data/en-zh/tst2022/IWSLT.TED.tst2022.en-zh.en.xml

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<srcset setid="iwslt2020-tst2022" srclang="English">
<doc docid="37498" genre="lectures">
<talkid>37498</talkid>
<seg id="1">So, 2014 was a big year for me.</seg>
<seg id="2">Do you ever have that, just like a big year, like a banner year?</seg>
<seg id="3">For me, it went like this: October 3, I lost my second pregnancy.</seg>
<seg id="4">And then October 8, my dad died of cancer.</seg>
<seg id="5">And then on November 25, my husband Aaron died after three years with stage-four glioblastoma, which is just a fancy word for brain cancer.</seg>
<seg id="6">So, I'm fun.</seg>
<seg id="7">People love to invite me out all the time.</seg>
<seg id="8">Packed social life.</seg>
<seg id="9">Usually, when I talk about this period of my life, the reaction I get is essentially:</seg>
<seg id="10">"I can't -- I can't imagine."</seg>
<seg id="11">But I do think you can.</seg>
<seg id="12">I think you can.</seg>
<seg id="13">And I think that you should because, someday, it's going to happen to you.</seg>
<seg id="14">Maybe not these specific losses in this specific order or at this speed, but like I said, I'm very fun and the research that I have seen will stun you: everyone you love has a 100 percent chance of dying.</seg>
<seg id="15">And that's why you came to TED.</seg>
<seg id="16">So, since all of this loss happened, I've made it a career to talk about death and loss, not just my own, because it's pretty easy to recap, but the losses and tragedies that other people have experienced.</seg>
<seg id="17">It's a niche, I have to say.</seg>
<seg id="18">It's a small niche, and I wish I made more money, but ...</seg>
<seg id="19">I've written some very uplifting books, host a very uplifting podcast, I started a little nonprofit.</seg>
<seg id="20">I'm just trying to do what I can to make more people comfortable with the uncomfortable, and grief is so uncomfortable.</seg>
<seg id="21">It's so uncomfortable, especially if it's someone else's grief.</seg>
<seg id="22">So part of that work is this group that I started with my friend Moe, who is also a widow; we call it the Hot Young Widows Club.</seg>
<seg id="23">And it's real, we have membership cards and T-shirts.</seg>
<seg id="24">And when your person dies, your husband, wife, girlfriend, boyfriend, literally don't care if you were married, your friends and your family are just going to look around through friends of friends of friends of friends until they find someone who's gone through something similar, and then they'll push you towards each other so you can talk amongst yourselves and not get your sad on other people.</seg>
<seg id="25">So that's what we do.</seg>
<seg id="26">It's just a series of small groups, where men, women, gay, straight, married, partnered, can talk about their dead person, and say the things that the other people in their lives aren't ready or willing to hear yet.</seg>
<seg id="27">Huge range of conversations.</seg>
<seg id="28">Like, "My husband died two weeks ago, I can't stop thinking about sex, is that normal?"</seg>
<seg id="29">Yeah.</seg>
<seg id="30">"What if it's one of the Property Brothers?"</seg>
<seg id="31">Less normal, but I'll accept it.</seg>
<seg id="32">Things like, "Look, when I'm out in public and I see old people holding hands, couples who have clearly been together for decades, and then I look at them and I imagine all of the things they've been through together, the good things, the bad things, the arguments they've had over who should take out the trash ... I just find my heart filled with rage."</seg>
<seg id="33">And that example is personal to me.</seg>
<seg id="34">Most of the conversations that we have in the group can and will just stay amongst ourselves, but there are things that we talk about that the rest of the world -- the world that is grief-adjacent but not yet grief-stricken -- could really benefit from hearing.</seg>
<seg id="35">And if you can't tell, I'm only interested in / capable of unscientific studies, so what I did was go to The Hot Young Widows Club and say, "Hello, friends, remember when your person died?" They did.</seg>
<seg id="36">"Do you remember all the things people said to you?"</seg>
<seg id="37">"Oh, yeah."</seg>
<seg id="38">"Which ones did you hate the most?"</seg>
<seg id="39">I got a lot of comments, lot of answers, people say a lot of things, but two rose to the top pretty quickly.</seg>
<seg id="40">"Moving on."</seg>
<seg id="41">Now, since 2014, I will tell you I have remarried a very handsome man named Matthew, we have four children in our blended family, we live in the suburbs of Minneapolis, Minnesota, USA.</seg>
<seg id="42">We have a rescue dog.</seg>
<seg id="43">I drive a minivan, like the kind where doors open and I don't even touch them.</seg>
<seg id="44">Like, by any "mezhure," life is good.</seg>
<seg id="45">I've also never said "mezhure," I've never once said it that way.</seg>
<seg id="46">I don't know where that came from.</seg>
<seg id="47">I've never heard anyone else say it that way.</seg>
<seg id="48">It looks like it should be said that way, and that's why the English language is trash, so ...</seg>
<seg id="49">So impressed with anyone who, like, speaks it in addition to a language that makes sense -- good job.</seg>
<seg id="50">But by any measure ...</seg>
<seg id="51">By any measure, life is really, really good, but I haven't "moved on."</seg>
<seg id="52">I haven't moved on, and I hate that phrase so much, and I understand why other people do.</seg>
<seg id="53">Because what it says is that Aaron's life and death and love are just moments that I can leave behind me -- and that I probably should.</seg>
<seg id="54">And when I talk about Aaron, I slip so easily into the present tense, and I've always thought that made me weird.</seg>
<seg id="55">And then I noticed that everybody does it.</seg>
<seg id="56">And it's not because we are in denial or because we're forgetful, it's because the people we love, who we've lost, are still so present for us.</seg>
<seg id="57">So, when I say, "Oh, Aaron is ..."</seg>
<seg id="58">It's because Aaron still is.</seg>
<seg id="59">And it's not in the way that he was before, which was much better, and it's not in the way that churchy people try to tell me that he would be.</seg>
<seg id="60">It's just that he's indelible, and so he is present for me.</seg>
<seg id="61">Here, he's present for me in the work that I do, in the child that we had together, in these three other children I'm raising, who never met him, who share none of his DNA, but who are only in my life because I had Aaron and because I lost Aaron.</seg>
<seg id="62">He's present in my marriage to Matthew, because Aaron's life and love and death made me the person that Matthew wanted to marry.</seg>
<seg id="63">So I've not moved on from Aaron, I've moved forward with him.</seg>
<seg id="64">We spread Aaron's ashes in his favorite river in Minnesota, and when the bag was empty -- because when you're cremated, you fit into a plastic bag -- there were still ashes stuck to my fingers.</seg>
<seg id="65">And I could have just put my hands in the water and rinsed them, but instead, I licked my hands clean, because I was so afraid of losing more than I had already lost, and I was so desperate to make sure that he would always be a part of me.</seg>
<seg id="66">But of course he would be.</seg>
<seg id="67">Because when you watch your person fill himself with poison for three years, just so he can stay alive a little bit longer with you, that stays with you.</seg>
<seg id="68">When you watch him fade from the healthy person he was the night you met to nothing, that stays with you.</seg>
<seg id="69">When you watch your son, who isn't even two years old yet, walk up to his father's bed on the last day of his life, like he knows what's coming in a few hours, and say, "I love you. All done. Bye, bye."</seg>
<seg id="70">That stays with you.</seg>
<seg id="71">Just like when you fall in love, finally, like really fall in love with someone who gets you and sees you and you even see, "Oh, my God, I've been wrong this entire time. Love is not a contest or a reality show -- it's so quiet, it's this invisible thread of calm that connects the two of us even when everything is chaos, when things are falling apart, even when he's gone."</seg>
<seg id="72">That stays with you.</seg>
<seg id="73">We used to do this thing -- because my hands are always freezing and he's so warm, where I would take my ice-cold hands and shove them up his shirt ...</seg>
<seg id="74">press them against his hot bod.</seg>
<seg id="75">And he hated it so much,</seg>
<seg id="76">but he loved me, and after he died, I laid in bed with Aaron and I put my hands underneath him and I felt his warmth.</seg>
<seg id="77">And I can't even tell you if my hands were cold, but I can tell you that I knew it was the last time I would ever do that.</seg>
<seg id="78">And that that memory is always going to be sad.</seg>
<seg id="79">That memory will always hurt.</seg>
<seg id="80">Even when I'm 600 years old and I'm just a hologram.</seg>
<seg id="81">Just like the memory of meeting him is always going to make me laugh.</seg>
<seg id="82">Grief doesn't happen in this vacuum, it happens alongside of and mixed in with all of these other emotions.</seg>
<seg id="83">So, I met Matthew, my current husband -- who doesn't love that title,</seg>
<seg id="84">but it's so accurate.</seg>
<seg id="85">I met Matthew, and ...</seg>
<seg id="86">there was this audible sigh of relief among the people who love me, like, "It's over!</seg>
<seg id="87">She did it.</seg>
<seg id="88">She got a happy ending, we can all go home.</seg>
<seg id="89">And we did good."</seg>
<seg id="90">And that narrative is so appealing even to me, and I thought maybe I had gotten that, too, but I didn't.</seg>
<seg id="91">I got another chapter.</seg>
<seg id="92">And it's such a good chapter -- I love you, honey -- it's such a good chapter.</seg>
<seg id="93">But especially at the beginning, it was like an alternate universe, or one of those old "choose your own adventure" books from the '80s where there are two parallel plot lines.</seg>
<seg id="94">So I opened my heart to Matthew, and my brain was like, "Would you like to think about Aaron? Like, the past, the present, future, just get in there," and I did.</seg>
<seg id="95">And all of a sudden, those two plots were unfurling at once, and falling in love with Matthew really helped me realize the enormity of what I lost when Aaron died.</seg>
<seg id="96">And just as importantly, it helped me realize that my love for Aaron and my grief for Aaron, and my love for Matthew, are not opposing forces.</seg>
<seg id="97">They are just strands to the same thread.</seg>
<seg id="98">They're the same stuff.</seg>
<seg id="99">I'm ... what would my parents say?</seg>
<seg id="100">I'm not special.</seg>
<seg id="101">They had four kids, they were like ... frankly.</seg>
<seg id="102">But I'm not, I'm not special.</seg>
<seg id="103">I know that, I'm fully aware that all day, every day, all around the world, terrible things are happening.</seg>
<seg id="104">All the time.</seg>
<seg id="105">Like I said, fun person.</seg>
<seg id="106">But terrible things are happening, people are experiencing deeply formative and traumatic losses every day.</seg>
<seg id="107">And as part of my job, this weird podcast that I have, I sometimes talk to people about the worst thing that's ever happened to them.</seg>
<seg id="108">And sometimes, that's the loss of someone they love, sometimes days ago or weeks ago, years ago, even decades ago.</seg>
<seg id="109">And these people that I interview, they haven't closed themselves around this loss and made it the center of their lives.</seg>
<seg id="110">They've lived, their worlds have kept spinning.</seg>
<seg id="111">But they're talking to me, a total stranger, about the person they love who has died, because these are the experiences that mark us and make us just as much as the joyful ones.</seg>
<seg id="112">And just as permanently.</seg>
<seg id="113">Long after you get your last sympathy card or your last hot dish.</seg>
<seg id="114">Like, we don't look at the people around us experiencing life's joys and wonders and tell them to "move on," do we?</seg>
<seg id="115">We don't send a card that's like, "Congratulations on your beautiful baby," and then, five years later, think like, "Another birthday party? Get over it."</seg>
<seg id="116">Yeah, we get it, he's five.</seg>
<seg id="117">Wow.</seg>
<seg id="118">But grief is kind of one of those things, like, falling in love or having a baby or watching "The Wire" on HBO, where you don't get it until you get it, until you do it.</seg>
<seg id="119">And once you do it, once it's your love or your baby, once it's your grief and your front row at the funeral, you get it.</seg>
<seg id="120">You understand what you're experiencing is not a moment in time, it's not a bone that will reset, but that you've been touched by something chronic.</seg>
<seg id="121">It's not fatal, but sometimes grief feels like it could be.</seg>
<seg id="122">And if we can't prevent it in one another, what can we do?</seg>
<seg id="123">What can we do other than try to remind one another that some things can't be fixed, and not all wounds are meant to heal?</seg>
<seg id="124">We need each other to remember, to help each other remember, that grief is this multitasking emotion.</seg>
<seg id="125">That you can and will be sad, and happy; you'll be grieving, and able to love in the same year or week, the same breath.</seg>
<seg id="126">We need to remember that a grieving person is going to laugh again and smile again.</seg>
<seg id="127">If they're lucky, they'll even find love again.</seg>
<seg id="128">But yes, absolutely, they're going to move forward.</seg>
<seg id="129">But that doesn't mean that they've moved on.</seg>
<seg id="130">Thank you.</seg>
</doc>
<doc docid="39331" genre="lectures">
<talkid>39331</talkid>
<seg id="1">So, on the day after the Brexit vote, in June 2016, when Britain woke up to the shock of discovering that we're leaving the European Union, my editor at the "Observer" newspaper in the UK asked me to go back to South Wales, where I grew up, and to write a report.</seg>
<seg id="2">And so I went to a town called Ebbw Vale.</seg>
<seg id="3">Here it is.</seg>
<seg id="4">It's in the South Wales Valleys, which is this quite special place.</seg>
<seg id="5">So it's had this very, sort of rich, working-class culture, and it's famous for its Welsh male voice choirs and rugby and its coal.</seg>
<seg id="6">But when I was a teenager, the coal mines and the steelworks closed, and the entire area was devastated.</seg>
<seg id="7">And I went there because it had one of the highest "Leave" votes in the country.</seg>
<seg id="8">Sixty-two percent of the people here voted to leave the European Union.</seg>
<seg id="9">And I wanted to know why.</seg>
<seg id="10">When I got there, I was just a bit taken aback, because the last time I went to Ebbw Vale, it looked like this.</seg>
<seg id="11">And now, it looks like this.</seg>
<seg id="12">This is a new 33-million-pound college of further education that was mostly funded by the European Union.</seg>
<seg id="13">And this is the new sports center that's at the middle of 350-million-pound regeneration project that's being funded by the European Union.</seg>
<seg id="14">And this is the new 77-million-pound road-improvement scheme, and there's a new train line, a new railway station, and they're all being funded by the European Union.</seg>
<seg id="15">And it's not as if any of this is a secret, because there's big signs like this everywhere.</seg>
<seg id="16">[EU Funds: Investing in Wales]</seg>
<seg id="17">I had this sort of weird sense of unreality, walking around the town.</seg>
<seg id="18">And it came to a head when I met this young man in front of the sports center.</seg>
<seg id="19">And he told me that he had voted to leave, because the European Union had done nothing for him.</seg>
<seg id="20">He was fed up with it.</seg>
<seg id="21">And all around town, people told me the same thing.</seg>
<seg id="22">They said that they wanted to take back control, which was one of the slogans in the campaign.</seg>
<seg id="23">And they told me that they were most fed up with the immigrants and with the refugees.</seg>
<seg id="24">They'd had enough.</seg>
<seg id="25">Which was odd.</seg>
<seg id="26">Because walking around, I didn't meet any immigrants or refugees.</seg>
<seg id="27">I met one Polish woman who told me she was practically the only foreigner in town.</seg>
<seg id="28">And when I checked the figures, I discovered that Ebbw Vale actually has one of the lowest rates of immigration in the country.</seg>
<seg id="29">And so I was just a bit baffled, because I couldn't really understand where people were getting their information from.</seg>
<seg id="30">Because it was the right-wing tabloid newspapers which printed all these stories about immigration.</seg>
<seg id="31">And this is a very much left-wing Labour stronghold.</seg>
<seg id="32">But then after the article came out, this woman got in touch with me.</seg>
<seg id="33">And she was from Ebbw Vale, and she told me about all this stuff that she'd seen on Facebook.</seg>
<seg id="34">I was like, "What stuff?"</seg>
<seg id="35">And she said it was all this quite scary stuff about immigration, and especially about Turkey.</seg>
<seg id="36">So I tried to find it.</seg>
<seg id="37">But there was nothing there.</seg>
<seg id="38">Because there's no archive of ads that people had seen or what had been pushed into their news feeds.</seg>
<seg id="39">No trace of anything, gone completely dark.</seg>
<seg id="40">And this referendum that will have this profound effect forever on Britain -- it's already had a profound effect: the Japanese car manufacturers that came to Wales and the north east to replace the mining jobs -- they are already going because of Brexit.</seg>
<seg id="41">And this entire referendum took place in darkness, because it took place on Facebook.</seg>
<seg id="42">And what happens on Facebook stays on Facebook, because only you see your news feed, and then it vanishes, so it's impossible to research anything.</seg>
<seg id="43">So we have no idea who saw what ads or what impact they had, or what data was used to target these people.</seg>
<seg id="44">Or even who placed the ads, or how much money was spent, or even what nationality they were.</seg>
<seg id="45">But Facebook does.</seg>
<seg id="46">Facebook has these answers, and it's refused to give them to us.</seg>
<seg id="47">Our parliament has asked Mark Zuckerberg multiple times to come to Britain and to give us these answers.</seg>
<seg id="48">And every single time, he's refused.</seg>
<seg id="49">And you have to wonder why.</seg>
<seg id="50">Because what I and other journalists have uncovered is that multiple crimes took place during the referendum.</seg>
<seg id="51">And they took place on Facebook.</seg>
<seg id="52">It's because in Britain, we limit the amount of money that you can spend in an election.</seg>
<seg id="53">And it's because in the 19th century, people would walk around with literally wheelbarrows of cash and just buy voters.</seg>
<seg id="54">So we passed these strict laws to stop that from happening.</seg>
<seg id="55">But those laws don't work anymore.</seg>
<seg id="56">This referendum took place almost entirely online.</seg>
<seg id="57">And you can spend any amount of money on Facebook or on Google or on YouTube ads and nobody will know, because they're black boxes.</seg>
<seg id="58">And this is what happened.</seg>
<seg id="59">We've actually got no idea of the full extent of it.</seg>
<seg id="60">But we do know that in the last days before the Brexit vote, the official "Vote Leave" campaign laundered nearly three quarters of a million pounds through another campaign entity that our electoral commission has ruled was illegal, and it's referred it to the police.</seg>
<seg id="61">And with this illegal cash, "Vote Leave" unleashed a fire hose of disinformation.</seg>
<seg id="62">Ads like this.</seg>
<seg id="63">[Turkey's 76m people joining the EU] This is a lie, it's a total lie.</seg>
<seg id="64">Turkey is not joining the European Union.</seg>
<seg id="65">There's not even any discussions of it joining the European Union.</seg>
<seg id="66">And most of us, we never saw these ads, because we were not the target of them.</seg>
<seg id="67">"Vote Leave" identified a tiny sliver of people who it identified as persuadable, and they saw them.</seg>
<seg id="68">And the only reason we are seeing these now is because parliament forced Facebook to hand them over.</seg>
<seg id="69">And maybe you think, "Well, it was just a bit of overspending. It's a few lies."</seg>
<seg id="70">But this was the biggest electoral fraud in Britain for 100 years.</seg>
<seg id="71">In a once-in-a-generation vote that hinged upon just one percent of the electorate.</seg>
<seg id="72">And it was just one of the crimes that took place in the referendum.</seg>
<seg id="73">There was another group, which was headed by this man, Nigel Farage, the one to the right of Trump.</seg>
<seg id="74">And his group, "Leave.EU" -- it also broke the law.</seg>
<seg id="75">It broke British electoral laws and British data laws, and it's also being referred to the police.</seg>
<seg id="76">And this man, Arron Banks, he funded this campaign.</seg>
<seg id="77">And in a completely separate case, he's being referred to our National Crime Agency, our equivalent of the FBI, because our electoral commission has concluded they don't know where his money came from.</seg>
<seg id="78">Or if it was even British.</seg>
<seg id="79">And I'm not even going to go into the lies that Arron Banks has told about his covert relationship with the Russian government.</seg>
<seg id="80">Or the weird timing of Nigel Farage's meetings with Julian Assange and with Trump's buddy, Roger Stone, now indicted, immediately before two massive WikiLeaks dumps, both of which happened to benefit Donald Trump.</seg>
<seg id="81">But I will tell you that Brexit and Trump were intimately entwined.</seg>
<seg id="82">This man told me that Brexit was the petri dish for Trump.</seg>
<seg id="83">And we know it's the same people, the same companies, the same data, the same techniques, the same use of hate and fear.</seg>
<seg id="84">This is what they were posting on Facebook.</seg>
<seg id="85">And I don't even want to call this a lie, [Immigration without assimilation equals invasion] because it feels more like a hate crime to me.</seg>
<seg id="86">I don't have to tell you that hate and fear are being sown online all across the world.</seg>
<seg id="87">Not just in Britain and America, but in France and in Hungary and Brazil and Myanmar and New Zealand.</seg>
<seg id="88">And we know there is this dark undertow which is connecting us all globally.</seg>
<seg id="89">And it is flowing via the technology platforms.</seg>
<seg id="90">But we only see a tiny amount of what's going on on the surface.</seg>
<seg id="91">And I only found out anything about this dark underbelly because I started looking into Trump's relationship to Farage, into a company called Cambridge Analytica.</seg>
<seg id="92">And I spent months tracking down an ex-employee, Christopher Wiley.</seg>
<seg id="93">And he told me how this company, that worked for both Trump and Brexit, had profiled people politically in order to understand their individual fears, to better target them with Facebook ads.</seg>
<seg id="94">And it did this by illicitly harvesting the profiles of 87 million people from Facebook.</seg>
<seg id="95">It took an entire year's work to get Christopher on the record.</seg>
<seg id="96">And I had to turn myself  from a feature writer into an investigative reporter to do it.</seg>
<seg id="97">And he was extraordinarily brave, because the company is owned by Robert Mercer, the billionaire who bankrolled Trump, and he threatened to sue us multiple times, to stop us from publishing.</seg>
<seg id="98">But we finally got there, and we were one day ahead of publication.</seg>
<seg id="99">We got another legal threat.</seg>
<seg id="100">Not from Cambridge Analytica this time, but from Facebook.</seg>
<seg id="101">It told us that if we publish, they would sue us.</seg>
<seg id="102">We did it anyway.</seg>
<seg id="103">Facebook, you were on the wrong side of history in that.</seg>
<seg id="104">And you were on the wrong side of history in this -- in refusing to give us the answers that we need.</seg>
<seg id="105">And that is why I am here.</seg>
<seg id="106">To address you directly, the gods of Silicon Valley.</seg>
<seg id="107">and Sheryl Sandberg and Larry Page and Sergey Brin and Jack Dorsey, and your employees and your investors, too.</seg>
<seg id="108">Because 100 years ago, the biggest danger in the South Wales coal mines was gas.</seg>
<seg id="109">Silent and deadly and invisible.</seg>
<seg id="110">It's why they sent the canaries down first to check the air.</seg>
<seg id="111">And in this massive, global, online experiment that we are all living through, we in Britain are the canary.</seg>
<seg id="112">We are what happens to a western democracy when a hundred years of electoral laws are disrupted by technology.</seg>
<seg id="113">Our democracy is broken, our laws don't work anymore, and it's not me saying this, it's our parliament published a report saying this.</seg>
<seg id="114">This technology that you have invented has been amazing.</seg>
<seg id="115">But now, it's a crime scene.</seg>
<seg id="116">And you have the evidence.</seg>
<seg id="117">And it is not enough to say that you will do better in the future.</seg>
<seg id="118">Because to have any hope of stopping this from happening again, we have to know the truth.</seg>
<seg id="119">And maybe you think, "Well, it was just a few ads. And people are smarter than that, right?"</seg>
<seg id="120">To which I would say, "Good luck with that."</seg>
<seg id="121">Because what the Brexit vote demonstrates is that liberal democracy is broken.</seg>
<seg id="122">And you broke it.</seg>
<seg id="123">This is not democracy -- spreading lies in darkness, paid for with illegal cash, from God knows where.</seg>
<seg id="124">It's subversion, and you are accessories to it.</seg>
<seg id="125">Our parliament has been the first in the world to try to hold you to account, and it's failed.</seg>
<seg id="126">You are literally beyond the reach of British law -- not just British laws, this is nine parliaments, nine countries are represented here, who Mark Zuckerberg refused to come and give evidence to.</seg>
<seg id="127">And what you don't seem to understand is that this is bigger than you.</seg>
<seg id="128">And it's bigger than any of us.</seg>
<seg id="129">And it is not about left or right or "Leave" or "Remain" or Trump or not.</seg>
<seg id="130">It's about whether it's actually possible to have a free and fair election ever again.</seg>
<seg id="131">Because as it stands, I don't think it is.</seg>
<seg id="132">And so my question to you is, is this what you want?</seg>
<seg id="133">Is this how you want history to remember you: as the handmaidens to authoritarianism that is on the rise all across the world?</seg>
<seg id="134">Because you set out to connect people.</seg>
<seg id="135">And you are refusing to acknowledge that the same technology is now driving us apart.</seg>
<seg id="136">And my question to everybody else is, is this what we want: to let them get away with it, and to sit back and play with our phones, as this darkness falls?</seg>
<seg id="137">The history of the South Wales Valleys is of a fight for rights.</seg>
<seg id="138">And this is not a drill -- it's a point of inflection.</seg>
<seg id="139">Democracy is not guaranteed, and it is not inevitable, and we have to fight and we have to win and we cannot let these tech companies have this unchecked power.</seg>
<seg id="140">It's up to us -- you, me and all of us.</seg>
<seg id="141">We are the ones who have to take back control.</seg>
</doc>
<doc docid="42604" genre="lectures">
<talkid>42604</talkid>
<seg id="1">It may seem like we're all standing on solid earth right now, but we're not.</seg>
<seg id="2">The rocks and the dirt underneath us are crisscrossed by tiny little fractures and empty spaces.</seg>
<seg id="3">And these empty spaces are filled with astronomical quantities of microbes, such as these ones.</seg>
<seg id="4">The deepest that we found microbes so far into the earth is five kilometers down.</seg>
<seg id="5">So like, if you pointed yourself at the ground and took off running into the ground, you could run an entire 5K race and microbes would line your whole path.</seg>
<seg id="6">So you may not have ever thought about these microbes that are deep inside earth's crust, but you probably thought about the microbes living in our guts.</seg>
<seg id="7">If you add up the gut microbiomes of all the people and all the animals on the planet, collectively, this weighs about 100,000 tons.</seg>
<seg id="8">This is a huge biome that we carry in our bellies every single day.</seg>
<seg id="9">We should all be proud.</seg>
<seg id="10">But it pales in comparison to the number of microbes that are covering the entire surface of the earth, like in our soils, our rivers and our oceans.</seg>
<seg id="11">Collectively, these weigh about two billion tons.</seg>
<seg id="12">But it turns out that the majority of microbes on earth aren't even in oceans or our guts or sewage treatment plants.</seg>
<seg id="13">Most of them are actually inside the earth's crust.</seg>
<seg id="14">So collectively, these weigh 40 billion tons.</seg>
<seg id="15">This is one of the biggest biomes on the planet, and we didn't even know it existed until a few decades ago.</seg>
<seg id="16">So the possibilities for what life is like down there, or what it might do for humans, are limitless.</seg>
<seg id="17">This is a map showing a red dot for every place where we've gotten pretty good deep subsurface samples with modern microbiological methods, and you may be impressed that we're getting a pretty good global coverage, but actually, if you remember that these are the only places that we have samples from, it looks a little worse.</seg>
