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The stories we tell about each other matter very much. The stories we tell ourselves about our own lives matter. And most of all, I think the way that we participate in each other's stories is of deep importance. I was six years old when I first heard stories about the poor. Now I didn't hear those stories from the poor themselves, I heard them from my Sunday school teacher and Jesus, kind of via my Sunday school teacher. I remember learning that people who were poor needed something material -- food, clothing, shelter -- that they didn't have. And I also was taught, coupled with that, that it was my job -- this classroom full of five and six year-old children -- it was our job, apparently, to help. This is what Jesus asked of us. And then he said, "What you do for the least of these, you do for me." Now I was pretty psyched. I was very eager to be useful in the world -- I think we all have that feeling. And also, it was kind of interesting that God needed help. That was news to me, and it felt like it was a very important thing to get to participate in. But I also learned very soon thereafter that Jesus also said, and I'm paraphrasing, the poor would always be with us. This frustrated and confused me; I felt like I had been just given a homework assignment that I had to do, and I was excited to do, but no matter what I would do, I would fail. So I felt confused, a little bit frustrated and angry, like maybe I'd misunderstood something here. And I felt overwhelmed. And for the first time, I began to fear this group of people and to feel negative emotion towards a whole group of people. I imagined in my head, a kind of long line of individuals that were never going away, that would always be with us. They were always going to ask me to help them and give them things, which I was excited to do, but I didn't know how it was going to work. And I didn't know what would happen when I ran out of things to give, especially if the problem was never going away. In the years following, the other stories I heard about the poor growing up were no more positive. For example, I saw pictures and images frequently of sadness and suffering. I heard about things that were going wrong in the lives of the poor. I heard about disease, I heard about war -- they always seemed to be kind of related. And in general, I got this sort of idea that the poor in the world lived lives that were wrought with suffering and sadness, devastation, hopelessness. And after a while, I developed what I think many of us do, is this predictable response, where I started to feel bad every time I heard about them. I started to feel guilty for my own relative wealth, because I wasn't doing more, apparently, to make things better. And I even felt a sense of shame because of that. And so naturally, I started to distance myself. I stopped listening to their stories quite as closely as I had before. And I stopped expecting things to really change. Now I still gave -- on the outside it looked like I was still quite involved. I gave of my time and my money, I gave when solutions were on sale. The cost of a cup of coffee can save a child's life, right. I mean who can argue with that? I gave when I was cornered, when it was difficult to avoid and I gave, in general, when the negative emotions built up enough that I gave to relieve my own suffering, not someone else's. The truth be told, I was giving out of that place, not out of a genuine place of hope and excitement to help and of generosity. It became a transaction for me, became sort of a trade. I was purchasing something -- I was buying my right to go on with my day and not necessarily be bothered by this bad news. And I think the way that we go through that sometimes can, first of all, disembody a group of people, individuals out there in the world. And it can also turn into a commodity, which is a very scary thing. So as I did this, and as I think many of us do this, we kind of buy our distance, we kind of buy our right to go on with our day. I think that exchange can actually get in the way of the very thing that we want most. It can get in the way of our desire to really be meaningful and useful in another person's life and, in short to love. Thankfully, a few years ago, things shifted for me because I heard this gentleman speak, Dr. Muhammad Yunus. I know many in the room probably know exactly who he is, but to give the shorthand version for any who have not heard him speak, Dr. Yunus won the Nobel Peace Prize a few years ago for his work pioneering modern microfinance. When I heard him speak, it was three years before that. But basically, microfinance -- if this is new to you as well -- think of that as financial services for the poor. Think of all the things you get at your bank and imagine those products and services tailored to the needs of someone living on a few dollars a day. Dr. Yunus shared his story, explaining what that was, and what he had done with his Grameen Bank. He also talked about, in particular, microlending, which is a tiny loan that could help someone start or grow a business. Now, when I heard him speak, it was exciting for a number of reasons. First and foremost, I learned about this new method of change in the world that, for once, showed me, maybe, a way to interact with someone and to give, to share of a resource in a way that wasn't weird and didn't make me feel bad -- that was exciting. But more importantly, he told stories about the poor that were different than any stories I had heard before. In fact, those individuals he talked about who were poor was sort of a side note. He was talking about strong, smart, hardworking entrepreneurs who woke up every day and were doing things to make their lives and their family's lives better. All they needed to do that more quickly and to do it better was a little bit of capital. It was an amazing sort of insight for me. And I, in fact, was so deeply moved by this -- it's hard to express now how much that affected me -- but I was so moved that I actually quit my job a few weeks later, and I moved to East Africa to try to see for myself what this was about. For the first time, actually, in a long time I wanted to meet those individuals, I wanted to meet these entrepreneurs, and see for myself what their lives were actually about. So I spent three months in Kenya, Uganda and Tanzania interviewing entrepreneurs that had received 100 dollars to start or grow a business. And in fact, through those interactions, for the first time, I was starting to get to be friends with some of those people in that big amorphous group out there that was supposed to be far away. I was starting to be friends and get to know their personal stories. And over and over again, as I interviewed them and spent my days with them, I did hear stories of life change and amazing little details of change. So I would hear from goat herders who had used that money that they had received to buy a few more goats. Their business trajectory would change. They would make a little bit more money; their standard of living would shift and would get better. And they would make really interesting little adjustments in their lives, like they would start to send their children to school. They might be able to buy mosquito nets. Maybe they could afford a lock for the door and feel secure. Maybe it was just that they could put sugar in their tea and offer that to me when I came as their guest and that made them feel proud. But there were these beautiful details, even if I talked to 20 goat herders in a row, and some days that's what happened -- these beautiful details of life change that were meaningful to them. That was another thing that really touched me. It was really humbling to see for the first time, to really understand that even if I could have taken a magic wand and fixed everything, I probably would have gotten a lot wrong. Because the best way for people to change their lives is for them to have control and to do that in a way that they believe is best for them. So I saw that and it was very humbling. Anyway, another interesting thing happened while I was there. I never once was asked for a donation, which had kind of been my mode, right. There's poverty, you give money to help -- no one asked me for a donation. In fact, no one wanted me to feel bad for them at all. If anything, they just wanted to be able to do more of what they were doing already and to build on their own capabilities. So what I did hear, once in a while, was that people wanted a loan -- I thought that sounded very reasonable and really exciting. And by the way, I was a philosophy and poetry major in school, so I didn't know the difference between profit and revenue when I went to East Africa. I just got this impression that the money would work. And my introduction to business was in these $100 little infuses of capital. And I learned about profit and revenue, about leverage, all sorts of things, from farmers, from seamstresses, from goat herders. So this idea that these new stories of business and hope might be shared with my friends and family, and through that, maybe we could get some of the money that they needed to be able to continue their businesses as loans, that's this little idea that turned into Kiva. A few months later, I went back to Uganda with a digital camera and a basic website that my partner, Matthew, and I had kind of built, and took pictures of seven of my new friends, posted their stories, these stories of entrepreneurship, up on the website, spammed friends and family and said, "We think this is legal. Haven't heard back yet from SEC on all the details, but do you say, do you want to help participate in this, provide the money that they need?" The money came in basically overnight. We sent it over to Uganda. And over the next six months, a beautiful thing happened; the entrepreneurs received the money, they were paid, and their businesses, in fact, grew, and they were able to support themselves and change the trajectory of their lives. In October of '05, after those first seven loans were paid, Matt and I took the word beta off of the site. We said, "Our little experiment has been a success. Let's start for real." That was our official launch. And then that first year, October '05 through '06, Kiva facilitated $500,000 in loans. The second year, it was a total of 15 million. The third year, the total was up to around 40. The fourth year, we were just short of 100. And today, less than five years in, Kiva's facilitated more than 150 million dollars, in little 25-dollar bits, from lenders and entrepreneurs -- more than a million of those, collectively in 200 countries. So that's where Kiva is today, just to bring you right up to the present. And while those numbers and those statistics are really fun to talk about and they're interesting, to me, Kiva's really about stories. It's about retelling the story of the poor, and it's about giving ourselves an opportunity to engage that validates their dignity, validates a partnership relationship, not a relationship that's based on the traditional sort of donor beneficiary weirdness that can happen. But instead a relationship that can promote respect and hope and this optimism that together we can move forward. So what I hope is that, not only can the money keep flowing forth through Kiva -- that's a very positive and meaningful thing -- but I hope Kiva can blur those lines, like I said, between the traditional rich and poor categories that we're taught to see in the world, this false dichotomy of us and them, have and have not. I hope that Kiva can blur those lines. Because as that happens, I think we can feel free to interact in a way that's more open, more just and more creative, to engage with each other and to help each other. Imagine how you feel when you see somebody on street who is begging and you're about to approach them. Imagine how you feel; and then imagine the difference when you might see somebody who has a story of entrepreneurship and hard work who wants to tell you about their business. Maybe they're smiling, and they want to talk to you about what they've done. Imagine if you're speaking with somebody who's growing things and making them flourish, somebody who's using their talents to do something productive, somebody who's built their own business from scratch, someone who is surrounded by abundance, not scarcity, who's in fact creating abundance, somebody with full hands with something to offer, not empty hands asking for you to give them something. Imagine if you could hear a story you didn't expect of somebody who wakes up every day and works very, very hard to make their life better. These stories can really change the way that we think about each other. And if we can catalyze a supportive community to come around these individuals and to participate in their story by lending a little bit of money, I think that can change the way we believe in each other and each other's potential. Now for me, Kiva is just the beginning. And as I look forward to what is next, it's been helpful to reflect on the things I've learned so far. The first one is, as I mentioned, entrepreneurship was a new idea to me. Kiva borrowers, as I interviewed them and got to know them over the last few years, have taught me what entrepreneurship is. And I think, at its core, it's deciding that you want your life to be better. You see an opportunity and you decide what you're going to do to try to seize that. In short, it's deciding that tomorrow can better than today and going after that. Second thing that I've learned is that loans are a very interesting tool for connectivity. So they're not a donation. Yeah, maybe it doesn't sound that much different. But in fact, when you give something to someone and they say, "Thanks," and let you know how things go, that's one thing. When you lend them money, and they slowly pay you back over time, you have this excuse to have an ongoing dialogue. This continued attention -- this ongoing attention -- is a really big deal to build different kinds of relationships among us. And then third, from what I've heard from the entrepreneurs I've gotten to know, when all else is equal, given the option to have just money to do what you need to do, or money plus the support and encouragement of a global community, people choose the community plus the money. That's a much more meaningful combination, a more powerful combination. So with that in mind, this particular incident has led to the things that I'm working on now. I see entrepreneurs everywhere now, now that I'm tuned into this. And one thing that I've seen is there are a lot of supportive communities that already exist in the world. With social networks, it's an amazing way, growing the number of people that we all have around us in our own supportive communities, rapidly. And so, as I have been thinking about this, I've been wondering: how can we engage these supportive communities to catalyze even more entrepreneurial ideas and to catalyze all of us to make tomorrow better than today? As I've researched what's going on in the United States, a few interesting little insights have come up. So one is that, of course, as we all might expect, many small businesses in the U.S. and all over the world still need money to grow and to do more of what they want to do or they might need money during a hard month. But there's always a need for resources close by. Another thing is, it turns out, those resources don't usually come from the places you might expect -- banks, venture capitalists, other organizations and support structures -- they come from friends and family. Some statistics say 85 percent or more of funding for small businesses comes from friends and family. That's around 130 billion dollars a year -- it's a lot. And third, so as people are doing this friends and family fundraising process, it's very awkward, people don't know exactly what to ask for, how to ask, what to promise in return, even though they have the best of intentions and want to thank those people that are supporting them. So to harness the power of these supportive communities in a new way and to allow entrepreneurs to decide for themselves exactly what that financial exchange should look like, exactly what fits them and the people around them, this week actually, we're quietly doing a launch of Profounder, which is a crowd funding platform for small businesses to raise what they need through investments from their friends and family. And it's investments, not donations, not loans, but investments that have a dynamic return. So the mapping of participating in the story, it actually flows with the up and down. So in short, it's a do-it-yourself tool for small businesses to raise these funds. And what you can do is go onto the site, create a profile, create investment terms in a really easy way. We make it really, really simple for me as well as anyone else who wants to use the site. And we allow entrepreneurs to share a percentage of their revenues. They can raise up to a million dollars from an unlimited number of unaccredited, unsophisticated investors -- everyday people, heaven forbid -- and they can share those returns over time -- again, whatever terms they set. As investors choose to become involved based on those terms, they can either take their rewards back as cash, or they can decide in advance to give those returns away to a non-profit. So they can be a cash, or a cause, investor. It's my hope that this kind of tool can show anybody who has an idea a path to go do what they want to do in the world and to gather the people around them that they already have, the people that know them best and that love them and want to support them, to gather them to make this happen. So that's what I'm working on now. And to close, I just want to say, look these are tools. Right now, Profounder's right at the very beginning, and it's very palpable; it's very clear to me, that it's just a vessel, it's just a tool. What we need are for people to care, to actually go use it, just like they've cared enough to use Kiva to make those connections. But the good news is I don't think I need to stand here and convince you to care -- I'm not even going to try. I don't think, even though we often hear, you know, hear the ethical and moral reasons, the religious reasons, "Here's why caring and giving will make you happier." I don't think we need to be convinced of that. I think we know; in fact, I think we know so much, and it's such a reality that we care so deeply, that in fact, what usually stops us is that we're afraid to try and to mess up, because we care so very much about helping each other and being meaningful in each other's lives. So what I think I can do today, that best thing I can give you -- I've given you my story, which is the best I can do. And I think I can remind us that we do care. I think we all already know that. And I think we know that love is resilient enough for us to get out there and try. Just a sec. (Applause) Thanks. (Applause) Thanks. (Applause) For me, the best way to be inspired to try is to stop and to listen to someone else's story. And I'm grateful that I've gotten to do that here at TED. And I'm grateful that whenever I do that, guaranteed, I am inspired -- I am inspired by the person I am listening to. And I believe more and more every time I listen in that that person's potential to do great things in the world and in my own potential to maybe help. And that -- forget the tools, forget the moving around of resources -- that stuff's easy. Believing in each other, really being sure when push comes to shove that each one of us can do amazing things in the world, that is what can make our stories into love stories and our collective story into one that continually perpetuates hope and good things for all of us. So that, this belief in each other, knowing that without a doubt and practicing that every day in whatever you do, that's what I believe will change the world and make tomorrow better than today. Thank you. (Applause)
The Value of Nothing: Out of Nothing Comes Something. That was an essay I wrote when I was 11 years old and I got a B+. (Laughter) What I'm going to talk about: nothing out of something, and how we create. And I'm gonna try and do that within the 18-minute time span that we were told to stay within, and to follow the TED commandments: that is, actually, something that creates a near-death experience, but near-death is good for creativity. (Laughter) OK. So, I also want to explain, because Dave Eggers said he was going to heckle me if I said anything that was a lie, or not true to universal creativity. And I've done it this way for half the audience, who is scientific. When I say we, I don't mean you, necessarily; I mean me, and my right brain, my left brain and the one that's in between that is the censor and tells me what I'm saying is wrong. And I'm going do that also by looking at what I think is part of my creative process, which includes a number of things that happened, actually -- the nothing started even earlier than the moment in which I'm creating something new. And that includes nature, and nurture, and what I refer to as nightmares. Now in the nature area, we look at whether or not we are innately equipped with something, perhaps in our brains, some abnormal chromosome that causes this muse-like effect. And some people would say that we're born with it in some other means. And others, like my mother, would say that I get my material from past lives. Some people would also say that creativity may be a function of some other neurological quirk -- van Gogh syndrome -- that you have a little bit of, you know, psychosis, or depression. I do have to say, somebody -- I read recently that van Gogh wasn't really necessarily psychotic, that he might have had temporal lobe seizures, and that might have caused his spurt of creativity, and I don't -- I suppose it does something in some part of your brain. And I will mention that I actually developed temporal lobe seizures a number of years ago, but it was during the time I was writing my last book, and some people say that book is quite different. I think that part of it also begins with a sense of identity crisis: you know, who am I, why am I this particular person, why am I not black like everybody else? And sometimes you're equipped with skills, but they may not be the kind of skills that enable creativity. I used to draw. I thought I would be an artist. And I had a miniature poodle. And it wasn't bad, but it wasn't really creative. Because all I could really do was represent in a very one-on-one way. And I have a sense that I probably copied this from a book. And then, I also wasn't really shining in a certain area that I wanted to be, and you know, you look at those scores, and it wasn't bad, but it was not certainly predictive that I would one day make my living out of the artful arrangement of words. Also, one of the principles of creativity is to have a little childhood trauma. And I had the usual kind that I think a lot of people had, and that is that, you know, I had expectations placed on me. That figure right there, by the way, figure right there was a toy given to me when I was but nine years old, and it was to help me become a doctor from a very early age. I have some ones that were long lasting: from the age of five to 15, this was supposed to be my side occupation, and it led to a sense of failure. But actually, there was something quite real in my life that happened when I was about 14. And it was discovered that my brother, in 1967, and then my father, six months later, had brain tumors. And my mother believed that something had gone wrong, and she was gonna find out what it was, and she was gonna fix it. My father was a Baptist minister, and he believed in miracles, and that God's will would take care of that. But, of course, they ended up dying, six months apart. And after that, my mother believed that it was fate, or curses -- she went looking through all the reasons in the universe why this would have happened. Everything except randomness. She did not believe in randomness. There was a reason for everything. And one of the reasons, she thought, was that her mother, who had died when she was very young, was angry at her. And so, I had this notion of death all around me, because my mother also believed that I would be next, and she would be next. And when you are faced with the prospect of death very soon, you begin to think very much about everything. You become very creative, in a survival sense. And this, then, led to my big questions. And they're the same ones that I have today. And they are: why do things happen, and how do things happen? And the one my mother asked: how do I make things happen? It's a wonderful way to look at these questions, when you write a story. Because, after all, in that framework, between page one and 300, you have to answer this question of why things happen, how things happen, in what order they happen. What are the influences? How do I, as the narrator, as the writer, also influence that? And it's also one that, I think, many of our scientists have been asking. It's a kind of cosmology, and I have to develop a cosmology of my own universe, as the creator of that universe. And you see, there's a lot of back and forth in trying to make that happen, trying to figure it out -- years and years, oftentimes. So, when I look at creativity, I also think that it is this sense or this inability to repress, my looking at associations in practically anything in life. And I got a lot of them during what's been going on throughout this conference, almost everything that's been going on. And so I'm going to use, as the metaphor, this association: quantum mechanics, which I really don't understand, but I'm still gonna use it as the process for explaining how it is the metaphor. So, in quantum mechanics, of course, you have dark energy and dark matter. And it's the same thing in looking at these questions of how things happen. There's a lot of unknown, and you often don't know what it is except by its absence. But when you make those associations, you want them to come together in a kind of synergy in the story, and what you're finding is what matters. The meaning. And that's what I look for in my work, a personal meaning. There is also the uncertainty principle, which is part of quantum mechanics, as I understand it. (Laughter) And this happens constantly in the writing. And there's the terrible and dreaded observer effect, in which you're looking for something, and you know, things are happening simultaneously, and you're looking at it in a different way, and you're trying to really look for the about-ness, or what is this story about. And if you try too hard, then you will only write the about. You won't discover anything. And what you were supposed to find, what you hoped to find in some serendipitous way, is no longer there. Now, I don't want to ignore the other side of what happens in our universe, like many of our scientists have. And so, I am going to just throw in string theory here, and just say that creative people are multidimensional, and there are 11 levels, I think, of anxiety. (Laughter) And they all operate at the same time. There is also a big question of ambiguity. And I would link that to something called the cosmological constant. And you don't know what is operating, but something is operating there. And ambiguity, to me, is very uncomfortable in my life, and I have it. Moral ambiguity. It is constantly there. And, just as an example, this is one that recently came to me. It was something I read in an editorial by a woman who was talking about the war in Iraq. And she said, "Save a man from drowning, you are responsible to him for life." A very famous Chinese saying, she said. And that means because we went into Iraq, we should stay there until things were solved. You know, maybe even 100 years. So, there was another one that I came across, and it's "saving fish from drowning." And it's what Buddhist fishermen say, because they're not supposed to kill anything. And they also have to make a living, and people need to be fed. So their way of rationalizing that is they are saving the fish from drowning, and unfortunately, in the process the fish die. Now, what's encapsulated in both these drowning metaphors -- actually, one of them is my mother's interpretation, and it is a famous Chinese saying, because she said it to me: "save a man from drowning, you are responsible to him for life." And it was a warning -- don't get involved in other people's business, or you're going to get stuck. OK. I think if somebody really was drowning, she'd save them. But, both of these sayings -- saving a fish from drowning, or saving a man from drowning -- to me they had to do with intentions. And all of us in life, when we see a situation, we have a response. And then we have intentions. There's an ambiguity of what that should be that we should do, and then we do something. And the results of that may not match what our intentions had been. Maybe things go wrong. And so, after that, what are our responsibilities? What are we supposed to do? Do we stay in for life, or do we do something else and justify and say, well, my intentions were good, and therefore I cannot be held responsible for all of it? That is the ambiguity in my life that really disturbed me, and led me to write a book called "Saving Fish From Drowning." I saw examples of that. Once I identified this question, it was all over the place. I got these hints everywhere. And then, in a way, I knew that they had always been there. And then writing, that's what happens. I get these hints, these clues, and I realize that they've been obvious, and yet they have not been. And what I need, in effect, is a focus. And when I have the question, it is a focus. And all these things that seem to be flotsam and jetsam in life actually go through that question, and what happens is those particular things become relevant. And it seems like it's happening all the time. You think there's a sort of coincidence going on, a serendipity, in which you're getting all this help from the universe. And it may also be explained that now you have a focus. And you are noticing it more often. But you apply this. You begin to look at things having to do with your tensions. Your brother, who's fallen in trouble, do you take care of him? Why or why not? It may be something that is perhaps more serious -- as I said, human rights in Burma. I was thinking that I shouldn't go because somebody said, if I did, it would show that I approved of the military regime there. And then, after a while, I had to ask myself, "Why do we take on knowledge, why do we take on assumptions that other people have given us?" And it was the same thing that I felt when I was growing up, and was hearing these rules of moral conduct from my father, who was a Baptist minister. So I decided that I would go to Burma for my own intentions, and still didn't know that if I went there, what the result of that would be, if I wrote a book -- and I just would have to face that later, when the time came. We are all concerned with things that we see in the world that we are aware of. We come to this point and say, what do I as an individual do? Not all of us can go to Africa, or work at hospitals, so what do we do, if we have this moral response, this feeling? Also, I think one of the biggest things we are all looking at, and we talked about today, is genocide. This leads to this question. When I look at all these things that are morally ambiguous and uncomfortable, and I consider what my intentions should be, I realize it goes back to this identity question that I had when I was a child -- and why am I here, and what is the meaning of my life, and what is my place in the universe? It seems so obvious, and yet it is not. We all hate moral ambiguity in some sense, and yet it is also absolutely necessary. In writing a story, it is the place where I begin. Sometimes I get help from the universe, it seems. My mother would say it was the ghost of my grandmother from the very first book, because it seemed I knew things I was not supposed to know. Instead of writing that the grandmother died accidentally, from an overdose of opium, while having too much of a good time, I actually put down in the story that the woman killed herself, and that actually was the way it happened. And my mother decided that that information must have come from my grandmother. There are also things, quite uncanny, which bring me information that will help me in the writing of the book. In this case, I was writing a story that included some kind of detail, period of history, a certain location. And I needed to find something historically that would match that. And I took down this book, and I -- first page that I flipped it to was exactly the setting, and the time period, and the kind of character I needed -- was the Taiping rebellion, happening in the area near Guilin, outside of that, and a character who thought he was the son of God. You wonder, are these things random chance? Well, what is random? What is chance? What is luck? What are things that you get from the universe that you can't really explain? And that goes into the story, too. These are the things I constantly think about from day to day. Especially when good things happen, and, in particular, when bad things happen. But I do think there's a kind of serendipity, and I do want to know what those elements are, so I can thank them, and also try to find them in my life. Because, again, I think that when I am aware of them, more of them happen. Another chance encounter is when I went to a place -- I just was with some friends, and we drove randomly to a different place, and we ended up in this non-tourist location, a beautiful village, pristine. And we walked three valleys beyond, and the third valley, there was something quite mysterious and ominous, a discomfort I felt. And then I knew that had to be [the] setting of my book. And in writing one of the scenes, it happened in that third valley. For some reason I wrote about cairns -- stacks of rocks -- that a man was building. And I didn't know exactly why I had it, but it was so vivid. I got stuck, and a friend, when she asked if I would go for a walk with her dogs, that I said, sure. And about 45 minutes later, walking along the beach, I came across this. And it was a man, a Chinese man, and he was stacking these things, not with glue, not with anything. And I asked him, "How is it possible to do this?" And he said, "Well, I guess with everything in life, there's a place of balance." And this was exactly the meaning of my story at that point. I had so many examples -- I have so many instances like this, when I'm writing a story, and I cannot explain it. Is it because I had the filter that I have such a strong coincidence in writing about these things? Or is it a kind of serendipity that we cannot explain, like the cosmological constant? A big thing that I also think about is accidents. And as I said, my mother did not believe in randomness. What is the nature of accidents? And how are we going to assign what the responsibility and the causes are, outside of a court of law? I was able to see that in a firsthand way, when I went to beautiful Dong village, in Guizhou, the poorest province of China. And I saw this beautiful place. I knew I wanted to come back. And I had a chance to do that, when National Geographic asked me if I wanted to write anything about China. And I said yes, about this village of singing people, singing minority. And they agreed, and between the time I saw this place and the next time I went, there was a terrible accident. A man, an old man, fell asleep, and his quilt dropped in a pan of fire that kept him warm. 60 homes were destroyed, and 40 were damaged. Responsibility was assigned to the family. The man's sons were banished to live three kilometers away, in a cowshed. And, of course, as Westerners, we say, "Well, it was an accident. That's not fair. It's the son, not the father." When I go on a story, I have to let go of those kinds of beliefs. It takes a while, but I have to let go of them and just go there, and be there. And so I was there on three occasions, different seasons. And I began to sense something different about the history, and what had happened before, and the nature of life in a very poor village, and what you find as your joys, and your rituals, your traditions, your links with other families. And I saw how this had a kind of justice, in its responsibility. I was able to find out also about the ceremony that they were using, a ceremony they hadn't used in about 29 years. And it was to send some men -- a Feng Shui master sent men down to the underworld on ghost horses. Now you, as Westerners, and I, as Westerners, would say well, that's superstition. But after being there for a while, and seeing the amazing things that happened, you begin to wonder whose beliefs are those that are in operation in the world, determining how things happen. So I remained with them, and the more I wrote that story, the more I got into those beliefs, and I think that's important for me -- to take on the beliefs, because that is where the story is real, and that is where I'm gonna find the answers to how I feel about certain questions that I have in life. Years go by, of course, and the writing, it doesn't happen instantly, as I'm trying to convey it to you here at TED. The book comes and it goes. When it arrives, it is no longer my book. It is in the hands of readers, and they interpret it differently. But I go back to this question of, how do I create something out of nothing? And how do I create my own life? And I think it is by questioning, and saying to myself that there are no absolute truths. I believe in specifics, the specifics of story, and the past, the specifics of that past, and what is happening in the story at that point. I also believe that in thinking about things -- my thinking about luck, and fate, and coincidences and accidents, God's will, and the synchrony of mysterious forces -- I will come to some notion of what that is, how we create. I have to think of my role. Where I am in the universe, and did somebody intend for me to be that way, or is it just something I came up with? And I also can find that by imagining fully, and becoming what is imagined -- and yet is in that real world, the fictional world. And that is how I find particles of truth, not the absolute truth, or the whole truth. And they have to be in all possibilities, including those I never considered before. So, there are never complete answers. Or rather, if there is an answer, it is to remind myself that there is uncertainty in everything, and that is good, because then I will discover something new. And if there is a partial answer, a more complete answer from me, it is to simply imagine. And to imagine is to put myself in that story, until there was only -- there is a transparency between me and the story that I am creating. And that's how I've discovered that if I feel what is in the story -- in one story -- then I come the closest, I think, to knowing what compassion is, to feeling that compassion. Because for everything, in that question of how things happen, it has to do with the feeling. I have to become the story in order to understand a lot of that. We've come to the end of the talk, and I will reveal what is in the bag, and it is the muse, and it is the things that transform in our lives, that are wonderful and stay with us. There she is. Thank you very much! (Applause)
Chris Anderson: We're having a debate. The debate is over the proposition: "What the world needs now is nuclear energy." True or false? And before we have the debate, I'd like to actually take a show of hands -- on balance, right now, are you for or against this? So those who are "yes," raise your hand. "For." Okay, hands down. Those who are against, raise your hands. Okay, I'm reading that at about 75 to 25 in favor at the start. Which means we're going to take a vote at the end and see how that shifts, if at all. So here's the format: They're going to have six minutes each, and then after one little, quick exchange between them, I want two people on each side of this debate in the audience to have 30 seconds to make one short, crisp, pungent, powerful point. So, in favor of the proposition, possibly shockingly, is one of, truly, the founders of the environmental movement, a long-standing TEDster, the founder of the Whole Earth Catalog, someone we all know and love, Stewart Brand. Stewart Brand: Whoa. (Applause) The saying is that with climate, those who know the most are the most worried. With nuclear, those who know the most are the least worried. A classic example is James Hansen, a NASA climatologist pushing for 350 parts per million carbon dioxide in the atmosphere. He came out with a wonderful book recently called "Storms of My Grandchildren." And Hansen is hard over for nuclear power, as are most climatologists who are engaging this issue seriously. This is the design situation: a planet that is facing climate change and is now half urban. Look at the client base for this. Five out of six of us live in the developing world. We are moving to cities. We are moving up in the world. And we are educating our kids, having fewer kids, basically good news all around. But we move to cities, toward the bright lights, and one of the things that is there that we want, besides jobs, is electricity. And if it isn't easily gotten, we'll go ahead and steal it. This is one of the most desired things by poor people all over the world, in the cities and in the countryside. Electricity for cities, at its best, is what's called baseload electricity. That's where it is on all the time. And so far there are only three major sources of that -- coal and gas, hydro-electric, which in most places is maxed-out -- and nuclear. I would love to have something in the fourth place here, but in terms of constant, clean, scalable energy, [solar] and wind and the other renewables aren't there yet because they're inconstant. Nuclear is and has been for 40 years. Now, from an environmental standpoint, the main thing you want to look at is what happens to the waste from nuclear and from coal, the two major sources of electricity. If all of your electricity in your lifetime came from nuclear, the waste from that lifetime of electricity would go in a Coke can -- a pretty heavy Coke can, about two pounds. But one day of coal adds up to one hell of a lot of carbon dioxide in a normal one-gigawatt coal-fired plant. Then what happens to the waste? The nuclear waste typically goes into a dry cask storage out back of the parking lot at the reactor site because most places don't have underground storage yet. It's just as well, because it can stay where it is. While the carbon dioxide, vast quantities of it, gigatons, goes into the atmosphere where we can't get it back -- yet -- and where it is causing the problems that we're most concerned about. So when you add up the greenhouse gases in the lifetime of these various energy sources, nuclear is down there with wind and hydro, below solar and way below, obviously, all the fossil fuels. Wind is wonderful; I love wind. I love being around these big wind generators. But one of the things we're discovering is that wind, like solar, is an actually relatively dilute source of energy. And so it takes a very large footprint on the land, a very large footprint in terms of materials, five to 10 times what you'd use for nuclear, and typically to get one gigawatt of electricity is on the order of 250 square miles of wind farm. In places like Denmark and Germany, they've maxed out on wind already. They've run out of good sites. The power lines are getting overloaded. And you peak out. Likewise, with solar, especially here in California, we're discovering that the 80 solar farm schemes that are going forward want to basically bulldoze 1,000 square miles of southern California desert. Well, as an environmentalist, we would rather that didn't happen. It's okay on frapped-out agricultural land. Solar's wonderful on rooftops. But out in the landscape, one gigawatt is on the order of 50 square miles of bulldozed desert. When you add all these things up -- Saul Griffith did the numbers and figured out what would it take to get 13 clean terawatts of energy from wind, solar and biofuels, and that area would be roughly the size of the United States, an area he refers to as "Renewistan." A guy who's added it up all this very well is David Mackay, a physicist in England, and in his wonderful book, "Sustainable Energy," among other things, he says, "I'm not trying to be pro-nuclear. I'm just pro-arithmetic." (Laughter) In terms of weapons, the best disarmament tool so far is nuclear energy. We have been taking down the Russian warheads, turning it into electricity. Ten percent of American electricity comes from decommissioned warheads. We haven't even started the American stockpile. I think of most interest to a TED audience would be the new generation of reactors that are very small, down around 10 to 125 megawatts. This is one from Toshiba. Here's one the Russians are already building that floats on a barge. And that would be very interesting in the developing world. Typically, these things are put in the ground. They're referred to as nuclear batteries. They're incredibly safe, weapons proliferation-proof and all the rest of it. Here is a commercial version from New Mexico called the Hyperion, and another one from Oregon called NuScale. Babcock & Wilcox that make nuclear reactors, here's an integral fast reactor. Thorium reactor that Nathan Myhrvold's involved in. The governments of the world are going to have to decide that coals need to be made expensive, and these will go ahead. And here's the future. (Applause) CA: Okay. Okay. (Applause) So arguing against, a man who's been at the nitty, gritty heart of the energy debate and the climate change debate for years. In 2000, he discovered that soot was probably the second leading cause of global warming, after CO2. His team have been making detailed calculations of the relative impacts of different energy sources. His first time at TED, possibly a disadvantage -- we shall see -- from Stanford, Professor Mark Jacobson. Good luck. Mark Jacobson: Thank you. (Applause) So my premise here is that nuclear energy puts out more carbon dioxide, puts out more air pollutants, enhances mortality more and takes longer to put up than real renewable energy systems, namely wind, solar, geothermal power, hydro-tidal wave power. And it also enhances nuclear weapons proliferation. So let's start just by looking at the CO2 emissions from the life cycle. CO2e emissions are equivalent emissions of all the greenhouse gases and particles that cause warming and converted to CO2. And if you look, wind and concentrated solar have the lowest CO2 emissions, if you look at the graph. Nuclear -- there are two bars here. One is a low estimate, and one is a high estimate. The low estimate is the nuclear energy industry estimate of nuclear. The high is the average of 103 scientific, peer-reviewed studies. And this is just the CO2 from the life cycle. If we look at the delays, it takes between 10 and 19 years to put up a nuclear power plant from planning to operation. This includes about three and a half to six years for a site permit. and another two and a half to four years for a construction permit and issue, and then four to nine years for actual construction. And in China, right now, they're putting up five gigawatts of nuclear. And the average, just for the construction time of these, is 7.1 years on top of any planning times. While you're waiting around for your nuclear, you have to run the regular electric power grid, which is mostly coal in the United States and around the world. And the chart here shows the difference between the emissions from the regular grid, resulting if you use nuclear, or anything else, versus wind, CSP or photovoltaics. Wind takes about two to five years on average, same as concentrated solar and photovoltaics. So the difference is the opportunity cost of using nuclear versus wind, or something else. So if you add these two together, alone, you can see a separation that nuclear puts out at least nine to 17 times more CO2 equivalent emissions than wind energy. And this doesn't even account for the footprint on the ground. If you look at the air pollution health effects, this is the number of deaths per year in 2020 just from vehicle exhaust. Let's say we converted all the vehicles in the United States to battery electric vehicles, hydrogen fuel cell vehicles or flex fuel vehicles run on E85. Well, right now in the United States, 50 to 100,000 people die per year from air pollution, and vehicles are about 25,000 of those. In 2020, the number will go down to 15,000 due to improvements. And so, on the right, you see gasoline emissions, the death rates of 2020. If you go to corn or cellulosic ethanol, you'd actually increase the death rate slightly. If you go to nuclear, you do get a big reduction, but it's not as much as with wind and concentrated solar. Now if you consider the fact that nuclear weapons proliferation is associated with nuclear energy proliferation, because we know for example, India and Pakistan developed nuclear weapons secretly by enriching uranium in nuclear energy facilities. North Korea did that to some extent. Iran is doing that right now. And Venezuela would be doing it if they started with their nuclear energy facilities. If you do a large scale expansion of nuclear energy across the world, and as a result there was just one nuclear bomb created that was used to destroy a city such as Mumbai or some other big city, megacity, the additional death rates due to this averaged over 30 years and then scaled to the population of the U.S. would be this. So, do we need this? The next thing is: What about the footprint? Stewart mentioned the footprint. Actually, the footprint on the ground for wind is by far the smallest of any energy source in the world. That, because the footprint, as you can see, is just the pole touching the ground. And you can power the entire U.S. vehicle fleet with 73,000 to 145,000 five-megawatt wind turbines. That would take between one and three square kilometers of footprint on the ground, entirely. The spacing is something else. That's the footprint that is always being confused. People confuse footprint with spacing. As you can see from these pictures, the spacing between can be used for multiple purposes including agricultural land, range land or open space. Over the ocean, it's not even land. Now if we look at nuclear -- (Laughter) With nuclear, what do we have? We have facilities around there. You also have a buffer zone that's 17 square kilometers. And you have the uranium mining that you have to deal with. Now if we go to the area, lots is worse than nuclear or wind. For example, cellulosic ethanol, to power the entire U.S. vehicle fleet, this is how much land you would need. That's cellulosic, second generation biofuels from prairie grass. Here's corn ethanol. It's smaller. This is based on ranges from data, but if you look at nuclear, it would be the size of Rhode Island to power the U.S. vehicle fleet. For wind, there's a larger area, but much smaller footprint. And of course, with wind, you could put it all over the East Coast, offshore theoretically, or you can split it up. And now, if you go back to looking at geothermal, it's even smaller than both, and solar is slightly larger than the nuclear spacing, but it's still pretty small. And this is to power the entire U.S. vehicle fleet. To power the entire world with 50 percent wind, you would need about one percent of world land. Matching the reliability, base load is actually irrelevant. We want to match the hour-by-hour power supply. You can do that by combining renewables. This is from real data in California, looking at wind data and solar data. And it considers just using existing hydro to match the hour-by-hour power demand. Here are the world wind resources. There's five to 10 times more wind available worldwide than we need for all the world. So then here's the final ranking. And one last slide I just want to show. This is the choice: You can either have wind or nuclear. If you use wind, you guarantee ice will last. Nuclear, the time lag alone will allow the Arctic to melt and other places to melt more. And we can guarantee a clean, blue sky or an uncertain future with nuclear power. (Applause) CA: All right. So while they're having their comebacks on each other -- and yours is slightly short because you slightly overran -- I need two people from either side. So if you're for this, if you're for nuclear power, put up two hands. If you're against, put up one. And I want two of each for the mics. Now then, you guys have -- you have a minute comeback on him to pick up a point he said, challenge it, whatever. SB: I think a point of difference we're having, Mark, has to do with weapons and energy. These diagrams that show that nuclear is somehow putting out a lot of greenhouse gases -- a lot of those studies include, "Well of course war will be inevitable and therefore we'll have cities burning and stuff like that," which is kind of finessing it a little bit, I think. The reality is that there's, what, 21 nations that have nuclear power? Of those, seven have nuclear weapons. In every case, they got the weapons before they got the nuclear power. There are two nations, North Korea and Israel, that have nuclear weapons and don't have nuclear power at all. The places that we would most like to have really clean energy occur are China, India, Europe, North America, all of which have sorted out their situation in relation to nuclear weapons. So that leaves a couple of places like Iran, maybe Venezuela, that you would like to have very close surveillance of anything that goes on with fissile stuff. Pushing ahead with nuclear power will mean we really know where all of the fissile material is, and we can move toward zero weapons left, once we know all that. CA: Mark, 30 seconds, either on that or on anything Stewart said. MJ: Well we know India and Pakistan had nuclear energy first, and then they developed nuclear weapons secretly in the factories. So the other thing is, we don't need nuclear energy. There's plenty of solar and wind. You can make it reliable, as I showed with that diagram. That's from real data. And this is an ongoing research. This is not rocket science. Solving the world's problems can be done, if you really put your mind to it and use clean, renewable energy. There's absolutely no need for nuclear power. (Applause) CA: We need someone for. Rod Beckstrom: Thank you Chris. I'm Rod Beckstrom, CEO of ICANN. I've been involved in global warming policy since 1994, when I joined the board of Environmental Defense Fund that was one of the crafters of the Kyoto Protocol. And I want to support Stewart Brand's position. I've come around in the last 10 years. I used to be against nuclear power. I'm now supporting Stewart's position, softly, from a risk-management standpoint, agreeing that the risks of overheating the planet outweigh the risk of nuclear incident, which certainly is possible and is a very real problem. However, I think there may be a win-win solution here where both parties can win this debate, and that is, we face a situation where it's carbon caps on this planet or die. And in the United States Senate, we need bipartisan support -- only one or two votes are needed -- to move global warming through the Senate, and this room can help. So if we get that through, then Mark will solve these problems. Thanks Chris. CA: Thank you Rod Beckstrom. Against. David Fanton: Hi, I'm David Fanton. I just want to say a couple quick things. The first is: be aware of the propaganda. The propaganda from the industry has been very, very strong. And we have not had the other side of the argument fully aired so that people can draw their own conclusions. Be very aware of the propaganda. Secondly, think about this. If we build all these nuclear power plants, all that waste is going to be on hundreds, if not thousands, of trucks and trains, moving through this country every day. Tell me they're not going to have accidents. Tell me that those accidents aren't going to put material into the environment that is poisonous for hundreds of thousands of years. And then tell me that each and every one of those trucks and trains isn't a potential terrorist target. CA: Thank you. For. Anyone else for? Go. Alex: Hi, I'm Alex. I just wanted to say, I'm, first of all, renewable energy's biggest fan. I've got solar PV on my roof. I've got a hydro conversion at a watermill that I own. And I'm, you know, very much "pro" that kind of stuff. However, there's a basic arithmetic problem here. The capability of the sun shining, the wind blowing and the rain falling, simply isn't enough to add up. So if we want to keep the lights on, we actually need a solution which is going to keep generating all of the time. I campaigned against nuclear weapons in the '80s, and I continue to do so now. But we've got an opportunity to recycle them into something more useful that enables us to get energy all of the time. And, ultimately, the arithmetic problem isn't going to go away. We're not going to get enough energy from renewables alone. We need a solution that generates all of the time. If we're going to keep the lights on, nuclear is that solution. CA: Thank you. Anyone else against? Man: The last person who was in favor made the premise that we don't have enough alternative renewable resources. And our "against" proponent up here made it very clear that we actually do. And so the fallacy that we need this resource and we can actually make it in a time frame that is meaningful is not possible. I will also add one other thing. Ray Kurzweil and all the other talks -- we know that the stick is going up exponentially. So you can't look at state-of-the-art technologies in renewables and say, "That's all we have." Because five years from now, it will blow you away what we'll actually have as alternatives to this horrible, disastrous nuclear power. CA: Point well made. Thank you. (Applause) So each of you has really just a couple sentences -- 30 seconds each to sum up. Your final pitch, Stewart. SB: I loved your "It all balances out" chart that you had there. It was a sunny day and a windy night. And just now in England they had a cold spell. All of the wind in the entire country shut down for a week. None of those things were stirring. And as usual, they had to buy nuclear power from France. Two gigawatts comes through the Chunnel. This keeps happening. I used to worry about the 10,000 year factor. And the fact is, we're going to use the nuclear waste we have for fuel in the fourth generation of reactors that are coming along. And especially the small reactors need to go forward. I heard from Nathan Myhrvold -- and I think here's the action point -- it'll take an act of Congress to make the Nuclear Regulatory Commission start moving quickly on these small reactors, which we need very much, here and in the world. (Applause) MJ: So we've analyzed the hour-by-hour power demand and supply, looking at solar, wind, using data for California. And you can match that demand, hour-by-hour, for the whole year almost. Now, with regard to the resources, we've developed the first wind map of the world, from data alone, at 80 meters. We know what the wind resources are. You can cover 15 percent. Fifteen percent of the entire U.S. has wind at fast enough speeds to be cost-competitive. And there's much more solar than there is wind. There's plenty of resource. You can make it reliable. CA: Okay. So, thank you, Mark. (Applause) So if you were in Palm Springs ... (Laughter) (Applause) Shameless. Shameless. Shameless. (Applause) So, people of the TED community, I put it to you that what the world needs now is nuclear energy. All those in favor, raise your hands. (Shouts) And all those against. Ooooh. Now that is -- my take on that ... Just put up ... Hands up, people who changed their minds during the debate, who voted differently. Those of you who changed your mind in favor of "for" put your hands up. Okay. So here's the read on it. Both people won supporters, but on my count, the mood of the TED community shifted from about 75 to 25 to about 65 to 35 in favor, in favor. You both won. I congratulate both of you. Thank you for that. (Applause)
What I want to talk about is, as background, is the idea that cars are art. This is actually quite meaningful to me, because car designers tend to be a little bit low on the totem pole -- we don't do coffee table books with just one lamp inside of it -- and cars are thought so much as a product that it's a little bit difficult to get into the aesthetic side under the same sort of terminology that one would discuss art. And so cars, as art, brings it into an emotional plane -- if you accept that -- that you have to deal with on the same level you would with art with a capital A. Now at this point you're going to see a picture of Michelangelo. This is completely different than automobiles. Automobiles are self-moving things, right? Elevators are automobiles. And they're not very emotional; they solve a purpose; and certainly automobiles have been around for 100 years and have made our lives functionally a lot better in many ways; they've also been a real pain in the ass, because automobiles are really the thing we have to solve. We have to solve the pollution, we have to solve the congestion -- but that's not what interests me in this speech. What interests me in this speech is cars. Automobiles may be what you use, but cars are what we are, in many ways. And as long as we can solve the problems of automobiles, and I believe we can, with fuel cells or hydrogen, like BMW is really hip on, and lots of other things, then I think we can look past that and try and understand why this hook is in many of us -- of this car-y-ness -- and what that means, what we can learn from it. That's what I want to get to. Cars are not a suit of clothes; cars are an avatar. Cars are an expansion of yourself: they take your thoughts, your ideas, your emotions, and they multiply it -- your anger, whatever. It's an avatar. It's a super-waldo that you happen to be inside of, and if you feel sexy, the car is sexy. And if you're full of road rage, you've got a "Chevy: Like a Rock," right? Cars are a sculpture -- did you know this? That every car you see out there is sculpted by hand. Many people think, "Well, it's computers, and it's done by machines and stuff like that." Well, they reproduce it, but the originals are all done by hand. It's done by men and women who believe a lot in their craft. And they put that same kind of tension into the sculpting of a car that you do in a great sculpture that you would go and look at in a museum. That tension between the need to express, the need to discover, then you put something new into it, and at the same time you have bounds of craftsmanship. Rules that say, this is how you handle surfaces; this is what control is all about; this is how you show you're a master of your craft. And that tension, that discovery, that push for something new -- and at the same time, that sense of obligation to the regards of craftsmanship -- that's as strong in cars as it is in anything. We work in clay, which hasn't changed much since Michelangelo started screwing around with it, and there's a very interesting analogy to that too. Real quickly -- Michelangelo once said he's there to "discover the figure within," OK? There we go, the automobile. That was 100 years right there -- did you catch that? Between that one there, and that one there, it changed a lot didn't it? OK, it's not marketing; there's a very interesting car concept here, but the marketing part is not what I want to talk about here. I want to talk about this. Why it means you have to wash a car, what is it, that sensuality you have to touch about it? That's the sculpture that goes into it. That sensuality. And it's done by men and women working just like this, making cars. Now this little quote about sculpture from Henry Moore, I believe that that "pressure within" that Moore's talking about -- at least when it comes to cars -- comes right back to this idea of the mean. It's that will to live, that need to survive, to express itself, that comes in a car, and takes over people like me. And we tell other people, "Do this, do this, do this," until this thing comes alive. We are completely infected. And beauty can be the result of this infectiousness; it's quite wonderful. This sculpture is, of course, at the heart of all of it, and it's really what puts the craftsmanship into our cars. And it's not a whole lot different, really, when they're working like this, or when somebody works like this. It's that same kind of commitment, that same kind of beauty. Now, now I get to the point. I want to talk about cars as art. Art, in the Platonic sense, is truth; it's beauty, and love. Now this is really where designers in car business diverge from the engineers. We don't really have a problem talking about love. We don't have a problem talking about truth or beauty in that sense. That's what we're searching for -- when we're working our craft, we are really trying to find that truth out there. We're not trying to find vanity and beauty. We're trying to find the beauty in the truth. However, engineers tend to look at things a little bit more Newtonian, instead of this quantum approach. We're dealing with irrationalisms, and we're dealing with paradoxes that we admit exist, and the engineers tend to look things a little bit more like two and two is four, and if you get 4.0 it's better, and 4.000 is even better. And that sometimes leads to bit of a divergence in why we're doing what we're doing. We've pretty much accepted the fact, though, that we are the women in the organization at BMW -- BMW is a very manly type business, -- men, men, men; it's engineers. And we're kind of the female side to that. That's OK, that's cool. You go off and be manly. We're going to be a little bit more female. Because what we're interested in is finding form that's more than just a function. We're interested in finding beauty that's more than just an aesthetic; it's really a truth. And I think this idea of soul, as being at the heart of great cars, is very applicable. You all know it. You know a car when you've seen it, with soul. You know how strong this is. Well, this experience of love, and the experience of design, to me, are interchangeable. And now I'm coming to my story. I discovered something about love and design through a project called Deep Blue. And first of all, you have to go with me for a second, and say, you know, you could take the word "love" out of a lot of things in our society, put the word "design" in, and it still works, like this quote here, you know. It kind of works, you know? You can understand that. It works in truisms. "All is fair in design and war." Certainly we live in a competitive society. I think this one here, there's a pop song that really describes Philippe Starck for me, you know, this is like you know, this is like puppy love, you know, this is cool right? Toothbrush, cool. It really only gets serious when you look at something like this. OK? (Laughter) This is one substitution that I believe all of us, in design management, are guilty of. And this idea that there is more to love, more to design, when it gets down to your neighbor, your other, it can be physical like this, and maybe in the future it will be. But right now it's in dealing with our own people, our own teams who are doing the creating. So, to my story. The idea of people-work is what we work with here, and I have to make a bond with my designers when we're creating BMWs. We have to have a shared intimacy, a shared vision -- that means we have to work as one family; we have to understand ourselves that way. There's good times; there's interesting times; and there's some stress times too. You want to do cars, you've got to go outside. You've got to do cars in the rain; you've got to do cars in the snow. That's, by the way, is a presentation we made to our board of directors. We haul their butts out in the snow, too. You want to know cars outside? Well, you've got to stand outside to do this. And because these are artists, they have very artistic temperaments. All right? Now one thing about art is, art is discovery, and art is discovering yourself through your art. Right? And one thing about cars is we're all a little bit like Pygmalion, we are completely in love with our own creations. This is one of my favorite paintings, it really describes our relationship with cars. This is sick beyond belief. (Laughter) But because of this, the intimacy with which we work together as a team takes on a new dimension, a new meaning. We have a shared center; we have a shared focus -- that car stays at the middle of all our relationships. And it's my job, in the competitive process, to narrow this down. I heard today about Joseph's death genes that have to go in and kill cell reproduction. You know, that's what I have to do sometimes. We start out with 10 cars; we narrow it down to five cars, down to three cars, down to two cars, down to one car, and I'm in the middle of that killing, basically. Someone's love, someone's baby. This is very difficult, and you have to have a bond with your team that permits you to do this, because their life is wrapped up in that too. They've got that gene infected in them as well, and they want that to live, more than anything else. Well, this project, Deep Blue, put me in contact with my team in a way that I never expected, and I want to pass it on to you, because I want you to reflect on this, perhaps in your own relationships. We wanted to a do a car which was a complete leap of faith for BMW. We wanted to do a team which was so removed from the way we'd done it, that I only had a phone number that connected me to them. So, what we did was: instead of having a staff of artists that are just your wrist, we decided to free up a team of creative designers and engineers to find out what's the successor to the SUV phenomenon in America. This is 1996 we did this project. And so we sent them off with this team name, Deep Blue. Now many people know Deep Blue from IBM -- we actually stole it from them because we figured if anybody read our faxes they'd think we're talking about computers. It turned out it was quite clever because Deep Blue, in a company like BMW, has a hook -- "Deep Blue," wow, cool name. So people get wrapped up in it. And we took a team of designers, and we sent them off to America. And we gave them a budget, what we thought was a set of deliverables, a timetable, and nothing else. Like I said, I just had a phone number that connected me to them. And a group of engineers worked in Germany, and the idea was they would work separately on this problem of what's the successor to the SUV. They would come together, compare notes. Then they would work apart, come together, and they would produce together a monumental set of diverse opinions that didn't pollute each other's ideas -- but at the same time came together and resolved the problems. Hopefully, really understand the customer at its heart, where the customer is, live with them in America. So -- sent the team off, and actually something different happened. They went other places. (Laughter) They disappeared, quite honestly, and all I got was postcards. Now, I got some postcards of these guys in Las Vegas, and I got some postcards of these guys in the Grand Canyon, and I got these postcards of Niagara Falls, and pretty soon they're in New York, and I don't know where else. And I'm telling myself, "This is going to be a great car, they're doing research that I've never even thought about before." Right? And they decided that instead of, like, having a studio, and six or seven apartments, it was cheaper to rent Elizabeth Taylor's ex-house in Malibu. And -- at least they told me it was her house, I guess it was at one time, she had a party there or something. But anyway, this was the house, and they all lived there. Now this is 24/7 living, half-a-dozen people who'd left their -- some had left their wives behind and families behind, and they literally lived in this house for the entire six months the project was in America, but the first three months were the most intensive. And one of the young women in the project, she was a fantastic lady, she actually built her room in the bathroom. The bathroom was so big, she built the bed over the bathtub -- it's quite fascinating. On the other hand, I didn't know anything about this. OK? Nothing. This is all going on, and all I'm getting is postcards of these guys in Las Vegas, or whatever, saying, "Don't worry Chris, this is really going to be good." OK? So my concept of what a design studio was probably -- I wasn't up to speed on where these guys were. However, the engineers back in Munich had taken on this kind of Newtonian solution, and they were trying to find how many cup holders can dance on the head of a pin, and, you know, these really serious questions that are confronting the modern consumer. And one was hoping that these two teams would get together, and this collusion of incredible creativity, under these incredible surroundings, and these incredibly stressed-out engineers, would create some incredible solutions. Well, what I didn't know was, and what we found out was -- these guys, they can't even like talk to each other under those conditions. You get a divergence of Newtonian and quantum thinking at that point, you have a split in your dialog that is so deep, and so far, that they cannot bring this together at all. And so we had our first meeting, after three months, in Tiburon, which is just up the road from here -- you know Tiburon? And the idea was after the first three months of this independent research they would present it all to Dr. Goschel -- who is now my boss, and at that time he was co-mentor on the project -- and they would present their results. We would see where we were going, we would see the first indication of what could be the successive phenomenon to the SUV in America. And so I had these ideas in my head, that this is going to be great. I mean, I'm going to see so much work, it's so intense -- I know probably Las Vegas meant a lot about it, and I'm not really sure where the Grand Canyon came in either -- but somehow all this is going to come together, and I'm going to see some really great product. So we went to Tiburon, after three months, and the team had gotten together the week before, many days ahead of time. The engineers flew over, and designers got together with them, and they put their presentation together. Well, it turns out that the engineers hadn't done anything. And they hadn't done anything because -- kind of, like in car business, engineers are there to solve problems, and we were asking them to create a problem. And the engineers were waiting for the designers to say, "This is the problem that we've created, now help us solve it." And they couldn't talk about it. So what happened was, the engineers showed up with nothing. And the engineers told the designers, "If you go in with all your stuff, we'll walk out, we'll walk right out of the project." So I didn't know any of this, and we got a presentation that had an agenda, looked like this. There was a whole lot of dialog. We spent four hours being told all about vocabulary that needs to be built between engineers and designers. And here I'm expecting at any moment, "OK, they're going to turn the page, and I'm going to see the cars, I'm going to see the sketches, I'm going to see maybe some idea of where it's going." Dialog kept on going, with mental maps of words, and pretty soon it was becoming obvious that instead of being dazzled with brilliance, I was seriously being baffled with bullshit. And if you can imagine what this is like, to have these months of postcard indication of how great this team is working, and they're out there spending all this money, and they're learning, and they're doing all this stuff. I went fucking ballistic, right? I went nuts. You can probably remember Tiburon, it used to look like this. After four hours of this, I stood up, and I took this team apart. I screamed at them, I yelled at them, "What the hell are you doing? You're letting me down, you're my designers, you're supposed to be the creative ones, what the hell is going on around here?" It was probably one of my better tirades, I have some good ones, but this was probably one of my better ones. And I went into these people; how could they take BMW's money, how could they have a holiday for three months and produce nothing, nothing? Because of course they didn't tell us that they had three station wagons full of drawings, model concepts, pictures -- everything I wanted, they'd locked up in the cars, because they had shown solidarity with the engineers -- and they'd decided not to show me anything, in order to give the chance for problem solving a chance to start, because they hadn't realized, of course, that they couldn't do problem creating. So we went to lunch -- (Laughter) And I've got to tell you, this was one seriously quiet lunch. The engineers all sat at one end of the table, the designers and I sat at the other end of the table, really quiet. And I was just fucking furious, furious. OK? Probably because they had all the fun and I didn't, you know. That's what you get furious about right? And somebody asked me about Catherine, my wife, you know, did she fly out with me or something? I said, "No," and it triggered a set of thoughts about my wife. And I recalled that when Catherine and I were married, the priest gave a very nice sermon, and he said something very important. He said, "Love is not selfish," he said, "Love does not mean counting how many times I say, 'I love you.' It doesn't mean you had sex this many times this month, and it's two times less than last month, so that means you don't love me as much. Love is not selfish." And I thought about this, and I thought, "You know, I'm not showing love here. I'm seriously not showing love. I'm in the air, I'm in the air without trust. This cannot be. This cannot be that I'm expecting a certain number of sketches, and to me that's my quantification method for qualifying a team. This cannot be." So I told them this story. I said, "Guys, I'm thinking about something here, this isn't right. I can't have a relationship with you guys based on a premise that is a quantifiable one. Based on a dictate premise that says, 'I'm a boss, you do what I say, without trust.'" I said "This can't be." Actually, we all broke down into tears, to be quite honest about it, because they still could not tell me how much frustration they had built up inside of them, not being able to show me what I wanted, and merely having to ask me to trust them that it would come. And I think we felt much closer that day, we cut a lot of strings that didn't need to be there, and we forged the concept for what real team and creativity is all about. We put the car back at the center of our thoughts, and we put love, I think, truly back into the center of the process. By the way, that team went on to create six different concepts for the next model of what would be the proposal for the next generation after SUVs in America. One of those was the idea of a crossover coupes -- you see it downstairs, the X Coupe -- they had a lot of fun with that. It was the rendition of our motorcycle, the GS, as Carl Magnusson says, "brute-iful," as the idea of what could be a motorcycle, if you add two more wheels. And so, in conclusion, my lesson that I wanted to pass on to you, was this one here. I'm also going to steal a little quote out of "Little Prince." There's a lot to be said about trust and love, if you know that those two words are synonymous for design. I had a very, very meaningful relationship with my team that day, and it's stayed that way ever since. And I hope that you too find that there's more to design, and more towards the art of the design, than doing it yourself. It's true that the trust and the love, that makes it worthwhile. Thanks so much. (Applause)
America's public energy conversation boils down to this question: Would you rather die of A) oil wars, or B) climate change, or C) nuclear holocaust, or D) all of the above? Oh, I missed one: or E) none of the above? That's the one we're not normally offered. What if we could make energy do our work without working our undoing? Could we have fuel without fear? Could we reinvent fire? You see, fire made us human; fossil fuels made us modern. But now we need a new fire that makes us safe, secure, healthy and durable. Let's see how. Four-fifths of the world's energy still comes from burning each year four cubic miles of the rotted remains of primeval swamp goo. Those fossil fuels have built our civilization. They've created our wealth. They've enriched the lives of billions. But they also have rising costs to our security, economy, health and environment that are starting to erode, if not outweigh their benefits. So we need a new fire. And switching from the old fire to the new fire means changing two big stories about oil and electricity, each of which puts two-fifths of the fossil carbon in the air. But they're really quite distinct. Less than one percent of our electricity is made from oil -- although almost half is made from coal. Their uses are quite concentrated. Three-fourths of our oil fuel is transportation. Three-fourths of our electricity powers buildings. And the rest of both runs factories. So very efficient vehicles, buildings and factories save oil and coal, and also natural gas that can displace both of them. But today's energy system is not just inefficient, it is also disconnected, aging, dirty and insecure. So it needs refurbishment. By 2050 though, it could become efficient, connected and distributed with elegantly frugal autos, factories and buildings all relying on a modern, secure and resilient electricity system. We can eliminate our addiction to oil and coal by 2050 and use one-third less natural gas while switching to efficient use and renewable supply. This could cost, by 2050, five trillion dollars less in net present value, that is expressed as a lump sum today, than business as usual -- assuming that carbon emissions and all other hidden or external costs are worth zero -- a conservatively low estimate. Yet this cheaper energy system could support 158 percent bigger U.S. economy all without needing oil or coal, or for that matter nuclear energy. Moreover, this transition needs no new inventions and no acts of Congress and no new federal taxes, mandate subsidies or laws and running Washington gridlock. Let me say that again. I'm going to tell you how to get the United States completely off oil and coal, five trillion dollars cheaper with no act of Congress led by business for profit. In other words, we're going to use our most effective institutions -- private enterprise co-evolving with civil society and sped by military innovation to go around our least effective institutions. And whether you care most about profits and jobs and competitive advantage or national security, or environmental stewardship and climate protection and public health, reinventing fire makes sense and makes money. General Eisenhower reputedly said that enlarging the boundaries of a tough problem makes it soluble by encompassing more options and more synergies. So in reinventing fire, we integrated all four sectors that use energy -- transportation, buildings, industry and electricity -- and we integrated four kinds of innovation, not just technology and policy, but also design and business strategy. Those combinations yield very much more than the sum of the parts, especially in creating deeply disruptive business opportunities. Oil costs our economy two billion dollars a day, plus another four billion dollars a day in hidden economic and military costs, raising its total cost to over a sixth of GDP. Our mobility fuel goes three-fifths to automobiles. So let's start by making autos oil free. Two-thirds of the energy it takes to move a typical car is caused by its weight. And every unit of energy you save at the wheels, by taking out weight or drag, saves seven units in the tank, because you don't have to waste six units getting the energy to the wheels. Unfortunately, over the past quarter century, epidemic obesity has made our two-ton steel cars gain weight twice as fast as we have. But today, ultralight, ultrastrong materials, like carbon fiber composites, can make dramatic weight savings snowball and can make cars simpler and cheaper to build. Lighter and more slippery autos need less force to move them, so their engines get smaller. Indeed, that sort of vehicle fitness then makes electric propulsion affordable because the batteries or fuel cells also get smaller and lighter and cheaper. So sticker prices will ultimately fall to about the same as today, while the driving cost, even from the start, is very much lower. So these innovations together can transform automakers from wringing tiny savings out of Victorian engine and seal-stamping technologies to the steeply falling costs of three linked innovations that strongly reenforce each other -- namely ultralight materials, making them into structures and electric propulsion. The sales can grow and the prices fall even faster with temporary feebates, that is rebates for efficient new autos paid for by fees on inefficient ones. And just in the first two years the biggest of Europe's five feebate programs has tripled the speed of improving automotive efficiency. The resulting shift to electric autos is going to be as game-changing as shifting from typewriters to the gains in computers. Of course, computers and electronics are now America's biggest industry, while typewriter makers have vanished. So vehicle fitness opens a new automotive competitive strategy that can double the oil savings over the next 40 years, but then also make electrification affordable, and that displaces the rest of the oil. America could lead this next automotive revolution. Currently the leader is Germany. Last year, Volkswagen announced that by next year they'll be producing this carbon fiber plugin hybrid getting 230 miles a gallon. Also last year, BMW announced this carbon fiber electric car, they said that its carbon fiber is paid for by needing fewer batteries. And they said, "We do not intend to be a typewriter maker." Audi claimed it's going to beat them both by a year. Seven years ago, an even faster and cheaper American manufacturing technology was used to make this little carbon fiber test part, which doubles as a carbon cap. (Laughter) In one minute -- and you can tell from the sound how immensely stiff and strong it is. Don't worry about dropping it, it's tougher than titanium. Tom Friedman actually whacked it as hard as he could with a sledgehammer without even scuffing it. But such manufacturing techniques can scale to automotive speed and cost with aerospace performance. They can save four-fifths of the capital needed to make autos. They can save lives because this stuff can absorb up to 12 times as much crash energy per pound as steel. If we made all of our autos this way, it would save oil equivalent to finding one and a half Saudi Arabias, or half an OPEC, by drilling in the Detroit formation, a very prospective play. And all those mega-barrels under Detroit cost an average of 18 bucks a barrel. They are all-American, carbon-free and inexhaustible. The same physics and the same business logic also apply to big vehicles. In the five years ending with 2010, Walmart saved 60 percent of the fuel per ton-mile in its giant fleet of heavy trucks through better logistics and design. But just the technological savings in heavy trucks can get to two-thirds. And combined with triple to quintuple efficiency airplanes, now on the drawing board, can save close to a trillion dollars. Also today's military revolution in energy efficiency is going to speed up all of these civilian advances in much the same way that military R&D has given us the Internet, the Global Positioning System and the jet engine and microchip industries. As we design and build vehicles better, we can also use them smarter by harnessing four powerful techniques for eliminating needless driving. Instead of just seeing the travel grow, we can use innovative pricing, charging for road infrastructure by the mile, not by the gallon. We can use some smart IT to enhance transit and enable car sharing and ride sharing. We can allow smart and lucrative growth models that help people already be near where they want to be, so they don't need to go somewhere else. And we can use smart IT to make traffic free-flowing. Together, those things can give us the same or better access with 46 to 84 percent less driving, saving another 0.4 trillion dollars, plus 0.3 trillion dollars from using trucks more productively. So 40 years hence, when you add it all up, a far more mobile U.S. economy can use no oil. Saving or displacing barrels for 25 bucks rather than buying them for over a hundred, adds up to a $4 trillion net saving counting all the hidden costs at zero. So to get mobility without oil, to phase out the oil, we can get efficient and then switch fuels. Those 125 to 240 mile-per-gallon-equivalent autos can use any mixture of hydrogen fuel cells, electricity and advanced biofuels. The trucks and planes can realistically use hydrogen or advanced biofuels. The trucks could even use natural gas. But no vehicles will need oil. And the most biofuel we might need, just three million barrels a day, can be made two-thirds from waste without displacing any cropland and without harming soil or climate. Our team speeds up these kinds of oil savings by what we call "institutional acupuncture." We figure out where the business logic is congested and not flowing properly, we stick little needles in it to get it flowing, working with partners like Ford and Walmart and the Pentagon. And the long transition is already well under way. In fact, three years ago mainstream analysts were starting to see peak oil, not in supply, but in demand. And Deutsche Bank even said world oil use could peak around 2016. In other words, oil is getting uncompetitive even at low prices before it becomes unavailable even at high prices. But the electrified vehicles don't need to burden the electricity grid. Rather, when smart autos exchange electricity and information through smart buildings with smart grids, they're adding to the grid valuable flexibility and storage that help the grid integrate varying solar and wind power. So the electrified autos make the auto and electricity problems easier to solve together than separately. And they also converge the oil story with our second big story, saving electricity and then making it differently. And those twin revolutions in electricity will bring to that sector more numerous and profound and diverse disruptions than any other sector, because we've got 21st century technology and speed colliding head-on with 20th and 19th century institutions, rules and cultures. Changing how we make electricity gets easier if we need less of it. Most of it now is wasted and the technologies for saving it keep improving faster than we're installing them. So the unbought efficiency resource keeps getting ever bigger and cheaper. But as efficiency in buildings and industry starts to grow faster than the economy, America's electricity use could actually shrink, even with the little extra use required for those efficient electrified autos. And we can do this just by reasonably accelerating existing trends. Over the next 40 years, buildings, which use three-quarters of the electricity, can triple or quadruple their energy productivity, saving 1.4 trillion dollars, net present value, with a 33 percent internal rate of return or in English, the savings are worth four times what they cost. And industry can accelerate too, doubling its energy productivity with a 21 percent internal rate of return. The key is a disruptive innovation that we call integrative design that often makes very big energy savings cost less than small or no savings. That is, it can give you expanding returns, not diminishing returns. That is how our 2010 retrofit is saving over two-fifths of the energy in the Empire State Building -- remanufacturing those six and a half thousand windows on site into super windows that pass light, but reflect heat. plus better lights and office equipment and such cut the maximum cooling load by a third. And then renovating smaller chillers instead of adding bigger ones saved 17 million dollars of capital cost, which helped pay for the other improvements and reduce the payback to just three years. Integrative design can also increase energy savings in industry. Dow's billion-dollar efficiency investment has already returned nine billion dollars. But industry as a whole has another half-trillion dollars of energy still to save. For example, three-fifths of the world's electricity runs motors. Half of that runs pumps and fans. And those can all be made more efficient, and the motors that turn them can have their system efficiency roughly doubled by integrating 35 improvements, paying back in about a year. But first we ought to be capturing bigger, cheaper savings that are normally ignored and are not in the textbooks. For example, pumps, the biggest use of motors, move liquid through pipes. But a standard industrial pumping loop was redesigned to use at least 86 percent less energy, not by getting better pumps, but just by replacing long, thin, crooked pipes with fat, short, straight pipes. This is not about new technology, it's just rearranging our metal furniture. Of course, it also shrinks the pumping equipment and its capital costs. So what do such savings mean for the electricity that is three-fifths used in motors? Well, from the coal burned at the power plant through all these compounding losses, only a tenth of the fuel energy actually ends up coming out the pipe as flow. But now let's turn those compounding losses around backwards, and every unit of flow or friction that we save in the pipe saves 10 units of fuel cost, pollution and what Hunter Lovins calls "global weirding" back at the power plant. And of course, as you go back upstream, the components get smaller and therefore cheaper. Our team has lately found such snowballing energy savings in more than 30 billion dollars worth of industrial redesigns -- everything from data centers and chip fabs to mines and refineries. Typically our retrofit designs save about 30 to 60 percent of the energy and pay back in a few years, while the new facility designs save 40 to 90-odd percent with generally lower capital cost. Now needing less electricity would ease and speed the shift to new sources of electricity, chiefly renewables. China leads their explosive growth and their plummeting cost. In fact, these solar power module costs have just fallen off the bottom of the chart. And Germany now has more solar workers than America has steel workers. Already in about 20 states private installers will come put those cheap solar cells on your roof with no money down and beat your utility bill. Such unregulated products could ultimately add up to a virtual utility that bypasses your electric company just as your cellphone bypassed your wireline phone company. And this sort of thing gives utility executives the heebee-jeebees and it gives venture capitalists sweet dreams. Renewables are no longer a fringe activity. For each of the past four years half of the world's new generating capacity has been renewable, mainly lately in developing countries. In 2010, renewables other than big hydro, particularly wind and solar cells, got 151 billion dollars of private investment, and they actually surpassed the total installed capacity of nuclear power in the world by adding 60 billion watts in that one year. That happens to be the same amount of solar cell capacity that the world can now make every year -- a number that goes up 60 or 70 percent a year. In contrast, the net additions of nuclear capacity and coal capacity and the orders behind those keep fading because they cost too much and they have too much financial risk. In fact in this country, no new nuclear power plant has been able to raise any private construction capital, despite seven years of 100-plus percent subsidies. So how else could we replace the coal-fired power plants? Well efficiency and gas can displace them all at just below their operating cost and, combined with renewables, can displace them more than 23 times at less than their replacement cost. But we only need to replace them once. We're often told though that only coal and nuclear plants can keep the lights on, because they're 24/7, whereas wind and solar power are variable, and hence supposedly unreliable. Actually no generator is 24/7. They all break. And when a big plant goes down, you lose a thousand megawatts in milliseconds, often for weeks or months, often without warning. That is exactly why we've designed the grid to back up failed plants with working plants. And in exactly the same way, the grid can handle wind and solar power's forecastable variations. Hourly simulations show that largely or wholly renewable grids can deliver highly reliable power when they're forecasted, integrated and diversified by both type and location. And that's true both for continental areas like the U.S. or Europe and for smaller areas embedded within a larger grid. That is how, for example, four German states in 2010 were 43 to 52 percent wind powered. Portugal was 45 percent renewable powered, Denmark 36. And it's how all of Europe can shift to renewable electricity. In America, our aging, dirty and insecure power system has to be replaced anyway by 2050. And whatever we replace it with is going to cost about the same, about six trillion dollars at present value -- whether we buy more of what we've got or new nuclear and so-called clean coal, or renewables that are more or less centralized. But those four futures at the same cost differ profoundly in their risks, around national security, fuel, water, finance, technology, climate and health. For example, our over-centralized grid is very vulnerable to cascading and potentially economy-shattering blackouts caused by bad space weather or other natural disasters or a terrorist attack. But that blackout risk disappears, and all of the other risks are best managed, with distributed renewables organized into local micro-grids that normally interconnect, but can stand alone at need. That is, they can disconnect fractally and then reconnect seamlessly. That approach is exactly what the Pentagon is adopting for its own power supply. They think they need that; how about the rest of us that they're defending? We want our stuff to work too. At about the same cost as business as usual, this would maximize national security, customer choice, entrepreneurial opportunity and innovation. Together, efficient use and diverse dispersed renewable supply are starting to transform the whole electricity sector. Traditionally utilities build a lot of giant coal and nuclear plants and a bunch of big gas plants and maybe a little bit of efficiency renewables. And those utilities were rewarded, as they still are in 34 states, for selling you more electricity. However, especially where regulators are now instead rewarding cutting your bills, the investments are shifting radically toward efficiency, demand response, cogeneration, renewables and ways to knit them all together reliably with less transmission and little or no bulk electricity storage. So our energy future is not fate, but choice, and that choice is very flexible. In 1976, for example, government and industry insisted that the amount of energy needed to make a dollar of GDP could never go down. And I heretically suggested it could go down several-fold. Well that's what's actually happened so far. It's fallen by half. But with today's much better technologies, more mature delivery channels and integrative design, we can do far more and even cheaper. So to solve the energy problem, we just needed to enlarge it. And the results may at first seem incredible, but as Marshall McLuhan said, "Only puny secrets need protection. Big discoveries are protected by public incredulity." Now combine the electricity and oil revolutions, both driven by modern efficiency, and you get the really big story: reinventing fire, where business enabled and sped by smart policies in mindful markets can lead the United States completely off oil and coal by 2050, saving 5 trillion dollars, growing the economy 2.6-fold, strengthening out national security, oh, and by the way, by getting rid of the oil and coal, reducing the fossil carbon emissions by 82 to 86 percent. Now if you like any of those outcomes, you can support reinventing fire without needing to like all of them and without needing to agree about which of them is most important. So focusing on outcomes, not motives, can turn gridlock and conflict into a unifying solution to America's energy challenge. This also turns out to be the best way to cope with global challenges -- climate change, nuclear proliferation, energy insecurity, energy poverty -- all of which make us less safe. Now our team at RMI helps smart companies to get unstuck and speed this journey via six sectoral initiatives, with some more hatching. Of course there's still a lot of old thinking out there too. Former oil man Maurice Strong said, "Not all the fossils are in the fuel." But as Edgar Woolard, who used to chair Dupont, reminds us, "Companies hampered by old thinking won't be a problem because," he said," they simply won't be around long-term." I've described not just a once-in-a-civilization business opportunity, but one of the most profound transitions in the history of our species. We humans are inventing a new fire, not dug from below, but flowing from above; not scarce, but bountiful; not local, but everywhere; not transient, but permanent; not costly, but free. And but for a little transitional tail of natural gas and a bit of biofuel grown in ways that sustain and endure, this new fire is flameless. Efficiently used, it really can do our work without working our undoing. Each of you owns a piece of that $5 trillion prize. And our new book "Reinventing Fire" describes how you can capture it. So with the conversation just begun at ReinventingFire.com, let me invite you each to engage with us and with each other, with everyone around you, to help make the world richer, fairer, cooler and safer by together reinventing fire. Thank you. (Applause)
When you have 21 minutes to speak, two million years seems like a really long time. But evolutionarily, two million years is nothing. And yet in two million years, the human brain has nearly tripled in mass, going from the one-and-a-quarter pound brain of our ancestor here, Habilis, to the almost three-pound meatloaf that everybody here has between their ears. What is it about a big brain that nature was so eager for every one of us to have one? Well, it turns out when brains triple in size, they don't just get three times bigger; they gain new structures. And one of the main reasons our brain got so big is because it got a new part, called the "frontal lobe." Particularly, a part called the "pre-frontal cortex." What does a pre-frontal cortex do for you that should justify the entire architectural overhaul of the human skull in the blink of evolutionary time? It turns out the pre-frontal cortex does lots of things, but one of the most important things it does is an experience simulator. Pilots practice in flight simulators so that they don't make real mistakes in planes. Human beings have this marvelous adaptation that they can actually have experiences in their heads before they try them out in real life. This is a trick that none of our ancestors could do, and that no other animal can do quite like we can. It's a marvelous adaptation. It's up there with opposable thumbs and standing upright and language as one of the things that got our species out of the trees and into the shopping mall. (Laughter) All of you have done this. Ben and Jerry's doesn't have liver-and-onion ice cream, and it's not because they whipped some up, tried it and went, "Yuck." It's because, without leaving your armchair, you can simulate that flavor and say "yuck" before you make it. Let's see how your experience simulators are working. Let's just run a quick diagnostic before I proceed with the rest of the talk. Here's two different futures that I invite you to contemplate. You can try to simulate them and tell me which one you think you might prefer. One of them is winning the lottery. This is about 314 million dollars. And the other is becoming paraplegic. (Laughter) Just give it a moment of thought. You probably don't feel like you need a moment of thought. Interestingly, there are data on these two groups of people, data on how happy they are. And this is exactly what you expected, isn't it? But these aren't the data. I made these up! These are the data. You failed the pop quiz, and you're hardly five minutes into the lecture. Because the fact is that a year after losing the use of their legs, and a year after winning the lotto, lottery winners and paraplegics are equally happy with their lives. Don't feel too bad about failing the first pop quiz, because everybody fails all of the pop quizzes all of the time. The research that my laboratory has been doing, that economists and psychologists around the country have been doing, has revealed something really quite startling to us, something we call the "impact bias," which is the tendency for the simulator to work badly. For the simulator to make you believe that different outcomes are more different than in fact they really are. From field studies to laboratory studies, we see that winning or losing an election, gaining or losing a romantic partner, getting or not getting a promotion, passing or not passing a college test, on and on, have far less impact, less intensity and much less duration than people expect them to have. This almost floors me -- a recent study showing how major life traumas affect people suggests that if it happened over three months ago, with only a few exceptions, it has no impact whatsoever on your happiness. Why? Because happiness can be synthesized. Sir Thomas Brown wrote in 1642, "I am the happiest man alive. I have that in me that can convert poverty to riches, adversity to prosperity. I am more invulnerable than Achilles; fortune hath not one place to hit me." What kind of remarkable machinery does this guy have in his head? Well, it turns out it's precisely the same remarkable machinery that all off us have. Human beings have something that we might think of as a "psychological immune system." A system of cognitive processes, largely non-conscious cognitive processes, that help them change their views of the world, so that they can feel better about the worlds in which they find themselves. Like Sir Thomas, you have this machine. Unlike Sir Thomas, you seem not to know it. We synthesize happiness, but we think happiness is a thing to be found. Now, you don't need me to give you too many examples of people synthesizing happiness, I suspect. Though I'm going to show you some experimental evidence, you don't have to look very far for evidence. As a challenge to myself, since I say this once in a while in lectures, I took a copy of the New York Times and tried to find some instances of people synthesizing happiness. Here are three guys synthesizing happiness. "I am so much better off physically, financially, emotionally, mentally and almost every other way." "I don't have one minute's regret. It was a glorious experience." "I believe it turned out for the best." Who are these characters who are so damn happy? The first one is Jim Wright. Some of you are old enough to remember: he was the chairman of the House of Representatives and he resigned in disgrace when this young Republican named Newt Gingrich found out about a shady book deal he had done. He lost everything. The most powerful Democrat in the country lost everything. He lost his money, he lost his power. What does he have to say all these years later? "I am so much better off physically, financially, mentally and in almost every other way." What other way would there be to be better off? Vegetably? Minerally? Animally? He's pretty much covered them there. Moreese Bickham is somebody you've never heard of. Moreese Bickham uttered these words upon being released. He was 78 years old. He'd spent 37 years in a Louisiana State Penitentiary for a crime he didn't commit. [He was ultimately released for good behavior halfway through his sentence.] What did he say about his experience? "I don't have one minute's regret. It was a glorious experience." Glorious! He is not saying, "Well, there were some nice guys. They had a gym." "Glorious," a word we usually reserve for something like a religious experience. Harry S. Langerman uttered these words, and he's somebody you might have known but didn't, because in 1949 he read a little article in the paper about a hamburger stand owned by two brothers named McDonalds. And he thought, "That's a really neat idea!" So he went to find them. They said, "We can give you a franchise on this for 3,000 bucks." Harry went back to New York, asked his brother, an investment banker, to loan him the $3,000, and his brother's immortal words were, "You idiot, nobody eats hamburgers." He wouldn't lend him the money, and of course, six months later Ray Kroc had exactly the same idea. It turns out people do eat hamburgers, and Ray Kroc, for a while, became the richest man in America. And then finally -- you know, the best of all possible worlds -- some of you recognize this young photo of Pete Best, who was the original drummer for the Beatles, until they, you know, sent him out on an errand and snuck away and picked up Ringo on a tour. Well, in 1994, when Pete Best was interviewed -- yes, he's still a drummer; yes, he's a studio musician -- he had this to say: "I'm happier than I would have been with the Beatles." Okay. There's something important to be learned from these people, and it is the secret of happiness. Here it is, finally to be revealed. First: accrue wealth, power, and prestige, then lose it. (Laughter) Second: spend as much of your life in prison as you possibly can. (Laughter) Third: make somebody else really, really rich. And finally: never ever join the Beatles. (Laughter) OK. Now I, like Ze Frank, can predict your next thought, which is, "Yeah, right." Because when people synthesize happiness, as these gentlemen seem to have done, we all smile at them, but we kind of roll our eyes and say, "Yeah right, you never really wanted the job." "Oh yeah, right. You really didn't have that much in common with her, and you figured that out just about the time she threw the engagement ring in your face." We smirk because we believe that synthetic happiness is not of the same quality as what we might call "natural happiness." What are these terms? Natural happiness is what we get when we get what we wanted, and synthetic happiness is what we make when we don't get what we wanted. And in our society, we have a strong belief that synthetic happiness is of an inferior kind. Why do we have that belief? Well, it's very simple. What kind of economic engine would keep churning if we believed that not getting what we want could make us just as happy as getting it? With all apologies to my friend Matthieu Ricard, a shopping mall full of Zen monks is not going to be particularly profitable, because they don't want stuff enough. (Laughter) I want to suggest to you that synthetic happiness is every bit as real and enduring as the kind of happiness you stumble upon when you get exactly what you were aiming for. I'm a scientist, so I'm going to do this not with rhetoric, but by marinating you in a little bit of data. Let me first show you an experimental paradigm that is used to demonstrate the synthesis of happiness among regular old folks. And this isn't mine. It's a 50-year-old paradigm called the "free choice paradigm." It's very simple. You bring in, say, six objects, and you ask a subject to rank them from the most to the least liked. In this case, because this experiment uses them, these are Monet prints. So, everybody can rank these Monet prints from the one they like the most, to the one they like the least. Now we give you a choice: "We happen to have some extra prints in the closet. We're going to give you one as your prize to take home. We happen to have number three and number four," we tell the subject. This is a bit of a difficult choice, because neither one is preferred strongly to the other, but naturally, people tend to pick number three because they liked it a little better than number four. Sometime later -- it could be 15 minutes; it could be 15 days -- the same stimuli are put before the subject, and the subject is asked to re-rank the stimuli. "Tell us how much you like them now." What happens? Watch as happiness is synthesized. This is the result that has been replicated over and over again. You're watching happiness be synthesized. Would you like to see it again? Happiness! "The one I got is really better than I thought! That other one I didn't get sucks!" That's the synthesis of happiness. (Laughter) Now, what's the right response to that? "Yeah, right!" Now, here's the experiment we did, and I hope this is going to convince you that "Yeah, right!" was not the right response. We did this experiment with a group of patients who had anterograde amnesia. These are hospitalized patients. Most of them have Korsakoff's syndrome, a polyneuritic psychosis. They drank way too much, and they can't make new memories. OK? They remember their childhood, but if you walk in and introduce yourself, and then leave the room, when you come back, they don't know who you are. We took our Monet prints to the hospital. And we asked these patients to rank them from the one they liked the most to the one they liked the least. We then gave them the choice between number three and number four. Like everybody else, they said, "Gee, thanks Doc! That's great! I could use a new print. I'll take number three." We explained we would have number three mailed to them. We gathered up our materials and we went out of the room, and counted to a half hour. (Laughter) Back into the room, we say, "Hi, we're back." The patients, bless them, say, "Ah, Doc, I'm sorry, I've got a memory problem; that's why I'm here. If I've met you before, I don't remember." "Really, you don't remember? I was just here with the Monet prints?" "Sorry, Doc, I just don't have a clue." "No problem, Jim. All I want you to do is rank these for me from the one you like the most to the one you like the least." What do they do? Well, let's first check and make sure they're really amnesiac. We ask these amnesiac patients to tell us which one they own, which one they chose last time, which one is theirs. And what we find is amnesiac patients just guess. These are normal controls, where if I did this with you, all of you would know which print you chose. But if I do this with amnesiac patients, they don't have a clue. They can't pick their print out of a lineup. Here's what normal controls do: they synthesize happiness. Right? This is the change in liking score, the change from the first time they ranked to the second time they ranked. Normal controls show -- that was the magic I showed you; now I'm showing it to you in graphical form -- "The one I own is better than I thought. The one I didn't own, the one I left behind, is not as good as I thought." Amnesiacs do exactly the same thing. Think about this result. These people like better the one they own, but they don't know they own it. "Yeah, right" is not the right response! What these people did when they synthesized happiness is they really, truly changed their affective, hedonic, aesthetic reactions to that poster. They're not just saying it because they own it, because they don't know they own it. Now, when psychologists show you bars, you know that they are showing you averages of lots of people. And yet, all of us have this psychological immune system, this capacity to synthesize happiness, but some of us do this trick better than others. And some situations allow anybody to do it more effectively than other situations do. It turns out that freedom -- the ability to make up your mind and change your mind -- is the friend of natural happiness, because it allows you to choose among all those delicious futures and find the one that you would most enjoy. But freedom to choose, to change and make up your mind, is the enemy of synthetic happiness. And I'm going to show you why. Dilbert already knows, of course. You're reading as I'm talking. "Dogbert's tech support. How may I abuse you?" "My printer prints a blank page after every document." "Why complain about getting free paper?" "Free? Aren't you just giving me my own paper?" "Look at the quality of the free paper compared to your lousy regular paper! Only a fool or a liar would say that they look the same!" "Now that you mention it, it does seem a little silkier!" "What are you doing?" "I'm helping people accept the things they cannot change." Indeed. The psychological immune system works best when we are totally stuck, when we are trapped. This is the difference between dating and marriage. You go out on a date with a guy, and he picks his nose; you don't go out on another date. You're married to a guy and he picks his nose? He has a heart of gold. Don't touch the fruitcake! You find a way to be happy with what's happened. (Laughter) Now, what I want to show you is that people don't know this about themselves, and not knowing this can work to our supreme disadvantage. Here's an experiment we did at Harvard. We created a black-and-white photography course, and we allowed students to come in and learn how to use a darkroom. So we gave them cameras; they went around campus; they took 12 pictures of their favorite professors and their dorm room and their dog, and all the other things they wanted to have Harvard memories of. They bring us the camera; we make up a contact sheet; they figure out which are the two best pictures; and we now spend six hours teaching them about darkrooms. And they blow two of them up, and they have two gorgeous eight-by-10 glossies of meaningful things to them, and we say, "Which one would you like to give up?" They say, "I have to give one up?" "Yes, we need one as evidence of the class project. So you have to give me one. You have to make a choice. You get to keep one, and I get to keep one." Now, there are two conditions in this experiment. In one case, the students are told, "But you know, if you want to change your mind, I'll always have the other one here, and in the next four days, before I actually mail it to headquarters," -- yeah, "headquarters" -- "I'll be glad to swap it out with you. In fact, I'll come to your dorm room, just give me an email. Better yet, I'll check with you. You ever want to change your mind, it's totally returnable." The other half of the students are told exactly the opposite: "Make your choice, and by the way, the mail is going out, gosh, in two minutes, to England. Your picture will be winging its way over the Atlantic. You will never see it again." Half of the students in each of these conditions are asked to make predictions about how much they're going to come to like the picture that they keep and the picture they leave behind. Other students are just sent back to their little dorm rooms and they are measured over the next three to six days on their liking, satisfaction with the pictures. And look at what we find. First of all, here's what students think is going to happen. They think they're going to maybe come to like the picture they chose a little more than the one they left behind, but these are not statistically significant differences. It's a very small increase, and it doesn't much matter whether they were in the reversible or irreversible condition. Wrong-o. Bad simulators. Because here's what's really happening. Both right before the swap and five days later, people who are stuck with that picture, who have no choice, who can never change their mind, like it a lot! And people who are deliberating -- "Should I return it? Have I gotten the right one? Maybe this isn't the good one? Maybe I left the good one?" -- have killed themselves. They don't like their picture, and in fact even after the opportunity to swap has expired, they still don't like their picture. Why? Because the [reversible] condition is not conducive to the synthesis of happiness. So here's the final piece of this experiment. We bring in a whole new group of naive Harvard students and we say, "You know, we're doing a photography course, and we can do it one of two ways. We could do it so that when you take the two pictures, you'd have four days to change your mind, or we're doing another course where you take the two pictures and you make up your mind right away and you can never change it. Which course would you like to be in?" Duh! 66 percent of the students, two-thirds, prefer to be in the course where they have the opportunity to change their mind. Hello? 66 percent of the students choose to be in the course in which they will ultimately be deeply dissatisfied with the picture. Because they do not know the conditions under which synthetic happiness grows. The Bard said everything best, of course, and he's making my point here but he's making it hyperbolically: "'Tis nothing good or bad / But thinking makes it so." It's nice poetry, but that can't exactly be right. Is there really nothing good or bad? Is it really the case that gall bladder surgery and a trip to Paris are just the same thing? That seems like a one-question IQ test. They can't be exactly the same. In more turgid prose, but closer to the truth, was the father of modern capitalism, Adam Smith, and he said this. This is worth contemplating: "The great source of both the misery and disorders of human life seems to arise from overrating the difference between one permanent situation and another -- Some of these situations may, no doubt, deserve to be preferred to others, but none of them can deserve to be pursued with that passionate ardor which drives us to violate the rules either of prudence or of justice, or to corrupt the future tranquility of our minds, either by shame from the remembrance of our own folly, or by remorse for the horror of our own injustice." In other words: yes, some things are better than others. We should have preferences that lead us into one future over another. But when those preferences drive us too hard and too fast because we have overrated the difference between these futures, we are at risk. When our ambition is bounded, it leads us to work joyfully. When our ambition is unbounded, it leads us to lie, to cheat, to steal, to hurt others, to sacrifice things of real value. When our fears are bounded, we're prudent, we're cautious, we're thoughtful. When our fears are unbounded and overblown, we're reckless, and we're cowardly. The lesson I want to leave you with, from these data, is that our longings and our worries are both to some degree overblown, because we have within us the capacity to manufacture the very commodity we are constantly chasing when we choose experience. Thank you.
I'm the luckiest guy in the world. I got to see the last case of killer smallpox in the world. I was in India this past year, and I may have seen the last cases of polio in the world. There's nothing that makes you feel more -- the blessing and the honor of working in a program like that than to know that something that horrible no longer exists. So, I'm going to tell -- (Applause) -- so, I'm going to show you some dirty pictures. They are difficult to watch, but you should look at them with optimism because the horror of these pictures will be matched by the uplifting quality of knowing that they no longer exist. But first I'm going to tell you a little bit about my own journey. My background is not exactly the conventional medical education that you might expect. When I was an intern in San Francisco, I heard about a group of Native Americans who had taken over Alcatraz Island, and a Native American who wanted to give birth on that island, and no other doctor wanted to go and help her give birth. I went out to Alcatraz, and I lived on the island for several weeks. She gave birth; I caught the baby; I got off the island; I landed in San Francisco; and all the press wanted to talk to me because my three weeks on the island made me an expert in Indian affairs. I wound up on every television show. Someone saw me on television; they called me up; and they asked me if I'd like to be in a movie and to play a young doctor for a bunch of rock and roll stars who were traveling in a bus ride from San Francisco to England. And I said, yes, I would do that, so I became the doctor in an absolutely awful movie called "Medicine Ball Caravan." Now, you know from the '60s, you're either on the bus or you're off the bus. I was on the bus. My wife and I, of 37 years, joined the bus. Our bus ride took us from San Francisco to London. We switched buses at the big pond. We then got on two more buses and we drove through Turkey and Iran, Afghanistan, over the Khyber Pass, into Pakistan, like every other young doctor. This is us at the Khyber Pass, and that's our bus. We had some difficulty getting over the Khyber Pass, but we wound up in India. And then, like everyone else in our generation, we went to live in a Himalayan monastery. (Laughter) This is just like a residency program, for those of you that are in medical school. And we studied with a wise man, a guru named Karoli Baba, who then told me to get rid of the dress, put on a three-piece suit, go join the United Nations as a diplomat and work for the World Health Organization. And he made an outrageous prediction that smallpox would be eradicated, and that this was God's gift to humanity because of the hard work of dedicated scientists. And that prediction came true, and this little girl is Rahima Banu, and she was the last case of killer smallpox in the world. And this document is the certificate that the global commission signed certifying the world to have eradicated the first disease in history. The key to eradicating smallpox was early detection, early response. I'm going to ask you to repeat that: early detection, early response. Can you say that? Audience: Early detection, early response. Larry Brilliant: Smallpox was the worst disease in history. It killed more people than all the wars in history. In the last century, it killed 500 million people. More than two -- you're reading about Larry Page already, somebody reads very fast. (Laughter) In the year that Larry Page and Sergey Brin -- with whom I have a certain affection and a new affiliation -- in the year in which they were born, two million people died of smallpox. We declared smallpox eradicated in 1980. This is the most important slide that I've ever seen in public health because it shows you to be the richest and the strongest, and to be kings and queens of the world, did not protect you from dying of smallpox. Never can you doubt that we are all in this together. But to see smallpox from the perspective of a sovereign is the wrong perspective. You should see it from the perspective of a mother watching her child develop this disease and standing by helplessly. Day one, day two, day three, day four, day five, day six. You're a mother and you're watching your child, and on day six, you see pustules that become hard. Day seven, they show the classic scars of smallpox umbilication. Day eight. And Al Gore said earlier that the most photographed image in the world, the most printed image in the world, was that of the Earth. But this was in 1974, and as of that moment this photograph was the photograph that was the most widely printed because we printed two billion copies of this photograph, and we took them hand to hand, door to door, to show people and ask them if there was smallpox in their house because that was our surveillance system. We didn't have Google; we didn't have web crawlers; we didn't have computers. By day nine, you look at this picture, and you're horrified. I look at this picture and I say, "Thank God" because it's clear that this is only an ordinary case of smallpox, and I know this child will live. And by day 13, the lesions are scabbing, his eyelids are swollen, but you know this child has no other secondary infection. And by day 20, while he will be scarred for life, he will live. There are other kinds of smallpox that are not like that. This is confluent smallpox, in which there isn't a single place on the body where you could put a finger and not be covered by lesions. Flat smallpox, which killed 100 percent of people who got it. And hemorrhagic smallpox, the most cruel of all, which had a predilection for pregnant women. I've probably had 50 women die. They all had hemorrhagic smallpox. I've never seen anybody die from it who wasn't a pregnant woman. In 1967, the WHO embarked on what was an outrageous program to eradicate a disease. In that year, there were 34 countries affected with smallpox. By 1970, we were down to 18 countries. 1974, we were down to five countries. But in that year, smallpox exploded throughout India. And India was the place where smallpox made its last stand. In 1974, India had a population of 600 million. There are 21 linguistic states in India, which is like saying 21 different countries. There are 20 million people on the road at any time in buses and trains, walking, 500,000 villages, 120 million households, and none of them wanted to report if they had a case of smallpox in their house because they thought that smallpox was the visitation of a deity, Shitala Mata, the cooling mother, and it was wrong to bring strangers into your house when the deity was in the house. No incentive to report smallpox. It wasn't just India that had smallpox deities; smallpox deities were prevalent all over the world. So, how we eradicated smallpox was -- max vaccination wouldn't work. You could vaccinate everybody in India, but one year later there'll be 21 million new babies, which was then the population of Canada. It wouldn't do just to vaccinate everyone. You had to find every single case of smallpox in the world at the same time and draw a circle of immunity around it. And that's what we did. In India alone, my 150,000 best friends and I went door to door with that same picture to every single house in India. We made over one billion house calls. And in the process, I learned something very important. Every time we did a house-to-house search, we had a spike in the number of reports of smallpox. When we didn't search, we had the illusion that there was no disease. When we did search, we had the illusion that there was more disease. A surveillance system was necessary because what we needed was early detection, early response. So, we searched and we searched, and we found every case of smallpox in India. We had a reward. We raised the reward. We continued to increase the reward. We had a scorecard that we wrote on every house. And as we did that, the number of reported cases in the world dropped to zero, and in 1980 we declared the globe free of smallpox. It was the largest campaign in United Nations history until the Iraq war. 150,000 people from all over the world, doctors of every race, religion, culture and nation, who fought side by side, brothers and sisters, with each other, not against each other, in a common cause to make the world better. But smallpox was the fourth disease that was intended for eradication. We failed three other times. We failed against malaria, yellow fever and yaws. But soon we may see polio eradicated. But the key to eradicating polio is early detection, early response. This may be the year we eradicate polio -- that will make it the second disease in history. And David Heymann, who's watching this on the webcast -- David, keep on going. We're close. We're down to four countries. (Applause) I feel like Hank Aaron. Barry Bonds can replace me any time. Let's get another disease off the list of terrible things to worry about. I was just in India working on the polio program. The polio surveillance program is four million people going door to door. That is the surveillance system. But we need to have early detection, early response. Blindness, the same thing. The key to discovering blindness is doing epidemiological surveys and finding out the causes of blindness so you can mount the correct response. The Seva Foundation was started by a group of alumni of the smallpox eradication program who, having climbed the highest mountain, tasted the elixir of the success of eradicating a disease, wanted to do it again. And over the last 27 years, Seva's programs in 15 countries have given back sight to more than two million blind people. Seva got started because we wanted to apply these lessons of surveillance and epidemiology to something which nobody else was looking at as a public health issue: blindness, which heretofore had been thought of only as a clinical disease. In 1980, Steve Jobs gave me that computer, which is Apple number 12, and it's still in Kathmandu, and it's still working, and we ought to go get it and auction it off and make more money for Seva. And we conducted the first Nepal survey ever done for health, and the first nationwide blindness survey ever done, and we had astonishing results. Instead of finding out what we thought was the case -- that blindness was caused mostly by glaucoma and trachoma -- we were astounded to find out that blindness was caused instead by cataract. You can't cure or prevent what you don't know is there. In your TED packages there's a DVD, "Infinite Vision," about Dr. V and the Aravind Eye Hospital. I hope that you will take a look at it. Aravind, which started as a Seva project, is now the world's largest and best eye hospital. This year, that one hospital will give back sight to more than 300,000 people in Tamil Nadu, India. (Applause) Bird flu. I stand here as a representative of all terrible things -- this might be the worst. The key to preventing or mitigating pandemic bird flu is early detection and rapid response. We will not have a vaccine or adequate supplies of an antiviral to combat bird flu if it occurs in the next three years. WHO stages the progress of a pandemic. We are now at stage three on the pandemic alert stage, with just a little bit of human-to-human transmission, but no human-to-human-to-human sustained transmission. The moment WHO says we've moved to category four, this will not be like Katrina. The world as we know it will stop. There'll be no airplanes flying. Would you get in an airplane with 250 people you didn't know, coughing and sneezing, when you knew that some of them might carry a disease that could kill you, for which you had no antivirals or vaccine? I did a study of the top epidemiologists in the world in October. I asked them -- these are all fluologists and specialists in influenza -- and I asked them the questions you'd like to ask them. What do you think the likelihood is that there'll be a pandemic? If it happens, how bad do you think it will be? 15 percent said they thought there'd be a pandemic within three years. But much worse than that, 90 percent said they thought there'd be a pandemic within your children or your grandchildren's lifetime. And they thought that if there was a pandemic, a billion people would get sick. As many as 165 million people would die. There would be a global recession and depression as our just-in-time inventory system and the tight rubber band of globalization broke, and the cost to our economy of one to three trillion dollars would be far worse for everyone than merely 100 million people dying because so many more people would lose their job and their healthcare benefits that the consequences are almost unthinkable. And it's getting worse because travel is getting so much better. Let me show you a simulation of what a pandemic looks like so we know what we're talking about. Let's assume, for example, that the first case occurs in South Asia. It initially goes quite slowly. You get two or three discrete locations. Then there'll be secondary outbreaks, and the disease will spread from country to country so fast that you won't know what hit you. Within three weeks it will be everywhere in the world. Now, if we had an "undo" button, and we could go back and isolate it and grab it when it first started. If we could find it early, and we had early detection and early response, and we could put each one of those viruses in jail -- that's the only way to deal with something like a pandemic. And let me show you why that is. We have a joke. This is an epidemic curve, and everyone in medicine, I think, ultimately gets to know what it is. But the joke is, an epidemiologist likes to arrive at an epidemic right here and ride to glory on the downhill curve. But you don't get to do that usually. You usually arrive right about here. What we really want is to arrive right here, so we can stop the epidemic. But you can't always do that. But there's an organization that has been able to find a way to learn when the first cases occur, and that is called GPHIN. It's the Global Public Health Information Network. And that simulation that I showed you that you thought was bird flu -- that was SARS. And SARS is the pandemic that did not occur. And it didn't occur because GPHIN found the pandemic-to-be of SARS three months before WHO actually announced it, and because of that we were able to stop the SARS pandemic. And I think we owe a great debt of gratitude to GPHIN and to Ron St. John, who I hope is in the audience some place -- over there -- who's the founder of GPHIN. (Applause) Hello, Ron. (Applause) And TED has flown Ron here from Ottawa, where GPHIN is located, because not only did GPHIN find SARS early, but you may have seen last week that Iran announced that they had bird flu in Iran, but GPHIN found the bird flu in Iran not February 14 but last September. We need an early-warning system to protect us against the things that are humanity's worst nightmare. And so my TED wish is based on the common denominator of these experiences. Smallpox -- early detection, early response. Blindness, polio -- early detection, early response. Pandemic bird flu -- early detection, early response. It is a litany. It is so obvious that our only way of dealing with these new diseases is to find them early and to kill them before they spread. So, my TED wish is for you to help build a global system, an early-warning system, to protect us against humanity's worst nightmares. And what I thought I would call it is "Early Detection," but it should really be called "Total Early Detection." (Laughter) (Applause) But in all seriousness -- because this idea is birthed in TED, I would like it to be a legacy of TED, and I'd like to call it the "International System for Total Early Disease Detection." And INSTEDD then becomes our mantra. So instead of a hidden pandemic of bird flu, we find it and immediately contain it. Instead of a novel virus caused by bio-terror or bio-error, or shift or drift, we find it, and we contain it. Instead of industrial accidents like oil spills or the catastrophe in Bhopal, we find them, and we respond to them. Instead of famine, hidden until it is too late, we detect it, and we respond. And instead of a system, which is owned by a government and hidden in the bowels of government, let's build an early detection system that's freely available to anyone in the world in their own language. Let's make it transparent, non-governmental, not owned by any single country or company, housed in a neutral country, with redundant backup in a different time zone and a different continent, and let's build it on GPHIN. Let's start with GPHIN. Let's increase the websites that they crawl from 20,000 to 20 million. Let's increase the languages they crawl from seven to 70, or more. Let's build in outbound confirmation messages using text messages or SMS or instant messaging to find out from people who are within 100 meters of the rumor that you hear if it is, in fact, valid. And let's add satellite confirmation. And we'll add Gapminder's amazing graphics to the front end. And we'll grow it as a moral force in the world, finding out those terrible things before anybody else knows about them, and sending our response to them. So that next year, instead of us meeting here, lamenting how many terrible things there are in the world, we will have pulled together, used the unique skills and the magic of this community, and be proud that we have done everything we can to stop pandemics, other catastrophes, and change the world beginning right now. (Applause) Chris Anderson: An amazing presentation. First of all, just so everyone understands, you're saying that by building -- by creating web crawlers, looking on the Internet for patterns, they can detect something suspicious before WHO, before anyone else can see it? Just explain. Give an example of how that could possibly be true. Larry Brilliant: First of all, you're not mad about the copyright violation? CA: No. I love it. (Laughter) LB: Well, you know, as Ron St. John -- I hope you'll go and meet him in the dinner afterwards and talk to him -- When he started GPHIN -- In 1997, there was an outbreak of bird flu. H5N1. It was in Hong Kong. And a remarkable doctor in Hong Kong responded immediately by slaughtering 1.5 million chickens and birds, and they stopped that outbreak in its tracks. Immediate detection, immediate response. Then a number of years went by, and there were a lot of rumors about bird flu. Ron and his team in Ottawa began to crawl the web, only crawling 20,000 different websites, mostly periodicals, and they read about and heard about a concern of a lot of children who had high fever and symptoms of bird flu. They reported this to WHO. WHO took a little while taking action because WHO will only receive a report from a government, because it's the United Nations. But they were able to point to WHO and let them know that there was this surprising and unexplained cluster of illnesses that looked like bird flu. That turned out to be SARS. That's how the world found out about SARS. And because of that we were able to stop SARS. Now, what's really important is that, before there was GPHIN, 100 percent of all the world's reports of bad things -- whether you're talking about famine or you're talking about bird flu or you're talking about Ebola -- 100 percent of all those reports came from nations. The moment these guys in Ottawa, on a budget of 800,000 dollars a year, got cracking, 75 percent of all the reports in the world came from GPHIN, 25 percent of all the reports in the world came from all the other 180 nations. Now, here's what's real interesting, after they'd been working for a couple years, what do you think happened to those nations? They felt pretty stupid, so they started sending in their reports earlier. Now their reporting percentage is down to 50 percent because other nations have started to report. So, can you find diseases early by crawling the web? Of course you can. Can you find it even earlier than GPHIN does now? Of course you can. You saw that they found SARS using their Chinese web crawler a full six weeks before they found it using their English web crawler. Well, they're only crawling in seven languages. These bad viruses really don't have any intention of showing up first in English or Spanish or French. (Laughter) So, yes, I want to take GPHIN; I want to build on it; I want to add all the languages of the world that we possibly can; I want to make this open to everybody so that the health officer in Nairobi or in Patna, Bihar will have as much access to it as the folks in Ottawa or in CDC; and I want to make it part of our culture that there is a community of people who are watching out for the worst nightmares of humanity, and that it's accessible to everyone.
This session is on natural wonders, and the bigger conference is on the pursuit of happiness. I want to try to combine them all, because to me, healing is really the ultimate natural wonder. Your body has a remarkable capacity to begin healing itself, and much more quickly than people had once realized, if you simply stop doing what’s causing the problem. And so, really, so much of what we do in medicine and life in general is focused on mopping up the floor without also turning off the faucet. I love doing this work, because it really gives many people new hope and new choices that they didn’t have before, and it allows us to talk about things that -- not just diet, but that happiness is not -- we're talking about the pursuit of happiness, but when you really look at all the spiritual traditions, what Aldous Huxley called the "perennial wisdom," when you get past the named and forms and rituals that really divide people, it’s really about -- our nature is to be happy; our nature is to be peaceful, our nature is to be healthy. And so it’s not something -- happiness is not something you get, health is generally not something that you get. But rather all of these different practices -- you know, the ancient swamis and rabbis and priests and monks and nuns didn’t develop these techniques to just manage stress or lower your blood pressure, unclog your arteries, even though it can do all those things. They’re powerful tools for transformation, for quieting down our mind and bodies to allow us to experience what it feels like to be happy, to be peaceful, to be joyful and to realize that it’s not something that you pursue and get, but rather it’s something that you have already until you disturb it. I studied yoga for many years with a teacher named Swami Satchidananda and people would say, "What are you, a Hindu?" He’d say, "No, I’m an undo." And it’s really about identifying what’s causing us to disturb our innate health and happiness, and then to allow that natural healing to occur. To me, that’s the real natural wonder. So, within that larger context, we can talk about diet, stress management -- which are really these spiritual practices -- moderate exercise, smoking cessation, support groups and community -- which I’ll talk more about -- and some vitamins and supplements. And it’s not a diet. You know, when most people think about the diet I recommend, they think it’s a really strict diet. For reversing disease, that’s what it takes, but if you’re just trying to be healthy, you have a spectrum of choices. And to the degree that you can move in a healthy direction, you’re going to live longer, you’re going to feel better, you’re going to lose weight, and so on. And in our studies, what we’ve been able to do is to use very expensive, high-tech, state-of-the-art measures to prove how powerful these very simple and low-tech and low-cost -- and in many ways, ancient -- interventions, can be. We first began by looking at heart disease, and when I began doing this work 26 or 27 years ago, it was thought that once you have heart disease it can only get worse. And what we found was that, instead of getting worse and worse, in many cases it could get better and better, and much more quickly than people had once realized. This is a representative patient who at the time was 73 -- totally needed to have a bypass, decided to do this instead. We used quantitative arteriography, showing the narrowing. This is one of the arteries that feed the heart, one of the main arteries, and you can see the narrowing here. A year later, it’s not as clogged; normally, it goes the other direction. These minor changes in blockages caused a 300 percent improvement in blood flow, and using cardiac positron emission tomography, or "PET," scans, blue and black is no blood flow, orange and white is maximal. Huge differences can occur without drugs, without surgery. Clinically, he literally couldn’t walk across the street without getting severe chest pain; within a month, like most people, was pain-free, and within a year, climbing more than 100 floors a day on a Stairmaster. This is not unusual, and it’s part of what enables people to maintain these kinds of changes, because it makes such a big difference in their quality of life. Overall, if you looked at all the arteries in all the patients, they got worse and worse, from one year to five years, in the comparison group. This is the natural history of heart disease, but it’s really not natural because we found it could get better and better, and much more quickly than people had once thought. We also found that the more people change, the better they got. It wasn’t a function of how old or how sick they were -- it was mainly how much they changed, and the oldest patients improved as much as the young ones. I got this as a Christmas card a few years ago from two of the patients in one of our programs. The younger brother is 86, the older one’s 95; they wanted to show me how much more flexible they were. And the following year they sent me this one, which I thought was kind of funny. (Laughter) You just never know. And what we found was that 99 percent of the patients start to reverse the progression of their heart disease. Now I thought, you know, if we just did good science, that would change medical practice. But, that was a little naive. It’s important, but not enough. Because we doctors do what we get paid to do, and we get trained to do what we get paid to do, so if we change insurance, then we change medical practice and medical education. Insurance will cover the bypass, it’ll cover the angioplasty; it won’t, until recently, cover diet and lifestyle. So, we began through our nonprofit institute's training hospitals around the country, and we found that most people could avoid surgery, and not only was it medically effective, it was also cost effective. And the insurance companies found that they began to save almost 30,000 dollars per patient, and Medicare is now in the middle of doing a demonstration project where they’re paying for 1,800 people to go through the program on the sites that we train. The fortuneteller says, "I give smokers a discount because there’s not as much to tell." (Laughter) I like this slide, because it’s a chance to talk about what really motivates people to change, and what doesn’t. And what doesn’t work is fear of dying, and that’s what’s normally used. Everybody who smokes knows it’s not good for you, and still 30 percent of Americans smoke -- 80 percent in some parts of the world. Why do people do it? Well, because it helps them get through the day. And I’ll talk more about this, but the real epidemic isn’t just heart disease or obesity or smoking -- it’s loneliness and depression. As one woman said, "I’ve got 20 friends in this package of cigarettes, and they’re always there for me and nobody else is. You’re going to take away my 20 friends? What are you going to give me?" Or they eat when they get depressed, or they use alcohol to numb the pain, or they work too hard, or watch too much TV. There are lots of ways we have of avoiding and numbing and bypassing pain, but the point of all of this is to deal with the cause of the problem. And the pain is not the problem: it’s the symptom. And telling people they’re going to die is too scary to think about, or, they’re going to get emphysema or heart attack is too scary, and so they don’t want to think about it, so they don’t. The most effective anti-smoking ad was this one. You’ll notice the limp cigarette hanging out of his mouth, and "impotence" -- the headline is, "Impotent" -- it’s not emphysema. What was the biggest selling drug of all time when it was introduced a few years ago? Viagra, right? Why? Because a lot of guys need it. It’s not like you say, "Hey Joe, I’m having erectile dysfunction, how about you?" And yet, look at the number of prescriptions that are being sold. It’s not so much psychological, it’s vascular, and nicotine makes your arteries constrict. So does cocaine, so does a high fat diet, so does emotional stress. So the very behaviors that we think of as being so sexy in our culture are the very ones that leave so many people feeling tired, lethargic, depressed and impotent, and that’s not much fun. But when you change those behaviors, your brain gets more blood, you think more clearly, you have more energy, your heart gets more blood in ways I’ve shown you. Your sexual function improves. And these things occur within hours. This is a study: a high fat meal, and within one or two hours blood-flow is measurably less -- and you’ve all experienced this at Thanksgiving. When you eat a big fatty meal, how do you feel? You feel kind of sleepy afterwards. On a low-fat meal, the blood flow doesn’t go down -- it even goes up. Many of you have kids, and you know that’s a big change in your lifestyle, and so people are not afraid to make big changes in lifestyle if they’re worth it. And the paradox is that when you make big changes, you get big benefits, and you feel so much better so quickly. For many people, those are choices worth making -- not to live longer, but to live better. I want to talk a little bit about the obesity epidemic, because it really is a problem. Two-thirds of adults are overweight or obese, and diabetes in kids and 30-year-olds has increased 70 percent in the last 10 years. It’s no joke: it’s real. And just to show you this, this is from the CDC. These are not election returns; these are the percentage of people who are overweight. And if you see from '85 to '86 to '87, '88, '89, '90, '91 -- you get a new category, 15 to 20 percent; '92, '93, '94, '95, '96, '97 -- you get a new category; '98, '99, 2000, and 2001. Mississippi, more than 25 percent of people are overweight. Why is this? Well, this is one way to lose weight that works very well ... but it doesn’t last, which is the problem. (Laughter) Now, there’s no mystery in how you lose weight; you either burn more calories by exercise or you eat fewer calories. Now, one way to eat fewer calories is to eat less food, which is why you can lose weight on any diet if you eat less food, or if you restrict entire categories of foods. But the problem is, you get hungry, so it’s hard to keep it off. The other way is to change the type of food. And fat has nine calories per gram, whereas protein and carbs only have four. So, when you eat less fat, you eat fewer calories without having to eat less food. So you can eat the same amount of food, but you’ll be getting fewer calories because the food is less dense in calories. And it’s the volume of food that affects satiety, rather than the type of food. You know, I don’t like talking about the Atkins diet, but I get asked about it every day, and so I just thought I’d spend a few minutes on that. The myth that you hear about is, Americans have been told to eat less fat, the percent of calories from fat is down, Americans are fatter than ever, therefore fat doesn’t make you fat. It’s a half-truth. Actually, Americans are eating more fat than ever, and even more carbs. And so the percentage is lower, the actual amount is higher, and so the goal is to reduce both. Dr. Atkins and I debated each other many times before he died, and we agreed that Americans eat too many simple carbs, the "bad carbs," and these are things like -- (Laughter) -- sugar, white flour, white rice, alcohol. And you get a double whammy: you get all these calories that don’t fill you up because you’ve removed the fiber, and they get absorbed quickly so your blood sugar zooms up. Your pancreas makes insulin to bring it back down, which is good. But insulin accelerates the conversion of calories into fat. So, the goal is not to go to pork rinds and bacon and sausages -- these are not health foods -- but to go from "bad carbs" to what are called "good carbs." And these are things like whole foods, or unrefined carbs: fruits, vegetables, whole wheat flour, brown rice, in their natural forms, are rich in fiber. And the fiber fills you up before you get too many calories, and it slows the absorption so you don’t get that rapid rise in blood sugar. So, and you get all the disease-protective substances. It’s not just what you exclude from your diet, but also what you include that’s protective. Just as all carbs are not bad for you, all fats are not bad for you. There are good fats. And these are predominantly what are called the Omega-3 fatty acids. You find these, for example, in fish oil. And the bad fats are things like trans-fatty acids and processed food and saturated fats, which we find in meat. If you don’t remember anything else from this talk, three grams a day of fish oil can reduce your risk of a heart attack and sudden death by 50 to 80 percent. Three grams a day. They come in one-gram capsules; more than that just gives you extra fat you don’t need. It also helps reduce the risk of the most common cancers like breast, prostate and colon cancer. Now, the problem with the Atkins diet, everybody knows people who have lost weight on it, but you can lose weight on amphetamines, you know, and fen-phen. I mean, there are lots of ways of losing weight that aren’t good for you. You want to lose weight in a way that enhances your health rather than the one that harms it. And the problem is that it’s based on this half-truth, which is that Americans eat too many simple carbs, so if you eat fewer simple carbs you’re going to lose weight. You’ll lose even more weight if you go to whole foods and less fat, and you’ll enhance your health rather than harming it. He says, "I’ve got some good news. While your cholesterol level has remained the same, the research findings have changed." (Laughter) Now, what happens to your heart when you go on an Atkins diet? The red is good at the beginning, and a year later -- this is from a study done in a peer-reviewed journal called Angiology -- there’s more red after a year on a diet like I would recommend, there’s less red, less blood flow after a year on an Atkins-type diet. So, yes, you can lose weight, but your heart isn’t happy. Now, one of the studies funded by the Atkins Center found that 70 percent of the people were constipated, 65 percent had bad breath, 54 percent had headaches – this is not a healthy way to eat. And so, you might start to lose weight and start to attract people towards you, but when they get too close it’s going to be a problem. (Laughter) And more seriously, there are case reports now of 16-year-old girls who died after a few weeks on the Atkins diet -- of bone disease, kidney disease, and so on. And that’s how your body excretes waste, is through your breath, your bowels and your perspiration. So when you go on these kinds of diet, they begin to smell bad. So, an optimal diet is low in fat, low in the bad carbs, high in the good carbs and enough of the good fats. And then, again, it’s a spectrum: when you move in this direction, you’re going to lose weight, you’re going to feel better and you’re going to gain health. Now, there are ecological reasons for eating lower on the food chain too, whether it’s the deforestation of the Amazon, or making more protein available, to the four billion people who live on a dollar a day -- not to mention whatever ethical concerns people have. So, there are lots of reasons for eating this way that go beyond just your health. Now, we’re about to publish the first study looking at the effects of this program on prostate cancer, and, in collaboration with Sloane-Kettering and with UCSF. We took 90 men who had biopsy-proven prostate cancer and who had elected, for reasons unrelated to the study, not to have surgery. We could randomly divide them into two groups, and then we could have one group that is a non-intervention control group to compare to, which we can’t do with, say, breast cancer, because everyone gets treated. What we found was that, after a year, none of the experimental group patients who made these lifestyle changes needed treatment, whereas six of the control-group patients needed surgery or radiation. When we looked at their PSA levels -- which is a marker for prostate cancer -- they got worse in the control group, but they actually got better in the experimental group, and these differences were highly significant. And then I wondered: was there any relationship between how much people changed their diet and lifestyle -- whichever group they were in -- and the changes in PSA? And sure enough, we found a dose-response relationship, just like we found in the arterial blockages in our cardiac studies. And in order for the PSA to go down, they had to make pretty big changes. I then wondered, well, maybe they’re just changing their PSA, but it’s not really affecting the tumor growth. So we took some of their blood serum and sent it down to UCLA; they added it to a standard line of prostate tumor cells growing in tissue culture, and it inhibited the growth seven times more in the experimental group than in the control group -- 70 versus 9 percent. And finally, I said, I wonder if there’s any relationship between how much people change and how it inhibited their tumor growth, whichever group they happened to be in. And this really got me excited because again, we found the same pattern: the more people change, the more it affected the growth of their tumors. And finally, we did MRI and MR spectroscopy scans on some of these patients, and the tumor activity is shown in red in this patient, and you can see clearly it’s better a year later, along with the PSA going down. So, if it’s true for prostate cancer, it’ll almost certainly be true for breast cancer as well. And whether or not you have conventional treatment, in addition, if you make these changes, it may help reduce the risk of recurrence. The last thing I want to talk about, apropos of the issue of the pursuit of happiness, is that study after study have shown that people who are lonely and depressed -- and depression is the other real epidemic in our culture -- are many times more likely to get sick and die prematurely, in part because, as we talked about, they’re more likely to smoke and overeat and drink too much and work too hard and so on. But also, through mechanisms that we don’t fully understand, people who are lonely and depressed are many times -- three to five to ten times, in some studies -- more likely to get sick and die prematurely. And depression is treatable. We need to do something about that. Now, on the other hand, anything that promotes intimacy is healing. It can be sexual intimacy – I happen to think that healing energy and erotic energy are just different forms of the same thing. Friendship, altruism, compassion, service – all the perennial truths that we talked about that are part of all religion and all cultures -- once you stop trying to see the differences, these are the things in our own self-interest, because they free us from our suffering and from disease. And it’s in a sense the most selfish thing that we can do. Just take a look at one study. This was done by David Spiegel at Stanford. He took women with metastatic breast cancer, randomly divided them into two groups. One group of people just met for an hour-and-a-half once a week in a support group. It was a nurturing, loving environment, where they were encouraged to let down their emotional defenses and talk about how awful it is to have breast cancer with people who understood, because they were going through it too. They just met once a week for a year. Five years later, those women lived twice as long, and you can see that the people -- and that was the only difference between the groups. It was a randomized control study published in The Lancet. Other studies have shown this as well. So, these simple things that create intimacy are really healing, and even the word healing, it comes from the root "to make whole." The word yoga comes from the Sanskrit, meaning "union, to yoke, to bring together." And the last slide I want to show you is from -- I was -- again, this swami that I studied with for so many years, and I did a combined oncology and cardiology Grand Rounds at the University of Virginia medical school a couple of years ago. And at the end of it, somebody said, "Hey, Swami, what’s the difference between wellness and illness?" And so he went up on the board and he wrote the word "illness," and circled the first letter, and then wrote the word "wellness," and circled the first two letters ... To me, it’s just shorthand for what we’re talking about: that anything that creates a sense of connection and community and love is really healing. And then we can enjoy our lives more fully without getting sick in the process. Thank you. (Applause)
So, indeed, I have spent my life looking into the lives of presidents who are no longer alive. Waking up with Abraham Lincoln in the morning, thinking of Franklin Roosevelt when I went to bed at night. But when I try and think about what I've learned about the meaning in life, my mind keeps wandering back to a seminar that I took when I was a graduate student at Harvard with the great psychologist Erik Erikson. He taught us that the richest and fullest lives attempt to achieve an inner balance between three realms: work, love and play. And that to pursue one realm to the disregard of the other, is to open oneself to ultimate sadness in older age. Whereas to pursue all three with equal dedication, is to make possible a life filled not only with achievement, but with serenity. So since I tell stories, let me look back on the lives of two of the presidents I've studied to illustrate this point -- Abraham Lincoln and Lyndon Johnson. As for that first sphere of work, I think what Abraham Lincoln's life suggests is that fierce ambition is a good thing. He had a huge ambition. But it wasn't simply for office or power or celebrity or fame -- what it was for was to accomplish something worthy enough in life so that he could make the world a little better place for his having lived in it. Even as a child, it seemed, Lincoln dreamed heroic dreams. He somehow had to escape that hard-scrabble farm from which he was born. No schooling was possible for him, except a few weeks here, a few weeks there. But he read books in every spare moment he could find. It was said when he got a copy of the King James Bible or "Aesop's Fables," he was so excited he couldn't sleep. He couldn't eat. The great poet Emily Dickinson once said, "There is no frigate like a book to take us lands away." How true for Lincoln. Though he never would travel to Europe, he went with Shakespeare's kings to merry England, he went with Lord Byron's poetry to Spain and Portugal. Literature allowed him to transcend his surroundings. But there were so many losses in his early life that he was haunted by death. His mother died when he was only nine years old; his only sister, Sarah, in childbirth a few years later; and his first love, Ann Rutledge, at the age of 22. Moreover, when his mother lay dying, she did not hold out for him the hope that they would meet in an afterworld. She simply said to him, "Abraham, I'm going away from you now, and I shall never return." As a result he became obsessed with the thought that when we die our life is swept away -- dust to dust. But only as he grew older did he develop a certain consolation from an ancient Greek notion -- but followed by other cultures as well -- that if you could accomplish something worthy in your life, you could live on in the memory of others. Your honor and your reputation would outlive your earthly existence. And that worthy ambition became his lodestar. It carried him through the one significant depression that he suffered when he was in his early 30s. Three things had combined to lay him low. He had broken his engagement with Mary Todd, not certain he was ready to marry her, but knowing how devastating it was to her that he did that. His one intimate friend, Joshua Speed, was leaving Illinois to go back to Kentucky because Speed's father had died. And his political career in the state legislature was on a downward slide. He was so depressed that friends worried he was suicidal. They took all knives and razors and scissors from his room. And his great friend Speed went to his side and said, "Lincoln, you must rally or you will die." He said that, "I would just as soon die right now, but I've not yet done anything to make any human being remember that I have lived." So fueled by that ambition, he returned to the state legislature. He eventually won a seat in Congress. He then ran twice for the Senate, lost twice. "Everyone is broken by life," Ernest Hemingway once said, "but some people are stronger in the broken places." So then he surprised the nation with an upset victory for the presidency over three far more experienced, far more educated, far more celebrated rivals. And then when he won the general election, he stunned the nation even more by appointing each of these three rivals into his Cabinet. It was an unprecedented act at the time because everybody thought, "He'll look like a figurehead compared to these people." They said, "Why are you doing this, Lincoln?" He said, "Look, these are the strongest and most able men in the country. The country is in peril. I need them by my side." But perhaps my old friend Lyndon Johnson might have put it in less noble fashion: "Better to have your enemies inside the tent pissing out, than outside the tent pissing in." (Laughter) But it soon became clear that Abraham Lincoln would emerge as the undisputed captain of this unruly team. For each of them soon came to understand that he possessed an unparalleled array of emotional strengths and political skills that proved far more important than the thinness of his external résumé. For one thing, he possessed an uncanny ability to empathize with and to think about other peoples' point of view. He repaired injured feelings that might have escalated into permanent hostility. He shared credit with ease, assumed responsibility for the failure of his subordinates, constantly acknowledged his errors and learned from his mistakes. These are the qualities we should be looking for in our candidates in 2008. (Applause) He refused to be provoked by petty grievances. He never submitted to jealousy or brooded over perceived slights. And he expressed his unshakeable convictions in everyday language, in metaphors, in stories. And with a beauty of language -- almost as if the Shakespeare and the poetry he had so loved as a child had worked their way into his very soul. In 1863, when the Emancipation Proclamation was signed, he brought his old friend, Joshua Speed, back to the White House, and remembered that conversation of decades before, when he was so sad. And he, pointing to the Proclamation, said, "I believe, in this measure, my fondest hopes will be realized." But as he was about to put his signature on the Proclamation his own hand was numb and shaking because he had shaken a thousand hands that morning at a New Year's reception. So he put the pen down. He said, "If ever my soul were in an act, it is in this act. But if I sign with a shaking hand, posterity will say, 'He hesitated.'" So he waited until he could take up the pen and sign with a bold and clear hand. But even in his wildest dreams, Lincoln could never have imagined how far his reputation would reach. I was so thrilled to find an interview with the great Russian writer, Leo Tolstoy, in a New York newspaper in the early 1900s. And in it, Tolstoy told of a trip that he'd recently made to a very remote area of the Caucasus, where there were only wild barbarians, who had never left this part of Russia. Knowing that Tolstoy was in their midst, they asked him to tell stories of the great men of history. So he said, "I told them about Napoleon and Alexander the Great and Frederick the Great and Julius Caesar, and they loved it. But before I finished, the chief of the barbarians stood up and said, 'But wait, you haven't told us about the greatest ruler of them all. We want to hear about that man who spoke with a voice of thunder, who laughed like the sunrise, who came from that place called America, which is so far from here, that if a young man should travel there, he would be an old man when he arrived. Tell us of that man. Tell us of Abraham Lincoln.'" He was stunned. He told them everything he could about Lincoln. And then in the interview he said, "What made Lincoln so great? Not as great a general as Napoleon, not as great a statesman as Frederick the Great." But his greatness consisted, and historians would roundly agree, in the integrity of his character and the moral fiber of his being. So in the end that powerful ambition that had carried Lincoln through his bleak childhood had been realized. That ambition that had allowed him to laboriously educate himself by himself, to go through that string of political failures and the darkest days of the war. His story would be told. So as for that second sphere, not of work, but of love -- encompassing family, friends and colleagues -- it, too, takes work and commitment. The Lyndon Johnson that I saw in the last years of his life, when I helped him on his memoirs, was a man who had spent so many years in the pursuit of work, power and individual success, that he had absolutely no psychic or emotional resources left to get him through the days once the presidency was gone. My relationship with him began on a rather curious level. I was selected as a White House Fellow when I was 24 years old. We had a big dance at the White House. President Johnson did dance with me that night. Not that peculiar -- there were only three women out of the 16 White House Fellows. But he did whisper in my ear that he wanted me to work directly for him in the White House. But it was not to be that simple. For in the months leading up to my selection, like many young people, I'd been active in the anti-Vietnam War movement, and had written an article against Lyndon Johnson, which unfortunately came out in The New Republic two days after the dance in the White House. (Laugher) And the theme of the article was how to remove Lyndon Johnson from power. (Laughter) So I was certain he would kick me out of the program. But instead, surprisingly, he said, "Oh, bring her down here for a year, and if I can't win her over, no one can." So I did end up working for him in the White House. Eventually accompanied him to his ranch to help him on those memoirs, never fully understanding why he'd chosen me to spend so many hours with. I like to believe it was because I was a good listener. He was a great storyteller. Fabulous, colorful, anecdotal stories. There was a problem with these stories, however, which I later discovered, which is that half of them weren't true. But they were great, nonetheless. (Laughter) So I think that part of his attraction for me was that I loved listening to his tall tales. But I also worried that part of it was that I was then a young woman. And he had somewhat of a minor league womanizing reputation. So I constantly chatted to him about boyfriends, even when I didn't have any at all. Everything was working perfectly, until one day he said he wanted to discuss our relationship. Sounded very ominous when he took me nearby to the lake, conveniently called Lake Lyndon Baines Johnson. And there was wine and cheese and a red-checked tablecloth -- all the romantic trappings. And he started out, "Doris, more than any other woman I have ever known ... " And my heart sank. And then he said, "You remind me of my mother." (Laughter) It was pretty embarrassing, given what was going on in my mind. But I must say, the older I've gotten, the more I realize what an incredible privilege it was to have spent so many hours with this aging lion of a man. A victor in a thousand contests, three great civil rights laws, Medicare, aid to education. And yet, roundly defeated in the end by the war in Vietnam. And because he was so sad and so vulnerable, he opened up to me in ways he never would have had I known him at the height of his power -- sharing his fears, his sorrows and his worries. And I'd like to believe that the privilege fired within me the drive to understand the inner person behind the public figure, that I've tried to bring to each of my books since then. But it also brought home to me the lessons which Erik Erikson had tried to instill in all of us about the importance of finding balance in life. For on the surface, Lyndon Johnson should have had everything in the world to feel good about in those last years, in the sense that he had been elected to the presidency; he had all the money he needed to pursue any leisure activity he wanted; he owned a spacious ranch in the countryside, a penthouse in the city, sailboats, speedboats. He had servants to answer any whim, and he had a family who loved him deeply. And yet, years of concentration solely on work and individual success meant that in his retirement he could find no solace in family, in recreation, in sports or in hobbies. It was almost as if the hole in his heart was so large that even the love of a family, without work, could not fill it. As his spirits sagged, his body deteriorated until, I believe, he slowly brought about his own death. In those last years, he said he was so sad watching the American people look toward a new president and forgetting him. He spoke with immense sadness in his voice, saying maybe he should have spent more time with his children, and their children in turn. But it was too late. Despite all that power, all that wealth, he was alone when he finally died -- his ultimate terror realized. So as for that third sphere of play, which he never had learned to enjoy, I've learned over the years that even this sphere requires a commitment of time and energy -- enough so that a hobby, a sport, a love of music, or art, or literature, or any form of recreation, can provide true pleasure, relaxation and replenishment. So deep, for instance, was Abraham Lincoln's love of Shakespeare, that he made time to spend more than a hundred nights in the theater, even during those dark days of the war. He said, when the lights went down and a Shakespeare play came on, for a few precious hours he could imagine himself back in Prince Hal's time. But an even more important form of relaxation for him, that Lyndon Johnson never could enjoy, was a love of -- somehow -- humor, and feeling out what hilarious parts of life can produce as a sidelight to the sadness. He once said that he laughed so he did not cry, that a good story, for him, was better than a drop of whiskey. His storytelling powers had first been recognized when he was on the circuit in Illinois. The lawyers and the judges would travel from one county courthouse to the other, and when anyone was knowing Lincoln was in town, they would come from miles around to listen to him tell stories. He would stand with his back against a fire and entertain the crowd for hours with his winding tales. And all these stories became part of his memory bank, so he could call on them whenever he needed to. And they're not quite what you might expect from our marble monument. One of his favorite stories, for example, had to do with the Revolutionary War hero, Ethan Allen. And as Lincoln told the story, Mr. Allen went to Britain after the war. And the British people were still upset about losing the Revolution, so they decided to embarrass him a little bit by putting a huge picture of General Washington in the only outhouse, where he'd have to encounter it. They figured he'd be upset about the indignity of George Washington being in an outhouse. But he came out of the outhouse not upset at all. And so they said, "Well, did you see George Washington in there?" "Oh, yes," he said, "perfectly appropriate place for him." "What do you mean?" they said. "Well," he said, "there's nothing to make an Englishman shit faster than the sight of General George Washington." (Laughter) (Applause) So you can imagine, if you are in the middle of a tense cabinet meeting -- and he had hundreds of these stories -- you would have to relax. So between his nightly treks to the theater, his story telling, and his extraordinary sense of humor and his love of quoting Shakespeare and poetry, he found that form of play which carried him through his days. In my own life, I shall always be grateful for having found a form of play in my irrational love of baseball. Which allows me, from the beginning of spring training to the end of the fall, to have something to occupy my mind and heart other than my work. It all began when I was only six years old, and my father taught me that mysterious art of keeping score while listening to baseball games -- so that when he went to work in New York during the day, I could record for him the history of that afternoon's Brooklyn Dodgers game. Now, when you're only six years old, and your father comes home every single night and listens to you -- as I now realize that I, in excruciating detail, recounted every single play of every inning of the game that had just taken place that afternoon. But he made me feel I was telling him a fabulous story. It makes you think there's something magic about history to keep your father's attention. In fact, I'm convinced I learned the narrative art from those nightly sessions with my father. Because at first, I'd be so excited I would blurt out, "The Dodgers won!" or, "The Dodgers lost!" Which took much of the drama of this two-hour telling away. (Laughter) So I finally learned you had to tell a story from beginning to middle to end. I must say, so fervent was my love of the old Brooklyn Dodgers in those days that I had to confess in my first confession two sins that related to baseball. The first occurred because the Dodgers' catcher, Roy Campanella, came to my hometown of Rockville Centre, Long Island, just as I was in preparation for my first Holy Communion. And I was so excited -- first person I'd ever see outside of Ebbets Field. But it so happened he was speaking in a Protestant Church. When you are brought up as a Catholic, you think that if you ever set foot in a Protestant Church, you'll be struck dead at the threshold. So I went to my father in tears, "What are we going to do?" He said, "Don't worry. He's speaking in a parish hall. We're sitting in folding chairs. He's talking about sportsmanship. It's not a sin." But as I left that night, I was certain that somehow I'd traded the life of my everlasting soul for this one night with Roy Campanella. (Laughter) And there were no indulgences around that I could buy. So I had this sin on my soul when I went to my first confession. I told the priest right away. He said, "No problem. It wasn't a religious service." But then, unfortunately, he said, "And what else, my child?" And then came my second sin. I tried to sandwich it in between talking too much in church, wishing harm to others, being mean to my sisters. And he said, "To whom did you wish harm?" And I had to say that I wished that various New York Yankees players would break arms, legs and ankles -- (Laughter) -- so that the Brooklyn Dodgers could win their first World Series. He said, "How often do you make these horrible wishes?" And I had to say, every night when I said my prayers. (Laughter) So he said, "Look, I'll tell you something. I love the Brooklyn Dodgers, as you do, but I promise you some day they will win fairly and squarely. You do not need to wish harm on others to make it happen." "Oh yes," I said. But luckily, my first confession -- to a baseball-loving priest! (Laughter) Well, though my father died of a sudden heart attack when I was still in my 20s, before I had gotten married and had my three sons, I have passed his memory -- as well as his love of baseball -- on to my boys. Though when the Dodgers abandoned us to come to L.A., I lost faith in baseball until I moved to Boston and became an irrational Red Socks fan. And I must say, even now, when I sit with my sons with our season tickets, I can sometimes close my eyes against the sun and imagine myself, a young girl once more, in the presence of my father, watching the players of my youth on the grassy fields below: Jackie Robinson, Roy Campanella, Pee Wee Reese, and Duke Snider. I must say there is magic in these moments. When I open my eyes and I see my sons in the place where my father once sat, I feel an invisible loyalty and love linking my sons to the grandfather whose face they never had a chance to see, but whose heart and soul they have come to know through all the stories I have told. Which is why, in the end, I shall always be grateful for this curious love of history, allowing me to spend a lifetime looking back into the past. Allowing me to learn from these large figures about the struggle for meaning for life. Allowing me to believe that the private people we have loved and lost in our families, and the public figures we have respected in our history, just as Abraham Lincoln wanted to believe, really can live on, so long as we pledge to tell and to retell the stories of their lives. Thank you for letting me be that storyteller today. (Applause) Thank you.
I'm the luckiest guy in the world. I got to see the last case of killer smallpox in the world. I was in India this past year, and I may have seen the last cases of polio in the world. There's nothing that makes you feel more -- the blessing and the honor of working in a program like that -- than to know that something that horrible no longer exists. So I'm going to tell you -- (Applause) so I'm going to show you some dirty pictures. They are difficult to watch, but you should look at them with optimism, because the horror of these pictures will be matched by the uplifting quality of knowing that they no longer exist. But first, I'm going to tell you a little bit about my own journey. My background is not exactly the conventional medical education that you might expect. When I was an intern in San Francisco, I heard about a group of Native Americans who had taken over Alcatraz Island, and a Native American who wanted to give birth on that island, and no other doctor wanted to go and help her give birth. I went out to Alcatraz, and I lived on the island for several weeks. She gave birth; I caught the baby; I got off the island; I landed in San Francisco; and all the press wanted to talk to me, because my three weeks on the island made me an expert in Indian affairs. (Laughter) I wound up on every television show. Someone saw me on television; they called me up; and they asked me if I'd like to be in a movie and to play a young doctor for a bunch of rock and roll stars who were traveling in a bus ride from San Francisco to England. And I said, yes, I would do that, so I became the doctor in an absolutely awful movie called "Medicine Ball Caravan." (Laughter) Now, you know from the '60s, you're either on the bus or you're off the bus; I was on the bus. My wife of 37 years and I joined the bus. Our bus ride took us from San Francisco to London, then we switched buses at the big pond. We then got on two more buses and we drove through Turkey and Iran, Afghanistan, over the Khyber Pass into Pakistan, like every other young doctor. This is us at the Khyber Pass, and that's our bus. We had some difficulty getting over the Khyber Pass. But we wound up in India. And then, like everyone else in our generation, we went to live in a Himalayan monastery. (Laughter) This is just like a residency program, for those of you that are in medical school. (Laughter) And we studied with a wise man, a guru named Karoli Baba, who then told me to get rid of the dress, put on a three-piece suit, go join the United Nations as a diplomat and work for the World Health Organization. And he made an outrageous prediction that smallpox would be eradicated, and that this was God's gift to humanity, because of the hard work of dedicated scientists. And that prediction came true. This little girl is Rahima Banu, and she was the last case of killer smallpox in the world. And this document is the certificate that the global commission signed, certifying the world to have eradicated the first disease in history. The key to eradicating smallpox was early detection, early response. I'm going to ask you to repeat that: early detection, early response. Can you say that? Audience: Early detection, early response. Larry Brilliant: Smallpox was the worst disease in history. It killed more people than all the wars in history. In the last century, it killed 500 million people. You're reading about Larry Page already. Somebody reads very fast. (Laughter) In the year that Larry Page and Sergey Brin -- with whom I have a certain affection and a new affiliation -- in the year in which they were born, two million people died of smallpox. We declared smallpox eradicated in 1980. This is the most important slide that I've ever seen in public health, [Sovereigns killed by smallpox] because it shows you to be the richest and the strongest, and to be kings and queens of the world, did not protect you from dying of smallpox. Never can you doubt that we are all in this together. But to see smallpox from the perspective of a sovereign is the wrong perspective. You should see it from the perspective of a mother, watching her child develop this disease and standing by helplessly. Day one, day two, day three, day four, day five, day six. You're a mother and you're watching your child, and on day six, you see pustules that become hard. Day seven, they show the classic scars of smallpox umbilication. Day eight. And Al Gore said earlier that the most photographed image in the world, the most printed image in the world, was that of the Earth. But this was in 1974, and as of that moment, this photograph was the photograph that was the most widely printed, because we printed two billion copies of this photograph, and we took them hand to hand, door to door, to show people and ask them if there was smallpox in their house, because that was our surveillance system. We didn't have Google, we didn't have web crawlers, we didn't have computers. By day nine -- you look at this picture and you're horrified; I look at this picture and I say, "Thank God," because it's clear that this is only an ordinary case of smallpox, and I know this child will live. And by day 13, the lesions are scabbing, his eyelids are swollen, but you know this child has no other secondary infection. And by day 20, while he will be scarred for life, he will live. There are other kinds of smallpox that are not like that. This is confluent smallpox, in which there isn't a single place on the body where you could put a finger and not be covered by lesions. Flat smallpox, which killed 100 percent of people who got it. And hemorrhagic smallpox, the most cruel of all, which had a predilection for pregnant women. I've probably had 50 women die. They all had hemorrhagic smallpox. I've never seen anybody die from it who wasn't a pregnant woman. In 1967, the WHO embarked on what was an outrageous program to eradicate a disease. In that year, there were 34 countries affected with smallpox. By 1970, we were down to 18 countries. 1974, we were down to five countries. But in that year, smallpox exploded throughout India. And India was the place where smallpox made its last stand. In 1974, India had a population of 600 million. There are 21 linguistic states in India, which is like saying 21 different countries. There are 20 million people on the road at any time, in buses and trains, walking; 500,000 villages, 120 million households, and none of them wanted to report if they had a case of smallpox in their house, because they thought that smallpox was the visitation of a deity, Shitala Mata, the cooling mother, and it was wrong to bring strangers into your house when the deity was in the house. No incentive to report smallpox. It wasn't just India that had smallpox deities; smallpox deities were prevalent all over the world. So, how we eradicated smallpox was -- max vaccination wouldn't work. You could vaccinate everybody in India, but one year later there'd be 21 million new babies, which was then the population of Canada. It wouldn't do just to vaccinate everyone. You had to find every single case of smallpox in the world at the same time, and draw a circle of immunity around it. And that's what we did. In India alone, my 150,000 best friends and I went door to door, with that same picture, to every single house in India. We made over one billion house calls. And in the process, I learned something very important. Every time we did a house-to-house search, we had a spike in the number of reports of smallpox. When we didn't search, we had the illusion that there was no disease. When we did search, we had the illusion that there was more disease. A surveillance system was necessary, because what we needed was early detection, early response. So we searched and we searched, and we found every case of smallpox in India. We had a reward. We raised the reward. We continued to increase the reward. We had a scorecard that we wrote on every house. And as we did that, the number of reported cases in the world dropped to zero. And in 1980, we declared the globe free of smallpox. It was the largest campaign in United Nations history, until the Iraq war. 150,000 people from all over the world -- doctors of every race, religion, culture and nation, who fought side by side, brothers and sisters, with each other, not against each other, in a common cause to make the world better. But smallpox was the fourth disease that was intended for eradication. We failed three other times. We failed against malaria, yellow fever and yaws. But soon we may see polio eradicated. But the key to eradicating polio is early detection, early response. This may be the year we eradicate polio. That will make it the second disease in history. And David Heymann, who's watching this on the webcast -- David, keep on going. We're close! We're down to four countries. (Applause) I feel like Hank Aaron. Barry Bonds can replace me any time. Let's get another disease off the list of terrible things to worry about. I was just in India working on the polio program. The polio surveillance program is four million people going door to door. That is the surveillance system. But we need to have early detection, early response. Blindness, the same thing. The key to discovering blindness is doing epidemiological surveys and finding out the causes of blindness, so you can mount the correct response. The Seva Foundation was started by a group of alumni of the Smallpox Eradication Programme, who, having climbed the highest mountain, tasted the elixir of the success of eradicating a disease, wanted to do it again. And over the last 27 years, Seva's programs in 15 countries have given back sight to more than two million blind people. Seva got started because we wanted to apply these lessons of surveillance and epidemiology to something which nobody else was looking at as a public health issue: blindness, which heretofore had been thought of only as a clinical disease. In 1980, Steve Jobs gave me that computer, which is Apple number 12, and it's still in Kathmandu, and it's still working, and we ought to go get it and auction it off and make more money for Seva. And we conducted the first Nepal survey ever done for health, and the first nationwide blindness survey ever done, and we had astonishing results. Instead of finding out what we thought was the case -- that blindness was caused mostly by glaucoma and trachoma -- we were astounded to find out that blindness was caused instead by cataract. You can't cure or prevent what you don't know is there. In your TED packages there's a DVD, "Infinite Vision," about Dr. V and the Aravind Eye Hospital. I hope that you will take a look at it. Aravind, which started as a Seva project, is now the world's largest and best eye hospital. This year, that one hospital will give back sight to more than 300,000 people in Tamil Nadu, India. (Applause) Bird flu. I stand here as a representative of all terrible things -- this might be the worst. The key to preventing or mitigating pandemic bird flu is early detection and rapid response. We will not have a vaccine or adequate supplies of an antiviral to combat bird flu if it occurs in the next three years. WHO stages the progress of a pandemic. We are now at stage three on the pandemic alert stage, with just a little bit of human-to-human transmission, but no human-to-human-to-human sustained transmission. The moment WHO says we've moved to category four -- this will not be like Katrina. The world as we know it will stop. There'll be no airplanes flying. Would you get in an airplane with 250 people you didn't know, coughing and sneezing, when you knew that some of them might carry a disease that could kill you, for which you had no antivirals or vaccine? I did a study of the top epidemiologists in the world in October. I asked them -- these are all fluologists and specialists in influenza -- and I asked them the questions you'd like to ask them: What do you think the likelihood is that there'll be a pandemic? If it happens, how bad do you think it will be? Fifteen percent said they thought there'd be a pandemic within three years. But much worse than that, 90 percent said they thought there'd be a pandemic within your children or your grandchildren's lifetime. And they thought that if there was a pandemic, a billion people would get sick. As many as 165 million people would die. There would be a global recession and depression as our just-in-time inventory system and the tight rubber band of globalization broke, and the cost to our economy of one to three trillion dollars would be far worse for everyone than merely 100 million people dying, because so many more people would lose their job and their healthcare benefits, that the consequences are almost unthinkable. And it's getting worse, because travel is getting so much better. Let me show you a simulation of what a pandemic looks like. So we know what we're talking about. Let's assume, for example, that the first case occurs in South Asia. It initially goes quite slowly. You get two or three discrete locations. Then there'll be secondary outbreaks, and the disease will spread from country to country so fast that you won't know what hit you. Within three weeks it will be everywhere in the world. Now, if we had an "undo" button, and we could go back and isolate it and grab it when it first started -- if we could find it early, and we had early detection and early response, and we could put each one of those viruses in jail -- that's the only way to deal with something like a pandemic. And let me show you why that is. We have a joke. This is an epidemic curve, and everyone in medicine, I think, ultimately gets to know what it is. But the joke is, an epidemiologist likes to arrive at an epidemic right here and ride to glory on the downhill curve. (Laughter) But you don't get to do that usually. You usually arrive right about here. What we really want is to arrive right here, so we can stop the epidemic. But you can't always do that. But there's an organization that has been able to find a way to learn when the first cases occur, and that is called GPHIN; it's the Global Public Health Information Network. And that simulation that I showed you that you thought was bird flu -- that was SARS. And SARS is the pandemic that did not occur. And it didn't occur because GPHIN found the pandemic-to-be of SARS three months before WHO actually announced it, and because of that, we were able to stop the SARS pandemic. And I think we owe a great debt of gratitude to GPHIN and to Ron St. John, who I hope is in the audience some place -- over there -- who's the founder of GPHIN. (Applause) Hello, Ron! (Applause) And TED has flown Ron here from Ottawa, where GPHIN is located, because not only did GPHIN find SARS early, but you may have seen last week that Iran announced that they had bird flu in Iran, but GPHIN found the bird flu in Iran not February 14 -- but last September. We need an early-warning system to protect us against the things that are humanity's worst nightmare. And so my TED wish is based on the common denominator of these experiences. Smallpox -- early detection, early response. Blindness, polio -- early detection, early response. Pandemic bird flu -- early detection, early response. It is a litany. It is so obvious that our only way of dealing with these new diseases is to find them early and to kill them before they spread. So, my TED wish is for you to help build a global system -- an early-warning system -- to protect us against humanity's worst nightmares. And what I thought I would call it is "Early Detection," But it should really be called ... "Total Early Detection." [TED] (Laughter) What? (Applause) What? (Applause) But in all seriousness, because this idea is birthed in TED, I would like it to be a legacy of TED, and I'd like to call it the "International System for Total Early Disease Detection." [INSTEDD] And INSTEDD then becomes our mantra. So instead of a hidden pandemic of bird flu, we find it and immediately contain it. Instead of a novel virus caused by bio-terror or bio-error, or shift or drift, we find it and we contain it. Instead of industrial accidents like oil spills or the catastrophe in Bhopal, we find them, and we respond to them. Instead of famine, hidden until it is too late, we detect it, and we respond. And instead of a system which is owned by a government, and hidden in the bowels of government, let's build an early detection system that's freely available to anyone in the world in their own language. Let's make it transparent, non-governmental, not owned by any single country or company, housed in a neutral country, with redundant backup in a different time zone and a different continent. And let's build it on GPHIN. Let's start with GPHIN. Let's increase the websites that they crawl from 20,000 to 20 million. Let's increase the languages they crawl from seven to 70, or more. Let's build in outbound confirmation messages, using text messages or SMS or instant messaging to find out from people who are within 100 meters of the rumor that you hear, if it is, in fact, valid. And let's add satellite confirmation. And we'll add Gapminder's amazing graphics to the front end. And we'll grow it as a moral force in the world, finding out those terrible things before anybody else knows about them, and sending our response to them, so that next year, instead of us meeting here, lamenting how many terrible things there are in the world, we will have pulled together, used the unique skills and the magic of this community, and be proud that we have done everything we can to stop pandemics, other catastrophes, and change the world, beginning right now. (Applause) Chris Anderson: An amazing presentation. First of all, just so everyone understands: you're saying that by creating web crawlers, looking on the Internet for patterns, they can detect something suspicious before WHO, before anyone else can see it? Give an example of how that could possibly be true. Larry Brilliant: You're not mad about the copyright violation? CA: No. I love it. (Laughter) LB: Well, as Ron St. John -- I hope you'll go and meet him in the dinner afterwards and talk to him. When he started GPHIN -- In 1997, there was an outbreak of bird flu -- H5N1. It was in Hong Kong. And a remarkable doctor in Hong Kong responded immediately, by slaughtering 1.5 million chickens and birds, and they stopped that outbreak in its tracks. Immediate detection, immediate response. Then a number of years went by, and there were a lot of rumors about bird flu. Ron and his team in Ottawa began to crawl the web -- only crawling 20,000 different websites, mostly periodicals -- and they read about and heard about a concern, of a lot of children who had high fever and symptoms of bird flu. They reported this to WHO. WHO took a little while taking action, because WHO will only receive a report from a government, because it's the United Nations. But they were able to point to WHO and let them know that there was this surprising and unexplained cluster of illnesses that looked like bird flu. That turned out to be SARS. That's how the world found out about SARS. And because of that, we were able to stop SARS. Now, what's really important is that, before there was GPHIN, 100 percent of all the world's reports of bad things -- whether you're talking about famine or you're talking about bird flu or you're talking about Ebola -- 100 percent of all those reports came from nations. The moment these guys in Ottawa -- on a budget of 800,000 dollars a year -- got cracking, 75 percent of all the reports in the world came from GPHIN, 25 percent of all the reports in the world came from all the other 180 nations. Now, here's what's really interesting: after they'd been working for a couple years, what do you think happened to those nations? They felt pretty stupid. So they started sending in their reports early. And now, their reporting percentage is down to 50 percent, because other nations have started to report. So, can you find diseases early by crawling the web? Of course you can. Can you find it even earlier than GPHIN does now? Of course you can. You saw that they found SARS using their Chinese web crawler a full six weeks before they found it using their English web crawler. Well, they're only crawling in seven languages. These bad viruses really don't have any intention of showing up first in English or Spanish or French. (Laughter) So yes, I want to take GPHIN, I want to build on it. I want to add all the languages of the world that we possibly can. I want to make this open to everybody, so that the health officer in Nairobi or in Patna, Bihar will have as much access to it as the folks in Ottawa or in CDC. And I want to make it part of our culture that there is a community of people who are watching out for the worst nightmares of humanity, and that it's accessible to everyone.
Once upon a time, there was a dread disease that afflicted children. And in fact, among all the diseases that existed in this land, it was the worst. It killed the most children. And along came a brilliant inventor, a scientist, who came up with a partial cure for that disease. And it wasn't perfect. Many children still died, but it was certainly better than what they had before. And one of the good things about this cure was that it was free, virtually free, and was very easy to use. But the worst thing about it was that you couldn't use it on the youngest children, on infants, and on one-year-olds. And so, as a consequence, a few years later, another scientist -- perhaps maybe this scientist not quite as brilliant as the one who had preceded him, but building on the invention of the first one -- came up with a second cure. And the beauty of the second cure for this disease was that it could be used on infants and one-year-olds. And the problem with this cure was it was very expensive, and it was very complicated to use. And although parents tried as hard as they could to use it properly, almost all of them ended up using it wrong in the end. But what they did, of course, since it was so complicated and expensive, they only used it on the zero-year-olds and the one-year-olds. And they kept on using the existing cure that they had on the two-year-olds and up. And this went on for quite some time. People were happy. They had their two cures. Until a particular mother, whose child had just turned two, died of this disease. And she thought to herself, "My child just turned two, and until the child turned two, I had always used this complicated, expensive cure, you know, this treatment. And then the child turned two, and I started using the cheap and easy treatment, and I wonder" -- and she wondered, like all parents who lose children wonder -- "if there isn't something that I could have done, like keep on using that complicated, expensive cure." And she told all the other people, and she said, "How could it possibly be that something that's cheap and simple works as well as something that's complicated and expensive?" And the people thought, "You know, you're right. It probably is the wrong thing to do to switch and use the cheap and simple solution." And the government, they heard her story and the other people, and they said, "Yeah, you're right, we should make a law. We should outlaw this cheap and simple treatment and not let anybody use this on their children." And the people were happy. They were satisfied. For many years this went along, and everything was fine. But then along came a lowly economist, who had children himself, and he used the expensive and complicated treatment. But he knew about the cheap and simple one. And he thought about it, and the expensive one didn't seem that great to him. So he thought, "I don't know anything about science, but I do know something about data, so maybe I should go and look at the data and see whether this expensive and complicated treatment actually works any better than the cheap and simple one." And lo and behold, when he went through the data, he found that it didn't look like the expensive, complicated solution was any better than the cheap one, at least for the children who were two and older -- the cheap one still didn't work on the kids who were younger. And so, he went forth to the people and he said, "I've made this wonderful finding: it looks as if we could just use the cheap and simple solution, and by doing so we could save ourselves 300 million dollars a year, and we could spend that on our children in other ways." And the parents were very unhappy, and they said, "This is a terrible thing, because how can the cheap and easy thing be as good as the hard thing?" And the government was very upset. And in particular, the people who made this expensive solution were very upset because they thought, "How can we hope to compete with something that's essentially free? We would lose all of our market." And people were very angry, and they called him horrible names. And he decided that maybe he should leave the country for a few days, and seek out some more intelligent, open-minded people in a place called Oxford, and come and try and tell the story at that place. And so, anyway, here I am. It's not a fairy tale. It's a true story about the United States today, and the disease I'm referring to is actually motor vehicle accidents for children. And the free cure is adult seatbelts, and the expensive cure -- the 300-million-dollar-a-year cure -- is child car seats. And what I'd like to talk to you about today is some of the evidence why I believe this to be true: that for children two years old and up, there really is no real benefit -- proven benefit -- of car seats, in spite of the incredible energy that has been devoted toward expanding the laws and making it socially unacceptable to put your children into seatbelts. And then talk about why -- what is it that makes that true? And then, finally talk a little bit about a third way, about another technology, which is probably better than anything we have, but which -- there hasn't been any enthusiasm for adoption precisely because people are so enamored with the current car seat solution. OK. So, many times when you try to do research on data, it records complicated stories -- it's hard to find in the data. It doesn't turn out to be the case when you look at seatbelts versus car seats. So the United States keeps a data set of every fatal accident that's happened since 1975. So in every car crash in which at least one person dies, they have information on all of the people. So if you look at that data -- it's right up on the National Highway Transportation Safety Administration's website -- you can just look at the raw data, and begin to get a sense of the limited amount of evidence that's in favor of car seats for children aged two and up. So, here is the data. Here I have, among two- to six-year-olds -- anyone above six, basically no one uses car seats, so you can't compare -- 29.3 percent of the children who are unrestrained in a crash in which at least one person dies, themselves die. If you put a child in a car seat, 18.2 percent of the children die. If they're wearing a lap-and-shoulder belt, in this raw data, 19.4 percent die. And interestingly, wearing a lap-only seatbelt, 16.7 percent die. And actually, the theory tells you that the lap-only seatbelt's got to be worse than the lap-and-shoulder belt. And that just reminds you that when you deal with raw data, there are hundreds of confounding variables that may be getting in the way. So what we do in the study is -- and this is just presenting the same information, but turned into a figure to make it easier. So the yellow bar represents car seats, the orange bar lap-and-shoulder, and the red bar lap-only seatbelts. And this is all relative to unrestrained -- the bigger the bar, the better. Okay. So, this is the data I just showed, OK? So the highest bar is what you're striving to beat. So you can control for the basic things, like how hard the crash was, what seat the child was sitting in, etc., the age of the child. And that's that middle set of bars. And so, you can see that the lap-only seatbelts start to look worse once you do that. And then finally, the last set of bars, which are really controlling for everything you could possibly imagine about the crash, 50, 75, 100 different characteristics of the crash. And what you find is that the car seats and the lap-and-shoulder belts, when it comes to saving lives, fatalities look exactly identical. And the standard error bands are relatively small around these estimates as well. And it's not just overall. It's very robust to anything you want to look at. One thing that's interesting: if you look at frontal-impact crashes -- when the car crashes, the front hits into something -- indeed, what you see is that the car seats look a little bit better. And I think this isn't just chance. In order to have the car seat approved, you need to pass certain federal standards, all of which involve slamming your car into a direct frontal crash. But when you look at other types of crashes, like rear-impact crashes, indeed, the car seats don't perform as well. And I think that's because they've been optimized to pass, as we always expect people to do, to optimize relative to bright-line rules about how affected the car will be. And the other thing you might argue is, "Well, car seats have got a lot better over time. And so if we look at recent crashes -- the whole data set is almost 30 years' worth of data -- you won't see it in the recent crashes. The new car seats are far, far better." But indeed, in recent crashes the lap-and-shoulder seatbelts, actually, are doing even better than the car seats. They say, "Well, that's impossible, that can't be." And the line of argument, if you ask parents, is, "But car seats are so expensive and complicated, and they have this big tangle of latches, how could they possibly not work better than seatbelts because they are so expensive and complicated?" It's kind of an interesting logic, I think, that people use. And the other logic, they say, "Well, the government wouldn't have told us [to] use them if they weren't much better." But what's interesting is the government telling us to use them is not actually based on very much. It really is based on some impassioned pleas of parents whose children died after they turned two, which has led to the passage of all these laws -- not very much on data. So you can only get so far, I think, in telling your story by using these abstract statistics. And so I had some friends over to dinner, and I was asking -- we had a cookout -- I was asking them what advice they might have for me about proving my point. They said, "Why don't you run some crash tests?" And I said, "That's a great idea." So we actually tried to commission some crash tests. And it turns out that as we called around to the independent crash test companies around the country, none of them wanted to do our crash test because they said, some explicitly, some not so explicitly, "All of our business comes from car seat manufacturers. We can't risk alienating them by testing seatbelts relative to car seats." Now, eventually, one did. Under the conditions of anonymity, they said they would be happy to do this test for us -- so anonymity, and 1,500 dollars per seat that we crashed. And so, we went to Buffalo, New York, and here is the precursor to it. These are the crash test dummies, waiting for their chance to take the center stage. And then, here's how the crash test works. Here, they don't actually crash the entire car, you know -- it's not worth ruining a whole car to do it. So they just have these bench seats, and they strap the car seat and the seatbelt onto it. So I just wanted you to look at this. And I think this gives you a good idea of why parents think car seats are so great. Look at the kid in the car seat. Does he not look content, ready to go, like he could survive anything? And then, if you look at the kid in back, it looks like he's already choking before the crash even happens. It's hard to believe, when you look at this, that that kid in back is going to do very well when you get in a crash. So this is going to be a crash where they're going to slam this thing forward into a wall at 30 miles an hour, and see what happens. OK? So, let me show you what happens. These are three-year-old dummies, by the way. So here -- this is the car seat. Now watch two things: watch how the head goes forward, and basically hits the knees -- and this is in the car seat -- and watch how the car seat flies around, in the rebound, up in the air. The car seat's moving all over the place. Bear in mind there are two things about this. This is a car seat that was installed by someone who has installed 1,000 car seats, who knew exactly how to do it. And also it turned out these bench seats are the very best way to install car seats. Having a flat back makes it much easier to install them. And so this is a test that's very much rigged in favor of the car seat, OK? So, that kid in this crash fared very well. The federal standards are that you have to score below a 1,000 to be an approved car seat on this crash, in some metric of units which are not important. And this crash would have been about a 450. So this car seat was actually an above-average car seat from Consumer Reports, and did quite well. So the next one. Now, this is the kid, same crash, who is in the seatbelt. He hardly moves at all, actually, relative to the other child. The funny thing is, the cam work is terrible because they've only set it up to do the car seats, and so, they actually don't even have a way to move the camera so you can see the kid that's on the rebound. Anyway, it turns out that those two crashes, that actually the three-year-old did slightly worse. So, he gets about a 500 out of -- you know, on this range -- relative to a 400 and something. But still, if you just took that data from that crash to the federal government, and said, "I have invented a new car seat. I would like you to approve it for selling," then they would say, "This is a fantastic new car seat, it works great. It only got a 500, it could have gotten as high up as a 1,000." And this seatbelt would have passed with flying colors into being approved as a car seat. So, in some sense, what this is suggesting is that it's not just that people are setting up their car seats wrong, which is putting children at risk. It's just that, fundamentally, the car seats aren't doing much. So here's the crash. So these are timed at the same time, so you can see that it takes much longer with the car seat -- at rebound, it takes a lot longer -- but there's just a lot less movement for child who's in the seatbelt. So, I'll show you the six-year-old crashes as well. The six-year-old is in a car seat, and it turns out that looks terrible, but that's great. That's like a 400, OK? So that kid would do fine in the crash. Nothing about that would have been problematic to the child at all. And then here's the six-year-old in the seatbelt, and in fact, they get exactly within, you know, within one or two points of the same. So really, for the six-year-old, the car seat did absolutely nothing whatsoever. That's some more evidence, so in some sense -- I was criticized by a scientist, who said, "You could never publish a study with an n of 4," meaning those four crashes. So I wrote him back and I said, "What about an n of 45,004?" Because I had the other 45,000 other real-world crashes. And I just think that it's interesting that the idea of using real-world crashes, which is very much something that economists think would be the right thing to do, is something that scientists don't actually, usually think -- they would rather use a laboratory, a very imperfect science of looking at the dummies, than actually 30 years of data of what we've seen with children and with car seats. And so I think the answer to this puzzle is that there's a much better solution out there, that's gotten nobody excited because everyone is so delighted with the way car seats are presumably working. And if you think from a design perspective, about going back to square one, and say, "I just want to protect kids in the back seat." I don't there's anyone in this room who'd say, "Well, the right way to start would be, let's make a great seat belt for adults. And then, let's make this really big contraption that you have to rig up to it in this daisy chain." I mean, why not start -- who's sitting in the back seat anyway except for kids? But essentially, do something like this, which I don't know exactly how much it would cost to do, but there's no reason I could see why this should be much more expensive than a regular car seat. It's just actually -- you see, this is folding up -- it's behind the seat. You've got a regular seat for adults, and then you fold it down, and the kid sits on top, and it's integrated. It seems to me that this can't be a very expensive solution, and it's got to work better than what we already have. So the question is, is there any hope for adoption of something like this, which would presumably save a lot of lives? And I think the answer, perhaps, lies in a story. The answer both to why has a car seat been so successful, and why this may someday be adopted or not, lies in a story that my dad told me, relating to when he was a doctor in the U.S. Air Force in England. And this is a long time ago: you were allowed to do things then you can't do today. So, my father would have patients come in who he thought were not really sick. And he had a big jar full of placebo pills that he would give them, and he'd say, "Come back in a week, if you still feel lousy." OK, and most of them would not come back, but some of them would come back. And when they came back, he, still convinced they were not sick, had another jar of pills. In this jar were huge horse pills. They were almost impossible to swallow. And these, to me, are the analogy for the car seats. People would look at these and say, "Man, this thing is so big and so hard to swallow. If this doesn't make me feel better, you know, what possibly could?" And it turned out that most people wouldn't come back, because it worked. But every once in a while, there was still a patient convinced that he was sick, and he'd come back. And my dad had a third jar of pills. And the jar of pills he had, he said, were the tiniest little pills he could find, so small you could barely see them. And he would say, listen, I know I gave you that huge pill, that complicated, hard-to-swallow pill before, but now I've got one that's so potent, that is really tiny and small and almost invisible. It's almost like this thing here, which you can't even see." And it turned out that never, in all the times my dad gave out this pill, the really tiny pill, did anyone ever come back still complaining of sickness. So, my dad always took that as evidence that this little, teeny, powerful pill had the ultimate placebo effect. And in some sense, if that's the right story, I think integrated car seats you will see, very quickly, becoming something that everyone has. The other possible conclusion is, well, maybe after coming to my father three times, getting sent home with placebos, he still felt sick, he went and found another doctor. And that's completely possible. And if that's the case, then I think we're stuck with conventional car seats for a long time to come. Thank you very much. (Applause) (Audience: I just wanted to ask you, when we wear seatbelts we don't necessarily wear them just to prevent loss of life, it's also to prevent lots of serious injury. Your data looks at fatalities. It doesn't look at serious injury. Is there any data to show that child seats are actually less effective, or just as effective as seatbelts for serious injury? Because that would prove your case.) Steven Levitt: Yeah, that's a great question. In my data, and in another data set I've looked at for New Jersey crashes, I find very small differences in injury. So in this data, it's statistically insignificant differences in injury between car seats and lap-and-shoulder belts. In the New Jersey data, which is different, because it's not just fatal crashes, but all crashes in New Jersey that are reported, it turns out that there is a 10 percent difference in injuries, but generally they're the minor injuries. Now, what's interesting, I should say this as a disclaimer, there is medical literature that is very difficult to resolve with this other data, which suggests that car seats are dramatically better. And they use a completely different methodology that involves -- after the crash occurs, they get from the insurance companies the names of the people who were in the crash, and they call them on the phone, and they asked them what happened. And I really can't resolve, yet, and I'd like to work with these medical researchers to try to understand how there can be these differences, which are completely at odds with one another. But it's obviously a critical question. The question is even if -- are there enough serious injuries to make these cost-effective? It's kind of tricky. Even if they're right, it's not so clear that they're so cost-effective.
