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It used to be that if you wanted to get a computer to do something new, you would have to program it. Now, programming, for those of you here that haven't done it yourself, requires laying out in excruciating detail every single step that you want the computer to do in order to achieve your goal. Now, if you want to do something that you don't know how to do yourself, then this is going to be a great challenge. So this was the challenge faced by this man, Arthur Samuel. In 1956, he wanted to get this computer to be able to beat him at checkers. How can you write a program, lay out in excruciating detail, how to be better than you at checkers? So he came up with an idea: he had the computer play against itself thousands of times and learn how to play checkers. And indeed it worked, and in fact, by 1962, this computer had beaten the Connecticut state champion. So Arthur Samuel was the father of machine learning, and I have a great debt to him, because I am a machine learning practitioner. I was the president of Kaggle, a community of over 200,000 machine learning practictioners. Kaggle puts up competitions to try and get them to solve previously unsolved problems, and it's been successful hundreds of times. So from this vantage point, I was able to find out a lot about what machine learning can do in the past, can do today, and what it could do in the future. Perhaps the first big success of machine learning commercially was Google. Google showed that it is possible to find information by using a computer algorithm, and this algorithm is based on machine learning. Since that time, there have been many commercial successes of machine learning. Companies like Amazon and Netflix use machine learning to suggest products that you might like to buy, movies that you might like to watch. Sometimes, it's almost creepy. Companies like LinkedIn and Facebook sometimes will tell you about who your friends might be and you have no idea how it did it, and this is because it's using the power of machine learning. These are algorithms that have learned how to do this from data rather than being programmed by hand. This is also how IBM was successful in getting Watson to beat the two world champions at "Jeopardy," answering incredibly subtle and complex questions like this one. ["The ancient 'Lion of Nimrud' went missing from this city's national museum in 2003 (along with a lot of other stuff)"] This is also why we are now able to see the first self-driving cars. If you want to be able to tell the difference between, say, a tree and a pedestrian, well, that's pretty important. We don't know how to write those programs by hand, but with machine learning, this is now possible. And in fact, this car has driven over a million miles without any accidents on regular roads. So we now know that computers can learn, and computers can learn to do things that we actually sometimes don't know how to do ourselves, or maybe can do them better than us. One of the most amazing examples I've seen of machine learning happened on a project that I ran at Kaggle where a team run by a guy called Geoffrey Hinton from the University of Toronto won a competition for automatic drug discovery. Now, what was extraordinary here is not just that they beat all of the algorithms developed by Merck or the international academic community, but nobody on the team had any background in chemistry or biology or life sciences, and they did it in two weeks. How did they do this? They used an extraordinary algorithm called deep learning. So important was this that in fact the success was covered in The New York Times in a front page article a few weeks later. This is Geoffrey Hinton here on the left-hand side. Deep learning is an algorithm inspired by how the human brain works, and as a result it's an algorithm which has no theoretical limitations on what it can do. The more data you give it and the more computation time you give it, the better it gets. The New York Times also showed in this article another extraordinary result of deep learning which I'm going to show you now. It shows that computers can listen and understand. (Video) Richard Rashid: Now, the last step that I want to be able to take in this process is to actually speak to you in Chinese. Now the key thing there is, we've been able to take a large amount of information from many Chinese speakers and produce a text-to-speech system that takes Chinese text and converts it into Chinese language, and then we've taken an hour or so of my own voice and we've used that to modulate the standard text-to-speech system so that it would sound like me. Again, the result's not perfect. There are in fact quite a few errors. (In Chinese) (Applause) There's much work to be done in this area. (In Chinese) (Applause) Jeremy Howard: Well, that was at a machine learning conference in China. It's not often, actually, at academic conferences that you do hear spontaneous applause, although of course sometimes at TEDx conferences, feel free. Everything you saw there was happening with deep learning. (Applause) Thank you. The transcription in English was deep learning. The translation to Chinese and the text in the top right, deep learning, and the construction of the voice was deep learning as well. So deep learning is this extraordinary thing. It's a single algorithm that can seem to do almost anything, and I discovered that a year earlier, it had also learned to see. In this obscure competition from Germany called the German Traffic Sign Recognition Benchmark, deep learning had learned to recognize traffic signs like this one. Not only could it recognize the traffic signs better than any other algorithm, the leaderboard actually showed it was better than people, about twice as good as people. So by 2011, we had the first example of computers that can see better than people. Since that time, a lot has happened. In 2012, Google announced that they had a deep learning algorithm watch YouTube videos and crunched the data on 16,000 computers for a month, and the computer independently learned about concepts such as people and cats just by watching the videos. This is much like the way that humans learn. Humans don't learn by being told what they see, but by learning for themselves what these things are. Also in 2012, Geoffrey Hinton, who we saw earlier, won the very popular ImageNet competition, looking to try to figure out from one and a half million images what they're pictures of. As of 2014, we're now down to a six percent error rate in image recognition. This is better than people, again. So machines really are doing an extraordinarily good job of this, and it is now being used in industry. For example, Google announced last year that they had mapped every single location in France in two hours, and the way they did it was that they fed street view images into a deep learning algorithm to recognize and read street numbers. Imagine how long it would have taken before: dozens of people, many years. This is also happening in China. Baidu is kind of the Chinese Google, I guess, and what you see here in the top left is an example of a picture that I uploaded to Baidu's deep learning system, and underneath you can see that the system has understood what that picture is and found similar images. The similar images actually have similar backgrounds, similar directions of the faces, even some with their tongue out. This is not clearly looking at the text of a web page. All I uploaded was an image. So we now have computers which really understand what they see and can therefore search databases of hundreds of millions of images in real time. So what does it mean now that computers can see? Well, it's not just that computers can see. In fact, deep learning has done more than that. Complex, nuanced sentences like this one are now understandable with deep learning algorithms. As you can see here, this Stanford-based system showing the red dot at the top has figured out that this sentence is expressing negative sentiment. Deep learning now in fact is near human performance at understanding what sentences are about and what it is saying about those things. Also, deep learning has been used to read Chinese, again at about native Chinese speaker level. This algorithm developed out of Switzerland by people, none of whom speak or understand any Chinese. As I say, using deep learning is about the best system in the world for this, even compared to native human understanding. This is a system that we put together at my company which shows putting all this stuff together. These are pictures which have no text attached, and as I'm typing in here sentences, in real time it's understanding these pictures and figuring out what they're about and finding pictures that are similar to the text that I'm writing. So you can see, it's actually understanding my sentences and actually understanding these pictures. I know that you've seen something like this on Google, where you can type in things and it will show you pictures, but actually what it's doing is it's searching the webpage for the text. This is very different from actually understanding the images. This is something that computers have only been able to do for the first time in the last few months. So we can see now that computers can not only see but they can also read, and, of course, we've shown that they can understand what they hear. Perhaps not surprising now that I'm going to tell you they can write. Here is some text that I generated using a deep learning algorithm yesterday. And here is some text that an algorithm out of Stanford generated. Each of these sentences was generated by a deep learning algorithm to describe each of those pictures. This algorithm before has never seen a man in a black shirt playing a guitar. It's seen a man before, it's seen black before, it's seen a guitar before, but it has independently generated this novel description of this picture. We're still not quite at human performance here, but we're close. In tests, humans prefer the computer-generated caption one out of four times. Now this system is now only two weeks old, so probably within the next year, the computer algorithm will be well past human performance at the rate things are going. So computers can also write. So we put all this together and it leads to very exciting opportunities. For example, in medicine, a team in Boston announced that they had discovered dozens of new clinically relevant features of tumors which help doctors make a prognosis of a cancer. Very similarly, in Stanford, a group there announced that, looking at tissues under magnification, they've developed a machine learning-based system which in fact is better than human pathologists at predicting survival rates for cancer sufferers. In both of these cases, not only were the predictions more accurate, but they generated new insightful science. In the radiology case, they were new clinical indicators that humans can understand. In this pathology case, the computer system actually discovered that the cells around the cancer are as important as the cancer cells themselves in making a diagnosis. This is the opposite of what pathologists had been taught for decades. In each of those two cases, they were systems developed by a combination of medical experts and machine learning experts, but as of last year, we're now beyond that too. This is an example of identifying cancerous areas of human tissue under a microscope. The system being shown here can identify those areas more accurately, or about as accurately, as human pathologists, but was built entirely with deep learning using no medical expertise by people who have no background in the field. Similarly, here, this neuron segmentation. We can now segment neurons about as accurately as humans can, but this system was developed with deep learning using people with no previous background in medicine. So myself, as somebody with no previous background in medicine, I seem to be entirely well qualified to start a new medical company, which I did. I was kind of terrified of doing it, but the theory seemed to suggest that it ought to be possible to do very useful medicine using just these data analytic techniques. And thankfully, the feedback has been fantastic, not just from the media but from the medical community, who have been very supportive. The theory is that we can take the middle part of the medical process and turn that into data analysis as much as possible, leaving doctors to do what they're best at. I want to give you an example. It now takes us about 15 minutes to generate a new medical diagnostic test and I'll show you that in real time now, but I've compressed it down to three minutes by cutting some pieces out. Rather than showing you creating a medical diagnostic test, I'm going to show you a diagnostic test of car images, because that's something we can all understand. So here we're starting with about 1.5 million car images, and I want to create something that can split them into the angle of the photo that's being taken. So these images are entirely unlabeled, so I have to start from scratch. With our deep learning algorithm, it can automatically identify areas of structure in these images. So the nice thing is that the human and the computer can now work together. So the human, as you can see here, is telling the computer about areas of interest which it wants the computer then to try and use to improve its algorithm. Now, these deep learning systems actually are in 16,000-dimensional space, so you can see here the computer rotating this through that space, trying to find new areas of structure. And when it does so successfully, the human who is driving it can then point out the areas that are interesting. So here, the computer has successfully found areas, for example, angles. So as we go through this process, we're gradually telling the computer more and more about the kinds of structures we're looking for. You can imagine in a diagnostic test this would be a pathologist identifying areas of pathosis, for example, or a radiologist indicating potentially troublesome nodules. And sometimes it can be difficult for the algorithm. In this case, it got kind of confused. The fronts and the backs of the cars are all mixed up. So here we have to be a bit more careful, manually selecting these fronts as opposed to the backs, then telling the computer that this is a type of group that we're interested in. So we do that for a while, we skip over a little bit, and then we train the machine learning algorithm based on these couple of hundred things, and we hope that it's gotten a lot better. You can see, it's now started to fade some of these pictures out, showing us that it already is recognizing how to understand some of these itself. We can then use this concept of similar images, and using similar images, you can now see, the computer at this point is able to entirely find just the fronts of cars. So at this point, the human can tell the computer, okay, yes, you've done a good job of that. Sometimes, of course, even at this point it's still difficult to separate out groups. In this case, even after we let the computer try to rotate this for a while, we still find that the left sides and the right sides pictures are all mixed up together. So we can again give the computer some hints, and we say, okay, try and find a projection that separates out the left sides and the right sides as much as possible using this deep learning algorithm. And giving it that hint -- ah, okay, it's been successful. It's managed to find a way of thinking about these objects that's separated out these together. So you get the idea here. This is a case not where the human is being replaced by a computer, but where they're working together. What we're doing here is we're replacing something that used to take a team of five or six people about seven years and replacing it with something that takes 15 minutes for one person acting alone. So this process takes about four or five iterations. You can see we now have 62 percent of our 1.5 million images classified correctly. And at this point, we can start to quite quickly grab whole big sections, check through them to make sure that there's no mistakes. Where there are mistakes, we can let the computer know about them. And using this kind of process for each of the different groups, we are now up to an 80 percent success rate in classifying the 1.5 million images. And at this point, it's just a case of finding the small number that aren't classified correctly, and trying to understand why. And using that approach, by 15 minutes we get to 97 percent classification rates. So this kind of technique could allow us to fix a major problem, which is that there's a lack of medical expertise in the world. The World Economic Forum says that there's between a 10x and a 20x shortage of physicians in the developing world, and it would take about 300 years to train enough people to fix that problem. So imagine if we can help enhance their efficiency using these deep learning approaches? So I'm very excited about the opportunities. I'm also concerned about the problems. The problem here is that every area in blue on this map is somewhere where services are over 80 percent of employment. What are services? These are services. These are also the exact things that computers have just learned how to do. So 80 percent of the world's employment in the developed world is stuff that computers have just learned how to do. What does that mean? Well, it'll be fine. They'll be replaced by other jobs. For example, there will be more jobs for data scientists. Well, not really. It doesn't take data scientists very long to build these things. For example, these four algorithms were all built by the same guy. So if you think, oh, it's all happened before, we've seen the results in the past of when new things come along and they get replaced by new jobs, what are these new jobs going to be? It's very hard for us to estimate this, because human performance grows at this gradual rate, but we now have a system, deep learning, that we know actually grows in capability exponentially. And we're here. So currently, we see the things around us and we say, "Oh, computers are still pretty dumb." Right? But in five years' time, computers will be off this chart. So we need to be starting to think about this capability right now. We have seen this once before, of course. In the Industrial Revolution, we saw a step change in capability thanks to engines. The thing is, though, that after a while, things flattened out. There was social disruption, but once engines were used to generate power in all the situations, things really settled down. The Machine Learning Revolution is going to be very different from the Industrial Revolution, because the Machine Learning Revolution, it never settles down. The better computers get at intellectual activities, the more they can build better computers to be better at intellectual capabilities, so this is going to be a kind of change that the world has actually never experienced before, so your previous understanding of what's possible is different. This is already impacting us. In the last 25 years, as capital productivity has increased, labor productivity has been flat, in fact even a little bit down. So I want us to start having this discussion now. I know that when I often tell people about this situation, people can be quite dismissive. Well, computers can't really think, they don't emote, they don't understand poetry, we don't really understand how they work. So what? Computers right now can do the things that humans spend most of their time being paid to do, so now's the time to start thinking about how we're going to adjust our social structures and economic structures to be aware of this new reality. Thank you. (Applause)

I was on a long road trip this summer, and I was having a wonderful time listening to the amazing Isabel Wilkerson's "The Warmth of Other Suns." It documents six million black folks fleeing the South from 1915 to 1970 looking for a respite from all the brutality and trying to get to a better opportunity up North, and it was filled with stories of the resilience and the brilliance of African-Americans, and it was also really hard to hear all the stories of the horrors and the humility, and all the humiliations. It was especially hard to hear about the beatings and the burnings and the lynchings of black men. And I said, "You know, this is a little deep. I need a break. I'm going to turn on the radio." I turned it on, and there it was: Ferguson, Missouri, Michael Brown, 18-year-old black man, unarmed, shot by a white police officer, laid on the ground dead, blood running for four hours while his grandmother and little children and his neighbors watched in horror, and I thought, here it is again. This violence, this brutality against black men has been going on for centuries. I mean, it's the same story. It's just different names. It could have been Amadou Diallo. It could have been Sean Bell. It could have been Oscar Grant. It could have been Trayvon Martin. This violence, this brutality, is really something that's part of our national psyche. It's part of our collective history. What are we going to do about it? You know that part of us that still crosses the street, locks the doors, clutches the purses, when we see young black men? That part. I mean, I know we're not shooting people down in the street, but I'm saying that the same stereotypes and prejudices that fuel those kinds of tragic incidents are in us. We've been schooled in them as well. I believe that we can stop these types of incidents, these Fergusons from happening, by looking within and being willing to change ourselves. So I have a call to action for you. There are three things that I want to offer us today to think about as ways to stop Ferguson from happening again; three things that I think will help us reform our images of young black men; three things that I'm hoping will not only protect them but will open the world so that they can thrive. Can you imagine that? Can you imagine our country embracing young black men, seeing them as part of our future, giving them that kind of openness, that kind of grace we give to people we love? How much better would our lives be? How much better would our country be? Let me just start with number one. We gotta get out of denial. Stop trying to be good people. We need real people. You know, I do a lot of diversity work, and people will come up to me at the beginning of the workshop. They're like, "Oh, Ms. Diversity Lady, we're so glad you're here" -- (Laughter) -- "but we don't have a biased bone in our body." And I'm like, "Really? Because I do this work every day, and I see all my biases." I mean, not too long ago, I was on a plane and I heard the voice of a woman pilot coming over the P.A. system, and I was just so excited, so thrilled. I was like, "Yes, women, we are rocking it. We are now in the stratosphere." It was all good, and then it started getting turbulent and bumpy, and I was like, "I hope she can drive." (Laughter) I know. Right. But it's not even like I knew that was a bias until I was coming back on the other leg and there's always a guy driving and it's often turbulent and bumpy, and I've never questioned the confidence of the male driver. The pilot is good. Now, here's the problem. If you ask me explicitly, I would say, "Female pilot: awesome." But it appears that when things get funky and a little troublesome, a little risky, I lean on a bias that I didn't even know that I had. You know, fast-moving planes in the sky, I want a guy. That's my default. Men are my default. Who is your default? Who do you trust? Who are you afraid of? Who do you implicitly feel connected to? Who do you run away from? I'm going to tell you what we have learned. The implicit association test, which measures unconscious bias, you can go online and take it. Five million people have taken it. Turns out, our default is white. We like white people. We prefer white. What do I mean by that? When people are shown images of black men and white men, we are more quickly able to associate that picture with a positive word, that white person with a positive word, than we are when we are trying to associate positive with a black face, and vice versa. When we see a black face, it is easier for us to connect black with negative than it is white with negative. Seventy percent of white people taking that test prefer white. Fifty percent of black people taking that test prefer white. You see, we were all outside when the contamination came down. What do we do about the fact that our brain automatically associates? You know, one of the things that you probably are thinking about, and you're probably like, you know what, I'm just going to double down on my color blindness. Yes, I'm going to recommit to that. I'm going to suggest to you, no. We've gone about as far as we can go trying to make a difference trying to not see color. The problem was never that we saw color. It was what we did when we saw the color. It's a false ideal. And while we're busy pretending not to see, we are not being aware of the ways in which racial difference is changing people's possibilities, that's keeping them from thriving, and sometimes it's causing them an early death. So in fact, what the scientists are telling us is, no way. Don't even think about color blindness. In fact, what they're suggesting is, stare at awesome black people. (Laughter) Look at them directly in their faces and memorize them, because when we look at awesome folks who are black, it helps to dissociate the association that happens automatically in our brain. Why do you think I'm showing you these beautiful black men behind me? There were so many, I had to cut them. Okay, so here's the thing: I'm trying to reset your automatic associations about who black men are. I'm trying to remind you that young black men grow up to be amazing human beings who have changed our lives and made them better. So here's the thing. The other possibility in science, and it's only temporarily changing our automatic assumptions, but one thing we know is that if you take a white person who is odious that you know, and stick it up next to a person of color, a black person, who is fabulous, then that sometimes actually causes us to disassociate too. So think Jeffrey Dahmer and Colin Powell. Just stare at them, right? (Laughter) But these are the things. So go looking for your bias. Please, please, just get out of denial and go looking for disconfirming data that will prove that in fact your old stereotypes are wrong. Okay, so that's number one: number two, what I'm going to say is move toward young black men instead of away from them. It's not the hardest thing to do, but it's also one of these things where you have to be conscious and intentional about it. You know, I was in a Wall Street area one time several years ago when I was with a colleague of mine, and she's really wonderful and she does diversity work with me and she's a woman of color, she's Korean. And we were outside, it was late at night, and we were sort of wondering where we were going, we were lost. And I saw this person across the street, and I was thinking, "Oh great, black guy." I was going toward him without even thinking about it. And she was like, "Oh, that's interesting." The guy across the street, he was a black guy. I think black guys generally know where they're going. I don't know why exactly I think that, but that's what I think. So she was saying, "Oh, you were going, 'Yay, a black guy'?" She said, "I was going, 'Ooh, a black guy.'" Other direction. Same need, same guy, same clothes, same time, same street, different reaction. And she said, "I feel so bad. I'm a diversity consultant. I did the black guy thing. I'm a woman of color. Oh my God!" And I said, "You know what? Please. We really need to relax about this." I mean, you've got to realize I go way back with black guys. (Laughter) My dad is a black guy. You see what I'm saying? I've got a 6'5" black guy son. I was married to a black guy. My black guy thing is so wide and so deep that I can pretty much sort and figure out who that black guy is, and he was my black guy. He said, "Yes, ladies, I know where you're going. I'll take you there." You know, biases are the stories we make up about people before we know who they actually are. But how are we going to know who they are when we've been told to avoid and be afraid of them? So I'm going to tell you to walk toward your discomfort. And I'm not asking you to take any crazy risks. I'm saying, just do an inventory, expand your social and professional circles. Who's in your circle? Who's missing? How many authentic relationships do you have with young black people, folks, men, women? Or any other major difference from who you are and how you roll, so to speak? Because, you know what? Just look around your periphery. There may be somebody at work, in your classroom, in your house of worship, somewhere, there's some black young guy there. And you're nice. You say hi. I'm saying go deeper, closer, further, and build the kinds of relationships, the kinds of friendships that actually cause you to see the holistic person and to really go against the stereotypes. I know some of you are out there, I know because I have some white friends in particular that will say, "You have no idea how awkward I am. Like, I don't think this is going to work for me. I'm sure I'm going to blow this." Okay, maybe, but this thing is not about perfection. It's about connection. And you're not going to get comfortable before you get uncomfortable. I mean, you just have to do it. And young black men, what I'm saying is if someone comes your way, genuinely and authentically, take the invitation. Not everyone is out to get you. Go looking for those people who can see your humanity. You know, it's the empathy and the compassion that comes out of having relationships with people who are different from you. Something really powerful and beautiful happens: you start to realize that they are you, that they are part of you, that they are you in your family, and then we cease to be bystanders and we become actors, we become advocates, and we become allies. So go away from your comfort into a bigger, brighter thing, because that is how we will stop another Ferguson from happening. That's how we create a community where everybody, especially young black men, can thrive. So this last thing is going to be harder, and I know it, but I'm just going to put it out there anyway. When we see something, we have to have the courage to say something, even to the people we love. You know, it's holidays and it's going to be a time when we're sitting around the table and having a good time. Many of us, anyways, will be in holidays, and you've got to listen to the conversations around the table. You start to say things like, "Grandma's a bigot." (Laughter) "Uncle Joe is racist." And you know, we love Grandma and we love Uncle Joe. We do. We know they're good people, but what they're saying is wrong. And we need to be able to say something, because you know who else is at the table? The children are at the table. And we wonder why these biases don't die, and move from generation to generation? Because we're not saying anything. We've got to be willing to say, "Grandma, we don't call people that anymore." "Uncle Joe, it isn't true that he deserved that. No one deserves that." And we've got to be willing to not shelter our children from the ugliness of racism when black parents don't have the luxury to do so, especially those who have young black sons. We've got to take our lovely darlings, our future, and we've got to tell them we have an amazing country with incredible ideals, we have worked incredibly hard, and we have made some progress, but we are not done. We still have in us this old stuff about superiority and it is causing us to embed those further into our institutions and our society and generations, and it is making for despair and disparities and a devastating devaluing of young black men. We still struggle, you have to tell them, with seeing both the color and the character of young black men, but that you, and you expect them, to be part of the forces of change in this society that will stand against injustice and is willing, above all other things, to make a society where young black men can be seen for all of who they are. So many amazing black men, those who are the most amazing statesmen that have ever lived, brave soldiers, awesome, hardworking laborers. These are people who are powerful preachers. They are incredible scientists and artists and writers. They are dynamic comedians. They are doting grandpas, caring sons. They are strong fathers, and they are young men with dreams of their own. Thank you. (Applause)

When we think about mapping cities, we tend to think about roads and streets and buildings, and the settlement narrative that led to their creation, or you might think about the bold vision of an urban designer, but there's other ways to think about mapping cities and how they got to be made. Today, I want to show you a new kind of map. This is not a geographic map. This is a map of the relationships between people in my hometown of Baltimore, Maryland, and what you can see here is that each dot represents a person, each line represents a relationship between those people, and each color represents a community within the network. Now, I'm here on the green side, down on the far right where the geeks are, and TEDx also is down on the far right. (Laughter) Now, on the other side of the network, you tend to have primarily African-American and Latino folks who are really concerned about somewhat different things than the geeks are, but just to give some sense, the green part of the network we call Smalltimore, for those of us that inhabit it, because it seems as though we're living in a very small town. We see the same people over and over again, but that's because we're not really exploring the full depth and breadth of the city. On the other end of the network, you have folks who are interested in things like hip-hop music and they even identify with living in the DC/Maryland/Virginia area over, say, the Baltimore city designation proper. But in the middle, you see that there's something that connects the two communities together, and that's sports. We have the Baltimore Orioles, the Baltimore Ravens football team, Michael Phelps, the Olympian. Under Armour, you may have heard of, is a Baltimore company, and that community of sports acts as the only bridge between these two ends of the network. Let's take a look at San Francisco. You see something a little bit different happening in San Francisco. On the one hand, you do have the media, politics and news lobe that tends to exist in Baltimore and other cities, but you also have this very predominant group of geeks and techies that are sort of taking over the top half of the network, and there's even a group that's so distinct and clear that we can identify it as Twitter employees, next to the geeks, in between the gamers and the geeks, at the opposite end of the hip-hop spectrum. So you can see, though, that the tensions that we've heard about in San Francisco in terms of people being concerned about gentrification and all the new tech companies that are bringing new wealth and settlement into the city are real, and you can actually see that documented here. You can see the LGBT community is not really getting along with the geek community that well, the arts community, the music community. And so it leads to things like this. ["Evict Twitter"] Somebody sent me this photo a few weeks ago, and it shows what is happening on the ground in San Francisco, and I think you can actually try to understand that through looking at a map like this. Let's take a look at Rio de Janeiro. I spent the last few weeks gathering data about Rio, and one of the things that stood out to me about this city is that everything's really kind of mixed up. It's a very heterogenous city in a way that Baltimore or San Francisco is not. You still have the lobe of people involved with government, newspapers, politics, columnists. TEDxRio is down in the lower right, right next to bloggers and writers. But then you also have this tremendous diversity of people that are interested in different kinds of music. Even Justin Bieber fans are represented here. Other boy bands, country singers, gospel music, funk and rap and stand-up comedy, and there's even a whole section around drugs and jokes. How cool is that? And then the Flamengo football team is also represented here. So you have that same kind of spread of sports and civics and the arts and music, but it's represented in a very different way, and I think that maybe fits with our understanding of Rio as being a very multicultural, musically diverse city. So we have all this data. It's an incredibly rich set of data that we have about cities now, maybe even richer than any data set that we've ever had before. So what can we do with it? Well, I think the first thing that we can try to understand is that segregation is a social construct. It's something that we choose to do, and we could choose not to do it, and if you kind of think about it, what we're doing with this data is aiming a space telescope at a city and looking at it as if was a giant high school cafeteria, and seeing how everybody arranged themselves in a seating chart. Well maybe it's time to shake up the seating chart a little bit. The other thing that we start to realize is that race is a really poor proxy for diversity. We've got people represented from all different types of races across the entire map here -- only looking at race doesn't really contribute to our development of diversity. So if we're trying to use diversity as a way to tackle some of our more intractable problems, we need to start to think about diversity in a new way. And lastly, we have the ability to create interventions to start to reshape our cities in a new way, and I believe that if we have that capability, we may even bear some responsibility to do so. So what is a city? I think some might say that it is a geographical area or a collection of streets and buildings, but I believe that a city is the sum of the relationships of the people that live there, and I believe that if we can start to document those relationships in a real way then maybe we have a real shot at creating those kinds of cities that we'd like to have. Thank you. (Applause)

The shocking police crackdown on protestors in Ferguson, Missouri, in the wake of the police shooting of Michael Brown, underscored the extent to which advanced military weapons and equipment, designed for the battlefield, are making their way to small-town police departments across the United States. Although much tougher to observe, this same thing is happening with surveillance equipment. NSA-style mass surveillance is enabling local police departments to gather vast quantities of sensitive information about each and every one of us in a way that was never previously possible. Location information can be very sensitive. If you drive your car around the United States, it can reveal if you go to a therapist, attend an Alcoholics Anonymous meeting, if you go to church or if you don't go to church. And when that information about you is combined with the same information about everyone else, the government can gain a detailed portrait of how private citizens interact. This information used to be private. Thanks to modern technology, the government knows far too much about what happens behind closed doors. And local police departments make decisions about who they think you are based on this information. One of the key technologies driving mass location tracking is the innocuous-sounding Automatic License Plate Reader. If you haven't seen one, it's probably because you didn't know what to look for -- they're everywhere. Mounted on roads or on police cars, Automatic License Plate Readers capture images of every passing car and convert the license plate into machine-readable text so that they can be checked against hot lists of cars potentially wanted for wrongdoing. But more than that, increasingly, local police departments are keeping records not just of people wanted for wrongdoing, but of every plate that passes them by, resulting in the collection of mass quantities of data about where Americans have gone. Did you know this was happening? When Mike Katz-Lacabe asked his local police department for information about the plate reader data they had on him, this is what they got: in addition to the date, time and location, the police department had photographs that captured where he was going and often who he was with. The second photo from the top is a picture of Mike and his two daughters getting out of their car in their own driveway. The government has hundreds of photos like this about Mike going about his daily life. And if you drive a car in the United States, I would bet money that they have photographs like this of you going about your daily life. Mike hasn't done anything wrong. Why is it okay that the government is keeping all of this information? The reason it's happening is because, as the cost of storing this data has plummeted, the police departments simply hang on to it, just in case it could be useful someday. The issue is not just that one police department is gathering this information in isolation or even that multiple police departments are doing it. At the same time, the federal government is collecting all of these individual pots of data, and pooling them together into one vast database with hundreds of millions of hits, showing where Americans have traveled. This document from the Federal Drug Enforcement Administration, which is one of the agencies primarily interested in this, is one of several that reveal the existence of this database. Meanwhile, in New York City, the NYPD has driven police cars equipped with license plate readers past mosques in order to figure out who is attending. The uses and abuses of this technology aren't limited to the United States. In the U.K., the police department put 80-year-old John Kat on a plate reader watch list after he had attended dozens of lawful political demonstrations where he liked to sit on a bench and sketch the attendees. License plate readers aren't the only mass location tracking technology available to law enforcement agents today. Through a technique known as a cell tower dump, law enforcement agents can uncover who was using one or more cell towers at a particular time, a technique which has been known to reveal the location of tens of thousands and even hundreds of thousands of people. Also, using a device known as a StingRay, law enforcement agents can send tracking signals inside people's houses to identify the cell phones located there. And if they don't know which house to target, they've been known to drive this technology around through whole neighborhoods. Just as the police in Ferguson possess high-tech military weapons and equipment, so too do police departments across the United States possess high-tech surveillance gear. Just because you don't see it, doesn't mean it's not there. The question is, what should we do about this? I think this poses a serious civil liberties threat. History has shown that once the police have massive quantities of data, tracking the movements of innocent people, it gets abused, maybe for blackmail, maybe for political advantage, or maybe for simple voyeurism. Fortunately, there are steps we can take. Local police departments can be governed by the city councils, which can pass laws requiring the police to dispose of the data about innocent people while allowing the legitimate uses of the technology to go forward. Thank you. (Applause).

Thank you. I have only got 18 minutes to explain something that lasts for hours and days, so I'd better get started. Let's start with a clip from Al Jazeera's Listening Post. Richard Gizbert: Norway is a country that gets relatively little media coverage. Even the elections this past week passed without much drama. And that's the Norwegian media in a nutshell: not much drama. A few years back, Norway's public TV channel NRK decided to broadcast live coverage of a seven-hour train ride -- seven hours of simple footage, a train rolling down the tracks. Norwegians, more than a million of them according to the ratings, loved it. A new kind of reality TV show was born, and it goes against all the rules of TV engagement. There is no story line, no script, no drama, no climax, and it's called Slow TV. For the past two months, Norwegians have been watching a cruise ship's journey up the coast, and there's a lot of fog on that coast. Executives at Norway's National Broadcasting Service are now considering broadcasting a night of knitting nationwide. On the surface, it sounds boring, because it is, but something about this TV experiment has gripped Norwegians. So we sent the Listening Post's Marcela Pizarro to Oslo to find out what it is, but first a warning: Viewers may find some of the images in the following report disappointing. (Laughter) Thomas Hellum: And then follows an eight-minute story on Al Jazeera about some strange TV programs in little Norway. Al Jazeera. CNN. How did we get there? We have to go back to 2009, when one of my colleagues got a great idea. Where do you get your ideas? In the lunchroom. So he said, why don't we make a radio program marking the day of the German invasion of Norway in 1940. We tell the story at the exact time during the night. Wow. Brilliant idea, except this was just a couple of weeks before the invasion day. So we sat in our lunchroom and discussed what other stories can you tell as they evolve? What other things take a really long time? So one of us came up with a train. The Bergen Railway had its 100-year anniversary that year It goes from western Norway to eastern Norway, and it takes exactly the same time as it did 40 years ago, over seven hours. (Laughter) So we caught our commissioning editors in Oslo, and we said, we want to make a documentary about the Bergen Railway, and we want to make it in full length, and the answer was, "Yes, but how long will the program be?" "Oh," we said, "full length." "Yes, but we mean the program." And back and forth. Luckily for us, they met us with laughter, very, very good laughter, so one bright day in September, we started a program that we thought should be seven hours and four minutes. Actually, it turned out to be seven hours and 14 minutes due to a signal failure at the last station. We had four cameras, three of them pointing out to the beautiful nature. I'm talking to the guests, some information. (Video) Train announcement: We will arrive at Haugastøl Station. TH: And that's about it, but of course, also the 160 tunnels gave us the opportunity to do some archives. Narrator [in Norwegian]: Then a bit of flirting while the food is digested. The last downhill stretch before we reach our destination. We pass Mjølfjell Station. Then a new tunnel. (Laughter) TH: And now we thought, yes, we have a brilliant program. It will fit for the 2,000 train spotters in Norway. We brought it on air in November 2009. But no, this was far more attractive. This is the five biggest TV channels in Norway on a normal Friday, and if you look at NRK2 over here, look what happened when they put on the Bergen Railway show: 1.2 million Norwegians watched part of this program. (Applause) And another funny thing: when the host on our main channel, after they have good news for you, she said, "And on our second channel, the train has now nearly reached Myrdal station." Thousands of people just jumped on the train on our second channel like this. (Laughter) This was also a huge success in terms of social media. It was so nice to see all the thousands of Facebook and Twitter users discussing the same view, talking to each other as if they were on the same train together. And especially, I like this one. It's a 76-year-old man. He's watched all the program, and at the end station, he rises up to pick up what he thinks is his luggage, and his head hit the curtain rod, and he realized he is in his own living room. (Applause) So that's strong and living TV. Four hundred and thirty-six minute by minute on a Friday night, and during that first night, the first Twitter message came: Why be a chicken? Why stop at 436 when you can expand that to 8,040, minute by minute, and do the iconic journey in Norway, the coastal ship journey Hurtigruten from Bergen to Kirkenes, almost 3,000 kilometers, covering most of our coast. It has 120-year-old, very interesting history, and literally takes part in life and death along the coast. So just a week after the Bergen Railway, we called the Hurtigruten company and we started planning for our next show. We wanted to do something different. The Bergen Railway was a recorded program. So when we sat in our editing room, we watched this picture -- it's all Ål Station -- we saw this journalist. We had called him, we had spoken to him, and when we left the station, he took this picture of us and he waved to the camera, and we thought, what if more people knew that we were on board that train? Would more people show up? What would it look like? So we decided our next project, it should be live. We wanted this picture of us on the fjord and on the screen at the same time. So this is not the first time NRK had been on board a ship. This is back in 1964, when the technical managers have suits and ties and NRK rolled all its equipment on board a ship, and 200 meters out of the shore, transmitting the signal back, and in the machine room, they talked to the machine guy, and on the deck, they have splendid entertainment. So being on a ship, it's not the first time. But five and a half days in a row, and live, we wanted some help. And we asked our viewers out there, what do you want to see? What do you want us to film? How do you want this to look? Do you want us to make a website? What do you want on it? And we got some answers from you out there, and it helped us a very lot to build the program. So in June 2011, 23 of us went on board the Hurtigruten coastal ship and we set off. (Music) I have some really strong memories from that week, and it's all about people. This guy, for instance, he's head of research at the University in Tromsø (Laughter) And I will show you a piece of cloth, this one. It's the other strong memory. It belongs to a guy called Erik Hansen. And it's people like those two who took a firm grip of our program, and together with thousands of others along the route, they made the program what it became. They made all the stories. This is Karl. He's in the ninth grade. It says, "I will be a little late for school tomorrow." He was supposed to be in the school at 8 a.m. He came at 9 a.m., and he didn't get a note from his teacher, because the teacher had watched the program. (Laughter) How did we do this? Yes, we took a conference room on board the Hurtigruten. We turned it into a complete TV control room. We made it all work, of course, and then we took along 11 cameras. This is one of them. This is my sketch from February, and when you give this sketch to professional people in the Norwegian broadcasting company NRK, you get some cool stuff back. And with some very creative solutions. (Video) Narrator [in Norwegian]: Run it up and down. This is Norway's most important drill right now. It regulates the height of a bow camera in NRK's live production, one of 11 that capture great shots from the MS Nord-Norge. Eight wires keep the camera stable. Cameraman: I work on different camera solutions. They're just tools used in a different context. TH: Another camera is this one. It's normally used for sports. It made it possible for us to take close-up pictures of people 100 kilomteres away, like this one. (Laughter) People called us and asked, how is this man doing? He's doing fine. Everything went well. We also could take pictures of people waving at us, people along the route, thousands of them, and they all had a phone in their hand. And when you take a picture of them, and they get the message, "Now we are on TV, dad," they start waving back. This was waving TV for five and a half days, and people get so extremely happy when they can send a warm message to their loved ones. It was also a great success on social media. On the last day, we met Her Majesty the Queen of Norway, and Twitter couldn't quite handle it. And we also, on the web, during this week we streamed more than 100 years of video to 148 nations, and the websites are still there and they will be forever, actually, because Hurtigruten was selected to be part of the Norwegian UNESCO list of documents, and it's also in the Guinness Book of Records as the longest documentary ever. (Applause) Thank you. But it's a long program, so some watched part of it, like the Prime Minister. Some watched a little bit more. It says, "I haven't used my bed for five days." And he's 82 years old, and he hardly slept. He kept watching because something might happen, though it probably won't. (Laughter) This is the number of viewers along the route. You can see the famous Trollfjord and a day after, all-time high for NRK2. If you see the four biggest channels in Norway during June 2011, they will look like this, and as a TV producer, it's a pleasure to put Hurtigruten on top of it. It looks like this: 3.2 million Norwegians watched part of this program, and we are only five million here. Even the passengers on board the Hurtigruten coastal ship -- (Laughter) -- they chose to watched the telly instead of turning 90 degrees and watching out the window. So we were allowed to be part of people's living room with this strange TV program, with music, nature, people. And Slow TV was now a buzzword, and we started looking for other things we could make Slow TV about. So we could either take something long and make it a topic, like with the railway and the Hurtigruten, or we could take a topic and make it long. This is the last project. It's the peep show. It's 14 hours of birdwatching on a TV screen, actually 87 days on the web. We have made 18 hours of live salmon fishing. It actually took three hours before we got the first fish, and that's quite slow. We have made 12 hours of boat ride into the beautiful Telemark Canal, and we have made another train ride with the northern railway, and because this we couldn't do live, we did it in four seasons just to give the viewer another experience on the way. So our next project got us some attention outside Norway. This is from the Colbert Report on Comedy Central. (Video) Stephen Colbert: I've got my eye on a wildly popular program from Norway called "National Firewood Night," which consisted of mostly people in parkas chatting and chopping in the woods, and then eight hours of a fire burning in a fireplace. (Laughter) It destroyed the other top Norwegian shows, like "So You Think You Can Watch Paint Dry" and "The Amazing Glacier Race." And get this, almost 20 percent of the Norwegian population tuned in, 20 percent. TH: So, when wood fire and wood chopping can be that interesting, why not knitting? So on our next project, we used more than eight hours to go live from a sheep to a sweater, and Jimmy Kimmel in the ABC show, he liked that. (Music) (Video) Jimmy Kimmel: Even the people on the show are falling asleep, and after all that, the knitters actually failed to break the world record. They did not succeed, but remember the old Norwegian saying, it's not whether you win or lose that counts. In fact, nothing counts, and death is coming for us all. (Laughter) TH: Exactly. So why does this stand out? This is so completely different to other TV programming. We take the viewer on a journey that happens right now in real time, and the viewer gets the feeling of actually being there, actually being on the train, on the boat, and knitting together with others, and the reason I think why they're doing that is because we don't edit the timeline. It's important that we don't edit the timeline, and it's also important that what we make Slow TV about is something that we all can relate to, that the viewer can relate to, and that somehow has a root in our culture. This is a picture from last summer when we traveled the coast again for seven weeks. And of course this is a lot of planning, this is a lot of logistics. So this is the working plan for 150 people last summer, but more important is what you don't plan. You don't plan what's going to happen. You have to just take your cameras with you. It's like a sports event. You rig them and you see what's happening. So this is actually the whole running order for Hurtigruten, 134 hours, just written on one page. We didn't know anything more when we left Bergen. So you have to let the viewers make the stories themselves, and I'll give you an example of that. This is from last summer, and as a TV producer, it's a nice picture, but now you can cut to the next one. But this is Slow TV, so you have to keep this picture until it really starts hurting your stomach, and then you keep it a little bit longer, and when you keep it that long, I'm sure some of you now have noticed the cow. Some of you have seen the flag. Some of you start wondering, is the farmer at home? Has he left? Are you watching the cow? And where is that cow going? So my point is, the longer you keep a picture like this, and we kept it for 10 minutes, you start making the stories in your own head. That's Slow TV. So we think that Slow TV is one nice way of telling a TV story, and we think that we can continue doing it, not too often, once or twice a year, so we keep the feeling of an event, and we also think that the good Slow TV idea, that's the idea when people say, "Oh no, you can't put that on TV." When people smile, it might be a very good slow idea, so after all, life is best when it's a bit strange. Thank you. (Applause)

When I arrived in Kiev, on February 1 this year, Independence Square was under siege, surrounded by police loyal to the government. The protesters who occupied Maidan, as the square is known, prepared for battle, stockpiling homemade weapons and mass-producing improvised body armor. The Euromaidan protests began peacefully at the end of 2013, after the president of Ukraine, Viktor Yanukovych, rejected a far-reaching accord with the European Union in favor of stronger ties with Russia. In response, tens of thousands of dissatisfied citizens poured into central Kiev to demonstrate against this allegiance. As the months passed, confrontations between police and civilians intensified. I set up a makeshift portrait studio by the barricades on Hrushevsky Street. There, I photographed the fighters against a black curtain, a curtain that obscured the highly seductive and visual backdrop of fire, ice and smoke. In order to tell the individual human stories here, I felt that I needed to remove the dramatic visuals that had become so familiar and repetitive within the mainstream media. What I was witnessing was not only news, but also history. With this realization, I was free from the photojournalistic conventions of the newspaper and the magazine. Oleg, Vasiliy and Maxim were all ordinary men, with ordinary lives from ordinary towns. But the elaborate costumes that they had bedecked themselves in were quite extraordinary. I say the word "costume" because these were not clothes that had been issued or coordinated by anyone. They were improvised uniforms made up of decommissioned military equipment, irregular combat fatigues and trophies taken from the police. I became interested in the way they were choosing to represent themselves, this outward expression of masculinity, the ideal of the warrior. I worked slowly, using an analog film camera with a manual focusing loop and a handheld light meter. The process is old-fashioned. It gives me time to speak with each person and to look at them, in silence, while they look back at me. Rising tensions culminated in the worst day of violence on February 20, which became known as Bloody Thursday. Snipers, loyal to the government, started firing on the civilians and protesters on Institutskaya Street. Many were killed in a very short space of time. The reception of the Hotel Ukraine became a makeshift morgue. There were lines of bodies laid in the street. And there was blood all over the pavements. The following day, President Yanukovych fled Ukraine. In all, three months of protests resulted in more than 120 confirmed dead and many more missing. History unfolded quickly, but celebration remained elusive in Maidan. As the days passed in Kiev's central square, streams of armed fighters were joined by tens of thousands of ordinary people, filling the streets in an act of collective mourning. Many were women who often carried flowers that they had brought to lay as marks of respect for the dead. They came day after day and they covered the square with millions of flowers. Sadness enveloped Maidan. It was quiet and I could hear the birds singing. I hadn't heard that before. I stopped women as they approached the barricades to lay their tributes and asked to make their picture. Most women cried when I photographed them. On the first day, my fixer, Emine, and I cried with almost every woman who visited our studio. There had been such a noticeable absence of women up until that point. And the color of their pastel coats, their shiny handbags, and the bunches of red carnations, white tulips and yellow roses that they carried jarred with the blackened square and the blackened men who were encamped there. It is clear to me that these two sets of pictures don't make much sense without the other. They are about men and women and the way we are -- not the way we look, but the way we are. They speak about different gender roles in conflict, not only in Maidan, and not only in Ukraine. Men fight most wars and women mourn them. If the men showed the ideal of the warrior, then the women showed the implications of such violence. When I made these pictures, I believed that I was documenting the end of violent events in Ukraine. But now I understand that it is a record of the beginning. Today, the death toll stands around 3,000, while hundreds of thousands have been displaced. I was in Ukraine again six weeks ago. In Maidan, the barricades have been dismantled, and the paving stones which were used as weapons during the protests replaced, so that traffic flows freely through the center of the square. The fighters, the women and the flowers are gone. A huge billboard depicting geese flying over a wheat field covers the burned-out shell of the trade union's building and proclaims, "Glory to Ukraine. Glory to heroes." Thank you. (Applause).

So, I thought a lot about the first word I'd say today, and I decided to say "Colombia." And the reason, I don't know how many of you have visited Colombia, but Colombia is just north of the border with Brazil. It's a beautiful country with extraordinary people, like me and others -- (Laughter) -- and it's populated with incredible fauna, flora. It's got water; it's got everything to be the perfect place. But we have a few problems. You may have heard of some of them. We have the oldest standing guerrilla in the world. It's been around for over 50 years, which means that in my lifetime, I have never lived one day of peace in my country. This guerrilla -- and the main group is the FARC guerrillas, Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia -- they have financed their war by kidnapping, by extortion, by getting into the drug trade, by illegal mining. There has been terrorism. There have been random bombs. So it's not good. It's not really good. And if you look at the human cost of this war over 50 years, we have had more than 5.7 million displaced population. It's one of the biggest displaced populations in the world, and this conflict has cost over 220,000 lives. So it's a little bit like the Bolívar wars again. It's a lot of people who have died unnecessarily. We are now in the middle of peace talks, and we've been trying to help resolve this problem peacefully, and as part of that, we decided to try something completely lateral and different: Christmas lights. So Christmas lights, and you're saying, what the hell is this guy going to talk about? I am going to talk about gigantic trees that we put in nine strategic pathways in the jungle covered with Christmas lights. These trees helped us demobilize 331 guerrillas, roughly five percent of the guerrilla force at the time. These trees were lit up at night, and they had a sign beside them that said, "If Christmas can come to the jungle, you can come home. Demobilize. At Christmas, everything is possible." So how do we know these trees worked? Well, we got 331, which is okay, but we also know that not a lot of guerrillas saw them, but we know that a lot of guerrillas heard about them, and we know this because we are constantly talking to demobilized guerrillas. So let me take you back four years before the trees. Four years before the trees, we were approached by the government to help them come up with a communications strategy to get as many guerrillas as we could out of the jungle. The government had a military strategy, it had a legal strategy, it had a political strategy, but it said, "We don't really have a communications strategy, and it probably would be a good thing to have," so we decided to immediately jump into this, because it is an opportunity to affect the outcome of the conflict with the things that we do, with the tools that we have. But we didn't know very much about it. We didn't understand in Colombia, if you live in the cities, you're very far away from where the war is actually happening, so you don't really understand it, and we asked the government to give us access to as many demobilized guerrillas as possible. And we talked to about 60 of them before we felt we fully understood the problem. We talked about -- they told us why they had joined the guerrillas, why the left the guerrillas, what their dreams were, what their frustrations were, and from those conversations came the underlying insight that has guided this whole campaign, which is that guerrillas are as much prisoners of their organizations as the people they hold hostage. And at the beginning, we were so touched by these stories, we were so amazed by these stories, that we thought that maybe the best way to talk to the guerrillas was to have them talk to themselves, so we recorded about a hundred different stories during the first year, and we put them on the radio and television so that the guerrillas in the jungle could hear stories, their stories, or stories similar to theirs, and when they heard them, they decided to go out. I want to tell you one of these stories. This person you see here is Giovanni Andres. Giovanni Andres is 25 when we took that picture. He had been seven years in the guerrilla, and he had demobilized very recently. His story is the following: He was recruited when he was 17, and sometime later, in his squadron, if you will, this beautiful girl was recruited, and they fell in love. Their conversations were about what their family was going to be like, what their kids' names would be, how their life would be when they left the guerrilla. But it turns out that love is very strictly forbidden in the lower ranks of the guerrilla, so their romance was discovered and they were separated. He was sent very far away, and she was left behind. She was very familiar with the territory, so one night, when she was on guard, she just left, and she went to the army, she demobilized, and she was one of the persons that we had the fortune to talk to, and we were really touched by this story, so we made a radio spot, and it turns out, by chance, that far away, many, many kilometers north, he heard her on the radio, and when he heard her on the radio, he said, "What am I doing here? She had the balls to get out. I need to do the same thing." And he did. He walked for two days and two nights, and he risked his life and he got out, and the only thing he wanted was to see her. The only thing that was in his mind was to see her. The story was, they did meet. I know you're wondering if they did meet. They did meet. She had been recruited when she was 15, and she left when she was 17, so there were a lot of other complications, but they did eventually meet. I don't know if they're together now, but I can find out. (Laughter) But what I can tell you is that our radio strategy was working. The problem is that it was working in the lower ranks of the guerrilla. It was not working with the commanders, the people that are more difficult to replace, because you can easily recruit but you can't get the older commanders. So we thought, well, we'll use the same strategy. We'll have commanders talking to commanders. And we even went as far as asking ex-commanders of the guerrilla to fly on helicopters with microphones telling the people that used to fight with them, "There is a better life out there," "I'm doing good," "This is not worth it," etc. But, as you can all imagine, it was very easy to counteract, because what was the guerrilla going to say? "Yeah, right, if he doesn't do that, he's going to get killed." So it was easy, so we were suddenly left with nothing, because the guerrilla were spreading the word that all of those things are done because if they don't do it, they're in danger. And somebody, some brilliant person in our team, came back and said, "You know what I noticed? I noticed that around Christmastime, there have been peaks of demobilization since this war has started." And that was incredible, because that led us to think that we needed to talk to the human being and not to the soldier. We needed to step away from talking from government to army, from army to army, and we needed to talk about the universal values, and we needed to talk about humanity. And that was when the Christmas tree happened. This picture that I have here, you see this is the planning of the Christmas trees, and that man you see there with the three stars, he's Captain Juan Manuel Valdez. Captain Valdez was the first high-ranking official to give us the helicopters and the support we needed to put these Christmas trees up, and he said in that meeting something that I will never forget. He said, "I want to do this because being generous makes me stronger, makes my men feel stronger." And I get very emotional when I remember him because he was killed later in combat and we really miss him, but I wanted you all to see him, because he was really, really important. He gave us all the support to put up the first Christmas trees. What happened later is that the guerrillas who came out during the Christmas tree operation and all of that said, "That's really good, Christmas trees are really cool, but you know what? We really don't walk anymore. We use rivers." So rivers are the highways of the jungle, and this is something we learned, and most of the recruiting was being done in and around the river villages. So we went to these river villages, and we asked the people, and probably some of them were direct acquaintances of the guerrillas. We asked them, "Can you send guerrillas a message?" We collected over 6,000 messages. Some of them were notes saying, get out. Some of them were toys. Some of them were candy. Even people took off their jewelry, their little crosses and religious things, and put them in these floating balls that we sent down the rivers so that they could be picked up at night. And we sent thousands of these down the rivers, and then picked them up later if they weren't. But lots of them were picked up. This generated, on average, a demobilization every six hours, so this was incredible and it was about: Come home at Christmas. Then came the peace process, and when the peace process started, the whole mindset of the guerrilla changed. And it changed because it makes you think, "Well, if there's a peace process, this is probably going to be over. At some point I'm going to get out." And their fears completely changed, and their fears were not about, "Am I going to get killed?" Their fears were, "Am I going to be rejected? When I get out of this, am I going to be rejected?" So the past Christmas, what we did was we asked -- we found 27 mothers of guerrillas, and we asked them to give us pictures of their children, when they only could recognize themselves, so as not to put their lives in danger, and we asked them to give the most motherly message you can get, which is, "Before you were a guerrilla, you were my child, so come home, I'm waiting for you." You can see the pictures here. I'll show you a couple. (Applause) Thank you. And these pictures were placed in many different places, and a lot of them came back, and it was really, really beautiful. And then we decided to work with society. So we did mothers around Christmastime. Now let's talk about the rest of the people. And you may be aware of this or not, but there was a World Cup this year, and Colombia played really well, and it was a unifying moment for Colombia. And what we did was tell the guerrillas, "Come, get out of the jungle. We're saving a place for you." So this was television, this was all different types of media saying, "We are saving a place for you." The soldier here in the commercial says, "I'm saving a place for you right here in this helicopter so that you can get out of this jungle and go enjoy the World Cup." Ex-football players, radio announcers, everybody was saving a place for the guerrilla. So since we started this work a little over eight years ago, 17,000 guerrillas have demobilized. I do not -- (Applause) Thank you. I don't want to say in any way that it only has to do with what we do, but what I do know is that our work and the work that we do may have helped a lot of them start thinking about demobilization, and it may have helped a lot of them take the final decision. If that is true, advertising is still one of the most powerful tools of change that we have available. And I speak not only my behalf, but on behalf of all the colleagues I see here who work in advertising, and of all the team that has worked with me to do this, that if you want to change the world, or if you want to achieve peace, please call us. We'd love to help. Thank you. (Applause)

Ten years ago, I got a phone call that changed my life. At the time, I was cardiologist at UCLA, specializing in cardiac imaging techniques. The call came from a veterinarian at the Los Angeles Zoo. An elderly female chimpanzee had woken up with a facial droop and the veterinarians were worried that she'd had a stroke. They asked if I'd come to the zoo and image the animal's heart to look for a possible cardiac cause. Now, to be clear, North American zoos are staffed by highly qualified, board-certified veterinarians who take outstanding care of their animal patients. But occasionally, they do reach into the human medical community, particularly for some speciality consultation, and I was one of the lucky physicians who was invited in to help. I had a chance to rule out a stroke in this chimpanzee and make sure that this gorilla didn't have a torn aorta, evaluate this macaw for a heart murmur, make sure that this California sea lion's paricardium wasn't inflamed, and in this picture, I'm listening to the heart of a lion after a lifesaving, collaborative procedure with veterinarians and physicians where we drained 700 cc's of fluid from the sac in which this lion's heart was contained. And this procedure, which I have done on many human patients, was identical, with the exception of that paw and that tail. Now most of the time, I was working at UCLA Medical Center with physicians, discussing symptoms and diagnoses and treatments for my human patients, but some of the time, I was working at the Los Angeles Zoo with veterinarians, discussing symptoms and diagnoses and treatments for their animal patients. And occasionally, on the very same day, I went on rounds at UCLA Medical Center and at the Los Angeles Zoo. And here's what started coming into very clear focus for me. Physicians and veterinarians were essentially taking care of the same disorders in their animal and human patients: congestive heart failure, brain tumors, leukemia, diabetes, arthritis, ALS, breast cancer, even psychiatric syndromes like depression, anxiety, compulsions, eating disorders and self-injury. Now, I've got a confession to make. Even though I studied comparative physiology and evolutionary biology as an undergrad -- I had even written my senior thesis on Darwinian theory -- learning about the significant overlap between the disorders of animals and humans, it came as a much needed wake-up call for me. So I started wondering, with all of these overlaps, how was it that I had never thought to ask a veterinarian, or consult the veterinary literature, for insights into one of my human patients? Why had I never, nor had any of my physician friends and colleagues whom I asked, ever attended a veterinary conference? For that matter, why was any of this a surprise? I mean, look, every single physician accepts some biological connection between animals and humans. Every medication that we prescribe or that we've taken ourselves or we've given to our families has first been tested on an animal. But there's something very different about giving an animal a medication or a human disease and the animal developing congestive heart failure or diabetes or breast cancer on their own. Now, maybe some of the surprise comes from the increasing separation in our world between the urban and the nonurban. You know, we hear about these city kids who think that wool grows on trees or that cheese comes from a plant. Well, today's human hospitals, increasingly, are turning into these gleaming cathedrals of technology. And this creates a psychological distance between the human patients who are being treated there and animal patients who are living in oceans and farms and jungles. But I think there's an even deeper reason. Physicians and scientists, we accept intellectually that our species, Homo sapiens, is merely one species, no more unique or special than any other. But in our hearts, we don't completely believe that. I feel it myself when I'm listening to Mozart or looking at pictures of the Mars Rover on my MacBook. I feel that tug of human exceptionalism, even as I recognize the scientifically isolating cost of seeing ourselves as a superior species, apart. Well, I'm trying these days. When I see a human patient now, I always ask, what do the animal doctors know about this problem that I don't know? And, might I be taking better care of my human patient if I saw them as a human animal patient? Here are a few examples of the kind of exciting connections that this kind of thinking has led me to. Fear-induced heart failure. Around the year 2000, human cardiologists "discovered" emotionally induced heart failure. It was described in a gambling father who had lost his life's savings with a roll of the dice, in a bride who'd been left at the alter. But it turns out, this "new" human diagnosis was neither new, nor was it uniquely human. Veterinarians had been diagnosing, treating and even preventing emotionally induced symptoms in animals ranging from monkeys to flamingos, from to deer to rabbits, since the 1970s. How many human lives might have been saved if this veterinary knowledge had been put into the hands of E.R. docs and cardiologists? Self-injury. Some human patients harm themselves. Some pluck out patches of hair, others actually cut themselves. Some animal patients also harm themselves. There are birds that pluck out feathers. There are stallions that repetitively bite their flanks until they bleed. But veterinarians have very specific and very effective ways of treating and even preventing self-injury in their self-injuring animals. Shouldn't this veterinary knowledge be put into the hands of psychotherapists and parents and patients struggling with self-injury? Postpartum depression and postpartum psychosis. Sometimes, soon after giving birth, some women become depressed, and sometimes they become seriously depressed and even psychotic. They may neglect their newborn, and in some extreme cases, even harm the child. Equine veterinarians also know that occasionally, a mare, soon after giving birth, will neglect the foal, refusing to nurse, and in some instances, kick the foal, even to death. But veterinarians have devised an intervention to deal with this foal rejection syndrome that involves increasing oxytocin in the mare. Oxytocin is the bonding hormone, and this leads to renewed interest, on the part of the mare, in her foal. Shouldn't this information be put into the hands of ob/gyn's and family doctors and patients who are struggling with postpartum depression and psychosis? Well, despite all of this promise, unfortunately the gulf between our fields remains large. To explain it, I'm afraid I'm going to have to air some dirty laundry. Some physicians can be real snobs about doctors who are not M.D.'s. I'm talking about dentists and optometrists and psychologists, but maybe especially animal doctors. Of course, most physicians don't realize that it is harder to get into vet school these days than medical school, and that when we go to medical school, we learn everything there is to know about one species, Homo sapiens, but veterinarians need to learn about health and disease in mammals, amphibians, reptiles, fish and birds. So I don't blame the vets for feeling annoyed by my profession's condescension and ignorance. But here's one from the vets: What do you call a veterinarian who can only take care of one species? A physician. (Laughter) Closing the gap has become a passion for me, and I'm doing this through programs like Darwin on Rounds at UCLA, where we're bringing animal experts and evolutionary biologists and embedding them on our medical teams with our interns and our residents. And through Zoobiquity conferences, where we bring medical schools together with veterinary schools for collabortive discussions of the shared diseases and disorders of animal and human patients. At Zoobiquity conferences, participants learn how treating breast cancer in a tiger can help us better treat breast cancer in a kindergarten teacher; how understanding polycystic overies in a Holstein cow can help us better take care of a dance instructor with painful periods; and how better understanding the treatment of separation anxiety in a high-strung Sheltie can help an anxious young child struggling with his first days of school. In the United States and now internationally, at Zoobiquity conferences physicians and veterinarians check their attitudes and their preconceptions at the door and come together as colleagues, as peers, as doctors. After all, we humans are animals, too, and it's time for us physicians to embrace our patients' and our own animal natures and join veterinarians in a species-spanning approach to health. Because it turns out, some of the best and most humanistic medicine is being practiced by doctors whose patients aren't human. And one of the best ways we can take care of the human patient is by paying close attention to how all the other patients on the planet live, grow, get sick and heal. Thank you. (Applause).

2014 is a very special year for me: 20 years as a consultant, 20 years of marriage, and I'm turning 50 in one month. That means I was born in 1964 in a small town in Germany. It was a gray November day, and I was overdue. The hospital's maternity ward was really stressed out because a lot of babies were born on this gray November day. As a matter of fact, 1964 was the year with the highest birth rate ever in Germany: more than 1.3 million. Last year, we just hit over 600,000, so half of my number. What you can see here is the German age pyramid, and there, the small black point at the top, that's me. (Laughter) (Applause) In red, you can see the potential working-age population, so people over 15 and under 65, and I'm actually only interested in this red area. Now, let's do a simple simulation of how this age structure will develop over the next couple of years. As you can see, the peak is moving to the right, and I, with many other baby boomers, will retire in 2030. By the way, I don't need any forecasts of birth rates for predicting this red area. The red area, so the potential working-age population in 2030, is already set in stone today, except for much higher migration rates. And if you compare this red area in 2030 with the red area in 2014, it is much, much smaller. So before I show you the rest of the world, what does this mean for Germany? So what we know from this picture is that the labor supply, so people who provide labor, will go down in Germany, and will go down significantly. Now, what about labor demand? That's where it gets tricky. As you might know, the consultant's favorite answer to any question is, "It depends." So I would say it depends. We didn't want to forecast the future. Highly speculative. We did something else. We looked at the GDP and productivity growth of Germany over the last 20 years, and calculated the following scenario: if Germany wants to continue this GDP and productivity growth, we could directly calculate how many people Germany would need to support this growth. And this is the green line: labor demand. So Germany will run into a major talent shortage very quickly. Eight million people are missing, which is more than 20 percent of our current workforce, so big numbers, really big numbers. And we calculated several scenarios, and the picture always looked like this. Now, to close the gap, Germany has to significantly increase migration, get many more women in the workforce, increase retirement age — by the way, we just lowered it this year — and all these measures at once. If Germany fails here, Germany will stagnate. We won't grow anymore. Why? Because the workers are not there who can generate this growth. And companies will look for talents somewhere else. But where? Now, we simulated labor supply and labor demand for the largest 15 economies in the world, representing more than 70 percent of world GDP, and the overall picture looks like this by 2020. Blue indicates a labor surplus, red indicates a labor shortfall, and gray are those countries which are borderline. So by 2020, we still see a labor surplus in some countries, like Italy, France, the U.S., but this picture will change dramatically by 2030. By 2030, we will face a global workforce crisis in most of our largest economies, including three out of the four BRIC countries. China, with its former one-child policy, will be hit, as well as Brazil and Russia. Now, to tell the truth, in reality, the situation will be even more challenging. What you can see here are average numbers. We de-averaged them and broke them down into different skill levels, and what we found were even higher shortfalls for high-skilled people and a partial surplus for low-skilled workers. So on top of an overall labor shortage, we will face a big skill mismatch in the future, and this means huge challenges in terms of education, qualification, upskilling for governments and companies. Now, the next thing we looked into was robots, automation, technology. Will technology change this picture and boost productivity? Now, the short answer would be that our numbers already include a significant growth in productivity driven by technology. A long answer would go like this. Let's take Germany again. The Germans have a certain reputation in the world when it comes to productivity. In the '90s, I worked in our Boston office for almost two years, and when I left, an old senior partner told me, literally, "Send me more of these Germans, they work like machines." (Laughter) That was 1998. Sixteen years later, you'd probably say the opposite. "Send me more of these machines. They work like Germans." (Laughter) (Applause) Technology will replace a lot of jobs, regular jobs. Not only in the production industry, but even office workers are in jeopardy and might be replaced by robots, artificial intelligence, big data, or automation. So the key question is not if technology replaces some of these jobs, but when, how fast, and to what extent? Or in other words, will technology help us to solve this global workforce crisis? Yes and no. This is a more sophisticated version of "it depends." (Laughter) Let's take the automotive industry as an example, because there, more than 40 percent of industrial robots are already working and automation has already taken place. In 1980, less than 10 percent of the production cost of a car was caused by electronic parts. Today, this number is more than 30 percent and it will grow to more than 50 percent by 2030. And these new electronic parts and applications require new skills and have created a lot of new jobs, like the cognitive systems engineer who optimizes the interaction between driver and electronic system. In 1980, no one had the slightest clue that such a job would ever exist. As a matter of fact, the overall number of people involved in the production of a car has only changed slightly in the last decades, in spite of robots and automation. So what does this mean? Yes, technology will replace a lot of jobs, but we will also see a lot of new jobs and new skills on the horizon, and that means technology will worsen our overall skill mismatch. And this kind of de-averaging reveals the crucial challenge for governments and businesses. So people, high-skilled people, talents, will be the big thing in the next decade. If they are the scarce resource, we have to understand them much better. Are they actually willing to work abroad? What are their job preferences? To find out, this year we conducted a global survey among more than 200,000 job seekers from 189 countries. Migration is certainly one key measure to close a gap, at least in the short term, so we asked about mobility. More than 60 percent of these 200,000 job seekers are willing to work abroad. For me, a surprisingly high number. If you look at the employees aged 21 to 30, this number is even higher. If you split this number up by country, yes, the world is mobile, but only partly. The least mobile countries are Russia, Germany and the U.S. Now where would these people like to move? Number seven is Australia, where 28 percent could imagine moving. Then France, Switzerland, Germany, Canada, U.K., and the top choice worldwide is the U.S. Now, what are the job preferences of these 200,000 people? So, what are they looking for? Out of a list of 26 topics, salary is only number eight. The top four topics are all around culture. Number four, having a great relationship with the boss; three, enjoying a great work-life balance; two, having a great relationship with colleagues; and the top priority worldwide is being appreciated for your work. So, do I get a thank you? Not only once a year with the annual bonus payment, but every day. And now, our global workforce crisis becomes very personal. People are looking for recognition. Aren't we all looking for recognition in our jobs? Now, let me connect the dots. We will face a global workforce crisis which consists of an overall labor shortage plus a huge skill mismatch, plus a big cultural challenge. And this global workforce crisis is approaching very fast. Right now, we are just at the turning point. So what can we, what can governments, what can companies do? Every company, but also every country, needs a people strategy, and to act on it immediately, and such a people strategy consists of four parts. Number one, a plan for how to forecast supply and demand for different jobs and different skills. Workforce planning will become more important than financial planning. Two, a plan for how to attract great people: generation Y, women, but also retirees. Three, a plan for how to educate and upskill them. There's a huge upskilling challenge ahead of us. And four, for how to retain the best people, or in other words, how to realize an appreciation and relationship culture. However, one crucial underlying factor is to change our attitudes. Employees are resources, are assets, not costs, not head counts, not machines, not even the Germans. Thank you. (Applause)

So in the oasis of intelligentsia that is TED, I stand here before you this evening as an expert in dragging heavy stuff around cold places. I've been leading polar expeditions for most of my adult life, and last month, my teammate Tarka L'Herpiniere and I finished the most ambitious expedition I've ever attempted. In fact, it feels like I've been transported straight here from four months in the middle of nowhere, mostly grunting and swearing, straight to the TED stage. So you can imagine that's a transition that hasn't been entirely seamless. One of the interesting side effects seems to be that my short-term memory is entirely shot. So I've had to write some notes to avoid too much grunting and swearing in the next 17 minutes. This is the first talk I've given about this expedition, and while we weren't sequencing genomes or building space telescopes, this is a story about giving everything we had to achieve something that hadn't been done before. So I hope in that you might find some food for thought. It was a journey, an expedition in Antarctica, the coldest, windiest, driest and highest altitude continent on Earth. It's a fascinating place. It's a huge place. It's twice the size of Australia, a continent that is the same size as China and India put together. As an aside, I have experienced an interesting phenomenon in the last few days, something that I expect Chris Hadfield may get at TED in a few years' time, conversations that go something like this: "Oh, Antarctica. Awesome. My husband and I did Antarctica with Lindblad for our anniversary." Or, "Oh cool, did you go there for the marathon?" (Laughter) Our journey was, in fact, 69 marathons back to back in 105 days, an 1,800-mile round trip on foot from the coast of Antarctica to the South Pole and back again. In the process, we broke the record for the longest human-powered polar journey in history by more than 400 miles. (Applause) For those of you from the Bay Area, it was the same as walking from here to San Francisco, then turning around and walking back again. So as camping trips go, it was a long one, and one I've seen summarized most succinctly here on the hallowed pages of Business Insider Malaysia. ["Two Explorers Just Completed A Polar Expedition That Killed Everyone The Last Time It Was Attempted"] Chris Hadfield talked so eloquently about fear and about the odds of success, and indeed the odds of survival. Of the nine people in history that had attempted this journey before us, none had made it to the pole and back, and five had died in the process. This is Captain Robert Falcon Scott. He led the last team to attempt this expedition. Scott and his rival Sir Ernest Shackleton, over the space of a decade, both led expeditions battling to become the first to reach the South Pole, to chart and map the interior of Antarctica, a place we knew less about, at the time, than the surface of the moon, because we could see the moon through telescopes. Antarctica was, for the most part, a century ago, uncharted. Some of you may know the story. Scott's last expedition, the Terra Nova Expedition in 1910, started as a giant siege-style approach. He had a big team using ponies, using dogs, using petrol-driven tractors, dropping multiple, pre-positioned depots of food and fuel through which Scott's final team of five would travel to the Pole, where they would turn around and ski back to the coast again on foot. Scott and his final team of five arrived at the South Pole in January 1912 to find they had been beaten to it by a Norwegian team led by Roald Amundsen, who rode on dogsled. Scott's team ended up on foot. And for more than a century this journey has remained unfinished. Scott's team of five died on the return journey. And for the last decade, I've been asking myself why that is. How come this has remained the high-water mark? Scott's team covered 1,600 miles on foot. No one's come close to that ever since. So this is the high-water mark of human endurance, human endeavor, human athletic achievement in arguably the harshest climate on Earth. It was as if the marathon record has remained unbroken since 1912. And of course some strange and predictable combination of curiosity, stubbornness, and probably hubris led me to thinking I might be the man to try to finish the job. Unlike Scott's expedition, there were just two of us, and we set off from the coast of Antarctica in October last year, dragging everything ourselves, a process Scott called "man-hauling." When I say it was like walking from here to San Francisco and back, I actually mean it was like dragging something that weighs a shade more than the heaviest ever NFL player. Our sledges weighed 200 kilos, or 440 pounds each at the start, the same weights that the weakest of Scott's ponies pulled. Early on, we averaged 0.5 miles per hour. Perhaps the reason no one had attempted this journey until now, in more than a century, was that no one had been quite stupid enough to try. And while I can't claim we were exploring in the genuine Edwardian sense of the word — we weren't naming any mountains or mapping any uncharted valleys — I think we were stepping into uncharted territory in a human sense. Certainly, if in the future we learn there is an area of the human brain that lights up when one curses oneself, I won't be at all surprised. You've heard that the average American spends 90 percent of their time indoors. We didn't go indoors for nearly four months. We didn't see a sunset either. It was 24-hour daylight. Living conditions were quite spartan. I changed my underwear three times in 105 days and Tarka and I shared 30 square feet on the canvas. Though we did have some technology that Scott could never have imagined. And we blogged live every evening from the tent via a laptop and a custom-made satellite transmitter, all of which were solar-powered: we had a flexible photovoltaic panel over the tent. And the writing was important to me. As a kid, I was inspired by the literature of adventure and exploration, and I think we've all seen here this week the importance and the power of storytelling. So we had some 21st-century gear, but the reality is that the challenges that Scott faced were the same that we faced: those of the weather and of what Scott called glide, the amount of friction between the sledges and the snow. The lowest wind chill we experienced was in the -70s, and we had zero visibility, what's called white-out, for much of our journey. We traveled up and down one of the largest and most dangerous glaciers in the world, the Beardmore glacier. It's 110 miles long; most of its surface is what's called blue ice. You can see it's a beautiful, shimmering steel-hard blue surface covered with thousands and thousands of crevasses, these deep cracks in the glacial ice up to 200 feet deep. Planes can't land here, so we were at the most risk, technically, when we had the slimmest chance of being rescued. We got to the South Pole after 61 days on foot, with one day off for bad weather, and I'm sad to say, it was something of an anticlimax. There's a permanent American base, the Amundsen-Scott South Pole Station at the South Pole. They have an airstrip, they have a canteen, they have hot showers, they have a post office, a tourist shop, a basketball court that doubles as a movie theater. So it's a bit different these days, and there are also acres of junk. I think it's a marvelous thing that humans can exist 365 days of the year with hamburgers and hot showers and movie theaters, but it does seem to produce a lot of empty cardboard boxes. You can see on the left of this photograph, several square acres of junk waiting to be flown out from the South Pole. But there is also a pole at the South Pole, and we got there on foot, unassisted, unsupported, by the hardest route, 900 miles in record time, dragging more weight than anyone in history. And if we'd stopped there and flown home, which would have been the eminently sensible thing to do, then my talk would end here and it would end something like this. If you have the right team around you, the right tools, the right technology, and if you have enough self-belief and enough determination, then anything is possible. But then we turned around, and this is where things get interesting. High on the Antarctic plateau, over 10,000 feet, it's very windy, very cold, very dry, we were exhausted. We'd covered 35 marathons, we were only halfway, and we had a safety net, of course, of ski planes and satellite phones and live, 24-hour tracking beacons that didn't exist for Scott, but in hindsight, rather than making our lives easier, the safety net actually allowed us to cut things very fine indeed, to sail very close to our absolute limits as human beings. And it is an exquisite form of torture to exhaust yourself to the point of starvation day after day while dragging a sledge full of food. For years, I'd been writing glib lines in sponsorship proposals about pushing the limits of human endurance, but in reality, that was a very frightening place to be indeed. We had, before we'd got to the Pole, two weeks of almost permanent headwind, which slowed us down. As a result, we'd had several days of eating half rations. We had a finite amount of food in the sledges to make this journey, so we were trying to string that out by reducing our intake to half the calories we should have been eating. As a result, we both became increasingly hypoglycemic — we had low blood sugar levels day after day — and increasingly susceptible to the extreme cold. Tarka took this photo of me one evening after I'd nearly passed out with hypothermia. We both had repeated bouts of hypothermia, something I hadn't experienced before, and it was very humbling indeed. As much as you might like to think, as I do, that you're the kind of person who doesn't quit, that you'll go down swinging, hypothermia doesn't leave you much choice. You become utterly incapacitated. It's like being a drunk toddler. You become pathetic. I remember just wanting to lie down and quit. It was a peculiar, peculiar feeling, and a real surprise to me to be debilitated to that degree. And then we ran out of food completely, 46 miles short of the first of the depots that we'd laid on our outward journey. We'd laid 10 depots of food, literally burying food and fuel, for our return journey — the fuel was for a cooker so you could melt snow to get water — and I was forced to make the decision to call for a resupply flight, a ski plane carrying eight days of food to tide us over that gap. They took 12 hours to reach us from the other side of Antarctica. Calling for that plane was one of the toughest decisions of my life. And I sound like a bit of a fraud standing here now with a sort of belly. I've put on 30 pounds in the last three weeks. Being that hungry has left an interesting mental scar, which is that I've been hoovering up every hotel buffet that I can find. (Laughter) But we were genuinely quite hungry, and in quite a bad way. I don't regret calling for that plane for a second, because I'm still standing here alive, with all digits intact, telling this story. But getting external assistance like that was never part of the plan, and it's something my ego is still struggling with. This was the biggest dream I've ever had, and it was so nearly perfect. On the way back down to the coast, our crampons — they're the spikes on our boots that we have for traveling over this blue ice on the glacier — broke on the top of the Beardmore. We still had 100 miles to go downhill on very slippery rock-hard blue ice. They needed repairing almost every hour. To give you an idea of scale, this is looking down towards the mouth of the Beardmore Glacier. You could fit the entirety of Manhattan in the gap on the horizon. That's 20 miles between Mount Hope and Mount Kiffin. I've never felt as small as I did in Antarctica. When we got down to the mouth of the glacier, we found fresh snow had obscured the dozens of deep crevasses. One of Shackleton's men described crossing this sort of terrain as like walking over the glass roof of a railway station. We fell through more times than I can remember, usually just putting a ski or a boot through the snow. Occasionally we went in all the way up to our armpits, but thankfully never deeper than that. And less than five weeks ago, after 105 days, we crossed this oddly inauspicious finish line, the coast of Ross Island on the New Zealand side of Antarctica. You can see the ice in the foreground and the sort of rubbly rock behind that. Behind us lay an unbroken ski trail of nearly 1,800 miles. We'd made the longest ever polar journey on foot, something I'd been dreaming of doing for a decade. And looking back, I still stand by all the things I've been saying for years about the importance of goals and determination and self-belief, but I'll also admit that I hadn't given much thought to what happens when you reach the all-consuming goal that you've dedicated most of your adult life to, and the reality is that I'm still figuring that bit out. As I said, there are very few superficial signs that I've been away. I've put on 30 pounds. I've got some very faint, probably covered in makeup now, frostbite scars. I've got one on my nose, one on each cheek, from where the goggles are, but inside I am a very different person indeed. If I'm honest, Antarctica challenged me and humbled me so deeply that I'm not sure I'll ever be able to put it into words. I'm still struggling to piece together my thoughts. That I'm standing here telling this story is proof that we all can accomplish great things, through ambition, through passion, through sheer stubbornness, by refusing to quit, that if you dream something hard enough, as Sting said, it does indeed come to pass. But I'm also standing here saying, you know what, that cliche about the journey being more important than the destination? There's something in that. The closer I got to my finish line, that rubbly, rocky coast of Ross Island, the more I started to realize that the biggest lesson that this very long, very hard walk might be teaching me is that happiness is not a finish line, that for us humans, the perfection that so many of us seem to dream of might not ever be truly attainable, and that if we can't feel content here, today, now, on our journeys amidst the mess and the striving that we all inhabit, the open loops, the half-finished to-do lists, the could-do-better-next-times, then we might never feel it. A lot of people have asked me, what next? Right now, I am very happy just recovering and in front of hotel buffets. But as Bob Hope put it, I feel very humble, but I think I have the strength of character to fight it. (Laughter) Thank you. (Applause)

I would like to start with the story of Mary, a woman from an African village. Her first memories are of her family fleeing violent riots orchestrated by the ruling political party. Her brother was murdered by the state-sponsored militia, and she was raped more than once just because she belonged to the wrong party. One morning, a month before the election, Mary's village was called to another intimidation meeting. In this meeting, there is a man standing in front of them, telling them, "We know who you are, we know who you will vote for, and if you're not going to drop the right paper, we're going to take revenge." But for Mary, this meeting is different. She feels different. This time, she's waiting for this meeting, because this time, she's carrying a small hidden camera in her dress, a camera that nobody else can see. Nobody is allowed to film in these meetings. You risk your life if you do. Mary knows that, but she also knows that the only way to stop them and to protect herself and her community is to expose their intimidation, to make sure they understand somebody is following them, to break the impunity they feel. Mary and her friends were filming for months, undercover, the intimidation of the ruling political party. (Video) ["Filmed with hidden cameras"] Man: We are now going to speak about the upcoming elections. Nothing can stop us from doing what we want. If we hear you are with [The Opposition] we will not forgive you. ["Militia intimidation rally"] [The Party] can torture you at any time. The youth can beat you. ["Disruption of political meeting"] For those who lie, saying they are back with [The Party], your time is running out. ["Party youth militia"] Some have died because they rebelled. Some have lost their homes. If you don't work together with [The Party], you will lead a very bad life. Oren Yakobovich: These images were broadcast all over the world, but more importantly, they have been broadcast back to the community. The perpetrators saw them too. They understood somebody is following them. They got scared. Impunity was broken. Mary and her friends forced the ruling political party not to use violence during the election, and saved hundreds of lives. Mary is just one of hundreds of people that my organization had helped to document human rights violations using cameras. My background should have led me to a different direction. I was born in Israel to a right-wing family, and as long as I remember myself, I wanted to join the Israeli army to serve my country and prove what I believed was our right for the whole land. I joined the Israeli army just after the first intifada, the first Palestinian uprising, and I served in one of the hard-minded, toughest, aggressive infantry units, and I got the biggest gun in my platoon. Quite fast, I became an officer and got soldiers under my command, and as time passed, I started serving in the West Bank, and I saw these images. I didn't like what I saw. It took me a while, but eventually I refused to serve in the West Bank and had to spend time in jail. It was a bit — (Applause) — It was not that bad, I have to say. It was a bit like being in a hotel, but with very shitty food. (Laughter) In jail, I kept thinking that I need people to know. I need people to understand what the reality in the West Bank looks like. I need them to hear what I heard, I need them to see what I saw, but I also understood, we need the Palestinians themselves, the people that are suffering, to be able to tell their own stories, not journalists or filmmakers that are coming outside of the situation. I joined a human rights organization, an Israeli human rights organization called B'Tselem. Together, we analyzed the West Bank and picked 100 families that are living in the most risky places: close to checkpoints, near army bases, side by side with settlers. We gave them cameras and training. Quite fast, we started getting very disturbing images about how the settlers and the soldiers are abusing them. I would like to share with you two clips from this project. Both of them were broadcast in Israel, and it created a massive debate. And I have to warn you, some of you might find them quite explicit. The masked men you will see in the first clips are Jewish settlers. Minutes before the camera was turned on, they approached a Palestinian family that was working their land and told them that they have to leave the land, because this land belongs to the Jewish settlers. The Palestinians refused. Let's see what happened. The masked men that are approaching are Jewish settlers. They are approaching the Palestinian family. This is a demonstration in the West Bank. The guy in green is Palestinian. He will be arrested in a second. Here you see him blindfolded and handcuffed. In a few seconds, he regrets he came to this demonstration. He's been shot in the foot with a rubber bullet. He is okay. Not all the settlers and the soldiers are acting this way. We're talking about a tiny minority, but they have to be brought to justice. These clips, and others like them, forced the army and the police to start investigations. They've been shown in Israel, of course, and the Israeli public was exposed to them also. This project redefined the struggle for human rights in the occupied territories, and we managed to reduce the number of violent attacks in the West Bank. The success of this project got me thinking how I can take the same methodology to other places in the world. Now, we tend to believe that today, with all of the technology, the smartphones and the Internet, we are able to see and understand most of what's happening in the world, and people are able to tell their story — but it's only partly true. Still today, with all the technology we have, less than half of the world's population has access to the Internet, and more than three billion people — I'm repeating the number — three billion people are consuming news that is censored by those in power. More or less around the same time, I'm approached by a great guy named Uri Fruchtmann. He's a filmmaker and an activist. We understood we were thinking along the same lines, and we decided to establish Videre, our organization, together. While building the organization in London, we've been traveling undercover to places where a community was suffering from abuses, where mass atrocities were happening, and there was a lack of reporting. We tried to understand how we can help. There were four things that I learned. The first thing is that we have to engage with communities that are living in rural areas, where violations are happening far from the public eye. We need to partner with them, and we need to understand which images are not making it out there and help them to document them. The second thing I learned is that we have to enable them to film in a safe way. Security has to be the priority. Where I used to work before, in the West Bank, one can take a camera out, most likely not going to get shot, but in places we wanted to work, just try to pull a phone out, and you're dead — literally dead. This is why we decided to take the operation undercover when necessary, and use mostly hidden cameras. Unfortunately, I can't show you the hidden cameras we're using today — for obvious reasons — but these are cameras we used before. You can buy them off the shelf. Today, we're building a custom-made hidden camera, like the one that Mary was wearing in her dress to film the intimidation meeting of the ruling political party. It's a camera that nobody can see, that blends into the environment, into the surroundings. Now, filming securities go beyond using hidden cameras. Being secure starts way before the activist is turning the camera on. To keep our partners safe, we work to understand the risk of every location and of every shot before it's happened, building a backup plan if something goes wrong, and making sure we have everything in place before our operations start. The third thing I learned is the importance of verification. You can have an amazing shot of atrocity, but if you can't verify it, it's worth nothing. Recently, like in the ongoing war in Syria or the war in Gaza, we've seen images that are staged or brought from a different conflict. This misinformation destroyed the credibility of the source, and it's harmed the credibility of other reliable and trustworthy sources. We use a variety of ways to make sure we can verify the information and we can trust the material. It starts with vetting the partners, understanding who they are, and working with them very intensively. How do you film a location? You film road signs, you film watches, you film newspapers. We are checking maps, looking at maps, double-checking the information, and looking also at the metadata of the material. Now, the fourth and the most important thing I learned is how you use images to create a positive change. To have an effect, the key thing is how you use the material. Today, we're working with hundreds of activists filming undercover. We work with them both to understand the situation on the ground and which images are missing to describe it, who are the ones that are influencing the situation, and when to release the material to advance the struggle. Sometimes, it's about putting it in the media, mostly local ones, to create awareness. Sometimes it's working with decision makers, to change laws. Sometimes, it's working with lawyers to use as evidence in court. But more than often, the most effective way to create a social change is to work within the community. I want to give you one example. Fatuma is part of a network of women that are fighting abuses in Kenya. Women in her community have been harassed constantly on their way to school and on their way to work. They are trying to change the behavior of the community from inside. In the next clip, Fatuma is taking us with her on her journey to work. Her voice is superimposed on images that she filmed herself using hidden cameras. (Video) Fatuma Chiusiku: My name is Fatuma Chiusiku. I'm 32 years old, a mother, And Ziwa La Ng'Ombe is my home. Each morning, I ride the mini-bus Number 11. But instead of a peaceful journey to work, each day begins with fear. Come with me now and use my eyes to feel what I feel. As I walk, I think to myself: Will I be touched? Grabbed? Violated by this conductor again? Even the men inside the way they look at me touch my body, rub against me, grab me, and now, as I sit in my seat I only wish my mind was full of thoughts for my day, my dreams, my children at school, but instead I worry about the moment when we will arrive and I will be violated again. OY: Today, there is a new front in the fight for human rights. I used to carry a big gun. Now, I am carrying this. This is a much more powerful and much, much more effective weapon. But we have to use its power wisely. By putting the right images in the right hands at the right time, we can truly create an impact. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause)

I'm a lifelong traveler. Even as a little kid, I was actually working out that it would be cheaper to go to boarding school in England than just to the best school down the road from my parents' house in California. So, from the time I was nine years old I was flying alone several times a year over the North Pole, just to go to school. And of course the more I flew the more I came to love to fly, so the very week after I graduated from high school, I got a job mopping tables so that I could spend every season of my 18th year on a different continent. And then, almost inevitably, I became a travel writer so my job and my joy could become one. And I really began to feel that if you were lucky enough to walk around the candlelit temples of Tibet or to wander along the seafronts in Havana with music passing all around you, you could bring those sounds and the high cobalt skies and the flash of the blue ocean back to your friends at home, and really bring some magic and clarity to your own life. Except, as you all know, one of the first things you learn when you travel is that nowhere is magical unless you can bring the right eyes to it. You take an angry man to the Himalayas, he just starts complaining about the food. And I found that the best way that I could develop more attentive and more appreciative eyes was, oddly, by going nowhere, just by sitting still. And of course sitting still is how many of us get what we most crave and need in our accelerated lives, a break. But it was also the only way that I could find to sift through the slideshow of my experience and make sense of the future and the past. And so, to my great surprise, I found that going nowhere was at least as exciting as going to Tibet or to Cuba. And by going nowhere, I mean nothing more intimidating than taking a few minutes out of every day or a few days out of every season, or even, as some people do, a few years out of a life in order to sit still long enough to find out what moves you most, to recall where your truest happiness lies and to remember that sometimes making a living and making a life point in opposite directions. And of course, this is what wise beings through the centuries from every tradition have been telling us. It's an old idea. More than 2,000 years ago, the Stoics were reminding us it's not our experience that makes our lives, it's what we do with it. Imagine a hurricane suddenly sweeps through your town and reduces every last thing to rubble. One man is traumatized for life. But another, maybe even his brother, almost feels liberated, and decides this is a great chance to start his life anew. It's exactly the same event, but radically different responses. There is nothing either good or bad, as Shakespeare told us in "Hamlet," but thinking makes it so. And this has certainly been my experience as a traveler. Twenty-four years ago I took the most mind-bending trip across North Korea. But the trip lasted a few days. What I've done with it sitting still, going back to it in my head, trying to understand it, finding a place for it in my thinking, that's lasted 24 years already and will probably last a lifetime. The trip, in other words, gave me some amazing sights, but it's only sitting still that allows me to turn those into lasting insights. And I sometimes think that so much of our life takes place inside our heads, in memory or imagination or interpretation or speculation, that if I really want to change my life I might best begin by changing my mind. Again, none of this is new; that's why Shakespeare and the Stoics were telling us this centuries ago, but Shakespeare never had to face 200 emails in a day. (Laughter) The Stoics, as far as I know, were not on Facebook. We all know that in our on-demand lives, one of the things that's most on demand is ourselves. Wherever we are, any time of night or day, our bosses, junk-mailers, our parents can get to us. Sociologists have actually found that in recent years Americans are working fewer hours than 50 years ago, but we feel as if we're working more. We have more and more time-saving devices, but sometimes, it seems, less and less time. We can more and more easily make contact with people on the furthest corners of the planet, but sometimes in that process we lose contact with ourselves. And one of my biggest surprises as a traveler has been to find that often it's exactly the people who have most enabled us to get anywhere who are intent on going nowhere. In other words, precisely those beings who have created the technologies that override so many of the limits of old, are the ones wisest about the need for limits, even when it comes to technology. I once went to the Google headquarters and I saw all the things many of you have heard about; the indoor tree houses, the trampolines, workers at that time enjoying 20 percent of their paid time free so that they could just let their imaginations go wandering. But what impressed me even more was that as I was waiting for my digital I.D., one Googler was telling me about the program that he was about to start to teach the many, many Googlers who practice yoga to become trainers in it, and the other Googler was telling me about the book that he was about to write on the inner search engine, and the ways in which science has empirically shown that sitting still, or meditation, can lead not just to better health or to clearer thinking, but even to emotional intelligence. I have another friend in Silicon Valley who is really one of the most eloquent spokesmen for the latest technologies, and in fact was one of the founders of Wired magazine, Kevin Kelly. And Kevin wrote his last book on fresh technologies without a smartphone or a laptop or a TV in his home. And like many in Silicon Valley, he tries really hard to observe what they call an Internet sabbath, whereby for 24 or 48 hours every week they go completely offline in order to gather the sense of direction and proportion they'll need when they go online again. The one thing perhaps that technology hasn't always given us is a sense of how to make the wisest use of technology. And when you speak of the sabbath, look at the Ten Commandments -- there's only one word there for which the adjective "holy" is used, and that's the Sabbath. I pick up the Jewish holy book of the Torah -- its longest chapter, it's on the Sabbath. And we all know that it's really one of our greatest luxuries, the empty space. In many a piece of music, it's the pause or the rest that gives the piece its beauty and its shape. And I know I as a writer will often try to include a lot of empty space on the page so that the reader can complete my thoughts and sentences and so that her imagination has room to breathe. Now, in the physical domain, of course, many people, if they have the resources, will try to get a place in the country, a second home. I've never begun to have those resources, but I sometimes remember that any time I want, I can get a second home in time, if not in space, just by taking a day off. And it's never easy because, of course, whenever I do I spend much of it worried about all the extra stuff that's going to crash down on me the following day. I sometimes think I'd rather give up meat or sex or wine than the chance to check on my emails. (Laughter) And every season I do try to take three days off on retreat but a part of me still feels guilty to be leaving my poor wife behind and to be ignoring all those seemingly urgent emails from my bosses and maybe to be missing a friend's birthday party. But as soon as I get to a place of real quiet, I realize that it's only by going there that I'll have anything fresh or creative or joyful to share with my wife or bosses or friends. Otherwise, really, I'm just foisting on them my exhaustion or my distractedness, which is no blessing at all. And so when I was 29, I decided to remake my entire life in the light of going nowhere. One evening I was coming back from the office, it was after midnight, I was in a taxi driving through Times Square, and I suddenly realized that I was racing around so much I could never catch up with my life. And my life then, as it happened, was pretty much the one I might have dreamed of as a little boy. I had really interesting friends and colleagues, I had a nice apartment on Park Avenue and 20th Street. I had, to me, a fascinating job writing about world affairs, but I could never separate myself enough from them to hear myself think -- or really, to understand if I was truly happy. And so, I abandoned my dream life for a single room on the backstreets of Kyoto, Japan, which was the place that had long exerted a strong, really mysterious gravitational pull on me. Even as a child I would just look at a painting of Kyoto and feel I recognized it; I knew it before I ever laid eyes on it. But it's also, as you all know, a beautiful city encircled by hills, filled with more than 2,000 temples and shrines, where people have been sitting still for 800 years or more. And quite soon after I moved there, I ended up where I still am with my wife, formerly our kids, in a two-room apartment in the middle of nowhere where we have no bicycle, no car, no TV I can understand, and I still have to support my loved ones as a travel writer and a journalist, so clearly this is not ideal for job advancement or for cultural excitement or for social diversion. But I realized that it gives me what I prize most, which is days and hours. I have never once had to use a cell phone there. I almost never have to look at the time, and every morning when I wake up, really the day stretches in front of me like an open meadow. And when life throws up one of its nasty surprises, as it will, more than once, when a doctor comes into my room wearing a grave expression, or a car suddenly veers in front of mine on the freeway, I know, in my bones, that it's the time I've spent going nowhere that is going to sustain me much more than all the time I've spent racing around to Bhutan or Easter Island. I'll always be a traveler -- my livelihood depends on it -- but one of the beauties of travel is that it allows you to bring stillness into the motion and the commotion of the world. I once got on a plane in Frankfurt, Germany, and a young German woman came down and sat next to me and engaged me in a very friendly conversation for about 30 minutes, and then she just turned around and sat still for 12 hours. She didn't once turn on her video monitor, she never pulled out a book, she didn't even go to sleep, she just sat still, and something of her clarity and calm really imparted itself to me. I've noticed more and more people taking conscious measures these days to try to open up a space inside their lives. Some people go to black-hole resorts where they'll spend hundreds of dollars a night in order to hand over their cell phone and their laptop to the front desk on arrival. Some people I know, just before they go to sleep, instead of scrolling through their messages or checking out YouTube, just turn out the lights and listen to some music, and notice that they sleep much better and wake up much refreshed. I was once fortunate enough to drive into the high, dark mountains behind Los Angeles, where the great poet and singer and international heartthrob Leonard Cohen was living and working for many years as a full-time monk in the Mount Baldy Zen Center. And I wasn't entirely surprised when the record that he released at the age of 77, to which he gave the deliberately unsexy title of "Old Ideas," went to number one in the charts in 17 nations in the world, hit the top five in nine others. Something in us, I think, is crying out for the sense of intimacy and depth that we get from people like that. who take the time and trouble to sit still. And I think many of us have the sensation, I certainly do, that we're standing about two inches away from a huge screen, and it's noisy and it's crowded and it's changing with every second, and that screen is our lives. And it's only by stepping back, and then further back, and holding still, that we can begin to see what the canvas means and to catch the larger picture. And a few people do that for us by going nowhere. So, in an age of acceleration, nothing can be more exhilarating than going slow. And in an age of distraction, nothing is so luxurious as paying attention. And in an age of constant movement, nothing is so urgent as sitting still. So you can go on your next vacation to Paris or Hawaii, or New Orleans; I bet you'll have a wonderful time. But, if you want to come back home alive and full of fresh hope, in love with the world, I think you might want to try considering going nowhere. Thank you. (Applause)

