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Democracy is in trouble, no question about that, and it comes in part from a deep dilemma in which it is embedded. It's increasingly irrelevant to the kinds of decisions we face that have to do with global pandemics, a cross-border problem; with HIV, a transnational problem; with markets and immigration, something that goes beyond national borders; with terrorism, with war, all now cross-border problems. In fact, we live in a 21st-century world of interdependence, and brutal interdependent problems, and when we look for solutions in politics and in democracy, we are faced with political institutions designed 400 years ago, autonomous, sovereign nation-states with jurisdictions and territories separate from one another, each claiming to be able to solve the problem of its own people. Twenty-first-century, transnational world of problems and challenges, 17th-century world of political institutions. In that dilemma lies the central problem of democracy. And like many others, I've been thinking about what can one do about this, this asymmetry between 21st-century challenges and archaic and increasingly dysfunctional political institutions like nation-states. And my suggestion is that we change the subject, that we stop talking about nations, about bordered states, and we start talking about cities. Because I think you will find, when we talk about cities, we are talking about the political institutions in which civilization and culture were born. We are talking about the cradle of democracy. We are talking about the venues in which those public spaces where we come together to create democracy, and at the same time protest those who would take our freedom, take place. Think of some great names: the Place de la Bastille, Zuccotti Park, Tahrir Square, Taksim Square in today's headlines in Istanbul, or, yes, Tiananmen Square in Beijing. (Applause) Those are the public spaces where we announce ourselves as citizens, as participants, as people with the right to write our own narratives. Cities are not only the oldest of institutions, they're the most enduring. If you think about it, Constantinople, Istanbul, much older than Turkey. Alexandria, much older than Egypt. Rome, far older than Italy. Cities endure the ages. They are the places where we are born, grow up, are educated, work, marry, pray, play, get old, and in time, die. They are home. Very different than nation-states, which are abstractions. We pay taxes, we vote occasionally, we watch the men and women we choose rule rule more or less without us. Not so in those homes known as our towns and cities where we live. Moreover, today, more than half of the world's population live in cities. In the developed world, it's about 78 percent. More than three out of four people live in urban institutions, urban places, in cities today. So cities are where the action is. Cities are us. Aristotle said in the ancient world, man is a political animal. I say we are an urban animal. We are an urban species, at home in our cities. So to come back to the dilemma, if the dilemma is we have old-fashioned political nation-states unable to govern the world, respond to the global challenges that we face like climate change, then maybe it's time for mayors to rule the world, for mayors and the citizens and the peoples they represent to engage in global governance. When I say if mayors ruled the world, when I first came up with that phrase, it occurred to me that actually, they already do. There are scores of international, inter-city, cross-border institutions, networks of cities in which cities are already, quite quietly, below the horizon, working together to deal with climate change, to deal with security, to deal with immigration, to deal with all of those tough, interdependent problems that we face. They have strange names: UCLG, United Cities and Local Governments; ICLEI, the International Council for Local Environmental Issues. And the list goes on: Citynet in Asia; City Protocol, a new organization out of Barcelona that is using the web to share best practices among countries. And then all the things we know a little better, the U.S. Conference of Mayors, the Mexican Conference of Mayors, the European Conference of Mayors. Mayors are where this is happening. And so the question is, how can we create a world in which mayors and the citizens they represent play a more prominent role? Well, to understand that, we need to understand why cities are special, why mayors are so different than prime ministers and presidents, because my premise is that a mayor and a prime minister are at the opposite ends of a political spectrum. To be a prime minister or a president, you have to have an ideology, you have to have a meta-narrative, you have to have a theory of how things work, you have to belong to a party. Independents, on the whole, don't get elected to office. But mayors are just the opposite. Mayors are pragmatists, they're problem-solvers. Their job is to get things done, and if they don't, they're out of a job. Mayor Nutter of Philadelphia said, we could never get away here in Philadelphia with the stuff that goes on in Washington, the paralysis, the non-action, the inaction. Why? Because potholes have to get filled, because the trains have to run, because kids have to be able to get to school. And that's what we have to do, and to do that is about pragmatism in that deep, American sense, reaching outcomes. Washington, Beijing, Paris, as world capitals, are anything but pragmatic, but real city mayors have to be pragmatists. They have to get things done, they have to put ideology and religion and ethnicity aside and draw their cities together. We saw this a couple of decades ago when Teddy Kollek, the great mayor of Jerusalem in the '80s and the '90s, was besieged one day in his office by religious leaders from all of the backgrounds, Christian prelates, rabbis, imams. They were arguing with one another about access to the holy sites. And the squabble went on and on, and Kollek listened and listened, and he finally said, "Gentlemen, spare me your sermons, and I will fix your sewers." (Laughter) That's what mayors do. They fix sewers, they get the trains running. There isn't a left or a right way of doing. Boris Johnson in London calls himself an anarcho-Tory. Strange term, but in some ways, he is. He's a libertarian. He's an anarchist. He rides to work on a bike, but at the same time, he's in some ways a conservative. Bloomberg in New York was a Democrat, then he was a Republican, and finally he was an Independent, and said the party label just gets in the way. Luzhkov, 20 years mayor in Moscow, though he helped found a party, United Party with Putin, in fact refused to be defined by the party and finally, in fact, lost his job not under Brezhnev, not under Gorbachev, but under Putin, who wanted a more faithful party follower. So mayors are pragmatists and problem-solvers. They get things done. But the second thing about mayors is they are also what I like to call homeboys, or to include the women mayors, homies. They're from the neighborhood. They're part of the neighborhood. They're known. Ed Koch used to wander around New York City saying, "How am I doing?" Imagine David Cameron wandering around the United Kingdom asking, "How am I doing?" He wouldn't like the answer. Or Putin. Or any national leader. He could ask that because he knew New Yorkers and they knew him. Mayors are usually from the places they govern. It's pretty hard to be a carpetbagger and be a mayor. You can run for the Senate out of a different state, but it's hard to do that as a mayor. And as a result, mayors and city councillors and local authorities have a much higher trust level, and this is the third feature about mayors, than national governing officials. In the United States, we know the pathetic figures: 18 percent of Americans approve of Congress and what they do. And even with a relatively popular president like Obama, the figures for the Presidency run about 40, 45, sometimes 50 percent at best. The Supreme Court has fallen way down from what it used to be. But when you ask, "Do you trust your city councillor, do you trust your mayor?" the rates shoot up to 70, 75, even 80 percent, because they're from the neighborhood, because the people they work with are their neighbors, because, like Mayor Booker in Newark, a mayor is likely to get out of his car on the way to work and go in and pull people out of a burning building -- that happened to Mayor Booker -- or intervene in a mugging in the street as he goes to work because he sees it. No head of state would be permitted by their security details to do it, nor be in a position to do it. That's the difference, and the difference has to do with the character of cities themselves, because cities are profoundly multicultural, open, participatory, democratic, able to work with one another. When states face each other, China and the U.S., they face each other like this. When cities interact, they interact like this. China and the U.S., despite the recent meta-meeting in California, are locked in all kinds of anger, resentment, and rivalry for number one. We heard more about who will be number one. Cities don't worry about number one. They have to work together, and they do work together. They work together in climate change, for example. Organizations like the C40, like ICLEI, which I mentioned, have been working together many, many years before Copenhagen. In Copenhagen, four or five years ago, 184 nations came together to explain to one another why their sovereignty didn't permit them to deal with the grave, grave crisis of climate change, but the mayor of Copenhagen had invited 200 mayors to attend. They came, they stayed, and they found ways and are still finding ways to work together, city-to-city, and through inter-city organizations. Eighty percent of carbon emissions come from cities, which means cities are in a position to solve the carbon problem, or most of it, whether or not the states of which they are a part make agreements with one another. And they are doing it. Los Angeles cleaned up its port, which was 40 percent of carbon emissions, and as a result got rid of about 20 percent of carbon. New York has a program to upgrade its old buildings, make them better insulated in the winter, to not leak energy in the summer, not leak air conditioning. That's having an impact. Bogota, where Mayor Mockus, when he was mayor, he introduced a transportation system that saved energy, that allowed surface buses to run in effect like subways, express buses with corridors. It helped unemployment, because people could get across town, and it had a profound impact on climate as well as many other things there. Singapore, as it developed its high-rises and its remarkable public housing, also developed an island of parks, and if you go there, you'll see how much of it is green land and park land. Cities are doing this, but not just one by one. They are doing it together. They are sharing what they do, and they are making a difference by shared best practices. Bike shares, many of you have heard of it, started 20 or 30 years ago in Latin America. Now it's in hundreds of cities around the world. Pedestrian zones, congestion fees, emission limits in cities like California cities have, there's lots and lots that cities can do even when opaque, stubborn nations refuse to act. So what's the bottom line here? The bottom line is, we still live politically in a world of borders, a world of boundaries, a world of walls, a world where states refuse to act together. Yet we know that the reality we experience day to day is a world without borders, a world of diseases without borders and doctors without borders, maladies sans frontières, Médecins Sans Frontières, of economics and technology without borders, of education without borders, of terrorism and war without borders. That is the real world, and unless we find a way to globalize democracy or democratize globalization, we will increasingly not only risk the failure to address all of these transnational problems, but we will risk losing democracy itself, locked up in the old nation-state box, unable to address global problems democratically. So where does that leave us? I'll tell you. The road to global democracy doesn't run through states. It runs through cities. Democracy was born in the ancient polis. I believe it can be reborn in the global cosmopolis. In that journey from polis to cosmopolis, we can rediscover the power of democracy on a global level. We can create not a League of Nations, which failed, but a League of Cities, not a United or a dis-United Nations, but United Cities of the World. We can create a global parliament of mayors. That's an idea. It's in my conception of the coming world, but it's also on the table in City Halls in Seoul, Korea, in Amsterdam, in Hamburg, and in New York. Mayors are considering that idea of how you can actually constitute a global parliament of mayors, and I love that idea, because a parliament of mayors is a parliament of citizens and a parliament of citizens is a parliament of us, of you and of me. If ever there were citizens without borders, I think it's the citizens of TED who show the promise to be those citizens without borders. I am ready to reach out and embrace a new global democracy, to take back our democracy. And the only question is, are you? Thank you so much, my fellow citizens. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause)

When my father and I started a company to 3D print human tissues and organs, some people initially thought we were a little crazy. But since then, much progress has been made, both in our lab and other labs around the world. And given this, we started getting questions like, "If you can grow human body parts, can you also grow animal products like meat and leather?" When someone first suggested this to me, quite frankly I thought they were a little crazy, but what I soon came to realize was that this is not so crazy after all. What's crazy is what we do today. I'm convinced that in 30 years, when we look back on today and on how we raise and slaughter billions of animals to make our hamburgers and our handbags, we'll see this as being wasteful and indeed crazy. Did you know that today we maintain a global herd of 60 billion animals to provide our meat, dairy, eggs and leather goods? And over the next few decades, as the world's population expands to 10 billion, this will need to nearly double to 100 billion animals. But maintaining this herd takes a major toll on our planet. Animals are not just raw materials. They're living beings, and already our livestock is one of the largest users of land, fresh water, and one of the biggest producers of greenhouse gases which drive climate change. On top of this, when you get so many animals so close together, it creates a breeding ground for disease and opportunities for harm and abuse. Clearly, we cannot continue on this path which puts the environment, public health, and food security at risk. There is another way, because essentially, animal products are just collections of tissues, and right now we breed and raise highly complex animals only to create products that are made of relatively simple tissues. What if, instead of starting with a complex and sentient animal, we started with what the tissues are made of, the basic unit of life, the cell? This is biofabrication, where cells themselves can be used to grow biological products like tissues and organs. Already in medicine, biofabrication techniques have been used to grow sophisticated body parts, like ears, windpipes, skin, blood vessels and bone, that have been successfully implanted into patients. And beyond medicine, biofabrication can be a humane, sustainable and scalable new industry. And we should begin by reimagining leather. I emphasize leather because it is so widely used. It is beautiful, and it has long been a part of our history. Growing leather is also technically simpler than growing other animal products like meat. It mainly uses one cell type, and it is largely two-dimensional. It is also less polarizing for consumers and regulators. Until biofabrication is better understood, it is clear that, initially at least, more people would be willing to wear novel materials than would be willing to eat novel foods, no matter how delicious. In this sense, leather is a gateway material, a beginning for the mainstream biofabrication industry. If we can succeed here, it brings our other consumer bioproducts like meat closer on the horizon. Now how do we do it? To grow leather, we begin by taking cells from an animal, through a simple biopsy. The animal could be a cow, lamb, or even something more exotic. This process does no harm, and Daisy the cow can live a happy life. We then isolate the skin cells and multiply them in a cell culture medium. This takes millions of cells and expands them into billions. And we then coax these cells to produce collagen, as they would naturally. This collagen is the stuff between cells. It's natural connective tissue. It's the extracellular matrix, but in leather, it's the main building block. And what we next do is we take the cells and their collagen and we spread them out to form sheets, and then we layer these thin sheets on top of one another, like phyllo pastry, to form thicker sheets, which we then let mature. And finally, we take this multilayered skin and through a shorter and much less chemical tanning process, we create leather. And so I'm very excited to show you, for the first time, the first batch of our cultured leather, fresh from the lab. This is real, genuine leather, without the animal sacrifice. It can have all the characteristics of leather because it is made of the same cells, and better yet, there is no hair to remove, no scars or insect's bites, and no waste. This leather can be grown in the shape of a wallet, a handbag or a car seat. It is not limited to the irregular shape of a cow or an alligator. And because we make this material, we grow this leather from the ground up, we can control its properties in very interesting ways. This piece of leather is a mere seven tissue layers thick, and as you can see, it is nearly transparent. And this leather is 21 layers thick and quite opaque. You don't have that kind of fine control with conventional leather. And we can tune this leather for other desirable qualities, like softness, breathability, durability, elasticity and even things like pattern. We can mimic nature, but in some ways also improve upon it. This type of leather can do what today's leather does, but with imagination, probably much more. What could the future of animal products look like? It need not look like this, which is actually the state of the art today. Rather, it could be much more like this. Already, we have been manufacturing with cell cultures for thousands of years, beginning with products like wine, beer and yogurt. And speaking of food, our cultured food has evolved, and today we prepare cultured food in beautiful, sterile facilities like this. A brewery is essentially a bioreactor. It is where cell culture takes place. Imagine that in this facility, instead of brewing beer, we were brewing leather or meat. Imagine touring this facility, learning about how the leather or meat is cultured, seeing the process from beginning to end, and even trying some. It's clean, open and educational, and this is in contrast to the hidden, guarded and remote factories where leather and meat is produced today. Perhaps biofabrication is a natural evolution of manufacturing for mankind. It's environmentally responsible, efficient and humane. It allows us to be creative. We can design new materials, new products, and new facilities. We need to move past just killing animals as a resource to something more civilized and evolved. Perhaps we are ready for something literally and figuratively more cultured. Thank you. (Applause)

Eric Berlow: I'm an ecologist, and Sean's a physicist, and we both study complex networks. And we met a couple years ago when we discovered that we had both given a short TED Talk about the ecology of war, and we realized that we were connected by the ideas we shared before we ever met. And then we thought, you know, there are thousands of other talks out there, especially TEDx Talks, that are popping up all over the world. How are they connected, and what does that global conversation look like? So Sean's going to tell you a little bit about how we did that. Sean Gourley: Exactly. So we took 24,000 TEDx Talks from around the world, 147 different countries, and we took these talks and we wanted to find the mathematical structures that underly the ideas behind them. And we wanted to do that so we could see how they connected with each other. And so, of course, if you're going to do this kind of stuff, you need a lot of data. So the data that you've got is a great thing called YouTube, and we can go down and basically pull all the open information from YouTube, all the comments, all the views, who's watching it, where are they watching it, what are they saying in the comments. But we can also pull up, using speech-to-text translation, we can pull the entire transcript, and that works even for people with kind of funny accents like myself. So we can take their transcript and actually do some pretty cool things. We can take natural language processing algorithms to kind of read through with a computer, line by line, extracting key concepts from this. And we take those key concepts and they sort of form this mathematical structure of an idea. And we call that the meme-ome. And the meme-ome, you know, quite simply, is the mathematics that underlies an idea, and we can do some pretty interesting analysis with it, which I want to share with you now. So each idea has its own meme-ome, and each idea is unique with that, but of course, ideas, they borrow from each other, they kind of steal sometimes, and they certainly build on each other, and we can go through mathematically and take the meme-ome from one talk and compare it to the meme-ome from every other talk, and if there's a similarity between the two of them, we can create a link and represent that as a graph, just like Eric and I are connected. So that's theory, that's great. Let's see how it works in actual practice. So what we've got here now is the global footprint of all the TEDx Talks over the last four years exploding out around the world from New York all the way down to little old New Zealand in the corner. And what we did on this is we analyzed the top 25 percent of these, and we started to see where the connections occurred, where they connected with each other. Cameron Russell talking about image and beauty connected over into Europe. We've got a bigger conversation about Israel and Palestine radiating outwards from the Middle East. And we've got something a little broader like big data with a truly global footprint reminiscent of a conversation that is happening everywhere. So from this, we kind of run up against the limits of what we can actually do with a geographic projection, but luckily, computer technology allows us to go out into multidimensional space. So we can take in our network projection and apply a physics engine to this, and the similar talks kind of smash together, and the different ones fly apart, and what we're left with is something quite beautiful. EB: So I want to just point out here that every node is a talk, they're linked if they share similar ideas, and that comes from a machine reading of entire talk transcripts, and then all these topics that pop out, they're not from tags and keywords. They come from the network structure of interconnected ideas. Keep going. SG: Absolutely. So I got a little quick on that, but he's going to slow me down. We've got education connected to storytelling triangulated next to social media. You've got, of course, the human brain right next to healthcare, which you might expect, but also you've got video games, which is sort of adjacent, as those two spaces interface with each other. But I want to take you into one cluster that's particularly important to me, and that's the environment. And I want to kind of zoom in on that and see if we can get a little more resolution. So as we go in here, what we start to see, apply the physics engine again, we see what's one conversation is actually composed of many smaller ones. The structure starts to emerge where we see a kind of fractal behavior of the words and the language that we use to describe the things that are important to us all around this world. So you've got food economy and local food at the top, you've got greenhouse gases, solar and nuclear waste. What you're getting is a range of smaller conversations, each connected to each other through the ideas and the language they share, creating a broader concept of the environment. And of course, from here, we can go and zoom in and see, well, what are young people looking at? And they're looking at energy technology and nuclear fusion. This is their kind of resonance for the conversation around the environment. If we split along gender lines, we can see females resonating heavily with food economy, but also out there in hope and optimism. And so there's a lot of exciting stuff we can do here, and I'll throw to Eric for the next part. EB: Yeah, I mean, just to point out here, you cannot get this kind of perspective from a simple tag search on YouTube. Let's now zoom back out to the entire global conversation out of environment, and look at all the talks together. Now often, when we're faced with this amount of content, we do a couple of things to simplify it. We might just say, well, what are the most popular talks out there? And a few rise to the surface. There's a talk about gratitude. There's another one about personal health and nutrition. And of course, there's got to be one about porn, right? And so then we might say, well, gratitude, that was last year. What's trending now? What's the popular talk now? And we can see that the new, emerging, top trending topic is about digital privacy. So this is great. It simplifies things. But there's so much creative content that's just buried at the bottom. And I hate that. How do we bubble stuff up to the surface that's maybe really creative and interesting? Well, we can go back to the network structure of ideas to do that. Remember, it's that network structure that is creating these emergent topics, and let's say we could take two of them, like cities and genetics, and say, well, are there any talks that creatively bridge these two really different disciplines. And that's -- Essentially, this kind of creative remix is one of the hallmarks of innovation. Well here's one by Jessica Green about the microbial ecology of buildings. It's literally defining a new field. And we could go back to those topics and say, well, what talks are central to those conversations? In the cities cluster, one of the most central was one by Mitch Joachim about ecological cities, and in the genetics cluster, we have a talk about synthetic biology by Craig Venter. These are talks that are linking many talks within their discipline. We could go the other direction and say, well, what are talks that are broadly synthesizing a lot of different kinds of fields. We used a measure of ecological diversity to get this. Like, a talk by Steven Pinker on the history of violence, very synthetic. And then, of course, there are talks that are so unique they're kind of out in the stratosphere, in their own special place, and we call that the Colleen Flanagan index. And if you don't know Colleen, she's an artist, and I asked her, "Well, what's it like out there in the stratosphere of our idea space?" And apparently it smells like bacon. I wouldn't know. So we're using these network motifs to find talks that are unique, ones that are creatively synthesizing a lot of different fields, ones that are central to their topic, and ones that are really creatively bridging disparate fields. Okay? We never would have found those with our obsession with what's trending now. And all of this comes from the architecture of complexity, or the patterns of how things are connected. SG: So that's exactly right. We've got ourselves in a world that's massively complex, and we've been using algorithms to kind of filter it down so we can navigate through it. And those algorithms, whilst being kind of useful, are also very, very narrow, and we can do better than that, because we can realize that their complexity is not random. It has mathematical structure, and we can use that mathematical structure to go and explore things like the world of ideas to see what's being said, to see what's not being said, and to be a little bit more human and, hopefully, a little smarter. Thank you. (Applause)

This is our life with bees, and this is our life without bees. Bees are the most important pollinators of our fruits and vegetables and flowers and crops like alfalfa hay that feed our farm animals. More than one third of the world's crop production is dependent on bee pollination. But the ironic thing is that bees are not out there pollinating our food intentionally. They're out there because they need to eat. Bees get all of the protein they need in their diet from pollen and all of the carbohydrates they need from nectar. They're flower-feeders, and as they move from flower to flower, basically on a shopping trip at the local floral mart, they end up providing this valuable pollination service. In parts of the world where there are no bees, or where they plant varieties that are not attractive to bees, people are paid to do the business of pollination by hand. These people are moving pollen from flower to flower with a paintbrush. Now this business of hand pollination is actually not that uncommon. Tomato growers often pollinate their tomato flowers with a hand-held vibrator. Now this one's the tomato tickler. (Laughter) Now this is because the pollen within a tomato flower is held very securely within the male part of the flower, the anther, and the only way to release this pollen is to vibrate it. So bumblebees are one of the few kinds of bees in the world that are able to hold onto the flower and vibrate it, and they do this by shaking their flight muscles at a frequency similar to the musical note C. So they vibrate the flower, they sonicate it, and that releases the pollen in this efficient swoosh, and the pollen gathers all over the fuzzy bee's body, and she takes it home as food. Tomato growers now put bumblebee colonies inside the greenhouse to pollinate the tomatoes because they get much more efficient pollination when it's done naturally and they get better quality tomatoes. So there's other, maybe more personal reasons, to care about bees. There's over 20,000 species of bees in the world, and they're absolutely gorgeous. These bees spend the majority of their life cycle hidden in the ground or within a hollow stem and very few of these beautiful species have evolved highly social behavior like honeybees. Now honeybees tend to be the charismatic representative for the other 19,900-plus species because there's something about honeybees that draws people into their world. Humans have been drawn to honeybees since early recorded history, mostly to harvest their honey, which is an amazing natural sweetener. I got drawn into the honeybee world completely by a fluke. I was 18 years old and bored, and I picked up a book in the library on bees and I spent the night reading it. I had never thought about insects living in complex societies. It was like the best of science fiction come true. And even stranger, there were these people, these beekeepers, that loved their bees like they were family, and when I put down the book, I knew I had to see this for myself. So I went to work for a commercial beekeeper, a family that owned 2,000 hives of bees in New Mexico. And I was permanently hooked. Honeybees can be considered a super-organism, where the colony is the organism and it's comprised of 40,000 to 50,000 individual bee organisms. Now this society has no central authority. Nobody's in charge. So how they come to collective decisions, and how they allocate their tasks and divide their labor, how they communicate where the flowers are, all of their collective social behaviors are mindblowing. My personal favorite, and one that I've studied for many years, is their system of healthcare. So bees have social healthcare. So in my lab, we study how bees keep themselves healthy. For example, we study hygiene, where some bees are able to locate and weed out sick individuals from the nest, from the colony, and it keeps the colony healthy. And more recently, we've been studying resins that bees collect from plants. So bees fly to some plants and they scrape these very, very sticky resins off the leaves, and they take them back to the nest where they cement them into the nest architecture where we call it propolis. We've found that propolis is a natural disinfectant. It's a natural antibiotic. It kills off bacteria and molds and other germs within the colony, and so it bolsters the colony health and their social immunity. Humans have known about the power of propolis since biblical times. We've been harvesting propolis out of bee colonies for human medicine, but we didn't know how good it was for the bees. So honeybees have these remarkable natural defenses that have kept them healthy and thriving for over 50 million years. So seven years ago, when honeybee colonies were reported to be dying en masse, first in the United States, it was clear that there was something really, really wrong. In our collective conscience, in a really primal way, we know we can't afford to lose bees. So what's going on? Bees are dying from multiple and interacting causes, and I'll go through each of these. The bottom line is, bees dying reflects a flowerless landscape and a dysfunctional food system. Now we have the best data on honeybees, so I'll use them as an example. In the United States, bees in fact have been in decline since World War II. We have half the number of managed hives in the United States now compared to 1945. We're down to about two million hives of bees, we think. And the reason is, after World War II, we changed our farming practices. We stopped planting cover crops. We stopped planting clover and alfalfa, which are natural fertilizers that fix nitrogen in the soil, and instead we started using synthetic fertilizers. Clover and alfalfa are highly nutritious food plants for bees. And after World War II, we started using herbicides to kill off the weeds in our farms. Many of these weeds are flowering plants that bees require for their survival. And we started growing larger and larger crop monocultures. Now we talk about food deserts, places in our cities, neighborhoods that have no grocery stores. The very farms that used to sustain bees are now agricultural food deserts, dominated by one or two plant species like corn and soybeans. Since World War II, we have been systematically eliminating many of the flowering plants that bees need for their survival. And these monocultures extend even to crops that are good for bees, like almonds. Fifty years ago, beekeepers would take a few colonies, hives of bees into the almond orchards, for pollination, and also because the pollen in an almond blossom is really high in protein. It's really good for bees. Now, the scale of almond monoculture demands that most of our nation's bees, over 1.5 million hives of bees, be transported across the nation to pollinate this one crop. And they're trucked in in semi-loads, and they must be trucked out, because after bloom, the almond orchards are a vast and flowerless landscape. Bees have been dying over the last 50 years, and we're planting more crops that need them. There has been a 300 percent increase in crop production that requires bee pollination. And then there's pesticides. After World War II, we started using pesticides on a large scale, and this became necessary because of the monocultures that put out a feast for crop pests. Recently, researchers from Penn State University have started looking at the pesticide residue in the loads of pollen that bees carry home as food, and they've found that every batch of pollen that a honeybee collects has at least six detectable pesticides in it, and this includes every class of insecticides, herbicides, fungicides, and even inert and unlabeled ingredients that are part of the pesticide formulation that can be more toxic than the active ingredient. This small bee is holding up a large mirror. How much is it going to take to contaminate humans? One of these class of insecticides, the neonicontinoids, is making headlines around the world right now. You've probably heard about it. This is a new class of insecticides. It moves through the plant so that a crop pest, a leaf-eating insect, would take a bite of the plant and get a lethal dose and die. If one of these neonics, we call them, is applied in a high concentration, such as in this ground application, enough of the compound moves through the plant and gets into the pollen and the nectar, where a bee can consume, in this case, a high dose of this neurotoxin that makes the bee twitch and die. In most agricultural settings, on most of our farms, it's only the seed that's coated with the insecticide, and so a smaller concentration moves through the plant and gets into the pollen and nectar, and if a bee consumes this lower dose, either nothing happens or the bee becomes intoxicated and disoriented and she may not find her way home. And on top of everything else, bees have their own set of diseases and parasites. Public enemy number one for bees is this thing. It's called varroa destructor. It's aptly named. It's this big, blood-sucking parasite that compromises the bee's immune system and circulates viruses. Let me put this all together for you. I don't know what it feels like to a bee to have a big, bloodsucking parasite running around on it, and I don't know what it feels like to a bee to have a virus, but I do know what it feels like when I have a virus, the flu, and I know how difficult it is for me to get to the grocery store to get good nutrition. But what if I lived in a food desert? And what if I had to travel a long distance to get to the grocery store, and I finally got my weak body out there and I consumed, in my food, enough of a pesticide, a neurotoxin, that I couldn't find my way home? And this is what we mean by multiple and interacting causes of death. And it's not just our honeybees. All of our beautiful wild species of bees are at risk, including those tomato-pollinating bumblebees. These bees are providing backup for our honeybees. They're providing the pollination insurance alongside our honeybees. We need all of our bees. So what are we going to do? What are we going to do about this big bee bummer that we've created? It turns out, it's hopeful. It's hopeful. Every one of you out there can help bees in two very direct and easy ways. Plant bee-friendly flowers, and don't contaminate these flowers, this bee food, with pesticides. So go online and search for flowers that are native to your area and plant them. Plant them in a pot on your doorstep. Plant them in your front yard, in your lawns, in your boulevards. Campaign to have them planted in public gardens, community spaces, meadows. Set aside farmland. We need a beautiful diversity of flowers that blooms over the entire growing season, from spring to fall. We need roadsides seeded in flowers for our bees, but also for migrating butterflies and birds and other wildlife. And we need to think carefully about putting back in cover crops to nourish our soil and nourish our bees. And we need to diversify our farms. We need to plant flowering crop borders and hedge rows to disrupt the agricultural food desert and begin to correct the dysfunctional food system that we've created. So maybe it seems like a really small countermeasure to a big, huge problem -- just go plant flowers -- but when bees have access to good nutrition, we have access to good nutrition through their pollination services. And when bees have access to good nutrition, they're better able to engage their own natural defenses, their healthcare, that they have relied on for millions of years. So the beauty of helping bees this way, for me, is that every one of us needs to behave a little bit more like a bee society, an insect society, where each of our individual actions can contribute to a grand solution, an emergent property, that's much greater than the mere sum of our individual actions. So let the small act of planting flowers and keeping them free of pesticides be the driver of large-scale change. On behalf of the bees, thank you. (Applause) Chris Anderson: Thank you. Just a quick question. The latest numbers on the die-off of bees, is there any sign of things bottoming out? What's your hope/depression level on this? Maria Spivak: Yeah. At least in the United States, an average of 30 percent of all bee hives are lost every winter. About 20 years ago, we were at a 15-percent loss. So it's getting precarious. CA: That's not 30 percent a year, that's -- MS: Yes, thirty percent a year. CA: Thirty percent a year. MS: But then beekeepers are able to divide their colonies and so they can maintain the same number, they can recuperate some of their loss. We're kind of at a tipping point. We can't really afford to lose that many more. We need to be really appreciative of all the beekeepers out there. Plant flowers. CA: Thank you. (Applause)

I'm going to be showing some of the cybercriminals' latest and nastiest creations. So basically, please don't go and download any of the viruses that I show you. Some of you might be wondering what a cybersecurity specialist looks like, and I thought I'd give you a quick insight into my career so far. It's a pretty accurate description. This is what someone that specializes in malware and hacking looks like. So today, computer viruses and trojans, designed to do everything from stealing data to watching you in your webcam to the theft of billions of dollars. Some malicious code today goes as far as targeting power, utilities and infrastructure. Let me give you a quick snapshot of what malicious code is capable of today. Right now, every second, eight new users are joining the Internet. Today, we will see 250,000 individual new computer viruses. We will see 30,000 new infected websites. And, just to kind of tear down a myth here, lots of people think that when you get infected with a computer virus, it's because you went to a porn site. Right? Well, actually, statistically speaking, if you only visit porn sites, you're safer. People normally write that down, by the way. (Laughter) Actually, about 80 percent of these are small business websites getting infected. Today's cybercriminal, what do they look like? Well, many of you have the image, don't you, of the spotty teenager sitting in a basement, hacking away for notoriety. But actually today, cybercriminals are wonderfully professional and organized. In fact, they have product adverts. You can go online and buy a hacking service to knock your business competitor offline. Check out this one I found. (Video) Man: So you're here for one reason, and that reason is because you need your business competitors, rivals, haters, or whatever the reason is, or who, they are to go down. Well you, my friend, you've came to the right place. If you want your business competitors to go down, well, they can. If you want your rivals to go offline, well, they will. Not only that, we are providing a short-term-to-long-term DDOS service or scheduled attack, starting five dollars per hour for small personal websites to 10 to 50 dollars per hour. James Lyne: Now, I did actually pay one of these cybercriminals to attack my own website. Things got a bit tricky when I tried to expense it at the company. Turns out that's not cool. But regardless, it's amazing how many products and services are available now to cybercriminals. For example, this testing platform, which enables the cybercriminals to test the quality of their viruses before they release them on the world. For a small fee, they can upload it and make sure everything is good. But it goes further. Cybercriminals now have crime packs with business intelligence reporting dashboards to manage the distribution of their malicious code. This is the market leader in malware distribution, the Black Hole Exploit Pack, responsible for nearly one third of malware distribution in the last couple of quarters. It comes with technical installation guides, video setup routines, and get this, technical support. You can email the cybercriminals and they'll tell you how to set up your illegal hacking server. So let me show you what malicious code looks like today. What I've got here is two systems, an attacker, which I've made look all Matrix-y and scary, and a victim, which you might recognize from home or work. Now normally, these would be on different sides of the planet or of the Internet, but I've put them side by side because it makes things much more interesting. Now, there are many ways you can get infected. You will have come in contact with some of them. Maybe some of you have received an email that says something like, "Hi, I'm a Nigerian banker, and I'd like to give you 53 billion dollars because I like your face." Or funnycats.exe, which rumor has it was quite successful in China's recent campaign against America. Now there are many ways you can get infected. I want to show you a couple of my favorites. This is a little USB key. Now how do you get a USB key to run in a business? Well, you could try looking really cute. Awww. Or, in my case, awkward and pathetic. So imagine this scenario: I walk into one of your businesses, looking very awkward and pathetic, with a copy of my C.V. which I've covered in coffee, and I ask the receptionist to plug in this USB key and print me a new one. So let's have a look here on my victim computer. What I'm going to do is plug in the USB key. After a couple of seconds, things start to happen on the computer on their own, usually a bad sign. This would, of course, normally happen in a couple of seconds, really, really quickly, but I've kind of slowed it down so you can actually see the attack occurring. Malware is very boring otherwise. So this is writing out the malicious code, and a few seconds later, on the left-hand side, you'll see the attacker's screen get some interesting new text. Now if I place the mouse cursor over it, this is what we call a command prompt, and using this we can navigate around the computer. We can access your documents, your data. You can turn on the webcam. That can be very embarrassing. Or just to really prove a point, we can launch programs like my personal favorite, the Windows Calculator. So isn't it amazing how much control the attackers can get with such a simple operation? Let me show you how most malware is now distributed today. What I'm going to do is open up a website that I wrote. It's a terrible website. It's got really awful graphics. And it's got a comments section here where we can submit comments to the website. Many of you will have used something a bit like this before. Unfortunately, when this was implemented, the developer was slightly inebriated and managed to forget all of the secure coding practices he had learned. So let's imagine that our attacker, called Evil Hacker just for comedy value, inserts something a little nasty. This is a script. It's code which will be interpreted on the webpage. So I'm going to submit this post, and then, on my victim computer, I'm going to open up the web browser and browse to my website, www.incrediblyhacked.com. Notice that after a couple of seconds, I get redirected. That website address at the top there, which you can just about see, microshaft.com, the browser crashes as it hits one of these exploit packs, and up pops fake antivirus. This is a virus pretending to look like antivirus software, and it will go through and it will scan the system, have a look at what its popping up here. It creates some very serious alerts. Oh look, a child porn proxy server. We really should clean that up. What's really insulting about this is not only does it provide the attackers with access to your data, but when the scan finishes, they tell you in order to clean up the fake viruses, you have to register the product. Now I liked it better when viruses were free. (Laughter) People now pay cybercriminals money to run viruses, which I find utterly bizarre. So anyway, let me change pace a little bit. Chasing 250,000 pieces of malware a day is a massive challenge, and those numbers are only growing directly in proportion to the length of my stress line, you'll note here. So I want to talk to you briefly about a group of hackers we tracked for a year and actually found -- and this is a rare treat in our job. Now this was a cross-industry collaboration, people from Facebook, independent researchers, guys from Sophos. So here we have a couple of documents which our cybercriminals had uploaded to a cloud service, kind of like Dropbox or SkyDrive, like many of you might use. At the top, you'll notice a section of source code. What this would do is send the cybercriminals a text message every day telling them how much money they'd made that day, so a kind of cybercriminal billings report, if you will. If you look closely, you'll notice a series of what are Russian telephone numbers. Now that's obviously interesting, because that gives us a way of finding our cybercriminals. Down below, highlighted in red, in the other section of source code, is this bit "leded:leded." That's a username, kind of like you might have on Twitter. So let's take this a little further. There are a few other interesting pieces the cybercriminals had uploaded. Lots of you here will use smartphones to take photos and post them from the conference. An interesting feature of lots of modern smartphones is that when you take a photo, it embeds GPS data about where that photo was taken. In fact, I've been spending a lot of time on Internet dating sites recently, obviously for research purposes, and I've noticed that about 60 percent of the profile pictures on Internet dating sites contain the GPS coordinates of where the photo was taken, which is kind of scary because you wouldn't give out your home address to lots of strangers, but we're happy to give away our GPS coordinates to plus or minus 15 meters. And our cybercriminals had done the same thing. So here's a photo which resolves to St. Petersburg. We then deploy the incredibly advanced hacking tool. We used Google. Using the email address, the telephone number and the GPS data, on the left you see an advert for a BMW that one of our cybercriminals is selling, on the other side an advert for the sale of sphynx kittens. One of these was more stereotypical for me. A little more searching, and here's our cybercriminal. Imagine, these are hardened cybercriminals sharing information scarcely. Imagine what you could find about each of the people in this room. A bit more searching through the profile and there's a photo of their office. They were working on the third floor. And you can also see some photos from his business companion where he has a taste in a certain kind of image. It turns out he's a member of the Russian Adult Webmasters Federation. But this is where our investigation starts to slow down. The cybercriminals have locked down their profiles quite well. And herein is the greatest lesson of social media and mobile devices for all of us right now. Our friends, our families and our colleagues can break our security even when we do the right things. This is MobSoft, one of the companies that this cybercriminal gang owned, and an interesting thing about MobSoft is the 50-percent owner of this posted a job advert, and this job advert matched one of the telephone numbers from the code earlier. This woman was Maria, and Maria is the wife of one of our cybercriminals. And it's kind of like she went into her social media settings and clicked on every option imaginable to make herself really, really insecure. By the end of the investigation, where you can read the full 27-page report at that link, we had photos of the cybercriminals, even the office Christmas party when they were out on an outing. That's right, cybercriminals do have Christmas parties, as it turns out. Now you're probably wondering what happened to these guys. Let me come back to that in just a minute. I want to change pace to one last little demonstration, a technique that is wonderfully simple and basic, but is interesting in exposing how much information we're all giving away, and it's relevant because it applies to us as a TED audience. This is normally when people start kind of shuffling in their pockets trying to turn their phones onto airplane mode desperately. Many of you all know about the concept of scanning for wireless networks. You do it every time you take out your iPhone or your Blackberry and connect to something like TEDAttendees. But what you might not know is that you're also beaming out a list of networks you've previously connected to, even when you're not using wireless actively. So I ran a little scan. I was relatively inhibited compared to the cybercriminals, who wouldn't be so concerned by law, and here you can see my mobile device. Okay? So you can see a list of wireless networks. TEDAttendees, HyattLB. Where do you think I'm staying? My home network, PrettyFlyForAWifi, which I think is a great name. Sophos_Visitors, SANSEMEA, companies I work with. Loganwifi, that's in Boston. HiltonLondon. CIASurveillanceVan. We called it that at one of our conferences because we thought that would freak people out, which is quite fun. This is how geeks party. So let's make this a little bit more interesting. Let's talk about you. Twenty-three percent of you have been to Starbucks recently and used the wireless network. Things get more interesting. Forty-six percent of you I could link to a business, XYZ Employee network. This isn't an exact science, but it gets pretty accurate. Seven hundred and sixty-one of you I could identify a hotel you'd been to recently, absolutely with pinpoint precision somewhere on the globe. Two hundred and thirty-four of you, well, I know where you live. Your wireless network name is so unique that I was able to pinpoint it using data available openly on the Internet with no hacking or clever, clever tricks. And I should mention as well that some of you do use your names, "James Lyne's iPhone," for example. And two percent of you have a tendency to extreme profanity. So something for you to think about: As we adopt these new applications and mobile devices, as we play with these shiny new toys, how much are we trading off convenience for privacy and security? Next time you install something, look at the settings and ask yourself, "Is this information that I want to share? Would someone be able to abuse it?" We also need to think very carefully about how we develop our future talent pool. You see, technology's changing at a staggering rate, and that 250,000 pieces of malware won't stay the same for long. There's a very concerning trend that whilst many people coming out of schools now are much more technology-savvy, they know how to use technology, fewer and fewer people are following the feeder subjects to know how that technology works under the covers. In the U.K., a 60 percent reduction since 2003, and there are similar statistics all over the world. We also need to think about the legal issues in this area. The cybercriminals I talked about, despite theft of millions of dollars, actually still haven't been arrested, and at this point possibly never will. Most laws are national in their implementation, despite cybercrime conventions, where the Internet is borderless and international by definition. Countries do not agree, which makes this area exceptionally challenging from a legal perspective. But my biggest ask is this: You see, you're going to leave here and you're going to see some astonishing stories in the news. You're going to read about malware doing incredible and terrifying, scary things. However, 99 percent of it works because people fail to do the basics. So my ask is this: Go online, find these simple best practices, find out how to update and patch your computer. Get a secure password. Make sure you use a different password on each of your sites and services online. Find these resources. Apply them. The Internet is a fantastic resource for business, for political expression, for art and for learning. Help me and the security community make life much, much more difficult for cybercriminals. Thank you. (Applause)

Do you think it's possible to control someone's attention? Even more than that, what about predicting human behavior? I think those are interesting ideas, if you could. I mean, for me, that would be the perfect superpower, actually kind of an evil way of approaching it. But for myself, in the past, I've spent the last 20 years studying human behavior from a rather unorthodox way: picking pockets. When we think of misdirection, we think of something as looking off to the side, when actually it's often the things that are right in front of us that are the hardest things to see, the things that you look at every day that you're blinded to. For example, how many of you still have your cell phones on you right now? Great. Double-check. Make sure you still have them on you. I was doing some shopping beforehand. Now you've looked at them probably a few times today, but I'm going to ask you a question about them. Without looking at your cell phone directly yet, can you remember the icon in the bottom right corner? Bring them out, check, and see how accurate you were. How'd you do? Show of hands. Did we get it? Now that you're done looking at those, close them down, because every phone has something in common. No matter how you organize the icons, you still have a clock on the front. So, without looking at your phone, what time was it? You just looked at your clock, right? It's an interesting idea. Now, I'll ask you to take that a step further with a game of trust. Close your eyes. I realize I'm asking you to do that while you just heard there's a pickpocket in the room, but close your eyes. Now, you've been watching me for about 30 seconds. With your eyes closed, what am I wearing? Make your best guess. What color is my shirt? What color is my tie? Now open your eyes. By a show of hands, were you right? It's interesting, isn't it? Some of us are a little bit more perceptive than others. It seems that way. But I have a different theory about that, that model of attention. They have fancy models of attention, Posner's trinity model of attention. For me, I like to think of it very simple, like a surveillance system. It's kind of like you have all these fancy sensors, and inside your brain is a little security guard. For me, I like to call him Frank. So Frank is sitting at a desk. He's got all sorts of cool information in front of him, high-tech equipment, he's got cameras, he's got a little phone that he can pick up, listen to the ears, all these senses, all these perceptions. But attention is what steers your perceptions, is what controls your reality. It's the gateway to the mind. If you don't attend to something, you can't be aware of it. But ironically, you can attend to something without being aware of it. That's why there's the cocktail effect: When you're in a party, you're having conversations with someone, and yet you can recognize your name and you didn't even realize you were listening to that. Now, for my job, I have to play with techniques to exploit this, to play with your attention as a limited resource. So if I could control how you spend your attention, if I could maybe steal your attention through a distraction. Now, instead of doing it like misdirection and throwing it off to the side, instead, what I choose to focus on is Frank, to be able to play with the Frank inside your head, your little security guard, and get you, instead of focusing on your external senses, just to go internal for a second. So if I ask you to access a memory, like, what is that? What just happened? Do you have a wallet? Do you have an American Express in your wallet? And when I do that, your Frank turns around. He accesses the file. He has to rewind the tape. And what's interesting is, he can't rewind the tape at the same time that he's trying to process new data. Now, I mean, this sounds like a good theory, but I could talk for a long time and tell you lots of things, and they may be true, a portion of them, but I think it's better if I tried to show that to you here live. So if I come down, I'm going to do a little bit of shopping. Just hold still where you are. Hello, how are you? It's lovely to see you. You did a wonderful job onstage. You have a lovely watch that doesn't come off very well. Do you have your ring as well? Good. Just taking inventory. You're like a buffet. It's hard to tell where to start, there's so many great things. Hi, how are you? Good to see you. Hi, sir, could you stand up for me, please? Just right where you are. Oh, you're married. You follow directions well. That's nice to meet you, sir. You don't have a whole lot inside your pockets. Anything down by the pocket over here? Hopefully so. Have a seat. There you go. You're doing well. Hi, sir, how are you? Good to see you, sir. You have a ring, a watch. Do you have a wallet on you? Joe: I don't. Apollo Robbins: Well, we'll find one for you. Come on up this way, Joe. Give Joe a round of applause. Come on up Joe. Let's play a game. (Applause) Pardon me. I don't think I need this clicker anymore. You can have that. Thank you very much. I appreciate that. Come on up to the stage, Joe. Let's play a little game now. Do you have anything in your front pockets? Joe: Money. AR: Money. All right, let's try that. Can you stand right over this way for me? Turn around and, let's see, if I give you something that belongs to me, this is just something I have, a poker chip. Hold out your hand for me. Watch it kind of closely. Now this is a task for you to focus on. Now you have your money in your front pocket here? Joe: Yup. AR: Good. I'm not going to actually put my hand in your pocket. I'm not ready for that kind of commitment. One time a guy had a hole in his pocket, and that was rather traumatizing for me. I was looking for his wallet and he gave me his phone number. It was a big miscommunication. So let's do this simply. Squeeze your hand. Squeeze it tight. Do you feel the poker chip in your hand? Joe: I do. AR: Would you be surprised if I could take it out of your hand? Say yes. Joe: Very. AR: Good. Open your hand. Thank you very much. I'll cheat if you give me a chance. Make it harder for me. Just use your hand. Grab my wrist, but squeeze, squeeze firm. Did you see it go? Joe: No. AR: No, it's not here. Open your hand. See, while we're focused on the hand, it's sitting on your shoulder right now. Go ahead and take it off. Now, let's try that again. Hold your hand out flat. Open it up all the way. Put your hand up a little bit higher, but watch it close there, Joe. See, if I did it slowly, it'd be back on your shoulder. (Laughter) Joe, we're going to keep doing this till you catch it. You're going to get it eventually. I have faith in you. Squeeze firm. You're human, you're not slow. It's back on your shoulder. You were focused on your hand. That's why you were distracted. While you were watching this, I couldn't quite get your watch off. It was difficult. Yet you had something inside your front pocket. Do you remember what it was? Joe: Money. AR: Check your pocket. See if it's still there. Is it still there? (Laughter) Oh, that's where it was. Go ahead and put it away. We're just shopping. This trick's more about the timing, really. I'm going to try to push it inside your hand. Put your other hand on top for me, would you? It's amazingly obvious now, isn't it? It looks a lot like the watch I was wearing, doesn't it? (Laughter) (Applause) Joe: That's pretty good. That's pretty good. AR: Oh, thanks. But it's only a start. Let's try it again, a little bit differently. Hold your hands together. Put your other hand on top. Now if you're watching this little token, this obviously has become a little target. It's like a red herring. If we watch this kind of close, it looks like it goes away. It's not back on your shoulder. It falls out of the air, lands right back in the hand. Did you see it go? Yeah, it's funny. We've got a little guy. He's union. He works up there all day. If I did it slowly, if it goes straightaway, it lands down by your pocket. I believe is it in this pocket, sir? No, don't reach in your pocket. That's a different show. So -- (Squeaking noise) -- that's rather strange. They have shots for that. Can I show them what that is? That's rather bizarre. Is this yours, sir? I have no idea how that works. We'll just send that over there. That's great. I need help with this one. Step over this way for me. Now don't run away. You had something down by your pants pocket. I was checking mine. I couldn't find everything, but I noticed you had something here. Can I feel the outside of your pocket for a moment? Down here I noticed this. Is this something of yours, sir? Is this? I have no idea. That's a shrimp. Joe: Yeah. I'm saving it for later. AR: You've entertained all of these people in a wonderful way, better than you know. So we'd love to give you this lovely watch as a gift. (Laughter) Hopefully it matches his taste. But also, we have a couple of other things, a little bit of cash, and then we have a few other things. These all belong to you, along with a big round of applause from all your friends. (Applause) Joe, thank you very much. (Applause) So, same question I asked you before, but this time you don't have to close your eyes. What am I wearing? (Laughter) (Applause) Attention is a powerful thing. Like I said, it shapes your reality. So, I guess I'd like to pose that question to you. If you could control somebody's attention, what would you do with it? Thank you. (Applause)