I'm a, or was, or kind of am a toy designer. And before I was a toy designer, oh, I was a mime, a street mime, actually. And then I was an entertainer, I guess. And before that, I was a silversmith, and before that, I was -- I was out of the house at about 15 and a half, and I never wound up going into college. I didn't really -- I didn't see the point at the time. I do now, after learning about all the quantum stuff. (Laughter) It's really cool. Anyway, I wanted to show you a little bit about the world of toy design, at least from my small aperture of the world. This is a video I made when I first started doing toy design. I'm in my garage, making weird stuff. And then you go to these toy companies and there's some guy across the table, and he goes, "Pass. Pass. Pass." You know, you think it's so cool, but they -- anyway, I made this little tape that I'd always show when I go in. This is the name of my company, Giving Toys. So I used to work at Mattel, actually. And after I left Mattel, I started all these hamburger makers, and then got the license to make the maker. So this is a hamburger maker that you take the peanut butter and stuff and you put it in there, and it makes -- and this is a French fry maker, little, tiny food you can eat. I beat up the pasta maker to make that. Then this is a McNugget maker, I think. This, now that's the McNugget maker, and this is a -- this is my oldest daughter making a McApple Pie. And let's see, you can make the pie and cinnamon and sugar, and then you eat, and you eat, and you eat, and you -- she's about 300 pounds now. No, she's not, she's beautiful. This is how they looked when they came out at the end. These are a -- this is like a 15 million dollar line. And it got me through some -- I didn't make any royalties on this, but it got me through. Next is a compilation of a bunch of stuff. That was a missile foam launcher that didn't get sold. This is a squishy head, for no apparent reason. This is some effects that I did for "Wig, Rattle and Roll." That was a robot eye thing controlling it in the back. That paid the rent for about a month. This is a walking Barbie -- I said, "Oh, this is it!" And they go, "Oh, that's really nice," and out it goes. So this is some fighting robots. I thought everyone would want these. They fight, they get back up, you know? Wouldn't this be cool? And they made it into a toy, and then they dropped it like a hot rock. They're pretty cool. This is a-- we're doing some flight-testing on my little pug, seeing if this can really grab. It does pretty good. I'm using little phone connectors to make them so they can spin. It's how they, see, have those album things -- kids don't know what they are. This is a clay maker. You know, I said -- I went to Play-Doh, and said, "Look, I can animate this." They said, "Don't talk to us about Play-Doh." And then, I made a Lego animator. I thought, this would be so great! And you know, Lego -- don't take Legos to Lego. That's the answer. They know everything about it. Then I started doing animatronics. I loved dinosaurs. I used to be in the film business, kind of, and actually, Nicholas Negroponte saw this when I was, like, 12, and anyway, so then they said, "No, you have to make two and they have to fight." You know, how -- why would a kid want a dinosaur? This is me using [unclear] or 3-D Studio, back in the '80s. That's David Letterman. You can see how old this stuff is. That's my youngest cousin. This is a segment called, "Dangerous Toys You Won't See at Christmas." We had my first saw blade launcher and we had a flamethrower chair. My career basically peaked here. And in the back are foam-core cutouts of the people who couldn't make it to the show. This is MEK going through a windshield wiper motor. So this is a -- I used to kind of be an actor. And I'm really not very good at it. But the -- this is a guy named Dr. Yatz, who would take toys apart and show kids about engineering. And you can see the massively parallel processing Nintendos there. And over to the left is a view master of the CD-ROM. And a guy named Stan Reznikov did this as a pilot. This is a -- you can see the little window there. You can actually see the Steadicam with a bubble on the bottom. You see the keyboard strapped to my wrist. Way ahead of my time here. (Video) I'm getting dizzy ... Narrator: I love toys! Caleb Chung: That's all I wanted to say there. I love toys. OK, so, so that was a, that was the first kind of a -- that was the first batch of products. Most of them did not go. You get one out of 20, one out of 30 products. And every now and then, we do something like a, you know, an automated hair wrap machine, you know, that tangles your hair and pulls your scalp out, and -- and we'd make some money on that, you know. And we'd give it out. But eventually, we left L.A., and we moved to Idaho, where there was actually a lot of peace and quiet. And I started working on this project -- oh, I have to tell you about this real quick. Throughout this whole thing, making toys, I think there is a real correlation with innovation and art and science. There's some kind of a blend that happens that allows, you know, to find innovation. And I tried to sum this up in some kind of symbol that means something, to me anyway. And so, art and science have a kind of dynamic balance, that's where I think innovation happens. And actually, this is, to me, how I can come up with great ideas. But it's not how you actually get leverage. Actually, you have to put a circle around that, and call it business. And those three together, I think, give you leverage in the world. But moving on. So, this is a quick tale I'm going to tell. This is the Furby tale. As he said, I was co-inventor of the Furby. I did the body and creature -- well, you'll see. So by way of showing you this, you can kind of get an understanding of what it is to, hopefully, try to create robotic life forms, or technology that has an emotional connection with the user. So this is my family. This is my wife, Christi, and Abby, and Melissa, and my 17-year-old now, Emily, who was just a pack of trouble. All right, there's that robot again. I came out of the movie business, as I said, and I said, let's make these animatronic robots. Let's make these things. And so I've always had a big interest in this. This one actually didn't go anywhere, but I got my feet wet doing this. This is a smaller one, and I have a little moving torso on there. A little, tiny guy walks along. More servo drives, lots of servo hacking, lots of mechanical stuff. There's another one. He actually has skeletor legs, I think, he's wearing there. Oh, this is a little pony, little pony -- very cute little thing. The point of showing these is I've always been interested in little artificial life pieces. So the challenge was -- I worked for Microsoft for a little bit, working on the Microsoft Barney. And this is a -- you know, the purple dinosaur with kind of bloat wear. And, you know, they had lots, just lots of stuff in there that you didn't need, I thought. And then Microsoft can just fill a, you know, a warehouse full of this stuff and see if they sell. So it's a really strange business model compared to coming from a toy company. But anyway, a friend of mine and I, Dave Hampton, decided to see if we could do like a single-cell organism. What's the fewest pieces we could use to make a little life form? And that's our little, thirty-cent Mabuchi motor. And so, I have all these design books, like I'm sure many of you have. And throughout the books -- this is the first page on Furby -- I have kind of the art and science. I have the why over here, and the how over there. I try to do a lot of philosophy, a lot of thinking about all of these projects. Because they're not just "bing" ideas; you have to really dig deep in these things. So there's some real pseudo-code over here, and getting the idea of different kind of drives, things like that. And originally, Furby only had two eyes and some batteries on the bottom. And then we said, well, you're going to feed him, and he needs to talk, and it got more complicated. And then I had to figure out how I'm going to use that one motor to make the eyes move, and the ears move, and the body to move, and the mouth to move. And, you know, I want to make it blink and do all that at the same time. Well, I came up with this kind of linear expression thing with these cams and feedback. And that worked pretty well. Then I started to get a little more realistic and I have to start drawing the stuff. And there's my "note to self" at the top: "lots of engineering." So that turned out to be a little more than true. There's my first exploded view and all the little pieces and the little worm drive and all that stuff. And then I've got to start building it, so this is the real thing. I get up and start cutting my finger and gluing things together. And that's my little workshop. And there's the first little cam that drove Furby. And there's Furby on the half shell. You can see the little BB in the box is my tilt sensor. I just basically gnawed all this stuff out of plastic. So there's the back of his head with a billion holes in it. And there I am. I'm done. There's my little Furby. No, it's a little robot on heroin or something, I think. (Laughter) So right now, you see, I love little robots. So my wife says, "Well, you may like it, but nobody else will." So she comes to the rescue. This is my wife Christi, who is just, you know, my muse and my partner for eternity here. And she does drawings, right? She's an actual, you know, artist. And she starts doing all these different drawings and does color patterns and coloring books. And I like the guy with the cigar at the bottom there. He didn't test so well, but I like him. And then she started doing these other images. At that time, Beanie Babies was a big hit, and we thought, we'll do a bunch of different ones. So here's a little pink one, a little pouf on his head. And here's -- this didn't do so well in testing either, I don't know why. There's my favorite, Demon Furby. That was a good one. Anyway, finally settled on kind of this kind of a look, little poufy body, a little imaginary character. And there he is, a little bush baby on -- caught in the headlights there. I actually went to Toys"R"Us, got a little furry cat, ripped it apart and made this. And since then, every time I come home from Toys"R"Us with dolls or something, they disappear from my desk and they get hidden in the house. I have three girls and they just, they -- it's like a rescue animal thing they're going there. (Laughter) So, a little tether coming off, it's just a control for the Fur's mouth and his eyes. It's just a little server control and I made a little video going: "Hi, my name's Furby, and I'm good," you know, and then I'd reach my hand. He'd -- you can tickle him. When I put my hand up, "Ha, ha, ha, ha" and that's how we sold him. And Hasbro actually said, I meant Tiger Electronics at the time, said, "Yeah, we want to do this. We have, you know, 13 weeks or something to Toy Fair, and we're going to hire you guys to do this." And so Dave and I got working. Mostly me, because it was all mechanics at this point. So now I have to really figure out all kinds of stuff I don't know how to do. And I started working with Solid Works and a whole other group to do that. And we started -- this was way back before there was really much SLA going on, not a lot of rapid prototyping. We certainly didn't have the money to do this. They only paid me, like, a little bit of money to do this, so I had to call a friend of a friend who was running the GM prototype plant, SLA plant, that was down. And they said, "Yeah, well, we'll run them." So they ran all the shells for us, which was nice of them. And the cams I got cut at Hewlett Packard. We snuck in on the weekend. And so we just had a disc of the files. But they have a closed system, so you couldn't print the things out on the machine. So we actually printed them out on clear and taped them on the monitors. And on the weekend we ran the parts for that. So this is how they come out close to the end. And then they looked like little Garfields there. Eight months later -- you may remember this, this was a -- total, total, total chaos. For a while, they were making two million Furbys a month. They actually wound up doing about 40 million Furbys. I -- it's unbelievable how -- I don't know how that can be. And Hasbro made about, you know, a billion and a half dollars. And I just a little bit on each one. So full circle -- why do I do this? Why do you, you know, try to do this stuff? And it's, of course, for your kids. And there's my youngest daughter with her Furbys. And she still actually has those. So I kind of retired, and we're already living in paradise up in Boise, on a river, you know. So and then I started another company called Toy Innovation and we did some projects with Mattel with actually with a lady who's here, Ivy Ross, and we did Miracle Moves Baby, made it in Wired magazine, did a bunch of other stuff. And then I started another company. We did a little hand-held device for teens that could hook up to the Internet, won "Best Innovations" at CES, but really I kind of slowed down and said, OK, I just ... After a while, I had this old tape of this dinosaur, and I gave it to this guy, and this other guy saw it, and then people started to want to do it. And they said they'd spend all this time. So I said, "OK, let's try to do this dinosaur project." The crazy idea is we're going to try to clone a dinosaur as much as we can with today's technology. And it's not really -- but as close as we can do. And we're going to try to really pull this off, intentfully try to make something that seems like it's alive. Not a robot that kind of does, but let's really go for it. So I picked a Camarasaurus, because the Camarasaurus was the most abundant of the sauropods in North America. And you could actually find full fossil evidence of these. That's a juvenile. And so we actually went in. There's a book called "Walking on Eggshells," where they found actual sauropod skin in Patagonia. And the picture from the book, so when I -- I told the sculptor to use this bump pattern, whatever you can to copy that. Very, very obsessive. There's a kind of truncated Camarasaurus skeleton, but the geometry's correct. And then I went in, and measured all the geometry because I figured, hey, biomimicry. If I do it kind of right, it might move kind of like the real thing. So there's the motor. And about this time, you know, all these other people are starting to help. Here's an example of what we did with the skull. There's the skull, there's my drawing of a skull. There's kind of the skin version of the soft tissue. There's the mechanism that would go in there, kind of a Geneva drive. There's some Solid Works versions of it. Here's some SLA parts of the same thing. And then, these are really crude pieces. We were just doing some tests here. There's the skull, pretty much the same shape as the Camarasaurus. There's a photorealistic eye behind a lens. And there's kind of the first exploded view, or see-through view. There's the first SLA version, and it already kind of has the feel, it has kind of a cuteness already. And the thing about blending science and art in this multidisciplinary stuff is you can do a robot, and then you go back and do the shape, and then you go back and forth. The servos in the front legs, we had to shape those like muscles. They had to fit within the envelope. There was a tremendous amount of work to get all that working right. All the neck and the tail are cable, so it moves smoothly and organically. And then, of course, you're not done yet. You have to get the look for the skin. The skin's a whole another thing, probably the hardest part. So you hire artists, and you try to get the look and feel of the character. Now, this is not -- we're character designers, right? And we're still trying to keep with the real character. So, now you go back and you cover the whole thing with clay. Now you start doing the sculpture for this. And you can see we got a guy from -- who's just a fanatic about dinosaurs to do the sculpting for us, down to the spoon-shaped teeth and everything. And then more sculpting, and then more sculpting, and then more sculpting, and then more sculpting. And then, four years and 10 million dollars later, we have a little Pleo. John, do you want to bring him up? John Sosoka is our CTO, and is really the man that's done most of the work with our 40-person company. I'd like to give John a hand. He never gets recognition. This is John Sosoka. (Applause) So, thank you, John, thank you, and get back to work, all right, man? All right -- (Laughter) -- no, it's very painful, so -- (Laughter) -- these are little Pleos and you can probably see them. This -- I on purpose -- they go through life stages. So when you first get them, they're babies. And you -- more you have them, kind of the older they get, and they kind of learn through their behavior. So this one, this one's actually asleep, and -- hang on. Pleo, wake up. Pleo, come on. So this guy's listening to my voice here. But they have 40 sensors all over their body. They have seven processors, they have 14 motors, they have -- but you don't care, do you? They're just cute, right? That's the idea, that's the idea. So you see -- hey, come on. Hey, did you feel that? There's something big and loud over here. Hey. (Laughter) That's good, wake up, wake up, wake up. Yeah, they're like kids, you know. You, yeah, yeah. Okay, he's hungry. I'll show you what he's been doing for, for four years. Here, here, here. Have some money, Pleo. (Laughter) There you go. That's what the investors think, that it's just -- (Laughter) -- right, right. So they're really sweet little guys. And we're hoping that -- you know, our belief is that humans need to feel empathy towards things in order to be more human. And we think we can help that out by having little creatures that you can love. Now these are not robots, they're kind of lovebots, you know. They do change over time. But mostly they evoke a feeling of caring. And we have a -- I have a little something here. Now I do want to say that, you know, Ugobe is not there yet. We've just opened the door, and it's for all of you to step through it. We did include some things that are hopefully useful. Excuse me, Pleo. They -- he has a USB and he has a SD card, so it's completely open architecture. So anyone can plug him -- (Applause) -- thank you. This is John over here. Anyone can take Pleo and they can totally redo his personality. You can make him bipolar, or as someone said, a -- (Laughter) -- you can change his homeostatic drives, or whatever you want to call them. Kids can just drag and drop, put in new sounds. We -- actually, it's very hard to keep people from doing this. We have one animator who's taken it and he's done a take on the Budweiser beer commercial, and they're going, "Whassup," you know? (Laughter) You -- so it's -- yes, he likes that. So they're a handful. We hope you get one. I don't know what I'm missing to say, but as a last thing, I'd like to say is that if we continue along this path, we are designing our children's best friends. And there's a lot of social responsibility in that. That's why Pleo's soft and gentle and loving. And so I just -- I hope we all dream well. Thank you. (Applause)
Wow, what an honor. I always wondered what this would feel like. So eight years ago, I got the worst career advice of my life. I had a friend tell me, "Don't worry about how much you like the work you're doing now. It's all about just building your resume." And I'd just come back from living in Spain for a while, and I'd joined this Fortune 500 company. I thought, "This is fantastic. I'm going to have big impact on the world." I had all these ideas. And within about two months, I noticed at about 10am every morning I had this strange urge to want to slam my head through the monitor of my computer. I don't know if anyone's ever felt that. And I noticed pretty soon after that that all the competitors in our space had already automated my job role. And this is right about when I got this sage advice to build up my resume. Well, as I'm trying to figure out what two-story window I'm going to jump out of and change things up, I read some altogether different advice from Warren Buffett, and he said, "Taking jobs to build up your resume is the same as saving up sex for old age." (Laughter) And I heard that, and that was all I needed. Within two weeks, I was out of there, and I left with one intention: to find something that I could screw up. That's how tough it was. I wanted to have some type of impact. It didn't matter what it was. And I found pretty quickly that I wasn't alone: it turns out that over 80 percent of the people around don't enjoy their work. I'm guessing this room is different, but that's the average that Deloitte has done with their studies. So I wanted to find out, what is it that sets these people apart, the people who do the passionate, world-changing work, that wake up inspired every day, and then these people, the other 80 percent who lead these lives of quiet desperation. So I started to interview all these people doing this inspiring work, and I read books and did case studies, 300 books altogether on purpose and career and all this, totally just self-immersion, really for the selfish reason of -- I wanted to find the work that I couldn't not do, what that was for me. But as I was doing this, more and more people started to ask me, "You're into this career thing. I don't like my job. Can we sit down for lunch?" I'd say, "Sure." But I would have to warn them, because at this point, my quit rate was also 80 percent. Of the people I'd sit down with for lunch, 80 percent would quit their job within two months. I was proud of this, and it wasn't that I had any special magic. It was that I would ask one simple question. It was, "Why are you doing the work that you're doing?" And so often their answer would be, "Well, because somebody told me I'm supposed to." And I realized that so many people around us are climbing their way up this ladder that someone tells them to climb, and it ends up being leaned up against the wrong wall, or no wall at all. The more time I spent around these people and saw this problem, I thought, what if we could create a community, a place where people could feel like they belonged and that it was OK to do things differently, to take the road less traveled, where that was encouraged, and inspire people to change? And that later became what I now call Live Your Legend, which I'll explain in a little bit. But as I've made these discoveries, I noticed a framework of really three simple things that all these different passionate world-changers have in common, whether you're a Steve Jobs or if you're just, you know, the person that has the bakery down the street. But you're doing work that embodies who you are. I want to share those three with you, so we can use them as a lens for the rest of today and hopefully the rest of our life. The first part of this three-step passionate work framework is becoming a self-expert and understanding yourself, because if you don't know what you're looking for, you're never going to find it. And the thing is that no one is going to do this for us. There's no major in university on passion and purpose and career. I don't know how that's not a required double major, but don't even get me started on that. I mean, you spend more time picking out a dorm room TV set than you do you picking your major and your area of study. But the point is, it's on us to figure that out, and we need a framework, we need a way to navigate through this. And so the first step of our compass is finding out what our unique strengths are. What are the things that we wake up loving to do no matter what, whether we're paid or we're not paid, the things that people thank us for? And the Strengths Finder 2.0 is a book and also an online tool. I highly recommend it for sorting out what it is that you're naturally good at. And next, what's our framework or our hierarchy for making decisions? Do we care about the people, our family, health, or is it achievement, success, all this stuff? We have to figure out what it is to make these decisions, so we know what our soul is made of, so that we don't go selling it to some cause we don't give a shit about. And then the next step is our experiences. All of us have these experiences. We learn things every day, every minute about what we love, what we hate, what we're good at, what we're terrible at. And if we don't spend time paying attention to that and assimilating that learning and applying it to the rest of our lives, it's all for nothing. Every day, every week, every month of every year I spend some time just reflecting on what went right, what went wrong, and what do I want to repeat, what can I apply more to my life. And even more so than that, as you see people, especially today, who inspire you, who are doing things where you say "Oh God, what Jeff is doing, I want to be like him." Why are you saying that? Open up a journal. Write down what it is about them that inspires you. It's not going to be everything about their life, but whatever it is, take note on that, so over time we'll have this repository of things that we can use to apply to our life and have a more passionate existence and make a better impact. Because when we start to put these things together, we can then define what success actually means to us, and without these different parts of the compass, it's impossible. We end up in the situation -- we have that scripted life that everybody seems to be living going up this ladder to nowhere. It's kind of like in Wall Street 2, if anybody saw that, the peon employee asks the big Wall Street banker CEO, "What's your number? Everyone's got a number, where if they make this money, they'll leave it all." He says, "Oh, it's simple. More." And he just smiles. And it's the sad state of most of the people that haven't spent time understanding what matters for them, who keep reaching for something that doesn't mean anything to us, but we're doing it because everyone said we're supposed to. But once we have this framework together, we can start to identify the things that make us come alive. You know, before this, a passion could come and hit you in the face, or maybe in your possible line of work, you might throw it away because you don't have a way of identifying it. But once you do, you can see something that's congruent with my strengths, my values, who I am as a person, so I'm going to grab ahold of this, I'm going to do something with it, and I'm going to pursue it and try to make an impact with it. And Live Your Legend and the movement we've built wouldn't exist if I didn't have this compass to identify, "Wow, this is something I want to pursue and make a difference with." If we don't know what we're looking for, we're never going to find it, but once we have this framework, this compass, then we can move on to what's next -- and that's not me up there -- doing the impossible and pushing our limits. There's two reasons why people don't do things. One is they tell themselves they can't do them, or people around them tell them they can't do them. Either way, we start to believe it. Either we give up, or we never start in the first place. The things is, everyone was impossible until somebody did it. Every invention, every new thing in the world, people thought were crazy at first. Roger Bannister and the four-minute mile, it was a physical impossibility to break the four-minute mile in a foot race until Roger Bannister stood up and did it. And then what happened? Two months later, 16 people broke the four-minute mile. The things that we have in our head that we think are impossible are often just milestones waiting to be accomplished if we can push those limits a bit. And I think this starts with probably your physical body and fitness more than anything, because we can control that. If you don't think you can run a mile, you show yourself you can run a mile or two, or a marathon, or lose five pounds, or whatever it is, you realize that confidence compounds and can be transferred into the rest of your world. And I've actually gotten into the habit of this a little bit with my friends. We have this little group. We go on physical adventures, and recently, I found myself in a kind of precarious spot. I'm terrified of deep, dark, blue water. I don't know if anyone's ever had that same fear ever since they watched Jaws 1, 2, 3 and 4 like six times when I was a kid. But anything above here, if it's murky, I can already feel it right now. I swear there's something in there. Even if it's Lake Tahoe, it's fresh water, totally unfounded fear, ridiculous, but it's there. Anyway, three years ago I find myself on this tugboat right down here in the San Francisco Bay. It's a rainy, stormy, windy day, and people are getting sick on the boat, and I'm sitting there wearing a wetsuit, and I'm looking out the window in pure terror thinking I'm about to swim to my death. I'm going to try to swim across the Golden Gate. And my guess is some people in this room might have done that before. I'm sitting there, and my buddy Jonathan, who had talked me into it, he comes up to me and he could see the state I was in. And he says, "Scott, hey man, what's the worst that could happen? You're wearing a wetsuit. You're not going to sink. And If you can't make it, just hop on one of the 20 kayaks. Plus, if there's a shark attack, why are they going to pick you over the 80 people in the water?" So thanks, that helps. He's like, "But really, just have fun with this. Good luck." And he dives in, swims off. OK. Turns out, the pep talk totally worked, and I felt this total feeling of calm, and I think it was because Jonathan was 13 years old. (Laughter) And of the 80 people swimming that day, 65 of them were between the ages of nine and 13. Think how you would have approached your world differently if at nine years old you found out you could swim a mile and a half in 56-degree water from Alcatraz to San Francisco. What would you have said yes to? What would you have not given up on? What would you have tried? As I'm finishing this swim, I get to Aquatic Park, and I'm getting out of the water and of course half the kids are already finished, so they're cheering me on and they're all excited. And I got total popsicle head, if anyone's ever swam in the Bay, and I'm trying to just thaw my face out, and I'm watching people finish. And I see this one kid, something didn't look right. And he's just flailing like this. And he's barely able to sip some air before he slams his head back down. And I notice other parents were watching too, and I swear they were thinking the same thing I was: this is why you don't let nine-year-olds swim from Alcatraz. This was not fatigue. All of a sudden, two parents run up and grab him, and they put him on their shoulders, and they're dragging him like this, totally limp. And then all of a sudden they walk a few more feet and they plop him down in his wheelchair. And he puts his fists up in the most insane show of victory I've ever seen. I can still feel the warmth and the energy on this guy when he made this accomplishment. I had seen him earlier that day in his wheelchair. I just had no idea he was going to swim. I mean, where is he going to be in 20 years? How many people told him he couldn't do that, that he would die if tried that? You prove people wrong, you prove yourself wrong, that you can make little incremental pushes of what you believe is possible. You don't have to be the fastest marathoner in the world, just your own impossibilities, to accomplish those, and it starts with little bitty steps. And the best way to do this is to surround yourself with passionate people. The fastest things to do things you don't think can be done is to surround yourself with people already doing them. There's this quote by Jim Rohn and it says. "You are the average of the five people you spend the most time with." And there is no bigger lifehack in the history of the world from getting where you are today to where you want to be than the people you choose to put in your corner. They change everything, and it's a proven fact. In 1898, Norman Triplett did this study with a bunch of cyclists, and he would measure their times around the track in a group, and also individually. And he found that every time the cyclists in the group would cycle faster. And it's been repeated in all kinds of walks of life since then, and it proves the same thing over again, that the people around you matter, and environment is everything. But it's on you to control it, because it can go both ways. With 80 percent of people who don't like the work they do, that means most people around us, not in this room, but everywhere else, are encouraging complacency and keeping us from pursuing the things that matter to us so we have to manage those surroundings. I found myself in this situation -- personal example, a couple years ago. Has anyone ever had a hobby or a passion they poured their heart and soul into, unbelievable amount of time, and they so badly want to call it a business, but no one's paying attention and it doesn't make a dime? OK, I was there for four years trying to build this Live Your Legend movement to help people do work that they genuinely cared about and that inspired them, and I was doing all I could, and there were only three people paying attention, and they're all right there: my mother, father and my wife, Chelsea. Thank you guys for the support. (Applause) And this is how badly I wanted it, it grew at zero percent for four years, and I was about to shut it down, and right about then, I moved to San Francisco and started to meet some pretty interesting people who had these crazy lifestyles of adventure, of businesses and websites and blogs that surrounded their passions and helped people in a meaningful way. And one of my friends, now, he has a family of eight, and he supports his whole family with a blog that he writes for twice a week. They just came back from a month in Europe, all of them together. This blew my mind. How does this even exist? And I got unbelievably inspired by seeing this, and instead of shutting it down, I decided, let's take it seriously. And I did everything I could to spend my time, every waking hour possible trying to hound these guys, hanging out and having beers and workouts, whatever it was. And after four years of zero growth, within six months of hanging around these people, the community at Live Your Legend grew by 10 times. In another 12 months, it grew by 160 times. And today over 30,000 people from 158 countries use our career and connection tools on a monthly basis. And those people have made up that community of passionate folks who inspired that possibility that I dreamed of for Live Your Legend so many years back. The people change everything, and this is why -- you know, you ask what was going on. Well, for four years, I knew nobody in this space, and I didn't even know it existed, that people could do this stuff, that you could have movements like this. And then I'm over here in San Francisco, and everyone around me was doing it. It became normal, so my thinking went from how could I possibly do this to how could I possibly not. And right then, when that happens, that switch goes on in your head, it ripples across your whole world. And without even trying, your standards go from here to here. You don't need to change your goals. You just need to change your surroundings. That's it, and that's why I love being around this whole group of people, why I go to every TED event I can, and watch them on my iPad on the way to work, whatever it is. Because this is the group of people that inspires possibility. We have a whole day to spend together and plenty more. To sum things up, in terms of these three pillars, they all have one thing in common more than anything else. They are 100 percent in our control. No one can tell you you can't learn about yourself. No one can tell you you can't push your limits and learn your own impossible and push that. No one can tell you you can't surround yourself with inspiring people or get away from the people who bring you down. You can't control a recession. You can't control getting fired or getting in a car accident. Most things are totally out of our hands. These three things are totally on us, and they can change our whole world if we decide to do something about it. And the thing is, it's starting to happen on a widespread level. I just read in Forbes, the US Government reported for the first time in a month where more people had quit their jobs than had been laid off. They thought this was an anomaly, but it's happened three months straight. In a time where people claim it's kind of a tough environment, people are giving a middle finger to this scripted life, the things that people say you're supposed to do, in exchange for things that matter to them and do the things that inspire them. And the thing is, people are waking up to this possibility, that really the only thing that limits possibility now is imagination. That's not a cliché anymore. I don't care what it is that you're into, what passion, what hobby. If you're into knitting, you can find someone who is killing it knitting, and you can learn from them. It's wild. And that's what this whole day is about, to learn from the folks speaking, and we profile these people on Live Your Legend every day, because when ordinary people are doing the extraordinary, and we can be around that, it becomes normal. And this isn't about being Gandhi or Steve Jobs, doing something crazy. It's just about doing something that matters to you, and makes an impact that only you can make. Speaking of Gandhi, he was a recovering lawyer, as I've heard the term, and he was called to a greater cause, something that mattered to him, he couldn't not do. And he has this quote that I absolutely live by. "First they ignore you, then they laugh at you, then they fight you, then you win." Everything was impossible until somebody did it. You can either hang around the people who tell you it can't be done and tell you you're stupid for trying, or surround yourself with the people who inspire possibility, the people who are in this room. Because I see it as our responsibility to show the world that what's seen as impossible can become that new normal. And that's already starting to happen. First, do the things that inspire us, so we can inspire other people to do the things that inspire them. But we can't find that unless we know what we're looking for. We have to do our work on ourself, be intentional about that, and make those discoveries. Because I imagine a world where 80 percent of people love the work they do. What would that look like? What would the innovation be like? How would you treat the people around you? Things would start to change. And as we finish up, I have just one question to ask you guys, and I think it's the only question that matters. And it's what is the work you can't not do? Discover that, live it, not just for you, but for everybody around you, because that is what starts to change the world. What is the work you can't not do? Thank you guys. (Applause)
I was excited to be a part of the "Dream" theme, and then I found out I'm leading off the "Nightmare?" section of it. (Laughter) And certainly there are things about the climate crisis that qualify. And I have some bad news, but I have a lot more good news. I'm going to propose three questions and the answer to the first one necessarily involves a little bad news. But -- hang on, because the answers to the second and third questions really are very positive. So the first question is, "Do we really have to change?" And of course, the Apollo Mission, among other things changed the environmental movement, really launched the modern environmental movement. 18 months after this Earthrise picture was first seen on earth, the first Earth Day was organized. And we learned a lot about ourselves looking back at our planet from space. And one of the things that we learned confirmed what the scientists have long told us. One of the most essential facts about the climate crisis has to do with the sky. As this picture illustrates, the sky is not the vast and limitless expanse that appears when we look up from the ground. It is a very thin shell of atmosphere surrounding the planet. That right now is the open sewer for our industrial civilization as it's currently organized. We are spewing 110 million tons of heat-trapping global warming pollution into it every 24 hours, free of charge, go ahead. And there are many sources of the greenhouse gases, I'm certainly not going to go through them all. I'm going to focus on the main one, but agriculture is involved, diet is involved, population is involved. Management of forests, transportation, the oceans, the melting of the permafrost. But I'm going to focus on the heart of the problem, which is the fact that we still rely on dirty, carbon-based fuels for 85 percent of all the energy that our world burns every year. And you can see from this image that after World War II, the emission rates started really accelerating. And the accumulated amount of man-made, global warming pollution that is up in the atmosphere now traps as much extra heat energy as would be released by 400,000 Hiroshima-class atomic bombs exploding every 24 hours, 365 days a year. Fact-checked over and over again, conservative, it's the truth. Now it's a big planet, but -- (Explosion sound) that is a lot of energy, particularly when you multiply it 400,000 times per day. And all that extra heat energy is heating up the atmosphere, the whole earth system. Let's look at the atmosphere. This is a depiction of what we used to think of as the normal distribution of temperatures. The white represents normal temperature days; 1951-1980 are arbitrarily chosen. The blue are cooler than average days, the red are warmer than average days. But the entire curve has moved to the right in the 1980s. And you'll see in the lower right-hand corner the appearance of statistically significant numbers of extremely hot days. In the 90s, the curve shifted further. And in the last 10 years, you see the extremely hot days are now more numerous than the cooler than average days. In fact, they are 150 times more common on the surface of the earth than they were just 30 years ago. So we're having record-breaking temperatures. Fourteen of the 15 of the hottest years ever measured with instruments have been in this young century. The hottest of all was last year. Last month was the 371st month in a row warmer than the 20th-century average. And for the first time, not only the warmest January, but for the first time, it was more than two degrees Fahrenheit warmer than the average. These higher temperatures are having an effect on animals, plants, people, ecosystems. But on a global basis, 93 percent of all the extra heat energy is trapped in the oceans. And the scientists can measure the heat buildup much more precisely now at all depths: deep, mid-ocean, the first few hundred meters. And this, too, is accelerating. It goes back more than a century. And more than half of the increase has been in the last 19 years. This has consequences. The first order of consequence: the ocean-based storms get stronger. Super Typhoon Haiyan went over areas of the Pacific five and a half degrees Fahrenheit warmer than normal before it slammed into Tacloban, as the most destructive storm ever to make landfall. Pope Francis, who has made such a difference to this whole issue, visited Tacloban right after that. Superstorm Sandy went over areas of the Atlantic nine degrees warmer than normal before slamming into New York and New Jersey. The second order of consequences are affecting all of us right now. The warmer oceans are evaporating much more water vapor into the skies. Average humidity worldwide has gone up four percent. And it creates these atmospheric rivers. The Brazilian scientists call them "flying rivers." And they funnel all of that extra water vapor over the land where storm conditions trigger these massive record-breaking downpours. This is from Montana. Take a look at this storm last August. As it moves over Tucson, Arizona. It literally splashes off the city. These downpours are really unusual. Last July in Houston, Texas, it rained for two days, 162 billion gallons. That represents more than two days of the full flow of Niagara Falls in the middle of the city, which was, of course, paralyzed. These record downpours are creating historic floods and mudslides. This one is from Chile last year. And you'll see that warehouse going by. There are oil tankers cars going by. This is from Spain last September, you could call this the running of the cars and trucks, I guess. Every night on the TV news now is like a nature hike through the Book of Revelation. (Laughter) I mean, really. The insurance industry has certainly noticed, the losses have been mounting up. They're not under any illusions about what's happening. And the causality requires a moment of discussion. We're used to thinking of linear cause and linear effect -- one cause, one effect. This is systemic causation. As the great Kevin Trenberth says, "All storms are different now. There's so much extra energy in the atmosphere, there's so much extra water vapor. Every storm is different now." So, the same extra heat pulls the soil moisture out of the ground and causes these deeper, longer, more pervasive droughts and many of them are underway right now. It dries out the vegetation and causes more fires in the western part of North America. There's certainly been evidence of that, a lot of them. More lightning, as the heat energy builds up, there's a considerable amount of additional lightning also. These climate-related disasters also have geopolitical consequences and create instability. The climate-related historic drought that started in Syria in 2006 destroyed 60 percent of the farms in Syria, killed 80 percent of the livestock, and drove 1.5 million climate refugees into the cities of Syria, where they collided with another 1.5 million refugees from the Iraq War. And along with other factors, that opened the gates of Hell that people are trying to close now. The US Defense Department has long warned of consequences from the climate crisis, including refugees, food and water shortages and pandemic disease. Right now we're seeing microbial diseases from the tropics spread to the higher latitudes; the transportation revolution has had a lot to do with this. But the changing conditions change the latitudes and the areas where these microbial diseases can become endemic and change the range of the vectors, like mosquitoes and ticks that carry them. The Zika epidemic now -- we're better positioned in North America because it's still a little too cool and we have a better public health system. But when women in some regions of South and Central America are advised not to get pregnant for two years -- that's something new, that ought to get our attention. The Lancet, one of the two greatest medical journals in the world, last summer labeled this a medical emergency now. And there are many factors because of it. This is also connected to the extinction crisis. We're in danger of losing 50 percent of all the living species on earth by the end of this century. And already, land-based plants and animals are now moving towards the poles at an average rate of 15 feet per day. Speaking of the North Pole, last December 29, the same storm that caused historic flooding in the American Midwest, raised temperatures at the North Pole 50 degrees Fahrenheit warmer than normal, causing the thawing of the North Pole in the middle of the long, dark, winter, polar night. And when the land-based ice of the Arctic melts, it raises sea level. Paul Nicklen's beautiful photograph from Svalbard illustrates this. It's more dangerous coming off Greenland and particularly, Antarctica. The 10 largest risk cities for sea-level rise by population are mostly in South and Southeast Asia. When you measure it by assets at risk, number one is Miami: three and a half trillion dollars at risk. Number three: New York and Newark. I was in Miami last fall during the supermoon, one of the highest high-tide days. And there were fish from the ocean swimming in some of the streets of Miami Beach and Fort Lauderdale and Del Rey. And this happens regularly during the highest-tide tides now. Not with rain -- they call it "sunny-day flooding." It comes up through the storm sewers. And the Mayor of Miami speaks for many when he says it is long past time this can be viewed through a partisan lens. This is a crisis that's getting worse day by day. We have to move beyond partisanship. And I want to take a moment to honor these House Republicans -- (Applause) who had the courage last fall to step out and take a political risk, by telling the truth about the climate crisis. So the cost of the climate crisis is mounting up, there are many of these aspects I haven't even mentioned. It's an enormous burden. I'll mention just one more, because the World Economic Forum last month in Davos, after their annual survey of 750 economists, said the climate crisis is now the number one risk to the global economy. So you get central bankers like Mark Carney, the head of the UK Central Bank, saying the vast majority of the carbon reserves are unburnable. Subprime carbon. I'm not going to remind you what happened with subprime mortgages, but it's the same thing. If you look at all of the carbon fuels that were burned since the beginning of the industrial revolution, this is the quantity burned in the last 16 years. Here are all the ones that are proven and left on the books, 28 trillion dollars. The International Energy Agency says only this amount can be burned. So the rest, 22 trillion dollars -- unburnable. Risk to the global economy. That's why divestment movement makes practical sense and is not just a moral imperative. So the answer to the first question, "Must we change?" is yes, we have to change. Second question, "Can we change?" This is the exciting news! The best projections in the world 16 years ago were that by 2010, the world would be able to install 30 gigawatts of wind capacity. We beat that mark by 14 and a half times over. We see an exponential curve for wind installations now. We see the cost coming down dramatically. Some countries -- take Germany, an industrial powerhouse with a climate not that different from Vancouver's, by the way -- one day last December, got 81 percent of all its energy from renewable resources, mainly solar and wind. A lot of countries are getting more than half on an average basis. More good news: energy storage, from batteries particularly, is now beginning to take off because the cost has been coming down very dramatically to solve the intermittency problem. With solar, the news is even more exciting! The best projections 14 years ago were that we would install one gigawatt per year by 2010. When 2010 came around, we beat that mark by 17 times over. Last year, we beat it by 58 times over. This year, we're on track to beat it 68 times over. We're going to win this. We are going to prevail. The exponential curve on solar is even steeper and more dramatic. When I came to this stage 10 years ago, this is where it was. We have seen a revolutionary breakthrough in the emergence of these exponential curves. (Applause) And the cost has come down 10 percent per year for 30 years. And it's continuing to come down. Now, the business community has certainly noticed this, because it's crossing the grid parity point. Cheaper solar penetration rates are beginning to rise. Grid parity is understood as that line, that threshold, below which renewable electricity is cheaper than electricity from burning fossil fuels. That threshold is a little bit like the difference between 32 degrees Fahrenheit and 33 degrees Fahrenheit, or zero and one Celsius. It's a difference of more than one degree, it's the difference between ice and water. And it's the difference between markets that are frozen up, and liquid flows of capital into new opportunities for investment. This is the biggest new business opportunity in the history of the world, and two-thirds of it is in the private sector. We are seeing an explosion of new investment. Starting in 2010, investments globally in renewable electricity generation surpassed fossils. The gap has been growing ever since. The projections for the future are even more dramatic, even though fossil energy is now still subsidized at a rate 40 times larger than renewables. And by the way, if you add the projections for nuclear on here, particularly if you assume that the work many are doing to try to break through to safer and more acceptable, more affordable forms of nuclear, this could change even more dramatically. So is there any precedent for such a rapid adoption of a new technology? Well, there are many, but let's look at cell phones. In 1980, AT&T, then Ma Bell, commissioned McKinsey to do a global market survey of those clunky new mobile phones that appeared then. "How many can we sell by the year 2000?" they asked. McKinsey came back and said, "900,000." And sure enough, when the year 2000 arrived, they did sell 900,000 -- in the first three days. And for the balance of the year, they sold 120 times more. And now there are more cell connections than there are people in the world. So, why were they not only wrong, but way wrong? I've asked that question myself, "Why?" (Laughter) And I think the answer is in three parts. First, the cost came down much faster than anybody expected, even as the quality went up. And low-income countries, places that did not have a landline grid -- they leap-frogged to the new technology. The big expansion has been in the developing counties. So what about the electricity grids in the developing world? Well, not so hot. And in many areas, they don't exist. There are more people without any electricity at all in India than the entire population of the United States of America. So now we're getting this: solar panels on grass huts and new business models that make it affordable. Muhammad Yunus financed this one in Bangladesh with micro-credit. This is a village market. Bangladesh is now the fastest-deploying country in the world: two systems per minute on average, night and day. And we have all we need: enough energy from the Sun comes to the earth every hour to supply the full world's energy needs for an entire year. It's actually a little bit less than an hour. So the answer to the second question, "Can we change?" is clearly "Yes." And it's an ever-firmer "yes." Last question, "Will we change?" Paris really was a breakthrough, some of the provisions are binding and the regular reviews will matter a lot. But nations aren't waiting, they're going ahead. China has already announced that starting next year, they're adopting a nationwide cap and trade system. They will likely link up with the European Union. The United States has already been changing. All of these coal plants were proposed in the next 10 years and canceled. All of these existing coal plants were retired. All of these coal plants have had their retirement announced. All of them -- canceled. We are moving forward. Last year -- if you look at all of the investment in new electricity generation in the United States, almost three-quarters was from renewable energy, mostly wind and solar. We are solving this crisis. The only question is: how long will it take to get there? So, it matters that a lot of people are organizing to insist on this change. Almost 400,000 people marched in New York City before the UN special session on this. Many thousands, tens of thousands, marched in cities around the world. And so, I am extremely optimistic. As I said before, we are going to win this. I'll finish with this story. When I was 13 years old, I heard that proposal by President Kennedy to land a person on the Moon and bring him back safely in 10 years. And I heard adults of that day and time say, "That's reckless, expensive, may well fail." But eight years and two months later, in the moment that Neil Armstrong set foot on the Moon, there was great cheer that went up in NASA's mission control in Houston. Here's a little-known fact about that: the average age of the systems engineers, the controllers in the room that day, was 26, which means, among other things, their age, when they heard that challenge, was 18. We now have a moral challenge that is in the tradition of others that we have faced. One of the greatest poets of the last century in the US, Wallace Stevens, wrote a line that has stayed with me: "After the final 'no,' there comes a 'yes,' and on that 'yes', the future world depends." When the abolitionists started their movement, they met with no after no after no. And then came a yes. The Women's Suffrage and Women's Rights Movement met endless no's, until finally, there was a yes. The Civil Rights Movement, the movement against apartheid, and more recently, the movement for gay and lesbian rights here in the United States and elsewhere. After the final "no" comes a "yes." When any great moral challenge is ultimately resolved into a binary choice between what is right and what is wrong, the outcome is fore-ordained because of who we are as human beings. Ninety-nine percent of us, that is where we are now and it is why we're going to win this. We have everything we need. Some still doubt that we have the will to act, but I say the will to act is itself a renewable resource. Thank you very much. (Applause) Chris Anderson: You've got this incredible combination of skills. You've got this scientist mind that can understand the full range of issues, and the ability to turn it into the most vivid language. No one else can do that, that's why you led this thing. It was amazing to see it 10 years ago, it was amazing to see it now. Al Gore: Well, you're nice to say that, Chris. But honestly, I have a lot of really good friends in the scientific community who are incredibly patient and who will sit there and explain this stuff to me over and over and over again until I can get it into simple enough language that I can understand it. And that's the key to trying to communicate. CA: So, your talk. First part: terrifying, second part: incredibly hopeful. How do we know that all those graphs, all that progress, is enough to solve what you showed in the first part? AG: I think that the crossing -- you know, I've only been in the business world for 15 years. But one of the things I've learned is that apparently it matters if a new product or service is more expensive than the incumbent, or cheaper than. Turns out, it makes a difference if it's cheaper than. (Laughter) And when it crosses that line, then a lot of things really change. We are regularly surprised by these developments. The late Rudi Dornbusch, the great economist said, "Things take longer to happen then you think they will, and then they happen much faster than you thought they could." I really think that's where we are. Some people are using the phrase "The Solar Singularity" now, meaning when it gets below the grid parity, unsubsidized in most places, then it's the default choice. Now, in one of the presentations yesterday, the jitney thing, there is an effort to use regulations to slow this down. And I just don't think it's going to work. There's a woman in Atlanta, Debbie Dooley, who's the Chairman of the Atlanta Tea Party. They enlisted her in this effort to put a tax on solar panels and regulations. And she had just put solar panels on her roof and she didn't understand the request. (Laughter) And so she went and formed an alliance with the Sierra Club and they formed a new organization called the Green Tea Party. (Laughter) (Applause) And they defeated the proposal. So, finally, the answer to your question is, this sounds a little corny and maybe it's a cliché, but 10 years ago -- and Christiana referred to this -- there are people in this audience who played an incredibly significant role in generating those exponential curves. And it didn't work out economically for some of them, but it kick-started this global revolution. And what people in this audience do now with the knowledge that we are going to win this. But it matters a lot how fast we win it. CA: Al Gore, that was incredibly powerful. If this turns out to be the year, that the partisan thing changes, as you said, it's no longer a partisan issue, but you bring along people from the other side together, backed by science, backed by these kinds of investment opportunities, backed by reason that you win the day -- boy, that's really exciting. Thank you so much. AG: Thank you so much for bringing me back to TED. Thank you! (Applause)
I'd like to talk today about the two biggest social trends in the coming century, and perhaps in the next 10,000 years. But I want to start with my work on romantic love, because that's my most recent work. What I and my colleagues did was put 32 people, who were madly in love, into a functional MRI brain scanner. 17 who were madly in love and their love was accepted; and 15 who were madly in love and they had just been dumped. And so I want to tell you about that first, and then go on into where I think love is going. "What 'tis to love?" Shakespeare said. I think our ancestors -- I think human beings have been wondering about this question since they sat around their campfires or lay and watched the stars a million years ago. I started out by trying to figure out what romantic love was by looking at the last 45 years of research on -- just the psychological research -- and as it turns out, there's a very specific group of things that happen when you fall in love. The first thing that happens is what I call -- a person begins to take on what I call, "special meaning." As a truck driver once said to me, he said, "The world had a new center, and that center was Mary Anne." George Bernard Shaw said it a little differently. He said, "Love consists of overestimating the differences between one woman and another." And indeed, that's what we do. (Laughter) And then you just focus on this person. You can list what you don't like about them, but then you sweep that aside and focus on what you do. As Chaucer said, "Love is blind." In trying to understand romantic love, I decided I would read poetry from all over the world, and I just want to give you one very short poem from eighth-century China, because it's an almost perfect example of a man who is focused totally on a particular woman. It's a little bit like when you are madly in love with somebody and you walk into a parking lot -- their car is different from every other car in the parking lot. Their wine glass at dinner is different from every other wine glass at the dinner party. And in this case, a man got hooked on a bamboo sleeping mat. And it goes like this. It's by a guy called Yuan Chen: "I cannot bear to put away the bamboo sleeping mat. The night I brought you home, I watched you roll it out." He became hooked on a sleeping mat, probably because of elevated activity of dopamine in his brain, just like with you and me. But anyway, not only does this person take on special meaning, you focus your attention on them. You aggrandize them. But you have intense energy. As one Polynesian said, he said, "I felt like jumping in the sky." You're up all night. You're walking till dawn. You feel intense elation when things are going well; mood swings into horrible despair when things are going poorly. Real dependence on this person. As one businessman in New York said to me, he said, "Anything she liked, I liked." Simple. Romantic love is very simple. You become extremely sexually possessive. You know, if you're just sleeping with somebody casually, you don't really care if they're sleeping with somebody else. But the moment you fall in love, you become extremely sexually possessive of them. I think that that is a Darwinian -- there's a Darwinian purpose to this. The whole point of this is to pull two people together strongly enough to begin to rear babies as a team. But the main characteristics of romantic love are craving: an intense craving to be with a particular person, not just sexually, but emotionally. You'd much rather -- it would be nice to go to bed with them, but you want them to call you on the telephone, to invite you out, etc., to tell you that they love you. The other main characteristic is motivation. The motor in your brain begins to crank, and you want this person. And last but not least, it is an obsession. When I put these people in the machine, before I put them in the MRI machine, I would ask them all kinds of questions. But my most important question was always the same. It was: "What percentage of the day and night do you think about this person?" And indeed, they would say, "All day. All night. I can never stop thinking about him or her." And then, the very last question I would ask them -- I would always have to work myself up to this question, because I am not a psychologist. I don't work with people in any kind of traumatic situation. And my final question was always the same. I would say, "Would you die for him or her?" And, indeed, these people would say "Yes!" as if I had asked them to pass the salt. I was just staggered by it. So we scanned their brains, looking at a photograph of their sweetheart and looking at a neutral photograph, with a distraction task in between. So we could look at the same brain when it was in that heightened state and when it was in a resting state. And we found activity in a lot of brain regions. In fact, one of the most important was a brain region that becomes active when you feel the rush of cocaine. And indeed, that's exactly what happens. I began to realize that romantic love is not an emotion. In fact, I had always thought it was a series of emotions, from very high to very low. But actually, it's a drive. It comes from the motor of the mind, the wanting part of the mind, the craving part of the mind. The kind of mind -- part of the mind -- when you're reaching for that piece of chocolate, when you want to win that promotion at work. The motor of the brain. It's a drive. And in fact, I think it's more powerful than the sex drive. You know, if you ask somebody to go to bed with you, and they say, "No, thank you," you certainly don't kill yourself or slip into a clinical depression. But certainly, around the world, people who are rejected in love will kill for it. People live for love. They kill for love. They die for love. They have songs, poems, novels, sculptures, paintings, myths, legends. In over 175 societies, people have left their evidence of this powerful brain system. I have come to think it's one of the most powerful brain systems on earth for both great joy and great sorrow. And I've also come to think that it's one of three basically different brain systems that evolved from mating and reproduction. One is the sex drive: the craving for sexual gratification. W.H. Auden called it an "intolerable neural itch," and indeed, that's what it is. It keeps bothering you a little bit, like being hungry. The second of these three brain systems is romantic love: that elation, obsession of early love. And the third brain system is attachment: that sense of calm and security you can feel for a long-term partner. And I think that the sex drive evolved to get you out there, looking for a whole range of partners. You know, you can feel it when you're just driving along in your car. It can be focused on nobody. I think romantic love evolved to enable you to focus your mating energy on just one individual at a time, thereby conserving mating time and energy. And I think that attachment, the third brain system, evolved to enable you to tolerate this human being -- (Laughter) -- at least long enough to raise a child together as a team. So with that preamble, I want to go into discussing the two most profound social trends. One of the last 10,000 years and the other, certainly of the last 25 years, that are going to have an impact on these three different brain systems: lust, romantic love and deep attachment to a partner. The first is women working, moving into the workforce. I've looked at 130 societies through the demographic yearbooks of the United Nations. And everywhere in the world, 129 out of 130 of them, women are not only moving into the job market -- sometimes very, very slowly, but they are moving into the job market -- and they are very slowly closing that gap between men and women in terms of economic power, health and education. It's very slow. For every trend on this planet, there's a counter-trend. We all know of them, but nevertheless -- the Arabs say, "The dogs may bark, but the caravan moves on." And, indeed, that caravan is moving on. Women are moving back into the job market. And I say back into the job market, because this is not new. For millions of years, on the grasslands of Africa, women commuted to work to gather their vegetables. They came home with 60 to 80 percent of the evening meal. The double income family was the standard. And women were regarded as just as economically, socially and sexually powerful as men. In short, we're really moving forward to the past. Then, women's worst invention was the plow. With the beginning of plow agriculture, men's roles became extremely powerful. Women lost their ancient jobs as collectors, but then with the industrial revolution and the post-industrial revolution they're moving back into the job market. In short, they are acquiring the status that they had a million years ago, 10,000 years ago, 100,000 years ago. We are seeing now one of the most remarkable traditions in the history of the human animal. And it's going to have an impact. I generally give a whole lecture on the impact of women on the business community. I'll only just say a couple of things, and then go on to sex and love. There's a lot of gender differences; anybody who thinks men and women are alike simply never had a boy and a girl child. I don't know why it is that they want to think that men and women are alike. There's much we have in common, but there's a whole lot that we do not have in common. We are -- in the words of Ted Hughes, "I think that we were built to be -- we're like two feet. We need each other to get ahead." But we did not evolve to have the same brain. And we're finding more and more and more gender differences in the brain. I'll only just use a couple and then move on to sex and love. One of them is women's verbal ability. Women can talk. Women's ability to find the right word rapidly, basic articulation goes up in the middle of the menstrual cycle, when estrogen levels peak. But even at menstruation, they're better than the average man. Women can talk. They've been doing it for a million years; words were women's tools. They held that baby in front of their face, cajoling it, reprimanding it, educating it with words. And, indeed, they're becoming a very powerful force. Even in places like India and Japan, where women are not moving rapidly into the regular job market, they're moving into journalism. And I think that the television is like the global campfire. We sit around it and it shapes our minds. Almost always, when I'm on TV, the producers who call me, who negotiate what we're going to say, is a woman. In fact, Solzhenitsyn once said, "To have a great writer is to have another government." Today 54 percent of people who are writers in America are women. It's one of many, many characteristics that women have that they will bring into the job market. They've got incredible people skills, negotiating skills. They're highly imaginative. We now know the brain circuitry of imagination, of long-term planning. They tend to be web thinkers. Because the female parts of the brain are better connected, they tend to collect more pieces of data when they think, put them into more complex patterns, see more options and outcomes. They tend to be contextual, holistic thinkers, what I call web thinkers. Men tend to -- and these are averages -- tend to get rid of what they regard as extraneous, focus on what they do, and move in a more step-by-step thinking pattern. They're both perfectly good ways of thinking. We need both of them to get ahead. In fact, there's many more male geniuses in the world. When the -- and there's also many more male idiots in the world. (Laughter) When the male brain works well, it works extremely well. And what I really think that we're doing is, we're moving towards a collaborative society, a society in which the talents of both men and women are becoming understood and valued and employed. But in fact, women moving into the job market is having a huge impact on sex and romance and family life. Foremost, women are starting to express their sexuality. I'm always astonished when people come to me and say, "Why is it that men are so adulterous?" And I say, "Why do you think more men are adulterous than women?" "Oh, well -- men are more adulterous!" And I say, "Who do you think these men are sleeping with?" And -- basic math! (Laughter) Anyway. In the Western world, women start sooner at sex, have more partners, express less remorse for the partners that they do, marry later, have fewer children, leave bad marriages in order to get good ones. We are seeing the rise of female sexual expression. And, indeed, once again we're moving forward to the kind of sexual expression that we probably saw on the grasslands of Africa a million years ago, because this is the kind of sexual expression that we see in hunting and gathering societies today. We're also returning to an ancient form of marriage equality. They're now saying that the 21st century is going to be the century of what they call the "symmetrical marriage," or the "pure marriage," or the "companionate marriage." This is a marriage between equals, moving forward to a pattern that is highly compatible with the ancient human spirit. We're also seeing a rise of romantic love. 91 percent of American women and 86 percent of American men would not marry somebody who had every single quality they were looking for in a partner, if they were not in love with that person. People around the world, in a study of 37 societies, want to be in love with the person that they marry. Indeed, arranged marriages are on their way off this braid of human life. I even think that marriages might even become more stable because of the second great world trend. The first one being women moving into the job market, the second one being the aging world population. They're now saying that in America, that middle age should be regarded as up to age 85. Because in that highest age category of 76 to 85, as much as 40 percent of people have nothing really wrong with them. So we're seeing there's a real extension of middle age. And I looked -- for one of my books, I looked at divorce data in 58 societies. And as it turns out, the older you get, the less likely you are to divorce. So the divorce rate right now is stable in America, and it's actually beginning to decline. It may decline some more. I would even say that with Viagra, estrogen replacement, hip replacements and the incredibly interesting women -- women have never been as interesting as they are now. Not at any time on this planet have women been so educated, so interesting, so capable. And so I honestly think that if there really was ever a time in human evolution when we have the opportunity to make good marriages, that time is now. However, there's always kinds of complications in this. In these three brain systems: lust, romantic love and attachment -- don't always go together. They can go together, by the way. That's why casual sex isn't so casual. With orgasm you get a spike of dopamine. Dopamine's associated with romantic love, and you can just fall in love with somebody who you're just having casual sex with. With orgasm, then you get a real rush of oxytocin and vasopressin -- those are associated with attachment. This is why you can feel such a sense of cosmic union with somebody after you've made love to them. But these three brain systems: lust, romantic love and attachment, aren't always connected to each other. You can feel deep attachment to a long-term partner while you feel intense romantic love for somebody else, while you feel the sex drive for people unrelated to these other partners. In short, we're capable of loving more than one person at a time. In fact, you can lie in bed at night and swing from deep feelings of attachment for one person to deep feelings of romantic love for somebody else. It's as if there's a committee meeting going on in your head as you are trying to decide what to do. So I don't think, honestly, we're an animal that was built to be happy; we are an animal that was built to reproduce. I think the happiness we find, we make. And I think, however, we can make good relationships with each other. So I want to conclude with two things. I want to conclude with a worry -- I have a worry -- and with a wonderful story. The worry is about antidepressants. Over 100 million prescriptions of antidepressants are written every year in the United States. And these drugs are going generic. They are seeping around the world. I know one girl who's been on these antidepressants, serotonin-enhancing -- SSRI, serotonin-enhancing antidepressants -- since she was 13. She's 23. She's been on them ever since she was 13. I've got nothing against people who take them short term, when they're going through something perfectly horrible. They want to commit suicide or kill somebody else. I would recommend it. But more and more people in the United States are taking them long term. And indeed, what these drugs do is raise levels of serotonin. And by raising levels of serotonin, you suppress the dopamine circuit. Everybody knows that. Dopamine is associated with romantic love. Not only do they suppress the dopamine circuit, but they kill the sex drive. And when you kill the sex drive, you kill orgasm. And when you kill orgasm, you kill that flood of drugs associated with attachment. The things are connected in the brain. And when you tamper with one brain system, you're going to tamper with another. I'm just simply saying that a world without love is a deadly place. So now -- (Applause) -- thank you. I want to end with a story. And then, just a comment. I've been studying romantic love and sex and attachment for 30 years. I'm an identical twin; I am interested in why we're all alike. Why you and I are alike, why the Iraqis and the Japanese and the Australian Aborigines and the people of the Amazon River are all alike. And about a year ago, an Internet dating service, Match.com, came to me and asked me if I would design a new dating site for them. I said, "I don't know anything about personality. You know? I don't know. Do you think you've got the right person?" They said, "Yes." It got me thinking about why it is that you fall in love with one person rather than another. That's my current project; it will be my next book. There's all kinds of reasons that you fall in love with one person rather than another. Timing is important. Proximity is important. Mystery is important. You fall in love with somebody who's somewhat mysterious, in part because mystery elevates dopamine in the brain, probably pushes you over that threshold to fall in love. You fall in love with somebody who fits within what I call your "love map," an unconscious list of traits that you build in childhood as you grow up. And I also think that you gravitate to certain people, actually, with somewhat complementary brain systems. And that's what I'm now contributing to this. But I want to tell you a story about -- to illustrate. I've been carrying on here about the biology of love. I wanted to show you a little bit about the culture of it, too -- the magic of it. It's a story that was told to me by somebody who had heard it just from one of the -- probably a true story. It was a graduate student at -- I'm at Rutgers and my two colleagues -- Art Aron is at SUNY Stony Brook. That's where we put our people in the MRI machine. And this graduate student was madly in love with another graduate student, and she was not in love with him. And they were all at a conference in Beijing. And he knew from our work that if you go and do something very novel with somebody, you can drive up the dopamine in the brain, and perhaps trigger this brain system for romantic love. (Laughter) So he decided he'd put science to work, and he invited this girl to go off on a rickshaw ride with him. And sure enough -- I've never been in one, but apparently they go all around the buses and the trucks and it's crazy and it's noisy and it's exciting. And he figured that this would drive up the dopamine, and she would fall in love with him. So off they go and she's squealing and squeezing him and laughing and having a wonderful time. An hour later they get down off of the rickshaw, and she throws her hands up and she says, "Wasn't that wonderful?" And, "Wasn't that rickshaw driver handsome!" (Laughter) (Applause) There's magic to love! But I will end by saying that millions of years ago, we evolved three basic drives: the sex drive, romantic love and attachment to a long-term partner. These circuits are deeply embedded in the human brain. They're going to survive as long as our species survives on what Shakespeare called "this mortal coil." Thank you. (Applause)
I thought I would think about changing your perspective on the world a bit, and showing you some of the designs that we have in nature. And so, I have my first slide to talk about the dawning of the universe and what I call the cosmic scene investigation, that is, looking at the relics of creation and inferring what happened at the beginning, and then following it up and trying to understand it. And so one of the questions that I asked you is, when you look around, what do you see? Well, you see this space that's created by designers and by the work of people, but what you actually see is a lot of material that was already here, being reshaped in a certain form. And so the question is: how did that material get here? How did it get into the form that it had before it got reshaped, and so forth? It's a question of what's the continuity? So one of the things I look at is, how did the universe begin and shape? What was the whole process in the creation and the evolution of the universe to getting to the point that we have these kinds of materials? So that's sort of the part, and let me move on then and show you the Hubble Ultra Deep Field. If you look at this picture, what you will see is a lot of dark with some light objects in it. And everything but -- four of these light objects are stars, and you can see them there -- little pluses. This is a star, this is a star, everything else is a galaxy, OK? So there's a couple of thousand galaxies you can see easily with your eye in here. And when I look out at particularly this galaxy, which looks a lot like ours, I wonder if there's an art design college conference going on, and intelligent beings there are thinking about, you know, what designs they might do, and there might be a few cosmologists trying to understand where the universe itself came from, and there might even be some in that galaxy looking at ours trying to figure out what's going on over here. But there's a lot of other galaxies, and some are nearby, and they're kind of the color of the Sun, and some are further away and they're a little bluer, and so forth. But one of the questions is -- this should be, to you -- how come there are so many galaxies? Because this represents a very clean fraction of the sky. This is only 1,000 galaxies. We think there's on the order -- visible to the Hubble Space Telescope, if you had the time to scan it around -- about 100 billion galaxies. Right? It's a very large number of galaxies. And that's roughly how many stars there are in our own galaxy. But when you look at some of these regions like this, you'll see more galaxies than stars, which is kind of a conundrum. So the question should come to your mind is, what kind of design, you know, what kind of creative process and what kind of design produced the world like that? And then I'm going to show you it's actually a lot more complicated. We're going to try and follow it up. We have a tool that actually helps us out in this study, and that's the fact that the universe is so incredibly big that it's a time machine, in a certain sense. We draw this set of nested spheres cut away so you see it. Put the Earth at the center of the nested spheres, just because that's where we're making observations. And the moon is only two seconds away, so if you take a picture of the moon using ordinary light, it's the moon two seconds ago, and who cares. Two seconds is like the present. The Sun is eight minutes ago. That's not such a big deal, right, unless there's solar flares coming then you want to get out the way. You'd like to have a little advance warning. But you get out to Jupiter and it's 40 minutes away. It's a problem. You hear about Mars, it's a problem communicating to Mars because it takes light long enough to go there. But if you look out to the nearest set of stars, to the nearest 40 or 50 stars, it's about 10 years. So if you take a picture of what's going on, it's 10 years ago. But you go and look to the center of the galaxy, it's thousands of years ago. If you look at Andromeda, which is the nearest big galaxy, and it's two million years ago. If you took a picture of the Earth two million years ago, there'd be no evidence of humans at all, because we don't think there were humans yet. I mean, it just gives you the scale. With the Hubble Space Telescope, we're looking at hundreds of millions of years to a billion years. But if we were capable to come up with an idea of how to look even further -- there's some things even further, and that was what I did in a lot of my work, was to develop the techniques -- we could look out back to even earlier epochs before there were stars and before there were galaxies, back to when the universe was hot and dense and very different. And so that's the sort of sequence, and so I have a more artistic impression of this. There's the galaxy in the middle, which is the Milky Way, and around that are the Hubble -- you know, nearby kind of galaxies, and there's a sphere that marks the different times. And behind that are some more modern galaxies. You see the whole big picture? The beginning of time is funny -- it's on the outside, right? And then there's a part of the universe we can't see because it's so dense and so hot, light can't escape. It's like you can't see to the center of the Sun; you have to use other techniques to know what's going on inside the Sun. But you can see the edge of the Sun, and the universe gets that way, and you can see that. And then you see this sort of model area around the outside, and that is the radiation coming from the Big Bang, which is actually incredibly uniform. The universe is almost a perfect sphere, but there are these very tiny variations which we show here in great exaggeration. And from them in the time sequence we're going to have to go from these tiny variations to these irregular galaxies and first stars to these more advanced galaxies, and eventually the solar system, and so forth. So it's a big design job, but we'll see about how things are going on. So the way these measurements were done, there's been a set of satellites, and this is where you get to see. So there was the COBE satellite, which was launched in 1989, and we discovered these variations. And then in 2000, the MAP satellite was launched -- the WMAP -- and it made somewhat better pictures. And later this year -- this is the cool stealth version, the one that actually has some beautiful design features to it, and you should look -- the Planck satellite will be launched, and it will make very high-resolution maps. And that will be the sequence of understanding the very beginning of the universe. And what we saw was, we saw these variations, and then they told us the secrets, both about the structure of space-time, and about the contents of the universe, and about how the universe started in its original motions. So we have this picture, which is quite a spectacular picture, and I'll come back to the beginning, where we're going to have some mysterious process that kicks the universe off at the beginning. And we go through a period of accelerating expansion, and the universe expands and cools until it gets to the point where it becomes transparent, then to the Dark Ages, and then the first stars turn on, and they evolve into galaxies, and then later they get to the more expansive galaxies. And somewhere around this period is when our solar system started forming. And it's maturing up to the present time. And there's some spectacular things. And this wastebasket part, that's to represent what the structure of space-time itself is doing during this period. And so this is a pretty weird model, right? What kind of evidence do we have for that? So let me show you some of nature's patterns that are the result of this. I always think of space-time as being the real substance of space, and the galaxies and the stars just like the foam on the ocean. It's a marker of where the interesting waves are and whatever went on. So here is the Sloan Digital Sky Survey showing the location of a million galaxies. So there's a dot on here for every galaxy. They go out and point a telescope at the sky, take a picture, identify what are stars and throw them away, look at the galaxies, estimate how far away they are, and plot them up. And just put radially they're going out that way. And you see these structures, this thing we call the Great Wall, but there are voids and those kinds of stuff, and they kind of fade out because the telescope isn't sensitive enough to do it. Now I'm going to show you this in 3D. What happens is, you take pictures as the Earth rotates, you get a fan across the sky. There are some places you can't look because of our own galaxy, or because there are no telescopes available to do it. So the next picture shows you the three-dimensional version of this rotating around. Do you see the fan-like scans made across the sky? Remember, every spot on here is a galaxy, and you see the galaxies, you know, sort of in our neighborhood, and you sort of see the structure. And you see this thing we call the Great Wall, and you see the complicated structure, and you see these voids. There are places where there are no galaxies and there are places where there are thousands of galaxies clumped together, right. So there's an interesting pattern, but we don't have enough data here to actually see the pattern. We only have a million galaxies, right? So we're keeping, like, a million balls in the air but, what's going on? There's another survey which is very similar to this, called the Two-degree Field of View Galaxy Redshift Survey. Now we're going to fly through it at warp a million. And every time there's a galaxy -- at its location there's a galaxy -- and if we know anything about the galaxy, which we do, because there's a redshift measurement and everything, you put in the type of galaxy and the color, so this is the real representation. And when you're in the middle of the galaxies it's hard to see the pattern; it's like being in the middle of life. It's hard to see the pattern in the middle of the audience, it's hard to see the pattern of this. So we're going to go out and swing around and look back at this. And you'll see, first, the structure of the survey, and then you'll start seeing the structure of the galaxies that we see out there. So again, you can see the extension of this Great Wall of galaxies showing up here. But you can see the voids, you can see the complicated structure, and you say, well, how did this happen? Suppose you're the cosmic designer. How are you going to put galaxies out there in a pattern like that? It's not just throwing them out at random. There's a more complicated process going on here. How are you going to end up doing that? And so now we're in for some serious play. That is, we have to seriously play God, not just change people's lives, but make the universe, right. So if that's your responsibility, how are you going to do that? What's the kind of technique? What's the kind of thing you're going to do? So I'm going to show you the results of a very large-scale simulation of what we think the universe might be like, using, essentially, some of the play principles and some of the design principles that, you know, humans have labored so hard to pick up, but apparently nature knew how to do at the beginning. And that is, you start out with very simple ingredients and some simple rules, but you have to have enough ingredients to make it complicated. And then you put in some randomness, some fluctuations and some randomness, and realize a whole bunch of different representations. So what I'm going to do is show you the distribution of matter as a function of scales. We're going to zoom in, but this is a plot of what it is. And we had to add one more thing to make the universe come out right. It's called dark matter. That is matter that doesn't interact with light the typical way that ordinary matter does, the way the light's shining on me or on the stage. It's transparent to light, but in order for you to see it, we're going to make it white. OK? So the stuff that's in this picture that's white, that is the dark matter. It should be called invisible matter, but the dark matter we've made visible. And the stuff that is in the yellow color, that is the ordinary kind of matter that's turned into stars and galaxies. So I'll show you the next movie. So this -- we're going to zoom in. Notice this pattern and pay attention to this pattern. We're going to zoom in and zoom in. And you'll see there are all these filaments and structures and voids. And when a number of filaments come together in a knot, that makes a supercluster of galaxies. This one we're zooming in on is somewhere between 100,000 and a million galaxies in that small region. So we live in the boonies. We don't live in the center of the solar system, we don't live in the center of the galaxy and our galaxy's not in the center of the cluster. So we're zooming in. This is a region which probably has more than 100,000, on the order of a million galaxies in that region. We're going to keep zooming in. OK. And so I forgot to tell you the scale. A parsec is 3.26 light years. So a gigaparsec is three billion light years -- that's the scale. So it takes light three billion years to travel over that distance. Now we're into a distance sort of between here and here. That's the distance between us and Andromeda, right? These little specks that you're seeing in here, they're galaxies. Now we're going to zoom back out, and you can see this structure that, when we get very far out, looks very regular, but it's made up of a lot of irregular variations. So they're simple building blocks. There's a very simple fluid to begin with. It's got dark matter, it's got ordinary matter, it's got photons and it's got neutrinos, which don't play much role in the later part of the universe. And it's just a simple fluid and it, over time, develops into this complicated structure. And so you know when you first saw this picture, it didn't mean quite so much to you. Here you're looking across one percent of the volume of the visible universe and you're seeing billions of galaxies, right, and nodes, but you realize they're not even the main structure. There's a framework, which is the dark matter, the invisible matter, that's out there that's actually holding it all together. So let's fly through it, and you can see how much harder it is when you're in the middle of something to figure this out. So here's that same end result. You see a filament, you see the light is the invisible matter, and the yellow is the stars or the galaxies showing up. And we're going to fly around, and we'll fly around, and you'll see occasionally a couple of filaments intersect, and you get a large cluster of galaxies. And then we'll fly in to where the very large cluster is, and you can see what it looks like. And so from inside, it doesn't look very complicated, right? It's only when you look at it at a very large scale, and explore it and so forth, you realize it's a very intricate, complicated kind of a design, right? And it's grown up in some kind of way. So the question is, how hard would it be to assemble this, right? How big a contractor team would you need to put this universe together, right? That's the issue, right? And so here we are. You see how the filament -- you see how several filaments are coming together, therefore making this supercluster of galaxies. And you have to understand, this is not how it would actually look if you -- first, you can't travel this fast, everything would be distorted, but this is using simple rendering and graphic arts kind of stuff. This is how, if you took billions of years to go around, it might look to you, right? And if you could see invisible matter, too. And so the idea is, you know, how would you put together the universe in a very simple way? We're going to start and realize that the entire visible universe, everything we can see in every direction with the Hubble Space Telescope plus our other instruments, was once in a region that was smaller than an atom. It started with tiny quantum mechanical fluctuations, but expanding at a tremendous rate. And those fluctuations were stretched to astronomical sizes, and those fluctuations eventually are the things we see in the cosmic microwave background. And then we needed some way to turn those fluctuations into galaxies and clusters of galaxies and make these kinds of structures go on. So I'm going to show you a smaller simulation. This simulation was run on 1,000 processors for a month in order to make just this simple visible one. So I'm going to show you one that can be run on a desktop in two days in the next picture. So you start out with teeny fluctuations when the universe was at this point, now four times smaller, and so forth. And you start seeing these networks, this cosmic web of structure forming. And this is a simple one, because it doesn't have the ordinary matter and it just has the dark matter in it. And you see how the dark matter lumps up, and the ordinary matter just trails along behind. So there it is. At the beginning it's very uniform. The fluctuations are a part in 100,000. There are a few peaks that are a part in 10,000, and then over billions of years, gravity just pulls in. This is light over density, pulls the material around in. That pulls in more material and pulls in more material. But the distances on the universe are so large and the time scales are so large that it takes a long time for this to form. And it keeps forming until the universe is roughly about half the size it is now, in terms of its expansion. And at that point, the universe mysteriously starts accelerating its expansion and cuts off the formation of larger-scale structure. So we're just seeing as large a scale structure as we can see, and then only things that have started forming already are going to form, and then from then on it's going to go on. So we're able to do the simulation, but this is two days on a desktop. We need, you know, 30 days on 1,000 processors to do the kind of simulation that I showed you before. So we have an idea of how to play seriously, creating the universe by starting with essentially less than an eyedrop full of material, and we create everything we can see in any direction, right, from almost nothing -- that is, something extremely tiny, extremely small -- and it is almost perfect, except it has these tiny fluctuations at a part in 100,000 level, which turn out to produce the interesting patterns and designs we see, that is, galaxies and stars and so forth. So we have a model, and we can calculate it, and we can use it to make designs of what we think the universe really looks like. And that design is sort of way beyond what our original imagination ever was. So this is what we started with 15 years ago, with the Cosmic Background Explorer -- made the map on the upper right, which basically showed us that there were large-scale fluctuations, and actually fluctuations on several scales. You can kind of see that. Since then we've had WMAP, which just gives us higher angular resolution. We see the same large-scale structure, but we see additional small-scale structure. And on the bottom right is if the satellite had flipped upside down and mapped the Earth, what kind of a map we would have got of the Earth. You can see, well, you can, kind of pick out all the major continents, but that's about it. But what we're hoping when we get to Planck, we'll have resolution about equivalent to the resolution you see of the Earth there, where you can really see the complicated pattern that exists on the Earth. And you can also tell, because of the sharp edges and the way things fit together, there are some non-linear processes. Geology has these effects, which is moving the plates around and so forth. You can see that just from the map alone. We want to get to the point in our maps of the early universe we can see whether there are any non-linear effects that are starting to move, to modify, and are giving us a hint about how space-time itself was actually created at the beginning moments. So that's where we are today, and that's what I wanted to give you a flavor of. Give you a different view about what the design and what everything else looks like. Thank you. (Applause)
"Even in purely non-religious terms, homosexuality represents a misuse of the sexual faculty. It is a pathetic little second-rate substitute for reality -- a pitiable flight from life. As such, it deserves no compassion, it deserves no treatment as minority martyrdom, and it deserves not to be deemed anything but a pernicious sickness." That's from Time magazine in 1966, when I was three years old. And last year, the president of the United States came out in favor of gay marriage. (Applause) And my question is, how did we get from there to here? How did an illness become an identity? When I was perhaps six years old, I went to a shoe store with my mother and my brother. And at the end of buying our shoes, the salesman said to us that we could each have a balloon to take home. My brother wanted a red balloon, and I wanted a pink balloon. My mother said that she thought I'd really rather have a blue balloon. But I said that I definitely wanted the pink one. And she reminded me that my favorite color was blue. The fact that my favorite color now is blue, but I'm still gay -- (Laughter) -- is evidence of both my mother's influence and its limits. (Laughter) (Applause) When I was little, my mother used to say, "The love you have for your children is like no other feeling in the world. And until you have children, you don't know what it's like." And when I was little, I took it as the greatest compliment in the world that she would say that about parenting my brother and me. And when I was an adolescent, I thought that I'm gay, and so I probably can't have a family. And when she said it, it made me anxious. And after I came out of the closet, when she continued to say it, it made me furious. I said, "I'm gay. That's not the direction that I'm headed in. And I want you to stop saying that." About 20 years ago, I was asked by my editors at The New York Times Magazine to write a piece about deaf culture. And I was rather taken aback. I had thought of deafness entirely as an illness. Those poor people, they couldn't hear. They lacked hearing, and what could we do for them? And then I went out into the deaf world. I went to deaf clubs. I saw performances of deaf theater and of deaf poetry. I even went to the Miss Deaf America contest in Nashville, Tennessee where people complained about that slurry Southern signing. (Laughter) And as I plunged deeper and deeper into the deaf world, I become convinced that deafness was a culture and that the people in the deaf world who said, "We don't lack hearing, we have membership in a culture," were saying something that was viable. It wasn't my culture, and I didn't particularly want to rush off and join it, but I appreciated that it was a culture and that for the people who were members of it, it felt as valuable as Latino culture or gay culture or Jewish culture. It felt as valid perhaps even as American culture. Then a friend of a friend of mine had a daughter who was a dwarf. And when her daughter was born, she suddenly found herself confronting questions that now began to seem quite resonant to me. She was facing the question of what to do with this child. Should she say, "You're just like everyone else but a little bit shorter?" Or should she try to construct some kind of dwarf identity, get involved in the Little People of America, become aware of what was happening for dwarfs? And I suddenly thought, most deaf children are born to hearing parents. Those hearing parents tend to try to cure them. Those deaf people discover community somehow in adolescence. Most gay people are born to straight parents. Those straight parents often want them to function in what they think of as the mainstream world, and those gay people have to discover identity later on. And here was this friend of mine looking at these questions of identity with her dwarf daughter. And I thought, there it is again: A family that perceives itself to be normal with a child who seems to be extraordinary. And I hatched the idea that there are really two kinds of identity. There are vertical identities, which are passed down generationally from parent to child. Those are things like ethnicity, frequently nationality, language, often religion. Those are things you have in common with your parents and with your children. And while some of them can be difficult, there's no attempt to cure them. You can argue that it's harder in the United States -- our current presidency notwithstanding -- to be a person of color. And yet, we have nobody who is trying to ensure that the next generation of children born to African-Americans and Asians come out with creamy skin and yellow hair. There are these other identities which you have to learn from a peer group. And I call them horizontal identities, because the peer group is the horizontal experience. These are identities that are alien to your parents and that you have to discover when you get to see them in peers. And those identities, those horizontal identities, people have almost always tried to cure. And I wanted to look at what the process is through which people who have those identities come to a good relationship with them. And it seemed to me that there were three levels of acceptance that needed to take place. There's self-acceptance, there's family acceptance, and there's social acceptance. And they don't always coincide. And a lot of the time, people who have these conditions are very angry because they feel as though their parents don't love them, when what actually has happened is that their parents don't accept them. Love is something that ideally is there unconditionally throughout the relationship between a parent and a child. But acceptance is something that takes time. It always takes time. One of the dwarfs I got to know was a guy named Clinton Brown. When he was born, he was diagnosed with diastrophic dwarfism, a very disabling condition, and his parents were told that he would never walk, he would never talk, he would have no intellectual capacity, and he would probably not even recognize them. And it was suggested to them that they leave him at the hospital so that he could die there quietly. And his mother said she wasn't going to do it. And she took her son home. And even though she didn't have a lot of educational or financial advantages, she found the best doctor in the country for dealing with diastrophic dwarfism, and she got Clinton enrolled with him. And in the course of his childhood, he had 30 major surgical procedures. And he spent all this time stuck in the hospital while he was having those procedures, as a result of which he now can walk. And while he was there, they sent tutors around to help him with his school work. And he worked very hard because there was nothing else to do. And he ended up achieving at a level that had never before been contemplated by any member of his family. He was the first one in his family, in fact, to go to college, where he lived on campus and drove a specially-fitted car that accommodated his unusual body. And his mother told me this story of coming home one day -- and he went to college nearby -- and she said, "I saw that car, which you can always recognize, in the parking lot of a bar," she said. (Laughter) "And I thought to myself, they're six feet tall, he's three feet tall. Two beers for them is four beers for him." She said, "I knew I couldn't go in there and interrupt him, but I went home, and I left him eight messages on his cell phone." She said, "And then I thought, if someone had said to me when he was born that my future worry would be that he'd go drinking and driving with his college buddies -- " (Applause) And I said to her, "What do you think you did that helped him to emerge as this charming, accomplished, wonderful person?" And she said, "What did I do? I loved him, that's all. Clinton just always had that light in him. And his father and I were lucky enough to be the first to see it there." I'm going to quote from another magazine of the '60s. This one is from 1968 -- The Atlantic Monthly, voice of liberal America -- written by an important bioethicist. He said, "There is no reason to feel guilty about putting a Down syndrome child away, whether it is put away in the sense of hidden in a sanitarium or in a more responsible, lethal sense. It is sad, yes -- dreadful. But it carries no guilt. True guilt arises only from an offense against a person, and a Down's is not a person." There's been a lot of ink given to the enormous progress that we've made in the treatment of gay people. The fact that our attitude has changed is in the headlines every day. But we forget how we used to see people who had other differences, how we used to see people who were disabled, how inhuman we held people to be. And the change that's been accomplished there, which is almost equally radical, is one that we pay not very much attention to. One of the families I interviewed, Tom and Karen Robards, were taken aback when, as young and successful New Yorkers, their first child was diagnosed with Down syndrome. They thought the educational opportunities for him were not what they should be, and so they decided they would build a little center -- two classrooms that they started with a few other parents -- to educate kids with D.S. And over the years, that center grew into something called the Cooke Center, where there are now thousands upon thousands of children with intellectual disabilities who are being taught. In the time since that Atlantic Monthly story ran, the life expectancy for people with Down syndrome has tripled. The experience of Down syndrome people includes those who are actors, those who are writers, some who are able to live fully independently in adulthood. The Robards had a lot to do with that. And I said, "Do you regret it? Do you wish your child didn't have Down syndrome? Do you wish you'd never heard of it?" And interestingly his father said, "Well, for David, our son, I regret it, because for David, it's a difficult way to be in the world, and I'd like to give David an easier life. But I think if we lost everyone with Down syndrome, it would be a catastrophic loss." And Karen Robards said to me, "I'm with Tom. For David, I would cure it in an instant to give him an easier life. But speaking for myself -- well, I would never have believed 23 years ago when he was born that I could come to such a point -- speaking for myself, it's made me so much better and so much kinder and so much more purposeful in my whole life, that speaking for myself, I wouldn't give it up for anything in the world." We live at a point when social acceptance for these and many other conditions is on the up and up. And yet we also live at the moment when our ability to eliminate those conditions has reached a height we never imagined before. Most deaf infants born in the United States now will receive Cochlear implants, which are put into the brain and connected to a receiver, and which allow them to acquire a facsimile of hearing and to use oral speech. A compound that has been tested in mice, BMN-111, is useful in preventing the action of the achondroplasia gene. Achondroplasia is the most common form of dwarfism, and mice who have been given that substance and who have the achondroplasia gene, grow to full size. Testing in humans is around the corner. There are blood tests which are making progress that would pick up Down syndrome more clearly and earlier in pregnancies than ever before, making it easier and easier for people to eliminate those pregnancies, or to terminate them. And so we have both social progress and medical progress. And I believe in both of them. I believe the social progress is fantastic and meaningful and wonderful, and I think the same thing about the medical progress. But I think it's a tragedy when one of them doesn't see the other. And when I see the way they're intersecting in conditions like the three I've just described, I sometimes think it's like those moments in grand opera when the hero realizes he loves the heroine at the exact moment that she lies expiring on a divan. (Laughter) We have to think about how we feel about cures altogether. And a lot of the time the question of parenthood is, what do we validate in our children, and what do we cure in them? Jim Sinclair, a prominent autism activist, said, "When parents say 'I wish my child did not have autism,' what they're really saying is 'I wish the child I have did not exist and I had a different, non-autistic child instead.' Read that again. This is what we hear when you mourn over our existence. This is what we hear when you pray for a cure -- that your fondest wish for us is that someday we will cease to be and strangers you can love will move in behind our faces." It's a very extreme point of view, but it points to the reality that people engage with the life they have and they don't want to be cured or changed or eliminated. They want to be whoever it is that they've come to be. One of the families I interviewed for this project was the family of Dylan Klebold who was one of the perpetrators of the Columbine massacre. It took a long time to persuade them to talk to me, and once they agreed, they were so full of their story that they couldn't stop telling it. And the first weekend I spent with them -- the first of many -- I recorded more than 20 hours of conversation. And on Sunday night, we were all exhausted. We were sitting in the kitchen. Sue Klebold was fixing dinner. And I said, "If Dylan were here now, do you have a sense of what you'd want to ask him?" And his father said, "I sure do. I'd want to ask him what the hell he thought he was doing." And Sue looked at the floor, and she thought for a minute. And then she looked back up and said, "I would ask him to forgive me for being his mother and never knowing what was going on inside his head." When I had dinner with her a couple of years later -- one of many dinners that we had together -- she said, "You know, when it first happened, I used to wish that I had never married, that I had never had children. If I hadn't gone to Ohio State and crossed paths with Tom, this child wouldn't have existed and this terrible thing wouldn't have happened. But I've come to feel that I love the children I had so much that I don't want to imagine a life without them. I recognize the pain they caused to others, for which there can be no forgiveness, but the pain they caused to me, there is," she said. "So while I recognize that it would have been better for the world if Dylan had never been born, I've decided that it would not have been better for me." I thought it was surprising how all of these families had all of these children with all of these problems, problems that they mostly would have done anything to avoid, and that they had all found so much meaning in that experience of parenting. And then I thought, all of us who have children love the children we have, with their flaws. If some glorious angel suddenly descended through my living room ceiling and offered to take away the children I have and give me other, better children -- more polite, funnier, nicer, smarter -- I would cling to the children I have and pray away that atrocious spectacle. And ultimately I feel that in the same way that we test flame-retardant pajamas in an inferno to ensure they won't catch fire when our child reaches across the stove, so these stories of families negotiating these extreme differences reflect on the universal experience of parenting, which is always that sometimes you look at your child and you think, where did you come from? (Laughter) It turns out that while each of these individual differences is siloed -- there are only so many families dealing with schizophrenia, there are only so many families of children who are transgender, there are only so many families of prodigies -- who also face similar challenges in many ways -- there are only so many families in each of those categories -- but if you start to think that the experience of negotiating difference within your family is what people are addressing, then you discover that it's a nearly universal phenomenon. Ironically, it turns out, that it's our differences, and our negotiation of difference, that unite us. I decided to have children while I was working on this project. And many people were astonished and said, "But how can you decide to have children in the midst of studying everything that can go wrong?" And I said, "I'm not studying everything that can go wrong. What I'm studying is how much love there can be, even when everything appears to be going wrong." I thought a lot about the mother of one disabled child I had seen, a severely disabled child who died through caregiver neglect. And when his ashes were interred, his mother said, "I pray here for forgiveness for having been twice robbed, once of the child I wanted and once of the son I loved." And I figured it was possible then for anyone to love any child if they had the effective will to do so. So my husband is the biological father of two children with some lesbian friends in Minneapolis. I had a close friend from college who'd gone through a divorce and wanted to have children. And so she and I have a daughter, and mother and daughter live in Texas. And my husband and I have a son who lives with us all the time of whom I am the biological father, and our surrogate for the pregnancy was Laura, the lesbian mother of Oliver and Lucy in Minneapolis. (Applause) So the shorthand is five parents of four children in three states. And there are people who think that the existence of my family somehow undermines or weakens or damages their family. And there are people who think that families like mine shouldn't be allowed to exist. And I don't accept subtractive models of love, only additive ones. And I believe that in the same way that we need species diversity to ensure that the planet can go on, so we need this diversity of affection and diversity of family in order to strengthen the ecosphere of kindness. The day after our son was born, the pediatrician came into the hospital room and said she was concerned. He wasn't extending his legs appropriately. She said that might mean that he had brain damage. In so far as he was extending them, he was doing so asymmetrically, which she thought could mean that there was a tumor of some kind in action. And he had a very large head, which she thought might indicate hydrocephalus. And as she told me all of these things, I felt the very center of my being pouring out onto the floor. And I thought, here I had been working for years on a book about how much meaning people had found in the experience of parenting children who are disabled, and I didn't want to join their number. Because what I was encountering was an idea of illness. And like all parents since the dawn of time, I wanted to protect my child from illness. And I wanted also to protect myself from illness. And yet, I knew from the work I had done that if he had any of the things we were about to start testing for, that those would ultimately be his identity, and if they were his identity they would become my identity, that that illness was going to take a very different shape as it unfolded. We took him to the MRI machine, we took him to the CAT scanner, we took this day-old child and gave him over for an arterial blood draw. We felt helpless. And at the end of five hours, they said that his brain was completely clear and that he was by then extending his legs correctly. And when I asked the pediatrician what had been going on, she said she thought in the morning he had probably had a cramp. (Laughter) But I thought how my mother was right. I thought, the love you have for your children is unlike any other feeling in the world, and until you have children, you don't know what it feels like. I think children had ensnared me the moment I connected fatherhood with loss. But I'm not sure I would have noticed that if I hadn't been so in the thick of this research project of mine. I'd encountered so much strange love, and I fell very naturally into its bewitching patterns. And I saw how splendor can illuminate even the most abject vulnerabilities. During these 10 years, I had witnessed and learned the terrifying joy of unbearable responsibility, and I had come to see how it conquers everything else. And while I had sometimes thought the parents I was interviewing were fools, enslaving themselves to a lifetime's journey with their thankless children and trying to breed identity out of misery, I realized that day that my research had built me a plank and that I was ready to join them on their ship. Thank you. (Applause)
On Mondays and Thursdays, I learn how to die. I call them my terminal days. My wife Fernanda doesn't like the term, but a lot of people in my family died of melanoma cancer and my parents and grandparents had it. And I kept thinking, one day I could be sitting in front of a doctor who looks at my exams and says, "Ricardo, things don't look very good. You have six months or a year to live." And you start thinking about what you would do with this time. And you say, "I'm going to spend more time with the kids. I'm going to visit these places, I'm going to go up and down mountains and places and I'm going to do all the things I didn't do when I had the time." But of course, we all know these are very bittersweet memories we're going to have. It's very difficult to do. You spend a good part of the time crying, probably. So I said, I'm going to do something else. Every Monday and Thursday, I'm going use my terminal days. And I will do, during those days, whatever it is I was going to do if I had received that piece of news. (Laughter) When you think about -- (Applause) when you think about the opposite of work, we, many times, think it's leisure. And you say, ah, I need some leisure time, and so forth. But the fact is that, leisure is a very busy thing. You go play golf and tennis, and you meet people, and you're going for lunch, and you're late for the movies. It's a very crowded thing that we do. The opposite of work is idleness. But very few of us know what to do with idleness. When you look at the way that we distribute our lives in general, you realize that in the periods in which we have a lot of money, we have very little time. And then when we finally have time, we have neither the money nor the health. So we started thinking about that as a company for the last 30 years. This is a complicated company with thousands of employees, hundreds of millions of dollars of business that makes rocket fuel propellent systems, runs 4,000 ATMs in Brazil, does income tax preparation for dozens of thousands. So this is not a simple business. We looked at it and we said, let's devolve to these people, let's give these people a company where we take away all the boarding school aspects of, this is when you arrive, this is how you dress, this is how you go to meetings, this is what you say, this is what you don't say, and let's see what's left. So we started this about 30 years ago, and we started dealing with this very issue. And so we said, look, the retirement, the whole issue of how we distribute our graph of life. Instead of going mountain climbing when you're 82, why don't you do it next week? And we'll do it like this, we'll sell you back your Wednesdays for 10 percent of your salary. So now, if you were going to be a violinist, which you probably weren't, you go and do this on Wednesday. And what we found -- we thought, these are the older people who are going to be really interested in this program. And the average age of the first people who adhered were 29, of course. And so we started looking, and we said, we have to do things in a different way. So we started saying things like, why do we want to know what time you came to work, what time you left, etc.? Can't we exchange this for a contract for buying something from you, some kind of work? Why are we building these headquarters? Is it not an ego issue that we want to look solid and big and important? But we're dragging you two hours across town because of it? So we started asking questions one by one. We'd say it like this: One: How do we find people? We'd go out and try and recruit people and we'd say, look, when you come to us, we're not going to have two or three interviews and then you're going to be married to us for life. That's not how we do the rest of our lives. So, come have your interviews. Anyone who's interested in interviewing, you will show up. And then we'll see what happens out of the intuition that rises from that, instead of just filling out the little items of whether you're the right person. And then, come back. Spend an afternoon, spend a whole day, talk to anybody you want. Make sure we are the bride you thought we were and not all the bullshit we put into our own ads. (Laughter) Slowly we went to a process where we'd say things like, we don't want anyone to be a leader in the company if they haven't been interviewed and approved by their future subordinates. Every six months, everyone gets evaluated, anonymously, as a leader. And this determines whether they should continue in that leadership position, which is many times situational, as you know. And so if they don't have 70, 80 percent of a grade, they don't stay, which is probably the reason why I haven't been CEO for more than 10 years. And over time, we started asking other questions. We said things like, why can't people set their own salaries? What do they need to know? There's only three things you need to know: how much people make inside the company, how much people make somewhere else in a similar business and how much we make in general to see whether we can afford it. So let's give people these three pieces of information. So we started having, in the cafeteria, a computer where you could go in and you could ask what someone spent, how much someone makes, what they make in benefits, what the company makes, what the margins are, and so forth. And this is 25 years ago. As this information started coming to people, we said things like, we don't want to see your expense report, we don't want to know how many holidays you're taking, we don't want to know where you work. We had, at one point, 14 different offices around town, and we'd say, go to the one that's closest to your house, to the customer that you're going to visit today. Don't tell us where you are. And more, even when we had thousands of people, 5,000 people, we had two people in the H.R. department, and thankfully one of them has retired. (Laughter) And so, the question we were asking was, how can we be taking care of people? People are the only thing we have. We can't have a department that runs after people and looks after people. So as we started finding that this worked, and we'd say, we're looking for -- and this is, I think, the main thing I was looking for in the terminal days and in the company, which is, how do you set up for wisdom? We've come from an age of revolution, industrial revolution, an age of information, an age of knowledge, but we're not any closer to the age of wisdom. How we design, how do we organize, for more wisdom? So for example, many times, what's the smartest or the intelligent decision doesn't jive. So we'd say things like, let's agree that you're going to sell 57 widgets per week. If you sell them by Wednesday, please go to the beach. Don't create a problem for us, for manufacturing, for application, then we have to buy new companies, we have to buy our competitors, we have to do all kinds of things because you sold too many widgets. So go to the beach and start again on Monday. (Laughter) (Applause) So the process is looking for wisdom. And in the process, of course, we wanted people to know everything, and we wanted to be truly democratic about the way we ran things. So our board had two seats open with the same voting rights, for the first two people who showed up. (Laughter) And so we had cleaning ladies voting on a board meeting, which had a lot of other very important people in suits and ties. And the fact is that they kept us honest. This process, as we started looking at the people who came to us, we'd say, now wait a second, people come to us and they say, where am I supposed to sit? How am I supposed to work? Where am I going to be in 5 years' time? And we looked at that and we said, we have to start much earlier. Where do we start? We said, oh, kindergarten seems like a good place. So we set up a foundation, which now has, for 11 years, three schools, where we started asking the same questions, how do you redesign school for wisdom? It is one thing to say, we need to recycle the teachers, we need the directors to do more. But the fact is that what we do with education is entirely obsolete. The teacher's role is entirely obsolete. Going from a math class, to biology, to 14th-century France is very silly. (Applause) So we started thinking, what could it look like? And we put together people, including people who like education, people like Paulo Freire, and two ministers of education in Brazil and we said, if we were to design a school from scratch, what would it look like? And so we created this school, which is called Lumiar, and Lumiar, one of them is a public school, and Lumiar says the following: Let's divide this role of the teacher into two. One guy, we'll call a tutor. A tutor, in the old sense of the Greek "paideia": Look after the kid. What's happening at home, what's their moment in life, etc.. But please don't teach, because the little you know compared to Google, we don't want to know. Keep that to yourself. (Laughter) Now, we'll bring in people who have two things: passion and expertise, and it could be their profession or not. And we use the senior citizens, who are 25 percent of the population with wisdom that nobody wants anymore. So we bring them to school and we say, teach these kids whatever you really believe in. So we have violinists teaching math. We have all kinds of things where we say, don't worry about the course material anymore. We have approximately 10 great threads that go from 2 to 17. Things like, how do we measure ourselves as humans? So there's a place for math and physics and all that there. How do we express ourselves? So there's a place for music and literature, etc., but also for grammar. And then we have things that everyone has forgotten, which are probably the most important things in life. The very important things in life, we know nothing about. We know nothing about love, we know nothing about death, we know nothing about why we're here. So we need a thread in school that talks about everything we don't know. So that's a big part of what we do. (Applause) So over the years, we started going into other things. We'd say, why do we have to scold the kids and say, sit down and come here and do that, and so forth. We said, let's get the kids to do something we call a circle, which meets once a week. And we'd say, you put the rules together and then you decide what you want to do with it. So can you all hit yourself on the head? Sure, for a week, try. They came up with the very same rules that we had, except they're theirs. And then, they have the power, which means, they can and do suspend and expel kids so that we're not playing school, they really decide. And then, in this same vein, we keep a digital mosaic, because this is not constructivist or Montessori or something. It's something where we keep the Brazilian curriculum with 600 tiles of a mosaic, which we want to expose these kids to by the time they're 17. And follow this all the time and we know how they're doing and we say, you're not interested in this now, let's wait a year. And the kids are in groups that don't have an age category, so the six-year-old kid who is ready for that with an 11-year-old, that eliminates all of the gangs and the groups and this stuff that we have in the schools, in general. And they have a zero to 100 percent grading, which they do themselves with an app every couple of hours. Until we know they're 37 percent of the way we'd like them to be on this issue, so that we can send them out in the world with them knowing enough about it. And so the courses are World Cup Soccer, or building a bicycle. And people will sign up for a 45-day course on building a bicycle. Now, try to build a bicycle without knowing that pi is 3.1416. You can't. And try, any one of you, using 3.1416 for something. You don't know anymore. So this is lost and that's what we try to do there, which is looking for wisdom in that school. And that brings us back to this graph and this distribution of our life. I accumulated a lot of money when I think about it. When you think and you say, now is the time to give back -- well, if you're giving back, you took too much. (Laughter) (Applause) I keep thinking of Warren Buffet waking up one day and finding out he has 30 billion dollars more than he thought he had. And he looks and he says, what am I going to do with this? And he says, I'll give it to someone who really needs this. I'll give it to Bill Gates. (Laughter) And my guy, who's my financial advisor in New York, he says, look, you're a silly guy because you would have 4.1 times more money today if you had made money with money instead of sharing as you go. But I like sharing as you go better. (Applause) I taught MBAs at MIT for a time and I ended up, one day, at the Mount Auburn Cemetery. It is a beautiful cemetery in Cambridge. And I was walking around. It was my birthday and I was thinking. And the first time around, I saw these tombstones and these wonderful people who'd done great things and I thought, what do I want to be remembered for? And I did another stroll around, and the second time, another question came to me, which did me better, which was, why do I want to be remembered at all? (Laughter) And that, I think, took me different places. When I was 50, my wife Fernanda and I sat for a whole afternoon, we had a big pit with fire, and I threw everything I had ever done into that fire. This is a book in 38 languages, hundreds and hundreds of articles and DVDs, everything there was. And that did two things. One, it freed our five kids from following in our steps, our shadow -- They don't know what I do. (Laughter) Which is good. And I'm not going to take them somewhere and say, one day all of this will be yours. (Laughter) The five kids know nothing, which is good. And the second thing is, I freed myself from this anchor of past achievement or whatever. I'm free to start something new every time and to decide things from scratch in part of those terminal days. And some people would say, oh, so now you have this time, these terminal days, and so you go out and do everything. No, we've been to the beaches, so we've been to Samoa and Maldives and Mozambique, so that's done. I've climbed mountains in the Himalayas. I've gone down 60 meters to see hammerhead sharks. I've spent 59 days on the back of a camel from Chad to Timbuktu. I've gone to the magnetic North Pole on a dog sled. So, we've been busy. It's what I'd like to call my empty bucket list. (Laughter) And with this rationale, I look at these days and I think, I'm not retired. I don't feel retired at all. And so I'm writing a new book. We started three new companies in the last two years. I'm now working on getting this school system for free out into the world, and I've found, very interestingly enough, that nobody wants it for free. And so I've been trying for 10 years to get the public system to take over this school rationale, much as the public schools we have, which has instead of 43 out of 100, as their rating, as their grades, has 91 out of 100. But for free, nobody wants it. So maybe we'll start charging for it and then it will go somewhere. But getting this out is one of the things we want to do. And I think what this leaves us as a message for all of you, I think is a little bit like this: We've all learned how to go on Sunday night to email and work from home. But very few of us have learned how to go to the movies on Monday afternoon. And if we're looking for wisdom, we need to learn to do that as well. And so, what we've done all of these years is very simple, is use the little tool, which is ask three whys in a row. Because the first why you always have a good answer for. The second why, it starts getting difficult. By the third why, you don't really know why you're doing what you're doing. What I want to leave you with is the seed and the thought that maybe if you do this, you will come to the question, what for? What am I doing this for? And hopefully, as a result of that, and over time, I hope that with this, and that's what I'm wishing you, you'll have a much wiser future. Thank you very much. (Applause) Chris Anderson: So Ricardo, you're kind of crazy. (Laughter) To many people, this seems crazy. And yet so deeply wise, also. The pieces I'm trying to put together are this: Your ideas are so radical. How, in business, for example, these ideas have been out for a while, probably the percentage of businesses that have taken some of them is still quite low. Are there any times you've seen some big company take on one of your ideas and you've gone, "Yes!"? Ricardo Semler: It happens. It happened about two weeks ago with Richard Branson, with his people saying, oh, I don't want to control your holidays anymore, or Netflix does a little bit of this and that, but I don't think it's very important. I'd like to see it happen maybe a little bit in a bit of a missionary zeal, but that's a very personal one. But the fact is that it takes a leap of faith about losing control. And almost nobody who is in control is ready to take leaps of faith. It will have to come from kids and other people who are starting companies in a different way. CA: So that's the key thing? From your point of view the evidence is there, in the business point of view this works, but people just don't have the courage to -- (Whoosh) RS: They don't even have the incentive. You're running a company with a 90-day mandate. It's a quarterly report. If you're not good in 90 days, you're out. So you say, "Here's a great program that, in less than one generation --" And the guy says, "Get out of here." So this is the problem. (Laughter) CA: What you're trying to do in education seems to me incredibly profound. Everyone is bothered about their country's education system. No one thinks that we've caught up yet to a world where there's Google and all these technological options. So you've got actual evidence now that the kids so far going through your system, there's a dramatic increase in performance. How do we help you move these ideas forward? RS: I think it's that problem of ideas whose time has come. And I've never been very evangelical about these things. We put it out there. Suddenly, you find people -- there's a group in Japan, which scares me very much, which is called the Semlerists, and they have 120 companies. They've invited me. I've always been scared to go. And there is a group in Holland that has 600 small, Dutch companies. It's something that will flourish on its own. Part of it will be wrong, and it doesn't matter. This will find its own place. And I'm afraid of the other one, which says, this is so good you've got to do this. Let's set up a system and put lots of money into it and then people will do it no matter what. CA: So you have asked extraordinary questions your whole life. It seems to me that's the fuel that's driven a lot of this. Do you have any other questions for us, for TED, for this group here? RS: I always come back to variations of the question that my son asked me when he was three. We were sitting in a jacuzzi, and he said, "Dad, why do we exist?" There is no other question. Nobody has any other question. We have variations of this one question, from three onwards. So when you spend time in a company, in a bureaucracy, in an organization and you're saying, boy -- how many people do you know who on their death beds said, boy, I wish I had spent more time at the office? So there's a whole thing of having the courage now -- not in a week, not in two months, not when you find out you have something -- to say, no, what am I doing this for? Stop everything. Let me do something else. And it will be okay, it will be much better than what you're doing, if you're stuck in a process. CA: So that strikes me as a profound and quite beautiful way to end this penultimate day of TED. Ricardo Semler, thank you so much. RS: Thank you so much. (Applause)
Good morning. My name is David Rose. I am a serial entrepreneur turned serial investor. And by the use of pitching PowerPoints to VCs, I have personally raised tens of millions of dollars from VCs through PowerPoint pitches. And then, turning round to the other side of the equation, I have personally supervised the investment of tens of millions of dollars into companies who have been pitching me with PowerPoint presentations. So I think it's safe to say I know a little bit about the process of pitching. So, the very first question that you've all got to figure out is: what is the single most important thing that a VC is looking for when you come to them pitching your new business idea? And there are obviously all kinds of things. There are business models, and there are financials, and there are markets and there is that. Overall, of all the things that you have to do, what is the single most important thing the VC is going to be investing in? Somebody? What? (Audience: People.) David S. Rose: People? You! That's it -- you are the person. And so therefore, the entire purpose of a VC pitch is to convince them that you are the entrepreneur in whom they are going to invest their money and make a lot of money in return. Now, how do you do this? You can't just walk up and say, you know, "Hi, I'm a really good guy, and a good girl, and you should really invest in me." Right? So, in the course of your VC pitch, you have a very few minutes, and most VC pitches -- most angel pitches are about 15 minutes, most VC pitches should be less than half an hour. People's attention span after 18 minutes begins to drop off, tests have shown. So in that 18 minutes, or 10 minutes, or five minutes, you have to convey a whole bunch of different characteristics. You actually have to convey about 10 different characteristics while you're standing up there. What's the single most important thing you've got to convey? What? (Audience: Integrity.) DSR: Boy, oh boy, oh boy! And that's a straight line we got right over there. And I didn't even prompt him. You're right, integrity. Because that's the key thing. I would much rather invest in somebody -- you know, take a chance on somebody -- who I know is straight than somebody where there's any possible question of, you know, who are they looking out for, and what's going on. So the most important thing is integrity. And what's the second most important thing after integrity? Let's see if you can get this one. (Audience: Self-confidence.) DSR: Close enough! Passion. Right, so here you want -- entrepreneurs by definition are people who are leaving something else, starting a new world over here, creating and putting their lifeblood into this kind of thing. You've got to convey passion. If you're not passionate about your own company, why on Earth should anyone else be passionate? Why should they put more money into your company, if you're not passionate about it? So, integrity and passion: the single most important things out there. Then there are a whole panoply of other things that you've got to do, to wrap up in this package that you're presenting to a VC. Experience. You've got to be able to say, "Hey, you know, I've done this before." And "done this before" is starting an enterprise and creating value, and taking something from beginning to end. So that's why VCs love to fund serial entrepreneurs. Because even if you didn't do it right the first time, you've learned the lessons, which are going to stand you in very good stead the next time. And now along with that, along with the experience of starting an enterprise, or running something -- and it doesn't have to be a business. It can be in an organization at school, it can be a not-for-profit. But they want experience in creating an organization. Next up is knowledge. If you're telling me you're going to be the great developer of the map of the human genome, you'd better know what a human genome is. I mean, I want you to have domain expertise. So I don't want somebody who's saying, "Hey, I've got a great idea in a business I know nothing about. I don't know who the players are. I don't know what the market is like." So you've got to know your market. You've got to know your area. And then you have to have the skills that it takes to get a company going. And those skills include everything from technical skills, if it's a technology business, to marketing, and sales, and management, and so on. But, you know, not everybody has all these skills. There are very few people who have the full set of skills that it takes to run a company. So what else do you require? Well, leadership. You've got to be able to convince us that you either have developed a team that has all those factors in it, or else you can. And you have the charisma and the management style and the ability to get people to follow your lead, to inspire them, to motivate them to be part of your team. All right, then, having done all that, what else do I want to know as a VC? I want to know that you have commitment. That you are going to be here to the end. I want you to say, or I want you to convey, that you are going to die if you have to, with your very last breath, with your fingernails scratching as they drag you out. You're going to keep my money alive and you're going to make more money out of it. So I don't want somebody who's going to cut and run at the first opportunity. Because bad things happen. There's never been an angel- or a venture-funded company where bad things didn't happen. So I want to know that you're committed to be there to the very end. You've got to have vision. You've got to be able to see where this is going. I don't want another "me too" product. I want somebody who knows, who can change the world out there. But on top of that, I also need realism. Because I need to know that you know that while changing the world is great, it doesn't always happen. And before you get to change the world, bad things are going to take place. And you've got to be able to deal with that. And you have to have rational projections and stuff. And then finally, you're asking for my money, not just because it's my money, but because it's me. You need to be coachable. So I need to know that you have the ability to listen. We've had a lot of experience. People who are VCs or angels investing in you have had experience and they'd like to know that you want to hear that experience. Okay, so how do you convey all these 10 things in 10 minutes without saying any more? You can't say, "Hey, I've got high integrity, invest in me!" Right? You've got to do a whole pitch that conveys this without conveying it. So think about your pitch as a timeline. It starts off, you walk in the door. They know nothing at all, whatsoever, about you. And you can take them on an emotional -- all pitches, or all sales presentations, are emotional at some level. You can go up, you can go down, right? And it goes from beginning to end. You walk in the door. So the first thing you've got to do -- the overall, you know, arc of your presentation -- it's got to start like a rocket. You've got maybe 10 seconds -- between 10 and 30 seconds, depending on how long the pitch is -- to get their attention. In my case, "I've invested. I have got tens of millions of dollars from PowerPoint pitches. I have invested tens of millions of dollars." That's it -- that should get you right there. This can be a factor, and everybody can be saying it's counterintuitive. It can be a story, it can be experience. But you've got to grab their emotional attention, focused on you, within that first few seconds. And then from there, you've got to take them on a very solid, steady, upward path, right from beginning to end. And everything has got to be reinforcing this. And you've got to get better, and better, and better, and better. And it's revving up to the very end, and then at the very end you've got to -- boom! -- knock them out of the park. You want to be able to get them to such an emotional high that they are ready to write you a check, throw money at you, right there before you leave. Okay, so how do you do that? Well, first of all, logical progression. Any time you go backwards, any time you skip a step -- imagine walking up a staircase where some of the treads are missing, or the heights are different heights. You stop, you've got to figure it out. You want a nice logical progression. Start with telling them what the market is. Why are you going to do X, Y or Z. And then you've got to tell me how you're going to do it, and what it is you're going to do. How you're going to do it. And the whole -- it's got to flow from beginning to end. You've also got to let me know that there are touchstones. You want to tie in to the rest of the world out there. So, for example, if you reference companies I've heard of, or basic items in your business, I want to know about them. Things that I can relate to: validators, or anything that tells me somebody else has approved this, or there's outside validation. It can be sales; it can be you've got an award for something; it can be, people have done it before; it can be your beta tests are going great. Whatever. I want to know validation, that you're telling me not just what you're telling me, but that somebody else -- or something else out there -- says this makes sense. And then, because I'm looking for the upside here, I've got to have believable upside. And that's two parts. It's got to be upside, and it's got to be believable. The upside means that if you're telling me that you're going to be out there, five years out, making a million dollars a year -- hmm. That's not really upside. Telling me you're going to be out there making a billion dollars a year -- that's not believable. So it's got to be both sides. On the other hand, there are a lot of things that drive me down, take the emotional level down, and you've got to recover from those. And those, for example, are anything you tell me that I know is not true. "We have no competition. There's nobody else who's ever made a widget like this." Odds are I probably know somebody who has made a widget. And the minute you tell me that -- boom! You know, I discount half of what you're saying from then on. Anything that makes me think. Anything that I don't understand, where I have to make the leap myself, in my own head, is going to stop the flow of the presentation. So, you've got to take me through like a sixth grader -- dub, dub, dub, dub, dub -- but without patronizing me. And it's a very tricky path to do it. But if you can do it, it works really, really well. Anything that's inconsistent within the concept of your thing. If you tell me sales of X, Y or Z are 10 million dollars, and the next slide, or five slides later, they're five million dollars. Well, one may have been gross sales, one may have been net sales, but I want to know that all the numbers make sense together. And then finally, anything that's an error, or a typo, or a stupid mistake, or a line that's in the wrong place. That shows me that -- if you can't even do a presentation, how the heck can you run a company? So this all feeds in together. All right, so the best way to do this stuff is to look at our betters, look at people who have done this before. So let's look at the most successful technology executive in the business and see how a presentation goes. Bill Gates' PowerPoint presentation over here. Here's Gates doing a thing for Windows. Is this the way you should do a PowerPoint presentation? What do you think? No. Who do you think we should look at as our role model? Oh, isn't that funny! There's another great one over here. Yes? OK, Steve Jobs. You want absolute -- this is the Zen of presentation, right? Here he is. One little guy, black jeans and stuff, on a totally empty stage. What are you focusing on? You're focusing on him! This is Steve Jobs. So, you know, our great -- these wonderful long bullet points, a whole list of things, you know -- good! No, they're not. The long bullet points are bad. What's good? Short, short bullet points. But you know what? Even better than short bullet points are no bullet points. Just give me the headline over here. And you know what? How many bullet points or headlines does Steve Jobs use? Basically none. What do you do? Best of all, images. Just a simple image. I looked at the image -- a picture's worth a thousand words. You look at the image and you see that, and you drop the whole thing. And then, you come back to me. And you're focused on me and why I'm such a great guy, and why you want to invest in me. And why this whole thing makes sense. So with that said, we only have a very, very short time. So let's run through the things you've got to include in your presentation. Well, first of all, start out. None of these big, long-titled slides with blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah and I'm presenting to so-and-so, such-and-such a date. I know the day, I know who I am, I know you're presenting. I don't need all that. Just give me your company logo. I look at the logo, and it sort of ties it to my brain. And then I come back to you. I'm focused on you, OK? You do that, you give me your quick 15-second or 30-second intro, grab my attention. And then you want to give me a quick business overview. This is not a five-minute pitch. This is, you know, two sentences. "We build widgets for the X, Y, Z market." Or, "We sell services to help somebody do X." You know, whatever. And that is like the picture on the outside of a jigsaw puzzle box. That lets me know the context. It gives me the armature for the whole thing you're going to be going through. And it lets me put everything else in relation to something you've already told me. So there you go -- walk me through, show me who your management team is. It's helpful that you've had experience and you've done this kind of thing before. And I want to know the market -- the size of the market. Why is this market worth getting at over here? I want to know your product, and that's very important. Now, this is not a product pitch, not a sales pitch. I don't want to know all the ins and outs, and the gazuntas and the yaddas and stuff. I just want to know -- what the heck is it? If it's a website, show me a screenshot of your website. You know, don't do a live demo. No, never do a live demo. Do a canned demo, or do something that lets me know why people are going to buy whatever it is. Then I want to know -- now that I know what you're selling, tell me how you make money on it. For every X you sell, you get Y, you do your services of Z. I want to know what the business model is on a sort of per-unit basis, or for the actual product that you're selling. I want to know who you're selling this thing to, in terms of customers. And I want to know if you have any relationships that are going to be special to help you. Whether you have a distribution relationship with somebody, you know, you have a producing partner. Or, you know, again, validation. This helps to say you're bigger than just one little thing over here. But then, everybody has competition. There has never been a company that doesn't have competition. Even if the competition is the old way of doing something. I want to know exactly what your competition is, and then that will help me judge how you fit into the whole operation over here. But then, I want to know how you're special. If I know what your competition does, how are you going to prevent your competition from eating your lunch over here? And then all this ties into the financial overview. And you have to have -- you can't do a VC pitch without giving me your financials. I want to know three and, you know, a year or two back, or as long as you've been in existence. And I want to know three or four or five years forward. Five is a bit much. Probably four is rational. And I want to know how that business model that you showed me on a product basis is going to translate into a company model. And, you know, how many widgets are you going to sell? You're making X amount per widget. I want to know what the driver is. We're going to have 1,000 customers this year, and 10,000 next year. And our revenues are going to go this, that and the other thing. And so that gives me the whole picture for the next several years into which I'm investing. And I want to know how the money you're going to get from me is going to help you get there. You're going to open an offshore plant in China, you're going to spend it all on sales and marketing, you're going to go to Tahiti, or whatever out there. But then comes the ask. This is where you tell me how much you actually want to get. You're looking for 5 million -- at what kind of valuation? Two million at 100,000. What's the money in so far? Who invested? I hope you invested personally. Because I'm following on. If you can't invest in your own thing, why should I invest in it? So I like to know if you have friends and family, or angel investors in there, or you've had more VCs before. What's the capital structure up until this point? And then finally, having done all that, you've now told me the whole thing, so now you've got to bring it back to that conclusion. This is that rocket going up. So hopefully everything has been positive, positive, positive, more positive. And everything, everything you say clicks with me, and it all makes sense. And I'm thinking, "This is really, really great." And then you take me back to your logo. Just your logo on the screen. And I look at the logo -- okay, good. Now I come back to you. Nothing else to look at, right? And now, you've got to wrap it up and tie it up here. You've got to give me the final, you know -- boom! -- the final pitch that's going to send me into space. Now, in the process of doing this over here, how do you remember the sequences and doers? You've noticed here that I'm not looking at the screen, right? The screen is, actually, in this room, is set up so it's in front of me. So, I couldn't even see if I wanted to. So now, how do I know what's going on here? Well, I've got a laptop in front of me, but you're looking at me. And you're looking at this. What do you think I'm looking at? You think that I'm looking at that? No, I'm looking actually at a special version of PowerPoint over here, which shows me the slides ahead, the slides behind, my notes from here, so I can see what's going on. PowerPoint has this built into every copy of PowerPoint that's shipped. If you use Apple's Keynote, it's got an even better version in Keynote. And then there's another program, called Ovation, you can get from Adobe, that they just bought last summer. Which actually helps you run the whole timers, and it lets you figure out what's going on. So, here's my wrap up to take you to the moon, right? David's -- I usually do a top 10, we don't have time for top 10s. So David's top five presentation tips. Number one: always use presenter mode, or Ovation, or presenter tools, because it lets you know exactly where you're going. It helps you pace yourself, it gives you a timer so we end on time and the whole bit. Number four: always use remote control. Have you seen me touch the computer? No, you haven't. Why not? Because I'm using remote control over here. Always use remote control. Number three: the handouts you give are not your presentation. If you follow my suggestions, you're going to have a very spare, very Zen-like presentation, which is great for conveying who you are and getting people emotionally involved. But it's not really good as a handout. You want to have a handout that gives a lot more information, because the handout has to stand without you over here. Number three: don't read your speech. Can you imagine? "Well, you should invest in my company because it's really good." It doesn't work, right? Don't read your speech. And the number one presentation tip: never, ever look at the screen. You're making a connection with your audience over here, and you always want to do a one-on-one connection. The screen should come up visually behind you, and supplement what you're doing instead of replace you. And that is how to pitch to a VC.
Charles Van Doren, who was later a senior editor of Britannica, said the ideal encyclopedia should be radical -- it should stop being safe. But if you know anything about the history of Britannica since 1962, it was anything but radical: still a very completely safe, stodgy type of encyclopedia. Wikipedia, on the other hand, begins with a very radical idea, and that's for all of us to imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. And that's what we're doing. So Wikipedia -- you just saw the little demonstration of it -- it's a freely licensed encyclopedia. It's written by thousands of volunteers all over the world in many, many languages. It's written using wiki software -- which is the type of software he just demonstrated -- so anyone can quickly edit and save, and it goes live on the Internet immediately. And everything about Wikipedia is managed by virtually an all-volunteer staff. So when Yochai is talking about new methods of organization, he's exactly describing Wikipedia. And what I'm going to do today is tell you a little bit more about how it really works on the inside. So Wikipedia's owned by the Wikimedia Foundation, which I founded, a nonprofit organization. And our goal, the core aim of the Wikimedia Foundation, is to get a free encyclopedia to every single person on the planet. And so, if you think about what that means, it means a lot more than just building a cool website. We're really interested in all the issues of the digital divide, poverty worldwide, empowering people everywhere to have the information that they need to make good decisions. And so we're going to have to do a lot of work that goes beyond just the Internet. And so that's a big part of why we've chosen the free licensing model, because that empowers local entrepreneurs or anyone who wants to -- they can take our content and do anything they like with it -- you can copy it, redistribute it -- and you can do it commercially or non-commercially. So there's a lot of opportunities that are going to arise around Wikipedia all over the world. We're funded by donations from the public, and one of the more interesting things about that is how little money it actually takes to run Wikipedia. So Yochai showed you the graph of what the cost of a printing press was. And I'm going to tell you what the cost of Wikipedia is. But first, I'll show you how big it is. So we've got over 600,000 articles in English. We've got two million total articles across many, many different languages. The biggest languages are German, Japanese, French -- all the Western-European languages are quite big. But only around one-third of all of our traffic to our web clusters to the English Wikipedia, which is surprising to a lot of people. A lot of people think in a very English-centric way on the Internet, but for us, we're truly global. We're in many, many languages. How popular we've gotten to be -- we're a top-50 website and we're more popular than the New York Times. So this is where we get to Yochai's discussion. This shows the growth of Wikipedia -- we're the blue line there -- and this is the New York Times over there. And what's interesting about this is the New York Times website is a huge, enormous corporate operation with I have no idea how many hundreds of employees. We have exactly one employee, and that employee is our lead software developer. And he's only been our employee since January 2005, all the other growth before that ... So the servers are managed by a ragtag band of volunteers. All the editing is done by volunteers. And the way that we're organized is not like any traditional organization you can imagine. People are always asking, "Well, who's in charge of this?" or "Who does that?" And the answer is: anybody who wants to pitch in. It's a very unusual and chaotic thing. We've got over 90 servers now in three locations. These are managed by volunteer system administrators who are online. I can go online any time of the day or night and see eight to 10 people waiting for me to ask a question or something, anything about the servers. You could never afford to do this in a company. You could never afford to have a standby crew of people 24 hours a day and do what we're doing at Wikipedia. So we're doing around 1.4 billion page views monthly, so it's really gotten to be a huge thing. And everything is managed by the volunteers. And the total monthly cost for our bandwidth is about 5,000 dollars. And that's essentially our main cost. We could actually do without the employee. We hired Brian because he was working part-time for two years and full-time at Wikipedia, so we actually hired him, so he could get a life and go to the movies sometimes. So the big question when you've got this really chaotic organization is, why isn't it all rubbish? Why is the website as good as it is? First of all, how good is it? Well, it's pretty good. It isn't perfect, but it's much better than you would expect, given our completely chaotic model. So when you saw him make a ridiculous edit to the page about me, you think, "Oh, this is obviously just going to degenerate into rubbish." But when we've seen quality tests -- and there haven't been enough of these yet and I'm really encouraging people to do more, comparing Wikipedia to traditional things -- we win hands down. So a German magazine compared German Wikipedia, which is much, much smaller than English, to Microsoft Encarta and to Brockhaus multimedial, and we won across the board. They hired experts to come and look at articles and compare the quality, and we were very pleased with that result. So a lot of people have heard about the Wikipedia Bush-Kerry controversy. The media has covered this somewhat extensively. It started out with an article in Red Herring. The reporters called me up and they -- I mean, I have to say they spelled my name right, but they really wanted to say the Bush-Kerry election is so contentious, it's tearing apart the Wikipedia community. And so they quote me as saying, "They're the most contentious in the history of Wikipedia." What I actually said is they're not contentious at all. So it's a slight misquote. (Laughter) The articles were edited quite heavily. And it is true that we did have to lock the articles on a couple of occasions. Time magazine recently reported that "Extreme action sometimes has to be taken, and Wales locked the entries on Kerry and Bush for most of 2004." This came after I told the reporter that we had to lock it for -- occasionally a little bit here and there. So the truth in general is that the kinds of controversies that you would probably think we have within the Wikipedia community are not really controversies at all. Articles on controversial topics are edited a lot, but they don't cause much controversy within the community. And the reason for this is that most people understand the need for neutrality. The real struggle is not between the right and the left -- that's where most people assume -- but it's between the party of the thoughtful and the party of the jerks. And no side of the political spectrum has a monopoly on either of those qualities. The actual truth about the specific Bush-Kerry incident is that the Bush-Kerry articles were locked less than one percent of the time in 2004, and it wasn't because they were contentious; it was just because there was routine vandalism -- which happens sometimes even on stage ... (Laughter) Sometimes even reporters have reported to me that they vandalized Wikipedia and were amazed that it was fixed so quickly. And I said -- you know, I always say, please don't do that. That's not a good thing. So how do we do this? How do we manage the quality control? How does it work? So there's a few elements, mostly social policies and some elements of the software. So the biggest and the most important thing is our neutral point of view policy. This is something that I set down, from the very beginning, as a core principle of the community that's completely not debatable. It's a social concept of cooperation, so we don't talk a lot about truth and objectivity. The reason for this is if we say we're only going to write the "truth" about some topic, that doesn't do us a damn bit of good of figuring out what to write, because I don't agree with you about what's the truth. But we have this jargon term of neutrality, which has its own long history within the community, which basically says, any time there's a controversial issue, Wikipedia itself should not take a stand on the issue. We should merely report on what reputable parties have said about it. So this neutrality policy is really important for us because it empowers a community that is very diverse to come together and actually get some work done. So we have very diverse contributors in terms of political, religious, cultural backgrounds. By having this firm neutrality policy, which is non-negotiable from the beginning, we ensure that people can work together and that the entries don't become simply a war back and forth between the left and the right. If you engage in that type of behavior, you'll be asked to leave the community. So, real-time peer review. Every single change on the site goes to the "Recent changes" page. So as soon as he made his change, it went to the "Recent changes" page. That recent changes page was also fed into an IRC channel, which is an Internet chat channel that people are monitoring with various software tools. And people can get RSS feeds -- they can get email notifications of changes. And then users can set up their own personal watch list. So my page is on quite a few volunteers' watch lists, because it is sometimes vandalized. And therefore, what happens is someone will notice the change very quickly, and then they'll just simply revert the change. There's a "new pages feed," for example, so you can go to a certain page of Wikipedia and see every new page as it's created. This is really important because a lot of new pages are just garbage that has to be deleted, you know, "ASDFASDF." But also, that's some of the most interesting and fun things, some of the new articles. People will start an article on some interesting topic, other people will find that intriguing and jump in and help and make it much better. So we do have edits by anonymous users, which is one of the most controversial and intriguing things about Wikipedia. So, Chris was able to do his change -- he didn't have to log in or anything; he just went on the website and made a change. But it turns out that only about 18 percent of all the edits to the website are done by anonymous users. And that's a really important thing to understand: the vast majority of the edits that go on on the website are from a very close-knit community of maybe 600 to 1,000 people who are in constant communication. And we have over 40 IRC channels, 40 mailing lists. All these people know each other. They communicate. We have off-line meetings. These are the people who are doing the bulk of the site, and they are, in a sense, semi-professionals at what they're doing. The standards we set for ourselves are equal to or higher than professional standards of quality. We don't always meet those standards, but that's what we're striving for. And so that tight community is who really cares for the site, and these are some of the smartest people I've ever met. It's my job to say that, but it's actually true. The type of people who were drawn to writing an encyclopedia for fun tend to be pretty smart people. The tools and the software: there's lots of tools that allow us -- allow us, meaning the community -- to self-monitor and to monitor all the work. This is an example of a page history on "flat Earth," and you can see some changes that were made. What's nice about this page is you can immediately take a look at this and see, "OK, I understand now." When somebody goes and looks at -- they see that someone, an anonymous IP number, made an edit to my page. That sounds suspicious. Who is this person? Somebody looks at it -- they can immediately see highlighted in red all of the changes that took place -- to see, OK, well, these words have changed, things like this. So that's one tool that we can use to very quickly monitor the history of a page. Another thing that we do within the community is we leave everything very open-ended. Most of the social rules and the methods of work are left completely open-ended in the software. All of that stuff is just on Wiki pages. And so there's nothing in the software that enforces the rules. The example I've got up here is the Votes for Deletion page. So, I mentioned earlier, people type "ASDFASDF" -- it needs to be deleted. Cases like that, the administrators just delete it. There's no reason to have a big argument about it. But you can imagine there's a lot of other areas where the question is, is this notable enough to go in an encyclopedia? Is the information verifiable? Is it a hoax? Is it true? Is it what? So we needed a social method for figuring out the answer to this. And so the method that arose organically within the community is the Votes For Deletion page. And in the particular example we have here, it's a film, "Twisted Issues," and the first person says, "Now this is supposedly a film. It fails the Google test miserably." The Google test is you look in Google and see if it's there, because if something's not even in Google, it probably doesn't exist at all. It's not a perfect rule, but it's a nice starting point for quick research. So somebody says, "Delete it, please. Delete it -- it's not notable." And then somebody says, "Wait, I found it. I found it in a book, 'Film Threat Video Guide: the 20 Underground Films You Must See.'" So the next persons says, "Clean it up." Somebody says, "I've found it on IMDB. Keep, keep, keep." And what's interesting about this is that the software is -- these votes are just text typed into a page. This is not really a vote so much as it is a dialogue. Now it is true that at the end of the day, an administrator can go through here and take a look at this and say, "OK, 18 deletes, two keeps: we'll delete it." But in other cases, this could be 18 deletes and two keeps, and we would keep it, because if those last two keeps say, "Wait a minute. Nobody else saw this but I found it in a book, and I found a link to a page that describes it, and I'm going to clean it up tomorrow, so please don't delete it," then it would survive. And it also matters who the people are who are voting. Like I say, it's a tight-knit community. Down here at the bottom, "Keep, real movie," RickK. RickK is a very famous Wikipedian who does an enormous amount of work with vandalism, hoaxes and votes for deletion. His voice carries a lot of weight within the community because he knows what he's doing. So how is all this governed? People really want to know about administrators, things like that. So the Wikipedia governance model, the governance of the community, is a very confusing, but workable mix of consensus -- meaning we try not to vote on the content of articles, because the majority view is not necessarily neutral -- some amount of democracy -- all of the administrators -- these are the people who have the ability to delete pages. That doesn't mean that they have the right to delete pages. They still have to follow all the rules -- but they're elected by the community. Sometimes people -- random trolls on the Internet -- like to accuse me of handpicking the administrators to bias the content of the encyclopedia. I always laugh at this, because I have no idea how they're elected, actually. There's a certain amount of aristocracy. You got a hint of that when I mentioned, like, RickK's voice would carry a lot more weight than someone we don't know. I give this talk sometimes with Angela, who was just re-elected to the board from the community -- to the Board of the Foundation, with more than twice the votes of the person who didn't make it. And I always embarrass her because I say, "Well, Angela, for example, could get away with doing absolutely anything within Wikipedia, because she's so admired and so powerful." But the irony is, of course, that Angela can do this because she's the one person who you know would never, ever break any rules of Wikipedia. And I also like to say she's the only person who actually knows all the rules of Wikipedia, so ... And then there's monarchy, and that's my role on the community, so ... (Laughter) I was describing this in Berlin once, and the next day in the newspaper the headline said, "I am the Queen of England." (Laughter) And that's not exactly what I said, but -- (Laughter) the point is my role in the community -- Within the free software world, there's been a long-standing tradition of the "benevolent dictator" model. So if you look at most of the major free software projects, they have one single person in charge who everyone agrees is the benevolent dictator. Well, I don't like the term "benevolent dictator," and I don't think that it's my job or my role in the world of ideas to be the dictator of the future of all human knowledge compiled by the world. It just isn't appropriate. But there is a need still for a certain amount of monarchy, a certain amount of -- sometimes we have to make a decision and we don't want to get bogged down too heavily in formal decision-making processes. So as an example of how this can be important: we recently had a situation where a neo-Nazi website discovered Wikipedia, and they said, "Oh, well, this is horrible, this Jewish conspiracy of a website, and we're going to get certain articles deleted that we don't like. And we see they have a voting process, so we're going to send -- we have 40,000 members and we're going to send them over and they're all going to vote and get these pages deleted." Well, they managed to get 18 people to show up. That's neo-Nazi math for you. They always think they've got 40,000 members when they've got 18. But they managed to get 18 people to come and vote in a fairly absurd way to delete a perfectly valid article. Of course, the vote ended up being about 85 to 18, so there was no real danger to our democratic processes. On the other hand, people said, "But what are we going to do? I mean, this could happen. What if some group gets really seriously organized and comes in and wants to vote?" Then I said, "Well, fuck it, we'll just change the rules." That's my job in the community: to say we won't allow our openness and freedom to undermine the quality of the content. And so, as long as people trust me in my role, then that's a valid place for me. Of course, because of the free licensing, if I do a bad job, the volunteers are more than happy to take and leave -- I can't tell anyone what to do. So the final point here is that to understand how Wikipedia works, it's important to understand that our wiki model is the way we work, but we are not fanatical web anarchists. In fact, we're very flexible about the social methodology, because ultimately, the passion of the community is for the quality of the work, not necessarily for the process that we use to generate it. Thank you. (Applause) Ben Saunders: Yeah, hi, Ben Saunders. Jimmy, you mentioned impartiality being a key to Wikipedia's success. It strikes me that much of the textbooks that are used to educate our children are inherently biased. Have you found Wikipedia being used by teachers and how do you see Wikipedia changing education? Jimmy Wales: Yeah, so, a lot of teachers are beginning to use Wikipedia. There's a media storyline about Wikipedia, which I think is false. It builds on the storyline of bloggers versus newspapers. And the storyline is, there's this crazy thing, Wikipedia, but academics hate it and teachers hate it. And that turns out to not be true. The last time I got an email from a journalist saying, "Why do academics hate Wikipedia?" I sent it from my Harvard email address because I was recently appointed a fellow there. And I said, "Well, they don't all hate it." (Laughter) But I think there's going to be huge impacts. And we actually have a project that I'm personally really excited about, which is the Wikibooks project, which is an effort to create textbooks in all the languages. And that's a much bigger project. It's going to take 20 years or so to come to fruition. But part of that is to fulfill our mission of giving an encyclopedia to every single person on the planet. We don't mean we're going to Spam them with AOL-style CDs. We mean we're going to give them a tool that they can use. And for a lot of people in the world, if I give you an encyclopedia that's written at a university level, it doesn't do you any good without a whole host of literacy materials to build you up to the point where you can actually use it. The Wikibooks project is an effort to do that. And I think that we're going to see -- it may not even come from us; there's all kinds of innovation going on. But freely licensed textbooks are the next big thing in education.
I'm supposed to scare you, because it's about fear, right? And you should be really afraid, but not for the reasons why you think you should be. You should be really afraid that -- if we stick up the first slide on this thing -- there we go -- that you're missing out. Because if you spend this week thinking about Iraq and thinking about Bush and thinking about the stock market, you're going to miss one of the greatest adventures that we've ever been on. And this is what this adventure's really about. This is crystallized DNA. Every life form on this planet -- every insect, every bacteria, every plant, every animal, every human, every politician -- (Laughter) is coded in that stuff. And if you want to take a single crystal of DNA, it looks like that. And we're just beginning to understand this stuff. And this is the single most exciting adventure that we have ever been on. It's the single greatest mapping project we've ever been on. If you think that the mapping of America's made a difference, or landing on the moon, or this other stuff, it's the map of ourselves and the map of every plant and every insect and every bacteria that really makes a difference. And it's beginning to tell us a lot about evolution. (Laughter) It turns out that what this stuff is -- and Richard Dawkins has written about this -- is, this is really a river out of Eden. So, the 3.2 billion base pairs inside each of your cells is really a history of where you've been for the past billion years. And we could start dating things, and we could start changing medicine and archeology. It turns out that if you take the human species about 700 years ago, white Europeans diverged from black Africans in a very significant way. White Europeans were subject to the plague. And when they were subject to the plague, most people didn't survive, but those who survived had a mutation on the CCR5 receptor. And that mutation was passed on to their kids because they're the ones that survived, so there was a great deal of population pressure. In Africa, because you didn't have these cities, you didn't have that CCR5 population pressure mutation. We can date it to 700 years ago. That is one of the reasons why AIDS is raging across Africa as fast as it is, and not as fast across Europe. And we're beginning to find these little things for malaria, for sickle cell, for cancers. And in the measure that we map ourselves, this is the single greatest adventure that we'll ever be on. And this Friday, I want you to pull out a really good bottle of wine, and I want you to toast these two people. Because this Friday, 50 years ago, Watson and Crick found the structure of DNA, and that is almost as important a date as the 12th of February when we first mapped ourselves, but anyway, we'll get to that. I thought we'd talk about the new zoo. So, all you guys have heard about DNA, all the stuff that DNA does, but some of the stuff we're discovering is kind of nifty because this turns out to be the single most abundant species on the planet. If you think you're successful or cockroaches are successful, it turns out that there's ten trillion trillion Pleurococcus sitting out there. And we didn't know that Pleurococcus was out there, which is part of the reason why this whole species-mapping project is so important. Because we're just beginning to learn where we came from and what we are. And we're finding amoebas like this. This is the amoeba dubia. And the amoeba dubia doesn't look like much, except that each of you has about 3.2 billion letters, which is what makes you you, as far as gene code inside each of your cells, and this little amoeba which, you know, sits in water in hundreds and millions and billions, turns out to have 620 billion base pairs of gene code inside. So, this little thingamajig has a genome that's 200 times the size of yours. And if you're thinking of efficient information storage mechanisms, it may not turn out to be chips. It may turn out to be something that looks a little like that amoeba. And, again, we're learning from life and how life works. This funky little thing: people didn't used to think that it was worth taking samples out of nuclear reactors because it was dangerous and, of course, nothing lived there. And then finally somebody picked up a microscope and looked at the water that was sitting next to the cores. And sitting next to that water in the cores was this little Deinococcus radiodurans, doing a backstroke, having its chromosomes blown apart every day, six, seven times, restitching them, living in about 200 times the radiation that would kill you. And by now you should be getting a hint as to how diverse and how important and how interesting this journey into life is, and how many different life forms there are, and how there can be different life forms living in very different places, maybe even outside of this planet. Because if you can live in radiation that looks like this, that brings up a whole series of interesting questions. This little thingamajig: we didn't know this thingamajig existed. We should have known that this existed because this is the only bacteria that you can see to the naked eye. So, this thing is 0.75 millimeters. It lives in a deep trench off the coast of Namibia. And what you're looking at with this namibiensis is the biggest bacteria we've ever seen. So, it's about the size of a little period on a sentence. Again, we didn't know this thing was there three years ago. We're just beginning this journey of life in the new zoo. This is a really odd one. This is Ferroplasma. The reason why Ferroplasma is interesting is because it eats iron, lives inside the equivalent of battery acid, and excretes sulfuric acid. So, when you think of odd life forms, when you think of what it takes to live, it turns out this is a very efficient life form, and they call it an archaea. Archaea means "the ancient ones." And the reason why they're ancient is because this thing came up when this planet was covered by things like sulfuric acid in batteries, and it was eating iron when the earth was part of a melted core. So, it's not just dogs and cats and whales and dolphins that you should be aware of and interested in on this little journey. Your fear should be that you are not, that you're paying attention to stuff which is temporal. I mean, George Bush -- he's going to be gone, alright? Life isn't. Whether the humans survive or don't survive, these things are going to be living on this planet or other planets. And it's just beginning to understand this code of DNA that's really the most exciting intellectual adventure that we've ever been on. And you can do strange things with this stuff. This is a baby gar. Conservation group gets together, tries to figure out how to breed an animal that's almost extinct. They can't do it naturally, so what they do with this thing is they take a spoon, take some cells out of an adult gar's mouth, code, take the cells from that and insert it into a fertilized cow's egg, reprogram cow's egg -- different gene code. When you do that, the cow gives birth to a gar. We are now experimenting with bongos, pandas, elims, Sumatran tigers, and the Australians -- bless their hearts -- are playing with these things. Now, the last of these things died in September 1936. These are Tasmanian tigers. The last known one died at the Hobart Zoo. But it turns out that as we learn more about gene code and how to reprogram species, we may be able to close the gene gaps in deteriorate DNA. And when we learn how to close the gene gaps, then we can put a full string of DNA together. And if we do that, and insert this into a fertilized wolf's egg, we may give birth to an animal that hasn't walked the earth since 1936. And then you can start going back further, and you can start thinking about dodos, and you can think about other species. And in other places, like Maryland, they're trying to figure out what the primordial ancestor is. Because each of us contains our entire gene code of where we've been for the past billion years, because we've evolved from that stuff, you can take that tree of life and collapse it back, and in the measure that you learn to reprogram, maybe we'll give birth to something that is very close to the first primordial ooze. And it's all coming out of things that look like this. These are companies that didn't exist five years ago. Huge gene sequencing facilities the size of football fields. Some are public. Some are private. It takes about 5 billion dollars to sequence a human being the first time. Takes about 3 million dollars the second time. We will have a 1,000-dollar genome within the next five to eight years. That means each of you will contain on a CD your entire gene code. And it will be really boring. It will read like this. (Laughter) The really neat thing about this stuff is that's life. And Laurie's going to talk about this one a little bit. Because if you happen to find this one inside your body, you're in big trouble, because that's the source code for Ebola. That's one of the deadliest diseases known to humans. But plants work the same way and insects work the same way, and this apple works the same way. This apple is the same thing as this floppy disk. Because this thing codes ones and zeros, and this thing codes A, T, C, Gs, and it sits up there, absorbing energy on a tree, and one fine day it has enough energy to say, execute, and it goes [thump]. Right? (Laughter) And when it does that, pushes a .EXE, what it does is, it executes the first line of code, which reads just like that, AATCAGGGACCC, and that means: make a root. Next line of code: make a stem. Next line of code, TACGGGG: make a flower that's white, that blooms in the spring, that smells like this. In the measure that you have the code and the measure that you read it -- and, by the way, the first plant was read two years ago; the first human was read two years ago; the first insect was read two years ago. The first thing that we ever read was in 1995: a little bacteria called Haemophilus influenzae. In the measure that you have the source code, as all of you know, you can change the source code, and you can reprogram life forms so that this little thingy becomes a vaccine, or this little thingy starts producing biomaterials, which is why DuPont is now growing a form of polyester that feels like silk in corn. This changes all rules. This is life, but we're reprogramming it. This is what you look like. This is one of your chromosomes. And what you can do now is, you can outlay exactly what your chromosome is, and what the gene code on that chromosome is right here, and what those genes code for, and what animals they code against, and then you can tie it to the literature. And in the measure that you can do that, you can go home today, and get on the Internet, and access the world's biggest public library, which is a library of life. And you can do some pretty strange things because in the same way as you can reprogram this apple, if you go to Cliff Tabin's lab at the Harvard Medical School, he's reprogramming chicken embryos to grow more wings. Why would Cliff be doing that? He doesn't have a restaurant. (Laughter) The reason why he's reprogramming that animal to have more wings is because when you used to play with lizards as a little child, and you picked up the lizard, sometimes the tail fell off, but it regrew. Not so in human beings: you cut off an arm, you cut off a leg -- it doesn't regrow. But because each of your cells contains your entire gene code, each cell can be reprogrammed, if we don't stop stem cell research and if we don't stop genomic research, to express different body functions. And in the measure that we learn how chickens grow wings, and what the program is for those cells to differentiate, one of the things we're going to be able to do is to stop undifferentiated cells, which you know as cancer, and one of the things we're going to learn how to do is how to reprogram cells like stem cells in such a way that they express bone, stomach, skin, pancreas. And you are likely to be wandering around -- and your children -- on regrown body parts in a reasonable period of time, in some places in the world where they don't stop the research. How's this stuff work? If each of you differs from the person next to you by one in a thousand, but only three percent codes, which means it's only one in a thousand times three percent, very small differences in expression and punctuation can make a significant difference. Take a simple declarative sentence. (Laughter) Right? That's perfectly clear. So, men read that sentence, and they look at that sentence, and they read this. Okay? Now, women look at that sentence and they say, uh-uh, wrong. This is the way it should be seen. (Laughter) That's what your genes are doing. That's why you differ from this person over here by one in a thousand. Right? But, you know, he's reasonably good looking, but... I won't go there. You can do this stuff even without changing the punctuation. You can look at this, right? And they look at the world a little differently. They look at the same world and they say... (Laughter) That's how the same gene code -- that's why you have 30,000 genes, mice have 30,000 genes, husbands have 30,000 genes. Mice and men are the same. Wives know that, but anyway. You can make very small changes in gene code and get really different outcomes, even with the same string of letters. That's what your genes are doing every day. That's why sometimes a person's genes don't have to change a lot to get cancer. These little chippies, these things are the size of a credit card. They will test any one of you for 60,000 genetic conditions. That brings up questions of privacy and insurability and all kinds of stuff, but it also allows us to start going after diseases, because if you run a person who has leukemia through something like this, it turns out that three diseases with completely similar clinical syndromes are completely different diseases. Because in ALL leukemia, that set of genes over there over-expresses. In MLL, it's the middle set of genes, and in AML, it's the bottom set of genes. And if one of those particular things is expressing in your body, then you take Gleevec and you're cured. If it is not expressing in your body, if you don't have one of those types -- a particular one of those types -- don't take Gleevec. It won't do anything for you. Same thing with Receptin if you've got breast cancer. Don't have an HER-2 receptor? Don't take Receptin. Changes the nature of medicine. Changes the predictions of medicine. Changes the way medicine works. The greatest repository of knowledge when most of us went to college was this thing, and it turns out that this is not so important any more. The U.S. Library of Congress, in terms of its printed volume of data, contains less data than is coming out of a good genomics company every month on a compound basis. Let me say that again: A single genomics company generates more data in a month, on a compound basis, than is in the printed collections of the Library of Congress. This is what's been powering the U.S. economy. It's Moore's Law. So, all of you know that the price of computers halves every 18 months and the power doubles, right? Except that when you lay that side by side with the speed with which gene data's being deposited in GenBank, Moore's Law is right here: it's the blue line. This is on a log scale, and that's what superexponential growth means. This is going to push computers to have to grow faster than they've been growing, because so far, there haven't been applications that have been required that need to go faster than Moore's Law. This stuff does. And here's an interesting map. This is a map which was finished at the Harvard Business School. One of the really interesting questions is, if all this data's free, who's using it? This is the greatest public library in the world. Well, it turns out that there's about 27 trillion bits moving inside from the United States to the United States; about 4.6 trillion is going over to those European countries; about 5.5's going to Japan; there's almost no communication between Japan, and nobody else is literate in this stuff. It's free. No one's reading it. They're focusing on the war; they're focusing on Bush; they're not interested in life. So, this is what a new map of the world looks like. That is the genomically literate world. And that is a problem. In fact, it's not a genomically literate world. You can break this out by states. And you can watch states rise and fall depending on their ability to speak a language of life, and you can watch New York fall off a cliff, and you can watch New Jersey fall off a cliff, and you can watch the rise of the new empires of intelligence. And you can break it out by counties, because it's specific counties. And if you want to get more specific, it's actually specific zip codes. (Laughter) So, you want to know where life is happening? Well, in Southern California it's happening in 92121. And that's it. And that's the triangle between Salk, Scripps, UCSD, and it's called Torrey Pines Road. That means you don't need to be a big nation to be successful; it means you don't need a lot of people to be successful; and it means you can move most of the wealth of a country in about three or four carefully picked 747s. Same thing in Massachusetts. Looks more spread out but -- oh, by the way, the ones that are the same color are contiguous. What's the net effect of this? In an agricultural society, the difference between the richest and the poorest, the most productive and the least productive, was five to one. Why? Because in agriculture, if you had 10 kids and you grow up a little bit earlier and you work a little bit harder, you could produce about five times more wealth, on average, than your neighbor. In a knowledge society, that number is now 427 to 1. It really matters if you're literate, not just in reading and writing in English and French and German, but in Microsoft and Linux and Apple. And very soon it's going to matter if you're literate in life code. So, if there is something you should fear, it's that you're not keeping your eye on the ball. Because it really matters who speaks life. That's why nations rise and fall. And it turns out that if you went back to the 1870s, the most productive nation on earth was Australia, per person. And New Zealand was way up there. And then the U.S. came in about 1950, and then Switzerland about 1973, and then the U.S. got back on top -- beat up their chocolates and cuckoo clocks. And today, of course, you all know that the most productive nation on earth is Luxembourg, producing about one third more wealth per person per year than America. Tiny landlocked state. No oil. No diamonds. No natural resources. Just smart people moving bits. Different rules. Here's differential productivity rates. Here's how many people it takes to produce a single U.S. patent. So, about 3,000 Americans, 6,000 Koreans, 14,000 Brits, 790,000 Argentines. You want to know why Argentina's crashing? It's got nothing to do with inflation. It's got nothing to do with privatization. You can take a Harvard-educated Ivy League economist, stick him in charge of Argentina. He still crashes the country because he doesn't understand how the rules have changed. Oh, yeah, and it takes about 5.6 million Indians. Well, watch what happens to India. India and China used to be 40 percent of the global economy just at the Industrial Revolution, and they are now about 4.8 percent. Two billion people. One third of the global population producing 5 percent of the wealth because they didn't get this change, because they kept treating their people like serfs instead of like shareholders of a common project. They didn't keep the people who were educated. They didn't foment the businesses. They didn't do the IPOs. Silicon Valley did. And that's why they say that Silicon Valley has been powered by ICs. Not integrated circuits: Indians and Chinese. (Laughter) Here's what's happening in the world. It turns out that if you'd gone to the U.N. in 1950, when it was founded, there were 50 countries in this world. It turns out there's now about 192. Country after country is splitting, seceding, succeeding, failing -- and it's all getting very fragmented. And this has not stopped. In the 1990s, these are sovereign states that did not exist before 1990. And this doesn't include fusions or name changes or changes in flags. We're generating about 3.12 states per year. People are taking control of their own states, sometimes for the better and sometimes for the worse. And the really interesting thing is, you and your kids are empowered to build great empires, and you don't need a lot to do it. (Music) And, given that the music is over, I was going to talk about how you can use this to generate a lot of wealth, and how code works. Moderator: Two minutes. (Laughter) Juan Enriquez: No, I'm going to stop there and we'll do it next year because I don't want to take any of Laurie's time. But thank you very much.
What I'd like to start off with is an observation, which is that if I've learned anything over the last year, it's that the supreme irony of publishing a book about slowness is that you have to go around promoting it really fast. I seem to spend most of my time these days zipping from city to city, studio to studio, interview to interview, serving up the book in really tiny bite-size chunks. Because everyone these days wants to know how to slow down, but they want to know how to slow down really quickly. So ... so I did a spot on CNN the other day where I actually spent more time in makeup than I did talking on air. And I think that -- that's not really surprising though, is it? Because that's kind of the world that we live in now, a world stuck in fast-forward. A world obsessed with speed, with doing everything faster, with cramming more and more into less and less time. Every moment of the day feels like a race against the clock. To borrow a phrase from Carrie Fisher, which is in my bio there; I'll just toss it out again -- "These days even instant gratification takes too long." (Laughter) And if you think about how we to try to make things better, what do we do? No, we speed them up, don't we? So we used to dial; now we speed dial. We used to read; now we speed read. We used to walk; now we speed walk. And of course, we used to date and now we speed date. And even things that are by their very nature slow -- we try and speed them up too. So I was in New York recently, and I walked past a gym that had an advertisement in the window for a new course, a new evening course. And it was for, you guessed it, speed yoga. So this -- the perfect solution for time-starved professionals who want to, you know, salute the sun, but only want to give over about 20 minutes to it. I mean, these are sort of the extreme examples, and they're amusing and good to laugh at. But there's a very serious point, and I think that in the headlong dash of daily life, we often lose sight of the damage that this roadrunner form of living does to us. We're so marinated in the culture of speed that we almost fail to notice the toll it takes on every aspect of our lives -- on our health, our diet, our work, our relationships, the environment and our community. And sometimes it takes a wake-up call, doesn't it, to alert us to the fact that we're hurrying through our lives, instead of actually living them; that we're living the fast life, instead of the good life. And I think for many people, that wake-up call takes the form of an illness. You know, a burnout, or eventually the body says, "I can't take it anymore," and throws in the towel. Or maybe a relationship goes up in smoke because we haven't had the time, or the patience, or the tranquility, to be with the other person, to listen to them. And my wake-up call came when I started reading bedtime stories to my son, and I found that at the end of day, I would go into his room and I just couldn't slow down -- you know, I'd be speed reading "The Cat In The Hat." I'd be -- you know, I'd be skipping lines here, paragraphs there, sometimes a whole page, and of course, my little boy knew the book inside out, so we would quarrel. And what should have been the most relaxing, the most intimate, the most tender moment of the day, when a dad sits down to read to his son, became instead this kind of gladiatorial battle of wills, a clash between my speed and his slowness. And this went on for some time, until I caught myself scanning a newspaper article with timesaving tips for fast people. And one of them made reference to a series of books called "The One-Minute Bedtime Story." And I wince saying those words now, but my first reaction at the time was very different. My first reflex was to say, "Hallelujah -- what a great idea! This is exactly what I'm looking for to speed up bedtime even more." But thankfully, a light bulb went on over my head, and my next reaction was very different, and I took a step back, and I thought, "Whoa -- you know, has it really come to this? Am I really in such a hurry that I'm prepared to fob off my son with a sound byte at the end of the day?" And I put away the newspaper -- and I was getting on a plane -- and I sat there, and I did something I hadn't done for a long time -- which is I did nothing. I just thought, and I thought long and hard. And by the time I got off that plane, I'd decided I wanted to do something about it. I wanted to investigate this whole roadrunner culture, and what it was doing to me and to everyone else. And I had two questions in my head. The first was, how did we get so fast? And the second is, is it possible, or even desirable, to slow down? Now, if you think about how our world got so accelerated, the usual suspects rear their heads. You think of, you know, urbanization, consumerism, the workplace, technology. But I think if you cut through those forces, you get to what might be the deeper driver, the nub of the question, which is how we think about time itself. In other cultures, time is cyclical. It's seen as moving in great, unhurried circles. It's always renewing and refreshing itself. Whereas in the West, time is linear. It's a finite resource; it's always draining away. You either use it, or lose it. "Time is money," as Benjamin Franklin said. And I think what that does to us psychologically is it creates an equation. Time is scarce, so what do we do? Well -- well, we speed up, don't we? We try and do more and more with less and less time. We turn every moment of every day into a race to the finish line -- a finish line, incidentally, that we never reach, but a finish line nonetheless. And I guess that the question is, is it possible to break free from that mindset? And thankfully, the answer is yes, because what I discovered, when I began looking around, that there is a global backlash against this culture that tells us that faster is always better, and that busier is best. Right across the world, people are doing the unthinkable: they're slowing down, and finding that, although conventional wisdom tells you that if you slow down, you're road kill, the opposite turns out to be true: that by slowing down at the right moments, people find that they do everything better. They eat better; they make love better; they exercise better; they work better; they live better. And, in this kind of cauldron of moments and places and acts of deceleration, lie what a lot of people now refer to as the "International Slow Movement." Now if you'll permit me a small act of hypocrisy, I'll just give you a very quick overview of what's going on inside the Slow Movement. If you think of food, many of you will have heard of the Slow Food movement. Started in Italy, but has spread across the world, and now has 100,000 members in 50 countries. And it's driven by a very simple and sensible message, which is that we get more pleasure and more health from our food when we cultivate, cook and consume it at a reasonable pace. I think also the explosion of the organic farming movement, and the renaissance of farmers' markets, are other illustrations of the fact that people are desperate to get away from eating and cooking and cultivating their food on an industrial timetable. They want to get back to slower rhythms. And out of the Slow Food movement has grown something called the Slow Cities movement, which has started in Italy, but has spread right across Europe and beyond. And in this, towns begin to rethink how they organize the urban landscape, so that people are encouraged to slow down and smell the roses and connect with one another. So they might curb traffic, or put in a park bench, or some green space. And in some ways, these changes add up to more than the sum of their parts, because I think when a Slow City becomes officially a Slow City, it's kind of like a philosophical declaration. It's saying to the rest of world, and to the people in that town, that we believe that in the 21st century, slowness has a role to play. In medicine, I think a lot of people are deeply disillusioned with the kind of quick-fix mentality you find in conventional medicine. And millions of them around the world are turning to complementary and alternative forms of medicine, which tend to tap into sort of slower, gentler, more holistic forms of healing. Now, obviously the jury is out on many of these complementary therapies, and I personally doubt that the coffee enema will ever, you know, gain mainstream approval. But other treatments such as acupuncture and massage, and even just relaxation, clearly have some kind of benefit. And blue-chip medical colleges everywhere are starting to study these things to find out how they work, and what we might learn from them. Sex. There's an awful lot of fast sex around, isn't there? I was coming to -- well -- no pun intended there. I was making my way, let's say, slowly to Oxford, and I went through a news agent, and I saw a magazine, a men's magazine, and it said on the front, "How to bring your partner to orgasm in 30 seconds." So, you know, even sex is on a stopwatch these days. Now, you know, I like a quickie as much as the next person, but I think that there's an awful lot to be gained from slow sex -- from slowing down in the bedroom. You know, you tap into that -- those deeper, sort of, psychological, emotional, spiritual currents, and you get a better orgasm with the buildup. You can get more bang for your buck, let's say. I mean, the Pointer Sisters said it most eloquently, didn't they, when they sang the praises of "a lover with a slow hand." Now, we all laughed at Sting a few years ago when he went Tantric, but you fast-forward a few years, and now you find couples of all ages flocking to workshops, or maybe just on their own in their own bedrooms, finding ways to put on the brakes and have better sex. And of course, in Italy where -- I mean, Italians always seem to know where to find their pleasure -- they've launched an official Slow Sex movement. The workplace. Right across much of the world -- North America being a notable exception -- working hours have been coming down. And Europe is an example of that, and people finding that their quality of life improves as they're working less, and also that their hourly productivity goes up. Now, clearly there are problems with the 35-hour workweek in France -- too much, too soon, too rigid. But other countries in Europe, notably the Nordic countries, are showing that it's possible to have a kick-ass economy without being a workaholic. And Norway, Sweden, Denmark and Finland now rank among the top six most competitive nations on Earth, and they work the kind of hours that would make the average American weep with envy. And if you go beyond sort of the country level, down at the micro-company level, more and more companies now are realizing that they need to allow their staff either to work fewer hours or just to unplug -- to take a lunch break, or to go sit in a quiet room, to switch off their Blackberrys and laptops -- you at the back -- mobile phones, during the work day or on the weekend, so that they have time to recharge and for the brain to slide into that kind of creative mode of thought. It's not just, though, these days, adults who overwork, though, is it? It's children, too. I'm 37, and my childhood ended in the mid-'80s, and I look at kids now, and I'm just amazed by the way they race around with more homework, more tutoring, more extracurriculars than we would ever have conceived of a generation ago. And some of the most heartrending emails that I get on my website are actually from adolescents hovering on the edge of burnout, pleading with me to write to their parents, to help them slow down, to help them get off this full-throttle treadmill. But thankfully, there is a backlash there in parenting as well, and you're finding that, you know, towns in the United States are now banding together and banning extracurriculars on a particular day of the month, so that people can, you know, decompress and have some family time, and slow down. Homework is another thing. There are homework bans springing up all over the developed world in schools which had been piling on the homework for years, and now they're discovering that less can be more. So there was a case up in Scotland recently where a fee-paying, high-achieving private school banned homework for everyone under the age of 13, and the high-achieving parents freaked out and said, "What are you -- you know, our kids will fall" -- the headmaster said, "No, no, your children need to slow down at the end of the day." And just this last month, the exam results came in, and in math, science, marks went up 20 percent on average last year. And I think what's very revealing is that the elite universities, who are often cited as the reason that people drive their kids and hothouse them so much, are starting to notice the caliber of students coming to them is falling. These kids have wonderful marks; they have CVs jammed with extracurriculars, to the point that would make your eyes water. But they lack spark; they lack the ability to think creatively and think outside -- they don't know how to dream. And so what these Ivy League schools, and Oxford and Cambridge and so on, are starting to send a message to parents and students that they need to put on the brakes a little bit. And in Harvard, for instance, they send out a letter to undergraduates -- freshmen -- telling them that they'll get more out of life, and more out of Harvard, if they put on the brakes, if they do less, but give time to things, the time that things need, to enjoy them, to savor them. And even if they sometimes do nothing at all. And that letter is called -- very revealing, I think -- "Slow Down!" -- with an exclamation mark on the end. So wherever you look, the message, it seems to me, is the same: that less is very often more, that slower is very often better. But that said, of course, it's not that easy to slow down, is it? I mean, you heard that I got a speeding ticket while I was researching my book on the benefits of slowness, and that's true, but that's not all of it. I was actually en route to a dinner held by Slow Food at the time. And if that's not shaming enough, I got that ticket in Italy. And if any of you have ever driven on an Italian highway, you'll have a pretty good idea of how fast I was going. (Laughter) But why is it so hard to slow down? I think there are various reasons. One is that speed is fun, you know, speed is sexy. It's all that adrenaline rush. It's hard to give it up. I think there's a kind of metaphysical dimension -- that speed becomes a way of walling ourselves off from the bigger, deeper questions. We fill our head with distraction, with busyness, so that we don't have to ask, am I well? Am I happy? Are my children growing up right? Are politicians making good decisions on my behalf? Another reason -- although I think, perhaps, the most powerful reason -- why we find it hard to slow down is the cultural taboo that we've erected against slowing down. "Slow" is a dirty word in our culture. It's a byword for "lazy," "slacker," for being somebody who gives up. You know, "he's a bit slow." It's actually synonymous with being stupid. I guess what the Slow Movement -- the purpose of the Slow Movement, or its main goal, really, is to tackle that taboo, and to say that yes, sometimes slow is not the answer, that there is such a thing as "bad slow." You know, I got stuck on the M25, which is a ring road around London, recently, and spent three-and-a-half hours there. And I can tell you, that's really bad slow. But the new idea, the sort of revolutionary idea, of the Slow Movement, is that there is such a thing as "good slow," too. And good slow is, you know, taking the time to eat a meal with your family, with the TV switched off. Or taking the time to look at a problem from all angles in the office to make the best decision at work. Or even simply just taking the time to slow down and savor your life. Now, one of the things that I found most uplifting about all of this stuff that's happened around the book since it came out, is the reaction to it. And I knew that when my book on slowness came out, it would be welcomed by the New Age brigade, but it's also been taken up, with great gusto, by the corporate world -- you know, business press, but also big companies and leadership organizations. Because people at the top of the chain, people like you, I think, are starting to realize that there's too much speed in the system, there's too much busyness, and it's time to find, or get back to that lost art of shifting gears. Another encouraging sign, I think, is that it's not just in the developed world that this idea's been taken up. In the developing world, in countries that are on the verge of making that leap into first world status -- China, Brazil, Thailand, Poland, and so on -- these countries have embraced the idea of the Slow Movement, many people in them, and there's a debate going on in their media, on the streets. Because I think they're looking at the West, and they're saying, "Well, we like that aspect of what you've got, but we're not so sure about that." So all of that said, is it, I guess, is it possible? That's really the main question before us today. Is it possible to slow down? And I'm happy to be able to say to you that the answer is a resounding yes. And I present myself as Exhibit A, a kind of reformed and rehabilitated speed-aholic. I still love speed. You know, I live in London, and I work as a journalist, and I enjoy the buzz and the busyness, and the adrenaline rush that comes from both of those things. I play squash and ice hockey, two very fast sports, and I wouldn't give them up for the world. But I've also, over the last year or so, got in touch with my inner tortoise. (Laughter) And what that means is that I no longer overload myself gratuitously. My default mode is no longer to be a rush-aholic. I no longer hear time's winged chariot drawing near, or at least not as much as I did before. I can actually hear it now, because I see my time is ticking off. And the upshot of all of that is that I actually feel a lot happier, healthier, more productive than I ever have. I feel like I'm living my life rather than actually just racing through it. And perhaps, the most important measure of the success of this is that I feel that my relationships are a lot deeper, richer, stronger. And for me, I guess, the litmus test for whether this would work, and what it would mean, was always going to be bedtime stories, because that's sort of where the journey began. And there too the news is rosy. You know, at the end of the day, I go into my son's room. I don't wear a watch. I switch off my computer, so I can't hear the email pinging into the basket, and I just slow down to his pace and we read. And because children have their own tempo and internal clock, they don't do quality time, where you schedule 10 minutes for them to open up to you. They need you to move at their rhythm. I find that 10 minutes into a story, you know, my son will suddenly say, "You know, something happened in the playground today that really bothered me." And we'll go off and have a conversation on that. And I now find that bedtime stories used to be a box on my to-do list, something that I dreaded, because it was so slow and I had to get through it quickly. It's become my reward at the end of the day, something I really cherish. And I have a kind of Hollywood ending to my talk this afternoon, which goes a little bit like this: a few months ago, I was getting ready to go on another book tour, and I had my bags packed. I was downstairs by the front door, and I was waiting for a taxi, and my son came down the stairs and he'd made a card for me. And he was carrying it. He'd gone and stapled two cards, very like these, together, and put a sticker of his favorite character, Tintin, on the front. And he said to me, or he handed this to me, and I read it, and it said, "To Daddy, love Benjamin." And I thought, "Aw, that's really sweet. Is that a good luck on the book tour card?" And he said, "No, no, no, Daddy -- this is a card for being the best story reader in the world." And I thought, "Yeah, you know, this slowing down thing really does work." Thank you very much.
When you have 21 minutes to speak, two million years seems like a really long time. But evolutionarily, two million years is nothing. And yet in two million years the human brain has nearly tripled in mass, going from the one-and-a-quarter pound brain of our ancestor here, Habilis, to the almost three-pound meatloaf that everybody here has between their ears. What is it about a big brain that nature was so eager for every one of us to have one? Well, it turns out when brains triple in size, they don't just get three times bigger; they gain new structures. And one of the main reasons our brain got so big is because it got a new part, called the "frontal lobe." And particularly, a part called the "pre-frontal cortex." Now what does a pre-frontal cortex do for you that should justify the entire architectural overhaul of the human skull in the blink of evolutionary time? Well, it turns out the pre-frontal cortex does lots of things, but one of the most important things it does is it is an experience simulator. Flight pilots practice in flight simulators so that they don't make real mistakes in planes. Human beings have this marvelous adaptation that they can actually have experiences in their heads before they try them out in real life. This is a trick that none of our ancestors could do, and that no other animal can do quite like we can. It's a marvelous adaptation. It's up there with opposable thumbs and standing upright and language as one of the things that got our species out of the trees and into the shopping mall. Now -- (Laughter) -- all of you have done this. I mean, you know, Ben and Jerry's doesn't have liver-and-onion ice cream, and it's not because they whipped some up, tried it and went, "Yuck." It's because, without leaving your armchair, you can simulate that flavor and say "yuck" before you make it. Let's see how your experience simulators are working. Let's just run a quick diagnostic before I proceed with the rest of the talk. Here's two different futures that I invite you to contemplate, and you can try to simulate them and tell me which one you think you might prefer. One of them is winning the lottery. This is about 314 million dollars. And the other is becoming paraplegic. So, just give it a moment of thought. You probably don't feel like you need a moment of thought. Interestingly, there are data on these two groups of people, data on how happy they are. And this is exactly what you expected, isn't it? But these aren't the data. I made these up! These are the data. You failed the pop quiz, and you're hardly five minutes into the lecture. Because the fact is that a year after losing the use of their legs, and a year after winning the lotto, lottery winners and paraplegics are equally happy with their lives. Now, don't feel too bad about failing the first pop quiz, because everybody fails all of the pop quizzes all of the time. The research that my laboratory has been doing, that economists and psychologists around the country have been doing, have revealed something really quite startling to us, something we call the "impact bias," which is the tendency for the simulator to work badly. For the simulator to make you believe that different outcomes are more different than in fact they really are. From field studies to laboratory studies, we see that winning or losing an election, gaining or losing a romantic partner, getting or not getting a promotion, passing or not passing a college test, on and on, have far less impact, less intensity and much less duration than people expect them to have. In fact, a recent study -- this almost floors me -- a recent study showing how major life traumas affect people suggests that if it happened over three months ago, with only a few exceptions, it has no impact whatsoever on your happiness. Why? Because happiness can be synthesized. Sir Thomas Brown wrote in 1642, "I am the happiest man alive. I have that in me that can convert poverty to riches, adversity to prosperity. I am more invulnerable than Achilles; fortune hath not one place to hit me." What kind of remarkable machinery does this guy have in his head? Well, it turns out it's precisely the same remarkable machinery that all off us have. Human beings have something that we might think of as a "psychological immune system." A system of cognitive processes, largely non-conscious cognitive processes, that help them change their views of the world, so that they can feel better about the worlds in which they find themselves. Like Sir Thomas, you have this machine. Unlike Sir Thomas, you seem not to know it. (Laughter) We synthesize happiness, but we think happiness is a thing to be found. Now, you don't need me to give you too many examples of people synthesizing happiness, I suspect. Though I'm going to show you some experimental evidence, you don't have to look very far for evidence. As a challenge to myself, since I say this once in a while in lectures, I took a copy of the New York Times and tried to find some instances of people synthesizing happiness. And here are three guys synthesizing happiness. "I am so much better off physically, financially, emotionally, mentally and almost every other way." "I don't have one minute's regret. It was a glorious experience." "I believe it turned out for the best." Who are these characters who are so damn happy? Well, the first one is Jim Wright. Some of you are old enough to remember: he was the chairman of the House of Representatives and he resigned in disgrace when this young Republican named Newt Gingrich found out about a shady book deal he had done. He lost everything. The most powerful Democrat in the country, he lost everything. He lost his money; he lost his power. What does he have to say all these years later about it? "I am so much better off physically, financially, mentally and in almost every other way." What other way would there be to be better off? Vegetably? Minerally? Animally? He's pretty much covered them there. Moreese Bickham is somebody you've never heard of. Moreese Bickham uttered these words upon being released. He was 78 years old. He spent 37 years in a Louisiana State Penitentiary for a crime he didn't commit. [He was ultimately released for good behavior halfway through his sentence.] And what did he have to say about his experience? "I don't have one minute's regret. It was a glorious experience." Glorious! This guy is not saying, "Well, you know, there were some nice guys. They had a gym." It's "glorious," a word we usually reserve for something like a religious experience. Harry S. Langerman uttered these words, and he's somebody you might have known but didn't, because in 1949 he read a little article in the paper about a hamburger stand owned by these two brothers named McDonalds. And he thought, "That's a really neat idea!" So he went to find them. They said, "We can give you a franchise on this for 3,000 bucks." Harry went back to New York, asked his brother who's an investment banker to loan him the 3,000 dollars, and his brother's immortal words were, "You idiot, nobody eats hamburgers." He wouldn't lend him the money, and of course six months later Ray Croc had exactly the same idea. It turns out people do eat hamburgers, and Ray Croc, for a while, became the richest man in America. And then finally -- you know, the best of all possible worlds -- some of you recognize this young photo of Pete Best, who was the original drummer for the Beatles, until they, you know, sent him out on an errand and snuck away and picked up Ringo on a tour. Well, in 1994, when Pete Best was interviewed -- yes, he's still a drummer; yes, he's a studio musician -- he had this to say: "I'm happier than I would have been with the Beatles." Okay. There's something important to be learned from these people, and it is the secret of happiness. Here it is, finally to be revealed. First: accrue wealth, power, and prestige, then lose it. (Laughter) Second: spend as much of your life in prison as you possibly can. (Laughter) Third: make somebody else really, really rich. (Laughter) And finally: never ever join the Beatles. (Laughter) OK. Now I, like Ze Frank, can predict your next thought, which is, "Yeah, right." Because when people synthesize happiness, as these gentlemen seem to have done, we all smile at them, but we kind of roll our eyes and say, "Yeah right, you never really wanted the job." "Oh yeah, right. You really didn't have that much in common with her, and you figured that out just about the time she threw the engagement ring in your face." We smirk because we believe that synthetic happiness is not of the same quality as what we might call "natural happiness." What are these terms? Natural happiness is what we get when we get what we wanted, and synthetic happiness is what we make when we don't get what we wanted. And in our society, we have a strong belief that synthetic happiness is of an inferior kind. Why do we have that belief? Well, it's very simple. What kind of economic engine would keep churning if we believed that not getting what we want could make us just as happy as getting it? With all apologies to my friend Matthieu Ricard, a shopping mall full of Zen monks is not going to be particularly profitable because they don't want stuff enough. I want to suggest to you that synthetic happiness is every bit as real and enduring as the kind of happiness you stumble upon when you get exactly what you were aiming for. Now, I'm a scientist, so I'm going to do this not with rhetoric, but by marinating you in a little bit of data. Let me first show you an experimental paradigm that is used to demonstrate the synthesis of happiness among regular old folks. And this isn't mine. This is a 50-year-old paradigm called the "free choice paradigm." It's very simple. You bring in, say, six objects, and you ask a subject to rank them from the most to the least liked. In this case, because the experiment I'm going to tell you about uses them, these are Monet prints. So, everybody can rank these Monet prints from the one they like the most, to the one they like the least. Now we give you a choice: "We happen to have some extra prints in the closet. We're going to give you one as your prize to take home. We happen to have number three and number four," we tell the subject. This is a bit of a difficult choice, because neither one is preferred strongly to the other, but naturally, people tend to pick number three because they liked it a little better than number four. Sometime later -- it could be 15 minutes; it could be 15 days -- the same stimuli are put before the subject, and the subject is asked to re-rank the stimuli. "Tell us how much you like them now." What happens? Watch as happiness is synthesized. This is the result that has been replicated over and over again. You're watching happiness be synthesized. Would you like to see it again? Happiness! "The one I got is really better than I thought! That other one I didn't get sucks!" (Laughter) That's the synthesis of happiness. Now what's the right response to that? "Yeah, right!" Now, here's the experiment we did, and I would hope this is going to convince you that "Yeah, right!" was not the right response. We did this experiment with a group of patients who had anterograde amnesia. These are hospitalized patients. Most of them have Korsakoff's syndrome, a polyneuritic psychosis that -- they drank way too much, and they can't make new memories. OK? They remember their childhood, but if you walk in and introduce yourself, and then leave the room, when you come back, they don't know who you are. We took our Monet prints to the hospital. And we asked these patients to rank them from the one they liked the most to the one they liked the least. We then gave them the choice between number three and number four. Like everybody else, they said, "Gee, thanks Doc! That's great! I could use a new print. I'll take number three." We explained we would have number three mailed to them. We gathered up our materials and we went out of the room, and counted to a half hour. Back into the room, we say, "Hi, we're back." The patients, bless them, say, "Ah, Doc, I'm sorry, I've got a memory problem; that's why I'm here. If I've met you before, I don't remember." "Really, Jim, you don't remember? I was just here with the Monet prints?" "Sorry, Doc, I just don't have a clue." "No problem, Jim. All I want you to do is rank these for me from the one you like the most to the one you like the least." What do they do? Well, let's first check and make sure they're really amnesiac. We ask these amnesiac patients to tell us which one they own, which one they chose last time, which one is theirs. And what we find is amnesiac patients just guess. These are normal controls, where if I did this with you, all of you would know which print you chose. But if I do this with amnesiac patients, they don't have a clue. They can't pick their print out of a lineup. Here's what normal controls do: they synthesize happiness. Right? This is the change in liking score, the change from the first time they ranked to the second time they ranked. Normal controls show -- that was the magic I showed you; now I'm showing it to you in graphical form -- "The one I own is better than I thought. The one I didn't own, the one I left behind, is not as good as I thought." Amnesiacs do exactly the same thing. Think about this result. These people like better the one they own, but they don't know they own it. "Yeah, right" is not the right response! What these people did when they synthesized happiness is they really, truly changed their affective, hedonic, aesthetic reactions to that poster. They're not just saying it because they own it, because they don't know they own it. Now, when psychologists show you bars, you know that they are showing you averages of lots of people. And yet, all of us have this psychological immune system, this capacity to synthesize happiness, but some of us do this trick better than others. And some situations allow anybody to do it more effectively than other situations do. It turns out that freedom -- the ability to make up your mind and change your mind -- is the friend of natural happiness, because it allows you to choose among all those delicious futures and find the one that you would most enjoy. But freedom to choose -- to change and make up your mind -- is the enemy of synthetic happiness. And I'm going to show you why. Dilbert already knows, of course. You're reading the cartoon as I'm talking. "Dogbert's tech support. How may I abuse you?" "My printer prints a blank page after every document." "Why would you complain about getting free paper?" "Free? Aren't you just giving me my own paper?" "Egad, man! Look at the quality of the free paper compared to your lousy regular paper! Only a fool or a liar would say that they look the same!" "Ah! Now that you mention it, it does seem a little silkier!" "What are you doing?" "I'm helping people accept the things they cannot change." Indeed. The psychological immune system works best when we are totally stuck, when we are trapped. This is the difference between dating and marriage, right? I mean, you go out on a date with a guy, and he picks his nose; you don't go out on another date. You're married to a guy and he picks his nose? Yeah, he has a heart of gold; don't touch the fruitcake. Right? (Laughter) You find a way to be happy with what's happened. Now what I want to show you is that people don't know this about themselves, and not knowing this can work to our supreme disadvantage. Here's an experiment we did at Harvard. We created a photography course, a black-and-white photography course, and we allowed students to come in and learn how to use a darkroom. So we gave them cameras; they went around campus; they took 12 pictures of their favorite professors and their dorm room and their dog, and all the other things they wanted to have Harvard memories of. They bring us the camera; we make up a contact sheet; they figure out which are the two best pictures; and we now spend six hours teaching them about darkrooms. And they blow two of them up, and they have two gorgeous eight-by-10 glossies of meaningful things to them, and we say, "Which one would you like to give up?" They say, "I have to give one up?" "Oh, yes. We need one as evidence of the class project. So you have to give me one. You have to make a choice. You get to keep one, and I get to keep one." Now, there are two conditions in this experiment. In one case, the students are told, "But you know, if you want to change your mind, I'll always have the other one here, and in the next four days, before I actually mail it to headquarters, I'll be glad to" -- (Laughter) -- yeah, "headquarters" -- "I'll be glad to swap it out with you. In fact, I'll come to your dorm room and give -- just give me an email. Better yet, I'll check with you. You ever want to change your mind, it's totally returnable." The other half of the students are told exactly the opposite: "Make your choice. And by the way, the mail is going out, gosh, in two minutes, to England. Your picture will be winging its way over the Atlantic. You will never see it again." Now, half of the students in each of these conditions are asked to make predictions about how much they're going to come to like the picture that they keep and the picture they leave behind. Other students are just sent back to their little dorm rooms and they are measured over the next three to six days on their liking, satisfaction with the pictures. And look at what we find. First of all, here's what students think is going to happen. They think they're going to maybe come to like the picture they chose a little more than the one they left behind, but these are not statistically significant differences. It's a very small increase, and it doesn't much matter whether they were in the reversible or irreversible condition. Wrong-o. Bad simulators. Because here's what's really happening. Both right before the swap and five days later, people who are stuck with that picture, who have no choice, who can never change their mind, like it a lot! And people who are deliberating -- "Should I return it? Have I gotten the right one? Maybe this isn't the good one? Maybe I left the good one?" -- have killed themselves. They don't like their picture, and in fact even after the opportunity to swap has expired, they still don't like their picture. Why? Because the reversible condition is not conducive to the synthesis of happiness. So here's the final piece of this experiment. We bring in a whole new group of naive Harvard students and we say, "You know, we're doing a photography course, and we can do it one of two ways. We could do it so that when you take the two pictures, you'd have four days to change your mind, or we're doing another course where you take the two pictures and you make up your mind right away and you can never change it. Which course would you like to be in?" Duh! 66 percent of the students, two-thirds, prefer to be in the course where they have the opportunity to change their mind. Hello? 66 percent of the students choose to be in the course in which they will ultimately be deeply dissatisfied with the picture. Because they do not know the conditions under which synthetic happiness grows. The Bard said everything best, of course, and he's making my point here but he's making it hyperbolically: "'Tis nothing good or bad / But thinking makes it so." It's nice poetry, but that can't exactly be right. Is there really nothing good or bad? Is it really the case that gall bladder surgery and a trip to Paris are just the same thing? That seems like a one-question IQ test. They can't be exactly the same. In more turgid prose, but closer to the truth, was the father of modern capitalism, Adam Smith, and he said this. This is worth contemplating: "The great source of both the misery and disorders of human life seems to arise from overrating the difference between one permanent situation and another ... Some of these situations may, no doubt, deserve to be preferred to others, but none of them can deserve to be pursued with that passionate ardor which drives us to violate the rules either of prudence or of justice, or to corrupt the future tranquility of our minds, either by shame from the remembrance of our own folly, or by remorse for the horror of our own injustice." In other words: yes, some things are better than others. We should have preferences that lead us into one future over another. But when those preferences drive us too hard and too fast because we have overrated the difference between these futures, we are at risk. When our ambition is bounded, it leads us to work joyfully. When our ambition is unbounded, it leads us to lie, to cheat, to steal, to hurt others, to sacrifice things of real value. When our fears are bounded, we're prudent; we're cautious; we're thoughtful. When our fears are unbounded and overblown, we're reckless, and we're cowardly. The lesson I want to leave you with from these data is that our longings and our worries are both to some degree overblown, because we have within us the capacity to manufacture the very commodity we are constantly chasing when we choose experience. Thank you.
This is the first of two rather extraordinary photographs I'm going to show you today. It was taken 18 years ago. I was 19 years old at the time. I had just returned from one of the deepest dives I'd ever made at that time, -- a little over 200 feet -- and, I had caught this little fish here. It turns out that that particular one was the first live one of that ever taken alive. I'm not just an ichthyologist, I'm a bona fide fish nerd. And to a fish nerd, this is some pretty exciting stuff. And more exciting was the fact that the person who took this photo was a guy named Jack Randall, the greatest living ichthyologist on Earth, the Grand Poobah of fish nerds, if you will. And so, it was really exciting to me to have this moment in time, it really set the course for the rest of my life. But really the most significant thing, the most profound thing about this picture is that it was taken two days before I was completely paralyzed from the neck down. I made a really stupid kind of mistake that most 19-year-old males do when they think they're immortal, and I got a bad case of the bends, and was paralyzed, and had to be flown back for treatment. I learned two really important things that day. The first thing I learned -- well, I'm mortal, that's a really big one. And the second thing I learned was that I knew, with profound certainty, that this is exactly what I was going to do for the rest of my life. I had to focus all my energies towards going to find new species of things down on deep coral reefs. Now, when you think of a coral reef, this is what most people think of: all these big, hard, elaborate corals and lots of bright, colorful fishes and things. But, this is really just the tip of the iceberg. If you look at this diagram of a coral reef, we know a lot about that part up near the top, and the reason we know so much about it is scuba divers can very easily go down there and access it. There is a problem with scuba though, in that it imposes some limitations on how deep you can go, and it turns out that depth is about 200 feet. I'll get into why that is in just a minute. But, the point is that scuba divers generally stay less than 100 feet deep, and very rarely go much below this, at least, not with any kind of sanity. So, to go deeper, most biologists have turned to submersibles. Now, submersibles are great, wonderful things, but if you're going to spend 30,000 dollars a day to use one of these things, and it's capable of going 2,000 feet, you're sure not going to go farting around up here in a couple of hundred feet, you're going to go way, way, way, down deep. So, the bottom line is that almost all research using submersibles has taken place well below 500 feet. Now, it's pretty obvious at this point that there's this zone here in the middle and that's the zone that really centers around my own personal pursuit of happiness. I want to find out what's in this zone. We know almost nothing about it. Scuba divers can't get there, submarines go right on past it. It took me a year to learn how to walk again after I had my diving accident in Palau and during that year I spent a lot of time learning about the physics and physiology of diving and figuring out how to overcome these limitations. So, I'm just going to show you a basic idea. We're all breathing air right now. Air is a mixture of oxygen and nitrogen, about 20 percent oxygen. About 80 percent nitrogen is in our lungs. And there's a phenomenon called Henry's Law that says that gases will dissolve into a fluid in proportion to the partial pressures which you're exposing them to. So, basically the gas dissolves into our body. The oxygen is bound by metabolism, we use it for energy. The nitrogen just sort of floats around in our blood and tissues, and that's all fine, that's how we're designed. The problem happens when you start to go underwater. Now, the deeper you go underwater, the higher the pressure is. If you were to go down to a depth of about 130 feet, which is the recommended limit for most scuba divers, you get this pressure effect. And the effect of that pressure is that you have an increased density of gas molecules in every breath you take. Over time, those gas molecules dissolve into your blood and tissues and start to fill you up. Now, if you were to go down to, say, 300 feet, you don't have five times as many gas molecules in your lungs -- you've got 10 times as many gas molecules in your lungs. And, sure enough, they dissolve into your blood, and into your tissues as well. And of course, if you were to down to where there's 15 times as much -- the deeper you go, the more exacerbating the problem becomes. And the problem, the limitation of diving with air is all those dots in your body -- all the nitrogen and all the oxygen. There're three basic limitations of scuba diving. The first limitation is the oxygen -- oxygen toxicity. Now, we all know the song: "Love is like oxygen./ You get too much, you get too high./ Not enough, and you're going to die." Well, in the context of diving, you get too much, you die also. You die also because oxygen toxicity can cause a seizure -- makes you convulse underwater, not a good thing to happen underwater. It happens because there's too much concentration of oxygen in your body. The nitrogen has two problems. One of them is what Jacques Cousteau called "rapture of the deep." It's nitrogen narcosis. It makes you loopy. The deeper you go, the loopier you get. You don't want to drive drunk, you don't want to dive drunk, so that's a real big problem. And of course, the third problem is the one I found out the hard way in Palau, which is the bends. Now the one thing that I forgot to mention, is that to obviate the problem of the nitrogen narcosis -- all of those blue dots in our body -- you remove the nitrogen and you replace it with helium. Now helium's a gas, there're a lot of reasons why helium's good, it's a tiny molecule, it's inert, it doesn't give you narcosis. So that's the basic concept that we use. But, the theory's relatively easy. The tricky part is the implementation. So, this is how I began, about 15 years ago. I'll admit, it wasn't exactly the smartest of starts, but, you know, you got to start somewhere. At the time, I wasn't the only one who didn't know what I was doing -- almost nobody did. And this rig was actually used for a dive of 300 feet. Over time we got a little bit better at it, and we came up with this really sophisticated-looking rig with four scuba tanks and five regulators and all the right gas mixtures and all that good stuff. And it was fine and dandy, and it allowed us to go down and find new species. This picture was taken 300 feet deep, catching new species of fish. But, the problem was that it didn't allow us much time. For all its bulk and size, it only gave us about 15 minutes at most down at those sorts of depths. We needed more time. There had to be a better way. And, indeed, there is a better way. In 1994, I was fortunate enough to get access to these prototype closed-circuit rebreathers. Alright, closed-circuit rebreather -- what is it about it that makes it different from scuba, and why is it better? Well, there are three main advantages to a rebreather. One, they're quiet, they don't make any noise. Two, they allow you to stay underwater longer. Three, they allow you to go deeper. How is it that they do that? Well, in order to really understand how they do that you have to take off the hood, and look underneath and see what's going on. There are three basic systems to a closed- circuit rebreather. The most fundamental of these is called the breathing loop. It's a breathing loop because you breathe off of it, and it's a closed loop, and you breathe the same gas around and around and around. So there's a mouthpiece that you put in your mouth, and there's also a counterlung, or in this case, two counterlungs. Now, the counterlungs aren't high-tech, they're just simply flexible bags. They allow you to mechanically breathe, or mechanically ventilate. When you exhale your breath, it goes in the exhale counterlung: when you inhale a breath, it comes from the inhale counterlung. It's just pure mechanics, allowing you to cycle air through this breathing loop. And, the other component on a breathing loop is the carbon dioxide absorbent canister. Now, as we breathe, we produce carbon dioxide, and that carbon dioxide needs to be scrubbed out of the system. There's a chemical filter in there that pulls the carbon dioxide out of the breathing gas -- so that, when it comes back to us to breathe again, it's safe to breathe again. So that's the breathing loop in a nutshell. The second main component of a closed-circuit rebreather is the gas system. The primary purpose of the gas system is to provide oxygen, to replenish the oxygen that your body consumes. So the main tank, the main critical thing, is this oxygen gas supply cylinder we have here. But, if we only had an oxygen gas supply cylinder we wouldn't be able to go very deep, because we'd run into oxygen toxicity very, very quickly. So we need another gas, something to dilute the oxygen with. And that, fittingly enough, is called the diluent gas supply. In our applications, we generally put air inside this diluent gas supply, because it's a very cheap and easy source of nitrogen. So that's where we get our nitrogen from. But, if we want to go deeper, of course, we need another gas supply. We need helium, and the helium is what we really need to go deep. And usually we'll have a slightly larger cylinder mounted exterior on the rebreather, like this. And that's what we use to inject, as we start to do our deep dives. We also have a second oxygen cylinder, that's solely as a back-up in case there's a problem with our first oxygen supply we can continue to breathe. And the way you manage all these different gases and all these different gas supplies is this really high-tech, sophisticated gas block up on the front here, where it's easy to reach. It's got all the valves and knobs and things you need to do to inject the right gases at the right time. Now, normally you don't have to do that because all of it's done automatically for you with the electronics, the third system of a rebreather. The most critical part of a rebreather is the oxygen sensors. You need three of them, so that if one of them goes bad, you know which one it is. You need voting logic. You also have three microprocessors. Any one of those computers can run the entire system, so if you have to lose two of them, there's also back-up power supplies. And of course there're multiple displays, to get the information to the diver. This is the high-tech gadgetry that allows us to do what we do on these kinds of deep dives. And I can talk about it all day -- just ask my wife -- but I want to move on to something that's kind of much more interesting. I'm going to take you on a deep dive. I'm going to show you what it's like to do one of these dives that we do. We start up here on the boat, and for all this high-tech, expensive equipment, this is still the best way to get in the water -- just pfft! -- flop over the side of the boat. Now, as I showed you in the earlier diagram, these reefs that we dive on start out near the surface and they go almost vertically, completely straight down. So, we drop in the water, and we just sort of go over the edge of this cliff, and then we just start dropping, dropping, dropping. People have asked me, "It must take a long time to get there?" No, it only takes a couple of minutes to get all the way down to three or four hundred feet, which is where we're aiming for. It's kind of like skydiving in slow motion. It's really a very interesting -- you ever see "The Abyss" where Ed Harris, you know, he's sinking down along the side of the wall? That's kind of what it feels like. It's pretty amazing. Also, when you get down there, you find that the water is very, very clear. It's extremely clear water, because there's hardly any plankton. But, when you turn on your light, you look around at the caves, and all of a sudden you're confronted with a tremendous amount of diversity, much more than anyone used to believe. Now not all of it is new species -- like that fish you see with the white stripe, that's a known species. But, if you look carefully into the cracks and crevices, you'll see little things scurrying all over the place. There's a just-unbelievable diversity. It's not just fish, either. These are crinoids, sponges, black corals. There're some more fishes. And those fishes that you see right now are new species. They're still new species because I had a video camera on this dive instead of my net, so they're still waiting down there for someone to go find them. But this is what it looks like, and this kind of habitat just goes on and on and on for miles. This is Papua, New Guinea. Now little fishes and invertebrates aren't the only things we see down there. We also see sharks, much more regularly than I would have expected to. And we're not quite sure why. But what I want you to do right now is imagine yourself 400 feet underwater, with all this high-tech gear on your back, you're in a remote reef off Papua, New Guinea, thousands of miles from the nearest recompression chamber, and you're completely surrounded by sharks. Video: Look at those ... Uh-oh ... uh-oh! I think we have their attention. (Laughter) Richard Pyle: When you start talking like Donald Duck, there's no situation in the world that can seem tense. (Laughter) So, we're down there, and this is at 400 feet -- that's looking straight up, by the way, so you can get a sense of how far away the surface is. And if you're a biologist and you know about sharks, and you want to assess, you know, how much jeopardy am I really in here, there's one question that sort of jumps to the forefront of your mind immediately which is -- Diver 1 (Video): What kind of sharks? Diver 2: Uh, silvertip sharks. Diver 1: Oh. RP: Silvertip sharks -- they're actually three species of sharks here. The silvertips are the one with the white edges on the fin, and there're also gray reef sharks and some hammerheads off in the distance. And yes, it's a little nerve-wracking. Diver 2 (Video): Hoo! That little guy is frisky! (Laughter) Now, you've seen video like this on TV a lot, and it's very intimidating, and I think it gives the wrong impression about sharks. Sharks are actually not very dangerous animals and that's why we weren't worried much, why we were joking around down there. More people are killed by pigs, more people are killed by lightning strikes, more people are killed at soccer games in England. There's a lot of other ways you can die. And I'm not making that stuff up. Coconuts! You can get killed by a coconut more likely than killed by a shark. So sharks aren't quite as dangerous as most people make them out to be. Now, I don't know if any of you get U.S. News and World Report -- I got the recent issue. There's a cover story all about the great explorers of our time. The last article is an article entitled "No New Frontiers." It questions whether or not there really are any new frontiers out there, whether there are any real, true, hardcore discoveries that can still be made. And this is my favorite line from the article. As a fish nerd, I have to laugh, because you know they don't call us fish nerds for nothing -- we actually do get excited about finding a new dorsal spine in a guppy. But, it's much more than that. And, I want to show you a few of the guppies we've found over the years. This one's -- you know, you can see how ugly it is. Even if you ignore the scientific value of this thing, just look at the monetary value of this thing. A couple of these ended up getting sold through the aquarium trade to Japan, where they sold for 15,000 dollars apiece. That's half-a-million dollars per pound. Here's another new angelfish we discovered. This one we actually first discovered back in the air days -- the bad old air days, as we used to say -- when we were doing these kind of dives with air. We were at 360 feet. And I remember coming up from one of these deep dives, and I had this fog, and the narcosis takes a little while to, you know, fade away. It's sort of like sobering up. And I had this vague recollection of seeing these yellow fish with a black spot, and I thought, "Aw, damn. I should have caught one. I think that's a new species." And then, eventually, I got around to looking in my bucket. Sure enough, I had caught one -- I just completely forgot that I had caught one. (Laughter) And so this one we decided to give the name Centropyge narcosis to. So that's it's official scientific name, in reference to its deep-dwelling habits. And this is another neat one. When we first found it, we weren't even sure what family this thing belonged to, so we just called it the Dr. Seuss fish, because it looked like something out of one of those books. Now, this one's pretty cool. If you go to Papua, New Guinea, and go down 300 feet, you're going to see these big mounds. And this may be kind of hard to see, but they're about -- oh, a couple meters in diameter. If you look closely, you'll see there's a little white fish and gray fish that hangs out near them. Well, it turns out this little white fish builds these giant mounds, one pebble at a time. It's really extraordinary to find something like this. It's not just new species: it's new behavior, it's new ecology it's all kind of new things. So, what I'm going to show you right now, very quickly, is just a sampling of a few of the new species we've discovered. What's extraordinary about this is not just the sheer number of species we're finding -- although as you can see that's pretty amazing, this is only half of what we've found -- what's extraordinary is how quickly we find them. We're up to seven new species per hour of time we spend at that depth. Now, if you go to an Amazon jungle and fog a tree, you may get a lot of bugs, but for fishes, there's nowhere in the world you can get seven new species per hour of time. Now, we've done some back of the envelope calculations, and we're predicting that there are probably on the order of 2,000 to 2,500 new species in the Indo-Pacific alone. There are only five to six thousand known species. So a very large percentage of what is out there isn't really known. We thought we had a handle on all the reef fish diversity -- evidently not. And I'm going to just close on a very somber note. At the beginning I told you that I was going to show you two extraordinary photographs. This is the second extraordinary photograph I'm going to show you. This one was taken at the exact moment I was down there filming those sharks. This was taken exactly 300 feet above my head. And the reason this photograph is extraordinary is because it captures a moment in the very last minute of a person's life. Less than 60 seconds after this picture was taken, this guy was dead. When we recovered his body, we figured out what had gone wrong. He had made a very simple mistake. He turned the wrong valve when he filled his cylinder -- he had 80 percent oxygen in his tank when he should have had 40. He had an oxygen toxicity seizure and he drowned. The reason I show this -- not to put a downer on everything -- but I just want to use it to key off my philosophy of life in general, which is that we all have two goals. The first goal we share with every other living thing on this planet, which is to survive. I call it perpetuation: the survival of the species and survival of ourselves, because they're both about perpetuating the genome. And the second goal, for those of us who have mastered that first goal, is to -- you know, you call it spiritual fulfillment, you can call it financial success, you can call it any number of different things. I call it seeking joy -- this pursuit of happiness. So, I guess my theme on this is this guy lived his life to the fullest, he absolutely did. You have to balance those two goals. If you live your whole life in fear -- I mean, life is a sexually transmitted disease with 100 percent mortality. So, you can't live your life in fear. (Laughter) I thought that was an old one. (Applause) But, at the same time you don't want to get so focused on rule number two, or goal number two, that you neglect goal number one. Because once you're dead, you really can't enjoy anything after that. I wish you all the best of luck in maintaining that balance in your future endeavors. Thanks. (Applause)
When you have 21 minutes to speak, two million years seems like a really long time. But evolutionarily, two million years is nothing. And yet in two million years the human brain has nearly tripled in mass, going from the one-and-a-quarter pound brain of our ancestor here, Habilis, to the almost three-pound meatloaf that everybody here has between their ears. What is it about a big brain that nature was so eager for every one of us to have one? Well, it turns out when brains triple in size, they don't just get three times bigger; they gain new structures. And one of the main reasons our brain got so big is because it got a new part, called the "frontal lobe." And particularly, a part called the "pre-frontal cortex." Now what does a pre-frontal cortex do for you that should justify the entire architectural overhaul of the human skull in the blink of evolutionary time? Well, it turns out the pre-frontal cortex does lots of things, but one of the most important things it does is it is an experience simulator. Flight pilots practice in flight simulators so that they don't make real mistakes in planes. Human beings have this marvelous adaptation that they can actually have experiences in their heads before they try them out in real life. This is a trick that none of our ancestors could do, and that no other animal can do quite like we can. It's a marvelous adaptation. It's up there with opposable thumbs and standing upright and language as one of the things that got our species out of the trees and into the shopping mall. Now -- (Laughter) -- all of you have done this. I mean, you know, Ben and Jerry's doesn't have liver-and-onion ice cream, and it's not because they whipped some up, tried it and went, "Yuck." It's because, without leaving your armchair, you can simulate that flavor and say "yuck" before you make it. Let's see how your experience simulators are working. Let's just run a quick diagnostic before I proceed with the rest of the talk. Here's two different futures that I invite you to contemplate, and you can try to simulate them and tell me which one you think you might prefer. One of them is winning the lottery. This is about 314 million dollars. And the other is becoming paraplegic. So, just give it a moment of thought. You probably don't feel like you need a moment of thought. Interestingly, there are data on these two groups of people, data on how happy they are. And this is exactly what you expected, isn't it? But these aren't the data. I made these up! These are the data. You failed the pop quiz, and you're hardly five minutes into the lecture. Because the fact is that a year after losing the use of their legs, and a year after winning the lotto, lottery winners and paraplegics are equally happy with their lives. Now, don't feel too bad about failing the first pop quiz, because everybody fails all of the pop quizzes all of the time. The research that my laboratory has been doing, that economists and psychologists around the country have been doing, have revealed something really quite startling to us, something we call the "impact bias," which is the tendency for the simulator to work badly. For the simulator to make you believe that different outcomes are more different than in fact they really are. From field studies to laboratory studies, we see that winning or losing an election, gaining or losing a romantic partner, getting or not getting a promotion, passing or not passing a college test, on and on, have far less impact, less intensity and much less duration than people expect them to have. In fact, a recent study -- this almost floors me -- a recent study showing how major life traumas affect people suggests that if it happened over three months ago, with only a few exceptions, it has no impact whatsoever on your happiness. Why? Because happiness can be synthesized. Sir Thomas Brown wrote in 1642, "I am the happiest man alive. I have that in me that can convert poverty to riches, adversity to prosperity. I am more invulnerable than Achilles; fortune hath not one place to hit me." What kind of remarkable machinery does this guy have in his head? Well, it turns out it's precisely the same remarkable machinery that all off us have. Human beings have something that we might think of as a "psychological immune system." A system of cognitive processes, largely non-conscious cognitive processes, that help them change their views of the world, so that they can feel better about the worlds in which they find themselves. Like Sir Thomas, you have this machine. Unlike Sir Thomas, you seem not to know it. (Laughter) We synthesize happiness, but we think happiness is a thing to be found. Now, you don't need me to give you too many examples of people synthesizing happiness, I suspect. Though I'm going to show you some experimental evidence, you don't have to look very far for evidence. As a challenge to myself, since I say this once in a while in lectures, I took a copy of the New York Times and tried to find some instances of people synthesizing happiness. And here are three guys synthesizing happiness. "I am so much better off physically, financially, emotionally, mentally and almost every other way." "I don't have one minute's regret. It was a glorious experience." "I believe it turned out for the best." Who are these characters who are so damn happy? Well, the first one is Jim Wright. Some of you are old enough to remember: he was the chairman of the House of Representatives and he resigned in disgrace when this young Republican named Newt Gingrich found out about a shady book deal he had done. He lost everything. The most powerful Democrat in the country, he lost everything. He lost his money; he lost his power. What does he have to say all these years later about it? "I am so much better off physically, financially, mentally and in almost every other way." What other way would there be to be better off? Vegetably? Minerally? Animally? He's pretty much covered them there. Moreese Bickham is somebody you've never heard of. Moreese Bickham uttered these words upon being released. He was 78 years old. He spent 37 years in a Louisiana State Penitentiary for a crime he didn't commit. He was ultimately exonerated, at the age of 78, through DNA evidence. And what did he have to say about his experience? "I don't have one minute's regret. It was a glorious experience." Glorious! This guy is not saying, "Well, you know, there were some nice guys. They had a gym." It's "glorious," a word we usually reserve for something like a religious experience. Harry S. Langerman uttered these words, and he's somebody you might have known but didn't, because in 1949 he read a little article in the paper about a hamburger stand owned by these two brothers named McDonalds. And he thought, "That's a really neat idea!" So he went to find them. They said, "We can give you a franchise on this for 3,000 bucks." Harry went back to New York, asked his brother who's an investment banker to loan him the 3,000 dollars, and his brother's immortal words were, "You idiot, nobody eats hamburgers." He wouldn't lend him the money, and of course six months later Ray Croc had exactly the same idea. It turns out people do eat hamburgers, and Ray Croc, for a while, became the richest man in America. And then finally -- you know, the best of all possible worlds -- some of you recognize this young photo of Pete Best, who was the original drummer for the Beatles, until they, you know, sent him out on an errand and snuck away and picked up Ringo on a tour. Well, in 1994, when Pete Best was interviewed -- yes, he's still a drummer; yes, he's a studio musician -- he had this to say: "I'm happier than I would have been with the Beatles." Okay. There's something important to be learned from these people, and it is the secret of happiness. Here it is, finally to be revealed. First: accrue wealth, power, and prestige, then lose it. (Laughter) Second: spend as much of your life in prison as you possibly can. (Laughter) Third: make somebody else really, really rich. (Laughter) And finally: never ever join the Beatles. (Laughter) OK. Now I, like Ze Frank, can predict your next thought, which is, "Yeah, right." Because when people synthesize happiness, as these gentlemen seem to have done, we all smile at them, but we kind of roll our eyes and say, "Yeah right, you never really wanted the job." "Oh yeah, right. You really didn't have that much in common with her, and you figured that out just about the time she threw the engagement ring in your face." We smirk because we believe that synthetic happiness is not of the same quality as what we might call "natural happiness." What are these terms? Natural happiness is what we get when we get what we wanted, and synthetic happiness is what we make when we don't get what we wanted. And in our society, we have a strong belief that synthetic happiness is of an inferior kind. Why do we have that belief? Well, it's very simple. What kind of economic engine would keep churning if we believed that not getting what we want could make us just as happy as getting it? With all apologies to my friend Matthieu Ricard, a shopping mall full of Zen monks is not going to be particularly profitable because they don't want stuff enough. I want to suggest to you that synthetic happiness is every bit as real and enduring as the kind of happiness you stumble upon when you get exactly what you were aiming for. Now, I'm a scientist, so I'm going to do this not with rhetoric, but by marinating you in a little bit of data. Let me first show you an experimental paradigm that is used to demonstrate the synthesis of happiness among regular old folks. And this isn't mine. This is a 50-year-old paradigm called the "free choice paradigm." It's very simple. You bring in, say, six objects, and you ask a subject to rank them from the most to the least liked. In this case, because the experiment I'm going to tell you about uses them, these are Monet prints. So, everybody can rank these Monet prints from the one they like the most, to the one they like the least. Now we give you a choice: "We happen to have some extra prints in the closet. We're going to give you one as your prize to take home. We happen to have number three and number four," we tell the subject. This is a bit of a difficult choice, because neither one is preferred strongly to the other, but naturally, people tend to pick number three because they liked it a little better than number four. Sometime later -- it could be 15 minutes; it could be 15 days -- the same stimuli are put before the subject, and the subject is asked to re-rank the stimuli. "Tell us how much you like them now." What happens? Watch as happiness is synthesized. This is the result that has been replicated over and over again. You're watching happiness be synthesized. Would you like to see it again? Happiness! "The one I got is really better than I thought! That other one I didn't get sucks!" (Laughter) That's the synthesis of happiness. Now what's the right response to that? "Yeah, right!" Now, here's the experiment we did, and I would hope this is going to convince you that "Yeah, right!" was not the right response. We did this experiment with a group of patients who had anterograde amnesia. These are hospitalized patients. Most of them have Korsakoff's syndrome, a polyneuritic psychosis that -- they drank way too much, and they can't make new memories. OK? They remember their childhood, but if you walk in and introduce yourself, and then leave the room, when you come back, they don't know who you are. We took our Monet prints to the hospital. And we asked these patients to rank them from the one they liked the most to the one they liked the least. We then gave them the choice between number three and number four. Like everybody else, they said, "Gee, thanks Doc! That's great! I could use a new print. I'll take number three." We explained we would have number three mailed to them. We gathered up our materials and we went out of the room, and counted to a half hour. Back into the room, we say, "Hi, we're back." The patients, bless them, say, "Ah, Doc, I'm sorry, I've got a memory problem; that's why I'm here. If I've met you before, I don't remember." "Really, Jim, you don't remember? I was just here with the Monet prints?" "Sorry, Doc, I just don't have a clue." "No problem, Jim. All I want you to do is rank these for me from the one you like the most to the one you like the least." What do they do? Well, let's first check and make sure they're really amnesiac. We ask these amnesiac patients to tell us which one they own, which one they chose last time, which one is theirs. And what we find is amnesiac patients just guess. These are normal controls, where if I did this with you, all of you would know which print you chose. But if I do this with amnesiac patients, they don't have a clue. They can't pick their print out of a lineup. Here's what normal controls do: they synthesize happiness. Right? This is the change in liking score, the change from the first time they ranked to the second time they ranked. Normal controls show -- that was the magic I showed you; now I'm showing it to you in graphical form -- "The one I own is better than I thought. The one I didn't own, the one I left behind, is not as good as I thought." Amnesiacs do exactly the same thing. Think about this result. These people like better the one they own, but they don't know they own it. "Yeah, right" is not the right response! What these people did when they synthesized happiness is they really, truly changed their affective, hedonic, aesthetic reactions to that poster. They're not just saying it because they own it, because they don't know they own it. Now, when psychologists show you bars, you know that they are showing you averages of lots of people. And yet, all of us have this psychological immune system, this capacity to synthesize happiness, but some of us do this trick better than others. And some situations allow anybody to do it more effectively than other situations do. It turns out that freedom -- the ability to make up your mind and change your mind -- is the friend of natural happiness, because it allows you to choose among all those delicious futures and find the one that you would most enjoy. But freedom to choose -- to change and make up your mind -- is the enemy of synthetic happiness. And I'm going to show you why. Dilbert already knows, of course. You're reading the cartoon as I'm talking. "Dogbert's tech support. How may I abuse you?" "My printer prints a blank page after every document." "Why would you complain about getting free paper?" "Free? Aren't you just giving me my own paper?" "Egad, man! Look at the quality of the free paper compared to your lousy regular paper! Only a fool or a liar would say that they look the same!" "Ah! Now that you mention it, it does seem a little silkier!" "What are you doing?" "I'm helping people accept the things they cannot change." Indeed. The psychological immune system works best when we are totally stuck, when we are trapped. This is the difference between dating and marriage, right? I mean, you go out on a date with a guy, and he picks his nose; you don't go out on another date. You're married to a guy and he picks his nose? Yeah, he has a heart of gold; don't touch the fruitcake. Right? (Laughter) You find a way to be happy with what's happened. Now what I want to show you is that people don't know this about themselves, and not knowing this can work to our supreme disadvantage. Here's an experiment we did at Harvard. We created a photography course, a black-and-white photography course, and we allowed students to come in and learn how to use a darkroom. So we gave them cameras; they went around campus; they took 12 pictures of their favorite professors and their dorm room and their dog, and all the other things they wanted to have Harvard memories of. They bring us the camera; we make up a contact sheet; they figure out which are the two best pictures; and we now spend six hours teaching them about darkrooms. And they blow two of them up, and they have two gorgeous eight-by-10 glossies of meaningful things to them, and we say, "Which one would you like to give up?" They say, "I have to give one up?" "Oh, yes. We need one as evidence of the class project. So you have to give me one. You have to make a choice. You get to keep one, and I get to keep one." Now, there are two conditions in this experiment. In one case, the students are told, "But you know, if you want to change your mind, I'll always have the other one here, and in the next four days, before I actually mail it to headquarters, I'll be glad to" -- (Laughter) -- yeah, "headquarters" -- "I'll be glad to swap it out with you. In fact, I'll come to your dorm room and give -- just give me an email. Better yet, I'll check with you. You ever want to change your mind, it's totally returnable." The other half of the students are told exactly the opposite: "Make your choice. And by the way, the mail is going out, gosh, in two minutes, to England. Your picture will be winging its way over the Atlantic. You will never see it again." Now, half of the students in each of these conditions are asked to make predictions about how much they're going to come to like the picture that they keep and the picture they leave behind. Other students are just sent back to their little dorm rooms and they are measured over the next three to six days on their liking, satisfaction with the pictures. And look at what we find. First of all, here's what students think is going to happen. They think they're going to maybe come to like the picture they chose a little more than the one they left behind, but these are not statistically significant differences. It's a very small increase, and it doesn't much matter whether they were in the reversible or irreversible condition. Wrong-o. Bad simulators. Because here's what's really happening. Both right before the swap and five days later, people who are stuck with that picture, who have no choice, who can never change their mind, like it a lot! And people who are deliberating -- "Should I return it? Have I gotten the right one? Maybe this isn't the good one? Maybe I left the good one?" -- have killed themselves. They don't like their picture, and in fact even after the opportunity to swap has expired, they still don't like their picture. Why? Because the reversible condition is not conducive to the synthesis of happiness. So here's the final piece of this experiment. We bring in a whole new group of naive Harvard students and we say, "You know, we're doing a photography course, and we can do it one of two ways. We could do it so that when you take the two pictures, you'd have four days to change your mind, or we're doing another course where you take the two pictures and you make up your mind right away and you can never change it. Which course would you like to be in?" Duh! 66 percent of the students, two-thirds, prefer to be in the course where they have the opportunity to change their mind. Hello? 66 percent of the students choose to be in the course in which they will ultimately be deeply dissatisfied with the picture. Because they do not know the conditions under which synthetic happiness grows. The Bard said everything best, of course, and he's making my point here but he's making it hyperbolically: "'Tis nothing good or bad / But thinking makes it so." It's nice poetry, but that can't exactly be right. Is there really nothing good or bad? Is it really the case that gall bladder surgery and a trip to Paris are just the same thing? That seems like a one-question IQ test. They can't be exactly the same. In more turgid prose, but closer to the truth, was the father of modern capitalism, Adam Smith, and he said this. This is worth contemplating: "The great source of both the misery and disorders of human life seems to arise from overrating the difference between one permanent situation and another ... Some of these situations may, no doubt, deserve to be preferred to others, but none of them can deserve to be pursued with that passionate ardor which drives us to violate the rules either of prudence or of justice, or to corrupt the future tranquility of our minds, either by shame from the remembrance of our own folly, or by remorse for the horror of our own injustice." In other words: yes, some things are better than others. We should have preferences that lead us into one future over another. But when those preferences drive us too hard and too fast because we have overrated the difference between these futures, we are at risk. When our ambition is bounded, it leads us to work joyfully. When our ambition is unbounded, it leads us to lie, to cheat, to steal, to hurt others, to sacrifice things of real value. When our fears are bounded, we're prudent; we're cautious; we're thoughtful. When our fears are unbounded and overblown, we're reckless, and we're cowardly. The lesson I want to leave you with from these data is that our longings and our worries are both to some degree overblown, because we have within us the capacity to manufacture the very commodity we are constantly chasing when we choose experience. Thank you.
I'm an American, which means, generally, I ignore football unless it involves guys my size or Bruno's size running into each other at extremely high speeds. That said, it's been really hard to ignore football for the last couple of weeks. I go onto Twitter, there are all these strange words that I've never heard before: FIFA, vuvuzela, weird jokes about octopi. But the one that's really been sort of stressing me out, that I haven't been able to figure out, is this phrase "Cala a boca, Galvao." If you've gone onto Twitter in the last couple of weeks, you've probably seen this. It's been a major trending topic. Being a monolingual American, I obviously don't know what the phrase means. So I went onto Twitter, and I asked some people if they could explain to me "Cala a boca, Galvao." And fortunately, my Brazilian friends were more than ready to help. They explained that the Galvao bird is a rare and endangered parrot that's in terrible, terrible danger. In fact, I'll let them tell you a bit more about it. Narrator: A word about Galvao, a very rare kind of bird native to Brazil. Every year, more than 300,000 Galvao birds are killed during Carnival parades. Ethan Zuckerman: Obviously, this is a tragic situation, and it actually gets worse. It turns out that, not only is the Galvao parrot very attractive, useful for headdresses, it evidently has certain hallucinogenic properties, which means that there's a terrible problem with Galvao abuse. Some sick and twisted people have found themselves snorting Galvao. And it's terribly endangered. The good news about this is that the global community -- again, my Brazilian friends tell me -- is pitching in to help out. It turns out that Lady Gaga has released a new single -- actually five or six new singles, as near as I can tell -- titled "Cala a boca, Galvao." And my Brazilian friends tell me that if I just tweet the phrase "Cala a boca, Galvao," 10 cents will be given to a global campaign to save this rare and beautiful bird. Now, most of you have figured out that this was a prank, and actually a very, very good one. "Cala a boca, Galvao" actually means something very different. In Portugese, it means "Shut your mouth, Galvao." And it specifically refers to this guy, Galvao Bueno, who's the lead soccer commentator for Rede Globo. And what I understand from my Brazilian friends is that this guy is just a cliche machine. He can ruin the most interesting match by just spouting cliche again and again and again. So Brazilians went to that first match against North Korea, put up this banner, started a Twitter campaign and tried to convince the rest of us to tweet the phrase: "Cala a boca, Galvao." And in fact, were so successful at this that it topped Twitter for two weeks. Now there's a couple -- there's a couple of lessons that you can take from this. And the first lesson, which I think is a worthwhile one, is that you cannot go wrong asking people to be active online, so long as activism just means retweeting a phrase. So as long as activism is that simple, it's pretty easy to get away with. The other thing you can take from this, by the way, is that there are a lot of Brazilians on Twitter. There's more than five million of them. As far as national representation, 11 percent of Brazilian internet users are on Twitter. That's a much higher number than in the U.S. or U.K. Next to Japan, it's the second most represented by population. Now if you're using Twitter or other social networks, and you didn't realize this was a space with a lot of Brazilians in it, you're like most of us. Because what happens on a social network is you interact with the people that you have chosen to interact with. And if you are like me, a big, geeky, white, American guy, you tend to interact with a lot of other geeky, white, American guys. And you don't necessarily have the sense that Twitter is in fact a very heavily Brazilian space. It's also extremely surprising to many Americans, a heavily African-American space. Twitter recently did some research. They looked at their local population. They believe that 24 percent of American Twitter users are African-American. That's about twice as high as African-Americans are represented in the population. And again, that was very shocking to many Twitter users, but it shouldn't be. And the reason it shouldn't be is that on any day you can go into Trending Topics. And you tend to find topics that are almost entirely African-American conversations. This was a visualization done by Fernando Viegas and Martin Wattenberg, two amazing visualization designers, who looked at a weekend's worth of Twitter traffic and essentially found that a lot of these trending topics were basically segregated conversations -- and in ways that you wouldn't expect. It turns out that oil spill is a mostly white conversation, that cookout is a mostly black conversation. And what's crazy about this is that if you wanted to mix up who you were seeing on Twitter, it's literally a quick click away. You click on that cookout tag, there an entirely different conversation with different people participating in it. But generally speaking, most of us don't. We end up within these filter bubbles, as my friend Eli Pariser calls them, where we see the people we already know and the people who are similar to the people we already know. And we tend not to see that wider picture. Now for me, I'm surprised by this, because this wasn't how the internet was supposed to be. If you go back into the early days of the internet, when cyber-utopians like Nick Negroponte were writing big books like "Being Digital," the prediction was that the internet was going to be an incredibly powerful force to smooth out cultural differences, to put us all on a common field of one fashion or another. Negroponte started his book with a story about how hard it is to build connections in the world of atoms. He's at a technology conference in Florida. And he's looking at something really, truly absurd, which is bottles of Evian water on the table. And Negroponte says this is crazy. This is the old economy. It's the economy of moving these heavy, slow atoms over long distances that's very difficult to do. We're heading to the future of bits, where everything is speedy, it's weightless. It can be anywhere in the world at any time. And it's going to change the world as we know it. Now, Negroponte has been right about a lot of things. He's totally wrong about this one. It turns out that in many cases atoms are much more mobile than bits. If I walk into a store in the United States, it's very, very easy for me to buy water that's bottled in Fiji, shipped at great expense to the United States. It's actually surprisingly hard for me to see a Fijian feature film. It's really difficult for me to listen to Fijian music. It's extremely difficult for me to get Fijian news, which is strange, because actually there's an enormous amount going on in Fiji. There's a coup government. There's a military government. There's crackdowns on the press. It's actually a place that we probably should be paying attention to at the moment. Here's what I think is going on. I think that we tend to look a lot at the infrastructure of globalization. We look at the framework that makes it possible to live in this connected world. And that's a framework that includes things like airline routes. It includes things like the Internet cables. We look at a map like this one, and it looks like the entire world is flat because everything is a hop or two away. You can get on a flight in London, you can end up in Bangalore later today. Two hops, you're in Suva, the capitol of Fiji. It's all right there. When you start looking at what actually flows on top of these networks, you get a very different picture. You start looking at how the global plane flights move, and you suddenly discover that the world isn't even close to flat. It's extremely lumpy. There are parts of the world that are very, very well connected. There's basically a giant pathway in the sky between London and New York. but look at this map, and you can watch this for, you know, two or three minutes. You won't see very many planes go from South America to Africa. And you'll discover that there are parts of the globe that are systematically cut off. When we stop looking at the infrastructure that makes connection possible, and we look at what actually happens, we start realizing that the world doesn't work quite the same way that we think it does. So here's the problem that I've been interested in in the last decade or so. The world is, in fact, getting more global. It's getting more connected. More of problems are global in scale. More of our economics is global in scale. And our media is less global by the day. If you watched a television broadcast in the United States in the 1970s, 35 to 40 percent of it would have been international news on a nightly new broadcast. That's down to about 12 to 15 percent. And this tends to give us a very distorted view of the world. Here's a slide that Alisa Miller showed at a previous TED Talk. Alisa's the president of Public Radio International. And she made a cartogram, which is basically a distorted map based on what American television news casts looked at for a month. And you see that when you distort a map based on attention, the world within American television news is basically reduced to this giant bloated U.S. and a couple of other countries which we've invaded. And that's basically what our media is about. And before you conclude that this is just a function of American TV news -- which is dreadful, and I agree that it's dreadful -- I've been mapping elite media like the New York Times, and I get the same thing. When you look at the New York Times, you look at other elite media, what you largely get are pictures of very wealthy nations and the nations we've invaded. It turns out that new media isn't necessarily helping us all that much. Here's a map made by Mark Graham who's down the street at the Oxford Internet Institute. A this is a map of articles in Wikipedia that have been geo-coded. And you'll notice that there's a very heavy bias towards North America and Western Europe. Even within Wikipedias, where we're creating their own content online, there's a heavy bias towards the place where a lot of the Wikipedia authors are based, rather than to the rest of the world. In the U.K., you can get up, you can pick up your computer when you get out of this session, you could read a newspaper from India or from Australia, from Canada, God forbid from the U.S. You probably won't. If you look at online media consumption -- in this case, in the top 10 users of the internet -- more than 95 percent of the news readership is on domestic news sites. It's one of these rare cases where the U.S. is actually slightly better than [the U.K.], because we actually like reading your media, rather than vice versa. So all of this starts leading me to think that we're in a state that I refer to as imaginary cosmopolitanism. We look at the internet. We think we're getting this wide view of the globe. We occasionally stumble onto a page in Chinese, and we decide that we do in fact have the greatest technology ever built to connect us to the rest of the world. And we forget that most of the time we're checking Boston Red Sox scores. So this is a real problem -- not just because the Red Sox are having a bad year -- but it's a real problem because, as we're discussing here at TED, the real problems in the world the interesting problems to solve are global in scale and scope, they require global conversations to get to global solutions. This is a problem we have to solve. So here's the good news. For six years, I've been hanging out with these guys. This is a group called Global Voices. This is a team of bloggers from around the world. Our mission was to fix the world's media. We started in 2004. You might have noticed, we haven't done all that well so far. Nor do I think we are by ourselves, actually going to solve the problem. But the more that I think about it, the more that I think that a few things that we have learned along the way are interesting lessons for how we would rewire if we we wanted to use the web to have a wider world. The first thing you have to consider is that there are parts of the world that are dark spots in terms of attention. In this case -- the map of the world at night by NASA -- they're dark literally because of lack of electricity. And I used to think that a dark spot on this map basically meant you're not going to get media from there because there are more basic needs. What I'm starting to realize is that you can get media, it's just an enormous amount of work, and you need an enormous amount of encouragement. One of those dark spots is Madagascar, a country which is generally better known for the Dreamworks film than it is actually known for the lovely people who live there. And so the people who founded Foko Club in Madagascar weren't actually concerned with trying to change the image of their country. They were doing something much simpler. It was a club to learn English and to learn computers and the internet. but what happened was that Madagascar went through a violent coup. Most independent media was shut down. And the high school students who were learning to blog through Foko Club suddenly found themselves talking to an international audience about the demonstrations, the violence, everything that was going on within this country. So a very, very small program designed to get people in front of computers, publishing their own thoughts, publishing independent media, ended up having a huge impact on what we know about this country. Now the trick with this is that I'm guessing most people here don't speak Malagasy. I'm also guessing that most of you don't even speak Chinese -- which is sort of sad if you think about it, as it's now the most represented language on the internet. Fortunately people are trying to figure out how to fix this. If you're using Google Chrome and you go to a Chinese language site, you notice this really cute box at the top, which automatically detects that the page is in Chinese and very quickly at a mouse click will give you a translation of the page. Unfortunately, it's a machine translation of the page. And while Google is very, very good with some languages, it's actually pretty dreadful with Chinese. And the results can be pretty funny. What you really want -- what I really want, is eventually the ability to push a button and have this queued so a human being can translate this. And if you think this is absurd, it's not. There's a group right now in China called Yeeyan. And Yeeyan is a group of 150,000 volunteers who get online every day. They look for the most interesting content in the English language. They translate roughly 100 articles a day from major newspapers, major websites. They put it online for free. It's the project of a guy named Zhang Lei, who was living in the United States during the Lhasa riots and who couldn't believe how biased American media coverage was. And he said, "If there's one thing I can do, I can start translating, so that people between these countries start understanding each other a little bit better." And my question to you is: if Yeeyan can line up 150,000 people to translate the English internet into Chinese, where's the English language Yeeyan? Who's going after Chinese, which now has 400 million internet users out there? My guess is at least one of them has something interesting to say. So even if we can find a way to translate from Chinese, there's no guarantee that we're going to find it. When we look for information online, we basically have two strategies. We use a lot of search. And search is terrific if you know what you're looking for. But if what you're looking for is serendipity, if you want to stumble onto something that you didn't know you needed, our main philosophy is to look to our social networks, to look for our friends. What are they looking at? Maybe we should be looking at it. The problem with this is that essentially what you end up getting after a while is the wisdom of the flock. You end up flocking with a lot of people who are probably similar to you, who have similar interests. And it's very, very hard to get information from the other flocks, from the other parts of the world where people getting together and talking about their own interests. To do this, at a certain point, you need someone to bump you out of your flock and into another flock. You need a guide. So this is Amira Al Hussaini. She is the Middle East editor for Global Voices. She has one of the hardest jobs in the world. Not only does she have to keep our Israeli and Palestinian contributors from killing each other, she has to figure out what is going to interest you about the Middle East. And in that sense of trying to get you out of your normal orbit, and to try to get you to pay attention to a story about someone who's given up smoking for the month of Ramadan, she has to know something about a global audience. She has to know something about what stories are available. Basically, she's a deejay. She's a skilled human curator who knows what material is available to her, who's able to listen to the audience, and who's able to make a selection and push people forward in one fashion or another. I don't think this is necessarily an algorithmic process. I think what's great about the internet is that it actually makes it much easier for deejays to reach a wider audience. I know Amira. I can ask her what to read. But with the internet, she's in a position where she can tell a lot of people what to read. And you can listen to her as well, if this is a way that you're interested in having your web widened. So once you start widening like this, once you start lighting up voices in the dark spots, once you start translating, once you start curating, you end up in some really weird places. This is an image from pretty much my favorite blog, which is AfriGadget. And AfriGadget is a blog that looks at technology in an Africa context. And specifically, it's looking at a blacksmith in Kibera in Nairobi, who is turning the shaft of a Landrover into a cold chisel. And when you look at this image, you might find yourself going, "Why would I conceivably care about this?" And the truth is, this guy can probably explain this to you. This is Erik Hersman. You guys may have seen him around the conference. He goes by the moniker White African. He's both a very well known American geek, but he's also Kenyan; he was born in Sudan, grew up in Kenya. He is a bridge figure. He is someone who literally has feet in both worlds -- one in the world of the African technology community, one in the world of the American technology community. And so he's able to tell a story about this blacksmith in Kibera and turn it into a story about repurposing technology, about innovating from constraint, about looking for inspiration based on reusing materials. He knows one world, and he's finding a way to communicate it to another world, both of which he has deep connections to. These bridge figures, I'm pretty well convinced, are the future of how we try to make the world wider through using the web. But the trick with bridges is, ultimately, you need someone to cross them. And that's where we start talking about xenophiles. So if I found myself in the NFL, I suspect I would spend my off-season nursing my wounds, enjoying my house, so on and so forth -- possibly recording a hip-hop album. Dhani Jones, who is the middle linebacker for the Cincinnati Bengals, has a slightly different approach to the off-season. Dhani has a television show. It's called "Dhani Tackles the Globe." And every week on this television show, Dhani travels to a different nation of the world. He finds a local sporting team. He trains with them for a week, and he plays a match with them. And his reason for this is not just that he wants to master Muay Thai boxing. It's because, for him, sport is the language that allows him to encounter the full width and wonder of the world. For some of us it might be music. For some of us it might be food. For a lot of us it might be literature or writing. But there are all these different techniques that allow you to go out and look at the world and find your place within it. The goal of my Talk here is not to persuade the people in this room to embrace your xenophilia. My guess -- given that you're at a conference called TEDGlobal -- is that most of you are xenophiles, whether or not you use that term. My challenge instead is this. It's not enough to make the personal decision that you want a wider world. We have to figure out how to rewire the systems that we have. We have to fix our media. We have to fix the internet. We have to fix our education. We have to fix our immigration policy. We need to look at ways of creating serendipity, of making translation pervasive, and we need to find ways to embrace and celebrate these bridge figures. And we need to figure out how to cultivate xenophiles. That's what I'm trying to do. I need your help. (Applause)
I can't help but with this wish to think about when you're a little kid and you -- all your friends ask you if a genie could give you one wish in the world, what would it be? And I always answered, "Well, I'd want the wish to have the wisdom to know exactly what to wish for." Well, then you'd be screwed because you'd know what to wish for and you'd used up your wish. And now, since we only have one wish -- unlike last year they had three wishes -- I'm not going to wish for that. So let's get to what I would like, which is world peace. And I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, the poor girl up there -- she thinks she's at a beauty pageant. She's not. She's at the TED Prize. (Laughter) But I really do think it makes sense, and I think that the first step to world peace is for people to meet each other. I've met a lot of different people over the years and I've filmed some of them -- from a dotcom executive in New York that wanted to take over the world to a military press officer in Qatar that would rather not take over the world. If you've seen the film "Control Room" that was sent out, you'd understand a little bit why. Thank you. (Applause) Wow! Some of you watched it. That's great. That's great. So basically what I'd like to talk about today is a way for people to travel, to meet people in a different way than -- because you can't travel all over the world at the same time. And a long time ago -- well, about 40 years ago -- my mom had an exchange student. And I'm going to show you slides of the exchange student. This is Donna. This is Donna at the Statue of Liberty. This is my mother and aunt teaching Donna how to ride a bike. This is Donna eating ice cream. And this is Donna teaching my aunt how to do a Filipino dance. Now I really think as the world is getting smaller, it becomes more and more important that we learn each other's dance moves, that we meet each other, we get to know each other, we are able to figure out a way to cross borders, to understand each other, to understand people's hopes and dreams, what makes them laugh and cry. And I know that we can't all do exchange programs, and I can't force everybody to travel. I've already talked about that to Chris and Amy, and they said that there's a problem with this. You can't force people of free will, and I totally support that. (Laughter) So we're not forcing people to travel. But I'd like to talk about another way to travel that doesn't require a ship or an airplane, and just requires a movie camera, a projector and a screen. And that's what I'm going to talk to you about today. I was asked that I speak a little bit about where I personally come from, and Cameron, I don't know how you managed to get out of that one, but I think that building bridges is important to me because of where I come from. I'm the daughter of an American mother and an Egyptian-Lebanese-Syrian father. So I'm the living product of two cultures coming together. No pun intended. And I've also been called -- as an Egyptian-Lebanese-Syrian American with a Persian name -- the "Middle East Peace Crisis." So maybe me starting to take pictures was some kind of way to bring both sides of my family together, a way to take the worlds with me, a way to tell stories visually. It all kind of started that way, but I think that I really realized the power of the image when I first went to the garbage-collecting village in Egypt, when I was about 16. My mother took me there. She's somebody that believes strongly in community service and decided that this was something that I needed to do and so I went there and I met some amazing women there. There was a center there where they were teaching people how to read and write and get vaccinations against the many diseases you can get from sorting through garbage. And I began to start teaching there. I taught English, and I met some incredible women there. I met people that live seven people to a room, barely can afford their evening meal, yet live with this strength of spirit and sense of humor and just incredible qualities. I got drawn into this community and I began to take pictures there. I took pictures of weddings and older family members, things that they wanted memories of. About two years after I started taking these pictures, the UN Conference on Population and Development asked me to show them at the conference. So I was 18; I was very excited. It was my first exhibit of photographs and they were all put up there, and after about two days, they all came down except for three. People were very upset, very angry that I was showing these dirty sides of Cairo, and why didn't I cut the dead donkey out of the frame? And as I sat there, I got very depressed. I looked at this big empty wall with three lonely photographs that were, you know, very pretty photographs and I was like, I failed at this. But I was looking at this intense emotion and intense feeling that had come out of people just seeing these photographs. I mean, here I was, this 18-year-old pipsqueak that nobody listened to, and all of a sudden I put these photographs on the wall and there were arguments, and they had to be taken down. And I just saw the power of the image. And it was incredible. And I think the most important reaction that I saw there was actually people that would never have gone to the garbage village themselves, that would never have seen that the human spirit could thrive in such difficult circumstances. And I think it was at that point that I decided that I wanted to use photography and film to somehow bridge gaps, to bridge cultures, bring people together, cross borders. And so that's what really kind of started me off. Did a stint at MTV, made a film called "Startup.com," and I've done a couple of music films -- but in 2003, when the war in Iraq was about to start, it was a very surreal feeling for me because before the war started, there was kind of this media war that was going on. And I was watching television in New York and there seemed to be just one point of view that was coming across, and the coverage went from the U.S. State Department to embedded troops and what was coming across on the news was that there was going to be this clean war and precision bombings, and the Iraqis would be greeting the Americans as liberators and throwing flowers at their feet in the streets of Baghdad. And I knew that there was a completely other story that was taking place in the Middle East where my parents were. I knew that there was a completely other story being told, and I was thinking, how are people supposed to communicate with each other when they're getting completely different messages and nobody knows what the other's being told? How are people supposed to have any kind of common understanding or know how to move together into the future? So I knew that I had to go there. I just wanted to be in the center. I had no plan. I had no funding. I didn't even have a camera at the time. I had somebody bring it there because I wanted to get access to Al Jazeera, George Bush's favorite channel and a place which I was very curious about because it's disliked by many governments across the Arab world and also called the mouthpiece of Osama Bin Laden by some people in the U.S. government. So I was thinking, you know, this station that's hated by so many people has to be doing something right. I've got to go see what this is all about. And I also wanted to go see Central Command, which was 10 minutes away, and that way I could get access to how this news was being created on the Arab side reaching the Arab world, and on the U.S. and Western side reaching the U.S. And when I went there and sat there, and met these people that were in the center of it and sat with these characters, I met some surprising, very complex people. And I'd like to share with you a little bit of that experience of when you sit with somebody and you film them, and you listen to them, and you allow them more than a five-second sound bite, the amazing complexity of people emerge. Sameer Khader: Business as usual. Iraq, and then Iraq, and then Iraq. But between us, if I'm offered a job with Fox, I'll take it. To change the Arab nightmare into the American dream. I still have that dream. Maybe I will never be able to do it. But I have plans for my children. When they finish their high school I will send them to America to study there. I will pay for their study. And they will stay there. Josh Rushing: The night they showed the POWs and the dead soldiers -- Al Jazeera showed them -- it was powerful because America doesn't show those kinds of images. Most of the news in America won't show really gory images and this showed American soldiers in uniform strewn about a floor, a cold tile floor. And it was revolting. It was absolutely revolting. It made me sick to my stomach. And then what hit me was, the night before, there had been some kind of bombing in Basra, and Al Jazeera had shown images of the people. And they were equally if not more horrifying -- the images were. And I remember having seen it in the Al Jazeera office and thought to myself, "Wow, that's gross. That's bad." And then going away, and probably eating dinner or something. And it didn't affect me as much. So -- the impact it had on me, me realizing that I just saw people on the other side, and those people in the Al Jazeera office must have felt the way I was feeling that night. And it upset me on a profound level that I wasn't bothered as much the night before. It makes me hate war. But it doesn't make me believe that we're in world that can live without war yet. Jehane Noujaim: I was overwhelmed by the response of the film, for we didn't know whether it would be able to get out there. We had no funding for it. We were incredibly lucky that it got picked up, and when we showed the film in both the United States and the Arab world we had such incredible reactions. It was amazing to see how people were moved by this film. In the Arab world -- and it's not really by the film; it's by the characters. I mean, Josh Rushing was this incredibly complex person who was thinking about things. And when I showed the film in the Middle East, people wanted to meet Josh. He kind of redefined us as an American population. People started to, you know, ask me, where is this guy now? Al Jazeera offered him a job. And Sameer, on the other hand, was also quite an interesting character for the Arab world to see, because it brought out the complexities of this love/hate relationship that the Arab world has with the West. In the United States, I was blown away by the motivations, the positive motivations of the American people when they'd see this film. You know, we're criticized abroad for believing we're the saviors of the world in some way, but the flip side of it is that actually, when people do see what is happening abroad and people's reactions to some of our policy abroad, we feel this power that we need to -- we feel like we have to get the power to change things. And I saw this with audiences. This woman came up to me after the screening and said, "You know, I know this is crazy. I saw the bombs being loaded on the planes; I saw the military going out to war. But you don't understand people's anger towards us until you see the people in the hospitals and the victims of the war, and how do we get out of this bubble? How do we understand what the other person is thinking?" Now, I don't know whether a film can change the world, but I know that it starts -- I know the power of it -- I know that it starts people thinking about how to change the world. Now, I'm not a philosopher, so I feel like I shouldn't go into great depth on this but let film speak for itself and take you to this other world. Because I believe that film has the ability to take you across borders. I'd like you to just sit back and experience for a couple of minutes being taken into another world. And these couple clips take you inside of two of the most difficult conflicts that we are faced with today. Man: As long as there is injustice, someone must make a sacrifice! Woman: That's no sacrifice, that's revenge! If you kill, there's no difference between victim and occupier. Man: If we had airplanes, we wouldn't need martyrs, that's the difference. Woman: The difference is that the Israeli military is still stronger. Man: Then let us be equal in death. We still have Paradise. Woman: There is no Paradise! It only exists in your head! Man: God forbid! May God forgive you. If you were not Abu Azzam's daughter ... Anyway, I'd rather have Paradise in my head than live in this hell! In this life, we're dead anyway. One only chooses bitterness when the alternative is even bitterer. Woman: And what about us? The ones who remain? Will we win that way? Don't you see what you're doing is destroying us? And that you give Israel an alibi to carry on? Man: So with no alibi, Israel will stop? Woman: Perhaps. We have to turn it into a moral war. Man: How, if Israel has no morals? Woman: Be careful! Tzvika: My wife Ayelet called me and said, "There was a suicide bombing in Tel Aviv." Ayelet: What do you know about the casualties? We're looking for three girls. Tzvika: We have no information. Ayelet: One is wounded here, but we haven't heard from the other three. Tzvika: I said, "OK, that's Bat-Chen, that's my daughter. Are you sure she is dead?" They said yes. George: On that day, at around 6:30 I was driving with my wife and daughters to the supermarket. When we got to here, we saw three Israeli military jeeps parked on the side of the road. When we passed by the first jeep, they opened fire on us. And my 12-year-old daughter Christine was killed in the shooting. I am the headmaster for all parts. George: But there is a teacher that is in charge? Tzvika: Yes, I have assistants. I deal with children all the time. George: At first, I thought it was a strange idea. But after thinking logically about it, I didn't find any reason why not to meet them and let them know of our suffering. George: There were many things that touched me. We see that there are Palestinians who suffered a lot, who lost children, and still believe in the peace process and in reconciliation. If we who lost what is most precious can talk to each other, and look forward to a better future, then everyone else must do so, too. Man: Song is something that we communicated with people who otherwise would not have understood where we're coming from. You could give them a long political speech they would still not understand. But I tell you, when you finish that song, people will be like, "Damn, I know where you niggaz are coming from. I know where you guys are coming from. Death unto apartheid!" Narrator: It's about the liberation struggle. It's about those children who took to the streets, fighting, screaming, "Free Nelson Mandela!" It's about those unions who put down their tools and demanded freedom. Yes. Yes! Freedom! Jehane Noujaim: I think everybody's had that feeling of sitting in a theater, in a dark room, with other strangers, watching a very powerful film, and they felt that feeling of transformation. And what I'd like to talk about is how can we use that feeling to actually create a movement through film? I've been listening to the talks in some of the conference, and Robert Wright said yesterday that if we have an appreciation for another person's humanity, then they will have an appreciation for ours. And that's what this is about. It's about connecting people through film, getting these independent voices out there. Now Josh Rushing actually ended up leaving the military and taking a job with Al Jazeera, so his feeling is that he's on Al Jazeera International because he feels like he can actually use media to bridge the gap between East and West. And that's an amazing thing. But I've been trying to think about ways to give power to these independent voices, to give power to the filmmakers, to give power to people who are trying to use film for change. And there are incredible organizations that are out there doing this already. There's Witness, that you heard from earlier. There's Just Vision, that are working with Palestinians and Israelis who are working together for peace, and documenting that process and getting interviews out there and using this film to take to Congress to show that it's a powerful tool to show that this is a woman who's had her daughter killed in an attack, and she believes that there are peaceful ways to solve this. There's Working Films and there's Current TV, which is an incredible platform for people around the world to be able to put their -- yes, it's amazing. I watched it and I'm just -- I'm blown away by it and its potential to bring voices from around the world, independent voices from around the world, and create a truly democratic, global television. So what can we do to create a platform for these organizations, to create some momentum, to get everybody in the world involved in this movement? I'd like for us to imagine for a second -- imagine a day when you have everyone coming together from around the world. You have towns and villages and theaters all from around the world getting together, and sitting in the dark, and sharing a communal experience of watching a film, or a couple of films, together. Watching a film which maybe highlights a character that is fighting to live, or just a character that defies stereotypes, makes a joke, sings a song. Comedies, documentaries, shorts. This amazing power can be used to change people and to bond people together, to cross borders and have people feel like they're having a communal experience. So if you imagine this day when all around the world you have theaters from around the world and places where we project films. If you imagine from -- projecting from Times Square to Tahir Square in Cairo, the same film in Ramallah, the same film in Jerusalem. You know, we've been talking to a friend of mine about using the side of the Great Pyramid and the Great Wall of China. It's endless what you can imagine, in terms of where you can project films and where you can have this communal experience. And I believe that this one day, if we can create it, this one day can create momentum for all of these independent voices. There isn't an organization which is connecting the independent voices of the world to get out there, and yet I'm hearing throughout this conference that the biggest danger in our future is [lack of] understanding the other and having mutual respect for the other and crossing borders. And if film can do that, and if we can get all of these different locations in the world to watch these films together, this could be an incredible day. So we've already made a partnership actually, set up through somebody from the TED community, John Camen, introduced me to Steven Apkon, from the Jacob Burns Film Center. And we started calling up everybody. And in the last week, there have been so many people that have responded to us from as close as Palo Alto to Mongolia and to India. There are people that want to be a part of this global day of film, to be able to provide a platform for independent voices and independent films to get out there. Now, we've thought about a name for this day and I'd like to share this with you. Now, the most amazing part of this whole process has been sharing ideas and wishes, and so I invite you to give brainstorms onto how does this day echo into the future? How do we use technology to make this day echo into the future, so that we can build community and have these communities working together, through the Internet? There was a time, many, many years ago, when all of the continents were stuck together. And we called that landmass Pangea. So what we'd like to call this day of film is Pangea Cinema Day. And if you just imagine that all of these people in these towns would be watching, then I think that we can actually really make a movement towards people understanding each other better. I know that it's very intangible, touching people's hearts and souls, but the only way that I know how to do it, the only way that I know how to reach out to somebody's heart and soul all across the world is by showing them a film. And I know that there are independent filmmakers and films out there that can really make this happen. And that's my wish. So I guess I'm supposed to give you my one-sentence wish, but we're way out of time. Chris Anderson: That is an incredible wish. Pangea Cinema -- the day the world comes together. JN: It's more tangible than world peace, and it's certainly more immediate. But it would be the day that the world comes together through film, the power of film. CA: Ladies and gentlemen, Jehane Noujaim.