Vision is the most important and prioritized sense that we have. We are constantly looking at the world around us, and quickly we identify and make sense of what it is that we see. Let's just start with an example of that very fact. I'm going to show you a photograph of a person, just for a second or two, and I'd like for you to identify what emotion is on his face. Ready? Here you go. Go with your gut reaction. Okay. What did you see? Well, we actually surveyed over 120 individuals, and the results were mixed. People did not agree on what emotion they saw on his face. Maybe you saw discomfort. That was the most frequent response that we received. But if you asked the person on your left, they might have said regret or skepticism, and if you asked somebody on your right, they might have said something entirely different, like hope or empathy. So we are all looking at the very same face again. We might see something entirely different, because perception is subjective. What we think we see is actually filtered through our own mind's eye. Of course, there are many other examples of how we see the world through own mind's eye. I'm going to give you just a few. So dieters, for instance, see apples as larger than people who are not counting calories. Softball players see the ball as smaller if they've just come out of a slump, compared to people who had a hot night at the plate. And actually, our political beliefs also can affect the way we see other people, including politicians. So my research team and I decided to test this question. In 2008, Barack Obama was running for president for the very first time, and we surveyed hundreds of Americans one month before the election. What we found in this survey was that some people, some Americans, think photographs like these best reflect how Obama really looks. Of these people, 75 percent voted for Obama in the actual election. Other people, though, thought photographs like these best reflect how Obama really looks. 89 percent of these people voted for McCain. We presented many photographs of Obama one at a time, so people did not realize that what we were changing from one photograph to the next was whether we had artificially lightened or darkened his skin tone. So how is that possible? How could it be that when I look at a person, an object, or an event, I see something very different than somebody else does? Well, the reasons are many, but one reason requires that we understand a little bit more about how our eyes work. So vision scientists know that the amount of information that we can see at any given point in time, what we can focus on, is actually relatively small. What we can see with great sharpness and clarity and accuracy is the equivalent of the surface area of our thumb on our outstretched arm. Everything else around that is blurry, rendering much of what is presented to our eyes as ambiguous. But we have to clarify and make sense of what it is that we see, and it's our mind that helps us fill in that gap. As a result, perception is a subjective experience, and that's how we end up seeing through our own mind's eye. So, I'm a social psychologist, and it's questions like these that really intrigue me. I am fascinated by those times when people do not see eye to eye. Why is it that somebody might literally see the glass as half full, and somebody literally sees it as half empty? What is it about what one person is thinking and feeling that leads them to see the world in an entirely different way? And does that even matter? So to begin to tackle these questions, my research team and I decided to delve deeply into an issue that has received international attention: our health and fitness. Across the world, people are struggling to manage their weight, and there is a variety of strategies that we have to help us keep the pounds off. For instance, we set the best of intentions to exercise after the holidays, but actually, the majority of Americans find that their New Year's resolutions are broken by Valentine's Day. We talk to ourselves in very encouraging ways, telling ourselves this is our year to get back into shape, but that is not enough to bring us back to our ideal weight. So why? Of course, there is no simple answer, but one reason, I argue, is that our mind's eye might work against us. Some people may literally see exercise as more difficult, and some people might literally see exercise as easier. So, as a first step to testing these questions, we gathered objective measurements of individuals' physical fitness. We measured the circumference of their waist, compared to the circumference of their hips. A higher waist-to-hip ratio is an indicator of being less physically fit than a lower waist-to-hip ratio. After gathering these measurements, we told our participants that they would walk to a finish line while carrying extra weight in a sort of race. But before they did that, we asked them to estimate the distance to the finish line. We thought that the physical states of their body might change how they perceived the distance. So what did we find? Well, waist-to-hip ratio predicted perceptions of distance. People who were out of shape and unfit actually saw the distance to the finish line as significantly greater than people who were in better shape. People's states of their own body changed how they perceived the environment. But so too can our mind. In fact, our bodies and our minds work in tandem to change how we see the world around us. That led us to think that maybe people with strong motivations and strong goals to exercise might actually see the finish line as closer than people who have weaker motivations. So to test whether motivations affect our perceptual experiences in this way, we conducted a second study. Again, we gathered objective measurements of people's physical fitness, measuring the circumference of their waist and the circumference of their hips, and we had them do a few other tests of fitness. Based on feedback that we gave them, some of our participants told us they're not motivated to exercise any more. They felt like they already met their fitness goals and they weren't going to do anything else. These people were not motivated. Other people, though, based on our feedback, told us they were highly motivated to exercise. They had a strong goal to make it to the finish line. But again, before we had them walk to the finish line, we had them estimate the distance. How far away was the finish line? And again, like the previous study, we found that waist-to-hip ratio predicted perceptions of distance. Unfit individuals saw the distance as farther, saw the finish line as farther away, than people who were in better shape. Importantly, though, this only happened for people who were not motivated to exercise. On the other hand, people who were highly motivated to exercise saw the distance as short. Even the most out of shape individuals saw the finish line as just as close, if not slightly closer, than people who were in better shape. So our bodies can change how far away that finish line looks, but people who had committed to a manageable goal that they could accomplish in the near future and who believed that they were capable of meeting that goal actually saw the exercise as easier. That led us to wonder, is there a strategy that we could use and teach people that would help change their perceptions of the distance, help them make exercise look easier? So we turned to the vision science literature to figure out what should we do, and based on what we read, we came up with a strategy that we called, "Keep your eyes on the prize." So this is not the slogan from an inspirational poster. It's an actual directive for how to look around your environment. People that we trained in this strategy, we told them to focus their attention on the finish line, to avoid looking around, to imagine a spotlight was shining on that goal, and that everything around it was blurry and perhaps difficult to see. We thought that this strategy would help make the exercise look easier. We compared this group to a baseline group. To this group we said, just look around the environment as you naturally would. You will notice the finish line, but you might also notice the garbage can off to the right, or the people and the lamp post off to the left. We thought that people who used this strategy would see the distance as farther. So what did we find? When we had them estimate the distance, was this strategy successful for changing their perceptual experience? Yes. People who kept their eyes on the prize saw the finish line as 30 percent closer than people who looked around as they naturally would. We thought this was great. We were really excited because it meant that this strategy helped make the exercise look easier, but the big question was, could this help make exercise actually better? Could it improve the quality of exercise as well? So next, we told our participants, you are going to walk to the finish line while wearing extra weight. We added weights to their ankles that amounted to 15 percent of their body weight. We told them to lift their knees up high and walk to the finish line quickly. We designed this exercise in particular to be moderately challenging but not impossible, like most exercises that actually improve our fitness. So the big question, then: Did keeping your eyes on the prize and narrowly focusing on the finish line change their experience of the exercise? It did. People who kept their eyes on the prize told us afterward that it required 17 percent less exertion for them to do this exercise than people who looked around naturally. It changed their subjective experience of the exercise. It also changed the objective nature of their exercise. People who kept their eyes on the prize actually moved 23 percent faster than people who looked around naturally. To put that in perspective, a 23 percent increase is like trading in your 1980 Chevy Citation for a 1980 Chevrolet Corvette. We were so excited by this, because this meant that a strategy that costs nothing, that is easy for people to use, regardless of whether they're in shape or struggling to get there, had a big effect. Keeping your eyes on the prize made the exercise look and feel easier even when people were working harder because they were moving faster. Now, I know there's more to good health than walking a little bit faster, but keeping your eyes on the prize might be one additional strategy that you can use to help promote a healthy lifestyle. If you're not convinced yet that we all see the world through our own mind's eye, let me leave you with one final example. Here's a photograph of a beautiful street in Stockholm, with two cars. The car in the back looks much larger than the car in the front. However, in reality, these cars are the same size, but that's not how we see it. So does this mean that our eyes have gone haywire and that our brains are a mess? No, it doesn't mean that at all. It's just how our eyes work. We might see the world in a different way, and sometimes that might not line up with reality, but it doesn't mean that one of us is right and one of us is wrong. We all see the world through our mind's eye, but we can teach ourselves to see it differently. So I can think of days that have gone horribly wrong for me. I'm fed up, I'm grumpy, I'm tired, and I'm so behind, and there's a big black cloud hanging over my head, and on days like these, it looks like everyone around me is down in the dumps too. My colleague at work looks annoyed when I ask for an extension on a deadline, and my friend looks frustrated when I show up late for lunch because a meeting ran long, and at the end of the day, my husband looks disappointed because I'd rather go to bed than go to the movies. And on days like these, when everybody looks upset and angry to me, I try to remind myself that there are other ways of seeing them. Perhaps my colleague was confused, perhaps my friend was concerned, and perhaps my husband was feeling empathy instead. So we all see the world through our own mind's eye, and on some days, it might look like the world is a dangerous and challenging and insurmountable place, but it doesn't have to look that way all the time. We can teach ourselves to see it differently, and when we find a way to make the world look nicer and easier, it might actually become so. Thank you. (Applause)

Now, I'm an ethnobotanist. That's a scientist who works in the rainforest to document how people use local plants. I've been doing this for a long time, and I want to tell you, these people know these forests and these medicinal treasures better than we do and better than we ever will. But also, these cultures, these indigenous cultures, are disappearing much faster than the forests themselves. And the greatest and most endangered species in the Amazon Rainforest is not the jaguar, it's not the harpy eagle, it's the isolated and uncontacted tribes. Now four years ago, I injured my foot in a climbing accident and I went to the doctor. She gave me heat, she gave me cold, aspirin, narcotic painkillers, anti-inflammatories, cortisone shots. It didn't work. Several months later, I was in the northeast Amazon, walked into a village, and the shaman said, "You're limping." And I'll never forget this as long as I live. He looked me in the face and he said, "Take off your shoe and give me your machete." (Laughter) He walked over to a palm tree and carved off a fern, threw it in the fire, applied it to my foot, threw it in a pot of water, and had me drink the tea. The pain disappeared for seven months. When it came back, I went to see the shaman again. He gave me the same treatment, and I've been cured for three years now. Who would you rather be treated by? (Applause) Now, make no mistake — Western medicine is the most successful system of healing ever devised, but there's plenty of holes in it. Where's the cure for breast cancer? Where's the cure for schizophrenia? Where's the cure for acid reflux? Where's the cure for insomnia? The fact is that these people can sometimes, sometimes, sometimes cure things we cannot. Here you see a medicine man in the northeast Amazon treating leishmaniasis, a really nasty protozoal disease that afflicts 12 million people around the world. Western treatment are injections of antimony. They're painful, they're expensive, and they're probably not good for your heart; it's a heavy metal. This man cures it with three plants from the Amazon Rainforest. This is the magic frog. My colleague, the late great Loren McIntyre, discoverer of the source lake of the Amazon, Laguna McIntyre in the Peruvian Andes, was lost on the Peru-Brazil border about 30 years ago. He was rescued by a group of isolated Indians called the Matsés. They beckoned for him to follow them into the forest, which he did. There, they took out palm leaf baskets. There, they took out these green monkey frogs — these are big suckers, they're like this — and they began licking them. It turns out, they're highly hallucinogenic. McIntyre wrote about this and it was read by the editor of High Times magazine. You see that ethnobotanists have friends in all sorts of strange cultures. This guy decided he would go down to the Amazon and give it a whirl, or give it a lick, and he did, and he wrote, "My blood pressure went through the roof, I lost full control of my bodily functions, I passed out in a heap, I woke up in a hammock six hours later, felt like God for two days." (Laughter) An Italian chemist read this and said, "I'm not really interested in the theological aspects of the green monkey frog. What's this about the change in blood pressure?" Now, this is an Italian chemist who's working on a new treatment for high blood pressure based on peptides in the skin of the green monkey frog, and other scientists are looking at a cure for drug-resistant Staph aureus. How ironic if these isolated Indians and their magic frog prove to be one of the cures. Here's an ayahuasca shaman in the northwest Amazon, in the middle of a yage ceremony. I took him to Los Angeles to meet a foundation officer looking for support for monies to protect their culture. This fellow looked at the medicine man, and he said, "You didn't go to medical school, did you?" The shaman said, "No, I did not." He said, "Well, then what can you know about healing?" The shaman looked at him and he said, "You know what? If you have an infection, go to a doctor. But many human afflictions are diseases of the heart, the mind and the spirit. Western medicine can't touch those. I cure them." (Applause) But all is not rosy in learning from nature about new medicines. This is a viper from Brazil, the venom of which was studied at the Universidade de São Paulo here. It was later developed into ACE inhibitors. This is a frontline treatment for hypertension. Hypertension causes over 10 percent of all deaths on the planet every day. This is a $4 billion industry based on venom from a Brazilian snake, and the Brazilians did not get a nickel. This is not an acceptable way of doing business. The rainforest has been called the greatest expression of life on Earth. There's a saying in Suriname that I dearly love: "The rainforests hold answers to questions we have yet to ask." But as you all know, it's rapidly disappearing. Here in Brazil, in the Amazon, around the world. I took this picture from a small plane flying over the eastern border of the Xingu indigenous reserve in the state of Mato Grosso to the northwest of here. The top half of the picture, you see where the Indians live. The line through the middle is the eastern border of the reserve. Top half Indians, bottom half white guys. Top half wonder drugs, bottom half just a bunch of skinny-ass cows. Top half carbon sequestered in the forest where it belongs, bottom half carbon in the atmosphere where it's driving climate change. In fact, the number two cause of carbon being released into the atmosphere is forest destruction. But in talking about destruction, it's important to keep in mind that the Amazon is the mightiest landscape of all. It's a place of beauty and wonder. The biggest anteater in the world lives in the rain forest, tips the scale at 90 pounds. The goliath bird-eating spider is the world's largest spider. It's found in the Amazon as well. The harpy eagle wingspan is over seven feet. And the black cayman — these monsters can tip the scale at over half a ton. They're known to be man-eaters. The anaconda, the largest snake, the capybara, the largest rodent. A specimen from here in Brazil tipped the scale at 201 pounds. Let's visit where these creatures live, the northeast Amazon, home to the Akuriyo tribe. Uncontacted peoples hold a mystical and iconic role in our imagination. These are the people who know nature best. These are the people who truly live in total harmony with nature. By our standards, some would dismiss these people as primitive. "They don't know how to make fire, or they didn't when they were first contacted." But they know the forest far better than we do. The Akuriyos have 35 words for honey, and other Indians look up to them as being the true masters of the emerald realm. Here you see the face of my friend Pohnay. When I was a teenager rocking out to the Rolling Stones in my hometown of New Orleans, Pohnay was a forest nomad roaming the jungles of the northeast Amazon in a small band, looking for game, looking for medicinal plants, looking for a wife, in other small nomadic bands. But it's people like these that know things that we don't, and they have lots of lessons to teach us. However, if you go into most of the forests of the Amazon, there are no indigenous peoples. This is what you find: rock carvings which indigenous peoples, uncontacted peoples, used to sharpen the edge of the stone axe. These cultures that once danced, made love, sang to the gods, worshipped the forest, all that's left is an imprint in stone, as you see here. Let's move to the western Amazon, which is really the epicenter of isolated peoples. Each of these dots represents a small, uncontacted tribe, and the big reveal today is we believe there are 14 or 15 isolated groups in the Colombian Amazon alone. Why are these people isolated? They know we exist, they know there's an outside world. This is a form of resistance. They have chosen to remain isolated, and I think it is their human right to remain so. Why are these the tribes that hide from man? Here's why. Obviously, some of this was set off in 1492. But at the turn of the last century was the rubber trade. The demand for natural rubber, which came from the Amazon, set off the botanical equivalent of a gold rush. Rubber for bicycle tires, rubber for automobile tires, rubber for zeppelins. It was a mad race to get that rubber, and the man on the left, Julio Arana, is one of the true thugs of the story. His people, his company, and other companies like them killed, massacred, tortured, butchered Indians like the Witotos you see on the right hand side of the slide. Even today, when people come out of the forest, the story seldom has a happy ending. These are Nukaks. They were contacted in the '80s. Within a year, everybody over 40 was dead. And remember, these are preliterate societies. The elders are the libraries. Every time a shaman dies, it's as if a library has burned down. They have been forced off their lands. The drug traffickers have taken over the Nukak lands, and the Nukaks live as beggars in public parks in eastern Colombia. From the Nukak lands, I want to take you to the southwest, to the most spectacular landscape in the world: Chiribiquete National Park. It was surrounded by three isolated tribes and thanks to the Colombian government and Colombian colleagues, it has now expanded. It's bigger than the state of Maryland. It is a treasure trove of botanical diversity. It was first explored botanically in 1943 by my mentor, Richard Schultes, seen here atop the Bell Mountain, the sacred mountains of the Karijonas. And let me show you what it looks like today. Flying over Chiribiquete, realize that these lost world mountains are still lost. No scientist has been atop them. In fact, nobody has been atop the Bell Mountain since Schultes in '43. And we'll end up here with the Bell Mountain just to the east of the picture. Let me show you what it looks like today. Not only is this a treasure trove of botanical diversity, not only is it home to three isolated tribes, but it's the greatest treasure trove of pre-Colombian art in the world: over 200,000 paintings. The Dutch scientist Thomas van der Hammen described this as the Sistine Chapel of the Amazon Rainforest. But move from Chiribiquete down to the southeast, again in the Colombian Amazon. Remember, the Colombian Amazon is bigger than New England. The Amazon's a big forest, and Brazil's got a big part of it, but not all of it. Moving down to these two national parks, Cahuinari and Puré in the Colombian Amazon — that's the Brazilian border to the right — it's home to several groups of isolated and uncontacted peoples. To the trained eye, you can look at the roofs of these malocas, these longhouses, and see that there's cultural diversity. These are, in fact, different tribes. As isolated as these areas are, let me show you how the outside world is crowding in. Here we see trade and transport increased in Putumayo. With the diminishment of the Civil War in Colombia, the outside world is showing up. To the north, we have illegal gold mining, also from the east, from Brazil. There's increased hunting and fishing for commercial purposes. We see illegal logging coming from the south, and drug runners are trying to move through the park and get into Brazil. This, in the past, is why you didn't mess with isolated Indians. And if it looks like this picture is out of focus because it was taken in a hurry, here's why. (Laughter) This looks like — (Applause) This looks like a hangar from the Brazilian Amazon. This is an art exhibit in Havana, Cuba. A group called Los Carpinteros. This is their perception of why you shouldn't mess with uncontacted Indians. But the world is changing. These are Mashco-Piros on the Brazil-Peru border who stumbled out of the jungle because they were essentially chased out by drug runners and timber people. And in Peru, there's a very nasty business. It's called human safaris. They will take you in to isolated groups to take their picture. Of course, when you give them clothes, when you give them tools, you also give them diseases. We call these "inhuman safaris." These are Indians again on the Peru border, who were overflown by flights sponsored by missionaries. They want to get in there and turn them into Christians. We know how that turns out. What's to be done? Introduce technology to the contacted tribes, not the uncontacted tribes, in a culturally sensitive way. This is the perfect marriage of ancient shamanic wisdom and 21st century technology. We've done this now with over 30 tribes, mapped, managed and increased protection of over 70 million acres of ancestral rainforest. (Applause) So this allows the Indians to take control of their environmental and cultural destiny. They also then set up guard houses to keep outsiders out. These are Indians, trained as indigenous park rangers, patrolling the borders and keeping the outside world at bay. This is a picture of actual contact. These are Chitonahua Indians on the Brazil-Peru border. They've come out of the jungle asking for help. They were shot at, their malocas, their longhouses, were burned. Some of them were massacred. Using automatic weapons to slaughter uncontacted peoples is the single most despicable and disgusting human rights abuse on our planet today, and it has to stop. (Applause) But let me conclude by saying, this work can be spiritually rewarding, but it's difficult and it can be dangerous. Two colleagues of mine passed away recently in the crash of a small plane. They were serving the forest to protect those uncontacted tribes. So the question is, in conclusion, is what the future holds. These are the Uray people in Brazil. What does the future hold for them, and what does the future hold for us? Let's think differently. Let's make a better world. If the climate's going to change, let's have a climate that changes for the better rather than the worse. Let's live on a planet full of luxuriant vegetation, in which isolated peoples can remain in isolation, can maintain that mystery and that knowledge if they so choose. Let's live in a world where the shamans live in these forests and heal themselves and us with their mystical plants and their sacred frogs. Thanks again. (Applause)

I haven't told many people this, but in my head, I've got thousands of secret worlds all going on all at the same time. I am also autistic. People tend to diagnose autism with really specific check-box descriptions, but in reality, it's a whole variation as to what we're like. For instance, my little brother, he's very severely autistic. He's nonverbal. He can't talk at all. But I love to talk. People often associate autism with liking maths and science and nothing else, but I know so many autistic people who love being creative. But that is a stereotype, and the stereotypes of things are often, if not always, wrong. For instance, a lot of people think autism and think "Rain Man" immediately. That's the common belief, that every single autistic person is Dustin Hoffman, and that's not true. But that's not just with autistic people, either. I've seen it with LGBTQ people, with women, with POC people. People are so afraid of variety that they try to fit everything into a tiny little box with really specific labels. This is something that actually happened to me in real life: I googled "autistic people are ..." and it comes up with suggestions as to what you're going to type. I googled "autistic people are ..." and the top result was "demons." That is the first thing that people think when they think autism. They know. (Laughter) One of the things I can do because I'm autistic — it's an ability rather than a disability — is I've got a very, very vivid imagination. Let me explain it to you a bit. It's like I'm walking in two worlds most of the time. There's the real world, the world that we all share, and there's the world in my mind, and the world in my mind is often so much more real than the real world. Like, it's very easy for me to let my mind loose because I don't try and fit myself into a tiny little box. That's one of the best things about being autistic. You don't have the urge to do that. You find what you want to do, you find a way to do it, and you get on with it. If I was trying to fit myself into a box, I wouldn't be here, I wouldn't have achieved half the things that I have now. There are problems, though. There are problems with being autistic, and there are problems with having too much imagination. School can be a problem in general, but having also to explain to a teacher on a daily basis that their lesson is inexplicably dull and you are secretly taking refuge in a world inside your head in which you are not in that lesson, that adds to your list of problems. (Laughter) Also, when my imagination takes hold, my body takes on a life of its own. When something very exciting happens in my inner world, I've just got to run. I've got to rock backwards and forwards, or sometimes scream. This gives me so much energy, and I've got to have an outlet for all that energy. But I've done that ever since I was a child, ever since I was a tiny little girl. And my parents thought it was cute, so they didn't bring it up, but when I got into school, they didn't really agree that it was cute. It can be that people don't want to be friends with the girl that starts screaming in an algebra lesson. And this doesn't normally happen in this day and age, but it can be that people don't want to be friends with the autistic girl. It can be that people don't want to associate with anyone who won't or can't fit themselves into a box that's labeled normal. But that's fine with me, because it sorts the wheat from the chaff, and I can find which people are genuine and true and I can pick these people as my friends. But if you think about it, what is normal? What does it mean? Imagine if that was the best compliment you ever received. "Wow, you are really normal." (Laughter) But compliments are, "you are extraordinary" or "you step outside the box." It's "you're amazing." So if people want to be these things, why are so many people striving to be normal? Why are people pouring their brilliant individual light into a mold? People are so afraid of variety that they try and force everyone, even people who don't want to or can't, to become normal. There are camps for LGBTQ people or autistic people to try and make them this "normal," and that's terrifying that people would do that in this day and age. All in all, I wouldn't trade my autism and my imagination for the world. Because I am autistic, I've presented documentaries to the BBC, I'm in the midst of writing a book, I'm doing this — this is fantastic — and one of the best things that I've achieved, that I consider to have achieved, is I've found ways of communicating with my little brother and sister, who as I've said are nonverbal. They can't speak. And people would often write off someone who's nonverbal, but that's silly, because my little brother and sister are the best siblings that you could ever hope for. They're just the best, and I love them so much and I care about them more than anything else. I'm going to leave you with one question: If we can't get inside the person's minds, no matter if they're autistic or not, instead of punishing anything that strays from normal, why not celebrate uniqueness and cheer every time someone unleashes their imagination? Thank you. (Applause)

I want you guys to imagine that you're a soldier running through the battlefield. Now, you're shot in the leg with a bullet, which severs your femoral artery. Now, this bleed is extremely traumatic and can kill you in less than three minutes. Unfortunately, by the time that a medic actually gets to you, what the medic has on his or her belt can take five minutes or more, with the application of pressure, to stop that type of bleed. Now, this problem is not only a huge problem for the military, but it's also a huge problem that's epidemic throughout the entire medical field, which is how do we actually look at wounds and how do we stop them quickly in a way that can work with the body? So now, what I've been working on for the last four years is to develop smart biomaterials, which are actually materials that will work with the body, helping it to heal and helping it to allow the wounds to heal normally. So now, before we do this, we have to take a much closer look at actually how does the body work. So now, everybody here knows that the body is made up of cells. So the cell is the most basic unit of life. But not many people know what else. But it actually turns out that your cells sit in this mesh of complicated fibers, proteins and sugars known as the extracellular matrix. So now, the ECM is actually this mesh that holds the cells in place, provides structure for your tissues, but it also gives the cells a home. It allows them to feel what they're doing, where they are, and tells them how to act and how to behave. And it actually turns out that the extracellular matrix is different from every single part of the body. So the ECM in my skin is different than the ECM in my liver, and the ECM in different parts of the same organ actually vary, so it's very difficult to be able to have a product that will react to the local extracellular matrix, which is exactly what we're trying to do. So now, for example, think of the rainforest. You have the canopy, you have the understory, and you have the forest floor. Now, all of these parts of the forest are made up of different plants, and different animals call them home. So just like that, the extracellular matrix is incredibly diverse in three dimensions. On top of that, the extracellular matrix is responsible for all wound healing, so if you imagine cutting the body, you actually have to rebuild this very complex ECM in order to get it to form again, and a scar, in fact, is actually poorly formed extracellular matrix. So now, behind me is an animation of the extracellular matrix. So as you see, your cells sit in this complicated mesh and as you move throughout the tissue, the extracellular matrix changes. So now every other piece of technology on the market can only manage a two- dimensional approximation of the extracellular matrix, which means that it doesn't fit in with the tissue itself. So when I was a freshman at NYU, what I discovered was you could actually take small pieces of plant-derived polymers and reassemble them onto the wound. So if you have a bleeding wound like the one behind me, you can actually put our material onto this, and just like Lego blocks, it'll reassemble into the local tissue. So that means if you put it onto liver, it turns into something that looks like liver, and if you put it onto skin, it turns into something that looks just like skin. So when you put the gel on, it actually reassembles into this local tissue. So now, this has a whole bunch of applications, but basically the idea is, wherever you put this product, you're able to reassemble into it immediately. Now, this is a simulated arterial bleed — blood warning — at twice human artery pressure. So now, this type of bleed is incredibly traumatic, and like I said before, would actually take five minutes or more with pressure to be able to stop. Now, in the time that it takes me to introduce the bleed itself, our material is able to stop that bleed, and it's because it actually goes on and works with the body to heal, so it reassembles into this piece of meat, and then the blood actually recognizes that that's happening, and produces fibrin, producing a very fast clot in less than 10 seconds. So now this technology — Thank you. (Applause) So now this technology, by January, will be in the hands of veterinarians, and we're working very diligently to try to get it into the hands of doctors, hopefully within the next year. But really, once again, I want you guys to imagine that you are a soldier running through a battlefield. Now, you get hit in the leg with a bullet, and instead of bleeding out in three minutes, you pull a small pack of gel out of your belt, and with the press of a button, you're able to stop your own bleed and you're on your way to recovery. Thank you very much. (Applause)

Well, good afternoon. How many of you took the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge? (Applause) Woo hoo! Well, I have to tell you, from the bottom of our hearts, thank you so very, very much. Do you know to date the ALS Association has raised 125 million dollars? Woo hoo! (Applause) It takes me back to the summer of 2011. My family, my kids had all grown up. We were officially empty nesters, and we decided, let's go on a family vacation. Jenn, my daughter, and my son-in-law came down from New York. My youngest, Andrew, he came down from his home in Charlestown where he was working in Boston, and my son Pete, who had played at Boston College, baseball, had played baseball professionally in Europe, and had now come home and was selling group insurance, he also joined us. And one night, I found myself having a beer with Pete, and Pete was looking at me and he just said, "You know, Mom, I don't know, selling group insurance is just not my passion." He said, "I just don't feel I'm living up to my potential. I don't feel this is my mission in life." And he said, "You know, oh by the way, Mom, I have to leave early from vacation because my inter-city league team that I play for made the playoffs, and I have to get back to Boston because I can't let my team down. I'm just not as passionate about my job as I am about baseball." So off Pete went, and left the family vacation — break a mother's heart — and he went, and we followed four days later to see the next playoff game. We're at the playoff game, Pete's at the plate, and a fastball's coming in, and it hits him on the wrist. Oh, Pete. His wrist went completely limp, like this. So for the next six months, Pete went back to his home in Southie, kept working that unpassionate job, and was going to doctors to see what was wrong with this wrist that never came back. Six months later, in March, he called my husband and me, and he said, "Oh, Mom and Dad, we have a doctor that found a diagnosis for that wrist. Do you want to come with the doctor's appointment with me?" I said, "Sure, we'll come in." That morning, Pete, John and I all got up, got dressed, got in our cars — three separate cars because we were going to go to work after the doctor's appointment to find out what happened to the wrist. We walked into the neurologist's office, sat down, four doctors walk in, and the head neurologist sits down. And he says, "Well, Pete, we've been looking at all the tests, and I have to tell you, it's not a sprained wrist, it's not a broken wrist, it's not nerve damage in the wrist, it's not an infection, it's not Lyme disease." And there was this deliberate elimination going up, and I was thinking to myself, where is he going with this? Then he put his hands on his knees, he looked right at my 27-year-old kid, and said, "I don't know how to tell a 27-year-old this: Pete, you have ALS." ALS? I had had a friend whose 80-year-old father had ALS. I looked at my husband, he looked at me, and then we looked at the doctor, and we said, "ALS? Okay, what treatment? Let's go. What do we do? Let's go." And he looked at us, and he said, "Mr. and Mrs. Frates, I'm sorry to tell you this, but there's no treatment and there's no cure." We were the worst culprits. We didn't even understand that it had been 75 years since Lou Gehrig and nothing had been done in the progress against ALS. So we all went home, and Jenn and Dan flew home from Wall Street, Andrew came home from Charlestown, and Pete went to B.C. to pick up his then-girlfriend Julie and brought her home, and six hours later after diagnosis, we're sitting around having a family dinner, and we're having small chat. I don't even remember cooking dinner that night. But then our leader, Pete, set the vision, and talked to us just like we were his new team. He said, "There will be no wallowing, people." He goes, "We're not looking back, we're looking forward. What an amazing opportunity we have to change the world. I'm going to change the face of this unacceptable situation of ALS. We're going to move the needle, and I'm going to get it in front of philanthropists like Bill Gates." And that was it. We were given our directive. So in the days and months that followed, within a week, we had our brothers and sisters and our family come to us, that they were already creating Team Frate Train. Uncle Dave, he was the webmaster; Uncle Artie, he was the accountant; Auntie Dana, she was the graphic artist; and my youngest son, Andrew, quit his job, left his apartment in Charlestown and says, "I'm going to take care of Pete and be his caregiver." Then all those people, classmates, teammates, coworkers that Pete had inspired throughout his whole life, the circles of Pete all started intersecting with one another, and made Team Frate Train. Six months after diagnosis, Pete was given an award at a research summit for advocacy. He got up and gave a very eloquent speech, and at the end of the speech, there was a panel, and on the panel were these pharmaceutical executives and biochemists and clinicians and I'm sitting there and I'm listening to them and most of the content went straight over my head. I avoided every science class I ever could. But I was watching these people, and I was listening to them, and they were saying, "I, I do this, I do that," and there was a real unfamiliarity between them. So at the end of their talk, the panel, they had questions and answers, and boom, my hand went right up, and I get the microphone, and I look at them and I say, "Thank you. Thank you so much for working in ALS. It means so very much to us." I said, "But I do have to tell you that I'm watching your body language and I'm listening to what you're saying. It just doesn't seem like there's a whole lot of collaboration going on here. And not only that, where's the flip chart with the action items and the follow-up and the accountability? What are you going to do after you leave this room?" And then I turned around and there was about 200 pairs of eyes just staring at me. And it was that point that I realized that I had talked about the elephant in the room. Thus my mission had begun. So over the next couple of years, Pete — we've had our highs and our lows. Pete was put on a compassionate use drug. It was hope in a bottle for the whole ALS community. It was in a phase III trial. Then six months later, the data comes back: no efficacy. We were supposed to have therapies overseas, and the rug was pulled out from under us. So for the next two years, we just watched my son be taken away from me, little by little every day. Two and a half years ago, Pete was hitting home runs at baseball fields. Today, Pete's completely paralyzed. He can't hold his head up any longer. He's confined to a motorized wheelchair. He can no longer swallow or eat. He has a feeding tube. He can't speak. He talks with eye gaze technology and a speech generating device, and we're watching his lungs, because his diaphragm eventually is going to give out and then the decision will be made to put him on a ventilator or not. ALS robs the human of all their physical parts, but the brain stays intact. So July 4th, 2014, 75th year of Lou Gehrig's inspirational speech comes, and Pete is asked by MLB.com to write an article in the Bleacher Report. And it was very significant, because he wrote it using his eye gaze technology. Twenty days later, the ice started to fall. On July 27th, Pete's roommate in New York City, wearing a Quinn For The Win shirt, signifying Pat Quinn, another ALS patient known in New York, and B.C. shorts said, "I'm taking the ALS Ice Bucket Challenge," picked up the ice, put it over his head. "And I'm nominating ..." And he sent it up to Boston. And that was on July 27th. Over the next couple of days, our news feed was full of family and friends. If you haven't gone back, the nice thing about Facebook is that you have the dates, you can go back. You've got to see Uncle Artie's human Bloody Mary. I'm telling you, it's one of the best ones, and that was probably in day two. By about day four, Uncle Dave, the webmaster, he isn't on Facebook, and I get a text from him, and it says, "Nancy, what the hell is going on?" Uncle Dave gets a hit every time Pete's website is gone onto, and his phone was blowing up. So we all sat down and we realized, money is coming in — how amazing. So we knew awareness would lead to funding, we just didn't know it would only take a couple of days. So we got together, put our best 501(c)(3)s on Pete's website, and off we went. So week one, Boston media. Week two, national media. It was during week two that our neighbor next door opened up our door and threw a pizza across the kitchen floor, saying, "I think you people might need food in there." (Laughter) Week three, celebrities — Entertainment Tonight, Access Hollywood. Week four, global — BBC, Irish Radio. Did anyone see "Lost In Translation"? My husband did Japanese television. It was interesting. (Laughter) And those videos, the popular ones. Paul Bissonnette's glacier video, incredible. How about the redemption nuns of Dublin? Who's seen that one? It's absolutely fantastic. J.T., Justin Timberlake. That's when we knew, that was a real A-list celebrity. I go back on my texts, and I can see "JT! JT!" My sister texting me. Angela Merkel, the chancellor of Germany. Incredible. And the ALS patients, you know what their favorite ones are, and their families'? All of them. Because this misunderstood and underfunded "rare" disease, they just sat and watched people saying it over and over: "ALS, ALS." It was unbelievable. And those naysayers, let's just talk a couple of stats, shall we? Okay, so the ALS Association, they think by year end, it'll be 160 million dollars. ALS TDI in Cambridge, they raised three million dollars. Well, guess what? They had a clinical trial for a drug that they've been developing. It was on a three-year track for funding. Two months. It's coming out starting in two months. (Applause) And YouTube has reported that over 150 countries have posted Ice Bucket Challenges for ALS. And Facebook, 2.5 million videos, and I had the awesome adventure visiting the Facebook campus last week, and I said to them, "I know what it was like in my house. I can't imagine what it was like around here." All she said was, "Jaw-dropping." And my family's favorite video? Bill Gates. Because the night Pete was diagnosed, he told us that he was going to get ALS in front of philanthropists like Bill Gates, and he did it. Goal number one, check. Now on to the treatment and cure. (Applause) So okay, after all of this ice, we know that it was much more than just pouring buckets of ice water over your head, and I really would like to leave you with a couple of things that I'd like you to remember. The first thing is, every morning when you wake up, you can choose to live your day in positivity. Would any of you blame me if I just was in the fetal position and pulled the covers over my head every day? No, I don't think anybody would blame me, but Pete has inspired us to wake up every morning and be positive and proactive. I actually had to ditch support groups because everybody was in there saying that spraying their lawns with chemicals, that's why they got ALS, and I was like, "I don't think so," but I had to get away from the negativity. The second thing I want to leave you with is the person at the middle of the challenge has to be willing to have the mental toughness to put themselves out there. Pete still goes to baseball games and he still sits with his teammates in the dugout, and he hangs his gravity feed bag right on the cages. You'll see the kids, they're up there hanging it up. "Pete, is that okay?" "Yup." And then they put it right into his stomach. Because he wants them to see what the reality of this is, and how he's never, ever going to give up. And the third thing I want to leave you with: If you ever come across a situation that you see as so unacceptable, I want you to dig down as deep as you can and find your best mother bear and go after it. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) I know that I'm running over, but I've got to leave you with this: the gifts that my son has given me. I have had 29 years of having the honor of being the mother of Pete Frates. Pete Frates has been inspiring and leading his whole life. He's thrown out kindness, and all that kindness has come back to him. He walks the face of the Earth right now and knows why he's here. What a gift. The second thing that my son has given me is he's given me my mission in life. Now I know why I'm here. I'm going to save my son, and if it doesn't happen in time for him, I'm going to work so that no other mother has to go through what I'm going through. And the third thing, and last but not least gift that my son has given me, as an exclamation point to the miraculous month of August 2014: That girlfriend that he went to get on the night of diagnosis is now his wife, and Pete and Julie have given me my granddaughter, Lucy Fitzgerald Frates. Lucy Fitzgerald Frates came two weeks early as the exclamation point on August 31st, 2014. And so — (Applause) — And so let me leave you with Pete's words of inspiration that he would use to classmates, coworkers and teammates. Be passionate. Be genuine. Be hardworking. And don't forget to be great. Thank you. (Applause)

The Earth needs no introduction. It needs no introduction in part because the Apollo 17 astronauts, when they were hurtling around the moon in 1972, took this iconic image. It galvanized a whole generation of human beings to realize that we're on Spaceship Earth, fragile and finite as it is, and that we need to take care of it. But while this picture is beautiful, it's static, and the Earth is constantly changing. It's changing on days' time scales with human activity. And the satellite imagery we have of it today is old. Typically, years old. And that's important because you can't fix what you can't see. What we'd ideally want is images of the whole planet every day. So, what's standing in our way? What's the problem? This is the problem: Satellites are big, expensive and they're slow. This one weighs three tons. It's six meters tall, four meters wide. It took up the entire fairing of a rocket just to launch it. One satellite, one rocket. It cost 855 million dollars. Satellites like these have done an amazing job at helping us to understand our planet. But if we want to understand it much more regularly, we need lots of satellites, and this model isn't scalable. So me and my friends, we started Planet Labs to make satellites ultra-compact and small and highly capable. I'm going to show you what our satellite looks like: This is our satellite. This is not a scale model, this is the real size. It's 10 by 10 by 30 centimeters, it weighs four kilograms, and we've stuffed the latest and greatest electronics and sensor systems into this little package so that even though this is really small, this can take pictures 10 times the resolution of the big satellite here, even though it weighs one thousandth of the mass. And we call this satellite "Dove" — Thank you. (Applause) We call this satellite "Dove," and we call it "Dove" because satellites are typically named after birds, but normally birds of prey: like Eagle, Hawk, Swoop, Kill, I don't know, Kestrel, these sort of things. But ours have a humanitarian mission, so we wanted to call them Doves. And we haven't just built them, though. We've launched them. And not just one, but many. It all started in our garage. Yes, we built our first satellite prototype in our garage. Now, this is pretty normal for a Silicon Valley company that we are, but we believe it's the first time for a space company. And that's not the only trick we learned from Silicon Valley. We rapidly prototype our satellites. We use "release early, release often" on our software. And we take a different risk approach. We take them outside and test them. We even put satellites in space just to test the satellites, and we've learned to manufacture our satellites at scale. We've used modern production techniques so we can build large numbers of them, I think for the first time. We call it agile aerospace, and that's what's enabled us to put so much capability into this little box. Now, what has bonded our team over the years is the idea of democratizing access to satellite information. In fact, the founders of our company, Chris, Robbie and I, we met over 15 years ago at the United Nations when they were hosting a conference about exactly that question: How do you use satellites to help humanity? How do you use satellites to help people in developing countries or with climate change? And this is what has bonded us. Our entire team is passionate about using satellites to help humanity. You could say we're space geeks, but not only do we care about what's up there, we care about what's down here, too. I'm going to show you a video from just four weeks ago of two of our satellites being launched from the International Space Station. This is not an animation, this is a video taken by the astronaut looking out of the window. It gives you a bit of a sense of scale of our two satellites. It's like some of the smallest satellites ever are being launched from the biggest satellite ever. And right at the end, the solar array glints in the sun. It's really cool. Wait for it. Boom! Yeah. It's the money shot. (Laughter) So we didn't just launch two of them like this, we launched 28 of them. It's the largest constellation of Earth-imaging satellites in human history, and it's going to provide a completely radical new data set about our changing planet. But that's just the beginning. You see, we're going to launch more than 100 of these satellites like these over the course of the next year. It's going to be the largest constellation of satellites in human history. And this is what it's going to do: Acting in a single-orbit plane that stays fixed with respect to the sun, the Earth rotates underneath. They're all cameras pointed down, and they slowly scan across as the Earth rotates underneath. The Earth rotates every 24 hours, so we scan every point on the planet every 24 hours. It's a line scanner for the planet. We don't take a picture of anywhere on the planet every day, we take a picture of every single place on the planet every day. Even though we launched these just a couple of weeks ago, we've already got some initial imagery from the satellites and I'm going to show it publicly for the first time right now. This is the very first picture taken by our satellite. It happened to be over UC-Davis' campus in California when we turned the camera on. But what's even cooler is when we compare it to the previous latest image of that area, which was taken many months ago. And the image on the left is from our satellite, and we see buildings are being built. The general point is that we will be able to track urban growth as it happens around the whole world in all cities, every day. Water as well. Thank you. (Applause) We'll be able to see the extent of all water bodies around the whole world every day and help water security. From water security to food security. We'll see crops as they grow in all the fields in every farmer's field around the planet every day. and help them to improve crop yield. This is a beautiful image that was taken just a few hours ago when the satellite was flying over Argentina. The general point is there are probably hundreds and thousands of applications of this data, I've mentioned a few, but there's others: deforestation, the ice caps melting. We can track all of these things, every tree on the planet every day. If you took the difference between today's image and yesterday's image, you'd see much of the world news — you'd see floods and fires and earthquakes. And we have decided, therefore, that the best thing that we could do with our data is to ensure universal access to it. We want to ensure everyone can see it. Thank you. (Applause) We want to empower NGOs and companies and scientists and journalists to be able to answer the questions that they have about the planet. We want to enable the developer community to run their apps on our data. In short, we want to democratize access to information about our planet. Which brings me back to this. You see, this will be an entirely new global data set. And we believe that together, we can help to take care of our Spaceship Earth. And what I would like to leave you with is the following question: If you had access to imagery of the whole planet every single day, what would you do with that data? What problems would you solve? What exploration would you do? Well, I invite you to come and explore with us. Thank you very much. (Applause)

Picture this: It's Monday morning, you're at the office, you're settling in for the day at work, and this guy that you sort of recognize from down the hall, walks right into your cubicle and he steals your chair. Doesn't say a word — just rolls away with it. Doesn't give you any information about why he took your chair out of all the other chairs that are out there. Doesn't acknowledge the fact that you might need your chair to get some work done today. You wouldn't stand for it. You'd make a stink. You'd follow that guy back to his cubicle and you'd say, "Why my chair?" Okay, so now it's Tuesday morning and you're at the office, and a meeting invitation pops up in your calendar. (Laughter) And it's from this woman who you kind of know from down the hall, and the subject line references some project that you heard a little bit about. But there's no agenda. There's no information about why you were invited to the meeting. And yet you accept the meeting invitation, and you go. And when this highly unproductive session is over, you go back to your desk, and you stand at your desk and you say, "Boy, I wish I had those two hours back, like I wish I had my chair back." (Laughter) Every day, we allow our coworkers, who are otherwise very, very nice people, to steal from us. And I'm talking about something far more valuable than office furniture. I'm talking about time. Your time. In fact, I believe that we are in the middle of a global epidemic of a terrible new illness known as MAS: Mindless Accept Syndrome. (Laughter) The primary symptom of Mindless Accept Syndrome is just accepting a meeting invitation the minute it pops up in your calendar. (Laughter) It's an involuntary reflex — ding, click, bing — it's in your calendar, "Gotta go, I'm already late for a meeting." (Laughter) Meetings are important, right? And collaboration is key to the success of any enterprise. And a well-run meeting can yield really positive, actionable results. But between globalization and pervasive information technology, the way that we work has really changed dramatically over the last few years. And we're miserable. (Laughter) And we're miserable not because the other guy can't run a good meeting, it's because of MAS, our Mindless Accept Syndrome, which is a self-inflicted wound. Actually, I have evidence to prove that MAS is a global epidemic. Let me tell you why. A couple of years ago, I put a video on Youtube, and in the video, I acted out every terrible conference call you've ever been on. It goes on for about five minutes, and it has all the things that we hate about really bad meetings. There's the moderator who has no idea how to run the meeting. There are the participants who have no idea why they're there. The whole thing kind of collapses into this collaborative train wreck. And everybody leaves very angry. It's kind of funny. (Laughter) Let's take a quick look. (Video) Our goal today is to come to an agreement on a very important proposal. As a group, we need to decide if — bloop bloop — Hi, who just joined? Hi, it's Joe. I'm working from home today. (Laughter) Hi, Joe. Thanks for joining us today, great. I was just saying, we have a lot of people on the call we'd like to get through, so let's skip the roll call and I'm gonna dive right in. Our goal today is to come to an agreement on a very important proposal. As a group, we need to decide if — bloop bloop — (Laughter) Hi, who just joined? No? I thought I heard a beep. (Laughter) Sound familiar? Yeah, it sounds familiar to me, too. A couple of weeks after I put that online, 500,000 people in dozens of countries, I mean dozens of countries, watched this video. And three years later, it's still getting thousands of views every month. It's close to about a million right now. And in fact, some of the biggest companies in the world, companies that you've heard of but I won't name, have asked for my permission to use this video in their new-hire training to teach their new employees how not to run a meeting at their company. And if the numbers — there are a million views and it's being used by all these companies — aren't enough proof that we have a global problem with meetings, there are the many, many thousands of comments posted online after the video went up. Thousands of people wrote things like, "OMG, that was my day today!" "That was my day every day!" "This is my life." One guy wrote, "It's funny because it's true. Eerily, sadly, depressingly true. It made me laugh until I cried. And cried. And I cried some more." (Laughter) This poor guy said, "My daily life until retirement or death, sigh." These are real quotes and it's real sad. A common theme running through all of these comments online is this fundamental belief that we are powerless to do anything other than go to meetings and suffer through these poorly run meetings and live to meet another day. But the truth is, we're not powerless at all. In fact, the cure for MAS is right here in our hands. It's right at our fingertips, literally. It's something that I call ¡No MAS! (Laughter) Which, if I remember my high school Spanish, means something like, "Enough already, make it stop!" Here's how No MAS works. It's very simple. First of all, the next time you get a meeting invitation that doesn't have a lot of information in it at all, click the tentative button! It's okay, you're allowed, that's why it's there. It's right next to the accept button. Or the maybe button, or whatever button is there for you not to accept immediately. Then, get in touch with the person who asked you to the meeting. Tell them you're very excited to support their work, ask them what the goal of the meeting is, and tell them you're interested in learning how you can help them achieve their goal. And if we do this often enough, and we do it respectfully, people might start to be a little bit more thoughtful about the way they put together meeting invitations. And you can make more thoughtful decisions about accepting it. People might actually start sending out agendas. Imagine! Or they might not have a conference call with 12 people to talk about a status when they could just do a quick email and get it done with. People just might start to change their behavior because you changed yours. And they just might bring your chair back, too. (Laughter) No MAS! Thank you. (Applause).

Vincent Moon: How can we use computers, cameras, microphones to represent the world in an alternative way, as much as possible? How, maybe, is it possible to use the Internet to create a new form of cinema? And actually, why do we record? Well, it is with such simple questions in mind that I started to make films 10 years ago, first with a friend, Christophe Abric. He had a website, La Blogothèque, dedicated to independent music. We were crazy about music. We wanted to represent music in a different way, to film the music we love, the musicians we admired, as much as possible, far from the music industry and far from the cliches attached to it. We started to publish every week sessions on the Internet. We are going to see a few extracts now. From Grizzly Bear in the shower to Sigur Ros playing in a Parisian cafe. From Phoenix playing by the Eiffel Tower to Tom Jones in his hotel room in New York. From Arcade Fire in an elevator in the Olympiades to Beirut going down a staircase in Brooklyn. From R.E.M. in a car to The National around a table at night in the south of France. From Bon Iver playing with some friends in an apartment in Montmartre to Yeasayer having a long night, and many, many, many more unknown or very famous bands. We published all those films for free on the Internet, and we wanted to share all those films and represent music in a different way. We wanted to create another type of intimacy using all those new technologies. At the time, 10 years ago actually, there was no such project on the Internet, and I guess that's why the project we were making, the Take Away Shows, got quite successful, reaching millions of viewers. After a while, I got a bit — I wanted to go somewhere else. I felt the need to travel and to discover some other music, to explore the world, going to other corners, and actually it was also this idea of nomadic cinema, sort of, that I had in mind. How could the use of new technologies and the road fit together? How could I edit my films in a bus crossing the Andes? So I went on five-year travels around the globe. I started at the time in the digital film and music label collection Petites Planètes, which was also an homage to French filmmaker Chris Marker. We're going to see now a few more extracts of those new films. From the tecno brega diva of northern Brazil, Gaby Amarantos to a female ensemble in Chechnya. From experimental electronic music in Singapore with One Man Nation to Brazilian icon Tom Zé singing on his rooftop in São Paolo. From The Bambir, the great rock band from Armenia to some traditional songs in a restaurant in Tbilisi, Georgia. From White Shoes, a great retro pop band from Jakarta, Indonesia to DakhaBrakha, the revolutionary band from Kiev, Ukraine. From Tomi Lebrero and his bandoneon and his friends in Buenos Aires, Argentina, to many other places and musicians around the world. My desire was to make it as a trek. To do all those films, it would have been impossible with a big company behind me, with a structure or anything. I was traveling alone with a backpack — computer, camera, microphones in it. Alone, actually, but just with local people, meeting my team, which was absolutely not professional people, on the spot there, going from one place to another and to make cinema as a trek. I really believed that cinema could be this very simple thing: I want to make a film and you're going to give me a place to stay for the night. I give you a moment of cinema and you offer me a capirinha. Well, or other drinks, depending on where you are. In Peru, they drink pisco sour. Well, when I arrived in Peru, actually, I had no idea about what I would do there. And I just had one phone number, actually, of one person. Three months later, after traveling all around the country, I had recorded 33 films, only with the help of local people, only with the help of people that I was asking all the time the same question: What is important to record here today? By living in such a way, by working without any structure, I was able to react to the moment and to decide, oh, this is important to make now. This is important to record that whole person. This is important to create this exchange. When I went to Chechnya, the first person I met looked at me and was like, "What are you doing here? Are you a journalist? NGO? Politics? What kind of problems are you going to study?" Well, I was there to research on Sufi rituals in Chechnya, actually — incredible culture of Sufism in Chechnya, which is absolutely unknown outside of the region. As soon as people understood that I would give them those films — I would publish them online for free under a Creative Commons license, but I would also really give them to the people and I would let them do what they want with it. I just want to represent them in a beautiful light. I just want to portray them in a way that their grandchildren are going to look at their grandfather, and they're going to be like, "Whoa, my grandfather is as cool as Beyoncé." (Laughter) It's a really important thing. (Applause) It's really important, because that's the way people are going to look differently at their own culture, at their own land. They're going to think about it differently. It may be a way to maintain a certain diversity. Why you will record? Hmm. There's a really good quote by American thinker Hakim Bey which says, "Every recording is a tombstone of a live performance." It's a really good sentence to keep in mind nowadays in an era saturated by images. What's the point of that? Where do we go with it? I was researching. I was still keeping this idea in mind: What's the point? I was researching on music, trying to pull, trying to get closer to a certain origin of it. Where is this all coming from? I am French. I had no idea about what I would discover, which is a very simple thing: Everything was sacred, at first, and music was spiritual healing. How could I use my camera, my little tool, to get closer and maybe not only capture the trance but find an equivalent, a cine-trance, maybe, something in complete harmony with the people? That is now my new research I'm doing on spirituality, on new spirits around the world. Maybe a few more extracts now. From the Tana Toraja funeral ritual in Indonesia to an Easter ceremony in the north of Ethiopia. From jathilan, a popular trance ritual on the island of Java, to Umbanda in the north of Brazil. The Sufi rituals of Chechnya to a mass in the holiest church of Armenia. Some Sufi songs in Harar, the holy city of Ethiopia, to an ayahuasca ceremony deep in the Amazon of Peru with the Shipibo. Then to my new project, the one I'm doing now here in Brazil, named "Híbridos." I'm doing it with Priscilla Telmon. It's research on the new spiritualities all around the country. This is my quest, my own little quest of what I call experimental ethnography, trying to hybrid all those different genres, trying to regain a certain complexity. Why do we record? I was still there. I really believe cinema teaches us to see. The way we show the world is going to change the way we see this world, and we live in a moment where the mass media are doing a terrible, terrible job at representing the world: violence, extremists, only spectacular events, only simplifications of everyday life. I think we are recording to regain a certain complexity. To reinvent life today, we have to make new forms of images. And it's very simple. Muito obrigado. (Applause) Bruno Giussani: Vincent, Vincent, Vincent. Merci. We have to prepare for the following performance, and I have a question for you, and the question is this: You show up in places like the ones you just have shown us, and you are carrying a camera and I assume that you are welcome but you are not always absolutely welcome. You walk into sacred rituals, private moments in a village, a town, a group of people. How do you break the barrier when you show up with a lens? VM: I think you break it with your body, more than with your knowledge. That's what it taught me to travel, to trust the memory of the body more than the memory of the brain. The respect is stepping forward, not stepping backward, and I really think that by engaging your body in the moment, in the ceremony, in the places, people welcome you and understand your energy. BG: You told me that most of the videos you have made are actually one single shot. You don't do much editing. I mean, you edited the ones for us at the beginning of the sessions because of the length, etc. Otherwise, you just go in and capture whatever happens in front of your eyes without much planning, and so is that the case? It's correct? VM: My idea is that I think that as long as we don't cut, in a way, as long as we let the viewer watch, more and more viewers are going to feel closer, are going to get closer to the moment, to that moment and to that place. I really think of that as a matter of respecting the viewer, to not cut all the time from one place to another, to just let the time go. BG: Tell me in a few words about your new project, "Híbridos," here in Brazil. Just before coming to TEDGlobal, you have actually been traveling around the country for that. Tell us a couple of things. VM: "Híbridos" is — I really believe Brazil, far from the cliches, is the greatest religious country in the world, the greatest country in terms of spirituality and in experimentations in spiritualities. And it's a big project I'm doing over this year, which is researching in very different regions of Brazil, in very different forms of cults, and trying to understand how people live together with spirituality nowadays. BG: The man who is going to appear onstage momentarily, and Vincent's going to introduce him, is one of the subjects of one of his past videos. When did you do a video with him? VM: I guess four years ago, four years in my first travel. BG: So it was one of your first ones in Brazil. VM: It was amongst the first ones in Brazil, yeah. I shot the film in Recife, in the place where he is from. BG: So let's introduce him. Who are we waiting for? VM: I'll just make it very short. It's a very great honor for me to welcome onstage one of the greatest Brazilian musicians of all time. Please welcome Naná Vasconcelos. BG: Naná Vasconcelos! (Applause) (Music) Naná Vasconcelos: Let's go to the jungle. (Applause)

They told me that I'm a traitor to my own profession, that I should be fired, have my medical license taken away, that I should go back to my own country. My email got hacked. In a discussion forum for other doctors, someone took credit for "Twitter-bombing" my account. Now, I didn't know if this was a good or bad thing, but then came the response: "Too bad it wasn't a real bomb." I never thought that I would do something that would provoke this level of anger among other doctors. Becoming a doctor was my dream. I grew up in China, and my earliest memories are of being rushed to the hospital because I had such bad asthma that I was there nearly every week. I had this one doctor, Dr. Sam, who always took care of me. She was about the same age as my mother. She had this wild, curly hair, and she always wore these bright yellow flowery dresses. She was one of those doctors who, if you fell and you broke your arm, she would ask you why you weren't laughing because it's your humerus. Get it? See, you'd groan, but she'd always make you feel better after having seen her. Well, we all have that childhood hero that we want to grow up to be just like, right? Well, I wanted to be just like Dr. Sam. When I was eight, my parents and I moved to the U.S., and ours became the typical immigrant narrative. My parents cleaned hotel rooms and washed dishes and pumped gas so that I could pursue my dream. Well, eventually I learned enough English, and my parents were so happy the day that I got into medical school and took my oath of healing and service. But then one day, everything changed. My mother called me to tell me that she wasn't feeling well, she had a cough that wouldn't go away, she was short of breath and tired. Well, I knew that my mother was someone who never complained about anything. For her to tell me that something was the matter, I knew something had to be really wrong. And it was: We found out that she had stage IV breast cancer, cancer that by then had spread to her lungs, her bones, and her brain. My mother was brave, though, and she had hope. She went through surgery and radiation, and was on her third round of chemotherapy when she lost her address book. She tried to look up her oncologist's phone number on the Internet and she found it, but she found something else too. On several websites, he was listed as a highly paid speaker to a drug company, and in fact often spoke on behalf of the same chemo regimen that he had prescribed her. She called me in a panic, and I didn't know what to believe. Maybe this was the right chemo regimen for her, but maybe it wasn't. It made her scared and it made her doubt. When it comes to medicine, having that trust is a must, and when that trust is gone, then all that's left is fear. There's another side to this fear. As a medical student, I was taking care of this 19-year-old who was biking back to his dorm when he got struck and hit, run over by an SUV. He had seven broken ribs, shattered hip bones, and he was bleeding inside his belly and inside his brain. Now, imagine being his parents who flew in from Seattle, 2,000 miles away, to find their son in a coma. I mean, you'd want to find out what's going on with him, right? They asked to attend our bedside rounds where we discussed his condition and his plan, which I thought was a reasonable request, and also would give us a chance to show them how much we were trying and how much we cared. The head doctor, though, said no. He gave all kinds of reasons. Maybe they'll get in the nurse's way. Maybe they'll stop students from asking questions. He even said, "What if they see mistakes and sue us?" What I saw behind every excuse was deep fear, and what I learned was that to become a doctor, we have to put on our white coats, put up a wall, and hide behind it. There's a hidden epidemic in medicine. Of course, patients are scared when they come to the doctor. Imagine you wake up with this terrible bellyache, you go to the hospital, you're lying in this strange place, you're on this hospital gurney, you're wearing this flimsy gown, strangers are coming to poke and prod at you. You don't know what's going to happen. You don't even know if you're going to get the blanket you asked for 30 minutes ago. But it's not just patients who are scared; doctors are scared too. We're scared of patients finding out who we are and what medicine is all about. And so what do we do? We put on our white coats and we hide behind them. Of course, the more we hide, the more people want to know what it is that we're hiding. The more fear then spirals into mistrust and poor medical care. We don't just have a fear of sickness, we have a sickness of fear. Can we bridge this disconnect between what patients need and what doctors do? Can we overcome the sickness of fear? Let me ask you differently: If hiding isn't the answer, what if we did the opposite? What if doctors were to become totally transparent with their patients? Last fall, I conducted a research study to find out what it is that people want to know about their healthcare. I didn't just want to study patients in a hospital, but everyday people. So my two medical students, Suhavi Tucker and Laura Johns, literally took their research to the streets. They went to banks, coffee shops, senior centers, Chinese restaurants and train stations. What did they find? Well, when we asked people, "What do you want to know about your healthcare?" people responded with what they want to know about their doctors, because people understand health care to be the individual interaction between them and their doctors. When we asked, "What do you want to know about your doctors?" people gave three different answers. Some want to know that their doctor is competent and certified to practice medicine. Some want to be sure that their doctor is unbiased and is making decisions based on evidence and science, not on who pays them. Surprisingly to us, many people want to know something else about their doctors. Jonathan, a 28-year-old law student, says he wants to find someone who is comfortable with LGBTQ patients and specializes in LGBT health. Serena, a 32-year-old accountant, says that it's important to her for her doctor to share her values when it comes to reproductive choice and women's rights. Frank, a 59-year-old hardware store owner, doesn't even like going to the doctor and wants to find someone who believes in prevention first, but who is comfortable with alternative treatments. One after another, our respondents told us that that doctor-patient relationship is a deeply intimate one — that to show their doctors their bodies and tell them their deepest secrets, they want to first understand their doctor's values. Just because doctors have to see every patient doesn't mean that patients have to see every doctor. People want to know about their doctors first so that they can make an informed choice. As a result of this, I formed a campaign, Who's My Doctor? that calls for total transparency in medicine. Participating doctors voluntarily disclose on a public website not just information about where we went to medical school and what specialty we're in, but also our conflicts of interest. We go beyond the Government in the Sunshine Act about drug company affiliations, and we talk about how we're paid. Incentives matter. If you go to your doctor because of back pain, you might want to know he's getting paid 5,000 dollars to perform spine surgery versus 25 dollars to refer you to see a physical therapist, or if he's getting paid the same thing no matter what he recommends. Then, we go one step further. We add our values when it comes to women's health, LGBT health, alternative medicine, preventive health, and end-of-life decisions. We pledge to our patients that we are here to serve you, so you have a right to know who we are. We believe that transparency can be the cure for fear. I thought some doctors would sign on and others wouldn't, but I had no idea of the huge backlash that would ensue. Within one week of starting Who's My Doctor? Medscape's public forum and several online doctors' communities had thousands of posts about this topic. Here are a few. From a gastroenterologist in Portland: "I devoted 12 years of my life to being a slave. I have loans and mortgages. I depend on lunches from drug companies to serve patients." Well, times may be hard for everyone, but try telling your patient making 35,000 dollars a year to serve a family of four that you need the free lunch. From an orthopedic surgeon in Charlotte: "I find it an invasion of my privacy to disclose where my income comes from. My patients don't disclose their incomes to me." But your patients' sources of income don't affect your health. From a psychiatrist in New York City: "Pretty soon we will have to disclose whether we prefer cats to dogs, what model of car we drive, and what toilet paper we use." Well, how you feel about Toyotas or Cottonelle won't affect your patients' health, but your views on a woman's right to choose and preventive medicine and end-of-life decisions just might. And my favorite, from a Kansas City cardiologist: "More government-mandated stuff? Dr. Wen needs to move back to her own country." Well, two pieces of good news. First of all, this is meant to be voluntary and not mandatory, and second of all, I'm American and I'm already here. (Laughter) (Applause) Within a month, my employers were getting calls asking for me to be fired. I received mail at my undisclosed home address with threats to contact the medical board to sanction me. My friends and family urged me to quit this campaign. After the bomb threat, I was done. But then I heard from patients. Over social media, a TweetChat, which I'd learned what that was by then, generated 4.3 million impressions, and thousands of people wrote to encourage me to continue. They wrote with things like, "If doctors are doing something they're that ashamed of, they shouldn't be doing it." "Elected officials have to disclose campaign contributions. Lawyers have to disclose conflicts of interests. Why shouldn't doctors?" And finally, many people wrote and said, "Let us patients decide what's important when we're choosing a doctor." In our initial trial, over 300 doctors have taken the total transparency pledge. What a crazy new idea, right? But actually, this is not that new of a concept at all. Remember Dr. Sam, my doctor in China, with the goofy jokes and the wild hair? Well, she was my doctor, but she was also our neighbor who lived in the building across the street. I went to the same school as her daughter. My parents and I trusted her because we knew who she was and what she stood for, and she had no need to hide from us. Just one generation ago, this was the norm in the U.S. as well. You knew that your family doctor was the father of two teenage boys, that he quit smoking a few years ago, that he says he's a regular churchgoer, but you see him twice a year: once at Easter and once when his mother-in-law comes to town. You knew what he was about, and he had no need to hide from you. But the sickness of fear has taken over, and patients suffer the consequences. I know this firsthand. My mother fought her cancer for eight years. She was a planner, and she thought a lot about how she wanted to live and how she wanted to die. Not only did she sign advance directives, she wrote a 12-page document about how she had suffered enough, how it was time for her to go. One day, when I was a resident physician, I got a call to say that she was in the intensive care unit. By the time I got there, she was about to be intubated and put on a breathing machine. "But this is not what she wants," I said, "and we have documents." The ICU doctor looked at me in the eye, pointed at my then 16-year-old sister, and said, "Do you remember when you were that age? How would you have liked to grow up without your mother?" Her oncologist was there too, and said, "This is your mother. Can you really face yourself for the rest of your life if you don't do everything for her?" I knew my mother so well. I understood what her directives meant so well, but I was a physician. That was the single hardest decision I ever made, to let her die in peace, and I carry those words of those doctors with me every single day. We can bridge the disconnect between what doctors do and what patients need. We can get there, because we've been there before, and we know that transparency gets us to that trust. Research has shown us that openness also helps doctors, that having open medical records, being willing to talk about medical errors, will increase patient trust, improve health outcomes, and reduce malpractice. That openness, that trust, is only going to be more important as we move from the infectious to the behavioral model of disease. Bacteria may not care so much about trust and intimacy, but for people to tackle the hard lifestyle choices, to address issues like smoking cessation, blood-pressure management and diabetes control, well, that requires us to establish trust. Here's what other transparent doctors have said. Brandon Combs, an internist in Denver: "This has brought me closer to my patients. The type of relationship I've developed — that's why I entered medicine." Aaron Stupple, an internist in Denver: "I tell my patients that I am totally open with them. I don't hide anything from them. This is me. Now tell me about you. We're in this together." May Nguyen, a family physician in Houston: "My colleagues are astounded by what I'm doing. They ask me how I could be so brave. I said, I'm not being brave, it's my job." I leave you today with a final thought. Being totally transparent is scary. You feel naked, exposed and vulnerable, but that vulnerability, that humility, it can be an extraordinary benefit to the practice of medicine. When doctors are willing to step off our pedestals, take off our white coats, and show our patients who we are and what medicine is all about, that's when we begin to overcome the sickness of fear. That's when we establish trust. That's when we change the paradigm of medicine from one of secrecy and hiding to one that is fully open and engaged for our patients. Thank you. (Applause)

What has the War on Drugs done to the world? Look at the murder and mayhem in Mexico, Central America, so many other parts of the planet, the global black market estimated at 300 billion dollars a year, prisons packed in the United States and elsewhere, police and military drawn into an unwinnable war that violates basic rights, and ordinary citizens just hope they don't get caught in the crossfire, and meanwhile, more people using more drugs than ever. It's my country's history with alcohol prohibition and Al Capone, times 50. Which is why it's particularly galling to me as an American that we've been the driving force behind this global drug war. Ask why so many countries criminalize drugs they'd never heard of, why the U.N. drug treaties emphasize criminalization over health, even why most of the money worldwide for dealing with drug abuse goes not to helping agencies but those that punish, and you'll find the good old U.S. of A. Why did we do this? Some people, especially in Latin America, think it's not really about drugs. It's just a subterfuge for advancing the realpolitik interests of the U.S. But by and large, that's not it. We don't want gangsters and guerrillas funded with illegal drug money terrorizing and taking over other nations. No, the fact is, America really is crazy when it comes to drugs. I mean, don't forget, we're the ones who thought that we could prohibit alcohol. So think about our global drug war not as any sort of rational policy, but as the international projection of a domestic psychosis. (Applause) But here's the good news. Now it's the Russians leading the Drug War and not us. Most politicians in my country want to roll back the Drug War now, put fewer people behind bars, not more, and I'm proud to say as an American that we now lead the world in reforming marijuana policies. It's now legal for medical purposes in almost half our 50 states, millions of people can purchase their marijuana, their medicine, in government- licensed dispensaries, and over half my fellow citizens now say it's time to legally regulate and tax marijuana more or less like alcohol. That's what Colorado and Washington are doing, and Uruguay, and others are sure to follow. So that's what I do: work to end the Drug War. I think it all started growing up in a fairly religious, moral family, eldest son of a rabbi, going off to university where I smoked some marijuana and I liked it. (Laughter) And I liked drinking too, but it was obvious that alcohol was really the more dangerous of the two, but my friends and I could get busted for smoking a joint. Now, that hypocrisy kept bugging me, so I wrote my Ph.D dissertation on international drug control. I talked my way into the State Department. I got a security clearance. I interviewed hundreds of DEA and other law enforcement agents all around Europe and the Americas, and I'd ask them, "What do you think the answer is?" Well, in Latin America, they'd say to me, "You can't really cut off the supply. The answer lies back in the U.S., in cutting off the demand." So then I go back home and I talk to people involved in anti-drug efforts there, and they'd say, "You know, Ethan, you can't really cut off the demand. The answer lies over there. You've got to cut off the supply." Then I'd go and talk to the guys in customs trying to stop drugs at the borders, and they'd say, "You're not going to stop it here. The answer lies over there, in cutting off supply and demand." And it hit me: Everybody involved in this thought the answer lay in that area about which they knew the least. So that's when I started reading everything I could about psychoactive drugs: the history, the science, the politics, all of it, and the more one read, the more it hit you how a thoughtful, enlightened, intelligent approach took you over here, whereas the politics and laws of my country were taking you over here. And that disparity struck me as this incredible intellectual and moral puzzle. There's probably never been a drug-free society. Virtually every society has ingested psychoactive substances to deal with pain, increase our energy, socialize, even commune with God. Our desire to alter our consciousness may be as fundamental as our desires for food, companionship and sex. So our true challenge is to learn how to live with drugs so they cause the least possible harm and in some cases the greatest possible benefit. I'll tell you something else I learned, that the reason some drugs are legal and others not has almost nothing to do with science or health or the relative risk of drugs, and almost everything to do with who uses and who is perceived to use particular drugs. In the late 19th century, when most of the drugs that are now illegal were legal, the principal consumers of opiates in my country and others were middle-aged white women, using them to alleviate aches and pains when few other analgesics were available. And nobody thought about criminalizing it back then because nobody wanted to put Grandma behind bars. But when hundreds of thousands of Chinese started showing up in my country, working hard on the railroads and the mines and then kicking back in the evening just like they had in the old country with a few puffs on that opium pipe, that's when you saw the first drug prohibition laws in California and Nevada, driven by racist fears of Chinese transforming white women into opium-addicted sex slaves. The first cocaine prohibition laws, similarly prompted by racist fears of black men sniffing that white powder and forgetting their proper place in Southern society. And the first marijuana prohibition laws, all about fears of Mexican migrants in the West and the Southwest. And what was true in my country, is true in so many others as well, with both the origins of these laws and their implementation. Put it this way, and I exaggerate only slightly: If the principal smokers of cocaine were affluent older white men and the principal consumers of Viagra were poor young black men, then smokable cocaine would be easy to get with a prescription from your doctor and selling Viagra would get you five to 10 years behind bars. (Applause) I used to be a professor teaching about this. Now I'm an activist, a human rights activist, and what drives me is my shame at living in an otherwise great nation that has less than five percent of the world's population but almost 25 percent of the world's incarcerated population. It's the people I meet who have lost someone they love to drug-related violence or prison or overdose or AIDS because our drug policies emphasize criminalization over health. It's good people who have lost their jobs, their homes, their freedom, even their children to the state, not because they hurt anyone but solely because they chose to use one drug instead of another. So is legalization the answer? On that, I'm torn: three days a week I think yes, three days a week I think no, and on Sundays I'm agnostic. But since today is Tuesday, let me just say that legally regulating and taxing most of the drugs that are now criminalized would radically reduce the crime, violence, corruption and black markets, and the problems of adulterated and unregulated drugs, and improve public safety, and allow taxpayer resources to be developed to more useful purposes. I mean, look, the markets in marijuana, cocaine, heroin and methamphetamine are global commodities markets just like the global markets in alcohol, tobacco, coffee, sugar, and so many other things. Where there is a demand, there will be a supply. Knock out one source and another inevitably emerges. People tend to think of prohibition as the ultimate form of regulation when in fact it represents the abdication of regulation with criminals filling the void. Which is why putting criminal laws and police front and center in trying to control a dynamic global commodities market is a recipe for disaster. And what we really need to do is to bring the underground drug markets as much as possible aboveground and regulate them as intelligently as we can to minimize both the harms of drugs and the harms of prohibitionist policies. Now, with marijuana, that obviously means legally regulating and taxing it like alcohol. The benefits of doing so are enormous, the risks minimal. Will more people use marijuana? Maybe, but it's not going to be young people, because it's not going to be legalized for them, and quite frankly, they already have the best access to marijuana. I think it's going to be older people. It's going to be people in their 40s and 60s and 80s who find they prefer a little marijuana to that drink in the evening or the sleeping pill or that it helps with their arthritis or diabetes or maybe helps spice up a long-term marriage. (Laughter) And that just might be a net public health benefit. As for the other drugs, look at Portugal, where nobody goes to jail for possessing drugs, and the government's made a serious commitment to treating addiction as a health issue. Look at Switzerland, Germany, the Netherlands, Denmark, England, where people who have been addicted to heroin for many years and repeatedly tried to quit and failed can get pharmaceutical heroin and helping services in medical clinics, and the results are in: Illegal drug abuse and disease and overdoses and crime and arrests all go down, health and well-being improve, taxpayers benefit, and many drug users even put their addictions behind them. Look at New Zealand, which recently enacted a law allowing certain recreational drugs to be sold legally provided their safety had been established. Look here in Brazil, and some other countries, where a remarkable psychoactive substance, ayahuasca, can be legally bought and consumed provided it's done so within a religious context. Look in Bolivia and Peru, where all sorts of products made from the coca leaf, the source of cocaine, are sold legally over the counter with no apparent harm to people's public health. I mean, don't forget, Coca-Cola had cocaine in it until 1900, and so far as we know was no more addictive than Coca-Cola is today. Conversely, think about cigarettes: Nothing can both hook you and kill you like cigarettes. When researchers ask heroin addicts what's the toughest drug to quit, most say cigarettes. Yet in my country and many others, half of all the people who were ever addicted to cigarettes have quit without anyone being arrested or put in jail or sent to a "treatment program" by a prosecutor or a judge. What did it were higher taxes and time and place restrictions on sale and use and effective anti-smoking campaigns. Now, could we reduce smoking even more by making it totally illegal? Probably. But just imagine the drug war nightmare that would result. So the challenges we face today are twofold. The first is the policy challenge of designing and implementing alternatives to ineffective prohibitionist policies, even as we need to get better at regulating and living with the drugs that are now legal. But the second challenge is tougher, because it's about us. The obstacles to reform lie not just out there in the power of the prison industrial complex or other vested interests that want to keep things the way they are, but within each and every one of us. It's our fears and our lack of knowledge and imagination that stands in the way of real reform. And ultimately, I think that boils down to the kids, and to every parent's desire to put our baby in a bubble, and the fear that somehow drugs will pierce that bubble and put our young ones at risk. In fact, sometimes it seems like the entire War on Drugs gets justified as one great big child protection act, which any young person can tell you it's not. So here's what I say to teenagers. First, don't do drugs. Second, don't do drugs. Third, if you do do drugs, there's some things I want you to know, because my bottom line as your parent is, come home safely at the end of the night and grow up and lead a healthy and good adulthood. That's my drug education mantra: Safety first. So this is what I've dedicated my life to, to building an organization and a movement of people who believe we need to turn our backs on the failed prohibitions of the past and embrace new drug policies grounded in science, compassion, health and human rights, where people who come from across the political spectrum and every other spectrum as well, where people who love our drugs, people who hate drugs, and people who don't give a damn about drugs, but every one of us believes that this War on Drugs, this backward, heartless, disastrous War on Drugs, has got to end. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. Thank you. Chris Anderson: Ethan, congrats — quite the reaction. That was a powerful talk. Not quite a complete standing O, though, and I'm guessing that some people here and maybe a few watching online, maybe someone knows a teenager or a friend or whatever who got sick, maybe died from some drug overdose. I'm sure you've had these people approach you before. What do you say to them? Ethan Nadelmann: Chris, the most amazing thing that's happened of late is that I've met a growing number of people who have actually lost a sibling or a child to a drug overdose, and 10 years ago, those people just wanted to say, let's line up all the drug dealers and shoot them and that will solve it. And what they've come to understand is that the Drug War did nothing to protect their kids. If anything, it made it more likely that those kids were put at risk. And so they're now becoming part of this drug policy reform movement. There's other people who have kids, one's addicted to alcohol, the other one's addicted to cocaine or heroin, and they ask themselves the question: Why does this kid get to take one step at a time and try to get better and that one's got to deal with jail and police and criminals all the time? So everybody's understanding, the Drug War's not protecting anybody. CA: Certainly in the U.S., you've got political gridlock on most issues. Is there any realistic chance of anything actually shifting on this issue in the next five years? EN: I'd say it's quite remarkable. I'm getting all these calls from journalists now who are saying to me, "Ethan, it seems like the only two issues advancing politically in America right now are marijuana law reform and gay marriage. What are you doing right?" And then you're looking at bipartisanship breaking out with, actually, Republicans in the Congress and state legislatures allowing bills to be enacted with majority Democratic support, so we've gone from being sort of the third rail, the most fearful issue of American politics, to becoming one of the most successful. CA: Ethan, thank you so much for coming to TEDGlobal. EN: Chris, thanks so much. CA: Thank you. EN: Thank you. (Applause)

On January 4, 1934, a young man delivered a report to the United States Congress that 80 years on, still shapes the lives of everyone in this room today, still shapes the lives of everyone on this planet. That young man wasn't a politician, he wasn't a businessman, a civil rights activist or a faith leader. He was that most unlikely of heroes, an economist. His name was Simon Kuznets and the report that he delivered was called "National Income, 1929-1932." Now, you might think this is a rather dry and dull report. And you're absolutely right. It's dry as a bone. But this report is the foundation of how, today, we judge the success of countries: what we know best as Gross Domestic Product, GDP. GDP has defined and shaped our lives for the last 80 years. And today I want to talk about a different way to measure the success of countries, a different way to define and shape our lives for the next 80 years. But first, we have to understand how GDP came to dominate our lives. Kuznets' report was delivered at a moment of crisis. The U.S. economy was plummeting into the Great Depression and policy makers were struggling to respond. Struggling because they didn't know what was going on. They didn't have data and statistics. So what Kuznet's report gave them was reliable data on what the U.S. economy was producing, updated year by year. And armed with this information, policy makers were, eventually, able to find a way out of the slump. And because Kuznets' invention was found to be so useful, it spread around the world. And now today, every country produces GDP statistics. But, in that first report, Kuznets himself delivered a warning. It's in the introductory chapter. On page seven he says, "The welfare of a nation can, therefore, scarcely be inferred from a measurement of national income as defined above." It's not the greatest sound bite in the world, and it's dressed up in the cautious language of the economist. But his message was clear: GDP is a tool to help us measure economic performance. It's not a measure of our well-being. And it shouldn't be a guide to all decision making. But we have ignored Kuznets' warning. We live in a world where GDP is the benchmark of success in a global economy. Our politicians boast when GDP goes up. Markets move and trillions of dollars of capital move around the world based on which countries are going up and which countries are going down, all measured in GDP. Our societies have become engines to create more GDP. But we know that GDP is flawed. It ignores the environment. It counts bombs and prisons as progress. It can't count happiness or community. And it has nothing to say about fairness or justice. Is it any surprise that our world, marching to the drumbeat of GDP, is teetering on the brink of environmental disaster and filled with anger and conflict? We need a better way to measure our societies, a measure based on the real things that matter to real people. Do I have enough to eat? Can I read and write? Am I safe? Do I have rights? Do I live in a society where I'm not discriminated against? Is my future and the future of my children prevented from environmental destruction? These are questions that GDP does not and cannot answer. There have, of course, been efforts in the past to move beyond GDP. But I believe that we're living in a moment when we are ready for a measurement revolution. We're ready because we've seen, in the financial crisis of 2008, how our fetish for economic growth led us so far astray. We've seen, in the Arab Spring, how countries like Tunisia were supposedly economic superstars, but they were societies that were seething with discontentment. We're ready, because today we have the technology to gather and analyze data in ways that would have been unimaginable to Kuznets. Today, I'd like to introduce you to the Social Progress Index. It's a measure of the well-being of society, completely separate from GDP. It's a whole new way of looking at the world. The Social Progress Index begins by defining what it means to be a good society based around three dimensions. The first is, does everyone have the basic needs for survival: food, water, shelter, safety? Secondly, does everyone have access to the building blocks to improve their lives: education, information, health and sustainable environment? And then third, does every individual have access to a chance to pursue their goals and dreams and ambitions free from obstacles? Do they have rights, freedom of choice, freedom from discrimination and access to the the world's most advanced knowledge? Together, these 12 components form the Social Progress framework. And for each of these 12 components, we have indicators to measure how countries are performing. Not indicators of effort or intention, but real achievement. We don't measure how much a country spends on healthcare, we measure the length and quality of people's lives. We don't measure whether governments pass laws against discrimination, we measure whether people experience discrimination. But what you want to know is who's top, don't you? (Laughter) I knew that, I knew that, I knew that. Okay, I'm going to show you. I'm going to show you on this chart. So here we are, what I've done here is put on the vertical axis social progress. Higher is better. And then, just for comparison, just for fun, on the horizontal axis is GDP per capita. Further to the right is more. So the country in the world with the highest social progress, the number one country on social progress is New Zealand. (Applause) Well done! Never been; must go. (Laughter) The country with the least social progress, I'm sorry to say, is Chad. I've never been; maybe next year. (Laughter) Or maybe the year after. Now, I know what you're thinking. You're thinking, "Aha, but New Zealand has a higher GDP than Chad!" It's a good point, well made. But let me show you two other countries. Here's the United States — considerably richer than New Zealand, but with a lower level of social progress. And then here's Senegal — it's got a higher level of social progress than Chad, but the same level of GDP. So what's going on? Well, look. Let me bring in the rest of the countries of the world, the 132 we've been able to measure, each one represented by a dot. There we go. Lots of dots. Now, obviously I can't do all of them, so a few highlights for you: The highest ranked G7 country is Canada. My country, the United Kingdom, is sort of middling, sort of dull, but who cares — at least we beat the French. (Laughter) And then looking at the emerging economies, top of the BRICS, pleased to say, is Brazil. (Applause) Come on, cheer! Go, Brazil! Beating South Africa, then Russia, then China and then India. Tucked away on the right-hand side, you will see a dot of a country with a lot of GDP but not a huge amount of social progress — that's Kuwait. Just above Brazil is a social progress superpower — that's Costa Rica. It's got a level of social progress the same as some Western European countries, with a much lower GDP. Now, my slide is getting a little cluttered and I'd like to step back a bit. So let me take away these countries, and then pop in the regression line. So this shows the average relationship between GDP and social progress. The first thing to notice, is that there's lots of noise around the trend line. And what this shows, what this empirically demonstrates, is that GDP is not destiny. At every level of GDP per capita, there are opportunities for more social progress, risks of less. The second thing to notice is that for poor countries, the curve is really steep. So what this tells us is that if poor countries can get a little bit of extra GDP, and if they reinvest that in doctors, nurses, water supplies, sanitation, etc., there's a lot of social progress bang for your GDP buck. And that's good news, and that's what we've seen over the last 20, 30 years, with a lot of people lifted out of poverty by economic growth and good policies in poorer countries. But go on a bit further up the curve, and then we see it flattening out. Each extra dollar of GDP is buying less and less social progress. And with more and more of the world's population living on this part of the curve, it means GDP is becoming less and less useful as a guide to our development. I'll show you an example of Brazil. Here's Brazil: social progress of about 70 out of 100, GDP per capita about 14,000 dollars a year. And look, Brazil's above the line. Brazil is doing a reasonably good job of turning GDP into social progress. But where does Brazil go next? Let's say that Brazil adopts a bold economic plan to double GDP in the next decade. But that is only half a plan. It's less than half a plan, because where does Brazil want to go on social progress? Brazil, it's possible to increase your growth, increase your GDP, while stagnating or going backwards on social progress. We don't want Brazil to become like Russia. What you really want is for Brazil to get ever more efficient at creating social progress from its GDP, so it becomes more like New Zealand. And what that means is that Brazil needs to prioritize social progress in its development plan and see that it's not just growth alone, it's growth with social progress. And that's what the Social Progress Index does: It reframes the debate about development, not just about GDP alone, but inclusive, sustainable growth that brings real improvements in people's lives. And it's not just about countries. Earlier this year, with our friends from the Imazon nonprofit here in Brazil, we launched the first subnational Social Progress Index. We did it for the Amazon region. It's an area the size of Europe, 24 million people, one of the most deprived parts of the country. And here are the results, and this is broken down into nearly 800 different municipalities. And with this detailed information about the real quality of life in this part of the country, Imazon and other partners from government, business and civil society can work together to construct a development plan that will help really improve people's lives, while protecting that precious global asset that is the Amazon Rainforest. And this is just the beginning, You can create a Social Progress Index for any state, region, city or municipality. We all know and love TEDx; this is Social Pogress-x. This is a tool for anyone to come and use. Contrary to the way we sometimes talk about it, GDP was not handed down from God on tablets of stone. (Laughter) It's a measurement tool invented in the 20th century to address the challenges of the 20th century. In the 21st century, we face new challenges: aging, obesity, climate change, and so on. To face those challenges, we need new tools of measurement, new ways of valuing progress. Imagine if we could measure what nonprofits, charities, volunteers, civil society organizations really contribute to our society. Imagine if businesses competed not just on the basis of their economic contribution, but on their contribution to social progress. Imagine if we could hold politicians to account for really improving people's lives. Imagine if we could work together — government, business, civil society, me, you — and make this century the century of social progress. Thank you. (Applause)