So over the long course of human history, the infectious disease that's killed more humans than any other is malaria. It's carried in the bites of infected mosquitos, and it's probably our oldest scourge. We may have had malaria since we evolved from the apes. And to this day, malaria takes a huge toll on our species. We've got 300 million cases a year and over half a million deaths. Now this really makes no sense. We've known how to cure malaria since the 1600s. That's when Jesuit missionaries in Peru discovered the bark of the cinchona tree, and inside that bark was quinine, still an effective cure for malaria to this day. So we've known how to cure malaria for centuries. We've known how to prevent malaria since 1897. That's when the British army surgeon Ronald Ross discovered that it was mosquitos that carried malaria, not bad air or miasmas, as was previously thought. So malaria should be a relatively simple disease to solve, and yet to this day, hundreds of thousands of people are going to die from the bite of a mosquito. Why is that? This is a question that's personally intrigued me for a long time. I grew up as the daughter of Indian immigrants visiting my cousins in India every summer, and because I had no immunity to the local malarias, I was made to sleep under this hot, sweaty mosquito net every night while my cousins, they were allowed to sleep out on the terrace and have this nice, cool night breeze wafting over them. And I really hated the mosquitos for that. But at the same time, I come from a Jain family, and Jainism is a religion that espouses a very extreme form of nonviolence. So Jains are not supposed to eat meat. We're not supposed to walk on grass, because you could, you know, inadvertently kill some insects when you walk on grass. We're certainly not supposed to swat mosquitos. So the fearsome power of this little insect was apparent to me from a very young age, and it's one reason why I spent five years as a journalist trying to understand, why has malaria been such a horrible scourge for all of us for so very long? And I think there's three main reasons why. Those three reasons add up to the fourth reason, which is probably the biggest reason of all. The first reason is certainly scientific. This little parasite that causes malaria, it's probably one of the most complex and wily pathogens known to humankind. It lives half its life inside the cold-blooded mosquito and half its life inside the warm-blooded human. These two environments are totally different, but not only that, they're both utterly hostile. So the insect is continually trying to fight off the parasite, and so is the human body continually trying to fight it off. This little creature survives under siege like that, but not only does it survive, it has thrived. It has spread. It has more ways to evade attack than we know. It's a shape-shifter, for one thing. Just as a caterpillar turns into a butterfly, the malaria parasite transforms itself like that seven times in its life cycle. And each of those life stages not only looks totally different from each other, they have totally different physiology. So say you came up with some great drug that worked against one stage of the parasite's life cycle. It might do nothing at all to any of the other stages. It can hide in our bodies, undetected, unbeknownst to us, for days, for weeks, for months, for years, in some cases even decades. So the parasite is a very big scientific challenge to tackle, but so is the mosquito that carries the parasite. Only about 12 species of mosquitos carry most of the world's malaria, and we know quite a bit about the kinds of watery habitats that they specialize in. So you might think, then, well, why don't we just avoid the places where the killer mosquitos live? Right? We could avoid the places where the killer grizzly bears live and we avoid the places where the killer crocodiles live. But say you live in the tropics and you walk outside your hut one day and you leave some footprints in the soft dirt around your home. Or say your cow does, or say your pig does, and then, say, it rains, and that footprint fills up with a little bit of water. That's it. You've created the perfect malarial mosquito habitat that's right outside your door. So it's not easy for us to extricate ourselves from these insects. We kind of create places that they love to live just by living our own lives. So there's a huge scientific challenge, but there's a huge economic challenge too. Malaria occurs in some of the poorest and most remote places on Earth, and there's a reason for that. If you're poor, you're more likely to get malaria. If you're poor, you're more likely to live in rudimentary housing on marginal land that's poorly drained. These are places where mosquitos breed. You're less likely to have door screens or window screens. You're less likely to have electricity and all the indoor activities that electricity makes possible, so you're outside more. You're getting bitten by mosquitos more. So poverty causes malaria, but what we also know now is that malaria itself causes poverty. For one thing, it strikes hardest during harvest season, so exactly when farmers need to be out in the fields collecting their crops, they're home sick with a fever. But it also predisposes people to death from all other causes. So this has happened historically. We've been able to take malaria out of a society. Everything else stays the same, so we still have bad food, bad water, bad sanitation, all the things that make people sick. But just if you take malaria out, deaths from everything else go down. And the economist Jeff Sachs has actually quantified what this means for a society. What it means is, if you have malaria in your society, your economic growth is depressed by 1.3 percent every year, year after year after year, just this one disease alone. So this poses a huge economic challenge, because say you do come up with your great drug or your great vaccine -- how do you deliver it in a place where there's no roads, there's no infrastructure, there's no electricity for refrigeration to keep things cold, there's no clinics, there's no clinicians to deliver these things where they're needed? So there's a huge economic challenge in taming malaria. But along with the scientific challenge and the economic challenge, there's also a cultural challenge, and this is probably the part about malaria that people don't like to talk about. And it's the paradox that the people who have the most malaria in the world tend to care about it the least. This has been the finding of medical anthropologists again and again. They ask people in malarious parts of the world, "What do you think about malaria?" And they don't say, "It's a killer disease. We're scared of it." They say, "Malaria is a normal problem of life." And that was certainly my personal experience. When I told my relatives in India that I was writing a book about malaria, they kind of looked at me like I told them I was writing a book about warts or something. Like, why would you write about something so boring, so ordinary? You know? And it's simple risk perception, really. A child in Malawi, for example, she might have 12 episodes of malaria before the age of two, but if she survives, she'll continue to get malaria throughout her life, but she's much less likely to die of it. And so in her lived experience, malaria is something that comes and goes. And that's actually true for most of the world's malaria. Most of the world's malaria comes and goes on its own. It's just, there's so much malaria that this tiny fraction of cases that end in death add up to this big, huge number. So I think people in malarious parts of the world must think of malaria the way those of us who live in the temperate world think of cold and flu. Right? Cold and flu have a huge burden on our societies and on our own lives, but we don't really even take the most rudimentary precautions against it because we consider it normal to get cold and flu during cold and flu season. And so this poses a huge cultural challenge in taming malaria, because if people think it's normal to have malaria, then how do you get them to run to the doctor to get diagnosed, to pick up their prescription, to get it filled, to take the drugs, to put on the repellents, to tuck in the bed nets? This is a huge cultural challenge in taming this disease. So take all that together. We've got a disease. It's scientifically complicated, it's economically challenging to deal with, and it's one for which the people who stand to benefit the most care about it the least. And that adds up to the biggest problem of all, which, of course, is the political problem. How do you get a political leader to do anything about a problem like this? And the answer is, historically, you don't. Most malarious societies throughout history have simply lived with the disease. So the main attacks on malaria have come from outside of malarious societies, from people who aren't constrained by these rather paralyzing politics. But this, I think, introduces a whole host of other kinds of difficulties. The first concerted attack against malaria started in the 1950s. It was the brainchild of the U.S. State Department. And this effort well understood the economic challenge. They knew they had to focus on cheap, easy-to-use tools, and they focused on DDT. They understood the cultural challenge. In fact, their rather patronizing view was that people at risk of malaria shouldn't be asked to do anything at all. Everything should be done to them and for them. But they greatly underestimated the scientific challenge. They had so much faith in their tools that they stopped doing malaria research. And so when those tools started to fail, and public opinion started to turn against those tools, they had no scientific expertise to figure out what to do. The whole campaign crashed, malaria resurged back, but now it was even worse than before because it was corralled into the hardest-to-reach places in the most difficult-to-control forms. One WHO official at the time actually called that whole campaign "one of the greatest mistakes ever made in public health." The latest effort to tame malaria started in the late 1990s. It's similarly directed and financed primarily from outside of malarious societies. Now this effort well understands the scientific challenge. They are doing tons of malaria research. And they understand the economic challenge too. They're focusing on very cheap, very easy-to-use tools. But now, I think, the dilemma is the cultural challenge. The centerpiece of the current effort is the bed net. It's treated with insecticides. This thing has been distributed across the malarious world by the millions. And when you think about the bed net, it's sort of a surgical intervention. You know, it doesn't really have any value to a family with malaria except that it helps prevent malaria. And yet we're asking people to use these nets every night. They have to sleep under them every night. That's the only way they are effective. And they have to do that even if the net blocks the breeze, even if they might have to get up in the middle of the night and relieve themselves, even if they might have to move all their furnishings to put this thing up, even if, you know, they might live in a round hut in which it's difficult to string up a square net. Now that's no big deal if you're fighting a killer disease. I mean, these are minor inconveniences. But that's not how people with malaria think of malaria. So for them, the calculus must be quite different. Imagine, for example, if a bunch of well-meaning Kenyans came up to those of us in the temperate world and said, "You know, you people have a lot of cold and flu. We've designed this great, easy-to-use, cheap tool, we're going to give it to you for free. It's called a face mask, and all you need to do is wear it every day during cold and flu season when you go to school and when you go to work." Would we do that? And I wonder if that's how people in the malarious world thought of those nets when they first received them? Indeed, we know from studies that only 20 percent of the bed nets that were first distributed were actually used. And even that's probably an overestimate, because the same people who distributed the nets went back and asked the recipients, "Oh, did you use that net I gave you?" Which is like your Aunt Jane asking you, "Oh, did you use that vase I gave you for Christmas?" So it's probably an overestimate. But that's not an insurmountable problem. We can do more education, we can try to convince these people to use the nets. And that's what happening now. We're throwing a lot more time and money into workshops and trainings and musicals and plays and school meetings, all these things to convince people to use the nets we gave you. And that might work. But it takes time. It takes money. It takes resources. It takes infrastructure. It takes all the things that that cheap, easy-to-use bed net was not supposed to be. So it's difficult to attack malaria from inside malarious societies, but it's equally tricky when we try to attack it from outside of those societies. We end up imposing our own priorities on the people of the malarious world. That's exactly what we did in the 1950s, and that effort backfired. I would argue today, when we are distributing tools that we've designed and that don't necessarily make sense in people's lives, we run the risk of making the same mistake again. That's not to say that malaria is unconquerable, because I think it is, but what if we attacked this disease according to the priorities of the people who lived with it? Take the example of England and the United States. We had malaria in those countries for hundreds of years, and we got rid of it completely, not because we attacked malaria. We didn't. We attacked bad roads and bad houses and bad drainage and lack of electricity and rural poverty. We attacked the malarious way of life, and by doing that, we slowly built malaria out. Now attacking the malarious way of life, this is something -- these are things people care about today. And attacking the malarious way of life, it's not fast, it's not cheap, it's not easy, but I think it's the only lasting way forward. Thank you so much. (Applause)

When I was about three or four years old, I remember my mum reading a story to me and my two big brothers, and I remember putting up my hands to feel the page of the book, to feel the picture they were discussing. And my mum said, "Darling, remember that you can't see and you can't feel the picture and you can't feel the print on the page." And I thought to myself, "But that's what I want to do. I love stories. I want to read." Little did I know that I would be part of a technological revolution that would make that dream come true. I was born premature by about 10 weeks, which resulted in my blindness, some 64 years ago. The condition is known as retrolental fibroplasia, and it's now very rare in the developed world. Little did I know, lying curled up in my prim baby humidicrib in 1948 that I'd been born at the right place and the right time, that I was in a country where I could participate in the technological revolution. There are 37 million totally blind people on our planet, but those of us who've shared in the technological changes mainly come from North America, Europe, Japan and other developed parts of the world. Computers have changed the lives of us all in this room and around the world, but I think they've changed the lives of we blind people more than any other group. And so I want to tell you about the interaction between computer-based adaptive technology and the many volunteers who helped me over the years to become the person I am today. It's an interaction between volunteers, passionate inventors and technology, and it's a story that many other blind people could tell. But let me tell you a bit about it today. When I was five, I went to school and I learned braille. It's an ingenious system of six dots that are punched into paper, and I can feel them with my fingers. In fact, I think they're putting up my grade six report. I don't know where Julian Morrow got that from. (Laughter) I was pretty good in reading, but religion and musical appreciation needed more work. (Laughter) When you leave the opera house, you'll find there's braille signage in the lifts. Look for it. Have you noticed it? I do. I look for it all the time. (Laughter) When I was at school, the books were transcribed by transcribers, voluntary people who punched one dot at a time so I'd have volumes to read, and that had been going on, mainly by women, since the late 19th century in this country, but it was the only way I could read. When I was in high school, I got my first Philips reel-to-reel tape recorder, and tape recorders became my sort of pre-computer medium of learning. I could have family and friends read me material, and I could then read it back as many times as I needed. And it brought me into contact with volunteers and helpers. For example, when I studied at graduate school at Queen's University in Canada, the prisoners at the Collins Bay jail agreed to help me. I gave them a tape recorder, and they read into it. As one of them said to me, "Ron, we ain't going anywhere at the moment." (Laughter) But think of it. These men, who hadn't had the educational opportunities I'd had, helped me gain post-graduate qualifications in law by their dedicated help. Well, I went back and became an academic at Melbourne's Monash University, and for those 25 years, tape recorders were everything to me. In fact, in my office in 1990, I had 18 miles of tape. Students, family and friends all read me material. Mrs. Lois Doery, whom I later came to call my surrogate mum, read me many thousands of hours onto tape. One of the reasons I agreed to give this talk today was that I was hoping that Lois would be here so I could introduce you to her and publicly thank her. But sadly, her health hasn't permitted her to come today. But I thank you here, Lois, from this platform. (Applause) I saw my first Apple computer in 1984, and I thought to myself, "This thing's got a glass screen, not much use to me." How very wrong I was. In 1987, in the month our eldest son Gerard was born, I got my first blind computer, and it's actually here. See it up there? And you see it has no, what do you call it, no screen. (Laughter) It's a blind computer. (Laughter) It's a Keynote Gold 84k, and the 84k stands for it had 84 kilobytes of memory. (Laughter) Don't laugh, it cost me 4,000 dollars at the time. (Laughter) I think there's more memory in my watch. It was invented by Russell Smith, a passionate inventor in New Zealand who was trying to help blind people. Sadly, he died in a light plane crash in 2005, but his memory lives on in my heart. It meant, for the first time, I could read back what I had typed into it. It had a speech synthesizer. I'd written my first coauthored labor law book on a typewriter in 1979 purely from memory. This now allowed me to read back what I'd written and to enter the computer world, even with its 84k of memory. In 1974, the great Ray Kurzweil, the American inventor, worked on building a machine that would scan books and read them out in synthetic speech. Optical character recognition units then only operated usually on one font, but by using charge-coupled device flatbed scanners and speech synthesizers, he developed a machine that could read any font. And his machine, which was as big as a washing machine, was launched on the 13th of January, 1976. I saw my first commercially available Kurzweil in March 1989, and it blew me away, and in September 1989, the month that my associate professorship at Monash University was announced, the law school got one, and I could use it. For the first time, I could read what I wanted to read by putting a book on the scanner. I didn't have to be nice to people! (Laughter) I no longer would be censored. For example, I was too shy then, and I'm actually too shy now, to ask anybody to read me out loud sexually explicit material. (Laughter) But, you know, I could pop a book on in the middle of the night, and -- (Laughter) (Applause) Now, the Kurzweil reader is simply a program on my laptop. That's what it's shrunk to. And now I can scan the latest novel and not wait to get it into talking book libraries. I can keep up with my friends. There are many people who have helped me in my life, and many that I haven't met. One is another American inventor Ted Henter. Ted was a motorcycle racer, but in 1978 he had a car accident and lost his sight, which is devastating if you're trying to ride motorbikes. He then turned to being a waterskier and was a champion disabled waterskier. But in 1989, he teamed up with Bill Joyce to develop a program that would read out what was on the computer screen from the Net or from what was on the computer. It's called JAWS, Job Access With Speech, and it sounds like this. (JAWS speaking) Ron McCallum: Isn't that slow? (Laughter) You see, if I read like that, I'd fall asleep. I slowed it down for you. I'm going to ask that we play it at the speed I read it. Can we play that one? (JAWS speaking) (Laughter) RM: You know, when you're marking student essays, you want to get through them fairly quickly. (Laughter) (Applause) This technology that fascinated me in 1987 is now on my iPhone and on yours as well. But, you know, I find reading with machines a very lonely process. I grew up with family, friends, reading to me, and I loved the warmth and the breath and the closeness of people reading. Do you love being read to? And one of my most enduring memories is in 1999, Mary reading to me and the children down near Manly Beach "Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone." Isn't that a great book? I still love being close to someone reading to me. But I wouldn't give up the technology, because it's allowed me to lead a great life. Of course, talking books for the blind predated all this technology. After all, the long-playing record was developed in the early 1930s, and now we put talking books on CDs using the digital access system known as DAISY. But when I'm reading with synthetic voices, I love to come home and read a racy novel with a real voice. Now there are still barriers in front of we people with disabilities. Many websites we can't read using JAWS and the other technologies. Websites are often very visual, and there are all these sorts of graphs that aren't labeled and buttons that aren't labeled, and that's why the World Wide Web Consortium 3, known as W3C, has developed worldwide standards for the Internet. And we want all Internet users or Internet site owners to make their sites compatible so that we persons without vision can have a level playing field. There are other barriers brought about by our laws. For example, Australia, like about one third of the world's countries, has copyright exceptions which allow books to be brailled or read for we blind persons. But those books can't travel across borders. For example, in Spain, there are a 100,000 accessible books in Spanish. In Argentina, there are 50,000. In no other Latin American country are there more than a couple of thousand. But it's not legal to transport the books from Spain to Latin America. There are hundreds of thousands of accessible books in the United States, Britain, Canada, Australia, etc., but they can't be transported to the 60 countries in our world where English is the first and the second language. And remember I was telling you about Harry Potter. Well, because we can't transport books across borders, there had to be separate versions read in all the different English-speaking countries: Britain, United States, Canada, Australia, and New Zealand all had to have separate readings of Harry Potter. And that's why, next month in Morocco, a meeting is taking place between all the countries. It's something that a group of countries and the World Blind Union are advocating, a cross-border treaty so that if books are available under a copyright exception and the other country has a copyright exception, we can transport those books across borders and give life to people, particularly in developing countries, blind people who don't have the books to read. I want that to happen. (Applause) My life has been extraordinarily blessed with marriage and children and certainly interesting work to do, whether it be at the University of Sydney Law School, where I served a term as dean, or now as I sit on the United Nations Committee on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities, in Geneva. I've indeed been a very fortunate human being. I wonder what the future will hold. The technology will advance even further, but I can still remember my mum saying, 60 years ago, "Remember, darling, you'll never be able to read the print with your fingers." I'm so glad that the interaction between braille transcribers, volunteer readers and passionate inventors, has allowed this dream of reading to come true for me and for blind people throughout the world. I'd like to thank my researcher Hannah Martin, who is my slide clicker, who clicks the slides, and my wife, Professor Mary Crock, who's the light of my life, is coming on to collect me. I want to thank her too. I think I have to say goodbye now. Bless you. Thank you very much. (Applause) Yay! (Applause) Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay. (Applause)

This is Charley Williams. He was 94 when this photograph was taken. In the 1930s, Roosevelt put thousands and thousands of Americans back to work by building bridges and infrastructure and tunnels, but he also did something interesting, which was to hire a few hundred writers to scour America to capture the stories of ordinary Americans. Charley Williams, a poor sharecropper, wouldn't ordinarily be the subject of a big interview, but Charley had actually been a slave until he was 22 years old. And the stories that were captured of his life make up one of the crown jewels of histories, of human-lived experiences filled with ex-slaves. Anna Deavere Smith famously said that there's a literature inside of each of us, and three generations later, I was part of a project called StoryCorps, which set out to capture the stories of ordinary Americans by setting up a soundproof booth in public spaces. The idea is very, very simple. You go into these booths, you interview your grandmother or relative, you leave with a copy of the interview and an interview goes into the Library of Congress. It's essentially a way to make a national oral histories archive one conversation at a time. And the question is, who do you want to remember -- if you had just 45 minutes with your grandmother? What's interesting, in conversations with the founder, Dave Isay, we always actually talked about this as a little bit of a subversive project, because when you think about it, it's actually not really about the stories that are being told, it's about listening, and it's about the questions that you get to ask, questions that you may not have permission to on any other day. I'm going to play you just a couple of quick excerpts from the project. [Jesus Melendez talking about poet Pedro Pietri's final moments] Jesus Melendez: We took off, and as we were ascending, before we had leveled off, our level-off point was 45,000 feet, so before we had leveled off, Pedro began leaving us, and the beauty about it is that I believe that there's something after life. You can see it in Pedro. [Danny Perasa to his wife Annie Perasa married 26 years] Danny Perasa: See, the thing of it is, I always feel guilty when I say "I love you" to you, and I say it so often. I say it to remind you that as dumpy as I am, it's coming from me, it's like hearing a beautiful song from a busted old radio, and it's nice of you to keep the radio around the house. (Laughter) [Michael Wolmetz with his girlfriend Debora Brakarz] Michael Wolmetz: So this is the ring that my father gave to my mother, and we can leave it there. And he saved up and he purchased this, and he proposed to my mother with this, and so I thought that I would give it to you so that he could be with us for this also. So I'm going to share a mic with you right now, Debora. Where's the right finger? Debora Brakarz: (Crying) MW: Debora, will you please marry me? DB: Yes. Of course. I love you. (Kissing) MW: So kids, this is how your mother and I got married, in a booth in Grand Central Station with my father's ring. My grandfather was a cab driver for 40 years. He used to pick people up here every day. So it seems right. Jake Barton: So I have to say I did not actually choose those individual samples to make you cry because they all make you cry. The entire project is predicated on this act of love which is listening itself. And that motion of building an institution out of a moment of conversation and listening is actually a lot of what my firm, Local Projects, is doing with our engagements in general. So we're a media design firm, and we're working with a broad array of different institutions building media installations for museums and public spaces. Our latest engagement is the Cleveland Museum of Art, which we've created an engagement called Gallery One for. And Gallery One is an interesting project because it started with this massive, $350 million expansion for the Cleveland Museum of Art, and we actually brought in this piece specifically to grow new capacity, new audiences, at the same time that the museum itself is growing. Glenn Lowry, the head of MoMA, put it best when he said, "We want visitors to actually cease being visitors. Visitors are transient. We want people who live here, people who have ownership." And so what we're doing is making a broad array of different ways for people to actually engage with the material inside of these galleries, so you can still have a traditional gallery experience, but if you're interested, you can actually engage with any individual artwork and see the original context from where it's from, or manipulate the work itself. So, for example, you can click on this individual lion head, and this is where it originated from, 1300 B.C. Or this individual piece here, you can see the actual bedroom. It really changes the way you think about this type of a tempera painting. This is one of my favorites because you see the studio itself. This is Rodin's bust. You get the sense of this incredible factory for creativity. And it makes you think about literally the hundreds or thousands of years of human creativity and how each individual artwork stands in for part of that story. This is Picasso, of course embodying so much of it from the 20th century. And so our next interface, which I'll show you, actually leverages that idea of this lineage of creativity. It's an algorithm that actually allows you to browse the actual museum's collection using facial recognition. So this person's making different faces, and it's actually drawing forth different objects from the collection that connect with exactly how she's looking. And so you can imagine that, as people are performing inside of the museum itself, you get this sense of this emotional connection, this way in which our face connects with the thousands and tens of thousands of years. This is an interface that actually allows you to draw and then draws forth objects using those same shapes. So more and more we're trying to find ways for people to actually author things inside of the museums themselves, to be creative even as they're looking at other people's creativity and understanding them. So in this wall, the collections wall, you can actually see all 3,000 artworks all at the same time, and you can actually author your own individual walking tours of the museum, so you can share them, and someone can take a tour with the museum director or a tour with their little cousin. But all the while that we've been working on this engagement for Cleveland, we've also been working in the background on really our largest engagement to date, and that's the 9/11 Memorial and Museum. So we started in 2006 as part of a team with Thinc Design to create the original master plan for the museum, and then we've done all the media design both for the museum and the memorial and then the media production. So the memorial opened in 2011, and the museum's going to open next year in 2014. And you can see from these images, the site is so raw and almost archaeological. And of course the event itself is so recent, somewhere between history and current events, it was a huge challenge to imagine how do you actually live up to a space like this, an event like this, to actually tell that story. And so what we started with was really a new way of thinking about building an institution, through a project called Make History, which we launched in 2009. So it's estimated that a third of the world watched 9/11 live, and a third of the world heard about it within 24 hours, making it really by nature of when it happened, this unprecedented moment of global awareness. And so we launched this to capture the stories from all around the world, through video, through photos, through written history, and so people's experiences on that day, which was, in fact, this huge risk for the institution to make its first move this open platform. But that was coupled together with this oral histories booth, really the simplest we've ever made, where you locate yourself on a map. It's in six languages, and you can tell your own story about what happened to you on that day. And when we started seeing the incredible images and stories that came forth from all around the world -- this is obviously part of the landing gear -- we really started to understand that there was this amazing symmetry between the event itself, between the way that people were telling the stories of the event, and how we ourselves needed to tell that story. This image in particular really captured our attention at the time, because it so much sums up that event. This is a shot from the Brooklyn-Battery Tunnel. There's a firefighter that's stuck, actually, in traffic, and so the firefighters themselves are running a mile and a half to the site itself with upwards of 70 pounds of gear on their back. And we got this amazing email that said, "While viewing the thousands of photos on the site, I unexpectedly found a photo of my son. It was a shock emotionally, yet a blessing to find this photo," and he was writing because he said, "I'd like to personally thank the photographer for posting the photo, as it meant more than words can describe to me to have access to what is probably the last photo ever taken of my son." And it really made us recognize what this institution needed to be in order to actually tell that story. We can't have just a historian or a curator narrating objectively in the third person about an event like that, when you have the witnesses to history who are going to make their way through the actual museum itself. And so we started imagining the museum, along with the creative team at the museum and the curators, thinking about how the first voice that you would hear inside the museum would actually be of other visitors. And so we created this idea of an opening gallery called We Remember. And I'll just play you part of a mockup of it, but you get a sense of what it's like to actually enter into that moment in time and be transported back in history. (Video) Voice 1: I was in Honolulu, Hawaii. Voice 2: I was in Cairo, Egypt. Voice 3: Sur les Champs-Élysées, à Paris. Voice 4: In college, at U.C. Berkeley. Voice 5: I was in Times Square. Voice 6: São Paolo, Brazil. (Multiple voices) Voice 7: It was probably about 11 o'clock at night. Voice 8: I was driving to work at 5:45 local time in the morning. Voice 9: We were actually in a meeting when someone barged in and said, "Oh my God, a plane has just crashed into the World Trade Center." Voice 10: Trying to frantically get to a radio. Voice 11: When I heard it over the radio -- Voice 12: Heard it on the radio. (Multiple voices) Voice 13: I got a call from my father. Voice 14: The phone rang, it woke me up. My business partner told me to turn on the television. Voice 15: So I switched on the television. Voice 16: All channels in Italy were displaying the same thing. Voice 17: The Twin Towers. Voice 18: The Twin Towers. JB: And you move from there into that open, cavernous space. This is the so-called slurry wall. It's the original, excavated wall at the base of the World Trade Center that withstood the actual pressure from the Hudson River for a full year after the event itself. And so we thought about carrying that sense of authenticity, of presence of that moment into the actual exhibition itself. And we tell the stories of being inside the towers through that same audio collage, so you're hearing people literally talking about seeing the planes as they make their way into the building, or making their way down the stairwells. And as you make your way into the exhibition where it talks about the recovery, we actually project directly onto these moments of twisted steel all of the experiences from people who literally excavated on top of the pile itself. And so you can hear oral histories -- so people who were actually working the so-called bucket brigades as you're seeing literally the thousands of experiences from that moment. And as you leave that storytelling moment understanding about 9/11, we then turn the museum back into a moment of listening and actually talk to the individual visitors and ask them their own experiences about 9/11. And we ask them questions that are actually not really answerable, the types of questions that 9/11 itself draws forth for all of us. And so these are questions like, "How can a democracy balance freedom and security?" "How could 9/11 have happened?" "And how did the world change after 9/11?" And so these oral histories, which we've actually been capturing already for years, are then mixed together with interviews that we're doing with people like Donald Rumsfeld, Bill Clinton, Rudy Giuliani, and you mix together these different players and these different experiences, these different reflection points about 9/11. And suddenly the institution, once again, turns into a listening experience. So I'll play you just a short excerpt of a mockup that we made of a couple of these voices, but you really get a sense of the poetry of everyone's reflection on the event. (Video) Voice 1: 9/11 was not just a New York experience. Voice 2: It's something that we shared, and it's something that united us. Voice 3: And I knew when I saw that, people who were there that day who immediately went to help people known and unknown to them was something that would pull us through. Voice 4: All the outpouring of affection and emotion that came from our country was something really that will forever, ever stay with me. Voice 5: Still today I pray and think about those who lost their lives, and those who gave their lives to help others, but I'm also reminded of the fabric of this country, the love, the compassIon, the strength, and I watched a nation come together in the middle of a terrible tragedy. JB: And so as people make their way out of the museum, reflecting on the experience, reflecting on their own thoughts of it, they then move into the actual space of the memorial itself, because they've gone back up to grade, and we actually got involved in the memorial after we'd done the museum for a few years. The original designer of the memorial, Michael Arad, had this image in his mind of all the names appearing undifferentiated, almost random, really a poetic reflection on top of the nature of a terrorism event itself, but it was a huge challenge for the families, for the foundation, certainly for the first responders, and there was a negotiation that went forth and a solution was found to actually create not an order in terms of chronology, or in terms of alphabetical, but through what's called meaningful adjacency. So these are groupings of the names themselves which appear undifferentiated but actually have an order, and we, along with Jer Thorp, created an algorithm to take massive amounts of data to actually start to connect together all these different names themselves. So this is an image of the actual algorithm itself with the names scrambled for privacy, but you can see that these blocks of color are actually the four different flights, the two different towers, the first responders, and you can actually see within that different floors, and then the green lines are the interpersonal connections that were requested by the families themselves. And so when you go to the memorial, you can actually see the overarching organization inside of the individual pools themselves. You can see the way that the geography of the event is reflected inside of the memorial, and you can search for an individual name, or in this case an employer, Cantor Fitzgerald, and see the way in which all of those names, those hundreds of names, are actually organized onto the memorial itself, and use that to navigate the memorial. And more importantly, when you're actually at the site of the memorial, you can see those connections. You can see the relationships between the different names themselves. So suddenly what is this undifferentiated, anonymous group of names springs into reality as an individual life. In this case, Harry Ramos, who was the head trader at an investment bank, who stopped to aid Victor Wald on the 55th floor of the South Tower. And Ramos told Wald, according to witnesses, "I'm not going to leave you." And Wald's widow requested that they be listed next to each other. Three generations ago, we had to actually get people to go out and capture the stories for common people. Today, of course, there's an unprecedented amount of stories for all of us that are being captured for future generations. And this is our hope, that's there's poetry inside of each of our stories. Thank you very much. (Applause)

When I was a young man, I spent six years of wild adventure in the tropics working as an investigative journalist in some of the most bewitching parts of the world. I was as reckless and foolish as only young men can be. This is why wars get fought. But I also felt more alive than I've ever done since. And when I came home, I found the scope of my existence gradually diminishing until loading the dishwasher seemed like an interesting challenge. And I found myself sort of scratching at the walls of life, as if I was trying to find a way out into a wider space beyond. I was, I believe, ecologically bored. Now, we evolved in rather more challenging times than these, in a world of horns and tusks and fangs and claws. And we still possess the fear and the courage and the aggression required to navigate those times. But in our comfortable, safe, crowded lands, we have few opportunities to exercise them without harming other people. And this was the sort of constraint that I found myself bumping up against. To conquer uncertainty, to know what comes next, that's almost been the dominant aim of industrialized societies, and having got there, or almost got there, we have just encountered a new set of unmet needs. We've privileged safety over experience and we've gained a lot in doing so, but I think we've lost something too. Now, I don't romanticize evolutionary time. I'm already beyond the lifespan of most hunter-gatherers, and the outcome of a mortal combat between me myopically stumbling around with a stone-tipped spear and an enraged giant aurochs isn't very hard to predict. Nor was it authenticity that I was looking for. I don't find that a useful or even intelligible concept. I just wanted a richer and rawer life than I've been able to lead in Britain, or, indeed, that we can lead in most parts of the industrialized world. And it was only when I stumbled across an unfamiliar word that I began to understand what I was looking for. And as soon as I found that word, I realized that I wanted to devote much of the rest of my life to it. The word is "rewilding," and even though rewilding is a young word, it already has several definitions. But there are two in particular that fascinate me. The first one is the mass restoration of ecosystems. One of the most exciting scientific findings of the past half century has been the discovery of widespread trophic cascades. A trophic cascade is an ecological process which starts at the top of the food chain and tumbles all the way down to the bottom, and the classic example is what happened in the Yellowstone National Park in the United States when wolves were reintroduced in 1995. Now, we all know that wolves kill various species of animals, but perhaps we're slightly less aware that they give life to many others. It sounds strange, but just follow me for a while. Before the wolves turned up, they'd been absent for 70 years. The numbers of deer, because there was nothing to hunt them, had built up and built up in the Yellowstone Park, and despite efforts by humans to control them, they'd managed to reduce much of the vegetation there to almost nothing, they'd just grazed it away. But as soon as the wolves arrived, even though they were few in number, they started to have the most remarkable effects. First, of course, they killed some of the deer, but that wasn't the major thing. Much more significantly, they radically changed the behavior of the deer. The deer started avoiding certain parts of the park, the places where they could be trapped most easily, particularly the valleys and the gorges, and immediately those places started to regenerate. In some areas, the height of the trees quintupled in just six years. Bare valley sides quickly became forests of aspen and willow and cottonwood. And as soon as that happened, the birds started moving in. The number of songbirds, of migratory birds, started to increase greatly. The number of beavers started to increase, because beavers like to eat the trees. And beavers, like wolves, are ecosystem engineers. They create niches for other species. And the dams they built in the rivers provided habitats for otters and muskrats and ducks and fish and reptiles and amphibians. The wolves killed coyotes, and as a result of that, the number of rabbits and mice began to rise, which meant more hawks, more weasels, more foxes, more badgers. Ravens and bald eagles came down to feed on the carrion that the wolves had left. Bears fed on it too, and their population began to rise as well, partly also because there were more berries growing on the regenerating shrubs, and the bears reinforced the impact of the wolves by killing some of the calves of the deer. But here's where it gets really interesting. The wolves changed the behavior of the rivers. They began to meander less. There was less erosion. The channels narrowed. More pools formed, more riffle sections, all of which were great for wildlife habitats. The rivers changed in response to the wolves, and the reason was that the regenerating forests stabilized the banks so that they collapsed less often, so that the rivers became more fixed in their course. Similarly, by driving the deer out of some places and the vegetation recovering on the valley sides, there was less soil erosion, because the vegetation stabilized that as well. So the wolves, small in number, transformed not just the ecosystem of the Yellowstone National Park, this huge area of land, but also its physical geography. Whales in the southern oceans have similarly wide-ranging effects. One of the many post-rational excuses made by the Japanese government for killing whales is that they said, "Well, the number of fish and krill will rise and then there'll be more for people to eat." Well, it's a stupid excuse, but it sort of kind of makes sense, doesn't it, because you'd think that whales eat huge amounts of fish and krill, so obviously take the whales away, there'll be more fish and krill. But the opposite happened. You take the whales away, and the number of krill collapses. Why would that possibly have happened? Well, it now turns out that the whales are crucial to sustaining that entire ecosystem, and one of the reasons for this is that they often feed at depth and then they come up to the surface and produce what biologists politely call large fecal plumes, huge explosions of poop right across the surface waters, up in the photic zone, where there's enough light to allow photosynthesis to take place, and those great plumes of fertilizer stimulate the growth of phytoplankton, the plant plankton at the bottom of the food chain, which stimulate the growth of zooplankton, which feed the fish and the krill and all the rest of it. The other thing that whales do is that, as they're plunging up and down through the water column, they're kicking the phytoplankton back up towards the surface where it can continue to survive and reproduce. And interestingly, well, we know that plant plankton in the oceans absorb carbon from the atmosphere -- the more plant plankton there are, the more carbon they absorb -- and eventually they filter down into the abyss and remove that carbon from the atmospheric system. Well, it seems that when whales were at their historic populations, they were probably responsible for sequestering some tens of millions of tons of carbon every year from the atmosphere. And when you look at it like that, you think, wait a minute, here are the wolves changing the physical geography of the Yellowstone National Park. Here are the whales changing the composition of the atmosphere. You begin to see that possibly, the evidence supporting James Lovelock's Gaia hypothesis, which conceives of the world as a coherent, self-regulating organism, is beginning, at the ecosystem level, to accumulate. Trophic cascades tell us that the natural world is even more fascinating and complex than we thought it was. They tell us that when you take away the large animals, you are left with a radically different ecosystem to one which retains its large animals. And they make, in my view, a powerful case for the reintroduction of missing species. Rewilding, to me, means bringing back some of the missing plants and animals. It means taking down the fences, it means blocking the drainage ditches, it means preventing commercial fishing in some large areas of sea, but otherwise stepping back. It has no view as to what a right ecosystem or a right assemblage of species looks like. It doesn't try to produce a heath or a meadow or a rain forest or a kelp garden or a coral reef. It lets nature decide, and nature, by and large, is pretty good at deciding. Now, I mentioned that there are two definitions of rewilding that interest me. The other one is the rewilding of human life. And I don't see this as an alternative to civilization. I believe we can enjoy the benefits of advanced technology, as we're doing now, but at the same time, if we choose, have access to a richer and wilder life of adventure when we want to because there would be wonderful, rewilded habitats. And the opportunities for this are developing more rapidly than you might think possible. There's one estimate which suggests that in the United States, two thirds of the land which was once forested and then cleared has become reforested as loggers and farmers have retreated, particularly from the eastern half of the country. There's another one which suggests that 30 million hectares of land in Europe, an area the size of Poland, will be vacated by farmers between 2000 and 2030. Now, faced with opportunities like that, does it not seem a little unambitious to be thinking only of bringing back wolves, lynx, bears, beavers, bison, boar, moose, and all the other species which are already beginning to move quite rapidly across Europe? Perhaps we should also start thinking about the return of some of our lost megafauna. What megafauna, you say? Well, every continent had one, apart from Antarctica. When Trafalgar Square in London was excavated, the river gravels there were found to be stuffed with the bones of hippopotamus, rhinos, elephants, hyenas, lions. Yes, ladies and gentlemen, there were lions in Trafalgar Square long before Nelson's Column was built. All these species lived here in the last interglacial period, when temperatures were pretty similar to our own. It's not climate, largely, which has got rid of the world's megafaunas. It's pressure from the human population hunting and destroying their habitats which has done so. And even so, you can still see the shadows of these great beasts in our current ecosystems. Why is it that so many deciduous trees are able to sprout from whatever point the trunk is broken? Why is it that they can withstand the loss of so much of their bark? Why do understory trees, which are subject to lower sheer forces from the wind and have to carry less weight than the big canopy trees, why are they so much tougher and harder to break than the canopy trees are? Elephants. They are elephant-adapted. In Europe, for example, they evolved to resist the straight-tusked elephant, elephas antiquus, which was a great beast. It was related to the Asian elephant, but it was a temperate animal, a temperate forest creature. It was a lot bigger than the Asian elephant. But why is it that some of our common shrubs have spines which seem to be over-engineered to resist browsing by deer? Perhaps because they evolved to resist browsing by rhinoceros. Isn't it an amazing thought that every time you wander into a park or down an avenue or through a leafy street, you can see the shadows of these great beasts? Paleoecology, the study of past ecosystems, crucial to an understanding of our own, feels like a portal through which you may pass into an enchanted kingdom. And if we really are looking at areas of land of the sort of sizes I've been talking about becoming available, why not reintroduce some of our lost megafauna, or at least species closely related to those which have become extinct everywhere? Why shouldn't all of us have a Serengeti on our doorsteps? And perhaps this is the most important thing that rewilding offers us, the most important thing that's missing from our lives: hope. In motivating people to love and defend the natural world, an ounce of hope is worth a ton of despair. The story rewilding tells us is that ecological change need not always proceed in one direction. It offers us the hope that our silent spring could be replaced by a raucous summer. Thank you. (Applause)

You may want to take a closer look. There's more to this painting than meets the eye. And yes, it's an acrylic painting of a man, but I didn't paint it on canvas. I painted it directly on top of the man. What I do in my art is I skip the canvas altogether, and if I want to paint your portrait, I'm painting it on you, physically on you. That also means you're probably going to end up with an earful of paint, because I need to paint your ear on your ear. Everything in this scene, the person, the clothes, chairs, wall, gets covered in a mask of paint that mimics what's directly below it, and in this way, I'm able to take a three-dimensional scene and make it look like a two-dimensional painting. I can photograph it from any angle, and it will still look 2D. There's no Photoshop here. This is just a photo of one of my three-dimensional paintings. You might be wondering how I came up with this idea of turning people into paintings. But originally, this had nothing to do with either people or paint. It was about shadows. I was fascinated with the absence of light, and I wanted to find a way that I could give it materiality and pin it down before it changed. I came up with the idea of painting shadows. I loved that I could hide within this shadow my own painted version, and it would be almost invisible until the light changed, and all of a sudden my shadow would be brought to the light. I wanted to think about what else I could put shadows on, and I thought of my friend Bernie. But I didn't just want to paint the shadows. I also wanted to paint the highlights and create a mapping on his body in greyscale. I had a very specific vision of what this would look like, and as I was painting him, I made sure to follow that very closely. But something kept on flickering before my eyes. I wasn't quite sure what I was looking at. And then when I took that moment to take a step back, magic. I had turned my friend into a painting. I couldn't have foreseen that when I wanted to paint a shadow, I would pull out this whole other dimension, that I would collapse it, that I would take a painting and make it my friend and then bring him back to a painting. I was a little conflicted though, because I was so excited about what I'd found, but I was just about to graduate from college with a degree in political science, and I'd always had this dream of going to Washington, D.C., and sitting at a desk and working in government. (Laughter) Why did this have to get in the way of all that? I made the tough decision of going home after graduation and not going up to Capitol Hill, but going down to my parents' basement and making it my job to learn how to paint. I had no idea where to begin. The last time I'd painted, I was 16 years old at summer camp, and I didn't want to teach myself how to paint by copying the old masters or stretching a canvas and practicing over and over again on that surface, because that's not what this project was about for me. It was about space and light. My early canvases ended up being things that you wouldn't expect to be used as canvas, like fried food. It's nearly impossible to get paint to stick to the grease in an egg. (Laughter) Even harder was getting paint to stick to the acid in a grapefruit. It just would erase my brush strokes like invisible ink. I'd put something down, and instantly it would be gone. And if I wanted to paint on people, well, I was a little bit embarrassed to bring people down into my studio and show them that I spent my days in a basement putting paint on toast. It just seemed like it made more sense to practice by painting on myself. One of my favorite models actually ended up being a retired old man who not only didn't mind sitting still and getting the paint in his ears, but he also didn't really have much embarrassment about being taken out into very public places for exhibition, like the Metro. I was having so much fun with this process. I was teaching myself how to paint in all these different styles, and I wanted to see what else I could do with it. I came together with a collaborator, Sheila Vand, and we had the idea of creating paintings in a more unusual surface, and that was milk. We got a pool. We filled it with milk. We filled it with Sheila. And I began painting. And the images were always completely unexpected in the end, because I could have a very specific image about how it would turn out, I could paint it to match that, but the moment that Sheila laid back into the milk, everything would change. It was in constant flux, and we had to, rather than fight it, embrace it, see where the milk would take us and compensate to make it even better. Sometimes, when Sheila would lay down in the milk, it would wash all the paint off of her arms, and it might seem a little bit clumsy, but our solution would be, okay, hide your arms. And one time, she got so much milk in her hair that it just smeared all the paint off of her face. All right, well, hide your face. And we ended up with something far more elegant than we could have imagined, even though this is essentially the same solution that a frustrated kid uses when he can't draw hands, just hiding them in the pockets. When we started out on the milk project, and when I started out, I couldn't have foreseen that I would go from pursuing my dream in politics and working at a desk to tripping over a shadow and then turning people into paintings and painting on people in a pool of milk. But then again, I guess it's also not unforeseeable that you can find the strange in the familiar, as long as you're willing to look beyond what's already been brought to light, that you can see what's below the surface, hiding in the shadows, and recognize that there can be more there than meets the eye. Thank you. (Applause)

So here's the most important economic fact of our time. We are living in an age of surging income inequality, particularly between those at the very top and everyone else. This shift is the most striking in the U.S. and in the U.K., but it's a global phenomenon. It's happening in communist China, in formerly communist Russia, it's happening in India, in my own native Canada. We're even seeing it in cozy social democracies like Sweden, Finland and Germany. Let me give you a few numbers to place what's happening. In the 1970s, the One Percent accounted for about 10 percent of the national income in the United States. Today, their share has more than doubled to above 20 percent. But what's even more striking is what's happening at the very tippy top of the income distribution. The 0.1 percent in the U.S. today account for more than eight percent of the national income. They are where the One Percent was 30 years ago. Let me give you another number to put that in perspective, and this is a figure that was calculated in 2005 by Robert Reich, the Secretary of Labor in the Clinton administration. Reich took the wealth of two admittedly very rich men, Bill Gates and Warren Buffett, and he found that it was equivalent to the wealth of the bottom 40 percent of the U.S. population, 120 million people. Now, as it happens, Warren Buffett is not only himself a plutocrat, he is one of the most astute observers of that phenomenon, and he has his own favorite number. Buffett likes to point out that in 1992, the combined wealth of the people on the Forbes 400 list -- and this is the list of the 400 richest Americans -- was 300 billion dollars. Just think about it. You didn't even need to be a billionaire to get on that list in 1992. Well, today, that figure has more than quintupled to 1.7 trillion, and I probably don't need to tell you that we haven't seen anything similar happen to the middle class, whose wealth has stagnated if not actually decreased. So we're living in the age of the global plutocracy, but we've been slow to notice it. One of the reasons, I think, is a sort of boiled frog phenomenon. Changes which are slow and gradual can be hard to notice even if their ultimate impact is quite dramatic. Think about what happened, after all, to the poor frog. But I think there's something else going on. Talking about income inequality, even if you're not on the Forbes 400 list, can make us feel uncomfortable. It feels less positive, less optimistic, to talk about how the pie is sliced than to think about how to make the pie bigger. And if you do happen to be on the Forbes 400 list, talking about income distribution, and inevitably its cousin, income redistribution, can be downright threatening. So we're living in the age of surging income inequality, especially at the top. What's driving it, and what can we do about it? One set of causes is political: lower taxes, deregulation, particularly of financial services, privatization, weaker legal protections for trade unions, all of these have contributed to more and more income going to the very, very top. A lot of these political factors can be broadly lumped under the category of "crony capitalism," political changes that benefit a group of well-connected insiders but don't actually do much good for the rest of us. In practice, getting rid of crony capitalism is incredibly difficult. Think of all the years reformers of various stripes have tried to get rid of corruption in Russia, for instance, or how hard it is to re-regulate the banks even after the most profound financial crisis since the Great Depression, or even how difficult it is to get the big multinational companies, including those whose motto might be "don't do evil," to pay taxes at a rate even approaching that paid by the middle class. But while getting rid of crony capitalism in practice is really, really hard, at least intellectually, it's an easy problem. After all, no one is actually in favor of crony capitalism. Indeed, this is one of those rare issues that unites the left and the right. A critique of crony capitalism is as central to the Tea Party as it is to Occupy Wall Street. But if crony capitalism is, intellectually at least, the easy part of the problem, things get trickier when you look at the economic drivers of surging income inequality. In and of themselves, these aren't too mysterious. Globalization and the technology revolution, the twin economic transformations which are changing our lives and transforming the global economy, are also powering the rise of the super-rich. Just think about it. For the first time in history, if you are an energetic entrepreneur with a brilliant new idea or a fantastic new product, you have almost instant, almost frictionless access to a global market of more than a billion people. As a result, if you are very, very smart and very, very lucky, you can get very, very rich very, very quickly. The latest poster boy for this phenomenon is David Karp. The 26-year-old founder of Tumblr recently sold his company to Yahoo for 1.1 billion dollars. Think about that for a minute: 1.1 billion dollars, 26 years old. It's easiest to see how the technology revolution and globalization are creating this sort of superstar effect in highly visible fields, like sports and entertainment. We can all watch how a fantastic athlete or a fantastic performer can today leverage his or her skills across the global economy as never before. But today, that superstar effect is happening across the entire economy. We have superstar technologists. We have superstar bankers. We have superstar lawyers and superstar architects. There are superstar cooks and superstar farmers. There are even, and this is my personal favorite example, superstar dentists, the most dazzling exemplar of whom is Bernard Touati, the Frenchman who ministers to the smiles of fellow superstars like Russian oligarch Roman Abramovich or European-born American fashion designer Diane von Furstenberg. But while it's pretty easy to see how globalization and the technology revolution are creating this global plutocracy, what's a lot harder is figuring out what to think about it. And that's because, in contrast with crony capitalism, so much of what globalization and the technology revolution have done is highly positive. Let's start with technology. I love the Internet. I love my mobile devices. I love the fact that they mean that whoever chooses to will be able to watch this talk far beyond this auditorium. I'm even more of a fan of globalization. This is the transformation which has lifted hundreds of millions of the world's poorest people out of poverty and into the middle class, and if you happen to live in the rich part of the world, it's made many new products affordable -- who do you think built your iPhone? — and things that we've relied on for a long time much cheaper. Think of your dishwasher or your t-shirt. So what's not to like? Well, a few things. One of the things that worries me is how easily what you might call meritocratic plutocracy can become crony plutocracy. Imagine you're a brilliant entrepreneur who has successfully sold that idea or that product to the global billions and become a billionaire in the process. It gets tempting at that point to use your economic nous to manipulate the rules of the global political economy in your own favor. And that's no mere hypothetical example. Think about Amazon, Apple, Google, Starbucks. These are among the world's most admired, most beloved, most innovative companies. They also happen to be particularly adept at working the international tax system so as to lower their tax bill very, very significantly. And why stop at just playing the global political and economic system as it exists to your own maximum advantage? Once you have the tremendous economic power that we're seeing at the very, very top of the income distribution and the political power that inevitably entails, it becomes tempting as well to start trying to change the rules of the game in your own favor. Again, this is no mere hypothetical. It's what the Russian oligarchs did in creating the sale-of-the-century privatization of Russia's natural resources. It's one way of describing what happened with deregulation of the financial services in the U.S. and the U.K. A second thing that worries me is how easily meritocratic plutocracy can become aristocracy. One way of describing the plutocrats is as alpha geeks, and they are people who are acutely aware of how important highly sophisticated analytical and quantitative skills are in today's economy. That's why they are spending unprecedented time and resources educating their own children. The middle class is spending more on schooling too, but in the global educational arms race that starts at nursery school and ends at Harvard, Stanford or MIT, the 99 percent is increasingly outgunned by the One Percent. The result is something that economists Alan Krueger and Miles Corak call the Great Gatsby Curve. As income inequality increases, social mobility decreases. The plutocracy may be a meritocracy, but increasingly you have to be born on the top rung of the ladder to even take part in that race. The third thing, and this is what worries me the most, is the extent to which those same largely positive forces which are driving the rise of the global plutocracy also happen to be hollowing out the middle class in Western industrialized economies. Let's start with technology. Those same forces that are creating billionaires are also devouring many traditional middle-class jobs. When's the last time you used a travel agent? And in contrast with the industrial revolution, the titans of our new economy aren't creating that many new jobs. At its zenith, G.M. employed hundreds of thousands, Facebook fewer than 10,000. The same is true of globalization. For all that it is raising hundreds of millions of people out of poverty in the emerging markets, it's also outsourcing a lot of jobs from the developed Western economies. The terrifying reality is that there is no economic rule which automatically translates increased economic growth into widely shared prosperity. That's shown in what I consider to be the most scary economic statistic of our time. Since the late 1990s, increases in productivity have been decoupled from increases in wages and employment. That means that our countries are getting richer, our companies are getting more efficient, but we're not creating more jobs and we're not paying people, as a whole, more. One scary conclusion you could draw from all of this is to worry about structural unemployment. What worries me more is a different nightmare scenario. After all, in a totally free labor market, we could find jobs for pretty much everyone. The dystopia that worries me is a universe in which a few geniuses invent Google and its ilk and the rest of us are employed giving them massages. So when I get really depressed about all of this, I comfort myself in thinking about the Industrial Revolution. After all, for all its grim, satanic mills, it worked out pretty well, didn't it? After all, all of us here are richer, healthier, taller -- well, there are a few exceptions — and live longer than our ancestors in the early 19th century. But it's important to remember that before we learned how to share the fruits of the Industrial Revolution with the broad swathes of society, we had to go through two depressions, the Great Depression of the 1930s, the Long Depression of the 1870s, two world wars, communist revolutions in Russia and in China, and an era of tremendous social and political upheaval in the West. We also, not coincidentally, went through an era of tremendous social and political inventions. We created the modern welfare state. We created public education. We created public health care. We created public pensions. We created unions. Today, we are living through an era of economic transformation comparable in its scale and its scope to the Industrial Revolution. To be sure that this new economy benefits us all and not just the plutocrats, we need to embark on an era of comparably ambitious social and political change. We need a new New Deal. (Applause)

I have a confession to make, but first, I want you to make a little confession to me. In the past year, I want you to just raise your hand if you've experienced relatively little stress. Anyone? How about a moderate amount of stress? Who has experienced a lot of stress? Yeah. Me too. But that is not my confession. My confession is this: I am a health psychologist, and my mission is to help people be happier and healthier. But I fear that something I've been teaching for the last 10 years is doing more harm than good, and it has to do with stress. For years I've been telling people, stress makes you sick. It increases the risk of everything from the common cold to cardiovascular disease. Basically, I've turned stress into the enemy. But I have changed my mind about stress, and today, I want to change yours. Let me start with the study that made me rethink my whole approach to stress. This study tracked 30,000 adults in the United States for eight years, and they started by asking people, "How much stress have you experienced in the last year?" They also asked, "Do you believe that stress is harmful for your health?" And then they used public death records to find out who died. (Laughter) Okay. Some bad news first. People who experienced a lot of stress in the previous year had a 43 percent increased risk of dying. But that was only true for the people who also believed that stress is harmful for your health. (Laughter) People who experienced a lot of stress but did not view stress as harmful were no more likely to die. In fact, they had the lowest risk of dying of anyone in the study, including people who had relatively little stress. Now the researchers estimated that over the eight years they were tracking deaths, 182,000 Americans died prematurely, not from stress, but from the belief that stress is bad for you. (Laughter) That is over 20,000 deaths a year. Now, if that estimate is correct, that would make believing stress is bad for you the 15th largest cause of death in the United States last year, killing more people than skin cancer, HIV/AIDS and homicide. (Laughter) You can see why this study freaked me out. Here I've been spending so much energy telling people stress is bad for your health. So this study got me wondering: Can changing how you think about stress make you healthier? And here the science says yes. When you change your mind about stress, you can change your body's response to stress. Now to explain how this works, I want you all to pretend that you are participants in a study designed to stress you out. It's called the social stress test. You come into the laboratory, and you're told you have to give a five-minute impromptu speech on your personal weaknesses to a panel of expert evaluators sitting right in front of you, and to make sure you feel the pressure, there are bright lights and a camera in your face, kind of like this. And the evaluators have been trained to give you discouraging, non-verbal feedback like this. (Laughter) Now that you're sufficiently demoralized, time for part two: a math test. And unbeknownst to you, the experimenter has been trained to harass you during it. Now we're going to all do this together. It's going to be fun. For me. Okay. I want you all to count backwards from 996 in increments of seven. You're going to do this out loud as fast as you can, starting with 996. Go! Audience: (Counting) Go faster. Faster please. You're going too slow. Stop. Stop, stop, stop. That guy made a mistake. We are going to have to start all over again. (Laughter) You're not very good at this, are you? Okay, so you get the idea. Now, if you were actually in this study, you'd probably be a little stressed out. Your heart might be pounding, you might be breathing faster, maybe breaking out into a sweat. And normally, we interpret these physical changes as anxiety or signs that we aren't coping very well with the pressure. But what if you viewed them instead as signs that your body was energized, was preparing you to meet this challenge? Now that is exactly what participants were told in a study conducted at Harvard University. Before they went through the social stress test, they were taught to rethink their stress response as helpful. That pounding heart is preparing you for action. If you're breathing faster, it's no problem. It's getting more oxygen to your brain. And participants who learned to view the stress response as helpful for their performance, well, they were less stressed out, less anxious, more confident, but the most fascinating finding to me was how their physical stress response changed. Now, in a typical stress response, your heart rate goes up, and your blood vessels constrict like this. And this is one of the reasons that chronic stress is sometimes associated with cardiovascular disease. It's not really healthy to be in this state all the time. But in the study, when participants viewed their stress response as helpful, their blood vessels stayed relaxed like this. Their heart was still pounding, but this is a much healthier cardiovascular profile. It actually looks a lot like what happens in moments of joy and courage. Over a lifetime of stressful experiences, this one biological change could be the difference between a stress-induced heart attack at age 50 and living well into your 90s. And this is really what the new science of stress reveals, that how you think about stress matters. So my goal as a health psychologist has changed. I no longer want to get rid of your stress. I want to make you better at stress. And we just did a little intervention. If you raised your hand and said you'd had a lot of stress in the last year, we could have saved your life, because hopefully the next time your heart is pounding from stress, you're going to remember this talk and you're going to think to yourself, this is my body helping me rise to this challenge. And when you view stress in that way, your body believes you, and your stress response becomes healthier. Now I said I have over a decade of demonizing stress to redeem myself from, so we are going to do one more intervention. I want to tell you about one of the most under-appreciated aspects of the stress response, and the idea is this: Stress makes you social. To understand this side of stress, we need to talk about a hormone, oxytocin, and I know oxytocin has already gotten as much hype as a hormone can get. It even has its own cute nickname, the cuddle hormone, because it's released when you hug someone. But this is a very small part of what oxytocin is involved in. Oxytocin is a neuro-hormone. It fine-tunes your brain's social instincts. It primes you to do things that strengthen close relationships. Oxytocin makes you crave physical contact with your friends and family. It enhances your empathy. It even makes you more willing to help and support the people you care about. Some people have even suggested we should snort oxytocin to become more compassionate and caring. But here's what most people don't understand about oxytocin. It's a stress hormone. Your pituitary gland pumps this stuff out as part of the stress response. It's as much a part of your stress response as the adrenaline that makes your heart pound. And when oxytocin is released in the stress response, it is motivating you to seek support. Your biological stress response is nudging you to tell someone how you feel instead of bottling it up. Your stress response wants to make sure you notice when someone else in your life is struggling so that you can support each other. When life is difficult, your stress response wants you to be surrounded by people who care about you. Okay, so how is knowing this side of stress going to make you healthier? Well, oxytocin doesn't only act on your brain. It also acts on your body, and one of its main roles in your body is to protect your cardiovascular system from the effects of stress. It's a natural anti-inflammatory. It also helps your blood vessels stay relaxed during stress. But my favorite effect on the body is actually on the heart. Your heart has receptors for this hormone, and oxytocin helps heart cells regenerate and heal from any stress-induced damage. This stress hormone strengthens your heart, and the cool thing is that all of these physical benefits of oxytocin are enhanced by social contact and social support, so when you reach out to others under stress, either to seek support or to help someone else, you release more of this hormone, your stress response becomes healthier, and you actually recover faster from stress. I find this amazing, that your stress response has a built-in mechanism for stress resilience, and that mechanism is human connection. I want to finish by telling you about one more study. And listen up, because this study could also save a life. This study tracked about 1,000 adults in the United States, and they ranged in age from 34 to 93, and they started the study by asking, "How much stress have you experienced in the last year?" They also asked, "How much time have you spent helping out friends, neighbors, people in your community?" And then they used public records for the next five years to find out who died. Okay, so the bad news first: For every major stressful life experience, like financial difficulties or family crisis, that increased the risk of dying by 30 percent. But -- and I hope you are expecting a but by now -- but that wasn't true for everyone. People who spent time caring for others showed absolutely no stress-related increase in dying. Zero. Caring created resilience. And so we see once again that the harmful effects of stress on your health are not inevitable. How you think and how you act can transform your experience of stress. When you choose to view your stress response as helpful, you create the biology of courage. And when you choose to connect with others under stress, you can create resilience. Now I wouldn't necessarily ask for more stressful experiences in my life, but this science has given me a whole new appreciation for stress. Stress gives us access to our hearts. The compassionate heart that finds joy and meaning in connecting with others, and yes, your pounding physical heart, working so hard to give you strength and energy, and when you choose to view stress in this way, you're not just getting better at stress, you're actually making a pretty profound statement. You're saying that you can trust yourself to handle life's challenges, and you're remembering that you don't have to face them alone. Thank you. (Applause) Chris Anderson: This is kind of amazing, what you're telling us. It seems amazing to me that a belief about stress can make so much difference to someone's life expectancy. How would that extend to advice, like, if someone is making a lifestyle choice between, say, a stressful job and a non-stressful job, does it matter which way they go? It's equally wise to go for the stressful job so long as you believe that you can handle it, in some sense? Kelly McGonigal: Yeah, and one thing we know for certain is that chasing meaning is better for your health than trying to avoid discomfort. And so I would say that's really the best way to make decisions, is go after what it is that creates meaning in your life and then trust yourself to handle the stress that follows. CA: Thank you so much, Kelly. It's pretty cool. KM: Thank you. (Applause)