So, here we go: a flyby of play. It's got to be serious if the New York Times puts a cover story of their February 17th Sunday magazine about play. At the bottom of this, it says, "It's deeper than gender. Seriously, but dangerously fun. And a sandbox for new ideas about evolution." Not bad, except if you look at that cover, what's missing? You see any adults? Well, lets go back to the 15th century. This is a courtyard in Europe, and a mixture of 124 different kinds of play. All ages, solo play, body play, games, taunting. And there it is. And I think this is a typical picture of what it was like in a courtyard then. I think we may have lost something in our culture. So I'm gonna take you through what I think is a remarkable sequence. North of Churchill, Manitoba, in October and November, there's no ice on Hudson Bay. And this polar bear that you see, this 1200-pound male, he's wild and fairly hungry. And Norbert Rosing, a German photographer, is there on scene, making a series of photos of these huskies, who are tethered. And from out of stage left comes this wild, male polar bear, with a predatory gaze. Any of you who've been to Africa or had a junkyard dog come after you, there is a fixed kind of predatory gaze that you know you're in trouble. But on the other side of that predatory gaze is a female husky in a play bow, wagging her tail. And something very unusual happens. That fixed behavior -- which is rigid and stereotyped and ends up with a meal -- changes. And this polar bear stands over the husky, no claws extended, no fangs taking a look. And they begin an incredible ballet. A play ballet. This is in nature: it overrides a carnivorous nature and what otherwise would have been a short fight to the death. And if you'll begin to look closely at the husky that's bearing her throat to the polar bear, and look a little more closely, they're in an altered state. They're in a state of play. And it's that state that allows these two creatures to explore the possible. They are beginning to do something that neither would have done without the play signals. And it is a marvelous example of how a differential in power can be overridden by a process of nature that's within all of us. Now how did I get involved in this? John mentioned that I've done some work with murderers, and I have. The Texas Tower murderer opened my eyes, in retrospect, when we studied his tragic mass murder, to the importance of play, in that that individual, by deep study, was found to have severe play deprivation. Charles Whitman was his name. And our committee, which consisted of a lot of hard scientists, did feel at the end of that study that the absence of play and a progressive suppression of developmentally normal play led him to be more vulnerable to the tragedy that he perpetrated. And that finding has stood the test of time -- unfortunately even into more recent times, at Virginia Tech. And other studies of populations at risk sensitized me to the importance of play, but I didn't really understand what it was. And it was many years in taking play histories of individuals before I really began to recognize that I didn't really have a full understanding of it. And I don't think any of us has a full understanding of it, by any means. But there are ways of looking at it that I think can give you -- give us all a taxonomy, a way of thinking about it. And this image is, for humans, the beginning point of play. When that mother and infant lock eyes, and the infant's old enough to have a social smile, what happens -- spontaneously -- is the eruption of joy on the part of the mother. And she begins to babble and coo and smile, and so does the baby. If we've got them wired up with an electroencephalogram, the right brain of each of them becomes attuned, so that the joyful emergence of this earliest of play scenes and the physiology of that is something we're beginning to get a handle on. And I'd like you to think that every bit of more complex play builds on this base for us humans. And so now I'm going to take you through sort of a way of looking at play, but it's never just singularly one thing. We're going to look at body play, which is a spontaneous desire to get ourselves out of gravity. This is a mountain goat. If you're having a bad day, try this: jump up and down, wiggle around -- you're going to feel better. And you may feel like this character, who is also just doing it for its own sake. It doesn't have a particular purpose, and that's what's great about play. If its purpose is more important than the act of doing it, it's probably not play. And there's a whole other type of play, which is object play. And this Japanese macaque has made a snowball, and he or she's going to roll down a hill. And -- they don't throw it at each other, but this is a fundamental part of being playful. The human hand, in manipulation of objects, is the hand in search of a brain; the brain is in search of a hand; and play is the medium by which those two are linked in the best way. JPL we heard this morning -- JPL is an incredible place. They have located two consultants, Frank Wilson and Nate Johnson, who are -- Frank Wilson is a neurologist, Nate Johnson is a mechanic. He taught mechanics in a high school in Long Beach, and found that his students were no longer able to solve problems. And he tried to figure out why. And he came to the conclusion, quite on his own, that the students who could no longer solve problems, such as fixing cars, hadn't worked with their hands. Frank Wilson had written a book called "The Hand." They got together -- JPL hired them. Now JPL, NASA and Boeing, before they will hire a research and development problem solver -- even if they're summa cum laude from Harvard or Cal Tech -- if they haven't fixed cars, haven't done stuff with their hands early in life, played with their hands, they can't problem-solve as well. So play is practical, and it's very important. Now one of the things about play is that it is born by curiosity and exploration. (Laughter) But it has to be safe exploration. This happens to be OK -- he's an anatomically interested little boy and that's his mom. Other situations wouldn't be quite so good. But curiosity, exploration, are part of the play scene. If you want to belong, you need social play. And social play is part of what we're about here today, and is a byproduct of the play scene. Rough and tumble play. These lionesses, seen from a distance, looked like they were fighting. But if you look closely, they're kind of like the polar bear and husky: no claws, flat fur, soft eyes, open mouth with no fangs, balletic movements, curvilinear movements -- all specific to play. And rough-and-tumble play is a great learning medium for all of us. Preschool kids, for example, should be allowed to dive, hit, whistle, scream, be chaotic, and develop through that a lot of emotional regulation and a lot of the other social byproducts -- cognitive, emotional and physical -- that come as a part of rough and tumble play. Spectator play, ritual play -- we're involved in some of that. Those of you who are from Boston know that this was the moment -- rare -- where the Red Sox won the World Series. But take a look at the face and the body language of everybody in this fuzzy picture, and you can get a sense that they're all at play. Imaginative play. I love this picture because my daughter, who's now almost 40, is in this picture, but it reminds me of her storytelling and her imagination, her ability to spin yarns at this age -- preschool. A really important part of being a player is imaginative solo play. And I love this one, because it's also what we're about. We all have an internal narrative that's our own inner story. The unit of intelligibility of most of our brains is the story. I'm telling you a story today about play. Well, this bushman, I think, is talking about the fish that got away that was that long, but it's a fundamental part of the play scene. So what does play do for the brain? Well, a lot. We don't know a whole lot about what it does for the human brain, because funding has not been exactly heavy for research on play. I walked into the Carnegie asking for a grant. They'd given me a large grant when I was an academician for the study of felony drunken drivers, and I thought I had a pretty good track record, and by the time I had spent half an hour talking about play, it was obvious that they were not -- did not feel that play was serious. I think that -- that's a few years back -- I think that wave is past, and the play wave is cresting, because there is some good science. Nothing lights up the brain like play. Three-dimensional play fires up the cerebellum, puts a lot of impulses into the frontal lobe -- the executive portion -- helps contextual memory be developed, and -- and, and, and. So it's -- for me, its been an extremely nourishing scholarly adventure to look at the neuroscience that's associated with play, and to bring together people who in their individual disciplines hadn't really thought of it that way. And that's part of what the National Institute for Play is all about. And this is one of the ways you can study play -- is to get a 256-lead electroencephalogram. I'm sorry I don't have a playful-looking subject, but it allows mobility, which has limited the actual study of play. And we've got a mother-infant play scenario that we're hoping to complete underway at the moment. The reason I put this here is also to queue up my thoughts about objectifying what play does. The animal world has objectified it. In the animal world, if you take rats, who are hardwired to play at a certain period of their juvenile years and you suppress play -- they squeak, they wrestle, they pin each other, that's part of their play. If you stop that behavior on one group that you're experimenting with, and you allow it in another group that you're experimenting with, and then you present those rats with a cat odor-saturated collar, they're hardwired to flee and hide. Pretty smart -- they don't want to get killed by a cat. So what happens? They both hide out. The non-players never come out -- they die. The players slowly explore the environment, and begin again to test things out. That says to me, at least in rats -- and I think they have the same neurotransmitters that we do and a similar cortical architecture -- that play may be pretty important for our survival. And, and, and -- there are a lot more animal studies that I could talk about. Now, this is a consequence of play deprivation. (Laughter) This took a long time -- I had to get Homer down and put him through the fMRI and the SPECT and multiple EEGs, but as a couch potato, his brain has shrunk. And we do know that in domestic animals and others, when they're play deprived, they don't -- and rats also -- they don't develop a brain that is normal. Now, the program says that the opposite of play is not work, it's depression. And I think if you think about life without play -- no humor, no flirtation, no movies, no games, no fantasy and, and, and. Try and imagine a culture or a life, adult or otherwise without play. And the thing that's so unique about our species is that we're really designed to play through our whole lifetime. And we all have capacity to play signal. Nobody misses that dog I took a picture of on a Carmel beach a couple of weeks ago. What's going to follow from that behavior is play. And you can trust it. The basis of human trust is established through play signals. And we begin to lose those signals, culturally and otherwise, as adults. That's a shame. I think we've got a lot of learning to do. Now, Jane Goodall has here a play face along with one of her favorite chimps. So part of the signaling system of play has to do with vocal, facial, body, gestural. You know, you can tell -- and I think when we're getting into collective play, its really important for groups to gain a sense of safety through their own sharing of play signals. You may not know this word, but it should be your biological first name and last name. Because neoteny means the retention of immature qualities into adulthood. And we are, by physical anthropologists, by many, many studies, the most neotenous, the most youthful, the most flexible, the most plastic of all creatures. And therefore, the most playful. And this gives us a leg up on adaptability. Now, there is a way of looking at play that I also want to emphasize here, which is the play history. Your own personal play history is unique, and often is not something we think about particularly. This is a book written by a consummate player by the name of Kevin Carroll. Kevin Carroll came from extremely deprived circumstances: alcoholic mother, absent father, inner-city Philadelphia, black, had to take care of a younger brother. Found that when he looked at a playground out of a window into which he had been confined, he felt something different. And so he followed up on it. And his life -- the transformation of his life from deprivation and what one would expect -- potentially prison or death -- he become a linguist, a trainer for the 76ers and now is a motivational speaker. And he gives play as a transformative force over his entire life. Now there's another play history that I think is a work in progress. Those of you who remember Al Gore, during the first term and then during his successful but unelected run for the presidency, may remember him as being kind of wooden and not entirely his own person, at least in public. And looking at his history, which is common in the press, it seems to me, at least -- looking at it from a shrink's point of view -- that a lot of his life was programmed. Summers were hard, hard work, in the heat of Tennessee summers. He had the expectations of his senatorial father and Washington, D.C. And although I think he certainly had the capacity for play -- because I do know something about that -- he wasn't as empowered, I think, as he now is by paying attention to what is his own passion and his own inner drive, which I think has its basis in all of us in our play history. So what I would encourage on an individual level to do, is to explore backwards as far as you can go to the most clear, joyful, playful image that you have, whether it's with a toy, on a birthday or on a vacation. And begin to build to build from the emotion of that into how that connects with your life now. And you'll find, you may change jobs -- which has happened to a number people when I've had them do this -- in order to be more empowered through their play. Or you'll be able to enrich your life by prioritizing it and paying attention to it. Most of us work with groups, and I put this up because the d.school, the design school at Stanford, thanks to David Kelley and a lot of others who have been visionary about its establishment, has allowed a group of us to get together and create a course called "From Play to Innovation." And you'll see this course is to investigate the human state of play, which is kind of like the polar bear-husky state and its importance to creative thinking: "to explore play behavior, its development and its biological basis; to apply those principles, through design thinking, to promote innovation in the corporate world; and the students will work with real-world partners on design projects with widespread application." This is our maiden voyage in this. We're about two and a half, three months into it, and it's really been fun. There is our star pupil, this labrador, who taught a lot of us what a state of play is, and an extremely aged and decrepit professor in charge there. And Brendan Boyle, Rich Crandall -- and on the far right is, I think, a person who will be in cahoots with George Smoot for a Nobel Prize -- Stuart Thompson, in neuroscience. So we've had Brendan, who's from IDEO, and the rest of us sitting aside and watching these students as they put play principles into practice in the classroom. And one of their projects was to see what makes meetings boring, and to try and do something about it. So what will follow is a student-made film about just that. Narrator: Flow is the mental state of apparition in which the person is fully immersed in what he or she is doing. Characterized by a feeling of energized focus, full involvement and success in the process of the activity. An important key insight that we learned about meetings is that people pack them in one after another, disruptive to the day. Attendees at meetings don't know when they'll get back to the task that they left at their desk. But it doesn't have to be that way. (Music) Some sage and repeatedly furry monks at this place called the d.school designed a meeting that you can literally step out of when it's over. Take the meeting off, and have peace of mind that you can come back to me. Because when you need it again, the meeting is literally hanging in your closet. The Wearable Meeting. Because when you put it on, you immediately get everything you need to have a fun and productive and useful meeting. But when you take it off -- that's when the real action happens. (Music) (Laughter) (Applause) Stuart Brown: So I would encourage you all to engage not in the work-play differential -- where you set aside time to play -- but where your life becomes infused minute by minute, hour by hour, with body, object, social, fantasy, transformational kinds of play. And I think you'll have a better and more empowered life. Thank You. (Applause) John Hockenberry: So it sounds to me like what you're saying is that there may be some temptation on the part of people to look at your work and go -- I think I've heard this, in my kind of pop psychological understanding of play, that somehow, the way animals and humans deal with play, is that it's some sort of rehearsal for adult activity. Your work seems to suggest that that is powerfully wrong. SB: Yeah, I don't think that's accurate, and I think probably because animals have taught us that. If you stop a cat from playing -- which you can do, and we've all seen how cats bat around stuff -- they're just as good predators as they would be if they hadn't played. And if you imagine a kid pretending to be King Kong, or a race car driver, or a fireman, they don't all become race car drivers or firemen, you know. So there's a disconnect between preparation for the future -- which is what most people are comfortable in thinking about play as -- and thinking of it as a separate biological entity. And this is where my chasing animals for four, five years really changed my perspective from a clinician to what I am now, which is that play has a biological place, just like sleep and dreams do. And if you look at sleep and dreams biologically, animals sleep and dream, and they rehearse and they do some other things that help memory and that are a very important part of sleep and dreams. The next step of evolution in mammals and creatures with divinely superfluous neurons will be to play. And the fact that the polar bear and husky or magpie and a bear or you and I and our dogs can crossover and have that experience sets play aside as something separate. And its hugely important in learning and crafting the brain. So it's not just something you do in your spare time. JH: How do you keep -- and I know you're part of the scientific research community, and you have to justify your existence with grants and proposals like everyone else -- how do you prevent -- and some of the data that you've produced, the good science that you're talking about you've produced, is hot to handle. How do you prevent either the media's interpretation of your work or the scientific community's interpretation of the implications of your work, kind of like the Mozart metaphor, where, "Oh, MRIs show that play enhances your intelligence. Well, let's round these kids up, put them in pens and make them play for months at a time; they'll all be geniuses and go to Harvard." How do you prevent people from taking that sort of action on the data that you're developing? SB: Well, I think the only way I know to do it is to have accumulated the advisers that I have who go from practitioners -- who can establish through improvisational play or clowning or whatever -- a state of play. So people know that it's there. And then you get an fMRI specialist, and you get Frank Wilson, and you get other kinds of hard scientists, including neuroendocrinologists. And you get them into a group together focused on play, and it's pretty hard not to take it seriously. Unfortunately, that hasn't been done sufficiently for the National Science Foundation, National Institute of Mental Health or anybody else to really look at it in this way seriously. I mean you don't hear about anything that's like cancer or heart disease associated with play. And yet I see it as something that's just as basic for survival -- long term -- as learning some of the basic things about public health. JH: Stuart Brown, thank you very much. (Applause)
Philosophers, dramatists, theologians have grappled with this question for centuries: what makes people go wrong? Interestingly, I asked this question when I was a little kid. I grew up in the South Bronx, inner-city ghetto in New York, and I was surrounded by evil, as all kids are who grew up in an inner city. And I had friends who were really good kids, who lived out the Dr. Jekyll Mr. Hyde scenario -- Robert Louis Stevenson. That is, they took drugs, got in trouble, went to jail. Some got killed, and some did it without drug assistance. So when I read Robert Louis Stevenson, that wasn't fiction. The only question is, what was in the juice? And more importantly, that line between good and evil -- which privileged people like to think is fixed and impermeable, with them on the good side, the others on the bad side -- I knew that line was movable, and it was permeable. Good people could be seduced across that line, and under good and some rare circumstances, bad kids could recover with help, with reform, with rehabilitation. So I want to begin with this wonderful illusion by [Dutch] artist M.C. Escher. If you look at it and focus on the white, what you see is a world full of angels. But let's look more deeply, and as we do, what appears is the demons, the devils in the world. That tells us several things. One, the world is, was, will always be filled with good and evil, because good and evil is the yin and yang of the human condition. It tells me something else. If you remember, God's favorite angel was Lucifer. Apparently, Lucifer means "the light." It also means "the morning star," in some scripture. And apparently, he disobeyed God, and that's the ultimate disobedience to authority. And when he did, Michael, the archangel, was sent to kick him out of heaven along with the other fallen angels. And so Lucifer descends into hell, becomes Satan, becomes the devil, and the force of evil in the universe begins. Paradoxically, it was God who created hell as a place to store evil. He didn't do a good job of keeping it there though. So, this arc of the cosmic transformation of God's favorite angel into the Devil, for me, sets the context for understanding human beings who are transformed from good, ordinary people into perpetrators of evil. So the Lucifer effect, although it focuses on the negatives -- the negatives that people can become, not the negatives that people are -- leads me to a psychological definition. Evil is the exercise of power. And that's the key: it's about power. To intentionally harm people psychologically, to hurt people physically, to destroy people mortally, or ideas, and to commit crimes against humanity. If you Google "evil," a word that should surely have withered by now, you come up with 136 million hits in a third of a second. A few years ago -- I am sure all of you were shocked, as I was, with the revelation of American soldiers abusing prisoners in a strange place in a controversial war, Abu Ghraib in Iraq. And these were men and women who were putting prisoners through unbelievable humiliation. I was shocked, but I wasn't surprised, because I had seen those same visual parallels when I was the prison superintendent of the Stanford Prison Study. Immediately the Bush administration military said what? What all administrations say when there's a scandal: "Don't blame us. It's not the system. It's the few bad apples, the few rogue soldiers." My hypothesis is, American soldiers are good, usually. Maybe it was the barrel that was bad. But how am I going to deal with that hypothesis? I became an expert witness for one of the guards, Sergeant Chip Frederick, and in that position, I had access to the dozen investigative reports. I had access to him. I could study him, have him come to my home, get to know him, do psychological analysis to see, was he a good apple or bad apple. And thirdly, I had access to all of the 1,000 pictures that these soldiers took. These pictures are of a violent or sexual nature. All of them come from the cameras of American soldiers. Because everybody has a digital camera or cell phone camera, they took pictures of everything, more than 1,000. And what I've done is I organized them into various categories. But these are by United States military police, army reservists. They are not soldiers prepared for this mission at all. And it all happened in a single place, Tier 1-A, on the night shift. Why? Tier 1-A was the center for military intelligence. It was the interrogation hold. The CIA was there. Interrogators from Titan Corporation, all there, and they're getting no information about the insurgency. So they're going to put pressure on these soldiers, military police, to cross the line, give them permission to break the will of the enemy, to prepare them for interrogation, to soften them up, to take the gloves off. Those are the euphemisms, and this is how it was interpreted. Let's go down to that dungeon. (Typewriting) [Abu Ghraib Iraq Prison Abuses 2008 Military Police Guards' Photos] [The following images include nudity and graphic depictions of violence] (Camera shutter sounds) (Thuds) (Camera shutter) (Camera shutter) (Breathing) (Bells) (Bells end) So, pretty horrific. That's one of the visual illustrations of evil. And it should not have escaped you that the reason I paired the prisoner with his arms out with Leonardo da Vinci's ode to humanity is that that prisoner was mentally ill. That prisoner covered himself with shit every day, they had to roll him in dirt so he wouldn't stink. But the guards ended up calling him "Shit Boy." What was he doing in that prison rather than in some mental institution? In any event, here's former Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld. He comes down and says, "I want to know, who is responsible? Who are the bad apples?" Well, that's a bad question. You have to reframe it and ask, "What is responsible?" "What" could be the who of people, but it could also be the what of the situation, and obviously that's wrongheaded. How do psychologists try to understand such transformations of human character, if you believe that they were good soldiers before they went down to that dungeon? There are three ways. The main way is called dispositional. We look at what's inside of the person, the bad apples. This is the foundation of all of social science, the foundation of religion, the foundation of war. Social psychologists like me come along and say, "Yeah, people are the actors on the stage, but you'll have to be aware of the situation. Who are the cast of characters? What's the costume? Is there a stage director?" And so we're interested in what are the external factors around the individual -- the bad barrel? Social scientists stop there and they miss the big point that I discovered when I became an expert witness for Abu Ghraib. The power is in the system. The system creates the situation that corrupts the individuals, and the system is the legal, political, economic, cultural background. And this is where the power is of the bad-barrel makers. If you want to change a person, change the situation. And to change it, you've got to know where the power is, in the system. So the Lucifer effect involves understanding human character transformations with these three factors. And it's a dynamic interplay. What do the people bring into the situation? What does the situation bring out of them? And what is the system that creates and maintains that situation? My recent book, "The Lucifer Effect," is about, how do you understand how good people turn evil? And it has a lot of detail about what I'm going to talk about today. So Dr. Z's "Lucifer Effect," although it focuses on evil, really is a celebration of the human mind's infinite capacity to make any of us kind or cruel, caring or indifferent, creative or destructive, and it makes some of us villains. And the good news that I'm going to hopefully come to at the end is that it makes some of us heroes. This wonderful cartoon in the New Yorker summarizes my whole talk: "I'm neither a good cop nor a bad cop, Jerome. Like yourself, I'm a complex amalgam of positive and negative personality traits that emerge or not, depending on the circumstances." (Laughter) There's a study some of you think you know about, but very few people have ever read the story. You watched the movie. This is Stanley Milgram, little Jewish kid from the Bronx, and he asked the question, "Could the Holocaust happen here, now?" People say, "No, that's Nazi Germany, Hitler, you know, that's 1939." He said, "Yeah, but suppose Hitler asked you, 'Would you electrocute a stranger?' 'No way, I'm a good person.'" He said, "Why don't we put you in a situation and give you a chance to see what you would do?" And so what he did was he tested 1,000 ordinary people. 500 New Haven, Connecticut, 500 Bridgeport. And the ad said, "Psychologists want to understand memory. We want to improve people's memory, because it is the key to success." OK? "We're going to give you five bucks -- four dollars for your time. We don't want college students. We want men between 20 and 50." In the later studies, they ran women. Ordinary people: barbers, clerks, white-collar people. So, you go down, one of you will be a learner, one will be a teacher. The learner's a genial, middle-aged guy. He gets tied up to the shock apparatus in another room. The learner could be middle-aged, could be as young as 20. And one of you is told by the authority, the guy in the lab coat, "Your job as teacher is to give him material to learn. Gets it right, reward. Gets it wrong, you press a button on the shock box. The first button is 15 volts. He doesn't even feel it." That's the key. All evil starts with 15 volts. And then the next step is another 15 volts. The problem is, at the end of the line, it's 450 volts. And as you go along, the guy is screaming, "I've got a heart condition! I'm out of here!" You're a good person. You complain. "Sir, who will be responsible if something happens to him?" The experimenter says, "Don't worry, I will be responsible. Continue, teacher." And the question is, who would go all the way to 450 volts? You should notice here, when it gets up to 375, it says, "Danger. Severe Shock." When it gets up to here, there's "XXX" -- the pornography of power. So Milgram asks 40 psychiatrists, "What percent of American citizens would go to the end?" They said only one percent. Because that's sadistic behavior, and we know, psychiatry knows, only one percent of Americans are sadistic. OK. Here's the data. They could not be more wrong. Two thirds go all the way to 450 volts. This was just one study. Milgram did more than 16 studies. And look at this. In study 16, where you see somebody like you go all the way, 90 percent go all the way. In study five, if you see people rebel, 90 percent rebel. What about women? Study 13 -- no different than men. So Milgram is quantifying evil as the willingness of people to blindly obey authority, to go all the way to 450 volts. And it's like a dial on human nature. A dial in a sense that you can make almost everybody totally obedient, down to the majority, down to none. What are the external parallels? For all research is artificial. What's the validity in the real world? 912 American citizens committed suicide or were murdered by family and friends in Guyana jungle in 1978, because they were blindly obedient to this guy, their pastor -- not their priest -- their pastor, Reverend Jim Jones. He persuaded them to commit mass suicide. And so, he's the modern Lucifer effect, a man of God who becomes the Angel of Death. Milgram's study is all about individual authority to control people. Most of the time, we are in institutions, so the Stanford Prison Study is a study of the power of institutions to influence individual behavior. Interestingly, Stanley Milgram and I were in the same high school class in James Monroe in the Bronx, 1954. I did this study with my graduate students, especially Craig Haney -- and it also began work with an ad. We had a cheap, little ad, but we wanted college students for a study of prison life. 75 people volunteered, took personality tests. We did interviews. Picked two dozen: the most normal, the most healthy. Randomly assigned them to be prisoner and guard. So on day one, we knew we had good apples. I'm going to put them in a bad situation. And secondly, we know there's no difference between the boys who will be guards and those who will be prisoners. To the prisoners, we said, "Wait at home. The study will begin Sunday." We didn't tell them that the city police were going to come and do realistic arrests. (Video) (Music) [Day 1] Student: A police car pulls up in front, and a cop comes to the front door, and knocks, and says he's looking for me. So they, right there, you know, they took me out the door, they put my hands against the car. It was a real cop car, it was a real policeman, and there were real neighbors in the street, who didn't know that this was an experiment. And there was cameras all around and neighbors all around. They put me in the car, then they drove me around Palo Alto. They took me to the basement of the police station. Then they put me in a cell. I was the first one to be picked up, so they put me in a cell, which was just like a room with a door with bars on it. You could tell it wasn't a real jail. They locked me in there, in this degrading little outfit. They were taking this experiment too seriously. Here are the prisoners, who are going to be dehumanized, they'll become numbers. Here are the guards with the symbols of power and anonymity. Guards get prisoners to clean the toilet bowls out with their bare hands, to do other humiliating tasks. They strip them naked. They sexually taunt them. They begin to do degrading activities, like having them simulate sodomy. You saw simulating fellatio in soldiers in Abu Ghraib. My guards did it in five days. The stress reaction was so extreme that normal kids we picked because they were healthy had breakdowns within 36 hours. The study ended after six days, because it was out of control. Five kids had emotional breakdowns. Does it make a difference if warriors go to battle changing their appearance or not? If they're anonymous, how do they treat their victims? In some cultures, they go to war without changing their appearance. In others, they paint themselves like "Lord of the Flies." In some, they wear masks. In many, soldiers are anonymous in uniform. So this anthropologist, John Watson, found 23 cultures that had two bits of data. Do they change their appearance? 15. Do they kill, torture, mutilate? 13. If they don't change their appearance, only one of eight kills, tortures or mutilates. The key is in the red zone. If they change their appearance, 12 of 13 -- that's 90 percent -- kill, torture, mutilate. And that's the power of anonymity. So what are the seven social processes that grease the slippery slope of evil? Mindlessly taking the first small step. Dehumanization of others. De-individuation of self. Diffusion of personal responsibility. Blind obedience to authority. Uncritical conformity to group norms. Passive tolerance of evil through inaction, or indifference. And it happens when you're in a new or unfamiliar situation. Your habitual response patterns don't work. Your personality and morality are disengaged. "Nothing is easier than to denounce the evildoer; nothing more difficult than understanding him," Dostoyevsky. Understanding is not excusing. Psychology is not excuse-ology. So social and psychological research reveals how ordinary, good people can be transformed without the drugs. You don't need it. You just need the social-psychological processes. Real world parallels? Compare this with this. James Schlesinger -- I'm going to end with this -- says, "Psychologists have attempted to understand how and why individuals and groups who usually act humanely can sometimes act otherwise in certain circumstances." That's the Lucifer effect. And he goes on to say, "The landmark Stanford study provides a cautionary tale for all military operations." If you give people power without oversight, it's a prescription for abuse. They knew that, and let that happen. So another report, an investigative report by General Fay, says the system is guilty. In this report, he says it was the environment that created Abu Ghraib, by leadership failures that contributed to the occurrence of such abuse, and because it remained undiscovered by higher authorities for a long period of time. Those abuses went on for three months. Who was watching the store? The answer is nobody, I think on purpose. He gave the guards permission to do those things, and they knew nobody was ever going to come down to that dungeon. So you need a paradigm shift in all of these areas. The shift is away from the medical model that focuses only on the individual. The shift is toward a public health model that recognizes situational and systemic vectors of disease. Bullying is a disease. Prejudice is a disease. Violence is a disease. Since the Inquisition, we've been dealing with problems at the individual level. It doesn't work. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn says, "The line between good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being." That means that line is not out there. That's a decision that you have to make, a personal thing. So I want to end very quickly on a positive note. Heroism as the antidote to evil, by promoting the heroic imagination, especially in our kids, in our educational system. We want kids to think, "I'm a hero in waiting, waiting for the right situation to come along, and I will act heroically. My whole life, I'm now going to focus away from evil -- that I've been in since I was a kid -- to understanding heroes. Banality of heroism. It's ordinary people who do heroic deeds. It's the counterpoint to Hannah Arendt's "Banality of Evil." Our traditional societal heroes are wrong, because they are the exceptions. They organize their life around this. That's why we know their names. Our kids' heroes are also wrong models for them, because they have supernatural talents. We want our kids to realize most heroes are everyday people, and the heroic act is unusual. This is Joe Darby. He was the one that stopped those abuses you saw, because when he saw those images, he turned them over to a senior investigating officer. He was a low-level private, and that stopped it. Was he a hero? No. They had to put him in hiding, because people wanted to kill him, and then his mother and his wife. For three years, they were in hiding. This is the woman who stopped the Stanford Prison Study. When I said it got out of control, I was the prison superintendent. I didn't know it was out of control. I was totally indifferent. She saw that madhouse and said, "You know what, it's terrible what you're doing to those boys. They're not prisoners nor guards, they're boys, and you are responsible." And I ended the study the next day. The good news is I married her the next year. (Laughter) (Applause) I just came to my senses, obviously. So situations have the power to do [three things]. But the point is, this is the same situation that can inflame the hostile imagination in some of us, that makes us perpetrators of evil, can inspire the heroic imagination in others. It's the same situation and you're on one side or the other. Most people are guilty of the evil of inaction, because your mother said, "Don't get involved. Mind your own business." And you have to say, "Mama, humanity is my business." So the psychology of heroism is -- we're going to end in a moment -- how do we encourage children in new hero courses, that I'm working on with Matt Langdon -- he has a hero workshop -- to develop this heroic imagination, this self-labeling, "I am a hero in waiting," and teach them skills. To be a hero, you have to learn to be a deviant, because you're always going against the conformity of the group. Heroes are ordinary people whose social actions are extraordinary. Who act. The key to heroism is two things. You have to act when other people are passive. B: You have to act socio-centrically, not egocentrically. And I want to end with a known story about Wesley Autrey, New York subway hero. Fifty-year-old African-American construction worker standing on a subway. A white guy falls on the tracks. The subway train is coming. There's 75 people there. You know what? They freeze. He's got a reason not to get involved. He's black, the guy's white, and he's got two kids. Instead, he gives his kids to a stranger, jumps on the tracks, puts the guy between the tracks, lays on him, the subway goes over him. Wesley and the guy -- 20 and a half inches height. The train clearance is 21 inches. A half an inch would have taken his head off. And he said, "I did what anyone could do," no big deal to jump on the tracks. And the moral imperative is "I did what everyone should do." And so one day, you will be in a new situation. Take path one, you're going to be a perpetrator of evil. Evil, meaning you're going to be Arthur Andersen. You're going to cheat, or you're going to allow bullying. Path two, you become guilty of the evil of passive inaction. Path three, you become a hero. The point is, are we ready to take the path to celebrating ordinary heroes, waiting for the right situation to come along to put heroic imagination into action? Because it may only happen once in your life, and when you pass it by, you'll always know, I could have been a hero and I let it pass me by. So the point is thinking it and then doing it. So I want to thank you. Thank you. Let's oppose the power of evil systems at home and abroad, and let's focus on the positive. Advocate for respect of personal dignity, for justice and peace, which sadly our administration has not been doing. Thanks so much. (Applause)
I bring to you a message from tens of thousands of people -- in the villages, in the slums, in the hinterland of the country -- who have solved problems through their own genius, without any outside help. When our home minister announces a few weeks ago a war on one third of India, about 200 districts that he mentioned were ungovernable, he missed the point. The point that we have been stressing for the last 21 years, the point that people may be economically poor, but they're not poor in the mind. In other words, the minds on the margin are not the marginal minds. That is the message, which we started 31 years ago. And what did it start? Let me just tell you, briefly, my personal journey, which led me to come to this point. In '85, '86, I was in Bangladesh advising the government and the research council there how to help scientists work on the lands, on the fields of the poor people, and how to develop research technologies, which are based on the knowledge of the people. I came back in '86. I had been tremendously invigorated by the knowledge and creativity that I found in that country, which had 60 percent landlessness but amazing creativity. I started looking at my own work: The work that I had done for the previous 10 years, almost every time, had instances of knowledge that people had shared. Now, I was paid in dollars as a consultant, and I looked at my income tax return and tried to ask myself: "Is there a line in my return, which shows how much of this income has gone to the people whose knowledge has made it possible? Was it because I'm brilliant that I'm getting this reward, or because of the revolution? Is it that I write very well? Is it that I articulate very well? Is it that I analyze the data very well? Is it because I'm a professor, and, therefore, I must be entitled to this reward from society?" I tried to convince myself that, "No, no, I have worked for the policy changes. You know, the public policy will become more responsive to the needs of the poor, and, therefore I think it's okay." But it appeared to me that all these years that I'd been working on exploitation -- exploitation by landlords, by moneylenders, by traders -- gave me an insight that probably I was also an exploiter, because there was no line in my income tax return which showed this income accrued because of the brilliance of the people -- those people who have shared their knowledge and good faith and trust with me -- and nothing ever went back to them. So much so, that much of my work till that time was in the English language. The majority of the people from whom I learned didn't know English. So what kind of a contributor was I? I was talking about social justice, and here I was, a professional who was pursuing the most unjust act -- of taking knowledge from the people, making them anonymous, getting rent from that knowledge by sharing it and doing consultancy, writing papers and publishing them in the papers, getting invited to the conferences, getting consultancies and whatever have you. So then, a dilemma rose in the mind that, if I'm also an exploiter, then this is not right; life cannot go on like that. And this was a moment of great pain and trauma because I couldn't live with it any longer. So I did a review of ethical dilemma and value conflicts and management research, wrote, read about 100 papers. And I came to the conclusion that while dilemma is unique, dilemma is not unique; the solution had to be unique. And one day -- I don't know what happened -- while coming back from the office towards home, maybe I saw a honey bee or it occurred to my mind that if I only could be like the honey bee, life would be wonderful. What the honey bee does: it pollinates, takes nectar from the flower, pollinates another flower, cross-pollinates. And when it takes the nectar, the flowers don't feel shortchanged. In fact, they invite the honey bees through their colors, and the bees don't keep all the honey for themselves. These are the three guiding principles of the Honey Bee Network: that whenever we learn something from people it must be shared with them in their language. They must not remain anonymous. And I must tell you that after 20 years, I have not made one percent of change in the professional practice of this art. That is a great tragedy -- which I'm carrying still with me and I hope that all of you will carry this with you -- that the profession still legitimizes publication of knowledge of people without attributing them by making them anonymous. The research guidelines of U.S. National Academy of Sciences or Research Councils of the U.K. or of Indian Councils of Science Research do not require that whatever you learn from people, you must share back with them. We are talking about an accountable society, a society that is fair and just, and we don't even do justice in the knowledge market. And India wants to be a knowledge society. How will it be a knowledge society? So, obviously, you cannot have two principles of justice, one for yourself and one for others. It must be the same. You cannot discriminate. You cannot be in favor of your own values, which are at a distance from the values that you espouse. So, fairness to one and to the other is not divisible. Look at this picture. Can you tell me where has it been taken from, and what is it meant for? Anybody? I'm a professor; I must quiz you. (Laughter) Anybody? Any guess at all? Pardon? (Audience Member: Rajasthan.) Anil Gupta: But what has it been used for? What has it been used for? (Murmuring) Pardon? You know, you're so right. We must give him a hand, because this man knows how insensitive our government is. Look at this. This is the site of the government of India. It invites tourists to see the shame of our country. I'm so sorry to say that. Is this a beautiful picture or is it a terrible picture? It depends upon how you look at the life of the people. If this woman has to carry water on her head for miles and miles and miles, you cannot be celebrating that. We should be doing something about it. And let me tell you, with all the science and technology at our command, millions of women still carry water on their heads. And we do not ask this question. You must have taken tea in the morning. Think for a minute. The leaves of the tea, plucked from the bushes; you know what the action is? The action is: The lady picks up a few leaves, puts them in the basket on the backside. Just do it 10 times; you will realize the pain in this shoulder. And she does it a few thousand times every day. The rice that you ate in the lunch, and you will eat today, is transplanted by women bending in a very awkward posture, millions of them, every season, in the paddy season, when they transplant paddy with their feet in the water. And feet in the water will develop fungus, infections, and that infection pains because then other insects bite that point. And every year, 99.9 percent of the paddy is transplanted manually. No machines have been developed. So the silence of scientists, of technologists, of public policy makers, of the change agent, drew our attention that this is not on, this is not on; this is not the way society will work. This is not what our parliament would do. You know, we have a program for employment: One hundred, 250 million people have to be given jobs for 100 days by this great country. Doing what? Breaking stones, digging earth. So we asked a question to the parliament: Do poor have heads? Do poor have legs, mouth and hands, but no head? So Honey Bee Network builds upon the resource in which poor people are rich. And what has happened? An anonymous, faceless, nameless person gets in contact with the network, and then gets an identity. This is what Honey Bee Network is about. And this network grew voluntarily, continues to be voluntary, and has tried to map the minds of millions of people of our country and other parts of the world who are creative. They could be creative in terms of education, they may be creative in terms of culture, they may be creative in terms of institutions; but a lot of our work is in the field of technological creativity, the innovations, either in terms of contemporary innovations, or in terms of traditional knowledge. And it all begins with curiosity. It all begins with curiosity. This person, whom we met -- and you will see it on the website, www.sristi.org -- this tribal person, he had a wish. And he said, "If my wish gets fulfilled" -- somebody was sick and he had to monitor -- "God, please cure him. And if you cure him, I will get my wall painted." And this is what he got painted. Somebody was talking yesterday about Maslowian hierarchy. There could be nothing more wrong than the Maslowian model of hierarchy of needs because the poorest people in this country can get enlightenment. Kabir, Rahim, all the great Sufi saints, they were all poor people, and they had a great reason. (Applause) Please do not ever think that only after meeting your physiological needs and other needs can you be thinking about your spiritual needs or your enlightenment. Any person anywhere is capable of rising to that highest point of attainment, only by the resolve that they have in their mind that they must achieve something. Look at this. We saw it in Shodh Yatra. Every six months we walk in different parts of the country. I've walked about 4,000 kilometers in the last 12 years. So on the wayside we found these dung cakes, which are used as a fuel. Now, this lady, on the wall of the dung cake heap, has made a painting. That's the only space she could express her creativity. And she's so marvelous. Look at this lady, Ram Timari Devi, on a grain bin. In Champaran, we had a Shodh Yatra and we were walking in the land where Gandhiji went to hear about the tragedy, pain of indigo growers. Bhabi Mahato in Purulia and Bankura. Look at what she has done. The whole wall is her canvas. She's sitting there with a broom. Is she an artisan or an artist? Obviously she's an artist; she's a creative person. If we can create markets for these artists, we will not have to employ them for digging earth and breaking stones. They will be paid for what they are good at, not what they're bad at. (Applause) Look at what Rojadeen has done. In Motihari in Champaran, there are a lot of people who sell tea on the shack and, obviously, there's a limited market for tea. Every morning you have tea, as well as coffee. So he thought, why don't I convert a pressure cooker into a coffee machine? So this is a coffee machine. Just takes a few hundred rupees. People bring their own cooker, he attaches a valve and a steam pipe, and now he gives you espresso coffee. (Laughter) Now, this is a real, affordable coffee percolator that works on gas. (Applause) Look at what Sheikh Jahangir has done. A lot of poor people do not have enough grains to get ground. So this fellow is bringing a flour-grinding machine on a two-wheeler. If you have 500 grams, 1000, one kilogram, he will grind it for it for you; the flourmill will not grind such a small quantity. Please understand the problem of poor people. They have needs which have to be met efficiently in terms of energy, in terms of cost, in terms of quality. They don't want second-standard, second-quality outputs. But to be able to give them high-quality output you need to adapt technology to their needs. And that is what Sheikh Jahangir did. But that's not enough, what he did. Look at what he did here. If you have clothes, and you don't have enough time to wash them, he brought a washing machine to your doorstep, mounted on a two-wheeler. So here's a model where a two-wheeler washing machine ... He is washing your clothes and drying them at your doorstep. (Applause) You bring your water, you bring your soap, I wash the clothes for you. Charge 50 paisa, one rupee for you per lot, and a new business model can emerge. Now, what we need is, we need people who will be able to scale them up. Look at this. It looks like a beautiful photograph. But you know what it is? Can anybody guess what it is? Somebody from India would know, of course. It's a tawa. It's a hot plate made of clay. Now, what is the beauty in it? When you have a non-stick pan, it costs about, maybe, 250 rupees, five dollars, six dollars. This is less than a dollar and this is non-stick; it is coated with one of these food-grade materials. And the best part is that, while you use a costly non-stick pan, you eat the so-called Teflon or Teflon-like material because after some time the stuff disappears. Where has it gone? It has gone in your stomach. It was not meant for that. (Laughter) You know? But here in this clay hot plate, it will never go into your stomach. So it is better, it is safer; it is affordable, it is energy-efficient. In other words, solutions by the poor people need not be cheaper, need not be, so-called, jugaad, need not be some kind of makeshift arrangement. They have to be better, they have to be more efficient, they have to be affordable. And that is what Mansukh Bhai Prajapati has done. He has designed this plate with a handle. And now with one dollar, you can afford a better alternative than the people market is offering you. This lady, she developed a herbal pesticide formulation. We filed the patent for her, the National Innovation Foundation. And who knows? Somebody will license this technology and develop marketable products, and she would get revenue. Now, let me mention one thing: I think we need a polycentric model of development, where a large number of initiatives in different parts of the country, in different parts of the world, would solve the needs of locality in a very efficient and adaptive manner. Higher the local fit, greater is the chance of scaling up. In the scaling up, there's an inherent inadequacy to match the needs of the local people, point by point, with the supply that you're making. So why are people willing to adjust with that mismatch? Things can scale up, and they have scaled up. For example, cell phones: We have 400 million cellphones in this country. Now, it is possible that I use only two buttons on the cellphone, only three options on the cellphone. It has 300 options, I'm paying for 300; I'm using only three but I'm willing to live with it, therefore it is scaling up. But if I had to get a match to match, obviously, I would need a different design of a cellphone. So what we're saying is that scalability should not become an enemy of sustainability. There must be a place in the world for solutions that are only relevant for a locality, and yet, one can be able to fund them. One of the greatest studies that we've been finding is that many times investors would ask this question -- "What is a scalable model?" -- as if the need of a community, which is only located in a space and time and has those needs only located in those places, has no legitimate right to get them for free because it's not part of a larger scale. So either you sub-optimize your needs to a larger scale or else you remain out. Now, the eminent model, the long-tail model tells you that small sales of a large number of books, for example, having only a few copies sold can still be a viable model. And we must find a mechanism where people will pool in the portfolio, will invest in the portfolio, where different innovations will go to a small number of people in their localities, and yet, the overall platform of the model will become viable. Look at what he is doing. Saidullah Sahib is an amazing man. At the age of 70, he is linking up something very creative. (Music) Saidullah Sahib: I couldn't wait for the boat. I had to meet my love. My desperation made me an innovator. Even love needs help from technology. Innovation is the light of my wife, Noor. New inventions are the passion of my life. My technology. (Applause) AG: Saidulluh Sahib is in Motihari, again in Champaran. Wonderful human being, but he stills sells, at this age, honey on a cycle to earn his livelihood, because we haven't been able to convince the water park people, the lake people, in [unclear] operations. And we have not been able to convince the fire brigade people in Mumbai -- where there was a flood a few years ago and people had to walk 20 kilometers, wading in the water -- that, look, you should have this cycle in your fire brigade office because you can then go to those lanes where your buses will not go, where your transport will not go. So we have not yet cracked the problem of making it available as a rescue device, as a vending device during the floods in eastern India, when you have to deliver things to people in different islands where they're marooned. But the idea has a merit. The idea has a merit. What has Appachan done? Appachan, unfortunately, is no more, but he has left behind a message. A very powerful message Appachan: I watch the world wake up every day. (Music) It's not that a coconut fell on my head, and I came upon this idea. With no money to fund my studies, I scaled new heights. Now, they call me the local Spiderman. My technology. (Applause) AG: Many of you might not realize and believe that we have sold this product internationally -- what I call a G2G model, grassroots to global. And a professor in the University of Massachusetts, in the zoology department, bought this climber because she wanted to study the insect diversity of the top of the tree canopy. And this device makes it possible for her to take samples from a larger number of palms, rather than only a few, because otherwise she had to make a big platform and then climb her [unclear] would climb on that. So, you know, we are advancing the frontiers of science. Remya Jose has developed ... you can go to the YouTube and find India Innovates and then you will find these videos. Innovation by her when she was in class 10th: a washing machine-cum-exercising machine. Mr. Kharai who is a physically challenged person, one and a half foot height, only. But he has modified a two-wheeler so that he can get autonomy and freedom and flexibility. This innovation is from the slums of Rio. And this person, Mr. Ubirajara. We were talking about, my friends in Brazil, how we scale up this model in China and Brazil. And we have a very vibrant network in China, particularly, but also emerging in Brazil and other parts of the world. This stand on the front wheel, you will not find on any cycle. India and China have the largest number of cycles. But this innovation emerged in Brazil. The point is, none of us should be parochial, none of us should be so nationalistic to believe that all good ideas will come only from our country. No, we have to have the humility to learn from knowledge of economically poor people, wherever they are. And look at this whole range of cycle-based innovations: cycle that's a sprayer, cycle that generates energy from the shocks on the road. I can't change the condition of the road, but I can make the cycle run faster. That is what Kanak Das has done. And in South Africa, we had taken our innovators, and many of us had gone there share with the colleagues in South Africa as to how innovation can become a means of liberation from the drudgery that people have. And this is a donkey cart which they modified. There's an axle here, of 30, 40 kg, serving no purpose. Remove it, the cart needs one donkey less. This is in China. This girl needed a breathing apparatus. These three people in the village sat down and decided to think, "How do we elongate the life of this girl of our village?" They were not related to her, but they tried to find out, "How can we use ... " They used a cycle, they put together a breathing apparatus. And this breathing apparatus now saved the life, and she's very welcome. There's a whole range of innovations that we have. A car, which runs on compressed air with six paisa per kilometer. Assam, Kanak Gogoi. And you would not find this car in U.S. or Europe, but this is available in India. Now, this lady, she used to do the winding of the yarn for Pochampally Saree. In one day, 18,000 times, she had to do this winding to generate two sarees. This is what her son has done after seven years of struggle. She said, "Change your profession." He said, "I can't. This is the only thing I know, but I'll invent a machine, which will solve your problem." And this is what he did, a sewing machine in Uttar Pradesh. So, this is what SRISTI is saying: "Give me a place to stand, and I will move the world." I will just tell you that we are also doing a competition among children for creativity, a whole range of things. We have sold things all over the world, from Ethiopia to Turkey to U.S. to wherever. Products have gone to the market, a few. These are the people whose knowledge made this Herbavate cream for eczema possible. And here, a company which licensed this herbal pesticide put a photograph of the innovator on the packing so that every time a user uses it, it asks the user, "You can also be an innovator. If you have an idea, send it back to us." So, creativity counts, knowledge matters, innovations transform, incentives inspire. And incentives: not just material, but also non-material incentives. Thank you. (Applause)
In 1962, Charles Van Doren, who was later a senior editor of Britannica, said the ideal encyclopedia should be radical -- it should stop being safe. But if you know anything about the history of Britannica since 1962, it was anything but radical: still a very completely safe, stodgy type of encyclopedia. Wikipedia, on the other hand, begins with a very radical idea, and that's for all of us to imagine a world in which every single person on the planet is given free access to the sum of all human knowledge. And that's what we're doing. So Wikipedia -- you just saw the little demonstration of it -- it's a freely licensed encyclopedia. It's written by thousands of volunteers all over the world in many, many languages. It's written using Wiki software -- which is the type of software he just demonstrated -- so anyone can quickly edit and save, and it goes live on the Internet immediately. And everything about Wikipedia is managed by virtually an all-volunteer staff. So when Yochai is talking about new methods of organization, he's exactly describing Wikipedia. And what I'm going to do today is tell you a little bit more about how it really works on the inside. So Wikipedia's owned by the Wikimedia Foundation, which I founded, a nonprofit organization. And our goal, the core aim of the Wikimedia Foundation, is to get a free encyclopedia to every single person on the planet. And so if you think about what that means, it means a lot more than just building a cool website. We're really interested in all the issues of the digital divide, poverty worldwide, empowering people everywhere to have the information that they need to make good decisions. And so we're going to have to do a lot of work that goes beyond just the Internet. And so that's a big part of why we've chosen the free licensing model, because that empowers local entrepreneurs -- or anyone who wants to, can take our content and do anything they like with it -- you can copy it, redistribute it and you can do it commercially or non-commercially. So there's a lot of opportunities that are going to arise around Wikipedia all over the world. We're funded by donations from the public, and one of the more interesting things about that is how little money it actually takes to run Wikipedia. So Yochai showed you the graph of what the cost of a printing press was. And I'm going to tell you what the cost of Wikipedia is, but first I'll show you how big it is. So we've got over 600,000 articles in English. We've got two million total articles across many, many different languages. The biggest languages are German, Japanese, French -- all the Western European languages are quite big. But only around one-third of all of our traffic to our web clusters to the English Wikipedia, which is surprising to a lot of people. A lot of people think in a very English-centric way on the Internet, but for us, we're truly global. We're in many, many languages. How popular we've gotten to be -- we're a top 50 website and we're more popular than the New York Times. So this is where we get to Yochai's discussion. This shows the growth of Wikipedia -- we're the blue line there -- and then this is the New York Times over there. And what's interesting about this is the New York Times website is a huge, enormous corporate operation with -- I have no idea how many hundreds of employees. We have exactly one employee, and that employee is our lead software developer. And he's only been our employee since January 2005, all the other growth before that. So the servers are managed by a rag-tag band of volunteers; all the editing is done by volunteers. And the way that we're organized is not like any traditional organization you can imagine. People are always asking, "Well, who's in charge of this?" or "Who does that?" And the answer is: anybody who wants to pitch in. It's a very unusual and chaotic thing. We've got over 90 servers now in three locations. These are managed by volunteer system administrators who are online. I can go online any time of the day or night and see eight to 10 people waiting for me to ask a question or something, anything about the servers. You could never afford to do this in a company. You could never afford to have a standby crew of people 24 hours a day and do what we're doing at Wikipedia. So we're doing around 1.4 billion page views monthly, so it's really gotten to be a huge thing. And everything is managed by the volunteers. And the total monthly cost for our bandwidth is about 5,000 dollars. And that's essentially our main cost. We could actually do without the employee. We actually -- we hired Brian because he was working part-time for two years and full-time at Wikipedia, so we actually hired him so he could get a life and go to the movies sometimes. So the big question when you've got this really chaotic organization is, why isn't it all rubbish? Why is the website as good as it is? First of all, how good is it? Well, it's pretty good. It isn't perfect, but it's much, much better than you would expect, given our completely chaotic model. So when you saw him make a ridiculous edit to the page about me, you think, oh, this is obviously just going to degenerate into rubbish. But when we've seen quality tests -- and there haven't been enough of these yet and I'm really encouraging people to do more, comparing Wikipedia to traditional things -- we win hands down. So a German magazine compared German Wikipedia, which is really much, much smaller than English, to Microsoft Encarta and to Brockhaus Multimedia, and we won across the board. They hired experts to come and look at articles and compare the quality, and we were very pleased with that result. So a lot of people have heard about the Wikipedia Bush-Kerry controversy. The media has covered this somewhat extensively. It started out with an article in Red Herring. The reporters called me up and they -- I mean, I have to say they spelled my name right, but they really wanted to say, the Bush-Kerry election is so contentious, it's tearing apart the Wikipedia community. And so they quote me as saying, "They're the most contentious in the history of Wikipedia." What I actually said is, they're not contentious at all. So it's a slight misquote. (Laughter) The articles were edited quite heavily. And it is true that we did have to lock the articles on a couple of occasions. Time magazine recently reported that "Extreme action sometimes has to be taken, and Wales locked the entries on Kerry and Bush for most of 2004." This came after I told the reporter that we had to lock it for -- occasionally a little bit here and there. So the truth in general is that the kinds of controversies that you would probably think we have within the Wikipedia community are not really controversies at all. Articles on controversial topics are edited a lot, but they don't cause much controversy within the community. And the reason for this is that most people understand the need for neutrality. The real struggle is not between the right and the left -- that's where most people assume -- but it's between the party of the thoughtful and the party of the jerks. And no side of the political spectrum has a monopoly on either of those qualities. The actual truth about the specific Bush-Kerry incident is that the Bush-Kerry articles were locked less than one percent of the time in 2004, and it wasn't because they were contentious; it was just because there was routine vandalism -- which happens sometimes even on stage, people -- sometimes even reporters have reported to me that they vandalize Wikipedia and were amazed that it was fixed so quickly. And I said -- you know, I always say, please don't do that; that's not a good thing. So how do we do this? How do we manage the quality control? How does it work? So there's a few elements, mostly social policies and some elements of the software. So the biggest and the most important thing is our neutral point-of-view policy. This is something that I set down from the very beginning, as a core principle of the community that's completely not debatable. It's a social concept of cooperation, so we don't talk a lot about truth and objectivity. The reason for this is if we say we're only going to write the "truth" about some topic, that doesn't do us a damn bit of good of figuring out what to write, because I don't agree with you about what's the truth. But we have this jargon term of neutrality, which has its own long history within the community, which basically says, any time there's a controversial issue, Wikipedia itself should not take a stand on the issue. We should merely report on what reputable parties have said about it. So this neutrality policy is really important for us, because it empowers a community that is very diverse to come together and actually get some work done. So we have very diverse contributors in terms of political, religious, cultural backgrounds. By having this firm neutrality policy, which is non-negotiable from the beginning, we ensure that people can work together and that the entries don't become simply a war back and forth between the left and the right. If you engage in that type of behavior, you'll be asked to leave the community. So real-time peer review. Every single change on the site goes to the recent changes page. So as soon as he made his change, it went to the recent changes page. That recent changes page was also fed into IRC channel, which is an Internet chat channel that people are monitoring with various software tools. And people can get RSS feeds -- they can get e-mail notifications of changes. And then users can set up their own personal watch list. So my page is on quite a few volunteers' watch lists, because it is sometimes vandalized. And therefore, what happens is someone will notice the change very quickly, and then they'll just simply revert the change. There's a new pages feed, for example, so you can go to a certain page of Wikipedia and see every new page as it's created. This is really important, because a lot of new pages that get created are just garbage that have to be deleted, you know, ASDFASDF. But also that's some of the most interesting and fun things at Wikipedia, some of the new articles. People will start an article on some interesting topic, other people will find that intriguing and jump in and help and make it much better. So we do have edits by anonymous users, which is one of the most controversial and intriguing things about Wikipedia. So Chris was able to do his change -- he didn't have to log in or anything; he just went on the website and made a change. But it turns out that only about 18 percent of all the edits to the website are done by anonymous users. And that's a really important thing to understand, is that the vast majority of the edits that go on on the website are from a very close-knit community of maybe 600 to 1,000 people who are in constant communication. And we have over 40 IRC channels, 40 mailing lists. All these people know each other. They communicate; we have offline meetings. These are the people who are doing the bulk of the site, and they are, in a sense, semi-professionals at what they're doing, that the standards we set for ourselves are equal to or higher than professional standards of quality. We don't always meet those standards, but that's what we're striving for. And so that tight community is who really cares for the site, and these are some of the smartest people I've ever met. Of course, it's my job to say that, but it's actually true. The type of people who were drawn to writing an encyclopedia for fun tend to be pretty smart people. (Laughter) The tools and the software: there's lots of tools that allow us -- allow us, meaning the community -- to self-monitor and to monitor all the work. This is an example of a page history on "flat earth," and you can see some changes that were made. What's nice about this page is you can immediately take a look at this and see, oh OK, I understand now. When somebody goes and looks at -- they see that someone, an anonymous IP number, made an edit to my page -- that sounds suspicious -- who is this person? Somebody looks at it -- they can immediately see highlighted in red all of the changes that took place, to see, OK, well, these words have changed, things like this. So that's one tool that we can use to very quickly monitor the history of a page. Another thing that we do within the community is we leave everything very open-ended. Most of the social rules and the methods of work are left completely open-ended in the software. All of that stuff is just on Wiki pages. And so there's nothing in the software that enforces the rules. The example I've got up here is a Votes For Deletion page. So, I mentioned earlier, people type ASDFASDF -- it needs to be deleted. Cases like that, the administrators just delete it. There's no reason to have a big argument about it. But you can imagine there's a lot of other areas where the question is, is this notable enough to go in an encyclopedia? Is the information verifiable? Is it a hoax? Is it true? Is it what? So we needed a social method for figuring out the answer to this. And so the method that arose organically within the community is the Votes For Deletion page. And in the particular example we have here, it's a film, "Twisted Issues," and the first person says, "Now this is supposedly a film. It fails the Google test miserably." The Google test is, you look in Google and see if it's there, because if something's not even in Google, it probably doesn't exist at all. It's not a perfect rule, but it's a nice starting point for quick research. So somebody says, "Delete it, please. Delete it -- it's not notable." And then somebody says, "Wait, wait, wait, wait, I found it. I found it in a book, 'Film Threat Video Guide: the 20 Underground Films You Must See.'" Oh, OK. So the next persons says, "Clean it up." Somebody says, "I've found it on IMDB. Keep, keep, keep." And what's interesting about this is that the software is -- these votes are just -- they're just text typed into a page. This is not really a vote so much as it is a dialogue. Now it is true that at the end of the day an administrator can go through here and take a look at this and say, OK, 18 deletes, two keeps: we'll delete it. But in other cases, this could be 18 deletes and two keeps, and we would keep it, because if those last two keeps say, "Wait a minute, wait a minute. Nobody else saw this but I found it in a book, and I found a link to a page that describes it, and I'm going to clean it up tomorrow, so please don't delete it," then it would survive. And it also matters who the people are who are voting. Like I say, it's a tight knit community. Down here at the bottom, "Keep, real movie," Rick Kay. Rick Kay is a very famous Wikipedian who does an enormous amount of work with vandalism, hoaxes and votes for deletion. His voice carries a lot of weight within the community because he knows what he's doing. So how's all this governed? People really want to know about, OK, administrators, things like that. So the Wikipedia governance model, the governance of the community, is a very confusing, but a workable mix of consensus -- meaning we try not to vote on the content of articles, because the majority view is not necessarily neutral. Some amount of democracy, all of the administrators -- these are the people who have the ability to delete pages, that doesn't mean that they have the right to delete pages; they still have to follow all the rules -- but they're elected; they're elected by the community. Sometimes people -- random trolls on the Internet -- like to accuse me of handpicking the administrators to bias the content of the encyclopedia. I always laugh at this, because I have no idea how they're elected, actually. There's a certain amount of aristocracy. And so you've got a hint of that when I mentioned, like, Rick Kay's voice would carry a lot more weight than someone we don't know. I give this talk sometimes with Angela, who was just re-elected to the Board from the community -- to the Board of the Foundation, with more than twice the votes of the person who didn't make it. And I always embarrass her because I say, well, Angela, for example, could get away with doing absolutely anything within Wikipedia, because she's so admired and so powerful. But the irony is, of course, that Angela can do this because she's the one person who you know would never, ever, ever break any rules of Wikipedia. And I also like to say she's the only person who actually knows all the rules of Wikipedia, so ... And then there's monarchy and that's my role on the community, so ... I was describing this in Berlin once and the next day in the newspaper the headline said, "I am the Queen of England." And that's not exactly what I said (Laughter), but -- the point is my role in the community -- within the free software world there's been a longstanding tradition of the "benevolent dictator" model. So if you look at most of the major free software projects, they have one single person in charge who everyone agrees is the benevolent dictator. Well, I don't like the term "benevolent dictator," and I don't think that it's my job or my role in the world of ideas to be the dictator of the future of all human knowledge compiled by the world. It just isn't appropriate. But there is a need still for a certain amount of monarchy, a certain amount of -- sometimes we have to make a decision, and we don't want to get bogged down too heavily in formal decision-making processes. So as an example of why this has been -- or how this can be important: we recently had a situation where a neo-Nazi website discovered Wikipedia, and they said, "Oh, well, this is horrible, this Jewish conspiracy of a website and we're going to get certain articles deleted that we don't like. And we see they have a voting process, so we're going to send -- we have 40,000 members and we're going to send them over and they're all going to vote and get these pages deleted." Well, they managed to get 18 people to show up. That's neo-Nazi math for you. They always think they've got 40,000 members when they've got 18. But they managed to get 18 people to come and vote in a fairly absurd way to delete a perfectly valid article. Of course, the vote ended up being about 85 to 18, so there was no real danger to our democratic processes. On the other hand, people said, "But what are we going to do? I mean, this could happen and what if some group gets really seriously organized and comes in and wants to vote?" Then I said, "Well fuck it, we'll just change the rules." That's my job in the community: to say we won't allow our openness and freedom to undermine the quality of the content. And so as long as people trust me in my role, then that's a valid place for me. Of course, because of the free licensing, if I do a bad job, the volunteers are more than happy to take and leave -- I can't tell anyone what to do. So the final point here is that to understand how Wikipedia works, it's important to understand that our Wiki model is the way we work, but we are not fanatical web anarchists. In fact, we're very flexible about the social methodology, because it's ultimately the passion of the community is for the quality of the work, not necessarily for the process that we use to generate it. Thank you. (Applause) Ben Saunders: Yeah, hi, Ben Saunders. Jimmy, you mentioned impartiality being a key to Wikipedia's success. It strikes me that much of the textbooks that are used to educate our children are inherently biased. Have you found Wikipedia being used by teachers, and how do you see Wikipedia changing education? Jimmy Wales: Yeah, so, a lot of teachers are beginning to use Wikipedia. There's a media storyline about Wikipedia, which I think is false. It builds on the storyline of bloggers versus newspapers. And the storyline is, there's this crazy thing, Wikipedia, but academics hate it and teachers hate it. And that turns out to not be true. The last time I got an e-mail from a journalist saying, "Why do academics hate Wikipedia?" I sent it from my Harvard email address, because I was recently appointed a fellow there. And I said, "Well, they don't all hate it." (Laughter) But I think there's going to be huge impacts. And we actually have a project that I'm personally really excited about, which is the Wiki books project, which is an effort to create textbooks in all the languages. And that's a much bigger project; it's going to take 20 years or so to come to fruition. But part of that is to fulfill our mission of giving an encyclopedia to every single person on the planet. We don't mean we're going to spam them with AOL-style CDs. We mean we're going to give them a tool that they can use. And for a lot of people in the world, if I give you an encyclopedia that's written at a university level, it doesn't do you any good without a whole host of literacy materials to build you up to the point where you can actually use it. And so the Wiki books project is an effort to do that. And I think that we're going to really see a huge -- it may not even come from us; there's all kinds of innovation going on. But freely licensed textbooks are the next big thing in education.
Welcome to 10,000 feet. Let me explain why we are here and why some of you have a pine cone close to you. Once upon a time, I did a book called "How Buildings Learn." Today's event you might call "How Mountains Teach." A little background: For 10 years I've been trying to figure out how to hack civilization so that we can get long-term thinking to be automatic and common instead of difficult and rare -- or in some cases, non-existent. It would be helpful if humanity got into the habit of thinking of the now not just as next week or next quarter, but you know, next 10,000 years and the last 10,000 years -- basically civilization's story so far. So we have the Long Now Foundation in San Francisco. It's an incubator for about a dozen projects, all having to do with continuity over the long term. Our core project is a rather ambitious folly -- I suppose, a mythic undertaking: to build a 10,000-year clock that can really keep good time for that long a period. And the design problems of a project like that are just absolutely delicious. Go to the clock. And what we have here is something many of you saw here three years ago. It's the first working prototype of the clock. It's about nine feet high. Designed by Danny Hillis and Alexander Rose. It's presently in London, and is ticking away very deliberately at the science museum there. So the design problem for today is going to be, how do you house an eventual monumental clock like this so it can really tick, save time beautifully for 100 centuries? Well, this was the first solution. Alexander Rose came up with this idea of a spiraloid tower with continuous sloping ramps. And it looked like a way to go, until you start thinking about, what does deep time do to a building? Well, this is what deep time does to a building. This is the Parthenon. It's only 2,450 years old, and look what happened to it. Here's a beautiful project. They really knew it'd last forever, because they'd build it out of absolutely huge stones. And now it's a pathetic ruin and no one even knows what it was used for. That's what happens to buildings. They're vulnerable. Even the most durable and intactable buildings, like the pyramids of Giza, are in bad shape when you look up close. They've been looted inside and out. And they're built to protect things but they don't protect things. So we got to thinking, if you can't put things safely in a building, where can you safely put them? We thought, OK, underground. How about underground with a view? Underground in a place that's really solid. So the obvious answer was, we need a mountain. You don't want just any mountain. You need absolutely the right mountain if you're going to have a clock for 10,000 years. So here's an image of the long view of the search problem. And we got to thinking for various reasons it ought to be a desert mountain, so we got looking in the dry areas of the Southwest. We looked at mesas in New Mexico. We were looking at dead volcanoes in Arizona. Then Roger Kennedy, who was the director of the National Parks Service, led us to Eastern Nevada, to America's newest and oldest national park, which is called Great Basin National Park. It's right on the eastern border of Nevada. It's the highest range in the state -- over 13,000 feet. And you'll notice that on the left, on the left, on the west, it's very steep, and on the right it's gentle. This place is remote. It's over 200 miles from any major city. It's nowhere near any Interstate or railroad. And it's -- the only thing that goes by is what's called America's loneliest highway, U.S. 50. Now, inside the yellow line here, on the right is -- that's all national park. Inside the green line is national forest. And then over to the left is Bureau of Land Management land and some private land. Now, as it happened, that two-mile-long strip right in the middle, this vertical, was available because it was private land. And thanks to Jay Walker who was here and Mitch Kapor who was here, who started the process, Long Now was able to get that two-mile-long strip of land. And now let's look at the grand truth of what's there. We're in Pole Canyon, looking west up the western escarpment of Mount Washington, which is 11,600 feet on top. Those white cliffs are a dense Cambrian limestone. That's a 2,000-foot thick formation, and it might be a beautiful place to hide a clock. It would be a pilgrimage to get to it; it would be a serious hike to get up to where the clock is. So last June, the Long Now board, some staff and some donors and advisors, made a two-week expedition to the mountain to explore it and investigate, one, if it's the right mountain, and two, if it's the right mountain, how it might actually work for us. Now Danny Hillis sort of framed the problem. He has a theory of how the overall clock experience should work. It's what he calls the seven stages of a mythic adventure. It starts with the image. The image is a picture you have in your mind of the goal at the end of the journey. In this case it might well be an image of the clock. Then there's the point of embarkation, that is, the point of transition from ordinary life to being a pilgrim on a quest. Then -- this is a nice image of it, there's the labyrinth. The labyrinth is a concept, it's like a twilight zone, it's a place where it's difficult, where you get disoriented, maybe you get scared -- but you have to go through it if you're going to get to some kind of deep reintegration. Then there should always be in sight the draw -- a kind of a beacon that draws you on through the labyrinth to finish the process of getting there. Now Brian Eno, who's been in the thick of the Long Now process, spent two years making a C.D. called "January 7003," and it's "Bell Studies for the Clock of the Long Now." Based on -- parts of it are based on an algorithm that Danny Hillis developed, so that a peal of 10 bells makes a different peal every day for 10,000 years. The Hillis algorithm. 10 factorial gives you that number. And in fact, pretty soon we'll hear the sound. January 7003. There it is. OK, back to Danny's list. Number five of the seven is the payoff. This is it. The climax. The goal. The main thing that you're trying to get to. And then Danny says a really great journey will have a secret payoff. Something you didn't expect that caps what you did expect. Then there's the return. You've got to have a gradual return to the ordinary world, so you have time to assimilate what you've learned. And then, how about a memento? Number seven. At the end of it there's something physical, a kind of reward that you take away. It might be a piece of a core drill of the mountain. Something that's just yours. How do you study a mountain for the kinds of things we're talking about? This is not a normal building project. What do you look for? What are the elements that will most affect your ideas and decisions? Start with borders. If you look on the left side of the cliffs here, that's national park. That's sacrosanct -- you can't do anything with that. To the right of it is national forest. There's possibilities. The borders are important. Other elements were mines, weather, approaches and elevation. And especially trees. Look at those things up on top there. It turns out that Mount Washington is covered with bristlecone pines. They're the world's oldest living thing. People think they're just the size of shrubs, but that's not actually true. There are trees on that mountain that are 5,000 years old and still living. The wood is so solid it's like stone, and it lasts for a long time. So when you do tree ring studies of trunks that are on the mountain, some of them go back 10,000 years. The stone itself is absolutely beautiful, sculpted by millennia of very tough winters up there. We had tree ring analysts from the University of Arizona join us on the expedition. Now, if you guys have a pine cone handy, now's a good time to put it in your hand and feel it, especially on the end. That's interesting. You'll find out why it's called a bristlecone pine. A little sensory experience. Here's Danny Hillis in the midst of a bristlecone pine forest on Long Now land. I should say that the age of bristlecones was discovered, led by a theory. Edmund Schulman in the 1950s had been studying trees under great stress at Timberline, and came to the realization that he put in an article in Science magazine called, "Longevity under Adversity in Conifers." And then, based on that principle, he started looking around at the various trees at Timberline, and realized that the bristlecone pines -- he found some in the White Mountains that were over 4,000 years old. Longevity under adversity is a pretty interesting design principle in its own right. OK, onto the mines. The first asking price for the property when we looked at it in 1998 was one billion dollars for 180 acres and a couple of mines. Because the owner said, "There's one billion dollars of beryllium in that mountain." And we said, "Wow, that's great. Listen, we'll counter. How about zero? (Laughter) And we're a non-profit foundation, you can give us the property and take a hell of a tax deduction. (Laughter) All you have to do is prove to the government it's worth a billion dollars." Well, a few years went by and there was some kind of back and forth, and by and by, thanks to Mitch and Jay, we were able to buy the whole property for 140,000 dollars. This is one of the mines. It doesn't have any beryllium in it. It's called the Pole Adit. And it does have tungsten, a little bit of tungsten, left over, that's the kind of mine it was. But it goes a mile-and-a-half in a straight line, due east into the range, into very interesting territory -- except that, as you'll see when we go inside in a minute, we were hoping for limestone but in there is just shale. And shale is not quite completely competent rock. Competent rock is rock that will hold itself up without any shoring. The shale would like some shoring, and so parts of it are caved in in there. That's Ben Roberts from -- he's the bat specialist from the National Park. But there are many wonders back in there, like this weird fungus on some of the collapsed timbers. OK, here's another mine that's up on top of the property, and it dates back to 1870. That's what the property was originally built around -- it was a set of mining claims. It was a very productive silver mine. In fact, it was the highest-operating mine in Nevada, and it ran year round. You can imagine what it was like in the winter at 10,000 feet. You may recognize a couple of the miners there. There's Jeff Bezos on the right and Paul Saville on the left looking for galena, which is the lead-silver thing. They didn't find any. They both kept their day jobs. Here's the last mine. It's called the Bonanza Adit. It's down in a canyon. And Alexander Rose on the left there worked with a bunch of people from the National Park to survey the whole mine. It's a mile deep. And they also found four species of bats in there. Now, almost all those mines, by the way, meet underneath the mountain. They don't quite, but it's something to think about. They don't quite meet. Let's go to weather. Mountains specialize in interesting weather. Way more interesting than Monterey even today. And so one Tuesday morning last June, there we were. Woke up in the morning -- the mountain was covered with snow. That was a great time to go up and visit our weather station which again, thanks to Mitch Kapor, we're building up there. And it's a pretty interesting scene. This is, on the left there, the joyful lady is Pat Irwin, who's the regional head of the National Forest Service, and they gave us the temporary use permit to be there. We want a temporary use permit for the clock, eventually -- 10,000-year temporary use permit. (Laughter) The weather station's pretty interesting. Kurt Bollacker and Alexander Rose designed a radically wireless station. It runs on solar, and it sends a signal with that antenna and bounces it off of micrometeorite trails in the atmosphere to a place in Bozeman, Montana, where the data is taken down and then sent through landlines to San Francisco, where we put the data in real time up on our website. And there you see a week of weather at 9,400 feet on Mount Washington. Let's go to approaches. As it happens, there are no trails anywhere on Mount Washington, just a few old mining roads like this, so you have to bushwhack everywhere. But there's no bears, and there's no poison oak, and there's basically no people because this place has been empty for a long time. You can hike for days and not encounter anybody. Well, here's a potential approach. You need to come up the Lincoln Canyon. It's this beautiful world all of its own, surrounded by cliffs, and it's an easy hike to stroll up the canyon bottom, until you get to this barrier, and it actually presents a problem. So you can scratch Lincoln Canyon as an approach. Another possible approach is right up the western front of the mountain. You can see why we sometimes call it Long Mountain. And from where you're standing at 6,000 feet in the valley, it's an easy hike up to the mature pinyon and juniper forest through that knoll at the front at 7,600 feet. And you can carry right on up through meadows and steepening forest to the high base of the cliffs at 10,500 feet, where there's a bit of a problem. Now, Jeff Bezos advised us when he left at the end of the expedition, "Make the clock inaccessible. The harder it is to get to, the more people will value it." And check -- those are 600-foot vertical walls there. So Alexander Rose wanted to explore this route, and he started over here on the left from his pickup truck at 8,900 feet and headed up the mountain. Now, as you gain elevation your IQ goes down -- (Laughter) but your emotional affect goes up, which is great for having a mythic experience, whether you want to or not. In fact, Danny Hillis can estimate altitude by how much math he can't do in his head. (Laughter) Now, I happened to be on the radio with Alexander when he got to this point at the base of the cliffs, and he said, quote, "There's a hidden notch. I think I can get up a ways." Now, he's a rock climber, but you know, he's our executive director. I don't want him killed. I know he's going to love cliffs. I'm saying, "Be careful, be careful, be careful." Then he starts going up, and the next thing I hear is, "I'm half-way up. It's like climbing stairs. I'm going up 60 degrees. It's a secret passage. It's like something from Tolkien." And I'm going, "Careful, careful. Please be careful." And then, of course, the next thing I hear is, "I've made it to the top. You can see all of creation from up here." And he dashed across the top of the mountains. In fact, there he is. That's Alexander Rose. First ascent of the western face to Mount Washington, and a solo ascent at that. This discovery changed everything about our sense of these cliffs and what to do with them. We realized that we had to name this thing that Alexander discovered. How about Zander's Crevice? No. (Laughter) So we finally decided on Alexander's Siq. Zander's Siq is named after -- some of you have been to Petra, there's this wonderful slot canyon that leads into Petra called the Siq, and so this is the Siq. And it really is hidden. I can't find it in this image, and I'm not sure you can. Only when you get fresh snow can you see just along the rim there, and that brings it out. Now, Danny and I were up at this same area one day, and Danny looked over to the right and noticed something halfway up the cliffs, which is a kind of a porch or a cliff shelf with bristlecones on it, and supposed that people going up to the clock inside the mountain could come out onto that shelf and look down at the view. And the people toiling up the mountain could see them, these tiny little people up there, incredibly halfway up the cliff. How did they get there? Do I have to do that? And so that maybe becomes part of the draw and part of the labyrinth. You can get another angle on Danny's porch by going around to the south and looking north at the whole formation there. And you need to know that Danny's clock is to be kept accurate by a ray of sunshine, that perfect noon hitting it every sunny day, and the pulse of heat from that sets off a solar trigger which resets the clock to make it perfectly accurate. So even with the slowing of the rotation of the earth and so on, the clock will keep perfectly good time. So here we're looking from the south, look north. This is all Forest Service land. If you go up on top of those cliffs, that's some of the Long Now land in those trees. And if you go up there and look back, then you'll get a sense of what the view starts to be like from the top of the mountain. That's the long view. That's 80 miles to the horizon. And that's also timberline and those bristlecones really are shrubs. That's a different place to be. It's 11,400 feet and it's exquisite. Now, if you go over to the right from this image to looking at the edge of the cliffs, it's 600 foot, just about a yard to the left of Kurt Bollacker's foot, there is a 600-foot drop. He's ambling on over to Zander's Siq. That's what it looks like looking down it. We should probably put in a rail or something. Over on the eastern side it's gentle, as you can see. And that's not snow -- that's what the white limestone looks like. You also see there a bighorn sheep. Their herd was reintroduced from Wyoming. And they're doing pretty well, but they've got a bit of trouble. This is Danny Hillis, and he's figuring out a design problem. he's trying to determine if where he is on a bit of Long Now land would appear from down in the valley to be the actual peak of the mountain. because the real peak is hidden around the corner. This is what in the infantry we used to call the military crest. And as it turned out the answer is, yes, that is from down below in the valley it does look like the peak, and that might be conjured with. We gradually realized we have three serious design domains to work on with this. One is the experience of the mountain. Another is the experience in the mountain. And the third is the experience from the mountain, which is really dominated by the view shed of the spring valley there behind Danny, and if you look off to the right, out there, 15 miles across to the Schell Creek range. In the front, there are 10 ranches strung right along the base of the mountains using the water from the mountains. In fact, there are artesian wells where water springs right into the air. One of the ranches is called the Kirkeby Ranch, and I'll take you there for a minute. It's a very nice ranch. Alfalfa and cattle, run by Paul and Ronnie Brenham, and it's pretty idyllic. It's also hard work. And most of these ranches are having trouble keeping going. This is their view to the west of the Schell Creek range. And if you go out to that line of trees at the far end, you'll see what the valley used to look like. This is Rocky Mountain junipers that have been there for thousands of years. And a scheme emerged that Long Now is looking to see if it might be possible to buy up the whole valley, because those 10 ranches with their 17,000 acres dominate a 500 square mile valley with their grazing allotments and so on, and there's a possibility that you could get the whole thing for five million dollars and gradually restore it to its wild condition, and somewhere in the process turn it back over to the National Park, and it would double the size of Great Basin National Park. That would be swell. OK, let's take one more look at the mountain itself. The clock experience should be profound, but from the outside it should be invisible. Now, at the base of the high cliffs there's this natural cave. It's only about 12 feet deep, but what if it were deepened from inside? You excavated from somewhere, came up from inside and deepened it. And then you could have an entrance which was very rough and narrow as you first went in, that gradually becomes more refined and then actually quite exquisite. And this stone takes a perfect polish. You'd have a polished set of passages and chambers in there eventually leading to the 10,000 year clock. And it's not a mine. This would be a nuanced evocation of the basic structure of the mountain, and you would be appreciating it as much from inside as you do from outside. This is architecture not made by building, but by what you very carefully take away. So that's what the mountain taught us. Most of the amazingness of the clock we can borrow from the amazingness of the mountain. All we have to do is highlight its spectacular features and blend in with them. It's not a clock in a mountain -- it's a mountain clock. Now, the Tewa Indians in the Southwest have a saying for what you need to do when you want to think long term about anything. They say, "pin peya obe" -- welcome to the mountain. Thank you. (Applause)
Think about your day for a second. You woke up, felt fresh air on your face as you walked out the door, encountered new colleagues and had great discussions, and felt in awe when you found something new. But I bet there's something you didn't think about today -- something so close to home that you probably don't think about it very often at all. And that's that all the sensations, feelings, decisions and actions are mediated by the computer in your head called the brain. Now the brain may not look like much from the outside -- a couple pounds of pinkish-gray flesh, amorphous -- but the last hundred years of neuroscience have allowed us to zoom in on the brain, and to see the intricacy of what lies within. And they've told us that this brain is an incredibly complicated circuit made out of hundreds of billions of cells called neurons. Now unlike a human-designed computer, where there's a fairly small number of different parts -- we know how they work, because we humans designed them -- the brain is made out of thousands of different kinds of cells, maybe tens of thousands. They come in different shapes; they're made out of different molecules. And they project and connect to different brain regions, and they also change different ways in different disease states. Let's make it concrete. There's a class of cells, a fairly small cell, an inhibitory cell, that quiets its neighbors. It's one of the cells that seems to be atrophied in disorders like schizophrenia. It's called the basket cell. And this cell is one of the thousands of kinds of cell that we are learning about. New ones are being discovered everyday. As just a second example: these pyramidal cells, large cells, they can span a significant fraction of the brain. They're excitatory. And these are some of the cells that might be overactive in disorders such as epilepsy. Every one of these cells is an incredible electrical device. They receive input from thousands of upstream partners and compute their own electrical outputs, which then, if they pass a certain threshold, will go to thousands of downstream partners. And this process, which takes just a millisecond or so, happens thousands of times a minute in every one of your 100 billion cells, as long as you live and think and feel. So how are we going to figure out what this circuit does? Ideally, we could go through the circuit and turn these different kinds of cell on and off and see whether we could figure out which ones contribute to certain functions and which ones go wrong in certain pathologies. If we could activate cells, we could see what powers they can unleash, what they can initiate and sustain. If we could turn them off, then we could try and figure out what they're necessary for. And that's a story I'm going to tell you about today. And honestly, where we've gone through over the last 11 years, through an attempt to find ways of turning circuits and cells and parts and pathways of the brain on and off, both to understand the science and also to confront some of the issues that face us all as humans. Now before I tell you about the technology, the bad news is that a significant fraction of us in this room, if we live long enough, will encounter, perhaps, a brain disorder. Already, a billion people have had some kind of brain disorder that incapacitates them, and the numbers don't do it justice though. These disorders -- schizophrenia, Alzheimer's, depression, addiction -- they not only steal our time to live, they change who we are. They take our identity and change our emotions and change who we are as people. Now in the 20th century, there was some hope that was generated through the development of pharmaceuticals for treating brain disorders, and while many drugs have been developed that can alleviate symptoms of brain disorders, practically none of them can be considered to be cured. And part of that's because we're bathing the brain in the chemical. This elaborate circuit made out of thousands of different kinds of cell is being bathed in a substance. That's also why, perhaps, most of the drugs, and not all, on the market can present some kind of serious side effect too. Now some people have gotten some solace from electrical stimulators that are implanted in the brain. And for Parkinson's disease, Cochlear implants, these have indeed been able to bring some kind of remedy to people with certain kinds of disorder. But electricity also will go in all directions -- the path of least resistance, which is where that phrase, in part, comes from. And it also will affect normal circuits as well as the abnormal ones that you want to fix. So again, we're sent back to the idea of ultra-precise control. Could we dial-in information precisely where we want it to go? So when I started in neuroscience 11 years ago, I had trained as an electrical engineer and a physicist, and the first thing I thought about was, if these neurons are electrical devices, all we need to do is to find some way of driving those electrical changes at a distance. If we could turn on the electricity in one cell, but not its neighbors, that would give us the tool we need to activate and shut down these different cells, figure out what they do and how they contribute to the networks in which they're embedded. And also it would allow us to have the ultra-precise control we need in order to fix the circuit computations that have gone awry. Now how are we going to do that? Well there are many molecules that exist in nature, which are able to convert light into electricity. You can think of them as little proteins that are like solar cells. If we can install these molecules in neurons somehow, then these neurons would become electrically drivable with light. And their neighbors, which don't have the molecule, would not. There's one other magic trick you need to make this all happen, and that's the ability to get light into the brain. And to do that -- the brain doesn't feel pain -- you can put -- taking advantage of all the effort that's gone into the Internet and communications and so on -- optical fibers connected to lasers that you can use to activate, in animal models for example, in pre-clinical studies, these neurons and to see what they do. So how do we do this? Around 2004, in collaboration with Gerhard Nagel and Karl Deisseroth, this vision came to fruition. There's a certain alga that swims in the wild, and it needs to navigate towards light in order to photosynthesize optimally. And it senses light with a little eye-spot, which works not unlike how our eye works. In its membrane, or its boundary, it contains little proteins that indeed can convert light into electricity. So these molecules are called channelrhodopsins. And each of these proteins acts just like that solar cell that I told you about. When blue light hits it, it opens up a little hole and allows charged particles to enter the eye-spot, and that allows this eye-spot to have an electrical signal just like a solar cell charging up a battery. So what we need to do is to take these molecules and somehow install them in neurons. And because it's a protein, it's encoded for in the DNA of this organism. So all we've got to do is take that DNA, put it into a gene therapy vector, like a virus, and put it into neurons. So it turned out that this was a very productive time in gene therapy, and lots of viruses were coming along. So this turned out to be very simple to do. And early in the morning one day in the summer of 2004, we gave it a try, and it worked on the first try. You take this DNA and you put it into a neuron. The neuron uses its natural protein-making machinery to fabricate these little light-sensitive proteins and install them all over the cell, like putting solar panels on a roof, and the next thing you know, you have a neuron which can be activated with light. So this is very powerful. One of the tricks you have to do is to figure out how to deliver these genes to the cells that you want and not all the other neighbors. And you can do that; you can tweak the viruses so they hit just some cells and not others. And there's other genetic tricks you can play in order to get light-activated cells. This field has now come to be known as optogenetics. And just as one example of the kind of thing you can do, you can take a complex network, use one of these viruses to deliver the gene just to one kind of cell in this dense network. And then when you shine light on the entire network, just that cell type will be activated. So for example, lets sort of consider that basket cell I told you about earlier -- the one that's atrophied in schizophrenia and the one that is inhibitory. If we can deliver that gene to these cells -- and they're not going to be altered by the expression of the gene, of course -- and then flash blue light over the entire brain network, just these cells are going to be driven. And when the light turns off, these cells go back to normal, so they don't seem to be averse against that. Not only can you use this to study what these cells do, what their power is in computing in the brain, but you can also use this to try to figure out -- well maybe we could jazz up the activity of these cells, if indeed they're atrophied. Now I want to tell you a couple of short stories about how we're using this, both at the scientific, clinical and pre-clinical levels. One of the questions we've confronted is, what are the signals in the brain that mediate the sensation of reward? Because if you could find those, those would be some of the signals that could drive learning. The brain will do more of whatever got that reward. And also these are signals that go awry in disorders such as addiction. So if we could figure out what cells they are, we could maybe find new targets for which drugs could be designed or screened against, or maybe places where electrodes could be put in for people who have very severe disability. So to do that, we came up with a very simple paradigm in collaboration with the Fiorella group, where one side of this little box, if the animal goes there, the animal gets a pulse of light in order to make different cells in the brain sensitive to light. So if these cells can mediate reward, the animal should go there more and more. And so that's what happens. This animal's going to go to the right-hand side and poke his nose there, and he gets a flash of blue light every time he does that. And he'll do that hundreds and hundreds of times. These are the dopamine neurons, which some of you may have heard about, in some of the pleasure centers in the brain. Now we've shown that a brief activation of these is enough, indeed, to drive learning. Now we can generalize the idea. Instead of one point in the brain, we can devise devices that span the brain, that can deliver light into three-dimensional patterns -- arrays of optical fibers, each coupled to its own independent miniature light source. And then we can try to do things in vivo that have only been done to-date in a dish -- like high-throughput screening throughout the entire brain for the signals that can cause certain things to happen. Or that could be good clinical targets for treating brain disorders. And one story I want to tell you about is how can we find targets for treating post-traumatic stress disorder -- a form of uncontrolled anxiety and fear. And one of the things that we did was to adopt a very classical model of fear. This goes back to the Pavlovian days. It's called Pavlovian fear conditioning -- where a tone ends with a brief shock. The shock isn't painful, but it's a little annoying. And over time -- in this case, a mouse, which is a good animal model, commonly used in such experiments -- the animal learns to fear the tone. The animal will react by freezing, sort of like a deer in the headlights. Now the question is, what targets in the brain can we find that allow us to overcome this fear? So what we do is we play that tone again after it's been associated with fear. But we activate targets in the brain, different ones, using that optical fiber array I told you about in the previous slide, in order to try and figure out which targets can cause the brain to overcome that memory of fear. And so this brief video shows you one of these targets that we're working on now. This is an area in the prefrontal cortex, a region where we can use cognition to try to overcome aversive emotional states. And the animal's going to hear a tone -- and a flash of light occurred there. There's no audio on this, but you can see the animal's freezing. This tone used to mean bad news. And there's a little clock in the lower left-hand corner, so you can see the animal is about two minutes into this. And now this next clip is just eight minutes later. And the same tone is going to play, and the light is going to flash again. Okay, there it goes. Right now. And now you can see, just 10 minutes into the experiment, that we've equipped the brain by photoactivating this area to overcome the expression of this fear memory. Now over the last couple of years, we've gone back to the tree of life because we wanted to find ways to turn circuits in the brain off. If we could do that, this could be extremely powerful. If you can delete cells just for a few milliseconds or seconds, you can figure out what necessary role they play in the circuits in which they're embedded. And we've now surveyed organisms from all over the tree of life -- every kingdom of life except for animals, we see slightly differently. And we found all sorts of molecules, they're called halorhodopsins or archaerhodopsins, that respond to green and yellow light. And they do the opposite thing of the molecule I told you about before with the blue light activator channelrhodopsin. Let's give an example of where we think this is going to go. Consider, for example, a condition like epilepsy, where the brain is overactive. Now if drugs fail in epileptic treatment, one of the strategies is to remove part of the brain. But that's obviously irreversible, and there could be side effects. What if we could just turn off that brain for a brief amount of time, until the seizure dies away, and cause the brain to be restored to its initial state -- sort of like a dynamical system that's being coaxed down into a stable state. So this animation just tries to explain this concept where we made these cells sensitive to being turned off with light, and we beam light in, and just for the time it takes to shut down a seizure, we're hoping to be able to turn it off. And so we don't have data to show you on this front, but we're very excited about this. Now I want to close on one story, which we think is another possibility -- which is that maybe these molecules, if you can do ultra-precise control, can be used in the brain itself to make a new kind of prosthetic, an optical prosthetic. I already told you that electrical stimulators are not uncommon. Seventy-five thousand people have Parkinson's deep-brain stimulators implanted. Maybe 100,000 people have Cochlear implants, which allow them to hear. There's another thing, which is you've got to get these genes into cells. And new hope in gene therapy has been developed because viruses like the adeno-associated virus, which probably most of us around this room have, and it doesn't have any symptoms, which have been used in hundreds of patients to deliver genes into the brain or the body. And so far, there have not been serious adverse events associated with the virus. There's one last elephant in the room, the proteins themselves, which come from algae and bacteria and fungi, and all over the tree of life. Most of us don't have fungi or algae in our brains, so what is our brain going to do if we put that in? Are the cells going to tolerate it? Will the immune system react? In its early days -- these have not been done on humans yet -- but we're working on a variety of studies to try and examine this, and so far we haven't seen overt reactions of any severity to these molecules or to the illumination of the brain with light. So it's early days, to be upfront, but we're excited about it. I wanted to close with one story, which we think could potentially be a clinical application. Now there are many forms of blindness where the photoreceptors, our light sensors that are in the back of our eye, are gone. And the retina, of course, is a complex structure. Now let's zoom in on it here, so we can see it in more detail. The photoreceptor cells are shown here at the top, and then the signals that are detected by the photoreceptors are transformed by various computations until finally that layer of cells at the bottom, the ganglion cells, relay the information to the brain, where we see that as perception. In many forms of blindness, like retinitis pigmentosa, or macular degeneration, the photoreceptor cells have atrophied or been destroyed. Now how could you repair this? It's not even clear that a drug could cause this to be restored, because there's nothing for the drug to bind to. On the other hand, light can still get into the eye. The eye is still transparent and you can get light in. So what if we could just take these channelrhodopsins and other molecules and install them on some of these other spare cells and convert them into little cameras. And because there's so many of these cells in the eye, potentially, they could be very high-resolution cameras. So this is some work that we're doing. It's being led by one of our collaborators, Alan Horsager at USC, and being sought to be commercialized by a start-up company Eos Neuroscience, which is funded by the NIH. And what you see here is a mouse trying to solve a maze. It's a six-arm maze. And there's a bit of water in the maze to motivate the mouse to move, or he'll just sit there. And the goal, of course, of this maze is to get out of the water and go to a little platform that's under the lit top port. Now mice are smart, so this mouse solves the maze eventually, but he does a brute-force search. He's swimming down every avenue until he finally gets to the platform. So he's not using vision to do it. These different mice are different mutations that recapitulate different kinds of blindness that affect humans. And so we're being careful in trying to look at these different models so we come up with a generalized approach. So how are we going to solve this? We're going to do exactly what we outlined in the previous slide. We're going to take these blue light photosensors and install them on a layer of cells in the middle of the retina in the back of the eye and convert them into a camera -- just like installing solar cells all over those neurons to make them light sensitive. Light is converted to electricity on them. So this mouse was blind a couple weeks before this experiment and received one dose of this photosensitive molecule in a virus. And now you can see, the animal can indeed avoid walls and go to this little platform and make cognitive use of its eyes again. And to point out the power of this: these animals are able to get to that platform just as fast as animals that have seen their entire lives. So this pre-clinical study, I think, bodes hope for the kinds of things we're hoping to do in the future. To close, I want to point out that we're also exploring new business models for this new field of neurotechnology. We're developing these tools, but we share them freely with hundreds of groups all over the world, so people can study and try to treat different disorders. And our hope is that, by figuring out brain circuits at a level of abstraction that lets us repair them and engineer them, we can take some of these intractable disorders that I told you about earlier, practically none of which are cured, and in the 21st century make them history. Thank you. (Applause) Juan Enriquez: So some of the stuff is a little dense. (Laughter) But the implications of being able to control seizures or epilepsy with light instead of drugs, and being able to target those specifically is a first step. The second thing that I think I heard you say is you can now control the brain in two colors, like an on/off switch. Ed Boyden: That's right. JE: Which makes every impulse going through the brain a binary code. EB: Right, yeah. So with blue light, we can drive information, and it's in the form of a one. And by turning things off, it's more or less a zero. So our hope is to eventually build brain coprocessors that work with the brain so we can augment functions in people with disabilities. JE: And in theory, that means that, as a mouse feels, smells, hears, touches, you can model it out as a string of ones and zeros. EB: Sure, yeah. We're hoping to use this as a way of testing what neural codes can drive certain behaviors and certain thoughts and certain feelings, and use that to understand more about the brain. JE: Does that mean that some day you could download memories and maybe upload them? EB: Well that's something we're starting to work on very hard. We're now working on some work where we're trying to tile the brain with recording elements too. So we can record information and then drive information back in -- sort of computing what the brain needs in order to augment its information processing. JE: Well, that might change a couple things. Thank you. (EB: Thank you.) (Applause)
Charlie Rose: So Larry sent me an email and he basically said, we've got to make sure that we don't seem like we're a couple of middle-aged boring men. I said, I'm flattered by that -- (Laughter) — because I'm a bit older, and he has a bit more net worth than I do. Larry Page: Well, thank you. CR: So we'll have a conversation about the Internet, and we'll have a conversation Google, and we'll have a conversation about search and privacy, and also about your philosophy and a sense of how you've connected the dots and how this journey that began some time ago has such interesting prospects. Mainly we want to talk about the future. So my first question: Where is Google and where is it going? LP: Well, this is something we think about a lot, and our mission we defined a long time ago is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. And people always say, is that really what you guys are still doing? And I always kind of think about that myself, and I'm not quite sure. But actually, when I think about search, it's such a deep thing for all of us, to really understand what you want, to understand the world's information, and we're still very much in the early stages of that, which is totally crazy. We've been at it for 15 years already, but it's not at all done. CR: When it's done, how will it be? LP: Well, I guess, in thinking about where we're going -- you know, why is it not done? -- a lot of it is just computing's kind of a mess. You know, your computer doesn't know where you are, it doesn't know what you're doing, it doesn't know what you know, and a lot we've been trying to do recently is just make your devices work, make them understand your context. Google Now, you know, knows where you are, knows what you may need. So really having computing work and understand you and understand that information, we really haven't done that yet. It's still very, very clunky. CR: Tell me, when you look at what Google is doing, where does Deep Mind fit? LP: Yeah, so Deep Mind is a company we just acquired recently. It's in the U.K. First, let me tell you the way we got there, which was looking at search and really understanding, trying to understand everything, and also make the computers not clunky and really understand you -- like, voice was really important. So what's the state of the art on speech recognition? It's not very good. It doesn't really understand you. So we started doing machine learning research to improve that. That helped a lot. And we started just looking at things like YouTube. Can we understand YouTube? But we actually ran machine learning on YouTube and it discovered cats, just by itself. Now, that's an important concept. And we realized there's really something here. If we can learn what cats are, that must be really important. So I think Deep Mind, what's really amazing about Deep Mind is that it can actually -- they're learning things in this unsupervised way. They started with video games, and really just, maybe I can show the video, just playing video games, and learning how to do that automatically. CR: Take a look at the video games and how machines are coming to be able to do some remarkable things. LP: The amazing thing about this is this is, I mean, obviously, these are old games, but the system just sees what you see, the pixels, and it has the controls and it has the score, and it's learned to play all of these games, same program. It's learned to play all of these games with superhuman performance. We've not been able to do things like this with computers before. And maybe I'll just narrate this one quickly. This is boxing, and it figures out it can sort of pin the opponent down. The computer's on the left, and it's just racking up points. So imagine if this kind of intelligence were thrown at your schedule, or your information needs, or things like that. We're really just at the beginning of that, and that's what I'm really excited about. CR: When you look at all that's taken place with Deep Mind and the boxing, also a part of where we're going is artificial intelligence. Where are we, when you look at that? LP: Well, I think for me, this is kind of one of the most exciting things I've seen in a long time. The guy who started this company, Demis, has a neuroscience and a computer science background. He went back to school to get his Ph.D. to study the brain. And so I think we're seeing a lot of exciting work going on that sort of crosses computer science and neuroscience in terms of really understanding what it takes to make something smart and do really interesting things. CR: But where's the level of it now? And how fast do you think we are moving? LP: Well, this is the state of the art right now, understanding cats on YouTube and things like that, improving voice recognition. We used a lot of machine learning to improve things incrementally, but I think for me, this example's really exciting, because it's one program that can do a lot of different things. CR: I don't know if we can do this, but we've got the image of the cat. It would be wonderful to see this. This is how machines looked at cats and what they came up with. Can we see that image? LP: Yeah. CR: There it is. Can you see the cat? Designed by machines, seen by machines. LP: That's right. So this is learned from just watching YouTube. And there's no training, no notion of a cat, but this concept of a cat is something important that you would understand, and now that the machines can kind of understand. Maybe just finishing also on the search part, it started with search, really understanding people's context and their information. I did have a video I wanted to show quickly on that that we actually found. (Video) ["Soy, Kenya"] Zack Matere: Not long ago, I planted a crop of potatoes. Then suddenly they started dying one after the other. I checked out the books and they didn't tell me much. So, I went and I did a search. ["Zack Matere, Farmer"] Potato diseases. One of the websites told me that ants could be the problem. It said, sprinkle wood ash over the plants. Then after a few days the ants disappeared. I got excited about the Internet. I have this friend who really would like to expand his business. So I went with him to the cyber cafe and we checked out several sites. When I met him next, he was going to put a windmill at the local school. I felt proud because something that wasn't there before was suddenly there. I realized that not everybody can be able to access what I was able to access. I thought that I need to have an Internet that my grandmother can use. So I thought about a notice board. A simple wooden notice board. When I get information on my phone, I'm able to post the information on the notice board. So it's basically like a computer. I use the Internet to help people. I think I am searching for a better life for me and my neighbors. So many people have access to information, but there's no follow-up to that. I think the follow-up to that is our knowledge. When people have the knowledge, they can find solutions without having to helped out. Information is powerful, but it is how we use it that will define us. (Applause) LP: Now, the amazing thing about that video, actually, was we just read about it in the news, and we found this gentlemen, and made that little clip. CR: When I talk to people about you, they say to me, people who know you well, say, Larry wants to change the world, and he believes technology can show the way. And that means access to the Internet. It has to do with languages. It also means how people can get access and do things that will affect their community, and this is an example. LP: Yeah, that's right, and I think for me, I have been focusing on access more, if we're talking about the future. We recently released this Loon Project which is using balloons to do it. It sounds totally crazy. We can show the video here. Actually, two out of three people in the world don't have good Internet access now. We actually think this can really help people sort of cost-efficiently. CR: It's a balloon. LP: Yeah, get access to the Internet. CR: And why does this balloon give you access to the Internet? Because there was some interesting things you had to do to figure out how to make balloons possible, they didn't have to be tethered. LP: Yeah, and this is a good example of innovation. Like, we've been thinking about this idea for five years or more before we started working on it, but it was just really, how do we get access points up high, cheaply? You normally have to use satellites and it takes a long time to launch them. But you saw there how easy it is to launch a balloon and get it up, and actually again, it's the power of the Internet, I did a search on it, and I found, 30, 40 years ago, someone had put up a balloon and it had gone around the Earth multiple times. And I thought, why can't we do that today? And that's how this project got going. CR: But are you at the mercy of the wind? LP: Yeah, but it turns out, we did some weather simulations which probably hadn't really been done before, and if you control the altitude of the balloons, which you can do by pumping air into them and other ways, you can actually control roughly where they go, and so I think we can build a worldwide mesh of these balloons that can cover the whole planet. CR: Before I talk about the future and transportation, where you've been a nerd for a while, and this fascination you have with transportation and automated cars and bicycles, let me talk a bit about what's been the subject here earlier with Edward Snowden. It is security and privacy. You have to have been thinking about that. LP: Yeah, absolutely. I saw the picture of Sergey with Edward Snowden yesterday. Some of you may have seen it. But I think, for me, I guess, privacy and security are a really important thing. We think about it in terms of both things, and I think you can't have privacy without security, so let me just talk about security first, because you asked about Snowden and all of that, and then I'll say a little bit about privacy. I think for me, it's tremendously disappointing that the government secretly did all this stuff and didn't tell us. I don't think we can have a democracy if we're having to protect you and our users from the government for stuff that we've never had a conversation about. And I don't mean we have to know what the particular terrorist attack is they're worried about protecting us from, but we do need to know what the parameters of it is, what kind of surveillance the government's going to do and how and why, and I think we haven't had that conversation. So I think the government's actually done itself a tremendous disservice by doing all that in secret. CR: Never coming to Google to ask for anything. LP: Not Google, but the public. I think we need to have a debate about that, or we can't have a functioning democracy. It's just not possible. So I'm sad that Google's in the position of protecting you and our users from the government doing secret thing that nobody knows about. It doesn't make any sense. CR: Yeah. And then there's a privacy side of it. LP: Yes. The privacy side, I think it's -- the world is changing. You carry a phone. It knows where you are. There's so much more information about you, and that's an important thing, and it makes sense why people are asking difficult questions. We spend a lot of time thinking about this and what the issues are. I'm a little bit -- I think the main thing that we need to do is just provide people choice, show them what data's being collected -- search history, location data. We're excited about incognito mode in Chrome, and doing that in more ways, just giving people more choice and more awareness of what's going on. I also think it's very easy. What I'm worried is that we throw out the baby with the bathwater. And I look at, on your show, actually, I kind of lost my voice, and I haven't gotten it back. I'm hoping that by talking to you I'm going to get it back. CR: If I could do anything, I would do that. LP: All right. So get out your voodoo doll and whatever you need to do. But I think, you know what, I look at that, I made that public, and I got all this information. We got a survey done on medical conditions with people who have similar issues, and I look at medical records, and I say, wouldn't it be amazing if everyone's medical records were available anonymously to research doctors? And when someone accesses your medical record, a research doctor, they could see, you could see which doctor accessed it and why, and you could maybe learn about what conditions you have. I think if we just did that, we'd save 100,000 lives this year. CR: Absolutely. Let me go — (Applause) LP: So I guess I'm just very worried that with Internet privacy, we're doing the same thing we're doing with medical records, is we're throwing out the baby with the bathwater, and we're not really thinking about the tremendous good that can come from people sharing information with the right people in the right ways. CR: And the necessary condition that people have to have confidence that their information will not be abused. LP: Yeah, and I had this problem with my voice stuff. I was scared to share it. Sergey encouraged me to do that, and it was a great thing to do. CR: And the response has been overwhelming. LP: Yeah, and people are super positive. We got thousands and thousands of people with similar conditions, which there's no data on today. So it was a really good thing. CR: So talking about the future, what is it about you and transportation systems? LP: Yeah. I guess I was just frustrated with this when I was at college in Michigan. I had to get on the bus and take it and wait for it. And it was cold and snowing. I did some research on how much it cost, and I just became a bit obsessed with transportation systems. CR: And that began the idea of an automated car. LP: Yeah, about 18 years ago I learned about people working on automated cars, and I became fascinated by that, and it takes a while to get these projects going, but I'm super excited about the possibilities of that improving the world. There's 20 million people or more injured per year. It's the leading cause of death for people under 34 in the U.S. CR: So you're talking about saving lives. LP: Yeah, and also saving space and making life better. Los Angeles is half parking lots and roads, half of the area, and most cities are not far behind, actually. It's just crazy that that's what we use our space for. CR: And how soon will we be there? LP: I think we can be there very, very soon. We've driven well over 100,000 miles now totally automated. I'm super excited about getting that out quickly. CR: But it's not only you're talking about automated cars. You also have this idea for bicycles. LP: Well at Google, we got this idea that we should just provide free bikes to everyone, and that's been amazing, most of the trips. You see bikes going everywhere, and the bikes wear out. They're getting used 24 hours a day. CR: But you want to put them above the street, too. LP: Well I said, how do we get people using bikes more? CR: We may have a video here. LP: Yeah, let's show the video. I just got excited about this. (Music) So this is actually how you might separate bikes from cars with minimal cost. Anyway, it looks totally crazy, but I was actually thinking about our campus, working with the Zippies and stuff, and just trying to get a lot more bike usage, and I was thinking about, how do you cost-effectively separate the bikes from traffic? And I went and searched, and this is what I found. And we're not actually working on this, that particular thing, but it gets your imagination going. CR: Let me close with this. Give me a sense of the philosophy of your own mind. You have this idea of [Google X]. You don't simply want to go in some small, measurable arena of progress. LP: Yeah, I think many of the things we just talked about are like that, where they're really -- I almost use the economic concept of additionality, which means that you're doing something that wouldn't happen unless you were actually doing it. And I think the more you can do things like that, the bigger impact you have, and that's about doing things that people might not think are possible. And I've been amazed, the more I learn about technology, the more I realize I don't know, and that's because this technological horizon, the thing that you can see to do next, the more you learn about technology, the more you learn what's possible. You learn that the balloons are possible because there's some material that will work for them. CR: What's interesting about you too, though, for me, is that, we have lots of people who are thinking about the future, and they are going and looking and they're coming back, but we never see the implementation. I think of somebody you knew and read about, Tesla. The principle of that for you is what? LP: Well, I think invention is not enough. If you invent something, Tesla invented electric power that we use, but he struggled to get it out to people. That had to be done by other people. It took a long time. And I think if we can actually combine both things, where we have an innovation and invention focus, plus the ability to really -- a company that can really commercialize things and get them to people in a way that's positive for the world and to give people hope. You know, I'm amazed with the Loon Project just how excited people were about that, because it gave them hope for the two thirds of the world that doesn't have Internet right now that's any good. CR: Which is a second thing about corporations. You are one of those people who believe that corporations are an agent of change if they are run well. LP: Yeah. I'm really dismayed most people think companies are basically evil. They get a bad rap. And I think that's somewhat correct. Companies are doing the same incremental thing that they did 50 years ago or 20 years ago. That's not really what we need. We need, especially in technology, we need revolutionary change, not incremental change. CR: You once said, actually, as I think I've got this about right, that you might consider, rather than giving your money, if you were leaving it to some cause, just simply giving it to Elon Musk, because you had confidence that he would change the future, and that you would therefore — LP: Yeah, if you want to go Mars, he wants to go to Mars, to back up humanity, that's a worthy goal, but it's a company, and it's philanthropical. So I think we aim to do kind of similar things. And I think, you ask, we have a lot of employees at Google who have become pretty wealthy. People make a lot of money in technology. A lot of people in the room are pretty wealthy. You're working because you want to change the world. You want to make it better. Why isn't the company that you work for worthy not just of your time but your money as well? I mean, but we don't have a concept of that. That's not how we think about companies, and I think it's sad, because companies are most of our effort. They're where most of people's time is, where a lot of the money is, and so I think I'd like for us to help out more than we are. CR: When I close conversations with lots of people, I always ask this question: What state of mind, what quality of mind is it that has served you best? People like Rupert Murdoch have said curiosity, and other people in the media have said that. Bill Gates and Warren Buffett have said focus. What quality of mind, as I leave this audience, has enabled you to think about the future and at the same time change the present? LP: You know, I think the most important thing -- I looked at lots of companies and why I thought they don't succeed over time. We've had a more rapid turnover of companies. And I said, what did they fundamentally do wrong? What did those companies all do wrong? And usually it's just that they missed the future. And so I think, for me, I just try to focus on that and say, what is that future really going to be and how do we create it, and how do we cause our organization, to really focus on that and drive that at a really high rate? And so that's been curiosity, it's been looking at things people might not think about, working on things that no one else is working on, because that's where the additionality really is, and be willing to do that, to take that risk. Look at Android. I felt guilty about working on Android when it was starting. It was a little startup we bought. It wasn't really what we were really working on. And I felt guilty about spending time on that. That was stupid. That was the future, right? That was a good thing to be working on. CR: It is great to see you here. It's great to hear from you, and a pleasure to sit at this table with you. Thanks, Larry. LP: Thank you. (Applause) CR: Larry Page.
I get asked a lot what the difference between my work is and typical Pentagon long-range strategic planners. And the answer I like to offer is what they typically do is they think about the future of wars in the context of war. And what I've spent 15 years doing in this business -- and it's taken me almost 14 to figure it out -- is I think about the future of wars in the context of everything else. So I tend to specialize on the scene between war and peace. The material I'm going to show you is one idea from a book with a lot of ideas. It's the one that takes me around the world right now interacting with foreign militaries quite a bit. The material was generated in two years of work I did for the Secretary of Defense, thinking about a new national grand strategy for the United States. I'm going to present a problem and try to give you an answer. Here's my favorite bonehead concept from the 1990s in the Pentagon: the theory of anti-access, area-denial asymmetrical strategies. Why do we call it that? Because it's got all those A's lined up I guess. This is gobbledygook for if the United States fights somebody we're going to be huge. They're going to be small. And if they try to fight us in the traditional, straight-up manner we're going to kick their ass, which is why people don't try to do that any more. I met the last Air Force General who had actually shot down an enemy plane in combat. He's now a one star General. That's how distant we are from even meeting an air force willing to fly against ours. So that overmatched capability creates problems -- catastrophic successes the White House calls them. (Laughter) And we're trying to figure that out, because it is an amazing capability. The question is, what's the good you can do with it? OK? The theory of anti-access, area-denial asymmetrical strategies -- gobbledygook that we sell to Congress, because if we just told them we can kick anybody's asses they wouldn't buy us all the stuff we want. So we say, area-denial, anti-access asymmetrical strategies and their eyes glaze over. (Laughter) And they say, "Will you build it in my district?" (Laughter) (Applause) Here's my parody and it ain't much of one. Let's talk about a battle space. I don't know, Taiwan Straits 2025. Let's talk about an enemy embedded within that battle space. I don't know, the Million Man Swim. (Laughter) The United States has to access that battle space instantaneously. They throw up anti-access, area-denial asymmetrical strategies. A banana peel on the tarmac. (Laughter) Trojan horses on our computer networks reveal all our Achilles' heels instantly. We say, "China, it's yours." Prometheus approach, largely a geographic definition, focuses almost exclusively on the start of conflict. We field the first-half team in a league that insists on keeping score until the end of the game. That's the problem. We can run the score up against anybody, and then get our asses kicked in the second half -- what they call fourth generation warfare. Here's the way I like to describe it instead. There is no battle space the U.S. Military cannot access. They said we couldn't do Afghanistan. We did it with ease. They said we couldn't do Iraq. We did it with 150 combat casualties in six weeks. We did it so fast we weren't prepared for their collapse. There is nobody we can't take down. The question is, what do you do with the power? So there's no trouble accessing battle spaces. What we have trouble accessing is the transition space that must naturally follow, and creating the peace space that allows us to move on. Problem is, the Defense Department over here beats the hell out of you. The State Department over here says, "Come on boy, I know you can make it." And that poor country runs off that ledge, does that cartoon thing and then drops. (Laughter) This is not about overwhelming force, but proportional force. It's about non-lethal technologies, because if you fire real ammo into a crowd of women and children rioting you're going to lose friends very quickly. This is not about projecting power, but about staying power, which is about legitimacy with the locals. Who do you access in this transition space? You have to create internal partners. You have to access coalition partners. We asked the Indians for 17,000 peace keepers. I know their senior leadership, they wanted to give it to us. But they said to us, "You know what? In that transition space you're mostly hat not enough cattle. We don't think you can pull it off, we're not going to give you our 17,000 peace keepers for fodder." We asked the Russians for 40,000. They said no. I was in China in August, I said, "You should have 50,000 peace keepers in Iraq. It's your oil, not ours." Which is the truth. It's their oil. And the Chinese said to me, "Dr. Barnett, you're absolutely right. In a perfect world we'd have 50,000 there. But it's not a perfect world, and your administration isn't getting us any closer." But we have trouble accessing our outcomes. We lucked out, frankly, on the selection. We face different opponents across these three. And it's time to start admitting you can't ask the same 19-year-old to do it all, day in and day out. It's just too damn hard. We have an unparalleled capacity to wage war. We don't do the everything else so well. Frankly, we do it better than anybody and we still suck at it. We have a brilliant Secretary of War. We don't have a Secretary of Everything Else. Because if we did, that guy would be in front of the Senate, still testifying over Abu Ghraib. The problem is he doesn't exist. There is no Secretary of Everything Else. I think we have an unparalleled capacity to wage war. I call that the Leviathan Force. What we need to build is a force for the Everything Else. I call them the System Administrators. What I think this really represents is lack of an A to Z rule set for the world as a whole for processing politically bankrupt states. We have one for processing economically bankrupt states. It's the IMF Sovereign Bankruptcy Plan, OK? We argue about it every time we use it. Argentina just went through it, broke a lot of rules. They got out on the far end, we said, "Fine, don't worry about it." It's transparent. A certain amount of certainty gives the sense of a non-zero outcome. We don't have one for processing politically bankrupt states that, frankly, everybody wants gone. Like Saddam, like Mugabe, like Kim Jong-Il -- people who kill in hundreds of thousands or millions. Like the 250,000 dead so far in Sudan. What would an A to Z system look like? I'm going to distinguish between what I call front half and back half. And let's call this red line, I don't know, mission accomplished. (Laughter) (Applause) What we have extant right now, at the beginning of this system, is the U.N. Security Council as a grand jury. What can they do? They can indict your ass. They can debate it. They can write it on a piece of paper. They can put it in an envelope and mail it to you, and then say in no uncertain terms, "Please cut that out." (Laughter) That gets you about four million dead in Central Africa over the 1990s. That gets you 250,000 dead in the Sudan in the last 15 months. Everybody's got to answer their grandchildren some day what you did about the holocaust in Africa, and you better have an answer. We don't have anything to translate that will into action. What we do have is the U.S.-enabled Leviathan Force that says, "You want me to take that guy down? I'll take that guy down. I'll do it on Tuesday. It will cost you 20 billion dollars." (Laughter) But here's the deal. As soon as I can't find anybody else to air out, I leave the scene immediately. That's called the Powell Doctrine. Way downstream we have the International Criminal Court. They love to put them on trial. They've got Milosevic right now. What are we missing? A functioning executive that will translate will into action, because we don't have it. Every time we lead one of these efforts we have to whip ourselves into this imminent threat thing. We haven't faced an imminent threat since the Cuban missile crisis in 1962. But we use this language from a bygone era to scare ourselves into doing something because we're a democracy and that's what it takes. And if that doesn't work we scream, "He's got a gun!" just as we rush in. (Laughter) And then we look over the body and we find an old cigarette lighter and we say, "Jesus, it was dark." (Laughter) Do you want to do it, France? France says, "No, but I do like to criticize you after the fact." What we need downstream is a great power enabled -- what I call that Sys Admin Force. We should have had 250,000 troops streaming into Iraq on the heels of that Leviathan sweeping towards Baghdad. What do you get then? No looting, no military disappearing, no arms disappearing, no ammo disappearing, no Muqtada al-Sadr -- I'm wrecking his bones -- no insurgency. Talk to anybody who was over there in the first six months. We had six months to feel the lob, to get the job done, and we dicked around for six months. And then they turned on us. Why? Because they just got fed up. They saw what we did to Saddam. They said, "You're that powerful, you can resurrect this country. You're America." What we need is an international reconstruction fund -- Sebastian Mallaby, Washington Post, great idea. Model on the IMF. Instead of passing the hat each time, OK? Where are we going to find this guy? G20, that's easy. Check out their agenda since 9/11. All security dominated. They're going to decide up front how the money gets spent just like in the IMF. You vote according to how much money you put in the kitty. Here's my challenge to the Defense Department. You've got to build this force. You've got to seed this force. You've got to track coalition partners. Create a record of success. You will get this model. You tell me it's too hard to do. I'll walk this dog right through that six part series on the Balkans. We did it just like that. I'm talking about regularizing it, making it transparent. Would you like Mugabe gone? Would you like Kim Jong-Il, who's killed about two million people, would you like him gone? Would you like a better system? This is why it matters to the military. They've been experiencing an identity crisis since the end of the Cold War. I'm not talking about the difference between reality and desire, which I can do because I'm not inside the beltway. (Laughter) I'm talking about the 1990s. The Berlin Wall falls. We do Desert Storm. The split starts to emerge between those in the military who see a future they can live with, and those who see a future that starts to scare them, like the U.S. submarine community, which watches the Soviet Navy disappear overnight. Ah! (Laughter) So they start moving from reality towards desire and they create their own special language to describe their voyage of self-discovery and self-actualization. (Laughter) The problem is you need a big, sexy opponent to fight against. And if you can't find one you've got to make one up. China, all grown up, going to be a looker! (Laughter) The rest of the military got dragged down into the muck across the 1990s and they developed this very derisive term to describe it: military operations other than war. I ask you, who joins the military to do things other than war? Actually, most of them. Jessica Lynch never planned on shooting back. Most of them don't pick up a rifle. I maintain this is code inside the Army for, "We don't want to do this." They spent the 1990s working the messy scene between globalized parts of the world What I call the core and the gap. The Clinton administration wasn't interested in running this. For eight years, after screwing up the relationship on day one -- inauguration day with gays in the military -- which was deft. (Laughter) So we were home alone for eight years. And what did we do home alone? We bought one military and we operated another. It's like the guy who goes to the doctor and says, "Doctor, it hurts when I do this." (Laughter) The doctor says, "Stop doing that you idiot." I used to give this brief inside the Pentagon in the early 1990s. I'd say, "You're buying one military and you're operating another, and eventually it's going to hurt. It's wrong. Bad Pentagon, bad!" (Laughter) And they'd say, "Dr. Barnett, you are so right. Can you come back next year and remind us again?" (Laughter) Some people say 9/11 heals the rift -- jerks the long-term transformation gurus out of their 30,000 foot view of history, drags them down in to the muck and says, "You want a networked opponent? I've got one, he's everywhere, go find him." It elevates MOOTW -- how we pronounce that acronym -- from crap to grand strategy, because that's how you're going to shrink that gap. Some people put these two things together and they call it empire, which I think is a boneheaded concept. Empire is about the enforcement of not just minimal rule sets, which you cannot do, but maximum rule sets which you must do. It's not our system of governance. Never how we've sought to interact with the outside world. I prefer that phrase System Administration. We enforce the minimal rule sets for maintaining connectivity to the global economy. Certain bad things you cannot do. How this impacts the way we think about the future of war. This is a concept which gets me vilified throughout the Pentagon. It makes me very popular as well. Everybody's got an opinion. Going back to the beginning of our country -- historically, defenses meant protection of the homeland. Security has meant everything else. Written into our constitution, two different forces, two different functions. Raise an army when you need it, and maintain a navy for day-to-day connectivity. A Department of War, a Department of Everything Else. A big stick, a baton stick. Can of whup ass, the networking force. In 1947 we merged these two things together in the Defense Department. Our long-term rationale becomes, we're involved in a hair trigger stand off with the Soviets. To attack America is to risk blowing up the world. We connected national security to international security with about a seven minute time delay. That's not our problem now. They can kill three million in Chicago tomorrow and we don't go to the mattresses with nukes. That's the scary part. The question is how do we reconnect American national security with global security to make the world a lot more comfortable, and to embed and contextualize our employment of force around the planet? What's happened since is that bifurcation I described. We talked about this going all the way back to the end of the Cold War. Let's have a Department of War, and a Department of Something Else. Some people say, "Hell, 9/11 did it for you." Now we've got a home game and an away game. (Laughter) The Department of Homeland Security is a strategic feel good measure. It's going to be the Department of Agriculture for the 21st century. TSA -- thousands standing around. (Laughter) Just be grateful Robert Reed didn't shove that bomb up his ass. (Laughter) Because we'd all be gay then. I supported the war in Iraq. He was a bad guy with multiple priors. It's not like we had to find him actually killing somebody live to arrest him. I knew we'd kick ass in the war with the Leviathan Force. I knew we'd have a hard time with what followed. But I know this organization doesn't change until it experiences failure. What do I mean by these two different forces? This is the Hobbesian Force. I love this force. I don't want to see it go. That plus nukes rules out great power war. This is the military the rest of the world wants us to build. It's why I travel all over the world talking to foreign militaries. What does this mean? It means you've got to stop pretending you can do these two very disparate skill sets with the same 19-year-old. Switching back, morning, afternoon, evening, morning, afternoon, evening. Handing out aid, shooting back, handing out aid, shooting back. It's too much. The 19-year-olds get tired from the switching, OK? (Laughter) That force on the left, you can train a 19-year-old to do that. That force on the right is more like a 40-year-old cop. You need the experience. What does this mean in terms of operations? The rule is going to be this. That Sys Admin force is the force that never comes home, does most of your work. You break out that Leviathan Force only every so often. But here's the promise you make to the American public, to your own people, to the world. You break out that Leviathan Force, you promise, you guarantee that you're going to mount one hell of a -- immediately -- follow-on Sys Admin effort. Don't plan for the war unless you plan to win the peace. (Applause) Other differences. Leviathan traditional partners, they all look like the Brits and their former colonies. (Laughter) Including us, I would remind you. The rest -- wider array of partners. International organizations, non-governmental organizations, private voluntary organizations, contractors. You're not going to get away from that. Leviathan Force, it's all about joint operations between the military services. We're done with that. What we need to do is inter-agency operations, which frankly Condi Rice was in charge of. And I'm amazed nobody asked her that question when she was confirmed. I call the Leviathan Force your dad's military. I like them young, male, unmarried, slightly pissed off. (Laughter) I call the Sys Admin Force your mom's military. It's everything the man's military hates. Gender balanced much more, older, educated, married with children. The force on the left, up or out. The force on the right, in and out. The force on the left respects Posse Comitatus restrictions on the use of force inside the U.S. The force on the right's going to obliterate it. That's where the National Guard's going to be. The force on the left is never coming under the purview of the International Criminal Court. Sys Admin Force has to. Different definitions of network centricity. One takes down networks, one puts them up. And you've got to wage war here in such a way to facilitate that. Do we need a bigger budget? Do we need a draft to pull this off? Absolutely not. I've been told by the Revolution of Military Affairs crowd for years, we can do it faster, cheaper, smaller, just as lethal. I say, "Great, I'm going to take the Sys Admin budget out of your hide." Here's the larger point. You're going to build the Sys Admin Force inside the U.S. Military first. But ultimately you're going to civilianize it, probably two thirds. Inter agency-ize it, internationalize it. So yes, it begins inside the Pentagon, but over time it's going to cross that river. (Laughter) I have been to the mountain top. I can see the future. I may not live long enough to get you there, but it's going to happen. We're going to have a Department of Something Else between war and peace. Last slide. Who gets custody of the kids? This is where the Marines in the audience get kind of tense. (Laughter) And this is when they think about beating the crap out of me after the talk. (Laughter) Read Max Boon. This is the history of the marines -- small wars, small arms. The Marines are like my West Highland Terrier. They get up every morning, they want to dig a hole and they want to kill something. (Laughter) I don't want my Marines handing out aid. I want them to be Marines. That's what keeps the Sys Admin Force from being a pussy force. It keeps it from being the U.N. You shoot at these people the Marines are going to come over and kill you. (Laughter) (Applause) Department of Navy, strategic subs go this way, surface combatants are over there, and the news is they may actually be that small. (Laughter) I call it the Smart Dust Navy. I tell young officers, "You may command 500 ships in your career. Bad news is they may not have anybody on them." Carriers go both ways because they're a swing asset. You'll see the pattern -- airborne, just like carriers. Armor goes this way. Here's the dirty secret of the Air Force, you can win by bombing. But you need lots of these guys on the ground to win the peace. Shinseki was right with the argument. Air force, strategic airlift goes both ways. Bombers, fighters go over here. Special Operations Command down at Tampa. Trigger-pullers go this way. Civil Affairs, that bastard child, comes over here. Return to the Army. The point about the trigger-pullers and Special Operations Command. No off season, these guys are always active. They drop in, do their business, disappear. See me now. Don't talk about it later. (Laughter) I was never here. (Laughter) The world is my playground. (Laughter) I want to keep trigger-pullers trigger-happy. I want the rules to be as loose as possible. Because when the thing gets prevented in Chicago with the three million dead that perverts our political system beyond all recognition, these are the guys who are going to kill them first. So it's better off to have them make some mistakes along the way than to see that. Reserve component -- National Guard reserves overwhelmingly Sys Admin. How are you going to get them to work for this force? Most firemen in this country do it for free. This is not about money. This is about being up front with these guys and gals. Last point, intelligence community -- the muscle and the defense agencies go this way. What should be the CIA, open, analytical, open source should come over here. The information you need to do this is not secret. It's not secret. Read that great piece in the New Yorker about how our echo boomers, 19 to 25, over in Iraq taught each other how to do Sys Admin work, over the Internet in chat rooms. They said, "Al Qaeda could be listening." They said, "Well, Jesus, they already know this stuff." (Laughter) Take a gift in the left hand. These are the sunglasses that don't scare people, simple stuff. Censors and transparency, the overheads go in both directions. Thanks.
I can't help but this wish: to think about when you're a little kid, and all your friends ask you, "If a genie could give you one wish in the world, what would it be?" And I always answered, "Well, I'd want the wish to have the wisdom to know exactly what to wish for." Well, then you'd be screwed, because you'd know what to wish for, and you'd use up your wish, and now, since we only have one wish -- unlike last year they had three wishes -- I'm not going to wish for that. So let's get to what I would like, which is world peace. And I know what you're thinking: You're thinking, "The poor girl up there, she thinks she's at a beauty pageant. She's not. She's at the TED Prize." (Laughter) But I really do think it makes sense. And I think that the first step to world peace is for people to meet each other. I've met a lot of different people over the years, and I've filmed some of them, from a dotcom executive in New York who wanted to take over the world, to a military press officer in Qatar, who would rather not take over the world. If you've seen the film "Control Room" that was sent out, you'd understand a little bit why. (Applause) Thank you. Wow! Some of you watched it. That's great. That's great. So basically what I'd like to talk about today is a way for people to travel, to meet people in a different way than -- because you can't travel all over the world at the same time. And a long time ago -- well, about 40 years ago -- my mom had an exchange student. And I'm going to show you slides of the exchange student. This is Donna. This is Donna at the Statue of Liberty. This is my mother and aunt teaching Donna how to ride a bike. This is Donna eating ice cream. And this is Donna teaching my aunt how to do a Filipino dance. I really think as the world is getting smaller, it becomes more and more important that we learn each other's dance moves, that we meet each other, we get to know each other, we are able to figure out a way to cross borders, to understand each other, to understand people's hopes and dreams, what makes them laugh and cry. And I know that we can't all do exchange programs, and I can't force everybody to travel; I've already talked about that to Chris and Amy, and they said that there's a problem with this: You can't force people, free will. And I totally support that, so we're not forcing people to travel. But I'd like to talk about another way to travel that doesn't require a ship or an airplane, and just requires a movie camera, a projector and a screen. And that's what I'm going to talk to you about today. I was asked that I speak a little bit about where I personally come from, and Cameron, I don't know how you managed to get out of that one, but I think that building bridges is important to me because of where I come from. I'm the daughter of an American mother and an Egyptian-Lebanese-Syrian father. So I'm the living product of two cultures coming together. No pun intended. (Laughter) And I've also been called, as an Egyptian-Lebanese-Syrian American with a Persian name, the "Middle East Peace Crisis." So maybe me starting to take pictures was some kind of way to bring both sides of my family together -- a way to take the worlds with me, a way to tell stories visually. It all kind of started that way, but I think that I really realized the power of the image when I first went to the garbage-collecting village in Egypt, when I was about 16. My mother took me there. She's somebody who believes strongly in community service, and decided that this was something that I needed to do. And so I went there and I met some amazing women there. There was a center there, where they were teaching people how to read and write, and get vaccinations against the many diseases you can get from sorting through garbage. And I began teaching there. I taught English, and I met some incredible women there. I met people that live seven people to a room, barely can afford their evening meal, yet lived with this strength of spirit and sense of humor and just incredible qualities. I got drawn into this community and I began to take pictures there. I took pictures of weddings and older family members -- things that they wanted memories of. About two years after I started taking these pictures, the UN Conference on Population and Development asked me to show them at the conference. So I was 18; I was very excited. It was my first exhibit of photographs and they were all put up there, and after about two days, they all came down except for three. People were very upset, very angry that I was showing these dirty sides of Cairo, and why didn't I cut the dead donkey out of the frame? And as I sat there, I got very depressed. I looked at this big empty wall with three lonely photographs that were, you know, very pretty photographs and I was like, "I failed at this." But I was looking at this intense emotion and intense feeling that had come out of people just seeing these photographs. Here I was, this 18-year-old pipsqueak that nobody listened to, and all of a sudden, I put these photographs on the wall, and there were arguments, and they had to be taken down. And I saw the power of the image, and it was incredible. And I think the most important reaction that I saw there was actually from people that would never have gone to the garbage village themselves, that would never have seen that the human spirit could thrive in such difficult circumstances. And I think it was at that point that I decided I wanted to use photography and film to somehow bridge gaps, to bridge cultures, bring people together, cross borders. And so that's what really kind of started me off. Did a stint at MTV, made a film called "Startup.com," and I've done a couple of music films. But in 2003, when the war in Iraq was about to start, it was a very surreal feeling for me, because before the war started, there was kind of this media war that was going on. And I was watching television in New York, and there seemed to be just one point of view that was coming across, and the coverage went from the US State Department to embedded troops. And what was coming across on the news was that there was going to be this clean war and precision bombings, and the Iraqis would be greeting the Americans as liberators, and throwing flowers at their feet in the streets of Baghdad. And I knew that there was a completely other story that was taking place in the Middle East, where my parents were. I knew that there was a completely other story being told, and I was thinking, "How are people supposed to communicate with each other when they're getting completely different messages, and nobody knows what the other's being told? How are people supposed to have any kind of common understanding or know how to move together into the future? So I knew that I had to go there. I just wanted to be in the center. I had no plan. I had no funding. I didn't even have a camera at the time -- I had somebody bring it there, because I wanted to get access to Al Jazeera, George Bush's favorite channel, and a place which I was very curious about because it's disliked by many governments across the Arab world, and also called the mouthpiece of Osama Bin Laden by some people in the US government. So I was thinking, this station that's hated by so many people has to be doing something right. I've got to go see what this is all about. And I also wanted to go see Central Command, which was 10 minutes away. And that way, I could get access to how this news was being created -- on the Arab side, reaching the Arab world, and on the US and Western side, reaching the US. And when I went there and sat there, and met these people that were in the center of it, and sat with these characters, I met some surprising, very complex people. And I'd like to share with you a little bit of that experience of when you sit with somebody and you film them, and you listen to them, and you allow them more than a five-second sound bite. The amazing complexity of people emerges. Samir Khader: Business as usual. Iraq, and then Iraq, and then Iraq. But between us, if I'm offered a job with Fox, I'll take it. To change the Arab nightmare into the American dream. I still have that dream. Maybe I will never be able to do it, but I have plans for my children. When they finish high school, I will send them to America to study there. I will pay for their study. And they will stay there. Josh Rushing: The night they showed the POWs and the dead soldiers -- Al Jazeera showed them -- it was powerful, because America doesn't show those kinds of images. Most of the news in America won't show really gory images and this showed American soldiers in uniform, strewn about a floor, a cold tile floor. And it was revolting. It was absolutely revolting. It made me sick at my stomach. And then what hit me was, the night before, there had been some kind of bombing in Basra, and Al Jazeera had shown images of the people. And they were equally, if not more, horrifying -- the images were. And I remember having seen it in the Al Jazeera office, and thought to myself, "Wow, that's gross. That's bad." And then going away, and probably eating dinner or something. And it didn't affect me as much. So, the impact that had on me -- me realizing that I just saw people on the other side, and those people in the Al Jazeera office must have felt the way I was feeling that night, and it upset me on a profound level that I wasn't as bothered as much the night before. It makes me hate war. But it doesn't make me believe that we're in a world that can live without war yet. Jehane Noujaim: I was overwhelmed by the response of the film. We didn't know whether it would be able to get out there. We had no funding for it. We were incredibly lucky that it got picked up. And when we showed the film in both the United States and the Arab world, we had such incredible reactions. It was amazing to see how people were moved by this film. In the Arab world -- and it's not really by the film, it's by the characters -- I mean, Josh Rushing was this incredibly complex person who was thinking about things. And when I showed the film in the Middle East, people wanted to meet Josh. He kind of redefined us as an American population. People started to ask me, "Where is this guy now?" Al Jazeera offered him a job. (Laughter) And Samir, on the other hand, was also quite an interesting character for the Arab world to see, because it brought out the complexities of this love-hate relationship that the Arab world has with the West. In the United States, I was blown away by the motivations, the positive motivations of the American people when they'd see this film. You know, we're criticized abroad for believing we're the saviors of the world in some way, but the flip side of it is that, actually, when people do see what is happening abroad and people's reactions to some of our policy abroad, we feel this power, that we need to -- we feel like we have to get the power to change things. And I saw this with audiences. This woman came up to me after the screening and said, "You know, I know this is crazy. I saw the bombs being loaded on the planes, I saw the military going out to war, but you don't understand people's anger towards us until you see the people in the hospitals and the victims of the war, and how do we get out of this bubble? How do we understand what the other person is thinking?" Now, I don't know whether a film can change the world. But I know the power of it, I know that it starts people thinking about how to change the world. Now, I'm not a philosopher, so I feel like I shouldn't go into great depth on this, but let film speak for itself and take you to this other world. Because I believe that film has the ability to take you across borders, I'd like you to just sit back and experience for a couple of minutes being taken into another world. And these couple clips take you inside of two of the most difficult conflicts that we're faced with today. [The last 48 hours of two Palestinian suicide bombers.] [Paradise Now] [Man: As long as there is injustice, someone must make a sacrifice!] [Woman: That's no sacrifice, that's revenge!] [If you kill, there's no difference between victim and occupier.] [Man: If we had airplanes, we wouldn't need martyrs, that's the difference.] [Woman: The difference is that the Israeli military is still stronger.] [Man: Then let us be equal in death.] [We still have Paradise.] [Woman: There is no Paradise! It only exists in your head!] [Man: God forbid!] [May God forgive you.] [If you were not Abu Azzam's daughter ...] [Anyway, I'd rather have Paradise in my head than live in this hell!] [In this life, we're dead anyway.] [One only chooses bitterness when the alternative is even bitterer.] [Woman: And what about us? The ones who remain?] [Will we win that way?] [Don't you see what you're doing is destroying us?] [And that you give Israel an alibi to carry on?] [Man: So with no alibi, Israel will stop?] [Woman: Perhaps. We have to turn it into a moral war.] [Man: How, if Israel has no morals?] [Woman: Be careful!] [And the real people building peace through non-violence] [Encounter Point] Video: (Ambulance siren) [Tel Aviv, Israel 1996] [Tzvika: My wife Ayelet called me and said, ] ["There was a suicide bombing in Tel Aviv."] [Ayelet: What do you know about the casualties?] [Tzvika off-screen: We're looking for three girls.] [We have no information.] [Ayelet: One is wounded here, but we haven't heard from the other three.] [Tzvika: I said, "OK, that's Bat-Chen, that's my daughter.] [Are you sure she is dead?"] [They said yes.] Video: (Police siren and shouting over megaphone) [Bethlehem, Occupied Palestinian Territories, 2003] [George: On that day, at around 6:30] [I was driving with my wife and daughters to the supermarket.] [When we got to here ...] [we saw three Israeli military jeeps parked on the side of the road.] [When we passed by the first jeep ...] [they opened fire on us.] [And my 12-year-old daughter Christine] [was killed in the shooting.] [Bereaved Families Forum, Jerusalem] [Tzvika: I'm the headmaster for all parts.] [George: But there is a teacher that is in charge?] [Tzvika: Yes, I have assistants.] [I deal with children all the time.] [One year after their daughters' deaths both Tzvika and George join the forum] [George: At first, I thought it was a strange idea.] [But after thinking logically about it, ] [I didn't find any reason why not to meet them] [and let them know of our suffering.] [Tzvika: There were many things that touched me.] [We see that there are Palestinians who suffered a lot, who lost children,] [and still believe in the peace process and in reconciliation.] [If we who lost what is most precious can talk to each other,] [and look forward to a better future,] [then everyone else must do so, too.] [From South Africa: A Revolution Through Music] [Amandla] (Music) (Video) Man: Song is something that we communicated with people who otherwise would not have understood where we're coming from. You could give them a long political speech, they would still not understand. But I tell you, when you finish that song, people will be like, "Damn, I know where you niggas are coming from. I know where you guys are coming from. Death unto apartheid!" Narrator: It's about the liberation struggle. It's about those children who took to the streets -- fighting, screaming, "Free Nelson Mandela!" It's about those unions who put down their tools and demanded freedom. Yes. Yes! (Music and singing) (Singing) Freedom! (Applause) Jehane Noujaim: I think everybody's had that feeling of sitting in a theater, in a dark room, with other strangers, watching a very powerful film, and they felt that feeling of transformation. And what I'd like to talk about is how can we use that feeling to actually create a movement through film? I've been listening to the talks in the conference, and Robert Wright said yesterday that if we have an appreciation for another person's humanity, then they will have an appreciation for ours. And that's what this is about. It's about connecting people through film, getting these independent voices out there. Now, Josh Rushing actually ended up leaving the military and taking a job with Al Jazeera. (Laughter) So his feeling is that he's at Al Jazeera International because he feels like he can actually use media to bridge the gap between East and West. And that's an amazing thing. But I've been trying to think about ways to give power to these independent voices, to give power to the filmmakers, to give power to people who are trying to use film for change. And there are incredible organizations that are out there doing this already. There's Witness, that you heard from earlier. There's Just Vision, that are working with Palestinians and Israelis who are working together for peace, and documenting that process and getting interviews out there and using this film to take to Congress to show that it's a powerful tool, to show that this is a woman who's had her daughter killed in an attack, and she believes that there are peaceful ways to solve this. There's Working Films and there's Current TV, which is an incredible platform for people around the world to be able to put their -- (Applause) Yeah, it's amazing. I've watched it and I'm blown away by it and its potential to bring voices from around the world -- independent voices from around the world -- and create a truly democratic, global television. So what can we do to create a platform for these organizations, to create some momentum, to get everybody in the world involved in this movement? I'd like for us to imagine for a second. Imagine a day when you have everyone coming together from around the world. You have towns and villages and theaters -- all from around the world, getting together, and sitting in the dark, and sharing a communal experience of watching a film, or a couple of films, together. Watching a film which maybe highlights a character that is fighting to live, or just a character that defies stereotypes, makes a joke, sings a song. Comedies, documentaries, shorts. This amazing power can be used to change people and to bond people together; to cross borders, and have people feel like they're having a communal experience. So if you imagine this day when all around the world, you have theaters and places where we project films. If you imagine projecting from Times Square to Tahrir Square in Cairo, the same film in Ramallah, the same film in Jerusalem. You know, we've been talking to a friend of mine about using the side of the Great Pyramid and the Great Wall of China. It's endless what you can imagine, in terms of where you can project films and where you can have this communal experience. And I believe that this one day, if we can create it, this one day can create momentum for all of these independent voices. There isn't an organization which is connecting the independent voices of the world to get out there, and yet I'm hearing throughout this conference that the biggest challenge in our future is understanding the other, and having mutual respect for the other and crossing borders. And if film can do that, and if we can get all of these different locations in the world to watch these films together -- this could be an incredible day. So we've already made a partnership, set up through somebody from the TED community, John Camen, who introduced me to Steven Apkon, from the Jacob Burns Film Center. And we started calling up everybody. And in the last week, there have been so many people that have responded to us, from as close as Palo Alto, to Mongolia and to India. There are people that want to be a part of this global day of film; to be able to provide a platform for independent voices and independent films to get out there. Now, we've thought about a name for this day, and I'd like to share this with you. Now, the most amazing part of this whole process has been sharing ideas and wishes, and so I invite you to give brainstorms onto how does this day echo into the future? How do we use technology to make this day echo into the future, so that we can build community and have these communities working together, through the Internet? There was a time, many, many years ago, when all of the continents were stuck together. And we call that landmass Pangea. So what we'd like to call this day of film is Pangea Cinema Day. And if you just imagine that all of these people in these towns would be watching, then I think that we can actually really make a movement towards people understanding each other better. I know that it's very intangible, touching people's hearts and souls, but the only way that I know how to do it, the only way that I know how to reach out to somebody's heart and soul all across the world, is by showing them a film. And I know that there are independent filmmakers and films out there that can really make this happen. And that's my wish. I guess I'm supposed to give you my one-sentence wish, but we're way out of time. Chris Anderson: That is an incredible wish. Pangea Cinema: The day the world comes together. JN: It's more tangible than world peace, and it's certainly more immediate. But it would be the day that the world comes together through film, the power of film. CA: Ladies and gentlemen, Jehane Noujaim.
Kurt Andersen: Like many architects, David is a hog for the limelight but is sufficiently reticent -- or at least pretends to be -- that he asked me to question him rather than speaking. In fact what we're going to talk about, I think, is in fact a subject that is probably better served by a conversation than an address. And I guess we have a bit of news clip to precede. Dan Rather: Since the September 11th attack on the World Trade Center, many people have flocked to downtown New York to see and pay respects at what amounts to the 16-acre burial ground. Now, as CBS's Jim Axelrod reports, they're putting the finishing touches on a new way for people to visit and view the scene. Jim Axelrod: Forget the Empire State Building or the Statue of Liberty. There's a new place in New York where the crowds are thickest -- Ground Zero. Tourist: I've taken my step-daughter here from Indianapolis. This was -- out of all the tourist sites in New York City -- this was her number-one pick. JA: Thousands now line up on lower Broadway. Tourist: I've been wanting to come down here since this happened. JA: Even on the coldest winter days. To honor and remember. Tourist: It's reality, it's us. It happened here. This is ours. JA: So many, in fact, that seeing has become a bit of a problem. Tourist: I think that people are very frustrated that they're not able to get closer to see what's going on. JA: But that is about to change. In record time, a team of architects and construction workers designed and built a viewing platform to ease the frustration and bring people closer. Man: They'll get an incredible panorama and understand, I think more completely, the sheer totality of the destruction of the place. JA: If you think about it, Ground Zero is unlike most any other tourist site in America. Unlike the Grand Canyon or the Washington Monument, people come here to see what's no longer there. David Rockwell: The first experience people will have here when they see this is not as a construction site but as this incredibly moving burial ground. JA: The walls are bare by design, so people can fill them with their own memorials the way they already have along the current perimeter. Tourist: From our hearts, it affected us just as much. JA: The ramps are made of simple material -- the kind of plywood you see at construction sites -- which is really the whole point. In the face of America's worst destruction people are building again. Jim Axelrod, CBS News, New York. KA: This is not an obvious subject to be in the sensuality segment, but certainly David you are known as -- I know, a phrase you hate -- an entertainment architect. Your work is highly sensual, even hedonistic. DR: I like that word. KA: It's about pleasure -- casinos and hotels and restaurants. How did the shock that all of us -- and especially all of us in New York -- felt on the 11th of September transmute into your desire to do this thing? DR: Well the truth of the matter is, post-September 11th, I felt myself in the role originally -- first of all as someone who lives in Tribeca and whose neighborhood was devastated, and as someone who works less than a mile from there -- that I was in the role of forcing 100 people who work with me in my firm, to continue to have the same level of enthusiasm about creating the places we had been creating. In fact we're finishing a book which is called "Pleasure," which is about sensual pleasure in spaces. But I've got to tell you -- it became impossible to do that. We were really paralyzed. And I found myself the Friday after September 11th -- two days afterwards -- literally unable to motivate anyone to do anything. We gave the office a few days off. And in discussing this with other architects, we had seen people saying in the press that they should rebuild the towers as they were -- they should rebuild them 50 stories taller. And I thought it was astonishing to speculate, as if this were a competition, on something that was such a fresh wound. And I had a series of discussions -- first with Rick Scofidio and Liz Diller, who collaborated with us on this, and several other people -- and really felt like we had to find relevance in doing something. And that as people who create places, the ultimate way to help wasn't to pontificate or to make up scenarios, but to help right now. So we tried to come up with a way, as a group, to have a kind of design SWAT team. And that was the mission that we came up with. KA: Were you conscious of suddenly -- as a designer whose work is all about fulfilling wants -- suddenly fulfilling needs? DR: Well what I was aware of was, there was this overwhelming need to act now. And we were asked to participate in a few projects before this. There was a school, PS 234, that had been evacuated down at Ground Zero. They moved to an abandoned school. We took about 20 or 30 architects and designers and artists, and over four days -- it was like this urban barn-raising -- to renovate it, and everyone wanted to help. It was just extraordinary. Tom Otterness contributed, Maira Kalman contributed and it became this cathartic experience for us. KA: And that was done, effectively, by October 8 or something? DR: Yeah. KA: Obviously, what you faced in trying to do something as substantial as this project -- and this is only one of four that you've designed to surround the site -- you must have run up against the incredibly byzantine, entrenched bureaucracy and powers that be in New York real estate and New York politics. DR: Well, it's a funny thing. We finished PS 234, and had dinner with a small group. I was actually asked to be a committee chair on an AIA committee to rebuild. And I sat in on several meetings. And there were the most circuitous grand plans that had to do with long-term infrastructure and rebuilding the entire city. And the fact is that there were immediate wounds and needs that needed to be filled, and there was talk about inclusion and wanting it to be an inclusive process. And it wasn't an inclusive group. So we said, what is -- KA: It was not an inclusive group? DR: It was not an inclusive group. It was predominantly a white, rich, corporate group that was not representative of the city. KA: Shocking. DR: Yeah, surprising. So Rick and Liz and Kevin and I came up with the idea. The city actually approached us. We first approached the city about Pier 94. We saw how PS 234 worked. The families -- the victims of the families -- were going to this pier that was incredibly dehumanizing. KA: On the Hudson River? DR: Yeah. And the city actually -- through Tim Zagat initially, and then through Christyne Nicholas, then we got to Giuliani -- said, "You know we don't want to do anything with Pier 94 right now, but we have an observation platform for the families down at Ground Zero that we'd like to be a more dignified experience for the families, and a way to protect it from the weather." So I went down there with Rick and Liz and Kevin, and I've got to say, it was the most moving experience of my life. It was devastating to see the simple plywood platform with a rail around it, where the families of the victims had left notes to them. And there was no mediation between us and the experience. There was no filter. And I remembered on September 11th, on 14th Street, the roof of our building -- we can see the World Trade Towers prominently -- and I saw the first building collapse from a conference room on the eighth floor on a TV that we had set up. And then everyone was up on the roof, so I ran up there. And it was amazing how much harder it was to believe in real life than it was on TV. There was something about the comfort of the filter and how much information was between us and the experience. So seeing this in a very simple, dignified way was a very powerful experience. So we went back to the city and said we're not particularly interested in the upgrade of this as a VIP platform, but we've spent some time down there. At the same time the city had this need. They were looking for a solution to deal with 30 or 40 thousand people a day who were going down there, that had nowhere to go. And there was no way to deal with the traffic around the site. So dealing with it is just an immediate master plan. There was a way -- there had to be a way -- to get people to move around the site. KA: But then you've got to figure out a way -- we will skip over the insanely tedious process of getting permits and getting everybody on board -- but simply funding this thing. It looks like a fairly simple thing, but this was a half a million dollar project? DR: Well, we knew that if it wasn't privately funded, it wasn't going to happen. And we also, frankly, knew that if it didn't happen by the end of the Giuliani administration, then everyone who we were dealing with at the DOT and the Police Department and all of the -- we were meeting with 20 or 30 people with the city at a time, and it was set up by the Office of Emergency Management. This incredible act on their part, because they really wanted this, and they sensed that this needed to happen. KA: And there was therefore this ticking clock, because Giuliani was obviously out three months after that. DR: Yeah. So the first thing we had to do was find a way to get this -- we had to work with the families of the victims, through the city, to make sure that they knew this was happening. Because this didn't want to be a surprise. And we also had to be as under the radar screen as we could be in New York, because the key was not raising a lot of objection and sort of working as quietly as possible. We came up with the idea of setting up a foundation, mainly because when we found a contractor who would build this, he would not agree to do this, even if we would pay him the money. There needed to be a foundation in place. So we came up with a foundation, and actually what happened was one major developer in New York -- KA: Who shall remain nameless, I guess? DR: Yeah. His initials are JS, and he owns Rockefeller Center, if that helps anyone -- volunteered to help. And we met with him. The prices from the contractors were between five to 700,000 dollars. And Atlantic-Heydt, who's the largest scaffolding contractor in the country, volunteered to do it at cost. So this developer said, "You know what, we'll underwrite the entire expense." And we said, "That's incredible!" And I think this was the 21st, and we knew this had to be built and up by the 28th. And we had to start construction the next day. We had a meeting that evening with his contractor of choice, and the contractor showed up with the drawings of the platform about half the size that we had drawn it. KA: Sort of like the Spinal Tap scene where you get the tiny little Stonehenge, I guess? (Laughter) DR: In fact, it was as if this was going to be window-washing scaffolding. There was no sense of the fact that this is next to Saint Paul -- that this is really a place that needs to be kind of dignified, and a place to reflect and remember. And I've got to say that we spent a lot of time in putting this together, watching the crowds that gathered at Saint Paul -- which is just to the right -- and moving around the site. And I live down there, so we spent a lot of time looking at the need. And I think people were amazed at two things -- I think they were amazed at the destruction, but I think there was a sense of disbelief about the heroics of New Yorkers that I found very moving. Just the sort of everyday heroics of New Yorkers. So we were in this meeting and the contractor literally said, "I'm going to lock the door, because this developer will not agree to have you leave till you've signed off on this." And we said, "Well, this is half the size, it doesn't have any of the design features that have been agreed upon by everyone -- everyone in the city. We'd have to go back to the beginning to do this." And I convinced him that we should leave the room with the agreement to build it as designed. The next day I got an email from the developer saying that he was withdrawing all funding. So we didn't know what to do, but we decided to cast a very wide net. We emailed out letters to as many people as we could -- several people in the audience here -- who were very helpful. KA: There was no thought of abandoning ship at that point? DR: No. In fact I told the contractor to go ahead. He had already ordered materials based on my go-ahead. We knew that one way or another this was going to happen. And we just felt it had to happen. KA: You were funding it yourself and with contributions and this foundation. Richard, I think very correctly, made the point at the beginning -- before all the chair designers came out -- about the history of chair designers imposing aesthetic solutions on this kind of universal, banal, common problem of sitting. It seems to me with this, that it was the opposite of that. This was an unprecedented, singular design problem. DR: Well here's the issue: we knew that this was not in the sense of -- we think about the site, and think about the need for a memorial. It was important that this not be categorized as a memorial. That this was a place for people to reflect, to remember -- a kind of quiet place. So it led us to using design solutions that created as few filters between the viewer -- as we said about the families' platform -- and the experience as possible. It's all incredibly humble material. It's scaffolding and plywood. And it allows -- by sort of the procession of the movement, up by Saint Paul's and down the other side -- it gives you about 300 feet to go up 13 feet from the ground to where you get the 360 degree view. But the design was driven by a need to be quick, cheap, safe, respectful, flexible. One of the other things is this is designed to be moveable. Because when we looked at the four platforms around the site, one of which is an upgrade of the families' platform, we knew that these had to be moveable to respond to changing conditions, and the changing definition of what Ground Zero is. KA: Your work -- I mean, we've talked about this before -- a lot of your work, I think, is informed by your belief in, or your focus on the temporariness of all things and the evanescence of things, and a kind of "Eat, drink, and be merry, for tomorrow we die," sort of sense of existence. This is clearly not a work for the ages. You know, a couple of years this thing isn't going to be here. Did that require, as an architect, a new way of thinking about what you were doing? To think of it as this purely temporary installation? DR: No, I don't think so. I think this is, obviously, substantially different from anything we'd ever thought about doing before, just by the nature of it. Where it overlaps with thoughts about our work in general is, number one -- the notion of collaboration as a sort of way to get things done. And Kevin Kennon, Rick Scofidio, Liz Diller and all the people within the city -- Norman Lear, who I spoke to four hours before our deadline for funding, offered to give us a bridge loan to help us get through it. So the notion of collaboration -- I think this reinforces how important that is. And in terms of the temporary nature of it, our goal was not to create something that would be there longer than it needed to be. I think what we were most interested in was promoting a kind of dialogue that we felt may not have been happening enough in this city, about what's really happening there. And a day or two before it opened was Giuliani's farewell address, where he proposed the idea of all of Ground Zero being a memorial. Which was very controversial, but it resonated with a lot of people. And I think regardless of what the position is about how this sacred piece of land is to be used, having it come out of actually seeing it in a real encounter, I think makes it a more powerful dialogue. And that's what we were interested in. So that, very much, is in the realm of things I've been interested in before. KA: It seems to me, among other things, a lovely piece of civic infrastructure. It enables that conversation to get serious. And six months after the fact -- and only a few months away from the site being cleaned -- we are very quickly, now, getting to the point where those conversations about what should go there are getting serious. Do you have -- having been as physically involved in the site as you have been doing this project -- have any ideas about what should or shouldn't be done? DR: Well, I think one thing that shouldn't be done is evaluate -- I think right now the discussion is a very closed discussion on the master plan. The Protetch Gallery recently had a show on ideas for buildings, which had some sort of inventive ideas of buildings. KA: But it had some really terrible ideas. DR: And it also felt a little bit like a kind of competition of ideas, where I think the focus of ideas should be on master planning and uses. And I think there should be a broader -- which there's starting to be -- the dialogue is really opening up to, what does this site really want to be? And I truly believe until the issue of memorial is sorted out, that it's going to be very hard to have an intelligent discussion. There's a few discussions right now that I think are very positive, about depressing the West Side Highway and connecting this over, so that there's one uninterrupted piece of land. KA: Well, I think that's interesting. And it gets to another issue that was probably inappropriate to discuss six months ago, but perhaps isn't now, which is, not many of us love the World Trade Center as a piece of architecture, as what it had done to this city and that huge plaza. Is this an opportunity, is the silver lining -- a silver lining, here -- to rebuild some more traditional city grid, or not? DR: I think there's a real opportunity to engage in a discussion of why we live in cities. And why do we live in places where such dissimilar people collide up against us each day? I don't think it has much to do with 50 or 60 or 70 or 80 thousand new office spaces, regardless of what the number is. So yeah, I think there is a chance to re-look at how we think about cities. And in fact, there's a proposal on the table now for building number seven. KA: Which was the building just north of the Towers? DR: Right, which the towers fell into. And the reason that's been held up is essentially by community outrage that they're not re-opening the street to connect that back to the rest of the city. I think a public dialogue -- I think, you know, I'd like to see an international competition, and a call for ideas for uses. KA: Whether it's arts, whether it's housing, whether it's what amount of shopping? DR: Right. And we're looking for other things. This small foundation we put together is looking for other ways to help. Including taking a small piece adjacent to the site and inviting 10 architects who currently don't have a voice in New York to do artist housing. And find other ways to encourage the discussion to be against sort of monolithic, single solutions, and more about a multiplicity of things. KA: Before we end, I know you have a piece of digital video of the experience of being on this platform? DR: John Kamen -- who's here, actually -- put together a two and a half minute piece that shows the platform in use. So I thought that would be good to end with. DR: We're looking from Fulton Street, west. One of the tricky issues we had with the Giuliani administration was I had forgotten how anti-graffiti he was. And essentially our structure was designed to be written on. KA: As you say, it's not a memorial. But were you conscious of memorials? The Vietnam Memorial? Those kinds of forms? DR: We certainly did as much research as we could, and we were conscious of other memorials. And also the complexity and length of time they really take to do. It's 350 people on the committee for Oklahoma City, which is why we thought of this as a sort of ad-hoc, spontaneous solution that expanded on Union Square and the places that were ad-hoc memorials in the city already. The scaffolding you can see built up over the street is de-mountable. What's interesting now is the nature of the site has totally changed, so that what you're aware of is not just the destruction of the buildings in Ground Zero, but all of the buildings around it -- and the scars on the building around it, which are enormous. This shows Saint Paul's on the left. KA: I just want to thank you on behalf of New Yorkers for making this happen and getting this done. But the kind of virtually instantaneous nature of its erection, and its being there, almost before you could believe that a response of this magnitude could be accomplished, is part of its extraordinary -- I don't know if beauty is the word -- but presence. DR: It was an honor to do. And we were thrilled to be able to show it here.
That splendid music, the coming-in music -- "The Elephant March" from "Aida" -- is the music I've chosen for my funeral -- (Laughter) -- and you can see why. It's triumphal. I won't feel anything, but if I could, I would feel triumphal at having lived at all, and at having lived on this splendid planet, and having been given the opportunity to understand something about why I was here in the first place, before not being here. Can you understand my quaint English accent? Like everybody else, I was entranced yesterday by the animal session. Robert Full and Frans Lanting and others -- the beauty of the things they showed. The only slight jarring note was when Jeffrey Katzenberg said of the mustang, "the most splendid creatures that God put on this earth." Now of course, we know that he didn't really mean that, but in this country at the moment, you can't be too careful. (Laughter) I'm a biologist, and the central theorem of our subject: the theory of design, Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection. In professional circles everywhere, it's of course universally accepted. In non-professional circles outside America, it's largely ignored. But in non-professional circles within America, it arouses so much hostility -- (Laughter) -- that it's fair to say that American biologists are in a state of war. The war is so worrying at present, with court cases coming up in one state after another, that I felt I had to say something about it. If you want to know what I have to say about Darwinism itself, I'm afraid you're going to have to look at my books, which you won't find in the bookstore outside. (Laughter) Contemporary court cases often concern an allegedly new version of creationism, called "Intelligent Design," or ID. Don't be fooled. There's nothing new about ID. It's just creationism under another name, rechristened -- I choose the word advisedly -- (Laughter) -- for tactical, political reasons. The arguments of so-called ID theorists are the same old arguments that had been refuted again and again, since Darwin down to the present day. There is an effective evolution lobby coordinating the fight on behalf of science, and I try to do all I can to help them, but they get quite upset when people like me dare to mention that we happen to be atheists as well as evolutionists. They see us as rocking the boat, and you can understand why. Creationists, lacking any coherent scientific argument for their case, fall back on the popular phobia against atheism. Teach your children evolution in biology class, and they'll soon move on to drugs, grand larceny and sexual pre-version. (Laughter) In fact, of course, educated theologians from the Pope down are firm in their support of evolution. This book, "Finding Darwin's God," by Kenneth Miller, is one of the most effective attacks on Intelligent Design that I know, and it's all the more effective because it's written by a devout Christian. People like Kenneth Miller could be called a "godsend" to the evolution lobby -- (Laughter) -- because they expose the lie that evolutionism is, as a matter of fact, tantamount to atheism. People like me, on the other hand, rock the boat. But here, I want to say something nice about creationists. It's not a thing I often do, so listen carefully. (Laughter) I think they're right about one thing. I think they're right that evolution is fundamentally hostile to religion. I've already said that many individual evolutionists, like the Pope, are also religious, but I think they're deluding themselves. I believe a true understanding of Darwinism is deeply corrosive to religious faith. Now, it may sound as though I'm about to preach atheism, and I want to reassure you that that's not what I'm going to do. In an audience as sophisticated as this one, that would be preaching to the choir. No, what I want to urge upon you -- (Laughter) -- instead what I want to urge upon you is militant atheism. (Laughter) (Applause) But that's putting it too negatively. If I was a person who were interested in preserving religious faith, I would be very afraid of the positive power of evolutionary science, and indeed science generally, but evolution in particular, to inspire and enthrall, precisely because it is atheistic. Now, the difficult problem for any theory of biological design is to explain the massive statistical improbability of living things. Statistical improbability in the direction of good design -- "complexity" is another word for this. The standard creationist argument -- there is only one; they all reduce to this one -- takes off from a statistical improbability. Living creatures are too complex to have come about by chance; therefore, they must have had a designer. This argument of course, shoots itself in the foot. Any designer capable of designing something really complex has to be even more complex himself, and that's before we even start on the other things he's expected to do, like forgive sins, bless marriages, listen to prayers -- favor our side in a war -- (Laughter) -- disapprove of our sex lives and so on. (Laughter) Complexity is the problem that any theory of biology has to solve, and you can't solve it by postulating an agent that is even more complex, thereby simply compounding the problem. Darwinian natural selection is so stunningly elegant because it solves the problem of explaining complexity in terms of nothing but simplicity. Essentially, it does it by providing a smooth ramp of gradual step-by-step increment. But here, I only want to make the point that the elegance of Darwinism is corrosive to religion precisely because it is so elegant, so parsimonious, so powerful, so economically powerful. It has the sinewy economy of a beautiful suspension bridge. The God theory is not just a bad theory. It turns out to be, in principle, incapable of doing the job required of it. So, returning to tactics and the evolution lobby, I want to argue that rocking the boat may be just the right thing to do. My approach to attacking creationism is unlike the evolution lobby. My approach to attacking creationism is to attack religion as a whole, and at this point I need to acknowledge the remarkable taboo against speaking ill of religion, and I'm going to do so in the words of the late Douglas Adams, a dear friend who, if he never came to TED, certainly should have been invited. (Richard Saul Wurman: He was.) Richard Dawkins: He was. Good. I thought he must have been. He begins this speech which was tape-recorded in Cambridge shortly before he died. He begins by explaining how science works through the testing of hypotheses that are framed to be vulnerable to disproof, and then he goes on. I quote, "Religion doesn't seem to work like that. It has certain ideas at the heart of it, which we call 'sacred' or 'holy.' What it means is: here is an idea or a notion that you're not allowed to say anything bad about. You're just not. Why not? Because you're not. (Laughter) Why should it be that it's perfectly legitimate to support the Republicans or Democrats, this model of economics versus that, Macintosh instead of Windows, but to have an opinion about how the universe began, about who created the universe -- no, that's holy. So, we're used to not challenging religious ideas and it's very interesting how much of a furor Richard creates when he does it." He meant me, not that one. "Everybody gets absolutely frantic about it, because you're not allowed to say these things, yet when you look at it rationally, there is no reason why those ideas shouldn't be as open to debate as any other, except that we've agreed somehow between us that they shouldn't be." And that's the end of the quote from Douglas. In my view, not only is science corrosive to religion; religion is corrosive to science. It teaches people to be satisfied with trivial, supernatural non-explanations and blinds them to the wonderful real explanations that we have within our grasp. It teaches them to accept authority, revelation and faith instead of always insisting on evidence. There's Douglas Adams, magnificent picture from his book, "Last Chance to See." Now, there's a typical scientific journal, the Quarterly Review of Biology. And I'm going to put together, as guest editor, a special issue on the question, "Did an asteroid kill the dinosaurs?" And the first paper is a standard scientific paper presenting evidence, "Iridium Layer at the K-T Boundary, Potassium-Argon Dated Crater in Yucatan, Indicate That an Asteroid Killed the Dinosaurs." Perfectly ordinary scientific paper. Now, the next one, "The President of The Royal Society Has Been Vouchsafed a Strong Inner Conviction" -- (Laughter) -- "... That an Asteroid Killed the Dinosaurs." (Laughter) "It Has Been Privately Revealed to Professor Huxtane That an Asteroid Killed the Dinosaurs." (Laughter) "Professor Hordley Was Brought Up to Have Total and Unquestioning Faith" -- (Laughter) -- "... That an Asteroid Killed the Dinosaurs." "Professor Hawkins Has Promulgated an Official Dogma Binding on All Loyal Hawkinsians That an Asteroid Killed the Dinosaurs." (Laughter) That's inconceivable, of course. But suppose -- (Applause) -- in 1987, a reporter asked George Bush, Sr. whether he recognized the equal citizenship and patriotism of Americans who are atheists. Mr. Bush's reply has become infamous. "No, I don't know that atheists should be considered citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God." Bush's bigotry was not an isolated mistake, blurted out in the heat of the moment and later retracted. He stood by it in the face of repeated calls for clarification or withdrawal. He really meant it. More to the point, he knew it posed no threat to his election, quite the contrary. Democrats as well as Republicans parade their religiousness if they want to get elected. Both parties invoke "one nation under God." What would Thomas Jefferson have said? Incidentally, I'm not usually very proud of being British, but you can't help making the comparison. (Applause) In practice, what is an atheist? An atheist is just somebody who feels about Yahweh the way any decent Christian feels about Thor or Baal or the golden calf. As has been said before, we are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further. (Laughter) (Applause) And however we define atheism, it's surely the kind of academic belief that a person is entitled to hold without being vilified as an unpatriotic, unelectable non-citizen. Nevertheless, it's an undeniable fact that to own up to being an atheist is tantamount to introducing yourself as Mr. Hitler or Miss Beelzebub. And that all stems from the perception of atheists as some kind of weird, way-out minority. Natalie Angier wrote a rather sad piece in the New Yorker, saying how lonely she felt as an atheist. She clearly feels in a beleaguered minority, but actually, how do American atheists stack up numerically? The latest survey makes surprisingly encouraging reading. Christianity, of course, takes a massive lion's share of the population, with nearly 160 million. But what would you think was the second largest group, convincingly outnumbering Jews with 2.8 million, Muslims at 1.1 million, and Hindus, Buddhists and all other religions put together? The second largest group, of nearly 30 million, is the one described as non-religious or secular. You can't help wondering why vote-seeking politicians are so proverbially overawed by the power of, for example, the Jewish lobby. The state of Israel seems to owe its very existence to the American Jewish vote, while at the same time consigning the non-religious to political oblivion. This secular non-religious vote, if properly mobilized, is nine times as numerous as the Jewish vote. Why does this far more substantial minority not make a move to exercise its political muscle? Well, so much for quantity. How about quality? Is there any correlation, positive or negative, between intelligence and tendency to be religious? (Laughter) The survey that I quoted, which is the ARIS survey, didn't break down its data by socio-economic class or education, IQ or anything else. But a recent article by Paul G. Bell in the Mensa magazine provides some straws in the wind. Mensa, as you know, is an international organization for people with very high IQ. And from a meta-analysis of the literature, Bell concludes that, I quote, "Of 43 studies carried out since 1927 on the relationship between religious belief and one's intelligence or educational level, all but four found an inverse connection. That is, the higher one's intelligence or educational level, the less one is likely to be religious." Well, I haven't seen the original 42 studies and I can't comment on that meta-analysis but I would like to see more studies done along those lines. And I know that there are, if I could put a little plug here, there are people in this audience easily capable of financing a massive research survey to settle the question, and I put the suggestion up -- for what it's worth. But let me know show you some data that have been properly published and analyzed on one special group, namely, top scientists. In 1998, Larson and Witham polled the cream of American scientists, those who'd been honored by election to the National Academy of Sciences, and among this select group, belief in a personal God dropped to a shattering seven percent. About 20 percent are agnostic, and the rest could fairly be called atheists. Similar figures obtained for belief in personal immortality. Among biological scientists, the figures are even lower: 5.5 percent, only, believe in God. Physical scientists: it's 7.5 percent. I've not seen corresponding figures for elite scholars in other fields, such history or philosophy, but I'd be surprised if they were different. So, we've reached a truly remarkable situation, a grotesque mismatch between the American intelligentsia and the American electorate. A philosophical opinion about the nature of the universe, which is held by the vast majority of top American scientists and probably the majority of the intelligentsia generally, is so abhorrent to the American electorate that no candidate for popular election dare affirm it in public. If I'm right, this means that high office in the greatest country in the world is barred to the very people best qualified to hold it -- the intelligentsia -- unless they are prepared to lie about their beliefs. To put it bluntly, American political opportunities are heavily loaded against those who are simultaneously intelligent and honest. (Applause) I'm not a citizen of this country, so I hope it won't be thought unbecoming if I suggest that something needs to be done. (Laughter) And I've already hinted what that something is. From what I've seen of TED, I think this may be the ideal place to launch it. Again, I fear it will cost money. We need a consciousness-raising, coming-out campaign for American atheists. (Laughter) This could be similar to the campaign organized by homosexuals a few years ago, although heaven forbid that we should stoop to public outing of people against their will. In most cases, people who out themselves will help to destroy the myth that there is something wrong with atheists. On the contrary, they'll demonstrate that atheists are often the kinds of people that could serve as decent role models for your children, the kinds of people an advertising agent could use to recommend a product, the kinds of people who are sitting in this room. There should be a snowball effect, a positive feedback, such that the more names we have, the more we get. There could be non-linearities, threshold effects. When a critical mass has been attained, there's an abrupt acceleration in recruitment. And again, it will need money. I suspect that the word "atheist" itself contains or remains a stumbling block far out of proportion to what it actually means, and a stumbling block to people who otherwise might be happy to out themselves. So, what other words might be used to smooth the path, oil the wheels, sugar the pill? Darwin himself preferred "agnostic" -- and not only out of loyalty to his friend Huxley, who coined the term. Darwin said, "I have never been an atheist in the same sense of denying the existence of a God. I think that generally an 'agnostic' would be the most correct description of my state of mind." He even became uncharacteristically tetchy with Edward Aveling. Aveling was a militant atheist who failed to persuade Darwin to accept the dedication of his book on atheism -- incidentally, giving rise to a fascinating myth that Karl Marx tried to dedicate "Das Kapital" to Darwin, which he didn't. It was actually Edward Aveling. What happened was that Aveling's mistress was Marx's daughter, and when both Darwin and Marx were dead, Marx's papers became muddled up with Aveling's papers and a letter from Darwin saying, "My dear sir, thank you very much but I don't want you to dedicate your book to me," was mistakenly supposed to be addressed to Marx, and that gave rise to this whole myth, which you've probably heard. It's a sort of urban myth, that Marx tried to dedicate "Kapital" to Darwin. Anyway, it was Aveling, and when they met, Darwin challenged Aveling, "Why do you call yourselves atheists?" "'Agnostic,'" retorted Aveling, "was simply 'atheist' writ respectable, and 'atheist' was simply 'agnostic' writ aggressive." Darwin complained, "But why should you be so aggressive?" Darwin thought that atheism might be well and good for the intelligentsia, but that ordinary people were not, quote, "ripe for it." Which is, of course, our old friend, the "don't rock the boat" argument. It's not recorded whether Aveling told Darwin to come down off his high horse. (Laughter) But in any case, that was more than 100 years ago. You think we might have grown up since then. Now, a friend, an intelligent lapsed Jew, who incidentally observed the Sabbath for reasons of cultural solidarity, describes himself as a "tooth fairy agnostic." He won't call himself an atheist because it's, in principle, impossible to prove a negative, but agnostic on its own might suggest that God's existence was therefore on equal terms of likelihood as his non-existence. So, my friend is strictly agnostic about the tooth fairy, but it isn't very likely, is it? Like God. Hence the phrase, "tooth fairy agnostic." Bertrand Russell made the same point using a hypothetical teapot in orbit about Mars. You would strictly have to be agnostic about whether there is a teapot in orbit about Mars, but that doesn't mean you treat the likelihood of its existence as on all fours with its non-existence. The list of things which we strictly have to be agnostic about doesn't stop at tooth fairies and teapots. It's infinite. If you want to believe one particular one of them -- unicorns or tooth fairies or teapots or Yahweh -- the onus is on you to say why. The onus is not on the rest of us to say why not. We, who are atheists, are also a-fairiests and a-teapotists. (Laughter) But we don't bother to say so, and this is why my friend uses "tooth fairy agnostic" as a label for what most people would call atheist. Nonetheless, if we want to attract deep down atheists to come out publicly, we're going to have find something better to stick on our banner than "tooth fairy" or "teapot agnostic." So, how about "humanist"? This has the advantage of a worldwide network of well-organized associations and journals and things already in place. My problem with it only is its apparent anthropocentrism. One of the things we've learned from Darwin is that the human species is only one among millions of cousins, some close, some distant. And there are other possibilities like "naturalist," but that also has problems of confusion, because Darwin would have thought naturalist -- "naturalist" means, of course, as opposed to "supernaturalist" -- and it is used sometimes -- Darwin would have been confused by the other sense of "naturalist," which he was, of course, and I suppose there might be others who would confuse it with nudism. (Laughter) Such people might be those belonging to the British lynch mob which last year attacked a pediatrician in mistake for a pedophile. (Laughter) I think the best of the available alternatives for "atheist" is simply "non-theist." It lacks the strong connotation that there's definitely no God, and it could therefore easily be embraced by teapot or tooth fairy agnostics. It's completely compatible with the God of the physicists. When atheists like Stephen Hawking and Albert Einstein use the word "God," they use it of course as a metaphorical shorthand for that deep, mysterious part of physics which we don't yet understand. "Non-theist" will do for all that, yet unlike "atheist," it doesn't have the same phobic, hysterical responses. But I think, actually, the alternative is to grasp the nettle of the word "atheism" itself, precisely because it is a taboo word carrying frissons of hysterical phobia. Critical mass may be harder to achieve with the word "atheist" than with the word "non-theist," or some other non-confrontational word. But if we did achieve it with that dread word -- "atheist" itself -- the political impact would be even greater. Now, I said that if I were religious, I'd be very afraid of evolution. I'd go further. I would fear science in general if properly understood. And this is because the scientific worldview is so much more exciting, more poetic, more filled with sheer wonder than anything in the poverty-stricken arsenals of the religious imagination. As Carl Sagan, another recently dead hero, put it, "How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, 'This is better than we thought! The universe is much bigger than our prophet said, grander, more subtle, more elegant?' Instead they say, 'No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way.' A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths." Now, this is an elite audience, and I would therefore expect about 10 percent of you to be religious. Many of you probably subscribe to our polite cultural belief that we should respect religion, but I also suspect that a fair number of those secretly despise religion as much as I do. (Laughter) If you're one of them, and of course many of you may not be, but if you are one of them, I'm asking you to stop being polite, come out and say so, and if you happen to be rich, give some thought to ways in which you might make a difference. The religious lobby in this country is massively financed by foundations -- to say nothing of all the tax benefits -- by foundations such as the Templeton Foundation and the Discovery Institute. We need an anti-Templeton to step forward. If my books sold as well as Stephen Hawking's books, instead of only as well as Richard Dawkins' books, I'd do it myself. People are always going on about, "How did September the 11th change you?" Well, here's how it changed me. Let's all stop being so damned respectful. Thank you very much. (Applause)
That splendid music, the coming-in music -- "The Elephant March" from "Aida" -- is the music I've chosen for my funeral -- (Laughter) -- and you can see why. It's triumphal. I won't feel anything, but if I could, I would feel triumphal at having lived at all, and at having lived on this splendid planet, and having been given the opportunity to understand something about why I was here in the first place, before not being here. Can you understand my quaint English accent? Like everybody else, I was entranced yesterday by the animal session. Robert Full and Frans Lanting and others -- the beauty of the things they showed. The only slight jarring note was when Jeffrey Katzenberg said of the mustang, "the most splendid creatures that God put on this earth." Now of course, we know that he didn't really mean that, but in this country at the moment, you can't be too careful. (Laughter) I'm a biologist, and the central theorem of our subject: the theory of design, Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection. In professional circles everywhere, it's of course universally accepted. In non-professional circles outside America, it's largely ignored. But in non-professional circles within America, it arouses so much hostility -- (Laughter) -- that it's fair to say that American biologists are in a state of war. The war is so worrying at present, with court cases coming up in one state after another, that I felt I had to say something about it. If you want to know what I have to say about Darwinism itself, I'm afraid you're going to have to look at my books, which you won't find in the bookstore outside. (Laughter) Contemporary court cases often concern an allegedly new version of creationism, called "Intelligent Design," or ID. Don't be fooled. There's nothing new about ID. It's just creationism under another name, rechristened -- I choose the word advisedly -- (Laughter) -- for tactical, political reasons. The arguments of so-called ID theorists are the same old arguments that had been refuted again and again, since Darwin down to the present day. There is an effective evolution lobby coordinating the fight on behalf of science, and I try to do all I can to help them, but they get quite upset when people like me dare to mention that we happen to be atheists as well as evolutionists. They see us as rocking the boat, and you can understand why. Creationists, lacking any coherent scientific argument for their case, fall back on the popular phobia against atheism. Teach your children evolution in biology class, and they'll soon move on to drugs, grand larceny and sexual pre-version. (Laughter) In fact, of course, educated theologians from the Pope down are firm in their support of evolution. This book, "Finding Darwin's God," by Kenneth Miller, is one of the most effective attacks on Intelligent Design that I know, and it's all the more effective because it's written by a devout Christian. People like Kenneth Miller could be called a "godsend" to the evolution lobby -- (Laughter) -- because they expose the lie that evolutionism is, as a matter of fact, tantamount to atheism. People like me, on the other hand, rock the boat. But here, I want to say something nice about creationists. It's not a thing I often do, so listen carefully. (Laughter) I think they're right about one thing. I think they're right that evolution is fundamentally hostile to religion. I've already said that many individual evolutionists, like the Pope, are also religious, but I think they're deluding themselves. I believe a true understanding of Darwinism is deeply corrosive to religious faith. Now, it may sound as though I'm about to preach atheism, and I want to reassure you that that's not what I'm going to do. In an audience as sophisticated as this one, that would be preaching to the choir. No, what I want to urge upon you -- (Laughter) -- instead what I want to urge upon you is militant atheism. (Laughter) (Applause) But that's putting it too negatively. If I was a person who were interested in preserving religious faith, I would be very afraid of the positive power of evolutionary science, and indeed science generally, but evolution in particular, to inspire and enthrall, precisely because it is atheistic. Now, the difficult problem for any theory of biological design is to explain the massive statistical improbability of living things. Statistical improbability in the direction of good design -- "complexity" is another word for this. The standard creationist argument -- there is only one; they all reduce to this one -- takes off from a statistical improbability. Living creatures are too complex to have come about by chance; therefore, they must have had a designer. This argument of course, shoots itself in the foot. Any designer capable of designing something really complex has to be even more complex himself, and that's before we even start on the other things he's expected to do, like forgive sins, bless marriages, listen to prayers -- favor our side in a war -- (Laughter) -- disapprove of our sex lives and so on. (Laughter) Complexity is the problem that any theory of biology has to solve, and you can't solve it by postulating an agent that is even more complex, thereby simply compounding the problem. Darwinian natural selection is so stunningly elegant because it solves the problem of explaining complexity in terms of nothing but simplicity. Essentially, it does it by providing a smooth ramp of gradual step-by-step increment. But here, I only want to make the point that the elegance of Darwinism is corrosive to religion precisely because it is so elegant, so parsimonious, so powerful, so economically powerful. It has the sinewy economy of a beautiful suspension bridge. The God theory is not just a bad theory. It turns out to be, in principle, incapable of doing the job required of it. So, returning to tactics and the evolution lobby, I want to argue that rocking the boat may be just the right thing to do. My approach to attacking creationism is unlike the evolution lobby. My approach to attacking creationism is to attack religion as a whole, and at this point I need to acknowledge the remarkable taboo against speaking ill of religion, and I'm going to do so in the words of the late Douglas Adams, a dear friend who, if he never came to TED, certainly should have been invited. (Richard Saul Wurman: He was.) Richard Dawkins: He was. Good. I thought he must have been. He begins this speech which was tape-recorded in Cambridge shortly before he died. He begins by explaining how science works through the testing of hypotheses that are framed to be vulnerable to disproof, and then he goes on. I quote, "Religion doesn't seem to work like that. It has certain ideas at the heart of it, which we call 'sacred' or 'holy.' What it means is: here is an idea or a notion that you're not allowed to say anything bad about. You're just not. Why not? Because you're not. (Laughter) Why should it be that it's perfectly legitimate to support the Republicans or Democrats, this model of economics versus that, Macintosh instead of Windows, but to have an opinion about how the universe began, about who created the universe -- no, that's holy. So, we're used to not challenging religious ideas and it's very interesting how much of a furor Richard creates when he does it." He meant me, not that one. "Everybody gets absolutely frantic about it, because you're not allowed to say these things, yet when you look at it rationally, there is no reason why those ideas shouldn't be as open to debate as any other, except that we've agreed somehow between us that they shouldn't be." And that's the end of the quote from Douglas. In my view, not only is science corrosive to religion; religion is corrosive to science. It teaches people to be satisfied with trivial, supernatural non-explanations and blinds them to the wonderful real explanations that we have within our grasp. It teaches them to accept authority, revelation and faith instead of always insisting on evidence. There's Douglas Adams, magnificent picture from his book, "Last Chance to See." Now, there's a typical scientific journal, the Quarterly Review of Biology. And I'm going to put together, as guest editor, a special issue on the question, "Did an asteroid kill the dinosaurs?" And the first paper is a standard scientific paper presenting evidence, "Iridium Layer at the K-T Boundary, Potassium-Argon Dated Crater in Yucatan, Indicate That an Asteroid Killed the Dinosaurs." Perfectly ordinary scientific paper. Now, the next one, "The President of The Royal Society Has Been Vouchsafed a Strong Inner Conviction" -- (Laughter) -- "... That an Asteroid Killed the Dinosaurs." (Laughter) "It Has Been Privately Revealed to Professor Huxtane That an Asteroid Killed the Dinosaurs." (Laughter) "Professor Hordley Was Brought Up to Have Total and Unquestioning Faith" -- (Laughter) -- "... That an Asteroid Killed the Dinosaurs." "Professor Hawkins Has Promulgated an Official Dogma Binding on All Loyal Hawkinsians That an Asteroid Killed the Dinosaurs." (Laughter) That's inconceivable, of course. But suppose -- (Applause) -- in 1987, a reporter asked George Bush, Sr. whether he recognized the equal citizenship and patriotism of Americans who are atheists. Mr. Bush's reply has become infamous. "No, I don't know that atheists should be considered citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God." Bush's bigotry was not an isolated mistake, blurted out in the heat of the moment and later retracted. He stood by it in the face of repeated calls for clarification or withdrawal. He really meant it. More to the point, he knew it posed no threat to his election, quite the contrary. Democrats as well as Republicans parade their religiousness if they want to get elected. Both parties invoke "one nation under God." What would Thomas Jefferson have said? Incidentally, I'm not usually very proud of being British, but you can't help making the comparison. (Applause) In practice, what is an atheist? An atheist is just somebody who feels about Yahweh the way any decent Christian feels about Thor or Baal or the golden calf. As has been said before, we are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further. (Laughter) (Applause) And however we define atheism, it's surely the kind of academic belief that a person is entitled to hold without being vilified as an unpatriotic, unelectable non-citizen. Nevertheless, it's an undeniable fact that to own up to being an atheist is tantamount to introducing yourself as Mr. Hitler or Miss Beelzebub. And that all stems from the perception of atheists as some kind of weird, way-out minority. Natalie Angier wrote a rather sad piece in the New Yorker, saying how lonely she felt as an atheist. She clearly feels in a beleaguered minority, but actually, how do American atheists stack up numerically? The latest survey makes surprisingly encouraging reading. Christianity, of course, takes a massive lion's share of the population, with nearly 160 million. But what would you think was the second largest group, convincingly outnumbering Jews with 2.8 million, Muslims at 1.1 million, and Hindus, Buddhists and all other religions put together? The second largest group, of nearly 30 million, is the one described as non-religious or secular. You can't help wondering why vote-seeking politicians are so proverbially overawed by the power of, for example, the Jewish lobby. The state of Israel seems to owe its very existence to the American Jewish vote, while at the same time consigning the non-religious to political oblivion. This secular non-religious vote, if properly mobilized, is nine times as numerous as the Jewish vote. Why does this far more substantial minority not make a move to exercise its political muscle? Well, so much for quantity. How about quality? Is there any correlation, positive or negative, between intelligence and tendency to be religious? (Laughter) The survey that I quoted, which is the ARIS survey, didn't break down its data by socio-economic class or education, IQ or anything else. But a recent article by Paul G. Bell in the Mensa magazine provides some straws in the wind. Mensa, as you know, is an international organization for people with very high IQ. And from a meta-analysis of the literature, Bell concludes that, I quote, "Of 43 studies carried out since 1927 on the relationship between religious belief and one's intelligence or educational level, all but four found an inverse connection. That is, the higher one's intelligence or educational level, the less one is likely to be religious." Well, I haven't seen the original 42 studies and I can't comment on that meta-anaysis but I would like to see more studies done along those lines. And I know that there are, if I could put a little plug here, there are people in this audience easily capable of financing a massive research survey to settle the question, and I put the suggestion up -- for what it's worth. But let me know show you some data that have been properly published and analyzed on one special group, namely, top scientists. In 1998, Larson and Witham polled the cream of American scientists, those who'd been honored by election to the National Academy of Sciences, and among this select group, belief in a personal God dropped to a shattering seven percent. About 20 percent are agnostic, and the rest could fairly be called atheists. Similar figures obtained for belief in personal immortality. Among biological scientists, the figures are even lower: 5.5 percent, only, believe in God. Physical scientists: it's 7.5 percent. I've not seen corresponding figures for elite scholars in other fields, such history or philosophy, but I'd be surprised if they were different. So, we've reached a truly remarkable situation, a grotesque mismatch between the American intelligentsia and the American electorate. A philosophical opinion about the nature of the universe, which is held by the vast majority of top American scientists and probably the majority of the intelligentsia generally, is so abhorrent to the American electorate that no candidate for popular election dare affirm it in public. If I'm right, this means that high office in the greatest country in the world is barred to the very people best qualified to hold it -- the intelligentsia -- unless they are prepared to lie about their beliefs. To put it bluntly, American political opportunities are heavily loaded against those who are simultaneously intelligent and honest. (Applause) I'm not a citizen of this country, so I hope it won't be thought unbecoming if I suggest that something needs to be done. (Laughter) And I've already hinted what that something is. From what I've seen of TED, I think this may be the ideal place to launch it. Again, I fear it will cost money. We need a consciousness-raising, coming-out campaign for American atheists. (Laughter) This could be similar to the campaign organized by homosexuals a few years ago, although heaven forbid that we should stoop to public outing of people against their will. In most cases, people who out themselves will help to destroy the myth that there is something wrong with atheists. On the contrary, they'll demonstrate that atheists are often the kinds of people that could serve as decent role models for your children, the kinds of people an advertising agent could use to recommend a product, the kinds of people who are sitting in this room. There should be a snowball effect, a positive feedback, such that the more names we have, the more we get. There could be non-linearities, threshold effects. When a critical mass has been attained, there's an abrupt acceleration in recruitment. And again, it will need money. I suspect that the word "atheist" itself contains or remains a stumbling block far out of proportion to what it actually means, and a stumbling block to people who otherwise might be happy to out themselves. So, what other words might be used to smooth the path, oil the wheels, sugar the pill? Darwin himself preferred "agnostic" -- and not only out of loyalty to his friend Huxley, who coined the term. Darwin said, "I have never been an atheist in the same sense of denying the existence of a God. I think that generally an 'agnostic' would be the most correct description of my state of mind." He even became uncharacteristically tetchy with Edward Aveling. Aveling was a militant atheist who failed to persuade Darwin to accept the dedication of his book on atheism -- incidentally, giving rise to a fascinating myth that Karl Marx tried to dedicate "Das Kapital" to Darwin, which he didn't. It was actually Edward Aveling. What happened was that Aveling's mistress was Marx's daughter, and when both Darwin and Marx were dead, Marx's papers became muddled up with Aveling's papers and a letter from Darwin saying, "My dear sir, thank you very much but I don't want you to dedicate your book to me," was mistakenly supposed to be addressed to Marx, and that gave rise to this whole myth, which you've probably heard. It's a sort of urban myth, that Marx tried to dedicate "Kapital" to Darwin. Anyway, it was Aveling, and when they met, Darwin challenged Aveling, "Why do you call yourselves atheists?" "'Agnostic,'" retorted Aveling, "was simply 'atheist' writ respectable, and 'atheist' was simply 'agnostic' writ aggressive." Darwin complained, "But why should you be so aggressive?" Darwin thought that atheism might be well and good for the intelligentsia, but that ordinary people were not, quote, "ripe for it." Which is, of course, our old friend, the "don't rock the boat" argument. It's not recorded whether Aveling told Darwin to come down off his high horse. (Laughter) But in any case, that was more than 100 years ago. You think we might have grown up since then. Now, a friend, an intelligent lapsed Jew, who incidentally observed the Sabbath for reasons of cultural solidarity, describes himself as a "tooth fairy agnostic." He won't call himself an atheist because it's, in principle, impossible to prove a negative, but agnostic on its own might suggest that God's existence was therefore on equal terms of likelihood as his non-existence. So, my friend is strictly agnostic about the tooth fairy, but it isn't very likely, is it? Like God. Hence the phrase, "tooth fairy agnostic." Bertrand Russell made the same point using a hypothetical teapot in orbit about Mars. You would strictly have to be agnostic about whether there is a teapot in orbit about Mars, but that doesn't mean you treat the likelihood of its existence as on all fours with its non-existence. The list of things which we strictly have to be agnostic about doesn't stop at tooth fairies and teapots. It's infinite. If you want to believe one particular one of them -- unicorns or tooth fairies or teapots or Yahweh -- the onus is on you to say why. The onus is not on the rest of us to say why not. We, who are atheists, are also a-fairiests and a-teapotists. (Laughter) But we don't bother to say so, and this is why my friend uses "tooth fairy agnostic" as a label for what most people would call atheist. Nonetheless, if we want to attract deep down atheists to come out publicly, we're going to have find something better to stick on our banner than "tooth fairy" or "teapot agnostic." So, how about "humanist"? This has the advantage of a worldwide network of well-organized associations and journals and things already in place. My problem with it only is its apparent anthropocentrism. One of the things we've learned from Darwin is that the human species is only one among millions of cousins, some close, some distant. And there are other possibilities like "naturalist," but that also has problems of confusion, because Darwin would have thought naturalist -- "naturalist" means, of course, as opposed to "supernaturalist" -- and it is used sometimes -- Darwin would have been confused by the other sense of "naturalist," which he was, of course, and I suppose there might be others who would confuse it with nudism. (Laughter) Such people might be those belonging to the British lynch mob which last year attacked a pediatrician in mistake for a pedophile. (Laughter) I think the best of the available alternatives for "atheist" is simply "non-theist." It lacks the strong connotation that there's definitely no God, and it could therefore easily be embraced by teapot or tooth fairy agnostics. It's completely compatible with the God of the physicists. When atheists like Stephen Hawking and Albert Einstein use the word "God," they use it of course as a metaphorical shorthand for that deep, mysterious part of physics which we don't yet understand. "Non-theist" will do for all that, yet unlike "atheist," it doesn't have the same phobic, hysterical responses. But I think, actually, the alternative is to grasp the nettle of the word "atheism" itself, precisely because it is a taboo word carrying frissons of hysterical phobia. Critical mass may be harder to achieve with the word "atheist" than with the word "non-theist," or some other non-confrontational word. But if we did achieve it with that dread word -- "atheist" itself -- the political impact would be even greater. Now, I said that if I were religious, I'd be very afraid of evolution. I'd go further. I would fear science in general if properly understood. And this is because the scientific worldview is so much more exciting, more poetic, more filled with sheer wonder than anything in the poverty-stricken arsenals of the religious imagination. As Carl Sagan, another recently dead hero, put it, "How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, 'This is better than we thought! The universe is much bigger than our prophet said, grander, more subtle, more elegant?' Instead they say, 'No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way.' A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the universe as revealed by modern science might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths." Now, this is an elite audience, and I would therefore expect about 10 percent of you to be religious. Many of you probably subscribe to our polite cultural belief that we should respect religion, but I also suspect that a fair number of those secretly despise religion as much as I do. (Laughter) If you're one of them, and of course many of you may not be, but if you are one of them, I'm asking you to stop being polite, come out and say so, and if you happen to be rich, give some thought to ways in which you might make a difference. The religious lobby in this country is massively financed by foundations -- to say nothing of all the tax benefits -- by foundations such as the Templeton Foundation and the Discovery Institute. We need an anti-Templeton to step forward. If my books sold as well as Stephen Hawking's books, instead of only as well as Richard Dawkins' books, I'd do it myself. People are always going on about, "How did September the 11th change you?" Well, here's how it changed me. Let's all stop being so damned respectful. Thank you very much. (Applause)
In this rather long sort of marathon presentation, I've tried to break it up into three parts: the first being a whole lot of examples on how it can be a little bit more pleasurable to deal with a computer and really address the qualities of the human interface. And these will be some simple design qualities and they will also be some qualities of, if you will, the intelligence of interaction. Then the second part will really just be examples of new technologies -- new media falling very much into that mold. Again, I will go through them as fast as possible. And then the last one will be some examples I've been able to collect, which I think illustrate this at least as best I can, in the world of entertainment. People have this belief -- and I share most of it -- that we will be using the TV screens or their equivalents for electronic books of the future. But then you think, "My God! What a terrible image you get when you look at still pictures on TV." Well, it doesn't have to be terrible. And that is a slide taken from a TV set and it was pre-processed to be very sympathetic to the TV medium, and it absolutely looks beautiful. Well, what's happened? How did people get into this mess? Where you are now, all of a sudden, sitting in front of personal computers and video text -- teletext systems, and somewhat horrified by what you see on the screen? Well, you have to remember that TV was designed to be looked at eight times the distance of the diagonal. So you get a 13-inch, 19-inch, whatever, TV, and then you should multiply that by eight and that's the distance you should sit away from the TV set. Now we've put people 18 inches in front of a TV, and all the artifacts that none of the original designers expected to be seen, all of a sudden, are staring you in the face: the shadow mask, the scan lines, all of that. And they can be treated very easily; there are actually ways of getting rid of them, there are actually ways of just making absolutely beautiful pictures. I'm talking here a little bit about display technologies. Let me talk about how you might input information. And my favorite example is always fingers. I'm very interested in touch-sensitive displays. High-tech, high-touch. Isn't that what some of you said? It's certainly a very important medium for input, and a lot of people think that fingers are a very low-resolution sort of stylus for inputting to a display. In fact, they're not: it's really a very, very high-resolution input medium -- you have to just do it twice, you have to touch the screen and then rotate your finger slightly -- and you can move a cursor with great accuracy. And so when you see on the market these systems that have just a few light emitting diodes on the side and are very low resolution, it's nice that they exist because it still is better than nothing. But it, in some sense, misses the point: namely, that fingers are a very, very high-resolution input medium. Now, what are some of the other advantages? Well, the one advantage is that you don't have to pick them up, and people don't realize how important that is -- not having to pick up your fingers to use them. (Laughter) When you think for a second of the mouse on Macintosh -- and I will not criticize the mouse too much -- when you're typing -- what you have -- you want to now put something -- first of all, you've got to find the mouse. You have to probably stop. Maybe not come to a grinding halt, but you've got to sort of find that mouse. Then you find the mouse, and you're going to have to wiggle it a little bit to see where the cursor is on the screen. And then when you finally see where it is, then you've got to move it to get the cursor over there, and then -- "Bang" -- you've got to hit a button or do whatever. That's four separate steps versus typing and then touching and typing and just doing it all in one motion -- or one-and-a-half, depending on how you want to count. Again, what I'm trying to do is just illustrate the kinds of problems that I think face the designers of new computer systems and entertainment systems and educational systems from the perspective of the quality of that interface. And another advantage, of course, of using fingers is you have 10 of them. And we have never known how to do this technically, so this slide is a fake slide. We never succeeded in using ten fingers, but there are certain things you can do, obviously, with more than one-finger input, which is rather fascinating. What we did stumble across was something ... Again, which is typical of the computer field, is when you have a bug that you can't get rid of you turn it into a feature. And maybe ... (Laughter) maybe a mouse is a new kind of bug. But the bug in our case was in touch-sensitive displays: we wanted to be able to draw -- you know, rub your finger across the screen to input continuous points -- and there was just too much friction created between your finger and the glass -- if glass was the substrate, which it usually is. So we found that that actually was a feature in the sense you could build a pressure-sensitive display. And when you touch it with your finger, you can actually, then, introduce all the forces on the face of that screen, and that actually has a certain amount of value. Let me see if I can load another disc and show you, quickly, an example. Now, imagine a screen, which is not only touch-sensitive now, it's pressure-sensitive. And it's pressure-sensitive to the forces both in the plane of the screen -- X, Y, and Z at least in one direction; we couldn't figure out how to come in the other direction. But let me get rid of the slide, and let's see if this comes on. OK. So there is the pressure-sensitive display in operation. The person's just, if you will, pushing on the screen to make a curve. But this is the interesting part. I want to stop it for a second because the movie is very badly made. And the particular display was built about six years ago, and when we moved from one room to another room, a rather large person sat on it and it got destroyed. So all we have is this record. (Laughter) But imagine that screen having lots of objects on it and the person has touched an object -- one of N -- like he did there, and then pushed on it. Now, imagine a program where some of those objects are physically heavy and some are light: one is an anvil on a fuzzy rug and the other one is a ping-pong ball on a sheet of glass. And when you touch it, you have to really push very hard to move that anvil across the screen, and yet you touch the ping-pong ball very lightly and it just scoots across the screen. And what you can do -- oops, I didn't mean to do that -- what you can do is actually feed back to the user the feeling of the physical properties. So again, they don't have to be weight; they could be a general trying to move troops, and he's got to move an aircraft carrier versus a little boat. In fact, they funded it for that very reason. (Laughter) The whole notion, then, is one that at the interface there are physical properties in that transducer -- in this case it's pressure and touches -- that allow you to present things to the user that you could never present before. So it's not simply looking at the quality or, if you will, the luxury of that interface, but it's actually looking at the idea of presenting things that previously couldn't be presented before. I want to move on to another example, which is one of a different sort, where we're trying to use computer and video disc technology now to come up with a new kind of book. Here, the idea is that you're going to take this book, if you will, and it's going to come alive. You're going to sort of breathe life into it. We are so used to doing monologues. Filmmakers, for example, are the experts in monologue making: you make a film and it has a well-formed beginning, middle and end, and in some sense the art of it is that. And you then say, "There's an opportunity for making conversational movies." Well, what does that mean? And it sort of nibbles at the core of the whole profession and all the assumptions of that medium. So, book writing is the same thing. What I'll show you very quickly is a new kind of book where it is mixed now with ... all sorts of things live in there, but you have to keep a few things in mind. One is that this book knows about itself. Each frame of the movie has information about itself. So it knows, or at least there is computer-readable information in the medium itself. It's just not a static movie frame. That's one thing. The other is that you have to realize that it is a random access medium, and you can, in fact, branch and expand and elaborate and shrink. And here -- again, my favorite example -- is the cookbook, the "Larousse Gastronomique." And I think I use the example all too often, but it's a great one because there is a classic ending in that little encyclopedia-style cookbook that tells you how to do something like penguin, and you get to the end of the recipe and it says, "Cook until done." Now, that would be, if you will, the top green track, which doesn't mean too much. But you might have to elaborate for me or for somebody who isn't an expert, and say, "Cook at 380 degrees for 45 minutes." And then for a real beginner, you would go down even further and elaborate more -- say, "Open the oven, preheat, wait for the light to go out, open the door, don't leave it open too long, put the penguin in and shut the door ..." (Laughter) whatever. And that's a much more elaborate one than you dribble back. That's one kind of use of random access. And the other is where you want to explain the same thing in different ways. If you're in a classroom situation and somebody asks a question, the last thing you do is repeat what you just said. You try and think of a different way of saying the same thing, or if you know the particular student and that student's cognitive style, then you might say it in a way that you think would have a good impedance match with that student. There are all sorts of techniques you will use -- and again, this is a different kind of branching. So, what I will show you is ... it's a rather boring book, but I'm afraid sometimes you have to do boring books because your sponsors aren't necessarily interested in fiction and entertainment. And this is a book on how to repair a transmission. Now, I don't even know what vintage the transmission is, but let me just show you very quickly some of it, and we'll move on. (Video) Narrator: And continue to get descriptions for each of these chapters. Nicholas Negroponte: Now, this is his table of contents. Just a picture of the transmission, and as you rub your finger across the transmission it highlights the various parts. Narrator: When I find a chapter that I want to see, I just touch the text and the system will format pages for me to read. The words or phrases that are lit up in red are glossary words, so I can get a different definition by just touching the word, and the definition appears, superimposed over the illustration. NN: This is about the oil pan, or the oil filter and all that. This is relatively important because it sets the page ... Narrator: This is another example of a page with glossary words highlighted in red. I can get a definition of these words just by touching them, and the definition will appear in the illustration corner. I can get back to the illustration, but in this case it's not a single frame, but it's actually a movie of someone coming into the frame and doing the repair that's described in the text. The two-headed slider is a speed control that allows me to watch the movie at various speeds, in forward or reverse. And the movie is displayed as a full frame movie. I can go back to the beginning ... and play the movie at full speed. Here's another step-by-step procedure, only in this case -- NN: Okay, this movie is ... Everybody's heard of sound-sync movies -- this is text-sync movies, so as the movie plays, the text gets highlighted. We highlight the text as we go through the movie. Repairman: ... Not too far out. Front poles, preferably. Don't loosen them too far. If you loosen them too far, you'll have a big mess. NN: I suspect that some of you might not even understand that language. (Laughter) OK. I'm at the third and last part of this, which I said I would make an attempt to at least give you some examples that may be more directly related to the world of entertainment. And of course, good education has got to be good entertainment, so my first example will be drawn from a very recent experiment that we've been doing -- in this case, in Senegal -- where we have tried to use personal computers as a pedagogical medium. But not as teaching machines at all; the whole notion is to use this as an instrument where there is a complete reversal of roles -- the child is, if you will, the teacher and the machine is the student -- and the art of computer programming is a vehicle that sort of approximates thinking about thinking. But teaching kids programming per se is utterly irrelevant. And there are just a few slides I want to go through, but there's a story I'd like to tell. And that was when, before we did this in any developing countries -- we're doing it, in fact, in three developing countries right now: Pakistan, Colombia and Senegal -- we did it in some pretty rough areas of New York City. And one child, whose name I've forgotten, was about seven or eight years old, absolutely considered mentally handicapped -- couldn't read, didn't even make it in the lowest section of the school's classes -- and was pretty much not in school, though physically there. But did hang around the, quote, "computer room," where there were quite a few computers, and learned this particular language called Logo -- and learned it with great ease and found it a lot of fun, it was very interesting. And one day, by chance, some visitors from the NIE came by in their double-breasted suits looking at this setup, and none of the children who were normally there, except for this one child, were there. He was, and he said, "Let me show you how this works," and they got an absolutely ingenuous, wonderful description of Logo. And the child was just zipping right through it, showing them all sorts of things until they asked him how to do something which he couldn't explain and so he flipped through the manual, found the explanation and typed the command and got it to do what they asked. They were delighted, and by the time it was time to go see the principal, whom they'd actually come to see -- not the computer room -- they went upstairs and they said, "This is absolutely remarkable! That child was very articulate and showed us and even dealt with the things he couldn't do automatically with that manual. It was just absolutely fantastic." The principal said, "There's a dreadful mistake, because that child can't read. And you obviously have been hoodwinked or you've talked about somebody else." And they all got up and they all went downstairs and the child was still there. And they did something very intelligent: they asked the child, "Can you read?" And the child said, "No, I can't." And then they said, "But wait a minute. You just looked through that manual and you found ... " and he said, "Oh, but that's not reading." And so they said, "Well, what's reading then?" He says, "Well, reading is this junk they give me in little books to read. It's absolutely irrelevant, (Laughter) and I get nothing for it. But here, with a little bit of effort I get a lot of return." And it really meant something to the child. The child read beautifully, it turned out, and was really very competent. So it actually meant something. And that story has many other anecdotes that are similar, but wow. The key to the future of computers in education is right there, and it is: when does it mean something to a child? There is a myth, and it truly is a myth: we believe -- and I'm sure a lot of you believe in this room -- that it is harder to read and write than it is to learn how to speak. And it's not, but we think speech -- "My God, little children pick it up somehow, and by the age of two they're doing a mediocre job, and by three and four they're speaking reasonably well. And yet you've got to go to school to learn how to read, and you have to sit in a classroom and somebody has to teach you. Hence, it must be harder." Well, it's not harder. What the truth is is that speaking has great value to a child; the child can get a great deal by talking to you. Reading and writing is utterly useless. There is no reason for a child to read and write except blind faith, and that it's going to help you. (Laughter) So what happens is you go to school and people say, "Just believe me, you're going to like it. You're going to like reading," and just read and read. On the other hand, you give a kid -- a three-year-old kid -- a computer and they type a little command and -- Poof! -- something happens. And all of a sudden ... You may not call that reading and writing, but a certain bit of typing and reading stuff on the screen has a huge payoff, and it's a lot of fun. And in fact, it's a powerful educational instrument. Well, in Senegal we found that this was the traditional classroom: 120 kids -- three per desk -- one teacher, a little bit of chalk. This student was one of our first students, and it's the girl on the left leaning with her chalkboard, and she came ... within two days -- I want to show you the program she wrote, and remember her hairstyle. And that is the program she made. That's what meant something to her, is doing the hair pattern, and actually did it within two days -- an hour each day -- and found it was, to her, absolutely the most meaningful piece ... But rooted in that, little did she know how much knowledge she was acquiring about geometry and just math and logic and all the rest. And again, I could talk for three hours about this subject. I will come to my last example and then quit. And my last example -- as some of my former colleagues, whom I see in the room, can imagine what it will be. Yes, it is. It's our work -- that was a while ago, and it still is my favorite project -- of teleconferencing. And the reason it remains a favorite project is that we were asked to do a teleconferencing system where you had the following situation: you had five people at five different sites -- they were known people -- and you had to have these people in teleconference, such that each one was utterly convinced that the other four were physically present. Now, that is sufficiently zany that we would, obviously, jump to the bait, and we did. And the fact that we knew the people -- we had to take a page out of the history of Walt Disney -- we actually went so far as to build CRTs in the shapes of the people's faces. So if I wanted to call my friend Peter Sprague on the phone, my secretary would get his head out and bring it and set it on the desk, (Laughter) and that would be the TV used for the occasion. And it's uncanny: there's no way I can explain to you the amount of eye contact you get with that physical face projected on a 3D CRT of that sort. The next thing that we had to do is to persuade them that there needed to be spatial correspondence, which is straightforward, but again, it's something that didn't fall naturally out of a telecommunications or computing style of thinking; it was a very, if you will, architectural or spatial concept. And that was to recognize that when you sit around the table, the actual location of the people becomes rather important. And when somebody gets up, in fact, to go answer a phone or use a bathroom or something, the empty seat becomes, if you will, that person. And you point frequently to the empty seat and you say, "He or she wouldn't agree," and the empty chair is that person and the spatiality is crucial. So we said, "Well, these will be on round tables and the order around the table had to be the same, so that at my site, I would be, if you will, real and then at each other's site you'd have these plastic heads. And the plastic heads, sometimes you want to project them. And there are a number of schemes, which I don't want to dwell on, but this is the one that we finally used where we projected onto rear screen material that was molded in the face -- literally in the face of the person. And I'll show you one more slide, where this is actually made from something called a solid photograph and is the screen. Now, we track, on the person's head, the head motions -- so we transmit with a video the head positions -- and so this head moves in about two axes. So if I, all of a sudden, turn to the person to my left and start talking to that person, then at the person to my right's site, he'll see these two plastic heads talking to each other. And then if that person interrupts, then those two heads may turn. And it really is reconstructing, quite accurately, teleconferencing.
