the inside of their pipes. They didn't know. This is not for lack of information; it's a lack of integration. You know, it's a silo, people in silos. They didn't know that the same thing was happening. So one of them thought about it and said, OK, well, if this is just crystallization that happens automatically out of seawater -- self-assembly -- then why aren't shells infinite in size? What stops the scaling? Why don't they just keep on going? And I said, well, in the same way that they exude a protein and it starts the crystallization -- and then they all sort of leaned in -- they let go of a protein that stops the crystallization. It literally adheres to the growing face of the crystal. And, in fact, there is a product called TPA that's mimicked that protein -- that stop-protein -- and it's an environmentally friendly way to stop scaling in pipes. That changed everything. From then on, you could not get these engineers back in the boat. The first day they would take a hike, and it was, click, click, click, click. Five minutes later they were back in the boat. We're done. You know, I've seen that island. After this, they were crawling all over. They would snorkel for as long as we would let them snorkel. What had happened was that they realized that there were organisms out there that had already solved the problems that they had spent their careers trying to solve. Learning about the natural world is one thing; learning from the natural world -- that's the switch. That's the profound switch. What they realized was that the answers to their questions are everywhere; they just needed to change the lenses with which they saw the world. 3.8 billion years of field-testing. 10 to 30 -- Craig Venter will probably tell you; I think there's a lot more than 30 million -- well-adapted solutions. The important thing for me is that these are solutions solved in context. And the context is the Earth -- the same context that we're trying to solve our problems in. So it's the conscious emulation of life's genius. It's not slavishly mimicking -- although Al is trying to get the hairdo going -- it's not a slavish mimicry; it's taking the design principles, the genius of the natural world, and learning something from it. Now, in a group with so many IT people, I do have to mention what I'm not going to talk about, and that is that your field is one that has learned an enormous amount from living things, on the software side. So there's computers that protect themselves, like an immune system, and we're learning from gene regulation and biological development. And we're learning from neural nets, genetic algorithms, evolutionary computing. That's on the software side. But what's interesting to me is that we haven't looked at this, as much. I mean, these machines are really not very high tech in my estimation in the sense that there's dozens and dozens of carcinogens in the water in Silicon Valley. So the hardware is not at all up to snuff in terms of what life would call a success. So what can we learn about making -- not just computers, but everything? The plane you came in, cars, the seats that you're sitting on. How do we redesign the world that we make, the human-made world? More importantly, what should we ask in the next 10 years? And there's a lot of cool technologies out there that life has. What's the syllabus? Three questions, for me, are key. How does life make things? This is the opposite; this is how we make things. It's called heat, beat and treat -- that's what material scientists call it. And it's carving things down from the top, with 96 percent waste left over and only 4 percent product. You heat it up; you beat it with high pressures; you use chemicals. OK. Heat, beat and treat. Life can't afford to do that. How does life make things? How does life make the most of things? That's a geranium pollen. And its shape is what gives it the function of being able to tumble through air so easily. Look at that shape. Life adds information to matter. In other words: structure. It gives it information. By adding information to matter, it gives it a function that's different than without that structure. And thirdly, how does life make things disappear into systems? Because life doesn't really deal in things; there are no things in the natural world divorced from their systems. Really quick syllabus. As I'm reading more and more now, and following the story, there are some amazing things coming up in the biological sciences. And at the same time, I'm listening to a lot of businesses and finding what their sort of grand challenges are. The two groups are not talking to each other. At all. What in the world of biology might be helpful at this juncture, to get us through this sort of evolutionary knothole that we're in? I'm going to try to go through 12, really quickly. One that's exciting to me is self-assembly. Now, you've heard about this in terms of nanotechnology. Back to that shell: the shell is a self-assembling material. On the lower left there is a picture of mother of pearl forming out of seawater. It's a layered structure that's mineral and then polymer, and it makes it very, very tough. It's twice as tough as our high-tech ceramics. But what's really interesting: unlike our ceramics that are in kilns, it happens in seawater. It happens near, in and near, the organism's body. This is Sandia National Labs. A guy named Jeff Brinker has found a way to have a self-assembling coding process. Imagine being able to make ceramics at room temperature by simply dipping something into a liquid, lifting it out of the liquid, and having evaporation force the molecules in the liquid together, so that they jigsaw together in the same way as this crystallization works. Imagine making all of our hard materials that way. Imagine spraying the precursors to a PV cell, to a solar cell, onto a roof, and having it self-assemble into a layered structure that harvests light. Here's an interesting one for the IT world: bio-silicon. This is a diatom, which is made of silicates. And so silicon, which we make right now -- it's part of our carcinogenic problem in the manufacture of our chips -- this is a bio-mineralization process that's now being mimicked. This is at UC Santa Barbara. Look at these diatoms. This is from Ernst Haeckel's work. Imagine being able to -- and, again, it's a templated process, and it solidifies out of a liquid process -- imagine being able to have that sort of structure coming out at room temperature. Imagine being able to make perfect lenses. On the left, this is a brittle star; it's covered with lenses that the people at Lucent Technologies have found have no distortion whatsoever. It's one of the most distortion-free lenses we know of. And there's many of them, all over its entire body. What's interesting, again, is that it self-assembles. A woman named Joanna Aizenberg, at Lucent, is now learning to do this in a low-temperature process to create these sort of lenses. She's also looking at fiber optics. That's a sea sponge that has a fiber optic. Down at the very base of it, there's fiber optics that work better than ours, actually, to move light, but you can tie them in a knot; they're incredibly flexible. Here's another big idea: CO2 as a feedstock. A guy named Geoff Coates, at Cornell, said to himself, you know, plants do not see CO2 as the biggest poison of our time. We see it that way. Plants are busy making long chains of starches and glucose, right, out of CO2. He's found a way -- he's found a catalyst -- and he's found a way to take CO2 and make it into polycarbonates. Biodegradable plastics out of CO2 -- how plant-like. Solar transformations: the most exciting one. There are people who are mimicking the energy-harvesting device inside of purple bacterium, the people at ASU. Even more interesting, lately, in the last couple of weeks, people have seen that there's an enzyme called hydrogenase that's able to evolve hydrogen from proton and electrons, and is able to take hydrogen up -- basically what's happening in a fuel cell, in the anode of a fuel cell and in a reversible fuel cell. In our fuel cells, we do it with platinum; life does it with a very, very common iron. And a team has now just been able to mimic that hydrogen-juggling hydrogenase. That's very exciting for fuel cells -- to be able to do that without platinum. Power of shape: here's a whale. We've seen that the fins of this whale have tubercles on them. And those little bumps actually increase efficiency in, for instance, the edge of an airplane -- increase efficiency by about 32 percent. Which is an amazing fossil fuel savings, if we were to just put that on the edge of a wing. Color without pigments: this peacock is creating color with shape. Light comes through, it bounces back off the layers; it's called thin-film interference. Imagine being able to self-assemble products with the last few layers playing with light to create color. Imagine being able to create a shape on the outside of a surface, so that it's self-cleaning with just water. That's what a leaf does. See that up-close picture? That's a ball of water, and those are dirt particles. And that's an up-close picture of a lotus leaf. There's a company making a product called Lotusan, which mimics -- when the building facade paint dries, it mimics the bumps in a self-cleaning leaf, and rainwater cleans the building. Water is going to be our big, grand challenge: quenching thirst. Here are two organisms that pull water. The one on the left is the Namibian beetle pulling water out of fog. The one on the right is a pill bug -- pulls water out of air, does not drink fresh water. Pulling water out of Monterey fog and out of the sweaty air in Atlanta, before it gets into a building, are key technologies. Separation technologies are going to be extremely important. What if we were to say, no more hard rock mining? What if we were to separate out metals from waste streams, small amounts of metals in water? That's what microbes do; they chelate metals out of water. There's a company here in San Francisco called MR3 that is embedding mimics of the microbes' molecules on filters to mine waste streams. Green chemistry is chemistry in water. We do chemistry in organic solvents. This is a picture of the spinnerets coming out of a spider and the silk being formed from a spider. Isn't that beautiful? Green chemistry is replacing our industrial chemistry with nature's recipe book. It's not easy, because life uses only a subset of the elements in the periodic table. And we use all of them, even the toxic ones. To figure out the elegant recipes that would take the small subset of the periodic table, and create miracle materials like that cell, is the task of green chemistry. Timed degradation: packaging that is good until you don't want it to be good anymore, and dissolves on cue. That's a mussel you can find in the waters out here, and the threads holding it to a rock are timed; at exactly two years, they begin to dissolve. Healing: this is a good one. That little guy over there is a tardigrade. There is a problem with vaccines around the world not getting to patients. And the reason is that the refrigeration somehow gets broken; what's called the "cold chain" gets broken. A guy named Bruce Rosner looked at the tardigrade -- which dries out completely, and yet stays alive for months and months and months, and is able to regenerate itself. And he found a way to dry out vaccines -- encase them in the same sort of sugar capsules as the tardigrade has within its cells -- meaning that vaccines no longer need to be refrigerated. They can be put in a glove compartment, OK. Learning from organisms. This is a session about water -- learning about organisms that can do without water, in order to create a vaccine that lasts and lasts and lasts without refrigeration. I'm not going to get to 12. But what I am going to do is tell you that the most important thing, besides all of these adaptations, is the fact that these organisms have figured out a way to do the amazing things they do while taking care of the place that's going to take care of their offspring. When they're involved in foreplay, they're thinking about something very, very important -- and that's having their genetic material remain, 10,000 generations from now. And that means finding a way to do what they do without destroying the place that'll take care of their offspring. That's the biggest design challenge. Luckily, there are millions and millions of geniuses willing to gift us with their best ideas. Good luck having a conversation with them. Thank you. (Applause) Chris Anderson: Talk about foreplay, I -- we need to get to 12, but really quickly. Janine Benyus: Oh really? CA: Yeah. Just like, you know, like the 10-second version of 10, 11 and 12. Because we just -- your slides are so gorgeous, and the ideas are so big, I can't stand to let you go down without seeing 10, 11 and 12. JB: OK, put this -- OK, I'll just hold this thing. OK, great. OK, so that's the healing one. Sensing and responding: feedback is a huge thing. This is a locust. There can be 80 million of them in a square kilometer, and yet they don't collide with one another. And yet we have 3.6 million car collisions a year. (Laughter) Right. There's a person at Newcastle who has figured out that it's a very large neuron. And she's actually figuring out how to make a collision-avoidance circuitry based on this very large neuron in the locust. This is a huge and important one, number 11. And that's the growing fertility. That means, you know, net fertility farming. We should be growing fertility. And, oh yes -- we get food, too. Because we have to grow the capacity of this planet to create more and more opportunities for life. And really, that's what other organisms do as well. In ensemble, that's what whole ecosystems do: they create more and more opportunities for life. Our farming has done the opposite. So, farming based on how a prairie builds soil, ranching based on how a native ungulate herd actually increases the health of the range, even wastewater treatment based on how a marsh not only cleans the water, but creates incredibly sparkling productivity. This is the simple design brief. I mean, it looks simple because the system, over 3.8 billion years, has worked this out. That is, those organisms that have not been able to figure out how to enhance or sweeten their places, are not around to tell us about it. That's the twelfth one. Life -- and this is the secret trick; this is the magic trick -- life creates conditions conducive to life. It builds soil; it cleans air; it cleans water; it mixes the cocktail of gases that you and I need to live. And it does that in the middle of having great foreplay and meeting their needs. So it's not mutually exclusive. We have to find a way to meet our needs, while making of this place an Eden. CA: Janine, thank you so much. (Applause)

I'll start with my favorite muse, Emily Dickinson, who said that wonder is not knowledge, neither is it ignorance. It's something which is suspended between what we believe we can be, and a tradition we may have forgotten. And I think, when I listen to these incredible people here, I've been so inspired -- so many incredible ideas, so many visions. And yet, when I look at the environment outside, you see how resistant architecture is to change. You see how resistant it is to those very ideas. We can think them out. We can create incredible things. And yet, at the end, it's so hard to change a wall. We applaud the well-mannered box. But to create a space that never existed is what interests me; to create something that has never been, a space that we have never entered except in our minds and our spirits. And I think that's really what architecture is based on. Architecture is not based on concrete and steel and the elements of the soil. It's based on wonder. And that wonder is really what has created the greatest cities, the greatest spaces that we have had. And I think that is indeed what architecture is. It is a story. By the way, it is a story that is told through its hard materials. But it is a story of effort and struggle against improbabilities. If you think of the great buildings, of the cathedrals, of the temples, of the pyramids, of pagodas, of cities in India and beyond, you think of how incredible this is that that was realized not by some abstract idea, but by people. So, anything that has been made can be unmade. Anything that has been made can be made better. There it is: the things that I really believe are of important architecture. These are the dimensions that I like to work with. It's something very personal. It's not, perhaps, the dimensions appreciated by art critics or architecture critics or city planners. But I think these are the necessary oxygen for us to live in buildings, to live in cities, to connect ourselves in a social space. And I therefore believe that optimism is what drives architecture forward. It's the only profession where you have to believe in the future. You can be a general, a politician, an economist who is depressed, a musician in a minor key, a painter in dark colors. But architecture is that complete ecstasy that the future can be better. And it is that belief that I think drives society. And today we have a kind of evangelical pessimism all around us. And yet it is in times like this that I think architecture can thrive with big ideas, ideas that are not small. Think of the great cities. Think of the Empire State Building, the Rockefeller Center. They were built in times that were not really the best of times in a certain way. And yet that energy and power of architecture has driven an entire social and political space that these buildings occupy. So again, I am a believer in the expressive. I have never been a fan of the neutral. I don't like neutrality in life, in anything. I think expression. And it's like espresso coffee, you know, you take the essence of the coffee. That's what expression is. It's been missing in much of the architecture, because we think architecture is the realm of the neutered, the realm of the kind of a state that has no opinion, that has no value. And yet, I believe it is the expression -- expression of the city, expression of our own space -- that gives meaning to architecture. And, of course, expressive spaces are not mute. Expressive spaces are not spaces that simply confirm what we already know. Expressive spaces may disturb us. And I think that's also part of life. Life is not just an anesthetic to make us smile, but to reach out across the abyss of history, to places we have never been, and would have perhaps been, had we not been so lucky. So again, radical versus conservative. Radical, what does it mean? It's something which is rooted, and something which is rooted deep in a tradition. And I think that is what architecture is, it's radical. It's not just a conservation in formaldehyde of dead forms. It is actually a living connection to the cosmic event that we are part of, and a story that is certainly ongoing. It's not something that has a good ending or a bad ending. It's actually a story in which our acts themselves are pushing the story in a particular way. So again I am a believer in the radical architecture. You know the Soviet architecture of that building is the conservation. It's like the old Las Vegas used to be. It's about conserving emotions, conserving the traditions that have obstructed the mind in moving forward and of course what is radical is to confront them. And I think our architecture is a confrontation with our own senses. Therefore I believe it should not be cool. There is a lot of appreciation for the kind of cool architecture. I've always been an opponent of it. I think emotion is needed. Life without emotion would really not be life. Even the mind is emotional. There is no reason which does not take a position in the ethical sphere, in the philosophical mystery of what we are. So I think emotion is a dimension that is important to introduce into city space, into city life. And of course, we are all about the struggle of emotions. And I think that is what makes the world a wondrous place. And of course, the confrontation of the cool, the unemotional with emotion, is a conversation that I think cities themselves have fostered. I think that is the progress of cities. It's not only the forms of cities, but the fact that they incarnate emotions, not just of those who build them, but of those who live there as well. Inexplicable versus understood. You know, too often we want to understand everything. But architecture is not the language of words. It's a language. But it is not a language that can be reduced to a series of programmatic notes that we can verbally write. Too many buildings that you see outside that are so banal tell you a story, but the story is very short, which says, "We have no story to tell you." (Laughter) So the important thing actually, is to introduce the actual architectural dimensions, which might be totally inexplicable in words, because they operate in proportions, in materials, in light. They connect themselves into various sources, into a kind of complex vector matrix that isn't really frontal but is really embedded in the lives, and in the history of a city, and of a people. So again, the notion that a building should just be explicit I think is a false notion, which has reduced architecture into banality. Hand versus the computer. Of course, what would we be without computers? Our whole practice depends on computing. But the computer should not just be the glove of the hand; the hand should really be the driver of the computing power. Because I believe that the hand in all its primitive, in all its physiological obscurity, has a source, though the source is unknown, though we don't have to be mystical about it. We realize that the hand has been given us by forces that are beyond our own autonomy. And I think when I draw drawings which may imitate the computer, but are not computer drawings -- drawings that can come from sources that are completely not known, not normal, not seen, yet the hand -- and that's what I really, to all of you who are working -- how can we make the computer respond to our hand rather than the hand responding to the computer. I think that's part of what the complexity of architecture is. Because certainly we have gotten used to the propaganda that the simple is the good. But I don't believe it. Listening to all of you, the complexity of thought, the complexity of layers of meaning is overwhelming. And I think we shouldn't shy away in architecture, You know, brain surgery, atomic theory, genetics, economics are complex complex fields. There is no reason that architecture should shy away and present this illusory world of the simple. It is complex. Space is complex. Space is something that folds out of itself into completely new worlds. And as wondrous as it is, it cannot be reduced to a kind of simplification that we have often come to be admired. And yet, our lives are complex. Our emotions are complex. Our intellectual desires are complex. So I do believe that architecture as I see it needs to mirror that complexity in every single space that we have, in every intimacy that we possess. Of course that means that architecture is political. The political is not an enemy of architecture. The politeama is the city. It's all of us together. And I've always believed that the act of architecture, even a private house, when somebody else will see it, is a political act, because it will be visible to others. And we live in a world which is connecting us more and more. So again, the evasion of that sphere, which has been so endemic to that sort of pure architecture, the autonomous architecture that is just an abstract object has never appealed to me. And I do believe that this interaction with the history, with history that is often very difficult, to grapple with it, to create a position that is beyond our normal expectations and to create a critique. Because architecture is also the asking of questions. It's not only the giving of answers. It's also, just like life, the asking of questions. Therefore it is important that it be real. You know we can simulate almost anything. But the one thing that can be ever simulated is the human heart, the human soul. And architecture is so closely intertwined with it because we are born somewhere and we die somewhere. So the reality of architecture is visceral. It's not intellectual. It's not something that comes to us from books and theories. It's the real that we touch -- the door, the window, the threshold, the bed -- such prosaic objects. And yet, I try, in every building, to take that virtual world, which is so enigmatic and so rich, and create something in the real world. Create a space for an office, a space of sustainability that really works between that virtuality and yet can be realized as something real. Unexpected versus habitual. What is a habit? It's just a shackle for ourselves. It's a self-induced poison. So the unexpected is always unexpected. You know, it's true, the cathedrals, as unexpected, will always be unexpected. You know Frank Gehry's buildings, they will continue to be unexpected in the future. So not the habitual architecture that instills in us the false sort of stability, but an architecture that is full of tension, an architecture that goes beyond itself to reach a human soul and a human heart, and that breaks out of the shackles of habits. And of course habits are enforced by architecture. When we see the same kind of architecture we become immured in that world of those angles, of those lights, of those materials. We think the world really looks like our buildings. And yet our buildings are pretty much limited by the techniques and wonders that have been part of them. So again, the unexpected which is also the raw. And I often think of the raw and the refined. What is raw? The raw, I would say is the naked experience, untouched by luxury, untouched by expensive materials, untouched by the kind of refinement that we associate with high culture. So the rawness, I think, in space, the fact that sustainability can actually, in the future translate into a raw space, a space that isn't decorated, a space that is not mannered in any source, but a space that might be cool in terms of its temperature, might be refractive to our desires. A space that doesn't always follow us like a dog that has been trained to follow us, but moves ahead into directions of demonstrating other possibilities, other experiences, that have never been part of the vocabulary of architecture. And of course that juxtaposition is of great interest to me because it creates a kind of a spark of new energy. And so I do like something which is pointed, not blunt, something which is focused on reality, something that has the power, through its leverage, to transform even a very small space. So architecture maybe is not so big, like science, but through its focal point it can leverage in an Archimedian way what we think the world is really about. And often it takes just a building to change our experience of what could be done, what has been done, how the world has remained both in between stability and instability. And of course buildings have their shapes. Those shapes are difficult to change. And yet, I do believe that in every social space, in every public space, there is a desire to communicate more than just that blunt thought, that blunt technique, but something that pinpoints, and can point in various directions forward, backward, sideways and around. So that is indeed what is memory. So I believe that my main interest is to memory. Without memory we would be amnesiacs. We would not know which way we were going, and why we are going where we're going. So I've been never interested in the forgettable reuse, rehashing of the same things over and over again, which, of course, get accolades of critics. Critics like the performance to be repeated again and again the same way. But I rather play something completely unheard of, and even with flaws, than repeat the same thing over and over which has been hollowed by its meaninglessness. So again, memory is the city, memory is the world. Without the memory there would be no story to tell. There would be nowhere to turn. The memorable, I think, is really our world, what we think the world is. And it's not only our memory, but those who remember us, which means that architecture is not mute. It's an art of communication. It tells a story. The story can reach into obscure desires. It can reach into sources that are not explicitly available. It can reach into millennia that have been buried, and return them in a just and unexpected equity. So again, I think the notion that the best architecture is silent has never appealed to me. Silence maybe is good for a cemetery but not for a city. Cities should be full of vibrations, full of sound, full of music. And that indeed is the architectural mission that I believe is important, is to create spaces that are vibrant, that are pluralistic, that can transform the most prosaic activities, and raise them to a completely different expectation. Create a shopping center, a swimming place that is more like a museum than like entertainment. And these are our dreams. And of course risk. I think architecture should be risky. You know it costs a lot of money and so on, but yes, it should not play it safe. It should not play it safe, because if it plays it safe it's not moving us in a direction that we want to be. And I think, of course, risk is what underlies the world. World without risk would not be worth living. So yes, I do believe that the risk we take in every building. Risks to create spaces that have never been cantilevered to that extent. Risks of spaces that have never been so dizzying, as they should be, for a pioneering city. Risks that really move architecture even with all its flaws, into a space which is much better that the ever again repeated hollowness of a ready-made thing. And of course that is finally what I believe architecture to be. It's about space. It's not about fashion. It's not about decoration. It's about creating with minimal means something which can not be repeated, cannot be simulated in any other sphere. And there of course is the space that we need to breathe, is the space we need to dream. These are the spaces that are not just luxurious spaces for some of us, but are important for everybody in this world. So again, it's not about the changing fashions, changing theories. It's about carving out a space for trees. It's carving out a space where nature can enter the domestic world of a city. A space where something which has never seen a light of day can enter into the inner workings of a density. And I think that is really the nature of architecture. Now I am a believer in democracy. I don't like beautiful buildings built for totalitarian regimes. Where people cannot speak, cannot vote, cannot do anything. We too often admire those buildings. We think they are beautiful. And yet when I think of the poverty of society which doesn't give freedom to its people, I don't admire those buildings. So democracy, as difficult as it is, I believe in it. And of course, at Ground Zero what else? It's such a complex project. It's emotional. There is so many interests. It's political. There is so many parties to this project. There is so many interests. There's money. There's political power. There are emotions of the victims. And yet, in all its messiness, in all its difficulties, I would not have liked somebody to say, "This is the tabula rasa, mister architect -- do whatever you want." I think nothing good will come out of that. I think architecture is about consensus. And it is about the dirty word "compromise." Compromise is not bad. Compromise, if it's artistic, if it is able to cope with its strategies -- and there is my first sketch and the last rendering -- it's not that far away. And yet, compromise, consensus, that is what I believe in. And Ground Zero, despite all its difficulties, it's moving forward. It's difficult. 2011, 2013. Freedom Tower, the memorial. And that is where I end. I was inspired when I came here as an immigrant on a ship like millions of others, looking at America from that point of view. This is America. This is liberty. This is what we dream about. Its individuality, demonstrated in the skyline. It's resilience. And finally, it's the freedom that America represents, not just to me, as an immigrant, but to everyone in the world. Thank you. (Applause) Chris Anderson: I've got a question. So have you come to peace with the process that happened at Ground Zero and the loss of the original, incredible design that you came up with? Daniel Libeskind: Look. We have to cure ourselves of the notion that we are authoritarian, that we can determine everything that happens. We have to rely on others, and shape the process in the best way possible. I came from the Bronx. I was taught not to be a loser, not to be somebody who just gives up in a fight. You have to fight for what you believe. You don't always win everything you want to win. But you can steer the process. And I believe that what will be built at Ground Zero will be meaningful, will be inspiring, will tell other generations of the sacrifices, of the meaning of this event. Not just for New York, but for the world. Chris Anderson: Thank you so much, Daniel Libeskind. (Applause)

Bruno Giussani: Commissioner, thank you for coming to TED. António Guterres: Pleasure. BG: Let's start with a figure. During 2015, almost one million refugees and migrants arrived in Europe from many different countries, of course, from Syria and Iraq, but also from Afghanistan and Bangladesh and Eritrea and elsewhere. And there have been reactions of two different kinds: welcoming parties and border fences. But I want to look at it a little bit from the short-term and the long-term perspective. And the first question is very simple: Why has the movement of refugees spiked so fast in the last six months? AG: Well, I think, basically, what triggered this huge increase was the Syrian refugee group. There has been an increased movement into Europe from Africa, from Asia, but slowly growing, and all of a sudden we had this massive increase in the first months of this year. Why? I think there are three reasons, two long-term ones and the trigger. The long-term ones, in relation to Syrians, is that hope is less and less clear for people. I mean, they look at their own country and they don't see much hope to go back home, because there is no political solution, so there is no light at the end of the tunnel. Second, the living conditions of the Syrians in the neighboring countries have been deteriorating. We just had research with the World Bank, and 87 percent of the Syrians in Jordan and 93 percent of the Syrians in Lebanon live below the national poverty lines. Only half of the children go to school, which means that people are living very badly. Not only are they refugees, out of home, not only have they suffered what they have suffered, but they are living in very, very dramatic conditions. And then the trigger was when all of a sudden, international aid decreased. The World Food Programme was forced, for lack of resources, to cut by 30 percent food support to the Syrian refugees. They're not allowed to work, so they are totally dependent on international support, and they felt, "The world is abandoning us." And that, in my opinion, was the trigger. All of a sudden, there was a rush, and people started to move in large numbers and, to be absolutely honest, if I had been in the same situation and I would have been brave enough to do it, I think I would have done the same. BG: But I think what surprised many people is it's not only sudden, but it wasn't supposed to be sudden. The war in Syria has been happening for five years. Millions of refugees are in camps and villages and towns around Syria. You have yourself warned about the situation and about the consequences of a breakdown of Libya, for example, and yet Europe looked totally unprepared. AG: Well, unprepared because divided, and when you are divided, you don't want to recognize the reality. You prefer to postpone decisions, because you do not have the capacity to make them. And the proof is that even when the spike occurred, Europe remained divided and was unable to put in place a mechanism to manage the situation. You talk about one million people. It looks enormous, but the population of the European Union is 550 million people, which means we are talking about one per every 2,000 Europeans. Now, in Lebanon, we have one refugee per three Lebanese. And Lebanon? Struggling, of course, but it's managing. So, the question is: is this something that could have been managed if -- not mentioning the most important thing, which would have been addressing the root causes, but forgetting about root causes for now, looking at the phenomenon as it is -- if Europe were able to come together in solidarity to create an adequate reception capacity of entry points? But for that, the countries at entry points need to be massively supported, and then screening the people with security checks and all the other mechanisms, distributing those that are coming into all European countries, according to the possibilities of each country. I mean, if you look at the relocation program that was approved by the Commission, always too little too late, or by the Council, too little too late -- BG: It's already breaking down. AG: My country is supposed to receive four thousand. Four thousand in Portugal means nothing. So this is perfectly manageable if it is managed, but in the present circumstances, the pressure is at the point of entry, and then, as people move in this chaotic way through the Balkans, then they come to Germany, Sweden, basically, and Austria. They are the three countries that are, in the end, receiving the refugees. The rest of Europe is looking without doing much. BG: Let me try to bring up three questions, playing a bit devil's advocate. I'll try to ask them, make them blunt. But I think the questions are very present in the minds of many people in Europe right now, The first, of course, is about numbers. You say 550 million versus one million is not much, but realistically, how many people can Europe take? AG: Well, that is a question that has no answer, because refugees have the right to be protected. And there is such a thing as international law, so there is no way you can say, "I take 10,000 and that's finished." I remind you of one thing: in Turkey, at the beginning of the crisis, I remember one minister saying, "Turkey will be able to receive up to 100,000 people." Turkey has now two million three-hundred thousand or something of the sort, if you count all refugees. So I don't think it's fair to say how many we can take. What it is fair to say is: how we can we organize ourselves to assume our international responsibilities? And Europe has not been able to do so, because basically, Europe is divided because there is no solidarity in the European project. And it's not only about refugees; there are many other areas. And let's be honest, this is the moment in which we need more Europe instead of less Europe. But as the public less and less believes in European institutions, it is also each time more difficult to convince the public that we need more Europe to solve these problems. BG: We seem to be at the point where the numbers turn into political shifts, particularly domestically. We saw it again this weekend in France, but we have seen it over and over in many countries: in Poland and in Denmark and in Switzerland and elsewhere, where the mood changes radically because of the numbers, although they are not very significant in absolute numbers. The Prime Minister of -- AG: But, if I may, on these: I mean, what does a European see at home in a village where there are no migrants? What a European sees is, on television, every single day, a few months ago, opening the news every single day, a crowd coming, uncontrolled, moving from border to border, and the images on television were of hundreds or thousands of people moving. And the idea is that nobody is taking care of it -- this is happening without any kind of management. And so their idea was, "They are coming to my village." So there was this completely false idea that Europe was being invaded and our way of life is going to change, and everything will -- And the problem is that if this had been properly managed, if people had been properly received, welcomed, sheltered at point of entry, screened at point of entry, and the moved by plane to different European countries, this would not have scared people. But, unfortunately, we have a lot of people scared, just because Europe was not able to do the job properly. BG: But there are villages in Germany with 300 inhabitants and 1,000 refugees. So, what's your position? How do you imagine these people reacting? AG: If there would be a proper management of the situation and the proper distribution of people all over Europe, you would always have the percentage that I mentioned: one per each 2,000. It is because things are not properly managed that in the end we have situations that are totally impossible to live with, and of course if you have a village -- in Lebanon, there are many villages that have more Syrians than Lebanese; Lebanon has been living with that. I'm not asking for the same to happen in Europe, for all European villages to have more refugees than inhabitants. What I am asking is for Europe to do the job properly, and to be able to organize itself to receive people as other countries in the world were forced to do in the past. BG: So, if you look at the global situation not only at Europe -- (Applause) BG: Yes! (Applause) BG: If you look at the global situation, so, not only at Europe, I know you can make a long list of countries that are not really stepping up, but I'm more interested in the other part -- is there somebody who's doing the right thing? AG: Well, 86 percent of the refugees in the world are in the developing world. And if you look at countries like Ethiopia -- Ethiopia has received more than 600,000 refugees. All the borders in Ethiopia are open. And they have, as a policy, they call the "people to people" policy that every refugee should be received. And they have South Sudanese, they have Sudanese, they have Somalis. They have all the neighbors. They have Eritreans. And, in general, African countries are extremely welcoming of refugees coming, and I would say that in the Middle East and in Asia, we have seen a tendency for borders to be open. Now we see some problems with the Syrian situation, as the Syrian situation evolved into also a major security crisis, but the truth is that for a large period, all borders in the Middle East were open. The truth is that for Afghans, the borders of Pakistan and Iran were open for, at the time, six million Afghans that came. So I would say that even today, the trend in the developing world has been for borders to be open. The trend in the developed world is for these questions to become more and more complex, especially when there is, in the public opinion, a mixture of discussions between refugee protections on one side and security questions -- in my opinion, misinterpreted -- on the other side. BG: We'll come back to that too, but you mentioned the cutting of funding and the vouchers from the World Food Programme. That reflects the general underfunding of the organizations working on these issues. Now that the world seems to have woken up, are you getting more funding and more support, or it's still the same? AG: We are getting more support. I would say that we are coming close to the levels of last year. We were much worse during the summer. But that is clearly insufficient to address the needs of the people and address the needs of the countries that are supporting the people. And here we have a basic review of the criteria, the objectives, the priorities of development cooperation that is required. For instance, Lebanon and Jordan are middle-income countries. Because they are middle-income countries, they cannot receive soft loans or grants from the World Bank. Now, today this doesn't make any sense, because they are providing a global public good. They have millions of refugees there, and to be honest, they are pillars of stability in the region, with all the difficulties they face, and the first line of defense of our collective security. So it doesn't make sense that these countries are not a first priority in development cooperation policies. And they are not. And not only do the refugees live in very dramatic circumstances inside those countries, but the local communities themselves are suffering, because salaries went down, because there are more unemployed, because prices and rents went up. And, of course, if you look at today's situation of the indicators in these countries, it is clear that, especially their poor groups of the population, are living worse and worse because of the crisis they are facing. BG: Who should be providing this support? Country by country, international organizations, the European Union? Who should be coming up with this support? AG: We need to join all efforts. It's clear that bilateral cooperation is essential. It's clear that multilateral cooperation is essential. It's clear that international financial institutions should have flexibility in order to be able to invest more massively in support to these countries. We need to combine all the instruments and to understand that today, in protracted situations, at a certain moment, that it doesn't make sense anymore to make a distinction between humanitarian aid and development aid or development processes. Because you are talking about children in school, you are talking about health, you are talking about infrastructure that is overcrowded. You are talking about things that require a long-term perspective, a development perspective and not only an emergency humanitarian aid perspective. BG: I would like your comment on something that was in newspapers this morning. It is a statement made by the current front-runner for the Republican nomination for US President, Donald Trump. Yesterday, he said this. (Laughter) No, listen to this. It's interesting. I quote: "I am calling for a total and complete shutdown of Muslims entering the US, until our country's representatives can figure out what's going on." How do you react to that? AG: Well, it's not only Donald Trump. We have seen several people around the world with political responsibility saying, for instance, that Muslims refugees should not be received. And the reason why they say this is because they think that by doing or saying this, they are protecting the security of their countries. Now, I've been in government. I am very keen on the need for governments to protect the security of their countries and their people. But if you say, like that, in the US or in any European country, "We are going to close our doors to Muslim refugees," what you are saying is the best possible help for the propaganda of terrorist organizations. Because what you are saying -- (Applause) What you are saying will be heard by all the Muslims in your own country, and it will pave the way for the recruitment and the mechanisms that, through technology, Daesh and al-Nusra, al-Qaeda, and all those other groups are today penetrating in our societies. And it's just telling them, "You are right, we are against you." So obviously, this is creating in societies that are all multiethnic, multi-religious, multicultural, this is creating a situation in which, really, it is much easier for the propaganda of these terrorist organizations to be effective in recruiting people for terror acts within the countries where these kinds of sentences are expressed. BG: Have the recent attacks in Paris and the reactions to them made your job more difficult? AG: Undoubtedly. BG: In what sense? AG: In the sense that, I mean, for many people the first reaction in relation to these kinds of terrorist attacks is: close all borders -- not understanding that the terrorist problem in Europe is largely homegrown. We have thousands and thousands of European fighters in Syria and in Iraq, so this is not something that you solve by just not allowing Syrians to come in. And I must say, I am convinced that the passport that appeared, I believe, was put by the person who has blown -- BG: -- himself up, yeah. AG: [I believe] it was on purpose, because part of the strategies of Daesh is against refugees, because they see refugees as people that should be with the caliphate and are fleeing to the crusaders. And I think that is part of Daesh's strategy to make Europe react, closing its doors to Muslim refugees and having an hostility towards Muslims inside Europe, exactly to facilitate Daesh's work. And my deep belief is that it was not the refugee movement that triggered terrorism. I think, as I said, essentially terrorism in Europe is today a homegrown movement in relation to the global situation that we are facing, and what we need is exactly to prove these groups wrong, by welcoming and integrating effectively those that are coming from that part of the world. And another thing that I believe is that to a large extent, what we are today paying for in Europe is the failures of integration models that didn't work in the '60s, in the '70s, in the '80s, in relation to big migration flows that took place at that time and generated what is today in many of the people, for instance, of the second generation of communities, a situation of feeling marginalized, having no jobs, having improper education, living in some of the neighborhoods that are not adequately provided by public infrastructure. And this kind of uneasiness, sometimes even anger, that exists in this second generation is largely due to the failure of integration policies, to the failure of what should have been a much stronger investment in creating the conditions for people to live together and respect each other. For me it is clear. (Applause) For me it is clear that all societies will be multiethnic, multicultural, multi-religious in the future. To try to avoid it is, in my opinion, impossible. And for me it's a good thing that they will be like that, but I also recognize that, for that to work properly, you need a huge investment in the social cohesion of your own societies. And Europe, to a large extent, failed in that investment in the past few decades. BG: Question: You are stepping down from your job at the end of the year, after 10 years. If you look back at 2005, when you entered that office for the first time, what do you see? AG: Well, look: In 2005, we were helping one million people go back home in safety and dignity, because conflicts had ended. Last year, we helped 124,000. In 2005, we had about 38 million people displaced by conflict in the world. Today, we have more than 60 million. At that time, we had had, recently, some conflicts that were solved. Now, we see a multiplication of new conflicts and the old conflicts never died: Afghanistan, Somalia, Democratic Republic of Congo. It is clear that the world today is much more dangerous than it was. It is clear that the capacity of the international community to prevent conflicts and to timely solve them, is, unfortunately, much worse than what it was 10 years ago. There are no clear power relations in the world, no global governance mechanisms that work, which means that we live in a situation where impunity and unpredictability tend to prevail, and that means that more and more people suffer, namely those that are displaced by conflicts. BG: It's a tradition in American politics that when a President leaves the Oval Office for the last time, he leaves a handwritten note on the desk for his successor that walks in a couple of hours later. If you had to write such a note to your successor, Filippo Grandi, what would you write? AG: Well, I don't think I would write any message. You know, one of the terrible things when one leaves an office is to try to become the backseat driver, always telling the new one what to do. So that, I will not do. If I had to say something to him, it would be, "Be yourself, and do your best." BG: Commissioner, thank you for the job you do. Thank you for coming to TED. (Applause)