Ah yes, those university days, a heady mix of Ph.D-level pure mathematics and world debating championships, or, as I like to say, "Hello, ladies. Oh yeah." Didn't get much sexier than the Spence at university, let me tell you. It is such a thrill for a humble breakfast radio announcer from Sydney, Australia, to be here on the TED stage literally on the other side of the world. And I wanted to let you know, a lot of the things you've heard about Australians are true. From the youngest of ages, we display a prodigious sporting talent. On the field of battle, we are brave and noble warriors. What you've heard is true. Australians, we don't mind a bit of a drink, sometimes to excess, leading to embarrassing social situations. (Laughter) This is my father's work Christmas party, December 1973. I'm almost five years old. Fair to say, I'm enjoying the day a lot more than Santa was. But I stand before you today not as a breakfast radio host, not as a comedian, but as someone who was, is, and always will be a mathematician. And anyone who's been bitten by the numbers bug knows that it bites early and it bites deep. I cast my mind back when I was in second grade at a beautiful little government-run school called Boronia Park in the suburbs of Sydney, and as we came up towards lunchtime, our teacher, Ms. Russell, said to the class, "Hey, year two. What do you want to do after lunch? I've got no plans." It was an exercise in democratic schooling, and I am all for democratic schooling, but we were only seven. So some of the suggestions we made as to what we might want to do after lunch were a little bit impractical, and after a while, someone made a particularly silly suggestion and Ms. Russell patted them down with that gentle aphorism, "That wouldn't work. That'd be like trying to put a square peg through a round hole." Now I wasn't trying to be smart. I wasn't trying to be funny. I just politely raised my hand, and when Ms. Russell acknowledged me, I said, in front of my year two classmates, and I quote, "But Miss, surely if the diagonal of the square is less than the diameter of the circle, well, the square peg will pass quite easily through the round hole." (Laughter) "It'd be like putting a piece of toast through a basketball hoop, wouldn't it?" And there was that same awkward silence from most of my classmates, until sitting next to me, one of my friends, one of the cool kids in class, Steven, leaned across and punched me really hard in the head. (Laughter) Now what Steven was saying was, "Look, Adam, you are at a critical juncture in your life here, my friend. You can keep sitting here with us. Any more of that sort of talk, you've got to go and sit over there with them." I thought about it for a nanosecond. I took one look at the road map of life, and I ran off down the street marked "Geek" as fast as my chubby, asthmatic little legs would carry me. I fell in love with mathematics from the earliest of ages. I explained it to all my friends. Maths is beautiful. It's natural. It's everywhere. Numbers are the musical notes with which the symphony of the universe is written. The great Descartes said something quite similar. The universe "is written in the mathematical language." And today, I want to show you one of those musical notes, a number so beautiful, so massive, I think it will blow your mind. Today we're going to talk about prime numbers. Most of you I'm sure remember that six is not prime because it's 2 x 3. Seven is prime because it's 1 x 7, but we can't break it down into any smaller chunks, or as we call them, factors. Now a few things you might like to know about prime numbers. One is not prime. The proof of that is a great party trick that admittedly only works at certain parties. (Laughter) Another thing about primes, there is no final biggest prime number. They keep going on forever. We know there are an infinite number of primes due to the brilliant mathematician Euclid. Over thousands of years ago, he proved that for us. But the third thing about prime numbers, mathematicians have always wondered, well at any given moment in time, what is the biggest prime that we know about? Today we're going to hunt for that massive prime. Don't freak out. All you need to know, of all the mathematics you've ever learned, unlearned, crammed, forgotten, never understood in the first place, all you need to know is this: When I say 2 ^ 5, I'm talking about five little number twos next to each other all multiplied together, 2 x 2 x 2 x 2 x 2. So 2 ^ 5 is 2 x 2 = 4, 8, 16, 32. If you've got that, you're with me for the entire journey. Okay? So 2 ^ 5, those five little twos multiplied together. (2 ^ 5) - 1 = 31. 31 is a prime number, and that five in the power is also a prime number. And the vast bulk of massive primes we've ever found are of that form: two to a prime number, take away one. I won't go into great detail as to why, because most of your eyes will bleed out of your head if I do, but suffice to say, a number of that form is fairly easy to test for primacy. A random odd number is a lot harder to test. But as soon as we go hunting for massive primes, we realize it's not enough just to put in any prime number in the power. (2 ^ 11) - 1 = 2,047, and you don't need me to tell you that's 23 x 89. (Laughter) But (2 ^ 13) - 1, (2 ^ 17) - 1 (2 ^ 19) - 1, are all prime numbers. After that point, they thin out a lot. And one of the things about the search for massive primes that I love so much is some of the great mathematical minds of all time have gone on this search. This is the great Swiss mathematician Leonhard Euler. In the 1700s, other mathematicians said he is simply the master of us all. He was so respected, they put him on European currency back when that was a compliment. (Laughter) Euler discovered at the time the world's biggest prime: (2 ^ 31) - 1. It's over two billion. He proved it was prime with nothing more than a quill, ink, paper and his mind. You think that's big. We know that (2 ^ 127) - 1 is a prime number. It's an absolute brute. Look at it here: 39 digits long, proven to be prime in 1876 by a mathematician called Lucas. Word up, L-Dog. (Laughter) But one of the great things about the search for massive primes, it's not just finding the primes. Sometimes proving another number not to be prime is just as exciting. Lucas again, in 1876, showed us (2 ^ 67) - 1, 21 digits long, was not prime. But he didn't know what the factors were. We knew it was like six, but we didn't know what are the 2 x 3 that multiply together to give us that massive number. We didn't know for almost 40 years until Frank Nelson Cole came along. And at a gathering of prestigious American mathematicians, he walked to the board, took up a piece of chalk, and started writing out the powers of two: two, four, eight, 16 -- come on, join in with me, you know how it goes -- 32, 64, 128, 256, 512, 1,024, 2,048. I'm in geek heaven. We'll stop it there for a second. Frank Nelson Cole did not stop there. He went on and on and calculated 67 powers of two. He took away one and wrote that number on the board. A frisson of excitement went around the room. It got even more exciting when he then wrote down these two large prime numbers in your standard multiplication format -- and for the rest of the hour of his talk Frank Nelson Cole busted that out. He had found the prime factors of (2 ^ 67) - 1. The room went berserk -- (Laughter) -- as Frank Nelson Cole sat down, having delivered the only talk in the history of mathematics with no words. He admitted afterwards it wasn't that hard to do. It took focus. It took dedication. It took him, by his estimate, "three years of Sundays." But then in the field of mathematics, as in so many of the fields that we've heard from in this TED, the age of the computer goes along and things explode. These are the largest prime numbers we knew decade by decade, each one dwarfing the one before as computers took over and our power to calculate just grew and grew. This is the largest prime number we knew in 1996, a very emotional year for me. It was the year I left university. I was torn between mathematics and media. It was a tough decision. I loved university. My arts degree was the best nine and a half years of my life. (Laughter) But I came to a realization about my own ability. Put simply, in a room full of randomly selected people, I'm a maths genius. In a roomful of maths Ph.Ds, I'm as dumb as a box of hammers. My skill is not in the mathematics. It is in telling the story of the mathematics. And during that time, since I've left university, these numbers have got bigger and bigger, each one dwarfing the last, until along came this man, Dr. Curtis Cooper, who a few years ago held the record for the largest ever prime, only to see it snatched away by a rival university. And then Curtis Cooper got it back. Not years ago, not months ago, days ago. In an amazing moment of serendipity, I had to send TED a new slide to show you what this guy had done. I still remember -- (Applause) -- I still remember when it happened. I was doing my breakfast radio show. I looked down on Twitter. There was a tweet: "Adam, have you seen the new largest prime number?" I shivered -- (Laughter) -- contacted the women who produced my radio show out in the other room, and said "Girls, hold the front page. We're not talking politics today. We're not talking sport today. They found another megaprime." The girls just shook their heads, put them in their hands, and let me go my own way. It's because of Curtis Cooper that we know, currently the largest prime number we know, is 2 ^ 57,885,161. Don't forget to subtract the one. This number is almost 17 and a half million digits long. If you typed it out on a computer and saved it as a text file, that's 22 meg. For the slightly less geeky of you, think about the Harry Potter novels, okay? This is the first Harry Potter novel. This is all seven Harry Potter novels, because she did tend to faff on a bit near the end. (Laughter) Written out as a book, this number would run the length of the Harry Potter novels and half again. Here's a slide of the first 1,000 digits of this prime. If, when TED had begun, at 11 o'clock on Tuesday, we'd walked out and simply hit one slide every second, it would have taken five hours to show you that number. I was keen to do it, could not convince Bono. That's the way it goes. This number is 17 and a half thousand slides long, and we know it is prime as confidently as we know the number seven is prime. That fills me with almost sexual excitement. And who am I kidding when I say almost? (Laughter) I know what you're thinking: Adam, we're happy that you're happy, but why should we care? Let me give you just three reasons why this is so beautiful. First of all, as I explained, to ask a computer "Is that number prime?" to type it in its abbreviated form, and then only about six lines of code is the test for primacy, is a remarkably simple question to ask. It's got a remarkably clear yes/no answer, and just requires phenomenal grunt. Large prime numbers are a great way of testing the speed and accuracy of computer chips. But secondly, as Curtis Cooper was looking for that monster prime, he wasn't the only guy searching. My laptop at home was looking through four potential candidate primes myself as part of a networked computer hunt around the world for these large numbers. The discovery of that prime is similar to the work people are doing in unraveling RNA sequences, in searching through data from SETI and other astronomical projects. We live in an age where some of the great breakthroughs are not going to happen in the labs or the halls of academia but on laptops, desktops, in the palms of people's hands who are simply helping out for the search. But for me it's amazing because it's a metaphor for the time in which we live, when human minds and machines can conquer together. We've heard a lot about robots in this TED. We've heard a lot about what they can and can't do. It is true, you can now download onto your smartphone an app that would beat most grandmasters at chess. You think that's cool. Here's a machine doing something cool. This is the CubeStormer II. It can take a randomly shuffled Rubik's Cube. Using the power of the smartphone, it can examine the cube and solve the cube in five seconds. (Applause) That scares some people. That excites me. How lucky are we to live in this age when mind and machine can work together? I was asked in an interview last year in my capacity as a lower-case "c" celebrity in Australia, "What was your highlight of 2012?" People were expecting me to talk about my beloved Sydney Swans football team. In our beautiful, indigenous sport of Australian football, they won the equivalent of the Super Bowl. I was there. It was the most emotional, exciting day. It wasn't my highlight of 2012. People thought it might have been an interview I'd done on my show. It might have been a politician. It might have been a breakthrough. It might have been a book I read, the arts. No, no, no. It might have been something my two gorgeous daughters had done. No, it wasn't. The highlight of 2012, so clearly, was the discovery of the Higgs boson. Give it up for the fundamental particle that bequeaths all other fundamental particles their mass. (Applause) And what was so gorgeous about this discovery was 50 years ago Peter Higgs and his team considered one of the deepest of all questions: How is it that the things that make us up have no mass? I've clearly got mass. Where does it come from? And he postulated a suggestion that there's this infinite, incredibly small field stretching throughout the universe, and as other particles go through those particles and interact, that's where they get their mass. The rest of the scientific community said, "Great idea, Higgsy. We've got no idea if we could ever prove it. It's beyond our reach." And within just 50 years, in his lifetime, with him sitting in the audience, we had designed the greatest machine ever to prove this incredible idea that originated just in a human mind. That's what is so exciting for me about this prime number. We thought it might be there, and we went and found it. That is the essence of being human. That is what we are all about. Or as my friend Descartes might put it, we think, therefore we are. Thank you. (Applause)

I come from Lebanon, and I believe that running can change the world. I know what I have just said is simply not obvious. You know, Lebanon as a country has been once destroyed by a long and bloody civil war. Honestly, I don't know why they call it civil war when there is nothing civil about it. With Syria to the north, Israel and Palestine to the south, and our government even up till this moment is still fragmented and unstable. For years, the country has been divided between politics and religion. However, for one day a year, we truly stand united, and that's when the marathon takes place. I used to be a marathon runner. Long distance running was not only good for my well-being but it helped me meditate and dream big. So the longer distances I ran, the bigger my dreams became, until one fateful morning, and while training, I was hit by a bus. I nearly died, was in a coma, stayed at the hospital for two years, and underwent 36 surgeries to be able to walk again. As soon as I came out of my coma, I realized that I was no longer the same runner I used to be, so I decided, if I couldn't run myself, I wanted to make sure that others could. So out of my hospital bed, I asked my husband to start taking notes, and a few months later, the marathon was born. Organizing a marathon as a reaction to an accident may sound strange, but at that time, even during my most vulnerable condition, I needed to dream big. I needed something to take me out of my pain, an objective to look forward to. I didn't want to pity myself, nor to be pitied, and I thought by organizing such a marathon, I'll be able to pay back to my community, build bridges with the outside world, and invite runners to come to Lebanon and run under the umbrella of peace. Organizing a marathon in Lebanon is definitely not like organizing one in New York. How do you introduce the concept of running to a nation that is constantly at the brink of war? How do you ask those who were once fighting and killing each other to come together and run next to each other? More than that, how do you convince people to run a distance of 26.2 miles at a time they were not even familiar with the word "marathon"? So we had to start from scratch. For almost two years, we went all over the country and even visited remote villages. I personally met with people from all walks of life -- mayors, NGOs, schoolchildren, politicians, militiamen, people from mosques, churches, the president of the country, even housewives. I learned one thing: When you walk the talk, people believe you. Many were touched by my personal story, and they shared their stories in return. It was honesty and transparency that brought us together. We spoke one common language to each other, and that was from one human to another. Once that trust was built, everybody wanted to be part of the marathon to show the world the true colors of Lebanon and the Lebanese and their desire to live in peace and harmony. In October 2003, over 6,000 runners from 49 different nationalities came to the start line, all determined, and when the gunfire went off, this time it was a signal to run in harmony for a change. The marathon grew. So did our political problems. But for every disaster we had, the marathon found ways to bring people together. In 2005, our prime minister was assassinated, and the country came to a complete standstill, so we organized a five-kilometer United We Run campaign. Over 60,000 people came to the start line, all wearing white t-shirts with no political slogans. That was a turning point for the marathon, where people started looking at it as a platform for peace and unity. Between 2006 up to 2009, our country, Lebanon, went through unstable years, invasions, and more assassinations that brought us close to a civil war. The country was divided again, so much that our parliament resigned, we had no president for a year, and no prime minister. But we did have a marathon. (Applause) So through the marathon, we learned that political problems can be overcome. When the opposition party decided to shut down part of the city center, we negotiated alternative routes. Government protesters became sideline cheerleaders. They even hosted juice stations. You know, the marathon has really become one of a kind. It gained credibility from both the Lebanese and the international community. Last November 2012, over 33,000 runners from 85 different nationalities came to the start line, but this time, they challenged very stormy and rainy weather. The streets were flooded, but people didn't want to miss out on the opportunity of being part of such a national day. BMA has expanded. We include everyone: the young, the elderly, the disabled, the mentally challenged, the blind, the elite, the amateur runners, even moms with their babies. Themes have included runs for the environment, breast cancer, for the love of Lebanon, for peace, or just simply to run. The first annual all-women-and-girls race for empowerment, which is one of its kind in the region, has just taken place only a few weeks ago, with 4,512 women, including the first lady, and this is only the beginning. Thank you. (Applause) BMA has supported charities and volunteers who have helped reshape Lebanon, raising funds for their causes and encouraging others to give. The culture of giving and doing good has become contagious. Stereotypes have been broken. Change-makers and future leaders have been created. I believe these are the building blocks for future peace. BMA has become such a respected event in the region that government officials in the region like Iraq, Egypt and Syria, have asked the organization to help them structure a similar sporting event. We are now one of the largest running events in the Middle East, but most importantly, it is a platform for hope and cooperation in an ever-fragile and unstable part of the world. From Boston to Beirut, we stand as one. (Applause) After 10 years in Lebanon, from national marathons or from national events to smaller regional races, we've seen that people want to run for a better future. After all, peacemaking is not a sprint. It is more of a marathon. Thank you. (Applause)

Steve Ramirez: My first year of grad school, I found myself in my bedroom eating lots of Ben & Jerry's watching some trashy TV and maybe, maybe listening to Taylor Swift. I had just gone through a breakup. (Laughter) So for the longest time, all I would do is recall the memory of this person over and over again, wishing that I could get rid of that gut-wrenching, visceral "blah" feeling. Now, as it turns out, I'm a neuroscientist, so I knew that the memory of that person and the awful, emotional undertones that color in that memory, are largely mediated by separate brain systems. And so I thought, what if we could go into the brain and edit out that nauseating feeling but while keeping the memory of that person intact? Then I realized, maybe that's a little bit lofty for now. So what if we could start off by going into the brain and just finding a single memory to begin with? Could we jump-start that memory back to life, maybe even play with the contents of that memory? All that said, there is one person in the entire world right now that I really hope is not watching this talk. (Laughter) So there is a catch. There is a catch. These ideas probably remind you of "Total Recall," "Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind," or of "Inception." But the movie stars that we work with are the celebrities of the lab. Xu Liu: Test mice. (Laughter) As neuroscientists, we work in the lab with mice trying to understand how memory works. And today, we hope to convince you that now we are actually able to activate a memory in the brain at the speed of light. To do this, there's only two simple steps to follow. First, you find and label a memory in the brain, and then you activate it with a switch. As simple as that. (Laughter) SR: Are you convinced? So, turns out finding a memory in the brain isn't all that easy. XL: Indeed. This is way more difficult than, let's say, finding a needle in a haystack, because at least, you know, the needle is still something you can physically put your fingers on. But memory is not. And also, there's way more cells in your brain than the number of straws in a typical haystack. So yeah, this task does seem to be daunting. But luckily, we got help from the brain itself. It turned out that all we need to do is basically to let the brain form a memory, and then the brain will tell us which cells are involved in that particular memory. SR: So what was going on in my brain while I was recalling the memory of an ex? If you were to just completely ignore human ethics for a second and slice up my brain right now, you would see that there was an amazing number of brain regions that were active while recalling that memory. Now one brain region that would be robustly active in particular is called the hippocampus, which for decades has been implicated in processing the kinds of memories that we hold near and dear, which also makes it an ideal target to go into and to try and find and maybe reactivate a memory. XL: When you zoom in into the hippocampus, of course you will see lots of cells, but we are able to find which cells are involved in a particular memory, because whenever a cell is active, like when it's forming a memory, it will also leave a footprint that will later allow us to know these cells are recently active. SR: So the same way that building lights at night let you know that somebody's probably working there at any given moment, in a very real sense, there are biological sensors within a cell that are turned on only when that cell was just working. They're sort of biological windows that light up to let us know that that cell was just active. XL: So we clipped part of this sensor, and attached that to a switch to control the cells, and we packed this switch into an engineered virus and injected that into the brain of the mice. So whenever a memory is being formed, any active cells for that memory will also have this switch installed. SR: So here is what the hippocampus looks like after forming a fear memory, for example. The sea of blue that you see here are densely packed brain cells, but the green brain cells, the green brain cells are the ones that are holding on to a specific fear memory. So you are looking at the crystallization of the fleeting formation of fear. You're actually looking at the cross-section of a memory right now. XL: Now, for the switch we have been talking about, ideally, the switch has to act really fast. It shouldn't take minutes or hours to work. It should act at the speed of the brain, in milliseconds. SR: So what do you think, Xu? Could we use, let's say, pharmacological drugs to activate or inactivate brain cells? XL: Nah. Drugs are pretty messy. They spread everywhere. And also it takes them forever to act on cells. So it will not allow us to control a memory in real time. So Steve, how about let's zap the brain with electricity? SR: So electricity is pretty fast, but we probably wouldn't be able to target it to just the specific cells that hold onto a memory, and we'd probably fry the brain. XL: Oh. That's true. So it looks like, hmm, indeed we need to find a better way to impact the brain at the speed of light. SR: So it just so happens that light travels at the speed of light. So maybe we could activate or inactive memories by just using light -- XL: That's pretty fast. SR: -- and because normally brain cells don't respond to pulses of light, so those that would respond to pulses of light are those that contain a light-sensitive switch. Now to do that, first we need to trick brain cells to respond to laser beams. XL: Yep. You heard it right. We are trying to shoot lasers into the brain. (Laughter) SR: And the technique that lets us do that is optogenetics. Optogenetics gave us this light switch that we can use to turn brain cells on or off, and the name of that switch is channelrhodopsin, seen here as these green dots attached to this brain cell. You can think of channelrhodopsin as a sort of light-sensitive switch that can be artificially installed in brain cells so that now we can use that switch to activate or inactivate the brain cell simply by clicking it, and in this case we click it on with pulses of light. XL: So we attach this light-sensitive switch of channelrhodopsin to the sensor we've been talking about and inject this into the brain. So whenever a memory is being formed, any active cell for that particular memory will also have this light-sensitive switch installed in it so that we can control these cells by the flipping of a laser just like this one you see. SR: So let's put all of this to the test now. What we can do is we can take our mice and then we can put them in a box that looks exactly like this box here, and then we can give them a very mild foot shock so that they form a fear memory of this box. They learn that something bad happened here. Now with our system, the cells that are active in the hippocampus in the making of this memory, only those cells will now contain channelrhodopsin. XL: When you are as small as a mouse, it feels as if the whole world is trying to get you. So your best response of defense is trying to be undetected. Whenever a mouse is in fear, it will show this very typical behavior by staying at one corner of the box, trying to not move any part of its body, and this posture is called freezing. So if a mouse remembers that something bad happened in this box, and when we put them back into the same box, it will basically show freezing because it doesn't want to be detected by any potential threats in this box. SR: So you can think of freezing as, you're walking down the street minding your own business, and then out of nowhere you almost run into an ex-girlfriend or ex-boyfriend, and now those terrifying two seconds where you start thinking, "What do I do? Do I say hi? Do I shake their hand? Do I turn around and run away? Do I sit here and pretend like I don't exist?" Those kinds of fleeting thoughts that physically incapacitate you, that temporarily give you that deer-in-headlights look. XL: However, if you put the mouse in a completely different new box, like the next one, it will not be afraid of this box because there's no reason that it will be afraid of this new environment. But what if we put the mouse in this new box but at the same time, we activate the fear memory using lasers just like we did before? Are we going to bring back the fear memory for the first box into this completely new environment? SR: All right, and here's the million-dollar experiment. Now to bring back to life the memory of that day, I remember that the Red Sox had just won, it was a green spring day, perfect for going up and down the river and then maybe going to the North End to get some cannolis, #justsaying. Now Xu and I, on the other hand, were in a completely windowless black room not making any ocular movement that even remotely resembles an eye blink because our eyes were fixed onto a computer screen. We were looking at this mouse here trying to activate a memory for the first time using our technique. XL: And this is what we saw. When we first put the mouse into this box, it's exploring, sniffing around, walking around, minding its own business, because actually by nature, mice are pretty curious animals. They want to know, what's going on in this new box? It's interesting. But the moment we turned on the laser, like you see now, all of a sudden the mouse entered this freezing mode. It stayed here and tried not to move any part of its body. Clearly it's freezing. So indeed, it looks like we are able to bring back the fear memory for the first box in this completely new environment. While watching this, Steve and I are as shocked as the mouse itself. (Laughter) So after the experiment, the two of us just left the room without saying anything. After a kind of long, awkward period of time, Steve broke the silence. SR: "Did that just work?" XL: "Yes," I said. "Indeed it worked!" We're really excited about this. And then we published our findings in the journal Nature. Ever since the publication of our work, we've been receiving numerous comments from all over the Internet. Maybe we can take a look at some of those. ["OMGGGGG FINALLY... so much more to come, virtual reality, neural manipulation, visual dream emulation... neural coding, 'writing and re-writing of memories', mental illnesses. Ahhh the future is awesome"] SR: So the first thing that you'll notice is that people have really strong opinions about this kind of work. Now I happen to completely agree with the optimism of this first quote, because on a scale of zero to Morgan Freeman's voice, it happens to be one of the most evocative accolades that I've heard come our way. (Laughter) But as you'll see, it's not the only opinion that's out there. ["This scares the hell out of me... What if they could do that easily in humans in a couple of years?! OH MY GOD WE'RE DOOMED"] XL: Indeed, if we take a look at the second one, I think we can all agree that it's, meh, probably not as positive. But this also reminds us that, although we are still working with mice, it's probably a good idea to start thinking and discussing about the possible ethical ramifications of memory control. SR: Now, in the spirit of the third quote, we want to tell you about a recent project that we've been working on in lab that we've called Project Inception. ["They should make a movie about this. Where they plant ideas into peoples minds, so they can control them for their own personal gain. We'll call it: Inception."] So we reasoned that now that we can reactivate a memory, what if we do so but then begin to tinker with that memory? Could we possibly even turn it into a false memory? XL: So all memory is sophisticated and dynamic, but if just for simplicity, let's imagine memory as a movie clip. So far what we've told you is basically we can control this "play" button of the clip so that we can play this video clip any time, anywhere. But is there a possibility that we can actually get inside the brain and edit this movie clip so that we can make it different from the original? Yes we can. Turned out that all we need to do is basically reactivate a memory using lasers just like we did before, but at the same time, if we present new information and allow this new information to incorporate into this old memory, this will change the memory. It's sort of like making a remix tape. SR: So how do we do this? Rather than finding a fear memory in the brain, we can start by taking our animals, and let's say we put them in a blue box like this blue box here and we find the brain cells that represent that blue box and we trick them to respond to pulses of light exactly like we had said before. Now the next day, we can take our animals and place them in a red box that they've never experienced before. We can shoot light into the brain to reactivate the memory of the blue box. So what would happen here if, while the animal is recalling the memory of the blue box, we gave it a couple of mild foot shocks? So here we're trying to artificially make an association between the memory of the blue box and the foot shocks themselves. We're just trying to connect the two. So to test if we had done so, we can take our animals once again and place them back in the blue box. Again, we had just reactivated the memory of the blue box while the animal got a couple of mild foot shocks, and now the animal suddenly freezes. It's as though it's recalling being mildly shocked in this environment even though that never actually happened. So it formed a false memory, because it's falsely fearing an environment where, technically speaking, nothing bad actually happened to it. XL: So, so far we are only talking about this light-controlled "on" switch. In fact, we also have a light-controlled "off" switch, and it's very easy to imagine that by installing this light-controlled "off" switch, we can also turn off a memory, any time, anywhere. So everything we've been talking about today is based on this philosophically charged principle of neuroscience that the mind, with its seemingly mysterious properties, is actually made of physical stuff that we can tinker with. SR: And for me personally, I see a world where we can reactivate any kind of memory that we'd like. I also see a world where we can erase unwanted memories. Now, I even see a world where editing memories is something of a reality, because we're living in a time where it's possible to pluck questions from the tree of science fiction and to ground them in experimental reality. XL: Nowadays, people in the lab and people in other groups all over the world are using similar methods to activate or edit memories, whether that's old or new, positive or negative, all sorts of memories so that we can understand how memory works. SR: For example, one group in our lab was able to find the brain cells that make up a fear memory and converted them into a pleasurable memory, just like that. That's exactly what I mean about editing these kinds of processes. Now one dude in lab was even able to reactivate memories of female mice in male mice, which rumor has it is a pleasurable experience. XL: Indeed, we are living in a very exciting moment where science doesn't have any arbitrary speed limits but is only bound by our own imagination. SR: And finally, what do we make of all this? How do we push this technology forward? These are the questions that should not remain just inside the lab, and so one goal of today's talk was to bring everybody up to speed with the kind of stuff that's possible in modern neuroscience, but now, just as importantly, to actively engage everybody in this conversation. So let's think together as a team about what this all means and where we can and should go from here, because Xu and I think we all have some really big decisions ahead of us. Thank you. XL: Thank you. (Applause)

What I'd like to do today is talk about one of my favorite subjects, and that is the neuroscience of sleep. Now, there is a sound -- (Alarm clock) -- aah, it worked -- a sound that is desperately, desperately familiar to most of us, and of course it's the sound of the alarm clock. And what that truly ghastly, awful sound does is stop the single most important behavioral experience that we have, and that's sleep. If you're an average sort of person, 36 percent of your life will be spent asleep, which means that if you live to 90, then 32 years will have been spent entirely asleep. Now what that 32 years is telling us is that sleep at some level is important. And yet, for most of us, we don't give sleep a second thought. We throw it away. We really just don't think about sleep. And so what I'd like to do today is change your views, change your ideas and your thoughts about sleep. And the journey that I want to take you on, we need to start by going back in time. "Enjoy the honey-heavy dew of slumber." Any ideas who said that? Shakespeare's Julius Caesar. Yes, let me give you a few more quotes. "O sleep, O gentle sleep, nature's soft nurse, how have I frighted thee?" Shakespeare again, from -- I won't say it -- the Scottish play. [Correction: Henry IV, Part 2] (Laughter) From the same time: "Sleep is the golden chain that ties health and our bodies together." Extremely prophetic, by Thomas Dekker, another Elizabethan dramatist. But if we jump forward 400 years, the tone about sleep changes somewhat. This is from Thomas Edison, from the beginning of the 20th century. "Sleep is a criminal waste of time and a heritage from our cave days." Bang. (Laughter) And if we also jump into the 1980s, some of you may remember that Margaret Thatcher was reported to have said, "Sleep is for wimps." And of course the infamous -- what was his name? -- the infamous Gordon Gekko from "Wall Street" said, "Money never sleeps." What do we do in the 20th century about sleep? Well, of course, we use Thomas Edison's light bulb to invade the night, and we occupied the dark, and in the process of this occupation, we've treated sleep as an illness, almost. We've treated it as an enemy. At most now, I suppose, we tolerate the need for sleep, and at worst perhaps many of us think of sleep as an illness that needs some sort of a cure. And our ignorance about sleep is really quite profound. Why is it? Why do we abandon sleep in our thoughts? Well, it's because you don't do anything much while you're asleep, it seems. You don't eat. You don't drink. And you don't have sex. Well, most of us anyway. And so therefore it's -- Sorry. It's a complete waste of time, right? Wrong. Actually, sleep is an incredibly important part of our biology, and neuroscientists are beginning to explain why it's so very important. So let's move to the brain. Now, here we have a brain. This is donated by a social scientist, and they said they didn't know what it was, or indeed how to use it, so -- (Laughter) Sorry. So I borrowed it. I don't think they noticed. Okay. (Laughter) The point I'm trying to make is that when you're asleep, this thing doesn't shut down. In fact, some areas of the brain are actually more active during the sleep state than during the wake state. The other thing that's really important about sleep is that it doesn't arise from a single structure within the brain, but is to some extent a network property, and if we flip the brain on its back -- I love this little bit of spinal cord here -- this bit here is the hypothalamus, and right under there is a whole raft of interesting structures, not least the biological clock. The biological clock tells us when it's good to be up, when it's good to be asleep, and what that structure does is interact with a whole raft of other areas within the hypothalamus, the lateral hypothalamus, the ventrolateral preoptic nuclei. All of those combine, and they send projections down to the brain stem here. The brain stem then projects forward and bathes the cortex, this wonderfully wrinkly bit over here, with neurotransmitters that keep us awake and essentially provide us with our consciousness. So sleep arises from a whole raft of different interactions within the brain, and essentially, sleep is turned on and off as a result of a range of interactions in here. Okay. So where have we got to? We've said that sleep is complicated and it takes 32 years of our life. But what I haven't explained is what sleep is about. So why do we sleep? And it won't surprise any of you that, of course, the scientists, we don't have a consensus. There are dozens of different ideas about why we sleep, and I'm going to outline three of those. The first is sort of the restoration idea, and it's somewhat intuitive. Essentially, all the stuff we've burned up during the day, we restore, we replace, we rebuild during the night. And indeed, as an explanation, it goes back to Aristotle, so that's, what, 2,300 years ago. It's gone in and out of fashion. It's fashionable at the moment because what's been shown is that within the brain, a whole raft of genes have been shown to be turned on only during sleep, and those genes are associated with restoration and metabolic pathways. So there's good evidence for the whole restoration hypothesis. What about energy conservation? Again, perhaps intuitive. You essentially sleep to save calories. Now, when you do the sums, though, it doesn't really pan out. If you compare an individual who has slept at night, or stayed awake and hasn't moved very much, the energy saving of sleeping is about 110 calories a night. Now, that's the equivalent of a hot dog bun. Now, I would say that a hot dog bun is kind of a meager return for such a complicated and demanding behavior as sleep. So I'm less convinced by the energy conservation idea. But the third idea I'm quite attracted to, which is brain processing and memory consolidation. What we know is that, if after you've tried to learn a task, and you sleep-deprive individuals, the ability to learn that task is smashed. It's really hugely attenuated. So sleep and memory consolidation is also very important. However, it's not just the laying down of memory and recalling it. What's turned out to be really exciting is that our ability to come up with novel solutions to complex problems is hugely enhanced by a night of sleep. In fact, it's been estimated to give us a threefold advantage. Sleeping at night enhances our creativity. And what seems to be going on is that, in the brain, those neural connections that are important, those synaptic connections that are important, are linked and strengthened, while those that are less important tend to fade away and be less important. Okay. So we've had three explanations for why we might sleep, and I think the important thing to realize is that the details will vary, and it's probable we sleep for multiple different reasons. But sleep is not an indulgence. It's not some sort of thing that we can take on board rather casually. I think that sleep was once likened to an upgrade from economy to business class, you know, the equiavlent of. It's not even an upgrade from economy to first class. The critical thing to realize is that if you don't sleep, you don't fly. Essentially, you never get there, and what's extraordinary about much of our society these days is that we are desperately sleep-deprived. So let's now look at sleep deprivation. Huge sectors of society are sleep-deprived, and let's look at our sleep-o-meter. So in the 1950s, good data suggests that most of us were getting around about eight hours of sleep a night. Nowadays, we sleep one and a half to two hours less every night, so we're in the six-and-a-half-hours-every-night league. For teenagers, it's worse, much worse. They need nine hours for full brain performance, and many of them, on a school night, are only getting five hours of sleep. It's simply not enough. If we think about other sectors of society, the aged, if you are aged, then your ability to sleep in a single block is somewhat disrupted, and many sleep, again, less than five hours a night. Shift work. Shift work is extraordinary, perhaps 20 percent of the working population, and the body clock does not shift to the demands of working at night. It's locked onto the same light-dark cycle as the rest of us. So when the poor old shift worker is going home to try and sleep during the day, desperately tired, the body clock is saying, "Wake up. This is the time to be awake." So the quality of sleep that you get as a night shift worker is usually very poor, again in that sort of five-hour region. And then, of course, tens of millions of people suffer from jet lag. So who here has jet lag? Well, my goodness gracious. Well, thank you very much indeed for not falling asleep, because that's what your brain is craving. One of the things that the brain does is indulge in micro-sleeps, this involuntary falling asleep, and you have essentially no control over it. Now, micro-sleeps can be sort of somewhat embarrassing, but they can also be deadly. It's been estimated that 31 percent of drivers will fall asleep at the wheel at least once in their life, and in the U.S., the statistics are pretty good: 100,000 accidents on the freeway have been associated with tiredness, loss of vigilance, and falling asleep. A hundred thousand a year. It's extraordinary. At another level of terror, we dip into the tragic accidents at Chernobyl and indeed the space shuttle Challenger, which was so tragically lost. And in the investigations that followed those disasters, poor judgment as a result of extended shift work and loss of vigilance and tiredness was attributed to a big chunk of those disasters. So when you're tired, and you lack sleep, you have poor memory, you have poor creativity, you have increased impulsiveness, and you have overall poor judgment. But my friends, it's so much worse than that. (Laughter) If you are a tired brain, the brain is craving things to wake it up. So drugs, stimulants. Caffeine represents the stimulant of choice across much of the Western world. Much of the day is fueled by caffeine, and if you're a really naughty tired brain, nicotine. And of course, you're fueling the waking state with these stimulants, and then of course it gets to 11 o'clock at night, and the brain says to itself, "Ah, well actually, I need to be asleep fairly shortly. What do we do about that when I'm feeling completely wired?" Well, of course, you then resort to alcohol. Now alcohol, short-term, you know, once or twice, to use to mildly sedate you, can be very useful. It can actually ease the sleep transition. But what you must be so aware of is that alcohol doesn't provide sleep, a biological mimic for sleep. It sedates you. So it actually harms some of the neural proccessing that's going on during memory consolidation and memory recall. So it's a short-term acute measure, but for goodness sake, don't become addicted to alcohol as a way of getting to sleep every night. Another connection between loss of sleep is weight gain. If you sleep around about five hours or less every night, then you have a 50 percent likelihood of being obese. What's the connection here? Well, sleep loss seems to give rise to the release of the hormone ghrelin, the hunger hormone. Ghrelin is released. It gets to the brain. The brain says, "I need carbohydrates," and what it does is seek out carbohydrates and particularly sugars. So there's a link between tiredness and the metabolic predisposition for weight gain. Stress. Tired people are massively stressed. And one of the things of stress, of course, is loss of memory, which is what I sort of just then had a little lapse of. But stress is so much more. So if you're acutely stressed, not a great problem, but it's sustained stress associated with sleep loss that's the problem. So sustained stress leads to suppressed immunity, and so tired people tend to have higher rates of overall infection, and there's some very good studies showing that shift workers, for example, have higher rates of cancer. Increased levels of stress throw glucose into the circulation. Glucose becomes a dominant part of the vasculature and essentially you become glucose intolerant. Therefore, diabetes 2. Stress increases cardiovascular disease as a result of raising blood pressure. So there's a whole raft of things associated with sleep loss that are more than just a mildly impaired brain, which is where I think most people think that sleep loss resides. So at this point in the talk, this is a nice time to think, well, do you think on the whole I'm getting enough sleep? So a quick show of hands. Who feels that they're getting enough sleep here? Oh. Well, that's pretty impressive. Good. We'll talk more about that later, about what are your tips. So most of us, of course, ask the question, "Well, how do I know whether I'm getting enough sleep?" Well, it's not rocket science. If you need an alarm clock to get you out of bed in the morning, if you are taking a long time to get up, if you need lots of stimulants, if you're grumpy, if you're irritable, if you're told by your work colleagues that you're looking tired and irritable, chances are you are sleep-deprived. Listen to them. Listen to yourself. What do you do? Well -- and this is slightly offensive -- sleep for dummies: Make your bedroom a haven for sleep. The first critical thing is make it as dark as you possibly can, and also make it slightly cool. Very important. Actually, reduce your amount of light exposure at least half an hour before you go to bed. Light increases levels of alertness and will delay sleep. What's the last thing that most of us do before we go to bed? We stand in a massively lit bathroom looking into the mirror cleaning our teeth. It's the worst thing we can possibly do before we went to sleep. Turn off those mobile phones. Turn off those computers. Turn off all of those things that are also going to excite the brain. Try not to drink caffeine too late in the day, ideally not after lunch. Now, we've set about reducing light exposure before you go to bed, but light exposure in the morning is very good at setting the biological clock to the light-dark cycle. So seek out morning light. Basically, listen to yourself. Wind down. Do those sorts of things that you know are going to ease you off into the honey-heavy dew of slumber. Okay. That's some facts. What about some myths? Teenagers are lazy. No. Poor things. They have a biological predisposition to go to bed late and get up late, so give them a break. We need eight hours of sleep a night. That's an average. Some people need more. Some people need less. And what you need to do is listen to your body. Do you need that much or do you need more? Simple as that. Old people need less sleep. Not true. The sleep demands of the aged do not go down. Essentially, sleep fragments and becomes less robust, but sleep requirements do not go down. And the fourth myth is, early to bed, early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy and wise. Well that's wrong at so many different levels. (Laughter) There is no, no evidence that getting up early and going to bed early gives you more wealth at all. There's no difference in socioeconomic status. In my experience, the only difference between morning people and evening people is that those people that get up in the morning early are just horribly smug. (Laughter) (Applause) Okay. So for the last part, the last few minutes, what I want to do is change gears and talk about some really new, breaking areas of neuroscience, which is the association between mental health, mental illness and sleep disruption. We've known for 130 years that in severe mental illness, there is always, always sleep disruption, but it's been largely ignored. In the 1970s, when people started to think about this again, they said, "Yes, well, of course you have sleep disruption in schizophrenia because they're on anti-psychotics. It's the anti-psychotics causing the sleep problems," ignoring the fact that for a hundred years previously, sleep disruption had been reported before anti-psychotics. So what's going on? Lots of groups, several groups are studying conditions like depression, schizophrenia and bipolar, and what's going on in terms of sleep disruption. We have a big study which we published last year on schizophrenia, and the data were quite extraordinary. In those individuals with schizophrenia, much of the time, they were awake during the night phase and then they were asleep during the day. Other groups showed no 24-hour patterns whatsoever. Their sleep was absolutely smashed. And some had no ability to regulate their sleep by the light-dark cycle. They were getting up later and later and later and later each night. It was smashed. So what's going on? And the really exciting news is that mental illness and sleep are not simply associated but they are physically linked within the brain. The neural networks that predispose you to normal sleep, give you normal sleep, and those that give you normal mental health are overlapping. And what's the evidence for that? Well, genes that have been shown to be very important in the generation of normal sleep, when mutated, when changed, also predispose individuals to mental health problems. And last year, we published a study which showed that a gene that's been linked to schizophrenia, which, when mutated, also smashes the sleep. So we have evidence of a genuine mechanistic overlap between these two important systems. Other work flowed from these studies. The first was that sleep disruption actually precedes certain types of mental illness, and we've shown that in those young individuals who are at high risk of developing bipolar disorder, they already have a sleep abnormality prior to any clinical diagnosis of bipolar. The other bit of data was that sleep disruption may actually exacerbate, make worse the mental illness state. My colleague Dan Freeman has used a range of agents which have stabilized sleep and reduced levels of paranoia in those individuals by 50 percent. So what have we got? We've got, in these connections, some really exciting things. In terms of the neuroscience, by understanding the neuroscience of these two systems, we're really beginning to understand how both sleep and mental illness are generated and regulated within the brain. The second area is that if we can use sleep and sleep disruption as an early warning signal, then we have the chance of going in. If we know that these individuals are vulnerable, early intervention then becomes possible. And the third, which I think is the most exciting, is that we can think of the sleep centers within the brain as a new therapeutic target. Stabilize sleep in those individuals who are vulnerable, we can certainly make them healthier, but also alleviate some of the appalling symptoms of mental illness. So let me just finish. What I started by saying is take sleep seriously. Our attitudes toward sleep are so very different from a pre-industrial age, when we were almost wrapped in a duvet. We used to understand intuitively the importance of sleep. And this isn't some sort of crystal-waving nonsense. This is a pragmatic response to good health. If you have good sleep, it increases your concentration, attention, decision-making, creativity, social skills, health. If you get sleep, it reduces your mood changes, your stress, your levels of anger, your impulsivity, and your tendency to drink and take drugs. And we finished by saying that an understanding of the neuroscience of sleep is really informing the way we think about some of the causes of mental illness, and indeed is providing us new ways to treat these incredibly debilitating conditions. Jim Butcher, the fantasy writer, said, "Sleep is God. Go worship." And I can only recommend that you do the same. Thank you for your attention. (Applause)

Hi. I am an architect. I am the only architect in the world making buildings out of paper like this cardboard tube, and this exhibition is the first one I did using paper tubes. 1986, much, much longer before people started talking about ecological issues and environmental issues, I just started testing the paper tube in order to use this as a building structure. It's very complicated to test the new material for the building, but this is much stronger than I expected, and also it's very easy to waterproof, and also, because it's industrial material, it's also possible to fireproof. Then I built the temporary structure, 1990. This is the first temporary building made out of paper. There are 330 tubes, diameter 55 [centimeters], there are only 12 tubes with a diameter of 120 centimeters, or four feet, wide. As you see it in the photo, inside is the toilet. In case you're finished with toilet paper, you can tear off the inside of the wall. (Laughter) So it's very useful. Year 2000, there was a big expo in Germany. I was asked to design the building, because the theme of the expo was environmental issues. So I was chosen to build the pavilion out of paper tubes, recyclable paper. My goal of the design is not when it's completed. My goal was when the building was demolished, because each country makes a lot of pavilions but after half a year, we create a lot of industrial waste, so my building has to be reused or recycled. After, the building was recycled. So that was the goal of my design. Then I was very lucky to win the competition to build the second Pompidou Center in France in the city of Metz. Because I was so poor, I wanted to rent an office in Paris, but I couldn't afford it, so I decided to bring my students to Paris to build our office on top of the Pompidou Center in Paris by ourselves. So we brought the paper tubes and the wooden joints to complete the 35-meter-long office. We stayed there for six years without paying any rent. (Laughter) (Applause) Thank you. I had one big problem. Because we were part of the exhibition, even if my friend wanted to see me, they had to buy a ticket to see me. That was the problem. Then I completed the Pompidou Center in Metz. It's a very popular museum now, and I created a big monument for the government. But then I was very disappointed at my profession as an architect, because we are not helping, we are not working for society, but we are working for privileged people, rich people, government, developers. They have money and power. Those are invisible. So they hire us to visualize their power and money by making monumental architecture. That is our profession, even historically it's the same, even now we are doing the same. So I was very disappointed that we are not working for society, even though there are so many people who lost their houses by natural disasters. But I must say they are no longer natural disasters. For example, earthquakes never kill people, but collapse of the buildings kill people. That's the responsibility of architects. Then people need some temporary housing, but there are no architects working there because we are too busy working for privileged people. So I thought, even as architects, we can be involved in the reconstruction of temporary housing. We can make it better. So that is why I started working in disaster areas. 1994, there was a big disaster in Rwanda, Africa. Two tribes, Hutu and Tutsi, fought each other. Over two million people became refugees. But I was so surprised to see the shelter, refugee camp organized by the U.N. They're so poor, and they are freezing with blankets during the rainy season, In the shelters built by the U.N., they were just providing a plastic sheet, and the refugees had to cut the trees, and just like this. But over two million people cut trees. It just became big, heavy deforestation and an environmental problem. That is why they started providing aluminum pipes, aluminum barracks. Very expensive, they throw them out for money, then cutting trees again. So I proposed my idea to improve the situation using these recycled paper tubes because this is so cheap and also so strong, but my budget is only 50 U.S. dollars per unit. We built 50 units to do that as a monitoring test for the durability and moisture and termites, so on. And then, year afterward, 1995, in Kobe, Japan, we had a big earthquake. Nearly 7,000 people were killed, and the city like this Nagata district, all the city was burned in a fire after the earthquake. And also I found out there's many Vietnamese refugees suffering and gathering at a Catholic church -- all the building was totally destroyed. So I went there and also I proposed to the priests, "Why don't we rebuild the church out of paper tubes?" And he said, "Oh God, are you crazy? After a fire, what are you proposing?" So he never trusted me, but I didn't give up. I started commuting to Kobe, and I met the society of Vietnamese people. They were living like this with very poor plastic sheets in the park. So I proposed to rebuild. I raised -- did fundraising. I made a paper tube shelter for them, and in order to make it easy to be built by students and also easy to demolish, I used beer crates as a foundation. I asked the Kirin beer company to propose, because at that time, the Asahi beer company made their plastic beer crates red, which doesn't go with the color of the paper tubes. The color coordination is very important. And also I still remember, we were expecting to have a beer inside the plastic beer crate, but it came empty. (Laughter) So I remember it was so disappointing. So during the summer with my students, we built over 50 units of the shelters. Finally the priest, finally he trusted me to rebuild. He said, "As long as you collect money by yourself, bring your students to build, you can do it." So we spent five weeks rebuilding the church. It was meant to stay there for three years, but actually it stayed there 10 years because people loved it. Then, in Taiwan, they had a big earthquake, and we proposed to donate this church, so we dismantled them, we sent them over to be built by volunteer people. It stayed there in Taiwan as a permanent church even now. So this building became a permanent building. Then I wonder, what is a permanent and what is a temporary building? Even a building made in paper can be permanent as long as people love it. Even a concrete building can be very temporary if that is made to make money. In 1999, in Turkey, the big earthquake, I went there to use the local material to build a shelter. 2001, in West India, I built also a shelter. In 2004, in Sri Lanka, after the Sumatra earthquake and tsunami, I rebuilt Islamic fishermen's villages. And in 2008, in Chengdu, Sichuan area in China, nearly 70,000 people were killed, and also especially many of the schools were destroyed because of the corruption between the authority and the contractor. I was asked to rebuild the temporary church. I brought my Japanese students to work with the Chinese students. In one month, we completed nine classrooms, over 500 square meters. It's still used, even after the current earthquake in China. In 2009, in Italy, L'Aquila, also they had a big earthquake. And this is a very interesting photo: former Prime Minister Berlusconi and Japanese former former former former Prime Minister Mr. Aso -- you know, because we have to change the prime minister ever year. And they are very kind, affording my model. I proposed a big rebuilding, a temporary music hall, because L'Aquila is very famous for music and all the concert halls were destroyed, so musicians were moving out. So I proposed to the mayor, I'd like to rebuild the temporary auditorium. He said, "As long as you bring your money, you can do it." And I was very lucky. Mr. Berlusconi brought G8 summit, and our former prime minister came, so they helped us to collect money, and I got half a million euros from the Japanese government to rebuild this temporary auditorium. Year 2010 in Haiti, there was a big earthquake, but it's impossible to fly over, so I went to Santo Domingo, next-door country, to drive six hours to get to Haiti with the local students in Santo Domingo to build 50 units of shelter out of local paper tubes. This is what happened in Japan two years ago, in northern Japan. After the earthquake and tsunami, people had to be evacuated in a big room like a gymnasium. But look at this. There's no privacy. People suffer mentally and physically. So we went there to build partitions with all the student volunteers with paper tubes, just a very simple shelter out of the tube frame and the curtain. However, some of the facility authority doesn't want us to do it, because, they said, simply, it's become more difficult to control them. But it's really necessary to do it. They don't have enough flat area to build standard government single-story housing like this one. Look at this. Even civil government is doing such poor construction of the temporary housing, so dense and so messy because there is no storage, nothing, water is leaking, so I thought, we have to make multi-story building because there's no land and also it's not very comfortable. So I proposed to the mayor while I was making partitions. Finally I met a very nice mayor in Onagawa village in Miyagi. He asked me to build three-story housing on baseball [fields]. I used the shipping container and also the students helped us to make all the building furniture to make them comfortable, within the budget of the government but also the area of the house is exactly the same, but much more comfortable. Many of the people want to stay here forever. I was very happy to hear that. Now I am working in New Zealand, Christchurch. About 20 days before the Japanese earthquake happened, also they had a big earthquake, and many Japanese students were also killed, and the most important cathedral of the city, the symbol of Christchurch, was totally destroyed. And I was asked to come to rebuild the temporary cathedral. So this is under construction. And I'd like to keep building monuments that are beloved by people. Thank you very much. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) Thank you very much. (Applause)

