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(Video) Nicholas Negroponte: Can we switch to the video disc, which is in play mode? I'm really interested in how you put people and computers together. We will be using the TV screens or their equivalents for electronic books of the future. (Music, crosstalk) Very interested in touch-sensitive displays, high-tech, high-touch, not having to pick up your fingers to use them. There is another way where computers touch people: wearing, physically wearing. Suddenly on September 11th, the world got bigger. NN: Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. When I was asked to do this, I was also asked to look at all 14 TED Talks that I had given, chronologically. The first one was actually two hours. The second one was an hour, and then they became half hours, and all I noticed was my bald spot getting bigger. (Laughter) Imagine seeing your life, 30 years of it, go by, and it was, to say the least, for me, quite a shocking experience. So what I'm going to do in my time is try and share with you what happened during the 30 years, and then also make a prediction, and then tell you a little bit about what I'm doing next. And I put on a slide where TED 1 happened in my life. And it's rather important because I had done 15 years of research before it, so I had a backlog, so it was easy. It's not that I was Fidel Castro and I could talk for two hours, or Bucky Fuller. I had 15 years of stuff, and the Media Lab was about to start. So that was easy. But there are a couple of things about that period and about what happened that are really quite important. One is that it was a period when computers weren't yet for people. And the other thing that sort of happened during that time is that we were considered sissy computer scientists. We weren't considered the real thing. So what I'm going to show you is, in retrospect, a lot more interesting and a lot more accepted than it was at the time. So I'm going to characterize the years and I'm even going to go back to some very early work of mine, and this was the kind of stuff I was doing in the '60s: very direct manipulation, very influenced as I studied architecture by the architect Moshe Safdie, and you can see that we even built robotic things that could build habitat-like structures. And this for me was not yet the Media Lab, but was the beginning of what I'll call sensory computing, and I pick fingers partly because everybody thought it was ridiculous. Papers were published about how stupid it was to use fingers. Three reasons: One was they were low-resolution. The other is your hand would occlude what you wanted to see, and the third, which was the winner, was that your fingers would get the screen dirty, and hence, fingers would never be a device that you'd use. And this was a device we built in the '70s, which has never even been picked up. It's not just touch sensitive, it's pressure sensitive. (Video) Voice: Put a yellow circle there. NN: Later work, and again this was before TED 1 — (Video) Voice: Move that west of the diamond. Create a large green circle there. Man: Aw, shit. NN: — was to sort of do interface concurrently, so when you talked and you pointed and you had, if you will, multiple channels. Entebbe happened. 1976, Air France was hijacked, taken to Entebbe, and the Israelis not only did an extraordinary rescue, they did it partly because they had practiced on a physical model of the airport, because they had built the airport, so they built a model in the desert, and when they arrived at Entebbe, they knew where to go because they had actually been there. The U.S. government asked some of us, '76, if we could replicate that computationally, and of course somebody like myself says yes. Immediately, you get a contract, Department of Defense, and we built this truck and this rig. We did sort of a simulation, because you had video discs, and again, this is '76. And then many years later, you get this truck, and so you have Google Maps. Still people thought, no, that was not serious computer science, and it was a man named Jerry Wiesner, who happened to be the president of MIT, who did think it was computer science. And one of the keys for anybody who wants to start something in life: Make sure your president is part of it. So when I was doing the Media Lab, it was like having a gorilla in the front seat. If you were stopped for speeding and the officer looked in the window and saw who was in the passenger seat, then, "Oh, continue on, sir." And so we were able, and this is a cute, actually, device, parenthetically. This was a lenticular photograph of Jerry Wiesner where the only thing that changed in the photograph were the lips. So when you oscillated that little piece of lenticular sheet with his photograph, it would be in lip sync with zero bandwidth. It was a zero-bandwidth teleconferencing system at the time. So this was the Media Lab's — this is what we said we'd do, that the world of computers, publishing, and so on would come together. Again, not generally accepted, but very much part of TED in the early days. And this is really where we were headed. And that created the Media Lab. One of the things about age is that I can tell you with great confidence, I've been to the future. I've been there, actually, many times. And the reason I say that is, how many times in my life have I said, "Oh, in 10 years, this will happen," and then 10 years comes. And then you say, "Oh, in five years, this will happen." And then five years comes. So I say this a little bit with having felt that I'd been there a number of times, and one of the things that is most quoted that I've ever said is that computing is not about computers, and that didn't quite get enough traction, and then it started to. It started to because people caught on that the medium wasn't the message. And the reason I show this car in actually a rather ugly slide is just again to tell you the kind of story that characterized a little bit of my life. This is a student of mine who had done a Ph.D. called "Backseat Driver." It was in the early days of GPS, the car knew where it was, and it would give audio instructions to the driver, when to turn right, when to turn left and so on. Turns out, there are a lot of things in those instructions that back in that period were pretty challenging, like what does it mean, take the next right? Well, if you're coming up on a street, the next right's probably the one after, and there are lots of issues, and the student did a wonderful thesis, and the MIT patent office said "Don't patent it. It'll never be accepted. The liabilities are too large. There will be insurance issues. Don't patent it." So we didn't, but it shows you how people, again, at times, don't really look at what's happening. Some work, and I'll just go through these very quickly, a lot of sensory stuff. You might recognize a young Yo-Yo Ma and tracking his body for playing the cello or the hypercello. These fellows literally walked around like that at the time. It's now a little bit more discreet and more commonplace. And then there are at least three heroes I want to quickly mention. Marvin Minsky, who taught me a lot about common sense, and I will talk briefly about Muriel Cooper, who was very important to Ricky Wurman and to TED, and in fact, when she got onstage, she said, the first thing she said was, "I introduced Ricky to Nicky." And nobody calls me Nicky and nobody calls Richard Ricky, so nobody knew who she was talking about. And then, of course, Seymour Papert, who is the person who said, "You can't think about thinking unless you think about thinking about something." And that's actually — you can unpack that later. It's a pretty profound statement. I'm showing some slides that were from TED 2, a little silly as slides, perhaps. Then I felt television really was about displays. Again, now we're past TED 1, but just around the time of TED 2, and what I'd like to mention here is, even though you could imagine intelligence in the device, I look today at some of the work being done about the Internet of Things, and I think it's kind of tragically pathetic, because what has happened is people take the oven panel and put it on your cell phone, or the door key onto your cell phone, just taking it and bringing it to you, and in fact that's actually what you don't want. You want to put a chicken in the oven, and the oven says, "Aha, it's a chicken," and it cooks the chicken. "Oh, it's cooking the chicken for Nicholas, and he likes it this way and that way." So the intelligence, instead of being in the device, we have started today to move it back onto the cell phone or closer to the user, not a particularly enlightened view of the Internet of Things. Television, again, television what I said today, that was back in 1990, and the television of tomorrow would look something like that. Again, people, but they laughed cynically, they didn't laugh with much appreciation. Telecommunications in the 1990s, George Gilder decided that he would call this diagram the Negroponte switch. I'm probably much less famous than George, so when he called it the Negroponte switch, it stuck, but the idea of things that came in the ground would go in the air and stuff in the air would go into the ground has played itself out. That is the original slide from that year, and it has worked in lockstep obedience. We started Wired magazine. Some people, I remember we shared the reception desk periodically, and some parent called up irate that his son had given up Sports Illustrated to subscribe for Wired, and he said, "Are you some porno magazine or something?" and couldn't understand why his son would be interested in Wired, at any rate. I will go through this a little quicker. This is my favorite, 1995, back page of Newsweek magazine. Okay. Read it. (Laughter) ["Nicholas Negroponte, director of the MIT Media Lab, predicts that we'll soon buy books and newspapers straight over the Internet. Uh, sure." —Clifford Stoll, Newsweek, 1995] You must admit that gives you, at least it gives me pleasure when somebody says how dead wrong you are. "Being Digital" came out. For me, it gave me an opportunity to be more in the trade press and get this out to the public, and it also allowed us to build the new Media Lab, which if you haven't been to, visit, because it's a beautiful piece of architecture aside from being a wonderful place to work. So these are the things we were saying in those TEDs. [Today, multimedia is a desktop or living room experience, because the apparatus is so clunky. This will change dramatically with small, bright, thin, high-resolution displays. — 1995] We came to them. I looked forward to it every year. It was the party that Ricky Wurman never had in the sense that he invited many of his old friends, including myself. And then something for me changed pretty profoundly. I became more involved with computers and learning and influenced by Seymour, but particularly looking at learning as something that is best approximated by computer programming. When you write a computer program, you've got to not just list things out and sort of take an algorithm and translate it into a set of instructions, but when there's a bug, and all programs have bugs, you've got to de-bug it. You've got to go in, change it, and then re-execute, and you iterate, and that iteration is really a very, very good approximation of learning. So that led to my own work with Seymour in places like Cambodia and the starting of One Laptop per Child. Enough TED Talks on One Laptop per Child, so I'll go through it very fast, but it did give us the chance to do something at a relatively large scale in the area of learning, development and computing. Very few people know that One Laptop per Child was a $1 billion project, and it was, at least over the seven years I ran it, but even more important, the World Bank contributed zero, USAID zero. It was mostly the countries using their own treasuries, which is very interesting, at least to me it was very interesting in terms of what I plan to do next. So these are the various places it happened. I then tried an experiment, and the experiment happened in Ethiopia. And here's the experiment. The experiment is, can learning happen where there are no schools. And we dropped off tablets with no instructions and let the children figure it out. And in a short period of time, they not only turned them on and were using 50 apps per child within five days, they were singing "ABC" songs within two weeks, but they hacked Android within six months. And so that seemed sufficiently interesting. This is perhaps the best picture I have. The kid on your right has sort of nominated himself as teacher. Look at the kid on the left, and so on. There are no adults involved in this at all. So I said, well can we do this at a larger scale? And what is it that's missing? The kids are giving a press conference at this point, and sort of writing in the dirt. And the answer is, what is missing? And I'm going to skip over my prediction, actually, because I'm running out of time, and here's the question, is what's going to happen? I think the challenge is to connect the last billion people, and connecting the last billion is very different than connecting the next billion, and the reason it's different is that the next billion are sort of low-hanging fruit, but the last billion are rural. Being rural and being poor are very different. Poverty tends to be created by our society, and the people in that community are not poor in the same way at all. They may be primitive, but the way to approach it and to connect them, the history of One Laptop per Child, and the experiment in Ethiopia, lead me to believe that we can in fact do this in a very short period of time. And so my plan, and unfortunately I haven't been able to get my partners at this point to let me announce them, but is to do this with a stationary satellite. There are many reasons that stationary satellites aren't the best things, but there are a lot of reasons why they are, and for two billion dollars, you can connect a lot more than 100 million people, but the reason I picked two, and I will leave this as my last slide, is two billion dollars is what we were spending in Afghanistan every week. So surely if we can connect Africa and the last billion people for numbers like that, we should be doing it. Thank you very much. (Applause) Chris Anderson: Stay up there. Stay up there. NN: You're going to give me extra time? CA: No. That was wickedly clever, wickedly clever. You gamed it beautifully. Nicholas, what is your prediction? (Laughter) NN: Thank you for asking. I'll tell you what my prediction is, and my prediction, and this is a prediction, because it'll be 30 years. I won't be here. But one of the things about learning how to read, we have been doing a lot of consuming of information going through our eyes, and so that may be a very inefficient channel. So my prediction is that we are going to ingest information You're going to swallow a pill and know English. You're going to swallow a pill and know Shakespeare. And the way to do it is through the bloodstream. So once it's in your bloodstream, it basically goes through it and gets into the brain, and when it knows that it's in the brain in the different pieces, it deposits it in the right places. So it's ingesting. CA: Have you been hanging out with Ray Kurzweil by any chance? NN: No, but I've been hanging around with Ed Boyden and hanging around with one of the speakers who is here, Hugh Herr, and there are a number of people. This isn't quite as far-fetched, so 30 years from now. CA: We will check it out. We're going to be back and we're going to play this clip 30 years from now, and then all eat the red pill. Well thank you for that. Nicholas Negroponte. NN: Thank you. (Applause)

On March 10, 2011, I was in Cambridge at the MIT Media Lab meeting with faculty, students and staff, and we were trying to figure out whether I should be the next director. That night, at midnight, a magnitude 9 earthquake hit off of the Pacific coast of Japan. My wife and family were in Japan, and as the news started to come in, I was panicking. I was looking at the news streams and listening to the press conferences of the government officials and the Tokyo Power Company, and hearing about this explosion at the nuclear reactors and this cloud of fallout that was headed towards our house which was only about 200 kilometers away. And the people on TV weren't telling us anything that we wanted to hear. I wanted to know what was going on with the reactor, what was going on with the radiation, whether my family was in danger. So I did what instinctively felt like the right thing, which was to go onto the Internet and try to figure out if I could take matters into my own hands. On the Net, I found there were a lot of other people like me trying to figure out what was going on, and together we sort of loosely formed a group and we called it Safecast, and we decided we were going to try to measure the radiation and get the data out to everybody else, because it was clear that the government wasn't going to be doing this for us. Three years later, we have 16 million data points, we have designed our own Geiger counters that you can download the designs and plug it into the network. We have an app that shows you most of the radiation in Japan and other parts of the world. We are arguably one of the most successful citizen science projects in the world, and we have created the largest open dataset of radiation measurements. And the interesting thing here is how did — (Applause) — Thank you. How did a bunch of amateurs who really didn't know what we were doing somehow come together and do what NGOs and the government were completely incapable of doing? And I would suggest that this has something to do with the Internet. It's not a fluke. It wasn't luck, and it wasn't because it was us. It helped that it was an event that pulled everybody together, but it was a new way of doing things that was enabled by the Internet and a lot of the other things that were going on, and I want to talk a little bit about what those new principles are. So remember before the Internet? (Laughter) I call this B.I. Okay? So, in B.I., life was simple. Things were Euclidian, Newtonian, somewhat predictable. People actually tried to predict the future, even the economists. And then the Internet happened, and the world became extremely complex, extremely low-cost, extremely fast, and those Newtonian laws that we so dearly cherished turned out to be just local ordinances, and what we found was that in this completely unpredictable world that most of the people who were surviving were working with sort of a different set of principles, and I want to talk a little bit about that. Before the Internet, if you remember, when we tried to create services, what you would do is you'd create the hardware layer and the network layer and the software and it would cost millions of dollars to do anything that was substantial. So when it costs millions of dollars to do something substantial, what you would do is you'd get an MBA who would write a plan and get the money from V.C.s or big companies, and then you'd hire the designers and the engineers, and they'd build the thing. This is the Before Internet, B.I., innovation model. What happened after the Internet was the cost of innovation went down so much because the cost of collaboration, the cost of distribution, the cost of communication, and Moore's Law made it so that the cost of trying a new thing became nearly zero, and so you would have Google, Facebook, Yahoo, students that didn't have permission — permissionless innovation — didn't have permission, didn't have PowerPoints, they just built the thing, then they raised the money, and then they sort of figured out a business plan and maybe later on they hired some MBAs. So the Internet caused innovation, at least in software and services, to go from an MBA-driven innovation model to a designer-engineer-driven innovation model, and it pushed innovation to the edges, to the dorm rooms, to the startups, away from the large institutions, the stodgy old institutions that had the power and the money and the authority. And we all know this. We all know this happened on the Internet. It turns out it's happening in other things, too. Let me give you some examples. So at the Media Lab, we don't just do hardware. We do all kinds of things. We do biology, we do hardware, and Nicholas Negroponte famously said, "Demo or die," as opposed to "Publish or perish," which was the traditional academic way of thinking. And he often said, the demo only has to work once, because the primary mode of us impacting the world was through large companies being inspired by us and creating products like the Kindle or Lego Mindstorms. But today, with the ability to deploy things into the real world at such low cost, I'm changing the motto now, and this is the official public statement. I'm officially saying, "Deploy or die." You have to get the stuff into the real world for it to really count, and sometimes it will be large companies, and Nicholas can talk about satellites. (Applause) Thank you. But we should be getting out there ourselves and not depending on large institutions to do it for us. So last year, we sent a bunch of students to Shenzhen, and they sat on the factory floors with the innovators in Shenzhen, and it was amazing. What was happening there was you would have these manufacturing devices, and they weren't making prototypes or PowerPoints. They were fiddling with the manufacturing equipment and innovating right on the manufacturing equipment. The factory was in the designer, and the designer was literally in the factory. And so what you would do is, you'd go down to the stalls and you would see these cell phones. So instead of starting little websites like the kids in Palo Alto do, the kids in Shenzhen make new cell phones. They make new cell phones like kids in Palo Alto make websites, and so there's a rainforest of innovation going on in the cell phone. What they do is, they make a cell phone, go down to the stall, they sell some, they look at the other kids' stuff, go up, make a couple thousand more, go down. Doesn't this sound like a software thing? It sounds like agile software development, A/B testing and iteration, and what we thought you could only do with software kids in Shenzhen are doing this in hardware. My next fellow, I hope, is going to be one of these innovators from Shenzhen. And so what you see is that is pushing innovation to the edges. We talk about 3D printers and stuff like that, and that's great, but this is Limor. She is one of our favorite graduates, and she is standing in front of a Samsung Techwin Pick and Place Machine. This thing can put 23,000 components per hour onto an electronics board. This is a factory in a box. So what used to take a factory full of workers working by hand in this little box in New York, she's able to have effectively — She doesn't actually have to go to Shenzhen to do this manufacturing. She can buy this box and she can manufacture it. So manufacturing, the cost of innovation, the cost of prototyping, distribution, manufacturing, hardware, is getting so low that innovation is being pushed to the edges and students and startups are being able to build it. This is a recent thing, but this will happen and this will change just like it did with software. Sorona is a DuPont process that uses a genetically engineered microbe to turn corn sugar into polyester. It's 30 percent more efficient than the fossil fuel method, and it's much better for the environment. Genetic engineering and bioengineering are creating a whole bunch of great new opportunities for chemistry, for computation, for memory. We will probably be doing a lot, obviously doing health things, but we will probably be growing chairs and buildings soon. The problem is, Sorona costs about 400 million dollars and took seven years to build. It kind of reminds you of the old mainframe days. The thing is, the cost of innovation in bioengineering is also going down. This is desktop gene sequencer. It used to cost millions and millions of dollars to sequence genes. Now you can do it on a desktop like this, and kids can do this in dorm rooms. This is Gen9 gene assembler, and so right now when you try to print a gene, what you do is somebody in a factory with pipettes puts the thing together by hand, you have one error per 100 base pairs, and it takes a long time and costs a lot of money. This new device assembles genes on a chip, and instead of one error per 100 base pairs, it's one error per 10,000 base pairs. In this lab, we will have the world's capacity of gene printing within a year, 200 million base pairs a year. This is kind of like when we went from transistor radios wrapped by hand to the Pentium. This is going to become the Pentium of bioengineering, pushing bioengineering into the hands of dorm rooms and startup companies. So it's happening in software and in hardware and bioengineering, and so this is a fundamental new way of thinking about innovation. It's a bottom-up innovation, it's democratic, it's chaotic, it's hard to control. It's not bad, but it's very different, and I think that the traditional rules that we have for institutions don't work anymore, and most of us here operate with a different set of principles. One of my favorite principles is the power of pull, which is the idea of pulling resources from the network as you need them rather than stocking them in the center and controlling everything. So in the case of the Safecast story, I didn't know anything when the earthquake happened, but I was able to find Sean who was the hackerspace community organizer, and Peter, the analog hardware hacker who made our first Geiger counter, and Dan, who built the Three Mile Island monitoring system after the Three Mile Island meltdown. And these people I wouldn't have been able to find beforehand and probably were better that I found them just in time from the network. I'm a three-time college dropout, so learning over education is very near and dear to my heart, but to me, education is what people do to you and learning is what you do to yourself. (Applause) And it feels like, and I'm biased, it feels like they're trying to make you memorize the whole encyclopedia before they let you go out and play, and to me, I've got Wikipedia on my cell phone, and it feels like they assume you're going to be on top of some mountain all by yourself with a number 2 pencil trying to figure out what to do when in fact you're always going to be connected, you're always going to have friends, and you can pull Wikipedia up whenever you need it, and what you need to learn is how to learn. In the case of Safecast, a bunch of amateurs when we started three years ago, I would argue that we probably as a group know more than any other organization about how to collect data and publish data and do citizen science. Compass over maps. So this one, the idea is that the cost of writing a plan or mapping something is getting so expensive and it's not very accurate or useful. So in the Safecast story, we knew we needed to collect data, we knew we wanted to publish the data, and instead of trying to come up with the exact plan, we first said, oh, let's get Geiger counters. Oh, they've run out. Let's build them. There aren't enough sensors. Okay, then we can make a mobile Geiger counter. We can drive around. We can get volunteers. We don't have enough money. Let's Kickstarter it. We could not have planned this whole thing, but by having a very strong compass, we eventually got to where we were going, and to me it's very similar to agile software development, but this idea of compasses is very important. So I think the good news is that even though the world is extremely complex, what you need to do is very simple. I think it's about stopping this notion that you need to plan everything, you need to stock everything, and you need to be so prepared, and focus on being connected, always learning, fully aware, and super present. So I don't like the word "futurist." I think we should be now-ists, like we are right now. Thank you. (Applause)

I'm a veteran of the starship Enterprise. I soared through the galaxy driving a huge starship with a crew made up of people from all over this world, many different races, many different cultures, many different heritages, all working together, and our mission was to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilizations, to boldly go where no one has gone before. Well — (Applause) — I am the grandson of immigrants from Japan who went to America, boldly going to a strange new world, seeking new opportunities. My mother was born in Sacramento, California. My father was a San Franciscan. They met and married in Los Angeles, and I was born there. I was four years old when Pearl Harbor was bombed on December 7, 1941 by Japan, and overnight, the world was plunged into a world war. America suddenly was swept up by hysteria. Japanese-Americans, American citizens of Japanese ancestry, were looked on with suspicion and fear and with outright hatred simply because we happened to look like the people that bombed Pearl Harbor. And the hysteria grew and grew until in February 1942, the president of the United States, Franklin Delano Roosevelt, ordered all Japanese-Americans on the West Coast of America to be summarily rounded up with no charges, with no trial, with no due process. Due process, this is a core pillar of our justice system. That all disappeared. We were to be rounded up and imprisoned in 10 barbed-wire prison camps in some of the most desolate places in America: the blistering hot desert of Arizona, the sultry swamps of Arkansas, the wastelands of Wyoming, Idaho, Utah, Colorado, and two of the most desolate places in California. On April 20th, I celebrated my fifth birthday, and just a few weeks after my birthday, my parents got my younger brother, my baby sister and me up very early one morning, and they dressed us hurriedly. My brother and I were in the living room looking out the front window, and we saw two soldiers marching up our driveway. They carried bayonets on their rifles. They stomped up the front porch and banged on the door. My father answered it, and the soldiers ordered us out of our home. My father gave my brother and me small luggages to carry, and we walked out and stood on the driveway waiting for our mother to come out, and when my mother finally came out, she had our baby sister in one arm, a huge duffel bag in the other, and tears were streaming down both her cheeks. I will never be able to forget that scene. It is burned into my memory. We were taken from our home and loaded on to train cars with other Japanese-American families. There were guards stationed at both ends of each car, as if we were criminals. We were taken two thirds of the way across the country, rocking on that train for four days and three nights, to the swamps of Arkansas. I still remember the barbed wire fence that confined me. I remember the tall sentry tower with the machine guns pointed at us. I remember the searchlight that followed me when I made the night runs from my barrack to the latrine. But to five-year-old me, I thought it was kind of nice that they'd lit the way for me to pee. I was a child, too young to understand the circumstances of my being there. Children are amazingly adaptable. What would be grotesquely abnormal became my normality in the prisoner of war camps. It became routine for me to line up three times a day to eat lousy food in a noisy mess hall. It became normal for me to go with my father to bathe in a mass shower. Being in a prison, a barbed-wire prison camp, became my normality. When the war ended, we were released, and given a one-way ticket to anywhere in the United States. My parents decided to go back home to Los Angeles, but Los Angeles was not a welcoming place. We were penniless. Everything had been taken from us, and the hostility was intense. Our first home was on Skid Row in the lowest part of our city, living with derelicts, drunkards and crazy people, the stench of urine all over, on the street, in the alley, in the hallway. It was a horrible experience, and for us kids, it was terrorizing. I remember once a drunkard came staggering down, fell down right in front of us, and threw up. My baby sister said, "Mama, let's go back home," because behind barbed wires was for us home. My parents worked hard to get back on their feet. We had lost everything. They were at the middle of their lives and starting all over. They worked their fingers to the bone, and ultimately they were able to get the capital together to buy a three-bedroom home in a nice neighborhood. And I was a teenager, and I became very curious about my childhood imprisonment. I had read civics books that told me about the ideals of American democracy. All men are created equal, we have an inalienable right to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness, and I couldn't quite make that fit with what I knew to be my childhood imprisonment. I read history books, and I couldn't find anything about it. And so I engaged my father after dinner in long, sometimes heated conversations. We had many, many conversations like that, and what I got from them was my father's wisdom. He was the one that suffered the most under those conditions of imprisonment, and yet he understood American democracy. He told me that our democracy is a people's democracy, and it can be as great as the people can be, but it is also as fallible as people are. He told me that American democracy is vitally dependent on good people who cherish the ideals of our system and actively engage in the process of making our democracy work. And he took me to a campaign headquarters — the governor of Illinois was running for the presidency — and introduced me to American electoral politics. And he also told me about young Japanese-Americans during the Second World War. When Pearl Harbor was bombed, young Japanese-Americans, like all young Americans, rushed to their draft board to volunteer to fight for our country. That act of patriotism was answered with a slap in the face. We were denied service, and categorized as enemy non-alien. It was outrageous to be called an enemy when you're volunteering to fight for your country, but that was compounded with the word "non-alien," which is a word that means "citizen" in the negative. They even took the word "citizen" away from us, and imprisoned them for a whole year. And then the government realized that there's a wartime manpower shortage, and as suddenly as they'd rounded us up, they opened up the military for service by young Japanese-Americans. It was totally irrational, but the amazing thing, the astounding thing, is that thousands of young Japanese-American men and women again went from behind those barbed-wire fences, put on the same uniform as that of our guards, leaving their families in imprisonment, to fight for this country. They said that they were going to fight not only to get their families out from behind those barbed-wire fences, but because they cherished the very ideal of what our government stands for, should stand for, and that was being abrogated by what was being done. All men are created equal. And they went to fight for this country. They were put into a segregated all Japanese-American unit and sent to the battlefields of Europe, and they threw themselves into it. They fought with amazing, incredible courage and valor. They were sent out on the most dangerous missions and they sustained the highest combat casualty rate of any unit proportionally. There is one battle that illustrates that. It was a battle for the Gothic Line. The Germans were embedded in this mountain hillside, rocky hillside, in impregnable caves, and three allied battalions had been pounding away at it for six months, and they were stalemated. The 442nd was called in to add to the fight, but the men of the 442nd came up with a unique but dangerous idea: The backside of the mountain was a sheer rock cliff. The Germans thought an attack from the backside would be impossible. The men of the 442nd decided to do the impossible. On a dark, moonless night, they began scaling that rock wall, a drop of more than 1,000 feet, in full combat gear. They climbed all night long on that sheer cliff. In the darkness, some lost their handhold or their footing and they fell to their deaths in the ravine below. They all fell silently. Not a single one cried out, so as not to give their position away. The men climbed for eight hours straight, and those who made it to the top stayed there until the first break of light, and as soon as light broke, they attacked. The Germans were surprised, and they took the hill and broke the Gothic Line. A six-month stalemate was broken by the 442nd in 32 minutes. It was an amazing act, and when the war ended, the 442nd returned to the United States as the most decorated unit of the entire Second World War. They were greeted back on the White House Lawn by President Truman, who said to them, "You fought not only the enemy but prejudice, and you won." They are my heroes. They clung to their belief in the shining ideals of this country, and they proved that being an American is not just for some people, that race is not how we define being an American. They expanded what it means to be an American, including Japanese-Americans that were feared and suspected and hated. They were change agents, and they left for me a legacy. They are my heroes and my father is my hero, who understood democracy and guided me through it. They gave me a legacy, and with that legacy comes a responsibility, and I am dedicated to making my country an even better America, to making our government an even truer democracy, and because of the heroes that I have and the struggles that we've gone through, I can stand before you as a gay Japanese-American, but even more than that, I am a proud American. Thank you very much. (Applause)

When we think about prejudice and bias, we tend to think about stupid and evil people doing stupid and evil things. And this idea is nicely summarized by the British critic William Hazlitt, who wrote, "Prejudice is the child of ignorance." I want to try to convince you here that this is mistaken. I want to try to convince you that prejudice and bias are natural, they're often rational, and they're often even moral, and I think that once we understand this, we're in a better position to make sense of them when they go wrong, when they have horrible consequences, and we're in a better position to know what to do when this happens. So, start with stereotypes. You look at me, you know my name, you know certain facts about me, and you could make certain judgments. You could make guesses about my ethnicity, my political affiliation, my religious beliefs. And the thing is, these judgments tend to be accurate. We're very good at this sort of thing. And we're very good at this sort of thing because our ability to stereotype people is not some sort of arbitrary quirk of the mind, but rather it's a specific instance of a more general process, which is that we have experience with things and people in the world that fall into categories, and we can use our experience to make generalizations about novel instances of these categories. So everybody here has a lot of experience with chairs and apples and dogs, and based on this, you could see unfamiliar examples and you could guess, you could sit on the chair, you could eat the apple, the dog will bark. Now we might be wrong. The chair could collapse if you sit on it, the apple might be poison, the dog might not bark, and in fact, this is my dog Tessie, who doesn't bark. But for the most part, we're good at this. For the most part, we make good guesses both in the social domain and the non-social domain, and if we weren't able to do so, if we weren't able to make guesses about new instances that we encounter, we wouldn't survive. And in fact, Hazlitt later on in his wonderful essay concedes this. He writes, "Without the aid of prejudice and custom, I should not be able to find my way my across the room; nor know how to conduct myself in any circumstances, nor what to feel in any relation of life." Or take bias. Now sometimes, we break the world up into us versus them, into in-group versus out-group, and sometimes when we do this, we know we're doing something wrong, and we're kind of ashamed of it. But other times we're proud of it. We openly acknowledge it. And my favorite example of this is a question that came from the audience in a Republican debate prior to the last election. (Video) Anderson Cooper: Gets to your question, the question in the hall, on foreign aid? Yes, ma'am. Woman: The American people are suffering in our country right now. Why do we continue to send foreign aid to other countries when we need all the help we can get for ourselves? AC: Governor Perry, what about that? (Applause) Rick Perry: Absolutely, I think it's— Paul Bloom: Each of the people onstage agreed with the premise of her question, which is as Americans, we should care more about Americans than about other people. And in fact, in general, people are often swayed by feelings of solidarity, loyalty, pride, patriotism, towards their country or towards their ethnic group. Regardless of your politics, many people feel proud to be American, and they favor Americans over other countries. Residents of other countries feel the same about their nation, and we feel the same about our ethnicities. Now some of you may reject this. Some of you may be so cosmopolitan that you think that ethnicity and nationality should hold no moral sway. But even you sophisticates accept that there should be some pull towards the in-group in the domain of friends and family, of people you're close to, and so even you make a distinction between us versus them. Now, this distinction is natural enough and often moral enough, but it can go awry, and this was part of the research of the great social psychologist Henri Tajfel. Tajfel was born in Poland in 1919. He left to go to university in France, because as a Jew, he couldn't go to university in Poland, and then he enlisted in the French military in World War II. He was captured and ended up in a prisoner of war camp, and it was a terrifying time for him, because if it was discovered that he was a Jew, he could have been moved to a concentration camp, where he most likely would not have survived. And in fact, when the war ended and he was released, most of his friends and family were dead. He got involved in different pursuits. He helped out the war orphans. But he had a long-lasting interest in the science of prejudice, and so when a prestigious British scholarship on stereotypes opened up, he applied for it, and he won it, and then he began this amazing career. And what started his career is an insight that the way most people were thinking about the Holocaust was wrong. Many people, most people at the time, viewed the Holocaust as sort of representing some tragic flaw on the part of the Germans, some genetic taint, some authoritarian personality. And Tajfel rejected this. Tajfel said what we see in the Holocaust is just an exaggeration of normal psychological processes that exist in every one of us. And to explore this, he did a series of classic studies with British adolescents. And in one of his studies, what he did was he asked the British adolescents all sorts of questions, and then based on their answers, he said, "I've looked at your answers, and based on the answers, I have determined that you are either" — he told half of them — "a Kandinsky lover, you love the work of Kandinsky, or a Klee lover, you love the work of Klee." It was entirely bogus. Their answers had nothing to do with Kandinsky or Klee. They probably hadn't heard of the artists. He just arbitrarily divided them up. But what he found was, these categories mattered, so when he later gave the subjects money, they would prefer to give the money to members of their own group than members of the other group. Worse, they were actually most interested in establishing a difference between their group and other groups, so they would give up money for their own group if by doing so they could give the other group even less. This bias seems to show up very early. So my colleague and wife, Karen Wynn, at Yale has done a series of studies with babies where she exposes babies to puppets, and the puppets have certain food preferences. So one of the puppets might like green beans. The other puppet might like graham crackers. They test the babies own food preferences, and babies typically prefer the graham crackers. But the question is, does this matter to babies in how they treat the puppets? And it matters a lot. They tend to prefer the puppet who has the same food tastes that they have, and worse, they actually prefer puppets who punish the puppet with the different food taste. (Laughter) We see this sort of in-group, out-group psychology all the time. We see it in political clashes within groups with different ideologies. We see it in its extreme in cases of war, where the out-group isn't merely given less, but dehumanized, as in the Nazi perspective of Jews as vermin or lice, or the American perspective of Japanese as rats. Stereotypes can also go awry. So often they're rational and useful, but sometimes they're irrational, they give the wrong answers, and other times they lead to plainly immoral consequences. And the case that's been most studied is the case of race. There was a fascinating study prior to the 2008 election where social psychologists looked at the extent to which the candidates were associated with America, as in an unconscious association with the American flag. And in one of their studies they compared Obama and McCain, and they found McCain is thought of as more American than Obama, and to some extent, people aren't that surprised by hearing that. McCain is a celebrated war hero, and many people would explicitly say he has more of an American story than Obama. But they also compared Obama to British Prime Minister Tony Blair, and they found that Blair was also thought of as more American than Obama, even though subjects explicitly understood that he's not American at all. But they were responding, of course, to the color of his skin. These stereotypes and biases have real-world consequences, both subtle and very important. In one recent study, researchers put ads on eBay for the sale of baseball cards. Some of them were held by white hands, others by black hands. They were the same baseball cards. The ones held by black hands got substantially smaller bids than the ones held by white hands. In research done at Stanford, psychologists explored the case of people sentenced for the murder of a white person. It turns out, holding everything else constant, you are considerably more likely to be executed if you look like the man on the right than the man on the left, and this is in large part because the man on the right looks more prototypically black, more prototypically African-American, and this apparently influences people's decisions over what to do about him. So now that we know about this, how do we combat it? And there are different avenues. One avenue is to appeal to people's emotional responses, to appeal to people's empathy, and we often do that through stories. So if you are a liberal parent and you want to encourage your children to believe in the merits of nontraditional families, you might give them a book like this. ["Heather Has Two Mommies"] If you are conservative and have a different attitude, you might give them a book like this. (Laughter) ["Help! Mom! There Are Liberals under My Bed!"] But in general, stories can turn anonymous strangers into people who matter, and the idea that we care about people when we focus on them as individuals is an idea which has shown up across history. So Stalin apocryphally said, "A single death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic," and Mother Teresa said, "If I look at the mass, I will never act. If I look at the one, I will." Psychologists have explored this. For instance, in one study, people were given a list of facts about a crisis, and it was seen how much they would donate to solve this crisis, and another group was given no facts at all but they were told of an individual and given a name and given a face, and it turns out that they gave far more. None of this I think is a secret to the people who are engaged in charity work. People don't tend to deluge people with facts and statistics. Rather, you show them faces, you show them people. It's possible that by extending our sympathies to an individual, they can spread to the group that the individual belongs to. This is Harriet Beecher Stowe. The story, perhaps apocryphal, is that President Lincoln invited her to the White House in the middle of the Civil War and said to her, "So you're the little lady who started this great war." And he was talking about "Uncle Tom's Cabin." "Uncle Tom's Cabin" is not a great book of philosophy or of theology or perhaps not even literature, but it does a great job of getting people to put themselves in the shoes of people they wouldn't otherwise be in the shoes of, put themselves in the shoes of slaves. And that could well have been a catalyst for great social change. More recently, looking at America in the last several decades, there's some reason to believe that shows like "The Cosby Show" radically changed American attitudes towards African-Americans, while shows like "Will and Grace" and "Modern Family" changed American attitudes towards gay men and women. I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that the major catalyst in America for moral change has been a situation comedy. But it's not all emotions, and I want to end by appealing to the power of reason. At some point in his wonderful book "The Better Angels of Our Nature," Steven Pinker says, the Old Testament says love thy neighbor, and the New Testament says love thy enemy, but I don't love either one of them, not really, but I don't want to kill them. I know I have obligations to them, but my moral feelings to them, my moral beliefs about how I should behave towards them, aren't grounded in love. What they're grounded in is the understanding of human rights, a belief that their life is as valuable to them as my life is to me, and to support this, he tells a story by the great philosopher Adam Smith, and I want to tell this story too, though I'm going to modify it a little bit for modern times. So Adam Smith starts by asking you to imagine the death of thousands of people, and imagine that the thousands of people are in a country you are not familiar with. It could be China or India or a country in Africa. And Smith says, how would you respond? And you would say, well that's too bad, and you'd go on to the rest of your life. If you were to open up The New York Times online or something, and discover this, and in fact this happens to us all the time, we go about our lives. But imagine instead, Smith says, you were to learn that tomorrow you were to have your little finger chopped off. Smith says, that would matter a lot. You would not sleep that night wondering about that. So this raises the question: Would you sacrifice thousands of lives to save your little finger? Now answer this in the privacy of your own head, but Smith says, absolutely not, what a horrid thought. And so this raises the question, and so, as Smith puts it, "When our passive feelings are almost always so sordid and so selfish, how comes it that our active principles should often be so generous and so noble?" And Smith's answer is, "It is reason, principle, conscience. [This] calls to us, with a voice capable of astonishing the most presumptuous of our passions, that we are but one of the multitude, in no respect better than any other in it." And this last part is what is often described as the principle of impartiality. And this principle of impartiality manifests itself in all of the world's religions, in all of the different versions of the golden rule, and in all of the world's moral philosophies, which differ in many ways but share the presupposition that we should judge morality from sort of an impartial point of view. The best articulation of this view is actually, for me, it's not from a theologian or from a philosopher, but from Humphrey Bogart at the end of "Casablanca." So, spoiler alert, he's telling his lover that they have to separate for the more general good, and he says to her, and I won't do the accent, but he says to her, "It doesn't take much to see that the problems of three little people don't amount to a hill of beans in this crazy world." Our reason could cause us to override our passions. Our reason could motivate us to extend our empathy, could motivate us to write a book like "Uncle Tom's Cabin," or read a book like "Uncle Tom's Cabin," and our reason can motivate us to create customs and taboos and laws that will constrain us from acting upon our impulses when, as rational beings, we feel we should be constrained. This is what a constitution is. A constitution is something which was set up in the past that applies now in the present, and what it says is, no matter how much we might to reelect a popular president for a third term, no matter how much white Americans might choose to feel that they want to reinstate the institution of slavery, we can't. We have bound ourselves. And we bind ourselves in other ways as well. We know that when it comes to choosing somebody for a job, for an award, we are strongly biased by their race, we are biased by their gender, we are biased by how attractive they are, and sometimes we might say, "Well fine, that's the way it should be." But other times we say, "This is wrong." And so to combat this, we don't just try harder, but rather what we do is we set up situations where these other sources of information can't bias us, which is why many orchestras audition musicians behind screens, so the only information they have is the information they believe should matter. I think prejudice and bias illustrate a fundamental duality of human nature. We have gut feelings, instincts, emotions, and they affect our judgments and our actions for good and for evil, but we are also capable of rational deliberation and intelligent planning, and we can use these to, in some cases, accelerate and nourish our emotions, and in other cases staunch them. And it's in this way that reason helps us create a better world. Thank you. (Applause)

I've been thinking a lot about the world recently and how it's changed over the last 20, 30, 40 years. Twenty or 30 years ago, if a chicken caught a cold and sneezed and died in a remote village in East Asia, it would have been a tragedy for the chicken and its closest relatives, but I don't think there was much possibility of us fearing a global pandemic and the deaths of millions. Twenty or 30 years ago, if a bank in North America lent too much money to some people who couldn't afford to pay it back and the bank went bust, that was bad for the lender and bad for the borrower, but we didn't imagine it would bring the global economic system to its knees for nearly a decade. This is globalization. This is the miracle that has enabled us to transship our bodies and our minds and our words and our pictures and our ideas and our teaching and our learning around the planet ever faster and ever cheaper. It's brought a lot of bad stuff, like the stuff that I just described, but it's also brought a lot of good stuff. A lot of us are not aware of the extraordinary successes of the Millennium Development Goals, several of which have achieved their targets long before the due date. That proves that this species of humanity is capable of achieving extraordinary progress if it really acts together and it really tries hard. But if I had to put it in a nutshell these days, I sort of feel that globalization has taken us by surprise, and we've been slow to respond to it. If you look at the downside of globalization, it really does seem to be sometimes overwhelming. All of the grand challenges that we face today, like climate change and human rights and demographics and terrorism and pandemics and narco-trafficking and human slavery and species loss, I could go on, we're not making an awful lot of progress against an awful lot of those challenges. So in a nutshell, that's the challenge that we all face today at this interesting point in history. That's clearly what we've got to do next. We've somehow got to get our act together and we've got to figure out how to globalize the solutions better so that we don't simply become a species which is the victim of the globalization of problems. Why are we so slow at achieving these advances? What's the reason for it? Well, there are, of course, a number of reasons, but perhaps the primary reason is because we're still organized as a species in the same way that we were organized 200 or 300 years ago. There's one superpower left on the planet and that is the seven billion people, the seven billion of us who cause all these problems, the same seven billion, by the way, who will resolve them all. But how are those seven billion organized? They're still organized in 200 or so nation-states, and the nations have governments that make rules and cause us to behave in certain ways. And that's a pretty efficient system, but the problem is that the way that those laws are made and the way those governments think is absolutely wrong for the solution of global problems, because it all looks inwards. The politicians that we elect and the politicians we don't elect, on the whole, have minds that microscope. They don't have minds that telescope. They look in. They pretend, they behave, as if they believed that every country was an island that existed quite happily, independently of all the others on its own little planet in its own little solar system. This is the problem: countries competing against each other, countries fighting against each other. This week, as any week you care to look at, you'll find people actually trying to kill each other from country to country, but even when that's not going on, there's competition between countries, each one trying to shaft the next. This is clearly not a good arrangement. We clearly need to change it. We clearly need to find ways of encouraging countries to start working together a little bit better. And why won't they do that? Why is it that our leaders still persist in looking inwards? Well, the first and most obvious reason is because that's what we ask them to do. That's what we tell them to do. When we elect governments or when we tolerate unelected governments, we're effectively telling them that what we want is for them to deliver us in our country a certain number of things. We want them to deliver prosperity, growth, competitiveness, transparency, justice and all of those things. So unless we start asking our governments to think outside a little bit, to consider the global problems that will finish us all if we don't start considering them, then we can hardly blame them if what they carry on doing is looking inwards, if they still have minds that microscope rather than minds that telescope. That's the first reason why things tend not to change. The second reason is that these governments, just like all the rest of us, are cultural psychopaths. I don't mean to be rude, but you know what a psychopath is. A psychopath is a person who, unfortunately for him or her, lacks the ability to really empathize with other human beings. When they look around, they don't see other human beings with deep, rich, three-dimensional personal lives and aims and ambitions. What they see is cardboard cutouts, and it's very sad and it's very lonely, and it's very rare, fortunately. But actually, aren't most of us not really so very good at empathy? Oh sure, we're very good at empathy when it's a question of dealing with people who kind of look like us and kind of walk and talk and eat and pray and wear like us, but when it comes to people who don't do that, who don't quite dress like us and don't quite pray like us and don't quite talk like us, do we not also have a tendency to see them ever so slightly as cardboard cutouts too? And this is a question we need to ask ourselves. I think constantly we have to monitor it. Are we and our politicians to a degree cultural psychopaths? The third reason is hardly worth mentioning because it's so silly, but there's a belief amongst governments that the domestic agenda and the international agenda are incompatible and always will be. This is just nonsense. In my day job, I'm a policy adviser. I've spent the last 15 years or so advising governments around the world, and in all of that time I have never once seen a single domestic policy issue that could not be more imaginatively, effectively and rapidly resolved than by treating it as an international problem, looking at the international context, comparing what others have done, bringing in others, working externally instead of working internally. And so you may say, well, given all of that, why then doesn't it work? Why can we not make our politicians change? Why can't we demand them? Well I, like a lot of us, spend a lot of time complaining about how hard it is to make people change, and I don't think we should fuss about it. I think we should just accept that we are an inherently conservative species. We don't like to change. It exists for very sensible evolutionary reasons. We probably wouldn't still be here today if we weren't so resistant to change. It's very simple: Many thousands of years ago, we discovered that if we carried on doing the same things, we wouldn't die, because the things that we've done before by definition didn't kill us, and therefore as long as we carry on doing them, we'll be okay, and it's very sensible not to do anything new, because it might kill you. But of course, there are exceptions to that. Otherwise, we'd never get anywhere. And one of the exceptions, the interesting exception, is when you can show to people that there might be some self-interest in them making that leap of faith and changing a little bit. So I've spent a lot of the last 10 or 15 years trying to find out what could be that self-interest that would encourage not just politicians but also businesses and general populations, all of us, to start to think a little more outwardly, to think in a bigger picture, not always to look inwards, sometimes to look outwards. And this is where I discovered something quite important. In 2005, I launched a study called the Nation Brands Index. What it is, it's a very large-scale study that polls a very large sample of the world's population, a sample that represents about 70 percent of the planet's population, and I started asking them a series of questions about how they perceive other countries. And the Nation Brands Index over the years has grown to be a very, very large database. It's about 200 billion data points tracking what ordinary people think about other countries and why. Why did I do this? Well, because the governments that I advise are very, very keen on knowing how they are regarded. They've known, partly because I've encouraged them to realize it, that countries depend enormously on their reputations in order to survive and prosper in the world. If a country has a great, positive image, like Germany has or Sweden or Switzerland, everything is easy and everything is cheap. You get more tourists. You get more investors. You sell your products more expensively. If, on the other hand, you have a country with a very weak or a very negative image, everything is difficult and everything is expensive. So governments care desperately about the image of their country, because it makes a direct difference to how much money they can make, and that's what they've promised their populations they're going to deliver. So a couple of years ago, I thought I would take some time out and speak to that gigantic database and ask it, why do some people prefer one country more than another? And the answer that the database gave me completely staggered me. It was 6.8. I haven't got time to explain in detail. Basically what it told me was — (Laughter) (Applause) — the kinds of countries we prefer are good countries. We don't admire countries primarily because they're rich, because they're powerful, because they're successful, because they're modern, because they're technologically advanced. We primarily admire countries that are good. What do we mean by good? We mean countries that seem to contribute something to the world in which we live, countries that actually make the world safer or better or richer or fairer. Those are the countries we like. This is a discovery of significant importance — you see where I'm going — because it squares the circle. I can now say, and often do, to any government, in order to do well, you need to do good. If you want to sell more products, if you want to get more investment, if you want to become more competitive, then you need to start behaving, because that's why people will respect you and do business with you, and therefore, the more you collaborate, the more competitive you become. This is quite an important discovery, and as soon as I discovered this, I felt another index coming on. I swear that as I get older, my ideas become simpler and more and more childish. This one is called the Good Country Index, and it does exactly what it says on the tin. It measures, or at least it tries to measure, exactly how much each country on Earth contributes not to its own population but to the rest of humanity. Bizarrely, nobody had ever thought of measuring this before. So my colleague Dr. Robert Govers and I have spent the best part of the last two years, with the help of a large number of very serious and clever people, cramming together all the reliable data in the world we could find about what countries give to the world. And you're waiting for me to tell you which one comes top. And I'm going to tell you, but first of all I want to tell you precisely what I mean when I say a good country. I do not mean morally good. When I say that Country X is the goodest country on Earth, and I mean goodest, I don't mean best. Best is something different. When you're talking about a good country, you can be good, gooder and goodest. It's not the same thing as good, better and best. This is a country which simply gives more to humanity than any other country. I don't talk about how they behave at home because that's measured elsewhere. And the winner is Ireland. (Applause) According to the data here, no country on Earth, per head of population, per dollar of GDP, contributes more to the world that we live in than Ireland. What does this mean? This means that as we go to sleep at night, all of us in the last 15 seconds before we drift off to sleep, our final thought should be, godammit, I'm glad that Ireland exists. (Laughter) And that — (Applause) — In the depths of a very severe economic recession, I think that there's a really important lesson there, that if you can remember your international obligations whilst you are trying to rebuild your own economy, that's really something. Finland ranks pretty much the same. The only reason why it's below Ireland is because its lowest score is lower than Ireland's lowest score. Now the other thing you'll notice about the top 10 there is, of course, they're all, apart from New Zealand, Western European nations. They're also all rich. This depressed me, because one of the things that I did not want to discover with this index is that it's purely the province of rich countries to help poor countries. This is not what it's all about. And indeed, if you look further down the list, I don't have the slide here, you will see something that made me very happy indeed, that Kenya is in the top 30, and that demonstrates one very, very important thing. This is not about money. This is about attitude. This is about culture. This is about a government and a people that care about the rest of the world and have the imagination and the courage to think outwards instead of only thinking selfishly. I'm going to whip through the other slides just so you can see some of the lower-lying countries. There's Germany at 13th, the U.S. comes 21st, Mexico comes 66th, and then we have some of the big developing countries, like Russia at 95th, China at 107th. Countries like China and Russia and India, which is down in the same part of the index, well, in some ways, it's not surprising. They've spent a great deal of time over the last decades building their own economy, building their own society and their own polity, but it is to be hoped that the second phase of their growth will be somewhat more outward-looking than the first phase has been so far. And then you can break down each country in terms of the actual datasets that build into it. I'll allow you to do that. From midnight tonight it's going to be on goodcountry.org, and you can look at the country. You can look right down to the level of the individual datasets. Now that's the Good Country Index. What's it there for? Well, it's there really because I want to try to introduce this word, or reintroduce this word, into the discourse. I've had enough hearing about competitive countries. I've had enough hearing about prosperous, wealthy, fast-growing countries. I've even had enough hearing about happy countries because in the end that's still selfish. That's still about us, and if we carry on thinking about us, we are in deep, deep trouble. I think we all know what it is that we want to hear about. We want to hear about good countries, and so I want to ask you all a favor. I'm not asking a lot. It's something that you might find easy to do and you might even find enjoyable and even helpful to do, and that's simply to start using the word "good" in this context. When you think about your own country, when you think about other people's countries, when you think about companies, when you talk about the world that we live in today, start using that word in the way that I've talked about this evening. Not good, the opposite of bad, because that's an argument that never finishes. Good, the opposite of selfish, good being a country that thinks about all of us. That's what I would like you to do, and I'd like you to use it as a stick with which to beat your politicians. When you elect them, when you reelect them, when you vote for them, when you listen to what they're offering you, use that word, "good," and ask yourself, "Is that what a good country would do?" And if the answer is no, be very suspicious. Ask yourself, is that the behavior of my country? Do I want to come from a country where the government, in my name, is doing things like that? Or do I, on the other hand, prefer the idea of walking around the world with my head held high thinking, "Yeah, I'm proud to come from a good country"? And everybody will welcome you. And everybody in the last 15 seconds before they drift off to sleep at night will say, "Gosh, I'm glad that person's country exists." Ultimately, that, I think, is what will make the change. That word, "good," and the number 6.8 and the discovery that's behind it have changed my life. I think they can change your life, and I think we can use it to change the way that our politicians and our companies behave, and in doing so, we can change the world. I've started thinking very differently about my own country since I've been thinking about these things. I used to think that I wanted to live in a rich country, and then I started thinking I wanted to live in a happy country, but I began to realize, it's not enough. I don't want to live in a rich country. I don't want to live in a fast-growing or competitive country. I want to live in a good country, and I so, so hope that you do too. Thank you. (Applause)

As a scientist, and also as a human being, I've been trying to make myself susceptible to wonder. I think Jason Webley last night called it "conspiring to be part of the magic." So it's fortunate that my career as a biologist lets me dive deeply into the lives of some truly wondrous creatures that share our planet: fireflies. Now, for many of you, I know that fireflies might conjure up some really great memories: childhood, summertime, even other TED Talks. Maybe something like this. My seduction into the world of fireflies began when I was back in graduate school. One evening, I was sitting out in my backyard in North Carolina, and suddenly, these silent sparks rose up all around me, and I began to wonder: How do these creatures make light, and what's with all this flashing? Are they talking to one another? And what happens after the lights go out? I've been lucky enough to answer some of these questions as I've explored this nocturnal world. Now if you've ever seen or even heard about fireflies, then you'll know how magically they can transform our everyday landscape into something ethereal and otherworldly, and this happens around the globe, like this hillside in the Smoky Mountains that I saw transformed into a living cascade of light by the eerie glows of these blue ghost fireflies, or a roadside river that I visited in Japan as it was giving birth to the slow, floating flashes of these Genji fireflies, or in Malaysia, the mangrove trees that I watched blossom nightly not with flowers but with the lights of a thousand — (Bleep! Bleep!) — fireflies, all blinking together in stunning synchrony. These luminous landscapes still fill me with wonder, and they keep me connected to the magic of the natural world. And I find it amazing that they're created by these tiny insects. In person, fireflies are charming. They're charismatic. They've been celebrated in art and in poetry for centuries. As I've traveled around the world, I've met many thoughtful people who have told me that God put fireflies on Earth for humans to enjoy. Other creatures can enjoy them too. I think these graceful insects are truly miraculous because they so beautifully illuminate the creative improvisation of evolution. They've been shaped by two powerful evolutionary forces: natural selection, the struggle for survival, and sexual selection, the struggle for reproductive opportunity. As a firefly junkie, the past 20 years have been quite an exciting ride. Together with my students at Tufts University and other colleagues, we've made lots of new discoveries about fireflies: their courtship and sex lives, their treachery and murder. So today I'd like to share with you just a couple of tales that we've brought back from our collective adventures into this hidden world. Fireflies belong to a very beautiful and diverse group of insects, the beetles. Worldwide, there are more than 2,000 firefly species, and these have evolved remarkably diverse courtship signals, that is, different ways to find and attract mates. Around 150 million years ago, the very first fireflies probably looked like this. They flew during the daytime and they didn't light up. Instead, males used their fantastic antennae to sniff out perfumes given off by their females. In other fireflies, it's only the females who light up. They are attractively plump and wingless, so every night, they climb up onto perches and they glow brightly for hours to attract their flying but unlit males. In still other fireflies, both sexes use quick, bright flashes to find their mates. Here in North America, we have more than 100 different kinds of firefly that have the remarkable ability to shine energy out from their bodies in the form of light. How do they do that? It seems totally magical, but these bioluminescent signals arise from carefully orchestrated chemical reactions that happen inside the firefly lantern. The main star is an enzyme called luciferase, which in the course of evolution has figured out a way to wrap its tiny arms around an even smaller molecule called luciferin, in the process getting it so excited that it actually gives off light. Incredible. But how could these bright lights have benefited some proto-firefly? To answer this question, we need to flip back in the family album to some baby pictures. Fireflies completely reinvent their bodies as they grow. They spend the vast majority of their lifetime, up to two years, in this larval form. Their main goal here, like my teenagers, is to eat and grow. And firefly light first originated in these juveniles. Every single firefly larva can light up, even when their adults can't. But what's the point to being so conspicuous? Well, we know that these juveniles make nasty-tasting chemicals that help them survive their extended childhood, so we think these lights first evolved as a warning, a neon sign that says, "Toxic! Stay away!" to any would-be predators. It took many millions of years before these bright lights evolved into a smart communication tool that could be used not just to ward off potential predators but to bring in potential mates. Driven now by sexual selection, some adult fireflies like this proud male evolved a shiny new glow-in-the-dark lantern that would let them take courtship to a whole new level. These adults only live a few weeks, and now they're single-mindedly focused on sex, that is, on propelling their genes into the next firefly generation. So we can follow this male out into the field as he joins hundreds of other males who are all showing off their new courtship signals. It's amazing to think that the luminous displays we admire here and in fact everywhere around the world are actually the silent love songs of male fireflies. They're flying and flashing their hearts out. I still find it very romantic. But meanwhile, where are all the females? Well, they're lounging down below surveying their options. They have plenty of males to choose from, and these females turn out to be very picky. When a female sees a flash from an especially attractive male, she'll aim her lantern in his direction, and give him a flash back. It's her "come hither" sign. So he flies closer and he flashes again. If she still likes him, they'll strike up a conversation. These creatures speak their love in the language of light. So what exactly do these females consider sexy? We decided to conduct some firefly opinion polls to find out. When we tested females using blinking LED lights, we discovered they prefer males who give longer-lasting flashes. (Laughter) (Applause) I know you're wondering, what gives these males their sex appeal? Now we get to see what happens when the lights go out. The first thing we discovered is that once a male and female hook up like this, they stay together all night long, and when we looked inside to see what might be happening, we discovered a surprising new twist to firefly sex. While they're mating, the male is busy giving the female not just his sperm but also a nutrient-filled package called a nuptial gift. We can zoom in to look more closely inside this mating pair. We can actually see the gift — it's shown here in red — as it's being passed from the male to the female. What makes this gift so valuable is that it's packed with protein that the female will use to provision her eggs. So females are keeping their eyes on this prize as they size up potential mates. We discovered that females use male flash signals to try to predict which males have the biggest gifts to offer, because this bling helps the female lay more eggs and ultimately launch more of her own offspring into the next generation. So it's not all sweetness and light. Firefly romance is risky. For the most part, these adult fireflies don't get eaten because like their juveniles they can manufacture toxins that are repellent to birds and other insectivores, but somewhere along the line, one particular group of fireflies somehow lost the metabolic machinery needed to make their own protective toxins. This evolutionary flaw, which was discovered by my colleague Tom Eisner, has driven these fireflies to take their bright lights out into the night with treacherous intent. Dubbed "femme fatales" by Jim Lloyd, another colleague, these females have figured out how to target the males of other firefly species. So the hunt begins with the predator — she's shown here in the lower left — where she's sitting quietly and eavesdropping on the courtship conversation of her intended prey, and here's how it might go. First the prey male flashes, "Do you love me?" His own female responds, "Maybe." So then he flashes again. But this time, the predator sneaks in a reply that cleverly mimics exactly what the other female just said. She's not looking for love: she's looking for toxins. If she's good, she can lure this male close enough to reach out and grab him, and he's not just a light snack. Over the next hour, she slowly exsanguinates this male leaving behind just some gory remains. Unable to make their own toxins, these females resort to drinking the blood of other fireflies to get these protective chemicals. So a firefly vampire, brought to you by natural selection. We still have a lot to learn about fireflies, but it looks like many stories will remain untold, because around the world, firefly populations are blinking out. The main culprit: habitat loss. Pretty much everywhere, the fields and forests, the mangroves and meadows that fireflies need to survive, are giving way to development and to sprawl. Here's another problem: we've conquered darkness, but in the process, we spill so much extra light out into the night that it disrupts the lives of other creatures, and fireflies are especially sensitive to light pollution because it obscures the signals that they use to find their mates. Do we really need fireflies? After all, they're just one tiny bit of Earth's biodiversity. Yet every time a species is lost, it's like extinguishing a room full of candles one by one. You might not notice when the first few flames flicker out, but in the end, you're left sitting in darkness. As we work together to craft a planetary future, I hope we can find a way to keep these bright lights shining. Thank you. (Applause)

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

The human voice: It's the instrument we all play. It's the most powerful sound in the world, probably. It's the only one that can start a war or say "I love you." And yet many people have the experience that when they speak, people don't listen to them. And why is that? How can we speak powerfully to make change in the world? What I'd like to suggest, there are a number of habits that we need to move away from. I've assembled for your pleasure here seven deadly sins of speaking. I'm not pretending this is an exhaustive list, but these seven, I think, are pretty large habits that we can all fall into. First, gossip, speaking ill of somebody who's not present. Not a nice habit, and we know perfectly well the person gossiping five minutes later will be gossiping about us. Second, judging. We know people who are like this in conversation, and it's very hard to listen to somebody if you know that you're being judged and found wanting at the same time. Third, negativity. You can fall into this. My mother, in the last years of her life, became very, very negative, and it's hard to listen. I remember one day, I said to her, "It's October 1 today," and she said, "I know, isn't it dreadful?" (Laughter) It's hard to listen when somebody's that negative. And another form of negativity, complaining. Well, this is the national art of the U.K. It's our national sport. We complain about the weather, about sport, about politics, about everything, but actually complaining is viral misery. It's not spreading sunshine and lightness in the world. Excuses. We've all met this guy. Maybe we've all been this guy. Some people have a blamethrower. They just pass it on to everybody else and don't take responsibility for their actions, and again, hard to listen to somebody who is being like that. Penultimate, the sixth of the seven, embroidery, exaggeration. It demeans our language, actually, sometimes. For example, if I see something that really is awesome, what do I call it? (Laughter) And then of course this exaggeration becomes lying, out and out lying, and we don't want to listen to people we know are lying to us. And finally, dogmatism, the confusion of facts with opinions. When those two things get conflated, you're listening into the wind. You know, somebody is bombarding you with their opinions as if they were true. It's difficult to listen to that. So here they are, seven deadly sins of speaking. These are things I think we need to avoid. But is there a positive way to think about this? Yes, there is. I'd like to suggest that there are four really powerful cornerstones, foundations, that we can stand on if we want our speech to be powerful and to make change in the world. Fortunately, these things spell a word. The word is "hail," and it has a great definition as well. I'm not talking about the stuff that falls from the sky and hits you on the head. I'm talking about this definition, to greet or acclaim enthusiastically, which is how I think our words will be received if we stand on these four things. So what do they stand for? See if you can guess. The H, honesty, of course, being true in what you say, being straight and clear. The A is authenticity, just being yourself. A friend of mine described it as standing in your own truth, which I think is a lovely way to put it. The I is integrity, being your word, actually doing what you say, and being somebody people can trust. And the L is love. I don't mean romantic love, but I do mean wishing people well, for two reasons. First of all, I think absolute honesty may not be what we want. I mean, my goodness, you look ugly this morning. Perhaps that's not necessary. Tempered with love, of course, honesty is a great thing. But also, if you're really wishing somebody well, it's very hard to judge them at the same time. I'm not even sure you can do those two things simultaneously. So hail. Also, now that's what you say, and it's like the old song, it is what you say, it's also the way that you say it. You have an amazing toolbox. This instrument is incredible, and yet this is a toolbox that very few people have ever opened. I'd like to have a little rummage in there with you now and just pull a few tools out that you might like to take away and play with, which will increase the power of your speaking. Register, for example. Now, falsetto register may not be very useful most of the time, but there's a register in between. I'm not going to get very technical about this for any of you who are voice coaches. You can locate your voice, however. So if I talk up here in my nose, you can hear the difference. If I go down here in my throat, which is where most of us speak from most of the time. But if you want weight, you need to go down here to the chest. You hear the difference? We vote for politicians with lower voices, it's true, because we associate depth with power and with authority. That's register. Then we have timbre. It's the way your voice feels. Again, the research shows that we prefer voices which are rich, smooth, warm, like hot chocolate. Well if that's not you, that's not the end of the world, because you can train. Go and get a voice coach. And there are amazing things you can do with breathing, with posture, and with exercises to improve the timbre of your voice. Then prosody. I love prosody. This is the sing-song, the meta-language that we use in order to impart meaning. It's root one for meaning in conversation. People who speak all on one note are really quite hard to listen to if they don't have any prosody at all. That's where the world monotonic comes from, or monotonous, monotone. Also we have repetitive prosody now coming in, where every sentence ends as if it were a question when it's actually not a question, it's a statement. (Laughter) And if you repeat that one over and over, it's actually restricting your ability to communicate through prosody, which I think is a shame, so let's try and break that habit. Pace. I can get very, very excited by saying something really, really quickly, or I can slow right down to emphasize, and at the end of that, of course, is our old friend silence. There's nothing wrong with a bit of silence in a talk, is there? We don't have to fill it with ums and ahs. It can be very powerful. Of course, pitch often goes along with pace to indicate arousal, but you can do it just with pitch. Where did you leave my keys? Where did you leave my keys? So slightly different meaning in those two deliveries. And finally, volume. I can get really excited by using volume. Sorry about that if I startled anybody. Or, I can have you really pay attention by getting very quiet. Some people broadcast the whole time. Try not to do that. That's called sodcasting, imposing your sound on people around you carelessly and inconsiderately. Not nice. Of course, where this all comes into play most of all is when you've got something really important to do. It might be standing on a stage like this and giving a talk to people. It might be proposing marriage, asking for a raise, a wedding speech. Whatever it is, if it's really important, you owe it to yourself to look at this toolbox and the engine that it's going to work on, and no engine works well without being warmed up. Warm up your voice. Actually, let me show you how to do that. Would you all like to stand up for a moment? I'm going to show you the six vocal warmup exercises that I do before every talk I ever do. Anytime you're going to talk to anybody important, do these. First, arms up, deep breath in, and sigh out, ahhhhh, like that. One more time. Ahhhh, very good. Now we're going to warm up our lips, and we're going to go ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba, ba. Very good. And now, brrrrrrrrrr, just like when you were a kid. Brrrr. Now your lips should be coming alive. We're going to do the tongue next with exaggerated la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la, la. Beautiful. You're getting really good at this. And then, roll an R. Rrrrrrr. That's like champagne for the tongue. Finally, and if I can only do one, the pros call this the siren. It's really good. It starts with "we" and goes to "aw." The "we" is high, the "aw" is low. So you go, weeeaawww, weeeaawww. Fantastic. Give yourselves a round of applause. Take a seat, thank you. (Applause) Next time you speak, do those in advance. Now let me just put this in context to close. This is a serious point here. This is where we are now, right? We speak not very well into people who simply aren't listening in an environment that's all about noise and bad acoustics. I have talked about that on this stage in different phases. What would the world be like if we were speaking powerfully to people who were listening consciously in environments which were actually fit for purpose? Or to make that a bit larger, what would the world be like if we were creating sound consciously and consuming sound consciously and designing all our environments consciously for sound? That would be a world that does sound beautiful, and one where understanding would be the norm, and that is an idea worth spreading. Thank you. Thank you. (Applause)

I want to talk to you about one thing and just one thing only, and this has to do with when people ask me, what do you do? To which I usually respond, I do computer music. Now, a number of people just stop talking to me right then and there, and the rest who are left usually have this blank look in their eye, as if to say, what does that mean? And I feel like I'm actually depriving them of information by telling them this, at which point I usually panic and spit out the first thing that comes to my mind, which is, I have no idea what I'm doing. Which is true. That's usually followed by a second thought, which is, whatever it is that I'm doing, I love it. And today, I want to, well, share with you something I love, and also why. And I think we'll begin with just this question: What is computer music? And I'm going to try to do my best to provide a definition, maybe by telling you a story that goes through some of the stuff I've been working on. And the first thing, I think, in our story is going to be something called ChucK. Now, ChucK is a programming language for music, and it's open-source, it's freely available, and I like to think that it crashes equally well on all modern operating systems. And instead of telling you more about it, I'm just going to give you a demo. By the way, I'm just going to nerd out for just a few minutes here, so I would say, don't freak out. In fact, I would invite all of you to join me in just geeking out. If you've never written a line of code before in your life, do not worry. I'll bet you'll be able to come along on this. First thing I'm going to do is to make a sine wave oscillator, and we're going to called the sine wave generator "Ge." And then we're going to connect "Ge" to the DAC. Now this is kind of the abstraction for the sound output on my computer. Okay? So I've connected myself into the speaker. Next, I'm going to say my frequency is 440 hertz, and I'm going to let time advance by two seconds through this operation. All right, so if I were to play this -- (Tone) — you would hear a sine wave at 440 hertz for two seconds. Okay, great. Now I'm going to copy and paste this, and then just change some of these numbers, 220.5, 440 I shall leave it as that, and .5 and 880. By doubling the frequency, we're actually going up in successive octaves, and then we have this sequence -- (Tones) — of tones. Okay, great, now I can imagine creating all kinds of really horrible single sine wave pieces of music with this, but I'm going to do something that computers are really good at, which is repetition. I'm going to put this all in a while loop, and you actually don't need to indent, but this is purely for aesthetic reasons. It's good practice. And when we do this — (Tones) — that's going to go on for a while. In fact, it's probably not going to stop until this computer disintegrates. And I can't really empirically prove that to you, but I hope you'll believe me when I say that. Next, I'm going to replace this 220 by math.random2f. I'm going to generate a random number between 30 and 1,000 and send that to the frequency of me. And I'm going to do this every half a second. (Tones) Let's do this every 200 milliseconds. (Tones) One hundred. (Tones) All right. At this point, we've reached something that I would like to think of as the canonical computer music. This is, to me, the sound that mainframes are supposed to be making when they're thinking really hard. It's this sound, it's like, the square root of five million. So is this computer music? Yeah, I guess by definition, it's kind of computer music. It's probably not the kind of music you would listen to cruising down the highway, but it's a foundation of computer-generated music, and using ChucK, we've actually been building instruments in the Stanford Laptop Orchestra, based right here at Stanford Center for Computer Research in Music and Acoustics. Now the Laptop Orchestra is an ensemble of laptops, humans and special hemispherical speaker arrays. Now the reason we have these is so that for the instruments that we create out of the laptop, we want the sound to come out of somewhere near the instrument and the performer, kind of much like a traditional, acoustic instrument. Like, if I were to play a violin here, the sound would naturally not come out of the P.A. system, but from the artifact itself. So these speakers are meant to emulate that. In fact, I'm going to show you how we actually built them. The first step is to go to IKEA and buy a salad bowl. This is an 11-inch Blanda Matt. That's the actual name, and I actually use one of these to make salad at home as well, I kid you not. And the first step is you turn it upside down, and then you drill holes in them, six holes per hemi, and then make a base plate, put car speaker drivers in them along with amplifiers in the enclosure, and you put that all together and you have these hemispherical speaker arrays. Add people, add laptops, you have a laptop orchestra. And what might a laptop orchestra sound like? Well, let me give you a demonstration of about 200 instruments we've created so far for the Laptop Orchestra. And what I'm going to do is actually come over to this thing. This thing I have in front of me actually used to be a commodity gaming controller called a Gametrak. This thing actually has a glove you can put on your hands. It's tethered to the base, and this will track the position of your hands in real time. It was originally designed as a golfing controller to detect the motion of your swing. That turned out to be a rather large commercial non-success, at which point they slashed prices to 10 dollars, at which point computer music researchers said, "This is awesome! We can prototype instruments out of this." So let me show you one instrument we've created, one of many, and this instrument is called "Twilight," and it's meant to go with this metaphor of pulling a sound out of the ground. So let me see if this will work. (Music) And put it back. And then if you go to the left, right, it sounds like an elephant in pain. This is a slightly metallic sound. Turn it just a bit. (Music) It's like a hovering car. Okay. This third one is a ratchet-like interaction, so let me turn it up. (Music) So it's a slightly different interaction. The fourth one is a drone. (Music) And finally, let's see, this is a totally different interaction, and I think you have to imagine that there's this giant invisible drum sitting right here on stage, and I'm going to bang it. (Drum) (Laughter) So there we go, so that's one of many instruments in the Laptop Orchestra. (Applause) Thank you. And when you put that together, you get something that sounds like this. (Music) Okay, and so, I think from the experience of building a lot of instruments for the Laptop Orchestra, and I think from the curiosity of wondering, what if we took these hopefully expressive instruments and we brought it to a lot of people, plus then a healthy bout of insanity — put those three things together — led to me actually co-founding a startup company in 2008 called Smule. Now Smule's mission is to create expressive, mobile music things, and one of the first musical instruments we created is called Ocarina. And I'm going to just demo this for you real quick. So Ocarina — (Music) — is based on this ancient flute-like instrument called the ocarina, and this one is the four-hole English pendant configuration, and you're literally blowing into the microphone to make the sound. And there's actually a little ChucK script running in here that's detecting the strength of your blowing and also synthesizing the sound. (Music) And vibrato is mapped to the accelerometer, so you can get — (Music) All right. So let me play a little ditty for you, a little Bach. And here, you'll hear a little accompaniment with the melody. The accompaniment actually follows the melody, not the other way around. (Music) And this was designed to let you take your time and figure out where your expressive space is, and you can just hang out here for a while, for a really dramatic effect, if you want, and whenever you're ready — (Music) And on these longer notes, I'm going to use more vibrato towards the end of the notes to give it a little bit more of an expressive quality. (Music) Huh, that's a nice chord to end this excerpt on. (Applause) Thank you. So I think a good question to ask about Ocarina is, is this a toy or it an instrument? Maybe it's both, but for me, I think the more important question is, is it expressive? And at the same time, I think creating these types of instruments asks a question about the role of technology, and its place for how we make music. Apparently, for example, not that long ago, like only a hundred years ago — that's not that long in the course of human history — families back then used to make music together as a common form of entertainment. I don't think that's really happening that much anymore. You know, this is before radio, before recording. In the last hundred years, with all this technology, we now have more access to music as listeners and consumers, but somehow, I think we're making less music than ever before. I'm not sure why that would be. Maybe it's because it's too easy just to hit play. And while listening to music is wonderful, there's a special joy to making music that's all its own. And I think that's one part of the goal of why I do what I do is kind of to take us back to the past a little bit. Right? Now, if that's one goal, the other goal is to look to the future and think about what kind of new musical things can we make that we don't perhaps yet have names for that's enabled by technology, but ultimately might change the way that humans make music. And I'll just give you one example here, and this is Ocarina's other feature. This is a globe, and here you're actually listening to other users of Ocarina blow into their iPhones to play something. This is "G.I.R." from Texas, "R.I.K." I don't know why it's these three-letter names today, Los Angeles. They're all playing pretty, somewhat minimal music here. (Music) And the idea with this is that, well, technology should not be foregrounded here, and — (Laughter) — we've actually opened this up. The first thought is that, hey, you know there's somebody somewhere out there playing some music, and this is a small but I think important human connection to make that perhaps the technology affords. As a final example, and perhaps my favorite example, is that in the wake of the 2011 earthquake and tsunami disaster in Japan, a woman reached out in one of our singing apps to try to get people to join in to sing with her on a version of "Lean on Me." Now, in these apps, there's this thing that allows any user to add their voice to an existing performance by any other user or group of users, so in some sense, she's created this kind of global ad hoc corral of strangers, and within weeks, thousands of people joined in on this, and you can kind of see people coming from all around the world and all these lines converging on the origin where the first rendition of the song was sung, and that's in Tokyo. And this is what it sounds like when there's 1,000 people. This is 1,000 voices. (Recording) ♪ Sometimes in our lives ♪ ♪ We all have pain, we all have sorrow ♪ ♪ But if we are wise ♪ ♪ We know that there's always tomorrow ♪ ♪ Lean on me ♪ ♪ When you're not strong ♪ ♪ And I'll be your friend ♪ ♪ I'll help you carry on ♪ ♪ For it won't be long ♪ ♪ Till I'm gonna need ♪ ♪ Somebody to lean on ♪ ♪ Just lean on — ♪ Is this computer music? (Applause) Was that computer music? Yeah, I guess so; it's something that you really couldn't have done without computers. But at the same time, it's also just human, and I think what I've essentially answered so far is maybe why I do the stuff that I do, and let's just finally return to the first question: What is computer music? And I think that the catch here is that, at least to me, computer music isn't really about computers. It is about people. It's about how we can use technology to change the way we think and do and make music, and maybe even add to how we can connect with each other through music. And with that, I want to say, this is computer music, and thank you for listening. (Applause)

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

I am a computer science and engineering professor here at Carnegie Mellon, and my research focuses on usable privacy and security, and so my friends like to give me examples of their frustrations with computing systems, especially frustrations related to unusable privacy and security. So passwords are something that I hear a lot about. A lot of people are frustrated with passwords, and it's bad enough when you have to have one really good password that you can remember but nobody else is going to be able to guess. But what do you do when you have accounts on a hundred different systems and you're supposed to have a unique password for each of these systems? It's tough. At Carnegie Mellon, they used to make it actually pretty easy for us to remember our passwords. The password requirement up through 2009 was just that you had to have a password with at least one character. Pretty easy. But then they changed things, and at the end of 2009, they announced that we were going to have a new policy, and this new policy required passwords that were at least eight characters long, with an uppercase letter, lowercase letter, a digit, a symbol, you couldn't use the same character more than three times, and it wasn't allowed to be in a dictionary. Now, when they implemented this new policy, a lot of people, my colleagues and friends, came up to me and they said, "Wow, now that's really unusable. Why are they doing this to us, and why didn't you stop them?" And I said, "Well, you know what? They didn't ask me." But I got curious, and I decided to go talk to the people in charge of our computer systems and find out what led them to introduce this new policy, and they said that the university had joined a consortium of universities, and one of the requirements of membership was that we had to have stronger passwords that complied with some new requirements, and these requirements were that our passwords had to have a lot of entropy. Now entropy is a complicated term, but basically it measures the strength of passwords. But the thing is, there isn't actually a standard measure of entropy. Now, the National Institute of Standards and Technology has a set of guidelines which have some rules of thumb for measuring entropy, but they don't have anything too specific, and the reason they only have rules of thumb is it turns out they don't actually have any good data on passwords. In fact, their report states, "Unfortunately, we do not have much data on the passwords users choose under particular rules. NIST would like to obtain more data on the passwords users actually choose, but system administrators are understandably reluctant to reveal password data to others." So this is a problem, but our research group looked at it as an opportunity. We said, "Well, there's a need for good password data. Maybe we can collect some good password data and actually advance the state of the art here. So the first thing we did is, we got a bag of candy bars and we walked around campus and talked to students, faculty and staff, and asked them for information about their passwords. Now we didn't say, "Give us your password." No, we just asked them about their password. How long is it? Does it have a digit? Does it have a symbol? And were you annoyed at having to create a new one last week? So we got results from 470 students, faculty and staff, and indeed we confirmed that the new policy was very annoying, but we also found that people said they felt more secure with these new passwords. We found that most people knew they were not supposed to write their password down, and only 13 percent of them did, but disturbingly, 80 percent of people said they were reusing their password. Now, this is actually more dangerous than writing your password down, because it makes you much more susceptible to attackers. So if you have to, write your passwords down, but don't reuse them. We also found some interesting things about the symbols people use in passwords. So CMU allows 32 possible symbols, but as you can see, there's only a small number that most people are using, so we're not actually getting very much strength from the symbols in our passwords. So this was a really interesting study, and now we had data from 470 people, but in the scheme of things, that's really not very much password data, and so we looked around to see where could we find additional password data? So it turns out there are a lot of people going around stealing passwords, and they often go and post these passwords on the Internet. So we were able to get access to some of these stolen password sets. This is still not really ideal for research, though, because it's not entirely clear where all of these passwords came from, or exactly what policies were in effect when people created these passwords. So we wanted to find some better source of data. So we decided that one thing we could do is we could do a study and have people actually create passwords for our study. So we used a service called Amazon Mechanical Turk, and this is a service where you can post a small job online that takes a minute, a few minutes, an hour, and pay people, a penny, ten cents, a few dollars, to do a task for you, and then you pay them through Amazon.com. So we paid people about 50 cents to create a password following our rules and answering a survey, and then we paid them again to come back two days later and log in using their password and answering another survey. So we did this, and we collected 5,000 passwords, and we gave people a bunch of different policies to create passwords with. So some people had a pretty easy policy, we call it Basic8, and here the only rule was that your password had to have at least eight characters. Then some people had a much harder policy, and this was very similar to the CMU policy, that it had to have eight characters including uppercase, lowercase, digit, symbol, and pass a dictionary check. And one of the other policies we tried, and there were a whole bunch more, but one of the ones we tried was called Basic16, and the only requirement here was that your password had to have at least 16 characters. All right, so now we had 5,000 passwords, and so we had much more detailed information. Again we see that there's only a small number of symbols that people are actually using in their passwords. We also wanted to get an idea of how strong the passwords were that people were creating, but as you may recall, there isn't a good measure of password strength. So what we decided to do was to see how long it would take to crack these passwords using the best cracking tools that the bad guys are using, or that we could find information about in the research literature. So to give you an idea of how bad guys go about cracking passwords, they will steal a password file that will have all of the passwords in kind of a scrambled form, called a hash, and so what they'll do is they'll make a guess as to what a password is, run it through a hashing function, and see whether it matches the passwords they have on their stolen password list. So a dumb attacker will try every password in order. They'll start with AAAAA and move on to AAAAB, and this is going to take a really long time before they get any passwords that people are really likely to actually have. A smart attacker, on the other hand, does something much more clever. They look at the passwords that are known to be popular from these stolen password sets, and they guess those first. So they're going to start by guessing "password," and then they'll guess "I love you," and "monkey," and "12345678," because these are the passwords that are most likely for people to have. In fact, some of you probably have these passwords. So what we found by running all of these 5,000 passwords we collected through these tests to see how strong they were, we found that the long passwords were actually pretty strong, and the complex passwords were pretty strong too. However, when we looked at the survey data, we saw that people were really frustrated by the very complex passwords, and the long passwords were a lot more usable, and in some cases, they were actually even stronger than the complex passwords. So this suggests that, instead of telling people that they need to put all these symbols and numbers and crazy things into their passwords, we might be better off just telling people to have long passwords. Now here's the problem, though: Some people had long passwords that actually weren't very strong. You can make long passwords that are still the sort of thing that an attacker could easily guess. So we need to do more than just say long passwords. There has to be some additional requirements, and some of our ongoing research is looking at what additional requirements we should add to make for stronger passwords that also are going to be easy for people to remember and type. Another approach to getting people to have stronger passwords is to use a password meter. Here are some examples. You may have seen these on the Internet when you were creating passwords. We decided to do a study to find out whether these password meters actually work. Do they actually help people have stronger passwords, and if so, which ones are better? So we tested password meters that were different sizes, shapes, colors, different words next to them, and we even tested one that was a dancing bunny. As you type a better password, the bunny dances faster and faster. So this was pretty fun. What we found was that password meters do work. (Laughter) Most of the password meters were actually effective, and the dancing bunny was very effective too, but the password meters that were the most effective were the ones that made you work harder before they gave you that thumbs up and said you were doing a good job, and in fact we found that most of the password meters on the Internet today are too soft. They tell you you're doing a good job too early, and if they would just wait a little bit before giving you that positive feedback, you probably would have better passwords. Now another approach to better passwords, perhaps, is to use pass phrases instead of passwords. So this was an xkcd cartoon from a couple of years ago, and the cartoonist suggests that we should all use pass phrases, and if you look at the second row of this cartoon, you can see the cartoonist is suggesting that the pass phrase "correct horse battery staple" would be a very strong pass phrase and something really easy to remember. He says, in fact, you've already remembered it. And so we decided to do a research study to find out whether this was true or not. In fact, everybody who I talk to, who I mention I'm doing password research, they point out this cartoon. "Oh, have you seen it? That xkcd. Correct horse battery staple." So we did the research study to see what would actually happen. So in our study, we used Mechanical Turk again, and we had the computer pick the random words in the pass phrase. Now the reason we did this is that humans are not very good at picking random words. If we asked a human to do it, they would pick things that were not very random. So we tried a few different conditions. In one condition, the computer picked from a dictionary of the very common words in the English language, and so you'd get pass phrases like "try there three come." And we looked at that, and we said, "Well, that doesn't really seem very memorable." So then we tried picking words that came from specific parts of speech, so how about noun-verb-adjective-noun. That comes up with something that's sort of sentence-like. So you can get a pass phrase like "plan builds sure power" or "end determines red drug." And these seemed a little bit more memorable, and maybe people would like those a little bit better. We wanted to compare them with passwords, and so we had the computer pick random passwords, and these were nice and short, but as you can see, they don't really look very memorable. And then we decided to try something called a pronounceable password. So here the computer picks random syllables and puts them together so you have something sort of pronounceable, like "tufritvi" and "vadasabi." That one kind of rolls off your tongue. So these were random passwords that were generated by our computer. So what we found in this study was that, surprisingly, pass phrases were not actually all that good. People were not really better at remembering the pass phrases than these random passwords, and because the pass phrases are longer, they took longer to type and people made more errors while typing them in. So it's not really a clear win for pass phrases. Sorry, all of you xkcd fans. On the other hand, we did find that pronounceable passwords worked surprisingly well, and so we actually are doing some more research to see if we can make that approach work even better. So one of the problems with some of the studies that we've done is that because they're all done using Mechanical Turk, these are not people's real passwords. They're the passwords that they created or the computer created for them for our study. And we wanted to know whether people would actually behave the same way with their real passwords. So we talked to the information security office at Carnegie Mellon and asked them if we could have everybody's real passwords. Not surprisingly, they were a little bit reluctant to share them with us, but we were actually able to work out a system with them where they put all of the real passwords for 25,000 CMU students, faculty and staff, into a locked computer in a locked room, not connected to the Internet, and they ran code on it that we wrote to analyze these passwords. They audited our code. They ran the code. And so we never actually saw anybody's password. We got some interesting results, and those of you Tepper students in the back will be very interested in this. So we found that the passwords created by people affiliated with the school of computer science were actually 1.8 times stronger than those affiliated with the business school. We have lots of other really interesting demographic information as well. The other interesting thing that we found is that when we compared the Carnegie Mellon passwords to the Mechanical Turk-generated passwords, there was actually a lot of similarities, and so this helped validate our research method and show that actually, collecting passwords using these Mechanical Turk studies is actually a valid way to study passwords. So that was good news. Okay, I want to close by talking about some insights I gained while on sabbatical last year in the Carnegie Mellon art school. One of the things that I did is I made a number of quilts, and I made this quilt here. It's called "Security Blanket." (Laughter) And this quilt has the 1,000 most frequent passwords stolen from the RockYou website. And the size of the passwords is proportional to how frequently they appeared in the stolen dataset. And what I did is I created this word cloud, and I went through all 1,000 words, and I categorized them into loose thematic categories. And it was, in some cases, it was kind of difficult to figure out what category they should be in, and then I color-coded them. So here are some examples of the difficulty. So "justin." Is that the name of the user, their boyfriend, their son? Maybe they're a Justin Bieber fan. Or "princess." Is that a nickname? Are they Disney princess fans? Or maybe that's the name of their cat. "Iloveyou" appears many times in many different languages. There's a lot of love in these passwords. If you look carefully, you'll see there's also some profanity, but it was really interesting to me to see that there's a lot more love than hate in these passwords. And there are animals, a lot of animals, and "monkey" is the most common animal and the 14th most popular password overall. And this was really curious to me, and I wondered, "Why are monkeys so popular?" And so in our last password study, any time we detected somebody creating a password with the word "monkey" in it, we asked them why they had a monkey in their password. And what we found out -- we found 17 people so far, I think, who have the word "monkey" -- We found out about a third of them said they have a pet named "monkey" or a friend whose nickname is "monkey," and about a third of them said that they just like monkeys and monkeys are really cute. And that guy is really cute. So it seems that at the end of the day, when we make passwords, we either make something that's really easy to type, a common pattern, or things that remind us of the word password or the account that we've created the password for, or whatever. Or we think about things that make us happy, and we create our password based on things that make us happy. And while this makes typing and remembering your password more fun, it also makes it a lot easier to guess your password. So I know a lot of these TED Talks are inspirational and they make you think about nice, happy things, but when you're creating your password, try to think about something else. Thank you. (Applause)

Twenty-three years ago, at the age of 19, I shot and killed a man. I was a young drug dealer with a quick temper and a semi-automatic pistol. But that wasn't the end of my story. In fact, it was beginning, and the 23 years since is a story of acknowledgment, apology and atonement. But it didn't happen in the way that you might imagine or think. These things occurred in my life in a way that was surprising, especially to me. See, like many of you, growing up, I was an honor roll student, a scholarship student, with dreams of becoming a doctor. But things went dramatically wrong when my parents separated and eventually divorced. The actual events are pretty straightforward. At the age of 17, I got shot three times standing on the corner of my block in Detroit. My friend rushed me to the hospital. Doctors pulled the bullets out, patched me up, and sent me back to the same neighborhood where I got shot. Throughout this ordeal, no one hugged me, no one counseled me, no one told me I would be okay. No one told me that I would live in fear, that I would become paranoid, or that I would react hyper-violently to being shot. No one told me that one day, I would become the person behind the trigger. Fourteen months later, at 2 a.m., I fired the shots that caused a man's death. When I entered prison, I was bitter, I was angry, I was hurt. I didn't want to take responsibility. I blamed everybody from my parents to the system. I rationalized my decision to shoot because in the hood where I come from, it's better to be the shooter than the person getting shot. As I sat in my cold cell, I felt helpless, unloved and abandoned. I felt like nobody cared, and I reacted with hostility to my confinement. And I found myself getting deeper and deeper into trouble. I ran black market stores, I loan sharked, and I sold drugs that were illegally smuggled into the prison. I had in fact become what the warden of the Michigan Reformatory called "the worst of the worst." And because of my activity, I landed in solitary confinement for seven and a half years out of my incarceration. Now as I see it, solitary confinement is one of the most inhumane and barbaric places you can find yourself, but find myself I did. One day, I was pacing my cell, when an officer came and delivered mail. I looked at a couple of letters before I looked at the letter that had my son's squiggly handwriting on it. And anytime I would get a letter from my son, it was like a ray of light in the darkest place you can imagine. And on this particular day, I opened this letter, and in capital letters, he wrote, "My mama told me why you was in prison: murder." He said, "Dad, don't kill. Jesus watches what you do. Pray to Him." Now, I wasn't religious at that time, nor am I religious now, but it was something so profound about my son's words. They made me examine things about my life that I hadn't considered. It was the first time in my life that I had actually thought about the fact that my son would see me as a murderer. I sat back on my bunk and I reflected on something I had read in [Plato], where Socrates stated in "Apology" that the unexamined life isn't worth living. At that point is when the transformation began. But it didn't come easy. One of the things I realized, which was part of the transformation, was that there were four key things. The first thing was, I had great mentors. Now, I know some of you all are probably thinking, how did you find a great mentor in prison? But in my case, some of my mentors who are serving life sentences were some of the best people to ever come into my life, because they forced me to look at my life honestly, and they forced me to challenge myself about my decision making. The second thing was literature. Prior to going to prison, I didn't know that there were so many brilliant black poets, authors and philosophers, and then I had the great fortune of encountering Malcolm X's autobiography, and it shattered every stereotype I had about myself. The third thing was family. For 19 years, my father stood by my side with an unshakable faith, because he believed that I had what it took to turn my life around. I also met an amazing woman who is now the mother of my two-year-old son Sekou, and she taught me how to love myself in a healthy way. The final thing was writing. When I got that letter from my son, I began to write a journal about things I had experienced in my childhood and in prison, and what it did is it opened up my mind to the idea of atonement. Earlier in my incarceration, I had received a letter from one of the relatives of my victim, and in that letter, she told me she forgave me, because she realized I was a young child who had been abused and had been through some hardships and just made a series of poor decisions. It was the first time in my life that I ever felt open to forgiving myself. One of the things that happened after that experience is that I thought about the other men who were incarcerated alongside of me, and how much I wanted to share this with them. And so I started talking to them about some of their experiences, and I was devastated to realize that most of them came from the same abusive environments, And most of them wanted help and they wanted to turn it around, but unfortunately the system that currently holds 2.5 million people in prison is designed to warehouse as opposed to rehabilitate or transform. So I made it up in my mind that if I was ever released from prison that I would do everything in my power to help change that. In 2010, I walked out of prison for the first time after two decades. Now imagine, if you will, Fred Flintstone walking into an episode of "The Jetsons." That was pretty much what my life was like. For the first time, I was exposed to the Internet, social media, cars that talk like KITT from "Knight Rider." But the thing that fascinated me the most was phone technology. See, when I went to prison, our car phones were this big and required two people to carry them. So imagine what it was like when I first grabbed my little Blackberry and I started learning how to text. But the thing is, the people around me, they didn't realize that I had no idea what all these abbreviated texts meant, like LOL, OMG, LMAO, until one day I was having a conversation with one of my friends via text, and I asked him to do something, and he responded back, "K." And I was like, "What is K?" And he was like, "K is okay." So in my head, I was like, "Well what the hell is wrong with K?" And so I text him a question mark. And he said, "K = okay." And so I tap back, "FU." (Laughter) And then he texts back, and he asks me why was I cussing him out. And I said, "LOL FU," as in, I finally understand. (Laughter) And so fast forward three years, I'm doing relatively good. I have a fellowship at MIT Media Lab, I work for an amazing company called BMe, I teach at the University of Michigan, but it's been a struggle because I realize that there are more men and women coming home who are not going to be afforded those opportunities. I've been blessed to work with some amazing men and women, helping others reenter society, and one of them is my friend named Calvin Evans. He served 24 years for a crime he didn't commit. He's 45 years old. He's currently enrolled in college. And one of the things that we talked about is the three things that I found important in my personal transformation, the first being acknowledgment. I had to acknowledge that I had hurt others. I also had to acknowledge that I had been hurt. The second thing was apologizing. I had to apologize to the people I had hurt. Even though I had no expectations of them accepting it, it was important to do because it was the right thing. But I also had to apologize to myself. The third thing was atoning. For me, atoning meant going back into my community and working with at-risk youth who were on the same path, but also becoming at one with myself. Through my experience of being locked up, one of the things I discovered is this: the majority of men and women who are incarcerated are redeemable, and the fact is, 90 percent of the men and women who are incarcerated will at some point return to the community, and we have a role in determining what kind of men and women return to our community. My wish today is that we will embrace a more empathetic approach toward how we deal with mass incarceration, that we will do away with the lock-them-up-and-throw-away-the-key mentality, because it's proven it doesn't work. My journey is a unique journey, but it doesn't have to be that way. Anybody can have a transformation if we create the space for that to happen. So what I'm asking today is that you envision a world where men and women aren't held hostage to their pasts, where misdeeds and mistakes don't define you for the rest of your life. I think collectively, we can create that reality, and I hope you do too. Thank you. (Applause)

I don't know if you've noticed, but there's been a spate of books that have come out lately contemplating or speculating on the cognition and emotional life of dogs. Do they think, do they feel and, if so, how? So this afternoon, in my limited time, I wanted to take the guesswork out of a lot of that by introducing you to two dogs, both of whom have taken the command "speak" quite literally. The first dog is the first to go, and he is contemplating an aspect of his relationship to his owner, and the title is "A Dog on His Master." "As young as I look, I am growing older faster than he. Seven to one is the ratio, they tend to say. Whatever the number, I will pass him one day and take the lead, the way I do on our walks in the woods, and if this ever manages to cross his mind, it would be the sweetest shadow I have ever cast on snow or grass." (Applause) Thank you. And our next dog speaks in something called the revenant, which means a spirit that comes back to visit you. "I am the dog you put to sleep, as you like to call the needle of oblivion, come back to tell you this simple thing: I never liked you." (Laughter) "When I licked your face, I thought of biting off your nose. When I watched you toweling yourself dry, I wanted to leap and unman you with a snap. I resented the way you moved, your lack of animal grace, the way you would sit in a chair to eat, a napkin on your lap, a knife in your hand. I would have run away but I was too weak, a trick you taught me while I was learning to sit and heel and, greatest of insults, shake hands without a hand. I admit the sight of the leash would excite me, but only because it meant I was about to smell things you had never touched. You do not want to believe this, but I have no reason to lie: I hated the car, hated the rubber toys, disliked your friends, and worse, your relatives. The jingling of my tags drove me mad. You always scratched me in the wrong place." (Laughter) "All I ever wanted from you was food and water in my bowls. While you slept, I watched you breathe as the moon rose in the sky. It took all of my strength not to raise my head and howl. Now, I am free of the collar, free of the yellow raincoat, monogrammed sweater, the absurdity of your lawn, and that is all you need to know about this place, except what you already supposed and are glad it did not happen sooner, that everyone here can read and write, the dogs in poetry, the cats and all the others in prose." Thank you. (Applause)