<seg id="18">If we were all in an alien spaceship, trying to reconstruct a map of the globe from only these samples, we'd never be able to do it.</seg>
<seg id="19">So people sometimes say to me, "Yeah, there's a lot of microbes in the subsurface, but ... aren't they just kind of dormant?"</seg>
<seg id="20">This is a good point.</seg>
<seg id="21">Relative to a ficus plant or the measles or my kid's guinea pigs, these microbes probably aren't doing much of anything at all.</seg>
<seg id="22">We know that they have to be slow, because there's so many of them.</seg>
<seg id="23">If they all started dividing at the rate of E. coli, then they would double the entire weight of the earth, rocks included, over a single night.</seg>
<seg id="24">In fact, many of them probably haven't even undergone a single cell division since the time of ancient Egypt.</seg>
<seg id="25">Which is just crazy.</seg>
<seg id="26">Like, how do you wrap your head around things that are so long-lived?</seg>
<seg id="27">But I thought of an analogy that I really love, but it's weird and it's complicated.</seg>
<seg id="28">So I hope that you can all go there with me.</seg>
<seg id="29">Alright, let's try it.</seg>
<seg id="30">It's like trying to figure out the life cycle of a tree ...</seg>
<seg id="31">if you only lived for a day.</seg>
<seg id="32">So like if human life span was only a day, and we lived in winter, then you would go your entire life without ever seeing a tree with a leaf on it.</seg>
<seg id="33">And there would be so many human generations that would pass by within a single winter that you may not even have access to a history book that says anything other than the fact that trees are always lifeless sticks that don't do anything.</seg>
<seg id="34">Of course, this is ridiculous.</seg>
<seg id="35">We know that trees are just waiting for summer so they can reactivate.</seg>
<seg id="36">But if the human life span were significantly shorter than that of trees, we might be completely oblivious to this totally mundane fact.</seg>
<seg id="37">So when we say that these deep subsurface microbes are just dormant, are we like people who die after a day, trying to figure out how trees work?</seg>
<seg id="38">What if these deep subsurface organisms are just waiting for their version of summer, but our lives are too short for us to see it?</seg>
<seg id="39">If you take E. coli and seal it up in a test tube, with no food or nutrients, and leave it there for months to years, most of the cells die off, of course, because they're starving.</seg>
<seg id="40">But a few of the cells survive.</seg>
<seg id="41">If you take these old surviving cells and compete them, also under starvation conditions, against a new, fast-growing culture of E. coli, the grizzled old tough guys beat out the squeaky clean upstarts every single time.</seg>
<seg id="42">So this is evidence there's actually an evolutionary payoff to being extraordinarily slow.</seg>
<seg id="43">So it's possible that maybe we should not equate being slow with being unimportant.</seg>
<seg id="44">Maybe these out-of-sight, out-of-mind microbes could actually be helpful to humanity.</seg>
<seg id="45">OK, so as far as we know, there are two ways to do subsurface living.</seg>
<seg id="46">The first is to wait for food to trickle down from the surface world, like trying to eat the leftovers of a picnic that happened 1,000 years ago.</seg>
<seg id="47">Which is a crazy way to live, but shockingly seems to work out for a lot of microbes in earth.</seg>
<seg id="48">The other possibility is for a microbe to just say, "Nah, I don't need the surface world. I'm good down here."</seg>
<seg id="49">For microbes that go this route, they have to get everything that they need in order to survive from inside the earth.</seg>
<seg id="50">Some things are actually easier for them to get.</seg>
<seg id="51">They're more abundant inside the earth, like water or nutrients, like nitrogen and iron and phosphorus, or places to live.</seg>
<seg id="52">These are things that we literally kill each other to get ahold of up at the surface world.</seg>
<seg id="53">But in the subsurface, the problem is finding enough energy.</seg>
<seg id="54">Up at the surface, plants can chemically knit together carbon dioxide molecules into yummy sugars as fast as the sun's photons hit their leaves.</seg>
<seg id="55">But in the subsurface, of course, there's no sunlight, so this ecosystem has to solve the problem of who is going to make the food for everybody else.</seg>
<seg id="56">The subsurface needs something that's like a plant but it breathes rocks.</seg>
<seg id="57">Luckily, such a thing exists, and it's called a chemolithoautotroph.</seg>
<seg id="58">Which is a microbe that uses chemicals -- "chemo," from rocks -- "litho," to make food -- "autotroph."</seg>
<seg id="59">And they can do this with a ton of different elements.</seg>
<seg id="60">They can do this with sulphur, iron, manganese, nitrogen, carbon, some of them can use pure electrons, straight up.</seg>
<seg id="61">Like, if you cut the end off of an electrical cord, they could breathe it like a snorkel.</seg>
<seg id="62">These chemolithoautotrophs take the energy that they get from these processes and use it to make food, like plants do.</seg>
<seg id="63">But we know that plants do more than just make food.</seg>
<seg id="64">They also make a waste product, oxygen, which we are 100 percent dependent upon.</seg>
<seg id="65">But the waste product that these chemolithoautotrophs make is often in the form of minerals, like rust or pyrite, like fool's gold, or carminites, like limestone.</seg>
<seg id="66">So what we have are microbes that are really, really slow, like rocks, that get their energy from rocks, that make as their waste product other rocks.</seg>
<seg id="67">So am I talking about biology, or am I talking about geology?</seg>
<seg id="68">This stuff really blurs the lines.</seg>
<seg id="69">So if I'm going to do this thing, and I'm going to be a biologist who studies microbes that kind of act like rocks, then I should probably start studying geology.</seg>
<seg id="70">And what's the coolest part of geology?</seg>
<seg id="71">Volcanoes.</seg>
<seg id="72">This is looking inside the crater of Poás Volcano in Costa Rica.</seg>
<seg id="73">Many volcanoes on earth arise because an oceanic tectonic plate crashes into a continental plate.</seg>
<seg id="74">As this oceanic plate subducts or gets moved underneath this continental plate, things like water and carbon dioxide and other materials get squeezed out of it, like ringing a wet washcloth.</seg>
<seg id="75">So in this way, subduction zones are like portals into the deep earth, where materials are exchanged between the surface and the subsurface world.</seg>
<seg id="76">So I was recently invited by some of my colleagues in Costa Rica to come and work with them on some of the volcanoes.</seg>
<seg id="77">And of course I said yes, because, I mean, Costa Rica is beautiful, but also because it sits on top of one of these subduction zones.</seg>
<seg id="78">We wanted to ask the very specific question: Why is it that the carbon dioxide that comes out of this deeply buried oceanic tectonic plate is only coming out of the volcanoes?</seg>
<seg id="79">Why don't we see it distributed throughout the entire subduction zone?</seg>
<seg id="80">Do the microbes have something to do with that?</seg>
<seg id="81">So this is a picture of me inside Poás Volcano, along with my colleague Donato Giovannelli.</seg>
<seg id="82">That lake that we're standing next to is made of pure battery acid.</seg>
<seg id="83">I know this because we were measuring the pH when this picture was taken.</seg>
<seg id="84">And at some point while we were working inside the crater, I turned to my Costa Rican colleague Carlos Ramírez and I said, "Alright, if this thing starts erupting right now, what's our exit strategy?"</seg>
<seg id="85">And he said, "Oh, yeah, great question, it's totally easy. Just turn around and enjoy the view."</seg>
<seg id="86">"Because it will be your last."</seg>
<seg id="87">And it may sound like he was being overly dramatic, but 54 days after I was standing next to that lake, this happened.</seg>
<seg id="88">Audience: Oh!</seg>
<seg id="89">Freaking terrifying, right?</seg>
<seg id="90">This was the biggest eruption this volcano had had in 60-some-odd years, and not long after this video ends, the camera that was taking the video is obliterated and the entire lake that we had been sampling vaporizes completely.</seg>
<seg id="91">But I also want to be clear that we were pretty sure this was not going to happen on the day that we were actually in the volcano, because Costa Rica monitors its volcanoes very carefully through the OVSICORI Institute, and we had scientists from that institute with us on that day.</seg>
<seg id="92">But the fact that it erupted illustrates perfectly that if you want to look for where carbon dioxide gas is coming out of this oceanic plate, then you should look no further than the volcanoes themselves.</seg>
<seg id="93">But if you go to Costa Rica, you may notice that in addition to these volcanoes there are tons of cozy little hot springs all over the place.</seg>
<seg id="94">Some of the water in these hot springs is actually bubbling up from this deeply buried oceanic plate.</seg>
<seg id="95">And our hypothesis was that there should be carbon dioxide bubbling up with it, but something deep underground was filtering it out.</seg>
<seg id="96">So we spent two weeks driving all around Costa Rica, sampling every hot spring we could find -- it was awful, let me tell you.</seg>
<seg id="97">And then we spent the next two years measuring and analyzing data.</seg>
<seg id="98">And if you're not a scientist, I'll just let you know that the big discoveries don't really happen when you're at a beautiful hot spring or on a public stage; they happen when you're hunched over a messy computer or you're troubleshooting a difficult instrument, or you're Skyping your colleagues because you are completely confused about your data.</seg>
<seg id="99">Scientific discoveries, kind of like deep subsurface microbes, can be very, very slow.</seg>
<seg id="100">But in our case, this really paid off this one time.</seg>
<seg id="101">We discovered that literally tons of carbon dioxide were coming out of this deeply buried oceanic plate.</seg>
<seg id="102">And the thing that was keeping them underground and keeping it from being released out into the atmosphere was that deep underground, underneath all the adorable sloths and toucans of Costa Rica, were chemolithoautotrophs.</seg>
<seg id="103">These microbes and the chemical processes that were happening around them were converting this carbon dioxide into carbonate mineral and locking it up underground.</seg>
<seg id="104">Which makes you wonder: If these subsurface processes are so good at sucking up all the carbon dioxide coming from below them, could they also help us with a little carbon problem we've got going on up at the surface?</seg>
<seg id="105">Humans are releasing enough carbon dioxide into our atmosphere that we are decreasing the ability of our planet to support life as we know it.</seg>
<seg id="106">And scientists and engineers and entrepreneurs are working on methods to pull carbon dioxide out of these point sources, so that they're not released into the atmosphere.</seg>
<seg id="107">And they need to put it somewhere.</seg>
<seg id="108">So for this reason, we need to keep studying places where this carbon might be stored, possibly in the subsurface, to know what's going to happen to it when it goes there.</seg>
<seg id="109">Will these deep subsurface microbes be a problem because they're too slow to actually keep anything down there?</seg>
<seg id="110">Or will they be helpful because they'll help convert this stuff to solid carbonate minerals?</seg>
<seg id="111">If we can make such a big breakthrough just from one study that we did in Costa Rica, then imagine what else is waiting to be discovered down there.</seg>
<seg id="112">This new field of geo-bio-chemistry, or deep subsurface biology, or whatever you want to call it, is going to have huge implications, not just for mitigating climate change, but possibly for understanding how life and earth have coevolved, or finding new products that are useful for industrial or medical applications.</seg>
<seg id="113">Maybe even predicting earthquakes or finding life outside our planet.</seg>
<seg id="114">It could even help us understand the origin of life itself.</seg>
<seg id="115">Fortunately, I don't have to do this by myself.</seg>
<seg id="116">I have amazing colleagues all over the world who are cracking into the mysteries of this deep subsurface world.</seg>
<seg id="117">And it may seem like life buried deep within the earth's crust is so far away from our daily experiences that it's kind of irrelevant.</seg>
<seg id="118">But the truth is that this weird, slow life may actually have the answers to some of the greatest mysteries of life on earth.</seg>
<seg id="119">Thank you.</seg>
</doc>
<doc docid="45614" genre="lectures">
<talkid>45614</talkid>
<seg id="1">Today, actually, is a very special day for me, because it is my birthday.</seg>
<seg id="2">And so, thanks to all of you for joining the party.</seg>
<seg id="3">But every time you throw a party, there's someone there to spoil it. Right?</seg>
<seg id="4">And I'm a physicist, and this time I brought another physicist along to do so.</seg>
<seg id="5">His name is Albert Einstein -- also Albert -- and he's the one who said that the person who has not made his great contributions to science by the age of 30 will never do so.</seg>
<seg id="6">Now, you don't need to check Wikipedia that I'm beyond 30.</seg>
<seg id="7">So, effectively, what he is telling me, and us, is that when it comes to my science, I'm deadwood.</seg>
<seg id="8">Well, luckily, I had my share of luck within my career.</seg>
<seg id="9">Around age 28, I became very interested in networks, and a few years later, we managed to publish a few key papers that reported the discovery of scale-free networks and really gave birth to a new discipline that we call network science today.</seg>
<seg id="10">And if you really care about it, you can get a PhD now in network science in Budapest, in Boston, and you can study it all over the world.</seg>
<seg id="11">A few years later, when I moved to Harvard first as a sabbatical, I became interested in another type of network: that time, the networks within ourselves, how the genes and the proteins and the metabolites link to each other and how they connect to disease.</seg>
<seg id="12">And that interest led to a major explosion within medicine, including the Network Medicine Division at Harvard, that has more than 300 researchers who are using this perspective to treat patients and develop new cures.</seg>
<seg id="13">And a few years ago, I thought that I would take this idea of networks and the expertise we had in networks in a different area, that is, to understand success.</seg>
<seg id="14">And why did we do that?</seg>
<seg id="15">Well, we thought that, to some degree, our success is determined by the networks we're part of -- that our networks can push us forward, they can pull us back.</seg>
<seg id="16">And I was curious if we could use the knowledge and big data and expertise where we develop the networks to really quantify how these things happen.</seg>
<seg id="17">This is a result from that.</seg>
<seg id="18">What you see here is a network of galleries in museums that connect to each other.</seg>
<seg id="19">And through this map that we mapped out last year, we are able to predict very accurately the success of an artist if you give me the first five exhibits that he or she had in their career.</seg>
<seg id="20">Well, as we thought about success, we realized that success is not only about networks; there are so many other dimensions to that.</seg>
<seg id="21">And one of the things we need for success, obviously, is performance.</seg>
<seg id="22">So let's define what's the difference between performance and success.</seg>
<seg id="23">Well, performance is what you do: how fast you run, what kind of paintings you paint, what kind of papers you publish.</seg>
<seg id="24">However, in our working definition, success is about what the community notices from what you did, from your performance: How does it acknowledge it, and how does it reward you for it?</seg>
<seg id="25">In other terms, your performance is about you, but your success is about all of us.</seg>
<seg id="26">And this was a very important shift for us, because the moment we defined success as being a collective measure that the community provides to us, it became measurable, because if it's in the community, there are multiple data points about that.</seg>
<seg id="27">So we go to school, we exercise, we practice, because we believe that performance leads to success.</seg>
<seg id="28">But the way we actually started to explore, we realized that performance and success are very, very different animals when it comes to the mathematics of the problem.</seg>
<seg id="29">And let me illustrate that.</seg>
<seg id="30">So what you see here is the fastest man on earth, Usain Bolt.</seg>
<seg id="31">And of course, he wins most of the competitions that he enters.</seg>
<seg id="32">And we know he's the fastest on earth because we have a chronometer to measure his speed.</seg>
<seg id="33">Well, what is interesting about him is that when he wins, he doesn't do so by really significantly outrunning his competition.</seg>
<seg id="34">He's running at most a percent faster than the one who loses the race.</seg>
<seg id="35">And not only does he run only one percent faster than the second one, but he doesn't run 10 times faster than I do -- and I'm not a good runner, trust me on that.</seg>
<seg id="36">And every time we are able to measure performance, we notice something very interesting; that is, performance is bounded.</seg>
<seg id="37">What it means is that there are no huge variations in human performance.</seg>
<seg id="38">It varies only in a narrow range, and we do need the chronometer to measure the differences.</seg>
<seg id="39">This is not to say that we cannot see the good from the best ones, but the best ones are very hard to distinguish.</seg>
<seg id="40">And the problem with that is that most of us work in areas where we do not have a chronometer to gauge our performance.</seg>
<seg id="41">Alright, performance is bounded, there are no huge differences between us when it comes to our performance.</seg>
<seg id="42">How about success?</seg>
<seg id="43">Well, let's switch to a different topic, like books.</seg>
<seg id="44">One measure of success for writers is how many people read your work.</seg>
<seg id="45">And so when my previous book came out in 2009, I was in Europe talking with my editor, and I was interested: Who is the competition?</seg>
<seg id="46">And I had some fabulous ones.</seg>
<seg id="47">That week --</seg>
<seg id="48">Dan Brown came out with "The Lost Symbol," and "The Last Song" also came out, Nicholas Sparks.</seg>
<seg id="49">And when you just look at the list, you realize, you know, performance-wise, there's hardly any difference between these books or mine.</seg>
<seg id="50">Right?</seg>
<seg id="51">So maybe if Nicholas Sparks's team works a little harder, he could easily be number one, because it's almost by accident who ended up at the top.</seg>
<seg id="52">So I said, let's look at the numbers -- I'm a data person, right?</seg>
<seg id="53">So let's see what were the sales for Nicholas Sparks.</seg>
<seg id="54">And it turns out that that opening weekend, Nicholas Sparks sold more than a hundred thousand copies, which is an amazing number.</seg>
<seg id="55">You can actually get to the top of the "New York Times" best-seller list by selling 10,000 copies a week, so he tenfold overcame what he needed to be number one.</seg>
<seg id="56">Yet he wasn't number one.</seg>
<seg id="57">Why?</seg>
<seg id="58">Because there was Dan Brown, who sold 1.2 million copies that weekend.</seg>
<seg id="59">And the reason I like this number is because it shows that, really, when it comes to success, it's unbounded, that the best doesn't only get slightly more than the second best but gets orders of magnitude more, because success is a collective measure.</seg>
<seg id="60">We give it to them, rather than we earn it through our performance.</seg>
<seg id="61">So one of things we realized is that performance, what we do, is bounded, but success, which is collective, is unbounded, which makes you wonder: How do you get these huge differences in success when you have such tiny differences in performance?</seg>
<seg id="62">And recently, I published a book that I devoted to that very question.</seg>
<seg id="63">And they didn't give me enough time to go over all of that, so I'm going to go back to the question of, alright, you have success; when should that appear?</seg>
<seg id="64">So let's go back to the party spoiler and ask ourselves: Why did Einstein make this ridiculous statement, that only before 30 you could actually be creative?</seg>
<seg id="65">Well, because he looked around himself and he saw all these fabulous physicists that created quantum mechanics and modern physics, and they were all in their 20s and early 30s when they did so.</seg>
<seg id="66">And it's not only him.</seg>
<seg id="67">It's not only observational bias, because there's actually a whole field of genius research that has documented the fact that, if we look at the people we admire from the past and then look at what age they made their biggest contribution, whether that's music, whether that's science, whether that's engineering, most of them tend to do so in their 20s, 30s, early 40s at most.</seg>
<seg id="68">But there's a problem with this genius research.</seg>
<seg id="69">Well, first of all, it created the impression to us that creativity equals youth, which is painful, right?</seg>
<seg id="70">And it also has an observational bias, because it only looks at geniuses and doesn't look at ordinary scientists and doesn't look at all of us and ask, is it really true that creativity vanishes as we age?</seg>
<seg id="71">So that's exactly what we tried to do, and this is important for that to actually have references.</seg>
<seg id="72">So let's look at an ordinary scientist like myself, and let's look at my career.</seg>
<seg id="73">So what you see here is all the papers that I've published from my very first paper, in 1989; I was still in Romania when I did so, till kind of this year.</seg>
<seg id="74">And vertically, you see the impact of the paper, that is, how many citations, how many other papers have been written that cited that work.</seg>
<seg id="75">And when you look at that, you see that my career has roughly three different stages.</seg>
<seg id="76">I had the first 10 years where I had to work a lot and I don't achieve much.</seg>
<seg id="77">No one seems to care about what I do, right?</seg>
<seg id="78">There's hardly any impact.</seg>
<seg id="79">That time, I was doing material science, and then I kind of discovered for myself networks and then started publishing in networks.</seg>
<seg id="80">And that led from one high-impact paper to the other one.</seg>
<seg id="81">And it really felt good. That was that stage of my career.</seg>
<seg id="82">So the question is, what happens right now?</seg>
<seg id="83">And we don't know, because there hasn't been enough time passed yet to actually figure out how much impact those papers will get; it takes time to acquire.</seg>
<seg id="84">Well, when you look at the data, it seems to be that Einstein, the genius research, is right, and I'm at that stage of my career.</seg>
<seg id="85">So we said, OK, let's figure out how does this really happen, first in science.</seg>
<seg id="86">And in order not to have the selection bias, to look only at geniuses, we ended up reconstructing the career of every single scientist from 1900 till today and finding for all scientists what was their personal best, whether they got the Nobel Prize or they never did, or no one knows what they did, even their personal best.</seg>
<seg id="87">And that's what you see in this slide.</seg>
<seg id="88">Each line is a career, and when you have a light blue dot on the top of that career, it says that was their personal best.</seg>
<seg id="89">And the question is, when did they actually make their biggest discovery?</seg>
<seg id="90">To quantify that, we look at what's the probability that you make your biggest discovery, let's say, one, two, three or 10 years into your career?</seg>
<seg id="91">We're looking at what we call "academic age."</seg>
<seg id="92">Your academic age starts when you publish your first papers.</seg>
<seg id="93">I know some of you are still babies.</seg>
<seg id="94">So let's look at the probability that you publish your highest-impact paper.</seg>
<seg id="95">And what you see is, indeed, the genius research is right.</seg>
<seg id="96">Most scientists tend to publish their highest-impact paper in the first 10, 15 years in their career, and it tanks after that.</seg>
<seg id="97">It tanks so fast that I'm about -- I'm exactly 30 years into my career, and the chance that I will publish a paper that would have a higher impact than anything that I did before is less than one percent.</seg>
<seg id="98">I am in that stage of my career, according to this data.</seg>
<seg id="99">But there's a problem with that.</seg>
<seg id="100">We're not doing controls properly.</seg>
<seg id="101">So the control would be, what would a scientist look like who makes random contribution to science?</seg>
<seg id="102">Or what is the productivity of the scientist?</seg>
<seg id="103">When do they write papers?</seg>
<seg id="104">So we measured the productivity, and amazingly, the productivity, your likelihood of writing a paper in year one, 10 or 20 in your career, is indistinguishable from the likelihood of having the impact in that part of your career.</seg>
<seg id="105">And to make a long story short, after lots of statistical tests, there's only one explanation for that, that really, the way we scientists work is that every single paper we write, every project we do, has exactly the same chance of being our personal best.</seg>
<seg id="106">That is, discovery is like a lottery ticket.</seg>
<seg id="107">And the more lottery tickets we buy, the higher our chances.</seg>
<seg id="108">And it happens to be so that most scientists buy most of their lottery tickets in the first 10, 15 years of their career, and after that, their productivity decreases.</seg>
<seg id="109">They're not buying any more lottery tickets.</seg>
<seg id="110">So it looks as if they would not be creative.</seg>
<seg id="111">In reality, they stopped trying.</seg>
<seg id="112">So when we actually put the data together, the conclusion is very simple: success can come at any time.</seg>
<seg id="113">It could be your very first or very last paper of your career.</seg>
<seg id="114">It's totally random in the space of the projects.</seg>
<seg id="115">It is the productivity that changes.</seg>
<seg id="116">Let me illustrate that.</seg>
<seg id="117">Here is Frank Wilczek, who got the Nobel Prize in Physics for the very first paper he ever wrote in his career as a graduate student.</seg>
<seg id="118">More interesting is John Fenn, who, at age 70, was forcefully retired by Yale University.</seg>
<seg id="119">They shut his lab down, and at that moment, he moved to Virginia Commonwealth University, opened another lab, and it is there, at age 72, that he published a paper for which, 15 years later, he got the Nobel Prize for Chemistry.</seg>
<seg id="120">And you think, OK, well, science is special, but what about other areas where we need to be creative?</seg>
<seg id="121">So let me take another typical example: entrepreneurship.</seg>
<seg id="122">Silicon Valley, the land of the youth, right?</seg>
<seg id="123">And indeed, when you look at it, you realize that the biggest awards, the TechCrunch Awards and other awards, are all going to people whose average age is late 20s, very early 30s.</seg>
<seg id="124">You look at who the VCs give the money to, some of the biggest VC firms -- all people in their early 30s.</seg>
<seg id="125">Which, of course, we know; there is this ethos in Silicon Valley that youth equals success.</seg>
<seg id="126">Not when you look at the data, because it's not only about forming a company -- forming a company is like productivity, trying, trying, trying -- when you look at which of these individuals actually put out a successful company, a successful exit.</seg>
<seg id="127">And recently, some of our colleagues looked at exactly that question.</seg>
<seg id="128">And it turns out that yes, those in the 20s and 30s put out a huge number of companies, form lots of companies, but most of them go bust.</seg>
<seg id="129">And when you look at the successful exits, what you see in this particular plot, the older you are, the more likely that you will actually hit the stock market or the sell the company successfully.</seg>
<seg id="130">This is so strong, actually, that if you are in the 50s, you are twice as likely to actually have a successful exit than if you are in your 30s.</seg>
<seg id="131">So in the end, what is it that we see, actually?</seg>
<seg id="132">What we see is that creativity has no age.</seg>
<seg id="133">Productivity does, right?</seg>
<seg id="134">Which is telling me that at the end of the day, if you keep trying --</seg>
<seg id="135">you could still succeed and succeed over and over.</seg>
<seg id="136">So my conclusion is very simple: I am off the stage, back in my lab.</seg>
<seg id="137">Thank you.</seg>
</doc>
<doc docid="45973" genre="lectures">
<talkid>45973</talkid>
<seg id="1">First of all, thank you for your attention.</seg>
<seg id="2">There's nothing quite like being in a room full of people like this, where all of you are giving your attention to me.</seg>
<seg id="3">It's a powerful feeling, to get attention.</seg>
<seg id="4">I'm an actor, so I'm a bit of an expert on, well, nothing, really.</seg>
<seg id="5">But I do know what it feels like to get attention -- I've been lucky in my life to get a lot more than my fair share of attention.</seg>