My journey to become a polar specialist, photographing, specializing in the polar regions, began when I was four years old, when my family moved from Southern Canada to Northern Baffin Island, up by Greenland. There we lived with the Inuit in the tiny Inuit community of 200 Inuit people, where [we] were one of three non-Inuit families. And in this community, we didn't have a television; we didn't have computers, obviously, radio. We didn't even have a telephone. All of my time was spent outside with the Inuit, playing. The snow and the ice were my sandbox, and the Inuit were my teachers. And that's where I became truly obsessed with this polar realm. And I knew someday that I was going to do something that had to do with trying to share news about it and protect it. I'd like to share with you, for just two minutes only, some images, a cross-section of my work, to the beautiful music by Brandi Carlile, "Have You Ever." I don't know why National Geographic has done this, they've never done this before, but they're allowing me to show you a few images from a coverage that I've just completed that is not published yet. National Geographic doesn't do this, so I'm very excited to be able to share this with you. And what these images are -- you'll see them at the start of the slide show -- there's only about four images -- but it's of a little bear that lives in the Great Bear Rainforest. It's pure white, but it's not a polar bear. It's a spirit bear, or a Kermode bear. There are only 200 of these bears left. They're more rare than the panda bear. I sat there on the river for two months without seeing one. I thought, my career's over. I proposed this stupid story to National Geographic. What in the heck was I thinking? So I had two months to sit there and figure out different ways of what I was going to do in my next life, after I was a photographer, because they were going to fire me. Because National Geographic is a magazine; they remind us all the time: they publish pictures, not excuses. (Laughter) And after two months of sitting there -- one day, thinking that it was all over, this incredible big white male came down, right beside me, three feet away from me, and he went down and grabbed a fish and went off in the forest and ate it. And then I spent the entire day living my childhood dream of walking around with this bear through the forest. He went through this old-growth forest and sat up beside this 400-year-old culturally modified tree and went to sleep. And I actually got to sleep within three feet of him, just in the forest, and photograph him. So I'm very excited to be able to show you those images and a cross-section of my work that I've done on the polar regions. Please enjoy. (Music) Brandi Carlile: ♫ Have you ever wandered lonely through the woods? ♫ ♫ And everything there feels just as it should ♫ ♫ You're part of the life there ♫ ♫ You're part of something good ♫ ♫ If you've ever wandered lonely through the woods ♫ ♫ Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh ♫ ♫ If you've ever wandered lonely through the woods ♫ ♫ Have you ever stared into a starry sky? ♫ ♫ Lying on your back, you're asking why ♫ ♫ What's the purpose? ♫ ♫ I wonder, who am I? ♫ ♫ If you've ever stared into a starry sky ♫ ♫ Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh ♫ ♫ Aah, ah, aah ♫ ♫ Ah, oh, oh, ah, ah, oh, oh ♫ ♫ Have you ever stared into a starry sky? ♫ ♫ Have you ever been out walking in the snow? ♫ ♫ Tried to get back where you were before ♫ ♫ You always end up ♫ ♫ Not knowing where to go ♫ ♫ If you've ever been out walking in the snow ♫ ♫ Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh ♫ ♫ Aah, ah, aah, ah, aah ♫ ♫ Ah, ah, oh, ah, ah, oh, ah ♫ ♫ Oh, ah, ah, ah ♫ ♫ Ah, ah, oh, ah, ah, oh, oh ♫ ♫ If you'd ever been out walking you would know ♫ (Applause) Paul Nicklen: Thank you very much. The show's not over. My clock is ticking. Okay, let's stop. Thank you very much. I appreciate it. We're inundated with news all the time that the sea ice is disappearing and it's at its lowest level. And in fact, scientists were originally saying sea ice is going to disappear in the next hundred years, then they said 50 years. Now they're saying the sea ice in the Arctic, the summertime extent is going to be gone in the next four to 10 years. And what does that mean? After a while of reading this in the news, it just becomes news. You glaze over with it. And what I'm trying to do with my work is put faces to this. And I want people to understand and get the concept that, if we lose ice, we stand to lose an entire ecosystem. Projections are that we could lose polar bears; they could become extinct in the next 50 to 100 years. And there's no better, sexier, more beautiful, charismatic megafauna species for me to hang my campaign on. Polar bears are amazing hunters. This was a bear I sat with for a while on the shores. There was no ice around. But this glacier caved into the water and a seal got on it. And this bear swam out to that seal -- 800 lb. bearded seal -- grabbed it, swam back and ate it. And he was so full, he was so happy and so fat eating this seal, that, as I approached him -- about 20 feet away -- to get this picture, his only defense was to keep eating more seal. And as he ate, he was so full -- he probably had about 200 lbs of meat in his belly -- and as he ate inside one side of his mouth, he was regurgitating out the other side of his mouth. So as long as these bears have any bit of ice they will survive, but it's the ice that's disappearing. We're finding more and more dead bears in the Arctic. When I worked on polar bears as a biologist 20 years ago, we never found dead bears. And in the last four or five years, we're finding dead bears popping up all over the place. We're seeing them in the Beaufort Sea, floating in the open ocean where the ice has melted out. I found a couple in Norway last year. We're seeing them on the ice. These bears are already showing signs of the stress of disappearing ice. Here's a mother and her two year-old cub were traveling on a ship a hundred miles offshore in the middle of nowhere, and they're riding on this big piece of glacier ice, which is great for them; they're safe at this point. They're not going to die of hypothermia. They're going to get to land. But unfortunately, 95 percent of the glaciers in the Arctic are also receding right now to the point that the ice is ending up on land and not injecting any ice back into the ecosystem. These ringed seals, these are the "fatsicles" of the Arctic. These little, fat dumplings, 150-pound bundles of blubber are the mainstay of the polar bear. And they're not like the harbor seals that you have here. These ringed seals also live out their entire life cycle associated and connected to sea ice. They give birth inside the ice, and they feed on the Arctic cod that live under the ice. And here's a picture of sick ice. This is a piece of multi-year ice that's 12 years old. And what scientists didn't predict is that, as this ice melts, these big pockets of black water are forming and they're grabbing the sun's energy and accelerating the melting process. And here we are diving in the Beaufort Sea. The visibility's 600 ft.; we're on our safety lines; the ice is moving all over the place. I wish I could spend half an hour telling you about how we almost died on this dive. But what's important in this picture is that you have a piece of multi-year ice, that big chunk of ice up in the corner. In that one single piece of ice, you have 300 species of microorganisms. And in the spring, when the sun returns to the ice, it forms the phytoplankton, grows under that ice, and then you get bigger sheets of seaweed, and then you get the zoo plankton feeding on all that life. So really what the ice does is it acts like a garden. It acts like the soil in a garden. It's an inverted garden. Losing that ice is like losing the soil in a garden. Here's me in my office. I hope you appreciate yours. This is after an hour under the ice. I can't feel my lips; my face is frozen; I can't feel my hands; I can't feel my feet. And I've come up, and all I wanted to do was get out of the water. After an hour in these conditions, it's so extreme that, when I go down, almost every dive I vomit into my regulator because my body can't deal with the stress of the cold on my head. And so I'm just so happy that the dive is over. I get to hand my camera to my assistant, and I'm looking up at him, and I'm going, "Woo. Woo. Woo." Which means, "Take my camera." And he thinks I'm saying, "Take my picture." So we had this little communication breakdown. (Laughter) But it's worth it. I'm going to show you pictures of beluga whales, bowhead whales, and narwhals, and polar bears, and leopard seals today, but this picture right here means more to me than any other I've ever made. I dropped down in this ice hole, just through that hole that you just saw, and I looked up under the underside of the ice, and I was dizzy; I thought I had vertigo. I got very nervous -- no rope, no safety line, the whole world is moving around me -- and I thought, "I'm in trouble." But what happened is that the entire underside was full of these billions of amphipods and copepods moving around and feeding on the underside of the ice, giving birth and living out their entire life cycle. This is the foundation of the whole food chain in the Arctic, right here. And when you have low productivity in this, in ice, the productivity in copepods go down. This is a bowhead whale. Supposedly, science is stating that it could be the oldest living animal on earth right now. This very whale right here could be over 250 years old. This whale could have been born around the start of the Industrial Revolution. It could have survived 150 years of whaling. And now its biggest threat is the disappearance of ice in the North because of the lives that we're leading in the South. Narwhals, these majestic narwhals with their eight-foot long ivory tusks, don't have to be here; they could be out on the open water. But they're forcing themselves to come up in these tiny little ice holes where they can breathe, catch a breath, because right under that ice are all the swarms of cod. And the cod are there because they are feeding on all the copepods and amphipods. Alright, my favorite part. When I'm on my deathbed, I'm going to remember one story more than any other. Even though that spirit bear moment was powerful, I don't think I'll ever have another experience like I did with these leopard seals. Leopard seals, since the time of Shackleton, have had a bad reputation. They've got that wryly smile on their mouth. They've got those black sinister eyes and those spots on their body. They look positively prehistoric and a bit scary. And tragically in [2003], a scientist was taken down and drowned, and she was being consumed by a leopard seal. And people were like, "We knew they were vicious. We knew they were." And so people love to form their opinions. And that's when I got a story idea: I want to go to Antarctica, get in the water with as many leopard seals as I possibly can and give them a fair shake -- find out if they really are these vicious animals, or if they're misunderstood. So this is that story. Oh, and they also happen to eat happy feet. (Laughter) As a species, as humans, we like to say penguins are really cute, therefore, leopard seals eat them, so leopard seals are ugly and bad. It doesn't work that way. The penguin doesn't know it's cute, and the leopard seal doesn't know it's kind of big and monstrous. This is just the food chain unfolding. They're also big. They're not these little harbor seals. They are 12 ft. long, a thousand pounds. And they're also curiously aggressive. You get 12 tourists packed into a Zodiac, floating in these icy waters, and a leopard seal comes up and bites the pontoon. The boat starts to sink, they race back to the ship and get to go home and tell the stories of how they got attacked. All the leopard seal was doing -- it's just biting a balloon. It just sees this big balloon in the ocean -- it doesn't have hands -- it's going to take a little bite, the boat pops, and off they go. (Laughter) So after five days of crossing the Drake Passage -- isn't that beautiful. After five days of crossing the Drake Passage, we have finally arrived at Antarctica. I'm with my Swedish assistant and guide. His name is Goran Ehlme from Sweden -- Goran. And he has a lot of experience with leopard seals. I have never seen one. So we come around the cove in our little Zodiac boat, and there's this monstrous leopard seal. And even in his voice, he goes, "That's a bloody big seal, ya." (Laughter) And this seal is taking this penguin by the head, and it's flipping it back and forth. And what it's trying to do is turn that penguin inside-out, so it can eat the meat off the bones, and then it goes off and gets another one. And so this leopard seal grabbed another penguin, came under the boat, the Zodiac, starting hitting the hull of the boat. And we're trying to not fall in the water. And we sit down, and that's when Goran said to me, "This is a good seal, ya. It's time for you to get in the water." (Laughter) And I looked at Goran, and I said to him, "Forget that." But I think I probably used a different word starting with the letter F. But he was right. He scolded me out, and said, "This is why we're here. And you purposed this stupid story to National Geographic. And now you've got to deliver. And you can't publish excuses." So I had such dry mouth -- probably not as bad as now -- but I had such, such dry mouth. And my legs were just trembling. I couldn't feel my legs. I put my flippers on. I could barely part my lips. I put my snorkel in my mouth, and I rolled over the side of the Zodiac into the water. And this was the first thing she did. She came racing up to me, engulfed my whole camera -- and her teeth are up here and down here -- but Goran, before I had gotten in the water, had given me amazing advice. He said, "If you get scared, you close your eyes, ya, and she'll go away." (Laughter) So that's all I had to work with at that point. But I just started to shoot these pictures. So she did this threat display for a few minutes, and then the most amazing thing happened -- she totally relaxed. She went off, she got a penguin. She stopped about 10 feet away from me, and she sat there with this penguin, the penguin's flapping, and she let's it go. The penguin swims toward me, takes off. She grabs another one. She does this over and over. And it dawned on me that she's trying to feed me a penguin. Why else would she release these penguins at me? And after she did this four or five times, she swam by me with this dejected look on her face. You don't want to be too anthropomorphic, but I swear that she looked at me like, "This useless predator's going to starve in my ocean." (Laughter) So realizing I couldn't catch swimming penguins, she'd get these other penguins and bring them slowly towards me, bobbing like this, and she'd let them go. This didn't work. I was laughing so hard and so emotional that my mask was flooding, because I was crying underwater, just because it was so amazing. And so that didn't work. So then she'd get another penguin and try this ballet-like sexy display sliding down this iceberg like this. (Laughter) And she would sort of bring them over to me and offer it to me. This went on for four days. This just didn't happen a couple of times. And then so she realized I couldn't catch live ones, so she brought me dead penguins. (Laughter) Now I've got four or five penguins floating around my head, and I'm just sitting there shooting away. And she would often stop and have this dejected look on her face like, "Are you for real?" Because she can't believe I can't eat this penguin. Because in her world, you're either breeding or you're eating -- and I'm not breeding, so ... (Laughter) And then that wasn't enough; she started to flip penguins onto my head. She was trying to force-feed me. She's pushing me around. She's trying to force-feed my camera, which is every photographer's dream. And she would get frustrated; she'd blow bubbles in my face. She would, I think, let me know that I was going to starve. But yet she didn't stop. She would not stop trying to feed me penguins. And on the last day with this female where I thought I had pushed her too far, I got nervous because she came up to me, she rolled over on her back, and she did this deep, guttural jackhammer sound, this gokgokgokgok. And I thought, she's about to bite. She's about to let me know she's too frustrated with me. What had happened was another seal had snuck in behind me, and she did that to threat display. She chased that big seal away, went and got its penguin and brought it to me. (Laughter) That wasn't the only seal I got in the water with. I got in the water with 30 other leopard seals, and I never once had a scary encounter. They are the most remarkable animals I've ever worked with, and the same with polar bears. And just like the polar bears, these animals depend on an icy environment. I get emotional. Sorry. It's a story that lives deep in my heart, and I'm proud to share this with you. And I'm so passionate about it. Anybody want to come with me to Antarctica or the Arctic, I'll take you; let's go. We've got to get the story out now. Thank you very much. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. Thanks very much. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause)

My journey to become a polar specialist, photographing, specializing in the polar regions, began when I was four years old, when my family moved from southern Canada to Northern Baffin Island, up by Greenland. There we lived with the Inuit in the tiny Inuit community of 200 Inuit people, where [we] were one of three non-Inuit families. And in this community, we didn't have a television; we didn't have computers, obviously, radio. We didn't even have a telephone. All of my time was spent outside with the Inuit, playing. The snow and the ice were my sandbox, and the Inuit were my teachers. And that's where I became truly obsessed with this polar realm. And I knew someday that I was going to do something that had to do with trying to share news about it and protect it. I'd like to share with you, for just two minutes only, some images, a cross-section of my work, to the beautiful music by Brandi Carlile, "Have You Ever." I don't know why National Geographic has done this, they've never done this before, but they're allowing me to show you a few images from a coverage that I've just completed that is not published yet. National Geographic doesn't do this, so I'm very excited to be able to share this with you. And what these images are -- you'll see them at the start of the slide show -- there's only about four images -- but it's of a little bear that lives in the Great Bear Rainforest. It's pure white, but it's not a polar bear. It's a spirit bear, or a Kermode bear. There are only 200 of these bears left. They're more rare than the panda bear. I sat there on the river for two months without seeing one. I thought, my career's over. I proposed this stupid story to National Geographic. What in the heck was I thinking? So I had two months to sit there and figure out different ways of what I was going to do in my next life, after I was a photographer, because they were going to fire me. Because National Geographic is a magazine; they remind us all the time: they publish pictures, not excuses. (Laughter) And after two months of sitting there -- one day, thinking that it was all over, this incredible big white male came down, right beside me, three feet away from me, and he went down and grabbed a fish and went off in the forest and ate it. And then I spent the entire day living my childhood dream of walking around with this bear through the forest. He went through this old-growth forest and sat up beside this 400-year-old culturally modified tree and went to sleep. And I actually got to sleep within three feet of him, just in the forest, and photograph him. So I'm very excited to be able to show you those images and a cross-section of my work that I've done on the polar regions. Please enjoy. (Music) Brandi Carlile: ♫ Have you ever wandered lonely through the woods? ♫ ♫ And everything there feels just as it should ♫ ♫ You're part of the life there ♫ ♫ You're part of something good ♫ ♫ If you've ever wandered lonely through the woods ♫ ♫ Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh ♫ ♫ If you've ever wandered lonely through the woods ♫ ♫ Have you ever stared into a starry sky? ♫ ♫ Lying on your back, you're asking why ♫ ♫ What's the purpose? ♫ ♫ I wonder, who am I? ♫ ♫ If you've ever stared into a starry sky ♫ ♫ Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh ♫ ♫ Aah, ah, aah ♫ ♫ Ah, oh, oh, ah, ah, oh, oh ♫ ♫ Have you ever stared into a starry sky? ♫ ♫ Have you ever been out walking in the snow? ♫ ♫ Tried to get back where you were before ♫ ♫ You always end up ♫ ♫ Not knowing where to go ♫ ♫ If you've ever been out walking in the snow ♫ ♫ Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh ♫ ♫ Aah, ah, aah, ah, aah ♫ ♫ Ah, ah, oh, ah, ah, oh, ah ♫ ♫ Oh, ah, ah, ah ♫ ♫ Ah, ah, oh, ah, ah, oh, oh ♫ ♫ If you'd ever been out walking you would know ♫ (Applause) Paul Nicklen: Thank you very much. The show's not over. My clock is ticking. OK, let's stop. Thank you very much. I appreciate it. We're inundated with news all the time that the sea ice is disappearing and it's at its lowest level. And in fact, scientists were originally saying sea ice is going to disappear in the next hundred years, then they said 50 years. Now they're saying the sea ice in the Arctic, the summertime extent is going to be gone in the next four to 10 years. And what does that mean? After a while of reading this in the news, it just becomes news. You glaze over with it. And what I'm trying to do with my work is put faces to this. And I want people to understand and get the concept that, if we lose ice, we stand to lose an entire ecosystem. Projections are that we could lose polar bears, they could become extinct in the next 50 to 100 years. And there's no better, sexier, more beautiful, charismatic megafauna species for me to hang my campaign on. Polar bears are amazing hunters. This was a bear I sat with for a while on the shores. There was no ice around. But this glacier caved into the water and a seal got on it. And this bear swam out to that seal -- 800 lb. bearded seal -- grabbed it, swam back and ate it. And he was so full, he was so happy and so fat eating this seal, that, as I approached him -- about 20 feet away -- to get this picture, his only defense was to keep eating more seal. And as he ate, he was so full -- he probably had about 200 lbs of meat in his belly -- and as he ate inside one side of his mouth, he was regurgitating out the other side of his mouth. So as long as these bears have any bit of ice they will survive, but it's the ice that's disappearing. We're finding more and more dead bears in the Arctic. When I worked on polar bears as a biologist 20 years ago, we never found dead bears. And in the last four or five years, we're finding dead bears popping up all over the place. We're seeing them in the Beaufort Sea, floating in the open ocean where the ice has melted out. I found a couple in Norway last year. We're seeing them on the ice. These bears are already showing signs of the stress of disappearing ice. Here's a mother and her two year-old cub were traveling on a ship a hundred miles offshore in the middle of nowhere, and they're riding on this big piece of glacier ice, which is great for them; they're safe at this point. They're not going to die of hypothermia. They're going to get to land. But unfortunately, 95 percent of the glaciers in the Arctic are also receding right now to the point that the ice is ending up on land and not injecting any ice back into the ecosystem. These ringed seals, these are the "fatsicles" of the Arctic. These little, fat dumplings, 150-pound bundles of blubber are the mainstay of the polar bear. And they're not like the harbor seals that you have here. These ringed seals also live out their entire life cycle associated and connected to sea ice. They give birth inside the ice, and they feed on the Arctic cod that live under the ice. And here's a picture of sick ice. This is a piece of multi-year ice that's 12 years old. And what scientists didn't predict is that, as this ice melts, these big pockets of black water are forming and they're grabbing the sun's energy and accelerating the melting process. And here we are diving in the Beaufort Sea. The visibility's 600 ft.; we're on our safety lines; the ice is moving all over the place. I wish I could spend half an hour telling you about how we almost died on this dive. But what's important in this picture is that you have a piece of multi-year ice, that big chunk of ice up in the corner. In that one single piece of ice, you have 300 species of microorganisms. And in the spring, when the sun returns to the ice, it forms the phytoplankton, grows under that ice, and then you get bigger sheets of seaweed, and then you get the zooplankton feeding on all that life. So really what the ice does is it acts like a garden. It acts like the soil in a garden. It's an inverted garden. Losing that ice is like losing the soil in a garden. Here's me in my office. I hope you appreciate yours. This is after an hour under the ice. I can't feel my lips; my face is frozen; I can't feel my hands; I can't feel my feet. And I've come up, and all I wanted to do was get out of the water. After an hour in these conditions, it's so extreme that, when I go down, almost every dive I vomit into my regulator because my body can't deal with the stress of the cold on my head. And so I'm just so happy that the dive is over. I get to hand my camera to my assistant, and I'm looking up at him, and I'm going, "Woo. Woo. Woo." Which means, "Take my camera." And he thinks I'm saying, "Take my picture." So we had this little communication breakdown. (Laughter) But it's worth it. I'm going to show you pictures of beluga whales, bowhead whales, and narwhals, and polar bears, and leopard seals today, but this picture right here means more to me than any other I've ever made. I dropped down in this ice hole, just through that hole that you just saw, and I looked up under the underside of the ice, and I was dizzy; I thought I had vertigo. I got very nervous -- no rope, no safety line, the whole world is moving around me -- and I thought, "I'm in trouble." But what happened is that the entire underside was full of these billions of amphipods and copepods moving around and feeding on the underside of the ice, giving birth and living out their entire life cycle. This is the foundation of the whole food chain in the Arctic, right here. And when you have low productivity in this, in ice, the productivity in copepods go down. This is a bowhead whale. Supposedly, science is stating that it could be the oldest living animal on earth right now. This very whale right here could be over 250 years old. This whale could have been born around the start of the Industrial Revolution. It could have survived 150 years of whaling. And now its biggest threat is the disappearance of ice in the North because of the lives that we're leading in the South. Narwhals, these majestic narwhals with their eight-foot long ivory tusks, don't have to be here; they could be out on the open water. But they're forcing themselves to come up in these tiny little ice holes where they can breathe, catch a breath, because right under that ice are all the swarms of cod. And the cod are there because they are feeding on all the copepods and amphipods. Alright, my favorite part. When I'm on my deathbed, I'm going to remember one story more than any other. Even though that spirit bear moment was powerful, I don't think I'll ever have another experience like I did with these leopard seals. Leopard seals, since the time of Shackleton, have had a bad reputation. They've got that wryly smile on their mouth. They've got those black sinister eyes and those spots on their body. They look positively prehistoric and a bit scary. And tragically in [2003], a scientist was taken down and drowned, and she was being consumed by a leopard seal. And people were like, "We knew they were vicious. We knew they were." And so people love to form their opinions. And that's when I got a story idea: I want to go to Antarctica, get in the water with as many leopard seals as I possibly can and give them a fair shake -- find out if they really are these vicious animals, or if they're misunderstood. So this is that story. Oh, and they also happen to eat Happy Feet. (Laughter) As a species, as humans, we like to say penguins are really cute, therefore, leopard seals eat them, so leopard seals are ugly and bad. It doesn't work that way. The penguin doesn't know it's cute, and the leopard seal doesn't know it's kind of big and monstrous. This is just the food chain unfolding. They're also big. They're not these little harbor seals. They are 12 ft. long, a thousand pounds. And they're also curiously aggressive. You get 12 tourists packed into a Zodiac, floating in these icy waters, and a leopard seal comes up and bites the pontoon. The boat starts to sink, they race back to the ship and get to go home and tell the stories of how they got attacked. All the leopard seal was doing -- it's just biting a balloon. It just sees this big balloon in the ocean -- it doesn't have hands -- it's going to take a little bite, the boat pops, and off they go. (Laughter) So after five days of crossing the Drake Passage -- isn't that beautiful -- after five days of crossing the Drake Passage, we have finally arrived at Antarctica. I'm with my Swedish assistant and guide. His name is Goran Ehlme from Sweden -- Goran. And he has a lot of experience with leopard seals. I have never seen one. So we come around the cove in our little Zodiac boat, and there's this monstrous leopard seal. And even in his voice, he goes, "That's a bloody big seal, ya." (Laughter) And this seal is taking this penguin by the head, and it's flipping it back and forth. And what it's trying to do is turn that penguin inside-out, so it can eat the meat off the bones, and then it goes off and gets another one. And so this leopard seal grabbed another penguin, came under the boat, the Zodiac, starting hitting the hull of the boat. And we're trying to not fall in the water. And we sit down, and that's when Goran said to me, "This is a good seal, ya. It's time for you to get in the water." (Laughter) And I looked at Goran, and I said to him, "Forget that." But I think I probably used a different word starting with the letter "F." But he was right. He scolded me out, and said, "This is why we're here. And you purposed this stupid story to National Geographic. And now you've got to deliver. And you can't publish excuses." So I had such dry mouth -- probably not as bad as now -- but I had such, such dry mouth. And my legs were just trembling. I couldn't feel my legs. I put my flippers on. I could barely part my lips. I put my snorkel in my mouth, and I rolled over the side of the Zodiac into the water. And this was the first thing she did. She came racing up to me, engulfed my whole camera -- and her teeth are up here and down here -- but Goran, before I had gotten in the water, had given me amazing advice. He said, "If you get scared, you close your eyes, ya, and she'll go away." (Laughter) So that's all I had to work with at that point. But I just started to shoot these pictures. So she did this threat display for a few minutes, and then the most amazing thing happened -- she totally relaxed. She went off, she got a penguin. She stopped about 10 feet away from me, and she sat there with this penguin, the penguin's flapping, and she let's it go. The penguin swims toward me, takes off. She grabs another one. She does this over and over. And it dawned on me that she's trying to feed me a penguin. Why else would she release these penguins at me? And after she did this four or five times, she swam by me with this dejected look on her face. You don't want to be too anthropomorphic, but I swear that she looked at me like, "This useless predator's going to starve in my ocean." (Laughter) So realizing I couldn't catch swimming penguins, she'd get these other penguins and bring them slowly towards me, bobbing like this, and she'd let them go. This didn't work. I was laughing so hard and so emotional that my mask was flooding, because I was crying underwater, just because it was so amazing. And so that didn't work. So then she'd get another penguin and try this ballet-like sexy display sliding down this iceberg like this. (Laughter) And she would sort of bring them over to me and offer it to me. This went on for four days. This just didn't happen a couple of times. And then so she realized I couldn't catch live ones, so she brought me dead penguins. (Laughter) Now I've got four or five penguins floating around my head, and I'm just sitting there shooting away. And she would often stop and have this dejected look on her face like, "Are you for real?" Because she can't believe I can't eat this penguin. Because in her world, you're either breeding or you're eating -- and I'm not breeding, so ... (Laughter) And then that wasn't enough; she started to flip penguins onto my head. She was trying to force-feed me. She's pushing me around. She's trying to force-feed my camera, which is every photographer's dream. And she would get frustrated; she'd blow bubbles in my face. She would, I think, let me know that I was going to starve. But yet she didn't stop. She would not stop trying to feed me penguins. And on the last day with this female where I thought I had pushed her too far, I got nervous because she came up to me, she rolled over on her back, and she did this deep, guttural jackhammer sound, this gok-gok-gok-gok. And I thought, she's about to bite. She's about to let me know she's too frustrated with me. What had happened was another seal had snuck in behind me, and she did that to threat display. She chased that big seal away, went and got its penguin and brought it to me. (Laughter) That wasn't the only seal I got in the water with. I got in the water with 30 other leopard seals, and I never once had a scary encounter. They are the most remarkable animals I've ever worked with, and the same with polar bears. And just like the polar bears, these animals depend on an icy environment. I get emotional. Sorry. It's a story that lives deep in my heart, and I'm proud to share this with you. And I'm so passionate about it. Anybody want to come with me to Antarctica or the Arctic, I'll take you; let's go. We've got to get the story out now. Thank you very much. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. Thanks very much. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause)

I'm going to present three projects in rapid fire. I don't have much time to do it. And I want to reinforce three ideas with that rapid-fire presentation. The first is what I like to call a hyper-rational process. It's a process that takes rationality almost to an absurd level, and it transcends all the baggage that normally comes with what people would call, sort of a rational conclusion to something. And it concludes in something that you see here, that you actually wouldn't expect as being the result of rationality. The second -- the second is that this process does not have a signature. There is no authorship. Architects are obsessed with authorship. This is something that has editing and it has teams, but in fact, we no longer see within this process, the traditional master architect creating a sketch that his minions carry out. And the third is that it challenges -- and this is, in the length of this, very hard to support why, connect all these things -- but it challenges the high modernist notion of flexibility. High modernists said we will create sort of singular spaces that are generic, almost anything can happen within them. I call it sort of "shotgun flexibility" -- turn your head this way; shoot; and you're bound to kill something. So, this is the promise of high modernism: within a single space, actually, any kind of activity can happen. But as we're seeing, operational costs are starting to dwarf capital costs in terms of design parameters. And so, with this sort of idea, what happens is, whatever actually is in the building on opening day, or whatever seems to be the most immediate need, starts to dwarf the possibility and sort of subsume it, of anything else could ever happen. And so we're proposing a different kind of flexibility, something that we call "compartmentalized flexibility." And the idea is that you, within that continuum, identify a series of points, and you design specifically to them. They can be pushed off-center a little bit, but in the end you actually still get as much of that original spectrum as you originally had hoped. With high modernist flexibility, that doesn't really work. Now I'm going to talk about -- I'm going to build up the Seattle Central Library in this way before your eyes in about five or six diagrams, and I truly mean this is the design process that you'll see. With the library staff and the library board, we settled on two core positions. This is the first one, and this is showing, over the last 900 years, the evolution of the book, and other technologies. This diagram was our sort of position piece about the book, and our position was, books are technology -- that's something people forget -- but it's a form of technology that will have to share its dominance with any other form of truly potent technology or media. The second premise -- and this was something that was very difficult for us to convince the librarians of at first -- is that libraries, since the inception of Carnegie Library tradition in America, had a second responsibility, and that was for social roles. Ok, now, this I'll come back to later, but something -- actually, the librarians at first said, "No, this isn't our mandate. Our mandate is media, and particularly the book." So what you're seeing now is actually the design of the building. The upper diagram is what we had seen in a whole host of contemporary libraries that used high modernist flexibility. Sort of, any activity could happen anywhere. We don't know the future of the library; we don't know the future of the book; and so, we'll use this approach. And what we saw were buildings that were very generic, and worse -- not only were they very generic -- so, not only does the reading room look like the copy room look like the magazine area -- but it meant that whatever issue was troubling the library at that moment was starting to engulf every other activity that was happening in it. And in this case, what was getting engulfed were these social responsibilities by the expansion of the book. And so we proposed what's at the lower diagram. Very dumb approach: simply compartmentalize. Put those things whose evolution we could predict -- and I don't mean that we could say what would actually happen in the future, but we have some certainty of the spectrum of what would happen in the future -- put those in boxes designed specifically for it, and put the things that we can't predict on the rooftops. So that was the core idea. Now, we had to convince the library that social roles were equally important to media, in order to get them to accept this. What you're seeing here is actually their program on the left. That's as it was given to us in all of its clarity and glory. Our first operation was to re-digest it back to them, show it to them and say, "You know what? We haven't touched it, but only one-third of your own program is dedicated to media and books. Two-thirds of it is already dedicated -- that's the white band below, the thing you said isn't important -- is already dedicated to social functions." So once we had presented that back to them, they agreed that this sort of core concept could work. We got the right to go back to first principles -- that's the third diagram. We recombined everything. And then we started making new decisions. What you're seeing on the right is the design of the library, specifically in terms of square footage. On the left of that diagram, here, you'll see a series of five platforms -- sort of combs, collective programs. And on the right are the more indeterminate spaces; things like reading rooms, whose evolution in 20, 30, 40 years we can't predict. So that literally was the design of the building. They signed it, and to their chagrin, we came back a week later, and we presented them this. And as you can see, it is literally the diagram on the right. (Laughter) We just sized -- no, really, I mean that, literally. The things on the left-hand side of the diagram, those are the boxes. We sized them into five compartments. They're super-efficient. We had a very low budget to work with. We pushed them around on the site to make very literal contextual relationships. The reading room should be able to see the water. The main entrance should have a public plaza in front of it to abide by the zoning code, and so forth. So, you see the five platforms, those are the boxes. within each one, a very discrete thing is happening. The area in between is sort of an urban continuum, these things that we can't predict their evolution to the same degree. To give you some sense of the power of this idea, the biggest block is what we call the book spiral. It's literally built in a very inexpensive way -- it is a parking garage for books. It just so happens to be on the 6th through 10th floors of the building, but that is not necessarily an expensive approach. And it allows us to organize the entire Dewey Decimal System on one continuous run; no matter how it grows or contracts within the building, it will always have its clarity to end the sort of trail of tears that we've all experienced in public libraries. (Laughter) And so this was the final operation, which was to take these blocks as they were all pushed off kilter, and to hold onto them with a skin. That skin serves double duty, again, for economics. One, it is the lateral stability for the entire building; it's a structural element. But its dimensions were designed not only for structure, but also for holding on every piece of glass. The glass was then -- I'll use the word impregnated -- but it had a layer of metal that was called "stretched metal." That metal acts as a microlouver, so from the exterior of the building, the sun sees it as totally opaque, but from the interior, it's entirely transparent. So now I'm going to take you on a tour of the building. Let me see if I can find it. For anyone who gets motion sickness, I apologize. So, this is the building. And I think what's important is, when we first unveiled the building, the public saw it as being totally about our whim and ego. And it was defended, believe it or not, by the librarians. They said, "Look, we don't know what it is, but we know it's everything that we need it to be, based on the observations that we've done about the program." This is going into one of the entries. So, it's an unusual building for a public library, obviously. So now we're going into what we call the living room. This is actually a program that we invented with the library. It was recognizing that public libraries are the last vestige of public free space. There are plenty of shopping malls that allow you to get out of the rain in downtown Seattle, but there are not so many free places that allow you to get out of the rain. So this was an unprogrammed area where people could pretty much do anything, including eat, yell, play chess and so forth. Now we're moving up into what we call the mixing chamber. That was the main technology area in the building. You'll have to tell me if I'm going too fast for you. And now up. This is actually the place that we put into the building so I could propose to my wife, right there. (Laughter) She said yes. (Laughter) I'm running out of time, so I'm actually going to stop. I can show this to you later. But let's see if I can very quickly get into the book spiral, because I think it's, as I said, the most -- this is the main reading room -- the most unique part of the building. You dizzy yet? Ok, so here, this is the book spiral. So, it's very indiscernible, but it's actually a continuous stair-stepping. It allows you to, on one city block, go up one full floor, so that it's on a continuum. Ok, now I'm going to go back, and I'm going to hit a second project. I'm going to go very, very quickly through this. Now this is the Dallas Theater. It was an unusual client for us, because they came to us and they said, "We need you to do a new building. We've been working in a temporary space for 30 years, but because of that temporary space, we've become an infamous theater company. Theater is really focused in New York, Chicago and Seattle, with the exception of the Dallas Theater Company." And the very fact that they worked in a provisional space meant that for Beckett, they could blow out a wall; they could do "Cherry Orchard" and blow a hole through the floor, and so forth. So it was a very daunting task for us to do a brand-new building that could be a pristine building, but keep this kind of experimental nature. And the second is, they were what we call a multi-form theater, they do different kinds of performances in repertory. So they in the morning will do something in arena, then they'll do something in proscenium and so forth. And so they needed to be able to quickly transform between different theater organizations, and for operational budget reasons, this actually no longer happens in pretty much any multi-form theater in the United States, so we needed to figure out a way to overcome that. So our thought was to literally put the theater on its head: to take those things that were previously defined as front-of-house and back-of-house and stack them above house and below house, and to create what we called a theater machine. We invest the money in the operation of the building. It's almost as though the building could be placed anywhere, wherever you place it, the area under it is charged for theatrical performances. And it allowed us to go back to first principles, and redefine fly tower, acoustic enclosure, light enclosure and so forth. And at the push of a button, it allows the artistic director to move between proscenium, thrust, and in fact, arena and traverse and flat floor, in a very quick transfiguration. So in fact, using operational budget, we can -- sorry, capital cost -- we can actually achieve what was no longer achievable in operational cost. And that means that the artistic director now has a palette that he or she can choose from, between a series of forms and a series of processions, because that enclosure around the theater that is normally trapped with front-of-house and back-of-house spaces has been liberated. So an artistic director has the ability to have a performance that enters in a Wagnerian procession, shows the first act in thrust, the intermission in a Greek procession, second act in arena, and so forth. So I'm going to show you what this actually means. This is the theater up close. Any portion around the theater actually can be opened discretely. The light enclosure can be lifted separate to the acoustic enclosure, so you can do Beckett with Dallas as the backdrop. Portions can be opened, so you can now actually have motorcycles drive directly into the performance, or you can even just have an open-air performance, or for intermissions. The balconies all move to go between those configurations, but they also disappear. The proscenium line can also disappear. You can bring enormous objects in, so in fact, the Dallas Theater Company -- their first show will be a play about Charles Lindbergh, and they'll want to bring in a real aircraft. And then it also provides them, in the off-season, the ability to actually rent out their space for entirely different things. This is it from a distance. Open up entire portions for different kinds of events. And at night. Again, remove the light enclosure; keep the acoustic enclosure. This is a monster truck show. I'm going to show now the last project. This also is an unusual client. They inverted the whole idea of development. They came to us and they said -- unlike normal developers -- they said, "We want to start out by providing a contemporary art museum in Louisville. That's our main goal." And so instead of being a developer that sees an opportunity to make money, they saw an ability to be a catalyst in their downtown. And the fact that they wanted to support the contemporary art museum actually built their pro forma, so they worked in reverse. And that pro forma led us to a mixed-use building that was very large, in order to support their aspirations of the art, but it also opened up opportunities for the art itself to collaborate, interact with commercial spaces that actually artists more and more want to work within. And it also charged us with thinking about how to have something that was both a single building and a credible sort of sub-building. So this is Louisville's skyline, and I'm going to take you through the various constraints that led to the project. First: the physical constraints. We actually had to operate on three discrete sites, all of them well smaller than the size of the building. We had to operate next to the new Muhammad Ali Center, and respect it. We had to operate within the 100-year floodplain. Now, this area floods three to four times a year, and there's a levee behind our site, similar to the ones that broke in New Orleans. Had to operate behind the I-64 corridor, a street that cuts through the middle of these separate sites. So we're starting to build a sort of nightmare of constraints in a bathtub. Underneath the bathtub are the city's main power lines. And there is a pedestrian corridor that they wanted to add, that would link a series of cultural buildings, and a view corridor -- because this is the historic district -- that they didn't want to obstruct with a new building. (Laughter) And now we're going to add 1.1 million square feet. And if we did the traditional thing, that 1.1 million square feet -- these are the different programs -- the traditional thing would be to identify the public elements, place them on sites, and now we'd have a really terrible situation: a public thing in the middle of a bathtub that floods. And then we would size all the other elements -- the different commercial elements: hotel, luxury housing, offices and so forth -- and dump it on top. And we would create something that was unviable. In fact -- and you know this -- this is called the Time Warner Building. (Laughter) So our strategy was very simple. Just lift the entire block, flip some of the elements over, reposition them so they have appropriate views and relationships to downtown, and make circulation connections and reroute the road. So that's the basic concept, and now I'm going to show you what it leads to. Ok, it seems a very formal, willful gesture, but something derived entirely out of the constraints. And again, when we unveiled it, there was a sort of nervousness that this was about an architect making a statement, not an architect who was attempting to solve a series of problems. Now, within that center zone, as I said, we have the ability to mix a series of things. So here, this is sort of an x-ray -- the towers are totally developer-driven. They told us the dimensions, the sizes and so forth, and we focused on taking all the public components -- the lobbies, the bars -- everything that different commercial elements would have, and combined it in the center, in the sort of subway map, in the transfer zone that would also include the contemporary art museum. So it creates a situation like this, where you have artists who can operate within an art space that also has an amazing view on the 22nd floor, but it also has proximity that the curator can either open or close. It allows people on exercise bicycles to be seen, or to see the art, and so forth. It also means that if an artist wants to invade something like a swimming pool, they can begin to do their exhibition in a swimming pool, so they're not forced to always work within the confines of a contemporary gallery space. So, how to build this. It's very simple: it's a chair. So, we begin by building the cores. As we're building the cores, we build the contemporary art museum at grade. That allows us to have incredible efficiency and cost efficiency. This is not a high-budget building. The moment the cores get to mid level, we finish the art museum; we put all the mechanical equipment in it; and then we jack it up into the air. This is how they build really large aircraft hangars, for instance, the ones that they did for the A380. Finish the cores, finish the meat and you get something that looks like this. Now I only have about 30 seconds, so I want to start an animation, and we'll conclude with that. Thank you. (Applause) Chris asked me to add -- the theater is under construction, and this project will start construction in about a year, and finish in 2010. [identify public elements] [insert public elements at grade] [optimize tower dimensions] [place towers on site] [lift program] [flip!] [optimize program adjacencies] [connect to context] [redirect 7th street]