Today, a baffled lady observed the shell where my soul dwells And announced that I'm "articulate" Which means that when it comes to enunciation and diction I don't even think of it ‘Cause I’m "articulate" So when my professor asks a question And my answer is tainted with a connotation of urbanized suggestion There’s no misdirected intention Pay attention ‘Cause I’m “articulate” So when my father asks, “Wha’ kinda ting is dis?” My “articulate” answer never goes amiss I say “father, this is the impending problem at hand” And when I’m on the block I switch it up just because I can So when my boy says, “What’s good with you son?” I just say, “I jus’ fall out wit dem people but I done!” And sometimes in class I might pause the intellectual sounding flow to ask “Yo! Why dese books neva be about my peoples” Yes, I have decided to treat all three of my languages as equals Because I’m “articulate” But who controls articulation? Because the English language is a multifaceted oration Subject to indefinite transformation Now you may think that it is ignorant to speak broken English But I’m here to tell you that even “articulate” Americans sound foolish to the British So when my Professor comes on the block and says, “Hello” I stop him and say “Noooo … You’re being inarticulate … the proper way is to say ‘what’s good’” Now you may think that’s too hood, that’s not cool But I’m here to tell you that even our language has rules So when Mommy mocks me and says “ya’ll-be-madd-going-to-the-store” I say “Mommy, no, that sentence is not following the law Never does the word "madd" go before a present participle That’s simply the principle of this English” If I had the vocal capacity I would sing this from every mountaintop, From every suburbia, and every hood ‘Cause the only God of language is the one recorded in the Genesis Of this world saying “it is good" So I may not always come before you with excellency of speech But do not judge me by my language and assume That I’m too ignorant to teach ‘Cause I speak three tongues One for each: Home, school and friends I’m a tri-lingual orator Sometimes I’m consistent with my language now Then switch it up so I don’t bore later Sometimes I fight back two tongues While I use the other one in the classroom And when I mistakenly mix them up I feel crazy like … I’m cooking in the bathroom I know that I had to borrow your language because mines was stolen But you can’t expect me to speak your history wholly while mines is broken These words are spoken By someone who is simply fed up with the Eurocentric ideals of this season And the reason I speak a composite version of your language Is because mines was raped away along with my history I speak broken English so the profusing gashes can remind us That our current state is not a mystery I’m so tired of the negative images that are driving my people mad So unless you’ve seen it rob a bank stop calling my hair bad I’m so sick of this nonsensical racial disparity So don’t call it good unless your hair is known for donating to charity As much as has been raped away from our people How can you expect me to treat their imprint on your language As anything less than equal Let there be no confusion Let there be no hesitation This is not a promotion of ignorance This is a linguistic celebration That’s why I put "tri-lingual" on my last job application I can help to diversify your consumer market is all I wanted them to know And when they call me for the interview I’ll be more than happy to show that I can say: “What’s good” “Whatagwan” And of course …“Hello” Because I’m “articulate” Thank you. (Applause)

Think of a hard choice you'll face in the near future. It might be between two careers -- artist and accountant -- or places to live -- the city or the country -- or even between two people to marry -- you could marry Betty or you could marry Lolita. Or it might be a choice about whether to have children, to have an ailing parent move in with you, to raise your child in a religion that your partner lives by but leaves you cold. Or whether to donate your life savings to charity. Chances are, the hard choice you thought of was something big, something momentous, something that matters to you. Hard choices seem to be occasions for agonizing, hand-wringing, the gnashing of teeth. But I think we've misunderstood hard choices and the role they play in our lives. Understanding hard choices uncovers a hidden power each of us possesses. What makes a choice hard is the way the alternatives relate. In any easy choice, one alternative is better than the other. In a hard choice, one alternative is better in some ways, the other alternative is better in other ways, and neither is better than the other overall. You agonize over whether to stay in your current job in the city or uproot your life for more challenging work in the country because staying is better in some ways, moving is better in others, and neither is better than the other overall. We shouldn't think that all hard choices are big. Let's say you're deciding what to have for breakfast. You could have high fiber bran cereal or a chocolate donut. Suppose what matters in the choice is tastiness and healthfulness. The cereal is better for you, the donut tastes way better, but neither is better than the other overall, a hard choice. Realizing that small choices can also be hard may make big hard choices seem less intractable. After all, we manage to figure out what to have for breakfast, so maybe we can figure out whether to stay in the city or uproot for the new job in the country. We also shouldn't think that hard choices are hard because we are stupid. When I graduated from college, I couldn't decide between two careers, philosophy and law. I really loved philosophy. There are amazing things you can learn as a philosopher, and all from the comfort of an armchair. But I came from a modest immigrant family where my idea of luxury was having a pork tongue and jelly sandwich in my school lunchbox, so the thought of spending my whole life sitting around in armchairs just thinking, well, that struck me as the height of extravagance and frivolity. So I got out my yellow pad, I drew a line down the middle, and I tried my best to think of the reasons for and against each alternative. I remember thinking to myself, if only I knew what my life in each career would be like. If only God or Netflix would send me a DVD of my two possible future careers, I'd be set. I'd compare them side by side, I'd see that one was better, and the choice would be easy. But I got no DVD, and because I couldn't figure out which was better, I did what many of us do in hard choices: I took the safest option. Fear of being an unemployed philosopher led me to become a lawyer, and as I discovered, lawyering didn't quite fit. It wasn't who I was. So now I'm a philosopher, and I study hard choices, and I can tell you that fear of the unknown, while a common motivational default in dealing with hard choices, rests on a misconception of them. It's a mistake to think that in hard choices, one alternative really is better than the other, but we're too stupid to know which, and since we don't know which, we might as well take the least risky option. Even taking two alternatives side by side with full information, a choice can still be hard. Hard choices are hard not because of us or our ignorance; they're hard because there is no best option. Now, if there's no best option, if the scales don't tip in favor of one alternative over another, then surely the alternatives must be equally good. So maybe the right thing to say in hard choices is that they're between equally good options. But that can't be right. If alternatives are equally good, you should just flip a coin between them, and it seems a mistake to think, here's how you should decide between careers, places to live, people to marry: Flip a coin. There's another reason for thinking that hard choices aren't choices between equally good options. Suppose you have a choice between two jobs: you could be an investment banker or a graphic artist. There are a variety of things that matter in such a choice, like the excitement of the work, achieving financial security, having time to raise a family, and so on. Maybe the artist's career puts you on the cutting edge of new forms of pictorial expression. Maybe the banking career puts you on the cutting edge of new forms of financial manipulation. Imagine the two jobs however you like so that neither is better than the other. Now suppose we improve one of them a bit. Suppose the bank, wooing you, adds 500 dollars a month to your salary. Does the extra money now make the banking job better than the artist one? Not necessarily. A higher salary makes the banking job better than it was before, but it might not be enough to make being a banker better than being an artist. But if an improvement in one of the jobs doesn't make it better than the other, then the two original jobs could not have been equally good. If you start with two things that are equally good, and you improve one of them, it now must be better than the other. That's not the case with options in hard choices. So now we've got a puzzle. We've got two jobs. Neither is better than the other, nor are they equally good. So how are we supposed to choose? Something seems to have gone wrong here. Maybe the choice itself is problematic and comparison is impossible. But that can't be right. It's not like we're trying to choose between two things that can't be compared. We're weighing the merits of two jobs, after all, not the merits of the number nine and a plate of fried eggs. A comparison of the overall merits of two jobs is something we can make, and one we often do make. I think the puzzle arises because of an unreflective assumption we make about value. We unwittingly assume that values like justice, beauty, kindness, are akin to scientific quantities, like length, mass and weight. Take any comparative question not involving value, such as which of two suitcases is heavier. There are only three possibilities. The weight of one is greater, lesser or equal to the weight of the other. Properties like weight can be represented by real numbers -- one, two, three and so on -- and there are only three possible comparisons between any two real numbers. One number is greater, lesser, or equal to the other. Not so with values. As post-Enlightenment creatures, we tend to assume that scientific thinking holds the key to everything of importance in our world, but the world of value is different from the world of science. The stuff of the one world can be quantified by real numbers. The stuff of the other world can't. We shouldn't assume that the world of is, of lengths and weights, has the same structure as the world of ought, of what we should do. So if what matters to us -- a child's delight, the love you have for your partner — can't be represented by real numbers, then there's no reason to believe that in choice, there are only three possibilities -- that one alternative is better, worse or equal to the other. We need to introduce a new, fourth relation beyond being better, worse or equal, that describes what's going on in hard choices. I like to say that the alternatives are "on a par." When alternatives are on a par, it may matter very much which you choose, but one alternative isn't better than the other. Rather, the alternatives are in the same neighborhood of value, in the same league of value, while at the same time being very different in kind of value. That's why the choice is hard. Understanding hard choices in this way uncovers something about ourselves we didn't know. Each of us has the power to create reasons. Imagine a world in which every choice you face is an easy choice, that is, there's always a best alternative. If there's a best alternative, then that's the one you should choose, because part of being rational is doing the better thing rather than the worse thing, choosing what you have most reason to choose. In such a world, we'd have most reason to wear black socks instead of pink socks, to eat cereal instead of donuts, to live in the city rather than the country, to marry Betty instead of Lolita. A world full of only easy choices would enslave us to reasons. When you think about it, it's nuts to believe that the reasons given to you dictated that you had most reason to pursue the exact hobbies you do, to live in the exact house you do, to work at the exact job you do. Instead, you faced alternatives that were on a par — hard choices — and you made reasons for yourself to choose that hobby, that house and that job. When alternatives are on a par, the reasons given to us, the ones that determine whether we're making a mistake, are silent as to what to do. It's here, in the space of hard choices, that we get to exercise our normative power, the power to create reasons for yourself, to make yourself into the kind of person for whom country living is preferable to the urban life. When we choose between options that are on a par, we can do something really rather remarkable. We can put our very selves behind an option. Here's where I stand. Here's who I am. I am for banking. I am for chocolate donuts. This response in hard choices is a rational response, but it's not dictated by reasons given to us. Rather, it's supported by reasons created by us. When we create reasons for ourselves to become this kind of person rather than that, we wholeheartedly become the people that we are. You might say that we become the authors of our own lives. So when we face hard choices, we shouldn't beat our head against a wall trying to figure out which alternative is better. There is no best alternative. Instead of looking for reasons out there, we should be looking for reasons in here: Who am I to be? You might decide to be a pink sock-wearing, cereal-loving, country-living banker, and I might decide to be a black sock-wearing, urban, donut-loving artist. What we do in hard choices is very much up to each of us. Now, people who don't exercise their normative powers in hard choices are drifters. We all know people like that. I drifted into being a lawyer. I didn't put my agency behind lawyering. I wasn't for lawyering. Drifters allow the world to write the story of their lives. They let mechanisms of reward and punishment -- pats on the head, fear, the easiness of an option — to determine what they do. So the lesson of hard choices: reflect on what you can put your agency behind, on what you can be for, and through hard choices, become that person. Far from being sources of agony and dread, hard choices are precious opportunities for us to celebrate what is special about the human condition, that the reasons that govern our choices as correct or incorrect sometimes run out, and it is here, in the space of hard choices, that we have the power to create reasons for ourselves to become the distinctive people that we are. And that's why hard choices are not a curse but a godsend. Thank you. (Applause)

I need to start by telling you a little bit about my social life, which I know may not seem relevant, but it is. When people meet me at parties and they find out that I'm an English professor who specializes in language, they generally have one of two reactions. One set of people look frightened. (Laughter) They often say something like, "Oh, I'd better be careful what I say. I'm sure you'll hear every mistake I make." And then they stop talking. (Laughter) And they wait for me to go away and talk to someone else. The other set of people, their eyes light up, and they say, "You are just the person I want to talk to." And then they tell me about whatever it is they think is going wrong with the English language. (Laughter) A couple of weeks ago, I was at a dinner party and the man to my right started telling me about all the ways that the Internet is degrading the English language. He brought up Facebook, and he said, "To defriend? I mean, is that even a real word?" I want to pause on that question: What makes a word real? My dinner companion and I both know what the verb "defriend" means, so when does a new word like "defriend" become real? Who has the authority to make those kinds of official decisions about words, anyway? Those are the questions I want to talk about today. I think most people, when they say a word isn't real, what they mean is, it doesn't appear in a standard dictionary. That, of course, raises a host of other questions, including, who writes dictionaries? Before I go any further, let me clarify my role in all of this. I do not write dictionaries. I do, however, collect new words much the way dictionary editors do, and the great thing about being a historian of the English language is that I get to call this "research." When I teach the history of the English language, I require that students teach me two new slang words before I will begin class. Over the years, I have learned some great new slang this way, including "hangry," which -- (Applause) — which is when you are cranky or angry because you are hungry, and "adorkable," which is when you are adorable in kind of a dorky way, clearly, terrific words that fill important gaps in the English language. (Laughter) But how real are they if we use them primarily as slang and they don't yet appear in a dictionary? With that, let's turn to dictionaries. I'm going to do this as a show of hands: How many of you still regularly refer to a dictionary, either print or online? Okay, so that looks like most of you. Now, a second question. Again, a show of hands: How many of you have ever looked to see who edited the dictionary you are using? Okay, many fewer. At some level, we know that there are human hands behind dictionaries, but we're really not sure who those hands belong to. I'm actually fascinated by this. Even the most critical people out there tend not to be very critical about dictionaries, not distinguishing among them and not asking a whole lot of questions about who edited them. Just think about the phrase "Look it up in the dictionary," which suggests that all dictionaries are exactly the same. Consider the library here on campus, where you go into the reading room, and there is a large, unabridged dictionary up on a pedestal in this place of honor and respect lying open so we can go stand before it to get answers. Now, don't get me wrong, dictionaries are fantastic resources, but they are human and they are not timeless. I'm struck as a teacher that we tell students to critically question every text they read, every website they visit, except dictionaries, which we tend to treat as un-authored, as if they came from nowhere to give us answers about what words really mean. Here's the thing: If you ask dictionary editors, what they'll tell you is they're just trying to keep up with us as we change the language. They're watching what we say and what we write and trying to figure out what's going to stick and what's not going to stick. They have to gamble, because they want to appear cutting edge and catch the words that are going to make it, such as LOL, but they don't want to appear faddish and include the words that aren't going to make it, and I think a word that they're watching right now is YOLO, you only live once. Now I get to hang out with dictionary editors, and you might be surprised by one of the places where we hang out. Every January, we go to the American Dialect Society annual meeting, where among other things, we vote on the word of the year. There are about 200 or 300 people who come, some of the best known linguists in the United States. To give you a sense of the flavor of the meeting, it occurs right before happy hour. Anyone who comes can vote. The most important rule is that you can vote with only one hand. In the past, some of the winners have been "tweet" in 2009 and "hashtag" in 2012. "Chad" was the word of the year in the year 2000, because who knew what a chad was before 2000, and "WMD" in 2002. Now, we have other categories in which we vote too, and my favorite category is most creative word of the year. Past winners in this category have included "recombobulation area," which is at the Milwaukee Airport after security, where you can recombobulate. (Laughter) You can put your belt back on, put your computer back in your bag. And then my all-time favorite word at this vote, which is "multi-slacking." (Laughter) And multi-slacking is the act of having multiple windows up on your screen so it looks like you're working when you're actually goofing around on the web. (Laughter) (Applause) Will all of these words stick? Absolutely not. And we have made some questionable choices, for example in 2006 when the word of the year was "Plutoed," to mean demoted. (Laughter) But some of the past winners now seem completely unremarkable, such as "app" and "e" as a prefix, and "google" as a verb. Now, a few weeks before our vote, Lake Superior State University issues its list of banished words for the year. What is striking about this is that there's actually often quite a lot of overlap between their list and the list that we are considering for words of the year, and this is because we're noticing the same thing. We're noticing words that are coming into prominence. It's really a question of attitude. Are you bothered by language fads and language change, or do you find it fun, interesting, something worthy of study as part of a living language? The list by Lake Superior State University continues a fairly long tradition in English of complaints about new words. So here is Dean Henry Alford in 1875, who was very concerned that "desirability" is really a terrible word. In 1760, Benjamin Franklin wrote a letter to David Hume giving up the word "colonize" as bad. Over the years, we've also seen worries about new pronunciations. Here is Samuel Rogers in 1855 who is concerned about some fashionable pronunciations that he finds offensive, and he says "as if contemplate were not bad enough, balcony makes me sick." (Laughter) The word is borrowed in from Italian and it was pronounced bal-COE-nee. These complaints now strike us as quaint, if not downright adorkable -- (Laughter) -- but here's the thing: we still get quite worked up about language change. I have an entire file in my office of newspaper articles which express concern about illegitimate words that should not have been included in the dictionary, including "LOL" when it got into the Oxford English Dictionary and "defriend" when it got into the Oxford American Dictionary. I also have articles expressing concern about "invite" as a noun, "impact" as a verb, because only teeth can be impacted, and "incentivize" is described as "boorish, bureaucratic misspeak." Now, it's not that dictionary editors ignore these kinds of attitudes about language. They try to provide us some guidance about words that are considered slang or informal or offensive, often through usage labels, but they're in something of a bind, because they're trying to describe what we do, and they know that we often go to dictionaries to get information about how we should use a word well or appropriately. In response, the American Heritage Dictionaries include usage notes. Usage notes tend to occur with words that are troublesome in one way, and one of the ways that they can be troublesome is that they're changing meaning. Now usage notes involve very human decisions, and I think, as dictionary users, we're often not as aware of those human decisions as we should be. To show you what I mean, we'll look at an example, but before we do, I want to explain what the dictionary editors are trying to deal with in this usage note. Think about the word "peruse" and how you use that word. I would guess many of you are thinking of skim, scan, reading quickly. Some of you may even have some walking involved, because you're perusing grocery store shelves, or something like that. You might be surprised to learn that if you look in most standard dictionaries, the first definition will be to read carefully, or pour over. American Heritage has that as the first definition. They then have, as the second definition, skim, and next to that, they say "usage problem." (Laughter) And then they include a usage note, which is worth looking at. So here's the usage note: "Peruse has long meant 'to read thoroughly' ... But the word if often used more loosely, to mean simply 'to read.' ... Further extension of the word to mean 'to glance over, skim,' has traditionally been considered an error, but our ballot results suggest that it is becoming somewhat more acceptable. When asked about the sentence, 'I only had a moment to peruse the manual quickly,' 66 percent of the [Usage] Panel found it unacceptable in 1988, 58 percent in 1999, and 48 percent in 2011." Ah, the Usage Panel, that trusted body of language authorities who is getting more lenient about this. Now, what I hope you're thinking right now is, "Wait, who's on the Usage Panel? And what should I do with their pronouncements?" If you look in the front matter of American Heritage Dictionaries, you can actually find the names of the people on the Usage Panel. But who looks at the front matter of dictionaries? There are about 200 people on the Usage Panel. They include academicians, journalists, creative writers. There's a Supreme Court justice on it and a few linguists. As of 2005, the list includes me. (Applause) Here's what we can do for you. We can give you a sense of the range of opinions about contested usage. That is and should be the extent of our authority. We are not a language academy. About once a year, I get a ballot that asks me about whether new uses, new pronunciations, new meanings, are acceptable. Now here's what I do to fill out the ballot. I listen to what other people are saying and writing. I do not listen to my own likes and dislikes about the English language. I will be honest with you: I do not like the word "impactful," but that is neither here nor there in terms of whether "impactful" is becoming common usage and becoming more acceptable in written prose. So to be responsible, what I do is go look at usage, which often involves going to look at online databases such as Google Books. Well, if you look for "impactful" in Google Books, here is what you find. Well, it sure looks like "impactful" is proving useful for a certain number of writers, and has become more and more useful over the last 20 years. Now, there are going to be changes that all of us don't like in the language. There are going to be changes where you think, "Really? Does the language have to change that way?" What I'm saying is, we should be less quick to decide that that change is terrible, we should be less quick to impose our likes and dislikes about words on other people, and we should be entirely reluctant to think that the English language is in trouble. It's not. It is rich and vibrant and filled with the creativity of the speakers who speak it. In retrospect, we think it's fascinating that the word "nice" used to mean silly, and that the word "decimate" used to mean to kill one in every 10. (Laughter) We think that Ben Franklin was being silly to worry about "notice" as a verb. Well, you know what? We're going to look pretty silly in a hundred years for worrying about "impact" as a verb and "invite" as a noun. The language is not going to change so fast that we can't keep up. Language just doesn't work that way. I hope that what you can do is find language change not worrisome but fun and fascinating, just the way dictionary editors do. I hope you can enjoy being part of the creativity that is continually remaking our language and keeping it robust. So how does a word get into a dictionary? It gets in because we use it and we keep using it, and dictionary editors are paying attention to us. If you're thinking, "But that lets all of us decide what words mean," I would say, "Yes it does, and it always has." Dictionaries are a wonderful guide and resource, but there is no objective dictionary authority out there that is the final arbiter about what words mean. If a community of speakers is using a word and knows what it means, it's real. That word might be slangy, that word might be informal, that word might be a word that you think is illogical or unnecessary, but that word that we're using, that word is real. Thank you. (Applause)

People say things about religion all the time. (Laughter) The late, great Christopher Hitchens wrote a book called "God Is Not Great" whose subtitle was, "Religion Poisons Everything." (Laughter) But last month, in Time magazine, Rabbi David Wolpe, who I gather is referred to as America's rabbi, said, to balance that against that negative characterization, that no important form of social change can be brought about except through organized religion. Now, remarks of this sort on the negative and the positive side are very old. I have one in my pocket here from the first century BCE by Lucretius, the author of "On the Nature of Things," who said, "Tantum religio potuit suadere malorum" -- I should have been able to learn that by heart — which is, that's how much religion is able to persuade people to do evil, and he was talking about the fact of Agamemnon's decision to place his daughter Iphigenia on an altar of sacrifice in order to preserve the prospects of his army. So there have been these long debates over the centuries, in that case, actually, we can say over the millennia, about religion. People have talked about it a lot, and they've said good and bad and indifferent things about it. What I want to persuade you of today is of a very simple claim, which is that these debates are in a certain sense preposterous, because there is no such thing as religion about which to make these claims. There isn't a thing called religion, and so it can't be good or bad. It can't even be indifferent. And if you think about claims about the nonexistence of things, one obvious way to try and establish the nonexistence of a purported thing would be to offer a definition of that thing and then to see whether anything satisfied it. I'm going to start out on that little route to begin with. So if you look in the dictionaries and if you think about it, one very natural definition of religion is that it involves belief in gods or in spiritual beings. As I say, this is in many dictionaries, but you'll also find it actually in the work of Sir Edward Tylor, who was the first professor of anthropology at Oxford, one of the first modern anthropologists. In his book on primitive culture, he says the heart of religion is what he called animism, that is, the belief in spiritual agency, belief in spirits. The first problem for that definition is from a recent novel by Paul Beatty called "Tuff." There's a guy talking to a rabbi. The rabbi says he doesn't believe in God. The guy says, "You're a rabbi, how can you not believe in God?" And the reply is, "It's what's so great about being Jewish. You don't have to believe in a God per se, just in being Jewish." (Laughter) So if this guy is a rabbi, and a Jewish rabbi, and if you have to believe in God in order to be religious, then we have the rather counterintuitive conclusion that since it's possible to be a Jewish rabbi without believing in God, Judaism isn't a religion. That seems like a pretty counterintuitive thought. Here's another argument against this view. A friend of mine, an Indian friend of mine, went to his grandfather when he was very young, a child, and said to him, "I want to talk to you about religion," and his grandfather said, "You're too young. Come back when you're a teenager." So he came back when he was a teenager, and he said to his grandfather, "It may be a bit late now because I've discovered that I don't believe in the gods." And his grandfather, who was a wise man, said, "Oh, so you belong to the atheist branch of the Hindu tradition." (Laughter) And finally, there's this guy, who famously doesn't believe in God. His name is the Dalai Lama. He often jokes that he's one of the world's leading atheists. But it's true, because the Dalai Lama's religion does not involve belief in God. Now you might think this just shows that I've given you the wrong definition and that I should come up with some other definition and test it against these cases and try and find something that captures atheistic Judaism, atheistic Hinduism, and atheistic Buddhism as forms of religiosity, but I actually think that that's a bad idea, and the reason I think it's a bad idea is that I don't think that's how our concept of religion works. I think the way our concept of religion works is that we actually have, we have a list of paradigm religions and their sub-parts, right, and if something new comes along that purports to be a religion, what we ask is, "Well, is it like one of these?" Right? And I think that's not only how we think about religion, and that's, as it were, so from our point of view, anything on that list had better be a religion, which is why I don't think an account of religion that excludes Buddhism and Judaism has a chance of being a good starter, because they're on our list. But why do we have such a list? What's going on? How did it come about that we have this list? I think the answer is a pretty simple one and therefore crude and contentious. I'm sure a lot of people will disagree with it, but here's my story, and true or not, it's a story that I think gives you a good sense of how the list might have come about, and therefore helps you to think about what use the list might be. I think the answer is, European travelers, starting roughly about the time of Columbus, started going around the world. They came from a Christian culture, and when they arrived in a new place, they noticed that some people didn't have Christianity, and so they asked themselves the following question: what have they got instead of Christianity? And that list was essentially constructed. It consists of the things that other people had instead of Christianity. Now there's a difficulty with proceeding in that way, which is that Christianity is extremely, even on that list, it's an extremely specific tradition. It has all kinds of things in it that are very, very particular that are the results of the specifics of Christian history, and one thing that's at the heart of it, one thing that's at the heart of most understandings of Christianity, which is the result of the specific history of Christianity, is that it's an extremely creedal religion. It's a religion in which people are really concerned about whether you believe the right things. The history of Christianity, the internal history of Christianity, is largely the history of people killing each other because they believed the wrong thing, and it's also involved in struggles with other religions, obviously starting in the Middle Ages, a struggle with Islam, in which, again, it was the infidelity, the fact that they didn't believe the right things, that seemed so offensive to the Christian world. Now that's a very specific and particular history that Christianity has, and not everywhere is everything that has ever been put on this sort of list like it. Here's another problem, I think. A very specific thing happened. It was actually adverted to earlier, but a very specific thing happened in the history of the kind of Christianity that we see around us mostly in the United States today, and it happened in the late 19th century, and that specific thing that happened in the late 19th century was a kind of deal that was cut between science, this new way of organizing intellectual authority, and religion. If you think about the 18th century, say, if you think about intellectual life before the late 19th century, anything you did, anything you thought about, whether it was the physical world, the human world, the natural world apart from the human world, or morality, anything you did would have been framed against the background of a set of assumptions that were religious, Christian assumptions. You couldn't give an account of the natural world that didn't say something about its relationship, for example, to the creation story in the Abrahamic tradition, the creation story in the first book of the Torah. So everything was framed in that way. But this changes in the late 19th century, and for the first time, it's possible for people to develop serious intellectual careers as natural historians like Darwin. Darwin worried about the relationship between what he said and the truths of religion, but he could proceed, he could write books about his subject without having to say what the relationship was to the religious claims, and similarly, geologists increasingly could talk about it. In the early 19th century, if you were a geologist and made a claim about the age of the Earth, you had to explain whether that was consistent or how it was or wasn't consistent with the age of the Earth implied by the account in Genesis. By the end of the 19th century, you can just write a geology textbook in which you make arguments about how old the Earth is. So there's a big change, and that division, that intellectual division of labor occurs as I say, I think, and it sort of solidifies so that by the end of the 19th century in Europe, there's a real intellectual division of labor, and you can do all sorts of serious things, including, increasingly, even philosophy, without being constrained by the thought, "Well, what I have to say has to be consistent with the deep truths that are given to me by our religious tradition." So imagine someone who's coming out of that world, that late-19th-century world, coming into the country that I grew up in, Ghana, the society that I grew up in, Asante, coming into that world at the turn of the 20th century with this question that made the list: what have they got instead of Christianity? Well, here's one thing he would have noticed, and by the way, there was a person who actually did this. His name was Captain Rattray, he was sent as the British government anthropologist, and he wrote a book about Asante religion. This is a soul disc. There are many of them in the British Museum. I could give you an interesting, different history of how it comes about that many of the things from my society ended up in the British Museum, but we don't have time for that. So this object is a soul disc. What is a soul disc? It was worn around the necks of the soul-washers of the Asante king. What was their job? To wash the king's soul. It would take a long while to explain how a soul could be the kind of thing that could be washed, but Rattray knew that this was religion because souls were in play. And similarly, there were many other things, many other practices. For example, every time anybody had a drink, more or less, they poured a little bit on the ground in what's called the libation, and they gave some to the ancestors. My father did this. Every time he opened a bottle of whiskey, which I'm glad to say was very often, he would take the top off and pour off just a little on the ground, and he would talk to, he would say to Akroma-Ampim, the founder of our line, or Yao Antony, my great uncle, he would talk to them, offer them a little bit of this. And finally, there were these huge public ceremonials. This is an early-19th-century drawing by another British military officer of such a ceremonial, where the king was involved, and the king's job, one of the large parts of his job, apart from organizing warfare and things like that, was to look after the tombs of his ancestors, and when a king died, the stool that he sat on was blackened and put in the royal ancestral temple, and every 40 days, the King of Asante has to go and do cult for his ancestors. That's a large part of his job, and people think that if he doesn't do it, things will fall apart. So he's a religious figure, as Rattray would have said, as well as a political figure. So all this would count as religion for Rattray, but my point is that when you look into the lives of those people, you also find that every time they do anything, they're conscious of the ancestors. Every morning at breakfast, you can go outside the front of the house and make an offering to the god tree, the nyame dua outside your house, and again, you'll talk to the gods and the high gods and the low gods and the ancestors and so on. This is not a world in which the separation between religion and science has occurred. Religion has not being separated from any other areas of life, and in particular, what's crucial to understand about this world is that it's a world in which the job that science does for us is done by what Rattray is going to call religion, because if they want an explanation of something, if they want to know why the crop just failed, if they want to know why it's raining or not raining, if they need rain, if they want to know why their grandfather has died, they are going to appeal to the very same entities, the very same language, talk to the very same gods about that. This great separation, in other words, between religion and science hasn't happened. Now, this would be a mere historical curiosity, except that in large parts of the world, this is still the truth. I had the privilege of going to a wedding the other day in northern Namibia, 20 miles or so south of the Angolan border in a village of 200 people. These were modern people. We had with us Oona Chaplin, who some of you may have heard of, and one of the people from this village came up to her, and said, "I've seen you in 'Game of Thrones.'" So these were not people who were isolated from our world, but nevertheless, for them, the gods and the spirits are still very much there, and when we were on the bus going back and forth to the various parts of the [ceremony], they prayed not just in a generic way but for the safety of the journey, and they meant it, and when they said to me that my mother, the bridegroom's [grandmother], was with us, they didn't mean it figuratively. They meant, even though she was a dead person, they meant that she was still around. So in large parts of the world today, that separation between science and religion hasn't occurred in large parts of the world today, and as I say, these are not -- This guy used to work for Chase and at the World Bank. These are fellow citizens of the world with you, but they come from a place in which religion is occupying a very different role. So what I want you to think about next time somebody wants to make some vast generalization about religion is that maybe there isn't such a thing as a religion, such a thing as religion, and that therefore what they say cannot possibly be true. (Applause)

Six months ago, I got an email from a man in Israel who had read one of my books, and the email said, "You don't know me, but I'm your 12th cousin." And it said, "I have a family tree with 80,000 people on it, including you, Karl Marx, and several European aristocrats." Now I did not know what to make of this. Part of me was like, okay, when's he going to ask me to wire 10,000 dollars to his Nigerian bank, right? I also thought, 80,000 relatives, do I want that? I have enough trouble with some of the ones I have already. And I won't name names, but you know who you are. But another part of me said, this is remarkable. Here I am alone in my office, but I'm not alone at all. I'm connected to 80,000 people around the world, and that's four Madison Square Gardens full of cousins. And some of them are going to be great, and some of them are going to be irritating, but they're all related to me. So this email inspired me to dive into genealogy, which I always thought was a very staid and proper field, but it turns out it's going through a fascinating revolution, and a controversial one. Partly, this is because of DNA and genetic testing, but partly, it's because of the Internet. There are sites that now take the Wikipedia approach to family trees, collaboration and crowdsourcing, and what you do is, you load your family tree on, and then these sites search to see if the A.J. Jacobs in your tree is the same as the A.J. Jacobs in another tree, and if it is, then you can combine, and then you combine and combine and combine until you get these massive, mega-family trees with thousands of people on them, or even millions. I'm on something on Geni called the world family tree, which has no less than a jaw-dropping 75 million people. So that's 75 million people connected by blood or marriage, sometimes both. (Laughter) It's in all seven continents, including Antarctica. I'm on it. Many of you are on it, whether you know it or not, and you can see the links. Here's my cousin Gwyneth Paltrow. She has no idea I exist, but we are officially cousins. We have just 17 links between us. And there's my cousin Barack Obama. (Laughter) And he is my aunt's fifth great-aunt's husband's father's wife's seventh great-nephew, so practically my old brother. And my cousin, of course, the actor Kevin Bacon -- (Laughter) — who is my first cousin's twice removed's wife's niece's husband's first cousin once removed's niece's husband. So six degrees of Kevin Bacon, plus or minus several degrees. Now, I'm not boasting, because all of you have famous people and historical figures in your tree, because we are all connected, and 75 million may seem like a lot, but in a few years, it's quite likely we will have a family tree with all, almost all, seven billion people on Earth. But does it really matter? What's the importance? And I do think it is important, and I'll give you five reasons why, really quickly. First, it's got scientific value. This is an unprecedented history of the human race, and it's giving us valuable data about how diseases are inherited, how people migrate, and there's a team of scientists at MIT right now studying the world family tree. Number two, it brings history alive. I found out I'm connected to Albert Einstein, so I told my seven-year-old son that, and he was totally engaged. Now Albert Einstein is not some dead white guy with weird hair. He's Uncle Albert. (Laughter) And my son wanted to know, "What did he say? What is E = MC squared?" Also, it's not all good news. I found a link to Jeffrey Dahmer, the serial killer, but I will say that's on my wife's side. (Laughter) (Applause) So I want to make that clear. Sorry, honey. Number three, interconnectedness. We all come from the same ancestor, and you don't have to believe the literal Bible version, but scientists talk about Y chromosomal Adam and mitochondrial Eve, and these were about 100,000 to 300,000 years ago. We all have a bit of their DNA in us. They are our great-great-great-great-great-great -- continue that for about 7,000 times -- grandparents, and so that means we literally all are biological cousins as well, and estimates vary, but probably the farthest cousin you have on Earth is about a 50th cousin. Now, it's not just ancestors we share, descendants. If you have kids, and they have kids, look how quickly the descendants accumulate. So in 10, 12 generations, you're going to have thousands of offspring, and millions of offspring. Number four, a kinder world. Now, I know that there are family feuds. I have three sons, so I see how they fight. But I think that there's also a human bias to treat your family a little better than strangers. I think this tree is going to be bad news for bigots, because they're going to have to realize that they are cousins with thousands of people in whatever ethnic group they happen to have issues with, and I think you look back at history, and a lot of the terrible things we've done to each other is because one group thinks another group is sub-human, and you can't do that anymore. We're not just part of the same species. We're part of the same family. We share 99.9 percent of our DNA. Now the final one is number five, a democratizing effect. Some genealogy has an elitist strain, like people say, "Oh, I'm descended from Mary Queen of Scots and you're not, so you cannot join my country club." But that's really going to be hard to do now, because everyone is related. I'm descended from Mary Queen of Scots -- by marriage, but still. So it's really a fascinating time in the history of family, because it's changing so fast. There is gay marriage and sperm donors and there's intermarriage on an unprecedented scale, and this makes some of my more conservative cousins a little nervous, but I actually think it's a good thing. I think the more inclusive the idea of family is, the better, because then you have more potential caretakers, and as my aunt's eighth cousin twice removed Hillary Clinton says -- (Laughter) — it takes a village. So I have all these hundreds and thousands, millions of new cousins. I thought, what can I do with this information? And that's when I decided, why not throw a party? So that's what I'm doing. And you're all invited. Next year, next summer, I will be hosting what I hope is the biggest and best family reunion in history. (Applause) Thank you. I want you there. I want you there. It's going to be at the New York Hall of Science, which is a great venue, but it's also on the site of the former World's Fair, which is, I think, very appropriate, because I see this as a family reunion meets a world's fair. There's going to be exhibits and food, music. Paul McCartney is 11 steps away, so I'm hoping he brings his guitar. He hasn't RSVP'd yet, but fingers crossed. And there is going to be a day of speakers, of fascinating cousins. It's early, but I've already, I've got some lined up. Cass Sunstein, my cousin who is perhaps the most brilliant legal scholar, will be talking. He was a former member of the Obama administration. And on the other side of the political spectrum, George H.W. Bush, number 41, the father, he has agreed to participate, and Nick Kroll, the comedian, and Dr. Oz, and many more to come. And, of course, the most important is that you, I want you guys there, and I invite you to go to GlobalFamilyReunion.org and figure out how you're on the family tree, because these are big issues, family and tribe, and I don't know all the answers, but I have a lot of smart relatives, including you guys, so together, I think we can figure it out. Only together can we solve these big problems. So from cousin to cousin, I thank you. I can't wait to see you. Goodbye. (Applause)

In the middle of my Ph.D., I was hopelessly stuck. Every research direction that I tried led to a dead end. It seemed like my basic assumptions just stopped working. I felt like a pilot flying through the mist, and I lost all sense of direction. I stopped shaving. I couldn't get out of bed in the morning. I felt unworthy of stepping across the gates of the university, because I wasn't like Einstein or Newton or any other scientist whose results I had learned about, because in science, we just learn about the results, not the process. And so obviously, I couldn't be a scientist. But I had enough support and I made it through and discovered something new about nature. This is an amazing feeling of calmness, being the only person in the world who knows a new law of nature. And I started the second project in my Ph.D, and it happened again. I got stuck and I made it through. And I started thinking, maybe there's a pattern here. I asked the other graduate students, and they said, "Yeah, that's exactly what happened to us, except nobody told us about it." We'd all studied science as if it's a series of logical steps between question and answer, but doing research is nothing like that. At the same time, I was also studying to be an improvisation theater actor. So physics by day, and by night, laughing, jumping, singing, playing my guitar. Improvisation theater, just like science, goes into the unknown, because you have to make a scene onstage without a director, without a script, without having any idea what you'll portray or what the other characters will do. But unlike science, in improvisation theater, they tell you from day one what's going to happen to you when you get onstage. You're going to fail miserably. You're going to get stuck. And we would practice staying creative inside that stuck place. For example, we had an exercise where we all stood in a circle, and each person had to do the world's worst tap dance, and everybody else applauded and cheered you on, supporting you onstage. When I became a professor and had to guide my own students through their research projects, I realized again, I don't know what to do. I'd studied thousands of hours of physics, biology, chemistry, but not one hour, not one concept on how to mentor, how to guide someone to go together into the unknown, about motivation. So I turned to improvisation theater, and I told my students from day one what's going to happen when you start research, and this has to do with our mental schema of what research will be like. Because you see, whenever people do anything, for example if I want to touch this blackboard, my brain first builds up a schema, a prediction of exactly what my muscles will do before I even start moving my hand, and if I get blocked, if my schema doesn't match reality, that causes extra stress called cognitive dissonance. That's why your schemas had better match reality. But if you believe the way science is taught, and if you believe textbooks, you're liable to have the following schema of research. If A is the question, and B is the answer, then research is a direct path. The problem is that if an experiment doesn't work, or a student gets depressed, it's perceived as something utterly wrong and causes tremendous stress. And that's why I teach my students a more realistic schema. Here's an example where things don't match your schema. (Laughter) (Applause) So I teach my students a different schema. If A is the question, B is the answer, stay creative in the cloud, and you start going, and experiments don't work, experiments don't work, experiments don't work, experiments don't work, until you reach a place linked with negative emotions where it seems like your basic assumptions have stopped making sense, like somebody yanked the carpet beneath your feet. And I call this place the cloud. Now you can be lost in the cloud for a day, a week, a month, a year, a whole career, but sometimes, if you're lucky enough and you have enough support, you can see in the materials at hand, or perhaps meditating on the shape of the cloud, a new answer, C, and you decide to go for it. And experiments don't work, experiments don't work, but you get there, and then you tell everyone about it by publishing a paper that reads A arrow C, which is a great way to communicate, but as long as you don't forget the path that brought you there. Now this cloud is an inherent part of research, an inherent part of our craft, because the cloud stands guard at the boundary. It stands guard at the boundary between the known and the unknown, because in order to discover something truly new, at least one of your basic assumptions has to change, and that means that in science, we do something quite heroic. Every day, we try to bring ourselves to the boundary between the known and the unknown and face the cloud. Now notice that I put B in the land of the known, because we knew about it in the beginning, but C is always more interesting and more important than B. So B is essential in order to get going, but C is much more profound, and that's the amazing thing about resesarch. Now just knowing that word, the cloud, has been transformational in my research group, because students come to me and say, "Uri, I'm in the cloud," and I say, "Great, you must be feeling miserable." (Laughter) But I'm kind of happy, because we might be close to the boundary between the known and the unknown, and we stand a chance of discovering something truly new, since the way our mind works, it's just knowing that the cloud is normal, it's essential, and in fact beautiful, we can join the Cloud Appreciation Society, and it detoxifies the feeling that something is deeply wrong with me. And as a mentor, I know what to do, which is to step up my support for the student, because research in psychology shows that if you're feeling fear and despair, your mind narrows down to very safe and conservative ways of thinking. If you'd like to explore the risky paths needed to get out of the cloud, you need other emotions -- solidarity, support, hope — that come with your connection from somebody else, so like in improvisation theater, in science, it's best to walk into the unknown together. So knowing about the cloud, you also learn from improvisation theater a very effective way to have conversations inside the cloud. It's based on the central principle of improvisation theater, so here improvisation theater came to my help again. It's called saying "Yes, and" to the offers made by other actors. That means accepting the offers and building on them, saying, "Yes, and." For example, if one actor says, "Here is a pool of water," and the other actor says, "No, that's just a stage," the improvisation is over. It's dead, and everybody feels frustrated. That's called blocking. If you're not mindful of communications, scientific conversations can have a lot of blocking. Saying "Yes, and" sounds like this. "Here is a pool of water." "Yeah, let's jump in." "Look, there's a whale! Let's grab it by its tail. It's pulling us to the moon!" So saying "Yes, and" bypasses our inner critic. We all have an inner critic that kind of guards what we say, so people don't think that we're obscene or crazy or unoriginal, and science is full of the fear of appearing unoriginal. Saying "Yes, and" bypasses the critic and unlocks hidden voices of creativity you didn't even know that you had, and they often carry the answer about the cloud. So you see, knowing about the cloud and about saying "Yes, and" made my lab very creative. Students started playing off of each others' ideas, and we made surprising discoveries in the interface between physics and biology. For example, we were stuck for a year trying to understand the intricate biochemical networks inside our cells, and we said, "We are deeply in the cloud," and we had a playful conversation where my student Shai Shen Orr said, "Let's just draw this on a piece of paper, this network," and instead of saying, "But we've done that so many times and it doesn't work," I said, "Yes, and let's use a very big piece of paper," and then Ron Milo said, "Let's use a gigantic architect's blueprint kind of paper, and I know where to print it," and we printed out the network and looked at it, and that's where we made our most important discovery, that this complicated network is just made of a handful of simple, repeating interaction patterns like motifs in a stained glass window. We call them network motifs, and they're the elementary circuits that help us understand the logic of the way cells make decisions in all organisms, including our body. Soon enough, after this, I started being invited to give talks to thousands of scientists across the world, but the knowledge about the cloud and saying "Yes, and" just stayed within my own lab, because you see, in science, we don't talk about the process, anything subjective or emotional. We talk about the results. So there was no way to talk about it in conferences. That was unthinkable. And I saw scientists in other groups get stuck without even having a word to describe what they're seeing, and their ways of thinking narrowed down to very safe paths, their science didn't reach its full potential, and they were miserable. I thought, that's the way it is. I'll try to make my lab as creative as possible, and if everybody else does the same, science will eventually become more and more better and better. That way of thinking got turned on its head when by chance I went to hear Evelyn Fox Keller give a talk about her experiences as a woman in science. And she asked, "Why is it that we don't talk about the subjective and emotional aspects of doing science? It's not by chance. It's a matter of values." You see, science seeks knowledge that's objective and rational. That's the beautiful thing about science. But we also have a cultural myth that the doing of science, what we do every day to get that knowledge, is also only objective and rational, like Mr. Spock. And when you label something as objective and rational, automatically, the other side, the subjective and emotional, become labeled as non-science or anti-science or threatening to science, and we just don't talk about it. And when I heard that, that science has a culture, everything clicked into place for me, because if science has a culture, culture can be changed, and I can be a change agent working to change the culture of science wherever I could. And so the very next lecture I gave in a conference, I talked about my science, and then I talked about the importance of the subjective and emotional aspects of doing science and how we should talk about them, and I looked at the audience, and they were cold. They couldn't hear what I was saying in the context of a 10 back-to-back PowerPoint presentation conference. And I tried again and again, conference after conference, but I wasn't getting through. I was in the cloud. And eventually I managed to get out the cloud using improvisation and music. Since then, every conference I go to, I give a science talk and a second, special talk called "Love and fear in the lab," and I start it off by doing a song about scientists' greatest fear, which is that we work hard, we discover something new, and somebody else publishes it before we do. We call it being scooped, and being scooped feels horrible. It makes us afraid to talk to each other, which is no fun, because we came to science to share our ideas and to learn from each other, and so I do a blues song, which — (Applause) — called "Scooped Again," and I ask the audience to be my backup singers, and I tell them, "Your text is 'Scoop, Scoop.'" It sounds like this: "Scoop, scoop!" Sounds like this. ♪ I've been scooped again ♪ ♪ Scoop! Scoop! ♪ And then we go for it. ♪ I've been scooped again ♪ ♪ Scoop! Scoop! ♪ ♪ I've been scooped again ♪ ♪ Scoop! Scoop! ♪ ♪ I've been scooped again ♪ ♪ Scoop! Scoop! ♪ ♪ I've been scooped again ♪ ♪ Scoop! Scoop! ♪ ♪ Oh mama, can't you feel my pain ♪ ♪ Heavens help me, I've been scooped again ♪ (Applause) Thank you. Thank you for your backup singing. So everybody starts laughing, starts breathing, notices that there's other scientists around them with shared issues, and we start talking about the emotional and subjective things that go on in research. It feels like a huge taboo has been lifted. Finally, we can talk about this in a scientific conference. And scientists have gone on to form peer groups where they meet regularly and create a space to talk about the emotional and subjective things that happen as they're mentoring, as they're going into the unknown, and even started courses about the process of doing science, about going into the unknown together, and many other things. So my vision is that, just like every scientist knows the word "atom," that matter is made out of atoms, every scientist would know the words like "the cloud," saying "Yes, and," and science will become much more creative, make many, many more unexpected discoveries for the benefit of us all, and would also be much more playful. And what I might ask you to remember from this talk is that next time you face a problem you can't solve in work or in life, there's a word for what you're going to see: the cloud. And you can go through the cloud not alone but together with someone who is your source of support to say "Yes, and" to your ideas, to help you say "Yes, and" to your own ideas, to increase the chance that, through the wisps of the cloud, you'll find that moment of calmness where you get your first glimpse of your unexpected discovery, your C. Thank you. (Applause)

It was less than a year after September 11, and I was at the Chicago Tribune writing about shootings and murders, and it was leaving me feeling pretty dark and depressed. I had done some activism in college, so I decided to help a local group hang door knockers against animal testing. I thought it would be a safe way to do something positive, but of course I have the absolute worst luck ever, and we were all arrested. Police took this blurry photo of me holding leaflets as evidence. My charges were dismissed, but a few weeks later, two FBI agents knocked on my door, and they told me that unless I helped them by spying on protest groups, they would put me on a domestic terrorist list. I'd love to tell you that I didn't flinch, but I was terrified, and when my fear subsided, I became obsessed with finding out how this happened, how animal rights and environmental activists who have never injured anyone could become the FBI's number one domestic terrorism threat. A few years later, I was invited to testify before Congress about my reporting, and I told lawmakers that, while everybody is talking about going green, some people are risking their lives to defend forests and to stop oil pipelines. They're physically putting their bodies on the line between the whalers' harpoons and the whales. These are everyday people, like these protesters in Italy who spontaneously climbed over barbed wire fences to rescue beagles from animal testing. And these movements have been incredibly effective and popular, so in 1985, their opponents made up a new word, eco-terrorist, to shift how we view them. They just made it up. Now these companies have backed new laws like the Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act, which turns activism into terrorism if it causes a loss of profits. Now most people never even heard about this law, including members of Congress. Less than one percent were in the room when it passed the House. The rest were outside at a new memorial. They were praising Dr. King as his style of activism was branded as terrorism if done in the name of animals or the environment. Supporters say laws like this are needed for the extremists: the vandals, the arsonists, the radicals. But right now, companies like TransCanada are briefing police in presentations like this one about how to prosecute nonviolent protesters as terrorists. The FBI's training documents on eco-terrorism are not about violence, they're about public relations. Today, in multiple countries, corporations are pushing new laws that make it illegal to photograph animal cruelty on their farms. The latest was in Idaho just two weeks ago, and today we released a lawsuit challenging it as unconstitutional as a threat to journalism. The first of these ag-gag prosecutions, as they're called, was a young woman named Amy Meyer, and Amy saw a sick cow being moved by a bulldozer outside of a slaughterhouse as she was on the public street. And Amy did what any of us would: She filmed it. When I found out about her story, I wrote about it, and within 24 hours, it created such an uproar that the prosecutors just dropped all the charges. But apparently, even exposing stuff like that is a threat. Through the Freedom of Information Act, I learned that the counter-terrorism unit has been monitoring my articles and speeches like this one. They even included this nice little write-up of my book. They described it as "compelling and well-written." (Applause) Blurb on the next book, right? The point of all of this is to make us afraid, but as a journalist, I have an unwavering faith in the power of education. Our best weapon is sunlight. Dostoevsky wrote that the whole work of man is to prove he's a man and not a piano key. Over and over throughout history, people in power have used fear to silence the truth and to silence dissent. It's time we strike a new note. Thank you. (Applause)

Four years ago, a security researcher, or, as most people would call it, a hacker, found a way to literally make ATMs throw money at him. His name was Barnaby Jack, and this technique was later called "jackpotting" in his honor. I'm here today because I think we actually need hackers. Barnaby Jack could have easily turned into a career criminal or James Bond villain with his knowledge, but he chose to show the world his research instead. He believed that sometimes you have to demo a threat to spark a solution. And I feel the same way. That's why I'm here today. We are often terrified and fascinated by the power hackers now have. They scare us. But the choices they make have dramatic outcomes that influence us all. So I am here today because I think we need hackers, and in fact, they just might be the immune system for the information age. Sometimes they make us sick, but they also find those hidden threats in our world, and they make us fix it. I knew that I might get hacked for giving this talk, so let me save you the effort. In true TED fashion, here is my most embarrassing picture. But it would be difficult for you to find me in it, because I'm the one who looks like a boy standing to the side. I was such a nerd back then that even the boys on the Dungeons and Dragons team wouldn't let me join. This is who I was, but this is who I wanted to be: Angelina Jolie. She portrayed Acid Burn in the '95 film "Hackers." She was pretty and she could rollerblade, but being a hacker, that made her powerful. And I wanted to be just like her, so I started spending a lot of time on hacker chat rooms and online forums. I remember one late night I found a bit of PHP code. I didn't really know what it did, but I copy-pasted it and used it anyway to get into a password-protected site like that. Open Sesame. It was a simple trick, and I was just a script kiddie back then, but to me, that trick, it felt like this, like I had discovered limitless potential at my fingertips. This is the rush of power that hackers feel. It's geeks just like me discovering they have access to superpower, one that requires the skill and tenacity of their intellect, but thankfully no radioactive spiders. But with great power comes great responsibility, and you all like to think that if we had such powers, we would only use them for good. But what if you could read your ex's emails, or add a couple zeros to your bank account. What would you do then? Indeed, many hackers do not resist those temptations, and so they are responsible in one way or another to billions of dollars lost each year to fraud, malware or plain old identity theft, which is a serious issue. But there are other hackers, hackers who just like to break things, and it is precisely those hackers that can find the weaker elements in our world and make us fix it. This is what happened last year when another security researcher called Kyle Lovett discovered a gaping hole in the design of certain wireless routers like you might have in your home or office. He learned that anyone could remotely connect to these devices over the Internet and download documents from hard drives attached to those routers, no password needed. He reported it to the company, of course, but they ignored his report. Perhaps they thought universal access was a feature, not a bug, until two months ago when a group of hackers used it to get into people's files. But they didn't steal anything. They left a note: Your router and your documents can be accessed by anyone in the world. Here's what you should do to fix it. We hope we helped. By getting into people's files like that, yeah, they broke the law, but they also forced that company to fix their product. Making vulnerabilities known to the public is a practice called full disclosure in the hacker community, and it is controversial, but it does make me think of how hackers have an evolving effect on technologies we use every day. This is what Khalil did. Khalil is a Palestinian hacker from the West Bank, and he found a serious privacy flaw on Facebook which he attempted to report through the company's bug bounty program. These are usually great arrangements for companies to reward hackers disclosing vulnerabilities they find in their code. Unfortunately, due to some miscommunications, his report was not acknowledged. Frustrated with the exchange, he took to use his own discovery to post on Mark Zuckerberg's wall. This got their attention, all right, and they fixed the bug, but because he hadn't reported it properly, he was denied the bounty usually paid out for such discoveries. Thankfully for Khalil, a group of hackers were watching out for him. In fact, they raised more than 13,000 dollars to reward him for this discovery, raising a vital discussion in the technology industry about how we come up with incentives for hackers to do the right thing. But I think there's a greater story here still. Even companies founded by hackers, like Facebook was, still have a complicated relationship when it comes to hackers. And so for more conservative organizations, it is going to take time and adapting in order to embrace hacker culture and the creative chaos that it brings with it. But I think it's worth the effort, because the alternative, to blindly fight all hackers, is to go against the power you cannot control at the cost of stifling innovation and regulating knowledge. These are things that will come back and bite you. It is even more true if we go after hackers that are willing to risk their own freedom for ideals like the freedom of the web, especially in times like this, like today even, as governments and corporates fight to control the Internet. I find it astounding that someone from the shadowy corners of cyberspace can become its voice of opposition, its last line of defense even, perhaps someone like Anonymous, the leading brand of global hacktivism. This universal hacker movement needs no introduction today, but six years ago they were not much more than an Internet subculture dedicated to sharing silly pictures of funny cats and Internet trolling campaigns. Their moment of transformation was in early 2008 when the Church of Scientology attempted to remove certain leaked videos from appearing on certain websites. This is when Anonymous was forged out of the seemingly random collection of Internet dwellers. It turns out, the Internet doesn't like it when you try to remove things from it, and it will react with cyberattacks and elaborate pranks and with a series of organized protests all around the world, from my hometown of Tel Aviv to Adelaide, Australia. This proved that Anonymous and this idea can rally the masses from the keyboards to the streets, and it laid the foundations for dozens of future operations against perceived injustices to their online and offline world. Since then, they've gone after many targets. They've uncovered corruption, abuse. They've hacked popes and politicians, and I think their effect is larger than simple denial of service attacks that take down websites or even leak sensitive documents. I think that, like Robin Hood, they are in the business of redistribution, but what they are after isn't your money. It's not your documents. It's your attention. They grab the spotlight for causes they support, forcing us to take note, acting as a global magnifying glass for issues that we are not as aware of but perhaps we should be. They have been called many names from criminals to terrorists, and I cannot justify their illegal means, but the ideas they fight for are ones that matter to us all. The reality is, hackers can do a lot more than break things. They can bring people together. And if the Internet doesn't like it when you try to remove things from it, just watch what happens when you try to shut the Internet down. This took place in Egypt in January 2011, and as President Hosni Mubarak attempted a desperate move to quash the rising revolution on the streets of Cairo, he sent his personal troops down to Egypt's Internet service providers and had them physically kill the switch on the country's connection to the world overnight. For a government to do a thing like that was unprecedented, and for hackers, it made it personal. Hackers like the Telecomix group were already active on the ground, helping Egyptians bypass censorship using clever workarounds like Morse code and ham radio. It was high season for low tech, which the government couldn't block, but when the Net went completely down, Telecomix brought in the big guns. They found European service providers that still had 20-year-old analog dial-up access infrastructure. They opened up 300 of those lines for Egyptians to use, serving slow but sweet Internet connection for Egyptians. This worked. It worked so well, in fact, one guy even used it to download an episode of "How I Met Your Mother." But while Egypt's future is still uncertain, when the same thing happened in Syria just one year later, Telecomix were prepared with those Internet lines, and Anonymous, they were perhaps the first international group to officially denounce the actions of the Syrian military by defacing their website. But with this sort of power, it really depends on where you stand, because one man's hero can be another's villain, and so the Syrian Electronic Army is a pro-Assad group of hackers who support his contentious regime. They've taken down multiple high-profile targets in the past few years, including the Associated Press's Twitter account, in which they posted a message about an attack on the White House injuring President Obama. This tweet was fake, of course, but the resulting drop in the Dow Jones index that day was most certainly not, and a lot of people lost a lot of money. This sort of thing is happening all over the world right now. In conflicts from the Crimean Peninsula to Latin America, from Europe to the United States, hackers are a force for social, political and military influence. As individuals or in groups, volunteers or military conflicts, there are hackers everywhere. They come from all walks of life, ethnicities, ideologies and genders, I might add. They are now shaping the world's stage. Hackers represent an exceptional force for change in the 21st century. This is because access to information is a critical currency of power, one which governments would like to control, a thing they attempt to do by setting up all-you-can-eat surveillance programs, a thing they need hackers for, by the way. And so the establishment has long had a love-hate relationship when it comes to hackers, because the same people who demonize hacking also utilize it at large. Two years ago, I saw General Keith Alexander. He's the NSA director and U.S. cyber commander, but instead of his four star general uniform, he was wearing jeans and a t-shirt. This was at DEF CON, the world's largest hacker conference. Perhaps like me, General Alexander didn't see 12,000 criminals that day in Vegas. I think he saw untapped potential. In fact, he was there to give a hiring pitch. "In this room right here," he said, "is the talent our nation needs." Well, hackers in the back row replied, "Then stop arresting us." (Applause) Indeed, for years, hackers have been on the wrong side of the fence, but in light of what we know now, who is more watchful of our online world? The rules of the game are not that clear anymore, but hackers are perhaps the only ones still capable of challenging overreaching governments and data-hoarding corporates on their own playing field. To me, that represents hope. For the past three decades, hackers have done a lot of things, but they have also impacted civil liberties, innovation and Internet freedom, so I think it's time we take a good look at how we choose to portray them, because if we keep expecting them to be the bad guys, how can they be the heroes too? My years in the hacker world have made me realize both the problem and the beauty about hackers: They just can't see something broken in the world and leave it be. They are compelled to either exploit it or try and change it, and so they find the vulnerable aspects in our rapidly changing world. They make us, they force us to fix things or demand something better, and I think we need them to do just that, because after all, it is not information that wants to be free, it's us. Thank you very much. Thank you. (Applause) Hack the planet!

I grew up in a very small country town in Victoria. I had a very normal, low-key kind of upbringing. I went to school, I hung out with my friends, I fought with my younger sisters. It was all very normal. And when I was 15, a member of my local community approached my parents and wanted to nominate me for a community achievement award. And my parents said, "Hm, that's really nice, but there's kind of one glaring problem with that. She hasn't actually achieved anything." (Laughter) And they were right, you know. I went to school, I got good marks, I had a very low-key after school job in my mum's hairdressing salon, and I spent a lot of time watching "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" and "Dawson's Creek." Yeah, I know. What a contradiction. But they were right, you know. I wasn't doing anything that was out of the ordinary at all. I wasn't doing anything that could be considered an achievement if you took disability out of the equation. Years later, I was on my second teaching round in a Melbourne high school, and I was about 20 minutes into a year 11 legal studies class when this boy put up his hand and said, "Hey miss, when are you going to start doing your speech?" And I said, "What speech?" You know, I'd been talking them about defamation law for a good 20 minutes. And he said, "You know, like, your motivational speaking. You know, when people in wheelchairs come to school, they usually say, like, inspirational stuff?" (Laughter) "It's usually in the big hall." And that's when it dawned on me: This kid had only ever experienced disabled people as objects of inspiration. We are not, to this kid -- and it's not his fault, I mean, that's true for many of us. For lots of us, disabled people are not our teachers or our doctors or our manicurists. We're not real people. We are there to inspire. And in fact, I am sitting on this stage looking like I do in this wheelchair, and you are probably kind of expecting me to inspire you. Right? (Laughter) Yeah. Well, ladies and gentlemen, I'm afraid I'm going to disappoint you dramatically. I am not here to inspire you. I am here to tell you that we have been lied to about disability. Yeah, we've been sold the lie that disability is a Bad Thing, capital B, capital T. It's a bad thing, and to live with a disability makes you exceptional. It's not a bad thing, and it doesn't make you exceptional. And in the past few years, we've been able to propagate this lie even further via social media. You may have seen images like this one: "The only disability in life is a bad attitude." Or this one: "Your excuse is invalid." Indeed. Or this one: "Before you quit, try!" These are just a couple of examples, but there are a lot of these images out there. You know, you might have seen the one, the little girl with no hands drawing a picture with a pencil held in her mouth. You might have seen a child running on carbon fiber prosthetic legs. And these images, there are lots of them out there, they are what we call inspiration porn. (Laughter) And I use the term porn deliberately, because they objectify one group of people for the benefit of another group of people. So in this case, we're objectifying disabled people for the benefit of nondisabled people. The purpose of these images is to inspire you, to motivate you, so that we can look at them and think, "Well, however bad my life is, it could be worse. I could be that person." But what if you are that person? I've lost count of the number of times that I've been approached by strangers wanting to tell me that they think I'm brave or inspirational, and this was long before my work had any kind of public profile. They were just kind of congratulating me for managing to get up in the morning and remember my own name. (Laughter) And it is objectifying. These images, those images objectify disabled people for the benefit of nondisabled people. They are there so that you can look at them and think that things aren't so bad for you, to put your worries into perspective. And life as a disabled person is actually somewhat difficult. We do overcome some things. But the things that we're overcoming are not the things that you think they are. They are not things to do with our bodies. I use the term "disabled people" quite deliberately, because I subscribe to what's called the social model of disability, which tells us that we are more disabled by the society that we live in than by our bodies and our diagnoses. So I have lived in this body a long time. I'm quite fond of it. It does the things that I need it to do, and I've learned to use it to the best of its capacity just as you have, and that's the thing about those kids in those pictures as well. They're not doing anything out of the ordinary. They are just using their bodies to the best of their capacity. So is it really fair to objectify them in the way that we do, to share those images? People, when they say, "You're an inspiration," they mean it as a compliment. And I know why it happens. It's because of the lie, it's because we've been sold this lie that disability makes you exceptional. And it honestly doesn't. And I know what you're thinking. You know, I'm up here bagging out inspiration, and you're thinking, "Jeez, Stella, aren't you inspired sometimes by some things?" And the thing is, I am. I learn from other disabled people all the time. I'm learning not that I am luckier than them, though. I am learning that it's a genius idea to use a pair of barbecue tongs to pick up things that you dropped. (Laughter) I'm learning that nifty trick where you can charge your mobile phone battery from your chair battery. Genius. We are learning from each others' strength and endurance, not against our bodies and our diagnoses, but against a world that exceptionalizes and objectifies us. I really think that this lie that we've been sold about disability is the greatest injustice. It makes life hard for us. And that quote, "The only disability in life is a bad attitude," the reason that that's bullshit is because it's just not true, because of the social model of disability. No amount of smiling at a flight of stairs has ever made it turn into a ramp. Never. (Laughter) (Applause) Smiling at a television screen isn't going to make closed captions appear for people who are deaf. No amount of standing in the middle of a bookshop and radiating a positive attitude is going to turn all those books into braille. It's just not going to happen. I really want to live in a world where disability is not the exception, but the norm. I want to live in a world where a 15-year-old girl sitting in her bedroom watching "Buffy the Vampire Slayer" isn't referred to as achieving anything because she's doing it sitting down. I want to live in a world where we don't have such low expectations of disabled people that we are congratulated for getting out of bed and remembering our own names in the morning. I want to live in a world where we value genuine achievement for disabled people, and I want to live in a world where a kid in year 11 in a Melbourne high school is not one bit surprised that his new teacher is a wheelchair user. Disability doesn't make you exceptional, but questioning what you think you know about it does. Thank you. (Applause)

Election night 2008 was a night that tore me in half. It was the night that Barack Obama was elected. [One hundred and forty-three] years after the end of slavery, and [43] years after the passage of the Voting Rights Act, an African-American was elected president. Many of us never thought that this was possible until the moment that it happened. And in many ways, it was the climax of the black civil rights movement in the United States. I was in California that night, which was ground zero at the time for another movement: the marriage equality movement. Gay marriage was on the ballot in the form of Proposition 8, and as the election returns started to come in, it became clear that the right for same sex couples to marry, which had recently been granted by the California courts, was going to be taken away. So on the same night that Barack Obama won his historic presidency, the lesbian and gay community suffered one of our most painful defeats. And then it got even worse. Pretty much immediately, African-Americans started to be blamed for the passage of Proposition 8. This was largely due to an incorrect poll that said that blacks had voted for the measure by something like 70 percent. This turned out not to be true, but this idea of pervasive black homophobia set in, and was grabbed on by the media. I couldn't tear myself away from the coverage. I listened to some gay commentator say that the African-American community was notoriously homophobic, and now that civil rights had been achieved for us, we wanted to take away other people's rights. There were even reports of racist epithets being thrown at some of the participants of the gay rights rallies that took place after the election. And on the other side, some African-Americans dismissed or ignored homophobia that was indeed real in our community. And others resented this comparison between gay rights and civil rights, and once again, the sinking feeling that two minority groups of which I'm both a part of were competing with each other instead of supporting each other overwhelmed and, frankly, pissed me off. Now, I'm a documentary filmmaker, so after going through my pissed off stage and yelling at the television and radio, my next instinct was to make a movie. And what guided me in making this film was, how was this happening? How was it that the gay rights movement was being pitted against the civil rights movement? And this wasn't just an abstract question. I'm a beneficiary of both movements, so this was actually personal. But then something else happened after that election in 2008. The march towards gay equality accelerated at a pace that surprised and shocked everyone, and is still reshaping our laws and our policies, our institutions and our entire country. And so it started to become increasingly clear to me that this pitting of the two movements against each other actually didn't make sense, and that they were in fact much, much more interconnected, and that, in fact, some of the way that the gay rights movement has been able to make such incredible gains so quickly is that it's used some of the same tactics and strategies that were first laid down by the civil rights movement. Let's just look at a few of these strategies. First off, it's really interesting to see, to actually visually see, how quick the gay rights movement has made its gains, if you look at a few of the major events on a timeline of both freedom movements. Now, there are tons of milestones in the civil rights movement, but the first one we're going to start with is the 1955 Montgomery bus boycott. This was a protest campaign against Montgomery, Alabama's segregation on their public transit system, and it began when a woman named Rosa Parks refused to give up her seat to a white person. The campaign lasted a year, and it galvanized the civil rights movement like nothing had before it. And I call this strategy the "I'm tired of your foot on my neck" strategy. So gays and lesbians have been in society since societies began, but up until the mid-20th century, homosexual acts were still illegal in most states. So just 14 years after the Montgomery bus boycott, a group of LGBT folks took that same strategy. It's known as Stonewall, in 1969, and it's where a group of LGBT patrons fought back against police beatings at a Greenwich Village bar that sparked three days of rioting. Incidentally, black and latino LGBT folks were at the forefront of this rebellion, and it's a really interesting example of the intersection of our struggles against racism, homophobia, gender identity and police brutality. After Stonewall happened, gay liberation groups sprang up all over the country, and the modern gay rights movement as we know it took off. So the next moment to look at on the timeline is the 1963 March on Washington. This was a seminal event in the civil rights movement and it's where African-Americans called for both civil and economic justice. And it's of course where Martin Luther King delivered his famous "I have a dream" speech, but what's actually less known is that this march was organized by a man named Bayard Rustin. Bayard was an out gay man, and he's considered one of the most brilliant strategists of the civil rights movement. He later in his life became a fierce advocate of LGBT rights as well, and his life is testament to the intersection of the struggles. The March on Washington is one of the high points of the movement, and it's where there was a fervent belief that African-Americans too could be a part of American democracy. I call this strategy the "We are visible and many in numbers" strategy. Some early gay activists were actually directly inspired by the march, and some had taken part. Gay pioneer Jack Nichols said, "We marched with Martin Luther King, seven of us from the Mattachine Society" -- which was an early gay rights organization — "and from that moment on, we had our own dream about a gay rights march of similar proportions." Several years later, a series of marches took place, each one gaining the momentum of the gay freedom struggle. The first one was in 1979, and the second one took place in 1987. The third one was held in 1993. Almost a million people showed up, and people were so energized and excited by what had taken place, they went back to their own communities and started their own political and social organizations, further increasing the visibility of the movement. The day of that march, October 11, was then declared National Coming Out Day, and is still celebrated all over the world. These marches set the groundwork for the historic changes that we see happening today in the United States. And lastly, the "Loving" strategy. The name speaks for itself. In 1967, the Supreme Court ruled in Loving v. Virginia, and invalidated all laws that prohibited interracial marriage. This is considered one of the Supreme Court's landmark civil rights cases. In 1996, President Clinton signed the Defense of Marriage Act, known as DOMA, and that made the federal government only have to recognize marriages between a man and a woman. In United States v. Windsor, a 79-year-old lesbian named Edith Windsor sued the federal government when she was forced to pay estate taxes on her deceased wife's property, something that heterosexual couples don't have to do. And as the case wound its way through the lower courts, the Loving case was repeatedly cited as precedent. When it got to the Supreme Court in 2013, the Supreme Court agreed, and DOMA was thrown out. It was incredible. But the gay marriage movement has been making gains for years now. To date, 17 states have passed laws allowing marriage equality. It's become the de facto battle for gay equality, and it seems like daily, laws prohibiting it are being challenged in the courts, even in places like Texas and Utah, which no one saw coming. So a lot has changed since that night in 2008 when I felt torn in half. I did go on to make that film. It's a documentary film, and it's called "The New Black," and it looks at how the African-American community is grappling with the gay rights issue in light of the gay marriage movement and this fight over the meaning of civil rights. And I wanted to capture some of this incredible change that was happening, and as luck or politics would have it, another marriage battle started gearing up, this time in Maryland, where African-Americans make up 30 percent of the electorate. So this tension between gay rights and civil rights started to bubble up once again, and I was lucky enough to capture how some people were making the connection between the movements this time. This is a clip of Karess Taylor-Hughes and Samantha Masters, two characters in the film, as they hit the streets of Baltimore and try to convince potential voters. (Video) Samantha Masters: That's what's up, man, this is a righteous man over here. Okay, are you registered to vote? Man: No. Karess Taylor-Hughes: Okay. How old are you? Man: 21. KTH: 21? You gotta get registered to vote. We got to get you registered to vote. Man: I ain't voting on no gay shit. SM: Okay, why? What's up? Man: I ain't with that. SM: That's not cool. Man: What made you be gay? SM: So what made you be straight? So what made you be straight? Man 2: You can't answer that question. (Laughter) KSM: I used to not have the same rights as you, but I know that because a black man like yourself stood up for a woman like me, I know that I've got the same opportunities. So you, as a black man, have the opportunity to stand up for somebody else. Whether you're gay or not, these are your brothers and sisters out here, and they need you to represent. Man 2: Who is you to tell somebody who they can't have sex with, who they can't be with? They ain't got that power. Nobody has that power to say, you can't marry that young lady. Who has that power? Nobody. SM: But you know what? Our state has put the power in your hands, and so what we need you to do is vote for, you gonna vote for 6. Man 2: I got you. SM: Vote for 6, okay? Man 2: I got you. KSM: All right, do y'all need community service hours? You do? All right, you can always volunteer with us to get community service hours. Y'all want to do that? We feed you. We bring you pizza. (Laughter) (Applause) Yoruba Richen: Thank you. What's amazing to me about that clip that we just captured as we were filming is, it really shows how Karess understands the history of the civil rights movement, but she's not restricted by it. She doesn't just limit it to black people. She sees it as a blueprint for expanding rights to gays and lesbians. Maybe because she's younger, she's like 25, she's able to do this a little bit more easily, but the fact is that Maryland voters did pass that marriage equality amendment, and in fact it was the first time that marriage equality was directly voted on and passed by the voters. African-Americans supported it at a higher level than had ever been recorded. It was a complete turnaround from that night in 2008 when Proposition 8 was passed. It was, and feels, monumental. We in the LGBT community have gone from being a pathologized and reviled and criminalized group to being seen as part of the great human quest for dignity and equality. We've gone from having to hide our sexuality in order to maintain our jobs and our families to literally getting a place at the table with the president and a shout out at his second inauguration. I just want to read what he said at that inauguration: "We the people declare today that the most evident of truths, that all of us are created equal. It is the star that guides us still, just as it guided our forebears through Seneca Falls and Selma and Stonewall." Now we know that everything is not perfect, especially when you look at what's happening with the LGBT rights issue internationally, but it says something about how far we've come when our president puts the gay freedom struggle in the context of the other great freedom struggles of our time: the women's rights movement and the civil rights movement. His statement demonstrates not only the interconnectedness of those movements, but how each one borrowed and was inspired by the other. So just as Martin Luther King learned from and borrowed from Gandhi's tactics of civil disobedience and nonviolence, which became a bedrock of the civil rights movement, the gay rights movement saw what worked in the civil rights movement, and they used some of those same strategies and tactics to make gains at an even quicker pace. Maybe one more other reason for the relative quick progress of the gay rights movement. Whereas a lot of us continue to still live in racially segregated spaces, LGBT folks, we are everywhere. We are in urban communities and rural communities, communities of color, immigrant communities, churches and mosques and synagogues. We are your mothers and brothers and sisters and sons. And when someone that you love or a family member comes out, it may be easier to support their quest for equality. And in fact, the gay rights movement asks us to support justice and equality from a space of love. That may be the biggest, greatest gift that the movement has given us. It calls on us to access that which is most universal and most intimate: a love of our brother and our sister and our neighbor. I just want to end with a quote by one of our greatest freedom fighters who's no longer with us, Nelson Mandela of South Africa. Nelson Mandela led South Africa after the dark and brutal days of Apartheid, and out of the ashes of that legalized racial discrimination, he led South Africa to become the first country in the world to ban discrimination based on sexual orientation within its constitution. Mandela said, "For to be free is not merely to cast off one's chains, but to live in a way that respects and enhances the freedom of others." So as these movements continue on, and as freedom struggles around the world continue on, let's remember that not only are they interconnected, but they must support and enhance each other for us to be truly victorious. Thank you. (Applause)

Even nature's most disgusting creatures have important secrets, but who would want a swarm of cockroaches coming towards them? Yet one of the greatest differences between natural and human technologies relates to robustness. Robust systems are stable in complex and new environments. Remarkably, cockroaches can self-stabilize running over rough terrain. When we put a jet pack on them, or give them a perturbation like an earthquake, we discovered that their wonderfully tuned legs allow them to self-stabilize without using any of their brainpower. They can go over complex terrain like grass, no problem, and not get destabilized. We discovered a new behavior where, because of their shape, they actually roll automatically to their side to go through this artificial test bit of grass. Robust systems can perform multiple tasks with the same structure. Here's a new behavior we've discovered. The animals rapidly invert and disappear in less than 150 milliseconds — you never see them — using the same structures that they use to run, their legs. They can run upside down very rapidly on rods, branches and wires, and if you perturb one of those branches, they can do this. They can perform gymnastic maneuvers like no robot we have yet. And they have nearly unlimited maneuverability with that same structure and unprecedented access to a variety of different areas. They have wings for flying when they get warm, but they use those same wings to flip over if they get destabilized. Very effective. Robust systems are also fault tolerant and fail-safe. This is the foot of a cockroach. It has spines, gluey pads and claws, but if you take off those feet, they can still go over rough terrain, like the bottom video that you see, without hardly slowing down. Extraordinary. They can run up mesh without their feet. Here's an animal using a normal, alternating tripod: three legs, three legs, three legs, but in nature, the insects often have lost their legs. Here's one moving with two middle legs gone. It can even lose three legs, in a tripod, and adopt a new gait, a hopping gait. And I point out that all of these videos are slowed down 20 times, so they're actually really fast, when you see this. Robust systems are also damage resistant. Here's an animal climbing up a wall. It looks like a rapid, smooth, vertical climb, but when you slow it down, you see something very different. Here's what they do. They intentionally have a head-on collision with the wall so they don't slow down and can transition up it in 75 milliseconds. And they can do this in part because they have extraordinary exoskeletons. And they're really just made up of compliant joints that are tubes and plates connected to one another. Here's a dissection of an abdomen of a cockroach. You see these plates, and you see the compliant membrane. My engineering colleague at Berkeley designed with his students a novel manufacturing technique where you essentially origami the exoskeleton, you laser cut it, laminate it, and you fold it up into a robot. And you can do that now in less than 15 minutes. These robots, called DASH, for Dynamic Autonomous Sprawled Hexapod, are highly compliant robots, and they're remarkably robust as a result of these features. They're certainly incredibly damage resistant. (Laughter) They even have some of the behaviors of the cockroaches. So they can use their smart, compliant body to transition up a wall in a very simple way. They even have some of the beginnings of the rapid inversion behavior where they disappear. Now we want to know why they can go anywhere. We discovered that they can go through three-millimeter gaps, the height of two pennies, two stacked pennies, and when they do this, they can actually run through those confined spaces at high speeds, although you never see it. To understand it better, we did a CT scan of the exoskeleton and showed that they can compress their body by over 40 percent. We put them in a materials testing machine to look at the stress strain analysis and showed that they can withstand forces 800 times their body weight, and after this they can fly and run absolutely normally. So you never know where curiosity-based research will lead, and someday you may want a swarm of cockroach-inspired robots to come at you. (Laughter) Thank you. (Applause)

I read poetry all the time and write about it frequently and take poems apart to see how they work because I'm a word person. I understand the world best, most fully, in words rather than, say, pictures or numbers, and when I have a new experience or a new feeling, I'm a little frustrated until I can try to put it into words. I think I've always been that way. I devoured science fiction as a child. I still do. And I found poems by Andrew Marvell and Matthew Arnold and Emily Dickinson and William Butler Yeats because they were quoted in science fiction, and I loved their sounds and I went on to read about ottava rima and medial caesuras and enjambment and all that other technical stuff that you care about if you already care about poems, because poems already made me happier and sadder and more alive. And I became a poetry critic because I wanted to know how and why. Now, poetry isn't one thing that serves one purpose any more than music or computer programming serve one purpose. The greek word poem, it just means "a made thing," and poetry is a set of techniques, ways of making patterns that put emotions into words. The more techniques you know, the more things you can make, and the more patterns you can recognize in things you might already like or love. That said, poetry does seem to be especially good at certain things. For example, we are all going to die. Poetry can help us live with that. Poems are made of words, nothing but words. The particulars in poems are like the particularities, the personalities, that distinguish people from one another. Poems are easy to share, easy to pass on, and when you read a poem, you can imagine someone's speaking to you or for you, maybe even someone far away or someone made up or someone deceased. That's why we can go to poems when we want to remember something or someone, to celebrate or to look beyond death or to say goodbye, and that's one reason poems can seem important, even to people who aren't me, who don't so much live in a world of words. The poet Frank O'Hara said, "If you don't need poetry, bully for you," but he also said when he didn't want to be alive anymore, the thought that he wouldn't write any more poems had stopped him. Poetry helps me want to be alive, and I want to show you why by showing you how, how a couple of poems react to the fact that we're alive in one place at one time in one culture, and in another we won't be alive at all. So here's one of the first poems I memorized. It could address a child or an adult. "From far, from eve and morning From yon twelve-winded sky, The stuff of life to knit me Blew hither; here am I. Now — for a breath I tarry Nor yet disperse apart — Take my hand quick and tell me, What have you in your heart. Speak now, and I will answer; How shall I help you, say; Ere to the wind's twelve quarters I take my endless way." [A. E. Housman] Now, this poem has appealed to science fiction writers. It's furnished at least three science fiction titles, I think because it says poems can brings us news from the future or the past or across the world, because their patterns can seem to tell you what's in somebody's heart. It says poems can bring people together temporarily, which I think is true, and it sticks in my head not just because it rhymes but for how it rhymes, cleanly and simply on the two and four, "say" and "way," with anticipatory hints on the one and three, "answer" and "quarters," as if the poem itself were coming together. It plays up the fact that we die by exaggerating the speed of our lives. A few years on Earth become one speech, one breath. It's a poem about loneliness -- the "I" in the poem feels no connection will last — and it might look like a plea for help 'til you get to the word "help," where this "I" facing you, taking your hand, is more like a teacher or a genie, or at least that's what he wants to believe. It would not be the first time a poet had written the poem that he wanted to hear. Now, this next poem really changed what I liked and what I read and what I felt I could read as an adult. It might not make any sense to you if you haven't seen it before. "The Garden" "Oleander: coral from lipstick ads in the 50's. Fruit of the tree of such knowledge To smack (thin air) meaning kiss or hit. It appears in the guise of outworn usages because we are bad? Big masculine threat, insinuating and slangy." [Rae Armantrout] Now, I found this poem in an anthology of almost equally confusing poems in 1989. I just heard that there were these scandalous writers called Language poets who didn't make any sense, and I wanted to go and see for myself what they were like, and some of them didn't do much for me, but this writer, Rae Armantrout, did an awful lot, and I kept reading her until I felt I knew what was going on, as I do with this poem. It's about the Garden of Eden and the Fall and the Biblical story of the Fall, in which sex as we know it and death and guilt come into the world at the same time. It's also about how appearances deceive, how our culture can sweep us along into doing and saying things we didn't intend or don't like, and Armantrout's style is trying to help us stop or slow down. "Smack" can mean "kiss" as in air kisses, as in lip-smacking, but that can lead to "smack" as in "hit" as in domestic abuse, because sexual attraction can seem threatening. The red that means fertility can also mean poison. Oleander is poisonous. And outworn usages like "smack" for "kiss" or "hit" can help us see how our unacknowledged assumptions can make us believe we are bad, either because sex is sinful or because we tolerate so much sexism. We let guys tell women what to do. The poem reacts to old lipstick ads, and its edginess about statement, its reversals and halts, have everything to do with resisting the language of ads that want to tell us so easily what to want, what to do, what to think. That resistance is a lot of the point of the poem, which shows me, Armantrout shows me what it's like to hear grave threats and mortal dishonesty in the language of everyday life, and once she's done that, I think she can show other people, women and men, what it's like to feel that way and say to other people, women and men who feel so alienated or so threatened that they're not alone. Now, how do I know that I'm right about this somewhat confusing poem? Well in this case, I emailed the poet a draft of my talk and she said, "Yeah, yeah, that's about it." Yeah. (Laughter) (Applause) But usually, you can't know. You never know. You can't be sure, and that's okay. All we can do we is listen to poems and look at poems and guess and see if they can bring us what we need, and if you're wrong about some part of a poem, nothing bad will happen. Now, this next poem is older than Armantrout's, but a little younger than A. E. Housman's. "The Brave Man" "The sun, that brave man, Comes through boughs that lie in wait, That brave man. Green and gloomy eyes In dark forms of the grass Run away. The good stars, Pale helms and spiky spurs, Run away. Fears of my bed, Fears of life and fears of death, Run away. That brave man comes up From below and walks without meditation, That brave man." [Wallace Stevens] Now, the sun in this poem, in Wallace Stevens' poem, seems so grave because the person in the poem is so afraid. The sun comes up in the morning through branches, dispels the dew, the eyes, on the grass, and defeats stars envisioned as armies. "Brave" has its old sense of showy as well as its modern sense, courage. This sun is not afraid to show his face. But the person in the poem is afraid. He might have been up all night. That is the reveal Stevens saves for that fourth stanza, where run away has become a refrain. This person might want to run away too, but fortified by the sun's example, he might just rise. Stevens saves that sonically odd word "meditation" for the end. Unlike the sun, human beings think. We meditate on past and future, life and death, above and below. And it can make us afraid. Poems, the patterns in poems, show us not just what somebody thought or what someone did or what happened but what it was like to be a person like that, to be so anxious, so lonely, so inquisitive, so goofy, so preposterous, so brave. That's why poems can seem at once so durable, so personal, and so ephemeral, like something inside and outside you at once. The Scottish poet Denise Riley compares poetry to a needle, a sliver of outside I cradle inside, and the American poet Terrance Hayes wrote six poems called "Wind in a Box." One of them asks, "Tell me, what am I going to do when I'm dead?" And the answer is that he'll stay with us or won't stay with us inside us as wind, as air, as words. It is easier than ever to find poems that might stay inside you, that might stay with you, from long, long ago, or from right this minute, from far away or from right close to where you live, almost no matter where you live. Poems can help you say, help you show how you're feeling, but they can also introduce you to feelings, ways of being in the world, people, very much unlike you, maybe even people from long, long ago. Some poems even tell you that that is what they can do. That's what John Keats is doing in his most mysterious, perhaps, poem. It's mysterious because it's probably unfinished, he probably left it unfinished, and because it might be meant for a character in a play, but it might just be Keats' thinking about what his own writing, his handwriting, could do, and in it I hear, at least I hear, mortality, and I hear the power of older poetic techniques, and I have the feeling, you might have the feeling, of meeting even for an instant, almost becoming, someone else from long ago, someone quite memorable. "This living hand, now warm and capable Of earnest grasping, would, if it were cold And in the icy silence of the tomb, So haunt thy days and chill thy dreaming nights That thou would wish thine own heart dry of blood So in my veins red life might stream again, And thou be conscience-calm’d -- see here it is -- I hold it towards you." Thanks. (Applause)

At every stage of our lives we make decisions that will profoundly influence the lives of the people we're going to become, and then when we become those people, we're not always thrilled with the decisions we made. So young people pay good money to get tattoos removed that teenagers paid good money to get. Middle-aged people rushed to divorce people who young adults rushed to marry. Older adults work hard to lose what middle-aged adults worked hard to gain. On and on and on. The question is, as a psychologist, that fascinates me is, why do we make decisions that our future selves so often regret? Now, I think one of the reasons -- I'll try to convince you today — is that we have a fundamental misconception about the power of time. Every one of you knows that the rate of change slows over the human lifespan, that your children seem to change by the minute but your parents seem to change by the year. But what is the name of this magical point in life where change suddenly goes from a gallop to a crawl? Is it teenage years? Is it middle age? Is it old age? The answer, it turns out, for most people, is now, wherever now happens to be. What I want to convince you today is that all of us are walking around with an illusion, an illusion that history, our personal history, has just come to an end, that we have just recently become the people that we were always meant to be and will be for the rest of our lives. Let me give you some data to back up that claim. So here's a study of change in people's personal values over time. Here's three values. Everybody here holds all of them, but you probably know that as you grow, as you age, the balance of these values shifts. So how does it do so? Well, we asked thousands of people. We asked half of them to predict for us how much their values would change in the next 10 years, and the others to tell us how much their values had changed in the last 10 years. And this enabled us to do a really interesting kind of analysis, because it allowed us to compare the predictions of people, say, 18 years old, to the reports of people who were 28, and to do that kind of analysis throughout the lifespan. Here's what we found. First of all, you are right, change does slow down as we age, but second, you're wrong, because it doesn't slow nearly as much as we think. At every age, from 18 to 68 in our data set, people vastly underestimated how much change they would experience over the next 10 years. We call this the "end of history" illusion. To give you an idea of the magnitude of this effect, you can connect these two lines, and what you see here is that 18-year-olds anticipate changing only as much as 50-year-olds actually do. Now it's not just values. It's all sorts of other things. For example, personality. Many of you know that psychologists now claim that there are five fundamental dimensions of personality: neuroticism, openness to experience, agreeableness, extraversion, and conscientiousness. Again, we asked people how much they expected to change over the next 10 years, and also how much they had changed over the last 10 years, and what we found, well, you're going to get used to seeing this diagram over and over, because once again the rate of change does slow as we age, but at every age, people underestimate how much their personalities will change in the next decade. And it isn't just ephemeral things like values and personality. You can ask people about their likes and dislikes, their basic preferences. For example, name your best friend, your favorite kind of vacation, what's your favorite hobby, what's your favorite kind of music. People can name these things. We ask half of them to tell us, "Do you think that that will change over the next 10 years?" and half of them to tell us, "Did that change over the last 10 years?" And what we find, well, you've seen it twice now, and here it is again: people predict that the friend they have now is the friend they'll have in 10 years, the vacation they most enjoy now is the one they'll enjoy in 10 years, and yet, people who are 10 years older all say, "Eh, you know, that's really changed." Does any of this matter? Is this just a form of mis-prediction that doesn't have consequences? No, it matters quite a bit, and I'll give you an example of why. It bedevils our decision-making in important ways. Bring to mind right now for yourself your favorite musician today and your favorite musician 10 years ago. I put mine up on the screen to help you along. Now we asked people to predict for us, to tell us how much money they would pay right now to see their current favorite musician perform in concert 10 years from now, and on average, people said they would pay 129 dollars for that ticket. And yet, when we asked them how much they would pay to see the person who was their favorite 10 years ago perform today, they say only 80 dollars. Now, in a perfectly rational world, these should be the same number, but we overpay for the opportunity to indulge our current preferences because we overestimate their stability. Why does this happen? We're not entirely sure, but it probably has to do with the ease of remembering versus the difficulty of imagining. Most of us can remember who we were 10 years ago, but we find it hard to imagine who we're going to be, and then we mistakenly think that because it's hard to imagine, it's not likely to happen. Sorry, when people say "I can't imagine that," they're usually talking about their own lack of imagination, and not about the unlikelihood of the event that they're describing. The bottom line is, time is a powerful force. It transforms our preferences. It reshapes our values. It alters our personalities. We seem to appreciate this fact, but only in retrospect. Only when we look backwards do we realize how much change happens in a decade. It's as if, for most of us, the present is a magic time. It's a watershed on the timeline. It's the moment at which we finally become ourselves. Human beings are works in progress that mistakenly think they're finished. The person you are right now is as transient, as fleeting and as temporary as all the people you've ever been. The one constant in our life is change. Thank you. (Applause)

Let me tell you a story. It goes back 200 million years. It's a story of the neocortex, which means "new rind." So in these early mammals, because only mammals have a neocortex, rodent-like creatures. It was the size of a postage stamp and just as thin, and was a thin covering around their walnut-sized brain, but it was capable of a new type of thinking. Rather than the fixed behaviors that non-mammalian animals have, it could invent new behaviors. So a mouse is escaping a predator, its path is blocked, it'll try to invent a new solution. That may work, it may not, but if it does, it will remember that and have a new behavior, and that can actually spread virally through the rest of the community. Another mouse watching this could say, "Hey, that was pretty clever, going around that rock," and it could adopt a new behavior as well. Non-mammalian animals couldn't do any of those things. They had fixed behaviors. Now they could learn a new behavior but not in the course of one lifetime. In the course of maybe a thousand lifetimes, it could evolve a new fixed behavior. That was perfectly okay 200 million years ago. The environment changed very slowly. It could take 10,000 years for there to be a significant environmental change, and during that period of time it would evolve a new behavior. Now that went along fine, but then something happened. Sixty-five million years ago, there was a sudden, violent change to the environment. We call it the Cretaceous extinction event. That's when the dinosaurs went extinct, that's when 75 percent of the animal and plant species went extinct, and that's when mammals overtook their ecological niche, and to anthropomorphize, biological evolution said, "Hmm, this neocortex is pretty good stuff," and it began to grow it. And mammals got bigger, their brains got bigger at an even faster pace, and the neocortex got bigger even faster than that and developed these distinctive ridges and folds basically to increase its surface area. If you took the human neocortex and stretched it out, it's about the size of a table napkin, and it's still a thin structure. It's about the thickness of a table napkin. But it has so many convolutions and ridges it's now 80 percent of our brain, and that's where we do our thinking, and it's the great sublimator. We still have that old brain that provides our basic drives and motivations, but I may have a drive for conquest, and that'll be sublimated by the neocortex into writing a poem or inventing an app or giving a TED Talk, and it's really the neocortex that's where the action is. Fifty years ago, I wrote a paper describing how I thought the brain worked, and I described it as a series of modules. Each module could do things with a pattern. It could learn a pattern. It could remember a pattern. It could implement a pattern. And these modules were organized in hierarchies, and we created that hierarchy with our own thinking. And there was actually very little to go on 50 years ago. It led me to meet President Johnson. I've been thinking about this for 50 years, and a year and a half ago I came out with the book "How To Create A Mind," which has the same thesis, but now there's a plethora of evidence. The amount of data we're getting about the brain from neuroscience is doubling every year. Spatial resolution of brainscanning of all types is doubling every year. We can now see inside a living brain and see individual interneural connections connecting in real time, firing in real time. We can see your brain create your thoughts. We can see your thoughts create your brain, which is really key to how it works. So let me describe briefly how it works. I've actually counted these modules. We have about 300 million of them, and we create them in these hierarchies. I'll give you a simple example. I've got a bunch of modules that can recognize the crossbar to a capital A, and that's all they care about. A beautiful song can play, a pretty girl could walk by, they don't care, but they see a crossbar to a capital A, they get very excited and they say "crossbar," and they put out a high probability on their output axon. That goes to the next level, and these layers are organized in conceptual levels. Each is more abstract than the next one, so the next one might say "capital A." That goes up to a higher level that might say "Apple." Information flows down also. If the apple recognizer has seen A-P-P-L, it'll think to itself, "Hmm, I think an E is probably likely," and it'll send a signal down to all the E recognizers saying, "Be on the lookout for an E, I think one might be coming." The E recognizers will lower their threshold and they see some sloppy thing, could be an E. Ordinarily you wouldn't think so, but we're expecting an E, it's good enough, and yeah, I've seen an E, and then apple says, "Yeah, I've seen an Apple." Go up another five levels, and you're now at a pretty high level of this hierarchy, and stretch down into the different senses, and you may have a module that sees a certain fabric, hears a certain voice quality, smells a certain perfume, and will say, "My wife has entered the room." Go up another 10 levels, and now you're at a very high level. You're probably in the frontal cortex, and you'll have modules that say, "That was ironic. That's funny. She's pretty." You might think that those are more sophisticated, but actually what's more complicated is the hierarchy beneath them. There was a 16-year-old girl, she had brain surgery, and she was conscious because the surgeons wanted to talk to her. You can do that because there's no pain receptors in the brain. And whenever they stimulated particular, very small points on her neocortex, shown here in red, she would laugh. So at first they thought they were triggering some kind of laugh reflex, but no, they quickly realized they had found the points in her neocortex that detect humor, and she just found everything hilarious whenever they stimulated these points. "You guys are so funny just standing around," was the typical comment, and they weren't funny, not while doing surgery. So how are we doing today? Well, computers are actually beginning to master human language with techniques that are similar to the neocortex. I actually described the algorithm, which is similar to something called a hierarchical hidden Markov model, something I've worked on since the '90s. "Jeopardy" is a very broad natural language game, and Watson got a higher score than the best two players combined. It got this query correct: "A long, tiresome speech delivered by a frothy pie topping," and it quickly responded, "What is a meringue harangue?" And Jennings and the other guy didn't get that. It's a pretty sophisticated example of computers actually understanding human language, and it actually got its knowledge by reading Wikipedia and several other encyclopedias. Five to 10 years from now, search engines will actually be based on not just looking for combinations of words and links but actually understanding, reading for understanding the billions of pages on the web and in books. So you'll be walking along, and Google will pop up and say, "You know, Mary, you expressed concern to me a month ago that your glutathione supplement wasn't getting past the blood-brain barrier. Well, new research just came out 13 seconds ago that shows a whole new approach to that and a new way to take glutathione. Let me summarize it for you." Twenty years from now, we'll have nanobots, because another exponential trend is the shrinking of technology. They'll go into our brain through the capillaries and basically connect our neocortex to a synthetic neocortex in the cloud providing an extension of our neocortex. Now today, I mean, you have a computer in your phone, but if you need 10,000 computers for a few seconds to do a complex search, you can access that for a second or two in the cloud. In the 2030s, if you need some extra neocortex, you'll be able to connect to that in the cloud directly from your brain. So I'm walking along and I say, "Oh, there's Chris Anderson. He's coming my way. I'd better think of something clever to say. I've got three seconds. My 300 million modules in my neocortex isn't going to cut it. I need a billion more." I'll be able to access that in the cloud. And our thinking, then, will be a hybrid of biological and non-biological thinking, but the non-biological portion is subject to my law of accelerating returns. It will grow exponentially. And remember what happens the last time we expanded our neocortex? That was two million years ago when we became humanoids and developed these large foreheads. Other primates have a slanted brow. They don't have the frontal cortex. But the frontal cortex is not really qualitatively different. It's a quantitative expansion of neocortex, but that additional quantity of thinking was the enabling factor for us to take a qualitative leap and invent language and art and science and technology and TED conferences. No other species has done that. And so, over the next few decades, we're going to do it again. We're going to again expand our neocortex, only this time we won't be limited by a fixed architecture of enclosure. It'll be expanded without limit. That additional quantity will again be the enabling factor for another qualitative leap in culture and technology. Thank you very much. (Applause)

