"Target","Pred","Norm Target","Norm Pred"
" last year i showed these two slides so that demonstrate that the arctic ice cap which for most of the last three million years has been the size of the lower forty eight states has shrunk by forty percent but this understates the seriousness of this particular problem because it doesn't show the thickness of the ice the arctic ice cap is in a sense the beating heart of the global climate system it expands in winter and contracts in summer the next slide i show you will be a rapid fast forward of what's happened over the last twenty five years the permanent ice is marked in red and as you see it expands to the dark blue that's the annual ice in winter and it contracts in summer and the so called permanent ice five years old or older you can see is almost like blood spilling out of the body here in twenty five years it's gone from this to this this is a problem because the warming heats up the frozen ground around the arctic ocean where there is a massive amount of frozen carbon which when it thaws is turned into methane by microbes compared to the total amount of global warming pollution in the atmosphere that amount could double if we cross this tipping point already in some shallow lakes in alaska methane is actively bubbling up out of the water professor katey walter from the university of alaska went out with another team to another shallow lake last winter she's okay the question is whether we will be and one reason is this enormous heat sink heats up greenland from the north this is an annual melting river but the volumes are much larger than ever this is the kangerlussuaq river in southwest greenland if you want to know how sea level rises from land base ice melting this is where it reaches the sea these flows are increasing very rapidly at the other end of the planet antarctica the largest mass of ice on the planet last month scientists reported the entire continent is now in negative ice balance and west antarctica cropped up on top some under sea islands is particularly rapid in its melting that's equal to twenty feet of sea level as is greenland in the himalayas the third largest mass of ice at the top you see new lakes which a few years ago were glaciers forty percent of all the people in the world get half of their drinking water from that melting flow in the andes this glacier is the source of drinking water for this city the flows have increased but when they go away so does much of the drinking water in california there has been a forty percent decline in the sierra snowpack this is hitting the reservoirs and the predictions as you've read are serious this drying around the world has lead to a dramatic increase in fires and the disasters around the world have been increasing at an absolutely extraordinary and unprecedented rate four times as many in the last thirty years as in the previous seventy five this is a completely unsustainable pattern if you look at in the context of history you can see what this is doing in the last five years we've added seventy million tons of co two every twenty four hours twenty five million tons every day to the oceans look carefully at the area of the eastern pacific from the americas extending westward and on either side of the indian subcontinent where there is a radical depletion of oxygen in the oceans the biggest single cause of global warming along with deforestation which is twenty percent of it is the burning of fossil fuels oil is a problem and coal is the most serious problem the united states is one of the two largest emitters along with china and the proposal has been to build a lot more coal plants but we're beginning to see a sea change here are the ones that have been cancelled in the last few years with some green alternatives proposed however there is a political battle in our country and the coal industries and the oil industries spent a quarter of a billion dollars in the last calendar year promoting clean coal which is an oxymoron that image reminded me of something around christmas in my home in tennessee a billion gallons of coal sludge was spilled you probably saw it on the news this all over the country is the second largest waste stream in america this happened around christmas one of the coal industry's ads around christmas was this one this is the source of much of the coal in west virginia the largest mountaintop miner is the head of massey coal so the alliance for climate protection has launched two campaigns this is one of them part of one of them finally the positive alternative meshes with our economic challenge and our national security challenge this is the last one there is an old african proverb that says if you want to go quickly go alone if you want to go far go together we need to go far quickly thank you very much"," Last year, I showed these two slides that demonstrate that the Arctic ice cap, which for most of the last 3 million years has been the size of the lower 48 states, has shrunk by 40%. But this understates the seriousness of this particular problem because it doesn't show the thickness of the ice. The Arctic ice cap is, in a sense, the beating heart of the global climate system. It expands in winter and contracts in summer. The next slide I show you will be a rapid fast-forward of what's happened over the last 25 years. The permanent ice is marked in red and as you see it expands to the dark blue. That's the annual ice in winter and it contracts in summer. And the so-called permanent ice, five years old or older older you can see it's almost like blood Spilling out of the body here in 25 years. It's gone from this to this This is a problem because the warming Heats up the frozen ground around the Arctic Ocean where there is a massive amount of frozen carbon Which when it thaws is turned into methane by microbes which when it thaws is turned into methane by microbes. Compared to the total amount of global warming pollution in the atmosphere, that amount could double if we cross this tipping point. Already in some shallow lakes in Alaska, methane is actively bubbling up out of the water. Professor Katie Walter from the University of Alaska went out with another team to another shallow lake last winter. She's okay, the question is whether we will be. And one reason is this enormous heat sink heats up Greenland from the north. This is an annual melting river, but the volumes are much larger than ever. This is the Kangarloosik River in southwest Greenland. If you wanna know how sea level rises from land-based ice melting, this is where it reaches the sea. These flows are increasing very rapidly. At the other end of the planet, Antarctica, the largest mass of ice on the planet, last month scientists reported the entire continent is now in negative ice balance. And West Antarctica, propped up on tops of undersea islands, is particularly rapid in its melting. That's equal to 20 feet of sea level, as is Greenland. In the Himalayas, the third largest mass of ice, at the top you see new lakes, which a few years ago were glaciers. 40% of all the people in the world get half of their drinking water from that melting flow. In the Andes, this glacier is the source of drinking water for this city. The flows have increased, but when they go away, so does much of the drinking water. In California, there's been a 40% decline in the Sierra snowpack. This is hitting the reservoirs, and the predictions, as you've read, are serious. This drying around the world has led to a dramatic increase in fires, and the disasters around the world have been increasing at an absolutely extraordinary and unprecedented rate, four times as many in the last 30 years as in the previous 75. This is a completely unsustainable pattern. If you look at it in the context of history, you can see what this is doing. In the last five years, we've added 70 million tons of CO2 every 24 hours, 25 million tons every day to the oceans. Look carefully at the area of the Eastern Pacific from the Americas extending westward, and on either side of the Indian subcontinent, where there is a radical depletion of oxygen in the oceans. The biggest single cause of global warming, along with deforestation, which is 20% of it, is the burning of fossil fuels. Oil is a problem, and coal is the most serious problem. The United States is one of the two largest emitters, along with China. And the proposal has been to build a lot more coal plants. But we're beginning to see a sea change. Here are the ones that have been canceled in the last few years, with some green alternatives proposed. However, there is a political battle in our country, and the coal industry and the oil industry spent a quarter of a billion dollars in the last calendar year promoting clean coal, which is an oxymoron. That image reminded me of something. Around Christmas in my home in Tennessee, a billion gallons of coal sludge was spilled. You probably saw it on the news. This all over the country is the second largest waste stream in America. This happened around Christmas. One of the coal industry's ads around Christmas was this one. This is the source of much of the coal in West Virginia. The largest mountaintop miner is the head of Massey Coal. So the Alliance for Climate Protection has launched two campaigns. This is one of them, part of one of them. Finally, the positive alternative meshes with our economic challenge and our national security challenge. This is the last one. There's an old African proverb that says, if you want to go quickly, go alone. If you want to go quickly go alone, if you want to go far go together. We need to go far quickly. Thank you very much.","last year i showed these 2 slides so that demonstrate that the arctic ice cap which for most of the last 3000000 years has been the size of the lower 48 states has shrunk by 40% but this understates the seriousness of this particular problem because it does not show the thickness of the ice the arctic ice cap is in a sense the beating heart of the global climate system it expands in winter and contracts in summer the next slide i show you will be a rapid fast forward of what is happened over the last 25 years the permanent ice is marked in red and as you see it expands to the dark blue that is the annual ice in winter and it contracts in summer and the so called permanent ice 5 years old or older you can see is almost like blood spilling out of the body here in 25 years it has gone from this to this this is a problem because the warming heats up the frozen ground around the arctic ocean where there is a massive amount of frozen carbon which when it thaws is turned into methane by microbes compared to the total amount of global warming pollution in the atmosphere that amount could double if we cross this tipping point already in some shallow lakes in alaska methane is actively bubbling up out of the water professor katey walter from the university of alaska went out with another team to another shallow lake last winter she is okay the question is whether we will be and one reason is this enormous heat sink heats up greenland from the north this is an annual melting river but the volumes are much larger than ever this is the kangerlussuaq river in southwest greenland if you want to know how sea level rises from land base ice melting this is where it reaches the sea these flows are increasing very rapidly at the other end of the planet antarctica the largest mass of ice on the planet last month scientists reported the entire continent is now in negative ice balance and west antarctica cropped up on top some under sea islands is particularly rapid in its melting that is equal to 20 feet of sea level as is greenland in the himalayas the 3rd largest mass of ice at the top you see new lakes which a few years ago were glaciers 40% of all the people in the world get half of their drinking water from that melting flow in the andes this glacier is the source of drinking water for this city the flows have increased but when they go away so does much of the drinking water in california there has been a 40% decline in the sierra snowpack this is hitting the reservoirs and the predictions as you have read are serious this drying around the world has lead to a dramatic increase in fires and the disasters around the world have been increasing at an absolutely extraordinary and unprecedented rate 4 times as many in the last 30 years as in the previous 75 this is a completely unsustainable pattern if you look at in the context of history you can see what this is doing in the last 5 years we have added 70000000 tons of co 2 every 24 hours 25000000 tons every day to the oceans look carefully at the area of the eastern pacific from the americas extending westward and on either side of the indian subcontinent where there is a radical depletion of oxygen in the oceans the biggest single cause of global warming along with deforestation which is 20% of it is the burning of fossil fuels oil is a problem and coal is the most serious problem the united states is one of the 2 largest emitters along with china and the proposal has been to build a lot more coal plants but we are beginning to see a sea change here are the ones that have been canceled in the last few years with some green alternatives proposed however there is a political battle in our country and the coal industries and the oil industries spent a quarter of a $1000000000 in the last calendar year promoting clean coal which is an oxymoron that image reminded me of something around christmas in my home in tennessee a 1000000000 gallons of coal sludge was spilled you probably saw it on the news this all over the country is the 2nd largest waste stream in america this happened around christmas one of the coal industry is ads around christmas was this one this is the source of much of the coal in west virginia the largest mountaintop miner is the head of massey coal so the alliance for climate protection has launched 2 campaigns this is one of them part of one of them finally the positive alternative meshes with our economic challenge and our national security challenge this is the last one there is an old african proverb that says if you want to go quickly go alone if you want to go far go together we need to go far quickly thank you very much","last year i showed these 2 slides that demonstrate that the arctic ice cap which for most of the last 3000000 years has been the size of the lower 48 states has shrunk by 40% but this understates the seriousness of this particular problem because it does not show the thickness of the ice the arctic ice cap is in a sense the beating heart of the global climate system it expands in winter and contracts in summer the next slide i show you will be a rapid fast forward of what is happened over the last 25 years the permanent ice is marked in red and as you see it expands to the dark blue that is the annual ice in winter and it contracts in summer and the so called permanent ice 5 years old or older older you can see it is almost like blood spilling out of the body here in 25 years it has gone from this to this this is a problem because the warming heats up the frozen ground around the arctic ocean where there is a massive amount of frozen carbon which when it thaws is turned into methane by microbes which when it thaws is turned into methane by microbes compared to the total amount of global warming pollution in the atmosphere that amount could double if we cross this tipping point already in some shallow lakes in alaska methane is actively bubbling up out of the water professor katie walter from the university of alaska went out with another team to another shallow lake last winter she is okay the question is whether we will be and one reason is this enormous heat sink heats up greenland from the north this is an annual melting river but the volumes are much larger than ever this is the kangarloosik river in southwest greenland if you want to know how sea level rises from land based ice melting this is where it reaches the sea these flows are increasing very rapidly at the other end of the planet antarctica the largest mass of ice on the planet last month scientists reported the entire continent is now in negative ice balance and west antarctica propped up on tops of undersea islands is particularly rapid in its melting that is equal to 20 feet of sea level as is greenland in the himalayas the 3rd largest mass of ice at the top you see new lakes which a few years ago were glaciers 40% of all the people in the world get half of their drinking water from that melting flow in the andes this glacier is the source of drinking water for this city the flows have increased but when they go away so does much of the drinking water in california there has been a 40% decline in the sierra snowpack this is hitting the reservoirs and the predictions as you have read are serious this drying around the world has led to a dramatic increase in fires and the disasters around the world have been increasing at an absolutely extraordinary and unprecedented rate 4 times as many in the last 30 years as in the previous 75 this is a completely unsustainable pattern if you look at it in the context of history you can see what this is doing in the last 5 years we have added 70000000 tons of co 2 every 24 hours 25000000 tons every day to the oceans look carefully at the area of the eastern pacific from the americas extending westward and on either side of the indian subcontinent where there is a radical depletion of oxygen in the oceans the biggest single cause of global warming along with deforestation which is 20% of it is the burning of fossil fuels oil is a problem and coal is the most serious problem the united states is one of the 2 largest emitters along with china and the proposal has been to build a lot more coal plants but we are beginning to see a sea change here are the ones that have been canceled in the last few years with some green alternatives proposed however there is a political battle in our country and the coal industry and the oil industry spent a quarter of a $1000000000 in the last calendar year promoting clean coal which is an oxymoron that image reminded me of something around christmas in my home in tennessee a 1000000000 gallons of coal sludge was spilled you probably saw it on the news this all over the country is the 2nd largest waste stream in america this happened around christmas one of the coal industry is ads around christmas was this one this is the source of much of the coal in west virginia the largest mountaintop miner is the head of massey coal so the alliance for climate protection has launched 2 campaigns this is one of them part of one of them finally the positive alternative meshes with our economic challenge and our national security challenge this is the last one there is an old african proverb that says if you want to go quickly go alone if you want to go quickly go alone if you want to go far go together we need to go far quickly thank you very much"
" i'm going to talk to you about some stuff that's in this book of mine that i hope will resonate with other things you've already heard and i'll try to make some connections myself in case you miss them i want to start with what i call the official dogma the official dogma of what the official dogma of all western industrial societies and the official dogma runs like this if we are interested in maximizing the welfare of our citizens the way to do that is to maximize individual freedom the reason for this is both that freedom is in and of itself good valuable worthwhile essential to being human and because if people have freedom then each of us can act on our own to do the things that will maximize our welfare and no one has to decide on our behalf the way to maximize freedom is to maximize choice the more choice people have the more freedom they have and the more freedom they have the more welfare they have this i think is so deeply embedded in the water supply that it wouldn't occur to anyone to question it and it's also deeply embedded in our lives i'll give you some examples of what modern progress has made possible for us this is my supermarket not such a big one i want to say just a word about salad dressing a hundred and seventy five salad dressings in my supermarket if you don't count the ten extra virgin olive oils and twelve balsamic vinegars you could buy to make a very large number of your own salad dressings in the off chance that none of the hundred seventy five the store has on offer suit you so this is what the supermarket is like and then you go to the consumer electronics store to set up a stereo system speakers cd player tape player tuner amplifier and in this one single consumer electronics store there are that many stereo systems we can construct six and a half million different stereo systems out of the components that are on offer in one store you've got to admit that's a lot of choice in other domains the world of communications there was a time when i was a boy when you could get any kind of telephone service you wanted as long as it came from ma bell you rented your phone you didn't buy it one consequence of that by the way is that the phone never broke and those days are gone we now have an almost unlimited variety of phones especially in the world of cell phones these are cell phones of the future my favorite is the middle one the mp three player nose hair trimmer and creme brulee torch and if if by some chance you haven't seen that in your store yet you can rest assured that one day soon you will and what this does is it leads people to walk into their stores asking this question and do you know what the answer to this question now is the answer is no it is not possible to buy a cell phone that doesn't do too much so in other aspects of life that are much more significant than buying things the same explosion of choice is true health care it is no longer the case in the united states that you go to the doctor and the doctor tells you what to do instead you go to the doctor and the doctor tells you well we could do a or we could do b a has these benefits and these risks b has these benefits and these risks what do you want to do and you say doc what should i do and the doc says a has these benefits and risks and b has these benefits and risks what do you want to do and you say if you were me doc what would you do and the doc says but i'm not you and the result is we call it patient autonomy which makes it sound like a good thing but what it really is is a shifting of the burden and the responsibility for decision making from somebody who knows something namely the doctor to somebody who knows nothing and is almost certainly sick and thus not in the best shape to be making decisions namely the patient there's enormous marketing of prescription drugs to people like you and me which if you think about it makes no sense at all since we can't buy them why do they market to us if we can't buy them the answer is that they expect us to call our doctors the next morning and ask our prescriptions to be changed something as dramatic as our identity has now become a matter of choice as this slide is meant to indicate we get to we don't inherit an identity we get to invent it and we get to re invent ourselves as often as we like and that means that every day when you wake up in the morning you have to decide what kind of person you want to be in with respect to marriage and family there was a time when the default assumption that almost everyone had is that you got married as soon as you could and then you started having kids as soon as you could the only real choice was who not when and not what you did after nowadays everything is very much up for grabs i teach wonderfully intelligent students and i assign twenty percent less work than i used to and it's not because they're less smart and it's not because they're less diligent it's because they are preoccupied asking themselves should i get married or not should i get married now should i get married later should i have kids first or a career first all of these are consuming questions and they're going to answer these questions whether or not it means not doing all the work i assign and not getting a good grade in my courses and indeed they should these are important questions to answer work we are blessed as carl was pointing out with the technology that enables us to work every minute of every day from any place on the planet except the randolph hotel there is one corner by the way that i'm not going to tell anybody about where you actually where the where the hi wifi works i'm not telling you about it because i want to use it so what this means this incredible freedom of choice we have with respect to work is that we have to make a decision again and again and again about whether we should or shouldn't be working we can go to watch our kid play soccer and we have our cell phone on one hip and our blackberry on our other hip and our laptop presumably on our laps and even if they're all shut off every minute that we're watching our kid mutilate a soccer game we are also asking ourselves should i answer this cell phone call should i respond to this email should i draft this letter and even if the answer to the question is no it's certainly going to make the experience of your kid's soccer game very different than it would've been so everywhere we look big things and small things material things and lifestyle things life is a matter of choice and the world we used to live in looked like this that is to say there were some choices but not everything was a matter of choice and the world we now live in looks like this and the question is is this good news or bad news and the answer is yes we all know what's good about it so i'm going to talk about what's bad about it all of this choice has two effects two negative effects on people one effect paradoxically is that it produces paralysis rather than liberation with so many options to choose from people find it very difficult to choose at all i'll give you one very dramatic example of this a study that was done of investments in voluntary retirement plans a colleague of mine got access to investment records from vanguard the gigantic mutual fund company of about a million employees and about two thousand different workplaces and what she found is that for every ten mutual funds the employer offered rate of participation went down two percent you offer fifty funds ten percent fewer employees participate than if you only offer five why because with fifty funds to choose from it's so damn hard to decide which fund to choose that you'll just put it off until tomorrow and then tomorrow and then tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow and of course tomorrow never comes understand that not only does this mean that people are gonna have to eat dog food when they retire because they don't have enough money put away it also means that making the decision is so hard that they pass up significant matching money from the employer by not participating they are passing up as much as five thousand dollars a year from the employer who would happily match their contribution so paralysis is a consequence of having too many choices and i think it makes the world look like this you really want to get the decision right if it's for all eternity right you don't want to pick the wrong mutual fund or even the wrong salad dressing so that's one effect the second effect is that even if we manage to overcome the paralysis and make a choice we end up less satisfied with the result of the choice than we would be if we had fewer options to choose from and there are several reasons for this one of them is that with a lot of different salad dressings to choose from if you buy one and it's not perfect and you know what salad dressing is it's easy to imagine that you could have made a different choice that would have been better and what happens is this imagined alternative induces you to regret the decision you made and this regret subtracts from the satisfaction you get out of the decision you made even if it was a good decision the more options there are the easier it is to regret anything at all that is disappointing about the option that you chose second what economists call opportunity costs dan gilbert made a big point this morning of talking about how how much the the way in which we value things depends on what we compare them to well when there are lots of alternatives to consider it is easy to imagine the attractive features of alternatives that you reject that make you less satisfied with the alternative that you've chosen here is an example for those of you who aren't new yorkers i apologize but here's what you're supposed to be thinking here's this couple on the hamptons very expensive real estate gorgeous beach beautiful day they have it all to themselves what could be better well damn it this guy is thinking it's august everybody in my manhattan neighborhood is away i could be parking right in front of my building and he spends two weeks nagged by the idea that he is missing the opportunity day after day to have a great parking space opportunity costs subtract from the satisfaction we get out of what we choose even when what we choose is terrific and the more options there are to consider the more attractive features of these options are going to be reflected by us as opportunity costs here's another example now now this cartoon makes a lot of points it makes points about living in the moment as well and probably about doing things slowly but one point it makes is that whenever you're choosing one thing you're choosing not to do other things and those other things may have lots of attractive features and it's going to make what you're doing less attractive third escalation of expectations this hit me when i went to replace my jeans i wear jeans almost all the time and there was a time when jeans came in one flavor and you bought them and they fit like crap and they were incredibly uncomfortable and if you wore them long enough and washed them enough times they started to feel feel ok so i went to replace my jeans after years and years of wearing these old ones and i said i you know i want a pair of jeans here's my size and the shopkeeper said do you want slim fit easy fit relaxed fit you want button fly or zipper fly you want stonewashed or acid washed do you want them distressed you want boot cut you want tapered blah blah blah on and on he went my jaw dropped and after i recovered i said i want the kind that used to be the only kind he had no idea what that was so i spent an hour trying on all these damn jeans and i walked out of the store truth with the best fitting jeans i had ever had i did better all this choice made it possible for me to do better but i felt worse why i wrote a whole book to try and explain this to myself the reason is the reason i felt worse is that with all of these options available my expectations about how good a pair of jeans should be went up i had very low exp i had no particular expectations when they only came in one flavor when they came in a hundred flavors damn it one of them should've been perfect and what i got was good but it wasn't perfect and so i compared what i got to what i expected and what i got was disappointing in comparison to what i expected adding options to people's lives can't help but increase the expectations people have about how good those options will be and what that's going to produce is less satisfaction with results even when they're good results nobody in the world of marketing knows this cause if they did you wouldn't all know what this was about the truth is more like this the reason that everything was better back when everything was worse is that when everything was worse it was actually possible for people to have experiences that were a pleasant surprise nowadays the world we live in we affluent industrialized citizens with perfection the expectation the best you can ever hope for is that this stuff is as good as you expect it to be you will never be pleasantly surprised because your expectations my expectations have gone through the roof the secret to happiness this is what you all came for the secret to happiness is low expectations i want to say just a little autobiographical moment that i i actually am married to a wife and and she's really quite wonderful i couldn't have done better i didn't settle but settling isn't always such a bad thing finally one consequence of buying a bad fitting pair of jeans when there is only one kind to buy is that when you are dissatisfied and you ask why who's responsible the answer is clear the world is responsible what could you do when there are hundreds of different styles of jeans available and you buy one that is disappointing and you ask why who's responsible it is equally clear that the answer to the question is you you could have done better with a thous with a hundred different kinds of jeans on display there is no excuse for failure and so when people make decisions and even though though the results of the decisions are good they feel disappointed about them they blame themselves clinical depression has exploded in the industrial world in the last generation i believe a significant not the only but a significant contributor to this explosion of depression and also suicide is that people have experiences that are disappointing because their standards are so high and then when they have to explain these experiences to themselves they think they're at fault and so the net result is that we do better and in general objectively and we feel worse so let me remind you this is the official dogma the one that we all take to be true and it's all false it is not true there's no question that some choice is better than none but it doesn't follow from that that more choice is better than some choice there's some magical amount i don't know what it is i'm pretty confident that we have long since passed the point where options improve our welfare now as a policy matter i'm almost done as a policy matter the thing to think about is this what enables all of this choice in industrial societies is material affluence there are lots of places in the world and we have heard about several of them where the their problem is not that they have too much choice their problem is that they have too little so the stuff i'm talking about is the peculiar problem of modern affluent western societies and what is so frustrating and infuriating is this steve levitt talked to you yesterday about how these expensive and difficult to install infants child seats don't help it's a waste of money what i'm telling you is that these expensive complicated choices it's not simply that they don't help they actually hurt they actually make us worse off if some of what enables people in our societies to make all of the choices we make were shifted to societies in which people have too few options not only would those people's lives be improved but ours would be improved also this is what economists call a pareto improving move income redistribution will make everyone better off not just poor people because of how all this excess choice plagues us so to conclude you're supposed to read this cartoon and being a sophisticated person say ah what does this fish know you know nothing is possible in this fishbowl impoverished imagination a myopic view of the world and that's the way i read it at first the more i thought about it however the more i came to the view that this fish knows something because the truth of the matter is that if you shatter the fishbowl so that everything is possible you don't have freedom you have paralysis if you shatter this fishbowl so that everything is possible you decrease satisfaction you increase paralysis and you decrease satisfaction everybody needs a fishbowl this one is almost certainly too limited perhaps even for the fish certainly for us but the absence of some metaphorical fishbowl is a recipe for misery and i suspect disaster thank you very much"," I'm going to talk to you about some stuff that's in this book of mine that I hope will resonate with other things that you've already heard, and I'll try to make some connections myself in case you miss them. But I want to start with what I call the official dogma. The official dogma of what? The official dogma of all Western industrial societies. And the official dogma runs like this. If we are interested in maximizing the welfare of our citizens, the way to do that is to maximize individual freedom. The reason for this is both that freedom is in and of itself good, valuable, worthwhile, essential to being human, and because if people have freedom, then each of us can act on our own to do the things that will maximize our welfare, and no one has to decide on our behalf. The way to maximize freedom is to maximize choice. The more choice people have, the more freedom they have, and the more freedom they have, the more welfare they have. This, I think, is so deeply embedded in the water supply that it wouldn't occur to anyone to question it. And it's also deeply embedded in our lives. I'll give you some examples of what modern progress has made possible for us. This is my supermarket. Not such a big one. I want to say just a word about salad dressing. 