I'm here today representing a team of artists and technologists and filmmakers that worked together on a remarkable film project for the last four years. And along the way they created a breakthrough in computer visualization. So I want to show you a clip of the film now. Hopefully it won't stutter. And if we did our jobs well, you won't know that we were even involved. Voice (Video): I don't know how it's possible ... but you seem to have more hair. Brad Pitt: What if I told you that I wasn't getting older ... but I was getting younger than everybody else? I was born with some form of disease. Voice: What kind of disease? BP: I was born old. Man: I'm sorry. BP: No need to be. There's nothing wrong with old age. Girl: Are you sick? BP: I heard momma and Tizzy whisper, and they said I was gonna die soon. But ... maybe not. Girl: You're different than anybody I've ever met. BB: There were many changes ... some you could see, some you couldn't. Hair started growing in all sorts of places, along with other things. I felt pretty good, considering. Ed Ulbrich: That was a clip from "The Curious Case of Benjamin Button." Many of you, maybe you've seen it or you've heard of the story, but what you might not know is that for nearly the first hour of the film, the main character, Benjamin Button, who's played by Brad Pitt, is completely computer-generated from the neck up. Now, there's no use of prosthetic makeup or photography of Brad superimposed over another actor's body. We've created a completely digital human head. So I'd like to start with a little bit of history on the project. This is based on an F. Scott Fitzgerald short story. It's about a man who's born old and lives his life in reverse. Now, this movie has floated around Hollywood for well over half a century, and we first got involved with the project in the early '90s, with Ron Howard as the director. We took a lot of meetings and we seriously considered it. But at the time we had to throw in the towel. It was deemed impossible. It was beyond the technology of the day to depict a man aging backwards. The human form, in particular the human head, has been considered the Holy Grail of our industry. The project came back to us about a decade later, and this time with a director named David Fincher. Now, Fincher is an interesting guy. David is fearless of technology, and he is absolutely tenacious. And David won't take "no." And David believed, like we do in the visual effects industry, that anything is possible as long as you have enough time, resources and, of course, money. And so David had an interesting take on the film, and he threw a challenge at us. He wanted the main character of the film to be played from the cradle to the grave by one actor. It happened to be this guy. We went through a process of elimination and a process of discovery with David, and we ruled out, of course, swapping actors. That was one idea: that we would have different actors, and we would hand off from actor to actor. We even ruled out the idea of using makeup. We realized that prosthetic makeup just wouldn't hold up, particularly in close-up. And makeup is an additive process. You have to build the face up. And David wanted to carve deeply into Brad's face to bring the aging to this character. He needed to be a very sympathetic character. So we decided to cast a series of little people that would play the different bodies of Benjamin at the different increments of his life and that we would in fact create a computer-generated version of Brad's head, aged to appear as Benjamin, and attach that to the body of the real actor. Sounded great. Of course, this was the Holy Grail of our industry, and the fact that this guy is a global icon didn't help either, because I'm sure if any of you ever stand in line at the grocery store, you know -- we see his face constantly. So there really was no tolerable margin of error. There were two studios involved: Warner Brothers and Paramount. And they both believed this would make an amazing film, of course, but it was a very high-risk proposition. There was lots of money and reputations at stake. But we believed that we had a very solid methodology that might work ... But despite our verbal assurances, they wanted some proof. And so, in 2004, they commissioned us to do a screen test of Benjamin. And we did it in about five weeks. But we used lots of cheats and shortcuts. We basically put something together to get through the meeting. I'll roll that for you now. This was the first test for Benjamin Button. And in here, you can see, that's a computer-generated head -- pretty good -- attached to the body of an actor. And it worked. And it gave the studio great relief. After many years of starts and stops on this project, and making that tough decision, they finally decided to greenlight the movie. And I can remember, actually, when I got the phone call to congratulate us, to say the movie was a go, I actually threw up. (Laughter) You know, this is some tough stuff. So we started to have early team meetings, and we got everybody together, and it was really more like therapy in the beginning, convincing each other and reassuring each other that we could actually undertake this. We had to hold up an hour of a movie with a character. And it's not a special effects film; it has to be a man. We really felt like we were in a -- kind of a 12-step program. And of course, the first step is: admit you've got a problem. (Laughter) So we had a big problem: we didn't know how we were going to do this. But we did know one thing. Being from the visual effects industry, we, with David, believed that we now had enough time, enough resources, and, God, we hoped we had enough money. And we had enough passion to will the processes and technology into existence. So, when you're faced with something like that, of course you've got to break it down. You take the big problem and you break it down into smaller pieces and you start to attack that. So we had three main areas that we had to focus on. We needed to make Brad look a lot older -- needed to age him 45 years or so. And we also needed to make sure that we could take Brad's idiosyncrasies, his little tics, the little subtleties that make him who he is and have that translate through our process so that it appears in Benjamin on the screen. And we also needed to create a character that could hold up under, really, all conditions. He needed to be able to walk in broad daylight, at nighttime, under candlelight, he had to hold an extreme close-up, he had to deliver dialogue, he had to be able to run, he had to be able to sweat, he had to be able to take a bath, to cry, he even had to throw up. Not all at the same time -- but he had to, you know, do all of those things. And the work had to hold up for almost the first hour of the movie. We did about 325 shots. So we needed a system that would allow Benjamin to do everything a human being can do. And we realized that there was a giant chasm between the state of the art of technology in 2004 and where we needed it to be. So we focused on motion capture. I'm sure many of you have seen motion capture. The state of the art at the time was something called marker-based motion capture. I'll give you an example here. It's basically the idea of, you wear a leotard, and they put some reflective markers on your body, and instead of using cameras, there're infrared sensors around a volume, and those infrared sensors track the three-dimensional position of those markers in real time. And then animators can take the data of the motion of those markers and apply them to a computer-generated character. You can see the computer characters on the right are having the same complex motion as the dancers. But we also looked at numbers of other films at the time that were using facial marker tracking, and that's the idea of putting markers on the human face and doing the same process. And as you can see, it gives you a pretty crappy performance. That's not terribly compelling. And what we realized was that what we needed was the information that was going on between the markers. We needed the subtleties of the skin. We needed to see skin moving over muscle moving over bone. We needed creases and dimples and wrinkles and all of those things. Our first revelation was to completely abort and walk away from the technology of the day, the status quo, the state of the art. So we aborted using motion capture. And we were now well out of our comfort zone, and in uncharted territory. So we were left with this idea that we ended up calling "technology stew." We started to look out in other fields. The idea was that we were going to find nuggets or gems of technology that come from other industries like medical imaging, the video game space, and re-appropriate them. And we had to create kind of a sauce. And the sauce was code in software that we'd written to allow these disparate pieces of technology to come together and work as one. Initially, we came across some remarkable research done by a gentleman named Dr. Paul Ekman in the early '70s. He believed that he could, in fact, catalog the human face. And he came up with this idea of Facial Action Coding System, or FACS. He believed that there were 70 basic poses or shapes of the human face, and that those basic poses or shapes of the face can be combined to create infinite possibilities of everything the human face is capable of doing. And of course, these transcend age, race, culture, gender. So this became the foundation of our research as we went forward. And then we came across some remarkable technology called Contour. And here you can see a subject having phosphorus makeup stippled on her face. And now what we're looking at is really creating a surface capture as opposed to a marker capture. The subject stands in front of a computer array of cameras, and those cameras can, frame-by-frame, reconstruct the geometry of exactly what the subject's doing at the moment. So, effectively, you get 3D data in real time of the subject. And if you look in a comparison, on the left, we see what volumetric data gives us and on the right you see what markers give us. So, clearly, we were in a substantially better place for this. But these were the early days of this technology, and it wasn't really proven yet. We measure complexity and fidelity of data in terms of polygonal count. And so, on the left, we were seeing 100,000 polygons. We could go up into the millions of polygons. It seemed to be infinite. This was when we had our "Aha!" This was the breakthrough. This is when we're like, "OK, we're going to be OK, This is actually going to work." And the "Aha!" was, what if we could take Brad Pitt, and we could put Brad in this device, and use this Contour process, and we could stipple on this phosphorescent makeup and put him under the black lights, and we could, in fact, scan him in real time performing Ekman's FACS poses. Right? So, effectively, we ended up with a 3D database of everything Brad Pitt's face is capable of doing. (Laughter) From there, we actually carved up those faces into smaller pieces and components of his face. So we ended up with literally thousands and thousands and thousands of shapes, a complete database of all possibilities that his face is capable of doing. Now, that's great, except we had him at age 44. We need to put another 40 years on him at this point. We brought in Rick Baker, and Rick is one of the great makeup and special effects gurus of our industry. And we also brought in a gentleman named Kazu Tsuji, and Kazu Tsuji is one of the great photorealist sculptors of our time. And we commissioned them to make a maquette, or a bust, of Benjamin. So, in the spirit of "The Great Unveiling" -- I had to do this -- I had to unveil something. So this is Ben 80. We created three of these: there's Ben 80, there's Ben 70, there's Ben 60. And this really became the template for moving forward. Now, this was made from a life cast of Brad. So, in fact, anatomically, it is correct. The eyes, the jaw, the teeth: everything is in perfect alignment with what the real guy has. We have these maquettes scanned into the computer at very high resolution -- enormous polygonal count. And so now we had three age increments of Benjamin in the computer. But we needed to get a database of him doing more than that. We went through this process, then, called retargeting. This is Brad doing one of the Ekman FACS poses. And here's the resulting data that comes from that, the model that comes from that. Retargeting is the process of transposing that data onto another model. And because the life cast, or the bust -- the maquette -- of Benjamin was made from Brad, we could transpose the data of Brad at 44 onto Brad at 87. So now, we had a 3D database of everything Brad Pitt's face can do at age 87, in his 70s and in his 60s. Next we had to go into the shooting process. So while all that's going on, we're down in New Orleans and locations around the world. And we shot our body actors, and we shot them wearing blue hoods. So these are the gentleman who played Benjamin. And the blue hoods helped us with two things: one, we could easily erase their heads; and we also put tracking markers on their heads so we could recreate the camera motion and the lens optics from the set. But now we needed to get Brad's performance to drive our virtual Benjamin. And so we edited the footage that was shot on location with the rest of the cast and the body actors and about six months later we brought Brad onto a sound stage in Los Angeles and he watched on the screen. His job, then, was to become Benjamin. And so we looped the scenes. He watched again and again. We encouraged him to improvise. And he took Benjamin into interesting and unusual places that we didn't think he was going to go. We shot him with four HD cameras so we'd get multiple views of him and then David would choose the take of Brad being Benjamin that he thought best matched the footage with the rest of the cast. From there we went into a process called image analysis. And so here, you can see again, the chosen take. And you are seeing, now, that data being transposed on to Ben 87. And so, what's interesting about this is we used something called image analysis, which is taking timings from different components of Benjamin's face. And so we could choose, say, his left eyebrow. And the software would tell us that, well, in frame 14 the left eyebrow begins to move from here to here, and it concludes moving in frame 32. And so we could choose numbers of positions on the face to pull that data from. And then, the sauce I talked about with our technology stew -- that secret sauce was, effectively, software that allowed us to match the performance footage of Brad in live action with our database of aged Benjamin, the FACS shapes that we had. On a frame-by-frame basis, we could actually reconstruct a 3D head that exactly matched the performance of Brad. So this was how the finished shot appeared in the film. And here you can see the body actor. And then this is what we called the "dead head," no reference to Jerry Garcia. And then here's the reconstructed performance now with the timings of the performance. And then, again, the final shot. It was a long process. (Applause) The next section here, I'm going to just blast through this, because we could do a whole TEDTalk on the next several slides. We had to create a lighting system. So really, a big part of our processes was creating a lighting environment for every single location that Benjamin had to appear so that we could put Ben's head into any scene and it would exactly match the lighting that's on the other actors in the real world. We also had to create an eye system. We found the old adage, you know, "The eyes are the window to the soul," absolutely true. So the key here was to keep everybody looking in Ben's eyes. And if you could feel the warmth, and feel the humanity, and feel his intent coming through the eyes, then we would succeed. So we had one person focused on the eye system for almost two full years. We also had to create a mouth system. We worked from dental molds of Brad. We had to age the teeth over time. We also had to create an articulating tongue that allowed him to enunciate his words. There was a whole system written in software to articulate the tongue. We had one person devoted to the tongue for about nine months. He was very popular. Skin displacement: another big deal. The skin had to be absolutely accurate. He's also in an old age home, he's in a nursing home around other old people, so he had to look exactly the same as the others. So, lots of work on skin deformation, you can see in some of these cases it works, in some cases it looks bad. This is a very, very, very early test in our process. So, effectively we created a digital puppet that Brad Pitt could operate with his own face. There were no animators necessary to come in and interpret behavior or enhance his performance. There was something that we encountered, though, that we ended up calling "the digital Botox effect." So, as things went through this process, Fincher would always say, "It sandblasts the edges off of the performance." And thing our process and the technology couldn't do, is they couldn't understand intent, the intent of the actor. So it sees a smile as a smile. It doesn't recognize an ironic smile, or a happy smile, or a frustrated smile. So it did take humans to kind of push it one way or another. But we ended up calling the entire process and all the technology "emotion capture," as opposed to just motion capture. Take another look. Brad Pitt: Well, I heard momma and Tizzy whisper, and they said I was gonna die soon, but ... maybe not. EU: That's how to create a digital human in 18 minutes. (Applause) A couple of quick factoids; it really took 155 people over two years, and we didn't even talk about 60 hairstyles and an all-digital haircut. But, that is Benjamin. Thank you.

My name is Lovegrove. I only know nine Lovegroves, two of which are my parents. They are first cousins, and you know what happens when, you know -- (Laughter) So there's a terribly weird freaky side to me, which I'm fighting with all the time. So to try and get through today, I've kind of disciplined myself with an 18-minute talk. I was hanging on to have a pee. I thought perhaps if I was hanging on long enough, that would guide me through the 18 minutes. (Laughter) OK. I am known as Captain Organic and that's a philosophical position as well as an aesthetic position. But today what I'd like to talk to you about is that love of form and how form can touch people's soul and emotion. Not very long ago, not many thousands of years ago, we actually lived in caves, and I don't think we've lost that coding system. We respond so well to form. But I'm interested in creating intelligent form. I'm not interested at all in blobism or any of that superficial rubbish that you see coming out as design. This artificially induced consumerism -- I think it's atrocious. My world is the world of people like Amory Lovins, Janine Benyus, James Watson. I'm in that world, but I work purely instinctively. I'm not a scientist. I could have been, perhaps, but I work in this world where I trust my instincts. So I am a 21st-century translator of technology into products that we use everyday and relate beautifully and naturally with. And we should be developing things -- we should be developing packaging for ideas which elevate people's perceptions and respect for the things that we dig out of the earth and translate into products for everyday use. So, the water bottle. I'll begin with this concept of what I call DNA. DNA: Design, Nature, Art. These are the three things that condition my world. Here is a drawing by Leonardo da Vinci, 500 years ago, before photography. It shows how observation, curiosity and instinct work to create amazing art. Industrial design is the art form of the 21st century. People like Leonardo -- there have not been many -- had this amazingly instinctive curiosity. I work from a similar position. I don't want to sound pretentious saying that, but this is my drawing made on a digital pad a couple of years ago -- well into the 21st century, 500 years later. It's my impression of water. Impressionism being the most valuable art form on the planet as we know it: 100 million dollars, easily, for a Monet. I use, now, a whole new process. A few years ago I reinvented my process to keep up with people like Greg Lynn, Thom Mayne, Zaha Hadid, Rem Koolhaas -- all these people that I think are persevering and pioneering with fantastic new ideas of how to create form. This is all created digitally. Here you see the machining, the milling of a block of acrylic. This is what I show to the client to say, "That's what I want to do." At that point, I don't know if that's possible at all. It's a seductor, but I just feel in my bones that that's possible. So we go, we look at the tooling. We look at how that is produced. These are the invisible things that you never see in your life. This is the background noise of industrial design. That is like an Anish Kapoor flowing through a Richard Serra. It is more valuable than the product in my eyes. I don't have one. When I do make some money, I'll have one machined for myself. This is the final product. When they sent it to me, I thought I'd failed. It felt like nothing. It has to feel like nothing. It was when I put the water in that I realized that I'd put a skin on water itself. It's an icon of water itself, and it elevates people's perception of contemporary design. Each bottle is different, meaning the water level will give you a different shape. It's mass individualism from a single product. It fits the hand. It fits arthritic hands. It fits children's hands. It makes the product strong, the tessellation. It's a millefiori of ideas. In the future, they will look like that, because we need to move away from those type of polymers and use that for medical equipment and more important things, perhaps, in life. Biopolymers, these new ideas for materials, will come into play in probably a decade. It doesn't look as cool, does it? But I can live up to that. I don't have a problem with that. I design for that condition, biopolymers. It's the future. I took this video in Cape Town last year. This is the freaky side coming out. I have this special interest in things like this, which blow my mind. I don't know whether to, you know, drop to my knees, cry; I don't know what I think. But I just know that nature -- nature improves with ever-greater purpose that which once existed, and that strangeness is a consequence of innovative thinking. When I look at these things, they look pretty normal to me. But these things evolved over many years, and what we're trying to do -- I get three weeks to design a telephone. How the hell do I do that, when you get these things that take hundreds of millions of years to evolve? How do you condense that? It comes back to instinct. I'm not talking about designing telephones that look like that and I'm not looking at designing architecture like that. I'm just interested in natural growth patterns and the beautiful forms that only nature really creates. How that flows through me and how that comes out is what I'm trying to understand. This is a scan through the human forearm. It's then blown up through rapid prototyping to reveal its cellular structure. I have these in my office. My office is a mixture of the Natural History Museum and a NASA space lab. It's a weird, kind of freaky place. This is one of my specimens. This is made -- bone is made from a mixture of inorganic minerals and polymers. I studied cooking in school for four years, and in that experience, which was called "domestic science," it was a bit of a cheap trick for me to try and get a science qualification. (Laughter) Actually, I put marijuana in everything I cooked -- (Laughter) And I had access to all the best girls. It was fabulous. All the guys in the rugby team couldn't understand. Anyway -- this is a meringue. This is another sample I have. A meringue is made exactly the same way, in my estimation, as a bone. It's made from polysaccharides and proteins. If you pour water on that, it dissolves. Could we be manufacturing from foodstuffs in the future? Not a bad idea. I don't know. I need to talk to Janine and a few other people about that, but I believe instinctively that that meringue can become something, a car -- I don't know. I'm also interested in growth patterns: the unbridled way that nature grows things so you're not restricted by form at all. These interrelated forms, they do inspire everything I do, although I might end up making something incredibly simple. This is a detail of a chair that I've designed in magnesium. It shows this interlocution of elements and the beauty of, kind of, engineering and biological thinking, shown pretty much as a bone structure. Any one of those elements you could sort of hang on the wall as some kind of art object. It's the world's first chair made in magnesium. It cost 1.7 million dollars to develop. It's called "Go," by Bernhardt, USA. It went into Time magazine in 2001 as the new language of the 21st century. Boy. For somebody growing up in Wales in a little village, that's enough. It shows how you make one holistic form, like the car industry, and then you break up what you need. This is an absolutely beautiful way of working. It's a godly way of working. It's organic and it's essential. It's an absolutely fat-free design, and when you look at it, you see human beings. When that moves into polymers, you can change the elasticity, the fluidity of the form. This is an idea for a gas-injected, one-piece polymer chair. What nature does is it drills holes in things. It liberates form. It takes away anything extraneous. That's what I do. I make organic things which are essential. And they look funky, too -- but I don't set out to make funky things because I think that's an absolute disgrace. I set out to look at natural forms. If you took the idea of fractal technology further, take a membrane, shrinking it down constantly like nature does -- that could be a seat for a chair. It could be a sole for a sports shoe. It could be a car blending into seats. Wow. Let's go for it. That's the kind of stuff. This is what exists in nature. Observation now allows us to bring that natural process into the design process every day. That's what I do. This is a show that's currently on in Tokyo. It's called "Superliquidity." It's my sculptural investigation. It's like 21st-century Henry Moore. When you see a Henry Moore, still, your hair stands up. There's some amazing spiritual connect. If he was a car designer, phew, we'd all be driving one. In his day, he was the highest taxpayer in Britain. That is the power of organic design. It contributes immensely to our -- sense of being, our sense of relationships with things, our sensuality and, you know, the sort of -- even the sort of socio-erotic side, which is very important. This is my artwork. This is all my process. These actually are sold as artwork. They're very big prints. But this is how I get to that object. Ironically, that object was made by the Killarney process, which is a brand-new process here for the 21st century, and I can hear Greg Lynn laughing his socks off as I say that. I'll tell you about that later. When I look into these data images, I see new things. It's self-inspired. Diatomic structures, radiolaria, the things that we couldn't see but we can do now -- these, again, are cored out. They're made virtually from nothing. They're made from silica. Why not structures from cars like that? Coral, all these natural forces, take away what they don't need and they deliver maximum beauty. We need to be in that realm. I want to do stuff like that. This is a new chair which should come on the market in September. It's for a company called Moroso in Italy. It's a gas-injected polymer chair. Those holes you see there are very filtered-down, watered-down versions of the extremity of the diatomic structures. It goes with the flow of the polymer and you'll see -- there's an image coming up right now that shows the full thing. It's great to have companies in Italy who support this way of dreaming. If you see the shadows that come through that, they're actually probably more important than the product, but it's the minimum it takes. The coring out of the back lets you breathe. It takes away any material you don't need and it actually garners flexure too. I was going to break into a dance then. This is some current work I'm doing. I'm looking at single-surface structures and how they stretch and flow. It's based on furniture typologies, but that's not the end motivation. It's made from aluminum ... as opposed to aluminium, and it's grown. It's grown in my mind, and then it's grown in terms of the whole process that I go through. This is two weeks ago in CCP in Coventry, who build parts for Bentleys and so on. It's being built as we speak and it will be on show in Phillips next year in New York. I have a big show with Phillips Auctioneers. When I see these animations, oh Jesus, I'm blown away. This is what goes on in my studio everyday. I walk -- I'm traveling. I come back. Some guy's got that on a computer -- there's this like, oh my goodness. So I try to create this energy of invention every day in my studio. This kind of effervescent -- fully charged sense of soup that delivers ideas. Single-surface products. Furniture's a good one. How you grow legs out of a surface. I would love to build this one day and perhaps I'd like to build it also out of flour, sugar, polymer, wood chips -- I don't know, human hair. I don't know. I'd love a go at that. I don't know. If I just got some time. That's the weird side coming out again. A lot of companies don't understand that. Three weeks ago I was with Sony in Tokyo. They said, "Give us the dream. What is our dream? How do we beat Apple?" I said, "You don't copy Apple, that's for sure. You get into biopolymers." They looked straight through me. What a waste. Anyway. (Laughter) No, it's true. Fuck them. You know, I mean -- (Laughter) I'm delivering; they're not taking. I've had this image 20 years. I've had this image of a water droplet for 20 years, sitting on a hot bed. That is an image of a car for me. That's the car of the future. It's a water droplet. I've been banging on about this like I can't believe. Cars are all wrong. I'm going to show you something a bit weird now. They laughed everywhere over the world I showed this. The only place that didn't laugh was Moscow. Cars are made from 30,000 components. How ridiculous is that? Couldn't you make that from 300? It's got a vacuum-formed, carbon-nylon pan. Everything's holistically integrated. It opens and closes like a bread bin. There is no engine. There's a solar panel on the back and there are batteries in the wheels; they're fitted like Formula 1. You take them off your wall, you plug them in. Off you go. A three-wheeled car: slow, feminine, transparent, so you can see the people in there. You drive different. You see that thing. You do. You do. And not anesthetized, separated from life. There's a hole at the front and there's a reason for that. It's a city car. You drive along. You get out. You drive on to a proboscis. You get out. It lifts you up. It presents the solar panel to the sun, and at night, it's a street lamp. (Applause) That's what happens if you get inspired by the street lamp first, and do the car second. I can see these bubbles with these hydrogen packages, floating around on the ground, driven by AI. When I showed this in South Africa, everybody afterwards was going, "Hey, car on a stick. Like this." Can you imagine? A car on a stick. (Laughter) If you put it next to contemporary architecture, it feels totally natural to me. And that's what I do with my furniture. I'm not putting Charles Eames' furniture in buildings anymore. I'm trying to build furniture which fits architecture. I'm trying to build transportation systems. I work on aircraft for Airbus, I do all this sort of stuff trying to force these natural, inspired-by-nature dreams home. I'm going to finish on two things. This is the stereolithography of a staircase. It's a little bit of a dedication to James, James Watson. I built this thing for my studio. It cost me 250,000 dollars to build this. Most people go and buy the Aston Martin. I built this. This is the data that goes with that. Incredibly complex. Took about two years, because I'm looking for fat-free design. Lean, efficient things. Healthy products. This is built by composites. It's a single element which rotates around to create a holistic element, and this is a carbon-fiber handrail which is only supported in two places. Modern materials allow us to do modern things. This is a shot in the studio. This is how it looks pretty much every day. You wouldn't want to have a fear of heights coming down it. There is virtually no handrail. It doesn't pass any standards. (Laughter) Who cares? (Laughter) And it has an internal handrail which gives it its strength. It's this holistic integration. That's my studio. It's subterranean. It's in Notting Hill, next to all the crap -- the prostitutes and all that stuff. It's next to David Hockney's original studio. It has a lighting system that changes throughout the day. My guys go out for lunch. The door's open. They come back in, because it's normally raining and they prefer to stay in. This is my studio. Elephant skull from Oxford University, 1988. I bought that last year. They're very difficult to find. If anybody's got a whale skeleton they want to sell me, I'll put it in the studio. So I'm just going to interject a little bit with some of the things that you'll see in the video. It's a homemade video, made it myself at three o'clock in the morning just to show you how my real world is. You never see that. You never see architects or designers showing you their real world. This is called a "Plasnet." It's a new bio-polycarbonate chair I'm doing in Italy. World's first bamboo bike with folding handlebars. We should all be riding one of these. As China buys all these crappy cars, we should be riding things like this. Counterbalance. Like I say, it's a cross between Natural History Museum and a NASA laboratory. It's full of prototypes and objects. It's self-inspirational, again. I mean, the rare times when I'm there, I do enjoy it. And I get lots and lots of kids coming. I'm a contaminator for all those children of investment bankers -- wankers. Sorry. (Laughter) That's a solar seed. It's a concept for new architecture. That thing on the top is the world's first solar-powered garden lamp -- the first produced. Giles Revell should be talking here today -- amazing photography of things you can't see. The first sculptural model I made for that thing in Tokyo. Lots of stuff. There's a little leaf chair -- that golden looking thing is called "Leaf." It's made from Kevlar. On the wall is my book called "Supernatural," which allows me to remember what I've done, because I forget. There's an aerated brick I did in Limoges last year, in Concepts for New Ceramics in Architecture. Gernot Oberfell, working at three o'clock in the morning -- and I don't pay overtime. Overtime is the passion of design, so join the club or don't. (Laughter) No, it's true. People like Tom and Greg -- we're traveling like you can't -- we fit it all in. I don't know how we do it. Next week I'm at Electrolux in Sweden, then I'm in Beijing on Friday. You work that one out. And when I see Ed's photographs, I think, why the hell am I going to China? It's true. It's true. Because there's a soul in this whole thing. We need to have a new instinct for the 21st century. We need to combine all this stuff. If all the people who were talking over this period worked on a car together, it would be a joy, absolute joy. So there's a new X-light system I'm doing in Japan. There's Tuareg shoes from North Africa. There's a Kifwebe mask. These are my sculptures. A copper jelly mold. (Laughter) It sounds like some quiz show or something, doesn't it? So, it's going to end. Thank you, James, for your great inspiration. Thank you very much. (Applause)

I want to open by quoting Einstein's wonderful statement, just so people will feel at ease that the great scientist of the 20th century also agrees with us, and also calls us to this action. He said, "A human being is a part of the whole, called by us, the 'universe,' -- a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest, a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest to us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circle of compassion, to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty." This insight of Einstein's is uncannily close to that of Buddhist psychology, wherein compassion -- "karuna," it is called -- is defined as, "the sensitivity to another's suffering and the corresponding will to free the other from that suffering." It pairs closely with love, which is the will for the other to be happy, which requires, of course, that one feels some happiness oneself and wishes to share it. This is perfect in that it clearly opposes self-centeredness and selfishness to compassion, the concern for others, and, further, it indicates that those caught in the cycle of self-concern suffer helplessly, while the compassionate are more free and, implicitly, more happy. The Dalai Lama often states that compassion is his best friend. It helps him when he is overwhelmed with grief and despair. Compassion helps him turn away from the feeling of his suffering as the most absolute, most terrible suffering anyone has ever had and broadens his awareness of the sufferings of others, even of the perpetrators of his misery and the whole mass of beings. In fact, suffering is so huge and enormous, his own becomes less and less monumental. And he begins to move beyond his self-concern into the broader concern for others. And this immediately cheers him up, as his courage is stimulated to rise to the occasion. Thus, he uses his own suffering as a doorway to widening his circle of compassion. He is a very good colleague of Einstein's, we must say. Now, I want to tell a story, which is a very famous story in the Indian and Buddhist tradition, of the great Saint Asanga who was a contemporary of Augustine in the West and was sort of like the Buddhist Augustine. And Asanga lived 800 years after the Buddha's time. And he was discontented with the state of people's practice of the Buddhist religion in India at that time. And so he said, "I'm sick of all this. Nobody's really living the doctrine. They're talking about love and compassion and wisdom and enlightenment, but they are acting selfish and pathetic. So, Buddha's teaching has lost its momentum. I know the next Buddha will come a few thousand years from now, but exists currently in a certain heaven" -- that's Maitreya -- "so, I'm going to go on a retreat and I'm going to meditate and pray until the Buddha Maitreya reveals himself to me, and gives me a teaching or something to revive the practice of compassion in the world today." So he went on this retreat. And he meditated for three years and he did not see the future Buddha Maitreya. And he left in disgust. And as he was leaving, he saw a man -- a funny little man sitting sort of part way down the mountain. And he had a lump of iron. And he was rubbing it with a cloth. And he became interested in that. He said, "Well what are you doing?" And the man said, "I'm making a needle." And he said, "That's ridiculous. You can't make a needle by rubbing a lump of iron with a cloth." And the man said, "Really?" And he showed him a dish full of needles. So he said, "Okay, I get the point." He went back to his cave. He meditated again. Another three years, no vision. He leaves again. This time, he comes down. And as he's leaving, he sees a bird making a nest on a cliff ledge. And where it's landing to bring the twigs to the cliff, its feathers brushes the rock -- and it had cut the rock six to eight inches in. There was a cleft in the rock by the brushing of the feathers of generations of the birds. So he said, "All right. I get the point." He went back. Another three years. Again, no vision of Maitreya after nine years. And he again leaves, and this time: water dripping, making a giant bowl in the rock where it drips in a stream. And so, again, he goes back. And after 12 years there is still no vision. And he's freaked out. And he won't even look left or right to see any encouraging vision. And he comes to the town. He's a broken person. And there, in the town, he's approached by a dog who comes like this -- one of these terrible dogs you can see in some poor countries, even in America, I think, in some areas -- and he's looking just terrible. And he becomes interested in this dog because it's so pathetic, and it's trying to attract his attention. And he sits down looking at the dog. And the dog's whole hindquarters are a complete open sore. Some of it is like gangrenous, and there are maggots in the flesh. And it's terrible. He thinks, "What can I do to fix up this dog? Well, at least I can clean this wound and wash it." So, he takes it to some water. He's about to clean, but then his awareness focuses on the maggots. And he sees the maggots, and the maggots are kind of looking a little cute. And they're maggoting happily in the dog's hindquarters there. "Well, if I clean the dog, I'll kill the maggots. So how can that be? That's it. I'm a useless person and there's no Buddha, no Maitreya, and everything is all hopeless. And now I'm going to kill the maggots?" So, he had a brilliant idea. And he took a shard of something, and cut a piece of flesh from his thigh, and he placed it on ground. He was not really thinking too carefully about the ASPCA. He was just immediately caught with the situation. So he thought, "I will take the maggots and put them on this piece of flesh, then clean the dog's wounds, and then I'll figure out what to do with the maggots." So he starts to do that. He can't grab the maggots. Apparently they wriggle around. They're kind of hard to grab, these maggots. So he says, "Well, I'll put my tongue on the dog's flesh. And then the maggots will jump on my warmer tongue" -- the dog is kind of used up -- "and then I'll spit them one by one down on the thing." So he goes down, and he's sticking his tongue out like this. And he had to close his eyes, it's so disgusting, and the smell and everything. And then, suddenly, there's a pfft, a noise like that. He jumps back and there, of course, is the future Buddha Maitreya in a beautiful vision -- rainbow lights, golden, jeweled, a plasma body, an exquisite mystic vision -- that he sees. And he says, "Oh." He bows. But, being human, he's immediately thinking of his next complaint. So as he comes up from his first bow he says, "My Lord, I'm so happy to see you, but where have you been for 12 years? What is this?" And Maitreya says, "I was with you. Who do you think was making needles and making nests and dripping on rocks for you, mister dense?" (Laughter) "Looking for the Buddha in person," he said. And he said, "You didn't have, until this moment, real compassion. And, until you have real compassion, you cannot recognize love." "Maitreya" means love, "the loving one," in Sanskrit. And so he looked very dubious, Asanga did. And he said, "If you don't believe me, just take me with you." And so he took the Maitreya -- it shrunk into a globe, a ball -- took him on his shoulder. And he ran into town in the marketplace, and he said, "Rejoice! Rejoice! The future Buddha has come ahead of all predictions. Here he is." And then pretty soon they started throwing rocks and stones at him -- it wasn't Chautauqua, it was some other town -- because they saw a demented looking, scrawny looking yogi man, like some kind of hippie, with a bleeding leg and a rotten dog on his shoulder, shouting that the future Buddha had come. So, naturally, they chased him out of town. But on the edge of town, one elderly lady, a charwoman in the charnel ground, saw a jeweled foot on a jeweled lotus on his shoulder and then the dog, but she saw the jewel foot of the Maitreya, and she offered a flower. So that encouraged him, and he went with Maitreya. Maitreya then took him to a certain heaven, which is the typical way a Buddhist myth unfolds. And Maitreya then kept him in heaven for five years, dictating to him five complicated tomes of the methodology of how you cultivate compassion. And then I thought I would share with you what that method is, or one of them. A famous one, it's called the "Sevenfold Causal Method of Developing Compassion." And it begins first by one meditating and visualizing that all beings are with one -- even animals too, but everyone is in human form. The animals are in one of their human lives. The humans are human. And then, among them, you think of your friends and loved ones, the circle at the table. And you think of your enemies, and you think of the neutral ones. And then you try to say, "Well, the loved ones I love. But, you know, after all, they're nice to me. I had fights with them. Sometimes they were unfriendly. I got mad. Brothers can fight. Parents and children can fight. So, in a way, I like them so much because they're nice to me. While the neutral ones I don't know. They could all be just fine. And then the enemies I don't like because they're mean to me. But they are nice to somebody. I could be them." And then the Buddhists, of course, think that, because we've all had infinite previous lives, we've all been each other's relatives, actually. Therefore all of you, in the Buddhist view, in some previous life, although you don't remember it and neither do I, have been my mother -- for which I do apologize for the trouble I caused you. And also, actually, I've been your mother. I've been female, and I've been every single one of yours' mother in a previous life, the way the Buddhists reflect. So, my mother in this life is really great. But all of you in a way are part of the eternal mother. You gave me that expression; "the eternal mama," you said. That's wonderful. So, that's the way the Buddhists do it. A theist Christian can think that all beings, even my enemies, are God's children. So, in that sense, we're related. So, they first create this foundation of equality. So, we sort of reduce a little of the clinging to the ones we love -- just in the meditation -- and we open our mind to those we don't know. And we definitely reduce the hostility and the "I don't want to be compassionate to them" to the ones we think of as the bad guys, the ones we hate and we don't like. And we don't hate anyone, therefore. So we equalize. That's very important. And then the next thing we do is what is called "mother recognition." And that is, we think of every being as familiar, as family. We expand. We take the feeling about remembering a mama, and we defuse that to all beings in this meditation. And we see the mother in every being. We see that look that the mother has on her face, looking at this child that is a miracle that she has produced from her own body, being a mammal, where she has true compassion, truly is the other, and identifies completely. Often the life of that other will be more important to her than her own life. And that's why it's the most powerful form of altruism. The mother is the model of all altruism for human beings, in spiritual traditions. And so, we reflect until we can sort of see that motherly expression in all beings. People laugh at me because, you know, I used to say that I used to meditate on mama Cheney as my mom, when, of course, I was annoyed with him about all of his evil doings in Iraq. I used to meditate on George Bush. He's quite a cute mom in a female form. He has his little ears and he smiles and he rocks you in his arms. And you think of him as nursing you. And then Saddam Hussein's serious mustache is a problem, but you think of him as a mom. And this is the way you do it. You take any being who looks weird to you, and you see how they could be familiar to you. And you do that for a while, until you really feel that. You can feel the familiarity of all beings. Nobody seems alien. They're not "other." You reduce the feeling of otherness about beings. Then you move from there to remembering the kindness of mothers in general, if you can remember the kindness of your own mother, if you can remember the kindness of your spouse, or, if you are a mother yourself, how you were with your children. And you begin to get very sentimental; you cultivate sentimentality intensely. You will even weep, perhaps, with gratitude and kindness. And then you connect that with your feeling that everyone has that motherly possibility. Every being, even the most mean looking ones, can be motherly. And then, third, you step from there to what is called "a feeling of gratitude." You want to repay that kindness that all beings have shown to you. And then the fourth step, you go to what is called "lovely love." In each one of these you can take some weeks, or months, or days depending on how you do it, or you can do them in a run, this meditation. And then you think of how lovely beings are when they are happy, when they are satisfied. And every being looks beautiful when they are internally feeling a happiness. Their face doesn't look like this. When they're angry, they look ugly, every being, but when they're happy they look beautiful. And so you see beings in their potential happiness. And you feel a love toward them and you want them to be happy, even the enemy. We think Jesus is being unrealistic when he says, "Love thine enemy." He does say that, and we think he's being unrealistic and sort of spiritual and highfalutin. "Nice for him to say it, but I can't do that." But, actually, that's practical. If you love your enemy that means you want your enemy to be happy. If your enemy was really happy, why would they bother to be your enemy? How boring to run around chasing you. They would be relaxing somewhere having a good time. So it makes sense to want your enemy to be happy, because they'll stop being your enemy because that's too much trouble. But anyway, that's the "lovely love. " And then finally, the fifth step is compassion, "universal compassion." And that is where you then look at the reality of all the beings you can think of. And you look at them, and you see how they are. And you realize how unhappy they are actually, mostly, most of the time. You see that furrowed brow in people. And then you realize they don't even have compassion on themselves. They're driven by this duty and this obligation. "I have to get that. I need more. I'm not worthy. And I should do something." And they're rushing around all stressed out. And they think of it as somehow macho, hard discipline on themselves. But actually they are cruel to themselves. And, of course, they are cruel and ruthless toward others. And they, then, never get any positive feedback. And the more they succeed and the more power they have, the more unhappy they are. And this is where you feel real compassion for them. And you then feel you must act. And the choice of the action, of course, hopefully will be more practical than poor Asanga, who was fixing the maggots on the dog because he had that motivation, and whoever was in front of him, he wanted to help. But, of course, that is impractical. He should have founded the ASPCA in the town and gotten some scientific help for dogs and maggots. And I'm sure he did that later. (Laughter) But that just indicates the state of mind, you know. And so the next step -- the sixth step beyond "universal compassion" -- is this thing where you're linked with the needs of others in a true way, and you have compassion for yourself also, and it isn't sentimental only. You might be in fear of something. Some bad guy is making himself more and more unhappy being more and more mean to other people and getting punished in the future for it in various ways. And in Buddhism, they catch it in the future life. Of course in theistic religion they're punished by God or whatever. And materialism, they think they get out of it just by not existing, by dying, but they don't. And so they get reborn as whatever, you know. Never mind. I won't get into that. But the next step is called "universal responsibility." And that is very important -- the Charter of Compassion must lead us to develop through true compassion, what is called "universal responsibility." In the great teaching of his Holiness the Dalai Lama that he always teaches everywhere, he says that that is the common religion of humanity: kindness. But "kindness" means "universal responsibility." And that means whatever happens to other beings is happening to us: we are responsible for that, and we should take it and do whatever we can at whatever little level and small level that we can do it. We absolutely must do that. There is no way not to do it. And then, finally, that leads to a new orientation in life where we live equally for ourselves and for others and we are joyful and happy. One thing we mustn't think is that compassion makes you miserable. Compassion makes you happy. The first person who is happy when you get great compassion is yourself, even if you haven't done anything yet for anybody else. Although, the change in your mind already does something for other beings: they can sense this new quality in yourself, and it helps them already, and gives them an example. And that uncompassionate clock has just showed me that it's all over. So, practice compassion, read the charter, disseminate it and develop it within yourself. Don't just think, "Well, I'm compassionate," or "I'm not compassionate," and sort of think you're stuck there. You can develop this. You can diminish the non-compassion, the cruelty, the callousness, the neglect of others, and take universal responsibility for them. And then, not only will God smile and the eternal mama will smile, but Karen Armstrong will smile. Thank you very much. (Applause)

So, I was just asked to go and shoot this film called "Elizabeth." And we're all talking about this great English icon and saying, "She's a fantastic woman, she does everything. How are we going to introduce her?" So we went around the table with the studio and the producers and the writer, and they came to me and said, "Shekhar, what do you think?" And I said, "I think she's dancing." And I could see everybody looked at me, somebody said, "Bollywood." The other said, "How much did we hire him for?" And the third said, "Let's find another director." I thought I had better change. So we had a lot of discussion on how to introduce Elizabeth, and I said, "OK, maybe I am too Bollywood. Maybe Elizabeth, this great icon, dancing? What are you talking about?" So I rethought the whole thing, and then we all came to a consensus. And here was the introduction of this great British icon called "Elizabeth." Leicester: May I join you, my lady? Elizabeth: If it please you, sir. (Music) Shekhar Kapur: So she was dancing. So how many people who saw the film did not get that here was a woman in love, that she was completely innocent and saw great joy in her life, and she was youthful? And how many of you did not get that? That's the power of visual storytelling, that's the power of dance, that's the power of music: the power of not knowing. When I go out to direct a film, every day we prepare too much, we think too much. Knowledge becomes a weight upon wisdom. You know, simple words lost in the quicksand of experience. So I come up, and I say, "What am I going to do today?" I'm not going to do what I planned to do, and I put myself into absolute panic. It's my one way of getting rid of my mind, getting rid of this mind that says, "Hey, you know what you're doing. You know exactly what you're doing. You're a director, you've done it for years." So I've got to get there and be in complete panic. It's a symbolic gesture. I tear up the script, I go and I panic myself, I get scared. I'm doing it right now; you can watch me. I'm getting nervous, I don't know what to say, I don't know what I'm doing, I don't want to go there. And as I go there, of course, my A.D. says, "You know what you're going to do, sir." I say, "Of course I do." And the studio executives, they would say, "Hey, look at Shekhar. He's so prepared." And inside I've just been listening to Nusrat Fateh Ali Khan because he's chaotic. I'm allowing myself to go into chaos because out of chaos, I'm hoping some moments of truth will come. All preparation is preparation. I don't even know if it's honest. I don't even know if it's truthful. The truth of it all comes on the moment, organically, and if you get five great moments of great, organic stuff in your storytelling, in your film, your film, audiences will get it. So I'm looking for those moments, and I'm standing there and saying, "I don't know what to say." So, ultimately, everybody's looking at you, 200 people at seven in the morning who got there at quarter to seven, and you arrived at seven, and everybody's saying, "Hey. What's the first thing? What's going to happen?" And you put yourself into a state of panic where you don't know, and so you don't know. And so, because you don't know, you're praying to the universe because you're praying to the universe that something -- I'm going to try and access the universe the way Einstein -- say a prayer -- accessed his equations, the same source. I'm looking for the same source because creativity comes from absolutely the same source that you meditate somewhere outside yourself, outside the universe. You're looking for something that comes and hits you. Until that hits you, you're not going to do the first shot. So what do you do? So Cate says, "Shekhar, what do you want me to do?" And I say, "Cate, what do you want to do?" (Laughter) "You're a great actor, and I like to give to my actors -- why don't you show me what you want to do?" (Laughter) What am I doing? I'm trying to buy time. I'm trying to buy time. So the first thing about storytelling that I learned, and I follow all the time is: Panic. Panic is the great access of creativity because that's the only way to get rid of your mind. Get rid of your mind. Get out of it, get it out. And let's go to the universe because there's something out there that is more truthful than your mind, that is more truthful than your universe. [unclear], you said that yesterday. I'm just repeating it because that's what I follow constantly to find the shunyata somewhere, the emptiness. Out of the emptiness comes a moment of creativity. So that's what I do. When I was a kid -- I was about eight years old. You remember how India was. There was no pollution. In Delhi, we used to live -- we used to call it a chhat or the khota. Khota's now become a bad word. It means their terrace -- and we used to sleep out at night. At school I was being just taught about physics, and I was told that if there is something that exists, then it is measurable. If it is not measurable, it does not exist. And at night I would lie out, looking at the unpolluted sky, as Delhi used to be at that time when I was a kid, and I used to stare at the universe and say, "How far does this universe go?" My father was a doctor. And I would think, "Daddy, how far does the universe go?" And he said, "Son, it goes on forever." So I said, "Please measure forever because in school they're teaching me that if I cannot measure it, it does not exist. It doesn't come into my frame of reference." So, how far does eternity go? What does forever mean? And I would lie there crying at night because my imagination could not touch creativity. So what did I do? At that time, at the tender age of seven, I created a story. What was my story? And I don't know why, but I remember the story. There was a woodcutter who's about to take his ax and chop a piece of wood, and the whole galaxy is one atom of that ax. And when that ax hits that piece of wood, that's when everything will destroy and the Big Bang will happen again. But all before that there was a woodcutter. And then when I would run out of that story, I would imagine that woodcutter's universe is one atom in the ax of another woodcutter. So every time, I could tell my story again and again and get over this problem, and so I got over the problem. How did I do it? Tell a story. So what is a story? A story is our -- all of us -- we are the stories we tell ourselves. In this universe, and this existence, where we live with this duality of whether we exist or not and who are we, the stories we tell ourselves are the stories that define the potentialities of our existence. We are the stories we tell ourselves. So that's as wide as we look at stories. A story is the relationship that you develop between who you are, or who you potentially are, and the infinite world, and that's our mythology. We tell our stories, and a person without a story does not exist. So Einstein told a story and followed his stories and came up with theories and came up with theories and then came up with his equations. Alexander had a story that his mother used to tell him, and he went out to conquer the world. We all, everybody, has a story that they follow. We tell ourselves stories. So, I will go further, and I say, "I tell a story, and therefore I exist." I exist because there are stories, and if there are no stories, we don't exist. We create stories to define our existence. If we do not create the stories, we probably go mad. I don't know; I'm not sure, but that's what I've done all the time. Now, a film. A film tells a story. I often wonder when I make a film -- I'm thinking of making a film of the Buddha -- and I often wonder: If Buddha had all the elements that are given to a director -- if he had music, if he had visuals, if he had a video camera -- would we get Buddhism better? But that puts some kind of burden on me. I have to tell a story in a much more elaborate way, but I have the potential. It's called subtext. When I first went to Hollywood, they said -- I used to talk about subtext, and my agent came to me, "Would you kindly not talk about subtext?" And I said, "Why?" He said, "Because nobody is going to give you a film if you talk about subtext. Just talk about plot and say how wonderful you'll shoot the film, what the visuals will be." So when I look at a film, here's what we look for: We look for a story on the plot level, then we look for a story on the psychological level, then we look for a story on the political level, then we look at a story on a mythological level. And I look for stories on each level. Now, it is not necessary that these stories agree with each other. What is wonderful is, at many times, the stories will contradict with each other. So when I work with Rahman who's a great musician, I often tell him, "Don't follow what the script already says. Find that which is not. Find the truth for yourself, and when you find the truth for yourself, there will be a truth in it, but it may contradict the plot, but don't worry about it." So, the sequel to "Elizabeth," "Golden Age." When I made the sequel to "Elizabeth," here was a story that the writer was telling: A woman who was threatened by Philip II and was going to war, and was going to war, fell in love with Walter Raleigh. Because she fell in love with Walter Raleigh, she was giving up the reasons she was a queen, and then Walter Raleigh fell in love with her lady in waiting, and she had to decide whether she was a queen going to war or she wanted... Here's the story I was telling: The gods up there, there were two people. There was Philip II, who was divine because he was always praying, and there was Elizabeth, who was divine, but not quite divine because she thought she was divine, but the blood of being mortal flowed in her. But the divine one was unjust, so the gods said, "OK, what we need to do is help the just one." And so they helped the just one. And what they did was, they sent Walter Raleigh down to physically separate her mortal self from her spirit self. And the mortal self was the girl that Walter Raleigh was sent, and gradually he separated her so she was free to be divine. And the two divine people fought, and the gods were on the side of divinity. Of course, all the British press got really upset. They said, "We won the Armada." But I said, "But the storm won the Armada. The gods sent the storm." So what was I doing? I was trying to find a mythic reason to make the film. Of course, when I asked Cate Blanchett, I said, "What's the film about?" She said, "The film's about a woman coming to terms with growing older." Psychological. The writer said "It's about history, plot." I said "It's about mythology, the gods." So let me show you a film -- a piece from that film -- and how a camera also -- so this is a scene, where in my mind, she was at the depths of mortality. She was discovering what mortality actually means, and if she is at the depths of mortality, what really happens. And she's recognizing the dangers of mortality and why she should break away from mortality. Remember, in the film, to me, both her and her lady in waiting were parts of the same body, one the mortal self and one the spirit self. So can we have that second? (Music) Elizabeth: Bess? Bess? Bess Throckmorton? Bess: Here, my lady. Elizabeth: Tell me, is it true? Are you with child? Are you with child? Bess: Yes, my lady. Elizabeth: Traitorous. You dare to keep secrets from me? You ask my permission before you rut, before you breed. My bitches wear my collars. Do you hear me? Do you hear me? Walsingham: Majesty. Please, dignity. Mercy. Elizabeth: This is no time for mercy, Walsingham. You go to your traitor brother and leave me to my business. Is it his? Tell me. Say it. Is the child his? Is it his? Bess: Yes. My lady, it is my husband's child. Elizabeth: Bitch! (Cries) Raleigh: Majesty. This is not the queen I love and serve. Elizabeth: This man has seduced a ward of the queen, and she has married without royal consent. These offenses are punishable by law. Arrest him. Go. You no longer have the queen's protection. Bess: As you wish, Majesty. Elizabeth: Get out! Get out! Get out! Get out. (Music) Shekhar Kapur: So, what am I trying to do here? Elizabeth has realized, and she's coming face-to-face with her own sense of jealousy, her own sense of mortality. What am I doing with the architecture? The architecture is telling a story. The architecture is telling a story about how, even though she's the most powerful woman in the world at that time, there is the other, the architecture's bigger. The stone is bigger than her because stone is an organic. It'll survive her. So it's telling you, to me, stone is part of her destiny. Not only that, why is the camera looking down? The camera's looking down at her because she's in the well. She's in the absolute well of her own sense of being mortal. That's where she has to pull herself out from the depths of mortality, come in, release her spirit. And that's the moment where, in my mind, both Elizabeth and Bess are the same person. But that's the moment she's surgically removing herself from that. So the film is operating on many many levels in that scene. And how we tell stories visually, with music, with actors, and at each level it's a different sense and sometimes contradictory to each other. So how do I start all this? What's the process of telling a story? About ten years ago, I heard this little thing from a politician, not a politician that was very well respected in India. And he said that these people in the cities, in one flush, expend as much water as you people in the rural areas don't get for your family for two days. That struck a chord, and I said, "That's true." I went to see a friend of mine, and he made me wait in his apartment in Malabar Hill on the twentieth floor, which is a really, really upmarket area in Mumbai. And he was having a shower for 20 minutes. I got bored and left, and as I drove out, I drove past the slums of Bombay, as you always do, and I saw lines and lines in the hot midday sun of women and children with buckets waiting for a tanker to come and give them water. And an idea started to develop. So how does that become a story? I suddenly realized that we are heading towards disaster. So my next film is called "Paani" which means water. And now, out of the mythology of that, I'm starting to create a world. What kind of world do I create, and where does the idea, the design of that come? So, in my mind, in the future, they started to build flyovers. You understand flyovers? Yeah? They started to build flyovers to get from A to B faster, but they effectively went from one area of relative wealth to another area of relative wealth. And then what they did was they created a city above the flyovers. And the rich people moved to the upper city and left the poorer people in the lower cities, about 10 to 12 percent of the people have moved to the upper city. Now, where does this upper city and lower city come? There's a mythology in India about -- where they say, and I'll say it in Hindi, [Hindi] Right. What does that mean? It says that the rich are always sitting on the shoulders and survive on the shoulders of the poor. So, from that mythology, the upper city and lower city come. So the design has a story. And now, what happens is that the people of the upper city, they suck up all the water. Remember the word I said, suck up. They suck up all the water, keep to themselves, and they drip feed the lower city. And if there's any revolution, they cut off the water. And, because democracy still exists, there's a democratic way in which you say "Well, if you give us what [we want], we'll give you water." So, okay my time is up. But I can go on about telling you how we evolve stories, and how stories effectively are who we are and how these get translated into the particular discipline that I am in, which is film. But ultimately, what is a story? It's a contradiction. Everything's a contradiction. The universe is a contradiction. And all of us are constantly looking for harmony. When you get up, the night and day is a contradiction. But you get up at 4 a.m. That first blush of blue is where the night and day are trying to find harmony with each other. Harmony is the notes that Mozart didn't give you, but somehow the contradiction of his notes suggest that. All contradictions of his notes suggest the harmony. It's the effect of looking for harmony in the contradiction that exists in a poet's mind, a contradiction that exists in a storyteller's mind. In a storyteller's mind, it's a contradiction of moralities. In a poet's mind, it's a conflict of words, in the universe's mind, between day and night. In the mind of a man and a woman, we're looking constantly at the contradiction between male and female, we're looking for harmony within each other. The whole idea of contradiction, but the acceptance of contradiction is the telling of a story, not the resolution. The problem with a lot of the storytelling in Hollywood and many films, and as [unclear] was saying in his, that we try to resolve the contradiction. Harmony is not resolution. Harmony is the suggestion of a thing that is much larger than resolution. Harmony is the suggestion of something that is embracing and universal and of eternity and of the moment. Resolution is something that is far more limited. It is finite; harmony is infinite. So that storytelling, like all other contradictions in the universe, is looking for harmony and infinity in moral resolutions, resolving one, but letting another go, letting another go and creating a question that is really important. Thank you very much. (Applause)