<seg id="6">And I'm grateful for that, because like I said, it's a powerful feeling.</seg>
<seg id="7">But there's another powerful feeling that I've also been lucky to experience a lot as an actor.</seg>
<seg id="8">And it's funny, it's sort of the opposite feeling, because it doesn't come from getting attention.</seg>
<seg id="9">It comes from paying attention.</seg>
<seg id="10">When I'm acting, I get so focused that I'm only paying attention to one thing.</seg>
<seg id="11">Like when I'm on set and we're about to shoot and the first AD calls out "Rolling!"</seg>
<seg id="12">And then I hear "speed," "marker," "set," and then the director calls "Action!"</seg>
<seg id="13">I've heard that sequence so many times, like, it's become this Pavlovian magic spell for me.</seg>
<seg id="14">"Rolling," "speed," "marker," "set" and "action."</seg>
<seg id="15">Something happens to me, I can't even help it.</seg>
<seg id="16">My attention ...</seg>
<seg id="17">narrows.</seg>
<seg id="18">And everything else in the world, anything else that might be bothering me or might grab my attention, it all goes away, and I'm just ... there.</seg>
<seg id="19">And that feeling, that is what I love, that, to me, is creativity.</seg>
<seg id="20">And that's the biggest reason I'm so grateful that I get to be an actor.</seg>
<seg id="21">So, there's these two powerful feelings.</seg>
<seg id="22">There's getting attention and paying attention.</seg>
<seg id="23">Of course, in the last decade or so, new technology has allowed more and more people to have this powerful feeling of getting attention.</seg>
<seg id="24">For any kind of creative expression, not just acting.</seg>
<seg id="25">It could be writing or photography or drawing, music -- everything.</seg>
<seg id="26">The channels of distribution have been democratized, and that's a good thing.</seg>
<seg id="27">But I do think there's an unintended consequence for anybody on the planet with an urge to be creative -- myself included, because I'm not immune to this.</seg>
<seg id="28">I think that our creativity is becoming more and more of a means to an end -- and that end is to get attention.</seg>
<seg id="29">And so I feel compelled to speak up because in my experience, the more I go after that powerful feeling of paying attention, the happier I am.</seg>
<seg id="30">But the more I go after the powerful feeling of getting attention, the unhappier I am.</seg>
<seg id="31">And -- thanks.</seg>
<seg id="32">So this is something that goes way back for me.</seg>
<seg id="33">I think the first time I can remember using my acting to get attention, I was eight years old at summer camp.</seg>
<seg id="34">And I'd been going on auditions for about a year by then, and I'd been lucky to get some small parts in TV shows and commercials, and I bragged about it a lot, that summer at camp.</seg>
<seg id="35">And at first, it worked.</seg>
<seg id="36">The other kids gave me a bunch of extra attention, because I had been on "Family Ties."</seg>
<seg id="37">That's a picture of me on "Family Ties."</seg>
<seg id="38">Then, the tide turned -- I think I took it too far with the bragging.</seg>
<seg id="39">And then, the other kids started to make fun of me.</seg>
<seg id="40">I remember there was this one girl I had a crush on, Rocky.</seg>
<seg id="41">Her name was Rachel, she went by Rocky.</seg>
<seg id="42">And she was beautiful, and she could sing, and I was smitten with her, and I was standing there, bragging.</seg>
<seg id="43">And she turned to me and she called me a show-off.</seg>
<seg id="44">Which I 100 percent deserved.</seg>
<seg id="45">But you know, it still really hurt.</seg>
<seg id="46">And ever since that summer, I've had a certain hesitance to seek attention for my acting.</seg>
<seg id="47">Sometimes, people would ask me, "Wait a minute, if you don't like the attention, then why are you an actor?"</seg>
<seg id="48">And I'd be like, "Because that's not what acting's about, man, it's about the art."</seg>
<seg id="49">And they'd be like, "OK, OK, dude."</seg>
<seg id="50">And then Twitter came out.</seg>
<seg id="51">And I got totally hooked on it, just like everybody else, which made me into a complete hypocrite.</seg>
<seg id="52">Because at that point, I was absolutely using my acting to get attention.</seg>
<seg id="53">I mean, what, did I think I was just getting all these followers because of my brilliant tweets?</seg>
<seg id="54">I actually did think that -- I was like --</seg>
<seg id="55">"They don't just like me because they saw me in 'Batman,' they like what I have to say, I've got a way with words."</seg>
<seg id="56">And then in no time at all, it started having an impact on my dearly beloved creative process.</seg>
<seg id="57">It still does.</seg>
<seg id="58">I try not to let it.</seg>
<seg id="59">But you know, I'd be sitting there, like, reading a script.</seg>
<seg id="60">And instead of thinking, "How can I personally identify with this character?"</seg>
<seg id="61">Or "How is the audience going to relate to this story?"</seg>
<seg id="62">I'm like, "What are people going to say about this movie on Twitter?"</seg>
<seg id="63">And "What will I say back that will be good and snarky enough to get a lot of retweets, but not too harsh, because people love to get offended, and I don't want to get canceled?"</seg>
<seg id="64">These are the thoughts that enter my mind when I'm supposed to be reading a script, trying to be an artist.</seg>
<seg id="65">And I'm not here to tell you that technology is the enemy of creativity.</seg>
<seg id="66">I don't think that.</seg>
<seg id="67">I think tech is just a tool.</seg>
<seg id="68">It has the potential to foster unprecedented human creativity.</seg>
<seg id="69">Like, I even started an online community called HITRECORD, where people all over the world collaborate on all kinds of creative projects, so I don't think that social media or smartphones or any technology is problematic in and of itself.</seg>
<seg id="70">But ...</seg>
<seg id="71">if we're going to talk about the perils of creativity becoming a means to get attention, then we have to talk about the attention-driven business model of today's big social media companies, right?</seg>
<seg id="72">This will be familiar territory for some of you, but it's a really relevant question here: How does a social media platform like, for example, Instagram, make money?</seg>
<seg id="73">It's not selling a photo-sharing service -- that part's free.</seg>
<seg id="74">So what is it selling?</seg>
<seg id="75">It's selling attention.</seg>
<seg id="76">It's selling the attention of its users to advertisers.</seg>
<seg id="77">And there's a lot of discussion right now about how much attention we're all giving to things like Instagram, but my question is: How is Instagram getting so much attention?</seg>
<seg id="78">We get it for them.</seg>
<seg id="79">Anytime somebody posts on Instagram, they get a certain amount of attention from their followers, whether they have a few followers or a few million followers.</seg>
<seg id="80">And the more attention you're able to get, the more attention Instagram is able to sell.</seg>
<seg id="81">So it's in Instagram's interest for you to get as much attention as possible.</seg>
<seg id="82">And so it trains you to want that attention, to crave it, to feel stressed out when you're not getting enough of it.</seg>
<seg id="83">Instagram gets its users addicted to the powerful feeling of getting attention.</seg>
<seg id="84">And I know we all joke, like, "Oh my God, I'm so addicted to my phone," but this is a real addiction.</seg>
<seg id="85">There's a whole science to it.</seg>
<seg id="86">If you're curious, I recommend the work of Jaron Lanier, Tristan Harris, Nir Eyal.</seg>
<seg id="87">But here's what I can tell you.</seg>
<seg id="88">Being addicted to getting attention is just like being addicted to anything else.</seg>
<seg id="89">It's never enough.</seg>
<seg id="90">You start out and you're thinking, "If only I had 1,000 followers, that would feel amazing."</seg>
<seg id="91">But then you're like, "Well, once I get to 10,000 followers," and, "Once I get to 100 -- Once I get to a million followers, then I'll feel amazing."</seg>
<seg id="92">So I have 4.2 million followers on Twitter -- it's never made me feel amazing.</seg>
<seg id="93">I'm not going to tell you how many I have on Instagram, because I feel genuine shame about how low the number is, because I joined Instagram after "Batman" came out.</seg>
<seg id="94">And I search other actors, and I see that their number is higher than mine, and it makes me feel terrible about myself.</seg>
<seg id="95">Because the follower count makes everybody feel terrible about themselves.</seg>
<seg id="96">That feeling of inadequacy is what drives you to post, so you can get more attention, and then that attention that you get is what these companies sell, that's how they make their money.</seg>
<seg id="97">So there is no amount of attention you can get where you feel like you've arrived, and you're like, "Ah, I'm good now."</seg>
<seg id="98">And of course, there are a lot of actors who are more famous than I am, have more followers than I do, but I bet you they would tell you the same thing.</seg>
<seg id="99">If your creativity is driven by a desire to get attention, you're never going to be creatively fulfilled.</seg>
<seg id="100">But I do have some good news.</seg>
<seg id="101">There is this other powerful feeling.</seg>
<seg id="102">Something else you can do with your attention besides letting a giant tech company control it and sell it.</seg>
<seg id="103">This is that feeling I was talking about, why I love acting so much -- it's being able to pay attention to just one thing.</seg>
<seg id="104">Turns out there's actually some science behind this too.</seg>
<seg id="105">Psychologists and neuroscientists -- they study a phenomenon they call flow, which is this thing that happens in the human brain when someone pays attention to just one thing, like something creative, and manages not to get distracted by anything else.</seg>
<seg id="106">And some say the more regularly you do this, the happier you'll be.</seg>
<seg id="107">Now I'm not a psychologist or a neuroscientist.</seg>
<seg id="108">But I can tell you, for me, that is very true.</seg>
<seg id="109">It's not always easy, it's hard.</seg>
<seg id="110">To really pay attention like this takes practice, everybody does it their own way.</seg>
<seg id="111">But if there's one thing I can share that I think helps me focus and really pay attention, it's this: I try not to see other creative people as my competitors.</seg>
<seg id="112">I try to find collaborators.</seg>
<seg id="113">Like, if I'm acting in a scene, if I start seeing the other actors as my competitors, and I'm like, "God, they're going to get more attention than I am, people are going to be talking about their performance more than mine" -- I've lost my focus.</seg>
<seg id="114">And I'm probably going to suck in that scene.</seg>
<seg id="115">But when I see the other actors as collaborators, then it becomes almost easy to focus, because I'm just paying attention to them.</seg>
<seg id="116">And I don't have to think about what I'm doing -- I react to what they're doing, they react to what I'm doing, and we can kind of keep each other in it together.</seg>
<seg id="117">But I don't want you to think it's only actors on a set that can collaborate in this way.</seg>
<seg id="118">I could be in whatever kind of creative situation.</seg>
<seg id="119">It could be professional, could be just for fun.</seg>
<seg id="120">I could be collaborating with people I'm not even in the same room with.</seg>
<seg id="121">In fact, some of my favorite things I've ever made, I made with people that I never physically met.</seg>
<seg id="122">And by the way, this, to me, is the beauty of the internet.</seg>
<seg id="123">If we could just stop competing for attention, then the internet becomes a great place to find collaborators.</seg>
<seg id="124">And once I'm collaborating with other people, whether they're on set, or online, wherever, that makes it so much easier for me to find that flow, because we're all just paying attention to the one thing that we're making together.</seg>
<seg id="125">And I fell like I'm part of something larger than myself, and we all sort of shield each other from anything else that might otherwise grab our attention, and we can all just be there.</seg>
<seg id="126">At least that's what works for me.</seg>
<seg id="127">Sometimes.</seg>
<seg id="128">Sometimes -- it doesn't always work.</seg>
<seg id="129">Sometimes, I still totally get wrapped up in that addictive cycle of wanting to get attention.</seg>
<seg id="130">I mean, like, even right now, can I honestly say there's not some part of me here who's like, "Hey, everybody, look at me, I'm giving a TED Talk!"</seg>
<seg id="131">There is -- there's, you know, some part.</seg>
<seg id="132">But I can also honestly say that this whole creative process of writing and giving this talk, it's been a huge opportunity for me to focus and really pay attention to something I care a lot about.</seg>
<seg id="133">So regardless of how much attention I do or don't get as a result, I'm happy I did it.</seg>
<seg id="134">And I'm grateful to all of you for letting me.</seg>
<seg id="135">So thank you, that's it, you can give your attention to someone else now.</seg>
<seg id="136">Thanks again.</seg>
</doc>
<doc docid="46528" genre="lectures">
<talkid>46528</talkid>
<seg id="1">So this is the first time I've told this story in public, the personal aspects of it.</seg>
<seg id="2">Yogi Berra was a world-famous baseball player who said, "If you come to a fork in the road, take it."</seg>
<seg id="3">Researchers had been, for more than a century, studying the immune system as a way to fight cancer, and cancer vaccines have, unfortunately, been disappointing.</seg>
<seg id="4">They've only worked in cancers caused by viruses, like cervical cancer or liver cancer.</seg>
<seg id="5">So cancer researchers basically gave up on the idea of using the immune system to fight cancer.</seg>
<seg id="6">And the immune system, in any case, did not evolve to fight cancer; it evolved to fight pathogens invading from the outside.</seg>
<seg id="7">So its job is to kill bacteria and viruses.</seg>
<seg id="8">And the reason the immune system has trouble with most cancers is that it doesn't invade from the outside; it evolves from its own cells.</seg>
<seg id="9">And so either the immune system does not recognize the cancer as a problem, or it attacks a cancer and also our normal cells, leading to autoimmune diseases like colitis or multiple sclerosis.</seg>
<seg id="10">So how do you get around that?</seg>
<seg id="11">Our answer turned out to be synthetic immune systems that are designed to recognize and kill cancer cells.</seg>
<seg id="12">That's right -- I said a synthetic immune system.</seg>
<seg id="13">You do that with genetic engineering and synthetic biology.</seg>
<seg id="14">We did it with the naturally occurring parts of the immune system, called B cells and T cells.</seg>
<seg id="15">These were our building blocks.</seg>
<seg id="16">T cells have evolved to kill cells infected with viruses, and B cells are the cells that make antibodies that are secreted and then bind to kill bacteria.</seg>
<seg id="17">Well, what if you combined these two functions in a way that was designed to repurpose them to fight cancer?</seg>
<seg id="18">We realized it would be possible to insert the genes for antibodies from B cells into T cells.</seg>
<seg id="19">So how do you do that?</seg>
<seg id="20">Well, we used an HIV virus as a Trojan horse to get past the T cells' immune system.</seg>
<seg id="21">The result is a chimera, a fantastic fire-breathing creature from Greek mythology, with a lion's head, a goat's body and a serpent's tail.</seg>
<seg id="22">So we decided that the paradoxical thing that we had created with our B-cell antibodies, our T cells carrier and the HIV Trojan horse should be called "Chimeric Antigen Receptor T cells," or CAR T cells.</seg>
<seg id="23">The virus also inserts genetic information to activate the T cells and program them into their killing mode.</seg>
<seg id="24">So when CAR T cells are injected into somebody with cancer, what happens when those CAR T cells see and bind to their tumor target?</seg>
<seg id="25">They act like supercharged killer T cells on steroids.</seg>
<seg id="26">They start this crash-defense buildup system in the body and literally divide and multiply by the millions, where they then attack and kill the tumor.</seg>
<seg id="27">All of this means that CAR T cells are the first living drug in medicine.</seg>
<seg id="28">CAR T cells break the mold.</seg>
<seg id="29">Unlike normal drugs that you take -- they do their job and get metabolized, and then you have to take them again -- CAR T cells stay alive and on the job for years.</seg>
<seg id="30">We have had CAR T cells stay in the bodies of our cancer patients now for more than eight years.</seg>
<seg id="31">And these designer cancer T cells, CAR T cells, have a calculated half-life of more than 17 years.</seg>
<seg id="32">So one infusion can do the job; they stay on patrol for the rest of your life.</seg>
<seg id="33">This is the beginning of a new paradigm in medicine.</seg>
<seg id="34">Now, there was one major challenge to these T-cell infusions.</seg>
<seg id="35">The only source of T cells that will work in a patient are your own T cells, unless you happen to have an identical twin.</seg>
<seg id="36">So for most of us, we're out of luck.</seg>
<seg id="37">So what we did was to make CAR T cells.</seg>
<seg id="38">We had to learn to grow the patient's own T cells.</seg>
<seg id="39">And we developed a robust platform for this in the 1990s.</seg>
<seg id="40">Then in 1997, we first tested CAR T cells in patients with advanced HIV-AIDS.</seg>
<seg id="41">And we found that those CAR T cells survived in the patients for more than a decade.</seg>
<seg id="42">And it improved their immune system and decreased their viruses, but it didn't cure them.</seg>
<seg id="43">So we went back to the laboratory, and over the next decade made improvements to the CAR T cell design.</seg>
<seg id="44">And by 2010, we began treating leukemia patients.</seg>
<seg id="45">And our team treated three patients with advanced chronic lymphocytic leukemia in 2012.</seg>
<seg id="46">It's a form of incurable leukemia that afflicts approximately 20,000 adults every year in the United States.</seg>
<seg id="47">The first patient that we treated was a retired Marine sergeant and a prison corrections officer.</seg>
<seg id="48">He had only weeks to live and had, in fact, already paid for his funeral.</seg>
<seg id="49">The cells were infused, and within days, he had high fevers.</seg>
<seg id="50">He developed multiple organ failures, was transferred to the ICU and was comatose.</seg>
<seg id="51">We thought he would die, and, in fact, he was given last rites.</seg>
<seg id="52">But then, another fork in the road happened.</seg>
<seg id="53">So, around 28 days after the CAR T cell infusion, he woke up, and the physicians finally examined him, and the cancer was gone.</seg>
<seg id="54">The big masses that had been there had melted.</seg>
<seg id="55">Bone marrow biopsies found no evidence of leukemia, and that year, in our first three patients we treated, two of three have had durable remissions now for eight years, and one had a partial remission.</seg>
<seg id="56">The CAR T cells had attacked the leukemia in these patients and had dissolved between 2.9 and 7.7 pounds of tumor in each patient.</seg>
<seg id="57">Their bodies had become veritable bioreactors for these CAR T cells, producing millions and millions of CAR T cells in the bone marrow, blood and tumor masses.</seg>
<seg id="58">And we discovered that these CAR T cells can punch far above their weight class, to use a boxing analogy.</seg>
<seg id="59">Just one CAR T cell can kill 1,000 tumor cells.</seg>
<seg id="60">That's right -- it's a ratio of one to a thousand.</seg>
<seg id="61">The CAR T cell and its daughter progeny cells can divide and divide and divide in the body until the last tumor cell is gone.</seg>
<seg id="62">There's no precedent for this in cancer medicine.</seg>
<seg id="63">The first two patients who had full remission remain today leukemia-free, and we think they are cured.</seg>
<seg id="64">These are people who had run out of options, and by all traditional methods they had, they were like modern-day Lazarus cases.</seg>
<seg id="65">All I can say is: thank goodness for those forks in the road.</seg>
<seg id="66">Our next step was to get permission to treat children with acute leukemia, the most common form of cancer in kids.</seg>
<seg id="67">The first patient we enrolled on the trial was Emily Whitehead, and at that time, she was six years old.</seg>
<seg id="68">She had gone through a series of chemotherapy and radiation treatments over several years, and her leukemia had always come back.</seg>
<seg id="69">In fact, it had come back three times.</seg>
<seg id="70">When we first saw her, Emily was very ill.</seg>
<seg id="71">Her official diagnosis was advanced, incurable leukemia.</seg>
<seg id="72">Cancer had invaded her bone marrow, her liver, her spleen.</seg>
<seg id="73">And when we infused her with the CAR T cells in the spring of April 2012, over the next few days, she did not get better.</seg>
<seg id="74">She got worse, and in fact, much worse.</seg>
<seg id="75">As our prison corrections officer had in 2010, she, in 2012, was admitted to the ICU, and this was the scariest fork in the whole road of this story.</seg>
<seg id="76">By day three, she was comatose and on life support for kidney failure, lung failure and coma.</seg>
<seg id="77">Her fever was as high as 106 degrees Fahrenheit for three days.</seg>
<seg id="78">And we didn't know what was causing those fevers.</seg>
<seg id="79">We did all the standard blood tests for infections, and we could not find an infectious cause for her fever.</seg>
<seg id="80">But we did find something very unusual in her blood that had never been seen before in medicine.</seg>
<seg id="81">She had elevated levels of a protein called interleukin-6, or IL-6, in her blood.</seg>
<seg id="82">It was, in fact, more than a thousandfold above the normal levels.</seg>
<seg id="83">And here's where yet another fork in the road came in.</seg>
<seg id="84">By sheer coincidence, one of my daughters has a form of pediatric arthritis.</seg>
<seg id="85">And as a result, I had been following as a cancer doc, experimental therapies for arthritis for my daughter, in case she would need them.</seg>
<seg id="86">And it so happened that just months before Emily was admitted to the hospital, a new therapy had been approved by the FDA to treat elevated levels of interleukin-6.</seg>
<seg id="87">And it was approved for the arthritis that my daughter had.</seg>
<seg id="88">It's called tocilizumab.</seg>
<seg id="89">And, in fact, it had just been added to the pharmacy at Emily's hospital, for arthritis.</seg>
<seg id="90">So when we found Emily had these very high levels of IL-6, I called her doctors in the ICU and said, "Why don't you treat her with this arthritis drug?"</seg>
<seg id="91">They said I was a cowboy for suggesting that.</seg>
<seg id="92">And since her fever and low blood pressure had not responded to any other therapy, her doctor quickly asked permission to the institutional review board, her parents, and everybody, of course, said yes.</seg>
<seg id="93">And they tried it, and the results were nothing short of striking.</seg>
<seg id="94">Within hours after treatment with tocilizumab, Emily began to improve very rapidly.</seg>
<seg id="95">Twenty-three days after her treatment, she was declared cancer-free.</seg>
<seg id="96">And today, she's 12 years old and still in remission.</seg>
<seg id="97">So we now call this violent reaction of the high fevers and coma, following CAR T cells, cytokine release syndrome, or CRS.</seg>
<seg id="98">We've found that it occurs in nearly all patients who respond to the therapy.</seg>
<seg id="99">But it does not happen in those patients who fail to respond.</seg>
<seg id="100">So paradoxically, our patients now hope for these high fevers after therapy, which feels like "the worst flu in their life," when they get CAR T-cell therapies.</seg>
<seg id="101">They hope for this reaction because they know it's part of the twisting and turning path back to health.</seg>
<seg id="102">Unfortunately, not every patient recovers.</seg>
<seg id="103">Patients who do not get CRS are often those who are not cured.</seg>
<seg id="104">So there's a strong link now between CRS and the ability of the immune system to eradicate leukemia.</seg>
<seg id="105">That's why last summer, when the FDA approved CAR T cells for leukemia, they also co-approved the use of tocilizumab to block the IL-6 effects and the accompanying CRS in these patients.</seg>
<seg id="106">That was a very unusual event in medical history.</seg>
<seg id="107">Emily's doctors have now completed further trials and reported that 27 out of 30 patients, the first 30 we treated, or 90 percent, had a complete remission after CAR T cells, within a month.</seg>
<seg id="108">A 90 percent complete remission rate in patients with advanced cancer is unheard of in more than 50 years of cancer research.</seg>
<seg id="109">In fact, companies often declare success in a cancer trial if 15 percent of the patients had a complete response rate.</seg>
<seg id="110">A remarkable study appeared in the "New England Journal of Medicine" in 2013.</seg>
<seg id="111">An international study has since confirmed those results.</seg>
<seg id="112">And that led to the approval by the FDA for pediatric and young adult leukemia in August of 2017.</seg>
<seg id="113">So as a first-ever approval of a cell and gene therapy, CAR T-cell therapy has also been tested now in adults with refractory lymphoma.</seg>
<seg id="114">This disease afflicts about 20,000 a year in the United States.</seg>
<seg id="115">The results were equally impressive and have been durable to date.</seg>
<seg id="116">And six months ago, the FDA approved the therapy of this advanced lymphoma with CAR T cells.</seg>
<seg id="117">So now there are many labs and physicians and scientists around the world who have tested CAR T cells across many different diseases, and understandably, we're all thrilled with the rapid pace of advancement.</seg>
<seg id="118">We're so grateful to see patients who were formerly terminal return to healthy lives, as Emily has.</seg>
<seg id="119">We're thrilled to see long remissions that may, in fact, be a cure.</seg>
<seg id="120">At the same time, we're also concerned about the financial cost.</seg>
<seg id="121">It can cost up to 150,000 dollars to make the CAR T cells for each patient.</seg>
<seg id="122">And when you add in the cost of treating CRS and other complications, the cost can reach one million dollars per patient.</seg>
<seg id="123">We must remember that the cost of failure, though, is even worse.</seg>
<seg id="124">The current noncurative therapies for cancer are also expensive and, in addition, the patient dies.</seg>
<seg id="125">So, of course, we'd like to see research done now to make this more efficient and increase affordability to all patients.</seg>
<seg id="126">Fortunately, this is a new and evolving field, and as with many other new therapies and services, prices will come down as industry learns to do things more efficiently.</seg>
<seg id="127">When I think about all the forks in the road that have led to CAR T-cell therapy, there is one thing that strikes me as very important.</seg>
<seg id="128">We're reminded that discoveries of this magnitude don't happen overnight.</seg>
<seg id="129">CAR T-cell therapies came to us after a 30-year journey, along a road full of setbacks and surprises.</seg>
<seg id="130">In all this world of instant gratification and 24/7, on-demand results, scientists require persistence, vision and patience to rise above all that.</seg>
<seg id="131">They can see that the fork in the road is not always a dilemma or a detour; sometimes, even though we may not know it at the time, the fork is the way home.</seg>
<seg id="132">Thank you very much.</seg>
</doc>
<doc docid="49440" genre="lectures">
<talkid>49440</talkid>
<seg id="1">So I had this very interesting experience five years ago.</seg>
<seg id="2">You know, me and my husband, we were out grocery shopping, as we do every other day, but this time, we found this fancy, you know, I'm talking fair-trade, I'm talking organic, I'm talking Kenyan, single-origin coffee that we splurged and got.</seg>
<seg id="3">And that was when the problem started already.</seg>
<seg id="4">You know, my husband, he deemed this coffee blend superior to our regular and much cheaper coffee, which made me imagine a life based solely on fancy coffee and I saw our household budget explode.</seg>
<seg id="5">And worse ...</seg>
<seg id="6">I also feared that this investment would be in vain.</seg>
<seg id="7">That we wouldn't be able to notice this difference after all.</seg>
<seg id="8">Unfortunately, especially for my husband, he had momentarily forgotten that he's married to a neuroscientist with a specialty in food science.</seg>
<seg id="9">So without further ado, I mean, I just put him to the test.</seg>
<seg id="10">I set up an experiment where I first blindfolded my husband.</seg>
<seg id="11">Then I brewed the two types of coffee and I told him that I would serve them to him one at a time.</seg>
<seg id="12">Now, with clear certainty, my husband, he described the first cup of coffee as more raw and bitter.</seg>
<seg id="13">You know, a coffee that would be ideal for the mornings with the sole purpose of terrorizing the body awake by its alarming taste.</seg>
<seg id="14">The second cup of coffee, on the other hand, was both fruity and delightful.</seg>
<seg id="15">You know, coffee that one can enjoy in the evening and relax.</seg>
<seg id="16">Little did my husband know, however, that I hadn't actually given him the two types of coffee.</seg>
<seg id="17">I had given him the exact same cup of coffee twice.</seg>
<seg id="18">And obviously, it wasn't this one cup of coffee that had suddenly gone from horrible to fantastic.</seg>