In the northwest corner of the United States, right up near the Canadian border, there's a little town called Libby, Montana, and it's surrounded by pine trees and lakes and just amazing wildlife and these enormous trees that scream up into the sky. And in there is a little town called Libby, which I visited, which feels kind of lonely, a little isolated. And in Libby, Montana, there's a rather unusual woman named Gayla Benefield. She always felt a little bit of an outsider, although she's been there almost all her life, a woman of Russian extraction. She told me when she went to school, she was the only girl who ever chose to do mechanical drawing. Later in life, she got a job going house to house reading utility meters -- gas meters, electricity meters. And she was doing the work in the middle of the day, and one thing particularly caught her notice, which was, in the middle of the day she met a lot of men who were at home, middle aged, late middle aged, and a lot of them seemed to be on oxygen tanks. It struck her as strange. Then, a few years later, her father died at the age of 59, five days before he was due to receive his pension. He'd been a miner. She thought he must just have been worn out by the work. But then a few years later, her mother died, and that seemed stranger still, because her mother came from a long line of people who just seemed to live forever. In fact, Gayla's uncle is still alive to this day, and learning how to waltz. It didn't make sense that Gayla's mother should die so young. It was an anomaly, and she kept puzzling over anomalies. And as she did, other ones came to mind. She remembered, for example, when her mother had broken a leg and went into the hospital, and she had a lot of x-rays, and two of them were leg x-rays, which made sense, but six of them were chest x-rays, which didn't. She puzzled and puzzled over every piece of her life and her parents' life, trying to understand what she was seeing. She thought about her town. The town had a vermiculite mine in it. Vermiculite was used for soil conditioners, to make plants grow faster and better. Vermiculite was used to insulate lofts, huge amounts of it put under the roof to keep houses warm during the long Montana winters. Vermiculite was in the playground. It was in the football ground. It was in the skating rink. What she didn't learn until she started working this problem is vermiculite is a very toxic form of asbestos. When she figured out the puzzle, she started telling everyone she could what had happened, what had been done to her parents and to the people that she saw on oxygen tanks at home in the afternoons. But she was really amazed. She thought, when everybody knows, they'll want to do something, but actually nobody wanted to know. In fact, she became so annoying as she kept insisting on telling this story to her neighbors, to her friends, to other people in the community, that eventually a bunch of them got together and they made a bumper sticker, which they proudly displayed on their cars, which said, "Yes, I'm from Libby, Montana, and no, I don't have asbestosis." But Gayla didn't stop. She kept doing research. The advent of the Internet definitely helped her. She talked to anybody she could. She argued and argued, and finally she struck lucky when a researcher came through town studying the history of mines in the area, and she told him her story, and at first, of course, like everyone, he didn't believe her, but he went back to Seattle and he did his own research and he realized that she was right. So now she had an ally. Nevertheless, people still didn't want to know. They said things like, "Well, if it were really dangerous, someone would have told us." "If that's really why everyone was dying, the doctors would have told us." Some of the guys used to very heavy jobs said, "I don't want to be a victim. I can't possibly be a victim, and anyway, every industry has its accidents." But still Gayla went on, and finally she succeeded in getting a federal agency to come to town and to screen the inhabitants of the town -- 15,000 people -- and what they discovered was that the town had a mortality rate 80 times higher than anywhere in the United States. That was in 2002, and even at that moment, no one raised their hand to say, "Gayla, look in the playground where your grandchildren are playing. It's lined with vermiculite." This wasn't ignorance. It was willful blindness. Willful blindness is a legal concept which means, if there's information that you could know and you should know but you somehow manage not to know, the law deems that you're willfully blind. You have chosen not to know. There's a lot of willful blindness around these days. You can see willful blindness in banks, when thousands of people sold mortgages to people who couldn't afford them. You could see them in banks when interest rates were manipulated and everyone around knew what was going on, but everyone studiously ignored it. You can see willful blindness in the Catholic Church, where decades of child abuse went ignored. You could see willful blindness in the run-up to the Iraq War. Willful blindness exists on epic scales like those, and it also exists on very small scales, in people's families, in people's homes and communities, and particularly in organizations and institutions. Companies that have been studied for willful blindness can be asked questions like, "Are there issues at work that people are afraid to raise?" And when academics have done studies like this of corporations in the United States, what they find is 85 percent of people say yes. Eighty-five percent of people know there's a problem, but they won't say anything. And when I duplicated the research in Europe, asking all the same questions, I found exactly the same number. Eighty-five percent. That's a lot of silence. It's a lot of blindness. And what's really interesting is that when I go to companies in Switzerland, they tell me, "This is a uniquely Swiss problem." And when I go to Germany, they say, "Oh yes, this is the German disease." And when I go to companies in England, they say, "Oh, yeah, the British are really bad at this." And the truth is, this is a human problem. We're all, under certain circumstances, willfully blind. What the research shows is that some people are blind out of fear. They're afraid of retaliation. And some people are blind because they think, well, seeing anything is just futile. Nothing's ever going to change. If we make a protest, if we protest against the Iraq War, nothing changes, so why bother? Better not to see this stuff at all. And the recurrent theme that I encounter all the time is people say, "Well, you know, the people who do see, they're whistleblowers, and we all know what happens to them." So there's this profound mythology around whistleblowers which says, first of all, they're all crazy. But what I've found going around the world and talking to whistleblowers is, actually, they're very loyal and quite often very conservative people. They're hugely dedicated to the institutions that they work for, and the reason that they speak up, the reason they insist on seeing, is because they care so much about the institution and want to keep it healthy. And the other thing that people often say about whistleblowers is, "Well, there's no point, because you see what happens to them. They are crushed. Nobody would want to go through something like that." And yet, when I talk to whistleblowers, the recurrent tone that I hear is pride. I think of Joe Darby. We all remember the photographs of Abu Ghraib, which so shocked the world and showed the kind of war that was being fought in Iraq. But I wonder who remembers Joe Darby, the very obedient, good soldier who found those photographs and handed them in. And he said, "You know, I'm not the kind of guy to rat people out, but some things just cross the line. Ignorance is bliss, they say, but you can't put up with things like this." I talked to Steve Bolsin, a British doctor, who fought for five years to draw attention to a dangerous surgeon who was killing babies. And I asked him why he did it, and he said, "Well, it was really my daughter who prompted me to do it. She came up to me one night, and she just said, 'Dad, you can't let the kids die.'" Or I think of Cynthia Thomas, a really loyal army daughter and army wife, who, as she saw her friends and relations coming back from the Iraq War, was so shocked by their mental condition and the refusal of the military to recognize and acknowledge post-traumatic stress syndrome that she set up a cafe in the middle of a military town to give them legal, psychological and medical assistance. And she said to me, she said, "You know, Margaret, I always used to say I didn't know what I wanted to be when I grow up. But I've found myself in this cause, and I'll never be the same." We all enjoy so many freedoms today, hard-won freedoms: the freedom to write and publish without fear of censorship, a freedom that wasn't here the last time I came to Hungary; a freedom to vote, which women in particular had to fight so hard for; the freedom for people of different ethnicities and cultures and sexual orientation to live the way that they want. But freedom doesn't exist if you don't use it, and what whistleblowers do, and what people like Gayla Benefield do is they use the freedom that they have. And what they're very prepared to do is recognize that yes, this is going to be an argument, and yes I'm going to have a lot of rows with my neighbors and my colleagues and my friends, but I'm going to become very good at this conflict. I'm going to take on the naysayers, because they'll make my argument better and stronger. I can collaborate with my opponents to become better at what I do. These are people of immense persistence, incredible patience, and an absolute determination not to be blind and not to be silent. When I went to Libby, Montana, I visited the asbestosis clinic that Gayla Benefield brought into being, a place where at first some of the people who wanted help and needed medical attention went in the back door because they didn't want to acknowledge that she'd been right. I sat in a diner, and I watched as trucks drove up and down the highway, carting away the earth out of gardens and replacing it with fresh, uncontaminated soil. I took my 12-year-old daughter with me, because I really wanted her to meet Gayla. And she said, "Why? What's the big deal?" I said, "She's not a movie star, and she's not a celebrity, and she's not an expert, and Gayla's the first person who'd say she's not a saint. The really important thing about Gayla is she is ordinary. She's like you, and she's like me. She had freedom, and she was ready to use it." Thank you very much. (Applause)

Adam Ockelford: I promise there won't be too much of me talking, and a lot of Derek playing, but I thought it would just be nice to recap on how Derek got to where he is today. It's amazing now, because he's so much bigger than me, but when Derek was born, he could have fitted on the palm of your hand. He was born three and a half months premature, and really it was a fantastic fight for him to survive. He had to have a lot of oxygen, and that affected your eyes, Derek, and also the way you understand language and the way you understand the world. But that was the end of the bad news, because when Derek came home from the hospital, his family decided to employ the redoubtable nanny who was going to look after you, Derek, really for the rest of your childhood. And Nanny's great insight, really, was to think, here's a child who can't see. Music must be the thing for Derek. And sure enough, she sang, or as Derek called it, warbled, to him for his first few years of life. And I think it was that excitement with hearing her voice hour after hour every day that made him think maybe, you know, in his brain something was stirring, some sort of musical gift. Here's a little picture of Derek going up now, when you were with your nanny. Now Nanny's great other insight was to think, perhaps we should get Derek something to play, and sure enough, she dragged this little keyboard out of the loft, never thinking really that anything much would come of it. But Derek, your tiny hand must have gone out to that thing and actually bashed it, bashed it so hard they thought it was going to break. But out of all the bashing, after a few months, emerged the most fantastic music, and I think there was just a miracle moment, really, Derek, when you realized that all the sounds you hear in the world out there is something that you can copy on the keyboard. That was the great eureka moment. Now, not being able to see meant, of course, that you taught yourself. Derek Paravicini: I taught myself to play. AO: You did teach yourself to play, and as a consequence, playing the piano for you, Derek, was a lot of knuckles and karate chops, and even a bit of nose going on in there. And now, here's what Nanny did also do was to press the record button on one of those little early tape recorders that they had, and this is a wonderful tape, now, of Derek playing when you were four years old. DP: "Molly Malone (Cockles and Mussels)." AO: It wasn't actually "Cockles and Mussels." This one is "English Country Garden." DP: "English Country Garden." (Music: "English Country Garden") AO: There you are. (Applause) I think that's just fantastic. You know, there's this little child who can't see, can't really understand much about the world, has no one in the family who plays an instrument, and yet he taught himself to play that. And as you can see from the picture, there was quite a lot of body action going on while you were playing, Derek. Now, along -- Derek and I met when he was four and a half years old, and at first, Derek, I thought you were mad, to be honest, because when you played the piano, you seemed to want to play every single note on the keyboard, and also you had this little habit of hitting me out of the way. So as soon as I tried to get near the piano, I was firmly shoved off. And having said to your dad, Nic, that I would try to teach you, I was then slightly confused as to how I might go about that if I wasn't allowed near the piano. But after a while, I thought, well, the only way is to just pick you up, shove Derek over to the other side of the room, and in the 10 seconds that I got before Derek came back, I could just play something very quickly for him to learn. And in the end, Derek, I think you agreed that we could actually have some fun playing the piano together. As you can see, there's me in my early, pre-marriage days with a brown beard, and little Derek concentrating there. I just realized this is going to be recorded, isn't it? Right. Okay. (Laughter) Now then, by the age of 10, Derek really had taken the world by storm. This is a photo of you, Derek, playing at the Barbican with the Royal Philharmonic Pops. Basically it was just an exciting journey, really. And in those days, Derek, you didn't speak very much, and so there was always a moment of tension as to whether you'd actually understood what it was we were going to play and whether you'd play the right piece in the right key, and all that kind of thing. But the orchestra were wowed as well, and the press of the world were fascinated by your ability to play these fantastic pieces. Now the question is, how do you do it, Derek? And hopefully we can show the audience now how it is you do what you do. I think that one of the first things that happened when you were very little, Derek, was that by the time you were two, your musical ear had already outstripped that of most adults. And so whenever you heard any note at all -- if I just play a random note -- (Piano notes) -- you knew instantly what it was, and you'd got the ability as well to find that note on the piano. Now that's called perfect pitch, and some people have perfect pitch for a few white notes in the middle of the piano. (Piano notes) You can see how -- you get a sense of playing with Derek. (Applause) But Derek, your ear is so much more than that. If I just put the microphone down for a bit, I'm going to play a cluster of notes. Those of you who can see will know how many notes, but Derek, of course, can't. Not only can you say how many notes, it's being able to play them all at the same time. Here we are. (Chords) Well, forget the terminology, Derek. Fantastic. And it's that ability, that ability to hear simultaneous sounds, not only just single sounds, but when a whole orchestra is playing, Derek, you can hear every note, and instantly, through all those hours and hours of practice, reproduce those on the keyboard, that makes you, I think, is the basis of all your ability. Now then. It's no use having that kind of raw ability without the technique, and luckily, Derek, you decided that, once we did start learning, you'd let me help you learn all the scale fingerings. So for example using your thumb under with C major. (Piano notes) Etc. And in the end, you got so quick, that things like "Flight of the Bumblebee" were no problem, were they? DP: No. AO: Right. So here, by the age of 11, Derek was playing things like this. DP: This. (Music: "Flight of the Bumblebee") (Applause) AO: Derek, let's have a bow. Well done. Now the truly amazing thing was, with all those scales, Derek, you could not only play "Flight of the Bumblebee" in the usual key, but any note I play, Derek can play it on. So if I just choose a note at random, like that one. (Piano notes) Can you play "Flight of the Bumblebee" on that note? DP: "Flight of the Bumblebee" on that note. (Music: "Flight of the Bumblebee") AO: Or another one? How about in G minor? DP: G minor. (Music: "Flight of the Bumblebee") AO: Fantastic. Well done, Derek. So you see, in your brain, Derek, is this amazing musical computer that can instantly recalibrate, recalculate, all the pieces in the world that are out there. Most pianists would have a heart attack if you said, "Sorry, do you mind playing 'Flight of the Bumblebee' in B minor instead of A minor?" as we went on. In fact, the first time, Derek, you played that with an orchestra, you'd learned the version that you'd learned, and then the orchestra, in fact, did have a different version, so while we were waiting in the two hours before the rehearsal and the concert, Derek listened to the different version and learned it quickly and then was able to play it with the orchestra. Fantastic chap. The other wonderful thing about you is memory. DP: Memory. AO: Your memory is truly amazing, and every concert we do, we ask the audience to participate, of course, by suggesting a piece Derek might like to play. And people say, "Well, that's terribly brave because what happens if Derek doesn't know it?" And I say, "No, it's not brave at all, because if you ask for something that Derek doesn't know, you're invited to come and sing it first, and then he'll pick it up." (Laughter) So just be thoughtful before you suggest something too outlandish. But seriously, would anyone like to choose a piece? DP: Choose a piece. Choose, choose, would you like to choose? AO: Because it's quite dark. You'll just have to shout out. Would you like to hear me play? (Audience: "Theme of Paganini.") AO: Paganini. DP: "The Theme of Paganini." (Laughter) (Music: "Theme of Paganini") (Applause) AO: Well done. Derek's going to L.A. soon, and it's a milestone, because it means that Derek and I will have spent over 100 hours on long-haul flights together, which is quite interesting, isn't it Derek? DP: Very interesting, Adam, yes. Long-haul flights. Yes. AO: You may think 13 hours is a long time to keep talking, but Derek does it effortlessly. Now then. (Laughter) But in America, they've coined this term, "the human iPod" for Derek, which I think is just missing the point, really, because Derek, you're so much more than an iPod. You're a fantastic, creative musician, and I think that was nowhere clearer to see, really, than when we went to Slovenia, and someone -- in a longer concert we tend to get people joining in, and this person, very, very nervously came onto the stage. DP: He played "Chopsticks." AO: And played "Chopsticks." DP: "Chopsticks." AO: A bit like this. DP: Like this. Yes. (Piano notes) AO: I should really get Derek's manager to come and play it. He's sitting there. DP: Somebody played "Chopsticks" like this. AO: Just teasing, right? Here we go. (Music: "Chopsticks") DP: Let Derek play it. AO: What did you do with it, Derek? DP: I got to improvise with it, Adam. AO: This is Derek the musician. (Music: "Chopsticks" improvisation) (Applause) (Music) (Clapping) Keep up with Derek. (Music) (Applause) The TED people will kill me, but perhaps there's time for one encore. DP: For one encore. AO: One encore, yes. So this is one of Derek's heroes. It's the great Art Tatum -- DP: Art Tatum. AO: -- who also was a pianist who couldn't see, and also, I think, like Derek, thought that all the world was a piano, so whenever Art Tatum plays something, it sounds like there's three pianos in the room. And here is Derek's take on Art Tatum's take on "Tiger Rag." DP: "Tiger Rag." (Music: "Tiger Rag") (Applause)

The day I left home for the first time to go to university was a bright day brimming with hope and optimism. I'd done well at school. Expectations for me were high, and I gleefully entered the student life of lectures, parties and traffic cone theft. Now appearances, of course, can be deceptive, and to an extent, this feisty, energetic persona of lecture-going and traffic cone stealing was a veneer, albeit a very well-crafted and convincing one. Underneath, I was actually deeply unhappy, insecure and fundamentally frightened -- frightened of other people, of the future, of failure and of the emptiness that I felt was within me. But I was skilled at hiding it, and from the outside appeared to be someone with everything to hope for and aspire to. This fantasy of invulnerability was so complete that I even deceived myself, and as the first semester ended and the second began, there was no way that anyone could have predicted what was just about to happen. I was leaving a seminar when it started, humming to myself, fumbling with my bag just as I'd done a hundred times before, when suddenly I heard a voice calmly observe, "She is leaving the room." I looked around, and there was no one there, but the clarity and decisiveness of the comment was unmistakable. Shaken, I left my books on the stairs and hurried home, and there it was again. "She is opening the door." This was the beginning. The voice had arrived. And the voice persisted, days and then weeks of it, on and on, narrating everything I did in the third person. "She is going to the library." "She is going to a lecture." It was neutral, impassive and even, after a while, strangely companionate and reassuring, although I did notice that its calm exterior sometimes slipped and that it occasionally mirrored my own unexpressed emotion. So, for example, if I was angry and had to hide it, which I often did, being very adept at concealing how I really felt, then the voice would sound frustrated. Otherwise, it was neither sinister nor disturbing, although even at that point it was clear that it had something to communicate to me about my emotions, particularly emotions which were remote and inaccessible. Now it was then that I made a fatal mistake, in that I told a friend about the voice, and she was horrified. A subtle conditioning process had begun, the implication that normal people don't hear voices and the fact that I did meant that something was very seriously wrong. Such fear and mistrust was infectious. Suddenly the voice didn't seem quite so benign anymore, and when she insisted that I seek medical attention, I duly complied, and which proved to be mistake number two. I spent some time telling the college G.P. about what I perceived to be the real problem: anxiety, low self-worth, fears about the future, and was met with bored indifference until I mentioned the voice, upon which he dropped his pen, swung round and began to question me with a show of real interest. And to be fair, I was desperate for interest and help, and I began to tell him about my strange commentator. And I always wish, at this point, the voice had said, "She is digging her own grave." I was referred to a psychiatrist, who likewise took a grim view of the voice's presence, subsequently interpreting everything I said through a lens of latent insanity. For example, I was part of a student TV station that broadcast news bulletins around the campus, and during an appointment which was running very late, I said, "I'm sorry, doctor, I've got to go. I'm reading the news at six." Now it's down on my medical records that Eleanor has delusions that she's a television news broadcaster. It was at this point that events began to rapidly overtake me. A hospital admission followed, the first of many, a diagnosis of schizophrenia came next, and then, worst of all, a toxic, tormenting sense of hopelessness, humiliation and despair about myself and my prospects. But having been encouraged to see the voice not as an experience but as a symptom, my fear and resistance towards it intensified. Now essentially, this represented taking an aggressive stance towards my own mind, a kind of psychic civil war, and in turn this caused the number of voices to increase and grow progressively hostile and menacing. Helplessly and hopelessly, I began to retreat into this nightmarish inner world in which the voices were destined to become both my persecutors and my only perceived companions. They told me, for example, that if I proved myself worthy of their help, then they could change my life back to how it had been, and a series of increasingly bizarre tasks was set, a kind of labor of Hercules. It started off quite small, for example, pull out three strands of hair, but gradually it grew more extreme, culminating in commands to harm myself, and a particularly dramatic instruction: "You see that tutor over there? You see that glass of water? Well, you have to go over and pour it over him in front of the other students." Which I actually did, and which needless to say did not endear me to the faculty. In effect, a vicious cycle of fear, avoidance, mistrust and misunderstanding had been established, and this was a battle in which I felt powerless and incapable of establishing any kind of peace or reconciliation. Two years later, and the deterioration was dramatic. By now, I had the whole frenzied repertoire: terrifying voices, grotesque visions, bizarre, intractable delusions. My mental health status had been a catalyst for discrimination, verbal abuse, and physical and sexual assault, and I'd been told by my psychiatrist, "Eleanor, you'd be better off with cancer, because cancer is easier to cure than schizophrenia." I'd been diagnosed, drugged and discarded, and was by now so tormented by the voices that I attempted to drill a hole in my head in order to get them out. Now looking back on the wreckage and despair of those years, it seems to me now as if someone died in that place, and yet, someone else was saved. A broken and haunted person began that journey, but the person who emerged was a survivor and would ultimately grow into the person I was destined to be. Many people have harmed me in my life, and I remember them all, but the memories grow pale and faint in comparison with the people who've helped me. The fellow survivors, the fellow voice-hearers, the comrades and collaborators; the mother who never gave up on me, who knew that one day I would come back to her and was willing to wait for me for as long as it took; the doctor who only worked with me for a brief time but who reinforced his belief that recovery was not only possible but inevitable, and during a devastating period of relapse told my terrified family, "Don't give up hope. I believe that Eleanor can get through this. Sometimes, you know, it snows as late as May, but summer always comes eventually." Fourteen minutes is not enough time to fully credit those good and generous people who fought with me and for me and who waited to welcome me back from that agonized, lonely place. But together, they forged a blend of courage, creativity, integrity, and an unshakeable belief that my shattered self could become healed and whole. I used to say that these people saved me, but what I now know is they did something even more important in that they empowered me to save myself, and crucially, they helped me to understand something which I'd always suspected: that my voices were a meaningful response to traumatic life events, particularly childhood events, and as such were not my enemies but a source of insight into solvable emotional problems. Now, at first, this was very difficult to believe, not least because the voices appeared so hostile and menacing, so in this respect, a vital first step was learning to separate out a metaphorical meaning from what I'd previously interpreted to be a literal truth. So for example, voices which threatened to attack my home I learned to interpret as my own sense of fear and insecurity in the world, rather than an actual, objective danger. Now at first, I would have believed them. I remember, for example, sitting up one night on guard outside my parents' room to protect them from what I thought was a genuine threat from the voices. Because I'd had such a bad problem with self-injury that most of the cutlery in the house had been hidden, so I ended up arming myself with a plastic fork, kind of like picnic ware, and sort of sat outside the room clutching it and waiting to spring into action should anything happen. It was like, "Don't mess with me. I've got a plastic fork, don't you know?" Strategic. But a later response, and much more useful, would be to try and deconstruct the message behind the words, so when the voices warned me not to leave the house, then I would thank them for drawing my attention to how unsafe I felt -- because if I was aware of it, then I could do something positive about it -- but go on to reassure both them and myself that we were safe and didn't need to feel frightened anymore. I would set boundaries for the voices, and try to interact with them in a way that was assertive yet respectful, establishing a slow process of communication and collaboration in which we could learn to work together and support one another. Throughout all of this, what I would ultimately realize was that each voice was closely related to aspects of myself, and that each of them carried overwhelming emotions that I'd never had an opportunity to process or resolve, memories of sexual trauma and abuse, of anger, shame, guilt, low self-worth. The voices took the place of this pain and gave words to it, and possibly one of the greatest revelations was when I realized that the most hostile and aggressive voices actually represented the parts of me that had been hurt most profoundly, and as such, it was these voices that needed to be shown the greatest compassion and care. It was armed with this knowledge that ultimately I would gather together my shattered self, each fragment represented by a different voice, gradually withdraw from all my medication, and return to psychiatry, only this time from the other side. Ten years after the voice first came, I finally graduated, this time with the highest degree in psychology the university had ever given, and one year later, the highest masters, which shall we say isn't bad for a madwoman. In fact, one of the voices actually dictated the answers during the exam, which technically possibly counts as cheating. (Laughter) And to be honest, sometimes I quite enjoyed their attention as well. As Oscar Wilde has said, the only thing worse than being talked about is not being talked about. It also makes you very good at eavesdropping, because you can listen to two conversations simultaneously. So it's not all bad. I worked in mental health services, I spoke at conferences, I published book chapters and academic articles, and I argued, and continue to do so, the relevance of the following concept: that an important question in psychiatry shouldn't be what's wrong with you but rather what's happened to you. And all the while, I listened to my voices, with whom I'd finally learned to live with peace and respect and which in turn reflected a growing sense of compassion, acceptance and respect towards myself. And I remember the most moving and extraordinary moment when supporting another young woman who was terrorized by her voices, and becoming fully aware, for the very first time, that I no longer felt that way myself but was finally able to help someone else who was. I'm now very proud to be a part of Intervoice, the organizational body of the International Hearing Voices Movement, an initiative inspired by the work of Professor Marius Romme and Dr. Sandra Escher, which locates voice hearing as a survival strategy, a sane reaction to insane circumstances, not as an aberrant symptom of schizophrenia to be endured, but a complex, significant and meaningful experience to be explored. Together, we envisage and enact a society that understands and respects voice hearing, supports the needs of individuals who hear voices, and which values them as full citizens. This type of society is not only possible, it's already on its way. To paraphrase Chavez, once social change begins, it cannot be reversed. You cannot humiliate the person who feels pride. You cannot oppress the people who are not afraid anymore. For me, the achievements of the Hearing Voices Movement are a reminder that empathy, fellowship, justice and respect are more than words; they are convictions and beliefs, and that beliefs can change the world. In the last 20 years, the Hearing Voices Movement has established hearing voices networks in 26 countries across five continents, working together to promote dignity, solidarity and empowerment for individuals in mental distress, to create a new language and practice of hope, which, at its very center, lies an unshakable belief in the power of the individual. As Peter Levine has said, the human animal is a unique being endowed with an instinctual capacity to heal and the intellectual spirit to harness this innate capacity. In this respect, for members of society, there is no greater honor or privilege than facilitating that process of healing for someone, to bear witness, to reach out a hand, to share the burden of someone's suffering, and to hold the hope for their recovery. And likewise, for survivors of distress and adversity, that we remember we don't have to live our lives forever defined by the damaging things that have happened to us. We are unique. We are irreplaceable. What lies within us can never be truly colonized, contorted, or taken away. The light never goes out. As a very wonderful doctor once said to me, "Don't tell me what other people have told you about yourself. Tell me about you." Thank you. (Applause)

I moved back home 15 years ago after a 20-year stay in the United States, and Africa called me back. And I founded my country's first graphic design and new media college. And I called it the Zimbabwe Institute of Vigital Arts. The idea, the dream, was really for a sort of Bauhaus sort of school where new ideas were interrogated and investigated, the creation of a new visual language based on the African creative heritage. We offer a two-year diploma to talented students who have successfully completed their high school education. And typography's a very important part of the curriculum and we encourage our students to look inward for influence. Here's a poster designed by one of the students under the theme "Education is a right." Some logos designed by my students. Africa has had a long tradition of writing, but this is not such a well-known fact, and I wrote the book "Afrikan Alphabets" to address that. The different types of writing in Africa, first was proto-writing, as illustrated by Nsibidi, which is the writing system of a secret society of the Ejagham people in southern Nigeria. So it's a special-interest writing system. The Akan of people of Ghana and [Cote d'Ivoire] developed Adinkra symbols some 400 years ago, and these are proverbs, historical sayings, objects, animals, plants, and my favorite Adinkra system is the first one at the top on the left. It's called Sankofa. It means, "Return and get it." Learn from the past. This pictograph by the Jokwe people of Angola tells the story of the creation of the world. At the top is God, at the bottom is man, mankind, and on the left is the sun, on the right is the moon. All the paths lead to and from God. These secret societies of the Yoruba, Kongo and Palo religions in Nigeria, Congo and Angola respectively, developed this intricate writing system which is alive and well today in the New World in Cuba, Brazil and Trinidad and Haiti. In the rainforests of the Democratic Republic of Congo, in the Ituri society, the men pound out a cloth out of a special tree, and the women, who are also the praise singers, paint interweaving patterns that are the same in structure as the polyphonic structures that they use in their singing -- a sort of a musical score, if you may. In South Africa, Ndebele women use these symbols and other geometric patterns to paint their homes in bright colors, and the Zulu women use the symbols in the beads that they weave into bracelets and necklaces. Ethiopia has had the longest tradition of writing, with the Ethiopic script that was developed in the fourth century A.D. and is used to write Amharic, which is spoken by over 24 million people. King Ibrahim Njoya of the Bamum Kingdom of Cameroon developed Shü-mom at the age of 25. Shü-mom is a writing system. It's a syllabary. It's not exactly an alphabet. And here we see three stages of development that it went through in 30 years. The Vai people of Liberia had a long tradition of literacy before their first contact with Europeans in the 1800s. It's a syllabary and reads from left to right. Next door, in Sierra Leone, the Mende also developed a syllabary, but theirs reads from right to left. Africa has had a long tradition of design, a well-defined design sensibility, but the problem in Africa has been that, especially today, designers in Africa struggle with all forms of design because they are more apt to look outward for influence and inspiration. The creative spirit in Africa, the creative tradition, is as potent as it has always been, if only designers could look within. This Ethiopic cross illustrates what Dr. Ron Eglash has established: that Africa has a lot to contribute to computing and mathematics through their intuitive grasp of fractals. Africans of antiquity created civilization, and their monuments, which still stand today, are a true testimony of their greatness. Most probably, one of humanity's greatest achievements is the invention of the alphabet, and that has been attributed to Mesopotamia with their invention of cuneiform in 1600 BC, followed by hieroglyphics in Egypt, and that story has been cast in stone as historical fact. That is, until 1998, when one Yale professor John Coleman Darnell discovered these inscriptions in the Thebes desert on the limestone cliffs in western Egypt, and these have been dated at between 1800 and 1900 B.C., centuries before Mesopotamia. Called Wadi el-Hol because of the place that they were discovered, these inscriptions -- research is still going on, a few of them have been deciphered, but there is consensus among scholars that this is really humanity's first alphabet. Over here, you see a paleographic chart that shows what has been deciphered so far, starting with the letter A, "ālep," at the top, and "bêt," in the middle, and so forth. It is time that students of design in Africa read the works of titans like Cheikh Anta Diop, Senegal's Cheikh Anta Diop, whose seminal work on Egypt is vindicated by this discovery. The last word goes to the great Jamaican leader Marcus Mosiah Garvey and the Akan people of Ghana with their Adinkra symbol Sankofa, which encourages us to go to the past so as to inform our present and build on a future for us and our children. It is also time that designers in Africa stop looking outside. They've been looking outward for a long time, yet what they were looking for has been right there within grasp, right within them. Thank you very much. (Applause)

In an age of global strife and climate change, I'm here to answer the all important question: Why is sex so damn good? If you're laughing, you know what I mean. Now, before we get to that answer, let me tell you about Chris Hosmer. Chris is a great friend of mine from my university days, but secretly, I hate him. Here's why. Back in university, we had a quick project to design some solar-powered clocks. Here's my clock. It uses something called the dwarf sunflower, which grows to about 12 inches in height. Now, as you know, sunflowers track the sun during the course of the day. So in the morning, you see which direction the sunflower is facing, and you mark it on the blank area in the base. At noon, you mark the changed position of the sunflower, and in the evening again, and that's your clock. Now, I know my clock doesn't tell you the exact time, but it does give you a general idea using a flower. So, in my completely unbiased, subjective opinion, it's brilliant. However, here's Chris' clock. It's five magnifying glasses with a shot glass under each one. In each shot glass is a different scented oil. In the morning, the sunlight will shine down on the first magnifying glass, focusing a beam of light on the shot glass underneath. This will warm up the scented oil inside, and a particular smell will be emitted. A couple of hours later, the sun will shine on the next magnifying glass, and a different smell will be emitted. So during the course of the day, five different smells are dispersed throughout that environment. Anyone living in that house can tell the time just by the smell. You can see why I hate Chris. I thought my idea was pretty good, but his idea is genius, and at the time, I knew his idea was better than mine, but I just couldn't explain why. One thing you have to know about me is I hate to lose. This problem's been bugging me for well over a decade. All right, let's get back to the question of why sex is so good. Many years after the solar powered clocks project, a young lady I knew suggested maybe sex is so good because of the five senses. And when she said this, I had an epiphany. So I decided to evaluate different experiences I had in my life from the point of view of the five senses. To do this, I devised something called the five senses graph. Along the y-axis, you have a scale from zero to 10, and along the x-axis, you have, of course, the five senses. Anytime I had a memorable experience in my life, I would record it on this graph like a five senses diary. Here's a quick video to show you how it works. (Video) Jinsop Lee: Hey, my name's Jinsop, and today, I'm going to show you what riding motorbikes is like from the point of view of the five senses. Hey! Bike designer: This is [unclear], custom bike designer. (Motorcyle revving) [Sound] [Touch] [Sight] [Smell] [Taste] JL: And that's how the five senses graph works. Now, for a period of three years, I gathered data, not just me but also some of my friends, and I used to teach in university, so I forced my -- I mean, I asked my students to do this as well. So here are some other results. The first is for instant noodles. Now obviously, taste and smell are quite high, but notice sound is at three. Many people told me a big part of the noodle-eating experience is the slurping noise. You know. (Slurps) Needless to say, I no longer dine with these people. Okay, next, clubbing. Okay, here what I found interesting was that taste is at four, and many respondents told me it's because of the taste of drinks, but also, in some cases, kissing is a big part of the clubbing experience. These people I still do hang out with. All right, and smoking. Here I found touch is at [six], and one of the reasons is that smokers told me the sensation of holding a cigarette and bringing it up to your lips is a big part of the smoking experience, which shows, it's kind of scary to think how well cigarettes are designed by the manufacturers. Okay. Now, what would the perfect experience look like on the five senses graph? It would, of course, be a horizontal line along the top. Now you can see, not even as intense an experience as riding a motorbike comes close. In fact, in the years that I gathered data, only one experience came close to being the perfect one. That is, of course, sex. Great sex. Respondents said that great sex hits all of the five senses at an extreme level. Here I'll quote one of my students who said, "Sex is so good, it's good even when it's bad." So the five senses theory does help explain why sex is so good. Now in the middle of all this five senses work, I suddenly remembered the solar-powered clocks project from my youth. And I realized this theory also explains why Chris' clock is so much better than mine. You see, my clock only focuses on sight, and a little bit of touch. Here's Chris' clock. It's the first clock ever that uses smell to tell the time. In fact, in terms of the five senses, Chris' clock is a revolution. And that's what this theory taught me about my field. You see, up till now, us designers, we've mainly focused on making things look very pretty, and a little bit of touch, which means we've ignored the other three senses. Chris' clock shows us that even raising just one of those other senses can make for a brilliant product. So what if we started using the five senses theory in all of our designs? Here's three quick ideas I came up with. This is an iron, you know, for your clothes, to which I added a spraying mechanism, so you fill up the vial with your favorite scent, and your clothes will smell nicer, but hopefully it should also make the ironing experience more enjoyable. We could call this "the perfumator." All right, next. So I brush my teeth twice a day, and what if we had a toothbrush that tastes like candy, and when the taste of candy ran out, you'd know it's time to change your toothbrush? Finally, I have a thing for the keys on a flute or a clarinet. It's not just the way they look, but I love the way they feel when you press down on them. Now, I don't play the flute or the clarinet, so I decided to combine these keys with an instrument I do play: the television remote control. Now, when we look at these three ideas together, you'll notice that the five senses theory doesn't only change the way we use these products but also the way they look. So in conclusion, I've found the five senses theory to be a very useful tool in evaluating different experiences in my life, and then taking those best experiences and hopefully incorporating them into my designs. Now, I realize the five senses isn't the only thing that makes life interesting. There's also the six emotions and that elusive x-factor. Maybe that could be the topic of my next talk. Until then, please have fun using the five senses in your own lives and your own designs. Oh, one last thing before I leave. Here's the experience you all had while listening to the TED Talks. However, it would be better if we could boost up a couple of the other senses like smell and taste. And the best way to do that is with free candy. You guys ready? All right. (Applause)

My name is Dan Cohen, and I am academic, as he said. And what that means is that I argue. It's an important part of my life, and I like to argue. And I'm not just an academic, I'm a philosopher, so I like to think that I'm actually pretty good at arguing. But I also like to think a lot about arguing. And thinking about arguing, I've come across some puzzles, and one of the puzzles is that as I've been thinking about arguing over the years, and it's been decades now, I've gotten better at arguing, but the more that I argue and the better I get at arguing, the more that I lose. And that's a puzzle. And the other puzzle is that I'm actually okay with that. Why is it that I'm okay with losing and why is it that I think that good arguers are actually better at losing? Well, there's some other puzzles. One is, why do we argue? Who benefits from arguments? And when I think about arguments now, I'm talking about, let's call them academic arguments or cognitive arguments, where something cognitive is at stake. Is this proposition true? Is this theory a good theory? Is this a viable interpretation of the data or the text? And so on. I'm not interested really in arguments about whose turn it is to do the dishes or who has to take out the garbage. Yeah, we have those arguments too. I tend to win those arguments, because I know the tricks. But those aren't the important arguments. I'm interested in academic arguments today, and here are the things that puzzle me. First, what do good arguers win when they win an argument? What do I win if I convince you that utilitarianism isn't really the right framework for thinking about ethical theories? So what do we win when we win an argument? Even before that, what does it matter to me whether you have this idea that Kant's theory works or Mill's the right ethicist to follow? It's no skin off my back whether you think functionalism is a viable theory of mind. So why do we even try to argue? Why do we try to convince other people to believe things that they don't want to believe? And is that even a nice thing to do? Is that a nice way to treat another human being, try and make them think something they don't want to think? Well, my answer is going to make reference to three models for arguments. The first model, let's call this the dialectical model, is that we think of arguments as war, and you know what that's like. There's a lot of screaming and shouting and winning and losing, and that's not really a very helpful model for arguing but it's a pretty common and entrenched model for arguing. But there's a second model for arguing: arguments as proofs. Think of a mathematician's argument. Here's my argument. Does it work? Is it any good? Are the premises warranted? Are the inferences valid? Does the conclusion follow from the premises? No opposition, no adversariality, not necessarily any arguing in the adversarial sense. But there's a third model to keep in mind that I think is going to be very helpful, and that is arguments as performances, arguments as being in front of an audience. We can think of a politician trying to present a position, trying to convince the audience of something. But there's another twist on this model that I really think is important, namely that when we argue before an audience, sometimes the audience has a more participatory role in the argument, that is, arguments are also audiences in front of juries who make a judgment and decide the case. Let's call this the rhetorical model, where you have to tailor your argument to the audience at hand. You know, presenting a sound, well-argued, tight argument in English before a francophone audience just isn't going to work. So we have these models -- argument as war, argument as proof, and argument as performance. Of those three, the argument as war is the dominant one. It dominates how we talk about arguments, it dominates how we think about arguments, and because of that, it shapes how we argue, our actual conduct in arguments. Now, when we talk about arguments, yeah, we talk in a very militaristic language. We want strong arguments, arguments that have a lot of punch, arguments that are right on target. We want to have our defenses up and our strategies all in order. We want killer arguments. That's the kind of argument we want. It is the dominant way of thinking about arguments. When I'm talking about arguments, that's probably what you thought of, the adversarial model. But the war metaphor, the war paradigm or model for thinking about arguments, has, I think, deforming effects on how we argue. First it elevates tactics over substance. You can take a class in logic, argumentation. You learn all about the subterfuges that people use to try and win arguments, the false steps. It magnifies the us-versus-them aspect of it. It makes it adversarial. It's polarizing. And the only foreseeable outcomes are triumph, glorious triumph, or abject, ignominious defeat. I think those are deforming effects, and worst of all, it seems to prevent things like negotiation or deliberation or compromise or collaboration. Think about that one. Have you ever entered an argument thinking, "Let's see if we can hash something out rather than fight it out. What can we work out together?" And I think the argument-as-war metaphor inhibits those other kinds of resolutions to argumentation. And finally, this is really the worst thing, arguments don't seem to get us anywhere. They're dead ends. They are roundabouts or traffic jams or gridlock in conversation. We don't get anywhere. Oh, and one more thing, and as an educator, this is the one that really bothers me: If argument is war, then there's an implicit equation of learning with losing. And let me explain what I mean. Suppose you and I have an argument. You believe a proposition, P, and I don't. And I say, "Well why do you believe P?" And you give me your reasons. And I object and say, "Well, what about ...?" And you answer my objection. And I have a question: "Well, what do you mean? How does it apply over here?" And you answer my question. Now, suppose at the end of the day, I've objected, I've questioned, I've raised all sorts of counter-considerations, and in every case you've responded to my satisfaction. And so at the end of the day, I say, "You know what? I guess you're right. P." So I have a new belief. And it's not just any belief, but it's a well-articulated, examined, it's a battle-tested belief. Great cognitive gain. Okay. Who won that argument? Well, the war metaphor seems to force us into saying you won, even though I'm the only one who made any cognitive gain. What did you gain cognitively from convincing me? Sure, you got some pleasure out of it, maybe your ego stroked, maybe you get some professional status in the field. This guy's a good arguer. But cognitively, now -- just from a cognitive point of view -- who was the winner? The war metaphor forces us into thinking that you're the winner and I lost, even though I gained. And there's something wrong with that picture. And that's the picture I really want to change if we can. So how can we find ways to make arguments yield something positive? What we need is new exit strategies for arguments. But we're not going to have new exit strategies for arguments until we have new entry approaches to arguments. We need to think of new kinds of arguments. In order to do that, well, I don't know how to do that. That's the bad news. The argument-as-war metaphor is just, it's a monster. It's just taken up habitation in our mind, and there's no magic bullet that's going to kill it. There's no magic wand that's going to make it disappear. I don't have an answer. But I have some suggestions, and here's my suggestion. If we want to think of new kinds of arguments, what we need to do is think of new kinds of arguers. So try this. Think of all the roles that people play in arguments. There's the proponent and the opponent in an adversarial, dialectical argument. There's the audience in rhetorical arguments. There's the reasoner in arguments as proofs. All these different roles. Now, can you imagine an argument in which you are the arguer, but you're also in the audience watching yourself argue? Can you imagine yourself watching yourself argue, losing the argument, and yet still, at the end of the argument, say, "Wow, that was a good argument." Can you do that? I think you can. And I think, if you can imagine that kind of argument where the loser says to the winner and the audience and the jury can say, "Yeah, that was a good argument," then you have imagined a good argument. And more than that, I think you've imagined a good arguer, an arguer that's worthy of the kind of arguer you should try to be. Now, I lose a lot of arguments. It takes practice to become a good arguer in the sense of being able to benefit from losing, but fortunately, I've had many, many colleagues who have been willing to step up and provide that practice for me. Thank you. (Applause)

I'd like you all to ask yourselves a question which you may never have asked yourselves before: What is possible with the human voice? What is possible with the human voice? (Beatboxing) ♪ Ooh baby ♪ ♪ baby ♪ ♪ baby ♪ ♪ baby ♪ (Baby crying) ♪ baby ♪ (Baby crying) ♪ baby ♪ (Cat meowing) (Dog barking) Yeah. (Applause) (Boomerang noises) It was coming straight for me. I had to. It was, yeah. As you can probably well imagine, I was a strange child. (Laughter) Because the thing is, I was constantly trying to extend my repertoire of noises to be the very maximum that it could be. I was constantly experimenting with these noises. And I'm still on that mission. I'm still trying to find every noise that I can possibly make. And the thing is, I'm a bit older and wiser now, and I know that there's some noises I'll never be able to make because I'm hemmed in by my physical body, and there's things it can't do. And there's things that no one's voice can do. For example, no one can do two notes at the same time. You can do two-tone singing, which monks can do, which is like... (Two-tone singing) But that's cheating. And it hurts your throat. So there's things you can't do, and these limitations on the human voice have always really annoyed me, because beatbox is the best way of getting musical ideas out of your head and into the world, but they're sketches at best, which is what's annoyed me. If only, if only there was a way for these ideas to come out unimpeded by the restrictions which my body gives it. So I've been working with these guys, and we've made a machine. We've made a system which is basically a live production machine, a real-time music production machine, and it enables me to, using nothing but my voice, create music in real time as I hear it in my head unimpeded by any physical restrictions that my body might place on me. And I'm going to show you what it can do. And before I start making noises with it, and using it to manipulate my voice, I want to reiterate that everything that you're about to hear is being made by my voice. This system has -- thank you, beautiful assistant -- this system has no sounds in it itself until I start putting sounds in it, so there's no prerecorded samples of any kind. So once this thing really gets going, and it really starts to mangle the audio I'm putting into it, it becomes not obvious that it is the human voice, but it is, so I'm going to take you through it bit by bit and start nice and simple. So the polyphony problem: I've only got one voice. How do I get around the problem of really wanting to have as many different voices going on at the same time. The simplest way to do it is something like this. (Beatboxing) By dancing. It's like this. (Music) Thanks. (Applause) So that's probably the easiest way. But if you want to do something a little bit more immediate, something that you can't achieve with live looping, there's other ways to layer your voice up. There's things like pitch-shifting, which are awesome, and I'm going to show you now what that sounds like. So I'm going to start another beat for you, like this. (Beatboxing) There's always got to be a bit of a dance at the start, because it's just fun, so you can clap along if you want. You don't have to. It's fine. Check it out. I'm going to lay down a bass sound now. (Music) And now, a rockabilly guitar. Which is nice. But what if I want to make, say, a -- (Applause) -- Thanks. What if I want to make, say, a rock organ? Is that possible? Yes, it is, by recording myself like this. (Organ sound) And now I have that, I have that recorded. Assign it to a keyboard. (Music) So that's cool. (Applause) But what if I wanted to sound like the whole of Pink Floyd? Impossible, you say. No. It is possible, and you can do it very simply using this machine. It's really fantastic. Check it out. (Music) So every noise you can hear there is my voice. I didn't just trigger something which sounds like that. There's no samples. There's no synthesizers. That is literally all my voice being manipulated, and when you get to that point, you have to ask, don't you, what's the point? Why do this? (Laughter) Because it's cheaper than hiring the whole of Pink Floyd, I suppose, is the easy answer. But in actual fact, I haven't made this machine so that I can emulate things that already exist. I've made this so that I can make any noise that I can imagine. So with your permission, I'm going to do some things that are in my mind, and I hope you enjoy them, because they're rather unusual, especially when you're doing things which are as unusual as this, it can be hard to believe that it is all my voice, you see. (Voice effects) (Music) Like this. (Music) So, loosely defined, that is what's possible with the human voice. Thank you very much, ladies and gentlemen. (Applause)

Motor racing is a funny old business. We make a new car every year, and then we spend the rest of the season trying to understand what it is we've built to make it better, to make it faster. And then the next year, we start again. Now, the car you see in front of you is quite complicated. The chassis is made up of about 11,000 components, the engine another 6,000, the electronics about eight and a half thousand. So there's about 25,000 things there that can go wrong. So motor racing is very much about attention to detail. The other thing about Formula 1 in particular is we're always changing the car. We're always trying to make it faster. So every two weeks, we will be making about 5,000 new components to fit to the car. Five to 10 percent of the race car will be different every two weeks of the year. So how do we do that? Well, we start our life with the racing car. We have a lot of sensors on the car to measure things. On the race car in front of you here there are about 120 sensors when it goes into a race. It's measuring all sorts of things around the car. That data is logged. We're logging about 500 different parameters within the data systems, about 13,000 health parameters and events to say when things are not working the way they should do, and we're sending that data back to the garage using telemetry at a rate of two to four megabits per second. So during a two-hour race, each car will be sending 750 million numbers. That's twice as many numbers as words that each of us speaks in a lifetime. It's a huge amount of data. But it's not enough just to have data and measure it. You need to be able to do something with it. So we've spent a lot of time and effort in turning the data into stories to be able to tell, what's the state of the engine, how are the tires degrading, what's the situation with fuel consumption? So all of this is taking data and turning it into knowledge that we can act upon. Okay, so let's have a look at a little bit of data. Let's pick a bit of data from another three-month-old patient. This is a child, and what you're seeing here is real data, and on the far right-hand side, where everything starts getting a little bit catastrophic, that is the patient going into cardiac arrest. It was deemed to be an unpredictable event. This was a heart attack that no one could see coming. But when we look at the information there, we can see that things are starting to become a little fuzzy about five minutes or so before the cardiac arrest. We can see small changes in things like the heart rate moving. These were all undetected by normal thresholds which would be applied to data. So the question is, why couldn't we see it? Was this a predictable event? Can we look more at the patterns in the data to be able to do things better? So this is a child, about the same age as the racing car on stage, three months old. It's a patient with a heart problem. Now, when you look at some of the data on the screen above, things like heart rate, pulse, oxygen, respiration rates, they're all unusual for a normal child, but they're quite normal for the child there, and so one of the challenges you have in health care is, how can I look at the patient in front of me, have something which is specific for her, and be able to detect when things start to change, when things start to deteriorate? Because like a racing car, any patient, when things start to go bad, you have a short time to make a difference. So what we did is we took a data system which we run every two weeks of the year in Formula 1 and we installed it on the hospital computers at Birmingham Children's Hospital. We streamed data from the bedside instruments in their pediatric intensive care so that we could both look at the data in real time and, more importantly, to store the data so that we could start to learn from it. And then, we applied an application on top which would allow us to tease out the patterns in the data in real time so we could see what was happening, so we could determine when things started to change. Now, in motor racing, we're all a little bit ambitious, audacious, a little bit arrogant sometimes, so we decided we would also look at the children as they were being transported to intensive care. Why should we wait until they arrived in the hospital before we started to look? And so we installed a real-time link between the ambulance and the hospital, just using normal 3G telephony to send that data so that the ambulance became an extra bed in intensive care. And then we started looking at the data. So the wiggly lines at the top, all the colors, this is the normal sort of data you would see on a monitor -- heart rate, pulse, oxygen within the blood, and respiration. The lines on the bottom, the blue and the red, these are the interesting ones. The red line is showing an automated version of the early warning score that Birmingham Children's Hospital were already running. They'd been running that since 2008, and already have stopped cardiac arrests and distress within the hospital. The blue line is an indication of when patterns start to change, and immediately, before we even started putting in clinical interpretation, we can see that the data is speaking to us. It's telling us that something is going wrong. The plot with the red and the green blobs, this is plotting different components of the data against each other. The green is us learning what is normal for that child. We call it the cloud of normality. And when things start to change, when conditions start to deteriorate, we move into the red line. There's no rocket science here. It is displaying data that exists already in a different way, to amplify it, to provide cues to the doctors, to the nurses, so they can see what's happening. In the same way that a good racing driver relies on cues to decide when to apply the brakes, when to turn into a corner, we need to help our physicians and our nurses to see when things are starting to go wrong. So we have a very ambitious program. We think that the race is on to do something differently. We are thinking big. It's the right thing to do. We have an approach which, if it's successful, there's no reason why it should stay within a hospital. It can go beyond the walls. With wireless connectivity these days, there is no reason why patients, doctors and nurses always have to be in the same place at the same time. And meanwhile, we'll take our little three-month-old baby, keep taking it to the track, keeping it safe, and making it faster and better. Thank you very much. (Applause)