175 salad dressings in my supermarket. If you don't count the 10 extra virgin olive oils and 12 balsamic vinegars you could buy to make a very large number of your own salad dressings in the off chance that none of the 175 the store has on offer suits you. So this is what the supermarket is like. And then you go to the consumer electronics store to set up a stereo system, speakers, CD player, tape player, tuner, amplifier, and in this one single consumer electronics store there are that many stereo systems. We can construct six and 1 half million different stereo systems out of the components that are on offer in one store. You've got to admit, that's a lot of choice. In other domains, the world of communications, there was a time when I was a boy, when you could get any kind of telephone service you wanted, as long as it came from Ma Bell. You rented your phone, you didn't buy it. One consequence of that, by the way, is that the phone never broke. And those days are gone. We now have an almost unlimited variety of phones, especially in the world of cell phones. These are cell phones of the future. My favorite is the middle one, the MP3 player, nose hair trimmer, and creme brulee torch. And if by some chance you haven't seen that in your store yet, you can rest assured that one day soon you will. And what this does is it leads people to walk into their stores asking this question. And do you know what the answer to this question now is? The answer is no. It is not possible to buy a cell phone that doesn't do too much. So in other aspects of life that are much more significant than buying things, the same explosion of choice is true. Healthcare. It is no longer the case in the United States that you go to the doctor and the doctor tells you what to do. Instead you go to the doctor and the doctor tells you what to do. Instead, you go to the doctor and the doctor tells you, well, we could do A or we could do B. A has these benefits and these risks. B has these benefits and these risks. What do you want to do? And you say, doc, what should I do? And the doc says, A has these benefits and risks, and B has these benefits and risks. What do you want to do? And you say, if you were me, doc, what would you do? And the doc says, but I'm not you. And the result is, we call it patient autonomy, which makes it sound like a good thing, but what it really is is a shifting of the burden and the responsibility for decision making from somebody who knows something, namely the doctor, to somebody who knows nothing and is almost certainly sick and thus not in the best shape to be making decisions, namely the patient. There's enormous marketing of prescription drugs to people like you and me, which if you think about it makes no sense at all since we can't buy them. Why do they market to us if we can't buy them? The answer is that they expect us to call our doctors the next morning and ask for our prescriptions to be changed. Something as dramatic as our identity has now become a matter of choice, as this slide is meant to indicate. We get to...we don't inherit an identity, we get to invent it and we get to reinvent ourselves as often as we like. And that means that every day when you wake up in the morning, you have to decide what kind of person you want to be. With respect to marriage and family, there was a time when the default assumption that almost everyone had is that you got married as soon as you could and then you started having kids as soon as you could, and then you started having kids as soon as you could. The only real choice was who, not when, and not what you did after. Nowadays, everything is very much up for grabs. I teach wonderfully intelligent students, and I assign 20% less work than I used to, and it's not because they're less smart, and it's not because they're less diligent, and it's not because they're less diligent, it's because they are preoccupied, asking themselves, should I get married or not? Should I get married now? Should I get married later? Should I have kids first or a career first? All of these are consuming questions, and they're gonna answer these questions whether or not it means not doing all the work I assign and not getting a good grade in my courses. And indeed, they should. These are important questions to answer. Work. We are blessed, as Carl was pointing out, with the technology that enables us to work every minute of every day from any place on the planet, except the Randolph Hotel. There is one corner, by the way, that I'm not going to tell anybody about where you actually where the Wi-Fi works. I'm not telling you about it because I want to use it. So what this means, this incredible freedom of choice we have with respect to work, is that we have to make a decision again and again and again about whether we should or shouldn't be working. We can go to watch our kid play soccer and and we have our cell phone on one hip, and our Blackberry on our other hip, and our laptop, presumably, on our laps. And even if they're all shut off, every minute that we're watching our kid mutilate a soccer game, we are also asking ourselves, should I answer this cell phone call, should I respond to this email, should I draft this letter? And even if the answer to the question is no, it's certainly going to make the experience of your kid's soccer game very different than it would have been. So everywhere we look, big things and small things, material things and lifestyle things, life is a matter of choice. And the world we used to live in looked like this. That is to say, there were some choices, but not everything was a matter of choice. And the world we now live in looks like this. And the question is, is this good news or bad news? And the answer is yes. We all know what's good about it, so I'm going to talk about what's bad about it. All of this choice has two effects, two negative effects on people. One effect, paradoxically, is that it produces paralysis rather than liberation. With so many options to choose from, people find it very difficult to choose at all. I'll give you one very dramatic example of this, a study that was done of investments in voluntary retirement plans. A colleague of mine got access to investment records from Vanguard, the gigantic mutual fund company of about a million employees in about 2,000 different workplaces. And what she found is that for every 10 mutual funds the employer offered, rate of participation went down 2%. You offer 50 funds, 10% fewer employees participate than if you only offer five. Why? Because with 50 funds to choose from, it's so damn hard to decide which fund to choose that you'll just put it off till tomorrow, and then tomorrow, and then tomorrow, and tomorrow, and tomorrow, and of course tomorrow never comes. Understand that not only does this mean that people are going to have to eat dog food when they retire because they don't have enough money put away, it also means that making the decision is so hard that they pass up significant matching money from the employer. By not participating, they are passing up as much as $5,000 a year from the employer who would happily match their contribution. So paralysis is a consequence of having too many choices, and I think it makes the world look like this. You really want to get the decision right if it's for all eternity, right? You don't want to pick the wrong mutual if it's for all eternity, right? You don't want to pick the wrong mutual fund or even the wrong salad dressing. So that's one effect. The second effect is that even if we manage to overcome the paralysis and make a choice, we end up less satisfied with the result of the choice than we would be if we had fewer options to choose from. And there are several reasons for this. One of them is that with a lot of different salad dressings to choose from, if you buy one and it's not perfect, and you know what salad dressing is, it's easy to imagine that you could have made a different choice that would have been better. And what happens is this imagined alternative induces you to regret the decision you made, and this regret subtracts from the satisfaction you get out of the decision you made, even if it was a good decision. The more options there are, the easier it is to regret anything at all that is disappointing about the option that you chose. Second, what economists call opportunity costs. Dan Gilbert made a big point this morning of talking about how much the way in which we value things depends on what we compare them to. Well, when there are lots of alternatives to consider, it is easy to imagine the attractive features of alternatives that you reject that make you less satisfied with the alternative that you've chosen. Here's an example. For those of you who aren't New Yorkers, I apologize. But here's what you're supposed to be thinking. Here's this couple on the Hamptons, very expensive real estate, gorgeous beach, beautiful day, they have it all to themselves. What could be better? Well, damn it, this guy is thinking it's August, everybody in my Manhattan neighborhood is away, I could be parking everybody in my Manhattan neighborhood is away, I could be parking right in front of my building. And he spends two weeks nagged by the idea that he is missing the opportunity day after day to have a great parking space. Opportunity costs subtract from the satisfaction we get out of what we choose, even when what we choose is terrific. And the more options there are to consider, the more attractive features of these options are going to be reflected by us as opportunity costs. Here's another example. Now, this cartoon makes a lot of points. It makes points about living in the moment as well, and probably about doing things slowly. But one point it makes is that whenever you're choosing one thing you're choosing not to do other things and those other things may have lots of attractive features and it's going to make what you're doing less attractive. Third, escalation of expectations. This hit me when I went to replace my jeans. I wear jeans almost all the time and there was a time when jeans came in one flavor and and you bought them, and they fit like crap, and they were incredibly uncomfortable, and if you wore them long enough and washed them enough times, they started to fit, feel okay. So I went to replace my jeans after years and years of wearing these old ones, and I said, I want a pair of jeans, here's my size, and the shopkeeper said, do you want slim fit, easy fit, relaxed fit? Do you want button fly or zipper fly? Do you want stonew washed or acid washed? Do you want them distressed? Do you want boot cut? Do you want tapered? Blah, blah, blah, on and on. He went. My jaw dropped. And after I recovered, I said, I want the kind that used to be the only kind. He had no idea what that was. So I spent an hour trying on all these damn jeans and I walked out of the store, truth, with the best fitting jeans I had ever had. I did better. All this choice made it possible for me to do better. But I felt worse. Why? I wrote a whole book to try to explain this to myself. The reason is, the reason I felt worse is that with all of these options available, my expectations about how good a pair of jeans should be went up. I had no particular expectations when they only came in one flavor. When they came in a hundred flavors, damn it, one of them should have been perfect. And what I got was good, but it wasn't perfect. And so I compared what I got to what I expected, and what I got was disappointing in comparison to what I expected. Adding options to people's lives can't help but increase the expectations people have about how good those options will be. And what that's going to produce is less satisfaction with results, even when they're good results. Nobody in the world of marketing knows this. Because if they did, you wouldn't all know what this was about. The truth is more like this. The reason that everything was better back when everything was worse is that when everything was worse, it was actually possible for people to have experiences that were a pleasant surprise. Nowadays, the world we live in, we affluent industrialized citizens, with perfection, the expectation, the best you can ever hope for is that stuff is as good as you expect it to be. You will never be pleasantly surprised because your expectations, my expectations have gone through the roof. The secret to happiness, this is what you all came for, have gone through the roof. The secret to happiness, this is what you all came for, the secret to happiness is low expectations. I want to say just a little autobiographical moment that I actually am married to a wife, and she's really quite wonderful. I couldn't have done better. I didn't settle. But settling isn't always such a bad thing. Finally, one consequence of buying a bad-fitting pair of jeans when there is only one kind to buy is that when you are dissatisfied and you ask why, who's responsible? The answer is clear. The world is responsible. What could you do? When there are hundreds of different styles of jeans available and you buy one that is disappointing, and you ask, why? Who's responsible? It is equally clear that the answer to the question is you. You could have done better. With a hundred different kinds of genes on display, there is no excuse for failure. And so when people make decisions, and even though the results of the decisions are good, they feel disappointed about them, they blame themselves. Clinical depression has exploded in the industrial world in the last generation. I believe a significant, not the only, but a significant contributor to this explosion of depression and also suicide is that people have experiences that are disappointing because their standards are so high, and then when they have to explain these experiences to themselves, they think they're at fault. And so the net result is that we do better in general, objectively, and we feel worse. So let me remind you, this is the official dogma, the one that we all take to be true, and it's all false. It is not true. There's no question that some choice is better than none, but it doesn't follow from that that more choice is better than some choice. There's some magical amount. I don't know what it is. I'm pretty confident that we have long since passed the point where options improve our welfare. Now, as a policy matter, I'm pretty confident that we have long since passed the point where options improve our welfare. Now, as a policy matter, I'm almost done. As a policy matter, the thing to think about is this. What enables all of this choice in industrial societies is material affluence. There are lots of places in the world, and we have heard about several of them, where their problem is not that they have too much choice, their problem is that they have too little. So the stuff I'm talking about is the peculiar problem of modern, affluent, Western societies. And what is so frustrating and infuriating is this. Steve Leavitt talked to you yesterday about how these expensive and difficult-to-install infant child seats don't help. It's a waste of money. What I'm telling you is that these expensive, complicated choices, it's not simply that they don't help, they actually hurt. They actually make us worse off. If some of what enables people in our societies to make all of the choices we make were shifted to societies in which people have too few options, not only would those people's lives be improved, but ours would be improved also. This is what economists call a Pareto improving move. Income redistribution will make everyone better off, not just poor people, because of how all this excess choice plagues us. So, to conclude, you're supposed to read this cartoon and being a sophisticated person, say, what does this fish know? You know, nothing is possible in this fishbowl. Impoverished imagination, a myopic view of the world, and that's the way I read it at first. The more I thought about it, however, the more I came to the view that this fish knows something. Because the truth of the matter is that if you shatter the fishbowl so that everything is possible, you don't have freedom, you have paralysis. If you shatter this fishbowl so that everything is possible, you decrease satisfaction. You increase possible, you decrease satisfaction. You increase paralysis and you decrease satisfaction. Everybody needs a fishbowl. This one is almost certainly too limited, perhaps even for the fish, certainly for us. But the absence of some metaphorical fishbowl is a recipe for misery and, I suspect, disaster. Thank you very much. is a recipe for misery and, I suspect, disaster. Thank you very much.","i am going to talk to you about some stuff that is in this book of mine that i hope will resonate with other things you have already heard and i will try to make some connections myself in case you miss them i want to start with what i call the official dogma the official dogma of what the official dogma of all western industrial societies and the official dogma runs like this if we are interested in maximizing the welfare of our citizens the way to do that is to maximize individual freedom the reason for this is both that freedom is in and of itself good valuable worthwhile essential to being human and because if people have freedom then each of us can act on our own to do the things that will maximize our welfare and no one has to decide on our behalf the way to maximize freedom is to maximize choice the more choice people have the more freedom they have and the more freedom they have the more welfare they have this i think is so deeply embedded in the water supply that it would not occur to anyone to question it and it is also deeply embedded in our lives i will give you some examples of what modern progress has made possible for us this is my supermarket not such a big one i want to say just a word about salad dressing a 175 salad dressings in my supermarket if you do not count the 10 extra virgin olive oils and 12 balsamic vinegars you could buy to make a very large number of your own salad dressings in the off chance that none of the 175 the store has on offer suit you so this is what the supermarket is like and then you go to the consumer electronics store to set up a stereo system speakers cd player tape player tuner amplifier and in this one single consumer electronics store there are that many stereo systems we can construct 6500000 different stereo systems out of the components that are on offer in one store you have got to admit that is a lot of choice in other domains the world of communications there was a time when i was a boy when you could get any kind of telephone service you wanted as long as it came from ma bell you rented your phone you did not buy it one consequence of that by the way is that the phone never broke and those days are gone we now have an almost unlimited variety of phones especially in the world of cell phones these are cell phones of the future my favorite is the middle one the mp 3 player nose hair trimmer and creme brulee torch and if if by some chance you have not seen that in your store yet you can rest assured that one day soon you will and what this does is it leads people to walk into their stores asking this question and do you know what the answer to this question now is the answer is no it is not possible to buy a cell phone that does not do too much so in other aspects of life that are much more significant than buying things the same explosion of choice is true health care it is no longer the case in the united states that you go to the doctor and the doctor tells you what to do instead you go to the doctor and the doctor tells you well we could do a or we could do b a has these benefits and these risks b has these benefits and these risks what do you want to do and you say doc what should i do and the doc says a has these benefits and risks and b has these benefits and risks what do you want to do and you say if you were me doc what would you do and the doc says but i am not you and the result is we call it patient autonomy which makes it sound like a good thing but what it really is is a shifting of the burden and the responsibility for decision making from somebody who knows something namely the doctor to somebody who knows nothing and is almost certainly sick and thus not in the best shape to be making decisions namely the patient there is enormous marketing of prescription drugs to people like you and me which if you think about it makes no sense at all since we can not buy them why do they market to us if we can not buy them the answer is that they expect us to call our doctors the next morning and ask our prescriptions to be changed something as dramatic as our identity has now become a matter of choice as this slide is meant to indicate we get to we do not inherit an identity we get to invent it and we get to re invent ourselves as often as we like and that means that every day when you wake up in the morning you have to decide what kind of person you want to be in with respect to marriage and family there was a time when the default assumption that almost everyone had is that you got married as soon as you could and then you started having kids as soon as you could the only real choice was who not when and not what you did after nowadays everything is very much up for grabs i teach wonderfully intelligent students and i assign 20% less work than i used to and it is not because they are less smart and it is not because they are less diligent it is because they are preoccupied asking themselves should i get married or not should i get married now should i get married later should i have kids 1st or a career 1st all of these are consuming questions and they are going to answer these questions whether or not it means not doing all the work i assign and not getting a good grade in my courses and indeed they should these are important questions to answer work we are blessed as carl was pointing out with the technology that enables us to work every minute of every day from any place on the planet except the randolph hotel there is one corner by the way that i am not going to tell anybody about where you actually where the where the hi wifi works i am not telling you about it because i want to use it so what this means this incredible freedom of choice we have with respect to work is that we have to make a decision again and again and again about whether we should or should not be working we can go to watch our kid play soccer and we have our cell phone on one hip and our blackberry on our other hip and our laptop presumably on our laps and even if they are all shut off every minute that we are watching our kid mutilate a soccer game we are also asking ourselves should i answer this cell phone call should i respond to this email should i draft this letter and even if the answer to the question is no it is certainly going to make the experience of your kid is soccer game very different than it would have been so everywhere we look big things and small things material things and lifestyle things life is a matter of choice and the world we used to live in looked like this that is to say there were some choices but not everything was a matter of choice and the world we now live in looks like this and the question is is this good news or bad news and the answer is yes we all know what is good about it so i am going to talk about what is bad about it all of this choice has 2 effects 2 negative effects on people one effect paradoxically is that it produces paralysis rather than liberation with so many options to choose from people find it very difficult to choose at all i will give you one very dramatic example of this a study that was done of investments in voluntary retirement plans a colleague of mine got access to investment records from vanguard the gigantic mutual fund company of about a 1000000 employees and about 2000 different workplaces and what she found is that for every 10 mutual funds the employer offered rate of participation went down 2% you offer 50 funds 10% fewer employees participate than if you only offer 5 why because with 50 funds to choose from it is so damn hard to decide which fund to choose that you will just put it off until tomorrow and then tomorrow and then tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow and of course tomorrow never comes understand that not only does this mean that people are going to have to eat dog food when they retire because they do not have enough money put away it also means that making the decision is so hard that they pass up significant matching money from the employer by not participating they are passing up as much as $5000 a year from the employer who would happily match their contribution so paralysis is a consequence of having too many choices and i think it makes the world look like this you really want to get the decision right if it is for all eternity right you do not want to pick the wrong mutual fund or even the wrong salad dressing so that is one effect the 2nd effect is that even if we manage to overcome the paralysis and make a choice we end up less satisfied with the result of the choice than we would be if we had fewer options to choose from and there are several reasons for this one of them is that with a lot of different salad dressings to choose from if you buy one and it is not perfect and you know what salad dressing is it is easy to imagine that you could have made a different choice that would have been better and what happens is this imagined alternative induces you to regret the decision you made and this regret subtracts from the satisfaction you get out of the decision you made even if it was a good decision the more options there are the easier it is to regret anything at all that is disappointing about the option that you chose 2nd what economists call opportunity costs dan gilbert made a big point this morning of talking about how how much the the way in which we value things depends on what we compare them to well when there are lots of alternatives to consider it is easy to imagine the attractive features of alternatives that you reject that make you less satisfied with the alternative that you have chosen here is an example for those of you who are not new yorkers i apologize but here is what you are supposed to be thinking here is this couple on the hamptons very expensive real estate gorgeous beach beautiful day they have it all to themselves what could be better well damn it this guy is thinking it is august everybody in my manhattan neighborhood is away i could be parking right in front of my building and he spends 2 weeks nagged by the idea that he is missing the opportunity day after day to have a great parking space opportunity costs subtract from the satisfaction we get out of what we choose even when what we choose is terrific and the more options there are to consider the more attractive features of these options are going to be reflected by us as opportunity costs here is another example now now this cartoon makes a lot of points it makes points about living in the moment as well and probably about doing things slowly but one point it makes is that whenever you are choosing one thing you are choosing not to do other things and those other things may have lots of attractive features and it is going to make what you are doing less attractive 3rd escalation of expectations this hit me when i went to replace my jeans i wear jeans almost all the time and there was a time when jeans came in one flavor and you bought them and they fit like crap and they were incredibly uncomfortable and if you wore them long enough and washed them enough times they started to feel feel ok so i went to replace my jeans after years and years of wearing these old ones and i said i you know i want a pair of jeans here is my size and the shopkeeper said do you want slim fit easy fit relaxed fit you want button fly or zipper fly you want stonewashed or acid washed do you want them distressed you want boot cut you want tapered blah blah blah on and on he went my jaw dropped and after i recovered i said i want the kind that used to be the only kind he had no idea what that was so i spent an hour trying on all these damn jeans and i walked out of the store truth with the best fitting jeans i had ever had i did better all this choice made it possible for me to do better but i felt worse why i wrote a whole book to try and explain this to myself the reason is the reason i felt worse is that with all of these options available my expectations about how good a pair of jeans should be went up i had very low exp i had no particular expectations when they only came in one flavor when they came in a 100 flavors damn it one of them should have been perfect and what i got was good but it was not perfect and so i compared what i got to what i expected and what i got was disappointing in comparison to what i expected adding options to people is lives can not help but increase the expectations people have about how good those options will be and what that is going to produce is less satisfaction with results even when they are good results nobody in the world of marketing knows this cause if they did you would not all know what this was about the truth is more like this the reason that everything was better back when everything was worse is that when everything was worse it was actually possible for people to have experiences that were a pleasant surprise nowadays the world we live in we affluent industrialized citizens with perfection the expectation the best you can ever hope for is that this stuff is as good as you expect it to be you will never be pleasantly surprised because your expectations my expectations have gone through the roof the secret to happiness this is what you all came for the secret to happiness is low expectations i want to say just a little autobiographical moment that i i actually am married to a wife and and she is really quite wonderful i could not have done better i did not settle but settling is not always such a bad thing finally one consequence of buying a bad fitting pair of jeans when there is only one kind to buy is that when you are dissatisfied and you ask why who is responsible the answer is clear the world is responsible what could you do when there are 100s of different styles of jeans available and you buy one that is disappointing and you ask why who is responsible it is equally clear that the answer to the question is you you could have done better with a thous with a 100 different kinds of jeans on display there is no excuse for failure and so when people make decisions and even though though the results of the decisions are good they feel disappointed about them they blame themselves clinical depression has exploded in the industrial world in the last generation i believe a significant not the only but a significant contributor to this explosion of depression and also suicide is that people have experiences that are disappointing because their standards are so high and then when they have to explain these experiences to themselves they think they are at fault and so the net result is that we do better and in general objectively and we feel worse so let me remind you this is the official dogma the one that we all take to be true and it is all false it is not true there is no question that some choice is better than none but it does not follow from that that more choice is better than some choice there is some magical amount i do not know what it is i am pretty confident that we have long since passed the point where options improve our welfare now as a policy matter i am almost done as a policy matter the thing to think about is this what enables all of this choice in industrial societies is material affluence there are lots of places in the world and we have heard about several of them where the their problem is not that they have too much choice their problem is that they have too little so the stuff i am talking about is the peculiar problem of modern affluent western societies and what is so frustrating and infuriating is this steve levitt talked to you yesterday about how these expensive and difficult to install infants child seats do not help it is a waste of money what i am telling you is that these expensive complicated choices it is not simply that they do not help they actually hurt they actually make us worse off if some of what enables people in our societies to make all of the choices we make were shifted to societies in which people have too few options not only would those people is lives be improved but ours would be improved also this is what economists call a pareto improving move income redistribution will make everyone better off not just poor people because of how all this excess choice plagues us so to conclude you are supposed to read this cartoon and being a sophisticated person say ah what does this fish know you know nothing is possible in this fishbowl impoverished imagination a myopic view of the world and that is the way i read it at 1st the more i thought about it however the more i came to the view that this fish knows something because the truth of the matter is that if you shatter the fishbowl so that everything is possible you do not have freedom you have paralysis if you shatter this fishbowl so that everything is possible you decrease satisfaction you increase paralysis and you decrease satisfaction everybody needs a fishbowl this one is almost certainly too limited perhaps even for the fish certainly for us but the absence of some metaphorical fishbowl is a recipe for misery and i suspect disaster thank you very much","i am going to talk to you about some stuff that is in this book of mine that i hope will resonate with other things that you have already heard and i will try to make some connections myself in case you miss them but i want to start with what i call the official dogma the official dogma of what the official dogma of all western industrial societies and the official dogma runs like this if we are interested in maximizing the welfare of our citizens the way to do that is to maximize individual freedom the reason for this is both that freedom is in and of itself good valuable worthwhile essential to being human and because if people have freedom then each of us can act on our own to do the things that will maximize our welfare and no one has to decide on our behalf the way to maximize freedom is to maximize choice the more choice people have the more freedom they have and the more freedom they have the more welfare they have this i think is so deeply embedded in the water supply that it would not occur to anyone to question it and it is also deeply embedded in our lives i will give you some examples of what modern progress has made possible for us this is my supermarket not such a big one i want to say just a word about salad dressing 175 salad dressings in my supermarket if you do not count the 10 extra virgin olive oils and 12 balsamic vinegars you could buy to make a very large number of your own salad dressings in the off chance that none of the 175 the store has on offer suits you so this is what the supermarket is like and then you go to the consumer electronics store to set up a stereo system speakers cd player tape player tuner amplifier and in this one single consumer electronics store there are that many stereo systems we can construct 6 and one half 1000000 different stereo systems out of the components that are on offer in one store you have got to admit that is a lot of choice in other domains the world of communications there was a time when i was a boy when you could get any kind of telephone service you wanted as long as it came from ma bell you rented your phone you did not buy it one consequence of that by the way is that the phone never broke and those days are gone we now have an almost unlimited variety of phones especially in the world of cell phones these are cell phones of the future my favorite is the middle one the mp 3 player nose hair trimmer and creme brulee torch and if by some chance you have not seen that in your store yet you can rest assured that one day soon you will and what this does is it leads people to walk into their stores asking this question and do you know what the answer to this question now is the answer is no it is not possible to buy a cell phone that does not do too much so in other aspects of life that are much more significant than buying things the same explosion of choice is true healthcare it is no longer the case in the united states that you go to the doctor and the doctor tells you what to do instead you go to the doctor and the doctor tells you what to do instead you go to the doctor and the doctor tells you well we could do a or we could do b a has these benefits and these risks b has these benefits and these risks what do you want to do and you say doc what should i do and the doc says a has these benefits and risks and b has these benefits and risks what do you want to do and you say if you were me doc what would you do and the doc says but i am not you and the result is we call it patient autonomy which makes it sound like a good thing but what it really is is a shifting of the burden and the responsibility for decision making from somebody who knows something namely the doctor to somebody who knows nothing and is almost certainly sick and thus not in the best shape to be making decisions namely the patient there is enormous marketing of prescription drugs to people like you and me which if you think about it makes no sense at all since we can not buy them why do they market to us if we can not buy them the answer is that they expect us to call our doctors the next morning and ask for our prescriptions to be changed something as dramatic as our identity has now become a matter of choice as this slide is meant to indicate we get to we do not inherit an identity we get to invent it and we get to reinvent ourselves as often as we like and that means that every day when you wake up in the morning you have to decide what kind of person you want to be with respect to marriage and family there was a time when the default assumption that almost everyone had is that you got married as soon as you could and then you started having kids as soon as you could and then you started having kids as soon as you could the only real choice was who not when and not what you did after nowadays everything is very much up for grabs i teach wonderfully intelligent students and i assign 20% less work than i used to and it is not because they are less smart and it is not because they are less diligent and it is not because they are less diligent it is because they are preoccupied asking themselves should i get married or not should i get married now should i get married later should i have kids 1st or a career 1st all of these are consuming questions and they are going to answer these questions whether or not it means not doing all the work i assign and not getting a good grade in my courses and indeed they should these are important questions to answer work we are blessed as carl was pointing out with the technology that enables us to work every minute of every day from any place on the planet except the randolph hotel there is one corner by the way that i am not going to tell anybody about where you actually where the wi fi works i am not telling you about it because i want to use it so what this means this incredible freedom of choice we have with respect to work is that we have to make a decision again and again and again about whether we should or should not be working we can go to watch our kid play soccer and and we have our cell phone on one hip and our blackberry on our other hip and our laptop presumably on our laps and even if they are all shut off every minute that we are watching our kid mutilate a soccer game we are also asking ourselves should i answer this cell phone call should i respond to this email should i draft this letter and even if the answer to the question is no it is certainly going to make the experience of your kid is soccer game very different than it would have been so everywhere we look big things and small things material things and lifestyle things life is a matter of choice and the world we used to live in looked like this that is to say there were some choices but not everything was a matter of choice and the world we now live in looks like this and the question is is this good news or bad news and the answer is yes we all know what