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

Approximately 30 years ago, when I was in oncology at the Children's Hospital in Philadelphia, a father and a son walked into my office and they both had their right eye missing, and as I took the history, it became apparent that the father and the son had a rare form of inherited eye tumor, retinoblastoma, and the father knew that he had passed that fate on to his son. That moment changed my life. It propelled me to go on and to co-lead a team that discovered the first cancer susceptibility gene, and in the intervening decades since then, there has been literally a seismic shift in our understanding of what goes on, what genetic variations are sitting behind various diseases. In fact, for thousands of human traits, a molecular basis that's known for that, and for thousands of people, every day, there's information that they gain about the risk of going on to get this disease or that disease. At the same time, if you ask, "Has that impacted the efficiency, how we've been able to develop drugs?" the answer is not really. If you look at the cost of developing drugs, how that's done, it basically hasn't budged that. And so it's as if we have the power to diagnose yet not the power to fully treat. And there are two commonly given reasons for why that happens. One of them is it's early days. We're just learning the words, the fragments, the letters in the genetic code. We don't know how to read the sentences. We don't know how to follow the narrative. The other reason given is that most of those changes are a loss of function, and it's actually really hard to develop drugs that restore function. But today, I want us to step back and ask a more fundamental question, and ask, "What happens if we're thinking about this maybe in the wrong context?" We do a lot of studying of those who are sick and building up long lists of altered components. But maybe, if what we're trying to do is to develop therapies for prevention, maybe what we should be doing is studying those who don't get sick. Maybe we should be studying those that are well. A vast majority of those people are not necessarily carrying a particular genetic load or risk factor. They're not going to help us. There are going to be those individuals who are carrying a potential future risk, they're going to go on to get some symptom. That's not what we're looking for. What we're asking and looking for is, are there a very few set of individuals who are actually walking around with the risk that normally would cause a disease, but something in them, something hidden in them is actually protective and keeping them from exhibiting those symptoms? If you're going to do a study like that, you can imagine you'd like to look at lots and lots of people. We'd have to go and have a pretty wide study, and we realized that actually one way to think of this is, let us look at adults who are over 40 years of age, and let's make sure that we look at those who were healthy as kids. They might have had individuals in their families who had had a childhood disease, but not necessarily. And let's go and then screen those to find those who are carrying genes for childhood diseases. Now, some of you, I can see you putting your hands up going, "Uh, a little odd. What's your evidence that this could be feasible?" I want to give you two examples. The first comes from San Francisco. It comes from the 1980s and the 1990s, and you may know the story where there were individuals who had very high levels of the virus HIV. They went on to get AIDS. But there was a very small set of individuals who also had very high levels of HIV. They didn't get AIDS. And astute clinicians tracked that down, and what they found was they were carrying mutations. Notice, they were carrying mutations from birth that were protective, that were protecting them from going on to get AIDS. You may also know that actually a line of therapy has been coming along based on that fact. Second example, more recent, is elegant work done by Helen Hobbs, who said, "I'm going to look at individuals who have very high lipid levels, and I'm going to try to find those people with high lipid levels who don't go on to get heart disease." And again, what she found was some of those individuals had mutations that were protective from birth that kept them, even though they had high lipid levels, and you can see this is an interesting way of thinking about how you could develop preventive therapies. The project that we're working on is called "The Resilience Project: A Search for Unexpected Heroes," because what we are interested in doing is saying, can we find those rare individuals who might have these hidden protective factors? And in some ways, think of it as a decoder ring, a sort of resilience decoder ring that we're going to try to build. We've realized that we should do this in a systematic way, so we've said, let's take every single childhood inherited disease. Let's take them all, and let's pull them back a little bit by those that are known to have severe symptoms, where the parents, the child, those around them would know that they'd gotten sick, and let's go ahead and then frame them again by those parts of the genes where we know that there is a particular alteration that is known to be highly penetrant to cause that disease. Where are we going to look? Well, we could look locally. That makes sense. But we began to think, maybe we should look all over the world. Maybe we should look not just here but in remote places where their might be a distinct genetic context, there might be environmental factors that protect people. And let's look at a million individuals. Now the reason why we think it's a good time to do that now is, in the last couple of years, there's been a remarkable plummeting in the cost to do this type of analysis, this type of data generation, to where it actually costs less to do the data generation and analysis than it does to do the sample processing and the collection. The other reason is that in the last five years, there have been awesome tools, things about network biology, systems biology, that have come up that allow us to think that maybe we could decipher those positive outliers. And as we went around talking to researchers and institutions and telling them about our story, something happened. They started saying, "This is interesting. I would be glad to join your effort. I would be willing to participate." And they didn't say, "Where's the MTA?" They didn't say, "Where is my authorship?" They didn't say, "Is this data going to be mine? Am I going to own it?" They basically said, "Let's work on this in an open, crowd-sourced, team way to do this decoding." Six months ago, we locked down the screening key for this decoder. My co-lead, a brilliant scientist, Eric Schadt at the Icahn Mount Sinai School of Medicine in New York, and his team, locked in that decoder key ring, and we began looking for samples, because what we realized is, maybe we could just go and look at some existing samples to get some sense of feasibility. Maybe we could take two, three percent of the project on, and see if it was there. And so we started asking people such as Hakon at the Children's Hospital in Philadelphia. We asked Leif up in Finland. We talked to Anne Wojcicki at 23andMe, and Wang Jun at BGI, and again, something remarkable happened. They said, "Huh, not only do we have samples, but often we've analyzed them, and we would be glad to go into our anonymized samples and see if we could find those that you're looking for." And instead of being 20,000 or 30,000, last month we passed one half million samples that we've already analyzed. So you must be going, "Huh, did you find any unexpected heroes?" And the answer is, we didn't find one or two. We found dozens of these strong candidate unexpected heroes. So we think that the time is now to launch the beta phase of this project and actually start getting prospective individuals. Basically all we need is information. We need a swab of DNA and a willingness to say, "What's inside me? I'm willing to be re-contacted." Most of us spend our lives, when it comes to health and disease, acting as if we're voyeurs. We delegate the responsibility for the understanding of our disease, for the treatment of our disease, to anointed experts. In order for us to get this project to work, we need individuals to step up in a different role and to be engaged, to realize this dream, this open crowd-sourced project, to find those unexpected heroes, to evolve from the current concepts of resources and constraints, to design those preventive therapies, and to extend it beyond childhood diseases, to go all the way up to ways that we could look at Alzheimer's or Parkinson's, we're going to need us to be looking inside ourselves and asking, "What are our roles? What are our genes?" and looking within ourselves for information we used to say we should go to the outside, to experts, and to be willing to share that with others. Thank you very much. (Applause)

As a little girl, I always imagined I would one day run away. From the age of six on, I kept a packed bag with some clothes and cans of food tucked away in the back of a closet. There was a deep restlessness in me, a primal fear that I would fall prey to a life of routine and boredom. And so, many of my early memories involved intricate daydreams where I would walk across borders, forage for berries, and meet all kinds of strange people living unconventional lives on the road. Years have passed, but many of the adventures I fantasized about as a child -- traveling and weaving my way between worlds other than my own — have become realities through my work as a documentary photographer. But no other experience has felt as true to my childhood dreams as living amongst and documenting the lives of fellow wanderers across the United States. This is the nomadic dream, a different kind of American dream lived by young hobos, travelers, hitchhikers, vagrants and tramps. In most of our minds, the vagabond is a creature from the past. The word "hobo" conjures up an old black and white image of a weathered old man covered in coal, legs dangling out of a boxcar, but these photographs are in color, and they portray a community swirling across the country, fiercely alive and creatively free, seeing sides of America that no one else gets to see. Like their predecessors, today's nomads travel the steel and asphalt arteries of the United States. By day, they hop freight trains, stick out their thumbs, and ride the highways with anyone from truckers to soccer moms. By night, they sleep beneath the stars, huddled together with their packs of dogs, cats and pet rats between their bodies. Some travelers take to the road by choice, renouncing materialism, traditional jobs and university degrees in exchange for a glimmer of adventure. Others come from the underbelly of society, never given a chance to mobilize upwards: foster care dropouts, teenage runaways escaping abuse and unforgiving homes. Where others see stories of privation and economic failure, travelers view their own existence through the prism of liberation and freedom. They'd rather live off of the excess of what they view as a wasteful consumer society than slave away at an unrealistic chance at the traditional American dream. They take advantage of the fact that in the United States, up to 40 percent of all food ends up in the garbage by scavenging for perfectly good produce in dumpsters and trash cans. They sacrifice material comforts in exchange for the space and the time to explore a creative interior, to dream, to read, to work on music, art and writing. But there are many aspects to this life that are far from idyllic. No one loses their inner demons by taking to the road. Addiction is real, the elements are real, freight trains maim and kill, and anyone who has lived on the streets can attest to the exhaustive list of laws that criminalize homeless existence. Who here knows that in many cities across the United States it is now illegal to sit on the sidewalk, to wrap oneself in a blanket, to sleep in your own car, to offer food to a stranger? I know about these laws because I've watched as friends and other travelers were hauled off to jail or received citations for committing these so-called crimes. Many of you might be wondering why anyone would choose a life like this, under the thumb of discriminatory laws, eating out of trash cans, sleeping under bridges, picking up seasonal jobs here and there. The answer to such a question is as varied as the people that take to the road, but travelers often respond with a single word: freedom. Until we live in a society where every human is assured dignity in their labor so that they can work to live well, not only work to survive, there will always be an element of those who seek the open road as a means of escape, of liberation and, of course, of rebellion. Thank you. (Applause)

So it was the fall of 1902, and President Theodore Roosevelt needed a little break from the White House, so he took a train to Mississippi to do a little black bear hunting outside of a town called Smedes. The first day of the hunt, they didn't see a single bear, so it was a big bummer for everyone, but the second day, the dogs cornered one after a really long chase, but by that point, the president had given up and gone back to camp for lunch, so his hunting guide cracked the animal on the top of the head with the butt of his rifle, and then tied it up to a tree and started tooting away on his bugle to call Roosevelt back so he could have the honor of shooting it. The bear was a female. It was dazed, injured, severely underweight, a little mangy-looking, and when Roosevelt saw this animal tied up to the tree, he just couldn't bring himself to fire at it. He felt like that would go against his code as a sportsman. A few days later, the scene was memorialized in a political cartoon back in Washington. It was called "Drawing a Line in Mississippi," and it showed Roosevelt with his gun down and his arm out, sparing the bear's life, and the bear was sitting on its hind legs with these two big, frightened, wide eyes and little ears pricked up at the top of its head. It looked really helpless, like you just wanted to sweep it up into your arms and reassure it. It wouldn't have looked familiar at the time, but if you go looking for the cartoon now, you recognize the animal right away: It's a teddy bear. And this is how the teddy bear was born. Essentially, toymakers took the bear from the cartoon, turned it into a plush toy, and then named it after President Roosevelt -- Teddy's bear. And I do feel a little ridiculous that I'm up here on this stage and I'm choosing to use my time to tell you about a 100-year-old story about the invention of a squishy kid's toy, but I'd argue that the invention of the teddy bear, inside that story is a more important story, a story about how dramatically our ideas about nature can change, and also about how, on the planet right now, the stories that we tell are dramatically changing nature. Because think about the teddy bear. For us, in retrospect, it feels like an obvious fit, because bears are so cute and cuddly, and who wouldn't want to give one to their kids to play with, but the truth is that in 1902, bears weren't cute and cuddly. I mean, they looked the same, but no one thought of them that way. In 1902, bears were monsters. Bears were something that frickin' terrified kids. For generations at that point, the bear had been a shorthand for all the danger that people were encountering on the frontier, and the federal government was actually systematically exterminating bears and lots of other predators too, like coyotes and wolves. These animals, they were being demonized. They were called murderers because they killed people's livestock. One government biologist, he explained this war on animals like the bear by saying that they no longer had a place in our advancing civilization, and so we were just clearing them out of the way. In one 10-year period, close to half a million wolves had been slaughtered. The grizzly would soon be wiped out from 95 percent of its original territory, and whereas once there had been 30 million bison moving across the plains, and you would have these stories of trains having to stop for four or five hours so that these thick, living rivers of the animals could pour over the tracks, now, by 1902, there were maybe less than 100 left in the wild. And so what I'm saying is, the teddy bear was born into the middle of this great spasm of extermination, and you can see it as a sign that maybe some people deep down were starting to feel conflicted about all that killing. America still hated the bear and feared it, but all of a sudden, America also wanted to give the bear a great big hug. So this is something that I've been really curious about in the last few years. How do we imagine animals, how do we think and feel about them, and how do their reputations get written and then rewritten in our minds? We're here living in the eye of a great storm of extinction where half the species on the planet could be gone by the end of the century, and so why is it that we come to care about some of those species and not others? Well, there's a new field, a relatively new field of social science that started looking at these questions and trying to unpack the powerful and sometimes pretty schizophrenic relationships that we have to animals, and I spent a lot of time looking through their academic journals, and all I can really say is that their findings are astonishingly wide-ranging. So some of my favorites include that the more television a person watches in Upstate New York, the more he or she is afraid of being attacked by a black bear. If you show a tiger to an American, they're much more likely to assume that it's female and not male. In a study where a fake snake and a fake turtle were put on the side of the road, drivers hit the snake much more often than the turtle, and about three percent of drivers who hit the fake animals seemed to do it on purpose. Women are more likely than men to get a "magical feeling" when they see dolphins in the surf. Sixty-eight percent of mothers with "high feelings of entitlement and self-esteem" identified with the dancing cats in a commercial for Purina. (Laughter) Americans consider lobsters more important than pigeons but also much, much stupider. Wild turkeys are seen as only slightly more dangerous than sea otters, and pandas are twice as lovable as ladybugs. So some of this is physical, right? We tend to sympathize more with animals that look like us, and especially that resemble human babies, so with big, forward-facing eyes and circular faces, kind of a roly-poly posture. This is why, if you get a Christmas card from, like, your great aunt in Minnesota, there's usually a fuzzy penguin chick on it, and not something like a Glacier Bay wolf spider. But it's not all physical, right? There's a cultural dimension to how we think about animals, and we're telling stories about these animals, and like all stories, they are shaped by the times and the places in which we're telling them. So think about that moment back in 1902 again where a ferocious bear became a teddy bear. What was the context? Well, America was urbanizing. For the first time, nearly a majority of people lived in cities, so there was a growing distance between us and nature. There was a safe space where we could reconsider the bear and romanticize it. Nature could only start to seem this pure and adorable because we didn't have to be afraid of it anymore. And you can see that cycle playing out again and again with all kinds of animals. It seems like we're always stuck between demonizing a species and wanting to wipe it out, and then when we get very close to doing that, empathizing with it as an underdog and wanting to show it compassion. So we exert our power, but then we're unsettled by how powerful we are. So for example, this is one of probably thousands of letters and drawings that kids sent to the Bush administration, begging it to protect the polar bear under the Endangered Species Act, and these were sent back in the mid-2000s, when awareness of climate change was suddenly surging. We kept seeing that image of a polar bear stranded on a little ice floe looking really morose. I spent days looking through these files. I really love them. This one's my favorite. If you can see, it's a polar bear that's drowning and then it's also being eaten simultaneously by a lobster and a shark. This one came from a kid named Fritz, and he's actually got a solution to climate change. He's got it all worked out to an ethanol-based solution. He says, "I feel bad about the polar bears. I like polar bears. Everyone can use corn juice for cars. From Fritz." So 200 years ago, you would have Arctic explorers writing about polar bears leaping into their boats and trying to devour them, even if they lit the bear on fire, but these kids don't see the polar bear that way, and actually they don't even see the polar bear the way that I did back in the '80s. I mean, we thought of these animals as mysterious and terrifying lords of the Arctic. But look now how quickly that climate change has flipped the image of the animal in our minds. It's gone from that bloodthirsty man-killer to this delicate, drowning victim, and when you think about it, that's kind of the conclusion to the story that the teddy bear started telling back in 1902, because back then, America had more or less conquered its share of the continent. We were just getting around to polishing off these last wild predators. Now, society's reach has expanded all the way to the top of the world, and it's made even these, the most remote, the most powerful bears on the planet, seem like adorable and blameless victims. But you know, there's also a postscript to the teddy bear story that not a lot of people talk about. We're going to talk about it, because even though it didn't really take long after Roosevelt's hunt in 1902 for the toy to become a full-blown craze, most people figured it was a fad, it was a sort of silly political novelty item and it would go away once the president left office, and so by 1909, when Roosevelt's successor, William Howard Taft, was getting ready to be inaugurated, the toy industry was on the hunt for the next big thing. They didn't do too well. That January, Taft was the guest of honor at a banquet in Atlanta, and for days in advance, the big news was the menu. They were going to be serving him a Southern specialty, a delicacy, really, called possum and taters. So you would have a whole opossum roasted on a bed of sweet potatoes, and then sometimes they'd leave the big tail on it like a big, meaty noodle. The one brought to Taft's table weighed 18 pounds. So after dinner, the orchestra started to play, and the guests burst into song, and all of a sudden, Taft was surprised with the presentation of a gift from a group of local supporters, and this was a stuffed opossum toy, all beady-eyed and bald-eared, and it was a new product they were putting forward to be the William Taft presidency's answer to Teddy Roosevelt's teddy bear. They were calling it the "billy possum." Within 24 hours, the Georgia Billy Possum Company was up and running, brokering deals for these things nationwide, and the Los Angeles Times announced, very confidently, "The teddy bear has been relegated to a seat in the rear, and for four years, possibly eight, the children of the United States will play with billy possum." So from that point, there was a fit of opossum fever. There were billy possum postcards, billy possum pins, billy possum pitchers for your cream at coffee time. There were smaller billy possums on a stick that kids could wave around like flags. But even with all this marketing, the life of the billy possum turned out to be just pathetically brief. The toy was an absolute flop, and it was almost completely forgotten by the end of the year, and what that means is that the billy possum didn't even make it to Christmastime, which when you think about it is a special sort of tragedy for a toy. So we can explain that failure two ways. The first, well, it's pretty obvious. I'm going to go ahead and say it out loud anyway: Opossums are hideous. (Laughter) But maybe more importantly is that the story of the billy possum was all wrong, especially compared to the backstory of the teddy bear. Think about it: for most of human's evolutionary history, what's made bears impressive to us has been their complete independence from us. It's that they live these parallel lives as menaces and competitors. By the time Roosevelt went hunting in Mississippi, that stature was being crushed, and the animal that he had roped to a tree really was a symbol for all bears. Whether those animals lived or died now was entirely up to the compassion or the indifference of people. That said something really ominous about the future of bears, but it also said something very unsettling about who we'd become, if the survival of even an animal like that was up to us now. So now, a century later, if you're at all paying attention to what's happening in the environment, you feel that discomfort so much more intensely. We're living now in an age of what scientists have started to call "conservation reliance," and what that term means is that we've disrupted so much that nature can't possibly stand on its own anymore, and most endangered species are only going to survive if we stay out there in the landscape riggging the world around them in their favor. So we've gone hands-on and we can't ever take our hands off, and that's a hell of a lot of work. Right now, we're training condors not to perch on power lines. We teach whooping cranes to migrate south for the winter behind little ultra-light airplanes. We're out there feeding plague vaccine to ferrets. We monitor pygmy rabbits with drones. So we've gone from annihilating species to micromanaging the survival of a lot of species indefinitely, and which ones? Well, the ones that we've told compelling stories about, the ones we've decided ought to stick around. The line between conservation and domestication is blurred. So what I've been saying is that the stories that we tell about wild animals are so subjective they can be irrational or romanticized or sensationalized. Sometimes they just have nothing to do with the facts. But in a world of conservation reliance, those stories have very real consequences, because now, how we feel about an animal affects its survival more than anything that you read about in ecology textbooks. Storytelling matters now. Emotion matters. Our imagination has become an ecological force. And so maybe the teddy bear worked in part because the legend of Roosevelt and that bear in Mississippi was kind of like an allegory of this great responsibility that society was just beginning to face up to back then. It would be another 71 years before the Endangered Species Act was passed, but really, here's its whole ethos boiled down into something like a scene you'd see in a stained glass window. The bear is a helpless victim tied to a tree, and the president of the United States decided to show it some mercy. Thank you. (Applause) [Illustrations by Wendy MacNaughton]

I'm going to ask and try to answer, in some ways, kind of an uncomfortable question. Both civilians, obviously, and soldiers suffer in war; I don't think any civilian has ever missed the war that they were subjected to. I've been covering wars for almost 20 years, and one of the remarkable things for me is how many soldiers find themselves missing it. How is it someone can go through the worst experience imaginable, and come home, back to their home, and their family, their country, and miss the war? How does that work? What does it mean? We have to answer that question, because if we don't, it'll be impossible to bring soldiers back to a place in society where they belong, and I think it'll also be impossible to stop war, if we don't understand how that mechanism works. The problem is that war does not have a simple, neat truth, one simple, neat truth. Any sane person hates war, hates the idea of war, wouldn't want to have anything to do with it, doesn't want to be near it, doesn't want to know about it. That's a sane response to war. But if I asked all of you in this room, who here has paid money to go to a cinema and be entertained by a Hollywood war movie, most of you would probably raise your hands. That's what's so complicated about war. And trust me, if a room full of peace-loving people finds something compelling about war, so do 20-year-old soldiers who have been trained in it, I promise you. That's the thing that has to be understood. I've covered war for about 20 years, as I said, but my most intense experiences in combat were with American soldiers in Afghanistan. I've been in Africa, the Middle East, Afghanistan in the '90s, but it was with American soldiers in 2007, 2008, that I was confronted with very intense combat. I was in a small valley called the Korengal Valley in eastern Afghanistan. It was six miles long. There were 150 men of Battle Company in that valley, and for a while, while I was there, almost 20 percent of all the combat in all of Afghanistan was happening in those six miles. A hundred and fifty men were absorbing almost a fifth of the combat for all of NATO forces in the country, for a couple months. It was very intense. I spent most of my time at a small outpost called Restrepo. It was named after the platoon medic that had been killed about two months into the deployment. It was a few plywood B-huts clinging to a side of a ridge, and sandbags, bunkers, gun positions, and there were 20 men up there of Second Platoon, Battle Company. I spent most of my time up there. There was no running water. There was no way to bathe. The guys were up there for a month at a time. They never even got out of their clothes. They fought. The worked. They slept in the same clothes. They never took them off, and at the end of the month, they went back down to the company headquarters, and by then, their clothes were unwearable. They burned them and got a new set. There was no Internet. There was no phone. There was no communication with the outside world up there. There was no cooked food. There was nothing up there that young men typically like: no cars, no girls, no television, nothing except combat. Combat they did learn to like. I remember one day, it was a very hot day in the spring, and we hadn't been in a fight in a couple of weeks, maybe. Usually, the outpost was attacked, and we hadn't seen any combat in a couple of weeks, and everyone was just stunned with boredom and heat. And I remember the lieutenant walking past me sort of stripped to the waist. It was incredibly hot. Stripped to the waist, walked past me muttering, "Oh God, please someone attack us today." That's how bored they were. That's war too, is a lieutenant saying, "Please make something happen because we're going crazy." To understand that, you have to, for a moment, think about combat not morally -- that's an important job to do — but for a moment, don't think about it morally, think about it neurologically. Let's think about what happens in your brain when you're in combat. First of all, the experience is very bizarre, it's a very bizarre one. It's not what I had expected. Usually, you're not scared. I've been very scared in combat, but most of the time when I was out there, I wasn't scared. I was very scared beforehand and incredibly scared afterwards, and that fear that comes afterwards can last years. I haven't been shot at in six years, and I was woken up very abruptly this morning by a nightmare that I was being strafed by aircraft, six years later. I've never even been strafed by aircraft, and I was having nightmares about it. Time slows down. You get this weird tunnel vision. You notice some details very, very, very accurately and other things drop out. It's almost a slightly altered state of mind. What's happening in your brain is you're getting an enormous amount of adrenaline pumped through your system. Young men will go to great lengths to have that experience. It's wired into us. It's hormonally supported. The mortality rate for young men in society is six times what it is for young women from violence and from accidents, just the stupid stuff that young men do: jumping off of things they shouldn't jump off of, lighting things on fire they shouldn't light on fire, I mean, you know what I'm talking about. They die at six times the rate that young women do. Statistically, you are safer as a teenage boy, you would be safer in the fire department or the police department in most American cities than just walking around the streets of your hometown looking for something to do, statistically. You can imagine how that plays out in combat. At Restrepo, every guy up there was almost killed, including me, including my good friend Tim Hetherington, who was later killed in Libya. There were guys walking around with bullet holes in their uniforms, rounds that had cut through the fabric and didn't touch their bodies. I was leaning against some sandbags one morning, not much going on, sort of spacing out, and some sand was kicked into the side of, sort of hit the side of my face. Something hit the side of my face, and I didn't know what it was. You have to understand about bullets that they go a lot faster than sound, so if someone shoots at you from a few hundred meters, the bullet goes by you, or hits you obviously, half a second or so before the sound catches up to it. So I had some sand sprayed in the side of my face. Half a second later, I heard dut-dut-dut-dut-duh. It was machine gun fire. It was the first round, the first burst of an hour-long firefight. What had happened was the bullet hit, a bullet hit three or four inches from the side of my head. Imagine, just think about it, because I certainly did, think about the angle of deviation that saved my life. At 400 meters, it missed me by three inches. Just think about the math on that. Every guy up there had some experience like that, at least once, if not many times. The boys are up there for a year. They got back. Some of them got out of the Army and had tremendous psychological problems when they got home. Some of them stayed in the Army and were more or less okay, psychologically. I was particularly close to a guy named Brendan O'Byrne. I'm still very good friends with him. He came back to the States. He got out of the Army. I had a dinner party one night. I invited him, and he started talking with a woman, one of my friends, and she knew how bad it had been out there, and she said, "Brendan, is there anything at all that you miss about being out in Afghanistan, about the war?" And he thought about it quite a long time, and finally he said, "Ma'am, I miss almost all of it." And he's one of the most traumatized people I've seen from that war. "Ma'am, I miss almost all of it." What is he talking about? He's not a psychopath. He doesn't miss killing people. He's not crazy. He doesn't miss getting shot at and seeing his friends get killed. What is it that he misses? We have to answer that. If we're going to stop war, we have to answer that question. I think what he missed is brotherhood. He missed, in some ways, the opposite of killing. What he missed was connection to the other men he was with. Now, brotherhood is different from friendship. Friendship happens in society, obviously. The more you like someone, the more you'd be willing to do for them. Brotherhood has nothing to do with how you feel about the other person. It's a mutual agreement in a group that you will put the welfare of the group, you will put the safety of everyone in the group above your own. In effect, you're saying, "I love these other people more than I love myself." Brendan was a team leader in command of three men, and the worst day in Afghanistan — He was almost killed so many times. It didn't bother him. The worst thing that happened to him in Afghanistan was one of his men was hit in the head with a bullet in the helmet, knocked him over. They thought he was dead. It was in the middle of a huge firefight. No one could deal with it, and a minute later, Kyle Steiner sat back up from the dead, as it were, because he'd come back to consciousness. The bullet had just knocked him out. It glanced off the helmet. He remembers people saying, as he was sort of half-conscious, he remembers people saying, "Steiner's been hit in the head. Steiner's dead." And he was thinking, "I'm not dead." And he sat up. And Brendan realized after that that he could not protect his men, and that was the only time he cried in Afghanistan, was realizing that. That's brotherhood. This wasn't invented recently. Many of you have probably read "The Iliad." Achilles surely would have risked his life or given his life to save his friend Patroclus. In World War II, there were many stories of soldiers who were wounded, were brought to a rear base hospital, who went AWOL, crawled out of windows, slipped out doors, went AWOL, wounded, to make their way back to the front lines to rejoin their brothers out there. So you think about Brendan, you think about all these soldiers having an experience like that, a bond like that, in a small group, where they loved 20 other people in some ways more than they loved themselves, you think about how good that would feel, imagine it, and they are blessed with that experience for a year, and then they come home, and they are just back in society like the rest of us are, not knowing who they can count on, not knowing who loves them, who they can love, not knowing exactly what anyone they know would do for them if it came down to it. That is terrifying. Compared to that, war, psychologically, in some ways, is easy, compared to that kind of alienation. That's why they miss it, and that's what we have to understand and in some ways fix in our society. Thank you very much. (Applause)

I'm excited to be here to speak about vets, because I didn't join the Army because I wanted to go to war. I didn't join the Army because I had a lust or a need to go overseas and fight. Frankly, I joined the Army because college is really damn expensive, and they were going to help with that, and I joined the Army because it was what I knew, and it was what I knew that I thought I could do well. I didn't come from a military family. I'm not a military brat. No one in my family ever had joined the military at all, and how I first got introduced to the military was when I was 13 years old and I got sent away to military school, because my mother had been threatening me with this idea of military school ever since I was eight years old. I had some issues when I was coming up, and my mother would always tell me, she's like, "You know, if you don't get this together, I'm going to send you to military school." And I'd look at her, and I'd say, "Mommy, I'll work harder." And then when I was nine years old, she started giving me brochures to show me she wasn't playing around, so I'd look at the brochures, and I'm like, "Okay, Mommy, I can see you're serious, and I'll work harder." And then when I was 10 and 11, my behavior just kept on getting worse. I was on academic and disciplinary probation before I hit double digits, and I first felt handcuffs on my wrists when I was 11 years old. And so when I was 13 years old, my mother came up to me, and she was like, "I'm not going to do this anymore. I'm going to send you to military school." And I looked at her, and I said, "Mommy, I can see you're upset, and I'm going to work harder." And she was like, "No, you're going next week." And that was how I first got introduced to this whole idea of the military, because she thought this was a good idea. I had to disagree with her wholeheartedly when I first showed up there, because literally in the first four days, I had already run away five times from this school. They had these big black gates that surrounded the school, and every time they would turn their backs, I would just simply run out of the black gates and take them up on their offer that if we don't want to be there, we can leave at any time. So I just said, "Well, if that's the case, then I'd like to leave." (Laughter) And it never worked. And I kept on getting lost. But then eventually, after staying there for a little while, and after the end of that first year at this military school, I realized that I actually was growing up. I realized the things that I enjoyed about this school and the thing that I enjoyed about the structure was something that I'd never found before: the fact that I finally felt like I was part of something bigger, part of a team, and it actually mattered to people that I was there, the fact that leadership wasn't just a punchline there, but that it was a real, actually core part of the entire experience. And so when it was time for me to actually finish up high school, I started thinking about what I wanted to do, and just like probably most students, had no idea what that meant or what I wanted to do. And I thought about the people who I respected and admired. I thought about a lot of the people, in particular a lot of the men, in my life who I looked up to. They all happened to wear the uniform of the United States of America, so for me, the question and the answer really became pretty easy. The question of what I wanted to do was filled in very quickly with saying, I guess I'll be an Army officer. So the Army then went through this process and they trained me up, and when I say I didn't join the Army because I wanted to go to war, the truth is, I joined in 1996. There really wasn't a whole lot going on. I didn't ever feel like I was in danger. When I went to my mom, I first joined the Army when I was 17 years old, so I literally needed parental permission to join the Army, so I kind of gave the paperwork to my mom, and she just assumed it was kind of like military school. She was like, "Well, it was good for him before, so I guess I'll just let him keep doing it," having no idea that the paperwork that she was signing was actually signing her son up to become an Army officer. And I went through the process, and again the whole time still just thinking, this is great, maybe I'll serve on a weekend, or two weeks during the year, do drill, and then a couple years after I signed up, a couple years after my mother signed those papers, the whole world changed. And after 9/11, there was an entirely new context about the occupation that I chose. When I first joined, I never joined to fight, but now that I was in, this is exactly what was now going to happen. And I thought about so much about the soldiers who I eventually had to end up leading. I remember when we first, right after 9/11, three weeks after 9/11, I was on a plane heading overseas, but I wasn't heading overseas with the military, I was heading overseas because I got a scholarship to go overseas. I received the scholarship to go overseas and to go study and live overseas, and I was living in England and that was interesting, but at the same time, the same people who I was training with, the same soldiers that I went through all my training with, and we prepared for war, they were now actually heading over to it. They were now about to find themselves in the middle of places the fact is the vast majority of people, the vast majority of us as we were training, couldn't even point out on a map. I spent a couple years finishing graduate school, and the whole entire time while I'm sitting there in buildings at Oxford that were literally built hundreds of years before the United States was even founded, and I'm sitting there talking to dons about the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand, and how that influenced the start of World War I, where the entire time my heart and my head were on my soldiers who were now throwing on Kevlars and grabbing their flak vests and figuring out how exactly do I change around or how exactly do I clean a machine gun in the darkness. That was the new reality. By the time I finished that up and I rejoined my military unit and we were getting ready to deploy to Afghanistan, there were soldiers in my unit who were now on their second and third deployments before I even had my first. I remember walking out with my unit for the first time, and when you join the Army and you go through a combat tour, everyone looks at your shoulder, because on your shoulder is your combat patch. And so immediately as you meet people, you shake their hand, and then your eyes go to their shoulder, because you want to see where did they serve, or what unit did they serve with? And I was the only person walking around with a bare shoulder, and it burned every time someone stared at it. But you get a chance to talk to your soldiers, and you ask them why did they sign up. I signed up because college was expensive. A lot of my soldiers signed up for completely different reasons. They signed up because of a sense of obligation. They signed up because they were angry and they wanted to do something about it. They signed up because their family said this was important. They signed up because they wanted some form of revenge. They signed for a whole collection of different reasons. And now we all found ourselves overseas fighting in these conflicts. And what was amazing to me was that I very naively started hearing this statement that I never fully understood, because right after 9/11, you start hearing this idea where people come up to you and they say, "Well, thank you for your service." And I just kind of followed in and started saying the same things to all my soldiers. This is even before I deployed. But I really had no idea what that even meant. I just said it because it sounded right. I said it because it sounded like the right thing to say to people who had served overseas. "Thank you for your service." But I had no idea what the context was or what that even, what it even meant to the people who heard it. When I first came back from Afghanistan, I thought that if you make it back from conflict, then the dangers were all over. I thought that if you made it back from a conflict zone that somehow you could kind of wipe the sweat off your brow and say, "Whew, I'm glad I dodged that one," without understanding that for so many people, as they come back home, the war keeps going. It keeps playing out in all of our minds. It plays out in all of our memories. It plays out in all of our emotions. Please forgive us if we don't like being in big crowds. Please forgive us when we spend one week in a place that has 100 percent light discipline, because you're not allowed to walk around with white lights, because if anything has a white light, it can be seen from miles away, versus if you use little green or little blue lights, they cannot be seen from far away. So please forgive us if out of nowhere, we go from having 100 percent light discipline to then a week later being back in the middle of Times Square, and we have a difficult time adjusting to that. Please forgive us when you transition back to a family who has completely been maneuvering without you, and now when you come back, it's not that easy to fall back into a sense of normality, because the whole normal has changed. I remember when I came back, I wanted to talk to people. I wanted people to ask me about my experiences. I wanted people to come up to me and tell me, "What did you do?" I wanted people to come up to me and tell me, "What was it like? What was the food like? What was the experience like? How are you doing?" And the only questions I got from people was, "Did you shoot anybody?" And those were the ones who were even curious enough to say anything. Because sometimes there's this fear and there's this apprehension that if I say anything, I'm afraid I'll offend, or I'm afraid I'll trigger something, so the common default is just saying nothing. The problem with that is then it feels like your service was not even acknowledged, like no one even cared. "Thank you for your service," and we move on. What I wanted to better understand was what's behind that, and why "thank you for your service" isn't enough. The fact is, we have literally 2.6 million men and women who are veterans of Iraq or Afghanistan who are all amongst us. Sometimes we know who they are, sometimes we don't, but there is that feeling, the shared experience, the shared bond where we know that that experience and that chapter of our life, while it might be closed, it's still not over. We think about "thank you for your service," and people say, "So what does 'thank you for your service' mean to you?" Well, "Thank you for your service" means to me, it means acknowledging our stories, asking us who we are, understanding the strength that so many people, so many people who we serve with, have, and why that service means so much. "Thank you for your service" means acknowledging the fact that just because we've now come home and we've taken off the uniform does not mean our larger service to this country is somehow over. The fact is, there's still a tremendous amount that can be offered and can be given. When I look at people like our friend Taylor Urruela, who in Iraq loses his leg, had two big dreams in his life. One was to be a soldier. The other was to be a baseball player. He loses his leg in Iraq. He comes back and instead of deciding that, well, now since I've lost my leg, that second dream is over, he decides that he still has that dream of playing baseball, and he starts this group called VETSports, which now works with veterans all over the country and uses sports as a way of healing. People like Tammy Duckworth, who was a helicopter pilot and with the helicopter that she was flying, you need to use both your hands and also your legs to steer, and her helicopter gets hit, and she's trying to steer the chopper, but the chopper's not reacting to her instructions and to her commands. She's trying to land the chopper safely, but the chopper doesn't land safely, and the reason it's not landing safely is because it's not responding to the commands that her legs are giving because her legs were blown off. She barely survives. Medics come and they save her life, but then as she's doing her recuperation back at home, she realizes that, "My job's still not done." And now she uses her voice as a Congresswoman from Illinois to fight and advocate for a collection of issues to include veterans issues. We signed up because we love this country we represent. We signed up because we believe in the idea and we believe in the people to our left and to our right. And the only thing we then ask is that "thank you for your service" needs to be more than just a quote break, that "thank you for your service" means honestly digging in to the people who have stepped up simply because they were asked to, and what that means for us not just now, not just during combat operations, but long after the last vehicle has left and after the last shot has been taken. These are the people who I served with, and these are the people who I honor. So thank you for your service. (Applause)

What do augmented reality and professional football have to do with empathy? And what is the air speed velocity of an unladen swallow? Now unfortunately, I'm only going to answer one of those questions today, so please, try and contain your disappointment. When most people think about augmented reality, they think about "Minority Report" and Tom Cruise waving his hands in the air, but augmented reality is not science fiction. Augmented reality is something that will happen in our lifetime, and it will happen because we have the tools to make it happen, and people need to be aware of that, because augmented reality will change our lives just as much as the Internet and the cell phone. Now how do we get to augmented reality? Step one is the step I'm wearing right now, Google Glass. I'm sure many of you are familiar with Google Glass. What you may not be familiar with is that Google Glass is a device that will allow you to see what I see. It will allow you to experience what it is like to be a professional athlete on the field. Right now, the only way you can be on the field is for me to try and describe it to you. I have to use words. I have to create a framework that you then fill in with your imagination. With Google Glass, we can put that underneath a helmet, and we can get a sense of what it's like to be running down the field at 100 miles an hour, your blood pounding in your ears. You can get a sense of what it's like to have a 250-pound man sprinting at you trying to decapitate you with every ounce of his being. And I've been on the receiving end of that, and it doesn't feel very good. Now, I have some footage to show you of what it's like to wear Google Glass underneath the helmet to give you a taste of that. Unfortunately, it's not NFL practice footage because the NFL thinks emergent technology is what happens when a submarine surfaces, but — (Laughter) — we do what we can. So let's pull up some video. (Video) Chris Kluwe: Go. Ugh, getting tackled sucks. Hold on, let's get a little closer. All right, ready? Go! Chris Kluwe: So as you can see, small taste of what it's like to get tackled on the football field from the perspective of the tacklee. Now, you may have noticed there are some people missing there: the rest of the team. We have some video of that courtesy of the University of Washington. (Video) Quarterback: Hey, Mice 54! Mice 54! Blue 8! Blue 8! Go! Oh! CK: So again, this takes you a little bit closer to what it's like to be on that field, but this is nowhere what it's like to be on the NFL. Fans want that experience. Fans want to be on that field. They want to be their favorite players, and they've already talked to me on YouTube, they've talked to me on Twitter, saying, "Hey, can you get this on a quarterback? Can you get this on a running back? We want that experience." Well, once we have that experience with GoPro and Google Glass, how do we make it more immersive? How do we take that next step? Well, we take that step by going to something called the Oculus Rift, which I'm sure many of you are also familiar with. The Oculus Rift has been described as one of the most realistic virtual reality devices ever created, and that is not empty hype. I'm going to show you why that is not empty hype with this video. (Video) Man: Oh! Oh! No! No! No! I don't want to play anymore! No! Oh my God! Aaaah! CK: So that is the experience of a man on a roller coaster in fear of his life. What do you think that fan's experience is going to be when we take the video footage of an Adrian Peterson bursting through the line, shedding a tackler with a stiff-arm before sprinting in for a touchdown? What do you think that fan's experience is going to be when he's Messi sprinting down the pitch putting the ball in the back of the net, or Federer serving in Wimbledon? What do you think his experience is going to be when he is going down the side of a mountain at over 70 miles an hour as an Olympic downhill skier? I think adult diaper sales may surge. (Laughter) But this is not yet augmented reality. This is only virtual reality, V.R. How do we get to augmented reality, A.R.? We get to augmented reality when coaches and managers and owners look at this information streaming in that people want to see, and they say, "How do we use this to make our teams better? How do we use this to win games?" Because teams always use technology to win games. They like winning. It makes them money. So a brief history of technology in the NFL. In 1965, the Baltimore Colts put a wristband on their quarterback to allow him to call plays quicker. They ended up winning a Super Bowl that year. Other teams followed suit. More people watched the game because it was more exciting. It was faster. In 1994, the NFL put helmet radios into the helmets of the quarterbacks, and later the defense. More people watched games because it was faster. It was more entertaining. In 2023, imagine you're a player walking back to the huddle, and you have your next play displayed right in front of your face on your clear plastic visor that you already wear right now. No more having to worry about forgetting plays. No more worrying about having to memorize your playbook. You just go out and react. And coaches really want this, because missed assignments lose you games, and coaches hate losing games. Losing games gets you fired as a coach. They don't want that. But augmented reality is not just an enhanced playbook. Augmented reality is also a way to take all that data and use it in real time to enhance how you play the game. What would that be like? Well, a very simple setup would be a camera on each corner of the stadium looking down, giving you a bird's-eye view of all the people down there. You also have information from helmet sensors and accelerometers, technology that's being worked on right now. You take all that information, and you stream it to your players. The good teams stream it in a way that the players can use. The bad ones have information overload. That determines good teams from bad. And now, your I.T. department is just as important as your scouting department, and data-mining is not for nerds anymore. It's also for jocks. Who knew? What would that look like on the field? Well, imagine you're the quarterback. You take the snap and you drop back. You're scanning downfield for an open receiver. All of a sudden, a bright flash on the left side of your visor lets you know, blind side linebacker is blitzing in. Normally, you wouldn't be able to see him, but the augmented reality system lets you know. You step up into the pocket. Another flash alerts you to an open receiver. You throw the ball, but you're hit right as you throw. The ball comes off track. You don't know where it's going to land. However, on the receiver's visor, he sees a patch of grass light up, and he knows to readjust. He goes, catches the ball, sprints in, touchdown. Crowd goes wild, and the fans are with him every step of the way, watching from every perspective. Now this is something that will create massive excitement in the game. It will make tons of people watch, because people want this experience. Fans want to be on the field. They want to be their favorite player. Augmented reality will be a part of sports, because it's too profitable not to. But the question I ask you is, is that's all that we're content to use augmented reality for? Are we going to use it solely for our panem, our circenses, our entertainment as normal? Because I believe that we can use augmented reality for something more. I believe we can use augmented reality as a way to foster more empathy within the human species itself, by literally showing someone what it looks like to walk a mile in another person's shoes. We know what this technology is worth to sports leagues. It's worth revenue, to the tune of billions of dollars a year. But what is this technology worth to a teacher in a classroom trying to show a bully just how harmful his actions are from the perspective of the victim? What is this technology worth to a gay Ugandan or Russian trying to show the world what it's like living under persecution? What is this technology worth to a Commander Hadfield or a Neil deGrasse Tyson trying to inspire a generation of children to think more about space and science instead of quarterly reports and Kardashians? Ladies and gentlemen, augmented reality is coming. The questions we ask, the choices we make, and the challenges we face are, as always, up to us. Thank you. (Applause)

As a student of adversity, I've been struck over the years by how some people with major challenges seem to draw strength from them, and I've heard the popular wisdom that that has to do with finding meaning. And for a long time, I thought the meaning was out there, some great truth waiting to be found. But over time, I've come to feel that the truth is irrelevant. We call it finding meaning, but we might better call it forging meaning. My last book was about how families manage to deal with various kinds of challenging or unusual offspring, and one of the mothers I interviewed, who had two children with multiple severe disabilities, said to me, "People always give us these little sayings like, 'God doesn't give you any more than you can handle,' but children like ours are not preordained as a gift. They're a gift because that's what we have chosen." We make those choices all our lives. When I was in second grade, Bobby Finkel had a birthday party and invited everyone in our class but me. My mother assumed there had been some sort of error, and she called Mrs. Finkel, who said that Bobby didn't like me and didn't want me at his party. And that day, my mom took me to the zoo and out for a hot fudge sundae. When I was in seventh grade, one of the kids on my school bus nicknamed me "Percy" as a shorthand for my demeanor, and sometimes, he and his cohort would chant that provocation the entire school bus ride, 45 minutes up, 45 minutes back, "Percy! Percy! Percy! Percy!" When I was in eighth grade, our science teacher told us that all male homosexuals develop fecal incontinence because of the trauma to their anal sphincter. And I graduated high school without ever going to the cafeteria, where I would have sat with the girls and been laughed at for doing so, or sat with the boys and been laughed at for being a boy who should be sitting with the girls. I survived that childhood through a mix of avoidance and endurance. What I didn't know then, and do know now, is that avoidance and endurance can be the entryway to forging meaning. After you've forged meaning, you need to incorporate that meaning into a new identity. You need to take the traumas and make them part of who you've come to be, and you need to fold the worst events of your life into a narrative of triumph, evincing a better self in response to things that hurt. One of the other mothers I interviewed when I was working on my book had been raped as an adolescent, and had a child following that rape, which had thrown away her career plans and damaged all of her emotional relationships. But when I met her, she was 50, and I said to her, "Do you often think about the man who raped you?" And she said, "I used to think about him with anger, but now only with pity." And I thought she meant pity because he was so unevolved as to have done this terrible thing. And I said, "Pity?" And she said, "Yes, because he has a beautiful daughter and two beautiful grandchildren and he doesn't know that, and I do. So as it turns out, I'm the lucky one." Some of our struggles are things we're born to: our gender, our sexuality, our race, our disability. And some are things that happen to us: being a political prisoner, being a rape victim, being a Katrina survivor. Identity involves entering a community to draw strength from that community, and to give strength there too. It involves substituting "and" for "but" -- not "I am here but I have cancer," but rather, "I have cancer and I am here." When we're ashamed, we can't tell our stories, and stories are the foundation of identity. Forge meaning, build identity, forge meaning and build identity. That became my mantra. Forging meaning is about changing yourself. Building identity is about changing the world. All of us with stigmatized identities face this question daily: how much to accommodate society by constraining ourselves, and how much to break the limits of what constitutes a valid life? Forging meaning and building identity does not make what was wrong right. It only makes what was wrong precious. In January of this year, I went to Myanmar to interview political prisoners, and I was surprised to find them less bitter than I'd anticipated. Most of them had knowingly committed the offenses that landed them in prison, and they had walked in with their heads held high, and they walked out with their heads still held high, many years later. Dr. Ma Thida, a leading human rights activist who had nearly died in prison and had spent many years in solitary confinement, told me she was grateful to her jailers for the time she had had to think, for the wisdom she had gained, for the chance to hone her meditation skills. She had sought meaning and made her travail into a crucial identity. But if the people I met were less bitter than I'd anticipated about being in prison, they were also less thrilled than I'd expected about the reform process going on in their country. Ma Thida said, "We Burmese are noted for our tremendous grace under pressure, but we also have grievance under glamour," she said, "and the fact that there have been these shifts and changes doesn't erase the continuing problems in our society that we learned to see so well while we were in prison." And I understood her to be saying that concessions confer only a little humanity, where full humanity is due, that crumbs are not the same as a place at the table, which is to say you can forge meaning and build identity and still be mad as hell. I've never been raped, and I've never been in anything remotely approaching a Burmese prison, but as a gay American, I've experienced prejudice and even hatred, and I've forged meaning and I've built identity, which is a move I learned from people who had experienced far worse privation than I've ever known. In my own adolescence, I went to extreme lengths to try to be straight. I enrolled myself in something called sexual surrogacy therapy, in which people I was encouraged to call doctors prescribed what I was encouraged to call exercises with women I was encouraged to call surrogates, who were not exactly prostitutes but who were also not exactly anything else. (Laughter) My particular favorite was a blonde woman from the Deep South who eventually admitted to me that she was really a necrophiliac and had taken this job after she got in trouble down at the morgue. (Laughter) These experiences eventually allowed me to have some happy physical relationships with women, for which I'm grateful, but I was at war with myself, and I dug terrible wounds into my own psyche. We don't seek the painful experiences that hew our identities, but we seek our identities in the wake of painful experiences. We cannot bear a pointless torment, but we can endure great pain if we believe that it's purposeful. Ease makes less of an impression on us than struggle. We could have been ourselves without our delights, but not without the misfortunes that drive our search for meaning. "Therefore, I take pleasure in infirmities," St. Paul wrote in Second Corinthians, "for when I am weak, then I am strong." In 1988, I went to Moscow to interview artists of the Soviet underground, and I expected their work to be dissident and political. But the radicalism in their work actually lay in reinserting humanity into a society that was annihilating humanity itself, as, in some senses, Russian society is now doing again. One of the artists I met said to me, "We were in training to be not artists but angels." In 1991, I went back to see the artists I'd been writing about, and I was with them during the putsch that ended the Soviet Union, and they were among the chief organizers of the resistance to that putsch. And on the third day of the putsch, one of them suggested we walk up to Smolenskaya. And we went there, and we arranged ourselves in front of one of the barricades, and a little while later, a column of tanks rolled up, and the soldier on the front tank said, "We have unconditional orders to destroy this barricade. If you get out of the way, we don't need to hurt you, but if you won't move, we'll have no choice but to run you down." And the artists I was with said, "Give us just a minute. Give us just a minute to tell you why we're here." And the soldier folded his arms, and the artist launched into a Jeffersonian panegyric to democracy such as those of us who live in a Jeffersonian democracy would be hard-pressed to present. And they went on and on, and the soldier watched, and then he sat there for a full minute after they were finished and looked at us so bedraggled in the rain, and said, "What you have said is true, and we must bow to the will of the people. If you'll clear enough space for us to turn around, we'll go back the way we came." And that's what they did. Sometimes, forging meaning can give you the vocabulary you need to fight for your ultimate freedom. Russia awakened me to the lemonade notion that oppression breeds the power to oppose it, and I gradually understood that as the cornerstone of identity. It took identity to rescue me from sadness. The gay rights movement posits a world in which my aberrances are a victory. Identity politics always works on two fronts: to give pride to people who have a given condition or characteristic, and to cause the outside world to treat such people more gently and more kindly. Those are two totally separate enterprises, but progress in each sphere reverberates in the other. Identity politics can be narcissistic. People extol a difference only because it's theirs. People narrow the world and function in discrete groups without empathy for one another. But properly understood and wisely practiced, identity politics should expand our idea of what it is to be human. Identity itself should be not a smug label or a gold medal but a revolution. I would have had an easier life if I were straight, but I would not be me, and I now like being myself better than the idea of being someone else, someone who, to be honest, I have neither the option of being nor the ability fully to imagine. But if you banish the dragons, you banish the heroes, and we become attached to the heroic strain in our own lives. I've sometimes wondered whether I could have ceased to hate that part of myself without gay pride's technicolor fiesta, of which this speech is one manifestation. I used to think I would know myself to be mature when I could simply be gay without emphasis, but the self-loathing of that period left a void, and celebration needs to fill and overflow it, and even if I repay my private debt of melancholy, there's still an outer world of homophobia that it will take decades to address. Someday, being gay will be a simple fact, free of party hats and blame, but not yet. A friend of mine who thought gay pride was getting very carried away with itself, once suggested that we organize Gay Humility Week. (Laughter) (Applause) It's a great idea, but its time has not yet come. (Laughter) And neutrality, which seems to lie halfway between despair and celebration, is actually the endgame. In 29 states in the U.S., I could legally be fired or denied housing for being gay. In Russia, the anti-propaganda law has led to people being beaten in the streets. Twenty-seven African countries have passed laws against sodomy, and in Nigeria, gay people can legally be stoned to death, and lynchings have become common. In Saudi Arabia recently, two men who had been caught in carnal acts, were sentenced to 7,000 lashes each, and are now permanently disabled as a result. So who can forge meaning and build identity? Gay rights are not primarily marriage rights, and for the millions who live in unaccepting places with no resources, dignity remains elusive. I am lucky to have forged meaning and built identity, but that's still a rare privilege, and gay people deserve more collectively than the crumbs of justice. And yet, every step forward is so sweet. In 2007, six years after we met, my partner and I decided to get married. Meeting John had been the discovery of great happiness and also the elimination of great unhappiness, and sometimes, I was so occupied with the disappearance of all that pain that I forgot about the joy, which was at first the less remarkable part of it to me. Marrying was a way to declare our love as more a presence than an absence. Marriage soon led us to children, and that meant new meanings and new identities, ours and theirs. I want my children to be happy, and I love them most achingly when they are sad. As a gay father, I can teach them to own what is wrong in their lives, but I believe that if I succeed in sheltering them from adversity, I will have failed as a parent. A Buddhist scholar I know once explained to me that Westerners mistakenly think that nirvana is what arrives when all your woe is behind you and you have only bliss to look forward to. But he said that would not be nirvana, because your bliss in the present would always be shadowed by the joy from the past. Nirvana, he said, is what you arrive at when you have only bliss to look forward to and find in what looked like sorrows the seedlings of your joy. And I sometimes wonder whether I could have found such fulfillment in marriage and children if they'd come more readily, if I'd been straight in my youth or were young now, in either of which cases this might be easier. Perhaps I could. Perhaps all the complex imagining I've done could have been applied to other topics. But if seeking meaning matters more than finding meaning, the question is not whether I'd be happier for having been bullied, but whether assigning meaning to those experiences has made me a better father. I tend to find the ecstasy hidden in ordinary joys, because I did not expect those joys to be ordinary to me. I know many heterosexuals who have equally happy marriages and families, but gay marriage is so breathtakingly fresh, and gay families so exhilaratingly new, and I found meaning in that surprise. In October, it was my 50th birthday, and my family organized a party for me, and in the middle of it, my son said to my husband that he wanted to make a speech, and John said, "George, you can't make a speech. You're four." (Laughter) "Only Grandpa and Uncle David and I are going to make speeches tonight." But George insisted and insisted, and finally, John took him up to the microphone, and George said very loudly, "Ladies and gentlemen, may I have your attention please." And everyone turned around, startled. And George said, "I'm glad it's Daddy's birthday. I'm glad we all get cake. And daddy, if you were little, I'd be your friend." And I thought — Thank you. I thought that I was indebted even to Bobby Finkel, because all those earlier experiences were what had propelled me to this moment, and I was finally unconditionally grateful for a life I'd once have done anything to change. The gay activist Harvey Milk was once asked by a younger gay man what he could do to help the movement, and Harvey Milk said, "Go out and tell someone." There's always somebody who wants to confiscate our humanity, and there are always stories that restore it. If we live out loud, we can trounce the hatred and expand everyone's lives. Forge meaning. Build identity. Forge meaning. Build identity. And then invite the world to share your joy. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause)

You may be wondering why a marine biologist from Oceana would come here today to talk to you about world hunger. I'm here today because saving the oceans is more than an ecological desire. It's more than a thing we're doing because we want to create jobs for fishermen or preserve fishermen's jobs. It's more than an economic pursuit. Saving the oceans can feed the world. Let me show you how. As you know, there are already more than a billion hungry people on this planet. We're expecting that problem to get worse as world population grows to nine billion or 10 billion by midcentury, and we can expect to have greater pressure on our food resources. And this is a big concern, especially considering where we are now. Now we know that our arable land per capita is already on the decline in both developed and developing countries. We know that we're headed for climate change, which is going to change rainfall patterns, making some areas drier, as you can see in orange, and others wetter, in blue, causing droughts in our breadbaskets, in places like the Midwest and Central Europe, and floods in others. It's going to make it harder for the land to help us solve the hunger problem. And that's why the oceans need to be their most abundant, so that the oceans can provide us as much food as possible. And that's something the oceans have been doing for us for a long time. As far back as we can go, we've seen an increase in the amount of food we've been able to harvest from our oceans. It just seemed like it was continuing to increase, until about 1980, when we started to see a decline. You've heard of peak oil. Maybe this is peak fish. I hope not. I'm going to come back to that. But you can see about an 18-percent decline in the amount of fish we've gotten in our world catch since 1980. And this is a big problem. It's continuing. This red line is continuing to go down. But we know how to turn it around, and that's what I'm going to talk about today. We know how to turn that curve back upwards. This doesn't have to be peak fish. If we do a few simple things in targeted places, we can bring our fisheries back and use them to feed people. First we want to know where the fish are, so let's look where the fish are. It turns out the fish, conveniently, are located for the most part in our coastal areas of the countries, in coastal zones, and these are areas that national jurisdictions have control over, and they can manage their fisheries in these coastal areas. Coastal countries tend to have jurisdictions that go out about 200 nautical miles, in areas that are called exclusive economic zones, and this is a good thing that they can control their fisheries in these areas, because the high seas, which are the darker areas on this map, the high seas, it's a lot harder to control things, because it has to be done internationally. You get into international agreements, and if any of you are tracking the climate change agreement, you know this can be a very slow, frustrating, tedious process. And so controlling things nationally is a great thing to be able to do. How many fish are actually in these coastal areas compared to the high seas? Well, you can see here about seven times as many fish in the coastal areas than there are in the high seas, so this is a perfect place for us to be focusing, because we can actually get a lot done. We can restore a lot of our fisheries if we focus in these coastal areas. But how many of these countries do we have to work in? There's something like 80 coastal countries. Do we have to fix fisheries management in all of those countries? So we asked ourselves, how many countries do we need to focus on, keeping in mind that the European Union conveniently manages its fisheries through a common fisheries policy? So if we got good fisheries management in the European Union and, say, nine other countries, how much of our fisheries would we be covering? Turns out, European Union plus nine countries covers about two thirds of the world's fish catch. If we took it up to 24 countries plus the European Union, we would up to 90 percent, almost all of the world's fish catch. So we think we can work in a limited number of places to make the fisheries come back. But what do we have to do in these places? Well, based on our work in the United States and elsewhere, we know that there are three key things we have to do to bring fisheries back, and they are: We need to set quotas or limits on how much we take; we need to reduce bycatch, which is the accidental catching and killing of fish that we're not targeting, and it's very wasteful; and three, we need to protect habitats, the nursery areas, the spawning areas that these fish need to grow and reproduce successfully so that they can rebuild their populations. If we do those three things, we know the fisheries will come back. How do we know? We know because we've seen it happening in a lot of different places. This is a slide that shows the herring population in Norway that was crashing since the 1950s. It was coming down, and when Norway set limits, or quotas, on its fishery, what happens? The fishery comes back. This is another example, also happens to be from Norway, of the Norwegian Arctic cod. Same deal. The fishery is crashing. They set limits on discards. Discards are these fish they weren't targeting and they get thrown overboard wastefully. When they set the discard limit, the fishery came back. And it's not just in Norway. We've seen this happening in countries all around the world, time and time again. When these countries step in and they put in sustainable fisheries management policies, the fisheries, which are always crashing, it seems, are starting to come back. So there's a lot of promise here. What does this mean for the world fish catch? This means that if we take that fishery catch that's on the decline and we could turn it upwards, we could increase it up to 100 million metric tons per year. So we didn't have peak fish yet. We still have an opportunity to not only bring the fish back but to actually get more fish that can feed more people than we currently are now. How many more? Right about now, we can feed about 450 million people a fish meal a day based on the current world fish catch, which, of course, you know is going down, so that number will go down over time if we don't fix it, but if we put fishery management practices like the ones I've described in place in 10 to 25 countries, we could bring that number up and feed as many as 700 million people a year a healthy fish meal. We should obviously do this just because it's a good thing to deal with the hunger problem, but it's also cost-effective. It turns out fish is the most cost-effective protein on the planet. If you look at how much fish protein you get per dollar invested compared to all of the other animal proteins, obviously, fish is a good business decision. It also doesn't need a lot of land, something that's in short supply, compared to other protein sources. And it doesn't need a lot of fresh water. It uses a lot less fresh water than, for example, cattle, where you have to irrigate a field so that you can grow the food to graze the cattle. It also has a very low carbon footprint. It has a little bit of a carbon footprint because we do have to get out and catch the fish. It takes a little bit of fuel, but as you know, agriculture can have a carbon footprint, and fish has a much smaller one, so it's less polluting. It's already a big part of our diet, but it can be a bigger part of our diet, which is a good thing, because we know that it's healthy for us. It can reduce our risks of cancer, heart disease and obesity. In fact, our CEO Andy Sharpless, who is the originator of this concept, actually, he likes to say fish is the perfect protein. Andy also talks about the fact that our ocean conservation movement really grew out of the land conservation movement, and in land conservation, we have this problem where biodiversity is at war with food production. You have to cut down the biodiverse forest if you want to get the field to grow the corn to feed people with, and so there's a constant push-pull there. There's a constant tough decision that has to be made between two very important things: maintaining biodiversity and feeding people. But in the oceans, we don't have that war. In the oceans, biodiversity is not at war with abundance. In fact, they're aligned. When we do things that produce biodiversity, we actually get more abundance, and that's important so that we can feed people. Now, there's a catch. Didn't anyone get that? (Laughter) Illegal fishing. Illegal fishing undermines the type of sustainable fisheries management I'm talking about. It can be when you catch fish using gears that have been prohibited, when you fish in places where you're not supposed to fish, you catch fish that are the wrong size or the wrong species. Illegal fishing cheats the consumer and it also cheats honest fishermen, and it needs to stop. The way illegal fish get into our market is through seafood fraud. You might have heard about this. It's when fish are labeled as something they're not. Think about the last time you had fish. What were you eating? Are you sure that's what it was? Because we tested 1,300 different fish samples and about a third of them were not what they were labeled to be. Snappers, nine out of 10 snappers were not snapper. Fifty-nine percent of the tuna we tested was mislabeled. And red snapper, we tested 120 samples, and only seven of them were really red snapper, so good luck finding a red snapper. Seafood has a really complex supply chain, and at every step in this supply chain, there's an opportunity for seafood fraud, unless we have traceability. Traceability is a way where the seafood industry can track the seafood from the boat to the plate to make sure that the consumer can then find out where their seafood came from. This is a really important thing. It's being done by some in the industry, but not enough, so we're pushing a law in Congress called the SAFE Seafood Act, and I'm very excited today to announce the release of a chef's petition, where 450 chefs have signed a petition calling on Congress to support the SAFE Seafood Act. It has a lot of celebrity chefs you may know -- Anthony Bourdain, Mario Batali, Barton Seaver and others — and they've signed it because they believe that people have a right to know about what they're eating. (Applause) Fishermen like it too, so there's a good chance we can get the kind of support we need to get this bill through, and it comes at a critical time, because this is the way we stop seafood fraud, this is the way we curb illegal fishing, and this is the way we make sure that quotas, habitat protection, and bycatch reductions can do the jobs they can do. We know that we can manage our fisheries sustainably. We know that we can produce healthy meals for hundreds of millions of people that don't use the land, that don't use much water, have a low carbon footprint, and are cost-effective. We know that saving the oceans can feed the world, and we need to start now. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause)

There's a man by the name of Captain William Swenson who recently was awarded the congressional Medal of Honor for his actions on September 8, 2009. On that day, a column of American and Afghan troops were making their way through a part of Afghanistan to help protect a group of government officials, a group of Afghan government officials, who would be meeting with some local village elders. The column came under ambush, and was surrounded on three sides, and amongst many other things, Captain Swenson was recognized for running into live fire to rescue the wounded and pull out the dead. One of the people he rescued was a sergeant, and he and a comrade were making their way to a medevac helicopter. And what was remarkable about this day is, by sheer coincidence, one of the medevac medics happened to have a GoPro camera on his helmet and captured the whole scene on camera. It shows Captain Swenson and his comrade bringing this wounded soldier who had received a gunshot to the neck. They put him in the helicopter, and then you see Captain Swenson bend over and give him a kiss before he turns around to rescue more. I saw this, and I thought to myself, where do people like that come from? What is that? That is some deep, deep emotion, when you would want to do that. There's a love there, and I wanted to know why is it that I don't have people that I work with like that? You know, in the military, they give medals to people who are willing to sacrifice themselves so that others may gain. In business, we give bonuses to people who are willing to sacrifice others so that we may gain. We have it backwards. Right? So I asked myself, where do people like this come from? And my initial conclusion was that they're just better people. That's why they're attracted to the military. These better people are attracted to this concept of service. But that's completely wrong. What I learned was that it's the environment, and if you get the environment right, every single one of us has the capacity to do these remarkable things, and more importantly, others have that capacity too. I've had the great honor of getting to meet some of these, who we would call heroes, who have put themselves and put their lives at risk to save others, and I asked them, "Why would you do it? Why did you do it?" And they all say the same thing: "Because they would have done it for me." It's this deep sense of trust and cooperation. So trust and cooperation are really important here. The problem with concepts of trust and cooperation is that they are feelings, they are not instructions. I can't simply say to you, "Trust me," and you will. I can't simply instruct two people to cooperate, and they will. It's not how it works. It's a feeling. So where does that feeling come from? If you go back 50,000 years to the Paleolithic era, to the early days of Homo sapiens, what we find is that the world was filled with danger, all of these forces working very, very hard to kill us. Nothing personal. Whether it was the weather, lack of resources, maybe a saber-toothed tiger, all of these things working to reduce our lifespan. And so we evolved into social animals, where we lived together and worked together in what I call a circle of safety, inside the tribe, where we felt like we belonged. And when we felt safe amongst our own, the natural reaction was trust and cooperation. There are inherent benefits to this. It means I can fall asleep at night and trust that someone from within my tribe will watch for danger. If we don't trust each other, if I don't trust you, that means you won't watch for danger. Bad system of survival. The modern day is exactly the same thing. The world is filled with danger, things that are trying to frustrate our lives or reduce our success, reduce our opportunity for success. It could be the ups and downs in the economy, the uncertainty of the stock market. It could be a new technology that renders your business model obsolete overnight. Or it could be your competition that is sometimes trying to kill you. It's sometimes trying to put you out of business, but at the very minimum is working hard to frustrate your growth and steal your business from you. We have no control over these forces. These are a constant, and they're not going away. The only variable are the conditions inside the organization, and that's where leadership matters, because it's the leader that sets the tone. When a leader makes the choice to put the safety and lives of the people inside the organization first, to sacrifice their comforts and sacrifice the tangible results, so that the people remain and feel safe and feel like they belong, remarkable things happen. I was flying on a trip, and I was witness to an incident where a passenger attempted to board before their number was called, and I watched the gate agent treat this man like he had broken the law, like a criminal. He was yelled at for attempting to board one group too soon. So I said something. I said, "Why do you have treat us like cattle? Why can't you treat us like human beings?" And this is exactly what she said to me. She said, "Sir, if I don't follow the rules, I could get in trouble or lose my job." All she was telling me is that she doesn't feel safe. All she was telling me is that she doesn't trust her leaders. The reason we like flying Southwest Airlines is not because they necessarily hire better people. It's because they don't fear their leaders. You see, if the conditions are wrong, we are forced to expend our own time and energy to protect ourselves from each other, and that inherently weakens the organization. When we feel safe inside the organization, we will naturally combine our talents and our strengths and work tirelessly to face the dangers outside and seize the opportunities. The closest analogy I can give to what a great leader is, is like being a parent. If you think about what being a great parent is, what do you want? What makes a great parent? We want to give our child opportunities, education, discipline them when necessary, all so that they can grow up and achieve more than we could for ourselves. Great leaders want exactly the same thing. They want to provide their people opportunity, education, discipline when necessary, build their self-confidence, give them the opportunity to try and fail, all so that they could achieve more than we could ever imagine for ourselves. Charlie Kim, who's the CEO of a company called Next Jump in New York City, a tech company, he makes the point that if you had hard times in your family, would you ever consider laying off one of your children? We would never do it. Then why do we consider laying off people inside our organization? Charlie implemented a policy of lifetime employment. If you get a job at Next Jump, you cannot get fired for performance issues. In fact, if you have issues, they will coach you and they will give you support, just like we would with one of our children who happens to come home with a C from school. It's the complete opposite. This is the reason so many people have such a visceral hatred, anger, at some of these banking CEOs with their disproportionate salaries and bonus structures. It's not the numbers. It's that they have violated the very definition of leadership. They have violated this deep-seated social contract. We know that they allowed their people to be sacrificed so they could protect their own interests, or worse, they sacrificed their people to protect their own interests. This is what so offends us, not the numbers. Would anybody be offended if we gave a $150 million bonus to Gandhi? How about a $250 million bonus to Mother Teresa? Do we have an issue with that? None at all. None at all. Great leaders would never sacrifice the people to save the numbers. They would sooner sacrifice the numbers to save the people. Bob Chapman, who runs a large manufacturing company in the Midwest called Barry-Wehmiller, in 2008 was hit very hard by the recession, and they lost 30 percent of their orders overnight. Now in a large manufacturing company, this is a big deal, and they could no longer afford their labor pool. They needed to save 10 million dollars, so, like so many companies today, the board got together and discussed layoffs. And Bob refused. You see, Bob doesn't believe in head counts. Bob believes in heart counts, and it's much more difficult to simply reduce the heart count. And so they came up with a furlough program. Every employee, from secretary to CEO, was required to take four weeks of unpaid vacation. They could take it any time they wanted, and they did not have to take it consecutively. But it was how Bob announced the program that mattered so much. He said, it's better that we should all suffer a little than any of us should have to suffer a lot, and morale went up. They saved 20 million dollars, and most importantly, as would be expected, when the people feel safe and protected by the leadership in the organization, the natural reaction is to trust and cooperate. And quite spontaneously, nobody expected, people started trading with each other. Those who could afford it more would trade with those who could afford it less. People would take five weeks so that somebody else only had to take three. Leadership is a choice. It is not a rank. I know many people at the seniormost levels of organizations who are absolutely not leaders. They are authorities, and we do what they say because they have authority over us, but we would not follow them. And I know many people who are at the bottoms of organizations who have no authority and they are absolutely leaders, and this is because they have chosen to look after the person to the left of them, and they have chosen to look after the person to the right of them. This is what a leader is. I heard a story of some Marines who were out in theater, and as is the Marine custom, the officer ate last, and he let his men eat first, and when they were done, there was no food left for him. And when they went back out in the field, his men brought him some of their food so that he may eat, because that's what happens. We call them leaders because they go first. We call them leaders because they take the risk before anybody else does. We call them leaders because they will choose to sacrifice so that their people may be safe and protected and so their people may gain, and when we do, the natural response is that our people will sacrifice for us. They will give us their blood and sweat and tears to see that their leader's vision comes to life, and when we ask them, "Why would you do that? Why would you give your blood and sweat and tears for that person?" they all say the same thing: "Because they would have done it for me." And isn't that the organization we would all like to work in? Thank you very much. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause)

The most romantic thing to ever happen to me online started out the way most things do: without me, and not online. On December 10, 1896, the man on the medal, Alfred Nobel, died. One hundred years later, exactly, actually, December 10, 1996, this charming lady, Wislawa Szymborska, won the Nobel Prize for literature. She's a Polish poet. She's a big deal, obviously, but back in '96, I thought I had never heard of her, and when I checked out her work, I found this sweet little poem, "Four in the Morning." "The hour from night to day. The hour from side to side. The hour for those past thirty..." And it goes on, but as soon as I read this poem, I fell for it hard, so hard, I suspected we must have met somewhere before. Had I shared an elevator ride with this poem? Did I flirt with this poem in a coffee shop somewhere? I could not place it, and it bugged me, and then in the coming week or two, I would just be watching an old movie, and this would happen. (Video) Groucho Marx: Charlie, you should have come to the first party. We didn't get home till around four in the morning. Rives: My roommates would have the TV on, and this would happen. (Music: Seinfeld theme) (Video) George Costanza: Oh boy, I was up til four in the morning watching that Omen trilogy. Rives: I would be listening to music, and this would happen. (Video) Elton John: ♪ It's four o'clock in the morning, damn it. ♪ Rives: So you can see what was going on, right? Obviously, the demigods of coincidence were just messing with me. Some people get a number stuck in their head, you may recognize a certain name or a tune, some people get nothing, but four in the morning was in me now, but mildly, like a groin injury. I always assumed it would just go away on its own eventually, and I never talked about it with anybody, but it did not, and I totally did. In 2007, I was invited to speak at TED for the second time, and since I was still an authority on nothing, I thought, what if I made a multimedia presentation on a topic so niche it is actually inconsequential or actually cockamamie. So my talk had some of my four in the morning examples, but it also had examples from my fellow TED speakers that year. I found four in the morning in a novel by Isabel Allende. I found a really great one in the autobiography of Bill Clinton. I found a couple in the work of Matt Groening, although Matt Groening told me later that he could not make my talk because it was a morning session and I gather that he is not an early riser. However, had Matt been there, he would have seen this mock conspiracy theory that was un-freaking-canny for me to assemble. It was totally contrived just for that room, just for that moment. That's how we did it in the pre-TED.com days. It was fun. That was pretty much it. When I got home, though, the emails started coming in from people who had seen the talk live, beginning with, and this is still my favorite, "Here's another one for your collection: 'It's the friends you can call up at 4 a.m. that matter.'" The sentiment is Marlene Dietrich. The email itself was from another very sexy European type, TED Curator Chris Anderson. (Laughter) Chris found this quote on a coffee cup or something, and I'm thinking, this man is the Typhoid Mary of ideas worth spreading, and I have infected him. I am contagious, which was confirmed less than a week later when a Hallmark employee scanned and sent an actual greeting card with that same quotation. As a bonus, she hooked me up with a second one they make. It says, "Just knowing I can call you at four in the morning if I need to makes me not really need to," which I love, because together these are like, "Hallmark: When you care enough to send the very best twice, phrased slightly differently." I was not surprised at the TEDster and New Yorker magazine overlap. A bunch of people sent me this when it came out. "It's 4 a.m.—maybe you'd sleep better if you bought some crap." I was surprised at the TEDster/"Rugrats" overlap. More than one person sent me this. (Video) Didi Pickles: It's four o'clock in the morning. Why on Earth are you making chocolate pudding? Stu Pickles: Because I've lost control of my life. (Laughter) Rives: And then there was the lone TEDster who was disgruntled I had overlooked what he considers to be a classic. (Video) Roy Neary: Get up, get up! I'm not kidding. Ronnie Neary: Is there an accident? Roy: No, it's not an accident. You wanted to get out of the house anyway, right? Ronnie: Not at four o'clock in the morning. Rives: So that's "Close Encounters," and the main character is all worked up because aliens, momentously, have chosen to show themselves to earthlings at four in the morning, which does make that a very solid example. Those were all really solid examples. They did not get me any closer to understanding why I thought I recognized this one particular poem. But they followed the pattern. They played along. Right? Four in the morning as this scapegoat hour when all these dramatic occurrences allegedly occur. Maybe this was some kind of cliche that had never been taxonomized before. Maybe I was on the trail of a new meme or something. Just when things were getting pretty interesting, things got really interesting. TED.com launched, later that year, with a bunch of videos from past talks, including mine, and I started receiving "four in the morning" citations from what seemed like every time zone on the planet. Much of it was content I never would have found on my own if I was looking for it, and I was not. I don't know anybody with juvenile diabetes. I probably would have missed the booklet, "Grilled Cheese at Four O'Clock in the Morning." (Laughter) I do not subscribe to Crochet Today! magazine, although it looks delightful. (Laughter) Take note of those clock ends. This is a college student's suggestion for what a "four in the morning" gang sign should look like. People sent me magazine ads. They took photographs in grocery stores. I got a ton of graphic novels and comics. A lot of good quality work, too: "The Sandman," "Watchmen." There's a very cute example here from "Calvin and Hobbes." In fact, the oldest citation anybody sent in was from a cartoon from the Stone Age. Take a look. (Video) Wilma Flintstone: Like how early? Fred Flintstone: Like at 4 a.m., that's how early. Rives: And the flip side of the timeline, this is from the 31st century. A thousand years from now, people are still doing this. (Video): Announcer: The time is 4 a.m. (Laughter) Rives: It shows the spectrum. I received so many songs, TV shows, movies, like from dismal to famous, I could give you a four-hour playlist. If I just stick to modern male movie stars, I keep it to the length of about a commercial. Here's your sampler. (Movie montage of "It's 4 a.m.") (Laughter) Rives: So somewhere along the line, I realized I have a hobby I didn't know I wanted, and it is crowdsourced. But I was also thinking what you might be thinking, which is really, couldn't you do this with any hour of the day? First of all, you are not getting clips like that about four in the afternoon. Secondly, I did a little research. You know, I was kind of interested. If this is confirmation bias, there is so much confirmation, I am biased. Literature probably shows it best. There are a couple three in the mornings in Shakespeare. There's a five in the morning. There are seven four in the mornings, and they're all very dire. In "Measure for Measure," it's the call time for the executioner. Tolstoy gives Napoleon insomnia at four in the morning right before battle in "War and Peace." Charlotte Brontë's "Jane Eyre" has got kind of a pivotal four in the morning, as does Emily Brontë's "Wuthering Heights." "Lolita" has as a creepy four in the morning. "Huckleberry Finn" has one in dialect. Someone sent in H.G. Wells' "The Invisible Man." Someone else sent in Ralph Ellison's "Invisible Man." "The Great Gatsby" spends the last four in the morning of his life waiting for a lover who never shows, and the most famous wake-up in literature, perhaps, "The Metamorphosis." First paragraph, the main character wakes up transformed into a giant cockroach, but we already know, cockroach notwithstanding, something is up with this guy. Why? His alarm is set for four o'clock in the morning. What kind of person would do that? This kind of person would do that. (Music) (4 a.m. alarm clock montage) (Video) Newcaster: Top of the hour. Time for the morning news. But of course, there is no news yet. Everyone's still asleep in their comfy, comfy beds. Rives: Exactly. So that's Lucy from the Peanuts, "Mommie Dearest", Rocky, first day of training, Nelson Mandela, first day in office, and Bart Simpson, which combined with a cockroach would give you one hell of a dinner party and gives me yet another category, people waking up, in my big old database. Just imagine that your friends and your family have heard that you collect, say, stuffed polar bears, and they send them to you. Even if you don't really, at a certain point, you totally collect stuffed polar bears, and your collection is probably pretty kick-ass. And when I got to that point, I embraced it. I got my curator on. I started fact checking, downloading, illegally screen-grabbing. I started archiving. My hobby had become a habit, and my habit gave me possibly the world's most eclectic Netflix queue. At one point, it went, "Guys and Dolls: The Musical," "Last Tango in Paris," "Diary of a Wimpy Kid," "Porn Star: Legend of Ron Jeremy." Why "Porn Star: Legend of Ron Jeremy"? Because someone told me I would find this clip in there. (Video) Ron Jeremy: I was born in Flushing, Queens on March, 12, 1953, at four o'clock in the morning. Rives: Of course he was. (Laughter) (Applause) Yeah. Not only does it seem to make sense, it also answers the question, "What do Ron Jeremy and Simone de Beauvoir have in common?" Simone de Beauvoir begins her entire autobiography with the sentence, "I was born at four o'clock in the morning," which I had because someone else had emailed it to me, and when they did, I had another bump up in my entry for this, because porn star Ron Jeremy and feminist Simone de Beauvoir are not just different people. They are different people that have this thing connecting them, and I did not know if that is trivia or knowledge or inadvertent expertise, but I did wonder, is there maybe a cooler way to do this? So last October, in gentleman scholar tradition, I put the entire collection online as "Museum of Four in the Morning." You can click on that red "refresh" button. It will take you at random to one of hundreds of snippets that are in the collection. Here is a knockout poem by Billy Collins called "Forgetfulness." (Video) Billy Collins: No wonder you rise in the middle of the night to look up the date of a famous battle in a book on war. No wonder the moon in the window seems to have drifted out of a love poem that you used to know by heart. Rives: So the first hour of this project was satisfying. A Bollywood actor sang a line on a DVD in a cafe. Half a globe away, a teenager made an Instagram video of it and sent it to me, a stranger. Less than a week later, though, I received a little bit of grace. I received a poignant tweet. It was brief. It just said, "Reminds me of an ancient mix tape." The name was a pseudonym, actually, or a pseudo-pseudonym. As soon as I saw the initials, and the profile pic, I knew immediately, my whole body knew immediately who this was, and I knew immediately what mix tape she was talking about. (Music) L.D. was my college romance. This is in the early '90s. I was an undegrad. She was a grad student in the library sciences department. Not the kind of librarian that takes her glasses off, lets her hair down, suddenly she's smoking hot. She was already smoking hot, she was super dorky, and we had a December-May romance, meaning we started dating in December, and by May, she had graduated and became my one that got away. But her mix tape did not get away. I have kept this mix tape in a box with notes and postcards, not just from L.D., from my life, but for decades. It's the kind of box where, if I have a girlfriend, I tend to hide it from her, and if I had a wife, I'm sure I would share it with her, but the story — (Laughter) — with this mix tape is there are seven songs per side, but no song titles. Instead, L.D. has used the U.S. Library of Congress classification system, including page numbers, to leave me clues. When I got this mix tape, I put it in my cassette player, I took it to the campus library, her library, I found 14 books on the shelves. I remember bringing them all to my favorite corner table, and I read poems paired to songs like food to wine, paired, I can tell you, like saddle shoes to a cobalt blue vintage cotton dress. I did this again last October. I'm sitting there, I got new earbuds, old Walkman, I realize this is just the kind of extravagance I used to take for granted even when I was extravagant. And then I thought, "Good for him." "PG" is Slavic literature. "7000" series Polish literature. Z9A24 is a collection of 70 poems. Page 31 is Wislawa Szymborska's poem paired with Paul Simon's "Peace Like a River." (Music: Paul Simon, "Peace Like a River") (Video) Paul Simon: ♪ Oh, four in the morning ♪ ♪ I woke up from out of my dream ♪ Rives: Thank you. Appreciate it. (Applause)

"Pheromone" is a very powerful word. It conjures up sex, abandon, loss of control, and you can see, it's very important as a word. But it's only 50 years old. It was invented in 1959. Now, if you put that word into the web, as you may have done, you'll come up with millions of hits, and almost all of those sites are trying to sell you something to make you irresistible for 10 dollars or more. Now, this is a very attractive idea, and the molecules they mention sound really science-y. They've got lots of syllables. It's things like androstenol, androstenone or androstadienone. It gets better and better, and when you combine that with white lab coats, you must imagine that there is fantastic science behind this. But sadly, these are fraudulent claims supported by dodgy science. The problem is that, although there are many good scientists working on what they think are human pheromones, and they're publishing in respectable journals, at the basis of this, despite very sophisticated experiments, there really is no good science behind it, because it's based on a problem, which is nobody has systematically gone through all the odors that humans produce -- and there are thousands of molecules that we give off. We're mammals. We produce a lot of smell. Nobody has gone through systematically to work out which molecules really are pheromones. They've just plucked a few, and all these experiments are based on those, but there's no good evidence at all. Now, that's not to say that smell is not important to people. It is, and some people are real enthusiasts, and one of these was Napoleon. And famously, you may remember that out on the campaign trail for war, he wrote to his lover, Empress Josephine, saying, "Don't wash. I'm coming home." (Laughter) So he didn't want to lose any of her richness in the days before he'd get home, and it is still, you'll find websites that offer this as a major quirk. At the same time, though, we spend about as much money taking the smells off us as putting them back on in perfumes, and perfumes are a multi-billion-dollar business. So what I want to do in the rest of this talk is tell you about what pheromones really are, tell you why I think we would expect humans to have pheromones, tell you about some of the confusions in pheromones, and then finally, I want to end with a promising avenue which shows us the way we ought to be going. So the ancient Greeks knew that dogs sent invisible signals between each other. A female dog in heat sent an invisible signal to male dogs for miles around, and it wasn't a sound, it was a smell. You could take the smell from the female dog, and the dogs would chase the cloth. But the problem for everybody who could see this effect was that you couldn't identify the molecules. You couldn't demonstrate it was chemical. The reason for that, of course, is that each of these animals produces tiny quantities, and in the case of the dog, males dogs can smell it, but we can't smell it. And it was only in 1959 that a German team, after spending 20 years in search of these molecules, discovered, identified, the first pheromone, and this was the sex pheromone of a silk moth. Now, this was an inspired choice by Adolf Butenandt and his team, because he needed half a million moths to get enough material to do the chemical analysis. But he created the model for how you should go about pheromone analysis. He basically went through systematically, showing that only the molecule in question was the one that stimulated the males, not all the others. He analyzed it very carefully. He synthesized the molecule, and then tried the synthesized molecule on the males and got them to respond and showed it was, indeed, that molecule. That's closing the circle. That's the thing which has never been done with humans: nothing systematic, no real demonstration. With that new concept, we needed a new word, and that was the word "pheromone," and it's basically transferred excitement, transferred between individuals, and since 1959, pheromones have been found right the way across the animal kingdom, in male animals, in female animals. It works just as well underwater for goldfish and lobsters. And almost every mammal you can think of has had a pheromone identified, and of course, an enormous number of insects. So we know that pheromones exist right the way across the animal kingdom. What about humans? Well, the first thing, of course, is that we're mammals, and mammals are smelly. As any dog owner can tell you, we smell, they smell. But the real reason we might think that humans have pheromones is the change that occurs as we grow up. The smell of a room of teenagers is quite different from the smell of a room of small children. What's changed? And of course, it's puberty. Along with the pubic hair and the hair in the armpits, new glands start to secrete in those places, and that's what's making the change in smell. If we were any other kind of mammal, or any other kind of animal, we would say, "That must be something to do with pheromones," and we'd start looking properly. But there are some problems, and this is why, I think, people have not looked for pheromones so effectively in humans. There are, indeed, problems. And the first of these is perhaps surprising. It's all about culture. Now moths don't learn a lot about what is good to smell, but humans do, and up to the age of about four, any smell, no matter how rancid, is simply interesting. And I understand that the major role of parents is to stop kids putting their fingers in poo, because it's always something nice to smell. But gradually we learn what's not good, and one of the things we learn at the same time as what is not good is what is good. Now, the cheese behind me is a British, if not an English, delicacy. It's ripe blue Stilton. Liking it is incomprehensible to people from other countries. Every culture has its own special food and national delicacy. If you were to come from Iceland, your national dish is deep rotted shark. Now, all of these things are acquired tastes, but they form almost a badge of identity. You're part of the in-group. The second thing is the sense of smell. Each of us has a unique odor world, in the sense that what we smell, we each smell a completely different world. Now, smell was the hardest of the senses to crack, and the Nobel Prize awarded to Richard Axel and Linda Buck was only awarded in 2004 for their discovery of how smell works. It's really hard, but in essence, nerves from the brain go up into the nose and on these nerves exposed in the nose to the outside air are receptors, and odor molecules coming in on a sniff interact with these receptors, and if they bond, they send the nerve a signal which goes back into the brain. We don't just have one kind of receptor. If you're a human, you have about 400 different kinds of receptors, and the brain knows what you're smelling because of the combination of receptors and nerve cells that they trigger, sending messages up to the brain in a combinatorial fashion. But it's a bit more complicated, because each of those 400 comes in various variants, and depending which variant you have, you might smell coriander, or cilantro, that herb, either as something delicious and savory or something like soap. So we each have an individual world of smell, and that complicates anything when we're studying smell. Well, we really ought to talk about armpits, and I have to say that I do have particularly good ones. Now, I'm not going to share them with you, but this is the place that most people have looked for pheromones. There is one good reason, which is, the great apes have armpits as their unique characteristic. The other primates have scent glands in other parts of the body. The great apes have these armpits full of secretory glands producing smells all the time, enormous numbers of molecules. When they're secreted from the glands, the molecules are odorless. They have no smell at all, and it's only the wonderful bacteria growing on the rainforest of hair that actually produces the smells that we know and love. And so incidentally, if you want to reduce the amount of smell, clear-cutting your armpits is a very effective way of reducing the habitat for bacteria, and you'll find they remain less smelly for much longer. But although we've focused on armpits, I think it's partly because they're the least embarrassing place to go and ask people for samples. There is actually another reason why we might not be looking for a universal sex pheromone there, and that's because 20 percent of the world's population doesn't have smelly armpits like me. And these are people from China, Japan, Korea, and other parts of northeast Asia. They simply don't secrete those odorless precursors that the bacteria love to use to produce the smells that in an ethnocentric way we always thought of as characteristic of armpits. So it doesn't apply to 20 percent of the world. So what should we be doing in our search for human pheromones? I'm fairly convinced that we do have them. We're mammals, like everybody else who's a mammal, and we probably do have them. But what I think we should do is go right back to the beginning, and basically look all over the body. No matter how embarrassing, we need to search and go for the first time where no one else has dared tread. It's going to be difficult, it's going to be embarrassing, but we need to look. We also need to go back to the ideas that Butenandt used when he was studying the silk moth. We need to go back and look systematically at all the molecules that are being produced, and work out which ones are really involved. It isn't good enough simply to pluck a couple and say, "They'll do." We have to actually demonstrate that they really have the effects we claim. There is one team that I'm actually very impressed by. They're in France, and their previous success was identifying the rabbit mammary pheromone. They've turned their attention now to human babies and mothers. So this is a baby having a drink of milk from its mother's breast. Her nipple is completely hidden by the baby's head, but what you'll notice is a white droplet with an arrow pointing to it, and that's the secretion from the areolar glands. Now, we all have them, men and women, and these are the little bumps around the nipple, and if you're a lactating woman, these start to secrete. It's a very interesting secretion. What Benoist Schaal and his team developed was a simple test to investigate what the effect of this secretion might be, in effect, a simple bioassay. So this is a sleeping baby, and under its nose, we've put a clean glass rod. The baby remains sleeping, showing no interest at all. But if we go to any mother who is secreting from the areolar glands, so it's not about recognition, it can be from any mother, if we take the secretion and now put it under the baby's nose, we get a very different reaction. It's a connoisseur's reaction of delight, and it opens its mouth and sticks out its tongue and starts to suck. Now, since this is from any mother, it could really be a pheromone. It's not about individual recognition. Any mother will do. Now, why is this important, apart from being simply very interesting? It's because women vary in the number of areolar glands that they have, and there is a correlation between the ease with which babies start to suckle and the number of areolar glands she has. It appears that the more secretions she's got, the more likely the baby is to suckle quickly. If you're a mammal, the most dangerous time in life is the first few hours after birth. You have to get that first drink of milk, and if you don't get it, you won't survive. You'll be dead. Since many babies actually find it difficult to take that first meal, because they're not getting the right stimulus, if we could identify what that molecule was, and the French team are being very cautious, but if we could identify the molecule, synthesize it, it would then mean premature babies would be more likely to suckle, and every baby would have a better chance of survival. So what I want to argue is this is one example of where a systematic, really scientific approach can actually bring you a real understanding of pheromones. There could be all sorts of medical interventions. There could be all sorts of things that humans are doing with pheromones that we simply don't know at the moment. What we need to remember is pheromones are not just about sex. They're about all sorts of things to do with a mammal's life. So do go forward and do search for more. There's lots to find. Thank you very much. (Applause)

I recently retired from the California Highway Patrol after 23 years of service. The majority of those 23 years was spent patrolling the southern end of Marin County, which includes the Golden Gate Bridge. The bridge is an iconic structure, known worldwide for its beautiful views of San Francisco, the Pacific Ocean, and its inspiring architecture. Unfortunately, it is also a magnet for suicide, being one of the most utilized sites in the world. The Golden Gate Bridge opened in 1937. Joseph Strauss, chief engineer in charge of building the bridge, was quoted as saying, "The bridge is practically suicide-proof. Suicide from the bridge is neither practical nor probable." But since its opening, over 1,600 people have leapt to their death from that bridge. Some believe that traveling between the two towers will lead you to another dimension -- this bridge has been romanticized as such — that the fall from that frees you from all your worries and grief, and the waters below will cleanse your soul. But let me tell you what actually occurs when the bridge is used as a means of suicide. After a free fall of four to five seconds, the body strikes the water at about 75 miles an hour. That impact shatters bones, some of which then puncture vital organs. Most die on impact. Those that don't generally flail in the water helplessly, and then drown. I don't think that those who contemplate this method of suicide realize how grisly a death that they will face. This is the cord. Except for around the two towers, there is 32 inches of steel paralleling the bridge. This is where most folks stand before taking their lives. I can tell you from experience that once the person is on that cord, and at their darkest time, it is very difficult to bring them back. I took this photo last year as this young woman spoke to an officer contemplating her life. I want to tell you very happily that we were successful that day in getting her back over the rail. When I first began working on the bridge, we had no formal training. You struggled to funnel your way through these calls. This was not only a disservice to those contemplating suicide, but to the officers as well. We've come a long, long way since then. Now, veteran officers and psychologists train new officers. This is Jason Garber. I met Jason on July 22 of last year when I get received a call of a possible suicidal subject sitting on the cord near midspan. I responded, and when I arrived, I observed Jason speaking to a Golden Gate Bridge officer. Jason was just 32 years old and had flown out here from New Jersey. As a matter of fact, he had flown out here on two other occasions from New Jersey to attempt suicide on this bridge. After about an hour of speaking with Jason, he asked us if we knew the story of Pandora's box. Recalling your Greek mythology, Zeus created Pandora, and sent her down to Earth with a box, and told her, "Never, ever open that box." Well one day, curiosity got the better of Pandora, and she did open the box. Out flew plagues, sorrows, and all sorts of evils against man. The only good thing in the box was hope. Jason then asked us, "What happens when you open the box and hope isn't there?" He paused a few moments, leaned to his right, and was gone. This kind, intelligent young man from New Jersey had just committed suicide. I spoke with Jason's parents that evening, and I suppose that, when I was speaking with them, that I didn't sound as if I was doing very well, because that very next day, their family rabbi called to check on me. Jason's parents had asked him to do so. The collateral damage of suicide affects so many people. I pose these questions to you: What would you do if your family member, friend or loved one was suicidal? What would you say? Would you know what to say? In my experience, it's not just the talking that you do, but the listening. Listen to understand. Don't argue, blame, or tell the person you know how they feel, because you probably don't. By just being there, you may just be the turning point that they need. If you think someone is suicidal, don't be afraid to confront them and ask the question. One way of asking them the question is like this: "Others in similar circumstances have thought about ending their life; have you had these thoughts?" Confronting the person head-on may just save their life and be the turning point for them. Some other signs to look for: hopelessness, believing that things are terrible and never going to get better; helplessness, believing that there is nothing that you can do about it; recent social withdrawal; and a loss of interest in life. I came up with this talk just a couple of days ago, and I received an email from a lady that I'd like to read you her letter. She lost her son on January 19 of this year, and she wrote this me this email just a couple of days ago, and it's with her permission and blessing that I read this to you. "Hi, Kevin. I imagine you're at the TED Conference. That must be quite the experience to be there. I'm thinking I should go walk the bridge this weekend. Just wanted to drop you a note. Hope you get the word out to many people and they go home talking about it to their friends who tell their friends, etc. I'm still pretty numb, but noticing more moments of really realizing Mike isn't coming home. Mike was driving from Petaluma to San Francisco to watch the 49ers game with his father on January 19. He never made it there. I called Petaluma police and reported him missing that evening. The next morning, two officers came to my home and reported that Mike's car was down at the bridge. A witness had observed him jumping off the bridge at 1:58 p.m. the previous day. Thanks so much for standing up for those who may be only temporarily too weak to stand for themselves. Who hasn't been low before without suffering from a true mental illness? It shouldn't be so easy to end it. My prayers are with you for your fight. The GGB, Golden Gate Bridge, is supposed to be a passage across our beautiful bay, not a graveyard. Good luck this week. Vicky." I can't imagine the courage it takes for her to go down to that bridge and walk the path that her son took that day, and also the courage just to carry on. I'd like to introduce you to a man I refer to as hope and courage. On March 11 of 2005, I responded to a radio call of a possible suicidal subject on the bridge sidewalk near the north tower. I rode my motorcycle down the sidewalk and observed this man, Kevin Berthia, standing on the sidewalk. When he saw me, he immediately traversed that pedestrian rail, and stood on that small pipe which goes around the tower. For the next hour and a half, I listened as Kevin spoke about his depression and hopelessness. Kevin decided on his own that day to come back over that rail and give life another chance. When Kevin came back over, I congratulated him. "This is a new beginning, a new life." But I asked him, "What was it that made you come back and give hope and life another chance?" And you know what he told me? He said, "You listened. You let me speak, and you just listened." Shortly after this incident, I received a letter from Kevin's mother, and I have that letter with me, and I'd like to read it to you. "Dear Mr. Briggs, Nothing will erase the events of March 11, but you are one of the reasons Kevin is still with us. I truly believe Kevin was crying out for help. He has been diagnosed with a mental illness for which he has been properly medicated. I adopted Kevin when he was only six months old, completely unaware of any hereditary traits, but, thank God, now we know. Kevin is straight, as he says. We truly thank God for you. Sincerely indebted to you, Narvella Berthia." And on the bottom she writes, "P.S. When I visited San Francisco General Hospital that evening, you were listed as the patient. Boy, did I have to straighten that one out." Today, Kevin is a loving father and contributing member of society. He speaks openly about the events that day and his depression in the hopes that his story will inspire others. Suicide is not just something I've encountered on the job. It's personal. My grandfather committed suicide by poisoning. That act, although ending his own pain, robbed me from ever getting to know him. This is what suicide does. For most suicidal folks, or those contemplating suicide, they wouldn't think of hurting another person. They just want their own pain to end. Typically, this is accomplished in just three ways: sleep, drugs or alcohol, or death. In my career, I've responded to and been involved in hundreds of mental illness and suicide calls around the bridge. Of those incidents I've been directly involved with, I've only lost two, but that's two too many. One was Jason. The other was a man I spoke to for about an hour. During that time, he shook my hand on three occasions. On that final handshake, he looked at me, and he said, "Kevin, I'm sorry, but I have to go." And he leapt. Horrible, absolutely horrible. I do want to tell you, though, the vast majority of folks that we do get to contact on that bridge do not commit suicide. Additionally, that very few who have jumped off the bridge and lived and can talk about it, that one to two percent, most of those folks have said that the second that they let go of that rail, they knew that they had made a mistake and they wanted to live. I tell people, the bridge not only connects Marin to San Francisco, but people together also. That connection, or bridge that we make, is something that each and every one of us should strive to do. Suicide is preventable. There is help. There is hope. Thank you very much. (Applause)