<seg id="19">No, this taste difference was a product of my husband's own mind.</seg>
<seg id="20">Of his bias in favor of the fancy coffee that made him experience taste differences that just weren't there.</seg>
<seg id="21">Alright, so, having saved our household budget, and finishing on a very good laugh, me especially --</seg>
<seg id="22">I then started wondering just how we could have received two such different responses from a single cup of coffee.</seg>
<seg id="23">Why would my husband make such a bold statement at the risk of being publicly mocked for the rest of his life?</seg>
<seg id="24">The striking answer is that I think you would have done the same.</seg>
<seg id="25">And that's the biggest challenge in my field of science, assessing what's reality behind these answers that we receive.</seg>
<seg id="26">Because how are we going to make food tastier if we cannot rely on what people actually say they like?</seg>
<seg id="27">To understand, let's first have a look at how we actually sense food.</seg>
<seg id="28">When I drink a cup of coffee, I detect this cup of coffee by receptors on my body, information which is then turned into activated neurons in my brain.</seg>
<seg id="29">Wavelengths of light are converted to colors.</seg>
<seg id="30">Molecules in the liquid are detected by receptors in my mouth, and categorized as one of five basic tastes.</seg>
<seg id="31">That's salty, sour, bitter, sweet and umami.</seg>
<seg id="32">Molecules in the air are detected by receptors in my nose and converted to odors.</seg>
<seg id="33">And ditto for touch, for temperature, for sound and more.</seg>
<seg id="34">All this information is detected by my receptors and converted into signals between neurons in my brain.</seg>
<seg id="35">Information which is then woven together and integrated, so that my brain recognizes that yes, I just had a cup of coffee, and yes, I liked it.</seg>
<seg id="36">And only then, after all this neuron heavy lifting, do we consciously experience this cup of coffee.</seg>
<seg id="37">And this is now where we have a very common misconception.</seg>
<seg id="38">People tend to think that what we experience consciously must then be an absolute true reflection of reality.</seg>
<seg id="39">But as you just heard, there are many stages of neural interpretation in between the physical item and the conscious experience of it.</seg>
<seg id="40">Which means that sometimes, this conscious experience is not really reflecting that reality at all.</seg>
<seg id="41">Like what happened to my husband.</seg>
<seg id="42">That's because some physical stimuli may just be so weak that they just can't break that barrier to enter our conscious mind, while the information that does may get twisted on its way there by our hidden biases.</seg>
<seg id="43">And people, they have a lot of biases.</seg>
<seg id="44">Yes, if you're sitting there right now, thinking ...</seg>
<seg id="45">you could probably have done better than my husband, you could probably have assessed those coffees correctly, then you're actually suffering from a bias.</seg>
<seg id="46">A bias called the bias blind spot.</seg>
<seg id="47">Our tendency to see ourselves as less biased than other people.</seg>
<seg id="48">And yeah, we can even be biased about the biases that we're biased about.</seg>
<seg id="49">Not trying to make this any easier.</seg>
<seg id="50">A bias that we know in the food industry is the courtesy bias.</seg>
<seg id="51">This is a bias where we give an opinion which is considered socially acceptable, but it's certainly not our own opinion, right?</seg>
<seg id="52">And I'm challenged by this as a food researcher, because when people say they like my new sugar-reduced milkshake, do they now?</seg>
<seg id="53">Or are they saying they like it because they know I'm listening and they want to please me?</seg>
<seg id="54">Or maybe they just to seem fit and healthy in my ears.</seg>
<seg id="55">I wouldn't know.</seg>
<seg id="56">But worse, they wouldn't even know themselves.</seg>
<seg id="57">Even trained food assessors, and that's people who have been explicitly taught to disentangle the sense of smell and the sense of taste, may still be biased to evaluate products sweeter if they contain vanilla.</seg>
<seg id="58">Why?</seg>
<seg id="59">Well, it's certainly not because vanilla actually tastes sweet.</seg>
<seg id="60">It's because even these professionals are human, and have eaten lot of desserts, like us, and have therefore learned to associate sweetness and vanilla.</seg>
<seg id="61">So taste and smell and other sensory information is inextricably entangled in our conscious mind.</seg>
<seg id="62">So on one hand, we can actually use this.</seg>
<seg id="63">We can use these conscious experiences, use this data, exploit it by adding vanilla instead of sugar to sweeten our products.</seg>
<seg id="64">But on the other hand, with these conscious evaluations, I still wouldn't know whether people actually liked that sugar-reduced milkshake.</seg>
<seg id="65">So how do we get around this problem?</seg>
<seg id="66">How do we actually assess what's reality behind these conscious food evaluations?</seg>
<seg id="67">The key is to remove the barrier of the conscious mind and instead target the information in the brain directly.</seg>
<seg id="68">And it turns out our brain holds a lot of fascinating secrets.</seg>
<seg id="69">Our brain constantly receives sensory information from our entire body, most of which we don't even become aware of, like the taste information that I constantly receive from my gastrointestinal tract.</seg>
<seg id="70">And my brain will also act on all this sensory information.</seg>
<seg id="71">It will alter my behavior without my knowledge, and it can increase the diameter of my pupils if I experience something I really like.</seg>
<seg id="72">And increase my sweat production ever so slightly if that emotion was intense.</seg>
<seg id="73">And with brain scans, we can now assess this information in the brain.</seg>
<seg id="74">Specifically, I have used a brain-scanning technique called electroencephalography, or "EEG" in short, which involves wearing a cap studded with electrodes, 128 in my case.</seg>
<seg id="75">Each electrode then measures the electrical activity of the brain with precision down to the millisecond.</seg>
<seg id="76">The problem is, however, it's not just the brain that's electrically active, it's also the rest of the body as well as the environment that contains a lot of electrical activity all the time.</seg>
<seg id="77">To do my research, I therefore need to minimize all this noise.</seg>
<seg id="78">So I ask my participants to do a number of things here.</seg>
<seg id="79">First off, I ask them to rest their head in a chin rest, to avoid too much muscle movement.</seg>
<seg id="80">I also ask them to, meanwhile, stare at the center of a computer monitor to avoid too much eye movements and eye blinks.</seg>
<seg id="81">And I can't even have swallowing, so I ask my participants to stick the tongue out of their mouth over a glass bowl, and then I constantly let taste stimuli onto the tongue, which then drip off into this bowl.</seg>
<seg id="82">And then, just to complete this wonderful picture, I also provide my participants with a bib, available in either pink or blue, as they please.</seg>
<seg id="83">Looks like a normal eating experience, right?</seg>
<seg id="84">No, obviously not.</seg>
<seg id="85">And worse, I can't even control what my participants are thinking about, so I need to repeat this taste procedure multiple times.</seg>
<seg id="86">Maybe the first time, they're thinking about the free lunch that I provide for participating, or maybe the second time, they're thinking about Christmas coming up and what to get for Mom this year, you know.</seg>
<seg id="87">But common for each response is the response to the taste.</seg>
<seg id="88">So I repeat this taste procedure multiple times.</seg>
<seg id="89">Sixty, in fact.</seg>
<seg id="90">And then I average the responses, because responses unrelated to taste will average out.</seg>
<seg id="91">And using this method, we and other labs, have investigated how long a time it takes from "food lands on our tongue" until our brain has figured out which taste it's experiencing.</seg>
<seg id="92">Turns out this occurs within the first already 100 milliseconds, that's about half a second before we even become aware of it.</seg>
<seg id="93">And next up, we also investigated the taste difference between sugar and artificial sweeteners that in our setup taste extremely similar.</seg>
<seg id="94">In fact, they tasted so similar that half my participants could only barely tell the taste apart, while the other half simply couldn't.</seg>
<seg id="95">But amazingly, if we looked across the entire group of participants, we saw that their brains definitely could tell the taste apart.</seg>
<seg id="96">So with EEG and other brain-scanning devices and other physiological measures -- sweat and pupil size -- we have new gateways to our brain.</seg>
<seg id="97">Gateways that will help us remove the barrier of the conscious mind to see through the biases of people and possibly even capture subconscious taste differences.</seg>
<seg id="98">And that's because we can now measure people's very first response to food before they've become conscious of it, and before they've started rationalizing why they like it or not.</seg>
<seg id="99">We can measure people's facial expressions, we can measure where they're looking, we can measure their sweat response, we can measure their brain response.</seg>
<seg id="100">And with all these measures, we are going to be able to create tastier foods, because we can measure whether people actually like that sugar-reduced milkshake.</seg>
<seg id="101">And we can create healthier foods without compromising taste, because we can measure the response to different sweeteners and find the sweetener that gives the response that's more similar to the response from sugar.</seg>
<seg id="102">And furthermore, we can just help create healthier foods, because we can help understand how we actually sense food in the first place.</seg>
<seg id="103">Which we know surprisingly little about.</seg>
<seg id="104">For example, we know that there are those five basic tastes, but we strongly suspect that there are more, and in fact, using our EEG setup, we found evidence that fat, besides being sensed by its texture and smell, is also tasted.</seg>
<seg id="105">Meaning that fat could be this new sixth basic taste.</seg>
<seg id="106">And if we figure out how our brain recognizes fat and sugar, and I'm just dreaming here, but could we then one day create a milkshake with zero calories that tastes just like the real deal?</seg>
<seg id="107">Or maybe we figure out that we can't, because we subconsciously detect calories via our receptors in our gastrointestinal tract.</seg>
<seg id="108">The future will show.</seg>
<seg id="109">Our conscious experience of food is just the tip of the iceberg of our total sensation of food.</seg>
<seg id="110">And by studying this total sensation, conscious and subconscious alike, I truly believe that we can make tastier and healthier foods for all.</seg>
<seg id="111">Thank you.</seg>
</doc>
<doc docid="50853" genre="lectures">
<talkid>50853</talkid>
<seg id="1">The story that I'm going to tell you today, for me, began back in 2006.</seg>
<seg id="2">That was when I first heard about an outbreak of mysterious illness that was happening in the Amazon rainforest of Peru.</seg>
<seg id="3">The people that were getting sick from this illness, they had horrifying symptoms, nightmarish.</seg>
<seg id="4">They had unbelievable headaches, they couldn't eat or drink.</seg>
<seg id="5">Some of them were even hallucinating -- confused and aggressive.</seg>
<seg id="6">The most tragic part of all was that many of the victims were children.</seg>
<seg id="7">And of all of those that got sick, none survived.</seg>
<seg id="8">It turned out that what was killing people was a virus, but it wasn't Ebola, it wasn't Zika, it wasn't even some new virus never before seen by science.</seg>
<seg id="9">These people were dying of an ancient killer, one that we've known about for centuries.</seg>
<seg id="10">They were dying of rabies.</seg>
<seg id="11">And what all of them had in common was that as they slept, they'd all been bitten by the only mammal that lives exclusively on a diet of blood: the vampire bat.</seg>
<seg id="12">These sorts of outbreaks that jump from bats into people, they've become more and more common in the last couple of decades.</seg>
<seg id="13">In 2003, it was SARS.</seg>
<seg id="14">It showed up in Chinese animal markets and spread globally.</seg>
<seg id="15">That virus, like the one from Peru, was eventually traced back to bats, which have probably harbored it, undetected, for centuries.</seg>
<seg id="16">Then, 10 years later, we see Ebola showing up in West Africa, and that surprised just about everybody because, according to the science at the time, Ebola wasn't really supposed to be in West Africa.</seg>
<seg id="17">That ended up causing the largest and most widespread Ebola outbreak in history.</seg>
<seg id="18">So there's a disturbing trend here, right?</seg>
<seg id="19">Deadly viruses are appearing in places where we can't really expect them, and as a global health community, we're caught on our heels.</seg>
<seg id="20">We're constantly chasing after the next viral emergency in this perpetual cycle, always trying to extinguish epidemics after they've already started.</seg>
<seg id="21">So with new diseases appearing every year, now is really the time that we need to start thinking about what we can do about it.</seg>
<seg id="22">If we just wait for the next Ebola to happen, we might not be so lucky next time.</seg>
<seg id="23">We might face a different virus, one that's more deadly, one that spreads better among people, or maybe one that just completely outwits our vaccines, leaving us defenseless.</seg>
<seg id="24">So can we anticipate pandemics?</seg>
<seg id="25">Can we stop them?</seg>
<seg id="26">Those are really hard questions to answer, and the reason is that the pandemics -- the ones that spread globally, the ones that we really want to anticipate -- they're actually really rare events.</seg>
<seg id="27">And for us as a species that is a good thing -- that's why we're all here.</seg>
<seg id="28">But from a scientific standpoint, it's a little bit of a problem.</seg>
<seg id="29">That's because if something happens just once or twice, that's really not enough to find any patterns.</seg>
<seg id="30">Patterns that could tell us when or where the next pandemic might strike.</seg>
<seg id="31">So what do we do?</seg>
<seg id="32">Well, I think one of the solutions we may have is to study some viruses that routinely jump from wild animals into people, or into our pets, or our livestock, even if they're not the same viruses that we think are going to cause pandemics.</seg>
<seg id="33">If we can use those everyday killer viruses to work out some of the patterns of what drives that initial, crucial jump from one species to the next, and, potentially, how we might stop it, then we're going to end up better prepared for those viruses that jump between species more rarely but pose a greater threat of pandemics.</seg>
<seg id="34">Now, rabies, as terrible as it is, turns out to be a pretty nice virus in this case.</seg>
<seg id="35">You see, rabies is a scary, deadly virus.</seg>
<seg id="36">It has 100 percent fatality.</seg>
<seg id="37">That means if you get infected with rabies and you don't get treated early, there's nothing that can be done.</seg>
<seg id="38">There is no cure.</seg>
<seg id="39">You will die.</seg>
<seg id="40">And rabies is not just a problem of the past either.</seg>
<seg id="41">Even today, rabies still kills 50 to 60,000 people every year.</seg>
<seg id="42">Just put that number in some perspective.</seg>
<seg id="43">Imagine the whole West African Ebola outbreak -- about two-and-a-half years; you condense all the people that died in that outbreak into just a single year.</seg>
<seg id="44">That's pretty bad.</seg>
<seg id="45">But then, you multiply it by four, and that's what happens with rabies every single year.</seg>
<seg id="46">So what sets rabies apart from a virus like Ebola is that when people get it, they tend not to spread it onward.</seg>
<seg id="47">That means that every single time a person gets rabies, it's because they were bitten by a rabid animal, and usually, that's a dog or a bat.</seg>
<seg id="48">But it also means that those jumps between species, which are so important to understand, but so rare for most viruses, for rabies, they're actually happening by the thousands.</seg>
<seg id="49">So in a way, rabies is almost like the fruit fly or the lab mouse of deadly viruses.</seg>
<seg id="50">This is a virus that we can use and study to find patterns and potentially test out new solutions.</seg>
<seg id="51">And so, when I first heard about that outbreak of rabies in the Peruvian Amazon, it struck me as something potentially powerful because this was a virus that was jumping from bats into other animals often enough that we might be able to anticipate it ...</seg>
<seg id="52">Maybe even stop it.</seg>
<seg id="53">So as a first-year graduate student with a vague memory of my high school Spanish class, I jumped onto a plane and flew off to Peru, looking for vampire bats.</seg>
<seg id="54">And the first couple of years of this project were really tough.</seg>
<seg id="55">I had no shortage of ambitious plans to rid Latin America of rabies, but at the same time, there seemed to be an equally endless supply of mudslides and flat tires, power outages, stomach bugs all stopping me.</seg>
<seg id="56">But that was kind of par for the course, working in South America, and to me, it was part of the adventure.</seg>
<seg id="57">But what kept me going was the knowledge that for the first time, the work that I was doing might actually have some real impact on people's lives in the short term.</seg>
<seg id="58">And that struck me the most when we actually went out to the Amazon and were trying to catch vampire bats.</seg>
<seg id="59">You see, all we had to do was show up at a village and ask around.</seg>
<seg id="60">"Who's been getting bitten by a bat lately?"</seg>
<seg id="61">And people raised their hands, because in these communities, getting bitten by a bat is an everyday occurrence, happens every day.</seg>
<seg id="62">And so all we had to do was go to the right house, open up a net and show up at night, and wait until the bats tried to fly in and feed on human blood.</seg>
<seg id="63">So to me, seeing a child with a bite wound on his head or blood stains on his sheets, that was more than enough motivation to get past whatever logistical or physical headache I happened to be feeling on that day.</seg>
<seg id="64">Since we were working all night long, though, I had plenty of time to think about how I might actually solve this problem, and it stood out to me that there were two burning questions.</seg>
<seg id="65">The first was that we know that people are bitten all the time, but rabies outbreaks aren't happening all the time -- every couple of years, maybe even every decade, you get a rabies outbreak.</seg>
<seg id="66">So if we could somehow anticipate when and where the next outbreak would be, that would be a real opportunity, meaning we could vaccinate people ahead of time, before anybody starts dying.</seg>
<seg id="67">But the other side of that coin is that vaccination is really just a Band-Aid.</seg>
<seg id="68">It's kind of a strategy of damage control.</seg>
<seg id="69">Of course it's lifesaving and important and we have to do it, but at the end of the day, no matter how many cows, how many people we vaccinate, we're still going to have exactly the same amount of rabies up there in the bats.</seg>
<seg id="70">The actual risk of getting bitten hasn't changed at all.</seg>
<seg id="71">So my second question was this: Could we somehow cut the virus off at its source?</seg>
<seg id="72">If we could somehow reduce the amount of rabies in the bats themselves, then that would be a real game changer.</seg>
<seg id="73">We'd been talking about shifting from a strategy of damage control to one based on prevention.</seg>
<seg id="74">So, how do we begin to do that?</seg>
<seg id="75">Well, the first thing we needed to understand was how this virus actually works in its natural host -- in the bats.</seg>
<seg id="76">And that is a tall order for any infectious disease, particularly one in a reclusive species like bats, but we had to start somewhere.</seg>
<seg id="77">So the way we started was looking at some historical data.</seg>
<seg id="78">When and where had these outbreaks happened in the past?</seg>
<seg id="79">And it became clear that rabies was a virus that just had to be on the move.</seg>
<seg id="80">It couldn't sit still.</seg>
<seg id="81">The virus might circulate in one area for a year, maybe two, but unless it found a new group of bats to infect somewhere else, it was pretty much bound to go extinct.</seg>
<seg id="82">So with that, we solved one key part of the rabies transmission challenge.</seg>
<seg id="83">We knew we were dealing with a virus on the move, but we still couldn't say where it was going.</seg>
<seg id="84">Essentially, what I wanted was more of a Google Maps-style prediction, which is, "What's the destination of the virus? What's the route it's going to take to get there? How fast will it move?"</seg>
<seg id="85">To do that, I turned to the genomes of rabies.</seg>
<seg id="86">You see, rabies, like many other viruses, has a tiny little genome, but one that evolves really, really quickly.</seg>
<seg id="87">So quickly that by the time the virus has moved from one point to the next, it's going to have picked up a couple of new mutations.</seg>
<seg id="88">And so all we have to do is kind of connect the dots across an evolutionary tree, and that's going to tell us where the virus has been in the past and how it spread across the landscape.</seg>
<seg id="89">So, I went out and I collected cow brains, because that's where you get rabies viruses.</seg>
<seg id="90">And from genome sequences that we got from the viruses in those cow brains, I was able to work out that this is a virus that spreads between 10 and 20 miles each year.</seg>
<seg id="91">OK, so that means we do now have the speed limit of the virus, but still missing that other key part of where is it going in the first place.</seg>
<seg id="92">For that, I needed to think a little bit more like a bat, because rabies is a virus -- it doesn't move by itself, it has to be moved around by its bat host, so I needed to think about how far to fly and how often to fly.</seg>
<seg id="93">My imagination didn't get me all that far with this and neither did little digital trackers that we first tried putting on bats.</seg>
<seg id="94">We just couldn't get the information we needed.</seg>
<seg id="95">So instead, we turned to the mating patterns of bats.</seg>
<seg id="96">We could look at certain parts of the bat genome, and they were telling us that some groups of bats were mating with each other and others were more isolated.</seg>
<seg id="97">And the virus was basically following the trail laid out by the bat genomes.</seg>
<seg id="98">Yet one of those trails stood out as being a little bit surprising -- hard to believe.</seg>
<seg id="99">That was one that seemed to cross straight over the Peruvian Andes, crossing from the Amazon to the Pacific coast, and that was kind of hard to believe, as I said, because the Andes are really tall -- about 22,000 feet, and that's way too high for a vampire to fly.</seg>
<seg id="100">Yet --</seg>
<seg id="101">when we looked more closely, we saw, in the northern part of Peru, a network of valley systems that was not quite too tall for the bats on either side to be mating with each other.</seg>
<seg id="102">And we looked a little bit more closely -- sure enough, there's rabies spreading through those valleys, just about 10 miles each year.</seg>
<seg id="103">Basically, exactly as our evolutionary models had predicated it would be.</seg>
<seg id="104">What I didn't tell you is that that's actually kind of an important thing because rabies had never been seen before on the western slopes of the Andes, or on the whole Pacific coast of South America, so we were actually witnessing, in real time, a historical first invasion into a pretty big part of South America, which raises the key question: "What are we going to do about that?"</seg>
<seg id="105">Well, the obvious short-term thing we can do is tell people: you need to vaccinate yourselves, vaccinate your animals; rabies is coming.</seg>
<seg id="106">But in the longer term, it would be even more powerful if we could use that new information to stop the virus from arriving altogether.</seg>
<seg id="107">Of course, we can't just tell bats, "Don't fly today," but maybe we could stop the virus from hitching a ride along with the bat.</seg>
<seg id="108">And that brings us to the key lesson that we have learned from rabies-management programs all around the world, whether it's dogs, foxes, skunks, raccoons, North America, Africa, Europe.</seg>
<seg id="109">It's that vaccinating the animal source is the only thing that stops rabies.</seg>
<seg id="110">So, can we vaccinate bats?</seg>
<seg id="111">You hear about vaccinating dogs and cats all the time, but you don't hear too much about vaccinating bats.</seg>
<seg id="112">It might sound like a crazy question, but the good news is that we actually already have edible rabies vaccines that are specially designed for bats.</seg>
<seg id="113">And what's even better is that these vaccines can actually spread from bat to bat.</seg>
<seg id="114">All you have to do is smear it on one and let the bats' habit of grooming each other take care of the rest of the work for you.</seg>
<seg id="115">So that means, at the very least, we don't have to be out there vaccinating millions of bats one by one with tiny little syringes.</seg>
<seg id="116">But just because we have that tool doesn't mean we know how to use it.</seg>
<seg id="117">Now we have a whole laundry list of questions.</seg>
<seg id="118">How many bats do we need to vaccinate?</seg>
<seg id="119">What time of the year do we need to be vaccinating?</seg>
<seg id="120">How many times a year do we need to be vaccinating?</seg>
<seg id="121">All of these are questions that are really fundamental to rolling out any sort of vaccination campaign, but they're questions that we can't answer in the laboratory.</seg>
<seg id="122">So instead, we're taking a slightly more colorful approach.</seg>
<seg id="123">We're using real wild bats, but fake vaccines.</seg>
<seg id="124">We use edible gels that make bat hair glow and UV powders that spread between bats when they bump into each other, and that's letting us study how well a real vaccine might spread in these wild colonies of bats.</seg>
<seg id="125">We're still in the earliest phases of this work, but our results so far are incredibly encouraging.</seg>
<seg id="126">They're suggesting that using the vaccines that we already have, we could potentially drastically reduce the size of rabies outbreaks.</seg>
<seg id="127">And that matters, because as you remember, rabies is a virus that always has to be on the move, and so every time we reduce the size of an outbreak, we're also reducing the chance that the virus makes it onto the next colony.</seg>
<seg id="128">We're breaking a link in the chain of transmission.</seg>
<seg id="129">And so every time we do that, we're bringing the virus one step closer to extinction.</seg>
<seg id="130">And so the thought, for me, of a world in the not-too-distant future where we're actually talking about getting rid of rabies altogether, that is incredibly encouraging and exciting.</seg>
<seg id="131">So let me return to the original question.</seg>
<seg id="132">Can we prevent pandemics?</seg>
<seg id="133">Well, there is no silver-bullet solution to this problem, but my experiences with rabies have left me pretty optimistic about it.</seg>
<seg id="134">I think we're not too far from a future where we're going to have genomics to forecast outbreaks and we're going to have clever new technologies, like edible, self-spreading vaccines, that can get rid of these viruses at their source before they have a chance to jump into people.</seg>
<seg id="135">So when it comes to fighting pandemics, the holy grail is just to get one step ahead.</seg>
<seg id="136">And if you ask me, I think one of the ways that we can do that is using some of the problems that we already have now, like rabies -- sort of the way an astronaut might use a flight simulator, figuring out what works and what doesn't, and building up our tool set so that when the stakes are high, we're not flying blind.</seg>
<seg id="137">Thank you.</seg>
</doc>
<doc docid="51101" genre="lectures">
<talkid>51101</talkid>
<seg id="1">When I waltzed off to high school with my new Nokia phone, I thought I just had the new, coolest replacement for my old pink princess walkie-talkie.</seg>
<seg id="2">Except now, my friends and I could text or talk to each other wherever we were, instead of pretending, when we were running around each other's backyards.</seg>
<seg id="3">Now, I'll be honest.</seg>
<seg id="4">Back then, I didn't think a lot about how these devices were made.</seg>
<seg id="5">They tended to show up on Christmas morning, so maybe they were made by the elves in Santa's workshop.</seg>
<seg id="6">Let me ask you a question.</seg>
<seg id="7">Who do you think the real elves that make these devices are?</seg>
<seg id="8">If I ask a lot of the people I know, they would say it's the hoodie-wearing software engineers in Silicon Valley, hacking away at code.</seg>
<seg id="9">But a lot has to happen to these devices before they're ready for any kind of code.</seg>
<seg id="10">These devices start at the atomic level.</seg>
<seg id="11">So if you ask me, the real elves are the chemists.</seg>
<seg id="12">That's right, I said the chemists.</seg>
<seg id="13">Chemistry is the hero of electronic communications.</seg>
<seg id="14">And my goal today is to convince you to agree with me.</seg>