is good about it so i am going to talk about what is bad about it all of this choice has 2 effects 2 negative effects on people one effect paradoxically is that it produces paralysis rather than liberation with so many options to choose from people find it very difficult to choose at all i will give you one very dramatic example of this a study that was done of investments in voluntary retirement plans a colleague of mine got access to investment records from vanguard the gigantic mutual fund company of about a 1000000 employees in about 2000 different workplaces and what she found is that for every 10 mutual funds the employer offered rate of participation went down 2% you offer 50 funds 10% fewer employees participate than if you only offer 5 why because with 50 funds to choose from it is so damn hard to decide which fund to choose that you will just put it off till tomorrow and then tomorrow and then tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow and of course tomorrow never comes understand that not only does this mean that people are going to have to eat dog food when they retire because they do not have enough money put away it also means that making the decision is so hard that they pass up significant matching money from the employer by not participating they are passing up as much as $5000 a year from the employer who would happily match their contribution so paralysis is a consequence of having too many choices and i think it makes the world look like this you really want to get the decision right if it is for all eternity right you do not want to pick the wrong mutual if it is for all eternity right you do not want to pick the wrong mutual fund or even the wrong salad dressing so that is one effect the 2nd effect is that even if we manage to overcome the paralysis and make a choice we end up less satisfied with the result of the choice than we would be if we had fewer options to choose from and there are several reasons for this one of them is that with a lot of different salad dressings to choose from if you buy one and it is not perfect and you know what salad dressing is it is easy to imagine that you could have made a different choice that would have been better and what happens is this imagined alternative induces you to regret the decision you made and this regret subtracts from the satisfaction you get out of the decision you made even if it was a good decision the more options there are the easier it is to regret anything at all that is disappointing about the option that you chose 2nd what economists call opportunity costs dan gilbert made a big point this morning of talking about how much the way in which we value things depends on what we compare them to well when there are lots of alternatives to consider it is easy to imagine the attractive features of alternatives that you reject that make you less satisfied with the alternative that you have chosen here is an example for those of you who are not new yorkers i apologize but here is what you are supposed to be thinking here is this couple on the hamptons very expensive real estate gorgeous beach beautiful day they have it all to themselves what could be better well damn it this guy is thinking it is august everybody in my manhattan neighborhood is away i could be parking everybody in my manhattan neighborhood is away i could be parking right in front of my building and he spends 2 weeks nagged by the idea that he is missing the opportunity day after day to have a great parking space opportunity costs subtract from the satisfaction we get out of what we choose even when what we choose is terrific and the more options there are to consider the more attractive features of these options are going to be reflected by us as opportunity costs here is another example now this cartoon makes a lot of points it makes points about living in the moment as well and probably about doing things slowly but one point it makes is that whenever you are choosing one thing you are choosing not to do other things and those other things may have lots of attractive features and it is going to make what you are doing less attractive 3rd escalation of expectations this hit me when i went to replace my jeans i wear jeans almost all the time and there was a time when jeans came in one flavor and and you bought them and they fit like crap and they were incredibly uncomfortable and if you wore them long enough and washed them enough times they started to fit feel okay so i went to replace my jeans after years and years of wearing these old ones and i said i want a pair of jeans here is my size and the shopkeeper said do you want slim fit easy fit relaxed fit do you want button fly or zipper fly do you want stonew washed or acid washed do you want them distressed do you want boot cut do you want tapered blah blah blah on and on he went my jaw dropped and after i recovered i said i want the kind that used to be the only kind he had no idea what that was so i spent an hour trying on all these damn jeans and i walked out of the store truth with the best fitting jeans i had ever had i did better all this choice made it possible for me to do better but i felt worse why i wrote a whole book to try to explain this to myself the reason is the reason i felt worse is that with all of these options available my expectations about how good a pair of jeans should be went up i had no particular expectations when they only came in one flavor when they came in a 100 flavors damn it one of them should have been perfect and what i got was good but it was not perfect and so i compared what i got to what i expected and what i got was disappointing in comparison to what i expected adding options to people is lives can not help but increase the expectations people have about how good those options will be and what that is going to produce is less satisfaction with results even when they are good results nobody in the world of marketing knows this because if they did you would not all know what this was about the truth is more like this the reason that everything was better back when everything was worse is that when everything was worse it was actually possible for people to have experiences that were a pleasant surprise nowadays the world we live in we affluent industrialized citizens with perfection the expectation the best you can ever hope for is that stuff is as good as you expect it to be you will never be pleasantly surprised because your expectations my expectations have gone through the roof the secret to happiness this is what you all came for have gone through the roof the secret to happiness this is what you all came for the secret to happiness is low expectations i want to say just a little autobiographical moment that i actually am married to a wife and she is really quite wonderful i could not have done better i did not settle but settling is not always such a bad thing finally one consequence of buying a bad fitting pair of jeans when there is only one kind to buy is that when you are dissatisfied and you ask why who is responsible the answer is clear the world is responsible what could you do when there are 100s of different styles of jeans available and you buy one that is disappointing and you ask why who is responsible it is equally clear that the answer to the question is you you could have done better with a 100 different kinds of genes on display there is no excuse for failure and so when people make decisions and even though the results of the decisions are good they feel disappointed about them they blame themselves clinical depression has exploded in the industrial world in the last generation i believe a significant not the only but a significant contributor to this explosion of depression and also suicide is that people have experiences that are disappointing because their standards are so high and then when they have to explain these experiences to themselves they think they are at fault and so the net result is that we do better in general objectively and we feel worse so let me remind you this is the official dogma the one that we all take to be true and it is all false it is not true there is no question that some choice is better than none but it does not follow from that that more choice is better than some choice there is some magical amount i do not know what it is i am pretty confident that we have long since passed the point where options improve our welfare now as a policy matter i am pretty confident that we have long since passed the point where options improve our welfare now as a policy matter i am almost done as a policy matter the thing to think about is this what enables all of this choice in industrial societies is material affluence there are lots of places in the world and we have heard about several of them where their problem is not that they have too much choice their problem is that they have too little so the stuff i am talking about is the peculiar problem of modern affluent western societies and what is so frustrating and infuriating is this steve leavitt talked to you yesterday about how these expensive and difficult to install infant child seats do not help it is a waste of money what i am telling you is that these expensive complicated choices it is not simply that they do not help they actually hurt they actually make us worse off if some of what enables people in our societies to make all of the choices we make were shifted to societies in which people have too few options not only would those people is lives be improved but ours would be improved also this is what economists call a pareto improving move income redistribution will make everyone better off not just poor people because of how all this excess choice plagues us so to conclude you are supposed to read this cartoon and being a sophisticated person say what does this fish know you know nothing is possible in this fishbowl impoverished imagination a myopic view of the world and that is the way i read it at 1st the more i thought about it however the more i came to the view that this fish knows something because the truth of the matter is that if you shatter the fishbowl so that everything is possible you do not have freedom you have paralysis if you shatter this fishbowl so that everything is possible you decrease satisfaction you increase possible you decrease satisfaction you increase paralysis and you decrease satisfaction everybody needs a fishbowl this one is almost certainly too limited perhaps even for the fish certainly for us but the absence of some metaphorical fishbowl is a recipe for misery and i suspect disaster thank you very much is a recipe for misery and i suspect disaster thank you very much"
" what i'm going to show you first as quickly as i can is is some some foundational work some some new technology that we brought to microsoft as part of an acquisition almost exactly a year ago this is seadragon and it's an environment in which you can either locally or remotely interact with vast amounts of of visual data we're looking at many many gigabytes of of digital photos here and kind of seam seamlessly and continuously zooming in panning through the thing rearranging it in any way we want and it doesn't matter how much information we're looking at how big these collections are or how big the images are in the most of them are ordinary digital camera photos but this one for example is a scan from the library of congress and it's in the in the three hundred megapixel range it doesn't doesn't make any difference because the only thing that that ought to limit the performance of a system like this one is the number of pixels on your screen at any given moment it's also very flexible architecture this is an entire book this is an example of non non image data this is bleak house by dickens every every column is a is a chapter and to prove to you that it's that it's really text and not an image we can do something like so to really show that this is a real representation of the text it's not a picture maybe this is a kind of an artificial way to read an e book i wouldn't recommend it this is a more realistic case this is an issue of the guardian every large image is the beginning of a section and this really gives you the the the joy and the good experience of reading the real paper version of of a magazine or a newspaper which is an inherently multi scale kind of medium we've also done a little something with the corner of of this particular issue of the guardian we've made up a fake ad that's very high resolution much higher than you'd be able to get in an ordinary ad and we've embedded extra content if you want to see the features of this car you can see it here or other models or even technical specifications and and this this really this really gets at some of these ideas about really doing away with with those limits on on screen real estate we hope that this means no more no more pop ups and other kind of rubbish like that shouldn't be necessary of course mapping is one of those really obvious applications for a technology like this and and this one i really won't spend any time on except to say that we have things to contribute to this field as well but those are all the roads in the in the u s superimposed on top of a nasa geospatial image so let's pull up now something else so this is actually live on the live on the web now you can go check it out this is a project called photosynth which really marries two different technologies one of them is seadragon and the other is some very beautiful computer vision research done by noah snavely a graduate student at the university of washington co advised by steve seitz at u w and rick szeliski at microsoft research a very nice collaboration and so this is this live on the web it's powered by seadragon you can see that when we kind of do these sorts of views where we can we can we can dive through images and have this kind of multi resolution experience but but the spatial arrangement of the images here is actually meaningful the computer vision algorithms have registered these images together so that they correspond to the real space in which these these shots all taken near grassi lakes in the canadian rockies all these shots were taken so you see elements here of of stabilized slide show or panoramic panoramic imaging and these things have all been related related spatially i'm not sure if i have if i have time to show you any other environments there are some that are much more spatial but i would like to jump straight to to one of noah's original data sets and this is from an early prototype of photosynth that we first got working in the summer to show you what i think is really the the punchline behind this this technology the photosynth technology and it's not necessarily so apparent from looking at the environments that we've put up on the website we we had to worry about the lawyers and so on this is a reconstruction of notre dame cathedral that was done entirely computationally from images scraped from flickr you just type notre dame into flickr and you get some pictures of guys in t shirts and of the campus and so on and each of these orange cones represents an image that was that was discovered to belong to this model and so these are all these are all flickr images and they've all been related spatially in this way and we can just navigate in this very simple way you know i never i never thought that i'd end up working at microsoft it's very it's very gratifying to to have this kind this kind of reception here so so this is i guess you can see this is very this is lots of different types of cameras it's everything from cell phone cameras to professional slrs quite a large number of them stitched together in this environment and if i can i'll find some of the sort of weird ones so many of them are occluded by faces and and so on there's somewhere in here there is actually there there is series of photographs here we go this is actually a poster of notre dame that registered correctly here we can dive in from the poster to a physical view of this of this environment what what the point here really is is that we can do things with the social environment this is this is now taking data from everybody from the entire collective memory of of visually what the earth looks like and link all of that together all of those photos become linked together and they make something emergent that's greater than the sum of the parts you have a a model that emerges of the entire earth think of this as the long tail to stephen lawler's virtual earth work and this is something that grows in complexity as people use it and whose benefits become greater to the users as they as they use it their own photos are getting tagged with meta data that somebody else entered if if somebody bothered to to tag all of these saints and say who they all are then then my photo of notre dame cathedral suddenly gets enriched with all of that data and i can use it as an entry point to dive into that space into that meta verse using everybody else's photos and and do a kind of a cross modal and and and cross user social experience that way and of course a by product of all of that is immensely rich virtual models of of every interesting part of the earth collected not just from from overhead flights and from satellite images and so on but from the collective memory thank you so much yes what this is really doing is discovering it's creating hyperlinks if you will between between images and it's doing that based on the content inside the images and that gets really exciting when you think about the richness of the semantic information that a lot of those images have like when you do a web search for images you type in phrases and the text on the web page is is carrying a lot of information about what that picture is of now what if that picture links to all of your pictures then the amount of semantic interconnection and the amount of richness that comes out of that is really huge it's a classic network effect thanks so much"," What I'm going to show you first, as quickly as I can, is some foundational work, some new technology that we brought to Microsoft as part of an acquisition almost exactly a year ago. This is Sea Dragon. And it's an environment in which you can either locally or remotely interact with vast amounts of visual data. We're looking at many, many gigabytes of digital photos here, and seamlessly and continuously zooming and padding through the thing, rearranging it in any way we want. It doesn't matter how much information we're looking at, how big these collections are, or how big the images are, and most of them are ordinary digital camera photos, but this one for example is a scan from the Library of Congress, and it's in the 300 megapixel range. It doesn't make any difference, because the only thing that ought to limit the performance of a system like this one is the number of pixels on your screen at any given moment. It's also a very flexible architecture. This is an entire book. So this is an example of non-image data. This is Bleak House by Dickens. Every column is a chapter. And to prove to you that it's really text and not an image, we can do something like so, to really show that this is a real representation of the text, it's not a picture. Maybe this is a kind of artificial way to read an e-book, I wouldn't recommend it. This is a more realistic case, this is an issue of the Guardian. Every large image is the beginning of a section, and this really gives you the joy and the good experience of reading the real paper version of a magazine or a newspaper, which is an inherently multi-scale kind of medium. We've also done a little something with the corner of this particular issue of The Guardian. We've made up a fake ad that's very high resolution, much higher than you'd be able to get in an ordinary ad, and we've embedded extra content. You're going to see the features of this car, You can see it here, or other models, or even technical specifications. And this really gets at some of these ideas about really doing away with those limits on screen real estate. We hope that this means no more pop-ups, and other kind of rubbish like that should be necessary. Of course, mapping is one of those really obvious applications for technology like this. And this one I really won't spend any time on, except to say that we have things to contribute to this field as well. But those are all the roads in the US superimposed on top of a NASA geospatial image. So let's pull up now something else. So this is actually live on the web now. You can go check it out. This is a project called Photosynth, which really marries two different technologies. One of them is Sea Dragon, and the other is some very beautiful computer vision research done by Noah Snavely, a graduate student at the University of Washington, co-advised by Steve Seitz at UW and Rick Zalisky at Microsoft Research. A very nice collaboration. And so this is live on the web. It's powered by Sea Dragon. You can see that when we do these sorts of views, where we can dive through images and have this multi-resolution experience. But the spatial arrangement of the images here is actually meaningful. The computer vision algorithms have registered these images together so that they correspond to the real space in which these shots, all taken near Grassy Lakes and the Canadian Rockies, all these shots were taken. So you see elements here of stabilized slideshow or panoramic imaging. And these things have all been related spatially. I'm not sure if I have time to show you any other environments. There are some that are much more spatial. But I'd like to jump straight to one of NOAA's original data sets. And this is from an early prototype of Photosynth that we first got working in the summer to show you what I think is really the punchline behind this technology, the Photosynth technology. And it's not necessarily so apparent from looking at the environments that we've put up on the website. We had to worry about the lawyers and so on. This is a reconstruction of Notre Dame Cathedral that was done entirely computationally from images scraped from Flickr. You just type Notre Dame into Flickr, and you get some pictures of guys in t-shirts and of the campus and so on. And each of these orange cones represents an image that was discovered to belong to this model. And so these are all Flickr images and they've all been related spatially in this way. We can just navigate in this very simple way. I never thought that I'd end up working at Microsoft. It's very it's very gratifying This kind of this kind of reception here, so so this is I just didn't see this a very this is this is lots of Different types of cameras. It's everything from cell phone cameras to professional SLRs Quite a large number that have been registered together into this environment if I can find some of the sort of weird ones There are so many of them are occluded by faces and so on. Somewhere in here, there's actually a series of photographs. Here we go. This is actually a poster of Notre Dame that registered correctly. So we can dive in from the poster to a physical view of this environment. What the point here really is is that we can do things with the social environment. This is now taking data from everybody, from the entire collective memory visually of what the Earth looks like, and link all of that together. All of those photos become linked together, and they make something emergent that's greater than the sum of the parts. You have a model that emerges of the entire Earth. Think of this as the long tail to Stephen Lawler's virtual earthwork. And this is something that grows in complexity as people use it, and whose benefits become greater to the users as they use it. Their own photos are getting tagged with metadata that somebody else entered. If somebody bothered to tag all of these saints and say who they all are, then my photo of Notre Dame Cathedral suddenly gets enriched with all that data. And I can use it as an entry point to dive into that space, into that metaverse, using everybody else's photos, and do a kind of cross-modal and cross-user social experience that way. And of course, a byproduct of all of that is immensely rich virtual models of every interesting part of the earth collected not just from from overhead flights and from satellite images and so on but from the collective memory. Thank you so much. Yes, what this is really doing is discovering. It's creating hyperlinks, if you will, between images. And it's doing that based on the content inside the images and that gets really exciting when you think about the richness of the semantic information that a lot of those images have. Like, when you do a web search for images, you type in phrases, and the text on the web page is carrying a lot of information about what that picture is of. Now, what if that picture links to all of your pictures? Then the amount of semantic interconnection and the amount of richness that comes out of that is really huge. It's a classic network effect. Thanks so much. Yeah. Thanks so much.","what i am going to show you 1st as quickly as i can is is some some foundational work some some new technology that we brought to microsoft as part of an acquisition almost exactly a year ago this is seadragon and it is an environment in which you can either locally or remotely interact with vast amounts of of visual data we are looking at many many gigabytes of of digital photos here and kind of seam seamlessly and continuously zooming in panning through the thing rearranging it in any way we want and it does not matter how much information we are looking at how big these collections are or how big the images are in the most of them are ordinary digital camera photos but this one for example is a scan from the library of congress and it is in the in the 300 megapixel range it does not does not make any difference because the only thing that that ought to limit the performance of a system like this one is the number of pixels on your screen at any given moment it is also very flexible architecture this is an entire book this is an example of non non image data this is bleak house by dickens every every column is a is a chapter and to prove to you that it is that it is really text and not an image we can do something like so to really show that this is a real representation of the text it is not a picture maybe this is a kind of an artificial way to read an e book i would not recommend it this is a more realistic case this is an issue of the guardian every large image is the beginning of a section and this really gives you the the the joy and the good experience of reading the real paper version of of a magazine or a newspaper which is an inherently multi scale kind of medium we have also done a little something with the corner of of this particular issue of the guardian we have made up a fake ad that is very high resolution much higher than you would be able to get in an ordinary ad and we have embedded extra content if you want to see the features of this car you can see it here or other models or even technical specifications and and this this really this really gets at some of these ideas about really doing away with with those limits on on screen real estate we hope that this means no more no more pop ups and other kind of rubbish like that should not be necessary of course mapping is one of those really obvious applications for a technology like this and and this one i really will not spend any time on except to say that we have things to contribute to this field as well but those are all the roads in the in the u s superimposed on top of a nasa geospatial image so let us pull up now something else so this is actually live on the live on the web now you can go check it out this is a project called photosynth which really marries 2 different technologies one of them is seadragon and the other is some very beautiful computer vision research done by noah snavely a graduate student at the university of washington co advised by steve seitz at u w and rick szeliski at microsoft research a very nice collaboration and so this is this live on the web it is powered by seadragon you can see that when we kind of do these sorts of views where we can we can we can dive through images and have this kind of multi resolution experience but but the spatial arrangement of the images here is actually meaningful the computer vision algorithms have registered these images together so that they correspond to the real space in which these these shots all taken near grassi lakes in the canadian rockies all these shots were taken so you see elements here of of stabilized slide show or panoramic panoramic imaging and these things have all been related related spatially i am not sure if i have if i have time to show you any other environments there are some that are much more spatial but i would like to jump straight to to one of noah is original data sets and this is from an early prototype of photosynth that we 1st got working in the summer to show you what i think is really the the punchline behind this this technology the photosynth technology and it is not necessarily so apparent from looking at the environments that we have put up on the website we we had to worry about the lawyers and so on this is a reconstruction of notre dame cathedral that was done entirely computationally from images scraped from flickr you just type notre dame into flickr and you get some pictures of guys in t shirts and of the campus and so on and each of these orange cones represents an image that was that was discovered to belong to this model and so these are all these are all flickr images and they have all been related spatially in this way and we can just navigate in this very simple way you know i never i never thought that i would end up working at microsoft it is very it is very gratifying to to have this kind this kind of reception here so so this is i guess you can see this is very this is lots of different types of cameras it is everything from cell phone cameras to professional slrs quite a large number of them stitched together in this environment and if i can i will find some of the sort of weird ones so many of them are occluded by faces and and so on there is somewhere in here there is actually there there is series of photographs here we go this is actually a poster of notre dame that registered correctly here we can dive in from the poster to a physical view of this of this environment what what the point here really is is that we can do things with the social environment this is this is now taking data from everybody from the entire collective memory of of visually what the earth looks like and link all of that together all of those photos become linked together and they make something emergent that is greater than the sum of the parts you have a a model that emerges of the entire earth think of this as the long tail to stephen lawler is virtual earth work and this is something that grows in complexity as people use it and whose benefits become greater to the users as they as they use it their own photos are getting tagged with meta data that somebody else entered if if somebody bothered to to tag all of these saints and say who they all are then then my photo of notre dame cathedral suddenly gets enriched with all of that data and i can use it as an entry point to dive into that space into that meta verse using everybody else is photos and and do a kind of a cross modal and and and cross user social experience that way and of course a by product of all of that is immensely rich virtual models of of every interesting part of the earth collected not just from from overhead flights and from satellite images and so on but from the collective memory thank you so much yes what this is really doing is discovering it is creating hyperlinks if you will between between images and it is doing that based on the content inside the images and that gets really exciting when you think about the richness of the semantic information that a lot of those images have like when you do a web search for images you type in phrases and the text on the web page is is carrying a lot of information about what that picture is of now what if that picture links to all of your pictures then the amount of semantic interconnection and the amount of richness that comes out of that is really huge it is a classic network effect thanks so much","what i am going to show you 1st as quickly as i can is some foundational work some new technology that we brought to microsoft as part of an acquisition almost exactly a year ago this is sea dragon and it is an environment in which you can either locally or remotely interact with vast amounts of visual data we are looking at many many gigabytes of digital photos here and seamlessly and continuously zooming and padding through the thing rearranging it in any way we want it does not matter how much information we are looking at how big these collections are or how big the images are and most of them are ordinary digital camera photos but this one for example is a scan from the library of congress and it is in the 300 megapixel range it does not make any difference because the only thing that ought to limit the performance of a system like this one is the number of pixels on your screen at any given moment it is also a very flexible architecture this is an entire book so this is an example of non image data this is bleak house by dickens every column is a chapter and to prove to you that it is really text and not an image we can do something like so to really show that this is a real representation of the text it is not a picture maybe this is a kind of artificial way to read an e book i would not recommend it this is a more realistic case this is an issue of the guardian every large image is the beginning of a section and this really gives you the joy and the good experience of reading the real paper version of a magazine or a newspaper which is an inherently multi scale kind of medium we have also done a little something with the corner of this particular issue of the guardian we have made up a fake ad that is very high resolution much higher than you would be able to get in an ordinary ad and we have embedded extra content you are going to see the features of this car you can see it here or other models or even technical specifications and this really gets at some of these ideas about really doing away with those limits on screen real estate we hope that this means no more pop ups and other kind of rubbish like that should be necessary of course mapping is one of those really obvious applications for technology like this and this one i really will not spend any time on except to say that we have things to contribute to this field as well but those are all the roads in the us superimposed on top of a nasa geospatial image so let us pull up now something else so this is actually live on the web now you can go check it out this is a project called photosynth which really marries 2 different technologies one of them is sea dragon and the other is some very beautiful computer vision research done by noah snavely a graduate student at the university of washington co advised by steve seitz at uw and rick zalisky at microsoft research a very nice collaboration and so this is live on the web it is powered by sea dragon you can see that when we do these sorts of views where we can dive through images and have this multi resolution experience but the spatial arrangement of the images here is actually meaningful the computer vision algorithms have registered these images together so that they correspond to the real space in which these shots all taken near grassy lakes and the canadian rockies all these shots were taken so you see elements here of stabilized slideshow or panoramic imaging and these things have all been related spatially i am not sure if i have time to show you any other environments there are some that are much more spatial but i would like to jump straight to one of noaa is original data sets and this is from an early prototype of photosynth that we 1st got working in the summer to show you what i think is really the punchline behind this technology the photosynth technology and it is not necessarily so apparent from looking at the environments that we have put up on the website we had to worry about the lawyers and so on this is a reconstruction of notre dame cathedral that was done entirely computationally from images scraped from flickr you just type notre dame into flickr and you get some pictures of guys in t shirts and of the campus and so on and each of these orange cones represents an image that was discovered to belong to this model and so these are all flickr images and they have all been related spatially in this way we can just navigate in this very simple way i never thought that i would end up working at microsoft it is very it is very gratifying this kind of this kind of reception here so so this is i just did not see this a very this is this is lots of different types of cameras it is everything from cell phone cameras to professional slrs quite a large number that have been registered together into this environment if i can find some of the sort of weird ones there are so many of them are occluded by faces and so on somewhere in here there is actually a series of photographs here we go this is actually a poster of notre dame that registered correctly so we can dive in from the poster to a physical view of this environment what the point here really is is that we can do things with the social environment this is now taking data from everybody from the entire collective memory visually of what the earth looks like and link all of that together all of those photos become linked together and they make something emergent that is greater than the sum of the parts you have a model that emerges of the entire earth think of this as the long tail to stephen lawler is virtual earthwork and this is something that grows in complexity as people use it and whose benefits become greater to the users as they use it their own photos are getting tagged with metadata that somebody else entered if somebody bothered to tag all of these saints and say who they all are then my photo of notre dame cathedral suddenly gets enriched with all that data and i can use it as an entry point to dive into that space into that metaverse using everybody else is photos and do a kind of cross modal and cross user social experience that way and of course a byproduct of all of that is immensely rich virtual models of every interesting part of the earth collected not just from from overhead flights and from satellite images and so on but from the collective memory thank you so much yes what this is really doing is discovering it is creating hyperlinks if you will between images and it is doing that based on the content inside the images and that gets really exciting when you think about the richness of the semantic information that a lot of those images have like when you do a web search for images you type in phrases and the text on the web page is carrying a lot of information about what that picture is of now what if that picture links to all of your pictures then the amount of semantic interconnection and the amount of richness that comes out of that is really huge it is a classic network effect thanks so much yeah thanks so much"