(Music) ["Oedipus Rex"] ["The Lion King"] ["Titus"] ["Frida"] ["The Magic Flute"] ["Across The Universe"] (Applause) Julie Taymor: Thank you. Thank you very much. That's a few samples of the theater, opera and films that I have done over the last 20 years. But what I'd like to begin with right now is to take you back to a moment that I went through in Indonesia, which is a seminal moment in my life and, like all myths, these stories need to be retold and told, lest we forget them. And when I'm in the turbulent times, as we know, that I am right now, through the crucible and the fire of transformation, which is what all of you do, actually. Anybody who creates knows there's that point where it hasn't quite become the phoenix or the burnt char. (Laughter) And I am right there on the edge, which I'll tell you about, another story. I want to go back to Indonesia where I was about 21, 22 years, a long time ago, on a fellowship. And I found myself, after two years there and performing and learning, on the island of Bali, on the edge of a crater, Gunung Batur. And I was in a village where there was an initiation ceremony for the young men, a rite of passage. Little did I know that it was mine as well. And as I sat in this temple square under this gigantic beringin banyan tree, in the dark, there was no electricity, just the full moon, down in this empty square, and I heard the most beautiful sounds, like a Charles Ives concert as I listened to the gamelan music from all the different villagers that came for this once-every-five-years ceremony. And I thought I was alone in the dark under this tree. And all of a sudden, out of the dark, from the other end of the square, I saw the glint of mirrors lit by the moon. And these 20 old men who I'd seen before all of a sudden stood up in these full warrior costumes with the headdress and the spears, and no one was in the square, and I was hidden in the shadows. No one was there, and they came out, and they did this incredible dance. "Huhuhuhuhuhuhuhahahahaha." And they moved their bodies and they came forward, and the lights bounced off these costumes. And I've been in theater since I was 11 years old, and performing, creating, and I went, "Who are they performing for with these elaborate costumes, these extraordinary headdresses?" And I realized that they were performing for God, whatever that means. But somehow, it didn't matter about the publicity. There was no money involved. It wasn't going to be written down. It was no news. And there were these incredible artists that felt for me like an eternity as they performed. The next moment, as soon as they finished and disappeared into the shadows, a young man with a propane lantern came on, hung it up on a tree, set up a curtain. The village square was filled with hundreds of people. And they put on an opera all night long. Human beings needed the light. They needed the light to see. So what I gained and gathered from this incredible, seminal moment in my life as a young artist was that you must be true to what you believe as an artist all the way through, but you also have to be aware that the audience is out there in our lives at this time, and they also need the light. And it's this incredible balance that I think that we walk when we are creating something that is breaking ground, that's trying to do something you've never seen before, that imaginary world where you actually don't know where you're going to end up, that's the fine line on the edge of a crater that I have walked my whole life. What I would like to do now is to tell you a little bit about how I work. Let's take "The Lion King." You saw many examples of my work up there, but it's one that people know. I start with the notion of the ideograph. An ideograph is like a brush painting, a Japanese brush painting. Three strokes, you get the whole bamboo forest. I go to the concept of "The Lion King" and I say, "What is the essence of it? What is the abstraction? If I were to reduce this entire story into one image, what would it be?" The circle. The circle. It's so obvious. The circle of life. The circle of Mufasa's mask. The circle that, when we come to Act II and there's a drought, how do you express drought? It's a circle of silk on the floor that disappears into the hole in the stage floor. The circle of life comes in the wheels of the gazelles that leap. And you see the mechanics. And being a theater person, what I know and love about the theater is that when the audience comes in and they suspend their disbelief, when you see men walking or women walking with a platter of grass on their heads, you know it's the savanna. You don't question that. I love the apparent truth of theater. I love that people are willing to fill in the blanks. The audience is willing to say, "Oh, I know that's not a real sun. You took pieces of sticks. You added silk to the bottom. You suspended these pieces. You let it fall flat on the floor. And as it rises with the strings, I see that it's a sun. But the beauty of it is that it's just silk and sticks. And in a way, that is what makes it spiritual. That's what moves you. It's not the actual literal sunrise that's coming. It's the art of it. So in the theater, as much as the story is critical and the book and the language, the telling of the story, how it's told, the mechanics, the methods that you use, is equal to the story itself. And I'm one who loves high tech and low tech. So I could go from -- For instance, I'll show you some "Spider-Man" later, these incredible machines that move people along. But the fact is, without the dancer who knows how to use his body and swing on those wires, it's nothing. So now I'm going to show you some clips from the other big project of my life this year, "The Tempest." It's a movie. I did "The Tempest" on a stage three times in the theater since 1984, '86, and I love the play. I did it always with a male Prospero. And all of a sudden, I thought, "Well, who am I gonna get to play Prospero? Why not Helen Mirren? She's a great actor. Why not?" And this material really did work for a woman equally as well. So now, let's take a look at some of the images from "The Tempest." (Music) (Video) Prospera: Hast thou, spirit, performed to the point the tempest that I bade thee? Ariel: I boarded the king's ship. In every cabin, I flamed amazement. Prospera: At first sight, they have changed eyes. Miranda: Do you love me? Ferdinand: Beyond all limit. HM: They are both in either's powers. Trinculo: Misery acquaints a man with strange bedfellows. (Music) Looking for business, governor? Caliban: Hast thou not dropped from heaven? Stephano: Out of the moon, I do assure thee. Prospera: Caliban! Caliban: This island is mine. Prospera: For this, be sure, tonight thou shalt have cramps. Antonio: Here lies your brother no better than the earth he lies upon. Sebastian: Draw thy sword. And I, the king, shall love thee. Prospera: I will plague them all, even to roaring. Ariel: I have made you mad. Prospera: We are such stuff as dreams are made on. and our little life is rounded with a sleep. (Music) JT: Okay. (Applause) So I went from theater, doing "The Tempest" on the stage in a very low-budget production many years ago, and I love the play, and I also think it's Shakespeare's last play, and it really lends itself, as you can see, to cinema. But I'm just going to give you a little example about how one stages it in theater and then how one takes that same idea or story and moves it into cinema. The ideograph that I talked to you about before, what is it for "The Tempest"? What, if I were to boil it down, would be the one image that I could hang my hat on for this? And it was the sand castle, the idea of nurture versus nature, that we build these civilizations -- she speaks about it at the end, Helen Mirren's Prospera -- we build them, but under nature, under the grand tempest, these cloud-capped towers, these gorgeous palaces will fade and there will -- leave not a rack behind. So in the theater, I started the play, it was a black sand rake, white cyc, and there was a little girl, Miranda, on the horizon, building a drip castle, a sand castle. And as she was there on the edge of that stage, two stagehands all in black with watering cans ran along the top and started to pour water on the sand castle, and the sand castle started to drip and sink, but before it did, the audience saw the black-clad stagehands. The medium was apparent. It was banal. We saw it. But as they started to pour the water, the light changed from showing you the black-clad stagehands to focusing, this rough magic that we do in theater, it focused right on the water itself. And all of a sudden, the audience's perspective changes. It becomes something magically large. It becomes the rainstorm. The masked actors, the puppeteers, they disappear, and the audience makes that leap into this world, into this imaginary world of "The Tempest" actually happening. Now the difference when I went and did it in the cinema, I started the actual movie with a close-up of a sand castle, a black sand castle, and what cinema can do is, by using camera, perspective, and also long shots and close-ups, it started on a close-up of the sand castle, and as it pulled away, you saw that it was a miniature sitting in the palm of the girl's hands. And so I could play with the medium, and why I move from one medium to another is to be able to do this. Now I'm going to take you to "Spider-Man." (Music) (Video) Peter Parker: ♪ Standing on the precipice, I can soar away from this. ♪ JT: We're trying to do everything in live theater that you can't do in two dimensions in film and television. PP: ♪ Rise above yourself and take control. ♪ George Tsypin: We're looking at New York from a Spider-Man point of view. Spider Man is not bound by gravity. Manhattan in the show is not bound by gravity either. PP: ♪ Be yourself and rise above it all. ♪ Ensemble: ♪ Sock! Pow! ♪ ♪ Slam! Scratch! ♪ Danny Ezralow: I don't want you to even think there's a choreographer. It's real, what's happening. I prefer you to see people moving, and you're going, "Whoa, what was that?" (Music) JT: If I give enough movement in the sculpture, and the actor moves their head, you feel like it's alive. It's really comic book live. It's a comic book coming alive. (Music) Bono: They're mythologies. They're modern myths, these comic book heroes. PP: ♪ They believe. ♪ (Screams) (Music) (Applause) JT: Ohhhh. What was that? Circus, rock 'n' roll, drama. What the hell are we doing up there on that stage? Well, one last story, very quickly. After I was in that village, I crossed the lake, and I saw that the volcano was erupting on the other side, Gunung Batur, and there was a dead volcano next to the live volcano. I didn't think I'd be swallowed by the volcano, and I am here. But it's very easy to climb up, is it not? You hold on to the roots, you put your foot in the little rocks and climb up there, and you get to the top, and I was with a good friend who was an actor, and we said, "Let's go up there. Let's see if we can come close to the edge of that live volcano." And we climbed up and we got to the very top, and we're on the edge, on this precipice, Roland disappears into the sulfur smoke at the volcano at the other end, and I'm up there alone on this incredible precipice. Did you hear the lyrics? I'm on the precipice looking down into a dead volcano to my left. To my right is sheer shale. It's coming off. I'm in thongs and sarongs. It was many years ago. And no hiking boots. And he's disappeared, this mad French gypsy actor, off in the smoke, and I realize, I can't go back the way that I've come. I can't. So I throw away my camera. I throw away my thongs, and I looked at the line straight in front of me, and I got down on all fours like a cat, and I held with my knees to either side of this line in front of me, for 30 yards or 30 feet, I don't know. The wind was massively blowing, and the only way I could get to the other side was to look at the line straight in front of me. I know you've all been there. I'm in the crucible right now. It's my trial by fire. It's my company's trials by fire. We survive because our theme song is "Rise Above." Boy falls from the sky, rise above. It's right there in the palm of both of our hands, of all of my company's hands. I have beautiful collaborators, and we as creators only get there all together. I know you understand that. And you just stay going forward, and then you see this extraordinary thing in front of your eyes. Thank you. (Applause)

This is an ambucycle. This is the fastest way to reach any medical emergency. It has everything an ambulance has except for a bed. You see the defibrillator. You see the equipment. We all saw the tragedy that happened in Boston. When I was looking at these pictures, it brought me back many years to my past when I was a child. I grew up in a small neighborhood in Jerusalem. When I was six years old, I was walking back from school on a Friday afternoon with my older brother. We were passing by a bus stop. We saw a bus blow up in front of our eyes. The bus was on fire, and many people were hurt and killed. I remembered an old man yelling to us and crying to help us get him up. He just needed someone helping him. We were so scared and we just ran away. Growing up, I decided I wanted to become a doctor and save lives. Maybe that was because of what I saw when I was a child. When I was 15, I took an EMT course, and I went to volunteer on an ambulance. For two years, I volunteered on an ambulance in Jerusalem. I helped many people, but whenever someone really needed help, I never got there in time. We never got there. The traffic is so bad. The distance, and everything. We never got there when somebody really needed us. One day, we received a call about a seven-year-old child choking from a hot dog. Traffic was horrific, and we were coming from the other side of town in the north part of Jerusalem. When we got there, 20 minutes later, we started CPR on the kid. A doctor comes in from a block away, stop us, checks the kid, and tells us to stop CPR. That second he declared this child dead. At that moment, I understood that this child died for nothing. If this doctor, who lived one block away from there, would have come 20 minutes earlier, not have to wait until that siren he heard before coming from the ambulance, if he would have heard about it way before, he would have saved this child. He could have run from a block away. He could have saved this child. I said to myself, there must be a better way. Together with 15 of my friends -- we were all EMTs — we decided, let's protect our neighborhood, so when something like that happens again, we will be there running to the scene a lot before the ambulance. So I went over to the manager of the ambulance company and I told him, "Please, whenever you have a call coming into our neighborhood, we have 15 great guys who are willing to stop everything they're doing and run and save lives. Just alert us by beeper. We'll buy these beepers, just tell your dispatch to send us the beeper, and we will run and save lives." Well, he was laughing. I was 17 years old. I was a kid. And he said to me — I remember this like yesterday — he was a great guy, but he said to me, "Kid, go to school, or go open a falafel stand. We're not really interested in these kinds of new adventures. We're not interested in your help." And he threw me out of the room. "I don't need your help," he said. I was a very stubborn kid. As you see now, I'm walking around like crazy, meshugenah. (Laughter) (Applause) So I decided to use the Israeli very famous technique you've probably all heard of, chutzpah. (Laughter) And the next day, I went and I bought two police scanners, and I said, "The hell with you, if you don't want to give me information, I'll get the information myself." And we did turns, who's going to listen to the radio scanners. The next day, while I was listening to the scanners, I heard about a call coming in of a 70-year-old man hurt by a car only one block away from me on the main street of my neighborhood. I ran there by foot. I had no medical equipment. When I got there, the 70-year-old man was lying on the floor, blood was gushing out of his neck. He was on Coumadin. I knew I had to stop his bleeding or else he would die. I took off my yarmulke, because I had no medical equipment, and with a lot of pressure, I stopped his bleeding. He was bleeding from his neck. When the ambulance arrived 15 minutes later, I gave them over a patient who was alive. (Applause) When I went to visit him two days later, he gave me a hug and was crying and thanking me for saving his life. At that moment, when I realized this is the first person I ever saved in my life after two years volunteering in an ambulance, I knew this is my life's mission. So today, 22 years later, we have United Hatzalah. (Applause) "Hatzalah" means "rescue," for all of you who don't know Hebrew. I forgot I'm not in Israel. So we have thousands of volunteers who are passionate about saving lives, and they're spread all around, so whenever a call comes in, they just stop everything and go and run and save a life. Our average response time today went down to less than three minutes in Israel. (Applause) I'm talking about heart attacks, I'm talking about car accidents, God forbid bomb attacks, shootings, whatever it is, even a woman 3 o'clock in the morning falling in her home and needs someone to help her. Three minutes, we'll have a guy with his pajamas running to her house and helping her get up. The reasons why we're so successful are because of three things. Thousands of passionate volunteers who will leave everything they do and run to help people they don't even know. We're not there to replace ambulances. We're just there to get the gap between the ambulance call until they arrive. And we save people that otherwise would not be saved. The second reason is because of our technology. You know, Israelis are good in technology. Every one of us has on his phone, no matter what kind of phone, a GPS technology done by NowForce, and whenever a call comes in, the closest five volunteers get the call, and they actually get there really quick, and navigated by a traffic navigator to get there and not waste time. And this is a great technology we use all over the country and reduce the response time. And the third thing are these ambucycles. These ambucycles are an ambulance on two wheels. We don't transfer people, but we stabilize them, and we save their lives. They never get stuck in traffic. They could even go on a sidewalk. They never, literally, get stuck in traffic. That's why we get there so fast. A few years after I started this organization, in a Jewish community, two Muslims from east Jerusalem called me up. They ask me to meet. They wanted to meet with me. Muhammad Asli and Murad Alyan. When Muhammad told me his personal story, how his father, 55 years old, collapsed at home, had a cardiac arrest, and it took over an hour for an ambulance arrive, and he saw his father die in front of his eyes, he asked me, "Please start this in east Jerusalem." I said to myself, I saw so much tragedy, so much hate, and it's not about saving Jews. It's not about saving Muslims. It's not about saving Christians. It's about saving people. So I went ahead, full force -- (Applause) — and I started United Hatzalah in east Jerusalem, and that's why the names United and Hatzalah match so well. We started hand in hand saving Jews and Arabs. Arabs were saving Jews. Jews were saving Arabs. Something special happened. Arabs and Jews, they don't always get along together, but here in this situation, the communities, literally, it's an unbelievable situation that happened, the diversities, all of a sudden they had a common interest: Let's save lives together. Settlers were saving Arabs and Arabs were saving settlers. It's an unbelievable concept that could work only when you have such a great cause. And these are all volunteers. No one is getting money. They're all doing it for the purpose of saving lives. When my own father collapsed a few years ago from a cardiac arrest, one of the first volunteers to arrive to save my father was one of these Muslim volunteers from east Jerusalem who was in the first course to join Hatzalah. And he saved my father. Could you imagine how I felt in that moment? When I started this organization, I was 17 years old. I never imagined that one day I'd be speaking at TEDMED. I never even knew what TEDMED was then. I don't think it existed, but I never imagined, I never imagined that it's going to go all around, it's going to spread around, and this last year we started in Panama and Brazil. All I need is a partner who is a little meshugenah like me, passionate about saving lives, and willing to do it. And I'm actually starting it in India very soon with a friend who I met in Harvard just a while back. Hatzalah actually started in Brooklyn by a Hasidic Jew years before us in Williamsburg, and now it's all over the Jewish community in New York, even Australia and Mexico and many other Jewish communities. But it could spread everywhere. It's very easy to adopt. You even saw these volunteers in New York saving lives in the World Trade Center. Last year alone, we treated in Israel 207,000 people. Forty-two thousand of them were life-threatening situations. And we made a difference. I guess you could call this a lifesaving flash mob, and it works. When I look all around here, I see lots of people who would go an extra mile, run an extra mile to save other people, no matter who they are, no matter what religion, no matter who, where they come from. We all want to be heroes. We just need a good idea, motivation and lots of chutzpah, and we could save millions of people that otherwise would not be saved. Thank you very much. (Applause)

What do we know about the future? Difficult question, simple answer: nothing. We cannot predict the future. We only can create a vision of the future, how it might be, a vision which reveals disruptive ideas, which is inspiring, and this is the most important reason which breaks the chains of common thinking. There are a lot of people who created their own vision about the future, for instance, this vision here from the early 20th century. It says here that this is the ocean plane of the future. It takes only one and a half days to cross the Atlantic Ocean. Today, we know that this future vision didn't come true. So this is our largest airplane which we have, the Airbus A380, and it's quite huge, so a lot of people fit in there and it's technically completely different than the vision I've shown to you. I'm working in a team with Airbus, and we have created our vision about a more sustainable future of aviation. So sustainability is quite important for us, which should incorporate social but as well as environmental and economic values. So we have created a very disruptive structure which mimics the design of bone, or a skeleton, which occurs in nature. So that's why it looks maybe a little bit weird, especially to the people who deal with structures in general. But at least it's just a kind of artwork to explore our ideas about a different future. What are the main customers of the future? So, we have the old, we have the young, we have the uprising power of women, and there's one mega-trend which affects all of us. These are the future anthropometrics. So our children are getting larger, but at the same time we are growing into different directions. So what we need is space inside the aircraft, inside a very dense area. These people have different needs. So we see a clear need of active health promotion, especially in the case of the old people. We want to be treated as individuals. We like to be productive throughout the entire travel chain, and what we are doing in the future is we want to use the latest man-machine interface, and we want to integrate this and show this in one product. So we combined these needs with technology's themes. So for instance, we are asking ourselves, how can we create more light? How can we bring more natural light into the airplane? So this airplane has no windows anymore, for example. What about the data and communication software which we need in the future? My belief is that the airplane of the future will get its own consciousness. It will be more like a living organism than just a collection of very complex technology. This will be very different in the future. It will communicate directly with the passenger in its environment. And then we are talking also about materials, synthetic biology, for example. And my belief is that we will get more and more new materials which we can put into structure later on, because structure is one of the key issues in aircraft design. So let's compare the old world with the new world. I just want to show you here what we are doing today. So this is a bracket of an A380 crew rest compartment. It takes a lot of weight, and it follows the classical design rules. This here is an equal bracket for the same purpose. It follows the design of bone. The design process is completely different. At the one hand, we have 1.2 kilos, and at the other hand 0.6 kilos. So this technology, 3D printing, and new design rules really help us to reduce the weight, which is the biggest issue in aircraft design, because it's directly linked to greenhouse gas emissions. Push this idea a little bit forward. So how does nature build its components and structures? So nature is very clever. It puts all the information into these small building blocks, which we call DNA. And nature builds large skeletons out of it. So we see a bottom-up approach here, because all the information, as I said, are inside the DNA. And this is combined with a top-down approach, because what we are doing in our daily life is we train our muscles, we train our skeleton, and it's getting stronger. And the same approach can be applied to technology as well. So our building block is carbon nanotubes, for example, to create a large, rivet-less skeleton at the end of the day. How this looks in particular, you can show it here. So imagine you have carbon nanotubes growing inside a 3D printer, and they are embedded inside a matrix of plastic, and follow the forces which occur in your component. And you've got trillions of them. So you really align them to wood, and you take this wood and make morphological optimization, so you make structures, sub-structures, which allows you to transmit electrical energy or data. And now we take this material, combine this with a top-down approach, and build bigger and bigger components. So how might the airplane of the future look? So we have very different seats which adapt to the shape of the future passenger, with the different anthropometrics. We have social areas inside the aircraft which might turn into a place where you can play virtual golf. And finally, this bionic structure, which is covered by a transparent biopolymer membrane, will really change radically how we look at aircrafts in the future. So as Jason Silva said, if we can imagine it, why not make it so? See you in the future. Thank you. (Applause)

I'm five years old, and I am very proud. My father has just built the best outhouse in our little village in Ukraine. Inside, it's a smelly, gaping hole in the ground, but outside, it's pearly white formica and it literally gleams in the sun. This makes me feel so proud, so important, that I appoint myself the leader of my little group of friends and I devise missions for us. So we prowl from house to house looking for flies captured in spider webs and we set them free. Four years earlier, when I was one, after the Chernobyl accident, the rain came down black, and my sister's hair fell out in clumps, and I spent nine months in the hospital. There were no visitors allowed, so my mother bribed a hospital worker. She acquired a nurse's uniform, and she snuck in every night to sit by my side. Five years later, an unexpected silver lining. Thanks to Chernobyl, we get asylum in the U.S. I am six years old, and I don't cry when we leave home and we come to America, because I expect it to be a place filled with rare and wonderful things like bananas and chocolate and Bazooka bubble gum, Bazooka bubble gum with the little cartoon wrappers inside, Bazooka that we'd get once a year in Ukraine and we'd have to chew one piece for an entire week. So the first day we get to New York, my grandmother and I find a penny in the floor of the homeless shelter that my family's staying in. Only, we don't know that it's a homeless shelter. We think that it's a hotel, a hotel with lots of rats. So we find this penny kind of fossilized in the floor, and we think that a very wealthy man must have left it there because regular people don't just lose money. And I hold this penny in the palm of my hand, and it's sticky and rusty, but it feels like I'm holding a fortune. I decide that I'm going to get my very own piece of Bazooka bubble gum. And in that moment, I feel like a millionaire. About a year later, I get to feel that way again when we find a bag full of stuffed animals in the trash, and suddenly I have more toys than I've ever had in my whole life. And again, I get that feeling when we get a knock on the door of our apartment in Brooklyn, and my sister and I find a deliveryman with a box of pizza that we didn't order. So we take the pizza, our very first pizza, and we devour slice after slice as the deliveryman stands there and stares at us from the doorway. And he tells us to pay, but we don't speak English. My mother comes out, and he asks her for money, but she doesn't have enough. She walks 50 blocks to and from work every day just to avoid spending money on bus fare. Then our neighbor pops her head in, and she turns red with rage when she realizes that those immigrants from downstairs have somehow gotten their hands on her pizza. Everyone's upset. But the pizza is delicious. It doesn't hit me until years later just how little we had. On our 10 year anniversary of being in the U.S., we decided to celebrate by reserving a room at the hotel that we first stayed in when we got to the U.S. The man at the front desk laughs, and he says, "You can't reserve a room here. This is a homeless shelter." And we were shocked. My husband Brian was also homeless as a kid. His family lost everything, and at age 11, he had to live in motels with his dad, motels that would round up all of their food and keep it hostage until they were able to pay the bill. And one time, when he finally got his box of Frosted Flakes back, it was crawling with roaches. But he did have one thing. He had this shoebox that he carried with him everywhere containing nine comic books, two G.I. Joes painted to look like Spider-Man and five Gobots. And this was his treasure. This was his own assembly of heroes that kept him from drugs and gangs and from giving up on his dreams. I'm going to tell you about one more formerly homeless member of our family. This is Scarlett. Once upon a time, Scarlet was used as bait in dog fights. She was tied up and thrown into the ring for other dogs to attack so they'd get more aggressive before the fight. And now, these days, she eats organic food and she sleeps on an orthopedic bed with her name on it, but when we pour water for her in her bowl, she still looks up and she wags her tail in gratitude. Sometimes Brian and I walk through the park with Scarlett, and she rolls through the grass, and we just look at her and then we look at each other and we feel gratitude. We forget about all of our new middle-class frustrations and disappointments, and we feel like millionaires. Thank you. (Applause)

So if I was to ask you what the connection between a bottle of Tide detergent and sweat was, you'd probably think that's the easiest question that you're going to be asked in Edinburgh all week. But if I was to say that they're both examples of alternative or new forms of currency in a hyperconnected, data-driven global economy, you'd probably think I was a little bit bonkers. But trust me, I work in advertising. (Laughter) And I am going to tell you the answer, but obviously after this short break. So a more challenging question is one that I was asked, actually, by one of our writers a couple of weeks ago, and I didn't know the answer: What's the world's best performing currency? It's actually Bitcoin. Now, for those of you who may not be familiar, Bitcoin is a crypto-currency, a virtual currency, synthetic currency. It was founded in 2008 by this anonymous programmer using a pseudonym Satoshi Nakamoto. No one knows who or what he is. He's almost like the Banksy of the Internet. And I'm probably not going to do it proper service here, but my interpretation of how it works is that Bitcoins are released through this process of mining. So there's a network of computers that are challenged to solve a very complex mathematical problem and the person that manages to solve it first gets the Bitcoins. And the Bitcoins are released, they're put into a public ledger called the Blockchain, and then they float, so they become a currency, and completely decentralized, that's the sort of scary thing about this, which is why it's so popular. So it's not run by the authorities or the state. It's actually managed by the network. And the reason that it's proved very successful is it's private, it's anonymous, it's fast, and it's cheap. And you do get to the point where there's some wild fluctuations with Bitcoin. So in one level it went from something like 13 dollars to 266, literally in the space of four months, and then crashed and lost half of its value in six hours. And it's currently around that kind of 110 dollar mark in value. But what it does show is that it's sort of gaining ground, it's gaining respectability. You get services, like Reddit and Wordpress are actually accepting Bitcoin as a payment currency now. And that's showing you that people are actually placing trust in technology, and it's started to trump and disrupt and interrogate traditional institutions and how we think about currencies and money. And that's not surprising, if you think about the basket case that is the E.U. I think there was a Gallup survey out recently that said something like, in America, trust in banks is at an all-time low, it's something like 21 percent. And you can see here some photographs from London where Barclays sponsored the city bike scheme, and some activists have done some nice piece of guerrilla marketing here and doctored the slogans. "Sub-prime pedaling." "Barclays takes you for a ride." These are the more polite ones I could share with you today. But you get the gist, so people have really started to sort of lose faith in institutions. There's a P.R. company called Edelman, they do this very interesting survey every year precisely around trust and what people are thinking. And this is a global survey, so these numbers are global. And what's interesting is that you can see that hierarchy is having a bit of a wobble, and it's all about heterarchical now, so people trust people like themselves more than they trust corporations and governments. And if you look at these figures for the more developed markets like U.K., Germany, and so on, they're actually much lower. And I find that sort of scary. People are actually trusting businesspeople more than they're trusting governments and leaders. So what's starting to happen, if you think about money, if you sort of boil money down to an essence, it is literally just an expression of value, an agreed value. So what's happening now, in the digital age, is that we can quantify value in lots of different ways and do it more easily, and sometimes the way that we quantify those values, it makes it much easier to create new forms and valid forms of currency. In that context, you can see that networks like Bitcoin suddenly start to make a bit more sense. So if you think we're starting to question and disrupt and interrogate what money means, what our relationship with it is, what defines money, then the ultimate extension of that is, is there a reason for the government to be in charge of money anymore? So obviously I'm looking at this through a marketing prism, so from a brand perspective, brands literally stand or fall on their reputations. And if you think about it, reputation has now become a currency. You know, reputations are built on trust, consistency, transparency. So if you've actually decided that you trust a brand, you want a relationship, you want to engage with the brand, you're already kind of participating in lots of new forms of currency. So you think about loyalty. Loyalty essentially is a micro-economy. You think about rewards schemes, air miles. The Economist said a few years ago that there are actually more unredeemed air miles in the world than there are dollar bills in circulation. You know, when you are standing in line in Starbucks, 30 percent of transactions in Starbucks on any one day are actually being made with Starbucks Star points. So that's a sort of Starbucks currency staying within its ecosystem. And what I find interesting is that Amazon has recently launched Amazon coins. So admittedly it's a currency at the moment that's purely for the Kindle. So you can buy apps and make purchases within those apps, but you think about Amazon, you look at the trust barometer that I showed you where people are starting to trust businesses, especially businesses that they believe in and trust more than governments. So suddenly, you start thinking, well Amazon potentially could push this. It could become a natural extension, that as well as buying stuff -- take it out of the Kindle -- you could buy books, music, real-life products, appliances and goods and so on. And suddenly you're getting Amazon, as a brand, is going head to head with the Federal Reserve in terms of how you want to spend your money, what money is, what constitutes money. And I'll get you back to Tide, the detergent now, as I promised. This is a fantastic article I came across in New York Magazine, where it was saying that drug users across America are actually purchasing drugs with bottles of Tide detergent. So they're going into convenience stores, stealing Tide, and a $20 bottle of Tide is equal to 10 dollars of crack cocaine or weed. And what they're saying, so some criminologists have looked at this and they're saying, well, okay, Tide as a product sells at a premium. It's 50 percent above the category average. It's infused with a very complex cocktail of chemicals, so it smells very luxurious and very distinctive, and, being a Procter and Gamble brand, it's been supported by a lot of mass media advertising. So what they're saying is that drug users are consumers too, so they have this in their neural pathways. When they spot Tide, there's a shortcut. They say, that is trust. I trust that. That's quality. So it becomes this unit of currency, which the New York Magazine described as a very oddly loyal crime wave, brand-loyal crime wave, and criminals are actually calling Tide "liquid gold." Now, what I thought was funny was the reaction from the P&G spokesperson. They said, obviously tried to dissociate themselves from drugs, but said, "It reminds me of one thing and that's the value of the brand has stayed consistent." (Laughter) Which backs up my point and shows he didn't even break a sweat when he said that. So that brings me back to the connection with sweat. In Mexico, Nike has run a campaign recently called, literally, Bid Your Sweat. So you think about, these Nike shoes have got sensors in them, or you're using a Nike FuelBand that basically tracks your movement, your energy, your calorie consumption. And what's happening here, this is where you've actually elected to join that Nike community. You've bought into it. They're not advertising loud messages at you, and that's where advertising has started to shift now is into things like services, tools and applications. So Nike is literally acting as a well-being partner, a health and fitness partner and service provider. So what happens with this is they're saying, "Right, you have a data dashboard. We know how far you've run, how far you've moved, what your calorie intake, all that sort of stuff. What you can do is, the more you run, the more points you get, and we have an auction where you can buy Nike stuff but only by proving that you've actually used the product to do stuff." And you can't come into this. This is purely for the community that are sweating using Nike products. You can't buy stuff with pesos. This is literally a closed environment, a closed auction space. In Africa, you know, airtime has become literally a currency in its own right. People are used to, because mobile is king, they're very, very used to transferring money, making payments via mobile. And one of my favorite examples from a brand perspective going on is Vodafone, where, in Egypt, lots of people make purchases in markets and very small independent stores. Loose change, small change is a real problem, and what tends to happen is you buy a bunch of stuff, you're due, say, 10 cents, 20 cents in change. The shopkeepers tend to give you things like an onion or an aspirin, or a piece of gum, because they don't have small change. So when Vodafone came in and saw this problem, this consumer pain point, they created some small change which they call Fakka, which literally sits and is given by the shopkeepers to people, and it's credit that goes straight onto their mobile phone. So this currency becomes credit, which again, is really, really interesting. And we did a survey that backs up the fact that, you know, 45 percent of people in this very crucial demographic in the U.S. were saying that they're comfortable using an independent or branded currency. So that's getting really interesting here, a really interesting dynamic going on. And you think, corporations should start taking their assets and thinking of them in a different way and trading them. And you think, is it much of a leap? It seems farfetched, but when you think about it, in America in 1860, there were 1,600 corporations issuing banknotes. There were 8,000 kinds of notes in America. And the only thing that stopped that, the government controlled four percent of the supply, and the only thing that stopped it was the Civil War breaking out, and the government suddenly wanted to take control of the money. So government, money, war, nothing changes there, then. So what I'm going to ask is, basically, is history repeating itself? Is technology making paper money feel outmoded? Are we decoupling money from the government? You know, you think about, brands are starting to fill the gaps. Corporations are filling gaps that governments can't afford to fill. So I think, you know, will we be standing on stage buying a coffee -- organic, fair trade coffee -- next year using TED florins or TED shillings? Thank you very much. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause)

Francesca Fedeli: Ciao. So he's Mario. He's our son. He was born two and a half years ago, and I had a pretty tough pregnancy because I had to stay still in a bed for, like, eight months. But in the end everything seemed to be under control. So he got the right weight at birth. He got the right Apgar index. So we were pretty reassured by this. But at the end, 10 days later after he was born, we discovered that he had a stroke. As you might know, a stroke is a brain injury. A perinatal stroke could be something that can happen during the nine months of pregnancy or just suddenly after the birth, and in his case, as you can see, the right part of his brain has gone. So the effect that this stroke could have on Mario's body could be the fact that he couldn't be able to control the left side of his body. Just imagine, if you have a computer and a printer and you want to transmit, to input to print out a document, but the printer doesn't have the right drives, so the same is for Mario. It's just like, he would like to move his left side of his body, but he's not able to transmit the right input to move his left arm and left leg. So life had to change. We needed to change our schedule. We needed to change the impact that this birth had on our life. Roberto D'Angelo: As you may imagine, unfortunately, we were not ready. Nobody taught us how to deal with such kinds of disabilities, and as many questions as possible started to come to our minds. And that has been really a tough time. Questions, some basics, like, you know, why did this happen to us? And what went wrong? Some more tough, like, really, what will be the impact on Mario's life? I mean, at the end, will he be able to work? Will he be able to be normal? And, you know, as a parent, especially for the first time, why is he not going to be better than us? And this, indeed, really is tough to say, but a few months later, we realized that we were really feeling like a failure. I mean, the only real product of our life, at the end, was a failure. And you know, it was not a failure for ourselves in itself, but it was a failure that will impact his full life. Honestly, we went down. I mean we went really down, but at the end, we started to look at him, and we said, we have to react. So immediately, as Francesca said, we changed our life. We started physiotherapy, we started the rehabilitation, and one of the paths that we were following in terms of rehabilitation is the mirror neurons pilot. Basically, we spent months doing this with Mario. You have an object, and we showed him how to grab the object. Now, the theory of mirror neurons simply says that in your brains, exactly now, as you watch me doing this, you are activating exactly the same neurons as if you do the actions. It looks like this is the leading edge in terms of rehabilitation. But one day we found that Mario was not looking at our hand. He was looking at us. We were his mirror. And the problem, as you might feel, is that we were down, we were depressed, we were looking at him as a problem, not as a son, not from a positive perspective. And that day really changed our perspective. We realized that we had to become a better mirror for Mario. We restarted from our strengths, and at the same time we restarted from his strengths. We stopped looking at him as a problem, and we started to look at him as an opportunity to improve. And really, this was the change, and from our side, we said, "What are our strengths that we really can bring to Mario?" And we started from our passions. I mean, at the end, my wife and myself are quite different, but we have many things in common. We love to travel, we love music, we love to be in places like this, and we started to bring Mario with us just to show to him the best things that we can show to him. This short video is from last week. I am not saying -- (Applause) — I am not saying it's a miracle. That's not the message, because we are just at the beginning of the path. But we want to share what was the key learning, the key learning that Mario drove to us, and it is to consider what you have as a gift and not only what you miss, and to consider what you miss just as an opportunity. And this is the message that we want to share with you. This is why we are here. Mario! And this is why -- (Applause) — And this is why we decided to share the best mirror in the world with him. And we thank you so much, all of you. FF: Thank you. RD: Thank you. Bye. (Applause) FF: Thank you. (Applause)

I love paper, and I love technology, and what I do is I make paper interactive. And that's what I say when people ask me what I do, but it really confuses most people, so really, the best way for me to convey it is to take the technology and be creative and create experiences. So I tried to think what I could use for here, and a couple of weeks ago I had a crazy idea that I wanted to print two DJ decks and to try and mix some music. And I'm going to try and show that at the end, and the suspense will be as much mine if it works. And I'm not a DJ, and I'm not a musician, so I'm a little bit scared of that. So I think, I found the best way to describe my journey is just to mention a few little things that have happened to me throughout my life. There's three particular things that I've done, and I'll just describe those first, and then talk about some of my work. So when I was a kid, I was obsessed with wires, and I used to thread them under my carpet and thread them behind the walls and have little switches and little speakers, and I wanted to make my bedroom be interactive but kind of all hidden away. And I was also really interested in wireless as well. So I bought one of those little kits that you could get to make a radio transmitter, and I got an old book and I carved out the inside and I hid it inside there, and then I placed it next to my dad and snuck back to my bedroom and tuned in on the radio so I could eavesdrop. I was not at all interested in what he was saying. It's more that I just liked the idea of an everyday object having something inside and doing something different. Several year later, I managed to successfully fail all of my exams and didn't really leave school with much to show for at all, and my parents, maybe as a reward, bought me what turned out to be a one-way ticket to Australia, and I came back home about four years later. I ended up on a farm in the middle of nowhere. It was in far western New South Wales. And this farm was 120,000 acres. There were 22,000 sheep, and it was about 40 degrees, or 100 or so Fahrenheit. And on this farm there was the farmer, his wife, and there was the four-year-old daughter. And they kind of took me into the farm and showed me what it was like to live and work. Obviously, one of the most important things was the sheep, and so my job was, well, pretty much to do everything, but it was about bringing the sheep back to the homestead. And we'd do that by building fences, using motorbikes and horses, and the sheep would make their way all the way back to the shearing shed for the different seasons. And what I learned was, although at the time, like everyone else, I thought sheep were pretty stupid because they didn't do what we wanted them to do, what I realize now, probably only just in the last few weeks looking back, is the sheep weren't stupid at all. We'd put them in an environment where they didn't want to be, and they didn't want to do what we wanted them to do. So the challenge was to try and get them to do what we wanted them to do by listening to the weather, the lay of the land, and creating things that would let the sheep flow and go where we wanted them to go. Another bunch of years later, I ended up at Cambridge University at the Cavendish Laboratory in the U.K. doing a Ph.D. in physics. My Ph.D. was to move electrons around, one at a time. And I realize — again, it's kind of these realizations looking back as to what I did — I realize now that it was pretty much the same as moving sheep around. It really is. It's just you do it by changing an environment. And that's kind of been a big lesson to me, that you can't act on any object. You change its environment, and the object will flow. So we made it very small, so things were about 30 nanometers in size; making it very cold, so at liquid helium temperatures; and changing environment by changing the voltage, and the electrons could make flow around a loop one at a time, on and off, a little memory node. And I wanted to go one step further, and I wanted to move one electron on and one electron off. And I was told that I wouldn't be able to do this, which, you know, as we've heard from other people, that's the thing that makes you do it. And I was determined, and I managed to show that I could do that. And a lot of that learning, I think, came from being on that farm, because when I was working on the farm, we'd have to use what was around us, we'd have to use the environment, and there was no such thing as something can't be done, because you're in an environment where, if you can't do what you need to do, you can die, and, you know, I had seen that sort of thing happen. So now my obsession is printing, and I'm really fascinated by the idea of using conventional printing processes, so the types of print that are used to create many of the things around us to make paper and card interactive. When I spoke to some printers when I started doing this and told them what I wanted to do, which was to print conductive inks onto paper, they told me it couldn't be done, again, that kind of favorite thing. So I got about 10 credit cards and loans and got myself very close to bankruptcy, really, and bought myself this huge printing press, which I had no idea how to use at all. It was about five meters long, and I covered myself and the floor with ink and made a massive mess, but I learned to print. And then I took it back to the printers and showed them what I've done, and they were like, "Of course you can do that. Why didn't you come here in the first place?" That's always the case. So what we do is we take conventional printing presses, we make conductive inks, and run those through a press, and basically just letting hundreds of thousands of electrons flow through pieces of paper so we can make that paper interactive. And it's pretty simple, really. It's just a collection of things that have been done before, but bringing them together in a different way. So we have a piece of paper with conductive ink on, and then add onto that a small circuit board with a couple of chips, one to run some capacitive touch software, so we know where we've touched it, and the other to run, quite often, some wireless software so the piece of paper can connect. So I'll just describe a couple of things that we've created. There's lots of different things we've created. This is one of them, because I love cake. And this one, it's a large poster, and you touch it and it has a little speaker behind it, and the poster talks to you when you touch it and asks you a series of questions, and it works out your perfect cake. But it doesn't tell you the cake there and then. It uploads a picture, and the reason why it chose that cake for you, to our Facebook page and to Twitter. So we're trying to create that connection between the physical and the digital, but have it not looking on a screen, and just looking like a regular poster. We've worked with a bunch of universities on a project looking at interactive newsprint. So for example, we've created a newspaper, a regular newspaper. You can wear a pair of headphones that are connected to it wirelessly, and when you touch it, you can hear the music that's described on the top, which is something you can't read. You can hear a press conference as well as reading what the editor has determined that press conference was about. And you can press a Facebook "like" button or you can vote on something as well. Something else that we created, and this was an idea that I had a couple of years ago, and so we've done a project on this. It was for funding from the government for user-centered design for energy-efficient buildings, difficult to say, and something I had no idea what it was when I went into the workshop, but quickly learned. And we wanted to try and encourage people to use energy better. And I really liked the idea that, instead of looking at dials and reading things to say -- looking at your energy usage, I wanted to create a poster that was wirelessly connected and had color-changing inks on it, and so if your energy usage was trending better, than the leaves would appear and the rabbits would appear and all would be good. And if it wasn't, then there'd be graffiti and the leaves would fall off the trees. So it was trying to make you look after something in your immediate environment, which you don't want to see not looking so good, rather than expecting people to do things in the local environment because of the effect that it has a long way off. And I think, kind of like going back to the farm, it's about how to let people do what you want them to do rather than making people do what you want them to do. Okay. So this is the bit I'm really scared of. So a couple of things I've created are, there's a poster over here that you can play drums on. And I am not a musician. It seemed like a good idea at the time. If anyone wants to try and play drums, then they can. I'll just describe how this works. This poster is wirelessly connected to my cell phone, and when you touch it, it connects to the app. (Drums) And it has really good response time. It's using Bluetooth 4, so it's pretty instantaneous. Okay. Thanks. (Applause) And there's a couple of other things. So this one is like a sound board, so you can touch it, and I just love these horrible noises. (Sirens, explosions, breaking glass) Okay, and this is a D.J. turntable. So it's wirelessly linked to my iPad, and this is a software that's running on the iPad. Oh, yes. I just love doing that. I'm not a D.J., though, but I just always wanted to do that. (Scratching) So I have a crossfader, and I have the two decks. So I've made some new technology, and I love things being creative, and I love working with creative people. So my 15-year-old niece, she's amazing, and she's called Charlotte, and I asked her to record something, and I worked with a friend called Elliot to put some beats together. So this is my niece, Charlotte. (Music) Yay! (Applause) So that's pretty much what I do. I just love bringing technology together, having a lot of fun, being creative. But it's not about the technology. It's just about, I want to create some great experiences. So thank you very much. (Applause)

I'm going to talk about consciousness. Why consciousness? Well, it's a curiously neglected subject, both in our scientific and our philosophical culture. Now why is that curious? Well, it is the most important aspect of our lives for a very simple, logical reason, namely, it's a necessary condition on anything being important in our lives that we're conscious. You care about science, philosophy, music, art, whatever -- it's no good if you're a zombie or in a coma, right? So consciousness is number one. The second reason is that when people do get interested in it, as I think they should, they tend to say the most appalling things. And then, even when they're not saying appalling things and they're really trying to do serious research, well, it's been slow. Progress has been slow. When I first got interested in this, I thought, well, it's a straightforward problem in biology. Let's get these brain stabbers to get busy and figure out how it works in the brain. So I went over to UCSF and I talked to all the heavy-duty neurobiologists there, and they showed some impatience, as scientists often do when you ask them embarrassing questions. But the thing that struck me is, one guy said in exasperation, a very famous neurobiologist, he said, "Look, in my discipline it's okay to be interested in consciousness, but get tenure first. Get tenure first." Now I've been working on this for a long time. I think now you might actually get tenure by working on consciousness. If so, that's a real step forward. Okay, now why then is this curious reluctance and curious hostility to consciousness? Well, I think it's a combination of two features of our intellectual culture that like to think they're opposing each other but in fact they share a common set of assumptions. One feature is the tradition of religious dualism: Consciousness is not a part of the physical world. It's a part of the spiritual world. It belongs to the soul, and the soul is not a part of the physical world. That's the tradition of God, the soul and immortality. There's another tradition that thinks it's opposed to this but accepts the worst assumption. That tradition thinks that we are heavy-duty scientific materialists: Consciousness is not a part of the physical world. Either it doesn't exist at all, or it's something else, a computer program or some damn fool thing, but in any case it's not part of science. And I used to get in an argument that really gave me a stomachache. Here's how it went. Science is objective, consciousness is subjective, therefore there cannot be a science of consciousness. Okay, so these twin traditions are paralyzing us. It's very hard to get out of these twin traditions. And I have only one real message in this lecture, and that is, consciousness is a biological phenomenon like photosynthesis, digestion, mitosis -- you know all the biological phenomena -- and once you accept that, most, though not all, of the hard problems about consciousness simply evaporate. And I'm going to go through some of them. Okay, now I promised you to tell you some of the outrageous things said about consciousness. One: Consciousness does not exist. It's an illusion, like sunsets. Science has shown sunsets and rainbows are illusions. So consciousness is an illusion. Two: Well, maybe it exists, but it's really something else. It's a computer program running in the brain. Three: No, the only thing that exists is really behavior. It's embarrassing how influential behaviorism was, but I'll get back to that. And four: Maybe consciousness exists, but it can't make any difference to the world. How could spirituality move anything? Now, whenever somebody tells me that, I think, you want to see spirituality move something? Watch. I decide consciously to raise my arm, and the damn thing goes up. (Laughter) Furthermore, notice this: We do not say, "Well, it's a bit like the weather in Geneva. Some days it goes up and some days it doesn't go up." No. It goes up whenever I damn well want it to. Okay. I'm going to tell you how that's possible. Now, I haven't yet given you a definition. You can't do this if you don't give a definition. People always say consciousness is very hard to define. I think it's rather easy to define if you're not trying to give a scientific definition. We're not ready for a scientific definition, but here's a common-sense definition. Consciousness consists of all those states of feeling or sentience or awareness. It begins in the morning when you wake up from a dreamless sleep, and it goes on all day until you fall asleep or die or otherwise become unconscious. Dreams are a form of consciousness on this definition. Now, that's the common-sense definition. That's our target. If you're not talking about that, you're not talking about consciousness. But they think, "Well, if that's it, that's an awful problem. How can such a thing exist as part of the real world?" And this, if you've ever had a philosophy course, this is known as the famous mind-body problem. I think that has a simple solution too. I'm going to give it to you. And here it is: All of our conscious states, without exception, are caused by lower-level neurobiological processes in the brain, and they are realized in the brain as higher-level or system features. It's about as mysterious as the liquidity of water. Right? The liquidity is not an extra juice squirted out by the H2O molecules. It's a condition that the system is in. And just as the jar full of water can go from liquid to solid depending on the behavior of the molecules, so your brain can go from a state of being conscious to a state of being unconscious, depending on the behavior of the molecules. The famous mind-body problem is that simple. All right? But now we get into some harder questions. Let's specify the exact features of consciousness, so that we can then answer those four objections that I made to it. Well, the first feature is, it's real and irreducible. You can't get rid of it. You see, the distinction between reality and illusion is the distinction between how things consciously seem to us and how they really are. It consciously seems like there's -- I like the French "arc-en-ciel" — it seems like there's an arch in the sky, or it seems like the sun is setting over the mountains. It consciously seems to us, but that's not really happening. But for that distinction between how things consciously seem and how they really are, you can't make that distinction for the very existence of consciousness, because where the very existence of consciousness is concerned, if it consciously seems to you that you are conscious, you are conscious. I mean, if a bunch of experts come to me and say, "We are heavy-duty neurobiologists and we've done a study of you, Searle, and we're convinced you are not conscious, you are a very cleverly constructed robot," I don't think, "Well, maybe these guys are right, you know?" I don't think that for a moment, because, I mean, Descartes may have made a lot of mistakes, but he was right about this. You cannot doubt the existence of your own consciousness. Okay, that's the first feature of consciousness. It's real and irreducible. You cannot get rid of it by showing that it's an illusion in a way that you can with other standard illusions. Okay, the second feature is this one that has been such a source of trouble to us, and that is, all of our conscious states have this qualitative character to them. There's something that it feels like to drink beer which is not what it feels like to do your income tax or listen to music, and this qualitative feel automatically generates a third feature, namely, conscious states are by definition subjective in the sense that they only exist as experienced by some human or animal subject, some self that experiences them. Maybe we'll be able to build a conscious machine. Since we don't know how our brains do it, we're not in a position, so far, to build a conscious machine. Okay. Another feature of consciousness is that it comes in unified conscious fields. So I don't just have the sight of the people in front of me and the sound of my voice and the weight of my shoes against the floor, but they occur to me as part of one single great conscious field that stretches forward and backward. That is the key to understanding the enormous power of consciousness. And we have not been able to do that in a robot. The disappointment of robotics derives from the fact that we don't know how to make a conscious robot, so we don't have a machine that can do this kind of thing. Okay, the next feature of consciousness, after this marvelous unified conscious field, is that it functions causally in our behavior. I gave you a scientific demonstration by raising my hand, but how is that possible? How can it be that this thought in my brain can move material objects? Well, I'll tell you the answer. I mean, we don't know the detailed answer, but we know the basic part of the answer, and that is, there is a sequence of neuron firings, and they terminate where the acetylcholine is secreted at the axon end-plates of the motor neurons. Sorry to use philosophical terminology here, but when it's secreted at the axon end-plates of the motor neurons, a whole lot of wonderful things happen in the ion channels and the damned arm goes up. Now, think of what I told you. One and the same event, my conscious decision to raise my arm has a level of description where it has all of these touchy-feely spiritual qualities. It's a thought in my brain, but at the same time, it's busy secreting acetylcholine and doing all sorts of other things as it makes its way from the motor cortex down through the nerve fibers in the arm. Now, what that tells us is that our traditional vocabularies for discussing these issues are totally obsolete. One and the same event has a level of description where it's neurobiological, and another level of description where it's mental, and that's a single event, and that's how nature works. That's how it's possible for consciousness to function causally. Okay, now with that in mind, with going through these various features of consciousness, let's go back and answer some of those early objections. Well, the first one I said was, consciousness doesn't exist, it's an illusion. Well, I've already answered that. I don't think we need to worry about that. But the second one had an incredible influence, and may still be around, and that is, "Well, if consciousness exists, it's really something else. It's really a digital computer program running in your brain and that's what we need to do to create consciousness is get the right program. Yeah, forget about the hardware. Any hardware will do provided it's rich enough and stable enough to carry the program." Now, we know that that's wrong. I mean, anybody who's thought about computers at all can see that that's wrong, because computation is defined as symbol manipulation, usually thought of as zeros as ones, but any symbols will do. You get an algorithm that you can program in a binary code, and that's the defining trait of the computer program. But we know that that's purely syntactical. That's symbolic. We know that actual human consciousness has something more than that. It's got a content in addition to the syntax. It's got a semantics. Now that argument, I made that argument 30 -- oh my God, I don't want to think about it — more than 30 years ago, but there's a deeper argument implicit in what I've told you, and I want to tell you that argument briefly, and that is, consciousness creates an observer-independent reality. It creates a reality of money, property, government, marriage, CERN conferences, cocktail parties and summer vacations, and all of those are creations of consciousness. Their existence is observer-relative. It's only relative to conscious agents that a piece of paper is money or that a bunch of buildings is a university. Now, ask yourself about computation. Is that absolute, like force and mass and gravitational attraction? Or is it observer-relative? Well, some computations are intrinsic. I add two plus two to get four. That's going on no matter what anybody thinks. But when I haul out my pocket calculator and do the calculation, the only intrinsic phenomenon is the electronic circuit and its behavior. That's the only absolute phenomenon. All the rest is interpreted by us. Computation only exists relative to consciousness. Either a conscious agent is carrying out the computation, or he's got a piece of machinery that admits of a computational interpretation. Now that doesn't mean computation is arbitrary. I spent a lot of money on this hardware. But we have this persistent confusion between objectivity and subjectivity as features of reality and objectivity and subjectivity as features of claims. And the bottom line of this part of my talk is this: You can have a completely objective science, a science where you make objectively true claims, about a domain whose existence is subjective, whose existence is in the human brain consisting of subjective states of sentience or feeling or awareness. So the objection that you can't have an objective science of consciousness because it's subjective and science is objective, that's a pun. That's a bad pun on objectivity and subjectivity. You can make objective claims about a domain that is subjective in its mode of existence, and indeed that's what neurologists do. I mean, you have patients that actually suffer pains, and you try to get an objective science of that. Okay, I promised to refute all these guys, and I don't have an awful lot of time left, but let me refute a couple more of them. I said that behaviorism ought to be one of the great embarrassments of our intellectual culture, because it's refuted the moment you think about it. Your mental states are identical with your behavior? Well, think about the distinction between feeling a pain and engaging in pain behavior. I won't demonstrate pain behavior, but I can tell you I'm not having any pains right now. So it's an obvious mistake. Why did they make the mistake? The mistake was — and you can go back and read the literature on this, you can see this over and over — they think if you accept the irreducible existence of consciousness, you're giving up on science. You're giving up on 300 years of human progress and human hope and all the rest of it. And the message I want to leave you with is, consciousness has to become accepted as a genuine biological phenomenon, as much subject to scientific analysis as any other phenomenon in biology, or, for that matter, the rest of science. Thank you very much. (Applause)

My name is Tom, and I've come here today to come clean about what I do for money. Basically, I use my mouth in strange ways in exchange for cash. (Laughter) I usually do this kind of thing in seedy downtown bars and on street corners, so this mightn't be the most appropriate setting, but I'd like to give you guys a bit of a demonstration about what I do. (Beatboxing) And now, for my next number, I'd like to return to the classics. (Applause) We're going to take it back, way back, back into time. (Beatboxing: "Billie Jean") ♫ Billie Jean is not my lover ♫ ♫ She's just a girl who claims that I am the one ♫ ♫ But the kid is not my son ♫ (Applause) All right. Wassup. Thank you very much, TEDx. If you guys haven't figured it out already, my name's Tom Thum, and I'm a beatboxer, which means all the sounds that you just heard were made entirely using just my voice, and the only thing was my voice. And I can assure you there are absolutely no effects on this microphone whatsoever. And I'm very, very stoked — (Applause) You guys are just applauding for everything. It's great. Look at this, Mom! I made it! I'm very, very stoked to be here today, representing my kinfolk and all those that haven't managed to make a career out of an innate ability for inhuman noisemaking. Because it is a bit of a niche market, and there's not much work going on, especially where I'm from. You know, I'm from Brisbane, which is a great city to live in. Yeah! All right! Most of Brisbane's here. That's good. (Laughter) You know, I'm from Brizzy, which is a great city to live in, but let's be honest -- it's not exactly the cultural hub of the Southern Hemisphere. So I do a lot of my work outside Brisbane and outside Australia, and so the pursuit of this crazy passion of mine has enabled me to see so many amazing places in the world. So I'd like to share with you, if I may, my experiences. So ladies and gentlemen, I would like to take you on a journey throughout the continents and throughout sound itself. We start our journey in the central deserts. (Didgeridoo) (Airplane) India. (Beatboxing) (Sitar) China. (Guzheng) (Beatboxing) Germany. (Beatboxing) Party, party, yeah. (Laughter) And before we reach our final destination, ladies and gentlemen, I would like to share with you some technology that I brought all the way from the thriving metropolis of Brisbane. These things in front of me here are called Kaoss Pads, and they allow me to do a whole lot of different things with my voice. For example, the one on the left here allows me to add a little bit of reverb to my sound, which gives me that -- (Trumpet) -- flavor. (Laughter) And the other ones here, I can use them in unison to mimic the effect of a drum machine or something like that. I can sample in my own sounds and I can play it back just by hitting the pads here. (Noises) TEDx. (Music) (Applause) I got way too much time on my hands. And last but not least, the one on my right here allows me to loop loop loop loop loop loop loop loop my voice. So with all that in mind, ladies and gentlemen, I would like to take you on a journey to a completely separate part of Earth as I transform the Sydney Opera House into a smoky downtown jazz bar. All right boys, take it away. (Music) Ladies and gentlemen, I'd like to introduce you to a very special friend of mine, one of the greatest double bassists I know. Mr. Smokey Jefferson, let's take it for a walk. Come on, baby. (Music) All right, ladies and gentlemen, I'd like to introduce you to the star of the show, one of the greatest jazz legends of our time. Music lovers and jazz lovers alike, please give a warm hand of applause for the one and only Mr. Peeping Tom. Take it away. (Music) (Applause) Thank you. Thank you very much. (Applause)