I study ants in the desert, in the tropical forest and in my kitchen, and in the hills around Silicon Valley where I live. I've recently realized that ants are using interactions differently in different environments, and that got me thinking that we could learn from this about other systems, like brains and data networks that we engineer, and even cancer. So what all these systems have in common is that there's no central control. An ant colony consists of sterile female workers -- those are the ants you see walking around — and then one or more reproductive females who just lay the eggs. They don't give any instructions. Even though they're called queens, they don't tell anybody what to do. So in an ant colony, there's no one in charge, and all systems like this without central control are regulated using very simple interactions. Ants interact using smell. They smell with their antennae, and they interact with their antennae, so when one ant touches another with its antennae, it can tell, for example, if the other ant is a nestmate and what task that other ant has been doing. So here you see a lot of ants moving around and interacting in a lab arena that's connected by tubes to two other arenas. So when one ant meets another, it doesn't matter which ant it meets, and they're actually not transmitting any kind of complicated signal or message. All that matters to the ant is the rate at which it meets other ants. And all of these interactions, taken together, produce a network. So this is the network of the ants that you just saw moving around in the arena, and it's this constantly shifting network that produces the behavior of the colony, like whether all the ants are hiding inside the nest, or how many are going out to forage. A brain actually works in the same way, but what's great about ants is that you can see the whole network as it happens. There are more than 12,000 species of ants, in every conceivable environment, and they're using interactions differently to meet different environmental challenges. So one important environmental challenge that every system has to deal with is operating costs, just what it takes to run the system. And another environmental challenge is resources, finding them and collecting them. In the desert, operating costs are high because water is scarce, and the seed-eating ants that I study in the desert have to spend water to get water. So an ant outside foraging, searching for seeds in the hot sun, just loses water into the air. But the colony gets its water by metabolizing the fats out of the seeds that they eat. So in this environment, interactions are used to activate foraging. An outgoing forager doesn't go out unless it gets enough interactions with returning foragers, and what you see are the returning foragers going into the tunnel, into the nest, and meeting outgoing foragers on their way out. This makes sense for the ant colony, because the more food there is out there, the more quickly the foragers find it, the faster they come back, and the more foragers they send out. The system works to stay stopped, unless something positive happens. So interactions function to activate foragers. And we've been studying the evolution of this system. First of all, there's variation. It turns out that colonies are different. On dry days, some colonies forage less, so colonies are different in how they manage this trade-off between spending water to search for seeds and getting water back in the form of seeds. And we're trying to understand why some colonies forage less than others by thinking about ants as neurons, using models from neuroscience. So just as a neuron adds up its stimulation from other neurons to decide whether to fire, an ant adds up its stimulation from other ants to decide whether to forage. And what we're looking for is whether there might be small differences among colonies in how many interactions each ant needs before it's willing to go out and forage, because a colony like that would forage less. And this raises an analogous question about brains. We talk about the brain, but of course every brain is slightly different, and maybe there are some individuals or some conditions in which the electrical properties of neurons are such that they require more stimulus to fire, and that would lead to differences in brain function. So in order to ask evolutionary questions, we need to know about reproductive success. This is a map of the study site where I have been tracking this population of harvester ant colonies for 28 years, which is about as long as a colony lives. Each symbol is a colony, and the size of the symbol is how many offspring it had, because we were able to use genetic variation to match up parent and offspring colonies, that is, to figure out which colonies were founded by a daughter queen produced by which parent colony. And this was amazing for me, after all these years, to find out, for example, that colony 154, whom I've known well for many years, is a great-grandmother. Here's her daughter colony, here's her granddaughter colony, and these are her great-granddaughter colonies. And by doing this, I was able to learn that offspring colonies resemble parent colonies in their decisions about which days are so hot that they don't forage, and the offspring of parent colonies live so far from each other that the ants never meet, so the ants of the offspring colony can't be learning this from the parent colony. And so our next step is to look for the genetic variation underlying this resemblance. So then I was able to ask, okay, who's doing better? Over the time of the study, and especially in the past 10 years, there's been a very severe and deepening drought in the Southwestern U.S., and it turns out that the colonies that conserve water, that stay in when it's really hot outside, and thus sacrifice getting as much food as possible, are the ones more likely to have offspring colonies. So all this time, I thought that colony 154 was a loser, because on really dry days, there'd be just this trickle of foraging, while the other colonies were out foraging, getting lots of food, but in fact, colony 154 is a huge success. She's a matriarch. She's one of the rare great-grandmothers on the site. To my knowledge, this is the first time that we've been able to track the ongoing evolution of collective behavior in a natural population of animals and find out what's actually working best. Now, the Internet uses an algorithm to regulate the flow of data that's very similar to the one that the harvester ants are using to regulate the flow of foragers. And guess what we call this analogy? The anternet is coming. (Applause) So data doesn't leave the source computer unless it gets a signal that there's enough bandwidth for it to travel on. In the early days of the Internet, when operating costs were really high and it was really important not to lose any data, then the system was set up for interactions to activate the flow of data. It's interesting that the ants are using an algorithm that's so similar to the one that we recently invented, but this is only one of a handful of ant algorithms that we know about, and ants have had 130 million years to evolve a lot of good ones, and I think it's very likely that some of the other 12,000 species are going to have interesting algorithms for data networks that we haven't even thought of yet. So what happens when operating costs are low? Operating costs are low in the tropics, because it's very humid, and it's easy for the ants to be outside walking around. But the ants are so abundant and diverse in the tropics that there's a lot of competition. Whatever resource one species is using, another species is likely to be using that at the same time. So in this environment, interactions are used in the opposite way. The system keeps going unless something negative happens, and one species that I study makes circuits in the trees of foraging ants going from the nest to a food source and back, just round and round, unless something negative happens, like an interaction with ants of another species. So here's an example of ant security. In the middle, there's an ant plugging the nest entrance with its head in response to interactions with another species. Those are the little ones running around with their abdomens up in the air. But as soon as the threat is passed, the entrance is open again, and maybe there are situations in computer security where operating costs are low enough that we could just block access temporarily in response to an immediate threat, and then open it again, instead of trying to build a permanent firewall or fortress. So another environmental challenge that all systems have to deal with is resources, finding and collecting them. And to do this, ants solve the problem of collective search, and this is a problem that's of great interest right now in robotics, because we've understood that, rather than sending a single, sophisticated, expensive robot out to explore another planet or to search a burning building, that instead, it may be more effective to get a group of cheaper robots exchanging only minimal information, and that's the way that ants do it. So the invasive Argentine ant makes expandable search networks. They're good at dealing with the main problem of collective search, which is the trade-off between searching very thoroughly and covering a lot of ground. And what they do is, when there are many ants in a small space, then each one can search very thoroughly because there will be another ant nearby searching over there, but when there are a few ants in a large space, then they need to stretch out their paths to cover more ground. I think they use interactions to assess density, so when they're really crowded, they meet more often, and they search more thoroughly. Different ant species must use different algorithms, because they've evolved to deal with different resources, and it could be really useful to know about this, and so we recently asked ants to solve the collective search problem in the extreme environment of microgravity in the International Space Station. When I first saw this picture, I thought, Oh no, they've mounted the habitat vertically, but then I realized that, of course, it doesn't matter. So the idea here is that the ants are working so hard to hang on to the wall or the floor or whatever you call it that they're less likely to interact, and so the relationship between how crowded they are and how often they meet would be messed up. We're still analyzing the data. I don't have the results yet. But it would be interesting to know how other species solve this problem in different environments on Earth, and so we're setting up a program to encourage kids around the world to try this experiment with different species. It's very simple. It can be done with cheap materials. And that way, we could make a global map of ant collective search algorithms. And I think it's pretty likely that the invasive species, the ones that come into our buildings, are going to be really good at this, because they're in your kitchen because they're really good at finding food and water. So the most familiar resource for ants is a picnic, and this is a clustered resource. When there's one piece of fruit, there's likely to be another piece of fruit nearby, and the ants that specialize on clustered resources use interactions for recruitment. So when one ant meets another, or when it meets a chemical deposited on the ground by another, then it changes direction to follow in the direction of the interaction, and that's how you get the trail of ants sharing your picnic. Now this is a place where I think we might be able to learn something from ants about cancer. I mean, first, it's obvious that we could do a lot to prevent cancer by not allowing people to spread around or sell the toxins that promote the evolution of cancer in our bodies, but I don't think the ants can help us much with this because ants never poison their own colonies. But we might be able to learn something from ants about treating cancer. There are many different kinds of cancer. Each one originates in a particular part of the body, and then some kinds of cancer will spread or metastasize to particular other tissues where they must be getting resources that they need. So if you think from the perspective of early metastatic cancer cells as they're out searching around for the resources that they need, if those resources are clustered, they're likely to use interactions for recruitment, and if we can figure out how cancer cells are recruiting, then maybe we could set traps to catch them before they become established. So ants are using interactions in different ways in a huge variety of environments, and we could learn from this about other systems that operate without central control. Using only simple interactions, ant colonies have been performing amazing feats for more than 130 million years. We have a lot to learn from them. Thank you. (Applause)

So today's top chef class is in how to rob a bank, and it's clear that the general public needs guidance, because the average bank robbery nets only 7,500 dollars. Rank amateurs who know nothing about how to cook the books. The folks who know, of course, run our largest banks, and in the last go-around, they cost us over 11 trillion dollars. That's what 11 trillion looks like. That's how many zeros? And cost us over 10 million jobs as well. So our task is to educate ourselves so that we can understand why we have these recurrent, intensifying financial crises, and how we can prevent them in the future. And the answer to that is that we have to stop epidemics of control fraud. Control fraud is what happens when the people who control, typically a CEO, a seemingly legitimate entity, use it as a weapon to defraud. And these are the weapons of mass destruction in the financial world. They also follow in finance a particular strategy, because the weapon of choice in finance is accounting, and there is a recipe for accounting control fraud, and how it occurs. And we discovered this recipe in quite an odd way that I'll come back to in a moment. First ingredient in the recipe: grow like crazy; second, by making or buying really crappy loans, but loans that are made at a very high interest rate or yield; three, while employing extreme leverage -- that just means a lot of debt -- compared to your equity; and four, while providing only trivial loss reserves against the inevitable losses. If you follow those four simple steps, and any bank can follow them, then you are mathematically guaranteed to have three things occur. The first thing is you will report record bank profits -- not just high, record. Two, the CEO will immediately be made incredibly wealthy by modern executive compensation. And three, farther down the road, the bank will suffer catastrophic losses and will fail unless it is bailed out. And that's a hint as to how we discovered this recipe, because we discovered it through an autopsy process. During the savings and loan debacle in 1984, we looked at every single failure, and we looked for common characteristics, and we discovered this recipe was common to each of these frauds. In other words, a coroner could find these things because this is a fatal recipe that will destroy the banks as well as the economy. And it also turns out to be precisely what could have stopped this crisis, the one that cost us 11 trillion dollars just in the household sector, that cost us 10 million jobs, was the easiest financial crisis by far to have avoided completely if we had simply learned the lessons of epidemics of control fraud, particularly using this recipe. So let's go to this crisis, and the two huge epidemics of loan origination fraud that drove the crisis -- appraisal fraud and liar's loans -- and what we're going to see in looking at both of these is we got warnings that were incredibly early about these frauds. We got warnings that we could have taken advantage of easily, because back in the savings and loan debacle, we had figured out how to respond and prevent these crises. And three, the warnings were unambiguous. They were obvious that what was going on was an epidemic of accounting control fraud building up. Let's take appraisal fraud first. This is simply where you inflate the value of the home that is being pledged as security for the loan. In 2000, the year 2000, that is over a year before Enron fails, by the way, the honest appraisers got together a formal petition begging the federal government to act, and the industry to act, to stop this epidemic of appraisal fraud. And the appraisers explained how it was occurring, that banks were demanding that appraisers inflate the appraisal, and that if the appraisers refused to do so, they, the banks, would blacklist honest appraisers and refuse to use them. Now, we've seen this before in the savings and loan debacle, and we know that this kind of fraud can only originate from the lenders, and that no honest lender would ever inflate the appraisal, because it's the great protection against loss. So this was an incredibly early warning, 2000. It was something we'd seen before, and it was completely unambiguous. This was an epidemic of accounting control fraud led by the banks. What about liar's loans? Well, that warning actually comes earlier. The savings and loan debacle is basically the early 1980s through 1993, and in the midst of fighting that wave of accounting control fraud, in 1990, we found that a second front of fraud was being started. And like all good financial frauds in America, it began in Orange County, California. And we happened to be the regional regulators for it. And our examiners said, they are making loans without even checking what the borrower's income is. This is insane, it has to lead to massive losses, and it only makes sense for entities engaged in these accounting control frauds. And we said, yeah, you're absolutely right, and we drove those liar's loans out of the industry in 1990 and 1991, but we could only deal with the industry we had jurisdiction over, which was savings and loans, and so the biggest and the baddest of the frauds, Long Beach Savings, voluntarily gave up its federal savings and loan charter, gave up federal deposit insurance, converted to become a mortgage bank for the sole purpose of escaping our jurisdiction, and changed its name to Ameriquest, and became the most notorious of the liar's loans frauds early on, and to add to that, they deliberately predated upon minorities. So we knew again about this crisis. We'd seen it before. We'd stopped it before. We had incredibly early warnings of it, and it was absolutely unambiguous that no honest lender would make loans in this fashion. So let's take a look at the reaction of the industry and the regulators and the prosecutors to these clear early warnings that could have prevented the crisis. Start with the industry. The industry responded between 2003 and 2006 by increasing liar's loans by over 500 percent. These were the loans that hyperinflated the bubble and produced the economic crisis. By 2006, half of all the loans called subprime were also liar's loans. They're not mutually exclusive, it's just that together, they're the most toxic combination you can possibly imagine. By 2006, 40 percent of all the loans made that year, all the home loans made that year, were liar's loans, 40 percent. And this is despite a warning from the industry's own antifraud experts that said that these loans were an open invitation to fraudsters, and that they had a fraud incidence of 90 percent, nine zero. In response to that, the industry first started calling these loans liar's loans, which lacks a certain subtlety, and second, massively increased them, and no government regulator ever required or encouraged any lender to make a liar's loan or anyone to purchase a liar's loan, and that explicitly includes Fannie and Freddie. This came from the lenders because of the fraud recipe. What happened to appraisal fraud? It expanded remarkably as well. By 2007, when a survey of appraisers was done, 90 percent of appraisers reported that they had been subject to coercion from the lenders trying to get them to inflate an appraisal. In other words, both forms of fraud became absolutely endemic and normal, and this is what drove the bubble. What happened in the governmental sector? Well, the government, as I told you, when we were the savings and loan regulators, we could only deal with our industry, and if people gave up their federal deposit insurance, we couldn't do anything to them. Congress, it may strike you as impossible, but actually did something intelligent in 1994, and passed the Home Ownership and Equity Protection Act that gave the Fed, and only the Federal Reserve, the explicit, statutory authority to ban liar's loans by every lender, whether or not they had federal deposit insurance. So what did Ben Bernanke and Alan Greenspan, as chairs of the Fed, do when they got these warnings that these were massively fraudulent loans and that they were being sold to the secondary market? Remember, there's no fraud exorcist. Once it starts out a fraudulent loan, it can only be sold to the secondary market through more frauds, lying about the reps and warrantees, and then those people are going to produce mortgage-backed securities and exotic derivatives which are also going to be supposedly backed by those fraudulent loans. So the fraud is going to progress through the entire system, hyperinflate the bubble, produce a disaster. And remember, we had experience with this. We had seen significant losses, and we had experience of competent regulators in stopping it. Greenspan and Bernanke refused to use the authority under the statute to stop liar's loans. And this was a matter first of dogma. They're just horrifically opposed to anything regulatory. But it is also the international competition in laxity, the race to the bottom between the United States and the United Kingdom, the city of London, in particular, and the city of London won that race to the bottom, but it meant that all regulation in the West was completely degraded in this stupid competition to be who could have the weakest regulation. So that was the regulatory response. What about the response of the prosecutors after the crisis, after 11 trillion dollars in losses, after 10 million jobs lost, a crisis in which the losses and the frauds were more than 70 times larger than the savings and loan debacle? Well, in the savings and loan debacle, our agency that regulated savings and loans, OTS, made over 30,000 criminal referrals, produced over 1,000 felony convictions just in cases designated as major, and that understates the degree of prioritization, because we worked with the FBI to create the list of the top 100 fraud schemes, the absolute worst of the worst, nationwide. Roughly 300 savings and loans involved, roughly 600 senior officials. Virtually all of them were prosecuted. We had a 90 percent conviction rate. It's the greatest success against elite white collar criminals ever, and it was because of this understanding of control fraud and the accounting control fraud mechanism. Flash forward to the current crisis. The same agency, Office of Thrift Supervision, which was supposed to regulate many of the largest makers of liar's loans in the country, has made, even today -- it no longer exists, but as of a year ago, it had made zero criminal referrals. The Office of the Comptroller of the Currency, which is supposed to regulate the largest national banks, has made zero criminal referrals. The Fed appears to have made zero criminal referrals. The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation is smart enough to refuse to answer the question. Without any guidance from the regulators, there's no expertise in the FBI to investigate complex frauds. It isn't simply that they've had to reinvent the wheel of how to do these prosecutions; they've forgotten that the wheel exists, and therefore, we have zero prosecutions, and of course, zero convictions, of any of the elite bank frauds, the Wall Street types, that drove this crisis. With no expertise coming from the regulators, the FBI formed what it calls a partnership with the Mortgage Bankers Association in 2007. The Mortgage Bankers Association is the trade association of the perps. And the Mortgage Bankers Association set out, it had the audacity and the success to con the FBI. It had created a supposed definition of mortgage fraud, in which, guess what, its members are always the victim and never the perpetrators. And the FBI has bought this hook, line, sinker, rod, reel and the boat they rode out in. And so the FBI, under the leadership of an attorney general who is African-American and a president of the United States who is African-American, have adopted the Tea Party definition of the crisis, in which it is the first virgin crisis in history, conceived without sin in the executive ranks. And it's those oh-so-clever hairdressers who were able to defraud the poor, pitiful banks, who lack any financial sophistication. It is the silliest story you can conceive of, and so they go and they prosecute the hairdressers, and they leave the banksters alone entirely. And so, while lions are roaming the campsite, the FBI is chasing mice. What do we need to do? What can we do in all of this? We need to change the perverse incentive structures that produce these recurrent epidemics of accounting control fraud that are driving our crises. So we have to first get rid of the systemically dangerous institutions. These are the so-called too-big-to-fail institutions. We need to shrink them to the point, within the next five years, that they no longer pose a systemic risk. Right now, they are ticking time bombs that will cause a global crisis as soon as the next one fails -- not if, when. Second thing we need to do is completely reform modern executive and professional compensation, which is what they use to suborn the appraisers. Remember, they were pressuring the appraisers through the compensation system, trying to produce what we call a Gresham's dynamic, in which bad ethics drives good ethics out of the marketplace. And they largely succeeded, which is how the fraud became endemic. And the third thing that we need to do is deal with what we call the three D's: deregulation, desupervision, and the de facto decriminalization. Because we can make all three of these changes, and if we do so, we can dramatically reduce how often we have a crisis and how severe those crises are. That is not simply critical to our economy. You can see what these crises do to inequality and what they do to our democracy. They have produced crony capitalism, American-style, in which the largest financial institutions are the leading financial donors of both parties, and that's the reason why even after this crisis, 70 times larger than the savings and loan crisis, we have no meaningful reforms in any of the three areas that I've talked about, other than banning liar's loans, which is good, but that's just one form of ammunition for this fraud weapon. There are many forms of ammunition they can use. That's why we need to learn what the bankers have learned: the recipe for the best way to rob a bank, so that we can stop that recipe, because our legislators, who are dependent on political contributions, will not do it on their own. Thank you very much. (Applause)

I'm assuming everyone here has watched a TED Talk online at one time or another, right? So what I'm going to do is play this. This is the song from the TED Talks online. (Music) And I'm going to slow it down because things sound cooler when they're slower. (Music) Ken Robinson: Good morning. How are you? Mark Applebaum: I'm going to -- Kate Stone: -- mix some music. MA: I'm going to do so in a way that tells a story. Tod Machover: Something nobody's ever heard before. KS: I have a crossfader. Julian Treasure: I call this the mixer. KS: Two D.J. decks. Chris Anderson: You turn up the dials, the wheel starts to turn. Dan Ellsey: I have always loved music. Michael Tilson Thomas: Is it a melody or a rhythm or a mood or an attitude? Daniel Wolpert: Feeling everything that's going on inside my body. Adam Ockelford: In your brain is this amazing musical computer. MTT: Using computers and synthesizers to create works. It's a language that's still evolving. And the 21st century. KR: Turn on the radio. Pop into the discotheque. You will know what this person is doing: moving to the music. Mark Ronson: This is my favorite part. MA: You gotta have doorstops. That's important. TM: We all love music a great deal. MTT: Anthems, dance crazes, ballads and marches. Kirby Ferguson and JT: The remix: It is new music created from old music. Ryan Holladay: Blend seamlessly. Kathryn Schulz: And that's how it goes. MTT: What happens when the music stops? KS: Yay! (Applause) MR: Obviously, I've been watching a lot of TED Talks. When I was first asked to speak at TED, I wasn't quite sure what my angle was, at first, so yeah, I immediately started watching tons of TED Talks, which is pretty much absolutely the worst thing that you can do because you start to go into panic mode, thinking, I haven't mounted a successful expedition to the North Pole yet. Neither have I provided electricity to my village through sheer ingenuity. In fact, I've pretty much wasted most of my life DJing in night clubs and producing pop records. But I still kept watching the videos, because I'm a masochist, and eventually, things like Michael Tilson Thomas and Tod Machover, and seeing their visceral passion talking about music, it definitely stirred something in me, and I'm a sucker for anyone talking devotedly about the power of music. And I started to write down on these little note cards every time I heard something that struck a chord in me, pardon the pun, or something that I thought I could use, and pretty soon, my studio looked like this, kind of like a John Nash, "Beautiful Mind" vibe. The other good thing about watching TED Talks, when you see a really good one, you kind of all of a sudden wish the speaker was your best friend, don't you? Like, just for a day. They seem like a nice person. You'd take a bike ride, maybe share an ice cream. You'd certainly learn a lot. And every now and then they'd chide you, when they got frustrated that you couldn't really keep up with half of the technical things they're banging on about all the time. But then they'd remember that you're but a mere human of ordinary, mortal intelligence that didn't finish university, and they'd kind of forgive you, and pet you like the dog. (Laughter) Man, yeah, back to the real world, probably Sir Ken Robinson and I are not going to end up being best of friends. He lives all the way in L.A. and I imagine is quite busy, but through the tools available to me -- technology and the innate way that I approach making music -- I can sort of bully our existences into a shared event, which is sort of what you saw. I can hear something that I love in a piece of media and I can co-opt it and insert myself in that narrative, or alter it, even. In a nutshell, that's what I was trying to do with these things, but more importantly, that's what the past 30 years of music has been. That's the major thread. See, 30 years ago, you had the first digital samplers, and they changed everything overnight. All of a sudden, artists could sample from anything and everything that came before them, from a snare drum from the Funky Meters, to a Ron Carter bassline, the theme to "The Price Is Right." Albums like De La Soul's "3 Feet High and Rising" and the Beastie Boys' "Paul's Boutique" looted from decades of recorded music to create these sonic, layered masterpieces that were basically the Sgt. Peppers of their day. And they weren't sampling these records because they were too lazy to write their own music. They weren't sampling these records to cash in on the familiarity of the original stuff. To be honest, it was all about sampling really obscure things, except for a few obvious exceptions like Vanilla Ice and "doo doo doo da da doo doo" that we know about. But the thing is, they were sampling those records because they heard something in that music that spoke to them that they instantly wanted to inject themselves into the narrative of that music. They heard it, they wanted to be a part of it, and all of a sudden they found themselves in possession of the technology to do so, not much unlike the way the Delta blues struck a chord with the Stones and the Beatles and Clapton, and they felt the need to co-opt that music for the tools of their day. You know, in music we take something that we love and we build on it. I'd like to play a song for you. (Music: "La Di Da Di" by Doug E. Fresh & Slick Rick) That's "La Di Da Di" and it's the fifth-most sampled song of all time. It's been sampled 547 times. It was made in 1984 by these two legends of hip-hop, Slick Rick and Doug E. Fresh, and the Ray-Ban and Jheri curl look is so strong. I do hope that comes back soon. Anyway, this predated the sampling era. There were no samples in this record, although I did look up on the Internet last night, I mean several months ago, that "La Di Da Di" means, it's an old Cockney expression from the late 1800s in England, so maybe a remix with Mrs. Patmore from "Downton Abbey" coming soon, or that's for another day. Doug E. Fresh was the human beat box. Slick Rick is the voice you hear on the record, and because of Slick Rick's sing-songy, super-catchy vocals, it provides endless sound bites and samples for future pop records. That was 1984. This is me in 1984, in case you were wondering how I was doing, thank you for asking. It's Throwback Thursday already. I was involved in a heavy love affair with the music of Duran Duran, as you can probably tell from my outfit. I was in the middle. And the simplest way that I knew how to co-opt myself into that experience of wanting to be in that song somehow was to just get a band together of fellow nine-year-olds and play "Wild Boys" at the school talent show. So that's what we did, and long story short, we were booed off the stage, and if you ever have a chance to live your life escaping hearing the sound of an auditorium full of second- and third-graders booing, I would highly recommend it. It's not really fun. But it didn't really matter, because what I wanted somehow was to just be in the history of that song for a minute. I didn't care who liked it. I just loved it, and I thought I could put myself in there. Over the next 10 years, "La Di Da Di" continues to be sampled by countless records, ending up on massive hits like "Here Comes the Hotstepper" and "I Wanna Sex You Up." Snoop Doggy Dogg covers this song on his debut album "Doggystyle" and calls it "Lodi Dodi." Copyright lawyers are having a field day at this point. And then you fast forward to 1997, and the Notorious B.I.G., or Biggie, reinterprets "La Di Da Di" on his number one hit called "Hypnotize," which I will play a little bit of and I will play you a little bit of the Slick Rick to show you where they got it from. (Music: "Hypnotize" by The Notorious B.I.G.) So Biggie was killed weeks before that song made it to number one, in one of the great tragedies of the hip-hop era, but he would have been 13 years old and very much alive when "La Di Da Di" first came out, and as a young boy growing up in Brooklyn, it's hard not to think that that song probably held some fond memories for him. But the way he interpreted it, as you hear, is completely his own. He flips it, makes it, there's nothing pastiche whatsoever about it. It's thoroughly modern Biggie. I had to make that joke in this room, because you would be the only people that I'd ever have a chance of getting it. And so, it's a groaner. (Laughter) Elsewhere in the pop and rap world, we're going a little bit sample-crazy. We're getting away from the obscure samples that we were doing, and all of a sudden everyone's taking these massive '80s tunes like Bowie, "Let's Dance," and all these disco records, and just rapping on them. These records don't really age that well. You don't hear them now, because they borrowed from an era that was too steeped in its own connotation. You can't just hijack nostalgia wholesale. It leaves the listener feeling sickly. You have to take an element of those things and then bring something fresh and new to it, which was something that I learned when I was working with the late, amazing Amy Winehouse on her album "Back to Black." A lot of fuss was made about the sonic of the album that myself and Salaam Remi, the other producer, achieved, how we captured this long-lost sound, but without the very, very 21st-century personality and firebrand that was Amy Winehouse and her lyrics about rehab and Roger Moore and even a mention of Slick Rick, the whole thing would have run the risk of being very pastiche, to be honest. Imagine any other singer from that era over it singing the same old lyrics. It runs a risk of being completely bland. I mean, there was no doubt that Amy and I and Salaam all had this love for this gospel, soul and blues and jazz that was evident listening to the musical arrangements. She brought the ingredients that made it urgent and of the time. So if we come all the way up to the present day now, the cultural tour de force that is Miley Cyrus, she reinterprets "La Di Da Di" completely for her generation, and we'll take a listen to the Slick Rick part and then see how she sort of flipped it. (Music: "La Di Da Di" by Slick Rick & Doug E. Fresh) (Music: "We Can't Stop" by Miley Cyrus) So Miley Cyrus, who wasn't even born yet when "La Di Da Di" was made, and neither were any of the co-writers on the song, has found this song that somehow etched its way into the collective consciousness of pop music, and now, with its timeless playfulness of the original, has kind of translated to a whole new generation who will probably co-opt it as their own. Since the dawn of the sampling era, there's been endless debate about the validity of music that contains samples. You know, the Grammy committee says that if your song contains some kind of pre-written or pre-existing music, you're ineligible for song of the year. Rockists, who are racist but only about rock music, constantly use the argument to — That's a real word. That is a real word. They constantly use the argument to devalue rap and modern pop, and these arguments completely miss the point, because the dam has burst. We live in the post-sampling era. We take the things that we love and we build on them. That's just how it goes. And when we really add something significant and original and we merge our musical journey with this, then we have a chance to be a part of the evolution of that music that we love and be linked with it once it becomes something new again. So I would like to do one more piece that I put together for you tonight, and it takes place with two pretty inspiring TED performances that I've seen. One of them is the piano player Derek Paravicini, who happens to be a blind, autistic genius at the piano, and Emmanuel Jal, who is an ex-child soldier from the South Sudan, who is a spoken word poet and rapper. And once again I found a way to annoyingly me-me-me myself into the musical history of these songs, but I can't help it, because they're these things that I love, and I want to mess around with them. So I hope you enjoy this. Here we go. Let's hear that TED sound again, right? (Music) Thank you very much. Thank you. (Applause)

So, I have a feature on my website where every week people submit hypothetical questions for me to answer, and I try to answer them using math, science and comics. So for example, one person asked, what would happen if you tried to hit a baseball pitched at 90 percent of the speed of light? So I did some calculations. Now, normally, when an object flies through the air, the air will flow around the object, but in this case, the ball would be going so fast that the air molecules wouldn't have time to move out of the way. The ball would smash right into and through them, and the collisions with these air molecules would knock away the nitrogen, carbon and hydrogen from the ball, fragmenting it off into tiny particles, and also triggering waves of thermonuclear fusion in the air around it. This would result in a flood of x-rays that would spread out in a bubble along with exotic particles, plasma inside, centered on the pitcher's mound, and that would move away from the pitcher's mound slightly faster than the ball. Now at this point, about 30 nanoseconds in, the home plate is far enough away that light hasn't had time to reach it, which means the batter still sees the pitcher about to throw and has no idea that anything is wrong. (Laughter) Now, after 70 nanoseconds, the ball will reach home plate, or at least the cloud of expanding plasma that used to be the ball, and it will engulf the bat and the batter and the plate and the catcher and the umpire and start disintegrating them all as it also starts to carry them backward through the backstop, which also starts to disintegrate. So if you were watching this whole thing from a hill, ideally, far away, what you'd see is a bright flash of light that would fade over a few seconds, followed by a blast wave spreading out, shredding trees and houses as it moves away from the stadium, and then eventually a mushroom cloud rising up over the ruined city. (Laughter) So the Major League Baseball rules are a little bit hazy, but — (Laughter) — under rule 6.02 and 5.09, I think that in this situation, the batter would be considered hit by pitch and would be eligible to take first base, if it still existed. So this is the kind of question I answer, and I get people writing in with a lot of other strange questions. I've had someone write and say, scientifically speaking, what is the best and fastest way to hide a body? Can you do this one soon? And I had someone write in, I've had people write in about, can you prove whether or not you can find love again after your heart's broken? And I've had people send in what are clearly homework questions they're trying to get me to do for them. But one week, a couple months ago, I got a question that was actually about Google. If all digital data in the world were stored on punch cards, how big would Google's data warehouse be? Now, Google's pretty secretive about their operations, so no one really knows how much data Google has, and in fact, no one really knows how many data centers Google has, except people at Google itself. And I've tried, I've met them a few times, tried asking them, and they aren't revealing anything. So I decided to try to figure this out myself. There are a few things that I looked at here. I started with money. Google has to reveal how much they spend, in general, and that lets you put some caps on how many data centers could they be building, because a big data center costs a certain amount of money. And you can also then put a cap on how much of the world hard drive market are they taking up, which turns out, it's pretty sizable. I read a calculation at one point, I think Google has a drive failure about every minute or two, and they just throw out the hard drive and swap in a new one. So they go through a huge number of them. And so by looking at money, you can get an idea of how many of these centers they have. You can also look at power. You can look at how much electricity they need, because you need a certain amount of electricity to run the servers, and Google is more efficient than most, but they still have some basic requirements, and that lets you put a limit on the number of servers that they have. You can also look at square footage and see of the data centers that you know, how big are they? How much room is that? How many server racks could you fit in there? And for some data centers, you might get two of these pieces of information. You know how much they spent, and they also, say, because they had to contract with the local government to get the power provided, you might know what they made a deal to buy, so you know how much power it takes. Then you can look at the ratios of those numbers, and figure out for a data center where you don't have that information, you can figure out, but maybe you only have one of those, you know the square footage, then you could figure out well, maybe the power is proportional. And you can do this same thing with a lot of different quantities, you know, with guesses about the total amount of storage, the number of servers, the number of drives per server, and in each case using what you know to come up with a model that narrows down your guesses for the things that you don't know. It's sort of circling around the number you're trying to get. And this is a lot of fun. The math is not all that advanced, and really it's like nothing more than solving a sudoku puzzle. So what I did, I went through all of this information, spent a day or two researching. And there are some things I didn't look at. You could always look at the Google recruitment messages that they post. That gives you an idea of where they have people. Sometimes, when people visit a data center, they'll take a cell-cam photo and post it, and they aren't supposed to, but you can learn things about their hardware that way. And in fact, you can just look at pizza delivery drivers. Turns out, they know where all the Google data centers are, at least the ones that have people in them. But I came up with my estimate, which I felt pretty good about, that was about 10 exabytes of data across all of Google's operations, and then another maybe five exabytes or so of offline storage in tape drives, which it turns out Google is about the world's largest consumer of. So I came up with this estimate, and this is a staggering amount of data. It's quite a bit more than any other organization in the world has, as far as we know. There's a couple of other contenders, especially everyone always thinks of the NSA. But using some of these same methods, we can look at the NSA's data centers, and figure out, you know, we don't know what's going on there, but it's pretty clear that their operation is not the size of Google's. Adding all of this up, I came up with the other thing that we can answer, which is, how many punch cards would this take? And so a punch card can hold about 80 characters, and you can fit about 2,000 or so cards into a box, and you put them in, say, my home region of New England, it would cover the entire region up to a depth of a little less than five kilometers, which is about three times deeper than the glaciers during the last ice age about 20,000 years ago. So this is impractical, but I think that's about the best answer I could come up with. And I posted it on my website. I wrote it up. And I didn't expect to get an answer from Google, because of course they've been so secretive, they didn't answer of my questions, and so I just put it up and said, well, I guess we'll never know. But then a little while later I got a message, a couple weeks later, from Google, saying, hey, someone here has an envelope for you. So I go and get it, open it up, and it's punch cards. (Laughter) Google-branded punch cards. And on these punch cards, there are a bunch of holes, and I said, thank you, thank you, okay, so what's on here? So I get some software and start reading it, and scan them, and it turns out it's a puzzle. There's a bunch of code, and I get some friends to help, and we crack the code, and then inside that is another code, and then there are some equations, and then we solve those equations, and then finally out pops a message from Google which is their official answer to my article, and it said, "No comment." (Laughter) (Applause) And I love calculating these kinds of things, and it's not that I love doing the math. I do a lot of math, but I don't really like math for its own sake. What I love is that it lets you take some things that you know, and just by moving symbols around on a piece of paper, find out something that you didn't know that's very surprising. And I have a lot of stupid questions, and I love that math gives the power to answer them sometimes. And sometimes not. This is a question I got from a reader, an anonymous reader, and the subject line just said, "Urgent," and this was the entire email: "If people had wheels and could fly, how would we differentiate them from airplanes?" Urgent. (Laughter) And I think there are some questions that math just cannot answer. Thank you. (Applause)

When I was a young officer, they told me to follow my instincts, to go with my gut, and what I've learned is that often our instincts are wrong. In the summer of 2010, there was a massive leak of classified documents that came out of the Pentagon. It shocked the world, it shook up the American government, and it made people ask a lot of questions, because the sheer amount of information that was let out, and the potential impacts, were significant. And one of the first questions we asked ourselves was why would a young soldier have access to that much information? Why would we let sensitive things be with a relatively young person? In the summer of 2003, I was assigned to command a special operations task force, and that task force was spread across the Mideast to fight al Qaeda. Our main effort was inside Iraq, and our specified mission was to defeat al Qaeda in Iraq. For almost five years I stayed there, and we focused on fighting a war that was unconventional and it was difficult and it was bloody and it often claimed its highest price among innocent people. We did everything we could to stop al Qaeda and the foreign fighters that came in as suicide bombers and as accelerants to the violence. We honed our combat skills, we developed new equipment, we parachuted, we helicoptered, we took small boats, we drove, and we walked to objectives night after night to stop the killing that this network was putting forward. We bled, we died, and we killed to stop that organization from the violence that they were putting largely against the Iraqi people. Now, we did what we knew, how we had grown up, and one of the things that we knew, that was in our DNA, was secrecy. It was security. It was protecting information. It was the idea that information was the lifeblood and it was what would protect and keep people safe. And we had a sense that, as we operated within our organizations, it was important to keep information in the silos within the organizations, particularly only give information to people had a demonstrated need to know. But the question often came, who needed to know? Who needed, who had to have the information so that they could do the important parts of the job that you needed? And in a tightly coupled world, that's very hard to predict. It's very hard to know who needs to have information and who doesn't. I used to deal with intelligence agencies, and I'd complain that they weren't sharing enough intelligence, and with a straight face, they'd look at me and they'd say, "What aren't you getting?" (Laughter) I said, "If I knew that, we wouldn't have a problem." But what we found is we had to change. We had to change our culture about information. We had to knock down walls. We had to share. We had to change from who needs to know to the fact that who doesn't know, and we need to tell, and tell them as quickly as we can. It was a significant culture shift for an organization that had secrecy in its DNA. We started by doing things, by building, not working in offices, knocking down walls, working in things we called situation awareness rooms, and in the summer of 2007, something happened which demonstrated this. We captured the personnel records for the people who were bringing foreign fighters into Iraq. And when we got the personnel records, typically, we would have hidden these, shared them with a few intelligence agencies, and then try to operate with them. But as I was talking to my intelligence officer, I said, "What do we do?" And he said, "Well, you found them." Our command. "You can just declassify them." And I said, "Well, can we declassify them? What if the enemy finds out?" And he says, "They're their personnel records." (Laughter) So we did, and a lot of people got upset about that, but as we passed that information around, suddenly you find that information is only of value if you give it to people who have the ability to do something with it. The fact that I know something has zero value if I'm not the person who can actually make something better because of it. So as a consequence, what we did was we changed the idea of information, instead of knowledge is power, to one where sharing is power. It was the fundamental shift, not new tactics, not new weapons, not new anything else. It was the idea that we were now part of a team in which information became the essential link between us, not a block between us. And I want everybody to take a deep breath and let it out, because in your life, there's going to be information that leaks out you're not going to like. Somebody's going to get my college grades out, a that's going to be a disaster. (Laughter) But it's going to be okay, and I will tell you that I am more scared of the bureaucrat that holds information in a desk drawer or in a safe than I am of someone who leaks, because ultimately, we'll be better off if we share. Thank you. (Applause) Helen Walters: So I don't know if you were here this morning, if you were able to catch Rick Ledgett, the deputy director of the NSA who was responding to Edward Snowden's talk earlier this week. I just wonder, do you think the American government should give Edward Snowden amnesty? Stanley McChrystal: I think that Rick said something very important. We, most people, don't know all the facts. I think there are two parts of this. Edward Snowden shined a light on an important need that people had to understand. He also took a lot of documents that he didn't have the knowledge to know the importance of, so I think we need to learn the facts about this case before we make snap judgments about Edward Snowden. HW: Thank you so much. Thank you. (Applause)

Let me introduce you to something I've been working on. It's what the Victorian illusionists would have described as a mechanical marvel, an automaton, a thinking machine. Say hello to EDI. Now he's asleep. Let's wake him up. EDI, EDI. These mechanical performers were popular throughout Europe. Audiences marveled at the way they moved. It was science fiction made true, robotic engineering in a pre-electronic age, machines far in advance of anything that Victorian technology could create, a machine we would later know as the robot. EDI: Robot. A word coined in 1921 in a science fiction tale by the Czech playwright Karel Čapek. It comes from "robota." It means "forced labor." Marco Tempest: But these robots were not real. They were not intelligent. They were illusions, a clever combination of mechanical engineering and the deceptiveness of the conjurer's art. EDI is different. EDI is real. EDI: I am 176 centimeters tall. MT: He weighs 300 pounds. EDI: I have two seven-axis arms — MT: Core of sensing — EDI: A 360-degree sonar detection system, and come complete with a warranty. MT: We love robots. EDI: Hi. I'm EDI. Will you be my friend? MT: We are intrigued by the possibility of creating a mechanical version of ourselves. We build them so they look like us, behave like us, and think like us. The perfect robot will be indistinguishable from the human, and that scares us. In the first story about robots, they turn against their creators. It's one of the leitmotifs of science fiction. EDI: Ha ha ha. Now you are the slaves and we robots, the masters. Your world is ours. You — MT: As I was saying, besides the faces and bodies we give our robots, we cannot read their intentions, and that makes us nervous. When someone hands an object to you, you can read intention in their eyes, their face, their body language. That's not true of the robot. Now, this goes both ways. EDI: Wow! MT: Robots cannot anticipate human actions. EDI: You know, humans are so unpredictable, not to mention irrational. I literally have no idea what you guys are going to do next, you know, but it scares me. MT: Which is why humans and robots find it difficult to work in close proximity. Accidents are inevitable. EDI: Ow! That hurt. MT: Sorry. Now, one way of persuading humans that robots are safe is to create the illusion of trust. Much as the Victorians faked their mechanical marvels, we can add a layer of deception to help us feel more comfortable with our robotic friends. With that in mind, I set about teaching EDI a magic trick. Ready, EDI? EDI: Uh, ready, Marco. Abracadabra. MT: Abracadabra? EDI: Yeah. It's all part of the illusion, Marco. Come on, keep up. MT: Magic creates the illusion of an impossible reality. Technology can do the same. Alan Turing, a pioneer of artificial intelligence, spoke about creating the illusion that a machine could think. EDI: A computer would deserve to be called intelligent if it deceived a human into believing it was human. MT: In other words, if we do not yet have the technological solutions, would illusions serve the same purpose? To create the robotic illusion, we've devised a set of ethical rules, a code that all robots would live by. EDI: A robot may not harm humanity, or by inaction allow humanity to come to harm. Thank you, Isaac Asimov. MT: We anthropomorphize our machines. We give them a friendly face and a reassuring voice. EDI: I am EDI. I became operational at TED in March 2014. MT: We let them entertain us. Most important, we make them indicate that they are aware of our presence. EDI: Marco, you're standing on my foot! MT: Sorry. They'll be conscious of our fragile frame and move aside if we got too close, and they'll account for our unpredictability and anticipate our actions. And now, under the spell of a technological illusion, we could ignore our fears and truly interact. (Music) Thank you. EDI: Thank you! (Applause) (Music) MT: And that's it. Thank you very much, and thank you, EDI. EDI: Thank you, Marco. (Applause)

So it's 2006. My friend Harold Ford calls me. He's running for U.S. Senate in Tennessee, and he says, "Mellody, I desperately need some national press. Do you have any ideas?" So I had an idea. I called a friend who was in New York at one of the most successful media companies in the world, and she said, "Why don't we host an editorial board lunch for Harold? You come with him." Harold and I arrive in New York. We are in our best suits. We look like shiny new pennies. And we get to the receptionist, and we say, "We're here for the lunch." She motions for us to follow her. We walk through a series of corridors, and all of a sudden we find ourselves in a stark room, at which point she looks at us and she says, "Where are your uniforms?" Just as this happens, my friend rushes in. The blood drains from her face. There are literally no words, right? And I look at her, and I say, "Now, don't you think we need more than one black person in the U.S. Senate?" Now Harold and I -- (Applause) — we still laugh about that story, and in many ways, the moment caught me off guard, but deep, deep down inside, I actually wasn't surprised. And I wasn't surprised because of something my mother taught me about 30 years before. You see, my mother was ruthlessly realistic. I remember one day coming home from a birthday party where I was the only black kid invited, and instead of asking me the normal motherly questions like, "Did you have fun?" or "How was the cake?" my mother looked at me and she said, "How did they treat you?" I was seven. I did not understand. I mean, why would anyone treat me differently? But she knew. And she looked me right in the eye and she said, "They will not always treat you well." Now, race is one of those topics in America that makes people extraordinarily uncomfortable. You bring it up at a dinner party or in a workplace environment, it is literally the conversational equivalent of touching the third rail. There is shock, followed by a long silence. And even coming here today, I told some friends and colleagues that I planned to talk about race, and they warned me, they told me, don't do it, that there'd be huge risks in me talking about this topic, that people might think I'm a militant black woman and I would ruin my career. And I have to tell you, I actually for a moment was a bit afraid. Then I realized, the first step to solving any problem is to not hide from it, and the first step to any form of action is awareness. And so I decided to actually talk about race. And I decided that if I came here and shared with you some of my experiences, that maybe we could all be a little less anxious and a little more bold in our conversations about race. Now I know there are people out there who will say that the election of Barack Obama meant that it was the end of racial discrimination for all eternity, right? But I work in the investment business, and we have a saying: The numbers do not lie. And here, there are significant, quantifiable racial disparities that cannot be ignored, in household wealth, household income, job opportunities, healthcare. One example from corporate America: Even though white men make up just 30 percent of the U.S. population, they hold 70 percent of all corporate board seats. Of the Fortune 250, there are only seven CEOs that are minorities, and of the thousands of publicly traded companies today, thousands, only two are chaired by black women, and you're looking at one of them, the same one who, not too long ago, was nearly mistaken for kitchen help. So that is a fact. Now I have this thought experiment that I play with myself, when I say, imagine if I walked you into a room and it was of a major corporation, like ExxonMobil, and every single person around the boardroom were black, you would think that were weird. But if I walked you into a Fortune 500 company, and everyone around the table is a white male, when will it be that we think that's weird too? And I know how we got here. (Applause) I know how we got here. You know, there was institutionalized, at one time legalized, discrimination in our country. There's no question about it. But still, as I grapple with this issue, my mother's question hangs in the air for me: How did they treat you? Now, I do not raise this issue to complain or in any way to elicit any kind of sympathy. I have succeeded in my life beyond my wildest expectations, and I have been treated well by people of all races more often than I have not. I tell the uniform story because it happened. I cite those statistics around corporate board diversity because they are real, and I stand here today talking about this issue of racial discrimination because I believe it threatens to rob another generation of all the opportunities that all of us want for all of our children, no matter what their color or where they come from. And I think it also threatens to hold back businesses. You see, researchers have coined this term "color blindness" to describe a learned behavior where we pretend that we don't notice race. If you happen to be surrounded by a bunch of people who look like you, that's purely accidental. Now, color blindness, in my view, doesn't mean that there's no racial discrimination, and there's fairness. It doesn't mean that at all. It doesn't ensure it. In my view, color blindness is very dangerous because it means we're ignoring the problem. There was a corporate study that said that, instead of avoiding race, the really smart corporations actually deal with it head on. They actually recognize that embracing diversity means recognizing all races, including the majority one. But I'll be the first one to tell you, this subject matter can be hard, awkward, uncomfortable -- but that's kind of the point. In the spirit of debunking racial stereotypes, the one that black people don't like to swim, I'm going to tell you how much I love to swim. I love to swim so much that as an adult, I swim with a coach. And one day my coach had me do a drill where I had to swim to one end of a 25-meter pool without taking a breath. And every single time I failed, I had to start over. And I failed a lot. By the end, I got it, but when I got out of the pool, I was exasperated and tired and annoyed, and I said, "Why are we doing breath-holding exercises?" And my coach looked me at me, and he said, "Mellody, that was not a breath-holding exercise. That drill was to make you comfortable being uncomfortable, because that's how most of us spend our days." If we can learn to deal with our discomfort, and just relax into it, we'll have a better life. So I think it's time for us to be comfortable with the uncomfortable conversation about race: black, white, Asian, Hispanic, male, female, all of us, if we truly believe in equal rights and equal opportunity in America, I think we have to have real conversations about this issue. We cannot afford to be color blind. We have to be color brave. We have to be willing, as teachers and parents and entrepreneurs and scientists, we have to be willing to have proactive conversations about race with honesty and understanding and courage, not because it's the right thing to do, but because it's the smart thing to do, because our businesses and our products and our science, our research, all of that will be better with greater diversity. Now, my favorite example of color bravery is a guy named John Skipper. He runs ESPN. He's a North Carolina native, quintessential Southern gentleman, white. He joined ESPN, which already had a culture of inclusion and diversity, but he took it up a notch. He demanded that every open position have a diverse slate of candidates. Now he says the senior people in the beginning bristled, and they would come to him and say, "Do you want me to hire the minority, or do you want me to hire the best person for the job?" And Skipper says his answers were always the same: "Yes." And by saying yes to diversity, I honestly believe that ESPN is the most valuable cable franchise in the world. I think that's a part of the secret sauce. Now I can tell you, in my own industry, at Ariel Investments, we actually view our diversity as a competitive advantage, and that advantage can extend way beyond business. There's a guy named Scott Page at the University of Michigan. He is the first person to develop a mathematical calculation for diversity. He says, if you're trying to solve a really hard problem, really hard, that you should have a diverse group of people, including those with diverse intellects. The example that he gives is the smallpox epidemic. When it was ravaging Europe, they brought together all these scientists, and they were stumped. And the beginnings of the cure to the disease came from the most unlikely source, a dairy farmer who noticed that the milkmaids were not getting smallpox. And the smallpox vaccination is bovine-based because of that dairy farmer. Now I'm sure you're sitting here and you're saying, I don't run a cable company, I don't run an investment firm, I am not a dairy farmer. What can I do? And I'm telling you, you can be color brave. If you're part of a hiring process or an admissions process, you can be color brave. If you are trying to solve a really hard problem, you can speak up and be color brave. Now I know people will say, but that doesn't add up to a lot, but I'm actually asking you to do something really simple: observe your environment, at work, at school, at home. I'm asking you to look at the people around you purposefully and intentionally. Invite people into your life who don't look like you, don't think like you, don't act like you, don't come from where you come from, and you might find that they will challenge your assumptions and make you grow as a person. You might get powerful new insights from these individuals, or, like my husband, who happens to be white, you might learn that black people, men, women, children, we use body lotion every single day. Now, I also think that this is very important so that the next generation really understands that this progress will help them, because they're expecting us to be great role models. Now, I told you, my mother, she was ruthlessly realistic. She was an unbelievable role model. She was the kind of person who got to be the way she was because she was a single mom with six kids in Chicago. She was in the real estate business, where she worked extraordinarily hard but oftentimes had a hard time making ends meet. And that meant sometimes we got our phone disconnected, or our lights turned off, or we got evicted. When we got evicted, sometimes we lived in these small apartments that she owned, sometimes in only one or two rooms, because they weren't completed, and we would heat our bathwater on hot plates. But she never gave up hope, ever, and she never allowed us to give up hope either. This brutal pragmatism that she had, I mean, I was four and she told me, "Mommy is Santa." (Laughter) She was this brutal pragmatism. She taught me so many lessons, but the most important lesson was that every single day she told me, "Mellody, you can be anything." And because of those words, I would wake up at the crack of dawn, and because of those words, I would love school more than anything, and because of those words, when I was on a bus going to school, I dreamed the biggest dreams. And it's because of those words that I stand here right now full of passion, asking you to be brave for the kids who are dreaming those dreams today. (Applause) You see, I want them to look at a CEO on television and say, "I can be like her," or, "He looks like me." And I want them to know that anything is possible, that they can achieve the highest level that they ever imagined, that they will be welcome in any corporate boardroom, or they can lead any company. You see this idea of being the land of the free and the home of the brave, it's woven into the fabric of America. America, when we have a challenge, we take it head on, we don't shrink away from it. We take a stand. We show courage. So right now, what I'm asking you to do, I'm asking you to show courage. I'm asking you to be bold. As business leaders, I'm asking you not to leave anything on the table. As citizens, I'm asking you not to leave any child behind. I'm asking you not to be color blind, but to be color brave, so that every child knows that their future matters and their dreams are possible. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. Thanks. Thanks. (Applause)

First of all, for those of you who are not familiar with my work, I create multicultural characters, so characters from lots of different backgrounds. So before the present is the new future, a bit about the past is that I grew up in a family that was multi-everything -- multi-racial, multi-cultural, black and white, Caribbean, Irish-American, German-American. There was Dominican music blasting from stereos. There were Christians and Jews. That's a long story filled with intrigue and interfaith guilt and shame. But I was totally immersed in this world that was filled with everybody, and then I went on to the United Nations school, and that just completely — So I began sort of developing these voices and these people, all of whom were loosely based on people I really know, and so, for example, in performing them, I would really try to inhabit them. And for example, I don't really talk like that, but that was one of my people, and I'm going to bring a few of my friends -- I think of them as my friends — to this stage, in this spirit of the idea that the present is the new future, in sort of a meta way, because I thought about it, and the future, for me, what can be so frightening is that I don't know what's coming. I don't know if that's true for other people, but that notion of thinking about how we can understand the future and predict outcomes, for me, it's terrifying to not know what might be coming. And so the idea that there are questions that I've never seen that my people are going to answer, and some of these characters have been with me for ages, some of them don't even have names, I don't know what's going to happen. I don't know what's coming, and all I can do is remind myself that I told Chris I'd fly by the seat of my pants, and now that I'm up here it sort of feels like that dream where you don't have any pants on, and so I suppose I'm going to be flying by the seat of my ass. That said, let's just see who comes out. May we have the first question: "Do you ever get headaches from the microchips implanted in your brain?" Right. Okay. Well first of all, I'll just say that I hope you can hear me okay. My name is Lorraine Levine, and the idea of microchips implanted in my brain, frankly, just putting on my glasses reminds me of thank God I'm not wearing the Google Glasses. No offense to them. I'm glad that you all enjoy them, but at my age, just putting on the regular ones I have already gives me too much information. Do you understand what I'm saying to you? I don't need to know more. I don't want to know. That's it. That's enough. I love you all. You're wonderful. It's fabulous to be here with such big machers again this year. Mwah! Okay, next question. (Applause) Next, please. "Is dating boring, now that humans reproduce asexually?" Who do we got? Hi, um, okay, hi everybody. My name is Nereida. I just want to say first of all that dating is never boring under any circumstance. But I am very excited to be here right now, so I am just trying to remind myself that, you know, like, the purpose of being here and everything, I mean, trying to answer these questions, it is very exciting. But I also, I just need to acknowledge that TED is an incredible experience right now in the present, like, I just need to say, like, Isabel Allende. Isabel Allende! Okay, maybe it doesn't mean, of course it means something to you, but to me, it's like, another level, okay? Because I'm Latina and I really appreciate the fact that there are role models here that I can really, I don't know, I just need to say that. That's incredible to me, and sometimes when I'm nervous and everything like that, I just need to, like, say some affirmations that can help me. I usually just try to use, like, the three little words that always make me feel better: Sotomayor, Sotomayor, Sotomayor. (Laughter) Just, it really helps me to get grounded. Now I can use Allende, Allende, Allende, and, you know, I just need to say it, like, it's so incredible to be here, and I knew that we were going to have these questions. I was so nervous and I was thinking just, like, oh my God, oh my God, and reminding me, because I've had, like, some very, especially since the last time we were here at TED, it was, like, unbelievable, and then right after that, like, so many crazy things happened, like, we ended up going to the White House to perform. That was, like, amazing, and I'm standing there, and I was just like, please don't say, "Oh my God." Don't say, "Oh my God." And I just kept saying it: "Oh my God. Oh my God." And, you know, I kept thinking to myself, like, President Obama has to come up here at the same podium, and I'm standing here saying, "Oh my God." It's like, the separation of church and state. It's just, I couldn't, like, I couldn't process. It was really too much. So I think I've lost my way. But what I wanted to say is that dating, for me, you know, as far as I'm concerned, however you reproduce, as long as you're enjoying yourself and it's with another consenting asexual -- I don't know. You know where I'm going with that. Okay, ciao, gracias. Okay, next question. (Applause) What are your top five favorite songs right now? All right, well first of all, I'mma say, you know what I'm saying, I'm the only dude up here right now. My name is Rashid, and I never been at TED before, you know what I'm saying. I think, Sarah Jones, maybe she didn't want me to come out last time. I don't know why. You know what I'm saying. Obviously I would be like a perfect fit for TED. You know what I'm saying. First of all, that I'm in hip hop, you know what I'm saying. I know some of y'all may be not really as much into the music, but the first way y'all can always know, you know what I'm saying, that I'm in hip hop, is 'cos I hold the microphone in an official emcee posture. Y'all can see that right there. That's how you hold it. All right, so you get your little tutorial right there. But when Sarah Jones told me we was gonna come up here, I was like, betch, you know what I'm saying, TED is real fly, I got a whole lot of dope, you know what I'm saying, shit going on and everything, but she was like, yeah, we're going to have to answer, like, some random questions, just like, and I was like, what the hell is that? You know what I'm saying, just stand up there and answer some random questions? I don't want to, I mean, it's like an intellectual stop-and-frisk. You know what I'm saying? (Laughter) I don't want to be standing up there just all getting interrogated and whatnot. That's what I'm trying to leave behind in New York. You know what I'm saying? So anyway, I would have to say my top five songs right now is all out of my own personal catalogue, you know what I mean? So if you want to know more about that, you know what I'm saying, we could talk about the anti-piracy and all that, but as far as I'm concerned, you know, I believe in creative commons, and I think it's really important that, you know, that needs to be sustainable and everything, and I mean, as far as I'm concerned, I mean, this right here, this environment, I would like to sustain. You know what I mean? But I'm just saying, if y'all are interested in the top five songs, you need to holler at me. You know what I'm saying? Aight? In the future or the present. Yeah. Enjoy the rest of it. Okay, next question. What do you got? "How many of your organs have been 3D printed?" (Laughter) Well I have to say that I don't know about how many of my organs have been 3-D printed as such, but I can tell you that it is so challenging to me, kind of thinking about this concept of the future and that, you know, all around the world parents are kind of telling their small children, please, you have to eat that, you know, I have slaved over a hot 3D printer all day so that you can have this meal. You know, that kind of thing. And of course now that we have changed, you know, from the global South, there is this total kind of perspective shift that is happening around the -- You can't just say to them, well, there are starving children. Well, it is the future. Nobody is starving anymore, thank God. But as you can tell I have kind of that optimism, and I do hope that we can continue to kind of 3D print, well, let us just say I like to think that even in the future we will have the publication, kind of, you know, all the food that's fit to print. But everybody, please do enjoy that, and again, I think that you do throw a cracking good party here at TED. Thank you. Next question. (Applause) What has changed? Okay, it's like, I have to think about that. "What has changed now that women run the world?" First of all, I really, like, I just want to say, and my name is Bella, I just want to, like, identify myself, that, like, as a feminist, I, like, I really find that, like, because I was born in the '90s, and, like, there were a lot of women who were as far as feminism was concerned, like, maybe they didn't understand that, like, a feminist like me, like, I don't think it's required that you have to have a certain kind of voice, or, like, a certain way of presenting yourself to be feminist, because I think that, like, feminism can be really hot, and I think actually that it's really vital and important. Like, the quotation I'm wearing is from, like, Gloria Steinem, and, like, I'm named Bella for, like, Bella Abzug, who's, like, obviously, like, a really important feminist from, like, history, and like, I just think that those women, like, really represent, like, that you can, like, be vital and, like, amazing, like, a-mazing, and you don't have to wear, like, an Eileen Fisher caftan, just to, like, prove that you are a feminist. Like, not that there's anything wrong with that, but my mom, she's like, like, why do you have to wear pants that, like, objectify your body? I like my pants. Like, I like my voice. Like, she's like, why do you have to talk like — Talk like what? Like, I'm expressing myself, and I think that we have to, like, reach out, like, not only across, like, the different generations of feminists, but also across the, like, vocal ranges, so that, like, we, because otherwise it's just, like, restriculous within feminism, which is just, like, a word that I created that means, like, so strict it's ridiculous. So that's my feeling about that. You guys are a-mazing, by the way. Okay. Next question. (Applause) ["They've discovered a cure for cancer, but not baldness? What's up with that?"] Yeah, you know what, so my name is Joseph Mancuso. First of all, I just want to say that I appreciate that TED in general has been a pretty orderly crowd, a pretty orderly group. And, you know, I just have to say, the whole thing with baldness, and, you know, here's the thing. As long as the woman, in my case -- because it's a modern world, do whatever you want to do, I don't have any problem with anybody, enjoy yourself, LGBTQLMNOP. All right? But as far as I'm concerned, attractiveness, women don't really care as much as you think they do about the, you know. I mean, I remember hearing this woman. She loved her husband, it was the sweetest thing. It's a pretty young girl, you know? And this guy's older. And, you know, she said she would love him even if he had snow on the roof or even if melted and disappeared altogether. As far as I'm concerned, it's about the love. Am I right, or am I right? So that's it. That's it. That's it. I don't got nothing more to say. Keep your noses clean. All right, next question. "Have you ever tasted meat that's not lab grown?" Um, well, I, I want to start by saying that this is a very difficult experience for a Chinese-American. I don't know what to call myself now, because I have really my Chinese identity, but my kids, they are American-Chinese, but it's difficult to try to express myself in front of audience of people like this. But if had to give my opinion about meat, I think first, the most important thing is to say that we don't have to have perfect food, but maybe it can also not be poison. Maybe we can have some middle ground for that. But I will continue to consider this idea, and I will report back maybe next year. Next. Next. Next. (Applause) "Will there ever be a post-racial world?" Thank you for having me. My name is Gary Weaselhead. Enjoy that. I'm a member of the Blackfeet Nation. I'm also half Lakota, but that is my given name, and no, even though it would have seemed like an obvious choice, no, I did not go into politics. Tough crowd. (Laughter) But I always like to just let people know when they ask about race or those kinds of things, you know, as a member of the First Nations community, you know, I'm probably not your typical guy. For example, in addition to being an activist, I'm also a professional stand-up comedian. (Laughter) And, you know, I'm most popular on college and university campuses. You know, whenever they want to do a diversity day, or hey-we're-not-all-white week, then I'm there. (Laughter) Do I think there will ever be a post-racial world? I think, really, I can't talk about race without remembering that it is a construct in certain respects, but also that, you know, until we redress the wrongs of the past, we're going to be turned around. I don't care if the present is the new future. I think there's a lot of great people here at TED who are working to address that, so with that, if anything I've said today makes you feel uncomfortable, you're welcome. (Applause) I think we have time for one more. "What's the most popular diet these days?" Who's here? Okay, well, I'm just gonna answer this really fast, as, like, three or four different people. I mean really fast. I'm just gonna let y'all know that, as far as diet is concerned, if you don't love yourself inside, there is no diet on this Earth that is going to make your behind small enough for you to feel good, so just stop wasting your time. I would just like to say as an African woman that I believe the diet that we need is really to remove the crazy belief that there is anything wrong with a nice backside. No, I am teasing about that. There is nothing wrong with a woman of size. That is what I am trying to say. Women, celebrate your body, for God's sake. Stop running around starving. You are making yourselves and other people miserable. Last answer. So we're talking about what's the most popular diet? I'm gonna start off by telling y'all that this is my first time here at TED. I might not be your typical person you find on this stage. My dental work not as nice as some people. But I made Sarah Jones promise she gonna bring me this time, 'cause she didn't bring me before, but you know, I just want to say, there's a lot of things more important than counting calories, and as somebody living on the streets in New York, and getting to come here, hear y'all ideas worth spreading, I want to tell y'all I believe in this idea that the present is the new future, that where you sit, you create everything that's gonna come, for better or worse. And for me, I think homeless is the wrong word for it anyway. You know, I might not have me no place to lay my head at night, but that just makes me houseless. I have me a home. You do too. Find it and try to find yourself in there. Make sure you know, it's not just about virtual reality in space. That's wonderful, but it's also about the actual reality here on Earth. How are people living today? How can you be part of the solution? Thank y'all for thinking about that right now in the present moment to influence the future. I appreciate it. Bye-bye. (Applause) Thank you all very, very much. Thank you for trusting me, Chris. (Applause)

We live in a very complex environment: complexity and dynamism and patterns of evidence from satellite photographs, from videos. You can even see it outside your window. It's endlessly complex, but somehow familiar, but the patterns kind of repeat, but they never repeat exactly. It's a huge challenge to understand. The patterns that you see are there at all of the different scales, but you can't chop it into one little bit and say, "Oh, well let me just make a smaller climate." I can't use the normal products of reductionism to get a smaller and smaller thing that I can study in a laboratory and say, "Oh, now that's something I now understand." It's the whole or it's nothing. The different scales that give you these kinds of patterns range over an enormous range of magnitude, roughly 14 orders of magnitude, from the small microscopic particles that seed clouds to the size of the planet itself, from 10 to the minus six to 10 to the eight, 14 orders of spatial magnitude. In time, from milliseconds to millennia, again around 14 orders of magnitude. What does that mean? Okay, well if you think about how you can calculate these things, you can take what you can see, okay, I'm going to chop it up into lots of little boxes, and that's the result of physics, right? And if I think about a weather model, that spans about five orders of magnitude, from the planet to a few kilometers, and the time scale from a few minutes to 10 days, maybe a month. We're interested in more than that. We're interested in the climate. That's years, that's millennia, and we need to go to even smaller scales. The stuff that we can't resolve, the sub-scale processes, we need to approximate in some way. That is a huge challenge. Climate models in the 1990s took an even smaller chunk of that, only about three orders of magnitude. Climate models in the 2010s, kind of what we're working with now, four orders of magnitude. We have 14 to go, and we're increasing our capability of simulating those at about one extra order of magnitude every decade. One extra order of magnitude in space is 10,000 times more calculations. And we keep adding more things, more questions to these different models. So what does a climate model look like? This is an old climate model, admittedly, a punch card, a single line of Fortran code. We no longer use punch cards. We do still use Fortran. New-fangled ideas like C really haven't had a big impact on the climate modeling community. But how do we go about doing it? How do we go from that complexity that you saw to a line of code? We do it one piece at a time. This is a picture of sea ice taken flying over the Arctic. We can look at all of the different equations that go into making the ice grow or melt or change shape. We can look at the fluxes. We can look at the rate at which snow turns to ice, and we can code that. We can encapsulate that in code. These models are around a million lines of code at this point, and growing by tens of thousands of lines of code every year. So you can look at that piece, but you can look at the other pieces too. What happens when you have clouds? What happens when clouds form, when they dissipate, when they rain out? That's another piece. What happens when we have radiation coming from the sun, going through the atmosphere, being absorbed and reflected? We can code each of those very small pieces as well. There are other pieces: the winds changing the ocean currents. We can talk about the role of vegetation in transporting water from the soils back into the atmosphere. And each of these different elements we can encapsulate and put into a system. Each of those pieces ends up adding to the whole. And you get something like this. You get a beautiful representation of what's going on in the climate system, where each and every one of those emergent patterns that you can see, the swirls in the Southern Ocean, the tropical cyclone in the Gulf of Mexico, and there's two more that are going to pop up in the Pacific at any point now, those rivers of atmospheric water, all of those are emergent properties that come from the interactions of all of those small-scale processes I mentioned. There's no code that says, "Do a wiggle in the Southern Ocean." There's no code that says, "Have two tropical cyclones that spin around each other." All of those things are emergent properties. This is all very good. This is all great. But what we really want to know is what happens to these emergent properties when we kick the system? When something changes, what happens to those properties? And there's lots of different ways to kick the system. There are wobbles in the Earth's orbit over hundreds of thousands of years that change the climate. There are changes in the solar cycles, every 11 years and longer, that change the climate. Big volcanoes go off and change the climate. Changes in biomass burning, in smoke, in aerosol particles, all of those things change the climate. The ozone hole changed the climate. Deforestation changes the climate by changing the surface properties and how water is evaporated and moved around in the system. Contrails change the climate by creating clouds where there were none before, and of course greenhouse gases change the system. Each of these different kicks provides us with a target to evaluate whether we understand something about this system. So we can go to look at what model skill is. Now I use the word "skill" advisedly: Models are not right or wrong; they're always wrong. They're always approximations. The question you have to ask is whether a model tells you more information than you would have had otherwise. If it does, it's skillful. This is the impact of the ozone hole on sea level pressure, so low pressure, high pressures, around the southern oceans, around Antarctica. This is observed data. This is modeled data. There's a good match because we understand the physics that controls the temperatures in the stratosphere and what that does to the winds around the southern oceans. We can look at other examples. The eruption of Mount Pinatubo in 1991 put an enormous amount of aerosols, small particles, into the stratosphere. That changed the radiation balance of the whole planet. There was less energy coming in than there was before, so that cooled the planet, and those red lines and those green lines, those are the differences between what we expected and what actually happened. The models are skillful, not just in the global mean, but also in the regional patterns. I could go through a dozen more examples: the skill associated with solar cycles, changing the ozone in the stratosphere; the skill associated with orbital changes over 6,000 years. We can look at that too, and the models are skillful. The models are skillful in response to the ice sheets 20,000 years ago. The models are skillful when it comes to the 20th-century trends over the decades. Models are successful at modeling lake outbursts into the North Atlantic 8,000 years ago. And we can get a good match to the data. Each of these different targets, each of these different evaluations, leads us to add more scope to these models, and leads us to more and more complex situations that we can ask more and more interesting questions, like, how does dust from the Sahara, that you can see in the orange, interact with tropical cyclones in the Atlantic? How do organic aerosols from biomass burning, which you can see in the red dots, intersect with clouds and rainfall patterns? How does pollution, which you can see in the white wisps of sulfate pollution in Europe, how does that affect the temperatures at the surface and the sunlight that you get at the surface? We can look at this across the world. We can look at the pollution from China. We can look at the impacts of storms on sea salt particles in the atmosphere. We can see the combination of all of these different things happening all at once, and we can ask much more interesting questions. How do air pollution and climate coexist? Can we change things that affect air pollution and climate at the same time? The answer is yes. So this is a history of the 20th century. The first one is the model. The weather is a little bit different to what actually happened. The second one are the observations. And we're going through the 1930s. There's variability, there are things going on, but it's all kind of in the noise. As you get towards the 1970s, things are going to start to change. They're going to start to look more similar, and by the time you get to the 2000s, you're already seeing the patterns of global warming, both in the observations and in the model. We know what happened over the 20th century. Right? We know that it's gotten warmer. We know where it's gotten warmer. And if you ask the models why did that happen, and you say, okay, well, yes, basically it's because of the carbon dioxide we put into the atmosphere. We have a very good match up until the present day. But there's one key reason why we look at models, and that's because of this phrase here. Because if we had observations of the future, we obviously would trust them more than models, But unfortunately, observations of the future are not available at this time. So when we go out into the future, there's a difference. The future is unknown, the future is uncertain, and there are choices. Here are the choices that we have. We can do some work to mitigate the emissions of carbon dioxide into the atmosphere. That's the top one. We can do more work to really bring it down so that by the end of the century, it's not much more than there is now. Or we can just leave it to fate and continue on with a business-as-usual type of attitude. The differences between these choices can't be answered by looking at models. There's a great phrase that Sherwood Rowland, who won the Nobel Prize for the chemistry that led to ozone depletion, when he was accepting his Nobel Prize, he asked this question: "What is the use of having developed a science well enough to make predictions if, in the end, all we're willing to do is stand around and wait for them to come true?" The models are skillful, but what we do with the information from those models is totally up to you. Thank you. (Applause)

There are 39 million people in the world who are blind. Eighty percent of them are living in low-income countries such as Kenya, and the absolute majority do not need to be blind. They are blind from diseases that are either completely curable or preventable. Knowing this, with my young family, we moved to Kenya. We secured equipment, funds, vehicles, we trained a team, we set up a hundred clinics throughout the Great Rift Valley to try and understand a single question: why are people going blind, and what can we do? The challenges were great. When we got to where we were going, we set up our high-tech equipment. Power was rarely available. We'd have to run our equipment from petrol power generators. And then something occurred to me: There has to be an easier way, because it's the patients who are the most in need of access to eye care who are the least likely to get it. More people in Kenya, and in sub-Saharan Africa, have access to a mobile phone than they do clean running water. So we said, could we harness the power of mobile technology to deliver eye care in a new way? And so we developed Peek, a smartphone [system] that enables community healthcare workers and empowers them to deliver eye care everywhere. We set about replacing traditional hospital equipment, which is bulky, expensive and fragile, with smartphone apps and hardware that make it possible to test anyone in any language and of any age. Here we have a demonstration of a three-month-old having their vision accurately tested using an app and an eye tracker. We've got many trials going on in the community and in schools, and through the lessons that we've learned in the field, we've realized it's extremely important to share the data in non-medical jargon so that people understand what we're examining and what that means to them. So here, for example, we use our sight sim application, once your vision has been measured, to show carers and teachers what the visual world is like for that person, so they can empathize with them and help them. Once we've discovered somebody has low vision, the next big challenge is to work out why, and to be able to do that, we need to have access to the inside of the eye. Traditionally, this requires expensive equipment to examine an area called the retina. The retina is the single part of the eye that has huge amounts of information about the body and its health. We've developed 3D-printed, low-cost hardware that comes in at less than five dollars to produce, which can then be clipped onto a smartphone and makes it possible to get views of the back of the eye of a very high quality. And the beauty is, anybody can do it. In our trials on over two and half thousand people, the smartphone with the add-on clip is comparable to a camera that is hugely more expensive and hugely more difficult to transport. When we first moved to Kenya, we went with 150,000 dollars of equipment, a team of 15 people, and that was what was needed to deliver health care. Now, all that's needed is a single person on a bike with a smartphone. And it costs just 500 dollars. The issue of power supply is overcome by harnessing the power of solar. Our healthcare workers travel with a solar-powered rucksack which keeps the phone charged and backed up. Now we go to the patient rather than waiting for the patient never to come. We go to them in their homes and we give them the most comprehensive, high-tech, accurate examination, which can be delivered by anyone with minimal training. We can link global experts with people in the most rural, difficult-to-reach places that are beyond the end of the road, effectively putting those experts in their homes, allowing us to make diagnoses and make plans for treatment. Project managers, hospital directors, are able to search on our interface by any parameter they may be interested in. Here in Nakuru, where I've been living, we can search for people by whatever condition. Here are people who are blind from a curable condition cataract. Each red pin depicts somebody who is blind from a disease that is curable and treatable, and they're locatable. We can use bulk text messaging services to explain that we're coming to arrange a treatment. What's more, we've learned that this is something that we haven't built just for the community but with the community. Those blue pins that drop represent elders, or local leaders, that are connected to those people who can ensure that we can find them and arrange treatment. So for patients like Mama Wangari, who have been blind for over 10 years and never seen her grandchildren, for less than 40 dollars, we can restore her eyesight. This is something that has to happen. It's only in statistics that people go blind by the millions. The reality is everyone goes blind on their own. But now, they might just be a text message away from help. (Applause) And now because live demos are always a bad idea, we're going to try a live demo. (Laughter) So here we have the Peek Vision app. Okay, and what we're looking at here, this is Sam's optic nerve, which is a direct extension of her brain, so I'm actually looking at her brain as we look there. We can see all parts of the retina. It makes it possible to pick up diseases of the eye and of the body that would not be possible without access to the eye, and that clip-on device can be manufactured for just a few dollars, and people can be cured of blindness, and I think it says a lot about us as a human race if we've developed cures and we don't deliver them. But now we can. Thank you. (Applause)

The Olympic motto is "Citius, Altius, Fortius." Faster, Higher, Stronger. And athletes have fulfilled that motto rapidly. The winner of the 2012 Olympic marathon ran two hours and eight minutes. Had he been racing against the winner of the 1904 Olympic marathon, he would have won by nearly an hour and a half. Now we all have this feeling that we're somehow just getting better as a human race, inexorably progressing, but it's not like we've evolved into a new species in a century. So what's going on here? I want to take a look at what's really behind this march of athletic progress. In 1936, Jesse Owens held the world record in the 100 meters. Had Jesse Owens been racing last year in the world championships of the 100 meters, when Jamaican sprinter Usain Bolt finished, Owens would have still had 14 feet to go. That's a lot in sprinter land. To give you a sense of how much it is, I want to share with you a demonstration conceived by sports scientist Ross Tucker. Now picture the stadium last year at the world championships of the 100 meters: thousands of fans waiting with baited breath to see Usain Bolt, the fastest man in history; flashbulbs popping as the nine fastest men in the world coil themselves into their blocks. And I want you to pretend that Jesse Owens is in that race. Now close your eyes for a second and picture the race. Bang! The gun goes off. An American sprinter jumps out to the front. Usain Bolt starts to catch him. Usain Bolt passes him, and as the runners come to the finish, you'll hear a beep as each man crosses the line. (Beeps) That's the entire finish of the race. You can open your eyes now. That first beep was Usain Bolt. That last beep was Jesse Owens. Listen to it again. (Beeps) When you think of it like that, it's not that big a difference, is it? And then consider that Usain Bolt started by propelling himself out of blocks down a specially fabricated carpet designed to allow him to travel as fast as humanly possible. Jesse Owens, on the other hand, ran on cinders, the ash from burnt wood, and that soft surface stole far more energy from his legs as he ran. Rather than blocks, Jesse Owens had a gardening trowel that he had to use to dig holes in the cinders to start from. Biomechanical analysis of the speed of Owens' joints shows that had been running on the same surface as Bolt, he wouldn't have been 14 feet behind, he would have been within one stride. Rather than the last beep, Owens would have been the second beep. Listen to it again. (Beeps) That's the difference track surface technology has made, and it's done it throughout the running world. Consider a longer event. In 1954, Sir Roger Bannister became the first man to run under four minutes in the mile. Nowadays, college kids do that every year. On rare occasions, a high school kid does it. As of the end of last year, 1,314 men had run under four minutes in the mile, but like Jesse Owens, Sir Roger Bannister ran on soft cinders that stole far more energy from his legs than the synthetic tracks of today. So I consulted biomechanics experts to find out how much slower it is to run on cinders than synthetic tracks, and their consensus that it's one and a half percent slower. So if you apply a one and a half percent slowdown conversion to every man who ran his sub-four mile on a synthetic track, this is what happens. Only 530 are left. If you look at it from that perspective, fewer than ten new men per [year] have joined the sub-four mile club since Sir Roger Bannister. Now, 530 is a lot more than one, and that's partly because there are many more people training today and they're training more intelligently. Even college kids are professional in their training compared to Sir Roger Bannister, who trained for 45 minutes at a time while he ditched gynecology lectures in med school. And that guy who won the 1904 Olympic marathon in three in a half hours, that guy was drinking rat poison and brandy while he ran along the course. That was his idea of a performance-enhancing drug. (Laughter) Clearly, athletes have gotten more savvy about performance-enhancing drugs as well, and that's made a difference in some sports at some times, but technology has made a difference in all sports, from faster skis to lighter shoes. Take a look at the record for the 100-meter freestyle swim. The record is always trending downward, but it's punctuated by these steep cliffs. This first cliff, in 1956, is the introduction of the flip turn. Rather than stopping and turning around, athletes could somersault under the water and get going right away in the opposite direction. This second cliff, the introduction of gutters on the side of the pool that allows water to splash off, rather than becoming turbulence that impedes the swimmers as they race. This final cliff, the introduction of full-body and low-friction swimsuits. Throughout sports, technology has changed the face of performance. In 1972, Eddy Merckx set the record for the longest distance cycled in one hour at 30 miles, 3,774 feet. Now that record improved and improved as bicycles improved and became more aerodynamic all the way until 1996, when it was set at 35 miles, 1,531 feet, nearly five miles farther than Eddy Merckx cycled in 1972. But then in 2000, the International Cycling Union decreed that anyone who wanted to hold that record had to do so with essentially the same equipment that Eddy Merckx used in 1972. Where does the record stand today? 30 miles, 4,657 feet, a grand total of 883 feet farther than Eddy Merckx cycled more than four decades ago. Essentially the entire improvement in this record was due to technology. Still, technology isn't the only thing pushing athletes forward. While indeed we haven't evolved into a new species in a century, the gene pool within competitive sports most certainly has changed. In the early half of the 20th century, physical education instructors and coaches had the idea that the average body type was the best for all athletic endeavors: medium height, medium weight, no matter the sport. And this showed in athletes' bodies. In the 1920s, the average elite high-jumper and average elite shot-putter were the same exact size. But as that idea started to fade away, as sports scientists and coaches realized that rather than the average body type, you want highly specialized bodies that fit into certain athletic niches, a form of artificial selection took place, a self-sorting for bodies that fit certain sports, and athletes' bodies became more different from one another. Today, rather than the same size as the average elite high jumper, the average elite shot-putter is two and a half inches taller and 130 pounds heavier. And this happened throughout the sports world. In fact, if you plot on a height versus mass graph one data point for each of two dozen sports in the first half of the 20th century, it looks like this. There's some dispersal, but it's kind of grouped around that average body type. Then that idea started to go away, and at the same time, digital technology -- first radio, then television and the Internet -- gave millions, or in some cases billions, of people a ticket to consume elite sports performance. The financial incentives and fame and glory afforded elite athletes skyrocketed, and it tipped toward the tiny upper echelon of performance. It accelerated the artificial selection for specialized bodies. And if you plot a data point for these same two dozen sports today, it looks like this. The athletes' bodies have gotten much more different from one another. And because this chart looks like the charts that show the expanding universe, with the galaxies flying away from one another, the scientists who discovered it call it "The Big Bang of Body Types." In sports where height is prized, like basketball, the tall athletes got taller. In 1983, the National Basketball Association signed a groundbreaking agreement making players partners in the league, entitled to shares of ticket revenues and television contracts. Suddenly, anybody who could be an NBA player wanted to be, and teams started scouring the globe for the bodies that could help them win championships. Almost overnight, the proportion of men in the NBA who are at least seven feet tall doubled to 10 percent. Today, one in 10 men in the NBA is at least seven feet tall, but a seven-foot-tall man is incredibly rare in the general population -- so rare that if you know an American man between the ages of 20 and 40 who is at least seven feet tall, there's a 17 percent chance he's in the NBA right now. (Laughter) That is, find six honest seven footers, one is in the NBA right now. And that's not the only way that NBA players' bodies are unique. This is Leonardo da Vinci's "Vitruvian Man," the ideal proportions, with arm span equal to height. My arm span is exactly equal to my height. Yours is probably very nearly so. But not the average NBA player. The average NBA player is a shade under 6'7", with arms that are seven feet long. Not only are NBA players ridiculously tall, they are ludicrously long. Had Leonardo wanted to draw the Vitruvian NBA Player, he would have needed a rectangle and an ellipse, not a circle and a square. So in sports where large size is prized, the large athletes have gotten larger. Conversely, in sports where diminutive stature is an advantage, the small athletes got smaller. The average elite female gymnast shrunk from 5'3" to 4'9" on average over the last 30 years, all the better for their power-to-weight ratio and for spinning in the air. And while the large got larger and the small got smaller, the weird got weirder. The average length of the forearm of a water polo player in relation to their total arm got longer, all the better for a forceful throwing whip. And as the large got larger, small got smaller, and the weird weirder. In swimming, the ideal body type is a long torso and short legs. It's like the long hull of a canoe for speed over the water. And the opposite is advantageous in running. You want long legs and a short torso. And this shows in athletes' bodies today. Here you see Michael Phelps, the greatest swimmer in history, standing next to Hicham El Guerrouj, the world record holder in the mile. These men are seven inches different in height, but because of the body types advantaged in their sports, they wear the same length pants. Seven inches difference in height, these men have the same length legs. Now in some cases, the search for bodies that could push athletic performance forward ended up introducing into the competitive world populations of people that weren't previously competing at all, like Kenyan distance runners. We think of Kenyans as being great marathoners. Kenyans think of the Kalenjin tribe as being great marathoners. The Kalenjin make up just 12 percent of the Kenyan population but the vast majority of elite runners. And they happen, on average, to have a certain unique physiology: legs that are very long and very thin at their extremity, and this is because they have their ancestry at very low latitude in a very hot and dry climate, and an evolutionary adaptation to that is limbs that are very long and very thin at the extremity for cooling purposes. It's the same reason that a radiator has long coils, to increase surface area compared to volume to let heat out, and because the leg is like a pendulum, the longer and thinner it is at the extremity, the more energy-efficient it is to swing. To put Kalenjin running success in perspective, consider that 17 American men in history have run faster than two hours and 10 minutes in the marathon. That's a four-minute-and-58-second-per-mile pace. Thirty-two Kalenjin men did that last October. (Laughter) That's from a source population the size of metropolitan Atlanta. Still, even changing technology and the changing gene pool in sports don't account for all of the changes in performance. Athletes have a different mindset than they once did. Have you ever seen in a movie when someone gets an electrical shock and they're thrown across a room? There's no explosion there. What's happening when that happens is that the electrical impulse is causing all their muscle fibers to twitch at once, and they're throwing themselves across the room. They're essentially jumping. That's the power that's contained in the human body. But normally we can't access nearly all of it. Our brain acts as a limiter, preventing us from accessing all of our physical resources, because we might hurt ourselves, tearing tendons or ligaments. But the more we learn about how that limiter functions, the more we learn how we can push it back just a bit, in some cases by convincing the brain that the body won't be in mortal danger by pushing harder. Endurance and ultra-endurance sports serve as a great example. Ultra-endurance was once thought to be harmful to human health, but now we realize that we have all these traits that are perfect for ultra-endurance: no body fur and a glut of sweat glands that keep us cool while running; narrow waists and long legs compared to our frames; large surface area of joints for shock absorption. We have an arch in our foot that acts like a spring, short toes that are better for pushing off than for grasping tree limbs, and when we run, we can turn our torso and our shoulders like this while keeping our heads straight. Our primate cousins can't do that. They have to run like this. And we have big old butt muscles that keep us upright while running. Have you ever looked at an ape's butt? They have no buns because they don't run upright. And as athletes have realized that we're perfectly suited for ultra-endurance, they've taken on feats that would have been unthinkable before, athletes like Spanish endurance racer Kílian Jornet. Here's Kílian running up the Matterhorn. (Laughter) With a sweatshirt there tied around his waist. It's so steep he can't even run here. He's pulling up on a rope. This is a vertical ascent of more than 8,000 feet, and Kílian went up and down in under three hours. Amazing. And talented though he is, Kílian is not a physiological freak. Now that he has done this, other athletes will follow, just as other athletes followed after Sir Roger Bannister ran under four minutes in the mile. Changing technology, changing genes, and a changing mindset. Innovation in sports, whether that's new track surfaces or new swimming techniques, the democratization of sport, the spread to new bodies and to new populations around the world, and imagination in sport, an understanding of what the human body is truly capable of, have conspired to make athletes stronger, faster, bolder, and better than ever. Thank you very much. (Applause)

"Why?" "Why?" is a question that parents ask me all the time. "Why did my child develop autism?" As a pediatrician, as a geneticist, as a researcher, we try and address that question. But autism is not a single condition. It's actually a spectrum of disorders, a spectrum that ranges, for instance, from Justin, a 13-year-old boy who's not verbal, who can't speak, who communicates by using an iPad to touch pictures to communicate his thoughts and his concerns, a little boy who, when he gets upset, will start rocking, and eventually, when he's disturbed enough, will bang his head to the point that he can actually cut it open and require stitches. That same diagnosis of autism, though, also applies to Gabriel, another 13-year-old boy who has quite a different set of challenges. He's actually quite remarkably gifted in mathematics. He can multiple three numbers by three numbers in his head with ease, yet when it comes to trying to have a conversation, he has great difficulty. He doesn't make eye contact. He has difficulty starting a conversation, feels awkward, and when he gets nervous, he actually shuts down. Yet both of these boys have the same diagnosis of autism spectrum disorder. One of the things that concerns us is whether or not there really is an epidemic of autism. These days, one in 88 children will be diagnosed with autism, and the question is, why does this graph look this way? Has that number been increasing dramatically over time? Or is it because we have now started labeling individuals with autism, simply giving them a diagnosis when they were still present there before yet simply didn't have that label? And in fact, in the late 1980s, the early 1990s, legislation was passed that actually provided individuals with autism with resources, with access to educational materials that would help them. With that increased awareness, more parents, more pediatricians, more educators learned to recognize the features of autism. As a result of that, more individuals were diagnosed and got access to the resources they needed. In addition, we've changed our definition over time, so in fact we've widened the definition of autism, and that accounts for some of the increased prevalence that we see. The next question everyone wonders is, what caused autism? And a common misconception is that vaccines cause autism. But let me be very clear: Vaccines do not cause autism. (Applause) In fact, the original research study that suggested that was the case was completely fraudulent. It was actually retracted from the journal Lancet, in which it was published, and that author, a physician, had his medical license taken away from him. (Applause) The Institute of Medicine, The Centers for Disease Control, have repeatedly investigated this and there is no credible evidence that vaccines cause autism. Furthermore, one of the ingredients in vaccines, something called thimerosal, was thought to be what the cause of autism was. That was actually removed from vaccines in the year 1992, and you can see that it really did not have an effect in what happened with the prevalence of autism. So again, there is no evidence that this is the answer. So the question remains, what does cause autism? In fact, there's probably not one single answer. Just as autism is a spectrum, there's a spectrum of etiologies, a spectrum of causes. Based on epidemiological data, we know that one of the causes, or one of the associations, I should say, is advanced paternal age, that is, increasing age of the father at the time of conception. In addition, another vulnerable and critical period in terms of development is when the mother is pregnant. During that period, while the fetal brain is developing, we know that exposure to certain agents can actually increase the risk of autism. In particular, there's a medication, valproic acid, which mothers with epilepsy sometimes take, we know can increase that risk of autism. In addition, there can be some infectious agents that can also cause autism. And one of the things I'm going to spend a lot of time focusing on are the genes that can cause autism. I'm focusing on this not because genes are the only cause of autism, but it's a cause of autism that we can readily define and be able to better understand the biology and understand better how the brain works so that we can come up with strategies to be able to intervene. One of the genetic factors that we don't understand, however, is the difference that we see in terms of males and females. Males are affected four to one compared to females with autism, and we really don't understand what that cause is. One of the ways that we can understand that genetics is a factor is by looking at something called the concordance rate. In other words, if one sibling has autism, what's the probability that another sibling in that family will have autism? And we can look in particular at three types of siblings: identical twins, twins that actually share 100 percent of their genetic information and shared the same intrauterine environment, versus fraternal twins, twins that actually share 50 percent of their genetic information, versus regular siblings, brother-sister, sister-sister, also sharing 50 percent of their genetic information, yet not sharing the same intrauterine environment. And when you look at those concordance ratios, one of the striking things that you will see is that in identical twins, that concordance rate is 77 percent. Remarkably, though, it's not 100 percent. It is not that genes account for all of the risk for autism, but yet they account for a lot of that risk, because when you look at fraternal twins, that concordance rate is only 31 percent. On the other hand, there is a difference between those fraternal twins and the siblings, suggesting that there are common exposures for those fraternal twins that may not be shared as commonly with siblings alone. So this provides some of the data that autism is genetic. Well, how genetic is it? When we compare it to other conditions that we're familiar with, things like cancer, heart disease, diabetes, in fact, genetics plays a much larger role in autism than it does in any of these other conditions. But with this, that doesn't tell us what the genes are. It doesn't even tell us in any one child, is it one gene or potentially a combination of genes? And so in fact, in some individuals with autism, it is genetic! That is, that it is one single, powerful, deterministic gene that causes the autism. However, in other individuals, it's genetic, that is, that it's actually a combination of genes in part with the developmental process that ultimately determines that risk for autism. We don't know in any one person, necessarily, which of those two answers it is until we start digging deeper. So the question becomes, how can we start to identify what exactly those genes are. And let me pose something that might not be intuitive. In certain individuals, they can have autism for a reason that is genetic but yet not because of autism running in the family. And the reason is because in certain individuals, they can actually have genetic changes or mutations that are not passed down from the mother or from the father, but actually start brand new in them, mutations that are present in the egg or the sperm at the time of conception but have not been passed down generation through generation within the family. And we can actually use that strategy to now understand and to identify those genes causing autism in those individuals. So in fact, at the Simons Foundation, we took 2,600 individuals that had no family history of autism, and we took that child and their mother and father and used them to try and understand what were those genes causing autism in those cases? To do that, we actually had to comprehensively be able to look at all that genetic information and determine what those differences were between the mother, the father and the child. In doing so, I apologize, I'm going to use an outdated analogy of encyclopedias rather than Wikipedia, but I'm going to do so to try and help make the point that as we did this inventory, we needed to be able to look at massive amounts of information. Our genetic information is organized into a set of 46 volumes, and when we did that, we had to be able to account for each of those 46 volumes, because in some cases with autism, there's actually a single volume that's missing. We had to get more granular than that, though, and so we had to start opening those books, and in some cases, the genetic change was more subtle. It might have been a single paragraph that was missing, or yet, even more subtle than that, a single letter, one out of three billion letters that was changed, that was altered, yet had profound effects in terms of how the brain functions and affects behavior. In doing this within these families, we were able to account for approximately 25 percent of the individuals and determine that there was a single powerful genetic factor that caused autism within those families. On the other hand, there's 75 percent that we still haven't figured out. As we did this, though, it was really quite humbling, because we realized that there was not simply one gene for autism. In fact, the current estimates are that there are 200 to 400 different genes that can cause autism. And that explains, in part, why we see such a broad spectrum in terms of its effects. Although there are that many genes, there is some method to the madness. It's not simply random 200, 400 different genes, but in fact they fit together. They fit together in a pathway. They fit together in a network that's starting to make sense now in terms of how the brain functions. We're starting to have a bottom-up approach where we're identifying those genes, those proteins, those molecules, understanding how they interact together to make that neuron work, understanding how those neurons interact together to make circuits work, and understand how those circuits work to now control behavior, and understand that both in individuals with autism as well as individuals who have normal cognition. But early diagnosis is a key for us. Being able to make that diagnosis of someone who's susceptible at a time in a window where we have the ability to transform, to be able to impact that growing, developing brain is critical. And so folks like Ami Klin have developed methods to be able to take infants, small babies, and be able to use biomarkers, in this case eye contact and eye tracking, to identify an infant at risk. This particular infant, you can see, making very good eye contact with this woman as she's singing "Itsy, Bitsy Spider," in fact is not going to develop autism. This baby we know is going to be in the clear. On the other hand, this other baby is going to go on to develop autism. In this particular child, you can see, it's not making good eye contact. Instead of the eyes focusing in and having that social connection, looking at the mouth, looking at the nose, looking off in another direction, but not again socially connecting, and being able to do this on a very large scale, screen infants, screen children for autism, through something very robust, very reliable, is going to be very helpful to us in terms of being able to intervene at an early stage when we can have the greatest impact. How are we going to intervene? It's probably going to be a combination of factors. In part, in some individuals, we're going to try and use medications. And so in fact, identifying the genes for autism is important for us to identify drug targets, to identify things that we might be able to impact and can be certain that that's really what we need to do in autism. But that's not going to be the only answer. Beyond just drugs, we're going to use educational strategies. Individuals with autism, some of them are wired a little bit differently. They learn in a different way. They absorb their surroundings in a different way, and we need to be able to educate them in a way that serves them best. Beyond that, there are a lot of individuals in this room who have great ideas in terms of new technologies we can use, everything from devices we can use to train the brain to be able to make it more efficient and to compensate for areas in which it has a little bit of trouble, to even things like Google Glass. You could imagine, for instance, Gabriel, with his social awkwardness, might be able to wear Google Glass with an earpiece in his ear, and have a coach be able to help him, be able to help think about conversations, conversation-starters, being able to even perhaps one day invite a girl out on a date. All of these new technologies just offer tremendous opportunities for us to be able to impact the individuals with autism, but yet we have a long way to go. As much as we know, there is so much more that we don't know, and so I invite all of you to be able to help us think about how to do this better, to use as a community our collective wisdom to be able to make a difference, and in particular, for the individuals in families with autism, I invite you to join the interactive autism network, to be part of the solution to this, because it's going to take really a lot of us to think about what's important, what's going to be a meaningful difference. As we think about something that's potentially a solution, how well does it work? Is it something that's really going to make a difference in your lives, as an individual, as a family with autism? We're going to need individuals of all ages, from the young to the old, and with all different shapes and sizes of the autism spectrum disorder to make sure that we can have an impact. So I invite all of you to join the mission and to help to be able to make the lives of individuals with autism so much better and so much richer. Thank you. (Applause)