" last year at ted i gave an introduction to the lhc and i promised to come back and give you an update on how that machine works so this is it and for those of you who weren't there the lhc is the largest scientific experiment ever attempted twenty seven kilometers in circumference its job is to recreate the conditions that were present less than a billionth of a second after the universe began up to six hundred million times a second it's nothing if not ambitious this is the machine below geneva we take the pictures of those mini big bangs inside detectors this is the one i work on it's called the atlas detector forty four meters wide twenty two meters in diameter spectacular picture here of atlas under construction so you can see the scale on the tenth of september last year we turned the machine on for the first time and this picture was taken by atlas it caused immense celebration in the control room it's a picture of the first beam particle going all the way around the lhc colliding with a piece of the lhc deliberately and showering particles into the detector in other words when we saw that picture on september tenth we knew the machine worked which is a great triumph i don't know whether this got the biggest cheer or this when someone went onto google and saw the front page was like that it means we made cultural impact as well as scientific impact about a week later we had a problem with the machine related actually to these bits of wire here these gold wires those wires carry thirteen thousand amps when the machine is working in full power now the engineers amongst you will look at them and say no they don't they're small wires they can do that because when they are very cold they are what's called superconducting wire so at minus two hundred and seventy one degrees colder than the space between the stars those wires can take that current in one of the joints between over nine thousand magnets in lhc there was a manufacturing defect so the wire heated up slightly and its thirteen thousand amps suddenly encountered electrical resistance this was the result now that's more impressive when you consider those magnets weigh over twenty tons and they moved about a foot so we damaged about fifty of the magnets we had to take them out which we did we reconditioned them all fixed them they're all on their way back underground now by the end of march the lhc will be intact again we will switch it on and we expect to take data in june or july and continue with our quest to find out what the building blocks of the universe are now of course in a way those accidents reignite the debate about the value of science and engineering at the edge it's easy to refute i think that the fact that it's so difficult the fact that we're overreaching is the value of things like the lhc i will leave the final word to an english scientist humphrey davy who i suspect when defending his protege's useless experiments his protege was michael faraday said this nothing is so dangerous to the progress of the human mind than to assume that our views of science are ultimate that there are no mysteries in nature that our triumphs are complete and that there are no new worlds to conquer"," Last year at TED, I gave an introduction to the LHC, and I promised to come back and give you an update on how that machine worked. So this is it. For those of you that weren't there, the LHC is the largest scientific experiment ever attempted, 27 kilometers in circumference. Its job is to recreate the conditions that were present less than a billionth of a second after the universe began up to 600 million times a second, so nothing if not ambitious. This is the machine below Geneva. We take the pictures of those mini big bangs in size detectors. This is the one I work on, it's called the Atlas detector. 44 metres wide, 22 metres in diameter. Spectacular picture here of Atlas under construction, so you can see the scale. On the 10th of September last year, we turned the machine on for the first time, and this picture was taken by Atlas. It caused immense celebration in the control room. It's a picture of the first beam particle going all the way around the LHC, colliding with a piece of the LHC deliberately and showering particles into the detector. In other words, when we saw that picture on September 10th, we knew the machine worked, which is a great triumph. I don't know whether this got the biggest cheer or this when someone went on to Google and saw the front page was like that. It means we made cultural impact as well as scientific impact. About a week later we had a problem with the machine related actually to these bits of wire here, these gold wires. Those wires carry 13,000 amps when the machine's working at full power. Now the engineers amongst you will look at them and say, no they don't, they're small wires. They can do that because when they're very cold, they're what's called superconducting wire. So at minus 271 degrees, colder than the space between the stars, those wires can take that current. In one of the joins between over 9,000 magnets in LHC, there was a manufacturing defect so the wire heated up slightly and its 13,000 amps suddenly encountered electrical resistance. This was the result. Now, that's more impressive when you consider those magnets weigh over 20 tonnes and they moved about a foot. So we damaged about 50 of the magnets. We had to take them out, which we did. We've reconditioned them all, fixed them. They're all on their way back underground now. By the end of March, the LHC will be intact again. We will switch it on, and we expect to take data in June or July. And continue with our quest to find out what the building blocks of the universe are. Now of course in a way those accidents reignite the debate about the value of science and engineering at the edge. It's easy to refuse I think that the fact that it's so difficult, the fact that we're overreaching is the value of things like the LHC. I'll leave the final word to an English scientist, Humphry Davy, who I suspect when defending his protege's useless experiments, his protege was Michael Faraday, said this, nothing is so dangerous to the progress of the human mind than to assume that our views of science are ultimate, that there are no mysteries in nature, that our triumphs are complete and that there are no new worlds to conquer. that there are no mysteries in nature, that our triumphs are complete and that there are no new worlds to conquer.","last year at ted i gave an introduction to the lhc and i promised to come back and give you an update on how that machine works so this is it and for those of you who were not there the lhc is the largest scientific experiment ever attempted 27 kilometers in circumference its job is to recreate the conditions that were present less than a 1000000000th of a 2nd after the universe began up to 600000000 times a 2nd it is nothing if not ambitious this is the machine below geneva we take the pictures of those mini big bangs inside detectors this is the one i work on it is called the atlas detector 44 meters wide 22 meters in diameter spectacular picture here of atlas under construction so you can see the scale on the 10th of september last year we turned the machine on for the 1st time and this picture was taken by atlas it caused immense celebration in the control room it is a picture of the 1st beam particle going all the way around the lhc colliding with a piece of the lhc deliberately and showering particles into the detector in other words when we saw that picture on september 10th we knew the machine worked which is a great triumph i do not know whether this got the biggest cheer or this when someone went onto google and saw the front page was like that it means we made cultural impact as well as scientific impact about a week later we had a problem with the machine related actually to these bits of wire here these gold wires those wires carry 13000 amps when the machine is working in full power now the engineers amongst you will look at them and say no they do not they are small wires they can do that because when they are very cold they are what is called superconducting wire so at -271 degrees colder than the space between the stars those wires can take that current in one of the joints between over 9000 magnets in lhc there was a manufacturing defect so the wire heated up slightly and its 13000 amps suddenly encountered electrical resistance this was the result now that is more impressive when you consider those magnets weigh over 20 tons and they moved about a foot so we damaged about 50 of the magnets we had to take them out which we did we reconditioned them all fixed them they are all on their way back underground now by the end of march the lhc will be intact again we will switch it on and we expect to take data in june or july and continue with our quest to find out what the building blocks of the universe are now of course in a way those accidents reignite the debate about the value of science and engineering at the edge it is easy to refute i think that the fact that it is so difficult the fact that we are overreaching is the value of things like the lhc i will leave the final word to an english scientist humphrey davy who i suspect when defending his protege is useless experiments his protege was michael faraday said this nothing is so dangerous to the progress of the human mind than to assume that our views of science are ultimate that there are no mysteries in nature that our triumphs are complete and that there are no new worlds to conquer","last year at ted i gave an introduction to the lhc and i promised to come back and give you an update on how that machine worked so this is it for those of you that were not there the lhc is the largest scientific experiment ever attempted 27 kilometers in circumference its job is to recreate the conditions that were present less than a 1000000000th of a 2nd after the universe began up to 600000000 times a 2nd so nothing if not ambitious this is the machine below geneva we take the pictures of those mini big bangs in size detectors this is the one i work on it is called the atlas detector 44 meters wide 22 meters in diameter spectacular picture here of atlas under construction so you can see the scale on the 10th of september last year we turned the machine on for the 1st time and this picture was taken by atlas it caused immense celebration in the control room it is a picture of the 1st beam particle going all the way around the lhc colliding with a piece of the lhc deliberately and showering particles into the detector in other words when we saw that picture on september 10th we knew the machine worked which is a great triumph i do not know whether this got the biggest cheer or this when someone went on to google and saw the front page was like that it means we made cultural impact as well as scientific impact about a week later we had a problem with the machine related actually to these bits of wire here these gold wires those wires carry 13000 amps when the machine is working at full power now the engineers amongst you will look at them and say no they do not they are small wires they can do that because when they are very cold they are what is called superconducting wire so at -271 degrees colder than the space between the stars those wires can take that current in one of the joins between over 9000 magnets in lhc there was a manufacturing defect so the wire heated up slightly and its 13000 amps suddenly encountered electrical resistance this was the result now that is more impressive when you consider those magnets weigh over 20 tons and they moved about a foot so we damaged about 50 of the magnets we had to take them out which we did we have reconditioned them all fixed them they are all on their way back underground now by the end of march the lhc will be intact again we will switch it on and we expect to take data in june or july and continue with our quest to find out what the building blocks of the universe are now of course in a way those accidents reignite the debate about the value of science and engineering at the edge it is easy to refuse i think that the fact that it is so difficult the fact that we are overreaching is the value of things like the lhc i will leave the final word to an english scientist humphry davy who i suspect when defending his protege is useless experiments his protege was michael faraday said this nothing is so dangerous to the progress of the human mind than to assume that our views of science are ultimate that there are no mysteries in nature that our triumphs are complete and that there are no new worlds to conquer that there are no mysteries in nature that our triumphs are complete and that there are no new worlds to conquer"
" you know i've talked about some of these projects before about the human genome and what that might mean and discovering new sets of genes we're actually starting at a new point we've been digitizing biology and now we're trying to go from that digital code into a new phase of biology with designing and synthesizing life so we've always been trying to ask big questions what is life is something that i think many biologists have been trying to understand at various levels we've tried various approaches paring it down to minimal components we've been digitizing it now for almost twenty years when we sequenced the human genome it was going from the analog world of biology into the digital world of the computer now we're trying to ask can we regenerate life or can we create new life out of this digital universe this is the map of a small organism mycoplasma genitalium that has the smallest genome for a species that can self replicate in the laboratory and we've been trying to just see if we can come up with an even smaller genome we're able to knock out on the order of a hundred genes out of the five hundred or so that are here but when we look at its metabolic map it's relatively simple compared to ours trust me this is simple but when we look at all the genes that we can knock out one at a time it's very unlikely that this would yield a living cell so we decided the only way forward was to actually synthesize this chromosome so we could vary the components to ask some of these most fundamental questions and so we started down the road of can we synthesize a chromosome can chemistry permit making these really large molecules where we've never been before and if we do can we boot up a chromosome a chromosome by the way is just a piece of inert chemical material so our pace of digitizing life has been increasing at an exponential pace our ability to write the genetic code has been moving pretty slowly but has been increasing and our latest point would put it on now an exponential curve we started this over fifteen years ago it took several stages in fact starting with a bioethical review before we did the first experiments but it turns out synthesizing dna is very difficult there's tens of thousands of machines around the world that make small pieces of dna thirty to fifty letters in length and it's a degenerate process so the longer you make the piece the more errors there are so we had to create a new method for putting these little pieces together and correct all the errors and this was our first attempt starting with the digital information of the genome of phi x one seventy four it's a small virus that kills bacteria we designed the pieces went through our error correction and had a dna molecule of about five thousand letters the exciting phase came when we took this piece of inert chemical and put it in the bacteria and the bacteria started to read this genetic code made the viral particles the viral particles then were released from the cells then came back and killed the e coli i was talking to the oil industry recently and i said they clearly understood that model they laughed more than you guys are it's and so we think this is a situation where the software can actually build its own hardware in a biological system but we wanted to go much larger we wanted to build the entire bacterial chromosome it's over five hundred and eighty thousand letters of genetic code so we thought we'd build them in cassettes the size of the viruses so we could actually vary the cassettes to understand what the actual components of a living cell are design is critical and if you're starting with digital information in the computer that digital information has to be really accurate when we first sequenced this genome in nineteen ninety five the standard of accuracy was one error per ten thousand base pairs we actually found on resequencing it thirty errors had we used that original sequence it never would have been able to be booted up part of the design is designing pieces that are fifty letters long that have to overlap with all the other fifty letter pieces to build smaller sub units we have to design so they can go together we design unique elements into this you may have read that we put watermarks in think of this we have a four letter genetic code a c g and t triplets of that letter of those letters code for roughly twenty amino acids that there's a single letter designation for each of the amino acids so we can use the genetic code to write out words sentences thoughts initially all we did was autograph it some people were disappointed there was not poetry we designed these pieces so we can just chew back with enzymes there's enzymes that repair them and put them together and we started making pieces starting with pieces that were five to seven thousand seven thousand letters fit those together to make twenty four thousand letter pieces then put sets of those going up to seventy two thousand at each stage we grew up these pieces in abundance so we could sequence them because we're trying to create a process that's extremely robust that you can see in a minute we're trying to get to the point of automation so this looks like a basketball playoff when we get into these really large pieces over a hundred thousand base pairs they won't any longer grow readily in e coli it exhausts all the modern tools of molecular biology and so we turned to other mechanisms we knew there's a mechanism called homologous recombination that biology uses to repair dna that can put pieces together here is an example of it there's an organism called deinococcus radiodurans that can take three millions rads of radiation you can see in the top panel its chromosome just gets blown apart twelve to twenty four hours later it put it back together exactly as it was before we have thousands of organisms that can do this these organisms can be totally desiccated they can live in a vacuum i am absolutely certain that life can exist in outer space move around find a new aqueous environment in fact nasa has shown a lot of this is out there here's an actual micrograph of the molecule we built using these processes actually just using yeast mechanisms with the right design of the pieces we put them in yeast puts them together automatically this is not an electron micrograph this is just a regular photomicrograph it's such a large molecule we can see it with a light microscope these are pictures over about a six second period so this is the publication we had just a short while ago this is over five hundred and eighty thousand letters of genetic code it's the largest molecule ever made by humans of a defined structure it's over three hundred million molecular weight if we print printed out at a ten font with no spacing it takes a hundred and forty two pages just to print this genetic code well how do we boot up a chromosome how how do we activate this obviously with a virus it's pretty simple it's much more complicated dealing with bacteria it's also simpler when you go into eukaryotes like ourselves you can just pop out the nucleus and pop in another one and that's what you've all heard about with cloning with bacteria archaea the chromosome is integrated into the cell but we recently showed that we can do a complete transplant of a chromosome from one cell to another and activate it we purified a chromosome from one microbial species roughly these two are as distant as human and mice we added a few extra genes so we could select for this chromosome we digested it with enzymes to kill all the proteins and it was pretty stunning when we put this in the cell and you'll appreciate our very sophisticated graphics here the new chromosome went into the cell in fact we thought this might be as far as it went but we tried to design the process a little bit further this is a major mechanism of evolution right here we find all kinds of species that have taken up a second chromosome or a third one from somewhere adding thousands of new traits in a second to that species so people who think of evolution as just one gene changing at a time have missed much of biology there's enzymes called restriction enzymes that actually digest dna the chromosome that was in the cell doesn't have one the cell the chromosome we put in does it got expressed and it recognized the other chromosome as foreign material chewed it up and so we ended up just with the cell with the new chromosome it turned blue because of the genes we put in it and with a very short period of time all the characteristics of one species were lost and it converted totally into the new species based on the new software that we put in the cell all the proteins changed the membranes changed when we read the genetic code it's exactly what we had transferred in so this may sound like genomic alchemy but we can by moving the software dna around change things quite dramatically now i've argued this is not genesis this is building on three and a half billion years of evolution and i've argued that we're about to perhaps create a new version of the cambrian explosion where there's massive new speciation based on this digital design why do this i think this is pretty obvious in terms of some of the needs we're about to go from six and a half to nine billion people over the next forty years to put it in context for myself i was born in nineteen forty six there's now three people on the planet for every one of us that existed in nineteen forty six within forty years there'll be four we have trouble feeding providing fresh clean water medicines fuel for the six and a half billion it's going to be a stretch to do it for nine we use over five billion tons of coal thirty billion plus barrels of oil that's a hundred million barrels a day when we try to think of biological processes or any process to replace that it's going to be a huge challenge then of course there's all that co two from this material that ends up in the atmosphere we now from our discovery around the world have a database with about twenty million genes and i like to think of these as the design components of the future the electronics industry only had a dozen or so components and look at the diversity that came out of that we're limited here primarily by a biological reality and our imagination we now have techniques because of these rapid methods of synthesis to do what we're calling combinatorial genomics we have the ability now to build a large robot that can make a million chromosomes a day when you think of processing these twenty million different genes or trying to optimize processes to produce octane or to produce pharmaceuticals new vaccines we can change just with a small team do more molecular biology than the last twenty years of all science and it's just standard selection we can select for viability chemical or fuel production vaccine production et cetera this is a screen snapshot of some true design software that we're working on to actually be able to sit down and design species in the computer you know we don't know necessarily what it'll look like we know exactly what their genetic code looks like we're focusing on now fourth generation fuels you've seen recently corn to ethanol is just a bad experiment we have second and third generation fuels that will be coming out relatively soon that are sugar to much higher value fuels like octane or different types of butanol but the only way we think that biology can have a major impact without further increasing the cost of food and limiting its availability is if we start with co two as its feedstock and so we're working with designing cells to go down this road and we think we'll have the first fourth generation fuels in about eighteen months sunlight and co two is one method but in our discovery around the world we have all kinds of other methods this is an organism we described in nineteen ninety six it lives in the deep ocean about a mile and a half deep almost at boiling water temperatures it takes co two to methane using molecular hydrogen as its energy source we're looking to see if we can take captured co two which can easily be piped to sites convert that co two back into fuel to drive this process so in a short period of time we think that we might be able to increase what the basic question is of what is life we're truly you know have modest goals of replacing the whole petrol chemical industry yeah if you can't do that at ted where can you become a major source of energy but also we're now working on using these same tools to come up with instant sets of vaccines you've seen this year with flu we're always a year behind and a dollar short when it comes to the right vaccine i think that can be changed by building combinatorial vaccines in advance here's what the future may begin to look like with changing now the evolutionary tree speeding up evolution with synthetic bacteria archea and eventually eukaryotes we're a ways away from improving people our goal is just to make sure that we have a chance to survive long enough to maybe do that thank you very much"," I've talked about some of these projects before, about the human genome and what that might mean, and discovering new sets of genes. We're actually starting at a new point. We've been digitizing biology. And now we're trying to go from that digital code into a new phase of biology with designing and synthesizing life. So we've always been trying to ask big questions. What is life? It's something that I think many biologists have been trying to understand at various levels. We've tried various approaches, paring it down to minimal components. We've been digitizing it now for almost 20 years when we sequenced the human genome. It was going from the analog world of biology into the digital world of the computer. Now we're trying to ask, can we regenerate life, or can we create new life out of this digital universe? This is the map of a small organism, mycoplasma genitalium, that has the smallest genome for a species that can self-replicate in the laboratory. And we've been trying to just see if we can come up with an even smaller genome. We were able to knock out on the order of 100 genes out of the 500 or so that are here. But when we look at its metabolic map, it's relatively simple compared to ours. Trust me, this is simple. But when we look at all the genes that we can knock out one at a time, it's very unlikely that this would yield a living cell. So we decided the only way forward was to actually synthesize this chromosome so we could vary the components to ask some of these most fundamental questions. And so we started down the road of can we synthesize a chromosome? Can chemistry permit making these really large molecules where we've never been before? And if we do, can we boot up a chromosome? A chromosome, by the way, is just a piece of inert chemical material. So our pace of digitizing life has been increasing at an exponential pace. Our ability to write the genetic code has been moving pretty slowly, but has been increasing. And our latest point would put it on now on exponential curve. We started this over 15 years ago. It took several stages, in fact, starting with a bioethical review before we did the first experiments. But it turns out synthesizing DNA is very difficult. There's tens of thousands of machines around the world that make small pieces of DNA, 30 to 50 letters in length. And it's a degenerate process, so the longer you make the piece, the more errors there are. So we had to create a new method for putting these little pieces together and correct all the errors. And this was our first attempt, starting with the digital information of the genome of Phi X174. It's a small virus that kills bacteria. We designed the pieces, went through our error correction, and had a DNA molecule of about 5,000 letters. The exciting phase came when we took this piece of inner chemical and put it in the bacteria. And the bacteria started to read this genetic code, made the viral particles. The viral particles then were released from the cells and came back and killed the E. coli. I was talking to the oil industry recently and I said they clearly understood that model. Um... They laugh more than you guys are. And so we think this is a situation where the software can actually build its own hardware in a biological system. But we wanted to go much larger. We wanted to build the entire bacterial chromosome. It's over 580,000 letters of genetic code. So we thought we'd build them in cassettes the size of the viruses, so we could actually vary the cassettes to understand what the actual components of a living cell are. Design is critical, and if you're starting with digital information in the computer, that digital information has to be really accurate. When we first sequenced this genome in 1995, the standard of accuracy was one error per 10,000 base pairs. We actually found on re-sequencing it, 30 errors. Had we used that original sequence, it never would have been able to be booted up. Part of the design is designing pieces that are 50 letters long, that have to overlap with all the other 50 letter pieces to build smaller subunits We have to design so they can go together. We design unique elements into this You may have read that we put watermarks in Think of this we have a four letter genetic code a C G and T Triplets of that letters of those letters code for roughly 20 amino acids, that there's a single letter designation for each of the amino acids. So we can use the genetic code to write out words, sentences, thoughts. Initially, all we did was autograph it. Some people were disappointed there was not poetry. We designed these pieces so we can just chew back with enzymes. There's enzymes that repair them and put them together. And we started making pieces, starting with pieces that were 5,000 to 7,000 letters, put those together to make 24,000 letter pieces, then put sets of those going up to 72,000. At each stage, we grew up these pieces in abundance so we could sequence them because we're trying to create a process that's extremely robust that you can see in a minute. We're trying to get to the point of automation. So this looks like a basketball playoff. When we get into these really large pieces, over 100,000 base pairs, they won't any longer grow readily in E. coli. It exhausts all the modern tools of molecular biology. And so we turned to other mechanisms. We knew there's a mechanism called homologous recombination that biology uses to repair DNA that can put pieces together. Here's an example of it. There's an organism called Deinococcus radiodorans that can take 3 million rads of radiation. You can see in the top panel, its chromosome just gets blown apart. 12 to 24 hours later, it put it back together exactly as it was before. We have thousands of organisms that can do this. These organisms can be totally desiccated, they can live in a vacuum. I am absolutely certain that life can exist in outer space, move around, find a new aqueous environment. In fact, NASA has shown a lot of this is out there. Here's an actual micrograph of the molecule we built using these processes. Actually, just using yeast mechanisms with the right design of the pieces. We put them in, yeast puts them together automatically. This is not an electron micrograph, this is just a regular photomicrograph. It's such a large molecule, we can see it with a light microscope. These are pictures over about a six second period. So this is the publication we had just a short while ago. This is over 580,000 letters of genetic code. It's the largest molecule ever made by humans of a defined structure. It's over 300 million molecular weight. If we print it out at a 10 font with no spacing, it takes 142 pages just to print this genetic code. Well, how do we boot up a chromosome? How do we activate this? Obviously with a virus it's pretty simple. It's much more complicated dealing with bacteria. It's also simpler when you go into eukaryotes like ourselves. You can just pop out the nucleus and pop in another one, And that's what you've all heard about with cloning. With bacterian archaea, the chromosome is integrated into the cell. But we recently showed that we can do a complete transplant of a chromosome from one cell to another and activate it. We purified a chromosome from one microbial species. Roughly, these two are as distant as human and mice. We added a few extra genes so we could select for this chromosome. We digested it with enzymes to kill all the proteins. And it was pretty stunning when we put this in the cell, and you'll appreciate our very sophisticated graphics here. The new chromosome went into the cell. In fact, we thought this might be as far as it went, but we tried to design the process a little bit further. This is a major mechanism of evolution right here. We find all kinds of species that have taken up a second chromosome or a third one from somewhere, adding thousands of new traits in a second to that species. So people who think of evolution as just one gene changing at a time have missed much of biology. There's enzymes called restriction enzymes that actually digest DNA. The chromosome that was in the cell doesn't have one. The chromosome we put in does. It got expressed and it recognized the other chromosome as foreign material, chewed it up, and so we ended up just with the cell with the new chromosome. It turned blue because of the genes we put in it, and with a very short period of time, all the characteristics of one species were lost and it converted totally into the new species based on the new software that we put in the cell. All the proteins changed, the membranes changed. When we read the genetic code, it's exactly what we had transferred in. So this may sound like genomic alchemy, but we can, by moving the software DNA around, change things quite dramatically Now I've argued this is not Genesis. This is building on three and a half billion years of evolution And I've argued that we're about to perhaps create a new version of the Cambrian explosion where there's massive new speciation based on this digital design Why do this? I think this is pretty obvious in terms of some of the needs. We're about to go from six and a half to nine billion people over the next 40 years. To put it in context for myself, I was born in 1946. There's now three people on the planet for every one of us that existed in 1946. Within 40 years, there'll be four. We have trouble feeding, providing fresh, clean water, medicines, fuel for the six and a half billion. It's going to be a stretch to do it for nine. We use over five billion tons of coal, 30 billion plus barrels of oil. That's 100 million barrels a day. When we try to think of biological processes or any process to replace that, it's going to be a huge challenge. Then of course there's all that CO2 from this material that ends up in the atmosphere. We now, from our discovery around the world, have a database with about 20 million genes. And I like to think of these as the design components of the future. The electronics industry only had a dozen or so components, and look at the diversity that came out of that. We're limited here primarily by biological reality and our imagination. We now have techniques, because of these rapid methods of synthesis, to do what we're calling combinatorial genomics. We have the ability now to build a large robot that can make a million chromosomes a day. When you think of processing these 20 million different genes or trying to optimize processes to produce octane or to produce pharmaceuticals new vaccines We can change just with a small team Do more molecular biology than the last 20 years of all science and it's just standard selection We can select for viability chemical or fuel production vaccine vaccine production, etc. This is a screen snapshot of some true design software that we're working on... to actually be able to sit down and design species in the computer. We don't know necessarily what they look like. We know exactly what their genetic code looks like. We're focusing on now fourth generation fuels. You've seen recently corn to ethanol is just a bad experiment. We have second and third generation fuels that will be coming out relatively soon that are sugar to much higher value fuels like octane or different types of butanol. But the only way we think that biology can have a major impact without further increasing the cost of food and limiting its availability is if we start with CO2 as its feedstock. And so we're working with designing cells to go down this road. And we think we'll have the first fourth generation fuels in about 18 months. Sunlight and CO2 is one method, but in our discovery around the world, we have all kinds of other methods. This is an organism we described in 1996. It lives in the deep ocean, about a mile and a half deep, almost at boiling water temperatures. It takes CO2 to methane, using molecular hydrogen as its energy source. We're looking to see if we can take captured CO2, which can easily be piped to sites, convert that CO2 back into fuel to drive this process. So, in a short period of time, we think that we might be able to increase what the basic question is of what is life. We're truly, you know, have modest goals of replacing the whole petrochemical industry. If you can't do that at TED, where can you? Become a major source of energy. But also we're now working on using these same tools to come up with instant sets of vaccines. You've seen this year with flu, we're always a year behind and a dollar short when it comes to the right vaccine. I think that can be changed by building combinatorial vaccines in