The first patient to ever be treated with an antibiotic was a policeman in Oxford. On his day off from work, he was scratched by a rose thorn while working in the garden. That small scratch became infected. Over the next few days, his head was swollen with abscesses, and in fact his eye was so infected that they had to take it out, and by February of 1941, this poor man was on the verge of dying. He was at Radcliffe Infirmary in Oxford, and fortunately for him, a small team of doctors led by a Dr. Howard Florey had managed to synthesize a very small amount of penicillin, a drug that had been discovered 12 years before by Alexander Fleming but had never actually been used to treat a human, and indeed no one even knew if the drug would work, if it was full of impurities that would kill the patient, but Florey and his team figured if they had to use it, they might as well use it on someone who was going to die anyway. So they gave Albert Alexander, this Oxford policeman, the drug, and within 24 hours, he started getting better. His fever went down, his appetite came back. Second day, he was doing much better. They were starting to run out of penicillin, so what they would do was run with his urine across the road to re-synthesize the penicillin from his urine and give it back to him, and that worked. Day four, well on the way to recovery. This was a miracle. Day five, they ran out of penicillin, and the poor man died. So that story didn't end that well, but fortunately for millions of other people, like this child who was treated again in the early 1940s, who was again dying of a sepsis, and within just six days, you can see, recovered thanks to this wonder drug, penicillin. Millions have lived, and global health has been transformed. Now, antibiotics have been used for patients like this, but they've also been used rather frivolously in some instances, for treating someone with just a cold or the flu, which they might not have responded to an antibiotic, and they've also been used in large quantities sub-therapeutically, which means in small concentrations, to make chicken and hogs grow faster. Just to save a few pennies on the price of meat, we've spent a lot of antibiotics on animals, not for treatment, not for sick animals, but primarily for growth promotion. Now, what did that lead us to? Basically, the massive use of antibiotics around the world has imposed such large selection pressure on bacteria that resistance is now a problem, because we've now selected for just the resistant bacteria. And I'm sure you've all read about this in the newspapers, you've seen this in every magazine that you come across, but I really want you to appreciate the significance of this problem. This is serious. The next slide I'm about to show you is of carbapenem resistance in acinetobacter. Acinetobacter is a nasty hospital bug, and carbapenem is pretty much the strongest class of antibiotics that we can throw at this bug. And you can see in 1999 this is the pattern of resistance, mostly under about 10 percent across the United States. Now watch what happens when we play the video. So I don't know where you live, but wherever it is, it certainly is a lot worse now than it was in 1999, and that is the problem of antibiotic resistance. It's a global issue affecting both rich and poor countries, and at the heart of it, you might say, well, isn't this really just a medical issue? If we taught doctors how not to use antibiotics as much, if we taught patients how not to demand antibiotics, perhaps this really wouldn't be an issue, and maybe the pharmaceutical companies should be working harder to develop more antibiotics. Now, it turns out that there's something fundamental about antibiotics which makes it different from other drugs, which is that if I misuse antibiotics or I use antibiotics, not only am I affected but others are affected as well, in the same way as if I choose to drive to work or take a plane to go somewhere, that the costs I impose on others through global climate change go everywhere, and I don't necessarily take these costs into consideration. This is what economists might call a problem of the commons, and the problem of the commons is exactly what we face in the case of antibiotics as well: that we don't consider — and we, including individuals, patients, hospitals, entire health systems — do not consider the costs that they impose on others by the way antibiotics are actually used. Now, that's a problem that's similar to another area that we all know about, which is of fuel use and energy, and of course energy use both depletes energy as well as leads to local pollution and climate change. And typically, in the case of energy, there are two ways in which you can deal with the problem. One is, we can make better use of the oil that we have, and that's analogous to making better use of existing antibiotics, and we can do this in a number of ways that we'll talk about in a second, but the other option is the "drill, baby, drill" option, which in the case of antibiotics is to go find new antibiotics. Now, these are not separate. They're related, because if we invest heavily in new oil wells, we reduce the incentives for conservation of oil in the same way that's going to happen for antibiotics. The reverse is also going to happen, which is that if we use our antibiotics appropriately, we don't necessarily have to make the investments in new drug development. And if you thought that these two were entirely, fully balanced between these two options, you might consider the fact that this is really a game that we're playing. The game is really one of coevolution, and coevolution is, in this particular picture, between cheetahs and gazelles. Cheetahs have evolved to run faster, because if they didn't run faster, they wouldn't get any lunch. Gazelles have evolved to run faster because if they don't run faster, they would be lunch. Now, this is the game we're playing against the bacteria, except we're not the cheetahs, we're the gazelles, and the bacteria would, just in the course of this little talk, would have had kids and grandkids and figured out how to be resistant just by selection and trial and error, trying it over and over again. Whereas how do we stay ahead of the bacteria? We have drug discovery processes, screening molecules, we have clinical trials, and then, when we think we have a drug, then we have the FDA regulatory process. And once we go through all of that, then we try to stay one step ahead of the bacteria. Now, this is clearly not a game that can be sustained, or one that we can win by simply innovating to stay ahead. We've got to slow the pace of coevolution down, and there are ideas that we can borrow from energy that are helpful in thinking about how we might want to do this in the case of antibiotics as well. Now, if you think about how we deal with energy pricing, for instance, we consider emissions taxes, which means we're imposing the costs of pollution on people who actually use that energy. We might consider doing that for antibiotics as well, and perhaps that would make sure that antibiotics actually get used appropriately. There are clean energy subsidies, which are to switch to fuels which don't pollute as much or perhaps don't need fossil fuels. Now, the analogy here is, perhaps we need to move away from using antibiotics, and if you think about it, what are good substitutes for antibiotics? Well, turns out that anything that reduces the need for the antibiotic would really work, so that could include improving hospital infection control or vaccinating people, particularly against the seasonal influenza. And the seasonal flu is probably the biggest driver of antibiotic use, both in this country as well as in many other countries, and that could really help. A third option might include something like tradeable permits. And these seem like faraway scenarios, but if you consider the fact that we might not have antibiotics for many people who have infections, we might consider the fact that we might want to allocate who actually gets to use some of these antibiotics over others, and some of these might have to be on the basis of clinical need, but also on the basis of pricing. And certainly consumer education works. Very often, people overuse antibiotics or prescribe too much without necessarily knowing that they do so, and feedback mechanisms have been found to be useful, both on energy — When you tell someone that they're using a lot of energy during peak hour, they tend to cut back, and the same sort of example has been performed even in the case of antibiotics. A hospital in St. Louis basically would put up on a chart the names of surgeons in the ordering of how much antibiotics they'd used in the previous month, and this was purely an informational feedback, there was no shaming, but essentially that provided some information back to surgeons that maybe they could rethink how they were using antibiotics. Now, there's a lot that can be done on the supply side as well. If you look at the price of penicillin, the cost per day is about 10 cents. It's a fairly cheap drug. If you take drugs that have been introduced since then — linezolid or daptomycin — those are significantly more expensive, so to a world that has been used to paying 10 cents a day for antibiotics, the idea of paying 180 dollars per day seems like a lot. But what is that really telling us? That price is telling us that we should no longer take cheap, effective antibiotics as a given into the foreseeable future, and that price is a signal to us that perhaps we need to be paying much more attention to conservation. That price is also a signal that maybe we need to start looking at other technologies, in the same way that gasoline prices are a signal and an impetus, to, say, the development of electric cars. Prices are important signals and we need to pay attention, but we also need to consider the fact that although these high prices seem unusual for antibiotics, they're nothing compared to the price per day of some cancer drugs, which might save a patient's life only for a few months or perhaps a year, whereas antibiotics would potentially save a patient's life forever. So this is going to involve a whole new paradigm shift, and it's also a scary shift because in many parts of this country, in many parts of the world, the idea of paying 200 dollars for a day of antibiotic treatment is simply unimaginable. So we need to think about that. Now, there are backstop options, which is other alternative technologies that people are working on. It includes bacteriophages, probiotics, quorum sensing, synbiotics. Now, all of these are useful avenues to pursue, and they will become even more lucrative when the price of new antibiotics starts going higher, and we've seen that the market does actually respond, and the government is now considering ways of subsidizing new antibiotics and development. But there are challenges here. We don't want to just throw money at a problem. What we want to be able to do is invest in new antibiotics in ways that actually encourage appropriate use and sales of those antibiotics, and that really is the challenge here. Now, going back to these technologies, you all remember the line from that famous dinosaur film, "Nature will find a way." So it's not as if these are permanent solutions. We really have to remember that, whatever the technology might be, that nature will find some way to work around it. You might think, well, this is just a problem just with antibiotics and with bacteria, but it turns out that we have the exact same identical problem in many other fields as well, with multidrug-resistant tuberculosis, which is a serious problem in India and South Africa. Thousands of patients are dying because the second-line drugs are so expensive, and in some instances, even those don't work and you have XDR TB. Viruses are becoming resistant. Agricultural pests. Malaria parasites. Right now, much of the world depends on one drug, artemisinin drugs, essentially to treat malaria. Resistance to artemisinin has already emerged, and if this were to become widespread, that puts at risk the single drug that we have to treat malaria around the world in a way that's currently safe and efficacious. Mosquitos develop resistance. If you have kids, you probably know about head lice, and if you're from New York City, I understand that the specialty there is bedbugs. So those are also resistant. And we have to bring an example from across the pond. Turns out that rats are also resistant to poisons. Now, what's common to all of these things is the idea that we've had these technologies to control nature only for the last 70, 80 or 100 years and essentially in a blink, we have squandered our ability to control, because we have not recognized that natural selection and evolution was going to find a way to get back, and we need to completely rethink how we're going to use measures to control biological organisms, and rethink how we incentivize the development, introduction, in the case of antibiotics prescription, and use of these valuable resources. And we really now need to start thinking about them as natural resources. And so we stand at a crossroads. An option is to go through that rethinking and carefully consider incentives to change how we do business. The alternative is a world in which even a blade of grass is a potentially lethal weapon. Thank you. (Applause)

Dre Urhahn: This theater is built on Copacabana, which is the most famous beach in the world, but 25 kilometers away from here in the North Zone of Rio lies a community called Vila Cruzeiro, and roughly 60,000 people live there. Now, the people here in Rio mostly know Vila Cruzeiro from the news, and unfortunately, news from Vila Cruzeiro often is not good news. But Vila Cruzeiro is also the place where our story begins. Jeroen Koolhaas: Ten years ago, we first came to Rio to shoot a documentary about life in the favelas. Now, we learned that favelas are informal communities. They emerged over the years when immigrants from the countryside came to the cities looking for work, like cities within the cities, known for problems like crime, poverty, and the violent drug war between police and the drug gangs. So what struck us was that these were communities that the people who lived there had built with their own hands, without a master plan and like a giant work in progress. Where we're from, in Holland, everything is planned. We even have rules for how to follow the rules. (Laughter) DU: So the last day of filming, we ended up in Vila Cruzeiro, and we were sitting down and we had a drink, and we were overlooking this hill with all these houses, and most of these houses looked unfinished, and they had walls of bare brick, but we saw some of these houses which were plastered and painted, and suddenly we had this idea: what would it look like if all these houses would be plastered and painted? And then we imagined one big design, one big work of art. Who would expect something like that in a place like this? So we thought, would that even be possible? So first we started to count the houses, but we soon lost count. But somehow the idea stuck. JK: We had a friend. He ran an NGO in Vila Cruzeiro. His name was Nanko, and he also liked the idea. He said, "You know, everybody here would pretty much love to have their houses plastered and painted. It's when a house is finished." So he introduced us to the right people, and Vitor and Maurinho became our crew. We picked three houses in the center of the community and we start here. We made a few designs, and everybody liked this design of a boy flying a kite the best. So we started painting, and the first thing we did was to paint everything blue, and we thought that looked already pretty good. But they hated it. The people who lived there really hated it. They said, "What did you do? You painted our house in exactly the same color as the police station." (Laughter) In a favela, that is not a good thing. Also the same color as the prison cell. So we quickly went ahead and we painted the boy, and then we thought we were finished, we were really happy, but still, it wasn't good because the little kids started coming up to us, and they said, "You know, there's a boy flying the kite, but where is his kite?" We said, "Uh, it's art. You know, you have to imagine the kite." (Laughter) And they said, "No, no, no, we want to see the kite." So we quickly installed a kite way up high on the hill, so that you could see the boy flying the kite and you could actually see a kite. So the local news started writing about it, which was great, and then even The Guardian wrote about it: "Notorious slum becomes open-air gallery." JK: So, encouraged by this success, we went back to Rio for a second project, and we stumbled upon this street. It was covered in concrete to prevent mudslides, and somehow we saw a sort of river in it, and we imagined this river to be a river in Japanese style with koi carp swimming upstream. So we decided to paint that river, and we invited Rob Admiraal, who is a tattoo artist, and he specialized in the Japanese style. So little did we know that we would spend almost an entire year painting that river, together with Geovani and Robinho and Vitor, who lived nearby. And we even moved into the neighborhood when one of the guys that lived on the street, Elias, told us that we could come and live in his house, together with his family, which was fantastic. Unfortunately, during that time, another war broke out between the police and the drug gangs. (Video) (Gunfire) We learned that during those times, people in communities really stick together during these times of hardship, but we also learned a very important element, the importance of barbecues. (Laughter) Because, when you throw a barbecue, it turns you from a guest into a host, so we decided to throw one almost every other week, and we got to know everybody in the neighborhood. JK: We still had this idea of the hill, though. DU: Yeah, yeah, we were talking about the scale of this, because this painting was incredibly big, and it was insanely detailed, and this process almost drove us completely insane ourselves. But we figured that maybe, during this process, all the time that we had spent in the neighborhood was maybe actually even more important than the painting itself. JK: So after all that time, this hill, this idea was still there, and we started to make sketches, models, and we figured something out. We figured that our ideas, our designs had to be a little bit more simple than that last project so that we could paint with more people and cover more houses at the same time. And we had an opportunity to try that out in a community in the central part of Rio, which is called Santa Marta, and we made a design for this place which looked like this, and then we got people to go along with it because turns out that if your idea is ridiculously big, it's easier to get people to go along with this. (Laughter) And the people of Santa Marta got together and in a little over a month they turned that square into this. (Applause) And this image somehow went all over the world. DU: So then we received an unexpected phone call from the Philadelphia Mural Arts Program, and they had this question if this idea, our approach, if this would actually work in North Philly, which is one of the poorest neighborhoods in the United States. So we immediately said yes. We had no idea how, but it seemed like a very interesting challenge, so we did exactly the same as we did in Rio, and we moved into the neighborhood and started barbecuing. (Laughter) So the project took almost two years to complete, and we made individual designs for every single house on the avenue that we painted, and we made these designs together with the local store owners, the building owners, and a team of about a dozen young men and women. They were hired, and then they were trained as painters, and together they transformed their own neighborhood, the whole street, into a giant patchwork of color. (Applause) And at the end, the city of Philadelphia thanked every single one of them and gave them a merit for their accomplishment. JK: So now we had painted a whole street. How about we do this whole hill now? We started looking for funding, but instead, we just ran into questions, like, how many houses are you going to paint? How many square meters is that? How much paint are you going to use, and how many people are you going to employ? And we did try for years to write plans for the funding and answer all those questions, but then we thought, in order to answer all those questions, you have to know exactly what you're going to do before you actually get there and start. And maybe it's a mistake to think like that. It would lose some of the magic that we had learned about that if you go somewhere and you spend time there, you can let the project grow organically and have a life of its own. DU: So what we did is we decided to take this plan and strip it away from all the numbers and all the ideas and presumptions and just go back to the base idea, which was to transform this hill into a giant work of art. And instead of looking for funding, we started a crowdfunding campaign, and in a little over a month, more than 1,500 people put together and donated over 100,000 dollars. So for us, this was an amazing moment, because now — (Applause) — because now we finally had the freedom to use all the lessons that we had learned and create a project that was built the same way that the favela was built, from the ground on up, bottom up, with no master plan. JK: So we went back, and we employed Angelo, and he's a local artist from Vila Cruzeiro, very talented guy, and he knows almost everybody there, and then we employed Elias, our former landlord who invited us into his house, and he's a master of construction. Together with them, we decided where to start. We picked this spot in Vila Cruzeiro, and houses are being plastered as we speak. And the good thing about them is that they are deciding which houses go next. They're even printing t-shirts, they're putting up banners explaining everything to everybody, and talking to the press. This article about Angelo appeared. DU: So while this is happening, we are bringing this idea all over the world. So, like the project we did in Philadelphia, we are also invited to do workshops, for instance in Curaçao, and right now we're planning a huge project in Haiti. JK: So the favela was not only the place where this idea started: it was also the place that made it possible to work without a master plan, because these communities are informal — this was the inspiration — and in a communal effort, together with the people, you can almost work like in an orchestra, where you can have a hundred instruments playing together to create a symphony. DU: So we want to thank everybody who wanted to become part of this dream and supported us along the way, and we are looking at continuing. JK: Yeah. And so one day pretty soon, when the colors start going up on these walls, we hope more people will join us, and join this big dream, and maybe one day, the whole of Vila Cruzeiro will be painted. DU: Thank you. (Applause)

If there's any power in design, that's the power of synthesis. The more complex the problem, the more the need for simplicity. So allow me to share three cases where we tried to apply design's power of synthesis. Let's start with the global challenge of urbanization. It's a fact that people are moving towards cities. and even if counterintuitive, it's good news. Evidence shows that people are better off in cities. But there's a problem that I would call the "3S" menace: The scale, speed, and scarcity of means with which we will have to respond to this phenomenon has no precedence in history. For you to have an idea, out of the three billion people living in cities today, one billion are under the line of poverty. By 2030, out of the five billion people that will be living in cities, two billion are going to be under the line of poverty. That means that we will have to build a one million-person city per week with 10,000 dollars per family during the next 15 years. A one million-person city per week with 10,000 dollars per family. If we don't solve this equation, it is not that people will stop coming to cities. They will come anyhow, but they will live in slums, favelas and informal settlements. So what to do? Well, an answer may come from favelas and slums themselves. A clue could be in this question we were asked 10 years ago. We were asked to accommodate 100 families that had been occupying illegally half a hectare in the center of the city of Iquique in the north of Chile using a $10,000 subsidy with which we had to buy the land, provide the infrastructure, and build the houses that, in the best of the cases, would be of around 40 square meters. And by the way, they said, the cost of the land, because it's in the center of the city, is three times more than what social housing can normally afford. Due to the difficulty of the question, we decided to include the families in the process of understanding the constraints, and we started a participatory design process, and testing what was available there in the market. Detached houses, 30 families could be accommodated. Row houses, 60 families. ["100 families"] The only way to accommodate all of them was by building in height, and they threatened us to go on a hunger strike if we even dared to offer this as a solution, because they could not make the tiny apartments expand. So the conclusion with the families — and this is important, not our conclusion — with the families, was that we had a problem. We had to innovate. So what did we do? Well, a middle-class family lives reasonably well in around 80 square meters, but when there's no money, what the market does is to reduce the size of the house to 40 square meters. What we said was, what if, instead of thinking of 40 square meters as a small house, why don't we consider it half of a good one? When you rephrase the problem as half of a good house instead of a small one, the key question is, which half do we do? And we thought we had to do with public money the half that families won't be able to do individually. We identified five design conditions that belonged to the hard half of a house, and we went back to the families to do two things: join forces and split tasks. Our design was something in between a building and a house. As a building, it could pay for expensive, well-located land, and as a house, it could expand. If, in the process of not being expelled to the periphery while getting a house, families kept their network and their jobs, we knew that the expansion would begin right away. So we went from this initial social housing to a middle-class unit achieved by families themselves within a couple of weeks. This was our first project in Iquique 10 years ago. This is our last project in Chile. Different designs, same principle: You provide the frame, and from then on, families take over. So the purpose of design, trying to understand and trying to give an answer to the "3S" menace, scale, speed, and scarcity, is to channel people's own building capacity. We won't solve the one million people per week equation unless we use people's own power for building. So, with the right design, slums and favelas may not be the problem but actually the only possible solution. The second case is how design can contribute to sustainability. In 2012, we entered the competition for the Angelini Innovation Center, and the aim was to build the right environment for knowledge creation. It is accepted that for such an aim, knowledge creation, interaction among people, face-to-face contact, it's important, and we agreed on that. But for us, the question of the right environment was a very literal question. We wanted to have a working space with the right light, with the right temperature, with the right air. So we asked ourselves: Does the typical office building help us in that sense? Well, how does that building look, typically? It's a collection of floors, one on top of each other, with a core in the center with elevators, stairs, pipes, wires, everything, and then a glass skin on the outside that, due to direct sun radiation, creates a huge greenhouse effect inside. In addition to that, let's say a guy working on the seventh floor goes every single day through the third floor, but has no idea what the guy on that floor is working on. So we thought, well, maybe we have to turn this scheme inside out. And what we did was, let's have an open atrium, a hollowed core, the same collection of floors, but have the walls and the mass in the perimeter, so that when the sun hits, it's not impacting directly glass, but a wall. When you have an open atrium inside, you are able to see what others are doing from within the building, and you have a better way to control light, and when you place the mass and the walls in the perimeter, then you are preventing direct sun radiation. You may also open those windows and get cross-ventilation. We just made those openings of such a scale that they could work as elevated squares, outdoor spaces throughout the entire height of the building. None of this is rocket science. You don't require sophisticated programming. It's not about technology. This is just archaic, primitive common sense, and by using common sense, we went from 120 kilowatts per square meter per year, which is the typical energy consumption for cooling a glass tower, to 40 kilowatts per square meter per year. So with the right design, sustainability is nothing but the rigorous use of common sense. Last case I would like to share is how design can provide more comprehensive answers against natural disasters. You may know that Chile, in 2010, was hit by an 8.8 Richter scale earthquake and tsunami, and we were called to work in the reconstruction of the Constitución, in the southern part of the country. We were given 100 days, three months, to design almost everything, from public buildings to public space, street grid, transportation, housing, and mainly how to protect the city against future tsunamis. This was new in Chilean urban design, and there were in the air a couple of alternatives. First one: Forbid installation on ground zero. Thirty million dollars spent mainly in land expropriation. This is exactly what's being discussed in Japan nowadays, and if you have a disciplined population like the Japanese, this may work, but we know that in Chile, this land is going to be occupied illegally anyhow, so this alternative was unrealistic and undesirable. Second alternative: build a big wall, heavy infrastructure to resist the energy of the waves. This alternative was conveniently lobbied by big building companies, because it meant 42 million dollars in contracts, and was also politically preferred, because it required no land expropriation. But Japan proved that trying to resist the force of nature is useless. So this alternative was irresponsible. As in the housing process, we had to include the community in the way of finding a solution for this, and we started a participatory design process. (Video) [In Spanish] Loudspeaker: What kind of city do you want? Vote for Constitución. Go to the Open House and express your options. Participate! Fisherman: I am a fisherman. Twenty-five fishermen work for me. Where should I take them? To the forest? Man: So why can't we have a concrete defense? Done well, of course. Man 2: I am the history of Constitución. And you come here to tell me that I cannot keep on living here? My whole family has lived here, I raised my children here, and my children will also raise their children here. and my grandchildren and everyone else will. But why are you imposing this on me? You! You are imposing this on me! In danger zone I am not authorized to build. He himself is saying that. Man 3: No, no, no, Nieves... Alejandro Aravena: I don't know if you were able to read the subtitles, but you can tell from the body language that participatory design is not a hippie, romantic, let's-all-dream-together-about- the-future-of-the-city kind of thing. It is actually — (Applause) It is actually not even with the families trying to find the right answer. It is mainly trying to identify with precision what is the right question. There is nothing worse than answering well the wrong question. So it was pretty obvious after this process that, well, we chicken out here and go away because it's too tense, or we go even further in asking, what else is bothering you? What other problems do you have and you want us to take care of now that the city will have to be rethought from scratch? And what they said was, look, fine to protect the city against future tsunamis, we really appreciate, but the next one is going to come in, what, 20 years? But every single year, we have problems of flooding due to rain. In addition, we are in the middle of the forest region of the country, and our public space sucks. It's poor and it's scarce. And the origin of the city, our identity, is not really connected to the buildings that fell, it is connected to the river, but the river cannot be accessed publicly, because its shores are privately owned. So we thought that we had to produce a third alternative, and our approach was against geographical threats, have geographical answers. What if, in between the city and the sea we have a forest, a forest that doesn't try to resist the energy of nature, but dissipates it by introducing friction? A forest that may be able to laminate the water and prevent the flooding? That may pay the historical debt of public space, and that may provide, finally, democratic access to the river. So as a conclusion of the participatory design, the alternative was validated politically and socially, but there was still the problem of the cost: 48 million dollars. So what we did was a survey in the public investment system, and found out that there were three ministries with three projects in the exact same place, not knowing of the existence of the other projects. The sum of them: 52 million dollars. So design's power of synthesis is trying to make a more efficient use of the scarcest resource in cities, which is not money but coordination. By doing so, we were able to save four million dollars, and that is why the forest is today under construction. (Applause) So be it the force of self construction, the force of common sense, or the force of nature, all these forces need to be translated into form, and what that form is modeling and shaping is not cement, bricks, or wood. It is life itself. Design's power of synthesis is just an attempt to put at the innermost core of architecture the force of life. Thank you so much. (Applause)

I grew up diagnosed as phobically shy, and, like at least 20 other people in a room of this size, I was a stutterer. Do you dare raise your hand? And it sticks with us. It really does stick with us, because when we are treated that way, we feel invisible sometimes, or talked around and at. And as I started to look at people, which is mostly all I did, I noticed that some people really wanted attention and recognition. Remember, I was young then. So what did they do? What we still do perhaps too often. We talk about ourselves. And yet there are other people I observed who had what I called a mutuality mindset. In each situation, they found a way to talk about us and create that "us" idea. So my idea to reimagine the world is to see it one where we all become greater opportunity-makers with and for others. There's no greater opportunity or call for action for us now than to become opportunity-makers who use best talents together more often for the greater good and accomplish things we couldn't have done on our own. And I want to talk to you about that, because even more than giving, even more than giving, is the capacity for us to do something smarter together for the greater good that lifts us both up and that can scale. That's why I'm sitting here. But I also want to point something else out: Each one of you is better than anybody else at something. That disproves that popular notion that if you're the smartest person in the room, you're in the wrong room. (Laughter) So let me tell you about a Hollywood party I went to a couple years back, and I met this up-and-coming actress, and we were soon talking about something that we both felt passionately about: public art. And she had the fervent belief that every new building in Los Angeles should have public art in it. She wanted a regulation for it, and she fervently started — who is here from Chicago? — she fervently started talking about these bean-shaped reflective sculptures in Millennium Park, and people would walk up to it and they'd smile in the reflection of it, and they'd pose and they'd vamp and they'd take selfies together, and they'd laugh. And as she was talking, a thought came to my mind. I said, "I know someone you ought to meet. He's getting out of San Quentin in a couple of weeks" — (Laughter) — "and he shares your fervent desire that art should engage and enable people to connect." He spent five years in solitary, and I met him because I gave a speech at San Quentin, and he's articulate and he's rather easy on the eyes because he's buff. He had workout regime he did every day. (Laughter) I think she was following me at that point. I said, "He'd be an unexpected ally." And not just that. There's James. He's an architect and he's a professor, and he loves place-making, and place-making is when you have those mini-plazas and those urban walkways and where they're dotted with art, where people draw and come up and talk sometimes. I think they'd make good allies. And indeed they were. They met together. They prepared. They spoke in front of the Los Angeles City Council. And the council members not only passed the regulation, half of them came down and asked to pose with them afterwards. They were startling, compelling and credible. You can't buy that. What I'm asking you to consider is what kind of opportunity- makers we might become, because more than wealth or fancy titles or a lot of contacts, it's our capacity to connect around each other's better side and bring it out. And I'm not saying this is easy, and I'm sure many of you have made the wrong moves too about who you wanted to connect with, but what I want to suggest is, this is an opportunity. I started thinking about it way back when I was a Wall Street Journal reporter and I was in Europe and I was supposed to cover trends and trends that transcended business or politics or lifestyle. So I had to have contacts in different worlds very different than mine, because otherwise you couldn't spot the trends. And third, I had to write the story in a way stepping into the reader's shoes, so they could see how these trends could affect their lives. That's what opportunity-makers do. And here's a strange thing: Unlike an increasing number of Americans who are working and living and playing with people who think exactly like them because we then become more rigid and extreme, opportunity-makers are actively seeking situations with people unlike them, and they're building relationships, and because they do that, they have trusted relationships where they can bring the right team in and recruit them to solve a problem better and faster and seize more opportunities. They're not affronted by differences, they're fascinated by them, and that is a huge shift in mindset, and once you feel it, you want it to happen a lot more. This world is calling out for us to have a collective mindset, and I believe in doing that. It's especially important now. Why is it important now? Because things can be devised like drones and drugs and data collection, and they can be devised by more people and cheaper ways for beneficial purposes and then, as we know from the news every day, they can be used for dangerous ones. It calls on us, each of us, to a higher calling. But here's the icing on the cake: It's not just the first opportunity that you do with somebody else that's probably your greatest, as an institution or an individual. It's after you've had that experience and you trust each other. It's the unexpected things that you devise later on you never could have predicted. For example, Marty is the husband of that actress I mentioned, and he watched them when they were practicing, and he was soon talking to Wally, my friend the ex-con, about that exercise regime. And he thought, I have a set of racquetball courts. That guy could teach it. A lot of people who work there are members at my courts. They're frequent travelers. They could practice in their hotel room, no equipment provided. That's how Wally got hired. Not only that, years later he was also teaching racquetball. Years after that, he was teaching the racquetball teachers. What I'm suggesting is, when you connect with people around a shared interest and action, you're accustomed to serendipitous things happening into the future, and I think that's what we're looking at. We open ourselves up to those opportunities, and in this room are key players and technology, key players who are uniquely positioned to do this, to scale systems and projects together. So here's what I'm calling for you to do. Remember the three traits of opportunity-makers. Opportunity-makers keep honing their top strength and they become pattern seekers. They get involved in different worlds than their worlds so they're trusted and they can see those patterns, and they communicate to connect around sweet spots of shared interest. So what I'm asking you is, the world is hungry. I truly believe, in my firsthand experience, the world is hungry for us to unite together as opportunity-makers and to emulate those behaviors as so many of you already do — I know that firsthand — and to reimagine a world where we use our best talents together more often to accomplish greater things together than we could on our own. Just remember, as Dave Liniger once said, "You can't succeed coming to the potluck with only a fork." (Laughter) Thank you very much. Thank you. (Applause)

You know, it's a big privilege for me to be working in one of the biodiversity hotspots in the world: the Mascarene Islands in the Indian Ocean. These islands — Mauritius, Rodrigues, and Réunion — along with the island of Madagascar, they are blessed with unique plants found nowhere else in the world. And today I will tell you about five of them and their particular features and why these plants are so unique. Take a look at this plant. I call it benjoin in the local vernacular, and the botanical name is Terminalia bentzoe, subspecies bentzoe. This subspecies is endemic to Mauritius, and its particular feature is its heterophylly. What do I mean by heterophylly? It's that the same plant has got leaves that are different shapes and sizes. Now, these plants have evolved very far away from the mainland, and within specific ecosystems. Often, these particular features have evolved as a response to the threat presented by the local fauna, in this case, grazing tortoises. Tortoises are known to have poor eyesight, and as such, they tend to avoid the plants they don't recognize. So this evolutionary foil safeguards the plant against these rather cute animals, and protects it and of course ensures its survival. Now the question you're probably asking yourself is, why is she telling us all these stories? The reason for that is that we tend to overlook the diversity and the variety of the natural world. These particular habitats are unique and they are host to a whole lot of plants. We don't realize how valuable and how precious these resources are, and yet, through our insouciance, we keep on destroying them. We're all familiar with the macro impact of urbanization, climate change, resource exploitation, but when that one last plant — or animal for that matter — when that very last specimen has disappeared from the face of this Earth, we would have lost an entire subset of the Earth's biology, and with it, important plants with medicinal potential or which could have ingredients that would speak to the cosmetic, nutrition, pharma, and even the ethno-veterinary sectors, be gone forever. And here we have a very prime example of the iconic dodo, which comes from Mauritius, and, of course, we know is now a symbol of extinction. We know plants have a fundamental role to play. Well, first of all, they feed us and they also give us the oxygen we breathe, but plants are also the source of important, biologically active ingredients that we should be studying very carefully, because human societies over the millennia, they have developed important knowledge, cultural traditions, and important plant-based medicinal resources. Here's a data point: 1.4 percent of the entire land surface is home to 40 percent of the species of higher plants, 35 percent of the species of vertebrates, and this 1.4 percent represents the 25 biodiversity hotspots in the world, and this 1.4 percent of the entire land surface already provides for 35 percent of the ecosystem services that vulnerable people depend on. And as you can see, the island of Mauritius where I work and where I live, belongs to one such biodiversity hotspot, and I study the unique plants on the island for their biomedical applications. Now, let's go back again to that first plant I showed you, the one, of course, with different-shaped leaves and different sizes, Terminalia bentzoe, subspecies bentzoe, a plant only found in Mauritius. Now, the local people, they used a decoction of the leaves against infectious diseases. Now our work, that is, the scientific validation of this traditional information, has shown that precisely that leaf extract shows activity, potent activity, against a wide range of bacteria that could be pathogenic to humans. Now, could this plant be the answer to antibiotic resistance? You know, antibiotic resistance is proving to be a big challenge globally. While we may not be sure, one thing is certain: we will not want this plant to disappear. But the harsh reality is that this particular plant is in fact considered to be vulnerable in its natural habitat. This brings me to another example. This bush here is known as baume de l'ile plate in the local vernacular. The botanical name is Psiadia arguta. It's a plant which is rare, which is endemic to Mauritius. It used to grow on the mainland, but through the sheer pressures of urbanization has been pushed out of the mainland, and we've managed to bring it back from the brink of extinction by developing in vitro plants which are now growing in the wild. Now, one thing I must point out straightaway is that not all plants can be developed in vitro. While we humans, we are happy in our comfort zone, these plants also need their ecosystem to be preserved, and they don't react — endemic plants don't react to very harsh changes in their ecosystem, and yet we know what are the challenges that climate change, for example, is posing to these plants. Now, the local people again use the leaves in traditional medicine against respiratory problems. Now, our preliminary labwork on the leaf extract has shown that precisely these leaves contain ingredients that are very close, in terms of structures, chemical structures, to those medicines which are sold in the chemist's shop against asthma. So who knows what humanity will benefit from should this plant decide to reveal all its secrets. Now, I come from the developing world where we are forever being challenged with this issue of population explosion. Africa is the continent which is getting younger, and whenever one talks about population explosion, one talks about the issue of food security as being the other side of the same coin. Now this plant here, the baobab, could be part of the answer. It's an underutilized, neglected food plant. It defines the landscape of West Africa, where it is known as the tree of life, and later on I will tell you why the Africans consider it to be the tree of life. Now interestingly, there are many legends which are associated with this plant. Because of its sheer size, it was meant to be lording over lesser plants, so God didn't like this arrogance, uprooted it, and planted it upside down, hence its particular shape. And if you look at this tree again within the African context, in West Africa, it's known as the palaver tree, because it performs great social functions. Now if you have a problem in the community, meeting under the palaver tree with the chiefs or the tribesmen would be synonymous to trying to find a solution to that particular problem, and also to reinforce trust and respect among members of the community. From the scientific point of view, there are eight species of baobab in the world. There's one from Africa, one from Australia, and six are endemic to the island of Madagascar. The one I have showed you is the one from Africa, Adansonia digitata. Now, the flower, this beautiful white flower, it opens at night, is pollinated by bats, and it gives rise to the fruit which is curiously known as the monkey apple. The monkeys are not stupid animals. They know what's good for them. Now, if you open the fruit of the baobab, you'll see a white, floury pulp, which is very rich in nutrients and has got protein, more protein than in human milk. Yes, you heard right: more protein than in human milk. And this is one of the reasons why the nutrition companies of this world, they are looking for this fruit to provide what we know as reinforced food. The seeds give an oil, a very stable oil which is sought after by the cosmetic industry to give to produce body lotions, for example. And if you look at the trunk, the trunk, of course, safeguards water, which is often harvested by a thirsty traveler, and the leaves are used in traditional medicine against infectious disease. Now, you can see now why the Africans consider it to be the tree of life. It's a complete plant, and in fact, the sheer size of these trees is hiding a massive potential, not only for the pharma, nutrition, and the cosmetic industry. What I have showed you here is only the species from Africa, Adansonia digitata. We have six species yet in Madagascar, and we don't know what is the potential of this plant, but one thing we know is that the flora is considered to be threatened with extinction. Let me take you to Africa again, and introduce you to one of my very favorite, the resurrection plant. Now here you'll find that even Jesus has competition. (Laughter) Now, this plant here has developed remarkable tolerance to drought, which enables it to withstand up to 98 percent dehydration over the period of a year without damage, and yet it can regenerate itself almost completely overnight, over 24 hours, and flower. Now, us human beings, we're always on the lookout for the elixir of youth. We don't want to get old, and rightly so. Why should we, especially if you can afford it? And this gives you an indication of what the plant looks like before. Now, if you are an inexperienced gardener, the first thing you'll do when you visit the garden is to uproot this plant because it's dead. But if you water it, this is what you get. Absolutely amazing. Now, if you look at our aging process, the aging process is in fact the loss of water from the upper epidermis, resulting in wrinkling as we know it, especially women, we are so conscious of this. And this plant, in fact, is giving the cosmetic chemists very important ingredients that are actually finding ways to slow down the aging process and at the same time reinforce the cells against the onslaught of environmental toxins. Now, these four examples I have just given you are just a very tiny reminder as to how our health and our survival are closely linked to the health and the resilience of our ecosystem, and why we should be very careful about preserving biodiversity. Every time a forest is cut down, every time a marsh is filled in, it is a potential lab that goes with it, and which we will never, ever recover. And I know what I'm talking about, coming from Mauritius and missing the dodo. Let me finish with just one last example. Conservation issues are normally guided towards rare, endemic plants, but what we call exotic plants, that is, the ones which grow in many different habitats across the world, they also need to be considered. You know why? Because the environment plays a very important role in modifying the composition of that plant. So let's take a look at this plant here, Centella asiatica. It's a weed. We call it a weed. Now, Centella asiatica grows across the world in many different habitats — in Africa, in Asia — and this plant has been instrumental in providing a solution to that dreadful disease called leprosy in Madagascar in the 1940s. Now, while Centella grows across the world — in Africa, in Asia — the best quality Centella comes from Madagascar, because that Centella contains the three vital ingredients which are sought after by the pharma and the cosmetic companies. And the cosmetic companies are already using it to make regenerating cream. Now, there is an ancient saying that for every disease known to mankind, there is a plant to cure it. Now, you may not believe in ancient sayings. You may think they're obsolete now that our science and technology are so powerful. So you may look on Centella as being an insignificant, humble weed, which, if destroyed, won't be missed. But you know, there is no such thing as a weed. It's a plant. It's a living biological lab that may well have answers to the question that we may have, but we have to ensure that it has the right to live. Thank you. (Applause)

Fifty-four percent of the world's population lives in our cities. In developing countries, one third of that population is living in slums. Seventy-five percent of global energy consumption occurs in our cities, and 80 percent of gas emissions that cause global warming come from our cities. So things that you and I might think about as global problems, like climate change, the energy crisis or poverty, are really, in many ways, city problems. They will not be solved unless people who live in cities, like most of us, actually start doing a better job, because right now, we are not doing a very good one. And that becomes very clear when we look into three aspects of city life: first, our citizens' willingness to engage with democratic institutions; second, our cities' ability to really include all of their residents; and lastly, our own ability to live fulfilling and happy lives. When it comes to engagement, the data is very clear. Voter turnout around the world peaked in the late '80s, and it has been declining at a pace that we have never seen before, and if those numbers are bad at the national level, at the level of our cities, they are just dismal. In the last two years, two of the world's most consolidated, oldest democracies, the U.S. and France, held nationwide municipal elections. In France, voter turnout hit a record low. Almost 40 percent of voters decided not to show up. In the U.S., the numbers were even scarier. In some American cities, voter turnout was close to five percent. I'll let that sink in for a second. We're talking about democratic cities in which 95 percent of people decided that it was not important to elect their leaders. The city of L.A., a city of four million people, elected its mayor with just a bit over 200,000 votes. That was the lowest turnout the city had seen in 100 years. Right here, in my city of Rio, in spite of mandatory voting, almost 30 percent of the voting population chose to either annul their votes or stay home and pay a fine in the last mayoral elections. When it comes to inclusiveness, our cities are not the best cases of success either, and again, you don't need to look very far in order to find proof of that. The city of Rio is incredibly unequal. This is Leblon. Leblon is the city's richest neighborhood. And this is Complexo do Alemão. This is where over 70,000 of the city's poorest residents live. Leblon has an HDI, a Human Development Index, of .967. That is higher than Norway, Switzerland or Sweden. Complexo do Alemão has an HDI of .711. It sits somewhere in between the HDI of Algeria and Gabon. So Rio, like so many cities across the global South, is a place where you can go from northern Europe to sub-Saharan Africa in the space of 30 minutes. If you drive, that is. If you take public transit, it's about two hours. And lastly, perhaps most importantly, cities, with the incredible wealth of relations that they enable, could be the ideal places for human happiness to flourish. We like being around people. We are social animals. Instead, countries where urbanization has already peaked seem to be the very countries in which cities have stopped making us happy. The United States population has suffered from a general decrease in happiness for the past three decades, and the main reason is this. The American way of building cities has caused good quality public spaces to virtually disappear in many, many American cities, and as a result, they have seen a decline of relations, of the things that make us happy. Many studies show an increase in solitude and a decrease in solidarity, honesty, and social and civic participation. So how do we start building cities that make us care? Cities that value their most important asset: the incredible diversity of the people who live in them? Cities that make us happy? Well, I believe that if we want to change what our cities look like, then we really have to change the decision-making processes that have given us the results that we have right now. We need a participation revolution, and we need it fast. The idea of voting as our only exercise in citizenship does not make sense anymore. People are tired of only being treated as empowered individuals every few years when it's time to delegate that power to someone else. If the protests that swept Brazil in June 2013 have taught us anything, it's that every time we try to exercise our power outside of an electoral context, we are beaten up, humiliated or arrested. And this needs to change, because when it does, not only will people re-engage with the structures of representation, but also complement these structures with direct, effective, and collective decision making, decision making of the kind that attacks inequality by its very inclusive nature, decision making of the kind that can change our cities into better places for us to live. But there is a catch, obviously: Enabling widespread participation and redistributing power can be a logistical nightmare, and there's where technology can play an incredibly helpful role, by making it easier for people to organize, communicate and make decisions without having to be in the same room at the same time. Unfortunately for us, when it comes to fostering democratic processes, our city governments have not used technology to its full potential. So far, most city governments have been effective at using tech to turn citizens into human sensors who serve authorities with data on the city: potholes, fallen trees or broken lamps. They have also, to a lesser extent, invited people to participate in improving the outcome of decisions that were already made for them, just like my mom when I was eight and she told me that I had a choice: I had to be in bed by 8 p.m., but I could choose my pink pajamas or my blue pajamas. That's not participation, and in fact, governments have not been very good at using technology to enable participation on what matters — the way we allocate our budget, the way we occupy our land, and the way we manage our natural resources. Those are the kinds of decisions that can actually impact global problems that manifest themselves in our cities. The good news is, and I do have good news to share with you, we don't need to wait for governments to do this. I have reason to believe that it's possible for citizens to build their own structures of participation. Three years ago, I cofounded an organization called Meu Rio, and we make it easier for people in the city of Rio to organize around causes and places that they care about in their own city, and have an impact on those causes and places every day. In these past three years, Meu Rio grew to a network of 160,000 citizens of Rio. About 40 percent of those members are young people aged 20 to 29. That is one in every 15 young people of that age in Rio today. Amongst our members is this adorable little girl, Bia, to your right, and Bia was just 11 years old when she started a campaign using one of our tools to save her model public school from demolition. Her school actually ranks among the best public schools in the country, and it was going to be demolished by the Rio de Janeiro state government to build, I kid you not, a parking lot for the World Cup right before the event happened. Bia started a campaign, and we even watched her school 24/7 through webcam monitoring, and many months afterwards, the government changed their minds. Bia's school stayed in place. There's also Jovita. She's an amazing woman whose daughter went missing about 10 years ago, and since then, she has been looking for her daughter. In that process, she found out that first, she was not alone. In the last year alone, 2013, 6,000 people disappeared in the state of Rio. But she also found out that in spite of that, Rio had no centralized intelligence system for solving missing persons cases. In other Brazilian cities, those systems have helped solve up to 80 percent of missing persons cases. She started a campaign, and after the secretary of security got 16,000 emails from people asking him to do this, he responded, and started to build a police unit specializing in those cases. It was open to the public at the end of last month, and Jovita was there giving interviews and being very fancy. And then, there is Leandro. Leandro is an amazing guy in a slum in Rio, and he created a recycling project in the slum. At the end of last year, December 16, he received an eviction order by the Rio de Janeiro state government giving him two weeks to leave the space that he had been using for two years. The plan was to hand it over to a developer, who planned to turn it into a construction site. Leandro started a campaign using one of our tools, the Pressure Cooker, the same one that Bia and Jovita used, and the state government changed their minds before Christmas Eve. These stories make me happy, but not just because they have happy endings. They make me happy because they are happy beginnings. The teacher and parent community at Bia's school is looking for other ways they could improve that space even further. Leandro has ambitious plans to take his model to other low-income communities in Rio, and Jovita is volunteering at the police unit that she helped created. Bia, Jovita and Leandro are living examples of something that citizens and city governments around the world need to know: We are ready. As citizens, we are ready to decide on our common destinies, because we know that the way we distribute power says a lot about how we actually value everyone, and because we know that enabling and participating in local politics is a sign that we truly care about our relations to one another, and we are ready to do this in cities around the world right now. With the Our Cities network, the Meu Rio team hopes to share what we have learned with other people who want to create similar initiatives in their own cities. We have already started doing it in São Paulo with incredible results, and want to take it to cities around the world through a network of citizen-centric, citizen-led organizations that can inspire us, challenge us, and remind us to demand real participation in our city lives. It is up to us to decide whether we want schools or parking lots, community-driven recycling projects or construction sites, loneliness or solidarity, cars or buses, and it is our responsibility to do that now, for ourselves, for our families, for the people who make our lives worth living, and for the incredible creativity, beauty, and wonder that make our cities, in spite of all of their problems, the greatest invention of our time. Obrigado. Thank you. (Applause)

So this is Anna Hazare, and Anna Hazare may well be the most cutting-edge digital activist in the world today. And you wouldn't know it by looking at him. Hazare is a 77-year-old Indian anticorruption and social justice activist. And in 2011, he was running a big campaign to address everyday corruption in India, a topic that Indian elites love to ignore. So as part of this campaign, he was using all of the traditional tactics that a good Gandhian organizer would use. So he was on a hunger strike, and Hazare realized through his hunger that actually maybe this time, in the 21st century, a hunger strike wouldn't be enough. So he started playing around with mobile activism. So the first thing he did is he said to people, "Okay, why don't you send me a text message if you support my campaign against corruption?" So he does this, he gives people a short code, and about 80,000 people do it. Okay, that's pretty respectable. But then he decides, "Let me tweak my tactics a little bit." He says, "Why don't you leave me a missed call?" Now, for those of you who have lived in the global South, you'll know that missed calls are a really critical part of global mobile culture. I see people nodding. People leave missed calls all the time: If you're running late for a meeting and you just want to let them know that you're on the way, you leave them a missed call. If you're dating someone and you just want to say "I miss you" you leave them a missed call. So a note for a dating tip here, in some cultures, if you want to please your lover, you call them and hang up. (Laughter) So why do people leave missed calls? Well, the reason of course is that they're trying to avoid charges associated with making calls and sending texts. So when Hazare asked people to leave him a missed call, let's have a little guess how many people actually did this? Thirty-five million. So this is one of the largest coordinated actions in human history. It's remarkable. And this reflects the extraordinary strength of the emerging Indian middle class and the power that their mobile phones bring. But he used that, Hazare ended up with this massive CSV file of mobile phone numbers, and he used that to deploy real people power on the ground to get hundreds of thousands of people out on the streets in Delhi to make a national point of everyday corruption in India. It's a really striking story. So this is me when I was 12 years old. I hope you see the resemblance. And I was also an activist, and I have been an activist all my life. I had this really funny childhood where I traipsed around the world meeting world leaders and Noble prize winners, talking about Third World debt, as it was then called, and demilitarization. I was a very, very serious child. (Laughter) And back then, in the early '90s, I had a very cutting-edge tech tool of my own: the fax. And the fax was the tool of my activism. And at that time, it was the best way to get a message to a lot of people all at once. I'll give you one example of a fax campaign that I ran. It was the eve of the Gulf War and I organized a global campaign to flood the hotel, the Intercontinental in Geneva, where James Baker and Tariq Aziz were meeting on the eve of the war, and I thought if I could flood them with faxes, we'll stop the war. Well, unsurprisingly, that campaign was wholly unsuccessful. There are lots of reasons for that, but there's no doubt that one sputtering fax machine in Geneva was a little bit of a bandwidth constraint in terms of the ability to get a message to lots of people. And so, I went on to discover some better tools. I cofounded Avaaz, which uses the Internet to mobilize people and now has almost 40 million members, and I now run Purpose, which is a home for these kinds of technology-powered movements. So what's the moral of this story? Is the moral of this story, you know what, the fax is kind of eclipsed by the mobile phone? This is another story of tech-determinism? Well, I would argue that there's actually more to it than that. I'd argue that in the last 20 years, something more fundamental has changed than just new tech. I would argue that there has been a fundamental shift in the balance of power in the world. You ask any activist how to understand the world, and they'll say, "Look at where the power is, who has it, how it's shifting." And I think we all sense that something big is happening. So Henry Timms and I — Henry's a fellow movement builder — got talking one day and we started to think, how can we make sense of this new world? How can we describe it and give it a framework that makes it more useful? Because we realized that many of the lessons that we were discovering in movements actually applied all over the world in many sectors of our society. So I want to introduce you to this framework: Old power, meet new power. And I want to talk to you about what new power is today. New power is the deployment of mass participation and peer coordination — these are the two key elements — to create change and shift outcomes. And we see new power all around us. This is Beppe Grillo he was a populist Italian blogger who, with a minimal political apparatus and only some online tools, won more than 25 percent of the vote in recent Italian elections. This is Airbnb, which in just a few years has radically disrupted the hotel industry without owning a single square foot of real estate. This is Kickstarter, which we know has raised over a billion dollars from more than five million people. Now, we're familiar with all of these models. But what's striking is the commonalities, the structural features of these new models and how they differ from old power. Let's look a little bit at this. Old power is held like a currency. New power works like a current. Old power is held by a few. New power isn't held by a few, it's made by many. Old power is all about download, and new power uploads. And you see a whole set of characteristics that you can trace, whether it's in media or politics or education. So we've talked a little bit about what new power is. Let's, for a second, talk about what new power isn't. New power is not your Facebook page. I assure you that having a social media strategy can enable you to do just as much download as you used to do when you had the radio. Just ask Syrian dictator Bashar al-Assad, I assure you that his Facebook page has not embraced the power of participation. New power is not inherently positive. In fact, this isn't an normative argument that we're making, there are many good things about new power, but it can produce bad outcomes. More participation, more peer coordination, sometimes distorts outcomes and there are some things, like things, for example, in the medical profession that we want new power to get nowhere near. And thirdly, new power is not the inevitable victor. In fact, unsurprisingly, as many of these new power models get to scale, what you see is this massive pushback from the forces of old power. Just look at this really interesting epic struggle going on right now between Edward Snowden and the NSA. You'll note that only one of the two people on this slide is currently in exile. And so, it's not at all clear that new power will be the inevitable victor. That said, keep one thing in mind: We're at the beginning of a very steep curve. So you think about some of these new power models, right? These were just like someone's garage idea a few years ago, and now they're disrupting entire industries. And so, what's interesting about new power, is the way it feeds on itself. Once you have an experience of new power, you tend to expect and want more of it. So let's say you've used a peer-to-peer lending platform like Lending Tree or Prosper, then you've figured out that you don't need the bank, and who wants the bank, right? And so, that experience tends to embolden you it tends to make you want more participation across more aspects of your life. And what this gives rise to is a set of values. We talked about the models that new power has engendered — the Airbnbs, the Kickstarters. What about the values? And this is an early sketch at what new power values look like. New power values prize transparency above all else. It's almost a religious belief in transparency, a belief that if you shine a light on something, it will be better. And remember that in the 20th century, this was not at all true. People thought that gentlemen should sit behind closed doors and make comfortable agreements. New power values of informal, networked governance. New power folks would never have invented the U.N. today, for better or worse. New power values participation, and new power is all about do-it-yourself. In fact, what's interesting about new power is that it eschews some of the professionalization and specialization that was all the rage in the 20th century. So what's interesting about these new power values and these new power models is what they mean for organizations. So we've spent a bit of time thinking, how can we plot organizations on a two-by-two where, essentially, we look at new power values and new power models and see where different people sit? We started with a U.S. analysis, and let me show you some interesting findings. So the first is Apple. In this framework, we actually described Apple as an old power company. That's because the ideology, the governing ideology of Apple is the ideology of the perfectionist product designer in Cupertino. It's absolutely about that beautiful, perfect thing descending upon us in perfection. And it does not value, as a company, transparency. In fact, it's very secretive. Now, Apple is one of the most succesful companies in the world. So this shows that you can still pursue a successful old power strategy. But one can argue that there's real vulnerabilites in that model. I think another interesting comparison is that of the Obama campaign versus the Obama presidency. (Applause) Now, I like President Obama, but he ran with new power at his back, right? And he said to people, we are the ones we've been waiting for. And he used crowdfunding to power a campaign. But when he got into office, he governed like more or less all the other presidents did. And this is a really interesting trend, is when new power gets powerful, what happens? So this is a framework you should look at and think about where your own organization sits on it. And think about where it should be in five or 10 years. So what do you do if you're old power? Well, if you're there thinking, in old power, this won't happen to us. Then just look at the Wikipedia entry for Encyclopædia Britannica. Let me tell you, it's a very sad read. But if you are old power, the most important thing you can do is to occupy yourself before others occupy you, before you are occupied. Imagine that a group of your biggest skeptics are camped in the heart of your organization asking the toughest questions and they can see everything inside of your organization. And ask them, would they like what they see and should our model change? What about if you're new power? Is new power kind of just riding the wave to glory? I would argue no. I would argue that there are some very real challenges to new power in this nascent phase. Let's stick with the Occupy Wall Street example for a moment. Occupy was this incredible example of new power, the purest example of new power. And yet, it failed to consolidate. So the energy that it created was great for the meme phase, but they were so committed to participation, that they never got anything done. And in fact that model means that the challenge for new power is: how do you use institutional power without being institutionalized? One the other end of the spectra is Uber. Uber is an amazing, highly scalable new power model. That network is getting denser and denser by the day. But what's really interesting about Uber is it hasn't really adopted new power values. This is a real quote from the Uber CEO recently: He says, "Once we get rid of the dude in the car" — he means drivers — "Uber will be cheaper." Now, new power models live and die by the strength of their networks. By whether the drivers and the consumers who use the service actually believe in it. Because they're not an exercise of top-down perfectionism, they are about the network. And so, the challenge, and this is why it's in no way surprising, is that Uber's drivers are now unionizing. It's extraordinary. Uber's drivers are turning on Uber. And the challenge for Uber — this isn't an easy situation for them — is that they are locked into a broader superstrcuture that is really old power. They've raised more than a billion dollars in the capital markets. Those markets expect a financial return, and they way you get a financial return is by squeezing and squeezing your users and your drivers for more and more value and giving that value to your investors. So the big question about the future of new power, in my view, is: Will that old power just emerge? So will new power elites just become old power and squeeze? Or will that new power base bite back? Will the next big Uber be co-owned by Uber drivers? And I think this going to be a very interesting structural question. Finally, think about new power being more than just an entity that scales things that make us have slightly better consumer experiences. My call to action for new power is to not be an island. We have major structural problems in the world today that could benefit enormously from the kinds of mass participation and peer coordination that these new power players know so well how to generate. And we badly need them to turn their energies and their power to big, what economists might call public goods problems, that are often beyond markets where investors can easily be found. And I think if we can do that, we might be able to fundamentally change not only human beings' sense of their own agency and power — because I think that's the most wonderful thing about new power, is that people feel more powerful — but we might also be able to change the way we relate to each other and the way we relate to authority and institutions. And to me, that's absolutely worth trying for. Thank you very much. (Applause)

I just met you on a bus, and we would really like to get to know each other, but I've got to get off at the next stop, so you're going to tell me three things about yourself that just define you as a person, three things about yourself that will help me understand who you are, three things that just get to your very essence. And what I'm wondering is, of those three things, is any one of them surviving some kind of trauma? Cancer survivor, rape survivor, Holocaust survivor, incest survivor. Ever notice how we tend to identify ourselves by our wounds? And where I have seen this survivor identity have the most consequences is in the cancer community. And I've been around this community for a long time, because I've been a hospice and a hospital chaplain for almost 30 years. And in 2005, I was working at a big cancer center when I received the news that my mother had breast cancer. And then five days later, I received the news that I had breast cancer. My mother and I can be competitive — (Laughter) — but I was really not trying to compete with her on this one. And in fact, I thought, well, if you have to have cancer, it's pretty convenient to be working at a place that treats it. But this is what I heard from a lot of outraged people. What? You're the chaplain. You should be immune. Like, maybe I should have just gotten off with a warning instead of an actual ticket, because I'm on the force. So I did get my treatment at the cancer center where I worked, which was amazingly convenient, and I had chemotherapy and a mastectomy, and a saline implant put in, and so before I say another word, let me just say right now, this is the fake one. (Laughter) I have found that I need to get that out of the way, because I'll see somebody go "Oh, I know it's this one." And then I'll move or I'll gesture and they'll go, "No, it's that one." So now you know. I learned a lot being a patient, and one of the surprising things was that only a small part of the cancer experience is about medicine. Most of it is about feelings and faith and losing and finding your identity and discovering strength and flexibility you never even knew you had. It's about realizing that the most important things in life are not things at all, but relationships, and it's about laughing in the face of uncertainty and learning that the way to get out of almost anything is to say, "I have cancer." So the other thing I learned was that I don't have to take on "cancer survivor" as my identity, but, boy, are there powerful forces pushing me to do just that. Now, don't, please, misunderstand me. Cancer organizations and the drive for early screening and cancer awareness and cancer research have normalized cancer, and this is a wonderful thing. We can now talk about cancer without whispering. We can talk about cancer and we can support one another. But sometimes, it feels like people go a little overboard and they start telling us how we're going to feel. So about a week after my surgery, we had a houseguest. That was probably our first mistake. And keep in mind that at this point in my life I had been a chaplain for over 20 years, and issues like dying and death and the meaning of life, these are all things I'd been yakking about forever. So at dinner that night, our houseguest proceeds to stretch his arms up over his head, and say, "You know, Deb, now you're really going to learn what's important. Yes, you are going to make some big changes in your life, and now you're going to start thinking about your death. Yep, this cancer is your wakeup call." Now, these are golden words coming from someone who is speaking about their own experience, but when someone is telling you how you are going to feel, it's instant crap. The only reason I did not kill him with my bare hands was because I could not lift my right arm. But I did say a really bad word to him, followed by a regular word, that — (Laughter) — made my husband say, "She's on narcotics." (Laughter) And then after my treatment, it just felt like everyone was telling me what my experience was going to mean. "Oh, this means you're going to be doing the walk." "Oh, this means you're coming to the luncheon." "This means you're going to be wearing the pink ribbon and the pink t-shirt and the headband and the earrings and the bracelet and the panties." Panties. No, seriously, google it. (Laughter) How is that raising awareness? Only my husband should be seeing my panties. (Laughter) He's pretty aware of cancer already. It was at that point where I felt like, oh my God, this is just taking over my life. And that's when I told myself, claim your experience. Don't let it claim you. We all know that the way to cope with trauma, with loss, with any life-changing experience, is to find meaning. But here's the thing: No one can tell us what our experience means. We have to decide what it means. And it doesn't have to be some gigantic, extroverted meaning. We don't all have to start a foundation or an organization or write a book or make a documentary. Meaning can be quiet and introverted. Maybe we make one small decision about our lives that can bring about big change. Many years ago, I had a patient, just a wonderful young man who was loved by the staff, and so it was something of a shock to us to realize that he had no friends. He lived by himself, he would come in for chemotherapy by himself, he would receive his treatment, and then he'd walk home alone. And I even asked him. I said, "Hey, how come you never bring a friend with you?" And he said, "I don't really have any friends." But he had tons of friends on the infusion floor. We all loved him, and people were going in and out of his room all the time. So at his last chemo, we sang him the song and we put the crown on his head and we blew the bubbles, and then I asked him, I said, "So what are you going to do now?" And he answered, "Make friends." And he did. He started volunteering and he made friends there, and he began going to a church and he made friends there, and at Christmas he invited my husband and me to a party in his apartment, and the place was filled with his friends. Claim your experience. Don't let it claim you. He decided that the meaning of his experience was to know the joy of friendship, and then learn to make friends. So what about you? How are you going to find meaning in your crappy experience? It could be a recent one, or it could be one that you've been carrying around for a really long time. It's never too late to change what it means, because meaning is dynamic. What it means today may not be what it means a year from now, or 10 years from now. It's never too late to become someone other than simply a survivor. Hear how static that word sounds? Survivor. No movement, no growth. Claim your experience. Don't let it claim you, because if you do, I believe you will become trapped, you will not grow, you will not evolve. But of course, sometimes it's not outside pressures that cause us to take on that identity of survivor. Sometimes we just like the perks. Sometimes there's a payoff. But then we get stuck. Now, one of the first things I learned as a chaplain intern was the three C's of the chaplain's job: Comfort, clarify and, when necessary, confront or challenge. Now, we all pretty much love the comforting and the clarifying. The confronting, not so much. One of the other things that I loved about being a chaplain was seeing patients a year, or even several years after their treatment, because it was just really cool to see how they had changed and how their lives had evolved and what had happened to them. So I was thrilled one day to get a page down into the lobby of the clinic from a patient who I had seen the year before, and she was there with her two adult daughters, who I also knew, for her one year follow-up exam. So I got down to the lobby, and they were ecstatic because she had just gotten all of her test results back and she was NED: No Evidence of Disease. Which I used to think meant Not Entirely Dead. So they were ecstatic, we sat down to visit, and it was so weird, because within two minutes, she started retelling me the story of her diagnosis and her surgery and her chemo, even though, as her chaplain, I saw her every week, and so I knew this story. And she was using words like suffering, agony, struggle. And she ended her story with, "I felt crucified." And at that point, her two daughters got up and said, "We're going to go get coffee." And they left. Tell me three things about yourself before the next stop. People were leaving the bus before she even got to number two or number three. So I handed her a tissue, and I gave her a hug, and then, because I really cared for this woman, I said, "Get down off your cross." And she said, "What?" And I repeated, "Get down off your cross." And to her credit, she could talk about her reasons for embracing and then clinging to this identity. It got her a lot of attention. People were taking care of her for a change. But now, it was having the opposite effect. It was pushing people away. People kept leaving to get coffee. She felt crucified by her experience, but she didn't want to let that crucified self die. Now, perhaps you are thinking I was a little harsh with her, so I must tell you that I was speaking out of my own experience. Many, many years before, I had been fired from a job that I loved, and I would not stop talking about my innocence and the injustice and the betrayal and the deceipt, until finally, just like this woman, people were walking away from me, until I finally realized I wasn't just processing my feelings, I was feeding them. I didn't want to let that crucified self die. But we all know that with any resurrection story, you have to die first. The Christian story, Jesus was dead a whole day in the tomb before he was resurrected. And I believe that for us, being in the tomb means doing our own deep inner work around our wounds and allowing ourselves to be healed. We have to let that crucified self die so that a new self, a truer self, is born. We have to let that old story go so that a new story, a truer story, can be told. Claim your experience. Don't let it claim you. What if there were no survivors, meaning, what if people decided to just claim their trauma as an experience instead of taking it on as an identity? Maybe it would be the end of being trapped in our wounds and the beginning of amazing self-exploration and discovery and growth. Maybe it would be the start of defining ourselves by who we have become and who we are becoming. So perhaps survivor was not one of the three things that you would tell me. No matter. I just want you all to know that I am really glad that we are on this bus together, and this is my stop. (Applause)

Humanity takes center stage at TED, but I would like to add a voice for the animals, whose bodies and minds and spirits shaped us. Some years ago, it was my good fortune to meet a tribal elder on an island not far from Vancouver. His name is Jimmy Smith, and he shared a story with me that is told among his people, who call themselves the Kwikwasut'inuxw. Once upon a time, he told me, all animals on Earth were one. Even though they look different on the outside, inside, they're all the same, and from time to time they would gather at a sacred cave deep inside the forest to celebrate their unity. When they arrived, they would all take off their skins. Raven shed his feathers, bear his fur, and salmon her scales, and then, they would dance. But one day, a human made it to the cave and laughed at what he saw because he did not understand. Embarrassed, the animals fled, and that was the last time they revealed themselves this way. The ancient understanding that underneath their separate identities, all animals are one, has been a powerful inspiration to me. I like to get past the fur, the feathers and the scales. I want to get under the skin. No matter whether I'm facing a giant elephant or a tiny tree frog, my goal is to connect us with them, eye to eye. You may wonder, do I ever photograph people? Sure. People are always present in my photos, no matter whether they appear to portray tortoises or cougars or lions. You just have to learn how to look past their disguise. As a photographer, I try to reach beyond the differences in our genetic makeup to appreciate all we have in common with every other living thing. When I use my camera, I drop my skin like the animals at that cave so I can show who they really are. As animals blessed with the power of rational thought, we can marvel at the intricacies of life. As citizens of a planet in trouble, it is our moral responsibility to deal with the dramatic loss in diversity of life. But as humans with hearts, we can all rejoice in the unity of life, and perhaps we can change what once happened in that sacred cave. Let's find a way to join the dance. Thank you. (Applause)

I came here to show you the Fotokite. It's a tethered, flying camera. But before I do that, I want to tell you a bit about where it came from, what motivated it. So I was born in Russia, and three years ago, in 2011, there were the Russian federal elections. There were massive irregularities reported, and people came out to protest, which was very unlikely for Russia. And no one really knew how significant these protests were, because, for whatever reason, the world media largely ignored it. Now, there was a group of photographers who kind of flew flying cameras as a hobby — usually photographing things like the Sphinx, the Pyramids — who happened to be right around the corner, and they flew a camera and they took some snapshots, some panoramas of this demonstration. Just completely independent entity, completely random occurrence, and the image, when I saw it, it really struck me. Here's one of the panoramas. So in a single image, you can really see the scale of this event — just the number of people, the colors, the banners. You just can't consider this insignificant. All in a single image, which was really cool to me. And I think, in the future, journalism and many other professions, there are flying cameras already quite commonly out there, but I think, you wait a few months, a few years, and for many professions, it's really going to be a requirement. And it make sense. It's such a unique perspective. Nothing really communicates this scale, for example, in context, in a way that this does. But there are a few hurdles, and they are quite basic and quite fundamental. One is piloting. So for this image, they flew a camera, a five kilogram device with an SLR under it. It's quite heavy, lots of spinning, sharp things. It's a bit uncomfortable to fly, probably also for the operator. In fact, you can see that on the back of the pilot's shirt, it says, "No questions until landing" in Russian and in English, because people are curious, and they'll go tap you, and then you lose your focus and things happen. And these guys are great. They're professionals; they're really careful in what they do. So in the protests, maybe you noticed, they flew over the river so it was quite safe. But this doesn't necessarily apply to all people and all conditions, so we really have to make piloting easier. The other problem is regulations, or rather, the lack of good regulation. For many good reasons, it's just difficult to come up with common sense laws to regulate flying cameras. So we already have cameras. Everyone here, I'm sure, has a smartphone with a camera, right? There are more and more of them. You hear about people with Google Glass being attacked. You hear about, actually, a drone pilot, a hobbyist, was attacked two weeks ago because he was flying near a beach. Here's some personal input I didn't expect. Just yesterday, I was attacked by a guy who claimed that I was filming him. I was checking my email right here — easy way to get input for your talk. But I think there are better solutions. I think we have to defuse the situation. We have to come up with responsible solutions that address the privacy issues and the safety, accountability issues but still give us that perspective. And this is one potential solution. So this is the Fotokite. Well, let me see, it's a quadrocopter, but what's kind of special about it is there's a leash. It's literally a dog leash. It's very convenient. And the neat thing about it is, to fly it, there's no joysticks, nothing like this. You just turn it on and you point in the direction that you want to fly. You give it a little twist. That's kind of the way you communicate. And there it goes. (Applause) So the interaction is super simple. It's like a personal flying pet. It just always maintains a certain angle to you, and if I move around with it, it'll actually follow me naturally. And of course, we can build on top of this. So this leash has some additional electronics. You can turn it on. And now, it's like telling your dog to fly lower, if you have such a dog. So, I can press a button and manipulate it rather easily. So I just shifted its position. And it's really safe. I don't know about you guys in the front row — (Laughter) — but at least in principle, you have to agree that you feel safer because there is a physical connection. Live demos are hard, right? Things go wrong all the time. But no matter what, this thing will actually prevent this thing from going into you. What's more, it tells you immediately that I am the one responsible for this device. You don't have to look for someone controlling it. Now, I can tell you that it's easy a lot, but I think a really good way to prove that is to grab a second one and launch it. And if I can do this on stage live, then I can show each and every one of you in five minutes how to operate one of these devices. So now we have two eyes in the sky. (Applause) And now the trick is getting them back. (Laughter) So my question now to you is, well, it's a nice solution, it's very accessible, it's safe. What would you use it for? What would you use such a camera for in your life? Thank you. (Applause)

Let me tell you a story about a little girl named Naghma. Naghma lived in a refugee camp with her parents and her eight brothers and sisters. Every morning, her father would wake up in the hopes he'd be picked for construction work, and on a good month he would earn 50 dollars. The winter was very harsh, and unfortunately, Naghma's brother died and her mother became very ill. In desperation, her father went to a neighbor to borrow 2,500 dollars. After several months of waiting, the neighbor became very impatient, and he demanded that he be paid back. Unfortunately, Naghma's father didn't have the money, and so the two men agreed to a jirga. So simply put, a jirga is a form of mediation that's used in Afghanistan's informal justice system. It's usually presided over by religious leaders and village elders, and jirgas are often used in rural countries like Afghanistan, where there's deep-seated resentment against the formal system. At the jirga, the men sat together and they decided that the best way to satisfy the debt would be if Naghma married the neighbor's 21-year-old son. She was six. Now, stories like Naghma's unfortunately are all too common, and from the comforts of our home, we may look at these stories as another crushing blow to women's rights. And if you watched Afghanistan on the news, you may have this view that it's a failed state. However, Afghanistan does have a legal system, and while jirgas are built on long-standing tribal customs, even in jirgas, laws are supposed to be followed, and it goes without saying that giving a child to satisfy a debt is not only grossly immoral, it's illegal. In 2008, I went to Afghanistan for a justice funded program, and I went there originally on this nine-month program to train Afghan lawyers. In that nine months, I went around the country and I talked to hundreds of people that were locked up, and I talked to many businesses that were also operating in Afghanistan. And within these conversations, I started hearing the connections between the businesses and the people, and how laws that were meant to protect them were being underused, while gross and illegal punitive measures were overused. And so this put me on a quest for justness, and what justness means to me is using laws for their intended purpose, which is to protect. The role of laws is to protect. So as a result, I decided to open up a private practice, and I became the first foreigner to litigate in Afghan courts. Throughout this time, I also studied many laws, I talked to many people, I read up on many cases, and I found that the lack of justness is not just a problem in Afghanistan, but it's a global problem. And while I originally shied away from representing human rights cases because I was really concerned about how it would affect me both professionally and personally, I decided that the need for justness was so great that I couldn't continue to ignore it. And so I started representing people like Naghma pro bono also. Now, since I've been in Afghanistan and since I've been an attorney for over 10 years, I've represented from CEOs of Fortune 500 companies to ambassadors to little girls like Naghma, and with much success. And the reason for my success is very simple: I work the system from the inside out and use the laws in the ways that they're intended to be used. I find that achieving justness in places like Afghanistan is difficult, and there's three reasons. The first reason is that simply put, people are very uneducated as to what their legal rights were, and I find that this is a global problem. The second issue is that even with laws on the books, it's often superseded or ignored by tribal customs, like in the first jirga that sold Naghma off. And the third problem with achieving justness is that even with good, existing laws on the books, there aren't people or lawyers that are willing to fight for those laws. And that's what I do: I use existing laws, often unused laws, and I work those to the benefits of my clients. We all need to create a global culture of human rights and be investors in a global human rights economy, and by working in this mindset, we can significantly improve justice globally. Now let's get back to Naghma. Several people heard about this story, and so they contacted me because they wanted to pay the $2,500 debt. And it's not just that simple; you can't just throw money at this problem and think that it's going to disappear. That's not how it works in Afghanistan. So I told them I'd get involved, but in order to get involved, what needed to happen is a second jirga needed to be called, a jirga of appeals. And so in order for that to happen, we needed to get the village elders together, we needed to get the tribal leaders together, the religious leaders. Naghma's father needed to agree, the neighbor needed to agree, and also his son needed to agree. And I thought, if I'm going to get involved in this thing, then they also need to agree that I preside over it. So, after hours of talking and tracking them down, and about 30 cups of tea, they finally agreed that we could sit down for a second jirga, and we did. And what was different about the second jirga is this time, we put the law at the center of it, and it was very important for me that they all understood that Naghma had a right to be protected. And at the end of this jirga, it was ordered by the judge that the first decision was erased, and that the $2,500 debt was satisfied, and we all signed a written order where all the men acknowledged that what they did was illegal, and if they did it again, that they would go to prison. Most — (Applause) Thanks. And most importantly, the engagement was terminated and Naghma was free. Protecting Naghma and her right to be free protects us. Now, with my job, there's above-average amount of risks that are involved. I've been temporarily detained. I've been accused of running a brothel, accused of being a spy. I've had a grenade thrown at my office. It didn't go off, though. But I find that with my job, that the rewards far outweigh the risks, and as many risks as I take, my clients take far greater risks, because they have a lot more to lose if their cases go unheard, or worse, if they're penalized for having me as their lawyer. With every case that I take, I realize that as much as I'm standing behind my clients, that they're also standing behind me, and that's what keeps me going. Law as a point of leverage is crucial in protecting all of us. Journalists are very vital in making sure that that information is given to the public. Too often, we receive information from journalists but we forget how that information was given. This picture is a picture of the British press corps in Afghanistan. It was taken a couple of years ago by my friend David Gill. According to the Committee to Protect Journalists, since 2010, there have been thousands of journalists who have been threatened, injured, killed, detained. Too often, when we get this information, we forget who it affects or how that information is given to us. What many journalists do, both foreign and domestic, is very remarkable, especially in places like Afghanistan, and it's important that we never forget that, because what they're protecting is not only our right to receive that information but also the freedom of the press, which is vital to a democratic society. Matt Rosenberg is a journalist in Afghanistan. He works for The New York Times, and unfortunately, a few months ago he wrote an article that displeased people in the government. As a result, he was temporarily detained and he was illegally exiled out of the country. I represent Matt, and after dealing with the government, I was able to get legal acknowledgment that in fact he was illegally exiled, and that freedom of the press does exist in Afghanistan, and there's consequences if that's not followed. And I'm happy to say that as of a few days ago, the Afghan government formally invited him back into the country and they reversed their exile order of him. (Applause) If you censor one journalist, then it intimidates others, and soon nations are silenced. It's important that we protect our journalists and freedom of the press, because that makes governments more accountable to us and more transparent. Protecting journalists and our right to receive information protects us. Our world is changing. We live in a different world now, and what were once individual problems are really now global problems for all of us. Two weeks ago, Afghanistan had its first democratic transfer of power and elected president Ashraf Ghani, which is huge, and I'm very optimistic about him, and I'm hopeful that he'll give Afghanistan the changes that it needs, especially within the legal sector. We live in a different world. We live in a world where my eight-year-old daughter only knows a black president. There's a great possibility that our next president will be a woman, and as she gets older, she may question, can a white guy be president? (Laughter) (Applause) Our world is changing, and we need to change with it, and what were once individual problems are problems for all of us. According to UNICEF, there are currently over 280 million boys and girls who are married under the age of 15. Two hundred and eighty million. Child marriages prolong the vicious cycle of poverty, poor health, lack of education. At the age of 12, Sahar was married. She was forced into this marriage and sold by her brother. When she went to her in-laws' house, they forced her into prostitution. Because she refused, she was tortured. She was severely beaten with metal rods. They burned her body. They tied her up in a basement and starved her. They used pliers to take out her fingernails. At one point, she managed to escape from this torture chamber to a neighbor's house, and when she went there, instead of protecting her, they dragged her back to her husband's house, and she was tortured even worse. When I met first Sahar, thankfully, Women for Afghan Women gave her a safe haven to go to. As a lawyer, I try to be very strong for all my clients, because that's very important to me, but seeing her, how broken and very weak as she was, was very difficult. It took weeks for us to really get to what happened to her when she was in that house, but finally she started opening up to me, and when she opened up, what I heard was she didn't know what her rights were, but she did know she had a certain level of protection by her government that failed her, and so we were able to talk about what her legal options were. And so we decided to take this case to the Supreme Court. Now, this is extremely significant, because this is the first time that a victim of domestic violence in Afghanistan was being represented by a lawyer, a law that's been on the books for years and years, but until Sahar, had never been used. In addition to this, we also decided to sue for civil damages, again using a law that's never been used, but we used it for her case. So there we were at the Supreme Court arguing in front of 12 Afghan justices, me as an American female lawyer, and Sahar, a young woman who when I met her couldn't speak above a whisper. She stood up, she found her voice, and my girl told them that she wanted justice, and she got it. At the end of it all, the court unanimously agreed that her in-laws should be arrested for what they did to her, her fucking brother should also be arrested for selling her — (Applause) — and they agreed that she did have a right to civil compensation. What Sahar has shown us is that we can attack existing bad practices by using the laws in the ways that they're intended to be used, and by protecting Sahar, we are protecting ourselves. After having worked in Afghanistan for over six years now, a lot of my family and friends think that what I do looks like this. (Laughter) But in all actuality, what I do looks like this. Now, we can all do something. I'm not saying we should all buy a plane ticket and go to Afghanistan, but we can all be contributors to a global human rights economy. We can create a culture of transparency and accountability to the laws, and make governments more accountable to us, as we are to them. A few months ago, a South African lawyer visited me in my office and he said, "I wanted to meet you. I wanted to see what a crazy person looked like." The laws are ours, and no matter what your ethnicity, nationality, gender, race, they belong to us, and fighting for justice is not an act of insanity. Businesses also need to get with the program. A corporate investment in human rights is a capital gain on your businesses, and whether you're a business, an NGO, or a private citizen, rule of law benefits all of us. And by working together with a concerted mindset, through the people, public and private sector, we can create a global human rights economy and all become global investors in human rights. And by doing this, we can achieve justness together. Thank you. (Applause)

George and Charlotte Blonsky, who were a married couple living in the Bronx in New York City, invented something. They got a patent in 1965 for what they call, "a device to assist women in giving birth." This device consists of a large, round table and some machinery. When the woman is ready to deliver her child, she lies on her back, she is strapped down to the table, and the table is rotated at high speed. The child comes flying out through centrifugal force. If you look at their patent carefully, especially if you have any engineering background or talent, you may decide that you see one or two points where the design is not perfectly adequate. (Laughter) Doctor Ivan Schwab in California is one of the people, one of the main people, who helped answer the question, "Why don't woodpeckers get headaches?" And it turns out the answer to that is because their brains are packaged inside their skulls in a way different from the way our brains, we being human beings, true, have our brains packaged. They, the woodpeckers, typically will peck, they will bang their head on a piece of wood thousands of times every day. Every day! And as far as anyone knows, that doesn't bother them in the slightest. How does this happen? Their brain does not slosh around like ours does. Their brain is packed in very tightly, at least for blows coming right from the front. Not too many people paid attention to this research until the last few years when, in this country especially, people are becoming curious about what happens to the brains of football players who bang their heads repeatedly. And the woodpecker maybe relates to that. There was a paper published in the medical journal The Lancet in England a few years ago called " A man who pricked his finger and smelled putrid for 5 years." Dr. Caroline Mills and her team received this patient and didn't really know what to do about it. The man had cut his finger, he worked processing chickens, and then he started to smell really, really bad. So bad that when he got in a room with the doctors and the nurses, they couldn't stand being in the room with him. It was intolerable. They tried every drug, every other treatment they could think of. After a year, he still smelled putrid. After two years, still smelled putrid. Three years, four years, still smelled putrid. After five years, it went away on its own. It's a mystery. In New Zealand, Dr. Lianne Parkin and her team tested an old tradition in her city. They live in a city that has huge hills, San Francisco-grade hills. And in the winter there, it gets very cold and very icy. There are lots of injuries. The tradition that they tested, they tested by asking people who were on their way to work in the morning, to stop and try something out. Try one of two conditions. The tradition is that in the winter, in that city, you wear your socks on the outside of your boots. And what they discovered by experiment, and it was quite graphic when they saw it, was that it's true. That if you wear your socks on the outside rather than the inside, you're much more likely to survive and not slip and fall. Now, I hope you will agree with me that these things I've just described to you, each of them, deserves some kind of prize. (Laughter) And that's what they got, each of them got an Ig Nobel prize. In 1991, I, together with bunch of other people, started the Ig Nobel prize ceremony. Every year we give out 10 prizes. The prizes are based on just one criteria. It's very simple. It's that you've done something that makes people laugh and then think. What you've done makes people laugh and then think. Whatever it is, there's something about it that when people encounter it at first, their only possible reaction is to laugh. And then a week later, it's still rattling around in their heads and all they want to do is tell their friends about it. That's the quality we look for. Every year, we get in the neighborhood of 9,000 new nominations for the Ig Nobel prize. Of those, consistently between 10 percent and 20 percent of those nominations are people who nominate themselves. Those self-nominees almost never win. It's very difficult, numerically, to win a prize if you want to. Even if you don't want to, it's very difficult numerically. You should know that when we choose somebody to win an Ig Nobel prize, We get in touch with that person, very quietly. We offer them the chance to decline this great honor if they want to. Happily for us, almost everyone who's offered a prize decides to accept. What do you get if you win an Ig Nobel prize? Well, you get several things. You get an Ig Nobel prize. The design is different every year. These are always handmade from extremely cheap materials. You're looking at a picture of the prize we gave last year, 2013. Most prizes in the world also give their winners some cash, some money. We don't have any money, so we can't give them. In fact, the winners have to pay their own way to come to the Ig Nobel ceremony, which most of them do. Last year, though, we did manage to scrape up some money. Last year, each of the 10 Ig Nobel prize winners received from us 10 trillion dollars. A $10 trillion bill from Zimbabwe. (Laughter) You may remember that Zimbabwe had a little adventure for a few years there of inflation. They ended up printing bills that were in denominations as large as 100 trillion dollars. The man responsible, who runs the national bank there, by the way, won an Ig Nobel prize in mathematics. The other thing you win is an invitation to come to the ceremony, which happens at Harvard University. And when you get there, you come to Harvard's biggest meeting place and classroom. It fits 1,100 people, it's jammed to the gills, and up on the stage, waiting to shake your hand, waiting to hand you your Ig Nobel prize, are a bunch of Nobel prize winners. That's the heart of the ceremony. The winners are kept secret until that moment, even the Nobel laureates who will shake their hand don't know who they are until they're announced. I am going to tell you about just a very few of the other medical-related prizes we've given. Keep in mind, we've given 230 prizes. There are lots of these people who walk among you. Maybe you have one. A paper was published about 30 years ago called "Injuries due to Falling Coconuts." It was written by Dr. Peter Barss, who is Canadian. Dr. Barss came to the ceremony and explained that as a young doctor, he wanted to see the world. So he went to Papua New Guinea. When he got there, he went to work in a hospital, and he was curious what kinds of things happen to people that bring them to the hospital. He looked through the records, and he discovered that a surprisingly large number of people in that hospital were there because of injuries due to falling coconuts. One typical thing that happens is people will come from the highlands, where there are not many coconut trees, down to visit their relatives on the coast, where there are lots. And they'll think that a coconut tree is a fine place to stand and maybe lie down. A coconut tree that is 90 feet tall, and has coconuts that weigh two pounds that can drop off at any time. A team of doctors in Europe published a series of papers about colonoscopies. You're all familiar with colonoscopies, one way or another. Or in some cases, one way and another. They, in these papers, explained to their fellow doctors who perform colonoscopies, how to minimize the chance that when you perform a colonoscopy, your patient will explode. (Laughter) Dr. Emmanuel Ben-Soussan one of the authors, flew in from Paris to the ceremony, where he explained the history of this, that in the 1950s, when colonoscopies were becoming a common technique for the first time, people were figuring out how to do it well. And there were some difficulties at first. The basic problem, I'm sure you're familiar with, that you're looking inside a long, narrow, dark place. And so, you want to have a larger space. You add some gas to inflate it so you have room to look around. Now, that's added to the gas, the methane gas, that's already inside. The gas that they used at first, in many cases, was oxygen. So they added oxygen to methane gas. And then they wanted to be able to see, they needed light, so they'd put in a light source, which in the 1950s was very hot. So you had methane gas, which is flammable, oxygen and heat. They stopped using oxygen pretty quickly. (Laughter) Now it's rare that patients will explode, but it does still happen. The final thing that I want to tell you about is a prize we gave to Dr. Elena Bodnar. Dr. Elena Bodnar invented a brassiere that in an emergency can be quickly separated into a pair of protective face masks. One to save your life, one to save the life of some lucky bystander. (Laughter) Why would someone do this, you might wonder. Dr. Bodnar came to the ceremony and she explained that she grew up in Ukraine. She was one of the doctors who treated victims of the Chernobyl power plant meltdown. And they later discovered that a lot of the worst medical problems came from the particles people breathed in. So she was always thinking after that about could there be some simple mask that was available everywhere when the unexpected happens. Years later, she moved to America. She had a baby, One day she looked, and on the floor, her infant son had picked up her bra, and had her bra on his face. And that's where the idea came from. She came to the Ig Nobel ceremony with the first prototype of the bra and she demonstrated: (Laughter) (Applause) ["Paul Krugman, Nobel laureate (2008) in economics"] ["Wolfgang Ketterle, Nobel laureate (2001) in physics"] I myself own an emergency bra. (Laughter) It's my favorite bra, but I would be happy to share it with any of you, should the need arise. Thank you. (Applause)

I have a confession to make. I am addicted to adventure, and as a young boy, I would rather look outside the window at the birds in the trees and the sky than looking at that two-dimensional chalky blackboard where time stands still and even sometimes dies. My teachers thought there was something wrong with me because I wasn't paying attention in class. They didn't find anything specifically wrong with me, other than being slightly dyslexic because I'm a lefty. But they didn't test for curiosity. Curiosity, to me, is about our connection with the world, with the universe. It's about seeing what's around that next coral head or what's around that next tree, and learning more not only about our environment but about ourselves. Now, my dream of dreams, I want to go explore the oceans of Mars, but until we can go there, I think the oceans still hold quite a few secrets. As a matter of fact, if you take our planet as the oasis in space that it is and dissect it into a living space, the ocean represents over 3.4 billion cubic kilometers of volume, within which we've explored less than five percent. And I look at this, and I go, well, there are tools to go deeper, longer and further: submarines, ROVs, even Scuba diving. But if we're going to explore the final frontier on this planet, we need to live there. We need to build a log cabin, if you will, at the bottom of the sea. And so there was a great curiosity in my soul when I went to go visit a TED [Prize winner] by the name of Dr. Sylvia Earle. Maybe you've heard of her. Two years ago, she was staked out at the last undersea marine laboratory to try and save it, to try and petition for us not to scrap it and bring it back on land. We've only had about a dozen or so scientific labs at the bottom of the sea. There's only one left in the world: it's nine miles offshore and 65 feet down. It's called Aquarius. Aquarius, in some fashion, is a dinosaur, an ancient robot chained to the bottom, this Leviathan. In other ways, it's a legacy. And so with that visit, I realized that my time is short if I wanted to experience what it was like to become an aquanaut. When we swam towards this after many moons of torture and two years of preparation, this habitat waiting to invite us was like a new home. And the point of going down to and living at this habitat was not to stay inside. It wasn't about living at something the size of a school bus. It was about giving us the luxury of time outside to wander, to explore, to understand more about this oceanic final frontier. We had megafauna come and visit us. This spotted eagle ray is a fairly common sight in the oceans. But why this is so important, why this picture is up, is because this particular animal brought his friends around, and instead of being the pelagic animals that they were, they started getting curious about us, these new strangers that were moving into the neighborhood, doing things with plankton. We were studying all sorts of animals and critters, and they got closer and closer to us, and because of the luxury of time, these animals, these residents of the coral reef, were starting to get used to us, and these pelagics that normal travel through stopped. This particular animal actually circled for 31 full days during our mission. So mission 31 wasn't so much about breaking records. It was about that human-ocean connection. Because of the luxury of time, we were able to study animals such as sharks and grouper in aggregations that we've never seen before. It's like seeing dogs and cats behaving well together. Even being able to commune with animals that are much larger than us, such as this endangered goliath grouper who only still resides in the Florida Keys. Of course, just like any neighbor, after a while, if they get tired, the goliath grouper barks at us, and this bark is so powerful that it actually stuns its prey before it aspirates it all within a split second. For us, it's just telling us to go back into the habitat and leave them alone. Now, this wasn't just about adventure. There was actually a serious note to it. We did a lot of science, and again, because of the luxury of time, we were able to do over three years of science in 31 days. In this particular case, we were using a PAM, or, let me just see if I can get this straight, a Pulse Amplitude Modulated Fluorometer. And our scientists from FIU, MIT, and from Northeastern were able to get a gauge for what coral reefs do when we're not around. The Pulse Amplitude Modulated Fluorometer, or PAM, gauges the fluorescence of corals as it pertains to pollutants in the water as well as climate change-related issues. We used all sorts of other cutting-edge tools, such as this sonde, or what I like to call the sponge proctologist, whereby the sonde itself tests for metabolism rates in what in this particular case is a barrel sponge, or the redwoods of the [ocean]. And this gives us a much better gauge of what's happening underwater with regard to climate change-related issues, and how the dynamics of that affect us here on land. And finally, we looked at predator-prey behavior. And predator-prey behavior is an interesting thing, because as we take away some of the predators on these coral reefs around the world, the prey, or the forage fish, act very differently. What we realized is not only do they stop taking care of the reef, darting in, grabbing a little bit of algae and going back into their homes, they start spreading out and disappearing from those particular coral reefs. Well, within that 31 days, we were able to generate over 10 scientific papers on each one of these topics. But the point of adventure is not only to learn, it's to be able to share that knowledge with the world, and with that, thanks to a couple of engineers at MIT, we were able to use a prototype camera called the Edgertronic to capture slow-motion video, up to 20,000 frames per second in a little box that's worth 3,000 dollars. It's available to every one of us. And that particular camera gives us an insight into what fairly common animals do but we can't even see it in the blink of an eye. Let me show you a quick video of what this camera does. You can see the silky bubble come out of our hard hats. It gives us an insight into some of the animals that we were sitting right next to for 31 days and never normally would have paid attention to, such as hermit crabs. Now, using a cutting-edge piece of technology that's not really meant for the oceans is not always easy. We sometimes had to put the camera upside down, cordon it back to the lab, and actually man the trigger from the lab itself. But what this gives us is the foresight to look at and analyze in scientific and engineering terms some of the most amazing behavior that the human eye just can't pick up, such as this manta shrimp trying to catch its prey, within about .3 seconds. That punch is as strong as a .22 caliber bullet, and if you ever try to catch a bullet in mid-flight with your eye, impossible. But now we can see things such as these Christmas tree worms pulling in and fanning out in a way that the eye just can't capture, or in this case, a fish throwing up grains of sand. This is an actual sailfin goby, and if you look at it in real time, it actually doesn't even show its fanning motion because it's so quick. One of the most precious gifts that we had underwater is that we had WiFi, and for 31 days straight we were able to connect with the world in real time from the bottom of the sea and share all of these experiences. Quite literally right there I am Skyping in the classroom with one of the six continents and some of the 70,000 students that we connected every single day to some of these experiences. As a matter of fact, I'm showing a picture that I took with my smartphone from underwater of a goliath grouper laying on the bottom. We had never seen that before. And I dream of the day that we have underwater cities, and maybe, just maybe, if we push the boundaries of adventure and knowledge, and we share that knowledge with others out there, we can solve all sorts of problems. My grandfather used to say, "People protect what they love." My father, "How can people protect what they don't understand?" And I've thought about this my whole life. Nothing is impossible. We need to dream, we need to be creative, and we all need to have an adventure in order to create miracles in the darkest of times. And whether it's about climate change or eradicating poverty or giving back to future generations what we've taken for granted, it's about adventure. And who knows, maybe there will be underwater cities, and maybe some of you will become the future aquanauts. Thank you very much. (Applause)