That splendid music, the coming-in music, "The Elephant March" from "Aida," is the music I've chosen for my funeral. (Laughter) And you can see why. It's triumphal. I won't feel anything, but if I could, I would feel triumphal at having lived at all, and at having lived on this splendid planet, and having been given the opportunity to understand something about why I was here in the first place, before not being here. Can you understand my quaint English accent? (Laughter) Like everybody else, I was entranced yesterday by the animal session. Robert Full and Frans Lanting and others; the beauty of the things that they showed. The only slight jarring note was when Jeffrey Katzenberg said of the mustang, "the most splendid creatures that God put on this earth." Now of course, we know that he didn't really mean that, but in this country at the moment, you can't be too careful. (Laughter) I'm a biologist, and the central theorem of our subject: the theory of design, Darwin's theory of evolution by natural selection. In professional circles everywhere, it's of course universally accepted. In non-professional circles outside America, it's largely ignored. But in non-professional circles within America, it arouses so much hostility -- (Laughter) it's fair to say that American biologists are in a state of war. The war is so worrying at present, with court cases coming up in one state after another, that I felt I had to say something about it. If you want to know what I have to say about Darwinism itself, I'm afraid you're going to have to look at my books, which you won't find in the bookstore outside. (Laughter) Contemporary court cases often concern an allegedly new version of creationism, called "Intelligent Design," or ID. Don't be fooled. There's nothing new about ID. It's just creationism under another name, rechristened -- I choose the word advisedly -- (Laughter) for tactical, political reasons. The arguments of so-called ID theorists are the same old arguments that had been refuted again and again, since Darwin down to the present day. There is an effective evolution lobby coordinating the fight on behalf of science, and I try to do all I can to help them, but they get quite upset when people like me dare to mention that we happen to be atheists as well as evolutionists. They see us as rocking the boat, and you can understand why. Creationists, lacking any coherent scientific argument for their case, fall back on the popular phobia against atheism: Teach your children evolution in biology class, and they'll soon move on to drugs, grand larceny and sexual "pre-version." (Laughter) In fact, of course, educated theologians from the Pope down are firm in their support of evolution. This book, "Finding Darwin's God," by Kenneth Miller, is one of the most effective attacks on Intelligent Design that I know and it's all the more effective because it's written by a devout Christian. People like Kenneth Miller could be called a "godsend" to the evolution lobby, (Laughter) because they expose the lie that evolutionism is, as a matter of fact, tantamount to atheism. People like me, on the other hand, rock the boat. But here, I want to say something nice about creationists. It's not a thing I often do, so listen carefully. (Laughter) I think they're right about one thing. I think they're right that evolution is fundamentally hostile to religion. I've already said that many individual evolutionists, like the Pope, are also religious, but I think they're deluding themselves. I believe a true understanding of Darwinism is deeply corrosive to religious faith. Now, it may sound as though I'm about to preach atheism, and I want to reassure you that that's not what I'm going to do. In an audience as sophisticated as this one, that would be preaching to the choir. No, what I want to urge upon you -- (Laughter) Instead, what I want to urge upon you is militant atheism. (Laughter) (Applause) But that's putting it too negatively. If I was a person who were interested in preserving religious faith, I would be very afraid of the positive power of evolutionary science, and indeed science generally, but evolution in particular, to inspire and enthrall, precisely because it is atheistic. Now, the difficult problem for any theory of biological design is to explain the massive statistical improbability of living things. Statistical improbability in the direction of good design -- "complexity" is another word for this. The standard creationist argument -- there is only one; they're all reduced to this one -- takes off from a statistical improbability. Living creatures are too complex to have come about by chance; therefore, they must have had a designer. This argument of course, shoots itself in the foot. Any designer capable of designing something really complex has to be even more complex himself, and that's before we even start on the other things he's expected to do, like forgive sins, bless marriages, listen to prayers -- favor our side in a war -- (Laughter) disapprove of our sex lives, and so on. (Laughter) Complexity is the problem that any theory of biology has to solve, and you can't solve it by postulating an agent that is even more complex, thereby simply compounding the problem. Darwinian natural selection is so stunningly elegant because it solves the problem of explaining complexity in terms of nothing but simplicity. Essentially, it does it by providing a smooth ramp of gradual, step-by-step increment. But here, I only want to make the point that the elegance of Darwinism is corrosive to religion, precisely because it is so elegant, so parsimonious, so powerful, so economically powerful. It has the sinewy economy of a beautiful suspension bridge. The God theory is not just a bad theory. It turns out to be -- in principle -- incapable of doing the job required of it. So, returning to tactics and the evolution lobby, I want to argue that rocking the boat may be just the right thing to do. My approach to attacking creationism is -- unlike the evolution lobby -- my approach to attacking creationism is to attack religion as a whole. And at this point I need to acknowledge the remarkable taboo against speaking ill of religion, and I'm going to do so in the words of the late Douglas Adams, a dear friend who, if he never came to TED, certainly should have been invited. (Richard Saul Wurman: He was.) Richard Dawkins: He was. Good. I thought he must have been. He begins this speech, which was tape recorded in Cambridge shortly before he died -- he begins by explaining how science works through the testing of hypotheses that are framed to be vulnerable to disproof, and then he goes on. I quote, "Religion doesn't seem to work like that. It has certain ideas at the heart of it, which we call 'sacred' or 'holy.' What it means is: here is an idea or a notion that you're not allowed to say anything bad about. You're just not. Why not? Because you're not." (Laughter) "Why should it be that it's perfectly legitimate to support the Republicans or Democrats, this model of economics versus that, Macintosh instead of Windows, but to have an opinion about how the universe began, about who created the universe -- no, that's holy. So, we're used to not challenging religious ideas, and it's very interesting how much of a furor Richard creates when he does it." -- He meant me, not that one. "Everybody gets absolutely frantic about it, because you're not allowed to say these things. Yet when you look at it rationally, there's no reason why those ideas shouldn't be as open to debate as any other, except that we've agreed somehow between us that they shouldn't be." And that's the end of the quote from Douglas. In my view, not only is science corrosive to religion; religion is corrosive to science. It teaches people to be satisfied with trivial, supernatural non-explanations, and blinds them to the wonderful, real explanations that we have within our grasp. It teaches them to accept authority, revelation and faith, instead of always insisting on evidence. There's Douglas Adams, magnificent picture from his book, "Last Chance to See." Now, there's a typical scientific journal, The Quarterly Review of Biology. And I'm going to put together, as guest editor, a special issue on the question, "Did an asteroid kill the dinosaurs?" And the first paper is a standard scientific paper, presenting evidence, "Iridium layer at the K-T boundary, and potassium argon dated crater in Yucatan, indicate that an asteroid killed the dinosaurs." Perfectly ordinary scientific paper. Now, the next one. "The President of the Royal Society has been vouchsafed a strong inner conviction that an asteroid killed the dinosaurs." (Laughter) "It has been privately revealed to Professor Huxtane that an asteroid killed the dinosaurs." (Laughter) "Professor Hordley was brought up to have total and unquestioning faith" -- (Laughter) -- "that an asteroid killed the dinosaurs." "Professor Hawkins has promulgated an official dogma binding on all loyal Hawkinsians that an asteroid killed the dinosaurs." (Laughter) That's inconceivable, of course. But suppose -- [Supporters of the Asteroid Theory cannot be patriotic citizens] (Laughter) (Applause) In 1987, a reporter asked George Bush, Sr. whether he recognized the equal citizenship and patriotism of Americans who are atheists. Mr. Bush's reply has become infamous. "No, I don't know that atheists should be considered citizens, nor should they be considered patriots. This is one nation under God." Bush's bigotry was not an isolated mistake, blurted out in the heat of the moment and later retracted. He stood by it in the face of repeated calls for clarification or withdrawal. He really meant it. More to the point, he knew it posed no threat to his election -- quite the contrary. Democrats as well as Republicans parade their religiousness if they want to get elected. Both parties invoke "one nation under God." What would Thomas Jefferson have said? [In every country and in every age, the priest has been hostile to liberty] Incidentally, I'm not usually very proud of being British, but you can't help making the comparison. (Applause) In practice, what is an atheist? An atheist is just somebody who feels about Yahweh the way any decent Christian feels about Thor or Baal or the golden calf. As has been said before, we are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further. (Laughter) (Applause) And however we define atheism, it's surely the kind of academic belief that a person is entitled to hold without being vilified as an unpatriotic, unelectable non-citizen. Nevertheless, it's an undeniable fact that to own up to being an atheist is tantamount to introducing yourself as Mr. Hitler or Miss Beelzebub. And that all stems from the perception of atheists as some kind of weird, way-out minority. Natalie Angier wrote a rather sad piece in the New Yorker, saying how lonely she felt as an atheist. She clearly feels in a beleaguered minority. But actually, how do American atheists stack up numerically? The latest survey makes surprisingly encouraging reading. Christianity, of course, takes a massive lion's share of the population, with nearly 160 million. But what would you think was the second largest group, convincingly outnumbering Jews with 2.8 million, Muslims at 1.1 million, Hindus, Buddhists and all other religions put together? The second largest group, with nearly 30 million, is the one described as non-religious or secular. You can't help wondering why vote-seeking politicians are so proverbially overawed by the power of, for example, the Jewish lobby -- the state of Israel seems to owe its very existence to the American Jewish vote -- while at the same time, consigning the non-religious to political oblivion. This secular non-religious vote, if properly mobilized, is nine times as numerous as the Jewish vote. Why does this far more substantial minority not make a move to exercise its political muscle? Well, so much for quantity. How about quality? Is there any correlation, positive or negative, between intelligence and tendency to be religious? [Them folks misunderestimated me] (Laughter) The survey that I quoted, which is the ARIS survey, didn't break down its data by socio-economic class or education, IQ or anything else. But a recent article by Paul G. Bell in the Mensa magazine provides some straws in the wind. Mensa, as you know, is an international organization for people with very high IQ. And from a meta-analysis of the literature, Bell concludes that, I quote -- "Of 43 studies carried out since 1927 on the relationship between religious belief, and one's intelligence or educational level, all but four found an inverse connection. That is, the higher one's intelligence or educational level, the less one is likely to be religious." Well, I haven't seen the original 42 studies, and I can't comment on that meta-analysis, but I would like to see more studies done along those lines. And I know that there are -- if I could put a little plug here -- there are people in this audience easily capable of financing a massive research survey to settle the question, and I put the suggestion up, for what it's worth. But let me know show you some data that have been properly published and analyzed, on one special group -- namely, top scientists. In 1998, Larson and Witham polled the cream of American scientists, those who'd been honored by election to the National Academy of Sciences, and among this select group, belief in a personal God dropped to a shattering seven percent. About 20 percent are agnostic; the rest could fairly be called atheists. Similar figures obtained for belief in personal immortality. Among biological scientists, the figure is even lower: 5.5 percent, only, believe in God. Physical scientists, it's 7.5 percent. I've not seen corresponding figures for elite scholars in other fields, such as history or philosophy, but I'd be surprised if they were different. So, we've reached a truly remarkable situation, a grotesque mismatch between the American intelligentsia and the American electorate. A philosophical opinion about the nature of the universe, which is held by the vast majority of top American scientists and probably the majority of the intelligentsia generally, is so abhorrent to the American electorate that no candidate for popular election dare affirm it in public. If I'm right, this means that high office in the greatest country in the world is barred to the very people best qualified to hold it -- the intelligentsia -- unless they are prepared to lie about their beliefs. To put it bluntly: American political opportunities are heavily loaded against those who are simultaneously intelligent and honest. (Laughter) (Applause) I'm not a citizen of this country, so I hope it won't be thought unbecoming if I suggest that something needs to be done. (Laughter) And I've already hinted what that something is. From what I've seen of TED, I think this may be the ideal place to launch it. Again, I fear it will cost money. We need a consciousness-raising, coming-out campaign for American atheists. (Laughter) This could be similar to the campaign organized by homosexuals a few years ago, although heaven forbid that we should stoop to public outing of people against their will. In most cases, people who out themselves will help to destroy the myth that there is something wrong with atheists. On the contrary, they'll demonstrate that atheists are often the kinds of people who could serve as decent role models for your children, the kinds of people an advertising agent could use to recommend a product, the kinds of people who are sitting in this room. There should be a snowball effect, a positive feedback, such that the more names we have, the more we get. There could be non-linearities, threshold effects. When a critical mass has been obtained, there's an abrupt acceleration in recruitment. And again, it will need money. I suspect that the word "atheist" itself contains or remains a stumbling block far out of proportion to what it actually means, and a stumbling block to people who otherwise might be happy to out themselves. So, what other words might be used to smooth the path, oil the wheels, sugar the pill? Darwin himself preferred "agnostic" -- and not only out of loyalty to his friend Huxley, who coined the term. Darwin said, "I have never been an atheist in the same sense of denying the existence of a God. I think that generally an 'agnostic' would be the most correct description of my state of mind." He even became uncharacteristically tetchy with Edward Aveling. Aveling was a militant atheist who failed to persuade Darwin to accept the dedication of his book on atheism -- incidentally, giving rise to a fascinating myth that Karl Marx tried to dedicate "Das Kapital" to Darwin, which he didn't, it was actually Edward Aveling. What happened was that Aveling's mistress was Marx's daughter, and when both Darwin and Marx were dead, Marx's papers became muddled up with Aveling's papers, and a letter from Darwin saying, "My dear sir, thank you very much but I don't want you to dedicate your book to me," was mistakenly supposed to be addressed to Marx, and that gave rise to this whole myth, which you've probably heard. It's a sort of urban myth, that Marx tried to dedicate "Kapital" to Darwin. Anyway, it was Aveling, and when they met, Darwin challenged Aveling. "Why do you call yourselves atheists?" "'Agnostic, '" retorted Aveling, "was simply 'atheist' writ respectable, and 'atheist' was simply 'agnostic' writ aggressive." Darwin complained, "But why should you be so aggressive?" Darwin thought that atheism might be well and good for the intelligentsia, but that ordinary people were not, quote, "ripe for it." Which is, of course, our old friend, the "don't rock the boat" argument. It's not recorded whether Aveling told Darwin to come down off his high horse. (Laughter) But in any case, that was more than 100 years ago. You'd think we might have grown up since then. Now, a friend, an intelligent lapsed Jew, who, incidentally, observes the Sabbath for reasons of cultural solidarity, describes himself as a "tooth-fairy agnostic." He won't call himself an atheist because it's, in principle, impossible to prove a negative, but "agnostic" on its own might suggest that God's existence was therefore on equal terms of likelihood as his non-existence. So, my friend is strictly agnostic about the tooth fairy, but it isn't very likely, is it? Like God. Hence the phrase, "tooth-fairy agnostic." Bertrand Russell made the same point using a hypothetical teapot in orbit about Mars. You would strictly have to be agnostic about whether there is a teapot in orbit about Mars, but that doesn't mean you treat the likelihood of its existence as on all fours with its non-existence. The list of things which we strictly have to be agnostic about doesn't stop at tooth fairies and teapots; it's infinite. If you want to believe one particular one of them -- unicorns or tooth fairies or teapots or Yahweh -- the onus is on you to say why. The onus is not on the rest of us to say why not. We, who are atheists, are also a-fairyists and a-teapotists. (Laughter) But we don't bother to say so. And this is why my friend uses "tooth-fairy agnostic" as a label for what most people would call atheist. Nonetheless, if we want to attract deep-down atheists to come out publicly, we're going to have find something better to stick on our banner than "tooth-fairy" or "teapot agnostic." So, how about "humanist"? This has the advantage of a worldwide network of well-organized associations and journals and things already in place. My problem with it is only its apparent anthropocentrism. One of the things we've learned from Darwin is that the human species is only one among millions of cousins, some close, some distant. And there are other possibilities, like "naturalist," but that also has problems of confusion, because Darwin would have thought naturalist -- "Naturalist" means, of course, as opposed to "supernaturalist" -- and it is used sometimes -- Darwin would have been confused by the other sense of "naturalist," which he was, of course, and I suppose there might be others who would confuse it with "nudism". (Laughter) Such people might be those belonging to the British lynch mob, which last year attacked a pediatrician in mistake for a pedophile. (Laughter) I think the best of the available alternatives for "atheist" is simply "non-theist." It lacks the strong connotation that there's definitely no God, and it could therefore easily be embraced by teapot or tooth-fairy agnostics. It's completely compatible with the God of the physicists. When atheists like Stephen Hawking and Albert Einstein use the word "God," they use it of course as a metaphorical shorthand for that deep, mysterious part of physics which we don't yet understand. "Non-theist" will do for all that, yet unlike "atheist," it doesn't have the same phobic, hysterical responses. But I think, actually, the alternative is to grasp the nettle of the word "atheism" itself, precisely because it is a taboo word, carrying frissons of hysterical phobia. Critical mass may be harder to achieve with the word "atheist" than with the word "non-theist," or some other non-confrontational word. But if we did achieve it with that dread word "atheist" itself, the political impact would be even greater. Now, I said that if I were religious, I'd be very afraid of evolution -- I'd go further: I would fear science in general, if properly understood. And this is because the scientific worldview is so much more exciting, more poetic, more filled with sheer wonder than anything in the poverty-stricken arsenals of the religious imagination. As Carl Sagan, another recently dead hero, put it, "How is it that hardly any major religion has looked at science and concluded, 'This is better than we thought! The universe is much bigger than our prophet said, grander, more subtle, more elegant'? Instead they say, 'No, no, no! My god is a little god, and I want him to stay that way.' A religion, old or new, that stressed the magnificence of the universe as revealed by modern science, might be able to draw forth reserves of reverence and awe hardly tapped by the conventional faiths." Now, this is an elite audience, and I would therefore expect about 10 percent of you to be religious. Many of you probably subscribe to our polite cultural belief that we should respect religion. But I also suspect that a fair number of those secretly despise religion as much as I do. (Laughter) If you're one of them, and of course many of you may not be, but if you are one of them, I'm asking you to stop being polite, come out, and say so. And if you happen to be rich, give some thought to ways in which you might make a difference. The religious lobby in this country is massively financed by foundations -- to say nothing of all the tax benefits -- by foundations, such as the Templeton Foundation and the Discovery Institute. We need an anti-Templeton to step forward. If my books sold as well as Stephen Hawking's books, instead of only as well as Richard Dawkins' books, I'd do it myself. People are always going on about, "How did September the 11th change you?" Well, here's how it changed me. Let's all stop being so damned respectful. Thank you very much. (Applause)
I'm a cancer doctor, and I walked out of my office and walked by the pharmacy in the hospital three or four years ago, and this was the cover of Fortune magazine sitting in the window of the pharmacy. And so, as a cancer doctor, you look at this, and you get a little bit downhearted. But when you start to read the article by Cliff, who himself is a cancer survivor, who was saved by a clinical trial where his parents drove him from New York City to upstate New York to get an experimental therapy for -- at the time -- Hodgkin's disease, which saved his life, he makes remarkable points here. And the point of the article was that we have gotten reductionist in our view of biology, in our view of cancer. For the last 50 years, we have focused on treating the individual gene in understanding cancer, not in controlling cancer. So, this is an astounding table. And this is something that sobers us in our field everyday in that, obviously, we've made remarkable impacts on cardiovascular disease, but look at cancer. The death rate in cancer in over 50 years hasn't changed. We've made small wins in diseases like chronic myelogenous leukemia, where we have a pill that can put 100 percent of people in remission, but in general, we haven't made an impact at all in the war on cancer. So, what I'm going to tell you today, is a little bit of why I think that's the case, and then go out of my comfort zone and tell you where I think it's going, where a new approach -- that we hope to push forward in terms of treating cancer. Because this is wrong. So, what is cancer, first of all? Well, if one has a mass or an abnormal blood value, you go to a doctor, they stick a needle in. They way we make the diagnosis today is by pattern recognition: Does it look normal? Does it look abnormal? So, that pathologist is just like looking at this plastic bottle. This is a normal cell. This is a cancer cell. That is the state-of-the-art today in diagnosing cancer. There's no molecular test, there's no sequencing of genes that was referred to yesterday, there's no fancy looking at the chromosomes. This is the state-of-the-art and how we do it. You know, I know very well, as a cancer doctor, I can't treat advanced cancer. So, as an aside, I firmly believe in the field of trying to identify cancer early. It is the only way you can start to fight cancer, is by catching it early. We can prevent most cancers. You know, the previous talk alluded to preventing heart disease. We could do the same in cancer. I co-founded a company called Navigenics, where, if you spit into a tube -- and we can look look at 35 or 40 genetic markers for disease, all of which are delayable in many of the cancers -- you start to identify what you could get, and then we can start to work to prevent them. Because the problem is, when you have advanced cancer, we can't do that much today about it, as the statistics allude to. So, the thing about cancer is that it's a disease of the aged. Why is it a disease of the aged? Because evolution doesn't care about us after we've had our children. See, evolution protected us during our childbearing years and then, after age 35 or 40 or 45, it said "It doesn't matter anymore, because they've had their progeny." So if you look at cancers, it is very rare -- extremely rare -- to have cancer in a child, on the order of thousands of cases a year. As one gets older? Very, very common. Why is it hard to treat? Because it's heterogeneous, and that's the perfect substrate for evolution within the cancer. It starts to select out for those bad, aggressive cells, what we call clonal selection. But, if we start to understand that cancer isn't just a molecular defect, it's something more, then we'll get to new ways of treating it, as I'll show you. So, one of the fundamental problems we have in cancer is that, right now, we describe it by a number of adjectives, symptoms: "I'm tired, I'm bloated, I have pain, etc." You then have some anatomic descriptions, you get that CT scan: "There's a three centimeter mass in the liver." You then have some body part descriptions: "It's in the liver, in the breast, in the prostate." And that's about it. So, our dictionary for describing cancer is very, very poor. It's basically symptoms. It's manifestations of a disease. What's exciting is that over the last two or three years, the government has spent 400 million dollars, and they've allocated another billion dollars, to what we call the Cancer Genome Atlas Project. So, it is the idea of sequencing all of the genes in the cancer, and giving us a new lexicon, a new dictionary to describe it. You know, in the mid-1850's in France, they started to describe cancer by body part. That hasn't changed in over 150 years. It is absolutely archaic that we call cancer by prostate, by breast, by muscle. It makes no sense, if you think about it. So, obviously, the technology is here today, and, over the next several years, that will change. You will no longer go to a breast cancer clinic. You will go to a HER2 amplified clinic, or an EGFR activated clinic, and they will go to some of the pathogenic lesions that were involved in causing this individual cancer. So, hopefully, we will go from being the art of medicine more to the science of medicine, and be able to do what they do in infectious disease, which is look at that organism, that bacteria, and then say, "This antibiotic makes sense, because you have a particular bacteria that will respond to it." When one is exposed to H1N1, you take Tamiflu, and you can remarkably decrease the severity of symptoms and prevent many of the manifestations of the disease. Why? Because we know what you have, and we know how to treat it -- although we can't make vaccine in this country, but that's a different story. The Cancer Genome Atlas is coming out now. The first cancer was done, which was brain cancer. In the next month, the end of December, you'll see ovarian cancer, and then lung cancer will come several months after. There's also a field of proteomics that I'll talk about in a few minutes, which I think is going to be the next level in terms of understanding and classifying disease. But remember, I'm not pushing genomics, proteomics, to be a reductionist. I'm doing it so we can identify what we're up against. And there's a very important distinction there that we'll get to. In health care today, we spend most of the dollars -- in terms of treating disease -- most of the dollars in the last two years of a person's life. We spend very little, if any, dollars in terms of identifying what we're up against. If you could start to move that, to identify what you're up against, you're going to do things a hell of a lot better. If we could even take it one step further and prevent disease, we can take it enormously the other direction, and obviously, that's where we need to go, going forward. So, this is the website of the National Cancer Institute. And I'm here to tell you, it's wrong. So, the website of the National Cancer Institute says that cancer is a genetic disease. The website says, "If you look, there's an individual mutation, and maybe a second, and maybe a third, and that is cancer." But, as a cancer doc, this is what I see. This isn't a genetic disease. So, there you see, it's a liver with colon cancer in it, and you see into the microscope a lymph node where cancer has invaded. You see a CT scan where cancer is in the liver. Cancer is an interaction of a cell that no longer is under growth control with the environment. It's not in the abstract; it's the interaction with the environment. It's what we call a system. The goal of me as a cancer doctor is not to understand cancer. And I think that's been the fundamental problem over the last five decades, is that we have strived to understand cancer. The goal is to control cancer. And that is a very different optimization scheme, a very different strategy for all of us. I got up at the American Association of Cancer Research, one of the big cancer research meetings, with 20,000 people there, and I said, "We've made a mistake. We've all made a mistake, myself included, by focusing down, by being a reductionist. We need to take a step back." And, believe it or not, there were hisses in the audience. People got upset, but this is the only way we're going to go forward. You know, I was very fortunate to meet Danny Hillis a few years ago. We were pushed together, and neither one of us really wanted to meet the other. I said, "Do I really want to meet a guy from Disney, who designed computers?" And he was saying: Does he really want to meet another doctor? But people prevailed on us, and we got together, and it's been transformative in what I do, absolutely transformative. We have designed, and we have worked on the modeling -- and much of these ideas came from Danny and from his team -- the modeling of cancer in the body as complex system. And I'll show you some data there where I really think it can make a difference and a new way to approach it. The key is, when you look at these variables and you look at this data, you have to understand the data inputs. You know, if I measured your temperature over 30 days, and I asked, "What was the average temperature?" and it came back at 98.7, I would say, "Great." But if during one of those days your temperature spiked to 102 for six hours, and you took Tylenol and got better, etc., I would totally miss it. So, one of the problems, the fundamental problems in medicine is that you and I, and all of us, we go to our doctor once a year. We have discrete data elements; we don't have a time function on them. Earlier it was referred to this direct life device. You know, I've been using it for two and a half months. It's a staggering device, not because it tells me how many kilocalories I do every day, but because it looks, over 24 hours, what I've done in a day. And I didn't realize that for three hours I'm sitting at my desk, and I'm not moving at all. And a lot of the functions in the data that we have as input systems here are really different than we understand them, because we're not measuring them dynamically. And so, if you think of cancer as a system, there's an input and an output and a state in the middle. So, the states, are equivalent classes of history, and the cancer patient, the input, is the environment, the diet, the treatment, the genetic mutations. The output are our symptoms: Do we have pain? Is the cancer growing? Do we feel bloated, etc.? Most of that state is hidden. So what we do in our field is we change and input, we give aggressive chemotherapy, and we say, "Did that output get better? Did that pain improve, etc.?" And so, the problem is that it's not just one system, it's multiple systems on multiple scales. It's a system of systems. And so, when you start to look at emergent systems, you can look at a neuron under a microscope. A neuron under the microscope is very elegant with little things sticking out and little things over here, but when you start to put them together in a complex system, and you start to see that it becomes a brain, and that brain can create intelligence, what we're talking about in the body, and cancer is starting to model it like a complex system. Well, the bad news is that these robust -- and robust is a key word -- emergent systems are very hard to understand in detail. The good news is you can manipulate them. You can try to control them without that fundamental understanding of every component. One of the most fundamental clinical trials in cancer came out in February in the New England Journal of Medicine, where they took women who were pre-menopausal with breast cancer. So, about the worst kind of breast cancer you can get. They had gotten their chemotherapy, and then they randomized them, where half got placebo, and half got a drug called Zoledronic acid that builds bone. It's used to treat osteoporosis, and they got that twice a year. They looked and, in these 1,800 women, given twice a year a drug that builds bone, you reduce the recurrence of cancer by 35 percent. Reduce occurrence of cancer by a drug that doesn't even touch the cancer. So the notion, you change the soil, the seed doesn't grow as well. You change that system, and you could have a marked effect on the cancer. Nobody has ever shown -- and this will be shocking -- nobody has ever shown that most chemotherapy actually touches a cancer cell. It's never been shown. There's all these elegant work in the tissue culture dishes, that if you give this cancer drug, you can do this effect to the cell, but the doses in those dishes are nowhere near the doses that happen in the body. If I give a woman with breast cancer a drug called Taxol every three weeks, which is the standard, about 40 percent of women with metastatic cancer have a great response to that drug. And a response is 50 percent shrinkage. Well, remember that's not even an order of magnitude, but that's a different story. They then recur, I give them that same drug every week. Another 30 percent will respond. They then recur, I give them that same drug over 96 hours by continuous infusion, another 20 or 30 percent will respond. So, you can't tell me it's working by the same mechanism in all three size. It's not. We have no idea the mechanism. So the idea that chemotherapy may just be disrupting that complex system, just like building bone disrupted that system and reduced recurrence, chemotherapy may work by that same exact way. The wild thing about that trial also, was that it reduced new primaries, so new cancers, by 30 percent also. So, the problem is, yours and mine, all of our systems are changing. They're dynamic. I mean, this is a scary slide, not to take an aside, but it looks at obesity in the world. And I'm sorry if you can't read the numbers, they're kind of small. But, if you start to look at it, that red, that dark color there, more than 75 percent of the population of those countries are obese. Look a decade ago, look two decades ago: markedly different. So, our systems today are dramatically different than our systems a decade or two ago. So the diseases we have today, which reflect patterns in the system over the last several decades, are going to change dramatically over the next decade or so based on things like this. So, this picture, although it is beautiful, is a 40-gigabyte picture of the whole proteome. So this is a drop of blood that has gone through a superconducting magnet, and we're able to get resolution where we can start to see all of the proteins in the body. We can start to see that system. Each of the red dots are where a protein has actually been identified. The power of these magnets, the power of what we can do here, is that we can see an individual neutron with this technology. So, again, this is stuff we're doing with Danny Hillis and a group called Applied Proteomics, where we can start to see individual neutron differences, and we can start to look at that system like we never have before. So, instead of a reductionist view, we're taking a step back. So this is a woman, 46 years old, who had recurrent lung cancer. It was in her brain, in her lungs, in her liver. She had gotten Carboplatin Taxol, Carboplatin Taxotere, Gemcitabine, Navelbine: Every drug we have she had gotten, and that disease continued to grow. She had three kids under the age of 12, and this is her CT scan. And so what this is, is we're taking a cross-section of her body here, and you can see in the middle there is her heart, and to the side of her heart on the left there is this large tumor that will invade and will kill her, untreated, in a matter of weeks. She goes on a pill a day that targets a pathway, and again, I'm not sure if this pathway was in the system, in the cancer, but it targeted a pathway, and a month later, pow, that cancer's gone. Six months later it's still gone. That cancer recurred, and she passed away three years later from lung cancer, but she got three years from a drug whose symptoms predominately were acne. That's about it. So, the problem is that the clinical trial was done, and we were a part of it, and in the fundamental clinical trial -- the pivotal clinical trial we call the Phase Three, we refused to use a placebo. Would you want your mother, your brother, your sister to get a placebo if they had advanced lung cancer and had weeks to live? And the answer, obviously, is not. So, it was done on this group of patients. Ten percent of people in the trial had this dramatic response that was shown here, and the drug went to the FDA, and the FDA said, "Without a placebo, how do I know patients actually benefited from the drug?" So the morning the FDA was going to meet, this was the editorial in the Wall Street Journal. (Laughter) And so, what do you know, that drug was approved. The amazing thing is another company did the right scientific trial, where they gave half placebo and half the drug. And we learned something important there. What's interesting is they did it in South America and Canada, where it's "more ethical to give placebos." They had to give it also in the U.S. to get approval, so I think there were three U.S. patients in upstate New York who were part of the trial. But they did that, and what they found is that 70 percent of the non-responders lived much longer and did better than people who got placebo. So it challenged everything we knew in cancer, is that you don't need to get a response. You don't need to shrink the disease. If we slow the disease, we may have more of a benefit on patient survival, patient outcome, how they feel, than if we shrink the disease. The problem is that, if I'm this doc, and I get your CT scan today and you've got a two centimeter mass in your liver, and you come back to me in three months and it's three centimeters, did that drug help you or not? How do I know? Would it have been 10 centimeters, or am I giving you a drug with no benefit and significant cost? So, it's a fundamental problem. And, again, that's where these new technologies can come in. And so, the goal obviously is that you go into your doctor's office -- well, the ultimate goal is that you prevent disease, right? The ultimate goal is that you prevent any of these things from happening. That is the most effective, cost-effective, best way we can do things today. But if one is unfortunate to get a disease, you'll go into your doctor's office, he or she will take a drop of blood, and we will start to know how to treat your disease. The way we've approached it is the field of proteomics, again, this looking at the system. It's taking a big picture. The problem with technologies like this is that if one looks at proteins in the body, there are 11 orders of magnitude difference between the high-abundant and the low-abundant proteins. So, there's no technology in the world that can span 11 orders of magnitude. And so, a lot of what has been done with people like Danny Hillis and others is to try to bring in engineering principles, try to bring the software. We can start to look at different components along this spectrum. And so, earlier was talked about cross-discipline, about collaboration. And I think one of the exciting things that is starting to happen now is that people from those fields are coming in. Yesterday, the National Cancer Institute announced a new program called the Physical Sciences and Oncology, where physicists, mathematicians, are brought in to think about cancer, people who never approached it before. Danny and I got 16 million dollars, they announced yesterday, to try to attach this problem. A whole new approach, instead of giving high doses of chemotherapy by different mechanisms, to try to bring technology to get a picture of what's actually happening in the body. So, just for two seconds, how these technologies work -- because I think it's important to understand it. What happens is every protein in your body is charged, so the proteins are sprayed in, the magnet spins them around, and then there's a detector at the end. When it hit that detector is dependent on the mass and the charge. And so we can accurately -- if the magnet is big enough, and your resolution is high enough -- you can actually detect all of the proteins in the body and start to get an understanding of the individual system. And so, as a cancer doctor, instead of having paper in my chart, in your chart, and it being this thick, this is what data flow is starting to look like in our offices, where that drop of blood is creating gigabytes of data. Electronic data elements are describing every aspect of the disease. And certainly the goal is we can start to learn from every encounter and actually move forward, instead of just having encounter and encounter, without fundamental learning. So, to conclude, we need to get away from reductionist thinking. We need to start to think differently and radically. And so, I implore everyone here: Think differently. Come up with new ideas. Tell them to me or anyone else in our field, because over the last 59 years, nothing has changed. We need a radically different approach. You know, Andy Grove stepped down as chairman of the board at Intel -- and Andy was one of my mentors, tough individual. When Andy stepped down, he said, "No technology will win. Technology itself will win." And I'm a firm believer, in the field of medicine and especially cancer, that it's going to be a broad platform of technologies that will help us move forward and hopefully help patients in the near-term. Thank you very much.
Philosophers, dramatists, theologians have grappled with this question for centuries: what makes people go wrong? Interestingly, I asked this question when I was a little kid. When I was a kid growing up in the South Bronx, inner-city ghetto in New York, I was surrounded by evil, as all kids are who grew up in an inner city. And I had friends who were really good kids, who lived out the Dr. Jekyll Mr. Hyde scenario -- Robert Louis Stevenson. That is, they took drugs, got in trouble, went to jail. Some got killed, and some did it without drug assistance. So when I read Robert Louis Stevenson, that wasn't fiction. The only question is, what was in the juice? And more importantly, that line between good and evil -- which privileged people like to think is fixed and impermeable, with them on the good side, and the others on the bad side -- I knew that line was movable, and it was permeable. Good people could be seduced across that line, and under good and some rare circumstances, bad kids could recover with help, with reform, with rehabilitation. So I want to begin with this this wonderful illusion by [Dutch] artist M.C. Escher. If you look at it and focus on the white, what you see is a world full of angels. But let's look more deeply, and as we do, what appears is the demons, the devils in the world. And that tells us several things. One, the world is, was, will always be filled with good and evil, because good and evil is the yin and yang of the human condition. It tells me something else. If you remember, God's favorite angel was Lucifer. Apparently, Lucifer means "the light." It also means "the morning star," in some scripture. And apparently, he disobeyed God, and that's the ultimate disobedience to authority. And when he did, Michael, the archangel, was sent to kick him out of heaven along with the other fallen angels. And so Lucifer descends into hell, becomes Satan, becomes the devil, and the force of evil in the universe begins. Paradoxically, it was God who created hell as a place to store evil. He didn't do a good job of keeping it there though. So, this arc of the cosmic transformation of God's favorite angel into the Devil, for me, sets the context for understanding human beings who are transformed from good, ordinary people into perpetrators of evil. So the Lucifer effect, although it focuses on the negatives -- the negatives that people can become, not the negatives that people are -- leads me to a psychological definition. Evil is the exercise of power. And that's the key: it's about power. To intentionally harm people psychologically, to hurt people physically, to destroy people mortally, or ideas, and to commit crimes against humanity. If you Google "evil," a word that should surely have withered by now, you come up with 136 million hits in a third of a second. A few years ago -- I am sure all of you were shocked, as I was, with the revelation of American soldiers abusing prisoners in a strange place in a controversial war, Abu Ghraib in Iraq. And these were men and women who were putting prisoners through unbelievable humiliation. I was shocked, but I wasn't surprised, because I had seen those same visual parallels when I was the prison superintendent of the Stanford Prison Study. Immediately the Bush administration military said ... what? What all administrations say when there's a scandal. "Don't blame us. It's not the system. It's the few bad apples, the few rogue soldiers." My hypothesis is, American soldiers are good, usually. Maybe it was the barrel that was bad. But how am I going to -- how am I going to deal with that hypothesis? I became an expert witness for one of the guards, Sergeant Chip Frederick, and in that position, I had access to the dozen investigative reports. I had access to him. I could study him, have him come to my home, get to know him, do psychological analysis to see, was he a good apple or bad apple. And thirdly, I had access to all of the 1,000 pictures that these soldiers took. These pictures are of a violent or sexual nature. All of them come from the cameras of American soldiers. Because everybody has a digital camera or cell phone camera, they took pictures of everything. More than 1,000. And what I've done is I organized them into various categories. But these are by United States military police, army reservists. They are not soldiers prepared for this mission at all. And it all happened in a single place, Tier 1-A, on the night shift. Why? Tier 1-A was the center for military intelligence. It was the interrogation hold. The CIA was there. Interrogators from Titan Corporation, all there, and they're getting no information about the insurgency. So they're going to put pressure on these soldiers, military police, to cross the line, give them permission to break the will of the enemy, to prepare them for interrogation, to soften them up, to take the gloves off. Those are the euphemisms, and this is how it was interpreted. Let's go down to that dungeon. (Camera shutter) (Thuds) (Camera shutter) (Thuds) (Breathing) (Bells) So, pretty horrific. That's one of the visual illustrations of evil. And it should not have escaped you that the reason I paired the prisoner with his arms out with Leonardo da Vinci's ode to humanity is that that prisoner was mentally ill. That prisoner covered himself with shit every day, and they used to have to roll him in dirt so he wouldn't stink. But the guards ended up calling him "Shit Boy." What was he doing in that prison rather than in some mental institution? In any event, here's former Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld. He comes down and says, "I want to know, who is responsible? Who are the bad apples?" Well, that's a bad question. You have to reframe it and ask, "What is responsible?" Because "what" could be the who of people, but it could also be the what of the situation, and obviously that's wrongheaded. So how do psychologists go about understanding such transformations of human character, if you believe that they were good soldiers before they went down to that dungeon? There are three ways. The main way is -- it's called dispositional. We look at what's inside of the person, the bad apples. This is the foundation of all of social science, the foundation of religion, the foundation of war. Social psychologists like me come along and say, "Yeah, people are the actors on the stage, but you'll have to be aware of what that situation is. Who are the cast of characters? What's the costume? Is there a stage director?" And so we're interested in, what are the external factors around the individual -- the bad barrel? And social scientists stop there, and they miss the big point that I discovered when I became an expert witness for Abu Ghraib. The power is in the system. The system creates the situation that corrupts the individuals, and the system is the legal, political, economic, cultural background. And this is where the power is of the bad-barrel makers. So if you want to change a person, you've got to change the situation. If you want to change the situation, you've got to know where the power is, in the system. So the Lucifer effect involves understanding human character transformations with these three factors. And it's a dynamic interplay. What do the people bring into the situation? What does the situation bring out of them? And what is the system that creates and maintains that situation? So my book, "The Lucifer Effect," recently published, is about, how do you understand how good people turn evil? And it has a lot of detail about what I'm going to talk about today. So Dr. Z's "Lucifer Effect," although it focuses on evil, really is a celebration of the human mind's infinite capacity to make any of us kind or cruel, caring or indifferent, creative or destructive, and it makes some of us villains. And the good news story that I'm going to hopefully come to at the end is that it makes some of us heroes. This is a wonderful cartoon in the New Yorker, which really summarizes my whole talk: "I'm neither a good cop nor a bad cop, Jerome. Like yourself, I'm a complex amalgam of positive and negative personality traits that emerge or not, depending on the circumstances." (Laughter) There's a study some of you think you know about, but very few people have ever read the story. You watched the movie. This is Stanley Milgram, little Jewish kid from the Bronx, and he asked the question, "Could the Holocaust happen here, now?" People say, "No, that's Nazi Germany, that's Hitler, you know, that's 1939." He said, "Yeah, but suppose Hitler asked you, 'Would you electrocute a stranger?' 'No way, not me, I'm a good person.' " He said, "Why don't we put you in a situation and give you a chance to see what you would do?" And so what he did was he tested 1,000 ordinary people. 500 New Haven, Connecticut, 500 Bridgeport. And the ad said, "Psychologists want to understand memory. We want to improve people's memory, because memory is the key to success." OK? "We're going to give you five bucks -- four dollars for your time." And it said, "We don't want college students. We want men between 20 and 50." In the later studies, they ran women. Ordinary people: barbers, clerks, white-collar people. So, you go down, and one of you is going to be a learner, and one of you is going to be a teacher. The learner's a genial, middle-aged guy. He gets tied up to the shock apparatus in another room. The learner could be middle-aged, could be as young as 20. And one of you is told by the authority, the guy in the lab coat, "Your job as teacher is to give this guy material to learn. Gets it right, reward him. Gets it wrong, you press a button on the shock box. The first button is 15 volts. He doesn't even feel it." That's the key. All evil starts with 15 volts. And then the next step is another 15 volts. The problem is, at the end of the line, it's 450 volts. And as you go along, the guy is screaming, "I've got a heart condition! I'm out of here!" You're a good person. You complain. "Sir, who's going to be responsible if something happens to him?" The experimenter says, "Don't worry, I will be responsible. Continue, teacher." And the question is, who would go all the way to 450 volts? You should notice here, when it gets up to 375, it says, "Danger. Severe Shock." When it gets up to here, there's "XXX" -- the pornography of power. (Laughter) So Milgram asks 40 psychiatrists, "What percent of American citizens would go to the end?" They said only one percent. Because that's sadistic behavior, and we know, psychiatry knows, only one percent of Americans are sadistic. OK. Here's the data. They could not be more wrong. Two thirds go all the way to 450 volts. This was just one study. Milgram did more than 16 studies. And look at this. In study 16, where you see somebody like you go all the way, 90 percent go all the way. In study five, if you see people rebel, 90 percent rebel. What about women? Study 13 -- no different than men. So Milgram is quantifying evil as the willingness of people to blindly obey authority, to go all the way to 450 volts. And it's like a dial on human nature. A dial in a sense that you can make almost everybody totally obedient, down to the majority, down to none. So what are the external parallels? For all research is artificial. What's the validity in the real world? 912 American citizens committed suicide or were murdered by family and friends in Guyana jungle in 1978, because they were blindly obedient to this guy, their pastor -- not their priest -- their pastor, Reverend Jim Jones. He persuaded them to commit mass suicide. And so, he's the modern Lucifer effect, a man of God who becomes the Angel of Death. Milgram's study is all about individual authority to control people. Most of the time, we are in institutions, so the Stanford Prison Study is a study of the power of institutions to influence individual behavior. Interestingly, Stanley Milgram and I were in the same high school class in James Monroe in the Bronx, 1954. So this study, which I did with my graduate students, especially Craig Haney -- we also began work with an ad. We didn't have money, so we had a cheap, little ad, but we wanted college students for a study of prison life. 75 people volunteered, took personality tests. We did interviews. Picked two dozen: the most normal, the most healthy. Randomly assigned them to be prisoner and guard. So on day one, we knew we had good apples. I'm going to put them in a bad situation. And secondly, we know there's no difference between the boys who are going to be guards and the boys who are going to be prisoners. The kids who were going to be prisoners, we said, "Wait at home in the dormitories. The study will begin Sunday." We didn't tell them that the city police were going to come and do realistic arrests. (Video) Student: A police car pulls up in front, and a cop comes to the front door, and knocks, and says he's looking for me. So they, right there, you know, they took me out the door, they put my hands against the car. It was a real cop car, it was a real policeman, and there were real neighbors in the street, who didn't know that this was an experiment. And there was cameras all around and neighbors all around. They put me in the car, then they drove me around Palo Alto. They took me to the police station, the basement of the police station. Then they put me in a cell. I was the first one to be picked up, so they put me in a cell, which was just like a room with a door with bars on it. You could tell it wasn't a real jail. They locked me in there, in this degrading little outfit. They were taking this experiment too seriously. Philip Zimbardo: Here are the prisoners who are going to be dehumanized. They're going to become numbers. Here are the guards with the symbols of power and anonymity. Guards get prisoners to clean the toilet bowls out with their bare hands, to do other humiliating tasks. They strip them naked. They sexually taunt them. They begin to do degrading activities, like having them simulate sodomy. You saw simulating fellatio in soldiers in Abu Ghraib. My guards did it in five days. The stress reaction was so extreme that normal kids we picked because they were healthy had breakdowns within 36 hours. The study ended after six days, because it was out of control. Five kids had emotional breakdowns. Does it make a difference if warriors go to battle changing their appearance or not? Does it make a difference if they're anonymous, in how they treat their victims? We know in some cultures, they go to war, they don't change their appearance. In other cultures, they paint themselves like "Lord of the Flies." In some, they wear masks. In many, soldiers are anonymous in uniform. So this anthropologist, John Watson, found 23 cultures that had two bits of data. Do they change their appearance? 15. Do they kill, torture, mutilate? 13. If they don't change their appearance, only one of eight kills, tortures or mutilates. The key is in the red zone. If they change their appearance, 12 of 13 -- that's 90 percent -- kill, torture, mutilate. And that's the power of anonymity. So what are the seven social processes that grease the slippery slope of evil? Mindlessly taking the first small step. Dehumanization of others. De-individuation of Self. Diffusion of personal responsibility. Blind obedience to authority. Uncritical conformity to group norms. Passive tolerance to evil through inaction or indifference. And it happens when you're in a new or unfamiliar situation. Your habitual response patterns don't work. Your personality and morality are disengaged. "Nothing is easier than to denounce the evildoer; nothing more difficult than understanding him," Dostoyevksy tells us. Understanding is not excusing. Psychology is not excuse-iology. So social and psychological research reveals how ordinary, good people can be transformed without the drugs. You don't need it. You just need the social-psychological processes. Real world parallels? Compare this with this. James Schlesinger -- and I'm going to have to end with this -- says, "Psychologists have attempted to understand how and why individuals and groups who usually act humanely can sometimes act otherwise in certain circumstances." That's the Lucifer effect. And he goes on to say, "The landmark Stanford study provides a cautionary tale for all military operations." If you give people power without oversight, it's a prescription for abuse. They knew that, and let that happen. So another report, an investigative report by General Fay, says the system is guilty. And in this report, he says it was the environment that created Abu Ghraib, by leadership failures that contributed to the occurrence of such abuse, and the fact that it remained undiscovered by higher authorities for a long period of time. Those abuses went on for three months. Who was watching the store? The answer is nobody, and, I think, nobody on purpose. He gave the guards permission to do those things, and they knew nobody was ever going to come down to that dungeon. So you need a paradigm shift in all of these areas. The shift is away from the medical model that focuses only on the individual. The shift is toward a public health model that recognizes situational and systemic vectors of disease. Bullying is a disease. Prejudice is a disease. Violence is a disease. And since the Inquisition, we've been dealing with problems at the individual level. And you know what? It doesn't work. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn says, "The line between good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being." That means that line is not out there. That's a decision that you have to make. That's a personal thing. So I want to end very quickly on a positive note. Heroism as the antidote to evil, by promoting the heroic imagination, especially in our kids, in our educational system. We want kids to think, I'm the hero in waiting, waiting for the right situation to come along, and I will act heroically. My whole life is now going to focus away from evil -- that I've been in since I was a kid -- to understanding heroes. Banality of heroism is, it's ordinary people who do heroic deeds. It's the counterpoint to Hannah Arendt's "Banality of Evil." Our traditional societal heroes are wrong, because they are the exceptions. They organize their whole life around this. That's why we know their names. And our kids' heroes are also wrong models for them, because they have supernatural talents. We want our kids to realize most heroes are everyday people, and the heroic act is unusual. This is Joe Darby. He was the one that stopped those abuses you saw, because when he saw those images, he turned them over to a senior investigating officer. He was a low-level private, and that stopped it. Was he a hero? No. They had to put him in hiding, because people wanted to kill him, and then his mother and his wife. For three years, they were in hiding. This is the woman who stopped the Stanford Prison Study. When I said it got out of control, I was the prison superintendent. I didn't know it was out of control. I was totally indifferent. She came down, saw that madhouse and said, "You know what, it's terrible what you're doing to those boys. They're not prisoners, they're not guards, they're boys, and you are responsible." And I ended the study the next day. The good news is I married her the next year. (Laughter) (Applause) I just came to my senses, obviously. So situations have the power to do, through -- but the point is, this is the same situation that can inflame the hostile imagination in some of us, that makes us perpetrators of evil, can inspire the heroic imagination in others. It's the same situation. And you're on one side or the other. Most people are guilty of the evil of inaction, because your mother said, "Don't get involved. Mind your own business." And you have to say, "Mama, humanity is my business." So the psychology of heroism is -- we're going to end in a moment -- how do we encourage children in new hero courses, that I'm working with Matt Langdon -- he has a hero workshop -- to develop this heroic imagination, this self-labeling, "I am a hero in waiting," and teach them skills. To be a hero, you have to learn to be a deviant, because you're always going against the conformity of the group. Heroes are ordinary people whose social actions are extraordinary. Who act. The key to heroism is two things. A: you've got to act when other people are passive. B: you have to act socio-centrically, not egocentrically. And I want to end with the story that some of you know, about Wesley Autrey, New York subway hero. Fifty-year-old African-American construction worker. He's standing on a subway in New York. A white guy falls on the tracks. The subway train is coming. There's 75 people there. You know what? They freeze. He's got a reason not to get involved. He's black, the guy's white, and he's got two little kids. Instead, he gives his kids to a stranger, jumps on the tracks, puts the guy between the tracks, lies on him, the subway goes over him. Wesley and the guy -- 20 and a half inches height. The train clearance is 21 inches. A half an inch would have taken his head off. And he said, "I did what anyone could do," no big deal to jump on the tracks. And the moral imperative is "I did what everyone should do." And so one day, you will be in a new situation. Take path one, you're going to be a perpetrator of evil. Evil, meaning you're going to be Arthur Andersen. You're going to cheat, or you're going to allow bullying. Path two, you become guilty of the evil of passive inaction. Path three, you become a hero. The point is, are we ready to take the path to celebrating ordinary heroes, waiting for the right situation to come along to put heroic imagination into action? Because it may only happen once in your life, and when you pass it by, you'll always know, I could have been a hero and I let it pass me by. So the point is thinking it and then doing it. So I want to thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Let's oppose the power of evil systems at home and abroad, and let's focus on the positive. Advocate for respect of personal dignity, for justice and peace, which sadly our administration has not been doing. Thanks so much. (Applause)
A couple of years ago when I was attending the TED Conference in Long Beach, I met Harriet. We'd actually met online before -- not the way you're thinking. We were actually introduced because we both knew Linda Avey, one of the founders of the first online personal genomic companies. And because we shared our genetic information with Linda, she could see that Harriet and I shared a very rare type of mitochondrial DNA -- Haplotype K1a1b1a -- which meant that we were distantly related. We actually share the same genealogy with Ozzie the iceman. So Ozzie, Harriet and me. And being the current day, of course, we started our own Facebook group. You're all welcome to join. And when I met Harriet in person the next year at the TED Conference, she'd gone online and ordered our own happy Haplotype T-shirts. (Laughter) Now why am I telling you this story, and what does this have to do with the future of health? Well the way I met Harriet is actually an example of how leveraging cross-disciplinary, exponentially-growing technologies is affecting our future of health and wellness -- from low-cost gene analysis to the ability to do powerful bio-informatics to the connection of the Internet and social networking. What I'd like to talk about today is understanding these exponential technologies. We often think linearly. But if you think about it, if you have a lily pad and it just divided every single day -- two, four, eight, 16 -- in 15 days you have 32,000. What do you think you have in a month? We're at a billion. So if we start to think exponentially, we can see how this is starting to affect all the technologies around us. And many of these technologies -- speaking as a physician and innovator -- we can really start to leverage to impact the future of our own health and of health care, and to address many of the major challenges that we have in health care today, ranging from the really exponential costs to the aging population, the way we really don't use information very well today, the fragmentation of care and often the very difficult course of adoption of innovation. And one of the major things we can do we've talked a bit about here today is moving the curve to the left. We spend most of our money on the last 20 percent of life. What if we could spend and incentivize positions in the health care system and our own self to move the curve to the left and improve our health, leveraging technology as well? Now my favorite technology, example of exponential technology, we all have in our pocket. So if you think about it, these are really dramatically improving. I mean this is the iPhone 4. Imagine what the iPhone 8 will be able to do. Now, I've gained some insight into this. I've been the track share for the medicine portion of a new institution called Singularity University based in Silicon Valley. And we bring together every summer about 100 very talented students from around the world. And we look at these exponential technologies from medicine, biotech, artificial intelligence, robotics, nanotechnology, space, and address how can we cross-train and leverage these to impact major unmet goals. We also have seven-day executive programs. And coming up next month is actually Future Med, a program to help cross-train and leverage technologies into medicine. Now I mentioned the phone. These mobile phones have over 20,000 different mobile apps available -- to the point where there's one out of the U.K. where you can pee on a little chip connected to your iPhone and check yourself for an STD. I don't know if I'd try that yet, but that's available. There are all other sorts of applications, merging your phone and diagnostics, for example -- measuring your blood glucose on your iPhone and sending that, potentially, to your physician so they can better understand and you can better understand your blood sugars as a diabetic. So let's see now how exponential technologies are taking health care. Let's start with faster. Well it's no secret that computers, through Moore's law, are speeding up faster and faster. We have the ability to do more powerful things with them. They're really approaching, in many cases surpassing, the ability of the human mind. But where I think computational speed is most applicable is in that of imaging. The ability now to look inside the body in real time with very high resolution is really becoming incredible. And we're layering multiple technologies -- PET scans, CT scans and molecular diagnostics -- to find and to seek things at different levels. Here you're going to see the very highest resolution MRI scan done today, reconstructed of Marc Hodosh, the curator of TEDMED. And now we can see inside of the brain with a resolution and ability that was never before available, and essentially learn how to reconstruct, and maybe even re-engineer, or backwards engineer, the brain so we can better understand pathology, disease and therapy. We can look inside with real time fMRI -- in the brain at real time. And by understanding these sorts of processes and these sorts of connections, we're going to understand the effects of medication or meditation and better personalize and make effective, for example, psychoactive drugs. The scanners for these are getting small, less expensive and more portable. And this sort of data explosion available from these is really almost becoming a challenge. The scan of today takes up about 800 books, or 20 gigabytes. The scan in a couple of years will be one terabyte, or 800,000 books. How do you leverage that information? Let's get personal. I won't ask who here's had a colonoscopy, but if you're over age 50, it's time for your screening colonoscopy. How would you like to avoid the pointy end of the stick? Well now there's essentially a virtual colonoscopy. Compare those two pictures, and now as a radiologist, you can essentially fly through your patient's colon and, augmenting that with artificial intelligence, identify potentially, as you see here, a lesion. Oh, we might have missed it, but using A.I. on top of radiology, we can find lesions that were missed before. And maybe this will encourage people to get colonoscopies that wouldn't have otherwise. And this is an example of this paradigm shift. We're moving to this integration of biomedicine, information technology, wireless and, I would say, mobile now -- this era of digital medicine. So even my stethoscope is now digital. And of course, there's an app for that. We're moving, obviously, to the era of the tricorder. So the handheld ultrasound is basically surpassing and supplanting the stethoscope. These are now at a price point of -- what used to be 100,000 euros or a couple of hundred-thousand dollars -- for about 5,000 dollars, I can have the power of a very powerful diagnostic device in my hand. And merging this now with the advent of electronic medical records -- in the United States, we're still less than 20 percent electronic. Here in the Netherlands, I think it's more than 80 percent. But now that we're switching to merging medical data, making it available electronically, we can crowd source that information, and now as a physician, I can access my patients' data from wherever I am just through my mobile device. And now, of course, we're in the era of the iPad, even the iPad 2. And just last month the first FDA-approved application was approved to allow radiologists to do actual reading on these sorts of devices. So certainly, the physicians of today, including myself, are completely reliable on these devices. And as you saw just about a month ago, Watson from IBM beat the two champions in "Jeopardy." So I want you to imagine when in a couple of years, when we've started to apply this cloud-based information, when we really have the A.I. physician and leverage our brains to connectivity to make decisions and diagnostics at a level never done. Already today, you don't need to go to your physician in many cases. Only for about 20 percent of actual visits do you have to lay hands on the patient. We're now in the era of virtual visits -- from sort of the Skype-type visits you can do with American Well, to Cisco that's developed a very complex health presence system. The ability to interact with your health care provider is different. And these are being augmented even by our devices again today. Here my friend Jessica sent me a picture of her head laceration so I can save her a trip to the emergency room -- I can do some diagnostics that way. Or might we be able to leverage today's gaming technology, like the Microsoft Kinect, and hack that to enable diagnostics, for example, in diagnosing stroke, using simple motion detection, using hundred-dollar devices. We can actually now visit our patients robotically -- this is the RP7; if I'm a hematologist, visit another clinic, visit a hospital. These will be augmented by a whole suite of tools actually in the home now. So imagine we already have wireless scales. You can step on the scale. You can Tweet your weight to your friends, and they can keep you in line. We have wireless blood pressure cuffs. A whole gamut of these technologies are being put together. So instead of wearing these kludgy devices, we can put on a simple patch. This was developed by colleagues at Stanford, called the iRhythm -- completely supplants the prior technology at a much lower price point with much more effectivity. Now we're also in the era, today, of quantified self. Consumers now can buy basically hundred-dollar devices, like this little FitBit. I can measure my steps, my caloric outtake. I can get insight into that on a daily basis. I can share that with my friends, with my physician. There's watches coming out that will measure your heart rate, the Zeo sleep monitors, a whole suite of tools that can enable you to leverage and have insight into your own health. And as we start to integrate this information, we're going to know better what to do with it and how better to have insight into our own pathologies, health and wellness. There's even mirrors today that can pick up your pulse rate. And I would argue, in the future, we'll have wearable devices in our clothes, monitoring ourselves 24/7. And just like we have the OnStar system in cars, your red light might go on -- it won't say "check engine" though. It's going to be "check your body" light, and go in and get it taken care of. Probably in a few years, you'll check into your mirror and it's going to be diagnosing you. (Laughter) For those of you with kiddos at home, how would you like to have the wireless diaper that supports your ... too much information, I think, than you might need. But it's going to be here. Now we've heard a lot today about new technology and connection. And I think some of these technologies will enable us to be more connected with our patients, and take more time and actually do the important human touch elements of medicine, as augmented by these sorts of technologies. Now we've talked about augmenting the patient, to some degree. How about augmenting the physician? We're now in the era of super-enabling the surgeon who can now go inside the body and do things with robotic surgery, which is here today, at a level that was not really possible even five years ago. Now this is being augmented with further layers of technology like augmented reality. So the surgeon can see inside the patient, through their lens, where the tumor is, where the blood vessels are. This can be integrated with decisions support. A surgeon in New York can be helping a surgeon in Amsterdam, for example. And we're entering an era of really, truly scarless surgery called NOTES, where the robotic endoscope can come out the stomach and pull out that gallbladder all in a scarless way and robotically. And this is called NOTES, and this is coming -- basically scarless surgery, as mediated by robotic surgery. Now how about controlling other elements? For those who have disabilities -- the paraplegic -- there's the era of brain-computer interface, or BCI, where chips have been put on the motor cortex of completely quadriplegic patients and they can control a curser or a wheelchair or, eventually, a robotic arm. And these devices are getting smaller and going into more and more of these patients. Still in clinical trials, but imagine when we can connect these, for example, to the amazing bionic limb, such as the DEKA Arm built by Dean Kamen and colleagues, which has 17 degrees of motion and freedom and can allow the person who's lost a limb to have much higher levels of dexterity or control than they've had in the past. So we're really entering the era of wearable robotics actually. If you haven't lost a limb -- you've had a stroke, for example -- you can wear these augmented limbs. Or if you're a paraplegic -- like I've visited the folks at Berkley Bionics -- they've developed eLEGS. I took this video last week. Here's a paraplegic patient actually walking by strapping on these exoskeletons. He's otherwise completely wheelchair-bound. And now this is the early era of wearable robotics. And I think by leveraging these sorts of technologies, we're going to change the definition of disability to in some cases be superability, or super-enabling. This is Aimee Mullins, who lost her lower limbs as a young child, and Hugh Herr, who's a professor at MIT who lost his limbs in a climbing accident. And now both of these can climb better, move faster, swim differently with their prosthetics than us normal-abled persons. Now how about other exponentials? Clearly the obesity trend is exponentially going in the wrong direction, including with huge costs. But the trend in medicine actually is to get exponentially smaller. So a few examples: we're now in the era of "Fantastic Voyage," the iPill. You can swallow this completely integrated device. It can take pictures of your GI system, help diagnose and treat as it moves through your GI tract. We get into even smaller micro-robots that will eventually autonomously move through your system again and be able to do things that surgeons can't do in a much less invasive manner. Sometimes these might self-assemble in your GI system and be augmented in that reality. On the cardiac side, pacemakers are getting smaller and much easier to place so you don't need to train an interventional cardiologist to place them. And they're going to be wirelessly telemetered again to your mobile devices so you can go places and be monitored remotely. These are shrinking even further. Here's one that's in prototyping by Medtronic that's smaller than a penny. Artificial retinas, the ability to put these arrays on the back of the eyeball and allow the blind to see. Again, in early trials, but moving into the future. These are going to be game changing. Or for those of us who are sighted, how about having the assisted-living contact lens? BlueTooth, WiFi available -- beams back images to your eye. Now if you have trouble maintaining your diet, it might help to have some extra imagery to remind you how many calories are going to be coming at you. How about enabling the pathologist to use their cell phone again to see at a microscopic level and to lumber that data back to the cloud and make better diagnostics? In fact, the whole era of laboratory medicine is completely changing. We can now leverage microfluidics, like this chip made by Steve Quake at Stanford. Microfluidics can replace an entire lab of technicians. Put it on a chip, enable thousands of tests to be done at the point of care, anywhere in the world. And this is really going to leverage technology to the rural and the under-served and enable what used to be thousand-dollar tests to be done at pennies and at the point of care. If we go down the small pathway a little bit farther, we're entering the era of nanomedicine, the ability to make devices super small to the point where we can design red blood cells or microrobots that will monitor our blood system or immune system, or even those that might clear out the clots from our arteries. Now how about exponentially cheaper? Not something we usually think about in the era of medicine, but hard disks used to be 3,400 dollars for 10 megabytes -- exponentially cheaper. In genomics now, the genome cost about a billion dollars about 10 years ago when the first one came out. We're now approaching essentially a thousand-dollar genome -- probably next year to two years, probably a hundred-dollar genome. What are we going to do with hundred-dollar genomes? And soon we'll have millions of these tests available. And that's when it gets interesting, when we start to crowdsource that information. And we enter the era of true personalized medicine -- the right drug for the right person at the right time -- instead of what we're doing today, which is the same drug for everybody -- sort of blockbuster drug medications, medications which don't work for you, the individual. And many, many different companies are working on leveraging these approaches. And I'll also show you a simple example, from 23andMe again. My data indicates that I've got about average risk for developing macular degeneration, a kind of blindness. But if I take that same data, upload it to deCODEme, I can look at my risk for sample type 2 diabetes. I'm at almost twice the risk for type 2 diabetes. I might want to watch how much dessert I have at the lunch break for example. It might change my behavior. Leveraging my knowledge of my pharmacogenomics -- how my genes modulate, what my drugs do and what doses I need are going to become increasingly important, and once in the hands of the individual and the patient, will make better drug dosing and selection available. So again, it's not just genes, it's multiple details -- our habits, our environmental exposure. When was the last time your physician asked you where you've lived? Geomedicine: where you've lived, what you've been exposed to, can dramatically affect your health. We can capture that information. So genomics, proteomics, the environment, all this data streaming at us individually and us, as poor physicians, how do we manage it? Well we're now entering the era of systems medicine, or systems biology, where we can start to integrate all of this information. And by looking at the patterns, for example, in our blood of 10,000 biomarkers in a single test, we can start to look at these little patterns and detect disease at a much earlier stage. This has been called by Lee Hood, the father of the field, P4 medicine. We're going to be predictive; we're going to know what you're likely to have. We can be preventative; that prevention can be personalized; and more importantly, it's going to become increasingly participatory. Through websites like Patients Like Me or managing your data on Microsoft HealthVault or Google Health, leveraging this together in participatory ways is going to become increasingly important. So I'll finish up with exponentially better. We'd like to get therapies better and more effective. Now today we treat high blood pressure mostly with pills. What if we take a new device and knock out the nerve vessels that help mediate blood pressure and in a single therapy to cure hypertension? This is a new device that is essentially doing that. It should be on the market within a year or two. How about more targeted therapies for cancer? Right, I'm an oncologist and I have to say most of what we give is actually poison. We've learned at Stanford and other places that we can discover cancer stem cells, the ones that seem to be really responsible for disease relapse. So if you think of cancer as a weed, we often can whack the weed away. It seems to shrink, but it often comes back. So we're attacking the wrong target. The cancer stem cells remain, and the tumor can return months or years later. We're now learning to identify the cancer stem cells and identify those as targets and go for the long-term cure. And we're entering the era of personalized oncology, the ability to leverage all of this data together, analyze the tumor and come up with a real, specific cocktail for the individual patient. Now I'll close with regenerative medicine. So I've studied a lot about stem cells -- embryonic stem cells are particularly powerful. We also have adult stem cells throughout our body. We use those in my field of bone marrow transplantation. Geron, just last year, started the first trial using human embryonic stem cells to treat spinal cord injuries. Still a Phase I trial, but evolving. We've been actually using adult stem cells now in clinical trials for about 15 years to approach a whole range of topics, particularly in cardiovascular disease. We take our own bone marrow cells and treat a patient with a heart attack, we can see much improved heart function and actually better survival using our own bone marrow drive cells after a heart attack. I invented a device called the MarrowMiner, a much less invasive way for harvesting bone marrow. It's now been FDA approved, and it'll hopefully be on the market in the next year or so. Hopefully you can appreciate the device there curving through the patient's body and removing the patient's bone marrow, instead of with 200 punctures, with just a single puncture under local anesthesia. But where is stem cell therapy really going? If you think about it, every cell in your body has the same DNA as you had when you were an embryo. We can now reprogram your skin cells to actually act like a pluripotent embryonic stem cell and to utilize those potentially to treat multiple organs in that same patient -- making your own personalized stem cell lines. And I think they'll be a new era of your own stem cell banking to have in the freezer your own cardiac cells, myocytes and neural cells to use them in the future, should you need them. And we're integrating this now with a whole era of cellular engineering, and integrating exponential technologies for essentially 3D organ printing -- replacing the ink with cells and essentially building and reconstructing a 3D organ. That's where things are going to head -- still very early days. But I think, as integration of exponential technologies, this is the example. So in close, as you think about technology trends and how to impact health and medicine, we're entering an era of miniaturization, decentralization and personalization. And I think by pulling these things together, if we can start to think about how to understand and leverage these, we're going to empower the patient, enable the doctor, enhance wellness and begin to cure the well before they get sick. Because I know as a doctor, if someone comes to me with Stage I disease, I'm thrilled -- we can often cure them. But often it's too late and it's Stage III or IV cancer, for example. So by leveraging these technologies together, I think we'll enter a new era that I like to call Stage 0 medicine. And as a cancer doctor, I'm looking forward to being out of a job. Thanks very much. Host: Thank you. Thank you. (Applause) Take a bow. Take a bow.
Well, it's great to be here. We've heard a lot about the promise of technology, and the peril. I've been quite interested in both. If we could convert 0.03 percent of the sunlight that falls on the earth into energy, we could meet all of our projected needs for 2030. We can't do that today because solar panels are heavy, expensive and very inefficient. There are nano-engineered designs, which at least have been analyzed theoretically, that show the potential to be very lightweight, very inexpensive, very efficient, and we'd be able to actually provide all of our energy needs in this renewable way. Nano-engineered fuel cells could provide the energy where it's needed. That's a key trend, which is decentralization, moving from centralized nuclear power plants and liquid natural gas tankers to decentralized resources that are environmentally more friendly, a lot more efficient and capable and safe from disruption. Bono spoke very eloquently, that we have the tools, for the first time, to address age-old problems of disease and poverty. Most regions of the world are moving in that direction. In 1990, in East Asia and the Pacific region, there were 500 million people living in poverty -- that number now is under 200 million. The World Bank projects by 2011, it will be under 20 million, which is a reduction of 95 percent. I did enjoy Bono's comment linking Haight-Ashbury to Silicon Valley. Being from the Massachusetts high-tech community myself, I'd point out that we were hippies also in the 1960s, although we hung around Harvard Square. But we do have the potential to overcome disease and poverty, and I'm going to talk about those issues, if we have the will. Kevin Kelly talked about the acceleration of technology. That's been a strong interest of mine, and a theme that I've developed for some 30 years. I realized that my technologies had to make sense when I finished a project. That invariably, the world was a different place when I would introduce a technology. And, I noticed that most inventions fail, not because the R&D department can't get it to work -- if you look at most business plans, they will actually succeed if given the opportunity to build what they say they're going to build -- and 90 percent of those projects or more will fail, because the timing is wrong -- not all the enabling factors will be in place when they're needed. So I began to be an ardent student of technology trends, and track where technology would be at different points in time, and began to build the mathematical models of that. It's kind of taken on a life of its own. I've got a group of 10 people that work with me to gather data on key measures of technology in many different areas, and we build models. And you'll hear people say, well, we can't predict the future. And if you ask me, will the price of Google be higher or lower than it is today three years from now, that's very hard to say. Will WiMax CDMA G3 be the wireless standard three years from now? That's hard to say. But if you ask me, what will it cost for one MIPS of computing in 2010, or the cost to sequence a base pair of DNA in 2012, or the cost of sending a megabyte of data wirelessly in 2014, it turns out that those are very predictable. There are remarkably smooth exponential curves that govern price performance, capacity, bandwidth. And I'm going to show you a small sample of this, but there's really a theoretical reason why technology develops in an exponential fashion. And a lot of people, when they think about the future, think about it linearly. They think they're going to continue to develop a problem or address a problem using today's tools, at today's pace of progress, and fail to take into consideration this exponential growth. The Genome Project was a controversial project in 1990. We had our best Ph.D. students, our most advanced equipment around the world, we got 1/10,000th of the project done, so how're we going to get this done in 15 years? And 10 years into the project, the skeptics were still going strong -- says, "You're two-thirds through this project, and you've managed to only sequence a very tiny percentage of the whole genome." But it's the nature of exponential growth that once it reaches the knee of the curve, it explodes. Most of the project was done in the last few years of the project. It took us 15 years to sequence HIV -- we sequenced SARS in 31 days. So we are gaining the potential to overcome these problems. I'm going to show you just a few examples of how pervasive this phenomena is. The actual paradigm-shift rate, the rate of adopting new ideas, is doubling every decade, according to our models. These are all logarithmic graphs, so as you go up the levels it represents, generally multiplying by factor of 10 or 100. It took us half a century to adopt the telephone, the first virtual-reality technology. Cell phones were adopted in about eight years. If you put different communication technologies on this logarithmic graph, television, radio, telephone were adopted in decades. Recent technologies -- like the PC, the web, cell phones -- were under a decade. Now this is an interesting chart, and this really gets at the fundamental reason why an evolutionary process -- and both biology and technology are evolutionary processes -- accelerate. They work through interaction -- they create a capability, and then it uses that capability to bring on the next stage. So the first step in biological evolution, the evolution of DNA -- actually it was RNA came first -- took billions of years, but then evolution used that information-processing backbone to bring on the next stage. So the Cambrian Explosion, when all the body plans of the animals were evolved, took only 10 million years. It was 200 times faster. And then evolution used those body plans to evolve higher cognitive functions, and biological evolution kept accelerating. It's an inherent nature of an evolutionary process. So Homo sapiens, the first technology-creating species, the species that combined a cognitive function with an opposable appendage -- and by the way, chimpanzees don't really have a very good opposable thumb -- so we could actually manipulate our environment with a power grip and fine motor coordination, and use our mental models to actually change the world and bring on technology. But anyway, the evolution of our species took hundreds of thousands of years, and then working through interaction, evolution used, essentially, the technology-creating species to bring on the next stage, which were the first steps in technological evolution. And the first step took tens of thousands of years -- stone tools, fire, the wheel -- kept accelerating. We always used then the latest generation of technology to create the next generation. Printing press took a century to be adopted; the first computers were designed pen-on-paper -- now we use computers. And we've had a continual acceleration of this process. Now by the way, if you look at this on a linear graph, it looks like everything has just happened, but some observer says, "Well, Kurzweil just put points on this graph that fall on that straight line." So, I took 15 different lists from key thinkers, like the Encyclopedia Britannica, the Museum of Natural History, Carl Sagan's Cosmic Calendar on the same -- and these people were not trying to make my point; these were just lists in reference works, and I think that's what they thought the key events were in biological evolution and technological evolution. And again, it forms the same straight line. You have a little bit of thickening in the line because people do have disagreements, what the key points are, there's differences of opinion when agriculture started, or how long the Cambrian Explosion took. But you see a very clear trend. There's a basic, profound acceleration of this evolutionary process. Information technologies double their capacity, price performance, bandwidth, every year. And that's a very profound explosion of exponential growth. A personal experience, when I was at MIT -- computer taking up about the size of this room, less powerful than the computer in your cell phone. But Moore's Law, which is very often identified with this exponential growth, is just one example of many, because it's basically a property of the evolutionary process of technology. I put 49 famous computers on this logarithmic graph -- by the way, a straight line on a logarithmic graph is exponential growth -- that's another exponential. It took us three years to double our price performance of computing in 1900, two years in the middle; we're now doubling it every one year. And that's exponential growth through five different paradigms. Moore's Law was just the last part of that, where we were shrinking transistors on an integrated circuit, but we had electro-mechanical calculators, relay-based computers that cracked the German Enigma Code, vacuum tubes in the 1950s predicted the election of Eisenhower, discreet transistors used in the first space flights and then Moore's Law. Every time one paradigm ran out of steam, another paradigm came out of left field to continue the exponential growth. They were shrinking vacuum tubes, making them smaller and smaller. That hit a wall. They couldn't shrink them and keep the vacuum. Whole different paradigm -- transistors came out of the woodwork. In fact, when we see the end of the line for a particular paradigm, it creates research pressure to create the next paradigm. And because we've been predicting the end of Moore's Law for quite a long time -- the first prediction said 2002, until now it says 2022. But by the teen years, the features of transistors will be a few atoms in width, and we won't be able to shrink them any more. That'll be the end of Moore's Law, but it won't be the end of the exponential growth of computing, because chips are flat. We live in a three-dimensional world; we might as well use the third dimension. We will go into the third dimension and there's been tremendous progress, just in the last few years, of getting three-dimensional, self-organizing molecular circuits to work. We'll have those ready well before Moore's Law runs out of steam. Supercomputers -- same thing. Processor performance on Intel chips, the average price of a transistor -- 1968, you could buy one transistor for a dollar. You could buy 10 million in 2002. It's pretty remarkable how smooth an exponential process that is. I mean, you'd think this is the result of some tabletop experiment, but this is the result of worldwide chaotic behavior -- countries accusing each other of dumping products, IPOs, bankruptcies, marketing programs. You would think it would be a very erratic process, and you have a very smooth outcome of this chaotic process. Just as we can't predict what one molecule in a gas will do -- it's hopeless to predict a single molecule -- yet we can predict the properties of the whole gas, using thermodynamics, very accurately. It's the same thing here. We can't predict any particular project, but the result of this whole worldwide, chaotic, unpredictable activity of competition and the evolutionary process of technology is very predictable. And we can predict these trends far into the future. Unlike Gertrude Stein's roses, it's not the case that a transistor is a transistor. As we make them smaller and less expensive, the electrons have less distance to travel. They're faster, so you've got exponential growth in the speed of transistors, so the cost of a cycle of one transistor has been coming down with a halving rate of 1.1 years. You add other forms of innovation and processor design, you get a doubling of price performance of computing every one year. And that's basically deflation -- 50 percent deflation. And it's not just computers. I mean, it's true of DNA sequencing; it's true of brain scanning; it's true of the World Wide Web. I mean, anything that we can quantify, we have hundreds of different measurements of different, information-related measurements -- capacity, adoption rates -- and they basically double every 12, 13, 15 months, depending on what you're looking at. In terms of price performance, that's a 40 to 50 percent deflation rate. And economists have actually started worrying about that. We had deflation during the Depression, but that was collapse of the money supply, collapse of consumer confidence, a completely different phenomena. This is due to greater productivity, but the economist says, "But there's no way you're going to be able to keep up with that. If you have 50 percent deflation, people may increase their volume 30, 40 percent, but they won't keep up with it." But what we're actually seeing is that we actually more than keep up with it. We've had 28 percent per year compounded growth in dollars in information technology over the last 50 years. I mean, people didn't build iPods for 10,000 dollars 10 years ago. As the price performance makes new applications feasible, new applications come to the market. And this is a very widespread phenomena. Magnetic data storage -- that's not Moore's Law, it's shrinking magnetic spots, different engineers, different companies, same exponential process. A key revolution is that we're understanding our own biology in these information terms. We're understanding the software programs that make our body run. These were evolved in very different times -- we'd like to actually change those programs. One little software program, called the fat insulin receptor gene, basically says, "Hold onto every calorie, because the next hunting season may not work out so well." That was in the interests of the species tens of thousands of years ago. We'd like to actually turn that program off. They tried that in animals, and these mice ate ravenously and remained slim and got the health benefits of being slim. They didn't get diabetes; they didn't get heart disease; they lived 20 percent longer; they got the health benefits of caloric restriction without the restriction. Four or five pharmaceutical companies have noticed this, felt that would be interesting drug for the human market, and that's just one of the 30,000 genes that affect our biochemistry. We were evolved in an era where it wasn't in the interests of people at the age of most people at this conference, like myself, to live much longer, because we were using up the precious resources which were better deployed towards the children and those caring for them. So, life -- long lifespans -- like, that is to say, much more than 30 -- weren't selected for, but we are learning to actually manipulate and change these software programs through the biotechnology revolution. For example, we can inhibit genes now with RNA interference. There are exciting new forms of gene therapy that overcome the problem of placing the genetic material in the right place on the chromosome. There's actually a -- for the first time now, something going to human trials, that actually cures pulmonary hypertension -- a fatal disease -- using gene therapy. So we'll have not just designer babies, but designer baby boomers. And this technology is also accelerating. It cost 10 dollars per base pair in 1990, then a penny in 2000. It's now under a 10th of a cent. The amount of genetic data -- basically this shows that smooth exponential growth doubled every year, enabling the genome project to be completed. Another major revolution: the communications revolution. The price performance, bandwidth, capacity of communications measured many different ways; wired, wireless is growing exponentially. The Internet has been doubling in power and continues to, measured many different ways. This is based on the number of hosts. Miniaturization -- we're shrinking the size of technology at an exponential rate, both wired and wireless. These are some designs from Eric Drexler's book -- which we're now showing are feasible with super-computing simulations, where actually there are scientists building molecule-scale robots. One has one that actually walks with a surprisingly human-like gait, that's built out of molecules. There are little machines doing things in experimental bases. The most exciting opportunity is actually to go inside the human body and perform therapeutic and diagnostic functions. And this is less futuristic than it may sound. These things have already been done in animals. There's one nano-engineered device that cures type 1 diabetes. It's blood cell-sized. They put tens of thousands of these in the blood cell -- they tried this in rats -- it lets insulin out in a controlled fashion, and actually cures type 1 diabetes. What you're watching is a design of a robotic red blood cell, and it does bring up the issue that our biology is actually very sub-optimal, even though it's remarkable in its intricacy. Once we understand its principles of operation, and the pace with which we are reverse-engineering biology is accelerating, we can actually design these things to be thousands of times more capable. An analysis of this respirocyte, designed by Rob Freitas, indicates if you replace 10 percent of your red blood cells with these robotic versions, you could do an Olympic sprint for 15 minutes without taking a breath. You could sit at the bottom of your pool for four hours -- so, "Honey, I'm in the pool," will take on a whole new meaning. It will be interesting to see what we do in our Olympic trials. Presumably we'll ban them, but then we'll have the specter of teenagers in their high schools gyms routinely out-performing the Olympic athletes. Freitas has a design for a robotic white blood cell. These are 2020-circa scenarios, but they're not as futuristic as it may sound. There are four major conferences on building blood cell-sized devices; there are many experiments in animals. There's actually one going into human trial, so this is feasible technology. If we come back to our exponential growth of computing, 1,000 dollars of computing is now somewhere between an insect and a mouse brain. It will intersect human intelligence in terms of capacity in the 2020s, but that'll be the hardware side of the equation. Where will we get the software? Well, it turns out we can see inside the human brain, and in fact not surprisingly, the spatial and temporal resolution of brain scanning is doubling every year. And with the new generation of scanning tools, for the first time we can actually see individual inter-neural fibers and see them processing and signaling in real time -- but then the question is, OK, we can get this data now, but can we understand it? Doug Hofstadter wonders, well, maybe our intelligence just isn't great enough to understand our intelligence, and if we were smarter, well, then our brains would be that much more complicated, and we'd never catch up to it. It turns out that we can understand it. This is a block diagram of a model and simulation of the human auditory cortex that actually works quite well -- in applying psychoacoustic tests, gets very similar results to human auditory perception. There's another simulation of the cerebellum -- that's more than half the neurons in the brain -- again, works very similarly to human skill formation. This is at an early stage, but you can show with the exponential growth of the amount of information about the brain and the exponential improvement in the resolution of brain scanning, we will succeed in reverse-engineering the human brain by the 2020s. We've already had very good models and simulation of about 15 regions out of the several hundred. All of this is driving exponentially growing economic progress. We've had productivity go from 30 dollars to 150 dollars per hour of labor in the last 50 years. E-commerce has been growing exponentially. It's now a trillion dollars. You might wonder, well, wasn't there a boom and a bust? That was strictly a capital-markets phenomena. Wall Street noticed that this was a revolutionary technology, which it was, but then six months later, when it hadn't revolutionized all business models, they figured, well, that was wrong, and then we had this bust. All right, this is a technology that we put together using some of the technologies we're involved in. This will be a routine feature in a cell phone. It would be able to translate from one language to another. So let me just end with a couple of scenarios. By 2010 computers will disappear. They'll be so small, they'll be embedded in our clothing, in our environment. Images will be written directly to our retina, providing full-immersion virtual reality, augmented real reality. We'll be interacting with virtual personalities. But if we go to 2029, we really have the full maturity of these trends, and you have to appreciate how many turns of the screw in terms of generations of technology, which are getting faster and faster, we'll have at that point. I mean, we will have two-to-the-25th-power greater price performance, capacity and bandwidth of these technologies, which is pretty phenomenal. It'll be millions of times more powerful than it is today. We'll have completed the reverse-engineering of the human brain, 1,000 dollars of computing will be far more powerful than the human brain in terms of basic raw capacity. Computers will combine the subtle pan-recognition powers of human intelligence with ways in which machines are already superior, in terms of doing analytic thinking, remembering billions of facts accurately. Machines can share their knowledge very quickly. But it's not just an alien invasion of intelligent machines. We are going to merge with our technology. These nano-bots I mentioned will first be used for medical and health applications: cleaning up the environment, providing powerful fuel cells and widely distributed decentralized solar panels and so on in the environment. But they'll also go inside our brain, interact with our biological neurons. We've demonstrated the key principles of being able to do this. So, for example, full-immersion virtual reality from within the nervous system, the nano-bots shut down the signals coming from your real senses, replace them with the signals that your brain would be receiving if you were in the virtual environment, and then it'll feel like you're in that virtual environment. You can go there with other people, have any kind of experience with anyone involving all of the senses. "Experience beamers," I call them, will put their whole flow of sensory experiences in the neurological correlates of their emotions out on the Internet. You can plug in and experience what it's like to be someone else. But most importantly, it'll be a tremendous expansion of human intelligence through this direct merger with our technology, which in some sense we're doing already. We routinely do intellectual feats that would be impossible without our technology. Human life expectancy is expanding. It was 37 in 1800, and with this sort of biotechnology, nano-technology revolutions, this will move up very rapidly in the years ahead. My main message is that progress in technology is exponential, not linear. Many -- even scientists -- assume a linear model, so they'll say, "Oh, it'll be hundreds of years before we have self-replicating nano-technology assembly or artificial intelligence." If you really look at the power of exponential growth, you'll see that these things are pretty soon at hand. And information technology is increasingly encompassing all of our lives, from our music to our manufacturing to our biology to our energy to materials. We'll be able to manufacture almost anything we need in the 2020s, from information, in very inexpensive raw materials, using nano-technology. These are very powerful technologies. They both empower our promise and our peril. So we have to have the will to apply them to the right problems. Thank you very much. (Applause)
Jambo, bonjour, zdravstvujtye, dayo: these are a few of the languages that I've spoken little bits of over the course of the last six weeks, as I've been to 17 countries I think I'm up to, on this crazy tour I've been doing, checking out various aspects of the project that we're doing. And I'm going to tell you a little bit about later on. And visiting some pretty incredible places, places like Mongolia, Cambodia, New Guinea, South Africa, Tanzania twice -- I was here a month ago. And the opportunity to make a whirlwind tour of the world like that is utterly amazing, for lots of reasons. You see some incredible stuff. And you get to make these spot comparisons between people all around the globe. And the thing that you really take away from that, the kind of surface thing that you take away from it, is not that we're all one, although I'm going to tell you about that, but rather how different we are. There is so much diversity around the globe. 6,000 different languages spoken by six and a half billion people, all different colors, shapes, sizes. You walk down the street in any big city, you travel like that, and you are amazed at the diversity in the human species. How do we explain that diversity? Well, that's what I'm going to talk about today, is how we're using the tools of genetics, population genetics in particular, to tell us how we generated this diversity, and how long it took. Now, the problem of human diversity, like all big scientific questions -- how do you explain something like that -- can be broken down into sub-questions. And you can ferret away at those little sub-questions. First one is really a question of origins. Do we all share a common origin, in fact? And given that we do -- and that's the assumption everybody, I think, in this room would make -- when was that? When did we originate as a species? How long have we been divergent from each other? And the second question is related, but slightly different. If we do spring from a common source, how did we come to occupy every corner of the globe, and in the process generate all of this diversity, the different ways of life, the different appearances, the different languages around the world? Well, the question of origins, as with so many other questions in biology, seems to have been answered by Darwin over a century ago. In "The Descent of Man," he wrote, "In each great region of the world, the living mammals are closely related to the extinct species of the same region. It's therefore probable that Africa was formerly inhabited by extinct apes closely allied to the gorilla and chimpanzee, and as these two species are now man's nearest allies, it's somewhat more probable that our early progenitors lived on the African continent than elsewhere." So we're done, we can go home -- finished the origin question. Well, not quite. Because Darwin was talking about our distant ancestry, our common ancestry with apes. And it is quite clear that apes originated on the African continent. Around 23 million years ago, they appear in the fossil record. Africa was actually disconnected from the other landmasses at that time, due to the vagaries of plate tectonics, floating around the Indian Ocean. Bumped into Eurasia around 16 million years ago, and then we had the first African exodus, as we call it. The apes that left at that time ended up in Southeast Asia, became the gibbons and the orangutans. And the ones that stayed on in Africa evolved into the gorillas, the chimpanzees and us. So, yes, if you're talking about our common ancestry with apes, it's very clear, by looking at the fossil record, we started off here. But that's not really the question I'm asking. I'm asking about our human ancestry, things that we would recognize as being like us if they were sitting here in the room. If they were peering over your shoulder, you wouldn't leap back, like that. What about our human ancestry? Because if we go far enough back, we share a common ancestry with every living thing on Earth. DNA ties us all together, so we share ancestry with barracuda and bacteria and mushrooms, if you go far enough back -- over a billion years. What we're asking about though is human ancestry. How do we study that? Well, historically, it has been studied using the science of paleoanthropology. Digging things up out of the ground, and largely on the basis of morphology -- the way things are shaped, often skull shape -- saying, "This looks a little bit more like us than that, so this must be my ancestor. This must be who I'm directly descended from." The field of paleoanthropology, I'll argue, gives us lots of fascinating possibilities about our ancestry, but it doesn't give us the probabilities that we really want as scientists. What do I mean by that? You're looking at a great example here. These are three extinct species of hominids, potential human ancestors. All dug up just west of here in Olduvai Gorge, by the Leakey family. And they're all dating to roughly the same time. From left to right, we've got Homo erectus, Homo habilis, and Australopithecus -- now called Paranthropus boisei, the robust australopithecine. Three extinct species, same place, same time. That means that not all three could be my direct ancestor. Which one of these guys am I actually related to? Possibilities about our ancestry, but not the probabilities that we're really looking for. Well, a different approach has been to look at morphology in humans using the only data that people really had at hand until quite recently -- again, largely skull shape. The first person to do this systematically was Linnaeus, Carl von Linne, a Swedish botanist, who in the eighteenth century took it upon himself to categorize every living organism on the planet. You think you've got a tough job? And he did a pretty good job. He categorized about 12,000 species in "Systema Naturae." He actually coined the term Homo sapiens -- it means wise man in Latin. But looking around the world at the diversity of humans, he said, "Well, you know, we seem to come in discreet sub-species or categories." And he talked about Africans and Americans and Asians and Europeans, and a blatantly racist category he termed "Monstrosus," which basically included all the people he didn't like, including imaginary folk like elves. It's easy to dismiss this as the perhaps well-intentioned but ultimately benighted musings of an eighteenth century scientist working in the pre-Darwinian era. Except, if you had taken physical anthropology as recently as 20 or 30 years ago, in many cases you would have learned basically that same classification of humanity. Human races that according to physical anthropologists of 30, 40 years ago -- Carlton Coon is the best example -- had been diverging from each other -- this was in the post-Darwinian era -- for over a million years, since the time of Homo erectus. But based on what data? Very little. Very little. Morphology and a lot of guesswork. Well, what I'm going to talk about today, what I'm going to talk about now is a new approach to this problem. Instead of going out and guessing about our ancestry, digging things up out of the ground, possible ancestors, and saying it on the basis of morphology -- which we still don't completely understand, we don't know the genetic causes underlying this morphological variation -- what we need to do is turn the problem on its head. Because what we're really asking is a genealogical problem, or a genealogical question. What we're trying to do is construct a family tree for everybody alive today. And as any genealogist will tell you -- anybody have a member of the family, or maybe you have tried to construct a family tree, trace back in time? You start in the present, with relationships you're certain about. You and your siblings, you have a parent in common. You and your cousins share a grandparent in common. You gradually trace further and further back into the past, adding these ever more distant relationships. But eventually, no matter how good you are at digging up the church records, and all that stuff, you hit what the genealogists call a brick wall. A point beyond which you don't know anything else about your ancestors, and you enter this dark and mysterious realm we call history that we have to feel our way through with whispered guidance. Who were these people who came before? We have no written record. Well, actually, we do. Written in our DNA, in our genetic code -- we have a historical document that takes us back in time to the very earliest days of our species. And that's what we study. Now, a quick primer on DNA. I suspect that not everybody in the audience is a geneticist. It is a very long, linear molecule, a coded version of how to make another copy of you. It's your blueprint. It's composed of four subunits: A, C, G and T, we call them. And it's the sequence of those subunits that defines that blueprint. How long is it? Well, it's billions of these subunits in length. A haploid genome -- we actually have two copies of all of our chromosomes -- a haploid genome is around 3.2 billion nucleotides in length. And the whole thing, if you add it all together, is over six billion nucleotides long. If you take all the DNA out of one cell in your body, and stretch it end to end, it's around two meters long. If you take all the DNA out of every cell in your body, and you stretch it end to end, it would reach from here to the moon and back, thousands of times. It's a lot of information. And so when you're copying this DNA molecule to pass it on, it's a pretty tough job. Imagine the longest book you can think of, "War and Peace." Now multiply it by 100. And imagine copying that by hand. And you're working away until late at night, and you're very, very careful, and you're drinking coffee and you're paying attention, but, occasionally, when you're copying this by hand, you're going to make a little typo, a spelling mistake -- substitute an I for an E, or a C for a T. Same thing happens to our DNA as it's being passed on through the generations. It doesn't happen very often. We have a proofreading mechanism built in. But when it does happen, and these changes get transmitted down through the generations, they become markers of descent. If you share a marker with someone, it means you share an ancestor at some point in the past, the person who first had that change in their DNA. And it's by looking at the pattern of genetic variation, the pattern of these markers in people all over the world, and assessing the relative ages when they occurred throughout our history, that we've been able to construct a family tree for everybody alive today. These are two pieces of DNA that we use quite widely in our work. Mitochondrial DNA, tracing a purely maternal line of descent. You get your mtDNA from your mother, and your mother's mother, all the way back to the very first woman. The Y chromosome, the piece of DNA that makes men men, traces a purely paternal line of descent. Everybody in this room, everybody in the world, falls into a lineage somewhere on these trees. Now, even though these are simplified versions of the real trees, they're still kind of complicated, so let's simplify them. Turn them on their sides, combine them so that they look like a tree with the root at the bottom and the branches going up. What's the take-home message? Well, the thing that jumps out at you first is that the deepest lineages in our family trees are found within Africa, among Africans. That means that Africans have been accumulating this mutational diversity for longer. And what that means is that we originated in Africa. It's written in our DNA. Every piece of DNA we look at has greater diversity within Africa than outside of Africa. And at some point in the past, a sub-group of Africans left the African continent to go out and populate the rest of the world. Now, how recently do we share this ancestry? Was it millions of years ago, which we might suspect by looking at all this incredible variation around the world? No, the DNA tells a story that's very clear. Within the last 200,000 years, we all share an ancestor, a single person -- Mitochondrial Eve, you might have heard about her -- in Africa, an African woman who gave rise to all the mitochondrial diversity in the world today. But what's even more amazing is that if you look at the Y-chromosome side, the male side of the story, the Y-chromosome Adam only lived around 60,000 years ago. That's only about 2,000 human generations, the blink of an eye in an evolutionary sense. That tells us we were all still living in Africa at that time. This was an African man who gave rise to all the Y chromosome diversity around the world. It's only within the last 60,000 years that we have started to generate this incredible diversity we see around the world. Such an amazing story. We're all effectively part of an extended African family. Now, that seems so recent. Why didn't we start to leave earlier? Why didn't Homo erectus evolve into separate species, or sub-species rather, human races around the world? Why was it that we seem to have come out of Africa so recently? Well, that's a big question. These "why" questions, particularly in genetics and the study of history in general, are always the big ones, the ones that are tough to answer. And so when all else fails, talk about the weather. What was going on to the world's weather around 60,000 years ago? Well, we were going into the worst part of the last ice age. The last ice age started roughly 120,000 years ago. It went up and down, and it really started to accelerate around 70,000 years ago. Lots of evidence from sediment cores and the pollen types, oxygen isotopes and so on. We hit the last glacial maximum around 16,000 years ago, but basically, from 70,000 years on, things were getting really tough, getting very cold. The Northern Hemisphere had massive growing ice sheets. New York City, Chicago, Seattle, all under a sheet of ice. Most of Britain, all of Scandinavia, covered by ice several kilometers thick. Now, Africa is the most tropical continent on the planet -- about 85 percent of it lies between Cancer and Capricorn -- and there aren't a lot of glaciers here, except on the high mountains here in East Africa. So what was going on here? We weren't covered in ice in Africa. Rather, Africa was drying out at that time. This is a paleo-climatological map of what Africa looked like between 60,000 and 70,000 years ago, reconstructed from all these pieces of evidence that I mentioned before. The reason for that is that ice actually sucks moisture out of the atmosphere. If you think about Antarctica, it's technically a desert, it gets so little precipitation. So the whole world was drying out. The sea levels were dropping. And Africa was turning to desert. The Sahara was much bigger then than it is now. And the human habitat was reduced to just a few small pockets, compared to what we have today. The evidence from genetic data is that the human population around this time, roughly 70,000 years ago, crashed to fewer than 2,000 individuals. We nearly went extinct. We were hanging on by our fingernails. And then something happened. A great illustration of it. Look at some stone tools. The ones on the left are from Africa, from around a million years ago. The ones on the right were made by Neanderthals, our distant cousins, not our direct ancestors, living in Europe, and they date from around 50,000 or 60,000 years ago. Now, at the risk of offending any paleoanthropologists or physical anthropologists in the audience, basically there's not a lot of change between these two stone tool groups. The ones on the left are pretty similar to the ones on the right. We are in a period of long cultural stasis from a million years ago until around 60,000 to 70,000 years ago. The tool styles don't change that much. The evidence is that the human way of life didn't change that much during that period. But then 50, 60, 70 thousand years ago, somewhere in that region, all hell breaks loose. Art makes its appearance. The stone tools become much more finely crafted. The evidence is that humans begin to specialize in particular prey species, at particular times of the year. The population size started to expand. Probably, according to what many linguists believe, fully modern language, syntactic language -- subject, verb, object -- that we use to convey complex ideas, like I'm doing now, appeared around that time. We became much more social. The social networks expanded. This change in behavior allowed us to survive these worsening conditions in Africa, and they allowed us to start to expand around the world. We've been talking at this conference about African success stories. Well, you want the ultimate African success story? Look in the mirror. You're it. The reason you're alive today is because of those changes in our brains that took place in Africa -- probably somewhere in the region where we're sitting right now, around 60, 70 thousand years ago -- allowing us not only to survive in Africa, but to expand out of Africa. An early coastal migration along the south coast of Asia, leaving Africa around 60,000 years ago, reaching Australia very rapidly, by 50,000 years ago. A slightly later migration up into the Middle East. These would have been savannah hunters. So those of you who are going on one of the post-conference tours, you'll get to see what a real savannah is like. And it's basically a meat locker. People who would have specialized in killing the animals, hunting the animals on those meat locker savannahs, moving up, following the grasslands into the Middle East around 45,000 years ago, during one of the rare wet phases in the Sahara. Migrating eastward, following the grasslands, because that's what they were adapted to live on. And when they reached Central Asia, they reached what was effectively a steppe super-highway, a grassland super-highway. The grasslands at that time -- this was during the last ice age -- stretched basically from Germany all the way over to Korea, and the entire continent was open to them. Entering Europe around 35,000 years ago, and finally, a small group migrating up through the worst weather imaginable, Siberia, inside the Arctic Circle, during the last ice age -- temperature was at -70, -80, even -100, perhaps -- migrating into the Americas, ultimately reaching that final frontier. An amazing story, and it happened first in Africa. The changes that allowed us to do that, the evolution of this highly adaptable brain that we all carry around with us, allowing us to create novel cultures, allowing us to develop the diversity that we see on a whirlwind trip like the one I've just been on. Now, that story I just told you is literally a whirlwind tour of how we populated the world, the great Paleolithic wanderings of our species. And that's the story that I told a couple of years ago in my book, "The Journey of Man," and a film that we made with the same title. And as we were finishing up that film -- it was co-produced with National Geographic -- I started talking to the folks at NG about this work. And they got really excited about it. They liked the film, but they said, "You know, we really see this as kind of the next wave in the study of human origins, where we all came from, using the tools of DNA to map the migrations around the world. You know, the study of human origins is kind of in our DNA, and we want to take it to the next level. What do you want to do next?" Which is a great question to be asked by National Geographic. And I said, "Well, you know, what I've sketched out here is just that. It is a very coarse sketch of how we migrated around the planet. And it's based on a few thousand people we've sampled from, you know, a handful of populations around the world. Studied a few genetic markers, and there are lots of gaps on this map. We've just connected the dots. What we need to do is increase our sample size by an order of magnitude or more -- hundreds of thousands of DNA samples from people all over the world." And that was the genesis of the Genographic Project. The project launched in April 2005. It has three core components. Obviously, science is a big part of it. The field research that we're doing around the world with indigenous peoples. People who have lived in the same location for a long period of time retain a connection to the place where they live that many of the rest of us have lost. So my ancestors come from all over northern Europe. I live in the Eastern Seaboard of North America when I'm not traveling. Where am I indigenous to? Nowhere really. My genes are all jumbled up. But there are people who retain that link to their ancestors that allows us to contextualize the DNA results. That's the focus of the field research, the centers that we've set up all over the world -- 10 of them, top population geneticists. But, in addition, we wanted to open up this study to anybody around the world. How often do you get to participate in a big scientific project? The Human Genome Project, or a Mars Rover mission. In this case, you actually can. You can go onto our website, Nationalgeographic.com/genographic. You can order a kit. You can test your own DNA. And you can actually submit those results to the database, and tell us a little about your genealogical background, have the data analyzed as part of the scientific effort. Now, this is all a nonprofit enterprise, and so the money that we raise, after we cover the cost of doing the testing and making the kit components, gets plowed back into the project. The majority going to something we call the Legacy Fund. It's a charitable entity, basically a grant-giving entity that gives money back to indigenous groups around the world for educational, cultural projects initiated by them. They apply to this fund in order to do various projects, and I'll show you a couple of examples. So how are we doing on the project? We've got about 25,000 samples collected from indigenous people around the world. The most amazing thing has been the interest on the part of the public; 210,000 people have ordered these participation kits since we launched two years ago, which has raised around five million dollars, the majority of which, at least half, is going back into the Legacy Fund. We've just awarded the first Legacy Grants totaling around 500,000 dollars. Projects around the world -- documenting oral poetry in Sierra Leone, preserving traditional weaving patterns in Gaza, language revitalization in Tajikistan, etc., etc. So the project is going very, very well, and I urge you to check out the website and watch this space. Thank you very much. (Applause)
You'll be happy to know that I'll be talking not about my own tragedy, but other people's tragedy. It's a lot easier to be lighthearted about other people's tragedy than your own, and I want to keep it in the spirit of the conference. So, if you believe the media accounts, being a drug dealer in the height of the crack cocaine epidemic was a very glamorous life, in the words of Virginia Postrel. There was money, there was drugs, guns, women, you know, you name it -- jewelry, bling-bling -- it had it all. What I'm going to tell you today is that, in fact, based on 10 years of research, a unique opportunity to go inside a gang -- to see the actual books, the financial records of the gang -- that the answer turns out not to be that being in the gang was a glamorous life. But I think, more realistically, that being in a gang -- selling drugs for a gang -- is perhaps the worst job in all of America. And that's what I'd like to convince you of today. So there are three things I want to do. First, I want to explain how and why crack cocaine had such a profound influence on inner-city gangs. Secondly, I want to tell you how somebody like me came to be able to see the inner workings of a gang -- an interesting story, I think. And then third, I want to tell you, in a very superficial way, about some of the things we found when we actually got to look at the financial records, the books, of the gang. So before I do that, just one warning, which is that this presentation has been rated 'R' by the Motion Picture Association of America. It contains adult themes, adult language. Given who is up on the stage, you'll be delighted to know that, in fact, there'll be no nudity -- (Laughter) Unexpected wardrobe malfunctions aside. (Laughter) So let me start by talking about crack cocaine, and how it transformed the gang. To do that, you have to actually go back to a time before crack cocaine, in the early '80s, and look at it from the perspective of a gang leader. Being a gang leader in the inner city wasn't such a bad deal in the mid-'80s -- the early '80s, let me say. Now, you had a lot of power, and you got to beat people up -- you got a lot of prestige, a lot of respect. But the thing is, there was no money in it. The gang had no way to make money. You couldn't charge dues to the people in the gang, because the people in the gang didn't have any money. You couldn't really make any money selling marijuana -- marijuana's too cheap, it turns out. You can't get rich selling marijuana. You couldn't sell cocaine; cocaine's a great product -- powdered cocaine -- but you've got to know rich white people. And most of the inner-city gang members didn't know any rich white people, so couldn't sell to that market. You couldn't really do petty crime, either. Turns out, petty crime's a terrible way to make a living. As a result, as a gang leader, you had, you know, power -- it's a pretty good life -- but the thing was, in the end, you were living at home with your mother. And so it wasn't really a career. There were limits to how powerful and important you could be if you had to live at home with your mother. Then along comes crack cocaine. And in the words of Malcolm Gladwell, crack cocaine was the extra-chunky version of tomato sauce for the inner city. (Laughter) Because crack cocaine was an unbelievable innovation. I don't have time to talk about it today, but if you think about it, I would say that in the last 25 years, of every invention or innovation that's occurred in this country, the biggest one in terms of impact on the well-being of people who live in the inner city, was crack cocaine. And for the worse -- not for the better, but for the worse. It had a huge impact on life. So what was it about crack cocaine? It was a brilliant way of getting the brain high. Because you could smoke crack cocaine -- you can't smoke powdered cocaine -- and smoking is a much more efficient mechanism of delivering a high than snorting it. And it turned out there was this audience that didn't know it wanted crack cocaine, but when it came, it really did. And it was a perfect drug; you could buy the cocaine that went into it for a dollar, sell it for five dollars. Highly addictive -- the high was very short. So for fifteen minutes, you get this great high, and then when you come down, all you want to do is get high again. It created a wonderful market. And for the people who were there running the gang, it was a great way, seemingly, to make a lot of money. At least for the people on the top. So this is where we enter the picture. Not really me -- I'm really a bit player in all this. My co-author, Sudhir Venkatesh, is the main character. He was a math major in college who had a good heart, and decided he wanted to get a sociology PhD, came to the University of Chicago. Now, the three months before he came to Chicago, he had spent following the Grateful Dead. And in his own words, he "looked like a freak." He's a South Asian -- very dark-skinned South Asian. Big man, and he had hair, in his words, "down to his ass." Defied all kinds of boundaries: Was he black or white? Was he man or woman? He was really a curious sight to be seen. So he showed up at the University of Chicago, and the famous sociologist William Julius Wilson was doing a book that involved surveying people all across Chicago. He took one look at Sudhir, who was going to go do some surveys for him, and decided he knew exactly the place to send him, which was to one of the toughest, most notorious housing projects not just in Chicago, but in the entire United States. So Sudhir, the suburban boy who had never really been in the inner city, dutifully took his clipboard and walked down to this housing project, gets to the first building. The first building? Well, there's nobody there. But he hears some voices up in the stairwell, so he climbs up the stairwell, comes around the corner, and finds a group of young African-American men playing dice. This is about 1990, peak of the crack epidemic. This is a very dangerous job, being in a gang. You don't like to be surprised. You don't like to be surprised by people who come around the corner. And the mantra was: shoot first; ask questions later. Now, Sudhir was lucky -- he was such a freak, and that clipboard probably saved his life, because they figured no other rival gang member would be coming up to shoot at them with a clipboard. (Laughter) So his greeting was not particularly warm, but they did say, well, OK -- let's hear your questions on your survey. So -- I kid you not -- the first question on the survey that he was sent to ask was: "How do you feel about being poor and Black in America?" (Laughter) Makes you wonder about academics. (Laughter) So the choice of answers were: [A) Very Good B) Good C) Bad D) Very Bad] (Laughter) What Sudhir found out is, in fact, that the real answer was the following: [A) Very Good B) Good C) Bad D) Very Bad E) Fuck you] (Laughter) The survey was not, in the end, going to be what got Sudhir off the hook. He was held hostage overnight in the stairwell. There was a lot of gunfire, there were a lot of philosophical discussions he had with the gang members. By morning, the gang leader arrived, checked out Sudhir, decided he was no threat, and they let him go home. So Sudhir went home, took a shower, took a nap. And you and I, probably, faced with the situation, would think, "I guess I'm going to write my dissertation on The Grateful Dead, I've been following them for the last three months." (Laughter) Sudhir, on the other hand, got right back, walked down to the housing project, went up to the second floor, and said: "Hey, guys, I had so much fun hanging out with you last night, I wonder if I could do it again tonight." And that was the beginning of what turned out to be a beautiful relationship that involved Sudhir living in the housing project on and off for 10 years, hanging out in crack houses, going to jail with the gang members, having the windows shot out of his car, having the police break into his apartment and steal his computer disks -- you name it. But ultimately, the story has a happy ending for Sudhir, who became one of the most respected sociologists in the country. And especially for me, as I sat in my office with my Excel spreadsheet open, waiting for Sudhir to come and deliver to me the latest load of data that he would get from the gang. (Laughter) It was one of the most unequal co-authoring relationships ever -- (Laughter) But I was glad to be the beneficiary of it. So what did we find? What did we find in the gang? Well, let me say one thing: We really got access to everybody in the gang. We got an inside look at the gang, from the very bottom up to the very top. They trusted Sudhir, in ways that really no academic has ever -- or really anybody, any outsider -- has ever earned the trust of these gangs, to the point where they actually opened up what was most interesting for me -- their books, the financial records they kept. They made them available to us, and we not only could study them, but we could ask them questions about what was in them. So if I have to kind of summarize very quickly in the short time I have what the bottom line of what I take away from the gang is, it's that, if I had to draw a parallel between the gang and any other organization, it would be that the gang is just like McDonald's, in a lot of different respects -- the restaurant McDonald's. So first, in one way, which isn't maybe the most interesting way, but it's a good way to start -- is in the way it's organized, the hierarchy of the gang, the way it looks. So here's what the org chart of the gang looks like. I don't know if you know much about org charts, but if you were to assign a stripped-down and simplified McDonald's org chart, this is exactly what it would look like. It's amazing, but the top level of the gang, they actually call themselves the "Board of Directors." (Laughter) And Sudhir says it's not like these guys had a very sophisticated view of what happened in American corporate life, but they had seen movies like "Wall Street," and they had learned a little bit about what it was like to be in the real world. Now, below that board of directors, you've got essentially what are regional VPs -- people who control, say, the South Side of Chicago, or the West Side of Chicago. Sudhir got to know very well the guy who had the unfortunate assignment of trying to take the Iowa franchise, which, it turned out, for this black gang, was not one of the more brilliant financial endeavors they undertook. (Laughter) But the thing that really makes the gang seem like McDonald's is its franchisees. The guys who are running the local gangs -- the four-square-block by four-square-block areas -- they're just like the guys, in some sense, who are running the McDonald's. They are the entrepreneurs. They get the exclusive property rights to control the drug-selling. They get the name of the gang behind them, for merchandising and marketing. And they're the ones who basically make the profit or lose a profit, depending on how good they are at running the business. Now, the group I really want you to think about, though, are the ones at the bottom -- the foot soldiers. These are the teenagers, typically, who'd be standing out on the street corner, selling the drugs. Extremely dangerous work. And important to note is that almost all of the weight, all of the people in this organization are at the bottom -- just like McDonald's. So in some sense, the foot soldiers are a lot like the people who are taking your order at McDonald's, and it's not just by chance that they're like them. In fact, in these neighborhoods, they'd be the same people. So the same kids who are working in the gang were actually, at the very same time, typically working part-time at a place like McDonald's. Which already foreshadows the main result that I've talked about, about what a crappy job it was, being in the gang. Because obviously, if being in the gang were such a wonderful, lucrative job, why in the world would these guys moonlight at McDonald's? So what do the wages look like? You might be surprised. But based on being able to talk to them and to see their records, this is what it looks like in terms of the wages. The hourly wage the foot soldiers were earning was $3.50 an hour. It was below the minimum wage. And this is well-documented. It's easy to see by the patterns of consumption they have. It really is not fiction -- it's fact. There was very little money in the gang, especially at the bottom. Now if you managed to rise up, say, and be that local leader, the guy who's the equivalent of the McDonald's franchisee, you'd be making 100,000 dollars a year. And that, in some ways, was the best job you could hope to get if you were growing up in one of these neighborhoods as a young black male. If you managed to rise to the very top, 200,000 or 400,000 dollars a year is what you'd hope to make. Truly, you would be a great success story. And one of the sad parts of this is that, indeed, among the many other ramifications of crack cocaine is that the most talented individuals in these communities -- this is what they were striving for. They weren't trying to make it in legitimate ways, because there were no legitimate channels out. This was the best way out. And it actually was the right choice, probably, to try to make it out this way. You look at this, the relationship to McDonald's breaks down here. The money looks about the same. Why is it such a bad job? Well, the reason it's such a bad job is that there's somebody shooting at you a lot of the time. So, with shooting at you, what are the death rates? We found, in our gang -- and admittedly, this was not really a standard situation; this was a time of intense violence, of a lot of gang wars, as this gang actually became quite successful. But there were costs. And so the death rate -- not to mention the rate of being arrested, sent to prison, being wounded -- the death rate in our sample was seven percent per person per year. You're in the gang for four years, you expect to die with about a 25 percent likelihood. That is about as high as you can get. So for comparison's purposes, let's think about some other walk of life you may expect might be extremely risky. Let's say that you were a murderer and you were convicted of murder, and you're sent to death row. It turns out, the death rates on death row from all causes, including execution: two percent a year. (Laughter) So it's a lot safer being on death row than it is selling drugs out on the street. That gives you some pause, for those of you who believe that a death penalty's going to have an enormous deterrent effect on crime. To give you a sense of just how bad the inner city was during crack -- and I'm not really focusing on the negatives, but really, there's another story to tell you there -- if you look at the death rates just of random, young black males growing up in the inner city in the United States, the death rates during crack were about one percent. That's extremely high. And this is violent death -- it's unbelievable, in some sense. To put it into perspective: if you compare this to the soldiers in Iraq, for instance, right now fighting the war: 0.5 percent. So in some very literal way, the young black men who were growing up in this country were living in a war zone, very much in the sense that the soldiers over in Iraq are fighting in a war. So why in the world, you might ask, would anybody be willing to stand out on a street corner selling drugs for $3.50 an hour, with a 25 percent chance of dying over the next four years? Why would they do that? And I think there are a couple answers. I think the first one is that they got fooled by history. It used to be the gang was a rite of passage; that the young people controlled the gang; that as you got older, you dropped out of the gang. So what happened was, the people who happened to be in the right place at the right time -- the people who happened to be leading the gang in the mid-to-late-'80s -- became very, very wealthy. And so the logical thing to think was that they are going to age out of the gang like everybody else has, and the next generation is going to take over and get the wealth. There are striking similarities, I think, to the Internet boom. The first set of people in Silicon Valley got very, very rich. And then all of my friends said, "Maybe I should go do that, too." And they were willing to work very cheap for stock options that never came. In some sense, that's what happened, exactly, to the set of people we were looking at. They were willing to start at the bottom, just like, say, a first-year lawyer at a law firm is willing to start at the bottom, work 80-hour weeks for not that much money, because they think they're going to make partner. But the rules changed, and they never got to make partner. Indeed, the same people who were running all of the major gangs in the late 1980s are still running the major gangs in Chicago today. They never passed on any of the wealth, So everybody got stuck at that $3.50-an-hour job, and it turned out to be a disaster. The other thing the gang was very good at was marketing and trickery. And so for instance, one thing the gang would do is -- the gang leaders would have big entourages, and they'd drive fancy cars and have fancy jewelry. So what Sudhir eventually realized as he hung out with them more, is that, really, they didn't own those cars -- they just leased them, because they couldn't afford to own the fancy cars. And they didn't really have gold jewelry, they had gold-plated jewelry. It goes back to, you know, the real-real versus the fake-real. And really, they did all sorts of things to trick the young people into thinking what a great deal the gang was going to be. So for instance, they would give a 14-year-old kid a whole roll of bills to hold. That 14-year-old kid would say to his friends, "Hey, look at all the money I got in the gang." It wasn't his money -- until he spent it, and then he was in debt to the gang, and was sort of an indentured servant for a while. So I have a couple minutes. Let me do one last thing I hadn't thought I'd have time to do, which is to talk about what we learned more generally about economics, from the study of the gang. So, economists tend to talk in technical words. Often, our theories fail quite miserably when we over the data, but what's kind of interesting is that in this setting, it turned out that some of the economic theories that worked not so well in the real economy worked very well in the drug economy, in some sense, because it's unfettered capitalism. Here's an economic principle. This is one of the basic ideas in labor economics, called a "compensating differential." It's the idea that the increment to wages that a worker requires to leave him indifferent between performing two tasks, one which is more unpleasant than the other. Compensating differential -- it's why we think garbagemen might be paid more than people who work in parks. The words of one of the members of the gang, I think, make this clear. So it turns out -- I'm sort of getting ahead of myself -- it turns out, in the gang, when there's a war going on, they actually pay the foot soldiers twice as much money. It's exactly this concept. Because they're not willing to be at risk. And the words of a gang member capture it quite nicely, he says: "Would you stand around here when all this shit ..." -- the shooting -- "... if all this shit's going on? No, right? So if I gonna be asked to put my life on the line, then front me the cash, man." I think the gang member says it much more articulately than the economist, about what's going on. (Laughter) Here's another one. Economists talk about game theory, that every two-person game has a Nash equilibrium. Here's the translation you get from the gang member. They're talking about the decision of why they don't go shoot -- One thing that turns out to be a great business tactic in the gang: if you go and just shoot guns in the air in the other gang's territory -- people are afraid to go buy drugs there, they're going to come into your neighborhood. Here's what he says about why they don't do that: "If we start shooting around there, the other gang's territory, nobody, I mean, you dig it, nobody gonna step on their turf. But we gotta be careful, 'cause they can shoot around here too and then we all fucked." (Laughter) So that's the same concept. Then again, sometimes economists get it wrong. One thing we observed in the data is that it looked like -- the gang leader always got paid. No matter how bad it was economically, he always got himself paid. We had some theories related to cash flow, and lack of access to capital markets, and things like that. Then we asked the gang member, "Why is it you always get paid and your workers don't always get paid?" His response is, "You got all these niggers below you who want your job, you dig? If you start taking losses, they see you as weak and shit." And I thought about it and said, "CEOs often pay themselves million-dollar bonuses, even when companies are losing a lot of money. And it never would really occur to an economist that this idea of 'weak and shit' could really be important." (Laughter) Maybe "weak and shit" is an important hypothesis that needs more analysis. Thank you very much. (Applause)
My story actually began when I was four years old and my family moved to a new neighborhood in our hometown of Savannah, Georgia. And this was the 1960s when actually all the streets in this neighborhood were named after Confederate war generals. We lived on Robert E. Lee Boulevard. And when I was five, my parents gave me an orange Schwinn Sting-Ray bicycle. It had a swooping banana seat and those ape hanger handlebars that made the rider look like an orangutan. That's why they were called ape hangers. They were actually modeled on hotrod motorcycles of the 1960s, which I'm sure my mom didn't know. And one day I was exploring this cul-de-sac hidden away a few streets away. And I came back, and I wanted to turn around and get back to that street more quickly, so I decided to turn around in this big street that intersected our neighborhood, and wham! I was hit by a passing sedan. My mangled body flew in one direction, my mangled bike flew in the other. And I lay on the pavement stretching over that yellow line, and one of my neighbors came running over. "Andy, Andy, how are you doing?" she said, using the name of my older brother. (Laughter) "I'm Bruce," I said, and promptly passed out. I broke my left femur that day -- it's the largest bone in your body -- and spent the next two months in a body cast that went from my chin to the tip of my toe to my right knee, and a steel bar went from my right knee to my left ankle. And for the next 38 years, that accident was the only medically interesting thing that ever happened to me. In fact, I made a living by walking. I traveled around the world, entered different cultures, wrote a series of books about my travels, including "Walking the Bible." I hosted a television show by that name on PBS. I was, for all the world, the "walking guy." Until, in May 2008, a routine visit to my doctor and a routine blood test produced evidence in the form of an alkaline phosphatase number that something might be wrong with my bones. And my doctor, on a whim, sent me to get a full-body bone scan, which showed that there was some growth in my left leg. That sent me to an X-ray, then to an MRI. And one afternoon, I got a call from my doctor. "The tumor in your leg is not consistent with a benign tumor." I stopped walking, and it took my mind a second to convert that double negative into a much more horrifying negative. I have cancer. And to think that the tumor was in the same bone, in the same place in my body as the accident 38 years earlier -- it seemed like too much of a coincidence. So that afternoon, I went back to my house, and my three year-old identical twin daughters, Eden and Tybee Feiler, came running to meet me. They'd just turned three, and they were into all things pink and purple. In fact, we called them Pinkalicious and Purplicious -- although I must say, our favorite nickname occurred on their birthday, April 15th. When they were born at 6:14 and 6:46 on April 15, 2005, our otherwise grim, humorless doctor looked at his watch, and was like, "Hmm, April 15th -- tax day. Early filer and late filer." (Laughter) The next day I came to see him. I was like, "Doctor, that was a really good joke." And he was like, "You're the writer, kid." Anyway -- so they had just turned three, and they came and they were doing this dance they had just made up where they were twirling faster and faster until they tumbled to the ground, laughing with all the glee in the world. I crumbled. I kept imagining all the walks I might not take with them, the art projects I might not mess up, the boyfriends I might not scowl at, the aisles I might not walk down. Would they wonder who I was, I thought. Would they yearn for my approval, my love, my voice? A few days later, I woke with an idea of how I might give them that voice. I would reach out to six men from all parts of my life and ask them to be present in the passages of my daughters' lives. "I believe my girls will have plenty of opportunities in their lives," I wrote these men. "They'll have loving families and welcoming homes, but they may not have me. They may not have their dad. Will you help be their dad?" And I said to myself I would call this group of men "the Council of Dads." Now as soon as I had this idea, I decided I wouldn't tell my wife. Okay. She's a very upbeat, naturally excited person. There's this idea in this culture -- I don't have to tell you -- that you sort of "happy" your way through a problem. We should focus on the positive. My wife, as I said, she grew up outside of Boston. She's got a big smile. She's got a big personality. She's got big hair -- although, she told me recently, I can't say she has big hair, because if I say she has big hair, people will think she's from Texas. And it's apparently okay to marry a boy from Georgia, but not to have hair from Texas. And actually, in her defense, if she were here right now, she would point out that, when we got married in Georgia, there were three questions on the marriage certificate license, the third of which was, "Are you related?" (Laughter) I said, "Look, in Georgia at least we want to know. In Arkansas they don't even ask." What I didn't tell her is, if she said, "Yes," you could jump. You don't need the 30-day waiting period. Because you don't need the get-to-know-you session at that point. So I wasn't going to tell her about this idea, but the next day I couldn't control myself, I told her. And she loved the idea, but she quickly started rejecting my nominees. She was like, "Well, I love him, but I would never ask him for advice." So it turned out that starting a council of dads was a very efficient way to find out what my wife really thought of my friends. (Laughter) So we decided that we needed a set of rules, and we came up with a number. And the first one was no family, only friends. We thought our family would already be there. Second, men only. We were trying to fill the dad-space in the girls' lives. And then third, sort of a dad for every side. We kind of went through my personality and tried to get a dad who represented each different thing. So what happened was I wrote a letter to each of these men. And rather than send it, I decided to read it to them in person. Linda, my wife, joked that it was like having six different marriage proposals. I sort of friend-married each of these guys. And the first of these guys was Jeff Schumlin. Now Jeff led this trip I took to Europe when I graduated from high school in the early 1980s. And on that first day we were in this youth hostel in a castle. And I snuck out behind, and there was a moat, a fence and a field of cows. And Jeff came up beside me and said, "So, have you ever been cow tipping?" I was like, "Cow tipping? He was like, "Yeah. Cows sleep standing up. So if you approach them from behind, down wind, you can push them over and they go thud in the mud." So before I had a chance to determine whether this was right or not, we had jumped the moat, we had climbed the fence, we were tiptoeing through the dung and approaching some poor, dozing cow. So a few weeks after my diagnosis, we went up to Vermont, and I decided to put Jeff as the first person in the Council of Dads. And we went to this apple orchard, and I read him this letter. "Will you help be their dad?" And I got to the end -- he was crying and I was crying -- and then he looked at me, and he said, "Yes." I was like, "Yes?" I kind of had forgotten there was a question at the heart of my letter. And frankly, although I keep getting asked this, it never occurred to me that anybody would turn me down under the circumstances. And then I asked him a question, which I ended up asking to all the dads and ended up really encouraging me to write this story down in a book. And that was, "What's the one piece of advice you would give to my girls?" And Jeff's advice was, "Be a traveller, not a tourist. Get off the bus. Seek out what's different. Approach the cow." "So it's 10 years from now," I said, "and my daughters are about to take their first trip abroad, and I'm not here. What would you tell them?" He said, "I would approach this journey as a young child might approach a mud puddle. You can bend over and look at your reflection in the mirror and maybe run your finger and make a small ripple, or you can jump in and thrash around and see what it feels like, what it smells like." And as he talked he had that glint in his eye that I first saw back in Holland -- the glint that says, "Let's go cow tipping," even though we never did tip the cow, even though no one tips the cow, even though cows don't sleep standing up. He said, "I want to see you back here girls, at the end of this experience, covered in mud." Two weeks after my diagnosis, a biopsy confirmed I had a seven-inch osteosarcoma in my left femur. Six hundred Americans a year get an osteosarcoma. Eighty-five percent are under 21. Only a hundred adults a year get one of these diseases. Twenty years ago, doctors would have cut off my leg and hoped, and there was a 15 percent survival rate. And then in the 1980's, they determined that one particular cocktail of chemo could be effective, and within weeks I had started that regimen. And since we are in a medical room, I went through four and a half months of chemo. Actually I had Cisplatin, Doxorubicin and very high-dose Methotrexate. And then I had a 15-hour surgery in which my surgeon, Dr. John Healey at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Hospital in New York, took out my left femur and replaced it with titanium. And if you did see the Sanjay special, you saw these enormous screws that they screwed into my pelvis. Then he took my fibula from my calf, cut it out and then relocated it to my thigh, where it now lives. And what he actually did was he de-vascularized it from my calf and re-vascularized it in my thigh and then connected it to the good parts of my knee and my hip. And then he took out a third of my quadriceps muscle. This is a surgery so rare only two human beings have survived it before me. And my reward for surviving it was to go back for four more months of chemo. It was, as we said in my house, a lost year. Because in those opening weeks, we all had nightmares. And one night I had a nightmare that I was walking through my house, sat at my desk and saw photographs of someone else's children sitting on my desk. And I remember a particular one night that, when you told that story of -- I don't know where you are Dr. Nuland -- of William Sloane Coffin -- it made me think of it. Because I was in the hospital after, I think it was my fourth round of chemo when my numbers went to zero, and I had basically no immune system. And they put me in an infectious disease ward at the hospital. And anybody who came to see me had to cover themselves in a mask and cover all of the extraneous parts of their body. And one night I got a call from my mother-in-law that my daughters, at that time three and a half, were missing me and feeling my absence. And I hung up the phone, and I put my face in my hands, and I screamed this silent scream. And what you said, Dr. Nuland -- I don't know where you are -- made me think of this today. Because the thought that came to my mind was that the feeling that I had was like a primal scream. And what was so striking -- and one of the messages I want to leave you here with today -- is the experience. As I became less and less human -- and at this moment in my life, I was probably 30 pounds less than I am right now. Of course, I had no hair and no immune system. They were actually putting blood inside my body. At that moment I was less and less human, I was also, at the same time, maybe the most human I've ever been. And what was so striking about that time was, instead of repulsing people, I was actually proving to be a magnet for people. People were incredibly drawn. When my wife and I had kids, we thought it would be all-hands-on-deck. Instead, it was everybody running the other way. And when I had cancer, we thought it'd be everybody running the other way. Instead, it was all-hands-on-deck. And when people came to me, rather than being incredibly turned off by what they saw -- I was like a living ghost -- they were incredibly moved to talk about what was going on in their own lives. Cancer, I found, is a passport to intimacy. It is an invitation, maybe even a mandate, to enter the most vital arenas of human life, the most sensitive and the most frightening, the ones that we never want to go to, but when we do go there, we feel incredibly transformed when we do. And this also happened to my girls as they began to see, and, we thought, maybe became an ounce more compassionate. One day, my daughter Tybee, Tybee came to me, and she said, "I have so much love for you in my body, daddy, I can't stop giving you hugs and kisses. And when I have no more love left, I just drink milk, because that's where love comes from." (Laughter) And one night my daughter Eden came to me. And as I lifted my leg out of bed, she reached for my crutches and handed them to me. In fact, if I cling to one memory of this year, it would be walking down a darkened hallway with five spongy fingers grasping the handle underneath my hand. I didn't need the crutch anymore, I was walking on air. And one of the profound things that happened was this act of actually connecting to all these people. And it made me think -- and I'll just note for the record -- one word that I've only heard once actually was when we were all doing Tony Robbins yoga yesterday -- the one word that has not been mentioned in this seminar actually is the word "friend." And yet from everything we've been talking about -- compliance, or addiction, or weight loss -- we now know that community is important, and yet it's one thing we don't actually bring in. And there was something incredibly profound about sitting down with my closest friends and telling them what they meant to me. And one of the things that I learned is that over time, particularly men, who used to be non-communicative, are becoming more and more communicative. And that particularly happened -- there was one in my life -- is this Council of Dads that Linda said, what we were talking about, it's like what the moms talk about at school drop-off. And no one captures this modern manhood to me more than David Black. Now David is my literary agent. He's about five-foot three and a half on a good day, standing fully upright in cowboy boots. And on kind of the manly-male front, he answers the phone -- I can say this I guess because you've done it here -- he answers the phone, "Yo, motherfucker." He gives boring speeches about obscure bottles of wine, and on his 50th birthday he bought a convertible sports car -- although, like a lot of men, he's impatient; he bought it on his 49th. But like a lot of modern men, he hugs, he bakes, he leaves work early to coach Little League. Someone asked me if he cried when I asked him to be in the council of dads. I was like, "David cries when you invite him to take a walk." (Laughter) But he's a literary agent, which means he's a broker of dreams in a world where most dreams don't come true. And this is what we wanted him to capture -- what it means to have setbacks and then aspirations. And I said, "What's the most valuable thing you can give to a dreamer?" And he said, "A belief in themselves." "But when I came to see you," I said, "I didn't believe in myself. I was at a wall." He said, "I don't see the wall," and I'm telling you the same, Don't see the wall. You may encounter one from time to time, but you've got to find a way to get over it, around it, or through it. But whatever you do, don't succumb to it. Don't give in to the wall. My home is not far from the Brooklyn Bridge, and during the year and a half I was on crutches, it became a sort of symbol to me. So one day near the end of my journey, I said, "Come on girls, let's take a walk across the Brooklyn Bridge." We set out on crutches. I was on crutches, my wife was next to me, my girls were doing these rockstar poses up ahead. And because walking was one of the first things I lost, I spent most of that year thinking about this most elemental of human acts. Walking upright, we are told, is the threshold of what made us human. And yet, for the four million years humans have been walking upright, the act is essentially unchanged. As my physical therapist likes to say, "Every step is a tragedy waiting to happen." You nearly fall with one leg, then you catch yourself with the other. And the biggest consequence of walking on crutches -- as I did for a year and a half -- is that you walk slower. You hurry, you get where you're going, but you get there alone. You go slow, you get where you're going, but you get there with this community you built along the way. At the risk of admission, I was never nicer than the year I was on crutches. 200 years ago, a new type of pedestrian appeared in Paris. He was called a "flaneur," one who wanders the arcades. And it was the custom of those flaneurs to show they were men of leisure by taking turtles for walks and letting the reptile set the pace. And I just love this ode to slow moving. And it's become my own motto for my girls. Take a walk with a turtle. Behold the world in pause. And this idea of pausing may be the single biggest lesson I took from my journey. There's a quote from Moses on the side of the Liberty Bell, and it comes from a passage in the book of Leviticus, that every seven years you should let the land lay fallow. And every seven sets of seven years, the land gets an extra year of rest during which time all families are reunited and people surrounded with the ones they love. That 50th year is called the jubilee year, and it's the origin of that term. And though I'm shy of 50, it captures my own experience. My lost year was my jubilee year. By laying fallow, I planted the seeds for a healthier future and was reunited with the ones I love. Come the one year anniversary of my journey, I went to see my surgeon, Dr. John Healey -- and by the way, Healey, great name for a doctor. He's the president of the International Society of Limb Salvage, which is the least euphemistic term I've ever heard. And I said, "Dr. Healey, if my daughters come to you one day and say, 'What should I learn from my daddy's story?' what would you tell them?" He said, "I would tell them what I know, and that is everybody dies, but not everybody lives. I want you to live." I wrote a letter to my girls that appears at the end of my book, "The Council of Dads," and I listed these lessons, a few of which you've heard here today: Approach the cow, pack your flipflops, don't see the wall, live the questions, harvest miracles. As I looked at this list -- to me it was sort of like a psalm book of living -- I realized, we may have done it for our girls, but it really changed us. And that is, the secret of the Council of Dads, is that my wife and I did this in an attempt to help our daughters, but it really changed us. So I stand here today as you see now, walking without crutches or a cane. And last week I had my 18-month scans. And as you all know, anybody with cancer has to get follow-up scans. In my case it's quarterly. And all the collective minds in this room, I dare say, can never find a solution for scan-xiety. As I was going there, I was wondering, what would I say depending on what happened here. I got good news that day, and I stand here today cancer-free, walking without aid and hobbling forward. And I just want to mention briefly in passing -- I'm past my time limit -- but I just want to briefly mention in passing that one of the nice things that can come out of a conference like this is, at a similar meeting, back in the spring, Anne Wojcicki heard about our story and very quickly -- in a span of three weeks -- put the full resources of 23andMe, and we announced an initiative in July to get to decode the genome of anybody, a living person with a heart tissue, bone sarcoma. And she told me last night, in the three months since we've done it, we've gotten 300 people who've contributed to this program. And the epidemiologists here will tell you, that's half the number of people who get the disease in one year in the United States. So if you go to 23andMe, or if you go to councilofdads.com, you can click on a link. And we encourage anybody to join this effort. But I'll just close what I've been talking about by leaving you with this message: May you find an excuse to reach out to some long-lost pal, or to that college roommate, or to some person you may have turned away from. May you find a mud puddle to jump in someplace, or find a way to get over, around, or through any wall that stands between you and one of your dreams. And every now and then, find a friend, find a turtle, and take a long, slow walk. Thank you very much. (Applause)
This machine, which we all have residing in our skulls, reminds me of an aphorism, of a comment of Woody Allen to ask about what is the very best thing to have within your skull. And it's this machine. And it's constructed for change. It's all about change. It confers on us the ability to do things tomorrow that we can't do today, things today that we couldn't do yesterday. And of course it's born stupid. The last time you were in the presence of a baby -- this happens to be my granddaughter, Mitra. Isn't she fabulous? (Laughter) But nonetheless when she popped out despite the fact that her brain had actually been progressing in its development for several months before on the basis of her experiences in the womb -- nonetheless she had very limited abilities, as does every infant at the time of normal, natural full-term birth. If we were to assay her perceptual abilities, they would be crude. There is no real indication that there is any real thinking going on. In fact there is little evidence that there is any cognitive ability in a very young infant. Infants don't respond to much. There is not really much of an indication in fact that there is a person on board. (Laughter) And they can only in a very primitive way, and in a very limited way control their movements. It would be several months before this infant could do something as simple as reach out and grasp under voluntary control an object and retrieve it, usually to the mouth. And it will be some months beforeward, and we see a long steady progression of the evolution from the first wiggles, to rolling over, and sitting up, and crawling, standing, walking, before we get to that magical point in which we can motate in the world. And yet, when we look forward in the brain we see really remarkable advance. By this age the brain can actually store. It has stored, recorded, can fastly retrieve the meanings of thousands, tens of thousands of objects, actions, and their relationships in the world. And those relationships can in fact be constructed in hundreds of thousands, potentially millions of ways. By this age the brain controls very refined perceptual abilities. And it actually has a growing repertoire of cognitive skills. This brain is very much a thinking machine. And by this age there is absolutely no question that this brain, it has a person on board. And in fact at this age it is substantially controlling its own self-development. And by this age we see a remarkable evolution in its capacity to control movement. Now movement has advanced to the point where it can actually control movement simultaneously, in a complex sequence, in complex ways as would be required for example for playing a complicated game, like soccer. Now this boy can bounce a soccer ball on his head. And where this boy comes from, Sao Paulo, Brazil, about 40 percent of boys of his age have this ability. You could go out into the community in Monterey, and you'd have difficulty finding a boy that has this ability. And if you did he'd probably be from Sao Paulo. (Laughter) That's all another way of saying that our individual skills and abilities are very much shaped by our environments. That environment extends into our contemporary culture, the thing our brain is challenged with. Because what we've done in our personal evolutions is build up a large repertoire of specific skills and abilities that are specific to our own individual histories. And in fact they result in a wonderful differentiation in humankind, in the way that, in fact, no two of us are quite alike. Every one of us has a different set of acquired skills and abilities that all derive out of the plasticity, the adaptability of this really remarkable adaptive machine. In an adult brain of course we've built up a large repertoire of mastered skills and abilities that we can perform more or less automatically from memory, and that define us as acting, moving, thinking creatures. Now we study this, as the nerdy, laboratory, university-based scientists that we are, by engaging the brains of animals like rats, or monkeys, or of this particularly curious creature -- one of the more bizarre forms of life on earth -- to engage them in learning new skills and abilities. And we try to track the changes that occur as the new skill or ability is acquired. In fact we do this in individuals of any age, in these different species -- that is to say from infancies, infancy up to adulthood and old age. So we might engage a rat, for example, to acquire a new skill or ability that might involve the rat using its paw to master particular manual grasp behaviors just like we might examine a child and their ability to acquire the sub-skills, or the general overall skill of accomplishing something like mastering the ability to read. Or you might look in an older individual who has mastered a complex set of abilities that might relate to reading musical notation or performing the mechanical acts of performance that apply to musical performance. From these studies we defined two great epochs of the plastic history of the brain. The first great epoch is commonly called the "Critical Period." And that is the period in which the brain is setting up in its initial form its basic processing machinery. This is actually a period of dramatic change in which it doesn't take learning, per se, to drive the initial differentiation of the machinery of the brain. All it takes for example in the sound domain, is exposure to sound. And the brain actually is at the mercy of the sound environment in which it is reared. So for example I can rear an animal in an environment in which there is meaningless dumb sound, a repertoire of sound that I make up, that I make, just by exposure, artificially important to the animal and its young brain. And what I see is that the animal's brain sets up its initial processing of that sound in a form that's idealized, within the limits of its processing achievements to represent it in an organized and orderly way. The sound doesn't have to be valuable to the animal: I could raise the animal in something that could be hypothetically valuable, like the sounds that simulate the sounds of a native language of a child. And I see the brain actually develop a processor that is specialized -- specialized for that complex array, a repertoire of sounds. It actually exaggerates their separateness of representation, in multi-dimensional neuronal representational terms. Or I can expose the animal to a completely meaningless and destructive sound. I can raise an animal under conditions that would be equivalent to raising a baby under a moderately loud ceiling fan, in the presence of continuous noise. And when I do that I actually specialize the brain to be a master processor for that meaningless sound. And I frustrate its ability to represent any meaningful sound as a consequence. Such things in the early history of babies occur in real babies. And they account for, for example the beautiful evolution of a language-specific processor in every normally developing baby. And so they also account for development of defective processing in a substantial population of children who are more limited, as a consequence, in their language abilities at an older age. Now in this early period of plasticity the brain actually changes outside of a learning context. I don't have to be paying attention to what I hear. The input doesn't really have to be meaningful. I don't have to be in a behavioral context. This is required so the brain sets up it's processing so that it can act differentially, so that it can act selectively, so that the creature that wears it, that carries it, can begin to operate on it in a selective way. In the next great epoch of life, which applies for most of life, the brain is actually refining its machinery as it masters a wide repertoire of skills and abilities. And in this epoch, which extends from late in the first year of life to death; it's actually doing this under behavioral control. And that's another way of saying the brain has strategies that define the significance of the input to the brain. And it's focusing on skill after skill, or ability after ability, under specific attentional control. It's a function of whether a goal in a behavior is achieved or whether the individual is rewarded in the behavior. This is actually very powerful. This lifelong capacity for plasticity, for brain change, is powerfully expressed. It is the basis of our real differentiation, one individual from another. You can look down in the brain of an animal that's engaged in a specific skill, and you can witness or document this change on a variety of levels. So here is a very simple experiment. It was actually conducted about five years ago in collaboration with scientists from the University of Provence in Marseilles. It's a very simple experiment where a monkey has been trained in a task that involves it manipulating a tool that's equivalent in its difficulty to a child learning to manipulate or handle a spoon. The monkey actually mastered the task in about 700 practice tries. So in the beginning the monkey could not perform this task at all. It had a success rate of about one in eight tries. Those tries were elaborate. Each attempt was substantially different from the other. But the monkey gradually developed a strategy. And 700 or so tries later the monkey is performing it flawlessly -- never fails. He's successful in his retrieval of food with this tool every time. At this point the task is being performed in a beautifully stereotyped way: very beautifully regulated and highly repeated, trial to trial. We can look down in the brain of the monkey. And we see that it's distorted. We can track these changes, and have tracked these changes in many such behaviors across time. And here we see the distortion reflected in the map of the skin surfaces of the hand of the monkey. Now this is a map, down in the surface of the brain, in which, in a very elaborate experiment we've reconstructed the responses, location by location, in a highly detailed response mapping of the responses of its neurons. We see here a reconstruction of how the hand is represented in the brain. We've actually distorted the map by the exercise. And that is indicated in the pink. We have a couple fingertip surfaces that are larger. These are the surfaces the monkey is using to manipulate the tool. If we look at the selectivity of responses in the cortex of the monkey, we see that the monkey has actually changed the filter characteristics which represents input from the skin of the fingertips that are engaged. In other words there is still a single, simple representation of the fingertips in this most organized of cortical areas of the surface of the skin of the body. Monkey has like you have. And yet now it's represented in substantially finer grain. The monkey is getting more detailed information from these surfaces. And that is an unknown -- unsuspected, maybe, by you -- part of acquiring the skill or ability. Now actually we've looked in several different cortical areas in the monkey learning this task. And each one of them changes in ways that are specific to the skill or ability. So for example we can look to the cortical area that represents input that's controlling the posture of the monkey. We look in cortical areas that control specific movements, and the sequences of movements that are required in the behavior, and so forth. They are all remodeled. They all become specialized for the task at hand. There are 15 or 20 cortical areas that are changed specifically when you learn a simple skill like this. And that represents in your brain, really massive change. It represents the change in a reliable way of the responses of tens of millions, possibly hundreds of millions of neurons in your brain. It represents changes of hundreds of millions, possibly billions of synaptic connections in your brain. This is constructed by physical change. And the level of construction that occurs is massive. Think about the changes that occur in the brain of a child through the course of acquiring their movement behavior abilities in general. Or acquiring their native language abilities. The changes are massive. What it's all about is the selective representations of things that are important to the brain. Because in most of the life of the brain this is under control of behavioral context. It's what you pay attention to. It's what's rewarding to you. It's what the brain regards, itself, as positive and important to you. It's all about cortical processing and forebrain specialization. And that underlies your specialization. That is why you, in your many skills and abilities, are a unique specialist: a specialist that's vastly different in your physical brain in detail than the brain of an individual 100 years ago; enormously different in the details from the brain of the average individual 1,000 years ago. Now, one of the characteristics of this change process is that information is always related to other inputs or information that is occurring in immediate time, in context. And that's because the brain is constructing representations of things that are correlated in little moments of time and that relate to one another in little moments of successive time. The brain is recording all information and driving all change in temporal context. Now overwhelmingly the most powerful context that's occurred in your brain is you. Billions of events have occurred in your history that are related in time to yourself as the receiver, or yourself as the actor, yourself as the thinker, yourself as the mover. Billions of times little pieces of sensation have come in from the surface of your body that are always associated with you as the receiver, and that result in the embodiment of you. You are constructed, your self is constructed from these billions of events. It's constructed. It's created in your brain. And it's created in the brain via physical change. This is a marvelously constructed thing that results in individual form because each one of us has vastly different histories, and vastly different experiences, that drive in to us this marvelous differentiation of self, of personhood. Now we've used this research to try to understand not just how a normal person develops, and elaborates their skills and abilities, but also try to understand the origins of impairment, and the origins of differences or variations that might limit the capacities of a child, or an adult. I'm going to talk about using these strategies to actually design brain plasticity-based approach to drive corrections in the machinery of a child that increases the competence of the child as a language receiver and user and, thereafter, as a reader. And I'm going to talk about experiments that involve actually using this brain science, first of all to understand how it contributes to the loss of function as we age. And then, by using it in a targeted approach we're going to try to differentiate the machinery to recover function in old age. So the first example I'm going to talk about relates to children with learning impairments. We now have a large body of literature that demonstrates that the fundamental problem that occurs in the majority of children that have early language impairments, and that are going to struggle to learn to read, is that their language processor is created in a defective form. And the reason that it rises in a defective form is because early in the baby's brain's life the machine process is noisy. It's that simple. It's a signal-to-noise problem. Okay? And there are a lot of things that contribute to that. There are numerous inherited faults that could make the machine process noisier. Now I might say the noise problem could also occur on the basis of information provided in the world from the ears. If any -- those of you who are older in the audience know that when I was a child we understood that a child born with a cleft palate was born with what we called mental retardation. We knew that they were going to be slow cognitively; we knew they were going to struggle to learn to develop normal language abilities; and we knew that they were going to struggle to learn to read. Most of them would be intellectual and academic failures. That's disappeared. That no longer applies. That inherited weakness, that inherited condition has evaporated. We don't hear about that anymore. Where did it go? Well, it was understood by a Dutch surgeon, about 35 years ago, that if you simply fix the problem early enough, when the brain is still in this initial plastic period so it can set up this machinery adequately, in this initial set up time in the critical period, none of that happens. What are you doing by operating on the cleft palate to correct it? You're basically opening up the tubes that drain fluid from the middle ears, which have had them reliably full. Every sound the child hears uncorrected is muffled. It's degraded. The child's native language is such a case is not English. It's not Japanese. It's muffled English. It's degraded Japanese. It's crap. And the brain specializes for it. It creates a representation of language crap. And then the child is stuck with it. Now the crap doesn't just happen in the ear. It can also happen in the brain. The brain itself can be noisy. It's commonly noisy. There are many inherited faults that can make it noisier. And the native language for a child with such a brain is degraded. It's not English. It's noisy English. And that results in defective representations of sounds of words -- not normal -- a different strategy, by a machine that has different time constants and different space constants. And you can look in the brain of such a child and record those time constants. They are about an order of magnitude longer, about 11 times longer in duration on average, than in a normal child. Space constants are about three times greater. Such a child will have memory and cognitive deficits in this domain. Of course they will. Because as a receiver of language, they are receiving it and representing it, and in information it's representing crap. And they are going to have poor reading skills. Because reading is dependent upon the translation of word sounds into this orthographic or visual representational form. If you don't have a brain representation of word sounds that translation makes no sense. And you are going to have corresponding abnormal neurology. Then these children increasingly in evaluation after evaluation, in their operations in language, and their operations in reading -- we document that abnormal neurology. The point is is that you can train the brain out of this. A way to think about this is you can actually re-refine the processing capacity of the machinery by changing it. Changing it in detail. It takes about 30 hours on the average. And we've accomplished that in about 430,000 kids today. Actually, probably about 15,000 children are being trained as we speak. And actually when you look at the impacts, the impacts are substantial. So here we're looking at the normal distribution. What we're most interested in is these kids on the left side of the distribution. This is from about 3,000 children. You can see that most of the children on the left side of the distribution are moving into the middle or the right. This is in a broad assessment of their language abilities. This is like an IQ test for language. The impact in the distribution, if you trained every child in the United States, would be to shift the whole distribution to the right and narrow the distribution. This is a substantially large impact. Think of a classroom of children in the language arts. Think of the children on the slow side of the class. We have the potential to move most of those children to the middle or to the right side. In addition to accurate language training it also fixes memory and cognition speech fluency and speech production. And an important language dependent skill is enabled by this training -- that is to say reading. And to a large extent it fixes the brain. You can look down in the brain of a child in a variety of tasks that scientists have at Stanford, and MIT, and UCSF, and UCLA, and a number of other institutions. And children operating in various language behaviors, or in various reading behaviors, you see for the most extent, for most children, their neuronal responses, complexly abnormal before you start, are normalized by the training. Now you can also take the same approach to address problems in aging. Where again the machinery is deteriorating now from competent machinery, it's going south. Noise is increasing in the brain. And learning modulation and control is deteriorating. And you can actually look down on the brain of such an individual and witness a change in the time constants and space constants with which, for example, the brain is representing language again. Just as the brain came out of chaos at the beginning, it's going back into chaos in the end. This results in declines in memory in cognition, and in postural ability and agility. It turns out you can train the brain of such an individual -- this is a small population of such individuals -- train equally intensively for about 30 hours. These are 80- to 90-year-olds. And what you see are substantial improvements of their immediate memory, of their ability to remember things after a delay, of their ability to control their attention, their language abilities and visual-spatial abilities. The overall neuropsychological index of these trained individuals in this population is about two standard deviations. That means that if you sit at the left side of the distribution, and I'm looking at your neuropyschological abilities, the average person has moved to the middle or the right side of the distribution. It means that most people who are at risk for senility, more or less immediately, are now in a protected position. My issues are to try to get to rescuing older citizens more completely and in larger numbers, because I think this can be done in this arena on a vast scale -- and the same for kids. My main interest is how to elaborate this science to address other maladies. I'm specifically interested in things like autism, and cerebral palsy, these great childhood catastrophes. And in older age conditions like Parkinsonism, and in other acquired impairments like schizophrenia. Your issues as it relates to this science, is how to maintain your own high-functioning learning machine. And of course, a well-ordered life in which learning is a continuous part of it, is key. But also in your future is brain aerobics. Get ready for it. It's going to be a part of every life not too far in the future, just like physical exercise is a part of every well organized life in the contemporary period. The other way that we will ultimately come to consider this literature and the science that is important to you is in a consideration of how to nurture yourself. Now that you know, now that science is telling us that you are in charge, that it's under your control, that your happiness, your well-being, your abilities, your capacities, are capable of continuous modification, continuous improvement, and you're the responsible agent and party. Of course a lot of people will ignore this advice. It will be a long time before they really understand it. (Laughter) Now that's another issue and not my fault. Okay. Thank you. (Applause)
I'm a neuroscientist. And in neuroscience, we have to deal with many difficult questions about the brain. But I want to start with the easiest question and the question you really should have all asked yourselves at some point in your life, because it's a fundamental question if we want to understand brain function. And that is, why do we and other animals have brains? Not all species on our planet have brains, so if we want to know what the brain is for, let's think about why we evolved one. Now you may reason that we have one to perceive the world or to think, and that's completely wrong. If you think about this question for any length of time, it's blindingly obvious why we have a brain. We have a brain for one reason and one reason only, and that's to produce adaptable and complex movements. There is no other reason to have a brain. Think about it. Movement is the only way you have of affecting the world around you. Now that's not quite true. There's one other way, and that's through sweating. But apart from that, everything else goes through contractions of muscles. So think about communication -- speech, gestures, writing, sign language -- they're all mediated through contractions of your muscles. So it's really important to remember that sensory, memory and cognitive processes are all important, but they're only important to either drive or suppress future movements. There can be no evolutionary advantage to laying down memories of childhood or perceiving the color of a rose if it doesn't affect the way you're going to move later in life. Now for those who don't believe this argument, we have trees and grass on our planet without the brain, but the clinching evidence is this animal here -- the humble sea squirt. Rudimentary animal, has a nervous system, swims around in the ocean in its juvenile life. And at some point of its life, it implants on a rock. And the first thing it does in implanting on that rock, which it never leaves, is to digest its own brain and nervous system for food. So once you don't need to move, you don't need the luxury of that brain. And this animal is often taken as an analogy to what happens at universities when professors get tenure, but that's a different subject. (Applause) So I am a movement chauvinist. I believe movement is the most important function of the brain -- don't let anyone tell you that it's not true. Now if movement is so important, how well are we doing understanding how the brain controls movement? And the answer is we're doing extremely poorly; it's a very hard problem. But we can look at how well we're doing by thinking about how well we're doing building machines which can do what humans can do. Think about the game of chess. How well are we doing determining what piece to move where? If you pit Garry Kasparov here, when he's not in jail, against IBM's Deep Blue, well the answer is IBM's Deep Blue will occasionally win. And I think if IBM's Deep Blue played anyone in this room, it would win every time. That problem is solved. What about the problem of picking up a chess piece, dexterously manipulating it and putting it back down on the board? If you put a five year-old child's dexterity against the best robots of today, the answer is simple: the child wins easily. There's no competition at all. Now why is that top problem so easy and the bottom problem so hard? One reason is a very smart five year-old could tell you the algorithm for that top problem -- look at all possible moves to the end of the game and choose the one that makes you win. So it's a very simple algorithm. Now of course there are other moves, but with vast computers we approximate and come close to the optimal solution. When it comes to being dexterous, it's not even clear what the algorithm is you have to solve to be dexterous. And we'll see you have to both perceive and act on the world, which has a lot of problems. But let me show you cutting-edge robotics. Now a lot of robotics is very impressive, but manipulation robotics is really just in the dark ages. So this is the end of a Ph.D. project from one of the best robotics institutes. And the student has trained this robot to pour this water into a glass. It's a hard problem because the water sloshes about, but it can do it. But it doesn't do it with anything like the agility of a human. Now if you want this robot to do a different task, that's another three-year Ph.D. program. There is no generalization at all from one task to another in robotics. Now we can compare this to cutting-edge human performance. So what I'm going to show you is Emily Fox winning the world record for cup stacking. Now the Americans in the audience will know all about cup stacking. It's a high school sport where you have 12 cups you have to stack and unstack against the clock in a prescribed order. And this is her getting the world record in real time. (Laughter) (Applause) And she's pretty happy. We have no idea what is going on inside her brain when she does that, and that's what we'd like to know. So in my group, what we try to do is reverse engineer how humans control movement. And it sounds like an easy problem. You send a command down, it causes muscles to contract. Your arm or body moves, and you get sensory feedback from vision, from skin, from muscles and so on. The trouble is these signals are not the beautiful signals you want them to be. So one thing that makes controlling movement difficult is, for example, sensory feedback is extremely noisy. Now by noise, I do not mean sound. We use it in the engineering and neuroscience sense meaning a random noise corrupting a signal. So the old days before digital radio when you were tuning in your radio and you heard "crrcckkk" on the station you wanted to hear, that was the noise. But more generally, this noise is something that corrupts the signal. So for example, if you put your hand under a table and try to localize it with your other hand, you can be off by several centimeters due to the noise in sensory feedback. Similarly, when you put motor output on movement output, it's extremely noisy. Forget about trying to hit the bull's eye in darts, just aim for the same spot over and over again. You have a huge spread due to movement variability. And more than that, the outside world, or task, is both ambiguous and variable. The teapot could be full, it could be empty. It changes over time. So we work in a whole sensory movement task soup of noise. Now this noise is so great that society places a huge premium on those of us who can reduce the consequences of noise. So if you're lucky enough to be able to knock a small white ball into a hole several hundred yards away using a long metal stick, our society will be willing to reward you with hundreds of millions of dollars. Now what I want to convince you of is the brain also goes through a lot of effort to reduce the negative consequences of this sort of noise and variability. And to do that, I'm going to tell you about a framework which is very popular in statistics and machine learning of the last 50 years called Bayesian decision theory. And it's more recently a unifying way to think about how the brain deals with uncertainty. And the fundamental idea is you want to make inferences and then take actions. So let's think about the inference. You want to generate beliefs about the world. So what are beliefs? Beliefs could be: where are my arms in space? Am I looking at a cat or a fox? But we're going to represent beliefs with probabilities. So we're going to represent a belief with a number between zero and one -- zero meaning I don't believe it at all, one means I'm absolutely certain. And numbers in between give you the gray levels of uncertainty. And the key idea to Bayesian inference is you have two sources of information from which to make your inference. You have data, and data in neuroscience is sensory input. So I have sensory input, which I can take in to make beliefs. But there's another source of information, and that's effectively prior knowledge. You accumulate knowledge throughout your life in memories. And the point about Bayesian decision theory is it gives you the mathematics of the optimal way to combine your prior knowledge with your sensory evidence to generate new beliefs. And I've put the formula up there. I'm not going to explain what that formula is, but it's very beautiful. And it has real beauty and real explanatory power. And what it really says, and what you want to estimate, is the probability of different beliefs given your sensory input. So let me give you an intuitive example. Imagine you're learning to play tennis and you want to decide where the ball is going to bounce as it comes over the net towards you. There are two sources of information Bayes' rule tells you. There's sensory evidence -- you can use visual information auditory information, and that might tell you it's going to land in that red spot. But you know that your senses are not perfect, and therefore there's some variability of where it's going to land shown by that cloud of red, representing numbers between 0.5 and maybe 0.1. That information is available in the current shot, but there's another source of information not available on the current shot, but only available by repeated experience in the game of tennis, and that's that the ball doesn't bounce with equal probability over the court during the match. If you're playing against a very good opponent, they may distribute it in that green area, which is the prior distribution, making it hard for you to return. Now both these sources of information carry important information. And what Bayes' rule says is that I should multiply the numbers on the red by the numbers on the green to get the numbers of the yellow, which have the ellipses, and that's my belief. So it's the optimal way of combining information. Now I wouldn't tell you all this if it wasn't that a few years ago, we showed this is exactly what people do when they learn new movement skills. And what it means is we really are Bayesian inference machines. As we go around, we learn about statistics of the world and lay that down, but we also learn about how noisy our own sensory apparatus is, and then combine those in a real Bayesian way. Now a key part to the Bayesian is this part of the formula. And what this part really says is I have to predict the probability of different sensory feedbacks given my beliefs. So that really means I have to make predictions of the future. And I want to convince you the brain does make predictions of the sensory feedback it's going to get. And moreover, it profoundly changes your perceptions by what you do. And to do that, I'll tell you about how the brain deals with sensory input. So you send a command out, you get sensory feedback back, and that transformation is governed by the physics of your body and your sensory apparatus. But you can imagine looking inside the brain. And here's inside the brain. You might have a little predictor, a neural simulator, of the physics of your body and your senses. So as you send a movement command down, you tap a copy of that off and run it into your neural simulator to anticipate the sensory consequences of your actions. So as I shake this ketchup bottle, I get some true sensory feedback as the function of time in the bottom row. And if I've got a good predictor, it predicts the same thing. Well why would I bother doing that? I'm going to get the same feedback anyway. Well there's good reasons. Imagine, as I shake the ketchup bottle, someone very kindly comes up to me and taps it on the back for me. Now I get an extra source of sensory information due to that external act. So I get two sources. I get you tapping on it, and I get me shaking it, but from my senses' point of view, that is combined together into one source of information. Now there's good reason to believe that you would want to be able to distinguish external events from internal events. Because external events are actually much more behaviorally relevant than feeling everything that's going on inside my body. So one way to reconstruct that is to compare the prediction -- which is only based on your movement commands -- with the reality. Any discrepancy should hopefully be external. So as I go around the world, I'm making predictions of what I should get, subtracting them off. Everything left over is external to me. What evidence is there for this? Well there's one very clear example where a sensation generated by myself feels very different then if generated by another person. And so we decided the most obvious place to start was with tickling. It's been known for a long time, you can't tickle yourself as well as other people can. But it hasn't really been shown, it's because you have a neural simulator, simulating your own body and subtracting off that sense. So we can bring the experiments of the 21st century by applying robotic technologies to this problem. And in effect, what we have is some sort of stick in one hand attached to a robot, and they're going to move that back and forward. And then we're going to track that with a computer and use it to control another robot, which is going to tickle their palm with another stick. And then we're going to ask them to rate a bunch of things including ticklishness. I'll show you just one part of our study. And here I've taken away the robots, but basically people move with their right arm sinusoidally back and forward. And we replay that to the other hand with a time delay. Either no time delay, in which case light would just tickle your palm, or with a time delay of two-tenths of three-tenths of a second. So the important point here is the right hand always does the same things -- sinusoidal movement. The left hand always is the same and puts sinusoidal tickle. All we're playing with is a tempo causality. And as we go from naught to 0.1 second, it becomes more ticklish. As you go from 0.1 to 0.2, it becomes more ticklish at the end. And by 0.2 of a second, it's equivalently ticklish to the robot that just tickled you without you doing anything. So whatever is responsible for this cancellation is extremely tightly coupled with tempo causality. And based on this illustration, we really convinced ourselves in the field that the brain's making precise predictions and subtracting them off from the sensations. Now I have to admit, these are the worst studies my lab has ever run. Because the tickle sensation on the palm comes and goes, you need large numbers of subjects with these stars making them significant. So we were looking for a much more objective way to assess this phenomena. And in the intervening years I had two daughters. And one thing you notice about children in backseats of cars on long journeys, they get into fights -- which started with one of them doing something to the other, the other retaliating. It quickly escalates. And children tend to get into fights which escalate in terms of force. Now when I screamed at my children to stop, sometimes they would both say to me the other person hit them harder. Now I happen to know my children don't lie, so I thought, as a neuroscientist, it was important how I could explain how they were telling inconsistent truths. And we hypothesize based on the tickling study that when one child hits another, they generate the movement command. They predict the sensory consequences and subtract it off. So they actually think they've hit the person less hard than they have -- rather like the tickling. Whereas the passive recipient doesn't make the prediction, feels the full blow. So if they retaliate with the same force, the first person will think it's been escalated. So we decided to test this in the lab. (Laughter) Now we don't work with children, we don't work with hitting, but the concept is identical. We bring in two adults. We tell them they're going to play a game. And so here's player one and player two sitting opposite to each other. And the game is very simple. We started with a motor with a little lever, a little force transfuser. And we use this motor to apply force down to player one's fingers for three seconds and then it stops. And that player's been told, remember the experience of that force and use your other finger to apply the same force down to the other subject's finger through a force transfuser -- and they do that. And player two's been told, remember the experience of that force. Use your other hand to apply the force back down. And so they take it in turns to apply the force they've just experienced back and forward. But critically, they're briefed about the rules of the game in separate rooms. So they don't know the rules the other person's playing by. And what we've measured is the force as a function of terms. And if we look at what we start with, a quarter of a Newton there, a number of turns, perfect would be that red line. And what we see in all pairs of subjects is this -- a 70 percent escalation in force on each go. So it really suggests, when you're doing this -- based on this study and others we've done -- that the brain is canceling the sensory consequences and underestimating the force it's producing. So it re-shows the brain makes predictions and fundamentally changes the precepts. So we've made inferences, we've done predictions, now we have to generate actions. And what Bayes' rule says is, given my beliefs, the action should in some sense be optimal. But we've got a problem. Tasks are symbolic -- I want to drink, I want to dance -- but the movement system has to contract 600 muscles in a particular sequence. And there's a big gap between the task and the movement system. So it could be bridged in infinitely many different ways. So think about just a point to point movement. I could choose these two paths out of an infinite number of paths. Having chosen a particular path, I can hold my hand on that path as infinitely many different joint configurations. And I can hold my arm in a particular joint configuration either very stiff or very relaxed. So I have a huge amount of choice to make. Now it turns out, we are extremely stereotypical. We all move the same way pretty much. And so it turns out we're so stereotypical, our brains have got dedicated neural circuitry to decode this stereotyping. So if I take some dots and set them in motion with biological motion, your brain's circuitry would understand instantly what's going on. Now this is a bunch of dots moving. You will know what this person is doing, whether happy, sad, old, young -- a huge amount of information. If these dots were cars going on a racing circuit, you would have absolutely no idea what's going on. So why is it that we move the particular ways we do? Well let's think about what really happens. Maybe we don't all quite move the same way. Maybe there's variation in the population. And maybe those who move better than others have got more chance of getting their children into the next generation. So in evolutionary scales, movements get better. And perhaps in life, movements get better through learning. So what is it about a movement which is good or bad? Imagine I want to intercept this ball. Here are two possible paths to that ball. Well if I choose the left-hand path, I can work out the forces required in one of my muscles as a function of time. But there's noise added to this. So what I actually get, based on this lovely, smooth, desired force, is a very noisy version. So if I pick the same command through many times, I will get a different noisy version each time, because noise changes each time. So what I can show you here is how the variability of the movement will evolve if I choose that way. If I choose a different way of moving -- on the right for example -- then I'll have a different command, different noise, playing through a noisy system, very complicated. All we can be sure of is the variability will be different. If I move in this particular way, I end up with a smaller variability across many movements. So if I have to choose between those two, I would choose the right one because it's less variable. And the fundamental idea is you want to plan your movements so as to minimize the negative consequence of the noise. And one intuition to get is actually the amount of noise or variability I show here gets bigger as the force gets bigger. So you want to avoid big forces as one principle. So we've shown that using this, we can explain a huge amount of data -- that exactly people are going about their lives planning movements so as to minimize negative consequences of noise. So I hope I've convinced you the brain is there and evolved to control movement. And it's an intellectual challenge to understand how we do that. But it's also relevant for disease and rehabilitation. There are many diseases which effect movement. And hopefully if we understand how we control movement, we can apply that to robotic technology. And finally, I want to remind you, when you see animals do what look like very simple tasks, the actual complexity of what is going on inside their brain is really quite dramatic. Thank you very much. (Applause) Chris Anderson: Quick question for you, Dan. So you're a movement -- (DW: Chauvinist.) -- chauvinist. Does that mean that you think that the other things we think our brains are about -- the dreaming, the yearning, the falling in love and all these things -- are a kind of side show, an accident? DW: No, no, actually I think they're all important to drive the right movement behavior to get reproduction in the end. So I think people who study sensation or memory without realizing why you're laying down memories of childhood. The fact that we forget most of our childhood, for example, is probably fine, because it doesn't effect our movements later in life. You only need to store things which are really going to effect movement. CA: So you think that people thinking about the brain, and consciousness generally, could get real insight by saying, where does movement play in this game? DW: So people have found out for example that studying vision in the absence of realizing why you have vision is a mistake. You have to study vision with the realization of how the movement system is going to use vision. And it uses it very differently once you think about it that way. CA: Well that was quite fascinating. Thank you very much indeed. (Applause)
I'm a neuroscientist. And in neuroscience, we have to deal with many difficult questions about the brain. But I want to start with the easiest question and the question you really should have all asked yourselves at some point in your life, because it's a fundamental question if we want to understand brain function. And that is, why do we and other animals have brains? Not all species on our planet have brains, so if we want to know what the brain is for, let's think about why we evolved one. Now you may reason that we have one to perceive the world or to think, and that's completely wrong. If you think about this question for any length of time, it's blindingly obvious why we have a brain. We have a brain for one reason and one reason only, and that's to produce adaptable and complex movements. There is no other reason to have a brain. Think about it. Movement is the only way you have of affecting the world around you. Now that's not quite true. There's one other way, and that's through sweating. But apart from that, everything else goes through contractions of muscles. So think about communication -- speech, gestures, writing, sign language -- they're all mediated through contractions of your muscles. So it's really important to remember that sensory, memory and cognitive processes are all important, but they're only important to either drive or suppress future movements. There can be no evolutionary advantage to laying down memories of childhood or perceiving the color of a rose if it doesn't affect the way you're going to move later in life. Now for those who don't believe this argument, we have trees and grass on our planet without the brain, but the clinching evidence is this animal here -- the humble sea squirt. Rudimentary animal, has a nervous system, swims around in the ocean in its juvenile life. And at some point of its life, it implants on a rock. And the first thing it does in implanting on that rock, which it never leaves, is to digest its own brain and nervous system for food. So once you don't need to move, you don't need the luxury of that brain. And this animal is often taken as an analogy to what happens at universities when professors get tenure, but that's a different subject. (Applause) So I am a movement chauvinist. I believe movement is the most important function of the brain -- don't let anyone tell you that it's not true. Now if movement is so important, how well are we doing understanding how the brain controls movement? And the answer is we're doing extremely poorly; it's a very hard problem. But we can look at how well we're doing by thinking about how well we're doing building machines which can do what humans can do. Think about the game of chess. How well are we doing determining what piece to move where? If you pit Gary Kasparov here, when he's not in jail, against IBM's Deep Blue, well the answer is IBM's Deep Blue will occasionally win. And I think if IBM's Deep Blue played anyone in this room, it would win every time. That problem is solved. What about the problem of picking up a chess piece, dexterously manipulating it and putting it back down on the board? If you put a five year-old child's dexterity against the best robots of today, the answer is simple: the child wins easily. There's no competition at all. Now why is that top problem so easy and the bottom problem so hard? One reason is a very smart five year-old could tell you the algorithm for that top problem -- look at all possible moves to the end of the game and choose the one that makes you win. So it's a very simple algorithm. Now of course there are other moves, but with vast computers we approximate and come close to the optimal solution. When it comes to being dexterous, it's not even clear what the algorithm is you have to solve to be dexterous. And we'll see you have to both perceive and act on the world, which has a lot of problems. But let me show you cutting-edge robotics. Now a lot of robotics is very impressive, but manipulation robotics is really just in the dark ages. So this is the end of a Ph.D. project from one of the best robotics institutes. And the student has trained this robot to pour this water into a glass. It's a hard problem because the water sloshes about, but it can do it. But it doesn't do it with anything like the agility of a human. Now if you want this robot to do a different task, that's another three-year Ph.D. program. There is no generalization at all from one task to another in robotics. Now we can compare this to cutting-edge human performance. So what I'm going to show you is Emily Fox winning the world record for cup stacking. Now the Americans in the audience will know all about cup stacking. It's a high school sport where you have 12 cups you have to stack and unstack against the clock in a prescribed order. And this is her getting the world record in real time. (Laughter) (Applause) And she's pretty happy. We have no idea what is going on inside her brain when she does that, and that's what we'd like to know. So in my group, what we try to do is reverse engineer how humans control movement. And it sounds like an easy problem. You send a command down, it causes muscles to contract. Your arm or body moves, and you get sensory feedback from vision, from skin, from muscles and so on. The trouble is these signals are not the beautiful signals you want them to be. So one thing that makes controlling movement difficult is, for example, sensory feedback is extremely noisy. Now by noise, I do not mean sound. We use it in the engineering and neuroscience sense meaning a random noise corrupting a signal. So the old days before digital radio when you were tuning in your radio and you heard "crrcckkk" on the station you wanted to hear, that was the noise. But more generally, this noise is something that corrupts the signal. So for example, if you put your hand under a table and try to localize it with your other hand, you can be off by several centimeters due to the noise in sensory feedback. Similarly, when you put motor output on movement output, it's extremely noisy. Forget about trying to hit the bull's eye in darts, just aim for the same spot over and over again. You have a huge spread due to movement variability. And more than that, the outside world, or task, is both ambiguous and variable. The teapot could be full, it could be empty. It changes over time. So we work in a whole sensory movement task soup of noise. Now this noise is so great that society places a huge premium on those of us who can reduce the consequences of noise. So if you're lucky enough to be able to knock a small white ball into a hole several hundred yards away using a long metal stick, our society will be willing to reward you with hundreds of millions of dollars. Now what I want to convince you of is the brain also goes through a lot of effort to reduce the negative consequences of this sort of noise and variability. And to do that, I'm going to tell you about a framework which is very popular in statistics and machine learning of the last 50 years called Bayesian decision theory. And it's more recently a unifying way to think about how the brain deals with uncertainty. And the fundamental idea is you want to make inferences and then take actions. So let's think about the inference. You want to generate beliefs about the world. So what are beliefs? Beliefs could be: where are my arms in space? Am I looking at a cat or a fox? But we're going to represent beliefs with probabilities. So we're going to represent a belief with a number between zero and one -- zero meaning I don't believe it at all, one means I'm absolutely certain. And numbers in between give you the gray levels of uncertainty. And the key idea to Bayesian inference is you have two sources of information from which to make your inference. You have data, and data in neuroscience is sensory input. So I have sensory input, which I can take in to make beliefs. But there's another source of information, and that's effectively prior knowledge. You accumulate knowledge throughout your life in memories. And the point about Bayesian decision theory is it gives you the mathematics of the optimal way to combine your prior knowledge with your sensory evidence to generate new beliefs. And I've put the formula up there. I'm not going to explain what that formula is, but it's very beautiful. And it has real beauty and real explanatory power. And what it really says, and what you want to estimate, is the probability of different beliefs given your sensory input. So let me give you an intuitive example. Imagine you're learning to play tennis and you want to decide where the ball is going to bounce as it comes over the net towards you. There are two sources of information Bayes' rule tells you. There's sensory evidence -- you can use visual information auditory information, and that might tell you it's going to land in that red spot. But you know that your senses are not perfect, and therefore there's some variability of where it's going to land shown by that cloud of red, representing numbers between 0.5 and maybe 0.1. That information is available in the current shot, but there's another source of information not available on the current shot, but only available by repeated experience in the game of tennis, and that's that the ball doesn't bounce with equal probability over the court during the match. If you're playing against a very good opponent, they may distribute it in that green area, which is the prior distribution, making it hard for you to return. Now both these sources of information carry important information. And what Bayes' rule says is that I should multiply the numbers on the red by the numbers on the green to get the numbers of the yellow, which have the ellipses, and that's my belief. So it's the optimal way of combining information. Now I wouldn't tell you all this if it wasn't that a few years ago, we showed this is exactly what people do when they learn new movement skills. And what it means is we really are Bayesian inference machines. As we go around, we learn about statistics of the world and lay that down, but we also learn about how noisy our own sensory apparatus is, and then combine those in a real Bayesian way. Now a key part to the Bayesian is this part of the formula. And what this part really says is I have to predict the probability of different sensory feedbacks given my beliefs. So that really means I have to make predictions of the future. And I want to convince you the brain does make predictions of the sensory feedback it's going to get. And moreover, it profoundly changes your perceptions by what you do. And to do that, I'll tell you about how the brain deals with sensory input. So you send a command out, you get sensory feedback back, and that transformation is governed by the physics of your body and your sensory apparatus. But you can imagine looking inside the brain. And here's inside the brain. You might have a little predictor, a neural simulator, of the physics of your body and your senses. So as you send a movement command down, you tap a copy of that off and run it into your neural simulator to anticipate the sensory consequences of your actions. So as I shake this ketchup bottle, I get some true sensory feedback as the function of time in the bottom row. And if I've got a good predictor, it predicts the same thing. Well why would I bother doing that? I'm going to get the same feedback anyway. Well there's good reasons. Imagine, as I shake the ketchup bottle, someone very kindly comes up to me and taps it on the back for me. Now I get an extra source of sensory information due to that external act. So I get two sources. I get you tapping on it, and I get me shaking it, but from my senses' point of view, that is combined together into one source of information. Now there's good reason to believe that you would want to be able to distinguish external events from internal events. Because external events are actually much more behaviorally relevant than feeling everything that's going on inside my body. So one way to reconstruct that is to compare the prediction -- which is only based on your movement commands -- with the reality. Any discrepancy should hopefully be external. So as I go around the world, I'm making predictions of what I should get, subtracting them off. Everything left over is external to me. What evidence is there for this? Well there's one very clear example where a sensation generated by myself feels very different then if generated by another person. And so we decided the most obvious place to start was with tickling. It's been known for a long time, you can't tickle yourself as well as other people can. But it hasn't really been shown, it's because you have a neural simulator, simulating your own body and subtracting off that sense. So we can bring the experiments of the 21st century by applying robotic technologies to this problem. And in effect, what we have is some sort of stick in one hand attached to a robot, and they're going to move that back and forward. And then we're going to track that with a computer and use it to control another robot, which is going to tickle their palm with another stick. And then we're going to ask them to rate a bunch of things including ticklishness. I'll show you just one part of our study. And here I've taken away the robots, but basically people move with their right arm sinusoidally back and forward. And we replay that to the other hand with a time delay. Either no time delay, in which case light would just tickle your palm, or with a time delay of two-tenths of three-tenths of a second. So the important point here is the right hand always does the same things -- sinusoidal movement. The left hand always is the same and puts sinusoidal tickle. All we're playing with is a tempo causality. And as we go from naught to 0.1 second, it becomes more ticklish. As you go from 0.1 to 0.2, it becomes more ticklish at the end. And by 0.2 of a second, it's equivalently ticklish to the robot that just tickled you without you doing anything. So whatever is responsible for this cancellation is extremely tightly coupled with tempo causality. And based on this illustration, we really convinced ourselves in the field that the brain's making precise predictions and subtracting them off from the sensations. Now I have to admit, these are the worst studies my lab has ever run. Because the tickle sensation on the palm comes and goes, you need large numbers of subjects with these stars making them significant. So we were looking for a much more objective way to assess this phenomena. And in the intervening years I had two daughters. And one thing you notice about children in backseats of cars on long journeys, they get into fights -- which started with one of them doing something to the other, the other retaliating. It quickly escalates. And children tend to get into fights which escalate in terms of force. Now when I screamed at my children to stop, sometimes they would both say to me the other person hit them harder. Now I happen to know my children don't lie, so I thought, as a neuroscientist, it was important how I could explain how they were telling inconsistent truths. And we hypothesize based on the tickling study that when one child hits another, they generate the movement command. They predict the sensory consequences and subtract it off. So they actually think they've hit the person less hard than they have -- rather like the tickling. Whereas the passive recipient doesn't make the prediction, feels the full blow. So if they retaliate with the same force, the first person will think it's been escalated. So we decided to test this in the lab. (Laughter) Now we don't work with children, we don't work with hitting, but the concept is identical. We bring in two adults. We tell them they're going to play a game. And so here's player one and player two sitting opposite to each other. And the game is very simple. We started with a motor with a little lever, a little force transfuser. And we use this motor to apply force down to player one's fingers for three seconds and then it stops. And that player's been told, remember the experience of that force and use your other finger to apply the same force down to the other subject's finger through a force transfuser -- and they do that. And player two's been told, remember the experience of that force. Use your other hand to apply the force back down. And so they take it in turns to apply the force they've just experienced back and forward. But critically, they're briefed about the rules of the game in separate rooms. So they don't know the rules the other person's playing by. And what we've measured is the force as a function of terms. And if we look at what we start with, a quarter of a Newton there, a number of turns, perfect would be that red line. And what we see in all pairs of subjects is this -- a 70 percent escalation in force on each go. So it really suggests, when you're doing this -- based on this study and others we've done -- that the brain is canceling the sensory consequences and underestimating the force it's producing. So it re-shows the brain makes predictions and fundamentally changes the precepts. So we've made inferences, we've done predictions, now we have to generate actions. And what Bayes' rule says is, given my beliefs, the action should in some sense be optimal. But we've got a problem. Tasks are symbolic -- I want to drink, I want to dance -- but the movement system has to contract 600 muscles in a particular sequence. And there's a big gap between the task and the movement system. So it could be bridged in infinitely many different ways. So think about just a point to point movement. I could choose these two paths out of an infinite number of paths. Having chosen a particular path, I can hold my hand on that path as infinitely many different joint configurations. And I can hold my arm in a particular joint configuration either very stiff or very relaxed. So I have a huge amount of choice to make. Now it turns out, we are extremely stereotypical. We all move the same way pretty much. And so it turns out we're so stereotypical, our brains have got dedicated neural circuitry to decode this stereotyping. So if I take some dots and set them in motion with biological motion, your brain's circuitry would understand instantly what's going on. Now this is a bunch of dots moving. You will know what this person is doing, whether happy, sad, old, young -- a huge amount of information. If these dots were cars going on a racing circuit, you would have absolutely no idea what's going on. So why is it that we move the particular ways we do? Well let's think about what really happens. Maybe we don't all quite move the same way. Maybe there's variation in the population. And maybe those who move better than others have got more chance of getting their children into the next generation. So in evolutionary scales, movements get better. And perhaps in life, movements get better through learning. So what is it about a movement which is good or bad? Imagine I want to intercept this ball. Here are two possible paths to that ball. Well if I choose the left-hand path, I can work out the forces required in one of my muscles as a function of time. But there's noise added to this. So what I actually get, based on this lovely, smooth, desired force, is a very noisy version. So if I pick the same command through many times, I will get a different noisy version each time, because noise changes each time. So what I can show you here is how the variability of the movement will evolve if I choose that way. If I choose a different way of moving -- on the right for example -- then I'll have a different command, different noise, playing through a noisy system, very complicated. All we can be sure of is the variability will be different. If I move in this particular way, I end up with a smaller variability across many movements. So if I have to choose between those two, I would choose the right one because it's less variable. And the fundamental idea is you want to plan your movements so as to minimize the negative consequence of the noise. And one intuition to get is actually the amount of noise or variability I show here gets bigger as the force gets bigger. So you want to avoid big forces as one principle. So we've shown that using this, we can explain a huge amount of data -- that exactly people are going about their lives planning movements so as to minimize negative consequences of noise. So I hope I've convinced you the brain is there and evolved to control movement. And it's an intellectual challenge to understand how we do that. But it's also relevant for disease and rehabilitation. There are many diseases which effect movement. And hopefully if we understand how we control movement, we can apply that to robotic technology. And finally, I want to remind you, when you see animals do what look like very simple tasks, the actual complexity of what is going on inside their brain is really quite dramatic. Thank you very much. (Applause) Chris Anderson: Quick question for you, Dan. So you're a movement -- (DW: Chauvinist.) -- chauvinist. Does that mean that you think that the other things we think our brains are about -- the dreaming, the yearning, the falling in love and all these things -- are a kind of side show, an accident? DW: No, no, actually I think they're all important to drive the right movement behavior to get reproduction in the end. So I think people who study sensation or memory without realizing why you're laying down memories of childhood. The fact that we forget most of our childhood, for example, is probably fine, because it doesn't effect our movements later in life. You only need to store things which are really going to effect movement. CA: So you think that people thinking about the brain, and consciousness generally, could get real insight by saying, where does movement play in this game? DW: So people have found out for example that studying vision in the absence of realizing why you have vision is a mistake. You have to study vision with the realization of how the movement system is going to use vision. And it uses it very differently once you think about it that way. CA: Well that was quite fascinating. Thank you very much indeed. (Applause)
There was a time in my life when everything seemed perfect. Everywhere I went, I felt at home. Everyone I met, I felt I knew them for as long as I could remember. And I want to share with you how I came to that place and what I've learned since I left it. This is where it began. And it raises an existential question, which is, if I'm having this experience of complete connection and full consciousness, why am I not visible in the photograph, and where is this time and place? This is Los Angeles, California, where I live. This is a police photo. That's actually my car. We're less than a mile from one of the largest hospitals in Los Angeles, called Cedars-Sinai. And the situation is that a car full of paramedics on their way home from the hospital after work have run across the wreckage, and they've advised the police that there were no survivors inside the car, that the driver's dead, that I'm dead. And the police are waiting for the fire department to arrive to cut apart the vehicle to extract the body of the driver. And when they do, they find that behind the glass, they find me. And my skull's crushed and my collar bone is crushed; all but two of my ribs, my pelvis and both arms -- they're all crushed, but there is still a pulse. And they get me to that nearby hospital, Cedars-Sinai, where that night I receive, because of my internal bleeding, 45 units of blood -- which means full replacements of all the blood in me -- before they're able to staunch the flow. I'm put on full life support, and I have a massive stroke, and my brain drops into a coma. Now comas are measured on a scale from 15 down to three. Fifteen is a mild coma. Three is the deepest. And if you look, you'll see that there's only one way you can score three. It's essentially there's no sign of life from outside at all. I spent more than a month in a Glasgow Coma Scale three, and it is inside that deepest level of coma, on the rim between my life and my death, that I'm experiencing the full connection and full consciousness of inner space. From my family looking in from outside, what they're trying to figure out is a different kind of existential question, which is, how far is it going to be possible to bridge from the comatose potential mind that they're looking at to an actual mind, which I define simply as the functioning of the brain that is remaining inside my head. Now to put this into a broader context, I want you to imagine that you are an eternal alien watching the Earth from outer space, and your favorite show on intergalactic satellite television is the Earth channel, and your favorite show is the Human Show. And the reason I think it would be so interesting to you is because consciousness is so interesting. It's so unpredictable and so fragile. And this is how we began. We all began in the Awash Valley in Ethiopia. The show began with tremendous special effects, because there were catastrophic climate shifts -- which sort of sounds interesting as a parallel to today. Because of the Earth tilting on its axis and those catastrophic climate shifts, we had to figure out how to find better food, and we had to learn -- there's Lucy; that's how we all began -- we had to learn how to crack open animal bones, use tools to do that, to feed on the marrow, to grow our brains more. So we actually grew our consciousness in response to this global threat. Now you also continue to watch as consciousness evolved to the point that here in India, in Madhya Pradesh, there's one of the two oldest known pieces of rock art found. It's a cupule that took 40 to 50,000 blows with a stone tool to create, and it's the first known expression of art on the planet. And the reason it connects us with consciousness today is that all of us still today, the very first shape we draw as a child is a circle. And then the next thing we do is we put a dot in the center of the circle. We create an eye -- and the eye that evolves through all of our history. There's the Egyptian god Horus, which symbolizes prosperity, wisdom and health. And that comes down right way to the present with the dollar bill in the United States, which has on it an eye of providence. So watching all of this show from outer space, you think we get it, we understand that the most precious resource on the blue planet is our consciousness. Because it's the first thing we draw; we surround ourselves with images of it; it's probably the most common image on the planet. But we don't. We take our consciousness for granted. While I was producing in Los Angeles, I never thought about it for a second. Until it was stripped from me, I never thought about it. And what I've learned since that event and during my recovery is that consciousness is under threat on this planet in ways it's never been under threat before. These are just some examples. And the reason I'm so honored to be here to talk today in India is because India has the sad distinction of being the head injury capital of the world. That statistic is so sad. There is no more drastic and sudden gap created between potential and actual mind than a severe head injury. Each one can entail up to a decade of rehabilitation, which means that India, unless something changes, is accumulating a need for millennia of rehabilitation. What you find in the United States is an injury every 20 seconds -- that's one and a half million every year -- stroke every 40 seconds, Alzheimer's disease, every 70 seconds somebody succumbs to that. All of these represent gaps between potential mind and actual mind. And here are some of the other categories, if you look at the whole planet. The World Health Organization tells us that depression is the number one disease on Earth in terms of years lived with disability. We find that the number two source of disability is depression in the age group of 15 to 44. Our children are becoming depressed at an alarming rate. I discovered during my recovery the third leading cause of death amongst teenagers is suicide. If you look at some of these other items -- concussions. Half of E.R. admissions from adolescents are for concussions. If I talk about migraine, 40 percent of the population suffer episodic headaches. Fifteen percent suffer migraines that wipe them out for days on end. All of this is leading -- computer addiction, just to cover that: the most frequent thing we do is use digital devices. The average teenager sends 3,300 texts every [month]. We're talking about a society that is retreating into depression and disassociation when we are potentially confronting the next great catastrophic climate shift. So what you'd be wondering, watching the Human Show, is are we going to confront and address the catastrophic climate shift that may be heading our way by growing our consciousness, or are we going to continue to retreat? And that then might lead you to watch an episode one day of Cedars-Sinai medical center and a consideration of the difference between potential mind and actual mind. This is a dense array EEG MRI tracking 156 channels of information. It's not my EEG at Cedars; it's your EEG tonight and last night. It's the what our minds do every night to digest the day and to prepare to bridge from the potential mind when we're asleep to the actual mind when we awaken the following morning. This is how I was when I returned from the hospital after nearly four months. The horseshoe shape you can see on my skull is where they operated and went inside my brain to do the surgeries they needed to do to rescue my life. But if you look into the eye of consciousness, that single eye you can see, I'm looking down, but let me tell you how I felt at that point. I didn't feel empty; I felt everything simultaneously. I felt empty and full, hot and cold, euphoric and depressed because the brain is the world's first fully functional quantum computer; it can occupy multiple states at the same time. And with all the internal regulators of my brain damaged, I felt everything simultaneously. But let's swivel around and look at me frontally. This is now flash-forward to the point in time where I've been discharged by the health system. Look into those eyes. I'm not able to focus those eyes. I'm not able to follow a line of text in a book. But the system has moved me on because, as my family started to discover, there is no long-term concept in the health care system. Neurological damage, 10 years of rehab, requires a long-term perspective. But let's take a look behind my eyes. This is a gamma radiation spec scan that uses gamma radiation to map three-dimensional function within the brain. It requires a laboratory to see it in three dimension, but in two dimensions I think you can see the beautiful symmetry and illumination of a normal mind at work. Here's my brain. That is the consequence of more than a third of the right side of my brain being destroyed by the stroke. So my family, as we moved forward and discovered that the health care system had moved us by, had to try to find solutions and answers. And during that process -- it took many years -- one of the doctors said that my recovery, my degree of advance, since the amount of head injury I'd suffered, was miraculous. And that was when I started to write a book, because I didn't think it was miraculous. I thought there were miraculous elements, but I also didn't think it was right that one should have to struggle and search for answers when this is a pandemic within our society. So from this experience of my recovery, I want to share four particular aspects -- I call them the four C's of consciousness -- that helped me grow my potential mind back towards the actual mind that I work with every day. The first C is cognitive training. Unlike the smashed glass of my car, plasticity of the brain means that there was always a possibility, with treatment, to train the brain so that you can regain and raise your level of awareness and consciousness. Plasticity means that there was always hope for our reason -- hope for our ability to rebuild that function. Indeed, the mind can redefine itself, and this is demonstrated by two specialists called Hagen and Silva back in the 1970's. The global perspective is that up to 30 percent of children in school have learning weaknesses that are not self-correcting, but with appropriate treatment, they can be screened for and detected and corrected and avoid their academic failure. But what I discovered is it's almost impossible to find anyone who provides that treatment or care. Here's what my neuropsychologist provided for me when I actually found somebody who could apply it. I'm not a doctor, so I'm not going to talk about the various subtests. Let's just talk about full-scale I.Q. Full-scale I.Q. is the mental processing -- how fast you can acquire information, retain it and retrieve it -- that is essential for success in life today. And you can see here there are three columns. Untestable -- that's when I'm in my coma. And then I creep up to the point that I get a score of 79, which is just below average. In the health care system, if you touch average, you're done. That's when I was discharged from the system. What does average I.Q. really mean? It meant that when I was given two and a half hours to take a test that anyone here would take in 50 minutes, I might score an F. This is a very, very low level in order to be kicked out of the health care system. Then I underwent cognitive training. And let me show you what happened to the right-hand column when I did my cognitive training over a period of time. This is not supposed to occur. I.Q. is supposed to stabilize and solidify at the age of eight. Now the Journal of the National Medical Association gave my memoir a full clinical review, which is very unusual. I'm not a doctor. I have no medical background whatsoever. But they felt the evidences that there was important, valuable information in the book, and they commented about it when they gave the full peer review to it. But they asked one question. They said, "Is this repeatable?" That was a fair question because my memoir was simply how I found solutions that worked for me. The answer is yes, and for the first time, it's my pleasure to be able to share two examples. Here's somebody, what they did as they went through cognitive training at ages seven and 11. And here's another person in, call it, high school and college. And this person is particularly interesting. I won't go into the intrascatter that's in the subtests, but they still had a neurologic issue. But that person could be identified as having a learning disability. And with accommodation, they went on to college and had a full life in terms of their opportunities. Second aspect: I still had crushing migraine headaches. Two elements that worked for me here are -- the first is 90 percent, I learned, of head and neck pain is through muscular-skeletal imbalance. The craniomandibular system is critical to that. And when I underwent it and found solutions, this is the interrelationship between the TMJ and the teeth. Up to 30 percent of the population have a disorder, disease or dysfunction in the jaw that affects the entire body. I was fortunate to find a dentist who applied this entire universe of technology you're about to see to establish that if he repositioned my jaw, the headaches pretty much resolved, but that then my teeth weren't in the right place. He then held my jaw in the right position while orthodontically he put my teeth into correct alignment. So my teeth actually hold my jaw in the correct position. This affected my entire body. If that sounds like a very, very strange thing to say and rather a bold statement -- How can the jaw affect the entire body? -- let me simply point out to you, if I ask you tomorrow to put one grain of sand between your teeth and go for a nice long walk, how far would you last before you had to remove that grain of sand? That tiny misalignment. Bear in mind, there are no nerves in the teeth. That's why the same between the before and after that this shows, it's hard to see the difference. Now just trying putting a few grains of sand between your teeth and see the difference it makes. I still had migraine headaches. The next issue that resolved was that, if 90 percent of head and neck pain is caused by imbalance, the other 10 percent, largely -- if you set aside aneurysms, brain cancer and hormonal issues -- is the circulation. Imagine the blood flowing through your body -- I was told at UCLA Medical Center -- as one sealed system. There's a big pipe with the blood flowing through it, and around that pipe are the nerves drawing their nutrient supply from the blood. That's basically it. If you press on a hose pipe in a sealed system, it bulges someplace else. If that some place else where it bulges is inside the biggest nerve in your body, your brain, you get a vascular migraine. This is a level of pain that's only known to other people who suffer vascular migraines. Using this technology, this is mapping in three dimensions. This is an MRI MRA MRV, a volumetric MRI. Using this technology, the specialists at UCLA Medical Center were able to identify where that compression in the hose pipe was occurring. A vascular surgeon removed most of the first rib on both sides of my body. And in the following months and years, I felt the neurological flow of life itself returning. Communication, the next C. This is critical. All consciousness is about communication. And here, by great fortune, one of my father's clients had a husband who worked at the Alfred Mann Foundation for Scientific Research. Alfred Mann is a brilliant physicist and innovator who's fascinated with bridging gaps in consciousness, whether to restore hearing to the deaf, vision to the blind or movement to the paralyzed. And I'm just going to give you an example today of movement to the paralyzed. I've brought with me, from Southern California, the FM device. This is it being held in the hand. It weighs less than a gram. So two of them implanted in the body would weigh less than a dime. Five of them would still weigh less than a rupee coin. Where does it go inside the body? It has been simulated and tested to endure in the body corrosion-free for over 80 years. So it goes in and it stays there. Here are the implantation sites. The concept that they're working towards -- and they have working prototypes -- is that we placed it throughout the motor points of the body where they're needed. The main unit will then go inside the brain. An FM device in the cortex of the brain, the motor cortex, will send signals in real time to the motor points in the relevant muscles so that the person will be able to move their arm, let's say, in real time, if they've lost control of their arm. And other FM devices implanted in fingertips, on contacting a surface, will send a message back to the sensory cortex of the brain, so that the person feels a sense of touch. Is this science fiction? No, because I'm wearing the first application of this technology. I don't have the ability to control my left foot. A radio device is controlling every step I take, and a sensor picks up my foot for me every time I walk. And in closing, I want to share the personal reason why this meant so much to me and changed the direction of my life. In my coma, one of the presences I sensed was someone I felt was a protector. And when I came out of my coma, I recognized my family, but I didn't remember my own past. Gradually, I remembered the protector was my wife. And I whispered the good news through my broken jaw, which was wired shut, to my night nurse. And the following morning, my mother came to explain that I'd not always been in this bed, in this room, that I'd been working in film and television and that I had been in a crash and that, yes, I was married, but Marcy had been killed instantly in the crash. And during my time in coma, she had been laid to rest in her hometown of Phoenix. Now in the dark years that followed, I had to work out what remained for me if everything that made today special was gone. And as I discovered these threats to consciousness and how they are surrounding the world and enveloping the lives of more and more people every day, I discovered what truly remained. I believe that we can overcome the threats to our consciousness, that the Human Show can stay on the air for millennia to come. I believe that we can all rise and shine. Thank you very much. (Applause) Lakshmi Pratury: Just stay for a second. Just stay here for a second. (Applause) You know, when I heard Simon's -- please sit down; I just want to talk to him for a second -- when I read his book, I went to LA to meet him. And so I was sitting in this restaurant, waiting for a man to come by who obviously would have some difficulty ... I don't know what I had in my mind. And he was walking around. I didn't expect that person that I was going to meet to be him. And then we met and we talked, and I'm like, he doesn't look like somebody who was built out of nothing. And then I was amazed at what role technology played in your recovery. And we have his book outside in the bookshop. The thing that amazed me is the painstaking detail with which he has written every hospital he has been to, every treatment he got, every near-miss he had, and how accidentally he stumbled upon innovations. So I think this one detail went past people really quick. Tell a little bit about what you're wearing on your leg. Simon Lewis: I knew when I was timing this that there wouldn't be time for me to do anything about -- Well this is it. This is the control unit. And this records every single step I've taken for, ooh, five or six years now. And if I do this, probably the mic won't hear it. That little chirp followed by two chirps is now switched on. When I press it again, it'll chirp three times, and that'll mean that it's armed and ready to go. And that's my friend. I mean, I charge it every night. And it works. It works. And what I would love to add because I didn't have time ... What does it do? Well actually, I'll show you down here. This down here, if the camera can see that, that is a small antenna. Underneath my heel, there is a sensor that detects when my foot leaves the ground -- what's called the heel lift. This thing blinks all the time; I'll leave it out, so you might be able to see it. But this is blinking all the time. It's sending signals in real time. And if you walk faster, if I walk faster, it detects what's called the time interval, which is the interval between each heel lift. And it accelerates the amount and level of the stimulation. The other things they've worked on -- I didn't have time to say this in my talk -- is they've restored functional hearing to thousands of deaf people. I could tell you the story: this was going to be an abandoned technology, but Alfred Mann met the doctor who was going to retire, [Dr. Schindler.] And he was going to retire -- all the technology was going to be lost, because not a single medical manufacturer would take it on because it was a small issue. But there's millions of deaf people in the world, and the Cochlear implant has given hearing to thousands of deaf people now. It works. And the other thing is they're working on artificial retinas for the blind. And this, this is the implantable generation. Because what I didn't say in my talk is this is actually exoskeletal. I should clarify that. Because the first generation is exoskeletal, it's wrapped around the leg, around the affected limb. I must tell you, they're an amazing -- there's a hundred people who work in that building -- engineers, scientists, and other team members -- all the time. Alfred Mann has set up this foundation to advance this research because he saw there's no way venture capital would come in for something like this. The audience is too small. You'd think, there's plenty of paralyzed people in the world, but the audience is too small, and the amount of research, the time it takes, the FDA clearances, the payback time is too long for V.C. to be interested. So he saw a need and he stepped in. He's a very, very remarkable man. He's done a lot of very cutting-edge science. LP: So when you get a chance, spend some time with Simon. Thank you. Thank you. (Applause)
As other speakers have said, it's a rather daunting experience -- a particularly daunting experience -- to be speaking in front of this audience. But unlike the other speakers, I'm not going to tell you about the mysteries of the universe, or the wonders of evolution, or the really clever, innovative ways people are attacking the major inequalities in our world. Or even the challenges of nation-states in the modern global economy. My brief, as you've just heard, is to tell you about statistics -- and, to be more precise, to tell you some exciting things about statistics. And that's -- (Laughter) -- that's rather more challenging than all the speakers before me and all the ones coming after me. (Laughter) One of my senior colleagues told me, when I was a youngster in this profession, rather proudly, that statisticians were people who liked figures but didn't have the personality skills to become accountants. (Laughter) And there's another in-joke among statisticians, and that's, "How do you tell the introverted statistician from the extroverted statistician?" To which the answer is, "The extroverted statistician's the one who looks at the other person's shoes." (Laughter) But I want to tell you something useful -- and here it is, so concentrate now. This evening, there's a reception in the University's Museum of Natural History. And it's a wonderful setting, as I hope you'll find, and a great icon to the best of the Victorian tradition. It's very unlikely -- in this special setting, and this collection of people -- but you might just find yourself talking to someone you'd rather wish that you weren't. So here's what you do. When they say to you, "What do you do?" -- you say, "I'm a statistician." (Laughter) Well, except they've been pre-warned now, and they'll know you're making it up. And then one of two things will happen. They'll either discover their long-lost cousin in the other corner of the room and run over and talk to them. Or they'll suddenly become parched and/or hungry -- and often both -- and sprint off for a drink and some food. And you'll be left in peace to talk to the person you really want to talk to. It's one of the challenges in our profession to try and explain what we do. We're not top on people's lists for dinner party guests and conversations and so on. And it's something I've never really found a good way of doing. But my wife -- who was then my girlfriend -- managed it much better than I've ever been able to. Many years ago, when we first started going out, she was working for the BBC in Britain, and I was, at that stage, working in America. I was coming back to visit her. She told this to one of her colleagues, who said, "Well, what does your boyfriend do?" Sarah thought quite hard about the things I'd explained -- and she concentrated, in those days, on listening. (Laughter) Don't tell her I said that. And she was thinking about the work I did developing mathematical models for understanding evolution and modern genetics. So when her colleague said, "What does he do?" She paused and said, "He models things." (Laughter) Well, her colleague suddenly got much more interested than I had any right to expect and went on and said, "What does he model?" Well, Sarah thought a little bit more about my work and said, "Genes." (Laughter) "He models genes." That is my first love, and that's what I'll tell you a little bit about. What I want to do more generally is to get you thinking about the place of uncertainty and randomness and chance in our world, and how we react to that, and how well we do or don't think about it. So you've had a pretty easy time up till now -- a few laughs, and all that kind of thing -- in the talks to date. You've got to think, and I'm going to ask you some questions. So here's the scene for the first question I'm going to ask you. Can you imagine tossing a coin successively? And for some reason -- which shall remain rather vague -- we're interested in a particular pattern. Here's one -- a head, followed by a tail, followed by a tail. So suppose we toss a coin repeatedly. Then the pattern, head-tail-tail, that we've suddenly become fixated with happens here. And you can count: one, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10 -- it happens after the 10th toss. So you might think there are more interesting things to do, but humor me for the moment. Imagine this half of the audience each get out coins, and they toss them until they first see the pattern head-tail-tail. The first time they do it, maybe it happens after the 10th toss, as here. The second time, maybe it's after the fourth toss. The next time, after the 15th toss. So you do that lots and lots of times, and you average those numbers. That's what I want this side to think about. The other half of the audience doesn't like head-tail-tail -- they think, for deep cultural reasons, that's boring -- and they're much more interested in a different pattern -- head-tail-head. So, on this side, you get out your coins, and you toss and toss and toss. And you count the number of times until the pattern head-tail-head appears and you average them. OK? So on this side, you've got a number -- you've done it lots of times, so you get it accurately -- which is the average number of tosses until head-tail-tail. On this side, you've got a number -- the average number of tosses until head-tail-head. So here's a deep mathematical fact -- if you've got two numbers, one of three things must be true. Either they're the same, or this one's bigger than this one, or this one's bigger than that one. So what's going on here? So you've all got to think about this, and you've all got to vote -- and we're not moving on. And I don't want to end up in the two-minute silence to give you more time to think about it, until everyone's expressed a view. OK. So what you want to do is compare the average number of tosses until we first see head-tail-head with the average number of tosses until we first see head-tail-tail. Who thinks that A is true -- that, on average, it'll take longer to see head-tail-head than head-tail-tail? Who thinks that B is true -- that on average, they're the same? Who thinks that C is true -- that, on average, it'll take less time to see head-tail-head than head-tail-tail? OK, who hasn't voted yet? Because that's really naughty -- I said you had to. (Laughter) OK. So most people think B is true. And you might be relieved to know even rather distinguished mathematicians think that. It's not. A is true here. It takes longer, on average. In fact, the average number of tosses till head-tail-head is 10 and the average number of tosses until head-tail-tail is eight. How could that be? Anything different about the two patterns? There is. Head-tail-head overlaps itself. If you went head-tail-head-tail-head, you can cunningly get two occurrences of the pattern in only five tosses. You can't do that with head-tail-tail. That turns out to be important. There are two ways of thinking about this. I'll give you one of them. So imagine -- let's suppose we're doing it. On this side -- remember, you're excited about head-tail-tail; you're excited about head-tail-head. We start tossing a coin, and we get a head -- and you start sitting on the edge of your seat because something great and wonderful, or awesome, might be about to happen. The next toss is a tail -- you get really excited. The champagne's on ice just next to you; you've got the glasses chilled to celebrate. You're waiting with bated breath for the final toss. And if it comes down a head, that's great. You're done, and you celebrate. If it's a tail -- well, rather disappointedly, you put the glasses away and put the champagne back. And you keep tossing, to wait for the next head, to get excited. On this side, there's a different experience. It's the same for the first two parts of the sequence. You're a little bit excited with the first head -- you get rather more excited with the next tail. Then you toss the coin. If it's a tail, you crack open the champagne. If it's a head you're disappointed, but you're still a third of the way to your pattern again. And that's an informal way of presenting it -- that's why there's a difference. Another way of thinking about it -- if we tossed a coin eight million times, then we'd expect a million head-tail-heads and a million head-tail-tails -- but the head-tail-heads could occur in clumps. So if you want to put a million things down amongst eight million positions and you can have some of them overlapping, the clumps will be further apart. It's another way of getting the intuition. What's the point I want to make? It's a very, very simple example, an easily stated question in probability, which every -- you're in good company -- everybody gets wrong. This is my little diversion into my real passion, which is genetics. There's a connection between head-tail-heads and head-tail-tails in genetics, and it's the following. When you toss a coin, you get a sequence of heads and tails. When you look at DNA, there's a sequence of not two things -- heads and tails -- but four letters -- As, Gs, Cs and Ts. And there are little chemical scissors, called restriction enzymes which cut DNA whenever they see particular patterns. And they're an enormously useful tool in modern molecular biology. And instead of asking the question, "How long until I see a head-tail-head?" -- you can ask, "How big will the chunks be when I use a restriction enzyme which cuts whenever it sees G-A-A-G, for example? How long will those chunks be?" That's a rather trivial connection between probability and genetics. There's a much deeper connection, which I don't have time to go into and that is that modern genetics is a really exciting area of science. And we'll hear some talks later in the conference specifically about that. But it turns out that unlocking the secrets in the information generated by modern experimental technologies, a key part of that has to do with fairly sophisticated -- you'll be relieved to know that I do something useful in my day job, rather more sophisticated than the head-tail-head story -- but quite sophisticated computer modelings and mathematical modelings and modern statistical techniques. And I will give you two little snippets -- two examples -- of projects we're involved in in my group in Oxford, both of which I think are rather exciting. You know about the Human Genome Project. That was a project which aimed to read one copy of the human genome. The natural thing to do after you've done that -- and that's what this project, the International HapMap Project, which is a collaboration between labs in five or six different countries. Think of the Human Genome Project as learning what we've got in common, and the HapMap Project is trying to understand where there are differences between different people. Why do we care about that? Well, there are lots of reasons. The most pressing one is that we want to understand how some differences make some people susceptible to one disease -- type-2 diabetes, for example -- and other differences make people more susceptible to heart disease, or stroke, or autism and so on. That's one big project. There's a second big project, recently funded by the Wellcome Trust in this country, involving very large studies -- thousands of individuals, with each of eight different diseases, common diseases like type-1 and type-2 diabetes, and coronary heart disease, bipolar disease and so on -- to try and understand the genetics. To try and understand what it is about genetic differences that causes the diseases. Why do we want to do that? Because we understand very little about most human diseases. We don't know what causes them. And if we can get in at the bottom and understand the genetics, we'll have a window on the way the disease works, and a whole new way about thinking about disease therapies and preventative treatment and so on. So that's, as I said, the little diversion on my main love. Back to some of the more mundane issues of thinking about uncertainty. Here's another quiz for you -- now suppose we've got a test for a disease which isn't infallible, but it's pretty good. It gets it right 99 percent of the time. And I take one of you, or I take someone off the street, and I test them for the disease in question. Let's suppose there's a test for HIV -- the virus that causes AIDS -- and the test says the person has the disease. What's the chance that they do? The test gets it right 99 percent of the time. So a natural answer is 99 percent. Who likes that answer? Come on -- everyone's got to get involved. Don't think you don't trust me anymore. (Laughter) Well, you're right to be a bit skeptical, because that's not the answer. That's what you might think. It's not the answer, and it's not because it's only part of the story. It actually depends on how common or how rare the disease is. So let me try and illustrate that. Here's a little caricature of a million individuals. So let's think about a disease that affects -- it's pretty rare, it affects one person in 10,000. Amongst these million individuals, most of them are healthy and some of them will have the disease. And in fact, if this is the prevalence of the disease, about 100 will have the disease and the rest won't. So now suppose we test them all. What happens? Well, amongst the 100 who do have the disease, the test will get it right 99 percent of the time, and 99 will test positive. Amongst all these other people who don't have the disease, the test will get it right 99 percent of the time. It'll only get it wrong one percent of the time. But there are so many of them that there'll be an enormous number of false positives. Put that another way -- of all of them who test positive -- so here they are, the individuals involved -- less than one in 100 actually have the disease. So even though we think the test is accurate, the important part of the story is there's another bit of information we need. Here's the key intuition. What we have to do, once we know the test is positive, is to weigh up the plausibility, or the likelihood, of two competing explanations. Each of those explanations has a likely bit and an unlikely bit. One explanation is that the person doesn't have the disease -- that's overwhelmingly likely, if you pick someone at random -- but the test gets it wrong, which is unlikely. The other explanation is that the person does have the disease -- that's unlikely -- but the test gets it right, which is likely. And the number we end up with -- that number which is a little bit less than one in 100 -- is to do with how likely one of those explanations is relative to the other. Each of them taken together is unlikely. Here's a more topical example of exactly the same thing. Those of you in Britain will know about what's become rather a celebrated case of a woman called Sally Clark, who had two babies who died suddenly. And initially, it was thought that they died of what's known informally as "cot death," and more formally as "Sudden Infant Death Syndrome." For various reasons, she was later charged with murder. And at the trial, her trial, a very distinguished pediatrician gave evidence that the chance of two cot deaths, innocent deaths, in a family like hers -- which was professional and non-smoking -- was one in 73 million. To cut a long story short, she was convicted at the time. Later, and fairly recently, acquitted on appeal -- in fact, on the second appeal. And just to set it in context, you can imagine how awful it is for someone to have lost one child, and then two, if they're innocent, to be convicted of murdering them. To be put through the stress of the trial, convicted of murdering them -- and to spend time in a women's prison, where all the other prisoners think you killed your children -- is a really awful thing to happen to someone. And it happened in large part here because the expert got the statistics horribly wrong, in two different ways. So where did he get the one in 73 million number? He looked at some research, which said the chance of one cot death in a family like Sally Clark's is about one in 8,500. So he said, "I'll assume that if you have one cot death in a family, the chance of a second child dying from cot death aren't changed." So that's what statisticians would call an assumption of independence. It's like saying, "If you toss a coin and get a head the first time, that won't affect the chance of getting a head the second time." So if you toss a coin twice, the chance of getting a head twice are a half -- that's the chance the first time -- times a half -- the chance a second time. So he said, "Here, I'll assume that these events are independent. When you multiply 8,500 together twice, you get about 73 million." And none of this was stated to the court as an assumption or presented to the jury that way. Unfortunately here -- and, really, regrettably -- first of all, in a situation like this you'd have to verify it empirically. And secondly, it's palpably false. There are lots and lots of things that we don't know about sudden infant deaths. It might well be that there are environmental factors that we're not aware of, and it's pretty likely to be the case that there are genetic factors we're not aware of. So if a family suffers from one cot death, you'd put them in a high-risk group. They've probably got these environmental risk factors and/or genetic risk factors we don't know about. And to argue, then, that the chance of a second death is as if you didn't know that information is really silly. It's worse than silly -- it's really bad science. Nonetheless, that's how it was presented, and at trial nobody even argued it. That's the first problem. The second problem is, what does the number of one in 73 million mean? So after Sally Clark was convicted -- you can imagine, it made rather a splash in the press -- one of the journalists from one of Britain's more reputable newspapers wrote that what the expert had said was, "The chance that she was innocent was one in 73 million." Now, that's a logical error. It's exactly the same logical error as the logical error of thinking that after the disease test, which is 99 percent accurate, the chance of having the disease is 99 percent. In the disease example, we had to bear in mind two things, one of which was the possibility that the test got it right or not. And the other one was the chance, a priori, that the person had the disease or not. It's exactly the same in this context. There are two things involved -- two parts to the explanation. We want to know how likely, or relatively how likely, two different explanations are. One of them is that Sally Clark was innocent -- which is, a priori, overwhelmingly likely -- most mothers don't kill their children. And the second part of the explanation is that she suffered an incredibly unlikely event. Not as unlikely as one in 73 million, but nonetheless rather unlikely. The other explanation is that she was guilty. Now, we probably think a priori that's unlikely. And we certainly should think in the context of a criminal trial that that's unlikely, because of the presumption of innocence. And then if she were trying to kill the children, she succeeded. So the chance that she's innocent isn't one in 73 million. We don't know what it is. It has to do with weighing up the strength of the other evidence against her and the statistical evidence. We know the children died. What matters is how likely or unlikely, relative to each other, the two explanations are. And they're both implausible. There's a situation where errors in statistics had really profound and really unfortunate consequences. In fact, there are two other women who were convicted on the basis of the evidence of this pediatrician, who have subsequently been released on appeal. Many cases were reviewed. And it's particularly topical because he's currently facing a disrepute charge at Britain's General Medical Council. So just to conclude -- what are the take-home messages from this? Well, we know that randomness and uncertainty and chance are very much a part of our everyday life. It's also true -- and, although, you, as a collective, are very special in many ways, you're completely typical in not getting the examples I gave right. It's very well documented that people get things wrong. They make errors of logic in reasoning with uncertainty. We can cope with the subtleties of language brilliantly -- and there are interesting evolutionary questions about how we got here. We are not good at reasoning with uncertainty. That's an issue in our everyday lives. As you've heard from many of the talks, statistics underpins an enormous amount of research in science -- in social science, in medicine and indeed, quite a lot of industry. All of quality control, which has had a major impact on industrial processing, is underpinned by statistics. It's something we're bad at doing. At the very least, we should recognize that, and we tend not to. To go back to the legal context, at the Sally Clark trial all of the lawyers just accepted what the expert said. So if a pediatrician had come out and said to a jury, "I know how to build bridges. I've built one down the road. Please drive your car home over it," they would have said, "Well, pediatricians don't know how to build bridges. That's what engineers do." On the other hand, he came out and effectively said, or implied, "I know how to reason with uncertainty. I know how to do statistics." And everyone said, "Well, that's fine. He's an expert." So we need to understand where our competence is and isn't. Exactly the same kinds of issues arose in the early days of DNA profiling, when scientists, and lawyers and in some cases judges, routinely misrepresented evidence. Usually -- one hopes -- innocently, but misrepresented evidence. Forensic scientists said, "The chance that this guy's innocent is one in three million." Even if you believe the number, just like the 73 million to one, that's not what it meant. And there have been celebrated appeal cases in Britain and elsewhere because of that. And just to finish in the context of the legal system. It's all very well to say, "Let's do our best to present the evidence." But more and more, in cases of DNA profiling -- this is another one -- we expect juries, who are ordinary people -- and it's documented they're very bad at this -- we expect juries to be able to cope with the sorts of reasoning that goes on. In other spheres of life, if people argued -- well, except possibly for politics -- but in other spheres of life, if people argued illogically, we'd say that's not a good thing. We sort of expect it of politicians and don't hope for much more. In the case of uncertainty, we get it wrong all the time -- and at the very least, we should be aware of that, and ideally, we might try and do something about it. Thanks very much.