advance. Here's what the future may begin to look like with changing now the evolutionary tree, speeding up evolution with synthetic bacteria, archaea, and eventually eukaryotes. We're a ways away from improving people. Our goal is just to make sure that we have a chance to survive long enough to maybe do that. Thank you very much. ways away from improving people. Our goal is just to make sure that we have a chance to survive long enough to maybe do that. Thank you very much.","you know i have talked about some of these projects before about the human genome and what that might mean and discovering new sets of genes we are actually starting at a new point we have been digitizing biology and now we are trying to go from that digital code into a new phase of biology with designing and synthesizing life so we have always been trying to ask big questions what is life is something that i think many biologists have been trying to understand at various levels we have tried various approaches paring it down to minimal components we have been digitizing it now for almost 20 years when we sequenced the human genome it was going from the analog world of biology into the digital world of the computer now we are trying to ask can we regenerate life or can we create new life out of this digital universe this is the map of a small organism mycoplasma genitalium that has the smallest genome for a species that can self replicate in the laboratory and we have been trying to just see if we can come up with an even smaller genome we are able to knock out on the order of a 100 genes out of the 500 or so that are here but when we look at its metabolic map it is relatively simple compared to ours trust me this is simple but when we look at all the genes that we can knock out one at a time it is very unlikely that this would yield a living cell so we decided the only way forward was to actually synthesize this chromosome so we could vary the components to ask some of these most fundamental questions and so we started down the road of can we synthesize a chromosome can chemistry permit making these really large molecules where we have never been before and if we do can we boot up a chromosome a chromosome by the way is just a piece of inert chemical material so our pace of digitizing life has been increasing at an exponential pace our ability to write the genetic code has been moving pretty slowly but has been increasing and our latest point would put it on now an exponential curve we started this over 15 years ago it took several stages in fact starting with a bioethical review before we did the 1st experiments but it turns out synthesizing dna is very difficult there is 10s of 1000s of machines around the world that make small pieces of dna 30 to 50 letters in length and it is a degenerate process so the longer you make the piece the more errors there are so we had to create a new method for putting these little pieces together and correct all the errors and this was our 1st attempt starting with the digital information of the genome of phi x 174 it is a small virus that kills bacteria we designed the pieces went through our error correction and had a dna molecule of about 5000 letters the exciting phase came when we took this piece of inert chemical and put it in the bacteria and the bacteria started to read this genetic code made the viral particles the viral particles then were released from the cells then came back and killed the e coli i was talking to the oil industry recently and i said they clearly understood that model they laughed more than you guys are it is and so we think this is a situation where the software can actually build its own hardware in a biological system but we wanted to go much larger we wanted to build the entire bacterial chromosome it is over 580000 letters of genetic code so we thought we would build them in cassettes the size of the viruses so we could actually vary the cassettes to understand what the actual components of a living cell are design is critical and if you are starting with digital information in the computer that digital information has to be really accurate when we 1st sequenced this genome in 1995 the standard of accuracy was one error per 10000 base pairs we actually found on resequencing it 30 errors had we used that original sequence it never would have been able to be booted up part of the design is designing pieces that are 50 letters long that have to overlap with all the other 50 letter pieces to build smaller sub units we have to design so they can go together we design unique elements into this you may have read that we put watermarks in think of this we have a 4 letter genetic code a c g and t triplets of that letter of those letters code for roughly 20 amino acids that there is a single letter designation for each of the amino acids so we can use the genetic code to write out words sentences thoughts initially all we did was autograph it some people were disappointed there was not poetry we designed these pieces so we can just chew back with enzymes there is enzymes that repair them and put them together and we started making pieces starting with pieces that were 5 to 14000 letters fit those together to make 24000 letter pieces then put sets of those going up to 72000 at each stage we grew up these pieces in abundance so we could sequence them because we are trying to create a process that is extremely robust that you can see in a minute we are trying to get to the point of automation so this looks like a basketball playoff when we get into these really large pieces over a 100000 base pairs they will not any longer grow readily in e coli it exhausts all the modern tools of molecular biology and so we turned to other mechanisms we knew there is a mechanism called homologous recombination that biology uses to repair dna that can put pieces together here is an example of it there is an organism called deinococcus radiodurans that can take 3000000s rads of radiation you can see in the top panel its chromosome just gets blown apart 12 to 24 hours later it put it back together exactly as it was before we have 1000s of organisms that can do this these organisms can be totally desiccated they can live in a vacuum i am absolutely certain that life can exist in outer space move around find a new aqueous environment in fact nasa has shown a lot of this is out there here is an actual micrograph of the molecule we built using these processes actually just using yeast mechanisms with the right design of the pieces we put them in yeast puts them together automatically this is not an electron micrograph this is just a regular photomicrograph it is such a large molecule we can see it with a light microscope these are pictures over about a 62nd period so this is the publication we had just a short while ago this is over 580000 letters of genetic code it is the largest molecule ever made by humans of a defined structure it is over 300000000 molecular weight if we print printed out at a 10 font with no spacing it takes a 142 pages just to print this genetic code well how do we boot up a chromosome how how do we activate this obviously with a virus it is pretty simple it is much more complicated dealing with bacteria it is also simpler when you go into eukaryotes like ourselves you can just pop out the nucleus and pop in another one and that is what you have all heard about with cloning with bacteria archaea the chromosome is integrated into the cell but we recently showed that we can do a complete transplant of a chromosome from one cell to another and activate it we purified a chromosome from one microbial species roughly these 2 are as distant as human and mice we added a few extra genes so we could select for this chromosome we digested it with enzymes to kill all the proteins and it was pretty stunning when we put this in the cell and you will appreciate our very sophisticated graphics here the new chromosome went into the cell in fact we thought this might be as far as it went but we tried to design the process a little bit further this is a major mechanism of evolution right here we find all kinds of species that have taken up a 2nd chromosome or a 3rd one from somewhere adding 1000s of new traits in a 2nd to that species so people who think of evolution as just one gene changing at a time have missed much of biology there is enzymes called restriction enzymes that actually digest dna the chromosome that was in the cell does not have one the cell the chromosome we put in does it got expressed and it recognized the other chromosome as foreign material chewed it up and so we ended up just with the cell with the new chromosome it turned blue because of the genes we put in it and with a very short period of time all the characteristics of one species were lost and it converted totally into the new species based on the new software that we put in the cell all the proteins changed the membranes changed when we read the genetic code it is exactly what we had transferred in so this may sound like genomic alchemy but we can by moving the software dna around change things quite dramatically now i have argued this is not genesis this is building on 3500000000 years of evolution and i have argued that we are about to perhaps create a new version of the cambrian explosion where there is massive new speciation based on this digital design why do this i think this is pretty obvious in terms of some of the needs we are about to go from 6.5 to 9000000000 people over the next 40 years to put it in context for myself i was born in 1946 there is now 3 people on the planet for every one of us that existed in 1946 within 40 years there will be 4 we have trouble feeding providing fresh clean water medicines fuel for the 6500000000 it is going to be a stretch to do it for 9 we use over 5000000000 tons of coal 30000000000 plus barrels of oil that is a 100000000 barrels a day when we try to think of biological processes or any process to replace that it is going to be a huge challenge then of course there is all that co 2 from this material that ends up in the atmosphere we now from our discovery around the world have a database with about 20000000 genes and i like to think of these as the design components of the future the electronics industry only had a dozen or so components and look at the diversity that came out of that we are limited here primarily by a biological reality and our imagination we now have techniques because of these rapid methods of synthesis to do what we are calling combinatorial genomics we have the ability now to build a large robot that can make a 1000000 chromosomes a day when you think of processing these 20000000 different genes or trying to optimize processes to produce octane or to produce pharmaceuticals new vaccines we can change just with a small team do more molecular biology than the last 20 years of all science and it is just standard selection we can select for viability chemical or fuel production vaccine production et cetera this is a screen snapshot of some true design software that we are working on to actually be able to sit down and design species in the computer you know we do not know necessarily what it will look like we know exactly what their genetic code looks like we are focusing on now 4th generation fuels you have seen recently corn to ethanol is just a bad experiment we have 2nd and 3rd generation fuels that will be coming out relatively soon that are sugar to much higher value fuels like octane or different types of butanol but the only way we think that biology can have a major impact without further increasing the cost of food and limiting its availability is if we start with co 2 as its feedstock and so we are working with designing cells to go down this road and we think we will have the 1st 4th generation fuels in about 18 months sunlight and co 2 is one method but in our discovery around the world we have all kinds of other methods this is an organism we described in 1996 it lives in the deep ocean about a mile and a half deep almost at boiling water temperatures it takes co 2 to methane using molecular hydrogen as its energy source we are looking to see if we can take captured co 2 which can easily be piped to sites convert that co 2 back into fuel to drive this process so in a short period of time we think that we might be able to increase what the basic question is of what is life we are truly you know have modest goals of replacing the whole petrol chemical industry yeah if you can not do that at ted where can you become a major source of energy but also we are now working on using these same tools to come up with instant sets of vaccines you have seen this year with flu we are always a year behind and a dollar short when it comes to the right vaccine i think that can be changed by building combinatorial vaccines in advance here is what the future may begin to look like with changing now the evolutionary tree speeding up evolution with synthetic bacteria archea and eventually eukaryotes we are a ways away from improving people our goal is just to make sure that we have a chance to survive long enough to maybe do that thank you very much","i have talked about some of these projects before about the human genome and what that might mean and discovering new sets of genes we are actually starting at a new point we have been digitizing biology and now we are trying to go from that digital code into a new phase of biology with designing and synthesizing life so we have always been trying to ask big questions what is life it is something that i think many biologists have been trying to understand at various levels we have tried various approaches paring it down to minimal components we have been digitizing it now for almost 20 years when we sequenced the human genome it was going from the analog world of biology into the digital world of the computer now we are trying to ask can we regenerate life or can we create new life out of this digital universe this is the map of a small organism mycoplasma genitalium that has the smallest genome for a species that can self replicate in the laboratory and we have been trying to just see if we can come up with an even smaller genome we were able to knock out on the order of 100 genes out of the 500 or so that are here but when we look at its metabolic map it is relatively simple compared to ours trust me this is simple but when we look at all the genes that we can knock out one at a time it is very unlikely that this would yield a living cell so we decided the only way forward was to actually synthesize this chromosome so we could vary the components to ask some of these most fundamental questions and so we started down the road of can we synthesize a chromosome can chemistry permit making these really large molecules where we have never been before and if we do can we boot up a chromosome a chromosome by the way is just a piece of inert chemical material so our pace of digitizing life has been increasing at an exponential pace our ability to write the genetic code has been moving pretty slowly but has been increasing and our latest point would put it on now on exponential curve we started this over 15 years ago it took several stages in fact starting with a bioethical review before we did the 1st experiments but it turns out synthesizing dna is very difficult there is 10s of 1000s of machines around the world that make small pieces of dna 30 to 50 letters in length and it is a degenerate process so the longer you make the piece the more errors there are so we had to create a new method for putting these little pieces together and correct all the errors and this was our 1st attempt starting with the digital information of the genome of phi x 174 it is a small virus that kills bacteria we designed the pieces went through our error correction and had a dna molecule of about 5000 letters the exciting phase came when we took this piece of inner chemical and put it in the bacteria and the bacteria started to read this genetic code made the viral particles the viral particles then were released from the cells and came back and killed the e coli i was talking to the oil industry recently and i said they clearly understood that model they laugh more than you guys are and so we think this is a situation where the software can actually build its own hardware in a biological system but we wanted to go much larger we wanted to build the entire bacterial chromosome it is over 580000 letters of genetic code so we thought we would build them in cassettes the size of the viruses so we could actually vary the cassettes to understand what the actual components of a living cell are design is critical and if you are starting with digital information in the computer that digital information has to be really accurate when we 1st sequenced this genome in 1995 the standard of accuracy was one error per 10000 base pairs we actually found on re sequencing it 30 errors had we used that original sequence it never would have been able to be booted up part of the design is designing pieces that are 50 letters long that have to overlap with all the other 50 letter pieces to build smaller subunits we have to design so they can go together we design unique elements into this you may have read that we put watermarks in think of this we have a 4 letter genetic code a c g and t triplets of that letters of those letters code for roughly 20 amino acids that there is a single letter designation for each of the amino acids so we can use the genetic code to write out words sentences thoughts initially all we did was autograph it some people were disappointed there was not poetry we designed these pieces so we can just chew back with enzymes there is enzymes that repair them and put them together and we started making pieces starting with pieces that were 5000 to 7000 letters put those together to make 24000 letter pieces then put sets of those going up to 72000 at each stage we grew up these pieces in abundance so we could sequence them because we are trying to create a process that is extremely robust that you can see in a minute we are trying to get to the point of automation so this looks like a basketball playoff when we get into these really large pieces over 100000 base pairs they will not any longer grow readily in e coli it exhausts all the modern tools of molecular biology and so we turned to other mechanisms we knew there is a mechanism called homologous recombination that biology uses to repair dna that can put pieces together here is an example of it there is an organism called deinococcus radiodorans that can take 3000000 rads of radiation you can see in the top panel its chromosome just gets blown apart 12 to 24 hours later it put it back together exactly as it was before we have 1000s of organisms that can do this these organisms can be totally desiccated they can live in a vacuum i am absolutely certain that life can exist in outer space move around find a new aqueous environment in fact nasa has shown a lot of this is out there here is an actual micrograph of the molecule we built using these processes actually just using yeast mechanisms with the right design of the pieces we put them in yeast puts them together automatically this is not an electron micrograph this is just a regular photomicrograph it is such a large molecule we can see it with a light microscope these are pictures over about a 62nd period so this is the publication we had just a short while ago this is over 580000 letters of genetic code it is the largest molecule ever made by humans of a defined structure it is over 300000000 molecular weight if we print it out at a 10 font with no spacing it takes 142 pages just to print this genetic code well how do we boot up a chromosome how do we activate this obviously with a virus it is pretty simple it is much more complicated dealing with bacteria it is also simpler when you go into eukaryotes like ourselves you can just pop out the nucleus and pop in another one and that is what you have all heard about with cloning with bacterian archaea the chromosome is integrated into the cell but we recently showed that we can do a complete transplant of a chromosome from one cell to another and activate it we purified a chromosome from one microbial species roughly these 2 are as distant as human and mice we added a few extra genes so we could select for this chromosome we digested it with enzymes to kill all the proteins and it was pretty stunning when we put this in the cell and you will appreciate our very sophisticated graphics here the new chromosome went into the cell in fact we thought this might be as far as it went but we tried to design the process a little bit further this is a major mechanism of evolution right here we find all kinds of species that have taken up a 2nd chromosome or a 3rd one from somewhere adding 1000s of new traits in a 2nd to that species so people who think of evolution as just one gene changing at a time have missed much of biology there is enzymes called restriction enzymes that actually digest dna the chromosome that was in the cell does not have one the chromosome we put in does it got expressed and it recognized the other chromosome as foreign material chewed it up and so we ended up just with the cell with the new chromosome it turned blue because of the genes we put in it and with a very short period of time all the characteristics of one species were lost and it converted totally into the new species based on the new software that we put in the cell all the proteins changed the membranes changed when we read the genetic code it is exactly what we had transferred in so this may sound like genomic alchemy but we can by moving the software dna around change things quite dramatically now i have argued this is not genesis this is building on 3500000000 years of evolution and i have argued that we are about to perhaps create a new version of the cambrian explosion where there is massive new speciation based on this digital design why do this i think this is pretty obvious in terms of some of the needs we are about to go from 6.5 to 9000000000 people over the next 40 years to put it in context for myself i was born in 1946 there is now 3 people on the planet for every one of us that existed in 1946 within 40 years there will be 4 we have trouble feeding providing fresh clean water medicines fuel for the 6500000000 it is going to be a stretch to do it for 9 we use over 5000000000 tons of coal 30000000000 plus barrels of oil that is 100000000 barrels a day when we try to think of biological processes or any process to replace that it is going to be a huge challenge then of course there is all that co 2 from this material that ends up in the atmosphere we now from our discovery around the world have a database with about 20000000 genes and i like to think of these as the design components of the future the electronics industry only had a dozen or so components and look at the diversity that came out of that we are limited here primarily by biological reality and our imagination we now have techniques because of these rapid methods of synthesis to do what we are calling combinatorial genomics we have the ability now to build a large robot that can make a 1000000 chromosomes a day when you think of processing these 20000000 different genes or trying to optimize processes to produce octane or to produce pharmaceuticals new vaccines we can change just with a small team do more molecular biology than the last 20 years of all science and it is just standard selection we can select for viability chemical or fuel production vaccine vaccine production etc this is a screen snapshot of some true design software that we are working on to actually be able to sit down and design species in the computer we do not know necessarily what they look like we know exactly what their genetic code looks like we are focusing on now 4th generation fuels you have seen recently corn to ethanol is just a bad experiment we have 2nd and 3rd generation fuels that will be coming out relatively soon that are sugar to much higher value fuels like octane or different types of butanol but the only way we think that biology can have a major impact without further increasing the cost of food and limiting its availability is if we start with co 2 as its feedstock and so we are working with designing cells to go down this road and we think we will have the 1st 4th generation fuels in about 18 months sunlight and co 2 is one method but in our discovery around the world we have all kinds of other methods this is an organism we described in 1996 it lives in the deep ocean about a mile and a half deep almost at boiling water temperatures it takes co 2 to methane using molecular hydrogen as its energy source we are looking to see if we can take captured co 2 which can easily be piped to sites convert that co 2 back into fuel to drive this process so in a short period of time we think that we might be able to increase what the basic question is of what is life we are truly you know have modest goals of replacing the whole petrochemical industry if you can not do that at ted where can you become a major source of energy but also we are now working on using these same tools to come up with instant sets of vaccines you have seen this year with flu we are always a year behind and a dollar short when it comes to the right vaccine i think that can be changed by building combinatorial vaccines in advance here is what the future may begin to look like with changing now the evolutionary tree speeding up evolution with synthetic bacteria archaea and eventually eukaryotes we are a ways away from improving people our goal is just to make sure that we have a chance to survive long enough to maybe do that thank you very much ways away from improving people our goal is just to make sure that we have a chance to survive long enough to maybe do that thank you very much"
" i want to start out by asking you to think back to when you were a kid playing with blocks as you figured out how to reach out and grasp pick them up and move them around you were actually learning how to think and solve problems by understanding and manipulating spatial relationships spatial reasoning is deeply connected to how we understand a lot of the world around us so as a computer scientist inspired by this utility of our interactions with physical objects along with my adviser pattie and my collaborator jeevan kalanithi i started to wonder what if when we used a computer instead of having this one mouse cursor that was a like a digital fingertip moving around a flat desktop what if we could reach in with both hands and grasp information physically arranging it the way we wanted this question was so compelling that we decided to explore the answer by building siftables in a nutshell a siftable is an interactive computer the size of a cookie they're able to be moved around by hand they can sense each other they can sense their motion and they have a screen and a wireless radio most importantly they're physical so like the blocks you can move them just by reaching out and grasping and siftables are an example of a new ecosystem of tools for manipulating digital information and as these tools become more physical more aware of their motion aware of each other and aware of the nuance of how we move them we can start to explore some new and fun interaction styles so i'm going to start with some simple examples this siftable is configured to show video and if i tilt it in one direction it'll roll the video this way if i tilt it the other way it rolls it backwards and these interactive portraits are aware of each other so if i put them next to each other they get interested if they get surrounded they notice that too they might get a little flustered and they can also sense their motion and tilt so one of the interesting implications on interaction we started to realize was that we could use everyday gestures on data like pouring a color the way we might pour a liquid so in this case we've got three siftables configured to be paint buckets and i can use them to pour color into that central one where they get mixed if we overshoot we can pour a little bit back there are also some neat possibilities for education like language math and logic games where we want to give people the ability to try things quickly and view the results immediately so here i'm this is a fibonacci sequence that i'm making with a simple equation program here we have a word game that's kind of like a mash up between scrabble and boggle basically in every round you get a randomly assigned letter on each siftable and as you try to make words it checks against a dictionary then after about thirty seconds it reshuffles and you have a new set of letters and new possibilities to try thank you so these are some kids that came on a field trip to the media lab and i managed to get them to try it out and shoot a video they really loved it and one of the interesting things about this kind of application is that you don't have to give people many instructions all you have to say is make words and they know exactly what to do so here's another few people trying it out that's our youngest beta tester down there on the right turns out all he wanted to do was to stack the siftables up so to him they were just blocks now this is an interactive cartoon application and we wanted to build a learning tool for language learners and this is felix actually and he can bring new characters into the scene just by lifting the siftables off the table that have that character shown on them here he's bringing the sun out now he's brought a tractor into the scene so by shaking the siftables and putting them next to each other he can make the characters interact inventing his own narrative it's an open ended story and he gets to decide how it unfolds so the last example i have time to show you today is a music sequencing and live performance tool that we've built recently in which siftables act as sounds like lead bass and drums each of these has four different variations you get to choose which one you want to use and you can inject these sounds into a sequence that you can assemble into the pattern that you want and you inject it by just bumping up the sound siftable against a sequence siftable there are effects that you can control live like reverb and filter you attach it to a particular sound and then tilt to adjust it and then overall effects like tempo and volume that apply to the entire sequence so let's have a look we'll start by putting a lead into two sequence siftables arrange them into a series extend it add a little more lead now i put a bassline in now i'll put some percussion in and now i'll attach the filter to the drums so i can control the effect live i can speed up the whole sequence by tilting the tempo to one one way or the other and now i'll attach the filter to the bass for some more expression i can rearrange the sequence while it plays i don't have to plan it out in advance but i can improvise changing it making it longer or shorter as i go and now finally i can fade the whole sequence out using the volume siftable tilted to the left thank you so as you can see my passion is for making new human computer interfaces that are a better match to the way our brains and bodies work and today i had time to show you one point in this new design space and a few of the possibilities that we're working to bring out of the laboratory so the thought i want to leave you with is that we're on the cusp of this new generation of tools for interacting with digital media that are going to bring information into our world on our terms thank you very much i look forward to talking with all of you"," I want to start by asking you to think back to when you were a kid playing with blocks. As you figured out how to reach out and grasp, pick them up and move them around, you were actually learning how to think and solve problems by understanding and manipulating spatial relationships. Spatial reasoning is deeply connected to how we understand a lot of the world around us. So as a computer scientist inspired by this utility of our interactions with physical objects along with my advisor, Patty, and my collaborator, Jeevan Kalanithi, I started to wonder, what if when we use a computer, instead of having this one mouse cursor that was like a digital fingertip moving around a flat desktop, what if we could reach in with both hands and grasp information physically, arranging it the way we wanted? This question was so compelling that we decided to explore the answer by building siftables. In a nutshell, a siftable is an interactive computer the size of a cookie. They're able to be moved around by hand. They can sense each other, they can sense their motion, and they have a screen and a wireless radio. Most importantly, they're physical, so like the blocks, you can move them just by reaching out and grasping. And the siftables are an example of a new ecosystem of tools for manipulating digital information. And as these tools become more physical, more aware of their motion, aware of each other, and aware of the nuance of how we move them, we can start to explore some new and fun interaction styles. So I'm going to start with some simple examples. This siftable is configured to show video. And if I tilt it in one direction, it'll roll the video this way. If I tilt it the other way, it rolls it backwards. These interactive portraits are aware of each other. So if I put them next to each other, they get interested. If they get surrounded, they notice that too. They might get a little flustered. And they can also sense their motion and tilt. So one of the interesting implications on interaction we started to realize was that we could use everyday gestures on data, like pouring a color the way we might pour a liquid. So in this case, we've got three siftables configured to be paint buckets, and I can use them to pour color into that central one where they get mixed. If we overshoot, we can pour a little bit back. There are also some neat possibilities for education, like language, math, and logic games, where you want to give people the ability to try things quickly and view the results immediately. So here I'm, this is a Fibonacci sequence that I'm making with a simple equation program. Here we have a word game that's kind of like a mashup between Scrabble and Boggle. Basically, in every round, you get a randomly assigned letter on each siftable. And as you try to make words, it checks against the dictionary. Then after about 30 seconds, it reshuffles, and you have a new set of letters and new possibilities to try. Thank you. So these are some kids that came on a field trip to the Media Lab, and I managed to get them to try it out and shoot a video. They really loved it. And one of the interesting things about this kind of application is that you don't have to give people many instructions. All I have to say is, make words, and they know exactly what to do. So here's another few people trying it out. That's our youngest beta tester down there on the right. Turns out all he wanted to do was to stack the siftables up. So to him, they were just blocks. Now this is an interactive cartoon application. And we wanted to build a learning tool for language learners. And this is Felix, actually. And he can bring new characters into the scene just by lifting the siftables off the table that have that character shown on them. Here he's bringing the sun out. Now he's brought a tractor into the scene. So by shaking the siftables and putting them next to each other, he can make the characters interact, inventing his own narrative. It's an open-ended story, and he gets to decide how it unfolds. So the last example I have time to show you today is a music sequencing and live performance tool that we've built recently, in which siftables act as sounds, like lead, bass, and drums. Each of these has four different variations. You get to choose which one you want to use. And you can inject these sounds into a sequence that you can assemble into the pattern that you want. And you inject it by just bumping up the sound siftable against the sequence siftable. There are effects that you can control live, like reverb and filter. You attach it to a particular sound and then tilt to adjust it. And then overall effects, like tempo and volume, that apply to the entire sequence. So let's have a look. I start by putting a lead into two sequence siftables, arrange them into a series, extend it, add a little more lead. Now I put a bass line in. Now I'll put some percussion in. And now I'll attach the filter to the drum so I can control the effect live. I can speed up the whole sequence by tilting the tempo to one way or the other. And now I'll attach the filter to the bass for some more expression. I can rearrange the sequence while it plays. I don't have to plan it out in advance, but I can improvise, changing it, making it longer or shorter as I go. And now finally, I can fade the whole sequence out using the volume siftable tilted to the left. Thank you. So as you can see, my passion is for making new human computer interfaces that are a better match to the ways our brains and bodies work. And today, I had time to show you one point in this new design space and a few of the possibilities that we're working to bring out of the laboratory. So the thought I want to leave you with is that we're on the cusp of this new generation of tools for interacting with digital media that are going to bring information into our world on our terms. Thank you very much. I look forward to talking with all of you.","i want to start out by asking you to think back to when you were a kid playing with blocks as you figured out how to reach out and grasp pick them up and move them around you were actually learning how to think and solve problems by understanding and manipulating spatial relationships spatial reasoning is deeply connected to how we understand a lot of the world around us so as a computer scientist inspired by this utility of our interactions with physical objects along with my adviser pattie and my collaborator jeevan kalanithi i started to wonder what if when we used a computer instead of having this one mouse cursor that was a like a digital fingertip moving around a flat desktop what if we could reach in with both hands and grasp information physically arranging it the way we wanted this question was so compelling that we decided to explore the answer by building siftables in a nutshell a siftable is an interactive computer the size of a cookie they are able to be moved around by hand they can sense each other they can sense their motion and they have a screen and a wireless radio most importantly they are physical so like the blocks you can move them just by reaching out and grasping and siftables are an example of a new ecosystem of tools for