I suspect that every aid worker in Africa comes to a time in her career when she wants to take all the money for her project — maybe it's a school or a training program — pack it in a suitcase, get on a plane flying over the poorest villages in the country, and start throwing that money out the window. Because to a veteran aid worker, the idea of putting cold, hard cash into the hands of the poorest people on Earth doesn't sound crazy, it sounds really satisfying. I had that moment right about the 10-year mark, and luckily, that's also when I learned that this idea actually exists, and it might be just what the aid system needs. Economists call it an unconditional cash transfer, and it's exactly that: It's cash given with no strings attached. Governments in developing countries have been doing this for decades, and it's only now, with more evidence and new technology that it's possible to make this a model for delivering aid. It's a pretty simple idea, right? Well, why did I spend a decade doing other stuff for the poor? Honestly, I believed that I could do more good with money for the poor than the poor could do for themselves. I held two assumptions: One, that poor people are poor in part because they're uneducated and don't make good choices; two is that we then need people like me to figure out what they need and get it to them. It turns out, the evidence says otherwise. In recent years, researchers have been studying what happens when we give poor people cash. Dozens of studies show across the board that people use cash transfers to improve their own lives. Pregnant women in Uruguay buy better food and give birth to healthier babies. Sri Lankan men invest in their businesses. Researchers who studied our work in Kenya found that people invested in a range of assets, from livestock to equipment to home improvements, and they saw increases in income from business and farming one year after the cash was sent. None of these studies found that people spend more on drinking or smoking or that people work less. In fact, they work more. Now, these are all material needs. In Vietnam, elderly recipients used their cash transfers to pay for coffins. As someone who wonders if Maslow got it wrong, I find this choice to prioritize spiritual needs deeply humbling. I don't know if I would have chosen to give food or equipment or coffins, which begs the question: How good are we at allocating resources on behalf of the poor? Are we worth the cost? Again, we can look at empirical evidence on what happens when we give people stuff of our choosing. One very telling study looked at a program in India that gives livestock to the so-called ultra-poor, and they found that 30 percent of recipients had turned around and sold the livestock they had been given for cash. The real irony is, for every 100 dollars worth of assets this program gave someone, they spent another 99 dollars to do it. What if, instead, we use technology to put cash, whether from aid agencies or from any one of us directly into a poor person's hands. Today, three in four Kenyans use mobile money, which is basically a bank account that can run on any cell phone. A sender can pay a 1.6 percent fee and with the click of a button send money directly to a recipient's account with no intermediaries. Like the technologies that are disrupting industries in our own lives, payments technology in poor countries could disrupt aid. It's spreading so quickly that it's possible to imagine reaching billions of the world's poor this way. That's what we've started to do at GiveDirectly. We're the first organization dedicated to providing cash transfers to the poor. We've sent cash to 35,000 people across rural Kenya and Uganda in one-time payments of 1,000 dollars per family. So far, we've looked for the poorest people in the poorest villages, and in this part of the world, they're the ones living in homes made of mud and thatch, not cement and iron. So let's say that's your family. We show up at your door with an Android phone. We'll get your name, take your photo and a photo of your hut and grab the GPS coordinates. That night, we send all the data to the cloud, and each piece gets checked by an independent team using, for one example, satellite images. Then, we'll come back, we'll sell you a basic cell phone if you don't have one already, and a few weeks later, we send money to it. Something that five years ago would have seemed impossible we can now do efficiently and free of corruption. The more cash we give to the poor, and the more evidence we have that it works, the more we have to reconsider everything else we give. Today, the logic behind aid is too often, well, we do at least some good. When we're complacent with that as our bar, when we tell ourselves that giving aid is better than no aid at all, we tend to invest inefficiently, in our own ideas that strike us as innovative, on writing reports, on plane tickets and SUVs. What if the logic was, will we do better than cash given directly? Organizations would have to prove that they're doing more good for the poor than the poor can do for themselves. Of course, giving cash won't create public goods like eradicating disease or building strong institutions, but it could set a higher bar for how we help individual families improve their lives. I believe in aid. I believe most aid is better than just throwing money out of a plane. I am also absolutely certain that a lot of aid today isn't better than giving directly to the poor. I hope that one day, it will be. Thank you. (Applause)

I experienced my first coup d'état at the age of four. Because of the coup d'état, my family had to leave my native home of Ghana and move to the Gambia. As luck would have it, six months after we arrived, they too had a military coup. I vividly remember being woken up in the middle of the night and gathering the few belongings we could and walking for about two hours to a safe house. For a week, we slept under our beds because we were worried that bullets might fly through the window. Then, at the age of eight, we moved to Botswana. This time, it was different. There were no coups. Everything worked. Great education. They had such good infrastructure that even at the time they had a fiber-optic telephone system, long before it had reached Western countries. The only thing they didn't have is that they didn't have their own national television station, and so I remember watching TV from neighboring South Africa, and watching Nelson Mandela in jail being offered a chance to come out if he would give up the apartheid struggle. But he didn't. He refused to do that until he actually achieved his objective of freeing South Africa from apartheid. And I remember feeling how just one good leader could make such a big difference in Africa. Then at the age of 12, my family sent me to high school in Zimbabwe. Initially, this too was amazing: growing economy, excellent infrastructure, and it seemed like it was a model for economic development in Africa. I graduated from high school in Zimbabwe and I went off to college. Six years later, I returned to the country. Everything was different. It had shattered into pieces. Millions of people had emigrated, the economy was in a shambles, and it seemed all of a sudden that 30 years of development had been wiped out. How could a country go so bad so fast? Most people would agree that it's all because of leadership. One man, President Robert Mugabe, is almost single-handedly responsible for having destroyed this country. Now, all these experiences of living in different parts of Africa growing up did two things to me. The first is it made me fall in love with Africa. Everywhere I went, I experienced the wonderful beauty of our continent and saw the resilience and the spirit of our people, and at the time, I realized that I wanted to dedicate the rest of my life to making this continent great. But I also realized that making Africa great would require addressing this issue of leadership. You see, all these countries I lived in, the coups d'état and the corruption I'd seen in Ghana and Gambia and in Zimbabwe, contrasted with the wonderful examples I had seen in Botswana and in South Africa of good leadership. It made me realize that Africa would rise or fall because of the quality of our leaders. Now, one might think, of course, leadership matters everywhere. But if there's one thing you take away from my talk today, it is this: In Africa, more than anywhere else in the world, the difference that just one good leader can make is much greater than anywhere else, and here's why. It's because in Africa, we have weak institutions, like the judiciary, the constitution, civil society and so forth. So here's a general rule of thumb that I believe in: When societies have strong institutions, the difference that one good leader can make is limited, but when you have weak institutions, then just one good leader can make or break that country. Let me make it a bit more concrete. You become the president of the United States. You think, "Wow, I've arrived. I'm the most powerful man in the world." So you decide, perhaps let me pass a law. All of a sudden, Congress taps you on the shoulder and says, "No, no, no, no, no, you can't do that." You say, "Let me try this way." The Senate comes and says, "Uh-uh, we don't think you can do that." You say, perhaps, "Let me print some money. I think the economy needs a stimulus." The central bank governor will think you're crazy. You might get impeached for that. But if you become the president of Zimbabwe, and you say, "You know, I really like this job. I think I'd like to stay in it forever." (Laughter) Well, you just can. You decide you want to print money. You call the central bank governor and you say, "Please double the money supply." He'll say, "Okay, yes, sir, is there anything else I can do for you?" This is the power that African leaders have, and this is why they make the most difference on the continent. The good news is that the quality of leadership in Africa has been improving. We've had three generations of leaders, in my mind. Generation one are those who appeared in the '50s and '60s. These are people like Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana and Julius Nyerere of Tanzania. The legacy they left is that they brought independence to Africa. They freed us from colonialism, and let's give them credit for that. They were followed by generation two. These are people that brought nothing but havoc to Africa. Think warfare, corruption, human rights abuses. This is the stereotype of the typical African leader that we typically think of: Mobutu Sese Seko from Zaire, Sani Abacha from Nigeria. The good news is that most of these leaders have moved on, and they were replaced by generation three. These are people like the late Nelson Mandela and most of the leaders that we see in Africa today, like Paul Kagame and so forth. Now these leaders are by no means perfect, but the one thing they have done is that they have cleaned up much of the mess of generation two. They've stopped the fighting, and I call them the stabilizer generation. They're much more accountable to their people, they've improved macroeconomic policies, and we are seeing for the first time Africa's growing, and in fact it's the second fastest growing economic region in the world. So these leaders are by no means perfect, but they are by and large the best leaders we've seen in the last 50 years. So where to from here? I believe that the next generation to come after this, generation four, has a unique opportunity to transform the continent. Specifically, they can do two things that previous generations have not done. The first thing they need to do is they need to create prosperity for the continent. Why is prosperity so important? Because none of the previous generations have been able to tackle this issue of poverty. Africa today has the fastest growing population in the world, but also is the poorest. By 2030, Africa will have a larger workforce than China, and by 2050, it will have the largest workforce in the world. One billion people will need jobs in Africa, so if we don't grow our economies fast enough, we're sitting on a ticking time bomb, not just for Africa but for the entire world. Let me show you an example of one person who is living up to this legacy of creating prosperity: Laetitia. Laetitia's a young woman from Kenya who at the age of 13 had to drop out of school because her family couldn't afford to pay fees for her. So she started her own business rearing rabbits, which happen to be a delicacy in this part of Kenya that she's from. This business did so well that within a year, she was employing 15 women and was able to generate enough income that she was able to send herself to school, and through these women fund another 65 children to go to school. The profits that she generated, she used that to build a school, and today she educates 400 children in her community. And she's just turned 18. (Applause) Another example is Erick Rajaonary. Erick comes from the island of Madagascar. Now, Erick realized that agriculture would be the key to creating jobs in the rural areas of Madagascar, but he also realized that fertilizer was a very expensive input for most farmers in Madagascar. Madagascar has these very special bats that produce these droppings that are very high in nutrients. In 2006, Erick quit his job as a chartered accountant and started a company to manufacture fertilizer from the bat droppings. Today, Erick has built a business that generates several million dollars of revenue, and he employs 70 people full time and another 800 people during the season when the bats drop their droppings the most. Now, what I like about this story is that it shows that opportunities to create prosperity can be found almost anywhere. Erick is known as the Batman. (Laughter) And who would have thought that you would have been able to build a multimillion-dollar business employing so many people just from bat poo? The second thing that this generation needs to do is to create our institutions. They need to build these institutions such that we are never held to ransom again by a few individuals like Robert Mugabe. Now, all of this sounds great, but where are we going to get this generation four from? Do we just sit and hope that they emerge by chance, or that God gives them to us? No, I don't think so. It's too important an issue for us to leave it to chance. I believe that we need to create African institutions, home-grown, that will identify and develop these leaders in a systematic, practical way. We've been doing this for the last 10 years through the African Leadership Academy. Laetitia is one of our young leaders. Today, we have 700 of them that are being groomed for the African continent, and over the next 50 years, we expect to create 6,000 of them. But one thing has been troubling me. We would get about 4,000 applications a year for 100 young leaders that we could take into this academy, and so I saw the tremendous hunger that existed for this leadership training that we're offering. But we couldn't satisfy it. So today, I'm announcing for the first time in public an extension to this vision for the African Leadership Academy. We're building 25 brand new universities in Africa that are going to cultivate this next generation of African leaders. Each campus will have 10,000 leaders at a time so we'll be educating and developing 250,000 leaders at any given time. (Applause) Over the next 50 years, this institution will create three million transformative leaders for the continent. My hope is that half of them will become the entrepreneurs that we need, who will create these jobs that we need, and the other half will go into government and the nonprofit sector, and they will build the institutions that we need. But they won't just learn academics. They will also learn how to become leaders, and they will develop their skills as entrepreneurs. So think of this as Africa's Ivy League, but instead of getting admitted because of your SAT scores or because of how much money you have or which family you come from, the main criteria for getting into this university will be what is the potential that you have for transforming Africa? But what we're doing is just one group of institutions. We cannot transform Africa by ourselves. My hope is that many, many other home-grown African institutions will blossom, and these institutions will all come together with a common vision of developing this next generation of African leaders, generation four, and they will teach them this common message: create jobs, build our institutions. Nelson Mandela once said, "Every now and then, a generation is called upon to be great. You can be that great generation." I believe that if we carefully identify and cultivate the next generation of African leaders, then this generation four that is coming up will be the greatest generation that Africa and indeed the entire world has ever seen. Thank you. (Applause)

Technology has brought us so much: the moon landing, the Internet, the ability to sequence the human genome. But it also taps into a lot of our deepest fears, and about 30 years ago, the culture critic Neil Postman wrote a book called "Amusing Ourselves to Death," which lays this out really brilliantly. And here's what he said, comparing the dystopian visions of George Orwell and Aldous Huxley. He said, Orwell feared we would become a captive culture. Huxley feared we would become a trivial culture. Orwell feared the truth would be concealed from us, and Huxley feared we would be drowned in a sea of irrelevance. In a nutshell, it's a choice between Big Brother watching you and you watching Big Brother. (Laughter) But it doesn't have to be this way. We are not passive consumers of data and technology. We shape the role it plays in our lives and the way we make meaning from it, but to do that, we have to pay as much attention to how we think as how we code. We have to ask questions, and hard questions, to move past counting things to understanding them. We're constantly bombarded with stories about how much data there is in the world, but when it comes to big data and the challenges of interpreting it, size isn't everything. There's also the speed at which it moves, and the many varieties of data types, and here are just a few examples: images, text, video, audio. And what unites this disparate types of data is that they're created by people and they require context. Now, there's a group of data scientists out of the University of Illinois-Chicago, and they're called the Health Media Collaboratory, and they've been working with the Centers for Disease Control to better understand how people talk about quitting smoking, how they talk about electronic cigarettes, and what they can do collectively to help them quit. The interesting thing is, if you want to understand how people talk about smoking, first you have to understand what they mean when they say "smoking." And on Twitter, there are four main categories: number one, smoking cigarettes; number two, smoking marijuana; number three, smoking ribs; and number four, smoking hot women. (Laughter) So then you have to think about, well, how do people talk about electronic cigarettes? And there are so many different ways that people do this, and you can see from the slide it's a complex kind of a query. And what it reminds us is that language is created by people, and people are messy and we're complex and we use metaphors and slang and jargon and we do this 24/7 in many, many languages, and then as soon as we figure it out, we change it up. So did these ads that the CDC put on, these television ads that featured a woman with a hole in her throat and that were very graphic and very disturbing, did they actually have an impact on whether people quit? And the Health Media Collaboratory respected the limits of their data, but they were able to conclude that those advertisements — and you may have seen them — that they had the effect of jolting people into a thought process that may have an impact on future behavior. And what I admire and appreciate about this project, aside from the fact, including the fact that it's based on real human need, is that it's a fantastic example of courage in the face of a sea of irrelevance. And so it's not just big data that causes challenges of interpretation, because let's face it, we human beings have a very rich history of taking any amount of data, no matter how small, and screwing it up. So many years ago, you may remember that former President Ronald Reagan was very criticized for making a statement that facts are stupid things. And it was a slip of the tongue, let's be fair. He actually meant to quote John Adams' defense of British soldiers in the Boston Massacre trials that facts are stubborn things. But I actually think there's a bit of accidental wisdom in what he said, because facts are stubborn things, but sometimes they're stupid, too. I want to tell you a personal story about why this matters a lot to me. I need to take a breath. My son Isaac, when he was two, was diagnosed with autism, and he was this happy, hilarious, loving, affectionate little guy, but the metrics on his developmental evaluations, which looked at things like the number of words — at that point, none — communicative gestures and minimal eye contact, put his developmental level at that of a nine-month-old baby. And the diagnosis was factually correct, but it didn't tell the whole story. And about a year and a half later, when he was almost four, I found him in front of the computer one day running a Google image search on women, spelled "w-i-m-e-n." And I did what any obsessed parent would do, which is immediately started hitting the "back" button to see what else he'd been searching for. And they were, in order: men, school, bus and computer. And I was stunned, because we didn't know that he could spell, much less read, and so I asked him, "Isaac, how did you do this?" And he looked at me very seriously and said, "Typed in the box." He was teaching himself to communicate, but we were looking in the wrong place, and this is what happens when assessments and analytics overvalue one metric — in this case, verbal communication — and undervalue others, such as creative problem-solving. Communication was hard for Isaac, and so he found a workaround to find out what he needed to know. And when you think about it, it makes a lot of sense, because forming a question is a really complex process, but he could get himself a lot of the way there by putting a word in a search box. And so this little moment had a really profound impact on me and our family because it helped us change our frame of reference for what was going on with him, and worry a little bit less and appreciate his resourcefulness more. Facts are stupid things. And they're vulnerable to misuse, willful or otherwise. I have a friend, Emily Willingham, who's a scientist, and she wrote a piece for Forbes not long ago entitled "The 10 Weirdest Things Ever Linked to Autism." It's quite a list. The Internet, blamed for everything, right? And of course mothers, because. And actually, wait, there's more, there's a whole bunch in the "mother" category here. And you can see it's a pretty rich and interesting list. I'm a big fan of being pregnant near freeways, personally. The final one is interesting, because the term "refrigerator mother" was actually the original hypothesis for the cause of autism, and that meant somebody who was cold and unloving. And at this point, you might be thinking, "Okay, Susan, we get it, you can take data, you can make it mean anything." And this is true, it's absolutely true, but the challenge is that we have this opportunity to try to make meaning out of it ourselves, because frankly, data doesn't create meaning. We do. So as businesspeople, as consumers, as patients, as citizens, we have a responsibility, I think, to spend more time focusing on our critical thinking skills. Why? Because at this point in our history, as we've heard many times over, we can process exabytes of data at lightning speed, and we have the potential to make bad decisions far more quickly, efficiently, and with far greater impact than we did in the past. Great, right? And so what we need to do instead is spend a little bit more time on things like the humanities and sociology, and the social sciences, rhetoric, philosophy, ethics, because they give us context that is so important for big data, and because they help us become better critical thinkers. Because after all, if I can spot a problem in an argument, it doesn't much matter whether it's expressed in words or in numbers. And this means teaching ourselves to find those confirmation biases and false correlations and being able to spot a naked emotional appeal from 30 yards, because something that happens after something doesn't mean it happened because of it, necessarily, and if you'll let me geek out on you for a second, the Romans called this "post hoc ergo propter hoc," after which therefore because of which. And it means questioning disciplines like demographics. Why? Because they're based on assumptions about who we all are based on our gender and our age and where we live as opposed to data on what we actually think and do. And since we have this data, we need to treat it with appropriate privacy controls and consumer opt-in, and beyond that, we need to be clear about our hypotheses, the methodologies that we use, and our confidence in the result. As my high school algebra teacher used to say, show your math, because if I don't know what steps you took, I don't know what steps you didn't take, and if I don't know what questions you asked, I don't know what questions you didn't ask. And it means asking ourselves, really, the hardest question of all: Did the data really show us this, or does the result make us feel more successful and more comfortable? So the Health Media Collaboratory, at the end of their project, they were able to find that 87 percent of tweets about those very graphic and disturbing anti-smoking ads expressed fear, but did they conclude that they actually made people stop smoking? No. It's science, not magic. So if we are to unlock the power of data, we don't have to go blindly into Orwell's vision of a totalitarian future, or Huxley's vision of a trivial one, or some horrible cocktail of both. What we have to do is treat critical thinking with respect and be inspired by examples like the Health Media Collaboratory, and as they say in the superhero movies, let's use our powers for good. Thank you. (Applause)

I know a man who soars above the city every night. In his dreams, he twirls and swirls with his toes kissing the Earth. Everything has motion, he claims, even a body as paralyzed as his own. This man is my father. Three years ago, when I found out that my father had suffered a severe stroke in his brain stem, I walked into his room in the ICU at the Montreal Neurological Institute and found him lying deathly still, tethered to a breathing machine. Paralysis had closed over his body slowly, beginning in his toes, then legs, torso, fingers and arms. It made its way up his neck, cutting off his ability to breathe, and stopped just beneath the eyes. He never lost consciousness. Rather, he watched from within as his body shut down, limb by limb, muscle by muscle. In that ICU room, I walked up to my father's body, and with a quivering voice and through tears, I began reciting the alphabet. A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I, J, K. At K, he blinked his eyes. I began again. A, B, C, D, E, F, G, H, I. He blinked again at the letter I, then at T, then at R, and A: Kitra. He said "Kitra, my beauty, don't cry. This is a blessing." There was no audible voice, but my father called out my name powerfully. Just 72 hours after his stroke, he had already embraced the totality of his condition. Despite his extreme physical state, he was completely present with me, guiding, nurturing, and being my father as much if not more than ever before. Locked-in syndrome is many people's worst nightmare. In French, it's sometimes called "maladie de l'emmuré vivant." Literally, "walled-in-alive disease." For many people, perhaps most, paralysis is an unspeakable horror, but my father's experience losing every system of his body was not an experience of feeling trapped, but rather of turning the psyche inwards, dimming down the external chatter, facing the recesses of his own mind, and in that place, falling in love with life and body anew. As a rabbi and spiritual man dangling between mind and body, life and death, the paralysis opened up a new awareness for him. He realized he no longer needed to look beyond the corporeal world in order to find the divine. "Paradise is in this body. It's in this world," he said. I slept by my father's side for the first four months, tending as much as I could to his every discomfort, understanding the deep human psychological fear of not being able to call out for help. My mother, sisters, brother and I, we surrounded him in a cocoon of healing. We became his mouthpiece, spending hours each day reciting the alphabet as he whispered back sermons and poetry with blinks of his eye. His room, it became our temple of healing. His bedside became a site for those seeking advice and spiritual counsel, and through us, my father was able to speak and uplift, letter by letter, blink by blink. Everything in our world became slow and tender as the din, drama and death of the hospital ward faded into the background. I want to read to you one of the first things that we transcribed in the week following the stroke. He composed a letter, addressing his synagogue congregation, and ended it with the following lines: "When my nape exploded, I entered another dimension: inchoate, sub-planetary, protozoan. Universes are opened and closed continually. There are many when low, who stop growing. Last week, I was brought so low, but I felt the hand of my father around me, and my father brought me back." When we weren't his voice, we were his legs and arms. I moved them like I know I would have wanted my own arms and legs to be moved were they still for all the hours of the day. I remember I'd hold his fingers near my face, bending each joint to keep it soft and limber. I'd ask him again and again to visualize the motion, to watch from within as the finger curled and extended, and to move along with it in his mind. Then, one day, from the corner of my eye, I saw his body slither like a snake, an involuntary spasm passing through the course of his limbs. At first, I thought it was my own hallucination, having spent so much time tending to this one body, so desperate to see anything react on its own. But he told me he felt tingles, sparks of electricity flickering on and off just beneath the surface of the skin. The following week, he began ever so slightly to show muscle resistance. Connections were being made. Body was slowly and gently reawakening, limb by limb, muscle by muscle, twitch by twitch. As a documentary photographer, I felt the need to photograph each of his first movements like a mother with her newborn. I photographed him taking his first unaided breath, the celebratory moment after he showed muscle resistance for the very first time, the new adapted technologies that allowed him to gain more and more independence. I photographed the care and the love that surrounded him. But my photographs only told the outside story of a man lying in a hospital bed attached to a breathing machine. I wasn't able to portray his story from within, and so I began to search for a new visual language, one which strived to express the ephemeral quality of his spiritual experience. Finally, I want to share with you a video from a series that I've been working on that tries to express the slow, in-between existence that my father has experienced. As he began to regain his ability to breathe, I started recording his thoughts, and so the voice that you hear in this video is his voice. (Video) Ronnie Cahana: You have to believe you're paralyzed to play the part of a quadriplegic. I don't. In my mind, and in my dreams every night I Chagall-man float over the city twirl and swirl with my toes kissing the floor. I know nothing about the statement of man without motion. Everything has motion. The heart pumps. The body heaves. The mouth moves. We never stagnate. Life triumphs up and down. Kitra Cahana: For most of us, our muscles begin to twitch and move long before we are conscious, but my father tells me his privilege is living on the far periphery of the human experience. Like an astronaut who sees a perspective that very few of us will ever get to share, he wonders and watches as he takes his first breaths and dreams about crawling back home. So begins life at 57, he says. A toddler has no attitude in its being, but a man insists on his world every day. Few of us will ever have to face physical limitations to the degree that my father has, but we will all have moments of paralysis in our lives. I know I frequently confront walls that feel completely unscalable, but my father insists that there are no dead ends. Instead, he invites me into his space of co-healing to give the very best of myself, and for him to give the very best of himself to me. Paralysis was an opening for him. It was an opportunity to emerge, to rekindle life force, to sit still long enough with himself so as to fall in love with the full continuum of creation. Today, my father is no longer locked in. He moves his neck with ease, has had his feeding peg removed, breathes with his own lungs, speaks slowly with his own quiet voice, and works every day to gain more movement in his paralyzed body. But the work will never be finished. As he says, "I'm living in a broken world, and there is holy work to do." Thank you. (Applause)

So I started working with refugees because I wanted to make a difference, and making a difference starts with telling their stories. So when I meet refugees, I always ask them questions. Who bombed your house? Who killed your son? Did the rest of your family make it out alive? How are you coping in your life in exile? But there's one question that always seems to me to be most revealing, and that is: What did you take? What was that most important thing that you had to take with you when the bombs were exploding in your town, and the armed gangs were approaching your house? A Syrian refugee boy I know told me that he didn't hesitate when his life was in imminent danger. He took his high school diploma, and later he told me why. He said, "I took my high school diploma because my life depended on it." And he would risk his life to get that diploma. On his way to school, he would dodge snipers. His classroom sometimes shook with the sound of bombs and shelling, and his mother told me, "Every day, I would say to him every morning, 'Honey, please don't go to school.'" And when he insisted, she said, "I would hug him as if it were for the last time." But he said to his mother, "We're all afraid, but our determination to graduate is stronger than our fear." But one day, the family got terrible news. Hany's aunt, his uncle and his cousin were murdered in their homes for refusing to leave their house. Their throats were slit. It was time to flee. They left that day, right away, in their car, Hany hidden in the back because they were facing checkpoints of menacing soldiers. And they would cross the border into Lebanon, where they would find peace. But they would begin a life of grueling hardship and monotony. They had no choice but to build a shack on the side of a muddy field, and this is Hany's brother Ashraf, who plays outside. And that day, they joined the biggest population of refugees in the world, in a country, Lebanon, that is tiny. It only has four million citizens, and there are one million Syrian refugees living there. There's not a town, a city or a village that is not host to Syrian refugees. This is generosity and humanity that is remarkable. Think about it this way, proportionately. It would be as if the entire population of Germany, 80 million people, would flee to the United States in just three years. Half of the entire population of Syria is now uprooted, most of them inside the country. Six and a half million people have fled for their lives. Over and well over three million people have crossed the borders and have found sanctuary in the neighboring countries, and only a small proportion, as you see, have moved on to Europe. What I find most worrying is that half of all Syrian refugees are children. I took this picture of this little girl. It was just two hours after she had arrived after a long trek from Syria into Jordan. And most troubling of all is that only 20 percent of Syrian refugee children are in school in Lebanon. And yet, Syrian refugee children, all refugee children tell us education is the most important thing in their lives. Why? Because it allows them to think of their future rather than the nightmare of their past. It allows them to think of hope rather than hatred. I'm reminded of a recent visit I took to a Syrian refugee camp in northern Iraq, and I met this girl, and I thought, "She's beautiful," and I went up to her and asked her, "Can I take your picture?" And she said yes, but she refused to smile. I think she couldn't, because I think she must realize that she represents a lost generation of Syrian refugee children, a generation isolated and frustrated. And yet, look at what they fled: utter destruction, buildings, industries, schools, roads, homes. Hany's home was also destroyed. This will need to be rebuilt by architects, by engineers, by electricians. Communities will need teachers and lawyers and politicians interested in reconciliation and not revenge. Shouldn't this be rebuilt by the people with the largest stake, the societies in exile, the refugees? Refugees have a lot of time to prepare for their return. You might imagine that being a refugee is just a temporary state. Well far from it. With wars going on and on, the average time a refugee will spend in exile is 17 years. Hany was into his second year in limbo when I went to visit him recently, and we conducted our entire conversation in English, which he confessed to me he learned from reading all of Dan Brown's novels and from listening to American rap. We also spent some nice moments of laughter and fun with his beloved brother Ashraf. But I'll never forget what he told me when we ended our conversation that day. He said to me, "If I am not a student, I am nothing." Hany is one of 50 million people uprooted in this world today. Never since World War II have so many people been forcibly displaced. So while we're making sweeping progress in human health, in technology, in education and design, we are doing dangerously little to help the victims and we are doing far too little to stop and prevent the wars that are driving them from their homes. And there are more and more victims. Every day, on average, by the end of this day, 32,000 people will be forcibly displaced from their homes — 32,000 people. They flee across borders like this one. We captured this on the Syrian border to Jordan, and this is a typical day. Or they flee on unseaworthy and overcrowded boats, risking their lives in this case just to reach safety in Europe. This Syrian young man survived one of these boats that capsized — most of the people drowned — and he told us, "Syrians are just looking for a quiet place where nobody hurts you, where nobody humiliates you, and where nobody kills you." Well, I think that should be the minimum. How about a place of healing, of learning, and even opportunity? Americans and Europeans have the impression that proportionally huge numbers of refugees are coming to their country, but the reality is that 86 percent, the vast majority of refugees, are living in the developing world, in countries struggling with their own insecurity, with their own issues of helping their own populations and poverty. So wealthy countries in the world should recognize the humanity and the generosity of the countries that are hosting so many refugees. And all countries should make sure that no one fleeing war and persecution arrives at a closed border. (Applause) Thank you. But there is something more that we can do than just simply helping refugees survive. We can help them thrive. We should think of refugee camps and communities as more than just temporary population centers where people languish waiting for the war to end. Rather, as centers of excellence, where refugees can triumph over their trauma and train for the day that they can go home as agents of positive change and social transformation. It makes so much sense, but I'm reminded of the terrible war in Somalia that has been raging on for 22 years. And imagine living in this camp. I visited this camp. It's in Djibouti, neighboring Somalia, and it was so remote that we had to take a helicopter to fly there. It was dusty and it was terribly hot. And we went to visit a school and started talking to the children, and then I saw this girl across the room who looked to me to be the same age as my own daughter, and I went up and talked to her. And I asked her the questions that grown-ups ask kids, like, "What is your favorite subject?" and, "What do you want to be when you grow up?" And this is when her face turned blank, and she said to me, "I have no future. My schooling days are over." And I thought, there must be some misunderstanding, so I turned to my colleague and she confirmed to me there is no funding for secondary education in this camp. And how I wished at that moment that I could say to her, "We will build you a school." And I also thought, what a waste. She should be and she is the future of Somalia. A boy named Jacob Atem had a different chance, but not before he experienced terribly tragedy. He watched — this is in Sudan — as his village — he was only seven years old — burned to the ground, and he learned that his mother and his father and his entire family were killed that day. Only his cousin survived, and the two of them walked for seven months — this is boys like him — chased and pursued by wild animals and armed gangs, and they finally made it to refugee camps where they found safety, and he would spend the next seven years in Kenya in a refugee camp. But his life changed when he got the chance to be resettled to the United States, and he found love in a foster family and he was able to go to school, and he wanted me to share with you this proud moment when he graduated from university. (Applause) I spoke to him on Skype the other day, and he was in his new university in Florida pursuing his Ph.D. in public health, and he proudly told me how he was able to raise enough funds from the American public to establish a health clinic back in his village back home. So I want to take you back to Hany. When I told him I was going to have the chance to speak to you here on the TED stage, he allowed me to read you a poem that he sent in an email to me. He wrote: "I miss myself, my friends, times of reading novels or writing poems, birds and tea in the morning. My room, my books, myself, and everything that was making me smile. Oh, oh, I had so many dreams that were about to be realized." So here is my point: Not investing in refugees is a huge missed opportunity. Leave them abandoned, and they risk exploitation and abuse, and leave them unskilled and uneducated, and delay by years the return to peace and prosperity in their countries. I believe how we treat the uprooted will shape the future of our world. The victims of war can hold the keys to lasting peace, and it's the refugees who can stop the cycle of violence. Hany is at a tipping point. We would love to help him go to university and to become an engineer, but our funds are prioritized for the basics in life: tents and blankets and mattresses and kitchen sets, food rations and a bit of medicine. University is a luxury. But leave him to languish in this muddy field, and he will become a member of a lost generation. Hany's story is a tragedy, but it doesn't have to end that way. Thank you. (Applause)

Almost a year ago, my aunt started suffering back pains. She went to see the doctor and they told her it was a normal injury for someone who had been playing tennis for almost 30 years. They recommended that she do some therapy, but after a while she wasn't feeling better, so the doctors decided to do further tests. They did an x-ray and discovered an injury in her lungs, and at the time they thought that the injury was a strain in the muscles and tendons between her ribs, but after a few weeks of treatment, again her health wasn't getting any better. So finally, they decided to do a biopsy, and two weeks later, the results of the biopsy came back. It was stage 3 lung cancer. Her lifestyle was almost free of risk. She never smoked a cigarette, she never drank alcohol, and she had been playing sports for almost half her life. Perhaps, that is why it took them almost six months to get her properly diagnosed. My story might be, unfortunately, familiar to most of you. One out of three people sitting in this audience will be diagnosed with some type of cancer, and one out of four will die because of it. Not only did that cancer diagnosis change the life of our family, but that process of going back and forth with new tests, different doctors describing symptoms, discarding diseases over and over, was stressful and frustrating, especially for my aunt. And that is the way cancer diagnosis has been done since the beginning of history. We have 21st-century medical treatments and drugs to treat cancer, but we still have 20th-century procedures and processes for diagnosis, if any. Today, most of us have to wait for symptoms to indicate that something is wrong. Today, the majority of people still don't have access to early cancer detection methods, even though we know that catching cancer early is basically the closest thing we have to a silver bullet cure against it. We know that we can change this in our lifetime, and that is why my team and I have decided to begin this journey, this journey to try to make cancer detection at the early stages and monitoring the appropriate response at the molecular level easier, cheaper, smarter and more accessible than ever before. The context, of course, is that we're living at a time where technology is disrupting our present at exponential rates, and the biological realm is no exception. It is said today that biotech is advancing at least six times faster than the growth rate of the processing power of computers. But progress in biotech is not only being accelerated, it is also being democratized. Just as personal computers or the Internet or smartphones leveled the playing field for entrepreneurship, politics or education, recent advances have leveled it up for biotech progress as well, and that is allowing multidisciplinary teams like ours to try to tackle and look at these problems with new approaches. We are a team of scientists and technologists from Chile, Panama, Mexico, Israel and Greece, and based on recent scientific discoveries, we believe that we have found a reliable and accurate way of detecting several types of cancer at the very early stages through a blood sample. We do it by detecting a set of very small molecules that circulate freely in our blood called microRNAs. To explain what microRNAs are and their important role in cancer, I need to start with proteins, because when cancer is present in our body, protein modification is observed in all cancerous cells. As you might know, proteins are large biological molecules that perform different functions within our body, like catalyzing metabolic reactions or responding to stimuli or replicating DNA, but before a protein is expressed or produced, relevant parts of its genetic code present in the DNA are copied into the messenger RNA, so this messenger RNA has instructions on how to build a specific protein, and potentially it can build hundreds of proteins, but the one that tells them when to build them and how many to build are microRNAs. So microRNAs are small molecules that regulate gene expression. Unlike DNA, which is mainly fixed, microRNAs can vary depending on internal and environmental conditions at any given time, telling us which genes are actively expressed at that particular moment. And that is what makes microRNAs such a promising biomarker for cancer, because as you know, cancer is a disease of altered gene expression. It is the uncontrolled regulation of genes. Another important thing to consider is that no two cancers are the same, but at the microRNA level, there are patterns. Several scientific studies have shown that abnormal microRNA expression levels varies and creates a unique, specific pattern for each type of cancer, even at the early stages, reflecting the progression of the disease, and whether it's responding to medication or in remission, making microRNAs a perfect, highly sensitive biomarker. However, the problem with microRNAs is that we cannot use existing DNA-based technology to detect them in a reliable way, because they are very short sequences of nucleotides, much smaller than DNA. And also, all microRNAs are very similar to each other, with just tiny differences. So imagine trying to differentiate two molecules, extremely similar, extremely small. We believe that we have found a way to do so, and this is the first time that we've shown it in public. Let me do a demonstration. Imagine that next time you go to your doctor and do your next standard blood test, a lab technician extracts a total RNA, which is quite simple today, and puts it in a standard 96-well plate like this one. Each well of these plates has specific biochemistry that we assign, that is looking for a specific microRNA, acting like a trap that closes only when the microRNA is present in the sample, and when it does, it will shine with green color. To run the reaction, you put the plate inside a device like this one, and then you can put your smartphone on top of it. If we can have a camera here so you can see my screen. A smartphone is a connected computer and it's also a camera, good enough for our purpose. The smartphone is taking pictures, and when the reaction is over, it will send the pictures to our online database for processing and interpretation. This entire process lasts around 60 minutes, but when the process is over, wells that shine are matched with the specific microRNAs and analyzed in terms of how much and how fast they shine. And then, when this entire process is over, this is what happens. This chart is showing the specific microRNAs present in this sample and how they reacted over time. Then, if we take this specific pattern of microRNA of this person's samples and compare it with existing scientific documentation that correlates microRNA patterns with a specific presence of a disease, this is how pancreatic cancer looks like. This inside is a real sample where we just detected pancreatic cancer. (Applause) Another important aspect of this approach is the gathering and mining of data in the cloud, so we can get results in real time and analyze them with our contextual information. If we want to better understand and decode diseases like cancer, we need to stop treating them as acute, isolated episodes, and consider and measure everything that affects our health on a permanent basis. This entire platform is a working prototype. It uses state-of-the-art molecular biology, a low-cost, 3D-printed device, and data science to try to tackle one of humanity's toughest challenges. Since we believe early cancer detection should really be democratized, this entire solution costs at least 50 times less than current available methods, and we know that the community can help us accelerate this even more, so we're making the design of the device open-source. (Applause) Let me say very clearly that we are at the very early stages, but so far, we have been able to successfully identify the microRNA pattern of pancreatic cancer, lung cancer, breast cancer and hepatic cancer. And currently, we're doing a clinical trial in collaboration with the German Cancer Research Center with 200 women for breast cancer. (Applause) This is the single non-invasive, accurate and affordable test that has the potential to dramatically change how cancer procedures and diagnostics have been done. Since we're looking for the microRNA patterns in your blood at any given time, you don't need to know which cancer you're looking for. You don't need to have any symptoms. You only need one milliliter of blood and a relatively simple array of tools. Today, cancer detection happens mainly when symptoms appear. That is, at stage 3 or 4, and I believe that is too late. It is too expensive for our families. It is too expensive for humanity. We cannot lose the war against cancer. It not only costs us billions of dollars, but it also costs us the people we love. Today, my aunt, she's fighting bravely and going through this process with a very positive attitude. However, I want fights like this to become very rare. I want to see the day when cancer is treated easily because it can be routinely diagnosed at the very early stages, and I'm certain that in the very near future, because of this and other breakthroughs that we are seeing every day in the life sciences, the way we see cancer will radically change. It will give us the chance of detecting it early, understanding it better, and finding a cure. Thank you very much. (Applause)

So imagine that a plane is about to crash with 250 children and babies, and if you knew how to stop that, would you? Now imagine that 60 planes full of babies under five crash every single day. That's the number of kids that never make it to their fifth birthday. 6.6 million children never make it to their fifth birthday. Most of these deaths are preventable, and that doesn't just make me sad, it makes me angry, and it makes me determined. Diarrhea and pneumonia are among the top two killers of children under five, and what we can do to prevent these diseases isn't some smart, new technological innovations. It's one of the world's oldest inventions: a bar of soap. Washing hands with soap, a habit we all take for granted, can reduce diarrhea by half, can reduce respiratory infections by one third. Handwashing with soap can have an impact on reducing flu, trachoma, SARS, and most recently in the case of cholera and Ebola outbreak, one of the key interventions is handwashing with soap. Handwashing with soap keeps kids in school. It stops babies from dying. Handwashing with soap is one of the most cost-effective ways of saving children's lives. It can save over 600,000 children every year. That's the equivalent of stopping 10 jumbo jets full of babies and children from crashing every single day. I think you'll agree with me that that's a pretty useful public health intervention. So now just take a minute. I think you need to get to know the person next to you. Why don't you just shake their hands. Please shake their hands. All right, get to know each other. They look really pretty. All right. So what if I told you that the person whose hands you just shook actually didn't wash their hands when they were coming out of the toilet? (Laughter) They don't look so pretty anymore, right? Pretty yucky, you would agree with me. Well, statistics are actually showing that four people out of five don't wash their hands when they come out of the toilet, globally. And the same way, we don't do it when we've got fancy toilets, running water, and soap available, it's the same thing in the countries where child mortality is really high. What is it? Is there no soap? Actually, soap is available. In 90 percent of households in India, 94 percent of households in Kenya, you will find soap. Even in countries where soap is the lowest, like Ethiopia, we are at 50 percent. So why is it? Why aren't people washing their hands? Why is it that Mayank, this young boy that I met in India, isn't washing his hands? Well, in Mayank's family, soap is used for bathing, soap is used for laundry, soap is used for washing dishes. His parents think sometimes it's a precious commodity, so they'll keep it in a cupboard. They'll keep it away from him so he doesn't waste it. On average, in Mayank's family, they will use soap for washing hands once a day at the very best, and sometimes even once a week for washing hands with soap. What's the result of that? Children pick up disease in the place that's supposed to love them and protect them the most, in their homes. Think about where you learned to wash your hands. Did you learn to wash your hands at home? Did you learn to wash your hands in school? I think behavioral scientists will tell you that it's very difficult to change the habits that you have had early in life. However, we all copy what everyone else does, and local cultural norms are something that shape how we change our behavior, and this is where the private sector comes in. Every second in Asia and Africa, 111 mothers will buy this bar to protect their family. Many women in India will tell you they learned all about hygiene, diseases, from this bar of soap from Lifebuoy brand. Iconic brands like this one have a responsibility to do good in the places where they sell their products. It's that belief, plus the scale of Unilever, that allows us to keep talking about handwashing with soap and hygiene to these mothers. Big businesses and brands can change and shift those social norms and make a difference for those habits that are so stubborn. Think about it: Marketeers spend all their time making us switch from one brand to the other. And actually, they know how to transform science and facts into compelling messages. Just for a minute, imagine when they put all their forces behind a message as powerful as handwashing with soap. The profit motive is transforming health outcomes in this world. But it's been happening for centuries: the Lifebuoy brand was launched in 1894 in Victorian England to actually combat cholera. Last week, I was in Ghana with the minister of health, because if you don't know, there's a cholera outbreak in Ghana at the moment. A hundred and eighteen years later, the solution is exactly the same: It's about ensuring that they have access to this bar of soap, and that they're using it, because that's the number one way to actually stop cholera from spreading. I think this drive for profit is extremely powerful, sometimes more powerful than the most committed charity or government. Government is doing what they can, especially in terms of the pandemics and epidemics such as cholera, or Ebola at the moment, but with competing priorities. The budget is not always there. And when you think about this, you think about what is required to make handwashing a daily habit, it requires sustained funding to refine this behavior. In short, those that fight for public health are actually dependent upon the soap companies to keep promoting handwashing with soap. We have friends like USAID, the Global Public-Private Partnership for Handwashing with Soap, London School of Hygiene and Tropical Medicine, Plan, WaterAid, that all believe for a win-win-win partnership. Win for the public sector, because we help them reach their targets. Win for the private sector, because we build new generations of future handwashers. And most importantly, win for the most vulnerable. On October 15, we will celebrate Global Handwashing Day. Schools, communities, our friends in the public sector and our friends in the private sector — yes, on that day even our competitors, we all join hands to celebrate the world's most important public health intervention. What's required, and again where the private sector can make a huge difference, is coming up with this big, creative thinking that drives advocacy. If you take our Help a Child Reach 5 campaign, we've created great films that bring the message of handwashing with soap to the everyday person in a way that can relate to them. We've had over 30 million views. Most of these discussions are still happening online. I urge you to take five minutes and look at those films. I come from Mali, one of the world's poorest countries. I grew up in a family where every dinner conversation was around social justice. I trained in Europe's premier school of public health. I think I'm probably one of the only women in my country with this high degree in health, and the only one with a doctorate in handwashing with soap. (Laughter) (Applause) Nine years ago, I decided, with a successful public health career in the making, that I could make the biggest impact coming, selling and promoting the world's best invention in public health: soap. We run today the world's largest handwashing program by any public health standards. We've reached over 183 million people in 16 countries. My team and I have the ambition to reach one billion by 2020. Over the last four years, business has grown double digits, whilst child mortality has reduced in all the places where soap use has increased. It may be uncomfortable for some to hear — business growth and lives saved somehow equated in the same sentence — but it is that business growth that allows us to keep doing more. Without it, and without talking about it, we cannot achieve the change that we need. Last week, my team and I spent time visiting mothers that have all experienced the same thing: the death of a newborn. I'm a mom. I can't imagine anything more powerful and more painful. This one is from Myanmar. She had the most beautiful smile, the smile, I think, that life gives you when you've had a second chance. Her son, Myo, is her second one. She had a daughter who passed away at three weeks, and we know that the majority of children that actually die die in the first month of their life, and we know that if we give a bar of soap to every skilled birth attendant, and that if soap is used before touching the babies, we can reduce and make a change in terms of those numbers. And that's what inspires me, inspires me to continue in this mission, to know that I can equip her with what's needed so that she can do the most beautiful job in the world: nurturing her newborn. And next time you think of a gift for a new mom and her family, don't look far: buy her soap. It's the most beautiful invention in public health. I hope you will join us and make handwashing part of your daily lives and our daily lives and help more children like Myo reach their fifth birthday. Thank you. (Applause)

Sleep. It's something we spend about a third of our lives doing, but do any of us really understand what it's all about? Two thousand years ago, Galen, one of the most prominent medical researchers of the ancient world, proposed that while we're awake, our brain's motive force, its juice, would flow out to all the other parts of the body, animating them but leaving the brain all dried up, and he thought that when we sleep, all this moisture that filled the rest of the body would come rushing back, rehydrating the brain and refreshing the mind. Now, that sounds completely ridiculous to us now, but Galen was simply trying to explain something about sleep that we all deal with every day. See, we all know based on our own experience that when you sleep, it clears your mind, and when you don't sleep, it leaves your mind murky. But while we know a great deal more about sleep now than when Galen was around, we still haven't understood why it is that sleep, of all of our activities, has this incredible restorative function for the mind. So today I want to tell you about some recent research that may shed new light on this question. We've found that sleep may actually be a kind of elegant design solution to some of the brain's most basic needs, a unique way that the brain meets the high demands and the narrow margins that set it apart from all the other organs of the body. So almost all the biology that we observe can be thought of as a series of problems and their corresponding solutions, and the first problem that every organ must solve is a continuous supply of nutrients to fuel all those cells of the body. In the brain, that is especially critical; its intense electrical activity uses up a quarter of the body's entire energy supply, even though the brain accounts for only about two percent of the body's mass. So the circulatory system solves the nutrient delivery problem by sending blood vessels to supply nutrients and oxygen to every corner of our body. You can actually see it in this video here. Here, we're imaging blood vessels in the brain of a living mouse. The blood vessels form a complex network that fills the entire brain volume. They start at the surface of the brain, and then they dive down into the tissue itself, and as they spread out, they supply nutrients and oxygen to each and every cell in the brain. Now, just as every cell requires nutrients to fuel it, every cell also produces waste as a byproduct, and the clearance of that waste is the second basic problem that each organ has to solve. This diagram shows the body's lymphatic system, which has evolved to meet this need. It's a second parallel network of vessels that extends throughout the body. It takes up proteins and other waste from the spaces between the cells, it collects them, and then dumps them into the blood so they can be disposed of. But if you look really closely at this diagram, you'll see something that doesn't make a lot of sense. So if we were to zoom into this guy's head, one of the things that you would see there is that there are no lymphatic vessels in the brain. But that doesn't make a lot of sense, does it? I mean, the brain is this intensely active organ that produces a correspondingly large amount of waste that must be efficiently cleared. And yet, it lacks lymphatic vessels, which means that the approach that the rest of the body takes to clearing away its waste won't work in the brain. So how, then, does the brain solve its waste clearance problem? Well, that seemingly mundane question is where our group first jumped into this story, and what we found as we dove down into the brain, down among the neurons and the blood vessels, was that the brain's solution to the problem of waste clearance, it was really unexpected. It was ingenious, but it was also beautiful. Let me tell you about what we found. So the brain has this large pool of clean, clear fluid called cerebrospinal fluid. We call it the CSF. The CSF fills the space that surrounds the brain, and wastes from inside the brain make their way out to the CSF, which gets dumped, along with the waste, into the blood. So in that way, it sounds a lot like the lymphatic system, doesn't it? But what's interesting is that the fluid and the waste from inside the brain, they don't just percolate their way randomly out to these pools of CSF. Instead, there is a specialized network of plumbing that organizes and facilitates this process. You can see that in these videos. Here, we're again imaging into the brain of living mice. The frame on your left shows what's happening at the brain's surface, and the frame on your right shows what's happening down below the surface of the brain within the tissue itself. We've labeled the blood vessels in red, and the CSF that's surrounding the brain will be in green. Now, what was surprising to us was that the fluid on the outside of the brain, it didn't stay on the outside. Instead, the CSF was pumped back into and through the brain along the outsides of the blood vessels, and as it flushed down into the brain along the outsides of these vessels, it was actually helping to clear away, to clean the waste from the spaces between the brain's cells. If you think about it, using the outsides of these blood vessels like this is a really clever design solution, because the brain is enclosed in a rigid skull and it's packed full of cells, so there is no extra space inside it for a whole second set of vessels like the lymphatic system. Yet the blood vessels, they extend from the surface of the brain down to reach every single cell in the brain, which means that fluid that's traveling along the outsides of these vessels can gain easy access to the entire brain's volume, so it's actually this really clever way to repurpose one set of vessels, the blood vessels, to take over and replace the function of a second set of vessels, the lymphatic vessels, to make it so you don't need them. And what's amazing is that no other organ takes quite this approach to clearing away the waste from between its cells. This is a solution that is entirely unique to the brain. But our most surprising finding was that all of this, everything I just told you about, with all this fluid rushing through the brain, it's only happening in the sleeping brain. Here, the video on the left shows how much of the CSF is moving through the brain of a living mouse while it's awake. It's almost nothing. Yet in the same animal, if we wait just a little while until it's gone to sleep, what we see is that the CSF is rushing through the brain, and we discovered that at the same time when the brain goes to sleep, the brain cells themselves seem to shrink, opening up spaces in between them, allowing fluid to rush through and allowing waste to be cleared out. So it seems that Galen may actually have been sort of on the right track when he wrote about fluid rushing through the brain when sleep came on. Our own research, now it's 2,000 years later, suggests that what's happening is that when the brain is awake and is at its most busy, it puts off clearing away the waste from the spaces between its cells until later, and then, when it goes to sleep and doesn't have to be as busy, it shifts into a kind of cleaning mode to clear away the waste from the spaces between its cells, the waste that's accumulated throughout the day. So it's actually a little bit like how you or I, we put off our household chores during the work week when we don't have time to get to it, and then we play catch up on all the cleaning that we have to do when the weekend rolls around. Now, I've just talked a lot about waste clearance, but I haven't been very specific about the kinds of waste that the brain needs to be clearing during sleep in order to stay healthy. The waste product that these recent studies focused most on is amyloid-beta, which is a protein that's made in the brain all the time. My brain's making amyloid-beta right now, and so is yours. But in patients with Alzheimer's disease, amyloid-beta builds up and aggregates in the spaces between the brain's cells, instead of being cleared away like it's supposed to be, and it's this buildup of amyloid-beta that's thought to be one of the key steps in the development of that terrible disease. So we measured how fast amyloid-beta is cleared from the brain when it's awake versus when it's asleep, and we found that indeed, the clearance of amyloid-beta is much more rapid from the sleeping brain. So if sleep, then, is part of the brain's solution to the problem of waste clearance, then this may dramatically change how we think about the relationship between sleep, amyloid-beta, and Alzheimer's disease. A series of recent clinical studies suggest that among patients who haven't yet developed Alzheimer's disease, worsening sleep quality and sleep duration are associated with a greater amount of amyloid-beta building up in the brain, and while it's important to point out that these studies don't prove that lack of sleep or poor sleep cause Alzheimer's disease, they do suggest that the failure of the brain to keep its house clean by clearing away waste like amyloid-beta may contribute to the development of conditions like Alzheimer's. So what this new research tells us, then, is that the one thing that all of you already knew about sleep, that even Galen understood about sleep, that it refreshes and clears the mind, may actually be a big part of what sleep is all about. See, you and I, we go to sleep every single night, but our brains, they never rest. While our body is still and our mind is off walking in dreams somewhere, the elegant machinery of the brain is quietly hard at work cleaning and maintaining this unimaginably complex machine. Like our housework, it's a dirty and a thankless job, but it's also important. In your house, if you stop cleaning your kitchen for a month, your home will become completely unlivable very quickly. But in the brain, the consequences of falling behind may be much greater than the embarrassment of dirty countertops, because when it comes to cleaning the brain, it is the very health and function of the mind and the body that's at stake, which is why understanding these very basic housekeeping functions of the brain today may be critical for preventing and treating diseases of the mind tomorrow. Thank you. (Applause)

There is an entire genre of YouTube videos devoted to an experience which I am certain that everyone in this room has had. It entails an individual who, thinking they're alone, engages in some expressive behavior — wild singing, gyrating dancing, some mild sexual activity — only to discover that, in fact, they are not alone, that there is a person watching and lurking, the discovery of which causes them to immediately cease what they were doing in horror. The sense of shame and humiliation in their face is palpable. It's the sense of, "This is something I'm willing to do only if no one else is watching." This is the crux of the work on which I have been singularly focused for the last 16 months, the question of why privacy matters, a question that has arisen in the context of a global debate, enabled by the revelations of Edward Snowden that the United States and its partners, unbeknownst to the entire world, has converted the Internet, once heralded as an unprecedented tool of liberation and democratization, into an unprecedented zone of mass, indiscriminate surveillance. There is a very common sentiment that arises in this debate, even among people who are uncomfortable with mass surveillance, which says that there is no real harm that comes from this large-scale invasion because only people who are engaged in bad acts have a reason to want to hide and to care about their privacy. This worldview is implicitly grounded in the proposition that there are two kinds of people in the world, good people and bad people. Bad people are those who plot terrorist attacks or who engage in violent criminality and therefore have reasons to want to hide what they're doing, have reasons to care about their privacy. But by contrast, good people are people who go to work, come home, raise their children, watch television. They use the Internet not to plot bombing attacks but to read the news or exchange recipes or to plan their kids' Little League games, and those people are doing nothing wrong and therefore have nothing to hide and no reason to fear the government monitoring them. The people who are actually saying that are engaged in a very extreme act of self-deprecation. What they're really saying is, "I have agreed to make myself such a harmless and unthreatening and uninteresting person that I actually don't fear having the government know what it is that I'm doing." This mindset has found what I think is its purest expression in a 2009 interview with the longtime CEO of Google, Eric Schmidt, who, when asked about all the different ways his company is causing invasions of privacy for hundreds of millions of people around the world, said this: He said, "If you're doing something that you don't want other people to know, maybe you shouldn't be doing it in the first place." Now, there's all kinds of things to say about that mentality, the first of which is that the people who say that, who say that privacy isn't really important, they don't actually believe it, and the way you know that they don't actually believe it is that while they say with their words that privacy doesn't matter, with their actions, they take all kinds of steps to safeguard their privacy. They put passwords on their email and their social media accounts, they put locks on their bedroom and bathroom doors, all steps designed to prevent other people from entering what they consider their private realm and knowing what it is that they don't want other people to know. The very same Eric Schmidt, the CEO of Google, ordered his employees at Google to cease speaking with the online Internet magazine CNET after CNET published an article full of personal, private information about Eric Schmidt, which it obtained exclusively through Google searches and using other Google products. (Laughter) This same division can be seen with the CEO of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg, who in an infamous interview in 2010 pronounced that privacy is no longer a "social norm." Last year, Mark Zuckerberg and his new wife purchased not only their own house but also all four adjacent houses in Palo Alto for a total of 30 million dollars in order to ensure that they enjoyed a zone of privacy that prevented other people from monitoring what they do in their personal lives. Over the last 16 months, as I've debated this issue around the world, every single time somebody has said to me, "I don't really worry about invasions of privacy because I don't have anything to hide." I always say the same thing to them. I get out a pen, I write down my email address. I say, "Here's my email address. What I want you to do when you get home is email me the passwords to all of your email accounts, not just the nice, respectable work one in your name, but all of them, because I want to be able to just troll through what it is you're doing online, read what I want to read and publish whatever I find interesting. After all, if you're not a bad person, if you're doing nothing wrong, you should have nothing to hide." Not a single person has taken me up on that offer. I check and — (Applause) I check that email account religiously all the time. It's a very desolate place. And there's a reason for that, which is that we as human beings, even those of us who in words disclaim the importance of our own privacy, instinctively understand the profound importance of it. It is true that as human beings, we're social animals, which means we have a need for other people to know what we're doing and saying and thinking, which is why we voluntarily publish information about ourselves online. But equally essential to what it means to be a free and fulfilled human being is to have a place that we can go and be free of the judgmental eyes of other people. There's a reason why we seek that out, and our reason is that all of us — not just terrorists and criminals, all of us — have things to hide. There are all sorts of things that we do and think that we're willing to tell our physician or our lawyer or our psychologist or our spouse or our best friend that we would be mortified for the rest of the world to learn. We make judgments every single day about the kinds of things that we say and think and do that we're willing to have other people know, and the kinds of things that we say and think and do that we don't want anyone else to know about. People can very easily in words claim that they don't value their privacy, but their actions negate the authenticity of that belief. Now, there's a reason why privacy is so craved universally and instinctively. It isn't just a reflexive movement like breathing air or drinking water. The reason is that when we're in a state where we can be monitored, where we can be watched, our behavior changes dramatically. The range of behavioral options that we consider when we think we're being watched severely reduce. This is just a fact of human nature that has been recognized in social science and in literature and in religion and in virtually every field of discipline. There are dozens of psychological studies that prove that when somebody knows that they might be watched, the behavior they engage in is vastly more conformist and compliant. Human shame is a very powerful motivator, as is the desire to avoid it, and that's the reason why people, when they're in a state of being watched, make decisions not that are the byproduct of their own agency but that are about the expectations that others have of them or the mandates of societal orthodoxy. This realization was exploited most powerfully for pragmatic ends by the 18th- century philosopher Jeremy Bentham, who set out to resolve an important problem ushered in by the industrial age, where, for the first time, institutions had become so large and centralized that they were no longer able to monitor and therefore control each one of their individual members, and the solution that he devised was an architectural design originally intended to be implemented in prisons that he called the panopticon, the primary attribute of which was the construction of an enormous tower in the center of the institution where whoever controlled the institution could at any moment watch any of the inmates, although they couldn't watch all of them at all times. And crucial to this design was that the inmates could not actually see into the panopticon, into the tower, and so they never knew if they were being watched or even when. And what made him so excited about this discovery was that that would mean that the prisoners would have to assume that they were being watched at any given moment, which would be the ultimate enforcer for obedience and compliance. The 20th-century French philosopher Michel Foucault realized that that model could be used not just for prisons but for every institution that seeks to control human behavior: schools, hospitals, factories, workplaces. And what he said was that this mindset, this framework discovered by Bentham, was the key means of societal control for modern, Western societies, which no longer need the overt weapons of tyranny — punishing or imprisoning or killing dissidents, or legally compelling loyalty to a particular party — because mass surveillance creates a prison in the mind that is a much more subtle though much more effective means of fostering compliance with social norms or with social orthodoxy, much more effective than brute force could ever be. The most iconic work of literature about surveillance and privacy is the George Orwell novel "1984," which we all learn in school, and therefore it's almost become a cliche. In fact, whenever you bring it up in a debate about surveillance, people instantaneously dismiss it as inapplicable, and what they say is, "Oh, well in '1984,' there were monitors in people's homes, they were being watched at every given moment, and that has nothing to do with the surveillance state that we face." That is an actual fundamental misapprehension of the warnings that Orwell issued in "1984." The warning that he was issuing was about a surveillance state not that monitored everybody at all times, but where people were aware that they could be monitored at any given moment. Here is how Orwell's narrator, Winston Smith, described the surveillance system that they faced: "There was, of course, no way of knowing whether you were being watched at any given moment." He went on to say, "At any rate, they could plug in your wire whenever they wanted to. You had to live, did live, from habit that became instinct, in the assumption that every sound you made was overheard and except in darkness every movement scrutinized." The Abrahamic religions similarly posit that there's an invisible, all-knowing authority who, because of its omniscience, always watches whatever you're doing, which means you never have a private moment, the ultimate enforcer for obedience to its dictates. What all of these seemingly disparate works recognize, the conclusion that they all reach, is that a society in which people can be monitored at all times is a society that breeds conformity and obedience and submission, which is why every tyrant, the most overt to the most subtle, craves that system. Conversely, even more importantly, it is a realm of privacy, the ability to go somewhere where we can think and reason and interact and speak without the judgmental eyes of others being cast upon us, in which creativity and exploration and dissent exclusively reside, and that is the reason why, when we allow a society to exist in which we're subject to constant monitoring, we allow the essence of human freedom to be severely crippled. The last point I want to observe about this mindset, the idea that only people who are doing something wrong have things to hide and therefore reasons to care about privacy, is that it entrenches two very destructive messages, two destructive lessons, the first of which is that the only people who care about privacy, the only people who will seek out privacy, are by definition bad people. This is a conclusion that we should have all kinds of reasons for avoiding, the most important of which is that when you say, "somebody who is doing bad things," you probably mean things like plotting a terrorist attack or engaging in violent criminality, a much narrower conception of what people who wield power mean when they say, "doing bad things." For them, "doing bad things" typically means doing something that poses meaningful challenges to the exercise of our own power. The other really destructive and, I think, even more insidious lesson that comes from accepting this mindset is there's an implicit bargain that people who accept this mindset have accepted, and that bargain is this: If you're willing to render yourself sufficiently harmless, sufficiently unthreatening to those who wield political power, then and only then can you be free of the dangers of surveillance. It's only those who are dissidents, who challenge power, who have something to worry about. There are all kinds of reasons why we should want to avoid that lesson as well. You may be a person who, right now, doesn't want to engage in that behavior, but at some point in the future you might. Even if you're somebody who decides that you never want to, the fact that there are other people who are willing to and able to resist and be adversarial to those in power — dissidents and journalists and activists and a whole range of others — is something that brings us all collective good that we should want to preserve. Equally critical is that the measure of how free a society is is not how it treats its good, obedient, compliant citizens, but how it treats its dissidents and those who resist orthodoxy. But the most important reason is that a system of mass surveillance suppresses our own freedom in all sorts of ways. It renders off-limits all kinds of behavioral choices without our even knowing that it's happened. The renowned socialist activist Rosa Luxemburg once said, "He who does not move does not notice his chains." We can try and render the chains of mass surveillance invisible or undetectable, but the constraints that it imposes on us do not become any less potent. Thank you very much. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) Bruno Giussani: Glenn, thank you. The case is rather convincing, I have to say, but I want to bring you back to the last 16 months and to Edward Snowden for a few questions, if you don't mind. The first one is personal to you. We have all read about the arrest of your partner, David Miranda in London, and other difficulties, but I assume that in terms of personal engagement and risk, that the pressure on you is not that easy to take on the biggest sovereign organizations in the world. Tell us a little bit about that. Glenn Greenwald: You know, I think one of the things that happens is that people's courage in this regard gets contagious, and so although I and the other journalists with whom I was working were certainly aware of the risk — the United States continues to be the most powerful country in the world and doesn't appreciate it when you disclose thousands of their secrets on the Internet at will — seeing somebody who is a 29-year-old ordinary person who grew up in a very ordinary environment exercise the degree of principled courage that Edward Snowden risked, knowing that he was going to go to prison for the rest of his life or that his life would unravel, inspired me and inspired other journalists and inspired, I think, people around the world, including future whistleblowers, to realize that they can engage in that kind of behavior as well. BG: I'm curious about your relationship with Ed Snowden, because you have spoken with him a lot, and you certainly continue doing so, but in your book, you never call him Edward, nor Ed, you say "Snowden." How come? GG: You know, I'm sure that's something for a team of psychologists to examine. (Laughter) I don't really know. The reason I think that, one of the important objectives that he actually had, one of his, I think, most important tactics, was that he knew that one of the ways to distract attention from the substance of the revelations would be to try and personalize the focus on him, and for that reason, he stayed out of the media. He tried not to ever have his personal life subject to examination, and so I think calling him Snowden is a way of just identifying him as this important historical actor rather than trying to personalize him in a way that might distract attention from the substance. Moderator: So his revelations, your analysis, the work of other journalists, have really developed the debate, and many governments, for example, have reacted, including in Brazil, with projects and programs to reshape a little bit the design of the Internet, etc. There are a lot of things going on in that sense. But I'm wondering, for you personally, what is the endgame? At what point will you think, well, actually, we've succeeded in moving the dial? GG: Well, I mean, the endgame for me as a journalist is very simple, which is to make sure that every single document that's newsworthy and that ought to be disclosed ends up being disclosed, and that secrets that should never have been kept in the first place end up uncovered. To me, that's the essence of journalism and that's what I'm committed to doing. As somebody who finds mass surveillance odious for all the reasons I just talked about and a lot more, I mean, I look at this as work that will never end until governments around the world are no longer able to subject entire populations to monitoring and surveillance unless they convince some court or some entity that the person they've targeted has actually done something wrong. To me, that's the way that privacy can be rejuvenated. BG: So Snowden is very, as we've seen at TED, is very articulate in presenting and portraying himself as a defender of democratic values and democratic principles. But then, many people really find it difficult to believe that those are his only motivations. They find it difficult to believe that there was no money involved, that he didn't sell some of those secrets, even to China and to Russia, which are clearly not the best friends of the United States right now. And I'm sure many people in the room are wondering the same question. Do you consider it possible there is that part of Snowden we've not seen yet? GG: No, I consider that absurd and idiotic. (Laughter) If you wanted to, and I know you're just playing devil's advocate, but if you wanted to sell secrets to another country, which he could have done and become extremely rich doing so, the last thing you would do is take those secrets and give them to journalists and ask journalists to publish them, because it makes those secrets worthless. People who want to enrich themselves do it secretly by selling secrets to the government, but I think there's one important point worth making, which is, that accusation comes from people in the U.S. government, from people in the media who are loyalists to these various governments, and I think a lot of times when people make accusations like that about other people — "Oh, he can't really be doing this for principled reasons, he must have some corrupt, nefarious reason" — they're saying a lot more about themselves than they are the target of their accusations, because — (Applause) — those people, the ones who make that accusation, they themselves never act for any reason other than corrupt reasons, so they assume that everybody else is plagued by the same disease of soullessness as they are, and so that's the assumption. (Applause) BG: Glenn, thank you very much. GG: Thank you very much. BG: Glenn Greenwald. (Applause)

I live in Washington, D.C., but I grew up in Sindhekela, a village in Orissa, in India. My father was a government worker. My mother could not read or write, but she would say to me, "A king is worshipped only in his own kingdom. A poet is respected everywhere." So I wanted to be a poet when I grew up. But I almost didn't go to college until an aunt offered financial help. I went to study in Sambalpur, the largest town in the region, where, already in college, I saw a television for the first time. I had dreams of going to the United States for higher studies. When the opportunity came, I crossed two oceans, with borrowed money for airfare and only a $20 bill in my pocket. In the U.S., I worked in a research center, part-time, while taking graduate classes in economics. And with the little I earned, I would finance myself and then I would send money home to my brother and my father. My story is not unique. There are millions of people who migrate each year. With the help of the family, they cross oceans, they cross deserts, they cross rivers, they cross mountains. They risk their lives to realize a dream, and that dream is as simple as having a decent job somewhere so they can send money home and help the family, which has helped them before. There are 232 million international migrants in the world. These are people who live in a country other than their country of birth. If there was a country made up of only international migrants, that would be larger, in population, than Brazil. That would be larger, in its size of the economy, than France. Some 180 million of them, from poor countries, send money home regularly. Those sums of money are called remittances. Here is a fact that might surprise you: 413 billion dollars, 413 billion dollars was the amount of remittances sent last year by migrants to developing countries. Migrants from developing countries, money sent to developing countries — 413 billion dollars. That's a remarkable number because that is three times the size of the total of development aid money. And yet, you and I, my colleagues in Washington, we endlessly debate and discuss about development aid, while we ignore remittances as small change. True, people send 200 dollars per month, on average. But, repeated month after month, by millions of people, these sums of money add up to rivers of foreign currency. So India, last year, received 72 billion dollars, larger than its IT exports. In Egypt remittances are three times the size of revenues from the Suez Canal. In Tajikistan, remittances are 42 percent of GDP. And in poorer countries, smaller countries, fragile countries, conflict-afflicted countries, remittances are a lifeline, as in Somalia or in Haiti. No wonder these flows have huge impacts on economies and on poor people. Remittances, unlike private investment money, they don't flow back at the first sign of trouble in the country. They actually act like an insurance. When the family is in trouble, facing hardship, facing hard times, remittances increase, they act like an insurance. Migrants send more money then. Unlike development aid money, that must go through official agencies, through governments, remittances directly reach the poor, reach the family, and often with business advice. So in Nepal, the share of poor people was 42 percent in 1995, the share of poor people in the population. By 2005, a decade later, at a time of political crisis, economic crisis, the share of poor people went down to 31 percent. That decline in poverty, most of it, about half of it, is believed to be because of remittances from India, another poor country. In El Salvador, the school dropout rate among children is lower in families that receive remittances. In Mexico and Sri Lanka, the birth weight of children is higher among families that receive remittances. Remittances are dollars wrapped with care. Migrants send money home for food, for buying necessities, for building houses, for funding education, for funding healthcare for the elderly, for business investments for friends and family. Migrants send even more money home for special occasions like a surgery or a wedding. And migrants also send money, perhaps far too many times, for unexpected funerals that they cannot attend. Much as these flows do all that good, there are barriers to these flows of remittances, these 400 billion dollars of remittances. Foremost among them is the exorbitant cost of sending money home. Money transfer companies structure their fees to milk the poor. They will say, "Up to 500 dollars if you want to send, we will charge you 30 dollars fixed." If you are poor and if you have only 200 dollars to send, you have to pay that $30 fee. The global average cost of sending money is eight percent. That means you send 100 dollars, the family on the other side receives only 92 dollars. To send money to Africa, the cost is even higher: 12 percent. To send money within Africa, the cost is even higher: over 20 percent. For example, sending money from Benin to Nigeria. And then there is the case of Venezuela, where, because of exchange controls, you send 100 dollars and you are lucky if the family on the other side receives even 10 dollars. Of course, nobody sends money to Venezuela through the official channel. It all goes in suitcases. Whereever costs are high, money goes underground. And what is worse, many developing countries actually have a blanket ban on sending money out of the country. Many rich nations also have a blanket ban on sending money to specific countries. So, is it that there are no options, no better options, cheaper options, to send money? There are. M-Pesa in Kenya enables people to send money and receive money at a fixed cost of only 60 cents per transaction. U.S. Fed started a program with Mexico to enable money service businesses to send money to Mexico for a fixed cost of only 67 cents per transaction. And yet, these faster, cheaper, better options can't be applied internationally because of the fear of money laundering, even though there is little data to support any connection, any significant connection between money laundering and these small remittance transactions. Many international banks now are wary of hosting bank accounts of money service businesses, especially those serving Somalia. Somalia, a country where the per capita income is only 250 dollars per year. Monthly remittances, on average, to Somalia is larger than that amount. Remittances are the lifeblood of Somalia. And yet, this is an example of the right hand giving a lot of aid, while the left hand is cutting the lifeblood to that economy, through regulations. Then there is the case of poor people from villages, like me. In the villages, the only place where you can get money is through the post office. Most of the governments in the world have allowed their post offices to have exclusive partnerships with money transfer companies. So, if I have to send money to my father in the village, I must send money through that particular money transfer company, even if the cost is high. I cannot go to a cheaper option. This has to go. So, what can international organizations and social entrepreneurs do to reduce the cost of sending money home? First, relax regulations on small remittances under 1,000 dollars. Governments should recognize that small remittances are not money laundering. Second, governments should abolish exclusive partnerships between their post office and the money transfer company. For that matter, between the post office and any national banking system that has a large network that serves the poor. In fact, they should promote competition, open up the partnership so that we will bring down costs like we did, like they did, in the telecommunications industry. You have seen what has happened there. Third, large nonprofit philanthropic organizations should create a remittance platform on a nonprofit basis. They should create a nonprofit remittance platform to serve the money transfer companies so that they can send money at a low cost, while complying with all the complex regulations all over the world. The development community should set a goal of reducing remittance costs to one percent from the current eight percent. If we reduce costs to one percent, that would release a saving of 30 billion dollars per year. Thirty billion dollars, that's larger than the entire bilateral aid budget going to Africa per year. That is larger than, or almost similar to, the total aid budget of the United States government, the largest donor on the planet. Actually, the savings would be larger than that 30 billion because remittance channels are also used for aid, trade and investment purposes. Another major impediment to the flow of remittances reaching the family is the large and exorbitant and illegal cost of recruitment, fees that migrants pay, migrant workers pay to laborers who found them the job. I was in Dubai a few years ago. I visited a camp for workers. It was 8 in the evening, dark, hot, humid. Workers were coming back from their grueling day of work, and I struck a conversation with a Bangladeshi construction worker. He was preoccupied that he is sending money home, he has been sending money home for a few months now, and the money is mostly going to the recruitment agent, to the labor agent who found him that job. And in my mind, I could picture the wife waiting for the monthly remittance. The remittance arrives. She takes the money and hands it over to the recruitment agent, while the children are looking on. This has to stop. It is not only construction workers from Bangladesh, it is all the workers. There are millions of migrant workers who suffer from this problem. A construction worker from Bangladesh, on an average, pays about 4,000 dollars in recruitment fees for a job that gives him only 2,000 dollars per year in income. That means that for the two years or three years of his life, he is basically sending money to pay for the recruitment fees. The family doesn't get to see any of it. It is not only Dubai, it is the dark underbelly of every major city in the world. It is not only Bangladeshi construction workers, it is workers from all over the world. It is not only men. Women are especially vulnerable to recruitment malpractices. One of the most exciting and newest thing happening in the area of remittances is how to mobilize, through innovation, diaspora saving and diaspora giving. Migrants send money home, but they also save a large amount of money where they live. Annually, migrant savings are estimated to be 500 billion dollars. Most of that money is parked in bank deposits that give you zero percent interest rate. If a country were to come and offer a three percent or four percent interest rate, and then say that the money would be used for building schools, roads, airports, train systems in the country of origin, a lot of migrants would be interested in parting with their money because it's not only financial gains that give them an opportunity to stay engaged with their country's development. Remittance channels can be used to sell these bonds to migrants because when they come on a monthly basis to send remittances, that's when you can actually sell it to them. You can also do the same for mobilizing diaspora giving. I would love to invest in a bullet train system in India and I would love to contribute to efforts to fight malaria in my village. Remittances are a great way of sharing prosperity between places in a targeted way that benefits those who need them most. Remittances empower people. We must do all we can to make remittances and recruitment safer and cheaper. And it can be done. As for myself, I have been away from India for two decades now. My wife is a Venezuelan. My children are Americans. Increasingly, I feel like a global citizen. And yet, I am growing nostalgic about my country of birth. I want to be in India and in the U.S. at the same time. My parents are not there anymore. My brothers and sisters have moved on. There is no real urgency for me to send money home. And yet, from time to time, I send money home to friends, to relatives, to the village, to be there, to stay engaged — that's part of my identity. And, I'm still striving to be a poet for the hardworking migrants and their struggle to break free of the cycle of poverty. Thank you. (Applause)

I have the feeling that we can all agree that we're moving towards a new model of the state and society. But, we're absolutely clueless as to what this is or what it should be. It seems like we need to have a conversation about democracy in our day and age. Let's think about it this way: We are 21st-century citizens, doing our very, very best to interact with 19th century-designed institutions that are based on an information technology of the 15th century. Let's have a look at some of the characteristics of this system. First of all, it's designed for an information technology that's over 500 years old. And the best possible system that could be designed for it is one where the few make daily decisions in the name of the many. And the many get to vote once every couple of years. In the second place, the costs of participating in this system are incredibly high. You either have to have a fair bit of money and influence, or you have to devote your entire life to politics. You have to become a party member and slowly start working up the ranks until maybe, one day, you'll get to sit at a table where a decision is being made. And last but not least, the language of the system — it's incredibly cryptic. It's done for lawyers, by lawyers, and no one else can understand. So, it's a system where we can choose our authorities, but we are completely left out on how those authorities reach their decisions. So, in a day where a new information technology allows us to participate globally in any conversation, our barriers of information are completely lowered and we can, more than ever before, express our desires and our concerns. Our political system remains the same for the past 200 years and expects us to be contented with being simply passive recipients of a monologue. So, it's really not surprising that this kind of system is only able to produce two kinds of results: silence or noise. Silence, in terms of citizens not engaging, simply not wanting to participate. There's this commonplace [idea] that I truly, truly dislike, and it's this idea that we citizens are naturally apathetic. That we shun commitment. But, can you really blame us for not jumping at the opportunity of going to the middle of the city in the middle of a working day to attend, physically, a public hearing that has no impact whatsoever? Conflict is bound to happen between a system that no longer represents, nor has any dialogue capacity, and citizens that are increasingly used to representing themselves. And, then we find noise: Chile, Argentina, Brazil, Mexico Italy, France, Spain, the United States, they're all democracies. Their citizens have access to the ballot boxes. But they still feel the need, they need to take to the streets in order to be heard. To me, it seems like the 18th-century slogan that was the basis for the formation of our modern democracies, "No taxation without representation," can now be updated to "No representation without a conversation." We want our seat at the table. And rightly so. But in order to be part of this conversation, we need to know what we want to do next, because political action is being able to move from agitation to construction. My generation has been incredibly good at using new networks and technologies to organize protests, protests that were able to successfully impose agendas, roll back extremely pernicious legislation, and even overthrow authoritarian governments. And we should be immensely proud of this. But, we also must admit that we haven't been good at using those same networks and technologies to successfully articulate an alternative to what we're seeing and find the consensus and build the alliances that are needed to make it happen. And so the risk that we face is that we can create these huge power vacuums that will very quickly get filled up by de facto powers, like the military or highly motivated and already organized groups that generally lie on the extremes. But our democracy is neither just a matter of voting once every couple of years. But it's not either the ability to bring millions onto the streets. So the question I'd like to raise here, and I do believe it's the most important question we need to answer, is this one: If Internet is the new printing press, then what is democracy for the Internet era? What institutions do we want to build for the 21st-century society? I don't have the answer, just in case. I don't think anyone does. But I truly believe we can't afford to ignore this question anymore. So, I'd like to share our experience and what we've learned so far and hopefully contribute two cents to this conversation. Two years ago, with a group of friends from Argentina, we started thinking, "how can we get our representatives, our elected representatives, to represent us?" Marshall McLuhan once said that politics is solving today's problems with yesterday's tools. So the question that motivated us was, can we try and solve some of today's problems with the tools that we use every single day of our lives? Our first approach was to design and develop a piece of software called DemocracyOS. DemocracyOS is an open-source web application that is designed to become a bridge between citizens and their elected representatives to make it easier for us to participate from our everyday lives. So first of all, you can get informed so every new project that gets introduced in Congress gets immediately translated and explained in plain language on this platform. But we all know that social change is not going to come from just knowing more information, but from doing something with it. So better access to information should lead to a conversation about what we're going to do next, and DemocracyOS allows for that. Because we believe that democracy is not just a matter of stacking up preferences, one on top of each other, but that our healthy and robust public debate should be, once again, one of its fundamental values. So DemocracyOS is about persuading and being persuaded. It's about reaching a consensus as much as finding a proper way of channeling our disagreement. And finally, you can vote how you would like your elected representative to vote. And if you do not feel comfortable voting on a certain issue, you can always delegate your vote to someone else, allowing for a dynamic and emerging social leadership. It suddenly became very easy for us to simply compare these results with how our representatives were voting in Congress. But, it also became very evident that technology was not going to do the trick. What we needed to do to was to find actors that were able to grab this distributed knowledge in society and use it to make better and more fair decisions. So we reached out to traditional political parties and we offered them DemocracyOS. We said, "Look, here you have a platform that you can use to build a two-way conversation with your constituencies." And yes, we failed. We failed big time. We were sent to play outside like little kids. Amongst other things, we were called naive. And I must be honest: I think, in hindsight, we were. Because the challenges that we face, they're not technological, they're cultural. Political parties were never willing to change the way they make their decisions. So it suddenly became a bit obvious that if we wanted to move forward with this idea, we needed to do it ourselves. And so we took quite a leap of faith, and in August last year, we founded our own political party, El Partido de la Red, or the Net Party, in the city of Buenos Aires. And taking an even bigger leap of faith, we ran for elections in October last year with this idea: if we want a seat in Congress, our candidate, our representatives were always going to vote according to what citizens decided on DemocracyOS. Every single project that got introduced in Congress, we were going vote according to what citizens decided on an online platform. It was our way of hacking the political system. We understood that if we wanted to become part of the conversation, to have a seat at the table, we needed to become valid stakeholders, and the only way of doing it is to play by the system rules. But we were hacking it in the sense that we were radically changing the way a political party makes its decisions. For the first time, we were making our decisions together with those who we were affecting directly by those decisions. It was a very, very bold move for a two-month-old party in the city of Buenos Aires. But it got attention. We got 22,000 votes, that's 1.2 percent of the votes, and we came in second for the local options. So, even if that wasn't enough to win a seat in Congress, it was enough for us to become part of the conversation, to the extent that next month, Congress, as an institution, is launching for the first time in Argentina's history, a DemocracyOS to discuss, with the citizens, three pieces of legislation: two on urban transportation and one on the use of public space. Of course, our elected representatives are not saying, "Yes, we're going to vote according to what citizens decide," but they're willing to try. They're willing to open up a new space for citizen engagement and hopefully they'll be willing to listen as well. Our political system can be transformed, and not by subverting it, by destroying it, but by rewiring it with the tools that Internet affords us now. But a real challenge is to find, to design to create, to empower those connectors that are able to innovate, to transform noise and silence into signal and finally bring our democracies to the 21st century. I'm not saying it's easy. But in our experience, we actually stand a chance of making it work. And in my heart, it's most definitely worth trying. Thank you. (Applause)

This is my niece, Stella. She's just turned one and started to walk. And she's walking in that really cool way that one-year-olds do, a kind of teetering, my-body's-moving- too-fast-for-my-legs kind of way. It is absolutely gorgeous. And one of her favorite things to do at the moment is to stare at herself in the mirror. She absolutely loves her reflection. She giggles and squeals, and gives herself these big, wet kisses. It is beautiful. Apparently, all of her friends do this and my mom tells me that I used to do this, and it got me thinking: When did I stop doing this? When is it suddenly not okay to love the way that we look? Because apparently we don't. Ten thousand people every month google, "Am I ugly?" This is Faye. Faye is 13 and she lives in Denver. And like any teenager, she just wants to be liked and to fit in. It's Sunday night. She's getting ready for the week ahead at school. And she's slightly dreading it, and she's a bit confused because despite her mom telling her all the time that she's beautiful, every day at school, someone tells her that she's ugly. Because of the difference between what her mom tells her and what her friends at school, or her peers at school are telling her, she doesn't know who to believe. So, she takes a video of herself. She posts it to YouTube and she asks people to please leave a comment: "Am I pretty or am I ugly?" Well, so far, Faye has received over 13,000 comments. Some of them are so nasty, they don't bear thinking about. This is an average, healthy-looking teenage girl receiving this feedback at one of the most emotionally vulnerable times in her life. Thousands of people are posting videos like this, mostly teenage girls, reaching out in this way. But what's leading them to do this? Well, today's teenagers are rarely alone. They're under pressure to be online and available at all times, talking, messaging, liking, commenting, sharing, posting — it never ends. Never before have we been so connected, so continuously, so instantaneously, so young. And as one mom told me, it's like there's a party in their bedroom every night. There's simply no privacy. And the social pressures that go along with that are relentless. This always-on environment is training our kids to value themselves based on the number of likes they get and the types of comments that they receive. There's no separation between online and offline life. What's real or what isn't is really hard to tell the difference between. And it's also really hard to tell the difference between what's authentic and what's digitally manipulated. What's a highlight in someone's life versus what's normal in the context of everyday. And where are they looking to for inspiration? Well, you can see the kinds of images that are covering the newsfeeds of girls today. Size zero models still dominate our catwalks. Airbrushing is now routine. And trends like #thinspiration, #thighgap, #bikinibridge and #proana. For those who don't know, #proana means pro-anorexia. These trends are teamed with the stereotyping and flagrant objectification of women in today's popular culture. It is not hard to see what girls are benchmarking themselves against. But boys are not immune to this either. Aspiring to the chiseled jaw lines and ripped six packs of superhero-like sports stars and playboy music artists. But, what's the problem with all of this? Well, surely we want our kids to grow up as healthy, well balanced individuals. But in an image-obsessed culture, we are training our kids to spend more time and mental effort on their appearance at the expense of all of the other aspects of their identities. So, things like their relationships, the development of their physical abilities, and their studies and so on begin to suffer. Six out of 10 girls are now choosing not to do something because they don't think they look good enough. These are not trivial activities. These are fundamental activities to their development as humans and as contributors to society and to the workforce. Thirty-one percent, nearly one in three teenagers, are withdrawing from classroom debate. They're failing to engage in classroom debate because they don't want to draw attention to the way that they look. One in five are not showing up to class at all on days when they don't feel good about it. And when it comes to exams, if you don't think you look good enough, specifically if you don't think you are thin enough, you will score a lower grade point average than your peers who are not concerned with this. And this is consistent across Finland, the U.S. and China, and is true regardless of how much you actually weigh. So to be super clear, we're talking about the way you think you look, not how you actually look. Low body confidence is undermining academic achievement. But it's also damaging health. Teenagers with low body confidence do less physical activity, eat less fruits and vegetables, partake in more unhealthy weight control practices that can lead to eating disorders. They have lower self-esteem. They're more easily influenced by people around them and they're at greater risk of depression. And we think it's for all of these reasons that they take more risks with things like alcohol and drug use; crash dieting; cosmetic surgery; unprotected, earlier sex; and self-harm. The pursuit of the perfect body is putting pressure on our healthcare systems and costing our governments billions of dollars every year. And we don't grow out of it. Women who think they're overweight — again, regardless of whether they are or are not — have higher rates of absenteeism. Seventeen percent of women would not show up to a job interview on a day when they weren't feeling confident about the way that they look. Have a think about what this is doing to our economy. If we could overcome this, what that opportunity looks like. Unlocking this potential is in the interest of every single one of us. But how do we do that? Well, talking, on its own, only gets you so far. It's not enough by itself. If you actually want to make a difference, you have to do something. And we've learned there are three key ways: The first is we have to educate for body confidence. We have to help our teenagers develop strategies to overcome image-related pressures and build their self-esteem. Now, the good news is that there are many programs out there available to do this. The bad news is that most of them don't work. I was shocked to learn that many well-meaning programs are inadvertently actually making the situation worse. So we need to make damn sure that the programs that our kids are receiving are not only having a positive impact, but having a lasting impact as well. And the research shows that the best programs address six key areas: The first is the influence of family, friends and relationships. The second is media and celebrity culture, then how to handle teasing and bullying, the way we compete and compare with one another based on looks, talking about appearance — some people call this "body talk" or "fat talk" — and finally, the foundations of respecting and looking after yourself. These six things are crucial starting points for anyone serious about delivering body-confidence education that works. An education is critical, but tackling this problem is going to require each and everyone of us to step up and be better role models for the women and girls in our own lives. Challenging the status quo of how women are seen and talked about in our own circles. It is not okay that we judge the contribution of our politicians by their haircuts or the size of their breasts, or to infer that the determination or the success of an Olympian is down to her not being a looker. We need to start judging people by what they do, not what they look like. We can all start by taking responsibility for the types of pictures and comments that we post on our own social networks. We can compliment people based on their effort and their actions and not on their appearance. And let me ask you, when was the last time that you kissed a mirror? Ultimately, we need to work together as communities, as governments and as businesses to really change this culture of ours so that our kids grow up valuing their whole selves, valuing individuality, diversity, inclusion. We need to put the people that are making a real difference on our pedestals, making a difference in the real world. Giving them the airtime, because only then will we create a different world. A world where our kids are free to become the best versions of themselves, where the way they think they look never holds them back from being who they are or achieving what they want in life. Think about what this might mean for someone in your life. Who have you got in mind? Is it your wife? Your sister? Your daughter? Your niece? Your friend? It could just be the woman a couple of seats away from you today. What would it mean for her if she were freed from that voice of her inner critic, nagging her to have longer legs, thinner thighs, smaller stomach, shorter feet? What could it mean for her if we overcame this and unlocked her potential in that way? Right now, our culture's obsession with image is holding us all back. But let's show our kids the truth. Let's show them that the way you look is just one part of your identity and that the truth is we love them for who they are and what they do and how they make us feel. Let's build self-esteem into our school curriculums. Let's each and every one of us change the way we talk and compare ourselves to other people. And let's work together as communities, from grassroots to governments, so that the happy little one-year-olds of today become the confident changemakers of tomorrow. Let's do this. (Applause)