Thank you so much. I'm going to try to take you on a journey of the underwater acoustic world of whales and dolphins. Since we are such a visual species, it's hard for us to really understand this, so I'll use a mixture of figures and sounds and hope this can communicate it. But let's also think, as a visual species, what it's like when we go snorkeling or diving and try to look underwater. We really can't see very far. Our vision, which works so well in air, all of a sudden is very restricted and claustrophobic. And what marine mammals have evolved over the last tens of millions of years is ways to depend on sound to both explore their world and also to stay in touch with one another. Dolphins and toothed whales use echolocation. They can produce loud clicks and listen for echoes from the sea floor in order to orient. They can listen for echoes from prey in order to decide where food is and to decide which one they want to eat. All marine mammals use sound for communication to stay in touch. So the large baleen whales will produce long, beautiful songs, which are used in reproductive advertisement for male and females, both to find one another and to select a mate. And mother and young and closely bonded animals use calls to stay in touch with one another, so sound is really critical for their lives. The first thing that got me interested in the sounds of these underwater animals, whose world was so foreign to me, was evidence from captive dolphins that captive dolphins could imitate human sounds. And I mentioned I'll use some visual representations of sounds. Here's the first example. This is a plot of frequency against time -- sort of like musical notation, where the higher notes are up higher and the lower notes are lower, and time goes this way. This is a picture of a trainer's whistle, a whistle a trainer will blow to tell a dolphin it's done the right thing and can come get a fish. It sounds sort of like "tweeeeeet." Like that. This is a calf in captivity making an imitation of that trainer's whistle. If you hummed this tune to your dog or cat and it hummed it back to you, you ought to be pretty surprised. Very few nonhuman mammals can imitate sounds. It's really important for our music and our language. So it's a puzzle: The few other mammal groups that do this, why do they do it? A lot of my career has been devoted to trying to understand how these animals use their learning, use the ability to change what you say based on what you hear in their own communication systems. So let's start with calls of a nonhuman primate. Many mammals have to produce contact calls when, say, a mother and calf are apart. This is an example of a call produced by squirrel monkeys when they're isolated from another one. And you can see, there's not much variability in these calls. By contrast, the signature whistle which dolphins use to stay in touch, each individual here has a radically different call. They can use this ability to learn calls in order to develop more complicated and more distinctive calls to identify individuals. How about the setting in which animals need to use this call? Well let's look at mothers and calves. In normal life for mother and calf dolphin, they'll often drift apart or swim apart if Mom is chasing a fish, and when they separate they have to get back together again. What this figure shows is the percentage of the separations in which dolphins whistle, against the maximum distance. So when dolphins are separating by less than 20 meters, less than half the time they need to use whistles. Most of the time they can just find each other just by swimming around. But all of the time when they separate by more than 100 meters, they need to use these individually distinctive whistles to come back together again. Most of these distinctive signature whistles are quite stereotyped and stable through the life of a dolphin. But there are some exceptions. When a male dolphin leaves Mom, it will often join up with another male and form an alliance, which may last for decades. As these two animals form a social bond, their distinctive whistles actually converge and become very similar. This plot shows two members of a pair. As you can see at the top here, they share an up-sweep, like "woop, woop, woop." They both have that kind of up-sweep. Whereas these members of a pair go "wo-ot, wo-ot, wo-ot." And what's happened is they've used this learning process to develop a new sign that identifies this new social group. It's a very interesting way that they can form a new identifier for the new social group that they've had. Let's now take a step back and see what this message can tell us about protecting dolphins from human disturbance. Anybody looking at this picture will know this dolphin is surrounded, and clearly his behavior is being disrupted. This is a bad situation. But it turns out that when just a single boat is approaching a group of dolphins at a couple hundred meters away, the dolphins will start whistling, they'll change what they're doing, they'll have a more cohesive group, wait for the boat to go by, and then they'll get back to normal business. Well, in a place like Sarasota, Florida, the average interval between times that a boat is passing within a hundred meters of a dolphin group is six minutes. So even in the situation that doesn't look as bad as this, it's still affecting the amount of time these animals have to do their normal work. And if we look at a very pristine environment like western Australia, Lars Bider has done work comparing dolphin behavior and distribution before there were dolphin-watching boats. When there was one boat, not much of an impact. And two boats: When the second boat was added, what happened was that some of the dolphins left the area completely. Of the ones that stayed, their reproductive rate declined. So it could have a negative impact on the whole population. When we think of marine-protected areas for animals like dolphins, this means that we have to be quite conscious about activities that we thought were benign. We may need to regulate the intensity of recreational boating and actual whale watching in order to prevent these kinds of problems. I'd also like to point out that sound doesn't obey boundaries. So you can draw a line to try to protect an area, but chemical pollution and noise pollution will continue to move through the area. And I'd like to switch now from this local, familiar, coastal environment to a much broader world of the baleen whales and the open ocean. This is a kind of map we've all been looking at. The world is mostly blue. But I'd also like to point out that the oceans are much more connected than we think. Notice how few barriers there are to movement across all of the oceans compared to land. To me, the most mind-bending example of the interconnectedness of the ocean comes from an acoustic experiment where oceanographers took a ship to the southern Indian Ocean, deployed an underwater loudspeaker and played back a sound. That same sound traveled to the west, and could be heard in Bermuda, and traveled to the east, and could be heard in Monterey -- the same sound. So we live in a world of satellite communication, are used to global communication, but it's still amazing to me. The ocean has properties that allow low-frequency sound to basically move globally. The acoustic transit time for each of these paths is about three hours. It's nearly halfway around the globe. In the early '70s, Roger Payne and an ocean acoustician published a theoretical paper pointing out that it was possible that sound could transmit over these large areas, but very few biologists believed it. It actually turns out, though, even though we've only known of long-range propagation for a few decades, the whales clearly have evolved, over tens of millions of years, a way to exploit this amazing property of the ocean. So blue whales and fin whales produce very low-frequency sounds that can travel over very long ranges. The top plot here shows a complicated series of calls that are repeated by males. They form songs, and they appear to play a role in reproduction, sort of like that of song birds. Down below here, we see calls made by both males and females that also carry over very long ranges. The biologists continued to be skeptical of the long-range communication issue well past the '70s, until the end of the Cold War. What happened was, during the Cold War, the U.S. Navy had a system that was secret at the time, that they used to track Russian submarines. It had deep underwater microphones, or hydrophones, cabled to shore, all wired back to a central place that could listen to sounds over the whole North Atlantic. And after the Berlin Wall fell, the Navy made these systems available to whale bio-acousticians to see what they could hear. This is a plot from Christopher Clark who tracked one individual blue whale as it passed by Bermuda, went down to the latitude of Miami and came back again. It was tracked for 43 days, swimming 1,700 kilometers, or more than 1,000 miles. This shows us both that the calls are detectable over hundreds of miles and that whales routinely swim hundreds of miles. They're ocean-based and scale animals who are communicating over much longer ranges than we had anticipated. Unlike fins and blues, which disperse into the temperate and tropical oceans, the humpbacked whales congregate in local traditional breeding grounds, so they can make a sound that's a little higher in frequency, broader-band and more complicated. So you're listening to the complicated song produced by humpbacks here. Humpbacks, when they develop the ability to sing this song, they're listening to other whales and modifying what they sing based on what they're hearing, just like song birds or the dolphin whistles I described. This means that humpback song is a form of animal culture, just like music for humans would be. I think one of the most interesting examples of this comes from Australia. Biologists on the east coast of Australia were recording the songs of humpbacks in that area. And this orange line here marks the typical songs of east coast humpbacks. In '95 they all sang the normal song. But in '96 they heard a few weird songs, and it turned out that these strange songs were typical of west coast whales. The west coast calls became more and more popular, until by 1998, none of the whales sang the east coast song; it was completely gone. They just sang the cool new west coast song. It's as if some new hit style had completely wiped out the old-fashioned style before, and with no golden oldies stations. Nobody sang the old ones. I'd like to briefly just show what the ocean does to these calls. Now you are listening to a recording made by Chris Clark, 0.2 miles away from a humpback. You can hear the full frequency range. It's quite loud. You sound very nearby. The next recording you're going to hear was made of the same humpback song 50 miles away. That's shown down here. You only hear the low frequencies. You hear the reverberation as the sound travels over long-range in the ocean and is not quite as loud. Now after I play back these humpback calls, I'll play blue whale calls, but they have to be sped up because they're so low in frequency that you wouldn't be able to hear it otherwise. Here's a blue whale call at 50 miles, which was distant for the humpback. It's loud, clear -- you can hear it very clearly. Here's the same call recorded from a hydrophone 500 miles away. There's a lot of noise, which is mostly other whales. But you can still hear that faint call. Let's now switch and think about a potential for human impacts. The most dominant sound that humans put into the ocean comes from shipping. This is the sound of a ship, and I'm having to talk a little louder to talk over it. Imagine that whale listening from 500 miles. There's a potential problem that maybe this kind of shipping noise would prevent whales from being able to hear each other. Now this is something that's been known for quite a while. This is a figure from a textbook on underwater sound. And on the y-axis is the loudness of average ambient noise in the deep ocean by frequency. In the low frequencies, this line indicates sound that comes from seismic activity of the earth. Up high, these variable lines indicate increasing noise in this frequency range from higher wind and wave. But right in the middle here where there's a sweet spot, the noise is dominated by human ships. Now think about it. This is an amazing thing: That in this frequency range where whales communicate, the main source globally, on our planet, for the noise comes from human ships, thousands of human ships, distant, far away, just all aggregating. The next slide will show what the impact this may have on the range at which whales can communicate. So here we have the loudness of a call at the whale. And as we get farther away, the sound gets fainter and fainter. Now in the pre-industrial ocean, as we were mentioning, this whale call could be easily detected. It's louder than noise at a range of a thousand kilometers. Let's now take that additional increase in noise that we saw comes from shipping. All of a sudden, the effective range of communication goes from a thousand kilometers to 10 kilometers. Now if this signal is used for males and females to find each other for mating and they're dispersed, imagine the impact this could have on the recovery of endangered populations. Whales also have contact calls like I described for the dolphins. I'll play the sound of a contact call used by right whales to stay in touch. And this is the kind of call that is used by, say, right whale mothers and calves as they separate to come back again. Now imagine -- let's put the ship noise in the picture. What's a mother to do if the ship comes by and her calf isn't there? I'll describe a couple strategies. One strategy is if your call's down here, and the noise is in this band, you could shift the frequency of your call out of the noise band and communicate better. Susan Parks of Penn State has actually studied this. She's looked in the Atlantic. Here's data from the South Atlantic. Here's a typical South Atlantic contact call from the '70s. Look what happened by 2000 to the average call. Same thing in the North Atlantic, in the '50s versus 2000. Over the last 50 years, as we've put more noise into the oceans, these whales have had to shift. It's as if the whole population had to shift from being basses to singing as a tenor. It's an amazing shift, induced by humans over this large scale, in both time and space. And we now know that whales can compensate for noise by calling louder, like I did when that ship was playing, by waiting for silence and by shifting their call out of the noise band. Now there's probably costs to calling louder or shifting the frequency away from where you want to be, and there's probably lost opportunities. If we also have to wait for silence, they may miss a critical opportunity to communicate. So we have to be very concerned about when the noise in habitats degrades the habitat enough that the animals either have to pay too much to be able to communicate, or are not able to perform critical functions. It's a really important problem. And I'm happy to say that there are several very promising developments in this area, looking at the impact of shipping on whales. In terms of the shipping noise, the International Maritime Organization of the United Nations has formed a group whose job is to establish guidelines for quieting ships, to tell the industry how you could quiet ships. And they've already found that by being more intelligent about better propeller design, you can reduce that noise by 90 percent. If you actually insulate and isolate the machinery of the ship from the hull, you can reduce that noise by 99 percent. So at this point, it's primarily an issue of cost and standards. If this group can establish standards, and if the shipbuilding industry adopts them for building new ships, we can now see a gradual decline in this potential problem. But there's also another problem from ships that I'm illustrating here, and that's the problem of collision. This is a whale that just squeaked by a rapidly moving container ship and avoided collision. But collision is a serious problem. Endangered whales are killed every year by ship collision, and it's very important to try to reduce this. I'll discuss two very promising approaches. The first case comes from the Bay of Fundy. These black lines mark shipping lanes in and out of the Bay of Fundy. The colorized area shows the risk of collision for endangered right whales because of the ships moving in this lane. It turns out that this lane here goes right through a major feeding area of right whales in the summer time, and it makes an area of a significant risk of collision. Well, biologists who couldn't take no for an answer went to the International Maritime Organization and petitioned them to say, "Can't you move that lane? Those are just lines on the ground. Can't you move them over to a place where there's less of a risk?" And the International Maritime Organization responded very strongly, "These are the new lanes." The shipping lanes have been moved. And as you can see, the risk of collision is much lower. So it's very promising, actually. We can be very creative about thinking of different ways to reduce these risks. Another action which was just taken independently by a shipping company itself was initiated because of concerns the shipping company had about greenhouse gas emissions with global warming. The Maersk Line looked at their competition and saw that everybody who is in shipping thinks time is money. They rush as fast as they can to get to their port. But then they often wait there. What Maersk did is they worked ways to slow down. They could slow down by about 50 percent. This reduced their fuel consumption by about 30 percent, which saved them money, and at the same time, it had a significant benefit for whales. It you slow down, you reduce the amount of noise you make and you reduce the risk of collision. So to conclude, I'd just like to point out, you know, the whales live in an amazing acoustic environment. They've evolved over tens of millions of years to take advantage of this. And we need to be very attentive and vigilant to thinking about where things that we do may unintentionally prevent them from being able to achieve their important activities. At the same time, we need to be really creative in thinking of solutions to be able to help reduce these problems. I hope these examples have shown some of the different directions we can take in addition to protected areas to be able to keep the ocean safe for whales to be able to continue to communicate. Thank you very much. (Applause)

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

The career that I started early on in my life was looking for exotic life forms in exotic places, and at that time I was working in the Antarctic and the Arctic, and high deserts and low deserts. Until about a dozen years ago, when I was really captured by caves, and I really re-focused most of my research in that direction. So I have a really cool day job-- I get to do some really amazing stuff. I work in some of the most extreme cave environments on the planet. Many of them are trying to kill us from the minute we go into them, but nevertheless, they're absolutely gripping, and contain unbelievable biological wonders that are very, very different from those that we have on the planet. Apart from the intrinsic value of the biology and mineralogy and geo-microbiology that we do there, we're also using these as templates for figuring out how to go look for life on other planets. Particularly Mars, but also Europa, the small, icy moon around Jupiter. And perhaps, someday, far beyond our solar system itself. I'm very passionately interested in the human future, on the Moon and Mars particularly, and elsewhere in the solar system. I think it's time that we transitioned to a solar system-going civilization and species. And, as an outgrowth of all of this then, I wonder about whether we can, and whether we even should, think about transporting Earth-type life to other planets. Notably Mars, as a first example. Something I never talk about in scientific meetings is how I actually got to this state and why I do the work that I do. Why don't I have a normal job, a sensible job? And then of course, I blame the Soviet Union. Because in the mid-1950s, when I was a tiny child, they had the audacity to launch a very primitive little satellite called Sputnik, which sent the Western world into a hysterical tailspin. And a tremendous amount of money went into the funding of science and mathematics skills for kids. And I'm a product of that generation, like so many other of my peers. It really caught hold of us, and caught fire, and it would be lovely if we could reproduce that again now. Of course, refusing to grow up -- -- even though I impersonate a grown-up in daily life, but I do a fairly good job of that -- but really retaining that childlike quality of not caring what other people think about what you're interested in, is really critical. The next element is the fact that I have applied a value judgment and my value judgment is that the presence of life is better than no life. And so, life is more valuable than no life. And so I think that that holds together a great deal of the work that people in this audience approach. I'm very interested in Mars, of course, and that was a product of my being a young undergraduate when the Viking Landers landed on Mars. And that took what had been a tiny little astronomical object in the sky, that you would see as a dot, and turned it completely into a landscape, as that very first primitive picture came rastering across the screen. And when it became a landscape, it also became a destination, and altered, really, the course of my life. In my graduate years I worked with my colleague and mentor and friend, Steve Schneider, at the National Center for Atmospheric Research, working on global change issues. We've written a number of things on the role of Gaia hypothesis -- whether or not you could consider Earth as a single entity in any meaningful scientific sense, and then, as an outgrowth of that, I worked on the environmental consequences of nuclear war. So, wonderful things and grim things. But what it taught me was to look at Earth as a planet with external eyes, not just as our home. And that is a wonderful stepping away in perspective, to try to then think about the way our planet behaves, as a planet, and with the life that's on it. And all of this seems to me to be a salient point in history. We're getting ready to begin to go through the process of leaving our planet of origin and out into the wider solar system and beyond. So, back to Mars. How hard is it going to be to find life on Mars? Well, sometimes it's really very hard for us to find each other, even on this planet. So, finding life on another planet is a non-trivial occupation and we spend a lot of time trying to think about that. Whether or not you think it's likely to be successful sort of depends on what you think about the chances of life in the universe. I think, myself, that life is a natural outgrowth of the increasing complexification of matter over time. So, you start with the Big Bang and you get hydrogen, and then you get helium, and then you get more complicated stuff, and you get planets forming -- and life is a common, planetary-based phenomenon, in my view. Certainly, in the last 15 years, we've seen increasing numbers of planets outside of our solar system being confirmed, and just last month, a couple of weeks ago, a planet in the size-class of Earth has actually been found. And so this is very exciting news. So, my first bold prediction is that, is that in the universe, life is going to be everywhere. It's going to be everywhere we look -- where there are planetary systems that can possibly support it. And those planetary systems are going to be very common. So, what about life on Mars? Well, if somebody had asked me about a dozen years ago what I thought the chances of life on Mars would be, I would've probably said, a couple of percent. And even that was considered outrageous at the time. I was once sneeringly introduced by a former NASA official, as the only person on the planet who still thought there was life on Mars. Of course, that official is now dead, and I'm not, so there's a certain amount of glory in outliving your adversaries. But things have changed greatly over the last dozen years. And the reason that they have changed is because we now have new information. The amazing Pathfinder mission that went in '97, and the MER Rover missions that are on Mars as we speak now and the European Space Agency's Mars Express, has taught us a number of amazing things. There is sub-surface ice on that planet. And so where there is water, there is a very high chance of our kind of life. There's clearly sedimentary rocks all over the place – one of the landers is sitting in the middle of an ancient seabed, and there are these amazing structures called blueberries, which are these little, rocky concretions that we are busy making biologically in my lab right now. So, with all of these things put together, I think that the chances of life are much greater than I would've ever thought. I think that the chance of life having arisen on Mars, sometime in its past, is maybe one in four to maybe even half and half. So this is a very bold statement. I think it's there, and I think we need to go look for it, and I think it's underground. So the game's afoot, and this is the game that we play in astro-biology. How do you try to get a handle on extraterrestrial life? How do you plan to look for it? How do you know it when you find it? Because if it's big and obvious, we would've already found it -- it would've already bitten us on the foot, and it hasn't. So, we know that it's probably quite cryptic. Very critically, how do we protect it, if we find it, and not contaminate it? And also, even perhaps more critically, because this is the only home planet we have, how do we protect us from it, while we study it? So why might it be hard to find? Well, it's probably microscopic, and it's never easy to study microscopic things, although the amazing tools that we now have to do that allow us to study things in much greater depth, at much smaller scales than ever before. But it's probably hiding, because if you are out sequestering resources from your environment, that makes you yummy, and other things might want to eat you, or consume you. And so, there's a game of predator-prey that's going to be, essentially, universal, really, in any kind of biological system. It also may be very, very different in its fundamental properties – its chemistry, or its size. We say small, but what does that mean? Is it virus-sized? Is it smaller than that? Is it bigger than the biggest bacterium? We don't know. And speed of activity, which is something that we face in our work with sub-surface organisms, because they grow very, very slowly. If I were to take a swab off your teeth and plate it on a Petri plate, within about four or five hours, I would have to see growth. But the organisms that we work with, from the sub-surface of Earth, very often it's months -- and in many cases, years -- before we see any growth whatsoever. So they are, intrinsically, a slower life-form. But the real issue is that we are guided by our limited experience, and until we can think out of the box of our cranium and what we know, then we can't recognize what to look for, or how to plan for it. So, perspective is everything and, because of the history that I've just briefly talked to you about, I have learned to think about Earth as an extraterrestrial planet. And this has been invaluable in our approach to try to study these things. This is my favorite game on airplanes: where you're in an airplane and you look out the window, you see the horizon. I always turn my head on the side, and that simple change makes me go from seeing this planet as home, to seeing it as a planet. It's a very simple trick, and I never fail to do it when I'm sitting in a window seat. Well, this is what we apply to our work. This shows one of the most extreme caves that we work in. This is Cueva de Villa Luz in Tabasco, in Mexico, and this cave is saturated with sulfuric acid. There is tremendous amounts of hydrogen sulfide coming into this cave from volcanic sources and from the breakdown of evaporite -- minerals below the carbonates in which this cave is formed -- and it is a completely hostile environment for us. We have to go in with protective suits and breathing gear, and 30 parts per million of H2S will kill you. This is regularly several hundred parts per million. So, it's a very hazardous environment, with CO as well, and many other gases. These extreme physical and chemical parameters make the biology that grows in these places very special. Because contrary to what you might think, this is not devoid of life. This is one of the richest caves that we have found on the planet, anywhere. It's bursting with life. The extremes on Earth are interesting in their own right, but one of the reasons that we're interested in them is because they represent, really, the average conditions that we may expect on other planets. So, this is part of the ability that we have, to try to stretch our imagination, in terms of what we may find in the future. There's so much life in this cave, and I can't even begin to scratch the surface of it with you. But one of the most famous objects out of this are what we call Snottites, for obvious reasons. This stuff looks like what comes out of your two-year-old's nose when he has a cold. And this is produced by bacteria who are actually making more sulfuric acid, and living at pHs right around zero. And so, this stuff is like battery acid. And yet, everything in this cave has adapted to it. In fact, there's so much energy available for biology in this cave, that there's actually a huge number of cavefish. And the local Zoque Indians harvest this twice a year, as part of their Easter week celebration and Holy Week celebration. This is very unusual for caves. In some of the other amazing caves that we work in -- this is in Lechuguilla cave in New Mexico near Carlsbad, and this is one of the most famous caves in the world. It's 115 miles of mapped passage, it's pristine, it has no natural opening and it's a gigantic biological, geo-microbiological laboratory. In this cave, great areas are covered by this reddish material that you see here, and also these enormous crystals of selenite that you can see dangling down. This stuff is produced biologically. This is the breakdown product of the bedrock, that organisms are busy munching their way through. They take iron and manganese minerals within the bedrock and they oxidize them. And every time they do that, they get a tiny little packet of energy. And that tiny little packet of energy is what they use, then, to run their life processes. Interestingly enough, they also do this with uranium and chromium, and various other toxic metals. And so, the obvious avenue for bio-remediation comes from organisms like this. These organisms we now bring into the lab, and you can see some of them growing on Petri plates, and get them to reproduce the precise biominerals that we find on the walls of these caves. So, these are signals that they leave in the rock record. Well, even in basalt surfaces in lava-tube caves, which are a by-product of volcanic activity, we find these walls totally covered, in many cases, by these beautiful, glistening silver walls, or shiny pink or shiny red or shiny gold. And these are mineral deposits that are also made by bacteria. And you can see in these central images here, scanning electron micrographs of some of these guys -- these are gardens of these bacteria. One of the interesting things about these particular guys is that they're in the actinomycete and streptomycete groups of the bacteria, which is where we get most of our antibiotics. The sub-surface of Earth contains a vast biodiversity. And these organisms, because they're very separate from the surface, make a vast array of novel compounds. And so, the potential for exploiting this for pharmaceutical and industrial chemical uses is completely untapped, but probably exceeds most of the rest of the biodiversity of the planet. So, lava-tube caves-- I've just told you about organisms that live here on this planet. We know that on Mars and the Moon there are tons of these structures. We can see them. On the left you can see a lava tube forming at a recent eruption -- Mount Etna in Sicily -- and this is the way these tubes form. And when they hollow out, then they become habitats for organisms. These are all over the planet Mars, and we're busy cataloguing them now. And so, there's very interesting cave real estate on Mars, at least of that type. In order to access these sub-surface environments that we're interested in, we're very interested in developing the tools to do this. You know, it's not easy to get into these caves. It requires crawling, climbing, rope-work, technical rope-work and many other complex human motions in order to access these. We face the problem of, how can we do this robotically? Why would we want to do it robotically? Well, we're going to be sending robotic missions to Mars long in advance of human missions. And then, secondly, getting back to that earlier point that I made about the preciousness of any life that we may find on Mars, we don't want to contaminate it. And one of the best ways to study something without contaminating it is to have an intermediary. And in this case, we're imagining intermediary robotic devices that can actually do some of that front-end work for us, to protect any potential life that we find. I'm not going to go through all of these projects now, but we're involved in about half-a-dozen robotic development projects, in collaboration with a number of different groups. I want to talk specifically about the array that you see on the top. These are hopping microbot swarms. I'm working on this with the Field and Space Robotics Laboratory and my friend Steve Dubowsky at MIT, and we have come up with the idea of having little, jumping bean-like robots that are propelled by artificial muscle, which is one of the Dubowsky Lab's specialties -- are the EPAMs, or artificial muscles. And these allow them to hop. They behave with a swarm behavior, where they relate to each other, modeled after insect swarm behavior, and they could be made very numerous. And so, one can send a thousand of them, as you can see in this upper left-hand picture, a thousand of them could fit into the payload bay that was used for one of the current MER Rovers. And these little guys -- you could lose many of them. If you send a thousand of them, you could probably get rid of 90 percent of them and still have a mission. And so, that allows you the flexibility to go into very challenging terrain and actually make your way where you want to go. Now, to wrap this up, I want to talk for two seconds about caves and the human expansion beyond Earth as a natural outgrowth of the work that we do in caves. It occurred to us a number of years ago that caves have many properties that people have used and other organisms have used as habitat in the past. And perhaps it's time we started to explore those, in the context of future Mars and the Moon exploration. So, we have just finished a NASA Institute for Advanced Concepts Phase II study, looking at the irreducible set of technologies that you would need in order to actually allow people to inhabit lava tubes on the Moon or Mars. It turns out to be a fairly simple and small list, and we have gone in the relatively primitive technology direction. So, we're talking about things like inflatable liners that can conform to the complex topological shape on the inside of a cave, foamed-in-place airlocks to deal with this complex topology, various ways of getting breathing gases made from the intrinsic materials of these bodies. And the future is there for us to use these lava-tube caves on Mars. And right now we're in caves, and we're doing science and recreation, but I think in the future we'll be using them for habitat and science on these other bodies. Now, my view of what the current status of potential life on Mars is that it's probably been on the planet, maybe one in two chances. The question as to whether there is life on Mars that is related to life on Earth has now been very muddied, because we now know, from Mars meteorites that have made it to Earth, that there's material that can be exchanged between those two planets. One of the burning questions, of course, is if we go there and find life in the sub-surface, as I fully expect that we will, is that a second genesis of life? Did life start here and was it transported there? Did it start there and get transported here? This will be a fascinating puzzle as we go into the next half-century, and where I expect that we will have more and more Mars missions to answer these questions. Thank you.

The National Portrait Gallery is the place dedicated to presenting great American lives, amazing people. And that's what it's about. We use portraiture as a way to deliver those lives, but that's it. And so I'm not going to talk about the painted portrait today. I'm going to talk about a program I started there, which, from my point of view, is the proudest thing I did. I started to worry about the fact that a lot of people don't get their portraits painted anymore, and they're amazing people, and we want to deliver them to future generations. So, how do we do that? And so I came up with the idea of the living self-portrait series. And the living self-portrait series was the idea of basically my being a brush in the hand of amazing people who would come and I would interview. And so what I'm going to do is, not so much give you the great hits of that program, as to give you this whole notion of how you encounter people in that kind of situation, what you try to find out about them, and when people deliver and when they don't and why. Now, I had two preconditions. One was that they be American. That's just because, in the nature of the National Portrait Gallery, it's created to look at American lives. That was easy, but then I made the decision, maybe arbitrary, that they needed to be people of a certain age, which at that point, when I created this program, seemed really old. Sixties, seventies, eighties and nineties. For obvious reasons, it doesn't seem that old anymore to me. And why did I do that? Well, for one thing, we're a youth-obsessed culture. And I thought really what we need is an elders program to just sit at the feet of amazing people and hear them talk. But the second part of it -- and the older I get, the more convinced I am that that's true. It's amazing what people will say when they know how the story turned out. That's the one advantage that older people have. Well, they have other, little bit of advantage, but they also have some disadvantages, but the one thing they or we have is that we've reached the point in life where we know how the story turned out. So, we can then go back in our lives, if we've got an interviewer who gets that, and begin to reflect on how we got there. All of those accidents that wound up creating the life narrative that we inherited. So, I thought okay, now, what is it going to take to make this work? There are many kinds of interviews. We know them. There are the journalist interviews, which are the interrogation that is expected. This is somewhat against resistance and caginess on the part of the interviewee. Then there's the celebrity interview, where it's more important who's asking the question than who answers. That's Barbara Walters and others like that, and we like that. That's Frost-Nixon, where Frost seems to be as important as Nixon in that process. Fair enough. But I wanted interviews that were different. I wanted to be, as I later thought of it, empathic, which is to say, to feel what they wanted to say and to be an agent of their self-revelation. By the way, this was always done in public. This was not an oral history program. This was all about 300 people sitting at the feet of this individual, and having me be the brush in their self-portrait. Now, it turns out that I was pretty good at that. I didn't know it coming into it. And the only reason I really know that is because of one interview I did with Senator William Fulbright, and that was six months after he'd had a stroke. And he had never appeared in public since that point. This was not a devastating stroke, but it did affect his speaking and so forth. And I thought it was worth a chance, he thought it was worth a chance, and so we got up on the stage, and we had an hour conversation about his life, and after that a woman rushed up to me, essentially did, and she said, "Where did you train as a doctor?" And I said, "I have no training as a doctor. I never claimed that." And she said, "Well, something very weird was happening. When he started a sentence, particularly in the early parts of the interview, and paused, you gave him the word, the bridge to get to the end of the sentence, and by the end of it, he was speaking complete sentences on his own." I didn't know what was going on, but I was so part of the process of getting that out. So I thought, okay, fine, I've got empathy, or empathy, at any rate, is what's critical to this kind of interview. But then I began to think of other things. Who makes a great interview in this context? It had nothing to do with their intellect, the quality of their intellect. Some of them were very brilliant, some of them were, you know, ordinary people who would never claim to be intellectuals, but it was never about that. It was about their energy. It's energy that creates extraordinary interviews and extraordinary lives. I'm convinced of it. And it had nothing to do with the energy of being young. These were people through their 90s. In fact, the first person I interviewed was George Abbott, who was 97, and Abbott was filled with the life force -- I guess that's the way I think about it -- filled with it. And so he filled the room, and we had an extraordinary conversation. He was supposed to be the toughest interview that anybody would ever do because he was famous for being silent, for never ever saying anything except maybe a word or two. And, in fact, he did wind up opening up -- by the way, his energy is evidenced in other ways. He subsequently got married again at 102, so he, you know, he had a lot of the life force in him. But after the interview, I got a call, very gruff voice, from a woman. I didn't know who she was, and she said, "Did you get George Abbott to talk?" And I said, "Yeah. Apparently I did." And she said, "I'm his old girlfriend, Maureen Stapleton, and I could never do it." And then she made me go up with the tape of it and prove that George Abbott actually could talk. So, you know, you want energy, you want the life force, but you really want them also to think that they have a story worth sharing. The worst interviews that you can ever have are with people who are modest. Never ever get up on a stage with somebody who's modest, because all of these people have been assembled to listen to them, and they sit there and they say, "Aw, shucks, it was an accident." There's nothing that ever happens that justifies people taking good hours of the day to be with them. The worst interview I ever did: William L. Shirer. The journalist who did "The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich." This guy had met Hitler and Gandhi within six months, and every time I'd ask him about it, he'd say, "Oh, I just happened to be there. Didn't matter." Whatever. Awful. I never would ever agree to interview a modest person. They have to think that they did something and that they want to share it with you. But it comes down, in the end, to how do you get through all the barriers we have. All of us are public and private beings, and if all you're going to get from the interviewee is their public self, there's no point in it. It's pre-programmed. It's infomercial, and we all have infomercials about our lives. We know the great lines, we know the great moments, we know what we're not going to share, and the point of this was not to embarrass anybody. This wasn't -- and some of you will remember Mike Wallace's old interviews -- tough, aggressive and so forth. They have their place. I was trying to get them to say what they probably wanted to say, to break out of their own cocoon of the public self, and the more public they had been, the more entrenched that person, that outer person was. And let me tell you at once the worse moment and the best moment that happened in this interview series. It all has to do with that shell that most of us have, and particularly certain people. There's an extraordinary woman named Clare Boothe Luce. It'll be your generational determinant as to whether her name means much to you. She did so much. She was a playwright. She did an extraordinary play called "The Women." She was a congresswoman when there weren't very many congresswomen. She was editor of Vanity Fair, one of the great phenomenal women of her day. And, incidentally, I call her the Eleanor Roosevelt of the Right. She was sort of adored on the Right the way Eleanor Roosevelt was on the Left. And, in fact, when we did the interview -- I did the living self-portrait with her -- there were three former directors of the CIA basically sitting at her feet, just enjoying her presence. And I thought, this is going to be a piece of cake, because I always have preliminary talks with these people for just maybe 10 or 15 minutes. We never talk before that because if you talk before, you don't get it on the stage. So she and I had a delightful conversation. We were on the stage and then -- by the way, spectacular. It was all part of Clare Boothe Luce's look. She was in a great evening gown. She was 80, almost that day of the interview, and there she was and there I was, and I just proceeded into the questions. And she stonewalled me. It was unbelievable. Anything that I would ask, she would turn around, dismiss, and I was basically up there -- any of you in the moderate-to-full entertainment world know what it is to die onstage. And I was dying. She was absolutely not giving me a thing. And I began to wonder what was going on, and you think while you talk, and basically, I thought, I got it. When we were alone, I was her audience. Now I'm her competitor for the audience. That's the problem here, and she's fighting me for that, and so then I asked her a question -- I didn't know how I was going to get out of it -- I asked her a question about her days as a playwright, and again, characteristically, instead of saying, "Oh yes, I was a playwright, and this is what blah blah blah," she said, "Oh, playwright. Everybody knows I was a playwright. Most people think that I was an actress. I was never an actress." But I hadn't asked that, and then she went off on a tear, and she said, "Oh, well, there was that one time that I was an actress. It was for a charity in Connecticut when I was a congresswoman, and I got up there," and she went on and on, "And then I got on the stage." And then she turned to me and said, "And you know what those young actors did? They upstaged me." And she said, "Do you know what that is?" Just withering in her contempt. And I said, "I'm learning." (Laughter) And she looked at me, and it was like the successful arm-wrestle, and then, after that, she delivered an extraordinary account of what her life really was like. I have to end that one. This is my tribute to Clare Boothe Luce. Again, a remarkable person. I'm not politically attracted to her, but through her life force, I'm attracted to her. And the way she died -- she had, toward the end, a brain tumor. That's probably as terrible a way to die as you can imagine, and very few of us were invited to a dinner party. And she was in horrible pain. We all knew that. She stayed in her room. Everybody came. The butler passed around canapes. The usual sort of thing. Then at a certain moment, the door opened and she walked out perfectly dressed, completely composed. The public self, the beauty, the intellect, and she walked around and talked to every person there and then went back into the room and was never seen again. She wanted the control of her final moment, and she did it amazingly. Now, there are other ways that you get somebody to open up, and this is just a brief reference. It wasn't this arm-wrestle, but it was a little surprising for the person involved. I interviewed Steve Martin. It wasn't all that long ago. And we were sitting there, and almost toward the beginning of the interview, I turned to him and I said, "Steve," or "Mr. Martin, it is said that all comedians have unhappy childhoods. Was yours unhappy?" And he looked at me, you know, as if to say, "This is how you're going to start this thing, right off?" And then he turned to me, not stupidly, and he said, "What was your childhood like?" And I said -- these are all arm wrestles, but they're affectionate -- and I said, "My father was loving and supportive, which is why I'm not funny." (Laughter) And he looked at me, and then we heard the big sad story. His father was an SOB, and, in fact, he was another comedian with an unhappy childhood, but then we were off and running. So the question is: What is the key that's going to allow this to proceed? Now, these are arm wrestle questions, but I want to tell you about questions that are more related to empathy and that really, very often, are the questions that people have been waiting their whole lives to be asked. And I'll just give you two examples of this because of the time constraints. One was an interview I did with one of the great American biographers. Again, some of you will know him, most of you won't, Dumas Malone. He did a five-volume biography of Thomas Jefferson, spent virtually his whole life with Thomas Jefferson, and by the way, at one point I asked him, "Would you like to have met him?" And he said, "Well, of course, but actually, I know him better than anyone who ever met him, because I got to read all of his letters." So, he was very satisfied with the kind of relationship they had over 50 years. And I asked him one question. I said, "Did Jefferson ever disappoint you?" And here is this man who had given his whole life to uncovering Jefferson and connecting with him, and he said, "Well ..." -- I'm going to do a bad southern accent. Dumas Malone was from Mississippi originally. But he said, "Well," he said, "I'm afraid so." He said, "You know, I've read everything, and sometimes Mr. Jefferson would smooth the truth a bit." And he basically was saying that this was a man who lied more than he wished he had, because he saw the letters. He said, "But I understand that." He said, "I understand that." He said, "We southerners do like a smooth surface, so that there were times when he just didn't want the confrontation." And he said, "Now, John Adams was too honest." And he started to talk about that, and later on he invited me to his house, and I met his wife who was from Massachusetts, and he and she had exactly the relationship of Thomas Jefferson and John Adams. She was the New Englander and abrasive, and he was this courtly fellow. But really the most important question I ever asked, and most of the times when I talk about it, people kind of suck in their breath at my audacity, or cruelty, but I promise you it was the right question. This was to Agnes de Mille. Agnes de Mille is one of the great choreographers in our history. She basically created the dances in "Oklahoma," transforming the American theater. An amazing woman. At the time that I proposed to her that -- by the way, I would have proposed to her; she was extraordinary -- but proposed to her that she come on. She said, "Come to my apartment." She lived in New York. "Come to my apartment and we'll talk for those 15 minutes, and then we'll decide whether we proceed." And so I showed up in this dark, rambling New York apartment, and she called out to me, and she was in bed. I had known that she had had a stroke, and that was some 10 years before. And so she spent almost all of her life in bed, but -- I speak of the life force -- her hair was askew. She wasn't about to make up for this occasion. And she was sitting there surrounded by books, and her most interesting possession she felt at that moment was her will, which she had by her side. She wasn't unhappy about this. She was resigned. She said, "I keep this will by my bed, memento mori, and I change it all the time just because I want to." And she was loving the prospect of death as much as she had loved life. I thought, this is somebody I've got to get in this series. She agreed. She came on. Of course she was wheelchaired on. Half of her body was stricken, the other half not. She was, of course, done up for the occasion, but this was a woman in great physical distress. And we had a conversation, and then I asked her this unthinkable question. I said, "Was it a problem for you in your life that you were not beautiful?" And the audience just -- you know, they're always on the side of the interviewee, and they felt that this was a kind of assault, but this was the question she had wanted somebody to ask her whole life. And she began to talk about her childhood, when she was beautiful, and she literally turned -- here she was, in this broken body -- and she turned to the audience and described herself as the fair demoiselle with her red hair and her light steps and so forth, and then she said, "And then puberty hit." And she began to talk about things that had happened to her body and her face, and how she could no longer count on her beauty, and her family then treated her like the ugly sister of the beautiful one for whom all the ballet lessons were given. And she had to go along just to be with her sister for company, and in that process, she made a number of decisions. First of all, was that dance, even though it hadn't been offered to her, was her life. And secondly, she had better be, although she did dance for a while, a choreographer because then her looks didn't matter. But she was thrilled to get that out as a real, real fact in her life. It was an amazing privilege to do this series. There were other moments like that, very few moments of silence. The key point was empathy because everybody in their lives is really waiting for people to ask them questions, so that they can be truthful about who they are and how they became what they are, and I commend that to you, even if you're not doing interviews. Just be that way with your friends and particularly the older members of your family. Thank you very much.