<seg id="15">OK, let's start simple, and take a look inside these insanely addictive devices.</seg>
<seg id="16">Because without chemistry, what is an information superhighway that we love, would just be a really expensive, shiny paperweight.</seg>
<seg id="17">Chemistry enables all of these layers.</seg>
<seg id="18">Let's start at the display.</seg>
<seg id="19">How do you think we get those bright, vivid colors that we love so much?</seg>
<seg id="20">Well, I'll tell you.</seg>
<seg id="21">There's organic polymers embedded within the display, that can take electricity and turn it into the blue, red and green that we enjoy in our pictures.</seg>
<seg id="22">What if we move down to the battery?</seg>
<seg id="23">Now there's some intense research.</seg>
<seg id="24">How do we take the chemical principles of traditional batteries and pair it with new, high surface area electrodes, so we can pack more charge in a smaller footprint of space, so that we could power our devices all day long, while we're taking selfies, without having to recharge our batteries or sit tethered to an electrical outlet?</seg>
<seg id="25">What if we go to the adhesives that bind it all together, so that it could withstand our frequent usage?</seg>
<seg id="26">After all, as a millennial, I have to take my phone out at least 200 times a day to check it, and in the process, drop it two to three times.</seg>
<seg id="27">But what are the real brains of these devices?</seg>
<seg id="28">What makes them work the way that we love them so much?</seg>
<seg id="29">Well that all has to do with electrical components and circuitry that are tethered to a printed circuit board.</seg>
<seg id="30">Or maybe you prefer a biological metaphor -- the motherboard, you might have heard of that.</seg>
<seg id="31">Now, the printed circuit board doesn't really get talked about a lot.</seg>
<seg id="32">And I'll be honest, I don't know why that is.</seg>
<seg id="33">Maybe it's because it's the least sexy layer and it's hidden beneath all of those other sleek-looking layers.</seg>
<seg id="34">But it's time to finally give this Clark Kent layer the Superman-worthy praise it deserves.</seg>
<seg id="35">And so I ask you a question.</seg>
<seg id="36">What do you think a printed circuit board is?</seg>
<seg id="37">Well, consider a metaphor.</seg>
<seg id="38">Think about the city that you live in.</seg>
<seg id="39">You have all these points of interest that you want to get to: your home, your work, restaurants, a couple of Starbucks on every block.</seg>
<seg id="40">And so we build roads that connect them all together.</seg>
<seg id="41">That's what a printed circuit board is.</seg>
<seg id="42">Except, instead of having things like restaurants, we have transistors on chips, capacitors, resistors, all of these electrical components that need to find a way to talk to each other.</seg>
<seg id="43">And so what are our roads?</seg>
<seg id="44">Well, we build tiny copper wires.</seg>
<seg id="45">So the next question is, how do we make these tiny copper wires?</seg>
<seg id="46">They're really small.</seg>
<seg id="47">Could it be that we go to the hardware store, pick up a spool of copper wire, get some wire cutters, a little clip-clip, saw it all up and then, bam -- we have our printed circuit board?</seg>
<seg id="48">No way.</seg>
<seg id="49">These wires are way too small for that.</seg>
<seg id="50">And so we have to rely on our friend: chemistry.</seg>
<seg id="51">Now, the chemical process to make these tiny copper wires is seemingly simple.</seg>
<seg id="52">We start with a solution of positively charged copper spheres.</seg>
<seg id="53">We then add to it an insulating printed circuit board.</seg>
<seg id="54">And we feed those positively charged spheres negatively charged electrons by adding formaldehyde to the mix.</seg>
<seg id="55">So you might remember formaldehyde.</seg>
<seg id="56">Really distinct odor, used to preserve frogs in biology class.</seg>
<seg id="57">Well it turns out it can do a lot more than just that.</seg>
<seg id="58">And it's a really key component to making these tiny copper wires.</seg>
<seg id="59">You see, the electrons on formaldehyde have a drive.</seg>
<seg id="60">They want to jump over to those positively charged copper spheres.</seg>
<seg id="61">And that's all because of a process known as redox chemistry.</seg>
<seg id="62">And when that happens, we can take these positively charged copper spheres and turn them into bright, shiny, metallic and conductive copper.</seg>
<seg id="63">And once we have conductive copper, now we're cooking with gas.</seg>
<seg id="64">And we can get all of those electrical components to talk to each other.</seg>
<seg id="65">So thank you once again to chemistry.</seg>
<seg id="66">And let's take a thought and think about how far we've come with chemistry.</seg>
<seg id="67">Clearly, in electronic communications, size matters.</seg>
<seg id="68">So let's think about how we can shrink down our devices, so that we can go from our 1990s Zack Morris cell phone to something a little bit more sleek, like the phones of today that can fit in our pockets.</seg>
<seg id="69">Although, let's be real here: absolutely nothing can fit into ladies' pants pockets, if you can find a pair of pants that has pockets.</seg>
<seg id="70">And I don't think chemistry can help us with that problem.</seg>
<seg id="71">But more important than shrinking the actual device, how do we shrink the circuitry inside of it, and shrink it by 100 times, so that we can take the circuitry from the micron scale all the way down to the nanometer scale?</seg>
<seg id="72">Because, let's face it, right now we all want more powerful and faster phones.</seg>
<seg id="73">Well, more power and faster requires more circuitry.</seg>
<seg id="74">So how do we do this?</seg>
<seg id="75">It's not like we have some magic electromagnetic shrink ray, like professor Wayne Szalinski used in "Honey, I Shrunk the Kids" to shrink his children.</seg>
<seg id="76">On accident, of course.</seg>
<seg id="77">Or do we?</seg>
<seg id="78">Well, actually, in the field, there's a process that's pretty similar to that.</seg>
<seg id="79">And it's name is photolithography.</seg>
<seg id="80">In photolithography, we take electromagnetic radiation, or what we tend to call light, and we use it to shrink down some of that circuitry, so that we could cram more of it into a really small space.</seg>
<seg id="81">Now, how does this work?</seg>
<seg id="82">Well, we start with a substrate that has a light-sensitive film on it.</seg>
<seg id="83">We then cover it with a mask that has a pattern on top of it of fine lines and features that are going to make the phone work the way that we want it to.</seg>
<seg id="84">We then expose a bright light and shine it through this mask, which creates a shadow of that pattern on the surface.</seg>
<seg id="85">Now, anywhere that the light can get through the mask, it's going to cause a chemical reaction to occur.</seg>
<seg id="86">And that's going to burn the image of that pattern into the substrate.</seg>
<seg id="87">So the question you're probably asking is, how do we go from a burned image to clean fine lines and features?</seg>
<seg id="88">And for that, we have to use a chemical solution called the developer.</seg>
<seg id="89">Now the developer is special.</seg>
<seg id="90">What it can do is take all of the nonexposed areas and remove them selectively, leaving behind clean fine lines and features, and making our miniaturized devices work.</seg>
<seg id="91">So, we've used chemistry now to build up our devices, and we've used it to shrink down our devices.</seg>
<seg id="92">So I've probably convinced you that chemistry is the true hero, and we could wrap it up there.</seg>
<seg id="93">Hold on, we're not done.</seg>
<seg id="94">Not so fast.</seg>
<seg id="95">Because we're all human.</seg>
<seg id="96">And as a human, I always want more.</seg>
<seg id="97">And so now I want to think about how to use chemistry to extract more out of a device.</seg>
<seg id="98">Right now, we're being told that we want something called 5G, or the promised fifth generation of wireless.</seg>
<seg id="99">Now, you might have heard of 5G in commercials that are starting to appear.</seg>
<seg id="100">Or maybe some of you even experienced it in the 2018 winter Olympics.</seg>
<seg id="101">What I'm most excited about for 5G is that, when I'm late, running out of the house to catch a plane, I can download movies onto my device in 40 seconds as opposed to 40 minutes.</seg>
<seg id="102">But once true 5G is here, it's going to be a lot more than how many movies we can put on our device.</seg>
<seg id="103">So the question is, why is true 5G not here?</seg>
<seg id="104">And I'll let you in on a little secret.</seg>
<seg id="105">It's pretty easy to answer.</seg>
<seg id="106">It's just plain hard to do.</seg>
<seg id="107">You see, if you use those traditional materials and copper to build 5G devices, the signal can't make it to its final destination.</seg>
<seg id="108">Traditionally, we use really rough insulating layers to support copper wires.</seg>
<seg id="109">Think about Velcro fasteners.</seg>
<seg id="110">It's the roughness of the two pieces that make them stick together.</seg>
<seg id="111">That's pretty important if you want to have a device that's going to last longer than it takes you to rip it out of the box and start installing all of your apps on it.</seg>
<seg id="112">But this roughness causes a problem.</seg>
<seg id="113">You see, at the high speeds for 5G the signal has to travel close to that roughness.</seg>
<seg id="114">And it makes it get lost before it reaches its final destination.</seg>
<seg id="115">Think about a mountain range.</seg>
<seg id="116">And you have a complex system of roads that goes up and over it, and you're trying to get to the other side.</seg>
<seg id="117">Don't you agree with me that it would probably take a really long time, and you would probably get lost, if you had to go up and down all of the mountains, as opposed to if you just drilled a flat tunnel that could go straight on through?</seg>
<seg id="118">Well it's the same thing in our 5G devices.</seg>
<seg id="119">If we could remove this roughness, then we can send the 5G signal straight on through uninterrupted.</seg>
<seg id="120">Sounds pretty good, right?</seg>
<seg id="121">But hold on.</seg>
<seg id="122">Didn't I just tell you that we needed that roughness to keep the device together?</seg>
<seg id="123">And if we remove it, we're in a situation where now the copper isn't going to stick to that underlying substrate.</seg>
<seg id="124">Think about building a house of Lego blocks, with all of the nooks and crannies that latch together, as opposed to smooth building blocks.</seg>
<seg id="125">Which of the two is going to have more structural integrity when the two-year-old comes ripping through the living room, trying to play Godzilla and knock everything down?</seg>
<seg id="126">But what if we put glue on those smooth blocks?</seg>
<seg id="127">And that's what the industry is waiting for.</seg>
<seg id="128">They're waiting for the chemists to design new, smooth surfaces with increased inherent adhesion for some of those copper wires.</seg>
<seg id="129">And when we solve this problem, and we will solve the problem, and we'll work with physicists and engineers to solve all of the challenges of 5G, well then the number of applications is going to skyrocket.</seg>
<seg id="130">So yeah, we'll have things like self-driving cars, because now our data networks can handle the speeds and the amount of information required to make that work.</seg>
<seg id="131">But let's start to use imagination.</seg>
<seg id="132">I can imagine going into a restaurant with a friend that has a peanut allergy, taking out my phone, waving it over the food and having the food tell us a really important answer to a question -- deadly or safe to consume?</seg>
<seg id="133">Or maybe our devices will get so good at processing information about us, that they'll become like our personal trainers.</seg>
<seg id="134">And they'll know the most efficient way for us to burn calories.</seg>
<seg id="135">I know come November, when I'm trying to burn off some of these pregnancy pounds, I would love a device that could tell me how to do that.</seg>
<seg id="136">I really don't know another way of saying it, except chemistry is just cool.</seg>
<seg id="137">And it enables all of these electronic devices.</seg>
<seg id="138">So the next time you send a text or take a selfie, think about all those atoms that are hard at work and the innovation that came before them.</seg>
<seg id="139">Who knows, maybe even some of you listening to this talk, perhaps even on your mobile device, will decide that you too want to play sidekick to Captain Chemistry, the true hero of electronic devices.</seg>
<seg id="140">Thank you for your attention, and thank you chemistry.</seg>
</doc>
<doc docid="52268" genre="lectures">
<talkid>52268</talkid>
<seg id="1">It was a fantastic new pink suit with big buttons and shoulder pads.</seg>
<seg id="2">It was 1997, and I was the new boss of Griffin's Foods, an iconic cookie and snacks company in New Zealand.</seg>
<seg id="3">It was my first time as the leader of a company, and I was on the stage to give a big speech about our ambitious new goals.</seg>
<seg id="4">I knew exactly what my call to action was, which was "One in every four times a Kiwi eats a snack, it will be one of ours."</seg>
<seg id="5">I emphasized that we knew how to measure our results and that our future was in our control.</seg>
<seg id="6">Embarrassingly enough, I finished up with "If not this, what? If not us, who? And if not now, when?"</seg>
<seg id="7">I got this huge round of applause and I was really, really pleased with myself.</seg>
<seg id="8">I wanted so much to be a good leader.</seg>
<seg id="9">I wanted to be followed by a devoted team, I wanted to be right.</seg>
<seg id="10">In short, I wanted to be a hero.</seg>
<seg id="11">A hero selling chips and biscuits in a pink suit.</seg>
<seg id="12">What happened after that speech?</seg>
<seg id="13">Nothing.</seg>
<seg id="14">All of that applause did not lead to action.</seg>
<seg id="15">Nothing changed.</seg>
<seg id="16">Not because they didn't like me or the message.</seg>
<seg id="17">The problem was that no one knew what they were expected to do.</seg>
<seg id="18">And most importantly, they didn't know that I needed them.</seg>
<seg id="19">Now, you may think that this is a classic hero speech, where I'm going to tell you that I overcame that obstacle and triumphed.</seg>
<seg id="20">Actually, I'm going to tell you that in a world as complex and interconnected as the one we live in, the idea that one person has the answer is ludicrous.</seg>
<seg id="21">It's not only ineffective, it's dangerous, because it leads us to believe that it's been solved by that hero, and we have no role.</seg>
<seg id="22">We don't need heroes.</seg>
<seg id="23">We need radical interdependence, which is just another way of saying we need each other.</seg>
<seg id="24">Even though other people can be really difficult, sometimes.</seg>
<seg id="25">I spent decades trying to work out how to be a good leader.</seg>
<seg id="26">I've lived in seven countries and five continents.</seg>
<seg id="27">And in recent years, I've spent a lot of time with the B Corp community, originally as a corporate participant and more recently as an ambassador.</seg>
<seg id="28">Now, B Corps are a group of companies who believe in business as a force for good.</seg>
<seg id="29">There's a tough certification with about 250 questions about your social and environmental performance.</seg>
<seg id="30">You must legally declare your intention to serve the community as well as your shareholders and you must sign the declaration of interdependence.</seg>
<seg id="31">Now one of the things that inspires me the most about the companies in this movement is that they see themselves as part of a whole system.</seg>
<seg id="32">It's sort of as if they imagine themselves on a big, flowing river of activity, where, if they are, for example, soft drinks manufacturers, they understand that upstream from them, there's water and sugar, and farmers that grow that sugar, and plastic and metal and glass, all of which flows into this thing that we call a company which has financial results.</seg>
<seg id="33">And the flowing continues with consequences.</seg>
<seg id="34">Some of them intended, like refreshment and hydration, and some unintended, like garbage and obesity.</seg>
<seg id="35">Spending time with leaders in this space has led me to see that true collaboration is possible, but it's subtle and it's complex.</seg>
<seg id="36">And the leaders in this space are doing a few things very differently from traditional heroic leaders.</seg>
<seg id="37">They set goals differently, they announce those goals differently and they have a very different relationship with other people.</seg>
<seg id="38">Let's begin with the first difference.</seg>
<seg id="39">A hero sets a goal that can be individually delivered and neatly measured.</seg>
<seg id="40">You can recognize a heroic goal -- they use terms like "revenue" and "market share" and are often competitive.</seg>
<seg id="41">I mean, remember pink-suit day?</seg>
<seg id="42">Interdependent leaders, on the other hand, start with a goal that's really important, but is actually impossible to achieve by one company or one person alone.</seg>
<seg id="43">I want to give you an example from the clothing industry, which produces 92 million tons of waste a year.</seg>
<seg id="44">Patagonia and Eileen Fisher are clothing manufacturers, both of them B Corps, both of them deeply committed to reducing waste.</seg>
<seg id="45">They don't see that their responsibility ends when a customer buys their clothes.</seg>
<seg id="46">Patagonia encourages you not to buy new clothes from them, and will repair your old clothes for free.</seg>
<seg id="47">Eileen Fisher will pay you when you bring back your clothes, and either sell them on or turn them into other clothes.</seg>
<seg id="48">While these two companies are competitive in some ways, they work together and with others in the industry to solve shared problems.</seg>
<seg id="49">They take responsibility for things that happen upstream as well.</seg>
<seg id="50">Around the world, there are around 300 million people who work from home in this industry, most of them women, many of them in very difficult circumstances with poor lighting, sewing on buttons and doing detailed stitching.</seg>
<seg id="51">Until 2014, there was no protection for these workers.</seg>
<seg id="52">A group of companies got together with a not-for-profit called Nest to create a set of standards that's now been adopted by the whole industry.</seg>
<seg id="53">Once you've seen problems like this, you can't unsee them, so you have to ask others to help you to solve them.</seg>
<seg id="54">These folks take interdependence as a given, and said to me, "We don't compete on human rights."</seg>
<seg id="55">The second big difference for collaborators is their willingness to declare their goals before they have a plan.</seg>
<seg id="56">Now the hero only reveals their carefully crafted goal when the path to achieve it is clear.</seg>
<seg id="57">In fact, the role of the hero announcement is to set the stage for the big win.</seg>
<seg id="58">Hero announcements are full of triumph.</seg>
<seg id="59">Interdependent leaders, on the other hand, want other people to help them, so their announcements are often an invitation for co-creation, and sometimes, they're a call for help.</seg>
<seg id="60">At the North American division of the French food company Danone, I announced that we wanted to become a B Corp.</seg>
<seg id="61">And unlike pink-suit day, I had no plan to get there.</seg>
<seg id="62">I remember the day really clearly.</seg>
<seg id="63">Everybody in the room gasped, because they knew we didn't have a plan.</seg>
<seg id="64">But they also knew that we had seen our role in the river that is the food system, and we wanted to make a change.</seg>
<seg id="65">Making that declaration without a plan meant that so many young people in our company stepped up to help us, and B Corps around us all rallied around.</seg>
<seg id="66">And the day we became a B Corp wasn't just a self-congratulatory moment of a hero company -- it was more like a community celebration.</seg>
<seg id="67">Now when you gave goals that you can't achieve alone, and you've told everyone about them, inevitably, you'll end up at the third big difference, which is how you see other people, inside your company and outside.</seg>
<seg id="68">Heroes see everyone as a competitor or a follower.</seg>
<seg id="69">Heroes don't want input, because they want to control everything because they want the credit.</seg>
<seg id="70">And you can see this in a typical hero meeting.</seg>
<seg id="71">Heroes like making speeches.</seg>
<seg id="72">People lean back in their chairs, maybe impressed but not engaged.</seg>
<seg id="73">Interdependent leaders, on the other hand, understand that they need other people.</seg>
<seg id="74">They know that meetings are not just mindless calendar fillers.</seg>
<seg id="75">These are the most precious things you have.</seg>
<seg id="76">It's where people collaborate and communicate and share ideas.</seg>
<seg id="77">People lean forward in meetings like this, wondering where they might fit in.</seg>
<seg id="78">When I was in Shanghai in China, where I lived for six years, running the Kraft Foods business, selling, amongst other things, Oreo cookies, we had a problem with hero culture.</seg>
<seg id="79">We kept on launching new products that failed.</seg>
<seg id="80">And we would find out afterwards that everyone in the company knew they were going to fail, they just didn't feel free to tell us.</seg>
<seg id="81">So we changed the way we ran our innovation and planning meetings in two important ways.</seg>
<seg id="82">First of all, language went back to Chinese.</seg>
<seg id="83">Because even though everyone spoke great English, when I was in the room and the meeting was in English, they focused on me.</seg>
<seg id="84">And I was the foreigner, and I was the boss and I apparently had that intimidating hero look.</seg>
<seg id="85">The second thing is we asked every single person in the meeting their opinion.</seg>
<seg id="86">And our understanding of the subtleties of the differences between American taste and Chinese taste, in this case, really improved, and our new product success rate radically turned around and we launched a lot of winners, including the now famous green-tea-flavored Oreos.</seg>
<seg id="87">Hero culture sneaks in everywhere.</seg>
<seg id="88">At Danone, we had a lot of great stuff happening in one part of the world, and we wanted it to spread to another part of the world.</seg>
<seg id="89">But when you put a person in business gear up in front of a group of people with PowerPoint, they have the urge to become sort of heroic.</seg>
<seg id="90">And they make everything look super shiny and they don't tell the truth.</seg>
<seg id="91">And it's not compelling and it's not even interesting.</seg>
<seg id="92">So, we changed it and we created these full-day marketplaces, kind of like a big bazaar.</seg>
<seg id="93">And everybody was dressed up in costume, some people a little, some people a lot.</seg>
<seg id="94">And sellers had to man their stalls and sell their ideas as persuasively as possible, and people who were convinced bought them with fake check books.</seg>
<seg id="95">Creating just a bit of silliness with the environment and a hat or a scarf drops people's guard and causes ideas to spread like wildfire.</seg>
<seg id="96">There's no recipe here, but time together has to be carefully curated and created so that people know that their time is valuable and important, and they can bring their best selves to the table.</seg>
<seg id="97">Hero culture is present right here in TED.</seg>
<seg id="98">This whole process makes it look like I think I'm a hero.</seg>
<seg id="99">So just in case there's any doubt about the point that I'm trying to make, I want to apply these ideas in an area in which I have zero credibility and zero experience.</seg>
<seg id="100">I'm originally South African, and I'm deeply passionate about wildlife conservation, most particularly rhinos.</seg>
<seg id="101">Those majestic creatures with big horns.</seg>
<seg id="102">Every day, three rhinos are killed, because there are people who think that those horns are valuable, even though they're just made of the same stuff as hair and fingernails.</seg>
<seg id="103">It breaks my heart.</seg>
<seg id="104">Like all good recovering heroes, I did everything I could to reduce this goal to something that I could do by myself.</seg>
<seg id="105">But clearly, stopping rhino poaching is a goal way too big for me.</seg>
<seg id="106">So I'm immediately in interdependence land.</seg>
<seg id="107">I'm declaring my goal on this stage.</seg>
<seg id="108">I found other people as passionate as I am and I've asked if I could join them.</seg>
<seg id="109">And after today, there may be more.</seg>
<seg id="110">And we're now in the complex but inspiring process of learning how to work together.</seg>
<seg id="111">My dream is that one day, someone will stand on this stage and tell you how radical interdependence saved my beloved rhinos.</seg>
<seg id="112">Why does hero culture persist, and why don't we work together more?</seg>
<seg id="113">Well, I don't know why everyone else does it, but I can tell you why I did it.</seg>
<seg id="114">Interdependence is a lot harder than being a hero.</seg>
<seg id="115">It requires us to be open and transparent and vulnerable, and that's not what traditional leaders have been trained to do.</seg>
<seg id="116">I thought being a hero would keep me safe.</seg>
<seg id="117">I thought that in the elevation and separation that comes from heroic leadership, that I would be untouchable.</seg>
<seg id="118">This is an illusion.</seg>
<seg id="119">The joy and success that comes from interdependence and vulnerability is worth the effort and the risk.</seg>
<seg id="120">And if we're going to solve the challenges that the world is facing today, we have no alternative, so we had better start getting good at it.</seg>
<seg id="121">Thank you.</seg>
</doc>
<doc docid="54706" genre="lectures">
<talkid>54706</talkid>
<seg id="1">I have to admit that it's a lot of fun when people ask me what I do for my job, because I tell them I literally rub things together.</seg>
<seg id="2">This sounds ridiculous, just rubbing things together.</seg>
<seg id="3">But it has a technical name: tribology.</seg>
<seg id="4">T-r-i-b-o-l-o-g-y, from the ancient Greek word "tribos," which means "to rub."</seg>
<seg id="5">It's a funny-sounding word you've probably never heard before, but I promise you, discovering it changes your experience with the physical world.</seg>
<seg id="6">Tribology has given me amazing projects.</seg>
<seg id="7">I've worked on materials that fly, and I've worked on dog food -- a combination that doesn't sound like one person has any business doing in the span of just a couple years, until you start to view the world through a tribological lens.</seg>
<seg id="8">And I think you'll be surprised at how significant a little bit of tribology can be in alleviating some very large problems.</seg>
<seg id="9">Tribology is the study of friction, wear and lubrication.</seg>
<seg id="10">You have all experienced all three of these things.</seg>
<seg id="11">Remember the last time you tried to move a heavy object across the floor, and you could just feel something resisting you?</seg>
<seg id="12">That would be friction.</seg>
<seg id="13">Friction is the force that opposes motion.</seg>
<seg id="14">Wear is the loss or transfer of material.</seg>
<seg id="15">It's the reason you have to replace your favorite shoes, because eventually the soles disappear.</seg>
<seg id="16">Lubricants are used to reduce friction and wear.</seg>
<seg id="17">They loosen up those stubborn rusted bolts that just otherwise will not budge.</seg>
<seg id="18">But tribology is also defined as the science of interacting surfaces in relative motion.</seg>
<seg id="19">So, interacting surfaces in relative motion: there are a lot of those in the world.</seg>
<seg id="20">As you're sitting there right now, are you wiggling your foot at all or maybe shifting around in your seat?</seg>
<seg id="21">Because guess what? Tribology is happening.</seg>
<seg id="22">Even the smallest shift in your seat involves two surfaces moving relative to each other.</seg>
<seg id="23">And your tribological interaction for the shift will be different than the person next to you.</seg>
<seg id="24">This is because the clothes you're wearing change the friction between you and the seat.</seg>
<seg id="25">If you're wearing silk, it's a little easier to squirm around in the seat than if you're wearing wool.</seg>
<seg id="26">That's because the friction is lower for silk.</seg>
<seg id="27">If you're moving your ankle or wiggling your ankle at all, did it make a popping sound?</seg>
<seg id="28">You've had that, right?</seg>
<seg id="29">You get up, you move around, and some joint cracks or pops.</seg>
<seg id="30">Thank you for that sound, tribology.</seg>
<seg id="31">That sound can come from the fluid that lubricates your joints just moving around.</seg>
<seg id="32">You're essentially releasing gas bubbles in that fluid.</seg>
<seg id="33">That sound can also come from the tendons simply moving over each other.</seg>
<seg id="34">Pretty common in the ankle, so any of my fellow foot-wigglers out there may suddenly find themselves curious about the tribology of tendons.</seg>
<seg id="35">But how does one become a tribologist like me?</seg>
<seg id="36">It starts when you're a kid, of course.</seg>
<seg id="37">I was a ballerina growing up.</seg>
<seg id="38">I reached the level where I was dancing on my toes, or "en pointe."</seg>
<seg id="39">Now, when you're dancing en pointe, you're wearing those amazing shoes, but they can be slippery on the stage.</seg>
<seg id="40">The last thing you want to do when you're trying to dance on your toes is to slip and fall.</seg>