manipulating digital information and as these tools become more physical more aware of their motion aware of each other and aware of the nuance of how we move them we can start to explore some new and fun interaction styles so i am going to start with some simple examples this siftable is configured to show video and if i tilt it in one direction it will roll the video this way if i tilt it the other way it rolls it backwards and these interactive portraits are aware of each other so if i put them next to each other they get interested if they get surrounded they notice that too they might get a little flustered and they can also sense their motion and tilt so one of the interesting implications on interaction we started to realize was that we could use everyday gestures on data like pouring a color the way we might pour a liquid so in this case we have got 3 siftables configured to be paint buckets and i can use them to pour color into that central one where they get mixed if we overshoot we can pour a little bit back there are also some neat possibilities for education like language math and logic games where we want to give people the ability to try things quickly and view the results immediately so here i am this is a fibonacci sequence that i am making with a simple equation program here we have a word game that is kind of like a mash up between scrabble and boggle basically in every round you get a randomly assigned letter on each siftable and as you try to make words it checks against a dictionary then after about 30 seconds it reshuffles and you have a new set of letters and new possibilities to try thank you so these are some kids that came on a field trip to the media lab and i managed to get them to try it out and shoot a video they really loved it and one of the interesting things about this kind of application is that you do not have to give people many instructions all you have to say is make words and they know exactly what to do so here is another few people trying it out that is our youngest beta tester down there on the right turns out all he wanted to do was to stack the siftables up so to him they were just blocks now this is an interactive cartoon application and we wanted to build a learning tool for language learners and this is felix actually and he can bring new characters into the scene just by lifting the siftables off the table that have that character shown on them here he is bringing the sun out now he is brought a tractor into the scene so by shaking the siftables and putting them next to each other he can make the characters interact inventing his own narrative it is an open ended story and he gets to decide how it unfolds so the last example i have time to show you today is a music sequencing and live performance tool that we have built recently in which siftables act as sounds like lead bass and drums each of these has 4 different variations you get to choose which one you want to use and you can inject these sounds into a sequence that you can assemble into the pattern that you want and you inject it by just bumping up the sound siftable against a sequence siftable there are effects that you can control live like reverb and filter you attach it to a particular sound and then tilt to adjust it and then overall effects like tempo and volume that apply to the entire sequence so let us have a look we will start by putting a lead into 2 sequence siftables arrange them into a series extend it add a little more lead now i put a bassline in now i will put some percussion in and now i will attach the filter to the drums so i can control the effect live i can speed up the whole sequence by tilting the tempo to 11 way or the other and now i will attach the filter to the bass for some more expression i can rearrange the sequence while it plays i do not have to plan it out in advance but i can improvise changing it making it longer or shorter as i go and now finally i can fade the whole sequence out using the volume siftable tilted to the left thank you so as you can see my passion is for making new human computer interfaces that are a better match to the way our brains and bodies work and today i had time to show you one point in this new design space and a few of the possibilities that we are working to bring out of the laboratory so the thought i want to leave you with is that we are on the cusp of this new generation of tools for interacting with digital media that are going to bring information into our world on our terms thank you very much i look forward to talking with all of you","i want to start by asking you to think back to when you were a kid playing with blocks as you figured out how to reach out and grasp pick them up and move them around you were actually learning how to think and solve problems by understanding and manipulating spatial relationships spatial reasoning is deeply connected to how we understand a lot of the world around us so as a computer scientist inspired by this utility of our interactions with physical objects along with my advisor patty and my collaborator jeevan kalanithi i started to wonder what if when we use a computer instead of having this one mouse cursor that was like a digital fingertip moving around a flat desktop what if we could reach in with both hands and grasp information physically arranging it the way we wanted this question was so compelling that we decided to explore the answer by building siftables in a nutshell a siftable is an interactive computer the size of a cookie they are able to be moved around by hand they can sense each other they can sense their motion and they have a screen and a wireless radio most importantly they are physical so like the blocks you can move them just by reaching out and grasping and the siftables are an example of a new ecosystem of tools for manipulating digital information and as these tools become more physical more aware of their motion aware of each other and aware of the nuance of how we move them we can start to explore some new and fun interaction styles so i am going to start with some simple examples this siftable is configured to show video and if i tilt it in one direction it will roll the video this way if i tilt it the other way it rolls it backwards these interactive portraits are aware of each other so if i put them next to each other they get interested if they get surrounded they notice that too they might get a little flustered and they can also sense their motion and tilt so one of the interesting implications on interaction we started to realize was that we could use everyday gestures on data like pouring a color the way we might pour a liquid so in this case we have got 3 siftables configured to be paint buckets and i can use them to pour color into that central one where they get mixed if we overshoot we can pour a little bit back there are also some neat possibilities for education like language math and logic games where you want to give people the ability to try things quickly and view the results immediately so here i am this is a fibonacci sequence that i am making with a simple equation program here we have a word game that is kind of like a mashup between scrabble and boggle basically in every round you get a randomly assigned letter on each siftable and as you try to make words it checks against the dictionary then after about 30 seconds it reshuffles and you have a new set of letters and new possibilities to try thank you so these are some kids that came on a field trip to the media lab and i managed to get them to try it out and shoot a video they really loved it and one of the interesting things about this kind of application is that you do not have to give people many instructions all i have to say is make words and they know exactly what to do so here is another few people trying it out that is our youngest beta tester down there on the right turns out all he wanted to do was to stack the siftables up so to him they were just blocks now this is an interactive cartoon application and we wanted to build a learning tool for language learners and this is felix actually and he can bring new characters into the scene just by lifting the siftables off the table that have that character shown on them here he is bringing the sun out now he is brought a tractor into the scene so by shaking the siftables and putting them next to each other he can make the characters interact inventing his own narrative it is an open ended story and he gets to decide how it unfolds so the last example i have time to show you today is a music sequencing and live performance tool that we have built recently in which siftables act as sounds like lead bass and drums each of these has 4 different variations you get to choose which one you want to use and you can inject these sounds into a sequence that you can assemble into the pattern that you want and you inject it by just bumping up the sound siftable against the sequence siftable there are effects that you can control live like reverb and filter you attach it to a particular sound and then tilt to adjust it and then overall effects like tempo and volume that apply to the entire sequence so let us have a look i start by putting a lead into 2 sequence siftables arrange them into a series extend it add a little more lead now i put a bass line in now i will put some percussion in and now i will attach the filter to the drum so i can control the effect live i can speed up the whole sequence by tilting the tempo to one way or the other and now i will attach the filter to the bass for some more expression i can rearrange the sequence while it plays i do not have to plan it out in advance but i can improvise changing it making it longer or shorter as i go and now finally i can fade the whole sequence out using the volume siftable tilted to the left thank you so as you can see my passion is for making new human computer interfaces that are a better match to the ways our brains and bodies work and today i had time to show you one point in this new design space and a few of the possibilities that we are working to bring out of the laboratory so the thought i want to leave you with is that we are on the cusp of this new generation of tools for interacting with digital media that are going to bring information into our world on our terms thank you very much i look forward to talking with all of you"
" i am a writer writing books is my profession but it's more than that of course it is also my great lifelong love and fascination and i don't expect that that's ever going to change but that said something kind of peculiar has happened recently in my life and in my career which has caused me to have to sort of recalibrate my whole relationship with this work and the peculiar thing is that i recently wrote this book this memoir called eat pray love which decidedly unlike any of my previous books went out in the world for some reason and became this big mega sensation international bestseller thing the result of which is that everywhere i go now people treat me like i'm doomed seriously doomed doomed like they come up to me now all worried and they say aren't you afraid aren't you afraid you're never going to be able to top that aren't you afraid you're going to keep writing for your whole life and you're never again going to create a book that anybody in the world cares about at all ever again so that's reassuring you know but it would be worse except for that i i happen to remember that over twenty years ago when i first started telling people when i was a teenager that i wanted to be a writer i was met with this same kind of sort of fear based reaction and people would say aren't you afraid you're never going to have any success aren't you afraid the humiliation of rejection will kill you aren't you afraid that you're going to work your whole life at this craft and nothing's ever going to come of it and you're going to die on a scrap heap of broken dreams with your mouth filled with bitter ash of failure like that you know and a a the answer the short answer to all those questions is yes yes i'm afraid of all those things and i always have been and i'm afraid of many many more things besides that you know people can't even guess at like seaweed and and other things that are scary but when it comes to writing the the thing that i've been sort of thinking about lately and wondering about lately is why you know is it rational is it logical that anybody should be expected to be afraid of the work that they feel they were put on this earth to do you know and what is it specifically about creative ventures that seems to make us really nervous about each other's mental health in a way that other careers kind of don't do you know like my dad for example was a chemical engineer and i don't recall once in his forty years of chemical engineering anybody asking him if he was afraid to be a chemical engineer you know it just didn't come that chemical engineering block john you know how's it going it just didn't come up like that you know but to be fair right chemical engineers as a group you know haven't really earned a reputation over the centuries for being alcoholic manic depressives and we writers you know we kind of do have that reputation and not not just writers but creative people across all genres it seems have this reputation for being enormously mentally unstable and you know all you have to do is look at the very grim death count in the twentieth century alone of of really magnificent creative minds who died young and often at their own hands you know and even the ones who didn't literally commit suicide seem to be really undone by their gifts you know norman mailer just before he died last interview he said every one of my books has killed me a little more an extraordinary statement to make about your life's work you know but we don't even blink when we hear somebody say this because we've heard that kind of stuff for so long and somehow we've completely internalized and accepted collectively this notion that creativity and suffering are somehow inherently linked and that artistry in the end will always ultimately lead to anguish and the question that i want to ask everybody here today is are you guys all cool with that idea like are you comfortable with that because you look at it even from an inch away and you know i'm not at all comfortable with that assumption i think it's odious and i also think it's dangerous and i don't want to see it perpetuated into the next century i think it's better if we encourage you know our great creative minds to live you know and i and i i definitely know that in in my case in my situation it would be very dangerous for me to start sort of leaking down that dark path of assumption you know particularly given the circumstance that i'm in right now in my career which is you know like check it out i'm pretty young i'm only about forty years old i still have maybe another four decades of work left in me and it's exceedingly likely that anything i write from this point forward is going to be judged by the world as the work that came after the freakish success of my last book right i i should just put it bluntly because we're all sort of friends here now it's exceedingly likely that my greatest success is behind me you know so jesus what a thought you know like that's the kind of thought that could lead a person to start drinking gin at nine o'clock in the morning and you know i don't want to go there you know i would prefer to keep doing this work that i love and so the question becomes how you know and and so it seems to me upon a lot of reflection that that the way that i have to work now in order to continue writing is that i have to create some sort of protective psychological construct right i have to sort of find some way to have a a safe distance you know between me as i am writing and my very natural anxiety about what the reaction to that writing is gonna be from now on and and as i've been looking over the last year for like models for how to do that i've been sort of looking across time and i've been trying to find like other societies to see if they might have had better and saner ideas than we have about how to help creative people sort of manage the inherent emotional risks of of creativity and that search has led me to ancient greece and ancient rome so stay with me cause it does circle around and back but ancient greece and ancient rome people did not happen to believe that creativity came from human beings back then ok people believed that creativity was this divine attendant spirit that came to human beings from some distant and unknowable source for distant and unknowable reasons the greeks famously called these divine attendant spirits of creativity daemons socrates famously believed that he had a daemon who spoke wisdom to him from afar the romans had the same idea but they called that sort of disembodied creative spirit a genius which is great cause the romans did not actually think that a genius was a particularly clever individual they believed that a genius was this sort of magical divine entity who was believed to literally live in the walls of an artist's studio kind of like dobby the house elf and who would come out and sort of invisibly assist the artist with their work and would shape the outcome of that work so brilliant there it is right there that distance that i'm talking about that psychological construct to protect you from the results of your work you know and everyone knew that this is how it functioned right so the ancient artist was protected from certain things like for example too much narcissism right if your work was brilliant you couldn't take all the credit for it everybody knew you had this like this disembodied genius who had helped you if your work bombed not entirely your fault you know everyone knew your genius was kind of lame and this is how people thought about creativity in the west for a really long time and then the renaissance came and everything changed and we had this big idea and the big idea was let's put the individual human being at the center of the universe right above all gods and mysteries and there's no more room for like mystical creatures who take dictation from the divine and and it's the beginning of rational humanism and people started to believe that creativity came completely from the self of the individual and for the first time in history you start to hear people referring to this or that artist as being a genius rather than having a genius and i got to tell you i think that was a huge error you know i think that allowing somebody like one mere person to believe that he or she is like the vessel you know like the font and the essence and the source of all divine creative unknowable eternal mystery is just like a smidge too much responsibility to put on one fragile human psyche it's like asking somebody to swallow the sun you know it just completely warps and distorts egos and it creates all these unmanageable expectations about performance and i think the pressure of that has been killing off our artists for the last five hundred years and if this is true and i i think it is true the question becomes you know what now you know can we do this differently maybe go back to some more ancient understanding about the relationship between humans and the creative mystery maybe not you know like maybe we can't just erase five hundred years of rational humanistic thought in one eighteen minute speech and there's probably people in this audience who would raise like really legitimate scientific suspicions about the notion of basically fairies who follow people around like rubbing fairy juice on their projects and stuff like i i'm not probably going to bring you all along with me on this but the the question that i kind of want to pose is you know why not why not think about it this way because it makes as much sense as anything else i have ever heard in terms of explaining the utter maddening capriciousness of the creative process a process which as anybody who has ever tried to make something which is to say as basically everyone here knows does not always behave rationally and in fact can sometimes feel downright paranormal i had this encounter recently where i met the extraordinary american poet ruth stone who's now in her nineties but she's been a poet her entire life and she told me that when she was growing up in rural virginia she would be out working in the fields and she said she would feel and hear a poem coming at her from over the landscape and she said it was like a thunderous train of air and it would come barreling down at her over the landscape and when she felt it coming because it would shake the earth under her feet she knew that she had only one thing to do at that point and that was to in her words run like hell and she would run like hell to the house and she would be getting chased by this poem and the whole deal was that she had to get to a piece of paper and a pencil fast enough so that when it thundered through her she could collect it and grab it on the page and other times she wouldn't be fast enough so she'd be running and running and running and she wouldn't get to the house and the poem would like barrel through her and she would miss it and she said it would continue on across the landscape looking as she put it for another poet and and then there were these times this is the piece i never forgot she said that there were moments where she would almost miss it right so she's like running to the house and she's looking for the paper and the poem passes through her and she grabs a pencil just as it's going through her and then she said it was like she would reach out with her other hand and she would catch it she would catch the poem by its tail and she would pull it backwards into her body as she was transcribing on the page and in these instances the poem would come up on the page perfect and intact but backwards from the last word to the first so when i heard that i was like that's you know that's uncanny that's exactly what my creative process is like it's not at all my creative process i'm not the pipeline you know like i'm a mule and the way that i have to work is that i have to get up at the same time every day and like sweat and labor and like barrel through it really awkwardly but even i in my mulishness even i have brushed up against that thing you know at times and i would imagine that a lot of you have too you know like even i have had work or ideas come through me from a source that i honestly cannot identify and what is that thing and how are we to relate to it in a way that will not make us lose our minds but in fact might actually keep us sane and for me the best contemporary example that i have of how to do that is the musician tom waits who i got to interview several years ago on a on a magazine assignment and we were talking about this and you know you you know tom i mean for most of his life he was pretty much the embodiment of the tormented contemporary modern artist you know like trying to control and manage and dominate these sort of uncontrollable creative impulses you know that were totally internalized but then he got older and he got calmer and one day he was driving down the freeway in los angeles he told me and this is when it all changed for him and and he's like speeding along and all of a sudden he hears this little fragment of melody you know that comes into his head as inspiration often comes elusive and tantalizing and he wants it you know it's gorgeous and and he longs for it but he has no way to get it he doesn't have a piece of paper he doesn't have a pencil he doesn't have a tape recorder so he starts to feel all of that old anxiety start to rise in him like i'm going to lose this thing you know i'm going to be haunted by this song forever and i'm not good enough and i can't do it and instead of panicking he just stopped he just stopped that whole mental process and he did something completely novel he just looked up at the sky and he said excuse me can you not see that i'm driving do i look like i can write down a song right now you know if you really want to exist come back at a more opportune moment when i can take care of you otherwise go bother somebody else today go bother leonard cohen you know and and his whole work process changed after that not the work the work was still oftentimes as dark as ever you know but the process and the heavy anxiety around it was released when he took the genie the genius out of him where it was causing nothing but trouble and released it kind of back where it came from and realized that this didn't have to be this internalized tormented thing it could be this peculiar wondrous bizarre collaboration kind of conversation between tom and the strange external thing that was not quite tom so when i heard that story it started to shift a little bit the way that i worked too and it already saved me once this idea it saved me when i was in the middle of writing eat pray love and i fell into one of those sort of pits of despair that we all fall into when we're working on something and it's not coming and you start to think this is gonna be a disaster this is gonna be the worst book ever written not just bad but the worst book ever written and and i started to think i should just dump this project you know but then i remembered tom talking to the open air and i i i tried it so i just lifted my face up from the manuscript and i directed my comments to an empty corner of the room and i i said aloud listen you thing you and i both know that if this book isn't brilliant that is not entirely my fault right cause you can see that i am putting everything i have into this you know i don't have anymore than this so if you want it to be better then you've got to show up and do your part of the deal ok but if you don't do that you know what the hell with it i'm going to keep writing anyway because that's my job and i would please like the record to reflect today that i showed up for my part of the job because in the end it's like this ok centuries ago in the deserts of north africa people used to gather for these moonlight dances of sacred dance and music that would go on for hours and hours until dawn and they were always magnificent because the dancers were professionals and they were terrific right but every once in a while very rarely something would happen and one of these performers would actually become transcendent and i know you know what i'm talking about because i know you've all seen at some point in your life a performance like this you know and it was like time would stop and the dancer would sort of step through some kind of portal and he wasn't doing anything different than he had ever done you know a thousand nights before but everything would align and all of a sudden he would no longer appear to be merely human you know he would be like lit from within and lit from below and all like lit up on fire with divinity and when this happened back then people knew it for what it was you know they called it by it's name they would put their hands together and they would start to chant allah allah allah god god god that's god you know curious historical footnote when the moors invaded southern spain they took this custom with them and the pronunciation changed over the centuries from allah allah allah to ole ole ole which you still hear in bullfights and in flamenco dances in spain when a performer has done something impossible and magic allah ole ole allah magnificent bravo incomprehensible there it is a glimpse of god which is great because we need that but the tricky bit comes the next morning right for the dancer himself when he wakes up and discovers that it's tuesday at eleven a m and he's no longer a glimpse of god he's just an aging mortal with really bad knees and you know maybe he's never going to ascend to that height again and maybe nobody will ever chant god's name again as he spins and what is he then to do with the rest of his life this is hard this is one of the most painful reconciliations to make in a creative life you know but maybe it doesn't have to be quite so full of anguish if you never happened to believe in the first place that the most extraordinary aspects of your being came from you but maybe if you just believed that they were on loan to you you know from some unimaginable source for some exquisite portion of your life to be passed along when you're finished with somebody else and you know if we think about it this way it starts to change everything you know this is how i've started to think and this is certainly how i've been thinking in the last few months you know as i've been working on the book that will soon be published as the dangerously frighteningly overanticipated follow up to my freakish success and and and what i have to sort of keep telling myself when i get really psyched out about that is don't be afraid don't be daunted just do your job continue to show up for your piece of it whatever that might be if your job is to dance do your dance if the divine cockeyed genius assigned to your case decides to let some sort of wonderment be glimpsed for just one moment through your efforts then ole and if not do your dance anyhow and ole to you nonetheless i believe this and i feel that we must teach it ole to you nonetheless just for having the sheer human love and stubbornness to keep showing up thank you"," I am a writer. Writing books is my profession, but it's more than that, of course. It is also my great lifelong love and fascination. And I don't expect that that's ever going to change. But that said, something kind of peculiar has happened recently in my life and in my career which has caused me to have to sort of recalibrate my whole relationship with this work. And the peculiar thing is that I recently wrote this book, this memoir called Eat, Pray, Love, which decidedly unlike any of my previous books went out in the world for some reason and became this big mega sensation international bestseller thing. The result of which is that everywhere I go now, people treat me like I'm doomed. Seriously, doomed, doomed. They come up to me now all worried and they say, aren't you afraid? Aren't you afraid you're never going to be able to top that? Aren't you afraid you're going to keep writing for your whole life and you're never again going to create a book that anybody in the world cares about at all, ever, again. So that's reassuring. But it would be worse, except for that I happen to remember that over 20 years ago, when I first started telling people when I was a teenager that I wanted to be a writer, I was met with this same kind of sort of fear-based reaction, and people would say, aren't you afraid you're never going to have any success? Aren't you afraid the humiliation of rejection will kill you? Aren't you afraid that you're going to work your whole life at this craft and nothing's ever going to come of it and you're going to die on a scrap heap of broken dreams with your mouth filled with bitter ash of failure? Like that, you know? And the answer, short answer to all those questions is yes. Yes, I'm afraid of all those questions is yes. Yes, I'm afraid of all those things. And I always have been, and I'm afraid of many, many more things besides that people can't even guess at, like seaweed and other things that are scary. But when it comes to writing, the thing that I've been thinking about lately and wondering about lately is why. Is it rational? Is it logical that anybody should be expected to be afraid of the work that they feel they were put on this earth to do? What is it specifically about creative ventures that seems to make us really nervous about each other's mental health in a way that other careers kind of don't do. Like my dad, for example, was a chemical engineer. I don't recall once in his 40 years of chemical engineering anybody asking him if he was afraid to be a chemical engineer. It just didn't come... like, got chemical engineering block, John? How's it going? It just didn't come up like that. To be fair, chemical engineers as a group haven't really earned a reputation over the centuries for being alcoholic manic depressives. And we writers, we kind of do have that reputation. And not just writers, but creative people across all genres, it seems, have this reputation for being enormously mentally unstable. All you have to do is look at the very grim death count in the 20th century alone of really magnificent creative minds who died young and often at their own hands. Even the ones who didn't literally commit suicide seem to be really undone by their gifts. Norman Mailer, just before he died, last interview, he said, every one of my books has killed me a little more. An extraordinary statement to make about your life's work. But we don't even blink when we hear somebody say this, because we've heard that kind of stuff for so long. And somehow we've completely internalized and accepted collectively this notion that creativity and suffering are somehow inherently linked, and that artistry in the end will always ultimately lead to anguish. And the question that I want to ask everybody here today is, are you guys all cool with that idea? Like, are you comfortable with that? Because you look at it even from an inch away, and I'm not at all comfortable with that assumption. I think it's odious and I also think it's dangerous and I don't want to see it perpetuated into the next century. I think better if we encourage our great creative minds to live. I definitely know that in my case, in my situation, it would be very dangerous for me to start sort of leaking down that dark path of assumption, particularly given the circumstance that I'm in right now in my career, which is, you know, like, check it out, I'm pretty young. I'm only about 40 years old. I still have maybe another four decades of work left in me, and it's exceedingly likely that anything I write from this point forward is going to be judged by the world as the work that came after the freakish success of my last book, right? I should just put it bluntly, because we're all sort of friends here now, it's exceedingly likely that my greatest success is behind me. So, Jesus, what a thought, you know? That's the kind of thought that could lead a person to start drinking gin at 9 o'clock in the morning. And, you know, I don't want to go there. You know, I would prefer to keep doing this work that I love. And so the question becomes, how? You know? And so it seems to me, upon a lot of reflection, that the way that I have to work now in order to continue writing is that I have to create some sort of protective psychological construct, right? I have to sort of find some way to have a safe distance, you know, between me as I am writing and my very natural anxiety about what the reaction to that writing is going to be from now on. And as I've been looking over the last year for like models for how to do that, I've been sort of looking across time, and I've been trying to find other societies to see if they might have had better and saner ideas than we have about how to help creative people sort of manage the inherent emotional risks of creativity. And that search has led me to ancient Greece and ancient Rome. So stay with me, because it does circle around back. But ancient Greece and ancient Rome, people did not happen to believe that creativity came from human beings back then. People believed that creativity was this divine attendant spirit that came to human beings from some distant and unknowable source for distant and unknowable reasons. The Greeks famously called these divine attendant spirits of creativity daemons. Socrates famously believed that he had a daemon who spoke wisdom to him from afar. The Romans had the same idea, but they called that sort of disembodied creative spirit a genius, which is great, because the Romans did not actually think that a genius was a particularly clever individual. They believed that a genius was this sort of magical divine entity who was believed to literally live in the walls of an artist's studio, kind of like Dobby, the house elf, and who would come out and sort of invisibly assist the artist with their work and would shape the outcome of that work. So brilliant, there it is, right there, that distance that I'm talking about, that psychological construct to protect you from the results of your work. And everyone knew that this is how it functioned, right? So the ancient artist was protected from certain things like, for example, too much narcissism, right? If your work was brilliant, couldn't take all the credit for it. Everybody knew you had this disembodied genius who had helped you. If your work bombed, not entirely your fault. Everyone knew your genius was kind of lame. This is how people thought about creativity in the West for a really long time. Creativity in the West for a really long time. Then the Renaissance came and everything changed and we had this big idea. The big idea was let's put the individual human being at the center of the universe, right? Above all gods and mysteries and there's no more room for like mystical creatures who take dictation from the divine. And it's the beginning of rational humanism. And people started to believe that creativity came completely from the self of the individual. And for the first time in history, you start to hear people referring to this or that artist as being a genius rather than having a genius. And I got to tell you, I think that was a huge error. I think that allowing somebody, like one mere person, to believe that he or she is like the vessel, like the font and the essence and the source of all divine, creative, unknowable, eternal mystery is just like a smidge too much responsibility to put on one fragile human psyche. It's like asking somebody to swallow the sun. It just completely warps and distorts egos, and it creates all these unmanageable expectations about performance. I think the pressure of that has been killing off our artists for the last 500 years. And if this is true, and I think it is true, the question becomes, what now? Can we do this differently? Maybe go back to some more ancient understanding about the relationship between humans and the creative mystery. Maybe not. You know, like maybe we can't just erase 500 years of rational humanistic thought in one 18-minute speech. And there's probably people in this audience who would raise like really legitimate scientific suspicions about the notion of basically fairies who follow people around like rubbing fairy juice on their projects and stuff. I'm not probably going to bring you all along with me on this, but the question that I kind of want to pose is, why not? Why not think about it this way? Because it makes as much sense as anything else I have ever heard in terms of explaining the utter maddening capriciousness of the creative