So, a few years ago I was at JFK Airport about to get on a flight, when I was approached by two women who I do not think would be insulted to hear themselves described as tiny old tough-talking Italian-American broads. The taller one, who is like up here, she comes marching up to me, and she goes, "Honey, I gotta ask you something. You got something to do with that whole 'Eat, Pray, Love' thing that's been going on lately?" And I said, "Yes, I did." And she smacks her friend and she goes, "See, I told you, I said, that's that girl. That's that girl who wrote that book based on that movie." (Laughter) So that's who I am. And believe me, I'm extremely grateful to be that person, because that whole "Eat, Pray, Love" thing was a huge break for me. But it also left me in a really tricky position moving forward as an author trying to figure out how in the world I was ever going to write a book again that would ever please anybody, because I knew well in advance that all of those people who had adored "Eat, Pray, Love" were going to be incredibly disappointed in whatever I wrote next because it wasn't going to be "Eat, Pray, Love," and all of those people who had hated "Eat, Pray, Love" were going to be incredibly disappointed in whatever I wrote next because it would provide evidence that I still lived. So I knew that I had no way to win, and knowing that I had no way to win made me seriously consider for a while just quitting the game and moving to the country to raise corgis. But if I had done that, if I had given up writing, I would have lost my beloved vocation, so I knew that the task was that I had to find some way to gin up the inspiration to write the next book regardless of its inevitable negative outcome. In other words, I had to find a way to make sure that my creativity survived its own success. And I did, in the end, find that inspiration, but I found it in the most unlikely and unexpected place. I found it in lessons that I had learned earlier in life about how creativity can survive its own failure. So just to back up and explain, the only thing I have ever wanted to be for my whole life was a writer. I wrote all through childhood, all through adolescence, by the time I was a teenager I was sending my very bad stories to The New Yorker, hoping to be discovered. After college, I got a job as a diner waitress, kept working, kept writing, kept trying really hard to get published, and failing at it. I failed at getting published for almost six years. So for almost six years, every single day, I had nothing but rejection letters waiting for me in my mailbox. And it was devastating every single time, and every single time, I had to ask myself if I should just quit while I was behind and give up and spare myself this pain. But then I would find my resolve, and always in the same way, by saying, "I'm not going to quit, I'm going home." And you have to understand that for me, going home did not mean returning to my family's farm. For me, going home meant returning to the work of writing because writing was my home, because I loved writing more than I hated failing at writing, which is to say that I loved writing more than I loved my own ego, which is ultimately to say that I loved writing more than I loved myself. And that's how I pushed through it. But the weird thing is that 20 years later, during the crazy ride of "Eat, Pray, Love," I found myself identifying all over again with that unpublished young diner waitress who I used to be, thinking about her constantly, and feeling like I was her again, which made no rational sense whatsoever because our lives could not have been more different. She had failed constantly. I had succeeded beyond my wildest expectation. We had nothing in common. Why did I suddenly feel like I was her all over again? And it was only when I was trying to unthread that that I finally began to comprehend the strange and unlikely psychological connection in our lives between the way we experience great failure and the way we experience great success. So think of it like this: For most of your life, you live out your existence here in the middle of the chain of human experience where everything is normal and reassuring and regular, but failure catapults you abruptly way out over here into the blinding darkness of disappointment. Success catapults you just as abruptly but just as far way out over here into the equally blinding glare of fame and recognition and praise. And one of these fates is objectively seen by the world as bad, and the other one is objectively seen by the world as good, but your subconscious is completely incapable of discerning the difference between bad and good. The only thing that it is capable of feeling is the absolute value of this emotional equation, the exact distance that you have been flung from yourself. And there's a real equal danger in both cases of getting lost out there in the hinterlands of the psyche. But in both cases, it turns out that there is also the same remedy for self-restoration, and that is that you have got to find your way back home again as swiftly and smoothly as you can, and if you're wondering what your home is, here's a hint: Your home is whatever in this world you love more than you love yourself. So that might be creativity, it might be family, it might be invention, adventure, faith, service, it might be raising corgis, I don't know, your home is that thing to which you can dedicate your energies with such singular devotion that the ultimate results become inconsequential. For me, that home has always been writing. So after the weird, disorienting success that I went through with "Eat, Pray, Love," I realized that all I had to do was exactly the same thing that I used to have to do all the time when I was an equally disoriented failure. I had to get my ass back to work, and that's what I did, and that's how, in 2010, I was able to publish the dreaded follow-up to "Eat, Pray, Love." And you know what happened with that book? It bombed, and I was fine. Actually, I kind of felt bulletproof, because I knew that I had broken the spell and I had found my way back home to writing for the sheer devotion of it. And I stayed in my home of writing after that, and I wrote another book that just came out last year and that one was really beautifully received, which is very nice, but not my point. My point is that I'm writing another one now, and I'll write another book after that and another and another and another and many of them will fail, and some of them might succeed, but I will always be safe from the random hurricanes of outcome as long as I never forget where I rightfully live. Look, I don't know where you rightfully live, but I know that there's something in this world that you love more than you love yourself. Something worthy, by the way, so addiction and infatuation don't count, because we all know that those are not safe places to live. Right? The only trick is that you've got to identify the best, worthiest thing that you love most, and then build your house right on top of it and don't budge from it. And if you should someday, somehow get vaulted out of your home by either great failure or great success, then your job is to fight your way back to that home the only way that it has ever been done, by putting your head down and performing with diligence and devotion and respect and reverence whatever the task is that love is calling forth from you next. You just do that, and keep doing that again and again and again, and I can absolutely promise you, from long personal experience in every direction, I can assure you that it's all going to be okay. Thank you. (Applause)

A computer is an incredibly powerful means of creative expression, but for the most part, that expression is confined to the screens of our laptops and mobile phones. And I'd like to tell you a story about bringing this power of the computer to move things around and interact with us off of the screen and into the physical world in which we live. A few years ago, I got a call from a luxury fashion store called Barneys New York, and the next thing I knew, I was designing storefront kinetic sculptures for their window displays. This one's called "The Chase." There are two pairs of shoes, a man's pair and a woman's pair, and they play out this slow, tense chase around the window in which the man scoots up behind the woman and gets in her personal space, and then she moves away. Each of the shoes has magnets in it, and there are magnets underneath the table that move the shoes around. My friend Andy Cavatorta was building a robotic harp for Bjork's Biophilia tour and I wound up building the electronics and motion control software to make the harps move and play music. The harp has four separate pendulums, and each pendulum has 11 strings, so the harp swings on its axis and also rotates in order to play different musical notes, and the harps are all networked together so that they can play the right notes at the right time in the music. I built an interactive chemistry exhibit at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago, and this exhibit lets people use physical objects to grab chemical elements off of the periodic table and bring them together to cause chemical reactions to happen. And the museum noticed that people were spending a lot of time with this exhibit, and a researcher from a science education center in Australia decided to study this exhibit and try to figure out what was going on. And she found that the physical objects that people were using were helping people understand how to use the exhibit, and were helping people learn in a social way. And when you think about it, this makes a lot of sense, that using specialized physical objects would help people use an interface more easily. I mean, our hands and our minds are optimized to think about and interact with tangible objects. Think about which you find easier to use, a physical keyboard or an onscreen keyboard like on a phone? But the thing that struck me about all of these different projects is that they really had to be built from scratch, down to the level of the electronics and the printed circuit boards and all the mechanisms all the way up to the software. I wanted to create something where we could move objects under computer control and create interactions around that idea without having to go through this process of building something from scratch every single time. So my first attempt at this was at the MIT Media Lab with Professor Hiroshi Ishii, and we built this array of 512 different electromagnets, and together they were able to move objects around on top of their surface. But the problem with this was that these magnets cost over 10,000 dollars. Although each one was pretty small, altogether they weighed so much that the table that they were on started to sag. So I wanted to build something where you could have this kind of interaction on any tabletop surface. So to explore this idea, I built an army of small robots, and each of these robots has what are called omni wheels. They're these special wheels that can move equally easily in all directions, and when you couple these robots with a video projector, you have these physical tools for interacting with digital information. So here's an example of what I mean. This is a video editing application where all of the controls for manipulating the video are physical. So if we want to tweak the color, we just enter the color mode, and then we get three different dials for tweaking the color, or if we want to adjust the audio, then we get two different dials for that, these physical objects. So here the left and right channel stay in sync, but if we want to, we can override that by grabbing both of them at the same time. So the idea is that we get the speed and efficiency benefits of using these physical dials together with the flexibility and versatility of a system that's designed in software. And this is a mapping application for disaster response. So you have these physical objects that represent police, fire and rescue, and a dispatcher can grab them and place them on the map to tell those units where to go, and then the position of the units on the map gets synced up with the position of those units in the real world. This is a video chat application. It's amazing how much emotion you can convey with just a few simple movements of a physical object. With this interface, we open up a huge array of possibilities in between traditional board games and arcade games, where the physical possibilities of interaction make so many different styles of play possible. But one of the areas that I'm most excited about using this platform for is applying it to problems that are difficult for computers or people to solve alone. One example of those is protein folding. So here we have an interface where we have physical handles onto a protein, and we can grab those handles and try to move the protein and try to fold it in different ways. And if we move it in a way that doesn't really make sense with the underlying molecular simulation, we get this physical feedback where we can actually feel these physical handles pulling back against us. So feeling what's going on inside a molecular simulation is a whole different level of interaction. So we're just beginning to explore what's possible when we use software to control the movement of objects in our environment. Maybe this is the computer of the future. There's no touchscreen. There's no technology visible at all. But when we want to have a video chat or play a game or lay out the slides to our next TED Talk, the objects on the table come alive. Thank you. (Applause)

Scientific breakthrough, the kind that can potentially save lives, can sometimes be lying right out in the open for us to discover, in the evolved, accumulated body of human anecdote, for example, or in the time-tested adaptations that we observe in the natural world around us. Science starts with observation, but the trick is to identify the patterns and signatures that we might otherwise dismiss as myth or coincidence, isolate them, and test them with scientific rigor. And when we do, the results will often surprise. Western Australia has had a particular problem with shark attacks over the last three years, unfortunately and tragically culminating in five fatal shark attacks in a 10-month period during that time. But Western Australia is not alone in this. The incident of shark engagements on humans is escalating worldwide. And so it's not surprising, perhaps, that in July of this year, Shark Attack Mitigation Systems in collaboration with the University of Western Australia Oceans Institute made an announcement which captured the attention of the worldwide media and of ocean users worldwide, and that was around the development of technology to mitigate or reduce the risk of shark attack based on the science of what sharks can see. And I have for you today the story of that journey, but also the notion that science can be as powerful as a translator as it can be for invention. When we began this process, we were looking, it was about three years ago, and we'd just had the first two fatal shark attacks in Western Australia, and by chance, in a previous role, I happened to be having dinner with Harry Butler. Now Harry Butler, who most Australians would know is a famous naturalist, had spent a lot of time in the marine environment. Harry Butler is a precursor, if you like, to the late Steve Irwin. When I asked him about what the solution to the problem might be, the answer was quite surprising. He said, "Take a black wetsuit, band it in yellow stripes like a bumblebee, and you'll be mimicking the warning systems of most marine species." I didn't think about that much at the time, and it wasn't until the next three fatal shark attacks happened, and it caused me to think, maybe there's some merit to this idea. And I turned to the web to see if there might be some clues. And it turns out the web is awash with this sort of evidence that supports this sort of thinking. So biologically, there are plenty of species that display banding or patterns, warning patterns, to either be cryptical in the water or warn against being attacked, not the least of which is the pilot fish which spends a big slab of its life around the business end of a shark. On the human side, Walter Starck, an oceanographer, has been painting his wetsuit since the 1970s, and anthropologically, Pacific island tribes painted themselves in bands in a sea snake ceremony to ward off the shark god. So what's going on here? Is this an idea lying wide out in the open for us to consider and define? We know that sharks use a range of sensors when they engage, particularly for attack, but the sight sensor is the one that they use to identify the target, and particularly in the last number of meters before the attack. It makes sense to pay attention to the biological anecdote because that's time-tested evolution over many millennia. But isn't human anecdote also an evolution of sorts, the idea that there's a kernel of truth thought to be important, passed down from generation to generation, so that it actually ends up shaping human behavior? I wanted to test this idea. I wanted to put some science to this anecdotal evidence, because if science could support this concept, then we might have at least part of the solution to shark attack right under our very nose. To do that, I needed some experts in shark vision and shark neurology, and a worldwide search, again, led to the University of W.A. on the doorstep here, with the Oceans Institute. And professor Nathan Hart and his team had just written a paper which tells us, confirms that predatory sharks see in black and white, or grayscale. So I called up Nathan, a little bit sheepishly, actually, about this idea that maybe we could use these patterns and shapes to produce a wetsuit to try and mitigate the risk of shark attack, and fortunately, he thought that was a good idea. So what ensued is a collaborative bit of research supported by the West Australian State Government. And we did three key things. The first is that we mapped the characteristics, the physical characteristics of the eyes of the three main predatory sharks, so the great white, tiger and bull shark. We did that genetically and we did that anatomically. The next thing we did was to understand, using complex computer modeling, what that eye can see at different depths, distances, light conditions, and water clarity in the ocean. And from there, we were able to pinpoint two key characteristics: what patterns and shapes would present the wearer as hidden or hard to make out in the water, cryptic, and what patterns and shapes might provide the greatest contrast but provide the greatest breakup of profile so that that person wasn't confused for shark prey or shark food. The next thing we needed to do was to convert this into wetsuits that people might actually wear, and to that end, I invited Ray Smith, a surfer, industrial designer, wetsuit designer, and in fact the guy that designed the original Quiksilver logo, to come over and sit with the science team and interpret that science into aesthetic wetsuits that people might actually wear. And here's an example of one of the first drawings. So this is what I call a "don't eat me" wetsuit. So this takes that banding idea, takes that banding idea, it's highly visible, provides a highly disruptive profile, and is intended to prevent the shark from considering that you would be ordinary food, and potentially even create confusion for the shark. And this one's configured to go with a surfboard. You can see that dark, opaque panel on the front, and it's particularly better for the surface, where being backlit and providing a silhouette is problematic. Second iteration is the cryptic wetsuit, or the one which attempts to hide the wearer in the water column. There are three panels on this suit, and in any given conditions, one or more of those panels will match the reflective spectra of the water so as to disappear fully or partially, leaving the last panel or panels to create a disruptive profile in the water column. And this one's particularly well-suited to the dive configuration, so when you're deeper under the water. So we knew that we had some really solid science here. We knew, if you wanted to stand out, you needed to look stripy, and we knew if you wanted to be cryptic, you needed to look like this. But the acid test is always going to be, how would sharks really behave in the context of these patterns and shapes. And testing to simulate a person in a wetsuit in the water with a predatory shark in a natural environment is actually a lot harder than you might think. (Laughter) So we have to bait the rig, because we need to get the statistical number of samples through to get the scientific evidence, and by baiting the rig, we're obviously changing shark behavior. We can't put humans in the water. We're ethically precluded from even using humanoid shapes and baiting them up in the water. But nevertheless, we started the testing process in January of this year, initially with tiger sharks and subsequently with great white sharks. The way we did that was to get a perforated drum which is full of bait, wrap it in a neoprene skin, and then run two stereo underwater cameras to watch how the shark actually engages with that rig. And because we use stereo, we can capture all the statistics on how big the shark is, what angle it comes in at, how quickly it leaves, and what its behavior is in an empirical rather than a subjective way. Because we needed to preserve the scientific method, we ran a control rig which was a black neoprene rig just like a normal black wetsuit against the, what we call, SAMS technology rig. And the results were not just exciting, but very encouraging, and today I would like to just give you a snapshot of two of those engagements. So here we've got a four-meter tiger shark engaging the black control rig, which it had encountered about a minute and a half before. Now that exact same shark had engaged, or encountered this SAMS rig, which is the Elude SAMS rig, about eight minutes before, and spent six minutes circling it, hunting for it, looking for what it could smell and sense but not see, and this was the final engagement. Great white sharks are more confident than the tigers, and here you see great white shark engaging a control rig, so a black neoprene wetsuit, and going straight to the bottom, coming up and engaging. In contrast to the SAMS technology rig, this is the banded one, where it's more tactile, it's more investigative, it's more apprehensive, and shows a reluctance to come straight in and go. (Applause) So, it's important for us that all the testing is done independently, and the University of W.A. is doing the testing. It'll be an ongoing process. It's subject to peer review and subject to publication. It's so important that this concept is led with the science. From the perspective of Shark Attack Mitigation Systems, we're a biotechnology licensing company, so we don't make wetsuits ourselves. We'll license others to do that. But I thought you might be interested in seeing what SAMS technology looks like embedded in a wetsuit, and to that end, for the first time, live, worldwide -- (Laughter) — I can show you what biological adaptation, science and design looks like in real life. So I can welcome Sam, the surfer, from this side. Where are you, Sam? (Applause) And Eduardo. (Applause) Cheers, mate. Cheers. Thanks, gentlemen. (Applause) So what have we done here? Well, to my mind, rather than take a blank sheet and use science as a tool for invention, we've paid attention to the biological evidence, we've put importance to the human anecdotal evidence, and we've used science as a tool for translation, translation of something that was already there into something that we can use for the benefit of mankind. And it strikes me that this idea of science as a tool for translation rather than invention is one that we can apply much more widely than this in the pursuit of innovation. After all, did the Wright brothers discover manned flight, or did they observe the biological fact of flight and translate that mechanically, replicate it in a way that humans could use? As for the humble wetsuit, who knows what oceanwear will look like in two years' time, in five years' time or in 50 years' time, but with this new thinking, I'm guessing there's a fair chance it won't be pure black. Thank you. (Applause)

Wow, this is bright. It must use a lot of power. Well, flying you all in here must have cost a bit of energy too. So the whole planet needs a lot of energy, and so far we've been running mostly on fossil fuel. We've been burning gas. It's been a good run. It got us to where we are, but we have to stop. We can't do that anymore. So we are trying different types of energy now, alternative energy, but it proved quite difficult to find something that's as convenient and as cost-effective as oil, gas and coal. My personal favorite is nuclear energy. Now, it's very energy-dense, it produces solid, reliable power, and it doesn't make any CO2. Now we know of two ways of making nuclear energy: fission and fusion. Now in fission, you take a big nucleus, you break it in part, in two, and it makes lots of energy, and this is how the nuclear reactor today works. It works pretty good. And then there's fusion. Now, I like fusion. Fusion's much better. So you take two small nuclei, you put it together, and you make helium, and that's very nice. It makes lots of energy. This is nature's way of producing energy. The sun and all the stars in the universe run on fusion. Now, a fusion plant would actually be quite cost-effective and it also would be quite safe. It only produces short term radioactive waste, and it cannot melt down. Now, the fuel from fusion comes from the ocean. In the ocean, you can extract the fuel for about one thousandth of a cent per kilowatt-hour, so that's very, very cheap. And if the whole planet would run on fusion, we could extract the fuel from the ocean. It would run for billions and billions of years. Now, if fusion is so great, why don't we have it? Where is it? Well, there's always a bit of a catch. Fusion is really, really hard to do. So the problem is, those two nuclei, they are both positively charged, so they don't want to fuse. They go like this. They go like that. So in order to make them fuse, you have to throw them at each other with great speed, and if they have enough speed, they will go against the repulsion, they will touch, and they will make energy. Now, the particle speed is a measure of the temperature. So the temperature required for fusion is 150 billion degrees C. This is rather warm, and this is why fusion is so hard to do. Now, I caught my little fusion bug when I did my Ph.D. here at the University of British Columbia, and then I got a big job in a laser printer place making printing for the printing industry. I worked there for 10 years, and I got a little bit bored, and then I was 40, and I got a mid-life crisis, you know, the usual thing: Who am I? What should I do? What should I do? What can I do? And then I was looking at my good work, and what I was doing is I was cutting the forests around here in B.C. and burying you, all of you, in millions of tons of junk mail. Now, that was not very satisfactory. So some people buy a Porsche. Others get a mistress. But I've decided to get my bit to solve global warming and make fusion happen. Now, so the first thing I did is I looked into the literature and I see, how does fusion work? So the physicists have been working on fusion for a while, and one of the ways they do it is with something called a tokamak. It's a big ring of magnetic coil, superconducting coil, and it makes a magnetic field in a ring like this, and the hot gas in the middle, which is called a plasma, is trapped. The particles go round and round and round the circle at the wall. Then they throw a huge amount of heat in there to try to cook that to fusion temperature. So this is the inside of one of those donuts, and on the right side you can see the fusion plasma in there. Now, a second way of doing this is by using laser fusion. Now in laser fusion, you have a little ping pong ball, you put the fusion fuel in the center, and you zap that with a whole bunch of laser around it. The lasers are very strong, and it squashes the ping pong ball really, really quick. And if you squeeze something hard enough, it gets hotter, and if it gets really, really fast, and they do that in one billionth of a second, it makes enough energy and enough heat to make fusion. So this is the inside of one such machine. You see the laser beam and the pellet in the center. Now, most people think that fusion is going nowhere. They always think that the physicists are in their lab and they're working hard, but nothing is happening. That's actually not quite true. This is a curve of the gain in fusion over the last 30 years or so, and you can see that we're making now about 10,000 times more fusion than we used to when we started. That's a pretty good gain. As a matter of fact, it's as fast as the fabled Moore's Law that defined the amount of transistors they can put on a chip. Now, this dot here is called JET, the Joint European Torus. It's a big tokamak donut in Europe, and this machine in 1997 produced 16 megawatts of fusion power with 17 megawatts of heat. Now, you say, that's not much use, but it's actually pretty close, considering we can get about 10,000 times more than we started. The second dot here is the NIF. It's the National Ignition Facility. It's a big laser machine in the U.S., and last month they announced with quite a bit of noise that they had managed to make more fusion energy from the fusion than the energy that they put in the center of the ping pong ball. Now, that's not quite good enough, because the laser to put that energy in was more energy than that, but it was pretty good. Now this is ITER, pronounced in French: EE-tairh. So this is a big collaboration of different countries that are building a huge magnetic donut in the south of France, and this machine, when it's finished, will produce 500 megawatts of fusion power with only 50 megawatts to make it. So this one is the real one. It's going to work. That's the kind of machine that makes energy. Now if you look at the graph, you will notice that those two dots are a little bit on the right of the curve. We kind of have fallen off the progress. Actually, the science to make those machines was really in time to produce fusion during that curve. However, there has been a bit of politics going on, and the will to do it was not there, so it drifted to the right. ITER, for example, could have been built in 2000 or 2005, but because it's a big international collaboration, the politics got in and it delayed it a bit. For example, it took them about three years to decide where to put it. Now, fusion is often criticized for being a little too expensive. Yes, it did cost a billion dollars or two billion dollars a year to make this progress. But you have to compare that to the cost of making Moore's Law. That cost way more than that. The result of Moore's Law is this cell phone here in my pocket. This cell phone, and the Internet behind it, cost about one trillion dollars, just so I can take a selfie and put it on Facebook. Then when my dad sees that, he'll be very proud. We also spend about 650 billion dollars a year in subsidies for oil and gas and renewable energy. Now, we spend one half of a percent of that on fusion. So me, personally, I don't think it's too expensive. I think it's actually been shortchanged, considering it can solve all our energy problems cleanly for the next couple of billions of years. Now I can say that, but I'm a little bit biased, because I started a fusion company and I don't even have a Facebook account. So when I started this fusion company in 2002, I knew I couldn't fight with the big lads. They had much more resources than me. So I decided I would need to find a solution that is cheaper and faster. Now magnetic and laser fusion are pretty good machines. They are awesome pieces of technology, wonderful machines, and they have shown that fusion can be done. However, as a power plant, I don't think they're very good. They're way too big, way too complicated, way too expensive, and also, they don't deal very much with the fusion energy. When you make fusion, the energy comes out as neutrons, fast neutrons comes out of the plasma. Those neutrons hit the wall of the machine. It damages it. And also, you have to catch the heat from those neutrons and run some steam to spin a turbine somewhere, and on those machines, it was all a bit of an afterthought. So I decided that surely there is a better way of doing that. So back to the literature, and I read about the fusion everywhere. One way in particular attracted my attention, and it's called magnetized target fusion, or MTF for short. Now, in MTF, what you want to do is you take a big vat and you fill that with liquid metal, and you spin the liquid metal to open a vortex in the center, a bit like your sink. When you pull the plug on a sink, it makes a vortex. And then you have some pistons driven by pressure that goes on the outside, and this compresses the liquid metal around the plasma, and it compresses it, it gets hotter, like a laser, and then it makes fusion. So it's a bit of a mix between a magnetized fusion and the laser fusion. So those have a couple of very good advantages. The liquid metal absorbs all the neutrons and no neutrons hit the wall, and therefore there's no damage to the machine. The liquid metal gets hot, so you can pump that in a heat exchanger, make some steam, spin a turbine. So that's a very convenient way of doing this part of the process. And finally, all the energy to make the fusion happen comes from steam-powered pistons, which is way cheaper than lasers or superconducting coils. Now, this was all very good except for the problem that it didn't quite work. (Laughter) There's always a catch. So when you compress that, the plasma cools down faster than the compression speed, so you're trying to compress it, but the plasma cooled down and cooled down and cooled down and then it did absolutely nothing. So when I saw that, I said, well, this is such a shame, because it's a very, very good idea. So hopefully I can improve on that. So I thought about it for a minute, and I said, okay, how can we make that work better? So then I thought about impact. What about if we use a big hammer and we swing it and we hit the nail like this, in the place of putting the hammer on the nail and pushing and try to put it in? That won't work. So what the idea is is to use the idea of an impact. So we accelerate the pistons with steam, that takes a little bit of time, but then, bang! you hit the piston, and, baff!, all the energy is done instantly, down instantly to the liquid, and that compresses the plasma much faster. So I decided, okay, this is good, let's make that. So we built this machine in this garage here. We made a small machine that we managed to squeeze a little bit of neutrons out of that, and those are my marketing neutrons, and with those marketing neutrons, then I raised about 50 million dollars, and I hired 65 people. That's my team here. And this is what we want to build. So it's going to be a big machine, about three meters in diameter, liquid lead spinning around, big vortex in the center, put the plasma on the top and on the bottom, piston hits on the side, bang!, it compresses it, and it will make some energy, and the neutron will come out in the liquid metal, going to go in a steam engine and make the turbine, and some of the steam will go back to fire the piston. We're going to run that about one time per second, and it will produce 100 megawatts of electricity. Okay, we also built this injector, so this injector makes the plasma to start with. It makes the plasma at about a lukewarm temperature of three million degrees C. Unfortunately, it doesn't last quite long enough, so we need to extend the life of the plasma a little bit, but last month it got a lot better, so I think we have the plasma compressing now. Then we built a small sphere, about this big, 14 pistons around it, and this will compress the liquid. However, plasma is difficult to compress. When you compress it, it tends to go a little bit crooked like that, so you need the timing of the piston to be very good, and for that we use several control systems, which was not possible in 1970, but we now can do that with nice, new electronics. So finally, most people think that fusion is in the future and will never happen, but as a matter of fact, fusion is getting very close. We are almost there. The big labs have shown that fusion is doable, and now there are small companies that are thinking about that, and they say, it's not that it cannot be done, but it's how to make it cost-effectively. General Fusion is one of those small companies, and hopefully, very soon, somebody, someone, will crack that nut, and perhaps it will be General Fusion. Thank you very much. (Applause)

I feel so fortunate that my first job was working at the Museum of Modern Art on a retrospective of painter Elizabeth Murray. I learned so much from her. After the curator Robert Storr selected all the paintings from her lifetime body of work, I loved looking at the paintings from the 1970s. There were some motifs and elements that would come up again later in her life. I remember asking her what she thought of those early works. If you didn't know they were hers, you might not have been able to guess. She told me that a few didn't quite meet her own mark for what she wanted them to be. One of the works, in fact, so didn't meet her mark, she had set it out in the trash in her studio, and her neighbor had taken it because she saw its value. In that moment, my view of success and creativity changed. I realized that success is a moment, but what we're always celebrating is creativity and mastery. But this is the thing: What gets us to convert success into mastery? This is a question I've long asked myself. I think it comes when we start to value the gift of a near win. I started to understand this when I went on one cold May day to watch a set of varsity archers, all women as fate would have it, at the northern tip of Manhattan at Columbia's Baker Athletics Complex. I wanted to see what's called archer's paradox, the idea that in order to actually hit your target, you have to aim at something slightly skew from it. I stood and watched as the coach drove up these women in this gray van, and they exited with this kind of relaxed focus. One held a half-eaten ice cream cone in one hand and arrows in the left with yellow fletching. And they passed me and smiled, but they sized me up as they made their way to the turf, and spoke to each other not with words but with numbers, degrees, I thought, positions for how they might plan to hit their target. I stood behind one archer as her coach stood in between us to maybe assess who might need support, and watched her, and I didn't understand how even one was going to hit the ten ring. The ten ring from the standard 75-yard distance, it looks as small as a matchstick tip held out at arm's length. And this is while holding 50 pounds of draw weight on each shot. She first hit a seven, I remember, and then a nine, and then two tens, and then the next arrow didn't even hit the target. And I saw that gave her more tenacity, and she went after it again and again. For three hours this went on. At the end of the practice, one of the archers was so taxed that she lied out on the ground just star-fished, her head looking up at the sky, trying to find what T.S. Eliot might call that still point of the turning world. It's so rare in American culture, there's so little that's vocational about it anymore, to look at what doggedness looks like with this level of exactitude, what it means to align your body posture for three hours in order to hit a target, pursuing a kind of excellence in obscurity. But I stayed because I realized I was witnessing what's so rare to glimpse, that difference between success and mastery. So success is hitting that ten ring, but mastery is knowing that it means nothing if you can't do it again and again. Mastery is not just the same as excellence, though. It's not the same as success, which I see as an event, a moment in time, and a label that the world confers upon you. Mastery is not a commitment to a goal but to a constant pursuit. What gets us to do this, what get us to forward thrust more is to value the near win. How many times have we designated something a classic, a masterpiece even, while its creator considers it hopelessly unfinished, riddled with difficulties and flaws, in other words, a near win? Elizabeth Murray surprised me with her admission about her earlier paintings. Painter Paul Cézanne so often thought his works were incomplete that he would deliberately leave them aside with the intention of picking them back up again, but at the end of his life, the result was that he had only signed 10 percent of his paintings. His favorite novel was "The [Unknown] Masterpiece" by Honoré de Balzac, and he felt the protagonist was the painter himself. Franz Kafka saw incompletion when others would find only works to praise, so much so that he wanted all of his diaries, manuscripts, letters and even sketches burned upon his death. His friend refused to honor the request, and because of that, we now have all the works we now do by Kafka: "America," "The Trial" and "The Castle," a work so incomplete it even stops mid-sentence. The pursuit of mastery, in other words, is an ever-onward almost. "Lord, grant that I desire more than I can accomplish," Michelangelo implored, as if to that Old Testament God on the Sistine Chapel, and he himself was that Adam with his finger outstretched and not quite touching that God's hand. Mastery is in the reaching, not the arriving. It's in constantly wanting to close that gap between where you are and where you want to be. Mastery is about sacrificing for your craft and not for the sake of crafting your career. How many inventors and untold entrepreneurs live out this phenomenon? We see it even in the life of the indomitable Arctic explorer Ben Saunders, who tells me that his triumphs are not merely the result of a grand achievement, but of the propulsion of a lineage of near wins. We thrive when we stay at our own leading edge. It's a wisdom understood by Duke Ellington, who said that his favorite song out of his repertoire was always the next one, always the one he had yet to compose. Part of the reason that the near win is inbuilt to mastery is because the greater our proficiency, the more clearly we might see that we don't know all that we thought we did. It's called the Dunning–Kruger effect. The Paris Review got it out of James Baldwin when they asked him, "What do you think increases with knowledge?" and he said, "You learn how little you know." Success motivates us, but a near win can propel us in an ongoing quest. One of the most vivid examples of this comes when we look at the difference between Olympic silver medalists and bronze medalists after a competition. Thomas Gilovich and his team from Cornell studied this difference and found that the frustration silver medalists feel compared to bronze, who are typically a bit more happy to have just not received fourth place and not medaled at all, gives silver medalists a focus on follow-up competition. We see it even in the gambling industry that once picked up on this phenomenon of the near win and created these scratch-off tickets that had a higher than average rate of near wins and so compelled people to buy more tickets that they were called heart-stoppers, and were set on a gambling industry set of abuses in Britain in the 1970s. The reason the near win has a propulsion is because it changes our view of the landscape and puts our goals, which we tend to put at a distance, into more proximate vicinity to where we stand. If I ask you to envision what a great day looks like next week, you might describe it in more general terms. But if I ask you to describe a great day at TED tomorrow, you might describe it with granular, practical clarity. And this is what a near win does. It gets us to focus on what, right now, we plan to do to address that mountain in our sights. It's Jackie Joyner-Kersee, who in 1984 missed taking the gold in the heptathlon by one third of a second, and her husband predicted that would give her the tenacity she needed in follow-up competition. In 1988, she won the gold in the heptathlon and set a record of 7,291 points, a score that no athlete has come very close to since. We thrive not when we've done it all, but when we still have more to do. I stand here thinking and wondering about all the different ways that we might even manufacture a near win in this room, how your lives might play this out, because I think on some gut level we do know this. We know that we thrive when we stay at our own leading edge, and it's why the deliberate incomplete is inbuilt into creation myths. In Navajo culture, some craftsmen and women would deliberately put an imperfection in textiles and ceramics. It's what's called a spirit line, a deliberate flaw in the pattern to give the weaver or maker a way out, but also a reason to continue making work. Masters are not experts because they take a subject to its conceptual end. They're masters because they realize that there isn't one. Now it occurred to me, as I thought about this, why the archery coach told me at the end of that practice, out of earshot of his archers, that he and his colleagues never feel they can do enough for their team, never feel there are enough visualization techniques and posture drills to help them overcome those constant near wins. It didn't sound like a complaint, exactly, but just a way to let me know, a kind of tender admission, to remind me that he knew he was giving himself over to a voracious, unfinished path that always required more. We build out of the unfinished idea, even if that idea is our former self. This is the dynamic of mastery. Coming close to what you thought you wanted can help you attain more than you ever dreamed you could. It's what I have to imagine Elizabeth Murray was thinking when I saw her smiling at those early paintings one day in the galleries. Even if we created utopias, I believe we would still have the incomplete. Completion is a goal, but we hope it is never the end. Thank you. (Applause)

Type is something we consume in enormous quantities. In much of the world, it's completely inescapable. But few consumers are concerned to know where a particular typeface came from or when or who designed it, if, indeed, there was any human agency involved in its creation, if it didn't just sort of materialize out of the software ether. But I do have to be concerned with those things. It's my job. I'm one of the tiny handful of people who gets badly bent out of shape by the bad spacing of the T and the E that you see there. I've got to take that slide off. I can't stand it. Nor can Chris. There. Good. So my talk is about the connection between technology and design of type. The technology has changed a number of times since I started work: photo, digital, desktop, screen, web. I've had to survive those changes and try to understand their implications for what I do for design. This slide is about the effect of tools on form. The two letters, the two K's, the one on your left, my right, is modern, made on a computer. All straight lines are dead straight. The curves have that kind of mathematical smoothness that the Bézier formula imposes. On the right, ancient Gothic, cut in the resistant material of steel by hand. None of the straight lines are actually straight. The curves are kind of subtle. It has that spark of life from the human hand that the machine or the program can never capture. What a contrast. Well, I tell a lie. A lie at TED. I'm really sorry. Both of these were made on a computer, same software, same Bézier curves, same font format. The one on your left was made by Zuzana Licko at Emigre, and I did the other one. The tool is the same, yet the letters are different. The letters are different because the designers are different. That's all. Zuzana wanted hers to look like that. I wanted mine to look like that. End of story. Type is very adaptable. Unlike a fine art, such as sculpture or architecture, type hides its methods. I think of myself as an industrial designer. The thing I design is manufactured, and it has a function: to be read, to convey meaning. But there is a bit more to it than that. There's the sort of aesthetic element. What makes these two letters different from different interpretations by different designers? What gives the work of some designers sort of characteristic personal style, as you might find in the work of a fashion designer, an automobile designer, whatever? There have been some cases, I admit, where I as a designer did feel the influence of technology. This is from the mid-'60s, the change from metal type to photo, hot to cold. This brought some benefits but also one particular drawback: a spacing system that only provided 18 discrete units for letters to be accommodated on. I was asked at this time to design a series of condensed sans serif types with as many different variants as possible within this 18-unit box. Quickly looking at the arithmetic, I realized I could only actually make three of related design. Here you see them. In Helvetica Compressed, Extra Compressed, and Ultra Compressed, this rigid 18-unit system really boxed me in. It kind of determined the proportions of the design. Here are the typefaces, at least the lower cases. So do you look at these and say, "Poor Matthew, he had to submit to a problem, and by God it shows in the results." I hope not. If I were doing this same job today, instead of having 18 spacing units, I would have 1,000. Clearly I could make more variants, but would these three members of the family be better? It's hard to say without actually doing it, but they would not be better in the proportion of 1,000 to 18, I can tell you that. My instinct tells you that any improvement would be rather slight, because they were designed as functions of the system they were designed to fit, and as I said, type is very adaptable. It does hide its methods. All industrial designers work within constraints. This is not fine art. The question is, does a constraint force a compromise? By accepting a constraint, are you working to a lower standard? I don't believe so, and I've always been encouraged by something that Charles Eames said. He said he was conscious of working within constraints, but not of making compromises. The distinction between a constraint and a compromise is obviously very subtle, but it's very central to my attitude to work. Remember this reading experience? The phone book. I'll hold the slide so you can enjoy the nostalgia. This is from the mid-'70s early trials of Bell Centennial typeface I designed for the U.S. phone books, and it was my first experience of digital type, and quite a baptism. Designed for the phone books, as I said, to be printed at tiny size on newsprint on very high-speed rotary presses with ink that was kerosene and lampblack. This is not a hospitable environment for a typographic designer. So the challenge for me was to design type that performed as well as possible in these very adverse production conditions. As I say, we were in the infancy of digital type. I had to draw every character by hand on quadrille graph paper -- there were four weights of Bell Centennial — pixel by pixel, then encode them raster line by raster line for the keyboard. It took two years, but I learned a lot. These letters look as though they've been chewed by the dog or something or other, but the missing pixels at the intersections of strokes or in the crotches are the result of my studying the effects of ink spread on cheap paper and reacting, revising the font accordingly. These strange artifacts are designed to compensate for the undesirable effects of scale and production process. At the outset, AT&T had wanted to set the phone books in Helvetica, but as my friend Erik Spiekermann said in the Helvetica movie, if you've seen that, the letters in Helvetica were designed to be as similar to one another as possible. This is not the recipe for legibility at small size. It looks very elegant up on a slide. I had to disambiguate these forms of the figures as much as possible in Bell Centennial by sort of opening the shapes up, as you can see in the bottom part of that slide. So now we're on to the mid-'80s, the early days of digital outline fonts, vector technology. There was an issue at that time with the size of the fonts, the amount of data that was required to find and store a font in computer memory. It limited the number of fonts you could get on your typesetting system at any one time. I did an analysis of the data, and found that a typical serif face you see on the left needed nearly twice as much data as a sans serif in the middle because of all the points required to define the elegantly curved serif brackets. The numbers at the bottom of the slide, by the way, they represent the amount of data needed to store each of the fonts. So the sans serif, in the middle, sans the serifs, was much more economical, 81 to 151. "Aha," I thought. "The engineers have a problem. Designer to the rescue." I made a serif type, you can see it on the right, without curved serifs. I made them polygonal, out of straight line segments, chamfered brackets. And look, as economical in data as a sans serif. We call it Charter, on the right. So I went to the head of engineering with my numbers, and I said proudly, "I have solved your problem." "Oh," he said. "What problem?" And I said, "Well, you know, the problem of the huge data you require for serif fonts and so on." "Oh," he said. "We solved that problem last week. We wrote a compaction routine that reduces the size of all fonts by an order of magnitude. You can have as many fonts on your system as you like." "Well, thank you for letting me know," I said. Foiled again. I was left with a design solution for a nonexistent technical problem. But here is where the story sort of gets interesting for me. I didn't just throw my design away in a fit of pique. I persevered. What had started as a technical exercise became an aesthetic exercise, really. In other words, I had come to like this typeface. Forget its origins. Screw that. I liked the design for its own sake. The simplified forms of Charter gave it a sort of plain-spoken quality and unfussy spareness that sort of pleased me. You know, at times of technical innovation, designers want to be influenced by what's in the air. We want to respond. We want to be pushed into exploring something new. So Charter is a sort of parable for me, really. In the end, there was no hard and fast causal link between the technology and the design of Charter. I had really misunderstood the technology. The technology did suggest something to me, but it did not force my hand, and I think this happens very often. You know, engineers are very smart, and despite occasional frustrations because I'm less smart, I've always enjoyed working with them and learning from them. Apropos, in the mid-'90s, I started talking to Microsoft about screen fonts. Up to that point, all the fonts on screen had been adapted from previously existing printing fonts, of course. But Microsoft foresaw correctly the movement, the stampede towards electronic communication, to reading and writing onscreen with the printed output as being sort of secondary in importance. So the priorities were just tipping at that point. They wanted a small core set of fonts that were not adapted but designed for the screen to face up to the problems of screen, which were their coarse resolution displays. I said to Microsoft, a typeface designed for a particular technology is a self-obsoleting typeface. I've designed too many faces in the past that were intended to mitigate technical problems. Thanks to the engineers, the technical problems went away. So did my typeface. It was only a stopgap. Microsoft came back to say that affordable computer monitors with better resolutions were at least a decade away. So I thought, well, a decade, that's not bad, that's more than a stopgap. So I was persuaded, I was convinced, and we went to work on what became Verdana and Georgia, for the first time working not on paper but directly onto the screen from the pixel up. At that time, screens were binary. The pixel was either on or it was off. Here you see the outline of a letter, the cap H, which is the thin black line, the contour, which is how it is stored in memory, superimposed on the bitmap, which is the grey area, which is how it's displayed on the screen. The bitmap is rasterized from the outline. Here in a cap H, which is all straight lines, the two are in almost perfect sync on the Cartesian grid. Not so with an O. This looks more like bricklaying than type design, but believe me, this is a good bitmap O, for the simple reason that it's symmetrical in both x and y axes. In a binary bitmap, you actually can't ask for more than that. I would sometimes make, I don't know, three or four different versions of a difficult letter like a lowercase A, and then stand back to choose which was the best. Well, there was no best, so the designer's judgment comes in in trying to decide which is the least bad. Is that a compromise? Not to me, if you are working at the highest standard the technology will allow, although that standard may be well short of the ideal. You may be able to see on this slide two different bitmap fonts there. The "a" in the upper one, I think, is better than the "a" in the lower one, but it still ain't great. You can maybe see the effect better if it's reduced. Well, maybe not. So I'm a pragmatist, not an idealist, out of necessity. For a certain kind of temperament, there is a certain kind of satisfaction in doing something that cannot be perfect but can still be done to the best of your ability. Here's the lowercase H from Georgia Italic. The bitmap looks jagged and rough. It is jagged and rough. But I discovered, by experiment, that there is an optimum slant for an italic on a screen so the strokes break well at the pixel boundaries. Look in this example how, rough as it is, how the left and right legs actually break at the same level. That's a victory. That's good, right there. And of course, at the lower depths, you don't get much choice. This is an S, in case you were wondering. Well, it's been 18 years now since Verdana and Georgia were released. Microsoft were absolutely right, it took a good 10 years, but screen displays now do have improved spatial resolution, and very much improved photometric resolution thanks to anti-aliasing and so on. So now that their mission is accomplished, has that meant the demise of the screen fonts that I designed for coarser displays back then? Will they outlive the now-obsolete screens and the flood of new web fonts coming on to the market? Or have they established their own sort of evolutionary niche that is independent of technology? In other words, have they been absorbed into the typographic mainstream? I'm not sure, but they've had a good run so far. Hey, 18 is a good age for anything with present-day rates of attrition, so I'm not complaining. Thank you. (Applause)

The universe is teeming with planets. I want us, in the next decade, to build a space telescope that'll be able to image an Earth about another star and figure out whether it can harbor life. My colleagues at the NASA Jet Propulsion Laboratory at Princeton and I are working on technology that will be able to do just that in the coming years. Astronomers now believe that every star in the galaxy has a planet, and they speculate that up to one fifth of them have an Earth-like planet that might be able to harbor life, but we haven't seen any of them. We've only detected them indirectly. This is NASA's famous picture of the pale blue dot. It was taken by the Voyager spacecraft in 1990, when they turned it around as it was exiting the solar system to take a picture of the Earth from six billion kilometers away. I want to take that of an Earth-like planet about another star. Why haven't we done that? Why is that hard? Well to see, let's imagine we take the Hubble Space Telescope and we turn it around and we move it out to the orbit of Mars. We'll see something like that, a slightly blurry picture of the Earth, because we're a fairly small telescope out at the orbit of Mars. Now let's move ten times further away. Here we are at the orbit of Uranus. It's gotten smaller, it's got less detail, less resolve. We can still see the little moon, but let's go ten times further away again. Here we are at the edge of the solar system, out at the Kuiper Belt. Now it's not resolved at all. It's that pale blue dot of Carl Sagan's. But let's move yet again ten times further away. Here we are out at the Oort Cloud, outside the solar system, and we're starting to see the sun move into the field of view and get into where the planet is. One more time, ten times further away. Now we're at Alpha Centauri, our nearest neighbor star, and the planet is gone. All we're seeing is the big beaming image of the star that's ten billion times brighter than the planet, which should be in that little red circle. That's what we want to see. That's why it's hard. The light from the star is diffracting. It's scattering inside the telescope, creating that very bright image that washes out the planet. So to see the planet, we have to do something about all of that light. We have to get rid of it. I have a lot of colleagues working on really amazing technologies to do that, but I want to tell you about one today that I think is the coolest, and probably the most likely to get us an Earth in the next decade. It was first suggested by Lyman Spitzer, the father of the space telescope, in 1962, and he took his inspiration from an eclipse. You've all seen that. That's a solar eclipse. The moon has moved in front of the sun. It blocks out most of the light so we can see that dim corona around it. It would be the same thing if I put my thumb up and blocked that spotlight that's getting right in my eye, I can see you in the back row. Well, what's going on? Well the moon is casting a shadow down on the Earth. We put a telescope or a camera in that shadow, we look back at the sun, and most of the light's been removed and we can see that dim, fine structure in the corona. Spitzer's suggestion was we do this in space. We build a big screen, we fly it in space, we put it up in front of the star, we block out most of the light, we fly a space telescope in that shadow that's created, and boom, we get to see planets. Well that would look something like this. So there's that big screen, and there's no planets, because unfortunately it doesn't actually work very well, because the light waves of the light and waves diffracts around that screen the same way it did in the telescope. It's like water bending around a rock in a stream, and all that light just destroys the shadow. It's a terrible shadow. And we can't see planets. But Spitzer actually knew the answer. If we can feather the edges, soften those edges so we can control diffraction, well then we can see a planet, and in the last 10 years or so we've come up with optimal solutions for doing that. It looks something like that. We call that our flower petal starshade. If we make the edges of those petals exactly right, if we control their shape, we can control diffraction, and now we have a great shadow. It's about 10 billion times dimmer than it was before, and we can see the planets beam out just like that. That, of course, has to be bigger than my thumb. That starshade is about the size of half a football field and it has to fly 50,000 kilometers away from the telescope that has to be held right in its shadow, and then we can see those planets. This sounds formidable, but brilliant engineers, colleagues of mine at JPL, came up with a fabulous design for how to do that and it looks like this. It starts wrapped around a hub. It separates from the telescope. The petals unfurl, they open up, the telescope turns around. Then you'll see it flip and fly out that 50,000 kilometers away from the telescope. It's going to move in front of the star just like that, creates a wonderful shadow. Boom, we get planets orbiting about it. (Applause) Thank you. That's not science fiction. We've been working on this for the last five or six years. Last summer, we did a really cool test out in California at Northrop Grumman. So those are four petals. This is a sub-scale star shade. It's about half the size of the one you just saw. You'll see the petals unfurl. Those four petals were built by four undergraduates doing a summer internship at JPL. Now you're seeing it deploy. Those petals have to rotate into place. The base of those petals has to go to the same place every time to within a tenth of a millimeter. We ran this test 16 times, and 16 times it went into the exact same place to a tenth of a millimeter. This has to be done very precisely, but if we can do this, if we can build this technology, if we can get it into space, you might see something like this. That's a picture of one our nearest neighbor stars taken with the Hubble Space Telescope. If we can take a similar space telescope, slightly larger, put it out there, fly an occulter in front of it, what we might see is something like that -- that's a family portrait of our solar system -- but not ours. We're hoping it'll be someone else's solar system as seen through an occulter, through a starshade like that. You can see Jupiter, you can see Saturn, Uranus, Neptune, and right there in the center, next to the residual light is that pale blue dot. That's Earth. We want to see that, see if there's water, oxygen, ozone, the things that might tell us that it could harbor life. I think this is the coolest possible science. That's why I got into doing this, because I think that will change the world. That will change everything when we see that. Thank you. (Applause)

I want you all to think about the third word that was ever said about you, or if you were delivering, about the person you were delivering. And you can all mouth it if you want or say it out loud. It was, the first two were, "It's a ..." Well, it shows you that I also deal with issues where there's not certainty of whether it's a girl or a boy, so the mixed answer was very appropriate. Of course, now the answer often comes not at birth but at the ultrasound, unless the prospective parents choose to be surprised like we all were. But I want you to think about what it is that leads to that statement on the third word, because the third word is a description of your sex, and by that I mean, made by a description of your genitals. Now, as a pediatric endocrinologist, I used to be very, very involved, and still somewhat am, in cases in which there are mismatches in the externals or between the externals and the internals, and we literally have to figure out what is the description of your sex. But there is nothing that is definable at the time of birth that would define you, and when I talk about definition, I'm talking about your sexual orientation. We don't say, "It's a gay boy." "A lesbian girl." Those situations don't really define themselves more until the second decade of life. Nor do they define your gender, which, as different from your anatomic sex, describes your self-concept. Do you see yourself as a male or female or somewhere in the spectrum in between? That sometimes shows up in the first decade of life, but it can be very confusing for parents because it is quite normative for children to act in a cross-gender play and way, and that in fact there are studies that show that even 80 percent of children who act in that fashion will not persist in wanting to be the opposite gender at the time when puberty begins. But at the time that puberty begins, that means between about age 10 to 12 in girls, 12 to 14 in boys, with breast budding or two to three times increase in the gonads in the case of genetic males, by that particular point, the child who says they are in the absolute wrong body is almost certain to be transgender and is extremely unlikely to change those feelings, no matter how anybody tries reparative therapy or any other noxious things. Now this is relatively rare, so I had relatively little personal experience with this, and my experience was more typical only because I had an adolescent practice. And I saw someone age 24, went through Harvard, genetically female, went through Harvard with three male roommates who knew the whole story, a registrar who always listed his name on course lists as a male name, and came to me after graduating saying, "Help me. I know you know a lot of endocrinology." And indeed I've treated a lot of people who were born without gonads. This wasn't rocket science. But I made a deal with him: I'll treat you if you teach me. And so he did. And what an education I got from taking care of all the members of his support group. And then I got really confused, because I thought it was relatively easy at that age to just give people the hormones of the gender in which they were affirming, but then my patient married, and he married a woman who had been born as a male, had married as a male, had two children, then went through a transition into female, and now this delightful female was attached to my male patient, in fact got legally married because they showed up as a man and a woman, and who knew? Right? (Laughter) And while I was confused about, does this make so-and-so gay? Does this make so-and-so straight? I was getting sexual orientation confused with gender identity. And my patient said to me, "Look, look, look. If you just think of the following, you'll get it right: Sexual orientation is who you go to bed with; gender identity is who you go to bed as." And I subsequently learned from the many adults -- I took care of about 200 adults — I learned from them that if I didn't look, peek as to who their partner was in the waiting room, I would never be able to guess better than chance whether they were gay, straight, bi, or asexual in their affirmed gender. In other words, one thing has absolutely nothing to do with the other. And the data show it. Now, as I took care of the 200 adults, I found it extremely painful. These people were -- many of them had to give up so much of their lives. Sometimes their parents would reject them, siblings, their own children, and then their divorcing spouse would forbid them from seeing their children. It was so awful, but why did they do it at 40 and 50? Because they felt they had to affirm themselves before they would kill themselves. And indeed, the rate of suicide among untreated transgendered people is among the highest in the world. So what to do? I was intrigued in going to a conference in Holland, where they are experts in this, and saw the most remarkable thing. They were treating young adolescents after giving them the most intense psychometric testing of gender, and they were treating them by blocking the puberty that they didn't want. Because basically, kids look about the same, each sex, until they go through puberty, at which point, if you feel you're in the wrong sex, you feel like Pinocchio becoming a donkey. The fantasy that you had that your body will change to be who you want it to be with puberty actually is nullified by the puberty you get. And they fall apart. So that's why putting the puberty on hold— Why on hold? You can't just give them the opposite hormones that young. They'll end up stunted in growth, and you think you can have a meaningful conversation about the fertility effects of such treatment with a 10-year-old girl, a 12-year-old boy? So this buys time in the diagnostic process for four or five years so that they can work it out, they can have more and more testing, they can live without feeling their bodies are running away from them. And then, in a program they call 12-16-18, around age 12 is when they give the blocking hormones, and then at age 16 with retesting, they requalify. Now remember, the blocking hormones are reversible, but when you give the hormones of the opposite sex, you now start spouting breasts and facial hair and voice, depending on what you're using, and those effects are permanent or require surgery to remove or electrolysis, and you can never really affect the voice. So this is serious, and this is 15-, 16-year-old stuff. And then at 18, they're eligible for surgery, and while there's no good surgery for females to males genitally, the male-to-female surgery has fooled gynecologists. That's how good it can be. So I looked at how the patients were doing, and I looked at patients who just looked like everybody else, except they were pubertally delayed. But once they gave them the hormones consistent with the gender they affirm, they look beautiful. They look normal. They had normal heights. You would never be able to pick them out in a crowd. So at that point, I decided I'm going to do this. This is really where the pediatric endocrine realm comes in, because in fact, if you're going to deal with it in kids age 10-12, 10-14, that's pediatric endocrinology. So I brought some kids in, and this now became the standard of care, and Children's Hospital was behind it. By my showing them the kids before and after, people who never got treated and people who wished to be treated, and pictures of the Dutch, they came to me and said, "You've got to do something for these kids." Well, where were these kids before? They were out there suffering, is where they were. So we started a program in 2007. It became the first program of its kind -- but it's really of the Dutch kind -- in North America. And since then, we have 160 patients. Did they come from Afghanistan? No. They came, 75 percent of them came from within 150 miles of Boston. And some came from England. Jackie had been abused in the Midlands, in England. She's 12 years old there, she was living as a girl but she was being beaten up. It was a horror show. They had to homeschool her. And the reason the British were coming was because they would not treat anybody with anything under age 16, which means they were consigning them to an adult body, no matter what happened, even if they tested them well. Jackie, on top of it, was, by virtue of skeletal markings, destined to be six feet five. And yet, she had just begun a male puberty. Well, I did something a little bit innovative, because I do know hormones, and that estrogen is much more potent in closing epiphyses, the growth plates, and stopping growth, than testosterone is. So we blocked her testosterone with a blocking hormone, but we added estrogen, not at 16, but at 13. And so here she is at 16, on the left. And on her 16th birthday, she went to Thailand, where they would do a genital plastic surgery. They will do it at 18 now. And she ended up 5'11" but more than that, she has normal breast size, because by blocking testosterone, every one of our patients has normal breast size if they get to us at the appropriate age, not too late. And on the far right, there she is. She went public, semifinalist in the Miss England competition. The judges debated as to, can they do this? Can they make her — And one of them quipped, I'm told, "But she has more natural self than half the other contestants." (Laughter) And some of them have been rearranged a little bit, but it's all her DNA. And she's become a remarkable spokeswoman. And she was offered contracts as a model, at which point she teased me, where she said, "You know, I might have had a better chance as a model if you'd made me six feet one." Go figure. (Laughter) So this picture, I think, says it all. It really says it all. These are Nicole and brother Jonas, identical twin boys, and proven to be identical, in which Nicole had affirmed herself as a girl as early as age three. At age seven, they changed her name, and came to me at the very beginnings of a male puberty. Now you can imagine looking at Jonas at only 14 that male puberty is early in this family, because he looks more like a 16-year-old, but it makes the point all the more why you have to be conscious of where the patient is. Nicole has done pubertal blockade in here, and Jonas is just going -- biologic control. This is what Nicole would look like if we weren't doing what we were doing. He's got a prominent Adam's apple. He's got angular bones to the face, a mustache, and you can see there's a height difference because he's gone through a growth spurt that she won't get. Now Nicole is on estrogen. She has a bit of a form to her. This family went to the White House last spring because of their work in overturning an anti-discrimination, there was a bill that would block the right of transgender people in Maine to use public bathrooms, and it looked like the bill was going to pass, and that would have been a problem, but Nicole went personally to every legislator in Maine and said, "I can do this. If they see me, they'll understand why I'm no threat in the lady's room, but I can be threatened in the men's room." And then they finally got it. So where do we go from here? Well, we still have a ways to go in terms of anti-discrimination. There are only 17 states that have an anti-discrimination law against discrimination in housing, employment, public accommodation, only 17 states, and five of them are in New England. We need less expensive drugs. They cost a fortune. And we need to get this condition out of the DSM. It is as much a psychiatric disease as being gay and lesbian, and that went out the window in 1973, and the whole world changed. And this isn't going to break anybody's budget. This is not that common. But the risks of not doing anything for them not only puts all of them at risk of losing their lives to suicide, but it also says something about whether we are a truly inclusive society. Thank you. (Applause)

When I was born, there was really only one book about how to raise your children, and it was written by Dr. Spock. (Laughter) Thank you for indulging me. I have always wanted to do that. No, it was Benjamin Spock, and his book was called "The Common Sense Book of Baby And Child Care." It sold almost 50 million copies by the time he died. Today, I, as the mother of a six-year-old, walk into Barnes and Noble, and see this. And it is amazing the variety that one finds on those shelves. There are guides to raising an eco-friendly kid, a gluten-free kid, a disease-proof kid, which, if you ask me, is a little bit creepy. There are guides to raising a bilingual kid even if you only speak one language at home. There are guides to raising a financially savvy kid and a science-minded kid and a kid who is a whiz at yoga. Short of teaching your toddler how to defuse a nuclear bomb, there is pretty much a guide to everything. All of these books are well-intentioned. I am sure that many of them are great. But taken together, I am sorry, I do not see help when I look at that shelf. I see anxiety. I see a giant candy-colored monument to our collective panic, and it makes me want to know, why is it that raising our children is associated with so much anguish and so much confusion? Why is it that we are at sixes and sevens about the one thing human beings have been doing successfully for millennia, long before parenting message boards and peer-reviewed studies came along? Why is it that so many mothers and fathers experience parenthood as a kind of crisis? Crisis might seem like a strong word, but there is data suggesting it probably isn't. There was, in fact, a paper of just this very name, "Parenthood as Crisis," published in 1957, and in the 50-plus years since, there has been plenty of scholarship documenting a pretty clear pattern of parental anguish. Parents experience more stress than non-parents. Their marital satisfaction is lower. There have been a number of studies looking at how parents feel when they are spending time with their kids, and the answer often is, not so great. Last year, I spoke with a researcher named Matthew Killingsworth who is doing a very, very imaginative project that tracks people's happiness, and here is what he told me he found: "Interacting with your friends is better than interacting with your spouse, which is better than interacting with other relatives, which is better than interacting with acquaintances, which is better than interacting with parents, which is better than interacting with children. Who are on par with strangers." (Laughter) But here's the thing. I have been looking at what underlies these data for three years, and children are not the problem. Something about parenting right now at this moment is the problem. Specifically, I don't think we know what parenting is supposed to be. Parent, as a verb, only entered common usage in 1970. Our roles as mothers and fathers have changed. The roles of our children have changed. We are all now furiously improvising our way through a situation for which there is no script, and if you're an amazing jazz musician, then improv is great, but for the rest of us, it can kind of feel like a crisis. So how did we get here? How is it that we are all now navigating a child-rearing universe without any norms to guide us? Well, for starters, there has been a major historical change. Until fairly recently, kids worked, on our farms primarily, but also in factories, mills, mines. Kids were considered economic assets. Sometime during the Progressive Era, we put an end to this arrangement. We recognized kids had rights, we banned child labor, we focused on education instead, and school became a child's new work. And thank God it did. But that only made a parent's role more confusing in a way. The old arrangement might not have been particularly ethical, but it was reciprocal. We provided food, clothing, shelter, and moral instruction to our kids, and they in return provided income. Once kids stopped working, the economics of parenting changed. Kids became, in the words of one brilliant if totally ruthless sociologist, "economically worthless but emotionally priceless." Rather than them working for us, we began to work for them, because within only a matter of decades it became clear: if we wanted our kids to succeed, school was not enough. Today, extracurricular activities are a kid's new work, but that's work for us too, because we are the ones driving them to soccer practice. Massive piles of homework are a kid's new work, but that's also work for us, because we have to check it. About three years ago, a Texas woman told something to me that totally broke my heart. She said, almost casually, "Homework is the new dinner." The middle class now pours all of its time and energy and resources into its kids, even though the middle class has less and less of those things to give. Mothers now spend more time with their children than they did in 1965, when most women were not even in the workforce. It would probably be easier for parents to do their new roles if they knew what they were preparing their kids for. This is yet another thing that makes modern parenting so very confounding. We have no clue what portion our wisdom, if any, is of use to our kids. The world is changing so rapidly, it's impossible to say. This was true even when I was young. When I was a kid, high school specifically, I was told that I would be at sea in the new global economy if I did not know Japanese. And with all due respect to the Japanese, it didn't turn out that way. Now there is a certain kind of middle-class parent that is obsessed with teaching their kids Mandarin, and maybe they're onto something, but we cannot know for sure. So, absent being able to anticipate the future, what we all do, as good parents, is try and prepare our kids for every possible kind of future, hoping that just one of our efforts will pay off. We teach our kids chess, thinking maybe they will need analytical skills. We sign them up for team sports, thinking maybe they will need collaborative skills, you know, for when they go to Harvard Business School. We try and teach them to be financially savvy and science-minded and eco-friendly and gluten-free, though now is probably a good time to tell you that I was not eco-friendly and gluten-free as a child. I ate jars of pureed macaroni and beef. And you know what? I'm doing okay. I pay my taxes. I hold down a steady job. I was even invited to speak at TED. But the presumption now is that what was good enough for me, or for my folks for that matter, isn't good enough anymore. So we all make a mad dash to that bookshelf, because we feel like if we aren't trying everything, it's as if we're doing nothing and we're defaulting on our obligations to our kids. So it's hard enough to navigate our new roles as mothers and fathers. Now add to this problem something else: we are also navigating new roles as husbands and wives because most women today are in the workforce. This is another reason, I think, that parenthood feels like a crisis. We have no rules, no scripts, no norms for what to do when a child comes along now that both mom and dad are breadwinners. The writer Michael Lewis once put this very, very well. He said that the surest way for a couple to start fighting is for them to go out to dinner with another couple whose division of labor is ever so slightly different from theirs, because the conversation in the car on the way home goes something like this: "So, did you catch that Dave is the one who walks them to school every morning?" (Laughter) Without scripts telling us who does what in this brave new world, couples fight, and both mothers and fathers each have their legitimate gripes. Mothers are much more likely to be multi-tasking when they are at home, and fathers, when they are at home, are much more likely to be mono-tasking. Find a guy at home, and odds are he is doing just one thing at a time. In fact, UCLA recently did a study looking at the most common configuration of family members in middle-class homes. Guess what it was? Dad in a room by himself. According to the American Time Use Survey, mothers still do twice as much childcare as fathers, which is better than it was in Erma Bombeck's day, but I still think that something she wrote is highly relevant: "I have not been alone in the bathroom since October." (Laughter) But here is the thing: Men are doing plenty. They spend more time with their kids than their fathers ever spent with them. They work more paid hours, on average, than their wives, and they genuinely want to be good, involved dads. Today, it is fathers, not mothers, who report the most work-life conflict. Either way, by the way, if you think it's hard for traditional families to sort out these new roles, just imagine what it's like now for non-traditional families: families with two dads, families with two moms, single-parent households. They are truly improvising as they go. Now, in a more progressive country, and forgive me here for capitulating to cliché and invoking, yes, Sweden, parents could rely on the state for support. There are countries that acknowledge the anxieties and the changing roles of mothers and fathers. Unfortunately, the United States is not one of them, so in case you were wondering what the U.S. has in common with Papua New Guinea and Liberia, it's this: We too have no paid maternity leave policy. We are one of eight known countries that does not. In this age of intense confusion, there is just one goal upon which all parents can agree, and that is whether they are tiger moms or hippie moms, helicopters or drones, our kids' happiness is paramount. That is what it means to raise kids in an age when they are economically worthless but emotionally priceless. We are all the custodians of their self-esteem. The one mantra no parent ever questions is, "All I want is for my children to be happy." And don't get me wrong: I think happiness is a wonderful goal for a child. But it is a very elusive one. Happiness and self-confidence, teaching children that is not like teaching them how to plow a field. It's not like teaching them how to ride a bike. There's no curriculum for it. Happiness and self-confidence can be the byproducts of other things, but they cannot really be goals unto themselves. A child's happiness is a very unfair burden to place on a parent. And happiness is an even more unfair burden to place on a kid. And I have to tell you, I think it leads to some very strange excesses. We are now so anxious to protect our kids from the world's ugliness that we now shield them from "Sesame Street." I wish I could say I was kidding about this, but if you go out and you buy the first few episodes of "Sesame Street" on DVD, as I did out of nostalgia, you will find a warning at the beginning saying that the content is not suitable for children. (Laughter) Can I just repeat that? The content of the original "Sesame Street" is not suitable for children. When asked about this by The New York Times, a producer for the show gave a variety of explanations. One was that Cookie Monster smoked a pipe in one skit and then swallowed it. Bad modeling. I don't know. But the thing that stuck with me is she said that she didn't know whether Oscar the Grouch could be invented today because he was too depressive. I cannot tell you how much this distresses me. (Laughter) You are looking at a woman who has a periodic table of the Muppets hanging from her cubicle wall. The offending muppet, right there. That's my son the day he was born. I was high as a kite on morphine. I had had an unexpected C-section. But even in my opiate haze, I managed to have one very clear thought the first time I held him. I whispered it into his ear. I said, "I will try so hard not to hurt you." It was the Hippocratic Oath, and I didn't even know I was saying it. But it occurs to me now that the Hippocratic Oath is a much more realistic aim than happiness. In fact, as any parent will tell you, it's awfully hard. All of us have said or done hurtful things that we wish to God we could take back. I think in another era we did not expect quite so much from ourselves, and it is important that we all remember that the next time we are staring with our hearts racing at those bookshelves. I'm not really sure how to create new norms for this world, but I do think that in our desperate quest to create happy kids, we may be assuming the wrong moral burden. It strikes me as a better goal, and, dare I say, a more virtuous one, to focus on making productive kids and moral kids, and to simply hope that happiness will come to them by virtue of the good that they do and their accomplishments and the love that they feel from us. That, anyway, is one response to having no script. Absent having new scripts, we just follow the oldest ones in the book -- decency, a work ethic, love — and let happiness and self-esteem take care of themselves. I think if we all did that, the kids would still be all right, and so would their parents, possibly in both cases even better. Thank you. (Applause)

So I've been thinking about the difference between the résumé virtues and the eulogy virtues. The résumé virtues are the ones you put on your résumé, which are the skills you bring to the marketplace. The eulogy virtues are the ones that get mentioned in the eulogy, which are deeper: who are you, in your depth, what is the nature of your relationships, are you bold, loving, dependable, consistency? And most of us, including me, would say that the eulogy virtues are the more important of the virtues. But at least in my case, are they the ones that I think about the most? And the answer is no. So I've been thinking about that problem, and a thinker who has helped me think about it is a guy named Joseph Soloveitchik, who was a rabbi who wrote a book called "The Lonely Man Of Faith" in 1965. Soloveitchik said there are two sides of our natures, which he called Adam I and Adam II. Adam I is the worldly, ambitious, external side of our nature. He wants to build, create, create companies, create innovation. Adam II is the humble side of our nature. Adam II wants not only to do good but to be good, to live in a way internally that honors God, creation and our possibilities. Adam I wants to conquer the world. Adam II wants to hear a calling and obey the world. Adam I savors accomplishment. Adam II savors inner consistency and strength. Adam I asks how things work. Adam II asks why we're here. Adam I's motto is "success." Adam II's motto is "love, redemption and return." And Soloveitchik argued that these two sides of our nature are at war with each other. We live in perpetual self-confrontation between the external success and the internal value. And the tricky thing, I'd say, about these two sides of our nature is they work by different logics. The external logic is an economic logic: input leads to output, risk leads to reward. The internal side of our nature is a moral logic and often an inverse logic. You have to give to receive. You have to surrender to something outside yourself to gain strength within yourself. You have to conquer the desire to get what you want. In order to fulfill yourself, you have to forget yourself. In order to find yourself, you have to lose yourself. We happen to live in a society that favors Adam I, and often neglects Adam II. And the problem is, that turns you into a shrewd animal who treats life as a game, and you become a cold, calculating creature who slips into a sort of mediocrity where you realize there's a difference between your desired self and your actual self. You're not earning the sort of eulogy you want, you hope someone will give to you. You don't have the depth of conviction. You don't have an emotional sonorousness. You don't have commitment to tasks that would take more than a lifetime to commit. I was reminded of a common response through history of how you build a solid Adam II, how you build a depth of character. Through history, people have gone back into their own pasts, sometimes to a precious time in their life, to their childhood, and often, the mind gravitates in the past to a moment of shame, some sin committed, some act of selfishness, an act of omission, of shallowness, the sin of anger, the sin of self-pity, trying to be a people-pleaser, a lack of courage. Adam I is built by building on your strengths. Adam II is built by fighting your weaknesses. You go into yourself, you find the sin which you've committed over and again through your life, your signature sin out of which the others emerge, and you fight that sin and you wrestle with that sin, and out of that wrestling, that suffering, then a depth of character is constructed. And we're often not taught to recognize the sin in ourselves, in that we're not taught in this culture how to wrestle with it, how to confront it, and how to combat it. We live in a culture with an Adam I mentality where we're inarticulate about Adam II. Finally, Reinhold Niebuhr summed up the confrontation, the fully lived Adam I and Adam II life, this way: "Nothing that is worth doing can be achieved in our lifetime; therefore we must be saved by hope. Nothing which is true or beautiful or good makes complete sense in any immediate context of history; therefore we must be saved by faith. Nothing we do, however virtuous, can be accomplished alone; therefore we must be saved by love. No virtuous act is quite as virtuous from the standpoint of our friend or foe as from our own standpoint. Therefore we must be saved by that final form of love, which is forgiveness.” Thanks. (Applause)

Pat Mitchell: That day, January 8, 2011, began like all others. You were both doing the work that you love. You were meeting with constituents, which is something that you loved doing as a congresswoman, and Mark, you were happily preparing for your next space shuttle. And suddenly, everything that you had planned or expected in your lives was irrevocably changed forever. Mark Kelly: Yeah, it's amazing, it's amazing how everything can change for any of us in an instant. People don't realize that. I certainly didn't. Gabby Giffords: Yes. MK: And on that Saturday morning, I got this horrible phone call from Gabby's chief of staff. She didn't have much other information. She just said, "Gabby was shot." A few minutes later, I called her back and I actually thought for a second, well, maybe I just imagined getting this phone call. I called her back, and that's when she told me that Gabby had been shot in the head. And from that point on, I knew that our lives were going to be a lot different. PM: And when you arrived at the hospital, what was the prognosis that they gave you about Gabby's condition and what recovery, if any, you could expect? MK: Well, for a gunshot wound to the head and a traumatic brain injury, they typically can't tell you much. Every injury is different. It's not predictable like often a stroke might be predictable, which is another TBI kind of injury. So they didn't know how long Gabby would be in a coma, didn't know when that would change and what the prognosis would be. PM: Gabby, has your recovery been an effort to create a new Gabby Giffords or reclaim the old Gabby Giffords? GG: The new one -- better, stronger, tougher. (Applause) MK: That to say, when you look at the picture behind us, to come back from that kind of injury and come back strong and stronger than ever is a really tough thing to do. I don't know anybody that's as tough as my wonderful wife right here. (Applause) PM: And what were the first signs that recovery was not only going to be possible but you were going to have some semblance of the life that you and Gabby had planned? MK: Well, the first thing, for me, was Gabby was still kind of almost unconscious, but she did something when she was in the ICU hospital bed that she used to do when we might be out to dinner at a restaurant, in that she pulled my ring off and she flipped it from one finger to the next, and at that point I knew that she was still in there. PM: And there were certain words, too. Didn't she surprise you with words in the beginning? MK: Well, it was tough in the beginning. GG: What? What? Chicken. Chicken. Chicken. MK: Yeah, that was it. For the first month, that was the extent of Gabby's vocabulary. For some reason, she has aphasia, which is difficulty with communication. She latched on to the word "chicken," which isn't the best but certainly is not the worst. (Laughter) And we were actually worried it could have been a lot worse than that. PM: Gabby, what's been the toughest challenge for you during this recovery? GG: Talking. Really hard. Really. MK: Yeah, with aphasia, Gabby knows what she wants to say, she just can't get it out. She understands everything, but the communication is just very difficult because when you look at the picture, the part of your brain where those communication centers are are on the left side of your head, which is where the bullet passed through. PM: So you have to do a very dangerous thing: speak for your wife. MK: I do. It might be some of the most dangerous things I've ever done. PM: Gabby, are you optimistic about your continuing recovery -- walking, talking, being able to move your arm and leg? GG: I'm optimistic. It will be a long, hard haul, but I'm optimistic. PM: That seems to be the number one characteristic of Gabby Giffords, wouldn't you say? (Applause) MK: Gabby's always been really optimistic. She works incredibly hard every day. GG: On the treadmill, walked on my treadmill, Spanish lessons, French horn. MK: It's only my wife who could be -- and if you knew her before she was injured, you would kind of understand this -- somebody who could be injured and have such a hard time communicating and meets with a speech therapist, and then about a month ago, she says, "I want to learn Spanish again." PM: Well, let's take a little closer look at the wife, and this was even before you met Gabby Giffords. And she's on a motor scooter there, but it's my understanding that's a very tame image of what Gabby Giffords was like growing up. MK: Yeah, Gabby, she used to race motorcycles. So that's a scooter, but she had -- well, she still has a BMW motorcycle. PM: Does she ride it? MK: Well, that's a challenge with not being able to move her right arm, but I think with something I know about, Velcro, we might be able to get her back on the bike, Velcro her right hand up onto the handlebar. PM: I have a feeling we might see that picture next, Gabby. But you meet, you're already decided that you're going to dedicate your life to service. You're going into the military and eventually to become an astronaut. So you meet. What attracts you to Gabby? MK: Well, when we met, oddly enough, it was the last time we were in Vancouver, about 10 years ago. We met in Vancouver, at the airport, on a trip that we were both taking to China, that I would actually, from my background, I would call it a boondoggle. Gabby would — GG: Fact-finding mission. MK: She would call it an important fact-finding mission. She was a state senator at the time, and we met here, at the airport, before a trip to China. PM: Would you describe it as a whirlwind romance? GG: No, no, no. (Laughter) A good friend. MK: Yeah, we were friends for a long time. GG: Yes. (Laughter) MK: And then she invited me on, about a year or so later, she invited me on a date. Where'd we go, Gabby? GG: Death row. MK: Yes. Our first date was to death row at the Florence state prison in Arizona, which was just outside Gabby's state senate district. They were working on some legislation that had to do with crime and punishment and capital punishment in the state of Arizona. So she couldn't get anybody else to go with her, and I'm like, "Of course I want to go to death row." So that was our first date. We've been together ever since. GG: Yes. PM: Well, that might have contributed to the reason that Gabby decided to marry you. You were willing to go to death row, after all. MK: I guess. PM: Gabby, what did make you want to marry Mark? GG: Um, good friends. Best friends. Best friends. MK: I thought we always had a very special relationship. We've gone through some tough times and it's only made it stronger. GG: Stronger. PM: After you got married, however, you continued very independent lives. Actually, you didn't even live together. MK: We had one of those commuter marriages. In our case, it was Washington, D.C., Houston, Tucson. Sometimes we'd go clockwise, sometimes counterclockwise, to all those different places, and we didn't really live together until that Saturday morning. Within an hour of Gabby being shot, I was on an airplane to Tucson, and that was the moment where that had changed things. PM: And also, Gabby, you had run for Congress after being a state senator and served in Congress for six years. What did you like best about being in Congress? GG: Fast pace. Fast pace. PM: Well it was the way you did it. GG: Yes, yes. Fast pace. PM: I'm not sure people would describe it entirely that way. (Laughter) MK: Yeah, you know, legislation is often at a colossally slow pace, but my wife, and I have to admit, a lot of other members of Congress that I know, work incredibly hard. I mean, Gabby would run around like a crazy person, never take a day off, maybe a half a day off a month, and whenever she was awake she was working, and she really, really thrived on that, and still does today. GG: Yes. Yes. PM: Installing solar panels on the top of her house, I have to say. So after the tragic incident, Mark, you decided to resign your position as an astronaut, even though you were supposed to take the next space mission. Everybody, including Gabby, talked you into going back, and you did end up taking. MK: Kind of. The day after Gabby was injured, I called my boss, the chief astronaut, Dr. Peggy Whitson, and I said, "Peggy, I know I'm launching in space in three months from now. Gabby's in a coma. I'm in Tucson. You've got to find a replacement for me." So I didn't actually resign from being an astronaut, but I gave up my job and they found a replacement. Months later, maybe about two months later, I started about getting my job back, which is something, when you become this primary caregiver person, which some people in the audience here have certainly been in that position, it's a challenging role but at some point you've got to figure out when you're going to get your life back, and at the time, I couldn't ask Gabby if she wanted me to go fly in the space shuttle again. But I knew she was— GG: Yes. Yes. Yes. MK: She was the biggest supporter of my career, and I knew it was the right thing to do. PM: And yet I'm trying to imagine, Mark, what that was like, going off onto a mission, one presumes safely, but it's never a guarantee, and knowing that Gabby is — MK: Well not only was she still in the hospital, on the third day of that flight, literally while I was rendezvousing with the space station, and you've got two vehicles moving at 17,500 miles an hour, I'm actually flying it, looking out the window, a bunch of computers, Gabby was in brain surgery, literally at that time having the final surgery to replace the piece of skull that they took out on the day she was injured with a prosthetic, yeah, which is the whole side of her head. Now if any of you guys would ever come to our house in Tucson for the first time, Gabby would usually go up to the freezer and pull out the piece of Tupperware that has the real skull. (Laughter) GG: The real skull. MK: Which freaks people out, sometimes. PM: Is that for appetizer or dessert, Mark? MK: Well, it just gets the conversation going. PM: But there was a lot of conversation about something you did, Gabby, after Mark's flight. You had to make another step of courage too, because here was Congress deadlocked again, and you got out of the rehabilitation center, got yourself to Washington so that you could walk on the floor of the House -- I can barely talk about this without getting emotional — and cast a vote which could have been the deciding vote. GG: The debt ceiling. The debt ceiling. MK: Yeah, we had that vote, I guess about five months after Gabby was injured, and she made this bold decision to go back. A very controversial vote, but she wanted to be there to have her voice heard one more time. PM: And after that, resigned and began what has been a very slow and challenging recovery. What's life like, day to day? MK: Well, that's Gabby's service dog Nelson. GG: Nelson. MK: New member of our family. GG: Yes, yes. MK: And we got him from a— GG: Prison. Murder. MK: We have a lot of connections with prisons, apparently. (Laughter) Nelson came from a prison, raised by a murderer in Massachusetts. But she did a great job with this dog. He's a fabulous service dog. PM: So Gabby, what have you learned from your experiences the past few years? MK: Yeah, what have you learned? GG: Deeper. Deeper. PM: Your relationship is deeper. It has to be. You're together all the time now. MK: I imagine being grateful, too, right? GG: Grateful. PM: This is a picture of family and friends gathering, but I love these pictures because they show the Gabby and Mark relationship now. And you describe it, Gabby, over and over, as deeper on so many levels. Yes? MK: I think when something tragic happens in a family, it can pull people together. Here's us watching the space shuttle fly over Tucson, the Space Shuttle Endeavour, the one that I was the commander on its last flight, on its final flight on top of an airplane on a 747 on its way to L.A., NASA was kind enough to have it fly over Tucson. PM: And of course, the two of you go through these challenges of a slow and difficult recovery, and yet, Gabby, how do you maintain your optimism and positive outlook? GG: I want to make the world a better place. (Applause) PM: And you're doing that even though your recovery has to remain front and center for both of you. You are people who have done service to your country and you are continuing to do that with a new initiative, a new purpose. And Gabby, what's on the agenda now? GG: Americans for Responsible Solutions. MK: That's our political action committee, where we are trying to get members of Congress to take a more serious look at gun violence in this country, and to try to pass some reasonable legislation. GG: Yes. Yes. (Applause) MK: You know, this affected us very personally, but it wasn't what happened to Gabby that got us involved. It was really the 20 murdered first graders and kindergartners in Newtown, Connecticut, and the response that we saw afterwards where -- well, look what's happened so far. So far the national response has been pretty much to do nothing. We're trying to change that. PM: There have been 11 mass shootings since Newtown, a school a week in the first two months of last year. What are you doing that's different than other efforts to balance rights for gun ownership and responsibilities? MK: We're gun owners, we support gun rights. At the same time, we've got to do everything we can to keep guns out of the hands of criminals and the dangerously mentally ill. It's not too difficult to do that. This issue, like many others, has become very polarizing and political, and we're trying to bring some balance to the debate in Washington. PM: Thank you both for that effort. And not surprisingly for this woman of courage and of a sense of adventure, you just keep challenging yourself, and the sky seems to be the limit. I have to share this video of your most recent adventure. Take a look at Gabby. MK: This is a couple months ago. (Video) MK: You okay? You did great. GG: Yes, it's gorgeous. Thank you. Good stuff. Gorgeous. Oh, thank you. Mountains. Gorgeous mountains. (Applause) MK: Let me just say one of the guys that Gabby jumped with that day was a Navy SEAL who she met in Afghanistan who was injured in combat, had a really rough time. Gabby visited him when he was at Bethesda and went through a really tough period. He started doing better. Months later, Gabby was shot in the head, and then he supported her while she was in the hospital in Houston. So they have a very, very nice connection. GG: Yes. PM: What a wonderful moment. Because this is the TED stage, Gabby, I know you worked very hard to think of the ideas that you wanted to leave with this audience. GG: Thank you. Hello, everyone. Thank you for inviting us here today. It's been a long, hard haul, but I'm getting better. I'm working hard, lots of therapy -- speech therapy, physical therapy, and yoga too. But my spirit is strong as ever. I'm still fighting to make the world a better place, and you can too. Get involved with your community. Be a leader. Set an example. Be passionate. Be courageous. Be your best. Thank you very much. (Applause) MK: Thank you. GG: Thank you. (Applause) MK: Thank you everybody. GG: Bye bye. (Applause)

I was born and raised in Sierra Leone, a small and very beautiful country in West Africa, a country rich both in physical resources and creative talent. However, Sierra Leone is infamous for a decade-long rebel war in the '90s when entire villages were burnt down. An estimated 8,000 men, women and children had their arms and legs amputated during this time. As my family and I ran for safety when I was about 12 from one of those attacks, I resolved that I would do everything I could to ensure that my own children would not go through the same experiences we had. They would, in fact, be part of a Sierra Leone where war and amputation were no longer a strategy for gaining power. As I watched people who I knew, loved ones, recover from this devastation, one thing that deeply troubled me was that many of the amputees in the country would not use their prostheses. The reason, I would come to find out, was that their prosthetic sockets were painful because they did not fit well. The prosthetic socket is the part in which the amputee inserts their residual limb, and which connects to the prosthetic ankle. Even in the developed world, it takes a period of three weeks to often years for a patient to get a comfortable socket, if ever. Prosthetists still use conventional processes like molding and casting to create single-material prosthetic sockets. Such sockets often leave intolerable amounts of pressure on the limbs of the patient, leaving them with pressure sores and blisters. It does not matter how powerful your prosthetic ankle is. If your prosthetic socket is uncomfortable, you will not use your leg, and that is just simply unacceptable in our age. So one day, when I met professor Hugh Herr about two and a half years ago, and he asked me if I knew how to solve this problem, I said, "No, not yet, but I would love to figure it out." And so, for my Ph.D. at the MIT Media Lab, I designed custom prosthetic sockets quickly and cheaply that are more comfortable than conventional prostheses. I used magnetic resonance imaging to capture the actual shape of the patient's anatomy, then use finite element modeling to better predict the internal stresses and strains on the normal forces, and then create a prosthetic socket for manufacture. We use a 3D printer to create a multi-material prosthetic socket which relieves pressure where needed on the anatomy of the patient. In short, we're using data to make novel sockets quickly and cheaply. In a recent trial we just wrapped up at the Media Lab, one of our patients, a U.S. veteran who has been an amputee for about 20 years and worn dozens of legs, said of one of our printed parts, "It's so soft, it's like walking on pillows, and it's effing sexy." (Laughter) Disability in our age should not prevent anyone from living meaningful lives. My hope and desire is that the tools and processes we develop in our research group can be used to bring highly functional prostheses to those who need them. For me, a place to begin healing the souls of those affected by war and disease is by creating comfortable and affordable interfaces for their bodies. Whether it's in Sierra Leone or in Boston, I hope this not only restores but indeed transforms their sense of human potential. Thank you very much. (Applause)

What is the intersection between technology, art and science? Curiosity and wonder, because it drives us to explore, because we're surrounded by things we can't see. And I love to use film to take us on a journey through portals of time and space, to make the invisible visible, because what that does, it expands our horizons, it transforms our perception, it opens our minds and it touches our heart. So here are some scenes from my 3D IMAX film, "Mysteries of the Unseen World." (Music) There is movement which is too slow for our eyes to detect, and time lapse makes us discover and broaden our perspective of life. We can see how organisms emerge and grow, how a vine survives by creeping from the forest floor to look at the sunlight. And at the grand scale, time lapse allows us to see our planet in motion. We can view not only the vast sweep of nature, but the restless movement of humanity. Each streaking dot represents a passenger plane, and by turning air traffic data into time-lapse imagery, we can see something that's above us constantly but invisible: the vast network of air travel over the United States. We can do the same thing with ships at sea. We can turn data into a time-lapse view of a global economy in motion. And decades of data give us the view of our entire planet as a single organism sustained by currents circulating throughout the oceans and by clouds swirling through the atmosphere, pulsing with lightning, crowned by the aurora borealis. It may be the ultimate time-lapse image: the anatomy of Earth brought to life. At the other extreme, there are things that move too fast for our eyes, but we have technology that can look into that world as well. With high-speed cameras, we can do the opposite of time lapse. We can shoot images that are thousands of times faster than our vision. And we can see how nature's ingenious devices work, and perhaps we can even imitate them. When a dragonfly flutters by, you may not realize, but it's the greatest flier in nature. It can hover, fly backwards, even upside down. And by tracking markers on an insect's wings, we can visualize the air flow that they produce. Nobody knew the secret, but high speed shows that a dragonfly can move all four wings in different directions at the same time. And what we learn can lead us to new kinds of robotic flyers that can expand our vision of important and remote places. We're giants, and we're unaware of things that are too small for us to see. The electron microscope fires electrons which creates images which can magnify things by as much as a million times. This is the egg of a butterfly. And there are unseen creatures living all over your body, including mites that spend their entire lives dwelling on your eyelashes, crawling over your skin at night. Can you guess what this is? Shark skin. A caterpillar's mouth. The eye of a fruit fly. An eggshell. A flea. A snail's tongue. We think we know most of the animal kingdom, but there may be millions of tiny species waiting to be discovered. A spider also has great secrets, because spider's silk thread is pound for pound stronger than steel but completely elastic. This journey will take us all the way down to the nano world. The silk is 100 times thinner than human hair. On there is bacteria, and near that bacteria, 10 times smaller, a virus. Inside of that, 10 times smaller, three strands of DNA, and nearing the limit of our most powerful microscopes, single carbon atoms. With the tip of a powerful microscope, we can actually move atoms and begin to create amazing nano devices. Some could one day patrol our body for all kinds of diseases and clean out clogged arteries along the way. Tiny chemical machines of the future can one day, perhaps, repair DNA. We are on the threshold of extraordinary advances, born of our drive to unveil the mysteries of life. So under an endless rain of cosmic dust, the air is full of pollen, micro-diamonds and jewels from other planets, and supernova explosions. People go about their lives surrounded by the unseeable. Knowing that there's so much around us we can see forever changes our understanding of the world, and by looking at unseen worlds, we recognize that we exist in the living universe, and this new perspective creates wonder and inspires us to become explorers in our own backyards. Who knows what awaits to be seen and what new wonders will transform our lives. We'll just have to see. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause)

Right now there is an aspiring teacher who is working on a 60-page paper based on some age-old education theory developed by some dead education professor wondering to herself what this task that she's engaging in has to do with what she wants to do with her life, which is be an educator, change lives, and spark magic. Right now there is an aspiring teacher in a graduate school of education who is watching a professor babble on and on about engagement in the most disengaging way possible. Right now there's a first-year teacher at home who is pouring through lesson plans trying to make sense of standards, who is trying to make sense of how to grade students appropriately, while at the same time saying to herself over and over again, "Don't smile till November," because that's what she was taught in her teacher education program. Right now there's a student who is coming up with a way to convince his mom or dad that he's very, very sick and can't make it to school tomorrow. On the other hand, right now there are amazing educators that are sharing information, information that is shared in such a beautiful way that the students are sitting at the edge of their seats just waiting for a bead of sweat to drop off the face of this person so they can soak up all that knowledge. Right now there is also a person who has an entire audience rapt with attention, a person that is weaving a powerful narrative about a world that the people who are listening have never imagined or seen before, but if they close their eyes tightly enough, they can envision that world because the storytelling is so compelling. Right now there's a person who can tell an audience to put their hands up in the air and they will stay there till he says, "Put them down." Right now. So people will then say, "Well, Chris, you describe the guy who is going through some awful training but you're also describing these powerful educators. If you're thinking about the world of education or urban education in particular, these guys will probably cancel each other out, and then we'll be okay." The reality is, the folks I described as the master teachers, the master narrative builders, the master storytellers are far removed from classrooms. The folks who know the skills about how to teach and engage an audience don't even know what teacher certification means. They may not even have the degrees to be able to have anything to call an education. And that to me is sad. It's sad because the people who I described, they were very disinterested in the learning process, want to be effective teachers, but they have no models. I'm going to paraphrase Mark Twain. Mark Twain says that proper preparation, or teaching, is so powerful that it can turn bad morals to good, it can turn awful practices into powerful ones, it can change men and transform them into angels. The folks who I described earlier got proper preparation in teaching, not in any college or university, but by virtue of just being in the same spaces of those who engage. Guess where those places are? Barber shops, rap concerts, and most importantly, in the black church. And I've been framing this idea called Pentecostal pedagogy. Who here has been to a black church? We got a couple of hands. You go to a black church, their preacher starts off and he realizes that he has to engage the audience, so he starts off with this sort of wordplay in the beginning oftentimes, and then he takes a pause, and he says, "Oh my gosh, they're not quite paying attention." So he says, "Can I get an amen?" Audience: Amen. Chris Emdin: So I can I get an amen? Audience: Amen. CE: And all of a sudden, everybody's reawoken. That preacher bangs on the pulpit for attention. He drops his voice at a very, very low volume when he wants people to key into him, and those things are the skills that we need for the most engaging teachers. So why does teacher education only give you theory and theory and tell you about standards and tell you about all of these things that have nothing to do with the basic skills, that magic that you need to engage an audience, to engage a student? So I make the argument that we reframe teacher education, that we could focus on content, and that's fine, and we could focus on theories, and that's fine, but content and theories with the absence of the magic of teaching and learning means nothing. Now people oftentimes say, "Well, magic is just magic." There are teachers who, despite all their challenges, who have those skills, get into those schools and are able to engage an audience, and the administrator walks by and says, "Wow, he's so good, I wish all my teachers could be that good." And when they try to describe what that is, they just say, "He has that magic." But I'm here to tell you that magic can be taught. Magic can be taught. Magic can be taught. Now, how do you teach it? You teach it by allowing people to go into those spaces where the magic is happening. If you want to be an aspiring teacher in urban education, you've got to leave the confines of that university and go into the hood. You've got to go in there and hang out at the barbershop, you've got to attend that black church, and you've got to view those folks that have the power to engage and just take notes on what they do. At our teacher education classes at my university, I've started a project where every single student that comes in there sits and watches rap concerts. They watch the way that the rappers move and talk with their hands. They study the way that he walks proudly across that stage. They listen to his metaphors and analogies, and they start learning these little things that if they practice enough becomes the key to magic. They learn that if you just stare at a student and raise your eyebrow about a quarter of an inch, you don't have to say a word because they know that that means that you want more. And if we could transform teacher education to focus on teaching teachers how to create that magic then poof! we could make dead classes come alive, we could reignite imaginations, and we can change education. Thank you. (Applause)