<seg id="41">So we had boxes of stuff called rosin.</seg>
<seg id="42">We would step into the rosin, put a light coating on our shoes.</seg>
<seg id="43">Rosin comes from tree sap and, in its powdered form, makes things less slippery.</seg>
<seg id="44">You learned real fast as a dancer how much was the right amount to put on your shoes, because if you didn't put enough on, you were probably going to slip due to the low friction between your shoe and the stage.</seg>
<seg id="45">Best case scenario, you're the clumsy ballerina on stage, but the worst case scenario would be an injury.</seg>
<seg id="46">Already, I was optimizing and manipulating friction.</seg>
<seg id="47">You see, I was destined to be a tribologist.</seg>
<seg id="48">But you were also a junior tribologist.</seg>
<seg id="49">When you used crayons or colored pencils, you knew that the harder you pressed, the darker the color.</seg>
<seg id="50">You also knew this meant you were going to have to sharpen that crayon or colored pencil more frequently, because it was wearing down faster.</seg>
<seg id="51">Now let's talk about those enticing shiny waxed floors that you just had to slide across.</seg>
<seg id="52">You knew if you put on a pair of socks, you were going to get a really good slide across that floor.</seg>
<seg id="53">Good luck trying to do that barefoot.</seg>
<seg id="54">Master manipulators of friction.</seg>
<seg id="55">All kids are tribologists.</seg>
<seg id="56">What about us as adults?</seg>
<seg id="57">At some point today, you brushed your teeth.</seg>
<seg id="58">I hope.</seg>
<seg id="59">This is tribology in action.</seg>
<seg id="60">The toothpaste and toothbrush are working to remove or wear the plaque from your teeth.</seg>
<seg id="61">For the record, my dad is a dentist.</seg>
<seg id="62">Never thought my career was going to circle back to the family business.</seg>
<seg id="63">But one day, we found ourselves speaking the same language when I was tasked with developing a test to investigate plaque removal.</seg>
<seg id="64">Sounded simple enough, until I started to look at it as a tribologist, and then it became incredibly complex.</seg>
<seg id="65">You have hard materials -- those would be your teeth -- soft materials like your gums, the toothpaste, the toothbrush.</seg>
<seg id="66">There's lubrication -- the form of saliva and water -- the dynamics of the person doing the brushing and more.</seg>
<seg id="67">I promise if we put diamonds in your toothpaste, you're going to remove that plaque.</seg>
<seg id="68">Probably going to remove your teeth as well.</seg>
<seg id="69">So there's a fine balance to be had between wearing the plaque away and not damaging your teeth and gums.</seg>
<seg id="70">We're brushing our teeth because we ate.</seg>
<seg id="71">Eating is another routine thing we all do.</seg>
<seg id="72">Seems simple enough.</seg>
<seg id="73">But it's another field of tribology, and it's not so simple.</seg>
<seg id="74">You have the food, which will break and wear while you're eating, and that food is interacting with your teeth, your tongue, your saliva, your throat.</seg>
<seg id="75">And all of those interactions are going to influence your experience of eating.</seg>
<seg id="76">I think you can all recall a moment where you tried something new and you just found yourself going, "Well, it tastes alright. I really don't like that texture."</seg>
<seg id="77">Tribologists are looking at lubricity, the coefficient of friction, as ways to connect mouth feel and texture to what you're experiencing, so that if we're changing the formulations of what we're eating and drinking so the sugar content or fat content are different, how does that change mouth feel?</seg>
<seg id="78">How do we quantify that?</seg>
<seg id="79">This is what tribologists are looking to solve.</seg>
<seg id="80">And while my colleagues were in one corner of this lab looking at the fat content of yogurt, I was in another corner studying dog food.</seg>
<seg id="81">That lab smelled really good, by the way, let me tell you.</seg>
<seg id="82">We all brush our teeth on a regular basis.</seg>
<seg id="83">How many of us brush our pets' teeth?</seg>
<seg id="84">Animals as adults commonly get periodontal disease, so we really should be brushing their teeth, and more pet owners are starting to do this.</seg>
<seg id="85">I know my best friend is really great at brushing her cat's teeth, somehow.</seg>
<seg id="86">Good luck trying to do that with my cat.</seg>
<seg id="87">So what pet food suppliers are trying to do is incorporate plaque removal in things like treats.</seg>
<seg id="88">If you have a dog, you may have observed that you give a dog a treat, and it magically seems to disappear after just one bite.</seg>
<seg id="89">So the added challenge here is: How do you remove plaque when you have one bite?</seg>
<seg id="90">I developed a benchtop test to study this problem, and to do so, I had to mimic the oral system of dogs: their teeth, plaque, saliva.</seg>
<seg id="91">And I used friction and wear measurements to study the effectiveness of that treat on removing plaque.</seg>
<seg id="92">If you're sitting there right now thinking about the last time you didn't brush your dog's teeth, you're very welcome.</seg>
<seg id="93">But what's the big deal with tribology?</seg>
<seg id="94">Let me give you one more example.</seg>
<seg id="95">No matter where you are right now, you got to this location somehow.</seg>
<seg id="96">Maybe you walked or rode your bike, but for most people in this room, you probably came in a car.</seg>
<seg id="97">Just think about all the tribological systems in a car.</seg>
<seg id="98">You have your personal interactions with the car, the car's interactions with the road and everything under the hood and in the drivetrain.</seg>
<seg id="99">Some routine maintenance is directly connected to tribology.</seg>
<seg id="100">You know how many miles your tires are recommended for using before you replace them.</seg>
<seg id="101">You regularly check the treads on those tires.</seg>
<seg id="102">You're actively monitoring the wear of your tires.</seg>
<seg id="103">Tribology is the study of wear and friction, and with tires, friction can be the difference between a safe arrival and a car accident.</seg>
<seg id="104">This is because the friction between your tires and the road will influence your acceleration, your deceleration and your stopping distance.</seg>
<seg id="105">As a driver, you instinctively already know how important friction is, because you know that when the roads are wet, they're more dangerous because they're slippery.</seg>
<seg id="106">This is because the water is reducing the friction between your tires and the road.</seg>
<seg id="107">You may recall that friction is the force that opposes motion, so water reducing that force means it's now easier for you to move, hence it's more slippery when the roads are wet.</seg>
<seg id="108">Something else to consider is that overcoming friction takes energy, so you're losing energy to friction.</seg>
<seg id="109">This is one way your tires can influence your fuel efficiency.</seg>
<seg id="110">And, in fact, did you know that about one-third of the fuel that you put into your internal combustion engine vehicle will be spent overcoming friction?</seg>
<seg id="111">One-third.</seg>
<seg id="112">Tribology research has helped us reduce friction and therefore increase fuel efficiency and reduce emissions.</seg>
<seg id="113">Holmberg and Erdemir have actually done some great studies showing the impact tribology research can have on reducing our energy consumption.</seg>
<seg id="114">And they found that, looking over the span of 20 years, we had the opportunity to reduce the energy consumption of passenger vehicles up to 60 percent.</seg>
<seg id="115">When you think about all the cars in the world, that's a lot of energy we can save.</seg>
<seg id="116">It's part of the nearly nine percent of our current global energy consumption that the authors identified tribology can help us save.</seg>
<seg id="117">That's a significant amount of energy.</seg>
<seg id="118">So when you look at the numbers, tribology can do some amazing things.</seg>
<seg id="119">My colleagues have identified up to 20 quads of energy we can save across the US alone.</seg>
<seg id="120">To put this in perspective: one quad of energy is roughly equivalent to 180 million barrels of oil, and tribology can help us save 20 times that.</seg>
<seg id="121">This is through new materials, new lubricants, novel component design, doing things like making wind turbines more efficient and reliable.</seg>
<seg id="122">This happened just by putting 31 people in a room who viewed the world through a tribology lens.</seg>
<seg id="123">Imagine the opportunities that will reveal themselves as more of us start to see tribology all around.</seg>
<seg id="124">My favorite projects right now are in aerospace applications.</seg>
<seg id="125">I love reducing wear and friction in these challenging environments.</seg>
<seg id="126">I can make materials and parts that will reduce the friction in moving components and engines so that they have less force opposing their motion.</seg>
<seg id="127">Less force to move means they require less power, so you can use a smaller actuator, which would weigh less, which saves fuel.</seg>
<seg id="128">I can also help make parts that last longer through lower wear.</seg>
<seg id="129">This will reduce material waste and also means we're manufacturing the parts less frequently, so we're saving energy in manufacturing.</seg>
<seg id="130">I encourage you to start seeing tribology in the world around you and to think about how you would improve those interacting surfaces you experience.</seg>
<seg id="131">Even the smallest improvements really add up.</seg>
<seg id="132">Tribology may be a funny-sounding word, but it has a huge impact on our world.</seg>
<seg id="133">Thank you.</seg>
</doc>
<doc docid="55061" genre="lectures">
<talkid>55061</talkid>
<seg id="1">Poet Ali: Hi. Audience: Hi.</seg>
<seg id="2">PA: I want to ask you guys a question. How many languages do you speak?</seg>
<seg id="3">This is not a rhetorical question.</seg>
<seg id="4">I actually want you to think of a number.</seg>
<seg id="5">For some of you, it's pretty easy.</seg>
<seg id="6">Inside your head, you're like, "It's one. You're speaking it, buddy. I'm done."</seg>
<seg id="7">Others of you maybe are wondering if the language an ex-boyfriend or ex-girlfriend taught you, where you learned all the cusswords, if it counts -- go ahead and count it.</seg>
<seg id="8">When I asked myself the question, I came up with four, arguably five, if I've been drinking.</seg>
<seg id="9">But on closer examination, I came up with 83 -- 83 languages, and I got tired and I stopped counting.</seg>
<seg id="10">And it forced me to revisit this definition that we have of language.</seg>
<seg id="11">The first entry said, "The method of human communication, either spoken or written, consisting of the use of words in a structured or conventional way."</seg>
<seg id="12">The definition at the bottom refers to specialized fields, like medicine, science, tech.</seg>
<seg id="13">We know they have their own vernacular, their own jargon.</seg>
<seg id="14">But what most interested me was that definition right in the center there: "the system of communication used by a particular community or country."</seg>
<seg id="15">And I'm not interested in altering this definition.</seg>
<seg id="16">I'm interested in applying it to everything we do, because I believe that we speak far more languages than we realize.</seg>
<seg id="17">And for the rest of our time together, I'm going to attempt to speak in one language that is native to every single human being in this room.</seg>
<seg id="18">But that changes things a little bit, because then it's no longer a presentation.</seg>
<seg id="19">It becomes a conversation, and in any conversation, there must be some sort of interaction.</seg>
<seg id="20">And for any interaction to happen, there has to be a degree of willingness on both parties.</seg>
<seg id="21">And I think if we just are willing, we will see the magic that can happen with just a little bit of willingness.</seg>
<seg id="22">So I've chosen a relatively low-risk common denominator that can kind of gauge if we're all willing.</seg>
<seg id="23">If you're happy and you know it, clap your hands.</seg>
<seg id="24">Now you're talking!</seg>
<seg id="25">Thank you so much. Please be seated.</seg>
<seg id="26">Now, if that felt a little bit awkward, I promise there was no joke being had at your expense.</seg>
<seg id="27">I simply asked the Spanish-speaking audience to stand up, look at a person that was sitting close to them and laugh.</seg>
<seg id="28">And I know that wasn't nice, and I'm sorry, but in that moment, some of us felt something.</seg>
<seg id="29">You see, we're often aware of what language does when we speak somebody's language, what it does to connect, what it does to bind.</seg>
<seg id="30">But we often forget what it does when you can't speak that language, what it does to isolate, what it does to exclude.</seg>
<seg id="31">And I want us to hold on as we journey through our little walk of languages here.</seg>
<seg id="32">I said in Farsi, "I'd like to translate this idea of 'taarof' in the Persian culture," which, really -- it has no equivalent in the English lexicon.</seg>
<seg id="33">The best definition would be something like an extreme grace or an extreme humility.</seg>
<seg id="34">But that doesn't quite get the job done.</seg>
<seg id="35">So I'll give you an example.</seg>
<seg id="36">If two gentlemen were walking by each other, it'd be very common  for the first one to say, (In Farsi: I am indebted to you), which means, "I am indebted to you."</seg>
<seg id="37">The other gentlemen would respond back, (In Farsi: I open my shirt for you) which means, "I open my shirt for you."</seg>
<seg id="38">The first guy would respond back, (In Farsi: I am your servant) which means, "I am your servant."</seg>
<seg id="39">And then the second guy would respond back to him, (In Farsi: I am the dirt  beneath your feet) which literally means, "I am the dirt beneath your feet."</seg>
<seg id="40">Here's an exhibit for you guys, in case you didn't get the picture.</seg>
<seg id="41">And I share that with you, because with new languages come new concepts that didn't exist before.</seg>
<seg id="42">And the other thing is, sometimes we think language is about understanding the meaning of a word, but I believe language is about making a word meaningful for yourself.</seg>
<seg id="43">If I were to flash this series of words on the screen, some of you, you'd know exactly what it is right away.</seg>
<seg id="44">Others of you, you might struggle a little bit.</seg>
<seg id="45">And I could probably draw a pretty clear-cut line right around the age of 35 and older, 35 and younger.</seg>
<seg id="46">And for those of us that are in the know, we know that's text-speak, or SMS language.</seg>
<seg id="47">It's a series of characters meant to convey the most amount of meaning with the least amount of characters, which sounds pretty similar to our definition of languages: "system of communication used by a community."</seg>
<seg id="48">Now, anyone who's ever got into an argument via text can make a case for how it's maybe not the best method of communication, but what if I told you that what you saw earlier was a modern-day love letter?</seg>
<seg id="49">If you follow along: "For the time being, I love you lots, because you positively bring out all the best in me, and I laugh out loud, in other words, let's me know what's up. 'Cause you are a cutie in my opinion, and as far as I know to see you, if you're not seeing someone, would make happy. For your information, I'll be right there forever. In any case, keep in touch, no response necessary, all my best wishes, don't know, don't care if anyone sees this. Don't go there, see you later, bye for now, hugs and kisses, you only live once."</seg>
<seg id="50">Kind of a modern-day Romeo or Juliet.</seg>
<seg id="51">In that moment, if you laughed, you spoke another language that needs no explanation: laughter.</seg>
<seg id="52">It's one of the most common languages in the world.</seg>
<seg id="53">We don't have to explain it to each other, it's just something we all feel, and that's why things like laughter and things like music are so prevalent, because they seem to somehow transcend explanation and convey a profound amount of meaning.</seg>
<seg id="54">Every language we learn is a portal by which we can access another language.</seg>
<seg id="55">The more you know, the more you can speak.</seg>
<seg id="56">And it's something common that we all do.</seg>
<seg id="57">We take any new concept, and we filter it through an already existing access of reality within us.</seg>
<seg id="58">And that's why languages are so important, because they give us access to new worlds, not just people.</seg>
<seg id="59">It's not just about seeing or hearing, it's about feeling, experiencing, sharing.</seg>
<seg id="60">And despite these languages that we've covered, I really don't think we've covered one of the most profound languages, and that's the language of experience.</seg>
<seg id="61">That's why when you're talking with someone, if they've shared something you've shared, you don't need to explain it much.</seg>
<seg id="62">Or that's why, when you're sharing a story and you finish, and the people you're talking to don't quite get it, the first thing we all say is, "Guess you had to be there."</seg>
<seg id="63">I guess you had to be here this week to know what this is about.</seg>
<seg id="64">It's kind of hard to explain, isn't it?</seg>
<seg id="65">And for the sake of our research, I'm going to close by asking that you participate one more time in this language of experience.</seg>
<seg id="66">I'm going to filter through some languages, and if I'm speaking your language, I'm going to ask that you just stand and you stay standing.</seg>
<seg id="67">You don't need to ask permission, just let me know that you see me, and I can also see you if you speak this language of experience.</seg>
<seg id="68">Do you speak this language?</seg>
<seg id="69">When I was growing up in primary school, at the end of the year, we would have these parties, and we'd vote on whether we wanted to celebrate at an amusement park or a water park.</seg>
<seg id="70">And I would really hope the party wasn't at a water park, because then I'd have to be in a bathing suit.</seg>
<seg id="71">I don't know about you, but sometimes when I approach a dressing room, my sweat glands start activating on their own, because I know the garment is not going to look on me like it did on that mannequin.</seg>
<seg id="72">Or how about this?</seg>
<seg id="73">When I would go to family functions or family gatherings, every time I wanted a second plate -- and I usually did --</seg>
<seg id="74">it was a whole exercise in cost-benefit analysis, my relatives looking at me like, "I don't know. Do you really need that? Looks like you're doing OK there, bud."</seg>
<seg id="75">Did my cheeks have a big "Pinch me" sign that I didn't see?</seg>
<seg id="76">And if you're squirming or you're laughing or you stood up, or you're beginning to stand, you're speaking the language that I endearingly call "the language of growing up a fat kid."</seg>
<seg id="77">And any body-image issue is a dialect of that language.</seg>
<seg id="78">I want you to stay standing.</seg>
<seg id="79">Again, if I'm speaking your language, please go ahead and stand.</seg>
<seg id="80">Imagine two bills in my hand.</seg>
<seg id="81">One is the phone bill, and one is the electric bill.</seg>
<seg id="82">Eeny, meeny, miny, mo, pay one off, let the other one go, which means, "I might not have enough to pay both at the current moment."</seg>
<seg id="83">You've got to be resourceful. You've got to figure it out.</seg>
<seg id="84">And if you're standing, you know the language of barely making ends meet, of financial struggle.</seg>
<seg id="85">And if you've been lucky enough to speak that language, you understand that there is no motivator of greatness like deficiency.</seg>
<seg id="86">Not having resources, not having looks, not having finances can often be the barren soil from which the most productive seeds are painstakingly plowed and harvested.</seg>
<seg id="87">I'm going to ask if you speak this language.</seg>
<seg id="88">The second you recognize it, feel free to stand.</seg>
<seg id="89">When we heard the diagnosis, I thought, "Not that word. Anything but that word. I hate that word."</seg>
<seg id="90">And then you ask a series of questions: "Are you sure?"</seg>
<seg id="91">"Has it spread?"</seg>
<seg id="92">"How long?"</seg>
<seg id="93">"Doctor, how long?"</seg>
<seg id="94">And a series of answers determines a person's life.</seg>
<seg id="95">And when my dad was hungry, we'd all rush to the dinner table to eat, because that's what we did before.</seg>
<seg id="96">We ate together, so we were going to continue doing that.</seg>
<seg id="97">And I didn't understand why we were losing this battle, because I was taught if you fight and if you have the right spirit, you're supposed to win.</seg>
<seg id="98">And we weren't winning.</seg>
<seg id="99">For any of you that stood up, you know very well that I'm speaking the language of watching a loved one battle cancer.</seg>
<seg id="100">Any terminal illness is a derivative of that language.</seg>
<seg id="101">I'm going to speak one last language.</seg>
<seg id="102">Oh -- no, no, I'm listening.</seg>
<seg id="103">Yeah, yeah, yeah, no no, no no, me and you, right here, yup.</seg>
<seg id="104">No, I'm with ya. I'm with ya!</seg>
<seg id="105">Or, imagine the lights are all off and a blue light is just shining in your face as you're laying on the bed.</seg>
<seg id="106">And I know some of you, like me, have dropped that phone right on your face.</seg>
<seg id="107">Or this one, right?</seg>
<seg id="108">Passenger seat freaking out, like, "Can you watch the road?"</seg>
<seg id="109">And for anybody that stood up, you speak the language that I like to call "the language of disconnection."</seg>
<seg id="110">It's been called the language of connection, but I like to call it the language of disconnection.</seg>
<seg id="111">I don't mean disconnection, I mean disconnection, human disconnection, disconnected from each other, from where we are, from our own thoughts, so we can occupy another space.</seg>
<seg id="112">If you're not standing, you probably know what it's like to feel left out.</seg>
<seg id="113">You probably -- you know what it's like when everybody's a part of something, and you're not.</seg>
<seg id="114">You know what it's like being the minority.</seg>
<seg id="115">And now that I'm speaking your language, I'm going to ask you to stand, since we're speaking the same language.</seg>
<seg id="116">Because I believe that language of being the minority is one of the most important languages you can ever speak in your life, because how you feel in that position of compromise will directly determine how you act in that position of power.</seg>
<seg id="117">Thank you for participating.</seg>
<seg id="118">If you'd take a seat, I want to speak one last language.</seg>
<seg id="119">This one, you don't need to stand.</seg>
<seg id="120">I just want to see if you recognize it.</seg>
<seg id="121">Most the girls in the world are complainin' about it.</seg>
<seg id="122">Most the poems in the world been written about it.</seg>
<seg id="123">Most the music on the radio be hittin' about it, kickin' about it, or rippin' about it.</seg>
<seg id="124">Most the verses in the game people spittin' about it, most the songs in the world, people talkin' about it.</seg>
<seg id="125">Most the broken hearts I know are walkin' without it, started to doubt it, or lost without it.</seg>
<seg id="126">Most the shadows in the dark have forgotten about it.</seg>
<seg id="127">Everybody in the world would be trippin' without it.</seg>
<seg id="128">Every boy and every girl will be dead without it, struggle without it, nothing without it.</seg>
<seg id="129">Most the pages that are filled are filled about it.</seg>
<seg id="130">The tears that are spilled are spilled about it.</seg>
<seg id="131">The people that have felt it are real about it.</seg>
<seg id="132">A life without it, you'd be lost.</seg>
<seg id="133">When I'm in it and I feel it, I be shoutin' about it.</seg>
<seg id="134">Everybody in the whole world knowin' about it.</seg>
<seg id="135">I'm hurt and broke down and be flowin' about it, goin' about it wrong 'cause I didn't allow it.</seg>
<seg id="136">Can the wound or scar heal without it?</seg>
<seg id="137">Can't the way that you feel be concealed about it?</seg>
<seg id="138">Everybody has their own ideal about it, dream about it, appeal about it.</seg>
<seg id="139">So what's the deal about it?</seg>
<seg id="140">Are you 'bout it to know that life is a dream and unreal without it?</seg>
<seg id="141">But I'm just a writer.</seg>
<seg id="142">What can I reveal about it?</seg>
<seg id="143">Why is it that the most spoken-about language in the world is the one we have the toughest time speaking or expressing?</seg>
<seg id="144">No matter how many books, how many seminars, how many life-coaching sessions we go to, we just can't get enough of it.</seg>
<seg id="145">And I ask you now: Is that number that you had at the beginning, has that changed?</seg>
<seg id="146">And I challenge you, when you see someone, to ask yourself: What languages do we share?</seg>
<seg id="147">And if you don't come up with anything, ask yourself: What languages could we share?</seg>
<seg id="148">And if you still don't come up with anything, ask yourself: What languages can I learn?</seg>
<seg id="149">And now matter how inconsequential or insignificant that conversation seems at the moment, I promise you it will serve you in the future.</seg>
<seg id="150">My name is Poet Ali. Thank you.</seg>
</doc>
<doc docid="56901" genre="lectures">
<talkid>56901</talkid>
<seg id="1">Ever since I can remember, African elephants have filled me with a sense of complete awe.</seg>
<seg id="2">They are the largest land mammal alive today on planet Earth, weighing up to seven tons, standing three and a half meters tall at the shoulder.</seg>
<seg id="3">They can eat up to 400 kilos of food in a day, and they disperse vital plant seeds across thousands of kilometers during their 50-to-60-year life span.</seg>
<seg id="4">Central to their compassionate and complex society are the matriarchs.</seg>
<seg id="5">These female, strong leaders nurture the young and navigate their way through the challenges of the African bush to find food, water and security.</seg>
<seg id="6">Their societies are so complex, we're yet to still fully tease apart how they communicate, how they verbalize to each other, how their dialects work.</seg>
<seg id="7">And we don't really understand yet how they navigate the landscape, remembering the safest places to cross a river.</seg>
<seg id="8">I'm pretty sure that like me, most of you in this room have a similar positive emotional response to these most magnificent of all animals.</seg>
<seg id="9">It's really hard not to have watched a documentary, learned about their intelligence or, if you've been lucky, to see them for yourselves on safari in the wild.</seg>
<seg id="10">But I wonder how many of you have been truly, utterly terrified by them.</seg>
<seg id="11">I was lucky to be brought up in Southern Africa by two teacher parents who had long holidays but very short budgets.</seg>
<seg id="12">And so we used to take our old Ford Cortina Estate, and with my sister, we'd pile in the back, take our tents and go camping in the different game reserves in Southern Africa.</seg>
<seg id="13">It really was heaven for a young, budding zoologist like myself.</seg>
<seg id="14">But I remember even at that young age that I found the tall electric fences blocking off the game parks quite divisive.</seg>
<seg id="15">Sure, they were keeping elephants out of the communities, but they also kept communities out of their wild spaces.</seg>
<seg id="16">It really was quite a challenge to me at that young age.</seg>
<seg id="17">It was only when I moved to Kenya at the age of 14, when I got to connect to the vast, wild open spaces of East Africa.</seg>
<seg id="18">And it is here now that I feel truly, instinctively, really at home.</seg>
<seg id="19">I spent many, many happy years studying elephant behavior in a tent, in Samburu National Reserve, under the guideship of professor Fritz Vollrath and Iain Douglas-Hamilton, studying for my PhD and understanding the complexities of elephant societies.</seg>
<seg id="20">But now, in my role as head of the human-elephant coexistence program for Save the Elephants, we're seeing so much change happening so fast that it's urged a change in some of our research programs.</seg>
<seg id="21">No longer can we just sit and understand elephant societies or study just how to stop the ivory trade, which is horrific and still ongoing.</seg>
<seg id="22">We're having to change our resources more and more to look at this rising problem of human-elephant conflict, as people and pachyderms compete for space and resources.</seg>
<seg id="23">It was only as recently as the 1970s that we used to have 1.2 million elephants roaming across Africa.</seg>
<seg id="24">Today, we're edging closer to only having 400,000 left.</seg>
<seg id="25">And at the same time period, the human population has quadrupled, and the land is being fragmented at such a pace that it's really hard to keep up with.</seg>
<seg id="26">Too often, these migrating elephants end up stuck inside communities, looking for food and water but ending up breaking open water tanks, breaking pipes and, of course, breaking into food stores for food.</seg>
<seg id="27">It's really a huge challenge.</seg>
<seg id="28">Can you imagine the terror of an elephant literally ripping the roof off your mud hut in the middle of the night and having to hold your children away as the trunk reaches in, looking for food in the pitch dark?</seg>
<seg id="29">These elephants also trample and eat crops, and this is traditionally eroding away that tolerance that people used to have for elephants.</seg>