You know, one of the intense pleasures of travel and one of the delights of ethnographic research is the opportunity to live amongst those who have not forgotten the old ways, who still feel their past in the wind, touch it in stones polished by rain, taste it in the bitter leaves of plants. Just to know that Jaguar shamans still journey beyond the Milky Way, or the myths of the Inuit elders still resonate with meaning, or that in the Himalaya, the Buddhists still pursue the breath of the Dharma, is to really remember the central revelation of anthropology, and that is the idea that the world in which we live does not exist in some absolute sense, but is just one model of reality, the consequence of one particular set of adaptive choices that our lineage made, albeit successfully, many generations ago. And of course, we all share the same adaptive imperatives. We're all born. We all bring our children into the world. We go through initiation rites. We have to deal with the inexorable separation of death, so it shouldn't surprise us that we all sing, we all dance, we all have art. But what's interesting is the unique cadence of the song, the rhythm of the dance in every culture. And whether it is the Penan in the forests of Borneo, or the Voodoo acolytes in Haiti, or the warriors in the Kaisut desert of Northern Kenya, the Curandero in the mountains of the Andes, or a caravanserai in the middle of the Sahara -- this is incidentally the fellow that I traveled into the desert with a month ago -- or indeed a yak herder in the slopes of Qomolangma, Everest, the goddess mother of the world. All of these peoples teach us that there are other ways of being, other ways of thinking, other ways of orienting yourself in the Earth. And this is an idea, if you think about it, can only fill you with hope. Now, together the myriad cultures of the world make up a web of spiritual life and cultural life that envelops the planet, and is as important to the well-being of the planet as indeed is the biological web of life that you know as a biosphere. And you might think of this cultural web of life as being an ethnosphere, and you might define the ethnosphere as being the sum total of all thoughts and dreams, myths, ideas, inspirations, intuitions brought into being by the human imagination since the dawn of consciousness. The ethnosphere is humanity's great legacy. It's the symbol of all that we are and all that we can be as an astonishingly inquisitive species. And just as the biosphere has been severely eroded, so too is the ethnosphere -- and, if anything, at a far greater rate. No biologists, for example, would dare suggest that 50 percent of all species or more have been or are on the brink of extinction because it simply is not true, and yet that -- the most apocalyptic scenario in the realm of biological diversity -- scarcely approaches what we know to be the most optimistic scenario in the realm of cultural diversity. And the great indicator of that, of course, is language loss. When each of you in this room were born, there were 6,000 languages spoken on the planet. Now, a language is not just a body of vocabulary or a set of grammatical rules. A language is a flash of the human spirit. It's a vehicle through which the soul of each particular culture comes into the material world. Every language is an old-growth forest of the mind, a watershed, a thought, an ecosystem of spiritual possibilities. And of those 6,000 languages, as we sit here today in Monterey, fully half are no longer being whispered into the ears of children. They're no longer being taught to babies, which means, effectively, unless something changes, they're already dead. What could be more lonely than to be enveloped in silence, to be the last of your people to speak your language, to have no way to pass on the wisdom of the ancestors or anticipate the promise of the children? And yet, that dreadful fate is indeed the plight of somebody somewhere on Earth roughly every two weeks, because every two weeks, some elder dies and carries with him into the grave the last syllables of an ancient tongue. And I know there's some of you who say, "Well, wouldn't it be better, wouldn't the world be a better place if we all just spoke one language?" And I say, "Great, let's make that language Yoruba. Let's make it Cantonese. Let's make it Kogi." And you'll suddenly discover what it would be like to be unable to speak your own language. And so, what I'd like to do with you today is sort of take you on a journey through the ethnosphere, a brief journey through the ethnosphere, to try to begin to give you a sense of what in fact is being lost. Now, there are many of us who sort of forget that when I say "different ways of being," I really do mean different ways of being. Take, for example, this child of a Barasana in the Northwest Amazon, the people of the anaconda who believe that mythologically they came up the milk river from the east in the belly of sacred snakes. Now, this is a people who cognitively do not distinguish the color blue from the color green because the canopy of the heavens is equated to the canopy of the forest upon which the people depend. They have a curious language and marriage rule which is called "linguistic exogamy:" you must marry someone who speaks a different language. And this is all rooted in the mythological past, yet the curious thing is in these long houses, where there are six or seven languages spoken because of intermarriage, you never hear anyone practicing a language. They simply listen and then begin to speak. Or, one of the most fascinating tribes I ever lived with, the Waorani of northeastern Ecuador, an astonishing people first contacted peacefully in 1958. In 1957, five missionaries attempted contact and made a critical mistake. They dropped from the air 8 x 10 glossy photographs of themselves in what we would say to be friendly gestures, forgetting that these people of the rainforest had never seen anything two-dimensional in their lives. They picked up these photographs from the forest floor, tried to look behind the face to find the form or the figure, found nothing, and concluded that these were calling cards from the devil, so they speared the five missionaries to death. But the Waorani didn't just spear outsiders. They speared each other. 54 percent of their mortality was due to them spearing each other. We traced genealogies back eight generations, and we found two instances of natural death and when we pressured the people a little bit about it, they admitted that one of the fellows had gotten so old that he died getting old, so we speared him anyway. (Laughter) But at the same time they had a perspicacious knowledge of the forest that was astonishing. Their hunters could smell animal urine at 40 paces and tell you what species left it behind. In the early '80s, I had a really astonishing assignment when I was asked by my professor at Harvard if I was interested in going down to Haiti, infiltrating the secret societies which were the foundation of Duvalier's strength and Tonton Macoutes, and securing the poison used to make zombies. In order to make sense out of sensation, of course, I had to understand something about this remarkable faith of Vodoun. And Voodoo is not a black magic cult. On the contrary, it's a complex metaphysical worldview. It's interesting. If I asked you to name the great religions of the world, what would you say? Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, Judaism, whatever. There's always one continent left out, the assumption being that sub-Saharan Africa had no religious beliefs. Well, of course, they did and Voodoo is simply the distillation of these very profound religious ideas that came over during the tragic Diaspora of the slavery era. But, what makes Voodoo so interesting is that it's this living relationship between the living and the dead. So, the living give birth to the spirits. The spirits can be invoked from beneath the Great Water, responding to the rhythm of the dance to momentarily displace the soul of the living, so that for that brief shining moment, the acolyte becomes the god. That's why the Voodooists like to say that "You white people go to church and speak about God. We dance in the temple and become God." And because you are possessed, you are taken by the spirit -- how can you be harmed? So you see these astonishing demonstrations: Voodoo acolytes in a state of trance handling burning embers with impunity, a rather astonishing demonstration of the ability of the mind to affect the body that bears it when catalyzed in the state of extreme excitation. Now, of all the peoples that I've ever been with, the most extraordinary are the Kogi of the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta in northern Colombia. Descendants of the ancient Tairona civilization which once carpeted the Caribbean coastal plain of Colombia, in the wake of the conquest, these people retreated into an isolated volcanic massif that soars above the Caribbean coastal plain. In a bloodstained continent, these people alone were never conquered by the Spanish. To this day, they remain ruled by a ritual priesthood but the training for the priesthood is rather extraordinary. The young acolytes are taken away from their families at the age of three and four, sequestered in a shadowy world of darkness in stone huts at the base of glaciers for 18 years: two nine-year periods deliberately chosen to mimic the nine months of gestation they spend in their natural mother's womb; now they are metaphorically in the womb of the great mother. And for this entire time, they are inculturated into the values of their society, values that maintain the proposition that their prayers and their prayers alone maintain the cosmic -- or we might say the ecological -- balance. And at the end of this amazing initiation, one day they're suddenly taken out and for the first time in their lives, at the age of 18, they see a sunrise. And in that crystal moment of awareness of first light as the Sun begins to bathe the slopes of the stunningly beautiful landscape, suddenly everything they have learned in the abstract is affirmed in stunning glory. And the priest steps back and says, "You see? It's really as I've told you. It is that beautiful. It is yours to protect." They call themselves the "elder brothers" and they say we, who are the younger brothers, are the ones responsible for destroying the world. Now, this level of intuition becomes very important. Whenever we think of indigenous people and landscape, we either invoke Rousseau and the old canard of the "noble savage," which is an idea racist in its simplicity, or alternatively, we invoke Thoreau and say these people are closer to the Earth than we are. Well, indigenous people are neither sentimental nor weakened by nostalgia. There's not a lot of room for either in the malarial swamps of the Asmat or in the chilling winds of Tibet, but they have, nevertheless, through time and ritual, forged a traditional mystique of the Earth that is based not on the idea of being self-consciously close to it, but on a far subtler intuition: the idea that the Earth itself can only exist because it is breathed into being by human consciousness. Now, what does that mean? It means that a young kid from the Andes who's raised to believe that that mountain is an Apu spirit that will direct his or her destiny will be a profoundly different human being and have a different relationship to that resource or that place than a young kid from Montana raised to believe that a mountain is a pile of rock ready to be mined. Whether it's the abode of a spirit or a pile of ore is irrelevant. What's interesting is the metaphor that defines the relationship between the individual and the natural world. I was raised in the forests of British Columbia to believe those forests existed to be cut. That made me a different human being than my friends amongst the Kwagiulth who believe that those forests were the abode of Huxwhukw and the Crooked Beak of Heaven and the cannibal spirits that dwelled at the north end of the world, spirits they would have to engage during their Hamatsa initiation. Now, if you begin to look at the idea that these cultures could create different realities, you could begin to understand some of their extraordinary discoveries. Take this plant here. It's a photograph I took in the Northwest Amazon just last April. This is ayahuasca, which many of you have heard about, the most powerful psychoactive preparation of the shaman's repertoire. What makes ayahuasca fascinating is not the sheer pharmacological potential of this preparation, but the elaboration of it. It's made really of two different sources: on the one hand, this woody liana which has in it a series of beta-carbolines, harmine, harmaline, mildly hallucinogenic -- to take the vine alone is rather to have sort of blue hazy smoke drift across your consciousness -- but it's mixed with the leaves of a shrub in the coffee family called Psychotria viridis. This plant had in it some very powerful tryptamines, very close to brain serotonin, dimethyltryptamine, 5-methoxydimethyltryptamine. If you've ever seen the Yanomami blowing that snuff up their noses, that substance they make from a different set of species also contains methoxydimethyltryptamine. To have that powder blown up your nose is rather like being shot out of a rifle barrel lined with baroque paintings and landing on a sea of electricity. (Laughter) It doesn't create the distortion of reality; it creates the dissolution of reality. In fact, I used to argue with my professor, Richard Evan Shultes -- who is a man who sparked the psychedelic era with his discovery of the magic mushrooms in Mexico in the 1930s -- I used to argue that you couldn't classify these tryptamines as hallucinogenic because by the time you're under the effects there's no one home anymore to experience a hallucination. (Laughter) But the thing about tryptamines is they cannot be taken orally because they're denatured by an enzyme found naturally in the human gut called monoamine oxidase. They can only be taken orally if taken in conjunction with some other chemical that denatures the MAO. Now, the fascinating things are that the beta-carbolines found within that liana are MAO inhibitors of the precise sort necessary to potentiate the tryptamine. So you ask yourself a question. How, in a flora of 80,000 species of vascular plants, do these people find these two morphologically unrelated plants that when combined in this way, created a kind of biochemical version of the whole being greater than the sum of the parts? Well, we use that great euphemism, "trial and error," which is exposed to be meaningless. But you ask the Indians, and they say, "The plants talk to us." Well, what does that mean? This tribe, the Cofan, has 17 varieties of ayahuasca, all of which they distinguish a great distance in the forest, all of which are referable to our eye as one species. And then you ask them how they establish their taxonomy and they say, "I thought you knew something about plants. I mean, don't you know anything?" And I said, "No." Well, it turns out you take each of the 17 varieties in the night of a full moon, and it sings to you in a different key. Now, that's not going to get you a Ph.D. at Harvard, but it's a lot more interesting than counting stamens. (Laughter) Now -- (Applause) -- the problem -- the problem is that even those of us sympathetic with the plight of indigenous people view them as quaint and colorful but somehow reduced to the margins of history as the real world, meaning our world, moves on. Well, the truth is the 20th century, 300 years from now, is not going to be remembered for its wars or its technological innovations, but rather as the era in which we stood by and either actively endorsed or passively accepted the massive destruction of both biological and cultural diversity on the planet. Now, the problem isn't change. All cultures through all time have constantly been engaged in a dance with new possibilities of life. And the problem is not technology itself. The Sioux Indians did not stop being Sioux when they gave up the bow and arrow any more than an American stopped being an American when he gave up the horse and buggy. It's not change or technology that threatens the integrity of the ethnosphere. It is power, the crude face of domination. Wherever you look around the world, you discover that these are not cultures destined to fade away; these are dynamic living peoples being driven out of existence by identifiable forces that are beyond their capacity to adapt to: whether it's the egregious deforestation in the homeland of the Penan -- a nomadic people from Southeast Asia, from Sarawak -- a people who lived free in the forest until a generation ago, and now have all been reduced to servitude and prostitution on the banks of the rivers, where you can see the river itself is soiled with the silt that seems to be carrying half of Borneo away to the South China Sea, where the Japanese freighters hang light in the horizon ready to fill their holds with raw logs ripped from the forest -- or, in the case of the Yanomami, it's the disease entities that have come in, in the wake of the discovery of gold. Or if we go into the mountains of Tibet, where I'm doing a lot of research recently, you'll see it's a crude face of political domination. You know, genocide, the physical extinction of a people is universally condemned, but ethnocide, the destruction of people's way of life, is not only not condemned, it's universally, in many quarters, celebrated as part of a development strategy. And you cannot understand the pain of Tibet until you move through it at the ground level. I once travelled 6,000 miles from Chengdu in Western China overland through southeastern Tibet to Lhasa with a young colleague, and it was only when I got to Lhasa that I understood the face behind the statistics you hear about: 6,000 sacred monuments torn apart to dust and ashes, 1.2 million people killed by the cadres during the Cultural Revolution. This young man's father had been ascribed to the Panchen Lama. That meant he was instantly killed at the time of the Chinese invasion. His uncle fled with His Holiness in the Diaspora that took the people to Nepal. His mother was incarcerated for the crime of being wealthy. He was smuggled into the jail at the age of two to hide beneath her skirt tails because she couldn't bear to be without him. The sister who had done that brave deed was put into an education camp. One day she inadvertently stepped on an armband of Mao, and for that transgression, she was given seven years of hard labor. The pain of Tibet can be impossible to bear, but the redemptive spirit of the people is something to behold. And in the end, then, it really comes down to a choice: do we want to live in a monochromatic world of monotony or do we want to embrace a polychromatic world of diversity? Margaret Mead, the great anthropologist, said, before she died, that her greatest fear was that as we drifted towards this blandly amorphous generic world view not only would we see the entire range of the human imagination reduced to a more narrow modality of thought, but that we would wake from a dream one day having forgotten there were even other possibilities. And it's humbling to remember that our species has, perhaps, been around for [150,000] years. The Neolithic Revolution -- which gave us agriculture, at which time we succumbed to the cult of the seed; the poetry of the shaman was displaced by the prose of the priesthood; we created hierarchy specialization surplus -- is only 10,000 years ago. The modern industrial world as we know it is barely 300 years old. Now, that shallow history doesn't suggest to me that we have all the answers for all of the challenges that will confront us in the ensuing millennia. When these myriad cultures of the world are asked the meaning of being human, they respond with 10,000 different voices. And it's within that song that we will all rediscover the possibility of being what we are: a fully conscious species, fully aware of ensuring that all peoples and all gardens find a way to flourish. And there are great moments of optimism. This is a photograph I took at the northern tip of Baffin Island when I went narwhal hunting with some Inuit people, and this man, Olayuk, told me a marvelous story of his grandfather. The Canadian government has not always been kind to the Inuit people, and during the 1950s, to establish our sovereignty, we forced them into settlements. This old man's grandfather refused to go. The family, fearful for his life, took away all of his weapons, all of his tools. Now, you must understand that the Inuit did not fear the cold; they took advantage of it. The runners of their sleds were originally made of fish wrapped in caribou hide. So, this man's grandfather was not intimidated by the Arctic night or the blizzard that was blowing. He simply slipped outside, pulled down his sealskin trousers and defecated into his hand. And as the feces began to freeze, he shaped it into the form of a blade. He put a spray of saliva on the edge of the shit knife and as it finally froze solid, he butchered a dog with it. He skinned the dog and improvised a harness, took the ribcage of the dog and improvised a sled, harnessed up an adjacent dog, and disappeared over the ice floes, shit knife in belt. Talk about getting by with nothing. (Laughter) And this, in many ways -- (Applause) -- is a symbol of the resilience of the Inuit people and of all indigenous people around the world. The Canadian government in April of 1999 gave back to total control of the Inuit an area of land larger than California and Texas put together. It's our new homeland. It's called Nunavut. It's an independent territory. They control all mineral resources. An amazing example of how a nation-state can seek restitution with its people. And finally, in the end, I think it's pretty obvious at least to all of all us who've traveled in these remote reaches of the planet, to realize that they're not remote at all. They're homelands of somebody. They represent branches of the human imagination that go back to the dawn of time. And for all of us, the dreams of these children, like the dreams of our own children, become part of the naked geography of hope. So, what we're trying to do at the National Geographic, finally, is, we believe that politicians will never accomplish anything. We think that polemics -- (Applause) -- we think that polemics are not persuasive, but we think that storytelling can change the world, and so we are probably the best storytelling institution in the world. We get 35 million hits on our website every month. 156 nations carry our television channel. Our magazines are read by millions. And what we're doing is a series of journeys to the ethnosphere where we're going to take our audience to places of such cultural wonder that they cannot help but come away dazzled by what they have seen, and hopefully, therefore, embrace gradually, one by one, the central revelation of anthropology: that this world deserves to exist in a diverse way, that we can find a way to live in a truly multicultural, pluralistic world where all of the wisdom of all peoples can contribute to our collective well-being. Thank you very much. (Applause)
Sixty-five million years ago, a very important and catastrophic event changed the course of life on land. And although we know that the land animals I'm going to talk about are just the scum of the Earth on the land -- the little bits of land floating around -- but they are important to us because they're sort of in our scale of experience from millimeters to meters. And these animals disappeared, and a separate life, mammals, radiated out to take their place. And so, we know this in extraordinary detail. And so this is a core from near Bermuda. We know that the tsunamis, the earthquakes, and the things that we've experienced in the entire record of humankind history can't really quite get around the kind of disaster that this represented for the Earth. So even before that impact was known, even before scientists in general came to an agreement over the theory of evolution, scientists and natural historians of all kinds of stripes actually had divided Earth's life's history into these two episodes: Mesozoic, the middle life, and the Cenozoic, the recent life. And as it turns out, it actually corresponds really nicely with geologic history. So we have a Mesozoic period, an age of fragmentation, and a Cenozoic period, an age of reconnection -- South America to North America, India to Asia. And so my work, really, is trying to understand the character of that Mesozoic radiation compared to the Cenozoic radiation to see what mysteries we can understand from dinosaurs and from other animals about what life on drifting continents really can tell us about evolution. The work immediately begs the question, "Why didn't they go into the waters?" I mean, certainly mammals did. This is one example. You can go outside -- see many other examples. Within five, 10 million years of the bolide impact we had a whole variety of animals going into the water. Why didn't they do that? Why didn't they hang around in trees at good size, and why didn't they burrow? Why didn't they do all these things, and if they didn't do all these things, what kinds of animals were in those spaces? And if there were no animals in those spaces, what does that tell us about, you know, how evolution works on land? Really interesting questions. I think a lot of it has to do with body size. In fact, I think that most of it has to do with body size -- the size you are when you inherit a vacant ecospace from whatever natural disaster. Looking at dinosaur evolution and studying it, digging it up for many years, I end up looking at the mammal radiation, and it seems as though everything is quick time, just like technology, advancing by an order of magnitude. Dinosaur evolution proceeded at a stately pace, an order of magnitude slower on any way you want to measure it. You want to measure it by diversity? You want to measure it by the time it took to reach maximum body size? Yes, they do have larger body size, but many of them are smaller, but we're interested in the time it took them to achieve that. Fifty million years to achieve this maximum body size. And that is 10 times longer than it took the mammals to achieve maximum body size and invade all those habitats. So there's lessons to learn, and there's lessons to learn from the exception, the exception that we know very well today from the discoveries we've made, and many other scholars have made around the world. This slide was shown before. This is the famous Jurassic bird Archaeopteryx. We now know this transition is the one time that dinosaurs actually went below that body size -- we're going to see where they began in a minute -- and it is the one time that they rapidly invaded all the habitats I just told you that dinosaurs weren't in. They became marine. We now know them today from the ice caps. There's burrowing birds. They inhabit the trees at all body sizes, and, of course, they inhabit the land. So we were the first to actually name a bird from the famous series that later exploded onto the pages of Science and Nature. We called this bird Sinornis. It's a little bit more advanced than Archaeopteryx, and if you go to different layers, you find things that are less advanced than Archaeopteryx, and every grade in between, so that if you find something today, we're usually splitting hairs -- or, more appropriately, feathers -- as to decide whether it's actually a non-avian or an avian. It is the greatest transition that we have, actually, on land from one habitat to another, bar none, to understand how a bony, fairly heavy, kilogram or a couple-of-kilogram animal could make such a transition. It is really our greatest -- one of our greatest -- evolutionary sequences. Now, my work began at the beginning. I thought if I'm going to understand dinosaur evolution, I'd have to go back to those beds where they had picked up fragments, go back to a time and a place where the earliest dinosaurs existed. I'd like to call for this little video clip to give you some idea of, sort of, what we face. Normally, we get asked a lot of questions: "Well, how do you find fossils in areas that look like this?" If we could roll that first video clip. This is sort of a nice helicopter ride through those early beds, and they're located in Northeastern Argentina. And we're coming over a cliff, and at the top of that cliff, dinosaurs had basically taken over. At the bottom of the cliff, we find that they're rare as hens' teeth. That's where dinosaur origins is to be found: at the bottom of the cliff. You go into an area like this, you get a geologic map, you get a topographic map, and the best, most-inspired team you can bring to the area. And the rest is up to you. You've got to find fossils. You've got to dig a hole that's usually quite a bit bigger than that to get it out; you've got to climb those cliffs and find, really, everything that existed -- not just the dinosaurs, but the entire story. If you're lucky, and you dig a place like that, you actually find the ash bed to dig it, and we did. 228 million years old, we found what really is the most primitive dinosaur: that's the Ur-dinosaur. A three-and-a-half foot thing, beautiful skull, predator, meat-eater, a two-legged animal. So, all the other dinosaurs that you know, or your kids know, at least, on four legs. This is sort of a look at the skull, and it's an absolutely fantastic thing about five or six inches long. It looks rather bird-like because it is. It's bird-like and hollow. A predator. Maybe 25 pounds, or 10 kilograms. That's where dinosaurs began. That's where the radiation began. That is 10 times larger than the mammal radiation, which was a four-legged radiation. We are extremely dinosaur-like, and unusual in our two-legged approach to life. Now, if you want to understand what happened then when the continents broke apart, and dinosaurs found -- landlubbers, as they are -- found themselves adrift. There's some missing puzzle pieces. Most of those missing puzzle pieces are southern continents, because it was those continents that are least explored. If you want to add to this picture and try and sketch it globally, you really have to force yourself to go down to the four corners of the Earth -- Africa, India, Antarctica, Australia -- and start putting together some of these pieces. I've been to some of those continents, but Africa was, in the words of Steven Pinker, was a blank slate, largely. But one with an immense chalkboard in the middle, with lots of little areas of dinosaur rock if you could survive an expedition. There's no roads into the Sahara. It's an enormous place. To be able to excavate the 80 tons of dinosaurs that we have in the Sahara and take them out, you really have to put together an expedition team that can handle the conditions. Some of them are political. Many of them are physical. Some of them -- the most important -- are mental. And you really have to be able to withstand conditions -- you have to drive into the desert, you will see landscapes in many cases -- you can see from what we've discovered -- that nobody else has ever seen. And the kinds of teams they bring in? Well, they're composed of people who understand science as adventure with a purpose. They're usually students who've never seen a desert. Some of them are more experienced. Your job as a leader -- this is definitely a team sport -- your job as a leader is to try to inspire them to do more work than they've ever done in their life under conditions that they can't imagine. So, 125 degrees is normal. The ground surface at 150 -- typical. So, you can't leave your normal metal tools out because you'll get a first-degree burn if you grab them sometimes. So, you are finding yourself also in an amazing cultural milieu. You're really rubbing shoulders with the world's last great nomadic people. These are the Tuareg nomads, and they're living their lives much as they have for centuries. Your job is to excavate things like this in the foreground, and make them enter the pages of history. To do that, you've got to actually transport them thousands of miles out of the desert. We're talking about Ethiopia, but let's talk about Niger -- or Niger, in our English language -- north of Nigeria -- that's where this photograph was taken. Basically you're talking about a country that, when we started working there, did not have container traffic. You transported the bones out yourself to the coast of Africa, onto a boat, if you wanted to get them out of the middle of the Sahara. That's a 2,000 mile journey. So enormous excavations and a lot of work, and out of essentially a partial herd of dinosaurs that you saw buried there -- 20 tons of material -- we erect Jobaria, a sauropod dinosaur like we haven't seen on some other continents. It really is a little bit out of place temporally. It looks nothing like what we would find if we dug in contemporary beds in North America. Here's the animal that was causing it trouble. And, you know, on and on -- a whole menagerie. When you pick up something like this -- and some of you have had the chance to touch it -- this is a piece of history. You're touching something that's 110 million years old. This is a thumb claw. There it was, moments after it was discovered. It is an incredible view of life, and it really began when we began to understand the depth of time. It's only been with us for less than a century, and in that time, that fourth dimension, when radioactive dating came about, less than a century ago, and we could actually tell how old some of these things were, is probably the most profound transformation, because it changes the way we look at ourselves and the world dramatically. When you pick up a piece of history like that, I think it can transform kids that are possibly interested in science. That's the animal that thumb claw came from: Suchomimus. Here's some others. This is something we found in Morocco, an immense animal. We prototyped by CAT-scanning the brain out of this animal. It turns out to have a forebrain one-fifteenth the size of a human. This was the cover of Science, because they thought that humans were more intelligent than these animals, but we can see by some in our administration that despite the enormous advantage in brain volume some of the attitudes remain the same. Anyway, smaller raptors. All the stuff from Jurassic Park that you know of -- all those small animals -- they all come from northern continents. This is the first skeleton from a southern continent, and guess what? You start preparing it. It has no big claw on its hind foot. It doesn't look like a Velociraptor. It's really a wholly separate radiation. So what we're trying to piece together here is a story. It involves flying reptiles like this Pterosaur that we reconstructed from Africa. Crocodiles, of course, and that's a nasty one we haven't named yet. And huge things -- I mean, this is a lower jaw just laying there in the desert of this enormous crocodile. The crocodile is technically called Sarcosuchus. That's an adult Orinoco crocodile in its jaws. We had to try and reconstruct this. We had to actually look at recent crocodiles to understand how crocodiles scale. Could I have the second little video clip? Now, this field is just -- and, of course, science in general -- is just -- adventure. We had to find and measure the largest crocodiles living today. Narrator: ... as long as their boat. Man: Look at that set of choppers! Yeah, he's a big one. Narrator: If they can just land it, this croc will provide useful data, helping Paul in his quest to understand Sarcosuchus. Man: OK, hand me some more here. Man 2: OK. Narrator: It falls to Paul to cover its eyes. Man: Watch out! Watch out! No, no, no, no. You're going to have to get on the back legs. Man: I got the back legs. Man 2: You have the back legs? No, you have the front legs, my friend. I've got it. I've got the back legs. Somebody get the front legs. Paul Sereno: Let's get this tape measure on him. Put it right there. Wow. Sixty-five. Wow. That's a big skull. Narrator: Big, but less than half the size of supercroc's skull. Man: Enormous. PS: You've got a ... 14-foot croc. Man: I knew it was big. PS: Don't get off. You don't get off, but don't worry about me. Narrator: Paul has his data, so they decide to release the animal back into the river. PS: Don't get off! Don't get off! Don't get off! Narrator: Paul has never seen a fossil do that. PS: Okay, when I say three, we move. One, two, three! Whoa! So -- there were -- (Applause) Well, you know, the -- the fossil record is truly amazing because it really forces you to look at living animals in a new way. We proved with those measurements that crocodiles scaled isometrically. It depended on the shape of their skull, though, so we had to actually get those measurements to be sure that we had reconstructed and could prove to the scientific world that supercroc in fact is a 40-foot crocodile, probably a male. Anyway, you find other things, too. I'm going to lead an expedition to the Sahara to dig up Africa's largest neolithic site. We found this last year. Two hundred skeletons, tools, jewelry. This is a ceremonial disk. An amazing record of the colonization of the Sahara 5,000 years ago is been sitting out there waiting for us to go back. So, really exciting. And then work later is going to take us to Tibet. Now, we normally think of Tibet as a highland. It's really an island continent. It was a precursor to India, a messenger from Gondwana -- a lost paradise of dinosaurs isolated for millions of years. No one's found them. We know where they are, and we're going to go and get them next year. They're only between 13 and 14,000 feet, but if you go in the warm part of the year, it's O.K. Now, I tried to suture together a dinosaur evolutionary history so that we can try to understand some basic patterns of evolution. I've talked about a few of them. We really need to take that further. We need to delve into this mass of anatomy that we've been compiling to understand where the changes are occurring and what this means. We can't predict, necessarily, what will happen in evolution, but we can learn some of the rules of the game, and that's really what we're trying to do. With regard to the biogeographic question, the Earth is dividing. These are all landlubbing animals. There's a couple of choices. You get divided, and a continent's division corresponds to a fork in the evolutionary tree, or you're crafty, and you manage to escape from one to the other and erase that division, or you're living peacefully on each side, and on one side you just go extinct, and you survive on the other side and create a difference. And the fourth thing is that you actually did one or the other of those three things, but the paleontologist never found you. And you take those four instances and you realize you have a complex problem. And so, in addition to digging, I think we have some answers from the dinosaur record. I think these dinosaurs migrated -- we call it dispersal -- around the globe, with the slightest land bridge. They did it within two or three degrees of the pole, to maintain similarity between continents. But when they were divided, indeed they were divided, and we do see the continents carving differences among dinosaurs. But there's one thing that's even more important, and I think that's extinction. We have downgraded this factor. It carves up the history of life, and gives us the differences that we see in the dinosaur world towards the end, right before the bolide impact. The best way to test this is to actually create a model. So if we move back, this is a two-dimensional typical tree of life. I want to give you three dimensions. So you see the tree of life, but now I've added the dimension of area. So the tree of life is normally divergence over time. Now we have divergence over time, but we've created the third dimension of area. This is a computer program which has three knobs. We can control those things that we're worried about: extinction, sampling, dispersal -- going from one area to another. And ultimately we can control the branching to mimic what we think the continents were like, and run it a thousand times, so we can estimate the parameters, to answer the question whether we are on the mark or not, at least to know the barriers of the problems. So that's a little bit about the science. Today I'm going to spend the rest of my few minutes up here talking about the other stuff that I do in Chicago, which is related to the fact that I never -- and actually, in talking to a lot of TEDsters, there's a number of you out there -- I don't know that I'd get an answer honestly, if I asked you to raise your hand, but there are a number of you out there that started your scientific, technical, entertainment career as failures, by society's standards, as failures by schools. I was one of those. I was failed by my school -- my school failed me. Who's pointing fingers? Several teachers nearly killed me. I found myself in art. I was a total failure in school, not really headed to graduate high school. And I went on -- that's my first painting on canvas. I read a dictionary. I got into college. I became an artist. O.K., and started drawing. It became abstract. I worked up a portfolio, and I was headed to New York. Sometimes I would see bones when there was a body there. Something was going on in the background. I headed to New York to a studio. I took a side trip to the American Museum, and I never recovered. But really it's the same discipline -- they're kindred disciplines. I mean, is there anything that is not visualizing what can't be seen, in terms of discovering this dinosaur bone from a small piece of it that's out there, or seeing the distortion that we try to see as evolutionary distortion in one animal to another? This is a very extraordinarily visual. I give you a human face because you're experts at that. It takes us years to understand how to do that with dinosaurs. They're really kindred disciplines. But what we're trying to create in Chicago is a way to get, collect together, those students who are least represented in our science and technology spheres. We all know, and there's been several allusions to it, that we are failing in our ability to produce enough scientists, engineers and technicians. We've known that for a long time. We've gone through the Sputnik phase, and now, as you see the increase in the pace of what we're doing, it becomes even more prominent. Where are all these people going to come from? And a more general question for our society is, what's going to happen to all the rest that are left behind? What about all the kids like me that were in school -- kids like some of you out there -- that were in school and didn't get a chance and will never get a chance to participate in science and technology? Those are the questions I ask. And we talk about Ethiopia, and it's very important. Niger is equally important, and I'm trying desperately to do something in Niger. They have an AIDS problem. I asked -- the U.S. State Department asked the government recently, What do you want to do? And they gave them two problems. Dinosaurs was one of them. Give us a museum of dinosaurs, and we will attract tourists, which is our number two industry. And I hope to God the United States government, me, or TED, or somebody helps us do that, because that would be an incredible thing for their country. But when we look back at our own country, we're looking back at our cities, the cities where most of you come from -- certainly the city I come from -- there's legions of kids out there like these. And the question is -- and we started to address this question for centuries -- as to how we get these kids involved in science. We've started in Chicago an organization -- a non-profit organization -- called Project Exploration. These are two kids from Project Exploration. We met them in their early stages in high school. They were -- failing to poor students, and they are now -- one at the University of Chicago, another in Illinois. We've got students at Harvard. We're six years old. And we created a track record. Because when you go out there as a scholar, and you try to find out longitudinal studies, track records like that, there essentially are very few, if none. So, we've created an incredible track record of 100 percent graduation, 90 percent going to college, many first-generation, 90 percent of those choosing science as a career. It's an impressive track record, and so we look back and we say, well, we didn't really exactly work this out theoretically from the start, but when we look back, there are theoretical movements in science education. It's gone through science as an inquiry, which was a big advance, and Dewey back at Chicago -- you learn by doing. To -- you learn by envisioning yourself as a scientist, and then you learn to envision yourself as a scientist. The next step is to learn the capability to make yourself a scientist. You have to have those steps. If you have -- It's easy to get kids interested in science. It's hard to get them to envision themselves as a scientist, which involves standing up in front of people like we're doing here at this symposium and presenting something as a knowledgeable person, and then seeing yourself in the role as a scientist and giving yourself the tools to pursue that. And so, that's what we're going to do. We're planning a permanent home in Chicago. We have lots of ideas, but I guarantee you this one thing -- and I've talked to some people here at TED -- it's not going to look like anything you've seen before. It's going to be part-school, part-museum hall, part-conservatory, part-zoo, and part of an answer to the problem of how you interest kids in science. Thank you very much.
I spent the better part of a decade looking at American responses to mass atrocity and genocide. And I'd like to start by sharing with you one moment that to me sums up what there is to know about American and democratic responses to mass atrocity. And that moment came on April 21, 1994. So 14 years ago, almost, in the middle of the Rwandan genocide, in which 800,000 people would be systematically exterminated by the Rwandan government and some extremist militia. On April 21, in the New York Times, the paper reported that somewhere between 200,000 and 300,000 people had already been killed in the genocide. It was in the paper -- not on the front page. It was a lot like the Holocaust coverage, it was buried in the paper. Rwanda itself was not seen as newsworthy, and amazingly, genocide itself was not seen as newsworthy. But on April 21, a wonderfully honest moment occurred. And that was that an American congresswoman named Patricia Schroeder from Colorado met with a group of journalists. And one of the journalists said to her, what's up? What's going on in the U.S. government? Two to 300,000 people have just been exterminated in the last couple of weeks in Rwanda. It's two weeks into the genocide at that time, but of course, at that time you don't know how long it's going to last. And the journalist said, why is there so little response out of Washington? Why no hearings, no denunciations, no people getting arrested in front of the Rwandan embassy or in front of the White House? What's the deal? And she said -- she was so honest -- she said, "It's a great question. All I can tell you is that in my congressional office in Colorado and my office in Washington, we're getting hundreds and hundreds of calls about the endangered ape and gorilla population in Rwanda, but nobody is calling about the people. The phones just aren't ringing about the people." And the reason I give you this moment is there's a deep truth in it. And that truth is, or was, in the 20th century, that while we were beginning to develop endangered species movements, we didn't have an endangered people's movement. We had Holocaust education in the schools. Most of us were groomed not only on images of nuclear catastrophe, but also on images and knowledge of the Holocaust. There's a museum, of course, on the Mall in Washington, right next to Lincoln and Jefferson. I mean, we have owned Never Again culturally, appropriately, interestingly. And yet the politicization of Never Again, the operationalization of Never Again, had never occurred in the 20th century. And that's what that moment with Patricia Schroeder I think shows: that if we are to bring about an end to the world's worst atrocities, we have to make it such. There has to be a role -- there has to be the creation of political noise and political costs in response to massive crimes against humanity, and so forth. So that was the 20th century. Now here -- and this will be a relief to you at this point in the afternoon -- there is good news, amazing news, in the 21st century, and that is that, almost out of nowhere, there has come into being an anti-genocide movement, an anti-genocide constituency, and one that looks destined, in fact, to be permanent. It grew up in response to the atrocities in Darfur. It is comprised of students. There are something like 300 anti-genocide chapters on college campuses around the country. It's bigger than the anti-apartheid movement. There are something like 500 high school chapters devoted to stopping the genocide in Darfur. Evangelicals have joined it. Jewish groups have joined it. "Hotel Rwanda" watchers have joined it. It is a cacophonous movement. To call it a movement, as with all movements, perhaps, is a little misleading. It's diverse. It's got a lot of different approaches. It's got all the ups and the downs of movements. But it has been amazingly successful in one regard, in that it has become, it has congealed into this endangered people's movement that was missing in the 20th century. It sees itself, such as it is, the it, as something that will create the impression that there will be political cost, there will be a political price to be paid, for allowing genocide, for not having an heroic imagination, for not being an upstander but for being, in fact, a bystander. Now because it's student-driven, there's some amazing things that the movement has done. They have launched a divestment campaign that has now convinced, I think, 55 universities in 22 states to divest their holdings of stocks with regard to companies doing business in Sudan. They have a 1-800-GENOCIDE number -- this is going to sound very kitsch, but for those of you who may not be, I mean, may be apolitical, but interested in doing something about genocide, you dial 1-800-GENOCIDE and you type in your zip code, and you don't even have to know who your congressperson is. It will refer you directly to your congressperson, to your U.S. senator, to your governor where divestment legislation is pending. They've lowered the transaction costs of stopping genocide. I think the most innovative thing they've introduced recently are genocide grades. And it takes students to introduce genocide grades. So what you now have when a Congress is in session is members of Congress calling up these 19-year-olds or 24-year-olds and saying, I'm just told I have a D minus on genocide; what do I do to get a C? I just want to get a C. Help me. And the students and the others who are part of this incredibly energized base are there to answer that, and there's always something to do. Now, what this movement has done is it has extracted from the Bush administration from the United States, at a time of massive over-stretch -- military, financial, diplomatic -- a whole series of commitments to Darfur that no other country in the world is making. For instance, the referral of the crimes in Darfur to the International Criminal Court, which the Bush administration doesn't like. The expenditure of 3 billion dollars in refugee camps to try to keep, basically, the people who've been displaced from their homes by the Sudanese government, by the so-called Janjaweed, the militia, to keep those people alive until something more durable can be achieved. And recently, or now not that recently, about six months ago, the authorization of a peacekeeping force of 26,000 that will go. And that's all the Bush administration's leadership, and it's all because of this bottom-up pressure and the fact that the phones haven't stopped ringing from the beginning of this crisis. The bad news, however, to this question of will evil prevail, is that evil lives on. The people in those camps are surrounded on all sides by so-called Janjaweed, these men on horseback with spears and Kalashnikovs. Women who go to get firewood in order to heat the humanitarian aid in order to feed their families -- humanitarian aid, the dirty secret of it is it has to be heated, really, to be edible -- are themselves subjected to rape, which is a tool of the genocide that is being used. And the peacekeepers I've mentioned, the force has been authorized, but almost no country on Earth has stepped forward since the authorization to actually put its troops or its police in harm's way. So we have achieved an awful lot relative to the 20th century, and yet far too little relative to the gravity of the crime that is unfolding as we sit here, as we speak. Why the limits to the movement? Why is what has been achieved, or what the movement has done, been necessary but not sufficient to the crime? I think there are a couple -- there are many reasons -- but a couple just to focus on briefly. The first is that the movement, such as it is, stops at America's borders. It is not a global movement. It does not have too many compatriots abroad who themselves are asking their governments to do more to stop genocide. And the Holocaust culture that we have in this country makes Americans, sort of, more prone to, I think, want to bring Never Again to life. The guilt that the Clinton administration expressed, that Bill Clinton expressed over Rwanda, created a space in our society for a consensus that Rwanda was bad and wrong and we wish we had done more, and that is something that the movement has taken advantage of. European governments, for the most part, haven't acknowledged responsibility, and there's nothing to kind of to push back and up against. So this movement, if it's to be durable and global, will have to cross borders, and you will have to see other citizens in democracies, not simply resting on the assumption that their government would do something in the face of genocide, but actually making it such. Governments will never gravitate towards crimes of this magnitude naturally or eagerly. As we saw, they haven't even gravitated towards protecting our ports or reigning in loose nukes. Why would we expect in a bureaucracy that it would orient itself towards distant suffering? So one reason is it hasn't gone global. The second is, of course, that at this time in particular in America's history, we have a credibility problem, a legitimacy problem in international institutions. It is structurally really, really hard to do, as the Bush administration rightly does, which is to denounce genocide on a Monday and then describe water boarding on a Tuesday as a no-brainer and then turn up on Wednesday and look for troop commitments. Now, other countries have their own reasons for not wanting to get involved. Let me be clear. They're in some ways using the Bush administration as an alibi. But it is essential for us to be a leader in this sphere, of course to restore our standing and our leadership in the world. The recovery's going to take some time. We have to ask ourselves, what now? What do we do going forward as a country and as citizens in relationship to the world's worst places, the world's worst suffering, killers, and the kinds of killers that could come home to roost sometime in the future? The place that I turned to answer that question was to a man that many of you may not have ever heard of, and that is a Brazilian named Sergio Vieira de Mello who, as Chris said, was blown up in Iraq in 2003. He was the victim of the first-ever suicide bomb in Iraq. It's hard to remember, but there was actually a time in the summer of 2003, even after the U.S. invasion, where, apart from looting, civilians were relatively safe in Iraq. Now, who was Sergio? Sergio Vieira de Mello was his name. In addition to being Brazilian, he was described to me before I met him in 1994 as someone who was a cross between James Bond on the one hand and Bobby Kennedy on the other. And in the U.N., you don't get that many people who actually manage to merge those qualities. He was James Bond-like in that he was ingenious. He was drawn to the flames, he chased the flames, he was like a moth to the flames. Something of an adrenalin junkie. He was successful with women. He was Bobby Kennedy-like because in some ways one could never tell if he was a realist masquerading as an idealist or an idealist masquerading as a realist, as people always wondered about Bobby Kennedy and John Kennedy in that way. What he was was a decathlete of nation-building, of problem-solving, of troubleshooting in the world's worst places and in the world's most broken places. In failing states, genocidal states, under-governed states, precisely the kinds of places that threats to this country exist on the horizon, and precisely the kinds of places where most of the world's suffering tends to get concentrated. These are the places he was drawn to. He moved with the headlines. He was in the U.N. for 34 years. He joined at the age of 21. Started off when the causes in the wars du jour in the '70s were wars of independence and decolonization. He was there in Bangladesh dealing with the outflow of millions of refugees -- the largest refugee flow in history up to that point. He was in Sudan when the civil war broke out there. He was in Cyprus right after the Turkish invasion. He was in Mozambique for the War of Independence. He was in Lebanon. Amazingly, he was in Lebanon -- the U.N. base was used -- Palestinians staged attacks out from behind the U.N. base. Israel then invaded and overran the U.N. base. Sergio was in Beirut when the U.S. Embassy was hit by the first-ever suicide attack against the United States. People date the beginning of this new era to 9/11, but surely 1983, with the attack on the US Embassy and the Marine barracks -- which Sergio witnessed -- those are, in fact, in some ways, the dawning of the era that we find ourselves in today. From Lebanon he went to Bosnia in the '90s. The issues were, of course, ethnic sectarian violence. He was the first person to negotiate with the Khmer Rouge. Talk about evil prevailing. I mean, here he was in the room with the embodiment of evil in Cambodia. He negotiates with the Serbs. He actually crosses so far into this realm of talking to evil and trying to convince evil that it doesn't need to prevail that he earns the nickname -- not Sergio but Serbio while he's living in the Balkans and conducting these kinds of negotiations. He then goes to Rwanda and to Congo in the aftermath of the genocide, and he's the guy who has to decide -- huh, OK, the genocide is over; 800,000 people have been killed; the people responsible are fleeing into neighboring countries -- into Congo, into Tanzania. I'm Sergio, I'm a humanitarian, and I want to feed those -- well, I don't want to feed the killers but I want to feed the two million people who are with them, so we're going to go, we're going to set up camps, and we're going to supply humanitarian aid. But, uh-oh, the killers are within the camps. Well, I'd like to separate the sheep from the wolves. Let me go door-to-door to the international community and see if anybody will give me police or troops to do the separation. And their response, of course, was no more than we wanted to stop the genocide and put our troops in harm's way to do that, nor do we now want to get in the way and pluck genocidaires from camps. So then you have to make the decision. Do you turn off the international spigot of life support and risk two million civilian lives? Or do you continue feeding the civilians, knowing that the genocidaires are in the camps, literally sharpening their knives for future battle? What do you do? It's all lesser-evil terrain in these broken places. Late '90s: nation-building is the cause du jour. He's the guy put in charge. He's the Paul Bremer or the Jerry Bremer of first Kosovo and then East Timor. He governs the places. He's the viceroy. He has to decide on tax policy, on currency, on border patrol, on policing. He has to make all these judgments. He's a Brazilian in these places. He speaks seven languages. He's been up to that point in 14 war zones so he's positioned to make better judgments, perhaps, than people who have never done that kind of work. But nonetheless, he is the cutting edge of our experimentation with doing good with very few resources being brought to bear in, again, the world's worst places. And then after Timor, 9/11 has happened, he's named U.N. Human Rights Commissioner, and he has to balance liberty and security and figure out, what do you do when the most powerful country in the United Nations is bowing out of the Geneva Conventions, bowing out of international law? Do you denounce? Well, if you denounce, you're probably never going to get back in the room. Maybe you stay reticent. Maybe you try to charm President Bush -- and that's what he did. And in so doing he earned himself, unfortunately, his final and tragic appointment to Iraq -- the one that resulted in his death. One note on his death, which is so devastating, is that despite predicating the war on Iraq on a link between Saddam Hussein and terrorism in 9/11, believe it or not, the Bush administration or the invaders did no planning, no pre-war planning, to respond to terrorism. So Sergio -- this receptacle of all of this learning on how to deal with evil and how to deal with brokenness, lay under the rubble for three and a half hours without rescue. Stateless. The guy who tried to help the stateless people his whole career. Like a refugee. Because he represents the U.N. If you represent everyone, in some ways you represent no one. You're un-owned. And what the American -- the most powerful military in the history of mankind was able to muster for his rescue, believe it or not, was literally these heroic two American soldiers went into the shaft. Building was shaking. One of them had been at 9/11 and lost his buddies on September 11th, and yet went in and risked his life in order to save Sergio. But all they had was a woman's handbag -- literally one of those basket handbags -- and they tied it to a curtain rope from one of the offices at U.N. headquarters, and created a pulley system into this shaft in this quivering building in the interests of rescuing this person, the person we most need to turn to now, this shepherd, at a time when so many of us feel like we're lacking guidance. And this was the pulley system. This was what we were able to muster for Sergio. The good news, for what it's worth, is after Sergio and 21 others were killed that day in the attack on the U.N., the military created a search and rescue unit that had the cutting equipment, the shoring wood, the cranes, the things that you would have needed to do the rescue. But it was too late for Sergio. I want to wrap up, but I want to close with what I take to be the four lessons from Sergio's life on this question of how do we prevent evil from prevailing, which is how I would have framed the question. Here's this guy who got a 34-year head start thinking about the kinds of questions we as a country are grappling with, we as citizens are grappling with now. What do we take away? First, I think, is his relationship to, in fact, evil is something to learn from. He, over the course of his career, changed a great deal. He had a lot of flaws, but he was very adaptive. I think that was his greatest quality. He started as somebody who would denounce harmdoers, he would charge up to people who were violating international law, and he would say, you're violating, this is the U.N. Charter. Don't you see it's unacceptable what you're doing? And they would laugh at him because he didn't have the power of states, the power of any military or police. He just had the rules, he had the norms, and he tried to use them. And in Lebanon, Southern Lebanon in '82, he said to himself and to everybody else, I will never use the word "unacceptable" again. I will never use it. I will try to make it such, but I will never use that word again. But he lunged in the opposite direction. He started, as I mentioned, to get in the room with evil, to not denounce, and became almost obsequious when he won the nickname Serbio, for instance, and even when he negotiated with the Khmer Rouge would black-box what had occurred prior to entering the room. But by the end of his life, I think he had struck a balance that we as a country can learn from. Be in the room, don't be afraid of talking to your adversaries, but don't bracket what happened before you entered the room. Don't black-box history. Don't check your principles at the door. And I think that's something that we have to be in the room, whether it's Nixon going to China or Khrushchev and Kennedy or Reagan and Gorbachev. All the great progress in this country with relation to our adversaries has come by going into the room. And it doesn't have to be an act of weakness. You can actually do far more to build an international coalition against a harmdoer or a wrongdoer by being in the room and showing to the rest of the world that that person, that regime, is the problem and that you, the United States, are not the problem. Second take-away from Sergio's life, briefly. What I take away, and this in some ways is the most important, he espoused and exhibited a reverence for dignity that was really, really unusual. At a micro level, the individuals around him were visible. He saw them. At a macro level, he thought, you know, we talk about democracy promotion, but we do it in a way sometimes that's an affront to people's dignity. We put people on humanitarian aid and we boast about it because we've spent three billion. It's incredibly important, those people would no longer be alive if the United States, for instance, hadn't spent that money in Darfur, but it's not a way to live. If we think about dignity in our conduct as citizens and as individuals with relation to the people around us, and as a country, if we could inject a regard for dignity into our dealings with other countries, it would be something of a revolution. Third point, very briefly. He talked a lot about freedom from fear. And I recognize there is so much to be afraid of. There are so many genuine threats in the world. But what Sergio was talking about is, let's calibrate our relationship to the threat. Let's not hype the threat; let's actually see it clearly. We have reason to be afraid of melting ice caps. We have reason to be afraid that we haven't secured loose nuclear material in the former Soviet Union. Let's focus on what are the legitimate challenges and threats, but not lunge into bad decisions because of a panic, of a fear. In times of fear, for instance, one of the things Sergio used to say is, fear is a bad advisor. We lunge towards the extremes when we aren't operating and trying to, again, calibrate our relationship to the world around us. Fourth and final point: he somehow, because he was working in all the world's worst places and all lesser evils, had a humility, of course, and an awareness of the complexity of the world around him. I mean, such an acute awareness of how hard it was. How Sisyphean this task was of mending, and yet aware of that complexity, humbled by it, he wasn't paralyzed by it. And we as citizens, as we go through this experience of the kind of, the crisis of confidence, crisis of competence, crisis of legitimacy, I think there's a temptation to pull back from the world and say, ah, Katrina, Iraq -- we don't know what we're doing. We can't afford to pull back from the world. It's a question of how to be in the world. And the lesson, I think, of the anti-genocide movement that I mentioned, that is a partial success but by no means has it achieved what it has set out to do -- it'll be many decades, probably, before that happens -- but is that if we want to see change, we have to become the change. We can't rely upon our institutions to do the work of necessarily talking to adversaries on their own without us creating a space for that to happen, for having respect for dignity, and for bringing that combination of humility and a sort of emboldened sense of responsibility to our dealings with the rest of the world. So will evil prevail? Is that the question? I think the short answer is: no, not unless we let it. Thank you. (Applause)
I draw to better understand things. Sometimes I make a lot of drawings and I still don't understand what it is I'm drawing. Those of you who are comfortable with digital stuff and even smug about that relationship might be amused to know that the guy who is best known for "The Way Things Work," while preparing for part of a panel for called Understanding, spent two days trying to get his laptop to communicate with his new CD burner. Who knew about extension managers? I've always managed my own extensions so it never even occurred to me to read the instructions, but I did finally figure it out. I had to figure it out, because along with the invitation came the frightening reminder that there would be no projector, so bringing those carousels would no longer be necessary but some alternate form of communication would. Now, I could talk about something that I'm known for, something that would be particularly appropriate for many of the more technically minded people here, or I could talk about something I really care about. I decided to go with the latter. I'm going to talk about Rome. Now, why would I care about Rome, particularly? Well, I went to Rhode Island School of Design in the second half of the '60s to study architecture. I was lucky enough to spend my last year, my fifth year, in Rome as a student. It changed my life. Not the least reason was the fact that I had spent those first four years living at home, driving into RISD everyday, driving back. I missed the '60s. I read about them; (Laughter) I understand they were pretty interesting. I missed them, but I did spend that extraordinary year in Rome, and it's a place that is never far from my mind. So, whenever given an opportunity, I try to do something in it or with it or for it. I also make drawings to help people understand things. Things that I want them to believe I understand. And that's what I do as an illustrator, that's my job. So, I'm going to show you some pictures of Rome. I've made a lot of drawings of Rome over the years. These are just drawings of Rome. I get back as often as possible -- I need to. All different materials, all different styles, all different times, drawings from sketchbooks looking at the details of Rome. Part of the reason I'm showing you these is that it sort of helps illustrate this process I go through of trying to figure out what it is I feel about Rome and why I feel it. These are sketches of some of the little details. Rome is a city full of surprises. I mean, we're talking about unusual perspectives, we're talking about narrow little winding streets that suddenly open into vast, sun-drenched piazzas -- never, though, piazzas that are not humanly scaled. Part of the reason for that is the fact that they grew up organically. That amazing juxtaposition of old and new, the bits of light that come down between the buildings that sort of create a map that's traveling above your head of usually blue -- especially in the summer -- compared to the map that you would normally expect to see of conventional streets. And I began to think about how I could communicate this in book form. How could I share my sense of Rome, my understanding of Rome? And I'm going to show you a bunch of dead ends, basically. The primary reason for all these dead ends is when if you're not quite sure where you're going, you're certainly not going to get there with any kind of efficiency. Here's a little map. And I thought of maps at the beginning; maybe I should just try and do a little atlas of my favorite streets and connections in Rome. And here's a line of text that actually evolves from the exhaust of a scooter zipping across the page. Here that same line of text wraps around a fountain in an illustration that can be turned upside down and read both ways. Maybe that line of text could be a story to help give some human aspect to this. Maybe I should get away from this map completely, and really be honest about wanting to show you my favorite bits and pieces of Rome and simply kick a soccer ball in the air -- which happens in so many of the squares in the city -- and let it bounce off of things. And I'll simply explain what each of those things is that the soccer ball hits. That seemed like a sort of a cheap shot. But even though I just started this presentation, this is not the first thing that I tried to do and I was getting sort of desperate. Eventually, I realized that I had really no content that I could count on, so I decided to move towards packaging. (Laughter) I mean, it seems to work for a lot of things. So I thought a little box set of four small books might do the trick. But one of the ideas that emerged from some of those sketches was the notion of traveling through Rome in different vehicles at different speeds in order to show the different aspects of Rome. Sort of an overview of Rome and the plan that you might see from a dirigible. Quick snapshots of things you might see from a speeding motor scooter, and very slow walking through Rome, you might be able to study in more detail some of the wonderful surfaces and whatnot that you come across. Anyways, I went back to the dirigible notion. Went to Alberto Santos-Dumont. Found one of his dirigibles that had enough dimensions so I could actually use it as a scale that I would then juxtapose with some of the things in Rome. This thing would be flying over or past or be parked in front of, but it would be like having a ruler -- sort of travel through the pages without being a ruler. Not that you know how long number 11 actually is, but you would be able to compare number 11 against the Pantheon with number 11 against the Baths of Caracalla, and so on and so forth. If you were interested. This is Beatrix. She has a dog named Ajax, she has purchased a dirigible -- a small dirigible -- she's assembling the structure, Ajax is sniffing for holes in the balloon before they set off. She launches this thing above the Spanish Steps and sets off for an aerial tour of the city. Over the Spanish Steps we go. A nice way to show that river, that stream sort of pouring down the hill. Unfortunately, just across the road from it or quite close by is the Column of Marcus Aurelius, and the diameter of the dirigible makes an impression, as you can see, as she starts trying to read the story that spirals around the Column of Marcus Aurelius -- gets a little too close, nudges it. This gives me a chance to suggest to you the structure of the Column of Marcus Aurelius, which is really no more than a pile of quarters high -- thick quarters. Over the Piazza of Saint Ignacio, completely ruining the symmetry, but that aside a spectacular place to visit. A spectacular framework, inside of which you see, usually, extraordinary blue sky. Over the Pantheon and the 26-foot diameter Oculus. She parks her dirigible, lowers the anchor rope and climbs down for a closer look inside. The text here is right side and upside down so that you are forced to turn the book around, and you can see it from ground point of view and from her point of view -- looking in the hole, getting a different kind of perspective, moving you around the space. Particularly appropriate in a building that can contain perfectly a sphere dimensions of the diameter being the same as the distance from the center of the floor to the center of the Oculus. Unfortunately for her, the anchor line gets tangled around the feet of some Boy Scouts who are visiting the Pantheon, and they are immediately yanked out and given an extraordinary but terrifying tour of some of the domes of Rome, which would, from their point of view, naturally be hanging upside down. They bail out as soon as they get to the top of Saint Ivo, that little spiral structure you see there. She continues on her way over Piazza Navona. Notices a lot of activity at the Tre Scalini restaurant, is reminded that it is lunchtime and she's hungry. They keep on motoring towards the Campo de' Fiori, which they soon reach. Ajax the dog is put in a basket and lowered with a list of food into the marketplace, which flourishes there until about one in the afternoon, and then is completely removed and doesn't appear again until six or seven the following morning. Anyway, the pooch gets back to the dirigible with the stuff. Unfortunately, when she goes to unwrap the prosciutto, Ajax makes a lunge for it. She's managed to save the prosciutto, but in the process she loses the tablecloth, which you can see flying away in the upper left-hand corner. They continue without their tablecloth, looking for a place to land this thing so that they can actually have lunch. They eventually discover a huge wall that's filled with small holes, ideal for docking a dirigible because you've got a place to tie up. Turns out to be the exterior wall -- that part of it that remains -- of the Coliseum, so they park themselves there and have a terrific lunch and have a spectacular view. At the end of lunch, they untie the anchor, they set off through the Baths of Caracalla and over the walls of the city and then an abandoned gatehouse and decide to take one more look at the Pyramid of Cestius, which has this lightning rod on top. Unfortunately, that's a problem: they get a little too close, and when you're in a dirigible you have to be very careful about spikes. So that sort of brings her little story to a conclusion. Marcello, on the other hand, is sort of a lazy guy, but he's not due at work until about noon. So, the alarm goes off and it's five to 12 or so. He gets up, leaps onto his scooter, races through the city past the church of Santa Maria della Pace, down the alleys, through the streets that tourists may be wandering through, disturbing the quiet backstreet life of Rome at every turn. That speed with which he is moving, I hope I have suggested in this little image, which, again, can be turned around and read from both sides because there's text on the bottom and text on the top, one of which is upside down in this image. So, he keeps on moving, approaching an unsuspecting waiter who is trying to deliver two plates of linguine in a delicate white wine clam sauce to diners who are sitting at a table just outside of a restaurant in the street. Waiter catches on, but it's too late. And Marcello keeps moving in his scooter. Everything he sees from this point on is slightly affected by the linguine, but keeps on moving because this guy's got a job to do. Removes some scaffolding. One of the reasons Rome remains the extraordinary place it is that because of scaffolding and the determination to maintain the fabric, it is a city that continues to grow and adapt to the needs of the particular time in which it finds itself, or we find it. Right through the Piazza della Rotonda, in front of the Pantheon -- again wreaking havoc -- and finally getting to work. Marcello, as it turns out, is the driver of the number 64 bus, and if you've been on the number 64 bus, you know that it's driven with the same kind of exuberance as Marcello demonstrated on his scooter. And finally Carletto. You see his apartment in the upper left-hand corner. He's looking at his table; he's planning to propose this evening to his girlfriend of 40 years, (Laughter) and he wants it to be perfect. He's got candles out, he's got flowers in the middle and he's trying to figure out where to put the plates and the glasses. But he's not happy; something's wrong. The phone rings anyway, he's called to the palazzo. He saunters -- he saunters at a good clip, but as compared to all the traveling we've just seen, he's sauntering. Everybody knows Carletto, because he's in entertainment, actually; he's in television. He's actually in television repair, which is why people know him. So they all have his number. He arrives at the palazzo, arrives at the big front door. Enters the courtyard and talks to the custodian, who tells him that there's been a disaster in the palazzo; nobody's TVs are working and there's a big soccer game coming up, and the crowd is getting a little restless and a little nervous. He goes down to the basement and starts to check the wiring, and then gradually works his way up to the top of the building, apartment by apartment, checking every television, checking every connection, hoping to find out what this problem is. He works his way up, finally, the grand staircase and then a smaller staircase until he reaches the attic. He opens the window of the attic, of course, and there's a tablecloth wrapped around the building's television antenna. He removes it, the problems are solved, everybody in the palazzo is happy. And of course, he also solves his own problem. All he has to do now, with a perfect table, is wait for her to arrive. That was the first attempt, but it didn't seem substantial enough to convey whatever it was I wanted to convey about Rome. So I thought, well, I'll just do piazzas, and I'll get inside and underneath and I'll show these things growing and show why they're shaped the way they are and so on. And then I thought, that's too complicated. No, I'll just take my favorite bits and pieces and I'll put them inside the Pantheon but keep the scale, so you can see the top of Sant'Ivo and the Pyramid of Cestius and the Tempietto of Bramante all side by side in this amazing space. Now that's one drawing, so I thought maybe it's time for Piranesi to meet Escher. (Laughter) You see that I'm beginning to really lose control here and also hope. There's a very thin blue line of exhaust that sort of runs through this thing that would be kind of the trail that holds it all together. Then I thought, "Wait a minute, what am I doing?" A book is not only a neat way of collecting and storing information, it's a series of layers. I mean, you always peel one layer off another; we think of them as pages, doing it a certain way. But think of them as layers. I mean, Rome is a place of layers -- horizontal layers, vertical layers -- and I thought, well just peeling off a page would allow me to -- if I got you thinking about it the right way -- would allow me to sort of show you the depth of layers. The stucco on the walls of most of the buildings in Rome covers the scars; the scars of centuries of change as these structures have been adapted rather than being torn down. If I do a foldout page on the left-hand side and let you just unfold it, you see behind it what I mean by scar tissue. You can see that in 1635, it became essential to make smaller windows because the bad guys were coming or whatever. Adaptations all get buried under the stucco. I could peel out a page of this palazzo to show you what's going on inside of it. But more importantly, I could also show you what it looks like at the corner of one of those magnificent buildings with all the massive stone blocks, or the fake stone blocks done with brick and stucco, which is more often the case. So it becomes slightly three-dimensional. I could take you down one of those narrow little streets into one of those surprising piazzas by using a double gate fold -- double foldout page -- which, if you were like me reading a pop-up book as a child, you hopefully stick your head into. You wrap the pages around your head and are in that piazza for that brief period of time. And I've really not done anything much more complicated than make foldout pages. But then I thought, maybe I could be simpler here. Let's look at the Pantheon and the Piazza della Rotonda in front of it. Here's a book completely wide open. OK, if I don't open the book the whole way, if I just open it 90 degrees, we're looking down the front of the Pantheon, and we're looking sort of at the top, more or less down on the square. And if I turn the book the other way, we're looking across the square at the front of the Pantheon. No foldouts, no tricks -- just a book that isn't open the whole way. That seemed promising. I thought, maybe I'll do it inside and I can even combine the foldouts with the only partially opened book. So we get inside the Pantheon and it grows and so on and so forth. And I thought, maybe I'm on the right track, but it sort of lost its human quality. So I went back to the notion of story, which is always a good thing to have if you're trying to get people to pay attention to a book and pick up information along the way. "Pigeon's Progress" struck me as a catchy title. If it was a homing pigeon, it would be called "Homer's Odyssey." But it was the journey of the ... (Laughter) I mean, if a title works, use it. But it would be a journey that went through Rome and showed all the things that I like about Rome. It's a pigeon sitting on top of a church. Goes off during the day and does normal pigeon stuff. Comes back, the whole place is covered with scaffolding and green netting and there's no way this pigeon can get home. So it's a homeless pigeon now and it's going to have to find another place to live, and that allows me to go through my catalog of favorite things, and we start with the tall ones and so on. Maybe it has to go back and live with family members; that's not always a good thing, but it does sort of bring pigeons together again. And I thought, that's sort of interesting, but maybe there's a person who should be involved in this in some way. So I kind of came up with this old guy who spends his life looking after sick pigeons. He'll go anywhere to get them -- dangerous places and whatnot -- and they become really friends with this guy, and learn to do tricks for him and entertain him at lunchtime and stuff like that. There's a real bond that develops between this old man and these pigeons. But unfortunately he gets sick. He gets really sick at the end of the story. He's taught them to spell his name, which is Aldo. They show up one day after three or four days of not seeing him -- he lives in this little garret -- and they spell his name and fly around. And he finally gets enough strength together to climb up the ladder onto the roof, and all the pigeons, a la Red Balloon, are there waiting for him and they carry him off over the walls of the city. And I forgot to mention this: whenever he lost a pigeon, he would take that pigeon out beyond the walls of the city. In the old Roman custom, the dead were never buried within the walls. And I thought that's a really cheery story. (Laughter). That's really going to go a long way. So anyway, I went through ... And again, if packaging doesn't work and if the stories aren't going anywhere, I just come up with titles and hope that a title will sort of kick me off in the right direction. And sometimes it does focus me enough and I'll even do a title page. So, these are all title pages that eventually led me to the solution I settled on, which is the story of a young woman who sends a message on a homing pigeon -- she lives outside the walls of the city of Rome -- to someone in the city. And the pigeon is flying down above the Appian Way here. You can see the tombs and pines and so on and so forth along the way. If you see the red line, you are seeing the trail of the pigeon; if you don't see the red line, you are the pigeon. And it becomes necessary and possible, at this point, to try to convey what that sense would be like of flying over the city without actually moving. Past the Pyramid of Cestius -- these will seem very familiar to you, even if you haven't been to Rome recently -- past the gatehouse. This is something that's a little bit unusual. This pigeon does something that most homing pigeons do not do: it takes the scenic route, (Laughter) which was a device that I felt was necessary to actually extend this book beyond about four pages. So, we circle around the Coliseum, past the Church of Santa Maria in Cosmedin and the Temple of Hercules towards the river. We almost collide with the cornice of the Palazzo Farnese -- designed by Michelangelo, built of stone taken from the Coliseum -- narrow escape. We swoop down over the Campo de' Fiori. This is one of those things I show to my students because it's a complete bastardization -- a denial of any rules of perspective. The only rule of perspective that I think matters is if it looks believable, you've succeeded. But you try and figure out where the vanishing points meet here; a couple are on Mars and a couple of others in Cremona. But into the piazza in front of Santa Maria della Pace, where invariably a soccer game is going on, and we're hit by a soccer ball. Now this is a terrible illustration of being hit by a soccer ball. I have all the pieces: there's Santa Maria della Pace, there's a soccer ball, there's a little bit of a bird's wing -- nothing's happening, so I had to rethink it. And if you do want to see Santa Maria della Pace, these books are really flexible, incredibly interactive -- just turn it around and look at it the other way. Through the alley, we can see the impact is captured in the red line. And then bird manages to pull itself together past this medieval tower -- one of the few remaining medieval towers -- towards the church of Sant'Agnese and around the dome looking down into Piazza Navona -- which we've already mentioned and seen and flown over a couple of times; there's the Bernini statue of the Four Rivers -- and then past the wonderful Borromini Sant'Ivo, stopping just long enough on the 26-foot diameter Oculus of the Pantheon to catch our breath. And then we can swoop inside and around; and because we're flying, we don't really have to worry about gravity at this particular moment in time, so this drawing can be oriented in any way on the page. We get a little exuberant as we pass Gesu; it's not surprising to sort of mimic the architecture in this way. Past the wonderful wall filled with the juxtaposition that I was talking about; beautiful carvings set into the walls above the neon "Ristorante" sign, and so on. And eventually, we arrive at the courtyard of the palazzo, which is our destination. Straight up through the courtyard into a little window into the attic, where somebody is working at the drawing board. He removes the message from the leg of the bird; this is what it says. As we look at the drawing board, we see what he's working on is, in fact, a map of the journey that the pigeon has just taken, and the red line extends through all the sights. And if you want the information, so that we complete this cycle of understanding, all you have to do is read these paragraphs. Thank you very much.
You'll be happy to know that I'll be talking not about my own tragedy, but other people's tragedy. It's a lot easier to be lighthearted about other people's tragedy than your own, and I want to keep it in the spirit of the conference. So, if you believe the media accounts, being a drug dealer in the height of the crack cocaine epidemic was a very glamorous life, in the words of Virginia Postrel. There was money, there was drugs, guns, women, you know, you name it -- jewelry, bling-bling -- it had it all. What I'm going to tell you today is that, in fact, based on 10 years of research, a unique opportunity to go inside a gang -- to see the actual books, the financial records of the gang -- that the answer turns out not to be that being in the gang was a glamorous life. But I think, more realistically, that being in a gang -- selling drugs for a gang -- is perhaps the worst job in all of America. And that's what I'd like to convince you of today. So there are three things I want to do. First, I want to explain how and why crack cocaine had such a profound influence on inner-city gangs. Secondly, I want to tell you how somebody like me came to be able to see the inner workings of a gang. It's an interesting story, I think. And then third, I want to tell you, in a very superficial way, about some of the things we found when we actually got to look at the financial records -- the books -- of the gang. So before I do that, just one warning, which is that this presentation has been rated 'R' by the Motion Picture Association of America. It contains adult themes, adult language. Given who is up on the stage, you'll be delighted to know that in fact there'll be no nudity, barring a -- (Laughter) -- unexpected wardrobe malfunctions aside. (Laughter) So let me start by talking about crack cocaine, and how it transformed the gang. And to do that, you have to actually go back to a time before crack cocaine, in the early '80s, and look at it from the perspective of a gang leader. So being a gang leader in the inner city wasn't such a bad deal in the mid-'80s. In the early '80s, some would say. Now, you had a lot of power, and you got to beat people up -- you got a lot of prestige, a lot of respect. But there was no money in it, OK? The gang had no way to make money. And you couldn't charge dues to the people in the gang, because the people in the gang didn't have any money. You couldn't really make any money selling marijuana. Marijuana's too cheap, it turns out. You can't get rich selling marijuana. You couldn't sell cocaine. You know, cocaine's a great product -- powdered cocaine -- but you've got to know rich white people. And most of the inner-city gang members didn't know any rich white people -- they couldn't sell to that market. You couldn't really do petty crime, either. It turns out, petty crime's a terrible way to make a living. So, as a result, as a gang leader, you had, you know, power -- it's a pretty good life -- but the thing was, in the end, you were living at home with your mother. And so it wasn't really a career. It was something that -- it's just there were limits to how powerful and important you could be if you had to live at home with your mother. Then along comes crack cocaine. And in the words of Malcolm Gladwell, crack cocaine was the extra-chunky version of tomato sauce for the inner city. (Laughter) Because crack cocaine was an unbelievable innovation. I don't have time to talk about it today. But if you think about it, I would say that in the last twenty-five years, of every invention or innovation that's occurred in this country, the biggest one, in terms of impact on the well-being of people who live in the inner city, was crack cocaine. And for the worse -- not for the better, but for the worse. It had a huge impact on life. So what was it about crack cocaine? It was a brilliant way of getting the brain high. Because you could smoke crack cocaine -- you can't smoke powdered cocaine -- and smoking is a much more efficient mechanism at delivering a high than is snorting it. And it turned out, there was this audience that didn't know it wanted crack cocaine, but, when it came, it really did. And it was a perfect drug. You could sell for -- buy the cocaine that went into it for a dollar, sell it for five dollars. Highly addictive -- the high was very short. So for fifteen minutes, you get this great high. And then, when you come down, all you want to do is get high again. It created a wonderful market. And for the people who were there running the gang, it was a great way, seemingly, to make a lot of money. At least for the people in the top. So this is where we enter the picture. Not really me -- I'm really a bit player in all this. My co-author, Sudhir Venkatesh, is the main character. So he was a math major in college who had a good heart, and decided he wanted to get a sociology Ph.D., came to the University of Chicago. Now, the three months before he came to Chicago, he had spent following the Grateful Dead. And, in his own words, he "looked like a freak." He's a South Asian -- very dark-skinned South Asian. Big man, and he had hair, in his words, "down to his ass." Defied all kinds of boundaries: Was he black or white? Was he man or woman? He was really a curious sight to be seen. So he showed up at the University of Chicago. And the famous sociologist, William Julius Wilson, was doing a book that involved surveying people all across Chicago. And he took one look at Sudhir, who was going to go do some surveys for him, and decided he knew exactly the place to send him -- which was to one of the toughest, most notorious housing projects. And not just in Chicago, but in the entire United States. So Sudhir -- the suburban boy who had never really been in the inner city -- dutifully took his clipboard and, you know, walked down to this housing project. Gets to the first building. The first building? Well, there's nobody there. But he hears some voices up in the stairwell, so he climbs up the stairwell. And he comes around the corner -- finds a group of young African-American men playing dice. This is about 1990 -- peak of the crack epidemic. This is a very dangerous job, being in a gang -- you don't like to be surprised. You don't like to be surprised by people who come around the corner. And the mantra was: shoot first; ask questions later. Now, Sudhir was lucky. He was such a freak -- and that clipboard probably saved his life, because they figured no other rival gang member would be coming up to shoot at them with a clipboard. (Laughter) So his greeting was not particularly warm, but they did say, well, OK -- let's hear your questions on your survey. So, I kid you not, the first question on the survey that he was sent to ask was, "How do you feel about being poor and black in America?" (Laughter) Makes you wonder about academics, OK? (Laughter) So the choice of answers were: very good, good, bad and very bad. What Sudhir found out is, in fact, that the real answer was the following -- (Laughter) The survey was not, in the end, going to be what got Sudhir off the hook. He was held hostage overnight in the stairwell. There was a lot of gunfire; there were a lot of philosophical discussions he had with the gang members. By morning, the gang leader arrived, checked out Sudhir, decided he was no threat and they let him go home. So Sudhir went home. Took a shower, took a nap. And you and I, probably, faced with the situation, would think, well, I guess I'm going to write my dissertation on The Grateful Dead. I've been following them for the last three months. (Laughter) Sudhir, on the other hand, got right back -- walked down to the housing project. Went up to the floor, the second floor, and said: "Hey, guys. I had so much fun hanging out with you last night, I wonder if I could do it again tonight." And that was the beginning of what turned out to be a beautiful relationship that involved Sudhir living in the housing project on and off for 10 years: hanging out in crack houses, going to jail with the gang members, having the car-windows shot out of his car, having the police break into his apartment and steal his computer disks -- you name it. But ultimately, the story has a happy ending for Sudhir, who became one of the most respected sociologists in the country. And especially for me, as I sat in my office with my Excel spreadsheet open, waiting for Sudhir to come and deliver to me the latest load of data that he would get from the gang. It was one of the most unequal co-authoring relationships ever -- (Laughter) -- but I was glad to be the beneficiary of it. So what do we find? What do we find in the gang? Well, let me say one thing. We really got access to everybody in the gang. We got an inside look at the gang, from the very bottom up to the very top. They trusted Sudhir -- in ways that really no academic has ever -- or really anybody, any outsider -- has ever earned the trust of these gangs, to the point where they actually opened up what was most interesting for me: their books, their financial records that they kept. And they made them available to us. And we not only could study them, but we could ask them questions about what was in them. So if I have to kind of summarize very quickly in the short time I have what the sort of bottom line of what I take away from the gang is, is that if I had to draw a parallel between the gang and any other organization, it would be that the gang is just like McDonald's. In a lot of different respects -- the restaurant McDonald's. So first, in one way -- which isn't maybe the most interesting way, but it's a good way to start -- is in the way it's organized -- the hierarchy of the gang, the way it looks. So here's what the org chart of the gang looks like. I don't know if any of you know very much about org charts, but if you were to assign a stripped-down and simplified McDonald's org chart, this is exactly what the org chart would look like. Now, it's amazing, but the top level of the gang, they actually call themselves the "board of directors." (Laughter) And Sudhir says it's not like these guys had a very sophisticated kind of view of like, what happened in American corporate life. But they had seen movies like "Wall Street," and they kind of had learned a little bit about what it was like to be in the real world. Now, below that board of directors, you've got essentially what are regional VPs -- people who control, say, the south side of Chicago, or the west side of Chicago. Now, Sudhir got to know very well the guy who had the unfortunate assignment of trying to take the Iowa franchise. (Laughter) Which, it turned out, for this black gang, was not one of the more brilliant financial endeavors that they undertook. (Laughter) But the thing that really makes the gang seem like McDonald's is its franchisees. That the guys who are running, you know, the local gangs -- the four-square-block by four-square-block areas -- they're just like the guys, in some sense, who are running the McDonald's. They are the entrepreneurs. They get the exclusive property rights to control the drug-selling. They get the name of the gang behind them, for merchandising and marketing. And they're the ones who basically make the profit or lose a profit, depending on how good they are at running the business. Now, the group I really want you to think about, though, are the ones at the bottom, the foot soldiers. These are the teenagers, typically, who'd be standing out on the street corner, selling the drugs. Extremely dangerous work. And important to note that almost all of the weight, all of the people in this organization are at the bottom. OK, just like McDonald's. So in some sense, the foot soldiers are a lot like the people who are taking your order at McDonald's. And indeed, it's not just by chance that they're like them. In fact, in these neighborhoods, they'd be the same people. So the same kids who are working in the gang were actually -- at the very same time, they would typically be working part-time at a place like McDonald's. Which already, I think, foreshadows the main result that I've talked about, about what a crappy job it was being in the gang. Because obviously, if being in the gang were such a wonderful, lucrative job, why in the world would these guys moonlight at McDonald's? So what do the wages look like? So you might be surprised. But based on the actual -- you know, being able to talk to them, and to see their records, this is what it looks like in terms of the wages. The hourly wage the foot soldiers were earning was $3.50 in an hour. It was below the minimum wage, OK? And this is well documented. It's easy to see, by the patterns of consumption they have. It really is not fiction -- it's fact. There was very little money in the gang, especially at the bottom. Now if you managed to rise up -- say, and be that local leader, the guy who's the equivalent of the McDonald's franchisee -- you'd be making 100,000 dollars a year. And that, in some ways, was the best job you could hope to get if you were growing up in one of these neighborhoods as a young black male. If you managed to rise to the very top, 200,000 or 400,000 dollars a year is what you'd hope to make. Truly, you would be a great success story. And one of the sad parts of this is that indeed, among the many other ramifications of crack cocaine is that the most talented individuals in these communities -- this is what they were striving for. They weren't trying to make it in legitimate ways, because there were no legitimate channels out. This was the best way out. And it actually was the right choice, probably, to try to make it out -- this way. You look at this -- the relationship to McDonald's breaks down here. The money looks about the same. Why is it such a bad job? Well, the reason it's such a bad job is that there's somebody shooting at you a lot of the time. So, with shooting at you, what are the death rates? We found in our gang -- and, admittedly, this was not really sort of a standard situation; this was a time of intense violence -- of a lot of gang wars -- as this gang actually became quite successful. But there were costs. And so the death rate -- not to mention the rate of being arrested, sent to prison, being wounded -- the death rate in our sample was seven percent per person per year. You're in the gang for four years; you expect to die with about a 25 percent likelihood. That is about as high as you can get. So for comparison's purposes, let's think about some other walk of life where you may expect might be extremely risky. Like let's say that you were a murderer and you were convicted of murder, and you're sent to death row. It turns out, the death rates on death row -- from all causes, including execution -- two percent a year. (Laughter) So it's a lot safer being on death row than it is selling drugs out on the street. That makes you pause -- gives you some pause -- those of you who believe that a death penalty's going to have an enormous deterrent effect on crime. Now to give you a sense of just how bad the inner city was during crack -- and I'm not really focusing on the negatives, but really, there's another story to tell you there -- if you look at the death rates -- just of random, young black males growing up in the inner city in the United States -- the death rates during crack were about one percent. That's extremely high. And this is violent death -- it's unbelievable, in some sense. To put it into perspective, if you compare this to the soldiers in Iraq, for instance, right now fighting the war: 0.5 percent. So in some very literal way, the young black men who were growing up in this country were living in a war zone, very much in the sense of the way that the soldiers over in Iraq are fighting in a war. So why in the world, you might ask, would anybody be willing to stand out on a street corner selling drugs for $3.50 an hour, with a 25 percent chance of dying over the next four years? Why would they do that? And I think there are a couple answers. I think the first one is that they got fooled by history. It used to be the gang was a rite of passage. That the young people controlled the gang -- that, as you got older, you dropped out of the gang. So what happened was, the people who happened to be in the right place at the right time -- the people who happened to be leading the gang in the mid- to late '80s -- became very, very wealthy. And so the logical thing to think was that: "Well, the next generation -- so they're going to age out of the gang, like everybody else has, and the next generation is going to take over and get the wealth." So there are striking similarities, I think, to the Internet boom, right? The first set of people in Silicon Valley got very, very rich. And then all of my friends said: "Maybe I should go do that, too." And they were willing to work very cheap, for stock options that never came. In some sense, that's what happened, exactly, to the set of people we were looking at, is that they were willing to start at the bottom. Just like, say, a lawyer at a law firm -- a first-year lawyer is wiling to start at the bottom, work 80-hour weeks for not that much money, because they think they're going to make partner. But what happened was, the rules changed, and they never got to make partner. Indeed, the same people who were running all of the major gangs in the late 1980s are still running the major gangs in Chicago today. They never passed on any of the wealth. So everybody got stuck at that $3.50-an-hour job, and it turned out to be a disaster. The other thing the gang was very, very good at was marketing and trickery. And so for instance, one thing the gang would do is -- you know, the gang leaders would have big entourages, and they'd drive fancy cars and have fancy jewelry. So what Sudhir eventually realized, as he hung out with them more, is that, really, they didn't own those cars. They just leased them -- because they couldn't afford to own the fancy cars. And they didn't really have gold jewelry -- they had gold-plated jewelry. It goes back to, you know, the real-real versus the fake-real. And really, they did all sorts of things to trick the young people into thinking what a great deal the gang was going to be. So for instance, they would give a 14-year-old kid -- they'd give him a whole, you know, roll of bills to hold. That 14-year-old kid would say: "Oh, well ..." You know, he would say to his friends, "Hey, look at all the money I got in the gang." It wasn't his money, until he spent it. And then essentially he was in debt to the gang, and was sort of an indentured servant for a while. So I have a couple minutes. Let me do one last thing I hadn't thought I'd have time to do, which is to talk about what we learned, more generally, about economics from the study of the gang. So economists tend to talk in technical words. Often, our theories fail quite miserably when we go to the data. But actually, what's kind of interesting is that in this setting it turned out that some of the economic theories that worked not so well in the real economy worked very well in the drug economy -- in some sense because it's unfettered capitalism. Here's an economic principle. This is one of the basic ideas in labor economics, called a "compensating differential." It's the idea that basically, the increment to wages that a worker requires to leave him indifferent between performing two tasks -- one which is more unpleasant than the other -- that's what you call a "compensating differential." It's why we think garbage men might be paid more than people who work in parks, OK? So in the words of one of the members of the gang I think makes this clear. So it turns out -- I'm sort of getting ahead of myself. It turns out, in the gang, when there's a war going on, that they actually pay the foot soldiers twice as much money. It's exactly this concept. Because they're not willing to be at risk. And the words of a gang member capture it quite nicely. He says, "Would you stand around here when all this shit" -- that means shooting -- "if all this shit's going on? No, right? So if I going to be asked to put my life on the line, then front me the cash, man." So essentially, I think the gang member says it much more articulately than does the economist, about what's going on. (Laughter) Here's another one. So economists talk about game theory -- that every two-person game has a Nash equilibrium. Here's the translation you get from the gang member. They're talking about the decision of why they don't go shoot -- one thing that turns out to be a great business tactic in the gang, if you go and just shoot in the air -- just shoot guns in the other gang's territory -- all the people are afraid to go buy their drugs there. They're going to come into your neighborhood. But here's what he says about why they don't do that. He says, "If we start shooting around there," -- in the other gang's territory -- "nobody, and, I mean, you dig it, nobody, going to step on their turf. But we gotta be careful, because they can shoot around here, too, and then we all fucked." (Laughter) So that's exactly the same concept. But then, again, sometimes economists get it wrong. So one thing we observed in the data is that it looked like, in terms of ... The gang leader always got paid, OK? No matter how bad it was economically, he always got himself paid. So we had some theories related to cash flow, and lack of access to capital markets, and things like that. But then we asked the gang member, "Well, why is it you always get paid, and your workers don't always get paid?" His response is, "You got all these niggers below you who want your job, you dig? If you start taking losses, they see you as weak and shit." And I thought about it, and I said, "CEOs often pay themselves million-dollar bonuses, even when companies are losing a lot of money. And it never would really occur to an economist that this idea of 'weak and shit' could really be important." But maybe -- maybe "weak and shit" -- maybe "weak and shit" is an important hypothesis that needs more analysis. Thank you very much.
As an architect you design for the present, with an awareness of the past, for a future which is essentially unknown. The green agenda is probably the most important agenda and issue of the day. And I'd like to share some experience over the last 40 years -- we celebrate our fortieth anniversary this year -- and to explore and to touch on some observations about the nature of sustainability. How far you can anticipate, what follows from it, what are the threats, what are the possibilities, the challenges, the opportunities? I think that -- I've said in the past, many, many years ago, before anybody even invented the concept of a green agenda, that it wasn't about fashion -- it was about survival. But what I never said, and what I'm really going to make the point is, that really, green is cool. I mean, all the projects which have, in some way, been inspired by that agenda are about a celebratory lifestyle, in a way celebrating the places and the spaces which determine the quality of life. I rarely actually quote anything, so I'm going to try and find a piece of paper if I can, [in] which somebody, at the end of last year, ventured the thought about what for that individual, as a kind of important observer, analyst, writer -- a guy called Thomas Friedman, who wrote in the Herald Tribune, about 2006. He said, "I think the most important thing to happen in 2006 was that living and thinking green hit Main Street. We reached a tipping point this year where living, acting, designing, investing and manufacturing green came to be understood by a critical mass of citizens, entrepreneurs and officials as the most patriotic, capitalistic, geo-political and competitive thing they could do. Hence my motto: green is the new red, white and blue." And I asked myself, in a way, looking back, "When did that kind of awareness of the planet and its fragility first appear?" And I think it was July 20, 1969, when, for the first time, man could look back at planet Earth. And, in a way, it was Buckminster Fuller who coined that phrase. And before the kind of collapse of the communist system, I was privileged to meet a lot of cosmonauts in Space City and other places in Russia. And interestingly, as I think back, they were the first true environmentalists. They were filled with a kind of pioneering passion, fired about the problems of the Aral Sea. And at that period it was -- in a way, a number of things were happening. Buckminster Fuller was the kind of green guru -- again, a word that had not been coined. He was a design scientist, if you like, a poet, but he foresaw all the things that are happening now. It's another subject. It's another conversation. You can go back to his writings: it's quite extraordinary. It was at that time, with an awareness fired by Bucky's prophecies, his concerns as a citizen, as a kind of citizen of the planet, that influenced my thinking and what we were doing at that time. And it's a number of projects. I select this one because it was 1973, and it was a master plan for one of the Canary Islands. And this probably coincided with the time when you had the planet Earth's sourcebook, and you had the hippie movement. And there are some of those qualities in this drawing, which seeks to sum up the recommendations. And all the components are there which are now in common parlance, in our vocabulary, you know, 30-odd years later: wind energy, recycling, biomass, solar cells. And in parallel at that time, there was a very kind of exclusive design club. People who were really design conscious were inspired by the work of Dieter Rams, and the objects that he would create for the company called Braun. This is going back the mid-'50s, '60s. And despite Bucky's prophecies that everything would be miniaturized and technology would make an incredible style -- access to comfort, to amenities -- it was very, very difficult to imagine that everything that we see in this image, would be very, very stylishly packaged. And that, and more besides, would be in the palm of your hand. And I think that that digital revolution now is coming to the point where, as the virtual world, which brings so many people together here, finally connects with the physical world, there is the reality that that has become humanized, so that digital world has all the friendliness, all the immediacy, the orientation of the analog world. Probably summed up in a way by the stylish or alternative available here, as we generously had gifted at lunchtime, the [unclear], which is a further kind of development -- and again, inspired by the incredible sort of sensual feel. A very, very beautiful object. So, something which in [the] '50s, '60s was very exclusive has now become, interestingly, quite inclusive. And the reference to the iPod as iconic, and in a way evocative of performance, delivery -- quite interesting that [in] the beginning of the year 2007, the Financial Times commented that the Detroit companies envy the halo effect that Toyota has gained from the Prius as the hybrid, energy-conscious vehicle, which rivals the iPod as an iconic product. And I think it's very tempting to, in a way, seduce ourselves -- as architects, or anybody involved with the design process -- that the answer to our problems lies with buildings. Buildings are important, but they're only a component of a much bigger picture. In other words, as I might seek to demonstrate, if you could achieve the impossible, the equivalent of perpetual motion, you could design a carbon-free house, for example. That would be the answer. Unfortunately, it's not the answer. It's only the beginning of the problem. You cannot separate the buildings out from the infrastructure of cites and the mobility of transit. For example, if, in that Bucky-inspired phrase, we draw back and we look at planet Earth, and we take a kind of typical, industrialized society, then the energy consumed would be split between the buildings, 44 percent, transport, 34 percent, and industry. But again, that only shows part of the picture. If you looked at the buildings together with the associated transport, in other words, the transport of people, which is 26 percent, then 70 percent of the energy consumption is influenced by the way that our cites and infrastructure work together. So the problems of sustainability cannot be separated from the nature of the cities, of which the buildings are a part. For example, if you take, and you make a comparison between a recent kind of city, what I'll call, simplistically, a North American city -- and Detroit is not a bad example, it is very car dependent. The city goes out in annular rings, consuming more and more green space, and more and more roads, and more and more energy in the transport of people between the city center -- which again, the city center, as it becomes deprived of the living and just becomes commercial, again becomes dead. If you compared Detroit with a city of a Northern European example -- and Munich is not a bad example of that, with the greater dependence on walking and cycling -- then a city which is really only twice as dense, is only using one-tenth of the energy. In other words, you take these comparable examples and the energy leap is enormous. So basically, if you wanted to generalize, you can demonstrate that as the density increases along the bottom there, that the energy consumed reduces dramatically. Of course you can't separate this out from issues like social diversity, mass transit, the ability to be able to walk a convenient distance, the quality of civic spaces. But again, you can see Detroit, in yellow at the top, extraordinary consumption, down below Copenhagen. And Copenhagen, although it's a dense city, is not dense compared with the really dense cities. In the year 2000, a rather interesting thing happened. You had for the first time mega-cities, [of] 5 million or more, which were occurring in the developing world. And now, out of typically 46 cities, 33 of those mega-cities are in the developing world. So you have to ask yourself -- the environmental impact of, for example, China or India. If you take China, and you just take Beijing, you can see on that traffic system, and the pollution associated with the consumption of energy as the cars expand at the price of the bicycles. In other words, if you put onto the roads, as is currently happening, 1,000 new cars every day -- statistically, it's the biggest booming auto market in the world -- and the half a billion bicycles serving one and a third billion people are reducing. And that urbanization is extraordinary, accelerated pace. So, if we think of the transition in our society of the movement from the land to the cities, which took 200 years, then that same process is happening in 20 years. In other words, it is accelerating by a factor of 10. And quite interestingly, over something like a 60-year period, we're seeing the doubling in life expectancy, over that period where the urbanization has trebled. If I pull back from that global picture, and I look at the implication over a similar period of time in terms of the technology -- which, as a tool, is a tool for designers, and I cite our own experience as a company, and I just illustrate that by a small selection of projects -- then how do you measure that change of technology? How does it affect the design of buildings? And particularly, how can it lead to the creation of buildings which consume less energy, create less pollution and are more socially responsible? That story, in terms of buildings, started in the late '60s, early '70s. The one example I take is a corporate headquarters for a company called Willis and Faber, in a small market town in the northeast of England, commuting distance with London. And here, the first thing you can see is that this building, the roof is a very warm kind of overcoat blanket, a kind of insulating garden, which is also about the celebration of public space. In other words, for this community, they have this garden in the sky. So the humanistic ideal is very, very strong in all this work, encapsulated perhaps by one of my early sketches here, where you can see greenery, you can see sunlight, you have a connection with nature. And nature is part of the generator, the driver for this building. And symbolically, the colors of the interior are green and yellow. It has facilities like swimming pools, it has flextime, it has a social heart, a space, you have contact with nature. Now this was 1973. In 2001, this building received an award. And the award was about a celebration for a building which had been in use over a long period of time. And the people who'd created it came back: the project managers, the company chairmen then. And they were saying, you know, "The architects, Norman was always going on about designing for the future, and you know, it didn't seem to cost us any more. So we humored him, we kept him happy." The image at the top, what it doesn't -- if you look at it in detail, really what it is saying is you can wire this building. This building was wired for change. So, in 1975, the image there is of typewriters. And when the photograph was taken, it's word processors. And what they were saying on this occasion was that our competitors had to build new buildings for the new technology. We were fortunate, because in a way our building was future-proofed. It anticipated change, even though those changes were not known. Round about that design period leading up to this building, I did a sketch, which we pulled out of the archive recently. And I was saying, and I wrote, "But we don't have the time, and we really don't have the immediate expertise at a technical level." In other words, we didn't have the technology to do what would be really interesting on that building. And that would be to create a kind of three-dimensional bubble -- a really interesting overcoat that would naturally ventilate, would breathe and would seriously reduce the energy loads. Notwithstanding the fact that the building, as a green building, is very much a pioneering building. And if I fast-forward in time, what is interesting is that the technology is now available and celebratory. The library of the Free University, which opened last year, is an example of that. And again, the transition from one of the many thousands of sketches and computer images to the reality. And a combination of devices here, the kind of heavy mass concrete of these book stacks, and the way in which that is enclosed by this skin, which enables the building to be ventilated, to consume dramatically less energy, and where it's really working with the forces of nature. And what is interesting is that this is hugely popular by the people who use it. Again, coming back to that thing about the lifestyle, and in a way, the ecological agenda is very much at one with the spirit. So it's not a kind of sacrifice, quite the reverse. I think it's a great -- it's a celebration. And you can measure the performance, in terms of energy consumption, of that building against a typical library. If I show another aspect of that technology then, in a completely different context -- this apartment building in the Alps in Switzerland. Prefabricated from the most traditional of materials, but that material -- because of the technology, the computing ability, the ability to prefabricate, make high-performance components out of timber -- very much at the cutting edge. And just to give a sort of glimpse of that technology, the ability to plot points in the sky and to transmit, to transfer that information now, directly into the factory. So if you cross the border -- just across the border -- a small factory in Germany, and here you can see the guy with his computer screen, and those points in space are communicated. And on the left are the cutting machines, which then, in the factory, enable those individual pieces to be fabricated and plus or minus very, very few millimeters, to be slotted together on site. And then interestingly, that building to then be clad in the oldest technology, which is the kind of hand-cut shingles. One quarter of a million of them applied by hand as the final finish. And again, the way in which that works as a building, for those of us who can enjoy the spaces, to live and visit there. If I made the leap into these new technologies, then how did we -- what happened before that? I mean, you know, what was life like before the mobile phone, the things that you take for granted? Well, obviously the building still happened. I mean, this is a glimpse of the interior of our Hong Kong bank of 1979, which opened in 1985, with the ability to be able to reflect sunlight deep into the heart of this space here. And in the absence of computers, you have to physically model. So for example, we would put models under an artificial sky. For wind tunnels, we would literally put them in a wind tunnel and blast air, and the many kilometers of cable and so on. And the turning point was probably, in our terms, when we had the first computer. And that was at the time that we sought to redesign, reinvent the airport. This is Terminal Four at Heathrow, typical of any terminal -- big, heavy roof, blocking out the sunlight, lots of machinery, big pipes, whirring machinery. And Stansted, the green alternative, which uses natural light, is a friendly place: you know where you are, you can relate to the outside. And for a large part of its cycle, not needing electric light -- electric light, which in turn creates more heat, which creates more cooling loads and so on. And at that particular point in time, this was one of the few solitary computers. And that's a little image of the tree of Stansted. Not going back very far in time, 1990, that's our office. And if you looked very closely, you'd see that people were drawing with pencils, and they were pushing, you know, big rulers and triangles. It's not that long ago, 17 years, and here we are now. I mean, major transformation. Going back in time, there was a lady called Valerie Larkin, and in 1987, she had all our information on one disk. Now, every week, we have the equivalent of 84 million disks, which record our archival information on past, current and future projects. That reaches 21 kilometers into the sky. This is the view you would get, if you looked down on that. But meanwhile, as you know, wonderful protagonists like Al Gore are noting the inexorable rise in temperature, set in the context of that, interestingly, those buildings which are celebratory and very, very relevant to this place. Our Reichstag project, which has a very familiar agenda, I'm sure, as a public place where we sought to, in a way, through a process of advocacy, reinterpret the relationship between society and politicians, public space. And maybe its hidden agenda, an energy manifesto -- something that would be free, completely free of fuel as we know it. So it would be totally renewable. And again, the humanistic sketch, the translation into the public space, but this very, very much a part of the ecology. But here, not having to model it for real. Obviously the wind tunnel had a place, but the ability now with the computer to explore, to plan, to see how that would work in terms of the forces of nature: natural ventilation, to be able to model the chamber below, and to look at biomass. A combination of biomass, aquifers, burning vegetable oil -- a process that, quite interestingly, was developed in Eastern Germany, at the time of its dependence on the Soviet Bloc. So really, retranslating that technology and developing something which was so clean, it was virtually pollution-free. You can measure it again. You can compare how that building, in terms of its emission in tons of carbon dioxide per year -- at the time that we took that project, over 7,000 tons -- what it would have been with natural gas and finally, with the vegetable oil, 450 tons. I mean, a 94 percent reduction -- virtually clean. We can see the same processes at work in terms of the Commerce Bank -- its dependence on natural ventilation, the way that you can model those gardens, the way they spiral around. But again, very much about the lifestyle, the quality -- something that would be more enjoyable as a place to work. And again, we can measure the reduction in terms of energy consumption. There is an evolution here between the projects, and Swiss Re again develops that a little bit further -- the project in the city in London. And this sequence shows the buildup of that model. But what it shows first, which I think is quite interesting, is that here you see the circle, you see the public space around it. What are the other ways of putting the same amount of space on the site? If, for example, you seek to do a building which goes right to the edge of the pavement, it's the same amount of space. And finally, you profile this, you cut grooves into it. The grooves become the kind of green lungs which give views, which give light, ventilation, make the building fresher. And you enclose that with something that also is central to its appearance, which is a mesh of triangulated structures -- again, in a long connection evocative of some of those works of Buckminster Fuller, and the way in which triangulation can increase performance and also give that building its sense of identity. And here, if we look at a detail of the way that the building opens up and breathes into those atria, the way in which now, with a computer, we can model the forces, we can see the high pressure, the low pressure, the way in which the building behaves rather like an aircraft wing. So it also has the ability, all the time, regardless of the direction of the wind, to be able to make the building fresh and efficient. And unlike conventional buildings, the top of the building is celebratory. It's a viewing place for people, not machinery. And the base of the building is again about public space. Comparing it with a typical building, what happens if we seek to use such design strategies in terms of really large-scale thinking? And I'm just going to give two images out of a kind of company research project. It's been well known that the Dead Sea is dying. The level is dropping, rather like the Aral Sea. And the Dead Sea is obviously much lower than the oceans and seas around it. So there has been a project which rescues the Dead Sea by creating a pipeline, a pipe, sometimes above the surface, sometimes buried, that will redress that, and will feed from the Gulf of Aqaba into the Dead Sea. And our translation of that, using a lot of the thinking built up over the 40 years, is to say, what if that, instead of being just a pipe, what if it is a lifeline? What if it is the equivalent, depending on where you are, of the Grand Canal, in terms of tourists, habitation, desalination, agriculture? In other words, water is the lifeblood. And if you just go back to the previous image, and you look at this area of volatility and hostility, that a unifying design idea as a humanitarian gesture could have the affect of bringing all those warring factions together in a united cause, in terms of something that would be genuinely green and productive in the widest sense. Infrastructure at that large scale is also inseparable from communication. And whether that communication is the virtual world or it is the physical world, then it's absolutely central to society. And how do we make more legible in this growing world, especially in some of the places that I'm talking about -- China, for example, which in the next ten years will create 400 new airports. Now what form do they take? How do you make them more friendly at that scale? Hong Kong I refer to as a kind of analog experience in a digital age, because you always have a point of reference. So what happens when we take that and you expand that further into the Chinese society? And what is interesting is that that produces in a way perhaps the ultimate mega-building. It is physically the largest project on the planet at the moment. 250 -- excuse me, 50,000 people working 24 hours, seven days. Larger by 17 percent than every terminal put together at Heathrow -- built -- plus the new, un-built Terminal Five. And the challenge here is a building that will be green, that is compact despite its size and is about the human experience of travel, is about friendly, is coming back to that starting point, is very, very much about the lifestyle. And perhaps these, in the end, as celebratory spaces. As Hubert was talking over lunch, as we sort of engaged in conversation, talked about this, talked about cities. Hubert was saying, absolutely correctly, "These are the new cathedrals." And in a way, one aspect of this conversation was triggered on New Year's Eve, when I was talking about the Olympic agenda in China in terms of its green ambitions and aspirations. And I was voicing the thought that -- it just crossed my mind that New Year's Eve, a sort of symbolic turning point as we move from 2006 to 2007 -- that maybe, you know, the future was the most powerful, innovative sort of nation. The way in which somebody like Kennedy inspirationally could say, "We put a man on the moon." You know, who is going to say that we cracked this thing of the dependence on fossil fuels, with all that being held to ransom by rogue regimes, and so on. And that's a concerted platform. It's more than one device, you know, it's renewable. And I voiced the thought that maybe at the turn of the year, I thought that the inspiration was more likely to come from those other, larger countries out there -- the Chinas, the Indias, the Asian-Pacific tigers. Thank you very much. (Applause)
Thank you. I have to tell you I'm both challenged and excited. My excitement is: I get a chance to give something back. My challenge is: the shortest seminar I usually do is 50 hours. (Laughter) I'm not exaggerating. I do weekends -- I do more, obviously, I also coach people -- but I'm into immersion, because how did you learn language? Not just by learning principles, you got in it and you did it so often that it became real. The bottom line of why I'm here, besides being a crazy mofo, is that -- I'm not here to motivate you, you don't need that, obviously. Often that's what people think I do, and it's the furthest thing from it. What happens, though, is people say to me, "I don't need any motivation." But that's not what I do. I'm the "why" guy. I want to know why you do what you do. What is your motive for action? What is it that drives you in your life today? Not 10 years ago. Are you running the same pattern? Because I believe that the invisible force of internal drive, activated, is the most important thing. I'm here because I believe emotion is the force of life. All of us here have great minds. Most of us here have great minds, right? We all know how to think. With our minds we can rationalize anything. We can make anything happen. I agree with what was described a few days ago, that people work in their self-interest. But we know that that's bullshit at times. You don't work in your self-interest all the time, because when emotion comes into it, the wiring changes in the way it functions. So it's wonderful to think intellectually about how the life of the world is, especially those who are very smart can play this game in our head. But I really want to know what's driving you. What I would like to invite you to do by the end of this talk is explore where you are today, for two reasons. One: so that you can contribute more. And two: that hopefully we can not just understand other people more, but appreciate them more, and create the kinds of connections that can stop some of the challenges that we face today. They're only going to get magnified by the very technology that connects us, because it's making us intersect. That intersection doesn't always create a view of "everybody now understands everybody, and everybody appreciates everybody." I've had an obsession basically for 30 years, "What makes the difference in the quality of people's lives? What in their performance?" I got hired to produce the result now. I've done it for 30 years. I get the phone call when the athlete is burning down on national television, and they were ahead by five strokes and now they can't get back on the course. I've got to do something right now or nothing matters. I get the phone call when the child is going to commit suicide, I've got to do something. In 29 years, I'm very grateful to tell you I've never lost one. It doesn't mean I won't some day, but I haven't yet. The reason is an understanding of these human needs. When I get those calls about performance, that's one thing. How do you make a change? I'm also looking to see what is shaping the person's ability to contribute, to do something beyond themselves. Maybe the real question is, I look at life and say there's two master lessons. One is: there's the science of achievement, which almost everyone here has mastered amazingly. "How do you take the invisible and make it visible," How do you make your dreams happen? Your business, your contribution to society, money -- whatever, your body, your family. The other lesson that is rarely mastered is the art of fulfillment. Because science is easy, right? We know the rules, you write the code and you get the results. Once you know the game, you just up the ante, don't you? But when it comes to fulfillment -- that's an art. The reason is, it's about appreciation and contribution. You can only feel so much by yourself. I've had an interesting laboratory to try to answer the real question how somebody's life changes if you look at them like those people that you've given everything to? Like all the resources they say they need. You gave not a 100-dollar computer, but the best computer. You gave them love, joy, were there to comfort them. Those people very often -- you know some of them -- end up the rest of their life with all this love, education, money and background going in and out of rehab. Some people have been through ultimate pain, psychologically, sexually, spiritually, emotionally abused -- and not always, but often, they become some of the people that contribute the most to society. The question we've got to ask ourselves really is, what is it? What is it that shapes us? We live in a therapy culture. Most of us don't do that, but the culture's a therapy culture, the mindset that we are our past. And you wouldn't be in this room if you bought that, but most of society thinks biography is destiny. The past equals the future. Of course it does if you live there. But what we know and what we have to remind ourselves -- because you can know something intellectually and then not use it, not apply it. We've got to remind ourselves that decision is the ultimate power. When you ask people, have you failed to achieve something significant in your life? Say, "Aye." Audience: Aye. TR: Thanks for the interaction on a high level there. But if you ask people, why didn't you achieve something? Somebody who's working for you, or a partner, or even yourself. When you fail to achieve, what's the reason people say? What do they tell you? Didn't have the knowledge, didn't have the money, didn't have the time, didn't have the technology. I didn't have the right manager. Al Gore: Supreme Court. TR: The Supreme Court. (Laughter) (Applause) (Cheering) (Applause continues) TR: And -- (Applause) What do all those, including the Supreme Court, have in common? (Laughter) They are a claim to you missing resources, and they may be accurate. You may not have the money, or the Supreme Court, but that is not the defining factor. (Applause) (Laughter) And you correct me if I'm wrong. The defining factor is never resources; it's resourcefulness. And what I mean specifically, rather than just some phrase, is if you have emotion, human emotion, something that I experienced from you the day before yesterday at a level that is as profound as I've ever experienced and I believe with that emotion you would have beat his ass and won. Audience: Yeah! (Applause) (Cheering) How easy for me to tell him what he should do. (Laughter) Idiot, Robbins. But I know when we watched the debate at that time, there were emotions that blocked people's ability to get this man's intellect and capacity. And the way that it came across to some people on that day -- because I know people that wanted to vote in your direction and didn't, and I was upset. But there was emotion there. Do you know what I'm talking about? Say, "Aye." Audience: Aye. TR: So, emotion is it. And if we get the right emotion, we can get ourselves to do anything. If you're creative, playful, fun enough, can you get through to anybody, yes or no? If you don't have the money, but you're creative and determined, you find the way. This is the ultimate resource. But this is not the story that people tell us. They tell us a bunch of different stories. They tell us we don't have the resources, but ultimately, if you take a look here, they say, what are all the reasons they haven't accomplished that? He's broken my pattern, that son-of-a-bitch. (Laughter) But I appreciated the energy, I'll tell you that. (Laughter) What determines your resources? We've said decisions shape destiny, which is my focus here. If decisions shape destiny, what determines it is three decisions. What will you focus on? You have to decide what you're going to focus on. Consciously or unconsciously. the minute you decide to focus, you must give it a meaning, and that meaning produces emotion. Is this the end or the beginning? Is God punishing me or rewarding me, or is this the roll of the dice? An emotion creates what we're going to do, or the action. So, think about your own life, the decisions that have shaped your destiny. And that sounds really heavy, but in the last five or 10 years, have there been some decisions that if you'd made a different decision, your life would be completely different? How many can think about it? Better or worse. Say, "Aye." Audience: Aye. So the bottom line is, maybe it was where to go to work, and you met the love of your life there, a career decision. I know the Google geniuses I saw here -- I mean, I understand that their decision was to sell their technology. What if they made that decision versus to build their own culture? How would the world or their lives be different, their impact? The history of our world is these decisions. When a woman stands up and says, "No, I won't go to the back of the bus." She didn't just affect her life. That decision shaped our culture. Or someone standing in front of a tank. Or being in a position like Lance Armstrong, "You've got testicular cancer." That's pretty tough for any male, especially if you ride a bike. (Laughter) You've got it in your brain; you've got it in your lungs. But what was his decision of what to focus on? Different than most people. What did it mean? It wasn't the end; it was the beginning. He goes off and wins seven championships he never once won before the cancer, because he got emotional fitness, psychological strength. That's the difference in human beings that I've seen of the three million I've been around. In my lab, I've had three million people from 80 countries over the last 29 years. And after a while, patterns become obvious. You see that South America and Africa may be connected in a certain way, right? Others say, "Oh, that sounds ridiculous." It's simple. So, what shaped Lance? What shapes you? Two invisible forces. Very quickly. One: state. We all have had times, you did something, and after, you thought to yourself, "I can't believe I said or did that, that was so stupid." Who's been there? Say, "Aye." Audience: Aye. Or after you did something, you go, "That was me!" (Laughter) It wasn't your ability; it was your state. Your model of the world is what shapes you long term. Your model of the world is the filter. That's what's shaping us. It makes people make decisions. To influence somebody, we need to know what already influences them. It's made up of three parts. First, what's your target? What are you after? It's not your desires. You can get your desires or goals. Who has ever got a goal or desire and thought, is this all there is? Say, "Aye." Audience: Aye. It's needs we have. I believe there are six human needs. Second, once you know what the target that's driving you is and you uncover it for the truth -- you don't form it -- then you find out what's your map, what's the belief systems that tell you how to get those needs. Some people think the way to get them is to destroy the world, some people, to build, create something, love someone. There's the fuel you pick. So very quickly, six needs. Let me tell you what they are. First one: certainty. These are not goals or desires, these are universal. Everyone needs certainty they can avoid pain and at least be comfortable. Now, how do you get it? Control everybody? Develop a skill? Give up? Smoke a cigarette? And if you got totally certain, ironically, even though we need that -- you're not certain about your health, or your children, or money. If you're not sure the ceiling will hold up, you won't listen to any speaker. While we go for certainty differently, if we get total certainty, we get what? What do you feel if you're certain? You know what will happen, when and how it will happen, what would you feel? Bored out of your minds. So, God, in Her infinite wisdom, gave us a second human need, which is uncertainty. We need variety. We need surprise. How many of you here love surprises? Say, "Aye." Audience: Aye. TR: Bullshit. You like the surprises you want. The ones you don't want, you call problems, but you need them. So, variety is important. Have you ever rented a video or a film that you've already seen? Who's done this? Get a fucking life. (Laughter) Why are you doing it? You're certain it's good because you read or saw it before, but you're hoping it's been long enough you've forgotten, and there's variety. Third human need, critical: significance. We all need to feel important, special, unique. You can get it by making more money or being more spiritual. You can do it by getting yourself in a situation where you put more tattoos and earrings in places humans don't want to know. Whatever it takes. The fastest way to do this, if you have no background, no culture, no belief and resources or resourcefulness, is violence. If I put a gun to your head and I live in the 'hood, instantly I'm significant. Zero to 10. How high? 10. How certain am I that you're going to respond to me? 10. How much uncertainty? Who knows what's going to happen next? Kind of exciting. Like climbing up into a cave and doing that stuff all the way down there. Total variety and uncertainty. And it's significant, isn't it? So you want to risk your life for it. So that's why violence has always been around and will be around unless we have a consciousness change as a species. You can get significance a million ways, but to be significant, you've got to be unique and different. Here's what we really need: connection and love, fourth need. We all want it; most settle for connection, love's too scary. Who here has been hurt in an intimate relationship? If you don't raise your hand, you've had other shit, too. And you're going to get hurt again. Aren't you glad you came to this positive visit? Here's what's true: we need it. We can do it through intimacy, friendship, prayer, through walking in nature. If nothing else works for you, don't get a cat, get a dog, because if you leave for two minutes, it's like you've been gone six months, when you come back 5 minutes later. These first four needs, every human finds a way to meet. Even if you lie to yourself, you need to have split personalities. I call the first four needs the needs of the personality. The last two are the needs of the spirit. And this is where fulfillment comes. You won't get it from the first four. You'll figure a way, smoke, drink, do whatever, meet the first four. But number five, you must grow. We all know the answer. If you don't grow, you're what? If a relationship or business is not growing, if you're not growing, doesn't matter how much money or friends you have, how many love you, you feel like hell. And I believe the reason we grow is so we have something to give of value. Because the sixth need is to contribute beyond ourselves. Because we all know, corny as that sounds, the secret to living is giving. We all know life is not about me, it's about we. This culture knows that, this room knows that. It's exciting. When you see Nicholas talking about his $100 computer, the most exciting thing is: here's a genius, but he's got a calling now. You can feel the difference in him, and it's beautiful. And that calling can touch other people. My life was touched because when I was 11 years old, Thanksgiving, no money, no food, we were not going to starve, but my father was totally messed up, my mom was letting him know how bad he messed up, and somebody came to the door and delivered food. My father made three decisions, I know what they were, briefly. His focus was "This is charity. What does it mean? I'm worthless. What do I have to do? Leave my family," which he did. It was one of the most painful experiences of life. My three decisions gave me a different path. I set focus on "There's food." What a concept! (Laughter) But this is what changed my life, shaped me as a human being. Somebody's gift, I don't even know who it is. My father always said, "No one gives a shit." And now somebody I don't know, they're not asking for anything, just giving us food, looking out for us. It made me believe this: that strangers care. And that made me decide, if strangers care about me and my family, I care about them. I'm going to do something to make a difference. So when I was 17, I went out on Thanksgiving, it was my target for years to have enough money to feed two families. The most fun and moving thing I ever did in my life. Next year, I did four, then eight. I didn't tell anybody what I was doing, I wasn't doing it for brownie points. But after eight, I thought I could use some help. So I went out, got my friends involved, then I grew companies, got 11, and I built the foundation. 18 years later, I'm proud to tell you last year we fed 2 million people in 35 countries through our foundation. All during the holidays, Thanksgiving, Christmas, in different countries around the world. (Applause) Thank you. I don't tell you that to brag, but because I'm proud of human beings because they get excited to contribute once they've had the chance to experience it, not talk about it. So, finally -- I'm about out of time. The target that shapes you -- Here's what's different about people. We have the same needs. But are you a certainty freak, is that what you value most, or uncertainty? This man couldn't be a certainty freak if he climbed through those caves. Are you driven by significance or love? We all need all six, but what your lead system is tilts you in a different direction. And as you move in a direction, you have a destination or destiny. The second piece is the map. The operating system tells you how to get there, and some people's map is, "I'm going to save lives even if I die for other people," and they're a fireman, and somebody else says, "I'm going to kill people to do it." They're trying to meet the same needs of significance. They want to honor God or honor their family. But they have a different map. And there are seven different beliefs; I can't go through them, because I'm done. The last piece is emotion. One of the parts of the map is like time. Some people's idea of a long time is 100 years. Somebody else's is three seconds, which is what I have. And the last one I've already mentioned that fell to you. If you've got a target and a map -- I can't use Google because I love Macs, and they haven't made it good for Macs yet. So if you use MapQuest -- how many have made this fatal mistake of using it? You use this thing and you don't get there. Imagine if your beliefs guarantee you can never get to where you want to go. (Laughter) The last thing is emotion. Here's what I'll tell you about emotion. There are 6,000 emotions that we have words for in the English language, which is just a linguistic representation that changes by language. But if your dominant emotions -- If I have 20,000 people or 1,000 and I have them write down all the emotions that they experience in an average week, and I give them as long as they need, and on one side they write empowering emotions, the other's disempowering, guess how many emotions they experience? Less than 12. And half of those make them feel like shit. They have six good feelings. Happy, happy, excited, oh shit, frustrated, frustrated, overwhelmed, depressed. How many of you know somebody who, no matter what happens, finds a way to get pissed off? (Laughter) Or no matter what happens, they find a way to be happy or excited. How many of you know somebody like this? When 9/11 happened, I'll finish with this, I was in Hawaii. I was with 2,000 people from 45 countries, we were translating four languages simultaneously for a program I was conducting, for a week. The night before was called Emotional Mastery. I got up, had no plan for this, and I said -- we had fireworks, I do crazy shit, fun stuff, and at the end, I stopped. I had this plan, but I never know what I'm going to say. And all of a sudden, I said, "When do people really start to live? When they face death." And I went through this whole thing about, if you weren't going to get off this island, if nine days from now, you were going to die, who would you call, what would you say, what would you do? That night is when 9/11 happened. One woman had come to the seminar, and when she came there, her previous boyfriend had been kidnapped and murdered. Her new boyfriend wanted to marry her, and she said no. He said, "If you go to that Hawaii thing, it's over with us." She said, "It's over." When I finished that night, she called him and left a message at the top of the World Trade Center where he worked, saying, "I love you, I want you to know I want to marry you. It was stupid of me." She was asleep, because it was 3 a.m. for us, when he called her back, and said, "Honey, I can't tell you what this means. I don't know how to tell you this, but you gave me the greatest gift, because I'm going to die." And she played the recording for us in the room. She was on Larry King later. And he said, "You're probably wondering how on Earth this could happen to you twice. All I can say is this must be God's message to you. From now on, every day, give your all, love your all. Don't let anything ever stop you." She finishes, and a man stands up, and he says, "I'm from Pakistan, I'm a Muslim. I'd love to hold your hand and say I'm sorry, but frankly, this is retribution." I can't tell you the rest, because I'm out of time. (Laughter) Are you sure? (Laughter) 10 seconds! (Laughter and applause) 10 seconds, I want to be respectful. All I can tell you is, I brought this man on stage with a man from New York who worked in the World Trade Center, because I had about 200 New Yorkers there. More than 50 lost their entire companies, friends, marking off their Palm Pilots. One financial trader, woman made of steel, bawling -- 30 friends crossing off that all died. And I said, "What are we going to focus on? What does this mean and what are we going to do?" And I got the group to focus on: if you didn't lose somebody today, your focus is going to be how to serve somebody else. Then one woman stood up and was so angry, screaming and yelling. I found out she wasn't from New York, she's not an American, doesn't know anybody here. I asked, "Do you always get angry?" She said, "Yes." Guilty people got guilty, sad people got sad. I took these two men and I did an indirect negotiation. Jewish man with family in the occupied territory, someone in New York who would have died if he was at work that day, and this man who wanted to be a terrorist, and I made it very clear. This integration is on a film, which I'd be happy to send you, instead of my verbalization, but the two of them not only came together and changed their beliefs and models of the world, but worked together to bring, for almost four years now, through various mosques and synagogues, the idea of how to create peace. And he wrote a book, called "My Jihad, My Way of Peace." So, transformation can happen. My invitation to you is: explore your web, the web in here -- the needs, the beliefs, the emotions that are controlling you, for two reasons: so there's more of you to give, and achieve, too, but I mean give, because that's what's going to fill you up. And secondly, so you can appreciate -- not just understand, that's intellectual, that's the mind, but appreciate what's driving other people. It's the only way our world's going to change. God bless you, thank you. I hope this was of service. (Applause)
I'm going to discuss with you three of my inventions that can have an effect on 10 to a 100 million people, which we will hope to see happen. We discussed, in the prior film, some of the old things that we did, like stents and insulin pumps for the diabetic. And I'd like to talk very briefly about three new inventions that will change the lives of many people. At the present time, it takes an average of three hours after the first symptoms of a heart attack are recognized by the patient, before that patient arrives at an emergency room. And people with silent ischemia -- which, translated into English, means they don't have any symptoms -- it takes even longer for them to get to the hospital. The AMI, Acute Myocardial Infarction, which is a doctor's big word so they can charge you more money -- (Laughter) -- means a heart attack. Annual incidence: 1.2 million Americans. Mortality: 300,000 people dying each year. About half of them, 600,000, have permanent damage to their heart that will cause them to have very bad problems later on. Thus 900,000 people either have died or have significant damage to their heart muscle. Symptoms are often denied by the patient, particularly us men, because we are very brave. We are very brave, and we don't want to admit that I'm having a hell of a chest pain. Then, approximately 25 percent of all patients never have any symptoms. What are we going to do about them? How can we save their lives? It's particularly true of diabetics and elderly women. Well, what is needed for the earliest possible warning of a heart attack? A means to determine if there's a complete blockage of a coronary artery. That, ladies and gentlemen, is a heart attack. The means consist of noting something a little technical, ST segment elevation of the electrogram -- translated into English, that means that if there's an electrical signal in the heart, and one part of the ECG -- which we call the ST segment -- elevates, that is a sure sign of a heart attack. And if we had a computer put into the body of a person who's at risk, we could know, before they even have symptoms, that they're having a heart attack, to save their life. Well, the doctor can program a level of this ST elevation voltage that will trigger an emergency alarm, vibration like your cell phone, but right by your clavicle bone. And when it goes beep, beep, beep, you better do something about it, because if you want to live you have to get to some medical treatment. So we have to try these devices out because the FDA won't just let us use them on people unless we try it out first, and the best model for this happens to be pigs. And what we tried with the pig was external electrodes on the skin, like you see in an emergency room, and I'm going to show you why they don't work very well. And then we put a lead, which is a wire, in the right ventricle inside the heart, which does the electrogram, which is the signal voltage from inside the heart. Well, with the pig, at the baseline, before we blocked the pig's artery to simulate a heart attack, that was the signal. After 43 seconds, even an expert couldn't tell the difference, and after three minutes -- well, if you really studied it, you'd see a difference. But what happened when we looked inside the pig's heart, to the electrogram? There was the baseline -- first of all, a much bigger and more reliable signal. Second of all, I'll bet even you people who are untrained can see the difference, and we see here an ST segment elevation right after this sharp line. Look at the difference there. It doesn't take much -- every layperson could see that difference, and computers can be programmed to easily detect it. Then, look at that after three minutes. We see that the signal that's actually in the heart, we can use it to tell people that they're having a heart attack even before they have symptoms so we can save their life. Then we tried it with my son, Dr. Tim Fischell, we tried it on some human patients who had to have a stent put in. Well, he kept the balloon filled to block the artery, to simulate a blockage, which is what a heart attack is. And it's not hard to see that -- the baseline is the first picture on the upper left. Next to it, at 30 seconds, you see this rise here, then this rise -- that's the ST elevation. And if we had a computer that could detect it, we could tell you you're having a heart attack so early it could save your life and prevent congestive heart failure. And then he did it again. We filled the balloon again a few minutes later and here you see, even after 10 seconds, a great rise in this piece, which we can have computers inside, under your chest like a pacemaker, with a wire into your heart like a pacemaker. And computers don't go to sleep. We have a little battery and on this little battery that computer will run for five years without needing replacement. What does the system look like? Well, on the left is the IMD, which is Implantable Medical Device, and tonight in the tent you can see it -- they've exhibited it. It's about this big, the size of a pacemaker. It's implanted with very conventional techniques. And the EXD is an External Device that you can have on your night table. It'll wake you up and tell you to get your tail to the emergency room when the thing goes off because, if you don't, you're in deep doo-doo. And then, finally, a programmer that will set the level of the stimulation, which is the level which says you are having a heart attack. The FDA says, OK, test this final device after it's built in some animal, which we said is a pig, so we had to get this pig to have a heart attack. And when you go to the farmyard, you can't easily get pigs to have heart attacks, so we said, well, we're experts in stents. Tonight you'll see some of our invented stents. We said, so we'll put in a stent, but we're not going to put in a stent that we'd put in people. We're putting in a copper stent, and this copper stent erodes the artery and causes heart attacks. That's not very nice, but, after all, we had to find out what the answer is. So we took two copper stents and we put it in the artery of this pig, and let me show you the result that's very gratifying as far as people who have heart disease are concerned. So there it was, Thursday morning we stopped the pig's medication and there is his electrogram, the signal from inside the pig's heart coming out by radio telemetry. Then, on Friday at 6:43, he began to get certain signs, which later we had the pig run around -- I'm not going to go into this early stage. But look what happened at 10:06 after we removed this pig's medication that kept him from having a heart attack. Any one of you now is an expert on ST elevation. Can you see it there? Can you see it in the picture after the big rise of the QRS -- you see ST elevation? This pig at 10:06 was having a heart attack. What happens after you have the heart attack, this blockage? Your rhythm becomes irregular, and that's what happened 45 minutes later. Then, ventricular fibrillation, the heart quivers instead of beats -- this is just before death of the pig -- and then the pig died; it went flat-line. But we had a little bit over an hour where we could've saved this pig's life. Well, because of the FDA, we didn't save the pig's life, because we need to do this type of animal research for humans. But when it comes to the sake of a human, we can save their life. We can save the lives of people who are at high risk for a heart attack. What is the response to acute myocardial infarction, a heart attack, today? Well, you feel some chest pain or indigestion. It's not all that bad; you decide not to do anything. Several hours pass and it gets worse, and even the man won't ignore it. Finally, you go to the emergency room. You wait as burns and other critical patients are treated, because 75 percent of the patients who go to an emergency room with chest pains don't have AMI, so you're not taken very seriously. They finally see you. It takes more time to get your electrocardiogram on your skin and diagnose it, and it's hard to do because they don't have the baseline data, which the computer we put in you gets. Finally, if you're lucky, you are treated in three or four hours after the incident, but the heart muscle has died. And that is the typical treatment in the advanced world -- not Africa -- that's the typical treatment in the advanced world today. So we developed the AngelMed Guardian System and we have a device inside this patient, called the Implanted AngelMed Guardian. And when you have a blockage, the alarm goes off and it sends the alarm and the electrogram to an external device, which gets your baseline electrogram from 24 hours ago and the one that caused the alarm, so you can take it to the emergency room and show them, and say, take care of me right away. Then it goes to a network operations center, where they get your data from your patient database that's been put in at some central location, say, in the United States. Then it goes to a diagnostic center, and within one minute of your heart attack, your signal appears on the screen of a computer and the computer analyzes what your problem is. And the person who's there, the medical practitioner, calls you -- this is also a cell phone -- and says, "Mr. Smith, you're in deep doo-doo; you have a problem. We've called the ambulance. The ambulance is on the way. It'll pick you up, and then we're going to call your doctor, tell him about it. We're going to send him the signal that we have, that says you have a heart attack, and we're going to send the signal to the hospital and we're going to have it analyzed there, and there you're going to be with your doctor and you'll be taken care of so you won't die of a heart attack." That's the first invention that I wanted to describe. (Applause) And now I want to talk about something entirely different. At first I didn't think migraine headaches were a big problem because I'd never had a migraine headache, but then I spoke to some people who have three or four every week of their life, and their lives are being totally ruined by it. We have a mission statement for our company doing migraine, which is, "Prevent or ameliorate migraine headaches by the application of a safe, controlled magnetic pulse applied, as needed, by the patient." Now, you're probably very few physicists here. If you're a physicist you'd know there's a certain Faraday's Law, which says if I apply a magnetic pulse on salt water -- that's your brains by the way -- it'll generate electric currents, and the electric current in the brain can erase a migraine headache. That's what we have discovered. So here's a picture of what we're doing. The patients who have a migraine preceded by an aura have a band of excited neurons -- that's shown in red -- that moves at three to five millimeters a minute towards the mid-brain. And when it hits the mid-brain, that's when the headache begins. There's this migraine that is preceded by a visual aura, and this visual aura, by the way -- and I'll show you a picture -- but it sort of begins with little dancing lights, gets bigger and bigger until it fills your whole visual field. And what we tried was this; here is a device called the Cadwell Model MES10. Weighs about 70 pounds, has a wire about an inch in diameter. And here's one of the patients who has an aura and always has a headache, bad one, after the aura. What do we do? This is what an aura looks like. It's sort of funny dancing lights, shown there on the left and right side. And that's a fully developed visual aura, as we see on top. In the middle, our experimentalist, the neurologist, who said, "I'm going to move this down a little and I'm going to erase half your aura." And, by God, the neurologist did erase it, and that's the middle picture: half of the aura erased by a short magnetic pulse. What does that mean? That means that the magnetic pulse is generating an electric current that's interfering with the erroneous electrical activity in the brain. And finally he says, "OK, now I'm going to -- " all of the aura get erased with an appropriately placed magnetic pulse. What is the result? We designed a magnetic depolarizer that looks like this, that you could have -- a lady, in her pocket book -- and when you get an aura you can try it and see how it works. Well, the next thing they have to show is what was on ABC News, Channel 7, last week in New York City, in the 11 o'clock news. Anchor: For anyone who suffers from migraine headaches -- and there are 30 million Americans who do -- tonight: a possible answer. Eyewitness news reporter Stacy Sager tonight, with a small and portable machine that literally zaps your migraines away. Christina Sidebottom: Well, my first reaction was that it was -- looked awfully gun-like, and it was very strange. Stacy Sager: But for Christina Sidebottom, almost anything was worth trying if it could stop a migraine. It may look silly or even frightening as you walk around with it in your purse, but researchers here in Ohio organizing clinical trials for this migraine zapper, say it is scientifically sound -- that, in fact, when the average person gets a migraine, it's caused by something similar to an electrical impulse. The zapper creates a magnetic field to counteract that. Yousef Mohammed: In other words, we're treating electricity with electricity, rather than treating electricity with the chemicals that we're using nowadays. SS: But is it safe to use everyday? Experts say the research has actually been around for more than a decade, and more long-term studies need to be done. Christina now swears by it. CS: It's been the most wonderful thing for my migraine. SS: Researchers are hoping to present their studies to the FDA this summer. Robert Fischell: And that is the invention to treat migraines. (Applause) You see, the problem is, 30 million Americans have migraine headaches, and we need a means to treat it, and I think that we now have it. And this is the first device that we did, and I'm going to talk about my second wish, which has something to do with this. Our conclusions from our studies so far, at three research centers, is there is a marked improvement in pain levels after using it just once. The most severe headaches responded better after we did it several times, and the unexpected finding indicates that even established headaches, not only those with aura, get treated and get diminished. And auras can be erased and the migraine, then, does not occur. And that is the migraine invention that we are talking about and that we are working on. (Applause) The third and last invention began with an idea. Epilepsy can best be treated by responsive electrical stimulation. Now, why do we use -- add on, nearly, an epileptic focus? Now, unfortunately, us technical people, unlike Mr. Bono, have to get into all these technical words. Well, "responsive electrical stimulation" means that we sense, at a place in your brain which is called an "epileptic focus," which is where the epileptic seizure begins -- we sense there, that it's going to happen, and then we respond by applying an electrical energy at that spot, which erases the errant signal so that you don't get the clinical manifestations of the migraine headache. We use current pacemaker defibrillator technology that's used for the heart. We thought we could adapt it for the brain. The device could be implanted under the scalp to be totally hidden and avoid wire breakage, which occurs if you put it in the chest and you try to move your neck around. Form a company to develop a neuro-pacemaker for epilepsy, as well as other diseases of the brain, because all diseases of the brain are a result of some electrical malfunction in it, that causes many, if not all, of brain disorders. We formed a company called NeuroPace and we started work on responsive neurostimulation, and this is a picture of what the device looked like, that's placed into the cranial bone. This is probably a better picture. Here we have our device in which we put in a frame. There's a cut made in the scalp; it's opened; the neurosurgeon has a template; he marks it around, and uses a dental burr to remove a piece of the cranial bone exactly the size of our device. And tonight, you'll be able to see the device in the tent. And then with four screws, we put in a frame, then we snap in the device and we run with wires -- the one shown in green will go to the surface of the brain with electrodes, to the epileptic focus, the origin of the epilepsy, where we can sense the electrical signal and have computer analysis that tells us when to hit it with some electrical current to prevent the clinical manifestation of the seizure. In the blue wire, we see what's called a deep brain electrode. If that's the source of the epilepsy, we can attack that as well. The comprehensive solution: this is the device; it's about one inches by two inches and, oddly enough, just the thickness of most cranial bones. The advantages of responsive neurostimulation: It can detect and terminate seizures before the clinical symptoms occur, provide stimulation only when needed, can be turned off if seizures disappear; it has minimal side effects -- as a matter of fact, in all our clinical trials to date, we've seen no side effects in the 40 or so patients in whom it's been implanted -- and it's invisible, cosmetically hidden, so, if you have epilepsy and you have the device, no one will know it because you can't tell that it's there. And this shows what an electroencephalogram is, and on the left is the signal of a spontaneous seizure of one of the patients. Then we stimulated, and you see how that heavy black line and then you see the electroencephalogram signal going to normal, which means they did not get the epileptic seizure. That concludes my discussion of epilepsy, which is the third invention that I want to discuss here this afternoon. (Applause) I have three wishes. Well, I can't do much about Africa. I'm a tech; I'm into medical gadgetry, which is mostly high-tech stuff like Mr. Bono talked about. The first wish is to use the epilepsy responsive neurostimulator, called RNS, for Responsive NeuroStimulator -- that's a brilliant acronym -- for the treatment of other brain disorders. Well, if we're going to do it for epilepsy, why the hell not try it for something else? Then you saw what that device looked like, that the woman was using to fix her migraines? I tell you this: that's something which some research engineer like me would concoct, not a real designer of good equipment. (Laughter) We want to have some people, who really know how to do this, perform human engineering studies to develop the optimum design for the portable device for treating migraine headaches. And some of the sponsors of this TED meeting are such organizations. Then we're going to challenge the TED attendees to come up with a way to improve health care in the USA, where we have problems that Africa doesn't have. And by reducing malpractice litigation -- malpractice litigation is not an African problem; it's an American problem. (Applause) So, to get quickly to my first wish -- the brain operates by electrical signals. If the electrical signals create a brain disorder, electro-stimulation can overcome that disorder by acting on the brain's neurons. In other words, if you've screwed up electrical signals, maybe, by putting other electrical signals from a computer in the brain, we can counteract that. A signal in the brain that triggers brain dysfunction might be sensed as a trigger for electro-stimulation like we're doing with epilepsy. But even if there is no signal, electro-stimulation of an appropriate part of the brain can turn off a brain disorder. And consider treating psychotic disorders -- and I want this involved with the TED group -- such as obsessive-compulsive disorder that, presently, is not well treated with drugs, and includes five million Americans. And Mr. Fischer, and his group at NeuroPace, and myself believe that we can have a dramatic effect in improving OCD in America and in the world. That is the first wish. (Applause) The second wish is, at the present time, the clinical trials of transcranial magnetic stimulators -- that's what TMS means, device to treat migraine headaches -- appears to be quite successful. Well, that's the good news. The present portable device is far from optimally designed, both as to human factors as appearance. I think she said it looks like a gun. A lot of people don't like guns. (Laughter) Engage a company having prior successes for human factors engineering and industrial design to optimize the design of the first portable TMS device that will be sold to the patients who have migraine headaches. And that is the second wish. (Applause) And, of the 100,000-dollar prize money, that TED was so generous to give me, I am donating 50,000 dollars to the NeuroPace people to get on with the treatment of OCD, obsessive-compulsive disorder, and I'm making another 50,000 available for a company to optimize the design of the device for migraines. And that's how I'll use my 100,000-dollar prize money. (Applause) Well, the third and final wish is somewhat -- unfortunately, it's much more complicated because it involves lawyers. (Laughter) Well, medical malpractice litigation in the US has escalated the cost of malpractice insurance, so that competent physicians are leaving their practice. Lawyers take cases on contingency with the hope of a big share of a big settlement by a sympathetic jury, because this patient really ended up badly. The high cost of health care in the US is partly due to litigation and insurance costs. I've seen pictures, graphs in today's USA Today showing it skyrocketing out of control, and this is one factor. Well, how can the TED community help with this situation? I have a couple of ideas to begin with. As a starting point for discussion with the TED group, a major part of the problem is the nature of the written extent of informed consent that the patient or spouse must read and sign. For example, I asked the epilepsy people what are they using for informed consent. Would you believe, 12 pages, single space, the patient has to read before they're in our trial to cure their epilepsy? What do you think someone has at the end of reading 12 single-spaced pages? They don't understand what the hell it's about. (Laughter) That's the present system. How about making a video? We have entertainment people here; we have people who know how to do videos, with visual presentation of the anatomy and procedure done with animation. Everybody knows that we can do better with a visual thing that can be interactive with the patient, where they see the video and they're being videoed and they press, do you understand this? No, I don't. Well, then let's go to a simpler explanation. Then there's a simpler one and, oh yes, I understand that. Well, press the button and you're on record, you understand. And that is one of the ideas. Now, also a video is done of the patient or spouse and medical presenter, with the patient agreeing that he understands the procedure to be done, including all the possible failure modes. The patient or spouse agrees not to file a lawsuit if one of the known procedure failures occurs. Now, in America, in fact, you cannot give up your right to trial by jury. However, if a video is there that everything was explained to you, and you have it all in the video file, it'll be much less likely that some hotshot lawyer will take this case on contingency, because it won't be nearly as good a case. If a medical error occurs, the patient or spouse agrees to a settlement for fair compensation by arbitration instead of going to court. That would save hundreds of millions of dollars in legal costs in the United States and would decrease the cost of medicine for everyone. These are just some starting points. And, so there, that's the end of all my wishes. I wish I had more wishes but three is what I've got and there they are. (Applause)
So, a big question that we're facing now and have been for quite a number of years now: are we at risk of a nuclear attack? Now, there's a bigger question that's probably actually more important than that, is the notion of permanently eliminating the possibility of a nuclear attack, eliminating the threat altogether. And I would like to make a case to you that over the years since we first developed atomic weaponry, until this very moment, we've actually lived in a dangerous nuclear world that's characterized by two phases, which I'm going to go through with you right now. First of all, we started off the nuclear age in 1945. The United States had developed a couple of atomic weapons through the Manhattan Project, and the idea was very straightforward: we would use the power of the atom to end the atrocities and the horror of this unending World War II that we'd been involved in in Europe and in the Pacific. And in 1945, we were the only nuclear power. We had a few nuclear weapons, two of which we dropped on Japan, in Hiroshima, a few days later in Nagasaki, in August 1945, killing about 250,000 people between those two. And for a few years, we were the only nuclear power on Earth. But by 1949, the Soviet Union had decided it was unacceptable to have us as the only nuclear power, and they began to match what the United States had developed. And from 1949 to 1985 was an extraordinary time of a buildup of a nuclear arsenal that no one could possibly have imagined back in the 1940s. So by 1985 -- each of those red bombs up here is equivalent of a thousands warheads -- the world had 65,000 nuclear warheads, and seven members of something that came to be known as the "nuclear club." And it was an extraordinary time, and I am going to go through some of the mentality that we -- that Americans and the rest of the world were experiencing. But I want to just point out to you that 95 percent of the nuclear weapons at any particular time since 1985 -- going forward, of course -- were part of the arsenals of the United States and the Soviet Union. After 1985, and before the break up of the Soviet Union, we began to disarm from a nuclear point of view. We began to counter-proliferate, and we dropped the number of nuclear warheads in the world to about a total of 21,000. It's a very difficult number to deal with, because what we've done is we've quote unquote "decommissioned" some of the warheads. They're still probably usable. They could be "re-commissioned," but the way they count things, which is very complicated, we think we have about a third of the nuclear weapons we had before. But we also, in that period of time, added two more members to the nuclear club: Pakistan and North Korea. So we stand today with a still fully armed nuclear arsenal among many countries around the world, but a very different set of circumstances. So I'm going to talk about a nuclear threat story in two chapters. Chapter one is 1949 to 1991, when the Soviet Union broke up, and what we were dealing with, at that point and through those years, was a superpowers' nuclear arms race. It was characterized by a nation-versus-nation, very fragile standoff. And basically, we lived for all those years, and some might argue that we still do, in a situation of being on the brink, literally, of an apocalyptic, planetary calamity. It's incredible that we actually lived through all that. We were totally dependent during those years on this amazing acronym, which is MAD. It stands for mutually assured destruction. So it meant if you attacked us, we would attack you virtually simultaneously, and the end result would be a destruction of your country and mine. So the threat of my own destruction kept me from launching a nuclear attack on you. That's the way we lived. And the danger of that, of course, is that a misreading of a radar screen could actually cause a counter-launch, even though the first country had not actually launched anything. During this chapter one, there was a high level of public awareness about the potential of nuclear catastrophe, and an indelible image was implanted in our collective minds that, in fact, a nuclear holocaust would be absolutely globally destructive and could, in some ways, mean the end of civilization as we know it. So this was chapter one. Now the odd thing is that even though we knew that there would be that kind of civilization obliteration, we engaged in America in a series -- and in fact, in the Soviet Union -- in a series of response planning. It was absolutely incredible. So premise one is we'd be destroying the world, and then premise two is, why don't we get prepared for it? So what we offered ourselves was a collection of things. I'm just going to go skim through a few things, just to jog your memories. If you're born after 1950, this is just -- consider this entertainment, otherwise it's memory lane. This was Bert the Turtle. (Video) This was basically an attempt to teach our schoolchildren that if we did get engaged in a nuclear confrontation and atomic war, then we wanted our school children to kind of basically duck and cover. That was the principle. You -- there would be a nuclear conflagration about to hit us, and if you get under your desk, things would be OK. (Laughter) I didn't do all that well in psychiatry in medical school, but I was interested, and I think this was seriously delusional. (Laughter) Secondly, we told people to go down in their basements and build a fallout shelter. Maybe it would be a study when we weren't having an atomic war, or you could use it as a TV room, or, as many teenagers found out, a very, very safe place for a little privacy with your girlfriend. And actually -- so there are multiple uses of the bomb shelters. Or you could buy a prefabricated bomb shelter that you could simply bury in the ground. Now, the bomb shelters at that point -- let's say you bought a prefab one -- it would be a few hundred dollars, maybe up to 500, if you got a fancy one. Yet, what percentage of Americans do you think ever had a bomb shelter in their house? What percentage lived in a house with a bomb shelter? Less than two percent. About 1.4 percent of the population, as far as anyone knows, did anything, either making a space in their basement or actually building a bomb shelter. Many buildings, public buildings, around the country -- this is New York City -- had these little civil defense signs, and the idea was that you would run into one of these shelters and be safe from the nuclear weaponry. And one of the greatest governmental delusions of all time was something that happened in the early days of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, FEMA, as we now know, and are well aware of their behaviors from Katrina. Here is their first big public announcement. They would propose -- actually there were about six volumes written on this -- a crisis relocation plan that was dependent upon the United States having three to four days warning that the Soviets were going to attack us. So the goal was to evacuate the target cities. We would move people out of the target cities into the countryside. And I'm telling you, I actually testified at the Senate about the absolute ludicrous idea that we would actually evacuate, and actually have three or four days' warning. It was just completely off the wall. Turns out that they had another idea behind it, even though this was -- they were telling the public it was to save us. The idea was that we would force the Soviets to re-target their nuclear weapons -- very expensive -- and potentially double their arsenal, to not only take out the original site, but take out sites where people were going. This was what apparently, as it turns out, was behind all this. It was just really, really frightening. The main point here is we were dealing with a complete disconnect from reality. The civil defense programs were disconnected from the reality of what we'd see in all-out nuclear war. So organizations like Physicians for Social Responsibility, around 1979, started saying this a lot publicly. They would do a bombing run. They'd go to your city, and they'd say, "Here's a map of your city. Here's what's going to happen if we get a nuclear hit." So no possibility of medical response to, or meaningful preparedness for all-out nuclear war. So we had to prevent nuclear war if we expected to survive. This disconnect was never actually resolved. And what happened was -- when we get in to chapter two of the nuclear threat era, which started back in 1945. Chapter two starts in 1991. When the Soviet Union broke up, we effectively lost that adversary as a potential attacker of the United States, for the most part. It's not completely gone. I'm going to come back to that. But from 1991 through the present time, emphasized by the attacks of 2001, the idea of an all-out nuclear war has diminished and the idea of a single event, act of nuclear terrorism is what we have instead. Although the scenario has changed very considerably, the fact is that we haven't changed our mental image of what a nuclear war means. So I'm going to tell you what the implications of that are in just a second. So, what is a nuclear terror threat? And there's four key ingredients to describing that. First thing is that the global nuclear weapons, in the stockpiles that I showed you in those original maps, happen to be not uniformly secure. And it's particularly not secure in the former Soviet Union, now in Russia. There are many, many sites where warheads are stored and, in fact, lots of sites where fissionable materials, like highly enriched uranium and plutonium, are absolutely not safe. They're available to be bought, stolen, whatever. They're acquirable, let me put it that way. From 1993 through 2006, the International Atomic Energy Agency documented 175 cases of nuclear theft, 18 of which involved highly enriched uranium or plutonium, the key ingredients to make a nuclear weapon. The global stockpile of highly enriched uranium is about 1,300, at the low end, to about 2,100 metric tons. More than 100 megatons of this is stored in particularly insecure Russian facilities. How much of that do you think it would take to actually build a 10-kiloton bomb? Well, you need about 75 pounds of it. So, what I'd like to show you is what it would take to hold 75 pounds of highly enriched uranium. This is not a product placement. It's just -- in fact, if I was Coca Cola, I'd be pretty distressed about this -- (Laughter) -- but basically, this is it. This is what you would need to steal or buy out of that 100-metric-ton stockpile that's relatively insecure to create the type of bomb that was used in Hiroshima. Now you might want to look at plutonium as another fissionable material that you might use in a bomb. That -- you'd need 10 to 13 pounds of plutonium. Now, plutonium, 10 to 13 pounds: this. This is enough plutonium to create a Nagasaki-size atomic weapon. Now this situation, already I -- you know, I don't really like thinking about this, although somehow I got myself a job where I have to think about it. So the point is that we're very, very insecure in terms of developing this material. The second thing is, what about the know-how? And there's a lot of controversy about whether terror organizations have the know-how to actually make a nuclear weapon. Well, there's a lot of know-how out there. There's an unbelievable amount of know-how out there. There's detailed information on how to assemble a nuclear weapon from parts. There's books about how to build a nuclear bomb. There are plans for how to create a terror farm where you could actually manufacture and develop all the components and assemble it. All of this information is relatively available. If you have an undergraduate degree in physics, I would suggest -- although I don't, so maybe it's not even true -- but something close to that would allow you, with the information that's currently available, to actually build a nuclear weapon. The third element of the nuclear terror threat is that, who would actually do such a thing? Well, what we're seeing now is a level of terrorism that involves individuals who are highly organized. They are very dedicated and committed. They are stateless. Somebody once said, Al Qaeda does not have a return address, so if they attack us with a nuclear weapon, what's the response, and to whom is the response? And they're retaliation-proof. Since there is no real retribution possible that would make any difference, since there are people willing to actually give up their lives in order to do a lot of damage to us, it becomes apparent that the whole notion of this mutually assured destruction would not work. Here is Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, and Sulaiman was a key lieutenant of Osama Bin Laden. He wrote many, many times statements to this effect: "we have the right to kill four million Americans, two million of whom should be children." And we don't have to go overseas to find people willing to do harm, for whatever their reasons. McVeigh and Nichols, and the Oklahoma City attack in the 1990s was a good example of homegrown terrorists. What if they had gotten their hands on a nuclear weapon? The fourth element is that the high-value U.S. targets are accessible, soft and plentiful. This would be a talk for another day, but the level of the preparedness that the United States has achieved since 9/11 of '01 is unbelievably inadequate. What you saw after Katrina is a very good indicator of how little prepared the United States is for any kind of major attack. Seven million ship cargo containers come into the United States every year. Five to seven percent only are inspected -- five to seven percent. This is Alexander Lebed, who was a general that worked with Yeltsin, who talked about, and presented to Congress, this idea that the Russians had developed -- these suitcase bombs. They were very low yield -- 0.1 to one kiloton, Hiroshima was around 13 kilotons -- but enough to do an unbelievable amount of damage. And Lebed came to the United States and told us that many, many -- more than 80 of the suitcase bombs were actually not accountable. And they look like this. They're basically very simple arrangements. You put the elements into a suitcase. It becomes very portable. The suitcase can be conveniently dropped in your trunk of your car. You take it wherever you want to take it, and you can detonate it. You don't want to build a suitcase bomb, and you happen to get one of those insecure nuclear warheads that exist. This is the size of the "Little Boy" bomb that was dropped at Hiroshima. It was 9.8 feet long, weighed 8,800 pounds. You go down to your local rent-a-truck and for 50 bucks or so, you rent a truck that's got the right capacity, and you take your bomb, you put it in the truck and you're ready to go. It could happen. But what it would mean and who would survive? You can't get an exact number for that kind of probability, but what I'm trying to say is that we have all the elements of that happening. Anybody who dismisses the thought of a nuclear weapon being used by a terrorist is kidding themselves. I think there's a lot of people in the intelligence community -- a lot of people who deal with this work in general think it's almost inevitable, unless we do certain things to really try to defuse the risk, like better interdiction, better prevention, better fixing, you know, better screening of cargo containers that are coming into the country and so forth. There's a lot that can be done to make us a lot safer. At this particular moment, we actually could end up seeing a nuclear detonation in one of our cities. I don't think we would see an all-out nuclear war any time soon, although even that is not completely off the table. There's still enough nuclear weapons in the arsenals of the superpowers to destroy the Earth many, many times over. There are flash points in India and Pakistan, in the Middle East, in North Korea, other places where the use of nuclear weapons, while initially locally, could very rapidly go into a situation where we'd be facing all-out nuclear war. It's very unsettling. Here we go. OK. I'm back in my truck, and we drove over the Brooklyn Bridge. We're coming down, and we bring that truck that you just saw somewhere in here, in the Financial District. This is a 10-kiloton bomb, slightly smaller than was used in Hiroshima. And I want to just conclude this by just giving you some information. I think -- "news you could use" kind of concept here. So, first of all, this would be horrific beyond anything we can possibly imagine. This is the ultimate. And if you're in the half-mile radius of where this bomb went off, you have a 90 percent chance of not making it. If you're right where the bomb went off, you will be vaporized. And that's -- I'm just telling you, this is not good. (Laughter) You assume that. Two-mile radius, you have a 50 percent chance of being killed, and up to about eight miles away -- now I'm talking about killed instantly -- somewhere between a 10 and 20 percent chance of getting killed. The thing about this is that the experience of the nuclear detonation is -- first of all, tens of millions of degrees Fahrenheit at the core here, where it goes off, and an extraordinary amount of energy in the form of heat, acute radiation and blast effects. An enormous hurricane-like wind, and destruction of buildings almost totally, within this yellow circle here. And what I'm going to focus on, as I come to conclusion here, is that, what happens to you if you're in here? Well, if we're talking about the old days of an all-out nuclear attack, you, up here, are as dead as the people here. So it was a moot point. My point now, though, is that there is a lot that we could do for you who are in here, if you've survived the initial blast. You have, when the blast goes off -- and by the way, if it ever comes up, don't look at it. (Laughter) If you look at it, you're going to be blind, either temporarily or permanently. So if there's any way that you can avoid, like, avert your eyes, that would be a good thing. If you find yourself alive, but you're in the vicinity of a nuclear weapon, you have -- that's gone off -- you have 10 to 20 minutes, depending on the size and exactly where it went off, to get out of the way before a lethal amount of radiation comes straight down from the mushroom cloud that goes up. In that 10 to 15 minutes, all you have to do -- and I mean this seriously -- is go about a mile away from the blast. And what happens is -- this is -- I'm going to show you now some fallout plumes. Within 20 minutes, it comes straight down. Within 24 hours, lethal radiation is going out with prevailing winds, and it's mostly in this particular direction -- it's going northeast. And if you're in this vicinity, you've got to get away. So you're feeling the wind -- and this tremendous wind now that you're going to be feeling -- and you want to go perpendicular to the wind or downwind, if you are in fact able to see where the blast was in front of you. You've got to get out of there. If you don't get out of there, you're going to be exposed to lethal radiation in very short order. If you can't get out of there, we want you to go into a shelter and stay there. Now, in a shelter in an urban area means you have to be either in a basement as deep as possible, or you have to be on a floor -- on a high floor -- if it's a ground burst explosion, which it would be, higher than the ninth floor. So you have to be tenth floor or higher, or in the basement. But basically, you've got to get out of town as quickly as possible. And if you do that, you actually can survive a nuclear blast. Over the next few days to a week, there will be a radiation cloud, again, going with the wind, and settling down for another 15 or 20 miles out -- in this case, over Long Island. And if you're in the direct fallout zone here, you really have to either be sheltered or you have to get out of there, and that's clear. But if you are sheltered, you can actually survive. The difference between knowing information of what you're going to do personally, and not knowing information, can save your life, and it could mean the difference between 150,000 to 200,000 fatalities from something like this and half a million to 700,000 fatalities. So, response planning in the twenty-first century is both possible and is essential. But in 2008, there isn't one single American city that has done effective plans to deal with a nuclear detonation disaster. Part of the problem is that the emergency planners themselves, personally, are overwhelmed psychologically by the thought of nuclear catastrophe. They are paralyzed. You say "nuclear" to them, and they're thinking, "Oh my God, we're all gone. What's the point? It's futile." And we're trying to tell them, "It's not futile. We can change the survival rates by doing some commonsensical things." So the goal here is to minimize fatalities. And I just want to leave you with the personal points that I think you might be interested in. The key to surviving a nuclear blast is getting out, and not going into harm's way. That's basically all we're going to be talking about here. And the farther you are away in distance, the longer it is in time from the initial blast; and the more separation between you and the outside atmosphere, the better. So separation -- hopefully with dirt or concrete, or being in a basement -- distance and time is what will save you. So here's what you do. First of all, as I said, don't stare at the light flash, if you can. I don't know you could possibly resist doing that. But let's assume, theoretically, you want to do that. You want to keep your mouth open, so your eardrums don't burst from the pressures. If you're very close to what happened, you actually do have to duck and cover, like Bert told you, Bert the Turtle. And you want to get under something so that you're not injured or killed by objects, if that's at all possible. You want to get away from the initial fallout mushroom cloud, I said, in just a few minutes. And shelter and place. You want to move downwind or crosswind for 1.2 miles. You know, if you're out there and you see buildings horribly destroyed and down in that direction, less destroyed here, then you know that it was over there, the blast, and you're going this way, as long as you're going crosswise to the wind. Once you're out and evacuating, you want to keep as much of your skin, your mouth and nose covered, as long as that covering doesn't impede you moving and getting out of there. And finally, you want to get decontaminated as soon as possible. And if you're wearing clothing, you've taken off your clothing, you're going to get showered down some place and remove the radiation that would be -- the radioactive material that might be on you. And then you want to stay in shelter for 48 to 72 hours minimum, but you're going to wait hopefully -- you'll have your little wind-up, battery-less radio, and you'll be waiting for people to tell you when it's safe to go outside. That's what you need to do. In conclusion, nuclear war is less likely than before, but by no means out of the question, and it's not survivable. Nuclear terrorism is possible -- it may be probable -- but is survivable. And this is Jack Geiger, who's one of the heroes of the U.S. public health community. And Jack said the only way to deal with nuclear anything, whether it's war or terrorism, is abolition of nuclear weapons. And you want something to work on once you've fixed global warming, I urge you to think about the fact that we have to do something about this unacceptable, inhumane reality of nuclear weapons in our world. Now, this is my favorite civil defense slide, and I -- (Laughter) -- I don't want to be indelicate, but this -- he's no longer in office. We don't really care, OK. This was sent to me by somebody who is an aficionado of civil defense procedures, but the fact of the matter is that America's gone through a very hard time. We've not been focused, we've not done what we had to do, and now we're facing the potential of bad, hell on Earth. Thank you.
Good morning everyone. First of all, it's been fantastic being here over these past few days. And secondly, I feel it's a great honor to kind of wind up this extraordinary gathering of people, these amazing talks that we've had. I feel that I've fitted in, in many ways, to some of the things that I've heard. I came directly here from the deep, deep tropical rainforest in Ecuador, where I was out -- you could only get there by a plane -- with indigenous people with paint on their faces and parrot feathers on their headdresses, where these people are fighting to try and keep the oil companies, and keep the roads, out of their forests. They're fighting to develop their own way of living within the forest in a world that's clean, a world that isn't contaminated, a world that isn't polluted. And what was so amazing to me, and what fits right in with what we're all talking about here at TED, is that there, right in the middle of this rainforest, was some solar panels -- the first in that part of Ecuador -- and that was mainly to bring water up by pump so that the women wouldn't have to go down. The water was cleaned, but because they got a lot of batteries, they were able to store a lot of electricity. So every house -- and there were, I think, eight houses in this little community -- could have light for, I think it was about half an hour each evening. And there is the Chief, in all his regal finery, with a laptop computer. (Laughter) And this man, he has been outside, but he's gone back, and he was saying, "You know, we have suddenly jumped into a whole new era, and we didn't even know about the white man 50 years ago, and now here we are with laptop computers, and there are some things we want to learn from the modern world. We want to know about health care. We want to know about what other people do -- we're interested in it. And we want to learn other languages. We want to know English and French and perhaps Chinese, and we're good at languages." So there he is with his little laptop computer, but fighting against the might of the pressures -- because of the debt, the foreign debt of Ecuador -- fighting the pressure of World Bank, IMF, and of course the people who want to exploit the forests and take out the oil. And so, coming directly from there to here. But, of course, my real field of expertise lies in an even different kind of civilization -- I can't really call it a civilization. A different way of life, a different being. We've talked earlier -- this wonderful talk by Wade Davis about the different cultures of the humans around the world -- but the world is not composed only of human beings; there are also other animal beings. And I propose to bring into this TED conference, as I always do around the world, the voice of the animal kingdom. Too often we just see a few slides, or a bit of film, but these beings have voices that mean something. And so, I want to give you a greeting, as from a chimpanzee in the forests of Tanzania -- Ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh! (Applause) I've been studying chimpanzees in Tanzania since 1960. During that time, there have been modern technologies that have really transformed the way that field biologists do their work. For example, for the first time, a few years ago, by simply collecting little fecal samples we were able to have them analyzed -- to have DNA profiling done -- so for the first time, we actually know which male chimps are the fathers of each individual infant. Because the chimps have a very promiscuous mating society. So this opens up a whole new avenue of research. And we use GSI -- geographic whatever it is, GSI -- to determine the range of the chimps. And we're using -- you can see that I'm not really into this kind of stuff -- but we're using satellite imagery to look at the deforestation in the area. And of course, there's developments in infrared, so you can watch animals at night, and equipment for recording by video, and tape recording is getting lighter and better. So in many, many ways, we can do things today that we couldn't do when I began in 1960. Especially when chimpanzees, and other animals with large brains, are studied in captivity, modern technology is helping us to search for the upper levels of cognition in some of these non-human animals. So that we know today, they're capable of performances that would have been thought absolutely impossible by science when I began. I think the chimpanzee in captivity who is the most skilled in intellectual performance is one called Ai in Japan -- her name means love -- and she has a wonderfully sensitive partner working with her. She loves her computer -- she'll leave her big group, and her running water, and her trees and everything. And she'll come in to sit at this computer -- it's like a video game for a kid; she's hooked. She's 28, by the way, and she does things with her computer screen and a touch pad that she can do faster than most humans. She does very complex tasks, and I haven't got time to go into them, but the amazing thing about this female is she doesn't like making mistakes. If she has a bad run, and her score isn't good, she'll come and reach up and tap on the glass -- because she can't see the experimenter -- which is asking to have another go. And her concentration -- she's already concentrated hard for 20 minutes or so, and now she wants to do it all over again, just for the satisfaction of having done it better. And the food is not important -- she does get a tiny reward, like one raisin for a correct response -- but she will do it for nothing, if you tell her beforehand. So here we are, a chimpanzee using a computer. Chimpanzees, gorillas, orangutans also learn human sign language. But the point is that when I was first in Gombe in 1960 -- I remember so well, so vividly, as though it was yesterday -- the first time, when I was going through the vegetation, the chimpanzees were still running away from me, for the most part, although some were a little bit acclimatized -- and I saw this dark shape, hunched over a termite mound, and I peered with my binoculars. It was, fortunately, one adult male whom I'd named David Greybeard -- and by the way, science at that time was telling me that I shouldn't name the chimps; they should all have numbers; that was more scientific. Anyway, David Greybeard -- and I saw that he was picking little pieces of grass and using them to fish termites from their underground nest. And not only that -- he would sometimes pick a leafy twig and strip the leaves -- modifying an object to make it suitable for a specific purpose -- the beginning of tool-making. The reason this was so exciting and such a breakthrough is at that time, it was thought that humans, and only humans, used and made tools. When I was at school, we were defined as man, the toolmaker. So that when Louis Leakey, my mentor, heard this news, he said, "Ah, we must now redefine 'man,' redefine 'tool,' or accept chimpanzees as humans." (Laughter) We now know that at Gombe alone, there are nine different ways in which chimpanzees use different objects for different purposes. Moreover, we know that in different parts of Africa, wherever chimps have been studied, there are completely different tool-using behaviors. And because it seems that these patterns are passed from one generation to the next, through observation, imitation and practice -- that is a definition of human culture. What we find is that over these 40-odd years that I and others have been studying chimpanzees and the other great apes, and, as I say, other mammals with complex brains and social systems, we have found that after all, there isn't a sharp line dividing humans from the rest of the animal kingdom. It's a very wuzzy line. It's getting wuzzier all the time as we find animals doing things that we, in our arrogance, used to think was just human. The chimps -- there's no time to discuss their fascinating lives -- but they have this long childhood, five years of suckling and sleeping with the mother, and then another three, four or five years of emotional dependence on her, even when the next child is born. The importance of learning in that time, when behavior is flexible -- and there's an awful lot to learn in chimpanzee society. The long-term affectionate supportive bonds that develop throughout this long childhood with the mother, with the brothers and sisters, and which can last through a lifetime, which may be up to 60 years. They can actually live longer than 60 in captivity, so we've only done 40 years in the wild so far. And we find chimps are capable of true compassion and altruism. We find in their non-verbal communication -- this is very rich -- they have a lot of sounds, which they use in different circumstances, but they also use touch, posture, gesture, and what do they do? They kiss; they embrace; they hold hands. They pat one another on the back; they swagger; they shake their fist -- the kind of things that we do, and they do them in the same kind of context. They have very sophisticated cooperation. Sometimes they hunt -- not that often, but when they hunt, they show sophisticated cooperation, and they share the prey. We find that they show emotions, similar to -- maybe sometimes the same -- as those that we describe in ourselves as happiness, sadness, fear, despair. They know mental as well as physical suffering. And I don't have time to go into the information that will prove some of these things to you, save to say that there are very bright students, in the best universities, studying emotions in animals, studying personalities in animals. We know that chimpanzees and some other creatures can recognize themselves in mirrors -- "self" as opposed to "other." They have a sense of humor, and these are the kind of things which traditionally have been thought of as human prerogatives. But this teaches us a new respect -- and it's a new respect not only for the chimpanzees, I suggest, but some of the other amazing animals with whom we share this planet. Once we're prepared to admit that after all, we're not the only beings with personalities, minds and above all feelings, and then we start to think about ways we use and abuse so many other sentient, sapient creatures on this planet, it really gives cause for deep shame, at least for me. So, the sad thing is that these chimpanzees -- who've perhaps taught us, more than any other creature, a little humility -- are in the wild, disappearing very fast. They're disappearing for the reasons that all of you in this room know only too well. The deforestation, the growth of human populations, needing more land. They're disappearing because some timber companies go in with clear-cutting. They're disappearing in the heart of their range in Africa because the big multinational logging companies have come in and made roads -- as they want to do in Ecuador and other parts where the forests remain untouched -- to take out oil or timber. And this has led in Congo basin, and other parts of the world, to what is known as the bush-meat trade. This means that although for hundreds, perhaps thousands of years, people have lived in those forests, or whatever habitat it is, in harmony with their world, just killing the animals they need for themselves and their families -- now, suddenly, because of the roads, the hunters can go in from the towns. They shoot everything, every single thing that moves that's bigger than a small rat; they sun-dry it or smoke it. And now they've got transport; they take it on the logging trucks or the mining trucks into the towns where they sell it. And people will pay more for bush-meat, as it's called, than for domestic meat -- it's culturally preferred. And it's not sustainable, and the huge logging camps in the forest are now demanding meat, so the Pygmy hunters in the Congo basin who've lived there with their wonderful way of living for so many hundreds of years are now corrupted. They're given weapons; they shoot for the logging camps; they get money. Their culture is being destroyed, along with the animals upon whom they depend. So, when the logging camp moves, there's nothing left. We talked already about the loss of human cultural diversity, and I've seen it happening with my own eyes. And the grim picture in Africa -- I love Africa, and what do we see in Africa? We see deforestation; we see the desert spreading; we see massive hunger; we see disease and we see population growth in areas where there are more people living on a certain piece of land than the land can possibly support, and they're too poor to buy food from elsewhere. Were the people that we heard about yesterday, on the Easter Island, who cut down their last tree -- were they stupid? Didn't they know what was happening? Of course, but if you've seen the crippling poverty in some of these parts of the world it isn't a question of "Let's leave the tree for tomorrow." "How am I going to feed my family today? Maybe I can get just a few dollars from this last tree which will keep us going a little bit longer, and then we'll pray that something will happen to save us from the inevitable end." So, this is a pretty grim picture. The one thing we have, which makes us so different from chimpanzees or other living creatures, is this sophisticated spoken language -- a language with which we can tell children about things that aren't here. We can talk about the distant past, plan for the distant future, discuss ideas with each other, so that the ideas can grow from the accumulated wisdom of a group. We can do it by talking to each other; we can do it through video; we can do it through the written word. And we are abusing this great power we have to be wise stewards, and we're destroying the world. In the developed world, in a way, it's worse, because we have so much access to knowledge of the stupidity of what we're doing. Do you know, we're bringing little babies into a world where, in many places, the water is poisoning them? And the air is harming them, and the food that's grown from the contaminated land is poisoning them. And that's not just in the far-away developing world; that's everywhere. Do you know we all have about 50 chemicals in our bodies we didn't have about 50 years ago? And so many of these diseases, like asthma and certain kinds of cancers, are on the increase around places where our filthy toxic waste is dumped. We're harming ourselves around the world, as well as harming the animals, as well as harming nature herself -- Mother Nature, that brought us into being; Mother Nature, where I believe we need to spend time, where there's trees and flowers and birds for our good psychological development. And yet, there are hundreds and hundreds of children in the developed world who never see nature, because they're growing up in concrete and all they know is virtual reality, with no opportunity to go and lie in the sun, or in the forest, with the dappled sun-specks coming down from the canopy above. As I was traveling around the world, you know, I had to leave the forest -- that's where I love to be. I had to leave these fascinating chimpanzees for my students and field staff to continue studying because, finding they dwindled from about two million 100 years ago to about 150,000 now, I knew I had to leave the forest to do what I could to raise awareness around the world. And the more I talked about the chimpanzees' plight, the more I realized the fact that everything's interconnected, and the problems of the developing world so often stem from the greed of the developed world, and everything was joining together, and making -- not sense, hope lies in sense, you said -- it's making a nonsense. How can we do it? Somebody said that yesterday. And as I was traveling around, I kept meeting young people who'd lost hope. They were feeling despair, they were feeling, "Well, it doesn't matter what we do; eat, drink and be merry, for tomorrow we die. Everything is hopeless -- we're always being told so by the media." And then I met some who were angry, and anger that can turn to violence, and we're all familiar with that. And I have three little grandchildren, and when some of these students would say to me at high school or university, they'd say, "We're angry," or "We're filled with despair, because we feel you've compromised our future, and there's nothing we can do about it." And I looked in the eyes of my little grandchildren, and think how much we've harmed this planet since I was their age. I feel this deep shame, and that's why in 1991 in Tanzania, I started a program that's called Roots and Shoots. There's little brochures all around outside, and if any of you have anything to do with children and care about their future, I beg that you pick up that brochure. And Roots and Shoots is a program for hope. Roots make a firm foundation. Shoots seem tiny, but to reach the sun they can break through brick walls. See the brick walls as all the problems that we've inflicted on this planet. Then, you see, it is a message of hope. Hundreds and thousands of young people around the world can break through, and can make this a better world. And the most important message of Roots and Shoots is that every single individual makes a difference. Every individual has a role to play. Every one of us impacts the world around us everyday, and you scientists know that you can't actually -- even if you stay in bed all day, you're breathing oxygen and giving out CO2, and probably going to the loo, and things like that -- you're making a difference in the world. So, the Roots and Shoots program involves youth in three kinds of projects. And these are projects to make the world around them a better place. One project to show care and concern for your own human community. One for animals, including domestic animals -- and I have to say, I learned everything I know about animal behavior even before I got to Gombe and the chimps from my dog, Rusty, who was my childhood companion. And the third kind of project: something for the local environment. So what the kids do depends first of all, how old are they -- and we go now from pre-school right through university. It's going to depend whether they're inner-city or rural. It's going to depend if they're wealthy or impoverished. It's going to depend which part, say, of America they're in. We're in every state now, and the problems in Florida are different from the problems in New York. It's going to depend on which country they're in -- and we're already in 60-plus countries, with about 5,000 active groups -- and there are groups all over the place that I keep hearing about that I've never even heard of, because the kids are taking the program and spreading it themselves. Why? Because they're buying into it, and they're the ones who get to decide what they're going to do. It isn't something that their parents tell them, or their teachers tell them. That's effective, but if they decide themselves, "We want to clean this river and put the fish back that used to be there. We want to clear away the toxic soil from this area and have an organic garden. We want to go and spend time with the old people and hear their stories and record their oral histories. We want to go and work in a dog shelter. We want to learn about animals. We want ... " You know, it goes on and on, and this is very hopeful for me. As I travel around the world 300 days a year, everywhere there's a group of Roots and Shoots of different ages. Everywhere there are children with shining eyes saying, "Look at the difference we've made." And now comes the technology into it, because with this new way of communicating electronically these kids can communicate with each other around the world. And if anyone is interested to help us, we've got so many ideas but we need help -- we need help to create the right kind of system that will help these young people to communicate their excitement. But also -- and this is so important -- to communicate their despair, to say, "We've tried this and it doesn't work, and what shall we do?" And then, lo and behold, there's another group answering these kids who may be in America, or maybe this is a group in Israel, saying, "Yeah, you did it a little bit wrong. This is how you should do it." The philosophy is very simple. We do not believe in violence. No violence, no bombs, no guns. That's not the way to solve problems. Violence leads to violence, at least in my view. So how do we solve? The tools for solving the problems are knowledge and understanding. Know the facts, but see how they fit in the big picture. Hard work and persistence --don't give up -- and love and compassion leading to respect for all life. How many more minutes? Two, one? Chris Anderson: One -- one to two. Jane Goodall: Two, two, I'm going to take two. (Laughter) Are you going to come and drag me off? (Laughter) Anyway -- so basically, Roots and Shoots is beginning to change young people's lives. It's what I'm devoting most of my energy to. And I believe that a group like this can have a very major impact, not just because you can share technology with us, but because so many of you have children. And if you take this program out, and give it to your children, they have such a good opportunity to go out and do good, because they've got parents like you. And it's been so clear how much you all care about trying to make this world a better place. It's very encouraging. But the kids do ask me -- and this won't take more than two minutes, I promise -- the kids say, "Dr. Jane, do you really have hope for the future? You travel, you see all these horrible things happening." Firstly, the human brain -- I don't need to say anything about that. Now that we know what the problems are around the world, human brains like yours are rising to solve those problems. And we've talked a lot about that. Secondly, the resilience of nature. We can destroy a river, and we can bring it back to life. We can see a whole area desolated, and it can be brought back to bloom again, with time or a little help. And thirdly, the last speaker talked about -- or the speaker before last, talked about the indomitable human spirit. We are surrounded by the most amazing people who do things that seem to be absolutely impossible. Nelson Mandela -- I take a little piece of limestone from Robben Island Prison, where he labored for 27 years, and came out with so little bitterness, he could lead his people from the horror of apartheid without a bloodbath. Even after the 11th of September -- and I was in New York and I felt the fear -- nevertheless, there was so much human courage, so much love and so much compassion. And then as I went around the country after that and felt the fear -- the fear that was leading to people feeling they couldn't worry about the environment any more, in case they seemed not to be patriotic -- and I was trying to encourage them, somebody came up with a little quotation from Mahatma Gandhi, "If you look back through human history, you see that every evil regime has been overcome by good." And just after that a woman brought me this little bell, and I want to end on this note. She said, "If you're talking about hope and peace, ring this. This bell is made from metal from a defused landmine, from the killing fields of Pol Pot -- one of the most evil regimes in human history -- where people are now beginning to put their lives back together after the regime has crumbled. So, yes, there is hope, and where is the hope? Is it out there with the politicians? It's in our hands. It's in your hands and my hands and those of our children. It's really up to us. We're the ones who can make a difference. If we lead lives where we consciously leave the lightest possible ecological footprints, if we buy the things that are ethical for us to buy and don't buy the things that are not, we can change the world overnight. Thank you.