Chris Anderson: Perhaps we could start by just telling us about your country. It's three dots there on the globe. Those dots are pretty huge. I think each one is about the size of California. Tell us about Kiribati. Anote Tong: Well, let me first begin by saying how deeply grateful I am for this opportunity to share my story with people who do care. I think I've been sharing my story with a lot of people who don't care too much. But Kiribati is comprised of three groups of islands: the Gilbert Group on the west, we have the Phoenix Islands in the middle, and the Line Islands in the east. And quite frankly, Kiribati is perhaps the only country that is actually in the four corners of the world, because we are in the Northern Hemisphere, in the Southern Hemisphere, and also in the east and the west of the International Date Line. These islands are entirely made up of coral atolls, and on average about two meters above sea level. And so this is what we have. Usually not more than two kilometers in width. And so, on many occasions, I've been asked by people, "You know, you're suffering, why don't you move back?" They don't understand. They have no concept of what it is that's involved. With the rising sea, they say, "Well, you can move back." And so this is what I tell them. If we move back, we will fall off on the other side of the ocean. OK? But these are the kinds of issues that people don't understand. CA: So certainly this is just a picture of fragility there. When was it that you yourself realized that there might be impending peril for your country? AT: Well, the story of climate change has been one that has been going on for quite a number of decades. And when I came into office in 2003, I began talking about climate change at the United Nations General Assembly, but not with so much passion, because then there was still this controversy among the scientists whether it was human-induced, whether it was real or it wasn't. But I think that that debate was fairly much concluded in 2007 with the Fourth Assessment Report of the IPCC, which made a categorical statement that it is real, it's human-induced, and it's predicting some very serious scenarios for countries like mine. And so that's when I got very serious. In the past, I talked about it. We were worried. But when the scenarios, the predictions came in 2007, it became a real issue for us. CA: Now, those predictions are, I think, that by 2100, sea levels are forecast to rise perhaps three feet. There's scenarios where it's higher than that, for sure, but what would you say to a skeptic who said, "What's three feet? You're on average six feet above sea level. What's the problem?" AT: Well, I think it's got to be understood that a marginal rise in sea level would mean a loss of a lot of land, because much of the land is low. And quite apart from that, we are getting the swells at the moment. So it's not about getting two feet. I think what many people do not understand is they think climate change is something that is happening in the future. Well, we're at the very bottom end of the spectrum. It's already with us. We have communities who already have been dislocated. They have had to move, and every parliament session, I'm getting complaints from different communities asking for assistance to build seawalls, to see what we can do about the freshwater lens because it's being destroyed, and so in my trips to the different islands, I'm seeing evidence of communities which are now having to cope with the loss of food crops, the contamination of the water lenses, and I see these communities perhaps leaving, having to relocate, within five to 10 years. CA: And then, I think the country suffered its first cyclone, and this is connected, yes? What happened here? AT: Well, we're on the equator, and I'm sure many of you understand that when you're on the equator, it's supposed to be in the doldrums. We're not supposed to get the cyclones. We create them, and then we send them either north or south. (Laughter) But they aren't supposed to come back. But for the first time, at the beginning of this year, the Cyclone Pam, which destroyed Vanuatu, and in the process, the very edges of it actually touched our two southernmost islands, and all of Tuvalu was underwater when Hurricane Pam struck. But for our two southernmost islands, we had waves come over half the island, and so this has never happened before. It's a new experience. And I've just come back from my own constituency, and I've seen these beautiful trees which had been there for decades, they've been totally destroyed. So this is what's happening, but when we talk about the rising sea level, we think it's something that happens gradually. It comes with the winds, it comes with the swells, and so they can be magnified, but what we are beginning to witness is the change in the weather pattern, which is perhaps the more urgent challenge that we will face sooner than perhaps the rising sea level. CA: So the country is already seeing effects now. As you look forward, what are your options as a country, as a nation? AT: Well, I've been telling this story every year. I think I visit a number of -- I've been traveling the world to try and get people to understand. We have a plan, we think we have a plan. And on one occasion, I think I spoke in Geneva and there was a gentleman who was interviewing me on something like this, and I said, "We are looking at floating islands," and he thought it was funny, but somebody said, "No, this is not funny. These people are looking for solutions." And so I have been looking at floating islands. The Japanese are interested in building floating islands. But, as a country, we have made a commitment that no matter what happens, we will try as much as possible to stay and continue to exist as a nation. What that will take, it's going to be something quite significant, very, very substantial. Either we live on floating islands, or we have to build up the islands to continue to stay out of the water as the sea level rises and as the storms get more severe. But even that, it's going to be very, very difficult to get the kind of resourcing that we would need. CA: And then the only recourse is some form of forced migration. AT: Well, we are also looking at that because in the event that nothing comes forward from the international community, we are preparing, we don't want to be caught like what's happening in Europe. OK? We don't want to mass migrate at some point in time. We want to be able to give the people the choice today, those who choose and want to do that, to migrate. We don't want something to happen that they are forced to migrate without having been prepared to do so. Of course, our culture is very different, our society is very different, and once we migrate into a different environment, a different culture, there's a whole lot of adjustments that are required. CA: Well, there's forced migration in your country's past, and I think just this week, just yesterday or the day before yesterday, you visited these people. What happened here? What's the story here? AT: Yes, and I'm sorry, I think somebody was asking why we were sneaking off to visit that place. I had a very good reason, because we have a community of Kiribati people living in that part of the Solomon Islands, but these were people who were relocated from the Phoenix Islands, in fact, in the 1960s. There was serious drought, and the people could not continue to live on the island, and so they were moved to live here in the Solomon Islands. And so yesterday it was very interesting to meet with these people. They didn't know who I was. They hadn't heard of me. Some of them later recognized me, but I think they were very happy. Later they really wanted to have the opportunity to welcome me formally. But I think what I saw yesterday was very interesting because here I see our people. I spoke in our language, and of course they spoke back, they replied, but their accent, they are beginning not to be able to speak Kiribati properly. I saw them, there was this lady with red teeth. She was chewing betel nuts, and it's not something we do in Kiribati. We don't chew betel nuts. I met also a family who have married the local people here, and so this is what is happening. As you go into another community, there are bound to be changes. There is bound to be a certain loss of identity, and this is what we will be looking for in the future if and when we do migrate. CA: It must have been just an extraordinarily emotional day because of these questions about identity, the joy of seeing you and perhaps an emphasized sense of what they had lost. And it's very inspiring to hear you say you're going to fight to the end to try to preserve the nation in a location. AT: This is our wish. Nobody wants ever to leave their home, and so it's been a very difficult decision for me. As a leader, you don't make plans to leave your island, your home, and so I've been asked on a number of occasions, "So how do you feel?" And it doesn't feel good at all. It's an emotional thing, and I've tried to live with it, and I know that on occasions, I'm accused of not trying to solve the problem because I can't solve the problem. It's something that's got to be done collectively. Climate change is a global phenomenon, and as I've often argued, unfortunately, the countries, when we come to the United Nations -- I was in a meeting with the Pacific Island Forum countries where Australia and New Zealand are also members, and we had an argument. There was a bit of a story in the news because they were arguing that to cut emissions, it would be something that they're unable to do because it would affect the industries. And so here I was saying, OK, I hear you, I understand what you're saying, but try also to understand what I'm saying because if you do not cut your emissions, then our survival is on the line. And so it's a matter for you to weigh this, these moral issues. It's about industry as opposed to the survival of a people. CA: You know, I ask you yesterday what made you angry, and you said, "I don't get angry." But then you paused. I think this made you angry. AT: I'd refer you to my earlier statement at the United Nations. I was very angry, very frustrated and then depressed. There was a sense of futility that we are fighting a fight that we have no hope of winning. I had to change my approach. I had to become more reasonable because I thought people would listen to somebody who was rational, but I remain radically rational, whatever that is. (Laughter) CA: Now, a core part of your nation's identity is fishing. I think you said pretty much everyone is involved in fishing in some way. AT: Well, we eat fish every day, every day, and I think there is no doubt that our rate of consumption of fish is perhaps the highest in the world. We don't have a lot of livestock, so it's fish that we depend on. CA: So you're dependent on fish, both at the local level and for the revenues that the country receives from the global fishing business for tuna, and yet despite that, a few years ago you took a very radical step. Can you tell us about that? I think something happened right here in the Phoenix Islands. AT: Let me give some of the background of what fish means for us. We have one of the largest tuna fisheries remaining in the world. In the Pacific, I think we own something like 60 percent of the remaining tuna fisheries, and it remains relatively healthy for some species, but not all. And Kiribati is one of the three major resource owners, tuna resource owners. And at the moment, we have been getting something like 80 to 90 percent of our revenue from access fees, license fees. CA: Of your national revenue. AT: National revenue, which drives everything that we do in governments, hospitals, schools and what have you. But we decided to close this, and it was a very difficult decision. I can assure you, politically, locally, it was not easy, but I was convinced that we had to do this in order to ensure that the fishery remains sustainable. There had been some indications that some of the species, in particular the bigeye, was under serious threat. The yellowfin was also heavily fished. Skipjack remains healthy. And so we had to do something like that, and so that was the reason I did that. Another reason why I did that was because I had been asking the international community that in order to deal with climate change, in order to fight climate change, there has got to be sacrifice, there has got to be commitment. So in asking the international community to make a sacrifice, I thought we ourselves need to make that sacrifice. And so we made the sacrifice. And forgoing commercial fishing in the Phoenix Islands protected area would mean a loss of revenue. We are still trying to assess what that loss would be because we actually closed it off at the beginning of this year, and so we will see by the end of this year what it means in terms of the lost revenue. CA: So there's so many things playing into this. On the one hand, it may prompt healthier fisheries. I mean, how much are you able to move the price up that you charge for the remaining areas? AT: The negotiations have been very difficult, but we have managed to raise the cost of a vessel day. For any vessel to come in to fish for a day, we have raised the fee from -- it was $6,000 and $8,000, now to $10,000, $12,000 per vessel day. And so there's been that significant increase. But at the same time, what's important to note is, whereas in the past these fishing boats might be fishing in a day and maybe catch 10 tons, now they're catching maybe 100 tons because they've become so efficient. And so we've got to respond likewise. We've got to be very, very careful because the technology has so improved. There was a time when the Brazilian fleet moved from the Atlantic to the Pacific. They couldn't. They started experimenting if they could, per se. But now they've got ways of doing it, and they've become so efficient. CA: Can you give us a sense of what it's like in those negotiations? Because you're up against companies that have hundreds of millions of dollars at stake, essentially. How do you hold the line? Is there any advice you can give to other leaders who are dealing with the same companies about how to get the most for your country, get the most for the fish? What advice would you give? AT: Well, I think we focus too often on licensing in order to get the rate of return, because what we are getting from license fees is about 10 percent of the landed value of the catch on the side of the wharf, not in the retail shops. And we only get about 10 percent. What we have been trying to do over the years is actually to increase our participation in the industry, in the harvesting, in the processing, and eventually, hopefully, the marketing. They're not easy to penetrate, but we are working towards that, and yes, the answer would be to enhance. In order to increase our rate of return, we have to become more involved. And so we've started doing that, and we have to restructure the industry. We've got to tell these people that the world has changed. Now we want to produce the fish ourselves. CA: And meanwhile, for your local fishermen, they are still able to fish, but what is business like for them? Is it getting harder? Are the waters depleted? Or is that being run on a sustainable basis? AT: For the artisanal fishery, we do not participate in the commercial fishing activity except only to supply the domestic market. The tuna fishery is really entirely for the foreign market, mostly here in the US, Europe, Japan. So I am a fisherman, very much, and I used to be able to catch yellowfin. Now it's very, very rare to be able to catch yellowfin because they are being lifted out of the water by the hundreds of tons by these purse seiners. CA: So here's a couple of beautiful girls from your country. I mean, as you think about their future, what message would you have for them and what message would you have for the world? AT: Well, I've been telling the world that we really have to do something about what is happening to the climate because for us, it's about the future of these children. I have 12 grandchildren, at least. I think I have 12, my wife knows. (Laughter) And I think I have eight children. It's about their future. Every day I see my grandchildren, about the same age as these young girls, and I do wonder, and I get angry sometimes, yes I do. I wonder what is to become of them. And so it's about them that we should be telling everybody, that it's not about their own national interest, because climate change, regrettably, unfortunately, is viewed by many countries as a national problem. It's not. And this is the argument we got into recently with our partners, the Australians and New Zealanders, because they said, "We can't cut any more." This is what one of the leaders, the Australian leader, said, that we've done our part, we are cutting back. I said, What about the rest? Why don't you keep it? If you could keep the rest of your emissions within your boundaries, within your borders, we'd have no question. You can go ahead as much as you like. But unfortunately, you're sending it our way, and it's affecting the future of our children. And so surely I think that is the heart of the problem of climate change today. We will be meeting in Paris at the end of this year, but until we can think of this as a global phenomenon, because we create it, individually, as nations, but it affects everybody else, and yet, we refuse to do anything about it, and we deal with it as a national problem, which it is not -- it is a global issue, and it's got to be dealt with collectively. CA: People are incredibly bad at responding to graphs and numbers, and we shut our minds to it. Somehow, to people, we're slightly better at responding to that sometimes. And it seems like it's very possible that your nation, despite, actually because of the intense problems you face, you may yet be the warning light to the world that shines most visibly, most powerfully. I just want to thank you, I'm sure, on behalf of all of us, for your extraordinary leadership and for being here. Mr. President, thank you so much. AT: Thank you. (Applause)

I'm going to present three projects in rapid fire. I don't have much time to do it. And I want to reinforce three ideas with that rapid-fire presentation. The first is what I like to call a hyper-rational process. It's a process that takes rationality almost to an absurd level, and it transcends all the baggage that normally comes with what people would call, sort of, a rational conclusion to something. And it concludes in something that you see here, that you actually wouldn't expect as being the result of rationality. The second -- the second is that this process does not have a signature. There is no authorship. Architects are obsessed with authorship. This is something that has editing and it has teams. In fact, we no longer see, within this process, the traditional master architect creating a sketch that his minions carry out. And the third is that it challenges -- and this is, in the length of this, very hard to support why, connect all these things -- but it challenges the high modernist notion of flexibility. High modernists said, we will create sort of singular spaces that are generic. Almost anything can happen within them. I call it sort of "shotgun flexibility." Turn your head this way; shoot; and you're bound to kill something. So, this is the promise of high modernism: within a single space, actually, any kind of activity can happen. But as we're seeing, operational costs are starting to dwarf capital costs in terms of design parameters. And so, with this sort of idea, what happens is, whatever actually is in the building on opening day, or whatever seems to be the most immediate need, starts to dwarf the possibility and sort of subsume it, of anything else could ever happen. And so we're proposing a different kind of flexibility, something that we call "compartmentalized flexibility." And the idea is that you, within that continuum, identify a series of points, and you design specifically to them. They can be pushed off-center a little bit, but in the end you actually still get as much of that original spectrum as you originally had hoped. With high modernist flexibility, that doesn't really work. Now I'm going to talk about -- I'm going to build up the Seattle Central Library in this way before your eyes in about five or six diagrams, and I truly mean this is the design process that you'll see. With the library staff and the library board, we settled on two core positions. This is the first one, and this is showing, over the last 900 years, the evolution of the book and other technologies. This diagram was our sort of position piece about the book, and our position was, books are technology -- that's something people forget -- but it's a form of technology that will have to share its dominance with any other form of truly potent technology or media. The second premise -- and this was something that was very difficult for us to convince the librarians of at first -- is that libraries, since the inception of Carnegie Library tradition in America, had a second responsibility, and that was for social roles. OK, now, this I'll come back to later, but something, actually, the librarians at first said, "No, this isn't our mandate. Our mandate is media, and particularly the book." So what you're seeing now is actually the design of the building. The upper diagram is what we had seen in a whole host of contemporary libraries that used high modernist flexibility. Sort of, any activity could happen anywhere. We don't know the future of the library; we don't know the future of the book; and so we'll use this approach. And what we saw were buildings that were very generic. And, worse, not only did we see buildings that were very generic -- so, not only does the reading room look like the copy room look like the magazine area -- but it meant that whatever issue was troubling the library at that moment was starting to engulf every other activity that was happening in it. And in this case, what was getting engulfed were these social responsibilities by the expansion of the book. And so we proposed what's at the lower diagram. Very dumb approach: simply compartmentalize. Put those things whose evolution we could predict -- and I don't mean that we could say whatever would actually happen in the future, but we have some certainty of the spectrum of whatever would happen in the future -- put those in boxes designed specifically for it, and put the things that we can't predict on the rooftops. So that was the core idea. Now, we had to convince the library that social roles was equally important to media in order to get them to accept this. What you're seeing here is actually their program on the left. That's as it was given to us in all of its clarity and glory. Our first operation was to re-digest it back to them, show it to them and say, "You know what? We haven't touched it, but only one-third of your own program is dedicated to media and books. Two-thirds of it is already dedicated -- that's the white band below -- the thing you said isn't important -- is already dedicated to social functions." So, once we had presented that back to them, they agreed that this sort of core concept could work. We got the right to go back to first principles -- that's the third diagram. We recombined everything. And then we started making new decisions. What you're seeing on the right is the design of the library, specifically in terms of square footage. On the left of that diagram, here, you'll see a series of five platforms -- sort of combs, collective programs. And on the right are the more indeterminate spaces; things like reading rooms, whose evolution in 20, 30, 40 years we can't predict. So that literally was the design of the building. They signed it, and to their chagrin, we came back a week later, and we presented them this. OK? And, as you can see, it is literally the diagram on the right. OK? We just sized -- no, really, I mean that, literally. The things on the -- on the left-hand side of the diagram, those are the boxes. We sized them into five compartments. They're super-efficient. We had a very low budget to work with. We pushed them around on the site to make very literal contextual relationships. The reading room should be able to see the water. The main entrance should have a public plaza in front of it to abide by the zoning code, and so forth. So, you see the five platforms -- those are the boxes -- within each one a very discrete thing is happening. The area in between is sort of an urban continuum, these things that we can't predict their evolution to the same degree. To give you some sense of the power of this idea, the biggest block is what we call the book spiral. It's literally built in a very inexpensive way -- it is a parking garage for books. It just so happens to be in the sixth through 10th floor of the building, but that is not necessarily an expensive approach. And it allows us to organize the entire Dewey decimal system on one continuous run: no matter how it grows or contracts within the building, it will always have its clarity to end the sort of trail of tears that we've all experienced in public libraries. (Laughter) And so this was the final operation, which was to take these blocks as they were all pushed off kilter, and to hold onto them with a skin. That skin serves double duty, again for economics. One, it is the lateral stability for the entire building; it is a structural element. But its dimensions were designed not only for structure, but also for holding on every piece of glass. The glass was then -- I'll just use the word impregnated -- but it had a layer of metal that was called "stressed metal." That metal acts as a micro louver, so from the exterior of the building the sun sees it as totally opaque, but from the interior it's entirely transparent. So, now I'm going to take you on a tour of the building. Let's see if I can find it. For anyone who is -- gets motion sickness, I apologize. So this is the building. And I think what's important is, when we first unveiled the building, the public thought -- saw it as being totally about our whim and ego. And it was defended, believe it or not, by the librarians. They said, "Look, we don't know what it is, but we know it's everything that we need it to be based on the observations that we've done about the program." This is going into one of the entries. So it's an unusual building for a public library, obviously. So now we're going into what we call the reading room -- sorry, living room. This is actually a program that we invented with the library. It was recognizing that public libraries are the last vestige of public free space. There are plenty of shopping malls that allow you to get out of the rain in downtown Seattle, but there are not so many free places that allow you to get out of the rain. So this was an unprogrammed area where people could pretty much do anything, including eat, yell, play chess and so forth. Now we're moving up into what we call the mixing chamber. That was the main sort of technology area in the building. You'll have to tell me if I'm going too fast for you. Now up. This is actually the place that we put into the building so I could propose to my wife. Right there. (Laughter) She said yes. I'm running out of time, so I'm actually going to stop. I can show this to you later. But let's see if I can very quickly get into the book spiral, because I think it's, as I said, the most -- this is the main reading room -- the most unique part of the building. You dizzy yet? OK, so here, this is the book spiral. So, it's very indiscernible, but it's actually a continuous stair stepping. It allows you to, on one city block, go up one full floor, so that it's on a continuum. OK, now I'm going to go back, and so I'm going to hit a second project. I'm going to go very, very quickly through this. Now this is the Dallas Theater. It was an unusual client for us, because they came to us and they said, "We need you to do a new building. We've been working in a temporary space for 30 years, but because of that temporary space, we've become an infamous theater company. Theater is really focused in New York, Chicago and Seattle, with the exception of the Dallas Theater Company." And the very fact that they worked on a provisional space meant that for Beckett they could blow out a wall; they could do "Cherry Orchard" and blow a hole through the floor, and so forth. So it was a very daunting task for us to do a brand-new building that could keep the -- be a pristine building, but keep this kind of experimental nature. And the second is, they were what we call a multi-form theater: they do different kinds of performances in repertory. So they in the morning will do something in arena, then they'll do something in proscenium and so forth. And so they needed to be able to quickly transform between different theater organizations, and for operational budget reasons, this actually no longer happens in pretty much any multi-form theater in the United States, so we needed to figure out a way to overcome that. So our thought was to literally put the theater on its head: to take those things that were previously defined as front-of-house and back-of-house and stack them -- above house and below house -- and to create sort of what we started to call a theater machine. We invest the money in the operation of the building. It's almost as though the building could be placed anywhere: wherever you place it, the area underneath it is charged for theatrical performances. And it allowed us to go back to first principles, and redefine fly tower, acoustic enclosure, light enclosure and so forth. And at the push of a button, it allows the artistic director to move between proscenium thrust and, in fact, arena and traverse and flat floor in a very quick transfiguration. So in fact, we can go, using operational budget, we can -- sorry, capital cost -- we can actually achieve what was no longer achievable in operational cost. And that means that the artistic director now has a palette that he or she can choose from between a series of forms and a series of processions, because that enclosure around the theater that is normally trapped with front-of-house and back-of-house spaces has been liberated. So an artistic director has the ability to show -- have a performance that enters in a Wagnerian procession, shows the first act in thrust, the intermission in a Greek procession, second act in arena, and so forth. So I'm going to show you what this actually means. This is the theater up close. Any portion around the theater actually can be opened discretely. The light enclosure can be lifted separate to the acoustic enclosure, so you can do Beckett with Dallas as the backdrop. Portions can be opened, so you can now actually have motorcycles drive directly into the performance, or you can even just have an open-air performance, or for intermissions. The balconies all move to go between those configurations, but they also disappear. The proscenium line can also disappear. You can bring enormous objects in, so in fact their -- the Dallas Theater Company -- their first show will be a play about Charles Lindbergh, and they'll want to bring in [a] real aircraft. And then it also provides them, in the off-season, the ability to actually rent out their space for entirely different things. This is it at night -- sorry, from a distance. Open up entire portions for different kinds of events. And at night. Again, remove the light enclosure; keep the acoustic enclosure. This is a monster truck show. I'm going to show now the last project. This also is an unusual client. They inverted the whole idea of development. They came to us and they said -- unlike normal developers -- they said, "We want to start out by providing a contemporary art museum in Louisville. That's our main goal." And so instead of being a developer that sees an opportunity to make money, they saw an ability to be a catalyst in their downtown. And the fact that they wanted to support the contemporary art museum actually built their pro forma, so they worked in reverse. And that pro forma led us to a mixed-use building that was very large in order to support their aspirations of the art, but it also opened up opportunities for the art itself to collaborate, interact with commercial spaces that actually artists more and more want to work within. And it also charged us with thinking about how to have something that was both a single building and a credible sort of sub-building. So now I'm going to -- this is Louisville's skyline -- and I'm going to take you through various constraints that led to the project. First: the physical constraints. We actually had to operate on three discrete sites, all of them well, well smaller than the size of the building. We had to operate next to the new Muhammad Ali center, and respect it. We had to operate within the 100-year floodplain. Now, this area floods three to four times a year, and there's a levee behind our site similar to the ones that broke in New Orleans. Have to operate behind the I-64 corridor, a street that cuts through the middle of these separate sites. So these -- we're starting to build a sort of nightmare of constraints in a bathtub. Underneath the bathtub are the city's main power lines. And there is a pedestrian corridor that they wanted to add that would link a series of cultural buildings, and a view corridor -- because this is the historic district -- that they didn't want to obstruct with the new building. (Laughter) And now we're going to add 1.1 million square feet. And if we did the traditional thing, that 1.1 million square feet -- these are the different programs -- the traditional thing would be to identify the public elements, place them on sites, and now we'd have a really terrible situation: a public thing in the middle of a bathtub that floods. And then we would size all the other elements -- the different commercial elements: hotel, luxury housing, offices and so forth -- and dump it on top. And we would create something that was unviable. In fact -- and you know this -- this is called the Time Warner building. (Laughter) So our strategy was very simple. Just lift the entire block, flip some of the elements over, reposition them so they have appropriate views and relationships to downtown, and make circulation connections and reroute the road. So that's the basic concept, and now I'm going to show you what it leads to. OK, it seems a very formal, willful gesture, but something derived entirely out of the constraints. And again, when we unveiled it, there was a sort of nervousness that this was about an architect making a statement, not an architect who was attempting to solve a series of problems. Now, within that center zone, as I said, we have the ability to mix a series of things. So here you can see that these -- this -- sort of an x-ray -- the towers are totally developer-driven. They told us the dimensions, the sizes and so forth and we focused on taking all the public components -- the lobbies, the bars, everything that the different commercial elements would have -- and combined it in the center, in the sort of subway map, in the transfer zone that would also include the contemporary art museum. So it creates a situation like this, where you have artists who can operate within an art space that also has an amazing view on the 22nd floor, but it also has proximity that the curator can either open or close. It allows people on exercise bicycles to be seen or to see the art, and so forth. It also means that if an artist wants to invade something like a swimming pool, they can begin to do their exhibition in a swimming pool, so they're not forced to always work within the confines of a contemporary gallery space. So, how to build this. It's very simple: it's a chair. So, we begin by building the cores. As we're building the cores, we build the contemporary art museum at grade. That allows us to have incredible efficiency and cost efficiency. This is not a high-budget building. The moment the cores get to mid level, we finish the art museum; we put all the mechanical equipment in it; and then we jack it up into the air. This is how they build really large aircraft hangars, for instance, the ones that they did for the A380. Finish the cores, finish the meat and you get something that looks like this. Now I only have about 30 seconds, so I want to start an animation, and we'll conclude with that. Thank you. (Applause) Chris asked me to add -- the theater is under construction, and this project will start construction in about a year, and finish in 2010.

(Music: "The Sound of Silence," Simon & Garfunkel) Hello voice mail, my old friend. (Laughter) I've called for tech support again. I ignored my boss's warning. I called on a Monday morning. Now it's evening, and my dinner first grew cold, and then grew mold. I'm still on hold. I'm listening to the sounds of silence. I don't think you understand. I think your phone lines are unmanned. I punched every touch tone I was told, but I've still spent 18 hours on hold. It's not enough your software crashed my Mac, and it constantly hangs and bombs -- it erased my ROMs! Now the Mac makes the sounds of silence. In my dreams I fantasize of wreaking vengeance on you guys. Say your motorcycle crashes. Blood comes gushing from your gashes. With your fading strength, you call 9-1-1 and you pray for a trained MD. But you get me. (Laughter) And you listen to the sounds of silence. (Music) (Applause) Thank you. Good evening and welcome to: "Spot the TED Presenter Who Used to Be a Broadway Accompanist." (Laughter) When I was offered the Times column six years ago, the deal was like this: you'll be sent the coolest, hottest, slickest new gadgets. Every week, it'll arrive at your door. You get to try them out, play with them, evaluate them until the novelty wears out, before you have to send them back, and you'll get paid for it. You can think about it, if you want. So, I've always been a technology nut, and I absolutely love it. The job, though, came with one small downside, and that is, they intended to publish my email address at the end of every column. And what I've noticed is -- first of all, you get an incredible amount of email. If you ever are feeling lonely, get a New York Times column, because you will get hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of emails. And the email I'm getting a lot today is about frustration. People are feeling like things -- Ok, I just had an alarm come up on my screen. Lucky you can't see it. People are feeling overwhelmed. They're feeling like it's too much technology, too fast. It may be good technology, but I feel like there's not enough of a support structure. There's not enough help. There's not enough thought put into the design of it to make it easy and enjoyable to use. One time I wrote a column about my efforts to reach Dell Technical Support, and within 12 hours, there were 700 messages from readers on the feedback boards on the Times website, from users saying, ""Me too, and here's my tale of woe." I call it "software rage." And man, let me tell you, whoever figures out how to make money off of this frustration will -- Oh, how did that get up there? Just kidding. (Laughter) Ok, so why is the problem accelerating? And part of the problem is, ironically, because the industry has put so much thought into making things easier to use. I'll show you what I mean. This is what the computer interface used to look like, DOS. Over the years, it's gotten easier to use. This is the original Mac operating system. Reagan was President. Madonna was still a brunette. And the entire operating system -- this is the good part -- the entire operating system fit in 211 k. You couldn't put the Mac OS X logo in 211 k! (Laughter) So the irony is, that as these things became easier to use, a less technical, broader audience was coming into contact with this equipment for the first time. I once had the distinct privilege of sitting in on the Apple call center for a day. The guy had a duplicate headset for me to listen to. And the calls that -- you know how they say, "Your call may be recorded for quality assurance?" Uh-uh. Your call may be recorded so that they can collect the funniest dumb user stories and pass them around on a CD. (Laughter) Which they do. (Laughter) And I have a copy. (Laughter) It's in your gift bag. No, no. With your voices on it! So, some of the stories are just so classic, and yet so understandable. A woman called Apple to complain that her mouse was squeaking. Making a squeaking noise. And the technician said, "Well, ma'am, what do you mean your mouse is squeaking?" She says, "All I can tell you is that it squeaks louder, the faster I move it across the screen." (Laughter) And the technician's like, "Ma'am, you've got the mouse up against the screen?" She goes, "Well, the message said, 'Click here to continue.'" (Laughter) Well, if you like that one -- how much time have we got? Another one, a guy called -- this is absolutely true -- his computer had crashed, and he told the technician he couldn't restart it, no matter how many times he typed "11." And the technician said, "What? Why are you typing 11?" He said, "The message says, 'Error Type 11.'" (Laughter) So, we must admit that some of the blame falls squarely at the feet of the users. But why is the technical overload crisis, the complexity crisis, accelerating now? In the hardware world, it's because we the consumers want everything to be smaller, smaller, smaller. So the gadgets are getting tinier and tinier, but our fingers are essentially staying the same size. So it gets to be more and more of a challenge. Software is subject to another primal force: the mandate to release more and more versions. When you buy a piece of software, it's not like buying a vase or a candy bar, where you own it. It's more like joining a club, where you pay dues every year, and every year, they say, "We've added more features, and we'll sell it to you for $99." I know one guy who's spent $4,000 just on Photoshop over the years. And software companies make 35 percent of their revenue from just these software upgrades. I call it the Software Upgrade Paradox -- which is that if you improve a piece of software enough times, you eventually ruin it. I mean, Microsoft Word was last just a word processor in, you know, the Eisenhower administration. (Laughter) But what's the alternative? Microsoft actually did this experiment. They said, "Well, wait a minute. Everyone complains that we're adding so many features. Let's create a word processor that's just a word processor: Simple, pure; does not do web pages, is not a database." And it came out, and it was called Microsoft Write. And none of you are nodding in acknowledgment, because it died. It tanked. No one ever bought it. I call this the Sport Utility Principle. People like to surround themselves with unnecessary power, right? They don't need the database and the website, but they're like, "Well, I'll upgrade, because, I might, you know, I might need that someday." So the problem is: as you add more features, where are they going to go? Where are you going to stick them? You only have so many design tools. You can do buttons, you can do sliders, pop-up menus, sub-menus. But if you're not careful about how you choose, you wind up with this. (Laughter) This is an un-retouched -- this is not a joke -- un-retouched photo of Microsoft Word, the copy that you have, with all the toolbars open. You've obviously never opened all the toolbars, but all you have to type in is this little, teeny window down here. (Laughter) And we've arrived at the age of interface matrices, where there are so many features and options, you have to do two dimensions, you know: a vertical and a horizontal. You guys all complain about how Microsoft Word is always bulleting your lists and underlining your links automatically. The off switch is in there somewhere. I'm telling you -- it's there. Part of the art of designing a simple, good interface, is knowing when to use which one of these features. So, here is the log-off dialogue box for Windows 2000. There are only four choices, so why are they in a pop-up menu? It's not like the rest of the screen is so full of other components that you need to collapse the choices. They could have put them all out in view. Here's Apple's take on the exact same dialogue box. (Applause) Thank you -- yes, I designed the dialogue box. No, no. Already, we can see that Apple and Microsoft have a severely divergent approach to software design. Microsoft's approach to simplicity tends to be: let's break it down; let's just make it more steps. There are these "wizards" everywhere. And you know, there's a new version of Windows coming out this fall. If they continue at this pace, there's absolutely no telling where they might wind up. [Welcome to the Type a Word Wizard] (Laughter) (Applause) "Welcome to the Type a Word Wizard." Ok, I'll bite. Let's click "Next" to continue. (Laughter) (Applause) From the drop-down menu, choose the first letter you want to type. Ok. (Laughter) So there is a limit that we don't want to cross. So what is the answer? How do you pack in all these features in a simple, intelligent way? I believe in consistency, when possible, real-world equivalents, trash can folder, when possible, label things, mostly. But I beg of the designers here to break all those rules if they violate the biggest rule of all, which is intelligence. Now what do I mean by that? I'm going to give you some examples where intelligence makes something not consistent, but it's better. If you are buying something on the web, you're supposed to put in your address, and you're supposed to choose what country you're from, ok? There are 200 countries in the world. We like to think of the Internet as a global village. I'm sorry; it's not one yet. It's mainly like, the United States, Europe, and Japan. So why is "United States" in the "U"s? (Laughter) You have to scroll, like, seven screensful to get to it. Now, it would be inconsistent to put "United States" first, but it would be intelligent. This one's been touched on before, but why in God's name do you shut down a Windows PC by clicking a button called "Start?" (Laughter) Here's another pet one of mine: you have a printer. Most of the time, you want to print one copy of your document, in page order, on that printer. So why in God's name do you see this every time you print? It's like a 747 shuttle cockpit. (Laughter) And one of the buttons at the bottom, you'll notice, is not "Print." (Laughter) (Applause) Now, I'm not saying that Apple is the only company who has embraced the cult of simplicity. Palm is also, especially in the old days, wonderful about this. I actually got to speak to Palm when they were flying high in the '90s, and after the talk, I met one of the employees. He says, "Nice talk." And I said, "Thank you. What do you do here?" He said, "I'm a tap counter." I'm like, "You're a what?" He goes, "Well Jeff Hawkins, the CEO, says, 'If any task on the Palm Pilot takes more than three taps of the stylus, it's too long, and it has to be redesigned.' So I'm the tap counter." So, I'm going to show you an example of a company that does not have a tap counter. (Laughter) This is Microsoft Word. Ok, when you want to create a new blank document in Word -- it could happen. (Laughter) You go up to the "File" menu and you choose "New." Now, what happens when you choose "New?" Do you get a new blank document? You do not. On the opposite side of the monitor, a task bar appears, and somewhere in those links -- by the way, not at the top -- somewhere in those links is a button that makes you a new document. Ok, so that is a company not counting taps. You know, I don't want to just stand here and make fun of Microsoft ... Yes, I do. (Laughter) (Applause) The Bill Gates song! (Piano music) I've been a geek forever and I wrote the very first DOS. I put my software and IBM together; I got profit and they got the loss. (Laughter) I write the code that makes the whole world run. I'm getting royalties from everyone. Sometimes it's garbage, but the press is snowed. You buy the box; I'll sell the code. Every software company is doing Microsoft's R&D. You can't keep a good idea down these days. Even Windows is a hack. We're kind of based loosely on the Mac. So it's big, so it's slow. You've got nowhere to go. I'm not doing this for praise. I write the code that fits the world today. Big mediocrity in every way. We've entered planet domination mode. You'll have no choice; you'll buy my code. I am Bill Gates and I write the code. (Applause) But actually, I believe there are really two Microsofts. There's the old one, responsible for Windows and Office. They're dying to throw the whole thing out and start fresh, but they can't. They're locked in, because so many add-ons and other company stuff locks into the old 1982 chassis. But there's also a new Microsoft, that's really doing good, simple interface designs. I liked the Media Center PC. I liked the Microsoft SPOT Watch. The Wireless Watch flopped miserably in the market, but it wasn't because it wasn't simply and beautifully designed. But let's put it this way: would you pay $10 a month to have a watch that has to be recharged every night like your cell phone, and stops working when you leave your area code? (Laughter) So, the signs might indicate that the complexity crunch is only going to get worse. So is there any hope? The screens are getting smaller, people are illuminating, putting manuals in the boxes, things are coming out at a faster pace. It's funny -- when Steve Jobs came back to Apple in 1997, after 12 years away, it was the MacWorld Expo -- he came to the stage in that black turtleneck and jeans, and he sort of did this. The crowd went wild, but I had just seen -- I'm like, where have I seen this before? I had just seen the movie "Evita" -- (Laughter) with Madonna, and I'm like, you know what? I've got to do one about Steve Jobs. (Music) It won't be easy. You'll think I'm strange. (Laughter) When I try to explain why I'm back, after telling the press Apple's future is black. You won't believe me. All that you see is a kid in his teens who started out in a garage with only a buddy named Woz. (Laughter) You try rhyming with garage! (Laughter) Don't cry for me, Cupertino. (Laughter) The truth is, I never left you. I know the ropes now, know what the tricks are. I made a fortune over at Pixar. (Laughter) Don't cry for me, Cupertino. I've still got the drive and vision. I still wear sandals in any weather. It's just that these days, they're Gucci leather. (Laughter) (Applause) Thank you. So Steve Jobs had always believed in simplicity and elegance and beauty. And the truth is, for years I was a little depressed, because Americans obviously did not value it, because the Mac had three percent market share, Windows had 95 percent market share -- people did not think it was worth putting a price on it. So I was a little depressed. And then I heard Al Gore's talk, and I realized I didn't know the meaning of depressed. (Laughter) But it turns out I was wrong, right? Because the iPod came out, and it violated every bit of common wisdom. Other products cost less; other products had more features, they had voice recorders and FM transmitters. The other products were backed by Microsoft, with an open standard, not Apple's propriety standard. But the iPod won -- this is the one they wanted. The lesson was: simplicity sells. And there are signs that the industry is getting the message. This is a little company that's done very well with simplicity and elegance. The Sonos thing -- it's catching on. I've got just a couple examples. Physically, a really cool, elegant thinking coming along lately. When you have a digital camera, how do you get the pictures back to your computer? Well, you either haul around a USB cable, or you buy a card reader and haul that around. Either one, you're going to lose. What I do is, I take out the memory card, and I fold it in half, revealing USB contacts. I just stick it in the computer, offload the pictures, put it right back in the camera. I never have to lose anything. Here's another example. Chris, you're the source of all power. Will you be my power plug? Chris Anderson: Oh yeah. DP: Hold that and don't let go. You might've seen this, this is Apple's new laptop. This the power cord. It hooks on like this. And I'm sure every one of you has done this at some point in your lives, or one of your children. You walk along -- and I'm about to pull this onto the floor. I don't care. It's a loaner. Here we go. Whoa! It's magnetic -- it doesn't pull the laptop onto the floor. (Applause) In my very last example -- I do a lot of my work using speech recognition software. And I'll just -- you have to be kind of quiet because the software is nervous. Speech recognition software is really great for doing emails very quickly; period. Like, I get hundreds of them a day; period. And it's not just what I dictate that it writes down; period. I also use this feature called voice macros; period. Correct "dissuade." Not "just." Ok, this is not an ideal situation, because it's getting the echo from the hall and stuff. The point is, I can respond to people very quickly by saying a short word, and having it write out a much longer thing. So if somebody sends me a fan letter, I'll say, "Thanks for that." [Thank you so much for taking the time to write ...] (Laughter) (Applause) And conversely, if somebody sends me hate mail -- which happens daily -- I say, "Piss off." (Laughter) [I admire your frankness ...] (Laughter) (Applause) So that's my dirty little secret. Don't tell anyone. (Laughter) So the point is -- this is a really interesting story. This is version eight of this software, and do you know what they put in version eight? No new features. It's never happened before in software! The company put no new features. They just said, "We'll make this software work right." Right? Because for years, people had bought this software, tried it out -- 95 percent accuracy was all they got, which means one in 20 words is wrong -- and they'd put it in their drawer. And the company got sick of that, so they said, "This version, we're not going to do anything, but make sure it's darned accurate." And so that's what they did. This cult of doing things right is starting to spread. So, my final advice for those of you who are consumers of this technology: remember, if it doesn't work, it's not necessarily you, ok? It could be the design of the thing you're using. Be aware in life of good design and bad design. And if you're among the people who create this stuff: Easy is hard. Pre-sweat the details for your audience. Count the taps. Remember, the hard part is not deciding what features to add, it's deciding what to leave out. And best of all, your motivation is: simplicity sells. CA: Bravo. DP: Thank you very much. CA: Hear, hear! (Applause)