<seg id="30">And sadly, we're losing these animals by the day and, in some countries, by the hour -- to not only ivory poaching but this rapid rise in human-elephant conflict as they compete for space and resources.</seg>
<seg id="31">It's a massive challenge.</seg>
<seg id="32">I mean, how do you keep seven-ton pachyderms, that often come in groups of 10 or 12, out of these very small rural farms when you're dealing with people who are living on the very edge of poverty?</seg>
<seg id="33">They don't have big budgets.</seg>
<seg id="34">How do you resolve this issue?</seg>
<seg id="35">Well, one issue is, you can just start to build electric fences, and this is happening across Africa, we're seeing this more and more.</seg>
<seg id="36">But they are dividing up areas and blocking corridors.</seg>
<seg id="37">And I'm telling you, these elephants don't think much of it either, particularly if they're blocking a really special water hole where they need water, or if there's a very attractive female on the other side.</seg>
<seg id="38">It doesn't take long to knock down one of these poles.</seg>
<seg id="39">And as soon as there's a gap in the fence, they go back, talk to their mates and suddenly they're all through, and now you have 12 elephants on the community side of the fence.</seg>
<seg id="40">And now you're really in trouble.</seg>
<seg id="41">People keep trying to come up with new designs for electric fences.</seg>
<seg id="42">Well, these elephants don't think much of those either.</seg>
<seg id="43">So rather than having these hard-line, straight, electric, really divisive migratory-blocking fences, there must be other ways to look at this challenge.</seg>
<seg id="44">I'm much more interested in holistic and natural methods to keep elephants and people apart where necessary.</seg>
<seg id="45">Simply talking to people, talking to rural pastoralists in northern Kenya who have so much knowledge about the bush, we discovered this story that they had that elephants would not feed on trees that had wild beehives in them.</seg>
<seg id="46">Now this was an interesting story.</seg>
<seg id="47">As the elephants were foraging on the tree, they would break branches and perhaps break open a wild beehive.</seg>
<seg id="48">And those bees would fly out of their natural nests and sting the elephants.</seg>
<seg id="49">Now if the elephants got stung, perhaps they would remember that this tree was dangerous and they wouldn't come back to that same site.</seg>
<seg id="50">It seems impossible that they could be stung through their thick skin -- elephant skin is around two centimeters thick.</seg>
<seg id="51">But it seems that they sting them around the watery areas, around the eyes, behind the ears, in the mouth, up the trunk.</seg>
<seg id="52">You can imagine they would remember that very quickly.</seg>
<seg id="53">And it's not really one sting that they're scared of.</seg>
<seg id="54">African bees have a phenomenal ability: when they sting in one site, they release a pheromone that triggers the rest of the bees to come and sting the same site.</seg>
<seg id="55">So it's not one beesting that they're scared of -- it's perhaps thousands of beestings, coming to sting in the same area -- that they're afraid of.</seg>
<seg id="56">And of course, a good matriarch would always keep her young away from such a threat.</seg>
<seg id="57">Young calves have much thinner skins, and it's potential that they could be stung through their thinner skins.</seg>
<seg id="58">So for my PhD, I had this unusual challenge of trying to work out how African elephants and African bees would interact, when the theory was that they wouldn't interact at all.</seg>
<seg id="59">How was I going to study this?</seg>
<seg id="60">Well, what I did was I took the sound of disturbed African honey bees, and I played it back to elephants resting under trees through a wireless speaker system, so I could understand how they would react as if there were wild bees in the area.</seg>
<seg id="61">And it turns out that they react quite dramatically to the sound of African wild bees.</seg>
<seg id="62">Here we are, playing the bee sounds back to this amazing group of elephants.</seg>
<seg id="63">You can see the ears going up, going out, they're turning their heads from side to side, one elephant is flicking her trunk to try and smell.</seg>
<seg id="64">There's another elephant that kicks one of calves on the ground to tell it to get up as if there is a threat.</seg>
<seg id="65">And one elephant triggers a retreat, and soon the whole family of elephants are running after her across the savannah in a cloud of dust.</seg>
<seg id="66">(Sound of bees buzzing)</seg>
<seg id="67">Now I've done this experiment many, many times, and the elephants almost always flee.</seg>
<seg id="68">Not only do they run away, but they dust themselves as they're running, as if to knock bees out of the air.</seg>
<seg id="69">And we placed infrasonic microphones around the elephants as we did these experiments.</seg>
<seg id="70">And it turns out they're communicating to each other in infrasonic rumbles to warn each other of the threat of bees and to stay away from the area.</seg>
<seg id="71">So these behavioral discoveries really helped us understand how elephants would react should they hear or see bee sounds.</seg>
<seg id="72">This led me to invent a novel design for a beehive fence, which we are now building around small, one-to-two-acre farms on the most vulnerable frontline areas of Africa where humans and elephants are competing for space.</seg>
<seg id="73">These beehive fences are very, very simple.</seg>
<seg id="74">We use 12 beehives and 12 dummy hives to protect one acre of farmland.</seg>
<seg id="75">Now a dummy hive is simply a piece of plywood which we cut into squares, paint yellow and hang in between the hives.</seg>
<seg id="76">We're basically tricking the elephants into thinking there are more beehives than there really are.</seg>
<seg id="77">And of course, it literally halves the cost of the fence.</seg>
<seg id="78">So there's a hive and a dummy hive and a beehive and now dummy hive, every 10 meters around the outside boundary.</seg>
<seg id="79">They're held up by posts with a shade roof to protect the bees, and they're interconnected with a simple piece of plain wire, which goes all the way around, connecting the hives.</seg>
<seg id="80">So if an elephant tries to enter the farm, he will avoid the beehive at all cost, but he might try and push through between the hive and the dummy hive, causing all the beehives to swing as the wire hits his chest.</seg>
<seg id="81">And as we know from our research work, this will cause the elephants to flee and run away -- and hopefully remember not to come back to that risky area.</seg>
<seg id="82">The bees swarm out of the hive, and they really scare the elephants away.</seg>
<seg id="83">These beehive fences we're studying using things like camera traps to help us understand how elephants are responding to them at night time, which is when most of the crop raiding occurs.</seg>
<seg id="84">And we found in our study farms that we're keeping up to 80 percent of elephants outside of the boundaries of these farms.</seg>
<seg id="85">And the bees and the beehive fences are also pollinating the fields.</seg>
<seg id="86">So we're having a great reduction both in elephant crop raids and a boost in yield through the pollination services that the bees are giving to the crops themselves.</seg>
<seg id="87">The strength of the beehive fences is really important -- the colonies have to be very strong.</seg>
<seg id="88">So we're trying to help farmers grow pollinator-friendly crops to boost their hives, boost the strength of their bees and, of course, produce the most amazing honey.</seg>
<seg id="89">This honey is so valuable as an extra livelihood income for the farmers.</seg>
<seg id="90">It's a healthy alternative to sugar, and in our community, it's a very valuable present to give a mother-in-law, which makes it almost priceless.</seg>
<seg id="91">We now bottle up this honey, and we've called this wild beautiful honey Elephant-Friendly Honey.</seg>
<seg id="92">It is a fun name, but it also attracts attention to our project and helps people understand what we're trying to do to save elephants.</seg>
<seg id="93">We're working now with so many women in over 60 human-elephant conflict sites in 19 countries in Africa and Asia to build these beehive fences, working very, very closely with so many farmers but particularly now with women farmers, helping them to live better in harmony with elephants.</seg>
<seg id="94">One of the things we're trying to do is develop a toolbox of options to live in better harmony with these massive pachyderms.</seg>
<seg id="95">One of those issues is to try and get farmers, and women in particular, to think different about what they're planting inside their farms as well.</seg>
<seg id="96">So we're looking at planting crops that elephants don't particularly want to eat, like chillies, ginger, Moringa, sunflowers.</seg>
<seg id="97">And of course, the bees and the beehive fences love these crops too, because they have beautiful flowers.</seg>
<seg id="98">One of these plants is a spiky plant called sisal -- you may know this here as jute.</seg>
<seg id="99">And this amazing plant can be stripped down and turned into a weaving product.</seg>
<seg id="100">We're working with these amazing women now who live daily with the challenges of elephants to use this plant to weave into baskets to provide an alternative income for them.</seg>
<seg id="101">We've just started construction only three weeks ago on a women's enterprise center where we're going to be working with these women not only as expert beekeepers but as amazing basket weavers; they're going to be processing chili oils, sunflower oils, making lip balms and honey, and we're somewhere on our way to helping these participating farmers live with better eco-generating projects that live and work better with living with elephants.</seg>
<seg id="102">So whether it's matriarchs or mothers or researchers like myself, I do see more women coming to the forefront now to think differently and more boldly about the challenges that we face.</seg>
<seg id="103">With more innovation, and perhaps with some more empathy towards each other, I do believe we can move from a state of conflict with elephants to true coexistence.</seg>
<seg id="104">Thank you.</seg>
</doc>
<doc docid="57418" genre="lectures">
<talkid>57418</talkid>
<seg id="1">It's a microorganism about a hair's width in size.</seg>
<seg id="2">They live everywhere on earth -- saltwater, freshwater, everywhere -- and this one is out looking for food.</seg>
<seg id="3">I remember the first time I saw this thing, I was like eight years old and it completely blew me away.</seg>
<seg id="4">I mean, here is this incredible little creature, it's hunting, swimming, going about its life, but its whole universe fits within a drop of pond water.</seg>
<seg id="5">Paul McEuen: So this little rotifer shows us something really amazing.</seg>
<seg id="6">It says that you can build a machine that is functional, complex, smart, but all in a tiny little package, one so small that it's impossible to see it.</seg>
<seg id="7">Now, the engineer in me is just blown away by this thing, that anyone could make such a creature.</seg>
<seg id="8">But right behind that wonder, I have to admit, is a bit of envy.</seg>
<seg id="9">I mean, nature can do it. Why can't we?</seg>
<seg id="10">Why can't we build tiny robots?</seg>
<seg id="11">Well, I'm not the only one to have this idea.</seg>
<seg id="12">In fact, in the last, oh, few years, researchers around the world have taken up the task of trying to build robots that are so small that they can't be seen.</seg>
<seg id="13">And what we're going to tell you about today is an effort at Cornell University and now at the University of Pennsylvania to try to build tiny robots.</seg>
<seg id="14">OK, so that's the goal.</seg>
<seg id="15">But how do we do it?</seg>
<seg id="16">How do we go about building tiny robots?</seg>
<seg id="17">Well, Pablo Picasso, of all people, gives us our first clue.</seg>
<seg id="18">Picasso said -- ["Good artists copy, great artists steal."]</seg>
<seg id="19">"Good artists copy. Great artists steal."</seg>
<seg id="20">OK. But steal from what?</seg>
<seg id="21">Well, believe it or not, most of the technology you need to build a tiny robot already exists.</seg>
<seg id="22">The semiconductor industry has been getting better and better at making tinier and tinier devices, so at this point they could put something like a million transistors into the size of a package that is occupied by, say, a single-celled paramecium.</seg>
<seg id="23">And it's not just electronics.</seg>
<seg id="24">They can also build little sensors, LEDs, whole communication packages that are too small to be seen.</seg>
<seg id="25">So that's what we're going to do.</seg>
<seg id="26">We're going to steal that technology.</seg>
<seg id="27">Here's a robot.</seg>
<seg id="28">Robot's got two parts, as it turns out.</seg>
<seg id="29">It's got a head, and it's got legs.</seg>
<seg id="30">[Steal these: Brains]</seg>
<seg id="31">We're going to call this a legless robot, which may sound exotic, but they're pretty cool all by themselves.</seg>
<seg id="32">In fact, most of you have a legless robot with you right now.</seg>
<seg id="33">Your smartphone is the world's most successful legless robot.</seg>
<seg id="34">In just 15 years, it has taken over the entire planet.</seg>
<seg id="35">And why not?</seg>
<seg id="36">It's such a beautiful little machine.</seg>
<seg id="37">It's incredibly intelligent, it's got great communication skills, and it's all in a package that you can hold in your hand.</seg>
<seg id="38">So we would like to be able to build something like this, only down at the cellular scale, the size of a paramecium.</seg>
<seg id="39">And here it is.</seg>
<seg id="40">This is our cell-sized smartphone.</seg>
<seg id="41">It even kind of looks like a smartphone, only it's about 10,000 times smaller.</seg>
<seg id="42">We call it an OWIC.</seg>
<seg id="43">[Optical Wireless Integrated Circuits] OK, we're not advertisers, all right?</seg>
<seg id="44">But it's pretty cool all by itself.</seg>
<seg id="45">In fact, this OWIC has a number of parts.</seg>
<seg id="46">So up near the top, there are these cool little solar cells that you shine light on the device and it wakes up a little circuit that's there in the middle.</seg>
<seg id="47">And that circuit can drive a little tiny LED that can blink at you and allows the OWIC to communicate with you.</seg>
<seg id="48">So unlike your cell phone, the OWIC communicates with light, sort of like a tiny firefly.</seg>
<seg id="49">Now, one thing that's pretty cool about these OWICs is we don't make them one at a time, soldering all the pieces together.</seg>
<seg id="50">We make them in massive parallel.</seg>
<seg id="51">For example, about a million of these OWICs can fit on a single four-inch wafer.</seg>
<seg id="52">And just like your phone has different apps, you can have different kinds of OWICs.</seg>
<seg id="53">There can be ones that, say, measure voltage, some that measure temperature, or just have a little light that can blink at you to tell you that it's there.</seg>
<seg id="54">So that's pretty cool, these tiny little devices.</seg>
<seg id="55">And I'd like to tell you about them in a little more detail.</seg>
<seg id="56">But first, I have to tell you about something else.</seg>
<seg id="57">I'm going to tell you a few things about pennies that you might not know.</seg>
<seg id="58">So this one is a little bit older penny.</seg>
<seg id="59">It's got a picture of the Lincoln Memorial on the back.</seg>
<seg id="60">But the first thing you might not know, that if you zoom in, you'll find in the center of this thing you can actually see Abraham Lincoln, just like in the real Lincoln Memorial not so far from here.</seg>
<seg id="61">What I'm sure you don't know, that if you zoom in even further --</seg>
<seg id="62">you'll see that there's actually an OWIC on Abe Lincoln's chest.</seg>
<seg id="63">But the cool thing is, you could stare at this all day long and you would never see it.</seg>
<seg id="64">It's invisible to the naked eye.</seg>
<seg id="65">These OWICs are so small, and we make them in such parallel fashion, that each OWIC costs actually less than a penny.</seg>
<seg id="66">In fact, the most expensive thing in this demo is that little sticker that says "OWIC."</seg>
<seg id="67">That cost about eight cents.</seg>
<seg id="68">Now, we're very excited about these things for all sorts of reasons.</seg>
<seg id="69">For example, we can use them as little tiny secure smart tags, more identifying than a fingerprint.</seg>
<seg id="70">We're actually putting them inside of other medical instruments to give other information, and even starting to think about putting them in the brain to listen to neurons one at a time.</seg>
<seg id="71">In fact, there's only one thing wrong with these OWICs: it's not a robot.</seg>
<seg id="72">It's just a head.</seg>
<seg id="73">And I think we'll all agree that half a robot really isn't a robot at all.</seg>
<seg id="74">Without the legs, we've got basically nothing.</seg>
<seg id="75">MM: OK, so you need the legs, too, if you want to build a robot.</seg>
<seg id="76">Now, here it turns out you can't just steal some preexisting technology.</seg>
<seg id="77">If you want legs for your tiny robot, you need actuators, parts that move.</seg>
<seg id="78">They have to satisfy a lot of different requirements.</seg>
<seg id="79">They need to be low voltage.</seg>
<seg id="80">They need to be low power, too.</seg>
<seg id="81">But most importantly, they have to be small.</seg>
<seg id="82">If you want to build a cell-sized robot, you need cell-sized legs.</seg>
<seg id="83">Now, nobody knows how to build that.</seg>
<seg id="84">There was no preexisting technology that meets all of those demands.</seg>
<seg id="85">To make our legs for our tiny robots, we had to make something new.</seg>
<seg id="86">So here's what we built.</seg>
<seg id="87">This is one of our actuators, and I'm applying a voltage to it.</seg>
<seg id="88">When I do, you can see the actuator respond by curling up.</seg>
<seg id="89">Now, this might not look like much, but if we were to put a red blood cell up on the screen, it'd be about that big, so these are unbelievably tiny curls.</seg>
<seg id="90">They're unbelievably small, and yet this device can just bend and unbend, no problem, nothing breaks.</seg>
<seg id="91">So how do we do it?</seg>
<seg id="92">Well, the actuator is made from a layer of platinum just a dozen atoms or so thick.</seg>
<seg id="93">Now it turns out, if you take platinum and put it in water and apply a voltage to it, atoms from the water will attach or remove themselves from the surface of the platinum, depending on how much voltage you use.</seg>
<seg id="94">This creates a force, and you can use that force for voltage-controlled actuation.</seg>
<seg id="95">The key here was to make everything ultrathin.</seg>
<seg id="96">Then your actuator is flexible enough to bend to these small sizes without breaking, and it can use the forces that come about from just attaching or removing a single layer of atoms.</seg>
<seg id="97">Now, we don't have to build these one at a time, either.</seg>
<seg id="98">In fact, just like the OWICs, we can build them massively in parallel as well.</seg>
<seg id="99">So here's a couple thousand or so actuators, and all I'm doing is applying a voltage, and they all wave, looking like nothing more than the legs of a future robot army.</seg>
<seg id="100">So now we've got the brains and we've got the brawn.</seg>
<seg id="101">We've got the smarts and the actuators.</seg>
<seg id="102">The OWICs are the brains.</seg>
<seg id="103">They give us sensors, they give us power supplies, and they give us a two-way communication system via light.</seg>
<seg id="104">The platinum layers are the muscle.</seg>
<seg id="105">They're what's going to move the robot around.</seg>
<seg id="106">Now we can take those two pieces, put them together and start to build our tiny, tiny robots.</seg>
<seg id="107">The first thing we wanted to build was something really simple.</seg>
<seg id="108">This robot walks around under user control.</seg>
<seg id="109">In the middle are some solar cells and some wiring attached to it.</seg>
<seg id="110">That's the OWIC.</seg>
<seg id="111">They're connected to a set of legs which have a platinum layer and these rigid panels that we put on top that tell the legs how to fold up, which shape they should take.</seg>
<seg id="112">The idea is that by shooting a laser at the different solar cells, you can choose which leg you want to move and make the robot walk around.</seg>
<seg id="113">Now, of course, we don't build those one at a time, either.</seg>
<seg id="114">We build them massively in parallel as well.</seg>
<seg id="115">We can build something like one million robots on a single four-inch wafer.</seg>
<seg id="116">So, for example, this image on the left, this is a chip, and this chip has something like 10,000 robots on it.</seg>
<seg id="117">Now, in our world, the macro world, this thing looks like it might be a new microprocessor or something.</seg>
<seg id="118">But if you take that chip and you put it under a microscope, what you're going to see are thousands and thousands of tiny robots.</seg>
<seg id="119">Now, these robots are still stuck down.</seg>
<seg id="120">They're still attached to the surface that we built them on.</seg>
<seg id="121">In order for them to walk around, we have to release them.</seg>
<seg id="122">We wanted to show you how we do that live, how we release the robot army, but the process involves highly dangerous chemicals, like, really nasty stuff, and we're like a mile from the White House right now?</seg>
<seg id="123">Yeah. They wouldn't let us do it.</seg>
<seg id="124">So --</seg>
<seg id="125">so we're going to show you a movie instead.  What you're looking at here are the final stages of robot deployment.</seg>
<seg id="126">We're using chemicals to etch the substrate out from underneath the robots.</seg>
<seg id="127">When it dissolves, the robots are free to fold up into their final shapes.</seg>
<seg id="128">Now, you can see here, the yield's about 90 percent, so almost every one of those 10,000 robots we build, that's a robot that we can deploy and control later.</seg>
<seg id="129">And we can take those robots and we can put them places as well.</seg>
<seg id="130">So if you look at the movie on the left, that's some robots in water.</seg>
<seg id="131">I'm going to come along with a pipette, and I can vacuum them all up.</seg>
<seg id="132">Now when you inject the robots back out of that pipette, they're just fine.</seg>
<seg id="133">In fact, these robots are so small, they're small enough to pass through the thinnest hypodermic needle you can buy.</seg>
<seg id="134">Yeah, so if you wanted to, you could inject yourself full of robots.</seg>
<seg id="135">I think they're into it.</seg>
<seg id="136">On the right is a robot that we put in some pond water.</seg>
<seg id="137">I want you to wait for just one second.</seg>
<seg id="138">You see that? That was no shark. That was a paramecium.</seg>
<seg id="139">So that's the world that these things live in.</seg>
<seg id="140">OK, so this is all well and good, but you might be wondering at this point, "Well, do they walk?"</seg>
<seg id="141">Right? That's what they're supposed to do. They better. So let's find out.</seg>
<seg id="142">So here's the robot and here are its solar cells in the middle.</seg>
<seg id="143">Those are those little rectangles.</seg>
<seg id="144">I want you to look at the solar cell closest to the top of the slide.</seg>
<seg id="145">See that little white dot? That's a laser spot.</seg>
<seg id="146">Now watch what happens when we start switching that laser between different solar cells on the robot.</seg>
<seg id="147">Off it goes!</seg>
<seg id="148">Off goes the robot marching around the microworld.</seg>
<seg id="149">Now, one of the things that's cool about this movie is: I'm actually piloting the robot in this movie.</seg>
<seg id="150">In fact, for six months, my job was to shoot lasers at tiny cell-sized robots to pilot them around the microworld.</seg>
<seg id="151">This was actually my job.</seg>
<seg id="152">As far as I could tell, that is the coolest job in the world.</seg>
<seg id="153">It was just the feeling of total excitement, like you're doing the impossible.</seg>
<seg id="154">It's a feeling of wonder like that first time I looked through a microscope as a kid staring at that rotifer.</seg>
<seg id="155">Now, I'm a dad, I have a son of my own, and he's about three years old.</seg>
<seg id="156">But one day, he's going to look through a microscope like that one.</seg>
<seg id="157">And I often wonder: What is he going to see?</seg>
<seg id="158">Instead of just watching the microworld, we as humans can now build technology to shape it, to interact with it, to engineer it.</seg>
<seg id="159">In 30 years, when my son is my age, what will we do with that ability?</seg>
<seg id="160">Will microrobots live in our bloodstream, as common as bacteria?</seg>
<seg id="161">Will they live on our crops and get rid of pests?</seg>
<seg id="162">Will they tell us when we have infections, or will they fight cancer cell by cell?</seg>
<seg id="163">PM: And one cool part is, you're going to be able to participate in this revolution.</seg>
<seg id="164">Ten years or so from now, when you buy your new iPhone 15x Moto or whatever it's called --</seg>
<seg id="165">it may come with a little jar with a few thousand tiny robots in it that you can control by an app on your cell phone.</seg>
<seg id="166">So if you want to ride a paramecium, go for it.</seg>
<seg id="167">If you want to -- I don't know -- DJ the world's smallest robot dance party, make it happen.</seg>
<seg id="168">And I, for one, am very excited about that day coming.</seg>
<seg id="169">MM: Thank you.</seg>
</doc>
<doc docid="60872" genre="lectures">
<talkid>60872</talkid>
<seg id="1">I want to lead here by talking a little bit about my credentials to bring this up with you, because, quite honestly, you really, really should not listen to any old person with an opinion about COVID-19.</seg>
<seg id="2">So I've been working in global health for about 20 years, and my specific technical specialty is in health systems and what happens when health systems experience severe shocks.</seg>
<seg id="3">I've also worked in global health journalism; I've written about global health and biosecurity for newspapers and web outlets, and I published a book a few years back about the major global health threats facing us as a planet.</seg>
<seg id="4">I have supported and led epidemiology efforts that range from evaluating Ebola treatment centers to looking at transmission of tuberculosis in health facilities and doing avian influenza preparedness.</seg>
<seg id="5">I have a master's degree in International Health.</seg>
<seg id="6">I'm not a physician. I'm not a nurse.</seg>
<seg id="7">My specialty isn't patient care or taking care of individual people.</seg>
<seg id="8">My specialty is looking at populations and health systems, what happens when diseases move on the large level.</seg>
<seg id="9">If we're ranking sources of global health expertise on a scale of one to 10, one is some random person ranting on Facebook and 10 is the World Health Organization, I'd say you can probably put me at like a seven or an eight.</seg>
<seg id="10">So keep that in mind as I talk to you.</seg>
<seg id="11">I'll start with the basics here, because I think that's gotten lost in some of the media noise around COVID-19.</seg>
<seg id="12">So, COVID-19 is a coronavirus.</seg>
<seg id="13">Coronaviruses are a specific subset of virus, and they have some unique characteristics as viruses.</seg>
<seg id="14">They use RNA instead of DNA as their genetic material, and they're covered in spikes on the surface of the virus.</seg>
<seg id="15">They use those spikes to invade cells.</seg>
<seg id="16">Those spikes are the corona in coronavirus.</seg>
<seg id="17">COVID-19 is known as a novel coronavirus because, until December, we'd only heard of six coronaviruses.</seg>
<seg id="18">COVID-19 is the seventh.</seg>
<seg id="19">It's new to us.</seg>
<seg id="20">It just had its gene sequencing, it just got its name.</seg>
<seg id="21">That's why it's novel.</seg>
<seg id="22">If you remember SARS, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome, or MERS, Middle Eastern Respiratory Syndrome, those were coronaviruses.</seg>
<seg id="23">And they're both called respiratory syndromes, because that's what coronaviruses do -- they go for your lungs.</seg>
<seg id="24">They don't make you puke, they don't make you bleed from the eyeballs, they don't make you hemorrhage.</seg>
<seg id="25">They head for your lungs.</seg>
<seg id="26">COVID-19 is no different.</seg>
<seg id="27">It causes a range of respiratory symptoms that go from stuff like a dry cough and a fever all the way out to fatal viral pneumonia.</seg>
<seg id="28">And that range of symptoms is one of the reasons it's actually been so hard to track this outbreak.</seg>
<seg id="29">Plenty of people get COVID-19 but so gently, their symptoms are so mild, they don't even go to a health care provider.</seg>
<seg id="30">They don't register in the system.</seg>
<seg id="31">Children, in particular, have it very easy with COVID-19, which is something we should all be grateful for.</seg>
<seg id="32">Coronaviruses are zoonotic, which means that they transmit from animals to people.</seg>
<seg id="33">Some coronaviruses, like COVID-19, also transmit person to person.</seg>
<seg id="34">The person-to-person ones travel faster and travel farther, just like COVID-19.</seg>
<seg id="35">Zoonotic illnesses are really hard to get rid of, because they have an animal reservoir.</seg>
<seg id="36">One example is avian influenza, where we can abolish it in farmed animals, in turkeys, in ducks, but it keeps coming back every year because it's brought to us by wild birds.</seg>