It's very nice to be here tonight. So I've been working on the history of income and wealth distribution for the past 15 years, and one of the interesting lessons coming from this historical evidence is indeed that, in the long run, there is a tendency for the rate of return of capital to exceed the economy's growth rate, and this tends to lead to high concentration of wealth. Not infinite concentration of wealth, but the higher the gap between r and g, the higher the level of inequality of wealth towards which society tends to converge. So this is a key force that I'm going to talk about today, but let me say right away that this is not the only important force in the dynamics of income and wealth distribution, and there are many other forces that play an important role in the long-run dynamics of income and wealth distribution. Also there is a lot of data that still needs to be collected. We know a little bit more today than we used to know, but we still know too little, and certainly there are many different processes — economic, social, political — that need to be studied more. And so I'm going to focus today on this simple force, but that doesn't mean that other important forces do not exist. So most of the data I'm going to present comes from this database that's available online: the World Top Incomes Database. So this is the largest existing historical database on inequality, and this comes from the effort of over 30 scholars from several dozen countries. So let me show you a couple of facts coming from this database, and then we'll return to r bigger than g. So fact number one is that there has been a big reversal in the ordering of income inequality between the United States and Europe over the past century. So back in 1900, 1910, income inequality was actually much higher in Europe than in the United States, whereas today, it is a lot higher in the United States. So let me be very clear: The main explanation for this is not r bigger than g. It has more to do with changing supply and demand for skill, the race between education and technology, globalization, probably more unequal access to skills in the U.S., where you have very good, very top universities but where the bottom part of the educational system is not as good, so very unequal access to skills, and also an unprecedented rise of top managerial compensation of the United States, which is difficult to account for just on the basis of education. So there is more going on here, but I'm not going to talk too much about this today, because I want to focus on wealth inequality. So let me just show you a very simple indicator about the income inequality part. So this is the share of total income going to the top 10 percent. So you can see that one century ago, it was between 45 and 50 percent in Europe and a little bit above 40 percent in the U.S., so there was more inequality in Europe. Then there was a sharp decline during the first half of the 20th century, and in the recent decade, you can see that the U.S. has become more unequal than Europe, and this is the first fact I just talked about. Now, the second fact is more about wealth inequality, and here the central fact is that wealth inequality is always a lot higher than income inequality, and also that wealth inequality, although it has also increased in recent decades, is still less extreme today than what it was a century ago, although the total quantity of wealth relative to income has now recovered from the very large shocks caused by World War I, the Great Depression, World War II. So let me show you two graphs illustrating fact number two and fact number three. So first, if you look at the level of wealth inequality, this is the share of total wealth going to the top 10 percent of wealth holders, so you can see the same kind of reversal between the U.S. and Europe that we had before for income inequality. So wealth concentration was higher in Europe than in the U.S. a century ago, and now it is the opposite. But you can also show two things: First, the general level of wealth inequality is always higher than income inequality. So remember, for income inequality, the share going to the top 10 percent was between 30 and 50 percent of total income, whereas for wealth, the share is always between 60 and 90 percent. Okay, so that's fact number one, and that's very important for what follows. Wealth concentration is always a lot higher than income concentration. Fact number two is that the rise in wealth inequality in recent decades is still not enough to get us back to 1910. So the big difference today, wealth inequality is still very large, with 60, 70 percent of total wealth for the top 10, but the good news is that it's actually better than one century ago, where you had 90 percent in Europe going to the top 10. So today what you have is what I call the middle 40 percent, the people who are not in the top 10 and who are not in the bottom 50, and what you can view as the wealth middle class that owns 20 to 30 percent of total wealth, national wealth, whereas they used to be poor, a century ago, when there was basically no wealth middle class. So this is an important change, and it's interesting to see that wealth inequality has not fully recovered to pre-World War I levels, although the total quantity of wealth has recovered. Okay? So this is the total value of wealth relative to income, and you can see that in particular in Europe, we are almost back to the pre-World War I level. So there are really two different parts of the story here. One has to do with the total quantity of wealth that we accumulate, and there is nothing bad per se, of course, in accumulating a lot of wealth, and in particular if it is more diffuse and less concentrated. So what we really want to focus on is the long-run evolution of wealth inequality, and what's going to happen in the future. How can we account for the fact that until World War I, wealth inequality was so high and, if anything, was rising to even higher levels, and how can we think about the future? So let me come to some of the explanations and speculations about the future. Let me first say that probably the best model to explain why wealth is so much more concentrated than income is a dynamic, dynastic model where individuals have a long horizon and accumulate wealth for all sorts of reasons. If people were accumulating wealth only for life cycle reasons, you know, to be able to consume when they are old, then the level of wealth inequality should be more or less in line with the level of income inequality. But it will be very difficult to explain why you have so much more wealth inequality than income inequality with a pure life cycle model, so you need a story where people also care about wealth accumulation for other reasons. So typically, they want to transmit wealth to the next generation, to their children, or sometimes they want to accumulate wealth because of the prestige, the power that goes with wealth. So there must be other reasons for accumulating wealth than just life cycle to explain what we see in the data. Now, in a large class of dynamic models of wealth accumulation with such dynastic motive for accumulating wealth, you will have all sorts of random, multiplicative shocks. So for instance, some families have a very large number of children, so the wealth will be divided. Some families have fewer children. You also have shocks to rates of return. Some families make huge capital gains. Some made bad investments. So you will always have some mobility in the wealth process. Some people will move up, some people will move down. The important point is that, in any such model, for a given variance of such shocks, the equilibrium level of wealth inequality will be a steeply rising function of r minus g. And intuitively, the reason why the difference between the rate of return to wealth and the growth rate is important is that initial wealth inequalities will be amplified at a faster pace with a bigger r minus g. So take a simple example, with r equals five percent and g equals one percent, wealth holders only need to reinvest one fifth of their capital income to ensure that their wealth rises as fast as the size of the economy. So this makes it easier to build and perpetuate large fortunes because you can consume four fifths, assuming zero tax, and you can just reinvest one fifth. So of course some families will consume more than that, some will consume less, so there will be some mobility in the distribution, but on average, they only need to reinvest one fifth, so this allows high wealth inequalities to be sustained. Now, you should not be surprised by the statement that r can be bigger than g forever, because, in fact, this is what happened during most of the history of mankind. And this was in a way very obvious to everybody for a simple reason, which is that growth was close to zero percent during most of the history of mankind. Growth was maybe 0.1, 0.2, 0.3 percent, but very slow growth of population and output per capita, whereas the rate of return on capital of course was not zero percent. It was, for land assets, which was the traditional form of assets in preindustrial societies, it was typically five percent. Any reader of Jane Austen would know that. If you want an annual income of 1,000 pounds, you should have a capital value of 20,000 pounds so that five percent of 20,000 is 1,000. And in a way, this was the very foundation of society, because r bigger than g was what allowed holders of wealth and assets to live off their capital income and to do something else in life than just to care about their own survival. Now, one important conclusion of my historical research is that modern industrial growth did not change this basic fact as much as one might have expected. Of course, the growth rate following the Industrial Revolution rose, typically from zero to one to two percent, but at the same time, the rate of return to capital also rose so that the gap between the two did not really change. So during the 20th century, you had a very unique combination of events. First, a very low rate of return due to the 1914 and 1945 war shocks, destruction of wealth, inflation, bankruptcy during the Great Depression, and all of this reduced the private rate of return to wealth to unusually low levels between 1914 and 1945. And then, in the postwar period, you had unusually high growth rate, partly due to the reconstruction. You know, in Germany, in France, in Japan, you had five percent growth rate between 1950 and 1980 largely due to reconstruction, and also due to very large demographic growth, the Baby Boom Cohort effect. Now, apparently that's not going to last for very long, or at least the population growth is supposed to decline in the future, and the best projections we have is that the long-run growth is going to be closer to one to two percent rather than four to five percent. So if you look at this, these are the best estimates we have of world GDP growth and rate of return on capital, average rates of return on capital, so you can see that during most of the history of mankind, the growth rate was very small, much lower than the rate of return, and then during the 20th century, it is really the population growth, very high in the postwar period, and the reconstruction process that brought growth to a smaller gap with the rate of return. Here I use the United Nations population projections, so of course they are uncertain. It could be that we all start having a lot of children in the future, and the growth rates are going to be higher, but from now on, these are the best projections we have, and this will make global growth decline and the gap between the rate of return go up. Now, the other unusual event during the 20th century was, as I said, destruction, taxation of capital, so this is the pre-tax rate of return. This is the after-tax rate of return, and after destruction, and this is what brought the average rate of return after tax, after destruction, below the growth rate during a long time period. But without the destruction, without the taxation, this would not have happened. So let me say that the balance between returns on capital and growth depends on many different factors that are very difficult to predict: technology and the development of capital-intensive techniques. So right now, the most capital-intensive sectors in the economy are the real estate sector, housing, the energy sector, but it could be in the future that we have a lot more robots in a number of sectors and that this would be a bigger share of the total capital stock that it is today. Well, we are very far from this, and from now, what's going on in the real estate sector, the energy sector, is much more important for the total capital stock and capital share. The other important issue is that there are scale effects in portfolio management, together with financial complexity, financial deregulation, that make it easier to get higher rates of return for a large portfolio, and this seems to be particularly strong for billionaires, large capital endowments. Just to give you one example, this comes from the Forbes billionaire rankings over the 1987-2013 period, and you can see the very top wealth holders have been going up at six, seven percent per year in real terms above inflation, whereas average income in the world, average wealth in the world, have increased at only two percent per year. And you find the same for large university endowments — the bigger the initial endowments, the bigger the rate of return. Now, what could be done? The first thing is that I think we need more financial transparency. We know too little about global wealth dynamics, so we need international transmission of bank information. We need a global registry of financial assets, more coordination on wealth taxation, and even wealth tax with a small tax rate will be a way to produce information so that then we can adapt our policies to whatever we observe. And to some extent, the fight against tax havens and automatic transmission of information is pushing us in this direction. Now, there are other ways to redistribute wealth, which it can be tempting to use. Inflation: it's much easier to print money than to write a tax code, so that's very tempting, but sometimes you don't know what you do with the money. This is a problem. Expropriation is very tempting. Just when you feel some people get too wealthy, you just expropriate them. But this is not a very efficient way to organize a regulation of wealth dynamics. So war is an even less efficient way, so I tend to prefer progressive taxation, but of course, history — (Laughter) — history will invent its own best ways, and it will probably involve a combination of all of these. Thank you. (Applause) Bruno Giussani: Thomas Piketty. Thank you. Thomas, I want to ask you two or three questions, because it's impressive how you're in command of your data, of course, but basically what you suggest is growing wealth concentration is kind of a natural tendency of capitalism, and if we leave it to its own devices, it may threaten the system itself, so you're suggesting that we need to act to implement policies that redistribute wealth, including the ones we just saw: progressive taxation, etc. In the current political context, how realistic are those? How likely do you think that it is that they will be implemented? Thomas Piketty: Well, you know, I think if you look back through time, the history of income, wealth and taxation is full of surprise. So I am not terribly impressed by those who know in advance what will or will not happen. I think one century ago, many people would have said that progressive income taxation would never happen and then it happened. And even five years ago, many people would have said that bank secrecy will be with us forever in Switzerland, that Switzerland was too powerful for the rest of the world, and then suddenly it took a few U.S. sanctions against Swiss banks for a big change to happen, and now we are moving toward more financial transparency. So I think it's not that difficult to better coordinate politically. We are going to have a treaty with half of the world GDP around the table with the U.S. and the European Union, so if half of the world GDP is not enough to make progress on financial transparency and minimal tax for multinational corporate profits, what does it take? So I think these are not technical difficulties. I think we can make progress if we have a more pragmatic approach to these questions and we have the proper sanctions on those who benefit from financial opacity. BG: One of the arguments against your point of view is that economic inequality is not only a feature of capitalism but is actually one of its engines. So we take measures to lower inequality, and at the same time we lower growth, potentially. What do you answer to that? TP: Yeah, I think inequality is not a problem per se. I think inequality up to a point can actually be useful for innovation and growth. The problem is, it's a question of degree. When inequality gets too extreme, then it becomes useless for growth and it can even become bad because it tends to lead to high perpetuation of inequality over time and low mobility. And for instance, the kind of wealth concentrations that we had in the 19th century and pretty much until World War I in every European country was, I think, not useful for growth. This was destroyed by a combination of tragic events and policy changes, and this did not prevent growth from happening. And also, extreme inequality can be bad for our democratic institutions if it creates very unequal access to political voice, and the influence of private money in U.S. politics, I think, is a matter of concern right now. So we don't want to return to that kind of extreme, pre-World War I inequality. Having a decent share of the national wealth for the middle class is not bad for growth. It is actually useful both for equity and efficiency reasons. BG: I said at the beginning that your book has been criticized. Some of your data has been criticized. Some of your choice of data sets has been criticized. You have been accused of cherry-picking data to make your case. What do you answer to that? TP: Well, I answer that I am very happy that this book is stimulating debate. This is part of what it is intended for. Look, the reason why I put all the data online with all of the detailed computation is so that we can have an open and transparent debate about this. So I have responded point by point to every concern. Let me say that if I was to rewrite the book today, I would actually conclude that the rise in wealth inequality, particularly in the United States, has been actually higher than what I report in my book. There is a recent study by Saez and Zucman showing, with new data which I didn't have at the time of the book, that wealth concentration in the U.S. has risen even more than what I report. And there will be other data in the future. Some of it will go in different directions. Look, we put online almost every week new, updated series on the World Top Income Database and we will keep doing so in the future, in particular in emerging countries, and I welcome all of those who want to contribute to this data collection process. In fact, I certainly agree that there is not enough transparency about wealth dynamics, and a good way to have better data would be to have a wealth tax with a small tax rate to begin with so that we can all agree about this important evolution and adapt our policies to whatever we observe. So taxation is a source of knowledge, and that's what we need the most right now. BG: Thomas Piketty, merci beaucoup. Thank you. TP: Thank you. (Applause)

Recently, I flew over a crowd of thousands of people in Brazil playing music by George Frideric Handel. I also drove along the streets of Amsterdam, again playing music by this same composer. Let's take a look. (Music: George Frideric Handel, "Allegro." Performed by Daria van den Bercken.) (Video) Daria van den Bercken: I live there on the third floor. (In Dutch) I live there on the corner. I actually live there, around the corner. and you'd be really welcome. Man: (In Dutch) Does that sound like fun? Child: (In Dutch) Yes! [(In Dutch) "Handel house concert"] (Applause) Daria van den Bercken: All this was a real magical experience for hundreds of reasons. Now you may ask, why have I done these things? They're not really typical for a musician's day-to-day life. Well, I did it because I fell in love with the music and I wanted to share it with as many people as possible. It started a couple of years ago. I was sitting at home on the couch with the flu and browsing the Internet a little, when I found out that Handel had written works for the keyboard. Well, I was surprised. I did not know this. So I downloaded the sheet music and started playing. And what happened next was that I entered this state of pure, unprejudiced amazement. It was an experience of being totally in awe of the music, and I had not felt that in a long time. It might be easier to relate to this when you hear it. The first piece that I played through started like this. (Music) Well this sounds very melancholic, doesn't it? And I turned the page and what came next was this. (Music) Well, this sounds very energetic, doesn't it? So within a couple of minutes, and the piece isn't even finished yet, I experienced two very contrasting characters: beautiful melancholy and sheer energy. And I consider these two elements to be vital human expressions. And the purity of the music makes you hear it very effectively. I've given a lot of children's concerts for children of seven and eight years old, and whatever I play, whether it's Bach, Beethoven, even Stockhausen, or some jazzy music, they are open to hear it, really willing to listen, and they are comfortable doing so. And when classes come in with children who are just a few years older, 11, 12, I felt that I sometimes already had trouble in reaching them like that. The complexity of the music does become an issue, and actually the opinions of others — parents, friends, media — they start to count. But the young ones, they don't question their own opinion. They are in this constant state of wonder, and I do firmly believe that we can keep listening like these seven-year-old children, even when growing up. And that is why I have played not only in the concert hall but also on the street, online, in the air: to feel that state of wonder, to truly listen, and to listen without prejudice. And I would like to invite you to do so now. (Music: George Frideric Handel, "Chaconne in G Major." Performed by Daria van den Bercken.) (Applause) Thank you. (Applause)

Today I want to tell you about a project being carried out by scientists all over the world to paint a neural portrait of the human mind. And the central idea of this work is that the human mind and brain is not a single, general-purpose processor, but a collection of highly specialized components, each solving a different specific problem, and yet collectively making up who we are as human beings and thinkers. To give you a feel for this idea, imagine the following scenario: You walk into your child's day care center. As usual, there's a dozen kids there waiting to get picked up, but this time, the children's faces look weirdly similar, and you can't figure out which child is yours. Do you need new glasses? Are you losing your mind? You run through a quick mental checklist. No, you seem to be thinking clearly, and your vision is perfectly sharp. And everything looks normal except the children's faces. You can see the faces, but they don't look distinctive, and none of them looks familiar, and it's only by spotting an orange hair ribbon that you find your daughter. This sudden loss of the ability to recognize faces actually happens to people. It's called prosopagnosia, and it results from damage to a particular part of the brain. The striking thing about it is that only face recognition is impaired; everything else is just fine. Prosopagnosia is one of many surprisingly specific mental deficits that can happen after brain damage. These syndromes collectively have suggested for a long time that the mind is divvied up into distinct components, but the effort to discover those components has jumped to warp speed with the invention of brain imaging technology, especially MRI. So MRI enables you to see internal anatomy at high resolution, so I'm going to show you in a second a set of MRI cross-sectional images through a familiar object, and we're going to fly through them and you're going to try to figure out what the object is. Here we go. It's not that easy. It's an artichoke. Okay, let's try another one, starting from the bottom and going through the top. Broccoli! It's a head of broccoli. Isn't it beautiful? I love that. Okay, here's another one. It's a brain, of course. In fact, it's my brain. We're going through slices through my head like that. That's my nose over on the right, and now we're going over here, right there. So this picture's nice, if I do say so myself, but it shows only anatomy. The really cool advance with functional imaging happened when scientists figured out how to make pictures that show not just anatomy but activity, that is, where neurons are firing. So here's how this works. Brains are like muscles. When they get active, they need increased blood flow to supply that activity, and lucky for us, blood flow control to the brain is local, so if a bunch of neurons, say, right there get active and start firing, then blood flow increases just right there. So functional MRI picks up on that blood flow increase, producing a higher MRI response where neural activity goes up. So to give you a concrete feel for how a functional MRI experiment goes and what you can learn from it and what you can't, let me describe one of the first studies I ever did. We wanted to know if there was a special part of the brain for recognizing faces, and there was already reason to think there might be such a thing based on this phenomenon of prosopagnosia that I described a moment ago, but nobody had ever seen that part of the brain in a normal person, so we set out to look for it. So I was the first subject. I went into the scanner, I lay on my back, I held my head as still as I could while staring at pictures of faces like these and objects like these and faces and objects for hours. So as somebody who has pretty close to the world record of total number of hours spent inside an MRI scanner, I can tell you that one of the skills that's really important for MRI research is bladder control. (Laughter) When I got out of the scanner, I did a quick analysis of the data, looking for any parts of my brain that produced a higher response when I was looking at faces than when I was looking at objects, and here's what I saw. Now this image looks just awful by today's standards, but at the time I thought it was beautiful. What it shows is that region right there, that little blob, it's about the size of an olive and it's on the bottom surface of my brain about an inch straight in from right there. And what that part of my brain is doing is producing a higher MRI response, that is, higher neural activity, when I was looking at faces than when I was looking at objects. So that's pretty cool, but how do we know this isn't a fluke? Well, the easiest way is to just do the experiment again. So I got back in the scanner, I looked at more faces and I looked at more objects and I got a similar blob, and then I did it again and I did it again and again and again, and around about then I decided to believe it was for real. But still, maybe this is something weird about my brain and no one else has one of these things in there, so to find out, we scanned a bunch of other people and found that pretty much everyone has that little face-processing region in a similar neighborhood of the brain. So the next question was, what does this thing really do? Is it really specialized just for face recognition? Well, maybe not, right? Maybe it responds not only to faces but to any body part. Maybe it responds to anything human or anything alive or anything round. The only way to be really sure that that region is specialized for face recognition is to rule out all of those hypotheses. So we spent much of the next couple of years scanning subjects while they looked at lots of different kinds of images, and we showed that that part of the brain responds strongly when you look at any images that are faces of any kind, and it responds much less strongly to any image you show that isn't a face, like some of these. So have we finally nailed the case that this region is necessary for face recognition? No, we haven't. Brain imaging can never tell you if a region is necessary for anything. All you can do with brain imaging is watch regions turn on and off as people think different thoughts. To tell if a part of the brain is necessary for a mental function, you need to mess with it and see what happens, and normally we don't get to do that. But an amazing opportunity came about very recently when a couple of colleagues of mine tested this man who has epilepsy and who is shown here in his hospital bed where he's just had electrodes placed on the surface of his brain to identify the source of his seizures. So it turned out by total chance that two of the electrodes happened to be right on top of his face area. So with the patient's consent, the doctors asked him what happened when they electrically stimulated that part of his brain. Now, the patient doesn't know where those electrodes are, and he's never heard of the face area. So let's watch what happens. It's going to start with a control condition that will say "Sham" nearly invisibly in red in the lower left, when no current is delivered, and you'll hear the neurologist speaking to the patient first. So let's watch. (Video) Neurologist: Okay, just look at my face and tell me what happens when I do this. All right? Patient: Okay. Neurologist: One, two, three. Patient: Nothing. Neurologist: Nothing? Okay. I'm going to do it one more time. Look at my face. One, two, three. Patient: You just turned into somebody else. Your face metamorphosed. Your nose got saggy, it went to the left. You almost looked like somebody I'd seen before, but somebody different. That was a trip. (Laughter) Nancy Kanwisher: So this experiment — (Applause) — this experiment finally nails the case that this region of the brain is not only selectively responsive to faces but causally involved in face perception. So I went through all of these details about the face region to show you what it takes to really establish that a part of the brain is selectively involved in a specific mental process. Next, I'll go through much more quickly some of the other specialized regions of the brain that we and others have found. So to do this, I've spent a lot of time in the scanner over the last month so I can show you these things in my brain. So let's get started. Here's my right hemisphere. So we're oriented like that. You're looking at my head this way. Imagine taking the skull off and looking at the surface of the brain like that. Okay, now as you can see, the surface of the brain is all folded up. So that's not good. Stuff could be hidden in there. We want to see the whole thing, so let's inflate it so we can see the whole thing. Next, let's find that face area I've been talking about that responds to images like these. To see that, let's turn the brain around and look on the inside surface on the bottom, and there it is, that's my face area. Just to the right of that is another region that is shown in purple that responds when you process color information, and near those regions are other regions that are involved in perceiving places, like right now, I'm seeing this layout of space around me and these regions in green right there are really active. There's another one out on the outside surface again where there's a couple more face regions as well. Also in this vicinity is a region that's selectively involved in processing visual motion, like these moving dots here, and that's in yellow at the bottom of the brain, and near that is a region that responds when you look at images of bodies and body parts like these, and that region is shown in lime green at the bottom of the brain. Now all these regions I've shown you so far are involved in specific aspects of visual perception. Do we also have specialized brain regions for other senses, like hearing? Yes, we do. So if we turn the brain around a little bit, here's a region in dark blue that we reported just a couple of months ago, and this region responds strongly when you hear sounds with pitch, like these. (Sirens) (Cello music) (Doorbell) In contrast, that same region does not respond strongly when you hear perfectly familiar sounds that don't have a clear pitch, like these. (Chomping) (Drum roll) (Toilet flushing) Okay. Next to the pitch region is another set of regions that are selectively responsive when you hear the sounds of speech. Okay, now let's look at these same regions. In my left hemisphere, there's a similar arrangement — not identical, but similar — and most of the same regions are in here, albeit sometimes different in size. Now, everything I've shown you so far are regions that are involved in different aspects of perception, vision and hearing. Do we also have specialized brain regions for really fancy, complicated mental processes? Yes, we do. So here in pink are my language regions. So it's been known for a very long time that that general vicinity of the brain is involved in processing language, but we showed very recently that these pink regions respond extremely selectively. They respond when you understand the meaning of a sentence, but not when you do other complex mental things, like mental arithmetic or holding information in memory or appreciating the complex structure in a piece of music. The most amazing region that's been found yet is this one right here in turquoise. This region responds when you think about what another person is thinking. So that may seem crazy, but actually, we humans do this all the time. You're doing this when you realize that your partner is going to be worried if you don't call home to say you're running late. I'm doing this with that region of my brain right now when I realize that you guys are probably now wondering about all that gray, uncharted territory in the brain, and what's up with that? Well, I'm wondering about that too, and we're running a bunch of experiments in my lab right now to try to find a number of other possible specializations in the brain for other very specific mental functions. But importantly, I don't think we have specializations in the brain for every important mental function, even mental functions that may be critical for survival. In fact, a few years ago, there was a scientist in my lab who became quite convinced that he'd found a brain region for detecting food, and it responded really strongly in the scanner when people looked at images like this. And further, he found a similar response in more or less the same location in 10 out of 12 subjects. So he was pretty stoked, and he was running around the lab telling everyone that he was going to go on "Oprah" with his big discovery. But then he devised the critical test: He showed subjects images of food like this and compared them to images with very similar color and shape, but that weren't food, like these. And his region responded the same to both sets of images. So it wasn't a food area, it was just a region that liked colors and shapes. So much for "Oprah." But then the question, of course, is, how do we process all this other stuff that we don't have specialized brain regions for? Well, I think the answer is that in addition to these highly specialized components that I've been describing, we also have a lot of very general- purpose machinery in our heads that enables us to tackle whatever problem comes along. In fact, we've shown recently that these regions here in white respond whenever you do any difficult mental task at all — well, of the seven that we've tested. So each of the brain regions that I've described to you today is present in approximately the same location in every normal subject. I could take any of you, pop you in the scanner, and find each of those regions in your brain, and it would look a lot like my brain, although the regions would be slightly different in their exact location and in their size. What's important to me about this work is not the particular locations of these brain regions, but the simple fact that we have selective, specific components of mind and brain in the first place. I mean, it could have been otherwise. The brain could have been a single, general-purpose processor, more like a kitchen knife than a Swiss Army knife. Instead, what brain imaging has delivered is this rich and interesting picture of the human mind. So we have this picture of very general-purpose machinery in our heads in addition to this surprising array of very specialized components. It's early days in this enterprise. We've painted only the first brushstrokes in our neural portrait of the human mind. The most fundamental questions remain unanswered. So for example, what does each of these regions do exactly? Why do we need three face areas and three place areas, and what's the division of labor between them? Second, how are all these things connected in the brain? With diffusion imaging, you can trace bundles of neurons that connect to different parts of the brain, and with this method shown here, you can trace the connections of individual neurons in the brain, potentially someday giving us a wiring diagram of the entire human brain. Third, how does all of this very systematic structure get built, both over development in childhood and over the evolution of our species? To address questions like that, scientists are now scanning other species of animals, and they're also scanning human infants. Many people justify the high cost of neuroscience research by pointing out that it may help us someday to treat brain disorders like Alzheimer's and autism. That's a hugely important goal, and I'd be thrilled if any of my work contributed to it, but fixing things that are broken in the world is not the only thing that's worth doing. The effort to understand the human mind and brain is worthwhile even if it never led to the treatment of a single disease. What could be more thrilling than to understand the fundamental mechanisms that underlie human experience, to understand, in essence, who we are? This is, I think, the greatest scientific quest of all time. (Applause)

I want to tell you how 20,000 remarkable young people from over 100 countries ended up in Cuba and are transforming health in their communities. Ninety percent of them would never have left home at all if it weren't for a scholarship to study medicine in Cuba and a commitment to go back to places like the ones they'd come from — remote farmlands, mountains, ghettos — to become doctors for people like themselves, to walk the walk. Havana's Latin American Medical School: It's the largest medical school in the world, graduating 23,000 young doctors since its first class of 2005, with nearly 10,000 more in the pipeline. Its mission, to train physicians for the people who need them the most: the over one billion who have never seen a doctor, the people who live and die under every poverty line ever invented. Its students defy all norms. They're the school's biggest risk and also its best bet. They're recruited from the poorest, most broken places on our planet by a school that believes they can become not just the good but the excellent physicians their communities desperately need, that they will practice where most doctors don't, in places not only poor but oftentimes dangerous, carrying venom antidotes in their backpacks or navigating neighborhoods riddled by drugs, gangs and bullets, their home ground. The hope is that they will help transform access to care, the health picture in impoverished areas, and even the way medicine itself is learned and practiced, and that they will become pioneers in our global reach for universal health coverage, surely a tall order. Two big storms and this notion of "walk the walk" prompted creation of ELAM back in 1998. The Hurricanes Georges and Mitch had ripped through the Caribbean and Central America, leaving 30,000 dead and two and a half million homeless. Hundreds of Cuban doctors volunteered for disaster response, but when they got there, they found a bigger disaster: whole communities with no healthcare, doors bolted shut on rural hospitals for lack of staff, and just too many babies dying before their first birthday. What would happen when these Cuban doctors left? New doctors were needed to make care sustainable, but where would they come from? Where would they train? In Havana, the campus of a former naval academy was turned over to the Cuban Health Ministry to become the Latin American Medical School, ELAM. Tuition, room and board, and a small stipend were offered to hundreds of students from the countries hardest hit by the storms. As a journalist in Havana, I watched the first 97 Nicaraguans arrive in March 1999, settling into dorms barely refurbished and helping their professors not only sweep out the classrooms but move in the desks and the chairs and the microscopes. Over the next few years, governments throughout the Americas requested scholarships for their own students, and the Congressional Black Caucus asked for and received hundreds of scholarships for young people from the USA. Today, among the 23,000 are graduates from 83 countries in the Americas, Africa and Asia, and enrollment has grown to 123 nations. More than half the students are young women. They come from 100 ethnic groups, speak 50 different languages. WHO Director Margaret Chan said, "For once, if you are poor, female, or from an indigenous population, you have a distinct advantage, an ethic that makes this medical school unique." Luther Castillo comes from San Pedro de Tocamacho on the Atlantic coast of Honduras. There's no running water, no electricity there, and to reach the village, you have to walk for hours or take your chances in a pickup truck like I did skirting the waves of the Atlantic. Luther was one of 40 Tocamacho children who started grammar school, the sons and daughters of a black indigenous people known as the Garífuna, 20 percent of the Honduran population. The nearest healthcare was fatal miles away. Luther had to walk three hours every day to middle school. Only 17 made that trip. Only five went on to high school, and only one to university: Luther, to ELAM, among the first crop of Garífuna graduates. Just two Garífuna doctors had preceded them in all of Honduran history. Now there are 69, thanks to ELAM. Big problems need big solutions, sparked by big ideas, imagination and audacity, but also solutions that work. ELAM's faculty had no handy evidence base to guide them, so they learned the hard way, by doing and correcting course as they went. Even the brightest students from these poor communities weren't academically prepared for six years of medical training, so a bridging course was set up in sciences. Then came language: these were Mapuche, Quechuas, Guaraní, Garífuna, indigenous peoples who learned Spanish as a second language, or Haitians who spoke Creole. So Spanish became part of the pre-pre-med curriculum. Even so, in Cuba, the music, the food, the smells, just about everything was different, so faculty became family, ELAM home. Religions ranged from indigenous beliefs to Yoruba, Muslim and Christian evangelical. Embracing diversity became a way of life. Why have so many countries asked for these scholarships? First, they just don't have enough doctors, and where they do, their distribution is skewed against the poor, because our global health crisis is fed by a crisis in human resources. We are short four to seven million health workers just to meet basic needs, and the problem is everywhere. Doctors are concentrated in the cities, where only half the world's people live, and within cities, not in the shantytowns or South L.A. Here in the United States, where we have healthcare reform, we don't have the professionals we need. By 2020, we will be short 45,000 primary care physicians. And we're also part of the problem. The United States is the number one importer of doctors from developing countries. The second reasons students flock to Cuba is the island's own health report card, relying on strong primary care. A commission from The Lancet rates Cuba among the best performing middle-income countries in health. Save the Children ranks Cuba the best country in Latin America to become a mother. Cuba has similar life expectancy and lower infant mortality than the United States, with fewer disparities, while spending per person one 20th of what we do on health here in the USA. Academically, ELAM is tough, but 80 percent of its students graduate. The subjects are familiar — basic and clinical sciences — but there are major differences. First, training has moved out of the ivory tower and into clinic classrooms and neighborhoods, the kinds of places most of these grads will practice. Sure, they have lectures and hospital rotations too, but community-based learning starts on day one. Second, students treat the whole patient, mind and body, in the context of their families, their communities and their culture. Third, they learn public health: to assess their patients' drinking water, housing, social and economic conditions. Fourth, they are taught that a good patient interview and a thorough clinical exam provide most of the clues for diagnosis, saving costly technology for confirmation. And finally, they're taught over and over again the importance of prevention, especially as chronic diseases cripple health systems worldwide. Such an in-service learning also comes with a team approach, as much how to work in teams as how to lead them, with a dose of humility. Upon graduation, these doctors share their knowledge with nurse's aids, midwives, community health workers, to help them become better at what they do, not to replace them, to work with shamans and traditional healers. ELAM's graduates: Are they proving this audacious experiment right? Dozens of projects give us an inkling of what they're capable of doing. Take the Garífuna grads. They not only went to work back home, but they organized their communities to build Honduras' first indigenous hospital. With an architect's help, residents literally raised it from the ground up. The first patients walked through the doors in December 2007, and since then, the hospital has received nearly one million patient visits. And government is paying attention, upholding the hospital as a model of rural public health for Honduras. ELAM's graduates are smart, strong and also dedicated. Haiti, January 2010. The pain. People buried under 30 million tons of rubble. Overwhelming. Three hundred forty Cuban doctors were already on the ground long term. More were on their way. Many more were needed. At ELAM, students worked round the clock to contact 2,000 graduates. As a result, hundreds arrived in Haiti, 27 countries' worth, from Mali in the Sahara to St. Lucia, Bolivia, Chile and the USA. They spoke easily to each other in Spanish and listened to their patients in Creole thanks to Haitian medical students flown in from ELAM in Cuba. Many stayed for months, even through the cholera epidemic. Hundreds of Haitian graduates had to pick up the pieces, overcome their own heartbreak, and then pick up the burden of building a new public health system for Haiti. Today, with aid of organizations and governments from Norway to Cuba to Brazil, dozens of new health centers have been built, staffed, and in 35 cases, headed by ELAM graduates. Yet the Haitian story also illustrates some of the bigger problems faced in many countries. Take a look: 748 Haitian graduates by 2012, when cholera struck, nearly half working in the public health sector but one quarter unemployed, and 110 had left Haiti altogether. So in the best case scenarios, these graduates are staffing and thus strengthening public health systems, where often they're the only doctors around. In the worst cases, there are simply not enough jobs in the public health sector, where most poor people are treated, not enough political will, not enough resources, not enough anything — just too many patients with no care. The grads face pressure from their families too, desperate to make ends meet, so when there are no public sector jobs, these new MDs decamp into private practice, or go abroad to send money home. Worst of all, in some countries, medical societies influence accreditation bodies not to honor the ELAM degree, fearful these grads will take their jobs or reduce their patient loads and income. It's not a question of competencies. Here in the USA, the California Medical Board accredited the school after rigorous inspection, and the new physicians are making good on Cuba's big bet, passing their boards and accepted into highly respected residencies from New York to Chicago to New Mexico. Two hundred strong, they're coming back to the United States energized, and also dissatisfied. As one grad put it, in Cuba, "We are trained to provide quality care with minimal resources, so when I see all the resources we have here, and you tell me that's not possible, I know it's not true. Not only have I seen it work, I've done the work." ELAM's graduates, some from right here in D.C. and Baltimore, have come from the poorest of the poor to offer health, education and a voice to their communities. They've done the heavy lifting. Now we need to do our part to support the 23,000 and counting, All of us — foundations, residency directors, press, entrepreneurs, policymakers, people — need to step up. We need to do much more globally to give these new doctors the opportunity to prove their mettle. They need to be able to take their countries' licensing exams. They need jobs in the public health sector or in nonprofit health centers to put their training and commitment to work. They need the chance to be the doctors their patients need. To move forward, we may have to find our way back to that pediatrician who would knock on my family's door on the South Side of Chicago when I was a kid, who made house calls, who was a public servant. These aren't such new ideas of what medicine should be. What's new is the scaling up and the faces of the doctors themselves: an ELAM graduate is more likely to be a she than a he; In the Amazon, Peru or Guatemala, an indigenous doctor; in the USA, a doctor of color who speaks fluent Spanish. She is well trained, can be counted on, and shares the face and culture of her patients, and she deserves our support surely, because whether by subway, mule, or canoe, she is teaching us to walk the walk. Thank you. (Applause)

Women represent 50 percent of middle management and professional positions, but the percentages of women at the top of organizations represent not even a third of that number. So some people hear that statistic and they ask, why do we have so few women leaders? But I look at that statistic and, if you, like me, believe that leadership manifests at every level, you would see that there's a tremendous, awesome resource of leaders who are leading in middle management, which raises a different question: Why are there so many women mired in the middle and what has to happen to take them to the top? So some of you might be some of those women who are in middle management and seeking to move up in your organization. Well, Tonya is a great example of one of these women. I met her two years ago. She was a vice president in a Fortune 50 company, and she said to me with a sense of deep frustration, "I've worked really hard to improve my confidence and my assertiveness and develop a great brand, I get terrific performance evals from my boss, my 360s in the organization let me know that my teams love working for me, I've taken every management course that I can here, I am working with a terrific mentor, and yet I've been passed over twice for advancement opportunities, even when my manager knows that I'm committed to moving up and even interested in an international assignment. I don't understand why I'm being passed over." So what Tonya doesn't realize is that there's a missing 33 percent of the career success equation for women, and it's understanding what this missing 33 percent is that's required to close the gender gap at the top. In order to move up in organizations, you have to be known for your leadership skills, and this would apply to any of you, women or men. It means that you have to be recognized for using the greatness in you to achieve and sustain extraordinary outcomes by engaging the greatness in others. Put in other language, it means you have to use your skills and talents and abilities to help the organization achieve its strategic financial goals and do that by working effectively with others inside of the organization and outside. And although all three of these elements of leadership are important, when it comes to moving up in organizations, they aren't equally important. So pay attention to the green box as I move forward. In seeking and identifying employees with high potential, the potential to go to the top of organizations, the skills and competencies that relate to that green box are rated twice as heavily as those in the other two elements of leadership. These skills and competencies can be summarized as business, strategic, and financial acumen. In other words, this skill set has to do with understanding where the organization is going, what its strategy is, what financial targets it has in place, and understanding your role in moving the organization forward. This is that missing 33 percent of the career success equation for women, not because it's missing in our capabilities or abilities, but because it's missing in the advice that we're given. Here's what I mean by that. Five years ago, I was asked to moderate a panel of executives, and the topic for the evening was "What do you look for in high-potential employees?" So think about the three elements of leadership as I summarize for you what they told me. They said, "We look for people who are smart and hard working and committed and trustworthy and resilient." So which element of leadership does that relate to? Personal greatness. They said, "We look for employees who are great with our customers, who empower their teams, who negotiate effectively, who are able to manage conflict well, and are overall great communicators." Which element of leadership does that equate to? Engaging the greatness in others. And then they pretty much stopped. So I asked, "Well, what about people who understand your business, where it's going, and their role in taking it there? And what about people who are able to scan the external environment, identify risks and opportunities, make strategy or make strategic recommendations? And what about people who are able to look at the financials of your business, understand the story that the financials tell, and either take appropriate action or make appropriate recommendations?" And to a man, they said, "That's a given." So I turned to the audience of 150 women and I asked, "How many of you have ever been told that the door-opener for career advancement is your business, strategic and financial acumen, and that all the other important stuff is what differentiates you in the talent pool?" Three women raised their hand, and I've asked this question of women all around the globe in the five years since, and the percentage is never much different. So this is obvious, right? But how can it be? Well, there are primarily three reasons that there's this missing 33 percent in the career success advice given to women? When organizations direct women toward resources that focus on the conventional advice that we've been hearing for over 40 years, there's a notable absence of advice that relates to business, strategic and financial acumen. Much of the advice is emphasizing personal actions that we need to take, like become more assertive, become more confident, develop your personal brand, things that Tonya's been working on, and advice about working with other people, things like learn to self-promote, get a mentor, enhance your network, and virtually nothing said about the importance of business, strategic and financial acumen. This doesn't mean that this advice is unimportant. What it means is that this is advice that's absolutely essential for breaking through from career start to middle management, but it's not the advice that gets women to break through from the middle, where we're 50 percent, to senior and executive positions. And this is why conventional advice to women in 40 years hasn't closed the gender gap at the top and won't close it. Now, the second reason relates to Tonya's comments about having had excellent performance evals, great feedback from her teams, and having taken every management training program she can lay her hands on. So you would think that she's getting messages from her organization through the talent development systems and performance management systems that let her know how important it is to develop business, strategic and financial acumen, but here again, that green square is quite small. On average, talent and performance management systems in the organizations that I've worked with focus three to one on the other two elements of leadership compared to the importance of business, strategic and financial acumen, which is why typical talent and performance systems haven't closed and won't close the gender gap at the top. Now, Tonya also talked about working with a mentor, and this is really important to talk about, because if organizations, talent and performance systems aren't giving people in general information about the importance of business, strategic and financial acumen, how are men getting to the top? Well, there are primarily two ways. One is because of the positions they're guided into, and the other is because of informal mentoring and sponsorship. So what's women's experience as it relates to mentoring? Well, this comment from an executive that I worked with recently illustrates that experience. He was very proud of the fact that last year, he had two protégés: a man and a woman. And he said, "I helped the woman build confidence, I helped the man learn the business, and I didn't realize that I was treating them any differently." And he was sincere about that. So what this illustrates is that as managers, whether we're women or men, we have mindsets about women and men, about careers in leadership, and these unexamined mindsets won't close the gender gap at the top. So how do we take this idea of the missing 33 percent and turn it into action? Well, for women, the answer is obvious: we have to begin to focus more on developing and demonstrating the skills we have that show that we're people who understand our businesses, where they're headed, and our role in taking it there. That's what enables that breakthrough from middle management to leadership at the top. But you don't have to be a middle manager to do this. One young scientist that works in a biotech firm used her insight about the missing 33 percent to weave financial impact data into a project update she did and got tremendous positive feedback from the managers in the room. So we don't want to put 100 percent of the responsibility on women's shoulders, nor would it be wise to do so, and here's why: In order for companies to achieve their strategic financial goals, executives understand that they have to have everyone pulling in the same direction. In other words, the term we use in business is, we have to have strategic alignment. And executives know this very well, and yet only 37 percent, according to a recent Conference Board report, believe that they have that strategic alignment in place. So for 63 percent of organizations, achieving their strategic financial goals is questionable. And if you think about what I've just shared, that you have situations where at least 50 percent of your middle managers haven't received clear messaging that they have to become focused on the business, where it's headed, and their role in taking it there, it's not surprising that that percentage of executives who are confident about alignment is so low, which is why there are other people who have a role to play in this. It's important for directors on boards to expect from their executives proportional pools of women when they sit down once a year for their succession discussions. Why? Because if they aren't seeing that, it could be a red flag that their organization isn't as aligned as it could potentially be. It's important for CEOs to also expect these proportional pools, and if they hear comments like, "Well, she doesn't have enough business experience," ask the question, "What are we going to do about that?" It's important for H.R. executives to make sure that the missing 33 percent is appropriately emphasized, and it's important for women and men who are in management positions to examine the mindsets we hold about women and men, about careers and success, to make sure we are creating a level playing field for everybody. So let me close with the latest chapter in Tonya's story. Tonya emailed me two months ago, and she said that she had been interviewed for a new position, and during the interview, they probed about her business acumen and her strategic insights into the industry, and she said that she was so happy to report that now she has a new position reporting directly to the chief information officer at her company. So for some of you, the missing 33 percent is an idea for you to put into action, and I hope that for all of you, you will see it as an idea worth spreading in order to help organizations be more effective, to help women create careers that soar, and to help close the gender gap at the top. Thank you. (Applause)

I am an engineering professor, and for the past 14 years I've been teaching crap. (Laughter) Not that I'm a bad teacher, but I've been studying and teaching about human waste and how waste is conveyed through these wastewater treatment plants, and how we engineer and design these treatment plants so that we can protect surface water like rivers. I've based my scientific career on using leading-edge molecular techniques, DNA- and RNA-based methods to look at microbial populations in biological reactors, and again to optimize these systems. And over the years, I have developed an unhealthy obsession with toilets, and I've been known to sneak into toilets and take my camera phone all over the world. But along the way, I've learned that it's not just the technical side, but there's also this thing called the culture of crap. So for example, how many of you are washers and how many of you are wipers? (Laughter) If, well, I guess you know what I mean. If you're a washer, then you use water for anal cleansing. That's the technical term. And if you're a wiper, then you use toilet paper or, in some regions of the world where it's not available, newspaper or rags or corncobs. And this is not just a piece of trivia, but it's really important to understand and solve the sanitation problem. And it is a big problem: There are 2.5 billion people in the world who don't have access to adequate sanitation. For them, there's no modern toilet. And there are 1.1 billion people whose toilets are the streets or river banks or open spaces, and again, the technical term for that is open defecation, but that is really simply shitting in the open. And if you're living in fecal material and it's surrounding you, you're going to get sick. It's going to get into your drinking water, into your food, into your immediate surroundings. So the United Nations estimates that every year, there are 1.5 million child deaths because of inadequate sanitation. That's one preventable death every 20 seconds, 171 every hour, 4,100 every day. And so, to avoid open defecation, municipalities and cities build infrastructure, for example, like pit latrines, in peri-urban and rural areas. For example, in KwaZulu-Natal province in South Africa, they've built tens of thousands of these pit latrines. But there's a problem when you scale up to tens of thousands, and the problem is, what happens when the pits are full? This is what happens. People defecate around the toilet. In schools, children defecate on the floors and then leave a trail outside the building and start defecating around the building, and these pits have to be cleaned and manually emptied. And who does the emptying? You've got these workers who have to sometimes go down into the pits and manually remove the contents. It's a dirty and dangerous business. As you can see, there's no protective equipment, no protective clothing. There's one worker down there. I hope you can see him. He's got a face mask on, but no shirt. And in some countries, like India, the lower castes are condemned to empty the pits, and they're further condemned by society. So you ask yourself, how can we solve this and why don't we just build Western-style flush toilets for these two and a half billion? And the answer is, it's just not possible. In some of these areas, there's not enough water, there's no energy, it's going to cost tens of trillions of dollars to lay out the sewer lines and to build the facilities and to operate and maintain these systems, and if you don't build it right, you're going to have flush toilets that basically go straight into the river, just like what's happening in many cities in the developing world. And is this really the solution? Because essentially, what you're doing is you're using clean water and you're using it to flush your toilet, convey it to a wastewater treatment plant which then discharges to a river, and that river, again, is a drinking water source. So we've got to rethink sanitation, and we've got to reinvent the sanitation infrastructure, and I'm going to argue that to do this, you have to employ systems thinking. We have to look at the whole sanitation chain. We start with a human interface, and then we have to think about how feces are collected and stored, transported, treated and reused — and not just disposal but reuse. So let's start with the human user interface. I say, it doesn't matter if you're a washer or a wiper, a sitter or a squatter, the human user interface should be clean and easy to use, because after all, taking a dump should be pleasurable. (Laughter) And when we open the possibilities to understanding this sanitation chain, then the back-end technology, the collection to the reuse, should not really matter, and then we can apply locally adoptable and context-sensitive solutions. So we can open ourselves to possibilities like, for example, this urine-diverting toilet, and there's two holes in this toilet. There's the front and the back, and the front collects the urine, and the back collects the fecal material. And so what you're doing is you're separating the urine, which has 80 percent of the nitrogen and 50 percent of the phosphorus, and then that can then be treated and precipitated to form things like struvite, which is a high-value fertilizer, and then the fecal material can then be disinfected and again converted to high-value end products. Or, for example, in some of our research, you can reuse the water by treating it in on-site sanitation systems like planter boxes or constructed wetlands. So we can open up all these possibilities if we take away the old paradigm of flush toilets and treatment plants. So you might be asking, who's going to pay? Well, I'm going to argue that governments should fund sanitation infrastructure. NGOs and donor organizations, they can do their best, but it's not going to be enough. Governments should fund sanitation the same way they fund roads and schools and hospitals and other infrastructure like bridges, because we know, and the WHO has done this study, that for every dollar that we invest in sanitation infrastructure, we get something like three to 34 dollars back. Let's go back to the problem of pit emptying. So at North Carolina State University, we challenged our students to come up with a simple solution, and this is what they came up with: a simple, modified screw auger that can move the waste up from the pit and into a collecting drum, and now the pit worker doesn't have to go down into the pit. We tested it in South Africa, and it works. We need to make it more robust, and we're going to do more testing in Malawi and South Africa this coming year. And our idea is to make this a professionalized pit-emptying service so that we can create a small business out of it, create profits and jobs, and the hope is that, as we are rethinking sanitation, we are extending the life of these pits so that we don't have to resort to quick solutions that don't really make sense. I believe that access to adequate sanitation is a basic human right. We need to stop the practice of lower castes and lower-status people going down and being condemned to empty pits. It is our moral, it is our social and our environmental obligation. Thank you. (Applause)

When, in 1960, still a student, I got a traveling fellowship to study housing in North America. We traveled the country. We saw public housing high-rise buildings in all major cities: New York, Philadelphia. Those who have no choice lived there. And then we traveled from suburb to suburb, and I came back thinking, we've got to reinvent the apartment building. There has to be another way of doing this. We can't sustain suburbs, so let's design a building which gives the qualities of a house to each unit. Habitat would be all about gardens, contact with nature, streets instead of corridors. We prefabricated it so we would achieve economy, and there it is almost 50 years later. It's a very desirable place to live in. It's now a heritage building, but it did not proliferate. In 1973, I made my first trip to China. It was the Cultural Revolution. We traveled the country, met with architects and planners. This is Beijing then, not a single high rise building in Beijing or Shanghai. Shenzhen didn't even exist as a city. There were hardly any cars. Thirty years later, this is Beijing today. This is Hong Kong. If you're wealthy, you live there, if you're poor, you live there, but high density it is, and it's not just Asia. São Paulo, you can travel in a helicopter 45 minutes seeing those high-rise buildings consume the 19th-century low-rise environment. And with it, comes congestion, and we lose mobility, and so on and so forth. So a few years ago, we decided to go back and rethink Habitat. Could we make it more affordable? Could we actually achieve this quality of life in the densities that are prevailing today? And we realized, it's basically about light, it's about sun, it's about nature, it's about fractalization. Can we open up the surface of the building so that it has more contact with the exterior? We came up with a number of models: economy models, cheaper to build and more compact; membranes of housing where people could design their own house and create their own gardens. And then we decided to take New York as a test case, and we looked at Lower Manhattan. And we mapped all the building area in Manhattan. On the left is Manhattan today: blue for housing, red for office buildings, retail. On the right, we reconfigured it: the office buildings form the base, and then rising 75 stories above, are apartments. There's a street in the air on the 25th level, a community street. It's permeable. There are gardens and open spaces for the community, almost every unit with its own private garden, and community space all around. And most important, permeable, open. It does not form a wall or an obstruction in the city, and light permeates everywhere. And in the last two or three years, we've actually been, for the first time, realizing the quality of life of Habitat in real-life projects across Asia. This in Qinhuangdao in China: middle-income housing, where there is a bylaw that every apartment must receive three hours of sunlight. That's measured in the winter solstice. And under construction in Singapore, again middle-income housing, gardens, community streets and parks and so on and so forth. And Colombo. And I want to touch on one more issue, which is the design of the public realm. A hundred years after we've begun building with tall buildings, we are yet to understand how the tall high-rise building becomes a building block in making a city, in creating the public realm. In Singapore, we had an opportunity: 10 million square feet, extremely high density. Taking the concept of outdoor and indoor, promenades and parks integrated with intense urban life. So they are outdoor spaces and indoor spaces, and you move from one to the other, and there is contact with nature, and most relevantly, at every level of the structure, public gardens and open space: on the roof of the podium, climbing up the towers, and finally on the roof, the sky park, two and a half acres, jogging paths, restaurants, and the world's longest swimming pool. And that's all I can tell you in five minutes. Thank you. (Applause)

I've been a critical care EMT for the past seven years in Suffolk County, New York. I've been a first responder in a number of incidents ranging from car accidents to Hurricane Sandy. If you are like most people, death might be one of your greatest fears. Some of us will see it coming. Some of us won't. There is a little-known documented medical term called impending doom. It's almost a symptom. As a medical provider, I'm trained to respond to this symptom like any other, so when a patient having a heart attack looks at me and says, "I'm going to die today," we are trained to reevaluate the patient's condition. Throughout my career, I have responded to a number of incidents where the patient had minutes left to live and there was nothing I could do for them. With this, I was faced with a dilemma: Do I tell the dying that they are about to face death, or do I lie to them to comfort them? Early in my career, I faced this dilemma by simply lying. I was afraid. I was afraid if I told them the truth, that they would die in terror, in fear, just grasping for those last moments of life. That all changed with one incident. Five years ago, I responded to a motorcycle accident. The rider had suffered critical, critical injuries. As I assessed him, I realized that there was nothing that could be done for him, and like so many other cases, he looked me in the eye and asked that question: "Am I going to die?" In that moment, I decided to do something different. I decided to tell him the truth. I decided to tell him that he was going to die and that there was nothing I could do for him. His reaction shocked me to this day. He simply laid back and had a look of acceptance on his face. He was not met with that terror or fear that I thought he would be. He simply laid there, and as I looked into his eyes, I saw inner peace and acceptance. From that moment forward, I decided it was not my place to comfort the dying with my lies. Having responded to many cases since then where patients were in their last moments and there was nothing I could do for them, in almost every case, they have all had the same reaction to the truth, of inner peace and acceptance. In fact, there are three patterns I have observed in all these cases. The first pattern always kind of shocked me. Regardless of religious belief or cultural background, there's a need for forgiveness. Whether they call it sin or they simply say they have a regret, their guilt is universal. I had once cared for an elderly gentleman who was having a massive heart attack. As I prepared myself and my equipment for his imminent cardiac arrest, I began to tell the patient of his imminent demise. He already knew by my tone of voice and body language. As I placed the defibrillator pads on his chest, prepping for what was going to happen, he looked me in the eye and said, "I wish I had spent more time with my children and grandchildren instead of being selfish with my time." Faced with imminent death, all he wanted was forgiveness. The second pattern I observe is the need for remembrance. Whether it was to be remembered in my thoughts or their loved ones', they needed to feel that they would be living on. There's a need for immortality within the hearts and thoughts of their loved ones, myself, my crew, or anyone around. Countless times, I have had a patient look me in the eyes and say, "Will you remember me?" The final pattern I observe always touched me the deepest, to the soul. The dying need to know that their life had meaning. They need to know that they did not waste their life on meaningless tasks. This came to me very, very early in my career. I had responded to a call. There was a female in her late 50s severely pinned within a vehicle. She had been t-boned at a high rate of speed, critical, critical condition. As the fire department worked to remove her from the car, I climbed in to begin to render care. As we talked, she had said to me, "There was so much more I wanted to do with my life." She had felt she had not left her mark on this Earth. As we talked further, it would turn out that she was a mother of two adopted children who were both on their way to medical school. Because of her, two children had a chance they never would have had otherwise and would go on to save lives in the medical field as medical doctors. It would end up taking 45 minutes to free her from the vehicle. However, she perished prior to freeing her. I believed what you saw in the movies: when you're in those last moments that it's strictly terror, fear. I have come to realize, regardless of the circumstance, it's generally met with peace and acceptance, that it's the littlest things, the littlest moments, the littlest things you brought into the world that give you peace in those final moments. Thank you. (Applause)

When I turned 19, I started my career as the first female photojournalist in the Gaza Strip, Palestine. My work as a woman photographer was considered a serious insult to local traditions, and created a lasting stigma for me and my family. The male-dominated field made my presence unwelcome by all possible means. They made clear that a woman must not do a man's job. Photo agencies in Gaza refused to train me because of my gender. The "No" sign was pretty clear. Three of my colleagues went as far as to drive me to an open air strike area where the explosion sounds were the only thing I could hear. Dust was flying in the air, and the ground was shaking like a swing beneath me. I only realized we weren't there to document the event when the three of them got back into the armored Jeep and drove away, waving and laughing, leaving me behind in the open air strike zone. For a moment, I felt terrified, humiliated, and sorry for myself. My colleagues' action was not the only death threat I have received, but it was the most dangerous one. The perception of women's life in Gaza is passive. Until a recent time, a lot of women were not allowed to work or pursue education. At times of such doubled war including both social restrictions on women and the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, women's dark and bright stories were fading away. To men, women's stories were seen as inconsequential. I started paying closer attention to women's lives in Gaza. Because of my gender, I had access to worlds where my colleagues were forbidden. Beyond the obvious pain and struggle, there was a healthy dose of laughter and accomplishments. In front of a police compound in Gaza City during the first war in Gaza, an Israeli air raid managed to destroy the compound and break my nose. For a moment, all I saw was white, bright white, like these lights. I thought to myself I either got blind or I was in heaven. By the time I managed to open my eyes, I had documented this moment. Mohammed Khader, a Palestinian worker who spent two decades in Israel, as his retirement plan, he decided to build a four-floor house, only by the first field operation at his neighborhood, the house was flattened to the ground. Nothing was left but the pigeons he raised and a jacuzzi, a bathtub that he got from Tel Aviv. Mohammed got the bathtub on the top of the rubble and started giving his kids an every morning bubble bath. My work is not meant to hide the scars of war, but to show the full frame of unseen stories of Gazans. As a Palestinian female photographer, the journey of struggle, survival and everyday life has inspired me to overcome the community taboo and see a different side of war and its aftermath. I became a witness with a choice: to run away or stand still. Thank you. (Applause)

America's favorite pie is? Audience: Apple. Kenneth Cukier: Apple. Of course it is. How do we know it? Because of data. You look at supermarket sales. You look at supermarket sales of 30-centimeter pies that are frozen, and apple wins, no contest. The majority of the sales are apple. But then supermarkets started selling smaller, 11-centimeter pies, and suddenly, apple fell to fourth or fifth place. Why? What happened? Okay, think about it. When you buy a 30-centimeter pie, the whole family has to agree, and apple is everyone's second favorite. (Laughter) But when you buy an individual 11-centimeter pie, you can buy the one that you want. You can get your first choice. You have more data. You can see something that you couldn't see when you only had smaller amounts of it. Now, the point here is that more data doesn't just let us see more, more of the same thing we were looking at. More data allows us to see new. It allows us to see better. It allows us to see different. In this case, it allows us to see what America's favorite pie is: not apple. Now, you probably all have heard the term big data. In fact, you're probably sick of hearing the term big data. It is true that there is a lot of hype around the term, and that is very unfortunate, because big data is an extremely important tool by which society is going to advance. In the past, we used to look at small data and think about what it would mean to try to understand the world, and now we have a lot more of it, more than we ever could before. What we find is that when we have a large body of data, we can fundamentally do things that we couldn't do when we only had smaller amounts. Big data is important, and big data is new, and when you think about it, the only way this planet is going to deal with its global challenges — to feed people, supply them with medical care, supply them with energy, electricity, and to make sure they're not burnt to a crisp because of global warming — is because of the effective use of data. So what is new about big data? What is the big deal? Well, to answer that question, let's think about what information looked like, physically looked like in the past. In 1908, on the island of Crete, archaeologists discovered a clay disc. They dated it from 2000 B.C., so it's 4,000 years old. Now, there's inscriptions on this disc, but we actually don't know what it means. It's a complete mystery, but the point is that this is what information used to look like 4,000 years ago. This is how society stored and transmitted information. Now, society hasn't advanced all that much. We still store information on discs, but now we can store a lot more information, more than ever before. Searching it is easier. Copying it easier. Sharing it is easier. Processing it is easier. And what we can do is we can reuse this information for uses that we never even imagined when we first collected the data. In this respect, the data has gone from a stock to a flow, from something that is stationary and static to something that is fluid and dynamic. There is, if you will, a liquidity to information. The disc that was discovered off of Crete that's 4,000 years old, is heavy, it doesn't store a lot of information, and that information is unchangeable. By contrast, all of the files that Edward Snowden took from the National Security Agency in the United States fits on a memory stick the size of a fingernail, and it can be shared at the speed of light. More data. More. Now, one reason why we have so much data in the world today is we are collecting things that we've always collected information on, but another reason why is we're taking things that have always been informational but have never been rendered into a data format and we are putting it into data. Think, for example, the question of location. Take, for example, Martin Luther. If we wanted to know in the 1500s where Martin Luther was, we would have to follow him at all times, maybe with a feathery quill and an inkwell, and record it, but now think about what it looks like today. You know that somewhere, probably in a telecommunications carrier's database, there is a spreadsheet or at least a database entry that records your information of where you've been at all times. If you have a cell phone, and that cell phone has GPS, but even if it doesn't have GPS, it can record your information. In this respect, location has been datafied. Now think, for example, of the issue of posture, the way that you are all sitting right now, the way that you sit, the way that you sit, the way that you sit. It's all different, and it's a function of your leg length and your back and the contours of your back, and if I were to put sensors, maybe 100 sensors into all of your chairs right now, I could create an index that's fairly unique to you, sort of like a fingerprint, but it's not your finger. So what could we do with this? Researchers in Tokyo are using it as a potential anti-theft device in cars. The idea is that the carjacker sits behind the wheel, tries to stream off, but the car recognizes that a non-approved driver is behind the wheel, and maybe the engine just stops, unless you type in a password into the dashboard to say, "Hey, I have authorization to drive." Great. What if every single car in Europe had this technology in it? What could we do then? Maybe, if we aggregated the data, maybe we could identify telltale signs that best predict that a car accident is going to take place in the next five seconds. And then what we will have datafied is driver fatigue, and the service would be when the car senses that the person slumps into that position, automatically knows, hey, set an internal alarm that would vibrate the steering wheel, honk inside to say, "Hey, wake up, pay more attention to the road." These are the sorts of things we can do when we datafy more aspects of our lives. So what is the value of big data? Well, think about it. You have more information. You can do things that you couldn't do before. One of the most impressive areas where this concept is taking place is in the area of machine learning. Machine learning is a branch of artificial intelligence, which itself is a branch of computer science. The general idea is that instead of instructing a computer what do do, we are going to simply throw data at the problem and tell the computer to figure it out for itself. And it will help you understand it by seeing its origins. In the 1950s, a computer scientist at IBM named Arthur Samuel liked to play checkers, so he wrote a computer program so he could play against the computer. He played. He won. He played. He won. He played. He won, because the computer only knew what a legal move was. Arthur Samuel knew something else. Arthur Samuel knew strategy. So he wrote a small sub-program alongside it operating in the background, and all it did was score the probability that a given board configuration would likely lead to a winning board versus a losing board after every move. He plays the computer. He wins. He plays the computer. He wins. He plays the computer. He wins. And then Arthur Samuel leaves the computer to play itself. It plays itself. It collects more data. It collects more data. It increases the accuracy of its prediction. And then Arthur Samuel goes back to the computer and he plays it, and he loses, and he plays it, and he loses, and he plays it, and he loses, and Arthur Samuel has created a machine that surpasses his ability in a task that he taught it. And this idea of machine learning is going everywhere. How do you think we have self-driving cars? Are we any better off as a society enshrining all the rules of the road into software? No. Memory is cheaper. No. Algorithms are faster. No. Processors are better. No. All of those things matter, but that's not why. It's because we changed the nature of the problem. We changed the nature of the problem from one in which we tried to overtly and explicitly explain to the computer how to drive to one in which we say, "Here's a lot of data around the vehicle. You figure it out. You figure it out that that is a traffic light, that that traffic light is red and not green, that that means that you need to stop and not go forward." Machine learning is at the basis of many of the things that we do online: search engines, Amazon's personalization algorithm, computer translation, voice recognition systems. Researchers recently have looked at the question of biopsies, cancerous biopsies, and they've asked the computer to identify by looking at the data and survival rates to determine whether cells are actually cancerous or not, and sure enough, when you throw the data at it, through a machine-learning algorithm, the machine was able to identify the 12 telltale signs that best predict that this biopsy of the breast cancer cells are indeed cancerous. The problem: The medical literature only knew nine of them. Three of the traits were ones that people didn't need to look for, but that the machine spotted. Now, there are dark sides to big data as well. It will improve our lives, but there are problems that we need to be conscious of, and the first one is the idea that we may be punished for predictions, that the police may use big data for their purposes, a little bit like "Minority Report." Now, it's a term called predictive policing, or algorithmic criminology, and the idea is that if we take a lot of data, for example where past crimes have been, we know where to send the patrols. That makes sense, but the problem, of course, is that it's not simply going to stop on location data, it's going to go down to the level of the individual. Why don't we use data about the person's high school transcript? Maybe we should use the fact that they're unemployed or not, their credit score, their web-surfing behavior, whether they're up late at night. Their Fitbit, when it's able to identify biochemistries, will show that they have aggressive thoughts. We may have algorithms that are likely to predict what we are about to do, and we may be held accountable before we've actually acted. Privacy was the central challenge in a small data era. In the big data age, the challenge will be safeguarding free will, moral choice, human volition, human agency. There is another problem: Big data is going to steal our jobs. Big data and algorithms are going to challenge white collar, professional knowledge work in the 21st century in the same way that factory automation and the assembly line challenged blue collar labor in the 20th century. Think about a lab technician who is looking through a microscope at a cancer biopsy and determining whether it's cancerous or not. The person went to university. The person buys property. He or she votes. He or she is a stakeholder in society. And that person's job, as well as an entire fleet of professionals like that person, is going to find that their jobs are radically changed or actually completely eliminated. Now, we like to think that technology creates jobs over a period of time after a short, temporary period of dislocation, and that is true for the frame of reference with which we all live, the Industrial Revolution, because that's precisely what happened. But we forget something in that analysis: There are some categories of jobs that simply get eliminated and never come back. The Industrial Revolution wasn't very good if you were a horse. So we're going to need to be careful and take big data and adjust it for our needs, our very human needs. We have to be the master of this technology, not its servant. We are just at the outset of the big data era, and honestly, we are not very good at handling all the data that we can now collect. It's not just a problem for the National Security Agency. Businesses collect lots of data, and they misuse it too, and we need to get better at this, and this will take time. It's a little bit like the challenge that was faced by primitive man and fire. This is a tool, but this is a tool that, unless we're careful, will burn us. Big data is going to transform how we live, how we work and how we think. It is going to help us manage our careers and lead lives of satisfaction and hope and happiness and health, but in the past, we've often looked at information technology and our eyes have only seen the T, the technology, the hardware, because that's what was physical. We now need to recast our gaze at the I, the information, which is less apparent, but in some ways a lot more important. Humanity can finally learn from the information that it can collect, as part of our timeless quest to understand the world and our place in it, and that's why big data is a big deal. (Applause)

We are at a remarkable moment in time. We face over the next two decades two fundamental transformations that will determine whether the next 100 years is the best of centuries or the worst of centuries. Let me illustrate with an example. I first visited Beijing 25 years ago to teach at the People's University of China. China was getting serious about market economics and about university education, so they decided to call in the foreign experts. Like most other people, I moved around Beijing by bicycle. Apart from dodging the occasional vehicle, it was a safe and easy way to get around. Cycling in Beijing now is a completely different prospect. The roads are jammed by cars and trucks. The air is dangerously polluted from the burning of coal and diesel. When I was there last in the spring, there was an advisory for people of my age — over 65 — to stay indoors and not move much. How did this come about? It came from the way in which Beijing has grown as a city. It's doubled over those 25 years, more than doubled, from 10 million to 20 million. It's become a sprawling urban area dependent on dirty fuel, dirty energy, particularly coal. China burns half the world's coal each year, and that's why, it is a key reason why, it is the world's largest emitter of greenhouse gases. At the same time, we have to recognize that in that period China has grown remarkably. It has become the world's second largest economy. Hundreds of millions of people have been lifted out of poverty. That's really important. But at the same time, the people of China are asking the question: What's the value of this growth if our cities are unlivable? They've analyzed, diagnosed that this is an unsustainable path of growth and development. China's planning to scale back coal. It's looking to build its cities in different ways. Now, the growth of China is part of a dramatic change, fundamental change, in the structure of the world economy. Just 25 years ago, the developing countries, the poorer countries of the world, were, notwithstanding being the vast majority of the people, they accounted for only about a third of the world's output. Now it's more than half; 25 years from now, it will probably be two thirds from the countries that we saw 25 years ago as developing. That's a remarkable change. It means that most countries around the world, rich or poor, are going to be facing the two fundamental transformations that I want to talk about and highlight. Now, the first of these transformations is the basic structural change of the economies and societies that I've already begun to illustrate through the description of Beijing. Fifty percent now in urban areas. That's going to go to 70 percent in 2050. Over the next two decades, we'll see the demand for energy rise by 40 percent, and the growth in the economy and in the population is putting increasing pressure on our land, on our water and on our forests. This is profound structural change. If we manage it in a negligent or a shortsighted way, we will create waste, pollution, congestion, destruction of land and forests. If we think of those three areas that I have illustrated with my numbers — cities, energy, land — if we manage all that badly, then the outlook for the lives and livelihoods of the people around the world would be poor and damaged. And more than that, the emissions of greenhouse gases would rise, with immense risks to our climate. Concentrations of greenhouse gases in the atmosphere are already higher than they've been for millions of years. If we go on increasing those concentrations, we risk temperatures over the next century or so that we have not seen on this planet for tens of millions of years. We've been around as Homo sapiens — that's a rather generous definition, sapiens — for perhaps a quarter of a million years, a quarter of a million. We risk temperatures we haven't seen for tens of millions of years over a century. That would transform the relationship between human beings and the planet. It would lead to changing deserts, changing rivers, changing patterns of hurricanes, changing sea levels, hundreds of millions of people, perhaps billions of people who would have to move, and if we've learned anything from history, that means severe and extended conflict. And we couldn't just turn it off. You can't make a peace treaty with the planet. You can't negotiate with the laws of physics. You're in there. You're stuck. Those are the stakes we're playing for, and that's why we have to make this second transformation, the climate transformation, and move to a low-carbon economy. Now, the first of these transformations is going to happen anyway. We have to decide whether to do it well or badly, the economic, or structural, transformation. But the second of the transformations, the climate transformations, we have to decide to do. Those two transformations face us in the next two decades. The next two decades are decisive for what we have to do. Now, the more I've thought about this, the two transformations coming together, the more I've come to realize that this is an enormous opportunity. It's an opportunity which we can use or it's an opportunity which we can lose. And let me explain through those three key areas that I've identified: cities, energy and land. And let me start with cities. I've already described the problems of Beijing: pollution, congestion, waste and so on. Surely we recognize that in many of our cities around the world. Now, with cities, like life but particularly cities, you have to think ahead. The cities that are going to be built — and there are many, and many big ones — we have to think of how to design them in a compact way so we can save travel time and we can save energy. The cities that already are there, well established, we have to think about renewal and investment in them so that we can connect ourselves much better within those cities, and make it easier, encourage more people, to live closer to the center. We've got examples building around the world of the kinds of ways in which we can do that. The bus rapid transport system in Bogotá in Colombia is a very important case of how to move around safely and quickly in a non-polluting way in a city: very frequent buses, strongly protected routes, the same service, really, as an underground railway system, but much, much cheaper and can be done much more quickly, a brilliant idea in many more cities around the world that's developing. Now, some things in cities do take time. Some things in cities can happen much more quickly. Take my hometown, London. In 1952, smog in London killed 4,000 people and badly damaged the lives of many, many more. And it happened all the time. For those of you live outside London in the U.K. will remember it used to be called The Smoke. That's the way London was. By regulating coal, within a few years the problems of smog were rapidly reduced. I remember the smogs well. When the visibility dropped to [less] than a few meters, they stopped the buses and I had to walk. This was the 1950s. I had to walk home three miles from school. Again, breathing was a hazardous activity. But it was changed. It was changed by a decision. Good decisions can bring good results, striking results, quickly. We've seen more: In London, we've introduced the congestion charge, actually quite quickly and effectively, and we've seen great improvements in the bus system, and cleaned up the bus system. You can see that the two transformations I've described, the structural and the climate, come very much together. But we have to invest. We have to invest in our cities, and we have to invest wisely, and if we do, we'll see cleaner cities, quieter cities, safer cities, more attractive cities, more productive cities, and stronger community in those cities — public transport, recycling, reusing, all sorts of things that bring communities together. We can do that, but we have to think, we have to invest, we have to plan. Let me turn to energy. Now, energy over the last 25 years has increased by about 50 percent. Eighty percent of that comes from fossil fuels. Over the next 20 years, perhaps it will increase by another 40 percent or so. We have to invest strongly in energy, we have to use it much more efficiently, and we have to make it clean. We can see how to do that. Take the example of California. It would be in the top 10 countries in the world if it was independent. I don't want to start any — (Laughter) California's a big place. (Laughter) In the next five or six years, they will likely move from around 20 percent in renewables — wind, solar and so on — to over 33 percent, and that would bring California back to greenhouse gas emissions in 2020 to where they were in 1990, a period when the economy in California would more or less have doubled. That's a striking achievement. It shows what can be done. Not just California — the incoming government of India is planning to get solar technology to light up the homes of 400 million people who don't have electricity in India. They've set themselves a target of five years. I think they've got a good chance of doing that. We'll see, but what you're seeing now is people moving much more quickly. Four hundred million, more than the population of the United States. Those are the kinds of ambitions now people are setting themselves in terms of rapidity of change. Again, you can see good decisions can bring quick results, and those two transformations, the economy and the structure and the climate and the low carbon, are intimately intertwined. Do the first one well, the structural, the second one on the climate becomes much easier. Look at land, land and particularly forests. Forests are the hosts to valuable plant and animal species. They hold water in the soil and they take carbon dioxide out of the atmosphere, fundamental to the tackling of climate change. But we're losing our forests. In the last decade, we've lost a forest area the size of Portugal, and much more has been degraded. But we're already seeing that we can do so much about that. We can recognize the problem, but we can also understand how to tackle it. In Brazil, the rate of deforestation has been reduced by 70 percent over the last 10 years. How? By involving local communities, investing in their agriculture and their economies, by monitoring more carefully, by enforcing the law more strictly. And it's not just stopping deforestation. That's of course of first and fundamental importance, but it's also regrading degraded land, regenerating, rehabilitating degraded land. I first went to Ethiopia in 1967. It was desperately poor. In the following years, it suffered devastating famines and profoundly destructive social conflict. Over the last few years, actually more than a few, Ethiopia has been growing much more rapidly. It has ambitions to be a middle-income country 15 years from now and to be carbon neutral. Again, I think it's a strong ambition but it is a plausible one. You're seeing that commitment there. You're seeing what can be done. Ethiopia is investing in clean energy. It's working in the rehabilitation of land. In Humbo, in southwest Ethiopia, a wonderful project to plant trees on degraded land and work with local communities on sustainable forest management has led to big increases in living standards. So we can see, from Beijing to London, from California to India, from Brazil to Ethiopia, we do understand how to manage those two transformations, the structural and the climate. We do understand how to manage those well. And technology is changing very rapidly. I don't have to list all those things to an audience like this, but you can see the electric cars, you can see the batteries using new materials. You can see that we can manage remotely now our household appliances on our mobile phones when we're away. You can see better insulation. And there's much more coming. But, and it's a big but, the world as a whole is moving far too slowly. We're not cutting emissions in the way we should. We're not managing those structural transformations as we can. The depth of understanding of the immense risks of climate change are not there yet. The depth of understanding of the attractiveness of what we can do is not there yet. We need political pressure to build. We need leaders to step up. We can have better growth, better climate, a better world. We can make, by managing those two transformations well, the next 100 years the best of centuries. If we make a mess of it, we, you and me, if we make a mess of it, if we don't manage those transformations properly, it will be, the next 100 years will be the worst of centuries. That's the major conclusion of the report on the economy and climate chaired by ex-President Felipe Calderón of Mexico, and I co-chaired that with him, and we handed that report yesterday here in New York, in the United Nations Building to the Secretary-General of the U.N., Ban Ki-moon. We know that we can do this. Now, two weeks ago, I became a grandfather for the fourth time. Our daughter — (Baby cries) (Laughter) (Applause) — Our daughter gave birth to Rosa here in New York two weeks ago. Here are Helen and Rosa. (Applause) Two weeks old. Are we going to look our grandchildren in the eye and tell them that we understood the issues, that we recognized the dangers and the opportunities, and still we failed to act? Surely not. Let's make the next 100 years the best of centuries. (Applause)

What do you guys think? For those who watched Sir Ken's memorable TED Talk, I am a typical example of what he describes as "the body as a form of transport for the head," a university professor. You might think it was not fair that I've been lined up to speak after these first two talks to speak about science. I can't move my body to the beat, and after a scientist who became a philosopher, I have to talk about hard science. It could be a very dry subject. Yet, I feel honored. Never in my career, and it's been a long career, have I had the opportunity to start a talk feeling so inspired, like this one. Usually, talking about science is like exercising in a dry place. However, I've had the pleasure of being invited to come here to talk about water. The words "water" and "dry" do not match, right? It is even better to talk about water in the Amazon, which is the splendid cradle of life. Fresh life. So this is what inspired me. That's why I'm here, although I'm carrying my head over here. I am trying, or will try to convey this inspiration. I hope this story will inspire you and that you'll spread the word. We know that there is controversy. The Amazon is the "lung of the world," because of its massive power to have vital gases exchanged between the forest and the atmosphere. We also hear about the storehouse of biodiversity. While many believe it, few know it. If you go out there, in this marsh, you'll be amazed at the — You can barely see the animals. The Indians say, "The forest has more eyes than leaves." That is true, and I will try to show you something. But today, I'm going to use a different approach, one that is inspired by these two initiatives here, a harmonic one and a philosophical one. I'll try to use an approach that's slightly materialistic, but it also attempts to convey that, in nature, there is extraordinary philosophy and harmony. There'll be no music in my presentation, but I hope you'll all notice the music of the reality I'm going to show you. I'm going to talk about physiology — not about lungs, but other analogies with human physiology, especially the heart. We'll start by thinking that water is like blood. The circulation in our body distributes fresh blood, which feeds, nurtures and supports us, and brings the used blood back to be renewed. In the Amazon, things happen similarly. We'll start by talking about the power of all these processes. This is an image of rain in motion. What you see there is the years passing in seconds. Rains all over the world. What do you see? The equatorial region, in general, and the Amazon specifically, is extremely important for the world's climate. It's a powerful engine. There is a frantic evaporation taking place here. If we take a look at this other image, which shows the water vapor flow, you have dry air in black, moist air in gray, and clouds in white. What you see there is an extraordinary resurgence in the Amazon. What phenomenon — if it's not a desert, what phenomenon makes water gush from the ground into the atmosphere with such power that it can be seen from space? What phenomenon is this? It could be a geyser. A geyser is underground water heated by magma, exploding into the atmosphere and transferring this water into the atmosphere. There are no geysers in the Amazon, unless I am wrong. I don't know of any. But we have something that plays the same role, with much more elegance though: the trees, our good old friends that, like geysers, can transfer an enormous amount of water from the ground into the atmosphere. There are 600 billion trees in the Amazon forest, 600 billion geysers. That is done with an extraordinary sophistication. They don't need the heat of magma. They use sunlight to do this process. So, in a typical sunny day in the Amazon, a big tree manages to transfer 1,000 liters of water through its transpiration — 1,000 liters. If we take all the Amazon, which is a very large area, and add it up to all that water that is released by transpiration, which is the sweat of the forest, we'll get to an incredible number: 20 billion metric tons of water. In one day. Do you know how much that is? The Amazon River, the largest river on Earth, one fifth of all the fresh water that leaves the continents of the whole world and ends up in the oceans, dumps 17 billion metric tons of water a day in the Atlantic Ocean. This river of vapor that comes up from the forest and goes into the atmosphere is greater than the Amazon River. Just to give you an idea. If we could take a gigantic kettle, the kind you could plug into a power socket, an electric one, and put those 20 billion metric tons of water in it, how much power would you need to have this water evaporated? Any idea? A really big kettle. A gigantic kettle, right? 50 thousand Itaipus. Itaipu is still the largest hydroelectric plant in the world. and Brazil is very proud of it because it provides more than 30 percent of the power that is consumed in Brazil. And the Amazon is here, doing this for free. It's a vivid and extremely powerful plant, providing environmental services. Related to this subject, we are going to talk about what I call the paradox of chance, which is curious. If you look at the world map — it's easy to see this — you'll see that there are forests in the equatorial zone, and deserts are organized at 30 degrees north latitude, 30 degrees south latitude, aligned. Look over there, in the southern hemisphere, the Atacama; Namibia and Kalahari in Africa; the Australian desert. In the northern hemisphere, the Sahara, Sonoran, etc. There is an exception, and it's curious: It's the quadrangle that ranges from Cuiabá to Buenos Aires, and from São Paulo to the Andes. This quadrangle was supposed to be a desert. It's on the line of deserts. Why isn't it? That's why I call it the paradox of chance. What do we have in South America that is different? If we could use the analogy of the blood circulating in our bodies, like the water circulating in the landscape, we see that rivers are veins, they drain the landscape, they drain the tissue of nature. Where are the arteries? Any guess? What takes — How does water get to irrigate the tissues of nature and bring everything back through rivers? There is a new type of river, which originates in the blue sea, which flows through the green ocean — it not only flows, but it is also pumped by the green ocean — and then it falls on our land. All our economy, that quadrangle, 70 percent of South America's GDP comes from that area. It depends on this river. This river flows invisibly above us. We are floating here on this floating hotel, on one of the largest rivers on Earth, the Negro River. It's a bit dry and rough, but we are floating here, and there is this invisible river running above us. This river has a pulse. Here it is, pulsing. That's why we also talk about the heart. You can see the different seasons there. There's the rainy season. In the Amazon, we used to have two seasons, the humid season and the even more humid season. Now we have a dry season. You can see the river covering that region which, otherwise, would be a desert. And it is not. We, scientists — You see that I'm struggling here to move my head from one side to the other. Scientists study how it works, why, etc. and these studies are generating a series of discoveries, which are absolutely fabulous, to raise our awareness of the wealth, the complexity, and the wonder that we have, the symphony we have in this process. One of them is: How is rain formed? Above the Amazon, there is clean air, as there is clean air above the ocean. The blue sea has clean air above it and forms pretty few clouds; there's almost no rain there. The green ocean has the same clean air, but forms a lot of rain. What is happening here that is different? The forest emits smells, and these smells are condensation nuclei, which form drops in the atmosphere. Then, clouds are formed and there is torrential rain. The sprinkler of the Garden of Eden. This relation between a living thing, which is the forest, and a nonliving thing, which is the atmosphere, is ingenious in the Amazon, because the forest provides water and seeds, and the atmosphere forms the rain and gives water back, guaranteeing the forest's survival. There are other factors as well. We've talked a little about the heart, and let's now talk about another function: the liver! When humid air, high humidity and radiation are combined with these organic compounds, which I call exogenous vitamin C, generous vitamin C in the form of gas, the plants release antioxidants which react with pollutants. You can rest assured that you are breathing the purest air on Earth, here in the Amazon, because the plants take care of this characteristic as well. This benefits the very way plants work, which is another ingenious cycle. Speaking of fractals, and their relation with the way we work, we can establish other comparisons. As in the upper airways of our lungs, the air in the Amazon gets cleaned up from the excess of dust. The dust in the air that we breathe is cleaned by our airways. This keeps the excess of dust from affecting the rainfall. When there are fires in the Amazon, the smoke stops the rain, it stops raining, the forest dries up and catches fire. There is another fractal analogy. Like in the veins and arteries, the rain water is a feedback. It returns to the atmosphere. Like endocrinal glands and hormones, there are those gases which I told you about before, that are formed and released into the atmosphere, like hormones, which help in the formation of rain. Like the liver and the kidneys, as I've said, cleaning the air. And, finally, like the heart: pumping water from outside, from the sea, into the forest. We call it the biotic moisture pump, a new theory that is explained in a very simple way. If there is a desert in the continent with a nearby sea, evaporation's greater on the sea, and it sucks the air above the desert. The desert is trapped in this condition. It will always be dry. If you have the opposite situation, a forest, the evaporation, as we showed, is much greater, because of the trees, and this relation is reversed. The air above the sea is sucked into the continent and humidity is imported. This satellite image was taken one month ago — that's Manaus down there, we're down there — and it shows this process. It's not a common little river that flows into a canal. It's a mighty river that irrigates South America, among other things. This image shows those paths, all the hurricanes that have been recorded. You can see that, in the red square, there hardly are any hurricanes. That is no accident. This pump that sucks the moisture into the continent also speeds up the air above the sea, and this prevents hurricane formations. To close this part and sum up, I'd like to talk about something a little different. I have several colleagues who worked in the development of these theories. They think, and so do I, that we can save planet Earth. I'm not talking only about the Amazon. The Amazon teaches us a lesson on how pristine nature works. We didn't understand these processes before because the rest of the world is messed up. We could understand it here, though. These colleagues propose that, yes, we can save other areas, including deserts. If we could establish forests in those other areas, we can reverse climate change, including global warming. I have a dear colleague in India, whose name is Suprabha Seshan, and she has a motto. Her motto is, "Gardening back the biosphere," "Reajardinando a biosfera" in Portuguese. She does a wonderful job rebuilding ecosystems. We need to do this. Having closed this quick introduction, we see the reality that we have out here, which is drought, this climate change, things that we already knew. I'd like to tell you a short story. Once, about four years ago, I attended a declamation, of a text by Davi Kopenawa, a wise representative of the Yanomami people, and it went more or less like this: "Doesn't the white man know that, if he destroys the forest, there will be no more rain? And that, if there's no more rain, there'll be nothing to drink, or to eat?" I heard that, and my eyes welled up and I went, "Oh, my! I've been studying this for 20 years, with a super computer, dozens, thousands of scientists, and we are starting to get to this conclusion, which he already knows!" A critical point is the Yanomami have never deforested. How could they know the rain would end? This bugged me and I was befuddled. How could he know that? Some months later, I met him at another event and said, "Davi, how did you know that if the forest was destroyed, there'd be no more rain?" He replied: "The spirit of the forest told us." For me, this was a game changer, a radical change. I said, "Gosh! Why am I doing all this science to get to a conclusion that he already knows?" Then, something absolutely critical hit me, which is, seeing is believing. Out of sight, out of mind. This is a need the previous speaker pointed out: We need to see things — I mean, we, Western society, which is becoming global, civilized — we need to see. If we don't see, we don't register the information. We live in ignorance. So, I propose the following — of course, the astronomers wouldn't like the idea — but let's turn the Hubble telescope upside down. And let's make it look down here, rather than to the far reaches of the universe. The universe is wonderful, but we have a practical reality, which is we live in an unknown cosmos, and we're ignorant about it. We're trampling on this wonderful cosmos that shelters us and houses us. Talk to any astrophysicist. The Earth is a statistical improbability. The stability and comfort that we enjoy, despite the droughts of the Negro River, and all the heat and cold and typhoons, etc., there is nothing like it in the universe, that we know of. Then, let's turn Hubble in our direction, and let's look at the Earth. Let's start with the Amazon! Let's dive, let's reach out the reality we live in every day, and look carefully at it, since that's what we need. Davi Kopenawa doesn't need this. He has something already that I think I missed. I was educated by television. I think that I missed this, an ancestral record, a valuation of what I don't know, what I haven't seen. He is not a doubting Thomas. He believes, with veneration and reverence, in what his ancestors and the spirits taught him. We can't do it, so let's look into the forest. Even with Hubble up there — this is a bird's-eye view, right? Even when this happens, we also see something that we don't know. The Spanish called it the green inferno. If you go out there into the bushes and get lost, and, let's say, if you head west, it's 900 kilometers to Colombia, and another 1,000 to somewhere else. So, you can figure out why they called it the green inferno. But go and look at what is in there. It is a live carpet. Each color you see is a tree species. Each tree, each tree top, has up to 10,000 species of insects in it, let alone the millions of species of fungi, bacteria, etc. All invisible. All of it is an even stranger cosmos to us than the galaxies billions of light years away from the Earth, which Hubble brings to our newspapers everyday. I'm going to end my talk here — I have a few seconds left — by showing you this wonderful being. When we see the morpho butterfly in the forest, we feel like someone's left open the door to heaven, and this creature escaped from there, because it's so beautiful. However, I cannot finish without showing you a tech side. We are tech-arrogant. We deprive nature of its technology. A robotic hand is technological, mine is biological, and we don't think about it anymore. Let's then look at the morpho butterfly, an example of an invisible technological competence of life, which is at the very heart of our possibility of surviving on this planet, and let's zoom in on it. Again, Hubble is there. Let's get into the butterfly's wings. Scholars have tried to explain: Why is it blue? Let's zoom in on it. What you see is that the architecture of the invisible humiliates the best architects in the world. All of this on a tiny scale. Besides its beauty and functioning, there is another side to it. In nature, all that is organized in extraordinary structures has a function. This function of the morpho butterfly — it is not blue; it does not have blue pigments. It has photonic crystals on its surface, according to people who studied it, which are extremely sophisticated crystals. Our technology had nothing like that at the time. Hitachi has now made a monitor that uses this technology, and it is used in optical fibers to transmit — Janine Benyus, who's been here several times, talks about it: biomimetics. My time's up. Then, I'll wrap it up with what is at the base of this capacity, of this competence of biodiversity, producing all these wonderful services: the living cell. It is a structure with a few microns, which is an internal wonder. There are TED Talks about it. I won't talk much longer, but each person in this room, including myself, has 100 trillion of these micromachines in their body, so that we can enjoy well-being. Imagine what is out there in the Amazon forest: 100 trillion. This is greater than the number of stars in the sky. And we are not aware of it. Thank you so much. (Applause)

My grandfather was a cobbler. Back in the day, he made custom-made shoes. I never got to meet him. He perished in the Holocaust. But I did inherit his love for making, except that it doesn't exist that much anymore. You see, while the Industrial Revolution did a great deal to improve humanity, it eradicated the very skill that my grandfather loved, and it atrophied craftsmanship as we know it. But all of that is about to change with 3D printing, and it all started with this, the very first part that was ever printed. It's a little older than TED. It was printed in 1983 by Chuck Hull, who invented 3D printing. But the thing that I want to talk to you about today, the big idea that I want to discuss with you, is not that 3D printing is going to catapult us into the future, but rather that it's actually going to connect us with our heritage, and it's going to usher in a new era of localized, distributed manufacturing that is actually based on digital fabrication. So think about useful things. You all know your shoe size. How many of you know the size of the bridge of your nose or the distance between your temples? Anybody? Wouldn't it be awesome if you could, for the first time, get eyewear that actually fits you perfectly and doesn't require any hinge assembly, so chances are, the hinges are not going to break? But the implications of 3D printing go well beyond the tips of our noses. When I met Amanda for the first time, she could already stand up and walk a little bit even though she was paralyzed from the waist down, but she complained to me that her suit was uncomfortable. It was a beautiful robotic suit made by Ekso Bionics, but it wasn't inspired by her body. It wasn't made to measure. So she challenged me to make her something that was a little bit more feminine, a little bit more elegant, and lightweight, and like good tailors, we thought that we would measure her digitally. And we did. We built her an amazing suit. The incredible part about what I learned from Amanda is a lot of us are looking at 3D printing and we say to ourselves, it's going to replace traditional methods. Amanda looked at it and she said, it's an opportunity for me to reclaim my symmetry and to embrace my authenticity. And you know what? She's not standing still. She now wants to walk in high heels. It doesn't stop there. 3D printing is changing personalized medical devices as we know them, from new, beautiful, conformal, ventilated scoliosis braces to millions of dental restorations and to beautiful bracings for amputees, another opportunity to emotionally reconnect with your symmetry. And as we sit here today, you can go wireless on your braces with clear aligners, or your dental restorations. Millions of in-the-ear hearing aids are already 3D printed today. Millions of people are served today from these devices. What about full knee replacements, from your data, made to measure, where all of the tools and guides are 3D printed? G.E. is using 3D printing to make the next generation LEAP engine that will save fuel to the tune of about 15 percent and cost for an airline of about 14 million dollars. Good for G.E., right? And their customers and the environment. But, you know, the even better news is that this technology is no longer reserved for deep-pocketed corporations. Planetary Resources, a startup for space explorations is going to put out its first space probe later this year. It was a fraction of a NASA spaceship, it costs a fraction of its cost, and it's made with less than a dozen moving parts, and it's going to be out in space later this year. Google is taking on this very audacious project of making the block phone, the Ara. It's only possible because of the development of high-speed 3D printing that for the first time will make functional, usable modules that will go into it. A real moonshot, powered by 3D printing. How about food? What if we could, for the first time, make incredible delectables like this beautiful TED Teddy here, that are edible? What if we could completely change the experience, like you see with that absinthe serving that is completely 3D printed? And what if we could begin to put ingredients and colors and flavors in every taste, which means not only delicious foods but the promise of personalized nutrition around the corner? And that gets me to one of the biggest deals about 3D printing. With 3D printing, complexity is free. The printer doesn't care if it makes the most rudimentary shape or the most complex shape, and that is completely turning design and manufacturing on its head as we know it. Many people think that 3D printing will be the end of manufacturing as we know it. I think that it's the opportunity to put tomorrow's technology in the hands of youngsters that will create endless abundance of job opportunities, and with that, everybody can become an expert maker and an expert manufacturer. That will take new tools. Not everybody knows how to use CAD, so we're developing haptics, perceptual devices that will allow you to touch and feel your designs as if you play with digital clay. When you do things like that, and we also developed things that take physical photographs that are instantly printable, it will make it easier to create content, but with all of the unimagined, we will also have the unintended, like democratized counterfeiting and ubiquitous illegal possession. So many people ask me, will we have a 3D printer in every home? I think it's the wrong question to ask. The right question to ask is, how will 3D printing change my life? Or, in other words, what room in my house will 3D printing fit in? So everything that you see here has been 3D printed, including these shoes at the Amsterdam fashion show. Now, these are not my grandfather's shoes. These are shoes that represent the continuation of his passion for hyper-local manufacturing. My grandfather didn't get to see Nike printing cleats for the recent Super Bowl, and my father didn't get to see me standing in my hybridized 3D printed shoes. He passed away three years ago. But Chuck Hull, the man that invented it all, is right here in the house today, and thanks to him, I can say, thanks to his invention, I can say that I am a cobbler too, and by standing in these shoes I am honoring my past while manufacturing the future. Thank you. (Applause)