Miranda Wang: We're here to talk about accidents. How do you feel about accidents? When we think about accidents, we usually consider them to be harmful, unfortunate or even dangerous, and they certainly can be. But are they always that bad? The discovery that had led to penicillin, for example, is one of the most fortunate accidents of all time. Without biologist Alexander Fleming's moldy accident, caused by a neglected workstation, we wouldn't be able to fight off so many bacterial infections. Jeanny Yao: Miranda and I are here today because we'd like to share how our accidents have led to discoveries. In 2011, we visited the Vancouver Waste Transfer Station and saw an enormous pit of plastic waste. We realized that when plastics get to the dump, it's difficult to sort them because they have similar densities, and when they're mixed with organic matter and construction debris, it's truly impossible to pick them out and environmentally eliminate them. MW: However, plastics are useful because they're durable, flexible, and can be easily molded into so many useful shapes. The downside of this convenience is that there's a high cost to this. Plastics cause serious problems, such as the destruction of ecosystems, the pollution of natural resources, and the reduction of available land space. This picture you see here is the Great Pacific Gyre. When you think about plastic pollution and the marine environment, we think about the Great Pacific Gyre, which is supposed to be a floating island of plastic waste. But that's no longer an accurate depiction of plastic pollution in the marine environment. Right now, the ocean is actually a soup of plastic debris, and there's nowhere you can go in the ocean where you wouldn't be able to find plastic particles. JY: In a plastic-dependent society, cutting down production is a good goal, but it's not enough. And what about the waste that's already been produced? Plastics take hundreds to thousands of years to biodegrade. So we thought, you know what? Instead of waiting for that garbage to sit there and pile up, let's find a way to break them down with bacteria. Sounds cool, right? Audience: Yeah. JY: Thank you. But we had a problem. You see, plastics have very complex structures and are difficult to biodegrade. Anyhow, we were curious and hopeful and still wanted to give it a go. MW: With this idea in mind, Jeanny and I read through some hundreds of scientific articles on the Internet, and we drafted a research proposal in the beginning of our grade 12 year. We aimed to find bacteria from our local Fraser River that can degrade a harmful plasticizer called phthalates. Phthalates are additives used in everyday plastic products to increase their flexibility, durability and transparency. Although they're part of the plastic, they're not covalently bonded to the plastic backbone. As a result, they easily escape into our environment. Not only do phthalates pollute our environment, but they also pollute our bodies. To make the matter worse, phthalates are found in products to which we have a high exposure, such as babies' toys, beverage containers, cosmetics, and even food wraps. Phthalates are horrible because they're so easily taken into our bodies. They can be absorbed by skin contact, ingested, and inhaled. JY: Every year, at least 470 million pounds of phthalates contaminate our air, water and soil. The Environmental Protection Agency even classified this group as a top-priority pollutant because it's been shown to cause cancer and birth defects by acting as a hormone disruptor. We read that each year, the Vancouver municipal government monitors phthalate concentration levels in rivers to assess their safety. So we figured, if there are places along our Fraser River that are contaminated with phthalates, and if there are bacteria that are able to live in these areas, then perhaps, perhaps these bacteria could have evolved to break down phthalates. MW: So we presented this good idea to Dr. Lindsay Eltis at the University of British Columbia, and surprisingly, he actually took us into his lab and asked his graduate students Adam and James to help us. Little did we know at that time that a trip to the dump and some research on the Internet and plucking up the courage to act upon inspiration would take us on a life-changing journey of accidents and discoveries. JY: The first step in our project was to collect soil samples from three different sites along the Fraser River. Out of thousands of bacteria, we wanted to find ones that could break down phthalates, so we enriched our cultures with phthalates as the only carbon source. This implied that, if anything grew in our cultures, then they must be able to live off of phthalates. Everything went well from there, and we became amazing scientists. (Laughter) MW: Um ... uh, Jeanny. JY: I'm just joking. MW: Okay. Well, it was partially my fault. You see, I accidentally cracked the flask that had contained our third enrichment culture, and as a result, we had to wipe down the incubator room with bleach and ethanol twice. And this is only one of the examples of the many accidents that happened during our experimentation. But this mistake turned out to be rather serendipitous. We noticed that the unharmed cultures came from places of opposite contamination levels, so this mistake actually led us to think that perhaps we can compare the different degradative potentials of bacteria from sites of opposite contamination levels. JY: Now that we grew the bacteria, we wanted to isolate strains by streaking onto mediate plates, because we thought that would be less accident-prone, but we were wrong again. We poked holes in our agar while streaking and contaminated some samples and funghi. As a result, we had to streak and restreak several times. Then we monitored phthalate utilization and bacterial growth, and found that they shared an inverse correlation, so as bacterial populations increased, phthalate concentrations decreased. This means that our bacteria were actually living off of phthalates. MW: So now that we found bacteria that could break down phthalates, we wondered what these bacteria were. So Jeanny and I took three of our most efficient strains and then performed gene amplification sequencing on them and matched our data with an online comprehensive database. We were happy to see that, although our three strains had been previously identified bacteria, two of them were not previously associated with phthalate degradation, so this was actually a novel discovery. JY: To better understand how this biodegradation works, we wanted to verify the catabolic pathways of our three strains. To do this, we extracted enzymes from our bacteria and reacted with an intermediate of phthalic acid. MW: We monitored this experiment with spectrophotometry and obtained this beautiful graph. This graph shows that our bacteria really do have a genetic pathway to biodegrade phthalates. Our bacteria can transform phthalates, which is a harmful toxin, into end products such as carbon dioxide, water and alcohol. I know some of you in the crowd are thinking, well, carbon dioxide is horrible, it's a greenhouse gas. But if our bacteria did not evolve to break down phthalates, they would have used some other kind of carbon source, and aerobic respiration would have led it to have end products such as carbon dioxide anyway. We were also interested to see that, although we've obtained greater diversity of bacteria biodegraders from the bird habitat site, we obtained the most efficient degraders from the landfill site. So this fully shows that nature evolves through natural selection. JY: So Miranda and I shared this research at the Sanofi BioGENEius Challenge competition and were recognized with the greatest commercialization potential. Although we're not the first ones to find bacteria that can break down phthalates, we were the first ones to look into our local river and find a possible solution to a local problem. We have not only shown that bacteria can be the solution to plastic pollution, but also that being open to uncertain outcomes and taking risks create opportunities for unexpected discoveries. Throughout this journey, we have also discovered our passion for science, and are currently continuing research on other fossil fuel chemicals in university. We hope that in the near future, we'll be able to create model organisms that can break down not only phthalates but a wide variety of different contaminants. We can apply this to wastewater treatment plants to clean up our rivers and other natural resources. And perhaps one day we'll be able to tackle the problem of solid plastic waste. MW: I think our journey has truly transformed our view of microorganisms, and Jeanny and I have shown that even mistakes can lead to discoveries. Einstein once said, "You can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking you used when you created them." If we're making plastic synthetically, then we think the solution would be to break them down biochemically. Thank you. JY: Thank you. (Applause)

Where do you come from? It's such a simple question, but these days, of course, simple questions bring ever more complicated answers. People are always asking me where I come from, and they're expecting me to say India, and they're absolutely right insofar as 100 percent of my blood and ancestry does come from India. Except, I've never lived one day of my life there. I can't speak even one word of its more than 22,000 dialects. So I don't think I've really earned the right to call myself an Indian. And if "Where do you come from?" means "Where were you born and raised and educated?" then I'm entirely of that funny little country known as England, except I left England as soon as I completed my undergraduate education, and all the time I was growing up, I was the only kid in all my classes who didn't begin to look like the classic English heroes represented in our textbooks. And if "Where do you come from?" means "Where do you pay your taxes? Where do you see your doctor and your dentist?" then I'm very much of the United States, and I have been for 48 years now, since I was a really small child. Except, for many of those years, I've had to carry around this funny little pink card with green lines running through my face identifying me as a permanent alien. I do actually feel more alien the longer I live there. (Laughter) And if "Where do you come from?" means "Which place goes deepest inside you and where do you try to spend most of your time?" then I'm Japanese, because I've been living as much as I can for the last 25 years in Japan. Except, all of those years I've been there on a tourist visa, and I'm fairly sure not many Japanese would want to consider me one of them. And I say all this just to stress how very old-fashioned and straightforward my background is, because when I go to Hong Kong or Sydney or Vancouver, most of the kids I meet are much more international and multi-cultured than I am. And they have one home associated with their parents, but another associated with their partners, a third connected maybe with the place where they happen to be, a fourth connected with the place they dream of being, and many more besides. And their whole life will be spent taking pieces of many different places and putting them together into a stained glass whole. Home for them is really a work in progress. It's like a project on which they're constantly adding upgrades and improvements and corrections. And for more and more of us, home has really less to do with a piece of soil than, you could say, with a piece of soul. If somebody suddenly asks me, "Where's your home?" I think about my sweetheart or my closest friends or the songs that travel with me wherever I happen to be. And I'd always felt this way, but it really came home to me, as it were, some years ago when I was climbing up the stairs in my parents' house in California, and I looked through the living room windows and I saw that we were encircled by 70-foot flames, one of those wildfires that regularly tear through the hills of California and many other such places. And three hours later, that fire had reduced my home and every last thing in it except for me to ash. And when I woke up the next morning, I was sleeping on a friend's floor, the only thing I had in the world was a toothbrush I had just bought from an all-night supermarket. Of course, if anybody asked me then, "Where is your home?" I literally couldn't point to any physical construction. My home would have to be whatever I carried around inside me. And in so many ways, I think this is a terrific liberation. Because when my grandparents were born, they pretty much had their sense of home, their sense of community, even their sense of enmity, assigned to them at birth, and didn't have much chance of stepping outside of that. And nowadays, at least some of us can choose our sense of home, create our sense of community, fashion our sense of self, and in so doing maybe step a little beyond some of the black and white divisions of our grandparents' age. No coincidence that the president of the strongest nation on Earth is half-Kenyan, partly raised in Indonesia, has a Chinese-Canadian brother-in-law. The number of people living in countries not their own now comes to 220 million, and that's an almost unimaginable number, but it means that if you took the whole population of Canada and the whole population of Australia and then the whole population of Australia again and the whole population of Canada again and doubled that number, you would still have fewer people than belong to this great floating tribe. And the number of us who live outside the old nation-state categories is increasing so quickly, by 64 million just in the last 12 years, that soon there will be more of us than there are Americans. Already, we represent the fifth-largest nation on Earth. And in fact, in Canada's largest city, Toronto, the average resident today is what used to be called a foreigner, somebody born in a very different country. And I've always felt that the beauty of being surrounded by the foreign is that it slaps you awake. You can't take anything for granted. Travel, for me, is a little bit like being in love, because suddenly all your senses are at the setting marked "on." Suddenly you're alert to the secret patterns of the world. The real voyage of discovery, as Marcel Proust famously said, consists not in seeing new sights, but in looking with new eyes. And of course, once you have new eyes, even the old sights, even your home become something different. Many of the people living in countries not their own are refugees who never wanted to leave home and ache to go back home. But for the fortunate among us, I think the age of movement brings exhilarating new possibilities. Certainly when I'm traveling, especially to the major cities of the world, the typical person I meet today will be, let's say, a half-Korean, half-German young woman living in Paris. And as soon as she meets a half-Thai, half-Canadian young guy from Edinburgh, she recognizes him as kin. She realizes that she probably has much more in common with him than with anybody entirely of Korea or entirely of Germany. So they become friends. They fall in love. They move to New York City. (Laughter) Or Edinburgh. And the little girl who arises out of their union will of course be not Korean or German or French or Thai or Scotch or Canadian or even American, but a wonderful and constantly evolving mix of all those places. And potentially, everything about the way that young woman dreams about the world, writes about the world, thinks about the world, could be something different, because it comes out of this almost unprecedented blend of cultures. Where you come from now is much less important than where you're going. More and more of us are rooted in the future or the present tense as much as in the past. And home, we know, is not just the place where you happen to be born. It's the place where you become yourself. And yet, there is one great problem with movement, and that is that it's really hard to get your bearings when you're in midair. Some years ago, I noticed that I had accumulated one million miles on United Airlines alone. You all know that crazy system, six days in hell, you get the seventh day free. (Laughter) And I began to think that really, movement was only as good as the sense of stillness that you could bring to it to put it into perspective. And eight months after my house burned down, I ran into a friend who taught at a local high school, and he said, "I've got the perfect place for you." "Really?" I said. I'm always a bit skeptical when people say things like that. "No, honestly," he went on, "it's only three hours away by car, and it's not very expensive, and it's probably not like anywhere you've stayed before." "Hmm." I was beginning to get slightly intrigued. "What is it?" "Well —" Here my friend hemmed and hawed — "Well, actually it's a Catholic hermitage." This was the wrong answer. I had spent 15 years in Anglican schools, so I had had enough hymnals and crosses to last me a lifetime. Several lifetimes, actually. But my friend assured me that he wasn't Catholic, nor were most of his students, but he took his classes there every spring. And as he had it, even the most restless, distractible, testosterone-addled 15-year-old Californian boy only had to spend three days in silence and something in him cooled down and cleared out. He found himself. And I thought, "Anything that works for a 15-year-old boy ought to work for me." So I got in my car, and I drove three hours north along the coast, and the roads grew emptier and narrower, and then I turned onto an even narrower path, barely paved, that snaked for two miles up to the top of a mountain. And when I got out of my car, the air was pulsing. The whole place was absolutely silent, but the silence wasn't an absence of noise. It was really a presence of a kind of energy or quickening. And at my feet was the great, still blue plate of the Pacific Ocean. All around me were 800 acres of wild dry brush. And I went down to the room in which I was to be sleeping. Small but eminently comfortable, it had a bed and a rocking chair and a long desk and even longer picture windows looking out on a small, private, walled garden, and then 1,200 feet of golden pampas grass running down to the sea. And I sat down, and I began to write, and write, and write, even though I'd gone there really to get away from my desk. And by the time I got up, four hours had passed. Night had fallen, and I went out under this great overturned saltshaker of stars, and I could see the tail lights of cars disappearing around the headlands 12 miles to the south. And it really seemed like my concerns of the previous day vanishing. And the next day, when I woke up in the absence of telephones and TVs and laptops, the days seemed to stretch for a thousand hours. It was really all the freedom I know when I'm traveling, but it also profoundly felt like coming home. And I'm not a religious person, so I didn't go to the services. I didn't consult the monks for guidance. I just took walks along the monastery road and sent postcards to loved ones. I looked at the clouds, and I did what is hardest of all for me to do usually, which is nothing at all. And I started to go back to this place, and I noticed that I was doing my most important work there invisibly just by sitting still, and certainly coming to my most critical decisions the way I never could when I was racing from the last email to the next appointment. And I began to think that something in me had really been crying out for stillness, but of course I couldn't hear it because I was running around so much. I was like some crazy guy who puts on a blindfold and then complains that he can't see a thing. And I thought back to that wonderful phrase I had learned as a boy from Seneca, in which he says, "That man is poor not who has little but who hankers after more." And, of course, I'm not suggesting that anybody here go into a monastery. That's not the point. But I do think it's only by stopping movement that you can see where to go. And it's only by stepping out of your life and the world that you can see what you most deeply care about and find a home. And I've noticed so many people now take conscious measures to sit quietly for 30 minutes every morning just collecting themselves in one corner of the room without their devices, or go running every evening, or leave their cell phones behind when they go to have a long conversation with a friend. Movement is a fantastic privilege, and it allows us to do so much that our grandparents could never have dreamed of doing. But movement, ultimately, only has a meaning if you have a home to go back to. And home, in the end, is of course not just the place where you sleep. It's the place where you stand. Thank you. (Applause)

Clouds. Have you ever noticed how much people moan about them? They get a bad rap. If you think about it, the English language has written into it negative associations towards the clouds. Someone who's down or depressed, they're under a cloud. And when there's bad news in store, there's a cloud on the horizon. I saw an article the other day. It was about problems with computer processing over the Internet. "A cloud over the cloud," was the headline. It seems like they're everyone's default doom-and-gloom metaphor. But I think they're beautiful, don't you? It's just that their beauty is missed because they're so omnipresent, so, I don't know, commonplace, that people don't notice them. They don't notice the beauty, but they don't even notice the clouds unless they get in the way of the sun. And so people think of clouds as things that get in the way. They think of them as the annoying, frustrating obstructions, and then they rush off and do some blue-sky thinking. (Laughter) But most people, when you stop to ask them, will admit to harboring a strange sort of fondness for clouds. It's like a nostalgic fondness, and they make them think of their youth. Who here can't remember thinking, well, looking and finding shapes in the clouds when they were kids? You know, when you were masters of daydreaming? Aristophanes, the ancient Greek playwright, he described the clouds as the patron godesses of idle fellows two and a half thousand years ago, and you can see what he means. It's just that these days, us adults seem reluctant to allow ourselves the indulgence of just allowing our imaginations to drift along in the breeze, and I think that's a pity. I think we should perhaps do a bit more of it. I think we should be a bit more willing, perhaps, to look at the beautiful sight of the sunlight bursting out from behind the clouds and go, "Wait a minute, that's two cats dancing the salsa!" (Laughter) (Applause) Or seeing the big, white, puffy one up there over the shopping center looks like the Abominable Snowman going to rob a bank. (Laughter) They're like nature's version of those inkblot images, you know, that shrinks used to show their patients in the '60s, and I think if you consider the shapes you see in the clouds, you'll save money on psychoanalysis bills. Let's say you're in love. All right? And you look up and what do you see? Right? Or maybe the opposite. You've just been dumped by your partner, and everywhere you look, it's kissing couples. (Laughter) Perhaps you're having a moment of existential angst. You know, you're thinking about your own mortality. And there, on the horizon, it's the Grim Reaper. (Laughter) Or maybe you see a topless sunbather. (Laughter) What would that mean? What would that mean? I have no idea. But one thing I do know is this: The bad press that clouds get is totally unfair. I think we should stand up for them, which is why, a few years ago, I started the Cloud Appreciation Society. Tens of thousands of members now in almost 100 countries around the world. And all these photographs that I'm showing, they were sent in by members. And the society exists to remind people of this: Clouds are not something to moan about. Far from it. They are, in fact, the most diverse, evocative, poetic aspect of nature. I think, if you live with your head in the clouds every now and then, it helps you keep your feet on the ground. And I want to show you why, with the help of some of my favorite types of clouds. Let's start with this one. It's the cirrus cloud, named after the Latin for a lock of hair. It's composed entirely of ice crystals cascading from the upper reaches of the troposphere, and as these ice crystals fall, they pass through different layers with different winds and they speed up and slow down, giving the cloud these brush-stroked appearances, these brush-stroke forms known as fall streaks. And these winds up there can be very, very fierce. They can be 200 miles an hour, 300 miles an hour. These clouds are bombing along, but from all the way down here, they appear to be moving gracefully, slowly, like most clouds. And so to tune into the clouds is to slow down, to calm down. It's like a bit of everyday meditation. Those are common clouds. What about rarer ones, like the lenticularis, the UFO-shaped lenticularis cloud? These clouds form in the region of mountains. When the wind passes, rises to pass over the mountain, it can take on a wave-like path in the lee of the peak, with these clouds hovering at the crest of these invisible standing waves of air, these flying saucer-like forms, and some of the early black-and-white UFO photos are in fact lenticularis clouds. It's true. A little rarer are the fallstreak holes. All right? This is when a layer is made up of very, very cold water droplets, and in one region they start to freeze, and this freezing sets off a chain reaction which spreads outwards with the ice crystals cascading and falling down below, giving the appearance of jellyfish tendrils down below. Rarer still, the Kelvin–Helmholtz cloud. Not a very snappy name. Needs a rebrand. This looks like a series of breaking waves, and it's caused by shearing winds -- the wind above the cloud layer and below the cloud layer differ significantly, and in the middle, in between, you get this undulating of the air, and if the difference in those speeds is just right, the tops of the undulations curl over in these beautiful breaking wave-like vortices. All right. Those are rarer clouds than the cirrus, but they're not that rare. If you look up, and you pay attention to the sky, you'll see them sooner or later, maybe not quite as dramatic as these, but you'll see them. And you'll see them around where you live. Clouds are the most egalitarian of nature's displays, because we all have a good, fantastic view of the sky. And these clouds, these rarer clouds, remind us that the exotic can be found in the everyday. Nothing is more nourishing, more stimulating to an active, inquiring mind than being surprised, being amazed. It's why we're all here at TED, right? But you don't need to rush off away from the familiar, across the world to be surprised. You just need to step outside, pay attention to what's so commonplace, so everyday, so mundane that everybody else misses it. One cloud that people rarely miss is this one: the cumulonimbus storm cloud. It's what's produces thunder and lightning and hail. These clouds spread out at the top in this enormous anvil fashion stretching 10 miles up into the atmosphere. They are an expression of the majestic architecture of our atmosphere. But from down below, they are the embodiment of the powerful, elemental force and power that drives our atmosphere. To be there is to be connected in the driving rain and the hail, to feel connected to our atmosphere. It's to be reminded that we are creatures that inhabit this ocean of air. We don't live beneath the sky. We live within it. And that connection, that visceral connection to our atmosphere feels to me like an antidote. It's an antidote to the growing tendency we have to feel that we can really ever experience life by watching it on a computer screen, you know, when we're in a wi-fi zone. But the one cloud that best expresses why cloudspotting is more valuable today than ever is this one, the cumulus cloud. Right? It forms on a sunny day. If you close your eyes and think of a cloud, it's probably one of these that comes to mind. All those cloud shapes at the beginning, those were cumulus clouds. The sharp, crisp outlines of this formation make it the best one for finding shapes in. And it reminds us of the aimless nature of cloudspotting, what an aimless activity it is. You're not going to change the world by lying on your back and gazing up at the sky, are you? It's pointless. It's a pointless activity, which is precisely why it's so important. The digital world conspires to make us feel eternally busy, perpetually busy. You know, when you're not dealing with the traditional pressures of earning a living and putting food on the table, raising a family, writing thank you letters, you have to now contend with answering a mountain of unanswered emails, updating a Facebook page, feeding your Twitter feed. And cloudspotting legitimizes doing nothing. (Laughter) And sometimes we need — (Applause) Sometimes we need excuses to do nothing. We need to be reminded by these patron goddesses of idle fellows that slowing down and being in the present, not thinking about what you've got to do and what you should have done, but just being here, letting your imagination lift from the everyday concerns down here and just being in the present, it's good for you, and it's good for the way you feel. It's good for your ideas. It's good for your creativity. It's good for your soul. So keep looking up, marvel at the ephemeral beauty, and always remember to live life with your head in the clouds. Thank you very much. (Applause)

(Nature sounds) When I first began recording wild soundscapes 45 years ago, I had no idea that ants, insect larvae, sea anemones and viruses created a sound signature. But they do. And so does every wild habitat on the planet, like the Amazon rainforest you're hearing behind me. In fact, temperate and tropical rainforests each produce a vibrant animal orchestra, that instantaneous and organized expression of insects, reptiles, amphibians, birds and mammals. And every soundscape that springs from a wild habitat generates its own unique signature, one that contains incredible amounts of information, and it's some of that information I want to share with you today. The soundscape is made up of three basic sources. The first is the geophony, or the nonbiological sounds that occur in any given habitat, like wind in the trees, water in a stream, waves at the ocean shore, movement of the Earth. The second of these is the biophony. The biophony is all of the sound that's generated by organisms in a given habitat at one time and in one place. And the third is all of the sound that we humans generate that's called anthrophony. Some of it is controlled, like music or theater, but most of it is chaotic and incoherent, which some of us refer to as noise. There was a time when I considered wild soundscapes to be a worthless artifact. They were just there, but they had no significance. Well, I was wrong. What I learned from these encounters was that careful listening gives us incredibly valuable tools by which to evaluate the health of a habitat across the entire spectrum of life. When I began recording in the late '60s, the typical methods of recording were limited to the fragmented capture of individual species like birds mostly, in the beginning, but later animals like mammals and amphibians. To me, this was a little like trying to understand the magnificence of Beethoven's Fifth Symphony by abstracting the sound of a single violin player out of the context of the orchestra and hearing just that one part. Fortunately, more and more institutions are implementing the more holistic models that I and a few of my colleagues have introduced to the field of soundscape ecology. When I began recording over four decades ago, I could record for 10 hours and capture one hour of usable material, good enough for an album or a film soundtrack or a museum installation. Now, because of global warming, resource extraction, and human noise, among many other factors, it can take up to 1,000 hours or more to capture the same thing. Fully 50 percent of my archive comes from habitats so radically altered that they're either altogether silent or can no longer be heard in any of their original form. The usual methods of evaluating a habitat have been done by visually counting the numbers of species and the numbers of individuals within each species in a given area. However, by comparing data that ties together both density and diversity from what we hear, I'm able to arrive at much more precise fitness outcomes. And I want to show you some examples that typify the possibilities unlocked by diving into this universe. This is Lincoln Meadow. Lincoln Meadow's a three-and-a-half-hour drive east of San Francisco in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, at about 2,000 meters altitude, and I've been recording there for many years. In 1988, a logging company convinced local residents that there would be absolutely no environmental impact from a new method they were trying called "selective logging," taking out a tree here and there rather than clear-cutting a whole area. With permission granted to record both before and after the operation, I set up my gear and captured a large number of dawn choruses to very strict protocol and calibrated recordings, because I wanted a really good baseline. This is an example of a spectrogram. A spectrogram is a graphic illustration of sound with time from left to right across the page -- 15 seconds in this case is represented — and frequency from the bottom of the page to the top, lowest to highest. And you can see that the signature of a stream is represented here in the bottom third or half of the page, while birds that were once in that meadow are represented in the signature across the top. There were a lot of them. And here's Lincoln Meadow before selective logging. (Nature sounds) Well, a year later I returned, and using the same protocols and recording under the same conditions, I recorded a number of examples of the same dawn choruses, and now this is what we've got. This is after selective logging. You can see that the stream is still represented in the bottom third of the page, but notice what's missing in the top two thirds. (Nature sounds) Coming up is the sound of a woodpecker. Well, I've returned to Lincoln Meadow 15 times in the last 25 years, and I can tell you that the biophony, the density and diversity of that biophony, has not yet returned to anything like it was before the operation. But here's a picture of Lincoln Meadow taken after, and you can see that from the perspective of the camera or the human eye, hardly a stick or a tree appears to be out of place, which would confirm the logging company's contention that there's nothing of environmental impact. However, our ears tell us a very different story. Young students are always asking me what these animals are saying, and really I've got no idea. But I can tell you that they do express themselves. Whether or not we understand it is a different story. I was walking along the shore in Alaska, and I came across this tide pool filled with a colony of sea anemones, these wonderful eating machines, relatives of coral and jellyfish. And curious to see if any of them made any noise, I dropped a hydrophone, an underwater microphone covered in rubber, down the mouth part, and immediately the critter began to absorb the microphone into its belly, and the tentacles were searching out of the surface for something of nutritional value. The static-like sounds that are very low, that you're going to hear right now. (Static sounds) Yeah, but watch. When it didn't find anything to eat -- (Honking sound) (Laughter) I think that's an expression that can be understood in any language. (Laughter) At the end of its breeding cycle, the Great Basin Spadefoot toad digs itself down about a meter under the hard-panned desert soil of the American West, where it can stay for many seasons until conditions are just right for it to emerge again. And when there's enough moisture in the soil in the spring, frogs will dig themselves to the surface and gather around these large, vernal pools in great numbers. And they vocalize in a chorus that's absolutely in sync with one another. And they do that for two reasons. The first is competitive, because they're looking for mates, and the second is cooperative, because if they're all vocalizing in sync together, it makes it really difficult for predators like coyotes, foxes and owls to single out any individual for a meal. This is a spectrogram of what the frog chorusing looks like when it's in a very healthy pattern. (Frogs croaking) Mono Lake is just to the east of Yosemite National Park in California, and it's a favorite habitat of these toads, and it's also favored by U.S. Navy jet pilots, who train in their fighters flying them at speeds exceeding 1,100 kilometers an hour and altitudes only a couple hundred meters above ground level of the Mono Basin, very fast, very low, and so loud that the anthrophony, the human noise, even though it's six and a half kilometers from the frog pond you just heard a second ago, it masked the sound of the chorusing toads. You can see in this spectrogram that all of the energy that was once in the first spectrogram is gone from the top end of the spectrogram, and that there's breaks in the chorusing at two and a half, four and a half, and six and a half seconds, and then the sound of the jet, the signature, is in yellow at the very bottom of the page. (Frogs croaking) Now at the end of that flyby, it took the frogs fully 45 minutes to regain their chorusing synchronicity, during which time, and under a full moon, we watched as two coyotes and a great horned owl came in to pick off a few of their numbers. The good news is that, with a little bit of habitat restoration and fewer flights, the frog populations, once diminishing during the 1980s and early '90s, have pretty much returned to normal. I want to end with a story told by a beaver. It's a very sad story, but it really illustrates how animals can sometimes show emotion, a very controversial subject among some older biologists. A colleague of mine was recording in the American Midwest around this pond that had been formed maybe 16,000 years ago at the end of the last ice age. It was also formed in part by a beaver dam at one end that held that whole ecosystem together in a very delicate balance. And one afternoon, while he was recording, there suddenly appeared from out of nowhere a couple of game wardens, who for no apparent reason, walked over to the beaver dam, dropped a stick of dynamite down it, blowing it up, killing the female and her young babies. Horrified, my colleagues remained behind to gather his thoughts and to record whatever he could the rest of the afternoon, and that evening, he captured a remarkable event: the lone surviving male beaver swimming in slow circles crying out inconsolably for its lost mate and offspring. This is probably the saddest sound I've ever heard coming from any organism, human or other. (Beaver crying) Yeah. Well. There are many facets to soundscapes, among them the ways in which animals taught us to dance and sing, which I'll save for another time. But you have heard how biophonies help clarify our understanding of the natural world. You've heard the impact of resource extraction, human noise and habitat destruction. And where environmental sciences have typically tried to understand the world from what we see, a much fuller understanding can be got from what we hear. Biophonies and geophonies are the signature voices of the natural world, and as we hear them, we're endowed with a sense of place, the true story of the world we live in. In a matter of seconds, a soundscape reveals much more information from many perspectives, from quantifiable data to cultural inspiration. Visual capture implicitly frames a limited frontal perspective of a given spatial context, while soundscapes widen that scope to a full 360 degrees, completely enveloping us. And while a picture may be worth 1,000 words, a soundscape is worth 1,000 pictures. And our ears tell us that the whisper of every leaf and creature speaks to the natural sources of our lives, which indeed may hold the secrets of love for all things, especially our own humanity, and the last word goes to a jaguar from the Amazon. (Growling) Thank you for listening. (Applause)

I'd like to talk to you today about a whole new way to think about sexual activity and sexuality education, by comparison. If you talk to someone today in America about sexual activity, you'll find pretty soon you're not just talking about sexual activity. You're also talking about baseball. Because baseball is the dominant cultural metaphor that Americans use to think about and talk about sexual activity, and we know that because there's all this language in English that seems to be talking about baseball but that's really talking about sexual activity. So, for example, you can be a pitcher or a catcher, and that corresponds to whether you perform a sexual act or receive a sexual act. Of course, there are the bases, which refer to specific sexual activities that happen in a very specific order, ultimately resulting in scoring a run or hitting a home run, which is usually having vaginal intercourse to the point of orgasm, at least for the guy. (Laughter) You can strike out, which means you don't get to have any sexual activity. And if you're a benchwarmer, you might be a virgin or somebody who for whatever reason isn't in the game, maybe because of your age or because of your ability or because of your skillset. A bat's a penis, and a nappy dugout is a vulva, or a vagina. A glove or a catcher's mitt is a condom. A switch-hitter is a bisexual person, and we gay and lesbian folks play for the other team. And then there's this one: "if there's grass on the field, play ball." And that usually refers to if a young person, specifically often a young woman, is old enough to have pubic hair, she's old enough to have sex with. This baseball model is incredibly problematic. It's sexist. It's heterosexist. It's competitive. It's goal-directed. And it can't result in healthy sexuality developing in young people or in adults. So we need a new model. I'm here today to offer you that new model. And it's based on pizza. Now pizza is something that is universally understood and that most people associate with a positive experience. So let's do this. Let's take baseball and pizza and compare it when talking about three aspects of sexual activity: the trigger for sexual activity, what happens during sexual activity, and the expected outcome of sexual activity. So when do you play baseball? You play baseball when it's baseball season and when there's a game on the schedule. It's not exactly your choice. So if it's prom night or a wedding night or at a party or if our parents aren't home, hey, it's just batter up. Can you imagine saying to your coach, "Uh, I'm not really feeling it today, I think I'll sit this game out." That's just not the way it happens. And when you get together to play baseball, immediately you're with two opposing teams, one playing offense, one playing defense, somebody's trying to move deeper into the field. That's usually a sign to the boy. Somebody's trying to defend people moving into the field. That's often given to the girl. It's competitive. We're not playing with each other. We're playing against each other. And when you show up to play baseball, nobody needs to talk about what we're going to do or how this baseball game might be good for us. Everybody knows the rules. You just take your position and play the game. But when do you have pizza? Well, you have pizza when you're hungry for pizza. It starts with an internal sense, an internal desire, or a need. "Huh. I could go for some pizza." (Laughter) And because it's an internal desire, we actually have some sense of control over that. I could decide that I'm hungry but know that it's not a great time to eat. And then when we get together with someone for pizza, we're not competing with them, we're looking for an experience that both of us will share that's satisfying for both of us, and when you get together for pizza with somebody, what's the first thing you do? You talk about it. You talk about what you want. You talk about what you like. You may even negotiate it. "How do you feel about pepperoni?" (Laughter) "Not so much, I'm kind of a mushroom guy myself." "Well, maybe we can go half and half." And even if you've had pizza with somebody for a very long time, don't you still say things like, "Should we get the usual?" (Laughter) "Or maybe something a little more adventurous?" Okay, so when you're playing baseball, so if we talk about during sexual activity, when you're playing baseball, you're just supposed to round the bases in the proper order one at a time. You can't hit the ball and run to right field. That doesn't work. And you also can't get to second base and say, "I like it here. I'm going to stay here." No. And also, of course, with baseball, there's, like, the specific equipment and a specific skill set. Not everybody can play baseball. It's pretty exclusive. Okay, but what about pizza? When we're trying to figure out what's good for pizza, isn't it all about what's our pleasure? There are a million different kinds of pizza. There's a million different toppings. There's a million different ways to eat pizza. And none of them are wrong. They're different. And in this case, difference is good, because that's going to increase the chance that we're having a satisfying experience. And lastly, what's the expected outcome of baseball? Well, in baseball, you play to win. You score as many runs as you can. There's always a winner in baseball, and that means there's always a loser in baseball. But what about pizza? Well, in pizza, we're not really -- there's no winning. How do you win pizza? You don't. But you do look for, "Are we satisfied?" And sometimes that can be different amounts over different times or with different people or on different days. And we get to decide when we feel satisfied. If we're still hungry, we might have some more. If you eat too much, though, you just feel gross. (Laughter) So what if we could take this pizza model and overlay it on top of sexuality education? A lot of sexuality education that happens today is so influenced by the baseball model, and it sets up education that can't help but produce unhealthy sexuality in young people. And those young people become older people. But if we could create sexuality education that was more like pizza, we could create education that invites people to think about their own desires, to make deliberate decisions about what they want, to talk about it with their partners, and to ultimately look for not some external outcome but for what feels satisfying, and we get to decide that. You may have noticed in the baseball and pizza comparison, under the baseball, it's all commands. They're all exclamation points. But under the pizza model, they're questions. And who gets to answer those questions? You do. I do. So remember, when we're thinking about sexuality education and sexual activity, baseball, you're out. Pizza is the way to think about healthy, satisfying sexual activity, and good, comprehensive sexuality education. Thank you very much for your time. (Applause)

Have you ever experienced a moment in your life that was so painful and confusing that all you wanted to do was learn as much as you could to make sense of it all? When I was 13, a close family friend who was like an uncle to me passed away from pancreatic cancer. When the disease hit so close to home, I knew I needed to learn more, so I went online to find answers. Using the Internet, I found a variety of statistics on pancreatic cancer, and what I had found shocked me. Over 85 percent of all pancreatic cancers are diagnosed late, when someone has less than a two percent chance of survival. Why are we so bad at detecting pancreatic cancer? The reason? Today's current modern medicine is a 60-year-old technique. That's older than my dad. (Laughter) But also, it's extremely expensive, costing 800 dollars per test, and it's grossly inaccurate, missing 30 percent of all pancreatic cancers. Your doctor would have to be ridiculously suspicious that you have the cancer in order to give you this test. Learning this, I knew there had to be a better way. So I set up a scientific criteria as to what a sensor would have to look like in order to effectively diagnose pancreatic cancer. The sensor would have to be inexpensive, rapid, simple, sensitive, selective, and minimally invasive. Now, there's a reason why this test hasn't been updated in over six decades, and that's because, when we're looking for pancreatic cancer, we're looking at your bloodstream, which is already abundant in all these tons and tons of protein, and you're looking for this miniscule difference in this tiny amount of protein, just this one protein. That's next to impossible. However, undeterred due to my teenage optimism -- (Applause) — I went online to a teenager's two best friends, Google and Wikipedia. I got everything for my homework from those two sources. And what I had found was an article that listed a database of over 8,000 different proteins that are found when you have pancreatic cancer. So I decided to go and make it my new mission to go through all these proteins and see which ones could serve as a biomarker for pancreatic cancer. And to make it a bit simpler for myself, I decided to map out a scientific criteria. And here it is. Essentially first, the protein would have to be found in all pancreatic cancers at high levels in the bloodstream in the earliest stages, but also only in cancer. And so I'm just plugging and chugging through this gargantuan task, and finally, on the 4,000th try, when I'm close to losing my sanity, I find the protein. And the name of the protein I'd located was called mesothelin, and it's just your ordinary, run-of-the-mill type protein, unless of course you have pancreatic, ovarian or lung cancer, in which case it's found at these very high levels in your bloodstream. But also the key is that it's found in the earliest stages of the disease, when someone has close to 100 percent chance of survival. So now that I'd found a reliable protein I could detect, I then shifted my focus to actually detecting that protein, and, thus, pancreatic cancer. Now, my breakthrough came in a very unlikely place, possibly the most unlikely place for innovation: my high school biology class, the absolute stifler of innovation. (Laughter) (Applause) And I had snuck in this article on these things called carbon nanotubes, and that's just a long, thin pipe of carbon that's an atom thick and one 50 thousandth the diameter of your hair. And despite their extremely small sizes, they have these incredible properties. They're kind of like the superheroes of material science. And while I was sneakily reading this article under my desk in my biology class, we were supposed to be paying attention to these other kind of cool molecules called antibodies. And these are pretty cool because they only react with one specific protein, but they're not nearly as interesting as carbon nanotubes. And so then, I was sitting in class, and suddenly it hit me: I could combine what I was reading about, carbon nanotubes, with what I was supposed to be thinking about, antibodies. Essentially, I could weave a bunch of these antibodies into a network of carbon nanotubes such that you have a network that only reacts with one protein, but also, due to the properties of these nanotubes, it would change its electrical properties based on the amount of protein present. However, there's a catch. These networks of carbon nanotubes are extremely flimsy, and since they're so delicate, they need to be supported. So that's why I chose to use paper. Making a cancer sensor out of paper is about as simple as making chocolate chip cookies, which I love. You start with some water, pour in some nanotubes, add antibodies, mix it up, take some paper, dip it, dry it, and you can detect cancer. (Applause) Then, suddenly, a thought occurred that kind of put a blemish on my amazing plan here. I can't really do cancer research on my kitchen countertop. My mom wouldn't really like that. So instead, I decided to go for a lab. So I typed up a budget, a materials list, a timeline, and a procedure, and I emailed it to 200 different professors at Johns Hopkins University and the National Institutes of Health, essentially anyone that had anything to do with pancreatic cancer. And I sat back waiting for these positive emails to be pouring in, saying, "You're a genius! You're going to save us all!" And — (Laughter) Then reality took hold, and over the course of a month, I got 199 rejections out of those 200 emails. One professor even went through my entire procedure, painstakingly -- I'm not really sure where he got all this time -- and he went through and said why each and every step was like the worst mistake I could ever make. Clearly, the professors did not have as high of an opinion of my work as I did. However, there was a silver lining. One professor said, "Maybe I might be able to help you, kid." So I went in that direction. (Laughter) As you can never say no to a kid. And so then, three months later, I finally nailed down a harsh deadline with this guy, and I get into his lab, I get all excited, and then I sit down, I start opening my mouth and talking, and five seconds later he calls in another Ph.D. Ph.D.'s just flock into this little room, and they're just firing these questions at me, and by the end, I kind of felt like I was in a clown car. There were 20 Ph.D.'s plus me and the professor crammed into this tiny office space with them firing these rapid-fire questions at me, trying to sink my procedure. How unlikely is that? I mean, pshhh. (Laughter) However, subjecting myself to that interrogation, I answered all of their questions, and I guessed on quite a few but I got them right, and I finally landed the lab space I needed. But it was shortly afterwards that I discovered my once brilliant procedure had something like a million holes in it, and over the course of seven months, I painstakingly filled each and every one of those holes. The result? One small paper sensor that costs three cents and takes five minutes to run. This makes it 168 times faster, over 26,000 times less expensive, and over 400 times more sensitive than our current standard for pancreatic cancer detection. (Applause) One of the best parts of the sensor, though, is that it has close to 100 percent accuracy, and can detect the cancer in the earliest stages when someone has close to 100 percent chance of survival. And so in the next two to five years, this sensor could potentially lift for pancreatic cancer survival rates from a dismal 5.5 percent to close to 100 percent, and it would do similar for ovarian and lung cancer. But it wouldn't stop there. By switching out that antibody, you can look at a different protein, thus, a different disease, potentially any disease in the entire world. So that ranges from heart disease to malaria, HIV, AIDS, as well as other forms of cancer -- anything. And so hopefully one day we can all have that one extra uncle, that one mother, that one brother, sister, we can have that one more family member to love, and that our hearts will be rid of that one disease burden that comes from pancreatic, ovarian and lung cancer, and potentially any disease, that through the Internet anything is possible. Theories can be shared, and you don't have to be a professor with multiple degrees to have your ideas valued. It's a neutral space, where what you look like, age or gender, it doesn't matter. It's just your ideas that count. For me, it's all about looking at the Internet in an entirely new way to realize that there's so much more to it than just posting duck-face pictures of yourself online. You could be changing the world. So if a 15-year-old who didn't even know what a pancreas was could find a new way to detect pancreatic cancer, just imagine what you could do. Thank you. (Applause)

Diana Reiss: You may think you're looking through a window at a dolphin spinning playfully, but what you're actually looking through is a two-way mirror at a dolphin looking at itself spinning playfully. This is a dolphin that is self-aware. This dolphin has self-awareness. It's a young dolphin named Bayley. I've been very interested in understanding the nature of the intelligence of dolphins for the past 30 years. How do we explore intelligence in this animal that's so different from us? And what I've used is a very simple research tool, a mirror, and we've gained great information, reflections of these animal minds. Dolphins aren't the only animals, the only non-human animals, to show mirror self-recognition. We used to think this was a uniquely human ability, but we learned that the great apes, our closest relatives, also show this ability. Then we showed it in dolphins, and then later in elephants. We did this work in my lab with the dolphins and elephants, and it's been recently shown in the magpie. Now, it's interesting, because we've embraced this Darwinian view of a continuity in physical evolution, this physical continuity. But we've been much more reticent, much slower at recognizing this continuity in cognition, in emotion, in consciousness in other animals. Other animals are conscious. They're emotional. They're aware. There have been multitudes of studies with many species over the years that have given us exquisite evidence for thinking and consciousness in other animals, other animals that are quite different than we are in form. We are not alone. We are not alone in these abilities. And I hope, and one of my biggest dreams, is that, with our growing awareness about the consciousness of others and our relationship with the rest of the animal world, that we'll give them the respect and protection that they deserve. So that's a wish I'm throwing out here for everybody, and I hope I can really engage you in this idea. Now, I want to return to dolphins, because these are the animals that I feel like I've been working up closely and personal with for over 30 years. And these are real personalities. They are not persons, but they're personalities in every sense of the word. And you can't get more alien than the dolphin. They are very different from us in body form. They're radically different. They come from a radically different environment. In fact, we're separated by 95 million years of divergent evolution. Look at this body. And in every sense of making a pun here, these are true non-terrestrials. I wondered how we might interface with these animals. In the 1980s, I developed an underwater keyboard. This was a custom-made touch-screen keyboard. What I wanted to do was give the dolphins choice and control. These are big brains, highly social animals, and I thought, well, if we give them choice and control, if they can hit a symbol on this keyboard -- and by the way, it was interfaced by fiber optic cables from Hewlett-Packard with an Apple II computer. This seems prehistoric now, but this was where we were with technology. So the dolphins could hit a key, a symbol, they heard a computer-generated whistle, and they got an object or activity. Now here's a little video. This is Delphi and Pan, and you're going to see Delphi hitting a key, he hears a computer-generated whistle -- (Whistle) -- and gets a ball, so they can actually ask for things they want. What was remarkable is, they explored this keyboard on their own. There was no intervention on our part. They explored the keyboard. They played around with it. They figured out how it worked. And they started to quickly imitate the sounds they were hearing on the keyboard. They imitated on their own. Beyond that, though, they started learning associations between the symbols, the sounds and the objects. What we saw was self-organized learning, and now I'm imagining, what can we do with new technologies? How can we create interfaces, new windows into the minds of animals, with the technologies that exist today? So I was thinking about this, and then, one day, I got a call from Peter. Peter Gabriel: I make noises for a living. On a good day, it's music, and I want to talk a little bit about the most amazing music-making experience I ever had. I'm a farm boy. I grew up surrounded by animals, and I would look in these eyes and wonder what was going on there? So as an adult, when I started to read about the amazing breakthroughs with Penny Patterson and Koko, with Sue Savage-Rumbaugh and Kanzi, Panbanisha, Irene Pepperberg, Alex the parrot, I got all excited. What was amazing to me also was they seemed a lot more adept at getting a handle on our language than we were on getting a handle on theirs. I work with a lot of musicians from around the world, and often we don't have any common language at all, but we sit down behind our instruments, and suddenly there's a way for us to connect and emote. So I started cold-calling, and eventually got through to Sue Savage-Rumbaugh, and she invited me down. I went down, and the bonobos had had access to percussion instruments, musical toys, but never before to a keyboard. At first they did what infants do, just bashed it with their fists, and then I asked, through Sue, if Panbanisha could try with one finger only. Sue Savage-Rumbaugh: Can you play a grooming song? I want to hear a grooming song. Play a real quiet grooming song. PG: So groom was the subject of the piece. (Music) So I'm just behind, jamming, yeah, this is what we started with. Sue's encouraging her to continue a little more. (Music) She discovers a note she likes, finds the octave. She'd never sat at a keyboard before. Nice triplets. SSR: You did good. That was very good. PG: She hit good. (Applause) So that night, we began to dream, and we thought, perhaps the most amazing tool that man's created is the Internet, and what would happen if we could somehow find new interfaces, visual-audio interfaces that would allow these remarkable sentient beings that we share the planet with access? And Sue Savage-Rumbaugh got excited about that, called her friend Steve Woodruff, and we began hustling all sorts of people whose work related or was inspiring, which led us to Diana, and led us to Neil. Neil Gershenfeld: Thanks, Peter. PG: Thank you. (Applause) NG: So Peter approached me. I lost it when I saw that clip. He approached me with a vision of doing these things not for people, for animals. And then I was struck in the history of the Internet. This is what the Internet looked like when it was born and you can call that the Internet of middle-aged white men, mostly middle-aged white men. Vint Cerf: (Laughs) (Laughter) NG: Speaking as one. Then, when I first came to TED, which was where I met Peter, I showed this. This is a $1 web server, and at the time that was radical. And the possibility of making a web server for a dollar grew into what became known as the Internet of Things, which is literally an industry now with tremendous implications for health care, energy efficiency. And we were happy with ourselves. And then when Peter showed me that, I realized we had missed something, which is the rest of the planet. So we started up this interspecies Internet project. Now we started talking with TED about how you bring dolphins and great apes and elephants to TED, and we realized that wouldn't work. So we're going to bring you to them. So if we could switch to the audio from this computer, we've been video conferencing with cognitive animals, and we're going to have each of them just briefly introduce them. And so if we could also have this up, great. So the first site we're going to meet is Cameron Park Zoo in Waco, with orangutans. In the daytime they live outside. It's nighttime there now. So can you please go ahead? Terri Cox: Hi, I'm Terri Cox with the Cameron Park Zoo in Waco, Texas, and with me I have KeraJaan and Mei, two of our Bornean orangutans. During the day, they have a beautiful, large outdoor habitat, and at night, they come into this habitat, into their night quarters, where they can have a climate-controlled and secure environment to sleep in. We participate in the Apps for Apes program Orangutan Outreach, and we use iPads to help stimulate and enrich the animals, and also help raise awareness for these critically endangered animals. And they share 97 percent of our DNA and are incredibly intelligent, so it's so exciting to think of all the opportunities that we have via technology and the Internet to really enrich their lives and open up their world. We're really excited about the possibility of an interspecies Internet, and K.J. has been enjoying the conference very much. NG: That's great. When we were rehearsing last night, he had fun watching the elephants. Next user group are the dolphins at the National Aquarium. Please go ahead. Allison Ginsburg: Good evening. Well, my name is Allison Ginsburg, and we're live in Baltimore at the National Aquarium. Joining me are three of our eight Atlantic bottlenose dolphins: 20-year-old Chesapeake, who was our first dolphin born here, her four-year-old daughter Bayley, and her half sister, 11-year-old Maya. Now, here at the National Aquarium we are committed to excellence in animal care, to research, and to conservation. The dolphins are pretty intrigued as to what's going on here tonight. They're not really used to having cameras here at 8 o'clock at night. In addition, we are very committed to doing different types of research. As Diana mentioned, our animals are involved in many different research studies. NG: Those are for you. Okay, that's great, thank you. And the third user group, in Thailand, is Think Elephants. Go ahead, Josh. Josh Plotnik: Hi, my name is Josh Plotnik, and I'm with Think Elephants International, and we're here in the Golden Triangle of Thailand with the Golden Triangle Asian Elephant Foundation elephants. And we have 26 elephants here, and our research is focused on the evolution of intelligence with elephants, but our foundation Think Elephants is focused on bringing elephants into classrooms around the world virtually like this and showing people how incredible these animals are. So we're able to bring the camera right up to the elephant, put food into the elephant's mouth, show people what's going on inside their mouths, and show everyone around the world how incredible these animals really are. NG: Okay, that's great. Thanks Josh. And once again, we've been building great relationships among them just since we've been rehearsing. So at that point, if we can go back to the other computer, we were starting to think about how you integrate the rest of the biomass of the planet into the Internet, and we went to the best possible person I can think of, which is Vint Cerf, who is one of the founders who gave us the Internet. Vint? VC: Thank you, Neil. (Applause) A long time ago in a galaxy — oops, wrong script. Forty years ago, Bob Kahn and I did the design of the Internet. Thirty years ago, we turned it on. Just last year, we turned on the production Internet. You've been using the experimental version for the last 30 years. The production version, it uses IP version 6. It has 3.4 times 10 to the 38th possible terminations. That's a number only that Congress can appreciate. But it leads to what is coming next. When Bob and I did this design, we thought we were building a system to connect computers together. What we very quickly discovered is that this was a system for connecting people together. And what you've seen tonight tells you that we should not restrict this network to one species, that these other intelligent, sentient species should be part of the system too. This is the system as it looks today, by the way. This is what the Internet looks like to a computer that's trying to figure out where the traffic is supposed to go. This is generated by a program that's looking at the connectivity of the Internet, and how all the various networks are connected together. There are about 400,000 networks, interconnected, run independently by 400,000 different operating agencies, and the only reason this works is that they all use the same standard TCP/IP protocols. Well, you know where this is headed. The Internet of Things tell us that a lot of computer-enabled appliances and devices are going to become part of this system too: appliances that you use around the house, that you use in your office, that you carry around with yourself or in the car. That's the Internet of Things that's coming. Now, what's important about what these people are doing is that they're beginning to learn how to communicate with species that are not us but share a common sensory environment. We're beginning to explore what it means to communicate with something that isn't just another person. Well, you can see what's coming next. All kinds of possible sentient beings may be interconnected through this system, and I can't wait to see these experiments unfold. What happens after that? Well, let's see. There are machines that need to talk to machines and that we need to talk to, and so as time goes on, we're going to have to learn how to communicate with computers and how to get computers to communicate with us in the way that we're accustomed to, not with keyboards, not with mice, but with speech and gestures and all the natural human language that we're accustomed to. So we'll need something like C3PO to become a translator between ourselves and some of the other machines we live with. Now, there is a project that's underway called the interplanetary Internet. It's in operation between Earth and Mars. It's operating on the International Space Station. It's part of the spacecraft that's in orbit around the Sun that's rendezvoused with two planets. So the interplanetary system is on its way, but there's a last project, which the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, which funded the original ARPANET, funded the Internet, funded the interplanetary architecture, is now funding a project to design a spacecraft to get to the nearest star in 100 years' time. What that means is that what we're learning with these interactions with other species will teach us, ultimately, how we might interact with an alien from another world. I can hardly wait. (Applause) June Cohen: So first of all, thank you, and I would like to acknowledge that four people who could talk to us for full four days actually managed to stay to four minutes each, and we thank you for that. I have so many questions, but maybe a few practical things that the audience might want to know. You're launching this idea here at TED — PG: Today. JC: Today. This is the first time you're talking about it. Tell me a little bit about where you're going to take the idea. What's next? PG: I think we want to engage as many people here as possible in helping us think of smart interfaces that will make all this possible. NG: And just mechanically, there's a 501(c)(3) and web infrastructure and all of that, but it's not quite ready to turn on, so we'll roll that out, and contact us if you want the information on it. The idea is this will be -- much like the Internet functions as a network of networks, which is Vint's core contribution, this will be a wrapper around all of these initiatives, that are wonderful individually, to link them globally. JC: Right, and do you have a web address that we might look for yet? NG: Shortly. JC: Shortly. We will come back to you on that. And very quickly, just to clarify. Some people might have looked at the video that you showed and thought, well, that's just a webcam. What's special about it? If you could talk for just a moment about how you want to go past that? NG: So this is scalable video infrastructure, not for a few to a few but many to many, so that it scales to symmetrical video sharing and content sharing across these sites around the planet. So there's a lot of back-end signal processing, not for one to many, but for many to many. JC: Right, and then on a practical level, which technologies are you looking at first? I know you mentioned that a keyboard is a really key part of this. DR: We're trying to develop an interactive touch screen for dolphins. This is sort of a continuation of some of the earlier work, and we just got our first seed money today towards that, so it's our first project. JC: Before the talk, even. DR: Yeah. JC: Wow. Well done. All right, well thank you all so much for joining us. It's such a delight to have you on the stage. DR: Thank you. VC: Thank you. (Applause)