<seg id="37">You don't hear a lot about it because avian influenza doesn't transmit person-to-person, but we have outbreaks in poultry farms every year all over the world.</seg>
<seg id="38">COVID-19 most likely skipped from animals into people at a wild animal market in Wuhan, China.</seg>
<seg id="39">Now for the less basic parts.</seg>
<seg id="40">This is not the last major outbreak we're ever going to see.</seg>
<seg id="41">There's going to be more outbreaks, and there's going to be more epidemics.</seg>
<seg id="42">That's not a maybe. That's a given.</seg>
<seg id="43">And it's a result of the way that we, as human beings, are interacting with our planet.</seg>
<seg id="44">Human choices are driving us into a position where we're going to see more outbreaks.</seg>
<seg id="45">Part of that is about climate change and the way a warming climate makes the world more hospitable to viruses and bacteria.</seg>
<seg id="46">But it's also about the way we're pushing into the last wild spaces on our planet.</seg>
<seg id="47">When we burn and plow the Amazon rain forest so that we can have cheap land for ranching, when the last of the African bush gets converted to farms, when wild animals in China are hunted to extinction, human beings come into contact with wildlife populations that they've never come into contact with before, and those populations have new kinds of diseases: bacteria, viruses, stuff we're not ready for.</seg>
<seg id="48">Bats, in particular, have a knack for hosting illnesses that can infect people, but they're not the only animals that do it.</seg>
<seg id="49">So as long as we keep making our remote places less remote, the outbreaks are going to keep coming.</seg>
<seg id="50">We can't stop the outbreaks with quarantine or travel restrictions.</seg>
<seg id="51">That's everybody's first impulse: "Let's stop the people from moving. Let's stop this outbreak from happening."</seg>
<seg id="52">But the fact is, it's really hard to get a good quarantine in place.</seg>
<seg id="53">It's really hard to set up travel restrictions.</seg>
<seg id="54">Even the countries that have made serious investments in public health, like the US and South Korea, can't get that kind of restriction in place fast enough to actually stop an outbreak instantly.</seg>
<seg id="55">There's logistical reasons for that, and there's medical reasons.</seg>
<seg id="56">If you look at COVID-19 right now, it seems like it could have a period where you're infected and show no symptoms that's as long as 24 days.</seg>
<seg id="57">So people are walking around with this virus showing no signs.</seg>
<seg id="58">They're not going to get quarantined. Nobody knows they need quarantining.</seg>
<seg id="59">There's also some real costs to quarantine and to travel restrictions.</seg>
<seg id="60">Humans are social animals, and they resist when you try to hold them into place and when you try to separate them.</seg>
<seg id="61">We saw in the Ebola outbreak that as soon as you put a quarantine in place, people start trying to evade it.</seg>
<seg id="62">Individual patients, if they know there's a strict quarantine protocol, may not go for health care, because they're afraid of the medical system or they can't afford care and they don't want to be separated from their family and friends.</seg>
<seg id="63">Politicians, government officials, when they know that they're going to get quarantined if they talk about outbreaks and cases, may conceal real information for fear of triggering a quarantine protocol.</seg>
<seg id="64">And, of course, these kinds of evasions and dishonesty are exactly what makes it so difficult to track a disease outbreak.</seg>
<seg id="65">We can get better at quarantines and travel restrictions, and we should, but they're not our only option, and they're not our best option for dealing with these situations.</seg>
<seg id="66">The real way for the long haul to make outbreaks less serious is to build the global health system to support core health care functions in every country in the world so that all countries, even poor ones, are able to rapidly identify and treat new infectious diseases as they emerge.</seg>
<seg id="67">China's taken a lot of criticism for its response to COVID-19.</seg>
<seg id="68">But the fact is, what if COVID-19 had emerged in Chad, which has three and a half doctors for every hundred thousand people?</seg>
<seg id="69">What if it had emerged in the Democratic Republic of the Congo, which just released its last Ebola patient from treatment?</seg>
<seg id="70">The truth is, countries like this don't have the resources to respond to an infectious disease -- not to treat people and not to report on it fast enough to help the rest of the world.</seg>
<seg id="71">I led an evaluation of Ebola treatment centers in Sierra Leone, and the fact is that local doctors in Sierra Leone identified the Ebola crisis very quickly, first as a dangerous, contagious hemorrhagic virus and then as Ebola itself.</seg>
<seg id="72">But, having identified it, they didn't have the resources to respond.</seg>
<seg id="73">They didn't have enough doctors, they didn't have enough hospital beds and they didn't have enough information about how to treat Ebola or how to implement infection control.</seg>
<seg id="74">Eleven doctors died in Sierra Leone of Ebola.</seg>
<seg id="75">The country only had 120 when the crisis started.</seg>
<seg id="76">By way of contrast, Dallas Baylor Medical Center has more than a thousand physicians on staff.</seg>
<seg id="77">These are the kinds of inequities that kill people.</seg>
<seg id="78">First, they kill the poor people when the outbreaks start, and then they kill people all over the world when the outbreaks spread.</seg>
<seg id="79">If we really want to slow down these outbreaks and minimize their impact, we need to make sure that every country in the world has the capacity to identify new diseases, treat them and report about them so they can share information.</seg>
<seg id="80">COVID-19 is going to be a huge burden on health systems.</seg>
<seg id="81">COVID-19 has also revealed some real weaknesses in our global health supply chains.</seg>
<seg id="82">Just-in-time-ordering, lean systems are great when things are going well, but in a time of crisis, what it means is we don't have any reserves.</seg>
<seg id="83">If a hospital -- or a country -- runs out of face masks or personal protective equipment, there's no big warehouse full of boxes that we can go to to get more.</seg>
<seg id="84">You have to order more from the supplier, you have to wait for them to produce it and you have to wait for them to ship it, generally from China.</seg>
<seg id="85">That's a time lag at a time when it's most important to move quickly.</seg>
<seg id="86">If we'd been perfectly prepared for COVID-19, China would have identified the outbreak faster.</seg>
<seg id="87">They would have been ready to provide care to infected people without having to build new buildings.</seg>
<seg id="88">They would have shared honest information with citizens so that we didn't see these crazy rumors spreading on social media in China.</seg>
<seg id="89">And they would have shared information with global health authorities so that they could start reporting to national health systems and getting ready for when the virus spread.</seg>
<seg id="90">National health systems would then have been able to stockpile the protective equipment they needed and train health care providers on treatment and infection control.</seg>
<seg id="91">We'd have science-based protocols for what to do when things happen, like cruise ships have infected patients.</seg>
<seg id="92">And we'd have real information going out to people everywhere, so we wouldn't see embarrassing, shameful incidents of xenophobia, like Asian-looking people getting attacked on the street in Philadelphia.</seg>
<seg id="93">But even with all of that in place, we would still have outbreaks.</seg>
<seg id="94">The choices we're making about how we occupy this planet make that inevitable.</seg>
<seg id="95">As far as we have an expert consensus on COVID-19, it's this: here in the US, and globally, it's going to get worse before it gets better.</seg>
<seg id="96">We're seeing cases of human transmission that aren't from returning travel, that are just happening in the community, and we're seeing people infected with COVID-19 when we don't even know where the infection came from.</seg>
<seg id="97">Those are signs of an outbreak that's getting worse, not an outbreak that's under control.</seg>
<seg id="98">It's depressing, but it's not surprising.</seg>
<seg id="99">Global health experts, when they talk about the scenario of new viruses, this is one of the scenarios that they look at.</seg>
<seg id="100">We all hoped we'd get off easy, but when experts talk about viral planning, this is the kind of situation and the way they expect the virus to move.</seg>
<seg id="101">I want to close here with some personal advice.</seg>
<seg id="102">Wash your hands.</seg>
<seg id="103">Wash your hands a lot.</seg>
<seg id="104">I know you already wash your hands a lot because you're not disgusting, but wash your hands even more.</seg>
<seg id="105">Set up cues and routines in your life to get you to wash your hands.</seg>
<seg id="106">Wash your hands every time you enter and leave a building.</seg>
<seg id="107">Wash your hands when you go into a meeting and when you come out of a meeting.</seg>
<seg id="108">Get rituals that are based around handwashing.</seg>
<seg id="109">Sanitize your phone.</seg>
<seg id="110">You touch that phone with your dirty, unwashed hands all the time.</seg>
<seg id="111">I know you take it into the bathroom with you.</seg>
<seg id="112">So sanitize your phone and consider not using it as often in public.</seg>
<seg id="113">Maybe TikTok and Instagram can be home things only.</seg>
<seg id="114">Don't touch your face.</seg>
<seg id="115">Don't rub your eyes.</seg>
<seg id="116">Don't bite your fingernails.</seg>
<seg id="117">Don't wipe your nose on the back of your hand.</seg>
<seg id="118">I mean, don't do that anyway because, gross.</seg>
<seg id="119">Don't wear a face mask.</seg>
<seg id="120">Face masks are for sick people and health care providers.</seg>
<seg id="121">If you're sick, your face mask holds in all your coughing and sneezing and protects the people around you.</seg>
<seg id="122">And if you're a health care provider, your face mask is one tool in a set of tools called personal protective equipment that you're trained to use so that you can give patient care and not get sick yourself.</seg>
<seg id="123">If you're a regular healthy person wearing a face mask, it's just making your face sweaty.</seg>
<seg id="124">Leave the face masks in stores for the doctors and the nurses and the sick people.</seg>
<seg id="125">If you think you have symptoms of COVID-19, stay home, call your doctor for advice.</seg>
<seg id="126">If you're diagnosed with COVID-19, remember it's generally very mild.</seg>
<seg id="127">And if you're a smoker, right now is the best possible time to quit smoking.</seg>
<seg id="128">I mean, if you're a smoker, right now is always the best possible time to quit smoking, but if you're a smoker and you're worried about COVID-19, I guarantee that quitting is absolutely the best thing you can do to protect yourself from the worst impacts of COVID-19.</seg>
<seg id="129">COVID-19 is scary stuff, at a time when pretty much all of our news feels like scary stuff.</seg>
<seg id="130">And there's a lot of bad but appealing options for dealing with it: panic, xenophobia, agoraphobia, authoritarianism, oversimplified lies that make us think that hate and fury and loneliness are the solution to outbreaks.</seg>
<seg id="131">But they're not.</seg>
<seg id="132">They just make us less prepared.</seg>
<seg id="133">There's also a boring but useful set of options that we can use in response to outbreaks, things like improving health care here and everywhere; investing in health infrastructure and disease surveillance so that we know when the new diseases come; building health systems all over the world; looking at strengthening our supply chains so they're ready for emergencies; and better education, so we're capable of talking about disease outbreaks and the mathematics of risk without just blind panic.</seg>
<seg id="134">We need to be guided by equity here, because in this situation, like so many, equity is actually in our own self-interest.</seg>
<seg id="135">So thank you so much for listening to me today, and can I be the first one to tell you: wash your hands when you leave the theater.</seg>
</doc>
<doc docid="62628" genre="lectures">
<talkid>62628</talkid>
<seg id="1">I never thought that I would be giving  my TED Talk somewhere like this.</seg>
<seg id="2">But, like half of humanity, I've spent the last four weeks under lockdown due to the global pandemic created by COVID-19.</seg>
<seg id="3">I am extremely fortunate that during this time I've been able to come here to these woods near my home in southern England.</seg>
<seg id="4">These woods have always inspired me, and as humanity now tries to think about how we can find the inspiration to retake control of our actions so that terrible things don't come down the road without us taking action to avert them, I thought this is a good place for us to talk.</seg>
<seg id="5">And I'd like to begin that story six years ago, when I had first joined the United Nations.</seg>
<seg id="6">Now, I firmly believe that the UN is of unparalleled importance in the world right now to promote collaboration and cooperation.</seg>
<seg id="7">But what they don't tell you when you join is that this essential work is delivered mainly in the form of extremely boring meetings -- extremely long, boring meetings.</seg>
<seg id="8">Now, you may feel that you have attended some long, boring meetings in your life, and I'm sure you have.</seg>
<seg id="9">But these UN meetings are next-level, and everyone who works there approaches them with a level of calm normally only achieved by Zen masters.</seg>
<seg id="10">But myself, I wasn't ready for that.</seg>
<seg id="11">I joined expecting drama and tension and breakthrough.</seg>
<seg id="12">What I wasn't ready for was a process that seemed to move at the speed of a glacier, at the speed that a glacier used to move at.</seg>
<seg id="13">Now, in the middle of one of these long meetings, I was handed a note.</seg>
<seg id="14">And it was handed to me by my friend and colleague and coauthor, Christiana Figueres.</seg>
<seg id="15">Christiana was the Executive Secretary of the UN Framework Convention on Climate Change, and as such, had overall responsibility for the UN reaching what would become the Paris Agreement.</seg>
<seg id="16">I was running political strategy for her.</seg>
<seg id="17">So when she handed me this note, I assumed that it would contain detailed political instructions about how we were going to get out of this nightmare quagmire that we seemed to be trapped in.</seg>
<seg id="18">I took the note and looked at it.</seg>
<seg id="19">It said, "Painful. But let's approach with love!"</seg>
<seg id="20">Now, I love this note for lots of reasons.</seg>
<seg id="21">I love the way the little tendrils are coming out from the word "painful."</seg>
<seg id="22">It was a really good visual depiction of how I felt at that moment.</seg>
<seg id="23">But I particularly love it because as I looked at it, I realized that it was a political instruction, and that if we were going to be successful, this was how we were going to do it.</seg>
<seg id="24">So let me explain that.</seg>
<seg id="25">What I'd been feeling in those meetings was actually about control.</seg>
<seg id="26">I had moved my life from Brooklyn in New York to Bonn in Germany with the extremely reluctant support of my wife.</seg>
<seg id="27">My children were now in a school where they couldn't speak the language, and I thought the deal for all this disruption to my world was that I would have some degree of control over what was going to happen.</seg>
<seg id="28">I felt for years that the climate crisis is the defining challenge of our generation, and here I was, ready to play my part and do something for humanity.</seg>
<seg id="29">But I put my hands on the levers of control that I'd been given and pulled them, and nothing happened.</seg>
<seg id="30">I realized the things I could control were menial day-to-day things.</seg>
<seg id="31">"Do I ride my bike to work?" and "Where do I have lunch?", whereas the things that were going to determine whether we were going to be successful were issues like, "Will Russia wreck the negotiations?"</seg>
<seg id="32">"Will China take responsibility for their emissions?"</seg>
<seg id="33">"Will the US help poorer countries deal with their burden of climate change?"</seg>
<seg id="34">The differential felt so huge, I could see no way I could bridge the two.</seg>
<seg id="35">It felt futile.</seg>
<seg id="36">I began to feel that I'd made a mistake.</seg>
<seg id="37">I began to get depressed.</seg>
<seg id="38">But even in that moment, I realized that what I was feeling had a lot of similarities to what I'd felt when I first found out about the climate crisis years before.</seg>
<seg id="39">I'd spent many of my most formative years as a Buddhist monk in my early 20s, but I left the monastic life, because even then, 20 years ago, I felt that the climate crisis was already a quickly unfolding emergency and I wanted to do my part.</seg>
<seg id="40">But once I'd left and I rejoined the world, I looked at what I could control.</seg>
<seg id="41">It was the few tons of my own emissions and that of my immediate family, which political party I voted for every few years, whether I went on a march or two.</seg>
<seg id="42">And then I looked at the issues that would determine the outcome, and they were big geopolitical negotiations, massive infrastructure spending plans, what everybody else did.</seg>
<seg id="43">The differential again felt so huge that I couldn't see any way that I could bridge it.</seg>
<seg id="44">I kept trying to take action, but it didn't really stick.</seg>
<seg id="45">It felt futile.</seg>
<seg id="46">Now, we know that this can be a common experience for many people, and maybe you have had this experience.</seg>
<seg id="47">When faced with an enormous challenge that we don't feel we have any agency or control over, our mind can do a little trick to protect us.</seg>
<seg id="48">We don't like to feel like we're out of control facing big forces, so our mind will tell us, "Maybe it's not that important. Maybe it's not happening in the way that people say, anyway."</seg>
<seg id="49">Or, it plays down our own role.</seg>
<seg id="50">"There's nothing that you individually can do, so why try?"</seg>
<seg id="51">But there's something odd going on here.</seg>
<seg id="52">Is it really true that humans will only take sustained and dedicated action on an issue of paramount importance when they feel they have a high degree of control?</seg>
<seg id="53">Look at these pictures.</seg>
<seg id="54">These people are caregivers and nurses who have been helping humanity face the coronavirus COVID-19 as it has swept around the world as a pandemic in the last few months.</seg>
<seg id="55">Are these people able to prevent the spread of the disease?</seg>
<seg id="56">No.</seg>
<seg id="57">Are they able to prevent their patients from dying?</seg>
<seg id="58">Some, they will have been able to prevent, but others, it will have been beyond their control.</seg>
<seg id="59">Does that make their contribution futile and meaningless?</seg>
<seg id="60">Actually, it's offensive even to suggest that.</seg>
<seg id="61">What they are doing is caring for their fellow human beings at their moment of greatest vulnerability.</seg>
<seg id="62">And that work has huge meaning, to the point where I only have to show you those pictures for it to become evident that the courage and humanity those people are demonstrating makes their work some of the most meaningful things that can be done as human beings, even though they can't control the outcome.</seg>
<seg id="63">Now, that's interesting, because it shows us that humans are capable of taking dedicated and sustained action, even when they can't control the outcome.</seg>
<seg id="64">But it leaves us with another challenge.</seg>
<seg id="65">With the climate crisis, the action that we take is separated from the impact of it, whereas what is happening with these images is these nurses are being sustained not by the lofty goal of changing the world but by the day-to-day satisfaction of caring for another human being through their moments of weakness.</seg>
<seg id="66">With the climate crisis, we have this huge separation.</seg>
<seg id="67">It used to be that we were separated by time.</seg>
<seg id="68">The impacts of the climate crisis were supposed to be way off in the future.</seg>
<seg id="69">But right now, the future has come to meet us.</seg>
<seg id="70">Continents are on fire.</seg>
<seg id="71">Cities are going underwater.</seg>
<seg id="72">Countries are going underwater.</seg>
<seg id="73">Hundreds of thousands of people are on the move as a result of climate change.</seg>
<seg id="74">But even if those impacts are no longer separated from us by time, they're still separated from us in a way that makes it difficult to feel that direct connection.</seg>
<seg id="75">They happen somewhere else to somebody else or to us in a different way than we're used to experiencing it.</seg>
<seg id="76">So even though that story of the nurse demonstrates something to us about human nature, we're going to have find a different way of dealing with the climate crisis in a sustained manner.</seg>
<seg id="77">There is a way that we can do this, a powerful combination of a deep and supporting attitude that when combined with consistent action can enable whole societies to take dedicated action in a sustained way towards a shared goal.</seg>
<seg id="78">It's been used to great effect throughout history.</seg>
<seg id="79">So let me give you a historical story to explain it.</seg>
<seg id="80">Right now, I am standing in the woods near my home in southern England.</seg>
<seg id="81">And these particular woods are not far from London.</seg>
<seg id="82">Eighty years ago, that city was under attack.</seg>
<seg id="83">In the late 1930s, the people of Britain would do anything to avoid facing the reality that Hitler would stop at nothing to conquer Europe.</seg>
<seg id="84">Fresh with memories from the First World War, they were terrified of Nazi aggression and would do anything to avoid facing that reality.</seg>
<seg id="85">In the end, the reality broke through.</seg>
<seg id="86">Churchill is remembered for many things, and not all of them positive, but what he did in those early days of the war was he changed the story the people of Britain told themselves about what they were doing and what was to come.</seg>
<seg id="87">Where previously there had been trepidation and nervousness and fear, there came a calm resolve, an island alone, a greatest hour, a greatest generation, a country that would fight them on the beaches and in the hills and in the streets, a country that would never surrender.</seg>
<seg id="88">That change from fear and trepidation to facing the reality, whatever it was and however dark it was, had nothing to do with the likelihood of winning the war.</seg>
<seg id="89">There was no news from the front that battles were going better or even at that point that a powerful new ally had joined the fight and changed the odds in their favor.</seg>
<seg id="90">It was simply a choice.</seg>
<seg id="91">A deep, determined, stubborn form of optimism emerged, not avoiding or denying the darkness that was pressing in but refusing to be cowed by it.</seg>
<seg id="92">That stubborn optimism is powerful.</seg>
<seg id="93">It is not dependent on assuming that the outcome is going to be good or having a form of wishful thinking about the future.</seg>
<seg id="94">However, what it does is it animates action and infuses it with meaning.</seg>
<seg id="95">We know that from that time, despite the risk and despite the challenge, it was a meaningful time full of purpose, and multiple accounts have confirmed that actions that ranged from pilots in the Battle of Britain to the simple act of pulling potatoes from the soil became infused with meaning.</seg>
<seg id="96">They were animated towards a shared purpose and a shared outcome.</seg>
<seg id="97">We have seen that throughout history.</seg>
<seg id="98">This coupling of a deep and determined stubborn optimism with action, when the optimism leads to a determined action, then they can become self-sustaining: without the stubborn optimism, the action doesn't sustain itself; without the action, the stubborn optimism is just an attitude.</seg>
<seg id="99">The two together can transform an entire issue and change the world.</seg>
<seg id="100">We saw this at multiple other times.</seg>
<seg id="101">We saw it when Rosa Parks refused to get up from the bus.</seg>
<seg id="102">We saw it in Gandhi's long salt marches to the beach.</seg>
<seg id="103">We saw it when the suffragettes said that "Courage calls to courage everywhere."</seg>
<seg id="104">And we saw it when Kennedy said that within 10 years, he would put a man on the moon.</seg>
<seg id="105">That electrified a generation and focused them on a shared goal against a dark and frightening adversary, even though they didn't know how they would achieve it.</seg>
<seg id="106">In each of these cases, a realistic and gritty but determined, stubborn optimism was not the result of success.</seg>
<seg id="107">It was the cause of it.</seg>
<seg id="108">That is also how the transformation happened on the road to the Paris Agreement.</seg>
<seg id="109">Those challenging, difficult, pessimistic meetings transformed as more and more people decided that this was our moment to dig in and determine that we would not drop the ball on our watch, and we would deliver the outcome that we knew was possible.</seg>
<seg id="110">More and more people transformed themselves to that perspective and began to work, and in the end, that worked its way up into a wave of momentum that crashed over us and delivered many of those challenging issues with a better outcome than we could possibly have imagined.</seg>
<seg id="111">And even now, years later and with a climate denier in the White House, much that was put in motion in those days is still unfolding, and we have everything to play for in the coming months and years on dealing with the climate crisis.</seg>
<seg id="112">So right now, we are coming through one of the most challenging periods in the lives of most of us.</seg>
<seg id="113">The global pandemic has been frightening, whether personal tragedy has been involved or not.</seg>
<seg id="114">But it has also shaken our belief that we are powerless in the face of great change.</seg>
<seg id="115">In the space of a few weeks, we mobilized to the point where half of humanity took drastic action to protect the most vulnerable.</seg>
<seg id="116">If we're capable of that, maybe we have not yet tested the limits of what humanity can do when it rises to meet a shared challenge.</seg>
<seg id="117">We now need to move beyond this narrative of powerlessness, because make no mistake -- the climate crisis will be orders of magnitude worse than the pandemic if we do not take the action that we can still take to avert the tragedy that we see coming towards us.</seg>
<seg id="118">We can no longer afford the luxury of feeling powerless.</seg>
<seg id="119">The truth is that future generations will look back at this precise moment with awe as we stand at the crossroads between a regenerative future and one where we have thrown it all away.</seg>
<seg id="120">And the truth is that a lot is going pretty well for us in this transition.</seg>
<seg id="121">Costs for clean energy are coming down.</seg>
<seg id="122">Cities are transforming. Land is being regenerated.</seg>
<seg id="123">People are on the streets calling for change with a verve and tenacity we have not seen for a generation.</seg>
<seg id="124">Genuine success is possible in this transition, and genuine failure is possible, too, which makes this the most exciting time to be alive.</seg>
<seg id="125">We can take a decision right now that we will approach this challenge with a stubborn form of gritty, realistic and determined optimism and do everything within our power to ensure that we shape the path as we come out of this pandemic towards a regenerative future.</seg>
<seg id="126">We can all decide that we will be hopeful beacons for humanity even if there are dark days ahead, and we can decide that we will be responsible, we will reduce our own emissions by at least 50 percent in the next 10 years, and we will take action to engage with governments and corporations to ensure they do what is necessary coming out of the pandemic to rebuild the world that we want them to.</seg>
<seg id="127">Right now, all of these things are possible.</seg>
<seg id="128">So let's go back to that boring meeting room where I'm looking at that note from Christiana.</seg>
<seg id="129">And looking at it took me back to some of the most transformative experiences of my life.</seg>
<seg id="130">One of the many things I learned as a monk is that a bright mind and a joyful heart is both the path and the goal in life.</seg>
<seg id="131">This stubborn optimism is a form of applied love.</seg>
<seg id="132">It is both the world we want to create and the way in which we can create that world.</seg>
<seg id="133">And it is a choice for all of us.</seg>
<seg id="134">Choosing to face this moment with stubborn optimism can fill our lives with meaning and purpose, and in doing so, we can put a hand on the arc of history and bend it towards the future that we choose.</seg>
<seg id="135">Yes, living now feels out of control.</seg>
<seg id="136">It feels frightening and scary and new.</seg>
<seg id="137">But let's not falter at this most crucial of transitions that is coming at us right now.</seg>
<seg id="138">Let's face it with stubborn and determined optimism.</seg>
<seg id="139">Yes, seeing the changes in the world right now can be painful.</seg>
<seg id="140">But let's approach it with love.</seg>
<seg id="141">Thank you.</seg>
</doc>
</srcset>
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