process, a process which, as anybody who has ever tried to make something, which is to say as basically everyone here knows, does not always behave rationally, and in fact can sometimes feel downright paranormal. I had this encounter recently where I met the extraordinary American poet Ruth Stone, who's now in her 90s, but she's been a poet her entire life. She told me that when she was growing up in rural Virginia, she would be out working in the fields, and she said she would feel and hear a poem coming at her from over the landscape. She said it was like a thunderous train of air, and it would come barreling down at her over the landscape. When she felt it coming, because it would shake the earth under her feet, she knew that she had only one thing to do at that point, and that was to, in her words, run like hell. And she would run like hell to the house, and she'd be getting chased by this poem. And the whole deal was that she had to get to a piece of paper and a pencil fast enough so that when it thundered through her, she could collect it and grab it on the page. And other times, she wouldn't be fast enough, so she'd be like running and running and running, and she wouldn't get to the house, and the poem would like barrel through her, and she would miss it, and she said it would continue on across the landscape, looking, as she put it, for another poet. And then there were these times, this is the piece I never forgot. She said that there were moments when she would almost miss it, right? So she's like running into the house and she's looking for the paper and the poem passes through her and she grabs a pencil just as it's going through her and then she said it was like she would reach out with her other hand and she would catch it, she would catch the poem by its tail and she would pull it backwards into her body as she was transcribing on the page and in these instances, the poem would come up on the page perfect and intact, but backwards from the last word to the first. So, when I heard that, I was like, that's uncanny, that's exactly what my creative process is like. It's not at all what my creative process, I'm not the pipeline, you know, like I'm a mule, and the way that I have to work is that I have to get up at the same time every day and like sweat and labor and like barrel through it really awkwardly. But even I, in my muleishness, even I have brushed up against that thing, you know, at times, and I would imagine that a lot of you have too. You know, like even I have had work or ideas come through me from a source that I honestly cannot identify, And what is that thing? And how are we to relate to it in a way that will not make us lose our minds, but in fact might actually keep us sane? And for me, the best contemporary example that I have of how to do that is the musician Tom Waits, who I got to interview several years ago on a magazine assignment, and we were talking about this. And you know, Tom, I mean, for most of his life, he was pretty much the embodiment of the tormented contemporary modern artist, you know, like trying to control and manage and dominate these sort of uncontrollable creative impulses, you know, that were totally internalized. But then he got older and he got calmer. And one day he was driving down the freeway in Los Angeles, he told me, and this is when it all changed for him. And he's like speeding along, and all of a sudden he hears this little fragment of melody that comes into his head as inspiration often comes, elusive and tantalizing, and he wants it. It's gorgeous. And he longs for it, but he has no way to get it. He doesn't have a piece of paper, he doesn't have a pencil, he doesn't have a tape recorder. So he starts to feel all that old anxiety start to rise in him, like, I'm going to lose this thing, you know, and I'm going to be haunted by this song forever, and I'm not good enough, and I can't do it. And instead of panicking, he just stopped that whole mental process, and he did something completely novel. He just looked up at the sky, and he said, excuse me, can you not see that I'm driving? Do I look like I can write down a song right now, you know? If you really want to exist, come back at a more opportune moment when I can take care of you. Otherwise, go bother somebody else today. Go bother Leonard Cohen, you know? And his whole work process changed after that. Not the work. The work was still oftentimes as dark as ever, you know? But the process and the heavy anxiety around it was released when he took the genie, the genius, out of him where it was causing nothing but trouble and released it kind of back where it came from and realized that this didn't have to be this internalized, tormented thing. It could be this peculiar, wondrous, bizarre collaboration, kind of conversation between Tom and the strange external thing that was not quite Tom. So when I heard that story, it started to shift a little bit the way that I worked, too, and it already saved me once, this idea. It saved me when I was in the middle of writing Eat, Pray, Love, and I fell into one of those sort of pits of despair that we all fall into when we're working on something and it's not coming and you start to think this is going to be a disaster, this is going to be the worst book ever written, not just bad, but the worst book ever written. I started to think I should just dump this project. But then I remembered Tom talking to the open air and I tried it. So I just lifted my face up from the manuscript and I directed my comments to an empty corner of the room and I said aloud, listen, you thing, you and I both know that if this book isn't brilliant, that is not entirely my fault, right? Because you can see that I am putting everything I have into this. You know, I don't have any more than this. So if you want it to be better, then you got to show up and do your part of the deal, okay? But if you don't do that, you know what, the hell with it. I'm going to keep writing anyway, because that's my job. And I would please like the record to reflect today that I showed up for my part of the job. Because... Thank you. In the end, it's like this, okay? Centuries ago in the deserts of North Africa, people used to gather for these moonlight dances of sacred dance and music that would go on for hours and hours until dawn. And they were always magnificent because the dancers were professionals and they were terrific, right? But every once in a while, very rarely, something would happen and one of these performers would actually become transcendent. And I know you know what I'm talking about because I know you've all seen at some point in your life a performance like this, you know? And it was like time would stop and the dancer would sort of step through some kind of portal, and he wasn't doing anything different than he had ever done a thousand nights before, but everything would align, and all of a sudden he would no longer appear to be merely human. He would be like lit from within and lit from below and all like lit up on fire with divinity. And when this happened back then, people knew it for what it was, you know, they called it by its name. They would put their hands together and they would start to chant, Allah, Allah, Allah, God, God, God, that's God. You know? Curious historical footnote. When the Moors invaded southern Spain, they took this custom with them, and the pronunciation changed over the centuries from Allah, Allah, Allah to ole, ole, ole, which you still hear in bullfights and in flamenco dances in Spain when a performer has done something impossible and magic. Allah, ole, ole, Allah, magnificent, bravo, incomprehensible, there it is, a glimpse of God. Which is great, because we need that. But the tricky bit comes the next morning, right, for the dancer himself, when he wakes up and discovers that it's Tuesday at 11 a.m. and he's no longer a glimpse of God. He's just an aging mortal with really bad knees, and maybe he's never going to ascend to that height again, and maybe nobody will ever chant God's name again as he spins, and what is he then to do with the rest of his life? This is hard. This is one of the most painful reconciliations to make in a creative life, you know? But maybe it doesn't have to be quite so full of anguish. If you never happened to believe in the first place that the most extraordinary aspects of your being came from you. But maybe if you just believed that they were on loan to you, you know, from some unimaginable source for some exquisite portion of your life to be passed along when you're finished with somebody else. And you know, if we think about it this way, it starts to change everything, you know. This is how I've started to think, and this is certainly how I was thinking about it in the last few months as I've been working on the book that will soon be published as the dangerously, frighteningly over-anticipated follow-up to my freakish success. What I have to keep telling myself when I get really psyched out about that is, don't be afraid. Don't be daunted. Just do your job. Continue to show up for your piece of it, whatever that might be. If your job is to dance, do your dance. If the divine cockeyed genius assigned to your case decides to let some sort of wonderment be glimpsed for just one moment through your efforts, then ole. And if not, do your dance anyhow. And ole to you nonetheless. I believe this, and I feel like we must teach it. Ole to you nonetheless, just for having the sheer human love and stubbornness to keep showing up. Thank you. you","i am a writer writing books is my profession but it is more than that of course it is also my great lifelong love and fascination and i do not expect that that is ever going to change but that said something kind of peculiar has happened recently in my life and in my career which has caused me to have to sort of recalibrate my whole relationship with this work and the peculiar thing is that i recently wrote this book this memoir called eat pray love which decidedly unlike any of my previous books went out in the world for some reason and became this big mega sensation international bestseller thing the result of which is that everywhere i go now people treat me like i am doomed seriously doomed doomed like they come up to me now all worried and they say are not you afraid are not you afraid you are never going to be able to top that are not you afraid you are going to keep writing for your whole life and you are never again going to create a book that anybody in the world cares about at all ever again so that is reassuring you know but it would be worse except for that i i happen to remember that over 20 years ago when i 1st started telling people when i was a teenager that i wanted to be a writer i was met with this same kind of sort of fear based reaction and people would say are not you afraid you are never going to have any success are not you afraid the humiliation of rejection will kill you are not you afraid that you are going to work your whole life at this craft and nothing is ever going to come of it and you are going to die on a scrap heap of broken dreams with your mouth filled with bitter ash of failure like that you know and a a the answer the short answer to all those questions is yes yes i am afraid of all those things and i always have been and i am afraid of many many more things besides that you know people can not even guess at like seaweed and and other things that are scary but when it comes to writing the the thing that i have been sort of thinking about lately and wondering about lately is why you know is it rational is it logical that anybody should be expected to be afraid of the work that they feel they were put on this earth to do you know and what is it specifically about creative ventures that seems to make us really nervous about each other is mental health in a way that other careers kind of do not do you know like my dad for example was a chemical engineer and i do not recall once in his 40 years of chemical engineering anybody asking him if he was afraid to be a chemical engineer you know it just did not come that chemical engineering block john you know how is it going it just did not come up like that you know but to be fair right chemical engineers as a group you know have not really earned a reputation over the centuries for being alcoholic manic depressives and we writers you know we kind of do have that reputation and not not just writers but creative people across all genres it seems have this reputation for being enormously mentally unstable and you know all you have to do is look at the very grim death count in the 20th century alone of of really magnificent creative minds who died young and often at their own hands you know and even the ones who did not literally commit suicide seem to be really undone by their gifts you know norman mailer just before he died last interview he said every one of my books has killed me a little more an extraordinary statement to make about your life is work you know but we do not even blink when we hear somebody say this because we have heard that kind of stuff for so long and somehow we have completely internalized and accepted collectively this notion that creativity and suffering are somehow inherently linked and that artistry in the end will always ultimately lead to anguish and the question that i want to ask everybody here today is are you guys all cool with that idea like are you comfortable with that because you look at it even from an inch away and you know i am not at all comfortable with that assumption i think it is odious and i also think it is dangerous and i do not want to see it perpetuated into the next century i think it is better if we encourage you know our great creative minds to live you know and i and i i definitely know that in in my case in my situation it would be very dangerous for me to start sort of leaking down that dark path of assumption you know particularly given the circumstance that i am in right now in my career which is you know like check it out i am pretty young i am only about 40 years old i still have maybe another 4 decades of work left in me and it is exceedingly likely that anything i write from this point forward is going to be judged by the world as the work that came after the freakish success of my last book right i i should just put it bluntly because we are all sort of friends here now it is exceedingly likely that my greatest success is behind me you know so jesus what a thought you know like that is the kind of thought that could lead a person to start drinking gin at 90 clock in the morning and you know i do not want to go there you know i would prefer to keep doing this work that i love and so the question becomes how you know and and so it seems to me upon a lot of reflection that that the way that i have to work now in order to continue writing is that i have to create some sort of protective psychological construct right i have to sort of find some way to have a a safe distance you know between me as i am writing and my very natural anxiety about what the reaction to that writing is going to be from now on and and as i have been looking over the last year for like models for how to do that i have been sort of looking across time and i have been trying to find like other societies to see if they might have had better and saner ideas than we have about how to help creative people sort of manage the inherent emotional risks of of creativity and that search has led me to ancient greece and ancient rome so stay with me cause it does circle around and back but ancient greece and ancient rome people did not happen to believe that creativity came from human beings back then ok people believed that creativity was this divine attendant spirit that came to human beings from some distant and unknowable source for distant and unknowable reasons the greeks famously called these divine attendant spirits of creativity daemons socrates famously believed that he had a daemon who spoke wisdom to him from afar the romans had the same idea but they called that sort of disembodied creative spirit a genius which is great cause the romans did not actually think that a genius was a particularly clever individual they believed that a genius was this sort of magical divine entity who was believed to literally live in the walls of an artist is studio kind of like dobby the house elf and who would come out and sort of invisibly assist the artist with their work and would shape the outcome of that work so brilliant there it is right there that distance that i am talking about that psychological construct to protect you from the results of your work you know and everyone knew that this is how it functioned right so the ancient artist was protected from certain things like for example too much narcissism right if your work was brilliant you could not take all the credit for it everybody knew you had this like this disembodied genius who had helped you if your work bombed not entirely your fault you know everyone knew your genius was kind of lame and this is how people thought about creativity in the west for a really long time and then the renaissance came and everything changed and we had this big idea and the big idea was let us put the individual human being at the center of the universe right above all gods and mysteries and there is no more room for like mystical creatures who take dictation from the divine and and it is the beginning of rational humanism and people started to believe that creativity came completely from the self of the individual and for the 1st time in history you start to hear people referring to this or that artist as being a genius rather than having a genius and i got to tell you i think that was a huge error you know i think that allowing somebody like one mere person to believe that he or she is like the vessel you know like the font and the essence and the source of all divine creative unknowable eternal mystery is just like a smidge too much responsibility to put on one fragile human psyche it is like asking somebody to swallow the sun you know it just completely warps and distorts egos and it creates all these unmanageable expectations about performance and i think the pressure of that has been killing off our artists for the last 500 years and if this is true and i i think it is true the question becomes you know what now you know can we do this differently maybe go back to some more ancient understanding about the relationship between humans and the creative mystery maybe not you know like maybe we can not just erase 500 years of rational humanistic thought in 118 minute speech and there is probably people in this audience who would raise like really legitimate scientific suspicions about the notion of basically fairies who follow people around like rubbing fairy juice on their projects and stuff like i i am not probably going to bring you all along with me on this but the the question that i kind of want to pose is you know why not why not think about it this way because it makes as much sense as anything else i have ever heard in terms of explaining the utter maddening capriciousness of the creative process a process which as anybody who has ever tried to make something which is to say as basically everyone here knows does not always behave rationally and in fact can sometimes feel downright paranormal i had this encounter recently where i met the extraordinary american poet ruth stone who is now in her 90s but she has been a poet her entire life and she told me that when she was growing up in rural virginia she would be out working in the fields and she said she would feel and hear a poem coming at her from over the landscape and she said it was like a thunderous train of air and it would come barreling down at her over the landscape and when she felt it coming because it would shake the earth under her feet she knew that she had only one thing to do at that and that was to in her words run like hell and she would run like hell to the house and she would be getting chased by this poem and the whole deal was that she had to get to a piece of paper and a pencil fast enough so that when it thundered through her she could collect it and grab it on the page and other times she would not be fast enough so she would be running and running and running and she would not get to the house and the poem would like barrel through her and she would miss it and she said it would continue on across the landscape looking as she put it for another poet and and then there were these times this is the piece i never forgot she said that there were moments where she would almost miss it right so she is like running to the house and she is looking for the paper and the poem passes through her and she grabs a pencil just as it is going through her and then she said it was like she would reach out with her other hand and she would catch it she would catch the poem by its tail and she would pull it backwards into her body as she was transcribing on the page and in these instances the poem would come up on the page perfect and intact but backwards from the last word to the 1st so when i heard that i was like that is you know that is uncanny that is exactly what my creative process is like it is not at all my creative process i am not the pipeline you know like i am a mule and the way that i have to work is that i have to get up at the same time every day and like sweat and labor and like barrel through it really awkwardly but even i in my mulishness even i have brushed up against that thing you know at times and i would imagine that a lot of you have too you know like even i have had work or ideas come through me from a source that i honestly cannot identify and what is that thing and how are we to relate to it in a way that will not make us lose our minds but in fact might actually keep us sane and for me the best contemporary example that i have of how to do that is the musician tom waits who i got to interview several years ago on a on a magazine assignment and we were talking about this and you know you you know tom i mean for most of his life he was pretty much the embodiment of the tormented contemporary modern artist you know like trying to control and manage and dominate these sort of uncontrollable creative impulses you know that were totally internalized but then he got older and he got calmer and one day he was driving down the freeway in los angeles he told me and this is when it all changed for him and and he is like speeding along and all of a sudden he hears this little fragment of melody you know that comes into his head as inspiration often comes elusive and tantalizing and he wants it you know it is gorgeous and and he longs for it but he has no way to get it he does not have a piece of paper he does not have a pencil he does not have a tape recorder so he starts to feel all of that old anxiety start to rise in him like i am going to lose this thing you know i am going to be haunted by this song forever and i am not good enough and i can not do it and instead of panicking he just stopped he just stopped that whole mental process and he did something completely novel he just looked up at the sky and he said excuse me can you not see that i am driving do i look like i can write down a song right now you know if you really want to exist come back at a more opportune moment when i can take care of you otherwise go bother somebody else today go bother leonard cohen you know and and his whole work process changed after that not the work the work was still oftentimes as dark as ever you know but the process and the heavy anxiety around it was released when he took the genie the genius out of him where it was causing nothing but trouble and released it kind of back where it came from and realized that this did not have to be this internalized tormented thing it could be this peculiar wondrous bizarre collaboration kind of conversation between tom and the strange external thing that was not quite tom so when i heard that story it started to shift a little bit the way that i worked too and it already saved me once this idea it saved me when i was in the middle of writing eat pray love and i fell into one of those sort of pits of despair that we all fall into when we are working on something and it is not coming and you start to think this is going to be a disaster this is going to be the worst book ever written not just bad but the worst book ever written and and i started to think i should just dump this project you know but then i remembered tom talking to the open air and i i i tried it so i just lifted my face up from the manuscript and i directed my comments to an empty corner of the room and i i said aloud listen you thing you and i both know that if this book is not brilliant that is not entirely my fault right cause you can see that i am putting everything i have into this you know i do not have anymore than this so if you want it to be better then you have got to show up and do your part of the deal ok but if you do not do that you know what the hell with it i am going to keep writing anyway because that is my job and i would please like the record to reflect today that i showed up for my part of the job because in the end it is like this ok centuries ago in the deserts of north africa people used to gather for these moonlight dances of sacred dance and music that would go on for hours and hours until dawn and they were always magnificent because the dancers were professionals and they were terrific right but every once in a while very rarely something would happen and one of these performers would actually become transcendent and i know you know what i am talking about because i know you have all seen at some point in your life a performance like this you know and it was like time would stop and the dancer would sort of step through some kind of portal and he was not doing anything different than he had ever done you know a 1000 nights before but everything would align and all of a sudden he would no longer appear to be merely human you know he would be like lit from within and lit from below and all like lit up on fire with divinity and when this happened back then people knew it for what it was you know they called it by it is name they would put their hands together and they would start to chant allah allah allah god god god that is god you know curious historical footnote when the moors invaded southern spain they took this custom with them and the pronunciation changed over the centuries from allah allah allah to ole ole ole which you still hear in bullfights and in flamenco dances in spain when a performer has done something impossible and magic allah ole ole allah magnificent bravo incomprehensible there it is a glimpse of god which is great because we need that but the tricky bit comes the next morning right for the dancer himself when he wakes up and discovers that it is tuesday at 11 a m and he is no longer a glimpse of god he is just an aging mortal with really bad knees and you know maybe he is never going to ascend to that height again and maybe nobody will ever chant god is name again as he spins and what is he then to do with the rest of his life this is hard this is one of the most painful reconciliations to make in a creative life you know but maybe it does not have to be quite so full of anguish if you never happened to believe in the 1st place that the most extraordinary aspects of your being came from you but maybe if you just believed that they were on loan to you you know from some unimaginable source for some exquisite portion of your life to be passed along when you are finished with somebody else and you know if we think about it this way it starts to change everything you know this is how i have started to think and this is certainly how i have been thinking in the last few months you know as i have been working on the book that will soon be published as the dangerously frighteningly overanticipated follow up to my freakish success and and and what i have to sort of keep telling myself when i get really psyched out about that is do not be afraid do not be daunted just do your job continue to show up for your piece of it whatever that might be if your job is to dance do your dance if the divine cockeyed genius assigned to your case decides to let some sort of wonderment be glimpsed for just one moment through your efforts then ole and if not do your dance anyhow and ole to you nonetheless i believe this and i feel that we must teach it ole to you nonetheless just for having the sheer human love and stubbornness to keep showing up thank you","i am a writer writing books is my profession but it is more than that of course it is also my great lifelong love and fascination and i do not expect that that is ever going to change but that said something kind of peculiar has happened recently in my life and in my career which has caused me to have to sort of recalibrate my whole relationship with this work and the peculiar thing is that i recently wrote this book this memoir called eat pray love which decidedly unlike any of my previous books went out in the world for some reason and became this big mega sensation international bestseller thing the result of which is that everywhere i go now people treat me like i am doomed seriously doomed doomed they come up to me now all worried and they say are not you afraid are not you afraid you are never going to be able to top that are not you afraid you are going to keep writing for your whole life and you are never again going to create a book that anybody in the world cares about at all ever again so that is reassuring but it would be worse except for that i happen to remember that over 20 years ago when i 1st started telling people when i was a teenager that i wanted to be a writer i was met with this same kind of sort of fear based reaction and people would say are not you afraid you are never going to have any success are not you afraid the humiliation of rejection will kill you are not you afraid that you are going to work your whole life at this craft and nothing is ever going to come of it and you are going to die on a scrap heap of broken dreams with your mouth filled with bitter ash of failure like that you know and the answer short answer to all those questions is yes yes i am afraid of all those questions is yes yes i am afraid of all those things and i always have been and i am afraid of many many more things besides that people can not even guess at like seaweed and other things that are scary but when it comes to writing the thing that i have been thinking about lately and wondering about lately is why is it rational is it logical that anybody should be expected to be afraid of the work that they feel they were put on this earth to do what is it specifically about creative ventures that seems to make us really nervous about each other is mental health in a way that other careers kind of do not do like my dad for example was a chemical engineer i do not recall once in his 40 years of chemical engineering anybody asking him if he was afraid to be a chemical engineer it just did not come like got chemical engineering block john how is it going it just did not come up like that to be fair chemical engineers as a group have not really earned a reputation over the centuries for being alcoholic manic depressives and we writers we kind of do have that reputation and not just writers but creative people across all genres it seems have this reputation for being enormously mentally unstable all you have to do is look at the very grim death count in the 20th century alone of really magnificent creative minds who died young and often at their own hands even the ones who did not literally commit suicide seem to be really undone by their gifts norman mailer just before he died last interview he said every one of my books has killed me a little more an extraordinary statement to make about your life is work but we do not even blink when we hear somebody say this because we have heard that kind of stuff for so long and somehow we have completely internalized and accepted collectively this notion that creativity and suffering are somehow inherently linked and that artistry in the end will always ultimately lead to anguish and the question that i want to ask everybody here today is are you guys all cool with that idea like are you comfortable with that because you look at it even from an inch away and i am not at all comfortable with that assumption i think it is odious and i also think it is dangerous and i do not want to see it perpetuated into the next century i think better if we encourage our great creative minds to live i definitely know that in my case in my situation it would be very dangerous for me to start sort of leaking down that dark path of assumption particularly given the circumstance that i am in right now in my career which is you know like check it out i am pretty young i am only about 40 years old i still have maybe another 4 decades of work left in me and it is exceedingly likely that anything i write from this point forward is going to be judged by the world as the work that came after the freakish success of my last book right i should just put it bluntly because we are all sort of friends here now it is exceedingly likely that my greatest success is behind me so jesus what a thought you know that is the kind of thought that could lead a person to start drinking gin at 90 clock in the morning and you know i do not want to go there you know i would prefer to keep doing this work that i love and so the question becomes how you know and so it seems to me upon a lot of reflection that the way that i have to work now in order to continue writing is that i have to create some sort of protective psychological construct right i have to sort of find some way to have a safe distance you know between me as i am writing and my very natural anxiety about what the reaction to that writing is going to be from now on and as i have been looking over the last year for like models for how to do that i have been sort of looking across time and i have been trying to find other societies to see if they might have had better and saner ideas than we have about how to help creative people sort of manage the inherent emotional risks of creativity and that search has led me to ancient greece and ancient rome so stay with me because it does circle around back but ancient greece and ancient rome people did not happen to believe that creativity came from human beings back then people believed that creativity was this divine attendant spirit that came to human beings from some distant and unknowable source for distant and unknowable reasons the greeks famously called these divine attendant spirits of creativity daemons socrates famously believed that he had a daemon who spoke wisdom to him from afar the romans had the same idea but they called that sort of disembodied creative spirit a genius which is great because the romans did not actually think that a genius was a particularly clever individual they believed that a genius was this sort of magical divine entity who was believed to literally live in the walls of an artist is studio kind of like dobby the house elf and who would come out and sort of invisibly assist the artist with their work and would shape the outcome of that work so brilliant there it is right there that distance that i am talking about that psychological construct to protect you from the results of your work and everyone knew that this is how it functioned right so the ancient artist was protected from certain things like for example too much narcissism right if your work was brilliant could not take all the credit for it everybody knew you had this disembodied genius who had helped you if your work bombed not entirely your fault everyone knew your genius was kind of lame this is how people thought about creativity in the west for a really long time creativity in the west for a really long time then the renaissance came and everything changed and we had this big idea the big idea was let us put the individual human being at the center of the universe right above all gods and mysteries and there is no more room for like mystical creatures who take dictation from the divine and it is the beginning of rational humanism and people started to believe that creativity came completely from the self of the individual and for the 1st time in history you start to hear people referring to this or that artist as being a genius rather than having a genius and i got to tell you i think that was a huge error i think that allowing somebody like one mere person to believe that he or she is like the vessel like the font and the essence and the source of all divine creative unknowable eternal mystery is just like a smidge too much responsibility to put on one fragile human psyche it is like asking somebody to swallow the sun it just completely warps and distorts egos and it creates all these unmanageable expectations about performance i think the pressure of that has been killing off our artists for the last 500 years and if this is true and i think it is true the question becomes what now can we do this differently maybe go back to some more ancient understanding about the relationship between humans and the creative mystery maybe not you know like maybe we can not just erase 500 years of rational humanistic thought in one 18 minute speech and there is probably people in this audience who would raise like really legitimate scientific suspicions about the notion of basically fairies who follow people around like rubbing fairy juice on their projects and stuff i am not probably going to bring you all along with me on this but the question that i kind of want to pose is why not why not think about it this way because it makes as much sense as anything else i have ever heard in terms of explaining the utter maddening capriciousness of the creative process a process which as anybody who has ever tried to make something which is to say as basically everyone here knows does not always behave rationally and in fact can sometimes feel downright paranormal i had this encounter recently where i met the extraordinary american poet ruth stone who is now in her 90s but she has been a poet her entire life she told me that when she was growing up in rural virginia she would be out working in the fields and she said she would feel and hear a poem coming at her from over the landscape she said it was like a thunderous train of air and it would come barreling down at her over the landscape when she felt it coming because it would shake the earth under her feet she knew that she had only one thing to do at that and that was to in her words run like hell and she would run like hell to the house and she would be getting chased by this poem and the whole deal was that she had