I wanna start today -- here's my thing. Hold on. There I go. Hey. I wanna start today -- talk about the structure of a polypeptide. (Laughter) I get a lot of people asking me, in terms of "Lost," you know, "What the hell's that island?" You know, it's usually followed by, "No, seriously, what the hell is that island?" (Laughter) Why so many mysteries? What is it about mystery that I seem to be drawn to? And I was thinking about this, what to talk about at TED. When I talked to the kind rep from TED, and I said, "Listen, you know, what should I talk about?" He said, "Don't worry about it. Just be profound." (Laughter) And I took enormous comfort in that. So thank you, if you're here. I was trying to think, what do I talk about? It's a good question. Why do I do so much stuff that involves mystery? And I started trying to figure it out. And I started thinking about why do I do any of what I do, and I started thinking about my grandfather. I loved my grandfather. Harry Kelvin was his name, my mother's father. He died in 1986. He was an amazing guy. And one of the reasons he was amazing: After World War II he began an electronics company. He started selling surplus parts, kits, to schools and stuff. So he had this incredible curiosity. As a kid I saw him come over to me with radios and telephones and all sorts of things. And he'd open them up, he'd unscrew them, and reveal the inner workings -- which many of us, I'm sure, take for granted. But it's an amazing gift to give a kid. To open up this thing and show how it works and why it works and what it is. He was the ultimate deconstructer, in many ways. And my grandfather was a kind of guy who would not only take things apart, but he got me interested in all sorts of different odd crafts, like, you know, printing, like the letter press. I'm obsessed with printing. I'm obsessed with silk screening and bookbinding and box making. When I was a kid, I was always, like, taking apart boxes and stuff. And last night in the hotel, I took apart the Kleenex box. I was just looking at it. And I'm telling you ... (Laughter) It's a beautiful thing. I swear to God. I mean, when you look at the box, and you sort of see how it works. Rives is here, and I met him years ago at a book fair; he does pop-up books. And I'm obsessed with, like, engineering of paper. But like, the scoring of it, the printing of it, where the thing gets glued, you know, the registration marks for the ink. I just love boxes. My grandfather was sort of the guy who, you know, kind of got me into all sorts of these things. He would also supply me with tools. He was this amazing encourager -- this patron, sort of, to make stuff. And he got me a Super 8 camera when I was 10 years old. And in 1976, that was sort of an anomaly, to be a 10-year-old kid that had access to a camera. And you know, he was so generous; I couldn't believe it. He wasn't doing it entirely without some manipulation. I mean, I would call him, and I'd be like, "Listen, Grandpa, I really need this camera. You don't understand. This is, like, you know, I want to make movies. I'll get invited to TED one day. This is like -- " (Laughter) And you know, and my grandmother was the greatest. Because she'd be like, you know -- she'd get on the phone. She'd be like, "Harry, it's better than the drugs. He should be doing -- " She was fantastic. (Laughter) So I found myself getting this stuff, thanks to her assist, and suddenly, you know, I had a synthesizer when I was 14 years old -- this kind of stuff. And it let me make things, which, to me, was sort of the dream. He sort of humored my obsession to other things too, like magic. The thing is, we'd go to this magic store in New York City called Lou Tannen's Magic. It was this great magic store. It was a crappy little building in Midtown, but you'd be in the elevator, the elevator would open -- there'd be this little, small magic store. You'd be in the magic store. And it was just, it was a magical place. So I got all these sort of magic tricks. Oh, here. I'll show you. This is the kind of thing. So it would be like, you know. Right? Which is good, but now I can't move. Now, I have to do this, the rest of the thing, like this. I'm like, "Oh, wow. Look at my computer over there!" (Laughter) Anyway, so one of the things that I bought at the magic store was this: Tannen's Mystery Magic Box. The premise behind the mystery magic box was the following: 15 dollars buys you 50 dollars worth of magic. Which is a savings. (Laughter) Now, I bought this decades ago and I'm not kidding. If you look at this, you'll see it's never been opened. But I've had this forever. Now, I was looking at this, it was in my office, as it always is, on the shelf, and I was thinking, why have I not opened this? And why have I kept it? Because I'm not a pack rat. I don't keep everything but for some reason I haven't opened this box. And I felt like there was a key to this, somehow, in talking about something at TED that I haven't discussed before, and bored people elsewhere. So I thought, maybe there's something with this. I started thinking about it. And there was this giant question mark. I love the design, for what it's worth, of this thing. And I started thinking, why haven't I opened it? And I realized that I haven't opened it because it represents something important -- to me. It represents my grandfather. Am I allowed to cry at TED? Because -- no, I'm not going to cry. But -- (Laughter) -- the thing is, that it represents infinite possibility. It represents hope. It represents potential. And what I love about this box, and what I realize I sort of do in whatever it is that I do, is I find myself drawn to infinite possibility, that sense of potential. And I realize that mystery is the catalyst for imagination. Now, it's not the most ground-breaking idea, but when I started to think that maybe there are times when mystery is more important than knowledge, I started getting interested in this. And so I started thinking about "Lost," and the stuff that we do, and I realized, oh my God, mystery boxes are everywhere in what I do! In how -- in the creation of "Lost," Damon Lindelof and I, who created the show with me, we were basically tasked with creating this series that we had very little time to do. We had 11 and a half weeks to write it, cast it, crew it, shoot it, cut it, post it, turn in a two-hour pilot. So it was not a lot of time. And that sense of possibility -- what could this thing be? There was no time to develop it. I'm sure you're all familiar with those people who tell you what you can't do and what you should change. And there was no time for that, which is kind of amazing. And so we did this show, and for those of you who, you know, who haven't seen it, or don't know it, I can show you this one little clip from the pilot, just to show you some stuff that we did. Claire: Help! Please help me! Help me! Help me! Jack: Get him out of here! Get him away from the engine! Get him out of here! C: I'm having contractions! J: How many months pregnant are you? C: I'm only eight months. J: And how far apart are they coming? C: I don't know. I think it just happened. Man: Hey! Hey! Hey, get away from -- JJA: Now, 10 years ago, if we wanted to do that, we'd have to kill a stuntman. We'd actually -- (Laughter) it would be harder. It would take -- Take 2 would be a bitch. So the amazing thing was, we were able to do this thing. And part of that was the amazing availability of technology, knowing we could do anything. I mean, we could never have done that. We might have been able to write it; we wouldn't have been able to depict it like we did. And so part of the amazing thing for me is in the creative process, technology is, like, mind-blowingly inspiring to me. I realize that that blank page is a magic box, you know? It needs to be filled with something fantastic. I used to have the "Ordinary People" script that I'd flip through. The romance of the script was amazing to me; it would inspire me. I wanted to try and fill pages with the same kind of spirit and thought and emotion that that script did. You know, I love Apple computers. I'm obsessed. So the Apple computer -- like those -- the PowerBook -- this computer, right, it challenges me. It basically says, what are you going to write worthy of me? (Laughter) I guess I feel this -- I'm compelled. And I often am like, you know, dude, today I'm out. I got nothing. You know? (Laughter) So there's that. In terms of the content of it, you look at stories, you think, well, what are stories but mystery boxes? There's a fundamental question -- in TV, the first act is called the teaser. It's literally the teaser. It's the big question. So you're drawn into it. Then of course, there's another question. And it goes on and on. Look at "Star Wars." You got the droids; they meet the mysterious woman. Who's that? We don't know. Mystery box! You know? Then you meet Luke Skywalker. He gets the Droid, you see the holographic image. You learn, oh, it's a message, you know. She wants to, you know, find Obi Wan Kenobi. He's her only hope. But who the hell's Obi Wan Kenobi? Mystery box! So then you go and he meets Ben Kenobi. Ben Kenobi is Obi Wan Kenobi. Holy shit! You know -- so it keeps us -- (Laughter) -- have you guys not seen that? (Laughter) It's huge! Anyway -- So there's this thing with mystery boxes that I started feeling compelled. Then there's the thing of mystery in terms of imagination -- the withholding of information. You know, doing that intentionally is much more engaging. Whether it's like the shark in "Jaws" -- if Spielberg's mechanical shark, Bruce, had worked, it would not be remotely as scary; you would have seen it too much. In "Alien", they never really showed the alien: terrifying! Even in a movie, like a romantic comedy, "The Graduate," they're having that date, remember? And they're in the car, and it's loud, and so they put the top up. They're in there -- you don't hear anything they're saying! You can't hear a word! But it's the most romantic date ever. And you love it because you don't hear it. So to me, there's that. And then, finally, there's this idea -- stretching the sort of paradigm a little bit -- but the idea of the mystery box. Meaning, what you think you're getting, then what you're really getting. And it's true in so many movies and stories. And when you look at "E.T.," for example -- "E.T." is this, you know, unbelievable movie about what? It's about an alien who meets a kid, right? Well, it's not. "E.T." is about divorce. "E.T." is about a heartbroken, divorce-crippled family, and ultimately, this kid who can't find his way. "Die Hard," right? Crazy, great, fun, action-adventure movie in a building. It's about a guy who's on the verge of divorce. He's showing up to L.A., tail between his legs. There are great scenes -- maybe not the most amazing dramatic scenes in the history of time, but pretty great scenes. There's a half an hour of investment in character before you get to the stuff that you're, you know, expecting. When you look at a movie like "Jaws," the scene that you expect -- we have the screen? These are the kind of, you know, scenes that you remember and expect from "Jaws." And she's being eaten; there's a shark. The thing about "Jaws" is, it's really about a guy who is sort of dealing with his place in the world -- with his masculinity, with his family, how he's going to, you know, make it work in this new town. This is one of my favorite scenes ever, and this is a scene that you wouldn't necessarily think of when you think of "Jaws." But it's an amazing scene. Father: C'mere. Give us a kiss. Son: Why? Father: 'Cause I need it. JJA: C'mon. "Why? 'Cause I need it?" Best scene ever, right? Come on! So you think of "Jaws" -- so that's the kind of stuff that, like, you know, the investment of character, which is the stuff that really is inside the box, you know? It's why when people do sequels, or rip off movies, you know, of a genre, they're ripping off the wrong thing. You're not supposed to rip off the shark or the monster. You gotta rip off -- you know, if you rip something off -- rip off the character. Rip off the stuff that matters. I mean, look inside yourself and figure out what is inside you. Because ultimately, you know, the mystery box is all of us. So there's that. Then the distribution. What's a bigger mystery box than a movie theater? You know? You go to the theater, you're just so excited to see anything. The moment the lights go down is often the best part, you know? And you're full of that amazing -- that feeling of excited anticipation. And often, the movie's, like, there and it's going, and then something happens and you go, "Oh--" and then something else, and you're, "Mmm ..." Now, when it's a great movie, you're along for the ride 'cause you're willing to give yourself to it. So to me, whether it's that, whether it's a TV, an iPod, computer, cell phone -- it's funny, I'm an -- as I said, Apple fanatic -- and one day, about a year or so ago, I was signing on online in the morning to watch Steve Jobs' keynote, 'cause I always do. And he came on, he was presenting the video iPod, and what was on the enormous iPod behind him? "Lost"! I had no idea! And I realized, holy shit, it'd come full circle. Like, the inspiration I get from the technology is now using the stuff that I do, inspired by it, to sell technology. I mean, it's nuts! (Laughter) I was gonna show you a couple of other things I'm gonna skip through. I just want to show you one other thing that has nothing to do with anything. This is something online; I don't know if you've seen it before. Six years ago they did this. This is an online thing done by guys who had some visual effects experience. But the point was, that they were doing things that were using these mystery boxes that they had -- everyone has now. What I've realized is what my grandfather did for me when I was a kid, everyone has access to now. You don't need to have my grandfather, though you wished you had. But I have to tell you -- this is a guy doing stuff on a Quadra 950 computer -- the resolution's a little bit low -- using Infinity software they stopped making 15 years ago. He's doing stuff that looks as amazing as stuff I've seen released from Hollywood. The most incredible sort of mystery, I think, is now the question of what comes next. Because it is now democratized. So now, the creation of media is -- it's everywhere. The stuff that I was lucky and begging for to get when I was a kid is now ubiquitous. And so, there's an amazing sense of opportunity out there. And when I think of the filmmakers who exist out there now who would have been silenced, you know -- who have been silenced in the past -- it's a very exciting thing. I used to say in classes and lectures and stuff, to someone who wants to write, "Go! Write! Do your thing." It's free, you know, you don't need permission to go write. But now I can say, "Go make your movie!" There's nothing stopping you from going out there and getting the technology. You can lease, rent, buy stuff off the shelf that is either as good, or just as good, as the stuff that's being used by the, you know, quote unquote "legit people." No community is best served when only the elite have control. And I feel like this is an amazing opportunity to see what else is out there. When I did "Mission: Impossible III," we had amazing visual effects stuff. ILM did the effects; it was incredible. And sort of like my dream to be involved. And there are a couple of sequences in the movie, like these couple of moments I'll show you. There's that. Okay, obviously I have an obsession with big crazy explosions. So my favorite visual effect in the movie is the one I'm about to show you. And it's a scene in which Tom's character wakes up. He's drowsy. He's crazy -- out of it. And the guy wakes up, and he shoves this gun in his nose and shoots this little capsule into his brain that he's going to use later to kill him, as bad guys do. Bad Guy: Good morning. JJA: OK, now. When we shot that scene, we were there doing it, the actor who had the gun, an English actor, Eddie Marsan -- sweetheart, great guy -- he kept taking the gun and putting it into Tom's nose, and it was hurting Tom's nose. And I learned this very early on in my career: Don't hurt Tom's nose. (Laughter) There are three things you don't want to do. Number two is: Don't hurt Tom's nose. So Eddie has this gun -- and he's the greatest guy -- he's this really sweet English guy. He's like, "Sorry, I don't want to hurt you." I'm like -- you gotta -- we have to make this look good. And I realized that we had to do something 'cause it wasn't working just as it was. And I literally, like, thought back to what I would have done using the Super 8 camera that my grandfather got me sitting in that room, and I realized that hand didn't have to be Eddie Marsan's. It could be Tom's. And Tom would know just how hard to push the gun. He wouldn't hurt himself. So we took his hand and we painted it to look a little bit more like Eddie's. We put it in Eddie's sleeve, and so the hand that you see -- I'll show you again, that's not Eddie's hand, that's Tom's. So Tom is playing two roles. (Laughter) And he didn't ask for any more money. So here, here. Watch it again. There he is. He's waking up. He's drowsy, been through a lot. Tom's hand. Tom's hand. Tom's hand. (Laughter) Anyway. So. (Applause) Thanks. So you don't need the greatest technology to do things that can work in movies. And the mystery box, in honor of my grandfather, stays closed. Thank you. (Applause)

I'm going to talk to you today about hopefully converting fear into hope. When we go to the physician today -- when we go to the doctor's office and we walk in, there are words that we just don't want to hear. There are words that we're truly afraid of. Diabetes, cancer, Parkinson's, Alzheimer's, heart failure, lung failure -- things that we know are debilitating diseases, for which there's relatively little that can be done. And what I want to lay out for you today is a different way of thinking about how to treat debilitating disease, why it's important, why without it perhaps our health care system will melt down if you think it already hasn't, and where we are clinically today, and where we might go tomorrow, and what some of the hurdles are. And we're going to do all of that in 18 minutes, I promise. I want to start with this slide, because this slide sort of tells the story the way Science Magazine thinks of it. This was an issue from 2002 that they published with a lot of different articles on the bionic human. It was basically a regenerative medicine issue. Regenerative medicine is an extraordinarily simple concept that everybody can understand. It's simply accelerating the pace at which the body heals itself to a clinically relevant timescale. So we know how to do this in many of the ways that are up there. We know that if we have a damaged hip, you can put an artificial hip in. And this is the idea that Science Magazine used on their front cover. This is the complete antithesis of regenerative medicine. This is not regenerative medicine. Regenerative medicine is what Business Week put up when they did a story about regenerative medicine not too long ago. The idea is that instead of figuring out how to ameliorate symptoms with devices and drugs and the like -- and I'll come back to that theme a few times -- instead of doing that, we will regenerate lost function of the body by regenerating the function of organs and damaged tissue. So that at the end of the treatment, you are the same as you were at the beginning of the treatment. Very few good ideas -- if you agree that this is a good idea -- very few good ideas are truly novel. And this is just the same. If you look back in history, Charles Lindbergh, who was better known for flying airplanes, was actually one of the first people along with Alexis Carrel, one of the Nobel Laureates from Rockefeller, to begin to think about, could you culture organs? And they published this book in 1937, where they actually began to think about, what could you do in bio-reactors to grow whole organs? We've come a long way since then. I'm going to share with you some of the exciting work that's going on. But before doing that, what I'd like to do is share my depression about the health care system and the need for this with you. Many of the talks yesterday talked about improving the quality of life, and reducing poverty, and essentially increasing life expectancy all around the globe. One of the challenges is that the richer we are, the longer we live. And the longer we live, the more expensive it is to take care of our diseases as we get older. This is simply the wealth of a country versus the percent of population over the age of 65. And you can basically see that the richer a country is, the older the people are within it. Why is this important? And why is this a particularly dramatic challenge right now? If the average age of your population is 30, then the average kind of disease that you have to treat is maybe a broken ankle every now and again, maybe a little bit of asthma. If the average age in your country is 45 to 55, now the average person is looking at diabetes, early-onset diabetes, heart failure, coronary artery disease -- things that are inherently more difficult to treat, and much more expensive to treat. Just have a look at the demographics in the U.S. here. This is from "The Untied States of America." In 1930, there were 41 workers per retiree. 41 people who were basically outside of being really sick, paying for the one retiree who was experiencing debilitating disease. In 2010, two workers per retiree in the U.S. And this is matched in every industrialized, wealthy country in the world. How can you actually afford to treat patients when the reality of getting old looks like this? This is age versus cost of health care. And you can see that right around age 45, 40 to 45, there's a sudden spike in the cost of health care. It's actually quite interesting. If you do the right studies, you can look at how much you as an individual spend on your own health care, plotted over your lifetime. And about seven years before you're about to die, there's a spike. And you can actually -- (Laughter) -- we won't get into that. (Laughter) There are very few things, very few things that you can really do that will change the way that you can treat these kinds of diseases and experience what I would call healthy aging. I'd suggest there are four things, and none of these things include an insurance system or a legal system. All those things do is change who pays. They don't actually change what the actual cost of the treatment is. One thing you can do is not treat. You can ration health care. We won't talk about that anymore. It's too depressing. You can prevent. Obviously a lot of monies should be put into prevention. But perhaps most interesting, to me anyway, and most important, is the idea of diagnosing a disease much earlier on in the progression, and then treating the disease to cure the disease instead of treating a symptom. Think of it in terms of diabetes, for instance. Today, with diabetes, what do we do? We diagnose the disease eventually, once it becomes symptomatic, and then we treat the symptom for 10, 20, 30, 40 years. And we do OK. Insulin's a pretty good therapy. But eventually it stops working, and diabetes leads to a predictable onset of debilitating disease. Why couldn't we just inject the pancreas with something to regenerate the pancreas early on in the disease, perhaps even before it was symptomatic? And it might be a little bit expensive at the time that we did it, but if it worked, we would truly be able to do something different. This video, I think, gets across the concept that I'm talking about quite dramatically. This is a newt re-growing its limb. If a newt can do this kind of thing, why can't we? I'll actually show you some more important features about limb regeneration in a moment. But what we're talking about in regenerative medicine is doing this in every organ system of the body, for tissues and for organs themselves. So today's reality is that if we get sick, the message is we will treat your symptoms, and you need to adjust to a new way of life. I would pose to you that tomorrow -- and when tomorrow is we could debate, but it's within the foreseeable future -- we will talk about regenerative rehabilitation. There's a limb prosthetic up here, similar actually one on the soldier that's come back from Iraq. There are 370 soldiers that have come back from Iraq that have lost limbs. Imagine if instead of facing that, they could actually face the regeneration of that limb. It's a wild concept. I'll show you where we are at the moment in working towards that concept. But it's applicable, again, to every organ system. How can we do that? The way to do that is to develop a conversation with the body. We need to learn to speak the body's language. And to switch on processes that we knew how to do when we were a fetus. A mammalian fetus, if it loses a limb during the first trimester of pregnancy, will re-grow that limb. So our DNA has the capacity to do these kinds of wound-healing mechanisms. It's a natural process, but it is lost as we age. In a child, before the age of about six months, if they lose their fingertip in an accident, they'll re-grow their fingertip. By the time they're five, they won't be able to do that anymore. So to engage in that conversation with the body, we need to speak the body's language. And there are certain tools in our toolbox that allow us to do this today. I'm going to give you an example of three of these tools through which to converse with the body. The first is cellular therapies. Clearly, we heal ourselves in a natural process, using cells to do most of the work. Therefore, if we can find the right cells and implant them in the body, they may do the healing. Secondly, we can use materials. We heard yesterday about the importance of new materials. If we can invent materials, design materials, or extract materials from a natural environment, then we might be able to have those materials induce the body to heal itself. And finally, we may be able to use smart devices that will offload the work of the body and allow it to heal. I'm going to show you an example of each of these, and I'm going to start with materials. Steve Badylak -- who's at the University of Pittsburgh -- about a decade ago had a remarkable idea. And that idea was that the small intestine of a pig, if you threw away all the cells, and if you did that in a way that allowed it to remain biologically active, may contain all of the necessary factors and signals that would signal the body to heal itself. And he asked a very important question. He asked the question, if I take that material, which is a natural material that usually induces healing in the small intestine, and I place it somewhere else on a person's body, would it give a tissue-specific response, or would it make small intestine if I tried to make a new ear? I wouldn't be telling you this story if it weren't compelling. The picture I'm about to show you is a compelling picture. (Laughter) However, for those of you that are even the slightest bit squeamish -- even though you may not like to admit it in front of your friends -- the lights are down. This is a good time to look at your feet, check your Blackberry, do anything other than look at the screen. (Laughter) What I'm about to show you is a diabetic ulcer. And although -- it's good to laugh before we look at this. This is the reality of diabetes. I think a lot of times we hear about diabetics, diabetic ulcers, we just don't connect the ulcer with the eventual treatment, which is amputation, if you can't heal it. So I'm going to put the slide up now. It won't be up for long. This is a diabetic ulcer. It's tragic. The treatment for this is amputation. This is an older lady. She has cancer of the liver as well as diabetes, and has decided to die with what' s left of her body intact. And this lady decided, after a year of attempted treatment of that ulcer, that she would try this new therapy that Steve invented. That's what the wound looked like 11 weeks later. That material contained only natural signals. And that material induced the body to switch back on a healing response that it didn't have before. There's going to be a couple more distressing slides for those of you -- I'll let you know when you can look again. This is a horse. The horse is not in pain. If the horse was in pain, I wouldn't show you this slide. The horse just has another nostril that's developed because of a riding accident. Just a few weeks after treatment -- in this case, taking that material, turning it into a gel, and packing that area, and then repeating the treatment a few times -- and the horse heals up. And if you took an ultrasound of that area, it would look great. Here's a dolphin where the fin's been re-attached. There are now 400,000 patients around the world who have used that material to heal their wounds. Could you regenerate a limb? DARPA just gave Steve 15 million dollars to lead an eight-institution project to begin the process of asking that question. And I'll show you the 15 million dollar picture. This is a 78 year-old man who's lost the end of his fingertip. Remember that I mentioned before the children who lose their fingertips. After treatment that's what it looks like. This is happening today. This is clinically relevant today. There are materials that do this. Here are the heart patches. But could you go a little further? Could you, say, instead of using material, can I take some cells along with the material, and remove a damaged piece of tissue, put a bio-degradable material on there? You can see here a little bit of heart muscle beating in a dish. This was done by Teruo Okano at Tokyo Women's Hospital. He can actually grow beating tissue in a dish. He chills the dish, it changes its properties and he peels it right out of the dish. It's the coolest stuff. Now I'm going to show you cell-based regeneration. And what I'm going to show you here is stem cells being removed from the hip of a patient. Again, if you're squeamish, you don't want to watch. But this one's kind of cool. So this is a bypass operation, just like what Al Gore had, with a difference. In this case, at the end of the bypass operation, you're going to see the stem cells from the patient that were removed at the beginning of the procedure being injected directly into the heart of the patient. And I'm standing up here because at one point I'm going to show you just how early this technology is. Here go the stem cells, right into the beating heart of the patient. And if you look really carefully, it's going to be right around this point you'll actually see a back-flush. You see the cells coming back out. We need all sorts of new technology, new devices, to get the cells to the right place at the right time. Just a little bit of data, a tiny bit of data. This was a randomized trial. At this time this was an N of 20. Now there's an N of about 100. Basically, if you take an extremely sick patient and you give them a bypass, they get a little bit better. If you give them stem cells as well as their bypass, for these particular patients, they became asymptomatic. These are now two years out. The coolest thing would be is if you could diagnose the disease early, and prevent the onset of the disease to a bad state. This is the same procedure, but now done minimally invasively, with only three holes in the body where they're taking the heart and simply injecting stem cells through a laparoscopic procedure. There go the cells. We don't have time to go into all of those details, but basically, that works too. You can take patients who are less sick, and bring them back to an almost asymptomatic state through that kind of therapy. Here's another example of stem-cell therapy that isn't quite clinical yet, but I think very soon will be. This is the work of Kacey Marra from Pittsburgh, along with a number of colleagues around the world. They've decided that liposuction fluid, which -- in the United States, we have a lot of liposuction fluid. (Laughter) It's a great source of stem cells. Stem cells are packed in that liposuction fluid. So you could go in, you could get your tummy-tuck. Out comes the liposuction fluid, and in this case, the stem cells are isolated and turned into neurons. All done in the lab. And I think fairly soon, you will see patients being treated with their own fat-derived, or adipose-derived, stem cells. I talked before about the use of devices to dramatically change the way we treat disease. Here's just one example before I close up. This is equally tragic. We have a very abiding and heartbreaking partnership with our colleagues at the Institute for Surgical Research in the US Army, who have to treat the now 11,000 kids that have come back from Iraq. Many of those patients are very severely burned. And if there's anything that's been learned about burn, it's that we don't know how to treat it. Everything that is done to treat burn -- basically we do a sodding approach. We make something over here, and then we transplant it onto the site of the wound, and we try and get the two to take. In this case here, a new, wearable bio-reactor has been designed -- it should be tested clinically later this year at ISR -- by Joerg Gerlach in Pittsburgh. And that bio-reactor will lay down in the wound bed. The gun that you see there sprays cells. That's going to spray cells over that area. The reactor will serve to fertilize the environment, deliver other things as well at the same time, and therefore we will seed that lawn, as opposed to try the sodding approach. It's a completely different way of doing it. So my 18 minutes is up. So let me finish up with some good news, and maybe a little bit of bad news. The good news is that this is happening today. It's very powerful work. Clearly the images kind of get that across. It's incredibly difficult because it's highly inter-disciplinary. Almost every field of science engineering and clinical practice is involved in trying to get this to happen. A number of governments, and a number of regions, have recognized that this is a new way to treat disease. The Japanese government were perhaps the first, when they decided to invest first 3 billion, later another 2 billion in this field. It's no coincidence. Japan is the oldest country on earth in terms of its average age. They need this to work or their health system dies. So they're putting a lot of strategic investment focused in this area. The European Union, same thing. China, the same thing. China just launched a national tissue-engineering center. The first year budget was 250 million US dollars. In the United States we've had a somewhat different approach. (Laughter) Oh, for Al Gore to come and be in the real world as president. We've had a different approach. And the approach has basically been to just sort of fund things as they come along. But there's been no strategic investment to bring all of the necessary things to bear and focus them in a careful way. And I'm going to finish up with a quote, maybe a little cheap shot, at the director of the NIH, who's a very charming man. Myself and Jay Vacanti from Harvard went to visit with him and a number of his directors of his institute just a few months ago, to try and convince him that it was time to take just a little piece of that 27.5 billion dollars that he's going to get next year and focus it, in a strategic way, to make sure we can accelerate the pace at which these things get to patients. And at the end of a very testy meeting, what the NIH director said was, "Your vision is larger than our appetite." I'd like to close by saying that no one's going to change our vision, but together we can change his appetite. Thank you.

I'm going to tell you two things today: One is what we have lost, and two, a way to bring it back. And let me start with this. This is my baseline: This is the Mediterranean coast with no fish, bare rock and lots of sea urchins that like to eat the algae. Something like this is what I first saw when I jumped in the water for the first time in the Mediterranean coast off Spain. Now, if an alien came to earth -- let's call him Joe -- what would Joe see? If Joe jumped in a coral reef, there are many things the alien could see. Very unlikely, Joe would jump on a pristine coral reef, a virgin coral reef with lots of coral, sharks, crocodiles, manatees, groupers, turtles, etc. So, probably, what Joe would see would be in this part, in the greenish part of the picture. Here we have the extreme with dead corals, microbial soup and jellyfish. And where the diver is, this is probably where most of the reefs of the world are now, with very few corals, algae overgrowing the corals, lots of bacteria, and where the large animals are gone. And this is what most marine scientists have seen too. This is their baseline. This is what they think is natural because we started modern science with scuba diving long after we started degrading marine ecosystems. So I'm going to get us all on a time machine, and we're going to the left; we're going to go back to the past to see what the ocean was like. And let's start with this time machine, the Line Islands, where we have conducted a series of National Geographic expeditions. This sea is an archipelago belonging to Kiribati that spans across the equator and it has several uninhabited, unfished, pristine islands and a few inhabited islands. So let's start with the first one: Christmas Island, over 5,000 people. Most of the reefs are dead, most of the corals are dead -- overgrown by algae -- and most of the fish are smaller than the pencils we use to count them. We did 250 hours of diving here in 2005. We didn't see a single shark. This is the place that Captain Cook discovered in 1777 and he described a huge abundance of sharks biting the rudders and the oars of their small boats while they were going ashore. Let's move the dial a little bit to the past. Fanning Island, 2,500 people. The corals are doing better here. Lots of small fish. This is what many divers would consider paradise. This is where you can see most of the Florida Keys National Marine Sanctuary. And many people think this is really, really beautiful, if this is your baseline. If we go back to a place like Palmyra Atoll, where I was with Jeremy Jackson a few years ago, the corals are doing better and there are sharks. You can see sharks in every single dive. And this is something that is very unusual in today's coral reefs. But then, if we shift the dial 200, 500 years back, then we get to the places where the corals are absolutely healthy and gorgeous, forming spectacular structures, and where the predators are the most conspicuous thing, where you see between 25 and 50 sharks per dive. What have we learned from these places? This is what we thought was natural. This is what we call the biomass pyramid. If we get all of the fish of a coral reef together and weigh them, this is what we would expect. Most of the biomass is low on the food chain, the herbivores, the parrotfish, the surgeonfish that eat the algae. Then the plankton feeders, these little damselfish, the little animals floating in the water. And then we have a lower biomass of carnivores, and a lower biomass of top head, or the sharks, the large snappers, the large groupers. But this is a consequence. This view of the world is a consequence of having studied degraded reefs. When we went to pristine reefs, we realized that the natural world was upside down; this pyramid was inverted. The top head does account for most of the biomass, in some places up to 85 percent, like Kingman Reef, which is now protected. The good news is that, in addition to having more predators, there's more of everything. The size of these boxes is bigger. We have more sharks, more biomass of snappers, more biomass of herbivores, too, like these parrot fish that are like marine goats. They clean the reef; everything that grows enough to be seen, they eat, and they keep the reef clean and allow the corals to replenish. Not only do these places -- these ancient, pristine places -- have lots of fish, but they also have other important components of the ecosystem like the giant clams; pavements of giant clams in the lagoons, up to 20, 25 per square meter. These have disappeared from every inhabited reef in the world, and they filter the water; they keep the water clean from microbes and pathogens. But still, now we have global warming. If we don't have fishing because these reefs are protected by law or their remoteness, this is great. But the water gets warmer for too long and the corals die. So how are these fish, these predators going to help? Well, what we have seen is that in this particular area during El Nino, year '97, '98, the water was too warm for too long, and many corals bleached and many died. In Christmas, where the food web is really trimmed down, where the large animals are gone, the corals have not recovered. In Fanning Island, the corals are not recovered. But you see here a big table coral that died and collapsed. And the fish have grazed the algae, so the turf of algae is a little lower. Then you go to Palmyra Atoll that has more biomass of herbivores, and the dead corals are clean, and the corals are coming back. And when you go to the pristine side, did this ever bleach? These places bleached too, but they recovered faster. The more intact, the more complete, [and] the more complex your food web, the higher the resilience, [and] the more likely that the system is going to recover from the short-term impacts of warming events. And that's good news, so we need to recover that structure. We need to make sure that all of the pieces of the ecosystem are there so the ecosystem can adapt to the effects of global warming. So if we have to reset the baseline, if we have to push the ecosystem back to the left, how can we do it? Well, there are several ways. One very clear way is the marine protected areas, especially no-take reserves that we set aside to allow for the recovery for marine life. And let me go back to that image of the Mediterranean. This was my baseline. This is what I saw when I was a kid. And at the same time I was watching Jacques Cousteau's shows on TV, with all this richness and abundance and diversity. And I thought that this richness belonged to tropical seas, and that the Mediterranean was a naturally poor sea. But, little did I know, until I jumped for the first time in a marine reserve. And this is what I saw, lots of fish. After a few years, between five and seven years, fish come back, they eat the urchins, and then the algae grow again. So you have this little algal forest, and in the size of a laptop you can find more than 100 species of algae, mostly microscopic fit hundreds of species of little animals that then feed the fish, so that the system recovers. And this particular place, the Medes Islands Marine Reserve, is only 94 hectares, and it brings 6 million euros to the local economy, 20 times more than fishing, and it represents 88 percent of all the tourist revenue. So these places not only help the ecosystem but also help the people who can benefit from the ecosystem. So let me just give you a summary of what no-take reserves do. These places, when we protect them, if we compare them to unprotected areas nearby, this is what happens. The number of species increases 21 percent; so if you have 1,000 species you would expect 200 more in a marine reserve. This is very substantial. The size of organisms increases a third, so your fish are now this big. The abundance, how many fish you have per square meter, increases almost 170 percent. And the biomass -- this is the most spectacular change -- 4.5 times greater biomass on average, just after five to seven years. In some places up to 10 times larger biomass inside the reserves. So we have all these things inside the reserve that grow, and what do they do? They reproduce. That's population biology 101. If you don't kill the fish, they take a longer time to die, they grow larger and they reproduce a lot. And same thing for invertebrates. This is the example. These are egg cases laid by a snail off the coast of Chile, and this is how many eggs they lay on the bottom. Outside the reserve, you cannot even detect this. One point three million eggs per square meter inside the marine reserve where these snails are very abundant. So these organisms reproduce, the little larvae juveniles spill over, they all spill over, and then people can benefit from them outside too. This is in the Bahamas: Nassau grouper. Huge abundance of groupers inside the reserve, and the closer you get to the reserve, the more fish you have. So the fishermen are catching more. You can see where the limits of the reserve are because you see the boats lined up. So there is spill over; there are benefits beyond the boundaries of these reserves that help people around them, while at the same time the reserve is protecting the entire habitat. It is building resilience. So what we have now -- or a world without reserves -- is like a debit account where we withdraw all the time and we never make any deposit. Reserves are like savings accounts. We have this principal that we don't touch; that produces returns, social, economic and ecological. And if we think about the increase of biomass inside the reserves, this is like compound interest. Two examples, again, of how these reserves can benefit people. This is how much fishermen get everyday in Kenya, fishing over a series of years, in a place where there is no protection; it's a free-for-all. Once the most degrading fishing gear, seine nets, were removed, the fishermen were catching more. If you fish less, you're actually catching more. But if we add the no-take reserve on top of that, the fishermen are still making more money by fishing less around an area that is protected. Another example: Nassau groupers in Belize in the Mesoamerican Reef. This is grouper sex, and the groupers aggregate around the full moons of December and January for a week. They used to aggregate up to the tens of thousands, 30,000 groupers about this big in one hectare, in one aggregation. Fishermen knew about these things; they caught them, and they depleted them. When I went there for the first time in 2000, there were only 3,000 groupers left. And the fishermen were authorized to catch 30 percent of the entire spawning population every year. So we did a simple analysis, and it doesn't take rocket science to figure out that, if you take 30 percent every year, your fishery is going to collapse very quickly. And with the fishery, the entire reproductive ability of the species goes extinct. It happened in many places around the Caribbean. And they would make 4,000 dollars per year, total, for the entire fishery, several fishing boats. Now, if you do an economic analysis and project what would happen if the fish were not cut, if we brought just 20 divers one month per year, the revenue would be more than 20 times higher and that would be sustainable over time. So how much of this do we have? If this is so good, if this is such a no-brainer, how much of this do we have? And you already heard that less than one percent of the ocean's protected. We're getting closer to one percent now, thanks to the protections of the Chagos Archipelago, and only a fraction of this is fully protected from fishing. Scientific studies recommend that at least 20 percent of the ocean should be protected. The estimated range is between 20 and 50 percent for a series of goals of biodiversity and fishery enhancement and resilience. Now, is this possible? People would ask: How much would that cost? Well, let's think about how much we are paying now to subsidize fishing: 35 billion dollars per year. Many of these subsidies go to destructive fishing practices. Well, there are a couple estimates of how much it would cost to create a network of protected areas covering 20 percent of the ocean that would be only a fraction of what we are now paying; the government hands out to a fishery that is collapsing. People are losing their jobs because the fisheries are collapsing. A creation of a network of reserves would provide direct employment for more than a million people plus all the secondary jobs and all the secondary benefits. So how can we do that? If it's so clear that these savings accounts are good for the environment and for people, why don't we have 20, 50 percent of the ocean? And how can we reach that goal? Well, there are two ways of getting there. The trivial solution is to create really large protected areas like the Chagos Archipelago. The problem is that we can create these large reserves only in places where there are no people, where there is no social conflict, where the political cost is really low and the economic cost is also low. And a few of us, a few organizations in this room and elsewhere are working on this. But what about the rest of the coast of the world, where people live and make a living out of fishing? Well, there are three main reasons why we don't have tens of thousands of small reserves: The first one is that people have no idea what marine reserves do, and fishermen tend to be really, really defensive when it comes to regulating or closing an area, even if it's small. Second, the governance is not right because most coastal communities around the world don't have the authority to monitor the resources to create the reserve and enforce it. It's a top down hierarchical structure where people wait for government agents to come and this is not effective. And the government doesn't have enough resources. Which takes us to the third reason, why we don't have many more reserves, is that the funding models have been wrong. NGOs and governments spend a lot of time and energy and resources in a few small areas, usually. So marine conservation and coastal protection has become a sink for government or philanthropic money, and this is not sustainable. So the solutions are just fixing these three issues. First, we need to develop a global awareness campaign to inspire local communities and governments to create no-take reserves that are better than what we have now. It's the savings accounts versus the debit accounts with no deposits. Second, we need to redesign our governance so conservation efforts can be decentralized, so conservation efforts don't depend on work from NGOs or from government agencies and can be created by the local communities, like it happens in the Philippines and a few other places. And third, and very important, we need to develop new business models. The philanthropy sink as the only way to create reserves is not sustainable. We really need to develop models, business models, where coastal conservation is an investment, because we already know that these marine reserves provide social, ecological and economic benefits. And I'd like to finish with one thought, which is that no one organization alone is going to save the ocean. There has been a lot of competition in the past, and we need to develop a new model of partnership, truly collaborative, where we are looking for complementing, not substituting. The stakes are just too high to continue the way we are going. So let's do that. Thank you very much. (Applause) Chris Anderson: Thank you Enric. Enric Sala: Thank you. CA: That was a masterful job of pulling things together. First of all, your pyramid, your inverted pyramid, showing 85 percent biomass in the predators, that seems impossible. How could 85 percent survive on 15 percent? ES: Well, imagine that you have two gears of a watch, a big one and a small one. The big one is moving very slowly, and the small one is moving fast. That's basically it. The animals at the lower parts of the food chain, they reproduce very fast; they grow really fast; they produce millions of eggs. Up there, you have sharks and large fish that live 25, 30 years. They reproduce very slowly; they have a slow metabolism; and, basically, they just maintain their biomass. So, basically, the production surplus of these guys down there is enough to maintain this biomass that is not moving. They are like capacitors of the system. CA: That's very fascinating. So, really, our picture of a food pyramid is just -- we have to change that completely. ES: At least in the seas. What we found in coral reefs is that the inverted pyramid is the equivalent of the Serengeti, with five lions per wildebeest. And on land, this cannot work. But at least on coral reefs are systems where there is a bottom component with structure. We think this is universal. But we have started studying pristine reefs only very recently. CA: So the numbers you presented really are astonishing. You're saying we're spending 35 billion dollars now on subsidies. It would only cost 16 billion to set up 20 percent of the ocean as marine protected areas that actually give new living choices to the fishermen as well. If the world was a smarter place, we could solve this problem for negative 19 billion dollars. We've got 19 billion to spend on health care or something. ES: And then we have the under-performance of fisheries that is 50 billion dollars. So again, one of the big solutions is have the World Trade Organization shifting the subsidies to sustainable practices. CA: Okay, so there's a lot of examples that I'm hearing out there about ending this subsidies madness. So thank you for those numbers. The last one's a personal question. A lot of the experience of people here who've been in the oceans for a long time has just been seeing this degradation, the places they saw that were beautiful getting worse, depressing. Talk to me about the feeling that you must have experienced of going to these pristine areas and seeing things coming back. ES: It is a spiritual experience. We go there to try to understand the ecosystems, to try to measure or count fish and sharks and see how these places are different from the places we know. But the best feeling is this biophilia that E.O. Wilson talks about, where humans have this sense of awe and wonder in front of untamed nature, of raw nature. And there, only there, you really feel that you are part of a larger thing or of a larger global ecosystem. And if it were not for these places that show hope, I don't think I could continue doing this job. It would be just too depressing. CA: Well, Enric, thank you so much for sharing some of that spiritual experience with us all. Thank you. ES: Thank you very much.