Hi everybody. So my name is Mac. My job is that I lie to children, but they're honest lies. I write children's books, and there's a quote from Pablo Picasso, "We all know that Art is not truth. Art is a lie that makes us realize truth or at least the truth that is given us to understand. The artist must know the manner whereby to convince others of the truthfulness of his lies." I first heard this when I was a kid, and I loved it, but I had no idea what it meant. (Laughter) So I thought, you know what, it's what I'm here to talk to you today about, though, truth and lies, fiction and reality. So how could I untangle this knotted bunch of sentences? And I said, I've got PowerPoint. Let's do a Venn diagram. ["Truth. Lies."] (Laughter) So there it is, right there, boom. We've got truth and lies and then there's this little space, the edge, in the middle. That liminal space, that's art. All right. Venn diagram. (Laughter) (Applause) But that's actually not very helpful either. The thing that made me understand that quote and really kind of what art, at least the art of fiction, was, was working with kids. I used to be a summer camp counselor. I would do it on my summers off from college, and I loved it. It was a sports summer camp for four- to six-year-olds. I was in charge of the four-year-olds, which is good, because four-year-olds can't play sports, and neither can I. (Laughter) I play sports at a four-year-old level, so what would happen is the kids would dribble around some cones, and then got hot, and then they would go sit underneath the tree where I was already sitting — (Laughter) — and I would just make up stories and tell them to them and I would tell them stories about my life. I would tell them about how, on the weekends, I would go home and I would spy for the Queen of England. And soon, other kids who weren't even in my group of kids, they would come up to me, and they would say, "You're Mac Barnett, right? You're the guy who spies for the Queen of England." And I had been waiting my whole life for strangers to come up and ask me that question. In my fantasy, they were svelte Russian women, but, you know, four-year-olds — you take what you can get in Berkeley, California. And I realized that the stories that I was telling were real in this way that was familiar to me and really exciting. I think the pinnacle of this for me — I'll never forget this — there was this little girl named Riley. She was tiny, and she used to always take out her lunch every day and she would throw out her fruit. She would just take her fruit, her mom packed her a melon every day, and she would just throw it in the ivy and then she would eat fruit snacks and pudding cups, and I was like, "Riley, you can't do that, you have to eat the fruit." And she was like, "Why?" And I was like, "Well, when you throw the fruit in the ivy, pretty soon, it's going to be overgrown with melons," which is why I think I ended up telling stories to children and not being a nutritionist for children. And so Riley was like, "That will never happen. That's not going to happen." And so, on the last day of camp, I got up early and I got a big cantaloupe from the grocery store and I hid it in the ivy, and then at lunchtime, I was like, "Riley, why don't you go over there and see what you've done." And — (Laughter) — she went trudging through the ivy, and then her eyes just got so wide, and she pointed out this melon that was bigger than her head, and then all the kids ran over there and rushed around her, and one of the kids was like, "Hey, why is there a sticker on this?" (Laughter) And I was like, "That is also why I say do not throw your stickers in the ivy. Put them in the trash can. It ruins nature when you do this." And Riley carried that melon around with her all day, and she was so proud. And Riley knew she didn't grow a melon in seven days, but she also knew that she did, and it's a weird place, but it's not just a place that kids can get to. It's anything. Art can get us to that place. She was right in that place in the middle, that place which you could call art or fiction. I'm going to call it wonder. It's what Coleridge called the willing suspension of disbelief or poetic faith, for those moments where a story, no matter how strange, has some semblance of the truth, and then you're able to believe it. It's not just kids who can get there. Adults can too, and we get there when we read. It's why in two days, people will be descending on Dublin to take the walking tour of Bloomsday and see everything that happened in "Ulysses," even though none of that happened. Or people go to London and they visit Baker Street to see Sherlock Holmes' apartment, even though 221B is just a number that was painted on a building that never actually had that address. We know these characters aren't real, but we have real feelings about them, and we're able to do that. We know these characters aren't real, and yet we also know that they are. Kids can get there a lot more easily than adults can, and that's why I love writing for kids. I think kids are the best audience for serious literary fiction. When I was a kid, I was obsessed with secret door novels, things like "Narnia," where you would open a wardrobe and go through to a magical land. And I was convinced that secret doors really did exist and I would look for them and try to go through them. I wanted to live and cross over into that fictional world, which is — I would always just open people's closet doors. (Laughter) I would just go through my mom's boyfriend's closet, and there was not a secret magical land there. There was some other weird stuff that I think my mom should know about. (Laughter) And I was happy to tell her all about it. After college, my first job was working behind one of these secret doors. This is a place called 826 Valencia. It's at 826 Valencia Street in the Mission in San Francisco, and when I worked there, there was a publishing company headquartered there called McSweeney's, a nonprofit writing center called 826 Valencia, but then the front of it was a strange shop. You see, this place was zoned retail, and in San Francisco, they were not going to give us a variance, and so the writer who founded it, a writer named Dave Eggers, to come into compliance with code, he said, "Fine, I'm just going to build a pirate supply store." And that's what he did. (Laughter) And it's beautiful. It's all wood. There's drawers you can pull out and get citrus so you don't get scurvy. They have eyepatches in lots of colors, because when it's springtime, pirates want to go wild. You don't know. Black is boring. Pastel. Or eyes, also in lots of colors, just glass eyes, depending on how you want to deal with that situation. And the store, strangely, people came to them and bought things, and they ended up paying the rent for our tutoring center, which was behind it, but to me, more important was the fact that I think the quality of work you do, kids would come and get instruction in writing, and when you have to walk this weird, liminal, fictional space like this to go do your writing, it's going to affect the kind of work that you make. It's a secret door that you can walk through. So I ran the 826 in Los Angeles, and it was my job to build the store down there. So we have The Echo Park Time Travel Mart. That's our motto: "Whenever you are, we're already then." (Laughter) And it's on Sunset Boulevard in Los Angeles. Our friendly staff is ready to help you. They're from all eras, including just the 1980s, that guy on the end, he's from the very recent past. There's our Employees of the Month, including Genghis Khan, Charles Dickens. Some great people have come up through our ranks. This is our kind of pharmacy section. We have some patent medicines, Canopic jars for your organs, communist soap that says, "This is your soap for the year." (Laughter) Our slushy machine broke on the opening night and we didn't know what to do. Our architect was covered in red syrup. It looked like he had just murdered somebody, which it was not out of the question for this particular architect, and we didn't know what to do. It was going to be the highlight of our store. So we just put that sign on it that said, "Out of order. Come back yesterday." (Laughter) And that ended up being a better joke than slushies, so we just left it there forever. Mammoth Chunks. These things weigh, like, seven pounds each. Barbarian repellent. It's full of salad and potpourri — things that barbarians hate. Dead languages. (Laughter) Leeches, nature's tiny doctors. And Viking Odorant, which comes in lots of great scents: toenails, sweat and rotten vegetables, pyre ash. Because we believe that Axe Body Spray is something that you should only find on the battlefield, not under your arms. (Laughter) And these are robot emotion chips, so robots can feel love or fear. Our biggest seller is Schadenfreude, which we did not expect. (Laughter) We did not think that was going to happen. But there's a nonprofit behind it, and kids go through a door that says "Employees Only" and they end up in this space where they do homework and write stories and make films and this is a book release party where kids will read. There's a quarterly that's published with just writing that's done by the kids who come every day after school, and we have release parties and they eat cake and read for their parents and drink milk out of champagne glasses. And it's a very special space, because it's this weird space in the front. The joke isn't a joke. You can't find the seams on the fiction, and I love that. It's this little bit of fiction that's colonized the real world. I see it as kind of a book in three dimensions. There's a term called metafiction, and that's just stories about stories, and meta's having a moment now. Its last big moment was probably in the 1960s with novelists like John Barth and William Gaddis, but it's been around. It's almost as old as storytelling itself. And one metafictive technique is breaking the fourth wall. Right? It's when an actor will turn to the audience and say, "I am an actor, these are just rafters." And even that supposedly honest moment, I would argue, is in service of the lie, but it's supposed to foreground the artificiality of the fiction. For me, I kind of prefer the opposite. If I'm going to break down the fourth wall, I want fiction to escape and come into the real world. I want a book to be a secret door that opens and lets the stories out into reality. And so I try to do this in my books. And here's just one example. This is the first book that I ever made. It's called "Billy Twitters and his Blue Whale Problem." And it's about a kid who gets a blue whale as a pet but it's a punishment and it ruins his life. So it's delivered overnight by FedUp. (Laughter) And he has to take it to school with him. He lives in San Francisco — very tough city to own a blue whale in. A lot of hills, real estate is at a premium. This market's crazy, everybody. But underneath the jacket is this case, and that's the cover underneath the book, the jacket, and there's an ad that offers a free 30-day risk-free trial for a blue whale. And you can just send in a self-addressed stamped envelope and we'll send you a whale. And kids do write in. So here's a letter. It says, "Dear people, I bet you 10 bucks you won't send me a blue whale. Eliot Gannon (age 6)." (Laughter) (Applause) So what Eliot and the other kids who send these in get back is a letter in very small print from a Norwegian law firm — (Laughter) — that says that due to a change in customs laws, their whale has been held up in Sognefjord, which is a very lovely fjord, and then it just kind of talks about Sognefjord and Norwegian food for a little while. It digresses. (Laughter) But it finishes off by saying that your whale would love to hear from you. He's got a phone number, and you can call and leave him a message. And when you call and leave him a message, you just, on the outgoing message, it's just whale sounds and then a beep, which actually sounds a lot like a whale sound. And they get a picture of their whale too. So this is Randolph, and Randolph belongs to a kid named Nico who was one of the first kids to ever call in, and I'll play you some of Nico's message. This is the first message I ever got from Nico. (Audio) Nico: Hello, this is Nico. I am your owner, Randolph. Hello. So this is the first time I can ever talk to you, and I might talk to you soon another day. Bye. Mac Barnett: So Nico called back, like, an hour later. (Laughter) And here's another one of Nico's messages. (Audio) Nico: Hello, Randolph, this is Nico. I haven't talked to you for a long time, but I talked to you on Saturday or Sunday, yeah, Saturday or Sunday, so now I'm calling you again to say hello and I wonder what you're doing right now, and I'm going to probably call you again tomorrow or today, so I'll talk to you later. Bye. MB: So he did, he called back that day again. He's left over 25 messages for Randolph over four years. You find out all about him and the grandma that he loves and the grandma that he likes a little bit less — (Laughter) — and the crossword puzzles that he does, and this is — I'll play you one more message from Nico. This is the Christmas message from Nico. [Beep] (Audio) Nico: Hello, Randolph, sorry I haven't talked to you in a long time. It's just that I've been so busy because school started, as you might not know, probably, since you're a whale, you don't know, and I'm calling you to just say, to wish you a merry Christmas. So have a nice Christmas, and bye-bye, Randolph. Goodbye. MB: I actually got Nico, I hadn't heard from in 18 months, and he just left a message two days ago. His voice is completely different, but he put his babysitter on the phone, and she was very nice to Randolph as well. But Nico's the best reader I could hope for. I would want anyone I was writing for to be in that place emotionally with the things that I create. I feel lucky. Kids like Nico are the best readers, and they deserve the best stories we can give them. Thank you very much. (Applause)

So in 1781, an English composer, technologist and astronomer called William Herschel noticed an object on the sky that didn't quite move the way the rest of the stars did. And Herschel's recognition that something was different, that something wasn't quite right, was the discovery of a planet, the planet Uranus, a name that has entertained countless generations of children, but a planet that overnight doubled the size of our known solar system. Just last month, NASA announced the discovery of 517 new planets in orbit around nearby stars, almost doubling overnight the number of planets we know about within our galaxy. So astronomy is constantly being transformed by this capacity to collect data, and with data almost doubling every year, within the next two decades, me may even reach the point for the first time in history where we've discovered the majority of the galaxies within the universe. But as we enter this era of big data, what we're beginning to find is there's a difference between more data being just better and more data being different, capable of changing the questions we want to ask, and this difference is not about how much data we collect, it's whether those data open new windows into our universe, whether they change the way we view the sky. So what is the next window into our universe? What is the next chapter for astronomy? Well, I'm going to show you some of the tools and the technologies that we're going to develop over the next decade, and how these technologies, together with the smart use of data, may once again transform astronomy by opening up a window into our universe, the window of time. Why time? Well, time is about origins, and it's about evolution. The origins of our solar system, how our solar system came into being, is it unusual or special in any way? About the evolution of our universe. Why our universe is continuing to expand, and what is this mysterious dark energy that drives that expansion? But first, I want to show you how technology is going to change the way we view the sky. So imagine if you were sitting in the mountains of northern Chile looking out to the west towards the Pacific Ocean a few hours before sunrise. This is the view of the night sky that you would see, and it's a beautiful view, with the Milky Way just peeking out over the horizon. but it's also a static view, and in many ways, this is the way we think of our universe: eternal and unchanging. But the universe is anything but static. It constantly changes on timescales of seconds to billions of years. Galaxies merge, they collide at hundreds of thousands of miles per hour. Stars are born, they die, they explode in these extravagant displays. In fact, if we could go back to our tranquil skies above Chile, and we allow time to move forward to see how the sky might change over the next year, the pulsations that you see are supernovae, the final remnants of a dying star exploding, brightening and then fading from view, each one of these supernovae five billion times the brightness of our sun, so we can see them to great distances but only for a short amount of time. Ten supernova per second explode somewhere in our universe. If we could hear it, it would be popping like a bag of popcorn. Now, if we fade out the supernovae, it's not just brightness that changes. Our sky is in constant motion. This swarm of objects you see streaming across the sky are asteroids as they orbit our sun, and it's these changes and the motion and it's the dynamics of the system that allow us to build our models for our universe, to predict its future and to explain its past. But the telescopes we've used over the last decade are not designed to capture the data at this scale. The Hubble Space Telescope: for the last 25 years it's been producing some of the most detailed views of our distant universe, but if you tried to use the Hubble to create an image of the sky, it would take 13 million individual images, about 120 years to do this just once. So this is driving us to new technologies and new telescopes, telescopes that can go faint to look at the distant universe but also telescopes that can go wide to capture the sky as rapidly as possible, telescopes like the Large Synoptic Survey Telescope, or the LSST, possibly the most boring name ever for one of the most fascinating experiments in the history of astronomy, in fact proof, if you should need it, that you should never allow a scientist or an engineer to name anything, not even your children. (Laughter) We're building the LSST. We expect it to start taking data by the end of this decade. I'm going to show you how we think it's going to transform our views of the universe, because one image from the LSST is equivalent to 3,000 images from the Hubble Space Telescope, each image three and a half degrees on the sky, seven times the width of the full moon. Well, how do you capture an image at this scale? Well, you build the largest digital camera in history, using the same technology you find in the cameras in your cell phone or in the digital cameras you can buy in the High Street, but now at a scale that is five and a half feet across, about the size of a Volkswagen Beetle, where one image is three billion pixels. So if you wanted to look at an image in its full resolution, just a single LSST image, it would take about 1,500 high-definition TV screens. And this camera will image the sky, taking a new picture every 20 seconds, constantly scanning the sky so every three nights, we'll get a completely new view of the skies above Chile. Over the mission lifetime of this telescope, it will detect 40 billion stars and galaxies, and that will be for the first time we'll have detected more objects in our universe than people on the Earth. Now, we can talk about this in terms of terabytes and petabytes and billions of objects, but a way to get a sense of the amount of data that will come off this camera is that it's like playing every TED Talk ever recorded simultaneously, 24 hours a day, seven days a week, for 10 years. And to process this data means searching through all of those talks for every new idea and every new concept, looking at each part of the video to see how one frame may have changed from the next. And this is changing the way that we do science, changing the way that we do astronomy, to a place where software and algorithms have to mine through this data, where the software is as critical to the science as the telescopes and the cameras that we've built. Now, thousands of discoveries will come from this project, but I'm just going to tell you about two of the ideas about origins and evolution that may be transformed by our access to data at this scale. In the last five years, NASA has discovered over 1,000 planetary systems around nearby stars, but the systems we're finding aren't much like our own solar system, and one of the questions we face is is it just that we haven't been looking hard enough or is there something special or unusual about how our solar system formed? And if we want to answer that question, we have to know and understand the history of our solar system in detail, and it's the details that are crucial. So now, if we look back at the sky, at our asteroids that were streaming across the sky, these asteroids are like the debris of our solar system. The positions of the asteroids are like a fingerprint of an earlier time when the orbits of Neptune and Jupiter were much closer to the sun, and as these giant planets migrated through our solar system, they were scattering the asteroids in their wake. So studying the asteroids is like performing forensics, performing forensics on our solar system, but to do this, we need distance, and we get the distance from the motion, and we get the motion because of our access to time. So what does this tell us? Well, if you look at the little yellow asteroids flitting across the screen, these are the asteroids that are moving fastest, because they're closest to us, closest to Earth. These are the asteroids we may one day send spacecraft to, to mine them for minerals, but they're also the asteroids that may one day impact the Earth, like happened 60 million years ago with the extinction of the dinosaurs, or just at the beginning of the last century, when an asteroid wiped out almost 1,000 square miles of Siberian forest, or even just last year, as one burnt up over Russia, releasing the energy of a small nuclear bomb. So studying the forensics of our solar system doesn't just tell us about the past, it can also predict the future, including our future. Now when we get distance, we get to see the asteroids in their natural habitat, in orbit around the sun. So every point in this visualization that you can see is a real asteroid. Its orbit has been calculated from its motion across the sky. The colors reflect the composition of these asteroids, dry and stony in the center, water-rich and primitive towards the edge, water-rich asteroids which may have seeded the oceans and the seas that we find on our planet when they bombarded the Earth at an earlier time. Because the LSST will be able to go faint and not just wide, we will be able to see these asteroids far beyond the inner part of our solar system, to asteroids beyond the orbits of Neptune and Mars, to comets and asteroids that may exist almost a light year from our sun. And as we increase the detail of this picture, increasing the detail by factors of 10 to 100, we will be able to answer questions such as, is there evidence for planets outside the orbit of Neptune, to find Earth-impacting asteroids long before they're a danger, and to find out whether, maybe, our sun formed on its own or in a cluster of stars, and maybe it's this sun's stellar siblings that influenced the formation of our solar system, and maybe that's one of the reasons why solar systems like ours seem to be so rare. Now, distance and changes in our universe — distance equates to time, as well as changes on the sky. Every foot of distance you look away, or every foot of distance an object is away, you're looking back about a billionth of a second in time, and this idea or this notion of looking back in time has revolutionized our ideas about the universe, not once but multiple times. The first time was in 1929, when an astronomer called Edwin Hubble showed that the universe was expanding, leading to the ideas of the Big Bang. And the observations were simple: just 24 galaxies and a hand-drawn picture. But just the idea that the more distant a galaxy, the faster it was receding, was enough to give rise to modern cosmology. A second revolution happened 70 years later, when two groups of astronomers showed that the universe wasn't just expanding, it was accelerating, a surprise like throwing up a ball into the sky and finding out the higher that it gets, the faster it moves away. And they showed this by measuring the brightness of supernovae, and how the brightness of the supernovae got fainter with distance. And these observations were more complex. They required new technologies and new telescopes, because the supernovae were in galaxies that were 2,000 times more distant than the ones used by Hubble. And it took three years to find just 42 supernovae, because a supernova only explodes once every hundred years within a galaxy. Three years to find 42 supernovae by searching through tens of thousands of galaxies. And once they'd collected their data, this is what they found. Now, this may not look impressive, but this is what a revolution in physics looks like: a line predicting the brightness of a supernova 11 billion light years away, and a handful of points that don't quite fit that line. Small changes give rise to big consequences. Small changes allow us to make discoveries, like the planet found by Herschel. Small changes turn our understanding of the universe on its head. So 42 supernovae, slightly too faint, meaning slightly further away, requiring that a universe must not just be expanding, but this expansion must be accelerating, revealing a component of our universe which we now call dark energy, a component that drives this expansion and makes up 68 percent of the energy budget of our universe today. So what is the next revolution likely to be? Well, what is dark energy and why does it exist? Each of these lines shows a different model for what dark energy might be, showing the properties of dark energy. They all are consistent with the 42 points, but the ideas behind these lines are dramatically different. Some people think about a dark energy that changes with time, or whether the properties of the dark energy are different depending on where you look on the sky. Others make differences and changes to the physics at the sub-atomic level. Or, they look at large scales and change how gravity and general relativity work, or they say our universe is just one of many, part of this mysterious multiverse, but all of these ideas, all of these theories, amazing and admittedly some of them a little crazy, but all of them consistent with our 42 points. So how can we hope to make sense of this over the next decade? Well, imagine if I gave you a pair of dice, and I said you wanted to see whether those dice were loaded or fair. One roll of the dice would tell you very little, but the more times you rolled them, the more data you collected, the more confident you would become, not just whether they're loaded or fair, but by how much, and in what way. It took three years to find just 42 supernovae because the telescopes that we built could only survey a small part of the sky. With the LSST, we get a completely new view of the skies above Chile every three nights. In its first night of operation, it will find 10 times the number of supernovae used in the discovery of dark energy. This will increase by 1,000 within the first four months: 1.5 million supernovae by the end of its survey, each supernova a roll of the dice, each supernova testing which theories of dark energy are consistent, and which ones are not. And so, by combining these supernova data with other measures of cosmology, we'll progressively rule out the different ideas and theories of dark energy until hopefully at the end of this survey around 2030, we would expect to hopefully see a theory for our universe, a fundamental theory for the physics of our universe, to gradually emerge. Now, in many ways, the questions that I posed are in reality the simplest of questions. We may not know the answers, but we at least know how to ask the questions. But if looking through tens of thousands of galaxies revealed 42 supernovae that turned our understanding of the universe on its head, when we're working with billions of galaxies, how many more times are we going to find 42 points that don't quite match what we expect? Like the planet found by Herschel or dark energy or quantum mechanics or general relativity, all ideas that came because the data didn't quite match what we expected. What's so exciting about the next decade of data in astronomy is, we don't even know how many answers are out there waiting, answers about our origins and our evolution. How many answers are out there that we don't even know the questions that we want to ask? Thank you. (Applause)

For over a decade as a doctor, I've cared for homeless veterans, for working-class families. I've cared for people who live and work in conditions that can be hard, if not harsh, and that work has led me to believe that we need a fundamentally different way of looking at healthcare. We simply need a healthcare system that moves beyond just looking at the symptoms that bring people into clinics, but instead actually is able to look and improve health where it begins. And where health begins is not in the four walls of a doctor's office, but where we live and where we work, where we eat, sleep, learn and play, where we spend the majority of our lives. So what does this different approach to healthcare look like, an approach that can improve health where it begins? To illustrate this, I'll tell you about Veronica. Veronica was the 17th patient out of my 26-patient day at that clinic in South Central Los Angeles. She came into our clinic with a chronic headache. This headache had been going on for a number of years, and this particular episode was very, very troubling. In fact, three weeks before she came to visit us for the first time, she went to an emergency room in Los Angeles. The emergency room doctors said, "We've run some tests, Veronica. The results are normal, so here's some pain medication, and follow up with a primary care doctor, but if the pain persists or if it worsens, then come on back." Veronica followed those standard instructions and she went back. She went back not just once, but twice more. In the three weeks before Veronica met us, she went to the emergency room three times. She went back and forth, in and out of hospitals and clinics, just like she had done in years past, trying to seek relief but still coming up short. Veronica came to our clinic, and despite all these encounters with healthcare professionals, Veronica was still sick. When she came to our clinic, though, we tried a different approach. Our approach started with our medical assistant, someone who had a GED-level training but knew the community. Our medical assistant asked some routine questions. She asked, "What's your chief complaint?" "Headache." "Let's get your vital signs" — measure your blood pressure and your heart rate, but let's also ask something equally as vital to Veronica and a lot of patients like her in South Los Angeles. "Veronica, can you tell me about where you live? Specifically, about your housing conditions? Do you have mold? Do you have water leaks? Do you have roaches in your home?" Turns out, Veronica said yes to three of those things: roaches, water leaks, mold. I received that chart in hand, reviewed it, and I turned the handle on the door and I entered the room. You should understand that Veronica, like a lot of patients that I have the privilege of caring for, is a dignified person, a formidable presence, a personality that's larger than life, but here she was doubled over in pain sitting on my exam table. Her head, clearly throbbing, was resting in her hands. She lifted her head up, and I saw her face, said hello, and then I immediately noticed something across the bridge of her nose, a crease in her skin. In medicine, we call that crease the allergic salute. It's usually seen among children who have chronic allergies. It comes from chronically rubbing one's nose up and down, trying to get rid of those allergy symptoms, and yet, here was Veronica, a grown woman, with the same telltale sign of allergies. A few minutes later, in asking Veronica some questions, and examining her and listening to her, I said, "Veronica, I think I know what you have. I think you have chronic allergies, and I think you have migraine headaches and some sinus congestion, and I think all of those are related to where you live." She looked a little bit relieved, because for the first time, she had a diagnosis, but I said, "Veronica, now let's talk about your treatment. We're going to order some medications for your symptoms, but I also want to refer you to a specialist, if that's okay." Now, specialists are a little hard to find in South Central Los Angeles, so she gave me this look, like, "Really?" And I said, "Veronica, actually, the specialist I'm talking about is someone I call a community health worker, someone who, if it's okay with you, can come to your home and try to understand what's going on with those water leaks and that mold, trying to help you manage those conditions in your housing that I think are causing your symptoms, and if required, that specialist might refer you to another specialist that we call a public interest lawyer, because it might be that your landlord isn't making the fixes he's required to make." Veronica came back in a few months later. She agreed to all of those treatment plans. She told us that her symptoms had improved by 90 percent. She was spending more time at work and with her family and less time shuttling back and forth between the emergency rooms of Los Angeles. Veronica had improved remarkably. Her sons, one of whom had asthma, were no longer as sick as they used to be. She had gotten better, and not coincidentally, Veronica's home was better too. What was it about this different approach we tried that led to better care, fewer visits to the E.R., better health? Well, quite simply, it started with that question: "Veronica, where do you live?" But more importantly, it was that we put in place a system that allowed us to routinely ask questions to Veronica and hundreds more like her about the conditions that mattered in her community, about where health, and unfortunately sometimes illness, do begin in places like South L.A. In that community, substandard housing and food insecurity are the major conditions that we as a clinic had to be aware of, but in other communities it could be transportation barriers, obesity, access to parks, gun violence. The important thing is, we put in place a system that worked, and it's an approach that I call an upstream approach. It's a term many of you are familiar with. It comes from a parable that's very common in the public health community. This is a parable of three friends. Imagine that you're one of these three friends who come to a river. It's a beautiful scene, but it's shattered by the cries of a child, and actually several children, in need of rescue in the water. So you do hopefully what everybody would do. You jump right in along with your friends. The first friend says, I'm going to rescue those who are about to drown, those at most risk of falling over the waterfall. The second friends says, I'm going to build a raft. I'm going to make sure that fewer people need to end up at the waterfall's edge. Let's usher more people to safety by building this raft, coordinating those branches together. Over time, they're successful, but not really, as much as they want to be. More people slip through, and they finally look up and they see that their third friend is nowhere to be seen. They finally spot her. She's in the water. She's swimming away from them upstream, rescuing children as she goes, and they shout to her, "Where are you going? There are children here to save." And she says back, "I'm going to find out who or what is throwing these children in the water." In healthcare, we have that first friend — we have the specialist, we have the trauma surgeon, the ICU nurse, the E.R. doctors. We have those people that are vital rescuers, people you want to be there when you're in dire straits. We also know that we have the second friend — we have that raft-builder. That's the primary care clinician, people on the care team who are there to manage your chronic conditions, your diabetes, your hypertension, there to give you your annual checkups, there to make sure your vaccines are up to date, but also there to make sure that you have a raft to sit on and usher yourself to safety. But while that's also vital and very necessary, what we're missing is that third friend. We don't have enough of that upstreamist. The upstreamists are the health care professionals who know that health does begin where we live and work and play, but beyond that awareness, is able to mobilize the resources to create the system in their clinics and in their hospitals that really does start to approach that, to connect people to the resources they need outside the four walls of the clinic. Now you might ask, and it's a very obvious question that a lot of colleagues in medicine ask: "Doctors and nurses thinking about transportation and housing? Shouldn't we just provide pills and procedures and just make sure we focus on the task at hand?" Certainly, rescuing people at the water's edge is important enough work. Who has the time? I would argue, though, that if we were to use science as our guide, that we would find an upstream approach is absolutely necessary. Scientists now know that the living and working conditions that we all are part of have more than twice the impact on our health than does our genetic code, and living and working conditions, the structures of our environments, the ways in which our social fabric is woven together, and the impact those have on our behaviors, all together, those have more than five times the impact on our health than do all the pills and procedures administered by doctors and hospitals combined. All together, living and working conditions account for 60 percent of preventable death. Let me give you an example of what this feels like. Let's say there was a company, a tech startup that came to you and said, "We have a great product. It's going to lower your risk of death from heart disease." Now, you might be likely to invest if that product was a drug or a device, but what if that product was a park? A study in the U.K., a landmark study that reviewed the records of over 40 million residents in the U.K., looked at several variables, controlled for a lot of factors, and found that when trying to adjust the risk of heart disease, one's exposure to green space was a powerful influence. The closer you were to green space, to parks and trees, the lower your chance of heart disease, and that stayed true for rich and for poor. That study illustrates what my friends in public health often say these days: that one's zip code matters more than your genetic code. We're also learning that zip code is actually shaping our genetic code. The science of epigenetics looks at those molecular mechanisms, those intricate ways in which our DNA is literally shaped, genes turned on and off based on the exposures to the environment, to where we live and to where we work. So it's clear that these factors, these upstream issues, do matter. They matter to our health, and therefore our healthcare professionals should do something about it. And yet, Veronica asked me perhaps the most compelling question I've been asked in a long time. In that follow-up visit, she said, "Why did none of my doctors ask about my home before? In those visits to the emergency room, I had two CAT scans, I had a needle placed in the lower part of my back to collect spinal fluid, I had nearly a dozen blood tests. I went back and forth, I saw all sorts of people in healthcare, and no one asked about my home." The honest answer is that in healthcare, we often treat symptoms without addressing the conditions that make you sick in the first place. And there are many reasons for that, but the big three are first, we don't pay for that. In healthcare, we often pay for volume and not value. We pay doctors and hospitals usually for the number of services they provide, but not necessarily on how healthy they make you. That leads to a second phenomenon that I call the "don't ask, don't tell" approach to upstream issues in healthcare. We don't ask about where you live and where you work, because if there's a problem there, we don't know what to tell you. It's not that doctors don't know these are important issues. In a recent survey done in the U.S. among physicians, over 1,000 physicians, 80 percent of them actually said that they know that their patients' upstream problems are as important as their health issues, as their medical problems, and yet despite that widespread awareness of the importance of upstream issues, only one in five doctors said they had any sense of confidence to address those issues, to improve health where it begins. There's this gap between knowing that patients' lives, the context of where they live and work, matters, and the ability to do something about it in the systems in which we work. This is a huge problem right now, because it leads them to this next question, which is, whose responsibility is it? And that brings me to that third point, that third answer to Veronica's compelling question. Part of the reason that we have this conundrum is because there are not nearly enough upstreamists in the healthcare system. There are not nearly enough of that third friend, that person who is going to find out who or what is throwing those kids in the water. Now, there are many upstreamists, and I've had the privilege of meeting many of them, in Los Angeles and in other parts of the country and around the world, and it's important to note that upstreamists sometimes are doctors, but they need not be. They can be nurses, other clinicians, care managers, social workers. It's not so important what specific degree upstreamists have at the end of their name. What's more important is that they all seem to share the same ability to implement a process that transforms their assistance, transforms the way they practice medicine. That process is a quite simple process. It's one, two and three. First, they sit down and they say, let's identify the clinical problem among a certain set of patients. Let's say, for instance, let's try to help children who are bouncing in and out of the hospital with asthma. After identifying the problem, they then move on to that second step, and they say, let's identify the root cause. Now, a root cause analysis, in healthcare, usually says, well, let's look at your genes, let's look at how you're behaving. Maybe you're not eating healthy enough. Eat healthier. It's a pretty simplistic approach to root cause analyses. It turns out, it doesn't really work when we just limit ourselves that worldview. The root cause analysis that an upstreamist brings to the table is to say, let's look at the living and the working conditions in your life. Perhaps, for children with asthma, it's what's happening in their home, or perhaps they live close to a freeway with major air pollution that triggers their asthma. And perhaps that's what we should mobilize our resources to address, because that third element, that third part of the process, is that next critical part of what upstreamists do. They mobilize the resources to create a solution, both within the clinical system, and then by bringing in people from public health, from other sectors, lawyers, whoever is willing to play ball, let's bring in to create a solution that makes sense, to take those patients who actually have clinical problems and address their root causes together by linking them to the resources you need. It's clear to me that there are so many stories of upstreamists who are doing remarkable things. The problem is that there's just not nearly enough of them out there. By some estimates, we need one upstreamist for every 20 to 30 clinicians in the healthcare system. In the U.S., for instance, that would mean that we need 25,000 upstreamists by the year 2020. But we only have a few thousand upstreamists out there right now, by all accounts, and that's why, a few years ago, my colleagues and I said, you know what, we need to train and make more upstreamists. So we decided to start an organization called Health Begins, and Health Begins simply does that: We train upstreamists. And there are a lot of measures that we use for our success, but the main thing that we're interested in is making sure that we're changing the sense of confidence, that "don't ask, don't tell" metric among clinicians. We're trying to make sure that clinicians, and therefore their systems that they work in have the ability, the confidence to address the problems in the living and working conditions in our lives. We're seeing nearly a tripling of that confidence in our work. It's remarkable, but I'll tell you the most compelling part of what it means to be working with upstreamists to gather them together. What is most compelling is that every day, every week, I hear stories just like Veronica's. There are stories out there of Veronica and many more like her, people who are coming to the healthcare system and getting a glimpse of what it feels like to be part of something that works, a health care system that stops bouncing you back and forth but actually improves your health, listens to you who you are, addresses the context of your life, whether you're rich or poor or middle class. These stories are compelling because not only do they tell us that we're this close to getting the healthcare system that we want, but that there's something that we can all do to get there. Doctors and nurses can get better at asking about the context of patients' lives, not simply because it's better bedside manner, but frankly, because it's a better standard of care. Healthcare systems and payers can start to bring in public health agencies and departments and say, let's look at our data together. Let's see if we can discover some patterns in our data about our patients' lives and see if we can identify an upstream cause, and then, as importantly, can we align the resources to be able to address them? Medical schools, nursing schools, all sorts of health professional education programs can help by training the next generation of upstreamists. We can also make sure that these schools certify a backbone of the upstream approach, and that's the community health worker. We need many more of them in the healthcare system if we're truly going to have it be effective, to move from a sickcare system to a healthcare system. But finally, and perhaps most importantly, what do we do? What do we do as patients? We can start by simply going to our doctors and our nurses, to our clinics, and asking, "Is there something in where I live and where I work that I should be aware of?" Are there barriers to health that I'm just not aware of, and more importantly, if there are barriers that I'm surfacing, if I'm coming to you and I'm saying I think have a problem with my apartment or at my workplace or I don't have access to transportation, or there's a park that's way too far, so sorry doctor, I can't take your advice to go and jog, if those problems exist, then doctor, are you willing to listen? And what can we do together to improve my health where it begins? If we're all able to do this work, doctors and healthcare systems, payers, and all of us together, we'll realize something about health. Health is not just a personal responsibility or phenomenon. Health is a common good. It comes from our personal investment in knowing that our lives matter, the context of where we live and where we work, eat, and sleep, matter, and that what we do for ourselves, we also should do for those whose living and working conditions again, can be hard, if not harsh. We can all invest in making sure that we improve the allocation of resources upstream, but at the same time work together and show that we can move healthcare upstream. We can improve health where it begins. Thank you. (Applause)

Good afternoon. My name is Uldus. I am a photo-based artist from Russia. I started my way around six years ago with ironic self-portraits to lay open so many stereotypes about nationalities, genders, and social issues — ["I am Russian. I sell drugs, guns, porno with kids!"] ["Vodka = water. I love vodka!"] (Laughter) — using photography as my tool to send a message. ["Marry me, I need a visa."] Today, I am still performing in front of the camera and trying to be brave like Wonder Woman. I focus on balancing meaningful message, aesthetic, beauty, composition, some irony, and artifacts. Today, I'm going to tell you about my project, which is named Desperate Romantics. They're my artifacts, or paintings from pre-Raphaelites Brotherhood England mid-19th century. I took the painting and gifted new, contemporary meaning talking about issues which are surrounding me in Russia, capturing people who are non-models but have an interesting story. This boy is a professional dancer, only 12 years old, but at secondary school, he hides his dancing classes and is wearing the mask of brutality, trying to be united with the rest of his classmates like a storm trooper has no personality. But this boy has goals and dreams but hides it to be socially accepted, because being different isn't easy, especially in Russia. Next portrait interpretation is metaphoric. And this is Nikita, a security guard from one of the bars in St. Petersburg. He likes to say, "You wouldn't like me when I'm angry," quoting Hulk from the movie, but I've never seen him angry. He hides his sensitivities and romantic side, because in Russia, among guys, that's not cool to be romantic, but it's cool to be surrounded with women and look like an aggressive hulk. (Laughter) Sometimes, in my project, I would take the painting and give it new meaning and new temptation about it. Sometimes, I would compare facial features and playing with words: irony, Iron Man, ironing man. (Laughter) Through the artifacts, I bring social issues which surround me in Russia into the conversation. Interesting fact about marriage in Russia, that most of the 18, 19-year-old girls are already ready, and dream to get married. We're taught from childhood, successful marriage means successful life, so most of the girls kind of fight to get a good husband. And what about me? I'm 27 years old. For Russian society, I'm an old maid and hopeless to ever get married. That's why you see me in a Mexican fighter mask, in the wedding dress, all desperate in my garden. But remember, irony is the key, and this is actually to motivate girls to fight for goals, for dreams, and change stereotypes. Be brave. Be ironic — it helps. Be funny and create some magic. (Applause)

Hans Rosling: I'm going to ask you three multiple choice questions. Use this device. Use this device to answer. The first question is, how did the number of deaths per year from natural disaster, how did that change during the last century? Did it more than double, did it remain about the same in the world as a whole, or did it decrease to less than half? Please answer A, B or C. I see lots of answers. This is much faster than I do it at universities. They are so slow. They keep thinking, thinking, thinking. Oh, very, very good. And we go to the next question. So how long did women 30 years old in the world go to school: seven years, five years or three years? A, B or C? Please answer. And we go to the next question. In the last 20 years, how did the percentage of people in the world who live in extreme poverty change? Extreme poverty — not having enough food for the day. Did it almost double, did it remain more or less the same, or did it halve? A, B or C? Now, answers. You see, deaths from natural disasters in the world, you can see it from this graph here, from 1900 to 2000. In 1900, there was about half a million people who died every year from natural disasters: floods, earthquakes, volcanic eruption, whatever, droughts. And then, how did that change? Gapminder asked the public in Sweden. This is how they answered. The Swedish public answered like this: Fifty percent thought it had doubled, 38 percent said it's more or less the same, 12 said it had halved. This is the best data from the disaster researchers, and it goes up and down, and it goes to the Second World War, and after that it starts to fall and it keeps falling and it's down to much less than half. The world has been much, much more capable as the decades go by to protect people from this, you know. So only 12 percent of the Swedes know this. So I went to the zoo and I asked the chimps. (Laughter) (Applause) The chimps don't watch the evening news, so the chimps, they choose by random, so the Swedes answer worse than random. Now how did you do? That's you. You were beaten by the chimps. (Laughter) But it was close. You were three times better than the Swedes, but that's not enough. You shouldn't compare yourself to Swedes. You must have higher ambitions in the world. Let's look at the next answer here: women in school. Here, you can see men went eight years. How long did women go to school? Well, we asked the Swedes like this, and that gives you a hint, doesn't it? The right answer is probably the one the fewest Swedes picked, isn't it? (Laughter) Let's see, let's see. Here we come. Yes, yes, yes, women have almost caught up. This is the U.S. public. And this is you. Here you come. Ooh. Well, congratulations, you're twice as good as the Swedes, but you don't need me — So how come? I think it's like this, that everyone is aware that there are countries and there are areas where girls have great difficulties. They are stopped when they go to school, and it's disgusting. But in the majority of the world, where most people in the world live, most countries, girls today go to school as long as boys, more or less. That doesn't mean that gender equity is achieved, not at all. They still are confined to terrible, terrible limitations, but schooling is there in the world today. Now, we miss the majority. When you answer, you answer according to the worst places, and there you are right, but you miss the majority. What about poverty? Well, it's very clear that poverty here was almost halved, and in U.S., when we asked the public, only five percent got it right. And you? Ah, you almost made it to the chimps. (Laughter) (Applause) That little, just a few of you! There must be preconceived ideas, you know. And many in the rich countries, they think that oh, we can never end extreme poverty. Of course they think so, because they don't even know what has happened. The first thing to think about the future is to know about the present. These questions were a few of the first ones in the pilot phase of the Ignorance Project in Gapminder Foundation that we run, and it was started, this project, last year by my boss, and also my son, Ola Rosling. (Laughter) He's cofounder and director, and he wanted, Ola told me we have to be more systematic when we fight devastating ignorance. So already the pilots reveal this, that so many in the public score worse than random, so we have to think about preconceived ideas, and one of the main preconceived ideas is about world income distribution. Look here. This is how it was in 1975. It's the number of people on each income, from one dollar a day — (Applause) See, there was one hump here, around one dollar a day, and then there was one hump here somewhere between 10 and 100 dollars. The world was two groups. It was a camel world, like a camel with two humps, the poor ones and the rich ones, and there were fewer in between. But look how this has changed: As I go forward, what has changed, the world population has grown, and the humps start to merge. The lower humps merged with the upper hump, and the camel dies and we have a dromedary world with one hump only. The percent in poverty has decreased. Still it's appalling that so many remain in extreme poverty. We still have this group, almost a billion, over there, but that can be ended now. The challenge we have now is to get away from that, understand where the majority is, and that is very clearly shown in this question. We asked, what is the percentage of the world's one-year-old children who have got those basic vaccines against measles and other things that we have had for many years: 20, 50 or 80 percent? Now, this is what the U.S. public and the Swedish answered. Look at the Swedish result: you know what the right answer is. (Laughter) Who the heck is a professor of global health in that country? Well, it's me. It's me. (Laughter) It's very difficult, this. It's very difficult. (Applause) However, Ola's approach to really measure what we know made headlines, and CNN published these results on their web and they had the questions there, millions answered, and I think there were about 2,000 comments, and this was one of the comments. "I bet no member of the media passed the test," he said. So Ola told me, "Take these devices. You are invited to media conferences. Give it to them and measure what the media know." And ladies and gentlemen, for the first time, the informal results from a conference with U.S. media. And then, lately, from the European Union media. (Laughter) You see, the problem is not that people don't read and listen to the media. The problem is that the media doesn't know themselves. What shall we do about this, Ola? Do we have any ideas? (Applause) Ola Rosling: Yes, I have an idea, but first, I'm so sorry that you were beaten by the chimps. Fortunately, I will be able to comfort you by showing why it was not your fault, actually. Then, I will equip you with some tricks for beating the chimps in the future. That's basically what I will do. But first, let's look at why are we so ignorant, and it all starts in this place. It's Hudiksvall. It's a city in northern Sweden. It's a neighborhood where I grew up, and it's a neighborhood with a large problem. Actually, it has exactly the same problem which existed in all the neighborhoods where you grew up as well. It was not representative. Okay? It gave me a very biased view of how life is on this planet. So this is the first piece of the ignorance puzzle. We have a personal bias. We have all different experiences from communities and people we meet, and on top of this, we start school, and we add the next problem. Well, I like schools, but teachers tend to teach outdated worldviews, because they learned something when they went to school, and now they describe this world to the students without any bad intentions, and those books, of course, that are printed are outdated in a world that changes. And there is really no practice to keep the teaching material up to date. So that's what we are focusing on. So we have these outdated facts added on top of our personal bias. What happens next is news, okay? An excellent journalist knows how to pick the story that will make headlines, and people will read it because it's sensational. Unusual events are more interesting, no? And they are exaggerated, and especially things we're afraid of. A shark attack on a Swedish person will get headlines for weeks in Sweden. So these three skewed sources of information were really hard to get away from. They kind of bombard us and equip our mind with a lot of strange ideas, and on top of it we put the very thing that makes us humans, our human intuition. It was good in evolution. It helped us generalize and jump to conclusions very, very fast. It helped us exaggerate what we were afraid of, and we seek causality where there is none, and we then get an illusion of confidence where we believe that we are the best car drivers, above the average. Everybody answered that question, "Yeah, I drive cars better." Okay, this was good evolutionarily, but now when it comes to the worldview, it is the exact reason why it's upside down. The trends that are increasing are instead falling, and the other way around, and in this case, the chimps use our intuition against us, and it becomes our weakness instead of our strength. It was supposed to be our strength, wasn't it? So how do we solve such problems? First, we need to measure it, and then we need to cure it. So by measuring it we can understand what is the pattern of ignorance. We started the pilot last year, and now we're pretty sure that we will encounter a lot of ignorance across the whole world, and the idea is really to scale it up to all domains or dimensions of global development, such as climate, endangered species, human rights, gender equality, energy, finance. All different sectors have facts, and there are organizations trying to spread awareness about these facts. So I've started actually contacting some of them, like WWF and Amnesty International and UNICEF, and asking them, what are your favorite facts which you think the public doesn't know? Okay, I gather those facts. Imagine a long list with, say, 250 facts. And then we poll the public and see where they score worst. So we get a shorter list with the terrible results, like some few examples from Hans, and we have no problem finding these kinds of terrible results. Okay, this little shortlist, what are we going to do with it? Well, we turn it into a knowledge certificate, a global knowledge certificate, which you can use, if you're a large organization, a school, a university, or maybe a news agency, to certify yourself as globally knowledgeable. Basically meaning, we don't hire people who score like chimpanzees. Of course you shouldn't. So maybe 10 years from now, if this project succeeds, you will be sitting in an interview having to fill out this crazy global knowledge. So now we come to the practical tricks. How are you going to succeed? There is, of course, one way, which is to sit down late nights and learn all the facts by heart by reading all these reports. That will never happen, actually. Not even Hans thinks that's going to happen. People don't have that time. People like shortcuts, and here are the shortcuts. We need to turn our intuition into strength again. We need to be able to generalize. So now I'm going to show you some tricks where the misconceptions are turned around into rules of thumb. Let's start with the first misconception. This is very widespread. Everything is getting worse. You heard it. You thought it yourself. The other way to think is, most things improve. So you're sitting with a question in front of you and you're unsure. You should guess "improve." Okay? Don't go for the worse. That will help you score better on our tests. (Applause) That was the first one. There are rich and poor and the gap is increasing. It's a terrible inequality. Yeah, it's an unequal world, but when you look at the data, it's one hump. Okay? If you feel unsure, go for "the most people are in the middle." That's going to help you get the answer right. Now, the next preconceived idea is first countries and people need to be very, very rich to get the social development like girls in school and be ready for natural disasters. No, no, no. That's wrong. Look: that huge hump in the middle already have girls in school. So if you are unsure, go for the "the majority already have this," like electricity and girls in school, these kinds of things. They're only rules of thumb, so of course they don't apply to everything, but this is how you can generalize. Let's look at the last one. If something, yes, this is a good one, sharks are dangerous. No — well, yes, but they are not so important in the global statistics, that is what I'm saying. I actually, I'm very afraid of sharks. So as soon as I see a question about things I'm afraid of, which might be earthquakes, other religions, maybe I'm afraid of terrorists or sharks, anything that makes me feel, assume you're going to exaggerate the problem. That's a rule of thumb. Of course there are dangerous things that are also great. Sharks kill very, very few. That's how you should think. With these four rules of thumb, you could probably answer better than the chimps, because the chimps cannot do this. They cannot generalize these kinds of rules. And hopefully we can turn your world around and we're going to beat the chimps. Okay? (Applause) That's a systematic approach. Now the question, is this important? Yeah, it's important to understand poverty, extreme poverty and how to fight it, and how to bring girls in school. When we realize that actually it's succeeding, we can understand it. But is it important for everyone else who cares about the rich end of this scale? I would say yes, extremely important, for the same reason. If you have a fact-based worldview of today, you might have a chance to understand what's coming next in the future. We're going back to these two humps in 1975. That's when I was born, and I selected the West. That's the current EU countries and North America. Let's now see how the rest and the West compares in terms of how rich you are. These are the people who can afford to fly abroad with an airplane for a vacation. In 1975, only 30 percent of them lived outside EU and North America. But this has changed, okay? So first, let's look at the change up till today, 2014. Today it's 50/50. The Western domination is over, as of today. That's nice. So what's going to happen next? Do you see the big hump? Did you see how it moved? I did a little experiment. I went to the IMF, International Monetary Fund, website. They have a forecast for the next five years of GDP per capita. So I can use that to go five years into the future, assuming the income inequality of each country is the same. I did that, but I went even further. I used those five years for the next 20 years with the same speed, just as an experiment what might actually happen. Let's move into the future. In 2020, it's 57 percent in the rest. In 2025, 63 percent. 2030, 68. And in 2035, the West is outnumbered in the rich consumer market. These are just projections of GDP per capita into the future. Seventy-three percent of the rich consumers are going to live outside North America and Europe. So yes, I think it's a good idea for a company to use this certificate to make sure to make fact- based decisions in the future. Thank you very much. (Applause) Bruno Giussani: Hans and Ola Rosling!

My dream is to build the world's first underground park in New York City. Now, why would someone want to build an underground park, and why in New York City? These three tough little buggers are, on the left, my grandmother, age five, and then her sister and brother, ages 11 and nine. This photo was taken just before they left from Italy to immigrate to the United States, just about a century ago. And like many immigrants at the time, they arrived on the Lower East Side in New York City and they encountered a crazy melting pot. What was amazing about their generation was that they were not only building new lives in this new, unfamiliar area, but they were also literally building the city. I've always been fascinated by those decades and by that history, and I would often beg my grandmother to tell me as many stories as possible about the old New York. But she would often just shrug it off, tell me to eat more meatballs, more pasta, and so I very rarely got any of the history that I wanted to hear about. The New York City that I encountered felt pretty built up. I always knew as a kid that I wanted to make a difference, and to somehow make the world more beautiful, more interesting and more just. I just didn't really know how. At first, I thought I wanted to go work abroad, so I took a job with UNICEF in Kenya. But it felt weird to me that I knew more about local Kenyan politics than the politics of my own hometown. I took a job with the City of New York, but very quickly felt frustrated with the slowness of government bureaucracy. I even took a job at Google, where very fast I drank the Kool-Aid and believed almost wholeheartedly that technology could solve all social problems. But I still didn't feel like I was making the world a better place. It was in 2009 that my friend and now business partner James Ramsey alerted me to the location of a pretty spectacular site, which is this. This is the former trolley terminal that was the depot for passengers traveling over the Williamsburg Bridge from Brooklyn to Manhattan, and it was open between 1908 and 1948, just around the time when my grandparents were living right in the area. And we learned also that the site was entirely abandoned in 1948. Fascinated by this discovery, we begged the authorities to draw us into the space, and we finally got a tour, and this is what we saw. Now, this photo doesn't really do it justice. It's kind of hard to imagine the unbelievably magical feeling that you have when you get in this space. It's a football field of unused land immediately below a very crowded area of the city, and it almost feels like you're Indiana Jones on an archaeological dig, and all the details are all still there. It's really pretty remarkable. Now, the site itself is located at the very heart of the Lower East Side, and today it still remains one of the most crowded neighborhoods in the city. New York City has two thirds the green space per resident as other big cities, and this neighborhood as one tenth the green space. So we immediately started thinking about how we could take this site and turn it into something that could be used for the public, but also could potentially even be green. Our plan, in a nutshell, is to draw natural sunlight underground using a simple system that harvests sunlight above the street, directs it below the city sidewalks, and would allow plants and trees to grow with the light that's directed underneath. With this approach, you could take a site that looks like this today and transform it into something that looks like this. In 2011, we first released some of these images, and what was funny was, a lot of people said to us, "Oh, it kind of looks like the High Line underground." And so what our nickname ended up becoming, and what ended up sticking, was the Lowline, so the Lowline was born. What was also clear was that people really wanted to know a lot more about how the technology would look and feel, and that there was really much more interest in this than we had ever thought possible. So, like a crazy person, I decided to quit my job and focus entirely on this project. Here is us with our team putting together a technology demonstration in a warehouse. Here's the underbelly of this solar canopy which we built to show the technology. You can see the six solar collectors at the center there. And here's the full exhibit all put together in this warehouse. You can see the solar canopy overhead, the light streaming in, and this entirely live green space below. So in the course of just a few weeks, tens of thousands of people came to see our exhibit, and since that time, we've grown our numbers of supporters both locally and among design enthusiasts all over the world. Here's a rendering of the neighborhood just immediately above the Line's site, and a rendering of how it will look after major redevelopment that is coming over the course of the next 10 years. Notice how crowded the neighborhood still feels and how there's really a lack of green space. So what we're proposing is really something that will add one football field of green space underneath this neighborhood, but more importantly will introduce a really community-driven focus in a rapidly gentrifying area. And right now, we're focusing very closely on how we engage with the City of New York on really transforming the overall ecosystem in an integrated way. Here's our rendering of how we would actually invite people into the space itself. So here you see this iconic entrance in which we would literally peel up the street and reveal the historical layers of the city, and invite people into this warm underground space. In the middle of winter, when it's absolutely freezing outside, the last place you'd want to go would be an outdoor space or outdoor park. The Lowline would really be a four-season space and a respite for the city. So I like to think that the Lowline actually brings my own family's story full circle. If my grandparents and my parents were really focused on building the city up and out, I think my generation is focused on reclaiming the spaces that we already have, rediscovering our shared history, and reimagining how we can make our communities more interesting, more beautiful and more just. Thanks. (Applause)

On November 5th, 1990, a man named El-Sayyid Nosair walked into a hotel in Manhattan and assassinated Rabbi Meir Kahane, the leader of the Jewish Defense League. Nosair was initially found not guilty of the murder, but while serving time on lesser charges, he and other men began planning attacks on a dozen New York City landmarks, including tunnels, synagogues and the United Nations headquarters. Thankfully, those plans were foiled by an FBI informant. Sadly, the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Center was not. Nosair would eventually be convicted for his involvement in the plot. El-Sayyid Nosair is my father. I was born in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania in 1983 to him, an Egyptian engineer, and a loving American mother and grade school teacher, who together tried their best to create a happy childhood for me. It wasn't until I was seven years old that our family dynamic started to change. My father exposed me to a side of Islam that few people, including the majority of Muslims, get to see. It's been my experience that when people take the time to interact with one another, it doesn't take long to realize that for the most part, we all want the same things out of life. However, in every religion, in every population, you'll find a small percentage of people who hold so fervently to their beliefs that they feel they must use any means necessary to make others live as they do. A few months prior to his arrest, he sat me down and explained that for the past few weekends, he and some friends had been going to a shooting range on Long Island for target practice. He told me I'd be going with him the next morning. We arrived at Calverton Shooting Range, which unbeknownst to our group was being watched by the FBI. When it was my turn to shoot, my father helped me hold the rifle to my shoulder and explained how to aim at the target about 30 yards off. That day, the last bullet I shot hit the small orange light that sat on top of the target and to everyone's surprise, especially mine, the entire target burst into flames. My uncle turned to the other men, and in Arabic said, "Ibn abuh." Like father, like son. They all seemed to get a really big laugh out of that comment, but it wasn't until a few years later that I fully understood what they thought was so funny. They thought they saw in me the same destruction my father was capable of. Those men would eventually be convicted of placing a van filled with 1,500 pounds of explosives into the sub-level parking lot of the World Trade Center's North Tower, causing an explosion that killed six people and injured over 1,000 others. These were the men I looked up to. These were the men I called ammu, which means uncle. By the time I turned 19, I had already moved 20 times in my life, and that instability during my childhood didn't really provide an opportunity to make many friends. Each time I would begin to feel comfortable around someone, it was time to pack up and move to the next town. Being the perpetual new face in class, I was frequently the target of bullies. I kept my identity a secret from my classmates to avoid being targeted, but as it turns out, being the quiet, chubby new kid in class was more than enough ammunition. So for the most part, I spent my time at home reading books and watching TV or playing video games. For those reasons, my social skills were lacking, to say the least, and growing up in a bigoted household, I wasn't prepared for the real world. I'd been raised to judge people based on arbitrary measurements, like a person's race or religion. So what opened my eyes? One of my first experiences that challenged this way of thinking was during the 2000 presidential elections. Through a college prep program, I was able to take part in the National Youth Convention in Philadelphia. My particular group's focus was on youth violence, and having been the victim of bullying for most of my life, this was a subject in which I felt particularly passionate. The members of our group came from many different walks of life. One day toward the end of the convention, I found out that one of the kids I had befriended was Jewish. Now, it had taken several days for this detail to come to light, and I realized that there was no natural animosity between the two of us. I had never had a Jewish friend before, and frankly I felt a sense of pride in having been able to overcome a barrier that for most of my life I had been led to believe was insurmountable. Another major turning point came when I found a summer job at Busch Gardens, an amusement park. There, I was exposed to people from all sorts of faiths and cultures, and that experience proved to be fundamental to the development of my character. Most of my life, I'd been taught that homosexuality was a sin, and by extension, that all gay people were a negative influence. As chance would have it, I had the opportunity to work with some of the gay performers at a show there, and soon found that many were the kindest, least judgmental people I had ever met. Being bullied as a kid created a sense of empathy in me toward the suffering of others, and it comes very unnaturally to me to treat people who are kind in any other way than how I would want to be treated. Because of that feeling, I was able to contrast the stereotypes I'd been taught as a child with real life experience and interaction. I don't know what it's like to be gay, but I'm well acquainted with being judged for something that's beyond my control. Then there was "The Daily Show." On a nightly basis, Jon Stewart forced me to be intellectually honest with myself about my own bigotry and helped me to realize that a person's race, religion or sexual orientation had nothing to do with the quality of one's character. He was in many ways a father figure to me when I was in desperate need of one. Inspiration can often come from an unexpected place, and the fact that a Jewish comedian had done more to positively influence my worldview than my own extremist father is not lost on me. One day, I had a conversation with my mother about how my worldview was starting to change, and she said something to me that I will hold dear to my heart for as long as I live. She looked at me with the weary eyes of someone who had experienced enough dogmatism to last a lifetime, and said, "I'm tired of hating people." In that instant, I realized how much negative energy it takes to hold that hatred inside of you. Zak Ebrahim is not my real name. I changed it when my family decided to end our connection with my father and start a new life. So why would I out myself and potentially put myself in danger? Well, that's simple. I do it in the hopes that perhaps someone someday who is compelled to use violence may hear my story and realize that there is a better way, that although I had been subjected to this violent, intolerant ideology, that I did not become fanaticized. Instead, I choose to use my experience to fight back against terrorism, against the bigotry. I do it for the victims of terrorism and their loved ones, for the terrible pain and loss that terrorism has forced upon their lives. For the victims of terrorism, I will speak out against these senseless acts and condemn my father's actions. And with that simple fact, I stand here as proof that violence isn't inherent in one's religion or race, and the son does not have to follow the ways of his father. I am not my father. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you, everybody. (Applause) Thank you all. (Applause) Thanks a lot. (Applause)

This is a photograph of a man whom for many years I plotted to kill. This is my father, Clinton George "Bageye" Grant. He's called Bageye because he has permanent bags under his eyes. As a 10-year-old, along with my siblings, I dreamt of scraping off the poison from fly-killer paper into his coffee, grounded down glass and sprinkling it over his breakfast, loosening the carpet on the stairs so he would trip and break his neck. But come the day, he would always skip that loose step, he would always bow out of the house without so much as a swig of coffee or a bite to eat. And so for many years, I feared that my father would die before I had a chance to kill him. (Laughter) Up until our mother asked him to leave and not come back, Bageye had been a terrifying ogre. He teetered permanently on the verge of rage, rather like me, as you see. He worked nights at Vauxhall Motors in Luton and demanded total silence throughout the house, so that when we came home from school at 3:30 in the afternoon, we would huddle beside the TV, and rather like safe-crackers, we would twiddle with the volume control knob on the TV so it was almost inaudible. And at times, when we were like this, so much "Shhh," so much "Shhh" going on in the house that I imagined us to be like the German crew of a U-boat creeping along the edge of the ocean whilst up above, on the surface, HMS Bageye patrolled ready to drop death charges at the first sound of any disturbance. So that lesson was the lesson that "Do not draw attention to yourself either in the home or outside of the home." Maybe it's a migrant lesson. We were to be below the radar, so there was no communication, really, between Bageye and us and us and Bageye, and the sound that we most looked forward to, you know when you're a child and you want your father to come home and it's all going to be happy and you're waiting for that sound of the door opening. Well the sound that we looked forward to was the click of the door closing, which meant he'd gone and would not come back. So for three decades, I never laid eyes on my father, nor he on me. We never spoke to each other for three decades, and then a couple of years ago, I decided to turn the spotlight on him. "You are being watched. Actually, you are. You are being watched." That was his mantra to us, his children. Time and time again he would say this to us. And this was the 1970s, it was Luton, where he worked at Vauxhall Motors, and he was a Jamaican. And what he meant was, you as a child of a Jamaican immigrant are being watched to see which way you turn, to see whether you conform to the host nation's stereotype of you, of being feckless, work-shy, destined for a life of crime. You are being watched, so confound their expectations of you. To that end, Bageye and his friends, mostly Jamaican, exhibited a kind of Jamaican bella figura: Turn your best side to the world, show your best face to the world. If you have seen some of the images of the Caribbean people arriving in the '40s and '50s, you might have noticed that a lot of the men wear trilbies. Now, there was no tradition of wearing trilbies in Jamaica. They invented that tradition for their arrival here. They wanted to project themselves in a way that they wanted to be perceived, so that the way they looked and the names that they gave themselves defined them. So Bageye is bald and has baggy eyes. Tidy Boots is very fussy about his footwear. Anxious is always anxious. Clock has one arm longer than the other. (Laughter) And my all-time favorite was the guy they called Summerwear. When Summerwear came to this country from Jamaica in the early '60s, he insisted on wearing light summer suits, no matter the weather, and in the course of researching their lives, I asked my mom, "Whatever became of Summerwear?" And she said, "He caught a cold and died." (Laughter) But men like Summerwear taught us the importance of style. Maybe they exaggerated their style because they thought that they were not considered to be quite civilized, and they transferred that generational attitude or anxiety onto us, the next generation, so much so that when I was growing up, if ever on the television news or radio a report came up about a black person committing some crime — a mugging, a murder, a burglary — we winced along with our parents, because they were letting the side down. You did not just represent yourself. You represented the group, and it was a terrifying thing to come to terms with, in a way, that maybe you were going to be perceived in the same light. So that was what needed to be challenged. Our father and many of his colleagues exhibited a kind of transmission but not receiving. They were built to transmit but not receive. We were to keep quiet. When our father did speak to us, it was from the pulpit of his mind. They clung to certainty in the belief that doubt would undermine them. But when I am working in my house and writing, after a day's writing, I rush downstairs and I'm very excited to talk about Marcus Garvey or Bob Marley and words are tripping out of my mouth like butterflies and I'm so excited that my children stop me, and they say, "Dad, nobody cares." (Laughter) But they do care, actually. They cross over. Somehow they find their way to you. They shape their lives according to the narrative of your life, as I did with my father and my mother, perhaps, and maybe Bageye did with his father. And that was clearer to me in the course of looking at his life and understanding, as they say, the Native Americans say, "Do not criticize the man until you can walk in his moccasins." But in conjuring his life, it was okay and very straightforward to portray a Caribbean life in England in the 1970s with bowls of plastic fruit, polystyrene ceiling tiles, settees permanently sheathed in their transparent covers that they were delivered in. But what's more difficult to navigate is the emotional landscape between the generations, and the old adage that with age comes wisdom is not true. With age comes the veneer of respectability and a veneer of uncomfortable truths. But what was true was that my parents, my mother, and my father went along with it, did not trust the state to educate me. So listen to how I sound. They determined that they would send me to a private school, but my father worked at Vauxhall Motors. It's quite difficult to fund a private school education and feed his army of children. I remember going on to the school for the entrance exam, and my father said to the priest — it was a Catholic school — he wanted a better "heducation" for the boy, but also, he, my father, never even managed to pass worms, never mind entrance exams. But in order to fund my education, he was going to have to do some dodgy stuff, so my father would fund my education by trading in illicit goods from the back of his car, and that was made even more tricky because my father, that's not his car by the way. My father aspired to have a car like that, but my father had a beaten-up Mini, and he never, being a Jamaican coming to this country, he never had a driving license, he never had any insurance or road tax or MOT. He thought, "I know how to drive; why do I need the state's validation?" But it became a little tricky when we were stopped by the police, and we were stopped a lot by the police, and I was impressed by the way that my father dealt with the police. He would promote the policeman immediately, so that P.C. Bloggs became Detective Inspector Bloggs in the course of the conversation and wave us on merrily. So my father was exhibiting what we in Jamaica called "playing fool to catch wise." But it lent also an idea that actually he was being diminished or belittled by the policeman — as a 10-year-old boy, I saw that — but also there was an ambivalence towards authority. So on the one hand, there was a mocking of authority, but on the other hand, there was a deference towards authority, and these Caribbean people had an overbearing obedience towards authority, which is very striking, very strange in a way, because migrants are very courageous people. They leave their homes. My father and my mother left Jamaica and they traveled 4,000 miles, and yet they were infantilized by travel. They were timid, and somewhere along the line, the natural order was reversed. The children became the parents to the parent. The Caribbean people came to this country with a five-year plan: they would work, some money, and then go back, but the five years became 10, the 10 became 15, and before you know it, you're changing the wallpaper, and at that point, you know you're here to stay. Although there's still the kind of temporariness that our parents felt about being here, but we children knew that the game was up. I think there was a feeling that they would not be able to continue with the ideals of the life that they expected. The reality was very much different. And also, that was true of the reality of trying to educate me. Having started the process, my father did not continue. It was left to my mother to educate me, and as George Lamming would say, it was my mother who fathered me. Even in his absence, that old mantra remained: You are being watched. But such ardent watchfulness can lead to anxiety, so much so that years later, when I was investigating why so many young black men were diagnosed with schizophrenia, six times more than they ought to be, I was not surprised to hear the psychiatrist say, "Black people are schooled in paranoia." And I wonder what Bageye would make of that. Now I also had a 10-year-old son, and turned my attention to Bageye and I went in search of him. He was back in Luton, he was now 82, and I hadn't seen him for 30-odd years, and when he opened the door, I saw this tiny little man with lambent, smiling eyes, and he was smiling, and I'd never seen him smile. I was very disconcerted by that. But we sat down, and he had a Caribbean friend with him, talking some old time talk, and my father would look at me, and he looked at me as if I would miraculously disappear as I had arisen. And he turned to his friend, and he said, "This boy and me have a deep, deep connection, deep, deep connection." But I never felt that connection. If there was a pulse, it was very weak or hardly at all. And I almost felt in the course of that reunion that I was auditioning to be my father's son. When the book came out, it had fair reviews in the national papers, but the paper of choice in Luton is not The Guardian, it's the Luton News, and the Luton News ran the headline about the book, "The Book That May Heal a 32-Year-Old Rift." And I understood that could also represent the rift between one generation and the next, between people like me and my father's generation, but there's no tradition in Caribbean life of memoirs or biographies. It was a tradition that you didn't chat about your business in public. But I welcomed that title, and I thought actually, yes, there is a possibility that this will open up conversations that we'd never had before. This will close the generation gap, perhaps. This could be an instrument of repair. And I even began to feel that this book may be perceived by my father as an act of filial devotion. Poor, deluded fool. Bageye was stung by what he perceived to be the public airing of his shortcomings. He was stung by my betrayal, and he went to the newspapers the next day and demanded a right of reply, and he got it with the headline "Bageye Bites Back." And it was a coruscating account of my betrayal. I was no son of his. He recognized in his mind that his colors had been dragged through the mud, and he couldn't allow that. He had to restore his dignity, and he did so, and initially, although I was disappointed, I grew to admire that stance. There was still fire bubbling through his veins, even though he was 82 years old. And if it meant that we would now return to 30 years of silence, my father would say, "If it's so, then it's so." Jamaicans will tell you that there's no such thing as facts, there are only versions. We all tell ourselves the versions of the story that we can best live with. Each generation builds up an edifice which they are reluctant or sometimes unable to disassemble, but in the writing, my version of the story began to change, and it was detached from me. I lost my hatred of my father. I did no longer want him to die or to murder him, and I felt free, much freer than I'd ever felt before. And I wonder whether that freedness could be transferred to him. In that initial reunion, I was struck by an idea that I had very few photographs of myself as a young child. This is a photograph of me, nine months old. In the original photograph, I'm being held up by my father, Bageye, but when my parents separated, my mother excised him from all aspects of our lives. She took a pair of scissors and cut him out of every photograph, and for years, I told myself the truth of this photograph was that you are alone, you are unsupported. But there's another way of looking at this photograph. This is a photograph that has the potential for a reunion, a potential to be reunited with my father, and in my yearning to be held up by my father, I held him up to the light. In that first reunion, it was very awkward and tense moments, and to lessen the tension, we decided to go for a walk. And as we walked, I was struck that I had reverted to being the child even though I was now towering above my father. I was almost a foot taller than my father. He was still the big man, and I tried to match his step. And I realized that he was walking as if he was still under observation, but I admired his walk. He walked like a man on the losing side of the F.A. Cup Final mounting the steps to collect his condolence medal. There was dignity in defeat. Thank you. (Applause)

I'm an industrial engineer. The goal in my life has always been to make more and more products in the least amount of time and resources. While working at Toyota, all I knew was how to make cars until I met Dr. Akira Miyawaki, who came to our factory to make a forest in it in order to make it carbon-neutral. I was so fascinated that I decided to learn this methodology by joining his team as a volunteer. Soon, I started making a forest in the backyard of my own house, and this is how it looks after three years. These forests, compared to a conventional plantation, grow 10 times faster, they're 30 times more dense, and 100 times more biodiverse. Within two years of having this forest in our backyard, I could observe that the groundwater didn't dry during summers, the number of bird species I spotted in this area doubled. Quality of air became better, and we started harvesting seasonal fruits growing effortlessly right in the backyard of our house. I wanted to make more of these forests. I was so moved by these results that I wanted to make these forests with the same acumen with which we make cars or write software or do any mainstream business, so I founded a company which is an end-to-end service provider to create these native natural forests. But to make afforestation as a mainstream business or an industry, we had to standardize the process of forest-making. So we benchmarked the Toyota Production System known for its quality and efficiency for the process of forest-making. For an example, the core of TPS, Toyota Production System, lies in heijunka, which is making manufacturing of different models of cars on a single assembly line. We replaced these cars with trees, using which now we can make multi-layered forests. These forests utilize 100 percent vertical space. They are so dense that one can't even walk into them. For an example, we can make a 300-tree forest in an area as small as the parking spaces of six cars. In order to reduce cost and our own carbon footprint, we started utilizing local biomass as soil amender and fertilizers. For example, coconut shells crushed in a machine mixed with rice straw, powder of rice husk mixed with organic manure is finally dumped in soil on which our forest is planted. Once planted, we use grass or rice straw to cover the soil so that all the water which goes into irrigation doesn't get evaporated back into the atmosphere. And using these simple improvisations, today we can make a forest for a cost as low as the cost of an iPhone. Today, we are making forests in houses, in schools, even in factories with the corporates. But that's not enough. There is a huge number of people who want to take matters into their own hands. So we let it happen. Today, we are working on an Internet-based platform where we are going to share our methodology on an open source using which anyone and everyone can make their own forest without our physical presence being there, using our methodology. At the click of a button, they can get to know all the native species of their place. By installing a small hardware probe on site, we can do remote soil testing, using which we can give step-by-step instructions on forest-making remotely. Also we can monitor the growth of this forest without being on site. This methodology, I believe, has a potential. By sharing, we can actually bring back our native forests. Now, when you go back home, if you see a barren piece of land, do remember that it can be a potential forest. Thank you very much. Thanks. (Applause)

Hi, kids. (Laughter) I'm 71. (Applause) My husband is 76. My parents are in their late 90s, and Olivia, the dog, is 16. So let's talk about aging. Let me tell you how I feel when I see my wrinkles in the mirror and I realize that some parts of me have dropped and I can't find them down there. (Laughter) Mary Oliver says in one of her poems, "Tell me, what is it that you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?" Me, I intend to live passionately. When do we start aging? Society decides when we are old, usually around 65, when we get Medicare, but we really start aging at birth. We are aging right now, and we all experience it differently. We all feel younger than our real age, because the spirit never ages. I am still 17. Sophia Loren. Look at her. She says that everything you see she owes to spaghetti. I tried it and gained 10 pounds in the wrong places. But attitude, aging is also attitude and health. But my real mentor in this journey of aging is Olga Murray. This California girl at 60 started working in Nepal to save young girls from domestic bondage. At 88, she has saved 12,000 girls, and she has changed the culture in the country. (Applause) Now it is illegal for fathers to sell their daughters into servitude. She has also founded orphanages and nutritional clinics. She is always happy and eternally young. What have I lost in the last decades? People, of course, places, and the boundless energy of my youth, and I'm beginning to lose independence, and that scares me. Ram Dass says that dependency hurts, but if you accept it, there is less suffering. After a very bad stroke, his ageless soul watches the changes in the body with tenderness, and he is grateful to the people who help him. What have I gained? Freedom: I don't have to prove anything anymore. I'm not stuck in the idea of who I was, who I want to be, or what other people expect me to be. I don't have to please men anymore, only animals. I keep telling my superego to back off and let me enjoy what I still have. My body may be falling apart, but my brain is not, yet. I love my brain. I feel lighter. I don't carry grudges, ambition, vanity, none of the deadly sins that are not even worth the trouble. It's great to let go. I should have started sooner. And I also feel softer because I'm not scared of being vulnerable. I don't see it as weakness anymore. And I've gained spirituality. I'm aware that before, death was in the neighborhood. Now, it's next door, or in my house. I try to live mindfully and be present in the moment. By the way, the Dalai Lama is someone who has aged beautifully, but who wants to be vegetarian and celibate? (Laughter) Meditation helps. (Video) Child: Ommm. Ommm. Ommm. Isabel Allende: Ommm. Ommm. There it is. And it's good to start early. You know, for a vain female like myself, it's very hard to age in this culture. Inside, I feel good, I feel charming, seductive, sexy. Nobody else sees that. (Laughter) I'm invisible. I want to be the center of attention. I hate to be invisible. (Laughter) (Applause) This is Grace Dammann. She has been in a wheelchair for six years after a terrible car accident. She says that there is nothing more sensual than a hot shower, that every drop of water is a blessing to the senses. She doesn't see herself as disabled. In her mind, she's still surfing in the ocean. Ethel Seiderman, a feisty, beloved activist in the place where I live in California. She wears red patent shoes, and her mantra is that one scarf is nice but two is better. She has been a widow for nine years, but she's not looking for another mate. She says that there is only a limited number of ways you can screw — well, she says it in another way — and she has tried them all. (Laughter) I, on the other hand, I still have erotic fantasies with Antonio Banderas — (Laughter) — and my poor husband has to put up with it. So how can I stay passionate? I cannot will myself to be passionate at 71. I have been training for some time, and when I feel flat and bored, I fake it. Attitude, attitude. How do I train? I train by saying yes to whatever comes my way: drama, comedy, tragedy, love, death, losses. Yes to life. And I train by trying to stay in love. It doesn't always work, but you cannot blame me for trying. And, on a final note, retirement in Spanish is jubilación. Jubilation. Celebration. We have paid our dues. We have contributed to society. Now it's our time, and it's a great time. Unless you are ill or very poor, you have choices. I have chosen to stay passionate, engaged with an open heart. I am working on it every day. Want to join me? Thank you. (Applause) June Cohen: So Isabel — IA: Thank you. JC: First of all, I never like to presume to speak for the TED community, but I would like to tell you that I have a feeling we can all agree that you are still charming, seductive and sexy. Yes? IA: Aww, thank you. (Applause) JC: Hands down. IA: No, it's makeup. Moderator: Now, would it be awkward if I asked you a follow-up question about your erotic fantasies? IA: Oh, of course. About what? (Laughter) Moderator: About your erotic fantasies. IA: With Antonio Banderas. Moderator: I was just wondering if you have anything more to share. IA: Well, one of them is that — (Laughter) One of them is that I place a naked Antonio Banderas on a Mexican tortilla, I slather him with guacamole and salsa, I roll him up, and I eat him. (Laughter) Thank you. (Applause)

Why does the universe exist? Why is there — Okay. Okay. (Laughter) This is a cosmic mystery. Be solemn. Why is there a world, why are we in it, and why is there something rather than nothing at all? I mean, this is the super ultimate "why" question? So I'm going to talk about the mystery of existence, the puzzle of existence, where we are now in addressing it, and why you should care, and I hope you do care. The philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer said that those who don't wonder about the contingency of their existence, of the contingency of the world's existence, are mentally deficient. That's a little harsh, but still. (Laughter) So this has been called the most sublime and awesome mystery, the deepest and most far-reaching question man can pose. It's obsessed great thinkers. Ludwig Wittgenstein, perhaps the greatest philosopher of the 20th century, was astonished that there should be a world at all. He wrote in his "Tractatus," Proposition 4.66, "It is not how things are in the world that is the mystical, it's that the world exists." And if you don't like taking your epigrams from a philosopher, try a scientist. John Archibald Wheeler, one of the great physicists of the 20th century, the teacher of Richard Feynman, the coiner of the term "black hole," he said, "I want to know how come the quantum, how come the universe, how come existence?" And my friend Martin Amis — sorry that I'll be doing a lot of name-dropping in this talk, so get used to it — my dear friend Martin Amis once said that we're about five Einsteins away from answering the mystery of where the universe came from. And I've no doubt there are five Einsteins in the audience tonight. Any Einsteins? Show of hands? No? No? No? No Einsteins? Okay. So this question, why is there something rather than nothing, this sublime question, was posed rather late in intellectual history. It was towards the end of the 17th century, the philosopher Leibniz who asked it, a very smart guy, Leibniz, who invented the calculus independently of Isaac Newton, at about the same time, but for Leibniz, who asked why is there something rather than nothing, this was not a great mystery. He either was or pretended to be an Orthodox Christian in his metaphysical outlook, and he said it's obvious why the world exists: because God created it. And God created, indeed, out of nothing at all. That's how powerful God is. He doesn't need any preexisting materials to fashion a world out of. He can make it out of sheer nothingness, creation ex nihilo. And by the way, this is what most Americans today believe. There is no mystery of existence for them. God made it. So let's put this in an equation. I don't have any slides so I'm going to mime my visuals, so use your imaginations. So it's God + nothing = the world. Okay? Now that's the equation. And so maybe you don't believe in God. Maybe you're a scientific atheist or an unscientific atheist, and you don't believe in God, and you're not happy with it. By the way, even if we have this equation, God + nothing = the world, there's already a problem: Why does God exist? God doesn't exist by logic alone unless you believe the ontological argument, and I hope you don't, because it's not a good argument. So it's conceivable, if God were to exist, he might wonder, I'm eternal, I'm all-powerful, but where did I come from? (Laughter) Whence then am I? God speaks in a more formal English. (Laughter) And so one theory is that God was so bored with pondering the puzzle of His own existence that He created the world just to distract himself. But anyway, let's forget about God. Take God out of the equation: We have ________ + nothing = the world. Now, if you're a Buddhist, you might want to stop right there, because essentially what you've got is nothing = the world, and by symmetry of identity, that means the world = nothing. Okay? And to a Buddhist, the world is just a whole lot of nothing. It's just a big cosmic vacuity. And we think there's a lot of something out there but that's because we're enslaved by our desires. If we let our desires melt away, we'll see the world for what it truly is, a vacuity, nothingness, and we'll slip into this happy state of nirvana which has been defined as having just enough life to enjoy being dead. (Laughter) So that's the Buddhist thinking. But I'm a Westerner, and I'm still concerned with the puzzle of existence, so I've got ________ + — this is going to get serious in a minute, so — ________ + nothing = the world. What are we going to put in that blank? Well, how about science? Science is our best guide to the nature of reality, and the most fundamental science is physics. That tells us what naked reality really is, that reveals what I call TAUFOTU, the True And Ultimate Furniture Of The Universe. So maybe physics can fill this blank, and indeed, since about the late 1960s or around 1970, physicists have purported to give a purely scientific explanation of how a universe like ours could have popped into existence out of sheer nothingness, a quantum fluctuation out of the void. Stephen Hawking is one of these physicists, more recently Alex Vilenkin, and the whole thing has been popularized by another very fine physicist and friend of mine, Lawrence Krauss, who wrote a book called "A Universe from Nothing," and Lawrence thinks that he's given — he's a militant atheist, by the way, so he's gotten God out of the picture. The laws of quantum field theory, the state-of-the-art physics, can show how out of sheer nothingness, no space, no time, no matter, nothing, a little nugget of false vacuum can fluctuate into existence, and then, by the miracle of inflation, blow up into this huge and variegated cosmos we see around us. Okay, this is a really ingenious scenario. It's very speculative. It's fascinating. But I've got a big problem with it, and the problem is this: It's a pseudo-religious point of view. Now, Lawrence thinks he's an atheist, but he's still in thrall to a religious worldview. He sees physical laws as being like divine commands. The laws of quantum field theory for him are like fiat lux, "Let there be light." The laws have some sort of ontological power or clout that they can form the abyss, that it's pregnant with being. They can call a world into existence out of nothing. But that's a very primitive view of what a physical law is, right? We know that physical laws are actually generalized descriptions of patterns and regularities in the world. They don't exist outside the world. They don't have any ontic cloud of their own. They can't call a world into existence out of nothingness. That's a very primitive view of what a scientific law is. And if you don't believe me on this, listen to Stephen Hawking, who himself put forward a model of the cosmos that was self-contained, didn't require any outside cause, any creator, and after proposing this, Hawking admitted that he was still puzzled. He said, this model is just equations. What breathes fire into the equations and creates a world for them to describe? He was puzzled by this, so equations themselves can't do the magic, can't resolve the puzzle of existence. And besides, even if the laws could do that, why this set of laws? Why quantum field theory that describes a universe with a certain number of forces and particles and so forth? Why not a completely different set of laws? There are many, many mathematically consistent sets of laws. Why not no laws at all? Why not sheer nothingness? So this is a problem, believe it or not, that reflective physicists really think a lot about, and at this point they tend to go metaphysical, say, well, maybe the set of laws that describes our universe, it's just one set of laws and it describes one part of reality, but maybe every consistent set of laws describes another part of reality, and in fact all possible physical worlds really exist, they're all out there. We just see a little tiny part of reality that's described by the laws of quantum field theory, but there are many, many other worlds, parts of reality that are described by vastly different theories that are different from ours in ways we can't imagine, that are inconceivably exotic. Steven Weinberg, the father of the standard model of particle physics, has actually flirted with this idea himself, that all possible realities actually exist. Also, a younger physicist, Max Tegmark, who believes that all mathematical structures exist, and mathematical existence is the same thing as physical existence, so we have this vastly rich multiverse that encompasses every logical possibility. Now, in taking this metaphysical way out, these physicists and also philosophers are actually reaching back to a very old idea that goes back to Plato. It's the principle of plenitude or fecundity, or the great chain of being, that reality is actually as full as possible. It's as far removed from nothingness as it could possibly be. So we have these two extremes now. We have sheer nothingness on one side, and we have this vision of a reality that encompasses every conceivable world at the other extreme: the fullest possible reality, nothingness, the simplest possible reality. Now what's in between these two extremes? There are all kinds of intermediate realities that include some things and leave out others. So one of these intermediate realities is, say, the most mathematically elegant reality, that leaves out the inelegant bits, the ugly asymmetries and so forth. Now, there are some physicists who will tell you that we're actually living in the most elegant reality. I think that Brian Greene is in the audience, and he has written a book called "The Elegant Universe." He claims that the universe we live in mathematically is very elegant. Don't believe him. (Laughter) It's a pious hope, I wish it were true, but I think the other day he admitted to me it's really an ugly universe. It's stupidly constructed, it's got way too many arbitrary coupling constants and mass ratios and superfluous families of elementary particles, and what the hell is dark energy? It's a stick and bubble gum contraption. It's not an elegant universe. (Laughter) And then there's the best of all possible worlds in an ethical sense. You should get solemn now, because a world in which sentient beings don't suffer needlessly, in which there aren't things like childhood cancer or the Holocaust. This is an ethical conception. Anyway, so between nothingness and the fullest possible reality, various special realities. Nothingness is special. It's the simplest. Then there's the most elegant possible reality. That's special. The fullest possible reality, that's special. But what are we leaving out here? There's also just the crummy, generic realities that aren't special in any way, that are sort of random. They're infinitely removed from nothingness, but they fall infinitely short of complete fullness. They're a mixture of chaos and order, of mathematical elegance and ugliness. So I would describe these realities as an infinite, mediocre, incomplete mess, a generic reality, a kind of cosmic junk shot. And these realities, is there a deity in any of these realities? Maybe, but the deity isn't perfect like the Judeo-Christian deity. The deity isn't all-good and all-powerful. It might be instead 100 percent malevolent but only 80 percent effective, which pretty much describes the world we see around us, I think. (Laughter) So I would like to propose that the resolution to the mystery of existence is that the reality we exist in is one of these generic realities. Reality has to turn out some way. It can either turn out to be nothing or everything or something in between. So if it has some special feature, like being really elegant or really full or really simple, like nothingness, that would require an explanation. But if it's just one of these random, generic realities, there's no further explanation for it. And indeed, I would say that's the reality we live in. That's what science is telling us. At the beginning of the week, we got the exciting information that the theory of inflation, which predicts a big, infinite, messy, arbitrary, pointless reality, it's like a big frothing champagne coming out of a bottle endlessly, a vast universe, mostly a wasteland with little pockets of charm and order and peace, this has been confirmed, this inflationary scenario, by the observations made by radio telescopes in Antarctica that looked at the signature of the gravitational waves from just before the Big Bang. I'm sure you all know about this. So anyway, I think there's some evidence that this really is the reality that we're stuck with. Now, why should you care? Well — (Laughter) — the question, "Why does the world exist?" that's the cosmic question, it sort of rhymes with a more intimate question: Why do I exist? Why do you exist? you know, our existence would seem to be amazingly improbable, because there's an enormous number of genetically possible humans, if you can compute it by looking at the number of the genes and the number of alleles and so forth, and a back-of-the-envelope calculation will tell you there are about 10 to the 10,000th possible humans, genetically. That's between a googol and a googolplex. And the number of the actual humans that have existed is 100 billion, maybe 50 billion, an infinitesimal fraction, so all of us, we've won this amazing cosmic lottery. We're here. Okay. So what kind of reality do we want to live in? Do we want to live in a special reality? What if we were living in the most elegant possible reality? Imagine the existential pressure on us to live up to that, to be elegant, not to pull down the tone of it. Or, what if we were living in the fullest possible reality? Well then our existence would be guaranteed, because every possible thing exists in that reality, but our choices would be meaningless. If I really struggle morally and agonize and I decide to do the right thing, what difference does it make, because there are an infinite number of versions of me also doing the right thing and an infinite number doing the wrong thing. So my choices are meaningless. So we don't want to live in that special reality. And as for the special reality of nothingness, we wouldn't be having this conversation. So I think living in a generic reality that's mediocre, there are nasty bits and nice bits and we could make the nice bits bigger and the nasty bits smaller and that gives us a kind of purpose in life. The universe is absurd, but we can still construct a purpose, and that's a pretty good one, and the overall mediocrity of reality kind of resonates nicely with the mediocrity we all feel in the core of our being. And I know you feel it. I know you're all special, but you're still kind of secretly mediocre, don't you think? (Laughter) (Applause) So anyway, you may say, this puzzle, the mystery of existence, it's just silly mystery-mongering. You're not astonished at the existence of the universe and you're in good company. Bertrand Russell said, "I should say the universe is just there, and that's all." Just a brute fact. And my professor at Columbia, Sidney Morgenbesser, a great philosophical wag, when I said to him, "Professor Morgenbesser, why is there something rather than nothing?" And he said, "Oh, even if there was nothing, you still wouldn't be satisfied." So — (Laughter) — okay. So you're not astonished. I don't care. But I will tell you something to conclude that I guarantee you will astonish you, because it's astonished all of the brilliant, wonderful people I've met at this TED conference, when I've told them, and it's this: Never in my life have I had a cell phone. Thank you. (Laughter) (Applause)

How many times have you used the word "awesome" today? Once? Twice? Seventeen times? Do you remember what you were describing when you used the word? No, I didn't think so, because it's come down to this, people: You're using the word incorrectly, and tonight I hope to show you how to put the "awe" back in "awesome." Recently, I was dining at an outdoor cafe, and the server came up to our table, and asked us if we had dined there before, and I said, "Yes, yes, we have." And she said, "Awesome." And I thought, "Really? Awesome or just merely good that we decided to visit your restaurant again?" The other day, one of my coworkers asked me if I could save that file as a PDF, and I said, "Well, of course," and he said, "Awesome." Seriously, can saving anything as a PDF be awesome? Sadly, the frequent overuse of the word "awesome" has now replaced words like "great" and "thank you." So Webster's dictionary defines the word "awesome" as fear mingled with admiration or reverence, a feeling produced by something majestic. Now, with that in mind, was your Quiznos sandwich awesome? How about that parking space? Was that awesome? Or that game the other day? Was that awesome? The answer is no, no and no. A sandwich can be delicious, that parking space can be nearby, and that game can be a blowout, but not everything can be awesome. (Laughter) So when you use the word "awesome" to describe the most mundane of things, you're taking away the very power of the word. This author says, "Snowy days or finding money in your pants is awesome." (Laughter) Um, no, it is not, and we need to raise the bar for this poor schmuck. (Laughter) So in other words, if you have everything, you value nothing. It's a lot like drinking from a firehose like this jackass right here. There's no dynamic, there's no highs or lows, if everything is awesome. Ladies and gentlemen, here are 10 things that are truly awesome. Imagine, if you will, having to schlep everything on your back. Wouldn't this be easier for me if I could roll this home? Yes, so I think I'll invent the wheel. The wheel, ladies and gentlemen. Is the wheel awesome? Say it with me. Yes, the wheel is awesome! The Great Pyramids were the tallest man-made structure in the world for 4,000 years. Pharaoh had his slaves move millions of blocks just to this site to erect a big freaking headstone. Were the Great Pyramids awesome? Yes, the pyramids were awesome. The Grand Canyon. Come on. It's almost 80 million years old. Is the Grand Canyon awesome? Yes, the Grand Canyon is. Louis Daguerre invented photography in 1829, and earlier today, when you whipped out your smartphone and you took a shot of your awesome sandwich, and you know who you are — (Laughter) — wasn't that easier than exposing the image to copper plates coated with iodized silver? I mean, come on. Is photography awesome? Yes, photography is awesome. D-Day, June 6, 1944, the Allied invasion of Normandy, the largest amphibious invasion in world history. Was D-Day awesome? Yes, it was awesome. Did you eat food today? Did you eat? Then you can thank the honeybee, that's the one, because if crops aren't pollinated, we can't grow food, and then we're all going to die. It's just like that. But it's not like a flower can just get up and have sex with another flower, although that would be awesome. (Laughter) Bees are awesome. Are you kidding me? Landing on the moon! Come on! Apollo 11. Are you kidding me? Sixty-six years after the Wright Brothers took off from Kitty Hawk, North Carolina, Neil Armstrong was 240,000 miles away. That's like from here to the moon. (Laughter) That's one small step for a man, one giant leap for awesome! You're damn right, it was. Woodstock, 1969: Rolling Stone Magazine said this changed the history of rock and roll. Tickets were only 24 dollars back then. You can't even buy a freaking t-shirt for that now. Jimi Hendrix's version of "The Star-Spangled Banner" was the most iconic. Was Woodstock awesome? Yes, it was awesome. Sharks! They're at the top of the food chain. Sharks have multiple rows of teeth that grow in their jaw and they move forward like a conveyor belt. Some sharks can lose 30,000 teeth in their lifetime. Does awesome inspire fear? Oh, hell yeah, sharks are awesome! The Internet was born in 1982 and it instantly took over global communication, and later tonight, when all these PowerPoints are uplifted to the Internet so that a guy in Siberia can get drunk and watch this crap, the Internet is awesome. And finally, finally some of you can't wait to come up and tell me how awesome my PowerPoint was. I will save you the time. It was not awesome, but it was true, and I hope it was entertaining, and out of all the audiences I've ever had, y'all are the most recent. Thank you and good night. (Applause)