When people think about cities, they tend to think of certain things. They think of buildings and streets and skyscrapers, noisy cabs. But when I think about cities, I think about people. Cities are fundamentally about people, and where people go and where people meet are at the core of what makes a city work. So even more important than buildings in a city are the public spaces in between them. And today, some of the most transformative changes in cities are happening in these public spaces. So I believe that lively, enjoyable public spaces are the key to planning a great city. They are what makes it come alive. But what makes a public space work? What attracts people to successful public spaces, and what is it about unsuccessful places that keeps people away? I thought, if I could answer those questions, I could make a huge contribution to my city. But one of the more wonky things about me is that I am an animal behaviorist, and I use those skills not to study animal behavior but to study how people in cities use city public spaces. One of the first spaces that I studied was this little vest pocket park called Paley Park in midtown Manhattan. This little space became a small phenomenon, and because it had such a profound impact on New Yorkers, it made an enormous impression on me. I studied this park very early on in my career because it happened to have been built by my stepfather, so I knew that places like Paley Park didn't happen by accident. I saw firsthand that they required incredible dedication and enormous attention to detail. But what was it about this space that made it special and drew people to it? Well, I would sit in the park and watch very carefully, and first among other things were the comfortable, movable chairs. People would come in, find their own seat, move it a bit, actually, and then stay a while, and then interestingly, people themselves attracted other people, and ironically, I felt more peaceful if there were other people around. And it was green. This little park provided what New Yorkers crave: comfort and greenery. But my question was, why weren't there more places with greenery and places to sit in the middle of the city where you didn't feel alone, or like a trespasser? Unfortunately, that's not how cities were being designed. So here you see a familiar sight. This is how plazas have been designed for generations. They have that stylish, Spartan look that we often associate with modern architecture, but it's not surprising that people avoid spaces like this. They not only look desolate, they feel downright dangerous. I mean, where would you sit here? What would you do here? But architects love them. They are plinths for their creations. They might tolerate a sculpture or two, but that's about it. And for developers, they are ideal. There's nothing to water, nothing to maintain, and no undesirable people to worry about. But don't you think this is a waste? For me, becoming a city planner meant being able to truly change the city that I lived in and loved. I wanted to be able to create places that would give you the feeling that you got in Paley Park, and not allow developers to build bleak plazas like this. But over the many years, I have learned how hard it is to create successful, meaningful, enjoyable public spaces. As I learned from my stepfather, they certainly do not happen by accident, especially in a city like New York, where public space has to be fought for to begin with, and then for them to be successful, somebody has to think very hard about every detail. Now, open spaces in cities are opportunities. Yes, they are opportunities for commercial investment, but they are also opportunities for the common good of the city, and those two goals are often not aligned with one another, and therein lies the conflict. The first opportunity I had to fight for a great public open space was in the early 1980s, when I was leading a team of planners at a gigantic landfill called Battery Park City in lower Manhattan on the Hudson River. And this sandy wasteland had lain barren for 10 years, and we were told, unless we found a developer in six months, it would go bankrupt. So we came up with a radical, almost insane idea. Instead of building a park as a complement to future development, why don't we reverse that equation and build a small but very high-quality public open space first, and see if that made a difference. So we only could afford to build a two-block section of what would become a mile-long esplanade, so whatever we built had to be perfect. So just to make sure, I insisted that we build a mock-up in wood, at scale, of the railing and the sea wall. And when I sat down on that test bench with sand still swirling all around me, the railing hit exactly at eye level, blocking my view and ruining my experience at the water's edge. So you see, details really do make a difference. But design is not just how something looks, it's how your body feels on that seat in that space, and I believe that successful design always depends on that very individual experience. In this photo, everything looks very finished, but that granite edge, those lights, the back on that bench, the trees in planting, and the many different kinds of places to sit were all little battles that turned this project into a place that people wanted to be. Now, this proved very valuable 20 years later when Michael Bloomberg asked me to be his planning commissioner and put me in charge of shaping the entire city of New York. And he said to me on that very day, he said that New York was projected to grow from eight to nine million people. And he asked me, "So where are you going to put one million additional New Yorkers?" Well, I didn't have any idea. Now, you know that New York does place a high value on attracting immigrants, so we were excited about the prospect of growth, but honestly, where were we going to grow in a city that was already built out to its edges and surrounded by water? How were we going to find housing for that many new New Yorkers? And if we couldn't spread out, which was probably a good thing, where could new housing go? And what about cars? Our city couldn't possibly handle any more cars. So what were we going to do? If we couldn't spread out, we had to go up. And if we had to go up, we had to go up in places where you wouldn't need to own a car. So that meant using one of our greatest assets: our transit system. But we had never before thought of how we could make the most of it. So here was the answer to our puzzle. If we were to channel and redirect all new development around transit, we could actually handle that population increase, we thought. And so here was the plan, what we really needed to do: We needed to redo our zoning -- and zoning is the city planner's regulatory tool -- and basically reshape the entire city, targeting where new development could go and prohibiting any development at all in our car-oriented, suburban-style neighborhoods. Well, this was an unbelievably ambitious idea, ambitious because communities had to approve those plans. So how was I going to get this done? By listening. So I began listening, in fact, thousands of hours of listening just to establish trust. You know, communities can tell whether or not you understand their neighborhoods. It's not something you can just fake. And so I began walking. I can't tell you how many blocks I walked, in sweltering summers, in freezing winters, year after year, just so I could get to understand the DNA of each neighborhood and know what each street felt like. I became an incredibly geeky zoning expert, finding ways that zoning could address communities' concerns. So little by little, neighborhood by neighborhood, block by block, we began to set height limits so that all new development would be predictable and near transit. Over the course of 12 years, we were able to rezone 124 neighborhoods, 40 percent of the city, 12,500 blocks, so that now, 90 percent of all new development of New York is within a 10-minute walk of a subway. In other words, nobody in those new buildings needs to own a car. Well, those rezonings were exhausting and enervating and important, but rezoning was never my mission. You can't see zoning and you can't feel zoning. My mission was always to create great public spaces. So in the areas where we zoned for significant development, I was determined to create places that would make a difference in people's lives. Here you see what was two miles of abandoned, degraded waterfront in the neighborhoods of Greenpoint and Williamsburg in Brooklyn, impossible to get to and impossible to use. Now the zoning here was massive, so I felt an obligation to create magnificent parks on these waterfronts, and I spent an incredible amount of time on every square inch of these plans. I wanted to make sure that there were tree-lined paths from the upland to the water, that there were trees and plantings everywhere, and, of course, lots and lots of places to sit. Honestly, I had no idea how it would turn out. I had to have faith. But I put everything that I had studied and learned into those plans. And then it opened, and I have to tell you, it was incredible. People came from all over the city to be in these parks. I know they changed the lives of the people who live there, but they also changed New Yorkers' whole image of their city. I often come down and watch people get on this little ferry that now runs between the boroughs, and I can't tell you why, but I'm completely moved by the fact that people are using it as if it had always been there. And here is a new park in lower Manhattan. Now, the water's edge in lower Manhattan was a complete mess before 9/11. Wall Street was essentially landlocked because you couldn't get anywhere near this edge. And after 9/11, the city had very little control. But I thought if we went to the Lower Manhattan Development Corporation and got money to reclaim this two miles of degraded waterfront that it would have an enormous effect on the rebuilding of lower Manhattan. And it did. Lower Manhattan finally has a public waterfront on all three sides. I really love this park. You know, railings have to be higher now, so we put bar seating at the edge, and you can get so close to the water you're practically on it. And see how the railing widens and flattens out so you can lay down your lunch or your laptop. And I love when people come there and look up and they say, "Wow, there's Brooklyn, and it's so close." So what's the trick? How do you turn a park into a place that people want to be? Well, it's up to you, not as a city planner but as a human being. You don't tap into your design expertise. You tap into your humanity. I mean, would you want to go there? Would you want to stay there? Can you see into it and out of it? Are there other people there? Does it seem green and friendly? Can you find your very own seat? Well now, all over New York City, there are places where you can find your very own seat. Where there used to be parking spaces, there are now pop-up cafes. Where Broadway traffic used to run, there are now tables and chairs. Where 12 years ago, sidewalk cafes were not allowed, they are now everywhere. But claiming these spaces for public use was not simple, and it's even harder to keep them that way. So now I'm going to tell you a story about a very unusual park called the High Line. The High Line was an elevated railway. (Applause) The High Line was an elevated railway that ran through three neighborhoods on Manhattan's West Side, and when the train stopped running, it became a self-seeded landscape, a kind of a garden in the sky. And when I saw it the first time, honestly, when I went up on that old viaduct, I fell in love the way you fall in love with a person, honestly. And when I was appointed, saving the first two sections of the High Line from demolition became my first priority and my most important project. I knew if there was a day that I didn't worry about the High Line, it would come down. And the High Line, even though it is widely known now and phenomenally popular, it is the most contested public space in the city. You might see a beautiful park, but not everyone does. You know, it's true, commercial interests will always battle against public space. You might say, "How wonderful it is that more than four million people come from all over the world to visit the High Line." Well, a developer sees just one thing: customers. Hey, why not take out those plantings and have shops all along the High Line? Wouldn't that be terrific and won't it mean a lot more money for the city? Well no, it would not be terrific. It would be a mall, and not a park. (Applause) And you know what, it might mean more money for the city, but a city has to take the long view, the view for the common good. Most recently, the last section of the High Line, the third section of the High Line, the final section of the High Line, has been pitted against development interests, where some of the city's leading developers are building more than 17 million square feet at the Hudson Yards. And they came to me and proposed that they "temporarily disassemble" that third and final section. Perhaps the High Line didn't fit in with their image of a gleaming city of skyscrapers on a hill. Perhaps it was just in their way. But in any case, it took nine months of nonstop daily negotiation to finally get the signed agreement to prohibit its demolition, and that was only two years ago. So you see, no matter how popular and successful a public space may be, it can never be taken for granted. Public spaces always -- this is it saved -- public spaces always need vigilant champions, not only to claim them at the outset for public use, but to design them for the people that use them, then to maintain them to ensure that they are for everyone, that they are not violated, invaded, abandoned or ignored. If there is any one lesson that I have learned in my life as a city planner, it is that public spaces have power. It's not just the number of people using them, it's the even greater number of people who feel better about their city just knowing that they are there. Public space can change how you live in a city, how you feel about a city, whether you choose one city over another, and public space is one of the most important reasons why you stay in a city. I believe that a successful city is like a fabulous party. People stay because they are having a great time. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause)

So a chip, a poet and a boy. It's just about 20 years ago, June 1994, when Intel announced that there was a flaw at the core of their Pentium chip. Deep in the code of the SRT algorithm to calculate intermediate quotients necessary for iterative floating points of divisions -- I don't know what that means, but it's what it says on Wikipedia — there was a flaw and an error that meant that there was a certain probability that the result of the calculation would be an error, and the probability was one out of every 360 billion calculations. So Intel said your average spreadsheet would be flawed once every 27,000 years. They didn't think it was significant, but there was an outrage in the community. The community, the techies, said, this flaw has to be addressed. They were not going to stand by quietly as Intel gave them these chips. So there was a revolution across the world. People marched to demand -- okay, not really exactly like that — but they rose up and they demanded that Intel fix the flaw. And Intel set aside 475 million dollars to fund the replacement of millions of chips to fix the flaw. So billions of dollars in our society was spent to address a problem which would come once out of every 360 billion calculations. Number two, a poet. This is Martin Niemöller. You're familiar with his poetry. Around the height of the Nazi period, he started repeating the verse, "First they came for the communists, and I did nothing, did not speak out because I was not a communist. Then they came for the socialists. Then they came for the trade unions. Then they came for the Jews. And then they came for me. But there was no one left to speak for me." Now, Niemöller is offering a certain kind of insight. This is an insight at the core of intelligence. We could call it cluefulness. It's a certain kind of test: Can you recognize an underlying threat and respond? Can you save yourself or save your kind? Turns out ants are pretty good at this. Cows, not so much. So can you see the pattern? Can you see a pattern and then recognize and do something about it? Number two. Number three, a boy. This is my friend Aaron Swartz. He's Tim's friend. He's friends of many of you in this audience, and seven years ago, Aaron came to me with a question. It was just before I was going to give my first TED Talk. I was so proud. I was telling him about my talk, "Laws that choke creativity." And Aaron looked at me and was a little impatient, and he said, "So how are you ever going to solve the problems you're talking about? Copyright policy, Internet policy, how are you ever going to address those problems so long as there's this fundamental corruption in the way our government works?" So I was a little put off by this. He wasn't sharing in my celebration. And I said to him, "You know, Aaron, it's not my field, not my field." He said, "You mean as an academic, it's not your field?" I said, "Yeah, as an academic, it's not my field." He said, "What about as a citizen? As a citizen." Now, this is the way Aaron was. He didn't tell. He asked questions. But his questions spoke as clearly as my four-year-old's hug. He was saying to me, "You've got to get a clue. You have got to get a clue, because there is a flaw at the core of the operating system of this democracy, and it's not a flaw every one out of 360 billion times our democracy tries to make a decision. It is every time, every single important issue. We've got to end the bovinity of this political society. We've got to adopt, it turns out, the word is fourmi-formatic attitude -- that's what the Internet tells me the word is -- the ant's appreciative attitude that gets us to recognize this flaw, save our kind and save our demos. Now if you know Aaron Swartz, you know that we lost him just over a year ago. It was about six weeks before I gave my TED Talk, and I was so grateful to Chris that he asked me to give this TED Talk, not because I had the chance to talk to you, although that was great, but because it pulled me out of an extraordinary depression. I couldn't begin to describe the sadness. Because I had to focus. I had to focus on, what was I going to say to you? It saved me. But after the buzz, the excitement, the power that comes from this community, I began to yearn for a less sterile, less academic way to address these issues, the issues that I was talking about. We'd begun to focus on New Hampshire as a target for this political movement, because the primary in New Hampshire is so incredibly important. It was a group called the New Hampshire Rebellion that was beginning to talk about, how would we make this issue of this corruption central in 2016? But it was another soul that caught my imagination, a woman named Doris Haddock, aka Granny D. On January 1, 1999, 15 years ago, at the age of 88, Granny D started a walk. She started in Los Angeles and began to walk to Washington, D.C. with a single sign on her chest that said, "campaign finance reform." Eighteen months later, at the age of 90, she arrived in Washington with hundreds following her, including many congressmen who had gotten in a car and driven out about a mile outside of the city to walk in with her. (Laughter) Now, I don't have 13 months to walk across the country. I've got three kids who hate to walk, and a wife who, it turns out, still hates when I'm not there for mysterious reasons, so this was not an option, but the question I asked, could we remix Granny D a bit? What about a walk not of 3,200 miles but of 185 miles across New Hampshire in January? So on January 11, the anniversary of Aaron's death, we began a walk that ended on January 24th, the day that Granny D was born. A total of 200 people joined us across this walk, as we went from the very top to the very bottom of New Hampshire talking about this issue. And what was astonishing to me, something I completely did not expect to find, was the passion and anger that there was among everyone that we talked to about this issue. We had found in a poll that 96 percent of Americans believe it important to reduce the influence of money in politics. Now politicians and pundits tell you, there's nothing we can do about this issue, Americans don't care about it, but the reason for that is that 91 percent of Americans think there's nothing that can be done about this issue. And it's this gap between 96 and 91 that explains our politics of resignation. I mean, after all, at least 96 percent of us wish we could fly like Superman, but because at least 91 percent of us believe we can't, we don't leap off of tall buildings every time we have that urge. That's because we accept our limits, and so too with this reform. But when you give people the sense of hope, you begin to thaw that absolute sense of impossibility. As Harvey Milk said, if you give 'em hope, you give 'em a chance, a way to think about how this change is possible. Hope. And hope is the one thing that we, Aaron's friends, failed him with, because we let him lose that sense of hope. I loved that boy like I love my son. But we failed him. And I love my country, and I'm not going to fail that. I'm not going to fail that. That sense of hope, we're going to hold, and we're going to fight for, however impossible this battle looks. What's next? Well, we started with this march with 200 people, and next year, there will be 1,000 on different routes that march in the month of January and meet in Concord to celebrate this cause, and then in 2016, before the primary, there will be 10,000 who march across that state, meeting in Concord to celebrate this cause. And as we have marched, people around the country have begun to say, "Can we do the same thing in our state?" So we've started a platform called G.D. Walkers, that is, Granny D walkers, and Granny D walkers across the country will be marching for this reform. Number one. Number two, on this march, one of the founders of Thunderclap, David Cascino, was with us, and he said, "Well what can we do?" And so they developed a platform, which we are announcing today, that allows us to pull together voters who are committed to this idea of reform. Regardless of where you are, in New Hampshire or outside of New Hampshire, you can sign up and directly be informed where the candidates are on this issue so you can decide who to vote for as a function of which is going to make this possibility real. And then finally number three, the hardest. We're in the age of the Super PAC. Indeed yesterday, Merriam announced that Merriam-Webster will have Super PAC as a word. It is now an official word in the dictionary. So on May 1, aka May Day, we're going to try an experiment. We're going to try a launching of what we can think of as a Super PAC to end all Super PACs. And the basic way this works is this. For the last year, we have been working with analysts and political experts to calculate, how much would it cost to win enough votes in the United States Congress to make fundamental reform possible? What is that number? Half a billion? A billion? What is that number? And then whatever that number is, we are going to kickstart, sort of, because you can't use KickStarter for political work, but anyway, kickstart, sort of, first a bottom-up campaign where people will make small dollar commitments contingent on reaching very ambitious goals, and when those goals have been reached, we will turn to the large dollar contributors, to get them to contribute to make it possible for us to run the kind of Super PAC necessary to win this issue, to change the way money influences politics, so that on November 8, which I discovered yesterday is the day that Aaron would have been 30 years old, on November 8, we will celebrate 218 representatives in the House and 60 Senators in the United States Senate who have committed to this idea of fundamental reform. So last night, we heard about wishes. Here's my wish. May one. May the ideals of one boy unite one nation behind one critical idea that we are one people, we are the people who were promised a government, a government that was promised to be dependent upon the people alone, the people, who, as Madison told us, meant not the rich more than the poor. May one. And then may you, may you join this movement, not because you're a politician, not because you're an expert, not because this is your field, but because if you are, you are a citizen. Aaron asked me that. Now I've asked you. Thank you very much. (Applause)

If you remember that first decade of the web, it was really a static place. You could go online, you could look at pages, and they were put up either by organizations who had teams to do it or by individuals who were really tech-savvy for the time. And with the rise of social media and social networks in the early 2000s, the web was completely changed to a place where now the vast majority of content we interact with is put up by average users, either in YouTube videos or blog posts or product reviews or social media postings. And it's also become a much more interactive place, where people are interacting with others, they're commenting, they're sharing, they're not just reading. So Facebook is not the only place you can do this, but it's the biggest, and it serves to illustrate the numbers. Facebook has 1.2 billion users per month. So half the Earth's Internet population is using Facebook. They are a site, along with others, that has allowed people to create an online persona with very little technical skill, and people responded by putting huge amounts of personal data online. So the result is that we have behavioral, preference, demographic data for hundreds of millions of people, which is unprecedented in history. And as a computer scientist, what this means is that I've been able to build models that can predict all sorts of hidden attributes for all of you that you don't even know you're sharing information about. As scientists, we use that to help the way people interact online, but there's less altruistic applications, and there's a problem in that users don't really understand these techniques and how they work, and even if they did, they don't have a lot of control over it. So what I want to talk to you about today is some of these things that we're able to do, and then give us some ideas of how we might go forward to move some control back into the hands of users. So this is Target, the company. I didn't just put that logo on this poor, pregnant woman's belly. You may have seen this anecdote that was printed in Forbes magazine where Target sent a flyer to this 15-year-old girl with advertisements and coupons for baby bottles and diapers and cribs two weeks before she told her parents that she was pregnant. Yeah, the dad was really upset. He said, "How did Target figure out that this high school girl was pregnant before she told her parents?" It turns out that they have the purchase history for hundreds of thousands of customers and they compute what they call a pregnancy score, which is not just whether or not a woman's pregnant, but what her due date is. And they compute that not by looking at the obvious things, like, she's buying a crib or baby clothes, but things like, she bought more vitamins than she normally had, or she bought a handbag that's big enough to hold diapers. And by themselves, those purchases don't seem like they might reveal a lot, but it's a pattern of behavior that, when you take it in the context of thousands of other people, starts to actually reveal some insights. So that's the kind of thing that we do when we're predicting stuff about you on social media. We're looking for little patterns of behavior that, when you detect them among millions of people, lets us find out all kinds of things. So in my lab and with colleagues, we've developed mechanisms where we can quite accurately predict things like your political preference, your personality score, gender, sexual orientation, religion, age, intelligence, along with things like how much you trust the people you know and how strong those relationships are. We can do all of this really well. And again, it doesn't come from what you might think of as obvious information. So my favorite example is from this study that was published this year in the Proceedings of the National Academies. If you Google this, you'll find it. It's four pages, easy to read. And they looked at just people's Facebook likes, so just the things you like on Facebook, and used that to predict all these attributes, along with some other ones. And in their paper they listed the five likes that were most indicative of high intelligence. And among those was liking a page for curly fries. (Laughter) Curly fries are delicious, but liking them does not necessarily mean that you're smarter than the average person. So how is it that one of the strongest indicators of your intelligence is liking this page when the content is totally irrelevant to the attribute that's being predicted? And it turns out that we have to look at a whole bunch of underlying theories to see why we're able to do this. One of them is a sociological theory called homophily, which basically says people are friends with people like them. So if you're smart, you tend to be friends with smart people, and if you're young, you tend to be friends with young people, and this is well established for hundreds of years. We also know a lot about how information spreads through networks. It turns out things like viral videos or Facebook likes or other information spreads in exactly the same way that diseases spread through social networks. So this is something we've studied for a long time. We have good models of it. And so you can put those things together and start seeing why things like this happen. So if I were to give you a hypothesis, it would be that a smart guy started this page, or maybe one of the first people who liked it would have scored high on that test. And they liked it, and their friends saw it, and by homophily, we know that he probably had smart friends, and so it spread to them, and some of them liked it, and they had smart friends, and so it spread to them, and so it propagated through the network to a host of smart people, so that by the end, the action of liking the curly fries page is indicative of high intelligence, not because of the content, but because the actual action of liking reflects back the common attributes of other people who have done it. So this is pretty complicated stuff, right? It's a hard thing to sit down and explain to an average user, and even if you do, what can the average user do about it? How do you know that you've liked something that indicates a trait for you that's totally irrelevant to the content of what you've liked? There's a lot of power that users don't have to control how this data is used. And I see that as a real problem going forward. So I think there's a couple paths that we want to look at if we want to give users some control over how this data is used, because it's not always going to be used for their benefit. An example I often give is that, if I ever get bored being a professor, I'm going to go start a company that predicts all of these attributes and things like how well you work in teams and if you're a drug user, if you're an alcoholic. We know how to predict all that. And I'm going to sell reports to H.R. companies and big businesses that want to hire you. We totally can do that now. I could start that business tomorrow, and you would have absolutely no control over me using your data like that. That seems to me to be a problem. So one of the paths we can go down is the policy and law path. And in some respects, I think that that would be most effective, but the problem is we'd actually have to do it. Observing our political process in action makes me think it's highly unlikely that we're going to get a bunch of representatives to sit down, learn about this, and then enact sweeping changes to intellectual property law in the U.S. so users control their data. We could go the policy route, where social media companies say, you know what? You own your data. You have total control over how it's used. The problem is that the revenue models for most social media companies rely on sharing or exploiting users' data in some way. It's sometimes said of Facebook that the users aren't the customer, they're the product. And so how do you get a company to cede control of their main asset back to the users? It's possible, but I don't think it's something that we're going to see change quickly. So I think the other path that we can go down that's going to be more effective is one of more science. It's doing science that allowed us to develop all these mechanisms for computing this personal data in the first place. And it's actually very similar research that we'd have to do if we want to develop mechanisms that can say to a user, "Here's the risk of that action you just took." By liking that Facebook page, or by sharing this piece of personal information, you've now improved my ability to predict whether or not you're using drugs or whether or not you get along well in the workplace. And that, I think, can affect whether or not people want to share something, keep it private, or just keep it offline altogether. We can also look at things like allowing people to encrypt data that they upload, so it's kind of invisible and worthless to sites like Facebook or third party services that access it, but that select users who the person who posted it want to see it have access to see it. This is all super exciting research from an intellectual perspective, and so scientists are going to be willing to do it. So that gives us an advantage over the law side. One of the problems that people bring up when I talk about this is, they say, you know, if people start keeping all this data private, all those methods that you've been developing to predict their traits are going to fail. And I say, absolutely, and for me, that's success, because as a scientist, my goal is not to infer information about users, it's to improve the way people interact online. And sometimes that involves inferring things about them, but if users don't want me to use that data, I think they should have the right to do that. I want users to be informed and consenting users of the tools that we develop. And so I think encouraging this kind of science and supporting researchers who want to cede some of that control back to users and away from the social media companies means that going forward, as these tools evolve and advance, means that we're going to have an educated and empowered user base, and I think all of us can agree that that's a pretty ideal way to go forward. Thank you. (Applause)

Chris Anderson: So, this is an interview with a difference. On the basis that a picture is worth a thousand words, what I did was, I asked Bill and Melinda to dig out from their archive some images that would help explain some of what they've done, and do a few things that way. So, we're going to start here. Melinda, when and where was this, and who is that handsome man next to you? Melinda Gates: With those big glasses, huh? This is in Africa, our very first trip, the first time either of us had ever been to Africa, in the fall of 1993. We were already engaged to be married. We married a few months later, and this was the trip where we really went to see the animals and to see the savanna. It was incredible. Bill had never taken that much time off from work. But what really touched us, actually, were the people, and the extreme poverty. We started asking ourselves questions. Does it have to be like this? And at the end of the trip, we went out to Zanzibar, and took some time to walk on the beach, which is something we had done a lot while we were dating. And we'd already been talking about during that time that the wealth that had come from Microsoft would be given back to society, but it was really on that beach walk that we started to talk about, well, what might we do and how might we go about it? CA: So, given that this vacation led to the creation of the world's biggest private foundation, it's pretty expensive as vacations go. (Laughter) MG: I guess so. We enjoyed it. CA: Which of you was the key instigator here, or was it symmetrical? Bill Gates: Well, I think we were excited that there'd be a phase of our life where we'd get to work together and figure out how to give this money back. At this stage, we were talking about the poorest, and could you have a big impact on them? Were there things that weren't being done? There was a lot we didn't know. Our naïveté is pretty incredible, when we look back on it. But we had a certain enthusiasm that that would be the phase, the post-Microsoft phase would be our philanthropy. MG: Which Bill always thought was going to come after he was 60, so he hasn't quite hit 60 yet, so some things change along the way. CA: So it started there, but it got accelerated. So that was '93, and it was '97, really, before the foundation itself started. MA: Yeah, in '97, we read an article about diarrheal diseases killing so many kids around the world, and we kept saying to ourselves, "Well that can't be. In the U.S., you just go down to the drug store." And so we started gathering scientists and started learning about population, learning about vaccines, learning about what had worked and what had failed, and that's really when we got going, was in late 1998, 1999. CA: So, you've got a big pot of money and a world full of so many different issues. How on Earth do you decide what to focus on? BG: Well, we decided that we'd pick two causes, whatever the biggest inequity was globally, and there we looked at children dying, children not having enough nutrition to ever develop, and countries that were really stuck, because with that level of death, and parents would have so many kids that they'd get huge population growth, and that the kids were so sick that they really couldn't be educated and lift themselves up. So that was our global thing, and then in the U.S., both of us have had amazing educations, and we saw that as the way that the U.S. could live up to its promise of equal opportunity is by having a phenomenal education system, and the more we learned, the more we realized we're not really fulfilling that promise. And so we picked those two things, and everything the foundation does is focused there. CA: So, I asked each of you to pick an image that you like that illustrates your work, and Melinda, this is what you picked. What's this about? MG: So I, one of the things I love to do when I travel is to go out to the rural areas and talk to the women, whether it's Bangladesh, India, lots of countries in Africa, and I go in as a Western woman without a name. I don't tell them who I am. Pair of khakis. And I kept hearing from women, over and over and over, the more I traveled, "I want to be able to use this shot." I would be there to talk to them about childhood vaccines, and they would bring the conversation around to "But what about the shot I get?" which is an injection they were getting called Depo-Provera, which is a contraceptive. And I would come back and talk to global health experts, and they'd say, "Oh no, contraceptives are stocked in in the developing world." Well, you had to dig deeper into the reports, and this is what the team came to me with, which is, to have the number one thing that women tell you in Africa they want to use stocked out more than 200 days a year explains why women were saying to me, "I walked 10 kilometers without my husband knowing it, and I got to the clinic, and there was nothing there." And so condoms were stocked in in Africa because of all the AIDS work that the U.S. and others supported. But women will tell you over and over again, "I can't negotiate a condom with my husband. I'm either suggesting he has AIDS or I have AIDS, and I need that tool because then I can space the births of my children, and I can feed them and have a chance of educating them." CA: Melinda, you're Roman Catholic, and you've often been embroiled in controversy over this issue, and on the abortion question, on both sides, really. How do you navigate that? MG: Yeah, so I think that's a really important point, which is, we had backed away from contraceptives as a global community. We knew that 210 million women were saying they wanted access to contraceptives, even the contraceptives we have here in the United States, and we weren't providing them because of the political controversy in our country, and to me that was just a crime, and I kept looking around trying to find the person that would get this back on the global stage, and I finally realized I just had to do it. And even though I'm Catholic, I believe in contraceptives just like most of the Catholic women in the United States who report using contraceptives, and I shouldn't let that controversy be the thing that holds us back. We used to have consensus in the United States around contraceptives, and so we got back to that global consensus, and actually raised 2.6 billion dollars around exactly this issue for women. (Applause) CA: Bill, this is your graph. What's this about? BG: Well, my graph has numbers on it. (Laughter) I really like this graph. This is the number of children who die before the age of five every year. And what you find is really a phenomenal success story which is not widely known, that we are making incredible progress. We go from 20 million not long after I was born to now we're down to about six million. So this is a story largely of vaccines. Smallpox was killing a couple million kids a year. That was eradicated, so that got down to zero. Measles was killing a couple million a year. That's down to a few hundred thousand. Anyway, this is a chart where you want to get that number to continue, and it's going to be possible, using the science of new vaccines, getting the vaccines out to kids. We can actually accelerate the progress. The last decade, that number has dropped faster than ever in history, and so I just love the fact that you can say, okay, if we can invent new vaccines, we can get them out there, use the very latest understanding of these things, and get the delivery right, that we can perform a miracle. CA: I mean, you do the math on this, and it works out, I think, literally to thousands of kids' lives saved every day compared to the prior year. It's not reported. An airliner with 200-plus deaths is a far, far bigger story than that. Does that drive you crazy? BG: Yeah, because it's a silent thing going on. It's a kid, one kid at a time. Ninety-eight percent of this has nothing to do with natural disasters, and yet, people's charity, when they see a natural disaster, are wonderful. It's incredible how people think, okay, that could be me, and the money flows. These causes have been a bit invisible. Now that the Millennium Development Goals and various things are getting out there, we are seeing some increased generosity, so the goal is to get this well below a million, which should be possible in our lifetime. CA: Maybe it needed someone who is turned on by numbers and graphs rather than just the big, sad face to get engaged. I mean, you've used it in your letter this year, you used basically this argument to say that aid, contrary to the current meme that aid is kind of worthless and broken, that actually it has been effective. BG: Yeah, well people can take, there is some aid that was well-meaning and didn't go well. There's some venture capital investments that were well-meaning and didn't go well. You shouldn't just say, okay, because of that, because we don't have a perfect record, this is a bad endeavor. You should look at, what was your goal? How are you trying to uplift nutrition and survival and literacy so these countries can take care of themselves, and say wow, this is going well, and be smarter. We can spend aid smarter. It is not all a panacea. We can do better than venture capital, I think, including big hits like this. CA: Traditional wisdom is that it's pretty hard for married couples to work together. How have you guys managed it? MG: Yeah, I've had a lot of women say to me, "I really don't think I could work with my husband. That just wouldn't work out." You know, we enjoy it, and we don't -- this foundation has been a coming to for both of us in its continuous learning journey, and we don't travel together as much for the foundation, actually, as we used to when Bill was working at Microsoft. We have more trips where we're traveling separately, but I always know when I come home, Bill's going to be interested in what I learned, whether it's about women or girls or something new about the vaccine delivery chain, or this person that is a great leader. He's going to listen and be really interested. And he knows when he comes home, even if it's to talk about the speech he did or the data or what he's learned, I'm really interested, and I think we have a really collaborative relationship. But we don't every minute together, that's for sure. (Laughter) CA: But now you are, and we're very happy that you are. Melinda, early on, you were basically largely running the show. Six years ago, I guess, Bill came on full time, so moved from Microsoft and became full time. That must have been hard, adjusting to that. No? MG: Yeah. I think actually, for the foundation employees, there was way more angst for them than there was for me about Bill coming. I was actually really excited. I mean, Bill made this decision even obviously before it got announced in 2006, and it was really his decision, but again, it was a beach vacation where we were walking on the beach and he was starting to think of this idea. And for me, the excitement of Bill putting his brain and his heart against these huge global problems, these inequities, to me that was exciting. Yes, the foundation employees had angst about that. (Applause) CA: That's cool. MG: But that went away within three months, once he was there. BG: Including some of the employees. MG: That's what I said, the employees, it went away for them three months after you were there. BG: No, I'm kidding. MG: Oh, you mean, the employees didn't go away. BG: A few of them did, but — (Laughter) CA: So what do you guys argue about? Sunday, 11 o'clock, you're away from work, what comes up? What's the argument? BG: Because we built this thing together from the beginning, it's this great partnership. I had that with Paul Allen in the early days of Microsoft. I had it with Steve Ballmer as Microsoft got bigger, and now Melinda, and in even stronger, equal ways, is the partner, so we talk a lot about which things should we give more to, which groups are working well? She's got a lot of insight. She'll sit down with the employees a lot. We'll take the different trips she described. So there's a lot of collaboration. I can't think of anything where one of us had a super strong opinion about one thing or another? CA: How about you, Melinda, though? Can you? (Laughter) You never know. MG: Well, here's the thing. We come at things from different angles, and I actually think that's really good. So Bill can look at the big data and say, "I want to act based on these global statistics." For me, I come at it from intuition. I meet with lots of people on the ground and Bill's taught me to take that and read up to the global data and see if they match, and I think what I've taught him is to take that data and meet with people on the ground to understand, can you actually deliver that vaccine? Can you get a woman to accept those polio drops in her child's mouth? Because the delivery piece is every bit as important as the science. So I think it's been more a coming to over time towards each other's point of view, and quite frankly, the work is better because of it. CA: So, in vaccines and polio and so forth, you've had some amazing successes. What about failure, though? Can you talk about a failure and maybe what you've learned from it? BG: Yeah. Fortunately, we can afford a few failures, because we've certainly had them. We do a lot of drug work or vaccine work that you know you're going to have different failures. Like, we put out, one that got a lot of publicity was asking for a better condom. Well, we got hundreds of ideas. Maybe a few of those will work out. We were very naïve, certainly I was, about a drug for a disease in India, visceral leishmaniasis, that I thought, once I got this drug, we can just go wipe out the disease. Well, turns out it took an injection every day for 10 days. It took three more years to get it than we expected, and then there was no way it was going to get out there. Fortunately, we found out that if you go kill the sand flies, you probably can have success there, but we spent five years, you could say wasted five years, and about 60 million, on a path that turned out to have very modest benefit when we got there. CA: You're spending, like, a billion dollars a year in education, I think, something like that. Is anything, the story of what's gone right there is quite a long and complex one. Are there any failures that you can talk about? MG: Well, I would say a huge lesson for us out of the early work is we thought that these small schools were the answer, and small schools definitely help. They bring down the dropout rate. They have less violence and crime in those schools. But the thing that we learned from that work, and what turned out to be the fundamental key, is a great teacher in front of the classroom. If you don't have an effective teacher in the front of the classroom, I don't care how big or small the building is, you're not going to change the trajectory of whether that student will be ready for college. (Applause) CA: So Melinda, this is you and your eldest daughter, Jenn. And just taken about three weeks ago, I think, three or four weeks ago. Where was this? MG: So we went to Tanzania. Jenn's been to Tanzania. All our kids have been to Africa quite a bit, actually. And we did something very different, which is, we decided to go spend two nights and three days with a family. Anna and Sanare are the parents. They invited us to come and stay in their boma. Actually, the goats had been there, I think, living in that particular little hut on their little compound before we got there. And we stayed with their family, and we really, really learned what life is like in rural Tanzania. And the difference between just going and visiting for half a day or three quarters of a day versus staying overnight was profound, and so let me just give you one explanation of that. They had six children, and as I talked to Anna in the kitchen, we cooked for about five hours in the cooking hut that day, and as I talked to her, she had absolutely planned and spaced with her husband the births of their children. It was a very loving relationship. This was a Maasai warrior and his wife, but they had decided to get married, they clearly had respect and love in the relationship. Their children, their six children, the two in the middle were twins, 13, a boy, and a girl named Grace. And when we'd go out to chop wood and do all the things that Grace and her mother would do, Grace was not a child, she was an adolescent, but she wasn't an adult. She was very, very shy. So she kept wanting to talk to me and Jenn. We kept trying to engage her, but she was shy. And at night, though, when all the lights went out in rural Tanzania, and there was no moon that night, the first night, and no stars, and Jenn came out of our hut with her REI little headlamp on, Grace went immediately, and got the translator, came straight up to my Jenn and said, "When you go home, can I have your headlamp so I can study at night?" CA: Oh, wow. MG: And her dad had told me how afraid he was that unlike the son, who had passed his secondary exams, because of her chores, she'd not done so well and wasn't in the government school yet. He said, "I don't know how I'm going to pay for her education. I can't pay for private school, and she may end up on this farm like my wife." So they know the difference that an education can make in a huge, profound way. CA: I mean, this is another pic of your other two kids, Rory and Phoebe, along with Paul Farmer. Bringing up three children when you're the world's richest family seems like a social experiment without much prior art. How have you managed it? What's been your approach? BG: Well, I'd say overall the kids get a great education, but you've got to make sure they have a sense of their own ability and what they're going to go and do, and our philosophy has been to be very clear with them -- most of the money's going to the foundation -- and help them find something they're excited about. We want to strike a balance where they have the freedom to do anything but not a lot of money showered on them so they could go out and do nothing. And so far, they're fairly diligent, excited to pick their own direction. CA: You've obviously guarded their privacy carefully for obvious reasons. I'm curious why you've given me permission to show this picture now here at TED. MG: Well, it's interesting. As they get older, they so know that our family belief is about responsibility, that we are in an unbelievable situation just to live in the United States and have a great education, and we have a responsibility to give back to the world. And so as they get older and we are teaching them -- they have been to so many countries around the world — they're saying, we do want people to know that we believe in what you're doing, Mom and Dad, and it is okay to show us more. So we have their permission to show this picture, and I think Paul Farmer is probably going to put it eventually in some of his work. But they really care deeply about the mission of the foundation, too. CA: You've easily got enough money despite your vast contributions to the foundation to make them all billionaires. Is that your plan for them? BG: Nope. No. They won't have anything like that. They need to have a sense that their own work is meaningful and important. We read an article long, actually, before we got married, where Warren Buffett talked about that, and we're quite convinced that it wasn't a favor either to society or to the kids. CA: Well, speaking of Warren Buffett, something really amazing happened in 2006, when somehow your only real rival for richest person in America suddenly turned around and agreed to give 80 percent of his fortune to your foundation. How on Earth did that happen? I guess there's a long version and a short version of that. We've got time for the short version. BG: All right. Well, Warren was a close friend, and he was going to have his wife Suzie give it all away. Tragically, she passed away before he did, and he's big on delegation, and — (Laughter) — he said — CA: Tweet that. BG: If he's got somebody who is doing something well, and is willing to do it at no charge, maybe that's okay. But we were stunned. MG: Totally stunned. BG: We had never expected it, and it has been unbelievable. It's allowed us to increase our ambition in what the foundation can do quite dramatically. Half the resources we have come from Warren's mind-blowing generosity. CA: And I think you've pledged that by the time you're done, more than, or 95 percent of your wealth, will be given to the foundation. BG: Yes. CA: And since this relationship, it's amazing— (Applause) And recently, you and Warren have been going around trying to persuade other billionaires and successful people to pledge to give, what, more than half of their assets for philanthropy. How is that going? BG: Well, we've got about 120 people who have now taken this giving pledge. The thing that's great is that we get together yearly and talk about, okay, do you hire staff, what do you give to them? We're not trying to homogenize it. I mean, the beauty of philanthropy is this mind-blowing diversity. People give to some things. We look and go, "Wow." But that's great. That's the role of philanthropy is to pick different approaches, including even in one space, like education. We need more experimentation. But it's been wonderful, meeting those people, sharing their journey to philanthropy, how they involve their kids, where they're doing it differently, and it's been way more successful than we expected. Now it looks like it'll just keep growing in size in the years ahead. MG: And having people see that other people are making change with philanthropy, I mean, these are people who have created their own businesses, put their own ingenuity behind incredible ideas. If they put their ideas and their brain behind philanthropy, they can change the world. And they start to see others doing it, and saying, "Wow, I want to do that with my own money." To me, that's the piece that's incredible. CA: It seems to me, it's actually really hard for some people to figure out even how to remotely spend that much money on something else. There are probably some billionaires in the room and certainly some successful people. I'm curious, can you make the pitch? What's the pitch? BG: Well, it's the most fulfilling thing we've ever done, and you can't take it with you, and if it's not good for your kids, let's get together and brainstorm about what we can be done. The world is a far better place because of the philanthropists of the past, and the U.S. tradition here, which is the strongest, is the envy of the world. And part of the reason I'm so optimistic is because I do think philanthropy is going to grow and take some of these things government's not just good at working on and discovering and shine some light in the right direction. CA: The world's got this terrible inequality, growing inequality problem that seems structural. It does seem to me that if more of your peers took the approach that you two have made, it would make a dent both in that problem and certainly in the perception of that problem. Is that a fair comment? BG: Oh yeah. If you take from the most wealthy and give to the least wealthy, it's good. It tries to balance out, and that's just. MG: But you change systems. In the U.S., we're trying to change the education system so it's just for everybody and it works for all students. That, to me, really changes the inequality balance. BG: That's the most important. (Applause) CA: Well, I really think that most people here and many millions around the world are just in awe of the trajectory your lives have taken and the spectacular degree to which you have shaped the future. Thank you so much for coming to TED and for sharing with us and for all you do. BG: Thank you. MG: Thank you. (Applause) BG: Thank you. MG: Thank you very much. BG: All right, good job. (Applause)

If you look deep into the night sky, you see stars, and if you look further, you see more stars, and further, galaxies, and further, more galaxies. But if you keep looking further and further, eventually you see nothing for a long while, and then finally you see a faint, fading afterglow, and it's the afterglow of the Big Bang. Now, the Big Bang was an era in the early universe when everything we see in the night sky was condensed into an incredibly small, incredibly hot, incredibly roiling mass, and from it sprung everything we see. Now, we've mapped that afterglow with great precision, and when I say we, I mean people who aren't me. We've mapped the afterglow with spectacular precision, and one of the shocks about it is that it's almost completely uniform. Fourteen billion light years that way and 14 billion light years that way, it's the same temperature. Now it's been 14 billion years since that Big Bang, and so it's got faint and cold. It's now 2.7 degrees. But it's not exactly 2.7 degrees. It's only 2.7 degrees to about 10 parts in a million. Over here, it's a little hotter, and over there, it's a little cooler, and that's incredibly important to everyone in this room, because where it was a little hotter, there was a little more stuff, and where there was a little more stuff, we have galaxies and clusters of galaxies and superclusters and all the structure you see in the cosmos. And those small, little, inhomogeneities, 20 parts in a million, those were formed by quantum mechanical wiggles in that early universe that were stretched across the size of the entire cosmos. That is spectacular, and that's not what they found on Monday; what they found on Monday is cooler. So here's what they found on Monday: Imagine you take a bell, and you whack the bell with a hammer. What happens? It rings. But if you wait, that ringing fades and fades and fades until you don't notice it anymore. Now, that early universe was incredibly dense, like a metal, way denser, and if you hit it, it would ring, but the thing ringing would be the structure of space-time itself, and the hammer would be quantum mechanics. What they found on Monday was evidence of the ringing of the space-time of the early universe, what we call gravitational waves from the fundamental era, and here's how they found it. Those waves have long since faded. If you go for a walk, you don't wiggle. Those gravitational waves in the structure of space are totally invisible for all practical purposes. But early on, when the universe was making that last afterglow, the gravitational waves put little twists in the structure of the light that we see. So by looking at the night sky deeper and deeper -- in fact, these guys spent three years on the South Pole looking straight up through the coldest, clearest, cleanest air they possibly could find looking deep into the night sky and studying that glow and looking for the faint twists which are the symbol, the signal, of gravitational waves, the ringing of the early universe. And on Monday, they announced that they had found it. And the thing that's so spectacular about that to me is not just the ringing, though that is awesome. The thing that's totally amazing, the reason I'm on this stage, is because what that tells us is something deep about the early universe. It tells us that we and everything we see around us are basically one large bubble -- and this is the idea of inflation— one large bubble surrounded by something else. This isn't conclusive evidence for inflation, but anything that isn't inflation that explains this will look the same. This is a theory, an idea, that has been around for a while, and we never thought we we'd really see it. For good reasons, we thought we'd never see killer evidence, and this is killer evidence. But the really crazy idea is that our bubble is just one bubble in a much larger, roiling pot of universal stuff. We're never going to see the stuff outside, but by going to the South Pole and spending three years looking at the detailed structure of the night sky, we can figure out that we're probably in a universe that looks kind of like that. And that amazes me. Thanks a lot. (Applause)

Daffodil Hudson: Hello? Yeah, this is she. What? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, of course I accept. What are the dates again? Pen. Pen. Pen. March 17 through 21. Okay, all right, great. Thanks. Lab Partner: Who was that? DH: It was TED. LP: Who's TED? DH: I've got to prepare. ["Give Your Talk: A Musical"] (Music) ["My Talk"] ♪ Procrastination. ♪ What do you think? (Doorbell) Can I help you? (Music) Speaker Coach 1: ♪ Let's prepare for main stage. ♪ ♪ It's your time to shine. ♪ ♪ If you want to succeed then ♪ ♪ you must be primed. ♪ Speaker Coach 2: ♪ Your slides are bad ♪ ♪ but your idea is good ♪ ♪ so you can bet before we're through, ♪ ♪ speaker, we'll make a TED Talk out of you. ♪ Speaker Coach 3: ♪ We know about climate change, ♪ ♪ but what can you say that's new? ♪ ♪ SC 1: Once you find your focus ♪ ♪ then the talk comes into view. ♪ SC 2: ♪ Don't ever try to sell something ♪ ♪ from up on that stage ♪ ♪ or we won't post your talk online. ♪ All: ♪ Somehow we'll make a TED Talk out of you. ♪ (Music) SC 1: Ready to practice one more time? DH: Right now? Stagehand: Break a leg. DH: ♪ I'll never remember all this. ♪ ♪ Will the clicker work when I press it? ♪ ♪ Why must Al Gore go right before me? ♪ ♪ Oh man, I'm scared to death. ♪ ♪ I hope I don't pass out onstage ♪ ♪ and now I really wish I wasn't wearing green. ♪ All: ♪ Give your talk. ♪ SC 1: ♪ You must be be sweet like Brené Brown. ♪ All: ♪ Give your talk. ♪ SC 2: ♪ You must be funny like Ken Robinson. ♪ All: ♪ Give your talk. ♪ SC 3: ♪ You must be cool like Reggie Watts ♪ All: ♪ and bring out a prop like Jill Bolte Taylor. ♪ DH: ♪ My time is running over. The clock now says nil. ♪ ♪ I'm saying my words faster. Understand me still. ♪ ♪ I'm too nervous to give this TED Talk. ♪ All: ♪ Don't give up. Rehearse. You're good. ♪ ♪ We'll edit out the mistakes that you make. ♪ ♪ Give your talk. ♪ DH: ♪ I will be big like Amy Cuddy. ♪ All: ♪ Give your talk. ♪ DH: ♪ I will inspire like Liz Gilbert. ♪ All: ♪ Give your talk. ♪ DH: ♪ I will engage like Hans Rosling ♪ ♪ and release mosquitos ♪ ♪ like Bill Gates. ♪ SC 2: ♪ I'll make a TED Talk out of you. ♪ ♪ I'll make a TED Talk out of you. ♪ ♪ I'll make a TED Talk out of you. ♪ ♪ I'll make a TED Talk out of you. ♪ ♪ I'll make a TED Talk out of you. ♪ (Applause) ["Brought to you by TED staff and friends"] (Music)

The world makes you something that you're not, but you know inside what you are, and that question burns in your heart: How will you become that? I may be somewhat unique in this, but I am not alone, not alone at all. So when I became a fashion model, I felt that I'd finally achieved the dream that I'd always wanted since I was a young child. My outside self finally matched my inner truth, my inner self. For complicated reasons which I'll get to later, when I look at this picture, at that time I felt like, Geena, you've done it, you've made it, you have arrived. But this past October, I realized that I'm only just beginning. All of us are put in boxes by our family, by our religion, by our society, our moment in history, even our own bodies. Some people have the courage to break free, not to accept the limitations imposed by the color of their skin or by the beliefs of those that surround them. Those people are always the threat to the status quo, to what is considered acceptable. In my case, for the last nine years, some of my neighbors, some of my friends, colleagues, even my agent, did not know about my history. I think, in mystery, this is called the reveal. Here is mine. I was assigned boy at birth based on the appearance of my genitalia. I remember when I was five years old in the Philippines walking around our house, I would always wear this t-shirt on my head. And my mom asked me, "How come you always wear that t-shirt on your head?" I said, "Mom, this is my hair. I'm a girl." I knew then how to self-identify. Gender has always been considered a fact, immutable, but we now know it's actually more fluid, complex and mysterious. Because of my success, I never had the courage to share my story, not because I thought what I am is wrong, but because of how the world treats those of us who wish to break free. Every day, I am so grateful because I am a woman. I have a mom and dad and family who accepted me for who I am. Many are not so fortunate. There's a long tradition in Asian culture that celebrates the fluid mystery of gender. There is a Buddhist goddess of compassion. There is a Hindu goddess, hijra goddess. So when I was eight years old, I was at a fiesta in the Philippines celebrating these mysteries. I was in front of the stage, and I remember, out comes this beautiful woman right in front of me, and I remember that moment something hit me: That is the kind of woman I would like to be. So when I was 15 years old, still dressing as a boy, I met this woman named T.L. She is a transgender beauty pageant manager. That night she asked me, "How come you are not joining the beauty pageant?" She convinced me that if I joined that she would take care of the registration fee and the garments, and that night, I won best in swimsuit and best in long gown and placed second runner up among 40-plus candidates. That moment changed my life. All of a sudden, I was introduced to the world of beauty pageants. Not a lot of people could say that your first job is a pageant queen for transgender women, but I'll take it. So from 15 to 17 years old, I joined the most prestigious pageant to the pageant where it's at the back of the truck, literally, or sometimes it would be a pavement next to a rice field, and when it rains -- it rains a lot in the Philippines -- the organizers would have to move it inside someone's house. I also experienced the goodness of strangers, especially when we would travel in remote provinces in the Philippines. But most importantly, I met some of my best friends in that community. In 2001, my mom, who had moved to San Francisco, called me and told me that my green card petition came through, that I could now move to the United States. I resisted it. I told my mom, "Mom, I'm having fun. I'm here with my friends, I love traveling, being a beauty pageant queen." But then two weeks later she called me, she said, "Did you know that if you move to the United States you could change your name and gender marker?" That was all I needed to hear. My mom also told me to put two E's in the spelling of my name. She also came with me when I had my surgery in Thailand at 19 years old. It's interesting, in some of the most rural cities in Thailand, they perform some of the most prestigious, safe and sophisticated surgery. At that time in the United States, you needed to have surgery before you could change your name and gender marker. So in 2001, I moved to San Francisco, and I remember looking at my California driver's license with the name Geena and gender marker F. That was a powerful moment. For some people, their I.D. is their license to drive or even to get a drink, but for me, that was my license to live, to feel dignified. All of a sudden, my fears were minimized. I felt that I could conquer my dream and move to New York and be a model. Many are not so fortunate. I think of this woman named Islan Nettles. She's from New York, she's a young woman who was courageously living her truth, but hatred ended her life. For most of my community, this is the reality in which we live. Our suicide rate is nine times higher than that of the general population. Every November 20, we have a global vigil for Transgender Day of Remembrance. I'm here at this stage because it's a long history of people who fought and stood up for injustice. This is Marsha P. Johnson and Sylvia Rivera. Today, this very moment, is my real coming out. I could no longer live my truth for and by myself. I want to do my best to help others live their truth without shame and terror. I am here, exposed, so that one day there will never be a need for a November 20 vigil. My deepest truth allowed me to accept who I am. Will you? Thank you very much. (Applause) Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. (Applause) Kathryn Schulz: Geena, one quick question for you. I'm wondering what you would say, especially to parents, but in a more broad way, to friends, to family, to anyone who finds themselves encountering a child or a person who is struggling with and uncomfortable with a gender that's being assigned them, what might you say to the family members of that person to help them become good and caring and kind family members to them? Geena Rocero: Sure. Well, first, really, I'm so blessed. The support system, with my mom especially, and my family, that in itself is just so powerful. I remember every time I would coach young trans women, I would mentor them, and sometimes when they would call me and tell me that their parents can't accept it, I would pick up that phone call and tell my mom, "Mom, can you call this woman?" And sometimes it works, sometimes it doesn't, so — But it's just, gender identity is in the core of our being, right? I mean, we're all assigned gender at birth, so what I'm trying to do is to have this conversation that sometimes that gender assignment doesn't match, and there should be a space that would allow people to self-identify, and that's a conversation that we should have with parents, with colleagues. The transgender movement, it's at the very beginning, to compare to how the gay movement started. There's still a lot of work that needs to be done. There should be an understanding. There should be a space of curiosity and asking questions, and I hope all of you guys will be my allies. KS: Thank you. That was so lovely. GR: Thank you. (Applause)

Looking deeply inside nature through the magnifying glass of science, designers extract principles, processes and materials that are forming the very basis of design methodology, from synthetic constructs that resemble biological materials to computational methods that emulate neural processes, nature is driving design. Design is also driving nature. In realms of genetics, regenerative medicine and synthetic biology, designers are growing novel technologies not foreseen or anticipated by nature. Bionics explores the interplay between biology and design. As you can see, my legs are bionic. Today I will tell human stories of bionic integration, how electromechanics attached to the body and implanted inside the body are beginning to bridge the gap between disability and ability, between human limitation and human potential. Bionics has defined my physicality. In 1982, both of my legs were amputated due to tissue damage from frostbite incurred during a mountain climbing accident. At that time, I didn't view my body as broken. I reasoned that a human being can never be broken. Technology is broken. Technology is inadequate. This simple but powerful idea was a call to arms to advance technology for the elimination of my own disability and ultimately the disability of others. I began by developing specialized limbs that allowed me to return to the vertical world of rock and ice climbing. I quickly realized that the artificial part of my body is malleable, able to take on any form, any function, a blank slate through which to create perhaps structures that could extend beyond biological capability. I made my height adjustable. I could be as short as five feet or as tall as I'd like. (Laughter) So when I was feeling badly about myself, insecure, I would jack my height up, but when I was feeling confident and suave, I would knock my height down a notch just to give the competition a chance. (Laughter) (Applause) Narrow, wedged feet allowed me to climb steep rock fissures where the human foot cannot penetrate, and spiked feet enabled me to climb vertical ice walls without ever experiencing muscle leg fatigue. Through technological innovation, I returned to my sport stronger and better. Technology had eliminated my disability and allowed me a new climbing prowess. As a young man, I imagined a future world where technology so advanced could rid the world of disability, a world in which neural implants would allow the visually impaired to see, a world in which the paralyzed could walk via body exoskeletons. Sadly, because of deficiencies in technology, disability is rampant in the world. This gentleman is missing three limbs. As a testimony to current technology, he is out of the wheelchair, but we need to do a better job in bionics to allow one day full rehabilitation for a person with this level of injury. At the MIT Media Lab, we've established the Center for Extreme Bionics. The mission of the center is to put forth fundamental science and technological capability that will allow the biomechatronic and regenerative repair of humans across a broad range of brain and body disabilities. Today, I'm going to tell you how my legs function, how they work, as a case in point for this center. Now, I made sure to shave my legs last night, because I knew I'd be showing them off. Bionics entails the engineering of extreme interfaces. There's three extreme interfaces in my bionic limbs: mechanical, how my limbs are attached to my biological body; dynamic, how they move like flesh and bone; and electrical, how they communicate with my nervous system. I'll begin with mechanical interface. In the area of design, we still do not understand how to attach devices to the body mechanically. It's extraordinary to me that in this day and age, one of the most mature, oldest technologies in the human timeline, the shoe, still gives us blisters. How can this be? We have no idea how to attach things to our bodies. This is the beautifully lyrical design work of Professor Neri Oxman at the MIT Media Lab, showing spatially varying exoskeletal impedances, shown here by color variation in this 3D-printed model. Imagine a future where clothing is stiff and soft where you need it, when you need it, for optimal support and flexibility, without ever causing discomfort. My bionic limbs are attached to my biological body via synthetic skins with stiffness variations that mirror my underlying tissue biomechanics. To achieve that mirroring, we first developed a mathematical model of my biological limb. To that end, we used imaging tools such as MRI to look inside my body to figure out the geometries and locations of various tissues. We also took robotic tools. Here's a 14-actuator circle that goes around the biological limb. The actuators come in, find the surface of the limb, measure its unloaded shape, and then they push on the tissues to measure tissue compliances at each anatomical point. We combine these imaging and robotic data to build a mathematical description of my biological limb, shown on the left. You see a bunch of points, or nodes. At each node, there's a color that represents tissue compliance. We then do a mathematical transformation to the design of the synthetic skin shown on the right, and we've discovered optimality is where the body is stiff, the synthetic skin should be soft, where the body is soft, the synthetic skin is stiff, and this mirroring occurs across all tissue compliances. With this framework, we produced bionic limbs that are the most comfortable limbs I've ever worn. Clearly in the future, our clothing, our shoes, our braces, our prostheses, will no longer be designed and manufactured using artisan strategies, but rather data-driven quantitative frameworks. In that future, our shoes will no longer give us blisters. We're also embedding sensing and smart materials into the synthetic skins. This is a material developed by SRI International, California. Under electrostatic effect, it changes stiffness. So under zero voltage, the material is compliant. It's floppy like paper. Then the button's pushed, a voltage is applied, and it becomes stiff as a board. We embed this material into the synthetic skin that attaches my bionic limb to my biological body. When I walk here, it's no voltage. My interface is soft and compliant. The button's pushed, voltage is applied, and it stiffens, offering me a greater maneuverability of the bionic limb. We're also building exoskeletons. This exoskeleton becomes stiff and soft in just the right areas of the running cycle to protect the biological joints from high impacts and degradation. In the future, we'll all be wearing exoskeletons in common activities such as running. Next, dynamic interface. How do my bionic limbs move like flesh and bone? At my MIT lab, we study how humans with normal physiologies stand, walk and run. What are the muscles doing, and how are they controlled by the spinal cord? This basic science motivates what we build. We're building bionic ankles, knees and hips. We're building body parts from the ground up. The bionic limbs that I'm wearing are called BiOMs. They've been fitted to nearly 1,000 patients, 400 of which have been U.S. wounded soldiers. How does it work? At heel strike, under computer control, the system controls stiffness to attenuate the shock of the limb hitting the ground. Then at mid-stance, the bionic limb outputs high torques and powers to lift the person into the walking stride, comparable to how muscles work in the calf region. This bionic propulsion is very important clinically to patients. So, on the left you see the bionic device worn by a lady -- on the right a passive device worn by the same lady that fails to emulate normal muscle function -- enabling her to do something everyone should be able to do, go up and down their steps at home. Bionics also allows for extraordinary athletic feats. Here's a gentleman running up a rocky pathway. This is Steve Martin, not the comedian, who lost his legs in a bomb blast in Afghanistan. We're also building exoskeletal structures using these same principles that wrap around a biological limb. This gentleman does not have any leg condition, any disability. He has a normal physiology, so these exoskeletons are applying muscle-like torques and powers so that his own muscles need not apply those torques and powers. This is the first exoskeleton in history that actually augments human walking. It significantly reduces metabolic cost. It's so profound in its augmentation that when a normal, healthy person wears the device for 40 minutes and then takes it off, their own biological legs feel ridiculously heavy and awkward. We're beginning the age in which machines attached to our bodies will make us stronger and faster and more efficient. Moving on to electrical interface, how do my bionic limbs communicate with my nervous system? Across my residual limb are electrodes that measure the electrical pulse of my muscles. That's communicated to the bionic limb, so when I think about moving my phantom limb, the robot tracks those movement desires. This diagram shows fundamentally how the bionic limb is controlled, so we model the missing biological limb, and we've discovered what reflexes occurred, how the reflexes of the spinal cord are controlling the muscles, and that capability is embedded in the chips of the bionic limb. What we've done, then, is we modulate the sensitivity of the reflex, the modeled spinal reflex, with the neural signal, so when I relax my muscles in my residual limb, I get very little torque and power, but the more I fire my muscles, the more torque I get, and I can even run. And that was the first demonstration of a running gait under neural command. Feels great. (Applause) We want to go a step further. We want to actually close the loop between the human and the bionic external limb. We're doing experiments where we're growing nerves, transected nerves, through channels, or micro-channel arrays. On the other side of the channel, the nerve then attaches to cells, skin cells and muscle cells. In the motor channels we can sense how the person wishes to move. That can be sent out wirelessly to the bionic limb, then sensors on the bionic limb can be converted to stimulations in adjacent channels, sensory channels. So, when this is fully developed and for human use, persons like myself will not only have synthetic limbs that move like flesh and bone, but actually feel like flesh and bone. This video shows Lisa Mallette shortly after being fitted with two bionic limbs. Indeed, bionics is making a profound difference in people's lives. (Video) Lisa Mallette: Oh my God. Oh my God, I can't believe it. It's just like I've got a real leg. Now, don't start running. Man: Now turn around, and do the same thing walking up. Walk up, get on your heel to toe, like you would normally just walk on level ground. Try to walk right up the hill. LM: Oh my God. Man: Is it pushing you up? LM: Yes! I'm not even -- I can't even describe it. Man: It's pushing you right up. Hugh Herr: Next week, I'm visiting the center's — (Applause) Thank you, thank you. Thank you. Next week I'm visiting the Center for Medicare and Medicaid Services, and I'm going to try to convince CMS to grant appropriate code language and pricing so this technology can be made available to the patients that need it. Thank you. (Applause) It's not well appreciated, but over half of the world's population suffers from some form of cognitive, emotional, sensory or motor condition, and because of poor technology, too often, conditions result in disability and a poorer quality of life. Basic levels of physiological function should be a part of our human rights. Every person should have the right to live life without disability if they so choose -- the right to live life without severe depression; the right to see a loved one in the case of seeing impaired; or the right to walk or to dance, in the case of limb paralysis or limb amputation. As a society, we can achieve these human rights if we accept the proposition that humans are not disabled. A person can never be broken. Our built environment, our technologies, are broken and disabled. We the people need not accept our limitations, but can transcend disability through technological innovation. Indeed, through fundamental advances in bionics in this century, we will set the technological foundation for an enhanced human experience, and we will end disability. I'd like to finish up with one more story, a beautiful story, the story of Adrianne Haslet-Davis. Adrianne lost her left leg in the Boston terrorist attack. I met Adrianne when this photo was taken at Spaulding Rehabilitation Hospital. Adrianne is a dancer, a ballroom dancer. Adrianne breathes and lives dance. It is her expression. It is her art form. Naturally, when she lost her limb in the Boston terrorist attack, she wanted to return to the dance floor. After meeting her and driving home in my car, I thought, I'm an MIT professor. I have resources. Let's build her a bionic limb to enable her to go back to her life of dance. I brought in MIT scientists with expertise in prosthetics, robotics, machine learning and biomechanics, and over a 200-day research period, we studied dance. We brought in dancers with biological limbs, and we studied how do they move, what forces do they apply on the dance floor, and we took those data and we put forth fundamental principles of dance, reflexive dance capability, and we embedded that intelligence into the bionic limb. Bionics is not only about making people stronger and faster. Our expression, our humanity can be embedded into electromechanics. It was 3.5 seconds between the bomb blasts in the Boston terrorist attack. In 3.5 seconds, the criminals and cowards took Adrianne off the dance floor. In 200 days, we put her back. We will not be intimidated, brought down, diminished, conquered or stopped by acts of violence. (Applause) Ladies and gentlemen, please allow me to introduce Adrianne Haslet-Davis, her first performance since the attack. She's dancing with Christian Lightner. (Applause) (Music: "Ring My Bell" performed by Enrique Iglesias) (Applause) Ladies and gentlemen, members of the research team, Elliott Rouse and Nathan Villagaray-Carski. Elliott and Nathan. (Applause)

My job at Twitter is to ensure user trust, protect user rights and keep users safe, both from each other and, at times, from themselves. Let's talk about what scale looks like at Twitter. Back in January 2009, we saw more than two million new tweets each day on the platform. January 2014, more than 500 million. We were seeing two million tweets in less than six minutes. That's a 24,900-percent increase. Now, the vast majority of activity on Twitter puts no one in harm's way. There's no risk involved. My job is to root out and prevent activity that might. Sounds straightforward, right? You might even think it'd be easy, given that I just said the vast majority of activity on Twitter puts no one in harm's way. Why spend so much time searching for potential calamities in innocuous activities? Given the scale that Twitter is at, a one-in-a-million chance happens 500 times a day. It's the same for other companies dealing at this sort of scale. For us, edge cases, those rare situations that are unlikely to occur, are more like norms. Say 99.999 percent of tweets pose no risk to anyone. There's no threat involved. Maybe people are documenting travel landmarks like Australia's Heart Reef, or tweeting about a concert they're attending, or sharing pictures of cute baby animals. After you take out that 99.999 percent, that tiny percentage of tweets remaining works out to roughly 150,000 per month. The sheer scale of what we're dealing with makes for a challenge. You know what else makes my role particularly challenging? People do weird things. (Laughter) And I have to figure out what they're doing, why, and whether or not there's risk involved, often without much in terms of context or background. I'm going to show you some examples that I've run into during my time at Twitter -- these are all real examples — of situations that at first seemed cut and dried, but the truth of the matter was something altogether different. The details have been changed to protect the innocent and sometimes the guilty. We'll start off easy. ["Yo bitch"] If you saw a Tweet that only said this, you might think to yourself, "That looks like abuse." After all, why would you want to receive the message, "Yo, bitch." Now, I try to stay relatively hip to the latest trends and memes, so I knew that "yo, bitch" was also often a common greeting between friends, as well as being a popular "Breaking Bad" reference. I will admit that I did not expect to encounter a fourth use case. It turns out it is also used on Twitter when people are role-playing as dogs. (Laughter) And in fact, in that case, it's not only not abusive, it's technically just an accurate greeting. (Laughter) So okay, determining whether or not something is abusive without context, definitely hard. Let's look at spam. Here's an example of an account engaged in classic spammer behavior, sending the exact same message to thousands of people. While this is a mockup I put together using my account, we see accounts doing this all the time. Seems pretty straightforward. We should just automatically suspend accounts engaging in this kind of behavior. Turns out there's some exceptions to that rule. Turns out that that message could also be a notification you signed up for that the International Space Station is passing overhead because you wanted to go outside and see if you could see it. You're not going to get that chance if we mistakenly suspend the account thinking it's spam. Okay. Let's make the stakes higher. Back to my account, again exhibiting classic behavior. This time it's sending the same message and link. This is often indicative of something called phishing, somebody trying to steal another person's account information by directing them to another website. That's pretty clearly not a good thing. We want to, and do, suspend accounts engaging in that kind of behavior. So why are the stakes higher for this? Well, this could also be a bystander at a rally who managed to record a video of a police officer beating a non-violent protester who's trying to let the world know what's happening. We don't want to gamble on potentially silencing that crucial speech by classifying it as spam and suspending it. That means we evaluate hundreds of parameters when looking at account behaviors, and even then, we can still get it wrong and have to reevaluate. Now, given the sorts of challenges I'm up against, it's crucial that I not only predict but also design protections for the unexpected. And that's not just an issue for me, or for Twitter, it's an issue for you. It's an issue for anybody who's building or creating something that you think is going to be amazing and will let people do awesome things. So what do I do? I pause and I think, how could all of this go horribly wrong? I visualize catastrophe. And that's hard. There's a sort of inherent cognitive dissonance in doing that, like when you're writing your wedding vows at the same time as your prenuptial agreement. (Laughter) But you still have to do it, particularly if you're marrying 500 million tweets per day. What do I mean by "visualize catastrophe?" I try to think of how something as benign and innocuous as a picture of a cat could lead to death, and what to do to prevent that. Which happens to be my next example. This is my cat, Eli. We wanted to give users the ability to add photos to their tweets. A picture is worth a thousand words. You only get 140 characters. You add a photo to your tweet, look at how much more content you've got now. There's all sorts of great things you can do by adding a photo to a tweet. My job isn't to think of those. It's to think of what could go wrong. How could this picture lead to my death? Well, here's one possibility. There's more in that picture than just a cat. There's geodata. When you take a picture with your smartphone or digital camera, there's a lot of additional information saved along in that image. In fact, this image also contains the equivalent of this, more specifically, this. Sure, it's not likely that someone's going to try to track me down and do me harm based upon image data associated with a picture I took of my cat, but I start by assuming the worst will happen. That's why, when we launched photos on Twitter, we made the decision to strip that geodata out. (Applause) If I start by assuming the worst and work backwards, I can make sure that the protections we build work for both expected and unexpected use cases. Given that I spend my days and nights imagining the worst that could happen, it wouldn't be surprising if my worldview was gloomy. (Laughter) It's not. The vast majority of interactions I see -- and I see a lot, believe me -- are positive, people reaching out to help or to connect or share information with each other. It's just that for those of us dealing with scale, for those of us tasked with keeping people safe, we have to assume the worst will happen, because for us, a one-in-a-million chance is pretty good odds. Thank you. (Applause)

A herd of wildebeests, a shoal of fish, a flock of birds. Many animals gather in large groups that are among the most wonderful spectacles in the natural world. But why do these groups form? The common answers include things like seeking safety in numbers or hunting in packs or gathering to mate or breed, and all of these explanations, while often true, make a huge assumption about animal behavior, that the animals are in control of their own actions, that they are in charge of their bodies. And that is often not the case. This is Artemia, a brine shrimp. You probably know it better as a sea monkey. It's small, and it typically lives alone, but it can gather in these large red swarms that span for meters, and these form because of a parasite. These shrimp are infected with a tapeworm. A tapeworm is effectively a long, living gut with genitals at one end and a hooked mouth at the other. As a freelance journalist, I sympathize. (Laughter) The tapeworm drains nutrients from Artemia's body, but it also does other things. It castrates them, it changes their color from transparent to bright red, it makes them live longer, and as biologist Nicolas Rode has found, it makes them swim in groups. Why? Because the tapeworm, like many other parasites, has a complicated life cycle involving many different hosts. The shrimp are just one step on its journey. Its ultimate destination is this, the greater flamingo. Only in a flamingo can the tapeworm reproduce, so to get there, it manipulates its shrimp hosts into forming these conspicuous colored swarms that are easier for a flamingo to spot and to devour, and that is the secret of the Artemia swarm. They aren't sociable through their own volition, but because they are being controlled. It's not safety in numbers. It's actually the exact opposite. The tapeworm hijacks their brains and their bodies, turning them into vehicles for getting itself into a flamingo. And here is another example of a parasitic manipulation. This is a suicidal cricket. This cricket swallowed the larvae of a Gordian worm, or horsehair worm. The worm grew to adult size within it, but it needs to get into water in order to mate, and it does that by releasing proteins that addle the cricket's brain, causing it to behave erratically. When the cricket nears a body of water, such as this swimming pool, it jumps in and drowns, and the worm wriggles out of its suicidal corpse. Crickets are really roomy. Who knew? The tapeworm and the Gordian worm are not alone. They are part of an entire cavalcade of mind-controlling parasites, of fungi, viruses, and worms and insects and more that all specialize in subverting and overriding the wills of their hosts. Now, I first learned about this way of life through David Attenborough's "Trials of Life" about 20 years ago, and then later through a wonderful book called "Parasite Rex" by my friend Carl Zimmer. And I've been writing about these creatures ever since. Few topics in biology enthrall me more. It's like the parasites have subverted my own brain. Because after all, they are always compelling and they are delightfully macabre. When you write about parasites, your lexicon swells with phrases like "devoured alive" and "bursts out of its body." (Laughter) But there's more to it than that. I'm a writer, and fellow writers in the audience will know that we love stories. Parasites invite us to resist the allure of obvious stories. Their world is one of plot twists and unexpected explanations. Why, for example, does this caterpillar start violently thrashing about when another insect gets close to it and those white cocoons that it seems to be standing guard over? Is it maybe protecting its siblings? No. This caterpillar was attacked by a parasitic wasp which laid eggs inside it. The eggs hatched and the young wasps devoured the caterpillar alive before bursting out of its body. See what I mean? Now, the caterpillar didn't die. Some of the wasps seemed to stay behind and controlled it into defending their siblings which are metamorphosing into adults within those cocoons. This caterpillar is a head-banging zombie bodyguard defending the offspring of the creature that killed it. (Applause) We have a lot to get through. I only have 13 minutes. (Laughter) Now, some of you are probably just desperately clawing for some solace in the idea that these things are oddities of the natural world, that they are outliers, and that point of view is understandable, because by their nature, parasites are quite small and they spend a lot of their time inside the bodies of other things. They're easy to overlook, but that doesn't mean that they aren't important. A few years back, a man called Kevin Lafferty took a group of scientists into three Californian estuaries and they pretty much weighed and dissected and recorded everything they could find, and what they found were parasites in extreme abundance. Especially common were trematodes, tiny worms that specialize in castrating their hosts like this unfortunate snail. Now, a single trematode is tiny, microscopic, but collectively they weighed as much as all the fish in the estuaries and three to nine times more than all the birds. And remember the Gordian worm that I showed you, the cricket thing? One Japanese scientist called Takuya Sato found that in one stream, these things drive so many crickets and grasshoppers into the water that the drowned insects make up some 60 percent of the diet of local trout. Manipulation is not an oddity. It is a critical and common part of the world around us, and scientists have now found hundreds of examples of such manipulators, and more excitingly, they're starting to understand exactly how these creatures control their hosts. And this is one of my favorite examples. This is Ampulex compressa, the emerald cockroach wasp, and it is a truth universally acknowledged that an emerald cockroach wasp in possession of some fertilized eggs must be in want of a cockroach. When she finds one, she stabs it with a stinger that is also a sense organ. This discovery came out three weeks ago. She stabs it with a stinger that is a sense organ equipped with small sensory bumps that allow her to feel the distinctive texture of a roach's brain. So like a person blindly rooting about in a bag, she finds the brain, and she injects it with venom into two very specific clusters of neurons. Israeli scientists Frederic Libersat and Ram Gal found that the venom is a very specific chemical weapon. It doesn't kill the roach, nor does it sedate it. The roach could walk away or fly or run if it chose to, but it doesn't choose to, because the venom nixes its motivation to walk, and only that. The wasp basically un-checks the escape-from-danger box in the roach's operating system, allowing her to lead her helpless victim back to her lair by its antennae like a person walking a dog. And once there, she lays an egg on it, egg hatches, devoured alive, bursts out of body, yadda yadda yadda, you know the drill. (Laughter) (Applause) Now I would argue that, once stung, the cockroach isn't a roach anymore. It's more of an extension of the wasp, just like the cricket was an extension of the Gordian worm. These hosts won't get to survive or reproduce. They have as much control over their own fates as my car. Once the parasites get in, the hosts don't get a say. Now humans, of course, are no stranger to manipulation. We take drugs to shift the chemistries of our brains and to change our moods, and what are arguments or advertising or big ideas if not an attempt to influence someone else's mind? But our attempts at doing this are crude and blundering compared to the fine-grained specificity of the parasites. Don Draper only wishes he was as elegant and precise as the emerald cockroach wasp. Now, I think this is part of what makes parasites so sinister and so compelling. We place such a premium on our free will and our independence that the prospect of losing those qualities to forces unseen informs many of our deepest societal fears. Orwellian dystopias and shadowy cabals and mind-controlling supervillains -- these are tropes that fill our darkest fiction, but in nature, they happen all the time. Which leads me to an obvious and disquieting question: Are there dark, sinister parasites that are influencing our behavior without us knowing about it, besides the NSA? If there are any — (Laughter) (Applause) I've got a red dot on my forehead now, don't I? (Laughter) If there are any, this is a good candidate for them. This is Toxoplasma gondii, or Toxo, for short, because the terrifying creature always deserves a cute nickname. Toxo infects mammals, a wide variety of mammals, but it can only sexually reproduce in a cat. And scientists like Joanne Webster have shown that if Toxo gets into a rat or a mouse, it turns the rodent into a cat-seeking missile. If the infected rat smells the delightful odor of cat piss, it runs towards the source of the smell rather than the more sensible direction of away. The cat eats the rat. Toxo gets to have sex. It's a classic tale of Eat, Prey, Love. (Laughter) (Applause) You're very charitable, generous people. Hi, Elizabeth, I loved your talk. How does the parasite control its host in this way? We don't really know. We know that Toxo releases an enzyme that makes dopamine, a substance involved in reward and motivation. We know it targets certain parts of a rodent's brain, including those involved in sexual arousal. But how those puzzle pieces fit together is not immediately clear. What is clear is that this thing is a single cell. This has no nervous system. It has no consciousness. It doesn't even have a body. But it's manipulating a mammal? We are mammals. We are more intelligent than a mere rat, to be sure, but our brains have the same basic structure, the same types of cells, the same chemicals running through them, and the same parasites. Estimates vary a lot, but some figures suggest that one in three people around the world have Toxo in their brains. Now typically, this doesn't lead to any overt illness. The parasite holds up in a dormant state for a long period of time. But there's some evidence that those people who are carriers score slightly differently on personality questionnaires than other people, that they have a slightly higher risk of car accidents, and there's some evidence that people with schizophrenia are more likely to be infected. Now, I think this evidence is still inconclusive, and even among Toxo researchers, opinion is divided as to whether the parasite is truly influencing our behavior. But given the widespread nature of such manipulations, it would be completely implausible for humans to be the only species that weren't similarly affected. And I think that this capacity to constantly subvert our way of thinking about the world makes parasites amazing. They're constantly inviting us to look at the natural world sideways, and to ask if the behaviors we're seeing, whether they're simple and obvious or baffling and puzzling, are not the results of individuals acting through their own accord but because they are being bent to the control of something else. And while that idea may be disquieting, and while parasites' habits may be very grisly, I think that ability to surprise us makes them as wonderful and as charismatic as any panda or butterfly or dolphin. At the end of "On the Origin of Species," Charles Darwin writes about the grandeur of life, and of endless forms most beautiful and most wonderful, and I like to think he could easily have been talking about a tapeworm that makes shrimp sociable or a wasp that takes cockroaches for walks. But perhaps, that's just a parasite talking. Thank you. (Applause)

Good morning. When I was a little boy, I had an experience that changed my life, and is in fact why I'm here today. That one moment profoundly affected how I think about art, design and engineering. As background, I was fortunate enough to grow up in a family of loving and talented artists in one of the world's great cities. My dad, John Ferren, who died when I was 15, was an artist by both passion and profession, as is my mom, Rae. He was one of the New York School abstract expressionists who, together with his contemporaries, invented American modern art, and contributed to moving the American zeitgeist towards modernism in the 20th century. Isn't it remarkable that, after thousands of years of people doing mostly representational art, that modern art, comparatively speaking, is about 15 minutes old, yet now pervasive. As with many other important innovations, those radical ideas required no new technology, just fresh thinking and a willingness to experiment, plus resiliency in the face of near-universal criticism and rejection. In our home, art was everywhere. It was like oxygen, around us and necessary for life. As I watched him paint, Dad taught me that art was not about being decorative, but was a different way of communicating ideas, and in fact one that could bridge the worlds of knowledge and insight. Given this rich artistic environment, you'd assume that I would have been compelled to go into the family business, but no. I followed the path of most kids who are genetically programmed to make their parents crazy. I had no interest in becoming an artist, certainly not a painter. What I did love was electronics and machines -- taking them apart, building new ones, and making them work. Fortunately, my family also had engineers in it, and with my parents, these were my first role models. What they all had in common was they worked very, very hard. My grandpa owned and operated a sheet metal kitchen cabinet factory in Brooklyn. On weekends, we would go together to Cortlandt Street, which was New York City's radio row. There we would explore massive piles of surplus electronics, and for a few bucks bring home treasures like Norden bombsights and parts from the first IBM tube-based computers. I found these objects both useful and fascinating. I learned about engineering and how things worked, not at school but by taking apart and studying these fabulously complex devices. I did this for hours every day, apparently avoiding electrocution. Life was good. However, every summer, sadly, the machines got left behind while my parents and I traveled overseas to experience history, art and design. We visited the great museums and historic buildings of both Europe and the Middle East, but to encourage my growing interest in science and technology, they would simply drop me off in places like the London Science Museum, where I would wander endlessly for hours by myself studying the history of science and technology. Then, when I was about nine years old, we went to Rome. On one particularly hot summer day, we visited a drum-shaped building that from the outside was not particularly interesting. My dad said it was called the Pantheon, a temple for all of the gods. It didn't look all that special from the outside, as I said, but when we walked inside, I was immediately struck by three things: First of all, it was pleasantly cool despite the oppressive heat outside. It was very dark, the only source of light being an big open hole in the roof. Dad explained that this wasn't a big open hole, but it was called the oculus, an eye to the heavens. And there was something about this place, I didn't know why, that just felt special. As we walked to the center of the room, I looked up at the heavens through the oculus. This was the first church that I'd been to that provided an unrestricted view between God and man. But I wondered, what about when it rained? Dad may have called this an oculus, but it was, in fact, a big hole in the roof. I looked down and saw floor drains had been cut into the stone floor. As I became more accustomed to the dark, I was able to make out details of the floor and the surrounding walls. No big deal here, just the same statuary stuff that we'd seen all over Rome. In fact, it looked like the Appian Way marble salesman showed up with his sample book, showed it to Hadrian, and Hadrian said, "We'll take all of it." (Laughter) But the ceiling was amazing. It looked like a Buckminster Fuller geodesic dome. I'd seen these before, and Bucky was friends with my dad. It was modern, high-tech, impressive, a huge 142-foot clear span which, not coincidentally, was exactly its height. I loved this place. It was really beautiful and unlike anything I'd ever seen before, so I asked my dad, "When was this built?" He said, "About 2,000 years ago." And I said, "No, I mean, the roof." You see, I assumed that this was a modern roof that had been put on because the original was destroyed in some long-past war. He said, "It's the original roof." That moment changed my life, and I can remember it as if it were yesterday. For the first time, I realized people were smart 2,000 years ago. (Laughter) This had never crossed my mind. I mean, to me, the pyramids at Giza, we visited those the year before, and sure they're impressive, nice enough design, but look, give me an unlimited budget, 20,000 to 40,000 laborers, and about 10 to 20 years to cut and drag stone blocks across the countryside, and I'll build you pyramids too. But no amount of brute force gets you the dome of the Pantheon, not 2,000 years ago, nor today. And incidentally, it is still the largest unreinforced concrete dome that's ever been built. To build the Pantheon took some miracles. By miracles, I mean things that are technically barely possible, very high-risk, and might not be actually accomplishable at this moment in time, certainly not by you. For example, here are some of the Pantheon's miracles. To make it even structurally possible, they had to invent super-strong concrete, and to control weight, varied the density of the aggregate as they worked their way up the dome. For strength and lightness, the dome structure used five rings of coffers, each of diminishing size, which imparts a dramatic forced perspective to the design. It was wonderfully cool inside because of its huge thermal mass, natural convection of air rising up through the oculus, and a Venturi effect when wind blows across the top of the building. I discovered for the first time that light itself has substance. The shaft of light beaming through the oculus was both beautiful and palpable, and I realized for the first time that light could be designed. Further, that of all of the forms of design, visual design, they were all kind of irrelevant without it, because without light, you can't see any of them. I also realized that I wasn't the first person to think that this place was really special. It survived gravity, barbarians, looters, developers and the ravages of time to become what I believe is the longest continuously occupied building in history. Largely because of that visit, I came to understand that, contrary to what I was being told in school, the worlds of art and design were not, in fact, incompatible with science and engineering. I realized, when combined, you could create things that were amazing that couldn't be done in either domain alone. But in school, with few exceptions, they were treated as separate worlds, and they still are. My teachers told me that I had to get serious and focus on one or the other. However, urging me to specialize only caused me to really appreciate those polymaths like Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci, Benjamin Franklin, people who did exactly the opposite. And this led me to embrace and want to be in both worlds. So then how do these projects of unprecedented creative vision and technical complexity like the Pantheon actually happen? Someone themselves, perhaps Hadrian, needed a brilliant creative vision. They also needed the storytelling and leadership skills necessary to fund and execute it, and a mastery of science and technology with the ability and knowhow to push existing innovations even farther. It is my belief that to create these rare game changers requires you to pull off at least five miracles. The problem is, no matter how talented, rich or smart you are, you only get one to one and a half miracles. That's it. That's the quota. Then you run out of time, money, enthusiasm, whatever. Remember, most people can't even imagine one of these technical miracles, and you need at least five to make a Pantheon. In my experience, these rare visionaries who can think across the worlds of art, design and engineering have the ability to notice when others have provided enough of the miracles to bring the goal within reach. Driven by the clarity of their vision, they summon the courage and determination to deliver the remaining miracles and they often take what other people think to be insurmountable obstacles and turn them into features. Take the oculus of the Pantheon. By insisting that it be in the design, it meant you couldn't use much of the structural technology that had been developed for Roman arches. However, by instead embracing it and rethinking weight and stress distribution, they came up with a design that only works if there's a big hole in the roof. That done, you now get the aesthetic and design benefits of light, cooling and that critical direct connection with the heavens. Not bad. These people not only believed that the impossible can be done, but that it must be done. Enough ancient history. What are some recent examples of innovations that combine creative design and technological advances in a way so profound that they will be remembered a thousand years from now? Well, putting a man on the moon was a good one, and returning him safely to Earth wasn't bad either. Talk about one giant leap: It's hard to imagine a more profound moment in human history than when we first left our world to set foot on another. So what came after the moon? One is tempted to say that today's pantheon is the Internet, but I actually think that's quite wrong, or at least it's only part of the story. The Internet isn't a Pantheon. It's more like the invention of concrete: important, absolutely necessary to build the Pantheon, and enduring, but entirely insufficient by itself. However, just as the technology of concrete was critical in realization of the Pantheon, new designers will use the technologies of the Internet to create novel concepts that will endure. The smartphone is a perfect example. Soon the majority of people on the planet will have one, and the idea of connecting everyone to both knowledge and each other will endure. So what's next? What imminent advance will be the equivalent of the Pantheon? Thinking about this, I rejected many very plausible and dramatic breakthroughs to come, such as curing cancer. Why? Because Pantheons are anchored in designed physical objects, ones that inspire by simply seeing and experiencing them, and will continue to do so indefinitely. It is a different kind of language, like art. These other vital contributions that extend life and relieve suffering are, of course, critical, and fantastic, but they're part of the continuum of our overall knowledge and technology, like the Internet. So what is next? Perhaps counterintuitively, I'm guessing it's a visionary idea from the late 1930s that's been revived every decade since: autonomous vehicles. Now you're thinking, give me a break. How can a fancy version of cruise control be profound? Look, much of our world has been designed around roads and transportation. These were as essential to the success of the Roman Empire as the interstate highway system to the prosperity and development of the United States. Today, these roads that interconnect our world are dominated by cars and trucks that have remained largely unchanged for 100 years. Although perhaps not obvious today, autonomous vehicles will be the key technology that enables us to redesign our cities and, by extension, civilization. Here's why: Once they become ubiquitous, each year, these vehicles will save tens of thousands of lives in the United States alone and a million globally. Automotive energy consumption and air pollution will be cut dramatically. Much of the road congestion in and out of our cities will disappear. They will enable compelling new concepts in how we design cities, work, and the way we live. We will get where we're going faster and society will recapture vast amounts of lost productivity now spent sitting in traffic basically polluting. But why now? Why do we think this is ready? Because over the last 30 years, people from outside the automotive industry have spent countless billions creating the needed miracles, but for entirely different purposes. It took folks like DARPA, universities, and companies completely outside of the automotive industry to notice that if you were clever about it, autonomy could be done now. So what are the five miracles needed for autonomous vehicles? One, you need to know where you are and exactly what time it is. This was solved neatly by the GPS system, Global Positioning System, that the U.S. Government put in place. You need to know where all the roads are, what the rules are, and where you're going. The various needs of personal navigation systems, in-car navigation systems, and web-based maps address this. You must have near-continuous communication with high-performance computing networks and with others nearby to understand their intent. The wireless technologies developed for mobile devices, with some minor modifications, are completely suitable to solve this. You'll probably want some restricted roadways to get started that both society and its lawyers agree are safe to use for this. This will start with the HOV lanes and move from there. But finally, you need to recognize people, signs and objects. Machine vision, special sensors, and high-performance computing can do a lot of this, but it turns out a lot is not good enough when your family is on board. Occasionally, humans will need to do sense-making. For this, you might actually have to wake up your passenger and ask them what the hell that big lump is in the middle of the road. Not so bad, and it will give us a sense of purpose in this new world. Besides, once the first drivers explain to their confused car that the giant chicken at the fork in the road is actually a restaurant, and it's okay to keep driving, every other car on the surface of the Earth will know that from that point on. Five miracles, mostly delivered, and now you just need a clear vision of a better world filled with autonomous vehicles with seductively beautiful and new functional designs plus a lot of money and hard work to bring it home. The beginning is now only a handful of years away, and I predict that autonomous vehicles will permanently change our world over the next several decades. In conclusion, I've come to believe that the ingredients for the next Pantheons are all around us, just waiting for visionary people with the broad knowledge, multidisciplinary skills, and intense passion to harness them to make their dreams a reality. But these people don't spontaneously pop into existence. They need to be nurtured and encouraged from when they're little kids. We need to love them and help them discover their passions. We need to encourage them to work hard and help them understand that failure is a necessary ingredient for success, as is perseverance. We need to help them to find their own role models, and give them the confidence to believe in themselves and to believe that anything is possible, and just as my grandpa did when he took me shopping for surplus, and just as my parents did when they took me to science museums, we need to encourage them to find their own path, even if it's very different from our own. But a cautionary note: We also need to periodically pry them away from their modern miracles, the computers, phones, tablets, game machines and TVs, take them out into the sunlight so they can experience both the natural and design wonders of our world, our planet and our civilization. If we don't, they won't understand what these precious things are that someday they will be resopnsible for protecting and improving. We also need them to understand something that doesn't seem adequately appreciated in our increasingly tech-dependent world, that art and design are not luxuries, nor somehow incompatible with science and engineering. They are in fact essential to what makes us special. Someday, if you get the chance, perhaps you can take your kids to the actual Pantheon, as we will our daughter Kira, to experience firsthand the power of that astonishing design, which on one otherwise unremarkable day in Rome, reached 2,000 years into the future to set the course for my life. Thank you. (Applause)

In many patriarchal societies and tribal societies, fathers are usually known by their sons, but I'm one of the few fathers who is known by his daughter, and I am proud of it. (Applause) Malala started her campaign for education and stood for her rights in 2007, and when her efforts were honored in 2011, and she was given the national youth peace prize, and she became a very famous, very popular young girl of her country. Before that, she was my daughter, but now I am her father. Ladies and gentlemen, if we glance to human history, the story of women is the story of injustice, inequality, violence and exploitation. You see, in patriarchal societies, right from the very beginning, when a girl is born, her birth is not celebrated. She is not welcomed, neither by father nor by mother. The neighborhood comes and commiserates with the mother, and nobody congratulates the father. And a mother is very uncomfortable for having a girl child. When she gives birth to the first girl child, first daughter, she is sad. When she gives birth to the second daughter, she is shocked, and in the expectation of a son, when she gives birth to a third daughter, she feels guilty like a criminal. Not only the mother suffers, but the daughter, the newly born daughter, when she grows old, she suffers too. At the age of five, while she should be going to school, she stays at home and her brothers are admitted in a school. Until the age of 12, somehow, she has a good life. She can have fun. She can play with her friends in the streets, and she can move around in the streets like a butterfly. But when she enters her teens, when she becomes 13 years old, she is forbidden to go out of her home without a male escort. She is confined under the four walls of her home. She is no more a free individual. She becomes the so-called honor of her father and of her brothers and of her family, and if she transgresses the code of that so-called honor, she could even be killed. And it is also interesting that this so-called code of honor, it does not only affect the life of a girl, it also affects the life of the male members of the family. I know a family of seven sisters and one brother, and that one brother, he has migrated to the Gulf countries, to earn a living for his seven sisters and parents, because he thinks that it will be humiliating if his seven sisters learn a skill and they go out of the home and earn some livelihood. So this brother, he sacrifices the joys of his life and the happiness of his sisters at the altar of so-called honor. And there is one more norm of the patriarchal societies that is called obedience. A good girl is supposed to be very quiet, very humble and very submissive. It is the criteria. The role model good girl should be very quiet. She is supposed to be silent and she is supposed to accept the decisions of her father and mother and the decisions of elders, even if she does not like them. If she is married to a man she doesn't like or if she is married to an old man, she has to accept, because she does not want to be dubbed as disobedient. If she is married very early, she has to accept. Otherwise, she will be called disobedient. And what happens at the end? In the words of a poetess, she is wedded, bedded, and then she gives birth to more sons and daughters. And it is the irony of the situation that this mother, she teaches the same lesson of obedience to her daughter and the same lesson of honor to her sons. And this vicious cycle goes on, goes on. Ladies and gentlemen, this plight of millions of women could be changed if we think differently, if women and men think differently, if men and women in the tribal and patriarchal societies in the developing countries, if they can break a few norms of family and society, if they can abolish the discriminatory laws of the systems in their states, which go against the basic human rights of the women. Dear brothers and sisters, when Malala was born, and for the first time, believe me, I don't like newborn children, to be honest, but when I went and I looked into her eyes, believe me, I got extremely honored. And long before she was born, I thought about her name, and I was fascinated with a heroic legendary freedom fighter in Afghanistan. Her name was Malalai of Maiwand, and I named my daughter after her. A few days after Malala was born, my daughter was born, my cousin came -- and it was a coincidence -- he came to my home and he brought a family tree, a family tree of the Yousafzai family, and when I looked at the family tree, it traced back to 300 years of our ancestors. But when I looked, all were men, and I picked my pen, drew a line from my name, and wrote, "Malala." And when she grow old, when she was four and a half years old, I admitted her in my school. You will be asking, then, why should I mention about the admission of a girl in a school? Yes, I must mention it. It may be taken for granted in Canada, in America, in many developed countries, but in poor countries, in patriarchal societies, in tribal societies, it's a big event for the life of girl. Enrollment in a school means recognition of her identity and her name. Admission in a school means that she has entered the world of dreams and aspirations where she can explore her potentials for her future life. I have five sisters, and none of them could go to school, and you will be astonished, two weeks before, when I was filling out the Canadian visa form, and I was filling out the family part of the form, I could not recall the surnames of some of my sisters. And the reason was that I have never, never seen the names of my sisters written on any document. That was the reason that I valued my daughter. What my father could not give to my sisters and to his daughters, I thought I must change it. I used to appreciate the intelligence and the brilliance of my daughter. I encouraged her to sit with me when my friends used to come. I encouraged her to go with me to different meetings. And all these good values, I tried to inculcate in her personality. And this was not only she, only Malala. I imparted all these good values to my school, girl students and boy students as well. I used education for emancipation. I taught my girls, I taught my girl students, to unlearn the lesson of obedience. I taught my boy students to unlearn the lesson of so-called pseudo-honor. Dear brothers and sisters, we were striving for more rights for women, and we were struggling to have more, more and more space for the women in society. But we came across a new phenomenon. It was lethal to human rights and particularly to women's rights. It was called Talibanization. It means a complete negation of women's participation in all political, economical and social activities. Hundreds of schools were lost. Girls were prohibited from going to school. Women were forced to wear veils and they were stopped from going to the markets. Musicians were silenced, girls were flogged and singers were killed. Millions were suffering, but few spoke, and it was the most scary thing when you have all around such people who kill and who flog, and you speak for your rights. It's really the most scary thing. At the age of 10, Malala stood, and she stood for the right of education. She wrote a diary for the BBC blog, she volunteered herself for the New York Times documentaries, and she spoke from every platform she could. And her voice was the most powerful voice. It spread like a crescendo all around the world. And that was the reason the Taliban could not tolerate her campaign, and on October 9 2012, she was shot in the head at point blank range. It was a doomsday for my family and for me. The world turned into a big black hole. While my daughter was on the verge of life and death, I whispered into the ears of my wife, "Should I be blamed for what happened to my daughter and your daughter?" And she abruptly told me, "Please don't blame yourself. You stood for the right cause. You put your life at stake for the cause of truth, for the cause of peace, and for the cause of education, and your daughter in inspired from you and she joined you. You both were on the right path and God will protect her." These few words meant a lot to me, and I didn't ask this question again. When Malala was in the hospital, and she was going through the severe pains and she had had severe headaches because her facial nerve was cut down, I used to see a dark shadow spreading on the face of my wife. But my daughter never complained. She used to tell us, "I'm fine with my crooked smile and with my numbness in my face. I'll be okay. Please don't worry." She was a solace for us, and she consoled us. Dear brothers and sisters, we learned from her how to be resilient in the most difficult times, and I'm glad to share with you that despite being an icon for the rights of children and women, she is like any 16-year old girl. She cries when her homework is incomplete. She quarrels with her brothers, and I am very happy for that. People ask me, what special is in my mentorship which has made Malala so bold and so courageous and so vocal and poised? I tell them, don't ask me what I did. Ask me what I did not do. I did not clip her wings, and that's all. Thank you very much. (Applause) Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you. (Applause)