So, a big question that we're facing now and have been for quite a number of years now: are we at risk of a nuclear attack? Now, there's a bigger question that's probably actually more important than that, is the notion of permanently eliminating the possibility of a nuclear attack, eliminating the threat altogether. And I would like to make a case to you that over the years since we first developed atomic weaponry, until this very moment, we've actually lived in a dangerous nuclear world that's characterized by two phases, which I'm going to go through with you right now. First of all, we started off the nuclear age in 1945. The United States had developed a couple of atomic weapons through the Manhattan Project, and the idea was very straightforward: we would use the power of the atom to end the atrocities and the horror of this unending World War II that we'd been involved in in Europe and in the Pacific. And in 1945, we were the only nuclear power. We had a few nuclear weapons, two of which we dropped on Japan, in Hiroshima, a few days later in Nagasaki, in August 1945, killing about 250,000 people between those two. And for a few years, we were the only nuclear power on Earth. But by 1949, the Soviet Union had decided it was unacceptable to have us as the only nuclear power, and they began to match what the United States had developed. And from 1949 to 1985 was an extraordinary time of a buildup of a nuclear arsenal that no one could possibly have imagined back in the 1940s. So by 1985 -- each of those red bombs up here is equivalent of a thousands warheads -- the world had 65,000 nuclear warheads, and seven members of something that came to be known as the "nuclear club." And it was an extraordinary time, and I am going to go through some of the mentality that we -- that Americans and the rest of the world were experiencing. But I want to just point out to you that 95 percent of the nuclear weapons at any particular time since 1985 -- going forward, of course -- were part of the arsenals of the United States and the Soviet Union. After 1985, and before the break up of the Soviet Union, we began to disarm from a nuclear point of view. We began to counter-proliferate, and we dropped the number of nuclear warheads in the world to about a total of 21,000. It's a very difficult number to deal with, because what we've done is we've quote unquote "decommissioned" some of the warheads. They're still probably usable. They could be "re-commissioned," but the way they count things, which is very complicated, we think we have about a third of the nuclear weapons we had before. But we also, in that period of time, added two more members to the nuclear club: Pakistan and North Korea. So we stand today with a still fully armed nuclear arsenal among many countries around the world, but a very different set of circumstances. So I'm going to talk about a nuclear threat story in two chapters. Chapter one is 1949 to 1991, when the Soviet Union broke up, and what we were dealing with, at that point and through those years, was a superpowers' nuclear arms race. It was characterized by a nation-versus-nation, very fragile standoff. And basically, we lived for all those years, and some might argue that we still do, in a situation of being on the brink, literally, of an apocalyptic, planetary calamity. It's incredible that we actually lived through all that. We were totally dependent during those years on this amazing acronym, which is MAD. It stands for mutually assured destruction. So it meant if you attacked us, we would attack you virtually simultaneously, and the end result would be a destruction of your country and mine. So the threat of my own destruction kept me from launching a nuclear attack on you. That's the way we lived. And the danger of that, of course, is that a misreading of a radar screen could actually cause a counter-launch, even though the first country had not actually launched anything. During this chapter one, there was a high level of public awareness about the potential of nuclear catastrophe, and an indelible image was implanted in our collective minds that, in fact, a nuclear holocaust would be absolutely globally destructive and could, in some ways, mean the end of civilization as we know it. So this was chapter one. Now the odd thing is that even though we knew that there would be that kind of civilization obliteration, we engaged in America in a series -- and in fact, in the Soviet Union -- in a series of response planning. It was absolutely incredible. So premise one is we'd be destroying the world, and then premise two is, why don't we get prepared for it? So what we offered ourselves was a collection of things. I'm just going to go skim through a few things, just to jog your memories. If you're born after 1950, this is just -- consider this entertainment, otherwise it's memory lane. This was Bert the Turtle. (Video) This was basically an attempt to teach our schoolchildren that if we did get engaged in a nuclear confrontation and atomic war, then we wanted our school children to kind of basically duck and cover. That was the principle. You -- there would be a nuclear conflagration about to hit us, and if you get under your desk, things would be OK. (Laughter) I didn't do all that well in psychiatry in medical school, but I was interested, and I think this was seriously delusional. (Laughter) Secondly, we told people to go down in their basements and build a fallout shelter. Maybe it would be a study when we weren't having an atomic war, or you could use it as a TV room, or, as many teenagers found out, a very, very safe place for a little privacy with your girlfriend. And actually -- so there are multiple uses of the bomb shelters. Or you could buy a prefabricated bomb shelter that you could simply bury in the ground. Now, the bomb shelters at that point -- let's say you bought a prefab one -- it would be a few hundred dollars, maybe up to 500, if you got a fancy one. Yet, what percentage of Americans do you think ever had a bomb shelter in their house? What percentage lived in a house with a bomb shelter? Less than two percent. About 1.4 percent of the population, as far as anyone knows, did anything, either making a space in their basement or actually building a bomb shelter. Many buildings, public buildings, around the country -- this is New York City -- had these little civil defense signs, and the idea was that you would run into one of these shelters and be safe from the nuclear weaponry. And one of the greatest governmental delusions of all time was something that happened in the early days of the Federal Emergency Management Agency, FEMA, as we now know, and are well aware of their behaviors from Katrina. Here is their first big public announcement. They would propose -- actually there were about six volumes written on this -- a crisis relocation plan that was dependent upon the United States having three to four days warning that the Soviets were going to attack us. So the goal was to evacuate the target cities. We would move people out of the target cities into the countryside. And I'm telling you, I actually testified at the Senate about the absolute ludicrous idea that we would actually evacuate, and actually have three or four days' warning. It was just completely off the wall. Turns out that they had another idea behind it, even though this was -- they were telling the public it was to save us. The idea was that we would force the Soviets to re-target their nuclear weapons -- very expensive -- and potentially double their arsenal, to not only take out the original site, but take out sites where people were going. This was what apparently, as it turns out, was behind all this. It was just really, really frightening. The main point here is we were dealing with a complete disconnect from reality. The civil defense programs were disconnected from the reality of what we'd see in all-out nuclear war. So organizations like Physicians for Social Responsibility, around 1979, started saying this a lot publicly. They would do a bombing run. They'd go to your city, and they'd say, "Here's a map of your city. Here's what's going to happen if we get a nuclear hit." So no possibility of medical response to, or meaningful preparedness for all-out nuclear war. So we had to prevent nuclear war if we expected to survive. This disconnect was never actually resolved. And what happened was -- when we get in to chapter two of the nuclear threat era, which started back in 1945. Chapter two starts in 1991. When the Soviet Union broke up, we effectively lost that adversary as a potential attacker of the United States, for the most part. It's not completely gone. I'm going to come back to that. But from 1991 through the present time, emphasized by the attacks of 2001, the idea of an all-out nuclear war has diminished and the idea of a single event, act of nuclear terrorism is what we have instead. Although the scenario has changed very considerably, the fact is that we haven't changed our mental image of what a nuclear war means. So I'm going to tell you what the implications of that are in just a second. So, what is a nuclear terror threat? And there's four key ingredients to describing that. First thing is that the global nuclear weapons, in the stockpiles that I showed you in those original maps, happen to be not uniformly secure. And it's particularly not secure in the former Soviet Union, now in Russia. There are many, many sites where warheads are stored and, in fact, lots of sites where fissionable materials, like highly enriched uranium and plutonium, are absolutely not safe. They're available to be bought, stolen, whatever. They're acquirable, let me put it that way. From 1993 through 2006, the International Atomic Energy Agency documented 175 cases of nuclear theft, 18 of which involved highly enriched uranium or plutonium, the key ingredients to make a nuclear weapon. The global stockpile of highly enriched uranium is about 1,300, at the low end, to about 2,100 metric tons. More than 100 megatons of this is stored in particularly insecure Russian facilities. How much of that do you think it would take to actually build a 10-kiloton bomb? Well, you need about 75 pounds of it. So, what I'd like to show you is what it would take to hold 75 pounds of highly enriched uranium. This is not a product placement. It's just -- in fact, if I was Coca Cola, I'd be pretty distressed about this -- (Laughter) -- but basically, this is it. This is what you would need to steal or buy out of that 100-metric-ton stockpile that's relatively insecure to create the type of bomb that was used in Hiroshima. Now you might want to look at plutonium as another fissionable material that you might use in a bomb. That -- you'd need 10 to 13 pounds of plutonium. Now, plutonium, 10 to 13 pounds: this. This is enough plutonium to create a Nagasaki-size atomic weapon. Now this situation, already I -- you know, I don't really like thinking about this, although somehow I got myself a job where I have to think about it. So the point is that we're very, very insecure in terms of developing this material. The second thing is, what about the know-how? And there's a lot of controversy about whether terror organizations have the know-how to actually make a nuclear weapon. Well, there's a lot of know-how out there. There's an unbelievable amount of know-how out there. There's detailed information on how to assemble a nuclear weapon from parts. There's books about how to build a nuclear bomb. There are plans for how to create a terror farm where you could actually manufacture and develop all the components and assemble it. All of this information is relatively available. If you have an undergraduate degree in physics, I would suggest -- although I don't, so maybe it's not even true -- but something close to that would allow you, with the information that's currently available, to actually build a nuclear weapon. The third element of the nuclear terror threat is that, who would actually do such a thing? Well, what we're seeing now is a level of terrorism that involves individuals who are highly organized. They are very dedicated and committed. They are stateless. Somebody once said, Al Qaeda does not have a return address, so if they attack us with a nuclear weapon, what's the response, and to whom is the response? And they're retaliation-proof. Since there is no real retribution possible that would make any difference, since there are people willing to actually give up their lives in order to do a lot of damage to us, it becomes apparent that the whole notion of this mutually assured destruction would not work. Here is Sulaiman Abu Ghaith, and Sulaiman was a key lieutenant of Osama Bin Laden. He wrote many, many times statements to this effect: "we have the right to kill four million Americans, two million of whom should be children." And we don't have to go overseas to find people willing to do harm, for whatever their reasons. McVeigh and Nichols, and the Oklahoma City attack in the 1990s was a good example of homegrown terrorists. What if they had gotten their hands on a nuclear weapon? The fourth element is that the high-value U.S. targets are accessible, soft and plentiful. This would be a talk for another day, but the level of the preparedness that the United States has achieved since 9/11 of '01 is unbelievably inadequate. What you saw after Katrina is a very good indicator of how little prepared the United States is for any kind of major attack. Seven million ship cargo containers come into the United States every year. Five to seven percent only are inspected -- five to seven percent. This is Alexander Lebed, who was a general that worked with Yeltsin, who talked about, and presented to Congress, this idea that the Russians had developed -- these suitcase bombs. They were very low yield -- 0.1 to one kiloton, Hiroshima was around 13 kilotons -- but enough to do an unbelievable amount of damage. And Lebed came to the United States and told us that many, many -- more than 80 of the suitcase bombs were actually not accountable. And they look like this. They're basically very simple arrangements. You put the elements into a suitcase. It becomes very portable. The suitcase can be conveniently dropped in your trunk of your car. You take it wherever you want to take it, and you can detonate it. You don't want to build a suitcase bomb, and you happen to get one of those insecure nuclear warheads that exist. This is the size of the "Little Boy" bomb that was dropped at Hiroshima. It was 9.8 feet long, weighed 8,800 pounds. You go down to your local rent-a-truck and for 50 bucks or so, you rent a truck that's got the right capacity, and you take your bomb, you put it in the truck and you're ready to go. It could happen. But what it would mean and who would survive? You can't get an exact number for that kind of probability, but what I'm trying to say is that we have all the elements of that happening. Anybody who dismisses the thought of a nuclear weapon being used by a terrorist is kidding themselves. I think there's a lot of people in the intelligence community -- a lot of people who deal with this work in general think it's almost inevitable, unless we do certain things to really try to defuse the risk, like better interdiction, better prevention, better fixing, you know, better screening of cargo containers that are coming into the country and so forth. There's a lot that can be done to make us a lot safer. At this particular moment, we actually could end up seeing a nuclear detonation in one of our cities. I don't think we would see an all-out nuclear war any time soon, although even that is not completely off the table. There's still enough nuclear weapons in the arsenals of the superpowers to destroy the Earth many, many times over. There are flash points in India and Pakistan, in the Middle East, in North Korea, other places where the use of nuclear weapons, while initially locally, could very rapidly go into a situation where we'd be facing all-out nuclear war. It's very unsettling. Here we go. OK. I'm back in my truck, and we drove over the Brooklyn Bridge. We're coming down, and we bring that truck that you just saw somewhere in here, in the Financial District. This is a 10-kiloton bomb, slightly smaller than was used in Hiroshima. And I want to just conclude this by just giving you some information. I think -- "news you could use" kind of concept here. So, first of all, this would be horrific beyond anything we can possibly imagine. This is the ultimate. And if you're in the half-mile radius of where this bomb went off, you have a 90 percent chance of not making it. If you're right where the bomb went off, you will be vaporized. And that's -- I'm just telling you, this is not good. (Laughter) You assume that. Two-mile radius, you have a 50 percent chance of being killed, and up to about eight miles away -- now I'm talking about killed instantly -- somewhere between a 10 and 20 percent chance of getting killed. The thing about this is that the experience of the nuclear detonation is -- first of all, tens of millions of degrees Fahrenheit at the core here, where it goes off, and an extraordinary amount of energy in the form of heat, acute radiation and blast effects. An enormous hurricane-like wind, and destruction of buildings almost totally, within this yellow circle here. And what I'm going to focus on, as I come to conclusion here, is that, what happens to you if you're in here? Well, if we're talking about the old days of an all-out nuclear attack, you, up here, are as dead as the people here. So it was a moot point. My point now, though, is that there is a lot that we could do for you who are in here, if you've survived the initial blast. You have, when the blast goes off -- and by the way, if it ever comes up, don't look at it. (Laughter) If you look at it, you're going to be blind, either temporarily or permanently. So if there's any way that you can avoid, like, avert your eyes, that would be a good thing. If you find yourself alive, but you're in the vicinity of a nuclear weapon, you have -- that's gone off -- you have 10 to 20 minutes, depending on the size and exactly where it went off, to get out of the way before a lethal amount of radiation comes straight down from the mushroom cloud that goes up. In that 10 to 15 minutes, all you have to do -- and I mean this seriously -- is go about a mile away from the blast. And what happens is -- this is -- I'm going to show you now some fallout plumes. Within 20 minutes, it comes straight down. Within 24 hours, lethal radiation is going out with prevailing winds, and it's mostly in this particular direction -- it's going northeast. And if you're in this vicinity, you've got to get away. So you're feeling the wind -- and there's tremendous wind now that you're going to be feeling -- and you want to go perpendicular to the wind [not upwind or downwind]. if you are in fact able to see where the blast was in front of you. You've got to get out of there. If you don't get out of there, you're going to be exposed to lethal radiation in very short order. If you can't get out of there, we want you to go into a shelter and stay there. Now, in a shelter in an urban area means you have to be either in a basement as deep as possible, or you have to be on a floor -- on a high floor -- if it's a ground burst explosion, which it would be, higher than the ninth floor. So you have to be tenth floor or higher, or in the basement. But basically, you've got to get out of town as quickly as possible. And if you do that, you actually can survive a nuclear blast. Over the next few days to a week, there will be a radiation cloud, again, going with the wind, and settling down for another 15 or 20 miles out -- in this case, over Long Island. And if you're in the direct fallout zone here, you really have to either be sheltered or you have to get out of there, and that's clear. But if you are sheltered, you can actually survive. The difference between knowing information of what you're going to do personally, and not knowing information, can save your life, and it could mean the difference between 150,000 to 200,000 fatalities from something like this and half a million to 700,000 fatalities. So, response planning in the twenty-first century is both possible and is essential. But in 2008, there isn't one single American city that has done effective plans to deal with a nuclear detonation disaster. Part of the problem is that the emergency planners themselves, personally, are overwhelmed psychologically by the thought of nuclear catastrophe. They are paralyzed. You say "nuclear" to them, and they're thinking, "Oh my God, we're all gone. What's the point? It's futile." And we're trying to tell them, "It's not futile. We can change the survival rates by doing some commonsensical things." So the goal here is to minimize fatalities. And I just want to leave you with the personal points that I think you might be interested in. The key to surviving a nuclear blast is getting out, and not going into harm's way. That's basically all we're going to be talking about here. And the farther you are away in distance, the longer it is in time from the initial blast; and the more separation between you and the outside atmosphere, the better. So separation -- hopefully with dirt or concrete, or being in a basement -- distance and time is what will save you. So here's what you do. First of all, as I said, don't stare at the light flash, if you can. I don't know you could possibly resist doing that. But let's assume, theoretically, you want to do that. You want to keep your mouth open, so your eardrums don't burst from the pressures. If you're very close to what happened, you actually do have to duck and cover, like Bert told you, Bert the Turtle. And you want to get under something so that you're not injured or killed by objects, if that's at all possible. You want to get away from the initial fallout mushroom cloud, I said, in just a few minutes. And shelter and place. You want to move [only] crosswind for 1.2 miles. You know, if you're out there and you see buildings horribly destroyed and down in that direction, less destroyed here, then you know that it was over there, the blast, and you're going this way, as long as you're going crosswise to the wind. Once you're out and evacuating, you want to keep as much of your skin, your mouth and nose covered, as long as that covering doesn't impede you moving and getting out of there. And finally, you want to get decontaminated as soon as possible. And if you're wearing clothing, you've taken off your clothing, you're going to get showered down some place and remove the radiation that would be -- the radioactive material that might be on you. And then you want to stay in shelter for 48 to 72 hours minimum, but you're going to wait hopefully -- you'll have your little wind-up, battery-less radio, and you'll be waiting for people to tell you when it's safe to go outside. That's what you need to do. In conclusion, nuclear war is less likely than before, but by no means out of the question, and it's not survivable. Nuclear terrorism is possible -- it may be probable -- but is survivable. And this is Jack Geiger, who's one of the heroes of the U.S. public health community. And Jack said the only way to deal with nuclear anything, whether it's war or terrorism, is abolition of nuclear weapons. And you want something to work on once you've fixed global warming, I urge you to think about the fact that we have to do something about this unacceptable, inhumane reality of nuclear weapons in our world. Now, this is my favorite civil defense slide, and I -- (Laughter) -- I don't want to be indelicate, but this -- he's no longer in office. We don't really care, OK. This was sent to me by somebody who is an aficionado of civil defense procedures, but the fact of the matter is that America's gone through a very hard time. We've not been focused, we've not done what we had to do, and now we're facing the potential of bad, hell on Earth. Thank you.
Well this is a really extraordinary honor for me. I spend most of my time in jails, in prisons, on death row. I spend most of my time in very low-income communities in the projects and places where there's a great deal of hopelessness. And being here at TED and seeing the stimulation, hearing it, has been very, very energizing to me. And one of the things that's emerged in my short time here is that TED has an identity. And you can actually say things here that have impacts around the world. And sometimes when it comes through TED, it has meaning and power that it doesn't have when it doesn't. And I mention that because I think identity is really important. And we've had some fantastic presentations. And I think what we've learned is that, if you're a teacher your words can be meaningful, but if you're a compassionate teacher, they can be especially meaningful. If you're a doctor you can do some good things, but if you're a caring doctor you can do some other things. And so I want to talk about the power of identity. And I didn't learn about this actually practicing law and doing the work that I do. I actually learned about this from my grandmother. I grew up in a house that was the traditional African-American home that was dominated by a matriarch, and that matriarch was my grandmother. She was tough, she was strong, she was powerful. She was the end of every argument in our family. She was the beginning of a lot of arguments in our family. She was the daughter of people who were actually enslaved. Her parents were born in slavery in Virginia in the 1840's. She was born in the 1880's and the experience of slavery very much shaped the way she saw the world. And my grandmother was tough, but she was also loving. When I would see her as a little boy, she'd come up to me and she'd give me these hugs. And she'd squeeze me so tight I could barely breathe and then she'd let me go. And an hour or two later, if I saw her, she'd come over to me and she'd say, "Bryan, do you still feel me hugging you?" And if I said, "No," she'd assault me again, and if I said, "Yes," she'd leave me alone. And she just had this quality that you always wanted to be near her. And the only challenge was that she had 10 children. My mom was the youngest of her 10 kids. And sometimes when I would go and spend time with her, it would be difficult to get her time and attention. My cousins would be running around everywhere. And I remember, when I was about eight or nine years old, waking up one morning, going into the living room, and all of my cousins were running around. And my grandmother was sitting across the room staring at me. And at first I thought we were playing a game. And I would look at her and I'd smile, but she was very serious. And after about 15 or 20 minutes of this, she got up and she came across the room and she took me by the hand and she said, "Come on, Bryan. You and I are going to have a talk." And I remember this just like it happened yesterday. I never will forget it. She took me out back and she said, "Bryan, I'm going to tell you something, but you don't tell anybody what I tell you." I said, "Okay, Mama." She said, "Now you make sure you don't do that." I said, "Sure." Then she sat me down and she looked at me and she said, "I want you to know I've been watching you." And she said, "I think you're special." She said, "I think you can do anything you want to do." I will never forget it. And then she said, "I just need you to promise me three things, Bryan." I said, "Okay, Mama." She said, "The first thing I want you to promise me is that you'll always love your mom." She said, "That's my baby girl, and you have to promise me now you'll always take care of her." Well I adored my mom, so I said, "Yes, Mama. I'll do that." Then she said, "The second thing I want you to promise me is that you'll always do the right thing even when the right thing is the hard thing." And I thought about it and I said, "Yes, Mama. I'll do that." Then finally she said, "The third thing I want you to promise me is that you'll never drink alcohol." (Laughter) Well I was nine years old, so I said, "Yes, Mama. I'll do that." I grew up in the country in the rural South, and I have a brother a year older than me and a sister a year younger. When I was about 14 or 15, one day my brother came home and he had this six-pack of beer -- I don't know where he got it -- and he grabbed me and my sister and we went out in the woods. And we were kind of just out there doing the stuff we crazily did. And he had a sip of this beer and he gave some to my sister and she had some, and they offered it to me. I said, "No, no, no. That's okay. You all go ahead. I'm not going to have any beer." My brother said, "Come on. We're doing this today; you always do what we do. I had some, your sister had some. Have some beer." I said, "No, I don't feel right about that. Y'all go ahead. Y'all go ahead." And then my brother started staring at me. He said, "What's wrong with you? Have some beer." Then he looked at me real hard and he said, "Oh, I hope you're not still hung up on that conversation Mama had with you." (Laughter) I said, "Well, what are you talking about?" He said, "Oh, Mama tells all the grandkids that they're special." (Laughter) I was devastated. (Laughter) And I'm going to admit something to you. I'm going to tell you something I probably shouldn't. I know this might be broadcast broadly. But I'm 52 years old, and I'm going to admit to you that I've never had a drop of alcohol. (Applause) I don't say that because I think that's virtuous; I say that because there is power in identity. When we create the right kind of identity, we can say things to the world around us that they don't actually believe makes sense. We can get them to do things that they don't think they can do. When I thought about my grandmother, of course she would think all her grandkids were special. My grandfather was in prison during prohibition. My male uncles died of alcohol-related diseases. And these were the things she thought we needed to commit to. Well I've been trying to say something about our criminal justice system. This country is very different today than it was 40 years ago. In 1972, there were 300,000 people in jails and prisons. Today, there are 2.3 million. The United States now has the highest rate of incarceration in the world. We have seven million people on probation and parole. And mass incarceration, in my judgment, has fundamentally changed our world. In poor communities, in communities of color there is this despair, there is this hopelessness, that is being shaped by these outcomes. One out of three black men between the ages of 18 and 30 is in jail, in prison, on probation or parole. In urban communities across this country -- Los Angeles, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington -- 50 to 60 percent of all young men of color are in jail or prison or on probation or parole. Our system isn't just being shaped in these ways that seem to be distorting around race, they're also distorted by poverty. We have a system of justice in this country that treats you much better if you're rich and guilty than if you're poor and innocent. Wealth, not culpability, shapes outcomes. And yet, we seem to be very comfortable. The politics of fear and anger have made us believe that these are problems that are not our problems. We've been disconnected. It's interesting to me. We're looking at some very interesting developments in our work. My state of Alabama, like a number of states, actually permanently disenfranchises you if you have a criminal conviction. Right now in Alabama 34 percent of the black male population has permanently lost the right to vote. We're actually projecting in another 10 years the level of disenfranchisement will be as high as it's been since prior to the passage of the Voting Rights Act. And there is this stunning silence. I represent children. A lot of my clients are very young. The United States is the only country in the world where we sentence 13-year-old children to die in prison. We have life imprisonment without parole for kids in this country. And we're actually doing some litigation. The only country in the world. I represent people on death row. It's interesting, this question of the death penalty. In many ways, we've been taught to think that the real question is, do people deserve to die for the crimes they've committed? And that's a very sensible question. But there's another way of thinking about where we are in our identity. The other way of thinking about it is not, do people deserve to die for the crimes they commit, but do we deserve to kill? I mean, it's fascinating. Death penalty in America is defined by error. For every nine people who have been executed, we've actually identified one innocent person who's been exonerated and released from death row. A kind of astonishing error rate -- one out of nine people innocent. I mean, it's fascinating. In aviation, we would never let people fly on airplanes if for every nine planes that took off one would crash. But somehow we can insulate ourselves from this problem. It's not our problem. It's not our burden. It's not our struggle. I talk a lot about these issues. I talk about race and this question of whether we deserve to kill. And it's interesting, when I teach my students about African-American history, I tell them about slavery. I tell them about terrorism, the era that began at the end of reconstruction that went on to World War II. We don't really know very much about it. But for African-Americans in this country, that was an era defined by terror. In many communities, people had to worry about being lynched. They had to worry about being bombed. It was the threat of terror that shaped their lives. And these older people come up to me now and they say, "Mr. Stevenson, you give talks, you make speeches, you tell people to stop saying we're dealing with terrorism for the first time in our nation's history after 9/11." They tell me to say, "No, tell them that we grew up with that." And that era of terrorism, of course, was followed by segregation and decades of racial subordination and apartheid. And yet, we have in this country this dynamic where we really don't like to talk about our problems. We don't like to talk about our history. And because of that, we really haven't understood what it's meant to do the things we've done historically. We're constantly running into each other. We're constantly creating tensions and conflicts. We have a hard time talking about race, and I believe it's because we are unwilling to commit ourselves to a process of truth and reconciliation. In South Africa, people understood that we couldn't overcome apartheid without a commitment to truth and reconciliation. In Rwanda, even after the genocide, there was this commitment, but in this country we haven't done that. I was giving some lectures in Germany about the death penalty. It was fascinating because one of the scholars stood up after the presentation and said, "Well you know it's deeply troubling to hear what you're talking about." He said, "We don't have the death penalty in Germany. And of course, we can never have the death penalty in Germany." And the room got very quiet, and this woman said, "There's no way, with our history, we could ever engage in the systematic killing of human beings. It would be unconscionable for us to, in an intentional and deliberate way, set about executing people." And I thought about that. What would it feel like to be living in a world where the nation state of Germany was executing people, especially if they were disproportionately Jewish? I couldn't bear it. It would be unconscionable. And yet, in this country, in the states of the Old South, we execute people -- where you're 11 times more likely to get the death penalty if the victim is white than if the victim is black, 22 times more likely to get it if the defendant is black and the victim is white -- in the very states where there are buried in the ground the bodies of people who were lynched. And yet, there is this disconnect. Well I believe that our identity is at risk. That when we actually don't care about these difficult things, the positive and wonderful things are nonetheless implicated. We love innovation. We love technology. We love creativity. We love entertainment. But ultimately, those realities are shadowed by suffering, abuse, degradation, marginalization. And for me, it becomes necessary to integrate the two. Because ultimately we are talking about a need to be more hopeful, more committed, more dedicated to the basic challenges of living in a complex world. And for me that means spending time thinking and talking about the poor, the disadvantaged, those who will never get to TED. But thinking about them in a way that is integrated in our own lives. You know ultimately, we all have to believe things we haven't seen. We do. As rational as we are, as committed to intellect as we are. Innovation, creativity, development comes not from the ideas in our mind alone. They come from the ideas in our mind that are also fueled by some conviction in our heart. And it's that mind-heart connection that I believe compels us to not just be attentive to all the bright and dazzly things, but also the dark and difficult things. Vaclav Havel, the great Czech leader, talked about this. He said, "When we were in Eastern Europe and dealing with oppression, we wanted all kinds of things, but mostly what we needed was hope, an orientation of the spirit, a willingness to sometimes be in hopeless places and be a witness." Well that orientation of the spirit is very much at the core of what I believe even TED communities have to be engaged in. There is no disconnect around technology and design that will allow us to be fully human until we pay attention to suffering, to poverty, to exclusion, to unfairness, to injustice. Now I will warn you that this kind of identity is a much more challenging identity than ones that don't pay attention to this. It will get to you. I had the great privilege, when I was a young lawyer, of meeting Rosa Parks. And Ms. Parks used to come back to Montgomery every now and then, and she would get together with two of her dearest friends, these older women, Johnnie Carr who was the organizer of the Montgomery bus boycott -- amazing African-American woman -- and Virginia Durr, a white woman, whose husband, Clifford Durr, represented Dr. King. And these women would get together and just talk. And every now and then Ms. Carr would call me, and she'd say, "Bryan, Ms. Parks is coming to town. We're going to get together and talk. Do you want to come over and listen?" And I'd say, "Yes, Ma'am, I do." And she'd say, "Well what are you going to do when you get here?" I said, "I'm going to listen." And I'd go over there and I would, I would just listen. It would be so energizing and so empowering. And one time I was over there listening to these women talk, and after a couple of hours Ms. Parks turned to me and she said, "Now Bryan, tell me what the Equal Justice Initiative is. Tell me what you're trying to do." And I began giving her my rap. I said, "Well we're trying to challenge injustice. We're trying to help people who have been wrongly convicted. We're trying to confront bias and discrimination in the administration of criminal justice. We're trying to end life without parole sentences for children. We're trying to do something about the death penalty. We're trying to reduce the prison population. We're trying to end mass incarceration." I gave her my whole rap, and when I finished she looked at me and she said, "Mmm mmm mmm." She said, "That's going to make you tired, tired, tired." (Laughter) And that's when Ms. Carr leaned forward, she put her finger in my face, she said, "That's why you've got to be brave, brave, brave." And I actually believe that the TED community needs to be more courageous. We need to find ways to embrace these challenges, these problems, the suffering. Because ultimately, our humanity depends on everyone's humanity. I've learned very simple things doing the work that I do. It's just taught me very simple things. I've come to understand and to believe that each of us is more than the worst thing we've ever done. I believe that for every person on the planet. I think if somebody tells a lie, they're not just a liar. I think if somebody takes something that doesn't belong to them, they're not just a thief. I think even if you kill someone, you're not just a killer. And because of that there's this basic human dignity that must be respected by law. I also believe that in many parts of this country, and certainly in many parts of this globe, that the opposite of poverty is not wealth. I don't believe that. I actually think, in too many places, the opposite of poverty is justice. And finally, I believe that, despite the fact that it is so dramatic and so beautiful and so inspiring and so stimulating, we will ultimately not be judged by our technology, we won't be judged by our design, we won't be judged by our intellect and reason. Ultimately, you judge the character of a society, not by how they treat their rich and the powerful and the privileged, but by how they treat the poor, the condemned, the incarcerated. Because it's in that nexus that we actually begin to understand truly profound things about who we are. I sometimes get out of balance. I'll end with this story. I sometimes push too hard. I do get tired, as we all do. Sometimes those ideas get ahead of our thinking in ways that are important. And I've been representing these kids who have been sentenced to do these very harsh sentences. And I go to the jail and I see my client who's 13 and 14, and he's been certified to stand trial as an adult. I start thinking, well, how did that happen? How can a judge turn you into something that you're not? And the judge has certified him as an adult, but I see this kid. And I was up too late one night and I starting thinking, well gosh, if the judge can turn you into something that you're not, the judge must have magic power. Yeah, Bryan, the judge has some magic power. You should ask for some of that. And because I was up too late, wasn't thinking real straight, I started working on a motion. And I had a client who was 14 years old, a young, poor black kid. And I started working on this motion, and the head of the motion was: "Motion to try my poor, 14-year-old black male client like a privileged, white 75-year-old corporate executive." (Applause) And I put in my motion that there was prosecutorial misconduct and police misconduct and judicial misconduct. There was a crazy line in there about how there's no conduct in this county, it's all misconduct. And the next morning, I woke up and I thought, now did I dream that crazy motion, or did I actually write it? And to my horror, not only had I written it, but I had sent it to court. (Applause) A couple months went by, and I had just forgotten all about it. And I finally decided, oh gosh, I've got to go to the court and do this crazy case. And I got into my car and I was feeling really overwhelmed -- overwhelmed. And I got in my car and I went to this courthouse. And I was thinking, this is going to be so difficult, so painful. And I finally got out of the car and I started walking up to the courthouse. And as I was walking up the steps of this courthouse, there was an older black man who was the janitor in this courthouse. When this man saw me, he came over to me and he said, "Who are you?" I said, "I'm a lawyer." He said, "You're a lawyer?" I said, "Yes, sir." And this man came over to me and he hugged me. And he whispered in my ear. He said, "I'm so proud of you." And I have to tell you, it was energizing. It connected deeply with something in me about identity, about the capacity of every person to contribute to a community, to a perspective that is hopeful. Well I went into the courtroom. And as soon as I walked inside, the judge saw me coming in. He said, "Mr. Stevenson, did you write this crazy motion?" I said, "Yes, sir. I did." And we started arguing. And people started coming in because they were just outraged. I had written these crazy things. And police officers were coming in and assistant prosecutors and clerk workers. And before I knew it, the courtroom was filled with people angry that we were talking about race, that we were talking about poverty, that we were talking about inequality. And out of the corner of my eye, I could see this janitor pacing back and forth. And he kept looking through the window, and he could hear all of this holler. He kept pacing back and forth. And finally, this older black man with this very worried look on his face came into the courtroom and sat down behind me, almost at counsel table. About 10 minutes later the judge said we would take a break. And during the break there was a deputy sheriff who was offended that the janitor had come into court. And this deputy jumped up and he ran over to this older black man. He said, "Jimmy, what are you doing in this courtroom?" And this older black man stood up and he looked at that deputy and he looked at me and he said, "I came into this courtroom to tell this young man, keep your eyes on the prize, hold on." I've come to TED because I believe that many of you understand that the moral arc of the universe is long, but it bends toward justice. That we cannot be full evolved human beings until we care about human rights and basic dignity. That all of our survival is tied to the survival of everyone. That our visions of technology and design and entertainment and creativity have to be married with visions of humanity, compassion and justice. And more than anything, for those of you who share that, I've simply come to tell you to keep your eyes on the prize, hold on. Thank you very much. (Applause) Chris Anderson: So you heard and saw an obvious desire by this audience, this community, to help you on your way and to do something on this issue. Other than writing a check, what could we do? BS: Well there are opportunities all around us. If you live in the state of California, for example, there's a referendum coming up this spring where actually there's going to be an effort to redirect some of the money we spend on the politics of punishment. For example, here in California we're going to spend one billion dollars on the death penalty in the next five years -- one billion dollars. And yet, 46 percent of all homicide cases don't result in arrest. 56 percent of all rape cases don't result. So there's an opportunity to change that. And this referendum would propose having those dollars go to law enforcement and safety. And I think that opportunity exists all around us. CA: There's been this huge decline in crime in America over the last three decades. And part of the narrative of that is sometimes that it's about increased incarceration rates. What would you say to someone who believed that? BS: Well actually the violent crime rate has remained relatively stable. The great increase in mass incarceration in this country wasn't really in violent crime categories. It was this misguided war on drugs. That's where the dramatic increases have come in our prison population. And we got carried away with the rhetoric of punishment. And so we have three strikes laws that put people in prison forever for stealing a bicycle, for low-level property crimes, rather than making them give those resources back to the people who they victimized. I believe we need to do more to help people who are victimized by crime, not do less. And I think our current punishment philosophy does nothing for no one. And I think that's the orientation that we have to change. (Applause) CA: Bryan, you've struck a massive chord here. You're an inspiring person. Thank you so much for coming to TED. Thank you. (Applause)
Well, as Chris pointed out, I study the human brain, the functions and structure of the human brain. And I just want you to think for a minute about what this entails. Here is this mass of jelly, three-pound mass of jelly you can hold in the palm of your hand, and it can contemplate the vastness of interstellar space. It can contemplate the meaning of infinity and it can contemplate itself contemplating on the meaning of infinity. And this peculiar recursive quality that we call self-awareness, which I think is the holy grail of neuroscience, of neurology, and hopefully, someday, we'll understand how that happens. OK, so how do you study this mysterious organ? I mean, you have 100 billion nerve cells, little wisps of protoplasm, interacting with each other, and from this activity emerges the whole spectrum of abilities that we call human nature and human consciousness. How does this happen? Well, there are many ways of approaching the functions of the human brain. One approach, the one we use mainly, is to look at patients with sustained damage to a small region of the brain, where there's been a genetic change in a small region of the brain. What then happens is not an across-the-board reduction in all your mental capacities, a sort of blunting of your cognitive ability. What you get is a highly selective loss of one function, with other functions being preserved intact, and this gives you some confidence in asserting that that part of the brain is somehow involved in mediating that function. So you can then map function onto structure, and then find out what the circuitry's doing to generate that particular function. So that's what we're trying to do. So let me give you a few striking examples of this. In fact, I'm giving you three examples, six minutes each, during this talk. The first example is an extraordinary syndrome called Capgras syndrome. If you look at the first slide there, that's the temporal lobes, frontal lobes, parietal lobes, OK -- the lobes that constitute the brain. And if you look, tucked away inside the inner surface of the temporal lobes -- you can't see it there -- is a little structure called the fusiform gyrus. And that's been called the face area in the brain, because when it's damaged, you can no longer recognize people's faces. You can still recognize them from their voice and say, "Oh yeah, that's Joe," but you can't look at their face and know who it is, right? You can't even recognize yourself in the mirror. I mean, you know it's you because you wink and it winks, and you know it's a mirror, but you don't really recognize yourself as yourself. OK. Now that syndrome is well known as caused by damage to the fusiform gyrus. But there's another rare syndrome, so rare, in fact, that very few physicians have heard about it, not even neurologists. This is called the Capgras delusion, and that is a patient, who's otherwise completely normal, has had a head injury, comes out of coma, otherwise completely normal, he looks at his mother and says, "This looks exactly like my mother, this woman, but she's an impostor. She's some other woman pretending to be my mother." Now, why does this happen? Why would somebody -- and this person is perfectly lucid and intelligent in all other respects, but when he sees his mother, his delusion kicks in and says, it's not mother. Now, the most common interpretation of this, which you find in all the psychiatry textbooks, is a Freudian view, and that is that this chap -- and the same argument applies to women, by the way, but I'll just talk about guys. When you're a little baby, a young baby, you had a strong sexual attraction to your mother. This is the so-called Oedipus complex of Freud. I'm not saying I believe this, but this is the standard Freudian view. And then, as you grow up, the cortex develops, and inhibits these latent sexual urges towards your mother. Thank God, or you would all be sexually aroused when you saw your mother. And then what happens is, there's a blow to your head, damaging the cortex, allowing these latent sexual urges to emerge, flaming to the surface, and suddenly and inexplicably you find yourself being sexually aroused by your mother. And you say, "My God, if this is my mom, how come I'm being sexually turned on? She's some other woman. She's an impostor." It's the only interpretation that makes sense to your damaged brain. This has never made much sense to me, this argument. It's very ingenious, as all Freudian arguments are -- (Laughter) -- but didn't make much sense because I have seen the same delusion, a patient having the same delusion, about his pet poodle. (Laughter) He'll say, "Doctor, this is not Fifi. It looks exactly like Fifi, but it's some other dog." Right? Now, you try using the Freudian explanation there. (Laughter) You'll start talking about the latent bestiality in all humans, or some such thing, which is quite absurd, of course. Now, what's really going on? So, to explain this curious disorder, we look at the structure and functions of the normal visual pathways in the brain. Normally, visual signals come in, into the eyeballs, go to the visual areas in the brain. There are, in fact, 30 areas in the back of your brain concerned with just vision, and after processing all that, the message goes to a small structure called the fusiform gyrus, where you perceive faces. There are neurons there that are sensitive to faces. You can call it the face area of the brain, right? I talked about that earlier. Now, when that area's damaged, you lose the ability to see faces, right? But from that area, the message cascades into a structure called the amygdala in the limbic system, the emotional core of the brain, and that structure, called the amygdala, gauges the emotional significance of what you're looking at. Is it prey? Is it predator? Is it mate? Or is it something absolutely trivial, like a piece of lint, or a piece of chalk, or a -- I don't want to point to that, but -- or a shoe, or something like that? OK? Which you can completely ignore. So if the amygdala is excited, and this is something important, the messages then cascade into the autonomic nervous system. Your heart starts beating faster. You start sweating to dissipate the heat that you're going to create from muscular exertion. And that's fortunate, because we can put two electrodes on your palm and measure the change in skin resistance produced by sweating. So I can determine, when you're looking at something, whether you're excited or whether you're aroused, or not, OK? And I'll get to that in a minute. So my idea was, when this chap looks at an object, when he looks at his -- any object for that matter, it goes to the visual areas and, however, and it's processed in the fusiform gyrus, and you recognize it as a pea plant, or a table, or your mother, for that matter, OK? And then the message cascades into the amygdala, and then goes down the autonomic nervous system. But maybe, in this chap, that wire that goes from the amygdala to the limbic system, the emotional core of the brain, is cut by the accident. So because the fusiform is intact, the chap can still recognize his mother, and says, "Oh yeah, this looks like my mother." But because the wire is cut to the emotional centers, he says, "But how come, if it's my mother, I don't experience a warmth?" Or terror, as the case may be? Right? (Laughter) And therefore, he says, "How do I account for this inexplicable lack of emotions? This can't be my mother. It's some strange woman pretending to be my mother." How do you test this? Well, what you do is, if you take any one of you here, and put you in front of a screen, and measure your galvanic skin response, and show pictures on the screen, I can measure how you sweat when you see an object, like a table or an umbrella. Of course, you don't sweat. If I show you a picture of a lion, or a tiger, or a pinup, you start sweating, right? And, believe it or not, if I show you a picture of your mother -- I'm talking about normal people -- you start sweating. You don't even have to be Jewish. (Laughter) Now, what happens if you show this patient? You take the patient and show him pictures on the screen and measure his galvanic skin response. Tables and chairs and lint, nothing happens, as in normal people, but when you show him a picture of his mother, the galvanic skin response is flat. There's no emotional reaction to his mother, because that wire going from the visual areas to the emotional centers is cut. So his vision is normal because the visual areas are normal, his emotions are normal -- he'll laugh, he'll cry, so on and so forth -- but the wire from vision to emotions is cut and therefore he has this delusion that his mother is an impostor. It's a lovely example of the sort of thing we do: take a bizarre, seemingly incomprehensible, neural psychiatric syndrome and say that the standard Freudian view is wrong, that, in fact, you can come up with a precise explanation in terms of the known neural anatomy of the brain. By the way, if this patient then goes, and mother phones from an adjacent room -- phones him -- and he picks up the phone, and he says, "Wow, mom, how are you? Where are you?" There's no delusion through the phone. Then, she approaches him after an hour, he says, "Who are you? You look just like my mother." OK? The reason is there's a separate pathway going from the hearing centers in the brain to the emotional centers, and that's not been cut by the accident. So this explains why through the phone he recognizes his mother, no problem. When he sees her in person, he says it's an impostor. OK, how is all this complex circuitry set up in the brain? Is it nature, genes, or is it nurture? And we approach this problem by considering another curious syndrome called phantom limb. And you all know what a phantom limb is. When an arm is amputated, or a leg is amputated, for gangrene, or you lose it in war -- for example, in the Iraq war, it's now a serious problem -- you continue to vividly feel the presence of that missing arm, and that's called a phantom arm or a phantom leg. In fact, you can get a phantom with almost any part of the body. Believe it or not, even with internal viscera. I've had patients with the uterus removed -- hysterectomy -- who have a phantom uterus, including phantom menstrual cramps at the appropriate time of the month. And in fact, one student asked me the other day, "Do they get phantom PMS?" (Laughter) A subject ripe for scientific enquiry, but we haven't pursued that. OK, now the next question is, what can you learn about phantom limbs by doing experiments? One of the things we've found was, about half the patients with phantom limbs claim that they can move the phantom. It'll pat his brother on the shoulder, it'll answer the phone when it rings, it'll wave goodbye. These are very compelling, vivid sensations. The patient's not delusional. He knows that the arm is not there, but, nevertheless, it's a compelling sensory experience for the patient. But however, about half the patients, this doesn't happen. The phantom limb -- they'll say, "But doctor, the phantom limb is paralyzed. It's fixed in a clenched spasm and it's excruciatingly painful. If only I could move it, maybe the pain will be relieved." Now, why would a phantom limb be paralyzed? It sounds like an oxymoron. But when we were looking at the case sheets, what we found was, these people with the paralyzed phantom limbs, the original arm was paralyzed because of the peripheral nerve injury. The actual nerve supplying the arm was severed, was cut, by say, a motorcycle accident. So the patient had an actual arm, which is painful, in a sling for a few months or a year, and then, in a misguided attempt to get rid of the pain in the arm, the surgeon amputates the arm, and then you get a phantom arm with the same pains, right? And this is a serious clinical problem. Patients become depressed. Some of them are driven to suicide, OK? So, how do you treat this syndrome? Now, why do you get a paralyzed phantom limb? When I looked at the case sheet, I found that they had an actual arm, and the nerves supplying the arm had been cut, and the actual arm had been paralyzed, and lying in a sling for several months before the amputation, and this pain then gets carried over into the phantom itself. Why does this happen? When the arm was intact, but paralyzed, the brain sends commands to the arm, the front of the brain, saying, "Move," but it's getting visual feedback saying, "No." Move. No. Move. No. Move. No. And this gets wired into the circuitry of the brain, and we call this learned paralysis, OK? The brain learns, because of this Hebbian, associative link, that the mere command to move the arm creates a sensation of a paralyzed arm. And then, when you've amputated the arm, this learned paralysis carries over into your body image and into your phantom, OK? Now, how do you help these patients? How do you unlearn the learned paralysis, so you can relieve him of this excruciating, clenching spasm of the phantom arm? Well, we said, what if you now send the command to the phantom, but give him visual feedback that it's obeying his command, right? Maybe you can relieve the phantom pain, the phantom cramp. How do you do that? Well, virtual reality. But that costs millions of dollars. So, I hit on a way of doing this for three dollars, but don't tell my funding agencies. (Laughter) OK? What you do is you create what I call a mirror box. You have a cardboard box with a mirror in the middle, and then you put the phantom -- so my first patient, Derek, came in. He had his arm amputated 10 years ago. He had a brachial avulsion, so the nerves were cut and the arm was paralyzed, lying in a sling for a year, and then the arm was amputated. He had a phantom arm, excruciatingly painful, and he couldn't move it. It was a paralyzed phantom arm. So he came there, and I gave him a mirror like that, in a box, which I call a mirror box, right? And the patient puts his phantom left arm, which is clenched and in spasm, on the left side of the mirror, and the normal hand on the right side of the mirror, and makes the same posture, the clenched posture, and looks inside the mirror. And what does he experience? He looks at the phantom being resurrected, because he's looking at the reflection of the normal arm in the mirror, and it looks like this phantom has been resurrected. "Now," I said, "now, look, wiggle your phantom -- your real fingers, or move your real fingers while looking in the mirror." He's going to get the visual impression that the phantom is moving, right? That's obvious, but the astonishing thing is, the patient then says, "Oh my God, my phantom is moving again, and the pain, the clenching spasm, is relieved." And remember, my first patient who came in -- (Applause) -- thank you. (Applause) My first patient came in, and he looked in the mirror, and I said, "Look at your reflection of your phantom." And he started giggling, he says, "I can see my phantom." But he's not stupid. He knows it's not real. He knows it's a mirror reflection, but it's a vivid sensory experience. Now, I said, "Move your normal hand and phantom." He said, "Oh, I can't move my phantom. You know that. It's painful." I said, "Move your normal hand." And he says, "Oh my God, my phantom is moving again. I don't believe this! And my pain is being relieved." OK? And then I said, "Close your eyes." He closes his eyes. "And move your normal hand." "Oh, nothing. It's clenched again." "OK, open your eyes." "Oh my God, oh my God, it's moving again!" So, he was like a kid in a candy store. So, I said, OK, this proves my theory about learned paralysis and the critical role of visual input, but I'm not going to get a Nobel Prize for getting somebody to move his phantom limb. (Laughter) (Applause) It's a completely useless ability, if you think about it. (Laughter) But then I started realizing, maybe other kinds of paralysis that you see in neurology, like stroke, focal dystonias -- there may be a learned component to this, which you can overcome with the simple device of using a mirror. So, I said, "Look, Derek" -- well, first of all, the guy can't just go around carrying a mirror to alleviate his pain -- I said, "Look, Derek, take it home and practice with it for a week or two. Maybe, after a period of practice, you can dispense with the mirror, unlearn the paralysis, and start moving your paralyzed arm, and then, relieve yourself of pain." So he said OK, and he took it home. I said, "Look, it's, after all, two dollars. Take it home." So, he took it home, and after two weeks, he phones me, and he said, "Doctor, you're not going to believe this." I said, "What?" He said, "It's gone." I said, "What's gone?" I thought maybe the mirror box was gone. (Laughter) He said, "No, no, no, you know this phantom I've had for the last 10 years? It's disappeared." And I said -- I got worried, I said, my God, I mean I've changed this guy's body image, what about human subjects, ethics and all of that? And I said, "Derek, does this bother you?" He said, "No, last three days, I've not had a phantom arm and therefore no phantom elbow pain, no clenching, no phantom forearm pain, all those pains are gone away. But the problem is I still have my phantom fingers dangling from the shoulder, and your box doesn't reach." (Laughter) "So, can you change the design and put it on my forehead, so I can, you know, do this and eliminate my phantom fingers?" He thought I was some kind of magician. Now, why does this happen? It's because the brain is faced with tremendous sensory conflict. It's getting messages from vision saying the phantom is back. On the other hand, there's no appropriate reception, muscle signals saying that there is no arm, right? And your motor command saying there is an arm, and, because of this conflict, the brain says, to hell with it, there is no phantom, there is no arm, right? It goes into a sort of denial -- negates the signals. And when the arm disappears, the bonus is, the pain disappears because you can't have disembodied pain floating out there, in space. So, that's the bonus. Now, this technique has been tried on dozens of patients by other groups in Helsinki, so it may prove to be valuable as a treatment for phantom pain, and indeed, people have tried it for stroke rehabilitation. Stroke you normally think of as damage to the fibers, nothing you can do about it. But, it turns out some component of stroke paralysis is also learned paralysis, and maybe that component can be overcome using mirrors. This has also gone through clinical trials, helping lots and lots of patients. OK, let me switch gears now to the third part of my talk, which is about another curious phenomenon called synesthesia. This was discovered by Francis Galton in the nineteenth century. He was a cousin of Charles Darwin. He pointed out that certain people in the population, who are otherwise completely normal, had the following peculiarity: every time they see a number, it's colored. Five is blue, seven is yellow, eight is chartreuse, nine is indigo, OK? Bear in mind, these people are completely normal in other respects. Or C sharp -- sometimes, tones evoke color. C sharp is blue, F sharp is green, another tone might be yellow, right? Why does this happen? This is called synesthesia. Galton called it synesthesia, a mingling of the senses. In us, all the senses are distinct. These people muddle up their senses. Why does this happen? One of the two aspects of this problem are very intriguing. Synesthesia runs in families, so Galton said this is a hereditary basis, a genetic basis. Secondly, synesthesia is about -- and this is what gets me to my point about the main theme of this lecture, which is about creativity -- synesthesia is eight times more common among artists, poets, novelists and other creative people than in the general population. Why would that be? I'm going to answer that question. It's never been answered before. OK, what is synesthesia? What causes it? Well, there are many theories. One theory is they're just crazy. Now, that's not really a scientific theory, so we can forget about it. Another theory is they are acid junkies and potheads, right? Now, there may be some truth to this, because it's much more common here in the Bay Area than in San Diego. (Laughter) OK. Now, the third theory is that -- well, let's ask ourselves what's really going on in synesthesia. All right? So, we found that the color area and the number area are right next to each other in the brain, in the fusiform gyrus. So we said, there's some accidental cross wiring between color and numbers in the brain. So, every time you see a number, you see a corresponding color, and that's why you get synesthesia. Now remember -- why does this happen? Why would there be crossed wires in some people? Remember I said it runs in families? That gives you the clue. And that is, there is an abnormal gene, a mutation in the gene that causes this abnormal cross wiring. In all of us, it turns out we are born with everything wired to everything else. So, every brain region is wired to every other region, and these are trimmed down to create the characteristic modular architecture of the adult brain. So, if there's a gene causing this trimming and if that gene mutates, then you get deficient trimming between adjacent brain areas. And if it's between number and color, you get number-color synesthesia. If it's between tone and color, you get tone-color synesthesia. So far, so good. Now, what if this gene is expressed everywhere in the brain, so everything is cross-connected? Well, think about what artists, novelists and poets have in common, the ability to engage in metaphorical thinking, linking seemingly unrelated ideas, such as, "It is the east, and Juliet is the Sun." Well, you don't say, Juliet is the sun, does that mean she's a glowing ball of fire? I mean, schizophrenics do that, but it's a different story, right? Normal people say, she's warm like the sun, she's radiant like the sun, she's nurturing like the sun. Instantly, you've found the links. Now, if you assume that this greater cross wiring and concepts are also in different parts of the brain, then it's going to create a greater propensity towards metaphorical thinking and creativity in people with synesthesia. And, hence, the eight times more common incidence of synesthesia among poets, artists and novelists. OK, it's a very phrenological view of synesthesia. The last demonstration -- can I take one minute? (Applause) OK. I'm going to show you that you're all synesthetes, but you're in denial about it. Here's what I call Martian alphabet. Just like your alphabet, A is A, B is B, C is C. Different shapes for different phonemes, right? Here, you've got Martian alphabet. One of them is Kiki, one of them is Buba. Which one is Kiki and which one is Buba? How many of you think that's Kiki and that's Buba? Raise your hands. Well, it's one or two mutants. (Laughter) How many of you think that's Buba, that's Kiki? Raise your hands. Ninety-nine percent of you. Now, none of you is a Martian. How did you do that? It's because you're all doing a cross-model synesthetic abstraction, meaning you're saying that that sharp inflection -- ki-ki, in your auditory cortex, the hair cells being excited -- Kiki, mimics the visual inflection, sudden inflection of that jagged shape. Now, this is very important, because what it's telling you is your brain is engaging in a primitive -- it's just -- it looks like a silly illusion, but these photons in your eye are doing this shape, and hair cells in your ear are exciting the auditory pattern, but the brain is able to extract the common denominator. It's a primitive form of abstraction, and we now know this happens in the fusiform gyrus of the brain, because when that's damaged, these people lose the ability to engage in Buba Kiki, but they also lose the ability to engage in metaphor. If you ask this guy, what -- "all that glitters is not gold," what does that mean?" The patient says, "Well, if it's metallic and shiny, it doesn't mean it's gold. You have to measure its specific gravity, OK?" So, they completely miss the metaphorical meaning. So, this area is about eight times the size in higher -- especially in humans -- as in lower primates. Something very interesting is going on here in the angular gyrus, because it's the crossroads between hearing, vision and touch, and it became enormous in humans. And something very interesting is going on. And I think it's a basis of many uniquely human abilities like abstraction, metaphor and creativity. All of these questions that philosophers have been studying for millennia, we scientists can begin to explore by doing brain imaging, and by studying patients and asking the right questions. Thank you. (Applause) Sorry about that. (Laughter)
Well, as Chris pointed out, I study the human brain, the functions and structure of the human brain. And I just want you to think for a minute about what this entails. Here is this mass of jelly, three-pound mass of jelly you can hold in the palm of your hand, and it can contemplate the vastness of interstellar space. It can contemplate the meaning of infinity and it can contemplate itself contemplating on the meaning of infinity. And this peculiar recursive quality that we call self-awareness, which I think is the holy grail of neuroscience, of neurology, and hopefully, someday, we'll understand how that happens. OK, so how do you study this mysterious organ? I mean, you have 100 billion nerve cells, little wisps of protoplasm, interacting with each other, and from this activity emerges the whole spectrum of abilities that we call human nature and human consciousness. How does this happen? Well, there are many ways of approaching the functions of the human brain. One approach, the one we use mainly, is to look at patients with sustained damage to a small region of the brain, where there's been a genetic change in a small region of the brain. What then happens is not an across-the-board reduction in all your mental capacities, a sort of blunting of your cognitive ability. What you get is a highly selective loss of one function, with other functions being preserved intact, and this gives you some confidence in asserting that that part of the brain is somehow involved in mediating that function. So you can then map function onto structure, and then find out what the circuitry's doing to generate that particular function. So that's what we're trying to do. So let me give you a few striking examples of this. In fact, I'm giving you three examples, six minutes each, during this talk. The first example is an extraordinary syndrome called Capgras syndrome. If you look at the first slide there, that's the temporal lobes, frontal lobes, parietal lobes, OK -- the lobes that constitute the brain. And if you look, tucked away inside the inner surface of the temporal lobes -- you can't see it there -- is a little structure called the fusiform gyrus. And that's been called the face area in the brain, because when it's damaged, you can no longer recognize people's faces. You can still recognize them from their voice and say, "Oh yeah, that's Joe," but you can't look at their face and know who it is, right? You can't even recognize yourself in the mirror. I mean, you know it's you because you wink and it winks, and you know it's a mirror, but you don't really recognize yourself as yourself. OK. Now that syndrome is well known as caused by damage to the fusiform gyrus. But there's another rare syndrome, so rare, in fact, that very few physicians have heard about it, not even neurologists. This is called the Capgras delusion, and that is a patient, who's otherwise completely normal, has had a head injury, comes out of coma, otherwise completely normal, he looks at his mother and says, "This looks exactly like my mother, this woman, but she's an impostor. She's some other woman pretending to be my mother." Now, why does this happen? Why would somebody -- and this person is perfectly lucid and intelligent in all other respects, but when he sees his mother, his delusion kicks in and says, it's not mother. Now, the most common interpretation of this, which you find in all the psychiatry textbooks, is a Freudian view, and that is that this chap -- and the same argument applies to women, by the way, but I'll just talk about guys. When you're a little baby, a young baby, you had a strong sexual attraction to your mother. This is the so-called Oedipus complex of Freud. I'm not saying I believe this, but this is the standard Freudian view. And then, as you grow up, the cortex develops, and inhibits these latent sexual urges towards your mother. Thank God, or you would all be sexually aroused when you saw your mother. And then what happens is, there's a blow to your head, damaging the cortex, allowing these latent sexual urges to emerge, flaming to the surface, and suddenly and inexplicably you find yourself being sexually aroused by your mother. And you say, "My God, if this is my mom, how come I'm being sexually turned on? She's some other woman. She's an impostor." It's the only interpretation that makes sense to your damaged brain. This has never made much sense to me, this argument. It's very ingenious, as all Freudian arguments are -- (Laughter) -- but didn't make much sense because I have seen the same delusion, a patient having the same delusion, about his pet poodle. (Laughter) He'll say, "Doctor, this is not Fifi. It looks exactly like Fifi, but it's some other dog." Right? Now, you try using the Freudian explanation there. (Laughter) You'll start talking about the latent bestiality in all humans, or some such thing, which is quite absurd, of course. Now, what's really going on? So, to explain this curious disorder, we look at the structure and functions of the normal visual pathways in the brain. Normally, visual signals come in, into the eyeballs, go to the visual areas in the brain. There are, in fact, 30 areas in the back of your brain concerned with just vision, and after processing all that, the message goes to a small structure called the fusiform gyrus, where you perceive faces. There are neurons there that are sensitive to faces. You can call it the face area of the brain, right? I talked about that earlier. Now, when that area's damaged, you lose the ability to see faces, right? But from that area, the message cascades into a structure called the amygdala in the limbic system, the emotional core of the brain, and that structure, called the amygdala, gauges the emotional significance of what you're looking at. Is it prey? Is it predator? Is it mate? Or is it something absolutely trivial, like a piece of lint, or a piece of chalk, or a -- I don't want to point to that, but -- or a shoe, or something like that? OK? Which you can completely ignore. So if the amygdala is excited, and this is something important, the messages then cascade into the autonomic nervous system. Your heart starts beating faster. You start sweating to dissipate the heat that you're going to create from muscular exertion. And that's fortunate, because we can put two electrodes on your palm and measure the change in skin resistance produced by sweating. So I can determine, when you're looking at something, whether you're excited or whether you're aroused, or not, OK? And I'll get to that in a minute. So my idea was, when this chap looks at an object, when he looks at his -- any object for that matter, it goes to the visual areas and, however, and it's processed in the fusiform gyrus, and you recognize it as a pea plant, or a table, or your mother, for that matter, OK? And then the message cascades into the amygdala, and then goes down the autonomic nervous system. But maybe, in this chap, that wire that goes from the amygdala to the limbic system, the emotional core of the brain, is cut by the accident. So because the fusiform is intact, the chap can still recognize his mother, and says, "Oh yeah, this looks like my mother." But because the wire is cut to the emotional centers, he says, "But how come, if it's my mother, I don't experience a warmth?" Or terror, as the case may be? Right? (Laughter) And therefore, he says, "How do I account for this inexplicable lack of emotions? This can't be my mother. It's some strange woman pretending to be my mother." How do you test this? Well, what you do is, if you take any one of you here, and put you in front of a screen, and measure your galvanic skin response, and show pictures on the screen, I can measure how you sweat when you see an object, like a table or an umbrella. Of course, you don't sweat. If I show you a picture of a lion, or a tiger, or a pinup, you start sweating, right? And, believe it or not, if I show you a picture of your mother -- I'm talking about normal people -- you start sweating. You don't even have to be Jewish. (Laughter) Now, what happens if you show this patient? You take the patient and show him pictures on the screen and measure his galvanic skin response. Tables and chairs and lint, nothing happens, as in normal people, but when you show him a picture of his mother, the galvanic skin response is flat. There's no emotional reaction to his mother, because that wire going from the visual areas to the emotional centers is cut. So his vision is normal because the visual areas are normal, his emotions are normal -- he'll laugh, he'll cry, so on and so forth -- but the wire from vision to emotions is cut and therefore he has this delusion that his mother is an impostor. It's a lovely example of the sort of thing we do: take a bizarre, seemingly incomprehensible, neural psychiatric syndrome and say that the standard Freudian view is wrong, that, in fact, you can come up with a precise explanation in terms of the known neural anatomy of the brain. By the way, if this patient then goes, and mother phones from an adjacent room -- phones him -- and he picks up the phone, and he says, "Wow, mom, how are you? Where are you?" There's no delusion through the phone. Then, she approaches him after an hour, he says, "Who are you? You look just like my mother." OK? The reason is there's a separate pathway going from the hearing centers in the brain to the emotional centers, and that's not been cut by the accident. So this explains why through the phone he recognizes his mother, no problem. When he sees her in person, he says it's an impostor. OK, how is all this complex circuitry set up in the brain? Is it nature, genes, or is it nurture? And we approach this problem by considering another curious syndrome called phantom limb. And you all know what a phantom limb is. When an arm is amputated, or a leg is amputated, for gangrene, or you lose it in war -- for example, in the Iraq war, it's now a serious problem -- you continue to vividly feel the presence of that missing arm, and that's called a phantom arm or a phantom leg. In fact, you can get a phantom with almost any part of the body. Believe it or not, even with internal viscera. I've had patients with the uterus removed -- hysterectomy -- who have a phantom uterus, including phantom menstrual cramps at the appropriate time of the month. And in fact, one student asked me the other day, "Do they get phantom PMS?" (Laughter) A subject ripe for scientific enquiry, but we haven't pursued that. OK, now the next question is, what can you learn about phantom limbs by doing experiments? One of the things we've found was, about half the patients with phantom limbs claim that they can move the phantom. It'll pat his brother on the shoulder, it'll answer the phone when it rings, it'll wave goodbye. These are very compelling, vivid sensations. The patient's not delusional. He knows that the arm is not there, but, nevertheless, it's a compelling sensory experience for the patient. But however, about half the patients, this doesn't happen. The phantom limb -- they'll say, "But doctor, the phantom limb is paralyzed. It's fixed in a clenched spasm and it's excruciatingly painful. If only I could move it, maybe the pain will be relieved." Now, why would a phantom limb be paralyzed? It sounds like an oxymoron. But when we were looking at the case sheets, what we found was, these people with the paralyzed phantom limbs, the original arm was paralyzed because of the peripheral nerve injury. The actual nerve supplying the arm was severed, was cut, by say, a motorcycle accident. So the patient had an actual arm, which is painful, in a sling for a few months or a year, and then, in a misguided attempt to get rid of the pain in the arm, the surgeon amputates the arm, and then you get a phantom arm with the same pains, right? And this is a serious clinical problem. Patients become depressed. Some of them are driven to suicide, OK? So, how do you treat this syndrome? Now, why do you get a paralyzed phantom limb? When I looked at the case sheet, I found that they had an actual arm, and the nerves supplying the arm had been cut, and the actual arm had been paralyzed, and lying in a sling for several months before the amputation, and this pain then gets carried over into the phantom itself. Why does this happen? When the arm was intact, but paralyzed, the brain sends commands to the arm, the front of the brain, saying, "Move," but it's getting visual feedback saying, "No." Move. No. Move. No. Move. No. And this gets wired into the circuitry of the brain, and we call this learned paralysis, OK? The brain learns, because of this Hebbian, associative link, that the mere command to move the arm creates a sensation of a paralyzed arm. And then, when you've amputated the arm, this learned paralysis carries over into your body image and into your phantom, OK? Now, how do you help these patients? How do you unlearn the learned paralysis, so you can relieve him of this excruciating, clenching spasm of the phantom arm? Well, we said, what if you now send the command to the phantom, but give him visual feedback that it's obeying his command, right? Maybe you can relieve the phantom pain, the phantom cramp. How do you do that? Well, virtual reality. But that costs millions of dollars. So, I hit on a way of doing this for three dollars, but don't tell my funding agencies. (Laughter) OK? What you do is you create what I call a mirror box. You have a cardboard box with a mirror in the middle, and then you put the phantom -- so my first patient, Derek, came in. He had his arm amputated 10 years ago. He had a brachial avulsion, so the nerves were cut and the arm was paralyzed, lying in a sling for a year, and then the arm was amputated. He had a phantom arm, excruciatingly painful, and he couldn't move it. It was a paralyzed phantom arm. So he came there, and I gave him a mirror like that, in a box, which I call a mirror box, right? And the patient puts his phantom left arm, which is clenched and in spasm, on the left side of the mirror, and the normal hand on the right side of the mirror, and makes the same posture, the clenched posture, and looks inside the mirror. And what does he experience? He looks at the phantom being resurrected, because he's looking at the reflection of the normal arm in the mirror, and it looks like this phantom has been resurrected. "Now," I said, "now, look, wiggle your phantom -- your real fingers, or move your real fingers while looking in the mirror." He's going to get the visual impression that the phantom is moving, right? That's obvious, but the astonishing thing is, the patient then says, "Oh my God, my phantom is moving again, and the pain, the clenching spasm, is relieved." And remember, my first patient who came in -- (Applause) -- thank you. (Applause) My first patient came in, and he looked in the mirror, and I said, "Look at your reflection of your phantom." And he started giggling, he says, "I can see my phantom." But he's not stupid. He knows it's not real. He knows it's a mirror reflection, but it's a vivid sensory experience. Now, I said, "Move your normal hand and phantom." He said, "Oh, I can't move my phantom. You know that. It's painful." I said, "Move your normal hand." And he says, "Oh my God, my phantom is moving again. I don't believe this! And my pain is being relieved." OK? And then I said, "Close your eyes." He closes his eyes. "And move your normal hand." "Oh, nothing. It's clenched again." "OK, open your eyes." "Oh my God, oh my God, it's moving again!" So, he was like a kid in a candy store. So, I said, OK, this proves my theory about learned paralysis and the critical role of visual input, but I'm not going to get a Nobel Prize for getting somebody to move his phantom limb. (Laughter) (Applause) It's a completely useless ability, if you think about it. (Laughter) But then I started realizing, maybe other kinds of paralysis that you see in neurology, like stroke, focal dystonias -- there may be a learned component to this, which you can overcome with the simple device of using a mirror. So, I said, "Look, Derek" -- well, first of all, the guy can't just go around carrying a mirror to alleviate his pain -- I said, "Look, Derek, take it home and practice with it for a week or two. Maybe, after a period of practice, you can dispense with the mirror, unlearn the paralysis, and start moving your paralyzed arm, and then, relieve yourself of pain." So he said OK, and he took it home. I said, "Look, it's, after all, two dollars. Take it home." So, he took it home, and after two weeks, he phones me, and he said, "Doctor, you're not going to believe this." I said, "What?" He said, "It's gone." I said, "What's gone?" I thought maybe the mirror box was gone. (Laughter) He said, "No, no, no, you know this phantom I've had for the last 10 years? It's disappeared." And I said -- I got worried, I said, my God, I mean I've changed this guy's body image, what about human subjects, ethics and all of that? And I said, "Derek, does this bother you?" He said, "No, last three days, I've not had a phantom arm and therefore no phantom elbow pain, no clenching, no phantom forearm pain, all those pains are gone away. But the problem is I still have my phantom fingers dangling from the shoulder, and your box doesn't reach." (Laughter) "So, can you change the design and put it on my forehead, so I can, you know, do this and eliminate my phantom fingers?" He thought I was some kind of magician. Now, why does this happen? It's because the brain is faced with tremendous sensory conflict. It's getting messages from vision saying the phantom is back. On the other hand, there's no proprioception, muscle signals saying that there is no arm, right? And your motor command saying there is an arm, and, because of this conflict, the brain says, to hell with it, there is no phantom, there is no arm, right? It goes into a sort of denial -- it gates the signals. And when the arm disappears, the bonus is, the pain disappears because you can't have disembodied pain floating out there, in space. So, that's the bonus. Now, this technique has been tried on dozens of patients by other groups in Helsinki, so it may prove to be valuable as a treatment for phantom pain, and indeed, people have tried it for stroke rehabilitation. Stroke you normally think of as damage to the fibers, nothing you can do about it. But, it turns out some component of stroke paralysis is also learned paralysis, and maybe that component can be overcome using mirrors. This has also gone through clinical trials, helping lots and lots of patients. OK, let me switch gears now to the third part of my talk, which is about another curious phenomenon called synesthesia. This was discovered by Francis Galton in the nineteenth century. He was a cousin of Charles Darwin. He pointed out that certain people in the population, who are otherwise completely normal, had the following peculiarity: every time they see a number, it's colored. Five is blue, seven is yellow, eight is chartreuse, nine is indigo, OK? Bear in mind, these people are completely normal in other respects. Or C sharp -- sometimes, tones evoke color. C sharp is blue, F sharp is green, another tone might be yellow, right? Why does this happen? This is called synesthesia. Galton called it synesthesia, a mingling of the senses. In us, all the senses are distinct. These people muddle up their senses. Why does this happen? One of the two aspects of this problem are very intriguing. Synesthesia runs in families, so Galton said this is a hereditary basis, a genetic basis. Secondly, synesthesia is about -- and this is what gets me to my point about the main theme of this lecture, which is about creativity -- synesthesia is eight times more common among artists, poets, novelists and other creative people than in the general population. Why would that be? I'm going to answer that question. It's never been answered before. OK, what is synesthesia? What causes it? Well, there are many theories. One theory is they're just crazy. Now, that's not really a scientific theory, so we can forget about it. Another theory is they are acid junkies and potheads, right? Now, there may be some truth to this, because it's much more common here in the Bay Area than in San Diego. (Laughter) OK. Now, the third theory is that -- well, let's ask ourselves what's really going on in synesthesia. All right? So, we found that the color area and the number area are right next to each other in the brain, in the fusiform gyrus. So we said, there's some accidental cross wiring between color and numbers in the brain. So, every time you see a number, you see a corresponding color, and that's why you get synesthesia. Now remember -- why does this happen? Why would there be crossed wires in some people? Remember I said it runs in families? That gives you the clue. And that is, there is an abnormal gene, a mutation in the gene that causes this abnormal cross wiring. In all of us, it turns out we are born with everything wired to everything else. So, every brain region is wired to every other region, and these are trimmed down to create the characteristic modular architecture of the adult brain. So, if there's a gene causing this trimming and if that gene mutates, then you get deficient trimming between adjacent brain areas. And if it's between number and color, you get number-color synesthesia. If it's between tone and color, you get tone-color synesthesia. So far, so good. Now, what if this gene is expressed everywhere in the brain, so everything is cross-connected? Well, think about what artists, novelists and poets have in common, the ability to engage in metaphorical thinking, linking seemingly unrelated ideas, such as, "It is the east, and Juliet is the Sun." Well, you don't say, Juliet is the sun, does that mean she's a glowing ball of fire? I mean, schizophrenics do that, but it's a different story, right? Normal people say, she's warm like the sun, she's radiant like the sun, she's nurturing like the sun. Instantly, you've found the links. Now, if you assume that this greater cross wiring and concepts are also in different parts of the brain, then it's going to create a greater propensity towards metaphorical thinking and creativity in people with synesthesia. And, hence, the eight times more common incidence of synesthesia among poets, artists and novelists. OK, it's a very phrenological view of synesthesia. The last demonstration -- can I take one minute? (Applause) OK. I'm going to show you that you're all synesthetes, but you're in denial about it. Here's what I call Martian alphabet. Just like your alphabet, A is A, B is B, C is C. Different shapes for different phonemes, right? Here, you've got Martian alphabet. One of them is Kiki, one of them is Buba. Which one is Kiki and which one is Buba? How many of you think that's Kiki and that's Buba? Raise your hands. Well, it's one or two mutants. (Laughter) How many of you think that's Buba, that's Kiki? Raise your hands. Ninety-nine percent of you. Now, none of you is a Martian. How did you do that? It's because you're all doing a cross-model synesthetic abstraction, meaning you're saying that that sharp inflection -- ki-ki, in your auditory cortex, the hair cells being excited -- Kiki, mimics the visual inflection, sudden inflection of that jagged shape. Now, this is very important, because what it's telling you is your brain is engaging in a primitive -- it's just -- it looks like a silly illusion, but these photons in your eye are doing this shape, and hair cells in your ear are exciting the auditory pattern, but the brain is able to extract the common denominator. It's a primitive form of abstraction, and we now know this happens in the fusiform gyrus of the brain, because when that's damaged, these people lose the ability to engage in Buba Kiki, but they also lose the ability to engage in metaphor. If you ask this guy, what -- "all that glitters is not gold," what does that mean?" The patient says, "Well, if it's metallic and shiny, it doesn't mean it's gold. You have to measure its specific gravity, OK?" So, they completely miss the metaphorical meaning. So, this area is about eight times the size in higher -- especially in humans -- as in lower primates. Something very interesting is going on here in the angular gyrus, because it's the crossroads between hearing, vision and touch, and it became enormous in humans. And something very interesting is going on. And I think it's a basis of many uniquely human abilities like abstraction, metaphor and creativity. All of these questions that philosophers have been studying for millennia, we scientists can begin to explore by doing brain imaging, and by studying patients and asking the right questions. Thank you. (Applause) Sorry about that. (Laughter)
Chris Anderson: So, this is an interview with a difference. On the basis that a picture is worth a thousand words, what I did was, I asked Bill and Melinda to dig out from their archive some images that would help explain some of what they've done, and do a few things that way. So, we're going to start here. Melinda, when and where was this, and who is that handsome man next to you? Melinda Gates: With those big glasses, huh? This is in Africa, our very first trip, the first time either of us had ever been to Africa, in the fall of 1993. We were already engaged to be married. We married a few months later, and this was the trip where we really went to see the animals and to see the savanna. It was incredible. Bill had never taken that much time off from work. But what really touched us, actually, were the people, and the extreme poverty. We started asking ourselves questions. Does it have to be like this? And at the end of the trip, we went out to Zanzibar, and took some time to walk on the beach, which is something we had done a lot while we were dating. And we'd already been talking about during that time that the wealth that had come from Microsoft would be given back to society, but it was really on that beach walk that we started to talk about, well, what might we do and how might we go about it? CA: So, given that this vacation led to the creation of the world's biggest private foundation, it's pretty expensive as vacations go. (Laughter) MG: I guess so. We enjoyed it. CA: Which of you was the key instigator here, or was it symmetrical? Bill Gates: Well, I think we were excited that there'd be a phase of our life where we'd get to work together and figure out how to give this money back. At this stage, we were talking about the poorest, and could you have a big impact on them? Were there things that weren't being done? There was a lot we didn't know. Our naïveté is pretty incredible, when we look back on it. But we had a certain enthusiasm that that would be the phase, the post-Microsoft phase would be our philanthropy. MG: Which Bill always thought was going to come after he was 60, so he hasn't quite hit 60 yet, so some things change along the way. CA: So it started there, but it got accelerated. So that was '93, and it was '97, really, before the foundation itself started. MA: Yeah, in '97, we read an article about diarrheal diseases killing so many kids around the world, and we kept saying to ourselves, "Well that can't be. In the U.S., you just go down to the drug store." And so we started gathering scientists and started learning about population, learning about vaccines, learning about what had worked and what had failed, and that's really when we got going, was in late 1998, 1999. CA: So, you've got a big pot of money and a world full of so many different issues. How on Earth do you decide what to focus on? BG: Well, we decided that we'd pick two causes, whatever the biggest inequity was globally, and there we looked at children dying, children not having enough nutrition to ever develop, and countries that were really stuck, because with that level of death, and parents would have so many kids that they'd get huge population growth, and that the kids were so sick that they really couldn't be educated and lift themselves up. So that was our global thing, and then in the U.S., both of us have had amazing educations, and we saw that as the way that the U.S. could live up to its promise of equal opportunity is by having a phenomenal education system, and the more we learned, the more we realized we're not really fulfilling that promise. And so we picked those two things, and everything the foundation does is focused there. CA: So, I asked each of you to pick an image that you like that illustrates your work, and Melinda, this is what you picked. What's this about? MG: So I, one of the things I love to do when I travel is to go out to the rural areas and talk to the women, whether it's Bangladesh, India, lots of countries in Africa, and I go in as a Western woman without a name. I don't tell them who I am. Pair of khakis. And I kept hearing from women, over and over and over, the more I traveled, "I want to be able to use this shot." I would be there to talk to them about childhood vaccines, and they would bring the conversation around to "But what about the shot I get?" which is an injection they were getting called Depo-Provera, which is a contraceptive. And I would come back and talk to global health experts, and they'd say, "Oh no, contraceptives are stocked in in the developing world." Well, you had to dig deeper into the reports, and this is what the team came to me with, which is, to have the number one thing that women tell you in Africa they want to use stocked out more than 200 days a year explains why women were saying to me, "I walked 10 kilometers without my husband knowing it, and I got to the clinic, and there was nothing there." And so condoms were stocked in in Africa because of all the AIDS work that the U.S. and others supported. But women will tell you over and over again, "I can't negotiate a condom with my husband. I'm either suggesting he has AIDS or I have AIDS, and I need that tool because then I can space the births of my children, and I can feed them and have a chance of educating them." CA: Melinda, you're Roman Catholic, and you've often been embroiled in controversy over this issue, and on the abortion question, on both sides, really. How do you navigate that? MG: Yeah, so I think that's a really important point, which is, we had backed away from contraceptives as a global community. We knew that 210 million women were saying they wanted access to contraceptives, even the contraceptives we have here in the United States, and we weren't providing them because of the political controversy in our country, and to me that was just a crime, and I kept looking around trying to find the person that would get this back on the global stage, and I finally realized I just had to do it. And even though I'm Catholic, I believe in contraceptives just like most of the Catholic women in the United States who report using contraceptives, and I shouldn't let that controversy be the thing that holds us back. We used to have consensus in the United States around contraceptives, and so we got back to that global consensus, and actually raised 2.6 billion dollars around exactly this issue for women. (Applause) CA: Bill, this is your graph. What's this about? BG: Well, my graph has numbers on it. (Laughter) I really like this graph. This is the number of children who die before the age of five every year. And what you find is really a phenomenal success story which is not widely known, that we are making incredible progress. We go from 20 million not long after I was born to now we're down to about six million. So this is a story largely of vaccines. Smallpox was killing a couple million kids a year. That was eradicated, so that got down to zero. Measles was killing a couple million a year. That's down to a few hundred thousand. Anyway, this is a chart where you want to get that number to continue, and it's going to be possible, using the science of new vaccines, getting the vaccines out to kids. We can actually accelerate the progress. The last decade, that number has dropped faster than ever in history, and so I just love the fact that you can say, okay, if we can invent new vaccines, we can get them out there, use the very latest understanding of these things, and get the delivery right, that we can perform a miracle. CA: I mean, you do the math on this, and it works out, I think, literally to thousands of kids' lives saved every day compared to the prior year. It's not reported. An airliner with 200-plus deaths is a far, far bigger story than that. Does that drive you crazy? BG: Yeah, because it's a silent thing going on. It's a kid, one kid at a time. Ninety-eight percent of this has nothing to do with natural disasters, and yet, people's charity, when they see a natural disaster, are wonderful. It's incredible how people think, okay, that could be me, and the money flows. These causes have been a bit invisible. Now that the Millennium Development Goals and various things are getting out there, we are seeing some increased generosity, so the goal is to get this well below a million, which should be possible in our lifetime. CA: Maybe it needed someone who is turned on by numbers and graphs rather than just the big, sad face to get engaged. I mean, you've used it in your letter this year, you used basically this argument to say that aid, contrary to the current meme that aid is kind of worthless and broken, that actually it has been effective. BG: Yeah, well people can take, there is some aid that was well-meaning and didn't go well. There's some venture capital investments that were well-meaning and didn't go well. You shouldn't just say, okay, because of that, because we don't have a perfect record, this is a bad endeavor. You should look at, what was your goal? How are you trying to uplift nutrition and survival and literacy so these countries can take care of themselves, and say wow, this is going well, and be smarter. We can spend aid smarter. It is not all a panacea. We can do better than venture capital, I think, including big hits like this. CA: Traditional wisdom is that it's pretty hard for married couples to work together. How have you guys managed it? MG: Yeah, I've had a lot of women say to me, "I really don't think I could work with my husband. That just wouldn't work out." You know, we enjoy it, and we don't -- this foundation has been a coming to for both of us in its continuous learning journey, and we don't travel together as much for the foundation, actually, as we used to when Bill was working at Microsoft. We have more trips where we're traveling separately, but I always know when I come home, Bill's going to be interested in what I learned, whether it's about women or girls or something new about the vaccine delivery chain, or this person that is a great leader. He's going to listen and be really interested. And he knows when he comes home, even if it's to talk about the speech he did or the data or what he's learned, I'm really interested, and I think we have a really collaborative relationship. But we don't every minute together, that's for sure. (Laughter) CA: But now you are, and we're very happy that you are. Melinda, early on, you were basically largely running the show. Six years ago, I guess, Bill came on full time, so moved from Microsoft and became full time. That must have been hard, adjusting to that. No? MG: Yeah. I think actually, for the foundation employees, there was way more angst for them than there was for me about Bill coming. I was actually really excited. I mean, Bill made this decision even obviously before it got announced in 2006, and it was really his decision, but again, it was a beach vacation where we were walking on the beach and he was starting to think of this idea. And for me, the excitement of Bill putting his brain and his heart against these huge global problems, these inequities, to me that was exciting. Yes, the foundation employees had angst about that. (Applause) CA: That's cool. MG: But that went away within three months, once he was there. BG: Including some of the employees. MG: That's what I said, the employees, it went away for them three months after you were there. BG: No, I'm kidding. MG: Oh, you mean, the employees didn't go away. BG: A few of them did, but — (Laughter) CA: So what do you guys argue about? Sunday, 11 o'clock, you're away from work, what comes up? What's the argument? BG: Because we built this thing together from the beginning, it's this great partnership. I had that with Paul Allen in the early days of Microsoft. I had it with Steve Ballmer as Microsoft got bigger, and now Melinda, and in even stronger, equal ways, is the partner, so we talk a lot about which things should we give more to, which groups are working well? She's got a lot of insight. She'll sit down with the employees a lot. We'll take the different trips she described. So there's a lot of collaboration. I can't think of anything where one of us had a super strong opinion about one thing or another? CA: How about you, Melinda, though? Can you? (Laughter) You never know. MG: Well, here's the thing. We come at things from different angles, and I actually think that's really good. So Bill can look at the big data and say, "I want to act based on these global statistics." For me, I come at it from intuition. I meet with lots of people on the ground and Bill's taught me to take that and read up to the global data and see if they match, and I think what I've taught him is to take that data and meet with people on the ground to understand, can you actually deliver that vaccine? Can you get a woman to accept those polio drops in her child's mouth? Because the delivery piece is every bit as important as the science. So I think it's been more a coming to over time towards each other's point of view, and quite frankly, the work is better because of it. CA: So, in vaccines and polio and so forth, you've had some amazing successes. What about failure, though? Can you talk about a failure and maybe what you've learned from it? BG: Yeah. Fortunately, we can afford a few failures, because we've certainly had them. We do a lot of drug work or vaccine work that you know you're going to have different failures. Like, we put out, one that got a lot of publicity was asking for a better condom. Well, we got hundreds of ideas. Maybe a few of those will work out. We were very naïve, certainly I was, about a drug for a disease in India, visceral leishmaniasis, that I thought, once I got this drug, we can just go wipe out the disease. Well, turns out it took an injection every day for 10 days. It took three more years to get it than we expected, and then there was no way it was going to get out there. Fortunately, we found out that if you go kill the sand flies, you probably can have success there, but we spent five years, you could say wasted five years, and about 60 million, on a path that turned out to have very modest benefit when we got there. CA: You're spending, like, a billion dollars a year in education, I think, something like that. Is anything, the story of what's gone right there is quite a long and complex one. Are there any failures that you can talk about? MG: Well, I would say a huge lesson for us out of the early work is we thought that these small schools were the answer, and small schools definitely help. They bring down the dropout rate. They have less violence and crime in those schools. But the thing that we learned from that work, and what turned out to be the fundamental key, is a great teacher in front of the classroom. If you don't have an effective teacher in the front of the classroom, I don't care how big or small the building is, you're not going to change the trajectory of whether that student will be ready for college. (Applause) CA: So Melinda, this is you and your eldest daughter, Jenn. And just taken about three weeks ago, I think, three or four weeks ago. Where was this? MG: So we went to Tanzania. Jenn's been to Tanzania. All our kids have been to Africa quite a bit, actually. And we did something very different, which is, we decided to go spend two nights and three days with a family. Anna and Sanare are the parents. They invited us to come and stay in their boma. Actually, the goats had been there, I think, living in that particular little hut on their little compound before we got there. And we stayed with their family, and we really, really learned what life is like in rural Tanzania. And the difference between just going and visiting for half a day or three quarters of a day versus staying overnight was profound, and so let me just give you one explanation of that. They had six children, and as I talked to Anna in the kitchen, we cooked for about five hours in the cooking hut that day, and as I talked to her, she had absolutely planned and spaced with her husband the births of their children. It was a very loving relationship. This was a Maasai warrior and his wife, but they had decided to get married, they clearly had respect and love in the relationship. Their children, their six children, the two in the middle were twins, 13, a boy, and a girl named Grace. And when we'd go out to chop wood and do all the things that Grace and her mother would do, Grace was not a child, she was an adolescent, but she wasn't an adult. She was very, very shy. So she kept wanting to talk to me and Jenn. We kept trying to engage her, but she was shy. And at night, though, when all the lights went out in rural Tanzania, and there was no moon that night, the first night, and no stars, and Jenn came out of our hut with her REI little headlamp on, Grace went immediately, and got the translator, came straight up to my Jenn and said, "When you go home, can I have your headlamp so I can study at night?" CA: Oh, wow. MG: And her dad had told me how afraid he was that unlike the son, who had passed his secondary exams, because of her chores, she'd not done so well and wasn't in the government school yet. He said, "I don't know how I'm going to pay for her education. I can't pay for private school, and she may end up on this farm like my wife." So they know the difference that an education can make in a huge, profound way. CA: I mean, this is another pic of your other two kids, Rory and Phoebe, along with Paul Farmer. Bringing up three children when you're the world's richest family seems like a social experiment without much prior art. How have you managed it? What's been your approach? BG: Well, I'd say overall the kids get a great education, but you've got to make sure they have a sense of their own ability and what they're going to go and do, and our philosophy has been to be very clear with them -- most of the money's going to the foundation -- and help them find something they're excited about. We want to strike a balance where they have the freedom to do anything but not a lot of money showered on them so they could go out and do nothing. And so far, they're fairly diligent, excited to pick their own direction. CA: You've obviously guarded their privacy carefully for obvious reasons. I'm curious why you've given me permission to show this picture now here at TED. MG: Well, it's interesting. As they get older, they so know that our family belief is about responsibility, that we are in an unbelievable situation just to live in the United States and have a great education, and we have a responsibility to give back to the world. And so as they get older and we are teaching them -- they have been to so many countries around the world — they're saying, we do want people to know that we believe in what you're doing, Mom and Dad, and it is okay to show us more. So we have their permission to show this picture, and I think Paul Farmer is probably going to put it eventually in some of his work. But they really care deeply about the mission of the foundation, too. CA: You've easily got enough money despite your vast contributions to the foundation to make them all billionaires. Is that your plan for them? BG: Nope. No. They won't have anything like that. They need to have a sense that their own work is meaningful and important. We read an article long, actually, before we got married, where Warren Buffett talked about that, and we're quite convinced that it wasn't a favor either to society or to the kids. CA: Well, speaking of Warren Buffett, something really amazing happened in 2006, when somehow your only real rival for richest person in America suddenly turned around and agreed to give 80 percent of his fortune to your foundation. How on Earth did that happen? I guess there's a long version and a short version of that. We've got time for the short version. BG: All right. Well, Warren was a close friend, and he was going to have his wife Suzie give it all away. Tragically, she passed away before he did, and he's big on delegation, and — (Laughter) — he said — CA: Tweet that. BG: If he's got somebody who is doing something well, and is willing to do it at no charge, maybe that's okay. But we were stunned. MG: Totally stunned. BG: We had never expected it, and it has been unbelievable. It's allowed us to increase our ambition in what the foundation can do quite dramatically. Half the resources we have come from Warren's mind-blowing generosity. CA: And I think you've pledged that by the time you're done, more than, or 95 percent of your wealth, will be given to the foundation. BG: Yes. CA: And since this relationship, it's amazing— (Applause) And recently, you and Warren have been going around trying to persuade other billionaires and successful people to pledge to give, what, more than half of their assets for philanthropy. How is that going? BG: Well, we've got about 120 people who have now taken this giving pledge. The thing that's great is that we get together yearly and talk about, okay, do you hire staff, what do you give to them? We're not trying to homogenize it. I mean, the beauty of philanthropy is this mind-blowing diversity. People give to some things. We look and go, "Wow." But that's great. That's the role of philanthropy is to pick different approaches, including even in one space, like education. We need more experimentation. But it's been wonderful, meeting those people, sharing their journey to philanthropy, how they involve their kids, where they're doing it differently, and it's been way more successful than we expected. Now it looks like it'll just keep growing in size in the years ahead. MG: And having people see that other people are making change with philanthropy, I mean, these are people who have created their own businesses, put their own ingenuity behind incredible ideas. If they put their ideas and their brain behind philanthropy, they can change the world. And they start to see others doing it, and saying, "Wow, I want to do that with my own money." To me, that's the piece that's incredible. CA: It seems to me, it's actually really hard for some people to figure out even how to remotely spend that much money on something else. There are probably some billionaires in the room and certainly some successful people. I'm curious, can you make the pitch? What's the pitch? BG: Well, it's the most fulfilling thing we've ever done, and you can't take it with you, and if it's not good for your kids, let's get together and brainstorm about what we can be done. The world is a far better place because of the philanthropists of the past, and the U.S. tradition here, which is the strongest, is the envy of the world. And part of the reason I'm so optimistic is because I do think philanthropy is going to grow and take some of these things government's not just good at working on and discovering and shine some light in the right direction. CA: The world's got this terrible inequality, growing inequality problem that seems structural. It does seem to me that if more of your peers took the approach that you two have made, it would make a dent both in that problem and certainly in the perception of that problem. Is that a fair comment? BG: Oh yeah. If you take from the most wealthy and give to the least wealthy, it's good. It tries to balance out, and that's just. MG: But you change systems. In the U.S., we're trying to change the education system so it's just for everybody and it works for all students. That, to me, really changes the inequality balance. BG: That's the most important. (Applause) CA: Well, I really think that most people here and many millions around the world are just in awe of the trajectory your lives have taken and the spectacular degree to which you have shaped the future. Thank you so much for coming to TED and for sharing with us and for all you do. BG: Thank you. MG: Thank you. (Applause) BG: Thank you. MG: Thank you very much. BG: All right, good job. (Applause)
I want to start my talk today with two observations about the human species. The first observation is something that you might think is quite obvious, and that's that our species, Homo sapiens, is actually really, really smart -- like, ridiculously smart -- like you're all doing things that no other species on the planet does right now. And this is, of course, not the first time you've probably recognized this. Of course, in addition to being smart, we're also an extremely vain species. So we like pointing out the fact that we're smart. You know, so I could turn to pretty much any sage from Shakespeare to Stephen Colbert to point out things like the fact that we're noble in reason and infinite in faculties and just kind of awesome-er than anything else on the planet when it comes to all things cerebral. But of course, there's a second observation about the human species that I want to focus on a little bit more, and that's the fact that even though we're actually really smart, sometimes uniquely smart, we can also be incredibly, incredibly dumb when it comes to some aspects of our decision making. Now I'm seeing lots of smirks out there. Don't worry, I'm not going to call anyone in particular out on any aspects of your own mistakes. But of course, just in the last two years we see these unprecedented examples of human ineptitude. And we've watched as the tools we uniquely make to pull the resources out of our environment kind of just blow up in our face. We've watched the financial markets that we uniquely create -- these markets that were supposed to be foolproof -- we've watched them kind of collapse before our eyes. But both of these two embarrassing examples, I think, don't highlight what I think is most embarrassing about the mistakes that humans make, which is that we'd like to think that the mistakes we make are really just the result of a couple bad apples or a couple really sort of FAIL Blog-worthy decisions. But it turns out, what social scientists are actually learning is that most of us, when put in certain contexts, will actually make very specific mistakes. The errors we make are actually predictable. We make them again and again. And they're actually immune to lots of evidence. When we get negative feedback, we still, the next time we're face with a certain context, tend to make the same errors. And so this has been a real puzzle to me as a sort of scholar of human nature. What I'm most curious about is, how is a species that's as smart as we are capable of such bad and such consistent errors all the time? You know, we're the smartest thing out there, why can't we figure this out? In some sense, where do our mistakes really come from? And having thought about this a little bit, I see a couple different possibilities. One possibility is, in some sense, it's not really our fault. Because we're a smart species, we can actually create all kinds of environments that are super, super complicated, sometimes too complicated for us to even actually understand, even though we've actually created them. We create financial markets that are super complex. We create mortgage terms that we can't actually deal with. And of course, if we are put in environments where we can't deal with it, in some sense makes sense that we actually might mess certain things up. If this was the case, we'd have a really easy solution to the problem of human error. We'd actually just say, okay, let's figure out the kinds of technologies we can't deal with, the kinds of environments that are bad -- get rid of those, design things better, and we should be the noble species that we expect ourselves to be. But there's another possibility that I find a little bit more worrying, which is, maybe it's not our environments that are messed up. Maybe it's actually us that's designed badly. This is a hint that I've gotten from watching the ways that social scientists have learned about human errors. And what we see is that people tend to keep making errors exactly the same way, over and over again. It feels like we might almost just be built to make errors in certain ways. This is a possibility that I worry a little bit more about, because, if it's us that's messed up, it's not actually clear how we go about dealing with it. We might just have to accept the fact that we're error prone and try to design things around it. So this is the question my students and I wanted to get at. How can we tell the difference between possibility one and possibility two? What we need is a population that's basically smart, can make lots of decisions, but doesn't have access to any of the systems we have, any of the things that might mess us up -- no human technology, human culture, maybe even not human language. And so this is why we turned to these guys here. These are one of the guys I work with. This is a brown capuchin monkey. These guys are New World primates, which means they broke off from the human branch about 35 million years ago. This means that your great, great, great great, great, great -- with about five million "greats" in there -- grandmother was probably the same great, great, great, great grandmother with five million "greats" in there as Holly up here. You know, so you can take comfort in the fact that this guy up here is a really really distant, but albeit evolutionary, relative. The good news about Holly though is that she doesn't actually have the same kinds of technologies we do. You know, she's a smart, very cut creature, a primate as well, but she lacks all the stuff we think might be messing us up. So she's the perfect test case. What if we put Holly into the same context as humans? Does she make the same mistakes as us? Does she not learn from them? And so on. And so this is the kind of thing we decided to do. My students and I got very excited about this a few years ago. We said, all right, let's, you know, throw so problems at Holly, see if she messes these things up. First problem is just, well, where should we start? Because, you know, it's great for us, but bad for humans. We make a lot of mistakes in a lot of different contexts. You know, where are we actually going to start with this? And because we started this work around the time of the financial collapse, around the time when foreclosures were hitting the news, we said, hhmm, maybe we should actually start in the financial domain. Maybe we should look at monkey's economic decisions and try to see if they do the same kinds of dumb things that we do. Of course, that's when we hit a sort second problem -- a little bit more methodological -- which is that, maybe you guys don't know, but monkeys don't actually use money. I know, you haven't met them. But this is why, you know, they're not in the queue behind you at the grocery store or the ATM -- you know, they don't do this stuff. So now we faced, you know, a little bit of a problem here. How are we actually going to ask monkeys about money if they don't actually use it? So we said, well, maybe we should just, actually just suck it up and teach monkeys how to use money. So that's just what we did. What you're looking at over here is actually the first unit that I know of of non-human currency. We weren't very creative at the time we started these studies, so we just called it a token. But this is the unit of currency that we've taught our monkeys at Yale to actually use with humans, to actually buy different pieces of food. It doesn't look like much -- in fact, it isn't like much. Like most of our money, it's just a piece of metal. As those of you who've taken currencies home from your trip know, once you get home, it's actually pretty useless. It was useless to the monkeys at first before they realized what they could do with it. When we first gave it to them in their enclosures, they actually kind of picked them up, looked at them. They were these kind of weird things. But very quickly, the monkeys realized that they could actually hand these tokens over to different humans in the lab for some food. And so you see one of our monkeys, Mayday, up here doing this. This is A and B are kind of the points where she's sort of a little bit curious about these things -- doesn't know. There's this waiting hand from a human experimenter, and Mayday quickly figures out, apparently the human wants this. Hands it over, and then gets some food. It turns out not just Mayday, all of our monkeys get good at trading tokens with human salesman. So here's just a quick video of what this looks like. Here's Mayday. She's going to be trading a token for some food and waiting happily and getting her food. Here's Felix, I think. He's our alpha male; he's a kind of big guy. But he too waits patiently, gets his food and goes on. So the monkeys get really good at this. They're surprisingly good at this with very little training. We just allowed them to pick this up on their own. The question is: is this anything like human money? Is this a market at all, or did we just do a weird psychologist's trick by getting monkeys to do something, looking smart, but not really being smart. And so we said, well, what would the monkeys spontaneously do if this was really their currency, if they were really using it like money? Well, you might actually imagine them to do all the kinds of smart things that humans do when they start exchanging money with each other. You might have them start paying attention to price, paying attention to how much they buy -- sort of keeping track of their monkey token, as it were. Do the monkeys do anything like this? And so our monkey marketplace was born. The way this works is that our monkeys normally live in a kind of big zoo social enclosure. When they get a hankering for some treats, we actually allowed them a way out into a little smaller enclosure where they could enter the market. Upon entering the market -- it was actually a much more fun market for the monkeys than most human markets because, as the monkeys entered the door of the market, a human would give them a big wallet full of tokens so they could actually trade the tokens with one of these two guys here -- two different possible human salesmen that they could actually buy stuff from. The salesmen were students from my lab. They dressed differently; they were different people. And over time, they did basically the same thing so the monkeys could learn, you know, who sold what at what price -- you know, who was reliable, who wasn't, and so on. And you can see that each of the experimenters is actually holding up a little, yellow food dish. and that's what the monkey can for a single token. So everything costs one token, but as you can see, sometimes tokens buy more than others, sometimes more grapes than others. So I'll show you a quick video of what this marketplace actually looks like. Here's a monkey-eye-view. Monkeys are shorter, so it's a little short. But here's Honey. She's waiting for the market to open a little impatiently. All of a sudden the market opens. Here's her choice: one grapes or two grapes. You can see Honey, very good market economist, goes with the guy who gives more. She could teach our financial advisers a few things or two. So not just Honey, most of the monkeys went with guys who had more. Most of the monkeys went with guys who had better food. When we introduced sales, we saw the monkeys paid attention to that. They really cared about their monkey token dollar. The more surprising thing was that when we collaborated with economists to actually look at the monkeys' data using economic tools, they basically matched, not just qualitatively, but quantitatively with what we saw humans doing in a real market. So much so that, if you saw the monkeys' numbers, you couldn't tell whether they came from a monkey or a human in the same market. And what we'd really thought we'd done is like we'd actually introduced something that, at least for the monkeys and us, works like a real financial currency. Question is: do the monkeys start messing up in the same ways we do? Well, we already saw anecdotally a couple of signs that they might. One thing we never saw in the monkey marketplace was any evidence of saving -- you know, just like our own species. The monkeys entered the market, spent their entire budget and then went back to everyone else. The other thing we also spontaneously saw, embarrassingly enough, is spontaneous evidence of larceny. The monkeys would rip-off the tokens at every available opportunity -- from each other, often from us -- you know, things we didn't necessarily think we were introducing, but things we spontaneously saw. So we said, this looks bad. Can we actually see if the monkeys are doing exactly the same dumb things as humans do? One possibility is just kind of let the monkey financial system play out, you know, see if they start calling us for bailouts in a few years. We were a little impatient so we wanted to sort of speed things up a bit. So we said, let's actually give the monkeys the same kinds of problems that humans tend to get wrong in certain kinds of economic challenges, or certain kinds of economic experiments. And so, since the best way to see how people go wrong is to actually do it yourself, I'm going to give you guys a quick experiment to sort of watch your own financial intuitions in action. So imagine that right now I handed each and every one of you a thousand U.S. dollars -- so 10 crisp hundred dollar bills. Take these, put it in your wallet and spend a second thinking about what you're going to do with it. Because it's yours now; you can buy whatever you want. Donate it, take it, and so on. Sounds great, but you get one more choice to earn a little bit more money. And here's your choice: you can either be risky, in which case I'm going to flip one of these monkey tokens. If it comes up heads, you're going to get a thousand dollars more. If it comes up tails, you get nothing. So it's a chance to get more, but it's pretty risky. Your other option is a bit safe. Your just going to get some money for sure. I'm just going to give you 500 bucks. You can stick it in your wallet and use it immediately. So see what your intuition is here. Most people actually go with the play-it-safe option. Most people say, why should I be risky when I can get 1,500 dollars for sure? This seems like a good bet. I'm going to go with that. You might say, eh, that's not really irrational. People are a little risk-averse. So what? Well, the "so what?" comes when start thinking about the same problem set up just a little bit differently. So now imagine that I give each and every one of you 2,000 dollars -- 20 crisp hundred dollar bills. Now you can buy double to stuff you were going to get before. Think about how you'd feel sticking it in your wallet. And now imagine that I have you make another choice But this time, it's a little bit worse. Now, you're going to be deciding how you're going to lose money, but you're going to get the same choice. You can either take a risky loss -- so I'll flip a coin. If it comes up heads, you're going to actually lose a lot. If it comes up tails, you lose nothing, you're fine, get to keep the whole thing -- or you could play it safe, which means you have to reach back into your wallet and give me five of those $100 bills, for certain. And I'm seeing a lot of furrowed brows out there. So maybe you're having the same intuitions as the subjects that were actually tested in this, which is when presented with these options, people don't choose to play it safe. They actually tend to go a little risky. The reason this is irrational is that we've given people in both situations the same choice. It's a 50/50 shot of a thousand or 2,000, or just 1,500 dollars with certainty. But people's intuitions about how much risk to take varies depending on where they started with. So what's going on? Well, it turns out that this seems to be the result of at least two biases that we have at the psychological level. One is that we have a really hard time thinking in absolute terms. You really have to do work to figure out, well, one option's a thousand, 2,000; one is 1,500. Instead, we find it very easy to think in very relative terms as options change from one time to another. So we think of things as, "Oh, I'm going to get more," or "Oh, I'm going to get less." This is all well and good, except that changes in different directions actually effect whether or not we think options are good or not. And this leads to the second bias, which economists have called loss aversion. The idea is that we really hate it when things go into the red. We really hate it when we have to lose out on some money. And this means that sometimes we'll actually switch our preferences to avoid this. What you saw in that last scenario is that subjects get risky because they want the small shot that there won't be any loss. That means when we're in a risk mindset -- excuse me, when we're in a loss mindset, we actually become more risky, which can actually be really worrying. These kinds of things play out in lots of bad ways in humans. They're why stock investors hold onto losing stocks longer -- because they're evaluating them in relative terms. They're why people in the housing market refused to sell their house -- because they don't want to sell at a loss. The question we were interested in is whether the monkeys show the same biases. If we set up those same scenarios in our little monkey market, would they do the same thing as people? And so this is what we did, we gave the monkeys choices between guys who were safe -- they did the same thing every time -- or guys who were risky -- they did things differently half the time. And then we gave them options that were bonuses -- like you guys did in the first scenario -- so they actually have a chance more, or pieces where they were experiencing losses -- they actually thought they were going to get more than they really got. And so this is what this looks like. We introduced the monkeys to two new monkey salesmen. The guy on the left and right both start with one piece of grape, so it looks pretty good. But they're going to give the monkeys bonuses. The guy on the left is a safe bonus. All the time, he adds one, to give the monkeys two. The guy on the right is actually a risky bonus. Sometimes the monkeys get no bonus -- so this is a bonus of zero. Sometimes the monkeys get two extra. For a big bonus, now they get three. But this is the same choice you guys just faced. Do the monkeys actually want to play it safe and then go with the guy who's going to do the same thing on every trial, or do they want to be risky and try to get a risky, but big, bonus, but risk the possibility of getting no bonus. People here played it safe. Turns out, the monkeys play it safe too. Qualitatively and quantitatively, they choose exactly the same way as people, when tested in the same thing. You might say, well, maybe the monkeys just don't like risk. Maybe we should see how they do with losses. And so we ran a second version of this. Now, the monkeys meet two guys who aren't giving them bonuses; they're actually giving them less than they expect. So they look like they're starting out with a big amount. These are three grapes; the monkey's really psyched for this. But now they learn these guys are going to give them less than they expect. They guy on the left is a safe loss. Every single time, he's going to take one of these away and give the monkeys just two. the guy on the right is the risky loss. Sometimes he gives no loss, so the monkeys are really psyched, but sometimes he actually gives a big loss, taking away two to give the monkeys only one. And so what do the monkeys do? Again, same choice; they can play it safe for always getting two grapes every single time, or they can take a risky bet and choose between one and three. The remarkable thing to us is that, when you give monkeys this choice, they do the same irrational thing that people do. They actually become more risky depending on how the experimenters started. This is crazy because it suggests that the monkeys too are evaluating things in relative terms and actually treating losses differently than they treat gains. So what does all of this mean? Well, what we've shown is that, first of all, we can actually give the monkeys a financial currency, and they do very similar things with it. They do some of the smart things we do, some of the kind of not so nice things we do, like steal it and so on. But they also do some of the irrational things we do. They systematically get things wrong and in the same ways that we do. This is the first take-home message of the Talk, which is that if you saw the beginning of this and you thought, oh, I'm totally going to go home and hire a capuchin monkey financial adviser. They're way cuter than the one at ... you know -- Don't do that; they're probably going to be just as dumb as the human one you already have. So, you know, a little bad -- Sorry, sorry, sorry. A little bad for monkey investors. But of course, you know, the reason you're laughing is bad for humans too. Because we've answered the question we started out with. We wanted to know where these kinds of errors came from. And we started with the hope that maybe we can sort of tweak our financial institutions, tweak our technologies to make ourselves better. But what we've learn is that these biases might be a deeper part of us than that. In fact, they might be due to the very nature of our evolutionary history. You know, maybe it's not just humans at the right side of this chain that's duncey. Maybe it's sort of duncey all the way back. And this, if we believe the capuchin monkey results, means that these duncey strategies might be 35 million years old. That's a long time for a strategy to potentially get changed around -- really, really old. What do we know about other old strategies like this? Well, one thing we know is that they tend to be really hard to overcome. You know, think of our evolutionary predilection for eating sweet things, fatty things like cheesecake. You can't just shut that off. You can't just look at the dessert cart as say, "No, no, no. That looks disgusting to me." We're just built differently. We're going to perceive it as a good thing to go after. My guess is that the same thing is going to be true when humans are perceiving different financial decisions. When you're watching your stocks plummet into the red, when you're watching your house price go down, you're not going to be able to see that in anything but old evolutionary terms. This means that the biases that lead investors to do badly, that lead to the foreclosure crisis are going to be really hard to overcome. So that's the bad news. The question is: is there any good news? I'm supposed to be up here telling you the good news. Well, the good news, I think, is what I started with at the beginning of the Talk, which is that humans are not only smart; we're really inspirationally smart to the rest of the animals in the biological kingdom. We're so good at overcoming our biological limitations -- you know, I flew over here in an airplane. I didn't have to try to flap my wings. I'm wearing contact lenses now so that I can see all of you. I don't have to rely on my own near-sightedness. We actually have all of these cases where we overcome our biological limitations through technology and other means, seemingly pretty easily. But we have to recognize that we have those limitations. And here's the rub. It was Camus who once said that, "Man is the only species who refuses to be what he really is." But the irony is that it might only be in recognizing our limitations that we can really actually overcome them. The hope is that you all will think about your limitations, not necessarily as unovercomable, but to recognize them, accept them and then use the world of design to actually figure them out. That might be the only way that we will really be able to achieve our own human potential and really be the noble species we hope to all be. Thank you. (Applause)
Right when I was 15 was when I first got interested in solar energy. My family had moved from Fort Lee, New Jersey to California, and we moved from the snow to lots of heat, and gas lines. There was gas rationing in 1973. The energy crisis was in full bore. I started reading Popular Science magazine, and I got really excited about the potential of solar energy to try and solve that crisis. I had just taken trigonometry in high school, I learned about the parabola and how it could concentrate rays of light to a single focus. That got me very excited. And I really felt that there would be potential to build some kind of thing that could concentrate light. So, I started this company called Solar Devices. And this was a company where I built parabolas, I took metal shop, and I remember walking into metal shop building parabolas and Stirling engines. And I was building this Stirling engine over on the lathe, and all the biker guys -- motorcycle guys -- came over and said, "You're building a bong, aren't you?" And I said, "No, it's a Stirling engine. It really is." But they didn't believe me. I sold the plans for this engine and for this dish in the back of Popular Science magazine, for four dollars each. And I earned enough money to pay for my first year of Caltech. It was a really big excitement for me to get into Caltech. And my first year at Caltech, I continued the business. But then, in the second year of Caltech, they started grading. The whole first year was pass/fail, but the second year was graded. I wasn't able to keep up with the business, and I ended up with a 25-year detour. My dream had been to convert solar energy at a very practical cost, but then I had this big detour. First, the coursework at Caltech. Then, when I graduated from Caltech, the IBM P.C. came out, and I got addicted to the IBM P.C. in 1981. And then in 1983, Lotus 1-2-3 came out, and I was completely blown away by Lotus 1-2-3. I began operating my business with 1-2-3, began writing add-ins for 1-2-3, wrote a natural language interface to 1-2-3. I started an educational software company after I joined Lotus, and then I started Idealab so I could have a roof under which I could build multiple companies in succession Then, much much later -- in 2000, very recently -- the new California energy crisis -- or what was purported to be a big energy crisis -- was coming. And I was trying to figure if there was some way we could build something that would capitalize on that and try and get people back-up energy, in case the crisis really came. And I started looking at how we could build battery back-up systems that could give people five hours, 10 hours, maybe even a full day, or three days' worth of back-up power. I'm glad you heard earlier today, batteries are unbelievably energy -- lack of density compared to fuel. So much more energy can be stored with fuel than with batteries. You'd have to fill your entire parking space of one garage space just to give yourself four hours of battery back-up. And I concluded, after researching every other technology that we could deploy for storing energy -- flywheels, different formulations of batteries -- it just wasn't practical to store energy. So what about making energy? Maybe we could make energy. I tried to figure out -- maybe solar's become attractive. It's been 25 years since I was doing this, let me go back and look at what's been happening with solar cells. And the price had gone down from 10 dollars a watt to about four or five dollars a watt, but it stabilized. And it really needed to get much lower than that to be cost effective. I studied all the new things that had happened in solar cells, and was trying to look for ways we could innovate and make solar cells more inexpensively. There are a lot of new things that are happening to do that, but fundamentally the process requires a tremendous amount of energy. Some people even say it takes more energy to make a solar cell than it will give out in its entire life. Hopefully, if we can reduce the amount of energy it takes to make the cells, that will become more practical. But right now, you pretty much have to take silicon, put it in an oven at 1600 degrees Fahrenheit for 17 hours, to make the cells. A lot of people are working on things to try and reduce that, but I didn't have anything to contribute in that area. So I tried to figure out what other way could we try and make cost-effective solar electricity. So I thought of an idea -- what if we collect the sun with a large reflector -- like I had been thinking about way back when, when I was in high school -- but maybe with modern technology we could make a cheaper, large collector, concentrate it to a small converter, and then the conversion device wouldn't have to be as expensive, because it's much smaller, rather than solar cells, which have to be covering the entire surface area that you want to gather sun from. This seemed practical now, because a lot of new technologies had come in the 25 years since I had last looked at it. First of all, there was a lot of new manufacturing techniques, not to mention really cheap miniature motors -- brushless motors, servo motors, stepper motors, that are used in printers and scanners and things like that. So, that's a breakthrough. Of course, inexpensive microprocessors and then a very important breakthrough -- genetic algorithms. I'll be very short on genetic algorithms. It's a powerful way of solving intractable problems using natural selection. You take a problem that you can't solve with a pure mathematical answer, you build an evolutionary system to try multiple tries at guessing, you add sex -- where you take half of one solution and half of another and then make new mutations -- and you use natural selection to kill off not as good solutions. Usually, with a genetic algorithm on a computer today, with a three gigahertz processor you can solve many, many formerly intractable problems in just a matter of minutes. We tried to come up with a way to use genetic algorithms to create a new type of concentrator. And I'll show you what we came up with. Traditionally, concentrators look like this. Those shapes are parabolas. They take all the parallel incoming rays and focus it to a single spot. They have to track the sun, because they have to be pointing directly at the sun. They usually have about a one degree acceptance angle, meaning once they're more than about a degree off, none of the sunlight rays will hit the focus. So we tried to come up with a way of making a non-tracking collector, a collector that would gather much more than one degree of light, with no moving parts. So we created this genetic algorithm to try this out, we made a model in XL of a multi-surface reflector, and an amazing thing evolved, literally evolved, from trying a billion cycles, a billion different attempts, with a fitness function that defined how can you collect the most light, from the most angles, over a day, from the sun. And this is the shape that evolved. It's this non-tracking collector with these six tuba-like horns, and each of them collect light in the following way -- if the sunlight strikes right here, it might bounce right to the center, the hot spot, directly, but if the sun is off-axis and comes from the side, it might hit two places and take two bounces. So for direct light, it takes only one bounce, for off-axis light it might take two, and for extreme off-axis, it might take three. Your efficiency goes down with more bounces, because you lose about 10 percent with each bounce, but this allowed us to collect light from a plus or minus 25 degree angle. So, about two and a half hours of the day we could collect with a stationary component. Solar cells collect light for four and a half hours though. On an average adjusted day, a solar cell -- because the sun's moving across the sky, the solar cell is going down with a sine wave function of performance at the off-axis angles. It collects about four and a half average hours of sunlight a day. So, even this, although it was great with no moving parts -- we could achieve high temperatures -- wasn't enough. We needed to beat solar cells. So we took a look at another idea. We looked at a way to break up a parabola into individual petals that would track. So what you see here is 12 separate petals, that each could be controlled with individual microprocessors that would only cost a dollar. You can buy a two megahertz microprocessor for a dollar now. And you can buy stepper motors that pretty much never wear out because they have no brushes, for a dollar. We can control all 12 of these petals for under 50 dollars and what this would allow us to do is not have to move the focus any more, but only move the petals. The whole system would have a much lower profile, but also we could gather sunlight for six and a half to seven hours a day. Now that we have concentrated sunlight, what are we going to put at the center to convert sunlight to electricity? So we tried to look at all the different heat engines that have been used in history to try and convert sunlight to electricity, or heat to electricity. And one of the great ones of all time, James Watt's steam engine of 1788 was a major, major breakthrough. James Watt didn't actually invent the steam engine, he just refined it. But, his refinements were incredible. He added new linear motion guides to the pistons, he added a condenser to cool the steam outside the cylinder, he made the engine double-acting so it had double the power. Those were major breakthroughs. I mean, all of the improvements he made -- and it's justifiable that our measure of energy, the watt, today is named after him. So we looked at this engine, and this had some potential. Steam engines are dangerous, and they had tremendous impact on the world, as you know -- industrial revolution and ships and locomotives. But they're usually good to be large, so they're not good for distributed power generation. But they're also very high pressure, so they're dangerous. Another type of engine is the hot air engine. And the hot air engine also was not invented by Robert Stirling, but Robert Stirling came along in 1816 and radically improved it. This engine, because it was so interesting -- it only worked on air, no steam -- has led to hundreds of creative designs over the years that use the Stirling engine principle. But after the Stirling engine, Otto came along, and also, he didn't invent the internal combustion engine, he just refined it. He showed it in Paris in 1867, and it was a major achievement because it brought the power density of the engine way up. You could now get a lot more power in a lot smaller space, and that allowed the engine to be used for mobile applications. So, once you have mobility, now you're making a lot of engines because you've got lots of units, as opposed to steam ships or big factories where you're not making as many units, so this was the engine that ended up benefiting from mass production where all the other engines didn't benefit. So, because it went into mass production, costs were reduced, 100 years of refinement, emissions were reduced, tremendous production value. There have been hundreds of millions of internal combustion engines built, compared to thousands of Stirling engines built. And not nearly as many small steam engines being built anymore, only large ones for big operations. So after looking at these three, and 47 others, we concluded that the Stirling engine would be the best one to use. I want to give you a brief explanation of how we looked at it and how it works. So we tried to look at the Stirling engine in a new way, because it was practical -- weight no longer mattered for our application The internal combustion engine took off because weight mattered because you were moving around. But if you're trying to generate solar energy in a static place the weight doesn't matter so much. The other thing we discovered is that efficiency doesn't matter so much if your energy source is free. Normally, efficiency is crucial because the fuel cost of your engine over its life dwarfs the cost of the engine. But if your fuel source is free, then the only thing that matters is the up-front capital cost of the engine. So you don't want to optimize for efficiency, you want to optimize for power per dollar. So using that new twist, with the new criteria, we thought we could re-look at the Stirling engine, and also bring genetic algorithms in. Basically, Robert Stirling didn't have Gordon Moore before him to get us three gigahertz of processor power. So we took the same genetic algorithm that we used earlier to make that concentrator, which didn't work out for us, to optimize the Stirling engine, and make its design sizes and all of its dimensions the exact optimum to get the most power per dollar, irrespective of weight, irrespective of size, to get the most conversion of solar energy, because the sun is free. And that's the process we took -- let me show you how the engine works. The simplest heat engine, or hot air engine, of all time would be this -- take a box, a steel canister, with a piston. Put a flame under it, the piston moves up. Take it off the flame and pour water on it, or let it cool down, the piston moves down. That's a heat engine. That's basically the most fundamental heat engine you could possibly have. The problem is the efficiency is one hundredth of one percent, because you're heating all the metal of the chamber and then cooling all the metal of the chamber each time. And you're only getting power from the air that's heating at the same time, but you're wasting all the energy heating the metal and cooling the metal. So someone came up with a very clever idea, to -- instead of heating the whole cylinder and cooling the whole cylinder, what about if you put a displacer inside -- a little thing that shuttles the air back and forth. You move that up and down with a little bit of energy but now you're only shifting the air down to the hot end and up to the cold end, down to the hot end and up to the cold end. So, now you're not alternately heating and cooling the metal, you're just alternately heating and cooling the air. That allows you to get the efficiency up from a hundredth of a percent to about two percent. And then Robert Stirling came along with this genius idea, which was, well I'm still not heating the metal now, with this kind of engine, but I'm still reheating all the air. I'm still heating the air every time and cooling the air every time. What about if I put a thermal sponge in the middle, in the passageway between where the air has to move between hot and cold? So he made fine wires, and cracked glass, and all different kinds of materials to be a heat sponge. So when the air pushes up to go from the hot end to the cold end, it puts some heat into the sponge. And then when the air comes back after it's been cooled it picks up that heat again. So you're reusing your energy five or six times, and that brings the efficiency up between 30 and 40 percent It's a little known, but brilliant, genius invention of Robert Stirling that takes the hot air engine from being somewhat impractical -- like I found out when I made the real simple version in high school -- to very potentially possible, once you get the efficiency up, if you can design this to be low enough cost. So we really set out on a path to try and make the lowest cost possible. We built a huge mathematical model of how a Stirling engine works. We applied the genetic algorithm. We got the results from that for the optimal engine. We built engines -- so we built 100 different engines over the last two years. We measured each one, we readjusted the model to what we measured, and then we led that to the current prototype. It led to a very compact, inexpensive engine, and this is what the engine looks like. Let me show you what it looks like in real life. So this is the engine. It's just a small cylinder down here which holds the generator inside and all the linkage and it's the hot cap -- the hot cylinder on the top -- this part gets hot, this part is cool, and electricity comes out. The exact converse is also true. If you put electricity in, this will get hot and this will get cold, you get refrigeration. So it's a complete reversible cycle, a very efficient cycle, and quite a simple thing to make. So now you put the two things together. So you have the engine, now what if you combine the petals and the engine in the center? The petals track and the engine gets the concentrated sunlight, take that heat and turn it into electricity. This is what the first prototype of our system looked like together with the petals and the engine in the center. This is being run out in the sun, and now I want to show you what the actual thing looks like. (Applause) Thank you. So this is a unit with the 12 petals These petals cost about a dollar each -- they're lightweight, injection molded plastic, aluminized. The mechanism to control each petal is below there with a microprocessor on each one. There are thermocouples on the engine -- little sensors that detect the heat when the sunlight strikes them. Each petal adjusts itself separately to keep the highest temperature on it. When the sun comes out in the morning, the petals will seek the sun, find it by searching for the highest temperature About a minute and a half or two minutes after the rays are striking the hot cap the engine will be warm enough to start and then the engine will generate electricity for about six and a half hours a day -- six and a half to seven hours as the sun moves across the sky A critical part that we can take advantage of is that we have these inexpensive microprocessors and each one of these petals are autonomous, and each one of these petals figures out where the sun is with no user set-up. So you don't have to tell what latitude, longitude you're at, you don't have to tell what your roof slope angle is, you don't have to tell what orientation. It doesn't really care. What it does is it searches to find the hottest spot, it searches again a half an hour later, it searches again a day later, it searches again a month later. It basically figures out where on Earth you are by watching the direction the sun moves, so you don't have to actually enter anything about that. The way the unit works is, when the sun comes out the engine will start and you get power out here. We have A.C. and D.C., get 12 volts D.C., so that could be used for certain applications. We have an inverter in there, so you get 117 volts A.C. and you also get hot water. The hot water's optional. You don't have to use the hot water, it will cool itself. But you can use it to optionally heat hot water and that brings the efficiency up even higher because some of the heat that you would normally be rejecting, you can now use as useful energy, whether it's for a pool or hot water. Let me show you a quick movie of what this looks like running. So this is the first test where we took it outside and each of the petals were individually seeking. And what they do is step, very coarsely at first, and then very finely afterward. Once they get a temperature reading on the thermocouple indicating they found the sun, then they slow down and do a fine search, then all the petals will move into position, and then the engine will start. So, we've been working on this for the last two years. We're very excited about the progress, we do have a very long way to go though still, and let me tell you a little bit more about that. This is how we envision it would be in a residential installation: you'd probably have more than one unit on your roof. It could be on your roof, or in your backyard, or somewhere else. You don't have to have enough units to power your entire house, you just save money with each incremental one you add. So you're still using the grid potentially, in this type of application, to be your back-up supply -- of course, you can't use these at night, and you can't use these on cloudy days. But by reducing your energy use, pretty much at the peak times -- usually when you have you air conditioning on, or other times like that -- this generates the peak power at the peak usage time, so it's very complementary in that sense. This is how we would envision a residential application. We also think there's very big potential for energy farms, especially in remote land where there happens to be a lot of sun. It's a really good combination of those two factors. It turns out there's a lot of powerful sun all around the world, obviously, but in special places where it happens to be relatively inexpensive to place these and also in many more places where there is high wind power. So an example of that is, here's the map of the United States. Pretty much everywhere that's not green or blue is a really ideal place, but even the green or blue areas are good, just not as good as the places that are red, orange and yellow. But the hot sport right around Las Vegas and Death Valley and that area is very, very good. And all this does is affect the payback period, it doesn't mean that you couldn't use solar energy; you could use solar energy anywhere on Earth. It just affects the payback period if you're comparing to grid-supplied electricity. But if you don't have grid-supplied electricity, then the whole question of payback is a different one entirely. It's just how many watts do you get per dollar, and how could you benefit from that using that power to change your life in some way. This is the map of the United States. This is the map of the whole Earth and again, you can see a huge swathe in the middle of pretty much where a large part of the population is, there's tremendous chances for solar energy. And of course, look at Africa. It's just unbelievable what the potential is to take advantage of solar energy there, and I'm really excited to talk more about finding ways we can help with that. So, in conclusion, I would say my journey has shown me that you can revisit old ideas in a new light, and sometimes ideas that have been discarded in the past can be practical now if you apply some new technology or new twists. We believe we're getting very close to something practical and affordable. Our short-term goal for this is to be half the price of solar cells and our longer-term goal is to be less than a five-year payback. And at less than a five-year payback, all of a sudden this becomes very economic So you don't have to just want to have a feel-good attitude about energy to want to have one of these. It just makes economic sense. Right now, solar paybacks are between 30 and 50 years. If you get it down below five years then it becomes almost a no-brainer because the interest to own it -- someone else will finance it for you and you can just make money, basically from day one. So that's our real powerful goal that we're really shooting for in the company. Two other things that I learned that were very surprising to me -- one was how casual we are about energy. I was walking from the elevator over here, and even just looking at the stage right now -- so there's probably 20 500 watt lights right now. There's 10,000 watts of light pouring on the stage, one horsepower is 756 watts, at full power. So there's basically 15 horses running at full speed just to keep the stage lit. Not to mention the 200 horses that are probably running right now to keep the airconditioning going. And it's just amazing, walk in the elevator and there's lights on in the elevator. Of course, now I'm very sensitive at home when we leave the lights on by mistake. But, everywhere around us we have insatiable use for energy because it's so cheap. And it's cheap because we've been subsidized by energy that's been concentrated by the sun. Basically, oil is solar energy concentrate. It's been pounded for a billion years with a lot of energy to make it have all that energy contained in it. And we don't have a birthright to just use that up as fast as we are, I think. And it would be great if we could find a way to make our energy usage renewable, where as we're using the energy we're creating it at the same pace, and I really hope we can get there. Thank you very much, you've been a great audience. (Applause)
I'm the weekly tech critic for the New York Times. I review gadgets and stuff. And mostly what good dads should be doing this time of year is nestling with their kids and decorating the Christmas tree. What I'm mostly doing this year is going on cable TV and answering the same question: "What are the tech trends for next year?" And I'm like, "Didn't we just go through this last year?" But I'm going to pick the one that interests me most, and that is the completed marriage of the cell phone and the Internet. You know, I found that volcano on Google Images, not realizing how much it makes me look like the cover of Dianetics. (Laughter) Anyway, this all started a few years ago, when they started carrying your voice over the Internet rather than over a phone line, and we've come a long way since that. But that was interesting in itself. This is companies like Vonage. Basically you take an ordinary telephone, you plug it into this little box that they give you and the box plugs into your cable modem. Now, it works just like a regular phone. So you can pick up the phone, you hear a dial tone, but its just a fake-out. It's a WAV file of a dial tone, just to reassure you that the world hasn't ended. It could be anything. It could be salsa music or a comedy routine -- it doesn't matter. The little box has your phone number. So that's really cool -- you can take it to London or Siberia, and your next door neighbor can dial your home number and your phone will ring, because it's got everything in the box. They've got every feature known to man in there, because adding a new feature is just software. And as a result of Voice Over IP -- I hate that term -- Voice Over Internet -- land-line home-phone service has gone down 30 percent in the last three years. I mean, no self-respecting college kid has home phone service anymore. This is what college kids are more likely to have. It's the most popular VOIP service in the world: It's Skype. It's a free program you download for your Mac or PC, and you make free phone calls anywhere in the world The downside is that you have to wear a headset like a nerd. It's not your phone -- it's your computer. But nonetheless, if you're a college kid and you have no money, believe me, this is better than trying to use your cell phone. It's really cute seeing middle-aged people like me, try out Skype for the first time, which is usually when their kid goes away for a semester abroad. They don't want to pay the international fees, so they're like, "Timmy! Is that you?" (Laughter) It's really cute. But I -- at least it was when I did it -- (Laughter) I think where VOIP is really going to get interesting is when they start putting it on cell phones. Imagine if you had an ordinary cell phone, and any time you were in a wireless hotspot -- free calls anywhere in the world, never pay the cellular company a nickel. It'd be really, really cool -- and yet, even though the technology for this has been available for five years, incredibly, the number of standard cell phones offered by US carriers with free VOIP is zero! I can't figure out why! (Laughter) Actually, I need to update that. There's one now. And it's so interesting that I thought I would tell you about it. It comes from T-Mobile. And I am not paid by T-Mobile. I'm not plugging T-Mobile. The New York Times has very rigid policies about that. Ever since that Jayson Blair jerk ruined it for all of us. (Laughter) Basically, the reason you haven't heard about this program is because it was introduced last year on June 29. Does anyone remember what else happened on June 29 last year? It was the iPhone. The iPhone came out that day. I'm like, can you imagine being the T-Mobile PR lady? You know? "Hi, we have an announcement to -- WAH!!!" (Laughter) But it's actually really, really cool. You have a choice of phones, and we're not talking smartphones -- ordinary phones, including a Blackberry, that have Wi-Fi. The deal is, any time you're in a Wi-Fi hotspot, all your calls are free. And when you're out of the hotspot, you're on the regular cellular network. You're thinking, "Well, how often am I in a hotspot?" The answer is, "All the time!" Because they give you a regular wireless router that works with the phone, for your house. Which is really ingenious, because we all know that T-Mobile is the most pathetic carrier. They have coverage like the size of my thumbnail. (Laughter) But it's a hundred million dollars to put up one of those towers. Right? They don't have that kind of money. Instead they give each of us a seven-dollar-and-95-cent box. They're like a stealth tower installation program. We're putting it in our homes for them! Anyway, they have Wi-Fi phones in Europe. But the thing that T-Mobile did that nobody's done before is, when you're on a call an you move from Wi-Fi into cellular range, the call is handed off in mid-syllable, seamlessly. I'll show you the advanced technologies we use at the New York Times to test this gear. This is me with a camcorder on a phone going like this. (Laughter) As I walk out of the house from my Wi-Fi hotspot into the cellular network on a call with my wife -- look at the upper left. That's the Wi-Fi signal. (Video): Jennifer Pogue: Hello? David Pogue: Hi babes, it's me. JP: Oh, hi darling, how are you? DP: You're on Wi-Fi. How does it sound? JP: Oh, it sounds pretty good. Now, I'm leaving the house. DP: I'm going for a walk -- do you mind? JP: No not at all. I'm having a great day with the kids. DP: What are you guys doing? Right there! It just changed to the cellular tower in mid-call. I don't know why my wife says I never listen to her. I don't get that. (Laughter) The bottom line is that the boundaries, because of the Internet plus cell phone, are melting. The cool thing about the T-Mobile phones is that although switching technologies is very advanced, the billing technology has not caught up. So what I mean is that you can start a call in your house in the Wi-Fi hotspot, you can get in your car and talk until the battery's dead -- which would be like 10 minutes -- (Laughter) And the call will continue to be free. Because they don't, they haven't -- well, no, wait! Not so fast. It also works the other way. So if you start a call on your cellular network and you come home, you keep being billed. Which is why most people with this service get into the habit of saying, "Hey, I just got home. Can I call you right back?" Now you get it. It's also true that if you use one of these phones overseas, it doesn't know what Internet hotspot you're in. On the Internet nobody knows you're a dog, right? Nobody knows you're in Pakistan. You can make free unlimited calls home to the US with these phones. So, very, very interesting. This is another favorite of mine. Does anyone here have a working cell phone that's on, with coverage, who can make a call right now without a lot of fussing? OK. Would you call me please right now? [Phone number given.] And don't you all call me at three a.m. asking me to fix your printer. (Laughter) I have two cell phones, so this going to be very odd, if it works. I should know not to do technology demos in front of an audience. It's just, like, absurd. This one is going off. And -- oh, I have the ringer off. Tsh! Great. Anyway, this one is also going off. So they're both ringing at the same time. Excuse me one second. Hello? Oh. Where are you calling from? No, no just kidding. There he is. Thank you very much for doing that. I didn't even know it was you -- I was looking at this guy. Oh great! Yeah. Yeah you can all stop calling now! (Laughter) All right! We've made the point. All right. Ringer off. Everyone wants in on the action. (Laughter) So this is Grand Central at work -- it's a -- oh, for gods sake! (Laughter) I have your numbers now! (Laughter) You will pay. Grand Central is this really brilliant idea where they give you a new phone number, and then at that point one phone number rings all your phones at once. Your home phone, your work phone, your cell phone, your yacht phone (this is the EG crowd). (Laughter) The beauty of that is you never miss a call. I know a lot of you are like, "Ooh, I don't want to be reached at any hour." But the beauty is it's all going through the internet, so you get all of these really cool features -- like you can say, I want these people to be able to call me only during these hours. And I want these people to hear this greeting, "Hi boss, I'm out making us both some money. Leave a message." And then your wife calls, and, "Hi honey, leave me a message." Very, very customizable. Google bought it, and they've been working on it for a year. They're supposed to come out with it very shortly in a public method. By the way, this is something that really bothers me. I don't know if you realize this. When you call 411 on your cell phone, they charge you two bucks. Did you know that? It's an outrage. I actually got a photograph of the Verizon employee right there. I'm going to tell you how to avoid that now. What you're going to use is Google Cellular. It's totally free -- there's not even ads. If you know how to send a text message, you can get the same information for free. I'm about to change your life. So here's me doing it. You send a text message to the word "Google," which turns out to be 46645. Leave off the last "e" for savings. Anyway, so lets say you need a drugstore near Chicago. You type "pharmacy Chicago," or the zip code. You hit send, and in five seconds, they will send you back the two closest drugstores, complete with name address and phone number. Here it comes. And it's already written down -- so, like, if you're driving, you don't have to do one of these things, "Uh huh, uh huh, uh huh." It works with weather, too. You can say "Weather," and the name of the city you're going to travel to. And then in five seconds, they send you back the complete weather forecast for that town. Shortly I'll tell you why I was in Milan. Here we go. And those are just the beginning. These are all the different things that you can text to Google and they will -- yeah! You're all trying to write this down. That's cute. I do have an email address. You can just ask me. It's absolutely phenomenal. The only downside is that it requires you to know how to text -- send a text message. Nobody over 40 knows how to do that. So I'm going to teach you something even better. This is called Google Info. They've just launched this voice-activated version of the same thing. It's speech recognition like you've never heard before. So lets say I'm in Monterey, and I want what? I want to find what? Bagels. OK. Google: Say the business and the city and state. DP: Bagels, Monterey, California. I got the Chinese line. (Laughter) Google: Bagels, Monterey, California. Top eight results: Number one, Bagel Bakery on El Dorado Street. To select number one, you can press one or say "number one." Number two: Bagel Bakery, commissary department. Number Two. Number Two. Two. (Laughter) Why do I listen to people in the audience? Well anyway -- oh! Here we go! Google: ... commissary department on McClellan Avenue, Monterey. I'll connect you, or say "details," or "go back." DP: He's connecting me! He doesn't even tell me the phone number. He's just connecting me directly. It's like having a personal valet. Google: Hold on. (Laughter) DP: Hi, could I have 400 with a schmear? No, no, no -- just kidding, no no. So anyway, you never even find out the number. It's just so amazing. And it has incredible, incredible accuracy. This is even more amazing. Put this in your speed dial. This you can ask by voice any question. Who won the 1958 World Series? What's the recipe for a certain cocktail? It's absolutely amazing -- and they text you back the answer. I tried this this morning just to make sure it's still alive. "Which actors have played James Bond?" They text me back this: "Sean Connery, George Lazenby, Roger Moore, Timothy Dalton, Pierce Brosnan, Daniel Craig." Right! And then I was trying to pretend I was like a Valley girl. I'm like, "What's the word that means you know, like, when the sun, the moon and the earth are, like, all in a line?" Just to see how the recognition was. They texted me back, "It's called a syzygy." Which I knew, because it's the word that won me the Ohio spelling bee in 1976. You know, there's a lot of people wondering, "How on earth are they going to make money doing this?" And the answer is: look at the last line. They put this teeny-weeny little ad, about 10 characters long. And a lot of people also want to know, "How does it work? How can it be so good? It's as though there is a human being on the other end of the line." Because there is one! They have 10,000 people who are being paid 20 cents per answer. As you can imagine, it's college kids and old people. That's who can afford to do that. But it's a human being on the line. And it's gotten me out of so many tough positions like, "When's the last flight out of Chicago?" You know. It's just absolutely amazing. Another thing that really bothers me about cell phones today -- this is probably my biggest pet peeve in all of technology. When I call to leave you a message, I get 15 seconds of instructions from a third-grade teacher on Ambien! (Laughter) "To page this person ... " Page? What is this, 1975? Nobody has pagers anymore. "You may begin speaking at the tone. When you have finished recording, you may hang up." No! (Laughter) And then it gets worse: when I call to retrieve my messages, first of all: "You have 87 messages. To listen to your messages ... " Why else am I calling? (Laughter) Of course I want to listen to the messages! (Laughter) Oh! You all have cell phones too. So last year I went to Milan, Italy, and I got to speak to an audience of cellular executives from 200 countries around the world. And I said as a joke -- as a joke, I said, "I did the math. Verizon has 70 million customers. If you check your voicemail twice a day, that's 100 million dollars a year. I bet you guys are doing this just to run up our airtime, aren't you?" No chuckle. They're like this -- (Laughter) Where is the outrage, people? Rise up! (Laughter) Sorry. I'm not bitter. (Laughter) So now I'm going to tell you how to get out of that. There are these services that transcribe your voicemail into text. And they send it either to your email or as text messages to your phone. It is a life-changer. And by the way, they don't always get the words right, because it's over the phone and all that. So they attach the audio file at the bottom of the email so you can listen to double-check. The services are called things like Spinvox, Phonetag -- this is the one I use -- Callwave. A lot of people say, "How are they doing this? I don't really want people listening in to my calls." The executives at these companies told me, "Well we use a proprietary B-to-B, best-of-breed, peer-to-peer soluti -- " you know. I think basically it's like these guys in India with headsets, you know, listening in. The reason I think that is that on the first day I tried one of these services, I got two voicemail messages. One was from a guy named Michael Stevenson, which shouldn't be that hard to transcribe, and it was misspelled. The other was from my video producer at the Times, whose name is Vijaiy Singh, with the silent 'h'. Nailed that one. (Laughter) So you be the judge. (Laughter) Anyway, this service, Callwave, promises that it's all software -- nobody is listening to your messages. And they also promise that they're going to transcribe only the gist of your messages. (Laughter) So I thought I'd see how that goes. This is me testing it out. (Video): Hello, this is Michael. Hope you're doing well. I'm fine here. Everything's good. Hey, I was walking along the street and the sky was blue. And your daughter broke her leg at soccer practice. I'm going to have a sandwich for lunch. She's in room -- emergency room 53W. OK, talk to you later -- bye. (Laughter) I love my job. (Laughter) So a couple minutes later, this I got by email. It's a very good transcription. But a couple minutes after that, I got the text message version. Now remember, a text message can only be 160 characters long. So it had better be the gist of the gist, right? I'm not kidding you. The message said, "Was walking along the street" and "sky was blue" and "emergency"! (Laughter) What the f -- ? (Laughter) Well I guess that was the gist. (Laughter) And lastly, I just have to talk about this one. This is my favorite of all time. It's called Popularitydialer.com. Basically, you're going to go on some iffy date, or a potentially bad meeting. So you go and you type in your phone number, and at the exact minute where you want to be called -- (Laughter) And at that moment your phone will ring. And you're like, "I'm sorry. I've got to take this." The really beautiful thing is, you know how when somebody's sitting next to you, sometimes they can sort of hear a little bit of the caller. So they give you a choice of what you want to hear on the other end. Here's the girlfriend. Phone: Hey you, what's going on? DP: I'm kinda, like, giving a talk right now. Phone: Well, that's good. DP: What are you doing? Phone: I was just wondering what you were up to. DP: Right, I can't really talk right now. This is the -- I love this -- the boss call. Phone: Hey, this is Mr. Johnson calling from the office. DP: Oh, hi, sir. Phone: Did you complete that thing about a month ago? That photocopier training? DP: Oh -- sorry I forgot. Phone: Yeah, well so when was the last time you used the photocopier? DP: It was like three weeks ago. Phone: Well, I don't know if you heard, you might have heard from Lenny, but -- (Laughter) I think the biggest change when Internet met phone was with the iPhone. Not my finest moment in New York Times journalism. It was when in the fall of 2006, I explained why Apple would never do a cell phone. (Laughter) I looked like a moron. However, my logic was good, because -- I don't know if you realize this, but -- until the iPhone came along, the carriers -- Verizon, AT&T, Cingular -- held veto power over every aspect of every design of every phone. I know the people who worked on the Treo. They went around to these carriers and said, "Look at these cool features." And Verizon is like, "Hmm, no. I don't think so." It was not very conducive to innovation. What I didn't anticipate was that Steve Jobs went around and said, "Tell you what -- I'll give you a five-year exclusive if you'll let me design this phone in peace -- and you won't even see it till it's done." Actually, even so, he was turned down by Verizon and others. Finally Cingular said OK. I'm going to talk about the effect of the iPhone. Please don't corner me at the party tonight and go, "What are you? An Apple fan boy?" - you know. I'm not. You can see what I said about it. It's a flawed masterpiece. It's got bad things and good things. Lets all acknowledge that right now. But it did change a few things. The first thing it changed was that all those carriers saw that they sold 10 million of these things in a year. And they said, "Oh my gosh, maybe we've been doing it wrong. Maybe we should let phone designers design the phones." (Applause) Another thing was that it let 10 million people, for the first time, experience being online all the time. Not using these 60-dollar-a-month cellular cards for their laptops. I don't understand why we're not there yet. When I'm an old man, I'm going to tell my grandchildren, "When I was your age, if I wanted to check my email, I used to drive around town looking for a coffee shop. I did!" (Laughter) "We had wireless base stations that could broadcast -- yay, about 150 feet across." (Laughter) It's absurd. We have power outlets in every room of every building. We have running water. What's the problem? Anyway -- but this teaches people what it's like. You have to go to YouTube and type in "iPhone Shuffle." This guy did a mock video of one that's one inch square, like the real iPod Shuffle. It's like, "It only has one button. Touch it and it dials a number at random." (Laughter) "Who the hell is this?" (Laughter) But the other thing it did is it opened up this idea of an app store. It downloads right to the phone. And you can use the tilt sensor to steer this car using this game. These programs can use all the components of the iPhone -- the touch screen. This is the Etch-A-Sketch program -- the theme of EG 2008. You know how you erase it? Of course. You shake it. Right, of course. We shake it to erase, like this. They have 10,000 of these programs. This is the translator program. They have every language in the world. You type in what you want, and it gives you the translation. This is amazing. This is Midomi. A song is running through your head -- you sing it into the thing: do do do do do, da da da da da da, da dum ... OK, you tap, "Done" and it will find out the song and play it for you. I know. It's insane, right? This is Pandora. Free Internet radio. Not just free Internet radio -- you type in a band or a song name. It will immediately play you that song or that band. It has a thumbs-up and a thumbs-down. You say if you like this song or not. If you like it, it tries another song on you from a different band, with the same instrumentation, vocals, theme and tempo. If you like that one, or don't like it, you do thumbs-up and thumbs-down. Over time it tailors the songs so that it completely stops playing bad songs. It eventually only plays songs you like. This is Urbanspoon. You're in a city. It knows from GPS where you're standing. You want to find a place to eat. You shake it. It proposes a restaurant. It gives you the price, and the location and ratings. Video: I'm not going all the way to Flushing. Anyway, just amazing, amazing things. Of course, its not just about the iPhone. The iPhone broke the dyke, the wall. But now it's everybody else. So Google has done their own Android operating system that will soon be on handsets -- phones from 34 companies. Touch screen -- very, very nice. Also with its own app store, where you can download programs. This is amazing. In the wake of all this, Verizon, the most calcified, corporate, conservative carrier of all, said, "You can use any phone you want on our network." I love the Wired headline: Pigs Fly, Hell Freezes Over and Verizon Opens Up Its Network -- No. Really. So everything is changing. We've entered a new world of innovation, where the cell phone becomes your laptop, customized the way you want it. Every cell phone is unique. There is software that you can add on. Can I do one more one-minute song? Thank you. (Applause) Just to round it up -- this is the new Apple Power Music Stand. It's only three pounds, or 12 if you install Microsoft Office. (Laughter) Sorry, that was mean. This is a song I did for the New York Times website as a music video. Ladies and gentlemen, for seven blissful hours it was the number one video on YouTube. (To the tune of "My Way") And now the end is near. I'm sick to death of this old cell phone. Bad sound, the signal's weak, the software stinks. A made-in-Hell phone. I've heard there's something new -- a million times more rad than my phone. I too will join the cult. I want an iPhone. Concerns -- I have a few. It's got some flaws; we may just face it. No keys, no memory card, the battery's sealed -- you can't replace it. But God, this thing is sweet. A multitouch, iPod, Wi-Fi phone. You had me from, "Hello." I want an iPhone. I want to touch its precious screen. I want to wipe the smudges clean. I want my friends to look and drool. I want to say, "Look -- now I'm cool" I stood in line and I'll get mine. I want an iPhone. For what is a man? What has he got? If not iPhone, then he's got squat. It's all the things a phone should be. Who cares if it's AT&T? I took a stand, paid half a grand! And I got an iPhone! (Applause) Thank you. Thank you very much. (Applause)
I'm going to talk today about energy and climate. And that might seem a bit surprising because my full-time work at the Foundation is mostly about vaccines and seeds, about the things that we need to invent and deliver to help the poorest two billion live better lives. But energy and climate are extremely important to these people -- in fact, more important than to anyone else on the planet. The climate getting worse means that many years, their crops won't grow: There will be too much rain, not enough rain, things will change in ways that their fragile environment simply can't support. And that leads to starvation, it leads to uncertainty, it leads to unrest. So, the climate changes will be terrible for them. Also, the price of energy is very important to them. In fact, if you could pick just one thing to lower the price of, to reduce poverty, by far you would pick energy. Now, the price of energy has come down over time. Really advanced civilization is based on advances in energy. The coal revolution fueled the Industrial Revolution, and, even in the 1900s we've seen a very rapid decline in the price of electricity, and that's why we have refrigerators, air-conditioning, we can make modern materials and do so many things. And so, we're in a wonderful situation with electricity in the rich world. But, as we make it cheaper -- and let's go for making it twice as cheap -- we need to meet a new constraint, and that constraint has to do with CO2. CO2 is warming the planet, and the equation on CO2 is actually a very straightforward one. If you sum up the CO2 that gets emitted, that leads to a temperature increase, and that temperature increase leads to some very negative effects: the effects on the weather; perhaps worse, the indirect effects, in that the natural ecosystems can't adjust to these rapid changes, and so you get ecosystem collapses. Now, the exact amount of how you map from a certain increase of CO2 to what temperature will be and where the positive feedbacks are, there's some uncertainty there, but not very much. And there's certainly uncertainty about how bad those effects will be, but they will be extremely bad. I asked the top scientists on this several times: Do we really have to get down to near zero? Can't we just cut it in half or a quarter? And the answer is that until we get near to zero, the temperature will continue to rise. And so that's a big challenge. It's very different than saying "We're a twelve-foot-high truck trying to get under a ten-foot bridge, and we can just sort of squeeze under." This is something that has to get to zero. Now, we put out a lot of carbon dioxide every year, over 26 billion tons. For each American, it's about 20 tons; for people in poor countries, it's less than one ton. It's an average of about five tons for everyone on the planet. And, somehow, we have to make changes that will bring that down to zero. It's been constantly going up. It's only various economic changes that have even flattened it at all, so we have to go from rapidly rising to falling, and falling all the way to zero. This equation has four factors, a little bit of multiplication: So, you've got a thing on the left, CO2, that you want to get to zero, and that's going to be based on the number of people, the services each person's using on average, the energy on average for each service, and the CO2 being put out per unit of energy. So, let's look at each one of these and see how we can get this down to zero. Probably, one of these numbers is going to have to get pretty near to zero. Now that's back from high school algebra, but let's take a look. First, we've got population. The world today has 6.8 billion people. That's headed up to about nine billion. Now, if we do a really great job on new vaccines, health care, reproductive health services, we could lower that by, perhaps, 10 or 15 percent, but there we see an increase of about 1.3. The second factor is the services we use. This encompasses everything: the food we eat, clothing, TV, heating. These are very good things: getting rid of poverty means providing these services to almost everyone on the planet. And it's a great thing for this number to go up. In the rich world, perhaps the top one billion, we probably could cut back and use less, but every year, this number, on average, is going to go up, and so, over all, that will more than double the services delivered per person. Here we have a very basic service: Do you have lighting in your house to be able to read your homework? And, in fact, these kids don't, so they're going out and reading their school work under the street lamps. Now, efficiency, E, the energy for each service, here finally we have some good news. We have something that's not going up. Through various inventions and new ways of doing lighting, through different types of cars, different ways of building buildings -- there are a lot of services where you can bring the energy for that service down quite substantially. Some individual services even bring it down by 90 percent. There are other services like how we make fertilizer, or how we do air transport, where the rooms for improvement are far, far less. And so, overall here, if we're optimistic, we may get a reduction of a factor of three to even, perhaps, a factor of six. But for these first three factors now, we've gone from 26 billion to, at best, maybe 13 billion tons, and that just won't cut it. So let's look at this fourth factor -- this is going to be a key one -- and this is the amount of CO2 put out per each unit of energy. And so the question is: Can you actually get that to zero? If you burn coal, no. If you burn natural gas, no. Almost every way we make electricity today, except for the emerging renewables and nuclear, puts out CO2. And so, what we're going to have to do at a global scale, is create a new system. And so, we need energy miracles. Now, when I use the term "miracle," I don't mean something that's impossible. The microprocessor is a miracle. The personal computer is a miracle. The Internet and its services are a miracle. So, the people here have participated in the creation of many miracles. Usually, we don't have a deadline, where you have to get the miracle by a certain date. Usually, you just kind of stand by, and some come along, some don't. This is a case where we actually have to drive at full speed and get a miracle in a pretty tight timeline. Now, I thought, "How could I really capture this? Is there some kind of natural illustration, some demonstration that would grab people's imagination here?" I thought back to a year ago when I brought mosquitos, and somehow people enjoyed that. (Laughter) It really got them involved in the idea of, you know, there are people who live with mosquitos. So, with energy, all I could come up with is this. I decided that releasing fireflies would be my contribution to the environment here this year. So here we have some natural fireflies. I'm told they don't bite; in fact, they might not even leave that jar. (Laughter) Now, there's all sorts of gimmicky solutions like that one, but they don't really add up to much. We need solutions -- either one or several -- that have unbelievable scale and unbelievable reliability, and, although there's many directions people are seeking, I really only see five that can achieve the big numbers. I've left out tide, geothermal, fusion, biofuels. Those may make some contribution, and if they can do better than I expect, so much the better, but my key point here is that we're going to have to work on each of these five, and we can't give up any of them because they look daunting, because they all have significant challenges. Let's look first at the burning fossil fuels, either burning coal or burning natural gas. What you need to do there, seems like it might be simple, but it's not, and that's to take all the CO2, after you've burned it, going out the flue, pressurize it, create a liquid, put it somewhere, and hope it stays there. Now we have some pilot things that do this at the 60 to 80 percent level, but getting up to that full percentage, that will be very tricky, and agreeing on where these CO2 quantities should be put will be hard, but the toughest one here is this long-term issue. Who's going to be sure? Who's going to guarantee something that is literally billions of times larger than any type of waste you think of in terms of nuclear or other things? This is a lot of volume. So that's a tough one. Next would be nuclear. It also has three big problems: Cost, particularly in highly regulated countries, is high; the issue of the safety, really feeling good about nothing could go wrong, that, even though you have these human operators, that the fuel doesn't get used for weapons. And then what do you do with the waste? And, although it's not very large, there are a lot of concerns about that. People need to feel good about it. So three very tough problems that might be solvable, and so, should be worked on. The last three of the five, I've grouped together. These are what people often refer to as the renewable sources. And they actually -- although it's great they don't require fuel -- they have some disadvantages. One is that the density of energy gathered in these technologies is dramatically less than a power plant. This is energy farming, so you're talking about many square miles, thousands of time more area than you think of as a normal energy plant. Also, these are intermittent sources. The sun doesn't shine all day, it doesn't shine every day, and, likewise, the wind doesn't blow all the time. And so, if you depend on these sources, you have to have some way of getting the energy during those time periods that it's not available. So, we've got big cost challenges here, we have transmission challenges: for example, say this energy source is outside your country; you not only need the technology, but you have to deal with the risk of the energy coming from elsewhere. And, finally, this storage problem. And, to dimensionalize this, I went through and looked at all the types of batteries that get made -- for cars, for computers, for phones, for flashlights, for everything -- and compared that to the amount of electrical energy the world uses, and what I found is that all the batteries we make now could store less than 10 minutes of all the energy. And so, in fact, we need a big breakthrough here, something that's going to be a factor of 100 better than the approaches we have now. It's not impossible, but it's not a very easy thing. Now, this shows up when you try to get the intermittent source to be above, say, 20 to 30 percent of what you're using. If you're counting on it for 100 percent, you need an incredible miracle battery. Now, how we're going to go forward on this -- what's the right approach? Is it a Manhattan Project? What's the thing that can get us there? Well, we need lots of companies working on this, hundreds. In each of these five paths, we need at least a hundred people. And a lot of them, you'll look at and say, "They're crazy." That's good. And, I think, here in the TED group, we have many people who are already pursuing this. Bill Gross has several companies, including one called eSolar that has some great solar thermal technologies. Vinod Khosla's investing in dozens of companies that are doing great things and have interesting possibilities, and I'm trying to help back that. Nathan Myhrvold and I actually are backing a company that, perhaps surprisingly, is actually taking the nuclear approach. There are some innovations in nuclear: modular, liquid. And innovation really stopped in this industry quite some ago, so the idea that there's some good ideas laying around is not all that surprising. The idea of TerraPower is that, instead of burning a part of uranium -- the one percent, which is the U235 -- we decided, "Let's burn the 99 percent, the U238." It is kind of a crazy idea. In fact, people had talked about it for a long time, but they could never simulate properly whether it would work or not, and so it's through the advent of modern supercomputers that now you can simulate and see that, yes, with the right material's approach, this looks like it would work. And, because you're burning that 99 percent, you have greatly improved cost profile. You actually burn up the waste, and you can actually use as fuel all the leftover waste from today's reactors. So, instead of worrying about them, you just take that. It's a great thing. It breathes this uranium as it goes along, so it's kind of like a candle. You can see it's a log there, often referred to as a traveling wave reactor. In terms of fuel, this really solves the problem. I've got a picture here of a place in Kentucky. This is the leftover, the 99 percent, where they've taken out the part they burn now, so it's called depleted uranium. That would power the U.S. for hundreds of years. And, simply by filtering seawater in an inexpensive process, you'd have enough fuel for the entire lifetime of the rest of the planet. So, you know, it's got lots of challenges ahead, but it is an example of the many hundreds and hundreds of ideas that we need to move forward. So let's think: How should we measure ourselves? What should our report card look like? Well, let's go out to where we really need to get, and then look at the intermediate. For 2050, you've heard many people talk about this 80 percent reduction. That really is very important, that we get there. And that 20 percent will be used up by things going on in poor countries, still some agriculture, hopefully we will have cleaned up forestry, cement. So, to get to that 80 percent, the developed countries, including countries like China, will have had to switch their electricity generation altogether. So, the other grade is: Are we deploying this zero-emission technology, have we deployed it in all the developed countries and we're in the process of getting it elsewhere? That's super important. That's a key element of making that report card. So, backing up from there, what should the 2020 report card look like? Well, again, it should have the two elements. We should go through these efficiency measures to start getting reductions: The less we emit, the less that sum will be of CO2, and, therefore, the less the temperature. But in some ways, the grade we get there, doing things that don't get us all the way to the big reductions, is only equally, or maybe even slightly less, important than the other, which is the piece of innovation on these breakthroughs. These breakthroughs, we need to move those at full speed, and we can measure that in terms of companies, pilot projects, regulatory things that have been changed. There's a lot of great books that have been written about this. The Al Gore book, "Our Choice" and the David McKay book, "Sustainable Energy Without the Hot Air." They really go through it and create a framework that this can be discussed broadly, because we need broad backing for this. There's a lot that has to come together. So this is a wish. It's a very concrete wish that we invent this technology. If you gave me only one wish for the next 50 years -- I could pick who's president, I could pick a vaccine, which is something I love, or I could pick that this thing that's half the cost with no CO2 gets invented -- this is the wish I would pick. This is the one with the greatest impact. If we don't get this wish, the division between the people who think short term and long term will be terrible, between the U.S. and China, between poor countries and rich, and most of all the lives of those two billion will be far worse. So, what do we have to do? What am I appealing to you to step forward and drive? We need to go for more research funding. When countries get together in places like Copenhagen, they shouldn't just discuss the CO2. They should discuss this innovation agenda, and you'd be stunned at the ridiculously low levels of spending on these innovative approaches. We do need the market incentives -- CO2 tax, cap and trade -- something that gets that price signal out there. We need to get the message out. We need to have this dialogue be a more rational, more understandable dialogue, including the steps that the government takes. This is an important wish, but it is one I think we can achieve. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. Chris Anderson: Thank you. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. So to understand more about TerraPower, right -- I mean, first of all, can you give a sense of what scale of investment this is? Bil Gates: To actually do the software, buy the supercomputer, hire all the great scientists, which we've done, that's only tens of millions, and even once we test our materials out in a Russian reactor to make sure that our materials work properly, then you'll only be up in the hundreds of millions. The tough thing is building the pilot reactor; finding the several billion, finding the regulator, the location that will actually build the first one of these. Once you get the first one built, if it works as advertised, then it's just clear as day, because the economics, the energy density, are so different than nuclear as we know it. CA: And so, to understand it right, this involves building deep into the ground almost like a vertical kind of column of nuclear fuel, of this sort of spent uranium, and then the process starts at the top and kind of works down? BG: That's right. Today, you're always refueling the reactor, so you have lots of people and lots of controls that can go wrong: that thing where you're opening it up and moving things in and out, that's not good. So, if you have very cheap fuel that you can put 60 years in -- just think of it as a log -- put it down and not have those same complexities. And it just sits there and burns for the 60 years, and then it's done. CA: It's a nuclear power plant that is its own waste disposal solution. BG: Yeah. Well, what happens with the waste, you can let it sit there -- there's a lot less waste under this approach -- then you can actually take that, and put it into another one and burn that. And we start off actually by taking the waste that exists today, that's sitting in these cooling pools or dry casking by reactors -- that's our fuel to begin with. So, the thing that's been a problem from those reactors is actually what gets fed into ours, and you're reducing the volume of the waste quite dramatically as you're going through this process. CA: I mean, you're talking to different people around the world about the possibilities here. Where is there most interest in actually doing something with this? BG: Well, we haven't picked a particular place, and there's all these interesting disclosure rules about anything that's called "nuclear," so we've got a lot of interest, that people from the company have been in Russia, India, China -- I've been back seeing the secretary of energy here, talking about how this fits into the energy agenda. So I'm optimistic. You know, the French and Japanese have done some work. This is a variant on something that has been done. It's an important advance, but it's like a fast reactor, and a lot of countries have built them, so anybody who's done a fast reactor is a candidate to be where the first one gets built. CA: So, in your mind, timescale and likelihood of actually taking something like this live? BG: Well, we need -- for one of these high-scale, electro-generation things that's very cheap, we have 20 years to invent and then 20 years to deploy. That's sort of the deadline that the environmental models have shown us that we have to meet. And, you know, TerraPower, if things go well -- which is wishing for a lot -- could easily meet that. And there are, fortunately now, dozens of companies -- we need it to be hundreds -- who, likewise, if their science goes well, if the funding for their pilot plants goes well, that they can compete for this. And it's best if multiple succeed, because then you could use a mix of these things. We certainly need one to succeed. CA: In terms of big-scale possible game changes, is this the biggest that you're aware of out there? BG: An energy breakthrough is the most important thing. It would have been, even without the environmental constraint, but the environmental constraint just makes it so much greater. In the nuclear space, there are other innovators. You know, we don't know their work as well as we know this one, but the modular people, that's a different approach. There's a liquid-type reactor, which seems a little hard, but maybe they say that about us. And so, there are different ones, but the beauty of this is a molecule of uranium has a million times as much energy as a molecule of, say, coal, and so -- if you can deal with the negatives, which are essentially the radiation -- the footprint and cost, the potential, in terms of effect on land and various things, is almost in a class of its own. CA: If this doesn't work, then what? Do we have to start taking emergency measures to try and keep the temperature of the earth stable? BG: If you get into that situation, it's like if you've been over-eating, and you're about to have a heart attack: Then where do you go? You may need heart surgery or something. There is a line of research on what's called geoengineering, which are various techniques that would delay the heating to buy us 20 or 30 years to get our act together. Now, that's just an insurance policy. You hope you don't need to do that. Some people say you shouldn't even work on the insurance policy because it might make you lazy, that you'll keep eating because you know heart surgery will be there to save you. I'm not sure that's wise, given the importance of the problem, but there's now the geoengineering discussion about -- should that be in the back pocket in case things happen faster, or this innovation goes a lot slower than we expect? CA: Climate skeptics: If you had a sentence or two to say to them, how might you persuade them that they're wrong? BG: Well, unfortunately, the skeptics come in different camps. The ones who make scientific arguments are very few. Are they saying that there's negative feedback effects that have to do with clouds that offset things? There are very, very few things that they can even say there's a chance in a million of those things. The main problem we have here, it's kind of like AIDS. You make the mistake now, and you pay for it a lot later. And so, when you have all sorts of urgent problems, the idea of taking pain now that has to do with a gain later, and a somewhat uncertain pain thing -- in fact, the IPCC report, that's not necessarily the worst case, and there are people in the rich world who look at IPCC and say, "OK, that isn't that big of a deal." The fact is it's that uncertain part that should move us towards this. But my dream here is that, if you can make it economic, and meet the CO2 constraints, then the skeptics say, "OK, I don't care that it doesn't put out CO2, I kind of wish it did put out CO2, but I guess I'll accept it because it's cheaper than what's come before." (Applause) CA: And so, that would be your response to the Bjorn Lomborg argument, that basically if you spend all this energy trying to solve the CO2 problem, it's going to take away all your other goals of trying to rid the world of poverty and malaria and so forth, it's a stupid waste of the Earth's resources to put money towards that when there are better things we can do. BG: Well, the actual spending on the R&D piece -- say the U.S. should spend 10 billion a year more than it is right now -- it's not that dramatic. It shouldn't take away from other things. The thing you get into big money on, and this, reasonable people can disagree, is when you have something that's non-economic and you're trying to fund that -- that, to me, mostly is a waste. Unless you're very close and you're just funding the learning curve and it's going to get very cheap, I believe we should try more things that have a potential to be far less expensive. If the trade-off you get into is, "Let's make energy super expensive," then the rich can afford that. I mean, all of us here could pay five times as much for our energy and not change our lifestyle. The disaster is for that two billion. And even Lomborg has changed. His shtick now is, "Why isn't the R&D getting more discussed?" He's still, because of his earlier stuff, still associated with the skeptic camp, but he's realized that's a pretty lonely camp, and so, he's making the R&D point. And so there is a thread of something that I think is appropriate. The R&D piece, it's crazy how little it's funded. CA: Well Bill, I suspect I speak on the behalf of most people here to say I really hope your wish comes true. Thank you so much. BG: Thank you. (Applause)
I would be willing to bet that I'm the dumbest guy in the room because I couldn't get through school. I struggled with school. But what I knew at a very early age was that I loved money and I loved business and I loved this entrepreneurial thing, and I was raised to be an entrepreneur, and what I've been really passionate about ever since -- and I've never spoken about this ever, until now -- so this is the first time anyone's ever heard it, except my wife three days ago, because she said, "What are you talking about?" and I told her -- is that I think we miss an opportunity to find these kids who have the entrepreneurial traits, and to groom them or show them that being an entrepreneur is actually a cool thing. It's not something that is a bad thing and is vilified, which is what happens in a lot of society. Kids, when we grow up, have dreams, and we have passions, and we have visions, and somehow we get those things crushed. We get told that we need to study harder or be more focused or get a tutor. My parents got me a tutor in French, and I still suck in French. Two years ago, I was the highest-rated lecturer at MIT's entrepreneurial master's program. And it was a speaking event in front of groups of entrepreneurs from around the world. When I was in grade two, I won a city-wide speaking competition, but nobody had ever said, "Hey, this kid's a good speaker. He can't focus, but he loves walking around and getting people energized." No one said, "Get him a coach in speaking." They said, get me a tutor in what I suck at. So as kids show these traits -- and we need to start looking for them -- I think we should be raising kids to be entrepreneurs instead of lawyers. Unfortunately the school system is grooming this world to say, "Hey, let's be a lawyer or let's be a doctor," and we're missing that opportunity because no one ever says, "Hey, be an entrepreneur." Entrepreneurs are people -- because we have a lot of them in this room -- who have these ideas and these passions or see these needs in the world and we decide to stand up and do it. And we put everything on the line to make that stuff happen. We have the ability to get those groups of people around us that want to kind of build that dream with us, and I think if we could get kids to embrace the idea at a young age of being entrepreneurial, we could change everything in the world that is a problem today. Every problem that's out there, somebody has the idea for. And as a young kid, nobody can say it can't happen because you're too dumb to realize that you couldn't figure it out. I think we have an obligation as parents and a society to start teaching our kids to fish instead of giving them the fish -- the old parable: "If you give a man a fish, you feed him for a day. If you teach a man to fish, you feed him for a lifetime." If we can teach our kids to become entrepreneurial -- the ones that show those traits to be -- like we teach the ones who have science gifts to go on in science, what if we saw the ones who had entrepreneurial traits and taught them to be entrepreneurs? We could actually have all these kids spreading businesses instead of waiting for government handouts. What we do is we sit and teach our kids all the things they shouldn't do: Don't hit; don't bite; don't swear. Right now we teach our kids to go after really good jobs, you know, and the school system teaches them to go after things like being a doctor and being a lawyer and being an accountant and a dentist and a teacher and a pilot. And the media says that it's really cool if we could go out and be a model or a singer or a sports hero like Luongo, Crosby. Our MBA programs do not teach kids to be entrepreneurs. The reason that I avoided an MBA program -- other than the fact that I couldn't get into any because I had a 61 percent average out of high school and then 61 percent average at the only school in Canada that accepted me, Carlton -- but our MBA programs don't teach kids to be entrepreneurs. They teach them to go work in corporations. So who's starting these companies? It's these random few people. Even in popular literature, the only book I've ever found -- and this should be on all of your reading lists -- the only book I've ever found that makes the entrepreneur into the hero is "Atlas Shrugged." Everything else in the world tends to look at entrepreneurs and say that we're bad people. I look at even my family. Both my grandfathers were entrepreneurs. My dad was an entrepreneur. Both my brother and sister and I, all three of us own companies as well. And we all decided to start these things because it's really the only place we fit. We didn't fit in the normal work. We couldn't work for somebody else because we're too stubborn and we have all these other traits. But kids could be entrepreneurs as well. I'm a big part of a couple organizations globally called the Entrepreneurs' Organization and the Young Presidents' Organization. I just came back from speaking in Barcelona at the YPO global conference, and everyone that I met over there who's an entrepreneur struggled with school. I have 18 out of the 19 signs of attention deficit disorder diagnosed. So this thing right here is freaking me out. (Laughter) It's probably why I'm a little bit panicked right now -- other than all the caffeine that I've had and the sugar -- but this is really creepy for an entrepreneur. Attention deficit disorder, bipolar disorder. Do you know that bipolar disorder is nicknamed the CEO disease? Ted Turner's got it. Steve Jobs has it. All three of the founders of Netscape had it. I could go on and on. Kids -- you can see these signs in kids. And what we're doing is we're giving them Ritalin and saying, "Don't be an entrepreneurial type. Fit into this other system and try to become a student." Sorry, entrepreneurs aren't students. We fast-track. We figure out the game. I stole essays. I cheated on exams. I hired kids to do my accounting assignments in university for 13 consecutive assignments. But as an entrepreneur you don't do accounting, you hire accountants. So I just figured that out earlier. (Laughter) (Applause) At least I can admit I cheated in university; most of you won't. I'm also quoted -- and I told the person who wrote the textbook -- I'm now quoted in that exact same university textbook in every Canadian university and college studies. In managerial accounting, I'm chapter eight. I open up chapter eight talking about budgeting. And I told the author, after they did my interview, that I cheated in that same course. And she thought it was too funny to not include it anyway. But kids, you can see these signs in them. The definition of an entrepreneur is "a person who organizes, operates and assumes the risk of a business venture." That doesn't mean you have to go to an MBA program. It doesn't mean you have to get through school. It just means that those few things have to feel right in your gut. And we've heard those things about "is it nurture or is it nature," right? Is it thing one or thing two? What is it? Well, I don't think it's either. I think it can be both. I was groomed as an entrepreneur. When I was growing up as a young kid, I had no choice, because I was taught at a very early, young age -- when my dad realized I wasn't going to fit into everything else that was being taught to me in school -- that he could teach me to figure out business at an early age. He groomed us, the three of us, to hate the thought of having a job and to love the fact of creating companies that we could employ other people. My first little business venture: I was seven years old, I was in Winnipeg, and I was lying in my bedroom with one of those long extension cords. And I was calling all the dry cleaners in Winnipeg to find out how much would the dry cleaners pay me for coat hangers. And my mom came into the room and she said, "Where are you going to get the coat hangers to sell to the dry cleaners?" And I said, "Let's go and look in the basement." And we went down to the basement. And I opened up this cupboard. And there was about a thousand coat hangers that I'd collected. Because, when I told her I was going out to play with the kids, I was going door to door in the neighborhood to collect coat hangers to put in the basement to sell. Because I saw her a few weeks before that -- you could get paid. They used to pay you two cents per coat hanger. So I was just like, well there's all kinds of coat hangers. And so I'll just go get them. And I knew she wouldn't want me to go get them, so I just did it anyway. And I learned that you could actually negotiate with people. This one person offered me three cents and I got him up to three and a half. I even knew at a seven-year-old age that I could actually get a fractional percent of a cent, and people would pay that because it multiplied up. At seven years old I figured it out. I got three and a half cents for a thousand coat hangers. I sold license plate protectors door to door. My dad actually made me go find someone who would sell me these things at wholesale. And at nine years old, I walked around in the city of Sudbury selling license plate protectors door to door to houses. And I remember this one customer so vividly because I also did some other stuff with these clients. I sold newspapers. And he wouldn't buy a newspaper from me ever. But I was convinced I was going to get him to buy a license plate protector. And he's like, "Well, we don't need one." And I said, "But you've got two cars ..." -- I'm nine years old. I'm like, "But you have two cars and they don't have license plate protectors." And he said, "I know." And I said, "This car here's got one license plate that's all crumpled up." And he said, "Yes, that's my wife's car." And I said, "Why don't we just test one on the front of your wife's car and see if it lasts longer." So I knew there were two cars with two license plates on each. If I couldn't sell all four, I could at least get one. I learned that at a young age. I did comic book arbitrage. When I was about 10 years old, I sold comic books out of our cottage on Georgian Bay. And I would go biking up to the end of the beach and buy all the comics from the poor kids. And then I would go back to the other end of the beach and sell them to the rich kids. But it was obvious to me, right? Buy low, sell high. You've got this demand over here that has money. Don't try to sell to the poor kids; they don't have cash. The rich people do. Go get some. So that's obvious, right. It's like a recession. So, there's a recession. There's still 13 trillion dollars circulating in the U.S. economy. Go get some of that. And I learned that at a young age. I also learned, don't reveal your source, because I got beat up after about four weeks of doing this because one of the rich kids found out where I was buying my comics from, and he didn't like the fact that he was paying a lot more. I was forced to get a paper route at 10 years old. I didn't really want a paper route, but at 10, my dad said, "That's going to be your next business." So not only would he get me one, but I had to get two, and then he wanted me to hire someone to deliver half the papers, which I did, and then I realized that collecting tips was where you made all the money. So I would collect the tips and get payment. So I would go and collect for all the papers. He could just deliver them. Because then I realized I could make the money. By this point, I was definitely not going to be an employee. (Laughter) My dad owned an automotive and industrial repair shop. He had all these old automotive parts lying around. They had this old brass and copper. I asked him what he did with it, and he said he just throws it out. I said, "But wouldn't somebody pay you for that?" And he goes, "Maybe." Remember at 10 years old -- so 34 years ago I saw opportunity in this stuff. I saw there was money in garbage. And I was actually collecting it from all the automotive shops in the area on my bicycle. And then my dad would drive me on Saturdays to a scrap metal recycler where I got paid. And I thought that was kind of cool. Strangely enough, 30 years later, we're building 1-800-GOT-JUNK? and making money off that too. I built these little pincushions when I was 11 years old in Cubs, and we made these pin cushions for our moms for Mother's Day. And you made these pincushions out of wooden clothespins -- when we used to hang clothes on clotheslines outside. And you'd make these chairs. And I had these little pillows that I would sew up. And you could stuff pins in them. Because people used to sew and they needed a pin cushion. But what I realized was that you had to have options. So I actually spray painted a whole bunch of them brown. And then when I went to the door, it wasn't, "Do you want to buy one?" It was, "Which color would you like?" Like I'm 10 years old; you're not going to say no to me, especially if you have two options -- you have the brown one or the clear one. So I learned that lesson at a young age. I learned that manual labor really sucks. Right, like cutting lawns is brutal. But because I had to cut lawns all summer for all of our neighbors and get paid to do that, I realized that recurring revenue from one client is amazing. That if I land this client once, and every week I get paid by that person, that's way better than trying to sell one clothespin thing to one person. Because you can't sell them more. So I love that recurring revenue model I started to learn at a young age. Remember, I was being groomed to do this. I was not allowed to have jobs. I would caddy, I would go to the golf course and caddy for people. But I realized that there was this one hill on our golf course, the 13th hole that had this huge hill. And people could never get their bags up it. So I would sit there with a lawn chair and just carry up all the people who didn't have caddies. I would carry their golf bags up to the top, and they'd pay me a dollar. Meanwhile, my friends were working for five hours to haul some guy's bag around and get paid 10 bucks. I'm like, "That's stupid because you have to work for five hours. That doesn't make any sense." You just figure out a way to make more money faster. Every week, I would go to the corner store and buy all these pops. Then I would go up and deliver them to these 70-year-old women playing bridge. And they'd give me their orders for the following week. And then I'd just deliver pop and I'd just charge twice. And I had this captured market. You didn't need contracts. You just needed to have a supply and demand and this audience who bought into you. These women weren't going to go to anybody else because they liked me, and I kind of figured it out. I went and got golf balls from golf courses. But everybody else was looking in the bush and looking in the ditches for golf balls. I'm like, screw that. They're all in the pond and nobody's going into the pond. So I would go into the ponds and crawl around and pick them up with my toes. You just pick them up with both feet. You can't do it on stage. You get the golf balls, and you just throw them in your bathing suit trunks and when you're done you've got a couple hundred of them. But the problem is that people all didn't want all the golf balls. So I just packaged them. I'm like 12, right? I packaged them up three ways. I had the Pinnacles and DDHs and the really cool ones back then. Those sold for two dollars each. And then I had all the good ones that didn't look crappy. They were 50 cents each. And then I'd sell 50 at a time of all the crappy ones. And they could use those for practice balls. I sold sunglasses, when I was in school, to all the kids in high school. This is what really kind of gets everybody hating you is because you're trying to extract money from all your friends all the time. But it paid the bills. So I sold lots and lots of sunglasses. Then when the school shut me down -- the school actually called me into the office and told me I couldn't do it -- so I went to the gas stations and I sold lots of them to the gas stations and had the gas stations sell them to their customers. That was cool because then I had retail outlets. And I think I was 14. Then I paid my entire way through first year university at Carlton by selling wine skins door to door. You know that you can hold a 40-ounce bottle of rum and two bottles of coke in a wineskin? So what, right? Yeah, but you know what? You stuff that down your shorts, when you go into a football game you can get booze in for free, everybody bought them. Supply, demand, big opportunity. I also branded it, so I sold them for five times the normal cost. It had our university logo on it. You know we teach our kids and we buy them games, but why don't we get them games, if they're entrepreneurial kids, that kind of nurture the traits that you need to be entrepreneurs? Why don't you teach them not to waste money? I remember being told to walk out in the middle of a street in Banff, Alberta because I'd thrown a penny out in the street, and my dad said, "Go pick it up." He said, "I work too damn hard for my money. I'm not going to see you ever waste a penny." And I remember that lesson to this day. Allowances teach kids the wrong habits. Allowances, by nature, are teaching kids to think about a job. An entrepreneur doesn't expect a regular paycheck. Allowance is breeding kids at a young age to expect a regular paycheck. That's wrong, for me, if you want to raise entrepreneurs. What I do with my kids now -- I've got two, nine and seven -- is I teach them to walk around the house and the yard, looking for stuff that needs to get done. Come to me and tell me what it is. Or I'll come to them and say, "Here's what I need done." And then you know what we do? We negotiate. They go around looking for what it is. But then we negotiate on what they're going to get paid. And then they don't have a regular check, but they have more opportunities to find more stuff, and they learn the skill of negotiating, and they learn the skill of finding opportunities as well. You breed that kind of stuff. Each of my kids has two piggy banks. Fifty percent of all the money that they earn or get gifted, 50 percent goes in their house account, 50 percent goes in their toy account. Anything in their toy account they can spend on whatever they want. The 50 percent that goes in their house account, every six months, goes to the bank. They walk up with me. Every year all the money in the bank goes to their broker. Both my nine- and seven-year-olds have a stock broker already. But I'm teaching them to force that savings habit. It drives me crazy that 30-year-olds are saying, "Maybe I'll start contributing to my RSP now." Shit, you've missed 25 years. You can teach those habits to young kids when they don't even feel the pain yet. Don't read them bedtime stories every night. Maybe four nights out of the week read them bedtime stories and three nights of the week have them tell stories. Why don't you sit down with kids and give them four items, a red shirt, a blue tie, a kangaroo and a laptop, and have them tell a story about those four things? My kids do that all the time. It teaches them to sell; it teaches them creativity; it teaches them to think on their feet. Just do that kind of stuff and have fun with it. Get kids to stand up in front of groups and talk, even if it's just stand up in front of their friends and do plays and have speeches. Those are entrepreneurial traits that you want to be nurturing. Show the kids what bad customers or bad employees look like. Show them the grumpy employees. When you see grumpy customer service, point that out to them. Say, "By the way, that guy's a crappy employee." And say, "These ones are good ones." (Laughter) If you go into a restaurant and you have bad customer service, show them what bad customer service looks like. (Laughter) We have all these lessons in front of us, but we don't take those opportunities; we teach kids to go get a tutor. Imagine if you actually took all the kids' junk that's in the house right now, all the toys that they've outgrown two years ago and said, "Why don't we start selling some of this on Craigslist and Kijiji?" And they can actually sell it and learn how to find scammers when they get email offers come in. They can come into your account or a sub account or whatever. But teach them how to fix the price, guess the price, pull up the photos. Teach them how to do that kind of stuff and make money. Then the money they get, 50 percent goes in their house account, 50 percent goes in their toy account. My kids love this stuff. Some of the entrepreneurial traits that you've got to nurture in kids: attainment, tenacity, leadership, introspection, interdependence, values. All these traits you can find in young kids, and you can help nurture them. Look for that kind of stuff. There's two traits that I want you to also look out for that we don't kind of get out of their system. Don't medicate kids for attention deficit disorder unless it is really, really freaking bad. (Applause) The same with the whole things on mania and stress and depression, unless it is so clinically brutal, man. Bipolar disorder is nicknamed the CEO disease. When Steve Jurvetson and Jim Clark and Jim Barksdale have all got it, and they built Netscape -- imagine if they were given Ritalin. We wouldn't have have that stuff, right? Al Gore really would have had to invented the Internet. (Laughter) These skills are the skills we should be teaching in the classroom as well as everything else. I'm not saying don't get kids to want to be lawyers. But how about getting entrepreneurship to be ranked right up there with the rest of them as well? Because there's huge opportunities in that. I want to close with a quick little video. It's a video that was done by one of the companies that I mentor. These guys, Grasshopper. It's about kids. It's about entrepreneurship. Hopefully this inspires you to take what you've heard from me and do something with it to change the world. [Kid ... "And you thought you could do anything?"] [You still can.] [Because a lot of what we consider impossible ...] [... is easy to overcome] [Because in case you haven't noticed, we live in a place where] [One individual can make a difference] [Want proof?] [Just look at the people who built our country;] [Our parents, grandparents, our aunts, uncles ...] [They were immigrants, newcomers ready to make their mark] [Maybe they came with very little] [Or perhaps they didn't own anything except for ...] [... a single brilliant idea] [These people were thinkers, doers ...] [... innovators ...] [... until they came up with the name ...] [... entrepreneurs!] [They change the way we think about what is possible.] [They have a clear vision of how life can be better] [for all of us, even when times are tough.] [Right now, it's hard to see ...] [... when our view is cluttered with obstacles.] [But turbulence creates opportunities] [for success, achievement, and pushes us ...] [to discover new ways of doing things] [So what opportunities will you go after and why?] [If you're an entrepreneur] [you know that risk isn't the reward.] [No. The rewards are driving innovation ...] [... changing people's lives. Creating jobs.] [Fueling growth.] [And making a better world.] [Entrepreneurs are everywhere.] [They run small businesses that support our economy,] [design tools to help you ...] [... stay connected with friends, family and colleagues around the world.] [And they're finding new ways of helping to solve society's oldest problems.] [Do you know an entrepreneur?] [Entrepreneurs can be anyone ...] [Even ... you!] [So seize the opportunity to create the job you always wanted] [Help heal the economy] [Make a difference.] [Take your business to new heights.] [But most importantly,] [remember when you were a kid ...] [when everything was within you reach,] [and then say to yourself quietly, but with determination:] ["It still is."] Thank you very much for having me.