So recently, some white guys and some black women swapped Twitter avatars, or pictures online. They didn't change their content, they kept tweeting the same as usual, but suddenly, the white guys noticed they were getting called the n-word all the time and they were getting the worst kind of online abuse, whereas the black women all of a sudden noticed things got a lot more pleasant for them. Now, if you're my five-year-old, your Internet consists mostly of puppies and fairies and occasionally fairies riding puppies. That's a thing. Google it. But the rest of us know that the Internet can be a really ugly place. I'm not talking about the kind of colorful debates that I think are healthy for our democracy. I'm talking about nasty personal attacks. Maybe it's happened to you, but it's at least twice as likely to happen, and be worse, if you're a woman, a person of color, or gay, or more than one at the same time. In fact, just as I was writing this talk, I found a Twitter account called @SallyKohnSucks. The bio says that I'm a "man-hater and a bull dyke and the only thing I've ever accomplished with my career is spreading my perverse sexuality." Which, incidentally, is only a third correct. I mean, lies! (Laughter) But seriously, we all say we hate this crap. The question is whether you're willing to make a personal sacrifice to change it. I don't mean giving up the Internet. I mean changing the way you click, because clicking is a public act. It's no longer the case that a few powerful elites control all the media and the rest of us are just passive receivers. Increasingly, we're all the media. I used to think, oh, okay, I get dressed up, I put on a lot of makeup, I go on television, I talk about the news. That is a public act of making media. And then I go home and I browse the web and I'm reading Twitter, and that's a private act of consuming media. I mean, of course it is. I'm in my pajamas. Wrong. Everything we blog, everything we Tweet, and everything we click is a public act of making media. We are the new editors. We decide what gets attention based on what we give our attention to. That's how the media works now. There's all these hidden algorithms that decide what you see more of and what we all see more of based on what you click on, and that in turn shapes our whole culture. Over three out of five Americans think we have a major incivility problem in our country right now, but I'm going to guess that at least three out of five Americans are clicking on the same insult-oriented, rumor-mongering trash that feeds the nastiest impulses in our society. In an increasingly noisy media landscape, the incentive is to make more noise to be heard, and that tyranny of the loud encourages the tyranny of the nasty. It does not have to be that way. It does not. We can change the incentive. For starters, there are two things we can all do. First, don't just stand by the sidelines when you see someone getting hurt. If someone is being abused online, do something. Be a hero. This is your chance. Speak up. Speak out. Be a good person. Drown out the negative with the positive. And second, we've got to stop clicking on the lowest-common-denominator, bottom-feeding linkbait. If you don't like the 24/7 all Kardashian all the time programming, you've got to stop clicking on the stories about Kim Kardashian's sideboob. I know you do it. (Applause) You too, apparently. I mean, really, same example: if you don't like politicians calling each other names, stop clicking on the stories about what one guy in one party called the other guy in the other party. Clicking on a train wreck just pours gasoline on it. It makes it worse, the fire spreads. Our whole culture gets burned. If what gets the most clicks wins, then we have to start shaping the world we want with our clicks, because clicking is a public act. So click responsibly. Thank you. (Applause)

Talking about empowerment is odd, because when we talk about empowerment, what affects us most are the stories. So I want to begin with an everyday story. What is it really like to be a young woman in India? Now, I've spent the last 27 years of my life in India, lived in three small towns, two major cities, and I've had several experiences. When I was seven, a private tutor who used to come home to teach me mathematics molested me. He would put his hand up my skirt. He put his hand up my skirt and told me he knew how to make me feel good. At 17, a boy from my high school circulated an email detailing all the sexually aggressive things he could do to me because I didn't pay attention to him. At 19, I helped a friend whose parents had forcefully married her to an older man escape an abusive marriage. At 21, when my friend and I were walking down the road one afternoon, a man pulled down his pants and masturbated in front of us. We called people for help, and nobody came. At 25, when I was walking home one evening, two men on a motorcycle attacked me. I spent two nights in the hospital recovering from trauma and injuries. So throughout my life, I've seen women — family, friends, colleagues — live through these experiences, and they seldom talk about it. So in simple words, life in India is not easy. But today I'm not going to talk to you about this fear. I'm going to talk to you about an interesting path of learning that this fear took me on. So, what happened one night in December 2012 changed my life. So a young girl, a 23-year-old student, boarded a bus in Delhi with her male friend. There were six men on the bus, young men who you might encounter every day in India, and the chilling account of what followed was played over and over again in the Indian and international media. This girl was raped repeatedly, forcefully penetrated with a blunt rod, beaten, bitten, and left to die. Her friend was gagged, attacked, and knocked unconscious. She died on the 29th of December. And at a time when most of us here were preparing to welcome the new year, India plunged into darkness. For the first time in our history, men and women in Indian cities woke up to the horrific truth about the true state of women in the country. Now, like many other young women, I was absolutely terrified. I couldn't believe that something like this could happen in a national capital. I was angry and I was frustrated, but most of all, I felt utterly, completely helpless. But really, what do you do, right? Some write blogs, some ignore it, some join protests. I did all of it. In fact, that was what everyone was doing two years ago. So the media was filled with stories about all the horrific deeds that Indian men are capable of. They were compared to animals, sexually repressed beasts. In fact, so alien and unthinkable was this event in an Indian mind that the response from the Indian media, public and politicians proved one point: No one knew what to do. And no one wanted to be responsible for it. In fact, these were a few insensitive comments which were made in the media by prominent people in response to sexual violence against women in general. So the first one is made by a member of parliament, the second one is made by a spiritual leader, and the third one was actually the defendants' lawyer when the girl was fighting for her life and she passed away. Now, as a woman watching this day after day, I was tired. So as a writer and gender activist, I have written extensively on women, but this time, I realized it was different, because a part of me realized I was a part of that young woman too, and I decided I wanted to change this. So I did something spontaneous, hasty. I logged on to a citizen journalism platform called iReport, and I recorded a video talking about what the scene was like in Bangalore. I talked about how I felt, I talked about the ground realities, and I talked about the frustrations of living in India. In a few hours, the blog was shared widely, and comments and thoughts poured in from across the world. In that moment, a few things occurred to me. One, technology was always at hand for many young women like me. Two, like me, most young women hardly use it to express their views. Three, I realized for the first time that my voice mattered. So in the months that followed, I covered a trail of events in Bangalore which had no space in the mainstream news. In Cubbon Park, which is a big park in Bangalore, I gathered with over 100 others when groups of young men came forward to wear skirts to prove that clothing does not invite rape. When I reported about these events, I felt I had charge, I felt like I had a channel to release all the emotions I had inside me. I attended the town hall march when students held up signs saying "Kill them, hang them." "You wouldn't do this to your mothers or sisters." I went to a candlelight vigil where citizens gathered together to talk about the issue of sexual violence openly, and I recorded a lot of blogs in response to how worrying the situation was in India at that point. ["I am born with sisters and cousin who now live in cities and abroad but they never talk to me or complain about their daily difficulties like you say"] Now, the reactions confused me. While supportive comments poured in from across the world, as did vicious ones. So some called me a hypocrite. Some called me a victim, a rape apologist. Some even said I had a political motive. But this one comment kind of describes what we are discussing here today. But I was soon to learn that this was not all. As empowered as I felt with the new liberty that this citizen journalism channel gave me, I found myself in an unfamiliar situation. So sometime last August, I logged onto Facebook and I was looking through my news feed, and I noticed there was a link that was being shared by my friends. I clicked on the link; it led me back to a report uploaded by an American girl called Michaela Cross. The report was titled, "India: The story you never wanted to hear." And in this report, she recounted her firsthand account of facing sexual harassment in India. She wrote, "There is no way to prepare for the eyes, the eyes that every day stared with such entitlement at my body, with no change of expression whether I met their gaze or not. Walking to the fruit seller's or the tailor's, I got stares so sharp that they sliced away bits of me piece by piece." She called India a traveler's heaven and a woman's hell. She said she was stalked, groped, and masturbated at. Now, late that evening, the report went viral. It was on news channels across the world. Everyone was discussing it. It had over a million views, a thousand comments and shares, and I found myself witnessing a very similar thing. The media was caught in this vicious cycle of opinion and outburst and no outcome whatsoever. So that night, as I sat wondering how I should respond, I found myself filled with doubt. You see, as a writer, I approached this issue as an observer, as an Indian, I felt embarrassment and disbelief, and as an activist, I looked at it as a defender of rights, but as a citizen journalist, I suddenly felt very vulnerable. I mean, here she was, a young woman who was using a channel to talk about her experience just as I was, and yet I felt unsettled. You see, no one ever tells you that true empowerment comes from giving yourself the permission to think and act. Empowerment is often made to sound as if it's an ideal, it's a wonderful outcome. When we talk about empowerment, we often talk about giving people access to materials, giving them access to tools. But the thing is, empowerment is an emotion. It's a feeling. The first step to empowerment is to give yourself the authority, the key to independent will, and for women everywhere, no matter who we are or where we come from, that is the most difficult step. We fear the sound of our own voice, for it means admission, but it is this that gives us the power to change our environment. Now in this situation where I was faced with so many different kinds of realities, I was unsure how to judge, because I didn't know what it would mean for me. I feared to judge because I didn't know what it would be if I didn't support the same view as this girl. I didn't know what it would mean for me if I was challenging someone else's truth. But yet, it was simple. I had to make a decision: Should I speak up or should I stay quiet? So after a lot of thought, I recorded a video blog in response, and I told Michaela, well, there are different sides to India, and I also tried to explain that things would be okay and I expressed my regret for what she had faced. And a few days later, I was invited to talk on air with her, and for the first time, I reached out to this girl who I had never met, who was so far away, but yet I felt so close to. Since this report came to light, more young people than ever were discussing sexual harassment on the campus, and the university that Michaela belonged to gave her the assistance she needed. The university even took measures to train its students to equip them with the skills that they need to confront challenges such as harassment, and for the first the time, I felt I wasn't alone. You see, if there's anything that I've learned as an active citizen journalist over the past few years, it is our dire lack as a society to actively find avenues where our voices can be heard. We don't realize that when we are standing up, we are not just standing up as individuals, we are standing up for our communities, our friends, our peers. Most of us say that women are denied their rights, but the truth is, oftentimes, women deny themselves these rights. In a recent survey in India, 95 percent of the women who work in I.T., aviation, hospitality and call centers, said they didn't feel safe returning home alone after work in the late hours or in the evening. In Bangalore, where I come from, this number is 85 percent. In rural areas in India, if anything is to go by the recent gang rapes in Badaun and acid attacks in Odisha and Aligarh are supposed to go by, we need to act really soon. Don't get me wrong, the challenges that women will face in telling their stories is real, but we need to start pursuing and trying to identify mediums to participate in our system and not just pursue the media blindly. Today, more women than ever are standing up and questioning the government in India, and this is a result of that courage. There is a sixfold increase in women reporting harassment, and the government passed the Criminal Law (Amendment) Act in 2013 to protect women against sexual assault. As I end this talk, I just want to say that I know a lot of us in this room have our secrets, but let us speak up. Let us fight the shame and talk about it. It could be a platform, a community, your loved one, whoever or whatever you choose, but let us speak up. The truth is, the end to this problem begins with us. Thank you. (Applause)

In Kenya, 1984 is known as the year of the cup, or the goro goro. The goro goro is a cup used to measure two kilograms of maize flower on the market, and the maize flower is used to make ugali, a polenta-like cake that is eaten together with vegetables. Both the maize and the vegetables are grown on most Kenyan farms, which means that most families can feed themselves from their own farm. One goro goro can feed three meals for an average family, and in 1984, the whole harvest could fit in one goro goro. It was and still is one of the worst droughts in living memory. Now today, I insure farmers against droughts like those in the year of the cup, or to be more specific, I insure the rains. I come from a family of missionaries who built hospitals in Indonesia, and my father built a psychiatric hospital in Tanzania. This is me, age five, in front of that hospital. I don't think they thought I'd grow up to sell insurance. (Laughter) So let me tell you how that happened. In 2008, I was working for the Ministry of Agriculture of Rwanda, and my boss had just been promoted to become the minister. She launched an ambitious plan to start a green revolution in her country, and before we knew it, we were importing tons of fertilizer and seed and telling farmers how to apply that fertilizer and plant. A couple of weeks later, the International Monetary Fund visited us, and asked my minister, "Minister, it's great that you want to help farmers reach food security, but what if it doesn't rain?" My minister answered proudly and somewhat defiantly, "I am going to pray for rain." That ended the discussion. On the way back to the ministry in the car, she turned around to me and said, "Rose, you've always been interested in finance. Go find us some insurance." It's been six years since, and last year I was fortunate enough to be part of a team that insured over 185,000 farmers in Kenya and Rwanda against drought. They owned an average of half an acre and paid on average two Euros in premium. It's microinsurance. Now, traditional insurance doesn't work with two to three Euros of premium, because traditional insurance relies on farm visits. A farmer here in Germany would be visited for the start of the season, halfway through, and at the end, and again if there was a loss, to estimate the damages. For a small-scale farmer in the middle of Africa, the maths of doing those visits simply don't add up. So instead, we rely on technology and data. This satellite measures whether there were clouds or not, because think about it: If there are clouds, then you might have some rain, but if there are no clouds, then it's actually impossible for it to rain. These images show the onset of the rains this season in Kenya. You see that around March 6, the clouds move in and then disappear, and then around the March 11, the clouds really move in. That, and those clouds, were the onset of the rains this year. This satellite covers the whole of Africa and goes back as far as 1984, and that's important, because if you know how many times a place has had a drought in the last 30 years, you can make a pretty good estimate what the chances are of drought in the future, and that means that you can put a price tag on the risk of drought. The data alone isn't enough. We devise agronomic algorithms which tell us how much rainfall a crop needs and when. For example, for maize at planting, you need to have two days of rain for farmers to plant, and then it needs to rain once every two weeks for the crop to properly germinate. After that, you need rain every three weeks for the crop to form its leaves, whereas at flowering, you need it to rain more frequently, about once every 10 days for the crop to form its cob. At the end of the season, you actually don't want it to rain, because rains then can damage the crop. Devising such a cover is difficult, but it turned out the real challenge was selling insurance. We set ourselves a modest target of 500 farmers insured after our first season. After a couple of months' intense marketing, we had signed up the grand total of 185 farmers. I was disappointed and confounded. Everybody kept telling me that farmers wanted insurance, but our prime customers simply weren't buying. They were waiting to see what would happen, didn't trust insurance companies, or thought, "I've managed for so many years. Why would I buy insurance now?" Now many of you know microcredit, the method of providing small loans to poor people pioneered by Muhammad Yunus, who won the Nobel Peace Prize for his work with the Grameen Bank. Turns out, selling microcredit isn't the same as selling insurance. For credit, a farmer needs to earn the trust of a bank, and if it succeeds, the bank will advance him money. That's an attractive proposition. For insurance, the farmer needs to trust the insurance company, and needs to advance the insurance company money. It's a very different value proposition. And so the uptick of insurance has been slow, with so far only 4.4 percent of Africans taking up insurance in 2012, and half of that number is in one country, South Africa. We tried for some years selling insurance directly to farmers, with very high marketing cost and very limited success. Then we realized that there were many organizations working with farmers: seed companies, microfinance institutions, mobile phone companies, government agencies. They were all providing loans to farmers, and often, just before they'd finalize the loan, the farmer would say, "But what if it doesn't rain? How do you expect me to repay my loan?" Many of these organizations were taking on the risk themselves, simply hoping that that year, the worst wouldn't happen. Most of the organizations, however, were limiting their growth in agriculture. They couldn't take on this kind of risk. These organizations became our customers, and when combining credit and insurance, interesting things can happen. Let me tell you one more story. At the start of February 2012 in western Kenya, the rains started, and they started early, and when rains start early, farmers are encouraged, because it usually means that the season is going to be good. So they took out loans and planted. For the next three weeks, there wasn't a single drop of rain, and the crops that had germinated so well shriveled and died. We'd insured the loans of a microfinance institution that had provided those loans to about 6,000 farmers in that area, and we called them up and said, "Look, we know about the drought. We've got you. We'll give you 200,000 Euros at the end of the season." They said, "Wow, that's great, but that'll be late. Could you give us the money now? Then these farmers can still replant and can get a harvest this season." So we convinced our insurance partners, and later that April, these farmers replanted. We took the idea of replanting to a seed company and convinced them to price the cost of insurance into every bag of seed, and in every bag, we packed a card that had a number on it, and when the farmers would open the card, they'd text in that number, and that number would actually help us to locate the farmer and allocate them to a satellite pixel. A satellite would then measure the rainfall for the next three weeks, and if it didn't rain, we'd replace their seed. One of the first — (Applause) — Hold on, I'm not there! One of the first beneficiaries of this replanting guarantee was Bosco Mwinyi. We visited his farm later that August, and I wish I could show you the smile on his face when he showed us his harvest, because it warmed my heart and it made me realize why selling insurance can be a good thing. But you know, he insisted that we get his whole harvest in the picture, so we had to zoom out a lot. Insurance secured his harvest that season, and I believe that today, we have all the tools to enable African farmers to take control of their own destiny. No more years of the cup. Instead, I am looking forward to, at least somehow, the year of the insurance, or the year of the great harvest. Thank you. (Applause)

Ten years ago, I wrote a book which I entitled "Our Final Century?" Question mark. My publishers cut out the question mark. (Laughter) The American publishers changed our title to "Our Final Hour." Americans like instant gratification and the reverse. (Laughter) And my theme was this: Our Earth has existed for 45 million centuries, but this one is special — it's the first where one species, ours, has the planet's future in its hands. Over nearly all of Earth's history, threats have come from nature — disease, earthquakes, asteroids and so forth — but from now on, the worst dangers come from us. And it's now not just the nuclear threat; in our interconnected world, network breakdowns can cascade globally; air travel can spread pandemics worldwide within days; and social media can spread panic and rumor literally at the speed of light. We fret too much about minor hazards — improbable air crashes, carcinogens in food, low radiation doses, and so forth — but we and our political masters are in denial about catastrophic scenarios. The worst have thankfully not yet happened. Indeed, they probably won't. But if an event is potentially devastating, it's worth paying a substantial premium to safeguard against it, even if it's unlikely, just as we take out fire insurance on our house. And as science offers greater power and promise, the downside gets scarier too. We get ever more vulnerable. Within a few decades, millions will have the capability to misuse rapidly advancing biotech, just as they misuse cybertech today. Freeman Dyson, in a TED Talk, foresaw that children will design and create new organisms just as routinely as his generation played with chemistry sets. Well, this may be on the science fiction fringe, but were even part of his scenario to come about, our ecology and even our species would surely not survive long unscathed. For instance, there are some eco-extremists who think that it would be better for the planet, for Gaia, if there were far fewer humans. What happens when such people have mastered synthetic biology techniques that will be widespread by 2050? And by then, other science fiction nightmares may transition to reality: dumb robots going rogue, or a network that develops a mind of its own threatens us all. Well, can we guard against such risks by regulation? We must surely try, but these enterprises are so competitive, so globalized, and so driven by commercial pressure, that anything that can be done will be done somewhere, whatever the regulations say. It's like the drug laws — we try to regulate, but can't. And the global village will have its village idiots, and they'll have a global range. So as I said in my book, we'll have a bumpy ride through this century. There may be setbacks to our society — indeed, a 50 percent chance of a severe setback. But are there conceivable events that could be even worse, events that could snuff out all life? When a new particle accelerator came online, some people anxiously asked, could it destroy the Earth or, even worse, rip apart the fabric of space? Well luckily, reassurance could be offered. I and others pointed out that nature has done the same experiments zillions of times already, via cosmic ray collisions. But scientists should surely be precautionary about experiments that generate conditions without precedent in the natural world. Biologists should avoid release of potentially devastating genetically modified pathogens. And by the way, our special aversion to the risk of truly existential disasters depends on a philosophical and ethical question, and it's this: Consider two scenarios. Scenario A wipes out 90 percent of humanity. Scenario B wipes out 100 percent. How much worse is B than A? Some would say 10 percent worse. The body count is 10 percent higher. But I claim that B is incomparably worse. As an astronomer, I can't believe that humans are the end of the story. It is five billion years before the sun flares up, and the universe may go on forever, so post-human evolution, here on Earth and far beyond, could be as prolonged as the Darwinian process that's led to us, and even more wonderful. And indeed, future evolution will happen much faster, on a technological timescale, not a natural selection timescale. So we surely, in view of those immense stakes, shouldn't accept even a one in a billion risk that human extinction would foreclose this immense potential. Some scenarios that have been envisaged may indeed be science fiction, but others may be disquietingly real. It's an important maxim that the unfamiliar is not the same as the improbable, and in fact, that's why we at Cambridge University are setting up a center to study how to mitigate these existential risks. It seems it's worthwhile just for a few people to think about these potential disasters. And we need all the help we can get from others, because we are stewards of a precious pale blue dot in a vast cosmos, a planet with 50 million centuries ahead of it. And so let's not jeopardize that future. And I'd like to finish with a quote from a great scientist called Peter Medawar. I quote, "The bells that toll for mankind are like the bells of Alpine cattle. They are attached to our own necks, and it must be our fault if they do not make a tuneful and melodious sound." Thank you very much. (Applause)

These are simple objects: clocks, keys, combs, glasses. They are the things the victims of genocide in Bosnia carried with them on their final journey. We are all familiar with these mundane, everyday objects. The fact that some of the victims carried personal items such as toothpaste and a toothbrush is a clear sign they had no idea what was about to happen to them. Usually, they were told that they were going to be exchanged for prisoners of war. These items have been recovered from numerous mass graves across my homeland, and as we speak, forensics are exhuming bodies from newly discovered mass graves, 20 years after the war. And it is quite possibly the largest ever discovered. During the four years of conflict that devastated the Bosnian nation in the early '90s, approximately 30,000 citizens, mainly civilians, went missing, presumed killed, and another 100,000 were killed during combat operations. Most of them were killed either in the early days of the war or towards the end of the hostilities, when U.N. safe zones like Srebrenica fell into the hands of the Serb army. The international criminal tribunal delivered a number of sentences for crimes against humanity and genocide. Genocide is a systematic and deliberate destruction of a racial, political, religious or ethnic group. As much as genocide is about killing. It is also about destroying their property, their cultural heritage, and ultimately the very notion that they ever existed. Genocide is not only about the killing; it is about the denied identity. There are always traces — no such thing as a perfect crime. There are always remnants of the perished ones that are more durable than their fragile bodies and our selective and fading memory of them. These items are recovered from numerous mass graves, and the main goal of this collection of the items is a unique process of identifying those who disappeared in the killings, the first act of genocide on European soil since the Holocaust. Not a single body should remain undiscovered or unidentified. Once recovered, these items that the victims carried with them on their way to execution are carefully cleaned, analyzed, catalogued and stored. Thousands of artifacts are packed in white plastic bags just like the ones you see on CSI. These objects are used as a forensic tool in visual identification of the victims, but they are also used as very valuable forensic evidence in the ongoing war crimes trials. Survivors are occasionally called to try to identify these items physically, but physical browsing is extremely difficult, an ineffective and painful process. Once the forensics and doctors and lawyers are done with these objects, they become orphans of the narrative. Many of them get destroyed, believe it or not, or they get simply shelved, out of sight and out of mind. I decided a few years ago to photograph every single exhumed item in order to create a visual archive that survivors could easily browse. As a storyteller, I like to give back to the community. I like to move beyond raising awareness. And in this case, someone may recognize these items or at least their photographs will remain as a permanent, unbiased and accurate reminder of what happened. Photography is about empathy, and the familiarity of these items guarantee empathy. In this case, I am merely a tool, a forensic, if you like, and the result is a photography that is as close as possible of being a document. Once all the missing persons are identified, only decaying bodies in their graves and these everyday items will remain. In all their simplicity, these items are the last testament to the identity of the victims, the last permanent reminder that these people ever existed. Thank you very much. (Applause)

Oliver was an extremely dashing, handsome, charming and largely unstable male that I completely lost my heart to. (Laughter) He was a Bernese mountain dog, and my ex-husband and I adopted him, and about six months in, we realized that he was a mess. He had such paralyzing separation anxiety that we couldn't leave him alone. Once, he jumped out of our third floor apartment. He ate fabric. He ate things, recyclables. He hunted flies that didn't exist. He suffered from hallucinations. He was diagnosed with a canine compulsive disorder and that's really just the tip of the iceberg. But like with humans, sometimes it's six months in before you realize that the person that you love has some issues. (Laughter) And most of us do not take the person we're dating back to the bar where we met them or give them back to the friend that introduced us, or sign them back up on Match.com. (Laughter) We love them anyway, and we stick to it, and that is what I did with my dog. And I was a — I'd studied biology. I have a Ph.D. in history of science from MIT, and had you asked me 10 years ago if a dog I loved, or just dogs generally, had emotions, I would have said yes, but I'm not sure that I would have told you that they can also wind up with an anxiety disorder, a Prozac prescription and a therapist. But then, I fell in love, and I realized that they can, and actually trying to help my own dog overcome his panic and his anxiety, it just changed my life. It cracked open my world. And I spent the last seven years, actually, looking into this topic of mental illness in other animals. Can they be mentally ill like people, and if so, what does it mean about us? And what I discovered is that I do believe they can suffer from mental illness, and actually looking and trying to identify mental illness in them often helps us be better friends to them and also can help us better understand ourselves. So let's talk about diagnosis for a minute. Many of us think that we can't know what another animal is thinking, and that is true, but any of you in relationships — at least this is my case — just because you ask someone that you're with or your parent or your child how they feel doesn't mean that they can tell you. They may not have words to explain what it is that they're feeling, and they may not know. It's actually a pretty recent phenomenon that we feel that we have to talk to someone to understand their emotional distress. Before the early 20th century, physicians often diagnosed emotional distress in their patients just by observation. It also turns out that thinking about mental illness in other animals isn't actually that much of a stretch. Most mental disorders in the United States are fear and anxiety disorders, and when you think about it, fear and anxiety are actually really extremely helpful animal emotions. Usually we feel fear and anxiety in situations that are dangerous, and once we feel them, we then are motivated to move away from whatever is dangerous. The problem is when we begin to feel fear and anxiety in situations that don't call for it. Mood disorders, too, may actually just be the unfortunate downside of being a feeling animal, and obsessive compulsive disorders also are often manifestations of a really healthy animal thing which is keeping yourself clean and groomed. This tips into the territory of mental illness when you do things like compulsively over-wash your hands or paws, or you develop a ritual that's so extreme that you can't sit down to a bowl of food unless you engage in that ritual. So for humans, we have the "Diagnostic and Statistical Manual," which is basically an atlas of the currently agreed-upon mental disorders. In other animals, we have YouTube. (Laughter) This is just one search I did for "OCD dog" but I encourage all of you to look at "OCD cat." You will be shocked by what you see. I'm going to show you just a couple examples. This is an example of shadow-chasing. I know, and it's funny and in some ways it's cute. The issue, though, is that dogs can develop compulsions like this that they then engage in all day. So they won't go for a walk, they won't hang out with their friends, they won't eat. They'll develop fixations like chasing their tails compulsively. Here's an example of a cat named Gizmo. He looks like he's on a stakeout but he does this for many, many, many hours a day. He just sits there and he will paw and paw and paw at the screen. This is another example of what's considered a stereotypic behavior. This is a sun bear at the Oakland Zoo named Ting Ting. And if you just sort of happened upon this scene, you might think that Ting Ting is just playing with a stick, but Ting Ting does this all day, and if you pay close attention and if I showed you guys the full half-hour of this clip, you'd see that he does the exact same thing in the exact same order, and he spins the stick in the exact same way every time. Other super common behaviors that you may see, particularly in captive animals, are pacing stereotypies or swaying stereotypies, and actually, humans do this too, and in us, we'll sway, we'll move from side to side. Many of us do this, and sometimes it's an effort to soothe ourselves, and I think in other animals that is often the case too. But it's not just stereotypic behaviors that other animals engage in. This is Gigi. She's a gorilla that lives at the Franklin Park Zoo in Boston. She actually has a Harvard psychiatrist, and she's been treated for a mood disorder among other things. Many animals develop mood disorders. Lots of creatures — this horse is just one example — develop self-destructive behaviors. They'll gnaw on things or do other things that may also soothe them, even if they're self-destructive, which could be considered similar to the ways that some humans cut themselves. Plucking. Turns out, if you have fur or feathers or skin, you can pluck yourself compulsively, and some parrots actually have been studied to better understand trichotillomania, or compulsive plucking in humans, something that affects 20 million Americans right now. Lab rats pluck themselves too. In them, it's called barbering. Canine veterans of conflicts of Iraq and Afghanistan are coming back with what's considered canine PTSD, and they're having a hard time reentering civilian life when they come back from deployments. They can be too scared to approach men with beards or to hop into cars. I want to be careful and be clear, though. I do not think that canine PTSD is the same as human PTSD. But I also do not think that my PTSD is like your PTSD, or that my anxiety or that my sadness is like yours. We are all different. We also all have very different susceptibilities. So two dogs, raised in the same household, exposed to the very same things, one may develop, say, a debilitating fear of motorcycles, or a phobia of the beep of the microwave, and another one is going to be just fine. So one thing that people ask me pretty frequently: Is this just an instance of humans driving other animals crazy? Or, is animal mental illness just a result of mistreatment or abuse? And it turns out we're actually so much more complicated than that. So one great thing that has happened to me is recently I published a book on this, and every day now that I open my email or when I go to a reading or even when I go to a cocktail party, people tell me their stories of the animals that they have met. And recently, I did a reading in California, and a woman raised her hand after the talk and she said, "Dr. Braitman, I think my cat has PTSD." And I said, "Well, why? Tell me a little bit about it." So, Ping is her cat. She was a rescue, and she used to live with an elderly man, and one day the man was vacuuming and he suffered a heart attack, and he died. A week later, Ping was discovered in the apartment alongside the body of her owner, and the vacuum had been running the entire time. For many months, up to I think two years after that incident, she was so scared she couldn't be in the house when anyone was cleaning. She was quite literally a scaredy cat. She would hide in the closet. She was un-self-confident and shaky, but with the loving support of her family, a lot of a time, and their patience, now, three years later, she's actually a happy, confident cat. Another story of trauma and recovery that I came across was actually a few years ago. I was in Thailand to do some research. I met a monkey named Boonlua, and when Boonlua was a baby, he was attacked by a pack of dogs, and they ripped off both of his legs and one arm, and Boonlua dragged himself to a monastery, where the monks took him in. They called in a veterinarian, who treated his wounds. Eventually, Boonlua wound up at an elephant facility, and the keepers really decided to take him under their wing, and they figured out what he liked, which, it turned out, was mint Mentos and Rhinoceros beetles and eggs. But they worried, because he was social, that he was lonely, and they didn't want to put him in with another monkey, because they thought with just one arm, he wouldn't be able to defend himself or even play. And so they gave him a rabbit, and Boonlua was immediately a different monkey. He was extremely happy to be with this rabbit. They groomed each other, they become close friends, and then the rabbit had bunnies, and Boonlua was even happier than he was before, and it had in a way given him a reason to wake up in the morning, and in fact it gave him such a reason to wake up that he decided not to sleep. He became extremely protective of these bunnies, and he stopped sleeping, and he would sort of nod off while trying to take care of them. In fact, he was so protective and so affectionate with these babies that the sanctuary eventually had to take them away from him because he was so protective, he was worried that their mother might hurt them. So after they were taken away, the sanctuary staff worried that he would fall into a depression, and so to avoid that, they gave him another rabbit friend. (Laughter) My official opinion is that he does not look depressed. (Laughter) So one thing that I would really like people to feel is that you really should feel empowered to make some assumptions about the creatures that you know well. So when it comes to your dog or your cat or maybe your one-armed monkey that you happen to know, if you think that they are traumatized or depressed, you're probably right. This is extremely anthropomorphic, or the assignation of human characteristics onto non-human animals or things. I don't think, though, that that's a problem. I don't think that we can not anthropomorphize. It's not as if you can take your human brain out of your head and put it in a jar and then use it to think about another animal thinking. We will always be one animal wondering about the emotional experience of another animal. So then the choice becomes, how do you anthropomorphize well? Or do you anthropomorphize poorly? And anthropomorphizing poorly is all too common. (Laughter) It may include dressing your corgis up and throwing them a wedding, or getting too close to exotic wildlife because you believe that you had a spiritual connection. There's all manner of things. Anthropomorphizing well, however, I believe is based on accepting our animal similarities with other species and using them to make assumptions that are informed about other animals' minds and experiences, and there's actually an entire industry that is in some ways based on anthropomorphizing well, and that is the psychopharmaceutical industry. One in five Americans is currently taking a psychopharmaceutical drug, from the antidepressants and antianxiety medications to the antipsychotics. It turns out that we owe this entire psychopharmaceutical arsenal to other animals. These drugs were tested in non-human animals first, and not just for toxicity but for behavioral effects. The very popular antipsychotic Thorazine first relaxed rats before it relaxed people. The antianxiety medication Librium was given to cats selected for their meanness in the 1950s and made them into peaceable felines. And even antidepressants were first tested in rabbits. Today, however, we are not just giving these drugs to other animals as test subjects, but they're giving them these drugs as patients, both in ethical and much less ethical ways. SeaWorld gives mother orcas antianxiety medications when their calves are taken away. Many zoo gorillas have been given antipsychotics and antianxiety medications. But dogs like my own Oliver are given antidepressants and some antianxiety medications to keep them from jumping out of buildings or jumping into traffic. Just recently, actually, a study came out in "Science" that showed that even crawdads responded to antianxiety medication. It made them braver, less skittish, and more likely to explore their environment. It's hard to know how many animals are on these drugs, but I can tell you that the animal pharmaceutical industry is immense and growing, from seven billion dollars in 2011 to a projected 9.25 billion by the year 2015. Some animals are on these drugs indefinitely. Others, like one bonobo who lives in Milwaukee at the zoo there was on them until he started to save his Paxil prescription and then distribute it among the other bonobos. (Laughter) (Applause) More than psychopharmaceuticals, though, there are many, many, many other therapeutic interventions that help other creatures. And here is a place where I think actually that veterinary medicine can teach something to human medicine, which is, if you take your dog, who is, say, compulsively chasing his tail, into the veterinary behaviorist, their first action isn't to reach for the prescription pad; it's to ask you about your dog's life. They want to know how often your dog gets outside. They want to know how much exercise your dog is getting. They want to know how much social time with other dogs and other humans. They want to talk to you about what sorts of therapies, largely behavior therapies, you've tried with that animal. Those are the things that often tend to help the most, especially when combined with psychopharmaceuticals. The thing, though, I believe, that helps the most, particularly with social animals, is time with other social animals. In many ways, I feel like I became a service animal to my own dog, and I have seen parrots do it for people and people do it for parrots and dogs do it for elephants and elephants do it for other elephants. I don't know about you; I get a lot of Internet forwards of unlikely animal friendships. I also think it's a huge part of Facebook, the monkey that adopts the cat or the great dane who adopted the orphaned fawn, or the cow that makes friends with the pig, and had you asked me eight, nine years ago, about these, I would have told you that they were hopelessly sentimental and maybe too anthropomorphic in the wrong way and maybe even staged, and what I can tell you now is that there is actually something to this. This is legit. In fact, some interesting studies have pointed to oxytocin levels, which are a kind of bonding hormone that we release when we're having sex or nursing or around someone that we care for extremely, oxytocin levels raising in both humans and dogs who care about each other or who enjoy each other's company, and beyond that, other studies show that oxytocin raised even in other pairs of animals, so, say, in goats and dogs who were friends and played with each other, their levels spiked afterwards. I have a friend who really showed me that mental health is in fact a two-way street. His name is Lonnie Hodge, and he's a veteran of Vietnam. When he returned, he started working with survivors of genocide and a lot of people who had gone through war trauma. And he had PTSD and also a fear of heights, because in Vietnam, he had been rappelling backwards out of helicopters over the skids, and he was givena service dog named Gander, a labradoodle, to help him with PTSD and his fear of heights. This is them actually on the first day that they met, which is amazing, and since then, they've spent a lot of time together visiting with other veterans suffering from similar issues. But what's so interesting to me about Lonnie and Gander's relationship is about a few months in, Gander actually developed a fear of heights, probably because he was watching Lonnie so closely. What's pretty great about this, though, is that he's still a fantastic service dog, because now, when they're both at a great height, Lonnie is so concerned with Gander's well-being that he forgets to be scared of the heights himself. Since I've spent so much time with these stories, digging into archives, I literally spent years doing this research, and it's changed me. I no longer look at animals at the species level. I look at them as individuals, and I think about them as creatures with their own individual weather systems guiding their behavior and informing how they respond to the world. And I really believe that this has made me a more curious and a more empathetic person, both to the animals that share my bed and occasionally wind up on my plate, but also to the people that I know who are suffering from anxiety and from phobias and all manner of other things, and I really do believe that even though you can't know exactly what's going on in the mind of a pig or your pug or your partner, that that shouldn't stop you from empathizing with them. The best thing that we could do for our loved ones is, perhaps, to anthropomorphize them. Charles Darwin's father once told him that everybody could lose their mind at some point. Thankfully, we can often find them again, but only with each other's help. Thank you. (Applause)

When my first children's book was published in 2001, I returned to my old elementary school to talk to the students about being an author and an illustrator, and when I was setting up my slide projector in the cafetorium, I looked across the room, and there she was: my old lunch lady. She was still there at the school and she was busily preparing lunches for the day. So I approached her to say hello, and I said, "Hi, Jeannie! How are you?" And she looked at me, and I could tell that she recognized me, but she couldn't quite place me, and she looked at me and she said, "Stephen Krosoczka?" And I was amazed that she knew I was a Krosoczka, but Stephen is my uncle who is 20 years older than I am, and she had been his lunch lady when he was a kid. And she started telling me about her grandkids, and that blew my mind. My lunch lady had grandkids, and therefore kids, and therefore left school at the end of the day? I thought she lived in the cafeteria with the serving spoons. I had never thought about any of that before. Well, that chance encounter inspired my imagination, and I created the Lunch Lady graphic novel series, a series of comics about a lunch lady who uses her fish stick nunchucks to fight off evil cyborg substitutes, a school bus monster, and mutant mathletes, and the end of every book, they get the bad guy with their hairnet, and they proclaim, "Justice is served!" (Laughter) (Applause) And it's been amazing, because the series was so welcomed into the reading lives of children, and they sent me the most amazing letters and cards and artwork. And I would notice as I would visit schools, the lunch staff would be involved in the programming in a very meaningful way. And coast to coast, all of the lunch ladies told me the same thing: "Thank you for making a superhero in our likeness." Because the lunch lady has not been treated very kindly in popular culture over time. But it meant the most to Jeannie. When the books were first published, I invited her to the book launch party, and in front of everyone there, everyone she had fed over the years, I gave her a piece of artwork and some books. And two years after this photo was taken, she passed away, and I attended her wake, and nothing could have prepared me for what I saw there, because next to her casket was this painting, and her husband told me it meant so much to her that I had acknowledged her hard work, I had validated what she did. And that inspired me to create a day where we could recreate that feeling in cafeterias across the country: School Lunch Hero Day, a day where kids can make creative projects for their lunch staff. And I partnered with the School Nutrition Association, and did you know that a little over 30 million kids participate in school lunch programs every day. That equals up to a little over five billion lunches made every school year. And the stories of heroism go well beyond just a kid getting a few extra chicken nuggets on their lunch tray. There is Ms. Brenda in California, who keeps a close eye on every student that comes through her line and then reports back to the guidance counselor if anything is amiss. There are the lunch ladies in Kentucky who realized that 67 percent of their students relied on those meals every day, and they were going without food over the summer, so they retrofitted a school bus to create a mobile feeding unit, and they traveled around the neighborhoods feedings 500 kids a day during the summer. And kids made the most amazing projects. I knew they would. Kids made hamburger cards that were made out of construction paper. They took photos of their lunch lady's head and plastered it onto my cartoon lunch lady and fixed that to a milk carton and presented them with flowers. And they made their own comics, starring the cartoon lunch lady alongside their actual lunch ladies. And they made thank you pizzas, where every kid signed a different topping of a construction paper pizza. For me, I was so moved by the response that came from the lunch ladies, because one woman said to me, she said, "Before this day, I felt like I was at the end of the planet at this school. I didn't think that anyone noticed us down here." Another woman said to me, "You know, what I got out of this is that what I do is important." And of course what she does is important. What they all do is important. They're feeding our children every single day, and before a child can learn, their belly needs to be full, and these women and men are working on the front lines to create an educated society. So I hope that you don't wait for School Lunch Hero Day to say thank you to your lunch staff, and I hope that you remember how powerful a thank you can be. A thank you can change a life. It changes the life of the person who receives it, and it changes the life of the person who expresses it. Thank you. (Applause)

I would like to share with you today a project that has changed how I approach and practice architecture: the Fez River Rehabilitation Project. My hometown of Fez, Morocco, boasts one of the largest walled medieval cities in the world, called the medina, nestled in a river valley. The entire city is a UNESCO World Heritage Site. Since the 1950s, as the population of the medina grew, basic urban infrastructure such as green open spaces and sewage quickly changed and got highly stressed. One of the biggest casualties of the situation was the Fez River, which bisects the medina in its middle and has been considered for many centuries as the city's very soul. In fact, one can witness the presence of the river's extensive water network all throughout the city, in places such as private and public fountains. Unfortunately, because of the pollution of the river, it has been covered little by little by concrete slabs since 1952. This process of erasure was coupled with the destruction of many houses along the river banks to be able to make machineries enter the narrow pedestrian network of the medina. Those urban voids quickly became illegal parking or trash yards. Actually, the state of the river before entering the medina is pretty healthy. Then pollution takes its toll, mainly due to untreated sewage and chemical dumping from crafts such as tanning. At some point, I couldn't bear the desecration of the river, such an important part of my city, and I decided to take action, especially after I heard that the city received a grant to divert sewage water and to treat it. With clean water, suddenly the uncovering of the river became possible, and with luck and actually a lot of pushing, my partner Takako Tajima and I were commissioned by the city to work with a team of engineers to uncover the river. However, we were sneaky, and we proposed more: to convert riverbanks into pedestrian pathways, and then to connect these pathways back to the city fabric, and finally to convert the urban voids along the riverbanks into public spaces that are lacking in the Medina of Fez. I will show you briefly now two of these public spaces. The first one is the Rcif Plaza, which sits actually right on top of the river, which you can see here in dotted lines. This plaza used to be a chaotic transportation hub that actually compromised the urban integrity of the medina, that has the largest pedestrian network in the world. And right beyond the historic bridge that you can see here, right next to the plaza, you can see that the river looked like a river of trash. Instead, what we proposed is to make the plaza entirely pedestrian, to cover it with recycled leather canopies, and to connect it to the banks of the river. The second site of intervention is also an urban void along the river banks, and it used to be an illegal parking, and we proposed to transform it into the first playground in the medina. The playground is constructed using recycled tires and also is coupled with a constructed wetland that not only cleans the water of the river but also retains it when floods occur. As the project progressed and received several design awards, new stakeholders intervened and changed the project goals and design. The only way for us to be able to bring the main goals of the project ahead was for us to do something very unusual that usually architects don't do. It was for us to take our design ego and our sense of authorship and put it in the backseat and to focus mainly on being activists and on trying to coalesce all of the agendas of stakeholders and focus on the main goals of the project: that is, to uncover the river, treat its water, and provide public spaces for all. We were actually very lucky, and many of those goals happened or are in the process of happening. Like, you can see here in the Rcif Plaza. This is how it looked like about six years ago. This is how it looks like today. It's still under construction, but actually it is heavily used by the local population. And finally, this is how the Rcif Plaza will look like when the project is completed. This is the river, covered, used as a trash yard. Then after many years of work, the river with clean water, uncovered. And finally, you can see here the river when the project will be completed. So for sure, the Fez River Rehabilitation will keep on changing and adapting to the sociopolitical landscape of the city, but we strongly believe that by reimagining the role and the agency of the architect, we have set up the core idea of the project into motion; that is, to transform the river from sewage to public space for all, thereby making sure that the city of Fez will remain a living city for its inhabitants rather than a mummified heritage. Thank you very much. (Applause)

TED is 30. The world wide web is celebrating this month its 25th anniversary. So I've got a question for you. Let's talk about the journey, mainly about the future. Let's talk about the state. Let's talk about what sort of a web we want. So 25 years ago, then, I was working at CERN. I got permission in the end after about a year to basically do it as a side project. I wrote the code. I was I suppose the first user. There was a lot of concern that people didn't want to pick it up because it would be too complicated. A lot of persuasion, a lot of wonderful collaboration with other people, and bit by bit, it worked. It took off. It was pretty cool. And in fact, a few years later in 2000, five percent of the world population were using the world wide web. In 2007, seven years later, 17 percent. In 2008, we formed the World Wide Web Foundation partly to look at that and worry about that figure. And now here we are in 2014, and 40 percent of the world are using the world wide web, and counting. Obviously it's increasing. I want you to think about both sides of that. Okay, obviously to anybody here at TED, the first question you ask is, what can we do to get the other 60 percent on board as quickly as possible? Lots of important things. Obviously it's going to be around mobile. But also, I want you to think about the 40 percent, because if you're sitting there yourself sort of with a web-enabled life, you don't remember things anymore, you just look them up, then you may feel that it's been a success and we can all sit back. But in fact, yeah, it's been a success, there's lots of things, Khan Academy for crying out loud, there's Wikipedia, there's a huge number of free e-books that you can read online, lots of wonderful things for education, things in many areas. Online commerce has in some cases completely turned upside down the way commerce works altogether, made types of commerce available which weren't available at all before. Commerce has been almost universally affected. Government, not universally affected, but very affected, and on a good day, lots of open data, lots of e-government, so lots of things which are visible happening on the web. Also, lots of things which are less visible. The healthcare, late at night when they're worried about what sort of cancer somebody they care about might have, when they just talk across the Internet to somebody who they care about very much in another country. Those sorts of things are not, they're not out there, and in fact they've acquired a certain amount of privacy. So we cannot assume that part of the web, part of the deal with the web, is when I use the web, it's just a transparent, neutral medium. I can talk to you over it without worrying about what we in fact now know is happening, without worrying about the fact that not only will surveillance be happening but it'll be done by people who may abuse the data. So in fact, something we realized, we can't just use the web, we have to worry about what the underlying infrastructure of the whole thing, is it in fact of a quality that we need? We revel in the fact that we have this wonderful free speech. We can tweet, and oh, lots and lots of people can see our tweets, except when they can't, except when actually Twitter is blocked from their country, or in some way the way we try to express ourselves has put some information about the state of ourselves, the state of the country we live in, which isn't available to anybody else. So we must protest and make sure that censorship is cut down, that the web is opened up where there is censorship. We love the fact that the web is open. It allows us to talk. Anybody can talk to anybody. It doesn't matter who we are. And then we join these big social networking companies which are in fact effectively built as silos, so that it's much easier to talk to somebody in the same social network than it is to talk to somebody in a different one, so in fact we're sometimes limiting ourselves. And we also have, if you've read the book about the filter bubble, the filter bubble phenomenon is that we love to use machines which help us find stuff we like. So we love it when we're bathed in what things we like to click on, and so the machine automatically feeds us the stuff that we like and we end up with this rose-colored spectacles view of the world called a filter bubble. So here are some of the things which maybe threaten the social web we have. What sort of web do you want? I want one which is not fragmented into lots of pieces, as some countries have been suggesting they should do in reaction to recent surveillance. I want a web which has got, for example, is a really good basis for democracy. I want a web where I can use healthcare with privacy and where there's a lot of health data, clinical data is available to scientists to do research. I want a web where the other 60 percent get on board as fast as possible. I want a web which is such a powerful basis for innovation that when something nasty happens, some disaster strikes, that we can respond by building stuff to respond to it very quickly. So this is just some of the things that I want, from a big list, obviously it's longer. You have your list. I want us to use this 25th anniversary to think about what sort of a web we want. You can go to webat25.org and find some links. There are lots of sites where people have started to put together a Magna Carta, a bill of rights for the web. How about we do that? How about we decide, these are, in a way, becoming fundamental rights, the right to communicate with whom I want. What would be on your list for that Magna Carta? Let's crowdsource a Magna Carta for the web. Let's do that this year. Let's use the energy from the 25th anniversary to crowdsource a Magna Carta to the web. (Applause) Thank you. And do me a favor, will you? Fight for it for me. Okay? Thanks. (Applause)

Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., in a 1968 speech where he reflects upon the Civil Rights Movement, states, "In the end, we will remember not the words of our enemies but the silence of our friends." As a teacher, I've internalized this message. Every day, all around us, we see the consequences of silence manifest themselves in the form of discrimination, violence, genocide and war. In the classroom, I challenge my students to explore the silences in their own lives through poetry. We work together to fill those spaces, to recognize them, to name them, to understand that they don't have to be sources of shame. In an effort to create a culture within my classroom where students feel safe sharing the intimacies of their own silences, I have four core principles posted on the board that sits in the front of my class, which every student signs at the beginning of the year: read critically, write consciously, speak clearly, tell your truth. And I find myself thinking a lot about that last point, tell your truth. And I realized that if I was going to ask my students to speak up, I was going to have to tell my truth and be honest with them about the times where I failed to do so. So I tell them that growing up, as a kid in a Catholic family in New Orleans, during Lent I was always taught that the most meaningful thing one could do was to give something up, sacrifice something you typically indulge in to prove to God you understand his sanctity. I've given up soda, McDonald's, French fries, French kisses, and everything in between. But one year, I gave up speaking. I figured the most valuable thing I could sacrifice was my own voice, but it was like I hadn't realized that I had given that up a long time ago. I spent so much of my life telling people the things they wanted to hear instead of the things they needed to, told myself I wasn't meant to be anyone's conscience because I still had to figure out being my own, so sometimes I just wouldn't say anything, appeasing ignorance with my silence, unaware that validation doesn't need words to endorse its existence. When Christian was beat up for being gay, I put my hands in my pocket and walked with my head down as if I didn't even notice. I couldn't use my locker for weeks because the bolt on the lock reminded me of the one I had put on my lips when the homeless man on the corner looked at me with eyes up merely searching for an affirmation that he was worth seeing. I was more concerned with touching the screen on my Apple than actually feeding him one. When the woman at the fundraising gala said "I'm so proud of you. It must be so hard teaching those poor, unintelligent kids," I bit my lip, because apparently we needed her money more than my students needed their dignity. We spend so much time listening to the things people are saying that we rarely pay attention to the things they don't. Silence is the residue of fear. It is feeling your flaws gut-wrench guillotine your tongue. It is the air retreating from your chest because it doesn't feel safe in your lungs. Silence is Rwandan genocide. Silence is Katrina. It is what you hear when there aren't enough body bags left. It is the sound after the noose is already tied. It is charring. It is chains. It is privilege. It is pain. There is no time to pick your battles when your battles have already picked you. I will not let silence wrap itself around my indecision. I will tell Christian that he is a lion, a sanctuary of bravery and brilliance. I will ask that homeless man what his name is and how his day was, because sometimes all people want to be is human. I will tell that woman that my students can talk about transcendentalism like their last name was Thoreau, and just because you watched one episode of "The Wire" doesn't mean you know anything about my kids. So this year, instead of giving something up, I will live every day as if there were a microphone tucked under my tongue, a stage on the underside of my inhibition. Because who has to have a soapbox when all you've ever needed is your voice? Thank you. (Applause)

I'm a teacher and a practitioner of civics in America. Now, I will kindly ask those of you who have just fallen asleep to please wake up. (Laughter) Why is it that the very word "civics" has such a soporific, even a narcoleptic effect on us? I think it's because the very word signifies something exceedingly virtuous, exceedingly important, and exceedingly boring. Well, I think it's the responsibility of people like us, people who show up for gatherings like this in person or online, in any way we can, to make civics sexy again, as sexy as it was during the American Revolution, as sexy as it was during the Civil Rights Movement. And I believe the way we make civics sexy again is to make explicitly about the teaching of power. The way we do that, I believe, is at the level of the city. This is what I want to talk about today, and I want to start by defining some terms and then I want to describe the scale of the problem I think we face and then suggest the ways that I believe cities can be the seat of the solution. So let me start with some definitions. By civics, I simply mean the art of being a pro-social, problem-solving contributor in a self-governing community. Civics is the art of citizenship, what Bill Gates Sr. calls simply showing up for life, and it encompasses three things: a foundation of values, an understanding of the systems that make the world go round, and a set of skills that allow you to pursue goals and to have others join in that pursuit. And that brings me to my definition of power, which is simply this: the capacity to make others do what you would have them do. It sounds menacing, doesn't it? We don't like to talk about power. We find it scary. We find it somehow evil. We feel uncomfortable naming it. In the culture and mythology of democracy, power resides with the people. Period. End of story. Any further inquiry not necessary and not really that welcome. Power has a negative moral valence. It sounds Machiavellian inherently. It seems inherently evil. But in fact power is no more inherently good or evil than fire or physics. It just is. And power governs how any form of government operates, whether a democracy or a dictatorship. And the problem we face today, here in America in particular, but all around the world, is that far too many people are profoundly illiterate in power — what it is, who has it, how it operates, how it flows, what part of it is visible, what part of it is not, why some people have it, why that's compounded. And as a result of this illiteracy, those few who do understand how power operates in civic life, those who understand how a bill becomes a law, yes, but also how a friendship becomes a subsidy, or how a bias becomes a policy, or how a slogan becomes a movement, the people who understand those things wield disproportionate influence, and they're perfectly happy to fill the vacuum created by the ignorance of the great majority. This is why it is so fundamental for us right now to grab hold of this idea of power and to democratize it. One of the things that is so profoundly exciting and challenging about this moment is that as a result of this power illiteracy that is so pervasive, there is a concentration of knowledge, of understanding, of clout. I mean, think about it: How does a friendship become a subsidy? Seamlessly, when a senior government official decides to leave government and become a lobbyist for a private interest and convert his or her relationships into capital for their new masters. How does a bias become a policy? Insidiously, just the way that stop-and-frisk, for instance, became over time a bureaucratic numbers game. How does a slogan become a movement? Virally, in the way that the Tea Party, for instance, was able to take the "Don't Tread on Me" flag from the American Revolution, or how, on the other side, a band of activists could take a magazine headline, "Occupy Wall Street," and turn that into a global meme and movement. The thing is, though, most people aren't looking for and don't want to see these realities. So much of this ignorance, this civic illiteracy, is willful. There are some millennials, for instance, who think the whole business is just sordid. They don't want to have anything to do with politics. They'd rather just opt out and engage in volunteerism. There are some techies out there who believe that the cure-all for any power imbalance or power abuse is simply more data, more transparency. There are some on the left who think power resides only with corporations, and some on the right who think power resides only with government, each side blinded by their selective outrage. There are the naive who believe that good things just happen and the cynical who believe that bad things just happen, the fortunate and unfortunate unlike who think that their lot is simply what they deserve rather than the eminently alterable result of a prior arrangement, an inherited allocation, of power. As a result of all of this creeping fatalism in public life, we here, particularly in America today, have depressingly low levels of civic knowledge, civic engagement, participation, awareness. The whole business of politics has been effectively subcontracted out to a band of professionals, money people, outreach people, message people, research people. The rest of us are meant to feel like amateurs in the sense of suckers. We become demotivated to learn more about how things work. We begin to opt out. Well, this problem, this challenge, is a thing that we must now confront, and I believe that when you have this kind of disengagement, this willful ignorance, it becomes both a cause and a consequence of this concentration of opportunity of wealth and clout that I was describing a moment ago, this profound civic inequality. This is why it is so important in our time right now to reimagine civics as the teaching of power. Perhaps it's never been more important at any time in our lifetimes. If people don't learn power, if people don't wake up, and if they don't wake up, they get left out. Now, part of the art of practicing power means being awake and having a voice, but it also is about having an arena where you can plausibly practice deciding. All of civics boils down to the simple question of who decides, and you have to play that out in a place, in an arena. And this brings me to the third point that I want to make today, which is simply that there is no better arena in our time for the practicing of power than the city. Think about the city where you live, where you're from. Think about a problem in the common life of your city. It can be something small, like where a street lamp should go, or something medium like which library should have its hours extended or cut, or maybe something bigger, like whether a dilapidated waterfront should be turned into a highway or a greenway, or whether all the businesses in your town should be required to pay a living wage. Think about the change that you want in your city, and then think about how you would get it, how you would make it happen. Take an inventory of all the forms of power that are at play in your city's situation: money, of course, people, yes, ideas, information, misinformation, the threat of force, the force of norms. All of these form of power are at play. Now think about how you would activate or perhaps neutralize these various forms of power. This is not some Game of Thrones empire-level set of questions. These are questions that play out in every single place on the planet. I'll just tell you quickly about two stories drawn from recent headlines. In Boulder, Colorado, voters not too long ago approved a process to replace the private power company, literally the power company, the electric company Xcel, with a publicly owned utility that would forego profits and attend far more to climate change. Well, Xcel fought back, and Xcel has now put in play a ballot measure that would undermine or undo this municipalization. And so the citizen activists in Boulder who have been pushing this now literally have to fight the power in order to fight for power. In Tuscaloosa, at the University of Alabama, there's an organization on campus called, kind of menacingly, the Machine, and it draws from largely white sororities and fraternities on campus, and for decades, the Machine has dominated student government elections. Well now, recently, the Machine has started to get involved in actual city politics, and they've engineered the election of a former Machine member, a young, pro-business recent graduate to the Tuscaloosa city school board. Now, as I say, these are just two examples drawn almost at random from the headlines. Every day, there are thousands more like them. And you may like or dislike the efforts I'm describing here in Boulder or in Tuscaloosa, but you cannot help but admire the power literacy of the players involved, their skill. You cannot help but reckon with and recognize the command they have of the elemental questions of civic power — what objective, what strategy, what tactics, what is the terrain, who are your enemies, who are your allies? Now I want you to return to thinking about that problem or that opportunity or that challenge in your city, and the thing it was that you want to fix or create in your city, and ask yourself, do you have command of these elemental questions of power? Could you put into practice effectively what it is that you know? This is the challenge and the opportunity for us. We live in a time right now where in spite of globalization or perhaps because of globalization, all citizenship is ever more resonantly, powerfully local. Indeed, power in our time is flowing ever faster to the city. Here in the United States, the national government has tied itself up in partisan knots. Civic imagination and innovation and creativity are emerging from local ecosystems now and radiating outward, and this great innovation, this great wave of localism that's now arriving, and you see it in how people eat and work and share and buy and move and live their everyday lives, this isn't some precious parochialism, this isn't some retreat into insularity, no. This is emergent. The localism of our time is networked powerfully. And so, for instance, consider the ways that strategies for making cities more bike-friendly have spread so rapidly from Copenhagen to New York to Austin to Boston to Seattle. Think about how experiments in participatory budgeting, where everyday citizens get a chance to allocate and decide upon the allocation of city funds. Those experiments have spread from Porto Alegre, Brazil to here in New York City, to the wards of Chicago. Migrant workers from Rome to Los Angeles and many cities between are now organizing to stage strikes to remind the people who live in their cities what a day without immigrants would look like. In China, all across that country, members of the New Citizens' Movement are beginning to activate and organize to fight official corruption and graft, and they're drawing the ire of officials there, but they're also drawing the attention of anti-corruption activists all around the world. In Seattle, where I'm from, we've become part of a great global array of cities that are now working together bypassing government altogether, national government altogether, in order to try to meet the carbon reduction goals of the Kyoto Protocol. All of these citizens, united, are forming a web, a great archipelago of power that allows us to bypass brokenness and monopolies of control. And our task now is to accelerate this work. Our task now is to bring more and more people into the fold of this work. That's why my organization, Citizen University, has undertaken a project now to create an everyman's curriculum in civic power. And this curriculum starts with this triad that I described earlier of values, systems and skills. And what I'd like to do is to invite all of you to help create this curriculum with the stories and the experiences and the challenges that each of you lives and faces, to create something powerfully collective. And I want to invite you in particular to try a simple exercise drawn from the early frameworks of this curriculum. I want you to write a narrative, a narrative from the future of your city, and you can date it, set it out one year from now, five years from now, a decade from now, a generation from now, and write it as a case study looking back, looking back at the change that you wanted in your city, looking back at the cause that you were championing, and describing the ways that that change and that cause came, in fact, to succeed. Describe the values of your fellow citizens that you activated, and the sense of moral purpose that you were able to stir. Recount all the different ways that you engaged the systems of government, of the marketplace, of social institutions, of faith organizations, of the media. Catalog all the skills you had to deploy, how to negotiate, how to advocate, how to frame issues, how to navigate diversity in conflict, all those skills that enabled you to bring folks on board and to overcome resistance. What you'll be doing when you write that narrative is you'll be discovering how to read power, and in the process, how to write power. So share what you write, do you what you write, and then share what you do. I invite you to literally share the narratives that you create on our Facebook page for Citizen University. But even beyond that, it's in the conversations that we have today all around the world in the simultaneous gatherings that are happening on this topic at this moment, and to think about how we can become one another's teachers and students in power. If we do that, then together we can make civics sexy again. Together, we can democratize democracy and make it safe again for amateurs. Together, we can create a great network of city that will be the most powerful collective laboratory for self-government this planet has ever seen. We have the power to do that. Thank you very much. (Applause)

We're seen as the organization that is the bucket for failed social policy. I can't define who comes to us or how long they stay. We get the people for whom nothing else has worked, people who have fallen through all of the other social safety nets. They can't contain them, so we must. That's our job: contain them, control them. Over the years, as a prison system, as a nation, and as a society, we've become very good at that, but that shouldn't make you happy. Today we incarcerate more people per capita than any other country in the world. We have more black men in prison today than were under slavery in 1850. We house the parents of almost three million of our community's children, and we've become the new asylum, the largest mental health provider in this nation. When we lock someone up, that is no small thing. And yet, we are called the Department of Corrections. Today I want to talk about changing the way we think about corrections. I believe, and my experience tells me, that when we change the way we think, we create new possibilities, or futures, and prisons need a different future. I've spent my entire career in corrections, over 30 years. I followed my dad into this field. He was a Vietnam veteran. Corrections suited him. He was strong, steady, disciplined. I was not so much any of those things, and I'm sure that worried him about me. Eventually I decided, if I was going to end up in prison, I'd better end up on the right side of the bars, so I thought I'd check it out, take a tour of the place my dad worked, the McNeil Island Penitentiary. Now this was the early '80s, and prisons weren't quite what you see on TV or in the movies. In many ways, it was worse. I walked into a cell house that was five tiers high. There were eight men to a cell. there were 550 men in that living unit. And just in case you wondered, they shared one toilet in those small confines. An officer put a key in a lockbox, and hundreds of men streamed out of their cells. Hundreds of men streamed out of their cells. I walked away as fast as I could. Eventually I went back and I started as an officer there. My job was to run one of those cell blocks and to control those hundreds of men. When I went to work at our receptions center, I could actually hear the inmates roiling from the parking lot, shaking cell doors, yelling, tearing up their cells. Take hundreds of volatile people and lock them up, and what you get is chaos. Contain and control — that was our job. One way we learned to do this more effectively was a new type of housing unit called the Intensive Management Unit, IMU, a modern version of a "hole." We put inmates in cells behind solid steel doors with cuff ports so we could restrain them and feed them. Guess what? It got quieter. Disturbances died down in the general population. Places became safer because those inmates who were most violent or disruptive could now be isolated. But isolation isn't good. Deprive people of social contact and they deteriorate. It was hard getting them out of IMU, for them and for us. Even in prison, it's no small thing to lock someone up. My next assignment was to one of the state's deep-end prisons where some of our more violent or disruptive inmates are housed. By then, the industry had advanced a lot, and we had different tools and techniques to manage disruptive behavior. We had beanbag guns and pepper spray and plexiglass shields, flash bangs, emergency response teams. We met violence with force and chaos with chaos. We were pretty good at putting out fires. While I was there, I met two experienced correctional workers who were also researchers, an anthropologist and a sociologist. One day, one of them commented to me and said, "You know, you're pretty good at putting out fires. Have you ever thought about how to prevent them?" I was patient with them, explaining our brute force approach to making prisons safer. They were patient with me. Out of those conversations grew some new ideas and we started some small experiments. First, we started training our officers in teams rather than sending them one or two at a time to the state training academy. Instead of four weeks of training, we gave them 10. Then we experimented with an apprenticeship model where we paired new staff with veteran staff. They both got better at the work. Second, we added verbal de-escalation skills into the training continuum and made it part of the use of force continuum. It was the non-force use of force. And then we did something even more radical. We trained the inmates on those same skills. We changed the skill set, reducing violence, not just responding to it. Third, when we expanded our facility, we tried a new type of design. Now the biggest and most controversial component of this design, of course, was the toilet. There were no toilets. Now that might not sound significant to you here today, but at the time, it was huge. No one had ever heard of a cell without a toilet. We all thought it was dangerous and crazy. Even eight men to a cell had a toilet. That small detail changed the way we worked. Inmates and staff started interacting more often and openly and developing a rapport. It was easier to detect conflict and intervene before it escalated. The unit was cleaner, quieter, safer and more humane. This was more effective at keeping the peace than any intimidation technique I'd seen to that point. Interacting changes the way you behave, both for the officer and the inmate. We changed the environment and we changed the behavior. Now, just in case I hadn't learned this lesson, they assigned me to headquarters next, and that's where I ran straight up against system change. Now, many things work against system change: politics and politicians, bills and laws, courts and lawsuits, internal politics. System change is difficult and slow, and oftentimes it doesn't take you where you want to go. It's no small thing to change a prison system. So what I did do is I reflected on my earlier experiences and I remembered that when we interacted with offenders, the heat went down. When we changed the environment, the behavior changed. And these were not huge system changes. These were small changes, and these changes created new possibilities. So next, I got reassigned as superintendent of a small prison. And at the same time, I was working on my degree at the Evergreen State College. I interacted with a lot of people who were not like me, people who had different ideas and came from different backgrounds. One of them was a rainforest ecologist. She looked at my small prison and what she saw was a laboratory. We talked and discovered how prisons and inmates could actually help advance science by helping them complete projects they couldn't complete on their own, like repopulating endangered species: frogs, butterflies, endangered prairie plants. At the same time, we found ways to make our operation more efficient through the addition of solar power, rainwater catchment, organic gardening, recycling. This initiative has led to many projects that have had huge system-wide impact, not just in our system, but in other state systems as well, small experiments making a big difference to science, to the community. The way we think about our work changes our work. The project just made my job more interesting and exciting. I was excited. Staff were excited. Officers were excited. Inmates were excited. They were inspired. Everybody wanted to be part of this. They were making a contribution, a difference, one they thought was meaningful and important. Let me be clear on what's going on here, though. Inmates are highly adaptive. They have to be. Oftentimes, they know more about our own systems than the people who run them. And they're here for a reason. I don't see my job as to punish them or forgive them, but I do think they can have decent and meaningful lives even in prison. So that was the question: Could inmates live decent and meaningful lives, and if so, what difference would that make? So I took that question back to the deep end, where some of our most violent offenders are housed. Remember, IMUs are for punishment. You don't get perks there, like programming. That was how we thought. But then we started to realize that if any inmates needed programming, it was these particular inmates. In fact, they needed intensive programming. So we changed our thinking 180 degrees, and we started looking for new possibilities. What we found was a new kind of chair. Instead of using the chair for punishment, we put it in classrooms. Okay, we didn't forget our responsibility to control, but now inmates could interact safely, face-to-face with other inmates and staff, and because control was no longer an issue, everybody could focus on other things, like learning. Behavior changed. We changed our thinking, and we changed what was possible, and this gives me hope. Now, I can't tell you that any of this stuff will work. What I can tell you, though, it is working. Our prisons are getting safer for both staff and inmates, and when our prisons are safe, we can put our energies into a lot more than just controlling. Reducing recidivism may be our ultimate goal, but it's not our only goal. To be honest with you, preventing crime takes so much more from so many more people and institutions. If we rely on just prisons to reduce crime, I'm afraid we'll never get there. But prisons can do some things we never thought they could do. Prisons can be the source of innovation and sustainability, repopulating endangered species and environmental restoration. Inmates can be scientists and beekeepers, dog rescuers. Prisons can be the source of meaningful work and opportunity for staff and the inmates who live there. We can contain and control and provide humane environments. These are not opposing qualities. We can't wait 10 to 20 years to find out if this is worth doing. Our strategy is not massive system change. Our strategy is hundreds of small changes that take place in days or months, not years. We need more small pilots where we learn as we go, pilots that change the range of possibility. We need new and better ways to measure impacts on engagement, on interaction, on safe environments. We need more opportunities to participate in and contribute to our communities, your communities. Prisons need to be secure, yes, safe, yes. We can do that. Prisons need to provide humane environments where people can participate, contribute, and learn meaningful lives. We're learning how to do that. That's why I'm hopeful. We don't have to stay stuck in old ideas about prison. We can define that. We can create that. And when we do that thoughtfully and with humanity, prisons can be more than the bucket for failed social policy. Maybe finally, we will earn our title: a department of corrections. Thank you. (Applause)

You probably don't know me, but I am one of those .01 percenters that you hear about and read about, and I am by any reasonable definition a plutocrat. And tonight, what I would like to do is speak directly to other plutocrats, to my people, because it feels like it's time for us all to have a chat. Like most plutocrats, I too am a proud and unapologetic capitalist. I have founded, cofounded or funded over 30 companies across a range of industries. I was the first non-family investor in Amazon.com. I cofounded a company called aQuantive that we sold to Microsoft for 6.4 billion dollars. My friends and I, we own a bank. I tell you this — (Laughter) — unbelievable, right? I tell you this to show that my life is like most plutocrats. I have a broad perspective on capitalism and business, and I have been rewarded obscenely for that with a life that most of you all can't even imagine: multiple homes, a yacht, my own plane, etc., etc., etc. But let's be honest: I am not the smartest person you've ever met. I am certainly not the hardest working. I was a mediocre student. I'm not technical at all. I can't write a word of code. Truly, my success is the consequence of spectacular luck, of birth, of circumstance and of timing. But I am actually pretty good at a couple of things. One, I have an unusually high tolerance for risk, and the other is I have a good sense, a good intuition about what will happen in the future, and I think that that intuition about the future is the essence of good entrepreneurship. So what do I see in our future today, you ask? I see pitchforks, as in angry mobs with pitchforks, because while people like us plutocrats are living beyond the dreams of avarice, the other 99 percent of our fellow citizens are falling farther and farther behind. In 1980, the top one percent of Americans shared about eight percent of national [income], while the bottom 50 percent of Americans shared 18 percent. Thirty years later, today, the top one percent shares over 20 percent of national [income], while the bottom 50 percent of Americans share 12 or 13. If the trend continues, the top one percent will share over 30 percent of national [income] in another 30 years, while the bottom 50 percent of Americans will share just six. You see, the problem isn't that we have some inequality. Some inequality is necessary for a high-functioning capitalist democracy. The problem is that inequality is at historic highs today and it's getting worse every day. And if wealth, power, and income continue to concentrate at the very tippy top, our society will change from a capitalist democracy to a neo-feudalist rentier society like 18th-century France. That was France before the revolution and the mobs with the pitchforks. So I have a message for my fellow plutocrats and zillionaires and for anyone who lives in a gated bubble world: Wake up. Wake up. It cannot last. Because if we do not do something to fix the glaring economic inequities in our society, the pitchforks will come for us, for no free and open society can long sustain this kind of rising economic inequality. It has never happened. There are no examples. You show me a highly unequal society, and I will show you a police state or an uprising. The pitchforks will come for us if we do not address this. It's not a matter of if, it's when. And it will be terrible when they come for everyone, but particularly for people like us plutocrats. I know I must sound like some liberal do-gooder. I'm not. I'm not making a moral argument that economic inequality is wrong. What I am arguing is that rising economic inequality is stupid and ultimately self-defeating. Rising inequality doesn't just increase our risks from pitchforks, but it's also terrible for business too. So the model for us rich guys should be Henry Ford. When Ford famously introduced the $5 day, which was twice the prevailing wage at the time, he didn't just increase the productivity of his factories, he converted exploited autoworkers who were poor into a thriving middle class who could now afford to buy the products that they made. Ford intuited what we now know is true, that an economy is best understood as an ecosystem and characterized by the same kinds of feedback loops you find in a natural ecosystem, a feedback loop between customers and businesses. Raising wages increases demand, which increases hiring, which in turn increases wages and demand and profits, and that virtuous cycle of increasing prosperity is precisely what is missing from today's economic recovery. And this is why we need to put behind us the trickle-down policies that so dominate both political parties and embrace something I call middle-out economics. Middle-out economics rejects the neoclassical economic idea that economies are efficient, linear, mechanistic, that they tend towards equilibrium and fairness, and instead embraces the 21st-century idea that economies are complex, adaptive, ecosystemic, that they tend away from equilibrium and toward inequality, that they're not efficient at all but are effective if well managed. This 21st-century perspective allows you to clearly see that capitalism does not work by [efficiently] allocating existing resources. It works by [efficiently] creating new solutions to human problems. The genius of capitalism is that it is an evolutionary solution-finding system. It rewards people for solving other people's problems. The difference between a poor society and a rich society, obviously, is the degree to which that society has generated solutions in the form of products for its citizens. The sum of the solutions that we have in our society really is our prosperity, and this explains why companies like Google and Amazon and Microsoft and Apple and the entrepreneurs who created those companies have contributed so much to our nation's prosperity. This 21st-century perspective also makes clear that what we think of as economic growth is best understood as the rate at which we solve problems. But that rate is totally dependent upon how many problem solvers — diverse, able problem solvers — we have, and thus how many of our fellow citizens actively participate, both as entrepreneurs who can offer solutions, and as customers who consume them. But this maximizing participation thing doesn't happen by accident. It doesn't happen by itself. It requires effort and investment, which is why all highly prosperous capitalist democracies are characterized by massive investments in the middle class and the infrastructure that they depend on. We plutocrats need to get this trickle-down economics thing behind us, this idea that the better we do, the better everyone else will do. It's not true. How could it be? I earn 1,000 times the median wage, but I do not buy 1,000 times as much stuff, do I? I actually bought two pairs of these pants, what my partner Mike calls my manager pants. I could have bought 2,000 pairs, but what would I do with them? (Laughter) How many haircuts can I get? How often can I go out to dinner? No matter how wealthy a few plutocrats get, we can never drive a great national economy. Only a thriving middle class can do that. There's nothing to be done, my plutocrat friends might say. Henry Ford was in a different time. Maybe we can't do some things. Maybe we can do some things. June 19, 2013, Bloomberg published an article I wrote called "The Capitalist’s Case for a $15 Minimum Wage." The good people at Forbes magazine, among my biggest admirers, called it "Nick Hanauer's near-insane proposal." And yet, just 350 days after that article was published, Seattle's Mayor Ed Murray signed into law an ordinance raising the minimum wage in Seattle to 15 dollars an hour, more than double what the prevailing federal $7.25 rate is. How did this happen, reasonable people might ask. It happened because a group of us reminded the middle class that they are the source of growth and prosperity in capitalist economies. We reminded them that when workers have more money, businesses have more customers, and need more employees. We reminded them that when businesses pay workers a living wage, taxpayers are relieved of the burden of funding the poverty programs like food stamps and medical assistance and rent assistance that those workers need. We reminded them that low-wage workers make terrible taxpayers, and that when you raise the minimum wage for all businesses, all businesses benefit yet all can compete. Now the orthodox reaction, of course, is raising the minimum wage costs jobs. Right? Your politician's always echoing that trickle-down idea by saying things like, "Well, if you raise the price of employment, guess what happens? You get less of it." Are you sure? Because there's some contravening evidence. Since 1980, the wages of CEOs in our country have gone from about 30 times the median wage to 500 times. That's raising the price of employment. And yet, to my knowledge, I have never seen a company outsource its CEO's job, automate their job, export the job to China. In fact, we appear to be employing more CEOs and senior managers than ever before. So too for technology workers and financial services workers, who earn multiples of the median wage and yet we employ more and more of them, so clearly you can raise the price of employment and get more of it. I know that most people think that the $15 minimum wage is this insane, risky economic experiment. We disagree. We believe that the $15 minimum wage in Seattle is actually the continuation of a logical economic policy. It is allowing our city to kick your city's ass. Because, you see, Washington state already has the highest minimum wage of any state in the nation. We pay all workers $9.32, which is almost 30 percent more than the federal minimum of 7.25, but crucially, 427 percent more than the federal tipped minimum of 2.13. If trickle-down thinkers were right, then Washington state should have massive unemployment. Seattle should be sliding into the ocean. And yet, Seattle is the fastest-growing big city in the country. Washington state is generating small business jobs at a higher rate than any other major state in the nation. The restaurant business in Seattle? Booming. Why? Because the fundamental law of capitalism is, when workers have more money, businesses have more customers and need more workers. When restaurants pay restaurant workers enough so that even they can afford to eat in restaurants, that's not bad for the restaurant business. That's good for it, despite what some restaurateurs may tell you. Is it more complicated than I'm making out? Of course it is. There are a lot of dynamics at play. But can we please stop insisting that if low-wage workers earn a little bit more, unemployment will skyrocket and the economy will collapse? There is no evidence for it. The most insidious thing about trickle-down economics is not the claim that if the rich get richer, everyone is better off. It is the claim made by those who oppose any increase in the minimum wage that if the poor get richer, that will be bad for the economy. This is nonsense. So can we please dispense with this rhetoric that says that rich guys like me and my plutocrat friends made our country? We plutocrats know, even if we don't like to admit it in public, that if we had been born somewhere else, not here in the United States, we might very well be just some dude standing barefoot by the side of a dirt road selling fruit. It's not that they don't have good entrepreneurs in other places, even very, very poor places. It's just that that's all that those entrepreneurs' customers can afford. So here's an idea for a new kind of economics, a new kind of politics that I call new capitalism. Let's acknowledge that capitalism beats the alternatives, but also that the more people we include, both as entrepreneurs and as customers, the better it works. Let's by all means shrink the size of government, but not by slashing the poverty programs, but by ensuring that workers are paid enough so that they actually don't need those programs. Let's invest enough in the middle class to make our economy fairer and more inclusive, and by fairer, more truly competitive, and by more truly competitive, more able to generate the solutions to human problems that are the true drivers of growth and prosperity. Capitalism is the greatest social technology ever invented for creating prosperity in human societies, if it is well managed, but capitalism, because of the fundamental multiplicative dynamics of complex systems, tends towards, inexorably, inequality, concentration and collapse. The work of democracies is to maximize the inclusion of the many in order to create prosperity, not to enable the few to accumulate money. Government does create prosperity and growth, by creating the conditions that allow both entrepreneurs and their customers to thrive. Balancing the power of capitalists like me and workers isn't bad for capitalism. It's essential to it. Programs like a reasonable minimum wage, affordable healthcare, paid sick leave, and the progressive taxation necessary to pay for the important infrastructure necessary for the middle class like education, R and D, these are indispensable tools shrewd capitalists should embrace to drive growth, because no one benefits from it like us. Many economists would have you believe that their field is an objective science. I disagree, and I think that it is equally a tool that humans use to enforce and encode our social and moral preferences and prejudices about status and power, which is why plutocrats like me have always needed to find persuasive stories to tell everyone else about why our relative positions are morally righteous and good for everyone: like, we are indispensable, the job creators, and you are not; like, tax cuts for us create growth, but investments in you will balloon our debt and bankrupt our great country; that we matter; that you don't. For thousands of years, these stories were called divine right. Today, we have trickle-down economics. How obviously, transparently self-serving all of this is. We plutocrats need to see that the United States of America made us, not the other way around; that a thriving middle class is the source of prosperity in capitalist economies, not a consequence of it. And we should never forget that even the best of us in the worst of circumstances are barefoot by the side of a dirt road selling fruit. Fellow plutocrats, I think it may be time for us to recommit to our country, to commit to a new kind of capitalism which is both more inclusive and more effective, a capitalism that will ensure that America's economy remains the most dynamic and prosperous in the world. Let's secure the future for ourselves, our children and their children. Or alternatively, we could do nothing, hide in our gated communities and private schools, enjoy our planes and yachts — they're fun — and wait for the pitchforks. Thank you. (Applause)

As a kid I always loved information that I could get from data and the stories that could be told with numbers. I remember, growing up, I'd be frustrated at how my own parents would lie to me using numbers. "Talithia, if I've told you once I've told you a thousand times." No dad, you've only told me 17 times and twice it wasn't my fault. (Laughter) I think that is one of the reasons I got a Ph.D. in statistics. I always wanted to know, what are people trying to hide with numbers? As a statistician, I want people to show me the data so I can decide for myself. Donald and I were pregnant with our third child and we were at about 41 and a half weeks, what some of you may refer to as being overdue. Statisticians, we call that being within the 95 percent confidence interval. (Laughter) And at this point in the process we had to come in every couple of days to do a stress test on the baby, and this is just routine, it tests whether or not the baby is feeling any type of undue stress. And you are rarely, if ever, seen by your actual doctor, just whoever happens to be working at the hospital that day. So we go in for a stress test and after 20 minutes the doctor comes out and he says, "Your baby is under stress, we need to induce you." Now, as a statistician, what's my response? Show me the data! So then he proceeds to tell us the baby's heart rate trace went from 18 minutes, the baby's heart rate was in the normal zone and for two minutes it was in what appeared to be my heart rate zone and I said, "Is it possible that maybe this was my heart rate? I was moving around a little bit, it's hard to lay still on your back, 41 weeks pregnant for 20 minutes. Maybe it was shifting around." He said, "Well, we don't want to take any chances." I said okay. I said, "What if I was at 36 weeks with this same data? Would your decision be to induce?" "Well, no, I would wait until you were at least 38 weeks, but you are almost 42, there is no reason to leave that baby inside, let's get you a room." I said, "Well, why don't we just do it again? We can collect more data. I can try to be really still for 20 minutes. We can average the two and see what that means. (Laughter) And he goes, "Ma'am, I just don't want you to have a miscarriage." That makes three of us. And then he says, "Your chances of having a miscarriage double when you go past your due date. Let's get you a room." Wow. So now as a statistician, what's my response? Show me the data! Dude, you're talking chances, I do chances all day long, tell me all about chances. Let's talk chances. (Laughter) Let's talk chances. So I say, "Okay, great. Do I go from a 30-percent chance to a 60-percent chance? Where are we here with this miscarriage thing? And he goes, "Not quite, but it doubles, and we really just want what's best for the baby." Undaunted, I try a different angle. I said, "Okay, out of 1,000 full-term pregnant women, how many of them are going to miscarry just before their due date? And then he looks at me and looks at Donald, and he goes, about one in 1,000. I said, "Okay, so of those 1,000 women, how many are going to miscarry just after their due date?" "About two." (Laughter) I said, "Okay, so you are telling me that my chances go from a 0.1-percent chance to a 0.2-percent chance." Okay, so at this point the data is not convincing us that we need to be induced, and so then we proceed to have a conversation about how inductions lead to a higher rate of Cesarean sections, and if at all possible we'd like to avoid that. And then I said, "And I really don't think my due date is accurate." (Laughter) And so this really stunned him and he looked sort of puzzled and I said, "You may not know this, but pregnancy due dates are calculated assuming that you have a standard 28-day cycle, and my cycle ranges — sometimes it's 27, sometimes it's up to 38 — and I have been collecting the data to prove it. (Laughter) And so we ended up leaving the hospital that day without being induced. We actually had to sign a waiver to walk out of the hospital. And I'm not advocating that you not listen to your doctors, because even with our first child, we were induced at 38 weeks; cervical fluid was low. I'm not anti-medical intervention. But why were confident to leave that day? Well, we had data that told a different story. We had been collecting data for six years. I had this temperature data, and it told a different story. In fact, we could probably pretty accurately estimate conception. Yeah, that's a story you want to tell at your kid's wedding reception. (Laughter) I remember like it was yesterday. My temperature was a sizzling 97.8 degrees as I stared into your father's eyes. (Laughter) Oh, yeah. Twenty-two more years, we're telling that story. But we were confident to leave because we had been collecting data. Now, what does that data look like? Here's a standard chart of a woman's waking body temperature during the course of a cycle. So from the beginning of the menstrual cycle till the beginning of the next. You'll see that the temperature is not random. Clearly there is a low pattern at the beginning of her cycle and then you see this jump and then a higher set of temperatures at the end of her cycle. So what's happening here? What is that data telling you? Well, ladies, at the beginning of our cycle, the hormone estrogen is dominant and that estrogen causes a suppression of your body temperature. And at ovulation, your body releases an egg and progesterone takes over, pro-gestation. And so your body heats up in anticipation of housing this new little fertilized egg. So why this temperature jump? Well, think about when a bird sits on her eggs. Why is she sitting on them? She wants to keep them warm, protect them and keep them warm. Ladies, this is exactly what our bodies do every month, they heat up in anticipation of keeping a new little life warm. And if nothing happens, if you are not pregnant, then estrogen takes back over and that cycle starts all over again. But if you do get pregnant, sometimes you actually see another shift in your temperatures and it stays elevated for those whole nine months. That's why you see those pregnant women just sweating and hot, because their temperatures are high. Here's a chart that we had about three or four years ago. We were really very excited about this chart. You'll see the low temperature level and then a shift and for about five days, that's about the time it takes for the egg to travel down the fallopian tube and implant, and then you see those temperatures start to go up a little bit. And in fact, we had a second temperature shift, confirmed with a pregnancy test that were indeed pregnant with our first child, very exciting. Until a couple of days later I saw some spotting and then I noticed heavy blood flow, and we had in fact had an early stage miscarriage. Had I not been taking my temperature I really would have just thought my period was late that month, but we actually had data to show that we had miscarried this baby, and even though this data revealed a really unfortunate event in our lives, it was information that we could then take to our doctor. So if there was a fertility issue or some problem, I had data to show: Look, we got pregnant, our temperature shifted, we somehow lost this baby. What is it that we can do to help prevent this problem? And it's not just about temperatures and it's not just about fertility; we can use data about our bodies to tell us a lot of things. For instance, did you know that taking your temperature can tell you a lot about the condition of your thyroid? So, your thyroid works a lot like the thermostat in your house. There is an optimal temperature that you want in your house; you set your thermostat. When it gets too cold in the house, your thermostat kicks in and says, "Hey, we need to blow some heat around." Or if it gets too hot, your thermostat registers, "Turn the A.C. on. Cool us off." That's exactly how your thyroid works in your body. Your thyroid tries to keep an optimal temperature for your body. If it gets too cold, your thyroid says, "Hey, we need to heat up." If it gets too hot, your thyroid cools you down. But what happens when your thyroid is not functioning well? When it doesn't function, then it shows up in your body temperatures, they tend to be lower than normal or very erratic. And so by collecting this data you can find out information about your thyroid. Now, what is it, if you had a thyroid problem and you went to the doctor, your doctor would actually test the amount of thyroid stimulating hormone in your blood. Fine. But the problem with that test is it doesn't tell you how active the hormone is in your body. So you might have a lot of hormone present, but it might not be actively working to regulate your body temperature. So just by collecting your temperature every day, you get information about the condition of your thyroid. So, what if you don't want to take your temperature every day? I advocate that you do, but there are tons of other things you could take. You could take your blood pressure, you could take your weight — yeah, who's excited about taking their weight every day? (Laughter) Early on in our marriage, Donald had a stuffy nose and he had been taking a slew of medications to try to relieve his stuffy nose, to no avail. And so, that night he comes and he wakes me up and he says, "Honey, I can't breath out of my nose." And I roll over and I look, and I said, "Well, can you breath out of your mouth?" (Laughter) And he goes, "Yes, but I can't breath out of my nose!" And so like any good wife, I rush him to the emergency room at 2 o'clock in the morning. And the whole time I'm driving and I'm thinking, you can't die on me now. We just got married, people will think I killed you! (Laughter) And so, we get to the emergency room, and the nurse sees us, and he can't breath out of his nose, and so she brings us to the back and the doctor says, "What seems to be the problem?" and he goes, "I can't breath out of my nose." And he said, "You can't breath out of your nose? No, but he can breath out of his mouth. (Laughter) He takes a step back and he looks at both of us and he says "Sir, I think I know the problem. You're having a heart attack. I'm going to order an EKG and a CAT scan for you immediately." And we are thinking, no, no, no. It's not a heart attack. He can breathe, just out of his mouth. No, no, no, no, no. And so we go back and forth with this doctor because we think this is the incorrect diagnosis, and he's like, "No really, it'll be fine, just calm down." And I'm thinking, how do you calm down? But I don't think he's having a heart attack. And so fortunately for us, this doctor was at the end of the shift. So this new doctor comes in, he sees us clearly distraught, with a husband who can't breath out of his nose. (Laughter) And he starts asking us questions. He says, "Well, do you two exercise?" We ride our bikes, we go to the gym occasionally. (Laughter) We move around. And he says, "What were you doing just before you came here?" I'm thinking, I was sleeping, honestly. But okay, what was Donald doing just before? So Donald goes into this slew of medications he was taking. He lists, "I took this decongestant and then I took this nasal spray," and then all of a sudden a lightbulb goes off and he says, "Oh! You should never mix this decongestant with this nasal spray. Clogs you up every time. Here, take this one instead." He gives us a prescription. We're looking at each other, and I looked at the doctor, and I said, "Why is it that it seems like you were able to accurately diagnose his condition, but this previous doctor wanted to order an EKG and a CAT scan?" And he looks at us and says, "Well, when a 350-pound man walks in the emergency room and says he can't breath, you assume he's having a heart attack and you ask questions later." Now, emergency room doctors are trained to make decisions quickly, but not always accurately. And so had we had some information about our heart health to share with him, maybe we would have gotten a better diagnosis the first time. I want you to consider the following chart, of systolic blood pressure measurements from October 2010 to July 2012. You'll see that these measurements start in the prehypertension/hypertension zone, but over about the course of a year and a half they move into the normal zone. This is about the heart rate of a healthy 16-year-old. What story is this data telling you? Obviously it's the data from someone who's made a drastic transformation, and fortunately for us, that person happens to be here today. So that 350-pound guy that walked into the emergency room with me is now an even sexier and healthier 225-pound guy, and that's his blood pressure trace. So over the course of that year and a half Donald's eating changed and our exercise regimen changed, and his heart rate responded, his blood pressure responded to that change that he made in his body. So what's the take-home message that I want you to leave with today? By taking ownership of your data just like we've done, just by taking this daily measurements about yourself, you become the expert on your body. You become the authority. It's not hard to do. You don't have to have a Ph.D. in statistics to be an expert in yourself. You don't have to have a medical degree to be your body's expert. Medical doctors, they're experts on the population, but you are the expert on yourself. And so when two of you come together, when two experts come together, the two of you are able to make a better decision than just your doctor alone. Now that you understand the power of information that you can get through personal data collection, I'd like you all to stand and raise your right hand. (Laughter) Yes, get it up. I challenge you to take ownership of your data. And today, I hereby confer upon you a TEDx associate's degree in elementary statistics with a concentration in time-dependent data analysis with all the rights and privileges appertaining thereto. And so the next time you are in your doctor's office, as newly inducted statisticians, what should always be your response? Audience: Show me the data! Talithia Williams: I can't hear you! Audience: Show me the data! TW: One more time! Audience: Show me the data! TW: Show me the data. Thank you. (Applause)