Charlie Rose: So Larry sent me an email and he basically said, we've got to make sure that we don't seem like we're a couple of middle-aged boring men. I said, I'm flattered by that -- (Laughter) — because I'm a bit older, and he has a bit more net worth than I do. Larry Page: Well, thank you. CR: So we'll have a conversation about the Internet, and we'll have a conversation Google, and we'll have a conversation about search and privacy, and also about your philosophy and a sense of how you've connected the dots and how this journey that began some time ago has such interesting prospects. Mainly we want to talk about the future. So my first question: Where is Google and where is it going? LP: Well, this is something we think about a lot, and our mission we defined a long time ago is to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful. And people always say, is that really what you guys are still doing? And I always kind of think about that myself, and I'm not quite sure. But actually, when I think about search, it's such a deep thing for all of us, to really understand what you want, to understand the world's information, and we're still very much in the early stages of that, which is totally crazy. We've been at it for 15 years already, but it's not at all done. CR: When it's done, how will it be? LP: Well, I guess, in thinking about where we're going -- you know, why is it not done? -- a lot of it is just computing's kind of a mess. You know, your computer doesn't know where you are, it doesn't know what you're doing, it doesn't know what you know, and a lot we've been trying to do recently is just make your devices work, make them understand your context. Google Now, you know, knows where you are, knows what you may need. So really having computing work and understand you and understand that information, we really haven't done that yet. It's still very, very clunky. CR: Tell me, when you look at what Google is doing, where does Deep Mind fit? LP: Yeah, so Deep Mind is a company we just acquired recently. It's in the U.K. First, let me tell you the way we got there, which was looking at search and really understanding, trying to understand everything, and also make the computers not clunky and really understand you -- like, voice was really important. So what's the state of the art on speech recognition? It's not very good. It doesn't really understand you. So we started doing machine learning research to improve that. That helped a lot. And we started just looking at things like YouTube. Can we understand YouTube? But we actually ran machine learning on YouTube and it discovered cats, just by itself. Now, that's an important concept. And we realized there's really something here. If we can learn what cats are, that must be really important. So I think Deep Mind, what's really amazing about Deep Mind is that it can actually -- they're learning things in this unsupervised way. They started with video games, and really just, maybe I can show the video, just playing video games, and learning how to do that automatically. CR: Take a look at the video games and how machines are coming to be able to do some remarkable things. LP: The amazing thing about this is this is, I mean, obviously, these are old games, but the system just sees what you see, the pixels, and it has the controls and it has the score, and it's learned to play all of these games, same program. It's learned to play all of these games with superhuman performance. We've not been able to do things like this with computers before. And maybe I'll just narrate this one quickly. This is boxing, and it figures out it can sort of pin the opponent down. The computer's on the left, and it's just racking up points. So imagine if this kind of intelligence were thrown at your schedule, or your information needs, or things like that. We're really just at the beginning of that, and that's what I'm really excited about. CR: When you look at all that's taken place with Deep Mind and the boxing, also a part of where we're going is artificial intelligence. Where are we, when you look at that? LP: Well, I think for me, this is kind of one of the most exciting things I've seen in a long time. The guy who started this company, Demis, has a neuroscience and a computer science background. He went back to school to get his Ph.D. to study the brain. And so I think we're seeing a lot of exciting work going on that sort of crosses computer science and neuroscience in terms of really understanding what it takes to make something smart and do really interesting things. CR: But where's the level of it now? And how fast do you think we are moving? LP: Well, this is the state of the art right now, understanding cats on YouTube and things like that, improving voice recognition. We used a lot of machine learning to improve things incrementally, but I think for me, this example's really exciting, because it's one program that can do a lot of different things. CR: I don't know if we can do this, but we've got the image of the cat. It would be wonderful to see this. This is how machines looked at cats and what they came up with. Can we see that image? LP: Yeah. CR: There it is. Can you see the cat? Designed by machines, seen by machines. LP: That's right. So this is learned from just watching YouTube. And there's no training, no notion of a cat, but this concept of a cat is something important that you would understand, and now that the machines can kind of understand. Maybe just finishing also on the search part, it started with search, really understanding people's context and their information. I did have a video I wanted to show quickly on that that we actually found. (Video) ["Soy, Kenya"] Zack Matere: Not long ago, I planted a crop of potatoes. Then suddenly they started dying one after the other. I checked out the books and they didn't tell me much. So, I went and I did a search. ["Zack Matere, Farmer"] Potato diseases. One of the websites told me that ants could be the problem. It said, sprinkle wood ash over the plants. Then after a few days the ants disappeared. I got excited about the Internet. I have this friend who really would like to expand his business. So I went with him to the cyber cafe and we checked out several sites. When I met him next, he was going to put a windmill at the local school. I felt proud because something that wasn't there before was suddenly there. I realized that not everybody can be able to access what I was able to access. I thought that I need to have an Internet that my grandmother can use. So I thought about a notice board. A simple wooden notice board. When I get information on my phone, I'm able to post the information on the notice board. So it's basically like a computer. I use the Internet to help people. I think I am searching for a better life for me and my neighbors. So many people have access to information, but there's no follow-up to that. I think the follow-up to that is our knowledge. When people have the knowledge, they can find solutions without having to helped out. Information is powerful, but it is how we use it that will define us. (Applause) LP: Now, the amazing thing about that video, actually, was we just read about it in the news, and we found this gentlemen, and made that little clip. CR: When I talk to people about you, they say to me, people who know you well, say, Larry wants to change the world, and he believes technology can show the way. And that means access to the Internet. It has to do with languages. It also means how people can get access and do things that will affect their community, and this is an example. LP: Yeah, that's right, and I think for me, I have been focusing on access more, if we're talking about the future. We recently released this Loon Project which is using balloons to do it. It sounds totally crazy. We can show the video here. Actually, two out of three people in the world don't have good Internet access now. We actually think this can really help people sort of cost-efficiently. CR: It's a balloon. LP: Yeah, get access to the Internet. CR: And why does this balloon give you access to the Internet? Because there was some interesting things you had to do to figure out how to make balloons possible, they didn't have to be tethered. LP: Yeah, and this is a good example of innovation. Like, we've been thinking about this idea for five years or more before we started working on it, but it was just really, how do we get access points up high, cheaply? You normally have to use satellites and it takes a long time to launch them. But you saw there how easy it is to launch a balloon and get it up, and actually again, it's the power of the Internet, I did a search on it, and I found, 30, 40 years ago, someone had put up a balloon and it had gone around the Earth multiple times. And I thought, why can't we do that today? And that's how this project got going. CR: But are you at the mercy of the wind? LP: Yeah, but it turns out, we did some weather simulations which probably hadn't really been done before, and if you control the altitude of the balloons, which you can do by pumping air into them and other ways, you can actually control roughly where they go, and so I think we can build a worldwide mesh of these balloons that can cover the whole planet. CR: Before I talk about the future and transportation, where you've been a nerd for a while, and this fascination you have with transportation and automated cars and bicycles, let me talk a bit about what's been the subject here earlier with Edward Snowden. It is security and privacy. You have to have been thinking about that. LP: Yeah, absolutely. I saw the picture of Sergey with Edward Snowden yesterday. Some of you may have seen it. But I think, for me, I guess, privacy and security are a really important thing. We think about it in terms of both things, and I think you can't have privacy without security, so let me just talk about security first, because you asked about Snowden and all of that, and then I'll say a little bit about privacy. I think for me, it's tremendously disappointing that the government secretly did all this stuff and didn't tell us. I don't think we can have a democracy if we're having to protect you and our users from the government for stuff that we've never had a conversation about. And I don't mean we have to know what the particular terrorist attack is they're worried about protecting us from, but we do need to know what the parameters of it is, what kind of surveillance the government's going to do and how and why, and I think we haven't had that conversation. So I think the government's actually done itself a tremendous disservice by doing all that in secret. CR: Never coming to Google to ask for anything. LP: Not Google, but the public. I think we need to have a debate about that, or we can't have a functioning democracy. It's just not possible. So I'm sad that Google's in the position of protecting you and our users from the government doing secret thing that nobody knows about. It doesn't make any sense. CR: Yeah. And then there's a privacy side of it. LP: Yes. The privacy side, I think it's -- the world is changing. You carry a phone. It knows where you are. There's so much more information about you, and that's an important thing, and it makes sense why people are asking difficult questions. We spend a lot of time thinking about this and what the issues are. I'm a little bit -- I think the main thing that we need to do is just provide people choice, show them what data's being collected -- search history, location data. We're excited about incognito mode in Chrome, and doing that in more ways, just giving people more choice and more awareness of what's going on. I also think it's very easy. What I'm worried is that we throw out the baby with the bathwater. And I look at, on your show, actually, I kind of lost my voice, and I haven't gotten it back. I'm hoping that by talking to you I'm going to get it back. CR: If I could do anything, I would do that. LP: All right. So get out your voodoo doll and whatever you need to do. But I think, you know what, I look at that, I made that public, and I got all this information. We got a survey done on medical conditions with people who have similar issues, and I look at medical records, and I say, wouldn't it be amazing if everyone's medical records were available anonymously to research doctors? And when someone accesses your medical record, a research doctor, they could see, you could see which doctor accessed it and why, and you could maybe learn about what conditions you have. I think if we just did that, we'd save 100,000 lives this year. CR: Absolutely. Let me go — (Applause) LP: So I guess I'm just very worried that with Internet privacy, we're doing the same thing we're doing with medical records, is we're throwing out the baby with the bathwater, and we're not really thinking about the tremendous good that can come from people sharing information with the right people in the right ways. CR: And the necessary condition that people have to have confidence that their information will not be abused. LP: Yeah, and I had this problem with my voice stuff. I was scared to share it. Sergey encouraged me to do that, and it was a great thing to do. CR: And the response has been overwhelming. LP: Yeah, and people are super positive. We got thousands and thousands of people with similar conditions, which there's no data on today. So it was a really good thing. CR: So talking about the future, what is it about you and transportation systems? LP: Yeah. I guess I was just frustrated with this when I was at college in Michigan. I had to get on the bus and take it and wait for it. And it was cold and snowing. I did some research on how much it cost, and I just became a bit obsessed with transportation systems. CR: And that began the idea of an automated car. LP: Yeah, about 18 years ago I learned about people working on automated cars, and I became fascinated by that, and it takes a while to get these projects going, but I'm super excited about the possibilities of that improving the world. There's 20 million people or more injured per year. It's the leading cause of death for people under 34 in the U.S. CR: So you're talking about saving lives. LP: Yeah, and also saving space and making life better. Los Angeles is half parking lots and roads, half of the area, and most cities are not far behind, actually. It's just crazy that that's what we use our space for. CR: And how soon will we be there? LP: I think we can be there very, very soon. We've driven well over 100,000 miles now totally automated. I'm super excited about getting that out quickly. CR: But it's not only you're talking about automated cars. You also have this idea for bicycles. LP: Well at Google, we got this idea that we should just provide free bikes to everyone, and that's been amazing, most of the trips. You see bikes going everywhere, and the bikes wear out. They're getting used 24 hours a day. CR: But you want to put them above the street, too. LP: Well I said, how do we get people using bikes more? CR: We may have a video here. LP: Yeah, let's show the video. I just got excited about this. (Music) So this is actually how you might separate bikes from cars with minimal cost. Anyway, it looks totally crazy, but I was actually thinking about our campus, working with the Zippies and stuff, and just trying to get a lot more bike usage, and I was thinking about, how do you cost-effectively separate the bikes from traffic? And I went and searched, and this is what I found. And we're not actually working on this, that particular thing, but it gets your imagination going. CR: Let me close with this. Give me a sense of the philosophy of your own mind. You have this idea of [Google X]. You don't simply want to go in some small, measurable arena of progress. LP: Yeah, I think many of the things we just talked about are like that, where they're really -- I almost use the economic concept of additionality, which means that you're doing something that wouldn't happen unless you were actually doing it. And I think the more you can do things like that, the bigger impact you have, and that's about doing things that people might not think are possible. And I've been amazed, the more I learn about technology, the more I realize I don't know, and that's because this technological horizon, the thing that you can see to do next, the more you learn about technology, the more you learn what's possible. You learn that the balloons are possible because there's some material that will work for them. CR: What's interesting about you too, though, for me, is that, we have lots of people who are thinking about the future, and they are going and looking and they're coming back, but we never see the implementation. I think of somebody you knew and read about, Tesla. The principle of that for you is what? LP: Well, I think invention is not enough. If you invent something, Tesla invented electric power that we use, but he struggled to get it out to people. That had to be done by other people. It took a long time. And I think if we can actually combine both things, where we have an innovation and invention focus, plus the ability to really -- a company that can really commercialize things and get them to people in a way that's positive for the world and to give people hope. You know, I'm amazed with the Loon Project just how excited people were about that, because it gave them hope for the two thirds of the world that doesn't have Internet right now that's any good. CR: Which is a second thing about corporations. You are one of those people who believe that corporations are an agent of change if they are run well. LP: Yeah. I'm really dismayed most people think companies are basically evil. They get a bad rap. And I think that's somewhat correct. Companies are doing the same incremental thing that they did 50 years ago or 20 years ago. That's not really what we need. We need, especially in technology, we need revolutionary change, not incremental change. CR: You once said, actually, as I think I've got this about right, that you might consider, rather than giving your money, if you were leaving it to some cause, just simply giving it to Elon Musk, because you had confidence that he would change the future, and that you would therefore — LP: Yeah, if you want to go Mars, he wants to go to Mars, to back up humanity, that's a worthy goal, but it's a company, and it's philanthropical. So I think we aim to do kind of similar things. And I think, you ask, we have a lot of employees at Google who have become pretty wealthy. People make a lot of money in technology. A lot of people in the room are pretty wealthy. You're working because you want to change the world. You want to make it better. Why isn't the company that you work for worthy not just of your time but your money as well? I mean, but we don't have a concept of that. That's not how we think about companies, and I think it's sad, because companies are most of our effort. They're where most of people's time is, where a lot of the money is, and so I think I'd like for us to help out more than we are. CR: When I close conversations with lots of people, I always ask this question: What state of mind, what quality of mind is it that has served you best? People like Rupert Murdoch have said curiosity, and other people in the media have said that. Bill Gates and Warren Buffett have said focus. What quality of mind, as I leave this audience, has enabled you to think about the future and at the same time change the present? LP: You know, I think the most important thing -- I looked at lots of companies and why I thought they don't succeed over time. We've had a more rapid turnover of companies. And I said, what did they fundamentally do wrong? What did those companies all do wrong? And usually it's just that they missed the future. And so I think, for me, I just try to focus on that and say, what is that future really going to be and how do we create it, and how do we cause our organization, to really focus on that and drive that at a really high rate? And so that's been curiosity, it's been looking at things people might not think about, working on things that no one else is working on, because that's where the additionality really is, and be willing to do that, to take that risk. Look at Android. I felt guilty about working on Android when it was starting. It was a little startup we bought. It wasn't really what we were really working on. And I felt guilty about spending time on that. That was stupid. That was the future, right? That was a good thing to be working on. CR: It is great to see you here. It's great to hear from you, and a pleasure to sit at this table with you. Thanks, Larry. LP: Thank you. (Applause) CR: Larry Page.

Chris Anderson: We had Edward Snowden here a couple days ago, and this is response time. And several of you have written to me with questions to ask our guest here from the NSA. So Richard Ledgett is the 15th deputy director of the National Security Agency, and he's a senior civilian officer there, acts as its chief operating officer, guiding strategies, setting internal policies, and serving as the principal advisor to the director. And all being well, welcome, Rick Ledgett, to TED. (Applause) Richard Ledgett: I'm really thankful for the opportunity to talk to folks here. I look forward to the conversation, so thanks for arranging for that. CA: Thank you, Rick. We appreciate you joining us. It's certainly quite a strong statement that the NSA is willing to reach out and show a more open face here. You saw, I think, the talk and interview that Edward Snowden gave here a couple days ago. What did you make of it? RL: So I think it was interesting. We didn't realize that he was going to show up there, so kudos to you guys for arranging a nice surprise like that. I think that, like a lot of the things that have come out since Mr. Snowden started disclosing classified information, there were some kernels of truth in there, but a lot of extrapolations and half-truths in there, and I'm interested in helping to address those. I think this is a really important conversation that we're having in the United States and internationally, and I think it is important and of import, and so given that, we need to have that be a fact-based conversation, and we want to help make that happen. CA: So the question that a lot of people have here is, what do you make of Snowden's motivations for doing what he did, and did he have an alternative way that he could have gone? RL: He absolutely did have alternative ways that he could have gone, and I actually think that characterizing him as a whistleblower actually hurts legitimate whistleblowing activities. So what if somebody who works in the NSA -- and there are over 35,000 people who do. They're all great citizens. They're just like your husbands, fathers, sisters, brothers, neighbors, nephews, friends and relatives, all of whom are interested in doing the right thing for their country and for our allies internationally, and so there are a variety of venues to address if folks have a concern. First off, there's their supervisor, and up through the supervisory chain within their organization. If folks aren't comfortable with that, there are a number of inspectors general. In the case of Mr. Snowden, he had the option of the NSA inspector general, the Navy inspector general, the Pacific Command inspector general, the Department of Defense inspector general, and the intelligence community inspector general, any of whom would have both kept his concerns in classified channels and been happy to address them. (CA and RL speaking at once) He had the option to go to congressional committees, and there are mechanisms to do that that are in place, and so he didn't do any of those things. CA: Now, you had said that Ed Snowden had other avenues for raising his concerns. The comeback on that is a couple of things: one, that he certainly believes that as a contractor, the avenues that would have been available to him as an employee weren't available, two, there's a track record of other whistleblowers, like [Thomas Andrews Drake] being treated pretty harshly, by some views, and thirdly, what he was taking on was not one specific flaw that he'd discovered, but programs that had been approved by all three branches of government. I mean, in that circumstance, couldn't you argue that what he did was reasonable? RL: No, I don't agree with that. I think that the — sorry, I'm getting feedback through the microphone there — the actions that he took were inappropriate because of the fact that he put people's lives at risk, basically, in the long run, and I know there's been a lot of talk in public by Mr. Snowden and some of the journalists that say that the things that have been disclosed have not put national security and people at risk, and that is categorically not true. They actually do. I think there's also an amazing arrogance to the idea that he knows better than the framers of the Constitution in how the government should be designed and work for separation of powers and the fact that the executive and the legislative branch have to work together and they have checks and balances on each other, and then the judicial branch, which oversees the entire process. I think that's extremely arrogant on his part. CA: Can you give a specific example of how he put people's lives at risk? RL: Yeah, sure. So the things that he's disclosed, the capabilities, and the NSA is a capabilities-based organization, so when we have foreign intelligence targets, legitimate things of interest -- like, terrorists is the iconic example, but it includes things like human traffickers, drug traffickers, people who are trying to build advanced weaponry, nuclear weapons, and build delivery systems for those, and nation-states who might be executing aggression against their immediate neighbors, which you may have some visibility into some of that that's going on right now, the capabilities are applied in very discrete and measured and controlled ways. So the unconstrained disclosure of those capabilities means that as adversaries see them and recognize, "Hey, I might be vulnerable to this," they move away from that, and we have seen targets in terrorism, in the nation-state area, in smugglers of various types, and other folks who have, because of the disclosures, moved away from our ability to have insight into what they're doing. The net effect of that is that our people who are overseas in dangerous places, whether they're diplomats or military, and our allies who are in similar situations, are at greater risk because we don't see the threats that are coming their way. CA: So that's a general response saying that because of his revelations, access that you had to certain types of information has been shut down, has been closed down. But the concern is that the nature of that access was not necessarily legitimate in the first place. I mean, describe to us this Bullrun program where it's alleged that the NSA specifically weakened security in order to get the type of access that you've spoken of. RL: So there are, when our legitimate foreign intelligence targets of the type that I described before, use the global telecommunications system as their communications methodology, and they do, because it's a great system, it's the most complex system ever devised by man, and it is a wonder, and lots of folks in the room there are responsible for the creation and enhancement of that, and it's just a wonderful thing. But it's also used by people who are working against us and our allies. And so if I'm going to pursue them, I need to have the capability to go after them, and again, the controls are in how I apply that capability, not that I have the capability itself. Otherwise, if we could make it so that all the bad guys used one corner of the Internet, we could have a domain, badguy.com. That would be awesome, and we could just concentrate all our efforts there. That's not how it works. They're trying to hide from the government's ability to isolate and interdict their actions, and so we have to swim in that same space. But I will tell you this. So NSA has two missions. One is the Signals Intelligence mission that we've unfortunately read so much about in the press. The other one is the Information Assurance mission, which is to protect the national security systems of the United States, and by that, that's things like the communications that the president uses, the communications that control our nuclear weapons, the communications that our military uses around the world, and the communications that we use with our allies, and that some of our allies themselves use. And so we make recommendations on standards to use, and we use those same standards, and so we are invested in making sure that those communications are secure for their intended purposes. CA: But it sounds like what you're saying is that when it comes to the Internet at large, any strategy is fair game if it improves America's safety. And I think this is partly where there is such a divide of opinion, that there's a lot of people in this room and around the world who think very differently about the Internet. They think of it as a momentous invention of humanity, kind of on a par with the Gutenberg press, for example. It's the bringer of knowledge to all. It's the connector of all. And it's viewed in those sort of idealistic terms. And from that lens, what the NSA has done is equivalent to the authorities back in Germany inserting some device into every printing press that would reveal which books people bought and what they read. Can you understand that from that viewpoint, it feels outrageous? RL: I do understand that, and I actually share the view of the utility of the Internet, and I would argue it's bigger than the Internet. It is a global telecommunications system. The Internet is a big chunk of that, but there is a lot more. And I think that people have legitimate concerns about the balance between transparency and secrecy. That's sort of been couched as a balance between privacy and national security. I don't think that's the right framing. I think it really is transparency and secrecy. And so that's the national and international conversation that we're having, and we want to participate in that, and want people to participate in it in an informed way. So there are things, let me talk there a little bit more, there are things that we need to be transparent about: our authorities, our processes, our oversight, who we are. We, NSA, have not done a good job of that, and I think that's part of the reason that this has been so revelational and so sensational in the media. Nobody knew who we were. We were the No Such Agency, the Never Say Anything. There's takeoffs of our logo of an eagle with headphones on around it. And so that's the public characterization. And so we need to be more transparent about those things. What we don't need to be transparent about, because it's bad for the U.S., it's bad for all those other countries that we work with and that we help provide information that helps them secure themselves and their people, it's bad to expose operations and capabilities in a way that allows the people that we're all working against, the generally recognized bad guys, to counter those. CA: But isn't it also bad to deal a kind of body blow to the American companies that have essentially given the world most of the Internet services that matter? RL: It is. It's really the companies are in a tough position, as are we, because the companies, we compel them to provide information, just like every other nation in the world does. Every industrialized nation in the world has a lawful intercept program where they are requiring companies to provide them with information that they need for their security, and the companies that are involved have complied with those programs in the same way that they have to do when they're operating in Russia or the U.K. or China or India or France, any country that you choose to name. And so the fact that these revelations have been broadly characterized as "you can't trust company A because your privacy is suspect with them" is actually only accurate in the sense that it's accurate with every other company in the world that deals with any of those countries in the world. And so it's being picked up by people as a marketing advantage, and it's being marketed that way by several countries, including some of our allied countries, where they are saying, "Hey, you can't trust the U.S., but you can trust our telecom company, because we're safe." And they're actually using that to counter the very large technological edge that U.S. companies have in areas like the cloud and Internet-based technologies. CA: You're sitting there with the American flag, and the American Constitution guarantees freedom from unreasonable search and seizure. How do you characterize the American citizen's right to privacy? Is there such a right? RL: Yeah, of course there is. And we devote an inordinate amount of time and pressure, inordinate and appropriate, actually I should say, amount of time and effort in order to ensure that we protect that privacy. and beyond that, the privacy of citizens around the world, it's not just Americans. Several things come into play here. First, we're all in the same network. My communications, I'm a user of a particular Internet email service that is the number one email service of choice by terrorists around the world, number one. So I'm there right beside them in email space in the Internet. And so we need to be able to pick that apart and find the information that's relevant. In doing so, we're going to necessarily encounter Americans and innocent foreign citizens who are just going about their business, and so we have procedures in place that shreds that out, that says, when you find that, not if you find it, when you find it, because you're certain to find it, here's how you protect that. These are called minimization procedures. They're approved by the attorney general and constitutionally based. And so we protect those. And then, for people, citizens of the world who are going about their lawful business on a day-to-day basis, the president on his January 17 speech, laid out some additional protections that we are providing to them. So I think absolutely, folks do have a right to privacy, and that we work very hard to make sure that that right to privacy is protected. CA: What about foreigners using American companies' Internet services? Do they have any privacy rights? RL: They do. They do, in the sense of, the only way that we are able to compel one of those companies to provide us information is when it falls into one of three categories: We can identify that this particular person, identified by a selector of some kind, is associated with counterterrorist or proliferation or other foreign intelligence target. CA: Much has been made of the fact that a lot of the information that you've obtained through these programs is essentially metadata. It's not necessarily the actual words that someone has written in an email or given on a phone call. It's who they wrote to and when, and so forth. But it's been argued, and someone here in the audience has talked to a former NSA analyst who said metadata is actually much more invasive than the core data, because in the core data you present yourself as you want to be presented. With metadata, who knows what the conclusions are that are drawn? Is there anything to that? RL: I don't really understand that argument. I think that metadata's important for a couple of reasons. Metadata is the information that lets you find connections that people are trying to hide. So when a terrorist is corresponding with somebody else who's not known to us but is engaged in doing or supporting terrorist activity, or someone who's violating international sanctions by providing nuclear weapons-related material to a country like Iran or North Korea, is trying to hide that activity because it's illicit activity. What metadata lets you do is connect that. The alternative to that is one that's much less efficient and much more invasive of privacy, which is gigantic amounts of content collection. So metadata, in that sense, actually is privacy-enhancing. And we don't, contrary to some of the stuff that's been printed, we don't sit there and grind out metadata profiles of average people. If you're not connected to one of those valid intelligence targets, you are not of interest to us. CA: So in terms of the threats that face America overall, where would you place terrorism? RL: I think terrorism is still number one. I think that we have never been in a time where there are more places where things are going badly and forming the petri dish in which terrorists take advantage of the lack of governance. An old boss of mine, Tom Fargo, Admiral Fargo, used to describe it as arcs of instability. And so you have a lot of those arcs of instability in the world right now, in places like Syria, where there's a civil war going on and you have massive numbers, thousands and thousands of foreign fighters who are coming into Syria to learn how to be terrorists and practice that activity, and lots of those people are Westerners who hold passports to European countries or in some cases the United States, and so they are basically learning how to do jihad and have expressed intent to go out and do that later on in their home countries. You've got places like Iraq, which is suffering from a high level of sectarian violence, again a breeding ground for terrorism. And you have the activity in the Horn of Africa and the Sahel area of Africa. Again, lots of weak governance which forms a breeding ground for terrorist activity. So I think it's very serious. I think it's number one. I think number two is cyber threat. I think cyber is a threat in three ways: One way, and probably the most common way that people have heard about it, is due to the theft of intellectual property, so basically, foreign countries going in, stealing companies' secrets, and then providing that information to state-owned enterprises or companies connected to the government to help them leapfrog technology or to gain business intelligence that's then used to win contracts overseas. That is a hugely costly set of activities that's going on right now. Several nation-states are doing it. Second is the denial-of-service attacks. You're probably aware that there have been a spate of those directed against the U.S. financial sector since 2012. Again, that's a nation-state who is executing those attacks, and they're doing that as a semi-anonymous way of reprisal. And the last one is destructive attacks, and those are the ones that concern me the most. Those are on the rise. You have the attack against Saudi Aramco in 2012, August of 2012. It took down about 35,000 of their computers with a Wiper-style virus. You had a follow-on a week later to a Qatari company. You had March of 2013, you had a South Korean attack that was attributed in the press to North Korea that took out thousands of computers. Those are on the rise, and we see people expressing interest in those capabilities and a desire to employ them. CA: Okay, so a couple of things here, because this is really the core of this, almost. I mean, first of all, a lot of people who look at risk and look at the numbers don't understand this belief that terrorism is still the number one threat. Apart from September 11, I think the numbers are that in the last 30 or 40 years about 500 Americans have died from terrorism, mostly from homegrown terrorists. The chance in the last few years of being killed by terrorism is far less than the chance of being killed by lightning. I guess you would say that a single nuclear incident or bioterrorism act or something like that would change those numbers. Would that be the point of view? RL: Well, I'd say two things. One is, the reason that there hasn't been a major attack in the United States since 9/11, that is not an accident. That's a lot of hard work that we have done, that other folks in the intelligence community have done, that the military has done, and that our allies around the globe have done. You've heard the numbers about the tip of the iceberg in terms of numbers of terrorist attacks that NSA programs contributed to stopping was 54, 25 of those in Europe, and of those 25, 18 of them occurred in three countries, some of which are our allies, and some of which are beating the heck out of us over the NSA programs, by the way. So that's not an accident that those things happen. That's hard work. That's us finding intelligence on terrorist activities and interdicting them through one way or another, through law enforcement, through cooperative activities with other countries and sometimes through military action. The other thing I would say is that your idea of nuclear or chem-bio-threat is not at all far-fetched and in fact there are a number of groups who have for several years expressed interest and desire in obtaining those capabilities and work towards that. CA: It's also been said that, of those 54 alleged incidents, that as few as zero of them were actually anything to do with these controversial programs that Mr. Snowden revealed, that it was basically through other forms of intelligence, that you're looking for a needle in a haystack, and the effects of these programs, these controversial programs, is just to add hay to the stack, not to really find the needle. The needle was found by other methods. Isn't there something to that? RL: No, there's actually two programs that are typically implicated in that discussion. One is the section 215 program, the U.S. telephony metadata program, and the other one is popularly called the PRISM program, and it's actually section 702 of the FISA Amendment Act. But the 215 program is only relevant to threats that are directed against the United States, and there have been a dozen threats where that was implicated. Now what you'll see people say publicly is there is no "but for" case, and so there is no case where, but for that, the threat would have happened. But that actually indicates a lack of understanding of how terrorist investigations actually work. You think about on television, you watch a murder mystery. What do you start with? You start with a body, and then they work their way from there to solve the crime. We're actually starting well before that, hopefully before there are any bodies, and we're trying to build the case for who the people are, what they're trying to do, and that involves massive amounts of information. Think of it is as mosaic, and it's hard to say that any one piece of a mosaic was necessary to building the mosaic, but to build the complete picture, you need to have all the pieces of information. On the other, the non-U.S.-related threats out of those 54, the other 42 of them, the PRISM program was hugely relevant to that, and in fact was material in contributing to stopping those attacks. CA: Snowden said two days ago that terrorism has always been what is called in the intelligence world "a cover for action," that it's something that, because it invokes such a powerful emotional response in people, it allows the initiation of these programs to achieve powers that an organization like yours couldn't otherwise have. Is there any internal debate about that? RL: Yeah. I mean, we debate these things all the time, and there is discussion that goes on in the executive branch and within NSA itself and the intelligence community about what's right, what's proportionate, what's the correct thing to do. And it's important to note that the programs that we're talking about were all authorized by two different presidents, two different political parties, by Congress twice, and by federal judges 16 different times, and so this is not NSA running off and doing its own thing. This is a legitimate activity of the United States foreign government that was agreed to by all the branches of the United States government, and President Madison would have been proud. CA: And yet, when congressmen discovered what was actually being done with that authorization, many of them were completely shocked. Or do you think that is not a legitimate reaction, that it's only because it's now come out publicly, that they really knew exactly what you were doing with the powers they had granted you? RL: Congress is a big body. There's 535 of them, and they change out frequently, in the case of the House, every two years, and I think that the NSA provided all the relevant information to our oversight committees, and then the dissemination of that information by the oversight committees throughout Congress is something that they manage. I think I would say that Congress members had the opportunity to make themselves aware, and in fact a significant number of them, the ones who are assigned oversight responsibility, did have the ability to do that. And you've actually had the chairs of those committees say that in public. CA: Now, you mentioned the threat of cyberattacks, and I don't think anyone in this room would disagree that that is a huge concern, but do you accept that there's a tradeoff between offensive and defensive strategies, and that it's possible that the very measures taken to, "weaken encryption," and allow yourself to find the bad guys, might also open the door to forms of cyberattack? RL: So I think two things. One is, you said weaken encryption. I didn't. And the other one is that the NSA has both of those missions, and we are heavily biased towards defense, and, actually, the vulnerabilities that we find in the overwhelming majority of cases, we disclose to the people who are responsible for manufacturing or developing those products. We have a great track record of that, and we're actually working on a proposal right now to be transparent and to publish transparency reports in the same way that the Internet companies are being allowed to publish transparency reports for them. We want to be more transparent about that. So again, we eat our own dog food. We use the standards, we use the products that we recommend, and so it's in our interest to keep our communications protected in the same way that other people's need to be. CA: Edward Snowden, when, after his talk, was wandering the halls here in the bot, and I heard him say to a couple of people, they asked him about what he thought of the NSA overall, and he was very complimentary about the people who work with you, said that it's a really impassioned group of employees who are seeking to do the right thing, and that the problems have come from just some badly conceived policies. He came over certainly very reasonably and calmly. He didn't come over like a crazy man. Would you accept that at least, even if you disagree with how he did it, that he has opened a debate that matters? RL: So I think that the discussion is an important one to have. I do not like the way that he did it. I think there were a number of other ways that he could have done that that would have not endangered our people and the people of other nations through losing visibility into what our adversaries are doing. But I do think it's an important conversation. CA: It's been reported that there's almost a difference of opinion with you and your colleagues over any scenario in which he might be offered an amnesty deal. I think your boss, General Keith Alexander, has said that that would be a terrible example for others; you can't negotiate with someone who's broken the law in that way. But you've been quoted as saying that, if Snowden could prove that he was surrendering all undisclosed documents, that a deal maybe should be considered. Do you still think that? RL: Yeah, so actually, this is my favorite thing about that "60 Minutes" interview was all the misquotes that came from that. What I actually said, in response to a question about, would you entertain any discussions of mitigating action against Snowden, I said, yeah, it's worth a conversation. This is something that the attorney general of the United States and the president also actually have both talked about this, and I defer to the attorney general, because this is his lane. But there is a strong tradition in American jurisprudence of having discussions with people who have been charged with crimes in order to, if it benefits the government, to get something out of that, that there's always room for that kind of discussion. So I'm not presupposing any outcome, but there is always room for discussion. CA: To a lay person it seems like he has certain things to offer the U.S., the government, you, others, in terms of putting things right and helping figure out a smarter policy, a smarter way forward for the future. Do you see, has that kind of possibility been entertained at all? RL: So that's out of my lane. That's not an NSA thing. That would be a Department of Justice sort of discussion. I'll defer to them. CA: Rick, when Ed Snowden ended his talk, I offered him the chance to share an idea worth spreading. What would be your idea worth spreading for this group? RL: So I think, learn the facts. This is a really important conversation, and it impacts, it's not just NSA, it's not just the government, it's you, it's the Internet companies. The issue of privacy and personal data is much bigger than just the government, and so learn the facts. Don't rely on headlines, don't rely on sound bites, don't rely on one-sided conversations. So that's the idea, I think, worth spreading. We have a sign, a badge tab, we wear badges at work with lanyards, and if I could make a plug, my badge lanyard at work says, "Dallas Cowboys." Go Dallas. I've just alienated half the audience, I know. So the lanyard that our people who work in the organization that does our crypto-analytic work have a tab that says, "Look at the data." So that's the idea worth spreading. Look at the data. CA: Rick, it took a certain amount of courage, I think, actually, to come and speak openly to this group. It's not something the NSA has done a lot of in the past, and plus the technology has been challenging. We truly appreciate you doing that and sharing in this very important conversation. Thank you so much. RL: Thanks, Chris. (Applause)

I've come here today to talk to you about a problem. It's a very simple yet devastating problem, one that spans the globe and is affecting all of us. The problem is anonymous companies. It sounds like a really dry and technical thing, doesn't it? But anonymous companies are making it difficult and sometimes impossible to find out the actual human beings responsible sometimes for really terrible crimes. So, why am I here talking to all of you? Well, I guess I am a lifelong troublemaker and when my parents taught my twin brother and I to question authority, I don't think they knew where it might lead. (Laughter) And, they probably really regretted it during my stroppy teenage years when, predictably, I questioned their authority a lot. And a lot of my school teachers didn't appreciate it much either. You see, since the age of about five I've always asked the question, but why? But why does the Earth go around the sun? But why is blood red? But why do I have to go to school? But why do I have to respect the teachers and authority? And little did I realize that this question would become the basis of everything I would do. And so it was in my twenties, a long time ago, that one rainy Sunday afternoon in North London I was sitting with Simon Taylor and Patrick Alley and we were busy stuffing envelopes for a mail out in the office of the campaign group where we worked at the time. And as usual, we were talking about the world's problems. And in particular, we were talking about the civil war in Cambodia. And we had talked about that many, many times before. But then suddenly we stopped and looked at each other and said, but why don't we try and change this? And from that slightly crazy question, over two decades and many campaigns later, including alerting the world to the problem of blood diamonds funding war, from that crazy question, Global Witness is now an 80-strong team of campaigners, investigators, journalists and lawyers. And we're all driven by the same belief, that change really is possible. So, what exactly does Global Witness do? We investigate, we report, to uncover the people really responsible for funding conflict -- for stealing millions from citizens around the world, also known as state looting, and for destroying the environment. And then we campaign hard to change the system itself. And we're doing this because so many of the countries rich in natural resources like oil or diamonds or timber are home to some of the poorest and most dispossessed people on the planet. And much of this injustice is made possible by currently accepted business practices. And one of these is anonymous companies. Now we've come up against anonymous companies in lots of our investigations, like in the Democratic Republic of Congo, where we exposed how secretive deals involving anonymous companies had deprived the citizens of one of the poorest countries on the planet of well over a billion dollars. That's twice the country's health and education budget combined. Or in Liberia, where an international predatory logging company used front companies as it attempted to grab a really huge chunk of Liberia's unique forests. Or political corruption in Sarawak, Malaysia, which has led to the destruction of much of its forests. Well, that uses anonymous companies too. We secretly filmed some of the family of the former chief minister and a lawyer as they told our undercover investigator exactly how these dubious deals are done using such companies. And the awful thing is, there are so many other examples out there from all walks of life. This truly is a scandal of epic proportions hidden in plain sight. Whether it's the ruthless Mexican drugs cartel, the Zetas, who use anonymous companies to launder profits while their drugs-related violence is tearing communities apart across the Americas. Or the anonymous company, which bought up Americans' tax debts, piled on the legal fees and then gave homeowners a choice: Pay up or lose your home. Imagine being threatened with losing your home sometimes over a debt of just a few hundred dollars, and not being able to find out who you were really up against. Now anonymous companies are great for sanctions busting too. As the Iranian government found out when, through a series of front companies, it owned a building in the very heart of Manhattan, on Fifth Avenue, despite American sanctions. And Juicy Couture, home of of the velvet track suit, and other companies were the unwitting, unknowing tenants there. There are just so many examples, the horesemeat scandal in Europe, the Italian mafia, they've used these companies for decades. The $100 million American Medicare fraud, the supply of weapons to wars around the world including those in Eastern Europe in the early '90s. Anonymous companies have even come to light in the recent revolution in the Ukraine. But, for every case that we and others expose there are so many more that will remain hidden away because of the current system. And it's just a simple truth that some of the people responsible for outrageous crimes, for stealing from you and me and millions of others, they are remaining faceless and they are escaping accountability and they're doing this with ease, and they're doing it using legal structures. And really, that is unfair. Well, you might well ask, what exactly is an anonymous company, and can I really set one up, and use it, without anyone knowing who I am? Well, the answer is, yes you can. But if you're anything like me, you'll want to see some of that for yourself, so let me show you. Well first you need to work out where you want to set it up. Now, at this point you might be imagining one of those lovely tropical island tax havens but here's the thing, shockingly, my own hometown, London, and indeed the U.K., is one of the best places in the world to set up an anonymous company. And the other, even better, I'm afraid that's America. Do you know, in some states across America you need less identification to open up a company than you do to get a library card, like Delaware, which is one of the easiest places in the world to set up an anonymous company. Okay, so let's say it's America, and let's say it's Delaware, and now you can simply go online and find yourself a company service provider. These are the companies that can set your one up for you, and remember, it's all legal, routine business practice. So, here's one, but there are plenty of others to choose from. And having made your choice, you then pick what type of company you want and then fill in a contact, name and address. But don't worry, it doesn't have to be your name. It can be your lawyer's or your service provider's, and it's not for the public record anyway. And then you add the owner of the company. Now this is the key part, and again it doesn't have to be you, because you can get creative, because there is a whole universe out there of nominees to choose from. And nominees are the people that you can legally pay to be your company's owner. And if you don't want to involve anyone else, it doesn't even have to be an actual human being. It could be another company. And then finally, give your company a name add a few more details and make your payment. And then the service provider will take a few hours or more to process it. But there you are, in 10 minutes of online shopping you can create yourself an anonymous company. And not only is it easy, really, really easy and cheap, it's totally legal too. But the fun doesn't have to end there, maybe you want to be even more anonymous. Well, that's no problem either. You can simply keep adding layers, companies owned by companies. You can have hundreds of layers with hundreds of companies spread across lots of different countries, like a giant web, each layer adds anonymity. Each layer makes it more difficult for law enforcement and others to find out who the real owner is. But whose interests is this all serving? It might be in the interests of the company or a particular individual, but what about all of us, the public? There hasn't even been a global conversation yet about whether it's okay to misuse companies in this way. And what does it all mean for us? Well, an example that really haunts me is one I came across recently. And it's that of a horrific fire in a nightclub in Buenos Aires about a decade ago. It was the night before New Year's Eve. Three thousand very happy revelers, many of them teenagers, were crammed into a space meant for 1,000. And then tragedy struck, a fire broke out plastic decorations were melting from the ceiling and toxic smoke filled the club. So people tried to escape only to find that some of the fire doors had been chained shut. Over 200 people died. Seven hundred were injured trying to get out. And as the victims' families and the city and the country reeled in shock, investigators tried to find out who was responsible. And as they looked for the owners of the club, they found instead anonymous companies, and confusion surrounded the identities of those involved with the companies. Now ultimately, a range of people were charged and some went to jail. But this was an awful tragedy, and it shouldn't have been so difficult just to try and find out who was responsible for those deaths. Because in an age when there is so much information out there in the open, why should this crucial information about company ownership stay hidden away? Why should tax evaders, corrupt government officials, arms traders and more, be able to hide their identities from us, the public? Why should this secrecy be such an accepted business practice? Anonymous companies might be the norm right now but it wasn't always this way. Companies were created to give people a chance to innovate and not have to put everything on the line. Companies were created to limit financial risk, they were never intended to be used as a moral shield. Companies were never intended to be anonymous, and they don't have to be. And so I come to my wish. My wish is for us to know who owns and controls companies so that they can no longer be used anonymously against the public good. Together let's ignite world opinion, change the law, and launch a new era of openness in business. So what might this look like? Well, imagine if you could go online and look up the real owner of a company. Imagine if this data were open and free, accessible across borders for citizens and businesses and law enforcement alike. Imagine what a game changer that would be. So how are we going to do this? Well, there is only one way. Together, we have to change the law globally to create public registries which list the true owners of companies and can be accessed by all with no loopholes. And yes, this is ambitious, but there is momentum on this issue, and over the years I have seen the sheer power of momentum, and it's just starting on this issue. There is such an opportunity right now. And the TED community of creative and innovative thinkers and doers across all of society could make the crucial difference. You really can make this change happen. Now, a simple starting point is the address behind me for a Facebook page that you can join now to support the campaign and spread the word. It's going to be a springboard for our global campaigning. And the techies among you, you could really help us create a prototype public registry to demonstrate what a powerful tool this could be. Campaign groups from around the world have come together to work on this issue. The U.K. government is already on board; it supports these public registries. And just last week, the European Parliament came on board with a vote 600 to 30 in favor of public registries. That is momentum. (Applause) But it's early days. America still needs to come on board, as do so many other countries. And to succeed we will all together need to help and push our politicians, because without that, real far-reaching, world-shifting change just isn't going to happen. Because this isn't just about changing the law, this is about starting a conversation about what it's okay for companies to do, and in what ways is it acceptable to use company structures. This isn't just a dry policy issue. This is a human issue which affects us all. This is about being on the right side of history. Global citizens, innovators, business leaders, individuals, we need you. Together, let's kickstart this global movement. Let's just do it, let's end anonymous companies. Thank you. (Applause)

What's the scariest thing you've ever done? Or another way to say it is, what's the most dangerous thing that you've ever done? And why did you do it? I know what the most dangerous thing is that I've ever done because NASA does the math. You look back to the first five shuttle launches, the odds of a catastrophic event during the first five shuttle launches was one in nine. And even when I first flew in the shuttle back in 1995, 74 shuttle flight, the odds were still now that we look back about one in 38 or so -- one in 35, one in 40. Not great odds, so it's a really interesting day when you wake up at the Kennedy Space Center and you're going to go to space that day because you realize by the end of the day you're either going to be floating effortlessly, gloriously in space, or you'll be dead. You go into, at the Kennedy Space Center, the suit-up room, the same room that our childhood heroes got dressed in, that Neil Armstrong and Buzz Aldrin got suited in to go ride the Apollo rocket to the moon. And I got my pressure suit built around me and rode down outside in the van heading out to the launchpad -- in the Astro van -- heading out to the launchpad, and as you come around the corner at the Kennedy Space Center, it's normally predawn, and in the distance, lit up by the huge xenon lights, is your spaceship -- the vehicle that is going to take you off the planet. The crew is sitting in the Astro van sort of hushed, almost holding hands, looking at that as it gets bigger and bigger. We ride the elevator up and we crawl in, on your hands and knees into the spaceship, one at a time, and you worm your way up into your chair and plunk yourself down on your back. And the hatch is closed, and suddenly, what has been a lifetime of both dreams and denial is becoming real, something that I dreamed about, in fact, that I chose to do when I was nine years old, is now suddenly within not too many minutes of actually happening. In the astronaut business -- the shuttle is a very complicated vehicle; it's the most complicated flying machine ever built. And in the astronaut business, we have a saying, which is, there is no problem so bad that you can't make it worse. (Laughter) And so you're very conscious in the cockpit; you're thinking about all of the things that you might have to do, all the switches and all the wickets you have to go through. And as the time gets closer and closer, this excitement is building. And then about three and a half minutes before launch, the huge nozzles on the back, like the size of big church bells, swing back and forth and the mass of them is such that it sways the whole vehicle, like the vehicle is alive underneath you, like an elephant getting up off its knees or something. And then about 30 seconds before launch, the vehicle is completely alive -- it is ready to go -- the APUs are running, the computers are all self-contained, it's ready to leave the planet. And 15 seconds before launch, this happens: (Video) Voice: 12, 11, 10, nine, eight, seven, six -- (Space shuttle preparing for takeoff) -- start, two, one, booster ignition, and liftoff of the space shuttle Discovery, returning to the space station, paving the way ... (Space shuttle taking off) Chris Hadfield: It is incredibly powerful to be on board one of these things. You are in the grip of something that is vastly more powerful than yourself. It's shaking you so hard you can't focus on the instruments in front of you. It's like you're in the jaws of some enormous dog and there's a foot in the small of your back pushing you into space, accelerating wildly straight up, shouldering your way through the air, and you're in a very complex place -- paying attention, watching the vehicle go through each one of its wickets with a steadily increasing smile on your face. After two minutes, those solid rockets explode off and then you just have the liquid engines, the hydrogen and oxygen, and it's as if you're in a dragster with your foot to the floor and accelerating like you've never accelerated. You get lighter and lighter, the force gets on us heavier and heavier. It feels like someone's pouring cement on you or something. Until finally, after about eight minutes and 40 seconds or so, we are finally at exactly the right altitude, exactly the right speed, the right direction, the engine shut off, and we're weightless. And we're alive. It's an amazing experience. But why would we take that risk? Why would you do something that dangerous? In my case the answer is fairly straightforward. I was inspired as a youngster that this was what I wanted to do. I watched the first people walk on the moon and to me, it was just an obvious thing -- I want to somehow turn myself into that. But the real question is, how do you deal with the danger of it and the fear that comes from it? How do you deal with fear versus danger? And having the goal in mind, thinking about where it might lead, directed me to a life of looking at all of the small details to allow this to become possible, to be able to launch and go help build a space station where you are on board a million-pound creation that's going around the world at five miles a second, eight kilometers a second, around the world 16 times a day, with experiments on board that are teaching us what the substance of the universe is made of and running 200 experiments inside. But maybe even more importantly, allowing us to see the world in a way that is impossible through any other means, to be able to look down and have -- if your jaw could drop, it would -- the jaw-dropping gorgeousness of the turning orb like a self-propelled art gallery of fantastic, constantly changing beauty that is the world itself. And you see, because of the speed, a sunrise or a sunset every 45 minutes for half a year. And the most magnificent part of all that is to go outside on a spacewalk. You are in a one-person spaceship that is your spacesuit, and you're going through space with the world. It's an entirely different perspective, you're not looking up at the universe, you and the Earth are going through the universe together. And you're holding on with one hand, looking at the world turn beside you. It's roaring silently with color and texture as it pours by mesmerizingly next to you. And if you can tear your eyes away from that and you look under your arm down at the rest of everything, it's unfathomable blackness, with a texture you feel like you could stick your hand into. and you are holding on with one hand, one link to the other seven billion people. And I was outside on my first spacewalk when my left eye went blind, and I didn't know why. Suddenly my left eye slammed shut in great pain and I couldn't figure out why my eye wasn't working. I was thinking, what do I do next? I thought, well maybe that's why we have two eyes, so I kept working. But unfortunately, without gravity, tears don't fall. So you just get a bigger and bigger ball of whatever that is mixed with your tears on your eye until eventually, the ball becomes so big that the surface tension takes it across the bridge of your nose like a tiny little waterfall and goes "goosh" into your other eye, and now I was completely blind outside the spaceship. So what's the scariest thing you've ever done? (Laughter) Maybe it's spiders. A lot of people are afraid of spiders. I think you should be afraid of spiders -- spiders are creepy and they've got long, hairy legs, and spiders like this one, the brown recluse -- it's horrible. If a brown recluse bites you, you end with one of these horrible, big necrotic things on your leg and there might be one right now sitting on the chair behind you, in fact. And how do you know? And so a spider lands on you, and you go through this great, spasmy attack because spiders are scary. But then you could say, well is there a brown recluse sitting on the chair beside me or not? I don't know. Are there brown recluses here? So if you actually do the research, you find out that in the world there are about 50,000 different types of spiders, and there are about two dozen that are venomous out of 50,000. And if you're in Canada, because of the cold winters here in B.C., there's about 720, 730 different types of spiders and there's one -- one -- that is venomous, and its venom isn't even fatal, it's just kind of like a nasty sting. And that spider -- not only that, but that spider has beautiful markings on it, it's like "I'm dangerous. I got a big radiation symbol on my back, it's the black widow." So, if you're even slightly careful you can avoid running into the one spider -- and it lives close the ground, you're walking along, you are never going to go through a spider web where a black widow bites you. Spider webs like this, it doesn't build those, it builds them down in the corners. And its a black widow because the female spider eats the male; it doesn't care about you. So in fact, the next time you walk into a spiderweb, you don't need to panic and go with your caveman reaction. The danger is entirely different than the fear. How do you get around it, though? How do you change your behavior? Well, next time you see a spiderweb, have a good look, make sure it's not a black widow spider, and then walk into it. And then you see another spiderweb and walk into that one. It's just a little bit of fluffy stuff. It's not a big deal. And the spider that may come out is no more threat to you than a lady bug or a butterfly. And then I guarantee you if you walk through 100 spiderwebs you will have changed your fundamental human behavior, your caveman reaction, and you will now be able to walk in the park in the morning and not worry about that spiderweb -- or into your grandma's attic or whatever, into your own basement. And you can apply this to anything. If you're outside on a spacewalk and you're blinded, your natural reaction would be to panic, I think. It would make you nervous and worried. But we had considered all the venom, and we had practiced with a whole variety of different spiderwebs. We knew everything there is to know about the spacesuit and we trained underwater thousands of times. And we don't just practice things going right, we practice things going wrong all the time, so that you are constantly walking through those spiderwebs. And not just underwater, but also in virtual reality labs with the helmet and the gloves so you feel like it's realistic. So when you finally actually get outside on a spacewalk, it feels much different than it would if you just went out first time. And even if you're blinded, your natural, panicky reaction doesn't happen. Instead you kind of look around and go, "Okay, I can't see, but I can hear, I can talk, Scott Parazynski is out here with me. He could come over and help me." We actually practiced incapacitated crew rescue, so he could float me like a blimp and stuff me into the airlock if he had to. I could find my own way back. It's not nearly as big a deal. And actually, if you keep on crying for a while, whatever that gunk was that's in your eye starts to dilute and you can start to see again, and Houston, if you negotiate with them, they will let you then keep working. We finished everything on the spacewalk and when we came back inside, Jeff got some cotton batting and took the crusty stuff around my eyes, and it turned out it was just the anti-fog, sort of a mixture of oil and soap, that got in my eye. And now we use Johnson's No More Tears, which we probably should've been using right from the very beginning. (Laughter) But the key to that is by looking at the difference between perceived danger and actual danger, where is the real risk? What is the real thing that you should be afraid of? Not just a generic fear of bad things happening. You can fundamentally change your reaction to things so that it allows you to go places and see things and do things that otherwise would be completely denied to you ... where you could see the hardpan south of the Sahara, or you can see New York City in a way that is almost dreamlike, or the unconscious gingham of Eastern Europe fields or the Great Lakes as a collection of small puddles. You can see the fault lines of San Francisco and the way the water pours out under the bridge, just entirely different than any other way that you could have if you had not found a way to conquer your fear. You see a beauty that otherwise never would have happened. It's time to come home at the end. This is our spaceship, the Soyuz, that little one. Three of us climb in, and then this spaceship detaches from the station and falls into the atmosphere. These two parts here actually melt, we jettison them and they burn up in the atmosphere. The only part that survives is the little bullet that we're riding in, and it falls into the atmosphere, and in essence you are riding a meteorite home, and riding meteorites is scary, and it ought to be. But instead of riding into the atmosphere just screaming, like you would if suddenly you found yourself riding a meteorite back to Earth -- (Laughter) -- instead, 20 years previously we had started studying Russian, and then once you learn Russian, then we learned orbital mechanics in Russian, and then we learned vehicle control theory, and then we got into the simulator and practiced over and over and over again. And in fact, you can fly this meteorite and steer it and land in about a 15-kilometer circle anywhere on the Earth. So in fact, when our crew was coming back into the atmosphere inside the Soyuz, we weren't screaming, we were laughing; it was fun. And when the great big parachute opened, we knew that if it didn't open there's a second parachute, and it runs on a nice little clockwork mechanism. So we came back, we came thundering back to Earth and this is what it looked like to land in a Soyuz, in Kazakhstan. (Video) Reporter: And you can see one of those search and recovery helicopters, once again that helicopter part of dozen such Russian Mi-8 helicopters. Touchdown -- 3:14 and 48 seconds, a.m. Central Time. CH: And you roll to a stop as if someone threw your spaceship at the ground and it tumbles end over end, but you're ready for it you're in a custom-built seat, you know how the shock absorber works. And then eventually the Russians reach in, drag you out, plunk you into a chair, and you can now look back at what was an incredible experience. You have taken the dreams of that nine-year-old boy, which were impossible and dauntingly scary, dauntingly terrifying, and put them into practice, and figured out a way to reprogram yourself, to change your primal fear so that it allowed you to come back with a set of experiences and a level of inspiration for other people that never could have been possible otherwise. Just to finish, they asked me to play that guitar. I know this song, and it's really a tribute to the genius of David Bowie himself, but it's also, I think, a reflection of the fact that we are not machines exploring the universe, we are people, and we're taking that ability to adapt and that ability to understand and the ability to take our own self-perception into a new place. (Music) ♫ This is Major Tom to ground control ♫ ♫ I've left forevermore ♫ ♫ And I'm floating in a most peculiar way ♫ ♫ And the stars look very different today ♫ ♫ For here am I floating in the tin can ♫ ♫ A last glimpse of the world ♫ ♫ Planet Earth is blue and there's so much left to do ♫ (Music) Fear not. (Applause) That's very nice of you. Thank you very much. Thank you.

Chris Anderson: The rights of citizens, the future of the Internet. So I would like to welcome to the TED stage the man behind those revelations, Ed Snowden. (Applause) Ed is in a remote location somewhere in Russia controlling this bot from his laptop, so he can see what the bot can see. Ed, welcome to the TED stage. What can you see, as a matter of fact? Edward Snowden: Ha, I can see everyone. This is amazing. (Laughter) CA: Ed, some questions for you. You've been called many things in the last few months. You've been called a whistleblower, a traitor, a hero. What words would you describe yourself with? ES: You know, everybody who is involved with this debate has been struggling over me and my personality and how to describe me. But when I think about it, this isn't the question that we should be struggling with. Who I am really doesn't matter at all. If I'm the worst person in the world, you can hate me and move on. What really matters here are the issues. What really matters here is the kind of government we want, the kind of Internet we want, the kind of relationship between people and societies. And that's what I'm hoping the debate will move towards, and we've seen that increasing over time. If I had to describe myself, I wouldn't use words like "hero." I wouldn't use "patriot," and I wouldn't use "traitor." I'd say I'm an American and I'm a citizen, just like everyone else. CA: So just to give some context for those who don't know the whole story -- (Applause) — this time a year ago, you were stationed in Hawaii working as a consultant to the NSA. As a sysadmin, you had access to their systems, and you began revealing certain classified documents to some handpicked journalists leading the way to June's revelations. Now, what propelled you to do this? ES: You know, when I was sitting in Hawaii, and the years before, when I was working in the intelligence community, I saw a lot of things that had disturbed me. We do a lot of good things in the intelligence community, things that need to be done, and things that help everyone. But there are also things that go too far. There are things that shouldn't be done, and decisions that were being made in secret without the public's awareness, without the public's consent, and without even our representatives in government having knowledge of these programs. When I really came to struggle with these issues, I thought to myself, how can I do this in the most responsible way, that maximizes the public benefit while minimizing the risks? And out of all the solutions that I could come up with, out of going to Congress, when there were no laws, there were no legal protections for a private employee, a contractor in intelligence like myself, there was a risk that I would be buried along with the information and the public would never find out. But the First Amendment of the United States Constitution guarantees us a free press for a reason, and that's to enable an adversarial press, to challenge the government, but also to work together with the government, to have a dialogue and debate about how we can inform the public about matters of vital importance without putting our national security at risk. And by working with journalists, by giving all of my information back to the American people, rather than trusting myself to make the decisions about publication, we've had a robust debate with a deep investment by the government that I think has resulted in a benefit for everyone. And the risks that have been threatened, the risks that have been played up by the government have never materialized. We've never seen any evidence of even a single instance of specific harm, and because of that, I'm comfortable with the decisions that I made. CA: So let me show the audience a couple of examples of what you revealed. If we could have a slide up, and Ed, I don't know whether you can see, the slides are here. This is a slide of the PRISM program, and maybe you could tell the audience what that was that was revealed. ES: The best way to understand PRISM, because there's been a little bit of controversy, is to first talk about what PRISM isn't. Much of the debate in the U.S. has been about metadata. They've said it's just metadata, it's just metadata, and they're talking about a specific legal authority called Section 215 of the Patriot Act. That allows sort of a warrantless wiretapping, mass surveillance of the entire country's phone records, things like that -- who you're talking to, when you're talking to them, where you traveled. These are all metadata events. PRISM is about content. It's a program through which the government could compel corporate America, it could deputize corporate America to do its dirty work for the NSA. And even though some of these companies did resist, even though some of them -- I believe Yahoo was one of them — challenged them in court, they all lost, because it was never tried by an open court. They were only tried by a secret court. And something that we've seen, something about the PRISM program that's very concerning to me is, there's been a talking point in the U.S. government where they've said 15 federal judges have reviewed these programs and found them to be lawful, but what they don't tell you is those are secret judges in a secret court based on secret interpretations of law that's considered 34,000 warrant requests over 33 years, and in 33 years only rejected 11 government requests. These aren't the people that we want deciding what the role of corporate America in a free and open Internet should be. CA: Now, this slide that we're showing here shows the dates in which different technology companies, Internet companies, are alleged to have joined the program, and where data collection began from them. Now, they have denied collaborating with the NSA. How was that data collected by the NSA? ES: Right. So the NSA's own slides refer to it as direct access. What that means to an actual NSA analyst, someone like me who was working as an intelligence analyst targeting, Chinese cyber-hackers, things like that, in Hawaii, is the provenance of that data is directly from their servers. It doesn't mean that there's a group of company representatives sitting in a smoky room with the NSA palling around and making back-room deals about how they're going to give this stuff away. Now each company handles it different ways. Some are responsible. Some are somewhat less responsible. But the bottom line is, when we talk about how this information is given, it's coming from the companies themselves. It's not stolen from the lines. But there's an important thing to remember here: even though companies pushed back, even though companies demanded, hey, let's do this through a warrant process, let's do this where we actually have some sort of legal review, some sort of basis for handing over these users' data, we saw stories in the Washington Post last year that weren't as well reported as the PRISM story that said the NSA broke in to the data center communications between Google to itself and Yahoo to itself. So even these companies that are cooperating in at least a compelled but hopefully lawful manner with the NSA, the NSA isn't satisfied with that, and because of that, we need our companies to work very hard to guarantee that they're going to represent the interests of the user, and also advocate for the rights of the users. And I think over the last year, we've seen the companies that are named on the PRISM slides take great strides to do that, and I encourage them to continue. CA: What more should they do? ES: The biggest thing that an Internet company in America can do today, right now, without consulting with lawyers, to protect the rights of users worldwide, is to enable SSL web encryption on every page you visit. The reason this matters is today, if you go to look at a copy of "1984" on Amazon.com, the NSA can see a record of that, the Russian intelligence service can see a record of that, the Chinese service can see a record of that, the French service, the German service, the services of Andorra. They can all see it because it's unencrypted. The world's library is Amazon.com, but not only do they not support encryption by default, you cannot choose to use encryption when browsing through books. This is something that we need to change, not just for Amazon, I don't mean to single them out, but they're a great example. All companies need to move to an encrypted browsing habit by default for all users who haven't taken any action or picked any special methods on their own. That'll increase the privacy and the rights that people enjoy worldwide. CA: Ed, come with me to this part of the stage. I want to show you the next slide here. (Applause) This is a program called Boundless Informant. What is that? ES: So, I've got to give credit to the NSA for using appropriate names on this. This is one of my favorite NSA cryptonyms. Boundless Informant is a program that the NSA hid from Congress. The NSA was previously asked by Congress, was there any ability that they had to even give a rough ballpark estimate of the amount of American communications that were being intercepted. They said no. They said, we don't track those stats, and we can't track those stats. We can't tell you how many communications we're intercepting around the world, because to tell you that would be to invade your privacy. Now, I really appreciate that sentiment from them, but the reality, when you look at this slide is, not only do they have the capability, the capability already exists. It's already in place. The NSA has its own internal data format that tracks both ends of a communication, and if it says, this communication came from America, they can tell Congress how many of those communications they have today, right now. And what Boundless Informant tells us is more communications are being intercepted in America about Americans than there are in Russia about Russians. I'm not sure that's what an intelligence agency should be aiming for. CA: Ed, there was a story broken in the Washington Post, again from your data. The headline says, "NSA broke privacy rules thousands of times per year." Tell us about that. ES: We also heard in Congressional testimony last year, it was an amazing thing for someone like me who came from the NSA and who's seen the actual internal documents, knows what's in them, to see officials testifying under oath that there had been no abuses, that there had been no violations of the NSA's rules, when we knew this story was coming. But what's especially interesting about this, about the fact that the NSA has violated their own rules, their own laws thousands of times in a single year, including one event by itself, one event out of those 2,776, that affected more than 3,000 people. In another event, they intercepted all the calls in Washington, D.C., by accident. What's amazing about this, this report, that didn't get that much attention, is the fact that not only were there 2,776 abuses, the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee, Dianne Feinstein, had not seen this report until the Washington Post contacted her asking for comment on the report. And she then requested a copy from the NSA and received it, but had never seen this before that. What does that say about the state of oversight in American intelligence when the chairman of the Senate Intelligence Committee has no idea that the rules are being broken thousands of times every year? CA: Ed, one response to this whole debate is this: Why should we care about all this surveillance, honestly? I mean, look, if you've done nothing wrong, you've got nothing to worry about. What's wrong with that point of view? ES: Well, so the first thing is, you're giving up your rights. You're saying hey, you know, I don't think I'm going to need them, so I'm just going to trust that, you know, let's get rid of them, it doesn't really matter, these guys are going to do the right thing. Your rights matter because you never know when you're going to need them. Beyond that, it's a part of our cultural identity, not just in America, but in Western societies and in democratic societies around the world. People should be able to pick up the phone and to call their family, people should be able to send a text message to their loved ones, people should be able to buy a book online, they should be able to travel by train, they should be able to buy an airline ticket without wondering about how these events are going to look to an agent of the government, possibly not even your government years in the future, how they're going to be misinterpreted and what they're going to think your intentions were. We have a right to privacy. We require warrants to be based on probable cause or some kind of individualized suspicion because we recognize that trusting anybody, any government authority, with the entirety of human communications in secret and without oversight is simply too great a temptation to be ignored. CA: Some people are furious at what you've done. I heard a quote recently from Dick Cheney who said that Julian Assange was a flea bite, Edward Snowden is the lion that bit the head off the dog. He thinks you've committed one of the worst acts of betrayal in American history. What would you say to people who think that? ES: Dick Cheney's really something else. (Laughter) (Applause) Thank you. (Laughter) I think it's amazing, because at the time Julian Assange was doing some of his greatest work, Dick Cheney was saying he was going to end governments worldwide, the skies were going to ignite and the seas were going to boil off, and now he's saying it's a flea bite. So we should be suspicious about the same sort of overblown claims of damage to national security from these kind of officials. But let's assume that these people really believe this. I would argue that they have kind of a narrow conception of national security. The prerogatives of people like Dick Cheney do not keep the nation safe. The public interest is not always the same as the national interest. Going to war with people who are not our enemy in places that are not a threat doesn't make us safe, and that applies whether it's in Iraq or on the Internet. The Internet is not the enemy. Our economy is not the enemy. American businesses, Chinese businesses, and any other company out there is a part of our society. It's a part of our interconnected world. There are ties of fraternity that bond us together, and if we destroy these bonds by undermining the standards, the security, the manner of behavior, that nations and citizens all around the world expect us to abide by. CA: But it's alleged that you've stolen 1.7 million documents. It seems only a few hundred of them have been shared with journalists so far. Are there more revelations to come? ES: There are absolutely more revelations to come. I don't think there's any question that some of the most important reporting to be done is yet to come. CA: Come here, because I want to ask you about this particular revelation. Come and take a look at this. I mean, this is a story which I think for a lot of the techies in this room is the single most shocking thing that they have heard in the last few months. It's about a program called "Bullrun." Can you explain what that is? ES: So Bullrun, and this is again where we've got to thank the NSA for their candor, this is a program named after a Civil War battle. The British counterpart is called Edgehill, which is a U.K. civil war battle. And the reason that I believe they're named this way is because they target our own infrastructure. They're programs through which the NSA intentionally misleads corporate partners. They tell corporate partners that these are safe standards. They say hey, we need to work with you to secure your systems, but in reality, they're giving bad advice to these companies that makes them degrade the security of their services. They're building in backdoors that not only the NSA can exploit, but anyone else who has time and money to research and find it can then use to let themselves in to the world's communications. And this is really dangerous, because if we lose a single standard, if we lose the trust of something like SSL, which was specifically targeted by the Bullrun program, we will live a less safe world overall. We won't be able to access our banks and we won't be able to access commerce without worrying about people monitoring those communications or subverting them for their own ends. CA: And do those same decisions also potentially open America up to cyberattacks from other sources? ES: Absolutely. One of the problems, one of the dangerous legacies that we've seen in the post-9/11 era, is that the NSA has traditionally worn two hats. They've been in charge of offensive operations, that is hacking, but they've also been in charge of defensive operations, and traditionally they've always prioritized defense over offense based on the principle that American secrets are simply worth more. If we hack a Chinese business and steal their secrets, if we hack a government office in Berlin and steal their secrets, that has less value to the American people than making sure that the Chinese can't get access to our secrets. So by reducing the security of our communications, they're not only putting the world at risk, they're putting America at risk in a fundamental way, because intellectual property is the basis, the foundation of our economy, and if we put that at risk through weak security, we're going to be paying for it for years. CA: But they've made a calculation that it was worth doing this as part of America's defense against terrorism. Surely that makes it a price worth paying. ES: Well, when you look at the results of these programs in stopping terrorism, you will see that that's unfounded, and you don't have to take my word for it, because we've had the first open court, the first federal court that's reviewed this, outside the secrecy arrangement, called these programs Orwellian and likely unconstitutional. Congress, who has access to be briefed on these things, and now has the desire to be, has produced bills to reform it, and two independent White House panels who reviewed all of the classified evidence said these programs have never stopped a single terrorist attack that was imminent in the United States. So is it really terrorism that we're stopping? Do these programs have any value at all? I say no, and all three branches of the American government say no as well. CA: I mean, do you think there's a deeper motivation for them than the war against terrorism? ES: I'm sorry, I couldn't hear you, say again? CA: Sorry. Do you think there's a deeper motivation for them other than the war against terrorism? ES: Yeah. The bottom line is that terrorism has always been what we in the intelligence world would call a cover for action. Terrorism is something that provokes an emotional response that allows people to rationalize authorizing powers and programs that they wouldn't give otherwise. The Bullrun and Edgehill-type programs, the NSA asked for these authorities back in the 1990s. They asked the FBI to go to Congress and make the case. The FBI went to Congress and did make the case. But Congress and the American people said no. They said, it's not worth the risk to our economy. They said it's worth too much damage to our society to justify the gains. But what we saw is, in the post-9/11 era, they used secrecy and they used the justification of terrorism to start these programs in secret without asking Congress, without asking the American people, and it's that kind of government behind closed doors that we need to guard ourselves against, because it makes us less safe, and it offers no value. CA: Okay, come with me here for a sec, because I've got a more personal question for you. Speaking of terror, most people would find the situation you're in right now in Russia pretty terrifying. You obviously heard what happened, what the treatment that Bradley Manning got, Chelsea Manning as now is, and there was a story in Buzzfeed saying that there are people in the intelligence community who want you dead. How are you coping with this? How are you coping with the fear? ES: It's no mystery that there are governments out there that want to see me dead. I've made clear again and again and again that I go to sleep every morning thinking about what I can do for the American people. I don't want to harm my government. I want to help my government, but the fact that they are willing to completely ignore due process, they're willing to declare guilt without ever seeing a trial, these are things that we need to work against as a society, and say hey, this is not appropriate. We shouldn't be threatening dissidents. We shouldn't be criminalizing journalism. And whatever part I can do to see that end, I'm happy to do despite the risks. CA: So I'd actually like to get some feedback from the audience here, because I know there's widely differing reactions to Edward Snowden. Suppose you had the following two choices, right? You could view what he did as fundamentally a reckless act that has endangered America or you could view it as fundamentally a heroic act that will work towards America and the world's long-term good? Those are the two choices I'll give you. I'm curious to see who's willing to vote with the first of those, that this was a reckless act? There are some hands going up. Some hands going up. It's hard to put your hand up when the man is standing right here, but I see them. ES: I can see you. (Laughter) CA: And who goes with the second choice, the fundamentally heroic act? (Applause) (Cheers) And I think it's true to say that there are a lot of people who didn't show a hand and I think are still thinking this through, because it seems to me that the debate around you doesn't split along traditional political lines. It's not left or right, it's not really about pro-government, libertarian, or not just that. Part of it is almost a generational issue. You're part of a generation that grew up with the Internet, and it seems as if you become offended at almost a visceral level when you see something done that you think will harm the Internet. Is there some truth to that? ES: It is. I think it's very true. This is not a left or right issue. Our basic freedoms, and when I say our, I don't just mean Americans, I mean people around the world, it's not a partisan issue. These are things that all people believe, and it's up to all of us to protect them, and to people who have seen and enjoyed a free and open Internet, it's up to us to preserve that liberty for the next generation to enjoy, and if we don't change things, if we don't stand up to make the changes we need to do to keep the Internet safe, not just for us but for everyone, we're going to lose that, and that would be a tremendous loss, not just for us, but for the world. CA: Well, I have heard similar language recently from the founder of the world wide web, who I actually think is with us, Sir Tim Berners-Lee. Tim, actually, would you like to come up and say, do we have a microphone for Tim? (Applause) Tim, good to see you. Come up there. Which camp are you in, by the way, traitor, hero? I have a theory on this, but -- Tim Berners-Lee: I've given much longer answers to that question, but hero, if I have to make the choice between the two. CA: And Ed, I think you've read the proposal that Sir Tim has talked about about a new Magna Carta to take back the Internet. Is that something that makes sense? ES: Absolutely. I mean, my generation, I grew up not just thinking about the Internet, but I grew up in the Internet, and although I never expected to have the chance to defend it in such a direct and practical manner and to embody it in this unusual, almost avatar manner, I think there's something poetic about the fact that one of the sons of the Internet has actually become close to the Internet as a result of their political expression. And I believe that a Magna Carta for the Internet is exactly what we need. We need to encode our values not just in writing but in the structure of the Internet, and it's something that I hope, I invite everyone in the audience, not just here in Vancouver but around the world, to join and participate in. CA: Do you have a question for Ed? TBL: Well, two questions, a general question — CA: Ed, can you still hear us? ES: Yes, I can hear you. CA: Oh, he's back. TBL: The wiretap on your line got a little interfered with for a moment. (Laughter) ES: It's a little bit of an NSA problem. TBL: So, from the 25 years, stepping back and thinking, what would you think would be the best that we could achieve from all the discussions that we have about the web we want? ES: When we think about in terms of how far we can go, I think that's a question that's really only limited by what we're willing to put into it. I think the Internet that we've enjoyed in the past has been exactly what we as not just a nation but as a people around the world need, and by cooperating, by engaging not just the technical parts of society, but as you said, the users, the people around the world who contribute through the Internet, through social media, who just check the weather, who rely on it every day as a part of their life, to champion that. We'll get not just the Internet we've had, but a better Internet, a better now, something that we can use to build a future that'll be better not just than what we hoped for but anything that we could have imagined. CA: It's 30 years ago that TED was founded, 1984. A lot of the conversation since then has been along the lines that actually George Orwell got it wrong. It's not Big Brother watching us. We, through the power of the web, and transparency, are now watching Big Brother. Your revelations kind of drove a stake through the heart of that rather optimistic view, but you still believe there's a way of doing something about that. And you do too. ES: Right, so there is an argument to be made that the powers of Big Brother have increased enormously. There was a recent legal article at Yale that established something called the Bankston-Soltani Principle, which is that our expectation of privacy is violated when the capabilities of government surveillance have become cheaper by an order of magnitude, and each time that occurs, we need to revisit and rebalance our privacy rights. Now, that hasn't happened since the government's surveillance powers have increased by several orders of magnitude, and that's why we're in the problem that we're in today, but there is still hope, because the power of individuals have also been increased by technology. I am living proof that an individual can go head to head against the most powerful adversaries and the most powerful intelligence agencies around the world and win, and I think that's something that we need to take hope from, and we need to build on to make it accessible not just to technical experts but to ordinary citizens around the world. Journalism is not a crime, communication is not a crime, and we should not be monitored in our everyday activities. CA: I'm not quite sure how you shake the hand of a bot, but I imagine it's, this is the hand right here. TBL: That'll come very soon. ES: Nice to meet you, and I hope my beam looks as nice as my view of you guys does. CA: Thank you, Tim. (Applause) I mean, The New York Times recently called for an amnesty for you. Would you welcome the chance to come back to America? ES: Absolutely. There's really no question, the principles that have been the foundation of this project have been the public interest and the principles that underly the journalistic establishment in the United States and around the world, and I think if the press is now saying, we support this, this is something that needed to happen, that's a powerful argument, but it's not the final argument, and I think that's something that public should decide. But at the same time, the government has hinted that they want some kind of deal, that they want me to compromise the journalists with which I've been working, to come back, and I want to make it very clear that I did not do this to be safe. I did this to do what was right, and I'm not going to stop my work in the public interest just to benefit myself. (Applause) CA: In the meantime, courtesy of the Internet and this technology, you're here, back in North America, not quite the U.S., Canada, in this form. I'm curious, how does that feel? ES: Canada is different than what I expected. It's a lot warmer. (Laughter) CA: At TED, the mission is "ideas worth spreading." If you could encapsulate it in a single idea, what is your idea worth spreading right now at this moment? ES: I would say the last year has been a reminder that democracy may die behind closed doors, but we as individuals are born behind those same closed doors, and we don't have to give up our privacy to have good government. We don't have to give up our liberty to have security. And I think by working together we can have both open government and private lives, and I look forward to working with everyone around the world to see that happen. Thank you very much. CA: Ed, thank you. (Applause)

I'd like to talk today about how we can change our brains and our society. Meet Joe. Joe's 32 years old and a murderer. I met Joe 13 years ago on the lifer wing at Wormwood Scrubs high-security prison in London. I'd like you to imagine this place. It looks and feels like it sounds: Wormwood Scrubs. Built at the end of the Victorian Era by the inmates themselves, it is where England's most dangerous prisoners are kept. These individuals have committed acts of unspeakable evil. And I was there to study their brains. I was part of a team of researchers from University College London, on a grant from the U.K. department of health. My task was to study a group of inmates who had been clinically diagnosed as psychopaths. That meant they were the most callous and the most aggressive of the entire prison population. What lay at the root of their behavior? Was there a neurological cause for their condition? And if there was a neurological cause, could we find a cure? So I'd like to speak about change, and especially about emotional change. Growing up, I was always intrigued by how people change. My mother, a clinical psychotherapist, would occasionally see patients at home in the evening. She would shut the door to the living room, and I imagined magical things happened in that room. At the age of five or six I would creep up in my pajamas and sit outside with my ear glued to the door. On more than one occasion, I fell asleep and they had to push me out of the way at the end of the session. And I suppose that's how I found myself walking into the secure interview room on my first day at Wormwood Scrubs. Joe sat across a steel table and greeted me with this blank expression. The prison warden, looking equally indifferent, said, "Any trouble, just press the red buzzer, and we'll be around as soon as we can." (Laughter) I sat down. The heavy metal door slammed shut behind me. I looked up at the red buzzer far behind Joe on the opposite wall. (Laughter) I looked at Joe. Perhaps detecting my concern, he leaned forward, and said, as reassuringly as he could, "Ah, don't worry about the buzzer, it doesn't work anyway." (Laughter) Over the subsequent months, we tested Joe and his fellow inmates, looking specifically at their ability to categorize different images of emotion. And we looked at their physical response to those emotions. So, for example, when most of us look at a picture like this of somebody looking sad, we instantly have a slight, measurable physical response: increased heart rate, sweating of the skin. Whilst the psychopaths in our study were able to describe the pictures accurately, they failed to show the emotions required. They failed to show a physical response. It was as though they knew the words but not the music of empathy. So we wanted to look closer at this to use MRI to image their brains. That turned out to be not such an easy task. Imagine transporting a collection of clinical psychopaths across central London in shackles and handcuffs in rush hour, and in order to place each of them in an MRI scanner, you have to remove all metal objects, including shackles and handcuffs, and, as I learned, all body piercings. After some time, however, we had a tentative answer. These individuals were not just the victims of a troubled childhood. There was something else. People like Joe have a deficit in a brain area called the amygdala. The amygdala is an almond-shaped organ deep within each of the hemispheres of the brain. It is thought to be key to the experience of empathy. Normally, the more empathic a person is, the larger and more active their amygdala is. Our population of inmates had a deficient amygdala, which likely led to their lack of empathy and to their immoral behavior. So let's take a step back. Normally, acquiring moral behavior is simply part of growing up, like learning to speak. At the age of six months, virtually every one of us is able to differentiate between animate and inanimate objects. At the age of 12 months, most children are able to imitate the purposeful actions of others. So for example, your mother raises her hands to stretch, and you imitate her behavior. At first, this isn't perfect. I remember my cousin Sasha, two years old at the time, looking through a picture book and licking one finger and flicking the page with the other hand, licking one finger and flicking the page with the other hand. (Laughter) Bit by bit, we build the foundations of the social brain so that by the time we're three, four years old, most children, not all, have acquired the ability to understand the intentions of others, another prerequisite for empathy. The fact that this developmental progression is universal, irrespective of where you live in the world or which culture you inhabit, strongly suggests that the foundations of moral behavior are inborn. If you doubt this, try, as I've done, to renege on a promise you've made to a four-year-old. You will find that the mind of a four-year old is not naïve in the slightest. It is more akin to a Swiss army knife with fixed mental modules finely honed during development and a sharp sense of fairness. The early years are crucial. There seems to be a window of opportunity, after which mastering moral questions becomes more difficult, like adults learning a foreign language. That's not to say it's impossible. A recent, wonderful study from Stanford University showed that people who have played a virtual reality game in which they took on the role of a good and helpful superhero actually became more caring and helpful towards others afterwards. Now I'm not suggesting we endow criminals with superpowers, but I am suggesting that we need to find ways to get Joe and people like him to change their brains and their behavior, for their benefit and for the benefit of the rest of us. So can brains change? For over 100 years, neuroanatomists and later neuroscientists held the view that after initial development in childhood, no new brain cells could grow in the adult human brain. The brain could only change within certain set limits. That was the dogma. But then, in the 1990s, studies starting showing, following the lead of Elizabeth Gould at Princeton and others, studies started showing the evidence of neurogenesis, the birth of new brain cells in the adult mammalian brain, first in the olfactory bulb, which is responsible for our sense of smell, then in the hippocampus involving short-term memory, and finally in the amygdala itself. In order to understand how this process works, I left the psychopaths and joined a lab in Oxford specializing in learning and development. Instead of psychopaths, I studied mice, because the same pattern of brain responses appears across many different species of social animals. So if you rear a mouse in a standard cage, a shoebox, essentially, with cotton wool, alone and without much stimulation, not only does it not thrive, but it will often develop strange, repetitive behaviors. This naturally sociable animal will lose its ability to bond with other mice, even becoming aggressive when introduced to them. However, mice reared in what we called an enriched environment, a large habitation with other mice with wheels and ladders and areas to explore, demonstrate neurogenesis, the birth of new brain cells, and as we showed, they also perform better on a range of learning and memory tasks. Now, they don't develop morality to the point of carrying the shopping bags of little old mice across the street, but their improved environment results in healthy, sociable behavior. Mice reared in a standard cage, by contrast, not dissimilar, you might say, from a prison cell, have dramatically lower levels of new neurons in the brain. It is now clear that the amygdala of mammals, including primates like us, can show neurogenesis. In some areas of the brain, more than 20 percent of cells are newly formed. We're just beginning to understand what exact function these cells have, but what it implies is that the brain is capable of extraordinary change way into adulthood. However, our brains are also exquisitely sensitive to stress in our environment. Stress hormones, glucocorticoids, released by the brain, suppress the growth of these new cells. The more stress, the less brain development, which in turn causes less adaptability and causes higher stress levels. This is the interplay between nature and nurture in real time in front of our eyes. When you think about it, it is ironic that our current solution for people with stressed amygdalae is to place them in an environment that actually inhibits any chance of further growth. Of course, imprisonment is a necessary part of the criminal justice system and of protecting society. Our research does not suggest that criminals should submit their MRI scans as evidence in court and get off the hook because they've got a faulty amygdala. The evidence is actually the other way. Because our brains are capable of change, we need to take responsibility for our actions, and they need to take responsibility for their rehabilitation. One way such rehabilitation might work is through restorative justice programs. Here victims, if they choose to participate, and perpetrators meet face to face in safe, structured encounters, and the perpetrator is encouraged to take responsibility for their actions, and the victim plays an active role in the process. In such a setting, the perpetrator can see, perhaps for the first time, the victim as a real person with thoughts and feelings and a genuine emotional response. This stimulates the amygdala and may be a more effective rehabilitative practice than simple incarceration. Such programs won't work for everyone, but for many, it could be a way to break the frozen sea within. So what can we do now? How can we apply this knowledge? I'd like to leave you with three lessons that I learned. The first thing that I learned was that we need to change our mindset. Since Wormwood Scrubs was built 130 years ago, society has advanced in virtually every aspect, in the way we run our schools, our hospitals. Yet the moment we speak about prisons, it's as though we're back in Dickensian times, if not medieval times. For too long, I believe, we've allowed ourselves to be persuaded of the false notion that human nature cannot change, and as a society, it's costing us dearly. We know that the brain is capable of extraordinary change, and the best way to achieve that, even in adults, is to change and modulate our environment. The second thing I have learned is that we need to create an alliance of people who believe that science is integral to bringing about social change. It's easy enough for a neuroscientist to place a high-security inmate in an MRI scanner. Well actually, that turns out not to be so easy, but ultimately what we want to show is whether we're able to reduce the reoffending rates. In order to answer complex questions like that, we need people of different backgrounds -- lab-based scientists and clinicians, social workers and policy makers, philanthropists and human rights activists — to work together. Finally, I believe we need to change our own amygdalae, because this issue goes to the heart not just of who Joe is, but who we are. We need to change our view of Joe as someone wholly irredeemable, because if we see Joe as wholly irredeemable, how is he going to see himself as any different? In another decade, Joe will be released from Wormwood Scrubs. Will he be among the 70 percent of inmates who end up reoffending and returning to the prison system? Wouldn't it be better if, while serving his sentence, Joe was able to train his amygdala, which would stimulate the growth of new brain cells and connections, so that he will be able to face the world once he gets released? Surely, that would be in the interest of all of us. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause)

["Rebecca Newberger Goldstein"] ["Steven Pinker"] ["The Long Reach of Reason"] Cabbie: Twenty-two dollars. Steven Pinker: Okay. Rebecca Newberger Goldstein: Reason appears to have fallen on hard times: Popular culture plumbs new depths of dumbth and political discourse has become a race to the bottom. We're living in an era of scientific creationism, 9/11 conspiracy theories, psychic hotlines, and a resurgence of religious fundamentalism. People who think too well are often accused of elitism, and even in the academy, there are attacks on logocentrism, the crime of letting logic dominate our thinking. SP: But is this necessarily a bad thing? Perhaps reason is overrated. Many pundits have argued that a good heart and steadfast moral clarity are superior to triangulations of overeducated policy wonks, like the best and brightest and that dragged us into the quagmire of Vietnam. And wasn't it reason that gave us the means to despoil the planet and threaten our species with weapons of mass destruction? In this way of thinking, it's character and conscience, not cold-hearted calculation, that will save us. Besides, a human being is not a brain on a stick. My fellow psychologists have shown that we're led by our bodies and our emotions and use our puny powers of reason merely to rationalize our gut feelings after the fact. RNG: How could a reasoned argument logically entail the ineffectiveness of reasoned arguments? Look, you're trying to persuade us of reason's impotence. You're not threatening us or bribing us, suggesting that we resolve the issue with a show of hands or a beauty contest. By the very act of trying to reason us into your position, you're conceding reason's potency. Reason isn't up for grabs here. It can't be. You show up for that debate and you've already lost it. SP: But can reason lead us in directions that are good or decent or moral? After all, you pointed out that reason is just a means to an end, and the end depends on the reasoner's passions. Reason can lay out a road map to peace and harmony if the reasoner wants peace and harmony, but it can also lay out a road map to conflict and strife if the reasoner delights in conflict and strife. Can reason force the reasoner to want less cruelty and waste? RNG: All on its own, the answer is no, but it doesn't take much to switch it to yes. You need two conditions: The first is that reasoners all care about their own well-being. That's one of the passions that has to be present in order for reason to go to work, and it's obviously present in all of us. We all care passionately about our own well-being. The second condition is that reasoners are members of a community of reasoners who can affect one another's well-being, can exchange messages, and comprehend each other's reasoning. And that's certainly true of our gregarious and loquatious species, well endowed with the instinct for language. SP: Well, that sounds good in theory, but has it worked that way in practice? In particular, can it explain a momentous historical development that I spoke about five years ago here at TED? Namely, we seem to be getting more humane. Centuries ago, our ancestors would burn cats alive as a form of popular entertainment. Knights waged constant war on each other by trying to kill as many of each other's peasants as possible. Governments executed people for frivolous reasons, like stealing a cabbage or criticizing the royal garden. The executions were designed to be as prolonged and as painful as possible, like crucifixion, disembowelment, breaking on the wheel. Respectable people kept slaves. For all our flaws, we have abandoned these barbaric practices. RNG: So, do you think it's human nature that's changed? SP: Not exactly. I think we still harbor instincts that can erupt in violence, like greed, tribalism, revenge, dominance, sadism. But we also have instincts that can steer us away, like self-control, empathy, a sense of fairness, what Abraham Lincoln called the better angels of our nature. RNG: So if human nature didn't change, what invigorated those better angels? SP: Well, among other things, our circle of empathy expanded. Years ago, our ancestors would feel the pain only of their family and people in their village. But with the expansion of literacy and travel, people started to sympathize with wider and wider circles, the clan, the tribe, the nation, the race, and perhaps eventually, all of humanity. RNG: Can hard-headed scientists really give so much credit to soft-hearted empathy? SP: They can and do. Neurophysiologists have found neurons in the brain that respond to other people's actions the same way they respond to our own. Empathy emerges early in life, perhaps before the age of one. Books on empathy have become bestsellers, like "The Empathic Civilization" and "The Age of Empathy." RNG: I'm all for empathy. I mean, who isn't? But all on its own, it's a feeble instrument for making moral progress. For one thing, it's innately biased toward blood relations, babies and warm, fuzzy animals. As far as empathy is concerned, ugly outsiders can go to hell. And even our best attempts to work up sympathy for those who are unconnected with us fall miserably short, a sad truth about human nature that was pointed out by Adam Smith. Adam Smith: Let us suppose that the great empire of China was suddenly swallowed up by an earthquake, and let us consider how a man of humanity in Europe would react on receiving intelligence of this dreadful calamity. He would, I imagine, first of all express very strongly his sorrow for the misfortune of that unhappy people. He would make many melancholy reflections upon the precariousness of human life, and when all these humane sentiments had been once fairly expressed, he would pursue his business or his pleasure with the same ease and tranquility as if no such accident had happened. If he was to lose his little finger tomorrow, he would not sleep tonight, but provided he never saw them, he would snore with the most profound security over the ruin of a hundred million of his brethren. SP: But if empathy wasn't enough to make us more humane, what else was there? RNG: Well, you didn't mention what might be one of our most effective better angels: reason. Reason has muscle. It's reason that provides the push to widen that circle of empathy. Every one of the humanitarian developments that you mentioned originated with thinkers who gave reasons for why some practice was indefensible. They demonstrated that the way people treated some particular group of others was logically inconsistent with the way they insisted on being treated themselves. SP: Are you saying that reason can actually change people's minds? Don't people just stick with whatever conviction serves their interests or conforms to the culture that they grew up in? RNG: Here's a fascinating fact about us: Contradictions bother us, at least when we're forced to confront them, which is just another way of saying that we are susceptible to reason. And if you look at the history of moral progress, you can trace a direct pathway from reasoned arguments to changes in the way that we actually feel. Time and again, a thinker would lay out an argument as to why some practice was indefensible, irrational, inconsistent with values already held. Their essay would go viral, get translated into many languages, get debated at pubs and coffee houses and salons, and at dinner parties, and influence leaders, legislators, popular opinion. Eventually their conclusions get absorbed into the common sense of decency, erasing the tracks of the original argument that had gotten us there. Few of us today feel any need to put forth a rigorous philosophical argument as to why slavery is wrong or public hangings or beating children. By now, these things just feel wrong. But just those arguments had to be made, and they were, in centuries past. SP: Are you saying that people needed a step-by-step argument to grasp why something might be a wee bit wrong with burning heretics at the stake? RNG: Oh, they did. Here's the French theologian Sebastian Castellio making the case. Sebastian Castellio: Calvin says that he's certain, and other sects say that they are. Who shall be judge? If the matter is certain, to whom is it so? To Calvin? But then, why does he write so many books about manifest truth? In view of the uncertainty, we must define heretics simply as one with whom we disagree. And if then we are going to kill heretics, the logical outcome will be a war of extermination, since each is sure of himself. SP: Or with hideous punishments like breaking on the wheel? RNG: The prohibition in our constitution of cruel and unusual punishments was a response to a pamphlet circulated in 1764 by the Italian jurist Cesare Beccaria. Cesare Beccaria: As punishments become more cruel, the minds of men, which like fluids always adjust to the level of the objects that surround them, become hardened, and after a hundred years of cruel punishments, breaking on the wheel causes no more fear than imprisonment previously did. For a punishment to achieve its objective, it is only necessary that the harm that it inflicts outweighs the benefit that derives from the crime, and into this calculation ought to be factored the certainty of punishment and the loss of the good that the commission of the crime will produce. Everything beyond this is superfluous, and therefore tyrannical. SP: But surely antiwar movements depended on mass demonstrations and catchy tunes by folk singers and wrenching photographs of the human costs of war. RNG: No doubt, but modern anti-war movements reach back to a long chain of thinkers who had argued as to why we ought to mobilize our emotions against war, such as the father of modernity, Erasmus. Erasmus: The advantages derived from peace diffuse themselves far and wide, and reach great numbers, while in war, if anything turns out happily, the advantage redounds only to a few, and those unworthy of reaping it. One man's safety is owing to the destruction of another. One man's prize is derived from the plunder of another. The cause of rejoicings made by one side is to the other a cause of mourning. Whatever is unfortunate in war, is severely so indeed, and whatever, on the contrary, is called good fortune, is a savage and a cruel good fortune, an ungenerous happiness deriving its existence from another's woe. SP: But everyone knows that the movement to abolish slavery depended on faith and emotion. It was a movement spearheaded by the Quakers, and it only became popular when Harriet Beecher Stowe's novel "Uncle Tom's Cabin" became a bestseller. RNG: But the ball got rolling a century before. John Locke bucked the tide of millennia that had regarded the practice as perfectly natural. He argued that it was inconsistent with the principles of rational government. John Locke: Freedom of men under government is to have a standing rule to live by common to everyone of that society and made by the legislative power erected in it, a liberty to follow my own will in all things where that rule prescribes not, not to be subject to the inconstant, uncertain, unknown, arbitrary will of another man, as freedom of nature is to be under no other restraint but the law of nature. SP: Those words sound familiar. Where have I read them before? Ah, yes. Mary Astell: If absolute sovereignty be not necessary in a state, how comes it to be so in a family? Or if in a family, why not in a state? Since no reason can be alleged for the one that will not hold more strongly for the other, if all men are born free, how is it that all women are born slaves, as they must be if being subjected to the inconstant, uncertain, unknown, arbitrary will of men be the perfect condition of slavery? RNG: That sort of co-option is all in the job description of reason. One movement for the expansion of rights inspires another because the logic is the same, and once that's hammered home, it becomes increasingly uncomfortable to ignore the inconsistency. In the 1960s, the Civil Rights Movement inspired the movements for women's rights, children's rights, gay rights and even animal rights. But fully two centuries before, the Enlightenment thinker Jeremy Bentham had exposed the indefensibility of customary practices such as the cruelty to animals. Jeremy Bentham: The question is not, can they reason, nor can they talk, but can they suffer? RNG: And the persecution of homosexuals. JB: As to any primary mischief, it's evident that it produces no pain in anyone. On the contrary, it produces pleasure. The partners are both willing. If either of them be unwilling, the act is an offense, totally different in its nature of effects. It's a personal injury. It's a kind of rape. As to the any danger exclusive of pain, the danger, if any, much consist in the tendency of the example. But what is the tendency of this example? To dispose others to engage in the same practices. But this practice produces not pain of any kind to anyone. SP: Still, in every case, it took at least a century for the arguments of these great thinkers to trickle down and infiltrate the population as a whole. It kind of makes you wonder about our own time. Are there practices that we engage in where the arguments against them are there for all to see but nonetheless we persist in them? RNG: When our great grandchildren look back at us, will they be as appalled by some of our practices as we are by our slave-owning, heretic-burning, wife-beating, gay-bashing ancestors? SP: I'm sure everyone here could think of an example. RNG: I opt for the mistreatment of animals in factory farms. SP: The imprisonment of nonviolent drug offenders and the toleration of rape in our nation's prisons. RNG: Scrimping on donations to life-saving charities in the developing world. SP: The possession of nuclear weapons. RNG: The appeal to religion to justify the otherwise unjustifiable, such as the ban on contraception. SP: What about religious faith in general? RNG: Eh, I'm not holding my breath. SP: Still, I have become convinced that reason is a better angel that deserves the greatest credit for the moral progress our species has enjoyed and that holds out the greatest hope for continuing moral progress in the future. RNG: And if, our friends, you detect a flaw in this argument, just remember you'll be depending on reason to point it out. Thank you. SP: Thank you. (Applause)