to get to a piece of paper and a pencil fast enough so that when it thundered through her she could collect it and grab it on the page and other times she would not be fast enough so she would be like running and running and running and she would not get to the house and the poem would like barrel through her and she would miss it and she said it would continue on across the landscape looking as she put it for another poet and then there were these times this is the piece i never forgot she said that there were moments when she would almost miss it right so she is like running into the house and she is looking for the paper and the poem passes through her and she grabs a pencil just as it is going through her and then she said it was like she would reach out with her other hand and she would catch it she would catch the poem by its tail and she would pull it backwards into her body as she was transcribing on the page and in these instances the poem would come up on the page perfect and intact but backwards from the last word to the 1st so when i heard that i was like that is uncanny that is exactly what my creative process is like it is not at all what my creative process i am not the pipeline you know like i am a mule and the way that i have to work is that i have to get up at the same time every day and like sweat and labor and like barrel through it really awkwardly but even i in my muleishness even i have brushed up against that thing you know at times and i would imagine that a lot of you have too you know like even i have had work or ideas come through me from a source that i honestly cannot identify and what is that thing and how are we to relate to it in a way that will not make us lose our minds but in fact might actually keep us sane and for me the best contemporary example that i have of how to do that is the musician tom waits who i got to interview several years ago on a magazine assignment and we were talking about this and you know tom i mean for most of his life he was pretty much the embodiment of the tormented contemporary modern artist you know like trying to control and manage and dominate these sort of uncontrollable creative impulses you know that were totally internalized but then he got older and he got calmer and one day he was driving down the freeway in los angeles he told me and this is when it all changed for him and he is like speeding along and all of a sudden he hears this little fragment of melody that comes into his head as inspiration often comes elusive and tantalizing and he wants it it is gorgeous and he longs for it but he has no way to get it he does not have a piece of paper he does not have a pencil he does not have a tape recorder so he starts to feel all that old anxiety start to rise in him like i am going to lose this thing you know and i am going to be haunted by this song forever and i am not good enough and i can not do it and instead of panicking he just stopped that whole mental process and he did something completely novel he just looked up at the sky and he said excuse me can you not see that i am driving do i look like i can write down a song right now you know if you really want to exist come back at a more opportune moment when i can take care of you otherwise go bother somebody else today go bother leonard cohen you know and his whole work process changed after that not the work the work was still oftentimes as dark as ever you know but the process and the heavy anxiety around it was released when he took the genie the genius out of him where it was causing nothing but trouble and released it kind of back where it came from and realized that this did not have to be this internalized tormented thing it could be this peculiar wondrous bizarre collaboration kind of conversation between tom and the strange external thing that was not quite tom so when i heard that story it started to shift a little bit the way that i worked too and it already saved me once this idea it saved me when i was in the middle of writing eat pray love and i fell into one of those sort of pits of despair that we all fall into when we are working on something and it is not coming and you start to think this is going to be a disaster this is going to be the worst book ever written not just bad but the worst book ever written i started to think i should just dump this project but then i remembered tom talking to the open air and i tried it so i just lifted my face up from the manuscript and i directed my comments to an empty corner of the room and i said aloud listen you thing you and i both know that if this book is not brilliant that is not entirely my fault right because you can see that i am putting everything i have into this you know i do not have any more than this so if you want it to be better then you got to show up and do your part of the deal okay but if you do not do that you know what the hell with it i am going to keep writing anyway because that is my job and i would please like the record to reflect today that i showed up for my part of the job because thank you in the end it is like this okay centuries ago in the deserts of north africa people used to gather for these moonlight dances of sacred dance and music that would go on for hours and hours until dawn and they were always magnificent because the dancers were professionals and they were terrific right but every once in a while very rarely something would happen and one of these performers would actually become transcendent and i know you know what i am talking about because i know you have all seen at some point in your life a performance like this you know and it was like time would stop and the dancer would sort of step through some kind of portal and he was not doing anything different than he had ever done a 1000 nights before but everything would align and all of a sudden he would no longer appear to be merely human he would be like lit from within and lit from below and all like lit up on fire with divinity and when this happened back then people knew it for what it was you know they called it by its name they would put their hands together and they would start to chant allah allah allah god god god that is god you know curious historical footnote when the moors invaded southern spain they took this custom with them and the pronunciation changed over the centuries from allah allah allah to ole ole ole which you still hear in bullfights and in flamenco dances in spain when a performer has done something impossible and magic allah ole ole allah magnificent bravo incomprehensible there it is a glimpse of god which is great because we need that but the tricky bit comes the next morning right for the dancer himself when he wakes up and discovers that it is tuesday at 11 a m and he is no longer a glimpse of god he is just an aging mortal with really bad knees and maybe he is never going to ascend to that height again and maybe nobody will ever chant god is name again as he spins and what is he then to do with the rest of his life this is hard this is one of the most painful reconciliations to make in a creative life you know but maybe it does not have to be quite so full of anguish if you never happened to believe in the 1st place that the most extraordinary aspects of your being came from you but maybe if you just believed that they were on loan to you you know from some unimaginable source for some exquisite portion of your life to be passed along when you are finished with somebody else and you know if we think about it this way it starts to change everything you know this is how i have started to think and this is certainly how i was thinking about it in the last few months as i have been working on the book that will soon be published as the dangerously frighteningly over anticipated follow up to my freakish success what i have to keep telling myself when i get really psyched out about that is do not be afraid do not be daunted just do your job continue to show up for your piece of it whatever that might be if your job is to dance do your dance if the divine cockeyed genius assigned to your case decides to let some sort of wonderment be glimpsed for just one moment through your efforts then ole and if not do your dance anyhow and ole to you nonetheless i believe this and i feel like we must teach it ole to you nonetheless just for having the sheer human love and stubbornness to keep showing up thank you you"
" 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 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 in 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 inex 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 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 ca caravanserai in the middle of the sahara this is incidentally the fellow that i travelled 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 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 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 fifty 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 six thousand 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 six thousand 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 barasana in 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 nineteen fifty eight in nineteen fifty seven five missionaries attempted contact and made a critical mistake they dropped from the air eight by ten 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 fifty four 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 but at the same time they had a perspicacious knowledge of the forest that was astonishing their hunters could smell animal urine at forty paces and tell you what species left it behind in the early eighties 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 example 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 eighteen 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 eighteen 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 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 no no the noble savage which is an idea racist in its simplicity or alternatively we invi 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 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 among 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 has in it some very powerful tryptamines very close to brain serotonin dimethyltryptamine five methoxydimethyltryptamine if you've ever seen the yanomami blowing that snuff up their noses that that substance they make from a different set of species is also contains five 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 it doesn't it doesn't create the 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 nineteen thirties i used to argue that you couldn't classify these tryptamines as hallucinogenic because the by the time you're under the effects there's no one home anymore to experience a hallucination 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 eighty thousand 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 seventeen 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 did 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 seventeen 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 now 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 twentieth century three hundred 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 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 and whenever 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 six thousand miles from chengdu in western china over land 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 six thousand sacred monuments torn apart to dust and ashes one point two 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 price of for the crime of being wealthy he was smuggled into the jail at the ti 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 that 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 that was was 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 and more narrow modality of thought but that we would wake from a dream one day having forgotten that there were even other possibilities and it's humbling to remember that our species has perhaps been around for six hundred thousand 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 ten thousand years ago the modern industrial world as we know it is barely three hundred 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 ten thousand 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 nineteen fifties 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 and this in many ways is a symbol of the resilience of the inuit people and of all indigenous people around the world the canadian government in april of nineteen ninety nine 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 reach reach 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 travelled 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 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 thirty five million hits on our website every month hundred and fifty six 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"," 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 paths 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 breadth of the Dharma, is to really remember the central revelation of anthropology. And that is the idea that the world in which we live in 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 to 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 Kaisu Desert of northern Kenya, the Kurandero in the mountains of the Andes, or a Karavansari in the middle of the Sahara, this is incidentally the fellow that I traveled into the desert with a month ago, or indeed a Yakurt in the slopes of Chomolungma, 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 that if you think about it, 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 a symbol of all that we are and all that we can be as an astonishingly inquisitive species. And just as the biosphere is being severely eroded, so too is the ethno-sphere, and if anything, at a far greater rate. No biologist, for example, would dare suggest that 50% of all species are morbid or 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 of thought, an ecosystem of spiritual possibilities. And of those 6,000 languages, as we see it 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, 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 the Barasana in northwest Amazon, a people of the Anaconda who believe that mythologically they came up the milk river from the east and 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 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 mythological past. Yet the curious thing is in these longhouses 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 Huarani 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 eight by ten 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 of the figure, found nothing, and concluded that these were calling cards from the devil, and so they speared the five missionaries to death. But the Warane didn't just spear outsiders, they speared each other. 54% of their mortality was due to them spearing each other. We traced genealogogy 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. 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 in the Tent-a-Makoutte, 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 Voodoo. 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, as 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 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 example of the ability of the mind to affect the body that bears it when catalyzed in a 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 their 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 enculturated 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, 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 this 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 a boat 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 Kwagyus, who believed that those forests were the abode of hukuk, 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 can 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, there's 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 has 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 5-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. It doesn't create the distortion of reality, it creates the disillusion of reality. In fact, I used to argue with my professor, Richard Evans Schultes, who was the 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. 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 thing is 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 did 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? Well, this tribe, the Kaufan, 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 established 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 on the night of a full moon, and it sings to you in a different key. Now, that's not going to get you a PhD at Harvard, but it's a lot more interesting than counting stamens. Now, 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 is 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. And whenever 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 on the horizon ready to fill their holes 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. 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 traveled 6,000 miles from Chengdu in western China over land through southeastern Tibet to Lhasa with a young colleague, and it was only when I got to Lhasa that I understood the face behind these statistics you hear about. 6,000 sacred monuments torn apart to dust and ashes, 1.2 million people killed by the Cadre during the Cultural Revolution. This young man's father had been a scribe for the Pachin 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 price of, for the crime of being wealthy. He was smuggled into the jail at the time, 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 that, 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 toward this blandly amorphous generic worldview, not only would we see the entire range of the human imagination reduced to a more narrow and more narrow modality of thought, but that we would wake from a dream one day having forgotten that there were even other possibilities. And it's humbling to remember that our species has perhaps been around for 600,000 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 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, Olayek, told me a marvelous story of his grandfather. The Canadian government has not always been kind to the Inuit people. And this man, Olayek, 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 their 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, the blizzard that was blowing, he simply slipped outside, pulled down his seal skin 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 rib cage of the dog and improvised a sled, harnessed up an adjacent dog, and disappeared over the ice flows, shit knife and belt. Talk about getting by with nothing. And this in many ways 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 reach, seek restitution with its people. And finally, in the end, I think it's pretty obvious, at least to all of us who have 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.","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 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 in 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 are all born we all bring our children into the world we go through initiation rites we have to deal with the inex inexorable separation of death so it should not surprise us that we all sing we all dance we all have art but what is interesting is the unique cadence of the song the rhythm of the dance in every culture and whether it is the 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 ca 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 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 human imagination since the dawn of consciousness the ethnosphere is humanity is great legacy it is 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% 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 6000 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 is 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 6000 languages as we sit here today in monterey fully half are no longer being whispered into the ears of children they are no longer being taught to babies which means effectively unless something changes they are 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 2 weeks because every 2 weeks some elder dies and carries with him into the grave the last syllables of an ancient tongue and i know there is some of you who say well would not it be better would not the world be a better place if we all just spoke one language and i say great let us make that language yoruba let us make it cantonese let us make it kogi and you will suddenly discover what it would be like to be unable to speak your own language and so what i would 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 barasana in 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 6 or 7 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 1st contacted peacefully in 1958 in 19575 missionaries attempted contact and made a critical mistake they dropped from the air 8 by 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 2 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 5 missionaries to death but the waorani did not just spear outsiders they speared each other 54% of their mortality was due to them spearing each other we traced genealogies back 8 generations and we found 2 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 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 is 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 is a complex metaphysical worldview it is interesting if i asked you to name the great religions of the world what would you say christianity islam buddhism judaism whatever there is 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 is 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 is 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 example 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 have 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 3 and 4 sequestered in a shadowy world of darkness in stone huts at the base of glaciers for 18 years 29 year periods deliberately chosen to mimic the 9 months of gestation they spend in their natural mother is 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 are suddenly taken out and for the 1st time in their lives at the age of 18 they see a sunrise and in that crystal moment of awareness of 1st 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 is it is really as i have 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 no no the noble savage which is an idea racist in its simplicity or alternatively we invi 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 is not a lot 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 is 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 is the abode of a spirit or a pile of ore is irrelevant what is 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 among 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 is 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 is repertoire what makes ayahuasca fascinating is not the sheer pharmacological potential of this preparation but the elaboration of it it is made really of 2 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 is mixed with the leaves of a shrub in the coffee family called psychotria viridis this plant has in it some very powerful tryptamines very close to brain serotonin dimethyltryptamine 5 methoxydimethyltryptamine if you have ever seen the yanomami blowing that snuff up their noses that that substance they make from a different set of species is also contains 5 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 it does not it does not create the it does not 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 could not classify these tryptamines as hallucinogenic because the by the time you are under the effects there is no one home anymore to experience a hallucination but the thing about tryptamines is they cannot be taken orally because they are 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 80000 species of vascular plants do these people find these 2 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 did i thought you knew something about plants i mean do not 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 is not going to get you a ph d at harvard but it is a lot more interesting than counting stamens now 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 is not change all cultures through all time have constantly been engaged in a 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 is not change or technology that threatens the integrity of the ethnosphere it is power the crude face of domination and whenever 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 is 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 is 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 am doing a lot of research recently you will see it is a crude face of political domination you know genocide the physical extinction of a people is universally condemned but ethnocide the destruction of people is way of life is not only not condemned it is 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 traveled 6000 miles from chengdu in western china over land 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 6000 sacred monuments torn apart to dust and ashes 1200000 people killed by the cadres during the cultural revolution this young man is 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 price of for the crime of being wealthy he was smuggled into the jail at the ti at the age of 2 to hide beneath her skirt tails because she could not 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 that of mao and for that transgression she was given 7 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 that was was 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 and more narrow modality of thought but that we would wake from a dream one day having forgotten that there were even other possibilities and it is humbling to remember that our species has perhaps been around for 600000 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 10000 years ago the modern industrial world as we know it is barely 300 years old now that shallow history does not 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 10000 different voices and it is 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 is 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 is 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 and this in many ways 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 is our new homeland it is called nunavut it is an independent territory they control all mineral resources an amazing example of how a nation state can reach reach seek restitution with its people and finally in the end i think it is pretty obvious at least to all of all us who have traveled in these remote reaches of the planet to realize that they are not remote at all they are 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 are trying to do at the national geographic finally is we believe that politicians will never accomplish anything we think that polemics 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 35000000 hits on our website every month 156 nations carry our television channel our magazines are read by 1000000s and what we are doing is a series of journeys to the ethnosphere where we are 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","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 paths 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 breadth of the dharma is to really remember the central revelation of anthropology and that is the idea that the world in which we live in 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 are all born we all bring our children to the world we go through initiation rites we have to deal with the inexorable separation of death so it should not surprise us that we all sing we all dance we all have art but what is 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 kaisu desert of northern kenya the kurandero in the mountains of the andes or a karavansari in the middle of the sahara this is incidentally the fellow that i traveled into the desert with a month ago or indeed a yakurt in the slopes of chomolungma 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 that if you think about it 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 is great legacy it is a symbol of all that we are and all that we can be as an astonishingly inquisitive species and just as the biosphere is being severely eroded so too is the ethno sphere and if anything at a far greater rate no biologist for example would dare suggest that 50% of all species are morbid or 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 6000 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 is 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 of thought an ecosystem of spiritual possibilities and of those 6000 languages as we see it here today in monterey fully half are no longer being whispered into the ears of children they are no longer being taught to babies which means effectively unless something changes they are 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 2 weeks because every 2 weeks some elder dies and carries with him into the grave the last syllables of an ancient tongue and i know there is some of you who say would not it be better would not the world be a better place if we all just spoke one language and i say great let us make that language yoruba let us make it cantonese let us make it kogi and you will suddenly discover what it would be like to be unable to speak your own language and so what i would 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 the barasana in northwest amazon a people of the anaconda who believe that mythologically they came up the milk river from the east and 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 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 mythological past yet the curious thing is in these longhouses where there are 6 or 7 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 huarani of northeastern ecuador an astonishing people 1st contacted peacefully in 1958 in 19575 missionaries attempted contact and made a critical mistake they dropped from the air 8 by 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 2 dimensional in their lives they picked up these photographs from the forest floor tried to look behind the face to find the form of the figure found nothing and concluded that these were calling cards from the devil and so they speared the 5 missionaries to death but the warane did not just spear outsiders they speared each other 54% of their mortality was due to them spearing each other we traced genealogogy back 8 generations and we found 2 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 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 is strength in the tent a makoutte 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 voodoo and voodoo is not a black magic cult on the contrary it is a complex metaphysical worldview it is interesting if i asked you to name the great religions of the world what would you say christianity islam buddhism judaism whatever there is always one continent left out as 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 is this living relationship between 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 is 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 example of the ability of the mind to affect the body that bears it when catalyzed in a state of extreme excitation now of all the peoples that i have 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 their training for the priesthood is rather extraordinary the young acolytes are taken away from their families at the age of 3 and 4 sequestered in a shadowy world of darkness in stone huts at the base of glaciers for 18 years 29 year periods deliberately chosen to mimic the 9 months of gestation they spend in their natural mother is womb now they are metaphorically in the womb of the great mother and for this entire time they are enculturated 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 are suddenly taken out and for the 1st time in their lives at the age of 18 they see a sunrise and in that crystal moment of awareness the 1st time in their lives at the age of 18 they see a sunrise and in that crystal moment of awareness of 1st light as the sun begins to bathe the slopes of this 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 is really as i have 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 is 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 is 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 is a boat of a spirit or a pile of ore is irrelevant what is 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 kwagyus who believed that those forests were the abode of hukuk 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 can begin to understand some of their extraordinary discoveries take this plant here it is 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 is repertoire what makes ayahuasca fascinating is not the sheer pharmacological potential of this preparation but the elaboration of it it is made really of 2 different sources on the one hand there is 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 is mixed with the leaves of a shrub in the coffee family called psychotria viridis this plant has in it some very powerful tryptamines very close to brain serotonin dimethyltryptamine 5 methoxydimethyltryptamine if you have ever seen the yanomami blowing that snuff up their noses that substance they make from a different set of species also contains 5 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 it does not create the distortion of reality it creates the disillusion of reality in fact i used to argue with my professor richard evans schultes who was the man who sparked the psychedelic era with his discovery of the magic mushrooms in mexico in the 1930s i used to argue that you could not classify these tryptamines as hallucinogenic because by the time you are under the effects there is no one home anymore to experience a hallucination but the thing about tryptamines is they cannot be taken orally because they are 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 thing is 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 80000 species of vascular plants did these people find these 2 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 well this tribe the kaufan 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 established their taxonomy and they say i thought you knew something about plants i mean do not you know anything and i said no well it turns out you take each of the 17 varieties on the night of a full moon and it sings to you in a different key now that is not going to get you a phd at harvard but it is a lot more interesting than counting stamens now 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 is 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 is not 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 is not change or technology that threatens the integrity of the ethnosphere it is power the crude face of domination and whenever 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 is 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 on the horizon ready to fill their holes with raw logs ripped from the forest or in the case of the yanomami it is 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 am doing a lot of research recently you will see it is a crude face of political domination genocide the physical extinction of a people is universally condemned but ethnocide the destruction of people is way of life is not only not condemned it is 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 traveled 6000 miles from chengdu in western china over land through southeastern tibet to lhasa with a young colleague and it was only when i got to lhasa that i understood the face behind these statistics you hear about 6000 sacred monuments torn apart to dust and ashes 1200000 people killed by the cadre during the cultural revolution this young man is father had been a scribe for the pachin 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 price of for the crime of being wealthy he was smuggled into the jail at the time at the age of 2 to hide beneath her skirt tails because she could not 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 that of mao and for that transgression she was given 7 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 toward this blandly amorphous generic worldview not only would we see the entire range of the human imagination reduced to a more narrow and more narrow modality of thought but that we would wake from a dream one day having forgotten that there were even other possibilities and it is humbling to remember that our species has perhaps been around for 600000 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 10000 years ago the modern industrial world as we know it is barely 300 years old now that shallow history does not 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 10000 different voices and it is within that song that we 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 olayek told me a marvelous story of his grandfather the canadian government has not always been kind to the inuit people and this man olayek 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 their sovereignty we forced them into settlements this old man is 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 is grandfather was not intimidated by the arctic night the blizzard that was blowing he simply slipped outside pulled down his seal skin 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 rib cage of the dog and improvised a sled harnessed up an adjacent dog and disappeared over the ice flows shit knife and belt talk about getting by with nothing and this in many ways 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 is our new homeland it is called nunavut it is an independent territory they control all mineral resources an amazing example of how a nation state can reach seek restitution with its people and finally in the end i think it is pretty obvious at least to all of us who have traveled in these remote reaches of the planet to realize that they are not remote at all they are 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 are 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 35000000 hits on our website every month 156 nations carry our television channel our magazines are read by 1000000s and what we are doing is a series of journeys to the ethnosphere where we are 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"