This is my grandfather. And this is my son. My grandfather taught me to work with wood when I was a little boy, and he also taught me the idea that if you cut down a tree to turn it into something, honor that tree's life and make it as beautiful as you possibly can. My little boy reminded me that for all the technology and all the toys in the world, sometimes just a small block of wood, if you stack it up tall, actually is an incredibly inspiring thing. These are my buildings. I build all around the world out of our office in Vancouver and New York. And we build buildings of different sizes and styles and different materials, depending on where we are. But wood is the material that I love the most, and I'm going to tell you the story about wood. And part of the reason I love it is that every time people go into my buildings that are wood, I notice they react completely differently. I've never seen anybody walk into one of my buildings and hug a steel or a concrete column, but I've actually seen that happen in a wood building. I've actually seen how people touch the wood, and I think there's a reason for it. Just like snowflakes, no two pieces of wood can ever be the same anywhere on Earth. That's a wonderful thing. I like to think that wood gives Mother Nature fingerprints in our buildings. It's Mother Nature's fingerprints that make our buildings connect us to nature in the built environment. Now, I live in Vancouver, near a forest that grows to 33 stories tall. Down the coast here in California, the redwood forest grows to 40 stories tall. But the buildings that we think about in wood are only four stories tall in most places on Earth. Even building codes actually limit the ability for us to build much taller than four stories in many places, and that's true here in the United States. Now there are exceptions, but there needs to be some exceptions, and things are going to change, I'm hoping. And the reason I think that way is that today half of us live in cities, and that number is going to grow to 75 percent. Cities and density mean that our buildings are going to continue to be big, and I think there's a role for wood to play in cities. And I feel that way because three billion people in the world today, over the next 20 years, will need a new home. That's 40 percent of the world that are going to need a new building built for them in the next 20 years. Now, one in three people living in cities today actually live in a slum. That's one billion people in the world live in slums. A hundred million people in the world are homeless. The scale of the challenge for architects and for society to deal with in building is to find a solution to house these people. But the challenge is, as we move to cities, cities are built in these two materials, steel and concrete, and they're great materials. They're the materials of the last century. But they're also materials with very high energy and very high greenhouse gas emissions in their process. Steel represents about three percent of man's greenhouse gas emissions, and concrete is over five percent. So if you think about that, eight percent of our contribution to greenhouse gases today comes from those two materials alone. We don't think about it a lot, and unfortunately, we actually don't even think about buildings, I think, as much as we should. This is a U.S. statistic about the impact of greenhouse gases. Almost half of our greenhouse gases are related to the building industry, and if we look at energy, it's the same story. You'll notice that transportation's sort of second down that list, but that's the conversation we mostly hear about. And although a lot of that is about energy, it's also so much about carbon. The problem I see is that, ultimately, the clash of how we solve that problem of serving those three billion people that need a home, and climate change, are a head-on collision about to happen, or already happening. That challenge means that we have to start thinking in new ways, and I think wood is going to be part of that solution, and I'm going to tell you the story of why. As an architect, wood is the only material, big material, that I can build with that's already grown by the power of the sun. When a tree grows in the forest and gives off oxygen and soaks up carbon dioxide, and it dies and it falls to the forest floor, it gives that carbon dioxide back to the atmosphere or into the ground. If it burns in a forest fire, it's going to give that carbon back to the atmosphere as well. But if you take that wood and you put it into a building or into a piece of furniture or into that wooden toy, it actually has an amazing capacity to store the carbon and provide us with a sequestration. One cubic meter of wood will store one tonne of carbon dioxide. Now our two solutions to climate are obviously to reduce our emissions and find storage. Wood is the only major material building material I can build with that actually does both those two things. So I believe that we have an ethic that the Earth grows our food, and we need to move to an ethic in this century that the Earth should grow our homes. Now, how are we going to do that when we're urbanizing at this rate and we think about wood buildings only at four stories? We need to reduce the concrete and steel and we need to grow bigger, and what we've been working on is 30-story tall buildings made of wood. We've been engineering them with an engineer named Eric Karsh who works with me on it, and we've been doing this new work because there are new wood products out there for us to use, and we call them mass timber panels. These are panels made with young trees, small growth trees, small pieces of wood glued together to make panels that are enormous: eight feet wide, 64 feet long, and of various thicknesses. The way I describe this best, I've found, is to say that we're all used to two-by-four construction when we think about wood. That's what people jump to as a conclusion. Two-by-four construction is sort of like the little eight-dot bricks of Lego that we all played with as kids, and you can make all kinds of cool things out of Lego at that size, and out of two-by-fours. But do remember when you were a kid, and you kind of sifted through the pile in your basement, and you found that big 24-dot brick of Lego, and you were kind of like, "Cool, this is awesome. I can build something really big, and this is going to be great." That's the change. Mass timber panels are those 24-dot bricks. They're changing the scale of what we can do, and what we've developed is something we call FFTT, which is a Creative Commons solution to building a very flexible system of building with these large panels where we tilt up six stories at a time if we want to. This animation shows you how the building goes together in a very simple way, but these buildings are available for architects and engineers now to build on for different cultures in the world, different architectural styles and characters. In order for us to build safely, we've engineered these buildings, actually, to work in a Vancouver context, where we're a high seismic zone, even at 30 stories tall. Now obviously, every time I bring this up, people even, you know, here at the conference, say, "Are you serious? Thirty stories? How's that going to happen?" And there's a lot of really good questions that are asked and important questions that we spent quite a long time working on the answers to as we put together our report and the peer reviewed report. I'm just going to focus on a few of them, and let's start with fire, because I think fire is probably the first one that you're all thinking about right now. Fair enough. And the way I describe it is this. If I asked you to take a match and light it and hold up a log and try to get that log to go on fire, it doesn't happen, right? We all know that. But to build a fire, you kind of start with small pieces of wood and you work your way up, and eventually you can add the log to the fire, and when you do add the log to the fire, of course, it burns, but it burns slowly. Well, mass timber panels, these new products that we're using, are much like the log. It's hard to start them on fire, and when they do, they actually burn extraordinarily predictably, and we can use fire science in order to predict and make these buildings as safe as concrete and as safe as steel. The next big issue, deforestation. Eighteen percent of our contribution to greenhouse gas emissions worldwide is the result of deforestation. The last thing we want to do is cut down trees. Or, the last thing we want to do is cut down the wrong trees. There are models for sustainable forestry that allow us to cut trees properly, and those are the only trees appropriate to use for these kinds of systems. Now I actually think that these ideas will change the economics of deforestation. In countries with deforestation issues, we need to find a way to provide better value for the forest and actually encourage people to make money through very fast growth cycles -- 10-, 12-, 15-year-old trees that make these products and allow us to build at this scale. We've calculated a 20-story building: We'll grow enough wood in North America every 13 minutes. That's how much it takes. The carbon story here is a really good one. If we built a 20-story building out of cement and concrete, the process would result in the manufacturing of that cement and 1,200 tonnes of carbon dioxide. If we did it in wood, in this solution, we'd sequester about 3,100 tonnes, for a net difference of 4,300 tonnes. That's the equivalent of about 900 cars removed from the road in one year. Think back to that three billion people that need a new home, and maybe this is a contributor to reducing. We're at the beginning of a revolution, I hope, in the way we build, because this is the first new way to build a skyscraper in probably 100 years or more. But the challenge is changing society's perception of possibility, and it's a huge challenge. The engineering is, truthfully, the easy part of this. And the way I describe it is this. The first skyscraper, technically -- and the definition of a skyscraper is 10 stories tall, believe it or not — but the first skyscraper was this one in Chicago, and people were terrified to walk underneath this building. But only four years after it was built, Gustave Eiffel was building the Eiffel Tower, and as he built the Eiffel Tower, he changed the skylines of the cities of the world, changed and created a competition between places like New York City and Chicago, where developers started building bigger and bigger buildings and pushing the envelope up higher and higher with better and better engineering. We built this model in New York, actually, as a theoretical model on the campus of a technical university soon to come, and the reason we picked this site to just show you what these buildings may look like, because the exterior can change. It's really just the structure that we're talking about. The reason we picked it is because this is a technical university, and I believe that wood is the most technologically advanced material I can build with. It just happens to be that Mother Nature holds the patent, and we don't really feel comfortable with it. But that's the way it should be, nature's fingerprints in the built environment. I'm looking for this opportunity to create an Eiffel Tower moment, we call it. Buildings are starting to go up around the world. There's a building in London that's nine stories, a new building that just finished in Australia that I believe is 10 or 11. We're starting to push the height up of these wood buildings, and we're hoping, and I'm hoping, that my hometown of Vancouver actually potentially announces the world's tallest at around 20 stories in the not-so-distant future. That Eiffel Tower moment will break the ceiling, these arbitrary ceilings of height, and allow wood buildings to join the competition. And I believe the race is ultimately on. Thank you. (Applause)

When we talk about corruption, there are typical types of individuals that spring to mind. There's the former Soviet megalomaniacs. Saparmurat Niyazov, he was one of them. Until his death in 2006, he was the all-powerful leader of Turkmenistan, a Central Asian country rich in natural gas. Now, he really loved to issue presidential decrees. And one renamed the months of the year including after himself and his mother. He spent millions of dollars creating a bizarre personality cult, and his crowning glory was the building of a 40-foot-high gold-plated statue of himself which stood proudly in the capital's central square and rotated to follow the sun. He was a slightly unusual guy. And then there's that cliché, the African dictator or minister or official. There's Teodorín Obiang. So his daddy is president for life of Equatorial Guinea, a West African nation that has exported billions of dollars of oil since the 1990s and yet has a truly appalling human rights record. The vast majority of its people are living in really miserable poverty despite an income per capita that's on a par with that of Portugal. So Obiang junior, well, he buys himself a $30 million mansion in Malibu, California. I've been up to its front gates. I can tell you it's a magnificent spread. He bought an €18 million art collection that used to belong to fashion designer Yves Saint Laurent, a stack of fabulous sports cars, some costing a million dollars apiece -- oh, and a Gulfstream jet, too. Now get this: Until recently, he was earning an official monthly salary of less than 7,000 dollars. And there's Dan Etete. Well, he was the former oil minister of Nigeria under President Abacha, and it just so happens he's a convicted money launderer too. We've spent a great deal of time investigating a $1 billion -- that's right, a $1 billion — oil deal that he was involved with, and what we found was pretty shocking, but more about that later. So it's easy to think that corruption happens somewhere over there, carried out by a bunch of greedy despots and individuals up to no good in countries that we, personally, may know very little about and feel really unconnected to and unaffected by what might be going on. But does it just happen over there? Well, at 22, I was very lucky. My first job out of university was investigating the illegal trade in African ivory. And that's how my relationship with corruption really began. In 1993, with two friends who were colleagues, Simon Taylor and Patrick Alley, we set up an organization called Global Witness. Our first campaign was investigating the role of illegal logging in funding the war in Cambodia. So a few years later, and it's now 1997, and I'm in Angola undercover investigating blood diamonds. Perhaps you saw the film, the Hollywood film "Blood Diamond," the one with Leonardo DiCaprio. Well, some of that sprang from our work. Luanda, it was full of land mine victims who were struggling to survive on the streets and war orphans living in sewers under the streets, and a tiny, very wealthy elite who gossiped about shopping trips to Brazil and Portugal. And it was a slightly crazy place. So I'm sitting in a hot and very stuffy hotel room feeling just totally overwhelmed. But it wasn't about blood diamonds. Because I'd been speaking to lots of people there who, well, they talked about a different problem: that of a massive web of corruption on a global scale and millions of oil dollars going missing. And for what was then a very small organization of just a few people, trying to even begin to think how we might tackle that was an enormous challenge. And in the years that I've been, and we've all been campaigning and investigating, I've repeatedly seen that what makes corruption on a global, massive scale possible, well it isn't just greed or the misuse of power or that nebulous phrase "weak governance." I mean, yes, it's all of those, but corruption, it's made possible by the actions of global facilitators. So let's go back to some of those people I talked about earlier. Now, they're all people we've investigated, and they're all people who couldn't do what they do alone. Take Obiang junior. Well, he didn't end up with high-end art and luxury houses without help. He did business with global banks. A bank in Paris held accounts of companies controlled by him, one of which was used to buy the art, and American banks, well, they funneled 73 million dollars into the States, some of which was used to buy that California mansion. And he didn't do all of this in his own name either. He used shell companies. He used one to buy the property, and another, which was in somebody else's name, to pay the huge bills it cost to run the place. And then there's Dan Etete. Well, when he was oil minister, he awarded an oil block now worth over a billion dollars to a company that, guess what, yeah, he was the hidden owner of. Now, it was then much later traded on with the kind assistance of the Nigerian government -- now I have to be careful what I say here — to subsidiaries of Shell and the Italian Eni, two of the biggest oil companies around. So the reality is, is that the engine of corruption, well, it exists far beyond the shores of countries like Equatorial Guinea or Nigeria or Turkmenistan. This engine, well, it's driven by our international banking system, by the problem of anonymous shell companies, and by the secrecy that we have afforded big oil, gas and mining operations, and, most of all, by the failure of our politicians to back up their rhetoric and do something really meaningful and systemic to tackle this stuff. Now let's take the banks first. Well, it's not going to come as any surprise for me to tell you that banks accept dirty money, but they prioritize their profits in other destructive ways too. For example, in Sarawak, Malaysia. Now this region, it has just five percent of its forests left intact. Five percent. So how did that happen? Well, because an elite and its facilitators have been making millions of dollars from supporting logging on an industrial scale for many years. So we sent an undercover investigator in to secretly film meetings with members of the ruling elite, and the resulting footage, well, it made some people very angry, and you can see that on YouTube, but it proved what we had long suspected, because it showed how the state's chief minister, despite his later denials, used his control over land and forest licenses to enrich himself and his family. And HSBC, well, we know that HSBC bankrolled the region's largest logging companies that were responsible for some of that destruction in Sarawak and elsewhere. The bank violated its own sustainability policies in the process, but it earned around 130 million dollars. Now shortly after our exposé, very shortly after our exposé earlier this year, the bank announced a policy review on this. And is this progress? Maybe, but we're going to be keeping a very close eye on that case. And then there's the problem of anonymous shell companies. Well, we've all heard about what they are, I think, and we all know they're used quite a bit by people and companies who are trying to avoid paying their proper dues to society, also known as taxes. But what doesn't usually come to light is how shell companies are used to steal huge sums of money, transformational sums of money, from poor countries. In virtually every case of corruption that we've investigated, shell companies have appeared, and sometimes it's been impossible to find out who is really involved in the deal. A recent study by the World Bank looked at 200 cases of corruption. It found that over 70 percent of those cases had used anonymous shell companies, totaling almost 56 billion dollars. Now many of these companies were in America or the United Kingdom, its overseas territories and Crown dependencies, and so it's not just an offshore problem, it's an on-shore one too. You see, shell companies, they're central to the secret deals which may benefit wealthy elites rather than ordinary citizens. One striking recent case that we've investigated is how the government in the Democratic Republic of Congo sold off a series of valuable, state-owned mining assets to shell companies in the British Virgin Islands. So we spoke to sources in country, trawled through company documents and other information trying to piece together a really true picture of the deal. And we were alarmed to find that these shell companies had quickly flipped many of the assets on for huge profits to major international mining companies listed in London. Now, the Africa Progress Panel, led by Kofi Annan, they've calculated that Congo may have lost more than 1.3 billion dollars from these deals. That's almost twice the country's annual health and education budget combined. And will the people of Congo, will they ever get their money back? Well, the answer to that question, and who was really involved and what really happened, well that's going to probably remain locked away in the secretive company registries of the British Virgin Islands and elsewhere unless we all do something about it. And how about the oil, gas and mining companies? Okay, maybe it's a bit of a cliché to talk about them. Corruption in that sector, no surprise. There's corruption everywhere, so why focus on that sector? Well, because there's a lot at stake. In 2011, natural resource exports outweighed aid flows by almost 19 to one in Africa, Asia and Latin America. Nineteen to one. Now that's a hell of a lot of schools and universities and hospitals and business startups, many of which haven't materialized and never will because some of that money has simply been stolen away. Now let's go back to the oil and mining companies, and let's go back to Dan Etete and that $1 billion deal. And now forgive me, I'm going to read the next bit because it's a very live issue, and our lawyers have been through this in some detail and they want me to get it right. Now, on the surface, the deal appeared straightforward. Subsidiaries of Shell and Eni paid the Nigerian government for the block. The Nigerian government transferred precisely the same amount, to the very dollar, to an account earmarked for a shell company whose hidden owner was Etete. Now, that's not bad going for a convicted money launderer. And here's the thing. After many months of digging around and reading through hundreds of pages of court documents, we found evidence that, in fact, Shell and Eni had known that the funds would be transferred to that shell company, and frankly, it's hard to believe they didn't know who they were really dealing with there. Now, it just shouldn't take these sorts of efforts to find out where the money in deals like this went. I mean, these are state assets. They're supposed to be used for the benefit of the people in the country. But in some countries, citizens and journalists who are trying to expose stories like this have been harassed and arrested and some have even risked their lives to do so. And finally, well, there are those who believe that corruption is unavoidable. It's just how some business is done. It's too complex and difficult to change. So in effect, what? We just accept it. But as a campaigner and investigator, I have a different view, because I've seen what can happen when an idea gains momentum. In the oil and mining sector, for example, there is now the beginning of a truly worldwide transparency standard that could tackle some of these problems. In 1999, when Global Witness called for oil companies to make payments on deals transparent, well, some people laughed at the extreme naiveté of that small idea. But literally hundreds of civil society groups from around the world came together to fight for transparency, and now it's fast becoming the norm and the law. Two thirds of the value of the world's oil and mining companies are now covered by transparency laws. Two thirds. So this is change happening. This is progress. But we're not there yet, by far. Because it really isn't about corruption somewhere over there, is it? In a globalized world, corruption is a truly globalized business, and one that needs global solutions, supported and pushed by us all, as global citizens, right here. Thank you. (Applause)

(Music) (Applause) (Music) (Applause) Robbie Mizzone: Thank you. Tommy Mizzone: Thank you very much. We're so excited to be here. It's such an honor for us. Like he said, we're three brothers from New Jersey -- you know, the bluegrass capital of the world. (Laughter) We discovered bluegrass a few years ago, and we fell in love with it. We hope you guys will too. This next song is an original we wrote called "Timelapse," and it will probably live up to its name. (Tuning) (Music) (Applause) TM: Thank you very much. RM: I'm just going to take a second to introduce the band. On guitar is my 15-year-old brother Tommy. (Applause) On banjo is 10-year-old Jonny. (Applause) He's also our brother. And I'm Robbie, and I'm 14, and I play the fiddle. (Applause) As you can see, we decided to make it hard on ourselves, and we chose to play three songs in three different keys. Yeah. I'm also going to explain, a lot of people want to know where we got the name Sleepy Man Banjo Boys from. So it started when Jonny was little, and he first started the banjo, he would play on his back with his eyes closed, and we'd say it looked like he was sleeping. So you can probably piece the rest together. TM: We can't really figure out the reason for this. It might have been that it weighs about a million pounds. (Music) (Applause) (Music) (Applause) TM: Thank you very much. RM: Thank you.

Throughout the history of computers we've been striving to shorten the gap between us and digital information, the gap between our physical world and the world in the screen where our imagination can go wild. And this gap has become shorter, shorter, and even shorter, and now this gap is shortened down to less than a millimeter, the thickness of a touch-screen glass, and the power of computing has become accessible to everyone. But I wondered, what if there could be no boundary at all? I started to imagine what this would look like. First, I created this tool which penetrates into the digital space, so when you press it hard on the screen, it transfers its physical body into pixels. Designers can materialize their ideas directly in 3D, and surgeons can practice on virtual organs underneath the screen. So with this tool, this boundary has been broken. But our two hands still remain outside the screen. How can you reach inside and interact with the digital information using the full dexterity of our hands? At Microsoft Applied Sciences, along with my mentor Cati Boulanger, I redesigned the computer and turned a little space above the keyboard into a digital workspace. By combining a transparent display and depth cameras for sensing your fingers and face, now you can lift up your hands from the keyboard and reach inside this 3D space and grab pixels with your bare hands. (Applause) Because windows and files have a position in the real space, selecting them is as easy as grabbing a book off your shelf. Then you can flip through this book while highlighting the lines, words on the virtual touch pad below each floating window. Architects can stretch or rotate the models with their two hands directly. So in these examples, we are reaching into the digital world. But how about reversing its role and having the digital information reach us instead? I'm sure many of us have had the experience of buying and returning items online. But now you don't have to worry about it. What I got here is an online augmented fitting room. This is a view that you get from head-mounted or see-through display when the system understands the geometry of your body. Taking this idea further, I started to think, instead of just seeing these pixels in our space, how can we make it physical so that we can touch and feel it? What would such a future look like? At MIT Media Lab, along with my advisor Hiroshi Ishii and my collaborator Rehmi Post, we created this one physical pixel. Well, in this case, this spherical magnet acts like a 3D pixel in our space, which means that both computers and people can move this object to anywhere within this little 3D space. What we did was essentially canceling gravity and controlling the movement by combining magnetic levitation and mechanical actuation and sensing technologies. And by digitally programming the object, we are liberating the object from constraints of time and space, which means that now, human motions can be recorded and played back and left permanently in the physical world. So choreography can be taught physically over distance and Michael Jordan's famous shooting can be replicated over and over as a physical reality. Students can use this as a tool to learn about the complex concepts such as planetary motion, physics, and unlike computer screens or textbooks, this is a real, tangible experience that you can touch and feel, and it's very powerful. And what's more exciting than just turning what's currently in the computer physical is to start imagining how programming the world will alter even our daily physical activities. (Laughter) As you can see, the digital information will not just show us something but it will start directly acting upon us as a part of our physical surroundings without disconnecting ourselves from our world. Today, we started by talking about the boundary, but if we remove this boundary, the only boundary left is our imagination. Thank you. (Applause)

There's an old joke about a cop who's walking his beat in the middle of the night, and he comes across a guy under a street lamp who's looking at the ground and moving from side to side, and the cop asks him what he's doing. The guys says he's looking for his keys. So the cop takes his time and looks over and kind of makes a little matrix and looks for about two, three minutes. No keys. The cop says, "Are you sure? Hey buddy, are you sure you lost your keys here?" And the guy says, "No, no, actually I lost them down at the other end of the street, but the light is better here." There's a concept that people talk about nowadays called big data, and what they're talking about is all of the information that we're generating through our interaction with and over the Internet, everything from Facebook and Twitter to music downloads, movies, streaming, all this kind of stuff, the live streaming of TED. And the folks who work with big data, for them, they talk about that their biggest problem is we have so much information, the biggest problem is, how do we organize all that information? I can tell you that working in global health, that is not our biggest problem. Because for us, even though the light is better on the Internet, the data that would help us solve the problems we're trying to solve is not actually present on the Internet. So we don't know, for example, how many people right now are being affected by disasters or by conflict situations. We don't know for really basically any of the clinics in the developing world, which ones have medicines and which ones don't. We have no idea of what the supply chain is for those clinics. We don't know -- and this is really amazing to me -- we don't know how many children were born, or how many children there are in Bolivia or Botswana or Bhutan. We don't know how many kids died last week in any of those countries. We don't know the needs of the elderly, the mentally ill. For all of these different critically important problems or critically important areas that we want to solve problems in, we basically know nothing at all. And part of the reason why we don't know anything at all is that the information technology systems that we use in global health to find the data to solve these problems is what you see here. And this is about a 5,000-year-old technology. Some of you may have used it before. It's kind of on its way out now, but we still use it for 99 percent of our stuff. This is a paper form, and what you're looking at is a paper form in the hand of a Ministry of Health nurse in Indonesia who is tramping out across the countryside in Indonesia on, I'm sure, a very hot and humid day, and she is going to be knocking on thousands of doors over a period of weeks or months, knocking on the doors and saying, "Excuse me, we'd like to ask you some questions. Do you have any children? Were your children vaccinated?" Because the only way we can actually find out how many children were vaccinated in the country of Indonesia, what percentage were vaccinated, is actually not on the Internet but by going out and knocking on doors, sometimes tens of thousands of doors. Sometimes it takes months to even years to do something like this. You know, a census of Indonesia would probably take two years to accomplish. And the problem, of course, with all of this is that with all those paper forms — and I'm telling you we have paper forms for every possible thing. We have paper forms for vaccination surveys. We have paper forms to track people who come into clinics. We have paper forms to track drug supplies, blood supplies, all these different paper forms for many different topics, they all have a single common endpoint, and the common endpoint looks something like this. And what we're looking at here is a truckful o' data. This is the data from a single vaccination coverage survey in a single district in the country of Zambia from a few years ago that I participated in. The only thing anyone was trying to find out is what percentage of Zambian children are vaccinated, and this is the data, collected on paper over weeks from a single district, which is something like a county in the United States. You can imagine that, for the entire country of Zambia, answering just that single question looks something like this. Truck after truck after truck filled with stack after stack after stack of data. And what makes it even worse is that that's just the beginning, because once you've collected all that data, of course someone's going to have to -- some unfortunate person is going to have to type that into a computer. When I was a graduate student, I actually was that unfortunate person sometimes. I can tell you, I often wasn't really paying attention. I probably made a lot of mistakes when I did it that no one ever discovered, so data quality goes down. But eventually that data hopefully gets typed into a computer, and someone can begin to analyze it, and once they have an analysis and a report, hopefully then you can take the results of that data collection and use it to vaccinate children better. Because if there's anything worse in the field of global public health, I don't know what's worse than allowing children on this planet to die of vaccine-preventable diseases, diseases for which the vaccine costs a dollar. And millions of children die of these diseases every year. And the fact is, millions is a gross estimate because we don't really know how many kids die each year of this. What makes it even more frustrating is that the data entry part, the part that I used to do as a grad student, can take sometimes six months. Sometimes it can take two years to type that information into a computer, and sometimes, actually not infrequently, it actually never happens. Now try and wrap your head around that for a second. You just had teams of hundreds of people. They went out into the field to answer a particular question. You probably spent hundreds of thousands of dollars on fuel and photocopying and per diem, and then for some reason, momentum is lost or there's no money left, and all of that comes to nothing because no one actually types it into the computer at all. The process just stops. Happens all the time. This is what we base our decisions on in global health: little data, old data, no data. So back in 1995, I began to think about ways in which we could improve this process. Now 1995, obviously that was quite a long time ago. It kind of frightens me to think of how long ago that was. The top movie of the year was "Die Hard with a Vengeance." As you can see, Bruce Willis had a lot more hair back then. I was working in the Centers for Disease Control, and I had a lot more hair back then as well. But to me, the most significant thing that I saw in 1995 was this. Hard for us to imagine, but in 1995, this was the ultimate elite mobile device. Right? It wasn't an iPhone. It wasn't a Galaxy phone. It was a Palm Pilot. And when I saw the Palm Pilot for the first time, I thought, why can't we put the forms on these Palm Pilots and go out into the field just carrying one Palm Pilot, which can hold the capacity of tens of thousands of paper forms? Why don't we try to do that? Because if we can do that, if we can actually just collect the data electronically, digitally, from the very beginning, we can just put a shortcut right through that whole process of typing, of having somebody type that stuff into the computer. We can skip straight to the analysis and then straight to the use of the data to actually save lives. So that's actually what I began to do. Working at CDC, I began to travel to different programs around the world and to train them in using Palm Pilots to do data collection instead of using paper. And it actually worked great. It worked exactly as well as anybody would have predicted. What do you know? Digital data collection is actually more efficient than collecting on paper. While I was doing it, my business partner, Rose, who's here with her husband, Matthew, here in the audience, Rose was out doing similar stuff for the American Red Cross. The problem was, after a few years of doing that, I realized I had done -- I had been to maybe six or seven programs, and I thought, you know, if I keep this up at this pace, over my whole career, maybe I'm going to go to maybe 20 or 30 programs. But the problem is, 20 or 30 programs, like, training 20 or 30 programs to use this technology, that is a tiny drop in the bucket. The demand for this, the need for data to run better programs, just within health, not to mention all of the other fields in developing countries, is enormous. There are millions and millions and millions of programs, millions of clinics that need to track drugs, millions of vaccine programs. There are schools that need to track attendance. There are all these different things for us to get the data that we need to do. And I realized, if I kept up the way that I was doing, I was basically hardly going to make any impact by the end of my career. And so I began to wrack my brain trying to think about, you know, what was the process that I was doing, how was I training folks, and what were the bottlenecks and what were the obstacles to doing it faster and to doing it more efficiently? And unfortunately, after thinking about this for some time, I realized -- I identified the main obstacle. And the main obstacle, it turned out, and this is a sad realization, the main obstacle was me. So what do I mean by that? I had developed a process whereby I was the center of the universe of this technology. If you wanted to use this technology, you had to get in touch with me. That means you had to know I existed. Then you had to find the money to pay for me to fly out to your country and the money to pay for my hotel and my per diem and my daily rate. So you could be talking about 10,000 or 20,000 or 30,000 dollars if I actually had the time or it fit my schedule and I wasn't on vacation. The point is that anything, any system that depends on a single human being or two or three or five human beings, it just doesn't scale. And this is a problem for which we need to scale this technology and we need to scale it now. And so I began to think of ways in which I could basically take myself out of the picture. And, you know, I was thinking, how could I take myself out of the picture for quite some time. You know, I'd been trained that the way that you distribute technology within international development is always consultant-based. It's always guys that look pretty much like me flying from countries that look pretty much like this to other countries with people with darker skin. And you go out there, and you spend money on airfare and you spend time and you spend per diem and you spend [on a] hotel and you spend all that stuff. As far as I knew, that was the only way you could distribute technology, and I couldn't figure out a way around it. But the miracle that happened, I'm going to call it Hotmail for short. Now you may not think of Hotmail as being miraculous, but for me it was miraculous, because I noticed, just as I was wrestling with this problem, I was working in sub-Saharan Africa mostly at the time. I noticed that every sub-Saharan African health worker that I was working with had a Hotmail account. And I thought, it struck me, wait a minute, I know that the Hotmail people surely didn't fly to the Ministry of Health of Kenya to train people in how to use Hotmail. So these guys are distributing technology. They're getting software capacity out there but they're not actually flying around the world. I need to think about this some more. While I was thinking about it, people started using even more things just like this, just as we were. They started using LinkedIn and Flickr and Gmail and Google Maps, all these things. Of course, all of these things are cloud-based and don't require any training. They don't require any programmers. They don't require any consultants, because the business model for all these businesses requires that something be so simple we can use it ourselves with little or no training. You just have to hear about it and go to the website. And so I thought, what would happen if we built software to do what I'd been consulting in? Instead of training people how to put forms onto mobile devices, let's create software that lets them do it themselves with no training and without me being involved? And that's exactly what we did. So we created software called Magpi, which has an online form creator. No one has to speak to me. You just have to hear about it and go to the website. You can create forms, and once you've created the forms, you push them to a variety of common mobile phones. Obviously nowadays, we've moved past Palm Pilots to mobile phones. And it doesn't have to be a smartphone. It can be a basic phone like the phone on the right there, you know, the basic kind of Symbian phone that's very common in developing countries. And the great part about this is, it's just like Hotmail. It's cloud-based, and it doesn't require any training, programming, consultants. But there are some additional benefits as well. Now we knew, when we built this system, the whole point of it, just like with the Palm Pilots, was that you'd have to, you'd be able to collect the data and immediately upload the data and get your data set. But what we found, of course, since it's already on a computer, we can deliver instant maps and analysis and graphing. We can take a process that took two years and compress that down to the space of five minutes. Unbelievable improvements in efficiency. Cloud-based, no training, no consultants, no me. And I told you that in the first few years of trying to do this the old-fashioned way, going out to each country, we reached about, I don't know, probably trained about 1,000 people. What happened after we did this? In the second three years, we had 14,000 people find the website, sign up, and start using it to collect data, data for disaster response, Canadian pig farmers tracking pig disease and pig herds, people tracking drug supplies. One of my favorite examples, the IRC, International Rescue Committee, they have a program where semi-literate midwives using $10 mobile phones send a text message using our software once a week with the number of births and the number of deaths, which gives IRC something that no one in global health has ever had: a near real-time system of counting babies, of knowing how many kids are born, of knowing how many children there are in Sierra Leone, which is the country where this is happening, and knowing how many children die. Physicians for Human Rights -- this is moving a little bit outside the health field — they are gathering, they're basically training people to do rape exams in Congo, where this is an epidemic, a horrible epidemic, and they're using our software to document the evidence they find, including photographically, so that they can bring the perpetrators to justice. Camfed, another charity based out of the U.K., Camfed pays girls' families to keep them in school. They understand this is the most significant intervention they can make. They used to track the dispersements, the attendance, the grades, on paper. The turnaround time between a teacher writing down grades or attendance and getting that into a report was about two to three years. Now it's real time, and because this is such a low-cost system and based in the cloud, it costs, for the entire five countries that Camfed runs this in with tens of thousands of girls, the whole cost combined is 10,000 dollars a year. That's less than I used to get just traveling out for two weeks to do a consultation. So I told you before that when we were doing it the old-fashioned way, I realized all of our work was really adding up to just a drop in the bucket -- 10, 20, 30 different programs. We've made a lot of progress, but I recognize that right now, even the work that we've done with 14,000 people using this, is still a drop in the bucket. But something's changed. And I think it should be obvious. What's changed now is, instead of having a program in which we're scaling at such a slow rate that we can never reach all the people who need us, we've made it unnecessary for people to get reached by us. We've created a tool that lets programs keep kids in school, track the number of babies that are born and the number of babies that die, to catch criminals and successfully prosecute them, to do all these different things to learn more about what's going on, to understand more, to see more, and to save lives and improve lives. Thank you. (Applause)

Good morning. My name is Eric Li, and I was born here. But no, I wasn't born there. This was where I was born: Shanghai, at the height of the Cultural Revolution. My grandmother tells me that she heard the sound of gunfire along with my first cries. When I was growing up, I was told a story that explained all I ever needed to know about humanity. It went like this. All human societies develop in linear progression, beginning with primitive society, then slave society, feudalism, capitalism, socialism, and finally, guess where we end up? Communism! Sooner or later, all of humanity, regardless of culture, language, nationality, will arrive at this final stage of political and social development. The entire world's peoples will be unified in this paradise on Earth and live happily ever after. But before we get there, we're engaged in a struggle between good and evil, the good of socialism against the evil of capitalism, and the good shall triumph. That, of course, was the meta-narrative distilled from the theories of Karl Marx. And the Chinese bought it. We were taught that grand story day in and day out. It became part of us, and we believed in it. The story was a bestseller. About one third of the entire world's population lived under that meta-narrative. Then, the world changed overnight. As for me, disillusioned by the failed religion of my youth, I went to America and became a Berkeley hippie. (Laughter) Now, as I was coming of age, something else happened. As if one big story wasn't enough, I was told another one. This one was just as grand. It also claims that all human societies develop in a linear progression towards a singular end. This one went as follows: All societies, regardless of culture, be it Christian, Muslim, Confucian, must progress from traditional societies in which groups are the basic units to modern societies in which atomized individuals are the sovereign units, and all these individuals are, by definition, rational, and they all want one thing: the vote. Because they are all rational, once given the vote, they produce good government and live happily ever after. Paradise on Earth, again. Sooner or later, electoral democracy will be the only political system for all countries and all peoples, with a free market to make them all rich. But before we get there, we're engaged in a struggle between good and evil. (Laughter) The good belongs to those who are democracies and are charged with a mission of spreading it around the globe, sometimes by force, against the evil of those who do not hold elections. (Video) George H.W. Bush: A new world order ... (Video) George W. Bush: ... ending tyranny in our world ... (Video) Barack Obama: ... a single standard for all who would hold power. Eric X. Li: Now -- (Laughter) (Applause) This story also became a bestseller. According to Freedom House, the number of democracies went from 45 in 1970 to 115 in 2010. In the last 20 years, Western elites tirelessly trotted around the globe selling this prospectus: Multiple parties fight for political power and everyone voting on them is the only path to salvation to the long-suffering developing world. Those who buy the prospectus are destined for success. Those who do not are doomed to fail. But this time, the Chinese didn't buy it. Fool me once ... (Laughter) The rest is history. In just 30 years, China went from one of the poorest agricultural countries in the world to its second-largest economy. Six hundred fifty million people were lifted out of poverty. Eighty percent of the entire world's poverty alleviation during that period happened in China. In other words, all the new and old democracies put together amounted to a mere fraction of what a single, one-party state did without voting. See, I grew up on this stuff: food stamps. Meat was rationed to a few hundred grams per person per month at one point. Needless to say, I ate all my grandmother's portions. So I asked myself, what's wrong with this picture? Here I am in my hometown, my business growing leaps and bounds. Entrepreneurs are starting companies every day. Middle class is expanding in speed and scale unprecedented in human history. Yet, according to the grand story, none of this should be happening. So I went and did the only thing I could. I studied it. Yes, China is a one-party state run by the Chinese Communist Party, the Party, and they don't hold elections. Three assumptions are made by the dominant political theories of our time. Such a system is operationally rigid, politically closed, and morally illegitimate. Well, the assumptions are wrong. The opposites are true. Adaptability, meritocracy, and legitimacy are the three defining characteristics of China's one-party system. Now, most political scientists will tell us that a one-party system is inherently incapable of self-correction. It won't last long because it cannot adapt. Now here are the facts. In 64 years of running the largest country in the world, the range of the Party's policies has been wider than any other country in recent memory, from radical land collectivization to the Great Leap Forward, then privatization of farmland, then the Cultural Revolution, then Deng Xiaoping's market reform, then successor Jiang Zemin took the giant political step of opening up Party membership to private businesspeople, something unimaginable during Mao's rule. So the Party self-corrects in rather dramatic fashions. Institutionally, new rules get enacted to correct previous dysfunctions. For example, term limits. Political leaders used to retain their positions for life, and they used that to accumulate power and perpetuate their rules. Mao was the father of modern China, yet his prolonged rule led to disastrous mistakes. So the Party instituted term limits with mandatory retirement age of 68 to 70. One thing we often hear is, "Political reforms have lagged far behind economic reforms," and "China is in dire need of political reform." But this claim is a rhetorical trap hidden behind a political bias. See, some have decided a priori what kinds of changes they want to see, and only such changes can be called political reform. The truth is, political reforms have never stopped. Compared with 30 years ago, 20 years, even 10 years ago, every aspect of Chinese society, how the country is governed, from the most local level to the highest center, are unrecognizable today. Now such changes are simply not possible without political reforms of the most fundamental kind. Now I would venture to suggest the Party is the world's leading expert in political reform. The second assumption is that in a one-party state, power gets concentrated in the hands of the few, and bad governance and corruption follow. Indeed, corruption is a big problem, but let's first look at the larger context. Now, this may be counterintuitive to you. The Party happens to be one of the most meritocratic political institutions in the world today. China's highest ruling body, the Politburo, has 25 members. In the most recent one, only five of them came from a background of privilege, so-called princelings. The other 20, including the president and the premier, came from entirely ordinary backgrounds. In the larger central committee of 300 or more, the percentage of those who were born into power and wealth was even smaller. The vast majority of senior Chinese leaders worked and competed their way to the top. Compare that with the ruling elites in both developed and developing countries, I think you'll find the Party being near the top in upward mobility. The question then is, how could that be possible in a system run by one party? Now we come to a powerful political institution, little-known to Westerners: the Party's Organization Department. The department functions like a giant human resource engine that would be the envy of even some of the most successful corporations. It operates a rotating pyramid made up of three components: civil service, state-owned enterprises, and social organizations like a university or a community program. They form separate yet integrated career paths for Chinese officials. They recruit college grads into entry-level positions in all three tracks, and they start from the bottom, called "keyuan" [clerk]. Then they could get promoted through four increasingly elite ranks: fuke [deputy section manager], ke [section manager], fuchu [deputy division manager], and chu [division manger]. Now these are not moves from "Karate Kid," okay? It's serious business. The range of positions is wide, from running health care in a village to foreign investment in a city district to manager in a company. Once a year, the department reviews their performance. They interview their superiors, their peers, their subordinates. They vet their personal conduct. They conduct public opinion surveys. Then they promote the winners. Throughout their careers, these cadres can move through and out of all three tracks. Over time, the good ones move beyond the four base levels to the fuju [deputy bureau chief] and ju [bureau chief] levels. There, they enter high officialdom. By that point, a typical assignment will be to manage a district with a population in the millions or a company with hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue. Just to show you how competitive the system is, in 2012, there were 900,000 fuke and ke levels, 600,000 fuchu and chu levels, and only 40,000 fuju and ju levels. After the ju levels, the best few move further up several more ranks, and eventually make it to the Central Committee. The process takes two to three decades. Does patronage play a role? Yes, of course. But merit remains the fundamental driver. In essence, the Organization Department runs a modernized version of China's centuries-old mentoring system. China's new president, Xi Jinping, is the son of a former leader, which is very unusual, first of his kind to make the top job. Even for him, the career took 30 years. He started as a village manager, and by the time he entered the Politburo, he had managed areas with a total population of 150 million people and combined GDPs of 1.5 trillion U.S. dollars. Now, please don't get me wrong, okay? This is not a put-down of anyone. It's just a statement of fact. George W. Bush, remember him? This is not a put-down. (Laughter) Before becoming governor of Texas, or Barack Obama before running for president, could not make even a small county manager in China's system. Winston Churchill once said that democracy is a terrible system except for all the rest. Well, apparently he hadn't heard of the Organization Department. Now, Westerners always assume that multi-party election with universal suffrage is the only source of political legitimacy. I was asked once, "The Party wasn't voted in by election. Where is the source of legitimacy?" I said, "How about competency?" We all know the facts. In 1949, when the Party took power, China was mired in civil wars, dismembered by foreign aggression, average life expectancy at that time, 41 years old. Today, it's the second largest economy in the world, an industrial powerhouse, and its people live in increasing prosperity. Pew Research polls Chinese public attitudes, and here are the numbers in recent years. Satisfaction with the direction of the country: 85 percent. Those who think they're better off than five years ago: 70 percent. Those who expect the future to be better: a whopping 82 percent. Financial Times polls global youth attitudes, and these numbers, brand new, just came from last week. Ninety-three percent of China's Generation Y are optimistic about their country's future. Now, if this is not legitimacy, I'm not sure what is. In contrast, most electoral democracies around the world are suffering from dismal performance. I don't need to elaborate for this audience how dysfunctional it is, from Washington to European capitals. With a few exceptions, the vast number of developing countries that have adopted electoral regimes are still suffering from poverty and civil strife. Governments get elected, and then they fall below 50 percent approval in a few months and stay there and get worse until the next election. Democracy is becoming a perpetual cycle of elect and regret. At this rate, I'm afraid it is democracy, not China's one-party system, that is in danger of losing legitimacy. Now, I don't want to create the misimpression that China's hunky-dory, on the way to some kind of superpowerdom. The country faces enormous challenges. The social and economic problems that come with wrenching change like this are mind-boggling. Pollution is one. Food safety. Population issues. On the political front, the worst problem is corruption. Corruption is widespread and undermines the system and its moral legitimacy. But most analysts misdiagnose the disease. They say that corruption is the result of the one-party system, and therefore, in order to cure it, you have to do away with the entire system. But a more careful look would tell us otherwise. Transparency International ranks China between 70 and 80 in recent years among 170 countries, and it's been moving up. India, the largest democracy in the world, 94 and dropping. For the hundred or so countries that are ranked below China, more than half of them are electoral democracies. So if election is the panacea for corruption, how come these countries can't fix it? Now, I'm a venture capitalist. I make bets. It wouldn't be fair to end this talk without putting myself on the line and making some predictions. So here they are. In the next 10 years, China will surpass the U.S. and become the largest economy in the world. Income per capita will be near the top of all developing countries. Corruption will be curbed, but not eliminated, and China will move up 10 to 20 notches to above 60 in T.I. ranking. Economic reform will accelerate, political reform will continue, and the one-party system will hold firm. We live in the dusk of an era. Meta-narratives that make universal claims failed us in the 20th century and are failing us in the 21st. Meta-narrative is the cancer that is killing democracy from the inside. Now, I want to clarify something. I'm not here to make an indictment of democracy. On the contrary, I think democracy contributed to the rise of the West and the creation of the modern world. It is the universal claim that many Western elites are making about their political system, the hubris, that is at the heart of the West's current ills. If they would spend just a little less time on trying to force their way onto others, and a little bit more on political reform at home, they might give their democracy a better chance. China's political model will never supplant electoral democracy, because unlike the latter, it doesn't pretend to be universal. It cannot be exported. But that is the point precisely. The significance of China's example is not that it provides an alternative, but the demonstration that alternatives exist. Let us draw to a close this era of meta-narratives. Communism and democracy may both be laudable ideals, but the era of their dogmatic universalism is over. Let us stop telling people and our children there's only one way to govern ourselves and a singular future towards which all societies must evolve. It is wrong. It is irresponsible. And worst of all, it is boring. Let universality make way for plurality. Perhaps a more interesting age is upon us. Are we brave enough to welcome it? Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. Thank you. Thank you. Thanks. Bruno Giussani: Eric, stay with me for a couple of minutes, because I want to ask you a couple of questions. I think many here, and in general in Western countries, would agree with your statement about analysis of democratic systems becoming dysfunctional, but at the same time, many would kind of find unsettling the thought that there is an unelected authority that, without any form of oversight or consultation, decides what the national interest is. What is the mechanism in the Chinese model that allows people to say, actually, the national interest as you defined it is wrong? EXL: You know, Frank Fukuyama, the political scientist, called the Chinese system "responsive authoritarianism." It's not exactly right, but I think it comes close. So I know the largest public opinion survey company in China, okay? Do you know who their biggest client is? The Chinese government. Not just from the central government, the city government, the provincial government, to the most local neighborhood districts. They conduct surveys all the time. Are you happy with the garbage collection? Are you happy with the general direction of the country? So there is, in China, there is a different kind of mechanism to be responsive to the demands and the thinking of the people. My point is, I think we should get unstuck from the thinking that there's only one political system -- election, election, election -- that could make it responsive. I'm not sure, actually, elections produce responsive government anymore in the world. (Applause) BG: Many seem to agree. One of the features of a democratic system is a space for civil society to express itself. And you have shown figures about the support that the government and the authorities have in China. But then you've just mentioned other elements like, you know, big challenges, and there are, of course, a lot of other data that go in a different direction: tens of thousands of unrests and protests and environmental protests, etc. So you seem to suggest the Chinese model doesn't have a space outside of the Party for civil society to express itself. EXL: There's a vibrant civil society in China, whether it's environment or what-have-you. But it's different. You wouldn't recognize it. Because, by Western definitions, a so-called civil society has to be separate or even in opposition to the political system, but that concept is alien for Chinese culture. For thousands of years, you have civil society, yet they are consistent and coherent and part of a political order, and I think it's a big cultural difference. BG: Eric, thank you for sharing this with TED. EXL: Thank you.

Well, Arthur C. Clarke, a famous science fiction writer from the 1950s, said that, "We overestimate technology in the short term, and we underestimate it in the long term." And I think that's some of the fear that we see about jobs disappearing from artificial intelligence and robots. That we're overestimating the technology in the short term. But I am worried whether we're going to get the technology we need in the long term. Because the demographics are really going to leave us with lots of jobs that need doing and that we, our society, is going to have to be built on the shoulders of steel of robots in the future. So I'm scared we won't have enough robots. But fear of losing jobs to technology has been around for a long time. Back in 1957, there was a Spencer Tracy, Katharine Hepburn movie. So you know how it ended up, Spencer Tracy brought a computer, a mainframe computer of 1957, in to help the librarians. The librarians in the company would do things like answer for the executives, "What are the names of Santa's reindeer?" And they would look that up. And this mainframe computer was going to help them with that job. Well of course a mainframe computer in 1957 wasn't much use for that job. The librarians were afraid their jobs were going to disappear. But that's not what happened in fact. The number of jobs for librarians increased for a long time after 1957. It wasn't until the Internet came into play, the web came into play and search engines came into play that the need for librarians went down. And I think everyone from 1957 totally underestimated the level of technology we would all carry around in our hands and in our pockets today. And we can just ask: "What are the names of Santa's reindeer?" and be told instantly -- or anything else we want to ask. By the way, the wages for librarians went up faster than the wages for other jobs in the U.S. over that same time period, because librarians became partners of computers. Computers became tools, and they got more tools that they could use and become more effective during that time. Same thing happened in offices. Back in the old days, people used spreadsheets. Spreadsheets were spread sheets of paper, and they calculated by hand. But here was an interesting thing that came along. With the revolution around 1980 of P.C.'s, the spreadsheet programs were tuned for office workers, not to replace office workers, but it respected office workers as being capable of being programmers. So office workers became programmers of spreadsheets. It increased their capabilities. They no longer had to do the mundane computations, but they could do something much more. Now today, we're starting to see robots in our lives. On the left there is the PackBot from iRobot. When soldiers came across roadside bombs in Iraq and Afghanistan, instead of putting on a bomb suit and going out and poking with a stick, as they used to do up until about 2002, they now send the robot out. So the robot takes over the dangerous jobs. On the right are some TUGs from a company called Aethon in Pittsburgh. These are in hundreds of hospitals across the U.S. And they take the dirty sheets down to the laundry. They take the dirty dishes back to the kitchen. They bring the medicines up from the pharmacy. And it frees up the nurses and the nurse's aides from doing that mundane work of just mechanically pushing stuff around to spend more time with patients. In fact, robots have become sort of ubiquitous in our lives in many ways. But I think when it comes to factory robots, people are sort of afraid, because factory robots are dangerous to be around. In order to program them, you have to understand six-dimensional vectors and quaternions. And ordinary people can't interact with them. And I think it's the sort of technology that's gone wrong. It's displaced the worker from the technology. And I think we really have to look at technologies that ordinary workers can interact with. And so I want to tell you today about Baxter, which we've been talking about. And Baxter, I see, as a way -- a first wave of robot that ordinary people can interact with in an industrial setting. So Baxter is up here. This is Chris Harbert from Rethink Robotics. We've got a conveyor there. And if the lighting isn't too extreme -- Ah, ah! There it is. It's picked up the object off the conveyor. It's going to come bring it over here and put it down. And then it'll go back, reach for another object. The interesting thing is Baxter has some basic common sense. By the way, what's going on with the eyes? The eyes are on the screen there. The eyes look ahead where the robot's going to move. So a person that's interacting with the robot understands where it's going to reach and isn't surprised by its motions. Here Chris took the object out of its hand, and Baxter didn't go and try to put it down; it went back and realized it had to get another one. It's got a little bit of basic common sense, goes and picks the objects. And Baxter's safe to interact with. You wouldn't want to do this with a current industrial robot. But with Baxter it doesn't hurt. It feels the force, understands that Chris is there and doesn't push through him and hurt him. But I think the most interesting thing about Baxter is the user interface. And so Chris is going to come and grab the other arm now. And when he grabs an arm, it goes into zero-force gravity-compensated mode and graphics come up on the screen. You can see some icons on the left of the screen there for what was about its right arm. He's going to put something in its hand, he's going to bring it over here, press a button and let go of that thing in the hand. And the robot figures out, ah, he must mean I want to put stuff down. It puts a little icon there. He comes over here, and he gets the fingers to grasp together, and the robot infers, ah, you want an object for me to pick up. That puts the green icon there. He's going to map out an area of where the robot should pick up the object from. It just moves it around, and the robot figures out that was an area search. He didn't have to select that from a menu. And now he's going to go off and train the visual appearance of that object while we continue talking. So as we continue here, I want to tell you about what this is like in factories. These robots we're shipping every day. They go to factories around the country. This is Mildred. Mildred's a factory worker in Connecticut. She's worked on the line for over 20 years. One hour after she saw her first industrial robot, she had programmed it to do some tasks in the factory. She decided she really liked robots. And it was doing the simple repetitive tasks that she had had to do beforehand. Now she's got the robot doing it. When we first went out to talk to people in factories about how we could get robots to interact with them better, one of the questions we asked them was, "Do you want your children to work in a factory?" The universal answer was "No, I want a better job than that for my children." And as a result of that, Mildred is very typical of today's factory workers in the U.S. They're older, and they're getting older and older. There aren't many young people coming into factory work. And as their tasks become more onerous on them, we need to give them tools that they can collaborate with, so that they can be part of the solution, so that they can continue to work and we can continue to produce in the U.S. And so our vision is that Mildred who's the line worker becomes Mildred the robot trainer. She lifts her game, like the office workers of the 1980s lifted their game of what they could do. We're not giving them tools that they have to go and study for years and years in order to use. They're tools that they can just learn how to operate in a few minutes. There's two great forces that are both volitional but inevitable. That's climate change and demographics. Demographics is really going to change our world. This is the percentage of adults who are working age. And it's gone down slightly over the last 40 years. But over the next 40 years, it's going to change dramatically, even in China. The percentage of adults who are working age drops dramatically. And turned up the other way, the people who are retirement age goes up very, very fast, as the baby boomers get to retirement age. That means there will be more people with fewer social security dollars competing for services. But more than that, as we get older we get more frail and we can't do all the tasks we used to do. If we look at the statistics on the ages of caregivers, before our eyes those caregivers are getting older and older. That's happening statistically right now. And as the number of people who are older, above retirement age and getting older, as they increase, there will be less people to take care of them. And I think we're really going to have to have robots to help us. And I don't mean robots in terms of companions. I mean robots doing the things that we normally do for ourselves but get harder as we get older. Getting the groceries in from the car, up the stairs, into the kitchen. Or even, as we get very much older, driving our cars to go visit people. And I think robotics gives people a chance to have dignity as they get older by having control of the robotic solution. So they don't have to rely on people that are getting scarcer to help them. And so I really think that we're going to be spending more time with robots like Baxter and working with robots like Baxter in our daily lives. And that we will -- Here, Baxter, it's good. And that we will all come to rely on robots over the next 40 years as part of our everyday lives. Thanks very much. (Applause)