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

What I want to talk to you about today is some of the problems that the military of the Western world -- Australia, United States, U.K. and so on -- face in some of the deployments that they're dealing with in the modern world at this time. If you think about the sorts of things that we've sent Australian military personnel to in recent years, we've got obvious things like Iraq and Afghanistan, but you've also got things like East Timor and the Solomon Islands and so on. And a lot of these deployments that we're actually sending military personnel to these days aren't traditional wars. In fact, a lot of the jobs that we're asking the military personnel to do in these situations are ones that, in their own countries, in Australia, the United States and so on, would actually be done by police officers. And so there's a bunch of problems that come up for military personnel in these situations, because they're doing things that they haven't really been trained for, and they're doing things that those who do them in their own countries are trained very differently for and equipped very differently for. Now there's a bunch of reasons why we actually do send military personnel rather than police to do these jobs. If Australia had to send a thousand people tomorrow to West Papua for example, we don't have a thousand police officers hanging around that could just go tomorrow and we do have a thousand soldiers that could go. So when we have to send someone, we send the military -- because they're there, they're available and, heck, they're used to going off and doing these things and living by themselves and not having all this extra support. So they are able to do it in that sense. But they aren't trained in the same way that police officers are and they're certainly not equipped in the same way police officers are. And so this has raised a bunch of problems for them when dealing with these sorts of issues. One particular thing that's come up that I am especially interested in is the question of whether, when we're sending military personnel to do these sorts of jobs, we ought to be equipping them differently, and in particular, whether we ought to be giving them access to some of the sorts of non-lethal weapons that police have. Since they're doing some of these same jobs, maybe they should have some of those things. And of course, there's a range of places where you'd think those things would be really useful. So for example, when you've got military checkpoints. If people are approaching these checkpoints and the military personnel there are unsure whether this person's hostile or not. Say this person approaching here, and they say, "Well is this a suicide bomber or not? Have they got something hidden under their clothing? What's going to happen?" They don't know whether this person's hostile or not. If this person doesn't follow directions, then they may end up shooting them and then find out afterward either, yes, we shot the right person, or, no, this was just an innocent person who didn't understand what was going on. So if they had non-lethal weapons then they would say, "Well we can use them in that sort of situation. If we shoot someone who wasn't hostile, at least we haven't killed them." Another situation. This photo is actually from one of the missions in the Balkans in the late 1990s. Situation's a little bit different where perhaps they know someone who's hostile, where they've got someone shooting at them or doing something else that's clearly hostile, throwing rocks, whatever. But if they respond, there's a range of other people around, who are innocent people who might also get hurt -- be collateral damage that the military often doesn't want to talk about. So again, they would say, "Well if we have access to non-lethal weapons, if we've got someone we know is hostile, we can do something to deal with them and know that if we hit anyone else around the place, at least, again, we're not going to kill them." Another suggestion has been, since we're putting so many robots in the field, we can see the time coming where they're actually going to be sending robots out in the field that are autonomous. They're going to make their own decisions about who to shoot and who not to shoot without a human in the loop. And so the suggestion is, well hey, if we're going to send robots out and allow them to do this, maybe it would be a good idea, again, with these things if they were armed with non-lethal weapons so that if the robot makes a bad decision and shoots the wrong person, again, they haven't actually killed them. Now there's a whole range of different sorts of non-lethal weapons, some of which are obviously available now, some of which they're developing. So you've got traditional things like pepper spray, O.C. spray up at the top there, or Tasers over here. The one on the top right here is actually a dazzling laser intended to just blind the person momentarily and disorient them. You've got non-lethal shotgun rounds that contain rubber pellets instead of the traditional metal ones. And this one in the middle here, the large truck, is actually called the Active Denial System -- something the U.S. military is working on at the moment. It's essentially a big microwave transmitter. It's sort of your classic idea of a heat ray. It goes out to a really long distance, compared to any of these other sorts of things. And anybody who is hit with this feels this sudden burst of heat and just wants to get out of the way. It is a lot more sophisticated than a microwave oven, but it is basically boiling the water molecules in the very surface level of your skin. So you feel this massive heat, and you go, "I want to get out of the way." And they're thinking, well this will be really useful in places like where we need to clear a crowd out of a particular area, if the crowd is being hostile. If we need to keep people away from a particular place, we can do that with these sorts of things. So obviously there's a whole range of different sorts of non-lethal weapons we could give military personnel and there's a whole range of situations where they're looking a them and saying, "Hey, these things could be really useful." But as I said, the military and the police are very different. Yes, you don't have to look very hard at this to recognize the fact that they might be very different. In particular, the attitude to the use of force and the way they're trained to use force is especially different. The police -- and knowing because I've actually helped to train police -- police, in particular Western jurisdictions at least, are trained to de-escalate force, to try and avoid using force wherever possible, and to use lethal force only as an absolute last resort. Military personnel are being trained for war, so they're trained that, as soon as things go bad, their first response is lethal force. The moment the fecal matter hits the rotating turbine, you can start shooting at people. So their attitudes to the use of lethal force are very different, and I think it's fairly obvious that their attitude to the use of non-lethal weapons would also be very different from what it is with the police. And since we've already had so many problems with police use of non-lethal weapons in various ways, I thought it would be a really good idea to look at some of those things and try to relate it to the military context. And I was really surprised when I started to do this, to see that, in fact, even those people who were advocating the use of non-lethal weapons by the military hadn't actually done that. They generally seem to think, "Well, why would we care what's happened with the police? We're looking at something different," and didn't seem to recognize, in fact, they were looking at pretty much the same stuff. So I actually started to investigate some of those issues and have a look at the way that police use non-lethal weapons when they're introduced and some of the problems that might arise out of those sorts of things when they actually do introduce them. And of course, being Australian, I started looking at stuff in Australia, knowing, again, from my own experience about various times when non-lethal weapons have been introduced in Australia. So one of the things I particularly looked at was the use of O.C. spray, oleoresin capsicum spray, pepper spray, by Australian police and seeing when that had been introduced, what had happened and those sorts of issues. And one study that I found, a particularly interesting one, was actually in Queensland, because they had a trial period for the use of pepper spray before they actually introduced it more broadly. And I went and had a look at some of the figures here. Now when they introduced O.C. spray in Queensland, they were really explicit. The police minister had a whole heap of public statements made about it. They were saying, "This is explicitly intended to give police an option between shouting and shooting. This is something they can use instead of a firearm in those situations where they would have previously had to shoot someone." So I went and looked at all of these police shooting figures. And you can't actually find them very easily for individual Australian states. I could only find these ones. This is from a Australian Institute of Criminology report. As you can see from the fine print, if you can read it at the top: "Police shooting deaths" means not just people who have been shot by police, but people who have shot themselves in the presence of police. But this is the figures across the entire country. And the red arrow represents the point where Queensland actually said, "Yes, this is where we're going to give all police officers across the entire state access to O.C. spray." So you can see there were six deaths sort of leading up to it every year for a number of years. There was a spike, of course, a few years before, but that wasn't actually Queensland. Anyone know where that was? Wasn't Port Arthur, no. Victoria? Yes, correct. That spike was all Victoria. So it wasn't that Queensland had a particular problem with deaths from police shootings and so on. So six shootings across the whole country, fairly consistently over the years before. So the next two years were the years they studied -- 2001, 2002. Anyone want to take a stab at the number of times, given how they've introduced this, the number of times police in Queensland used O.C. spray in that period? Hundreds? One, three. Thousand is getting better. Explicitly introduced as an alternative to the use of lethal force -- an alternative between shouting and shooting. I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that if Queensland police didn't have O.C. spray, they wouldn't have shot 2,226 people in those two years. In fact, if you have a look at the studies that they were looking at, the material they were collecting and examining, you can see the suspects were only armed in about 15 percent of cases where O.C. spray was used. It was routinely being used in this period, and, of course, still is routinely used -- because there were no complaints about it, not within the context of this study anyway -- it was routinely being used to deal with people who were violent, who were potentially violent, and also quite frequently used to deal with people who were simply passively non-compliant. This person is not doing anything violent, but they just won't do what we want them to. They're not obeying the directions that we're giving them, so we'll give them a shot of the O.C. spray. That'll speed them up. Everything will work out better that way. This was something explicitly introduced to be an alternative to firearms, but it's being routinely used to deal with a whole range of other sorts of problems. Now one of the particular issues that comes up with military use of non-lethal weapons -- and people when they're actually saying, "Well hey, there might be some problems" -- there's a couple of particular problems that get focused on. One of those problems is that non-lethal weapons may be used indiscriminately. One of the fundamental principles of military use of force is that you have to be discriminate. You have to be careful about who you're shooting at. So one of the problems that's been suggested with non-lethal weapons is that they might be used indiscriminately -- that you use them against a whole range of people because you don't have to worry so much anymore. And in fact, one particular instance where I think that actually happens where you can look at it was the Dubrovka Theatre siege in Moscow in 2002, which probably a lot of you, unlike most of my students at ADFA, are actually old enough to remember. So Chechens had come in and taken control of the theater. They were holding something like 700 people hostage. They'd released a bunch of people, but they still had about 700 people hostage. And the Russian special military police, special forces, Spetsnaz, came in and actually stormed the theater. And the way they did it was to pump the whole thing full of anesthetic gas. And it turned out that lots of these hostages actually died as a result of inhaling the gas. It was used indiscriminately. They pumped the whole theater full of the gas. And it's no surprise that people died, because you don't know how much of this gas each person is going to inhale, what position they're going to fall in when they become unconscious and so on. There were, in fact, only a couple of people who got shot in this episode. So when they had a look at it afterward, there were only a couple of people who'd apparently been shot by the hostage takers or shot by the police forces coming in and trying to deal with the situation. Virtually everybody that got killed got killed from inhaling the gas. The final toll of hostages is a little unclear, but it's certainly a few more than that, because there were other people who died over the next few days. So this was one particular problem they talked about, that it might be used indiscriminately. Second problem that people sometimes talk about with military use of non-lethal weapons, and it's actually the reason why in the chemical weapons convention, it's very clear that you can't use riot control agents as a weapon of warfare, the problem with that is that it's seen that sometimes non-lethal weapons might actually be used, not as an alternative to lethal force, but as a lethal force multiplier -- that you use non-lethal weapons first so that your lethal weapons will actually be more effective. The people you're going to be shooting at aren't going to be able to get out of the way. They're not going to be aware of what's happening and you can kill them better. And in fact, that's exactly what happened here. The hostage takers who had been rendered unconscious by the gas were not taken into custody, they were simply shot in the head. So this non-lethal weapon was being used, in fact, in this case as a lethal force multiplier to make killing more effective in this particular situation. Another problem that I just want to quickly mention is that there's a whole heap of problems with the way that people actually get taught to use non-lethal weapons and get trained about them and then get tested and so on. Because they get tested in nice, safe environments. And people get taught to use them in nice, safe environments like this, where you can see exactly what's going on. The person who's spraying the O.C. spray is wearing a rubber glove to make sure they don't get contaminated and so on. But they don't ever get used like that. They get used out in the real world, like in Texas, like this. I confess, this particular case was actually one that piqued my interest in this. It happened while I was working as a research fellow at the U.S. Naval Academy. And news reports started coming up about this situation where this woman was arguing with the police officer. She wasn't violent. In fact, he was probably six inches taller than me, and she was about this tall. And eventually she said to him "Well I'm going to get back in my car." And he says, "If you get back into your car, I'm going to tase you." And she says, "Oh, go ahead. Tase me." And so he does. And it's all captured by the video camera running in the front of the police car. So she's 72, and it's seen that this is the most appropriate way of dealing with her. And other examples of the same sorts of things with other people where you think where you think, "Is this really an appropriate way to use non-lethal weapons?" "Police chief fires Taser into 14 year-old girl's head." "She was running away. What else was I suppose to do?" (Laughter) Or Florida: "Police Taser six year-old boy at elementary school." And they clearly learned a lot from it because in the same district, "Police review policy after children shocked: 2nd child shocked by Taser stun gun within weeks." Same police district. Another child within weeks of Tasering the six year-old boy. Just in case you think it's only going to happen in the United States, it happened in Canada as well. And a colleague of mine sent me this one from London. But my personal favorite of these ones, I have to confess, does actually come from the United States: "Officers Taser 86 year-old disabled woman in her bed." I checked the reports on this one. I looked at it. I was really surprised. Apparently she took up a more threatening position in her bed. (Laughter) I kid you not. That's exactly what it said. "She took up a more threatening position in her bed." Okay. But I'd remind you what I'm talking about, I'm talking about military uses of non-lethal weapons. So why is this relevant? Because police are actually more restrained in the use of force than the military are. They're trained to be more restrained in the use of force than the military are. They're trained to think more, to try and de-escalate. So if you have these problems with police officers with non-lethal weapons, what on earth would make you think it's going to be better with military personnel? The last thing that I would just like to say, when I'm talking to the police about what a perfect non-lethal weapon would look like, they almost inevitably say the same thing. They say, "Well, it's got to be something that's nasty enough that people don't want to be hit with this weapon. So if you threaten to use it, people are going to comply with it, but it's also going to be something that doesn't leave any lasting effects." In other words, your perfect non-lethal weapon is something that's perfect for abuse. What would these guys have done if they'd had access to Tasers or to a manned, portable version of the Active Denial System -- a small heat ray that you can use on people and not worry about it. So I think, yes, there may be ways that non-lethal weapons are going to be great in these situations, but there's also a whole heap of problems that need to be considered as well. Thanks very much. (Applause)

I was trying to think, how is sync connected to happiness, and it occurred to me that for some reason we take pleasure in synchronizing. We like to dance together, we like singing together. And so, if you'll put up with this, I would like to enlist your help with a first experiment today. The experiment is -- and I notice, by the way, that when you applauded, that you did it in a typical North American way, that is, you were raucous and incoherent. You were not organized. It didn't even occur to you to clap in unison. Do you think you could do it? I would like to see if this audience would -- no, you haven't practiced, as far as I know -- can you get it together to clap in sync? (Clapping) Whoa! Now, that's what we call emergent behavior. (Laughter) So I didn't expect that, but -- I mean, I expected you could synchronize. It didn't occur to me you'd increase your frequency. It's interesting. (Laughter) So what do we make of that? First of all, we know that you're all brilliant. This is a room full of intelligent people, highly sensitive. Some trained musicians out there. Is that what enabled you to synchronize? So to put the question a little more seriously, let's ask ourselves what are the minimum requirements for what you just did, for spontaneous synchronization. Do you need, for instance, to be as smart as you are? Do you even need a brain at all just to synchronize? Do you need to be alive? I mean, that's a spooky thought, right? Inanimate objects that might spontaneously synchronize themselves. It's real. In fact, I'll try to explain today that sync is maybe one of, if not one of the most, perhaps the most pervasive drive in all of nature. It extends from the subatomic scale to the farthest reaches of the cosmos. It's a deep tendency toward order in nature that opposes what we've all been taught about entropy. I mean, I'm not saying the law of entropy is wrong -- it's not. But there is a countervailing force in the universe -- the tendency towards spontaneous order. And so that's our theme. Now, to get into that, let me begin with what might have occurred to you immediately when you hear that we're talking about synchrony in nature, which is the glorious example of birds that flock together, or fish swimming in organized schools. So these are not particularly intelligent creatures, and yet, as we'll see, they exhibit beautiful ballets. This is from a BBC show called "Predators," and what we're looking at here are examples of synchrony that have to do with defense. When you're small and vulnerable, like these starlings, or like the fish, it helps to swarm to avoid predators, to confuse predators. Let me be quiet for a second because this is so gorgeous. For a long time, biologists were puzzled by this behavior, wondering how it could be possible. We're so used to choreography giving rise to synchrony. These creatures are not choreographed. They're choreographing themselves. And only today is science starting to figure out how it works. I'll show you a computer model made by Iain Couzin, a researcher at Oxford, that shows how swarms work. There are just three simple rules. First, all the individuals are only aware of their nearest neighbors. Second, all the individuals have a tendency to line up. And third, they're all attracted to each other, but they try to keep a small distance apart. And when you build those three rules in, automatically you start to see swarms that look very much like fish schools or bird flocks. Now, fish like to stay close together, about a body length apart. Birds try to stay about three or four body lengths apart. But except for that difference, the rules are the same for both. Now, all this changes when a predator enters the scene. There's a fourth rule: when a predator's coming, get out of the way. Here on the model you see the predator attacking. The prey move out in random directions, and then the rule of attraction brings them back together again, so there's this constant splitting and reforming. And you see that in nature. Keep in mind that, although it looks as if each individual is acting to cooperate, what's really going on is a kind of selfish Darwinian behavior. Each is scattering away at random to try to save its scales or feathers. That is, out of the desire to save itself, each creature is following these rules, and that leads to something that's safe for all of them. Even though it looks like they're thinking as a group, they're not. You might wonder what exactly is the advantage to being in a swarm, so you can think of several. As I say, if you're in a swarm, your odds of being the unlucky one are reduced as compared to a small group. There are many eyes to spot danger. And you'll see in the example with the starlings, with the birds, when this peregrine hawk is about to attack them, that actually waves of panic can propagate, sending messages over great distances. You'll see -- let's see, it's coming up possibly at the very end -- maybe not. Information can be sent over half a kilometer away in a very short time through this mechanism. Yes, it's happening here. See if you can see those waves propagating through the swarm. It's beautiful. The birds are, we sort of understand, we think, from that computer model, what's going on. As I say, it's just those three simple rules, plus the one about watch out for predators. There doesn't seem to be anything mystical about this. We don't, however, really understand at a mathematical level. I'm a mathematician. We would like to be able to understand better. I mean, I showed you a computer model, but a computer is not understanding. A computer is, in a way, just another experiment. We would really like to have a deeper insight into how this works and to understand, you know, exactly where this organization comes from. How do the rules give rise to the patterns? There is one case that we have begun to understand better, and it's the case of fireflies. If you see fireflies in North America, like so many North American sorts of things, they tend to be independent operators. They ignore each other. They each do their own thing, flashing on and off, paying no attention to their neighbors. But in Southeast Asia -- places like Thailand or Malaysia or Borneo -- there's a beautiful cooperative behavior that occurs among male fireflies. You can see it every night along the river banks. The trees, mangrove trees, are filled with fireflies communicating with light. Specifically, it's male fireflies who are all flashing in perfect time together, in perfect synchrony, to reinforce a message to the females. And the message, as you can imagine, is "Come hither. Mate with me." (Music) In a second I'm going to show you a slow motion of a single firefly so that you can get a sense. This is a single frame. Then on, and then off -- a 30th of a second, there. And then watch this whole river bank, and watch how precise the synchrony is. On, more on and then off. The combined light from these beetles -- these are actually tiny beetles -- is so bright that fishermen out at sea can use them as navigating beacons to find their way back to their home rivers. It's stunning. For a long time it was not believed when the first Western travelers, like Sir Francis Drake, went to Thailand and came back with tales of this unbelievable spectacle. No one believed them. We don't see anything like this in Europe or in the West. And for a long time, even after it was documented, it was thought to be some kind of optical illusion. Scientific papers were published saying it was twitching eyelids that explained it, or, you know, a human being's tendency to see patterns where there are none. But I hope you've convinced yourself now, with this nighttime video, that they really were very well synchronized. Okay, well, the issue then is, do we need to be alive to see this kind of spontaneous order, and I've already hinted that the answer is no. Well, you don't have to be a whole creature. You can even be just a single cell. Like, take, for instance, your pacemaker cells in your heart right now. They're keeping you alive. Every beat of your heart depends on this crucial region, the sinoatrial node, which has about 10,000 independent cells that would each beep, have an electrical rhythm -- a voltage up and down -- to send a signal to the ventricles to pump. Now, your pacemaker is not a single cell. It's this democracy of 10,000 cells that all have to fire in unison for the pacemaker to work correctly. I don't want to give you the idea that synchrony is always a good idea. If you have epilepsy, there is an instance of billions of brain cells, or at least millions, discharging in pathological concert. So this tendency towards order is not always a good thing. You don't have to be alive. You don't have to be even a single cell. If you look, for instance, at how lasers work, that would be a case of atomic synchrony. In a laser, what makes laser light so different from the light above my head here is that this light is incoherent -- many different colors and different frequencies, sort of like the way you clapped initially -- but if you were a laser, it would be rhythmic applause. It would be all atoms pulsating in unison, emitting light of one color, one frequency. Now comes the very risky part of my talk, which is to demonstrate that inanimate things can synchronize. Hold your breath for me. What I have here are two empty water bottles. This is not Keith Barry doing a magic trick. This is a klutz just playing with some water bottles. I have some metronomes here. Can you hear that? All right, so, I've got a metronome, and it's the world's smallest metronome, the -- well, I shouldn't advertise. Anyway, so this is the world's smallest metronome. I've set it on the fastest setting, and I'm going to now take another one set to the same setting. We can try this first. If I just put them on the table together, there's no reason for them to synchronize, and they probably won't. Maybe you'd better listen to them. I'll stand here. What I'm hoping is that they might just drift apart because their frequencies aren't perfectly the same. Right? They did. They were in sync for a while, but then they drifted apart. And the reason is that they're not able to communicate. Now, you might think that's a bizarre idea. How can metronomes communicate? Well, they can communicate through mechanical forces. So I'm going to give them a chance to do that. I also want to wind this one up a bit. How can they communicate? I'm going to put them on a movable platform, which is the "Guide to Graduate Study at Cornell." Okay? So here it is. Let's see if we can get this to work. My wife pointed out to me that it will work better if I put both on at the same time because otherwise the whole thing will tip over. All right. So there we go. Let's see. OK, I'm not trying to cheat -- let me start them out of sync. No, hard to even do that. (Applause) All right. So before any one goes out of sync, I'll just put those right there. (Laughter) Now, that might seem a bit whimsical, but this pervasiveness of this tendency towards spontaneous order sometimes has unexpected consequences. And a clear case of that, was something that happened in London in the year 2000. The Millennium Bridge was supposed to be the pride of London -- a beautiful new footbridge erected across the Thames, first river crossing in over 100 years in London. There was a big competition for the design of this bridge, and the winning proposal was submitted by an unusual team -- in the TED spirit, actually -- of an architect -- perhaps the greatest architect in the United Kingdom, Lord Norman Foster -- working with an artist, a sculptor, Sir Anthony Caro, and an engineering firm, Ove Arup. And together they submitted a design based on Lord Foster's vision, which was -- he remembered as a kid reading Flash Gordon comic books, and he said that when Flash Gordon would come to an abyss, he would shoot what today would be a kind of a light saber. He would shoot his light saber across the abyss, making a blade of light, and then scamper across on this blade of light. He said, "That's the vision I want to give to London. I want a blade of light across the Thames." So they built the blade of light, and it's a very thin ribbon of steel, the world's -- probably the flattest and thinnest suspension bridge there is, with cables that are out on the side. You're used to suspension bridges with big droopy cables on the top. These cables were on the side of the bridge, like if you took a rubber band and stretched it taut across the Thames -- that's what's holding up this bridge. Now, everyone was very excited to try it out. On opening day, thousands of Londoners came out, and something happened. And within two days the bridge was closed to the public. So I want to first show you some interviews with people who were on the bridge on opening day, who will describe what happened. Man: It really started moving sideways and slightly up and down, rather like being on the boat. Woman: Yeah, it felt unstable, and it was very windy, and I remember it had lots of flags up and down the sides, so you could definitely -- there was something going on sideways, it felt, maybe. Interviewer: Not up and down? Boy: No. Interviewer: And not forwards and backwards? Boy: No. Interviewer: Just sideways. About how much was it moving, do you think? Boy: It was about -- Interviewer: I mean, that much, or this much? Boy: About the second one. Interviewer: This much? Boy: Yeah. Man: It was at least six, six to eight inches, I would have thought. Interviewer: Right, so, at least this much? Man: Oh, yes. Woman: I remember wanting to get off. Interviewer: Oh, did you? Woman: Yeah. It felt odd. Interviewer: So it was enough to be scary? Woman: Yeah, but I thought that was just me. Interviewer: Ah! Now, tell me why you had to do this? Boy: We had to do this because, to keep in balance because if you didn't keep your balance, then you would just fall over about, like, to the left or right, about 45 degrees. Interviewer: So just show me how you walk normally. Right. And then show me what it was like when the bridge started to go. Right. So you had to deliberately push your feet out sideways and -- oh, and short steps? Man: That's right. And it seemed obvious to me that it was probably the number of people on it. Interviewer: Were they deliberately walking in step, or anything like that? Man: No, they just had to conform to the movement of the bridge. Steven Strogatz: All right, so that already gives you a hint of what happened. Think of the bridge as being like this platform. Think of the people as being like metronomes. Now, you might not be used to thinking of yourself as a metronome, but after all, we do walk like -- I mean, we oscillate back and forth as we walk. And especially if we start to walk like those people did, right? They all showed this strange sort of skating gait that they adopted once the bridge started to move. And so let me show you now the footage of the bridge. But also, after you see the bridge on opening day, you'll see an interesting clip of work done by a bridge engineer at Cambridge named Allan McRobie, who figured out what happened on the bridge, and who built a bridge simulator to explain exactly what the problem was. It was a kind of unintended positive feedback loop between the way the people walked and the way the bridge began to move, that engineers knew nothing about. Actually, I think the first person you'll see is the young engineer who was put in charge of this project. Okay. (Video) Interviewer: Did anyone get hurt? Engineer: No. Interviewer: Right. So it was quite small -- Engineer: Yes. Interviewer: -- but real? Engineer: Absolutely. Interviewer: You thought, "Oh, bother." Engineer: I felt I was disappointed about it. We'd spent a lot of time designing this bridge, and we'd analyzed it, we'd checked it to codes -- to heavier loads than the codes -- and here it was doing something that we didn't know about. Interviewer: You didn't expect. Engineer: Exactly. Narrator: The most dramatic and shocking footage shows whole sections of the crowd -- hundreds of people -- apparently rocking from side to side in unison, not only with each other, but with the bridge. This synchronized movement seemed to be driving the bridge. But how could the crowd become synchronized? Was there something special about the Millennium Bridge that caused this effect? This was to be the focus of the investigation. Interviewer: Well, at last the simulated bridge is finished, and I can make it wobble. Now, Allan, this is all your fault, isn't it? Allan McRobie: Yes. Interviewer: You designed this, yes, this simulated bridge, and this, you reckon, mimics the action of the real bridge? AM: It captures a lot of the physics, yes. Interviewer: Right. So if we get on it, we should be able to wobble it, yes? Allan McRobie is a bridge engineer from Cambridge who wrote to me, suggesting that a bridge simulator ought to wobble in the same way as the real bridge -- provided we hung it on pendulums of exactly the right length. AM: This one's only a couple of tons, so it's fairly easy to get going. Just by walking. Interviewer: Well, it's certainly going now. AM: It doesn't have to be a real dangle. Just walk. It starts to go. Interviewer: It's actually quite difficult to walk. You have to be careful where you put your feet down, don't you, because if you get it wrong, it just throws you off your feet. AM: It certainly affects the way you walk, yes. You can't walk normally on it. Interviewer: No. If you try and put one foot in front of another, it's moving your feet away from under you. AM: Yes. Interviewer: So you've got to put your feet out sideways. So already, the simulator is making me walk in exactly the same way as our witnesses walked on the real bridge. AM: ... ice-skating gait. There isn't all this sort of snake way of walking. Interviewer: For a more convincing experiment, I wanted my own opening-day crowd, the sound check team. Their instructions: just walk normally. It's really intriguing because none of these people is trying to drive it. They're all having some difficulty walking. And the only way you can walk comfortably is by getting in step. But then, of course, everyone is driving the bridge. You can't help it. You're actually forced by the movement of the bridge to get into step, and therefore to drive it to move further. SS: All right, well, with that from the Ministry of Silly Walks, maybe I'd better end. I see I've gone over. But I hope that you'll go outside and see the world in a new way, to see all the amazing synchrony around us. Thank you. (Applause)

It was an incredible surprise to me to find out that there was actually an organization that cared about both parts of my life. Because, basically, I work as a theoretical physicist. I develop and test models of the Big Bang, using observational data. And I've been moonlighting for the last five years helping with a project in Africa. And, I get a lot of flak for this at Cambridge. People wonder, you know, "How do you have time to do this?" And so on. And so it was simply astonishing to me to find an organization that actually appreciated both those sides. So I thought I'd start off by just telling you a little bit about myself and why I lead this schizophrenic life. Well, I was born in South Africa and my parents were imprisoned for resisting the racist regime. When they were released, we left and we went as refugees to Kenya and Tanzania. Both were very young countries then, and full of hope for the future. We had an amazing childhood. We didn't have any money, but we were outdoors most of the time. We had fantastic friends and we saw the wonders of the world, like Kilimanjaro, Serengeti and the Olduvai Gorge. Well, then we moved to London for high school. And after that -- there's nothing much to say about that. It was rather dull. But I came back to Africa at the age of 17, as a volunteer teacher to Lesotho, which is a tiny country, surrounded at that time by apartheid South Africa. Well, 80 percent of the men in Lesotho worked in the mines over the border, in brutal conditions. Nevertheless, I -- as I'm sure -- as a rather irritating young, white man coming into their village, I was welcomed with incredible hospitality and warmth. But the kids were the best part. The kids were amazing: extremely eager and often very bright. And I'm just going to tell you one story, which got through to me. I used to try to take the kids outside as often as possible, to try to connect the academic stuff with the real world. And they weren't used to that. But I took them outside one day and I said, "I want you to estimate the height of the building." And I expected them to put a ruler next to the wall, size it up with a finger, and make an estimate of the height. But there was one little boy, very small for his age. He was the son of one of the poorest families in the village. And he wasn't doing that. He was scribbling with chalk on the pavement. And so, I said -- I was annoyed -- I said, "What are you doing? I want you to estimate the height of the building." He said, "OK. I measured the height of a brick. I counted the number of bricks and now I'm multiplying." Well -- (Laughter) -- I hadn't thought of that one. And many experiences like this happened to me. Another one is that I met a miner. He was home on his three-month leave from the mines. Sitting next to him one day, he said, "There's only one thing that I really loved at school. And you know what it was? Shakespeare." And he recited some to me. And these and many similar experiences convinced me that there are just tons of bright kids in Africa -- inventive kids, intellectual kids -- and starved of opportunity. And if Africa is going to get fixed, it's by them, not by us. Well, after -- (Applause) -- that's the truth. Well, after Lesotho, I traveled across Africa before returning to England -- so gray and depressing, in comparison. And I went to Cambridge. And there, I fell for theoretical physics. Well, I'm not going to explain this equation, but theoretical physics is really an amazing subject. We can write down all the laws of physics we know in one line. And, admittedly, it's in a very shorthand notation. And it contains 18 free parameters, OK, which we have to fit to the data. So it's not the final story, but it's an incredibly powerful summary of everything we know about nature at the most basic level. And apart from a few very important loose ends, which you've heard about here -- like dark energy and dark matter -- this equation describes, seems to describe everything about the universe and what's in it. But there's one big puzzle remaining, and this was most succinctly put to me by my primary school math teacher in Tanzania, who's a wonderful Scottish lady who I still stay in touch with. And she's now in her 80s. And when I try to explain my work to her, she waved away all the details, and she said, "Neil, there's only one question that really matters. What banged?" (Laughter) "Everyone talks about the Big Bang. What banged?" And she's right. It's a question we've all been avoiding. The standard explanation is that the universe somehow sprang into existence, full of a strange kind of energy -- inflationary energy -- which blew it up. But the puzzle of why the universe emerged in that peculiar state is completely unsolved. Now, I worked on that theory for a while, with Stephen Hawking and others. But then I began to explore another alternative. The alternative is that the Big Bang wasn't the beginning. Perhaps the universe existed before the bang, and the bang was just a violent event in a pre-existing universe. Well, this possibility is actually suggested by the latest theories, the unified theories, which try to explain all those 18 free parameters in a single framework, which will hopefully predict all of them. And I'll just share a cartoon of this idea here. It's all I can convey. According to these theories, there are extra dimensions of space, not just the three we're familiar with, but at every point in the room there are more dimensions. And in particular, there's one rather strange one, in the most elegant unified theories we have. The strange one looks likes this: that we live in a three-dimensional world. We live in one of these worlds, and I can only show it as a sheet, but it's really three-dimensional. And a tiny distance away, there's another sheet, also three-dimensional, and they're separated by a gap. The gap is very tiny, and I've blown it up so you can see it. But it's really a tiny fraction of the size of an atomic nucleus. I won't go into the details of why we think the universe is like this, but it comes out of the math and trying to explain the physics that we know. Well, I got interested in this because it seemed to me that it was an obvious question. Which is, what happens if these two, three-dimensional worlds should actually collide? And if they collide, it would look a lot like the Big Bang. But it's slightly different than in the conventional picture. The conventional picture of the Big Bang is a point. Everything comes out of a point; you have infinite density. And all the equations break down. No hope of describing that. In this picture, you'll notice, the bang is extended. It's not a point. The density of matter is finite, and we have a chance of a consistent set of equations that can describe the whole process. So, to cut a long story short, we've explored this alternative. We've shown that it can fit all of the data that we have about the formation of galaxies, the fluctuations in the microwave background. Furthermore, there's an experimental way to tell this theory, apart from the inflationary explanation that I told you before. It involves gravitational waves. And in this scenario, not only was the Big Bang not the beginning, as you can see from the picture, it can happen over and over again. It may be that we live in an endless universe, both in space and in time. And there've been bangs in the past, and there will be bangs in the future. And maybe we live in an endless universe. Well, making and testing models of the universe is, for me, the best way I have of enjoying and appreciating the universe. We need to make the best mathematical models we can, the most consistent ones. And then we scrutinize them, logically and with data. And we try to convince ourselves -- we really try to convince ourselves they're wrong. That's progress: when we prove things wrong. And gradually, we hopefully move closer and closer to understanding the world. As I pursued my career, something was always gnawing away inside me. What about Africa? What about those kids I'd left behind? Instead of developing, as we'd all hoped in the '60s, things had gotten worse. Africa was gripped by poverty, disease and war. This is very graphically shown by the Worldmapper website and project. And so the idea is to represent each country on a map, but scale the area according to some quantity. So here's just the standard area map of the world. By the way, Africa is very large. And the next map now shows Africa's GDP in 1960, around the time of independence for many African states. Now, this is 1990, and then 2002. And here's a projection for 2015. Big changes are happening in the world, but they're not helping Africa. What about Africa's population? The population isn't out of proportion to its area, but Africa leads the world in deaths from often preventable causes: malnutrition, simple infections and birth complications. Then there's HIV/AIDS. And then there are deaths from war. OK, currently there are 45,000 people a month dying in the Congo, as a consequence of the war there over coltan and diamonds and other things. It's still going on. What about Africa's capacity to do something about these problems? Well, here's the number of physicians in Africa. Here's the number of people in higher education. And here -- most shocking to me -- the number of scientific research papers coming out of Africa. It just doesn't exist scientifically. And this was very eloquently argued at TED Africa: that all of the aid that's been given has completely failed to put Africa onto its own two feet. Well, the transition to democracy in South Africa in 1994 was literally a dream come true for many of us. My parents were both elected to the first parliament, alongside Nelson and Winnie Mandela. They were the only other couple. And in 2001, I took a research leave to visit them. And while I was busy working -- I was working on these colliding worlds, in the day. But I learned that there was a desperate shortage of skills, especially mathematical skills, in industry, in government, in education. The ability to make and test models has become essential, not only to every single area of science today, but also to modern society itself. And if you don't have math, you're not going to enter the modern age. So I had an idea. And the idea was very simple. The idea was to set up an African Institute for Mathematical Sciences, or AIMS. And let's recruit students from the whole of Africa, bring them together with lecturers from all over the world, and we'll try to give them a fantastic education. Well, as a Cambridge professor, I had many contacts. And to my astonishment, they backed me 100 percent. They said, "Go and do it, and we'll come and lecture." And I knew it would be amazing fun to bring brilliant students from these countries -- where they don't have any opportunities -- together with the best lecturers in the world -- who I knew would come, because of the interest in Africa -- and put them together and just let the sparks fly. So we bought a derelict hotel near Cape Town. It's an 80-room Art Deco hotel from the 1920s. The area was kind of seedy, so we got an 80-room hotel for 100,000 dollars. It's a beautiful building. We decided we would refurbish it and then put out the word: we're going to start the best math institute in Africa in this hotel. Well, the new South Africa is a very exciting country. And those of you who haven't been there, you should go. It's very, very interesting what's happening. And we recruited wonderful staff, highly motivated staff. The other thing that's happened, which was good for us, is the Internet. Even though the Internet is very expensive all over Africa, there are Internet cafes everywhere. And bright young Africans are desperate to join the global community, to be successful -- and they're very ambitious. They want to be the next Einstein. And so when word came out that AIMS was opening, it spread very quickly via e-mail and our website. And we got lots of applicants. Well, we designed AIMS as a 24-hour learning environment, and it was fantastic to start a university from the beginning. You have to rethink, what is the university for? And that's really exciting. So we designed it to have interactive teaching. No droning on at the chalkboard. We emphasize problem-solving, working in groups, every student discovering and maximizing their own potential and not chasing grades. Everyone lives together in this hotel -- lecturers and students -- and it's not surprising at all to find an impromptu tutorial at 1 a.m. The students don't usually leave the computer lab till 2 or 3 a.m. And then they're up again at eight in the morning. Lectures, problem-solving and so on. It's an extraordinary place. We especially emphasize areas of great relevance to Africa's development, because, in those areas, scientists working in Africa will have a competitive advantage. They'll publish, be invited to conferences. They'll do well. They'll have successful careers. And AIMS has done extremely well. Here is a list of last year's graduates, graduated in June, and what they're currently doing -- 48 of them. And where they are is indicated over here. And where they've gone. So these are all postgraduate students. And they've all gone on to master's and Ph.D. degrees in excellent places. Five students can be educated at AIMS for the cost of educating one in the U.S. or Europe. But more important, the pan-African student body is a continual source of strength, pride and commitment to Africa. We illustrate AIMS' progress by coloring in the countries of Africa. So here you can see behind this list. When a county is colored yellow, we've received an application; orange, we've accepted an application; and green, a student has graduated. So here is where we were after the first graduation in 2004. And we set ourselves a goal of turning the continent green. So there's 2005, -6, -7, -8. (Applause) We're well on the way to achieving our initial goal. We had some of the students filmed at home before they came to AIMS. And I'll just show you one. Tendai Mugwagwa: My name is Tendai Mugwagwa. I have a Bachelor of Science with an education degree. I will be attending AIMS. My understanding of the course is that it covers quite a lot. You know, from physics to medicine, in particular, epidemiology and also mathematical modeling. Neil Turok: So Tendai came to AIMS and did very well. And I'll let her take it from there. TM: My name is Tendai Mugwagwa and I was a student at AIMS in 2003 and 2004. After leaving AIMS, I went on to do a master's in applied mathematics at the University of Cape Town in South Africa. After that, I came to the Netherlands where I'm now doing a Ph.D. in theoretical immunology. Professor: Tendai is working very independently. She communicates well with the immunologists at the hospital. So all in all I have a very good Ph.D. student from South Africa. So I'm happy she's here. NT: Another student in the first year of AIMS was Shehu. And he's shown here with his favorite high school teacher. And then entering university in northern Nigeria. And after AIMS, Shehu wanted to do high-energy physics, and he came to Cambridge. He's about to finish his Ph.D., and he was filmed recently with someone you all know. Shehu: And from there we will be able to, hopefully, make better predictions and then we compare it to the graph and also make some predictions. Stephen Hawking: That is nice. NT: Here are the current students at AIMS. There are 53 of them from 20 different countries, including 20 women. So now I'm going to get to my TED business. Well, we had a party. This is Africa -- we have good parties in Africa. And last month, they threw a surprise party for me. Here's somebody you've seen already. (Applause) I want to point out a few other exceptional people in this picture. So, we were having a party, as you can see they're completely eclipsing me at this point. This is Ezra. She's from Darfur. She's a physicist, and somehow stays smiling, in spite of everything going on back home. But she wants to continue in physics, and she's doing extremely well. This is Lydia. Lydia is the first ever woman to graduate in mathematics in the Central African Republic. And she's now at AIMS. (Applause) So now let me get to our TED wish. Well, it's not my TED wish; it's our wish, as you've already gathered. And our wish has two parts: one is a dream and the other's a plan. OK. Our TED dream is that the next Einstein will be African. (Applause) In striving for the heights of creative genius, we want to give thousands of people the motivation, the encouragement and the courage to obtain the high-level skills they need to help Africa. Among them will be not only brilliant scientists -- I'm sure of that from what we've seen at AIMS -- they'll also be the African Gates, Brins and Pages of the future. Well, I said we also have a plan. And our plan is quite simple. AIMS is now a proven model. And what we need to do is to replicate it. We want to roll out 15 AIMS centers in the next five years, all over Africa. Each will have a pan-African student body, but specialize in a different area of science. We want to use science to overcome the national and cultural barriers, as it does at AIMS. And we want to add elements to the curriculum. We want to add entrepreneurship and policy skills. The expanded AIMS will be a coherent pan-African institution, and its graduates will form a powerful network, working together for peace and progress across the continent. Over the last year, we've been visiting sites in Africa, looking at potential sites for new AIMS centers. And here are the ones we've selected. And each of these centers has a strong local team, each is in a beautiful place, an interesting place, which international lecturers will be happy to visit. And our partners across Africa are extremely enthusiastic about this. Everyone wants an AIMS center in their country. And last November, the conference of all the African ministers of science and technology, held in Mombasa, called for a comprehensive plan to roll out AIMS. So we have political support right across the continent. It won't be easy. At every site there will be huge challenges. Local scientists must play leading roles and governments must be persuaded to buy in. Conditions are very difficult, but we cannot afford to compromise on those principles which made AIMS work. And we summarize them this way: the institutes have got to be relevant, innovative, cost-effective and high quality. Why? Because we want Africa to be rich. Easy to remember the basic rules we need. So, just in ending, let me say the only people who can fix Africa are talented young Africans. By unlocking and nurturing their creative potential, we can create a step change in Africa's future. Over time, they will contribute to African development and to science in ways we can only imagine. Thank you. (Applause)