This is a guy named Bob McKim. He was a creativity researcher in the '60s and '70s, and also led the Stanford Design Program. And in fact, my friend and IDEO founder, David Kelley, who’s out there somewhere, studied under him at Stanford. And he liked to do an exercise with his students where he got them to take a piece of paper and draw the person who sat next to them, their neighbor, very quickly, just as quickly as they could. And in fact, we’re going to do that exercise right now. You all have a piece of cardboard and a piece of paper. It’s actually got a bunch of circles on it. I need you to turn that piece of paper over; you should find that it’s blank on the other side. And there should be a pencil. And I want you to pick somebody that’s seated next to you, and when I say, go, you’ve got 30 seconds to draw your neighbor, OK? So, everybody ready? OK. Off you go. You’ve got 30 seconds, you’d better be fast. Come on: those masterpieces ... OK? Stop. All right, now. (Laughter) Yes, lot’s of laughter. Yeah, exactly. Lots of laughter, quite a bit of embarrassment. (Laughter) Am I hearing a few "sorry’s"? I think I’m hearing a few sorry’s. Yup, yup, I think I probably am. And that’s exactly what happens every time, every time you do this with adults. McKim found this every time he did it with his students. He got exactly the same response: lots and lots of sorry’s. (Laughter) And he would point this out as evidence that we fear the judgment of our peers, and that we’re embarrassed about showing our ideas to people we think of as our peers, to those around us. And this fear is what causes us to be conservative in our thinking. So we might have a wild idea, but we’re afraid to share it with anybody else. OK, so if you try the same exercise with kids, they have no embarrassment at all. They just quite happily show their masterpiece to whoever wants to look at it. But as they learn to become adults, they become much more sensitive to the opinions of others, and they lose that freedom and they do start to become embarrassed. And in studies of kids playing, it’s been shown time after time that kids who feel secure, who are in a kind of trusted environment -- they’re the ones that feel most free to play. And if you’re starting a design firm, let’s say, then you probably also want to create a place where people have the same kind of security. Where they have the same kind of security to take risks. Maybe have the same kind of security to play. Before founding IDEO, David said that what he wanted to do was to form a company where all the employees are my best friends. Now, that wasn’t just self-indulgence. He knew that friendship is a short cut to play. And he knew that it gives us a sense of trust, and it allows us then to take the kind of creative risks that we need to take as designers. And so, that decision to work with his friends -- now he has 550 of them -- was what got IDEO started. And our studios, like, I think, many creative workplaces today, are designed to help people feel relaxed: familiar with their surroundings, comfortable with the people that they’re working with. It takes more than decor, but I think we’ve all seen that creative companies do often have symbols in the workplace that remind people to be playful, and that it’s a permissive environment. So, whether it’s this microbus meeting room that we have in one our buildings at IDEO; or at Pixar, where the animators work in wooden huts and decorated caves; or at the Googleplex, where it’s famous for its [beach] volleyball courts, and even this massive dinosaur skeleton with pink flamingos on it. Don’t know the reason for the pink flamingos, but anyway, they’re there in the garden. Or even in the Swiss office of Google, which perhaps has the most wacky ideas of all. And my theory is, that’s so the Swiss can prove to their Californian colleagues that they’re not boring. So they have the slide, and they even have a fireman’s pole. Don’t know what they do with that, but they have one. So all of these places have these symbols. Now, our big symbol at IDEO is actually not so much the place, it’s a thing. And it’s actually something that we invented a few years ago, or created a few years ago. It’s a toy; it’s called a "finger blaster." And I forgot to bring one up with me. So if somebody can reach under the chair that’s next to them, you’ll find something taped underneath it. That’s great. If you could pass it up. Thanks, David, I appreciate it. So this is a finger blaster, and you will find that every one of you has got one taped under your chair. And I’m going to run a little experiment. Another little experiment. But before we start, I need just to put these on. Thank you. All right. Now, what I’m going to do is, I’m going to see how -- I can’t see out of these, OK. I’m going to see how many of you at the back of the room can actually get those things onto the stage. So the way they work is, you know, you just put your finger in the thing, pull them back, and off you go. So, don’t look backwards. That’s my only recommendation here. I want to see how many of you can get these things on the stage. So come on! There we go, there we go. Thank you. Thank you. Oh. I have another idea. I wanted to -- there we go. (Laughter) There we go. (Laughter) Thank you, thank you, thank you. Not bad, not bad. No serious injuries so far. (Laughter) Well, they’re still coming in from the back there; they’re still coming in. Some of you haven’t fired them yet. Can you not figure out how to do it, or something? It’s not that hard. Most of your kids figure out how to do this in the first 10 seconds, when they pick it up. All right. This is pretty good; this is pretty good. Okay, all right. Let’s -- I suppose we'd better... I'd better clear these up out of the way; otherwise, I’m going to trip over them. All right. So the rest of you can save them for when I say something particularly boring, and then you can fire at me. (Laughter) All right. I think I’m going to take these off now, because I can’t see a damn thing when I’ve -- all right, OK. So, ah, that was fun. (Laughter) All right, good. (Applause) So, OK, so why? So we have the finger blasters. Other people have dinosaurs, you know. Why do we have them? Well, as I said, we have them because we think maybe playfulness is important. But why is it important? We use it in a pretty pragmatic way, to be honest. We think playfulness helps us get to better creative solutions. Helps us do our jobs better, and helps us feel better when we do them. Now, an adult encountering a new situation -- when we encounter a new situation we have a tendency to want to categorize it just as quickly as we can, you know. And there’s a reason for that: we want to settle on an answer. Life’s complicated; we want to figure out what’s going on around us very quickly. I suspect, actually, that the evolutionary biologists probably have lots of reasons [for] why we want to categorize new things very, very quickly. One of them might be, you know, when we see this funny stripy thing: is that a tiger just about to jump out and kill us? Or is it just some weird shadows on the tree? We need to figure that out pretty fast. Well, at least, we did once. Most of us don’t need to anymore, I suppose. This is some aluminum foil, right? You use it in the kitchen. That’s what it is, isn’t it? Of course it is, of course it is. Well, not necessarily. (Laughter) Kids are more engaged with open possibilities. Now, they’ll certainly -- when they come across something new, they’ll certainly ask, "What is it?" Of course they will. But they’ll also ask, "What can I do with it?" And you know, the more creative of them might get to a really interesting example. And this openness is the beginning of exploratory play. Any parents of young kids in the audience? There must be some. Yeah, thought so. So we’ve all seen it, haven’t we? We’ve all told stories about how, on Christmas morning, our kids end up playing with the boxes far more than they play with the toys that are inside them. And you know, from an exploration perspective, this behavior makes complete sense. Because you can do a lot more with boxes than you can do with a toy. Even one like, say, Tickle Me Elmo -- which, despite its ingenuity, really only does one thing, whereas boxes offer an infinite number of choices. So again, this is another one of those playful activities that, as we get older, we tend to forget and we have to relearn. So another one of Bob McKim’s favorite exercises is called the "30 Circles Test." So we’re back to work. You guys are going to get back to work again. Turn that piece of paper that you did the sketch on back over, and you’ll find those 30 circles printed on the piece of paper. So it should look like this. You should be looking at something like this. So what I’m going to do is, I’m going to give you minute, and I want you to adapt as many of those circles as you can into objects of some form. So for example, you could turn one into a football, or another one into a sun. All I’m interested in is quantity. I want you to do as many of them as you can, in the minute that I’m just about to give you. So, everybody ready? OK? Off you go. Okay. Put down your pencils, as they say. So, who got more than five circles figured out? Hopefully everybody? More than 10? Keep your hands up if you did 10. 15? 20? Anybody get all 30? No? Oh! Somebody did. Fantastic. Did anybody to a variation on a theme? Like a smiley face? Happy face? Sad face? Sleepy face? Anybody do that? Anybody use my examples? The sun and the football? Great. Cool. So I was really interested in quantity. I wasn’t actually very interested in whether they were all different. I just wanted you to fill in as many circles as possible. And one of the things we tend to do as adults, again, is we edit things. We stop ourselves from doing things. We self-edit as we’re having ideas. And in some cases, our desire to be original is actually a form of editing. And that actually isn’t necessarily really playful. So that ability just to go for it and explore lots of things, even if they don’t seem that different from each other, is actually something that kids do well, and it is a form of play. So now, Bob McKim did another version of this test in a rather famous experiment that was done in the 1960s. Anybody know what this is? It’s the peyote cactus. It’s the plant from which you can create mescaline, one of the psychedelic drugs. For those of you around in the '60s, you probably know it well. McKim published a paper in 1966, describing an experiment that he and his colleagues conducted to test the effects of psychedelic drugs on creativity. So he picked 27 professionals -- they were engineers, physicists, mathematicians, architects, furniture designers even, artists -- and he asked them to come along one evening, and to bring a problem with them that they were working on. He gave each of them some mescaline, and had them listen to some nice, relaxing music for a while. And then he did what’s called the Purdue Creativity Test. You might know it as, "How many uses can you find for a paper clip?" It’s basically the same thing as the 30 circles thing that I just had you do. Now, actually, he gave the test before the drugs and after the drugs, to see what the difference was in people’s facility and speed with coming up with ideas. And then he asked them to go away and work on those problems that they’d brought. And they’d come up with a bunch of interesting solutions -- and actually, quite valid solutions -- to the things that they’d been working on. And so, some of the things that they figured out, some of these individuals figured out; in one case, a new commercial building and designs for houses that were accepted by clients; a design of a solar space probe experiment; a redesign of the linear electron accelerator; an engineering improvement to a magnetic tape recorder -- you can tell this is a while ago; the completion of a line of furniture; and even a new conceptual model of the photon. So it was a pretty successful evening. In fact, maybe this experiment was the reason that Silicon Valley got off to its great start with innovation. We don’t know, but it may be. We need to ask some of the CEOs whether they were involved in this mescaline experiment. But really, it wasn’t the drugs that were important; it was this idea that what the drugs did would help shock people out of their normal way of thinking, and getting them to forget the adult behaviors that were getting in the way of their ideas. But it’s hard to break our habits, our adult habits. At IDEO we have brainstorming rules written on the walls. Edicts like, "Defer judgment," or "Go for quantity." And somehow that seems wrong. I mean, can you have rules about creativity? Well, it sort of turns out that we need rules to help us break the old rules and norms that otherwise we might bring to the creative process. And we’ve certainly learnt that over time, you get much better brainstorming, much more creative outcomes when everybody does play by the rules. Now, of course, many designers, many individual designers, achieve this is in a much more organic way. I think the Eameses are wonderful examples of experimentation. And they experimented with plywood for many years without necessarily having one single goal in mind. They were exploring following what was interesting to them. They went from designing splints for wounded soldiers coming out of World War II and the Korean War, I think, and from this experiment they moved on to chairs. Through constant experimentation with materials, they developed a wide range of iconic solutions that we know today, eventually resulting in, of course, the legendary lounge chair. Now, if the Eameses had stopped with that first great solution, then we wouldn’t be the beneficiaries of so many wonderful designs today. And of course, they used experimentation in all aspects of their work, from films to buildings, from games to graphics. So, they’re great examples, I think, of exploration and experimentation in design. Now, while the Eameses were exploring those possibilities, they were also exploring physical objects. And they were doing that through building prototypes. And building is the next of the behaviors that I thought I’d talk about. So the average Western first-grader spends as much as 50 percent of their play time taking part in what’s called "construction play." Construction play -- it’s playful, obviously, but also a powerful way to learn. When play is about building a tower out of blocks, the kid begins to learn a lot about towers. And as they repeatedly knock it down and start again, learning is happening as a sort of by-product of play. It’s classically learning by doing. Now, David Kelley calls this behavior, when it’s carried out by designers, "thinking with your hands." And it typically involves making multiple, low-resolution prototypes very quickly, often by bringing lots of found elements together in order to get to a solution. On one of his earliest projects, the team was kind of stuck, and they came up with a mechanism by hacking together a prototype made from a roll-on deodorant. Now, that became the first commercial computer mouse for the Apple Lisa and the Macintosh. So, they learned their way to that by building prototypes. Another example is a group of designers who were working on a surgical instrument with some surgeons. They were meeting with them; they were talking to the surgeons about what it was they needed with this device. And one of the designers ran out of the room and grabbed a white board marker and a film canister -- which is now becoming a very precious prototyping medium -- and a clothespin. He taped them all together, ran back into the room and said, "You mean, something like this?" And the surgeons grabbed hold of it and said, well, I want to hold it like this, or like that. And all of a sudden a productive conversation was happening about design around a tangible object. And in the end it turned into a real device. And so this behavior is all about quickly getting something into the real world, and having your thinking advanced as a result. At IDEO there’s a kind of a back-to-preschool feel sometimes about the environment. The prototyping carts, filled with colored paper and Play-Doh and glue sticks and stuff -- I mean, they do have a bit of a kindergarten feel to them. But the important idea is that everything’s at hand, everything’s around. So when designers are working on ideas, they can start building stuff whenever they want. They don’t necessarily even have to go into some kind of formal workshop to do it. And we think that’s pretty important. And then the sad thing is, although preschools are full of this kind of stuff, as kids go through the school system it all gets taken away. They lose this stuff that facilitates this sort of playful and building mode of thinking. And of course, by the time you get to the average workplace, maybe the best construction tool we have might be the Post-it notes. It’s pretty barren. But by giving project teams and the clients who they’re working with permission to think with their hands, quite complex ideas can spring into life and go right through to execution much more easily. This is a nurse using a very simple -- as you can see -- plasticine prototype, explaining what she wants out of a portable information system to a team of technologists and designers that are working with her in a hospital. And just having this very simple prototype allows her to talk about what she wants in a much more powerful way. And of course, by building quick prototypes, we can get out and test our ideas with consumers and users much more quickly than if we’re trying to describe them through words. But what about designing something that isn’t physical? Something like a service or an experience? Something that exists as a series of interactions over time? Instead of building play, this can be approached with role-play. So, if you’re designing an interaction between two people -- such as, I don’t know -- ordering food at a fast food joint or something, you need to be able to imagine how that experience might feel over a period of time. And I think the best way to achieve that, and get a feeling for any flaws in your design, is to act it out. So we do quite a lot of work at IDEO trying to convince our clients of this. They can be a little skeptical; I’ll come back to that. But a place, I think, where the effort is really worthwhile is where people are wrestling with quite serious problems -- things like education or security or finance or health. And this is another example in a healthcare environment of some doctors and some nurses and designers acting out a service scenario around patient care. But you know, many adults are pretty reluctant to engage with role-play. Some of it’s embarrassment and some of it is because they just don’t believe that what emerges is necessarily valid. They dismiss an interesting interaction by saying, you know, "That’s just happening because they’re acting it out." Research into kids' behavior actually suggests that it’s worth taking role-playing seriously. Because when children play a role, they actually follow social scripts quite closely that they’ve learnt from us as adults. If one kid plays "store," and another one’s playing "house," then the whole kind of play falls down. So they get used to quite quickly to understanding the rules for social interactions, and are actually quite quick to point out when they’re broken. So when, as adults, we role-play, then we have a huge set of these scripts already internalized. We’ve gone through lots of experiences in life, and they provide a strong intuition as to whether an interaction is going to work. So we’re very good, when acting out a solution, at spotting whether something lacks authenticity. So role-play is actually, I think, quite valuable when it comes to thinking about experiences. Another way for us, as designers, to explore role-play is to put ourselves through an experience which we’re designing for, and project ourselves into an experience. So here are some designers who are trying to understand what it might feel like to sleep in a confined space on an airplane. And so they grabbed some very simple materials, you can see, and did this role-play, this kind of very crude role-play, just to get a sense of what it would be like for passengers if they were stuck in quite small places on airplanes. This is one of our designers, Kristian Simsarian, and he’s putting himself through the experience of being an ER patient. Now, this is a real hospital, in a real emergency room. One of the reasons he chose to take this rather large video camera with him was because he didn’t want the doctors and nurses thinking he was actually sick, and sticking something into him that he was going to regret later. So anyhow, he went there with his video camera, and it’s kind of interesting to see what he brought back. Because when we looked at the video when he got back, we saw 20 minutes of this. (Laughter) And also, the amazing thing about this video -- as soon as you see it you immediately project yourself into that experience. And you know what it feels like: all of that uncertainty while you’re left out in the hallway while the docs are dealing with some more urgent case in one of the emergency rooms, wondering what the heck’s going on. And so this notion of using role-play -- or in this case, living through the experience as a way of creating empathy -- particularly when you use video, is really powerful. Or another one of our designers, Altay Sendil: he’s here having his chest waxed, not because he’s very vain, although actually he is -- no, I’m kidding -- but in order to empathize with the pain that chronic care patients go through when they’re having dressings removed. And so sometimes these analogous experiences, analogous role-play, can also be quite valuable. So when a kid dresses up as a firefighter, you know, he’s beginning to try on that identity. He wants to know what it feels like to be a firefighter. We’re doing the same thing as designers. We’re trying on these experiences. And so the idea of role-play is both as an empathy tool, as well as a tool for prototyping experiences. And you know, we kind of admire people who do this at IDEO anyway. Not just because they lead to insights about the experience, but also because of their willingness to explore and their ability to unselfconsciously surrender themselves to the experience. In short, we admire their willingness to play. Playful exploration, playful building and role-play: those are some of the ways that designers use play in their work. And so far, I admit, this might feel like it’s a message just to go out and play like a kid. And to certain extent it is, but I want to stress a couple of points. The first thing to remember is that play is not anarchy. Play has rules, especially when it’s group play. When kids play tea party, or they play cops and robbers, they’re following a script that they’ve agreed to. And it’s this code negotiation that leads to productive play. So, remember the sketching task we did at the beginning? The kind of little face, the portrait you did? Well, imagine if you did the same task with friends while you were drinking in a pub. But everybody agreed to play a game where the worst sketch artist bought the next round of drinks. That framework of rules would have turned an embarrassing, difficult situation into a fun game. As a result, we’d all feel perfectly secure and have a good time -- but because we all understood the rules and we agreed on them together. But there aren’t just rules about how to play; there are rules about when to play. Kids don’t play all the time, obviously. They transition in and out of it, and good teachers spend a lot of time thinking about how to move kids through these experiences. As designers, we need to be able to transition in and out of play also. And if we’re running design studios we need to be able to figure out, how can we transition designers through these different experiences? I think this is particularly true if we think about the sort of -- I think what’s very different about design is that we go through these two very distinctive modes of operation. We go through a sort of generative mode, where we’re exploring many ideas; and then we come back together again, and come back looking for that solution, and developing that solution. I think they’re two quite different modes: divergence and convergence. And I think it’s probably in the divergent mode that we most need playfulness. Perhaps in convergent mode we need to be more serious. And so being able to move between those modes is really quite important. So, it’s where there’s a more nuanced version view of play, I think, is required. Because it’s very easy to fall into the trap that these states are absolute. You’re either playful or you’re serious, and you can’t be both. But that’s not really true: you can be a serious professional adult and, at times, be playful. It’s not an either/or; it’s an "and." You can be serious and play. So to sum it up, we need trust to play, and we need trust to be creative. So, there’s a connection. And there are a series of behaviors that we’ve learnt as kids, and that turn out to be quite useful to us as designers. They include exploration, which is about going for quantity; building, and thinking with your hands; and role-play, where acting it out helps us both to have more empathy for the situations in which we’re designing, and to create services and experiences that are seamless and authentic. Thank you very much. (Applause)
Thank you so much everyone from TED, and Chris and Amy in particular. I cannot believe I'm here. I have not slept in weeks. Neil and I were sitting there comparing how little we've slept in anticipation for this. I've never been so nervous -- and I do this when I'm nervous, I just realized. (Laughter) So, I'm going to talk about sort of what we did at this organization called 826 Valencia, and then I'm going to talk about how we all might join in and do similar things. Back in about 2000, I was living in Brooklyn, I was trying to finish my first book, I was wandering around dazed every day because I wrote from 12 a.m. to 5 a.m. So I would walk around in a daze during the day. I had no mental acuity to speak of during the day, but I had flexible hours. In the Brooklyn neighborhood that I lived in, Park Slope, there are a lot of writers -- it's like a very high per capita ratio of writers to normal people. Meanwhile, I had grown up around a lot of teachers. My mom was a teacher, my sister became a teacher and after college so many of my friends went into teaching. And so I was always hearing them talk about their lives and how inspiring they were, and they were really sort of the most hard-working and constantly inspiring people I knew. But I knew so many of the things they were up against, so many of the struggles they were dealing with. And one of them was that so many of my friends that were teaching in city schools were having trouble with their students keeping up at grade level, in their reading and writing in particular. Now, so many of these students had come from households where English isn't spoken in the home, where a lot of them have different special needs, learning disabilities. And of course they're working in schools which sometimes and very often are under-funded. And so they would talk to me about this and say, "You know, what we really need is just more people, more bodies, more one-on-one attention, more hours, more expertise from people that have skills in English and can work with these students one-on-one." Now, I would say, "Well, why don't you just work with them one-on-one?" And they would say, "Well, we have five classes of 30 to 40 students each. This can lead up to 150, 180, 200 students a day. How can we possibly give each student even one hour a week of one-on-one attention?" You'd have to greatly multiply the workweek and clone the teachers. And so we started talking about this. And at the same time, I thought about this massive group of people I knew: writers, editors, journalists, graduate students, assistant professors, you name it. All these people that had sort of flexible daily hours and an interest in the English word -- I hope to have an interest in the English language, but I'm not speaking it well right now. (Laughter) I'm trying. That clock has got me. But everyone that I knew had an interest in the primacy of the written word in terms of nurturing a democracy, nurturing an enlightened life. And so they had, you know, their time and their interest, but at the same time there wasn't a conduit that I knew of in my community to bring these two communities together. So when I moved back to San Francisco, we rented this building. And the idea was to put McSweeney's -- McSweeney's Quarterly, that we published twice or three times a year, and a few other magazines -- we were going to move it into an office for the first time. It used to be in my kitchen in Brooklyn. We were going to move it into an office, and we were going to actually share space with a tutoring center. So we thought, "We'll have all these writers and editors and everybody -- sort of a writing community -- coming into the office every day anyway, why don't we just open up the front of the building for students to come in there after school, get extra help on their written homework, so you have basically no border between these two communities?" So the idea was that we would be working on whatever we're working on, at 2:30 p.m. the students flow in and you put down what you're doing, or you trade, or you work a little bit later or whatever it is. You give those hours in the afternoon to the students in the neighborhood. So, we had this place, we rented it, the landlord was all for it. We did this mural, that's a Chris Ware mural, that basically explains the entire history of the printed word, in mural form -- it takes a long time to digest and you have to stand in the middle of the road. So we rented this space. And everything was great except the landlord said, "Well, the space is zoned for retail; you have to come up with something. You've gotta sell something. You can't just have a tutoring center." So we thought, "Ha ha! Really!" And we couldn't think of anything necessarily to sell, but we did all the necessary research. It used to be a weight room, so there were rubber floors below, acoustic tile ceilings and fluorescent lights. We took all that down, and we found beautiful wooden floors, whitewashed beams and it had the look -- while we were renovating this place, somebody said, "You know, it really kind of looks like the hull of a ship." And we looked around and somebody else said, "Well, you should sell supplies to the working buccaneer." (Laughter) And so this is what we did. So it made everybody laugh, and we said, "There's a point to that. Let's sell pirate supplies." This is the pirate supply store. You see, this is sort of a sketch I did on a napkin. A great carpenter built all this stuff and you see, we made it look sort of pirate supply-like. Here you see planks sold by the foot and we have supplies to combat scurvy. We have the peg legs there, that are all handmade and fitted to you. Up at the top, you see the eyepatch display, which is the black column there for everyday use for your eyepatch, and then you have the pastel and other colors for stepping out at night -- special occasions, bar mitzvahs and whatever. So we opened this place. And this is a vat that we fill with treasures that students dig in. This is replacement eyes in case you lose one. These are some signs that we have all over the place: "Practical Joking with Pirates." While you're reading the sign, we pull a rope behind the counter and eight mop heads drop on your head. That was just my one thing -- I said we had to have something that drops on people's heads. It became mop heads. And this is the fish theater, which is just a saltwater tank with three seats, and then right behind it we set up this space, which was the tutoring center. So right there is the tutoring center, and then behind the curtain were the McSweeney's offices, where all of us would be working on the magazine and book editing and things like that. The kids would come in -- or we thought they would come in. I should back up. We set the place up, we opened up, we spent months and months renovating this place. We had tables, chairs, computers, everything. I went to a dot-com auction at a Holiday Inn in Palo Alto and I bought 11 G4s with a stroke of a paddle. Anyway, we bought 'em, we set everything up and then we waited. It was started with about 12 of my friends, people that I had known for years that were writers in the neighborhood. And we sat. And at 2:30 p.m. we put a sandwich board out on the front sidewalk and it just said, "Free Tutoring for Your English-Related and Writing-Related Needs -- Just Come In, It's All Free." And we thought, "Oh, they're going to storm the gates, they're gonna love it." And they didn't. And so we waited, we sat at the tables, we waited and waited. And everybody was becoming very discouraged because it was weeks and weeks that we waited, really, where nobody came in. And then somebody alerted us to the fact that maybe there was a trust gap, because we were operating behind a pirate supply store. (Laughter) We never put it together, you know? And so then, around that time, I persuaded a woman named Nineveh Caligari, a longtime San Francisco educator -- she was teaching in Mexico City, she had all the experience necessary, knew everything about education, was connected with all the teachers and community members in the neighborhood -- I convinced her to move up from Mexico City where she was teaching. She took over as executive director. Immediately, she made the inroads with the teachers and the parents and the students and everything, and so suddenly it was actually full every day. And what we were trying to offer every day was one-on-one attention. The goal was to have a one-to-one ratio with every one of these students. You know, it's been proven that 35 to 40 hours a year with one-on-one attention, a student can get one grade level higher. And so most of these students, English is not spoken in the home. They come there, many times their parents -- you can't see it, but there's a church pew that I bought in a Berkeley auction right there -- the parents will sometimes watch while their kids are being tutored. So that was the basis of it, was one-on-one attention. And we found ourselves full every day with kids. If you're on Valencia Street within those few blocks at around 2 p.m., 2:30 p.m., you will get run over, often, by the kids and their big backpacks, or whatever, actually running to this space, which is very strange, because it's school, in a way. But there was something psychological happening there that was just a little bit different. And the other thing was, there was no stigma. Kids weren't going into the "Center-for-Kids-That-Need-More-Help," or something like that. It was 826 Valencia. First of all, it was a pirate supply store, which is insane. And then secondly, there's a publishing company in the back. And so our interns were actually working at the same tables very often, and shoulder-to-shoulder, computer-next-to-computer with the students. And so it became a tutoring center -- publishing center, is what we called it -- and a writing center. They go in, and they might be working with a high school student actually working on a novel -- because we had very gifted kids, too. So there's no stigma. They're all working next to each other. It's all a creative endeavor. They're seeing adults. They're modeling their behavior. These adults, they're working in their field. They can lean over, ask a question of one of these adults and it all sort of feeds on each other. There's a lot of cross-pollination. The only problem, especially for the adults working at McSweeney's who hadn't necessarily bought into all of this when they signed up, was that there was just the one bathroom. (Laughter) With like 60 kids a day, this is a problem. But you know, there's something about the kids finishing their homework in a given day, working one-on-one, getting all this attention -- they go home, they're finished. They don't stall. They don't do their homework in front of the TV. They're allowed to go home at 5:30 p.m., enjoy their family, enjoy other hobbies, get outside, play. And that makes a happy family. A bunch of happy families in a neighborhood is a happy community. A bunch of happy communities tied together is a happy city and a happy world. So the key to it all is homework! (Laughter) (Applause) There you have it, you know -- one-on-one attention. So we started off with about 12 volunteers, and then we had about 50, and then a couple hundred. And we now have 1,400 volunteers on our roster. And we make it incredibly easy to volunteer. The key thing is, even if you only have a couple of hours a month, those two hours shoulder-to-shoulder, next to one student, concentrated attention, shining this beam of light on their work, on their thoughts and their self-expression, is going to be absolutely transformative, because so many of the students have not had that ever before. So we said, "Even if you have two hours one Sunday every six months, it doesn't matter. That's going to be enough." So that's partly why the tutor corps grew so fast. Then we said, "Well, what are we going to do with the space during the day, because it has to be used before 2:30 p.m.?" So we started bringing in classes during the day. So every day, there's a field trip where they together create a book -- you can see it being typed up above. This is one of the classes getting way too excited about writing. You just point a camera at a class, and it always looks like this. So this is one of the books that they do. Notice the title of the book, "The Book That Was Never Checked Out: Titanic." And the first line of that book is, "Once there was a book named Cindy that was about the Titanic." So, meanwhile, there's an adult in the back typing this up, taking it completely seriously, which blows their mind. So then we still had more tutors to use. This is a shot of just some of the tutors during one of the events. The teachers that we work with -- and everything is different to teachers -- they tell us what to do. We went in there thinking, "We're ultimately, completely malleable. You're going to tell us. The neighborhood's going to tell us, the parents are going to tell us. The teachers are going to tell us how we're most useful." So then they said, "Why don't you come into the schools? Because what about the students that wouldn't come to you, necessarily, who don't have really active parents that are bringing them in, or aren't close enough?" So then we started saying, "Well, we've got 1,400 people on our tutor roster. Let's just put out the word." A teacher will say, "I need 12 tutors for the next five Sundays. We're working on our college essays. Send them in." So we put that out on the wire: 1,400 tutors. Whoever can make it signs up. They go in about a half an hour before the class. The teacher tells them what to do, how to do it, what their training is, what their project is so far. They work under the teacher's guide, and it's all in one big room. And that's actually the brunt of what we do is, people going straight from their workplace, straight from home, straight into the classroom and working directly with the students. So then we're able to work with thousands and thousands of more students. Then another school said, "Well, what if we just give you a classroom and you can staff it all day?" So this is the Everett Middle School Writers' Room, where we decorated it in buccaneer style. It's right off the library. And there we serve all 529 kids in this middle school. This is their newspaper, the "Straight-Up News," that has an ongoing column from Mayor Gavin Newsom in both languages -- English and Spanish. So then one day Isabel Allende wrote to us and said, "Hey, why don't you assign a book with high school students? I want them to write about how to achieve peace in a violent world." And so we went into Thurgood Marshall High School, which is a school that we had worked with on some other things, and we gave that assignment to the students. And we said, "Isabel Allende is going to read all your essays at the end. She's going to publish them in a book. She's going to sponsor the printing of this book in paperback form. It's going to be available in all the bookstores in the Bay Area and throughout the world, on Amazon and you name it." So these kids worked harder than they've ever worked on anything in their lives, because there was that outside audience, there was Isabel Allende on the other end. I think we had about 170 tutors that worked on this book with them and so this worked out incredibly well. We had a big party at the end. This is a book that you can find anywhere. So that led to a series of these. You can see Amy Tan sponsored the next one, "I Might Get Somewhere." And this became an ongoing thing. More and more books. Now we're sort of addicted to the book thing. The kids will work harder than they've ever worked in their life if they know it's going to be permanent, know it's going to be on a shelf, know that nobody can diminish what they've thought and said, that we've honored their words, honored their thoughts with hundreds of hours of five drafts, six drafts -- all this attention that we give to their thoughts. And once they achieve that level, once they've written at that level, they can never go back. It's absolutely transformative. And so then they're all sold in the store. This is near the planks. We sell all the student books. Where else would you put them, right? So we sell 'em, and then something weird had been happening with the stores. The store, actually -- even though we started out as just a gag -- the store actually made money. So it was paying the rent. And maybe this is just a San Francisco thing -- I don't know, I don't want to judge. But people would come in -- and this was before the pirate movies and everything! It was making a lot of money. Not a lot of money, but it was paying the rent, paying a full-time staff member there. There's the ocean maps you can see on the left. And it became a gateway to the community. People would come in and say, "What the --? What is this?" I don't want to swear on the web. (Laughter) Is that a rule? I don't know. They would say, "What is this?" And people would come in and learn more about it. And then right beyond -- there's usually a little chain there -- right beyond, they would see the kids being tutored. This is a field trip going on. And so they would be shopping, and they might be more likely to buy some lard, or millet for their parrot, or, you know, a hook, or hook protector for nighttime, all of these things we sell. So the store actually did really well. But it brought in so many people -- teachers, donors, volunteers, everybody -- because it was street level. It was open to the public. It wasn't a non-profit buried, you know, on the 30th floor of some building downtown. It was right in the neighborhood that it was serving, and it was open all the time to the public. So, it became this sort of weird, happy accident. So all the people I used to know in Brooklyn, they said, "Well, why don't we have a place like that here?" And a lot of them had been former educators or would-be educators, so they combined with a lot of local designers, local writers, and they just took the idea independently and they did their own thing. They didn't want to sell pirate supplies. They didn't think that that was going to work there. So, knowing the crime-fighting community in New York, they opened the Brooklyn Superhero Supply Company. This is Sam Potts' great design that did this. And this was to make it look sort of like one of those keysmith's shops that has to have every service they've ever offered, you know, all over there. So they opened this place. Inside, it's like a Costco for superheroes -- all the supplies in kind of basic form. These are all handmade. These are all sort of repurposed other products, or whatever. All the packaging is done by Sam Potts. So then you have the villain containment unit, where kids put their parents. You have the office. This is a little vault -- you have to put your product in there, it goes up an electric lift and then the guy behind the counter tells you that you have to recite the vow of heroism, which you do, if you want to buy anything. And it limits, really, their sales. Personally, I think it's a problem. Because they have to do it hand on heart and everything. These are some of the products. These are all handmade. This is a secret identity kit. If you want to take on the identity of Sharon Boone, one American female marketing executive from Hoboken, New Jersey. It's a full dossier on everything you would need to know about Sharon Boone. So, this is the capery where you get fitted for your cape, and then you walk up these three steel-graded steps and then we turn on three hydraulic fans from every side and then you can see the cape in action. There's nothing worse than, you know, getting up there and the cape is bunching up or something like that. So then, the secret door -- this is one of the shelves you don't see when you walk in, but it slowly opens. You can see it there in the middle next to all the grappling hooks. It opens and then this is the tutoring center in the back. (Applause) So you can see the full effect! But this is -- I just want to emphasize -- locally funded, locally built. All the designers, all of the builders, everybody was local, all the time was pro-bono. I just came and visited and said, "Yes, you guys are doing great," or whatever. That was it. You can see the time in all five boroughs of New York in the back. (Laughter) (Applause) So this is the space during tutoring hours. It's very busy. Same principles: one-on-one attention, complete devotion to the students' work and a boundless optimism and sort of a possibility of creativity and ideas. And this switch is flicked in their heads when they walk through those 18 feet of this bizarre store, right? So it's school, but it's not school. It's clearly not school, even though they're working shoulder-to-shoulder on tables, pencils and papers, whatever. This is one of the students, Khaled Hamdan. You can read this quote. Addicted to video games and TV. Couldn't concentrate at home. Came in. Got this concentrated attention. And he couldn't escape it. So, soon enough, he was writing. He would finish his homework early -- got really addicted to finishing his homework early. It's an addictive thing to sort of be done with it, and to have it checked, and to know he's going to achieve the next thing and be prepared for school the next day. So he got hooked on that, and then he started doing other things. He's now been published in five books. He co-wrote a mockumentary about failed superheroes called "Super-Has-Beens." He wrote a series on "Penguin Balboa," which is a fighting -- a boxing -- penguin. And then he read aloud just a few weeks ago to 500 people at Symphony Space, at a benefit for 826 New York. So he's there every day. He's evangelical about it. He brings his cousins in now. There's four family members that come in every day. So, I'll go through really quickly. This is L.A., The Echo Park Time Travel Mart: "Whenever You Are, We're Already Then." (Laughter) This is sort of a 7-Eleven for time travelers. So you see everything: it's exactly as a 7-Eleven would be. Leeches. Mammoth chunks. They even have their own Slurpee machine: "Out of Order. Come Back Yesterday." (Laughter) (Applause) Anyway. So I'm going to jump ahead. These are spaces that are only affiliated with us, doing this same thing: Word St. in Pittsfield, Massachusetts; Ink Spot in Cincinnati; Youth Speaks, San Francisco, California, which inspired us; Studio St. Louis in St. Louis; Austin Bat Cave in Austin; Fighting Words in Dublin, Ireland, started by Roddy Doyle, this will be open in April. Now I'm going to the TED Wish -- is that okay? All right, I've got a minute. So, the TED Wish: I wish that you -- you personally and every creative individual and organization you know -- will find a way to directly engage with a public school in your area and that you'll then tell the story of how you got involved, so that within a year we have a thousand examples -- a thousand! -- of transformative partnerships. Profound leaps forward! And these can be things that maybe you're already doing. I know that so many people in this room are already doing really interesting things. I know that for a fact. So, tell us these stories and inspire others on the website. We created a website. I'm going to switch to "we," and not "I," hope: We hope that the attendees of this conference will usher in a new era of participation in our public schools. We hope that you will take the lead in partnering your innovative spirit and expertise with that of innovative educators in your community. Always let the teachers lead the way. They will tell you how to be useful. I hope that you'll step in and help out. There are a million ways. You can walk up to your local school and consult with the teachers. They'll always tell you how to help. So, this is with Hot Studio in San Francisco, they did this phenomenal job. This website is already up, it's already got a bunch of stories, a lot of ideas. It's called "Once Upon a School," which is a great title, I think. This site will document every story, every project that comes out of this conference and around the world. So you go to the website, you see a bunch of ideas you can be inspired by and then you add your own projects once you get started. Hot Studio did a great job in a very tight deadline. So, visit the site. If you have any questions, you can ask this guy, who's our director of national programs. He'll be on the phone. You email him, he'll answer any question you possibly want. And he'll get you inspired and get you going and guide you through the process so that you can affect change. And it can be fun! That's the point of this talk -- it needn't be sterile. It needn't be bureaucratically untenable. You can do and use the skills that you have. The schools need you. The teachers need you. Students and parents need you. They need your actual person: your physical personhood and your open minds and open ears and boundless compassion, sitting next to them, listening and nodding and asking questions for hours at a time. Some of these kids just don't plain know how good they are: how smart and how much they have to say. You can tell them. You can shine that light on them, one human interaction at a time. So we hope you'll join us. Thank you so much.
18 minutes is an absolutely brutal time limit, so I'm going to dive straight in, right at the point where I get this thing to work. Here we go. I'm going to talk about five different things. I'm going to talk about why defeating aging is desirable. I'm going to talk about why we have to get our shit together, and actually talk about this a bit more than we do. I'm going to talk about feasibility as well, of course. I'm going to talk about why we are so fatalistic about doing anything about aging. And then I'm going spend perhaps the second half of the talk talking about, you know, how we might actually be able to prove that fatalism is wrong, namely, by actually doing something about it. I'm going to do that in two steps. The first one I'm going to talk about is how to get from a relatively modest amount of life extension -- which I'm going to define as 30 years, applied to people who are already in middle-age when you start -- to a point which can genuinely be called defeating aging. Namely, essentially an elimination of the relationship between how old you are and how likely you are to die in the next year -- or indeed, to get sick in the first place. And of course, the last thing I'm going to talk about is how to reach that intermediate step, that point of maybe 30 years life extension. So I'm going to start with why we should. Now, I want to ask a question. Hands up: anyone in the audience who is in favor of malaria? That was easy. OK. OK. Hands up: anyone in the audience who's not sure whether malaria is a good thing or a bad thing? OK. So we all think malaria is a bad thing. That's very good news, because I thought that was what the answer would be. Now the thing is, I would like to put it to you that the main reason why we think that malaria is a bad thing is because of a characteristic of malaria that it shares with aging. And here is that characteristic. The only real difference is that aging kills considerably more people than malaria does. Now, I like in an audience, in Britain especially, to talk about the comparison with foxhunting, which is something that was banned after a long struggle, by the government not very many months ago. I mean, I know I'm with a sympathetic audience here, but, as we know, a lot of people are not entirely persuaded by this logic. And this is actually a rather good comparison, it seems to me. You know, a lot of people said, "Well, you know, city boys have no business telling us rural types what to do with our time. It's a traditional part of the way of life, and we should be allowed to carry on doing it. It's ecologically sound; it stops the population explosion of foxes." But ultimately, the government prevailed in the end, because the majority of the British public, and certainly the majority of members of Parliament, came to the conclusion that it was really something that should not be tolerated in a civilized society. And I think that human aging shares all of these characteristics in spades. What part of this do people not understand? It's not just about life, of course -- (Laughter) -- it's about healthy life, you know -- getting frail and miserable and dependent is no fun, whether or not dying may be fun. So really, this is how I would like to describe it. It's a global trance. These are the sorts of unbelievable excuses that people give for aging. And, I mean, OK, I'm not actually saying that these excuses are completely valueless. There are some good points to be made here, things that we ought to be thinking about, forward planning so that nothing goes too -- well, so that we minimize the turbulence when we actually figure out how to fix aging. But these are completely crazy, when you actually remember your sense of proportion. You know, these are arguments; these are things that would be legitimate to be concerned about. But the question is, are they so dangerous -- these risks of doing something about aging -- that they outweigh the downside of doing the opposite, namely, leaving aging as it is? Are these so bad that they outweigh condemning 100,000 people a day to an unnecessarily early death? You know, if you haven't got an argument that's that strong, then just don't waste my time, is what I say. (Laughter) Now, there is one argument that some people do think really is that strong, and here it is. People worry about overpopulation; they say, "Well, if we fix aging, no one's going to die to speak of, or at least the death toll is going to be much lower, only from crossing St. Giles carelessly. And therefore, we're not going to be able to have many kids, and kids are really important to most people." And that's true. And you know, a lot of people try to fudge this question, and give answers like this. I don't agree with those answers. I think they basically don't work. I think it's true, that we will face a dilemma in this respect. We will have to decide whether to have a low birth rate, or a high death rate. A high death rate will, of course, arise from simply rejecting these therapies, in favor of carrying on having a lot of kids. And, I say that that's fine -- the future of humanity is entitled to make that choice. What's not fine is for us to make that choice on behalf of the future. If we vacillate, hesitate, and do not actually develop these therapies, then we are condemning a whole cohort of people -- who would have been young enough and healthy enough to benefit from those therapies, but will not be, because we haven't developed them as quickly as we could -- we'll be denying those people an indefinite life span, and I consider that that is immoral. That's my answer to the overpopulation question. Right. So the next thing is, now why should we get a little bit more active on this? And the fundamental answer is that the pro-aging trance is not as dumb as it looks. It's actually a sensible way of coping with the inevitability of aging. Aging is ghastly, but it's inevitable, so, you know, we've got to find some way to put it out of our minds, and it's rational to do anything that we might want to do, to do that. Like, for example, making up these ridiculous reasons why aging is actually a good thing after all. But of course, that only works when we have both of these components. And as soon as the inevitability bit becomes a little bit unclear -- and we might be in range of doing something about aging -- this becomes part of the problem. This pro-aging trance is what stops us from agitating about these things. And that's why we have to really talk about this a lot -- evangelize, I will go so far as to say, quite a lot -- in order to get people's attention, and make people realize that they are in a trance in this regard. So that's all I'm going to say about that. I'm now going to talk about feasibility. And the fundamental reason, I think, why we feel that aging is inevitable is summed up in a definition of aging that I'm giving here. A very simple definition. Aging is a side effect of being alive in the first place, which is to say, metabolism. This is not a completely tautological statement; it's a reasonable statement. Aging is basically a process that happens to inanimate objects like cars, and it also happens to us, despite the fact that we have a lot of clever self-repair mechanisms, because those self-repair mechanisms are not perfect. So basically, metabolism, which is defined as basically everything that keeps us alive from one day to the next, has side effects. Those side effects accumulate and eventually cause pathology. That's a fine definition. So we can put it this way: we can say that, you know, we have this chain of events. And there are really two games in town, according to most people, with regard to postponing aging. They're what I'm calling here the "gerontology approach" and the "geriatrics approach." The geriatrician will intervene late in the day, when pathology is becoming evident, and the geriatrician will try and hold back the sands of time, and stop the accumulation of side effects from causing the pathology quite so soon. Of course, it's a very short-term-ist strategy; it's a losing battle, because the things that are causing the pathology are becoming more abundant as time goes on. The gerontology approach looks much more promising on the surface, because, you know, prevention is better than cure. But unfortunately the thing is that we don't understand metabolism very well. In fact, we have a pitifully poor understanding of how organisms work -- even cells we're not really too good on yet. We've discovered things like, for example, RNA interference only a few years ago, and this is a really fundamental component of how cells work. Basically, gerontology is a fine approach in the end, but it is not an approach whose time has come when we're talking about intervention. So then, what do we do about that? I mean, that's a fine logic, that sounds pretty convincing, pretty ironclad, doesn't it? But it isn't. Before I tell you why it isn't, I'm going to go a little bit into what I'm calling step two. Just suppose, as I said, that we do acquire -- let's say we do it today for the sake of argument -- the ability to confer 30 extra years of healthy life on people who are already in middle age, let's say 55. I'm going to call that "robust human rejuvenation." OK. What would that actually mean for how long people of various ages today -- or equivalently, of various ages at the time that these therapies arrive -- would actually live? In order to answer that question -- you might think it's simple, but it's not simple. We can't just say, "Well, if they're young enough to benefit from these therapies, then they'll live 30 years longer." That's the wrong answer. And the reason it's the wrong answer is because of progress. There are two sorts of technological progress really, for this purpose. There are fundamental, major breakthroughs, and there are incremental refinements of those breakthroughs. Now, they differ a great deal in terms of the predictability of time frames. Fundamental breakthroughs: very hard to predict how long it's going to take to make a fundamental breakthrough. It was a very long time ago that we decided that flying would be fun, and it took us until 1903 to actually work out how to do it. But after that, things were pretty steady and pretty uniform. I think this is a reasonable sequence of events that happened in the progression of the technology of powered flight. We can think, really, that each one is sort of beyond the imagination of the inventor of the previous one, if you like. The incremental advances have added up to something which is not incremental anymore. This is the sort of thing you see after a fundamental breakthrough. And you see it in all sorts of technologies. Computers: you can look at a more or less parallel time line, happening of course a bit later. You can look at medical care. I mean, hygiene, vaccines, antibiotics -- you know, the same sort of time frame. So I think that actually step two, that I called a step a moment ago, isn't a step at all. That in fact, the people who are young enough to benefit from these first therapies that give this moderate amount of life extension, even though those people are already middle-aged when the therapies arrive, will be at some sort of cusp. They will mostly survive long enough to receive improved treatments that will give them a further 30 or maybe 50 years. In other words, they will be staying ahead of the game. The therapies will be improving faster than the remaining imperfections in the therapies are catching up with us. This is a very important point for me to get across. Because, you know, most people, when they hear that I predict that a lot of people alive today are going to live to 1,000 or more, they think that I'm saying that we're going to invent therapies in the next few decades that are so thoroughly eliminating aging that those therapies will let us live to 1,000 or more. I'm not saying that at all. I'm saying that the rate of improvement of those therapies will be enough. They'll never be perfect, but we'll be able to fix the things that 200-year-olds die of, before we have any 200-year-olds. And the same for 300 and 400 and so on. I decided to give this a little name, which is "longevity escape velocity." (Laughter) Well, it seems to get the point across. So, these trajectories here are basically how we would expect people to live, in terms of remaining life expectancy, as measured by their health, for given ages that they were at the time that these therapies arrive. If you're already 100, or even if you're 80 -- and an average 80-year-old, we probably can't do a lot for you with these therapies, because you're too close to death's door for the really initial, experimental therapies to be good enough for you. You won't be able to withstand them. But if you're only 50, then there's a chance that you might be able to pull out of the dive and, you know -- (Laughter) -- eventually get through this and start becoming biologically younger in a meaningful sense, in terms of your youthfulness, both physical and mental, and in terms of your risk of death from age-related causes. And of course, if you're a bit younger than that, then you're never really even going to get near to being fragile enough to die of age-related causes. So this is a genuine conclusion that I come to, that the first 150-year-old -- we don't know how old that person is today, because we don't know how long it's going to take to get these first-generation therapies. But irrespective of that age, I'm claiming that the first person to live to 1,000 -- subject of course, to, you know, global catastrophes -- is actually, probably, only about 10 years younger than the first 150-year-old. And that's quite a thought. Alright, so finally I'm going to spend the rest of the talk, my last seven-and-a-half minutes, on step one; namely, how do we actually get to this moderate amount of life extension that will allow us to get to escape velocity? And in order to do that, I need to talk about mice a little bit. I have a corresponding milestone to robust human rejuvenation. I'm calling it "robust mouse rejuvenation," not very imaginatively. And this is what it is. I say we're going to take a long-lived strain of mouse, which basically means mice that live about three years on average. We do exactly nothing to them until they're already two years old. And then we do a whole bunch of stuff to them, and with those therapies, we get them to live, on average, to their fifth birthday. So, in other words, we add two years -- we treble their remaining lifespan, starting from the point that we started the therapies. The question then is, what would that actually mean for the time frame until we get to the milestone I talked about earlier for humans? Which we can now, as I've explained, equivalently call either robust human rejuvenation or longevity escape velocity. Secondly, what does it mean for the public's perception of how long it's going to take for us to get to those things, starting from the time we get the mice? And thirdly, the question is, what will it do to actually how much people want it? And it seems to me that the first question is entirely a biology question, and it's extremely hard to answer. One has to be very speculative, and many of my colleagues would say that we should not do this speculation, that we should simply keep our counsel until we know more. I say that's nonsense. I say we absolutely are irresponsible if we stay silent on this. We need to give our best guess as to the time frame, in order to give people a sense of proportion so that they can assess their priorities. So, I say that we have a 50/50 chance of reaching this RHR milestone, robust human rejuvenation, within 15 years from the point that we get to robust mouse rejuvenation. 15 years from the robust mouse. The public's perception will probably be somewhat better than that. The public tends to underestimate how difficult scientific things are. So they'll probably think it's five years away. They'll be wrong, but that actually won't matter too much. And finally, of course, I think it's fair to say that a large part of the reason why the public is so ambivalent about aging now is the global trance I spoke about earlier, the coping strategy. That will be history at this point, because it will no longer be possible to believe that aging is inevitable in humans, since it's been postponed so very effectively in mice. So we're likely to end up with a very strong change in people's attitudes, and of course that has enormous implications. So in order to tell you now how we're going to get these mice, I'm going to add a little bit to my description of aging. I'm going to use this word "damage" to denote these intermediate things that are caused by metabolism and that eventually cause pathology. Because the critical thing about this is that even though the damage only eventually causes pathology, the damage itself is caused ongoing-ly throughout life, starting before we're born. But it is not part of metabolism itself. And this turns out to be useful. Because we can re-draw our original diagram this way. We can say that, fundamentally, the difference between gerontology and geriatrics is that gerontology tries to inhibit the rate at which metabolism lays down this damage. And I'm going to explain exactly what damage is in concrete biological terms in a moment. And geriatricians try to hold back the sands of time by stopping the damage converting into pathology. And the reason it's a losing battle is because the damage is continuing to accumulate. So there's a third approach, if we look at it this way. We can call it the "engineering approach," and I claim that the engineering approach is within range. The engineering approach does not intervene in any processes. It does not intervene in this process or this one. And that's good because it means that it's not a losing battle, and it's something that we are within range of being able to do, because it doesn't involve improving on evolution. The engineering approach simply says, "Let's go and periodically repair all of these various types of damage -- not necessarily repair them completely, but repair them quite a lot, so that we keep the level of damage down below the threshold that must exist, that causes it to be pathogenic." We know that this threshold exists, because we don't get age-related diseases until we're in middle age, even though the damage has been accumulating since before we were born. Why do I say that we're in range? Well, this is basically it. The point about this slide is actually the bottom. If we try to say which bits of metabolism are important for aging, we will be here all night, because basically all of metabolism is important for aging in one way or another. This list is just for illustration; it is incomplete. The list on the right is also incomplete. It's a list of types of pathology that are age-related, and it's just an incomplete list. But I would like to claim to you that this list in the middle is actually complete -- this is the list of types of thing that qualify as damage, side effects of metabolism that cause pathology in the end, or that might cause pathology. And there are only seven of them. They're categories of things, of course, but there's only seven of them. Cell loss, mutations in chromosomes, mutations in the mitochondria and so on. First of all, I'd like to give you an argument for why that list is complete. Of course one can make a biological argument. One can say, "OK, what are we made of?" We're made of cells and stuff between cells. What can damage accumulate in? The answer is: long-lived molecules, because if a short-lived molecule undergoes damage, but then the molecule is destroyed -- like by a protein being destroyed by proteolysis -- then the damage is gone, too. It's got to be long-lived molecules. So, these seven things were all under discussion in gerontology a long time ago and that is pretty good news, because it means that, you know, we've come a long way in biology in these 20 years, so the fact that we haven't extended this list is a pretty good indication that there's no extension to be done. However, it's better than that; we actually know how to fix them all, in mice, in principle -- and what I mean by in principle is, we probably can actually implement these fixes within a decade. Some of them are partially implemented already, the ones at the top. I haven't got time to go through them at all, but my conclusion is that, if we can actually get suitable funding for this, then we can probably develop robust mouse rejuvenation in only 10 years, but we do need to get serious about it. We do need to really start trying. So of course, there are some biologists in the audience, and I want to give some answers to some of the questions that you may have. You may have been dissatisfied with this talk, but fundamentally you have to go and read this stuff. I've published a great deal on this; I cite the experimental work on which my optimism is based, and there's quite a lot of detail there. The detail is what makes me confident of my rather aggressive time frames that I'm predicting here. So if you think that I'm wrong, you'd better damn well go and find out why you think I'm wrong. And of course the main thing is that you shouldn't trust people who call themselves gerontologists because, as with any radical departure from previous thinking within a particular field, you know, you expect people in the mainstream to be a bit resistant and not really to take it seriously. So, you know, you've got to actually do your homework, in order to understand whether this is true. And we'll just end with a few things. One thing is, you know, you'll be hearing from a guy in the next session who said some time ago that he could sequence the human genome in half no time, and everyone said, "Well, it's obviously impossible." And you know what happened. So, you know, this does happen. We have various strategies -- there's the Methuselah Mouse Prize, which is basically an incentive to innovate, and to do what you think is going to work, and you get money for it if you win. There's a proposal to actually put together an institute. This is what's going to take a bit of money. But, I mean, look -- how long does it take to spend that on the war in Iraq? Not very long. OK. (Laughter) It's got to be philanthropic, because profits distract biotech, but it's basically got a 90 percent chance, I think, of succeeding in this. And I think we know how to do it. And I'll stop there. Thank you. (Applause) Chris Anderson: OK. I don't know if there's going to be any questions but I thought I would give people the chance. Audience: Since you've been talking about aging and trying to defeat it, why is it that you make yourself appear like an old man? (Laughter) AG: Because I am an old man. I am actually 158. (Laughter) (Applause) Audience: Species on this planet have evolved with immune systems to fight off all the diseases so that individuals live long enough to procreate. However, as far as I know, all the species have evolved to actually die, so when cells divide, the telomerase get shorter, and eventually species die. So, why does -- evolution has -- seems to have selected against immortality, when it is so advantageous, or is evolution just incomplete? AG: Brilliant. Thank you for asking a question that I can answer with an uncontroversial answer. I'm going to tell you the genuine mainstream answer to your question, which I happen to agree with, which is that, no, aging is not a product of selection, evolution; [aging] is simply a product of evolutionary neglect. In other words, we have aging because it's hard work not to have aging; you need more genetic pathways, more sophistication in your genes in order to age more slowly, and that carries on being true the longer you push it out. So, to the extent that evolution doesn't matter, doesn't care whether genes are passed on by individuals, living a long time or by procreation, there's a certain amount of modulation of that, which is why different species have different lifespans, but that's why there are no immortal species. CA: The genes don't care but we do? AG: That's right. Audience: Hello. I read somewhere that in the last 20 years, the average lifespan of basically anyone on the planet has grown by 10 years. If I project that, that would make me think that I would live until 120 if I don't crash on my motorbike. That means that I'm one of your subjects to become a 1,000-year-old? AG: If you lose a bit of weight. (Laughter) Your numbers are a bit out. The standard numbers are that lifespans have been growing at between one and two years per decade. So, it's not quite as good as you might think, you might hope. But I intend to move it up to one year per year as soon as possible. Audience: I was told that many of the brain cells we have as adults are actually in the human embryo, and that the brain cells last 80 years or so. If that is indeed true, biologically are there implications in the world of rejuvenation? If there are cells in my body that live all 80 years, as opposed to a typical, you know, couple of months? AG: There are technical implications certainly. Basically what we need to do is replace cells in those few areas of the brain that lose cells at a respectable rate, especially neurons, but we don't want to replace them any faster than that -- or not much faster anyway, because replacing them too fast would degrade cognitive function. What I said about there being no non-aging species earlier on was a little bit of an oversimplification. There are species that have no aging -- Hydra for example -- but they do it by not having a nervous system -- and not having any tissues in fact that rely for their function on very long-lived cells.
The advances that have taken place in astronomy, cosmology and biology, in the last 10 years, are really extraordinary -- to the point where we know more about our universe and how it works than many of you might imagine. But there was something else that I've noticed as those changes were taking place, as people were starting to find out that hmm ... yeah, there really is a black hole at the center of every galaxy. The science writers and editors -- I shouldn't say science writers, I should say people who write about science -- and editors would sit down over a couple of beers, after a hard day of work, and start talking about some of these incredible perceptions about how the universe works. And they would inevitably end up in what I thought was a very bizarre place, which is ways the world could end very suddenly. And that's what I want to talk about today. (Laughter) Ah, you laugh, you fools. (Laughter) (Voice: Can we finish up a little early?) (Laughter) Yeah, we need the time! Stephen Petranek: At first, it all seemed a little fantastical to me, but after challenging a lot of these ideas, I began to take a lot of them seriously. And then September 11 happened, and I thought, ah, God, I can't go to the TED conference and talk about how the world is going to end. Nobody wants to hear that. Not after this! And that got me into a discussion with some other people, other scientists, about maybe some other subjects, and one of the guys I talked to, who was a neuroscientist, said, "You know, I think there are a lot of solutions to the problems you brought up," and reminds me of Michael's talk yesterday and his mother saying you can't have a solution if you don't have a problem. So, we went out looking for solutions to ways that the world might end tomorrow, and lo and behold, we found them. Which leads me to a videotape of a President Bush press conference from a couple of weeks ago. Can we run that, Andrew? President George W. Bush: Whatever it costs to defend our security, and whatever it costs to defend our freedom, we must pay it. SP: I agree with the president. He wants two trillion dollars to protect us from terrorists next year, a two-trillion-dollar federal budget, which will land us back into deficit spending real fast. But terrorists aren't the only threat we face. There are really serious calamities staring us in the eye that we're in the same kind of denial about that we were about terrorism, and what could've happened on September 11. I would propose, therefore, that if we took 10 billion dollars from that 2.13 trillion dollar budget -- which is two one hundredths of that budget -- and we doled out a billion dollars to each one of these problems I'm going to talk to you about, the vast majority could be solved, and the rest we could deal with. So, I hope you find this both fascinating -- I'm fascinated by this kind of stuff, I gotta admit -- to me these are Richard's cockroaches. But I also hope, because I think the people in this room can literally change the world, I hope you take some of this stuff away with you, and when you have an opportunity to be influential, that you try to get some heavy-duty money spent on some of these ideas. So let's start. Number 10: we lose the will to survive. We live in an incredible age of modern medicine. We are all much healthier than we were 20 years ago. People around the world are getting better medicine -- but mentally, we're falling apart. The World Health Organization now estimates that one out of five people on the planet is clinically depressed. And the World Health Organization also says that depression is the biggest epidemic that humankind has ever faced. Soon, genetic breakthroughs and even better medicine are going to allow us to think of 100 as a normal lifespan. A female child born tomorrow, on average -- median -- will live to age 83. Our life longevity is going up almost a year for every year that passes. Now the problem with all of this, getting older, is that people over 65 are the most likely people to commit suicide. So, what are the solutions? We don't really have mental health insurance in this country, and it's -- (Applause) -- it's really a crime. Something like 98 percent of all people with depression, and I mean really severe depression -- I have a friend with stunningly severe depression -- this is a curable disease, with present medicine and present technology. But it is often a combination of talk therapy and pills. Pills alone don't do it, especially in clinically depressed people. You ought to be able to go to a psychiatrist or a psychologist, and put down your 10-dollar copay, and get treated, just like you do when you got a cut on your arm. It's ridiculous. Secondly, drug companies are not going to develop really sophisticated psychoactive drugs. We know that most mental illnesses have a biological component that can be dealt with. And we know just an amazing amount more about the brain now than we did 10 years ago. We need a pump-push from the federal government, through NIH and National Science -- NSF -- and places like that to start helping the drug companies develop some advanced psychoactive drugs. Moving on. Number nine -- don't laugh -- aliens invade Earth. Ten years ago, you couldn't have found an astronomer -- well, very few astronomers -- in the world who would've told you that there are any planets anywhere outside our solar system. 1995, we found three. The count now is up to 80 -- we're finding about two or three a month. All of the ones we've found, by the way, are in this little, teeny, tiny corner where we live, in the Milky Way. There must be millions of planets in the Milky Way, and as Carl Sagan insisted for many years, and was laughed at for it, there must be billions and billions in the universe. In a few years, NASA is going to launch four or five telescopes out to Jupiter, where there's less dust, and start looking for Earth-like planets, which we cannot see with present technology, nor detect. It's becoming obvious that the chance that life does not exist elsewhere in the universe, and probably fairly close to us, is a fairly remote idea. And the chance that some of it isn't more intelligent than ours is also a remote idea. Remember, we've only been an advanced civilization -- an industrial civilization, if you would -- for 200 years. Although every time I go to Pompeii, I'm amazed that they had the equivalent of a McDonald's on every street corner, too. So, I don't know how much civilization really has progressed since AD 79, but there's a great likelihood. I really believe this, and I don't believe in aliens, and I don't believe there are any aliens on the Earth or anything like that. But there's a likelihood that we will confront a civilization that is more intelligent than our own. Now, what will happen? What if they come to, you know, suck up our oceans for the hydrogen? And swat us away like flies, the way we swat away flies when we go into the rainforest and start logging it. We can look at our own history. The late physicist Gerard O'Neill said, "Advanced Western civilization has had a destructive effect on all primitive civilizations it has come in contact with, even in those cases where every attempt was made to protect and guard the primitive civilization." If the aliens come visiting, we're the primitive civilization. So, what are the solutions to this? (Laughter) Thank God you can all read! It may seem ridiculous, but we have a really lousy history of anticipating things like this and actually being prepared for them. How much energy and money does it take to actually have a plan to negotiate with an advanced species? Secondly -- and you're going to hear more from me about this -- we have to become an outward-looking, space-faring nation. We have got to develop the idea that the Earth doesn't last forever, our sun doesn't last forever. If we want humanity to last forever, we have to colonize the Milky Way. And that is not something that is beyond comprehension at this point. (Applause) It'll also help us a lot, if we meet an advanced civilization along the way, if we're trying to be an advanced civilization. Number eight -- (Voice: Steve, that's what I'm doing after TED.) (Laughter) (Applause) SP: You've got it! You've got the job. Number eight: the ecosystem collapses. Last July, in Science, the journal Science, 19 oceanographers published a very, very unusual article. It wasn't really a research report; it was a screed. They said, we've been looking at the oceans for a long time now, and we want to tell you they're not in trouble, they're near collapse. Many other ecosystems on Earth are in real, real danger. We're living in a time of mass extinctions that exceeds the fossil record by a factor of 10,000. We have lost 25 percent of the unique species in Hawaii in the last 20 years. California is expected to lose 25 percent of its species in the next 40 years. Somewhere in the Amazon forest is the marginal tree. You cut down that tree, the rain forest collapses as an ecosystem. There's really a tree like that out there. That's really what it comes to. And when that ecosystem collapses, it could take a major ecosystem with it, like our atmosphere. So, what do we do about this? What are the solutions? There is some modeling of ecosystems going on now. The problem with ecosystems is that we understand them so poorly, that we don't know they're really in trouble until it's almost too late. We need to know earlier that they're getting in trouble, and we need to be able to pump possible solutions into models. And with the kind of computing power we have now, there is, as I say, some of this going on, but it needs money. National Science Foundation needs to say -- you know, almost all the money that's spent on science in this country comes from the federal government, one way or another. And they get to prioritize, you know? There are people at the National Science Foundation who get to say, this is the most important thing. This is one of the things they ought to be thinking more about. Secondly, we need to create huge biodiversity reserves on the planet, and start moving them around. There's been an experiment for the last four or five years on the Georges Bank, or the Grand Banks off of Newfoundland. It's a no-take fishing zone. They can't fish there for a radius of 200 miles. And an amazing thing has happened: almost all the fish have come back, and they're reproducing like crazy. We're going to have to start doing this around the globe. We're going to have to have no-take zones. We're going to have to say, no more logging in the Amazon for 20 years. Let it recover, before we start logging again. (Applause) Number seven: particle accelerator mishap. You all remember Ted Kaczynski, the Unabomber? One of the things he raved about was that a particle accelerator experiment could go haywire and set off a chain reaction that would destroy the world. A lot of very sober-minded physicists, believe it or not, have had exactly the same thought. This spring -- there's a collider at Brookhaven, on Long Island -- this spring, it's going to have an experiment in which it creates black holes. They are expecting to create little, tiny black holes. They expect them to evaporate. (Laughter) I hope they're right. (Laughter) Other collider experiments -- there's one that's going to take place next summer at CERN -- have the possibility of creating something called strangelets, which are kind of like antimatter. Whenever they hit other matter, they destroy it and obliterate it. Most physicists say that the accelerators we have now are not really powerful enough to create black holes and strangelets that we need to worry about, and they're probably right. But, all around the world, in Japan, in Canada, there's talk about this, of reviving this in the United States. We shut one down that was going to be big. But there's talk of building very big accelerators. What can we do about this? What are the solutions? We've got the fox watching the henhouse here. We need to -- we need the advice of particle physicists to talk about particle physics and what should be done in particle physics, but we need some outside thinking and watchdogging of what's going on with these experiments. Secondly, we have a natural laboratory surrounding the Earth. We have an electromagnetic field around the Earth, and it's constantly bombarded by high-energy particles, like protons. And in my opinion, we don't spend enough time looking at that natural laboratory and figuring out first what's safe to do on Earth. Number six: biotech disaster. It's one of my favorite ones, because we've done several stories on Bt corn. Bt corn is a corn that creates its own pesticide to kill a corn borer. You may of heard of it -- heard it called StarLink, especially when all those taco shells were taken out of the supermarkets about a year and a half ago. This stuff was supposed to only be feed for animals in the United States, and it got into the human food supply, and somebody should've figured out that it would get in the human food supply very easily. But the thing that's alarming is a couple of months ago, in Mexico, where Bt corn and all genetically altered corn is totally illegal, they found Bt corn genes in wild corn plants. Now, corn originated, we think, in Mexico. This is the genetic biodiversity storehouse of corn. This brings back a skepticism that has gone away recently, that superweeds and superpests could spread around the world, from biotechnology, that literally could destroy the world's food supply in very short order. So, what do we do about that? We treat biotechnology with the same scrutiny we apply to nuclear power plants. It's that simple. This is an amazingly unregulated field. When the StarLink disaster happened, there was a battle between the EPA and the FDA over who really had authority, and over what parts of this, and they didn't get it straightened out for months. That's kind of crazy. Number five, one of my favorites: reversal of the Earth's magnetic field. Believe it or not, this happens every few hundred thousand years, and has happened many times in our history. North Pole goes to the South, South Pole goes to the North, and vice versa. But what happens, as this occurs, is that we lose our magnetic field around the Earth over the period of about 100 years, and that means that all these cosmic rays and particles that are to come streaming at us from the sun, that this field protects us from, are -- well, basically, we're gonna fry. (Laughter) (Voice: Steve, I have some additional hats downstairs.) SP: So, what can we do about this? Oh, by the way, we're overdue. It's been 780,000 years since this happened. So, it should have happened about 480,000 years ago. Oh, and here's one other thing. Scientists think now our magnetic field may be diminished by about five percent. So, maybe we're in the throes of it. One of the problems of trying to figure out how healthy the Earth is, is that we have -- you know, we don't have good weather data from 60 years ago, much less data on things like the ozone layer. So, there's a fairly simple solution to this. There's going to be a lot of cheap rocketry that's going to come online in about six or seven years that gets us into the low atmosphere very cheaply. You know, we can make ozone from car tailpipes. It's not hard: it's just three oxygen atoms. If you brought the entire ozone layer down to the surface of the Earth, it would be the thickness of two pennies, at 14 pounds per square inch. You don't need that much up there. We need to learn how to repair and replenish the Earth's ozone layer. (Applause) Number four: giant solar flares. Solar flares are enormous magnetic outbursts from the Sun that bombard the Earth with high-speed subatomic particles. So far, our atmosphere has done, and our magnetic field has done pretty well protecting us from this. Occasionally, we get a flare from the Sun that causes havoc with communications and so forth, and electricity. But the alarming thing is that astronomers recently have been studying stars that are similar to our Sun, and they've found that a number of them, when they're about the age of our Sun, brighten by a factor of as much as 20. Doesn't last for very long. And they think these are super-flares, millions of times more powerful than any flares we've had from our Sun so far. Obviously, we don't want one of those. (Laughter) There's a flip side to it. In studying stars like our Sun, we've found that they go through periods of diminishment, when their total amount of energy that's expelled from them goes down by maybe one percent. One percent doesn't sound like a lot, but it would cause one hell of an ice age here. So, what can we do about this? (Laughter) Start terraforming Mars. This is one of my favorite subjects. I wrote a story about this in Life magazine in 1993. This is rocket science, but it's not hard rocket science. Everything that we need to make an atmosphere on Mars, and to make a livable planet on Mars, is probably there. And you just, literally, have to send little nuclear factories up there that gobble up the iron oxide on the surface of Mars and spit out the oxygen. The problem is it takes 300 years to terraform Mars, minimum. Really more like 500 years to do it right. There's no reason why we shouldn't start now. (Laughter) Number three -- isn't this stuff cool? (Laughter) A new global epidemic. People have been at war with germs ever since there have been people, and from time to time, the germs sure get the upper hand. In 1918, we had a flu epidemic in the United States that killed 20 million people. That was back when the population was around 100 million people. The bubonic plague in Europe, in the Middle Ages, killed one out of four Europeans. AIDS is coming back. Ebola seems to be rearing its head with much too much frequency, and old diseases like cholera are becoming resistant to antibiotics. We've all learned what -- the kind of panic that can occur when an old disease rears its head, like anthrax. The worst possibility is that a very simple germ, like staph, for which we have one antibiotic that still works, mutates. And we know staph can do amazing things. A staph cell can be next to a muscle cell in your body and borrow genes from it when antibiotics come, and change and mutate. The danger is that some germ like staph will be -- will mutate into something that's really virulent, very contagious, and will sweep through populations before we can do anything about it. That's happened before. About 12,000 years ago, there was a massive wave of mammal extinctions in the Americas, and that is thought to have been a virulent disease. So, what can we do about it? It is nuts. We give antibiotics -- (Applause) -- every cow, every lamb, every chicken, they get antibiotics every day, all. You know, you go to a restaurant, you eat fish, I got news for you, it's all farmed. You know, you gotta ask when you go to a restaurant if it's a wild fish, cause they're not going to tell you. We're giving away the code. This is like being at war and giving somebody your secret code. We're telling the germs out there how to fight us. We gotta fix that. We gotta outlaw that right away. Secondly, our public health system, as we saw with anthrax, is a real disaster. We have a real, major outbreak of disease in the United States, we are not prepared to cope with it. Now, there is money in the federal budget, next year, to build up the public health service. But I don't think to any extent that it really needs to be done. Number two -- my favorite -- we meet a rogue black hole. You know, 10 years ago, or 15 years ago, really, you walk into an astronomy convention, and you say, "You know, there's probably a black hole at the center of every galaxy," and they're going to hoot you off the stage. And now, if you went into one of those conventions and you said, "Well, I don't think black holes are out there," they'd hoot you off the stage. Our comprehension of the way the universe works is really -- has just gained unbelievably in recent years. We think that there are about 10 million dead stars in the Milky Way alone, our galaxy. And these stars have compressed down to maybe something like 12, 15 miles wide, and they are black holes. And they are gobbling up everything around them, including light, which is why we can't see them. Most of them should be in orbit around something. But galaxies are very violent places, and things can be spun out of orbit. And also, space is incredibly vast. So even if you flung a million of these things out of orbit, the chances that one would actually hit us is fairly remote. But it only has to get close, about a billion miles away, one of these things. About a billion miles away, here's what happens to Earth's orbit: it becomes elliptical instead of circular. And for three months out of the year, the surface temperatures go up to 150 to 180. For three months out of the year, they go to 50 below zero. That won't work too well. What can we do about this? And this is my scariest. (Laughter) I don't have a good answer for this one. Again, we gotta think about being a colonizing race. And finally, number one: biggest danger to life as we know it, I think, a really big asteroid heads for Earth. The important thing to remember here -- this is not a question of if, this is a question of when, and how big. In 1908, just a 200-foot piece of a comet exploded over Siberia and flattened forests for maybe 100 miles. It had the effect of about 1,000 Hiroshima bombs. Astronomers estimate that little asteroids like that come about every hundred years. In 1989, a large asteroid passed 400,000 miles away from Earth. Nothing to worry about, right? It passed directly through Earth's orbit. We were in that that spot six hours earlier. A small asteroid, say a half mile wide, would touch off firestorms followed by severe global cooling from the debris kicked up -- Carl Sagan's nuclear winter thing. An asteroid five miles wide causes major extinctions. We think the one that got the dinosaurs was about five miles wide. Where are they? There's something called the Kuiper belt, which -- some people think Pluto's not a planet, that's where Pluto is, it's in the Kuiper belt. There's also something a little farther out, called the Oort cloud. There are about 100,000 balls of ice and rock -- comets, really -- out there, that are 50 miles in diameter or more, and they regularly take a little spin, in towards the Sun and pass reasonably close to us. Of more concern, I think, is the asteroids that exist between Mars and Jupiter. The folks at the Sloan Digital Sky Survey told us last fall -- they're making the first map of the universe, three-dimensional map of the universe -- that there are probably 700,000 asteroids between Mars and Jupiter that are a half a mile big or bigger. So you say, yeah, well, what are really the chances of this happening? Andrew, can you put that chart up? This is a chart that Dr. Clark Chapman at the Southwest Research Institute presented to Congress a few years ago. You'll notice that the chance of an asteroid-slash-comet impact killing you is about one in 20,000, according to the work they've done. Now look at the one right below that. Passenger aircraft crash, one in 20,000. We spend an awful lot of money trying to be sure that we don't die in airplane accidents, and we're not spending hardly anything on this. And yet, this is completely preventable. We finally have, just in the last year, the technology to stop this cold. Could we have the solutions? NASA's spending three million dollars a year, three million bucks -- that is like pocket change -- to search for asteroids. Because we can actually figure out every asteroid that's out there, and if it might hit Earth, and when it might hit Earth. And they're trying to do that. But it's going to take them 10 years, at spending three million dollars a year, and even then, they claim they'll only have about 80 percent of them catalogued. Comets are a tougher act. We don't really have the technology to predict comet trajectories, or when one with our name on it might arrive. But we would have lots of time, if we see it coming. We really need a dedicated observatory. You'll notice that a lot of comets are named after people you never heard of, amateur astronomers? That's because nobody's looking for them, except amateurs. We need a dedicated observatory that looks for comets. Part two of the solutions: we need to figure out how to blow up an asteroid, or alter its trajectory. Now, a year ago, we did an amazing thing. We sent a probe out to this asteroid belt, called NEAR, Near Earth Asteroid Rendezvous. And these guys orbited a 30 -- or no, about a 22-mile long asteroid called Eros. And then, of course, you know, they pulled one of those sneaky NASA things, where they had extra batteries and extra gas aboard and everything, and then, at the last minute, they landed. When the mission was over, they actually landed on the thing. We have landed a rocket ship on an asteroid. It's not a big deal. Now, the trouble with just sending a bomb out for this thing is that you don't have anything to push against in space, because there's no air. A nuclear explosion is just as hot, but we don't really have anything big enough to melt a 22-mile long asteroid, or vaporize it, would be more like it. But we can learn to land on these asteroids that have our name on them and put something like a small ion propulsion motor on it, which would gently, slowly, after a period of time, push it into a different trajectory, which, if we've done our math right, would keep it from hitting Earth. This is just a matter of finding 'em, going there, and doing something about it. I know your head is spinning from all this stuff. Yikes! So many big threats! The thing, I think, to remember, is September 11. We don't want to get caught flat-footed again. We know about this stuff. Science has the power to predict the future in many cases now. Knowledge is power. The worst thing we can do is say, jeez, I got enough to worry about without worrying about an asteroid. (Laughter) That's a mistake that could literally cost us our future. Thank you.
I do two things: I design mobile computers and I study brains. And today's talk is about brains and, yay, somewhere I have a brain fan out there. (Laughter) I'm going to, if I can have my first slide up here, and you'll see the title of my talk and my two affiliations. So what I'm going to talk about is why we don't have a good brain theory, why it is important that we should develop one and what we can do about it. And I'll try to do all that in 20 minutes. I have two affiliations. Most of you know me from my Palm and Handspring days, but I also run a nonprofit scientific research institute called the Redwood Neuroscience Institute in Menlo Park, and we study theoretical neuroscience, and we study how the neocortex works. I'm going to talk all about that. I have one slide on my other life, the computer life, and that's the slide here. These are some of the products I've worked on over the last 20 years, starting back from the very original laptop to some of the first tablet computers and so on, and ending up most recently with the Treo, and we're continuing to do this. And I've done this because I really believe that mobile computing is the future of personal computing, and I'm trying to make the world a little bit better by working on these things. But this was, I have to admit, all an accident. I really didn't want to do any of these products and very early in my career I decided I was not going to be in the computer industry. And before I tell you about that, I just have to tell you this one little picture of graffiti there I picked off the web the other day. I was looking for a picture of graffiti, little text input language, and I found the website dedicated to teachers who want to make these, you know, the script writing things across the top of their blackboard, and they had added graffiti to it, and I'm sorry about that. (Laughter) So what happened was, when I was young and got out of engineering school at Cornell in '79, I decided -- I went to work for Intel and I was in the computer industry -- and three months into that, I fell in love with something else, and I said, "I made the wrong career choice here," and I fell in love with brains. This is not a real brain. This is a picture of one, a line drawing. But I don't remember exactly how it happened, but I have one recollection, which was pretty strong in my mind. In September 1979, Scientific American came out with a single topic issue about the brain. And it was quite good. It was one of the best issues ever. And they talked about the neuron and development and disease and vision and all the things you might want to know about brains. It was really quite impressive. And one might have the impression that we really knew a lot about brains. But the last article in that issue was written by Francis Crick of DNA fame. Today is, I think, the 50th anniversary of the discovery of DNA. And he wrote a story basically saying, well, this is all well and good, but you know what, we don't know diddley squat about brains and no one has a clue how these things work, so don't believe what anyone tells you. This is a quote from that article. He said, "What is conspicuously lacking," he's a very proper British gentleman so, "What is conspicuously lacking is a broad framework of ideas in which to interpret these different approaches." I thought the word framework was great. He didn't say we didn't even have a theory. He says, we don't even know how to begin to think about it -- we don't even have a framework. We are in the pre-paradigm days, if you want to use Thomas Kuhn. And so I fell in love with this, and said look, we have all this knowledge about brains. How hard can it be? And this is something we can work on my lifetime. I felt I could make a difference, and so I tried to get out of the computer business, into the brain business. First, I went to MIT, the AI lab was there, and I said, well, I want to build intelligent machines, too, but the way I want to do it is to study how brains work first. And they said, oh, you don't need to do that. We're just going to program computers; that's all we need to do. And I said, no, you really ought to study brains. They said, oh, you know, you're wrong. And I said, no, you're wrong, and I didn't get in. (Laughter) But I was a little disappointed -- pretty young -- but I went back again a few years later and this time was in California, and I went to Berkeley. And I said, I'll go in from the biological side. So I got in -- in the Ph.D. program in biophysics, and I was, all right, I'm studying brains now, and I said, well, I want to study theory. And they said, oh no, you can't study theory about brains. That's not something you do. You can't get funded for that. And as a graduate student, you can't do that. So I said, oh my gosh. I was very depressed. I said, but I can make a difference in this field. So what I did is I went back in the computer industry and said, well, I'll have to work here for a while, do something. That's when I designed all those computer products. (Laughter) And I said, I want to do this for four years, make some money, like I was having a family, and I would mature a bit, and maybe the business of neuroscience would mature a bit. Well, it took longer than four years. It's been about 16 years. But I'm doing it now, and I'm going to tell you about it. So why should we have a good brain theory? Well, there's lots of reasons people do science. One is -- the most basic one is -- people like to know things. We're curious, and we just go out and get knowledge, you know? Why do we study ants? Well, it's interesting. Maybe we'll learn something really useful about it, but it's interesting and fascinating. But sometimes, a science has some other attributes which makes it really, really interesting. Sometimes a science will tell something about ourselves, it'll tell us who we are. Rarely, you know: evolution did this and Copernicus did this, where we have a new understanding of who we are. And after all, we are our brains. My brain is talking to your brain. Our bodies are hanging along for the ride, but my brain is talking to your brain. And if we want to understand who we are and how we feel and perceive, we really understand what brains are. Another thing is sometimes science leads to really big societal benefits and technologies, or businesses, or whatever, that come out of it. And this is one, too, because when we understand how brains work, we're going to be able to build intelligent machines, and I think that's actually a good thing on the whole, and it's going to have tremendous benefits to society, just like a fundamental technology. So why don't we have a good theory of brains? And people have been working on it for 100 years. Well, let's first take a look at what normal science looks like. This is normal science. Normal science is a nice balance between theory and experimentalists. And so the theorist guys say, well, I think this is what's going on, and the experimentalist says, no, you're wrong. And it goes back and forth, you know? This works in physics. This works in geology. But if this is normal science, what does neuroscience look like? This is what neuroscience looks like. We have this mountain of data, which is anatomy, physiology and behavior. You can't imagine how much detail we know about brains. There were 28,000 people who went to the neuroscience conference this year, and every one of them is doing research in brains. A lot of data. But there's no theory. There's a little, wimpy box on top there. And theory has not played a role in any sort of grand way in the neurosciences. And it's a real shame. Now why has this come about? If you ask neuroscientists, why is this the state of affair, they'll first of all admit it. But if you ask them, they'll say, well, there's various reasons we don't have a good brain theory. Some people say, well, we don't still have enough data, we need to get more information, there's all these things we don't know. Well, I just told you there's so much data coming out your ears. We have so much information, we don't even know how to begin to organize it. What good is more going to do? Maybe we'll be lucky and discover some magic thing, but I don't think so. This is actually a symptom of the fact that we just don't have a theory. We don't need more data -- we need a good theory about it. Another one is sometimes people say, well, brains are so complex, it'll take another 50 years. I even think Chris said something like this yesterday. I'm not sure what you said, Chris, but something like, well, it's one of the most complicated things in the universe. That's not true. You're more complicated than your brain. You've got a brain. And it's also, although the brain looks very complicated, things look complicated until you understand them. That's always been the case. And so all we can say, well, my neocortex, which is the part of the brain I'm interested in, has 30 billion cells. But, you know what? It's very, very regular. In fact, it looks like it's the same thing repeated over and over and over again. It's not as complex as it looks. That's not the issue. Some people say, brains can't understand brains. Very Zen-like. Whoo. (Laughter) You know, it sounds good, but why? I mean, what's the point? It's just a bunch of cells. You understand your liver. It's got a lot of cells in it too, right? So, you know, I don't think there's anything to that. And finally, some people say, well, you know, I don't feel like a bunch of cells, you know. I'm conscious. I've got this experience, I'm in the world, you know. I can't be just a bunch of cells. Well, you know, people used to believe there was a life force to be living, and we now know that's really not true at all. And there's really no evidence that says -- well, other than people just have disbelief that cells can do what they do. And so, if some people have fallen into the pit of metaphysical dualism, some really smart people, too, but we can reject all that. (Laughter) No, I'm going to tell you there's something else, and it's really fundamental, and this is what it is: there's another reason why we don't have a good brain theory, and it's because we have an intuitive, strongly-held, but incorrect assumption that has prevented us from seeing the answer. There's something we believe that just, it's obvious, but it's wrong. Now, there's a history of this in science and before I tell you what it is, I'm going to tell you a bit about the history of it in science. You look at some other scientific revolutions, and this case, I'm talking about the solar system, that's Copernicus, Darwin's evolution, and tectonic plates, that's Wegener. They all have a lot in common with brain science. First of all, they had a lot of unexplained data. A lot of it. But it got more manageable once they had a theory. The best minds were stumped -- really, really smart people. We're not smarter now than they were then. It just turns out it's really hard to think of things, but once you've thought of them, it's kind of easy to understand it. My daughters understood these three theories in their basic framework by the time they were in kindergarten. And now it's not that hard, you know, here's the apple, here's the orange, you know, the Earth goes around, that kind of stuff. Finally, another thing is the answer was there all along, but we kind of ignored it because of this obvious thing, and that's the thing. It was an intuitive, strong-held belief that was wrong. In the case of the solar system, the idea that the Earth is spinning and the surface of the Earth is going like a thousand miles an hour, and the Earth is going through the solar system about a million miles an hour. This is lunacy. We all know the Earth isn't moving. Do you feel like you're moving a thousand miles an hour? Of course not. You know, and someone who said, well, it was spinning around in space and it's so huge, they would lock you up, and that's what they did back then. (Laughter) So it was intuitive and obvious. Now what about evolution? Evolution's the same thing. We taught our kids, well, the Bible says, you know, God created all these species, cats are cats, dogs are dogs, people are people, plants are plants, they don't change. Noah put them on the Ark in that order, blah, blah, blah. And, you know, the fact is, if you believe in evolution, we all have a common ancestor, and we all have a common ancestry with the plant in the lobby. This is what evolution tells us. And, it's true. It's kind of unbelievable. And the same thing about tectonic plates, you know? All the mountains and the continents are kind of floating around on top of the Earth, you know? It's like, it doesn't make any sense. So what is the intuitive, but incorrect assumption, that's kept us from understanding brains? Now I'm going to tell it to you, and it's going to seem obvious that that is correct, and that's the point, right? Then I'm going to have to make an argument why you're incorrect about the other assumption. The intuitive but obvious thing is that somehow intelligence is defined by behavior, that we are intelligent because of the way that we do things and the way we behave intelligently, and I'm going to tell you that's wrong. What it is is intelligence is defined by prediction. And I'm going to work you through this in a few slides here, give you an example of what this means. Here's a system. Engineers like to look at systems like this. Scientists like to look at systems like this. They say, well, we have a thing in a box, and we have its inputs and its outputs. The AI people said, well, the thing in the box is a programmable computer because that's equivalent to a brain, and we'll feed it some inputs and we'll get it to do something, have some behavior. And Alan Turing defined the Turing test, which is essentially saying, we'll know if something's intelligent if it behaves identical to a human. A behavioral metric of what intelligence is, and this has stuck in our minds for a long period of time. Reality though, I call it real intelligence. Real intelligence is built on something else. We experience the world through a sequence of patterns, and we store them, and we recall them. And when we recall them, we match them up against reality, and we're making predictions all the time. It's an eternal metric. There's an eternal metric about us sort of saying, do we understand the world? Am I making predictions? And so on. You're all being intelligent right now, but you're not doing anything. Maybe you're scratching yourself, or picking your nose, I don't know, but you're not doing anything right now, but you're being intelligent; you're understanding what I'm saying. Because you're intelligent and you speak English, you know what word is at the end of this -- (Silence) sentence. The word came into you, and you're making these predictions all the time. And then, what I'm saying is, is that the eternal prediction is the output in the neocortex. And that somehow, prediction leads to intelligent behavior. And here's how that happens. Let's start with a non-intelligent brain. Well I'll argue a non-intelligent brain, we got hold of an old brain, and we're going to say it's like a non-mammal, like a reptile, so I'll say, an alligator; we have an alligator. And the alligator has some very sophisticated senses. It's got good eyes and ears and touch senses and so on, a mouth and a nose. It has very complex behavior. It can run and hide. It has fears and emotions. It can eat you, you know. It can attack. It can do all kinds of stuff. But we don't consider the alligator very intelligent, not like in a human sort of way. But it has all this complex behavior already. Now, in evolution, what happened? First thing that happened in evolution with mammals, we started to develop a thing called the neocortex. And I'm going to represent the neocortex here, by this box that's sticking on top of the old brain. Neocortex means new layer. It is a new layer on top of your brain. If you don't know it, it's the wrinkly thing on the top of your head that, it's got wrinkly because it got shoved in there and doesn't fit. (Laughter) No, really, that's what it is. It's about the size of a table napkin. And it doesn't fit, so it gets all wrinkly. Now look at how I've drawn this here. The old brain is still there. You still have that alligator brain. You do. It's your emotional brain. It's all those things, and all those gut reactions you have. And on top of it, we have this memory system called the neocortex. And the memory system is sitting over the sensory part of the brain. And so as the sensory input comes in and feeds from the old brain, it also goes up into the neocortex. And the neocortex is just memorizing. It's sitting there saying, ah, I'm going to memorize all the things that are going on: where I've been, people I've seen, things I've heard, and so on. And in the future, when it sees something similar to that again, so in a similar environment, or the exact same environment, it'll play it back. It'll start playing it back. Oh, I've been here before. And when you've been here before, this happened next. It allows you to predict the future. It allows you to, literally it feeds back the signals into your brain; they'll let you see what's going to happen next, will let you hear the word "sentence" before I said it. And it's this feeding back into the old brain that'll allow you to make very more intelligent decisions. This is the most important slide of my talk, so I'll dwell on it a little bit. And so, all the time you say, oh, I can predict the things. And if you're a rat and you go through a maze, and then you learn the maze, the next time you're in a maze, you have the same behavior, but all of a sudden, you're smarter because you say, oh, I recognize this maze, I know which way to go, I've been here before, I can envision the future. And that's what it's doing. In humans -- by the way, this is true for all mammals; it's true for other mammals -- and in humans, it got a lot worse. In humans, we actually developed the front part of the neocortex called the anterior part of the neocortex. And nature did a little trick. It copied the posterior part, the back part, which is sensory, and put it in the front part. And humans uniquely have the same mechanism on the front, but we use it for motor control. So we are now able to make very sophisticated motor planning, things like that. I don't have time to get into all this, but if you want to understand how a brain works, you have to understand how the first part of the mammalian neocortex works, how it is we store patterns and make predictions. So let me give you a few examples of predictions. I already said the word "sentence." In music, if you've heard a song before, if you heard Jill sing those songs before, when she sings them, the next note pops into your head already -- you anticipate it as you're going. If it was an album of music, the end of one album, the next song pops into your head. And these things happen all the time. You're making these predictions. I have this thing called the altered door thought experiment. And the altered door thought experiment says, you have a door at home, and when you're here, I'm changing it, I've got a guy back at your house right now, moving the door around, and they're going to take your doorknob and move it over two inches. And when you go home tonight, you're going to put your hand out there, and you're going to reach for the doorknob and you're going to notice it's in the wrong spot, and you'll go, whoa, something happened. It may take a second to figure out what it was, but something happened. Now I could change your doorknob in other ways. I can make it larger or smaller, I can change its brass to silver, I could make it a lever. I can change your door, put colors on; I can put windows in. I can change a thousand things about your door, and in the two seconds you take to open your door, you're going to notice that something has changed. Now, the engineering approach to this, the AI approach to this, is to build a door database. It has all the door attributes. And as you go up to the door, you know, let's check them off one at time. Door, door, door, you know, color, you know what I'm saying. We don't do that. Your brain doesn't do that. What your brain is doing is making constant predictions all the time about what is going to happen in your environment. As I put my hand on this table, I expect to feel it stop. When I walk, every step, if I missed it by an eighth of an inch, I'll know something has changed. You're constantly making predictions about your environment. I'll talk about vision here briefly. This is a picture of a woman. And when you look at people, your eyes are caught over at two to three times a second. You're not aware of this, but your eyes are always moving. And so when you look at someone's face, you'd typically go from eye to eye to eye to nose to mouth. Now, when your eye moves from eye to eye, if there was something else there like, a nose, you'd see a nose where an eye is supposed to be, and you'd go, oh shit, you know -- (Laughter) There's something wrong about this person. And that's because you're making a prediction. It's not like you just look over there and say, what am I seeing now? A nose, that's okay. No, you have an expectation of what you're going to see. (Laughter) Every single moment. And finally, let's think about how we test intelligence. We test it by prediction. What is the next word in this, you know? This is to this as this is to this. What is the next number in this sentence? Here's three visions of an object. What's the fourth one? That's how we test it. It's all about prediction. So what is the recipe for brain theory? First of all, we have to have the right framework. And the framework is a memory framework, not a computation or behavior framework. It's a memory framework. How do you store and recall these sequences or patterns? It's spatio-temporal patterns. Then, if in that framework, you take a bunch of theoreticians. Now biologists generally are not good theoreticians. It's not always true, but in general, there's not a good history of theory in biology. So I found the best people to work with are physicists, engineers and mathematicians, who tend to think algorithmically. Then they have to learn the anatomy, and they've got to learn the physiology. You have to make these theories very realistic in anatomical terms. Anyone who gets up and tells you their theory about how the brain works and doesn't tell you exactly how it's working in the brain and how the wiring works in the brain, it is not a theory. And that's what we're doing at the Redwood Neuroscience Institute. I would love to have more time to tell you we're making fantastic progress in this thing, and I expect to be back up on this stage, maybe this will be some other time in the not too distant future and tell you about it. I'm really, really excited. This is not going to take 50 years at all. So what will brain theory look like? First of all, it's going to be a theory about memory. Not like computer memory. It's not at all like computer memory. It's very, very different. And it's a memory of these very high-dimensional patterns, like the things that come from your eyes. It's also memory of sequences. You cannot learn or recall anything outside of a sequence. A song must be heard in sequence over time, and you must play it back in sequence over time. And these sequences are auto-associatively recalled, so if I see something, I hear something, it reminds me of it, and then it plays back automatically. It's an automatic playback. And prediction of future inputs is the desired output. And as I said, the theory must be biologically accurate, it must be testable, and you must be able to build it. If you don't build it, you don't understand it. So, one more slide here. What is this going to result in? Are we going to really build intelligent machines? Absolutely. And it's going to be different than people think. No doubt that it's going to happen, in my mind. First of all, it's going to be built up, we're going to build the stuff out of silicon. The same techniques we use for building silicon computer memories, we can use for here. But they're very different types of memories. And we're going to attach these memories to sensors, and the sensors will experience real-live, real-world data, and these things are going to learn about their environment. Now it's very unlikely the first things you're going to see are like robots. Not that robots aren't useful and people can build robots. But the robotics part is the hardest part. That's the old brain. That's really hard. The new brain is actually kind of easier than the old brain. So the first thing we're going to do are the things that don't require a lot of robotics. So you're not going to see C-3PO. You're going to more see things like, you know, intelligent cars that really understand what traffic is and what driving is and have learned that certain types of cars with the blinkers on for half a minute probably aren't going to turn, things like that. (Laughter) We can also do intelligent security systems. Anywhere where we're basically using our brain, but not doing a lot of mechanics. Those are the things that are going to happen first. But ultimately, the world's the limit here. I don't know how this is going to turn out. I know a lot of people who invented the microprocessor and if you talk to them, they knew what they were doing was really significant, but they didn't really know what was going to happen. They couldn't anticipate cell phones and the Internet and all this kind of stuff. They just knew like, hey, they were going to build calculators and traffic light controllers. But it's going to be big. In the same way, this is like brain science and these memories are going to be a very fundamental technology, and it's going to lead to very unbelievable changes in the next 100 years. And I'm most excited about how we're going to use them in science. So I think that's all my time, I'm over it, and I'm going to end my talk right there.
"I felt a Funeral, in my Brain, and Mourners to and fro kept treading -- treading -- till [it seemed] that Sense was breaking through -- And when they all were seated, a Service, like a Drum -- kept beating -- beating -- till I [thought] my Mind was going numb -- And then I heard them lift a Box and creak across my Soul with those same Boots of Lead, again, then Space -- began to toll, As [all] the Heavens were a Bell, and Being, [but] an Ear, and I, and Silence, some strange Race, wrecked, solitary, here -- [And] then a Plank in Reason, broke, and I fell down and down -- and hit a World, at every plunge, and Finished knowing -- then --" We know depression through metaphors. Emily Dickinson was able to convey it in language, Goya in an image. Half the purpose of art is to describe such iconic states. As for me, I had always thought myself tough, one of the people who could survive if I'd been sent to a concentration camp. In 1991, I had a series of losses. My mother died, a relationship I'd been in ended, I moved back to the United States from some years abroad, and I got through all of those experiences intact. But in 1994, three years later, I found myself losing interest in almost everything. I didn't want to do any of the things I had previously wanted to do, and I didn't know why. The opposite of depression is not happiness, but vitality. And it was vitality that seemed to seep away from me in that moment. Everything there was to do seemed like too much work. I would come home and I would see the red light flashing on my answering machine, and instead of being thrilled to hear from my friends, I would think, "What a lot of people that is to have to call back." Or I would decide I should have lunch, and then I would think, but I'd have to get the food out and put it on a plate and cut it up and chew it and swallow it, and it felt to me like the Stations of the Cross. And one of the things that often gets lost in discussions of depression is that you know it's ridiculous. You know it's ridiculous while you're experiencing it. You know that most people manage to listen to their messages and eat lunch and organize themselves to take a shower and go out the front door and that it's not a big deal, and yet you are nonetheless in its grip and you are unable to figure out any way around it. And so I began to feel myself doing less and thinking less and feeling less. It was a kind of nullity. And then the anxiety set in. If you told me that I'd have to be depressed for the next month, I would say, "As long I know it'll be over in November, I can do it." But if you said to me, "You have to have acute anxiety for the next month," I would rather slit my wrist than go through it. It was the feeling all the time like that feeling you have if you're walking and you slip or trip and the ground is rushing up at you, but instead of lasting half a second, the way that does, it lasted for six months. It's a sensation of being afraid all the time but not even knowing what it is that you're afraid of. And it was at that point that I began to think that it was just too painful to be alive, and that the only reason not to kill oneself was so as not to hurt other people. And finally one day, I woke up and I thought perhaps I'd had a stroke, because I lay in bed completely frozen, looking at the telephone, thinking, "Something is wrong and I should call for help," and I couldn't reach out my arm and pick up the phone and dial. And finally, after four full hours of my lying and staring at it, the phone rang, and somehow I managed to pick it up, and it was my father, and I said, "I'm in serious trouble. We need to do something." The next day I started with the medications and the therapy. And I also started reckoning with this terrible question: If I'm not the tough person who could have made it through a concentration camp, then who am I? And if I have to take medication, is that medication making me more fully myself, or is it making me someone else? And how do I feel about it if it's making me someone else? I had two advantages as I went into the fight. The first is that I knew that, objectively speaking, I had a nice life, and that if I could only get well, there was something at the other end that was worth living for. And the other was that I had access to good treatment. But I nonetheless emerged and relapsed, and emerged and relapsed, and emerged and relapsed, and finally understood I would have to be on medication and in therapy forever. And I thought, "But is it a chemical problem or a psychological problem? And does it need a chemical cure or a philosophical cure?" And I couldn't figure out which it was. And then I understood that actually, we aren't advanced enough in either area for it to explain things fully. The chemical cure and the psychological cure both have a role to play, and I also figured out that depression was something that was braided so deep into us that there was no separating it from our character and personality. I want to say that the treatments we have for depression are appalling. They're not very effective. They're extremely costly. They come with innumerable side effects. They're a disaster. But I am so grateful that I live now and not 50 years ago, when there would have been almost nothing to be done. I hope that 50 years hence, people will hear about my treatments and be appalled that anyone endured such primitive science. Depression is the flaw in love. If you were married to someone and thought, "Well, if my wife dies, I'll find another one," it wouldn't be love as we know it. There's no such thing as love without the anticipation of loss, and that specter of despair can be the engine of intimacy. There are three things people tend to confuse: depression, grief and sadness. Grief is explicitly reactive. If you have a loss and you feel incredibly unhappy, and then, six months later, you are still deeply sad, but you're functioning a little better, it's probably grief, and it will probably ultimately resolve itself in some measure. If you experience a catastrophic loss, and you feel terrible, and six months later you can barely function at all, then it's probably a depression that was triggered by the catastrophic circumstances. The trajectory tells us a great deal. People think of depression as being just sadness. It's much, much too much sadness, much too much grief at far too slight a cause. As I set out to understand depression, and to interview people who had experienced it, I found that there were people who seemed, on the surface, to have what sounded like relatively mild depression who were nonetheless utterly disabled by it. And there were other people who had what sounded as they described it like terribly severe depression who nonetheless had good lives in the interstices between their depressive episodes. And I set out to find out what it is that causes some people to be more resilient than other people. What are the mechanisms that allow people to survive? And I went out and I interviewed person after person who was suffering with depression. One of the first people I interviewed described depression as a slower way of being dead, and that was a good thing for me to hear early on because it reminded me that that slow way of being dead can lead to actual deadness, that this is a serious business. It's the leading disability worldwide, and people die of it every day. One of the people I talked to when I was trying to understand this was a beloved friend who I had known for many years, and who had had a psychotic episode in her freshman year of college, and then plummeted into a horrific depression. She had bipolar illness, or manic depression, as it was then known. And then she did very well for many years on lithium, and then eventually, she was taken off her lithium to see how she would do without it, and she had another psychosis, and then plunged into the worst depression that I had ever seen in which she sat in her parents' apartment, more or less catatonic, essentially without moving, day after day after day. And when I interviewed her about that experience some years later -- she's a poet and psychotherapist named Maggie Robbins -- when I interviewed her, she said, "I was singing 'Where Have All The Flowers Gone,' over and over, to occupy my mind. I was singing to blot out the things my mind was saying, which were, 'You are nothing. You are nobody. You don't even deserve to live.' And that was when I really started thinking about killing myself." You don't think in depression that you've put on a gray veil and are seeing the world through the haze of a bad mood. You think that the veil has been taken away, the veil of happiness, and that now you're seeing truly. It's easier to help schizophrenics who perceive that there's something foreign inside of them that needs to be exorcised, but it's difficult with depressives, because we believe we are seeing the truth. But the truth lies. I became obsessed with that sentence: "But the truth lies." And I discovered, as I talked to depressive people, that they have many delusional perceptions. People will say, "No one loves me." And you say, "I love you, your wife loves you, your mother loves you." You can answer that one pretty readily, at least for most people. But people who are depressed will also say, "No matter what we do, we're all just going to die in the end." Or they'll say, "There can be no true communion between two human beings. Each of us is trapped in his own body." To which you have to say, "That's true, but I think we should focus right now on what to have for breakfast." (Laughter) A lot of the time, what they are expressing is not illness, but insight, and one comes to think what's really extraordinary is that most of us know about those existential questions and they don't distract us very much. There was a study I particularly liked in which a group of depressed and a group of non-depressed people were asked to play a video game for an hour, and at the end of the hour, they were asked how many little monsters they thought they had killed. The depressive group was usually accurate to within about 10 percent, and the non-depressed people guessed between 15 and 20 times as many little monsters -- (Laughter) as they had actually killed. A lot of people said, when I chose to write about my depression, that it must be very difficult to be out of that closet, to have people know. They said, "Do people talk to you differently?" I said, "Yes, people talk to me differently. They talk to me differently insofar as they start telling me about their experience, or their sister's experience, or their friend's experience. Things are different because now I know that depression is the family secret that everyone has. I went a few years ago to a conference, and on Friday of the three-day conference, one of the participants took me aside, and she said, "I suffer from depression and I'm a little embarrassed about it, but I've been taking this medication, and I just wanted to ask you what you think?" And so I did my best to give her such advice as I could. And then she said, "You know, my husband would never understand this. He's really the kind of guy to whom this wouldn't make any sense, so, you know, it's just between us." And I said, "Yes, that's fine." On Sunday of the same conference, her husband took me aside, (Laughter) and he said, "My wife wouldn't think that I was really much of a guy if she knew this, but I've been dealing with this depression and I'm taking some medication, and I wondered what you think?" They were hiding the same medication in two different places in the same bedroom. (Laughter) And I said that I thought communication within the marriage might be triggering some of their problems. (Laughter) But I was also struck by the burdensome nature of such mutual secrecy. Depression is so exhausting. It takes up so much of your time and energy, and silence about it, it really does make the depression worse. And then I began thinking about all the ways people make themselves better. I'd started off as a medical conservative. I thought there were a few kinds of therapy that worked, it was clear what they were -- there was medication, there were certain psychotherapies, there was possibly electroconvulsive treatment, and that everything else was nonsense. But then I discovered something. If you have brain cancer, and you say that standing on your head for 20 minutes every morning makes you feel better, it may make you feel better, but you still have brain cancer, and you'll still probably die from it. But if you say that you have depression, and standing on your head for 20 minutes every day makes you feel better, then it's worked, because depression is an illness of how you feel, and if you feel better, then you are effectively not depressed anymore. So I became much more tolerant of the vast world of alternative treatments. And I get letters, I get hundreds of letters from people writing to tell me about what's worked for them. Someone was asking me backstage today about meditation. My favorite of the letters that I got was the one that came from a woman who wrote and said that she had tried therapy, medication, she had tried pretty much everything, and she had found a solution and hoped I would tell the world, and that was making little things from yarn. (Laughter) She sent me some of them. (Laughter) And I'm not wearing them right now. (Laughter) I suggested to her that she also should look up obsessive compulsive disorder in the DSM. And yet, when I went to look at alternative treatments, I also gained perspective on other treatments. I went through a tribal exorcism in Senegal that involved a great deal of ram's blood and that I'm not going to detail right now, but a few years afterwards I was in Rwanda, working on a different project, and I happened to describe my experience to someone, and he said, "Well, that's West Africa, and we're in East Africa, and our rituals are in some ways very different, but we do have some rituals that have something in common with what you're describing." And he said, "But we've had a lot of trouble with Western mental health workers, especially the ones who came right after the genocide." I said, "What kind of trouble did you have?" And he said, "Well, they would do this bizarre thing. They didn't take people out in the sunshine where you begin to feel better. They didn't include drumming or music to get people's blood going. They didn't involve the whole community. They didn't externalize the depression as an invasive spirit. Instead what they did was they took people one at a time into dingy little rooms and had them talk for an hour about bad things that had happened to them." (Laughter) (Applause) He said, "We had to ask them to leave the country." (Laughter) Now at the other end of alternative treatments, let me tell you about Frank Russakoff. Frank Russakoff had the worst depression perhaps that I've ever seen in a man. He was constantly depressed. He was, when I met him, at a point at which every month, he would have electroshock treatment. Then he would feel sort of disoriented for a week. Then he would feel okay for a week. Then he would have a week of going downhill. And then he would have another electroshock treatment. And he said to me when I met him, "It's unbearable to go through my weeks this way. I can't go on this way, and I've figured out how I'm going to end it if I don't get better." "But," he said to me, "I heard about a protocol at Mass General for a procedure called a cingulotomy, which is a brain surgery, and I think I'm going to give that a try." And I remember being amazed at that point to think that someone who clearly had so many bad experiences with so many different treatments still had buried in him, somewhere, enough optimism to reach out for one more. And he had the cingulotomy, and it was incredibly successful. He's now a friend of mine. He has a lovely wife and two beautiful children. He wrote me a letter the Christmas after the surgery, and he said, "My father sent me two presents this year, First, a motorized CD rack from The Sharper Image that I didn't really need, but I knew he was giving it to me to celebrate the fact that I'm living on my own and have a job I seem to love. And the other present was a photo of my grandmother, who committed suicide. As I unwrapped it, I began to cry, and my mother came over and said, 'Are you crying because of the relatives you never knew?' And I said, 'She had the same disease I have.' I'm crying now as I write to you. It's not that I'm so sad, but I get overwhelmed, I think, because I could have killed myself, but my parents kept me going, and so did the doctors, and I had the surgery. I'm alive and grateful. We live in the right time, even if it doesn't always feel like it." I was struck by the fact that depression is broadly perceived to be a modern, Western, middle-class thing, and I went to look at how it operated in a variety of other contexts, and one of the things I was most interested in was depression among the indigent. And so I went out to try to look at what was being done for poor people with depression. And what I discovered is that poor people are mostly not being treated for depression. Depression is the result of a genetic vulnerability, which is presumably evenly distributed in the population, and triggering circumstances, which are likely to be more severe for people who are impoverished. And yet it turns out that if you have a really lovely life but feel miserable all the time, you think, "Why do I feel like this? I must have depression." And you set out to find treatment for it. But if you have a perfectly awful life, and you feel miserable all the time, the way you feel is commensurate with your life, and it doesn't occur to you to think, "Maybe this is treatable." And so we have an epidemic in this country of depression among impoverished people that's not being picked up and that's not being treated and that's not being addressed, and it's a tragedy of a grand order. And so I found an academic who was doing a research project in slums outside of D.C., where she picked up women who had come in for other health problems and diagnosed them with depression, and then provided six months of the experimental protocol. One of them, Lolly, came in, and this is what she said the day she came in. She said, and she was a woman, by the way, who had seven children. She said, "I used to have a job but I had to give it up because I couldn't go out of the house. I have nothing to say to my children. In the morning, I can't wait for them to leave, and then I climb in bed and pull the covers over my head, and three o'clock when they come home, it just comes so fast." She said, "I've been taking a lot of Tylenol, anything I can take so that I can sleep more. My husband has been telling me I'm stupid, I'm ugly. I wish I could stop the pain." Well, she was brought into this experimental protocol, and when I interviewed her six months later, she had taken a job working in childcare for the U.S. Navy, she had left the abusive husband, and she said to me, "My kids are so much happier now." She said, "There's one room in my new place for the boys and one room for the girls, but at night, they're just all up on my bed, and we're doing homework all together and everything. One of them wants to be a preacher, one of them wants to be a firefighter, and one of the girls says she's going to be a lawyer. They don't cry like they used to, and they don't fight like they did. That's all I need now, is my kids. Things keep on changing, the way I dress, the way I feel, the way I act. I can go outside not being afraid anymore, and I don't think those bad feelings are coming back, and if it weren't for Dr. Miranda and that, I would still be at home with the covers pulled over my head, if I were still alive at all. I asked the Lord to send me an angel, and He heard my prayers." I was really moved by these experiences, and I decided that I wanted to write about them not only in a book I was working on, but also in an article, and I got a commission from The New York Times Magazine to write about depression among the indigent. And I turned in my story, and my editor called me and said, "We really can't publish this." And I said, "Why not?" And she said, "It just is too far-fetched. These people who are sort of at the very bottom rung of society and then they get a few months of treatment and they're virtually ready to run Morgan Stanley? It's just too implausible." She said, "I've never even heard of anything like it." And I said, "The fact that you've never heard of it is an indication that it is news." (Laughter) (Applause) "And you are a news magazine." So after a certain amount of negotiation, they agreed to it. But I think a lot of what they said was connected in some strange way to this distaste that people still have for the idea of treatment, the notion that somehow if we went out and treated a lot of people in indigent communities, that would be exploitative, because we would be changing them. There is this false moral imperative that seems to be all around us, that treatment of depression, the medications and so on, are an artifice, and that it's not natural. And I think that's very misguided. It would be natural for people's teeth to fall out, but there is nobody militating against toothpaste, at least not in my circles. People then say, "But isn't depression part of what people are supposed to experience? Didn't we evolve to have depression? Isn't it part of your personality?" To which I would say, mood is adaptive. Being able to have sadness and fear and joy and pleasure and all of the other moods that we have, that's incredibly valuable. And major depression is something that happens when that system gets broken. It's maladaptive. People will come to me and say, "I think, though, if I just stick it out for another year, I think I can just get through this." And I always say to them, "You may get through it, but you'll never be 37 again. Life is short, and that's a whole year you're talking about giving up. Think it through." It's a strange poverty of the English language, and indeed of many other languages, that we use this same word, depression, to describe how a kid feels when it rains on his birthday, and to describe how somebody feels the minute before they commit suicide. People say to me, "Well, is it continuous with normal sadness?" And I say, in a way it's continuous with normal sadness. There is a certain amount of continuity, but it's the same way there's continuity between having an iron fence outside your house that gets a little rust spot that you have to sand off and do a little repainting, and what happens if you leave the house for 100 years and it rusts through until it's only a pile of orange dust. And it's that orange dust spot, that orange dust problem, that's the one we're setting out to address. So now people say, "You take these happy pills, and do you feel happy?" And I don't. But I don't feel sad about having to eat lunch, and I don't feel sad about my answering machine, and I don't feel sad about taking a shower. I feel more, in fact, I think, because I can feel sadness without nullity. I feel sad about professional disappointments, about damaged relationships, about global warming. Those are the things that I feel sad about now. And I said to myself, well, what is the conclusion? How did those people who have better lives even with bigger depression manage to get through? What is the mechanism of resilience? And what I came up with over time was that the people who deny their experience, and say, "I was depressed a long time ago, I never want to think about it again, I'm not going to look at it and I'm just going to get on with my life," ironically, those are the people who are most enslaved by what they have. Shutting out the depression strengthens it. While you hide from it, it grows. And the people who do better are the ones who are able to tolerate the fact that they have this condition. Those who can tolerate their depression are the ones who achieve resilience. So Frank Russakoff said to me, "If I had a do-over, I suppose I wouldn't do it this way, but in a strange way, I'm grateful for what I've experienced. I'm glad to have been in the hospital 40 times. It taught me so much about love, and my relationship with my parents and my doctors has been so precious to me, and will be always." And Maggie Robbins said, "I used to volunteer in an AIDS clinic, and I would just talk and talk and talk, and the people I was dealing with weren't very responsive, and I thought, 'That's not very friendly or helpful of them.'" (Laughter) "And then I realized, I realized that they weren't going to do more than make those first few minutes of small talk. It was simply going to be an occasion where I didn't have AIDS and I wasn't dying, but could tolerate the fact that they did and they were. Our needs are our greatest assets. It turns out I've learned to give all the things I need." Valuing one's depression does not prevent a relapse, but it may make the prospect of relapse and even relapse itself easier to tolerate. The question is not so much of finding great meaning and deciding your depression has been very meaningful. It's of seeking that meaning and thinking, when it comes again, "This will be hellish, but I will learn something from it." I have learned in my own depression how big an emotion can be, how it can be more real than facts, and I have found that that experience has allowed me to experience positive emotion in a more intense and more focused way. The opposite of depression is not happiness, but vitality, and these days, my life is vital, even on the days when I'm sad. I felt that funeral in my brain, and I sat next to the colossus at the edge of the world, and I have discovered something inside of myself that I would have to call a soul that I had never formulated until that day 20 years ago when hell came to pay me a surprise visit. I think that while I hated being depressed and would hate to be depressed again, I've found a way to love my depression. I love it because it has forced me to find and cling to joy. I love it because each day I decide, sometimes gamely, and sometimes against the moment's reason, to cleave to the reasons for living. And that, I think, is a highly privileged rapture. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause)
(Applause) Thank you. I have to tell you I'm both challenged and excited. My excitement is: I get a chance to give something back. My challenge is: the shortest seminar I usually do is 50 hours. (Laughter) I'm not exaggerating. I do weekends, and what I do -- I do even more than that, obviously, coach people -- but I'm into immersion. Because how did you learn language? You didn't learn it by just learning principles, you got in it and you did it so often that it became real. And the bottom line of why I'm here, besides being a crazy mofo, is that I'm really in a position -- I'm not here to motivate you, obviously; you don't need that. And a lot of times that's what people think I do, and it's the furthest thing from it. What happens, though, is people say to me, "I don't need any motivation." And I say, "Well, that's interesting. That's not what I do." I'm the "Why" guy. I want to know why you do what you do. What is your motive for action? What is it that drives you in your life today? Not 10 years ago. Or are you running the same pattern? Because I believe that the invisible force of internal drive, activated, is the most important thing in the world. I'm here because I believe emotion is the force of life. All of us here have great minds. You know? Most of us here have great minds, right? I don't know about another category, but we all know how to think. And with our minds we can rationalize anything. We can make anything happen. We can -- I agree with what was described a few days ago, about this idea that people work in their self-interest. But we all know that that's bullshit at times. You don't work in your self-interest all the time, because when emotion comes into it, the wiring changes in the way it functions. And so it's wonderful for us to think intellectually about how the life of the world is, and especially those who are very smart -- we can play this game in our head. But I really want to know what's driving you. And what I would like to maybe invite you to do by the end of this talk is explore where you are today, for two reasons. One: so that you can contribute more. And two: so that hopefully we can not just understand other people more, but maybe appreciate them more, and create the kinds of connections that can stop some of the challenges that we face in our society today. They're only going to get magnified by the very technology that's connecting us, because it's making us intersect. And that intersection doesn't always create the view of "everybody now understands everybody, and everybody appreciates everybody." So, I've had an obsession basically for 30 years, and that obsession has been, "What makes the difference in the quality of peoples lives? What makes the difference in their performance?" Because that's what I got hired to do. I've got to produce the result now. That's what I've done for 30 years. I get the phone call when the athlete is burning down on national television, and they were ahead by five strokes and now they can't get back on the course. And I've got to do something right now to get the result or nothing matters. I get the phone call when the child is going commit suicide, and I've got to do something right now. And in 29 years -- I'm very grateful to tell you I've never lost one in 29 years. It doesn't mean I won't some day. But I haven't done it, and the reason is an understanding of these human needs that I want to talk to you about. So, when I get those calls about performance, that's one thing. How do you make a change? But also, I'm looking to see what is it that's shaping that person's ability to contribute, to do something beyond themselves. So maybe the real question is, you know, I look at life and say, there's two master lessons. One is: there's the science of achievement, which almost everything that's run is mastered to an amazing extent. That's "How do you take the invisible and make it visible," right? How do you take what you're dreaming of and make it happen? Whether it be your business, your contribution to society, money -- whatever it is for you -- your body, your family. But the other lesson of life that is rarely mastered is the art of fulfillment. Because science is easy, right? We know the rules. You write the code. You follow the -- and you get the results. Once you know the game you just, you know, you up the ante, don't you? But when it comes to fulfillment -- that's an art. And the reason is, it's about appreciation and it's about contribution. You can only feel so much by yourself. So, I've had an interesting laboratory to try to answer the question of the real question, which is what's the difference in somebody's life if you look at somebody like those people that you've given everything to? Like all the resources they say they need. You gave them not a 100-dollar computer; you gave them the best computer. You gave them love; you gave them joy. You were there to comfort them. And those people very often -- and you know some of them, I'm sure -- end up the rest of their life with all this love, education, money and background, spending their life going in and out of rehab. And then you meet people that have been through ultimate pain -- psychologically, sexually, spiritually, emotionally abused -- and not always, but often, they become some of the people that contribute the most to society. So, the question we've got to ask ourselves really is, what is it? What is it that shapes us? And we live in a therapy culture. Most of us don't do that, but the culture's a therapy culture. And what I mean by that is the mindset that we are our past. And everybody in this room -- you wouldn't be in this room if you bought that theory -- but the -- most of society thinks biography is destiny. The past equals the future. And of course it does if you live there. But what people in this room know, and what we have to remind ourselves, though -- because you can know something intellectually, you can know what to do and then not use it, not apply it. So really, we're going to remind ourselves that decision is the ultimate power. That's what it really is. Now, when you ask people, you know, have you failed to achieve something? How many have ever failed to achieve something significant in your life? Say, "Aye." Audience: Aye. TR: Thanks for the interaction on a high level there. (Laughter) But if you ask people, why didn't you achieve something? Somebody who's working for you, you know, or a partner, or even yourself. When you fail to achieve a goal, what's the reason people say they fail to achieve? What do they tell you? Don't have the -- didn't know enough, didn't have the -- knowledge. Didn't have the -- money. Didn't have the -- time. Didn't have the -- technology. You know, I didn't have the right manager. Didn't have the ... Al Gore: Supreme Court. (Laughter) TR: And -- (Applause) and -- (Applause) -- what do all those, including the Supreme Court, have in common? (Laughter) They are a claim to you missing resources, and they may be accurate. You may not have the money; you may not have the Supreme Court; but that is not the defining factor. (Applause) And you correct me if I'm wrong. The defining factor is never resources; it's resourcefulness. And what I mean specifically, rather than just some phrase, is if you have emotion, human emotion, something that I experienced from you a day before yesterday at a level that is as profound as I've ever experienced, and if you'd communicated with that emotion I believe you would have beat his ass and won. (Applause) But, how easy for me to tell him what he should do. (Laughter) Idiot, Robbins. But I know when we watched the debate at that time, there were emotions that blocked people's ability to get this man's intellect and capacity. And the way that it came across to some people on that day -- because I know people that wanted to vote in your direction and didn't, and I was upset. But there was emotion that was there. How many know what I'm talking about here? Say, "Aye." Audience: Aye. TR: So, emotion is it. And if we get the right emotion, we can get ourselves to do anything. We can get through it. If you're creative enough, playful enough, fun enough, can you get through to anybody? Yes or no? Audience: Yes. TR: If you don't have the money, but you're creative and determined enough, you find the way. So this is the ultimate resource. But this is not the story that people tell us, right? The story people tell us is a bunch of different stories. They tell us we don't have the resources, but ultimately, if you take a look here -- flip it up, if you would -- they say, what are all the reasons they haven't accomplished that? Next one, please. He's broken my pattern, that son-of-a-bitch. (Laughter) But I appreciated the energy, I'll tell you that. (Laughter) What determines your resources? We've said decisions shape destiny, which is my focus here. If decisions shape destiny, what determines it is three decisions. What are you going to focus on? Right now, you have to decide what you're going to focus on. In this second, consciously or unconsciously, the minute you decide to focus on something you've got to give it a meaning, and whatever that meaning is produces emotion. Is this the end or the beginning? Is God punishing me or rewarding me, or is this the roll of the dice? An emotion, then, creates what we're going to do or the action. So, think about your own life, the decisions that have shaped your destiny. And that sounds really heavy, but in the last five or 10 years, 15 years, how have there been some decisions you've made that if you'd made a different decision, your life would be completely different? How many can think about it? Honestly, better or worse? Say, "Aye." Audience: Aye. TR: So the bottom line is, maybe it was where to go to work, and you met the love of your life there. Maybe it was a career decision. I know the Google geniuses I saw here -- I mean, I understand that their decision was to sell their technology at first. What if they made that decision versus to build their own culture? How would the world be different? How would their lives be different? Their impact? The history of our world is these decisions. When a woman stands up and says, "No, I won't go to the back of the bus," she didn't just affect her life. That decision shaped our culture. Or someone standing in front of a tank. Or being in a position like Lance Armstrong, and someone says to you, "You've got testicular cancer." That's pretty tough for any male, especially if you ride a bike. (Laughter) You've got it in your brain; you've got it in your lungs. But what was his decision of what to focus on? Different than most people. What did it mean? It wasn't the end; it was the beginning. What am I going to do? He goes off and wins seven championships he never once won before the cancer, because he got emotional fitness, psychological strength. That's the difference in human beings that I've seen of the three million that I've been around. Because that's about my lab. I've had three million people from 80 different countries that I've had a chance to interact with over the last 29 years. And after a while, patterns become obvious. You see that South America and Africa may be connected in a certain way, right? Other people say, "Oh, that sounds ridiculous." It's simple. So, what shaped Lance? What shapes you? Two invisible forces. Very quickly. One: state. We all have had time. So if you had a time you did something, and after you did it you thought to yourself, I can't believe I said that, I can't believe I did that, that was so stupid -- who's been there? Say, "Aye." Audience: Aye. TR: Have you ever done something, after you did it, you go, "That was me!" (Laughter) Right? It wasn't your ability; it was your state. Your model of the world is what shapes you long term. Your model of the world is the filter. That's what's shaping us. That's what makes people make decisions. When we want to influence somebody, we've got to know what already influences them. And it's made up of three parts, I believe. First, what's your target? What are you after? Which, I believe -- it's not your desires. You can get your desires or goals. How many have ever got a goal or desire and thought, is this all there is? How many have been there? Say, "Aye." Audience: Aye. TR: So, it's needs we have. I believe there are six human needs. Second, once you know what the target that's driving you is and you uncover it for the truth -- you don't form it; you uncover it -- then you find out what's your map, what's the belief systems that are telling you how to get those needs. Some people think the way to get those needs is destroy the world, some people is to build something, create something, love someone. And then there's the fuel you pick. So very quickly, six needs. Let me tell you what they are. First one: certainty. Now, these are not goals or desires, these are universal. Everyone needs certainty that they can avoid pain and at least be comfortable. Now, how do you get it? Control everybody? Develop a skill? Give up? Smoke a cigarette? And if you got totally certain, ironically, even though we all need that -- like if you're not certain about your health, or your children, or money, you don't think about much. You're not sure if the ceiling's going to hold up, you're not going to listen to any speaker. But, while we go for certainty differently, if we get total certainty, we get what? What do you feel if you're certain? You know what's going to happen, when it's going to happen, how it's going to happen -- what would you feel? Bored out of your minds. So, God, in Her infinite wisdom, (Laughter) gave us a second human need, which is uncertainty. We need variety. We need surprise. How many of you here love surprises? Say, "Aye." Audience: Aye. TR: Bullshit. You like the surprises you want. (Laughter) The ones you don't want you call problems, but you need them. So, variety is important. Have you ever rented a video or a film that you've already seen? Who's done this? Get a fucking life. (Laughter) All right. Why are you doing it? You're certain it's good because you read it before, saw it before, but you're hoping it's been long enough you've forgotten, that there's variety. Third human need, critical: significance. We all need to feel important, special, unique. You can get it by making more money. You can do it by being more spiritual. You can do it by getting yourself in a situation where you put more tattoos and earrings in places humans don't want to know. Whatever it takes. The fastest way to do this, if you have no background, no culture, no belief and resources or resourcefulness, is violence. If I put a gun to your head and I live in the 'hood, instantly I'm significant. Zero to 10. How high? 10. How certain am I that you're going to respond to me? 10. How much uncertainty? Who knows what's going to happen next? Kind of exciting. Like climbing up into a cave and doing that stuff all the way down there. Total variety and uncertainty. And it's significant, isn't it? So you want to risk your life for it. So that's why violence has always been around and will be around unless we have a consciousness change as a species. Now, you can get significance a million ways, but to be significant, you've got to be unique and different. Here's what we really need: connection and love -- fourth need. We all want it. Most people settle for connection because love's too scary. Don't want to get hurt. Who here has ever been hurt in an intimate relationship? Say, "Aye." (Laughter) If you don't raise your hand, you'll have had other shit too, come on. (Laughter) And you're going to get hurt again. Aren't you glad you came to this positive visit? (Laughter) But here's what's true -- we need it. We can do it through intimacy, through friendship, through prayer, through walking in nature. If nothing else works for you, get a dog. Don't get a cat. Get a dog, because if you leave for two minutes, it's like you've been gone for six months when you show back up again five minutes later, right? (Laughter) Now, these first four needs, every human finds a way to meet. Even if you lie to yourself, you need to have split personalities. But the last two needs -- the first four needs are called the needs of the personalities, is what I call it -- the last two are the needs of the spirit. And this is where fulfillment comes. You won't get fulfillment from the first four. You'll figure a way -- smoke, drink, do whatever -- to meet the first four, but the last two -- number five: you must grow. We all know the answer here. If you don't grow, you're what? If a relationship's not growing, if a business is not growing, if you're not growing, it doesn't matter how much money you have, how many friends you have, how many people love you, you feel like hell. And the reason we grow, I believe, is so we have something to give of value. Because the sixth need is to contribute beyond ourselves. Because we all know, corny as it sounds, the secret to living is giving. We all know life's not about me; it's about we. This culture knows that. This room knows that. And it's exciting. When you see Nicholas up here talking about his $100 computer, the most passionate exciting thing is: here's a genius, but he's got a calling now. You can feel the difference in him and it's beautiful. And that calling can touch other people. In my own life, my life was touched because when I was 11 years old, Thanksgiving, no money, no food -- we're not going to starve, but my father was totally messed up. My mom was letting him know how bad he messed up. And somebody came to the door and delivered food. My father made three decisions. I know what they were briefly. His focus was: "This is charity. What does it mean? I'm worthless. What've I got to do? Leave my family." Which he did. The time was one of the most painful experiences of life. My three decisions gave me a different path. I said, "Focus on: 'there's food'" -- what a concept, you know. (Laughter) Second -- but this is what changed my life, this is what shaped me as a human being -- "Somebody's gift. I don't even know who it is." My father always said, "No one gives a shit." And all of a sudden, somebody I don't know, they're not asking for anything, they're just giving our family food, looking out for us. It made me believe this: "What does it mean that strangers care?" And what that made me decide is, if strangers care about me and my family, I care about them. What am I going to do? I'm going to do something to make a difference. So, when I was 17, I went out one day on Thanksgiving. It was my target for years to have enough money to feed two families. The most fun thing I ever did in my life, the most moving. Then next year I did four. I didn't tell anybody what I was doing. Next year eight. I wasn't doing it for brownie points, but after eight, I thought, shit, I could use some help. (Laughter) So sure enough, I went out and what did I do? I got my friends involved and I grew companies and then I got 11 companies and I built the foundation. Now, 18 years later, I'm proud to tell you, last year we fed two million people in 35 countries through our foundation, all during the holidays: Thanksgiving, Christmas -- (Applause) -- in all the different countries around the world. It's been fantastic. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) So, I don't tell you that to brag; I tell you because I'm proud of human beings, because they get excited to contribute once they've had the chance to experience it, not talk about it. So, finally -- and I'm about out of time -- the target that shapes you -- here's what's different about people. We have the same needs, but are you a certainty freak? Is that what you value most, or uncertainty? This man here couldn't be a certainty freak if he climbed through those caves. Are you driven by significance or love? We all need all six, but whatever your lead system is, tilts you in a different direction. And as you move in a direction, you have a destination or destiny. The second piece is the map. Think of that as the operating system that tells you how to get there. And some people's map is: "I'm going to save lives even if I die for other people," and they're firemen. Somebody else is: "I'm going to kill people to do it." They're trying to meet the same needs of significance, right? They want to honor God or honor their family, but they have a different map. And there are seven different beliefs. I can't go through them because I'm done. The last piece is emotion. I'd say one of the parts of the map is like time. Some people's idea of a long time is 100 years. Somebody else's is three seconds, which is what I have. (Laughter) And the last one I've already mentioned, that fell to you. If you've got a target and you've got a map and let's say -- I can't use Google because I love Macs and they haven't made it good for Macs yet -- so if you use MapQuest -- how many have made this fatal mistake of using MapQuest at some time? (Laughter) You use this thing and you don't get there. Well, imagine if your beliefs guarantee you can never get to where you want to go? (Laughter) The last thing is emotion. Now, here's what I'll tell you about emotion. There are 6,000 emotions that we all have words for in the English language, which is just a linguistic representation, right, that changes by language. But if your dominant emotions -- if I had more time, I have 20,000 people or 1,000, and I have them write down all the emotions that they experience in an average week, and I gave them as long as they needed, and on one side they write empowering emotions, the other's disempowering -- guess how many emotions people experience? Less than 12. And half of those make them feel like shit. So they got five or six good frickin' feelings, right? It's like they feel "happy, happy, excited, oh shit, frustrated, frustrated, overwhelmed, depressed." How many of you know somebody who no matter what happens finds a way to get pissed off? How many know somebody like this? (Laughter) Or, no matter what happens, they find a way to be happy or excited. How may know somebody like this? Come on. When 9/11 happened -- I'll finish with this -- I was in Hawaii. I was with 2,000 people from 45 countries. We were translating four languages simultaneously for a program that I was conducting for a week. The night before was called "Emotional Mastering." I got up, had no plan for the this, and I said -- we had all these fireworks -- I do crazy shit, fun stuff -- and then at the end I stopped -- I had this plan I was going to say but I never do what I'm going to say. And all of a sudden I said, "When do people really start to live? When they face death." And then I went through this whole thing about, if you weren't going to get off this island, if nine days from now you were going to die, who would you call, what would you say, what would you do? One woman -- well, that night is when 9/11 happened -- one woman had come to the seminar and when she came there, her previous boyfriend had been kidnapped and murdered. Her friend, her new boyfriend, wanted to marry her, and she said no. He said, "If you leave and go to that Hawaii thing, it's over with us." She said, "It's over." When I finished that night, she called him and left a message -- true story -- at the top of the World Trade Center where he worked, saying, "Honey, I love you, I just want you to know I want to marry you. It was stupid of me." She was asleep, because it was 3 a.m. for us, when he called her back from the top and said, "Honey, I can't tell you what this means." He said, "I don't know how to tell you this, but you gave me the greatest gift because I'm going to die." And she played the recording for us in the room. She was on Larry King later, and he said, "You're probably wondering how on Earth this could happen to you twice." And he said, "All I can say to you is, this must be God's message to you, honey. From now on, every day give your all, love your all. Don't let anything ever stop you." She finishes, and a man stands up and he says, "I'm from Pakistan; I'm a Muslim. I'd love to hold your hand and say I'm sorry, but, frankly, this is retribution." I can't tell you the rest because I'm out of time. (Laughter) 10 seconds. (Applause) 10 seconds, that's all. I want to be respectful. 10 seconds. All I can tell you is, I brought this man on stage with a man from New York who worked in the World Trade Center, because I had about 200 New Yorkers there. More than 50 lost their entire companies, their friends, marking off their Palm Pilots -- one financial trader, this woman made of steel, bawling -- 30 friends crossing off that all died. And what I did to people is said, "What are we going to focus on? What does this mean and what are we going to do?" And I took the group and got people to focus on: if you didn't lose somebody today, your focus is going to be how to serve somebody else. There are people -- then one woman got up and she was so angry and screaming and yelling. Then I found out she wasn't from New York; she's not an American; she doesn't know anybody here. I said, "Do you always get angry?" She said, "Yes." Guilty people got guilty, sad people got sad. And I took these two men and did what I call an indirect negotiation. Jewish man with family in the occupied territory, someone in New York who would have died if he was at work that day, and this man who wanted to be a terrorist and made it very clear. And the integration that happened is on a film, which I'll be happy to send you, so you can really see what actually happened instead of my verbalization of it, but the two of them not only came together and changed their beliefs and morals of the world, but they worked together to bring, for almost four years now, through various mosques and synagogues, the idea of how to create peace. And he wrote a book, which is called "My Jihad, My Way of Peace." So, transformation can happen. So my invitation to you is this: explore your web, the web in here -- the needs, the beliefs, the emotions that are controlling you, for two reasons: so there's more of you to give -- and achieve too, we all want to do it -- but I mean give, because that's what's going to fill you up. And secondly, so you can appreciate -- not just understand, that's intellectual, that's the mind -- but appreciate what's driving other people. It's the only way our world's going to change. God bless you. Thank you. I hope this was of service. (Applause)
"I felt a funeral in my brain, and mourners to and fro kept treading, treading till I felt that sense was breaking through. And when they all were seated, a service, like a drum, kept beating, beating, till I felt my mind was going numb. And then I heard them lift a box and creak across my soul with those same boots of lead again, then space began to toll, as if the heavens were a bell and being were an ear, and I, and silence, some strange race wrecked, solitary, here. Just then, a plank in reason broke, and I fell down and down and hit a world at every plunge, and finished knowing then." We know depression through metaphors. Emily Dickinson was able to convey it in language, Goya in an image. Half the purpose of art is to describe such iconic states. As for me, I had always thought myself tough, one of the people who could survive if I'd been sent to a concentration camp. In 1991, I had a series of losses. My mother died, a relationship I'd been in ended, I moved back to the United States from some years abroad, and I got through all of those experiences intact. But in 1994, three years later, I found myself losing interest in almost everything. I didn't want to do any of the things I had previously wanted to do, and I didn't know why. The opposite of depression is not happiness, but vitality, and it was vitality that seemed to seep away from me in that moment. Everything there was to do seemed like too much work. I would come home and I would see the red light flashing on my answering machine, and instead of being thrilled to hear from my friends, I would think, "What a lot of people that is to have to call back." Or I would decide I should have lunch, and then I would think, but I'd have to get the food out and put it on a plate and cut it up and chew it and swallow it, and it felt to me like the Stations of the Cross. And one of the things that often gets lost in discussions of depression is that you know it's ridiculous. You know it's ridiculous while you're experiencing it. You know that most people manage to listen to their messages and eat lunch and organize themselves to take a shower and go out the front door and that it's not a big deal, and yet you are nonetheless in its grip and you are unable to figure out any way around it. And so I began to feel myself doing less and thinking less and feeling less. It was a kind of nullity. And then the anxiety set in. If you told me that I'd have to be depressed for the next month, I would say, "As long I know it'll be over in November, I can do it." But if you said to me, "You have to have acute anxiety for the next month," I would rather slit my wrist than go through it. It was the feeling all the time like that feeling you have if you're walking and you slip or trip and the ground is rushing up at you, but instead of lasting half a second, the way that does, it lasted for six months. It's a sensation of being afraid all the time but not even knowing what it is that you're afraid of. And it was at that point that I began to think that it was just too painful to be alive, and that the only reason not to kill oneself was so as not to hurt other people. And finally one day, I woke up and I thought perhaps I'd had a stroke, because I lay in bed completely frozen, looking at the telephone, thinking, "Something is wrong and I should call for help," and I couldn't reach out my arm and pick up the phone and dial. And finally, after four full hours of my lying and staring at it, the phone rang, and somehow I managed to pick it up, and it was my father, and I said, "I'm in serious trouble. We need to do something." The next day I started with the medications and the therapy. And I also started reckoning with this terrible question: If I'm not the tough person who could have made it through a concentration camp, then who am I? And if I have to take medication, is that medication making me more fully myself, or is it making me someone else? And how do I feel about it if it's making me someone else? I had two advantages as I went in to the fight. The first is that I knew that, objectively speaking, I had a nice life, and that if I could only get well, there was something at the other end that was worth living for. And the other was that I had access to good treatment. But I nonetheless emerged and relapsed, and emerged and relapsed, and emerged and relapsed, and finally understood I would have to be on medication and in therapy forever. And I thought, "But is it a chemical problem or a psychological problem? And does it need a chemical cure or a philosophical cure?" And I couldn't figure out which it was. And then I understood that actually, we aren't advanced enough in either area for it to explain things fully. The chemical cure and the psychological cure both have a role to play, and I also figured out that depression was something that was braided so deep into us that there was no separating it from our character and personality. I want to say that the treatments we have for depression are appalling. They're not very effective. They're extremely costly. They come with innumerable side effects. They're a disaster. But I am so grateful that I live now and not 50 years ago, when there would have been almost nothing to be done. I hope that 50 years hence, people will hear about my treatments and be appalled that anyone endured such primitive science. Depression is the flaw in love. If you were married to someone and thought, "Well, if my wife dies, I'll find another one," it wouldn't be love as we know it. There's no such thing as love without the anticipation of loss, and that specter of despair can be the engine of intimacy. There are three things people tend to confuse: depression, grief and sadness. Grief is explicitly reactive. If you have a loss and you feel incredibly unhappy, and then, six months later, you are still deeply sad, but you're functioning a little better, it's probably grief, and it will probably ultimately resolve itself in some measure. If you experience a catastrophic loss, and you feel terrible, and six months later you can barely function at all, then it's probably a depression that was triggered by the catastrophic circumstances. The trajectory tells us a great deal. People think of depression as being just sadness. It's much, much too much sadness, much too much grief at far too slight a cause. As I set out to understand depression, and to interview people who had experienced it, I found that there were people who seemed on the surface to have what sounded like relatively mild depression who were nonetheless utterly disabled by it. And there were other people who had what sounded as they described it like terribly severe depression who nonetheless had good lives in the interstices between their depressive episodes. And I set out to find out what it is that causes some people to be more resilient than other people. What are the mechanisms that allow people to survive? And I went out and I interviewed person after person who was suffering with depression. One of the first people I interviewed described depression as a slower way of being dead, and that was a good thing for me to hear early on because it reminded me that that slow way of being dead can lead to actual deadness, that this is a serious business. It's the leading disability worldwide, and people die of it every day. One of the people I talked to when I was trying to understand this was a beloved friend who I had known for many years, and who had had a psychotic episode in her freshman year of college, and then plummeted into a horrific depression. She had bipolar illness, or manic depression, as it was then known. And then she did very well for many years on lithium, and then eventually, she was taken off her lithium to see how she would do without it, and she had another psychosis, and then plunged into the worst depression that I had ever seen in which she sat in her parents' apartment, more or less catatonic, essentially without moving, day after day after day. And when I interviewed her about that experience some years later -- she's a poet and psychotherapist named Maggie Robbins — when I interviewed her, she said, "I was singing 'Where Have All The Flowers Gone' over and over to occupy my mind. I was singing to blot out the things my mind was saying, which were, 'You are nothing. You are nobody. You don't even deserve to live.' And that was when I really started thinking about killing myself." You don't think in depression that you've put on a gray veil and are seeing the world through the haze of a bad mood. You think that the veil has been taken away, the veil of happiness, and that now you're seeing truly. It's easier to help schizophrenics who perceive that there's something foreign inside of them that needs to be exorcised, but it's difficult with depressives, because we believe we are seeing the truth. But the truth lies. I became obsessed with that sentence: "But the truth lies." And I discovered, as I talked to depressive people, that they have many delusional perceptions. People will say, "No one loves me." And you say, "I love you, your wife loves you, your mother loves you." You can answer that one pretty readily, at least for most people. But people who are depressed will also say, "No matter what we do, we're all just going to die in the end." Or they'll say, "There can be no true communion between two human beings. Each of us is trapped in his own body." To which you have to say, "That's true, but I think we should focus right now on what to have for breakfast." (Laughter) A lot of the time, what they are expressing is not illness, but insight, and one comes to think what's really extraordinary is that most of us know about those existential questions and they don't distract us very much. There was a study I particularly liked in which a group of depressed and a group of non-depressed people were asked to play a video game for an hour, and at the end of the hour, they were asked how many little monsters they thought they had killed. The depressive group was usually accurate to within about 10 percent, and the non-depressed people guessed between 15 and 20 times as many little monsters — (Laughter) — as they had actually killed. A lot of people said, when I chose to write about my depression, that it must be very difficult to be out of that closet, to have people know. They said, "Do people talk to you differently?" And I said, "Yes, people talk to me differently. They talk to me differently insofar as they start telling me about their experience, or their sister's experience, or their friend's experience. Things are different because now I know that depression is the family secret that everyone has. I went a few years ago to a conference, and on Friday of the three-day conference, one of the participants took me aside, and she said, "I suffer from depression and I'm a little embarrassed about it, but I've been taking this medication, and I just wanted to ask you what you think?" And so I did my best to give her such advice as I could. And then she said, "You know, my husband would never understand this. He's really the kind of guy to whom this wouldn't make any sense, so I just, you know, it's just between us." And I said, "Yes, that's fine." On Sunday of the same conference, her husband took me aside, and he said, "My wife wouldn't think that I was really much of a guy if she knew this, but I've been dealing with this depression and I'm taking some medication, and I wondered what you think?" They were hiding the same medication in two different places in the same bedroom. And I said that I thought communication within the marriage might be triggering some of their problems. (Laughter) But I was also struck by the burdensome nature of such mutual secrecy. Depression is so exhausting. It takes up so much of your time and energy, and silence about it, it really does make the depression worse. And then I began thinking about all the ways people make themselves better. I'd started off as a medical conservative. I thought there were a few kinds of therapy that worked, it was clear what they were -- there was medication, there were certain psychotherapies, there was possibly electroconvulsive treatment, and that everything else was nonsense. But then I discovered something. If you have brain cancer, and you say that standing on your head for 20 minutes every morning makes you feel better, it may make you feel better, but you still have brain cancer, and you'll still probably die from it. But if you say that you have depression, and standing on your head for 20 minutes every day makes you feel better, then it's worked, because depression is an illness of how you feel, and if you feel better, then you are effectively not depressed anymore. So I became much more tolerant of the vast world of alternative treatments. And I get letters, I get hundreds of letters from people writing to tell me about what's worked for them. Someone was asking me backstage today about meditation. My favorite of the letters that I got was the one that came from a woman who wrote and said that she had tried therapy, she had tried medication, she had tried pretty much everything, and she had found a solution and hoped I would tell the world, and that was making little things from yarn. (Laughter) She sent me some of them. (Laughter) And I'm not wearing them right now. I suggested to her that she also should look up obsessive compulsive disorder in the DSM. And yet, when I went to look at alternative treatments, I also gained perspective on other treatments. I went through a tribal exorcism in Senegal that involved a great deal of ram's blood and that I'm not going to detail right now, but a few years afterwards I was in Rwanda working on a different project, and I happened to describe my experience to someone, and he said, "Well, you know, that's West Africa, and we're in East Africa, and our rituals are in some ways very different, but we do have some rituals that have something in common with what you're describing." And I said, "Oh." And he said, "Yes," he said, "but we've had a lot of trouble with Western mental health workers, especially the ones who came right after the genocide." And I said, "What kind of trouble did you have?" And he said, "Well, they would do this bizarre thing. They didn't take people out in the sunshine where you begin to feel better. They didn't include drumming or music to get people's blood going. They didn't involve the whole community. They didn't externalize the depression as an invasive spirit. Instead what they did was they took people one at a time into dingy little rooms and had them talk for an hour about bad things that had happened to them." (Laughter) (Applause) He said, "We had to ask them to leave the country." (Laughter) Now at the other end of alternative treatments, let me tell you about Frank Russakoff. Frank Russakoff had the worst depression perhaps that I've ever seen in a man. He was constantly depressed. He was, when I met him, at a point at which every month he would have electroshock treatment. Then he would feel sort of disoriented for a week. Then he would feel okay for a week. Then he would have a week of going downhill. And then he would have another electroshock treatment. And he said to me when I met him, "It's unbearable to go through my weeks this way. I can't go on this way, and I've figured out how I'm going to end it if I don't get better. But," he said to me, "I heard about a protocol at Mass General for a procedure called a cingulotomy, which is a brain surgery, and I think I'm going to give that a try." And I remember being amazed at that point to think that someone who clearly had so many bad experiences with so many different treatments still had buried in him somewhere enough optimism to reach out for one more. And he had the cingulotomy, and it was incredibly successful. He's now a friend of mine. He has a lovely wife and two beautiful children. He wrote me a letter the Christmas after the surgery, and he said, "My father sent me two presents this year, First, a motorized C.D. rack from The Sharper Image that I didn't really need, but I knew he was giving it to me to celebrate the fact that I'm living on my own and have a job I seem to love. And the other present was a photo of my grandmother, who committed suicide. As I unwrapped it, I began to cry, and my mother came over and said, 'Are you crying because of the relatives you never knew?' And I said, 'She had the same disease I have.' I'm crying now as I write to you. It's not that I'm so sad, but I get overwhelmed, I think, because I could have killed myself, but my parents kept me going, and so did the doctors, and I had the surgery. I'm alive and grateful. We live in the right time, even if it doesn't always feel like it." I was struck by the fact that depression is broadly perceived to be a modern, Western, middle-class thing, and I went to look at how it operated in a variety of other contexts, and one of the things I was most interested in was depression among the indigent. And so I went out to try to look at what was being done for poor people with depression. And what I discovered is that poor people are mostly not being treated for depression. Depression is the result of a genetic vulnerability, which is presumably evenly distributed in the population, and triggering circumstances, which are likely to be more severe for people who are impoverished. And yet it turns out that if you have a really lovely life but feel miserable all the time, you think, "Why do I feel like this? I must have depression." And you set out to find treatment for it. But if you have a perfectly awful life, and you feel miserable all the time, the way you feel is commensurate with your life, and it doesn't occur to you to think, "Maybe this is treatable." And so we have an epidemic in this country of depression among impoverished people that's not being picked up and that's not being treated and that's not being addressed, and it's a tragedy of a grand order. And so I found an academic who was doing a research project in slums outside of D.C., where she picked up women who had come in for other health problems and diagnosed them with depression, and then provided six months of the experimental protocol. One of them, Lolly, came in, and this is what she said the day she came in. She said, and she was a woman, by the way, who had seven children. She said, "I used to have a job but I had to give it up because I couldn't go out of the house. I have nothing to say to my children. In the morning, I can't wait for them to leave, and then I climb in bed and pull the covers over my head, and three o'clock when they come home, it just comes so fast." She said, "I've been taking a lot of Tylenol, anything I can take so that I can sleep more. My husband has been telling me I'm stupid, I'm ugly. I wish I could stop the pain." Well, she was brought into this experimental protocol, and when I interviewed her six months later, she had taken a job working in childcare for the U.S. Navy, she had left the abusive husband, and she said to me, "My kids are so much happier now." She said, "There's one room in my new place for the boys and one room for the girls, but at night, they're just all up on my bed, and we're doing homework all together and everything. One of them wants to be a preacher, one of them wants to be a firefighter, and one of the girls says she's going to be a lawyer. They don't cry like they used to, and they don't fight like they did. That's all I need now is my kids. Things keep on changing, the way I dress, the way I feel, the way I act. I can go outside not being afraid anymore, and I don't think those bad feelings are coming back, and if it weren't for Dr. Miranda and that, I would still be at home with the covers pulled over my head, if I were still alive at all. I asked the Lord to send me an angel, and he heard my prayers." I was really moved by these experiences, and I decided that I wanted to write about them not only in a book I was working on, but also in an article, and so I got a commission from The New York Times Magazine to write about depression among the indigent. And I turned in my story, and my editor called me and said, "We really can't publish this." And I said, "Why not?" And she said, "It just is too far-fetched. These people who are sort of at the very bottom rung of society and then they get a few months of treatment and they're virtually ready to run Morgan Stanley? It's just too implausible." She said, I've never even heard of anything like it." And I said, "The fact that you've never heard of it is an indication that it is news." (Laughter) (Applause) "And you are a news magazine." So after a certain amount of negotiation, they agreed to it. But I think a lot of what they said was connected in some strange way to this distaste that people still have for the idea of treatment, the notion that somehow if we went out and treated a lot of people in indigent communities, that would be an exploitative thing to do, because we would be changing them. There is this false moral imperative that seems to be all around us that treatment of depression, the medications and so on, are an artifice, and that it's not natural. And I think that's very misguided. It would be natural for people's teeth to fall out, but there is nobody militating against toothpaste, at least not in my circles. And people then say, "Well, but isn't depression part of what people are supposed to experience? Didn't we evolve to have depression? Isn't it part of your personality?" To which I would say, mood is adaptive. Being able to have sadness and fear and joy and pleasure and all of the other moods that we have, that's incredibly valuable. And major depression is something that happens when that system gets broken. It's maladaptive. People will come to me and say, "I think, though, if I just stick it out for another year, I think I can just get through this." And I always say to them, "You may get through it, but you'll never be 37 again. Life is short, and that's a whole year you're talking about giving up. Think it through." It's a strange poverty of the English language, and indeed of many other languages, that we use this same word, depression, to describe how a kid feels when it rains on his birthday, and to describe how somebody feels the minute before they commit suicide. People say to me, "Well, is it continuous with normal sadness?" And I say, in a way it's continuous with normal sadness. There is a certain amount of continuity, but it's the same way there's continuity between having an iron fence outside your house that gets a little rust spot that you have to sand off and do a little repainting, and what happens if you leave the house for 100 years and it rusts through until it's only a pile of orange dust. And it's that orange dust spot, that orange dust problem, that's the one we're setting out to address. So now people say, "You take these happy pills, and do you feel happy?" And I don't. But I don't feel sad about having to eat lunch, and I don't feel sad about my answering machine, and I don't feel sad about taking a shower. I feel more, in fact, I think, because I can feel sadness without nullity. I feel sad about professional disappointments, about damaged relationships, about global warming. Those are the things that I feel sad about now. And I said to myself, well, what is the conclusion? How did those people who have better lives even with bigger depression manage to get through? What is the mechanism of resilience? And what I came up with over time was that the people who deny their experience, the ones who say, "I was depressed a long time ago and I never want to think about it again and I'm not going to look at it and I'm just going to get on with my life," ironically, those are the people who are most enslaved by what they have. Shutting out the depression strengthens it. While you hide from it, it grows. And the people who do better are the ones who are able to tolerate the fact that they have this condition. Those who can tolerate their depression are the ones who achieve resilience. So Frank Russakoff said to me, "If I had it again to do over, I suppose I wouldn't do it this way, but in a strange way, I'm grateful for what I've experienced. I'm glad to have been in the hospital 40 times. It taught me so much about love, and my relationship with my parents and my doctors has been so precious to me, and will be always." And Maggie Robbins said, "I used to volunteer in an AIDS clinic, and I would just talk and talk and talk, and the people I was dealing with weren't very responsive, and I thought, 'That's not very friendly or helpful of them.' And then I realized, I realized that they weren't going to do more than make those first few minutes of small talk. It was simply going to be an occasion where I didn't have AIDS and I wasn't dying, but could tolerate the fact that they did and they were. Our needs are our greatest assets. It turns out I've learned to give all the things I need." Valuing one's depression does not prevent a relapse, but it may make the prospect of relapse and even relapse itself easier to tolerate. The question is not so much of finding great meaning and deciding your depression has been very meaningful. It's of seeking that meaning and thinking, when it comes again, "This will be hellish, but I will learn something from it." I have learned in my own depression how big an emotion can be, how it can be more real than facts, and I have found that that experience has allowed me to experience positive emotion in a more intense and more focused way. The opposite of depression is not happiness, but vitality, and these days, my life is vital, even on the days when I'm sad. I felt that funeral in my brain, and I sat next to the colossus at the edge of the world, and I have discovered something inside of myself that I would have to call a soul that I had never formulated until that day 20 years ago when hell came to pay me a surprise visit. I think that while I hated being depressed and would hate to be depressed again, I've found a way to love my depression. I love it because it has forced me to find and cling to joy. I love it because each day I decide, sometimes gamely, and sometimes against the moment's reason, to cleave to the reasons for living. And that, I think, is a highly privileged rapture. Thank you. (Applause)
Chris Anderson: Welcome to TED. Richard Branson: Thank you very much. The first TED has been great. CA: Have you met anyone interesting? RB: Well, the nice thing about TED is everybody's interesting. I was very glad to see Goldie Hawn, because I had an apology to make to her. I'd had dinner with her about two years ago and I'd -- she had this big wedding ring and I put it on my finger and I couldn't get it off. And I went home to my wife that night and she wanted to know why I had another woman's big, massive, big wedding ring on my finger. And, anyway, the next morning we had to go along to the jeweler and get it cut off. So -- (Laughter) -- so apologies to Goldie. CA: That's pretty good. So, we're going to put up some slides of some of your companies here. You've started one or two in your time. So, you know, Virgin Atlantic, Virgin Records -- I guess it all started with a magazine called Student. And then, yes, all these other ones as well. I mean, how do you do this? RB: I read all these sort of TED instructions: you must not talk about your own business, and this, and now you ask me. So I suppose you're not going to be able to kick me off the stage, since you asked the question. (Laughter) CA: It depends what the answer is though. RB: No, I mean, I think I learned early on that if you can run one company, you can really run any companies. I mean, companies are all about finding the right people, inspiring those people, you know, drawing out the best in people. And I just love learning and I'm incredibly inquisitive and I love taking on, you know, the status quo and trying to turn it upside down. So I've seen life as one long learning process. And if I see -- you know, if I fly on somebody else's airline and find the experience is not a pleasant one, which it wasn't, 21 years ago, then I'd think, well, you know, maybe I can create the kind of airline that I'd like to fly on. And so, you know, so got one secondhand 747 from Boeing and gave it a go. CA: Well, that was a bizarre thing, because you made this move that a lot of people advised you was crazy. And in fact, in a way, it almost took down your empire at one point. I had a conversation with one of the investment bankers who, at the time when you basically sold Virgin Records and invested heavily in Virgin Atlantic, and his view was that you were trading, you know, the world's fourth biggest record company for the twenty-fifth biggest airline and that you were out of your mind. Why did you do that? RB: Well, I think that there's a very thin dividing line between success and failure. And I think if you start a business without financial backing, you're likely to go the wrong side of that dividing line. We had -- we were being attacked by British Airways. They were trying to put our airline out of business, and they launched what's become known as the dirty tricks campaign. And I realized that the whole empire was likely to come crashing down unless I chipped in a chip. And in order to protect the jobs of the people who worked for the airline, and protect the jobs of the people who worked for the record company, I had to sell the family jewelry to protect the airline. CA: Post-Napster, you're looking like a bit of a genius, actually, for that as well. RB: Yeah, as it turned out, it proved to be the right move. But, yeah, it was sad at the time, but we moved on. CA: Now, you use the Virgin brand a lot and it seems like you're getting synergy from one thing to the other. What does the brand stand for in your head? RB: Well, I like to think it stands for quality, that you know, if somebody comes across a Virgin company, they -- CA: They are quality, Richard. Come on now, everyone says quality. Spirit? RB: No, but I was going to move on this. We have a lot of fun and I think the people who work for it enjoy it. As I say, we go in and shake up other industries, and I think, you know, we do it differently and I think that industries are not quite the same as a result of Virgin attacking the market. CA: I mean, there are a few launches you've done where the brand maybe hasn't worked quite as well. I mean, Virgin Brides -- what happened there? (Laughter) RB: We couldn't find any customers. (Laughter) (Applause) CA: I was actually also curious why -- I think you missed an opportunity with your condoms launch. You called it Mates. I mean, couldn't you have used the Virgin brand for that as well? Ain't virgin no longer, or something. RB: Again, we may have had problems finding customers. I mean, we had -- often, when you launch a company and you get customer complaints, you know, you can deal with them. But about three months after the launch of the condom company, I had a letter, a complaint, and I sat down and wrote a long letter back to this lady apologizing profusely. But obviously, there wasn't a lot I could do about it. And then six months later, or nine months after the problem had taken, I got this delightful letter with a picture of the baby asking if I'd be godfather, which I became. So, it all worked out well. CA: Really? You should have brought a picture. That's wonderful. RB: I should have. CA: So, just help us with some of the numbers. I mean, what are the numbers on this? I mean, how big is the group overall? How much -- what's the total revenue? RB: It's about 25 billion dollars now, in total. CA: And how many employees? RB: About 55,000. CA: So, you've been photographed in various ways at various times and never worrying about putting your dignity on the line or anything like that. What was that? Was that real? RB: Yeah. We were launching a megastore in Los Angeles, I think. No, I mean, I think -- CA: But is that your hair? RB: No. CA: What was that one? RB: Dropping in for tea. CA: OK. (Laughter) RB: Ah, that was quite fun. That was a wonderful car-boat in which -- CA: Oh, that car that we -- actually we -- it was a TEDster event there, I think. Is that -- could you still pause on that one actually, for a minute? (Laughter) RB: It's a tough job, isn't it? CA: I mean, it is a tough job. (Laughter) When I first came to America, I used to try this with employees as well and they kind of -- they have these different rules over here, it's very strange. RB: I know, I have -- the lawyers say you mustn't do things like that, but -- CA: I mean, speaking of which, tell us about -- RB: "Pammy" we launched, you know -- mistakenly thought we could take on Coca-Cola, and we launched a cola bottle called "The Pammy" and it was shaped a bit like Pamela Anderson. But the trouble is, it kept on tipping over, but -- (Laughter) CA: Designed by Philippe Starck perhaps? RB: Of course. CA: So, we'll just run a couple more pictures here. Virgin Brides. Very nice. And, OK, so stop there. This was -- you had some award I think? RB: Yeah, well, 25 years earlier, we'd launched the Sex Pistols' "God Save The Queen," and I'd certainly never expected that 25 years later -- that she'd actually knight us. But somehow, she must have had a forgetful memory, I think. CA: Well, God saved her and you got your just reward. Do you like to be called Sir Richard, or how? RB: Nobody's ever called me Sir Richard. Occasionally in America, I hear people saying Sir Richard and think there's some Shakespearean play taking place. But nowhere else anyway. CA: OK. So can you use your knighthood for anything or is it just ... RB: No. I suppose if you're having problems getting a booking in a restaurant or something, that might be worth using it. CA: You know, it's not Richard Branson. It's Sir Richard Branson. RB: I'll go get the secretary to use it. CA: OK. So let's look at the space thing. I think, with us, we've got a video that shows what you're up to, and Virgin Galactic up in the air. (Video) So that's the Bert Rutan designed spaceship? RB: Yeah, it'll be ready in -- well, ready in 12 months and then we do 12 months extensive testing. And then 24 months from now, people will be able to take a ride into space. CA: So this interior is Philippe Starcke designed? RB: Philippe has done the -- yeah, quite a bit of it: the logos and he's building the space station in New Mexico. And basically, he's just taken an eye and the space station will be one giant eye, so when you're in space, you ought to be able to see this massive eye looking up at you. And when you land, you'll be able to go back into this giant eye. But he's an absolute genius when it comes to design. CA: But you didn't have him design the engine? RB: Philippe is quite erratic, so I think that he wouldn't be the best person to design the engine, no. CA: He gave a wonderful talk here two days ago. RB: Yeah? No, he is a -- CA: Well, some people found it wonderful, some people found it completely bizarre. But, I personally found it wonderful. RB: He's a wonderful enthusiast, which is why I love him. But ... CA: So, now, you've always had this exploration bug in you. Have you ever regretted that? RB: Many times. I mean, I think with the ballooning and boating expeditions we've done in the past. Well, I got pulled out of the sea I think six times by helicopters, so -- and each time, I didn't expect to come home to tell the tale. So in those moments, you certainly wonder what you're doing up there or -- CA: What was the closest you got to -- when did you think, this is it, I might be on my way out? RB: Well, I think the balloon adventures were -- each one was, each one, actually, I think we came close. And, I mean, first of all we -- nobody had actually crossed the Atlantic in a hot air balloon before, so we had to build a hot air balloon that was capable of flying in the jet stream, and we weren't quite sure, when a balloon actually got into the jet stream, whether it would actually survive the 200, 220 miles an hour winds that you can find up there. And so, just the initial lift off from Sugarloaf to cross the Atlantic, as we were pushing into the jet stream, this enormous balloon -- the top of the balloon ended up going at a couple of hundred miles an hour, the capsule that we were in at the bottom was going at maybe two miles an hour, and it just took off. And it was like holding onto a thousand horses. And we were just crossing every finger, praying that the balloon would hold together, which, fortunately, it did. But the ends of all those balloon trips were, you know -- something seemed to go wrong every time, and on that particular occasion, the more experienced balloonist who was with me jumped, and left me holding on for dear life. (Laughter) CA: Did he tell you to jump, or he just said, "I'm out of here!" and ... RB: No, he told me jump, but once his weight had gone, the balloon just shot up to 12,000 feet and I ... CA: And you inspired an Ian McEwan novel I think with that. RB: Yeah. No, I put on my oxygen mask and stood on top of the balloon, with my parachute, looking at the swirling clouds below, trying to pluck up my courage to jump into the North Sea, which -- and it was a very, very, very lonely few moments. But, anyway, we managed to survive it. CA: Did you jump? Or it came down in the end? RB: Well, I knew I had about half an hour's fuel left, and I also knew that the chances were that if I jumped, I would only have a couple of minutes of life left. So I climbed back into the capsule and just desperately tried to make sure that I was making the right decision. And wrote some notes to my family. And then climbed back up again, looked down at those clouds again, climbed back into the capsule again. And then finally, just thought, there's a better way. I've got, you know, this enormous balloon above me, it's the biggest parachute ever, why not use it? And so I managed to fly the balloon down through the clouds, and about 50 feet, before I hit the sea, threw myself over. And the balloon hit the sea and went shooting back up to 10,000 feet without me. But it was a wonderful feeling being in that water and -- CA: What did you write to your family? RB: Just what you would do in a situation like that: just I love you very much. And I'd already written them a letter before going on this trip, which -- just in case anything had happened. But fortunately, they never had to use it. CA: Your companies have had incredible PR value out of these heroics. The years -- and until I stopped looking at the polls, you were sort of regarded as this great hero in the U.K. and elsewhere. And cynics might say, you know, this is just a smart business guy doing what it takes to execute his particular style of marketing. How much was the PR value part of this? RB: Well, of course, the PR experts said that as an airline owner, the last thing you should be doing is heading off in balloons and boats, and crashing into the seas. (Laughter) CA: They have a point, Richard. RB: In fact, I think our airline took a full page ad at the time saying, you know, come on, Richard, there are better ways of crossing the Atlantic. (Laughter) CA: To do all this, you must have been a genius from the get-go, right? RB: Well, I won't contradict that. (Laughter) CA: OK, this isn't exactly hardball. OK. Didn't -- weren't you just terrible at school? RB: I was dyslexic. I had no understanding of schoolwork whatsoever. I certainly would have failed IQ tests. And it was one of the reasons I left school when I was 15 years old. And if I -- if I'm not interested in something, I don't grasp it. As somebody who's dyslexic, you also have some quite bizarre situations. I mean, for instance, I've had to -- you know, I've been running the largest group of private companies in Europe, but haven't been able to know the difference between net and gross. And so the board meetings have been fascinating. (Laughter) And so, it's like, good news or bad news? And generally, the people would say, oh, well that's bad news. CA: But just to clarify, the 25 billion dollars is gross, right? That's gross? (Laughter) RB: Well, I hope it's net actually, having -- (Laughter) -- I've got it right. CA: No, trust me, it's gross. (Laughter) RB: So, when I turned 50, somebody took me outside the boardroom and said, "Look Richard, here's a -- let me draw on a diagram. Here's a net in the sea, and the fish have been pulled from the sea into this net. And that's the profits you've got left over in this little net, everything else is eaten." And I finally worked it all out. (Laughter) (Applause) CA: But, I mean, at school -- so as well as being, you know, doing pretty miserably academically, but you were also the captain of the cricket and football teams. So you were kind of a -- you were a natural leader, but just a bit of a ... Were you a rebel then, or how would you ... RB: Yeah, I think I was a bit of a maverick and -- but I ... And I was, yeah, I was fortunately good at sport, and so at least I had something to excel at, at school. CA: And some bizarre things happened just earlier in your life. I mean, there's the story about your mother allegedly dumping you in a field, aged four, and saying "OK, walk home." Did this really happen? RB: She was, you know, she felt that we needed to stand on our own two feet from an early age. So she did things to us, which now she'd be arrested for, such as pushing us out of the car, and telling us to find our own way to Granny's, about five miles before we actually got there. And making us go on wonderful, long bike rides. And we were never allowed to watch television and the like. CA: But is there a risk here? I mean, there's a lot of people in the room who are wealthy, and they've got kids, and we've got this dilemma about how you bring them up. Do you look at the current generation of kids coming up and think they're too coddled, they don't know what they've got, we're going to raise a generation of privileged ... RB: No, I think if you're bringing up kids, you just want to smother them with love and praise and enthusiasm. So I don't think you can mollycoddle your kids too much really. CA: You didn't turn out too bad, I have to say, I'm ... Your headmaster said to you -- I mean he found you kind of an enigma at your school -- he said, you're either going to be a millionaire or go to prison, and I'm not sure which. Which of those happened first? (Laughter) RB: Well, I've done both. I think I went to prison first. I was actually prosecuted under two quite ancient acts in the U.K. I was prosecuted under the 1889 Venereal Diseases Act and the 1916 Indecent Advertisements Act. On the first occasion, for mentioning the word venereal disease in public, which -- we had a center where we would help young people who had problems. And one of the problems young people have is venereal disease. And there's an ancient law that says you can't actually mention the word venereal disease or print it in public. So the police knocked on the door, and told us they were going to arrest us if we carried on mentioning the word venereal disease. We changed it to social diseases and people came along with acne and spots, but nobody came with VD any more. So, we put it back to VD and promptly got arrested. And then subsequently, "Never Mind the Bollocks, Here's the Sex Pistols," the word bollocks, the police decided was a rude word and so we were arrested for using the word bollocks on the Sex Pistols' album. And John Mortimer, the playwright, defended us. And he asked if I could find a linguistics expert to come up with a different definition of the word bollocks. And so I rang up Nottingham University, and I asked to talk to the professor of linguistics. And he said, "Look, bollocks is not a -- has nothing to do with balls whatsoever. It's actually a nickname given to priests in the eighteenth century." (Laughter) And he went, "Furthermore, I'm a priest myself." And so I said, "Would you mind coming to the court?" And he said he'd be delighted. And I said -- and he said, "Would you like me to wear my dog collar?" And I said, "Yes, definitely. Please." (Laughter) CA: That's great. RB: So our key witness argued that it was actually "Never Mind the Priest, Here's the Sex Pistols." (Laughter) And the judge found us -- reluctantly found us not guilty, so ... (Laughter) CA: That is outrageous. (Applause) So seriously, is there a dark side? A lot of people would say there's no way that someone could put together this incredible collection of businesses without knifing a few people in the back, you know, doing some ugly things. You've been accused of being ruthless. There was a nasty biography written about you by someone. Is any of it true? Is there an element of truth in it? RB: I don't actually think that the stereotype of a businessperson treading all over people to get to the top, generally speaking, works. I think if you treat people well, people will come back and come back for more. And I think all you have in life is your reputation and it's a very small world. And I actually think that the best way of becoming a successful business leader is dealing with people fairly and well, and I like to think that's how we run Virgin. CA: And what about the people who love you and who see you spending -- you keep getting caught up in these new projects, but it almost feels like you're addicted to launching new stuff. You get excited by an idea and, kapow! I mean, do you think about life balance? How do your family feel about each time you step into something big and new? RB: I also believe that being a father's incredibly important, so from the time the kids were very young, you know, when they go on holiday, I go on holiday with them. And so we spend a very good sort of three months away together. Yes, I'll, you know, be in touch. We're very lucky, we have this tiny little island in the Caribbean and we can -- so I can take them there and we can bring friends, and we can play together, but I can also keep in touch with what's going on. CA: You started talking in recent years about this term capitalist philanthropy. What is that? RB: Capitalism has been proven to be a system that works. You know, the alternative, communism, has not worked. But the problem with capitalism is extreme wealth ends up in the hands of a few people, and therefore extreme responsibility, I think, goes with that wealth. And I think it's important that the individuals, who are in that fortunate position, do not end up competing for bigger and bigger boats, and bigger and bigger cars, but, you know, use that money to either create new jobs or to tackle issues around the world. CA: And what are the issues that you worry about most, care most about, want to turn your resources toward? RB: Well, there's -- I mean there's a lot of issues. I mean global warming certainly is a massive threat to mankind and we are putting a lot of time and energy into, A, trying to come up with alternative fuels and, B, you know, we just launched this prize, which is really a prize in case we don't get an answer on alternative fuels, in case we don't actually manage to get the carbon emissions cut down quickly, and in case we go through the tipping point. We need to try to encourage people to come up with a way of extracting carbon out of the Earth's atmosphere. And we just -- you know, there weren't really people working on that before, so we wanted people to try to -- all the best brains in the world to start thinking about that, and also to try to extract the methane out of the Earth's atmosphere as well. And actually, we've had about 15,000 people fill in the forms saying they want to give it a go. And so we only need one, so we're hopeful. CA: And you're also working in Africa on a couple of projects? RB: Yes, I mean, we've got -- we're setting up something called the war room, which is maybe the wrong word. We're trying to -- maybe we'll change it -- but anyway, it's a war room to try to coordinate all the attack that's going on in Africa, all the different social problems in Africa, and try to look at best practices. So, for instance, there's a doctor in Africa that's found that if you give a mother antiretroviral drugs at 24 weeks, when she's pregnant, that the baby will not have HIV when it's born. And so disseminating that information to around the rest of Africa is important. CA: The war room sounds, it sounds powerful and dramatic. And is there a risk that the kind of the business heroes of the West get so excited about -- I mean, they're used to having an idea, getting stuff done, and they believe profoundly in their ability to make a difference in the world. Is there a risk that we go to places like Africa and say, we've got to fix this problem and we can do it, I've got all these billions of dollars, you know, da, da, da -- here's the big idea. And kind of take a much more complex situation and actually end up making a mess of it. Do you worry about that? RB: Well, first of all, on this particular situation, we're actually -- we're working with the government on it. I mean, Thabo Mbeki's had his problems with accepting HIV and AIDS are related, but this is a way, I think, of him tackling this problem and instead of the world criticizing him, it's a way of working with him, with his government. It's important that if people do go to Africa and do try to help, they don't just go in there and then leave after a few years. It's got to be consistent. But I think business leaders can bring their entrepreneurial know-how and help governments approach things slightly differently. For instance, we're setting up clinics in Africa where we're going to be giving free antiretroviral drugs, free TB treatment and free malaria treatment. But we're also trying to make them self-sustaining clinics, so that people pay for some other aspects. CA: I mean a lot of cynics say about someone like yourself, or Bill Gates, or whatever, that this is really being -- it's almost driven by some sort of desire again, you know, for the right image, for guilt avoidance and not like a real philanthropic instinct. What would you say to them? RB: Well, I think that everybody -- people do things for a whole variety of different reasons and I think that, you know, when I'm on me deathbed, I will want to feel that I've made a difference to other people's lives. And that may be a selfish thing to think, but it's the way I've been brought up. I think if I'm in a position to radically change other people's lives for the better, I should do so. CA: How old are you? RB: I'm 56. CA: I mean, the psychologist Erik Erikson says that -- as I understand him and I'm a total amateur -- but that during 30s, 40s people are driven by this desire to grow and that's where they get their fulfillment. 50s, 60s, the mode of operation shifts more to the quest for wisdom and a search for legacy. I mean, it seems like you're still a little bit in the growth phases, you're still doing these incredible new plans. How much do you think about legacy, and what would you like your legacy to be? RB: I don't think I think too much about legacy. I mean, I like to -- you know, my grandmother lived to 101, so hopefully I've got another 30 or 40 years to go. No, I just want to live life to its full. You know, if I can make a difference, I hope to be able to make a difference. And I think one of the positive things at the moment is you've got Sergey and Larry from Google, for instance, who are good friends. And, thank God, you've got two people who genuinely care about the world and with that kind of wealth. If they had that kind of wealth and they didn't care about the world, it would be very worrying. And you know they're going to make a hell of a difference to the world. And I think it's important that people in that kind of position do make a difference. CA: Well, Richard, when I was starting off in business, I knew nothing about it and I also was sort of -- I thought that business people were supposed to just be ruthless and that that was the only way you could have a chance of succeeding. And you actually did inspire me. I looked at you, I thought, well, he's made it. Maybe there is a different way. So I would like to thank you for that inspiration, and for coming to TED today. Thank you. Thank you so much. (Applause)
You know, we're going to do things a little differently. I'm not going to show you a presentation. I'm going to talk to you. And at the same time, we're going to look at just images from a photo stream that is pretty close to live of things that -- snapshots from Second Life. So hopefully this will be fascinating. You can -- I can compete for your attention with the strange pictures that you see on screen that come from there. I thought I'd talk a little bit about some just big ideas about this, and then get John back out here so we can talk interactively a little bit more and think and ask questions. You know, I guess the first question is, why build a virtual world at all? And I think the answer to that is always going to be at least driven to a certain extent by the people initially crazy enough to start the project, you know. So I can give you a little bit of first background just on me and what moved me as a -- really going back as far as a teenager and then an adult, to actually try and build this kind of thing. I was a very creative kid who read a lot, and got into electronics first, and then later, programming computers, when I was really young. I was just always trying to make things. I was just obsessed with taking things apart and building things, and just anything I could do with my hands or with wood or electronics or metal or anything else. And so, for example -- and it's a great Second Life thing -- I had a bedroom. And every kid, you know, as a teenager, has got his bedroom he retreats to -- but I wanted my door, I thought it would be cool if my door went up rather than opened, like on Star Trek. I thought it would be neat to do that. And so I got up in the ceiling and I cut through the ceiling joists, much to my parents' delight, and put the door, you know, being pulled up through the ceiling. I built -- I put a garage-door opener up in the attic that would pull this door up. You can imagine the amount of time that it took me to do this to the house and the displeasure of my parents. The thing that was always striking to me was that we as people could have so many really amazing ideas about things we'd like to do, but are so often unable, in the real world, to actually do those things -- to actually cobble together the materials and go through the actual execution phase of building something that you imagine from a design perspective. And so for me, I know that when the Internet came around and I was doing computer programming and just, you know, just generally trying to run my own little company and figure out what to do with the Internet and with computers, I was just immediately struck by how the ultimate thing that you would really want to do with the Internet and with computers would be to use the Internet and connected computers to simulate a world to sort of recreate the laws of physics and the rules of how things went together -- the sort of -- the idea of atoms and how to make things, and do that inside a computer so that we could all get in there and make stuff. And so for me that was the thing that was so enticing. I just wanted this place where you could build things. And so I think you see that in the genesis of what has happened with Second Life, and I think it's important. I also think that more generally, the use of the Internet and technology as a kind of a space between us for creativity and design is a general trend. It is a -- sort of a great human progress. Technology is just generally being used to allow us to create in as shared and social a way as possible. And I think that Second Life and virtual worlds more generally represent the best we can do to achieve that right now. You know, another way to look at that, and related to the content and, you know, thinking about space, is to connect sort of virtual worlds to space. I thought that might be a fun thing to talk about for a second. If you think about going into space, it's a fascinating thing. So many movies, so many kids, we all sort of dream about exploring space. Now, why is that? Stop for a moment and ask, why that conceit? Why do we as people want to do that? I think there's a couple of things. It's what we see in the movies -- you know, it's this dream that we all share. One is that if you went into space you'd be able to begin again. In some sense, you would become someone else in that journey, because there wouldn't be -- you'd leave society and life as you know it, behind. And so inevitably, you would transform yourself -- irreversibly, in all likelihood -- as you began this exploration. And then the second thing is that there's this tangible sense that if you travel far enough, you can find out there -- oh, yeah -- you have no idea what you're going to find once you get there, into space. It's going to be different than here. And in fact, it's going to be so different than what we see here on earth that anything is going to be possible. So that's kind of the idea -- we as humans crave the idea of creating a new identity and going into a place where anything is possible. And I think that if you really sit and think about it, virtual worlds, and where we're going with more and more computing technology, represent essentially the likely, really tactically possible version of space exploration. We are moved by the idea of virtual worlds because, like space, they allow us to reinvent ourselves and they contain anything and everything, and probably anything could happen there. You know, to give you a size idea about scale, you know, comparing space to Second Life, most people don't realize, kind of -- and then this is just like the Internet in the early '90s. In fact, Second Life virtual worlds are a lot like the Internet in the early '90s today: everybody's very excited, there's a lot of hype and excitement about one idea or the next from moment to moment, and then there's despair and everybody thinks the whole thing's not going to work. Everything that's happening with Second Life and more broadly with virtual worlds, all happened in the early '90s. We always play a game at the office where you can take any article and find the same article where you just replace the words "Second Life" with "Web," and "virtual reality" with "Internet." You can find exactly the same articles written about everything that people are observing. To give you an idea of scale, Second Life is about 20,000 CPUs at this point. It's about 20,000 computers connected together in three facilities in the United States right now, that are simulating this virtual space. And the virtual space itself -- there's about 250,000 people a day that are wandering around in there, so the kind of, active population is something like a smallish city. The space itself is about 10 times the size of San Francisco, and it's about as densely built out. So it gives you an idea of scale. Now, it's expanding very rapidly -- about five percent a month or so right now, in terms of new servers being added. And so of course, radically unlike the real world, and like the Internet, the whole thing is expanding very, very quickly, and historically exponentially. So that sort of space exploration thing is matched up here by the amount of content that's in there, and I think that amount is critical. It was critical with the virtual world that it be this space of truly infinite possibility. We're very sensitive to that as humans. You know, you know when you see it. You know when you can do anything in a space and you know when you can't. Second Life today is this 20,000 machines, and it's about 100 million or so user-created objects where, you know, an object would be something like this, possibly interactive. Tens of millions of them are thinking all the time; they have code attached to them. So it's a really large world already, in terms of the amount of stuff that's there and that's very important. If anybody plays, like, World of Warcraft, World of Warcraft comes on, like, four DVDs. Second Life, by comparison, has about 100 terabytes of user-created data, making it about 25,000 times larger. So again, like the Internet compared to AOL, and the sort of chat rooms and content on AOL at the time, what's happening here is something very different, because the sheer scale of what people can do when they're enabled to do anything they want is pretty amazing. The last big thought is that it is almost certainly true that whatever this is going to evolve into is going to be bigger in total usage than the Web itself. And let me justify that with two statements. Generically, what we use the Web for is to organize, exchange, create and consume information. It's kind of like Irene talking about Google being data-driven. I'd say I kind of think about the world as being information. Everything that we interact with, all the experiences that we have, is kind of us flowing through a sea of information and interacting with it in different ways. The Web puts information in the form of text and images. The topology, the geography of the Web is text-to-text links for the most part. That's one way of organizing information, but there are two things about the way you access information in a virtual world that I think are the important ways that they're very different and much better than what we've been able to do to date with the Web. The first is that, as I said, the -- well, the first difference for virtual worlds is that information is presented to you in the virtual world using the most powerful iconic symbols that you can possibly use with human beings. So for example, C-H-A-I-R is the English word for that, but a picture of this is a universal symbol. Everybody knows what it means. There's no need to translate it. It's also more memorable if I show you that picture, and I show you C-H-A-I-R on a piece of paper. You can do tests that show that you'll remember that I was talking about a chair a couple of days later a lot better. So when you organize information using the symbols of our memory, using the most common symbols that we've been immersed in all our lives, you maximally both excite, stimulate, are able to remember, transfer and manipulate data. And so virtual worlds are the best way for us to essentially organize and experience information. And I think that's something that people have talked about for 20 years -- you know, that 3D, that lifelike environments are really important in some magical way to us. But the second thing -- and I think this one is less obvious -- is that the experience of creating, consuming, exploring that information is in the virtual world implicitly and inherently social. You are always there with other people. And we as humans are social creatures and must, or are aided by, or enjoy more, the consumption of information in the presence of others. It's essential to us. You can't escape it. When you're on Amazon.com and you're looking for digital cameras or whatever, you're on there right now, when you're on the site, with like 5,000 other people, but you can't talk to them. You can't just turn to the people that are browsing digital cameras on the same page as you, and ask them, "Hey, have you seen one of these before? Because I'm thinking about buying it." That experience of like, shopping together, just as a simple example, is an example of how as social creatures we want to experience information in that way. So that second point, that we inherently experience information together or want to experience it together, is critical to essentially, kind of, this trend of where we're going to use technology to connect us. And so I think, again, that it's likely that in the next decade or so these virtual worlds are going to be the most common way as human beings that we kind of use the electronics of the Internet, if you will, to be together, to consume information. You know, mapping in India -- that's such a great example. Maybe the solution there involves talking to other people in real time. Asking for advice, rather than any possible way that you could just statically organize a map. So I think that's another big point. I think that wherever this is all going, whether it's Second Life or its descendants, or something broader that happens all around the world at a lot of different points -- this is what we're going to see the Internet used for, and total traffic and total unique users is going to invert, so that the Web and its bibliographic set of text and graphical information is going to become a tool or a part of that consumption pattern, but the pattern itself is going to happen mostly in this type of an environment. Big idea, but I think highly defensible. So let me stop there and bring John back, and maybe we can just have a longer conversation. Thank you. John. That's great. (Applause) John Hockenberry: Why is the creation, the impulse to create Second Life, not a utopian impulse? Like for example, in the 19th century, any number of works of literature that imagined alternative worlds were explicitly utopian. Philip Rosedale: I think that's great. That's such a deep question. Yeah. Is a virtual world likely to be a utopia, would be one way I'd say it. The answer is no, and I think the reason why is because the Web itself as a good example is profoundly bottoms-up. That idea of infinite possibility, that magic of anything can happen, only happens in an environment where you really know that there's a fundamental freedom at the level of the individual actor, at the level of the Lego blocks, if you will, that make up the virtual world. You have to have that level of freedom, and so I'm often asked that, you know, is there a, kind of, utopian or, is there a utopian tendency to Second Life and things like it, that you would create a world that has a grand scheme to it? Those top-down schemes are alienating to just about everybody, even if you mean well when you build them. And what's more, human society, when it's controlled, when you set out a grand scheme of rules, a new way of people interacting, or a new way of laying out a city, or whatever, that stuff historically has never scaled much beyond, you know -- I always laughingly say -- the Mall of America, you know, which is like, the largest piece of centrally designed architecture that, you know, has been built. JH: The Kremlin was pretty big. PR: The Kremlin, yeah. That's true. The whole complex. JH: Give me a story of a tool you created at the beginning in Second Life that you were pretty sure people would want to use in the creation of their avatars or in communicating that people actually in practice said, no, I'm not interested in that at all, and name something that you didn't come up with that almost immediately people began to demand. PR: I'm sure I can think of multiple examples of both of those. One of my favorites. I had this feature that I built into Second Life -- I was really passionate about it. It was an ability to kind of walk up close to somebody and have a more private conversation, but it wasn't instant messaging because you had to sort of befriend somebody. It was just this idea that you could kind of have a private chat. I just remember it was one of those examples of data-driven design. I thought it was such a good idea from my perspective, and it was just absolutely never used, and we ultimately -- I think we've now turned it off, if I remember. We finally gave up, took it out of the code. But more generally, you know, one other example I think about this, which is great relative to the utopian idea. Second Life originally had 16 simulators. It now has 20,000. So when it only had 16, it was only about as big as this college campus. And we had -- we zoned it, you know: we put a nightclub, we put a disco where you could dance, and then we had a place where you could fight with guns if you wanted to, and we had another place that was like a boardwalk, kind of a Coney Island. And we laid out the zoning, but of course, people could build all around it however they wanted to. And what was so amazing right from the start was that the idea that we had put out in the zoning concept, basically, was instantly and thoroughly ignored, and like, two months into the whole thing, -- which is really a small amount of time, even in Second Life time -- I remember the users, the people who were then using Second Life, the residents came to me and said, we want to buy the disco -- because I had built it -- we want to buy that land and raze it and put houses on it. And I sold it to them -- I mean, we transferred ownership and they had a big party and blew up the entire building. And I remember that that was just so telling, you know, that you didn't know exactly what was going to happen. When you think about stuff that people have built that's popular -- JH: CBGB's has to close eventually, you know. That's the rule. PR: Exactly. And it -- but it closed on day one, basically, in Internet time. You know, an example of something -- pregnancy. You can have a baby in Second Life. This is done entirely using, kind of, the tools that are built into Second Life, so the innate concept of becoming pregnant and having a baby, of course -- Second Life is, at the platform level, at the level of the company -- at Linden Lab -- Second Life has no game properties to it whatsoever. There is no attempt to structure the experience, to make it utopian in that sense that we put into it. So of course, we never would have put a mechanism for having babies or, you know, taking two avatars and merging them, or something. But people built the ability to have babies and care for babies as a purchasable experience that you can have in Second Life and so -- I mean, that's a pretty fascinating example of, you know, what goes on in the overall economy. And of course, the existence of an economy is another idea. I didn't talk about it, but it's a critical feature. When people are given the opportunity to create in the world, there's really two things they want. One is fair ownership of the things they create. And then the second one is -- if they feel like it, and they're not going to do it in every case, but in many they are -- they want to actually be able to sell that creation as a way of providing for their own livelihood. True on the Web -- also true in Second Life. And so the existence of an economy is critical. JH: Questions for Philip Rosedale? Right here. (Audience: Well, first an observation, which is that you look like a character.) JH: The observation is, Philip has been accused of looking like a character, an avatar, in Second Life. Respond, and then we'll get the rest of your question. PR: But I don't look like my avatar. (Laughter) How many people here know what my avatar looks like? That's probably not very many. JH: Are you ripping off somebody else's avatar with that, sort of -- PR: No, no. I didn't. One of the other guys at work had a fantastic avatar -- a female avatar -- that I used to be once in a while. But my avatar is a guy wearing chaps. Spiky hair -- spikier than this. Kind of orange hair. Handlebar mustache. Kind of a Village People sort of a character. So, very cool. JH: And your question? (Audience: [Unclear].) JH: The question is, there appears to be a lack of cultural fine-tuning in Second Life. It doesn't seem to have its own culture, and the sort of differences that exist in the real world aren't translated into the Second Life map. PR: Well, first of all, we're very early, so this has only been going on for a few years. And so part of what we see is the same evolution of human behavior that you see in emerging societies. So a fair criticism -- is what it is -- of Second Life today is that it's more like the Wild West than it is like Rome, from a cultural standpoint. That said, the evolution of, and the nuanced interaction that creates culture, is happening at 10 times the speed of the real world, and in an environment where, if you walk into a bar in Second Life, 65 percent of the people there are not in the United States, and in fact are speaking their, you know, various and different languages. In fact, one of the ways to make money in Second Life is to make really cool translators that you drag onto your body and they basically, kind of, pop up on your screen and allow you to use Google or Babel Fish or one of the other online text translators to on-the-fly translate spoken -- I'm sorry -- typed text between individuals. And so, the multicultural nature and the sort of cultural melting pot that's happening inside Second Life is quite -- I think, quite remarkable relative to what in real human terms in the real world we've ever been able to achieve. So, I think that culture will fine-tune, it will emerge, but we still have some years to wait while that happens, as you would naturally expect. JH: Other questions? Right here. (Audience: What's your demographic?) JH: What's your demographic? PR: So, the question is, what's the demographic. So, the average age of a person in Second Life is 32, however, the use of Second Life increases dramatically as your physical age increases. So as you go from age 30 to age 60 -- and there are many people in their sixties using Second Life -- this is also not a sharp curve -- it's very, very distributed -- usage goes up in terms of, like, hours per week by 40 percent as you go from age 30 to age 60 in real life, so there's not -- many people make the mistake of believing that Second Life is some kind of an online game. Actually it's generally unappealing -- I'm just speaking broadly and critically -- it's not very appealing to people that play online video games, because the graphics are not yet equivalent to -- I mean, these are very nice pictures, but in general the graphics are not quite equivalent to the fine-tuned graphics that you see in a Grand Theft Auto 4. So average age: 32. I mentioned 65 percent of the users are not in the United States. The distribution amongst countries is extremely broad. There's users from, you know, virtually every country in the world now in Second Life. The dominant ones are -- if you take the UK and Europe, together they make up about 55 percent of the usage base in Second Life. In terms of psychographic -- oh, men and women: men and women are almost equally matched in Second Life, so about 45 percent of the people online right now on Second Life are women. Women use Second Life, though, about 30 to 40 percent more, on an hours basis, than men do, meaning that more men sign up than women, and more women stay and use it than men. So that's another demographic fact. In terms of psychographic, you know, the people in Second Life are remarkably dissimilar relative to what you might think, when you go in and talk to them and meet them, and I would, you know, challenge you to just do this and find out. But it's not a bunch of programmers. It's not easy to describe as a demographic. If I had to just sort of paint a broad picture, I'd say, remember the people who were really getting into eBay in the first few years of eBay? Maybe a little bit like that: in other words, people who are early adopters. They tend to be creative. They tend to be entrepreneurial. A lot of them -- about 55,000 people so far -- are cash-flow positive: they're making money from what -- I mean, real-world money -- from what they're doing in Second Life, so it's a very build -- still a creative, building things, build-your-own-business type of an orientation. So, that's it. JH: You describe yourself, Philip, as someone who was really creative when you were young and, you know, liked to make things. I mean, it's not often that you hear somebody describe themselves as really creative. I suspect that's possibly a euphemism for C student who spent a lot of time in his room? Is it possible? (Laughter) PR: I was a -- there were times I was a C student. You know, it's funny. When I got to college -- I studied physics in college -- and I got really -- it was funny, because I was definitely a more antisocial kid. I read all the time. I was shy. I don't seem like it now, but I was very shy. Moved around a bunch -- had that experience too. So I did, kind of, I think, live in my own world, and obviously that helps, you know, engage your real interest in something. JH: So you're on your fifth life at this point? PR: If you count, yeah, cities. So -- but I did -- and I didn't do -- I think I didn't do as well in school as I could have. I think you're right. I wasn't, like, an obsessed -- you know, get A's kind of guy. I was going to say, I had a great social experience when I went to college that I hadn't had before, a more fraternal experience, where I met six or seven other guys who I studied physics with, and I was very competitive with them, so then I started to get A's. But you're right: I wasn't an A student. JH: Last question. Right here. (Audience: In the pamphlet, there's a statement -- ) JH: You want to paraphrase that? PR: Yeah, so let me restate that. So, you're saying that in the pamphlet there's a statement that we may come to prefer our digital selves to our real ones -- our more malleable or manageable digital identities to our real identities -- and that in fact, much of human life and human experience may move into the digital realm. And then that's kind of a horrifying thought, of course. That's a frightening change, frightening disruption. I guess, and you're asking, what do I think about that? How do I -- JH: What's your response to the people who would say, that's horrifying? (Audience: If someone would say to you, I find that disturbing, what would be your response?) PR: Well, I'd say a couple of things. One is, it's disturbing like the Internet or electricity was. That is to say, it's a big change, but it isn't avoidable. So, no amount of backpedaling or intentional behavior or political behavior is going to keep these technology changes from connecting us together, because the basic motive that people have -- to be creative and entrepreneurial -- is going to drive energy into these virtual worlds in the same way that it has with the Web. So this change, I believe, is a huge disruptive change. Obviously, I'm the optimist and a big believer in what's going on here, but I think that as -- even a sober, you know, the most sober, disconnected thinker about this, looking at it from the side, has to conclude, based on the data, that with those kinds of economic forces at play, there is definitely going to be a sea change, and that change is going to be intensely disruptive relative to our concept of our very lives and being, and our identities, as well. I don't think we can get away from those changes. I think generally, we were talking about this -- I think that generally being present in a virtual world and being challenged by it, being -- surviving there, having a good life there, so to speak, is a challenge because of the multiculturality of it, because of the languages, because of the entrepreneurial richness of it, the sort of flea market nature, if you will, of the virtual world today. It puts challenges on us to rise to. We must be better than ourselves, in many ways. We must learn things and, you know, be more tolerant, and be smarter and learn faster and be more creative, perhaps, than we are typically in our real lives. And I think that if that is true of virtual worlds, then these changes, though scary -- and, I say, inevitable -- are ultimately for the better, and therefore something that we should ride out. But I would say that -- and many other authors and speakers about this, other than me, have said, you know, fasten your seat belts because the change is coming. There are going to be big changes. JH: Philip Rosedale, thank you very much. (Applause)
Chris Anderson: We had Edward Snowden here a couple days ago, and this is response time. And several of you have written to me with questions to ask our guest here from the NSA. So Richard Ledgett is the 15th deputy director of the National Security Agency, and he's a senior civilian officer there, acts as its chief operating officer, guiding strategies, setting internal policies, and serving as the principal advisor to the director. And all being well, welcome, Rick Ledgett, to TED. (Applause) Richard Ledgett: I'm really thankful for the opportunity to talk to folks here. I look forward to the conversation, so thanks for arranging for that. CA: Thank you, Rick. We appreciate you joining us. It's certainly quite a strong statement that the NSA is willing to reach out and show a more open face here. You saw, I think, the talk and interview that Edward Snowden gave here a couple days ago. What did you make of it? RL: So I think it was interesting. We didn't realize that he was going to show up there, so kudos to you guys for arranging a nice surprise like that. I think that, like a lot of the things that have come out since Mr. Snowden started disclosing classified information, there were some kernels of truth in there, but a lot of extrapolations and half-truths in there, and I'm interested in helping to address those. I think this is a really important conversation that we're having in the United States and internationally, and I think it is important and of import, and so given that, we need to have that be a fact-based conversation, and we want to help make that happen. CA: So the question that a lot of people have here is, what do you make of Snowden's motivations for doing what he did, and did he have an alternative way that he could have gone? RL: He absolutely did have alternative ways that he could have gone, and I actually think that characterizing him as a whistleblower actually hurts legitimate whistleblowing activities. So what if somebody who works in the NSA -- and there are over 35,000 people who do. They're all great citizens. They're just like your husbands, fathers, sisters, brothers, neighbors, nephews, friends and relatives, all of whom are interested in doing the right thing for their country and for our allies internationally, and so there are a variety of venues to address if folks have a concern. First off, there's their supervisor, and up through the supervisory chain within their organization. If folks aren't comfortable with that, there are a number of inspectors general. In the case of Mr. Snowden, he had the option of the NSA inspector general, the Navy inspector general, the Pacific Command inspector general, the Department of Defense inspector general, and the intelligence community inspector general, any of whom would have both kept his concerns in classified channels and been happy to address them. (CA and RL speaking at once) He had the option to go to congressional committees, and there are mechanisms to do that that are in place, and so he didn't do any of those things. CA: Now, you had said that Ed Snowden had other avenues for raising his concerns. The comeback on that is a couple of things: one, that he certainly believes that as a contractor, the avenues that would have been available to him as an employee weren't available, two, there's a track record of other whistleblowers, like [Thomas Andrews Drake] being treated pretty harshly, by some views, and thirdly, what he was taking on was not one specific flaw that he'd discovered, but programs that had been approved by all three branches of government. I mean, in that circumstance, couldn't you argue that what he did was reasonable? RL: No, I don't agree with that. I think that the — sorry, I'm getting feedback through the microphone there — the actions that he took were inappropriate because of the fact that he put people's lives at risk, basically, in the long run, and I know there's been a lot of talk in public by Mr. Snowden and some of the journalists that say that the things that have been disclosed have not put national security and people at risk, and that is categorically not true. They actually do. I think there's also an amazing arrogance to the idea that he knows better than the framers of the Constitution in how the government should be designed and work for separation of powers and the fact that the executive and the legislative branch have to work together and they have checks and balances on each other, and then the judicial branch, which oversees the entire process. I think that's extremely arrogant on his part. CA: Can you give a specific example of how he put people's lives at risk? RL: Yeah, sure. So the things that he's disclosed, the capabilities, and the NSA is a capabilities-based organization, so when we have foreign intelligence targets, legitimate things of interest -- like, terrorists is the iconic example, but it includes things like human traffickers, drug traffickers, people who are trying to build advanced weaponry, nuclear weapons, and build delivery systems for those, and nation-states who might be executing aggression against their immediate neighbors, which you may have some visibility into some of that that's going on right now, the capabilities are applied in very discrete and measured and controlled ways. So the unconstrained disclosure of those capabilities means that as adversaries see them and recognize, "Hey, I might be vulnerable to this," they move away from that, and we have seen targets in terrorism, in the nation-state area, in smugglers of various types, and other folks who have, because of the disclosures, moved away from our ability to have insight into what they're doing. The net effect of that is that our people who are overseas in dangerous places, whether they're diplomats or military, and our allies who are in similar situations, are at greater risk because we don't see the threats that are coming their way. CA: So that's a general response saying that because of his revelations, access that you had to certain types of information has been shut down, has been closed down. But the concern is that the nature of that access was not necessarily legitimate in the first place. I mean, describe to us this Bullrun program where it's alleged that the NSA specifically weakened security in order to get the type of access that you've spoken of. RL: So there are, when our legitimate foreign intelligence targets of the type that I described before, use the global telecommunications system as their communications methodology, and they do, because it's a great system, it's the most complex system ever devised by man, and it is a wonder, and lots of folks in the room there are responsible for the creation and enhancement of that, and it's just a wonderful thing. But it's also used by people who are working against us and our allies. And so if I'm going to pursue them, I need to have the capability to go after them, and again, the controls are in how I apply that capability, not that I have the capability itself. Otherwise, if we could make it so that all the bad guys used one corner of the Internet, we could have a domain, badguy.com. That would be awesome, and we could just concentrate all our efforts there. That's not how it works. They're trying to hide from the government's ability to isolate and interdict their actions, and so we have to swim in that same space. But I will tell you this. So NSA has two missions. One is the Signals Intelligence mission that we've unfortunately read so much about in the press. The other one is the Information Assurance mission, which is to protect the national security systems of the United States, and by that, that's things like the communications that the president uses, the communications that control our nuclear weapons, the communications that our military uses around the world, and the communications that we use with our allies, and that some of our allies themselves use. And so we make recommendations on standards to use, and we use those same standards, and so we are invested in making sure that those communications are secure for their intended purposes. CA: But it sounds like what you're saying is that when it comes to the Internet at large, any strategy is fair game if it improves America's safety. And I think this is partly where there is such a divide of opinion, that there's a lot of people in this room and around the world who think very differently about the Internet. They think of it as a momentous invention of humanity, kind of on a par with the Gutenberg press, for example. It's the bringer of knowledge to all. It's the connector of all. And it's viewed in those sort of idealistic terms. And from that lens, what the NSA has done is equivalent to the authorities back in Germany inserting some device into every printing press that would reveal which books people bought and what they read. Can you understand that from that viewpoint, it feels outrageous? RL: I do understand that, and I actually share the view of the utility of the Internet, and I would argue it's bigger than the Internet. It is a global telecommunications system. The Internet is a big chunk of that, but there is a lot more. And I think that people have legitimate concerns about the balance between transparency and secrecy. That's sort of been couched as a balance between privacy and national security. I don't think that's the right framing. I think it really is transparency and secrecy. And so that's the national and international conversation that we're having, and we want to participate in that, and want people to participate in it in an informed way. So there are things, let me talk there a little bit more, there are things that we need to be transparent about: our authorities, our processes, our oversight, who we are. We, NSA, have not done a good job of that, and I think that's part of the reason that this has been so revelational and so sensational in the media. Nobody knew who we were. We were the No Such Agency, the Never Say Anything. There's takeoffs of our logo of an eagle with headphones on around it. And so that's the public characterization. And so we need to be more transparent about those things. What we don't need to be transparent about, because it's bad for the U.S., it's bad for all those other countries that we work with and that we help provide information that helps them secure themselves and their people, it's bad to expose operations and capabilities in a way that allows the people that we're all working against, the generally recognized bad guys, to counter those. CA: But isn't it also bad to deal a kind of body blow to the American companies that have essentially given the world most of the Internet services that matter? RL: It is. It's really the companies are in a tough position, as are we, because the companies, we compel them to provide information, just like every other nation in the world does. Every industrialized nation in the world has a lawful intercept program where they are requiring companies to provide them with information that they need for their security, and the companies that are involved have complied with those programs in the same way that they have to do when they're operating in Russia or the U.K. or China or India or France, any country that you choose to name. And so the fact that these revelations have been broadly characterized as "you can't trust company A because your privacy is suspect with them" is actually only accurate in the sense that it's accurate with every other company in the world that deals with any of those countries in the world. And so it's being picked up by people as a marketing advantage, and it's being marketed that way by several countries, including some of our allied countries, where they are saying, "Hey, you can't trust the U.S., but you can trust our telecom company, because we're safe." And they're actually using that to counter the very large technological edge that U.S. companies have in areas like the cloud and Internet-based technologies. CA: You're sitting there with the American flag, and the American Constitution guarantees freedom from unreasonable search and seizure. How do you characterize the American citizen's right to privacy? Is there such a right? RL: Yeah, of course there is. And we devote an inordinate amount of time and pressure, inordinate and appropriate, actually I should say, amount of time and effort in order to ensure that we protect that privacy. and beyond that, the privacy of citizens around the world, it's not just Americans. Several things come into play here. First, we're all in the same network. My communications, I'm a user of a particular Internet email service that is the number one email service of choice by terrorists around the world, number one. So I'm there right beside them in email space in the Internet. And so we need to be able to pick that apart and find the information that's relevant. In doing so, we're going to necessarily encounter Americans and innocent foreign citizens who are just going about their business, and so we have procedures in place that shreds that out, that says, when you find that, not if you find it, when you find it, because you're certain to find it, here's how you protect that. These are called minimization procedures. They're approved by the attorney general and constitutionally based. And so we protect those. And then, for people, citizens of the world who are going about their lawful business on a day-to-day basis, the president on his January 17 speech, laid out some additional protections that we are providing to them. So I think absolutely, folks do have a right to privacy, and that we work very hard to make sure that that right to privacy is protected. CA: What about foreigners using American companies' Internet services? Do they have any privacy rights? RL: They do. They do, in the sense of, the only way that we are able to compel one of those companies to provide us information is when it falls into one of three categories: We can identify that this particular person, identified by a selector of some kind, is associated with counterterrorist or proliferation or other foreign intelligence target. CA: Much has been made of the fact that a lot of the information that you've obtained through these programs is essentially metadata. It's not necessarily the actual words that someone has written in an email or given on a phone call. It's who they wrote to and when, and so forth. But it's been argued, and someone here in the audience has talked to a former NSA analyst who said metadata is actually much more invasive than the core data, because in the core data you present yourself as you want to be presented. With metadata, who knows what the conclusions are that are drawn? Is there anything to that? RL: I don't really understand that argument. I think that metadata's important for a couple of reasons. Metadata is the information that lets you find connections that people are trying to hide. So when a terrorist is corresponding with somebody else who's not known to us but is engaged in doing or supporting terrorist activity, or someone who's violating international sanctions by providing nuclear weapons-related material to a country like Iran or North Korea, is trying to hide that activity because it's illicit activity. What metadata lets you do is connect that. The alternative to that is one that's much less efficient and much more invasive of privacy, which is gigantic amounts of content collection. So metadata, in that sense, actually is privacy-enhancing. And we don't, contrary to some of the stuff that's been printed, we don't sit there and grind out metadata profiles of average people. If you're not connected to one of those valid intelligence targets, you are not of interest to us. CA: So in terms of the threats that face America overall, where would you place terrorism? RL: I think terrorism is still number one. I think that we have never been in a time where there are more places where things are going badly and forming the petri dish in which terrorists take advantage of the lack of governance. An old boss of mine, Tom Fargo, Admiral Fargo, used to describe it as arcs of instability. And so you have a lot of those arcs of instability in the world right now, in places like Syria, where there's a civil war going on and you have massive numbers, thousands and thousands of foreign fighters who are coming into Syria to learn how to be terrorists and practice that activity, and lots of those people are Westerners who hold passports to European countries or in some cases the United States, and so they are basically learning how to do jihad and have expressed intent to go out and do that later on in their home countries. You've got places like Iraq, which is suffering from a high level of sectarian violence, again a breeding ground for terrorism. And you have the activity in the Horn of Africa and the Sahel area of Africa. Again, lots of weak governance which forms a breeding ground for terrorist activity. So I think it's very serious. I think it's number one. I think number two is cyber threat. I think cyber is a threat in three ways: One way, and probably the most common way that people have heard about it, is due to the theft of intellectual property, so basically, foreign countries going in, stealing companies' secrets, and then providing that information to state-owned enterprises or companies connected to the government to help them leapfrog technology or to gain business intelligence that's then used to win contracts overseas. That is a hugely costly set of activities that's going on right now. Several nation-states are doing it. Second is the denial-of-service attacks. You're probably aware that there have been a spate of those directed against the U.S. financial sector since 2012. Again, that's a nation-state who is executing those attacks, and they're doing that as a semi-anonymous way of reprisal. And the last one is destructive attacks, and those are the ones that concern me the most. Those are on the rise. You have the attack against Saudi Aramco in 2012, August of 2012. It took down about 35,000 of their computers with a Wiper-style virus. You had a follow-on a week later to a Qatari company. You had March of 2013, you had a South Korean attack that was attributed in the press to North Korea that took out thousands of computers. Those are on the rise, and we see people expressing interest in those capabilities and a desire to employ them. CA: Okay, so a couple of things here, because this is really the core of this, almost. I mean, first of all, a lot of people who look at risk and look at the numbers don't understand this belief that terrorism is still the number one threat. Apart from September 11, I think the numbers are that in the last 30 or 40 years about 500 Americans have died from terrorism, mostly from homegrown terrorists. The chance in the last few years of being killed by terrorism is far less than the chance of being killed by lightning. I guess you would say that a single nuclear incident or bioterrorism act or something like that would change those numbers. Would that be the point of view? RL: Well, I'd say two things. One is, the reason that there hasn't been a major attack in the United States since 9/11, that is not an accident. That's a lot of hard work that we have done, that other folks in the intelligence community have done, that the military has done, and that our allies around the globe have done. You've heard the numbers about the tip of the iceberg in terms of numbers of terrorist attacks that NSA programs contributed to stopping was 54, 25 of those in Europe, and of those 25, 18 of them occurred in three countries, some of which are our allies, and some of which are beating the heck out of us over the NSA programs, by the way. So that's not an accident that those things happen. That's hard work. That's us finding intelligence on terrorist activities and interdicting them through one way or another, through law enforcement, through cooperative activities with other countries and sometimes through military action. The other thing I would say is that your idea of nuclear or chem-bio-threat is not at all far-fetched and in fact there are a number of groups who have for several years expressed interest and desire in obtaining those capabilities and work towards that. CA: It's also been said that, of those 54 alleged incidents, that as few as zero of them were actually anything to do with these controversial programs that Mr. Snowden revealed, that it was basically through other forms of intelligence, that you're looking for a needle in a haystack, and the effects of these programs, these controversial programs, is just to add hay to the stack, not to really find the needle. The needle was found by other methods. Isn't there something to that? RL: No, there's actually two programs that are typically implicated in that discussion. One is the section 215 program, the U.S. telephony metadata program, and the other one is popularly called the PRISM program, and it's actually section 702 of the FISA Amendment Act. But the 215 program is only relevant to threats that are directed against the United States, and there have been a dozen threats where that was implicated. Now what you'll see people say publicly is there is no "but for" case, and so there is no case where, but for that, the threat would have happened. But that actually indicates a lack of understanding of how terrorist investigations actually work. You think about on television, you watch a murder mystery. What do you start with? You start with a body, and then they work their way from there to solve the crime. We're actually starting well before that, hopefully before there are any bodies, and we're trying to build the case for who the people are, what they're trying to do, and that involves massive amounts of information. Think of it is as mosaic, and it's hard to say that any one piece of a mosaic was necessary to building the mosaic, but to build the complete picture, you need to have all the pieces of information. On the other, the non-U.S.-related threats out of those 54, the other 42 of them, the PRISM program was hugely relevant to that, and in fact was material in contributing to stopping those attacks. CA: Snowden said two days ago that terrorism has always been what is called in the intelligence world "a cover for action," that it's something that, because it invokes such a powerful emotional response in people, it allows the initiation of these programs to achieve powers that an organization like yours couldn't otherwise have. Is there any internal debate about that? RL: Yeah. I mean, we debate these things all the time, and there is discussion that goes on in the executive branch and within NSA itself and the intelligence community about what's right, what's proportionate, what's the correct thing to do. And it's important to note that the programs that we're talking about were all authorized by two different presidents, two different political parties, by Congress twice, and by federal judges 16 different times, and so this is not NSA running off and doing its own thing. This is a legitimate activity of the United States foreign government that was agreed to by all the branches of the United States government, and President Madison would have been proud. CA: And yet, when congressmen discovered what was actually being done with that authorization, many of them were completely shocked. Or do you think that is not a legitimate reaction, that it's only because it's now come out publicly, that they really knew exactly what you were doing with the powers they had granted you? RL: Congress is a big body. There's 535 of them, and they change out frequently, in the case of the House, every two years, and I think that the NSA provided all the relevant information to our oversight committees, and then the dissemination of that information by the oversight committees throughout Congress is something that they manage. I think I would say that Congress members had the opportunity to make themselves aware, and in fact a significant number of them, the ones who are assigned oversight responsibility, did have the ability to do that. And you've actually had the chairs of those committees say that in public. CA: Now, you mentioned the threat of cyberattacks, and I don't think anyone in this room would disagree that that is a huge concern, but do you accept that there's a tradeoff between offensive and defensive strategies, and that it's possible that the very measures taken to, "weaken encryption," and allow yourself to find the bad guys, might also open the door to forms of cyberattack? RL: So I think two things. One is, you said weaken encryption. I didn't. And the other one is that the NSA has both of those missions, and we are heavily biased towards defense, and, actually, the vulnerabilities that we find in the overwhelming majority of cases, we disclose to the people who are responsible for manufacturing or developing those products. We have a great track record of that, and we're actually working on a proposal right now to be transparent and to publish transparency reports in the same way that the Internet companies are being allowed to publish transparency reports for them. We want to be more transparent about that. So again, we eat our own dog food. We use the standards, we use the products that we recommend, and so it's in our interest to keep our communications protected in the same way that other people's need to be. CA: Edward Snowden, when, after his talk, was wandering the halls here in the bot, and I heard him say to a couple of people, they asked him about what he thought of the NSA overall, and he was very complimentary about the people who work with you, said that it's a really impassioned group of employees who are seeking to do the right thing, and that the problems have come from just some badly conceived policies. He came over certainly very reasonably and calmly. He didn't come over like a crazy man. Would you accept that at least, even if you disagree with how he did it, that he has opened a debate that matters? RL: So I think that the discussion is an important one to have. I do not like the way that he did it. I think there were a number of other ways that he could have done that that would have not endangered our people and the people of other nations through losing visibility into what our adversaries are doing. But I do think it's an important conversation. CA: It's been reported that there's almost a difference of opinion with you and your colleagues over any scenario in which he might be offered an amnesty deal. I think your boss, General Keith Alexander, has said that that would be a terrible example for others; you can't negotiate with someone who's broken the law in that way. But you've been quoted as saying that, if Snowden could prove that he was surrendering all undisclosed documents, that a deal maybe should be considered. Do you still think that? RL: Yeah, so actually, this is my favorite thing about that "60 Minutes" interview was all the misquotes that came from that. What I actually said, in response to a question about, would you entertain any discussions of mitigating action against Snowden, I said, yeah, it's worth a conversation. This is something that the attorney general of the United States and the president also actually have both talked about this, and I defer to the attorney general, because this is his lane. But there is a strong tradition in American jurisprudence of having discussions with people who have been charged with crimes in order to, if it benefits the government, to get something out of that, that there's always room for that kind of discussion. So I'm not presupposing any outcome, but there is always room for discussion. CA: To a lay person it seems like he has certain things to offer the U.S., the government, you, others, in terms of putting things right and helping figure out a smarter policy, a smarter way forward for the future. Do you see, has that kind of possibility been entertained at all? RL: So that's out of my lane. That's not an NSA thing. That would be a Department of Justice sort of discussion. I'll defer to them. CA: Rick, when Ed Snowden ended his talk, I offered him the chance to share an idea worth spreading. What would be your idea worth spreading for this group? RL: So I think, learn the facts. This is a really important conversation, and it impacts, it's not just NSA, it's not just the government, it's you, it's the Internet companies. The issue of privacy and personal data is much bigger than just the government, and so learn the facts. Don't rely on headlines, don't rely on sound bites, don't rely on one-sided conversations. So that's the idea, I think, worth spreading. We have a sign, a badge tab, we wear badges at work with lanyards, and if I could make a plug, my badge lanyard at work says, "Dallas Cowboys." Go Dallas. I've just alienated half the audience, I know. So the lanyard that our people who work in the organization that does our crypto-analytic work have a tab that says, "Look at the data." So that's the idea worth spreading. Look at the data. CA: Rick, it took a certain amount of courage, I think, actually, to come and speak openly to this group. It's not something the NSA has done a lot of in the past, and plus the technology has been challenging. We truly appreciate you doing that and sharing in this very important conversation. Thank you so much. RL: Thanks, Chris. (Applause)
Well, good morning. You know, the computer and television both recently turned 60, and today I'd like to talk about their relationship. Despite their middle age, if you've been following the themes of this conference or the entertainment industry, it's pretty clear that one has been picking on the other. So it's about time that we talked about how the computer ambushed television, or why the invention of the atomic bomb unleashed forces that lead to the writers' strike. And it's not just what these are doing to each other, but it's what the audience thinks that really frames this matter. To get a sense of this, and it's been a theme we've talked about all week, I recently talked to a bunch of tweeners. I wrote on cards: "television," "radio," "MySpace," "Internet," "PC." And I said, just arrange these, from what's important to you and what's not, and then tell me why. Let's listen to what happens when they get to the portion of the discussion on television. (Video) Girl 1: Well, I think it's important but, like, not necessary because you can do a lot of other stuff with your free time than watch programs. Peter Hirshberg: Which is more fun, Internet or TV? Girls: Internet. Girl 2: I think we -- the reasons, one of the reasons we put computer before TV is because nowadays, like, we have TV shows on the computer. (Girl 3: Oh, yeah.) Girl 2: And then you can download onto your iPod. PH: Would you like to be the president of a TV network? Girl 4: I wouldn't like it. Girl 2: That would be so stressful. Girl 5: No. PH: How come? Girl 5: Because they're going to lose all their money eventually. Girl 3: Like the stock market, it goes up and down and stuff. I think right now the computers will be at the top and everything will be kind of going down and stuff. PH: There's been an uneasy relationship between the TV business and the tech business, really ever since they both turned about 30. We go through periods of enthrallment, followed by reactions in boardrooms, in the finance community best characterized as, what's the finance term? Ick pooey. Let me give you an example of this. The year is 1976, and Warner buys Atari because video games are on the rise. The next year they march forward and they introduce Qube, the first interactive cable TV system, and the New York Times heralds this as telecommunications moving to the home, convergence, great things are happening. Everybody in the East Coast gets in the pictures -- Citicorp, Penney, RCA -- all getting into this big vision. By the way, this is about when I enter the picture. I'm going to do a summer internship at Time Warner. That summer I'm all -- I'm at Warner that summer -- I'm all excited to work on convergence, and then the bottom falls out. Doesn't work out too well for them, they lose money. And I had a happy brush with convergence until, kind of, Warner basically has to liquidate the whole thing. That's when I leave graduate school, and I can't work in New York on kind of entertainment and technology because I have to be exiled to California, where the remaining jobs are, almost to the sea, to go to work for Apple Computer. Warner, of course, writes off more than 400 million dollars. Four hundred million dollars, which was real money back in the '70s. But they were onto something and they got better at it. By the year 2000, the process was perfected. They merged with AOL, and in just four years, managed to shed about 200 billion dollars of market capitalization, showing that they'd actually mastered the art of applying Moore's law of successive miniaturization to their balance sheet. (Laughter) Now, I think that one reason that the media and the entertainment communities, or the media community, is driven so crazy by the tech community is that tech folks talk differently. You know, for 50 years, we've talked about changing the world, about total transformation. For 50 years, it's been about hopes and fears and promises of a better world. And I got to thinking, you know, who else talks that way? And the answer is pretty clearly -- it's people in religion and in politics. And so I realized that actually the tech world is best understood, not as a business cycle, but as a messianic movement. We promise something great, we evangelize it, we're going to change the world. It doesn't work out too well, and so we actually go back to the well and start all over again, as the people in New York and L.A. look on in absolute, morbid astonishment. But it's this irrational view of things that drives us on to the next thing. So, what I'd like to ask is, if the computer is becoming a principal tool of media and entertainment, how did we get here? I mean, how did a machine that was built for accounting and artillery morph into media? Of course, the first computer was built just after World War II to solve military problems, but things got really interesting just a couple of years later -- 1949 with Whirlwind, built at MIT's Lincoln Lab. Jay Forrester was building this for the Navy, but you can't help but see that the creator of this machine had in mind a machine that might actually be a potential media star. So take a look at what happens when the foremost journalist of early television meets one of the foremost computer pioneers, and the computer begins to express itself. (Video) Journalist: It's a Whirlwind electronic computer. With considerable trepidation, we undertake to interview this new machine. Jay Forrester: Hello New York, this is Cambridge. And this is the oscilloscope of the Whirlwind electronic computer. Would you like if I used the machine? Journalist: Yes, of course. But I have an idea, Mr. Forrester. Since this computer was made in conjunction with the Office of Naval Research, why don't we switch down to the Pentagon in Washington and let the Navy's research chief, Admiral Bolster, give Whirlwind the workout? Calvin Bolster: Well, Ed, this problem concerns the Navy's Viking rocket. This rocket goes up 135 miles into the sky. Now, at the standard rate of fuel consumption, I would like to see the computer trace the flight path of this rocket and see how it can determine, at any instant, say at the end of 40 seconds, the amount of fuel remaining, and the velocity at that set instant. JF: Over on the left-hand side, you will notice fuel consumption decreasing as the rocket takes off. And on the right-hand side, there's a scale that shows the rocket's velocity. The rocket's position is shown by the trajectory that we're now looking at. And as it reaches the peak of its trajectory, the velocity, you will notice, has dropped off to a minimum. Then, as the rocket dives down, velocity picks up again toward a maximum velocity and the rocket hits the ground. How's that? Journalist: What about that, Admiral? CB: Looks very good to me. JF: And before leaving, we would like to show you another kind of mathematical problem that some of the boys have worked out in their spare time, in a less serious vein, for a Sunday afternoon. (Music) Journalist: Thank you very much indeed, Mr. Forrester and the MIT lab. PH: You know, so much was worked out: the first real-time interaction, the video display, pointing a gun. It lead to the microcomputer, but unfortunately, it was too pricey for the Navy, and all of this would have been lost if it weren't for a happy coincidence. Enter the atomic bomb. We're threatened by the greatest weapon ever, and knowing a good thing when it sees it, the Air Force decides it needs the biggest computer ever to protect us. They adapt Whirlwind to a massive air defense system, deploy it all across the frozen north, and spend nearly three times as much on this computer as was spent on the Manhattan Project building the A-Bomb in the first place. Talk about a shot in the arm for the computer industry. And you can imagine that the Air Force became a pretty good salesman. Here's their marketing video. (Video) Narrator: In a mass raid, high-speed bombers could be in on us before we could determine their tracks. And then it would be too late to act. We cannot afford to take that chance. It is to meet this threat that the Air Force has been developing SAGE, the Semi-Automatic Ground Environment system, to strengthen our air defenses. This new computer, built to become the nerve center of a defense network, is able to perform all the complex mathematical problems involved in countering a mass enemy raid. It is provided with its own powerhouse containing large diesel-driven generators, air-conditioning equipment, and cooling towers required to cool the thousands of vacuum tubes in the computer. PH: You know, that one computer was huge. There's an interesting marketing lesson from it, which is basically, when you market a product, you can either say, this is going to be wonderful, it will make you feel better and enliven you. Or there's one other marketing proposition: if you don't use our product, you'll die. This is a really good example of that. This had the first pointing device. It was distributed, so it worked out -- distributed computing and modems -- so all these things could talk to each other. About 20 percent of all the nation's programmers were wrapped up in this thing, and it led to an awful lot of what we have today. It also used vacuum tubes. You saw how huge it was, and to give you a sense for this -- because we've talked a lot about Moore's law and making things small at this conference, so let's talk about making things large. If we took Whirlwind and put it in a place that you all know, say, Century City, it would fit beautifully. You'd kind of have to take Century City out, but it could fit in there. But like, let's imagine we took the latest Pentium processor, the latest Core 2 Extreme, which is a four-core processor that Intel's working on, it will be our laptop tomorrow. To build that, what we'd do with Whirlwind technology is we'd have to take up roughly from the 10 to Mulholland, and from the 405 to La Cienega just with those Whirlwinds. And then, the 92 nuclear power plants that it would take to provide the power would fill up the rest of Los Angeles. That's roughly a third more nuclear power than all of France creates. So, the next time they tell you they're on to something, clearly they're not. So -- and we haven't even worked out the cooling needs. But it gives you the kind of power that people have, that the audience has, and the reasons these transformations are happening. All of this stuff starts moving into industry. DEC kind of reduces all this and makes the first mini-computer. It shows up at places like MIT, and then a mutation happens. Spacewar! is built, the first computer game, and all of a sudden, interactivity and involvement and passion is worked out. Actually, many MIT students stayed up all night long working on this thing, and many of the principles of gaming today were worked out. DEC knew a good thing about wasting time. It shipped every one of its computers with that game. Meanwhile, as all of this is happening, by the mid-'50s, the business model of traditional broadcasting and cinema has been busted completely. A new technology has confounded radio men and movie moguls and they're quite certain that television is about to do them in. In fact, despair is in the air. And a quote that sounds largely reminiscent from everything I've been reading all week. RCA had David Sarnoff, who basically commercialized radio, said this, "I don't say that radio networks must die. Every effort has been made and will continue to be made to find a new pattern, new selling arrangements and new types of programs that may arrest the declining revenues. It may yet be possible to eke out a poor existence for radio, but I don't know how." And of course, as the computer industry develops interactively, producers in the emerging TV business actually hit on the same idea. And they fake it. (Video) Jack Berry: Boys and girls, I think you all know how to get your magic windows up on the set, you just get them out. First of all, get your Winky Dink kits out. Put out your Magic Window and your erasing glove, and rub it like this. That's the way we get some of the magic into it, boys and girls. Then take it and put it right up against the screen of your own television set, and rub it out from the center to the corners, like this. Make sure you keep your magic crayons handy, your Winky Dink crayons and your erasing glove, because you'll be using them during the show to draw like that. You all set? OK, let's get right to the first story about Dusty Man. Come on into the secret lab. PH: It was the dawn of interactive TV, and you may have noticed they wanted to sell you the Winky Dink kits. Those are the Winky Dink crayons. I know what you're saying. "Pete, I could use any ordinary open-source crayon, why do I have to buy theirs?" I assure you, that's not the case. Turns out they told us directly that these are the only crayons you should ever use with your Winky Dink Magic Window, other crayons may discolor or hurt the window. This proprietary principle of vendor lock-in would go on to be perfected with great success as one of the enduring principles of windowing systems everywhere. It led to lawsuits -- (Laughter) -- federal investigations, and lots of repercussions, and that's a scandal we won't discuss today. But we will discuss this scandal, because this man, Jack Berry, the host of "Winky Dink," went on to become the host of "Twenty One," one of the most important quiz shows ever. And it was rigged, and it became unraveled when this man, Charles van Doren, was outed after an unnatural winning streak, ending Berry's career. And actually, ending the career of a lot of people at CBS. It turns out there was a lot to learn about how this new medium worked. And 50 years ago, if you'd been at a meeting like this and were trying to understand the media, there was one prophet and only but one you wanted to hear from, Professor Marshall McLuhan. He actually understood something about a theme that we've been discussing all week. It's the role of the audience in an era of pervasive electronic communications. Here he is talking from the 1960s. (Video) Marshall McLuhan: If the audience can become involved in the actual process of making the ad, then it's happy. It's like the old quiz shows. They were great TV because it gave the audience a role, something to do. They were horrified when they discovered they'd really been left out all the time because the shows were rigged. Now, then, this was a horrible misunderstanding of TV on the part of the programmers. PH: You know, McLuhan talked about the global village. If you substitute the word blogosphere, of the Internet today, it is very true that his understanding is probably very enlightening now. Let's listen in to him. (Video) MM: The global village is a world in which you don't necessarily have harmony. You have extreme concern with everybody else's business and much involvement in everybody else's life. It's a sort of Ann Landers' column writ large. And it doesn't necessarily mean harmony and peace and quiet, but it does mean huge involvement in everybody else's affairs. And so the global village is as big as a planet, and as small as a village post office. PH: We'll talk a little bit more about him later. We're now right into the 1960s. It's the era of big business and data centers for computing. But all that was about to change. You know, the expression of technology reflects the people and the time of the culture it was built in. And when I say that code expresses our hopes and aspirations, it's not just a joke about messianism, it's actually what we do. But for this part of the story, I'd actually like to throw it to America's leading technology correspondent, John Markoff. (Video) John Markoff: Do you want to know what the counterculture in drugs, sex, rock 'n' roll and the anti-war movement had to do with computing? Everything. It all happened within five miles of where I'm standing, at Stanford University, between 1960 and 1975. In the midst of revolution in the streets and rock and roll concerts in the parks, a group of researchers led by people like John McCarthy, a computer scientist at the Stanford Artificial Intelligence Lab, and Doug Engelbart, a computer scientist at SRI, changed the world. Engelbart came out of a pretty dry engineering culture, but while he was beginning to do his work, all of this stuff was bubbling on the mid-peninsula. There was LSD leaking out of Kesey's Veterans' Hospital experiments and other areas around the campus, and there was music literally in the streets. The Grateful Dead was playing in the pizza parlors. People were leaving to go back to the land. There was the Vietnam War. There was black liberation. There was women's liberation. This was a remarkable place, at a remarkable time. And into that ferment came the microprocessor. I think it was that interaction that led to personal computing. They saw these tools that were controlled by the establishment as ones that could actually be liberated and put to use by these communities that they were trying to build. And most importantly, they had this ethos of sharing information. I think these ideas are difficult to understand, because when you're trapped in one paradigm, the next paradigm is always like a science fiction universe -- it makes no sense. The stories were so compelling that I decided to write a book about them. The title of the book is, "What the Dormouse Said: How the '60s Counterculture Shaped the Personal Computer Industry." The title was taken from the lyrics to a Jefferson Airplane song. The lyrics go, "Remember what the dormouse said. Feed your head, feed your head, feed your head." (Music) PH: By this time, computing had kind of leapt into media territory, and in short order much of what we're doing today was imagined in Cambridge and Silicon Valley. Here's the Architecture Machine Group, the predecessor of the Media Lab, in 1981. Meanwhile, in California, we were trying to commercialize a lot of this stuff. HyperCard was the first program to introduce the public to hyperlinks, where you could randomly hook to any kind of picture, or piece of text, or data across a file system, and we had no way of explaining it. There was no metaphor. Was it a database? A prototyping tool? A scripted language? Heck, it was everything. So we ended up writing a marketing brochure. We asked a question about how the mind works, and we let our customers play the role of so many blind men filling out the elephant. A few years later, we then hit on the idea of explaining to people the secret of, how do you get the content you want, the way you want it and the easy way? Here's the Apple marketing video. (Video) James Burke: You'll be pleased to know, I'm sure, that there are several ways to create a HyperCard interactive video. The most involved method is to go ahead and produce your own videodisc as well as build your own HyperCard stacks. By far the simplest method is to buy a pre-made videodisc and HyperCard stacks from a commercial supplier. The method we illustrate in this video uses a pre-made videodisc but creates custom HyperCard stacks. This method allows you to use existing videodisc materials in ways which suit your specific needs and interests. PH: I hope you realize how subversive that is. That's like a Dick Cheney speech. You think he's a nice balding guy, but he's just declared war on the content business. Find the commercial stuff, mash it up, tell the story your way. Now, as long as we confine this to the education market, and a personal matter between the computer and the file system, that's fine, but as you can see, it was about to leap out and upset Jack Valenti and a lot of other people. By the way, speaking of the filing system, it never occurred to us that these hyperlinks could go beyond the local area network. A few years later, Tim Berners-Lee worked that out. It became a killer app of links, and today, of course, we call that the World Wide Web. Now, not only was I instrumental in helping Apple miss the Internet, but a couple of years later, I helped Bill Gates do the same thing. The year is 1993 and he was working on a book and I was working on a video to help him kind of explain where we were all heading and how to popularize all this. We were plenty aware that we were messing with media, and on the surface, it looks like we predicted a lot of the right things, but we also missed an awful lot. Let's take a look. (Video) Narrator: The pyramids, the Colosseum, the New York subway system and TV dinners, ancient and modern wonders of the man-made world all. Yet each pales to insignificance with the completion of that magnificent accomplishment of twenty-first-century technology, the Digital Superhighway. Once it was only a dream of technoids and a few long-forgotten politicians. The Digital Highway arrived in America's living rooms late in the twentieth century. Let us recall the pioneers who made this technical marvel possible. The Digital Highway would follow the rutted trail first blazed by Alexander Graham Bell. Though some were incredulous ... Man 1: The phone company! Narrator: Stirred by the prospects of mass communication and making big bucks on advertising, David Sarnoff commercializes radio. Man 2: Never had scientists been put under such pressure and demand. Narrator: The medium introduced America to new products. Voice 1: Say, mom, Windows for Radio means more enjoyment and greater ease of use for the whole family. Be sure to enjoy Windows for Radio at home and at work. Narrator: In 1939, the Radio Corporation of America introduced television. Man 2: Never had scientists been put under such pressure and demand. Narrator: Eventually, the race to the future took on added momentum with the breakup of the telephone company. And further stimulus came with the deregulation of the cable television industry, and the re-regulation of the cable television industry. Ted Turner: We did the work to build this, this cable industry, now the broadcasters want some of our money. I mean, it's ridiculous. Narrator: Computers, once the unwieldy tools of accountants and other geeks, escaped the backrooms to enter the media fracas. The world and all its culture reduced to bits, the lingua franca of all media. And the forces of convergence exploded. Finally, four great industrial sectors combined. Telecommunications, entertainment, computing and everything else. Man 3: We'll see channels for the gourmet and we'll see channels for the pet lover. Voice 2: Next on the gourmet pet channel, decorating birthday cakes for your schnauzer. Narrator: All of industry was in play, as investors flocked to place their bets. At stake: the battle for you, the consumer, and the right to spend billions to send a lot of information into the parlors of America. (Music) PH: We missed a lot. You know, you missed, we missed the Internet, the long tail, the role of the audience, open systems, social networks. It just goes to show how tough it is to come up with the right uses of media. Thomas Edison had the same problem. He wrote a list of what the phonograph might be good for when he invented it, and kind of only one of his ideas turned out to have been the right early idea. Well, you know where we're going on from here. We come into the era of the dotcom, the World Wide Web, and I don't need to tell you about that because we all went through that bubble together. But when we emerge from this and what we call Web 2.0, things actually are quite different. And I think it's the reason that TV's so challenged. If Internet one was about pages, now it's about people. It's a customer, it's an audience, it's a person who's participating. It's the formidable thing that is changing entertainment now. (Video) MM: Because it gave the audience a role, something to do. PH: In my own company, Technorati, we see something like 67,000 blog posts an hour come in. That's about 2,700 fresh, connective links across about 112 million blogs that are out there. And it's no wonder that as we head into the writers' strike, odd things happen. You know, it reminds me of that old saw in Hollywood, that a producer is anyone who knows a writer. I now think a network boss is anyone who has a cable modem. But it's not a joke. This is a real headline. "Websites attract striking writers: operators of sites like MyDamnChannel.com could benefit from labor disputes." Meanwhile, you have the TV bloggers going out on strike, in sympathy with the television writers. And then you have TV Guide, a Fox property, which is about to sponsor the online video awards -- but cancels it out of sympathy with traditional television, not appearing to gloat. To show you how schizophrenic this all is, here's the head of MySpace, or Fox Interactive, a News Corp company, being asked, well, with the writers' strike, isn't this going to hurt News Corp and help you online? (Video) Man: But I, yeah, I think there's an opportunity. As the strike continues, there's an opportunity for more people to experience video on places like MySpace TV. PH: Oh, but then he remembers he works for Rupert Murdoch. (Video) Man: Yes, well, first, you know, I'm part of News Corporation as part of Fox Entertainment Group. Obviously, we hope that the strike is -- that the issues are resolved as quickly as possible. PH: One of the great things that's going on here is the globalization of content really is happening. Here is a clip from a video, from a piece of animation that was written by a writer in Hollywood, animation worked out in Israel, farmed out to Croatia and India, and it's now an international series. (Video) Narrator: The following takes place between the minutes of 2:15 p.m. and 2:18 p.m., in the months preceding the presidential primaries. Voice 1: You'll have to stay here in the safe house until we get word the terrorist threat is over. Voice 2: You mean we'll have to live here, together? Voices 2, 3 and 4: With her? Voice 2: Well, there goes the neighborhood. PH: The company that created this, Aniboom, is an interesting example of where this is headed. Traditional TV animation costs, say, between 80,000 and 10,000 dollars a minute. They're producing things for between 1,500 and 800 dollars a minute. And they're offering their creators 30 percent of the back end, in a much more entrepreneurial manner. So, it's a different model. What the entertainment business is struggling with, the world of brands is figuring out. For example, Nike now understands that Nike Plus is not just a device in its shoe, it's a network to hook its customers together. And the head of marketing at Nike says, "People are coming to our site an average of three times a week. We don't have to go to them." Which means television advertising is down 57 percent for Nike. Or, as Nike's head of marketing says, "We're not in the business of keeping media companies alive. We're in the business of connecting with consumers." And media companies realize the audience is important also. Here's a man announcing the new Market Watch from Dow Jones, powered 100 percent by the user experience on the home page -- user-generated content married up with traditional content. It turns out you have a bigger audience and more interest if you hook up with them. Or, as Geoffrey Moore once told me, it's intellectual curiosity that's the trade that brands need in the age of the blogosphere. And I think this is beginning to happen in the entertainment business. One of my heroes is songwriter, Ally Willis, who just wrote "The Color Purple" and has been an R and -- rhythm and blues writer, and this is what she said about where songwriting's going. Ally Willis: Where millions of collaborators wanted the song, because to look at them strictly as spam is missing what this medium is about. PH: So, to wrap up, I'd love to throw it back to Marshall McLuhan, who, 40 years ago, was dealing with audiences that were going through just as much change, and I think that, today, traditional Hollywood and the writers are framing this perhaps in the way that it was being framed before. But I don't need to tell you this, let's throw it back to him. (Video) Narrator: We are in the middle of a tremendous clash between the old and the new. MM: The medium does things to people and they are always completely unaware of this. They don't really notice the new medium that is wrapping them up. They think of the old medium, because the old medium is always the content of the new medium, as movies tend to be the content of TV, and as books used to be the content, novels used to be the content of movies. And so every time a new medium arrives, the old medium is the content, and it is highly observable, highly noticeable, but the real, real roughing up and massaging is done by the new medium, and it is ignored. PH: I think it's a great time of enthrallment. There's been more raw DNA of communications and media thrown out there. Content is moving from shows to particles that are batted back and forth, and part of social communications, and I think this is going to be a time of great renaissance and opportunity. And whereas television may have gotten beat up, what's getting built is a really exciting new form of communication, and we kind of have the merger of the two industries and a new way of thinking to look at it. Thanks very much.