I didn't know when I agreed to do this whether I was expected to talk or to sing. But when I was told that the topic was language, I felt that I had to speak about something for a moment. I have a problem. It's not the worst thing in the world. I'm fine. I'm not on fire. I know that other people in the world have far worse things to deal with, but for me, language and music are inextricably linked through this one thing. And the thing is that I have a stutter. It might seem curious given that I spend a lot of my life on the stage. One would assume that I'm comfortable in the public sphere and comfortable here, speaking to you guys. But the truth is that I've spent my life up until this point and including this point, living in mortal dread of public speaking. Public singing, whole different thing. (Laughter) But we'll get to that in a moment. I've never really talked about it before so explicitly. I think that that's because I've always lived in hope that when I was a grown-up, I wouldn't have one. I sort of lived with this idea that when I'm grown, I'll have learned to speak French, and when I'm grown, I'll learn how to manage my money, and when I'm grown, I won't have a stutter, and then I'll be able to public speak and maybe be the prime minister and anything's possible and, you know. (Laughter) So I can talk about it now because I've reached this point, where — I mean, I'm 28. I'm pretty sure that I'm grown now. (Laughter) And I'm an adult woman who spends her life as a performer, with a speech impediment. So, I might as well come clean about it. There are some interesting angles to having a stutter. For me, the worst thing that can happen is meeting another stutterer. (Laughter) This happened to me in Hamburg, when this guy, we met and he said, "Hello, m-m-m-my name is Joe," and I said, "Oh, hello, m-m-m-my name is Meg." Imagine my horror when I realized he thought I was making fun of him. (Laughter) People think I'm drunk all the time. (Laughter) People think that I've forgotten their name when I hesitate before saying it. And it is a very weird thing, because proper nouns are the worst. If I'm going to use the word "Wednesday" in a sentence, and I'm coming up to the word, and I can feel that I'm going to stutter or something, I can change the word to "tomorrow," or "the day after Tuesday," or something else. It's clunky, but you can get away with it, because over time I've developed this loophole method of using speech where right at the last minute you change the thing and you trick your brain. But with people's names, you can't change them. (Laughter) When I was singing a lot of jazz, I worked a lot with a pianist whose name was Steve. As you can probably gather, S's and T's, together or independently, are my kryptonite. But I would have to introduce the band over this rolling vamp, and when I got around to Steve, I'd often find myself stuck on the "St." And it was a bit awkward and uncomfortable and it totally kills the vibe. So after a few instances of this, Steve happily became "Seve," and we got through it that way. (Laughter) I've had a lot of therapy, and a common form of treatment is to use this technique that's called smooth speech, which is where you almost sing everything that you say. You kind of join everything together in this very singsong, kindergarten teacher way, and it makes you sound very serene, like you've had lots of Valium, and everything is calm. (Laughter) That's not actually me. And I do use that. I do. I use it when I have to be on panel shows, or when I have to do radio interviews, when the economy of airtime is paramount. (Laughter) I get through it that way for my job. But as an artist who feels that their work is based solely on a platform of honesty and being real, that feels often like cheating. Which is why before I sing, I wanted to tell you what singing means to me. It's more than making nice sounds, and it's more than making nice songs. It's more than feeling known, or understood. It's more than making you feel the things that I feel. It's not about mythology, or mythologizing myself to you. Somehow, through some miraculous synaptic function of the human brain, it's impossible to stutter when you sing. And when I was younger, that was a method of treatment that worked very well for me, singing, so I did it a lot. And that's why I'm here today. (Applause) Thank you. Singing for me is sweet relief. It is the only time when I feel fluent. It is the only time when what comes out of my mouth is comprehensively exactly what I intended. (Laughter) So I know that this is a TED Talk, but now i'm going to TED sing. This is a song that I wrote last year. Thank you very much. Thank you. (Applause) (Piano) ♪ I would be a beauty ♪ ♪ but my nose ♪ ♪ is slightly too big ♪ ♪ for my face ♪ ♪ And I would be a dreamer ♪ ♪ but my dream ♪ ♪ is slightly too big ♪ ♪ for this space ♪ ♪ And I would be an angel ♪ ♪ but my halo ♪ ♪ it pales in the glow ♪ ♪ of your grace ♪ ♪ And I would be a joker ♪ ♪ but that card looks silly when you play ♪ ♪ your ace ♪ ♪ I'd like to know ♪ ♪ Are there stars in hell? ♪ ♪ And I'd like to know ♪ ♪ know if you can tell ♪ ♪ that you make me lose everything I know ♪ ♪ That I cannot choose to or not let go ♪ ♪ And I'd stay forever ♪ ♪ but my home ♪ ♪ is slightly too far ♪ ♪ from this place ♪ ♪ And I swear I tried to ♪ ♪ slow it down ♪ ♪ when I am walking at your pace ♪ ♪ But all I could think ♪ ♪ idling through the cities ♪ ♪ do I look pretty in the rain? ♪ ♪ And I don't know how someone ♪ ♪ quite so lovely ♪ ♪ makes me feel ugly ♪ ♪ So much shame ♪ ♪ And I'd like to know ♪ ♪ Are there stars in hell? ♪ ♪ And I'd like to know ♪ ♪ know if you can tell ♪ ♪ that you make me lose everything I know ♪ ♪ that I cannot choose to or not let go ♪ Thank you very much. (Applause)

Take a look at this drawing. Can you tell what it is? I'm a molecular biologist by training, and I've seen a lot of these kinds of drawings. They're usually referred to as a model figure, a drawing that shows how we think a cellular or molecular process occurs. This particular drawing is of a process called clathrin-mediated endocytosis. It's a process by which a molecule can get from the outside of the cell to the inside by getting captured in a bubble or a vesicle that then gets internalized by the cell. There's a problem with this drawing, though, and it's mainly in what it doesn't show. From lots of experiments, from lots of different scientists, we know a lot about what these molecules look like, how they move around in the cell, and that this is all taking place in an incredibly dynamic environment. So in collaboration with a clathrin expert Tomas Kirchhausen, we decided to create a new kind of model figure that showed all of that. So we start outside of the cell. Now we're looking inside. Clathrin are these three-legged molecules that can self-assemble into soccer-ball-like shapes. Through connections with a membrane, clathrin is able to deform the membrane and form this sort of a cup that forms this sort of a bubble, or a vesicle, that's now capturing some of the proteins that were outside of the cell. Proteins are coming in now that basically pinch off this vesicle, making it separate from the rest of the membrane, and now clathrin is basically done with its job, and so proteins are coming in now — we've covered them yellow and orange — that are responsible for taking apart this clathrin cage. And so all of these proteins can get basically recycled and used all over again. These processes are too small to be seen directly, even with the best microscopes, so animations like this provide a really powerful way of visualizing a hypothesis. Here's another illustration, and this is a drawing of how a researcher might think that the HIV virus gets into and out of cells. And again, this is a vast oversimplification and doesn't begin to show what we actually know about these processes. You might be surprised to know that these simple drawings are the only way that most biologists visualize their molecular hypotheses. Why? Because creating movies of processes as we think they actually occur is really hard. I spent months in Hollywood learning 3D animation software, and I spend months on each animation, and that's just time that most researchers can't afford. The payoffs can be huge, though. Molecular animations are unparalleled in their ability to convey a great deal of information to broad audiences with extreme accuracy. And I'm working on a new project now called "The Science of HIV" where I'll be animating the entire life cycle of the HIV virus as accurately as possible and all in molecular detail. The animation will feature data from thousands of researchers collected over decades, data on what this virus looks like, how it's able to infect cells in our body, and how therapeutics are helping to combat infection. Over the years, I found that animations aren't just useful for communicating an idea, but they're also really useful for exploring a hypothesis. Biologists for the most part are still using a paper and pencil to visualize the processes they study, and with the data we have now, that's just not good enough anymore. The process of creating an animation can act as a catalyst that allows researchers to crystalize and refine their own ideas. One researcher I worked with who works on the molecular mechanisms of neurodegenerative diseases came up with experiments that were related directly to the animation that she and I worked on together, and in this way, animation can feed back into the research process. I believe that animation can change biology. It can change the way that we communicate with one another, how we explore our data and how we teach our students. But for that change to happen, we need more researchers creating animations, and toward that end, I brought together a team of biologists, animators and programmers to create a new, free, open-source software — we call it Molecular Flipbook — that's created just for biologists just to create molecular animations. From our testing, we've found that it only takes 15 minutes for a biologist who has never touched animation software before to create her first molecular animation of her own hypothesis. We're also building an online database where anyone can view, download and contribute their own animations. We're really excited to announce that the beta version of the molecular animation software toolkit will be available for download today. We are really excited to see what biologists will create with it and what new insights they're able to gain from finally being able to animate their own model figures. Thank you. (Applause)

This year, Germany is celebrating the 25th anniversary of the peaceful revolution in East Germany. In 1989, the Communist regime was moved away, the Berlin Wall came down, and one year later, the German Democratic Republic, the GDR, in the East was unified with the Federal Republic of Germany in the West to found today's Germany. Among many other things, Germany inherited the archives of the East German secret police, known as the Stasi. Only two years after its dissolution, its documents were opened to the public, and historians such as me started to study these documents to learn more about how the GDR surveillance state functioned. Perhaps you have watched the movie "The Lives of Others." This movie made the Stasi known worldwide, and as we live in an age where words such as "surveillance" or "wiretapping" are on the front pages of newspapers, I would like to speak about how the Stasi really worked. At the beginning, let's have a short look at the history of the Stasi, because it's really important for understanding its self-conception. Its origins are located in Russia. In 1917, the Russian Communists founded the Emergency Commission for Combating Counter-Revolution and Sabotage, shortly Cheka. It was led by Felix Dzerzhinsky. The Cheka was an instrument of the Communists to establish their regime by terrorizing the population and executing their enemies. It evolved later into the well-known KGB. The Cheka was the idol of the Stasi officers. They called themselves Chekists, and even the emblem was very similar, as you can see here. In fact, the secret police of Russia was the creator and instructor of the Stasi. When the Red Army occupied East Germany in 1945, it immediately expanded there, and soon it started to train the German Communists to build up their own secret police. By the way, in this hall where we are now, the ruling party of the GDR was founded in 1946. Five years later, the Stasi was established, and step by step, the dirty job of oppression was handed over to it. For instance, the central jail for political prisoners, which was established by the Russians, was taken over by the Stasi and used until the end of Communism. You see it here. At the beginning, every important step took place under the attendance of the Russians. But the Germans are known to be very effective, so the Stasi grew very quickly, and already in 1953, it had more employees than the Gestapo had, the secret police of Nazi Germany. The number doubled in each decade. In 1989, more than 90,000 employees worked for the Stasi. This meant that one employee was responsible for 180 inhabitants, which was really unique in the world. At the top of this tremendous apparatus, there was one man, Erich Mielke. He ruled the Ministry of State Security for more than 30 years. He was a scrupulous functionary — in his past, he killed two policemen not far away from here — who in fact personalized the Stasi. But what was so exceptional about the Stasi? Foremost, it was its enormous power, because it united different functions in one organization. First of all, the Stasi was an intelligence service. It used all the imaginable instruments for getting information secretly, such as informers, or tapping phones, as you can see it on the picture here. And it was not only active in East Germany, but all over the world. Secondly, the Stasi was a secret police. It could stop people on the street and arrest them in its own prisons. Thirdly, the Stasi worked as a kind of public prosecutor. It had the right to open preliminary investigations and to interrogate people officially. Last but not least, the Stasi had its own armed forces. More than 11,000 soldiers were serving in its so-called Guards Regiment. It was founded to crash down protests and uprisings. Due to this concentration of power, the Stasi was called a state in the state. But let's look in more and more detail at the tools of the Stasi. Please keep in mind that at that time the web and smartphones were not yet invented. Of course, the Stasi used all kinds of technical instruments to survey people. Telephones were wiretapped, including the phone of the German chancellor in the West, and often also the apartments. Every day, 90,000 letters were being opened by these machines. The Stasi also shadowed tens of thousands of people using specially trained agents and secret cameras to document every step one took. In this picture, you can see me as a young man just in front of this building where we are now, photographed by a Stasi agent. The Stasi even collected the smell of people. It stored samples of it in closed jars which were found after the peaceful revolution. For all these tasks, highly specialized departments were responsible. The one which was tapping phone calls was completely separated from the one which controlled the letters, for good reasons, because if one agent quit the Stasi, his knowledge was very small. Contrast that with Snowden, for example. But the vertical specialization was also important to prevent all kinds of empathy with the object of observation. The agent who shadowed me didn't know who I was or why I was surveyed. In fact, I smuggled forbidden books from West to East Germany. But what was even more typical for the Stasi was the use of human intelligence, people who reported secretly to the Stasi. For the Minister of State Security, these so-called unofficial employees were the most important tools. From 1975 on, nearly 200,000 people collaborated constantly with the Stasi, more than one percent of the population. And in a way, the minister was right, because technical instruments can only register what people are doing, but agents and spies can also report what people are planning to do and what they are thinking. Therefore, the Stasi recruited so many informants. The system of how to get them and how to educate them, as it was called, was very sophisticated. The Stasi had its own university, not far away from here, where the methods were explored and taught to the officers. This guideline gave a detailed description of every step you have to take if you want to convince human beings to betray their fellow citizens. Sometimes it's said that informants were pressured to becoming one, but that's mostly not true, because a forced informant is a bad informant. Only someone who wants to give you the information you need is an effective whistleblower. The main reasons why people cooperated with the Stasi were political conviction and material benefits. The officers also tried to create a personal bond between themselves and the informant, and to be honest, the example of the Stasi shows that it's not so difficult to win someone in order to betray others. Even some of the top dissidents in East Germany collaborated with the Stasi, as for instance Ibrahim Böhme. In 1989, he was the leader of the peaceful revolution and he nearly became the first freely elected Prime Minister of the GDR until it came out that he was an informant. The net of spies was really broad. In nearly every institution, even in the churches or in West Germany, there were many of them. I remember telling a leading Stasi officer, "If you had sent an informant to me, I would surely have recognized him." His answer was, "We didn't send anyone. We took those who were around you." And in fact, two of my best friends reported about me to the Stasi. Not only in my case, informers were very close. For example, Vera Lengsfeld, another leading dissident, in her case it was her husband who spied on her. A famous writer was betrayed by his brother. This reminds me of the novel "1984" by George Orwell, where the only apparently trustable person was an informer. But why did the Stasi collect all this information in its archives? The main purpose was to control the society. In nearly every speech, the Stasi minister gave the order to find out who is who, which meant who thinks what. He didn't want to wait until somebody tried to act against the regime. He wanted to know in advance what people were thinking and planning. The East Germans knew, of course, that they were surrounded by informers, in a totalitarian regime that created mistrust and a state of widespread fear, the most important tools to oppress people in any dictatorship. That's why not many East Germans tried to fight against the Communist regime. If yes, the Stasi often used a method which was really diabolic. It was called Zersetzung, and it's described in another guideline. The word is difficult to translate because it means originally "biodegradation." But actually, it's a quite accurate description. The goal was to destroy secretly the self-confidence of people, for example by damaging their reputation, by organizing failures in their work, and by destroying their personal relationships. Considering this, East Germany was a very modern dictatorship. The Stasi didn't try to arrest every dissident. It preferred to paralyze them, and it could do so because it had access to so much personal information and to so many institutions. Detaining someone was used only as a last resort. For this, the Stasi owned 17 remand prisons, one in every district. Here, the Stasi also developed quite modern methods of detention. Normally, the interrogation officer didn't torture the prisoner. Instead, he used a sophisticated system of psychological pressure in which strict isolation was central. Nearly no prisoner resisted without giving a testimony. If you have the occasion, do visit the former Stasi prison in Berlin and attend a guided tour with a former political prisoner who will explain to you how this worked. One more question needs to be answered: If the Stasi were so well organized, why did the Communist regime collapse? First, in 1989, the leadership in East Germany was uncertain what to do against the growing protest of people. It was especially confused because in the mother country of socialism, the Soviet Union, a more liberal policy took place. In addition, the regime was dependent on the loans from the West. Therefore, no order to crash down the uprising was given to the Stasi. Secondly, in the Communist ideology, there's no place for criticism. Instead, the leadership stuck to the belief that socialism is a perfect system, and the Stasi had to confirm that, of course. The consequence was that despite all the information, the regime couldn't analyze its real problems, and therefore it couldn't solve them. In the end, the Stasi died because of the structures that it was charged with protecting. The ending of the Stasi was something tragic, because these officers were kept busy during the peaceful revolution with only one thing: to destroy the documents they had produced during decades. Fortunately, they had been stopped by human rights activists. That's why today we can use the files to get a better understanding of how a surveillance state functions. Thank you. (Applause) Bruno Giussani: Thank you. Thank you very much. So Hubertus, I want to ask you a couple of questions because I have here Der Spiegel from last week. "Mein Nachbar NSA." My neighbor, the NSA. And you just told us about my neighbor, the spies and the informant from East Germany. So there is a direct link between these two stories or there isn't? What's your reaction as a historian when you see this? Hubertus Knabe: I think there are several aspects to mention. At first, I think there's a difference of why you are collecting this data. Are you doing that for protecting your people against terrorist attacks, or are you doing that for oppressing your people? So that makes a fundamental difference. But on the other hand, also in a democracy, these instruments can be abused, and that is something where we really have to be aware to stop that, and that also the intelligence services are respecting the rules we have. The third point, probably, we really can be happy that we live in a democracy, because you can be sure that Russia and China are doing the same, but nobody speaks about that because nobody could do that. (Applause) BG: When the story came out first, last July, last year, you filed a criminal complaint with a German tribunal. Why? HK: Yeah, I did so because of the second point I mentioned, that I think especially in a democracy, the rules are for everybody. They are made for everybody, so it's not allowed that any institution doesn't respect the rules. In the criminal code of Germany, it's written that it's not allowed to tap somebody without the permission of the judge. Fortunately, it's written in the criminal code of Germany, so if it's not respected, then I think an investigation is necessary, and it took a very long time that the public prosecutor of Germany started this, and he started it only in the case of Angela Merkel, and not in the case of all the other people living in Germany. BG: That doesn't surprise me because — (Applause) — because of the story you told. Seen from the outside, I live outside of Germany, and I expected the Germans to react much more strongly, immediately. And instead, the reaction really came only when Chancellor Merkel was revealed as being wiretapped. Why so? HK: I take it as a good sign, because people feel secure in this democracy. They aren't afraid that they will be arrested, and if you leave this hall after the conference, nobody has to be afraid that the secret police is standing out and is arresting you. So that's a good sign, I think. People are not really scared, as they could be. But of course, I think, the institutions are responsible to stop illegal actions in Germany or wherever they happen. BG: A personal question, and this is the last one. There has been a debate in Germany about granting asylum to Edward Snowden. Would you be in favor or against? HK: Oh, that's a difficult question, but if you ask me, and if I answer honestly, I would give him the asylum, because I think it was really brave what he did, and he destroyed his whole life and his family and everything. So I think, for these people, we should do something, and especially if you see the German history, where so many people had to escape and they asked for asylum in other countries and they didn't get it, so it would be a good sign to give him asylum. (Applause) BG: Hubertus, thank you very much.

What do you think of when I say the word "design"? You probably think of things like this, finely crafted objects that you can hold in your hand, or maybe logos and posters and maps that visually explain things, classic icons of timeless design. But I'm not here to talk about that kind of design. I want to talk about the kind that you probably use every day and may not give much thought to, designs that change all the time and that live inside your pocket. I'm talking about the design of digital experiences and specifically the design of systems that are so big that their scale can be hard to comprehend. Consider the fact that Google processes over one billion search queries every day, that every minute, over 100 hours of footage are uploaded to YouTube. That's more in a single day than all three major U.S. networks broadcast in the last five years combined. And Facebook transmitting the photos, messages and stories of over 1.23 billion people. That's almost half of the Internet population, and a sixth of humanity. These are some of the products that I've helped design over the course of my career, and their scale is so massive that they've produced unprecedented design challenges. But what is really hard about designing at scale is this: It's hard in part because it requires a combination of two things, audacity and humility — audacity to believe that the thing that you're making is something that the entire world wants and needs, and humility to understand that as a designer, it's not about you or your portfolio, it's about the people that you're designing for, and how your work just might help them live better lives. Now, unfortunately, there's no school that offers the course Designing for Humanity 101. I and the other designers who work on these kinds of products have had to invent it as we go along, and we are teaching ourselves the emerging best practices of designing at scale, and today I'd like share some of the things that we've learned over the years. Now, the first thing that you need to know about designing at scale is that the little things really matter. Here's a really good example of how a very tiny design element can make a big impact. The team at Facebook that manages the Facebook "Like" button decided that it needed to be redesigned. The button had kind of gotten out of sync with the evolution of our brand and it needed to be modernized. Now you might think, well, it's a tiny little button, it probably is a pretty straightforward, easy design assignment, but it wasn't. Turns out, there were all kinds of constraints for the design of this button. You had to work within specific height and width parameters. You had to be careful to make it work in a bunch of different languages, and be careful about using fancy gradients or borders because it has to degrade gracefully in old web browsers. The truth is, designing this tiny little button was a huge pain in the butt. Now, this is the new version of the button, and the designer who led this project estimates that he spent over 280 hours redesigning this button over the course of months. Now, why would we spend so much time on something so small? It's because when you're designing at scale, there's no such thing as a small detail. This innocent little button is seen on average 22 billion times a day and on over 7.5 million websites. It's one of the single most viewed design elements ever created. Now that's a lot of pressure for a little button and the designer behind it, but with these kinds of products, you need to get even the tiny things right. Now, the next thing that you need to understand is how to design with data. Now, when you're working on products like this, you have incredible amounts of information about how people are using your product that you can then use to influence your design decisions, but it's not just as simple as following the numbers. Let me give you an example so that you can understand what I mean. Facebook has had a tool for a long time that allowed people to report photos that may be in violation of our community standards, things like spam and abuse. And there were a ton of photos reported, but as it turns out, only a small percentage were actually in violation of those community standards. Most of them were just your typical party photo. Now, to give you a specific hypothetical example, let's say my friend Laura hypothetically uploads a picture of me from a drunken night of karaoke. This is purely hypothetical, I can assure you. (Laughter) Now, incidentally, you know how some people are kind of worried that their boss or employee is going to discover embarrassing photos of them on Facebook? Do you know how hard that is to avoid when you actually work at Facebook? So anyway, there are lots of these photos being erroneously reported as spam and abuse, and one of the engineers on the team had a hunch. He really thought there was something else going on and he was right, because when he looked through a bunch of the cases, he found that most of them were from people who were requesting the takedown of a photo of themselves. Now this was a scenario that the team never even took into account before. So they added a new feature that allowed people to message their friend to ask them to take the photo down. But it didn't work. Only 20 percent of people sent the message to their friend. So the team went back at it. They consulted with experts in conflict resolution. They even studied the universal principles of polite language, which I didn't even actually know existed until this research happened. And they found something really interesting. They had to go beyond just helping people ask their friend to take the photo down. They had to help people express to their friend how the photo made them feel. Here's how the experience works today. So I find this hypothetical photo of myself, and it's not spam, it's not abuse, but I really wish it weren't on the site. So I report it and I say, "I'm in this photo and I don't like it," and then we dig deeper. Why don't you like this photo of yourself? And I select "It's embarrassing." And then I'm encouraged to message my friend, but here's the critical difference. I'm provided specific suggested language that helps me communicate to Laura how the photo makes me feel. Now the team found that this relatively small change had a huge impact. Before, only 20 percent of people were sending the message, and now 60 percent were, and surveys showed that people on both sides of the conversation felt better as a result. That same survey showed that 90 percent of your friends want to know if they've done something to upset you. Now I don't know who the other 10 percent are, but maybe that's where our "Unfriend" feature can come in handy. So as you can see, these decisions are highly nuanced. Of course we use a lot of data to inform our decisions, but we also rely very heavily on iteration, research, testing, intuition, human empathy. It's both art and science. Now, sometimes the designers who work on these products are called "data-driven," which is a term that totally drives us bonkers. The fact is, it would be irresponsible of us not to rigorously test our designs when so many people are counting on us to get it right, but data analytics will never be a substitute for design intuition. Data can help you make a good design great, but it will never made a bad design good. The next thing that you need to understand as a principle is that when you introduce change, you need to do it extraordinarily carefully. Now I often have joked that I spend almost as much time designing the introduction of change as I do the change itself, and I'm sure that we can all relate to that when something that we use a lot changes and then we have to adjust. The fact is, people can become very efficient at using bad design, and so even if the change is good for them in the long run, it's still incredibly frustrating when it happens, and this is particularly true with user-generated content platforms, because people can rightfully claim a sense of ownership. It is, after all, their content. Now, years ago, when I was working at YouTube, we were looking for ways to encourage more people to rate videos, and it was interesting because when we looked into the data, we found that almost everyone was exclusively using the highest five-star rating, a handful of people were using the lowest one-star, and virtually no one was using two, three or four stars. So we decided to simplify into an up-down kind of voting binary model. It's going to be much easier for people to engage with. But people were very attached to the five-star rating system. Video creators really loved their ratings. Millions and millions of people were accustomed to the old design. So in order to help people prepare themselves for change and acclimate to the new design more quickly, we actually published the data graph sharing with the community the rationale for what we were going to do, and it even engaged the larger industry in a conversation, which resulted in my favorite TechCrunch headline of all time: "YouTube Comes to a 5-Star Realization: Its Ratings Are Useless." Now, it's impossible to completely avoid change aversion when you're making changes to products that so many people use. Even though we tried to do all the right things, we still received our customary flood of video protests and angry emails and even a package that had to be scanned by security, but we have to remember people care intensely about this stuff, and it's because these products, this work, really, really matters to them. Now, we know that we have to be careful about paying attention to the details, we have to be cognizant about how we use data in our design process, and we have to introduce change very, very carefully. Now, these things are all really useful. They're good best practices for designing at scale. But they don't mean anything if you don't understand something much more fundamental. You have to understand who you are designing for. Now, when you set a goal to design for the entire human race, and you start to engage in that goal in earnest, at some point you run into the walls of the bubble that you're living in. Now, in San Francisco, we get a little miffed when we hit a dead cell zone because we can't use our phones to navigate to the new hipster coffee shop. But what if you had to drive four hours to charge your phone because you had no reliable source of electricity? What if you had no access to public libraries? What if your country had no free press? What would these products start to mean to you? This is what Google, YouTube and Facebook look like to most of the world, and it's what they'll look like to most of the next five billion people to come online. Designing for low-end cell phones is not glamorous design work, but if you want to design for the whole world, you have to design for where people are, and not where you are. So how do we keep this big, big picture in mind? We try to travel outside of our bubble to see, hear and understand the people we're designing for. We use our products in non-English languages to make sure that they work just as well. And we try to use one of these phones from time to time to keep in touch with their reality. So what does it mean to design at a global scale? It means difficult and sometimes exasperating work to try to improve and evolve products. Finding the audacity and the humility to do right by them can be pretty exhausting, and the humility part, it's a little tough on the design ego. Because these products are always changing, everything that I've designed in my career is pretty much gone, and everything that I will design will fade away. But here's what remains: the never-ending thrill of being a part of something that is so big, you can hardly get your head around it, and the promise that it just might change the world. Thank you. (Applause)

I would like to share with you a new model of higher education, a model that, once expanded, can enhance the collective intelligence of millions of creative and motivated individuals that otherwise would be left behind. Look at the world. Pick up a place and focus on it. You will find humans chasing higher education. Let's meet some of them. Patrick. Patrick was born in Liberia to a family of 20 children. During the civil war, he and his family were forced to flee to Nigeria. There, in spite of his situation, he graduated high school with nearly perfect grades. He wanted to continue to higher education, but due to his family living on the poverty line, he was soon sent to South Africa to work and send back money to feed his family. Patrick never gave up his dream of higher education. Late at night, after work, he surfed the Net looking for ways to study. Meet Debbie. Debbie is from Florida. Her parents didn't go to college, and neither did any of her siblings. Debbie has worked all her life, pays taxes, supports herself month to month, proud of the American dream, a dream that just won't be complete without higher education. But Debbie doesn't have the savings for higher education. She can't pay the tuition. Neither could she leave work. Meet Wael. Wael is from Syria. He's firsthand experiencing the misery, fear and failure imposed on his country. He's a big believer in education. He knew that if he would find an opportunity for higher education, an opportunity to get ahead of the rest, he has a better chance to survive in a world turned upside down. The higher education system failed Patrick, Debbie and Wael, exactly as it is failing millions of potential students, millions that graduate high school, millions that are qualified for higher education, millions that want to study yet cannot access for various reasons. First, financial. Universities are expensive. We all know it. In large parts of the world, higher education is unattainable for an average citizen. This is probably the biggest problem facing our society. Higher education stopped being a right for all and became a privilege for the few. Second, cultural. Students who are qualified for higher education, can afford, want to study, cannot because it is not decent, it is not a place for a woman. This is the story of countless women in Africa, for example, prevented from higher education because of cultural barriers. And here comes the third reason: UNESCO stated that in 2025, 100 million students will be deprived from higher education simply because there will not be enough seats to accommodate them, to meet the demand. They will take a placement test, they will pass it, but they still won't have access because there are no places available. These are the reasons I founded University of the People, a nonprofit, tuition-free, degree-granting university to give an alternative, to create an alternative to those who have no other, an alternative that will be affordable and scalable, an alternative that will disrupt the current education system, open the gates to higher education for every qualified student regardless of what they earn, where they live, or what society says about them. Patrick, Debbie and Wael are only three examples out of the 1,700 accepted students from 143 countries. We — (Applause) — Thank you. We didn't need to reinvent the wheel. We just looked at what wasn't working and used the amazing power of the Internet to get around it. We set out to build a model that will cut down almost entirely the cost of higher education, and that's how we did it. First, bricks and mortar cost money. Universities have expenses that virtual universities don't. We don't need to pass these expenses onto our students. They don't exist. We also don't need to worry about capacity. There are no limits of seats in virtual university. Actually, nobody needs to stand at the back of the lecture hall. Textbooks is also something our students don't need to buy. By using open educational resources and the generosity of professors who are putting their material free and accessible, we don't need to send our students to buy textbooks. All of our materials come free. Even professors, the most expensive line in any university balance sheet, come free to our students, over 3,000 of them, including presidents, vice chancellors, professors and academic advisors from top universities such as NYU, Yale, Berkeley and Oxford, came on board to help our students. Finally, it's our belief in peer-to-peer learning. We use this sound pedagogical model to encourage our students from all over the world to interact and study together and also to reduce the time our professors need to labor over class assignments. If the Internet has made us a global village, this model can develop its future leadership. Look how we do it. We only offer two programs: business administration and computer science, the two programs that are most in demand worldwide, the two programs that are likeliest to help our students find a job. When our students are accepted, they are placed in a small classroom of 20 to 30 students to ensure that those who need personalized attention get it. Moreover, for every nine weeks' course, they meet a new peer, a whole new set of students from all over the world. Every week, when they go into the classroom, they find the lecture notes of the week, the reading assignment, the homework assignment, and the discussion question, which is the core of our studies. Every week, every student must contribute to the class discussion and also must comment on the contribution of others. This way, we open our students' minds, we develop a positive shift in attitude toward different cultures. By the end of each week, the students take a quiz, hand in their homework, which are assessed by their peers under the supervision of the instructors, get a grade, move to the next week. By the end of the course, they take the final exam, get a grade, and follow to the next course. We opened the gates for higher education for every qualified student. Every student with a high school diploma, sufficient English and Internet connection can study with us. We don't use audio. We don't use video. Broadband is not necessary. Any student from any part of the world with any Internet connection can study with us. We are tuition-free. All we ask our students to cover is the cost of their exams, 100 dollars per exam. A full-time bachelor degree student taking 40 courses, will pay 1,000 dollars a year, 4,000 dollars for the entire degree, and for those who cannot afford even this, we offer them a variety of scholarships. It is our mission that nobody will be left behind for financial reasons. With 5,000 students in 2016, this model is financially sustainable. Five years ago, it was a vision. Today, it is a reality. Last month, we got the ultimate academic endorsement to our model. University of the People is now fully accredited. (Applause) Thank you. With this accreditation, it's our time now to scale up. We have demonstrated that our model works. I invite universities and, even more important, developing countries' governments, to replicate this model to ensure that the gates of higher education will open widely. A new era is coming, an era that will witness the disruption of the higher education model as we know it today, from being a privilege for the few to becoming a basic right, affordable and accessible for all. Thank you. (Applause)

(Music) This is the human test, a test to see if you are a human. Please raise your hand if something applies to you. Are we agreed? Yes? Then let's begin. Have you ever eaten a booger long past your childhood? (Laughter) It's okay, it's safe here. Have you ever made a small, weird sound when you remembered something embarrassing? Have you ever purposely lowercased the first letter of a text in order to come across as sad or disappointed? (Laughter) Okay. Have you ever ended a text with a period as a sign of aggression? Okay. Period. Have you ever laughed or smiled when someone said something shitty to you and then spent the rest of the day wondering why you reacted that way? Yes. Have you ever seemed to lose your airplane ticket a thousand times as you walked from the check-in to the gate? Yes. Have you ever put on a pair of pants and then much later realized that there was a loose sock smushed up against your thigh? (Laughter) Good. Have you ever tried to guess someone else's password so many times that it locked their account? Mmm. Have you ever had a nagging feeling that one day you will be discovered as a fraud? Yes, it's safe here. Have you ever hoped that there was some ability you hadn't discovered yet that you were just naturally great at? Mmm. Have you ever broken something in real life, and then found yourself looking for an "undo" button in real life? Have you ever misplaced your TED badge and then immediately started imagining what a three-day Vancouver vacation might look like? Have you ever marveled at how someone you thought was so ordinary could suddenly become so beautiful? Have you ever stared at your phone smiling like an idiot while texting with someone? Have you ever subsequently texted that person the phrase "I'm staring at the phone smiling like an idiot"? Have you ever been tempted to, and then gave in to the temptation, of looking through someone else's phone? Have you ever had a conversation with yourself and then suddenly realized you're a real asshole to yourself? (Laughter) Has your phone ever run out of battery in the middle of an argument, and it sort of felt like the phone was breaking up with both of you? Have you ever thought that working on an issue between you was futile because it should just be easier than this, or this is supposed to happen just naturally? Have you ever realized that very little, in the long run, just happens naturally? Have you ever woken up blissfully and suddenly been flooded by the awful remembrance that someone had left you? Have you ever lost the ability to imagine a future without a person that no longer was in your life? Have you ever looked back on that event with the sad smile of autumn and the realization that futures will happen regardless? Congratulations. You have now completed the test. You are all human. (Applause)

I'd like to introduce you to an organism: a slime mold, Physarum polycephalum. It's a mold with an identity crisis, because it's not a mold, so let's get that straight to start with. It is one of 700 known slime molds belonging to the kingdom of the amoeba. It is a single-celled organism, a cell, that joins together with other cells to form a mass super-cell to maximize its resources. So within a slime mold you might find thousands or millions of nuclei, all sharing a cell wall, all operating as one entity. In its natural habitat, you might find the slime mold foraging in woodlands, eating rotting vegetation, but you might equally find it in research laboratories, classrooms, and even artists' studios. I first came across the slime mold about five years ago. A microbiologist friend of mine gave me a petri dish with a little yellow blob in it and told me to go home and play with it. The only instructions I was given, that it likes it dark and damp and its favorite food is porridge oats. I'm an artist who's worked for many years with biology, with scientific processes, so living material is not uncommon for me. I've worked with plants, bacteria, cuttlefish, fruit flies. So I was keen to get my new collaborator home to see what it could do. So I took it home and I watched. I fed it a varied diet. I observed as it networked. It formed a connection between food sources. I watched it leave a trail behind it, indicating where it had been. And I noticed that when it was fed up with one petri dish, it would escape and find a better home. I captured my observations through time-lapse photography. Slime mold grows at about one centimeter an hour, so it's not really ideal for live viewing unless there's some form of really extreme meditation, but through the time lapse, I could observe some really interesting behaviors. For instance, having fed on a nice pile of oats, the slime mold goes off to explore new territories in different directions simultaneously. When it meets itself, it knows it's already there, it recognizes it's there, and instead retreats back and grows in other directions. I was quite impressed by this feat, at how what was essentially just a bag of cellular slime could somehow map its territory, know itself, and move with seeming intention. I found countless scientific studies, research papers, journal articles, all citing incredible work with this one organism, and I'm going to share a few of those with you. For example, a team in Hokkaido University in Japan filled a maze with slime mold. It joined together and formed a mass cell. They introduced food at two points, oats of course, and it formed a connection between the food. It retracted from empty areas and dead ends. There are four possible routes through this maze, yet time and time again, the slime mold established the shortest and the most efficient route. Quite clever. The conclusion from their experiment was that the slime mold had a primitive form of intelligence. Another study exposed cold air at regular intervals to the slime mold. It didn't like it. It doesn't like it cold. It doesn't like it dry. They did this at repeat intervals, and each time, the slime mold slowed down its growth in response. However, at the next interval, the researchers didn't put the cold air on, yet the slime mold slowed down in anticipation of it happening. It somehow knew that it was about the time for the cold air that it didn't like. The conclusion from their experiment was that the slime mold was able to learn. A third experiment: the slime mold was invited to explore a territory covered in oats. It fans out in a branching pattern. As it goes, each food node it finds, it forms a network, a connection to, and keeps foraging. After 26 hours, it established quite a firm network between the different oats. Now there's nothing remarkable in this until you learn that the center oat that it started from represents the city of Tokyo, and the surrounding oats are suburban railway stations. The slime mold had replicated the Tokyo transport network — (Laughter) — a complex system developed over time by community dwellings, civil engineering, urban planning. What had taken us well over 100 years took the slime mold just over a day. The conclusion from their experiment was that the slime mold can form efficient networks and solve the traveling salesman problem. It is a biological computer. As such, it has been mathematically modeled, algorithmically analyzed. It's been sonified, replicated, simulated. World over, teams of researchers are decoding its biological principles to understand its computational rules and applying that learning to the fields of electronics, programming and robotics. So the question is, how does this thing work? It doesn't have a central nervous system. It doesn't have a brain, yet it can perform behaviors that we associate with brain function. It can learn, it can remember, it can solve problems, it can make decisions. So where does that intelligence lie? So this is a microscopy, a video I shot, and it's about 100 times magnification, sped up about 20 times, and inside the slime mold, there is a rhythmic pulsing flow, a vein-like structure carrying cellular material, nutrients and chemical information through the cell, streaming first in one direction and then back in another. And it is this continuous, synchronous oscillation within the cell that allows it to form quite a complex understanding of its environment, but without any large-scale control center. This is where its intelligence lies. So it's not just academic researchers in universities that are interested in this organism. A few years ago, I set up SliMoCo, the Slime Mould Collective. It's an online, open, democratic network for slime mold researchers and enthusiasts to share knowledge and experimentation across disciplinary divides and across academic divides. The Slime Mould Collective membership is self-selecting. People have found the collective as the slime mold finds the oats. And it comprises of scientists and computer scientists and researchers but also artists like me, architects, designers, writers, activists, you name it. It's a very interesting, eclectic membership. Just a few examples: an artist who paints with fluorescent Physarum; a collaborative team who are combining biological and electronic design with 3D printing technologies in a workshop; another artist who is using the slime mold as a way of engaging a community to map their area. Here, the slime mold is being used directly as a biological tool, but metaphorically as a symbol for ways of talking about social cohesion, communication and cooperation. Other public engagement activities, I run lots of slime mold workshops, a creative way of engaging with the organism. So people are invited to come and learn about what amazing things it can do, and they design their own petri dish experiment, an environment for the slime mold to navigate so they can test its properties. Everybody takes home a new pet and is invited to post their results on the Slime Mould Collective. And the collective has enabled me to form collaborations with a whole array of interesting people. I've been working with filmmakers on a feature-length slime mold documentary, and I stress feature-length, which is in the final stages of edit and will be hitting your cinema screens very soon. (Laughter) It's also enabled me to conduct what I think is the world's first human slime mold experiment. This is part of an exhibition in Rotterdam last year. We invited people to become slime mold for half an hour. So we essentially tied people together so they were a giant cell, and invited them to follow slime mold rules. You have to communicate through oscillations, no speaking. You have to operate as one entity, one mass cell, no egos, and the motivation for moving and then exploring the environment is in search of food. So a chaotic shuffle ensued as this bunch of strangers tied together with yellow ropes wearing "Being Slime Mold" t-shirts wandered through the museum park. When they met trees, they had to reshape their connections and reform as a mass cell through not speaking. This is a ludicrous experiment in many, many ways. This isn't hypothesis-driven. We're not trying to prove, demonstrate anything. But what it did provide us was a way of engaging a broad section of the public with ideas of intelligence, agency, autonomy, and provide a playful platform for discussions about the things that ensued. One of the most exciting things about this experiment was the conversation that happened afterwards. An entirely spontaneous symposium happened in the park. People talked about the human psychology, of how difficult it was to let go of their individual personalities and egos. Other people talked about bacterial communication. Each person brought in their own individual interpretation, and our conclusion from this experiment was that the people of Rotterdam were highly cooperative, especially when given beer. We didn't just give them oats. We gave them beer as well. But they weren't as efficient as the slime mold, and the slime mold, for me, is a fascinating subject matter. It's biologically fascinating, it's computationally interesting, but it's also a symbol, a way of engaging with ideas of community, collective behavior, cooperation. A lot of my work draws on the scientific research, so this pays homage to the maze experiment but in a different way. And the slime mold is also my working material. It's a coproducer of photographs, prints, animations, participatory events. Whilst the slime mold doesn't choose to work with me, exactly, it is a collaboration of sorts. I can predict certain behaviors by understanding how it operates, but I can't control it. The slime mold has the final say in the creative process. And after all, it has its own internal aesthetics. These branching patterns that we see we see across all forms, scales of nature, from river deltas to lightning strikes, from our own blood vessels to neural networks. There's clearly significant rules at play in this simple yet complex organism, and no matter what our disciplinary perspective or our mode of inquiry, there's a great deal that we can learn from observing and engaging with this beautiful, brainless blob. I give you Physarum polycephalum. Thank you. (Applause)

I was born in Taiwan. I grew up surrounded by different types of hardware stores, and I like going to night markets. I love the energy of the night markets, the colors, the lights, the toys, and all the unexpected things I find every time I go, things like watermelon with straw antennas or puppies with mohawks. When I was growing up, I liked taking toys apart, any kind of toys I'd find around the house, like my brother's BB gun when he's not home. I also liked to make environments for people to explore and play. In these early installations, I would take plastic sheets, plastic bags, and things I would find in the hardware store or around the house. I would take things like highlighter pen, mix it with water, pump it through plastic tubing, creating these glowing circulatory systems for people to walk through and enjoy. I like these materials because of the way they look, the way they feel, and they're very affordable. I also liked to make devices that work with body parts. I would take camera LED lights and a bungee cord and strap it on my waist and I would videotape my belly button, get a different perspective, and see what it does. (Laughter) I also like to modify household appliances. This is an automatic night light. Some of you might have them at home. I would cut out the light sensor, add an extension line, and use modeling clay, stick it onto the television, and then I would videotape my eye, and using the dark part of my eye tricking the sensor into thinking it's night time, so you turn on the lightbulb. The white of the eye and the eyelid will trick the sensor into thinking it's daytime, and it will shut off the light. I wanted to collect more different types of eyes, so I built this device using bicycle helmets, some lightbulbs and television sets. It would be easier for other people to wear the helmet and record their eyes. This device allows me to symbolically extract other people's eyes, so I have a diversity of eyes to use for my other sculptures. This sculpture has four eyes. Each eye is controlling a different device. This eye is turning itself around in a television. This eye is inflating a plastic tube. This eye is watching a video of another piece being made. And these two eyes are activating glowing water. Many of these pieces are later on shown in museums, biennials, triennial exhibitions around the world. I love science and biology. In 2007, I was doing a research fellowship at the Smithsonian Natural History Museum looking at bioluminous organisms in the oean. I love these creatures. I love the way they look, the way they feel. They're soft, they're slimy, and I was fascinated by the way they use light in their environment, either to attract mates, for self-defense, or to attract food. This research inspired my work in many different ways, things like movement or different light patterns. So I started gathering a lot of different types of material in my studio and just experimenting and trying this out, trying that out, and seeing what types of creatures I can come up with. I used a lot of computer cooling fans and just kind of put them together and see what happens. This is an 8,000-square-foot installation composed of many different creatures, some hanging from the ceiling and some resting on the floor. From afar, they look alien-like, but when you look closer, they're all made out of black garbage bags or Tupperware containers. I'd like to share with you how ordinary things can become something magical and wondrous. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause)

The first time I stood in the operating room and watched a real surgery, I had no idea what to expect. I was a college student in engineering. I thought it was going to be like on TV. Ominous music playing in the background, beads of sweat pouring down the surgeon's face. But it wasn't like that at all. There was music playing on this day, I think it was Madonna's greatest hits. (Laughter) And there was plenty of conversation, not just about the patient's heart rate, but about sports and weekend plans. And since then, the more surgeries I watched, the more I realized this is how it is. In some weird way, it's just another day at the office. But every so often the music gets turned down, everyone stops talking, and stares at exactly the same thing. And that's when you know that something absolutely critical and dangerous is happening. The first time I saw that I was watching a type of surgery called laparoscopic surgery And for those of you who are unfamiliar, laparoscopic surgery, instead of the large open incision you might be used to with surgery, a laparoscopic surgery is where the surgeon creates these three or more small incisions in the patient. And then inserts these long, thin instruments and a camera, and actually does the procedure inside the patient. This is great because there's much less risk of infection, much less pain, shorter recovery time. But there is a trade-off, because these incisions are created with a long, pointed device called a trocar. And the way the surgeon uses this device is that he takes it and he presses it into the abdomen until it punctures through. And now the reason why everyone in the operating room was staring at that device on that day was because he had to be absolutely careful not to plunge it through and puncture it into the organs and blood vessels below. But this problem should seem pretty familiar to all of you because I'm pretty sure you've seen it somewhere else. (Laughter) Remember this? (Applause) You knew that at any second that straw was going to plunge through, and you didn't know if it was going to go out the other side and straight into your hand, or if you were going to get juice everywhere, but you were terrified. Right? Every single time you did this, you experienced the same fundamental physics that I was watching in the operating room that day. And it turns out it really is a problem. In 2003, the FDA actually came out and said that trocar incisions might be the most dangerous step in minimally invasive surgery. Again in 2009, we see a paper that says that trocars account for over half of all major complications in laparoscopic surgery. And, oh by the way, this hasn't changed for 25 years. So when I got to graduate school, this is what I wanted to work on. I was trying to explain to a friend of mine what exactly I was spending my time doing, and I said, "It's like when you're drilling through a wall to hang something in your apartment. There's that moment when the drill first punctures through the wall and there's this plunge. Right? And he looked at me and he said, "You mean like when they drill into people's brains?" And I said, "Excuse me?" (Laughter) And then I looked it up and they do drill into people's brains. A lot of neurosurgical procedures actually start with a drill incision through the skull. And if the surgeon isn't careful, he can plunge directly into the brain. So this is the moment when I started thinking, okay, cranial drilling, laparoscopic surgery, why not other areas of medicine? Because think about it, when was the last time you went to the doctor and you didn't get stuck with something? Right? So the truth is in medicine puncture is everywhere. And here are just a couple of the procedures that I've found that involve some tissue puncture step. And if we take just three of them — laparoscopic surgery, epidurals, and cranial drilling — these procedures account for over 30,000 complications every year in this country alone. I call that a problem worth solving. So let's take a look at some of the devices that are used in these types of procedures. I mentioned epidurals. This is an epidural needle. It's used to puncture through the ligaments in the spine and deliver anesthesia during childbirth. Here's a set of bone marrow biopsy tools. These are actually used to burrow into the bone and collect bone marrow or sample bone lesions. Here's a bayonette from the Civil War. (Laughter) If I had told you it was a medical puncture device you probably would have believed me. Because what's the difference? So, the more I did this research the more I thought there has to be a better way to do this. And for me the key to this problem is that all these different puncture devices share a common set of fundamental physics. So what are those physics? Let's go back to drilling through a wall. So you're applying a force on a drill towards the wall. And Newton says the wall is going to apply force back, equal and opposite. So, as you drill through the wall, those forces balance. But then there's that moment when the drill first punctures through the other side of the wall, and right at that moment the wall can't push back anymore. But your brain hasn't reacted to that change in force. So for that millisecond, or however long it takes you to react, you're still pushing, and that unbalanced force causes an acceleration, and that is the plunge. But what if right at the moment of puncture you could pull that tip back, actually oppose the forward acceleration? That's what I set out to do. So imagine you have a device and it's got some kind of sharp tip to cut through tissue. What's the simplest way you could pull that tip back? I chose a spring. So when you extend that spring, you extend that tip out so it's ready to puncture tissue, the spring wants to pull the tip back. How do you keep the tip in place until the moment of puncture? I used this mechanism. When the tip of the device is pressed against tissue, the mechanism expands outwards and wedges in place against the wall. And the friction that's generated locks it in place and prevents the spring from retracting the tip. But right at the moment of puncture, the tissue can't push back on the tip anymore. So the mechanism unlocks and the spring retracts the tip. Let me show you that happening in slow motion. This is about 2,000 frames a second, and I'd like you to notice the tip that's right there on the bottom, about to puncture through tissue. And you'll see that right at the moment of puncture, right there, the mechanism unlocks and retracts that tip back. I want to show it to you again, a little closer up. You're going to see the sharp bladed tip, and right when it punctures that rubber membrane it's going to disappear into this white blunt sheath. Right there. That happens within four 100ths of a second after puncture. And because this device is designed to address the physics of puncture and not the specifics of cranial drilling or laparoscopic surgery, or another procedure, it's applicable across these different medical disciplines and across different length scales. But it didn't always look like this. This was my first prototype. Yes, those are popsicle sticks, and there's a rubber band at the top. It took about 30 minutes to do this, but it worked. And it proved to me that my idea worked and it justified the next couple years of work on this project. I worked on this because this problem really fascinated me. It kept me up at night. But I think it should fascinate you too, because I said puncture is everywhere. That means at some point it's going to be your problem too. That first day in the operating room I never expected to find myself on the other end of a trocar. But last year, I got appendicitis when I was visiting Greece. So I was in the hospital in Athens, and the surgeon was telling me he was going to perform a laparoscopic surgery. He was going to remove my appendix through these tiny incisions, and he was talking about what I could expect for the recovery, and what was going to happen. He said, "Do you have any questions?" And I said, "Just one, doc. What kind of trocar do you use?" So my favorite quote about laparoscopic surgery comes from a Doctor H. C. Jacobaeus: "It is puncture itself that causes risk." That's my favorite quote because H.C. Jacobaeus was the first person to ever perform laparoscopic surgery on humans, and he wrote that in 1912. This is a problem that's been injuring and even killing people for over 100 years. So it's easy to think that for every major problem out there there's some team of experts working around the clock to solve it. The truth is that's not always the case. We have to be better at finding those problems and finding ways to solve them. So if you come across a problem that grabs you, let it keep you up at night. Allow yourself to be fascinated, because there are so many lives to save. (Applause)

Right now you have a movie playing inside your head. It's an amazing multi-track movie. It has 3D vision and surround sound for what you're seeing and hearing right now, but that's just the start of it. Your movie has smell and taste and touch. It has a sense of your body, pain, hunger, orgasms. It has emotions, anger and happiness. It has memories, like scenes from your childhood playing before you. And it has this constant voiceover narrative in your stream of conscious thinking. At the heart of this movie is you experiencing all this directly. This movie is your stream of consciousness, the subject of experience of the mind and the world. Consciousness is one of the fundamental facts of human existence. Each of us is conscious. We all have our own inner movie, you and you and you. There's nothing we know about more directly. At least, I know about my consciousness directly. I can't be certain that you guys are conscious. Consciousness also is what makes life worth living. If we weren't conscious, nothing in our lives would have meaning or value. But at the same time, it's the most mysterious phenomenon in the universe. Why are we conscious? Why do we have these inner movies? Why aren't we just robots who process all this input, produce all that output, without experiencing the inner movie at all? Right now, nobody knows the answers to those questions. I'm going to suggest that to integrate consciousness into science, some radical ideas may be needed. Some people say a science of consciousness is impossible. Science, by its nature, is objective. Consciousness, by its nature, is subjective. So there can never be a science of consciousness. For much of the 20th century, that view held sway. Psychologists studied behavior objectively, neuroscientists studied the brain objectively, and nobody even mentioned consciousness. Even 30 years ago, when TED got started, there was very little scientific work on consciousness. Now, about 20 years ago, all that began to change. Neuroscientists like Francis Crick and physicists like Roger Penrose said now is the time for science to attack consciousness. And since then, there's been a real explosion, a flowering of scientific work on consciousness. And this work has been wonderful. It's been great. But it also has some fundamental limitations so far. The centerpiece of the science of consciousness in recent years has been the search for correlations, correlations between certain areas of the brain and certain states of consciousness. We saw some of this kind of work from Nancy Kanwisher and the wonderful work she presented just a few minutes ago. Now we understand much better, for example, the kinds of brain areas that go along with the conscious experience of seeing faces or of feeling pain or of feeling happy. But this is still a science of correlations. It's not a science of explanations. We know that these brain areas go along with certain kinds of conscious experience, but we don't know why they do. I like to put this by saying that this kind of work from neuroscience is answering some of the questions we want answered about consciousness, the questions about what certain brain areas do and what they correlate with. But in a certain sense, those are the easy problems. No knock on the neuroscientists. There are no truly easy problems with consciousness. But it doesn't address the real mystery at the core of this subject: why is it that all that physical processing in a brain should be accompanied by consciousness at all? Why is there this inner subjective movie? Right now, we don't really have a bead on that. And you might say, let's just give neuroscience a few years. It'll turn out to be another emergent phenomenon like traffic jams, like hurricanes, like life, and we'll figure it out. The classical cases of emergence are all cases of emergent behavior, how a traffic jam behaves, how a hurricane functions, how a living organism reproduces and adapts and metabolizes, all questions about objective functioning. You could apply that to the human brain in explaining some of the behaviors and the functions of the human brain as emergent phenomena: how we walk, how we talk, how we play chess, all these questions about behavior. But when it comes to consciousness, questions about behavior are among the easy problems. When it comes to the hard problem, that's the question of why is it that all this behavior is accompanied by subjective experience? And here, the standard paradigm of emergence, even the standard paradigms of neuroscience, don't really, so far, have that much to say. Now, I'm a scientific materialist at heart. I want a scientific theory of consciousness that works, and for a long time, I banged my head against the wall looking for a theory of consciousness in purely physical terms that would work. But I eventually came to the conclusion that that just didn't work for systematic reasons. It's a long story, but the core idea is just that what you get from purely reductionist explanations in physical terms, in brain-based terms, is stories about the functioning of a system, its structure, its dynamics, the behavior it produces, great for solving the easy problems — how we behave, how we function — but when it comes to subjective experience — why does all this feel like something from the inside? — that's something fundamentally new, and it's always a further question. So I think we're at a kind of impasse here. We've got this wonderful, great chain of explanation, we're used to it, where physics explains chemistry, chemistry explains biology, biology explains parts of psychology. But consciousness doesn't seem to fit into this picture. On the one hand, it's a datum that we're conscious. On the other hand, we don't know how to accommodate it into our scientific view of the world. So I think consciousness right now is a kind of anomaly, one that we need to integrate into our view of the world, but we don't yet see how. Faced with an anomaly like this, radical ideas may be needed, and I think that we may need one or two ideas that initially seem crazy before we can come to grips with consciousness scientifically. Now, there are a few candidates for what those crazy ideas might be. My friend Dan Dennett, who's here today, has one. His crazy idea is that there is no hard problem of consciousness. The whole idea of the inner subjective movie involves a kind of illusion or confusion. Actually, all we've got to do is explain the objective functions, the behaviors of the brain, and then we've explained everything that needs to be explained. Well I say, more power to him. That's the kind of radical idea that we need to explore if you want to have a purely reductionist brain-based theory of consciousness. At the same time, for me and for many other people, that view is a bit too close to simply denying the datum of consciousness to be satisfactory. So I go in a different direction. In the time remaining, I want to explore two crazy ideas that I think may have some promise. The first crazy idea is that consciousness is fundamental. Physicists sometimes take some aspects of the universe as fundamental building blocks: space and time and mass. They postulate fundamental laws governing them, like the laws of gravity or of quantum mechanics. These fundamental properties and laws aren't explained in terms of anything more basic. Rather, they're taken as primitive, and you build up the world from there. Now sometimes, the list of fundamentals expands. In the 19th century, Maxwell figured out that you can't explain electromagnetic phenomena in terms of the existing fundamentals — space, time, mass, Newton's laws — so he postulated fundamental laws of electromagnetism and postulated electric charge as a fundamental element that those laws govern. I think that's the situation we're in with consciousness. If you can't explain consciousness in terms of the existing fundamentals — space, time, mass, charge — then as a matter of logic, you need to expand the list. The natural thing to do is to postulate consciousness itself as something fundamental, a fundamental building block of nature. This doesn't mean you suddenly can't do science with it. This opens up the way for you to do science with it. What we then need is to study the fundamental laws governing consciousness, the laws that connect consciousness to other fundamentals: space, time, mass, physical processes. Physicists sometimes say that we want fundamental laws so simple that we could write them on the front of a t-shirt. Well I think something like that is the situation we're in with consciousness. We want to find fundamental laws so simple we could write them on the front of a t-shirt. We don't know what those laws are yet, but that's what we're after. The second crazy idea is that consciousness might be universal. Every system might have some degree of consciousness. This view is sometimes called panpsychism: pan for all, psych for mind, every system is conscious, not just humans, dogs, mice, flies, but even Rob Knight's microbes, elementary particles. Even a photon has some degree of consciousness. The idea is not that photons are intelligent or thinking. It's not that a photon is wracked with angst because it's thinking, "Aww, I'm always buzzing around near the speed of light. I never get to slow down and smell the roses." No, not like that. But the thought is maybe photons might have some element of raw, subjective feeling, some primitive precursor to consciousness. This may sound a bit kooky to you. I mean, why would anyone think such a crazy thing? Some motivation comes from the first crazy idea, that consciousness is fundamental. If it's fundamental, like space and time and mass, it's natural to suppose that it might be universal too, the way they are. It's also worth noting that although the idea seems counterintuitive to us, it's much less counterintuitive to people from different cultures, where the human mind is seen as much more continuous with nature. A deeper motivation comes from the idea that perhaps the most simple and powerful way to find fundamental laws connecting consciousness to physical processing is to link consciousness to information. Wherever there's information processing, there's consciousness. Complex information processing, like in a human, complex consciousness. Simple information processing, simple consciousness. A really exciting thing is in recent years a neuroscientist, Giulio Tononi, has taken this kind of theory and developed it rigorously with a mathematical theory. He has a mathematical measure of information integration which he calls phi, measuring the amount of information integrated in a system. And he supposes that phi goes along with consciousness. So in a human brain, incredibly large amount of information integration, high degree of phi, a whole lot of consciousness. In a mouse, medium degree of information integration, still pretty significant, pretty serious amount of consciousness. But as you go down to worms, microbes, particles, the amount of phi falls off. The amount of information integration falls off, but it's still non-zero. On Tononi's theory, there's still going to be a non-zero degree of consciousness. In effect, he's proposing a fundamental law of consciousness: high phi, high consciousness. Now, I don't know if this theory is right, but it's actually perhaps the leading theory right now in the science of consciousness, and it's been used to integrate a whole range of scientific data, and it does have a nice property that it is in fact simple enough you can write it on the front of a t-shirt. Another final motivation is that panpsychism might help us to integrate consciousness into the physical world. Physicists and philosophers have often observed that physics is curiously abstract. It describes the structure of reality using a bunch of equations, but it doesn't tell us about the reality that underlies it. As Stephen Hawking puts it, what puts the fire into the equations? Well, on the panpsychist view, you can leave the equations of physics as they are, but you can take them to be describing the flux of consciousness. That's what physics really is ultimately doing, describing the flux of consciousness. On this view, it's consciousness that puts the fire into the equations. On that view, consciousness doesn't dangle outside the physical world as some kind of extra. It's there right at its heart. This view, I think, the panpsychist view, has the potential to transfigure our relationship to nature, and it may have some pretty serious social and ethical consequences. Some of these may be counterintuitive. I used to think I shouldn't eat anything which is conscious, so therefore I should be vegetarian. Now, if you're a panpsychist and you take that view, you're going to go very hungry. So I think when you think about it, this tends to transfigure your views, whereas what matters for ethical purposes and moral considerations, not so much the fact of consciousness, but the degree and the complexity of consciousness. It's also natural to ask about consciousness in other systems, like computers. What about the artificially intelligent system in the movie "Her," Samantha? Is she conscious? Well, if you take the informational, panpsychist view, she certainly has complicated information processing and integration, so the answer is very likely yes, she is conscious. If that's right, it raises pretty serious ethical issues about both the ethics of developing intelligent computer systems and the ethics of turning them off. Finally, you might ask about the consciousness of whole groups, the planet. Does Canada have its own consciousness? Or at a more local level, does an integrated group like the audience at a TED conference, are we right now having a collective TED consciousness, an inner movie for this collective TED group which is distinct from the inner movies of each of our parts? I don't know the answer to that question, but I think it's at least one worth taking seriously. Okay, so this panpsychist vision, it is a radical one, and I don't know that it's correct. I'm actually more confident about the first crazy idea, that consciousness is fundamental, than about the second one, that it's universal. I mean, the view raises any number of questions, has any number of challenges, like how do those little bits of consciousness add up to the kind of complex consciousness we know and love. If we can answer those questions, then I think we're going to be well on our way to a serious theory of consciousness. If not, well, this is the hardest problem perhaps in science and philosophy. We can't expect to solve it overnight. But I do think we're going to figure it out eventually. Understanding consciousness is a real key, I think, both to understanding the universe and to understanding ourselves. It may just take the right crazy idea. Thank you. (Applause)

Puzzles and magic. I work in what most people think are two distinct fields, but I believe they are the same. I am both a magician and a New York Times crossword puzzle constructor, which basically means I've taken the world's two nerdiest hobbies and combined them into one career. And I believe that magic and puzzles are the same because they both key into one of the most important human drives: the urge to solve. Human beings are wired to solve, to make order out of chaos. It's certainly true for me. I've been solving my whole life. High school consisted of epic Scrabble matches in the cafeteria and not really talking to girls, and then at about that time I started learning magic tricks and definitely not talking to girls. There's nothing like starting a conversation with, "Hey, did you know that 'prestidigitation' is worth 20 points in Scrabble?" But back then, I noticed an intersection between puzzles and illusion. When you do the crossword puzzle or when you watch a magic show, you become a solver, and your goal is to try to find the order in the chaos, the chaos of, say, a black-and-white puzzle grid, a mixed-up bag of Scrabble tiles, or a shuffled pack of playing cards. And today, as a cruciverbalist — 23 points — and an illusion designer, I create that chaos. I test your ability to solve. Now, it turns out research tells us that solving is as primal as eating and sleeping. From birth, we are wired to solve. In one UCLA study, newborns still in the hospital were shown patterns, patterns like this: circle, cross, circle, cross. And then the pattern was changed: triangle, square. And by tracking an infant's gaze, we know that newborns as young as a day old can notice and respond to disruptions in order. It's remarkable. So from infancy through old age, the urge to solve unites us all, and I even found this photo on Instagram of pop star Katy Perry solving a crossword puzzle with her morning coffee. Like. (Laughter) Now, solving exists across all cultures. The American invention is the crossword puzzle, and this year we are celebrating the 100th anniversary of the crossword puzzle, first published in The New York World. But many other cultures have their signature puzzles as well. China gives us tangrams, which would test solvers' abilities to form shapes from the jumbled pieces. Chaos. Order. Order. And order. That one's my favorite, let's hear it again. Okay. And how about this puzzle invented in 18th-century England: the jigsaw puzzle. Is this not making order out of chaos? So as you can see, we are always solving. We are always trying to decode our world. It's an eternal quest. It's just like the one Cervantes wrote about in "Don Quixote," which by the way is the root of the word "quixotry," the highest-scoring Scrabble word of all time, 365 points. But anyway, "Don Quixote" is an important book. You guys have read "Don Quixote," yes? I'm seeing some heads nod. Come on guys, really? Who's read "Don Quixote?" Let's do this. Raise your hands if you've read "Don Quixote." There we go. Smart audience. Who's read "Don Quixote?" Get them up. Okay, good, because I need somebody smart here because now I'm going to demonstrate with the help of one of you just how deeply rooted your urge to solve is, just how wired to solve all of you really are, so I'm going to come into the audience and find somebody to help me. Let's see. Everybody's looking away all of a sudden. Can I? Would you? What is your name? Gwen. I'm not a mind reader, I can see your name tag. Come with me, Gwen. Everyone give her a round of applause, make her feel welcome. Gwen, after you. (Applause) Are you so excited? Did you know that your name is worth eight points in Scrabble? Okay, stand right here, Gwen, right here. Now, Gwen, before we begin, I'd like to point out a piece of the puzzle, which is here in this envelope, and I will not go near it. Okay? And over here we have a drawing of some farm animals. You can see we have an owl, we have a horse, a donkey, a rooster, an ox, and a sheep, and then here, Gwen, we have some fancy art store markers, colors like, can you see that word right there? Gwen: Cobalt. David Kwong: Cobalt, yes. Cobalt. But we have a silver, a red, an emerald, and an amber marker, and Gwen, you are going to color this drawing just like you were five years old, one marker at a time. It's going to be a lot of fun. But I'm going to go over here. I don't want to see what you're doing. Okay, so don't start yet. Wait for me to get over here and close my eyes. Now Gwen, are you ready? Pick up just one marker, pick up just one marker, and why don't you color in the horse for me? Color in the horse — big, big, big scribbles, broad strokes, don't worry about staying in the lines. All right. Great. And why don't you take that marker and recap it and place it on the table for me. Okay, and pick up another marker out of the cup and take off the cap and color in the donkey for me, color in the donkey. Big scribbles. Okay, cool, and re-cap that marker and place it on the table. And pick up another marker for me and take off the cap. Isn't this fun? And color in the owl for me. Color in the owl. Okay, and recap that marker and pick up another marker out of the cup and color in the rooster for me, color in the rooster. Good, good, good, good, good. Big, big, big strokes. Good, good. Pick up another marker out of the cup and color in the ox for me. Color in the ox. Okay, good. A lot of color on that, and recap, and place it on the table, and pick up another marker out of the cup. Oh, I'm out? Okay, I'm going to turn around. Did I forget? Oh, I forgot my purple marker. This is still going to work, though. I think this is still going to work, mostly. So Gwen, I'm going to hand you this envelope. Don't open it yet. Do not open it yet, but I am going to write down your choices so that everybody can see the choices that you made. Okay, great. So we have a cobalt horse, amber owl, a silver ox, yes, okay, a red donkey, and what was the emerald color? A rooster. An emerald rooster. Okay. Now for the moment of truth, Gwen, we're going to take a look in that envelope. Why don't you open it up and remove the one piece of paper from inside and hand it to me, and we will see if it matches your choices. Yes, I think it does. We have a cobalt horse, we have a red donkey, we have an amber owl, we have an emerald rooster, a silver ox, I forgot my purple marker so we have a blank sheep, but that's a pretty amazing coincidence, don't you think? Gwen, well done. That's beautiful. (Applause) I'll take that back from you. So ladies and gentlemen, how is this possible? How is this possible? Well, could it be that Gwen's brain is so wired to solve that she decoded hidden messages? Well this is the puzzle I present to you. Could there be order in the chaos that I created? Let's take a closer look. Do you recall when I showed you these puzzle pieces? What image did it ultimately become? A cobalt horse. The plot thickens. And then we played a game of tangrams with an emerald rooster. That one's my favorite. And then we had an experiment with a silver ox. And Katy Perry drinks her morning coffee out of an amber owl. Thank you, Katy, for taking that photo for me. Oh, and there's one more, there's one more. I believe you colored a red donkey, Gwen. Ladies and gentlemen, could you raise your hands for me if you've read "Don Quixote?" Who's read "Don Quixote?" (Laughter) But wait, but wait, wait, wait, wait, there's more. There's more. Gwen, I was so confident that you were going to make these choices that I made another prediction, and I put it in an even more indelible place, and it's right here. Ladies and gentlemen, we have today's New York Times. The date is March 18th, 2014. Many of you in the first couple of rows have it underneath your seats as well. Really dig. We hid them under there. See if you can fish out the newspaper and open up to the arts section and you will find the crossword puzzle, and the crossword puzzle today was written by yours truly. You can see my name above the grid. I'm going to give this to you, Gwen, to take a look. And I will also put it up on the screen. Now let's take a look at another piece of the puzzle. If you look at the first clue for 1-across, it starts with the letter C, for corrupt, and just below that we have an O, for outfielder, and if you keep reading the first letters of the clues down, you get cobalt horse, amber owl, silver ox, red donkey, and emerald rooster. (Applause) That's pretty cool, right? It's The New York Times. But wait, wait, wait, wait. Wait. Oh, Gwen, do you recall how I forgot my purple marker, and you were unable to color the sheep? Well, if you keep reading starting with 25-down, it says, "Oh, by the way, the sheep can be left blank." (Laughter) (Applause) But wait, wait, wait, there's one more thing, there's one more thing, there's one final piece of the puzzle. Gwen, I am so grateful for your choices because if we take a look at the first letters of your combinations, we get "C-H-A-O-S" for chaos and "O-R-D-E-R" for order. That's chaos and order. We've all made order out of chaos. So ladies and gentlemen, the next time you find yourself with a puzzle, whether it's in your life or in your work, or maybe it's at the Sunday morning breakfast table with The New York Times, remember, you are all wired to solve. Thank you. (Applause)

Could I protect my father from the Armed Islamic Group with a paring knife? That was the question I faced one Tuesday morning in June of 1993, when I was a law student. I woke up early that morning in Dad's apartment on the outskirts of Algiers, Algeria, to an unrelenting pounding on the front door. It was a season as described by a local paper when every Tuesday a scholar fell to the bullets of fundamentalist assassins. My father's university teaching of Darwin had already provoked a classroom visit from the head of the so-called Islamic Salvation Front, who denounced Dad as an advocate of biologism before Dad had ejected the man, and now whoever was outside would neither identify himself nor go away. So my father tried to get the police on the phone, but perhaps terrified by the rising tide of armed extremism that had already claimed the lives of so many Algerian officers, they didn't even answer. And that was when I went to the kitchen, got out a paring knife, and took up a position inside the entryway. It was a ridiculous thing to do, really, but I couldn't think of anything else, and so there I stood. When I look back now, I think that that was the moment that set me on the path was to writing a book called "Your Fatwa Does Not Apply Here: Untold Stories from the Fight Against Muslim Fundamentalism." The title comes from a Pakistani play. I think it was actually that moment that sent me on the journey to interview 300 people of Muslim heritage from nearly 30 countries, from Afghanistan to Mali, to find out how they fought fundamentalism peacefully like my father did, and how they coped with the attendant risks. Luckily, back in June of 1993, our unidentified visitor went away, but other families were so much less lucky, and that was the thought that motivated my research. In any case, someone would return a few months later and leave a note on Dad's kitchen table, which simply said, "Consider yourself dead." Subsequently, Algeria's fundamentalist armed groups would murder as many as 200,000 civilians in what came to be known as the dark decade of the 1990s, including every single one of the women that you see here. In its harsh counterterrorist response, the state resorted to torture and to forced disappearances, and as terrible as all of these events became, the international community largely ignored them. Finally, my father, an Algerian peasant's son turned professor, was forced to stop teaching at the university and to flee his apartment, but what I will never forget about Mahfoud Bennoune, my dad, was that like so many other Algerian intellectuals, he refused to leave the country and he continued to publish pointed criticisms, both of the fundamentalists and sometimes of the government they battled. For example, in a November 1994 series in the newspaper El Watan entitled "How Fundamentalism Produced a Terrorism without Precedent," he denounced what he called the terrorists' radical break with the true Islam as it was lived by our ancestors. These were words that could get you killed. My father's country taught me in that dark decade of the 1990s that the popular struggle against Muslim fundamentalism is one of the most important and overlooked human rights struggles in the world. This remains true today, nearly 20 years later. You see, in every country where you hear about armed jihadis targeting civilians, there are also unarmed people defying those militants that you don't hear about, and those people need our support to succeed. In the West, it's often assumed that Muslims generally condone terrorism. Some on the right think this because they view Muslim culture as inherently violent, and some on the left imagine this because they view Muslim violence, fundamentalist violence, solely as a product of legitimate grievances. But both views are dead wrong. In fact, many people of Muslim heritage around the world are staunch opponents both of fundamentalism and of terrorism, and often for very good reason. You see, they're much more likely to be victims of this violence than its perpetrators. Let me just give you one example. According to a 2009 survey of Arabic language media resources, between 2004 and 2008, no more than 15 percent of al Qaeda's victims were Westerners. That's a terrible toll, but the vast majority were people of Muslim heritage, killed by Muslim fundamentalists. Now I've been talking for the last five minutes about fundamentalism, and you have a right to know exactly what I mean. I cite the definition given by the Algerian sociologist Marieme Helie Lucas, and she says that fundamentalisms, note the "s," so within all of the world's great religious traditions, "fundamentalisms are political movements of the extreme right which in a context of globalization manipulate religion in order to achieve their political aims." Sadia Abbas has called this the radical politicization of theology. Now I want to avoid projecting the notion that there's sort of a monolith out there called Muslim fundamentalism that is the same everywhere, because these movements also have their diversities. Some use and advocate violence. Some do not, though they're often interrelated. They take different forms. Some may be non-governmental organizations, even here in Britain like Cageprisoners. Some may become political parties, like the Muslim Brotherhood, and some may be openly armed groups like the Taliban. But in any case, these are all radical projects. They're not conservative or traditional approaches. They're most often about changing people's relationship with Islam rather than preserving it. What I am talking about is the Muslim extreme right, and the fact that its adherents are or purport to be Muslim makes them no less offensive than the extreme right anywhere else. So in my view, if we consider ourselves liberal or left-wing, human rights-loving or feminist, we must oppose these movements and support their grassroots opponents. Now let me be clear that I support an effective struggle against fundamentalism, but also a struggle that must itself respect international law, so nothing I am saying should be taken as a justification for refusals to democratize, and here I send out a shout-out of support to the pro-democracy movement in Algeria today, Barakat. Nor should anything I say be taken as a justification of violations of human rights, like the mass death sentences handed out in Egypt earlier this week. But what I am saying is that we must challenge these Muslim fundamentalist movements because they threaten human rights across Muslim-majority contexts, and they do this in a range of ways, most obviously with the direct attacks on civilians by the armed groups that carry those out. But that violence is just the tip of the iceberg. These movements as a whole purvey discrimination against religious minorities and sexual minorities. They seek to curtail the freedom of religion of everyone who either practices in a different way or chooses not to practice. And most definingly, they lead an all-out war on the rights of women. Now, faced with these movements in recent years, Western discourse has most often offered two flawed responses. The first that one sometimes finds on the right suggests that most Muslims are fundamentalist or something about Islam is inherently fundamentalist, and this is just offensive and wrong, but unfortunately on the left one sometimes encounters a discourse that is too politically correct to acknowledge the problem of Muslim fundamentalism at all or, even worse, apologizes for it, and this is unacceptable as well. So what I'm seeking is a new way of talking about this all together, which is grounded in the lived experiences and the hope of the people on the front lines. I'm painfully aware that there has been an increase in discrimination against Muslims in recent years in countries like the U.K. and the U.S., and that too is a matter of grave concern, but I firmly believe that telling these counter-stereotypical stories of people of Muslim heritage who have confronted the fundamentalists and been their primary victims is also a great way of countering that discrimination. So now let me introduce you to four people whose stories I had the great honor of telling. Faizan Peerzada and the Rafi Peer Theatre workshop named for his father have for years promoted the performing arts in Pakistan. With the rise of jihadist violence, they began to receive threats to call off their events, which they refused to heed. And so a bomber struck their 2008 eighth world performing arts festival in Lahore, producing rain of glass that fell into the venue injuring nine people, and later that same night, the Peerzadas made a very difficult decision: they announced that their festival would continue as planned the next day. As Faizan said at the time, if we bow down to the Islamists, we'll just be sitting in a dark corner. But they didn't know what would happen. Would anyone come? In fact, thousands of people came out the next day to support the performing arts in Lahore, and this simultaneously thrilled and terrified Faizan, and he ran up to a woman who had come in with her two small children, and he said, "You do know there was a bomb here yesterday, and you do know there's a threat here today." And she said, "I know that, but I came to your festival with my mother when I was their age, and I still have those images in my mind. We have to be here." With stalwart audiences like this, the Peerzadas were able to conclude their festival on schedule. And then the next year, they lost all of their sponsors due to the security risk. So when I met them in 2010, they were in the middle of the first subsequent event that they were able to have in the same venue, and this was the ninth youth performing arts festival held in Lahore in a year when that city had already experienced 44 terror attacks. This was a time when the Pakistani Taliban had commenced their systematic targeting of girls' schools that would culminate in the attack on Malala Yousafzai. What did the Peerzadas do in that environment? They staged girls' school theater. So I had the privilege of watching "Naang Wal," which was a musical in the Punjabi language, and the girls of Lahore Grammar School played all the parts. They sang and danced, they played the mice and the water buffalo, and I held my breath, wondering, would we get to the end of this amazing show? And when we did, the whole audience collectively exhaled, and a few people actually wept, and then they filled the auditorium with the peaceful boom of their applause. And I remember thinking in that moment that the bombers made headlines here two years before but this night and these people are as important a story. Maria Bashir is the first and only woman chief prosecutor in Afghanistan. She's been in the post since 2008 and actually opened an office to investigate cases of violence against women, which she says is the most important area in her mandate. When I meet her in her office in Herat, she enters surrounded by four large men with four huge guns. In fact, she now has 23 bodyguards, because she has weathered bomb attacks that nearly killed her kids, and it took the leg off of one of her guards. Why does she continue? She says with a smile that that is the question that everyone asks— as she puts it, "Why you risk not living?" And it is simply that for her, a better future for all the Maria Bashirs to come is worth the risk, and she knows that if people like her do not take the risk, there will be no better future. Later on in our interview, Prosecutor Bashir tells me how worried she is about the possible outcome of government negotiations with the Taliban, the people who have been trying to kill her. "If we give them a place in the government," she asks, "Who will protect women's rights?" And she urges the international community not to forget its promise about women because now they want peace with Taliban. A few weeks after I leave Afghanistan, I see a headline on the Internet. An Afghan prosecutor has been assassinated. I google desperately, and thankfully that day I find out that Maria was not the victim, though sadly, another Afghan prosecutor was gunned down on his way to work. And when I hear headlines like that now, I think that as international troops leave Afghanistan this year and beyond, we must continue to care about what happens to people there, to all of the Maria Bashirs. Sometimes I still hear her voice in my head saying, with no bravado whatsoever, "The situation of the women of Afghanistan will be better someday. We should prepare the ground for this, even if we are killed." There are no words adequate to denounce the al Shabaab terrorists who attacked the Westgate Mall in Nairobi on the same day as a children's cooking competition in September of 2013. They killed 67, including poets and pregnant women. Far away in the American Midwest, I had the good fortune of meeting Somali-Americans who were working to counter the efforts of al Shabaab to recruit a small number of young people from their city of Minneapolis to take part in atrocities like Westgate. Abdirizak Bihi's studious 17-year-old nephew Burhan Hassan was recruited here in 2008, spirited to Somalia, and then killed when he tried to come home. Since that time, Mr. Bihi, who directs the no-budget Somali Education and Advocacy Center, has been vocally denouncing the recruitment and the failures of government and Somali-American institutions like the Abubakar As-Saddique Islamic Center where he believes his nephew was radicalized during a youth program. But he doesn't just criticize the mosque. He also takes on the government for its failure to do more to prevent poverty in his community. Given his own lack of financial resources, Mr. Bihi has had to be creative. To counter the efforts of al Shabaab to sway more disaffected youth, in the wake of the group's 2010 attack on World Cup viewers in Uganda, he organized a Ramadan basketball tournament in Minneapolis in response. Scores of Somali-American kids came out to embrace sport despite the fatwa against it. They played basketball as Burhan Hassan never would again. For his efforts, Mr. Bihi has been ostracized by the leadership of the Abubakar As-Saddique Islamic Center, with which he used to have good relations. He told me, "One day we saw the imam on TV calling us infidels and saying, 'These families are trying to destroy the mosque.'" This is at complete odds with how Abdirizak Bihi understands what he is trying to do by exposing al Shabaab recruitment, which is to save the religion I love from a small number of extremists. Now I want to tell one last story, that of a 22-year-old law student in Algeria named Amel Zenoune-Zouani who had the same dreams of a legal career that I did back in the '90s. She refused to give up her studies, despite the fact that the fundamentalists battling the Algerian state back then threatened all who continued their education. On January 26, 1997, Amel boarded the bus in Algiers where she was studying to go home and spend a Ramadan evening with her family, and would never finish law school. When the bus reached the outskirts of her hometown, it was stopped at a checkpoint manned by men from the Armed Islamic Group. Carrying her schoolbag, Amel was taken off the bus and killed in the street. The men who cut her throat then told everyone else, "If you go to university, the day will come when we will kill all of you just like this." Amel died at exactly 5:17 p.m., which we know because when she fell in the street, her watch broke. Her mother showed me the watch with the second hand still aimed optimistically upward towards a 5:18 that would never come. Shortly before her death, Amel had said to her mother of herself and her sisters, "Nothing will happen to us, Inshallah, God willing, but if something happens, you must know that we are dead for knowledge. You and father must keep your heads held high." The loss of such a young woman is unfathomable, and so as I did my research I found myself searching for Amel's hope again and her name even means "hope" in Arabic. I think I found it in two places. The first is in the strength of her family and all the other families to continue telling their stories and to go on with their lives despite the terrorism. In fact, Amel's sister Lamia overcame her grief, went to law school, and practices as a lawyer in Algiers today, something which is only possible because the armed fundamentalists were largely defeated in the country. And the second place I found Amel's hope was everywhere that women and men continue to defy the jihadis. We must support all of those in honor of Amel who continue this human rights struggle today, like the Network of Women Living Under Muslim Laws. It is not enough, as the victims rights advocate Cherifa Kheddar told me in Algiers, it is not enough just to battle terrorism. We must also challenge fundamentalism, because fundamentalism is the ideology that makes the bed of this terrorism. Why is it that people like her, like all of them are not more well known? Why is it that everyone knows who Osama bin Laden was and so few know of all of those standing up to the bin Ladens in their own contexts. We must change that, and so I ask you to please help share these stories through your networks. Look again at Amel Zenoune's watch, forever frozen, and now please look at your own watch and decide this is the moment that you commit to supporting people like Amel. We don't have the right to be silent about them because it is easier or because Western policy is flawed as well, because 5:17 is still coming to too many Amel Zenounes in places like northern Nigeria, where jihadis still kill students. The time to speak up in support of all of those who peacefully challenge fundamentalism and terrorism in their own communities is now. Thank you. (Applause)

When I was preparing for this talk, I went to search for a couple of quotes that I can share with you. Good news: I found three that I particularly liked, the first by Samuel Johnson, who said, "When making your choice in life, do not forget to live," the second by Aeschylus, who reminded us that "happiness is a choice that requires effort," and the third is one by Groucho Marx who said, "I wouldn't want to choose to belong to any club that would have me as a member." Now, bad news: I didn't know which one of these quotes to choose and share with you. The sweet anxiety of choice. In today's times of post-industrial capitalism, choice, together with individual freedom and the idea of self-making, has been elevated to an ideal. Now, together with this, we also have a belief in endless progress. But the underside of this ideology has been an increase of anxiety, feelings of guilt, feelings of being inadequate, feeling that we are failing in our choices. Sadly, this ideology of individual choice has prevented us from thinking about social changes. It appears that this ideology was actually very efficient in pacifying us as political and social thinkers. Instead of making social critiques, we are more and more engaging in self-critique, sometimes to the point of self-destruction. Now, how come that ideology of choice is still so powerful, even among people who have not many things to choose among? How come that even people who are poor very much still identify with the idea of choice, the kind of rational idea of choice which we embrace? Now, the ideology of choice is very successful in opening for us a space to think about some imagined future. Let me give you an example. My friend Manya, when she was a student at university in California, was earning money by working for a car dealer. Now, Manya, when she encountered the typical customer, would debate with him about his lifestyle, how much he wants to spend, how many children he has, what does he need the car for? They would usually come to a good conclusion what would be a perfect car. Now, before Manya's customer would go home and think things through, she would say to him, "The car that you are buying now is perfect, but in a few year's time, when your kids will be already out of the house, when you will have a little bit more money, that other car will be ideal. But what you are buying now is great." Now, the majority of Manya's customers who came back the next day bought that other car, the car they did not need, the car that cost far too much money. Now, Manya became so successful in selling cars that soon she moved on to selling airplanes. (Laughter) And knowing so much about the psychology of people prepared her well for her current job, which is that of a psychoanalyst. Now, why were Manya's customers so irrational? Manya's success was that she was able to open in their heads an image of an idealized future, an image of themselves when they are already more successful, freer, and for them, choosing that other car was as if they are coming closer to this ideal in which it was as if Manya already saw them. Now, we rarely make really totally rational choices. Choices are influenced by our unconscious, by our community. We're often choosing by guessing, what would other people think about our choice? Also we are choosing by looking at what others are choosing. We're also guessing what is socially acceptable choice. Now, because of this, we actually even after we have already chosen, like bought a car, endlessly read reviews about cars, as if we still want to convince ourselves that we made the right choice. Now, choices are anxiety-provoking. They are linked to risks, losses. They are highly unpredictable. Now, because of this, people have now more and more problems that they are not choosing anything. Not long ago, I was at a wedding reception, and I met a young, beautiful woman who immediately started telling me about her anxiety over choice. She said to me, "I needed one month to decide which dress to wear." Then she said, "For weeks I was researching which hotel to stay for this one night. And now, I need to choose a sperm donor." (Laughter) I looked at this woman in shock. "Sperm donor? What's the rush?" She said, "I'm turning 40 at the end of this year, and I've been so bad in choosing men in my life." Now choice, because it's linked to risk, is anxiety-provoking, and it was already the famous Danish philosopher Søren Kierkegaard who pointed out that anxiety is linked to the possibility of possibility. Now, we think today that we can prevent these risks. We have endless market analysis, projections of the future earnings. Even with market, which is about chance, randomness, we think we can predict rationally where it's going. Now, chance is actually becoming very traumatic. Last year, my friend Bernard Harcourt at the University of Chicago organized an event, a conference on the idea of chance. He and I were together on the panel, and just before delivering our papers — we didn't know each other's papers — we decided to take chance seriously. So we informed our audience that what they will just now hear will be a random paper, a mixture of the two papers which we didn't know what each was writing. Now, we delivered the conference in such a way. Bernard read his first paragraph, I read my first paragraph, Bernard read his second paragraph, I read my second paragraph, in this way towards the end of our papers. Now, you will be surprised that a majority of our audience did not think that what they'd just listened to was a completely random paper. They couldn't believe that speaking from the position of authority like two professors we were, we would take chance seriously. They thought we prepared the papers together and were just joking that it's random. Now, we live in times with a lot of information, big data, a lot of knowledge about the insides of our bodies. We decoded our genome. We know about our brains more than before. But surprisingly, people are more and more turning a blind eye in front of this knowledge. Ignorance and denial are on the rise. Now, in regard to the current economic crisis, we think that we will just wake up again and everything will be the same as before, and no political or social changes are needed. In regard to ecological crisis, we think nothing needs to be done just now, or others need to act before us. Or even when ecological crisis already happens, like a catastrophe in Fukushima, often we have people living in the same environment with the same amount of information, and half of them will be anxious about radiation and half of them will ignore it. Now, psychoanalysts know very well that people surprisingly don't have passion for knowledge but passion for ignorance. Now, what does that mean? Let's say when we are facing a life-threatening illness, a lot of people don't want to know that. They'd rather prefer denying the illness, which is why it's not so wise to inform them if they don't ask. Surprisingly, research shows that sometimes people who deny their illness live longer than those who are rationally choosing the best treatment. Now, this ignorance, however, is not very helpful on the level of the social. When we are ignorant about where we are heading, a lot of social damage can be caused. Now, on top of facing ignorance, we are also facing today some kind of an obviousness. Now, it was French philosopher Louis Althusser who pointed out that ideology functions in such a way that it creates a veil of obviousness. Before we do any social critique, it is necessary really to lift that veil of obviousness and to think through a little bit differently. If we go back to this ideology of individual, rational choice we often embrace, it's necessary precisely here to lift this obviousness and to think a little bit differently. Now for me, a question often is why we still embrace this idea of a self-made man on which capitalism relied from its beginning? Why do we think that we are really such masters of our lives that we can rationally make the best ideal choices, that we don't accept losses and risks? And for me, it's very shocking to see sometimes very poor people, for example, not supporting the idea of the rich being taxed more. Quite often here they still identify with a certain kind of a lottery mentality. Okay, maybe they don't think that they will make it in the future, but maybe they think, my son might become the next Bill Gates. And who would want to tax one's son? Or, a question for me is also, why would people who have no health insurance not embrace universal healthcare? Sometimes they don't embrace it, again identifying with the idea of choice, but they have nothing to choose from. Now, Margaret Thatcher famously said that there is nothing like a society. Society doesn't exist, it is only individuals and their families. Sadly, this ideology still functions very well, which is why people who are poor might feel ashamed for their poverty. We might endlessly feel guilty that we are not making the right choices, and that's why we didn't succeed. We are anxious that we are not good enough. That's why we work very hard, long hours at the workplace and equally long hours on remaking ourselves. Now, when we are anxious over choices, sometimes we easily give our power of choice away. We identify with the guru who tells us what to do, self-help therapist, or we embrace a totalitarian leader who appears to have no doubts about choices, who sort of knows. Now, often people ask me, "What did you learn by studying choice?" And there is an important message that I did learn. When thinking about choices, I stopped taking choices too seriously, personally. First, I realized a lot of choice I make is not rational. It's linked to my unconscious, my guesses of what others are choosing, or what is a socially embraced choice. I also embrace the idea that we should go beyond thinking about individual choices, that it's very important to rethink social choices, since this ideology of individual choice has pacified us. It really prevented us to think about social change. We spend so much time choosing things for ourselves and barely reflect on communal choices we can make. Now, we should not forget that choice is always linked to change. We can make individual changes, but we can make social changes. We can choose to have more wolves. We can choose to change our environment to have more bees. We can choose to have different rating agencies. We can choose to control corporations instead of allowing corporations to control us. We have a possibility to make changes. Now, I started with a quote from Samuel Johnson, who said that when we make choice in life, we shouldn't forget to live. Finally, you can see I did have a choice to choose one of the three quotes with which I wanted to start my lecture. I did have a choice, such as nations, as people, we have choices too to rethink in what kind of society we want to live in the future. Thank you. (Applause)