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

Bacteria are the oldest living organisms on the earth. They've been here for billions of years, and what they are are single-celled microscopic organisms. So they are one cell and they have this special property that they only have one piece of DNA. They have very few genes, and genetic information to encode all of the traits that they carry out. And the way bacteria make a living is that they consume nutrients from the environment, they grow to twice their size, they cut themselves down in the middle, and one cell becomes two, and so on and so on. They just grow and divide, and grow and divide -- so a kind of boring life, except that what I would argue is that you have an amazing interaction with these critters. I know you guys think of yourself as humans, and this is sort of how I think of you. This man is supposed to represent a generic human being, and all of the circles in that man are all of the cells that make up your body. There is about a trillion human cells that make each one of us who we are and able to do all the things that we do, but you have 10 trillion bacterial cells in you or on you at any moment in your life. So, 10 times more bacterial cells than human cells on a human being. And of course it's the DNA that counts, so here's all the A, T, Gs and Cs that make up your genetic code, and give you all your charming characteristics. You have about 30,000 genes. Well it turns out you have 100 times more bacterial genes playing a role in you or on you all of your life. At the best, you're 10 percent human, but more likely about one percent human, depending on which of these metrics you like. I know you think of yourself as human beings, but I think of you as 90 or 99 percent bacterial. (Laughter) These bacteria are not passive riders, these are incredibly important, they keep us alive. They cover us in an invisible body armor that keeps environmental insults out so that we stay healthy. They digest our food, they make our vitamins, they actually educate your immune system to keep bad microbes out. So they do all these amazing things that help us and are vital for keeping us alive, and they never get any press for that. But they get a lot of press because they do a lot of terrible things as well. So, there's all kinds of bacteria on the Earth that have no business being in you or on you at any time, and if they are, they make you incredibly sick. And so, the question for my lab is whether you want to think about all the good things that bacteria do, or all the bad things that bacteria do. The question we had is how could they do anything at all? I mean they're incredibly small, you have to have a microscope to see one. They live this sort of boring life where they grow and divide, and they've always been considered to be these asocial reclusive organisms. And so it seemed to us that they are just too small to have an impact on the environment if they simply act as individuals. And so we wanted to think if there couldn't be a different way that bacteria live. The clue to this came from another marine bacterium, and it's a bacterium called Vibrio fischeri. What you're looking at on this slide is just a person from my lab holding a flask of a liquid culture of a bacterium, a harmless beautiful bacterium that comes from the ocean, named Vibrio fischeri. This bacterium has the special property that it makes light, so it makes bioluminescence, like fireflies make light. We're not doing anything to the cells here. We just took the picture by turning the lights off in the room, and this is what we see. What was actually interesting to us was not that the bacteria made light, but when the bacteria made light. What we noticed is when the bacteria were alone, so when they were in dilute suspension, they made no light. But when they grew to a certain cell number all the bacteria turned on light simultaneously. The question that we had is how can bacteria, these primitive organisms, tell the difference from times when they're alone, and times when they're in a community, and then all do something together. What we've figured out is that the way that they do that is that they talk to each other, and they talk with a chemical language. This is now supposed to be my bacterial cell. When it's alone it doesn't make any light. But what it does do is to make and secrete small molecules that you can think of like hormones, and these are the red triangles, and when the bacteria is alone the molecules just float away and so no light. But when the bacteria grow and double and they're all participating in making these molecules, the molecule -- the extracellular amount of that molecule increases in proportion to cell number. And when the molecule hits a certain amount that tells the bacteria how many neighbors there are, they recognize that molecule and all of the bacteria turn on light in synchrony. That's how bioluminescence works -- they're talking with these chemical words. The reason that Vibrio fischeri is doing that comes from the biology. Again, another plug for the animals in the ocean, Vibrio fischeri lives in this squid. What you are looking at is the Hawaiian Bobtail Squid, and it's been turned on its back, and what I hope you can see are these two glowing lobes and these house the Vibrio fischeri cells, they live in there, at high cell number that molecule is there, and they're making light. The reason the squid is willing to put up with these shenanigans is because it wants that light. The way that this symbiosis works is that this little squid lives just off the coast of Hawaii, just in sort of shallow knee-deep water. The squid is nocturnal, so during the day it buries itself in the sand and sleeps, but then at night it has to come out to hunt. On bright nights when there is lots of starlight or moonlight that light can penetrate the depth of the water the squid lives in, since it's just in those couple feet of water. What the squid has developed is a shutter that can open and close over this specialized light organ housing the bacteria. Then it has detectors on its back so it can sense how much starlight or moonlight is hitting its back. And it opens and closes the shutter so the amount of light coming out of the bottom -- which is made by the bacterium -- exactly matches how much light hits the squid's back, so the squid doesn't make a shadow. It actually uses the light from the bacteria to counter-illuminate itself in an anti-predation device so predators can't see its shadow, calculate its trajectory, and eat it. This is like the stealth bomber of the ocean. (Laughter) But then if you think about it, the squid has this terrible problem because it's got this dying, thick culture of bacteria and it can't sustain that. And so what happens is every morning when the sun comes up the squid goes back to sleep, it buries itself in the sand, and it's got a pump that's attached to its circadian rhythm, and when the sun comes up it pumps out like 95 percent of the bacteria. Now the bacteria are dilute, that little hormone molecule is gone, so they're not making light -- but of course the squid doesn't care. It's asleep in the sand. And as the day goes by the bacteria double, they release the molecule, and then light comes on at night, exactly when the squid wants it. First we figured out how this bacterium does this, but then we brought the tools of molecular biology to this to figure out really what's the mechanism. And what we found -- so this is now supposed to be, again, my bacterial cell -- is that Vibrio fischeri has a protein -- that's the red box -- it's an enzyme that makes that little hormone molecule, the red triangle. And then as the cells grow, they're all releasing that molecule into the environment, so there's lots of molecule there. And the bacteria also have a receptor on their cell surface that fits like a lock and key with that molecule. These are just like the receptors on the surfaces of your cells. When the molecule increases to a certain amount -- which says something about the number of cells -- it locks down into that receptor and information comes into the cells that tells the cells to turn on this collective behavior of making light. Why this is interesting is because in the past decade we have found that this is not just some anomaly of this ridiculous, glow-in-the-dark bacterium that lives in the ocean -- all bacteria have systems like this. So now what we understand is that all bacteria can talk to each other. They make chemical words, they recognize those words, and they turn on group behaviors that are only successful when all of the cells participate in unison. We have a fancy name for this: we call it quorum sensing. They vote with these chemical votes, the vote gets counted, and then everybody responds to the vote. What's important for today's talk is that we know that there are hundreds of behaviors that bacteria carry out in these collective fashions. But the one that's probably the most important to you is virulence. It's not like a couple bacteria get in you and they start secreting some toxins -- you're enormous, that would have no effect on you. You're huge. What they do, we now understand, is they get in you, they wait, they start growing, they count themselves with these little molecules, and they recognize when they have the right cell number that if all of the bacteria launch their virulence attack together, they are going to be successful at overcoming an enormous host. Bacteria always control pathogenicity with quorum sensing. That's how it works. We also then went to look at what are these molecules -- these were the red triangles on my slides before. This is the Vibrio fischeri molecule. This is the word that it talks with. So then we started to look at other bacteria, and these are just a smattering of the molecules that we've discovered. What I hope you can see is that the molecules are related. The left-hand part of the molecule is identical in every single species of bacteria. But the right-hand part of the molecule is a little bit different in every single species. What that does is to confer exquisite species specificities to these languages. Each molecule fits into its partner receptor and no other. So these are private, secret conversations. These conversations are for intraspecies communication. Each bacteria uses a particular molecule that's its language that allows it to count its own siblings. Once we got that far we thought we were starting to understand that bacteria have these social behaviors. But what we were really thinking about is that most of the time bacteria don't live by themselves, they live in incredible mixtures, with hundreds or thousands of other species of bacteria. And that's depicted on this slide. This is your skin. So this is just a picture -- a micrograph of your skin. Anywhere on your body, it looks pretty much like this, and what I hope you can see is that there's all kinds of bacteria there. And so we started to think if this really is about communication in bacteria, and it's about counting your neighbors, it's not enough to be able to only talk within your species. There has to be a way to take a census of the rest of the bacteria in the population. So we went back to molecular biology and started studying different bacteria, and what we've found now is that in fact, bacteria are multilingual. They all have a species-specific system -- they have a molecule that says "me." But then, running in parallel to that is a second system that we've discovered, that's generic. So, they have a second enzyme that makes a second signal and it has its own receptor, and this molecule is the trade language of bacteria. It's used by all different bacteria and it's the language of interspecies communication. What happens is that bacteria are able to count how many of me and how many of you. They take that information inside, and they decide what tasks to carry out depending on who's in the minority and who's in the majority of any given population. Then again we turn to chemistry, and we figured out what this generic molecule is -- that was the pink ovals on my last slide, this is it. It's a very small, five-carbon molecule. What the important thing is that we learned is that every bacterium has exactly the same enzyme and makes exactly the same molecule. So they're all using this molecule for interspecies communication. This is the bacterial Esperanto. (Laughter) Once we got that far, we started to learn that bacteria can talk to each other with this chemical language. But what we started to think is that maybe there is something practical that we can do here as well. I've told you that bacteria do have all these social behaviors, they communicate with these molecules. Of course, I've also told you that one of the important things they do is to initiate pathogenicity using quorum sensing. We thought, what if we made these bacteria so they can't talk or they can't hear? Couldn't these be new kinds of antibiotics? Of course, you've just heard and you already know that we're running out of antibiotics. Bacteria are incredibly multi-drug-resistant right now, and that's because all of the antibiotics that we use kill bacteria. They either pop the bacterial membrane, they make the bacterium so it can't replicate its DNA. We kill bacteria with traditional antibiotics and that selects for resistant mutants. And so now of course we have this global problem in infectious diseases. We thought, well what if we could sort of do behavior modifications, just make these bacteria so they can't talk, they can't count, and they don't know to launch virulence. And so that's exactly what we've done, and we've sort of taken two strategies. The first one is we've targeted the intraspecies communication system. So we made molecules that look kind of like the real molecules -- which you saw -- but they're a little bit different. And so they lock into those receptors, and they jam recognition of the real thing. By targeting the red system, what we are able to do is to make species-specific, or disease-specific, anti-quorum sensing molecules. We've also done the same thing with the pink system. We've taken that universal molecule and turned it around a little bit so that we've made antagonists of the interspecies communication system. The hope is that these will be used as broad-spectrum antibiotics that work against all bacteria. To finish I'll just show you the strategy. In this one I'm just using the interspecies molecule, but the logic is exactly the same. What you know is that when that bacterium gets into the animal, in this case, a mouse, it doesn't initiate virulence right away. It gets in, it starts growing, it starts secreting its quorum sensing molecules. It recognizes when it has enough bacteria that now they're going to launch their attack, and the animal dies. What we've been able to do is to give these virulent infections, but we give them in conjunction with our anti-quorum sensing molecules -- so these are molecules that look kind of like the real thing, but they're a little bit different which I've depicted on this slide. What we now know is that if we treat the animal with a pathogenic bacterium -- a multi-drug-resistant pathogenic bacterium -- in the same time we give our anti-quorum sensing molecule, in fact, the animal lives. We think that this is the next generation of antibiotics and it's going to get us around, at least initially, this big problem of resistance. What I hope you think, is that bacteria can talk to each other, they use chemicals as their words, they have an incredibly complicated chemical lexicon that we're just now starting to learn about. Of course what that allows bacteria to do is to be multicellular. So in the spirit of TED they're doing things together because it makes a difference. What happens is that bacteria have these collective behaviors, and they can carry out tasks that they could never accomplish if they simply acted as individuals. What I would hope that I could further argue to you is that this is the invention of multicellularity. Bacteria have been on the Earth for billions of years; humans, couple hundred thousand. We think bacteria made the rules for how multicellular organization works. We think, by studying bacteria, we're going to be able to have insight about multicellularity in the human body. We know that the principles and the rules, if we can figure them out in these sort of primitive organisms, the hope is that they will be applied to other human diseases and human behaviors as well. I hope that what you've learned is that bacteria can distinguish self from other. By using these two molecules they can say "me" and they can say "you." Again of course that's what we do, both in a molecular way, and also in an outward way, but I think about the molecular stuff. This is exactly what happens in your body. It's not like your heart cells and your kidney cells get all mixed up every day, and that's because there's all of this chemistry going on, these molecules that say who each of these groups of cells is, and what their tasks should be. Again, we think that bacteria invented that, and you've just evolved a few more bells and whistles, but all of the ideas are in these simple systems that we can study. The final thing is, again just to reiterate that there's this practical part, and so we've made these anti-quorum sensing molecules that are being developed as new kinds of therapeutics. But then, to finish with a plug for all the good and miraculous bacteria that live on the Earth, we've also made pro-quorum sensing molecules. So, we've targeted those systems to make the molecules work better. Remember you have these 10 times or more bacterial cells in you or on you, keeping you healthy. What we're also trying to do is to beef up the conversation of the bacteria that live as mutualists with you, in the hopes of making you more healthy, making those conversations better, so bacteria can do things that we want them to do better than they would be on their own. Finally, I wanted to show you this is my gang at Princeton, New Jersey. Everything I told you about was discovered by someone in that picture. I hope when you learn things, like about how the natural world works -- I just want to say that whenever you read something in the newspaper or you get to hear some talk about something ridiculous in the natural world it was done by a child. Science is done by that demographic. All of those people are between 20 and 30 years old, and they are the engine that drives scientific discovery in this country. It's a really lucky demographic to work with. I keep getting older and older and they're always the same age, and it's just a crazy delightful job. I want to thank you for inviting me here. It's a big treat for me to get to come to this conference. (Applause) Thanks. (Applause)

This is Aunt Zip from Sodom, North Carolina. She was 105 years old when I took this picture. She was always saying things that made me stop and think, like, "Time may be a great healer, but it ain't no beauty specialist." (Laughter) She said, "Be good to your friends. Why, without them, you'd be a total stranger." (Laughter) This is one of her songs. Let's see if we can get into the flow here and all do this one together. And I'm going to have Michael Manring play bass with me. Give him a big old hand. (Applause) One, two, three, four. (Music) Well, my true love's a black-eyed daisy; if I don't see her, I go crazy. My true love lives up the river; a few more jumps and I'll be with her. Hey, hey, black-eyed Susie! Hey, hey, black-eyed Susie! Hey, hey black-eyed Susie, hey. Now you've got to picture Aunt Zip at 105 years old in Sodom, North Carolina. I'd go up and learn these old songs from her. She couldn't sing much, couldn't play anymore. And I'd pull her out on the front porch. Down below, there was her grandson plowing the tobacco field with a mule. A double outhouse over here on the side. And we'd sing this old song. She didn't have a whole lot of energy, so I'd sing, "Hey, hey!" and she'd just answer back with, "Black-eyed Susie." Oh, hey, hey, black-eyed Susie! Hey, hey, black-eyed Susie! Hey, hey, black-eyed Susie, hey. Well, she and I went blackberry picking. She got mad; I took a licking. Ducks on the millpond, geese in the ocean, Devil in the pretty girl when she takes a notion. Hey, hey, black-eyed Susie! Hey, hey, black-eyed Susie! Hey, hey black-eyed Susie, hey. Let's have the banjo. Well, we'll get married next Thanksgiving. I'll lay around; she'll make a living. She'll cook blackjacks, I'll cook gravy; we'll have chicken someday, maybe. Hey, hey, hey, hey. Hey, hey, black-eyed Susie, hey! One more time now. Oh, hey, hey, black-eyed Susie! Hey, hey, black-eyed Susie! Hey, hey, black-eyed Susie, hey. (Applause) Thank you, Michael. This is Ralph Stanley. When I was going to college at University of California at Santa Barbara in the College of Creative Studies, taking majors in biology and art, he came to the campus. This was in 1968, I guess it was. And he played his bluegrass style of music, but near the end of the concert, he played the old timing style of banjo picking that came from Africa, along with the banjo. It's called claw-hammer style, that he had learned from his mother and grandmother. I fell in love with that. I went up to him and said, how can I learn that? He said, well, you can go back to Clinch Mountain, where I'm from, or Asheville or Mount Airy, North Carolina -- some place that has a lot of music. Because there's a lot of old people still living that play that old style. So I went back that very summer. I just fell in love with the culture and the people. And you know, I came back to school, I finished my degrees and told my parents I wanted to be a banjo player. You can imagine how excited they were. So I thought I would just like to show you some of the pictures I've taken of some of my mentors. Just a few of them, but maybe you'll get just a little hint of some of these folks. And play a little banjo. Let's do a little medley. (Music) (Applause) Those last few pictures were of Ray Hicks, who just passed away last year. He was one of the great American folk tale-tellers. The Old Jack tales that he had learned -- he talked like this, you could hardly understand him. But it was really wonderful. And he lived in that house that his great-grandfather had built. No running water, no electricity. A wonderful, wonderful guy. And you can look at more pictures. I've actually got a website that's got a bunch of photos that I've done of some of the other folks I didn't get a chance to show you. This instrument came up in those pictures. It's called the mouth bow. It is definitely the first stringed instrument ever in the world, and still played in the Southern mountains. Now, the old timers didn't take a fancy guitar string and make anything like this. They would just take a stick and a catgut and string it up. It was hard on the cats, but it made a great little instrument. It sounds something like this. (Music) Well, have you heard the many stories told by young and old with joy about the many deeds of daring that were done by the Johnson boys? You take Kate, I'll take Sal; we'll both have a Johnson gal. You take Kate, I'll take Sal; we'll both have a Johnson gal. Now, they were scouts in the rebels' army, they were known both far and wide. When the Yankees saw them coming, they'd lay down their guns and hide. You take Kate, I'll take Sal; we'll both have a Johnson gal. You take Kate, I'll take Sal; we'll both have a Johnson gal. Ain't that a sound? (Applause) Well, it was 1954, I guess it was. We were driving in the car outside of Gatesville, Texas, where I grew up in the early part of my life. Outside of Gatesville we were coming back from the grocery store. My mom was driving; my brother and I were in the back seat. We were really mad at my mom. We looked out the window. We were surrounded by thousands of acres of cotton fields. You see, we'd just been to the grocery store, and my mom refused to buy us the jar of Ovaltine that had the coupon for the Captain Midnight decoder ring in it. And, buddy, that made us mad. Well, my mom didn't put up with much either, and she was driving, and she said, "You boys! You think you can have anything you want. You don't know how hard it is to earn money. Your dad works so hard. You think money grows on trees. You've never worked a day in your lives. You boys make me so mad. You're going to get a job this summer." She pulled the car over; she said, "Get out of the car." My brother and I stepped out of the car. We were standing on the edge of thousands of acres of cotton. There were about a hundred black folks out there picking. My mom grabbed us by the shoulders. She marched us out in the field. She went up to the foreman; she said, "I've got these two little boys never worked a day in their lives." Of course, we were just eight and 10. (Laughter) She said, "Would you put them to work?" Well, that must have seemed like a funny idea to that foreman: put these two middle-class little white boys out in a cotton field in August in Texas -- it's hot. So he gave us each a cotton sack, about 10 feet long, about that big around, and we started picking. Now, cotton is soft but the outside of the plant is just full of stickers. And if you don't know what you're doing, your hands are bleeding in no time. And my brother and I started to pick it, and our hands were startin' to bleed, and then -- "Mom!" And Mom was just sitting by the car like this. She wasn't going to give up. Well, the foreman could see he was in over his head, I guess. He kind of just snuck up behind us and he sang out in a low voice. He just sang: "Well, there's a long white robe in heaven, I know. Don't want it to leave me behind. Well, there's a long white robe in heaven, I know. Don't want it to leave me behind." And from all around as people started singing and answering back, he sang: "Good news, good news: Chariot's coming. Good news: Chariot's coming. Good news: Chariot's coming. And I don't want it to leave me behind." Now, my brother and I had never heard anything like that in our whole lives. It was so beautiful. We sat there all day picking cotton, without complaining, without crying, while they sang things like: "Oh, Mary, don't you weep, don't you moan" and "Wade in the water," and "I done done," "This little light of mine." Finally, by the end of the day, we'd each picked about a quarter of a bag of cotton. But the foreman was kind enough to give us each a check for a dollar, but my mother would never let us cash it. I'm 57; still have the check. Now, my mother hoped that we learned from that the value of hard work. But if you have children, you know it doesn't often work that way. No, we learned something else. The first thing I learned that day was that I never ever wanted to work that hard again. (Laughter) And pretty much never did. But I also learned that some people in this world do have to work that hard every day, and that was an eye-opener. And I also learned that a great song can make hard work go a little easier. And it also can bring the group together in a way that nothing else can. Now, I was just a little eight-year-old boy that day when my mama put me out of the car in that hot Texas cotton field. I wasn't even aware of music -- not even aware of it. But that day in the cotton field out there picking, when those people started singing, I realized I was in the very heart of real music, and that's where I've wanted to be ever since. Try this old song with me. I sing: Well, there's a long white robe in heaven, I know. You sing: Don't want it to leave me behind. Well, there's a long white robe in heaven, I know. Don't want it to leave me behind. Good news, good news: Chariot's coming. Good news: Chariot's coming. Good news: Chariot's coming. And I don't want it to leave me -- It's been a while since you guys have been picking your last bale of cotton, isn't it? Let's try it one more time. There's a starry crown in heaven, I know. Don't want it to leave me behind. There's a starry crown in heaven, I know. Don't want it to leave me behind. Good news: Chariot's coming. Good news: Chariot's coming. Good news: Chariot's coming. And I don't want it to leave me behind. It was a few years ago, but I sort of remembered this story, and I told it at a concert. My mom was in the audience. After the -- she was glad to have a story about herself, of course, but after the concert she came up and she said, "David, I've got to tell you something. I set that whole thing up. I set it up with the foreman. I set it up with the owner of the land. I just wanted you boys to learn the value of hard work. I didn't know it was going to make you fall in love with music though." Let's try. Good news: Chariot's coming. Good news: Chariot's coming. Good news: Chariot's coming. And I don't want it to leave me behind. (Applause) Well, this is the steel guitar. It's an American-made instrument. It was originally made by the Dopyera Brothers, who later on made the Dobro, which is a wood-bodied instrument with a metal cone for -- where the sound comes from. It's usually played flat on your lap. It was made to play Hawaiian music back in the 1920s, before they had electric guitars, trying to make a loud guitar. And then African-American folks figured out you could take a broken bottle neck, just like that -- a nice Merlot works very well. That wine we had yesterday would have been perfect. Break it off, put it on your finger, and slide into the notes. This instrument pretty much saved my life. Fifteen years ago, 14 years ago, I guess, this year, my wife and I lost our daughter, Sarah Jane, in a car accident, and it was the most -- it almost took me out -- it almost took me out of this world. And I think I learned a lot about what happiness was by going through such unbelievable grief, just standing on the edge of that abyss and just wanting to jump in. I had to make lists of reasons to stay alive. I had to sit down and make lists, because I was ready to go; I was ready to check out of this world. And you know, at the top of the list, of course, were Jenny, and my son, Zeb, my parents -- I didn't want to hurt them. But then, when I thought about it beyond that, it was very simple things. I didn't care about -- I had a radio show, I have a radio show on public radio, "Riverwalk," I didn't care about that. I didn't care about awards or money or anything. Nothing. Nothing. On the list it would be stuff like, seeing the daffodils bloom in the spring, the smell of new-mown hay, catching a wave and bodysurfing, the touch of a baby's hand, the sound of Doc Watson playing the guitar, listening to old records of Muddy Waters and Uncle Dave Macon. And for me, the sound of a steel guitar, because one of my parents' neighbors just gave me one of these things. And I would sit around with it, and I didn't know how to play it, but I would just play stuff as sad as I could play. And it was the only instrument that, of all the ones that I play, that would really make that connection. This is a song that came out of that. (Music) Well, I hear you're having trouble. Lord, I hate to hear that news. If you want to talk about it, you know, I will listen to you through. Words no longer say it; let me tell you what I always do. I just break off another bottleneck and play these steel guitar blues. People say, "Oh, snap out of it!" Oh yeah, that's easier said than done. While you can hardly move, they're running around having all kinds of fun. Sometimes I think it's better just to sink way down in your funky mood 'til you can rise up humming these steel guitar blues. Now, you can try to keep it all inside with drink and drugs and cigarettes, but you know that's not going to get you where you want to get. But I got some medicine here that just might shake things loose. Call me in the morning after a dose of these steel guitar blues. Open up now. (Applause) Oh, I think I've got time to tell you about this. My dad was an inventor. We moved to California when Sputnik went up, in 1957. And he was working on gyroscopes; he has a number of patents for that kind of thing. And we moved across the street from Michael and John Whitney. They were about my age. John went on, and Michael did too, to become some of the inventors of computer animation. Michael's dad was working on something called the computer. This was 1957, I was a little 10-year-old kid; I didn't know what that was. But he took me down to see one, you know, what they were making. It was like a library, just full of vacuum tubes as far as you could see, just floors and floors of these things, and one of the engineers said, some day you're going to be able to put this thing in your pocket. I thought, damn, those are going to be some big pants! (Laughter) So that Christmas -- maybe I've got time for this -- that Christmas I got the Mister Wizard Fun-o-Rama chemistry set. Well, I wanted to be an inventor just like my dad; so did Michael. His great-granddad had been Eli Whitney, the inventor of the cotton gin. So we looked in that -- this was a commercial chemistry set. It had three chemicals we were really surprised to see: sulfur, potassium nitrate and charcoal. Man, we were only 10, but we knew that made gunpowder. We made up a little batch and we put it on the driveway and we threw a match and phew, it flared up. Ah, it was great. Well, obviously the next thing to do was build a cannon. So we went over into Michael's garage -- his dad had all kinds of stuff, and we put a pipe in the vice there, and screwed a cap on the end of the pipe, drilled a hole in the back of the pipe, took some of our firecrackers, pulled out the fuses, tied them together, put them in the back there, and -- down in that hole -- and then stuffed some of our gunpowder down that pipe and put three ball bearings on the top, in the garage. (Laughter) We weren't stupid: we put up a sheet of plywood about five feet in front of it. We stood back, we lit that thing, and they flew out of there -- they went through that plywood like it was paper. Through the garage. Two of them landed in the side door of his new Citroen. (Laughter) We tore everything down and buried it in his backyard. That was Pacific Palisades; it probably is still there, back there. Well, my brother heard that we had made gunpowder. He and his buddies, they were older, and they were pretty mean. They said they were going to beat us up if we didn't make some gunpowder for them. We said, well, what are you going to do with it? They said, we're going to melt it down and make rocket fuel. (Laughter) Sure. We'll make you a big batch. (Laughter) So we made them a big batch, and it was in my -- now, we'd just moved here. We'd just moved to California. Mom had redone the kitchen; Mom was gone that day. We had a pie tin. It became Chris Berquist's job to do the melting down. Michael and I were standing way at the side of the kitchen. He said, "Yeah, hey, it's melting. Yeah, the sulfur's melting. No problem. Yeah, you know." It just flared up, and he turned around, and he looked like this. No hair, no eyelashes, no nothing. There were big welts all over my mom's kitchen cabinet; the air was the just full of black smoke. She came home, she took that chemistry set away, and we never saw it again. But we thought of it often, because every time she'd cook tuna surprise it made -- tasted faintly of gunpowder. So I like to invent things too, and I think I'll close out my set with something I invented a good while back. When drum machines were new, I got to thinking, why couldn't you take the oldest form of music, the hambone rhythms, and combine it with the newest technology? I call this Thunderwear. At that time, drum triggers were new. And so I put them all together and sewed 12 of them in this suit. I showed you some of the hambone rhythms yesterday; I'm going to be doing some of the same ones. I have a trigger here, trigger here, here, here. Right there. It's going to really hurt if I don't take that off. Okay. Now, the drum triggers go out my tail here, into the drum machine, and they can make various sounds, like drums. So let me put them all together. And also, I can change the sounds by stepping on this pedal right here, and -- let me just close out here by doing you a little hambone solo or something like this. Thank you, folks. (Applause)

My name is Lovegrove. I only know nine Lovegroves, two of which are my parents. They are first cousins, and you know what happens when, you know -- so there's a terribly weird freaky side to me, which I'm fighting with all the time. So to try and get through today, I've kind of disciplined myself with an 18-minute talk. I was hanging on to have a pee. I thought perhaps if I was hanging on long enough, that would guide me through the 18 minutes. (Laughter) Okay. I am known as Captain Organic, and that's a philosophical position as well as an aesthetic position. But today what I'd like to talk to you about is that love of form and how form can touch people's soul and emotion. Not very long ago, not many thousands of years ago, we actually lived in caves, and I don't think we've lost that coding system. We respond so well to form, but I'm interested in creating intelligent form. I'm not interested at all in blobism or any of that superficial rubbish that you see coming out as design. These -- this artificially induced consumerism -- I think it's atrocious. My world is the world of people like Amory Lovins, Janine Benyus, James Watson. I'm in that world, but I work purely instinctively. I'm not a scientist. I could have been, perhaps, but I work in this world where I trust my instincts. So I am a 21st-century translator of technology into products that we use everyday and relate beautifully and naturally with. And we should be developing things -- we should be developing packaging for ideas which elevate people's perceptions and respect for the things that we dig out of the earth and translate into products for everyday use. So, the water bottle. I'll begin with this concept of what I call DNA. DNA: Design, Nature, Art. These are the three things that condition my world. Here is a drawing by Leonardo da Vinci, 500 years ago, before photography. It shows how observation, curiosity and instinct work to create amazing art. Industrial design is the art form of the 21st century. People like Leonardo -- there have not been many -- had this amazingly instinctive curiosity. I work from a similar position. I don't want to sound pretentious saying that, but this is my drawing made on a digital pad a couple of years ago -- well into the 21st century, 500 years later. It's my impression of water. Impressionism being the most valuable art form on the planet as we know it: 100 million dollars, easily, for a Monet. I use, now, a whole new process. A few years ago I reinvented my process to keep up with people like Greg Lynn, Tom Main, Zaha Hadid, Rem Koolhaas -- all these people that I think are persevering and pioneering with fantastic new ideas of how to create form. This is all created digitally. Here you see the machining, the milling of a block of acrylic. This is what I show to the client to say, "That's what I want to do." At that point, I don't know if that's possible at all. It's a seductor, but I just feel in my bones that that's possible. So we go. We look at the tooling. We look at how that is produced. These are the invisible things that you never see in your life. This is the background noise of industrial design. That is like an Anish Kapoor flowing through a Richard Serra. It is more valuable than the product in my eyes. I don't have one. When I do make some money, I'll have one machined for myself. This is the final product. When they sent it to me, I thought I'd failed. It felt like nothing. It has to feel like nothing. It was when I put the water in that I realized that I'd put a skin on water itself. It's an icon of water itself, and it elevates people's perception of contemporary design. Each bottle is different, meaning the water level will give you a different shape. It's mass individualism from a single product. It fits the hand. It fits arthritic hands. It fits children's hands. It makes the product strong, the tessellation. It's a millefiori of ideas. In the future they will look like that, because we need to move away from those type of polymers and use that for medical equipment and more important things, perhaps, in life. Biopolymers, these new ideas for materials, will come into play in probably a decade. It doesn't look as cool, does it? But I can live up to that. I don't have a problem with that. I design for that condition, biopolymers. It's the future. I took this video in Cape Town last year. This is the freaky side coming out. I have this special interest in things like this which blow my mind. I don't know whether to, you know, drop to my knees, cry; I don't know what I think. But I just know that nature improves with ever-greater purpose that which once existed, and that strangeness is a consequence of innovative thinking. When I look at these things, they look pretty normal to me. But these things evolved over many years, and now what we're trying to do -- I get three weeks to design a telephone. How the hell do I do a telephone in three weeks, when you get these things that take hundreds of million years to evolve? How do you condense that? It comes back to instinct. I'm not talking about designing telephones that look like that, and I'm not looking at designing architecture like that. I'm just interested in natural growth patterns, and the beautiful forms that only nature really creates. How that flows through me and how that comes out is what I'm trying to understand. This is a scan through the human forearm. It's then blown up through rapid prototyping to reveal the cellular structure. I have these in my office. My office is a mixture of the Natural History Museum and a NASA space lab. It's a weird, kind of freaky place. This is one of my specimens. This is made -- bone is made from a mixture of inorganic minerals and polymers. I studied cooking in school for four years, and in that experience, which was called "domestic science," it was a bit of a cheap trick for me to try and get a science qualification. (Laughter) Actually, I put marijuana in everything I cooked -- (Laughter) -- and I had access to all the best girls. It was fabulous. All the guys in the rugby team couldn't understand, but anyway -- this is a meringue. This is another sample I have. A meringue is made exactly the same way, in my estimation, as a bone. It's made from polysaccharides and proteins. If you pour water on that, it dissolves. Could we be manufacturing from foodstuffs in the future? Not a bad idea. I don't know. I need to talk to Janine and a few other people about that, but I believe instinctively that that meringue can become something, a car -- I don't know. I'm also interested in growth patterns: the unbridled way that nature grows things so you're not restricted by form at all. These interrelated forms, they do inspire everything I do although I might end up making something incredibly simple. This is a detail of a chair that I've designed in magnesium. It shows this interlocution of elements and the beauty of kind of engineering and biological thinking, shown pretty much as a bone structure. Any one of those elements you could sort of hang on the wall as some kind of art object. It's the world's first chair made in magnesium. It cost 1.7 million dollars to develop. It's called "Go" by Bernhardt, USA. It went into Time magazine in 2001 as the new language of the 21st century. Boy. For somebody growing up in Wales in a little village, that's enough. It shows how you make one holistic form, like the car industry, and then you break up what you need. This is an absolutely beautiful way of working. It's a godly way of working. It's organic and it's essential. It's an absolutely fat-free design, and when you look at it, you see human beings. Bless you. When that moves into polymers, you can change the elasticity, the fluidity of the form. This is an idea for a gas-injected, one-piece polymer chair. What nature does is it drills holes in things. It liberates form. It takes away anything extraneous. That's what I do. I make organic things which are essential. I don't -- and they look funky too -- but I don't set out to make funky things because I think that's an absolute disgrace. I set out to look at natural forms. If you took the idea of fractal technology further, take a membrane, shrinking it down constantly like nature does -- that could be a seat for a chair; it could be a sole for a sports shoe; it could be a car blending into seats. Wow. Let's go for it. That's the kind of stuff. This is what exists in nature. Observation now allows us to bring that natural process into the design process every day. That's what I do. This is a show that's currently on in Tokyo. It's called "Superliquidity." It's my sculptural investigation. It's like 21st-century Henry Moore. When you see a Henry Moore still, your hair stands up. There's some amazing spiritual connect. If he was a car designer, phew, we'd all be driving one. In his day, he was the highest taxpayer in Britain. That is the power of organic design. It contributes immensely to our sense of being, our sense of relationships with things, our sensuality and, you know, the sort of -- even the sort of socio-erotic side, which is very important. This is my artwork. This is all my process. These actually are sold as artwork. They're very big prints. But this is how I get to that object. Ironically, that object was made by the Killarney process, which is a brand-new process here for the 21st century, and I can hear Greg Lynn laughing his socks off as I say that. I'll tell you about that later. When I look into these data images, I see new things. I'm self -- it's self-inspired. Diatomic structures, radiolaria, the things that we couldn't see but we can do now -- these, again, are cored out. They're made virtually from nothing. They're made from silica. Why not structures from cars like that? Coral, all these natural forces, take away what they don't need and they deliver maximum beauty. We need to be in that realm. I want to do stuff like that. This is a new chair which should come on the market in September. It's for a company called Moroso in Italy. It's a gas-injected polymer chair. Those holes you see there are very filtered-down, watered-down versions of the extremity of the diatomic structures. It goes with the flow of the polymer and you'll see -- there's an image coming up right now that shows the full thing. It's great to have companies in Italy who support this way of dreaming. If you see the shadows that come through that, they're actually probably more important than the product, but it's the minimum it takes. The coring out of the back lets you breathe. It takes away any material you don't need and it actually garners flexure too, so -- I was going to break into a dance then. This is some current work I'm doing. I'm looking at single-surface structures and how they flow -- how they stretch and flow. It's based on furniture typologies, but that's not the end motivation. It's made from aluminum, as opposed to aluminium, and it's grown. It's grown in my mind, and then it's grown in terms of the whole process that I go through. This is two weeks ago in CCP in Coventry, who build parts for Bentleys and so on. It's being built as we speak, and it will be on show in Phillips next year in New York. I have a big show with Phillips Auctioneers. When I see these animations, oh Jesus, I'm blown away. This is what goes on in my studio everyday. I walk -- I'm traveling. I come back. Some guy's got that on a computer -- there's this like, oh my goodness. So I try to create this energy of invention every day in my studio. This kind of effervescent, fully charged sense of soup that delivers ideas. Single-surface products. Furniture's a good one. How you grow legs out of a surface. I would love to build this one day, and perhaps I'd like to build it also out of flour, sugar, polymer, wood chips -- I don't know, human hair. I don't know. I'd love a go at that. I don't know. If I just got some time. That's the weird side coming out again, and a lot of companies don't understand that. Three weeks ago I was with Sony in Tokyo. They said, "Give us the dream. What is our dream? How do we beat Apple?" I said, "Well you don't copy Apple, that's for sure." I said, "You get into biopolymers." They looked straight through me. What a waste. Anyway. (Laughter) No, it's true. Fuck 'em. Fuck 'em. You know, I mean. (Laughter) I'm delivering; they're not taking. I've had this image 20 years. I've had this image of a water droplet for 20 years sitting on a hot bed. That is an image of a car for me. That's the car of the future. It's a water droplet. I've been banging on about this like I can't believe. Cars are all wrong. I'm going to show you something a bit weird now. They laughed everywhere over the world I showed this. The only place that didn't laugh was Moscow. Its cars are made from 30,000 components. How ridiculous is that? Couldn't you make that from 300? It's got a vacuum-formed, carbon-nylon pan. Everything's holistically integrated. It opens and closes like a bread bin. There is no engine. There's a solar panel on the back, and there are batteries in the wheels. They're fitted like Formula One. You take them off your wall. You plug them in. Off you jolly well go. A three-wheeled car: slow, feminine, transparent, so you can see the people in there. You drive different. (Laughter) You see that thing. You do. You do and not anaesthetized, separated from life. There's a hole at the front, and there's a reason for that. It's a city car. You drive along. You get out. You drive on to a proboscis. You get out. It lifts you up. It presents the solar panel to the sun, and at night it's a street lamp. (Applause) That's what happens if you get inspired by the street lamp first, and then do the car second. These bubbles -- I can see these bubbles with these hydrogen packages, floating around on the ground driven by AI. When I showed this in South Africa, everybody after was going, "Yeah, hey, car on a stick. Like this." Can you imagine? A car on a stick. If you put it next to contemporary architecture, it feels totally natural to me. And that's what I do with my furniture. I'm not putting Charles Eames' furniture in buildings anymore. Forget that. We move on. I'm trying to build furniture that fits architecture. I'm trying to build transportation systems. I work on aircraft for Airbus, the whole thing -- I do all this sort of stuff trying to force these natural, inspired-by-nature dreams home. I'm going to finish on two things. This is the steriolithography of a staircase. It's a little bit of a dedication to James, James Watson. I built this thing for my studio. It cost me 250,000 dollars to build this. Most people go and buy the Aston Martin. I built this. This is the data that goes with that. Incredibly complex. Took about two years, because I'm looking for fat-free design. Lean, efficient things. Healthy products. This is built by composites. It's a single element which rotates around to create a holistic element, and this is a carbon-fiber handrail which is only supported in two places. Modern materials allow us to do modern things. This is a shot in the studio. This is how it looks pretty much every day. You wouldn't want to have a fear of heights coming down it. There is virtually no handrail. It doesn't pass any standards. (Laughter) Who cares? (Laughter) Yeah, and it has an internal handrail which gives it it's strength. It's this holistic integration. That's my studio. It's subterranean. It's in Notting Hill next to all the crap -- you know, the prostitutes and all that stuff. It's next to David Hockney's original studio. It has a lighting system that changes throughout the day. My guys go out for lunch. The door's open. They come back in, because it's normally raining, and they prefer to stay in. This is my studio. Elephant skull from Oxford University, 1988. I bought that last year. They're very difficult to find. I would -- if anybody's got a whale skeleton they want to sell me, I'll put it in the studio. So I'm just going to interject a little bit with some of the things that you'll see in the video. It's a homemade video, made it myself at three o'clock in the morning just to show you how my real world is. You never see that. You never see architects or designers showing you their real world. This is called a "Plasnet." It's a bio-polycarbonate new chair I'm doing in Italy. World's first bamboo bike with folding handlebars. We should all be riding one of these. As China buys all these crappy cars, we should be riding things like this. Counterbalance. Like I say, it's a cross between Natural History Museum and a NASA laboratory. It's full of prototypes and objects. It's self-inspirational again. I mean, the rare times when I'm there, I do enjoy it. And I get lots of kids coming -- lots and lots of kids coming. I'm a contaminator for all those children of investment bankers -- wankers. This -- sorry -- (Laughter) -- that's a solar seed. It's a concept for new architecture. That thing on the top is the world's first solar-powered garden lamp -- the first produced. Giles Revell should be talking here today -- amazing photography of things you can't see. The first sculptural model I made for that thing in Tokyo. Lots of stuff. There's a little leaf chair -- that golden looking thing is called "Leaf." It's made from Kevlar. On the wall is my book called "Supernatural," which allows me to remember what I've done, because I forget. There's an aerated brick I did in Limoges last year, in Concepts for New Ceramics in Architecture. [Unclear], working at three o'clock in the morning -- and I don't pay overtime. Overtime is the passion of design, so join the club or don't. (Laughter) No, it's true. It's true. People like Tom and Greg -- we're traveling like you can't -- we fit it all in. I don't know how we do it. Next week I'm at Electrolux in Sweden, then I'm in Beijing on Friday. You work that one out. And when I see Ed's photographs I think, why the hell am I going to China? It's true. It's true. Because there's a soul in this whole thing. We need to have a new instinct for the 21st century. We need to combine all this stuff. If all the people who were talking over this period worked on a car together, it would be a joy, absolute joy. So there's a new X-light system I'm doing in Japan. There's Tuareg shoes from North Africa. There's a Kifwebe mask. These are my sculptures. A copper jelly mold. It sounds like some quiz show or something, doesn't it? So, it's going to end. Thank you, James, for your great inspiration. Thank you very much. (Applause)