Chris Anderson: The rights of citizens, the future of the Internet. So I would like to welcome to the TED stage the man behind those revelations, Ed Snowden. (Applause) Ed is in a remote location somewhere in Russia controlling this bot from his laptop, so he can see what the bot can see. Ed, welcome to the TED stage. What can you see, as a matter of fact? Edward Snowden: Ha, I can see everyone. This is amazing. (Laughter) CA: Ed, some questions for you. You've been called many things in the last few months. You've been called a whistleblower, a traitor, a hero. What words would you describe yourself with? ES: You know, everybody who is involved with this debate has been struggling over me and my personality and how to describe me. But when I think about it, this isn't the question that we should be struggling with. Who I am really doesn't matter at all. If I'm the worst person in the world, you can hate me and move on. What really matters here are the issues. What really matters here is the kind of government we want, the kind of Internet we want, the kind of relationship between people and societies. And that's what I'm hoping the debate will move towards, and we've seen that increasing over time. If I had to describe myself, I wouldn't use words like "hero." I wouldn't use "patriot," and I wouldn't use "traitor." I'd say I'm an American and I'm a citizen, just like everyone else. CA: So just to give some context for those who don't know the whole story -- (Applause) — this time a year ago, you were stationed in Hawaii working as a consultant to the NSA. As a sysadmin, you had access to their systems, and you began revealing certain classified documents to some handpicked journalists leading the way to June's revelations. Now, what propelled you to do this? ES: You know, when I was sitting in Hawaii, and the years before, when I was working in the intelligence community, I saw a lot of things that had disturbed me. We do a lot of good things in the intelligence community, things that need to be done, and things that help everyone. But there are also things that go too far. There are things that shouldn't be done, and decisions that were being made in secret without the public's awareness, without the public's consent, and without even our representatives in government having knowledge of these programs. When I really came to struggle with these issues, I thought to myself, how can I do this in the most responsible way, that maximizes the public benefit while minimizing the risks? And out of all the solutions that I could come up with, out of going to Congress, when there were no laws, there were no legal protections for a private employee, a contractor in intelligence like myself, there was a risk that I would be buried along with the information and the public would never find out. But the First Amendment of the United States Constitution guarantees us a free press for a reason, and that's to enable an adversarial press, to challenge the government, but also to work together with the government, to have a dialogue and debate about how we can inform the public about matters of vital importance without putting our national security at risk. And by working with journalists, by giving all of my information back to the American people, rather than trusting myself to make the decisions about publication, we've had a robust debate with a deep investment by the government that I think has resulted in a benefit for everyone. And the risks that have been threatened, the risks that have been played up by the government have never materialized. We've never seen any evidence of even a single instance of specific harm, and because of that, I'm comfortable with the decisions that I made. CA: So let me show the audience a couple of examples of what you revealed. If we could have a slide up, and Ed, I don't know whether you can see, the slides are here. This is a slide of the PRISM program, and maybe you could tell the audience what that was that was revealed. ES: The best way to understand PRISM, because there's been a little bit of controversy, is to first talk about what PRISM isn't. Much of the debate in the U.S. has been about metadata. They've said it's just metadata, it's just metadata, and they're talking about a specific legal authority called Section 215 of the Patriot Act. That allows sort of a warrantless wiretapping, mass surveillance of the entire country's phone records, things like that -- who you're talking to, when you're talking to them, where you traveled. These are all metadata events. PRISM is about content. It's a program through which the government could compel corporate America, it could deputize corporate America to do its dirty work for the NSA. And even though some of these companies did resist, even though some of them -- I believe Yahoo was one of them — challenged them in court, they all lost, because it was never tried by an open court. They were only tried by a secret court. And something that we've seen, something about the PRISM program that's very concerning to me is, there's been a talking point in the U.S. government where they've said 15 federal judges have reviewed these programs and found them to be lawful, but what they don't tell you is those are secret judges in a secret court based on secret interpretations of law that's considered 34,000 warrant requests over 33 years, and in 33 years only rejected 11 government requests. These aren't the people that we want deciding what the role of corporate America in a free and open Internet should be. CA: Now, this slide that we're showing here shows the dates in which different technology companies, Internet companies, are alleged to have joined the program, and where data collection began from them. Now, they have denied collaborating with the NSA. How was that data collected by the NSA? ES: Right. So the NSA's own slides refer to it as direct access. What that means to an actual NSA analyst, someone like me who was working as an intelligence analyst targeting, Chinese cyber-hackers, things like that, in Hawaii, is the provenance of that data is directly from their servers. It doesn't mean that there's a group of company representatives sitting in a smoky room with the NSA palling around and making back-room deals about how they're going to give this stuff away. Now each company handles it different ways. Some are responsible. Some are somewhat less responsible. But the bottom line is, when we talk about how this information is given, it's coming from the companies themselves. It's not stolen from the lines. But there's an important thing to remember here: even though companies pushed back, even though companies demanded, hey, let's do this through a warrant process, let's do this where we actually have some sort of legal review, some sort of basis for handing over these users' data, we saw stories in the Washington Post last year that weren't as well reported as the PRISM story that said the NSA broke in to the data center communications between Google to itself and Yahoo to itself. So even these companies that are cooperating in at least a compelled but hopefully lawful manner with the NSA, the NSA isn't satisfied with that, and because of that, we need our companies to work very hard to guarantee that they're going to represent the interests of the user, and also advocate for the rights of the users. And I think over the last year, we've seen the companies that are named on the PRISM slides take great strides to do that, and I encourage them to continue. CA: What more should they do? ES: The biggest thing that an Internet company in America can do today, right now, without consulting with lawyers, to protect the rights of users worldwide, is to enable SSL web encryption on every page you visit. The reason this matters is today, if you go to look at a copy of "1984" on Amazon.com, the NSA can see a record of that, the Russian intelligence service can see a record of that, the Chinese service can see a record of that, the French service, the German service, the services of Andorra. They can all see it because it's unencrypted. The world's library is Amazon.com, but not only do they not support encryption by default, you cannot choose to use encryption when browsing through books. This is something that we need to change, not just for Amazon, I don't mean to single them out, but they're a great example. All companies need to move to an encrypted browsing habit by default for all users who haven't taken any action or picked any special methods on their own. That'll increase the privacy and the rights that people enjoy worldwide. CA: Ed, come with me to this part of the stage. I want to show you the next slide here. (Applause) This is a program called Boundless Informant. What is that? ES: So, I've got to give credit to the NSA for using appropriate names on this. This is one of my favorite NSA cryptonyms. Boundless Informant is a program that the NSA hid from Congress. The NSA was previously asked by Congress, was there any ability that they had to even give a rough ballpark estimate of the amount of American communications that were being intercepted. They said no. They said, we don't track those stats, and we can't track those stats. We can't tell you how many communications we're intercepting around the world, because to tell you that would be to invade your privacy. Now, I really appreciate that sentiment from them, but the reality, when you look at this slide is, not only do they have the capability, the capability already exists. It's already in place. The NSA has its own internal data format that tracks both ends of a communication, and if it says, this communication came from America, they can tell Congress how many of those communications they have today, right now. And what Boundless Informant tells us is more communications are being intercepted in America about Americans than there are in Russia about Russians. I'm not sure that's what an intelligence agency should be aiming for. CA: Ed, there was a story broken in the Washington Post, again from your data. The headline says, "NSA broke privacy rules thousands of times per year." Tell us about that. ES: We also heard in Congressional testimony last year, it was an amazing thing for someone like me who came from the NSA and who's seen the actual internal documents, knows what's in them, to see officials testifying under oath that there had been no abuses, that there had been no violations of the NSA's rules, when we knew this story was coming. But what's especially interesting about this, about the fact that the NSA has violated their own rules, their own laws thousands of times in a single year, including one event by itself, one event out of those 2,776, that affected more than 3,000 people. In another event, they intercepted all the calls in Washington, D.C., by accident. What's amazing about this, this report, that didn't get that much attention, is the fact that not only were there 2,776 abuses, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Dianne Feinstein, had not seen this report until the Washington Post contacted her asking for comment on the report. And she then requested a copy from the NSA and received it, but had never seen this before that. What does that say about the state of oversight in American intelligence when the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee has no idea that the rules are being broken thousands of times every year? CA: Ed, one response to this whole debate is this: Why should we care about all this surveillance, honestly? I mean, look, if you've done nothing wrong, you've got nothing to worry about. What's wrong with that point of view? ES: Well, so the first thing is, you're giving up your rights. You're saying hey, you know, I don't think I'm going to need them, so I'm just going to trust that, you know, let's get rid of them, it doesn't really matter, these guys are going to do the right thing. Your rights matter because you never know when you're going to need them. Beyond that, it's a part of our cultural identity, not just in America, but in Western societies and in democratic societies around the world. People should be able to pick up the phone and to call their family, people should be able to send a text message to their loved ones, people should be able to buy a book online, they should be able to travel by train, they should be able to buy an airline ticket without wondering about how these events are going to look to an agent of the government, possibly not even your government years in the future, how they're going to be misinterpreted and what they're going to think your intentions were. We have a right to privacy. We require warrants to be based on probable cause or some kind of individualized suspicion because we recognize that trusting anybody, any government authority, with the entirety of human communications in secret and without oversight is simply too great a temptation to be ignored. CA: Some people are furious at what you've done. I heard a quote recently from Dick Cheney who said that Julian Assange was a flea bite, Edward Snowden is the lion that bit the head off the dog. He thinks you've committed one of the worst acts of betrayal in American history. What would you say to people who think that? ES: Dick Cheney's really something else. (Laughter) (Applause) Thank you. (Laughter) I think it's amazing, because at the time Julian Assange was doing some of his greatest work, Dick Cheney was saying he was going to end governments worldwide, the skies were going to ignite and the seas were going to boil off, and now he's saying it's a flea bite. So we should be suspicious about the same sort of overblown claims of damage to national security from these kind of officials. But let's assume that these people really believe this. I would argue that they have kind of a narrow conception of national security. The prerogatives of people like Dick Cheney do not keep the nation safe. The public interest is not always the same as the national interest. Going to war with people who are not our enemy in places that are not a threat doesn't make us safe, and that applies whether it's in Iraq or on the Internet. The Internet is not the enemy. Our economy is not the enemy. American businesses, Chinese businesses, and any other company out there is a part of our society. It's a part of our interconnected world. There are ties of fraternity that bond us together, and if we destroy these bonds by undermining the standards, the security, the manner of behavior, that nations and citizens all around the world expect us to abide by. CA: But it's alleged that you've stolen 1.7 million documents. It seems only a few hundred of them have been shared with journalists so far. Are there more revelations to come? ES: There are absolutely more revelations to come. I don't think there's any question that some of the most important reporting to be done is yet to come. CA: Come here, because I want to ask you about this particular revelation. Come and take a look at this. I mean, this is a story which I think for a lot of the techies in this room is the single most shocking thing that they have heard in the last few months. It's about a program called "Bullrun." Can you explain what that is? ES: So Bullrun, and this is again where we've got to thank the NSA for their candor, this is a program named after a Civil War battle. The British counterpart is called Edgehill, which is a U.K. civil war battle. And the reason that I believe they're named this way is because they target our own infrastructure. They're programs through which the NSA intentionally misleads corporate partners. They tell corporate partners that these are safe standards. They say hey, we need to work with you to secure your systems, but in reality, they're giving bad advice to these companies that makes them degrade the security of their services. They're building in backdoors that not only the NSA can exploit, but anyone else who has time and money to research and find it can then use to let themselves in to the world's communications. And this is really dangerous, because if we lose a single standard, if we lose the trust of something like SSL, which was specifically targeted by the Bullrun program, we will live a less safe world overall. We won't be able to access our banks and we won't be able to access commerce without worrying about people monitoring those communications or subverting them for their own ends. CA: And do those same decisions also potentially open America up to cyberattacks from other sources? ES: Absolutely. One of the problems, one of the dangerous legacies that we've seen in the post-9/11 era, is that the NSA has traditionally worn two hats. They've been in charge of offensive operations, that is hacking, but they've also been in charge of defensive operations, and traditionally they've always prioritized defense over offense based on the principle that American secrets are simply worth more. If we hack a Chinese business and steal their secrets, if we hack a government office in Berlin and steal their secrets, that has less value to the American people than making sure that the Chinese can't get access to our secrets. So by reducing the security of our communications, they're not only putting the world at risk, they're putting America at risk in a fundamental way, because intellectual property is the basis, the foundation of our economy, and if we put that at risk through weak security, we're going to be paying for it for years. CA: But they've made a calculation that it was worth doing this as part of America's defense against terrorism. Surely that makes it a price worth paying. ES: Well, when you look at the results of these programs in stopping terrorism, you will see that that's unfounded, and you don't have to take my word for it, because we've had the first open court, the first federal court that's reviewed this, outside the secrecy arrangement, called these programs Orwellian and likely unconstitutional. Congress, who has access to be briefed on these things, and now has the desire to be, has produced bills to reform it, and two independent White House panels who reviewed all of the classified evidence said these programs have never stopped a single terrorist attack that was imminent in the United States. So is it really terrorism that we're stopping? Do these programs have any value at all? I say no, and all three branches of the American government say no as well. CA: I mean, do you think there's a deeper motivation for them than the war against terrorism? ES: I'm sorry, I couldn't hear you, say again? CA: Sorry. Do you think there's a deeper motivation for them other than the war against terrorism? ES: Yeah. The bottom line is that terrorism has always been what we in the intelligence world would call a cover for action. Terrorism is something that provokes an emotional response that allows people to rationalize authorizing powers and programs that they wouldn't give otherwise. The Bullrun and Edgehill-type programs, the NSA asked for these authorities back in the 1990s. They asked the FBI to go to Congress and make the case. The FBI went to Congress and did make the case. But Congress and the American people said no. They said, it's not worth the risk to our economy. They said it's worth too much damage to our society to justify the gains. But what we saw is, in the post-9/11 era, they used secrecy and they used the justification of terrorism to start these programs in secret without asking Congress, without asking the American people, and it's that kind of government behind closed doors that we need to guard ourselves against, because it makes us less safe, and it offers no value. CA: Okay, come with me here for a sec, because I've got a more personal question for you. Speaking of terror, most people would find the situation you're in right now in Russia pretty terrifying. You obviously heard what happened, what the treatment that Bradley Manning got, Chelsea Manning as now is, and there was a story in Buzzfeed saying that there are people in the intelligence community who want you dead. How are you coping with this? How are you coping with the fear? ES: It's no mystery that there are governments out there that want to see me dead. I've made clear again and again and again that I go to sleep every morning thinking about what I can do for the American people. I don't want to harm my government. I want to help my government, but the fact that they are willing to completely ignore due process, they're willing to declare guilt without ever seeing a trial, these are things that we need to work against as a society, and say hey, this is not appropriate. We shouldn't be threatening dissidents. We shouldn't be criminalizing journalism. And whatever part I can do to see that end, I'm happy to do despite the risks. CA: So I'd actually like to get some feedback from the audience here, because I know there's widely differing reactions to Edward Snowden. Suppose you had the following two choices, right? You could view what he did as fundamentally a reckless act that has endangered America or you could view it as fundamentally a heroic act that will work towards America and the world's long-term good? Those are the two choices I'll give you. I'm curious to see who's willing to vote with the first of those, that this was a reckless act? There are some hands going up. Some hands going up. It's hard to put your hand up when the man is standing right here, but I see them. ES: I can see you. (Laughter) CA: And who goes with the second choice, the fundamentally heroic act? (Applause) (Cheers) And I think it's true to say that there are a lot of people who didn't show a hand and I think are still thinking this through, because it seems to me that the debate around you doesn't split along traditional political lines. It's not left or right, it's not really about pro-government, libertarian, or not just that. Part of it is almost a generational issue. You're part of a generation that grew up with the Internet, and it seems as if you become offended at almost a visceral level when you see something done that you think will harm the Internet. Is there some truth to that? ES: It is. I think it's very true. This is not a left or right issue. Our basic freedoms, and when I say our, I don't just mean Americans, I mean people around the world, it's not a partisan issue. These are things that all people believe, and it's up to all of us to protect them, and to people who have seen and enjoyed a free and open Internet, it's up to us to preserve that liberty for the next generation to enjoy, and if we don't change things, if we don't stand up to make the changes we need to do to keep the Internet safe, not just for us but for everyone, we're going to lose that, and that would be a tremendous loss, not just for us, but for the world. CA: Well, I have heard similar language recently from the founder of the world wide web, who I actually think is with us, Sir Tim Berners-Lee. Tim, actually, would you like to come up and say, do we have a microphone for Tim? (Applause) Tim, good to see you. Come up there. Which camp are you in, by the way, traitor, hero? I have a theory on this, but -- Tim Berners-Lee: I've given much longer answers to that question, but hero, if I have to make the choice between the two. CA: And Ed, I think you've read the proposal that Sir Tim has talked about about a new Magna Carta to take back the Internet. Is that something that makes sense? ES: Absolutely. I mean, my generation, I grew up not just thinking about the Internet, but I grew up in the Internet, and although I never expected to have the chance to defend it in such a direct and practical manner and to embody it in this unusual, almost avatar manner, I think there's something poetic about the fact that one of the sons of the Internet has actually become close to the Internet as a result of their political expression. And I believe that a Magna Carta for the Internet is exactly what we need. We need to encode our values not just in writing but in the structure of the Internet, and it's something that I hope, I invite everyone in the audience, not just here in Vancouver but around the world, to join and participate in. CA: Do you have a question for Ed? TBL: Well, two questions, a general question — CA: Ed, can you still hear us? ES: Yes, I can hear you. CA: Oh, he's back. TBL: The wiretap on your line got a little interfered with for a moment. (Laughter) ES: It's a little bit of an NSA problem. TBL: So, from the 25 years, stepping back and thinking, what would you think would be the best that we could achieve from all the discussions that we have about the web we want? ES: When we think about in terms of how far we can go, I think that's a question that's really only limited by what we're willing to put into it. I think the Internet that we've enjoyed in the past has been exactly what we as not just a nation but as a people around the world need, and by cooperating, by engaging not just the technical parts of society, but as you said, the users, the people around the world who contribute through the Internet, through social media, who just check the weather, who rely on it every day as a part of their life, to champion that. We'll get not just the Internet we've had, but a better Internet, a better now, something that we can use to build a future that'll be better not just than what we hoped for but anything that we could have imagined. CA: It's 30 years ago that TED was founded, 1984. A lot of the conversation since then has been along the lines that actually George Orwell got it wrong. It's not Big Brother watching us. We, through the power of the web, and transparency, are now watching Big Brother. Your revelations kind of drove a stake through the heart of that rather optimistic view, but you still believe there's a way of doing something about that. And you do too. ES: Right, so there is an argument to be made that the powers of Big Brother have increased enormously. There was a recent legal article at Yale that established something called the Bankston-Soltani Principle, which is that our expectation of privacy is violated when the capabilities of government surveillance have become cheaper by an order of magnitude, and each time that occurs, we need to revisit and rebalance our privacy rights. Now, that hasn't happened since the government's surveillance powers have increased by several orders of magnitude, and that's why we're in the problem that we're in today, but there is still hope, because the power of individuals have also been increased by technology. I am living proof that an individual can go head to head against the most powerful adversaries and the most powerful intelligence agencies around the world and win, and I think that's something that we need to take hope from, and we need to build on to make it accessible not just to technical experts but to ordinary citizens around the world. Journalism is not a crime, communication is not a crime, and we should not be monitored in our everyday activities. CA: I'm not quite sure how you shake the hand of a bot, but I imagine it's, this is the hand right here. TBL: That'll come very soon. ES: Nice to meet you, and I hope my beam looks as nice as my view of you guys does. CA: Thank you, Tim. (Applause) I mean, The New York Times recently called for an amnesty for you. Would you welcome the chance to come back to America? ES: Absolutely. There's really no question, the principles that have been the foundation of this project have been the public interest and the principles that underly the journalistic establishment in the United States and around the world, and I think if the press is now saying, we support this, this is something that needed to happen, that's a powerful argument, but it's not the final argument, and I think that's something that public should decide. But at the same time, the government has hinted that they want some kind of deal, that they want me to compromise the journalists with which I've been working, to come back, and I want to make it very clear that I did not do this to be safe. I did this to do what was right, and I'm not going to stop my work in the public interest just to benefit myself. (Applause) CA: In the meantime, courtesy of the Internet and this technology, you're here, back in North America, not quite the U.S., Canada, in this form. I'm curious, how does that feel? ES: Canada is different than what I expected. It's a lot warmer. (Laughter) CA: At TED, the mission is "ideas worth spreading." If you could encapsulate it in a single idea, what is your idea worth spreading right now at this moment? ES: I would say the last year has been a reminder that democracy may die behind closed doors, but we as individuals are born behind those same closed doors, and we don't have to give up our privacy to have good government. We don't have to give up our liberty to have security. And I think by working together we can have both open government and private lives, and I look forward to working with everyone around the world to see that happen. Thank you very much. CA: Ed, thank you. (Applause)
Some of you have heard the story before, but, in fact, there's somebody in the audience who's never heard this story -- in front of an audience -- before, so I'm a little more nervous than I normally am telling this story. I used to be a photographer for many years. In 1978, I was working for Time magazine, and I was given a three-day assignment to photograph Amerasian children, children who had been fathered by American GIs all over Southeast Asia, and then abandoned -- 40,000 children all over Asia. I had never heard the word Amerasian before. I spent a few days photographing children in different countries, and like a lot of photographers and a lot of journalists, I always hope that when my pictures were published, they might actually have an effect on a situation, instead of just documenting it. So, I was so disturbed by what I saw, and I was so unhappy with the article that ran afterwards, that I decided I would take six months off. I was 28 years old. I decided I would find six children in different countries, and actually go spend some time with the kids, and try to tell their story a little bit better than I thought I had done for Time magazine. In the course of doing the story, I was looking for children who hadn't been photographed before, and the Pearl Buck Foundation told me that they worked with a lot of Americans who were donating money to help some of these kids. And a man told me, who ran the Pearl Buck Foundation in Korea, that there was a young girl, who was 11 years old, being raised by her grandmother. And the grandmother had never let any Westerners ever see her. Every time any Westerners came to the village, she hid the girl. And of course, I was immediately intrigued. I saw photographs of her, and I thought I wanted to go. And the guy just told me, "There's no way. This grandmother won't even -- you know, there's no way she's ever going to let you meet this girl that's she's raising." I took a translator with me, and went to this village, found the grandmother, sat down with her. And to my astonishment, she agreed to let me photograph her granddaughter. And I was paying for this myself, so I asked the translator if it would be OK if I stayed for the week. I had a sleeping bag. The family had a small shed on the side of the house, so I said, "Could I sleep in my sleeping bag in the evenings?" And I just told the little girl, whose name was Hyun-Sook Lee, that if I ever did anything to embarrass her -- she didn't speak a word of English, although she looked very American -- she could just put up her hand and say, "Stop," and I would stop taking pictures. And then, my translator left. So there I was, I couldn't speak a word of Korean, and this is the first night I met Hyun-Sook. Her mother was still alive. Her mother was not raising her, her grandmother was raising her. And what struck me immediately was how in love the two of these people were. The grandmother was incredibly fond, deeply in love with this little girl. They slept on the floor at night. The way they heat their homes in Korea is to put bricks under the floors, so the heat actually radiates from underneath the floor. Hyun-Sook was 11 years old. I had photographed, as I said, a lot of these kids. Hyun-Sook was in fact the fifth child that I found to photograph. And almost universally, amongst all the kids, they were really psychologically damaged by having been made fun of, ridiculed, picked on and been rejected. And Korea was probably the place I found to be the worst for these kids. And what struck me immediately in meeting Hyun-Sook was how confident she appeared to be, how happy she seemed to be in her own skin. And remember this picture, because I'm going to show you another picture later, but you can see how much she looks like her grandmother, although she looks so Western. I decided to follow her to school. This is the first morning I stayed with her. This is on the way to school. This is the morning assembly outside her school. And I noticed that she was clowning around. When the teachers would ask questions, she'd be the first person to raise her hand. Again, not at all shy or withdrawn, or anything like the other children that I'd photographed. Again, the first one to go to the blackboard to answer questions. Getting in trouble for whispering into her best friend's ears in the middle of class. And one of the other things that I said to her through the translator -- again, this thing about saying stop -- was to not pay attention to me. And so, she really just completely ignored me most of the time. I noticed that at recess, she was the girl who picked the other girls to be on her team. It was very obvious, from the very beginning, that she was a leader. This is on the way home. And that's North Korea up along the hill. This is up along the DMZ. They would actually cover the windows every night, so that light couldn't be seen, because the South Korean government has said for years that the North Koreans may invade at any time. So there's always this -- the closer you were to North Korea, the more terrifying it was. Very often at school, I'd be taking pictures, and she would whisper into her girlfriends' ears, and then look at me and say, "Stop." And I would stand at attention, and all the girls would crack up, and it was sort of a little joke. (Laughter) The end of the week came and my translator came back, because I'd asked her to come back, so I could formally thank the grandmother and Hyun-Sook. And in the course of the grandmother talking to the translator, the grandmother started crying. And I said to my translator, "What's going on, why is she crying?" And she spoke to the grandmother for a moment, and then she started getting tears in her eyes. And I said, "OK, what did I do? What's going on? Why is everyone crying?" And the translator said, "The grandmother says that she thinks she's dying, and she wants to know if you would take Hyun-Sook to America with you." And I said, "I'm 28 years old, and I live in hotels, and I'm not married." I mean I had fallen in love with this girl, but I -- you know, it was, like, emotionally I was about 12 years old. If you know of photographers, the joke is it's the finest form of delayed adolescence ever invented. "Sorry, I have to go on an assignment, I'll be back" -- and then you never come back. So, I asked the translator why she thought she was dying. Can I get her to a hospital? Could I pay to get her a doctor? And she refused any help at all. And so, when I got outside, I actually gave the translator some money and said, "Please go back and see if you can do something." And I gave the grandmother my business card. And I said, "If you're serious, I will try to find a family for her." And I immediately wrote a letter to my best friends in Atlanta, Georgia, who had an 11-year-old son. And my best friend had mistakenly one day said something about wishing he had another child. So here my friends Gene and Gail had not heard from me in about a year, and suddenly I was calling, saying "I'm in Korea, and I've met this extraordinary girl." And I said, "The grandmother thinks she's sick, but I think maybe we would have to bring the grandmother over also." And I said, "I'll pay for the ... " I mean, I had this whole sort of picture. So anyway, I left. And my friends actually said they were very interested in adopting her. And I said, "Look, I think I'll scare the grandmother to death, if I actually write to her and tell her that you're willing to adopt her, I want to go back and talk to her." But I was off on assignment. I figured I'd come back in a couple of weeks and talk to the grandmother. And on Christmas Day, I was in Bangkok with a group of photographers and got a telegram -- back in those days, you got telegrams -- from Time magazine saying someone in Korea had died, and left their child in a will to me. Did I know anything about this? Because I hadn't told them what I was doing, because I was so upset with the story they'd run. So, I went back to Korea, and I went back to Hyun-Sook's village, and she was gone. And the house that I had spent time in was empty. It was incredibly cold. No one in the village would tell me where Hyun-Sook was, because the grandmother had always hidden her from Westerners. And they had no idea about this request that she'd made of me. So I finally found Myung Sung, her best friend that she used to play with after school every day. And Myung Sung, under some pressure from me and the translator, gave us an address on the outside of Seoul. And I went to that address and knocked on the door, and a man answered the door. It was not a very nice area of Seoul, as there were mud streets outside of it. And I knocked on the door, and Hyun-Sook answered the door, and her eyes were bloodshot, and she seemed to be in shock. She didn't recognize me -- there was no recognition whatsoever. And this man came to the door and kind of barked something in Korean. And I said to the translator, "What did he say?" And she said, "He wants to know who you are." And I said, "Well, tell him that I am a photographer." I started explaining who I was, and he interrupted. And she said, "He says he knows who you are, what do you want?" I said, "Well, tell him that I was asked by this little girl's grandmother to find a family for her." And he said, "I'm her uncle, she's fine, you can leave now." So I was -- you know, the door was being slammed in my face, it's incredibly cold, and I'm trying to think, "What would the hero do in a movie, if I was writing this as a movie script?" So I said, "Listen, it's really cold, I've come a very long way, do you mind if I just come in for a minute? I'm freezing." So the guy kind of reluctantly let us in and we sat down on the floor. And as we started talking, I saw him yell something, and Hyun-Sook came and brought us some food. And I had this whole mental picture of, sort of like Cinderella. I sort of had this picture of this incredibly wonderful, bright, happy little child, who now appeared to be very withdrawn, being enslaved by this family. And I was really appalled, and I couldn't figure out what to do. And the more I tried talking to him, the less friendly he was getting. So I finally decided, I said "Look," -- this is all through the translator, because, this is all, you know, I don't speak a word of Korean -- and I said, "Look, I'm really glad that Hyun-Sook has a family to live with. I was very worried about her. I made a promise to her grandmother, your mother, that I would find a family, and now I'm so happy that you're going to take care of her." I said, "But you know, I bought an airline ticket, and I'm stuck here for a week." And I said, "I'm staying in a hotel downtown. Would you like to come and have lunch tomorrow? And you can practice your English." Because he told me -- I was trying to ask him questions about himself. And so I went to the hotel, and I found two older Amerasians. A girl whose mother had been a prostitute, and she was a prostitute, and a boy who'd been in and out of jail. And I said to them, "Look, there's a little girl who has a tiny chance of getting out of here and going to America." I said, "I don't know if it's the right decision or not, but I would like you to come to lunch tomorrow and tell the uncle what it's like to walk down the street, what people say to you, what you do for a living. And just -- I want him to understand what happens if she stays here. And I could be wrong, I don't know, but I wish you would come tomorrow." So, these two came to lunch, and we got thrown out of the restaurant. They were yelling at him, they were -- it got to be really ugly. And we went outside, and he was just furious. And I knew I had totally blown this whole thing. Here I was again, trying to figure out what to do. And he started yelling at me, and I said to the translator, "OK, tell him to calm down, what is he saying?" And she said, "Well, he's saying, 'Who the hell are you to walk into my house, some rich American with your cameras around your neck, accusing me of enslaving my niece? This is my niece, I love her, she's my sister's daughter. Who the hell are you to accuse me of something like this?'" And I said, you know, "Look," I said, "You're absolutely right. I don't pretend to understand what's going on here." I said, "All I know is, I've been photographing a lot of these children." I said, "I'm in love with your niece, I think she's an incredibly special child." And I said, "Look, I will fly my friends over here from the United States if you want to meet them, to see if you approve of them. I just think that -- what little I know about the situation, she has very little chance here of having the kind of life that you probably would like her to have." So, everyone told me afterwards that inviting the prospective parents over was, again, the stupidest thing I could have possibly done, because who's ever good enough for your relative? But he invited me to come to a ceremony they were having that day for her grandmother. And they actually take items of clothing and photographs, and they burn them as part of the ritual. And you can see how different she looks just in three months. This was now, I think, February, early February. And the pictures before were taken in September. Well, there was an American Marine priest that I had met in the course of doing the story, who had 75 children living in his house. He had three women helping him take care of these kids. And so I suggested to the uncle that we go down and meet Father Keene, to find out how the adoption process worked. Because I wanted him to feel like this was all being done very much above board. So, this is on the way down to the orphanage. This is Father Keene. He's just a wonderful guy. He had kids from all over Korea living there, and he would find families for these kids. This is a social worker interviewing Hyun-Sook. Now, I had always thought she was completely untouched by all of this, because the grandmother, to me, appeared to be sort of the village wise woman, and the person everybody -- throughout the day, I noticed people kept coming to visit her grandmother. And I always had this mental picture that even though they may have been one of the poorer families in the village, they were one of the most respected families in the village. And I always felt that the grandmother had kind of demanded, and insisted, that the villagers treat Hyun-Sook with the same respect they treated her. Hyun-Sook stayed at Father Keene's, and her uncle agreed to let her stay there until the adoption went through. He actually agreed to the adoption. And I went off on assignment and came back a week later, and Father Keene said, "I've got to talk to you about Hyun-Sook." I kind of said, "Oh God, now what?" And he takes me into this room, and he closes the door, and he says, "I have 75 children here in the orphanage, and it's total bedlam." And there's clothes, and there's kids, and, you know, there's three adults and 75 kids -- you can imagine. And he said, "The second day she was here she made up a list of all of the names of the older kids and the younger kids. And she assigned one of the older kids to each of the younger kids. And then she set up a work detail list of who cleaned the orphanage on what day." And he said, "She's telling me that I'm messy, and I have to clean up my room." And he said, "I don't know who raised her, but," he said, "she's running the orphanage, and she's been here three days." (Laughter) This was movie day -- that she organized -- where all the kids went to the movies. A lot of the kids who had been adopted actually wrote back to the other kids, telling them about what their life was like with their new families. So, it was a really big deal when the letters showed up. This is a woman who is now working at the orphanage, whose son had been adopted. Gene and Gail started studying Korean the moment they had gotten my first letter. They really wanted to be able to welcome Hyun-Sook into their family. And one of the things Father Keene told me when I came back from one of these trips -- Hyun-Sook had chosen the name Natasha, which I understood was from her watching a "Rocky and Bullwinkle" cartoon on the American Air Force station. This may be one of those myth-buster things that we'll have to clear up here, in a minute. So, my friend Gene flew over with his son, Tim. Gail couldn't come. And they spent a lot of time huddled over a dictionary. And this was Gene showing the uncle where Atlanta was on the map, where he lived. This is the uncle signing the adoption papers. Now, we went out to dinner that night to celebrate. The uncle went back to his family, and Natasha and Tim and Gene and I went out to dinner. And Gene was showing Natasha how to use a knife and fork, and then Natasha was returning the utensil lessons. We went back to our hotel room, and Gene was showing Natasha also where Atlanta was. This is the third night we were in Korea. The first night we'd gotten a room for the kids right next to us. Now, I'd been staying in this room for about three months -- it was a little 15-story Korean hotel. So, the second night, we didn't keep the kids' room, because we went down and slept on the floor with all the kids at the orphanage. And the third night, we came back, we'd just gone out to dinner, where you saw the pictures, and we got to the front desk and the guy at the front desk said, "There's no other free rooms on your floor tonight, so if you want to put the kids five floors below you, there's a room there." And Gene and I looked at each other and said, "No, we don't want two 11-year-olds five floors away." So, his son said, "Dad, I have a sleeping bag, I'll sleep on the floor." And I said, "Yeah, I have one too." So, Tim and I slept on the floor, Natasha got one bed, Gene got the other -- kids pass out, it's been very exciting for three days. We're lying in bed, and Gene and I are talking about how cool we are. We said, "That was so great, we saved this little girl's life." We were just like, you know, ah, just full of ourselves. And we fall asleep -- and I've been in this room, you know, for a couple of months now. And they always overheat the hotels in Korea terribly, so during the day I always left the window open. And then, at night, about midnight, they turn the heat off in the hotel. So at about 1 a.m., the whole room would be like 20 below zero, and I'd get up. I'd been doing this every night I'd been there. So, sure enough, it's one o'clock, room's freezing, I go to close the window, and I hear people shouting outside, and I thought, "Oh, the bars must have just gotten out." And I don't speak Korean, but I'm hearing these voices, and I'm not hearing anger, I'm hearing terror. So, I open the window, and I look out, and there's flames coming up the side of our hotel, and the hotel's on fire. So, I run over to Gene, and I wake him up, and I say, "Gene, don't freak out, I think the hotel's on fire." And now there's smoke and flames coming by our windows -- we're on the eleventh floor. So, the two of us were just like, "Oh my God, oh my God." So, we're trying to get Natasha up, and we can't talk to her. And you know what kids are like when they've been asleep for like an hour, it's like they took five Valiums -- you know, they're all over the place. And we can't talk to her. I remember his son had the L.L. Bean bootlaces, and we're trying to do up his laces. So, we try to get to the door, and we run to the door, and we open the door and it's like walking into a blast furnace. There's people screaming, there's the sound of glass breaking, there's these weird thumps. And the whole room filled with smoke in about two seconds. And Gene turns around and says, "We're not going to make it." And he closes the door, and the whole room is now filled with smoke. We're all choking, and there's smoke pouring through the vents, under the doors. There's people screaming. I just remember this unbelievable, just utter chaos. I remember sitting near the bed, and I was just so -- I had two overwhelming feelings. One was absolute terror -- it's like, "Oh, please God, I just want to wake up. This has got to be a nightmare, this can't be happening. Please, I just want to wake up, it's got to be a nightmare." And the other is unbelievable guilt. Here I've been, playing God with my friends' lives, my friends' son, with Natasha's life, and this what you get when you try playing God, is you hurt people. I remember just being so frightened and terrified. And Gene, who's lying on the floor, says, "Man, we've got to soak towels." I said, "What?" He says, "We've got to soak towels. We're going to die from the smoke." So, we ran to the bathroom, and got towels, and put them over our faces, and the kids faces. Then he said, "Do you have gaffer's tape?" I said, "What?" He said, "Do you have gaffer's tape?" I said, "Yeah, somewhere in my Halliburton." He says, "We've got to stop the smoke." He said, "That's all we can do, we've got to stop the smoke." I mean, Gene -- thank God for Gene. So, we put the room service menus over the vents in the wall, we put blankets at the bottom of the door, we put the kids on the windowsill to try to get some air. And there was a building, a new building, going up, that was being built right outside, across the street from our hotel. And there, in the building were photographers waiting for people to jump. Eleven people ended up dying in the fire. Five people jumped and died, other people were killed by the smoke. And there's this loud thumping on the door after about 45 minutes in all this, and people were shouting in Korean. And I remember, Natasha didn't want us opening the door -- sorry, I was trying not to open the door, because we'd spent so much time barricading the room. I didn't know who it was, I didn't know what they wanted, and Natasha could tell they were firemen trying to get us out. I remember a sort of a tussle at the door, trying to get the door open. In any case, 12 hours later, I mean, they put us in the lobby. Gene ended up using his coat, and his fist in the coat, to break open a liquor cabinet. People were lying on the floor. It was one of just the most horrifying nights. And then 12 hours later, we rented a car, as we had planned to, and drove back to Natasha's village. And we kept saying, "Do you realize we were dying in a hotel fire, like eight hours ago?" It's so weird how life just goes on. Natasha wanted to introduce her brother and father to all the villagers, and the day we showed up turned out to be a 60-year-old man's birthday. This guy's 60 years old. So it turned into a dual celebration, because Natasha was the first person from this village ever to go to the United States. So, these are the greenhouse tents. This is the elders teaching Gene their dances. We drank a lot of rice wine. We were both so drunk, I couldn't believe it. This is the last picture before Gene and Tim headed back. The adoption people told us it was going to take a year for the adoption to go through. Like, what could you do for a year? So I found out the name of every official on both the Korean and American side, and I photographed them, and told them how famous they were going to be when this book was done. And four months later, the adoption papers came through. This is saying goodbye to everybody at the orphanage. This is Father Keene with Natasha at the bus stop. Her great aunt at the airport. I had a wonderful deal with Cathay Pacific airlines for many years, where they gave me free passes on all their airlines in return for photography. It was like the ultimate perk. And the pilot, I actually knew -- because they used to let me sit in the jump seat, to tell you how long ago this was. This is a Tri-Star, and so they let Natasha actually sit in the jump seat. And the pilot, Jeff Cowley, actually went back and adopted one of the other kids at the orphanage after meeting Natasha. This is 28 hours later in Atlanta. It's a very long flight. Just to make things even crazier, Gail, Natasha's new mom, was three days away from giving birth to her own daughter. So you know, if you were writing this, you'd say, "No, we've got to write the script differently." This is the first night showing Natasha her new cousins and uncles and aunts. Gene and Gail know everyone in Atlanta -- they're the most social couple imaginable. So, at this point, Natasha doesn't speak a word of English, other than what little Father Keene taught her. This is Kylie, her sister, who's now a doctor, on the right. This is a deal I had with Natasha, which is that when we got to Atlanta she could take -- she could cut off my beard. She never liked it very much. She learned English in three months. She entered seventh grade at her own age level. Pledge of Allegiance for the first time. This is her cooking teacher. Natasha told me that a lot of the kids thought she was stuck up, because they would talk to her and she wouldn't answer, and they didn't realize she didn't actually speak English very well, in the beginning. But what I noticed, again as an observer, was she was choosing who was going to be on her team, and seemed to be very popular very, very quickly. Now, remember the picture, how much she looked like her grandmother, at the beginning? People were always telling Natasha how much she looks like her mother, Gail. This is a tense moment in the first football game, I think. And Kylie -- I mean, it was almost like Kylie was her own child. She's being baptized. Now, a lot of parents, when they adopt, actually want to erase their children's history. And Gail and Gene did the complete opposite. They were studying Korean; they bought Korean clothes. Gene even did a little tile work in the kitchen, which was that, "Once upon a time, there was a beautiful girl that came from hills of Korea to live happily ever after in Atlanta." She hates this picture -- it was her first job. She bought a bright red Karmann Ghia with the money she made working at Burger King. The captain of the cheerleaders. Beauty pageant. Used to do their Christmas card every year. Gene's been restoring this car for a million years. Kodak hired Natasha to be a translator for them at the Olympics in Korea. Her future husband, Jeff, was working for Canon cameras, and met Natasha at the Olympic Village. This is her first trip back to Korea, so there's her uncle. This is her half-sister. She went back to the village. That's her best friend's mother. And I always thought that was a very Annie Hall kind of outfit. It's just, you know, it was just so interesting, just to watch -- this is her mother in the background there. This is Natasha's wedding day. Gene is looking a little older. This is Sydney, who's going to be three years old in a couple of days. And there's Evan. Natasha, would you just come up, for a second, just maybe to say hello to everybody? (Applause) Natasha's actually never heard me tell the story. I mean, she -- you know, we've looked at the pictures together. Natasha: I've seen pictures millions of times, but today was the first time I'm actually seeing him give the whole presentation. I started crying. Rick Smolan: I'm sure there's about 40 things she's going to tell me, "That wasn't what happened, that wasn't what you said." Natasha: Later, I'll do that later. (Laughter) RS: Anyway, thank you, Mike and Richard, so much for letting us tell the story. Thank you all of you. (Applause)
It's a great honor to be here with you. The good news is I'm very aware of my responsibilities to get you out of here because I'm the only thing standing between you and the bar. (Laughter) And the good news is I don't have a prepared speech, but I have a box of slides. I have some pictures that represent my life and what I do for a living. I've learned through experience that people remember pictures long after they've forgotten words, and so I hope you'll remember some of the pictures I'm going to share with you for just a few minutes. The whole story really starts with me as a high school kid in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, in a tough neighborhood that everybody gave up on for dead. And on a Wednesday afternoon, I was walking down the corridor of my high school kind of minding my own business. And there was this artist teaching, who made a great big old ceramic vessel, and I happened to be looking in the door of the art room -- and if you've ever seen clay done, it's magic -- and I'd never seen anything like that before in my life. So, I walked in the art room and I said, "What is that?" And he said, "Ceramics. And who are you?" And I said, "I'm Bill Strickland. I want you to teach me that." And he said, "Well, get your homeroom teacher to sign a piece of paper that says you can come here, and I'll teach it to you." And so for the remaining two years of my high school, I cut all my classes. (Laughter) But I had the presence of mind to give the teachers' classes that I cut the pottery that I made, (Laughter) and they gave me passing grades. And that's how I got out of high school. And Mr. Ross said, "You're too smart to die and I don't want it on my conscience, so I'm leaving this school and I'm taking you with me." And he drove me out to the University of Pittsburgh where I filled out a college application and got in on probation. Well, I'm now a trustee of the university, and at my installation ceremony I said, "I'm the guy who came from the neighborhood who got into the place on probation. Don't give up on the poor kids, because you never know what's going to happen to those children in life." What I'm going to show you for a couple of minutes is a facility that I built in the toughest neighborhood in Pittsburgh with the highest crime rate. One is called Bidwell Training Center; it is a vocational school for ex-steel workers and single parents and welfare mothers. You remember we used to make steel in Pittsburgh? Well, we don't make any steel anymore, and the people who used to make the steel are having a very tough time of it. And I rebuild them and give them new life. Manchester Craftsmen's Guild is named after my neighborhood. I was adopted by the Bishop of the Episcopal Diocese during the riots, and he donated a row house. And in that row house I started Manchester Craftsmen's Guild, and I learned very quickly that wherever there are Episcopalians, there's money in very close proximity. (Laughter) And the Bishop adopted me as his kid. And last year I spoke at his memorial service and wished him well in this life. I went out and hired a student of Frank Lloyd Wright, the architect, and I asked him to build me a world class center in the worst neighborhood in Pittsburgh. And my building was a scale model for the Pittsburgh airport. And when you come to Pittsburgh -- and you're all invited -- you'll be flying into the blown-up version of my building. That's the building. Built in a tough neighborhood where people have been given up for dead. My view is that if you want to involve yourself in the life of people who have been given up on, you have to look like the solution and not the problem. As you can see, it has a fountain in the courtyard. And the reason it has a fountain in the courtyard is I wanted one and I had the checkbook, so I bought one and put it there. (Laughter) And now that I'm giving speeches at conferences like TED, I got put on the board of the Carnegie Museum. At a reception in their courtyard, I noticed that they had a fountain because they think that the people who go to the museum deserve a fountain. Well, I think that welfare mothers and at-risk kids and ex-steel workers deserve a fountain in their life. And so the first thing that you see in my center in the springtime is water that greets you -- water is life and water of human possibility -- and it sets an attitude and expectation about how you feel about people before you ever give them a speech. So, from that fountain I built this building. As you can see, it has world class art, and it's all my taste because I raised all the money. (Laughter) I said to my boy, "When you raise the money, we'll put your taste on the wall." That we have quilts and clay and calligraphy and everywhere your eye turns, there's something beautiful looking back at you, that's deliberate. That's intentional. In my view, it is this kind of world that can redeem the soul of poor people. We also created a boardroom, and I hired a Japanese cabinetmaker from Kyoto, Japan, and commissioned him to do 60 pieces of furniture for our building. We have since spun him off into his own business. He's making a ton of money doing custom furniture for rich people. And I got 60 pieces out of it for my school because I felt that welfare moms and ex-steel workers and single parents deserved to come to a school where there was handcrafted furniture that greeted them every day. Because it sets a tone and an attitude about how you feel about people long before you give them the speech. We even have flowers in the hallway, and they're not plastic. Those are real and they're in my building every day. And now that I've given lots of speeches, we had a bunch of high school principals come and see me, and they said, "Mr. Strickland, what an extraordinary story and what a great school. And we were particularly touched by the flowers and we were curious as to how the flowers got there." I said, "Well, I got in my car and I went out to the greenhouse and I bought them and I brought them back and I put them there." You don't need a task force or a study group to buy flowers for your kids. What you need to know is that the children and the adults deserve flowers in their life. The cost is incidental but the gesture is huge. And so in my building, which is full of sunlight and full of flowers, we believe in hope and human possibilities. That happens to be at Christmas time. And so the next thing you'll see is a million dollar kitchen that was built by the Heinz company -- you've heard of them? They did all right in the ketchup business. And I happen to know that company pretty well because John Heinz, who was our U.S. senator -- who was tragically killed in a plane accident -- he had heard about my desire to build a new building, because I had a cardboard box and I put it in a garbage bag and I walking all over Pittsburgh trying to raise money for this site. And he called me into his office -- which is the equivalent of going to see the Wizard of Oz (Laughter) -- and John Heinz had 600 million dollars, and at the time I had about 60 cents. And he said, "But we've heard about you. We've heard about your work with the kids and the ex-steel workers, and we're inclined to want to support your desire to build a new building. And you could do us a great service if you would add a culinary program to your program." Because back then, we were building a trades program. He said, "That way we could fulfill our affirmative action goals for the Heinz company." I said, "Senator, I'm reluctant to go into a field that I don't know much about, but I promise you that if you'll support my school, I'll get it built and in a couple of years, I'll come back and weigh out that program that you desire." And Senator Heinz sat very quietly and he said, "Well, what would your reaction be if I said I'd give you a million dollars?" I said, "Senator, it appears that we're going into the food training business." (Laughter) And John Heinz did give me a million bucks. And most importantly, he loaned me the head of research for the Heinz company. And we kind of borrowed the curriculum from the Culinary Institute of America, which in their mind is kind of the Harvard of cooking schools, and we created a gourmet cooks program for welfare mothers in this million dollar kitchen in the middle of the inner city. And we've never looked back. I would like to show you now some of the food that these welfare mothers do in this million dollar kitchen. That happens to be our cafeteria line. That's puff pastry day. Why? Because the students made puff pastry and that's what the school ate every day. But the concept was that I wanted to take the stigma out of food. That good food's not for rich people -- good food's for everybody on the planet, and there's no excuse why we all can't be eating it. So at my school, we subsidize a gourmet lunch program for welfare mothers in the middle of the inner city because we've discovered that it's good for their stomachs, but it's better for their heads. Because I wanted to let them know every day of their life that they have value at this place I call my center. We have students who sit together, black kids and white kids, and what we've discovered is you can solve the race problem by creating a world class environment, because people will have a tendency to show you world class behavior if you treat them in that way. These are examples of the food that welfare mothers are doing after six months in the training program. No sophistication, no class, no dignity, no history. What we've discovered is the only thing wrong with poor people is they don't have any money, which happens to be a curable condition. It's all in the way that you think about people that often determines their behavior. That was done by a student after seven months in the program, done by a very brilliant young woman who was taught by our pastry chef. I've actually eaten seven of those baskets and they're very good. (Laughter) They have no calories. That's our dining room. It looks like your average high school cafeteria in your average town in America. But this is my view of how students ought to be treated, particularly once they have been pushed aside. We train pharmaceutical technicians for the pharmacy industry, we train medical technicians for the medical industry, and we train chemical technicians for companies like Bayer and Calgon Carbon and Fisher Scientific and Exxon. And I will guarantee you that if you come to my center in Pittsburgh -- and you're all invited -- you'll see welfare mothers doing analytical chemistry with logarithmic calculators 10 months from enrolling in the program. There is absolutely no reason why poor people can't learn world class technology. What we've discovered is you have to give them flowers and sunlight and food and expectations and Herbie's music, and you can cure a spiritual cancer every time. We train corporate travel agents for the travel industry. We even teach people how to read. The kid with the red stripe was in the program two years ago -- he's now an instructor. And I have children with high school diplomas that they can't read. And so you must ask yourself the question: how is it possible in the 21st century that we graduate children from schools who can't read the diplomas that they have in their hands? The reason is that the system gets reimbursed for the kids they spit out the other end, not the children who read. I can take these children and in 20 weeks, demonstrated aptitude; I can get them high school equivalent. No big deal. That's our library with more handcrafted furniture. And this is the arts program I started in 1968. Remember I'm the black kid from the '60s who got his life saved with ceramics. Well, I went out and decided to reproduce my experience with other kids in the neighborhood, the theory being if you get kids flowers and you give them food and you give them sunshine and enthusiasm, you can bring them right back to life. I have 400 kids from the Pittsburgh public school system that come to me every day of the week for arts education. And these are children who are flunking out of public school. And last year I put 88 percent of those kids in college and I've averaged over 80 percent for 15 years. We've made a fascinating discovery: there's nothing wrong with the kids that affection and sunshine and food and enthusiasm and Herbie's music can't cure. For that I won a big old plaque -- Man of the Year in Education. I beat out all the Ph.D.'s because I figured that if you treat children like human beings, it increases the likelihood they're going to behave that way. And why we can't institute that policy in every school and in every city and every town remains a mystery to me. Let me show you what these people do. We have ceramics and photography and computer imaging. And these are all kids with no artistic ability, no talent, no imagination. And we bring in the world's greatest artists -- Gordon Parks has been there, Chester Higgins has been there -- and what we've learned is that the children will become like the people who teach them. In fact, I brought in a mosaic artist from the Vatican, an African-American woman who had studied the old Vatican mosaic techniques, and let me show you what they did with the work. These were children who the whole world had given up on, who were flunking out of public school, and that's what they're capable of doing with affection and sunlight and food and good music and confidence. We teach photography. And these are examples of some of the kids' work. That boy won a four-year scholarship on the strength of that photograph. This is our gallery. We have a world class gallery because we believe that poor kids need a world class gallery, so I designed this thing. We have smoked salmon at the art openings, we have a formal printed invitation, and I even have figured out a way to get their parents to come. I couldn't buy a parent 15 years ago so I hired a guy who got off on the Jesus big time. He was dragging guys out of bars and saving those lives for the Lord. And I said, "Bill, I want to hire you, man. You have to tone down the Jesus stuff a little bit, but keep the enthusiasm. (Laughter) (Applause) I can't get these parents to come to the school." He said, "I'll get them to come to the school." So, he jumped in the van, he went to Miss Jones' house and said, "Miss Jones, I knew you wanted to come to your kid's art opening but you probably didn't have a ride. So, I came to give you a ride." And he got 10 parents and then 20 parents. At the last show that we did, 200 parents showed up and we didn't pick up one parent. Because now it's become socially not acceptable not to show up to support your children at the Manchester Craftsmen's Guild because people think you're bad parents. And there is no statistical difference between the white parents and the black parents. Mothers will go where their children are being celebrated, every time, every town, every city. I wanted you to see this gallery because it's as good as it gets. And by the time I cut these kids loose from high school, they've got four shows on their resume before they apply to college because it's all up here. You have to change the way that people see themselves before you can change their behavior. And it's worked out pretty good up to this day. I even stuck another room on the building, which I'd like to show you. This is brand new. We just got this slide done in time for the TED Conference. I gave this little slide show at a place called the Silicon Valley and I did all right. And the woman came out of the audience, she said, "That was a great story and I was very impressed with your presentation. My only criticism is your computers are getting a little bit old." And I said, "Well, what do you do for a living?" She said, "Well, I work for a company called Hewlett-Packard." And I said, "You're in the computer business, is that right?" She said, "Yes, sir." And I said, "Well, there's an easy solution to that problem." Well, I'm very pleased to announce to you that HP and a furniture company called Steelcase have adopted us as a demonstration model for all of their technology and all their furniture for the United States of America. And that's the room that's initiating the relationship. We got it just done in time to show you, so it's kind of the world debut of our digital imaging center. (Applause) (Music) I only have a couple more slides, and this is where the story gets kind of interesting. So, I just want you to listen up for a couple more minutes and you'll understand why he's there and I'm here. In 1986, I had the presence of mind to stick a music hall on the north end of the building while I was building it. And a guy named Dizzy Gillespie showed up to play there because he knew this man over here, Marty Ashby. And I stood on that stage with Dizzy Gillespie on sound check on a Wednesday afternoon, and I said, "Dizzy, why would you come to a black-run center in the middle of an industrial park with a high crime rate that doesn't even have a reputation in music?" He said, "Because I heard you built the center and I didn't believe that you did it, and I wanted to see for myself. And now that I have, I want to give you a gift." I said, "You're the gift." He said, "No, sir. You're the gift. And I'm going to allow you to record the concert and I'm going to give you the music, and if you ever choose to sell it, you must sign an agreement that says the money will come back and support the school." And I recorded Dizzy. And he died a year later, but not before telling a fellow named McCoy Tyner what we were doing. And he showed up and said, "Dizzy talking about you all over the country, man, and I want to help you." And then a guy named Wynton Marsalis showed up. Then a bass player named Ray Brown, and a fellow named Stanley Turrentine, and a piano player named Herbie Hancock, and a band called the Count Basie Orchestra, and a fellow named Tito Puente, and a guy named Gary Burton, and Shirley Horn, and Betty Carter, and Dakota Staton and Nancy Wilson all have come to this center in the middle of an industrial park to sold out audiences in the middle of the inner city. And I'm very pleased to tell you that, with their permission, I have now accumulated 600 recordings of the greatest artists in the world, including Joe Williams, who died, but not before his last recording was done at my school. And Joe Williams came up to me and he put his hand on my shoulder and he said, "God's picked you, man, to do this work. And I want my music to be with you." And that worked out all right. When the Basie band came, the band got so excited about the school they voted to give me the rights to the music. And I recorded it and we won something called a Grammy. And like a fool, I didn't go to the ceremony because I didn't think we were going to win. Well, we did win, and our name was literally in lights over Madison Square Garden. Then the U.N. Jazz Orchestra dropped by and we recorded them and got nominated for a second Grammy back to back. So, we've become one of the hot, young jazz recording studios in the United States of America (Laughter) in the middle of the inner city with a high crime rate. That's the place all filled up with Republicans. (Laughter) (Applause) If you'd have dropped a bomb on that room, you'd have wiped out all the money in Pennsylvania because it was all sitting there. Including my mother and father, who lived long enough to see their kid build that building. And there's Dizzy, just like I told you. He was there. And he was there, Tito Puente. And Pat Metheny and Jim Hall were there and they recorded with us. And that was our first recording studio, which was the broom closet. We put the mops in the hallway and re-engineered the thing and that's where we recorded the first Grammy. And this is our new facility, which is all video technology. And that is a room that was built for a woman named Nancy Wilson, who recorded that album at our school last Christmas. And any of you who happened to have been watching Oprah Winfrey on Christmas Day, he was there and Nancy was there singing excerpts from this album, the rights to which she donated to our school. And I can now tell you with absolute certainty that an appearance on Oprah Winfrey will sell 10,000 CDs. (Laughter) We are currently number four on the Billboard Charts, right behind Tony Bennett. And I think we're going to be fine. This was burned out during the riots -- this is next to my building -- and so I had another cardboard box built and I walked back out in the streets again. And that's the building, and that's the model, and on the right's a high-tech greenhouse and in the middle's the medical technology building. And I'm very pleased to tell you that the building's done. It's also full of anchor tenants at 20 dollars a foot -- triple that in the middle of the inner city. And there's the fountain. (Laughter) Every building has a fountain. And the University of Pittsburgh Medical Center are anchor tenants and they took half the building, and we now train medical technicians through all their system. And Mellon Bank's a tenant. And I love them because they pay the rent on time. (Laughter) And as a result of the association, I'm now a director of the Mellon Financial Corporation that bought Dreyfus. And this is in the process of being built as we speak. Multiply that picture times four and you will see the greenhouse that's going to open in October this year because we're going to grow those flowers in the middle of the inner city. And we're going to have high school kids growing Phalaenopsis orchids in the middle of the inner city. And we have a handshake with one of the large retail grocers to sell our orchids in all 240 stores in six states. And our partners are Zuma Canyon Orchids of Malibu, California, who are Hispanic. So, the Hispanics and the black folks have formed a partnership to grow high technology orchids in the middle of the inner city. And I told my United States senator that there was a very high probability that if he could find some funding for this, we would become a left-hand column in the Wall Street Journal, to which he readily agreed. And we got the funding and we open in the fall. And you ought to come and see it -- it's going to be a hell of a story. And this is what I want to do when I grow up. (Laughter) The brown building is the one you guys have been looking at and I'll tell you where I made my big mistake. I had a chance to buy this whole industrial park -- which is less than 1,000 feet from the riverfront -- for four million dollars and I didn't do it. And I built the first building, and guess what happened? I appreciated the real estate values beyond everybody's expectations and the owners of the park turned me down for eight million dollars last year, and said, "Mr. Strickland, you ought to get the Civic Leader of the Year Award because you've appreciated our property values beyond our wildest expectations. Thank you very much for that." The moral of the story is you must be prepared to act on your dreams, just in case they do come true. And finally, there's this picture. This is in a place called San Francisco. And the reason this picture's in here is I did this slide show a couple years ago at a big economics summit, and there was a fellow in the audience who came up to me. He said, "Man, that's a great story. I want one of those." I said, "Well, I'm very flattered. What do you do for a living?" He says, "I run the city of San Francisco. My name's Willie Brown." And so I kind of accepted the flattery and the praise and put it out of my mind. And that weekend, I was going back home and Herbie Hancock was playing our center that night -- first time I'd met him. And he walked in and he says, "What is this?" And I said, "Herbie, this is my concept of a training center for poor people." And he said, "As God as my witness, I've had a center like this in my mind for 25 years and you've built it. And now I really want to build one." I said, "Well, where would you build this thing?" He said, "San Francisco." I said, "Any chance you know Willie Brown?" (Laughter) As a matter of fact he did know Willie Brown, and Willie Brown and Herbie and I had dinner four years ago, and we started drawing out that center on the tablecloth. And Willie Brown said, "As sure as I'm the mayor of San Francisco, I'm going to build this thing as a legacy to the poor people of this city." And he got me five acres of land on San Francisco Bay and we got an architect and we got a general contractor and we got Herbie on the board, and our friends from HP, and our friends from Steelcase, and our friends from Cisco, and our friends from Wells Fargo and Genentech. And along the way, I met this real short guy at my slide show in the Silicon Valley. He came up to me afterwards, he said, "Man, that's a fabulous story. I want to help you." And I said, "Well, thank you very much for that. What do you do for a living?" He said, "Well, I built a company called eBay." I said, "Well, that's very nice. Thanks very much, and give me your card and sometime we'll talk." I didn't know eBay from that jar of water sitting on that piano, but I had the presence of mind to go back and talk to one of the techie kids at my center. I said, "Hey man, what is eBay?" He said, "Well, that's the electronic commerce network." I said, "Well, I met the guy who built the thing and he left me his card." So, I called him up on the phone and I said, "Mr. Skoll, I've come to have a much deeper appreciation of who you are (Laughter) and I'd like to become your friend." (Laughter) And Jeff and I did become friends, and he's organized a team of people and we're going to build this center. And I went down into the neighborhood called Bayview-Hunters Point, and I said, "The mayor sent me down here to work with you and I want to build a center with you, but I'm not going to build you anything if you don't want it. And all I've got is a box of slides." And so I stood up in front of 200 very angry, very disappointed people on a summer night, and the air conditioner had broken and it was 100 degrees outside, and I started showing these pictures. And after about 10 pictures they all settled down. And I ran the story and I said, "What do you think?" And in the back of the room, a woman stood up and she said, "In 35 years of living in this God forsaken place, you're the only person that's come down here and treated us with dignity. I'm going with you, man." And she turned that audience around on a pin. And I promised these people that I was going to build this thing, and we're going to build it all right. And I think we can get in the ground this year as the first replication of the center in Pittsburgh. But I met a guy named Quincy Jones along the way and I showed him the box of slides. And Quincy said, "I want to help you, man. Let's do one in L.A." And so he's assembled a group of people. And I've fallen in love with him, as I have with Herbie and with his music. And Quincy said, "Where did the idea for centers like this come from?" And I said, "It came from your music, man. Because Mr. Ross used to bring in your albums when I was 16 years old in the pottery class, when the world was all dark, and your music got me to the sunlight." And I said, "If I can follow that music, I'll get out into the sunlight and I'll be OK. And if that's not true, how did I get here?" I want you all to know that I think the world is a place that's worth living. I believe in you. I believe in your hopes and your dreams, I believe in your intelligence and I believe in your enthusiasm. And I'm tired of living like this, going into town after town with people standing around on corners with holes where eyes used to be, their spirits damaged. We won't make it as a country unless we can turn this thing around. In Pennsylvania it costs 60,000 dollars to keep people in jail, most of whom look like me. It's 40,000 dollars to build the University of Pittsburgh Medical School. It's 20,000 dollars cheaper to build a medical school than to keep people in jail. Do the math -- it will never work. I am banking on you and I'm banking on guys like Herbie and Quincy and Hackett and Richard and very decent people who still believe in something. And I want to do this in my lifetime, in every city and in every town. And I don't think I'm crazy. I think we can get home on this thing and I think we can build these all over the country for less money than we're spending on prisons. And I believe we can turn this whole story around to one of celebration and one of hope. In my business it's very difficult work. You're always fighting upstream like a salmon -- never enough money, too much need -- and so there is a tendency to have an occupational depression that accompanies my work. And so I've figured out, over time, the solution to the depression: you make a friend in every town and you'll never be lonely. And my hope is that I've made a few here tonight. And thanks for listening to what I had to say. (Applause)
I thought I'd start with telling you or showing you the people who started [Jet Propulsion Lab]. When they were a bunch of kids, they were kind of very imaginative, very adventurous, as they were trying at Caltech to mix chemicals and see which one blows up more. Well, I don't recommend that you try to do that now. Naturally, they blew up a shack, and Caltech, well, then, hey, you go to the Arroyo and really do all your tests in there. So, that's what we call our first five employees during the tea break, you know, in here. As I said, they were adventurous people. As a matter of fact, one of them, who was, kind of, part of a cult which was not too far from here on Orange Grove, and unfortunately he blew up himself because he kept mixing chemicals and trying to figure out which ones were the best chemicals. So, that gives you a kind of flavor of the kind of people we have there. We try to avoid blowing ourselves up. This one I thought I'd show you. Guess which one is a JPL employee in the heart of this crowd. I tried to come like him this morning, but as I walked out, then it was too cold, and I said, I'd better put my shirt back on. But more importantly, the reason I wanted to show this picture: look where the other people are looking, and look where he is looking. Wherever anybody else looks, look somewhere else, and go do something different, you know, and doing that. And that's kind of what has been the spirit of what we are doing. And I want to tell you a quote from Ralph Emerson that one of my colleagues, you know, put on my wall in my office, and it says, "Do not go where the path may lead. Go instead where there is no path, and leave a trail." And that's my recommendation to all of you: look what everybody is doing, what they are doing; go do something completely different. Don't try to improve a little bit on what somebody else is doing, because that doesn't get you very far. In our early days we used to work a lot on rockets, but we also used to have a lot of parties, you know. As you can see, one of our parties, you know, a few years ago. But then a big difference happened about 50 years ago, after Sputnik was launched. We launched the first American satellite, and that's the one you see on the left in there. And here we made 180 degrees change: we changed from a rocket house to be an exploration house. And that was done over a period of a couple of years, and now we are the leading organization, you know, exploring space on all of your behalf. But even when we did that, we had to remind ourselves, sometimes there are setbacks. So you see, on the bottom, that rocket was supposed to go upward; somehow it ended going sideways. So that's what we call the misguided missile. But then also, just to celebrate that, we started an event at JPL for "Miss Guided Missile." So, we used to have a celebration every year and select -- there used to be competition and parades and so on. It's not very appropriate to do it now. Some people tell me to do it; I think, well, that's not really proper, you know, these days. So, we do something a little bit more serious. And that's what you see in the last Rose Bowl, you know, when we entered one of the floats. That's more on the play side. And on the right side, that's the Rover just before we finished its testing to take it to the Cape to launch it. These are the Rovers up here that you have on Mars now. So that kind of tells you about, kind of, the fun things, you know, and the serious things that we try to do. But I said I'm going to show you a short clip of one of our employees to kind of give you an idea about some of the talent that we have. Video: Morgan Hendry: Beware of Safety is an instrumental rock band. It branches on more the experimental side. There's the improvisational side of jazz. There's the heavy-hitting sound of rock. Being able to treat sound as an instrument, and be able to dig for more abstract sounds and things to play live, mixing electronics and acoustics. The music's half of me, but the other half -- I landed probably the best gig of all. I work for the Jet Propulsion Lab. I'm building the next Mars Rover. Some of the most brilliant engineers I know are the ones who have that sort of artistic quality about them. You've got to do what you want to do. And anyone who tells you you can't, you don't listen to them. Maybe they're right - I doubt it. Tell them where to put it, and then just do what you want to do. I'm Morgan Hendry. I am NASA. Charles Elachi: Now, moving from the play stuff to the serious stuff, always people ask, why do we explore? Why are we doing all of these missions and why are we exploring them? Well, the way I think about it is fairly simple. Somehow, 13 billion years ago there was a Big Bang, and you've heard a little bit about, you know, the origin of the universe. But somehow what strikes everybody's imagination -- or lots of people's imagination -- somehow from that original Big Bang we have this beautiful world that we live in today. You look outside: you have all that beauty that you see, all that life that you see around you, and here we have intelligent people like you and I who are having a conversation here. All that started from that Big Bang. So, the question is: How did that happen? How did that evolve? How did the universe form? How did the galaxies form? How did the planets form? Why is there a planet on which there is life which have evolved? Is that very common? Is there life on every planet that you can see around the stars? So we literally are all made out of stardust. We started from those stars; we are made of stardust. So, next time you are really depressed, look in the mirror and you can look and say, hi, I'm looking at a star here. You can skip the dust part. But literally, we are all made of stardust. So, what we are trying to do in our exploration is effectively write the book of how things have came about as they are today. And one of the first, or the easiest, places we can go and explore that is to go towards Mars. And the reason Mars takes particular attention: it's not very far from us. You know, it'll take us only six months to get there. Six to nine months at the right time of the year. It's a planet somewhat similar to Earth. It's a little bit smaller, but the land mass on Mars is about the same as the land mass on Earth, you know, if you don't take the oceans into account. It has polar caps. It has an atmosphere somewhat thinner than ours, so it has weather. So, it's very similar to some extent, and you can see some of the features on it, like the Grand Canyon on Mars, or what we call the Grand Canyon on Mars. It is like the Grand Canyon on Earth, except a hell of a lot larger. So it's about the size, you know, of the United States. It has volcanoes on it. And that's Mount Olympus on Mars, which is a kind of huge volcanic shield on that planet. And if you look at the height of it and you compare it to Mount Everest, you see, it'll give you an idea of how large that Mount Olympus, you know, is, relative to Mount Everest. So, it basically dwarfs, you know, Mount Everest here on Earth. So, that gives you an idea of the tectonic events or volcanic events which have happened on that planet. Recently from one of our satellites, this shows that it's Earth-like -- we caught a landslide occurring as it was happening. So it is a dynamic planet, and activity is going on as we speak today. And these Rovers, people wonder now, what are they doing today, so I thought I would show you a little bit what they are doing. This is one very large crater. Geologists love craters, because craters are like digging a big hole in the ground without really working at it, and you can see what's below the surface. So, this is called Victoria Crater, which is about a few football fields in size. And if you look at the top left, you see a little teeny dark dot. This picture was taken from an orbiting satellite. If I zoom on it, you can see: that's the Rover on the surface. So, that was taken from orbit; we had the camera zoom on the surface, and we actually saw the Rover on the surface. And we actually used the combination of the satellite images and the Rover to actually conduct science, because we can observe large areas and then you can get those Rovers to move around and basically go to a certain location. So, specifically what we are doing now is that Rover is going down in that crater. As I told you, geologists love craters. And the reason is, many of you went to the Grand Canyon, and you see in the wall of the Grand Canyon, you see these layers. And what these layers -- that's what the surface used to be a million years ago, 10 million years ago, 100 million years ago, and you get deposits on top of them. So if you can read the layers it's like reading your book, and you can learn the history of what happened in the past in that location. So what you are seeing here are the layers on the wall of that crater, and the Rover is going down now, measuring, you know, the properties and analyzing the rocks as it's going down, you know, that canyon. Now, it's kind of a little bit of a challenge driving down a slope like this. If you were there you wouldn't do it yourself. But we really made sure we tested those Rovers before we got them down -- or that Rover -- and made sure that it's all working well. Now, when I came last time, shortly after the landing -- I think it was, like, a hundred days after the landing -- I told you I was surprised that those Rovers are lasting even a hundred days. Well, here we are four years later, and they're still working. Now you say, Charles, you are really lying to us, and so on, but that's not true. We really believed they were going to last 90 days or 100 days, because they are solar powered, and Mars is a dusty planet, so we expected the dust would start accumulating on the surface, and after a while we wouldn't have enough power, you know, to keep them warm. Well, I always say it's important that you are smart, but every once in a while it's good to be lucky. And that's what we found out. It turned out that every once in a while there are dust devils which come by on Mars, as you are seeing here, and when the dust devil comes over the Rover, it just cleans it up. It is like a brand new car that you have, and that's literally why they have lasted so long. And now we designed them reasonably well, but that's exactly why they are lasting that long and still providing all the science data. Now, the two Rovers, each one of them is, kind of, getting old. You know, one of them, one of the wheels is stuck, is not working, one of the front wheels, so what we are doing, we are driving it backwards. And the other one has arthritis of the shoulder joint, you know, it's not working very well, so it's walking like this, and we can move the arm, you know, that way. But still they are producing a lot of scientific data. Now, during that whole period, a number of people got excited, you know, outside the science community about these Rovers, so I thought I'd show you a video just to give you a reflection about how these Rovers are being viewed by people other than the science community. So let me go on the next short video. By the way, this video is pretty accurate of how the landing took place, you know, about four years ago. Video: Okay, we have parachute aligned. Okay, deploy the airbags. Open. Camera. We have a picture right now. Yeah! CE: That's about what happened in the Houston operation room. It's exactly like this. Video: Now, if there is life, the Dutch will find it. What is he doing? What is that? CE: Not too bad. So anyway, let me continue on showing you a little bit about the beauty of that planet. As I said earlier, it looked very much like Earth, so you see sand dunes. It looks like I could have told you these are pictures taken from the Sahara Desert or somewhere, and you'd have believed me, but these are pictures taken from Mars. But one area which is particularly intriguing for us is the northern region, you know, of Mars, close to the North Pole, because we see ice caps, and we see the ice caps shrinking and expanding, so it's very much like you have in northern Canada. And we wanted to find out -- and we see all kinds of glacial features on it. So, we wanted to find out, actually, what is that ice made of, and could that have embedded in it some organic, you know, material. So we have a spacecraft which is heading towards Mars, called Phoenix, and that spacecraft will land 17 days, seven hours and 20 seconds from now, so you can adjust your watch. So it's on May 25 around just before five o'clock our time here on the West Coast, actually we will be landing on another planet. And as you can see, this is a picture of the spacecraft put on Mars, but I thought that just in case you're going to miss that show, you know, in 17 days, I'll show you, kind of, a little bit of what's going to happen. Video: That's what we call the seven minutes of terror. So the plan is to dig in the soil and take samples that we put them in an oven and actually heat them and look what gases will come from it. So this was launched about nine months ago. We'll be coming in at 12,000 miles per hour, and in seven minutes we have to stop and touch the surface very softly so we don't break that lander. Ben Cichy: Phoenix is the first Mars Scout mission. It's the first mission that's going to try to land near the North Pole of Mars, and it's the first mission that's actually going to try and reach out and touch water on the surface of another planet. Lynn Craig: Where there tends to be water, at least on Earth, there tends to be life, and so it's potentially a place where life could have existed on the planet in the past. Erik Bailey: The main purpose of EDL is to take a spacecraft that is traveling at 12,500 miles an hour and bring it to a screeching halt in a soft way in a very short amount of time. BC: We enter the Martian atmosphere. We're 70 miles above the surface of Mars. And our lander is safely tucked inside what we call an aeroshell. EB: Looks kind of like an ice cream cone, more or less. BC: And on the front of it is this heat shield, this saucer-looking thing that has about a half-inch of essentially what's cork on the front of it, which is our heat shield. Now, this is really special cork, and this cork is what's going to protect us from the violent atmospheric entry that we're about to experience. Rob Grover: Friction really starts to build up on the spacecraft, and we use the friction when it's flying through the atmosphere to our advantage to slow us down. BC: From this point, we're going to decelerate from 12,500 miles an hour down to 900 miles an hour. EB: The outside can get almost as hot as the surface of the Sun. RG: The temperature of the heat shield can reach 2,600 degrees Fahrenheit. EB: The inside doesn't get very hot. It probably gets about room temperature. Richard Kornfeld: There is this window of opportunity within which we can deploy the parachute. EB: If you fire the 'chute too early, the parachute itself could fail. The fabric and the stitching could just pull apart. And that would be bad. BC: In the first 15 seconds after we deploy the parachute, we'll decelerate from 900 miles an hour to a relatively slow 250 miles an hour. We no longer need the heat shield to protect us from the force of atmospheric entry, so we jettison the heat shield, exposing for the first time our lander to the atmosphere of Mars. LC: After the heat shield has been jettisoned and the legs are deployed, the next step is to have the radar system begin to detect how far Phoenix really is from the ground. BC: We've lost 99 percent of our entry velocity. So, we're 99 percent of the way to where we want to be. But that last one percent, as it always seems to be, is the tricky part. EB: Now the spacecraft actually has to decide when it's going to get rid of its parachute. BC: We separate from the lander going 125 miles an hour at roughly a kilometer above the surface of Mars: 3,200 feet. That's like taking two Empire State Buildings and stacking them on top of one another. EB: That's when we separate from the back shell, and we're now in free-fall. It's a very scary moment; a lot has to happen in a very short amount of time. LC: So it's in a free-fall, but it's also trying to use all of its actuators to make sure that it's in the right position to land. EB: And then it has to light up its engines, right itself, and then slowly slow itself down and touch down on the ground safely. BC: Earth and Mars are so far apart that it takes over ten minutes for a signal from Mars to get to Earth. And EDL itself is all over in a matter of seven minutes. So by the time you even hear from the lander that EDL has started it'll already be over. EB: We have to build large amounts of autonomy into the spacecraft so that it can land itself safely. BC: EDL is this immense, technically challenging problem. It's about getting a spacecraft that's hurtling through deep space and using all this bag of tricks to somehow figure out how to get it down to the surface of Mars at zero miles an hour. It's this immensely exciting and challenging problem. CE: Hopefully it all will happen the way you saw it in here. So it will be a very tense moment, you know, as we are watching that spacecraft landing on another planet. So now let me talk about the next things that we are doing. So we are in the process, as we speak, of actually designing the next Rover that we are going to be sending to Mars. So I thought I would go a little bit and tell you, kind of, the steps we go through. It's very similar to what you do when you design your product. As you saw a little bit earlier, when we were doing the Phoenix one, we have to take into account the heat that we are going to be facing. So we have to study all kinds of different materials, the shape that we want to do. In general we don't try to please the customer here. What we want to do is to make sure we have an effective, you know, an efficient kind of machine. First we start by we want to have our employees to be as imaginative as they can. And we really love being close to the art center, because we have, as a matter of fact, one of the alumni from the art center, Eric Nyquist, had put a series of displays, far-out displays, you know, in our what we call mission design or spacecraft design room, just to get people to think wildly about things. We have a bunch of Legos. So, as I said, this is a playground for adults, where they sit down and try to play with different shapes and different designs. Then we get a little bit more serious, so we have what we call our CAD/CAMs and all the engineers who are involved, or scientists who are involved, who know about thermal properties, know about design, know about atmospheric interaction, parachutes, all of these things, which they work in a team effort and actually design a spacecraft in a computer to some extent, so to see, does that meet the requirement that we need. On the right, also, we have to take into account the environment of the planet where we are going. If you are going to Jupiter, you have a very high-radiation, you know, environment. It's about the same radiation environment close by Jupiter as inside a nuclear reactor. So just imagine: you take your P.C. and throw it into a nuclear reactor and it still has to work. So these are kind of some of the little challenges, you know, that we have to face. If we are doing entry, we have to do tests of parachutes. You saw in the video a parachute breaking. That would be a bad day, you know, if that happened, so we have to test, because we are deploying this parachute at supersonic speeds. We are coming at extremely high speeds, and we are deploying them to slow us down. So we have to do all kinds of tests. To give you an idea of the size, you know, of that parachute relative to the people standing there. Next step, we go and actually build some kind of test models and actually test them, you know, in the lab at JPL, in what we call our Mars Yard. We kick them, we hit them, we drop them, just to make sure we understand how, where would they break. And then we back off, you know, from that point. And then we actually do the actual building and the flight. And this next Rover that we're flying is about the size of a car. That big shield that you see outside, that's a heat shield which is going to protect it. And that will be basically built over the next year, and it will be launched June a year from now. Now, in that case, because it was a very big Rover, we couldn't use airbags. And I know many of you, kind of, last time afterwards said well, that was a cool thing to have -- those airbags. Unfortunately this Rover is, like, ten times the size of the, you know, mass-wise, of the other Rover, or three times the mass. So we can't use airbags. So we have to come up with another ingenious idea of how do we land it. And we didn't want to take it propulsively all the way to the surface because we didn't want to contaminate the surface; we wanted the Rover to immediately land on its legs. So we came up with this ingenious idea, which is used here on Earth for helicopters. Actually, the lander will come down to about 100 feet and hover above that surface for 100 feet, and then we have a sky crane which will take that Rover and land it down on the surface. Hopefully it all will work, you know, it will work that way. And that Rover will be more kind of like a chemist. What we are going to be doing with that Rover as it drives around, it's going to go and analyze the chemical composition of rocks. So it will have an arm which will take samples, put them in an oven, crush and analyze them. But also, if there is something that we cannot reach because it is too high on a cliff, we have a little laser system which will actually zap the rock, evaporate some of it, and actually analyze what's coming from that rock. So it's a little bit like "Star Wars," you know, but it's real. It's real stuff. And also to help you, to help the community so you can do ads on that Rover, we are going to train that Rover to actually in addition to do this, to actually serve cocktails, you know, also on Mars. So that's kind of giving you an idea of the kind of, you know, fun things we are doing on Mars. I thought I'd go to "The Lord of the Rings" now and show you some of the things we have there. Now, "The Lord of the Rings" has two things played through it. One, it's a very attractive planet -- it just has the beauty of the rings and so on. But for scientists, also the rings have a special meaning, because we believe they represent, on a small scale, how the Solar System actually formed. Some of the scientists believe that the way the Solar System formed, that the Sun when it collapsed and actually created the Sun, a lot of the dust around it created rings and then the particles in those rings accumulated together, and they formed bigger rocks, and then that's how the planets, you know, were formed. So, the idea is, by watching Saturn we're actually watching our solar system in real time being formed on a smaller scale, so it's like a test bed for it. So, let me show you a little bit on what that Saturnian system looks like. First, I'm going to fly you over the rings. By the way, all of this is real stuff. This is not animation or anything like this. This is actually taken from the satellite that we have in orbit around Saturn, the Cassini. And you see the amount of detail that is in those rings, which are the particles. Some of them are agglomerating together to form larger particles. So that's why you have these gaps, is because a small satellite, you know, is being formed in that location. Now, you think that those rings are very large objects. Yes, they are very large in one dimension; in the other dimension they are paper thin. Very, very thin. What you are seeing here is the shadow of the ring on Saturn itself. And that's one of the satellites which was actually formed on that one. So, think about it as a paper-thin, huge area of many hundreds of thousands of miles, which is rotating. And we have a wide variety of kind of satellites which will form, each one looking very different and very odd, and that keeps scientists busy for tens of years trying to explain this, and telling NASA we need more money so we can explain what these things look like, or why they formed that way. Well, there were two satellites which were particularly interesting. One of them is called Enceladus. It's a satellite which was all made of ice, and we measured it from orbit. Made of ice. But there was something bizarre about it. If you look at these stripes in here, what we call tiger stripes, when we flew over them, all of a sudden we saw an increase in the temperature, which said that those stripes are warmer than the rest of the planet. So as we flew by away from it, we looked back. And guess what? We saw geysers coming out. So this is a Yellowstone, you know, of Saturn. We are seeing geysers of ice which are coming out of that planet, which indicate that most likely there is an ocean, you know, below the surface. And somehow, through some dynamic effect, we're having these geysers which are being, you know, emitted from it. And the reason I showed the little arrow there, I think that should say 30 miles, we decided a few months ago to actually fly the spacecraft through the plume of that geyser so we can actually measure the material that it is made of. That was [unclear] also -- you know, because we were worried about the risk of it, but it worked pretty well. We flew at the top of it, and we found that there is a fair amount of organic material which is being emitted in combination with the ice. And over the next few years, as we keep orbiting, you know, Saturn, we are planning to get closer and closer down to the surface and make more accurate measurements. Now, another satellite also attracted a lot of attention, and that's Titan. And the reason Titan is particularly interesting, it's a satellite bigger than our moon, and it has an atmosphere. And that atmosphere is very -- as dense as our own atmosphere. So if you were on Titan, you would feel the same pressure that you feel in here. Except it's a lot colder, and that atmosphere is heavily made of methane. Now, methane gets people all excited, because it's organic material, so immediately people start thinking, could life have evolved in that location, when you have a lot of organic material. So people believe now that Titan is most likely what we call a pre-biotic planet, because it's so cold organic material did not get to the stage of becoming biological material, and therefore life could have evolved on it. So it could be Earth, frozen three billion years ago before life actually started on it. So that's getting a lot of interest, and to show you some example of what we did in there, we actually dropped a probe, which was developed by our colleagues in Europe, we dropped a probe as we were orbiting Saturn. We dropped a probe in the atmosphere of Titan. And this is a picture of an area as we were coming down. Just looked like the coast of California for me. You see the rivers which are coming along the coast, and you see that white area which looks like Catalina Island, and that looks like an ocean. And then with an instrument we have on board, a radar instrument, we found there are lakes like the Great Lakes in here, so it looks very much like Earth. It looks like there are rivers on it, there are oceans or lakes, we know there are clouds. We think it's raining also on it. So it's very much like the cycle on Earth except because it's so cold, it could not be water, you know, because water would have frozen. What it turned out, that all that we are seeing, all this liquid, [is made of] hydrocarbon and ethane and methane, similar to what you put in your car. So here we have a cycle of a planet which is like our Earth, but is all made of ethane and methane and organic material. So if you were on Mars -- sorry, on Titan, you don't have to worry about four-dollar gasoline. You just drive to the nearest lake, stick your hose in it, and you've got your car filled up. On the other hand, if you light a match the whole planet will blow up. So in closing, I said I want to close by a couple of pictures. And just to kind of put us in perspective, this is a picture of Saturn taken with a spacecraft from behind Saturn, looking towards the Sun. The Sun is behind Saturn, so we see what we call "forward scattering," so it highlights all the rings. And I'm going to zoom. There is a -- I'm not sure you can see it very well, but on the top left, around 10 o'clock, there is a little teeny dot, and that's Earth. You barely can see ourselves. So what I did, I thought I'd zoom on it. So as you zoom in, you know, you can see Earth, you know, just in the middle here. So we zoomed all the way on the art center. So thank you very much.
Walk around for four months with three wishes, and all the ideas will start to percolate up. I think everybody should do it -- think that you've got three wishes. And what would you do? It's actually a great exercise to really drill down to the things that you feel are important, and really reflect on the world around us. And thinking that, can an individual actually do something, or come up with something, that may actually get some traction out there and make a difference? Inspired by nature -- that's the theme here. And I think, quite frankly, that's where I started. I became very interested in the landscape as a Canadian. We have this Great North. And there was a pretty small population, and my father was an avid outdoorsman. So I really had a chance to experience that. And I could never really understand exactly what it was, or how it was informing me. But what I think it was telling me is that we are this transient thing that's happening, and that the nature that you see out there -- the untouched shorelines, the untouched forest that I was able to see -- really bring in a sense of that geological time, that this has gone on for a long time, and we're experiencing it in a different way. And that, to me, was a reference point that I think I needed to have to be able to make the work that I did. And I did go out, and I did this picture of grasses coming through in the spring, along a roadside. This rebirth of grass. And then I went out for years trying to photograph the pristine landscape. But as a fine-art photographer I somehow felt that it wouldn't catch on out there, that there would be a problem with trying to make this as a fine-art career. And I kept being sucked into this genre of the calendar picture, or something of that nature, and I couldn't get away from it. So I started to think of, how can I rethink the landscape? I decided to rethink the landscape as the landscape that we've transformed. I had a bit of an epiphany being lost in Pennsylvania, and I took a left turn trying to get back to the highway. And I ended up in a town called Frackville. I got out of the car, and I stood up, and it was a coal-mining town. I did a 360 turnaround, and that became one of the most surreal landscapes I've ever seen. Totally transformed by man. And that got me to go out and look at mines like this, and go out and look at the largest industrial incursions in the landscape that I could find. And that became the baseline of what I was doing. And it also became the theme that I felt that I could hold onto, and not have to re-invent myself -- that this theme was large enough to become a life's work, to become something that I could sink my teeth into and just research and find out where these industries are. And I think one of the things I also wanted to say in my thanks, which I kind of missed, was to thank all the corporations who helped me get in. Because it took negotiation for almost every one of these photographs -- to get into that place to make those photographs, and if it wasn't for those people letting me in at the heads of those corporations, I would have never made this body of work. So in that respect, to me, I'm not against the corporation. I own a corporation. I work with them, and I feel that we all need them and they're important. But I am also for sustainability. So there's this thing that is pulling me in both directions. And I'm not making an indictment towards what's happening here, but it is a slow progression. So I started thinking, well, we live in all these ages of man: the Stone Age, and the Iron Age, and the Copper Age. And these ages of man are still at work today. But we've become totally disconnected from them. There's something that we're not seeing there. And it's a scary thing as well. Because when we start looking at the collective appetite for our lifestyles, and what we're doing to that landscape -- that, to me, is something that is a very sobering moment for me to contemplate. And through my photographs, I'm hoping to be able to engage the audiences of my work, and to come up to it and not immediately be rejected by the image. Not to say, "Oh my God, what is it?" but to be challenged by it -- to say, "Wow, this is beautiful," on one level, but on the other level, "This is scary. I shouldn't be enjoying it." Like a forbidden pleasure. And it's that forbidden pleasure that I think is what resonates out there, and it gets people to look at these things, and it gets people to enter it. And it also, in a way, defines kind of what I feel, too -- that I'm drawn to have a good life. I want a house, and I want a car. But there's this consequence out there. And how do I begin to have that attraction, repulsion? It's even in my own conscience I'm having it, and here in my work, I'm trying to build that same toggle. These things that I photographed -- this tire pile here had 45 million tires in it. It was the largest one. It was only about an hour-and-a-half away from me, and it caught fire about four years ago. It's around Westley, California, around Modesto. And I decided to start looking at something that, to me, had -- if the earlier work of looking at the landscape had a sense of lament to what we were doing to nature, in the recycling work that you're seeing here was starting to point to a direction. To me, it was our redemption. That in the recycling work that I was doing, I'm looking for a practice, a human activity that is sustainable. That if we keep putting things, through industrial and urban existence, back into the system -- if we keep doing that -- we can continue on. Of course, listening at the conference, there's many, many things that are coming. Bio-mimicry, and there's many other things that are coming on stream -- nanotechnology that may also prevent us from having to go into that landscape and tear it apart. And we all look forward to those things. But in the meantime, these things are scaling up. These things are continuing to happen. What you're looking at here -- I went to Bangladesh, so I started to move away from North America; I started to look at our world globally. These images of Bangladesh came out of a radio program I was listening to. They were talking about Exxon Valdez, and that there was going to be a glut of oil tankers because of the insurance industries. And that those oil tankers needed to be decommissioned, and 2004 was going to be the pinnacle. And I thought, "My God, wouldn't that be something?" To see the largest vessels of man being deconstructed by hand, literally, in third-world countries. So originally I was going to go to India. And I was shut out of India because of a Greenpeace situation there, and then I was able to get into Bangladesh, and saw for the first time a third world, a view of it, that I had never actually thought was possible. 130 million people living in an area the size of Wisconsin -- people everywhere -- the pollution was intense, and the working conditions were horrible. Here you're looking at some oil fields in California, some of the biggest oil fields. And again, I started to think that -- there was another epiphany -- that the whole world I was living in was a result of having plentiful oil. And that, to me, was again something that I started building on, and I continued to build on. So this is a series I'm hoping to have ready in about two or three years, under the heading of "The Oil Party." Because I think everything that we're involved in -- our clothing, our cars, our roads, and everything -- are directly a result. I'm going to move to some pictures of China. And for me China -- I started photographing it four years ago, and China truly is a question of sustainability in my mind, not to mention that China, as well, has a great effect on the industries that I grew up around. I came out of a blue-collar town, a GM town, and my father worked at GM, so I was very familiar with that kind of industry and that also informed my work. But you know, to see China and the scale at which it's evolving, is quite something. So what you see here is the Three Gorges Dam, and this is the largest dam by 50 percent ever attempted by man. Most of the engineers around the world left the project because they said, "It's just too big." In fact, when it did actually fill with water a year and a half ago, they were able to measure a wobble within the earth as it was spinning. It took fifteen days to fill it. So this created a reservoir 600 kilometers long, one of the largest reservoirs ever created. And what was also one of the bigger projects around that was moving 13 full-size cities up out of the reservoir, and flattening all the buildings so they could make way for the ships. This is a "before and after." So that was before. And this is like 10 weeks later, demolished by hand. I think 11 of the buildings they used dynamite, everything else was by hand. That was 10 weeks later. And this gives you an idea. And it was all the people who lived in those homes, were the ones that were actually taking it apart and working, and getting paid per brick to take their cities apart. And these are some of the images from that. So I spent about three trips to the Three Gorges Dam, looking at that massive transformation of a landscape. And it looks like a bombed-out landscape, but it isn't. What it is, it's a landscape that is an intentional one. This is a need for power, and they're willing to go through this massive transformation, on this scale, to get that power. And again, it's actually a relief for what's going on in China because I think on the table right now, there's 27 nuclear power stations to be built. There hasn't been one built in North America for 20 years because of the "NIMBY" problem -- "Not In My BackYard." But in China they're saying, "No, we're putting in 27 in the next 10 years." And coal-burning furnaces are going in there for hydroelectric power literally weekly. So coal itself is probably one of the largest problems. And one of the other things that happened in the Three Gorges -- a lot of the agricultural land that you see there on the left was also lost; some of the most fertile agricultural land was lost in that. And 1.2 to 2 million people were relocated, depending on whose statistics you're looking at. And this is what they were building. This is Wushan, one of the largest cities that was relocated. This is the town hall for the city. And again, the rebuilding of the city -- to me, it was sad to see that they didn't really grab a lot of, I guess, what we know here, in terms of urban planning. There were no parks; there were no green spaces. Very high-density living on the side of a hill. And here they had a chance to rebuild cities from the bottom up, but somehow were not connecting with them. Here is a sign that, translated, says, "Obey the birth control law. Build our science, civilized and advanced idea of marriage and giving birth." So here, if you look at this poster, it has all the trappings of Western culture. You're seeing the tuxedos, the bouquets. But what's really, to me, frightening about the picture and about this billboard is the refinery in the background. So it's like marrying up all the things that we have and it's an adaptation of our way of life, full stop. And again, when you start seeing that kind of embrace, and you start looking at them leading their rural lifestyle with a very, very small footprint and moving into an urban lifestyle with a much higher footprint, it starts to become very sobering. This is a shot in one of the biggest squares in Guangdong -- and this is where a lot of migrant workers are coming in from the country. And there's about 130 million people in migration trying to get into urban centers at all times, and in the next 10 to 15 years, are expecting another 400 to 500 million people to migrate into the urban centers like Shanghai and the manufacturing centers. The manufacturers are -- the domestics are usually -- you can tell a domestic factory by the fact that they all use the same color uniforms. So this is a pink uniform at this factory. It's a shoe factory. And they have dorms for the workers. So they bring them in from the country and put them up in the dorms. This is one of the biggest shoe factories, the Yuyuan shoe factory near Shenzhen. It has 90,000 employees making shoes. This is a shift change, one of three. There's two factories of this scale in the same town. This is one with 45,000, so every lunch, there's about 12,000 coming through for lunch. They sit down; they have about 20 minutes. The next round comes in. It's an incredible workforce that's building there. Shanghai -- I'm looking at the urban renewal in Shanghai, and this is a whole area that will be flattened and turned into skyscrapers in the next five years. What's also happening in Shanghai is -- China is changing because this wouldn't have happened five years ago, for instance. This is a holdout. They're called dengzahoos -- they're like pin tacks to the ground. They won't move. They're not negotiating. They're not getting enough, so they're not going to move. And so they're holding off until they get a deal with them. And they've been actually quite successful in getting better deals because most of them are getting a raw deal. They're being put out about two hours -- the communities that have been around for literally hundreds of years, or maybe even thousands of years, are being broken up and spread across in the suburban areas outside of Shanghai. But these are a whole series of guys holding out in this reconstruction of Shanghai. Probably the largest urban-renewal project, I think, ever attempted on the planet. And then the embrace of the things that they're replacing it with -- again, one of my wishes, and I never ended up going there, was to somehow tell them that there were better ways to build a house. The kinds of collisions of styles and things were quite something, and these are called the villas. And also, like right now, they're just moving. The scaffolding is still on, and this is an e-waste area, and if you looked in the foreground on the big print, you'd see that the industry -- their industry -- they're all recycling. So the industry's already growing around these new developments. This is a five-level bridge in Shanghai. Shanghai was a very intriguing city -- it's exploding on a level that I don't think any city has experienced. In fact, even Shenzhen, the economic zone -- one of the first ones -- 15 years ago was about 100,000 people, and today it boasts about 10 to 11 million. So that gives you an idea of the kinds of migrations and the speed with which -- this is just the taxis being built by Volkswagen. There's 9,000 of them here, and they're being built for most of the big cities, Beijing and Shanghai, Shenzhen. And this isn't even the domestic car market; this is the taxi market. And what we would see here as a suburban development -- a similar thing, but they're all high-rises. So they'll put 20 or 40 up at a time, and they just go up in the same way as a single-family dwelling would go up here in an area. And the density is quite incredible. And one of the things in this picture that I wanted to point out is that when I saw these kinds of buildings, I was shocked to see that they're not using a central air-conditioning system; every window has an air conditioner in it. And I'm sure there are people here who probably know better than I do about efficiencies, but I can't imagine that every apartment having its own air conditioner is a very efficient way to cool a building on this scale. And when you start looking at that, and then you start factoring up into a city the size of Shanghai, it's literally a forest of skyscrapers. It's breathtaking, in terms of the speed at which this city is transforming. And you can see in the foreground of this picture, it's still one of the last areas that was being held up. Right now that's all cleared out -- this was done about eight months ago -- and high-rises are now going up into that central spot. So a skyscraper is built, literally, overnight in Shanghai. Most recently I went in, and I started looking at some of the biggest industries in China. And this is Baosteel, right outside of Shanghai. This is the coal supply for the steel factory -- 18 square kilometers. It's an incredibly massive operation, I think 15,000 workers, five cupolas, and the sixth one's coming in here. So they're building very large blast furnaces to try to deal with the demand for steel in China. So this is three of the visible blast furnaces within that shot. And again, looking at these images, there's this constant, like, haze that you're seeing. This is going to show you, real time, an assembler. It's a circuit breaker. 10 hours a day at this speed. I think one of the issues that we here are facing with China, is that they're using a lot of the latest production technology. In that one, there were 400 people that worked on the floor. And I asked the manager to point out five of your fastest producers, and then I went and looked at each one of them for about 15 or 20 minutes, and picked this one woman. And it was just lightning fast; the way she was working was almost unbelievable. But that is the trick that they've got right now, that they're winning with, is that they're using all the latest technologies and extrusion machines, and bringing all the components into play, but the assembly is where they're actually bringing in -- the country workers are very willing to work. They want to work. There's a massive backlog of people wanting their jobs. That condition's going to be there for the next 10 to 15 years if they realize what they want, which is, you know, 400 to 500 million more people coming into the cities. In this particular case -- this is the assembly line that you saw; this is a shot of it. I had to use a very small aperture to get the depth of field. I had to have them freeze for 10 seconds to get this shot. It took me five fake tries because they were just going. To slow them down was literally impossible. They were just wound up doing these things all day long, until the manager had to, with a stern voice, say, "Okay, everybody freeze." It wasn't too bad, but they're driven to produce these things at an incredible rate. This is a textile mill doing synthetic silk, an oil byproduct. And what you're seeing here is, again, one of the most state-of-the-art textile mills. There are 500 of these machines; they're worth about 200,000 dollars each. So you have about 12 people running this, and they're just inspecting it -- and they're just walking the lines. The machines are all running, absolutely incredible to see what the scale of industries are. And I started getting in further and further into the factories. And that's a diptych. I do a lot of pairings to try and get the sense of scale in these places. This is a line where they get the threads and they wind the threads together, pre-going into the textile mills. Here's something that's far more labor-intensive, which is the making of shoes. This floor has about 1,500 workers on this floor. The company itself had about 10,000 employees, and they're doing domestic shoes. It was very hard to get into the international companies because I had to get permission from companies like Nike and Adidas, and that's very hard to get. And they don't want to let me in. But the domestic was much easier to do. It just gives you a sense of, again -- and that's where, really, the whole migration of jobs started going over to China and making the shoes. Nike was one of the early ones. It was such a high labor component to it that it made a lot of sense to go after that labor market. This is a high-tech mobile phone: Bird mobile phone, one of the largest mobile makers in China. I think mobile phone companies are popping up, literally, on a weekly basis, and they have an explosive growth in mobile phones. This is a textile where they're doing shirts -- Youngor, the biggest shirt factory and clothing factory in China. And this next shot here is one of the lunchrooms. Everything is very efficient. While setting up this shot, people on average would spend eight to 10 minutes having a lunch. This was one of the biggest factories I've ever seen. They make coffeemakers here, the biggest coffeemaker and the biggest iron makers -- they make 20 million of them in the world. There's 21,000 employees. This one factory -- and they had several of them -- is half a kilometer long. These are just recently shot -- I just came back about a month ago, so you're the first ones to be seeing these, these new factory pictures I've taken. So it's taken me almost a year to gain access into these places. The other aspect of what's happening in China is that there's a real need for materials there. So a lot of the recycled materials that are collected here are being recycled and taken to China by ships. That's cubed metal. This is armatures, electrical armatures, where they're getting the copper and the high-end steel from electrical motors out, and recycling them. This is certainly connected to California and Silicon Valley. But this is what happens to most of the computers. Fifty percent of the world's computers end up in China to be recycled. It's referred to as "e-waste" there. And it is a bit of a problem. The way they recycle the boards is that they actually use the coal briquettes, which are used all through China, but they heat up the boards, and with pairs of pliers they pull off all the components. They're trying to get all the valued metals out of those components. But the toxic smells -- when you come into a town that's actually doing this kind of burning of the boards, you can smell it a good five or 10 kilometers before you get there. Here's another operation. It's all cottage industries, so it's not big places -- it's all in people's front porches, in their backyards, even in their homes they're burning boards, if there's a concern for somebody coming by -- because it is considered in China to be illegal, doing it, but they can't stop the product from coming in. This portrait -- I'm not usually known for portraits, but I couldn't resist this one, where she's been through Mao, and she's been through the Great Leap Forward, and the Cultural Revolution, and now she's sitting on her porch with this e-waste beside her. It's quite something. This is a road where it's been shored up by computer boards in one of the biggest towns where they're recycling. So that's the photographs that I wanted to show you. (Applause) I want to dedicate my wishes to my two girls. They've been sitting on my shoulder the whole time while I've been thinking. One's Megan, the one of the right, and Katja there. And to me the whole notion -- the things I'm photographing are out of a great concern about the scale of our progress and what we call progress. And as much as there are great things around the corner -- and it's palpable in this room -- of all of the things that are just about to break that can solve so many problems, I'm really hoping that those things will spread around the world and will start to have a positive effect. And it isn't something that isn't just affecting our world, but it starts to go up -- because I think we can start correcting our footprint and bring it down -- but there's a growing footprint that's happening in Asia, and is growing at a rapid, rapid rate, and so I don't think we can equalize it. So ultimately the strategy, I think, here is that we have to be very concerned about their evolution, because it is going to be connected to our evolution as well. So part of my thinking, and part of my wishes, is sitting with these thoughts in mind, and thinking about, "How is their life going to be when they want to have children, or when they're ready to get married 20 years from now -- or whatever, 15 years from now?" And to me that has been the core behind most of my thinking -- in my work, and also for this incredible chance to have some wishes. Wish one: world-changing. I want to use my images to persuade millions of people to join in the global conversation on sustainability. And it is through communications today that I believe that that is not an unreal idea. Oh, and I went in search -- I wanted to put what I had in mind, hitch it onto something. I didn't want a wish just to start from nowhere. One of them I'm starting from almost nothing, but the other one, I wanted to find out what's going on that's working right now. And Worldchanging.com is a fantastic blog, and that blog is now being visited by close to half-a-million people a month. And it just started about 14 months ago. And the beauty of what's going on there is that the tone of the conversation is the tone that I like. What they're doing there is that they're not -- I think the environmental movement has failed in that it's used the stick too much; it's used the apocalyptic tone too much; it hasn't sold the positive aspects of being environmentally concerned and trying to pull us out. Whereas this conversation that is going on in this blog is about positive movements, about how to change our world in a better way, quickly. And it's looking at technology, and it's looking at new energy-saving devices, and it's looking at how to rethink and how to re-strategize the movement towards sustainability. And so for me, one of the things that I thought would be to put some of my work in the service of promoting the Worldchanging.com website. Some of you might know, he's a TEDster -- Stephen Sagmeister and I are working on some layouts. And this is still in preliminary stages; these aren't the finals. But these images, with Worldchanging.com, can be placed into any kind of media. They could be posted through the Web; they could be used as a billboard or a bus shelter, or anything of that nature. So we're looking at this as trying to build out. And what we ended up discussing was that in most media you get mostly an image with a lot of text, and the text is blasted all over. What was unusual, according to Stephen, is less than five percent of ads are actually leading with image. And so in this case, because it's about a lot of these images and what they represent, and the kinds of questions they bring up, that we thought letting the images play out and bring someone to say, "Well, what's Worldchanging.com, with these images, have to do?" And hopefully inspire people to go to that website. So Worldchanging.com, and building that blog, and it is a blog, and I'm hoping that it isn't -- I don't see it as the kind of blog where we're all going to follow each other to death. This one is one that will spoke out, and will go out, and to start reaching. Because right now there's conversations in India, in China, in South America -- there's entries coming from all around the world. I think there's a chance to have a dialogue, a conversation about sustainability at Worldchanging.com. And anything that you can do to promote that would be fantastic. Wish two is more of the bottom-up, ground-up one that I'm trying to work with. And this one is: I wish to launch a groundbreaking competition that motivates kids to invest ideas on, and invent ideas on, sustainability. And one of the things that came out -- Allison, who actually nominated me, said something earlier on in a brainstorming. She said that recycling in Canada had a fantastic entry into our psyche through kids between grade four and six. And you think about it, you know, grade four -- my wife and I, we say age seven is the age of reason, so they're into the age of reason. And they're pre-puberty. So it's this great window where they actually are -- you can influence them. You know what happens at puberty? You know, we know that from earlier presentations. So my thinking here is that we try to motivate those kids to start driving home ideas. Let them understand what sustainability is, and that they have a vested interest in it to happen. And one of the ways I thought of doing it is to use my prize, so I would take 30,000 or 40,000 dollars of the winnings, and the rest is going to be to manage this project, but to use that as prizes for kids to get into their hands. But the other thing that I thought would be fantastic was to create these -- call them "prize targets." And so one could be for the best sustainable idea for an in-school project, the best one for a household project, or it could be the best community project for sustainability. And I also thought there should be a nice prize for the best artwork for "In My World." And what would happen -- it's a scalable thing. And if we can get people to put in things -- whether it's equipment, like a media lab, or money to make the prize significant enough -- and to open it up to all the schools that are public schools, or schools that are with kids that age, and make it a wide-open competition for them to go after those prizes and to submit them. And the prize has to be a verifiable thing, so it's not about just ideas. The art pieces are about the ideas and how they present them and do them, but the actual things have to be verifiable. In that way, what's happening is that we're motivating a certain age group to start thinking. And they're going to push that up, from the bottom -- up into, I believe, into the households. And parents will be reacting to it, and trying to help them with the projects. And I think it starts to motivate the whole idea towards sustainability in a very positive way, and starts to teach them. They know about recycling now, but they don't really, I think, get sustainability in all the things, and the energy footprint, and how that matters. And to teach them, to me, would be a fantastic wish, and it would be something that I would certainly put my shoulder into. And again, in "In My World," the competition -- we would use the artwork that comes in from that competition to promote it. And I like the words, "in my world," because it gives possession of the world to the person who's doing it. It is my world; it's not someone else's. I want to help it; I want to do something with it. So I think it has a great opportunity to engage the imaginations -- and great ideas, I think, come from kids -- and engage their imagination into a project, and do something for schools. I think all schools could use extra equipment, extra cash -- it's going to be an incentive for them to do that. And these are some of the ideas in terms of where we could possibly put in some promotion for "In My World." And wish three is: Imax film. So I was told I should do one for myself, and I've always wanted to actually get involved with doing something. And the scale of my work, and the kinds of ideas I'm playing with -- when I first saw an Imax film, I almost immediately thought, "There's a real resonance between what I'm trying to do and the scale of what I try to do as a photographer." And I think there's a real possibility to reach new audiences if I had a chance. So I'm looking, really, for a mentor, because I just had my birthday. I'm 50, and I don't have time to go back to school right now -- I'm too busy. So I need somebody who can put me on a quick catch-up course on how to do something like that, and lead me through the maze of how one does something like this. That would be fantastic. So those are my three wishes. (Applause)
I'm going to go right into the slides. And all I'm going to try and prove to you with these slides is that I do just very straight stuff. And my ideas are -- in my head, anyway -- they're very logical and relate to what's going on and problem solving for clients. I either convince clients at the end that I solve their problems, or I really do solve their problems, because usually they seem to like it. Let me go right into the slides. Can you turn off the light? Down. I like to be in the dark. I don't want you to see what I'm doing up here. (Laughter) Anyway, I did this house in Santa Monica, and it got a lot of notoriety. In fact, it appeared in a porno comic book, which is the slide on the right. (Laughter) This is in Venice. I just show it because I want you to know I'm concerned about context. On the left-hand side, I had the context of those little houses, and I tried to build a building that fit into that context. When people take pictures of these buildings out of that context they look really weird, and my premise is that they make a lot more sense when they're photographed or seen in that space. And then, once I deal with the context, I then try to make a place that's comfortable and private and fairly serene, as I hope you'll find that slide on the right. And then I did a law school for Loyola in downtown L.A. I was concerned about making a place for the study of law. And we continue to work with this client. The building on the right at the top is now under construction. The garage on the right -- the gray structure -- will be torn down, finally, and several small classrooms will be placed along this avenue that we've created, this campus. And it all related to the clients and the students from the very first meeting saying they felt denied a place. They wanted a sense of place. And so the whole idea here was to create that kind of space in downtown, in a neighborhood that was difficult to fit into. And it was my theory, or my point of view, that one didn't upstage the neighborhood -- one made accommodations. I tried to be inclusive, to include the buildings in the neighborhood, whether they were buildings I liked or not. In the '60s I started working with paper furniture and made a bunch of stuff that was very successful in Bloomingdale's. We even made flooring, walls and everything, out of cardboard. And the success of it threw me for a loop. I couldn't deal with the success of furniture -- I wasn't secure enough as an architect -- and so I closed it all up and made furniture that nobody would like. (Laughter) So, nobody would like this. And it was in this, preliminary to these pieces of furniture, that Ricky and I worked on furniture by the slice. And after we failed, I just kept failing. (Laughter) The piece on the left -- and that ultimately led to the piece on the right -- happened when the kid that was working on this took one of those long strings of stuff and folded it up to put it in the wastebasket. And I put a piece of tape around it, as you see there, and realized you could sit on it, and it had a lot of resilience and strength and so on. So, it was an accidental discovery. I got into fish. (Laughter) I mean, the story I tell is that I got mad at postmodernism -- at po-mo -- and said that fish were 500 million years earlier than man, and if you're going to go back, we might as well go back to the beginning. And so I started making these funny things. And they started to have a life of their own and got bigger -- as the one glass at the Walker. And then, I sliced off the head and the tail and everything and tried to translate what I was learning about the form of the fish and the movement. And a lot of my architectural ideas that came from it -- accidental, again -- it was an intuitive kind of thing, and I just kept going with it, and made this proposal for a building, which was only a proposal. I did this building in Japan. I was taken out to dinner after the contract for this little restaurant was signed. And I love sake and Kobe and all that stuff. And after I got -- I was really drunk -- I was asked to do some sketches on napkins. (Laughter) And I made some sketches on napkins -- little boxes and Morandi-like things that I used to do. And the client said, "Why no fish?" And so I made a drawing with a fish, and I left Japan. Three weeks later, I received a complete set of drawings saying we'd won the competition. (Laughter) Now, it's hard to do. It's hard to translate a fish form, because they're so beautiful -- perfect -- into a building or object like this. And Oldenburg, who I work with a little once in a while, told me I couldn't do it, and so that made it even more exciting. But he was right -- I couldn't do the tail. I started to get the head OK, but the tail I couldn't do. It was pretty hard. The thing on the right is a snake form, a ziggurat. And I put them together, and you walk between them. It was a dialog with the context again. Now, if you saw a picture of this as it was published in Architectural Record -- they didn't show the context, so you would think, "God, what a pushy guy this is." But a friend of mine spent four hours wandering around here looking for this restaurant. Couldn't find it. So ... (Laughter) As for craft and technology and all those things that you've all been talking about, I was thrown for a complete loop. This was built in six months. The way we sent drawings to Japan: we used the magic computer in Michigan that does carved models, and we used to make foam models, which that thing scanned. We made the drawings of the fish and the scales. And when I got there, everything was perfect -- except the tail. So, I decided to cut off the head and the tail. And I made the object on the left for my show at the Walker. And it's one of the nicest pieces I've ever made, I think. And then Jay Chiat, a friend and client, asked me to do his headquarters building in L.A. For reasons we don't want to talk about, it got delayed. Toxic waste, I guess, is the key clue to that one. And so we built a temporary building -- I'm getting good at temporary -- and we put a conference room in that's a fish. And, finally, Jay dragged me to my hometown, Toronto, Canada. And there is a story -- it's a real story -- about my grandmother buying a carp on Thursday, bringing it home, putting it in the bathtub when I was a kid. I played with it in the evening. When I went to sleep, the next day it wasn't there. And the next night, we had gefilte fish. (Laughter) And so I set up this interior for Jay's offices and I made a pedestal for a sculpture. And he didn't buy a sculpture, so I made one. I went around Toronto and found a bathtub like my grandmother's, and I put the fish in. It was a joke. (Laughter) I play with funny people like [Claes] Oldenburg. We've been friends for a long time. And we've started to work on things. A few years ago, we did a performance piece in Venice, Italy, called "Il Corso del Coltello" -- the Swiss Army knife. And most of the imagery is -- (Laughter) Claes', but those two little boys are my sons, and they were Claes' assistants in the play. He was the Swiss Army knife. He was a souvenir salesman who always wanted to be a painter, and I was Frankie P. Toronto. P for Palladio. Dressed up like the AT&T building by Claes -- (Laughter) with a fish hat. The highlight of the performance was at the end. This beautiful object, the Swiss Army knife, which I get credit for participating in. And I can tell you -- it's totally an Oldenburg. I had nothing to do with it. The only thing I did was, I made it possible for them to turn those blades so you could sail this thing in the canal, because I love sailing. (Laughter) We made it into a sailing craft. I've been known to mess with things like chain link fencing. I do it because it's a curious thing in the culture, when things are made in such great quantities, absorbed in such great quantities, and there's so much denial about them. People hate it. And I'm fascinated with that, which, like the paper furniture -- it's one of those materials. And I'm always drawn to that. And so I did a lot of dirty things with chain link, which nobody will forgive me for. But Claes made homage to it in the Loyola Law School. And that chain link is really expensive. It's in perspective and everything. And then we did a camp together for children with cancer. And you can see, we started making a building together. Of course, the milk can is his. But we were trying to collide our ideas, to put objects next to each other. Like a Morandi -- like the little bottles -- composing them like a still life. And it seemed to work as a way to put he and I together. Then Jay Chiat asked me to do this building on this funny lot in Venice, and I started with this three-piece thing, and you entered in the middle. And Jay asked me what I was going to do with the piece in the middle. And he pushed that. And one day I had a -- oh, well, the other way. I had the binoculars from Claes, and I put them there, and I could never get rid of them after that. Oldenburg made the binoculars incredible when he sent me the first model of the real proposal. It made my building look sick. And it was this interaction between that kind of, up-the-ante stuff that became pretty interesting. It led to the building on the left. And I still think the Time magazine picture will be of the binoculars, you know, leaving out the -- what the hell. I use a lot of metal in my work, and I have a hard time connecting with the craft. The whole thing about my house, the whole use of rough carpentry and everything, was the frustration with the crafts available. I said, "If I can't get the craft that I want, I'll use the craft I can get." There were plenty of models for that, in Rauschenberg and Jasper Johns, and many artists who were making beautiful art and sculpture with junk materials. I went into the metal because it was a way of building a building that was a sculpture. And it was all of one material, and the metal could go on the roof as well as the walls. The metalworkers, for the most part, do ducts behind the ceilings and stuff. I was given an opportunity to design an exhibit for the metalworkers' unions of America and Canada in Washington, and I did it on the condition that they become my partners in the future and help me with all future metal buildings, etc. etc. And it's working very well to have these people, these craftsmen, interested in it. I just tell the stories. It's a way of connecting, at least, with some of those people that are so important to the realization of architecture. The metal continued into a building -- Herman Miller, in Sacramento. And it's just a complex of factory buildings. And Herman Miller has this philosophy of having a place -- a people place. I mean, it's kind of a trite thing to say, but it is real that they wanted to have a central place where the cafeteria would be, where the people would come and where the people working would interact. So it's out in the middle of nowhere, and you approach it. It's copper and galvanize. I used the galvanize and copper in a very light gauge, so it would buckle. I spent a lot of time undoing Richard Meier's aesthetic. Everybody's trying to get the panels perfect, and I always try to get them sloppy and fuzzy. And they end up looking like stone. This is the central area. There's a ramp. And that little dome in there is a building by Stanley Tigerman. Stanley was instrumental in my getting this job. And when I was awarded the contract I, at the very beginning, asked the client if they would let Stanley do a cameo piece with me. Because these were ideas that we were talking about, building things next to each other, making -- it's all about [a] metaphor for a city, maybe. And so Stanley did the little dome thing. And we did it over the phone and by fax. He would send me a fax and show me something. He'd made a building with a dome and he had a little tower. I told him, "No, no, that's too ongepotchket. I don't want the tower." So he came back with a simpler building, but he put some funny details on it, and he moved it closer to my building. And so I decided to put him in a depression. I put him in a hole and made a kind of a hole that he sits in. And so then he put two bridges -- this all happened on the fax, going back and forth over a couple of weeks' period. And he put these two bridges with pink guardrails on it. And so then I put this big billboard behind it. And I call it, "David and Goliath." And that's my cafeteria. In Boston, we had that old building on the left. It was a very prominent building off the freeway, and we added a floor and cleaned it up and fixed it up and used the kind of -- I thought -- the language of the neighborhood, which had these cornices, projecting cornices. Mine got a little exuberant, but I used lead copper, which is a beautiful material, and it turns green in 100 years. Instead of, like, copper in 10 or 15. We redid the side of the building and re-proportioned the windows so it sort of fit into the space. And it surprised both Boston and myself that we got it approved, because they have very strict kind of design guideline, and they wouldn't normally think I would fit them. The detailing was very careful with the lead copper and making panels and fitting it tightly into the fabric of the existing building. In Barcelona, on Las Ramblas for some film festival, I did the Hollywood sign going and coming, made a building out of it, and they built it. I flew in one night and took this picture. But they made it a third smaller than my model without telling me. And then more metal and some chain link in Santa Monica -- a little shopping center. And this is a laser laboratory at the University of Iowa, in which the fish comes back as an abstraction in the back. It's the support labs, which, by some coincidence, required no windows. And the shape fit perfectly. I just joined the points. In the curved part there's all the mechanical equipment. That solid wall behind it is a pipe chase -- a pipe canyon -- and so it was an opportunity that I seized, because I didn't have to have any protruding ducts or vents or things in this form. It gave me an opportunity to make a sculpture out of it. This is a small house somewhere. They've been building it so long I don't remember where it is. It's in the West Valley. And we started with the stream and built the house along the stream -- dammed it up to make a lake. These are the models. The reality, with the lake -- the workmanship is pretty bad. And it reminded me why I play defensively in things like my house. When you have to do something really cheaply, it's hard to get perfect corners and stuff. That big metal thing is a passage, and in it is -- you go downstairs into the living room and then down into the bedroom, which is on the right. It's kind of like a whole built town. I was asked to do a hospital for schizophrenic adolescents at Yale. I thought it was fitting for me to be doing that. This is a house next to a Philip Johnson house in Minnesota. The owners had a dilemma -- they asked Philip to do it. He was too busy. He didn't recommend me, by the way. (Laughter) We ended up having to make it a sculpture, because the dilemma was, how do you build a building that doesn't look like the language? Is it going to look like this beautiful estate is sub-divided? Etc. etc. You've got the idea. And so we finally ended up making it. These people are art collectors. And we finally made it so it appears very sculptural from the main house and all the windows are on the other side. And the building is very sculptural as you walk around it. It's made of metal and the brown stuff is Fin-Ply -- it's that formed lumber from Finland. We used it at Loyola on the chapel, and it didn't work. I keep trying to make it work. In this case we learned how to detail it. In Cleveland, there's Burnham Mall, on the left. It's never been finished. Going out to the lake, you can see all those new buildings we built. And we had the opportunity to build a building on this site. There's a railroad track. This is the city hall over here somewhere, and the courthouse. And the centerline of the mall goes out. Burnham had designed a railroad station that was never built, and so we followed. Sohio is on the axis here, and we followed the axis, and they're two kind of goalposts. And this is our building, which is a corporate headquarters for an insurance company. We collaborated with Oldenburg and put the newspaper on top, folded. The health club is fastened to the garage with a C-clamp, for Cleveland. (Laughter) You drive down. So it's about a 10-story C-clamp. And all this stuff at the bottom is a museum, and an idea for a very fancy automobile entry. This owner has a pet peeve about bad automobile entries. And this would be a hotel. So, the centerline of this thing -- we'd preserve it, and it would start to work with the scale of the new buildings by Pelli and Kohn Pederson Fox, etc., that are underway. It's hard to do high-rise. I feel much more comfortable down here. This is a piece of property in Brentwood. And a long time ago, about '82 or something, after my house -- I designed a house for myself that would be a village of several pavilions around a courtyard -- and the owner of this lot worked for me and built that actual model on the left. And she came back, I guess wealthier or something -- something happened -- and asked me to design a house for her on this site. And following that basic idea of the village, we changed it as we got into it. I locked the house into the site by cutting the back end -- here you see on the photographs of the site -- slicing into it and putting all the bathrooms and dressing rooms like a retaining wall, creating a lower level zone for the master bedroom, which I designed like a kind of a barge, looking like a boat. And that's it, built. The dome was a request from the client. She wanted a dome somewhere in the house. She didn't care where. When you sleep in this bedroom, I hope -- I mean, I haven't slept in it yet. I've offered to marry her so I could sleep there, but she said I didn't have to do that. But when you're in that room, you feel like you're on a kind of barge on some kind of lake. And it's very private. The landscape is being built around to create a private garden. And then up above there's a garden on this side of the living room, and one on the other side. These aren't focused very well. I don't know how to do it from here. Focus the one on the right. It's up there. Left -- it's my right. Anyway, you enter into a garden with a beautiful grove of trees. That's the living room. Servants' quarters. A guest bedroom, which has this dome with marble on it. And then you enter into the living room and then so on. This is the bedroom. You come down from this level along the stairway, and you enter the bedroom here, going into the lake. And the bed is back in this space, with windows looking out onto the lake. These Stonehenge things were designed to give foreground and to create a greater depth in this shallow lot. The material is lead copper, like in the building in Boston. And so it was an intent to make this small piece of land -- it's 100 by 250 -- into a kind of an estate by separating these areas and making the living room and dining room into this pavilion with a high space in it. And this happened by accident that I got this right on axis with the dining room table. It looks like I got a Baldessari painting for free. But the idea is, the windows are all placed so you see pieces of the house outside. Eventually this will be screened -- these trees will come up -- and it will be very private. And you feel like you're in your own kind of village. This is for Michael Eisner -- Disney. We're doing some work for him. And this is in Anaheim, California, and it's a freeway building. You go under this bridge at about 65 miles an hour, and there's another bridge here. And you're through this room in a split second, and the building will sort of reflect that. On the backside, it's much more humane -- entrance, dining hall, etc. And then this thing here -- I'm hoping as you drive by you'll hear the picket fence effect of the sound hitting it. Kind of a fun thing to do. I'm doing a building in Switzerland, Basel, which is an office building for a furniture company. And we struggled with the image. These are the early studies, but they have to sell furniture to normal people, so if I did the building and it was too fancy, then people might say, "Well, the furniture looks OK in his thing, but no, it ain't going to look good in my normal building." So we've made a kind of pragmatic slab in the second phase here, and we've taken the conference facilities and made a villa out of them so that the communal space is very sculptural and separate. And you're looking at it from the offices and you create a kind of interaction between these pieces. This is in Paris, along the Seine. Palais des Sports, the Gare de Lyon over here. The Minister of Finance -- the guy that moved from the Louvre -- goes in here. There's a new library across the river. And back in here, in this already treed park, we're doing a very dense building called the American Center, which has a theater, apartments, dance school, an art museum, restaurants and all kinds of -- it's a very dense program -- bookstores, etc. In a very tight, small -- this is the ground level. And the French have this extraordinary way of screwing things up by taking a beautiful site and cutting the corner off. They call it the plan coupe. And I struggled with that thing -- how to get around the corner. These are the models for it. I showed you the other model, the one -- this is the way I organized myself so I could make the drawing -- so I understood the problem. I was trying to get around this plan coupe -- how do you do it? Apartments, etc. And these are the kind of study models we did. And the one on the left is pretty awful. You can see why I was ready to commit suicide when this one was built. But out of it came finally this resolution, where the elevator piece worked frontally to this, parallel to this street, and also parallel to here. And then this kind of twist, with this balcony and the skirt, kind of like a ballerina lifting her skirt to let you into the foyer. The restaurants here -- the apartments and the theater, etc. So it would all be built in stone, in French limestone, except for this metal piece. And it faces into a park. And the idea was to make this express the energy of this. On the side facing the street it's much more normal, except I slipped a few mansards down, so that coming on the point, these housing units made a gesture to the corner. And this will be some kind of high-tech billboard. If any of you guys have any ideas for it, please contact me. I don't know what to do. Jay Chiat is a glutton for punishment, and he hired me to do a house for him in the Hamptons. And it's got a fish. And I keep thinking, "This is going to be the last fish." It's like a drug addict. I say, "I'm not going to do it anymore -- I don't want to do it anymore -- I'm not going to do it." And then I do it. (Laughter) There it is. But it's the living room. And this piece here is -- I don't know what it is. I just added it so that we'd have enough money in the budget so we could take something out. (Applause) This is Euro Disney, and I've worked with all of the guys that presented to you earlier. We've had a lot of fun working together. I think I'm from Mars for them, and they are for me, but somehow we all manage to work together, and I think, productively. So far. This is a shopping thing. You come into the Magic Kingdom and the hotel that Tony Baxter's group is doing out here. And then this is a kind of a shopping mall, with a rodeo and restaurants. And another restaurant. What I did -- because of the Paris skies being quite dull, I made a light grid that's perpendicular to the train station, to the route of the train. It looks like it's kind of been there, and then crashed all these simpler forms into it. The light grid will have a light, be lit up at night and give a kind of light ceiling. In Switzerland -- Germany, actually -- on the Rhine across from Basel, we did a furniture factory and a furniture museum. And I tried to -- there's a Nick Grimshaw building over here, there's an Oldenburg sculpture over here -- I tried to make a relationship urbanistically. And I don't gave good slides to show -- it's just been completed -- but this piece here is this building, and these pieces here and here. And as you pass by it's always part -- you see it as all of these pieces accrue and become part of an overall neighborhood. It's plaster and just zinc. And you wonder, if this is a museum, what it's going to be like inside? If it's going to be so busy and crazy that you wouldn't show anything, and just wait. I'm so cunning and clever -- I made it quiet and wonderful. But on the outside it does scream out at you a bit. It's actually basically three square rooms with a couple of skylights and stuff. And from the building in the back, you see it as an iceberg floating by in the hills. I know I'm over time. See, that skylight goes down and becomes that one. So it's pretty quiet inside. This is the Disney Hall -- the concert hall. It's a complicated project. It has a chamber hall. It's related to an existing Chandler Pavilion that was built with a lot of love and tears and caring. And it's not a great building, but I approached it optimistically, that we would make a compositional relationship between us that would strengthen both of us. And the plan of this -- it's a concert hall. This is the foyer, which is kind of a garden structure. There's commercial at the ground floor. These are offices, which, really, in the competition, we didn't have to design. But finally, there's a hotel there. These were the kind of relationships made to the Chandler, composing these elevations together and relating them to the buildings that existed -- to MOCA, etc. The acoustician in the competition gave us criteria, which led to this compartmentalized scheme, which we found out after the competition would not work at all. But everybody liked these forms and liked the space, and so that's one of the problems of a competition. You have to then try and get that back in some way. And we studied many models. This was our original model. These were the three buildings that were the ideal -- the Concertgebouw, Boston and Berlin. Everybody liked the surround. Actually, this is the smallest hall in size, and it has more seats than any of these because it has double balconies. Our client doesn't want balconies, so -- and when we met our new acoustician, he told us this was the right shape or this was the right shape. And we tried many shapes, trying to get the energy of the original design within an acoustical, acceptable format. We finally settled on a shape that was the proportion of the Concertgebouw with the sloping outside walls, which the acoustician said were crucial to this and later decided they weren't, but now we have them. (Laughter) And our idea is to make the seating carriage very sculptural and out of wood and like a big boat sitting in this plaster room. That's the idea. And the corners would have skylights and these columns would be structural. And the nice thing about introducing columns is they give you a kind of sense of proscenium from wherever you sit, and create intimacy. Now, this is not a final design -- these are just on the way to being -- and so I wouldn't take it literally, except the feeling of the space. We studied the acoustics with laser stuff, and they bounce them off this and see where it all works. But you get the sense of the hall in section. Most halls come straight down into a proscenium. In this case we're opening it back up and getting skylights in the four corners. And so it will be quite a different shape. (Laughter) The original building, because it was frog-like, fit nicely on the site and cranked itself well. When you get into a box, it's harder to do it -- and here we are, struggling with how to put the hotel in. And this is a teapot I designed for Alessi. I just stuck it on there. But this is how I do work. I do take pieces and bits and look at it and struggle with it and cut it away. And of course it's not going to look like that, but it is the crazy way I tend to work. And then finally, in L.A. I was asked to do a sculpture at the foot of Interstate Bank Tower, the highest building in L.A. Larry Halprin is doing the stairs. And I was asked to do a fish, and so I did a snake. (Laughter) It's a public space, and I made it kind of a garden structure, and you can go in it. It's a kiva, and Larry's putting some water in there, and it works much better than a fish. In Barcelona I was asked to do a fish, and we're working on that, at the foot of a Ritz-Carlton Tower being done by Skidmore, Owings and Merrill. And the Ritz-Carlton Tower is being designed with exposed steel, non-fire proof, much like those old gas tanks. And so we took the language of this exposed steel and used it, perverted it, into the form of the fish, and created a kind of a 19th-century contraption that looks like, that will sit -- this is the beach and the harbor out in front, and this is really a shopping center with department stores. And we split these bridges. Originally, this was all solid with a hole in it. We cut them loose and made several bridges and created a kind of a foreground for this hotel. We showed this to the hotel people the other day, and they were terrified and said that nobody would come to the Ritz-Carlton anymore, because of this fish. (Laughter) And finally, I just threw these in -- Lou Danziger. I didn't expect Lou Danziger to be here, but this is a building I did for him in 1964, I think. A little studio -- and it's sadly for sale. Time goes on. And this is my son working with me on a small fast-food thing. He designed the robot as the cashier, and the head moves, and I did the rest of it. And the food wasn't as good as the stuff, and so it failed. It should have been the other way around -- the food should have been good first. It didn't work. Thank you very much.
I'll just start talking about the 17th century. I hope nobody finds that offensive. I -- you know, when I -- after I had invented PCR, I kind of needed a change. And I moved down to La Jolla and learned how to surf. And I started living down there on the beach for a long time. And when surfers are out waiting for waves, you probably wonder, if you've never been out there, what are they doing? You know, sometimes there's a 10-, 15-minute break out there when you're waiting for a wave to come in. They usually talk about the 17th century. You know, they get a real bad rap in the world. People think they're sort of lowbrows. One day, somebody suggested I read this book. It was called -- it was called "The Air Pump," or something like "The Leviathan and The Air Pump." It was a real weird book about the 17th century. And I realized, the roots of the way I sort of thought was just the only natural way to think about things. That -- you know, I was born thinking about things that way, and I had always been like a little scientist guy. And when I went to find out something, I used scientific methods. I wasn't real surprised, you know, when they first told me how -- how you were supposed to do science, because I'd already been doing it for fun and whatever. But it didn't -- it never occurred to me that it had to be invented and that it had been invented only 350 years ago. You know, it was -- like it happened in England, and Germany, and Italy sort of all at the same time. And the story of that, I thought, was really fascinating. So I'm going to talk a little bit about that, and what exactly is it that scientists are supposed to do. And it's, it's a kind of -- You know, Charles I got beheaded somewhere early in the 17th century. And the English set up Cromwell and a whole bunch of Republicans or whatever, and not the kind of Republicans we had. They changed the government, and it didn't work. And Charles II, the son, was finally put back on the throne of England. He was really nervous, because his dad had been, you know, beheaded for being the King of England And he was nervous about the fact that conversations that got going in, like, bars and stuff would turn to -- this is kind of -- it's hard to believe, but people in the 17th century in England were starting to talk about, you know, philosophy and stuff in bars. They didn't have TV screens, and they didn't have any football games to watch. And they would get really pissy, and all of a sudden people would spill out into the street and fight about issues like whether or not it was okay if Robert Boyle made a device called the vacuum pump. Now, Boyle was a friend of Charles II. He was a Christian guy during the weekends, but during the week he was a scientist. (Laughter) Which was -- back then it was sort of, you know, well, you know -- if you made this thing -- he made this little device, like kind of like a bicycle pump in reverse that could suck all the air out of -- you know what a bell jar is? One of these things, you pick it up, put it down, and it's got a seal, and you can see inside of it, so you can see what's going on inside this thing. But what he was trying to do was to pump all the air out of there, and see what would happen inside there. I mean, the first -- I think one of the first experiments he did was he put a bird in there. And people in the 17th century, they didn't really understand the same way we do about you know, this stuff is a bunch of different kinds of molecules, and we breathe it in for a purpose and all that. I mean, fish don't know much about water, and people didn't know much about air. But both started exploring it. One thing, he put a bird in there, and he pumped all the air out, and the bird died. So he said, hmm ... He said -- he called what he'd done as making -- they didn't call it a vacuum pump at the time. Now you call it a vacuum pump; he called it a vacuum. Right? And immediately, he got into trouble with the local clergy who said, you can't make a vacuum. Ah, uh -- (Laughter) Aristotle said that nature abhors one. I think it was a poor translation, probably, but people relied on authorities like that. And you know, Boyle says, well, shit. I make them all the time. I mean, whatever that is that kills the bird -- and I'm calling it a vacuum. And the religious people said that if God wanted you to make -- I mean, God is everywhere, that was one of their rules, is God is everywhere. And a vacuum -- there's nothing in a vacuum, so you've -- God couldn't be in there. So therefore the church said that you can't make a vacuum, you know. And Boyle said, bullshit. I mean, you want to call it Godless, you know, you call it Godless. But that's not my job. I'm not into that. I do that on the weekend. And like -- what I'm trying to do is figure out what happens when you suck everything out of a compartment. And he did all these cute little experiments. Like he did one with -- he had a little wheel, like a fan, that was sort of loosely attached, so it could spin by itself. He had another fan opposed to it that he had like a -- I mean, the way I would have done this would be, like, a rubber band, and, you know, around a tinker toy kind of fan. I know exactly how he did it; I've seen the drawings. It's two fans, one which he could turn from outside after he got the vacuum established, and he discovered that if he pulled all the air out of it, the one fan would no longer turn the other one, right? Something was missing, you know. I mean, these are -- it's kind of weird to think that someone had to do an experiment to show that, but that was what was going on at the time. And like, there was big arguments about it in the -- you know, the gin houses and in the coffee shops and stuff. And Charles started not liking that. Charles II was kind of saying, you know, you should keep that -- let's make a place where you can do this stuff where people don't get so -- you know, we don't want the -- we don't want to get the people mad at me again. And so -- because when they started talking about religion and science and stuff like that, that's when it had sort of gotten his father in trouble. And so, Charles said, I'm going to put up the money give you guys a building, come here and you can meet in the building, but just don't talk about religion in there. And that was fine with Boyle. He said, OK, we're going to start having these meetings. And anybody who wants to do science is -- this is about the time that Isaac Newton was starting to whip out a lot of really interesting things. And there was all kind of people that would come to the Royal Society, they called it. You had to be dressed up pretty well. It wasn't like a TED conference. That was the only criteria, was that you be -- you looked like a gentleman, and they'd let anybody could come. You didn't have to be a member then. And so, they would come in and you would do -- Anybody that was going to show an experiment, which was kind of a new word at the time, demonstrate some principle, they had to do it on stage, where everybody could see it. So they were -- the really important part of this was, you were not supposed to talk about final causes, for instance. And God was out of the picture. The actual nature of reality was not at issue. You're not supposed to talk about the absolute nature of anything. You were not supposed to talk about anything that you couldn't demonstrate. So if somebody could see it, you could say, here's how the machine works, here's what we do, and then here's what happens. And seeing what happens, it was OK to generalize, and say, I'm sure that this will happen anytime we make one of these things. And so you can start making up some rules. You say, anytime you have a vacuum state, you will discover that one wheel will not turn another one, if the only connection between them is whatever was there before the vacuum. That kind of thing. Candles can't burn in a vacuum, therefore, probably sparklers wouldn't either. It's not clear; actually sparklers will, but they didn't know that. They didn't have sparklers. But, they -- (Laughter) -- you can make up rules, but they have to relate only to the things that you've been able to demonstrate. And most the demonstrations had to do with visuals. Like if you do an experiment on stage, and nobody can see it, they can just hear it, they would probably think you were freaky. I mean, reality is what you can see. That wasn't an explicit rule in the meeting, but I'm sure that was part of it, you know. If people hear voices, and they can't see and associate it with somebody, that person's probably not there. But the general idea that you could only -- you could only really talk about things in that place that had some kind of experimental basis. It didn't matter what Thomas Hobbes, who was a local philosopher, said about it, you know, because you weren't going to be talking final causes. What's happening here, in the middle of the 17th century, was that what became my field -- science, experimental science -- was pulling itself away, and it was in a physical way, because we're going to do it in this room over here, but it was also what -- it was an amazing thing that happened. Science had been all interlocked with theology, and philosophy, and -- and -- and mathematics, which is really not science. But experimental science had been tied up with all those things. And the mathematics part and the experimental science part was pulling away from philosophy. And -- things -- we never looked back. It's been so cool since then. I mean, it just -- it just -- untangled a thing that was really impeding technology from being developed. And, I mean, everybody in this room -- now, this is 350 short years ago. Remember, that's a short time. It was 300,000, probably, years ago that most of us, the ancestors of most of us in this room came up out of Africa and turned to the left. You know, the ones that turned to the right, there are some of those in the Japanese translation. But that happened very -- a long time ago compared to 350 short years ago. But in that 350 years, the place has just undergone a lot of changes. In fact, everybody in this room probably, especially if you picked up your bag -- some of you, I know, didn't pick up your bags -- but if you picked up your bag, everybody in this room has got in their pocket, or back in their room, something that 350 years ago, kings would have gone to war to have. I mean, if you can think how important -- If you have a GPS system and there are no satellites, it's not going to be much use. But, like -- but, you know, if somebody had a GPS system in the 17th century some king would have gotten together an army and gone to get it, you know. If that person -- Audience: For the teddy bear? The teddy bear? Kary Mullis: They might have done it for the teddy bear, yeah. But -- all of us own stuff. I mean, individuals own things that kings would have definitely gone to war to get. And this is just 350 years. Not a whole lot of people doing this stuff. You know, the important people -- you can almost read about their lives, about all the really important people that made advances, you know. And, I mean -- this kind of stuff, you know, all this stuff came from that separation of this little sort of thing that we do -- now I, when I was a boy was born sort of with this idea that if you want to know something -- you know, maybe it's because my old man was gone a lot, and my mother didn't really know much science, but I thought if you want to know something about stuff, you do it -- you make an experiment, you know. You get -- you get, like -- I just had a natural feeling for science and setting up experiments. I thought that was the way everybody had always thought. I thought that anybody with any brains will do it that way. It isn't true. I mean, there's a lot of people -- You know, I was one of those scientists that was -- got into trouble the other night at dinner because of the post-modernism thing. And I didn't mean, you know -- where is that lady? Audience: Here. (Laughter) KM: I mean, I didn't really think of that as an argument so much as just a lively discussion. I didn't take it personally, but -- I just -- I had -- I naively had thought, until this surfing experience started me into the 17th century, I'd thought that's just the way people thought, and everybody did, and they recognized reality by what they could see or touch or feel or hear. At any rate, when I was a boy, I, like, for instance, I had this -- I got this little book from Fort Sill, Oklahoma -- This is about the time that George Dyson's dad was starting to blow nuclear -- thinking about blowing up nuclear rockets and stuff. I was thinking about making my own little rockets. And I knew that frogs -- little frogs -- had aspirations of space travel, just like people. And I -- (Laughter) I was looking for a -- a propulsion system that would like, make a rocket, like, maybe about four feet high go up a couple of miles. And, I mean, that was my sort of goal. I wanted it to go out of sight and then I wanted this little parachute to come back with the frog in it. And -- I -- I -- I got this book from Fort Sill, Oklahoma, where there's a missile base. They send it out for amateur rocketeers, and it said in there do not ever heat a mixture of potassium perchlorate and sugar. (Laughter) You know, that's what you call a lead. (Laughter) You sort of -- now you say, well, let's see if I can get hold of some potassium chlorate and sugar, perchlorate and sugar, and heat it; it would be interesting to see what it is they don't want me to do, and what it is going to -- and how is it going to work. And we didn't have -- like, my mother presided over the back yard from an upstairs window, where she would be ironing or something like that. And she was usually just sort of keeping an eye on, and if there was any puffs of smoke out there, she'd lean out and admonish us all not to blow our eyes out. That was her -- You know, that was kind of the worst thing that could happen to us. That's why I thought, as long as I don't blow my eyes out ... I may not care about the fact that it's prohibited from heating this solution. I'm going to do it carefully, but I'll do it. It's like anything else that's prohibited: you do it behind the garage. (Laughter) So, I went to the drug store and I tried to buy some potassium perchlorate and it wasn't unreasonable then for a kid to walk into a drug store and buy chemicals. Nowadays, it's no ma'am, check your shoes. And like -- (Laughter) But then it wasn't -- they didn't have any, but the guy had -- I said, what kind of salts of potassium do you have? You know. And he had potassium nitrate. And I said, that might do the same thing, whatever it is. I'm sure it's got to do with rockets or it wouldn't be in that manual. And so I -- I did some experiments. You know, I started off with little tiny amounts of potassium nitrate and sugar, which was readily available, and I mixed it in different proportions, and I tried to light it on fire. Just to see what would happen, if you mixed it together. And it -- they burned. It burned kind of slow, but it made a nice smell, compared to other rocket fuels I had tried, that all had sulfur in them. And, it smelt like burnt candy. And then I tried the melting business, and I melted it. And then it melted into a little sort of syrupy liquid, brown. And then it cooled down to a brick-hard substance, that when you lit that, it went off like a bat. I mean, the little bowl of that stuff that had cooled down -- you'd light it, and it would just start dancing around the yard. And I said, there is a way to get a frog up to where he wants to go. (Laughter) So I started developing -- you know, George's dad had a lot of help. I just had my brother. But I -- it took me about -- it took me about, I'd say, six months to finally figure out all the little things. There's a lot of little things involved in making a rocket that it will actually work, even after you have the fuel. But you do it, by -- what I just-- you know, you do experiments, and you write down things sometimes, you make observations, you know. And then you slowly build up a theory of how this stuff works. And it was -- I was following all the rules. I didn't know what the rules were, I'm a natural born scientist, I guess, or some kind of a throwback to the 17th century, whatever. But at any rate, we finally did have a device that would reproduceably put a frog out of sight and get him back alive. And we had not -- I mean, we weren't frightened by it. We should have been, because it made a lot of smoke and it made a lot of noise, and it was powerful, you know. And once in a while, they would blow up. But I wasn't worried, by the way, about, you know, the explosion causing the destruction of the planet. I hadn't heard about the 10 ways that we should be afraid of the -- By the way, I could have thought, I'd better not do this because they say not to, you know. And I'd better get permission from the government. If I'd have waited around for that, I would have never -- the frog would have died, you know. At any rate, I bring it up because it's a good story, and he said, tell personal things, you know, and that's a personal -- I was going to tell you about the first night that I met my wife, but that would be too personal, wouldn't it. So, so I've got something else that's not personal. But that ... process is what I think of as science, see, where you start with some idea, and then instead of, like, looking up, every authority that you've ever heard of I -- sometimes you do that, if you're going to write a paper later, you want to figure out who else has worked on it. But in the actual process, you get an idea -- like, when I got the idea one night that I could amplify DNA with two oligonucleotides, and I could make lots of copies of some little piece of DNA, you know, the thinking for that was about 20 minutes while I was driving my car, and then instead of going -- I went back and I did talk to people about it, but if I'd listened to what I heard from all my friends who were molecular biologists -- I would have abandoned it. You know, if I had gone back looking for an authority figure who could tell me if it would work or not, he would have said, no, it probably won't. Because the results of it were so spectacular that if it worked it was going to change everybody's goddamn way of doing molecular biology. Nobody wants a chemist to come in and poke around in their stuff like that and change things. But if you go to authority, and you always don't -- you don't always get the right answer, see. But I knew, you'd go into the lab and you'd try to make it work yourself. And then you're the authority, and you can say, I know it works, because right there in that tube is where it happened, and here, on this gel, there's a little band there that I know that's DNA, and that's the DNA I wanted to amplify, so there! So it does work. You know, that's how you do science. And then you say, well, what can make it work better? And then you figure out better and better ways to do it. But you always work from, from like, facts that you have made available to you by doing experiments: things that you could do on a stage. And no tricky shit behind the thing. I mean, it's all -- you've got to be very honest with what you're doing if it really is going to work. I mean, you can't make up results, and then do another experiment based on that one. So you have to be honest. And I'm basically honest. I have a fairly bad memory, and dishonesty would always get me in trouble, if I, like -- so I've just sort of been naturally honest and naturally inquisitive, and that sort of leads to that kind of science. Now, let's see ... I've got another five minutes, right? OK. All scientists aren't like that. You know -- and there is a lot -- (Laughter) There is a lot -- a lot has been going on since Isaac Newton and all that stuff happened. One of the things that happened right around World War II in that same time period before, and as sure as hell afterwards, government got -- realized that scientists aren't strange dudes that, you know, hide in ivory towers and do ridiculous things with test tube. Scientists, you know, made World War II as we know it quite possible. They made faster things. They made bigger guns to shoot them down with. You know, they made drugs to give the pilots if they were broken up in the process. They made all kinds of -- and then finally one giant bomb to end the whole thing, right? And everybody stepped back a little and said, you know, we ought to invest in this shit, because whoever has got the most of these people working in the places is going to have a dominant position, at least in the military, and probably in all kind of economic ways. And they got involved in it, and the scientific and industrial establishment was born, and out of that came a lot of scientists who were in there for the money, you know, because it was suddenly available. And they weren't the curious little boys that liked to put frogs up in the air. They were the same people that later went in to medical school, you know, because there was money in it, you know. I mean, later, then they all got into business -- I mean, there are waves of -- going into your high school, person saying, you want to be rich, you know, be a scientist. You know, not anymore. You want to be rich, you be a businessman. But a lot of people got in it for the money and the power and the travel. That's back when travel was easy. And those people don't think -- they don't -- they don't always tell you the truth, you know. There is nothing in their contract, in fact, that makes it to their advantage always, to tell you the truth. And the people I'm talking about are people that like -- they say that they're a member of the committee called, say, the Inter-Governmental Panel on Climate Change. And they -- and they have these big meetings where they try to figure out how we're going to -- how we're going to continually prove that the planet is getting warmer, when that's actually contrary to most people's sensations. I mean, if you actually measure the temperature over a period -- I mean, the temperature has been measured now pretty carefully for about 50, 60 years -- longer than that it's been measured, but in really nice, precise ways, and records have been kept for 50 or 60 years, and in fact, the temperature hadn't really gone up. It's like, the average temperature has gone up a tiny little bit, because the nighttime temperatures at the weather stations have come up just a little bit. But there's a good explanation for that. And it's that the weather stations are all built outside of town, where the airport was, and now the town's moved out there, there's concrete all around and they call it the skyline effect. And most responsible people that measure temperatures realize you have to shield your measuring device from that. And even then, you know, because the buildings get warm in the daytime, and they keep it a little warmer at night. So the temperature has been, sort of, inching up. It should have been. But not a lot. Not like, you know -- the first guy -- the first guy that got the idea that we're going to fry ourselves here, actually, he didn't think of it that way. His name was Sven Arrhenius. He was Swedish, and he said, if you double the CO2 level in the atmosphere, which he thought might -- this is in 1900 -- the temperature ought to go up about 5.5 degrees, he calculated. He was thinking of the earth as, kind of like, you know, like a completely insulated thing with no stuff in it, really, just energy coming down, energy leaving. And so he came up with this theory, and he said, this will be cool, because it'll be a longer growing season in Sweden, you know, and the surfers liked it, the surfers thought, that's a cool idea, because it's pretty cold in the ocean sometimes, and -- but a lot of other people later on started thinking it would be bad, you know. But nobody actually demonstrated it, right? I mean, the temperature as measured -- and you can find this on our wonderful Internet, you just go and look for all NASAs records, and all the Weather Bureau's records, and you'll look at it yourself, and you'll see, the temperature has just -- the nighttime temperature measured on the surface of the planet has gone up a tiny little bit. So if you just average that and the daytime temperature, it looks like it went up about .7 degrees in this century. But in fact, it was just coming up -- it was the nighttime; the daytime temperatures didn't go up. So -- and Arrhenius' theory -- and all the global warmers think -- they would say, yeah, it should go up in the daytime, too, if it's the greenhouse effect. Now, people like things that have, like, names like that, that they can envision it, right? I mean -- but people don't like things like this, so -- most -- I mean, you don't get all excited about things like the actual evidence, you know, which would be evidence for strengthening of the tropical circulation in the 1990s. It's a paper that came out in February, and most of you probably hadn't heard about it. "Evidence for Large Decadal Variability in the Tropical Mean Radiative Energy Budget." Excuse me. Those papers were published by NASA, and some scientists at Columbia, and Viliki and a whole bunch of people, Princeton. And those two papers came out in Science Magazine, February the first, and these -- the conclusion in both of these papers, and in also the Science editor's, like, descriptions of these papers, for, you know, for the quickie, is that our theories about global warming are completely wrong. I mean, what these guys were doing, and this is what -- the NASA people have been saying this for a long time. They say, if you measure the temperature of the atmosphere, it isn't going up -- it's not going up at all. We've doing it very carefully now for 20 years, from satellites, and it isn't going up. And in this paper, they show something much more striking, and that was that they did what they call a radiation -- and I'm not going to go into the details of it, actually it's quite complicated, but it isn't as complicated as they might make you think it is by the words they use in those papers. If you really get down to it, they say, the sun puts out a certain amount of energy -- we know how much that is -- it falls on the earth, the earth gives back a certain amount. When it gets warm it generates -- it makes redder energy -- I mean, like infra-red, like something that's warm gives off infra-red. The whole business of the global warming -- trash, really, is that -- if the -- if there's too much CO2 in the atmosphere, the heat that's trying to escape won't be able to get out. But the heat coming from the sun, which is mostly down in the -- it's like 350 nanometers, which is where it's centered -- that goes right through CO2. So you still get heated, but you don't dissipate any. Well, these guys measured all of those things. I mean, you can talk about that stuff, and you can write these large reports, and you can get government money to do it, but these -- they actually measured it, and it turns out that in the last 10 years -- that's why they say "decadal" there -- that the energy -- that the level of what they call "imbalance" has been way the hell over what was expected. Like, the amount of imbalance -- meaning, heat's coming in and it's not going out that you would get from having double the CO2, which we're not anywhere near that, by the way. But if we did, in 2025 or something, have double the CO2 as we had in 1900, they say it would be increase the energy budget by about -- in other words, one watt per square centimeter more would be coming in than going out. So the planet should get warmer. Well, they found out in this study -- these two studies by two different teams -- that five and a half watts per square meter had been coming in from 1998, 1999, and the place didn't get warmer. So the theory's kaput -- it's nothing. These papers should have been called, "The End to the Global Warming Fiasco," you know. They're concerned, and you can tell they have very guarded conclusions in these papers, because they're talking about big laboratories that are funded by lots of money and by scared people. You know, if they said, you know what? There isn't a problem with global warming any longer, so we can -- you know, they're funding. And if you start a grant request with something like that, and say, global warming obviously hadn't happened ... if they -- if they -- if they actually -- if they actually said that, I'm getting out. (Laughter) I'll stand up too, and -- (Laughter) (Applause) They have to say that. They had to be very cautious. But what I'm saying is, you can be delighted, because the editor of Science, who is no dummy, and both of these fairly professional -- really professional teams, have really come to the same conclusion and in the bottom lines in their papers they have to say, what this means is, that what we've been thinking, was the global circulation model that we predict that the earth is going to get overheated that it's all wrong. It's wrong by a large factor. It's not by a small one. They just -- they just misinterpreted the fact that the earth -- there's obviously some mechanisms going on that nobody knew about, because the heat's coming in and it isn't getting warmer. So the planet is a pretty amazing thing, you know, it's big and horrible -- and big and wonderful, and it does all kinds of things we don't know anything about. So I mean, the reason I put those things all together, OK, here's the way you're supposed to do science -- some science is done for other reasons, and just curiosity. And there's a lot of things like global warming, and ozone hole and you know, a whole bunch of scientific public issues, that if you're interested in them, then you have to get down the details, and read the papers called, "Large Decadal Variability in the ... " You have to figure out what all those words mean. And if you just listen to the guys who are hyping those issues, and making a lot of money out of it, you'll be misinformed, and you'll be worrying about the wrong things. Remember the 10 things that are going to get you. The -- one of them -- (Laughter) And the asteroids is the one I really agree with there. I mean, you've got to watch out for asteroids. OK, thank you for having me here. (Applause)
We all make decisions every day; we want to know what the right thing is to do -- in domains from the financial to the gastronomic to the professional to the romantic. And surely, if somebody could really tell us how to do exactly the right thing at all possible times, that would be a tremendous gift. It turns out that, in fact, the world was given this gift in 1738 by a Dutch polymath named Daniel Bernoulli. And what I want to talk to you about today is what that gift is, and I also want to explain to you why it is that it hasn't made a damn bit of difference. Now, this is Bernoulli's gift. This is a direct quote. And if it looks like Greek to you, it's because, well, it's Greek. But the simple English translation -- much less precise, but it captures the gist of what Bernoulli had to say -- was this: The expected value of any of our actions -- that is, the goodness that we can count on getting -- is the product of two simple things: the odds that this action will allow us to gain something, and the value of that gain to us. In a sense, what Bernoulli was saying is, if we can estimate and multiply these two things, we will always know precisely how we should behave. Now, this simple equation, even for those of you who don't like equations, is something that you're quite used to. Here's an example: if I were to tell you, let's play a little coin toss game, and I'm going to flip a coin, and if it comes up heads, I'm going to pay you 10 dollars, but you have to pay four dollars for the privilege of playing with me, most of you would say, sure, I'll take that bet. Because you know that the odds of you winning are one half, the gain if you do is 10 dollars, that multiplies to five, and that's more than I'm charging you to play. So, the answer is, yes. This is what statisticians technically call a damn fine bet. Now, the idea is simple when we're applying it to coin tosses, but in fact, it's not very simple in everyday life. People are horrible at estimating both of these things, and that's what I want to talk to you about today. There are two kinds of errors people make when trying to decide what the right thing is to do, and those are errors in estimating the odds that they're going to succeed, and errors in estimating the value of their own success. Now, let me talk about the first one first. Calculating odds would seem to be something rather easy: there are six sides to a die, two sides to a coin, 52 cards in a deck. You all know what the likelihood is of pulling the ace of spades or of flipping a heads. But as it turns out, this is not a very easy idea to apply in everyday life. That's why Americans spend more -- I should say, lose more -- gambling than on all other forms of entertainment combined. The reason is, this isn't how people do odds. The way people figure odds requires that we first talk a bit about pigs. Now, the question I'm going to put to you is whether you think there are more dogs or pigs on leashes observed in any particular day in Oxford. And of course, you all know that the answer is dogs. And the way that you know that the answer is dogs is you quickly reviewed in memory the times you've seen dogs and pigs on leashes. It was very easy to remember seeing dogs, not so easy to remember pigs. And each one of you assumed that if dogs on leashes came more quickly to your mind, then dogs on leashes are more probable. That's not a bad rule of thumb, except when it is. So, for example, here's a word puzzle. Are there more four-letter English words with R in the third place or R in the first place? Well, you check memory very briefly, make a quick scan, and it's awfully easy to say to yourself, Ring, Rang, Rung, and very hard to say to yourself, Pare, Park: they come more slowly. But in fact, there are many more words in the English language with R in the third than the first place. The reason words with R in the third place come slowly to your mind isn't because they're improbable, unlikely or infrequent. It's because the mind recalls words by their first letter. You kind of shout out the sound, S -- and the word comes. It's like the dictionary; it's hard to look things up by the third letter. So, this is an example of how this idea that the quickness with which things come to mind can give you a sense of their probability -- how this idea could lead you astray. It's not just puzzles, though. For example, when Americans are asked to estimate the odds that they will die in a variety of interesting ways -- these are estimates of number of deaths per year per 200 million U.S. citizens. And these are just ordinary people like yourselves who are asked to guess how many people die from tornado, fireworks, asthma, drowning, etc. Compare these to the actual numbers. Now, you see a very interesting pattern here, which is first of all, two things are vastly over-estimated, namely tornadoes and fireworks. Two things are vastly underestimated: dying by drowning and dying by asthma. Why? When was the last time that you picked up a newspaper and the headline was, "Boy dies of Asthma?" It's not interesting because it's so common. It's very easy for all of us to bring to mind instances of news stories or newsreels where we've seen tornadoes devastating cities, or some poor schmuck who's blown his hands off with a firework on the Fourth of July. Drownings and asthma deaths don't get much coverage. They don't come quickly to mind, and as a result, we vastly underestimate them. Indeed, this is kind of like the Sesame Street game of "Which thing doesn't belong?" And you're right to say it's the swimming pool that doesn't belong, because the swimming pool is the only thing on this slide that's actually very dangerous. The way that more of you are likely to die than the combination of all three of the others that you see on the slide. The lottery is an excellent example, of course -- an excellent test-case of people's ability to compute probabilities. And economists -- forgive me, for those of you who play the lottery -- but economists, at least among themselves, refer to the lottery as a stupidity tax, because the odds of getting any payoff by investing your money in a lottery ticket are approximately equivalent to flushing the money directly down the toilet -- which, by the way, doesn't require that you actually go to the store and buy anything. Why in the world would anybody ever play the lottery? Well, there are many answers, but one answer surely is, we see a lot of winners. Right? When this couple wins the lottery, or Ed McMahon shows up at your door with this giant check -- how the hell do you cash things that size, I don't know. We see this on TV; we read about it in the paper. When was the last time that you saw extensive interviews with everybody who lost? Indeed, if we required that television stations run a 30-second interview with each loser every time they interview a winner, the 100 million losers in the last lottery would require nine-and-a-half years of your undivided attention just to watch them say, "Me? I lost." "Me? I lost." Now, if you watch nine-and-a-half years of television -- no sleep, no potty breaks -- and you saw loss after loss after loss, and then at the end there's 30 seconds of, "and I won," the likelihood that you would play the lottery is very small. Look, I can prove this to you: here's a little lottery. There's 10 tickets in this lottery. Nine of them have been sold to these individuals. It costs you a dollar to buy the ticket and, if you win, you get 20 bucks. Is this a good bet? Well, Bernoulli tells us it is. The expected value of this lottery is two dollars; this is a lottery in which you should invest your money. And most people say, "OK, I'll play." Now, a slightly different version of this lottery: imagine that the nine tickets are all owned by one fat guy named Leroy. Leroy has nine tickets; there's one left. Do you want it? Most people won't play this lottery. Now, you can see the odds of winning haven't changed, but it's now fantastically easy to imagine who's going to win. It's easy to see Leroy getting the check, right? You can't say to yourself, "I'm as likely to win as anybody," because you're not as likely to win as Leroy. The fact that all those tickets are owned by one guy changes your decision to play, even though it does nothing whatsoever to the odds. Now, estimating odds, as difficult as it may seem, is a piece of cake compared to trying to estimate value: trying to say what something is worth, how much we'll enjoy it, how much pleasure it will give us. I want to talk now about errors in value. How much is this Big Mac worth? Is it worth 25 dollars? Most of you have the intuition that it's not -- you wouldn't pay that for it. But in fact, to decide whether a Big Mac is worth 25 dollars requires that you ask one, and only one question, which is: What else can I do with 25 dollars? If you've ever gotten on one of those long-haul flights to Australia and realized that they're not going to serve you any food, but somebody in the row in front of you has just opened the McDonald's bag, and the smell of golden arches is wafting over the seat, you think, I can't do anything else with this 25 dollars for 16 hours. I can't even set it on fire -- they took my cigarette lighter! Suddenly, 25 dollars for a Big Mac might be a good deal. On the other hand, if you're visiting an underdeveloped country, and 25 dollars buys you a gourmet meal, it's exorbitant for a Big Mac. Why were you all sure that the answer to the question was no, before I'd even told you anything about the context? Because most of you compared the price of this Big Mac to the price you're used to paying. Rather than asking, "What else can I do with my money," comparing this investment to other possible investments, you compared to the past. And this is a systematic error people make. What you knew is, you paid three dollars in the past; 25 is outrageous. This is an error, and I can prove it to you by showing the kinds of irrationalities to which it leads. For example, this is, of course, one of the most delicious tricks in marketing, is to say something used to be higher, and suddenly it seems like a very good deal. When people are asked about these two different jobs: a job where you make 60K, then 50K, then 40K, a job where you're getting a salary cut each year, and one in which you're getting a salary increase, people like the second job better than the first, despite the fact they're all told they make much less money. Why? Because they had the sense that declining wages are worse than rising wages, even when the total amount of wages is higher in the declining period. Here's another nice example. Here's a $2,000 Hawaiian vacation package; it's now on sale for 1,600. Assuming you wanted to go to Hawaii, would you buy this package? Most people say they would. Here's a slightly different story: $2,000 Hawaiian vacation package is now on sale for 700 dollars, so you decide to mull it over for a week. By the time you get to the ticket agency, the best fares are gone -- the package now costs 1,500. Would you buy it? Most people say, no. Why? Because it used to cost 700, and there's no way I'm paying 1,500 for something that was 700 last week. This tendency to compare to the past is causing people to pass up the better deal. In other words, a good deal that used to be a great deal is not nearly as good as an awful deal that was once a horrible deal. Here's another example of how comparing to the past can befuddle our decisions. Imagine that you're going to the theater. You're on your way to the theater. In your wallet you have a ticket, for which you paid 20 dollars. You also have a 20-dollar bill. When you arrive at the theater, you discover that somewhere along the way you've lost the ticket. Would you spend your remaining money on replacing it? Most people answer, no. Now, let's just change one thing in this scenario. You're on your way to the theater, and in your wallet you have two 20-dollar bills. When you arrive you discover you've lost one of them. Would you spend your remaining 20 dollars on a ticket? Well, of course, I went to the theater to see the play. What does the loss of 20 dollars along the way have to do? Now, just in case you're not getting it, here's a schematic of what happened, OK? (Laughter) Along the way, you lost something. In both cases, it was a piece of paper. In one case, it had a U.S. president on it; in the other case it didn't. What the hell difference should it make? The difference is that when you lost the ticket you say to yourself, I'm not paying twice for the same thing. You compare the cost of the play now -- 40 dollars -- to the cost that it used to have -- 20 dollars -- and you say it's a bad deal. Comparing with the past causes many of the problems that behavioral economists and psychologists identify in people's attempts to assign value. But even when we compare with the possible, instead of the past, we still make certain kinds of mistakes. And I'm going to show you one or two of them. One of the things we know about comparison: that when we compare one thing to the other, it changes its value. So in 1992, this fellow, George Bush, for those of us who were kind of on the liberal side of the political spectrum, didn't seem like such a great guy. Suddenly, we're almost longing for him to return. (Laughter) The comparison changes how we evaluate him. Now, retailers knew this long before anybody else did, of course, and they use this wisdom to help you -- spare you the undue burden of money. And so a retailer, if you were to go into a wine shop and you had to buy a bottle of wine, and you see them here for eight, 27 and 33 dollars, what would you do? Most people don't want the most expensive, they don't want the least expensive. So, they will opt for the item in the middle. If you're a smart retailer, then, you will put a very expensive item that nobody will ever buy on the shelf, because suddenly the $33 wine doesn't look as expensive in comparison. So I'm telling you something you already knew: namely, that comparison changes the value of things. Here's why that's a problem: the problem is that when you get that $33 bottle of wine home, it won't matter what it used to be sitting on the shelf next to. The comparisons we make when we are appraising value, where we're trying to estimate how much we'll like things, are not the same comparisons we'll be making when we consume them. This problem of shifting comparisons can bedevil our attempts to make rational decisions. Let me just give you an example. I have to show you something from my own lab, so let me sneak this in. These are subjects coming to an experiment to be asked the simplest of all questions: How much will you enjoy eating potato chips one minute from now? They're sitting in a room with potato chips in front of them. For some of the subjects, sitting in the far corner of a room is a box of Godiva chocolates, and for others is a can of Spam. In fact, these items that are sitting in the room change how much the subjects think they're going to enjoy the potato chips. Namely, those who are looking at Spam think potato chips are going to be quite tasty; those who are looking at Godiva chocolate think they won't be nearly so tasty. Of course, what happens when they eat the potato chips? Well, look, you didn't need a psychologist to tell you that when you have a mouthful of greasy, salty, crispy, delicious snacks, what's sitting in the corner of the room makes not a damn bit of difference to your gustatory experience. Nonetheless, their predictions are perverted by a comparison that then does not carry through and change their experience. You've all experienced this yourself, even if you've never come into our lab to eat potato chips. So here's a question: You want to buy a car stereo. The dealer near your house sells this particular stereo for 200 dollars, but if you drive across town, you can get it for 100 bucks. So would you drive to get 50 percent off, saving 100 dollars? Most people say they would. They can't imagine buying it for twice the price when, with one trip across town, they can get it for half off. Now, let's imagine instead you wanted to buy a car that had a stereo, and the dealer near your house had it for 31,000. But if you drove across town, you could get it for 30,900. Would you drive to get it? At this point, 0.003 savings -- the 100 dollars. Most people say, no, I'm going to schlep across town to save 100 bucks on the purchase of a car? This kind of thinking drives economists crazy, and it should. Because this 100 dollars that you save -- hello! -- doesn't know where it came from. It doesn't know what you saved it on. When you go to buy groceries with it, it doesn't go, I'm the money saved on the car stereo, or, I'm the dumb money saved on the car. It's money. And if a drive across town is worth 100 bucks, it's worth 100 bucks no matter what you're saving it on. People don't think that way. That's why they don't know whether their mutual fund manager is taking 0.1 percent or 0.15 percent of their investment, but they clip coupons to save one dollar off of toothpaste. Now, you can see, this is the problem of shifting comparisons, because what you're doing is, you're comparing the 100 bucks to the purchase that you're making, but when you go to spend that money you won't be making that comparison. You've all had this experience. If you're an American, for example, you've probably traveled in France. And at some point you may have met a couple from your own hometown, and you thought, "Oh, my God, these people are so warm. They're so nice to me. I mean, compared to all these people who hate me when I try to speak their language and hate me more when I don't, these people are just wonderful." And so you tour France with them, and then you get home and you invite them over for dinner, and what do you find? Compared to your regular friends, they are boring and dull, right? Because in this new context, the comparison is very, very different. In fact, you find yourself disliking them enough almost to qualify for French citizenship. Now, you have exactly the same problem when you shop for a stereo. You go to the stereo store, you see two sets of speakers -- these big, boxy, monoliths, and these little, sleek speakers, and you play them, and you go, you know, I do hear a difference: the big ones sound a little better. And so you buy them, and you bring them home, and you entirely violate the décor of your house. And the problem, of course, is that this comparison you made in the store is a comparison you'll never make again. What are the odds that years later you'll turn on the stereo and go, "Sounds so much better than those little ones," which you can't even remember hearing. The problem of shifting comparisons is even more difficult when these choices are arrayed over time. People have a lot of trouble making decisions about things that will happen at different points in time. And what psychologists and behavioral economists have discovered is that by and large people use two simple rules. So let me give you one very easy problem, a second very easy problem and then a third, hard, problem. Here's the first easy problem: You can have 60 dollars now or 50 dollars now. Which would you prefer? This is what we call a one-item IQ test, OK? All of us, I hope, prefer more money, and the reason is, we believe more is better than less. Here's the second problem: You can have 60 dollars today or 60 dollars in a month. Which would you prefer? Again, an easy decision, because we all know that now is better than later. What's hard in our decision-making is when these two rules conflict. For example, when you're offered 50 dollars now or 60 dollars in a month. This typifies a lot of situations in life in which you will gain by waiting, but you have to be patient. What do we know? What do people do in these kinds of situations? Well, by and large people are enormously impatient. That is, they require interest rates in the hundred or thousands of percents in order to delay gratification and wait until next month for the extra 10 dollars. Maybe that isn't so remarkable, but what is remarkable is how easy it is to make this impatience go away by simply changing when the delivery of these monetary units will happen. Imagine that you can have 50 dollars in a year -- that's 12 months -- or 60 dollars in 13 months. What do we find now? People are gladly willing to wait: as long as they're waiting 12, they might as well wait 13. What makes this dynamic inconsistency happen? Comparison. Troubling comparison. Let me show you. This is just a graph showing the results that I just suggested you would show if I gave you time to respond, which is, people find that the subjective value of 50 is higher than the subjective value of 60 when they'll be delivered in now or one month, respectively -- a 30-day delay -- but they show the reverse pattern when you push the entire decision off into the future a year. Now, why in the world do you get this pattern of results? These guys can tell us. What you see here are two lads, one of them larger than the other: the fireman and the fiddler. They are going to recede towards the vanishing point in the horizon, and I want you to notice two things. At no point will the fireman look taller than the fiddler. No point. However, the difference between them seems to be getting smaller. First it's an inch in your view, then it's a quarter-inch, then a half-inch, and then finally they go off the edge of the earth. Here are the results of what I just showed you. This is the subjective height -- the height you saw of these guys at various points. And I want you to see that two things are true. One, the farther away they are, the smaller they look; and two, the fireman is always bigger than the fiddler. But watch what happens when we make some of them disappear. Right. At a very close distance, the fiddler looks taller than the fireman, but at a far distance their normal, their true, relations are preserved. As Plato said, what space is to size, time is to value. These are the results of the hard problem I gave you: 60 now or 50 in a month? And these are subjective values, and what you can see is, our two rules are preserved. People always think more is better than less: 60 is always better than 50, and they always think now is better than later: the bars on this side are higher than the bars on this side. Watch what happens when we drop some out. Suddenly we have the dynamic inconsistency that puzzled us. We have the tendency for people to go for 50 dollars now over waiting a month, but not if that decision is far in the future. Notice something interesting that this implies -- namely, that when people get to the future, they will change their minds. That is, as that month 12 approaches, you will say, what was I thinking, waiting an extra month for 60 dollars? I'll take the 50 dollars now. Well, the question with which I'd like to end is this: If we're so damn stupid, how did we get to the moon? Because I could go on for about two hours with evidence of people's inability to estimate odds and inability to estimate value. The answer to this question, I think, is an answer you've already heard in some of the talks, and I dare say you will hear again: namely, that our brains were evolved for a very different world than the one in which we are living. They were evolved for a world in which people lived in very small groups, rarely met anybody who was terribly different from themselves, had rather short lives in which there were few choices and the highest priority was to eat and mate today. Bernoulli's gift, Bernoulli's little formula, allows us, it tells us how we should think in a world for which nature never designed us. That explains why we are so bad at using it, but it also explains why it is so terribly important that we become good, fast. We are the only species on this planet that has ever held its own fate in its hands. We have no significant predators, we're the masters of our physical environment; the things that normally cause species to become extinct are no longer any threat to us. The only thing -- the only thing -- that can destroy us and doom us are our own decisions. If we're not here in 10,000 years, it's going to be because we could not take advantage of the gift given to us by a young Dutch fellow in 1738, because we underestimated the odds of our future pains and overestimated the value of our present pleasures. Thank you. (Applause) Chris Anderson: That was remarkable. We have time for some questions for Dan Gilbert. One and two. Bill Lyell: Would you say that this mechanism is in part how terrorism actually works to frighten us, and is there some way that we could counteract that? Dan Gilbert: I actually was consulting recently with the Department of Homeland Security, which generally believes that American security dollars should go to making borders safer. I tried to point out to them that terrorism was a name based on people's psychological reaction to a set of events, and that if they were concerned about terrorism they might ask what causes terror and how can we stop people from being terrified, rather than -- not rather than, but in addition to stopping the atrocities that we're all concerned about. Surely the kinds of play that at least American media give to -- and forgive me, but in raw numbers these are very tiny accidents. We already know, for example, in the United States, more people have died as a result of not taking airplanes -- because they were scared -- and driving on highways, than were killed in 9/11. OK? If I told you that there was a plague that was going to kill 15,000 Americans next year, you might be alarmed if you didn't find out it was the flu. These are small-scale accidents, and we should be wondering whether they should get the kind of play, the kind of coverage, that they do. Surely that causes people to overestimate the likelihood that they'll be hurt in these various ways, and gives power to the very people who want to frighten us. CA: Dan, I'd like to hear more on this. So, you're saying that our response to terror is, I mean, it's a form of mental bug? Talk more about it. DG: It's out-sized. I mean, look. If Australia disappears tomorrow, terror is probably the right response. That's an awful large lot of very nice people. On the other hand, when a bus blows up and 30 people are killed, more people than that were killed by not using their seatbelts in the same country. Is terror the right response? CA: What causes the bug? Is it the drama of the event -- that it's so spectacular? Is it the fact that it's an intentional attack by, quote, outsiders? What is it? DG: Yes. It's a number of things, and you hit on several of them. First, it's a human agent trying to kill us -- it's not a tree falling on us by accident. Second, these are enemies who may want to strike and hurt us again. People are being killed for no reason instead of good reason -- as if there's good reason, but sometimes people think there are. So there are a number of things that together make this seem like a fantastic event, but let's not play down the fact that newspapers sell when people see something in it they want to read. So there's a large role here played by the media, who want these things to be as spectacular as they possibly can. CA: I mean, what would it take to persuade our culture to downplay it? DG: Well, go to Israel. You know, go to Israel. And a mall blows up, and then everybody's unhappy about it, and an hour-and-a-half later -- at least when I was there, and I was 150 feet from the mall when it blew up -- I went back to my hotel and the wedding that was planned was still going on. And as the Israeli mother said, she said, "We never let them win by stopping weddings." I mean, this is a society that has learned -- and there are others too -- that has learned to live with a certain amount of terrorism and not be quite as upset by it, shall I say, as those of us who have not had many terror attacks. CA: But is there a rational fear that actually, the reason we're frightened about this is because we think that the Big One is to come? DG: Yes, of course. So, if we knew that this was the worst attack there would ever be, there might be more and more buses of 30 people -- we would probably not be nearly so frightened. I don't want to say -- please, I'm going to get quoted somewhere as saying, "Terrorism is fine and we shouldn't be so distressed." That's not my point at all. What I'm saying is that, surely, rationally, our distress about things that happen, about threats, should be roughly proportional to the size of those threats and threats to come. I think in the case of terrorism, it isn't. And many of the things we've heard about from our speakers today -- how many people do you know got up and said, Poverty! I can't believe what poverty is doing to us. People get up in the morning; they don't care about poverty. It's not making headlines, it's not making news, it's not flashy. There are no guns going off. I mean, if you had to solve one of these problems, Chris, which would you solve? Terrorism or poverty? (Laughter) (Applause) That's a tough one. CA: There's no question. Poverty, by an order of magnitude, a huge order of magnitude, unless someone can show that there's, you know, terrorists with a nuke are really likely to come. The latest I've read, seen, thought is that it's incredibly hard for them to do that. If that turns out to be wrong, we all look silly, but with poverty it's a bit -- DG: Even if that were true, still more people die from poverty. CA: We've evolved to get all excited about these dramatic attacks. Is that because in the past, in the ancient past, we just didn't understand things like disease and systems that cause poverty and so forth, and so it made no sense for us as a species to put any energy into worrying about those things? People died; so be it. But if you got attacked, that was something you could do something about. And so we evolved these responses. Is that what happened? DG: Well, you know, the people who are most skeptical about leaping to evolutionary explanations for everything are the evolutionary psychologists themselves. My guess is that there's nothing quite that specific in our evolutionary past. But rather, if you're looking for an evolutionary explanation, you might say that most organisms are neo-phobic -- that is, they're a little scared of stuff that's new and different. And there's a good reason to be, because old stuff didn't eat you. Right? Any animal you see that you've seen before is less likely to be a predator than one that you've never seen before. So, you know, when a school bus is blown up and we've never seen this before, our general tendency is to orient towards that which is new and novel is activated. I don't think it's quite as specific a mechanism as the one you alluded to, but maybe a more fundamental one underlying it. Jay Walker: You know, economists love to talk about the stupidity of people who buy lottery tickets. But I suspect you're making the exact same error you're accusing those people of, which is the error of value. I know, because I've interviewed about 1,000 lottery buyers over the years. It turns out that the value of buying a lottery ticket is not winning. That's what you think it is. All right? The average lottery buyer buys about 150 tickets a year, so the buyer knows full well that he or she is going to lose, and yet she buys 150 tickets a year. Why is that? It's not because she is stupid or he is stupid. It's because the anticipation of possibly winning releases serotonin in the brain, and actually provides a good feeling until the drawing indicates you've lost. Or, to put it another way, for the dollar investment, you can have a much better feeling than flushing the money down the toilet, which you cannot have a good feeling from. Now, economists tend to -- (Applause) -- economists tend to view the world through their own lenses, which is: this is just a bunch of stupid people. And as a result, many people look at economists as stupid people. And so fundamentally, the reason we got to the moon is, we didn't listen to the economists. Thank you very much. (Applause) DG: Well, no, it's a great point. It remains to be seen whether the joy of anticipation is exactly equaled by the amount of disappointment after the lottery. Because remember, people who didn't buy tickets don't feel awful the next day either, even though they don't feel great during the drawing. I would disagree that people know they're not going to win. I think they think it's unlikely, but it could happen, which is why they prefer that to the flushing. But certainly I see your point: that there can be some utility to buying a lottery ticket other than winning. Now, I think there's many good reasons not to listen to economists. That isn't one of them, for me, but there's many others. CA: Last question. Aubrey de Grey: My name's Aubrey de Grey, from Cambridge. I work on the thing that kills more people than anything else kills -- I work on aging -- and I'm interested in doing something about it, as we'll all hear tomorrow. I very much resonate with what you're saying, because it seems to me that the problem with getting people interested in doing anything about aging is that by the time aging is about to kill you it looks like cancer or heart disease or whatever. Do you have any advice? (Laughter) DG: For you or for them? AdG: In persuading them. DG: Ah, for you in persuading them. Well, it's notoriously difficult to get people to be farsighted. But one thing that psychologists have tried that seems to work is to get people to imagine the future more vividly. One of the problems with making decisions about the far future and the near future is that we imagine the near future much more vividly than the far future. To the extent that you can equalize the amount of detail that people put into the mental representations of near and far future, people begin to make decisions about the two in the same way. So, would you like to have an extra 100,000 dollars when you're 65 is a question that's very different than, imagine who you'll be when you're 65: will you be living, what will you look like, how much hair will you have, who will you be living with. Once we have all the details of that imaginary scenario, suddenly we feel like it might be important to save so that that guy has a little retirement money. But these are tricks around the margins. I think in general you're battling a very fundamental human tendency, which is to say, "I'm here today, and so now is more important than later." CA: Dan, thank you. Members of the audience, that was a fantastic session. Thank you. (Applause)