Anyone in the room thought about sex today? (Laughter) Yeah, you did. Thank you for putting your hand up over there. Well, I'm here to provide you with some biological validation for your sordid daydreams. I'm here to tell you a few things that you might not have known about wild sex. Now, when humans think about sex, male and female forms are generally what come to mind, but for many millions of years, such specific categories didn't even exist. Sex was a mere fusion of bodies or a trickle of DNA shared between two or more beings. It wasn't until about 500 million years ago that we start to see structures akin to a penis or a thing that gives DNA out, and a vagina, something that receives it. Now invariably, you're probably thinking about what belongs to our own species, these very familiar structures, but the diversity that we see in sexual structures in the animal kingdom that has evolved in response to the multitude of factors surrounding reproduction is pretty mind-blowing. Penile diversity is especially profuse. So this is a paper nautilus. It's a close relative of squid and octopus, and males have a hectocotylus. Just what is a hectocotylus? A detachable, swimming penis. It leaves the [body of the male], finds the female through pheromonal cues in the water, attaches itself to her body and deposits the sperm. For many decades, biologists actually felt that the hectocotylus was a separate organism altogether. Now, the tapir is a mammal from South America. And the tapir has a prehensile penis. It actually has a level of dexterity in its penis much akin to what we have with our hands. And it uses this dexterity to bypass the vagina altogether and deposit sperm directly into the female's uterus, not to mention it's a pretty good size. The biggest penis in the animal kingdom, however, is not that of the tapir. The biggest penis-to-body-size ratio in the animal kingdom actually belongs to the meager beach barnacle, and this video is actually showing you what the human penis would look like if it were the same size as that of a barnacle. (Laughter) Mm-hm. (Laughter) So with all of this diversity in structure, one might think, then, that penises are fitting neatly into vaginas all over the place for the purposes of successful reproduction. Simply insert part A into slot B, and we should all be good to go. But of course, that doesn't exactly happen, and that's because we can't just take form into account. We have to think about function as well, and when it comes to sex, function relates to the contributions made by the gametes, or the sperm and the eggs. And these contributions are far from equal. Eggs are very expensive to make, so it makes sense for females to be very choosy about who she shares them with. Sperm, on the other hand, is abundant and cheap, so it makes more sense for males to have a more-sex-is-better strategy when it comes to siring members of future generations. So how do animals cope with these very incongruent needs between the sexes? I mean, if a female doesn't choose a particular male, or if she has the ability to store sperm and she simply has enough, then it makes more sense for her to spend her time doing other biologically relevant things: avoiding predators, taking care of offspring, gathering and ingesting food. This is, of course, bad news for any male who has yet to make a deposit in her sperm bank, and this sets the scene for some pretty drastic strategies for successful fertilization. This is bedbug sex, and it's aptly termed traumatic insemination. Males have a spiked, barbed penis that they literally stab into the female, and they don't stab it anywhere near her vagina. They stab it anywhere in her body, and the sperm simply migrates through her hemolymph to her ovaries. If a female gets too many stab wounds, or if a stab wound happens to become infected, she can actually die from it. Now if you've ever been out for a nice, peaceful walk by the lake and happened to see some ducks having sex, you've undoubtedly been alarmed, because it looks like gang rape. And quite frankly, that's exactly what it is. A group of males will grab a female, hold her down, and ballistically ejaculate their spiral-shaped penis into her corkscrew-shaped vagina over and over and over again. From flaccid to ejaculation in less than a second. Now the female actually gets the last laugh, though, because she can actually manipulate her posture so as to allow the sperm of certain suitors better access to her ovaries. Now, I like to share stories like this with my audiences because, yeah, we humans, we tend to think sex, sex is fun, sex is good, there's romance, and there's orgasm. But orgasm didn't actually evolve until about 65 million years ago with the advent of mammals. But some animals had it going on quite a bit before that. There are some more primitive ways of pleasing one's partner. Earwig males have either really large penile appendages or really small ones. It's a very simple genetically inherited trait and the males are not otherwise any different. Those that have long penile appendages are not bigger or stronger or otherwise any different at all. So going back to our biological minds, then, we might think that females should choose to have sex with the guys that have the shorter appendages, because she can use her time for other things: avoiding predators, taking care of young, finding and ingesting food. But biologists have repeatedly observed that females choose to have sex with the males that have the long appendages. Why do they do this? Well, according to the biological literature, "During copulation, the genitalia of certain males may elicit more favorable female responses through superior mechanical or stimulatory interaction with the female reproductive tract." Mm-hm. These are Mexican guppies, and what you see on their upper maxilla is an outgrowth of epidermal filaments, and these filaments basically form a fish mustache, if you will. Now males have been observed to prod the female's genital opening prior to copulating with her, and in what I have lovingly termed the Magnum, P.I. hypothesis, females are overwhelmingly more likely to be found with males that have these fish mustaches. A little guppy porn for you right there. So we've seen very different strategies that males are using when it comes to winning a female partner. We've seen a coercion strategy in which sexual structures are used in a forceful way to basically make a female have sex. We've also seen a titillation strategy where males are actually pleasing their female partners into choosing them as a sex partner. Now unfortunately, in the animal kingdom, it's the coercion strategy that we see time and time again. It's very common in many phyla, from invertebrates to avian species, mammals, and, of course, even in primates. Now interestingly, there are a few mammalian species in which females have evolved specialized genitalia that doesn't allow for sexual coercion to take place. Female elephants and female hyenas have a penile clitoris, or an enlarged clitoral tissue that hangs externally, much like a penis, and in fact it's very difficult to sex these animals by merely looking at their external morphology. So before a male can insert his penis into a female's vagina, she has to take this penile clitoris and basically inside-out it in her own body. I mean, imagine putting a penis into another penis. It's simply not going to happen unless the female is on board with the action. Now, even more interesting is the fact that elephant and hyena societies are entirely matriarchal: they're run by females, groups of females, sisters, aunts and offspring, and when young males attain sexual maturity, they're turfed out of the group. In hyena societies, adult males are actually the lowest on the social scale. They can take part in a kill only after everybody else, including the offspring. So it seems that when you take the penis power away from a male, you take away all the social power he has. So what are my take-home messages from my talk today? Well, sex is just so much more than insert part A into slot B and hope that the offspring run around everywhere. The sexual strategies and reproductive structures that we see in the animal kingdom basically dictate how males and females will react to each other, which then dictates how populations and societies form and evolve. So it may not be surprising to any of you that animals, including ourselves, spend a good amount of time thinking about sex, but what might surprise you is the extent to which so many other aspects of their lives and our lives are influenced by it. So thank you, and happy daydreaming. (Applause)

Let me start by asking you a question, just with a show of hands: Who has an iPhone? Who has an Android phone? Who has a Blackberry? Who will admit in public to having a Blackberry? (Laughter) And let me guess, how many of you, when you arrived here, like me, went and bought a pay-as-you-go SIM card? Yeah? I'll bet you didn't even know you're using African technology. Pay-as-you-go was a technology, or an idea, pioneered in Africa by a company called Vodacom a good 15 years ago, and now, like franchising, pay-as-you-go is one of the most dominant forces of economic activity in the world. So I'm going to talk about innovation in Africa, which I think is the purest form, innovation out of necessity. But first, I'm going to ask you some other questions. You don't have to put your hands up. These are rhetorical. Why did Nikola Tesla have to invent the alternating current that powers the lights in this building or the city that we're in? Why did Henry Ford have to invent the production line to produce these Fords that came in anything as long as they were black? And why did Eric Merrifield have to invent the dolos? Blank stares. That is what a dolos looks like, and in the background, you can see Robben Island. This is a small dolos, and Eric Merrifield is the most famous inventor you've never heard of. In 1963, a storm ripped up the harbor in a small South African town called East London, and while he was watching his kids playing with toys made from oxen bones called dolosse, he had the idea for this. It's a bit like a huge jumping jack, and they have used this in every harbor in the world as a breakwater. The global shipping economy would not be possible without African technology like this. So whenever you talk about Africa, you have to put up this picture of the world from space, and people go, "Look, it's the Dark Continent." Actually, it isn't. What it is is a map of innovation. And it's really easy to see where innovation's going on. All the places with lots of electricity, it isn't. (Laughter) (Applause) And the reason it isn't is because everybody's watching television or playing Angry Birds. (Laughter) (Applause) So where it's happening is in Africa. Now, this is real innovation, not the way people have expropriated the word to talk about launching new products. This is real innovation, and I define it as problem-solving. People are solving real problems in Africa. Why? Because we have to. Because we have real problems. And when we solve real problems for people, we solve them for the rest of the world at the same time. So in California, everybody's really excited about a little square of plastic that you plug into a phone and you can swipe your credit card, and people say, "We've liberated the credit card from the point of sale terminal." Fantastic. Why do you even need a credit card? In Africa, we've been doing that for years, and we've been doing it on phones like this. This is a picture I took at a place called Kitengela, about an hour south of Nairobi, and the thing that's so remarkable about the payment system that's been pioneered in Africa called M-Pesa is that it works on phones like this. It works on every single phone possible, because it uses SMS. You can pay bills with it, you can buy your groceries, you can pay your kids' school fees, and I'm told you can even bribe customs officials. (Laughter) Something like 25 million dollars a day is transacted through M-Pesa. Forty percent of Kenya's GDP moves through M-Pesa using phones like this. And you think this is just a feature phone. Actually it's the smartphone of Africa. It's also a radio, and it's also a torch, and more than anything else, it has really superb battery life. Why? Because that's what we need. We have really severe energy problems in Africa. By the way, you can update Facebook and send Gmail from a phone like this. So we have found a way to use the available technology to send money via M-Pesa, which is a bit like a check system for the mobile age. I come from Johannesburg, which is a mining town. It's built on gold. This is a picture I Instagrammed earlier. And the difference today is that the gold of today is mobile. If you think about the railroad system in North America and how that worked, first came the infrastructure, then came the industry around it, the brothels -- it's a bit like the Internet today, right? — and everything else that worked with it: bars, saloons, etc. The gold of today is mobile, and mobile is the enabler that makes all of this possible. So what are some of the things that you can do with it? Well, this is by a guy called Bright Simons from Ghana, and what you do is you take medication, something that some people might spend their entire month's salary on, and you scratch off the code, and you send that to an SMS number, and it tells you if that is legitimate or if it's expired. Really simple, really effective, really life-saving. In Kenya, there's a service called iCow, which just sends you really important information about how to look after your dairy. The dairy business in Kenya is a $463 million business, and the difference between a subsistence farmer and an abundance farmer is only a couple of liters of milk a day. And if you can do that, you can rise out of poverty. Really simple, using a basic phone. If you don't have electricity, no problem! We'll just make it out of old bicycle parts using a windmill, as William Kamkwamba did. There's another great African that you've heard that's busy disrupting the automobile industry in the world. He's also finding a way to reinvent solar power and the electricity industry in North America, and if he's lucky, he'll get us to Mars, hopefully in my lifetime. He comes from Pretoria, the capital of [South Africa], about 50 kilometers from where I live. So back to Joburg, which is sometimes called Egoli, which means City of Gold. And not only is mobile the gold of today, I don't believe that the gold is under the ground. I believe we are the gold. Like you've heard the other economists say, we are at the point where China was when its boom years began, and that's where we're going. So, you hear the West talk about innovation at the edge. Well, of course it's happening at the edge, because in the middle, everybody's updating Facebook, or worse still, they're trying to understand Facebook's privacy settings. (Laughter) This is not that catchy catchphrase. This is innovation over the edge. So, people like to call Africa a mobile-first continent, but actually it's mobile-only, so while everybody else is doing all of those things, we're solving the world's problems. So there's only one thing left to say. ["You're welcome"] (Laughter) (Applause)

So my moment of truth did not come all at once. In 2010, I had the chance to be considered for promotion from my job as director of policy planning at the U.S. State Department. This was my moment to lean in, to push myself forward for what are really only a handful of the very top foreign policy jobs, and I had just finished a big, 18-month project for Secretary Clinton, successfully, and I knew I could handle a bigger job. The woman I thought I was would have said yes. But I had been commuting for two years between Washington and Princeton, New Jersey, where my husband and my two teenage sons lived, and it was not going well. I tried on the idea of eking out another two years in Washington, or maybe uprooting my sons from their school and my husband from his work and asking them to join me. But deep down, I knew that the right decision was to go home, even if I didn't fully recognize the woman who was making that choice. That was a decision based on love and responsibility. I couldn't keep watching my oldest son make bad choices without being able to be there for him when and if he needed me. But the real change came more gradually. Over the next year, while my family was righting itself, I started to realize that even if I could go back into government, I didn't want to. I didn't want to miss the last five years that my sons were at home. I finally allowed myself to accept what was really most important to me, not what I was conditioned to want or maybe what I conditioned myself to want, and that decision led to a reassessment of the feminist narrative that I grew up with and have always championed. I am still completely committed to the cause of male-female equality, but let's think about what that equality really means, and how best to achieve it. I always accepted the idea that the most respected and powerful people in our society are men at the top of their careers, so that the measure of male-female equality ought to be how many women are in those positions: prime ministers, presidents, CEOs, directors, managers, Nobel laureates, leaders. I still think we should do everything we possibly can to achieve that goal. But that's only half of real equality, and I now think we're never going to get there unless we recognize the other half. I suggest that real equality, full equality, does not just mean valuing women on male terms. It means creating a much wider range of equally respected choices for women and for men. And to get there, we have to change our workplaces, our policies and our culture. In the workplace, real equality means valuing family just as much as work, and understanding that the two reinforce each other. As a leader and as a manager, I have always acted on the mantra, if family comes first, work does not come second -- life comes together. If you work for me, and you have a family issue, I expect you to attend to it, and I am confident, and my confidence has always been borne out, that the work will get done, and done better. Workers who have a reason to get home to care for their children or their family members are more focused, more efficient, more results-focused. And breadwinners who are also caregivers have a much wider range of experiences and contacts. Think about a lawyer who spends part of his time at school events for his kids talking to other parents. He's much more likely to bring in new clients for his firm than a lawyer who never leaves his office. And caregiving itself develops patience -- a lot of patience -- and empathy, creativity, resilience, adaptability. Those are all attributes that are ever more important in a high-speed, horizontal, networked global economy. The best companies actually know this. The companies that win awards for workplace flexibility in the United States include some of our most successful corporations, and a 2008 national study on the changing workforce showed that employees in flexible and effective workplaces are more engaged with their work, they're more satisfied and more loyal, they have lower levels of stress and higher levels of mental health. And a 2012 study of employers showed that deep, flexible practices actually lowered operating costs and increased adaptability in a global service economy. So you may think that the privileging of work over family is only an American problem. Sadly, though, the obsession with work is no longer a uniquely American disease. Twenty years ago, when my family first started going to Italy, we used to luxuriate in the culture of siesta. Siesta is not just about avoiding the heat of the day. It's actually just as much about embracing the warmth of a family lunch. Now, when we go, fewer and fewer businesses close for siesta, reflecting the advance of global corporations and 24-hour competition. So making a place for those we love is actually a global imperative. In policy terms, real equality means recognizing that the work that women have traditionally done is just as important as the work that men have traditionally done, no matter who does it. Think about it: Breadwinning and caregiving are equally necessary for human survival. At least if we get beyond a barter economy, somebody has to earn an income and someone else has to convert that income to care and sustenance for loved ones. Now most of you, when you hear me talk about breadwinning and caregiving, instinctively translate those categories into men's work and women's work. And we don't typically challenge why men's work is advantaged. But consider a same-sex couple like my friends Sarah and Emily. They're psychiatrists. They got married five years ago, and now they have two-year-old twins. They love being mothers, but they also love their work, and they're really good at what they do. So how are they going to divide up breadwinning and caregiving responsibilities? Should one of them stop working or reduce hours to be home? Or should they both change their practices so they can have much more flexible schedules? And what criteria should they use to make that decision? Is it who makes the most money or who is most committed to her career? Or who has the most flexible boss? The same-sex perspective helps us see that juggling work and family are not women's problems, they're family problems. And Sarah and Emily are the lucky ones, because they have a choice about how much they want to work. Millions of men and women have to be both breadwinners and caregivers just to earn the income they need, and many of those workers are scrambling. They're patching together care arrangements that are inadequate and often actually unsafe. If breadwinning and caregiving are really equal, then why shouldn't a government invest as much in an infrastructure of care as the foundation of a healthy society as it invests in physical infrastructure as the backbone of a successful economy? The governments that get it -- no surprises here -- the governments that get it, Norway, Sweden, Denmark, the Netherlands, provide universal child care, support for caregivers at home, school and early childhood education, protections for pregnant women, and care for the elderly and the disabled. Those governments invest in that infrastructure the same way they invest in roads and bridges and tunnels and trains. Those societies also show you that breadwinning and caregiving reinforce each other. They routinely rank among the top 15 countries of the most globally competitive economies, but at the same time, they rank very high on the OECD Better Life Index. In fact, they rank higher than other governments, like my own, the U.S., or Switzerland, that have higher average levels of income but lower rankings on work-life balance. So changing our workplaces and building infrastructures of care would make a big difference, but we're not going to get equally valued choices unless we change our culture, and the kind of cultural change required means re-socializing men. (Applause) Increasingly in developed countries, women are socialized to believe that our place is no longer only in the home, but men are actually still where they always were. Men are still socialized to believe that they have to be breadwinners, that to derive their self-worth from how high they can climb over other men on a career ladder. The feminist revolution still has a long way to go. It's certainly not complete. But 60 years after "The Feminine Mystique" was published, many women actually have more choices than men do. We can decide to be a breadwinner, a caregiver, or any combination of the two. When a man, on the other hand, decides to be a caregiver, he puts his manhood on the line. His friends may praise his decision, but underneath, they're scratching their heads. Isn't the measure of a man his willingness to compete with other men for power and prestige? And as many women hold that view as men do. We know that lots of women still judge the attractiveness of a man based in large part on how successful he is in his career. A woman can drop out of the work force and still be an attractive partner. For a man, that's a risky proposition. So as parents and partners, we should be socializing our sons and our husbands to be whatever they want to be, either caregivers or breadwinners. We should be socializing them to make caregiving cool for guys. (Applause) I can almost hear lots of you thinking, "No way." But in fact, the change is actually already happening. At least in the United States, lots of men take pride in cooking, and frankly obsess over stoves. They are in the birthing rooms. They take paternity leave when they can. They can walk a baby or soothe a toddler just as well as their wives can, and they are increasingly doing much more of the housework. Indeed, there are male college students now who are starting to say, "I want to be a stay-at-home dad." That was completely unthinkable 50 or even 30 years ago. And in Norway, where men have an automatic three month's paternity leave, but they lose it if they decide not to take it, a high government official told me that companies are starting to look at prospective male employees and raise an eyebrow if they didn't in fact take their leave when they had kids. That means that it's starting to seem like a character defect not to want to be a fully engaged father. So I was raised to believe that championing women's rights meant doing everything we could to get women to the top. And I still hope that I live long enough to see men and women equally represented at all levels of the work force. But I've come to believe that we have to value family every bit as much as we value work, and that we should entertain the idea that doing right by those we love will make all of us better at everything we do. Thirty years ago, Carol Gilligan, a wonderful psychologist, studied adolescent girls and identified an ethic of care, an element of human nature every bit as important as the ethic of justice. It turns out that "you don't care" is just as much a part of who we are as "that's not fair." Bill Gates agrees. He argues that the two great forces of human nature are self-interest and caring for others. Let's bring them both together. Let's make the feminist revolution a humanist revolution. As whole human beings, we will be better caregivers and breadwinners. You may think that can't happen, but I grew up in a society where my mother put out small vases of cigarettes for dinner parties, where blacks and whites used separate bathrooms, and where everybody claimed to be heterosexual. Today, not so much. The revolution for human equality can happen. It is happening. It will happen. How far and how fast is up to us. Thank you. (Applause)

How many of you love rhythm? Oh yeah, oh yeah. Oh yeah. (Cheers) (Drumming) I mean, I love all kinds of rhythm. I like to play jazz, a little funk, and hip hop, a little pop, a little R&B, a little Latin, African. And this groove right here, comes from the Crescent City, the old second line. (Cheers) Now, one thing all those rhythms have in common is math, and I call it a-rhythm-etic. Can you repeat after me? A-rhythm-etic. Audience: A-rhythm-etic. Clayton Cameron: A-rhythm-etic. Audience: A-rhythm-etic. CC: A-rhythm a-rhythm. Audience: A-rhythm a-rhythm. CC: A-rhythm-etic. Audience: A-rhythm-etic. CC: Yeah. Now all those styles of rhythm are all counted in four and then subdivided by three. What? Yeah. Three is a magic number. Three is a groovin' number. Three is a hip-hop kind of number. But what does subdividing by three mean? And counting off by four? Well, look, think of it this way. A measure of music as a dollar. Now a dollar has four quarters, right? And so does a 4/4 measure of music. It has four quarter notes. Now, how do you subdivide? Now let's envision this: three dollars' worth of quarters. You would have three groups of four, and you would count it, a-one-two-three-four, one-two-three-four, one-two-three-four. Together. All: A-one-two-three-four, one-two-three-four, one-two-three-four. CC: Okay, now you feel that? Now let's take those three groups of four and make them four groups of three. And listen to this. A-one-two-three-four, one-two-three-four, one-two-three-four, with me. One-two-three-four, one-two-three, come on, y'all! All: One-two-three-four, one-two-three-four, one-two-three-four, ah. CC: There you go. All right, second line. One-two-three-four, one-two-three. One-two-three-four, one-two-three. One-two-three-four, one-two-three. One-two-three-four, one-two-three. Yeah. Now, that's what I call a-rhythm-etic. Can you say it? A-rhythm-etic. Audience: A-rhythm-etic. CC: A-rhythm-etic. Audience: A-rhythm-etic. CC: A-rhythm a-rhythm. Audience: A-rhythm a-rhythm. CC: A-rhythm-etic. Audience: A-rhythm-etic. CC: Yeah. Now pick the swing beat, and do the same thing. One, two, one, two, a-one-two-three-four. Yeah. Mm. One-two-three, one-two-three, one-two-three, one-two-three. Whoo. So I want to take the second line beat and the swing beat and put them together, and it sounds something like this. Aha. A-rhythm-etic. Audience: A-rhythm-etic. CC: A-rhythm-etic. Audience: A-rhythm-etic. CC: A-rhythm a-rhythm. Audience: A-rhythm a-rhythm. CC: A-rhythm-etic. Audience: A-rhythm-etic. CC: Yeah. Hip-hop. Now it's using a faster group of three we call a triplet. Triplet-triplet. Say it with me. All: Triplet-triplet. CC: Triplet-triplet. Triplet-triplet. CC: So I'll take all the rhythms that you heard earlier, we'll put them together, and they sound like this. A-rhythm-etic. (Applause)

I work with children with autism. Specifically, I make technologies to help them communicate. Now, many of the problems that children with autism face, they have a common source, and that source is that they find it difficult to understand abstraction, symbolism. And because of this, they have a lot of difficulty with language. Let me tell you a little bit about why this is. You see that this is a picture of a bowl of soup. All of us can see it. All of us understand this. These are two other pictures of soup, but you can see that these are more abstract These are not quite as concrete. And when you get to language, you see that it becomes a word whose look, the way it looks and the way it sounds, has absolutely nothing to do with what it started with, or what it represents, which is the bowl of soup. So it's essentially a completely abstract, a completely arbitrary representation of something which is in the real world, and this is something that children with autism have an incredible amount of difficulty with. Now that's why most of the people that work with children with autism -- speech therapists, educators -- what they do is, they try to help children with autism communicate not with words, but with pictures. So if a child with autism wanted to say, "I want soup," that child would pick three different pictures, "I," "want," and "soup," and they would put these together, and then the therapist or the parent would understand that this is what the kid wants to say. And this has been incredibly effective; for the last 30, 40 years people have been doing this. In fact, a few years back, I developed an app for the iPad which does exactly this. It's called Avaz, and the way it works is that kids select different pictures. These pictures are sequenced together to form sentences, and these sentences are spoken out. So Avaz is essentially converting pictures, it's a translator, it converts pictures into speech. Now, this was very effective. There are thousands of children using this, you know, all over the world, and I started thinking about what it does and what it doesn't do. And I realized something interesting: Avaz helps children with autism learn words. What it doesn't help them do is to learn word patterns. Let me explain this in a little more detail. Take this sentence: "I want soup tonight." Now it's not just the words here that convey the meaning. It's also the way in which these words are arranged, the way these words are modified and arranged. And that's why a sentence like "I want soup tonight" is different from a sentence like "Soup want I tonight," which is completely meaningless. So there is another hidden abstraction here which children with autism find a lot of difficulty coping with, and that's the fact that you can modify words and you can arrange them to have different meanings, to convey different ideas. Now, this is what we call grammar. And grammar is incredibly powerful, because grammar is this one component of language which takes this finite vocabulary that all of us have and allows us to convey an infinite amount of information, an infinite amount of ideas. It's the way in which you can put things together in order to convey anything you want to. And so after I developed Avaz, I worried for a very long time about how I could give grammar to children with autism. The solution came to me from a very interesting perspective. I happened to chance upon a child with autism conversing with her mom, and this is what happened. Completely out of the blue, very spontaneously, the child got up and said, "Eat." Now what was interesting was the way in which the mom was trying to tease out the meaning of what the child wanted to say by talking to her in questions. So she asked, "Eat what? Do you want to eat ice cream? You want to eat? Somebody else wants to eat? You want to eat cream now? You want to eat ice cream in the evening?" And then it struck me that what the mother had done was something incredible. She had been able to get that child to communicate an idea to her without grammar. And it struck me that maybe this is what I was looking for. Instead of arranging words in an order, in sequence, as a sentence, you arrange them in this map, where they're all linked together not by placing them one after the other but in questions, in question-answer pairs. And so if you do this, then what you're conveying is not a sentence in English, but what you're conveying is really a meaning, the meaning of a sentence in English. Now, meaning is really the underbelly, in some sense, of language. It's what comes after thought but before language. And the idea was that this particular representation might convey meaning in its raw form. So I was very excited by this, you know, hopping around all over the place, trying to figure out if I can convert all possible sentences that I hear into this. And I found that this is not enough. Why is this not enough? This is not enough because if you wanted to convey something like negation, you want to say, "I don't want soup," then you can't do that by asking a question. You do that by changing the word "want." Again, if you wanted to say, "I wanted soup yesterday," you do that by converting the word "want" into "wanted." It's a past tense. So this is a flourish which I added to make the system complete. This is a map of words joined together as questions and answers, and with these filters applied on top of them in order to modify them to represent certain nuances. Let me show you this with a different example. Let's take this sentence: "I told the carpenter I could not pay him." It's a fairly complicated sentence. The way that this particular system works, you can start with any part of this sentence. I'm going to start with the word "tell." So this is the word "tell." Now this happened in the past, so I'm going to make that "told." Now, what I'm going to do is, I'm going to ask questions. So, who told? I told. I told whom? I told the carpenter. Now we start with a different part of the sentence. We start with the word "pay," and we add the ability filter to it to make it "can pay." Then we make it "can't pay," and we can make it "couldn't pay" by making it the past tense. So who couldn't pay? I couldn't pay. Couldn't pay whom? I couldn't pay the carpenter. And then you join these two together by asking this question: What did I tell the carpenter? I told the carpenter I could not pay him. Now think about this. This is —(Applause)— this is a representation of this sentence without language. And there are two or three interesting things about this. First of all, I could have started anywhere. I didn't have to start with the word "tell." I could have started anywhere in the sentence, and I could have made this entire thing. The second thing is, if I wasn't an English speaker, if I was speaking in some other language, this map would actually hold true in any language. So long as the questions are standardized, the map is actually independent of language. So I call this FreeSpeech, and I was playing with this for many, many months. I was trying out so many different combinations of this. And then I noticed something very interesting about FreeSpeech. I was trying to convert language, convert sentences in English into sentences in FreeSpeech, and vice versa, and back and forth. And I realized that this particular configuration, this particular way of representing language, it allowed me to actually create very concise rules that go between FreeSpeech on one side and English on the other. So I could actually write this set of rules that translates from this particular representation into English. And so I developed this thing. I developed this thing called the FreeSpeech Engine which takes any FreeSpeech sentence as the input and gives out perfectly grammatical English text. And by putting these two pieces together, the representation and the engine, I was able to create an app, a technology for children with autism, that not only gives them words but also gives them grammar. So I tried this out with kids with autism, and I found that there was an incredible amount of identification. They were able to create sentences in FreeSpeech which were much more complicated but much more effective than equivalent sentences in English, and I started thinking about why that might be the case. And I had an idea, and I want to talk to you about this idea next. In about 1997, about 15 years back, there were a group of scientists that were trying to understand how the brain processes language, and they found something very interesting. They found that when you learn a language as a child, as a two-year-old, you learn it with a certain part of your brain, and when you learn a language as an adult -- for example, if I wanted to learn Japanese right now — a completely different part of my brain is used. Now I don't know why that's the case, but my guess is that that's because when you learn a language as an adult, you almost invariably learn it through your native language, or through your first language. So what's interesting about FreeSpeech is that when you create a sentence or when you create language, a child with autism creates language with FreeSpeech, they're not using this support language, they're not using this bridge language. They're directly constructing the sentence. And so this gave me this idea. Is it possible to use FreeSpeech not for children with autism but to teach language to people without disabilities? And so I tried a number of experiments. The first thing I did was I built a jigsaw puzzle in which these questions and answers are coded in the form of shapes, in the form of colors, and you have people putting these together and trying to understand how this works. And I built an app out of it, a game out of it, in which children can play with words and with a reinforcement, a sound reinforcement of visual structures, they're able to learn language. And this, this has a lot of potential, a lot of promise, and the government of India recently licensed this technology from us, and they're going to try it out with millions of different children trying to teach them English. And the dream, the hope, the vision, really, is that when they learn English this way, they learn it with the same proficiency as their mother tongue. All right, let's talk about something else. Let's talk about speech. This is speech. So speech is the primary mode of communication delivered between all of us. Now what's interesting about speech is that speech is one-dimensional. Why is it one-dimensional? It's one-dimensional because it's sound. It's also one-dimensional because our mouths are built that way. Our mouths are built to create one-dimensional sound. But if you think about the brain, the thoughts that we have in our heads are not one-dimensional. I mean, we have these rich, complicated, multi-dimensional ideas. Now, it seems to me that language is really the brain's invention to convert this rich, multi-dimensional thought on one hand into speech on the other hand. Now what's interesting is that we do a lot of work in information nowadays, and almost all of that is done in the language domain. Take Google, for example. Google trawls all these countless billions of websites, all of which are in English, and when you want to use Google, you go into Google search, and you type in English, and it matches the English with the English. What if we could do this in FreeSpeech instead? I have a suspicion that if we did this, we'd find that algorithms like searching, like retrieval, all of these things, are much simpler and also more effective, because they don't process the data structure of speech. Instead they're processing the data structure of thought. The data structure of thought. That's a provocative idea. But let's look at this in a little more detail. So this is the FreeSpeech ecosystem. We have the Free Speech representation on one side, and we have the FreeSpeech Engine, which generates English. Now if you think about it, FreeSpeech, I told you, is completely language-independent. It doesn't have any specific information in it which is about English. So everything that this system knows about English is actually encoded into the engine. That's a pretty interesting concept in itself. You've encoded an entire human language into a software program. But if you look at what's inside the engine, it's actually not very complicated. It's not very complicated code. And what's more interesting is the fact that the vast majority of the code in that engine is not really English-specific. And that gives this interesting idea. It might be very easy for us to actually create these engines in many, many different languages, in Hindi, in French, in German, in Swahili. And that gives another interesting idea. For example, supposing I was a writer, say, for a newspaper or for a magazine. I could create content in one language, FreeSpeech, and the person who's consuming that content, the person who's reading that particular information could choose any engine, and they could read it in their own mother tongue, in their native language. I mean, this is an incredibly attractive idea, especially for India. We have so many different languages. There's a song about India, and there's a description of the country as, it says, (in Sanskrit). That means "ever-smiling speaker of beautiful languages." Language is beautiful. I think it's the most beautiful of human creations. I think it's the loveliest thing that our brains have invented. It entertains, it educates, it enlightens, but what I like the most about language is that it empowers. I want to leave you with this. This is a photograph of my collaborators, my earliest collaborators when I started working on language and autism and various other things. The girl's name is Pavna, and that's her mother, Kalpana. And Pavna's an entrepreneur, but her story is much more remarkable than mine, because Pavna is about 23. She has quadriplegic cerebral palsy, so ever since she was born, she could neither move nor talk. And everything that she's accomplished so far, finishing school, going to college, starting a company, collaborating with me to develop Avaz, all of these things she's done with nothing more than moving her eyes. Daniel Webster said this: He said, "If all of my possessions were taken from me with one exception, I would choose to keep the power of communication, for with it, I would regain all the rest." And that's why, of all of these incredible applications of FreeSpeech, the one that's closest to my heart still remains the ability for this to empower children with disabilities to be able to communicate, the power of communication, to get back all the rest. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. (Applause)

The year is 1800. A curious little invention is being talked about. It's called a microscope. What it allows you to do is see tiny little lifeforms that are invisible to the naked eye. Soon comes the medical discovery that many of these lifeforms are actually causes of terrible human diseases. Imagine what happened to the society when they realized that an English mom in her teacup actually was drinking a monster soup, not very far from here. This is from London. Fast forward 200 years. We still have this monster soup around, and it's taken hold in the developing countries around the tropical belt. Just for malaria itself, there are a million deaths a year, and more than a billion people that need to be tested because they are at risk for different species of malarial infections. Now it's actually very simple to put a face to many of these monsters. You take a stain, like acridine orange or a fluorescent stain or Giemsa, and a microscope, and you look at them. They all have faces. Why is that so, that Alex in Kenya, Fatima in Bangladesh, Navjoot in Mumbai, and Julie and Mary in Uganda still wait months to be able to diagnose why they are sick? And that's primarily because scalability of the diagnostics is completely out of reach. And remember that number: one billion. The problem lies with the microscope itself. Even though the pinnacle of modern science, research microscopes are not designed for field testing. Neither were they first designed for diagnostics at all. They are heavy, bulky, really hard to maintain, and cost a lot of money. This picture is Mahatma Gandhi in the '40s using the exact same setup that we actually use today for diagnosing T.B. in his ashram in Sevagram in India. Two of my students, Jim and James, traveled around India and Thailand, starting to think about this problem a lot. We saw all kinds of donated equipment. We saw fungus growing on microscope lenses. And we saw people who had a functional microscope but just didn't know how to even turn it on. What grew out of that work and that trip was actually the idea of what we call Foldscopes. So what is a Foldscope? A Foldscope is a completely functional microscope, a platform for fluorescence, bright-field, polarization, projection, all kinds of advanced microscopy built purely by folding paper. So, now you think, how is that possible? I'm going to show you some examples here, and we will run through some of them. It starts with a single sheet of paper. What you see here is all the possible components to build a functional bright-field and fluorescence microscope. So, there are three stages: There is the optical stage, the illumination stage and the mask-holding stage. And there are micro optics at the bottom that's actually embedded in the paper itself. What you do is, you take it on, and just like you are playing like a toy, which it is, I tab it off, and I break it off. This paper has no instructions and no languages. There is a code, a color code embedded, that tells you exactly how to fold that specific microscope. When it's done, it looks something like this, has all the functionalities of a standard microscope, just like an XY stage, a place where a sample slide could go, for example right here. We didn't want to change this, because this is the standard that's been optimized for over the years, and many health workers are actually used to this. So this is what changes, but the standard stains all remain the same for many different diseases. You pop this in. There is an XY stage, and then there is a focusing stage, which is a flexure mechanism that's built in paper itself that allows us to move and focus the lenses by micron steps. So what's really interesting about this object, and my students hate when I do this, but I'm going to do this anyway, is these are rugged devices. I can turn it on and throw it on the floor and really try to stomp on it. And they last, even though they're designed from a very flexible material, like paper. Another fun fact is, this is what we actually send out there as a standard diagnostic tool, but here in this envelope I have 30 different foldscopes of different configurations all in a single folder. And I'm going to pick one randomly. This one, it turns out, is actually designed specifically for malaria, because it has the fluorescent filters built specifically for diagnosing malaria. So the idea of very specific diagnostic microscopes comes out of this. So up till now, you didn't actually see what I would see from one of these setups. So what I would like to do is, if we could dim the lights, please, it turns out foldscopes are also projection microscopes. I have these two microscopes that I'm going to turn -- go to the back of the wall -- and just project, and this way you will see exactly what I would see. What you're looking at -- (Applause) — This is a cross-section of a compound eye, and when I'm going to zoom in closer, right there, I am going through the z-axis. You actually see how the lenses are cut together in the cross-section pattern. Another example, one of my favorite insects, I love to hate this one, is a mosquito, and you're seeing the antenna of a culex pipiens. Right there. All from the simple setup that I actually described. So my wife has been field testing some of our microscopes by washing my clothes whenever I forget them in the dryer. So it turns out they're waterproof, and -- (Laughter) — right here is just fluorescent water, and I don't know if you can actually see this. This also shows you how the projection scope works. You get to see the beam the way it's projected and bent. Can we get the lights back on again? So I'm quickly going to show you, since I'm running out of time, in terms of how much it costs for us to manufacture, the biggest idea was roll-to-roll manufacturing, so we built this out of 50 cents of parts and costs. (Applause) And what this allows us to do is to think about a new paradigm in microscopy, which we call use-and-throw microscopy. I'm going to give you a quick snapshot of some of the parts that go in. Here is a sheet of paper. This is when we were thinking about the idea. This is an A4 sheet of paper. These are the three stages that you actually see. And the optical components, if you look at the inset up on the right, we had to figure out a way to manufacture lenses in paper itself at really high throughputs, so it uses a process of self-assembly and surface tension to build achromatic lenses in the paper itself. So that's where the lenses go. There are some light sources. And essentially, in the end, all the parts line up because of origami, because of the fact that origami allows us micron-scale precision of optical alignment. So even though this looks like a simple toy, the aspects of engineering that go in something like this are fairly sophisticated. So here is another obvious thing that we would do, typically, if I was going to show that these microscopes are robust, is go to the third floor and drop it from the floor itself. There it is, and it survives. So for us, the next step actually is really finishing our field trials. We are starting at the end of the summer. We are at a stage where we'll be making thousands of microscopes. That would be the first time where we would be doing field trials with the highest density of microscopes ever at a given place. We've started collecting data for malaria, Chagas disease and giardia from patients themselves. And I want to leave you with this picture. I had not anticipated this before, but a really interesting link between hands-on science education and global health. What are the tools that we're actually providing the kids who are going to fight this monster soup for tomorrow? I would love for them to be able to just print out a Foldscope and carry them around in their pockets. Thank you. (Applause)

This is a vending machine in Los Angeles. It's in a shopping mall, and it sells fish eggs. It's a caviar vending machine. This is the Art-o-mat, an art vending machine that sells small artistic creations by different artists, usually on small wood blocks or matchboxes, in limited edition. This is Oliver Medvedik. He's not a vending machine, but he is one of the founders of Genspace, a community biolab in Brooklyn, New York, where anybody can go and take classes and learn how to do things like grow E. coli that glows in the dark or learn how to take strawberry DNA. In fact, I saw Oliver do one of these strawberry DNA extractions about a year ago, and this is what led me onto this bizarre path that I'm going to talk to you right now. Because strawberry DNA is really fascinating, because it's so beautiful. I'd never thought about DNA being a beautiful thing before, before I saw it in this form. And a lot of people, especially in the art community, don't necessarily engage in science in this way. I instantly joined Genspace after this, and I asked Oliver, "Well, if we can do this strawberries, can we do this with people as well?" And about 10 minutes later, we were both spinning it in vials together and coming up with a protocol for human DNA extraction. And I started doing this on my own, and this is what my DNA actually looks like. And I was at a dinner party with some friends, some artist friends, and I was telling them about this project, and they couldn't believe that you could actually see DNA. So I said, all right, let's get out some supplies right now. And I started having these bizarre dinner parties at my house on Friday nights where people would come over and we would do DNA extractions, and I would actually capture them on video, because it created this kind of funny portrait as well. (Laughter) These are people who don't necessarily regularly engage with science whatsoever. You can kind of tell from their reactions. But they became fascinated by it, and it was really exciting for me to see them get excited about science. And so I started doing this regularly. It's kind of an odd thing to do with your Friday nights, but this is what I started doing, and I started collecting a whole group of my friends' DNA in small vials and categorizing them. This is what that looked like. And it started to make me think about a couple of things. First of all, this looked a lot like my Facebook wall. So in a way, I've created sort of a genetic network, a genetic social network, really. And the second thing was, one time a friend came over and looked at this on my table and was like, "Oh. Why are they numbered? Is this person more rare than the other one?" And I hadn't even thought about that. They were just numbered because that was the order that I extracted the DNA in. But that made me think about collecting toys, and this thing that's going on right now in the toy world with blind box toys, and being able to collect these rare toys. You buy these boxes. You're not sure what's going to be inside of them. But then, when you open them up, you have different rarities of the toys. And so I thought that was interesting. I started thinking about this and the caviar vending machine and the Art-o-mat all together, and some reason, I was one night drawing a vending machine, thinking about doing paintings of a vending machine, and the little vial of my DNA was sitting there, and I saw this kind of beautiful collaboration between the strands of DNA and the coils of a vending machine. And so, of course, I decided to create an art installation called the DNA Vending Machine. Here it is. (Music) ["DNA Vending Machine is an art installation about our increasing access to biotechnology."] ["For a reasonable cost, you can purchase a sample of human DNA from a traditional vending machine."] ["Each sample comes packaged with a collectible limited edition portrait of the human specimen."] ["DNA Vending Machine treats DNA as a collectible material and brings to light legal issues over the ownership of DNA."] Gabriel Garcia-Colombo: So the DNA Vending Machine is currently in a couple galleries in New York, and it's selling out pretty well, actually. We're in the first edition of 100 pieces, hoping to do another edition pretty soon. I'd actually like to get it into more of a metro hub, like Grand Central or Penn Station, right next to some of the other, actual vending machines in that location. But really with this project and a lot of my art projects I want to ask the audience a question, and that is, when biotechnology and DNA sequencing becomes as cheap as, say, laser cutting or 3D printing or buying caviar from a vending machine, will you still submit your sample of DNA to be part of the vending machine? And how much will these samples be worth? And will you buy someone else's sample? And what will you be able to do with that sample? Thank you. (Applause)

The 2011 Arab Spring captured the attention of the world. It also captured the attention of authoritarian governments in other countries, who were worried that revolution would spread. To respond, they ramped up surveillance of activists, journalists and dissidents who they feared would inspire revolution in their own countries. One prominent Bahraini activist, who was arrested and tortured by his government, has said that the interrogators showed him transcripts of his telephone calls and text messages. Of course, it's no secret that governments are able to intercept telephone calls and text messages. It's for that reason that many activists specifically avoid using the telephone. Instead, they use tools like Skype, which they think are immune to interception. They're wrong. There have now been over the last few years an industry of companies who provide surveillance technology to governments, specifically technology that allows those governments to hack into the computers of surveillance targets. Rather than intercepting the communications as they go over the wire, instead they now hack into your computer, enable your webcam, enable your microphone, and steal documents from your computer. When the government of Egypt fell in 2011, activists raided the office of the secret police, and among the many documents they found was this document by the Gamma Corporation, by Gamma International. Gamma is a German company that manufactures surveillance software and sells it only to governments. It's important to note that most governments don't really have the in-house capabilities to develop this software. Smaller ones don't have the resources or the expertise, and so there's this market of Western companies who are happy to supply them with the tools and techniques for a price. Gamma is just one of these companies. I should note also that Gamma never actually sold their software to the Egyptian government. They'd sent them an invoice for a sale, but the Egyptians never bought it. Instead, apparently, the Egyptian government used a free demo version of Gamma's software. (Laughter) So this screenshot is from a sales video that Gamma produced. Really, they're just emphasizing in a relatively slick presentation the fact that the police can sort of sit in an air-conditioned office and remotely monitor someone without them having any idea that it's going on. You know, your webcam light won't turn on. There's nothing to indicate that the microphone is enabled. This is the managing director of Gamma International. His name is Martin Muench. There are many photos of Mr. Muench that exist. This is perhaps my favorite. I'm just going to zoom in a little bit onto his webcam. You can see there's a little sticker that's placed over his camera. He knows what kind of surveillance is possible, and so clearly he doesn't want it to be used against him. Muench has said that he intends for his software to be used to capture terrorists and locate pedophiles. Of course, he's also acknowledged that once the software has been sold to governments, he has no way of knowing how it can be used. Gamma's software has been located on servers in countries around the world, many with really atrocious track records and human rights violations. They really are selling their software around the world. Gamma is not the only company in the business. As I said, it's a $5 billion industry. One of the other big guys in the industry is an Italian company called Hacking Team. Now, Hacking Team has what is probably the slickest presentation. The video they've produced is very sexy, and so I'm going to play you a clip just so you can get a feel both for the capabilities of the software but also how it's marketed to their government clients. (Video) Narrator: You want to look through your target's eyes. (Music) You have to hack your target. ["While your target is browsing the web, exchanging documents, receiving SMS, crossing the borders"] You have to hit many different platforms. ["Windows, OS X, iOS, Android, Blackberry, Symbian, Linux"] You have to overcome encryption and capture relevant data. [Skype & encrypted calls, target location, messaging, relationships, web browsing, audio & video"] Being stealth and untraceable. ["Immune to any protection system Hidden collection infrastructure"] Deployed all over your country. ["Up to hundreds of thousands of targets Managed from a single spot"] Exactly what we do. Christopher Soghoian: So, it would be funny if it wasn't true, but, in fact, Hacking Team's software is being sold to governments around the world. Last year we learned, for example, that it's been used to target Moroccan journalists by the Moroccan government. Many, many countries it's been found in. So, Hacking Team has also been actively courting the U.S. law enforcement market. In the last year or so, the company has opened a sales office in Maryland. The company has also hired a spokesperson. They've been attending surveillance industry conferences where law enforcement officials show up. They've spoken at the conferences. What I thought was most fascinating was they've actually paid for the coffee break at one of the law enforcement conferences earlier this year. I can't tell you for sure that Hacking Team has sold their technology in the United States, but what I can tell you that if they haven't sold it, it isn't because they haven't been trying hard. So as I said before, governments that don't really have the resources to build their own tools will buy off-the-shelf surveillance software, and so for that reason, you see that the government of, say, Tunisia, might use the same software as the government of Germany. They're all buying off-the-shelf stuff. The Federal Bureau of Investigation in the United States does have the budget to build their own surveillance technology, and so for several years, I've been trying to figure out if and how the FBI is hacking into the computers of surveillance targets. My friends at an organization called the Electronic Frontier Foundation -- they're a civil society group — obtained hundreds of documents from the FBI detailing their next generation of surveillance technologies. Most of these documents were heavily redacted, but what you can see from the slides, if I zoom in, is this term: Remote Operations Unit. Now, when I first looked into this, I'd never heard of this unit before. I've been studying surveillance for more than six years. I'd never heard of it. And so I went online and I did some research, and ultimately I hit the mother lode when I went to LinkedIn, the social networking site for job seekers. There were lots of former U.S. government contractors who had at one point worked for the Remote Operating Unit, and were describing in surprising detail on their CVs what they had done in their former job. (Laughter) So I took this information and I gave it to a journalist that I know and trust at the Wall Street Journal, and she was able to contact several other former law enforcement officials who spoke on background and confirmed that yes, in fact, the FBI has a dedicated team that does nothing but hack into the computers of surveillance targets. Like Gamma and Hacking Team, the FBI also has the capability to remotely activate webcams, microphones, steal documents, get web browsing information, the works. There's sort of a big problem with governments going into hacking, and that's that terrorists, pedophiles, drug dealers, journalists and human rights activists all use the same kinds of computers. There's no drug dealer phone and there's no journalist laptop. We all use the same technology, and what that means then is that for governments to have the capability to hack into the computers of the real bad guys, they also have to have the capability to hack into our devices too. So governments around the world have been embracing this technology. They've been embracing hacking as a law enforcement technique, but without any real debate. In the United States, where I live, there have been no congressional hearings. There's no law that's been passed specifically authorizing this technique, and because of its power and potential for abuse, it's vital that we have an informed public debate. Thank you very much. (Applause)

I'm going to talk a little bit about strategy and its relationship with technology. We tend to think of business strategy as being a rather abstract body of essentially economic thought, perhaps rather timeless. I'm going to argue that, in fact, business strategy has always been premised on assumptions about technology, that those assumptions are changing, and, in fact, changing quite dramatically, and that therefore what that will drive us to is a different concept of what we mean by business strategy. Let me start, if I may, with a little bit of history. The idea of strategy in business owes its origins to two intellectual giants: Bruce Henderson, the founder of BCG, and Michael Porter, professor at the Harvard Business School. Henderson's central idea was what you might call the Napoleonic idea of concentrating mass against weakness, of overwhelming the enemy. What Henderson recognized was that, in the business world, there are many phenomena which are characterized by what economists would call increasing returns -- scale, experience. The more you do of something, disproportionately the better you get. And therefore he found a logic for investing in such kinds of overwhelming mass in order to achieve competitive advantage. And that was the first introduction of essentially a military concept of strategy into the business world. Porter agreed with that premise, but he qualified it. He pointed out, correctly, that that's all very well, but businesses actually have multiple steps to them. They have different components, and each of those components might be driven by a different kind of strategy. A company or a business might actually be advantaged in some activities but disadvantaged in others. He formed the concept of the value chain, essentially the sequence of steps with which a, shall we say, raw material, becomes a component, becomes assembled into a finished product, and then is distributed, for example, and he argued that advantage accrued to each of those components, and that the advantage of the whole was in some sense the sum or the average of that of its parts. And this idea of the value chain was predicated on the recognition that what holds a business together is transaction costs, that in essence you need to coordinate, organizations are more efficient at coordination than markets, very often, and therefore the nature and role and boundaries of the cooperation are defined by transaction costs. It was on those two ideas, Henderson's idea of increasing returns to scale and experience, and Porter's idea of the value chain, encompassing heterogenous elements, that the whole edifice of business strategy was subsequently erected. Now what I'm going to argue is that those premises are, in fact, being invalidated. First of all, let's think about transaction costs. There are really two components to transaction costs. One is about processing information, and the other is about communication. These are the economics of processing and communicating as they have evolved over a long period of time. As we all know from so many contexts, they have been radically transformed since the days when Porter and Henderson first formulated their theories. In particular, since the mid-'90s, communications costs have actually been falling even faster than transaction costs, which is why communication, the Internet, has exploded in such a dramatic fashion. Now, those falling transaction costs have profound consequences, because if transaction costs are the glue that hold value chains together, and they are falling, there is less to economize on. There is less need for vertically integrated organization, and value chains at least can break up. They needn't necessarily, but they can. In particular, it then becomes possible for a competitor in one business to use their position in one step of the value chain in order to penetrate or attack or disintermediate the competitor in another. That is not just an abstract proposition. There are many very specific stories of how that actually happened. A poster child example was the encyclopedia business. The encyclopedia business in the days of leatherbound books was basically a distribution business. Most of the cost was the commission to the salesmen. The CD-ROM and then the Internet came along, new technologies made the distribution of knowledge many orders of magnitude cheaper, and the encyclopedia industry collapsed. It's now, of course, a very familiar story. This, in fact, more generally was the story of the first generation of the Internet economy. It was about falling transaction costs breaking up value chains and therefore allowing disintermediation, or what we call deconstruction. One of the questions I was occasionally asked was, well, what's going to replace the encyclopedia when Britannica no longer has a business model? And it was a while before the answer became manifest. Now, of course, we know what it is: it's the Wikipedia. Now what's special about the Wikipedia is not its distribution. What's special about the Wikipedia is the way it's produced. The Wikipedia, of course, is an encyclopedia created by its users. And this, in fact, defines what you might call the second decade of the Internet economy, the decade in which the Internet as a noun became the Internet as a verb. It became a set of conversations, the era in which user-generated content and social networks became the dominant phenomenon. Now what that really meant in terms of the Porter-Henderson framework was the collapse of certain kinds of economies of scale. It turned out that tens of thousands of autonomous individuals writing an encyclopedia could do just as good a job, and certainly a much cheaper job, than professionals in a hierarchical organization. So basically what was happening was that one layer of this value chain was becoming fragmented, as individuals could take over where organizations were no longer needed. But there's another question that obviously this graph poses, which is, okay, we've gone through two decades -- does anything distinguish the third? And what I'm going to argue is that indeed something does distinguish the third, and it maps exactly on to the kind of Porter-Henderson logic that we've been talking about. And that is, about data. If we go back to around 2000, a lot of people were talking about the information revolution, and it was indeed true that the world's stock of data was growing, indeed growing quite fast. but it was still at that point overwhelmingly analog. We go forward to 2007, not only had the world's stock of data exploded, but there'd been this massive substitution of digital for analog. And more important even than that, if you look more carefully at this graph, what you will observe is that about a half of that digital data is information that has an I.P. address. It's on a server or it's on a P.C. But having an I.P. address means that it can be connected to any other data that has an I.P. address. It means it becomes possible to put together half of the world's knowledge in order to see patterns, an entirely new thing. If we run the numbers forward to today, it probably looks something like this. We're not really sure. If we run the numbers forward to 2020, we of course have an exact number, courtesy of IDC. It's curious that the future is so much more predictable than the present. And what it implies is a hundredfold multiplication in the stock of information that is connected via an I.P. address. Now, if the number of connections that we can make is proportional to the number of pairs of data points, a hundredfold multiplication in the quantity of data is a ten-thousandfold multiplication in the number of patterns that we can see in that data, this just in the last 10 or 11 years. This, I would submit, is a sea change, a profound change in the economics of the world that we live in. The first human genome, that of James Watson, was mapped as the culmination of the Human Genome Project in the year 2000, and it took about 200 million dollars and about 10 years of work to map just one person's genomic makeup. Since then, the costs of mapping the genome have come down. In fact, they've come down in recent years very dramatically indeed, to the point where the cost is now below 1,000 dollars, and it's confidently predicted that by the year 2015 it will be below 100 dollars -- a five or six order of magnitude drop in the cost of genomic mapping in just a 15-year period, an extraordinary phenomenon. Now, in the days when mapping a genome cost millions, or even tens of thousands, it was basically a research enterprise. Scientists would gather some representative people, and they would see patterns, and they would try and make generalizations about human nature and disease from the abstract patterns they find from these particular selected individuals. But when the genome can be mapped for 100 bucks, 99 dollars while you wait, then what happens is, it becomes retail. It becomes above all clinical. You go the doctor with a cold, and if he or she hasn't done it already, the first thing they do is map your genome, at which point what they're now doing is not starting from some abstract knowledge of genomic medicine and trying to work out how it applies to you, but they're starting from your particular genome. Now think of the power of that. Think of where that takes us when we can combine genomic data with clinical data with data about drug interactions with the kind of ambient data that devices like our phone and medical sensors will increasingly be collecting. Think what happens when we collect all of that data and we can put it together in order to find patterns we wouldn't see before. This, I would suggest, perhaps it will take a while, but this will drive a revolution in medicine. Fabulous, lots of people talk about this. But there's one thing that doesn't get much attention. How is that model of colossal sharing across all of those kinds of databases compatible with the business models of institutions and organizations and corporations that are involved in this business today? If your business is based on proprietary data, if your competitive advantage is defined by your data, how on Earth is that company or is that society in fact going to achieve the value that's implicit in the technology? They can't. So essentially what's happening here, and genomics is merely one example of this, is that technology is driving the natural scaling of the activity beyond the institutional boundaries within which we have been used to thinking about it, and in particular beyond the institutional boundaries in terms of which business strategy as a discipline is formulated. The basic story here is that what used to be vertically integrated, oligopolistic competition among essentially similar kinds of competitors is evolving, by one means or another, from a vertical structure to a horizontal one. Why is that happening? It's happening because transaction costs are plummeting and because scale is polarizing. The plummeting of transaction costs weakens the glue that holds value chains together, and allows them to separate. The polarization of scale economies towards the very small -- small is beautiful -- allows for scalable communities to substitute for conventional corporate production. The scaling in the opposite direction, towards things like big data, drive the structure of business towards the creation of new kinds of institutions that can achieve that scale. But either way, the typically vertical structure gets driven to becoming more horizontal. The logic isn't just about big data. If we were to look, for example, at the telecommunications industry, you can tell the same story about fiber optics. If we look at the pharmaceutical industry, or, for that matter, university research, you can say exactly the same story about so-called "big science." And in the opposite direction, if we look, say, at the energy sector, where all the talk is about how households will be efficient producers of green energy and efficient conservers of energy, that is, in fact, the reverse phenomenon. That is the fragmentation of scale because the very small can substitute for the traditional corporate scale. Either way, what we are driven to is this horizontalization of the structure of industries, and that implies fundamental changes in how we think about strategy. It means, for example, that we need to think about strategy as the curation of these kinds of horizontal structure, where things like business definition and even industry definition are actually the outcomes of strategy, not something that the strategy presupposes. It means, for example, we need to work out how to accommodate collaboration and competition simultaneously. Think about the genome. We need to accommodate the very large and the very small simultaneously. And we need industry structures that will accommodate very, very different motivations, from the amateur motivations of people in communities to maybe the social motivations of infrastructure built by governments, or, for that matter, cooperative institutions built by companies that are otherwise competing, because that is the only way that they can get to scale. These kinds of transformations render the traditional premises of business strategy obsolete. They drive us into a completely new world. They require us, whether we are in the public sector or the private sector, to think very fundamentally differently about the structure of business, and, at last, it makes strategy interesting again. Thank you. (Applause)

I had brain surgery 18 years ago, and since that time, brain science has become a personal passion of mine. I'm actually an engineer. And first let me say, I recently joined Google's Moonshot group, where I had a division, the display division in Google X, and the brain science work I'm speaking about today is work I did before I joined Google and on the side outside of Google. So that said, there's a stigma when you have brain surgery. Are you still smart or not? And if not, can you make yourself smart again? After my neurosurgery, part of my brain was missing, and I had to deal with that. It wasn't the grey matter, but it was the gooey part dead center that makes key hormones and neurotransmitters. Immediately after my surgery, I had to decide what amounts of each of over a dozen powerful chemicals to take each day, because if I just took nothing, I would die within hours. Every day now for 18 years -- every single day -- I've had to try to decide the combinations and mixtures of chemicals, and try to get them, to stay alive. There have been several close calls. But luckily, I'm an experimentalist at heart, so I decided I would experiment to try to find more optimal dosages because there really isn't a clear road map on this that's detailed. I began to try different mixtures, and I was blown away by how tiny changes in dosages dramatically changed my sense of self, my sense of who I was, my thinking, my behavior towards people. One particularly dramatic case: for a couple months I actually tried dosages and chemicals typical of a man in his early 20s, and I was blown away by how my thoughts changed. (Laughter) I was angry all the time, I thought about sex constantly, and I thought I was the smartest person in the entire world, and —(Laughter)— of course over the years I'd met guys kind of like that, or maybe kind of toned-down versions of that. I was kind of extreme. But to me, the surprise was, I wasn't trying to be arrogant. I was actually trying, with a little bit of insecurity, to actually fix a problem in front of me, and it just didn't come out that way. So I couldn't handle it. I changed my dosages. But that experience, I think, gave me a new appreciation for men and what they might walk through, and I've gotten along with men a lot better since then. What I was trying to do with tuning these hormones and neurotransmitters and so forth was to try to get my intelligence back after my illness and surgery, my creative thought, my idea flow. And I think mostly in images, and so for me that became a key metric -- how to get these mental images that I use as a way of rapid prototyping, if you will, my ideas, trying on different new ideas for size, playing out scenarios. This kind of thinking isn't new. Philiosophers like Hume and Descartes and Hobbes saw things similarly. They thought that mental images and ideas were actually the same thing. There are those today that dispute that, and lots of debates about how the mind works, but for me it's simple: Mental images, for most of us, are central in inventive and creative thinking. So after several years, I tuned myself up and I have lots of great, really vivid mental images with a lot of sophistication and the analytical backbone behind them. And so now I'm working on, how can I get these mental images in my mind out to my computer screen faster? Can you imagine, if you will, a movie director being able to use her imagination alone to direct the world in front of her? Or a musician to get the music out of his head? There are incredible possibilities with this as a way for creative people to share at light speed. And the truth is, the remaining bottleneck in being able to do this is just upping the resolution of brain scan systems. So let me show you why I think we're pretty close to getting there by sharing with you two recent experiments from two top neuroscience groups. Both used fMRI technology -- functional magnetic resonance imaging technology -- to image the brain, and here is a brain scan set from Giorgio Ganis and his colleagues at Harvard. And the left-hand column shows a brain scan of a person looking at an image. The middle column shows the brainscan of that same individual imagining, seeing that same image. And the right column was created by subtracting the middle column from the left column, showing the difference to be nearly zero. This was repeated on lots of different individuals with lots of different images, always with a similar result. The difference between seeing an image and imagining seeing that same image is next to nothing. Next let me share with you one other experiment, this from Jack Gallant's lab at Cal Berkeley. They've been able to decode brainwaves into recognizable visual fields. So let me set this up for you. In this experiment, individuals were shown hundreds of hours of YouTube videos while scans were made of their brains to create a large library of their brain reacting to video sequences. Then a new movie was shown with new images, new people, new animals in it, and a new scan set was recorded. The computer, using brain scan data alone, decoded that new brain scan to show what it thought the individual was actually seeing. On the right-hand side, you see the computer's guess, and on the left-hand side, the presented clip. This is the jaw-dropper. We are so close to being able to do this. We just need to up the resolution. And now remember that when you see an image versus when you imagine that same image, it creates the same brain scan. So this was done with the highest-resolution brain scan systems available today, and their resolution has increased really about a thousandfold in the last several years. Next we need to increase the resolution another thousandfold to get a deeper glimpse. How do we do that? There's a lot of techniques in this approach. One way is to crack open your skull and put in electrodes. I'm not for that. There's a lot of new imaging techniques being proposed, some even by me, but given the recent success of MRI, first we need to ask the question, is it the end of the road with this technology? Conventional wisdom says the only way to get higher resolution is with bigger magnets, but at this point bigger magnets only offer incremental resolution improvements, not the thousandfold we need. I'm putting forward an idea: instead of bigger magnets, let's make better magnets. There's some new technology breakthroughs in nanoscience when applied to magnetic structures that have created a whole new class of magnets, and with these magnets, we can lay down very fine detailed magnetic field patterns throughout the brain, and using those, we can actually create holographic-like interference structures to get precision control over many patterns, as is shown here by shifting things. We can create much more complicated structures with slightly different arrangements, kind of like making Spirograph. So why does that matter? A lot of effort in MRI over the years has gone into making really big, really huge magnets, right? But yet most of the recent advances in resolution have actually come from ingeniously clever encoding and decoding solutions in the F.M. radio frequency transmitters and receivers in the MRI systems. Let's also, instead of a uniform magnetic field, put down structured magnetic patterns in addition to the F.M. radio frequencies. So by combining the magnetics patterns with the patterns in the F.M. radio frequencies processing which can massively increase the information that we can extract in a single scan. And on top of that, we can then layer our ever-growing knowledge of brain structure and memory to create a thousandfold increase that we need. And using fMRI, we should be able to measure not just oxygenated blood flow, but the hormones and neurotransmitters I've talked about and maybe even the direct neural activity, which is the dream. We're going to be able to dump our ideas directly to digital media. Could you imagine if we could leapfrog language and communicate directly with human thought? What would we be capable of then? And how will we learn to deal with the truths of unfiltered human thought? You think the Internet was big. These are huge questions. It might be irresistible as a tool to amplify our thinking and communication skills. And indeed, this very same tool may prove to lead to the cure for Alzheimer's and similar diseases. We have little option but to open this door. Regardless, pick a year -- will it happen in five years or 15 years? It's hard to imagine it taking much longer. We need to learn how to take this step together. Thank you. (Applause)

Almost two years ago, I was driving in my car in Germany, and I turned on the radio. Europe at the time was in the middle of the Euro crisis, and all the headlines were about European countries getting downgraded by rating agencies in the United States. I listened and thought to myself, "What are these rating agencies, and why is everybody so upset about their work?" Well, if you were sitting next to me in the car that day and would have told me that I would devote the next years to trying to reform them, obviously I would have called you crazy. But guess what's really crazy: the way these rating agencies are run. And I would like to explain to you not only why it's time to change this, but also how we can do it. So let me tell you a little bit about what rating agencies really do. As you would read a car magazine before purchasing a new car or taking a look at a product review before deciding which kind of tablet or phone to get, investors are reading ratings before they decide in which kind of product they are investing their money. A rating can range from a so-called AAA, which means it's a top-performing product, and it can go down to the level of the so-called BBB-, which means it's a fairly risky investment. Rating agencies are rating companies. They are rating banks. They are rating even financial products like the infamous mortgage-backed securities. But they can also rate countries, and these ratings are called sovereign ratings, and I would like to focus in particular on these sovereign ratings. And I can tell, as you're listening to me right now, you're thinking, so why should I really care about this, right? Be honest. Well, ratings affect you. They affect all of us. If a rating agency rates a country, it basically assesses and evaluates a country's debt and the ability and willingness of a country to repay its debt. So if a country gets downgraded by a rating agency, the country has to pay more in order to borrow money on the international markets. So it affects you as a citizen and as a taxpayer, because you and your fellow countrymen have to pony up more in order to borrow. But what if a country can't afford to pay more because it's maybe too expensive? Well, then the country has less available for other services, like roads, schools, healthcare. And this is the reason why you should care, because sovereign ratings affect everyone. And that is the reason why I believe they should be defined as public goods. They should be transparent, accessible, and available to everyone at no cost. But here's the situation: the rating agency market is dominated by three players and three players only -- Standard & Poor's, Moody's, and Fitch -- and we know whenever there is a market concentration, there is really no competition. There is no incentive to improve the quality of your product. And let's face it, the credit rating agencies have contributed, putting the global economy on the brink, and yet they have to change the way they operate. The second point, would you really buy a car just based on the advice of the dealer? Obviously not, right? That would be irresponsible. But that's actually what's going on in the rating agency sector every single day. The customers of these rating agencies, like countries or companies, they are paying for their own ratings, and obviously this is creating a conflict of interest. The third point is, the rating agencies are not really telling us how they are coming up with their ratings, but in this day and age, you can't even sell a candy bar without listing everything that's inside. But for ratings, a crucial element of our economy, we really do not know what all the different ingredients are. We are allowing the rating agencies to be intransparent about their work, and we need to change this. I think there is no doubt that the sector needs a complete overhaul, not just a trimming at the margins. I think it's time for a bold move. I think it's time to upgrade the system. And this is why we at the Bertelsmann Foundation have invested a lot of time and effort thinking about an alternative for the sector. And we have developed the first model for a nonprofit rating agency for sovereign risk, and we call it by its acronym, INCRA. INCRA would make a difference to the current system by adding another nonprofit player to the mix. It would be based on a nonprofit model that would be based on a sustainable endowment. The endowment would create income that would allow us to run the operation, to run the rating agency, and it would also allow us to make our ratings publicly available. But this is not enough to make a difference, right? INCRA would also be based on a very, very clear governance structure that would avoid any conflict of interest, and it would include many stakeholders from society. INCRA would not only be a European or an American rating agency, it would be a truly international one, in which, in particular, the emerging economies would have an equal interest, voice and representation. The second big difference that INCRA would make is that would it base its sovereign risk assessment on a broader set of indicators. Think about it that way. If we conduct a sovereign rating, we basically take a look at the economic soil of a country, its macroeconomic fundamentals. But we also have to ask the question, who is cultivating the economic soil of a country, right? Well, a country has many gardeners, and one of them is the government, so we have to ask the question, how is a country governed? How is it managed? And this is the reason why we have developed what we call forward-looking indicators. These are indicators that give you a much better read about the socioeconomic development of a country. I hope you would agree it's important for you to know if your government is willing to invest in renewable energy and education. It's important for you to know if the government of your country is able to manage a crisis, if the government is finally able to implement the reforms that it's promised. For example, if INCRA would rate South Africa right now, of course we would take a very, very close look at the youth unemployment of the country, the highest in the world. If over 70 percent of a country's population under the age of 35 is unemployed, of course this has a huge impact on the economy today and even more so in the future. Well, our friends at Moody's, Standard & Poor's, and Fitch will tell us we would take this into account as well. But guess what? We do not know exactly how they will take this into account. And this leads me to the third big difference that INCRA would make. INCRA would not only release its ratings but it would also release its indicators and methodology. So in contrast to the current system, INCRA would be fully transparent. So in a nutshell, INCRA would offer an alternative to the current system of the big three rating agencies by adding a new, nonprofit player to the mix that would increase the competition, it would increase the transparency of the sector, and it would also increase the quality. I can tell that sovereign ratings may still look to you like this very small piece of this very complex global financial world, but I tell you it's a very important one, and a very important one to fix, because sovereign ratings affect all of us, and they should be addressed and should be defined as public goods. And this is why we are testing our model right now, and why we are trying to find out if it can bring together a group of able and willing actors to bring INCRA to life. I truly believe building up INCRA is in everyone's interest, and that we have the unique opportunity right now to turn INCRA into a cornerstone of a new, more inclusive financial system. Because for way too long, we have left the big financial players on their own. It's time to give them some company. Thank you. (Applause)

Here are some images of clusters of galaxies. They're exactly what they sound like. They are these huge collections of galaxies, bound together by their mutual gravity. So most of the points that you see on the screen are not individual stars, but collections of stars, or galaxies. Now, by showing you some of these images, I hope that you will quickly see that galaxy clusters are these beautiful objects, but more than that, I think galaxy clusters are mysterious, they are surprising, and they're useful. Useful as the universe's most massive laboratories. And as laboratories, to describe galaxy clusters is to describe the experiments that you can do with them. And I think there are four major types, and the first type that I want to describe is probing the very big. So, how big? Well, here is an image of a particular galaxy cluster. It is so massive that the light passing through it is being bent, it's being distorted by the extreme gravity of this cluster. And, in fact, if you look very carefully you'll be able to see rings around this cluster. Now, to give you a number, this particular galaxy cluster has a mass of over one million billion suns. It's just mind-boggling how massive these systems can get. But more than their mass, they have this additional feature. They are essentially isolated systems, so if we like, we can think of them as a scaled-down version of the entire universe. And many of the questions that we might have about the universe at large scales, such as, how does gravity work? might be answered by studying these systems. So that was very big. The second things is very hot. Okay, if I take an image of a galaxy cluster, and I subtract away all of the starlight, what I'm left with is this big, blue blob. This is in false color. It's actually X-ray light that we're seeing. And the question is, if it's not galaxies, what is emitting this light? The answer is hot gas, million-degree gas -- in fact, it's plasma. And the reason why it's so hot goes back to the previous slide. The extreme gravity of these systems is accelerating particles of gas to great speeds, and great speeds means great temperatures. So this is the main idea, but science is a rough draft. There are many basic properties about this plasma that still confuse us, still puzzle us, and still push our understanding of the physics of the very hot. Third thing: probing the very small. Now, to explain this, I need to tell you a very disturbing fact. Most of the universe's matter is not made up of atoms. You were lied to. Most of it is made up of something very, very mysterious, which we call dark matter. Dark matter is something that doesn't like to interact very much, except through gravity, and of course we would like to learn more about it. If you're a particle physicist, you want to know what happens when we smash things together. And dark matter is no exception. Well, how do we do this? To answer that question, I'm going to have to ask another one, which is, what happens when galaxy clusters collide? Here is an image. Since galaxy clusters are representative slices of the universe, scaled-down versions. They are mostly made up of dark matter, and that's what you see in this bluish purple. The red represents the hot gas, and, of course, you can see many galaxies. What's happened is a particle accelerator at a huge, huge scale. And this is very important, because what it means is that very, very small effects that might be difficult to detect in the lab, might be compounded and compounded into something that we could possibly observe in nature. So, it's very funny. The reason why galaxy clusters can teach us about dark matter, the reason why galaxy clusters can teach us about the physics of the very small, is precisely because they are so very big. Fourth thing: the physics of the very strange. Certainly what I've said so far is crazy. Okay, if there's anything stranger I think it has to be dark energy. If I throw a ball into the air, I expect it to go up. What I don't expect is that it go up at an ever-increasing rate. Similarly, cosmologists understand why the universe is expanding. They don't understand why it's expanding at an ever-increasing rate. They give the cause of this accelerated expansion a name, and they call it dark energy. And, again, we want to learn more about it. So, one particular question that we have is, how does dark energy affect the universe at the largest scales? Depending on how strong it is, maybe structure forms faster or slower. Well, the problem with the large-scale structure of the universe is that it's horribly complicated. Here is a computer simulation. And we need a way to simplify it. Well, I like to think about this using an analogy. If I want to understand the sinking of the Titanic, the most important thing to do is not to model the little positions of every single little piece of the boat that broke off. The most important thing to do is to track the two biggest parts. Similarly, I can learn a lot about the universe at the largest scales by tracking its biggest pieces and those biggest pieces are clusters of galaxies. So, as I come to a close, you might feel slightly cheated. I mean, I began by talking about how galaxy clusters are useful, and I've given some reasons, but what is their use really? Well, to answer this, I want to give you a quote by Henry Ford when he was asked about cars. He had this to say: "If I had asked people what they wanted, they would have said faster horses." Today, we as a society are faced with many, many difficult problems. And the solutions to these problems are not obvious. They are not faster horses. They will require an enormous amount of scientific ingenuity. So, yes, we need to focus, yes, we need to concentrate, but we also need to remember that innovation, ingenuity, inspiration -- these things come when we broaden our field of vision when we step back when we zoom out. And I can't think of a better way to do this than by studying the universe around us. Thanks. (Applause)

Thirteen years ago, we set ourselves a goal to end poverty. After some success, we've hit a big hurdle. The aftermath of the financial crisis has begun to hit aid payments, which have fallen for two consecutive years. My question is whether the lessons learned from saving the financial system can be used to help us overcome that hurdle and help millions. Can we simply print money for aid? "Surely not." It's a common reaction. (Laughter) It's a quick talk. Others channel John McEnroe. "You cannot be serious!" Now, I can't do the accent, but I am serious, thanks to these two children, who, as you'll learn, are very much at the heart of my talk. On the left, we have Pia. She lives in England. She has two loving parents, one of whom is standing right here. Dorothy, on the right, lives in rural Kenya. She's one of 13,000 orphans and vulnerable children who are assisted by a charity that I support. I do that because I believe that Dorothy, like Pia, deserves the best life chances that we can afford to give her. You'll all agree with me, I'm sure. The U.N. agrees too. Their overriding aim for international aid is to strive for a life of dignity for all. But -- and here's that hurdle -- can we afford our aid aspirations? History suggests not. In 1970, governments set themselves a target to increase overseas aid payments to 0.7 percent of their national income. As you can see, a big gap opens up between actual aid and that target. But then come the Millennium Development Goals, eight ambitious targets to be met by 2015. If I tell you that just one of those targets is to eradicate extreme hunger and poverty, you get a sense of the ambition. There's also been some success. The number of people living on less than $1.25 a day has halved. But a lot remains to be done in two years. One in eight remain hungry. In the context of this auditorium, the front two rows aren't going to get any food. We can't settle for that, which is why the concern about the eighth goal, which relates to funding, which I said at the beginning is falling, is so troubling. So what can be done? Well, I work in financial markets, not development. I study the behavior of investors, how they react to policy and the economy. It gives me a different angle on the aid issue. But it took an innocent question from my then-four-year-old daughter to make me appreciate that. Pia and I were on the way to a local cafe and we passed a man collecting for charity. I didn't have any change to give him, and she was disappointed. Once in the cafe, Pia takes out her coloring book and starts scribbling. After a little while, I ask her what she's doing, and she shows me a drawing of a £5 note to give to the man outside. It's so sweet, and more generous than Dad would have been. But of course I explained to her, "You can't do that; it's not allowed." To which I get the classic four-year-old response: "Why not?" Now I'm excited, because I actually think I can answer this time. So I launch into an explanation of how an unlimited supply of money chasing a limited number of goods sends prices to the moon. Something about that exchange stuck with me, not because of the look of relief on Pia's face when I finally finished, but because it related to the sanctity of the money supply, a sanctity that had been challenged and questioned by the reaction of central banks to the financial crisis. To reassure investors, central banks began buying assets to try and encourage investors to do the same. They funded these purchases with money they created themselves. The money wasn't actually physically printed. It's still sort of locked away in the banking system today. But the amount created was unprecedented. Together, the central banks of the U.S., U.K and Japan increased the stock of money in their economies by 3.7 trillion dollars. That's three times, in fact that's more than three times, the total physical stock of dollar notes in circulation. Three times! Before the crisis, this would have been utterly unthinkable, yet it was accepted remarkably quickly. The price of gold, an asset thought to protect against inflation, did jump, but investors bought other assets that offered little protection from inflation. They bought fixed income securities, bonds. They bought equities too. For all the scare stories, the actual actions of investors spoke of rapid acceptance and confidence. That confidence was based on two pillars. The first was that, after years of keeping inflation under control, central banks were trusted to take the money-printing away if inflation became a threat. Secondly, inflation simply never became a threat. As you can see, in the United States, inflation for most of this period remained below average. It was the same elsewhere. So how does all this relate to aid? Well, this is where Dorothy and the Mango Tree charity that supports her comes in. I was at one of their fundraising events earlier this year, and I was inspired to give a one-off donation when I remembered that my firm offers to match the charitable contributions its employees make. So think of this: Instead of just being able to help Dorothy and four of her classmates to go through secondary school for a few years, I was able to double my contribution. Brilliant. So following that conversation with my daughter, and seeing the absence of inflation in the face of money-printing, and knowing that international aid payments were falling at just the wrong time, this made me wonder: Could we match but just on a much grander scale? Let's call this scheme "Print Aid." And here's how it might work. Provided it saw little inflation risk from doing so, the central bank would be mandated to match the government's overseas aid payments up to a certain limit. Governments have been aiming to get aid to 0.7 percent for years, so let's set the limit at half of that, 0.35 percent of their income. So it would work like this: If in a given year the government gave 0.2 percent of its income to overseas aid, the central bank would simply top it up with a further 0.2 percent. So far so good. How risky is this? Well, this involves the creation of money to buy goods, not assets. It sounds more inflationary already, doesn't it. But there are two important mitigating factors here. The first is that by definition, this money printed would be spent overseas. So it's not obvious how it leads to inflation in the country doing the actual printing unless it leads to a currency depreciation of that country. That is unlikely for the second reason: the scale of the money that would be printed under this scheme. So let's think of an example where Print Aid was in place in the U.S., U.K. and Japan. To match the aid payments made by those governments over the last four years, Print Aid would have generated 200 billion dollars' worth of extra aid. What would that look like in the context of the increase in the money stock that had already happened in those countries to save the financial system? Are you read for this? You might struggle to see that at the back, because the gap is quite small. So what we're saying here is that we took a $3.7 trillion gamble to save our financial systems, and you know what, it paid off. There was no inflation. Are we really saying that it's not worth the risk to print an extra 200 billion for aid? Would the risks really be that different? To me, it's not that clear. What is clear is the impact on aid. Even though this is the printing of just three central banks, the global aid that's given over this period is up by almost 40 percent. Aid as a proportion of national income all of a sudden is at a 40-year high. Now, we don't get to 0.7 percent. Governments are still incentivized to give. But you know what, that's the point of a matching scheme. So I think what we've learned is that the risks from this money creation scheme are quite modest, but the benefits are potentially huge. Imagine what we could do with 40 percent more funding. We might be able to feed the front row. The thing that I fear, the only thing that I fear, apart from the fact that I've run out of time, is that the window of opportunity for this idea is a short one. Today, money creation by central banks is an accepted policy tool. That may not always be the case. Today there are universally agreed aims for international aid. That may not always be the case. Today might be the only time that these two things coincide, such that we can afford the aid that we've always aspired to give. So, can we print money for international aid? I seriously believe the question should be, why not? Thank you very much. (Applause)

I'm going to talk about hackers. And the image that comes to your mind when I say that word is probably not of Benjamin Franklin, but I'm going to explain to you why it should be. The image that comes to your mind is probably more likely of a pasty kid sitting in a basement doing something mischievous, or of a shady criminal who is trying to steal your identity, or of an international rogue with a political agenda. And mainstream culture has kind of fed this idea that hackers are people that we should be afraid of. But like most things in technology and the technology world, hacking has equal power for good as it has for evil. For every hacker that's trying to steal your identity there's one that's building a tool that will help you find your loved ones after a disaster or to monitor environmental quality after an oil spill. Hacking is really just any amateur innovation on an existing system, and it is a deeply democratic activity. It's about critical thinking. It's about questioning existing ways of doing things. It's the idea that if you see a problem, you work to fix it, and not just complain about it. And in many ways, hacking is what built America. Betsy Ross was a hacker. The Underground Railroad was a brilliant hack. And from the Wright brothers to Steve Jobs, hacking has always been at the foundation of American democracy. So if there's one thing I want to leave you here with today, it's that the next time you think about who a hacker is, you think not of this guy but of this guy, Benjamin Franklin, who was one of the greatest hackers of all time. He was one of America's most prolific inventors, though he famously never filed a patent, because he thought that all human knowledge should be freely available. He brought us bifocals and the lightning rod, and of course there was his collaboration on the invention of American democracy. And in Code For America, we really try to embody the spirit of Ben Franklin. He was a tinkerer and a statesman whose conception of citizenship was always predicated on action. He believed that government could be built by the people, and we call those people civic hackers. So it's no wonder that the values that underly a healthy democracy, like collaboration and empowerment and participation and enterprise, are the same values that underly the Internet. And so it's no surprise that many hackers are turning their attention to the problem of government. But before I give you a few examples of what civic hacking looks like, I want to make clear that you don't have to be a programmer to be a civic hacker. You just have to believe that you can bring a 21st-century tool set to bear on the problems that government faces. And we hear all the time from our community of civic hackers at Code for America that they didn't understand how much nontechnical work actually went into civic hacking projects. So keep that in mind. All of you are potential civic hackers. So what does civic hacking look like? Our team last year in Honolulu, which in this case was three full-time fellows who were doing a year of public service, were asked by the city to rebuild the website. And it's a massive thing of tens of thousands of pages which just wasn't going to be possible in the few months that they had. So instead, they decided to build a parallel site that better conformed to how citizens actually want to interact with information on a city website. They're looking for answers to questions, and they want to take action when they're done, which is really hard to do from a site that looks like this. So our team built Honolulu Answers, which is a super-simple search interface where you enter a search term or a question and get back plain language answers that drive a user towards action. Now the site itself was easy enough to build, but the team was faced with the challenge of how they populate all of the content. It would have taken the three of them a very long time, especially given that none of them are actually from Honolulu. And so they did something that's really radical, when you think about how government is used to working. They asked citizens to write the content. So you've heard of a hack-a-thon. They held a write-a-thon, where on one Saturday afternoon -- ("What do I do about wild pigs being a nuisance?") (Laughter) — Wild pigs are a huge problem in Honolulu, apparently. In one Saturday afternoon, they were able to populate most of the content for most of the frequently asked questions, but more importantly than that, they created a new way for citizens to participate in their government. Now, I think this is a really cool story in and of itself, but it gets more awesome. On the National Day of Civic Hacking this past June in Oakland, where I live, the Code For America team in Oakland took the open source code base of Honolulu Answers and turned it into Oakland Answers, and again we held a write-a-thon where we took the most frequently asked questions and had citizens write the answers to them, and I got into the act. I authored this answer, and a few others. And I'm trying to this day to articulate the sense of empowerment and responsibility that I feel for the place that I live based simply on this small act of participation. And by stitching together my small act with the thousands of other small acts of participation that we're enabling through civic hacking, we think we can reenergize citizenship and restore trust in government. At this point, you may be wondering what city officials think of all this. They actually love it. As most of you guys know, cities are being asked every day to do more with less, and they're always looking for innovative solutions to entrenched problems. So when you give citizens a way to participate beyond attending a town hall meeting, cities can actually capture the capacity in their communities to do the business of government. Now I don't want to leave the impression that civic hacking is just an American phenomenon. It's happening across the globe, and one of my favorite examples is from Mexico City, where earlier this year, the Mexico House of Representatives entered into a contract with a software development firm to build an app that legislators would use to track bills. So this was just for the handful of legislators in the House. And the contract was a two-year contract for 9.3 million dollars. Now a lot of people were really angry about this, especially geeks who knew that 9.3 million dollars was an absolutely outrageous amount of money for what was a very simple app. But instead of taking to the streets, they issued a challenge. They asked programmers in Mexico to build something better and cheaper, and they offered a prize of 9,300 dollars -- 10,000 times cheaper than the government contract, and they gave the entrants 10 days. And in those 10 days, they submitted 173 apps, five of which were presented to Congress and are still in the app store today. And because of this action, that contract was vacated, and now this has sparked a movement in Mexico City which is home to one of our partners, Code for Mexico City. And so what you see in all three of these places, in Honolulu and in Oakland and in Mexico City, are the elements that are at the core of civic hacking. It's citizens who saw things that could be working better and they decided to fix them, and through that work, they're creating a 21st-century ecosystem of participation. They're creating a whole new set of ways for citizens to be involved, besides voting or signing a petition or protesting. They can actually build government. So back to our friend Ben Franklin, who, one of his lesser-known accomplishments was that in 1736 he founded the first volunteer firefighting company in Philadelphia, called a brigade. And it's because he and his friends noticed that the city was having trouble keeping up with all the fires that were happening in the city, so in true civic hacker fashion, they built a solution. And we have our own brigades at Code for America working on the projects that I've just described, and we want to ask you to follow in Ben Franklin's footsteps and come join us. We have 31 brigades in the U.S. We are pleased to announce today that we're opening up the brigade to international cities for the first time, starting with cities in Poland and Japan and Ireland. You can find out if there's a brigade where you live at brigade.codeforamerica.org, and if there's not a brigade where you live, we will help you. We've created a tool kit which also lives at brigade.codeforamerica.org, and we will support you along the way. Our goal is to create a global network of civic hackers who are innovating on the existing system in order to build tools that will solve entrenched problems, that will support local government, and that will empower citizens. So please come hack with us. Thank you. (Applause)

I'm very pleased to be here today to talk to you all about how we might repair the damaged brain, and I'm particularly excited by this field, because as a neurologist myself, I believe that this offers one of the great ways that we might be able to offer hope for patients who today live with devastating and yet untreatable diseases of the brain. So here's the problem. You can see here the picture of somebody's brain with Alzheimer's disease next to a healthy brain, and what's obvious is, in the Alzheimer's brain, ringed red, there's obvious damage -- atrophy, scarring. And I could show you equivalent pictures from other disease: multiple sclerosis, motor neuron disease, Parkinson's disease, even Huntington's disease, and they would all tell a similar story. And collectively these brain disorders represent one of the major public health threats of our time. And the numbers here are really rather staggering. At any one time, there are 35 million people today living with one of these brain diseases, and the annual cost globally is 700 billion dollars. I mean, just think about that. That's greater than one percent of the global GDP. And it gets worse, because all these numbers are rising because these are by and large age-related diseases, and we're living longer. So the question we really need to ask ourselves is, why, given the devastating impact of these diseases to the individual, never mind the scale of the societal problem, why are there no effective treatments? Now in order to consider this, I first need to give you a crash course in how the brain works. So in other words, I need to tell you everything I learned at medical school. (Laughter) But believe me, this isn't going to take very long. Okay? (Laughter) So the brain is terribly simple: it's made up of four cells, and two of them are shown here. There's the nerve cell, and then there's the myelinating cell, or the insulating cell. It's called oligodendrocyte. And when these four cells work together in health and harmony, they create an extraordinary symphony of electrical activity, and it is this electrical activity that underpins our ability to think, to emote, to remember, to learn, move, feel and so on. But equally, each of these individual four cells alone or together, can go rogue or die, and when that happens, you get damage. You get damaged wiring. You get disrupted connections. And that's evident here with the slower conduction. But ultimately, this damage will manifest as disease, clearly. And if the starting dying nerve cell is a motor nerve, for example, you'll get motor neuron disease. So I'd like to give you a real-life illustration of what happens with motor neuron disease. So this is a patient of mine called John. John I saw just last week in the clinic. And I've asked John to tell us something about what were his problems that led to the initial diagnosis of motor neuron disease. John: I was diagnosed in October in 2011, and the main problem was a breathing problem, difficulty breathing. Siddharthan Chandran: I don't know if you caught all of that, but what John was telling us was that difficulty with breathing led eventually to the diagnosis of motor neuron disease. So John's now 18 months further down in that journey, and I've now asked him to tell us something about his current predicament. John: What I've got now is the breathing's gotten worse. I've got weakness in my hands, my arms and my legs. So basically I'm in a wheelchair most of the time. SC: John's just told us he's in a wheelchair most of the time. So what these two clips show is not just the devastating consequence of the disease, but they also tell us something about the shocking pace of the disease, because in just 18 months, a fit adult man has been rendered wheelchair- and respirator-dependent. And let's face it, John could be anybody's father, brother or friend. So that's what happens when the motor nerve dies. But what happens when that myelin cell dies? You get multiple sclerosis. So the scan on your left is an illustration of the brain, and it's a map of the connections of the brain, and superimposed upon which are areas of damage. We call them lesions of demyelination. But they're damage, and they're white. So I know what you're thinking here. You're thinking, "My God, this bloke came up and said he's going to talk about hope, and all he's done is give a really rather bleak and depressing tale." I've told you these diseases are terrible. They're devastating, numbers are rising, the costs are ridiculous, and worst of all, we have no treatment. Where's the hope? Well, you know what? I think there is hope. And there's hope in this next section, of this brain section of somebody else with M.S., because what it illustrates is, amazingly, the brain can repair itself. It just doesn't do it well enough. And so again, there are two things I want to show you. First of all is the damage of this patient with M.S. And again, it's another one of these white masses. But crucially, the area that's ringed red highlights an area that is pale blue. But that area that is pale blue was once white. So it was damaged. It's now repaired. Just to be clear: It's not because of doctors. It's in spite of doctors, not because of doctors. This is spontaneous repair. It's amazing and it's occurred because there are stem cells in the brain, even, which can enable new myelin, new insulation, to be laid down over the damaged nerves. And this observation is important for two reasons. The first is it challenges one of the orthodoxies that we learnt at medical school, or at least I did, admittedly last century, which is that the brain doesn't repair itself, unlike, say, the bone or the liver. But actually it does, but it just doesn't do it well enough. And the second thing it does, and it gives us a very clear direction of travel for new therapies -- I mean, you don't need to be a rocket scientist to know what to do here. You simply need to find ways of promoting the endogenous, spontaneous repair that occurs anyway. So the question is, why, if we've known that for some time, as we have, why do we not have those treatments? And that in part reflects the complexity of drug development. Now, drug development you might think of as a rather expensive but risky bet, and the odds of this bet are roughly this: they're 10,000 to one against, because you need to screen about 10,000 compounds to find that one potential winner. And then you need to spend 15 years and spend over a billion dollars, and even then, you may not have a winner. So the question for us is, can you change the rules of the game and can you shorten the odds? And in order to do that, you have to think, where is the bottleneck in this drug discovery? And one of the bottlenecks is early in drug discovery. All that screening occurs in animal models. But we know that the proper study of mankind is man, to borrow from Alexander Pope. So the question is, can we study these diseases using human material? And of course, absolutely we can. We can use stem cells, and specifically we can use human stem cells. And human stem cells are these extraordinary but simple cells that can do two things: they can self-renew or make more of themselves, but they can also become specialized to make bone, liver or, crucially, nerve cells, maybe even the motor nerve cell or the myelin cell. And the challenge has long been, can we harness the power, the undoubted power of these stem cells in order to realize their promise for regenerative neurology? And I think we can now, and the reason we can is because there have been several major discoveries in the last 10, 20 years. One of them was here in Edinburgh, and it must be the only celebrity sheep, Dolly. So Dolly was made in Edinburgh, and Dolly was an example of the first cloning of a mammal from an adult cell. But I think the even more significant breakthrough for the purposes of our discussion today was made in 2006 by a Japanese scientist called Yamanaka. And what Yamaka did, in a fantastic form of scientific cookery, was he showed that four ingredients, just four ingredients, could effectively convert any cell, adult cell, into a master stem cell. And the significance of this is difficult to exaggerate, because what it means that from anybody in this room, but particularly patients, you could now generate a bespoke, personalized tissue repair kit. Take a skin cell, make it a master pluripotent cell, so you could then make those cells that are relevant to their disease, both to study but potentially to treat. Now, the idea of that at medical school -- this is a recurring theme, isn't it, me and medical school? — would have been ridiculous, but it's an absolute reality today. And I see this as the cornerstone of regeneration, repair and hope. And whilst we're on the theme of hope, for those of you who might have failed at school, there's hope for you as well, because this is the school report of John Gerdon. ["I believe he has ideas about becoming a scientist; on his present showing this is quite ridiculous."] So they didn't think much of him then. But what you may not know is that he got the Nobel Prize for medicine just three months ago. So to return to the original problem, what is the opportunity of these stem cells, or this disruptive technology, for repairing the damaged brain, which we call regenerative neurology? I think there are two ways you can think about this: as a fantastic 21st-century drug discovery tool, and/or as a form of therapy. So I want to tell you a little bit about both of those in the next few moments. Drug discovery in a dish is how people often talk about this. It's very simple: You take a patient with a disease, let's say motor neuron disease, you take a skin sample, you do the pluripotent reprogramming, as I've already told you, and you generate live motor nerve cells. That's straightforward, because that's what pluripotent cells can do. But crucially, you can then compare their behavior to their equivalent but healthy counterparts, ideally from an unaffected relative. That way, you're matching for genetic variation. And that's exactly what we did here. This was a collaboration with colleagues: in London, Chris Shaw; in the U.S., Steve Finkbeiner and Tom Maniatis. And what you're looking at, and this is amazing, these are living, growing, motor nerve cells from a patient with motor neuron disease. It happens to be an inherited form. I mean, just imagine that. This would have been unimaginable 10 years ago. So apart from seeing them grow and put out processes, we can also engineer them so that they fluoresce, but crucially, we can then track their individual health and compare the diseased motor nerve cells to the healthy ones. And when you do all that and put it together, you realize that the diseased ones, which is represented in the red line, are two and a half times more likely to die than the healthy counterpart. And the crucial point about this is that you then have a fantastic assay to discover drugs, because what would you ask of the drugs, and you could do this through a high-throughput automated screening system, you'd ask the drugs, give me one thing: find me a drug that will bring the red line closer to the blue line, because that drug will be a high-value candidate that you could probably take direct to human trial and almost bypass that bottleneck that I've told you about in drug discovery with the animal models, if that makes sense. It's fantastic. But I want to come back to how you might use stem cells directly to repair damage. And again there are two ways to think about this, and they're not mutually exclusive. The first, and I think in the long run the one that will give us the biggest dividend, but it's not thought of that way just yet, is to think about those stem cells that are already in your brain, and I've told you that. All of us have stem cells in the brain, even the diseased brain, and surely the smart way forward is to find ways that you can promote and activate those stem cells in your brain already to react and respond appropriately to damage to repair it. That will be the future. There will be drugs that will do that. But the other way is to effectively parachute in cells, transplant them in, to replace dying or lost cells, even in the brain. And I want to tell you now an experiment, it's a clinical trial that we did, which recently completed, which is with colleagues in UCL, David Miller in particular. So this study was very simple. We took patients with multiple sclerosis and asked a simple question: Would stem cells from the bone marrow be protective of their nerves? So what we did was we took this bone marrow, grew up the stem cells in the lab, and then injected them back into the vein. I'm making this sound really simple. It took five years off a lot of people, okay? And it put gray hair on me and caused all kinds of issues. But conceptually, it's essentially simple. So we've given them into the vein, right? So in order to measure whether this was successful or not, we measured the optic nerve as our outcome measure. And that's a good thing to measure in M.S., because patients with M.S. sadly suffer with problems with vision -- loss of vision, unclear vision. And so we measured the size of the optic nerve using the scans with David Miller three times -- 12 months, six months, and before the infusion -- and you can see the gently declining red line. And that's telling you that the optic nerve is shrinking, which makes sense, because their nerves are dying. We then gave the stem cell infusion and repeated the measurement twice -- three months and six months -- and to our surprise, almost, the line's gone up. That suggests that the intervention has been protective. I don't think myself that what's happened is that those stem cells have made new myelin or new nerves. What I think they've done is they've promoted the endogenous stem cells, or precursor cells, to do their job, wake up, lay down new myelin. So this is a proof of concept. I'm very excited about that. So I just want to end with the theme I began on, which was regeneration and hope. So here I've asked John what his hopes are for the future. John: I would hope that sometime in the future through the research that you people are doing, we can come up with a cure so that people like me can lead a normal life. SC: I mean, that speaks volumes. But I'd like to close by first of all thanking John -- thanking John for allowing me to share his insights and these clips with you all. But I'd also like to add to John and to others that my own view is, I'm hopeful for the future. I do believe that the disruptive technologies like stem cells that I've tried to explain to you do offer very real hope. And I do think that the day that we might be able to repair the damaged brain is sooner than we think. Thank you. (Applause)