I do want to test this question we're all interested in: Does extinction have to be forever? I'm focused on two projects I want to tell you about. One is the Thylacine Project. The other one is the Lazarus Project, and that's focused on the gastric brooding frog. And it would be a fair question to ask, well, why have we focused on these two animals? Well, point number one, each of them represents a unique family of its own. We've lost a whole family. That's a big chunk of the global genome gone. I'd like it back. The second reason is that we killed these things. In the case of the thylacine, regrettably, we shot every one that we saw. We slaughtered them. In the case of the gastric brooding frog, we may have "fungicided" it to death. There's a dreadful fungus that's sort of moving through the world that's called the chytrid fungus, and it's nailing frogs all over the world. We think that's probably what got this frog, and humans are spreading this fungus. And this introduces a very important ethical point, and I think you will have heard this many times when this topic comes up. What I think is important is that, if it's clear that we exterminated these species, then I think we not only have a moral obligation to see what we can do about it, but I think we've got a moral imperative to try to do something, if we can. Okay. Let me talk to you about the Lazarus Project. It's a frog. And you think, frog. Yeah, but this was not just any frog. Unlike a normal frog, which lays its eggs in the water and goes away and wishes its froglets well, this frog swallowed its fertilized eggs, swallowed them into the stomach where it should be having food, didn't digest the eggs, and turned its stomach into a uterus. In the stomach, the eggs went on to develop into tadpoles, and in the stomach, the tadpoles went on to develop into frogs, and they grew in the stomach until eventually the poor old frog was at risk of bursting apart. It has a little cough and a hiccup, and out comes sprays of little frogs. Now, when biologists saw this, they were agog. They thought, this is incredible. No animal, let alone a frog, has been known to do this, to change one organ in the body into another. And you can imagine the medical world went nuts over this as well. If we could understand how that frog is managing the way its tummy works, is there information here that we need to understand or could usefully use to help ourselves? Now, I'm not suggesting we want to raise our babies in our stomach, but I am suggesting it's possible we might want to manage gastric secretion in the gut. And just as everybody got excited about it, bang! It was extinct. I called up my friend, Professor Mike Tyler in the University of Adelaide. He was the last person who had this frog, a colony of these things, in his lab. And I said, "Mike, by any chance -- " this was 30 or 40 years ago — "by any chance had you kept any frozen tissue of this frog?" And he thought about it, and he went to his deep freezer, minus 20 degrees centigrade, and he poured through everything in the freezer, and there in the bottom was a jar and it contained tissues of these frogs. This was very exciting, but there was no reason why we should expect that this would work, because this tissue had not had any antifreeze put in it, cryoprotectants, to look after it when it was frozen. And normally, when water freezes, as you know, it expands, and the same thing happens in a cell. If you freeze tissues, the water expands, damages or bursts the cell walls. Well, we looked at the tissue under the microscope. It actually didn't look bad. The cell walls looked intact. So we thought, let's give it a go. What we did is something called somatic cell nuclear transplantation. We took the eggs of a related species, a living frog, and we inactivated the nucleus of the egg. We used ultraviolet radiation to do that. And then we took the dead nucleus from the dead tissue of the extinct frog and we inserted those nuclei into that egg. Now by rights, this is kind of like a cloning project, like what produced Dolly, but it's actually very different, because Dolly was live sheep into live sheep cells. That was a miracle, but it was workable. What we're trying to do is take a dead nucleus from an extinct species and put it into a completely different species and expect that to work. Well, we had no real reason to expect it would, and we tried hundreds and hundreds of these. And just last February, the last time we did these trials, I saw a miracle starting to happen. What we found was, most of these eggs didn't work, but then suddenly one of them began to divide. That was so exciting. And then the egg divided again. And then again. And pretty soon, we had early stage embryos with hundreds of cells forming those. We even DNA tested some of these cells, and the DNA of the extinct frog is in those cells. So we're very excited. This is not a tadpole. It's not a frog. But it's a long way along the journey to producing, or bringing back, an extinct species. And this is news. We haven't announced this publicly before. We're excited. We've got to get past this point. We now want this ball of cells to start to gastrulate, to turn in so that it will produce the other tissues. It'll go on and produce a tadpole and then a frog. Watch this space. I think we're going to have this frog hopping glad to be back in the world again. Thank you. (Applause) We haven't done it yet, but keep those applause ready. The second project I want to talk to you about is the Thylacine Project. The thylacine looks a bit, to most people, like a dog, or maybe like a tiger, because it has stripes. But it's not related to any of those. It's a marsupial. It raised its young in a pouch, like a koala or a kangaroo would do, and it has a long history, a long, fascinating history, that goes back 25 million years. But it's also a tragic history. The first one that we see occurs in the ancient rainforests of Australia about 25 million years ago, and the National Geographic Society is helping us to explore these fossil deposits. This is Riversleigh. In those fossil rocks are some amazing animals. We found marsupial lions. We found carnivorous kangaroos. It's not what you usually think about as a kangaroo, but these are meat-eating kangaroos. We found the biggest bird in the world, bigger than that thing that was in Madagascar, and it too was a flesh-eater. It was a giant, weird duck. And crocodiles were not behaving at that time either. You think of crocodiles as doing their ugly thing, sitting in a pool of water. These crocodiles were actually out on the land and they were even climbing trees and jumping on prey on the ground. We had, in Australia, drop crocs. They really do exist. But what they were dropping on was not only other weird animals but also thylacines. There were five different kinds of thylacines in those ancient forests, and they ranged from great big ones to middle-sized ones to one that was about the size of a chihuahua. Paris Hilton would have been able to carry one of these things around in a little handbag, until a drop croc landed on her. At any rate, it was a fascinating place, but unfortunately, Australia didn't stay this way. Climate change has affected the world for a long period of time, and gradually, the forests disappeared, the country began to dry out, and the number of kinds of thylacines began to decline, until by five million years ago, only one left. By 10,000 years ago, they had disappeared from New Guinea, and unfortunately by 4,000 years ago, somebodies, we don't know who this was, introduced dingoes -- this is a very archaic kind of a dog — into Australia. And as you can see, dingoes are very similar in their body form to thylacines. That similarity meant they probably competed. They were eating the same kinds of foods. It's even possible that aborigines were keeping some of these dingoes as pets, and therefore they may have had an advantage in the battle for survival. All we know is, soon after the dingoes were brought in, thylacines were extinct in the Australian mainland, and after that they only survived in Tasmania. Then, unfortunately, the next sad part of the thylacine story is that Europeans arrived in 1788, and they brought with them the things they valued, and that included sheep. They took one look at the thylacine in Tasmania, and they thought, hang on, this is not going to work. That guy is going to eat all our sheep. That was not what happened, actually. Wild dogs did eat a few of the sheep, but the thylacine got a bad rap. But immediately, the government said, that's it, let's get rid of them, and they paid people to slaughter every one that they saw. By the early 1930s, 3,000 to 4,000 thylacines had been murdered. It was a disaster, and they were about to hit the wall. Have a look at this bit of film footage. It makes me very sad, because, while, it's a fascinating animal, and it's amazing to think that we had the technology to film it before it actually plunged off that cliff of extinction, we didn't, unfortunately, at this same time, have a molecule of concern about the welfare for this species. These are photos of the last surviving thylacine, Benjamin, who was in the Beaumaris Zoo in Hobart. To add insult to injury, having swept this species nearly off the table, this animal, when it died of neglect, the keepers didn't let it into the hutch on a cold night in Hobart. It died of exposure, and in the morning, when they found the body of Benjamin, they still cared so little for this animal that they threw the body in the dump. Does it have to stay this way? In 1990, I was in the Australian Museum. I was fascinated by thylacines. I've always been obsessed with these animals. And I was studying skulls, trying to figure out their relationships to other sorts of animals, and I saw this jar, and here, in the jar, was a little girl thylacine pup, perhaps six months old. The guy who had found it and killed the mother had pickled the pup and they pickled it in alcohol. I'm a paleontologist, but I still knew alcohol was a DNA preservative. But this was 1990, and I asked my geneticist friends, couldn't we think about going into this pup and extracting DNA, if it's there, and then somewhere down the line in the future, we'll use this DNA to bring the thylacine back? The geneticists laughed. But this was six years before Dolly. Cloning was science fiction. It had not happened. But then suddenly cloning did happen. And I thought, when I became director of the Australian Museum, I'm going to give this a go. I put a team together. We went into that pup to see what was in there, and we did find thylacine DNA. It was a eureka moment. We were very excited. Unfortunately, we also found a lot of human DNA. Every old curator who'd been in that museum had seen this wonderful specimen, put their hand in the jar, pulled it out and thought, "Wow, look at that," plop, dropped it back in the jar, contaminating this specimen. And that was a worry. If the goal here was to get the DNA out and use the DNA down the track to try to bring a thylacine back, what we didn't want happening when the information was shoved into the machine and the wheel turned around and the lights flashed, was to have a wizened old horrible curator pop out the other end of the machine. (Laughter) It would've kept the curator very happy, but it wasn't going to keep us happy. So we went back to these specimens and we started digging around, and particularly we looked into the teeth of skulls, hard parts where humans had not been able to get their fingers, and we found much better quality DNA. We found nuclear mitochondrial genes. It's there. So we got it. Okay. What could we do with this stuff? Well, George Church in his book, "Regenesis," has mentioned many of the techniques that are rapidly advancing to work with fragmented DNA. We would hope that we'll be able to get that DNA back into a viable form, and then, much like we've done with the Lazarus Project, get that stuff into an egg of a host species. It has to be a different species. What could it be? Why couldn't it be a Tasmanian devil? They're related distantly to thylacines. And then the Tasmanian devil is going to pop a thylacine out the south end. Critics of this project say, hang on. Thylacine, Tasmanian devil? That's going to hurt. No, it's not. These are marsupials. They give birth to babies that are the size of a jelly bean. That Tasmanian devil's not even going to know it gave birth. It is, shortly, going to think it's got the ugliest Tasmanian devil baby in the world, so maybe it'll need some help to keep it going. Andrew Pask and his colleagues have demonstrated this might not be a waste of time. And it's sort of in the future, we haven't got there yet, but it's the kind of thing we want to think about. They took some of this same pickled thylacine DNA and they spliced it into a mouse genome, but they put a tag on it so that anything that this thylacine DNA produced would appear blue-green in the mouse baby. In other words, if thylacine tissues were being produced by the thylacine DNA, it would be able to be recognized. When the baby popped up, it was filled with blue-green tissues. And that tells us if we can get that genome back together, get it into a live cell, it's going to produce thylacine stuff. Is this a risk? You've taken the bits of one animal and you've mixed them into the cell of a different kind of an animal. Are we going to get a Frankenstein? You know, some kind of weird hybrid chimera? And the answer is no. If the only nuclear DNA that goes into this hybrid cell is thylacine DNA, that's the only thing that can pop out the other end of the devil. Okay, if we can do this, could we put it back? This is a key question for everybody. Does it have to stay in a laboratory, or could we put it back where it belongs? Could we put it back in the throne of the king of beasts in Tasmania where it belongs, restore that ecosystem? Or has Tasmania changed so much that that's no longer possible? I've been to Tasmania. I've been to many of the areas where the thylacines were common. I've even spoken to people, like Peter Carter here, who when I spoke to him was 90 years old, but in 1926, this man and his father and his brother caught thylacines. They trapped them. And it just, when I spoke to this man, I was looking in his eyes and thinking, behind those eyes is a brain that has memories of what thylacines feel like, what they smelled like, what they sounded like. He led them around on a rope. He has personal experiences that I would give my left leg to have in my head. We'd all love to have this sort of thing happen. Anyway, I asked Peter, by any chance, could he take us back to where he caught those thylacines. My interest was in whether the environment had changed. He thought hard. I mean, it was nearly 80 years before this that he'd been at this hut. At any rate, he led us down this bush track, and there, right where he remembered, was the hut, and tears came into his eyes. He looked at the hut. We went inside. There were the wooden boards on the sides of the hut where he and his father and his brother had slept at night. And he told me, as it all was flooding back in memories. He said, "I remember the thylacines going around the hut wondering what was inside," and he said they made sounds like "Yip! Yip! Yip!" All of these are parts of his life and what he remembers. And the key question for me was to ask Peter, has it changed? And he said no. The southern beech forests surrounded his hut just like it was when he was there in 1926. The grasslands were sweeping away. That's classic thylacine habitat. And the animals in those areas were the same that were there when the thylacine was around. So could we put it back? Yes. Is that all we would do? And this is an interesting question. Sometimes you might be able to put it back, but is that the safest way to make sure it never goes extinct again, and I don't think so. I think gradually, as we see species all around the world, it's kind of a mantra that wildlife is increasingly not safe in the wild. We'd love to think it is, but we know it isn't. We need other parallel strategies coming online. And this one interests me. Some of the thylacines that were being turned into zoos, sanctuaries, even at the museums, had collar marks on the neck. They were being kept as pets, and we know a lot of bush tales and memories of people who had them as pets, and they say they were wonderful, friendly. This particular one came in out of the forest to lick this boy and curled up around the fireplace to go to sleep. A wild animal. And I'd like to ask the question, all of -- we need to think about this. If it had not been illegal to keep these thylacines as pets then, would the thylacine be extinct now? And I'm positive it wouldn't. We need to think about this in today's world. Could it be that getting animals close to us so that we value them, maybe they won't go extinct? And this is such a critical issue for us, because if we don't do that, we're going to watch more of these animals plunge off the precipice. As far as I'm concerned, this is why we're trying to do these kinds of de-extinction projects. We are trying to restore that balance of nature that we have upset. Thank you. (Applause)

I'm going to be talking about designing humor, which is sort of an interesting thing, but it goes to some of the discussions about constraints, and how in certain contexts, humor is right, and in other contexts it's wrong. Now, I'm from New York, so it's 100 percent satisfaction here. Actually, that's ridiculous, because when it comes to humor, 75 percent is really absolutely the best you can hope for. Nobody is ever satisfied 100 percent with humor except this woman. (Video) Woman: (Laughs) Bob Mankoff: That's my first wife. (Laughter) That part of the relationship went fine. (Laughter) Now let's look at this cartoon. One of the things I'm pointing out is that cartoons appear within the context of The New Yorker magazine, that lovely Caslon type, and it seems like a fairly benign cartoon within this context. It's making a little bit fun of getting older, and, you know, people might like it. But like I said, you cannot satisfy everyone. You couldn't satisfy this guy. "Another joke on old white males. Ha ha. The wit. It's nice, I'm sure to be young and rude, but some day you'll be old, unless you drop dead as I wish." (Laughter) The New Yorker is rather a sensitive environment, very easy for people to get their nose out of joint. And one of the things that you realize is it's an unusual environment. Here I'm one person talking to you. You're all collective. You all hear each other laugh and know each other laugh. In The New Yorker, it goes out to a wide audience, and when you actually look at that, and nobody knows what anybody else is laughing at, and when you look at that the subjectivity involved in humor is really interesting. Let's look at this cartoon. "Discouraging data on the antidepressant." (Laughter) Indeed, it is discouraging. Now, you would think, well, look, most of you laughed at that. Right? You thought it was funny. In general, that seems like a funny cartoon, but let's look what online survey I did. Generally, about 85 percent of the people liked it. A hundred and nine voted it a 10, the highest. Ten voted it one. But look at the individual responses. "I like animals!!!!!" Look how much they like them. (Laughter) "I don't want to hurt them. That doesn't seem very funny to me." This person rated it a two. "I don't like to see animals suffer -- even in cartoons." To people like this, I point out we use anesthetic ink. Other people thought it was funny. That actually is the true nature of the distribution of humor when you don't have the contagion of humor. Humor is a type of entertainment. All entertainment contains a little frisson of danger, something that might happen wrong, and yet we like it when there's protection. That's what a zoo is. It's danger. The tiger is there. The bars protect us. That's sort of fun, right? That's a bad zoo. (Laughter) It's a very politically correct zoo, but it's a bad zoo. But this is a worse one. (Laughter) So in dealing with humor in the context of The New Yorker, you have to see, where is that tiger going to be? Where is the danger going to exist? How are you going to manage it? My job is to look at 1,000 cartoons a week. But The New Yorker only can take 16 or 17 cartoons, and we have 1,000 cartoons. Of course, many, many cartoons must be rejected. Now, we could fit more cartoons in the magazine if we removed the articles. (Laughter) But I feel that would be a huge loss, one I could live with, but still huge. Cartoonists come in through the magazine every week. The average cartoonist who stays with the magazine does 10 or 15 ideas every week. But they mostly are going to be rejected. That's the nature of any creative activity. Many of them fade away. Some of them stay. Matt Diffee is one of them. Here's one of his cartoons. (Laughter) Drew Dernavich. "Accounting night at the improv." "Now is the part of the show when we ask the audience to shout out some random numbers." Paul Noth. "He's all right. I just wish he were a little more pro-Israel." (Laughter) Now I know all about rejection, because when I quit -- actually, I was booted out of -- psychology school and decided to become a cartoonist, a natural segue, from 1974 to 1977 I submitted 2,000 cartoons to The New Yorker, and got 2,000 cartoons rejected by The New Yorker. At a certain point, this rejection slip, in 1977 -- [We regret that we are unable to use the enclosed material. Thank you for giving us the opportunity to consider it.] — magically changed to this. [Hey! You sold one. No shit! You really sold a cartoon to the fucking New Yorker magazine.] (Laughter) Now of course that's not what happened, but that's the emotional truth. And of course, that is not New Yorker humor. What is New Yorker humor? Well, after 1977, I broke into The New Yorker and started selling cartoons. Finally, in 1980, I received the revered New Yorker contract, which I blurred out parts because it's none of your business. From 1980. "Dear Mr. Mankoff, confirming the agreement there of -- " blah blah blah blah -- blur -- "for any idea drawings." With respect to idea drawings, nowhere in the contract is the word "cartoon" mentioned. The word "idea drawings," and that's the sine qua non of New Yorker cartoons. So what is an idea drawing? An idea drawing is something that requires you to think. Now that's not a cartoon. It requires thinking on the part of the cartoonist and thinking on your part to make it into a cartoon. (Laughter) Here are some, generally you get my cast of cartoon mind. "There is no justice in the world. There is some justice in the world. The world is just." This is What Lemmings Believe. (Laughter) The New Yorker and I, when we made comments, the cartoon carries a certain ambiguity about what it actually is. What is it, the cartoon? Is it really about lemmings? No. It's about us. You know, it's my view basically about religion, that the real conflict and all the fights between religion is who has the best imaginary friend. (Laughter) And this is my most well-known cartoon. "No, Thursday's out. How about never — is never good for you?" It's been reprinted thousands of times, totally ripped off. It's even on thongs, but compressed to "How about never — is never good for you?" Now these look like very different forms of humor but actually they bear a great similarity. In each instance, our expectations are defied. In each instance, the narrative gets switched. There's an incongruity and a contrast. In "No, Thursday's out. How about never — is never good for you?" what you have is the syntax of politeness and the message of being rude. That really is how humor works. It's a cognitive synergy where we mash up these two things which don't go together and temporarily in our minds exist. He is both being polite and rude. In here, you have the propriety of The New Yorker and the vulgarity of the language. Basically, that's the way humor works. So I'm a humor analyst, you would say. Now E.B. White said, analyzing humor is like dissecting a frog. Nobody is much interested, and the frog dies. Well, I'm going to kill a few, but there won't be any genocide. But really, it makes me — Let's look at this picture. This is an interesting picture, The Laughing Audience. There are the people, fops up there, but everybody is laughing, everybody is laughing except one guy. This guy. Who is he? He's the critic. He's the critic of humor, and really I'm forced to be in that position, when I'm at The New Yorker, and that's the danger that I will become this guy. Now here's a little video made by Matt Diffee, sort of how they imagine if we really exaggerated that. (Video) Bob Mankoff: "Oooh, no. Ehhh. Oooh. Hmm. Too funny. Normally I would but I'm in a pissy mood. I'll enjoy it on my own. Perhaps. No. Nah. No. Overdrawn. Underdrawn. Drawn just right, still not funny enough. No. No. For God's sake no, a thousand times no. (Music) No. No. No. No. No. [Four hours later] Hey, that's good, yeah, whatcha got there? Office worker: Got a ham and swiss on rye?BM: No. Office worker: Okay. Pastrami on sourdough?BM: No. Office worker: Smoked turkey with bacon?BM: No. Office worker: Falafel?BM: Let me look at it. Eh, no. Office worker: Grilled cheese?BM: No. Office worker: BLT?BM: No. Office worker: Black forest ham and mozzarella with apple mustard?BM: No. Office worker: Green bean salad?BM: No. (Music) No. No. Definitely no. [Several hours after lunch] (Siren) No. Get out of here. (Laughter) That's sort of an exaggeration of what I do. Now, we do reject, many, many, many cartoons, so many that there are many books called "The Rejection Collection." "The Rejection Collection" is not quite New Yorker kind of humor. And you might notice the bum on the sidewalk here who is boozing and his ventriloquist dummy is puking. See, that's probably not going to be New Yorker humor. It's actually put together by Matt Diffee, one of our cartoonists. So I'll give you some examples of rejection collection humor. "I'm thinking about having a child." (Laughter) There you have an interesting -- the guilty laugh, the laugh against your better judgment. (Laughter) "Ass-head. Please help." (Laughter) Now, in fact, within a context of this book, which says, "Cartoons you never saw and never will see in The New Yorker," this humor is perfect. I'm going to explain why. There's a concept about humor about it being a benign violation. In other words, for something to be funny, we've got to think it's both wrong and also okay at the same time. If we think it's completely wrong, we say, "That's not funny." And if it's completely okay, what's the joke? Okay? And so, this benign, that's true of "No, Thursday's out. How about never — is never good for you?" It's rude. The world really shouldn't be that way. Within that context, we feel it's okay. So within this context, "Asshead. Please help" is a benign violation. Within the context of The New Yorker magazine ... "T-Cell Army: Can the body's immune response help treat cancer?" Oh, goodness. You're reading about this smart stuff, this intelligent dissection of the immune system. You glance over at this, and it says, "Asshead. Please help"? God. So there the violation is malign. It doesn't work. There is no such thing as funny in and of itself. Everything will be within the context and our expectations. One way to look at it is this. It's sort of called a meta-motivational theory about how we look, a theory about motivation and the mood we're in and how the mood we're in determines the things we like or dislike. When we're in a playful mood, we want excitement. We want high arousal. We feel excited then. If we're in a purposeful mood, that makes us anxious. "The Rejection Collection" is absolutely in this field. You want to be stimulated. You want to be aroused. You want to be transgressed. It's like this, like an amusement park. Voice: Here we go. (Screams) He laughs. He is both in danger and safe, incredibly aroused. There's no joke. No joke needed. If you arouse people enough and get them stimulated enough, they will laugh at very, very little. This is another cartoon from "The Rejection Collection." "Too snug?" That's a cartoon about terrorism. The New Yorker occupies a very different space. It's a space that is playful in its own way, and also purposeful, and in that space, the cartoons are different. Now I'm going to show you cartoons The New Yorker did right after 9/11, a very, very sensitive area when humor could be used. How would The New Yorker attack it? It would not be with a guy with a bomb saying, "Too snug?" Or there was another cartoon I didn't show because actually I thought maybe people would be offended. The great Sam Gross cartoon, this happened after the Muhammad controversy where it's Muhammad in heaven, the suicide bomber is all in little pieces, and he's saying to the suicide bomber, "You'll get the virgins when we find your penis." (Laughter) Better left undrawn. The first week we did no cartoons. That was a black hole for humor, and correctly so. It's not always appropriate every time. But the next week, this was the first cartoon. "I thought I'd never laugh again. Then I saw your jacket." It basically was about, if we were alive, we were going to laugh. We were going to breathe. We were going to exist. Here's another one. "I figure if I don't have that third martini, then the terrorists win." These cartoons are not about them. They're about us. The humor reflects back on us. The easiest thing to do with humor, and it's perfectly legitimate, is a friend makes fun of an enemy. It's called dispositional humor. It's 95 percent of the humor. It's not our humor. Here's another cartoon. "I wouldn't mind living in a fundamentalist Islamic state." (Laughter) Humor does need a target. But interestingly, in The New Yorker, the target is us. The target is the readership and the people who do it. The humor is self-reflective and makes us think about our assumptions. Look at this cartoon by Roz Chast, the guy reading the obituary. "Two years younger than you, 12 years older than you, three years your junior, your age on the dot, exactly your age." That is a deeply profound cartoon. And so The New Yorker is also trying to, in some way, make cartoons say something besides funny and something about us. Here's another one. "I started my vegetarianism for health reasons, Then it became a moral choice, and now it's just to annoy people." (Laughter) "Excuse me — I think there's something wrong with this in a tiny way that no one other than me would ever be able to pinpoint." So it focuses on our obsessions, our narcissism, our foils and our foibles, really not someone else's. The New Yorker demands some cognitive work on your part, and what it demands is what Arthur Koestler, who wrote "The Act of Creation" about the relationship between humor, art and science, is what's called bisociation. You have to bring together ideas from different frames of reference, and you have to do it quickly to understand the cartoon. If the different frames of reference don't come together in about .5 seconds, it's not funny, but I think they will for you here. Different frames of reference. "You slept with her, didn't you?" (Laughter) "Lassie! Get help!!" (Laughter) It's called French Army Knife. (Laughter) And this is Einstein in bed. "To you it was fast." (Laughter) Now there are some cartoons that are puzzling. Like, this cartoon would puzzle many people. How many people know what this cartoon means? The dog is signaling he wants to go for a walk. This is the signal for a catcher to walk the dog. That's why we run a feature in the cartoon issue every year called "I Don't Get It: The New Yorker Cartoon I.Q. Test." (Laughter) The other thing The New Yorker plays around with is incongruity, and incongruity, I've shown you, is sort of the basis of humor. Something that's completely normal or logical isn't going to be funny. But the way incongruity works is, observational humor is humor within the realm of reality. "My boss is always telling me what to do." Okay? That could happen. It's humor within the realm of reality. Here, cowboy to a cow: "Very impressive. I'd like to find 5,000 more like you." We understand that. It's absurd. But we're putting the two together. Here, in the nonsense range: "Damn it, Hopkins, didn't you get yesterday's memo?" Now that's a little puzzling, right? It doesn't quite come together. In general, people who enjoy more nonsense, enjoy more abstract art, they tend to be liberal, less conservative, that type of stuff. But for us, and for me, helping design the humor, it doesn't make any sense to compare one to the other. It's sort of a smorgasbord that's made all interesting. So I want to sum all this up with a caption to a cartoon, and I think this sums up the whole thing, really, about The New Yorker cartoons. "It sort of makes you stop and think, doesn't it." (Laughter) And now, when you look at New Yorker cartoons, I'd like you to stop and think a little bit more about them. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause)

I'll never forget that day back in the spring of 2006. I was a surgical resident at The Johns Hopkins Hospital, taking emergency call. I got paged by the E.R. around 2 in the morning to come and see a woman with a diabetic ulcer on her foot. I can still remember sort of that smell of rotting flesh as I pulled the curtain back to see her. And everybody there agreed this woman was very sick and she needed to be in the hospital. That wasn't being asked. The question that was being asked of me was a different one, which was, did she also need an amputation? Now, looking back on that night, I'd love so desperately to believe that I treated that woman on that night with the same empathy and compassion I'd shown the 27-year-old newlywed who came to the E.R. three nights earlier with lower back pain that turned out to be advanced pancreatic cancer. In her case, I knew there was nothing I could do that was actually going to save her life. The cancer was too advanced. But I was committed to making sure that I could do anything possible to make her stay more comfortable. I brought her a warm blanket and a cup of a coffee. I brought some for her parents. But more importantly, see, I passed no judgment on her, because obviously she had done nothing to bring this on herself. So why was it that, just a few nights later, as I stood in that same E.R. and determined that my diabetic patient did indeed need an amputation, why did I hold her in such bitter contempt? You see, unlike the woman the night before, this woman had type 2 diabetes. She was fat. And we all know that's from eating too much and not exercising enough, right? I mean, how hard can it be? As I looked down at her in the bed, I thought to myself, if you just tried caring even a little bit, you wouldn't be in this situation at this moment with some doctor you've never met about to amputate your foot. Why did I feel justified in judging her? I'd like to say I don't know. But I actually do. You see, in the hubris of my youth, I thought I had her all figured out. She ate too much. She got unlucky. She got diabetes. Case closed. Ironically, at that time in my life, I was also doing cancer research, immune-based therapies for melanoma, to be specific, and in that world I was actually taught to question everything, to challenge all assumptions and hold them to the highest possible scientific standards. Yet when it came to a disease like diabetes that kills Americans eight times more frequently than melanoma, I never once questioned the conventional wisdom. I actually just assmed the pathologic sequence of events was settled science. Three years later, I found out how wrong I was. But this time, I was the patient. Despite exercising three or four hours every single day, and following the food pyramid to the letter, I'd gained a lot of weight and developed something called metabolic syndrome. Some of you may have heard of this. I had become insulin-resistant. You can think of insulin as this master hormone that controls what our body does with the foods we eat, whether we burn it or store it. This is called fuel partitioning in the lingo. Now failure to produce enough insulin is incompatible with life. And insulin resistance, as its name suggests, is when your cells get increasingly resistant to the effect of insulin trying to do its job. Once you're insulin-resistant, you're on your way to getting diabetes, which is what happens when your pancreas can't keep up with the resistance and make enough insulin. Now your blood sugar levels start to rise, and an entire cascade of pathologic events sort of spirals out of control that can lead to heart disease, cancer, even Alzheimer's disease, and amputations, just like that woman a few years earlier. With that scare, I got busy changing my diet radically, adding and subtracting things most of you would find almost assuredly shocking. I did this and lost 40 pounds, weirdly while exercising less. I, as you can see, I guess I'm not overweight anymore. More importantly, I don't have insulin resistance. But most important, I was left with these three burning questions that wouldn't go away: How did this happen to me if I was supposedly doing everything right? If the conventional wisdom about nutrition had failed me, was it possible it was failing someone else? And underlying these questions, I became almost maniacally obsessed in trying to understand the real relationship between obesity and insulin resistance. Now, most researchers believe obesity is the cause of insulin resistance. Logically, then, if you want to treat insulin resistance, you get people to lose weight, right? You treat the obesity. But what if we have it backwards? What if obesity isn't the cause of insulin resistance at all? In fact, what if it's a symptom of a much deeper problem, the tip of a proverbial iceberg? I know it sounds crazy because we're obviously in the midst of an obesity epidemic, but hear me out. What if obesity is a coping mechanism for a far more sinister problem going on underneath the cell? I'm not suggesting that obesity is benign, but what I am suggesting is it may be the lesser of two metabolic evils. You can think of insulin resistance as the reduced capacity of ourselves to partition fuel, as I alluded to a moment ago, taking those calories that we take in and burning some appropriately and storing some appropriately. When we become insulin-resistant, the homeostasis in that balance deviates from this state. So now, when insulin says to a cell, I want you to burn more energy than the cell considers safe, the cell, in effect, says, "No thanks, I'd actually rather store this energy." And because fat cells are actually missing most of the complex cellular machinery found in other cells, it's probably the safest place to store it. So for many of us, about 75 million Americans, the appropriate response to insulin resistance may actually be to store it as fat, not the reverse, getting insulin resistance in response to getting fat. This is a really subtle distinction, but the implication could be profound. Consider the following analogy: Think of the bruise you get on your shin when you inadvertently bang your leg into the coffee table. Sure, the bruise hurts like hell, and you almost certainly don't like the discolored look, but we all know the bruise per se is not the problem. In fact, it's the opposite. It's a healthy response to the trauma, all of those immune cells rushing to the site of the injury to salvage cellular debris and prevent the spread of infection to elsewhere in the body. Now, imagine we thought bruises were the problem, and we evolved a giant medical establishment and a culture around treating bruises: masking creams, painkillers, you name it, all the while ignoring the fact that people are still banging their shins into coffee tables. How much better would we be if we treated the cause -- telling people to pay attention when they walk through the living room -- rather than the effect? Getting the cause and the effect right makes all the difference in the world. Getting it wrong, and the pharmaceutical industry can still do very well for its shareholders but nothing improves for the people with bruised shins. Cause and effect. So what I'm suggesting is maybe we have the cause and effect wrong on obesity and insulin resistance. Maybe we should be asking ourselves, is it possible that insulin resistance causes weight gain and the diseases associated with obesity, at least in most people? What if being obese is just a metabolic response to something much more threatening, an underlying epidemic, the one we ought to be worried about? Let's look at some suggestive facts. We know that 30 million obese Americans in the United States don't have insulin resistance. And by the way, they don't appear to be at any greater risk of disease than lean people. Conversely, we know that six million lean people in the United States are insulin-resistant, and by the way, they appear to be at even greater risk for those metabolic disease I mentioned a moment ago than their obese counterparts. Now I don't know why, but it might be because, in their case, their cells haven't actually figured out the right thing to do with that excess energy. So if you can be obese and not have insulin resistance, and you can be lean and have it, this suggests that obesity may just be a proxy for what's going on. So what if we're fighting the wrong war, fighting obesity rather than insulin resistance? Even worse, what if blaming the obese means we're blaming the victims? What if some of our fundamental ideas about obesity are just wrong? Personally, I can't afford the luxury of arrogance anymore, let alone the luxury of certainty. I have my own ideas about what could be at the heart of this, but I'm wide open to others. Now, my hypothesis, because everybody always asks me, is this. If you ask yourself, what's a cell trying to protect itself from when it becomes insulin resistant, the answer probably isn't too much food. It's more likely too much glucose: blood sugar. Now, we know that refined grains and starches elevate your blood sugar in the short run, and there's even reason to believe that sugar may lead to insulin resistance directly. So if you put these physiological processes to work, I'd hypothesize that it might be our increased intake of refined grains, sugars and starches that's driving this epidemic of obesity and diabetes, but through insulin resistance, you see, and not necessarily through just overeating and under-exercising. When I lost my 40 pounds a few years ago, I did it simply by restricting those things, which admittedly suggests I have a bias based on my personal experience. But that doesn't mean my bias is wrong, and most important, all of this can be tested scientifically. But step one is accepting the possibility that our current beliefs about obesity, diabetes and insulin resistance could be wrong and therefore must be tested. I'm betting my career on this. Today, I devote all of my time to working on this problem, and I'll go wherever the science takes me. I've decided that what I can't and won't do anymore is pretend I have the answers when I don't. I've been humbled enough by all I don't know. For the past year, I've been fortunate enough to work on this problem with the most amazing team of diabetes and obesity researchers in the country, and the best part is, just like Abraham Lincoln surrounded himself with a team of rivals, we've done the same thing. We've recruited a team of scientific rivals, the best and brightest who all have different hypotheses for what's at the heart of this epidemic. Some think it's too many calories consumed. Others think it's too much dietary fat. Others think it's too many refined grains and starches. But this team of multi-disciplinary, highly skeptical and exceedingly talented researchers do agree on two things. First, this problem is just simply too important to continue ignoring because we think we know the answer. And two, if we're willing to be wrong, if we're willing to challenge the conventional wisdom with the best experiments science can offer, we can solve this problem. I know it's tempting to want an answer right now, some form of action or policy, some dietary prescription -- eat this, not that — but if we want to get it right, we're going to have to do much more rigorous science before we can write that prescription. Briefly, to address this, our research program is focused around three meta-themes, or questions. First, how do the various foods we consume impact our metabolism, hormones and enzymes, and through what nuanced molecular mechanisms? Second, based on these insights, can people make the necessary changes in their diets in a way that's safe and practical to implement? And finally, once we identify what safe and practical changes people can make to their diet, how can we move their behavior in that direction so that it becomes more the default rather than the exception? Just because you know what to do doesn't mean you're always going to do it. Sometimes we have to put cues around people to make it easier, and believe it or not, that can be studied scientifically. I don't know how this journey is going to end, but this much seems clear to me, at least: We can't keep blaming our overweight and diabetic patients like I did. Most of them actually want to do the right thing, but they have to know what that is, and it's got to work. I dream of a day when our patients can shed their excess pounds and cure themselves of insulin resistance, because as medical professionals, we've shed our excess mental baggage and cured ourselves of new idea resistance sufficiently to go back to our original ideals: open minds, the courage to throw out yesterday's ideas when they don't appear to be working, and the understanding that scientific truth isn't final, but constantly evolving. Staying true to that path will be better for our patients and better for science. If obesity is nothing more than a proxy for metabolic illness, what good does it do us to punish those with the proxy? Sometimes I think back to that night in the E.R. seven years ago. I wish I could speak with that woman again. I'd like to tell her how sorry I am. I'd say, as a doctor, I delivered the best clinical care I could, but as a human being, I let you down. You didn't need my judgment and my contempt. You needed my empathy and compassion, and above all else, you needed a doctor who was willing to consider maybe you didn't let the system down. Maybe the system, of which I was a part, was letting you down. If you're watching this now, I hope you can forgive me. (Applause)

Writing biography is a strange thing to do. It's a journey into the foreign territory of somebody else's life, a journey, an exploration that can take you places you never dreamed of going and still can't quite believe you've been, especially if, like me, you're an agnostic Jew and the life you've been exploring is that of Muhammad. Five years ago, for instance, I found myself waking each morning in misty Seattle to what I knew was an impossible question: What actually happened one desert night, half the world and almost half of history away? What happened, that is, on the night in the year 610 when Muhammad received the first revelation of the Koran on a mountain just outside Mecca? This is the core mystical moment of Islam, and as such, of course, it defies empirical analysis. Yet the question wouldn't let go of me. I was fully aware that for someone as secular as I am, just asking it could be seen as pure chutzpah. (Laughter) And I plead guilty as charged, because all exploration, physical or intellectual, is inevitably in some sense an act of transgression, of crossing boundaries. Still, some boundaries are larger than others. So a human encountering the divine, as Muslims believe Muhammad did, to the rationalist, this is a matter not of fact but of wishful fiction, and like all of us, I like to think of myself as rational. Which might be why when I looked at the earliest accounts we have of that night, what struck me even more than what happened was what did not happen. Muhammad did not come floating off the mountain as though walking on air. He did not run down shouting, "Hallelujah!" and "Bless the Lord!" He did not radiate light and joy. There were no choirs of angels, no music of the spheres, no elation, no ecstasy, no golden aura surrounding him, no sense of an absolute, fore-ordained role as the messenger of God. That is, he did none of the things that might make it easy to cry foul, to put down the whole story as a pious fable. Quite the contrary. In his own reported words, he was convinced at first that what had happened couldn't have been real. At best, he thought, it had to have been a hallucination -- a trick of the eye or the ear, perhaps, or his own mind working against him. At worst, possession -- that he'd been seized by an evil jinn, a spirit out to deceive him, even to crush the life out of him. In fact, he was so sure that he could only be majnun, possessed by a jinn, that when he found himself still alive, his first impulse was to finish the job himself, to leap off the highest cliff and escape the terror of what he'd experienced by putting an end to all experience. So the man who fled down the mountain that night trembled not with joy but with a stark, primordial fear. He was overwhelmed not with conviction, but by doubt. And that panicked disorientation, that sundering of everything familiar, that daunting awareness of something beyond human comprehension, can only be called a terrible awe. This might be somewhat difficult to grasp now that we use the word "awesome" to describe a new app or a viral video. With the exception perhaps of a massive earthquake, we're protected from real awe. We close the doors and hunker down, convinced that we're in control, or, at least, hoping for control. We do our best to ignore the fact that we don't always have it, and that not everything can be explained. Yet whether you're a rationalist or a mystic, whether you think the words Muhammad heard that night came from inside himself or from outside, what's clear is that he did experience them, and that he did so with a force that would shatter his sense of himself and his world and transform this otherwise modest man into a radical advocate for social and economic justice. Fear was the only sane response, the only human response. Too human for some, like conservative Muslim theologians who maintain that the account of his wanting to kill himself shouldn't even be mentioned, despite the fact that it's in the earliest Islamic biographies. They insist that he never doubted for even a single moment, let alone despaired. Demanding perfection, they refuse to tolerate human imperfection. Yet what, exactly, is imperfect about doubt? As I read those early accounts, I realized it was precisely Muhammad's doubt that brought him alive for me, that allowed me to begin to see him in full, to accord him the integrity of reality. And the more I thought about it, the more it made sense that he doubted, because doubt is essential to faith. If this seems a startling idea at first, consider that doubt, as Graham Greene once put it, is the heart of the matter. Abolish all doubt, and what's left is not faith, but absolute, heartless conviction. You're certain that you possess the Truth -- inevitably offered with an implied uppercase T -- and this certainty quickly devolves into dogmatism and righteousness, by which I mean a demonstrative, overweening pride in being so very right, in short, the arrogance of fundamentalism. It has to be one of the multiple ironies of history that a favorite expletive of Muslim fundamentalists is the same one once used by the Christian fundamentalists known as Crusaders: "infidel," from the Latin for "faithless." Doubly ironic, in this case, because their absolutism is in fact the opposite of faith. In effect, they are the infidels. Like fundamentalists of all religious stripes, they have no questions, only answers. They found the perfect antidote to thought and the ideal refuge of the hard demands of real faith. They don't have to struggle for it like Jacob wrestling through the night with the angel, or like Jesus in his 40 days and nights in the wilderness, or like Muhammad, not only that night on the mountain, but throughout his years as a prophet, with the Koran constantly urging him not to despair, and condemning those who most loudly proclaim that they know everything there is to know and that they and they alone are right. And yet we, the vast and still far too silent majority, have ceded the public arena to this extremist minority. We've allowed Judaism to be claimed by violently messianic West Bank settlers, Christianity by homophobic hypocrites and misogynistic bigots, Islam by suicide bombers. And we've allowed ourselves to be blinded to the fact that no matter whether they claim to be Christians, Jews or Muslims, militant extremists are none of the above. They're a cult all their own, blood brothers steeped in other people's blood. This isn't faith. It's fanaticism, and we have to stop confusing the two. We have to recognize that real faith has no easy answers. It's difficult and stubborn. It involves an ongoing struggle, a continual questioning of what we think we know, a wrestling with issues and ideas. It goes hand in hand with doubt, in a never-ending conversation with it, and sometimes in conscious defiance of it. And this conscious defiance is why I, as an agnostic, can still have faith. I have faith, for instance, that peace in the Middle East is possible despite the ever-accumulating mass of evidence to the contrary. I'm not convinced of this. I can hardly say I believe it. I can only have faith in it, commit myself, that is, to the idea of it, and I do this precisely because of the temptation to throw up my hands in resignation and retreat into silence. Because despair is self-fulfilling. If we call something impossible, we act in such a way that we make it so. And I, for one, refuse to live that way. In fact, most of us do, whether we're atheist or theist or anywhere in between or beyond, for that matter, what drives us is that, despite our doubts and even because of our doubts, we reject the nihilism of despair. We insist on faith in the future and in each other. Call this naive if you like. Call it impossibly idealistic if you must. But one thing is sure: Call it human. Could Muhammad have so radically changed his world without such faith, without the refusal to cede to the arrogance of closed-minded certainty? I think not. After keeping company with him as a writer for the past five years, I can't see that he'd be anything but utterly outraged at the militant fundamentalists who claim to speak and act in his name in the Middle East and elsewhere today. He'd be appalled at the repression of half the population because of their gender. He'd be torn apart by the bitter divisiveness of sectarianism. He'd call out terrorism for what it is, not only criminal but an obscene travesty of everything he believed in and struggled for. He'd say what the Koran says: Anyone who takes a life takes the life of all humanity. Anyone who saves a life, saves the life of all humanity. And he'd commit himself fully to the hard and thorny process of making peace. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause)

Everything is interconnected. As a Shinnecock Indian, I was raised to know this. We are a small fishing tribe situated on the southeastern tip of Long Island near the town of Southampton in New York. When I was a little girl, my grandfather took me to sit outside in the sun on a hot summer day. There were no clouds in the sky. And after a while I began to perspire. And he pointed up to the sky, and he said, "Look, do you see that? That's part of you up there. That's your water that helps to make the cloud that becomes the rain that feeds the plants that feeds the animals." In my continued exploration of subjects in nature that have the ability to illustrate the interconnection of all life, I started storm chasing in 2008 after my daughter said, "Mom, you should do that." And so three days later, driving very fast, I found myself stalking a single type of giant cloud called the super cell, capable of producing grapefruit-size hail and spectacular tornadoes, although only two percent actually do. These clouds can grow so big, up to 50 miles wide and reach up to 65,000 feet into the atmosphere. They can grow so big, blocking all daylight, making it very dark and ominous standing under them. Storm chasing is a very tactile experience. There's a warm, moist wind blowing at your back and the smell of the earth, the wheat, the grass, the charged particles. And then there are the colors in the clouds of hail forming, the greens and the turquoise blues. I've learned to respect the lightning. My hair used to be straight. (Laughter) I'm just kidding. (Laughter) What really excites me about these storms is their movement, the way they swirl and spin and undulate, with their lava lamp-like mammatus clouds. They become lovely monsters. When I'm photographing them, I cannot help but remember my grandfather's lesson. As I stand under them, I see not just a cloud, but understand that what I have the privilege to witness is the same forces, the same process in a small-scale version that helped to create our galaxy, our solar system, our sun and even this very planet. All my relations. Thank you. (Applause)

The idea of eliminating poverty is a great goal. I don't think anyone in this room would disagree. What worries me is when politicians with money and charismatic rock stars use the words, it all just sounds so, so simple. Now, I've got no bucket of money today and I've got no policy to release, and I certainly haven't got a guitar. I'll leave that to others. But I do have an idea, and that idea is called Housing for Health. Housing For Health works with poor people. It works in the places where they live, and the work is done to improve their health. Over the last 28 years, this tough, grinding, dirty work has been done by literally thousands of people around Australia, and more recently overseas, and their work has proven that focused design can improve even the poorest living environments. It can improve health, and it can play a part in reducing, if not eliminating, poverty. I'm going to start where the story began, 1985, in central Australia. A man called Yami Lester, an Aboriginal man, was running a health service. Eighty percent of what walked in the door, in terms of illness, was infectious disease -- third world, developing world infectious disease, caused by a poor living environment. Yami assembled a team in Alice Springs. He got a medical doctor. He got an environmental health guy. And he hand-selected a team of local Aboriginal people to work on this project. Yami told us at that first meeting, there's no money. Always a good start, no money. You have six months. And I want you to start on a project which in his language he called "uwankara palyanku kanyintjaku," which, translated, is "a plan to stop people getting sick," a profound brief. That was our task. First step, the medical doctor went away for about six months, and he worked on what were to become these nine health goals, what were we aiming at. After six months of work, he came to my office and presented me with those nine words on a piece of paper. [Washing, clothes, wastewater, nutrition... ] Now, I was very, very unimpressed. Come on. Big ideas need big words and preferably a lot of them. This didn't fit the bill. What I didn't see and what you can't see is that he'd assembled thousands of pages of local, national and international health research that filled out the picture as to why these were the health targets. The pictures that came a bit later had a very simple reason. The Aboriginal people who were our bosses and the senior people were most commonly illiterate, so the story had to be told in pictures of what were these goals. We work with the community, not telling them what was going to happen in a language they didn't understand. So we had the goals, and each one of these goals -- and I won't go through them all — puts at the center the person and their health issue, and it then connects them to the bits of the physical environment that are actually needed to keep their health good. And the highest priority, you see on the screen, is washing people once a day, particularly children. Now I hope most of you are thinking, "What? That sounds simple." Now, I'm going to ask you all a very personal question. This morning before you came, who could have had a wash using a shower? I'm not going to ask if you had a shower, because I'm too polite. That's it. (Laughter) Okay. All right. I think it's fair to say, most people here could have had a shower this morning. I'm going to ask you to do some more work. I want you all to select one of the houses of the 25 houses you see on the screen. I want you to select one of them and note the position of that house and keep that in your head. Have you all got a house? I'm going to ask you to live there for a few months, so make sure you've got it right. It's in the northwest of Western Australia, very pleasant place. Okay. Let's see if your shower in that house is working. I hear some "aw"s and I hear some "aah." If you get a green tick, your shower's working. You and your kids are fine. If you get a red cross, well, I've looked carefully around the room and it's not going to make much difference to this crew. Why? Because you're all too old. And I know that's going to come as a shock to some of you, but you are. Now before you get offended and leave, I've got to say that being too old in this case means that pretty much everyone in the room, I think, is over five years of age. We're really concerned with kids naught to five. And why? Washing is the antidote to the sort of bugs, the common infectious diseases of the eyes, the ears, the chest and the skin that, if they occur in the first five years of life, permanently damage those organs. They leave a lifelong remnant. That means that, by the age of five, you can't see as well for the rest of your life. You can't hear as well for the rest of your life. You can't breath as well. You've lost a third of your lung capacity by the age of five. And even skin infection, which we originally thought wasn't that big a problem, mild skin infections naught to five give you a greatly increased chance of renal failure, needing dialysis at age 40. This is a big deal, so the ticks and crosses on the screen are actually critical for young kids. Those ticks and crosses represent the 7,800 houses we've looked at nationally around Australia, the same proportion. What you see on the screen -- 35 percent of those not-so-famous houses lived in by 50,000 indigenous people, 35 percent had a working shower. Ten percent of those same 7,800 houses had safe electrical systems, and 58 percent of those houses had a working toilet. These are by a simple, standard test: In the case of the shower, does it have hot and cold water, two taps that work, a shower rose to get water onto your head or onto your body, and a drain that takes the water away? Not well designed, not beautiful, not elegant -- just that they function. And the same test for the electrical system and the toilets. Housing for Health projects aren't about measuring failure. They're actually about improving houses. We start on day one of every project -- we've learned, we don't make promises, we don't do reports. We arrive in the morning with tools, tons of equipment, trades, and we train up a local team on the first day to start work. By the evening of the first day, a few houses in that community are better than when we started in the morning. That work continues for six to 12 months until all the houses are improved and we've spent our budget of 7,500 dollars total per house. That's our average budget. At the end of six months to a year, we test every house again. It's very easy to spend money. It's very difficult to improve the function of all those parts of the house, and for a whole house, the nine healthy living practices, we test, check and fix 250 items in every house. And these are the results we can get with our 7,500 dollars. We can get showers up to 86 percent working, we can get electrical systems up to 77 percent working, and we can get 90 percent of toilets working in those 7,500 houses. Thank you. (Applause) The teams do a great job, and that's their work. I think there's an obvious question that I hope you're thinking about. Why do we have to do this work? Why are the houses in such poor condition? Seventy percent of the work we do is due to lack of routine maintenance, the sort of things that happen in all our houses. Things wear out. Should have been done by state government or local government. Simply not done, the house doesn't work. Twenty-one percent of the things we fix are due to faulty construction, literally things that are built upside down and back-to-front. They don't work. We have to fix them. And if you've lived in Australia in the last 30 years, the final cause -- You will have heard always that indigenous people trash houses. It's one of the almost rock-solid pieces of evidence, which I've never seen evidence for, that's always ruled out as that's the problem with indigenous housing. Well, nine percent of what we spend is damage, misuse or abuse of any sort. We argue strongly that the people living in the house are simply not the problem. And we'll go a lot further than that. The people living in the house are actually a major part of the solution. Seventy-five percent of our national team in Australia, over 75 at the minute, are actually local, indigenous people from the communities we work in. They do all aspects of the work. (Applause) In 2010, for example, there were 831, all over Australia, and the Torres Strait Islands, all states, working to improve the houses where they and their families live, and that's an important thing. Our work's always had a focus on health. That's the key. The developing world bug trachoma, it causes blindness. It's a developing world illness, and yet, the picture you see behind is in an Aboriginal community in the late 1990s where 95 percent of school-aged kids had active trachoma in their eyes doing damage. Okay, what do we do? Well, first thing we do, we get showers working. Why? Because that flushes the bug out. We put washing facilities in the school as well, so kids can wash their faces many times during the day. We wash the bug out. Second, the eye doctors tell us that dust scours the eye and lets the bug in quick. So what do we do? We call up the doctor of dust, and there is such a person. He was loaned to us by a mining company. He controls dust on mining company sites, and he came out, and within a day it worked out that most dust in this community was within a meter of the ground, the wind-driven dust, so he suggested making mounds to catch the dust before it went into the house area and affected the eyes of kids. So we used dirt to stop dust. We did it. He provided us dust monitors. We tested and we reduced the dust. Then we wanted to get rid of the bug generally. So how do we do that? Well, we call up the doctor of flies, and yes there is a doctor of flies. As our Aboriginal mate said, "You white fellows ought to get out more." (Laughter) And the doctor of flies very quickly determined that there was one fly that carried the bug. He could give school kids in this community the beautiful fly trap you see above in the slide. They could trap the flies, send them to him in Perth. When the bug was in the gut, he'd send back by return post some dung beetles. The dung beetles ate the camel dung, the flies died through lack of food, and trachoma dropped. And over the year, trachoma dropped radically in this place, and stayed low. We changed the environment, not just treated the eyes. And finally, you get a good eye. All these small health gains and small pieces of the puzzle make a big difference. The New South Wales Department of Health, that radical organization, did an independent trial over three years to look at 10 years of the work we've been doing in these sorts of projects in New South Wales, and they found a 40-percent reduction in hospital admissions for the illnesses that you could attribute to the poor environment. A 40-percent reduction. (Applause) Just to show that the principles we've used in Australia can be used in other places, I'm just going to go to one other place, and that's Nepal, and what a beautiful place to go. We were asked by a small village of 600 people to go in and make toilets where none existed. Health was poor. We went in with no grand plan, no grand promises of a great program, just the offer to build two toilets for two families. It was during the design of the first toilet that I went for lunch, invited by the family into their main room of the house. It was choking with smoke. People were cooking on their only fuel source, green timber. The smoke coming off that timber is choking, and in an enclosed house, you simply can't breathe. Later we found the leading cause of illness and death in this particular region is through respiratory failure. So all of a sudden we had two problems. We were there originally to look at toilets and get human waste off the ground. That's fine. But all of a sudden now there was a second problem. How do we actually get the smoke down? So two problems, and design should be about more than one thing. Solution: Take human waste, take animal waste, put it into a chamber, out of that extract biogas, methane gas. The gas gives three to four hours cooking a day -- clean, smokeless and free for the family. (Applause) I put it to you, is this eliminating poverty? And the answer from the Nepali team who is working at the minute would say, don't be ridiculous, we have three million more toilets to build before we can even make a stab at that claim. And I don't pretend anything else. But as we all sit here today, there are now over 100 toilets built in this village and a couple nearby. Well over 1,000 people use those toilets. Yami Lama, he's a young boy. He's got significantly less gut infection because he's now got toilets, and there isn't human waste on the ground. Kanji Maya, she's a mother and a proud one. She's probably right now cooking lunch for her family on biogas, smokeless fuel. Her lungs have got better, and they'll get better as time increases, because she's not cooking in the same smoke. Surya takes the waste out of the biogas chamber when it's shed the gas, he puts it on his crops. He's trebled his crop income, more food for the family and more money for the family. And finally Bishnu, the leader of the team, has now understood that not only have we built toilets, we've also built a team, and that team is now working in two villages where they're training up the next two villages to keep the work expanding. And that, to me, is the key. (Applause) People are not the problem. We've never found that. The problem: poor living environment, poor housing, and the bugs that do people harm. None of those are limited by geography, by skin color or by religion. None of them. The common link between all the work we've had to do is one thing, and that's poverty. Nelson Mandela said, in the mid-2000s, not too far from here, he said that like slavery and Apartheid, "Poverty is not natural. It's man-made and can be overcome and eradicated by the actions of human beings." I want to end by saying it's been the actions of thousands of ordinary human beings doing, I think, extraordinary work, that have actually improved health, and, maybe only in a small way, reduced poverty. Thank you very much for your time. (Applause)

I was born and raised in North Korea. Although my family constantly struggled against poverty, I was always loved and cared for first, because I was the only son and the youngest of two in the family. But then the great famine began in 1994. I was four years old. My sister and I would go searching for firewood starting at 5 in the morning and come back after midnight. I would wander the streets searching for food, and I remember seeing a small child tied to a mother's back eating chips, and wanting to steal them from him. Hunger is humiliation. Hunger is hopelessness. For a hungry child, politics and freedom are not even thought of. On my ninth birthday, my parents couldn't give me any food to eat. But even as a child, I could feel the heaviness in their hearts. Over a million North Koreans died of starvation in that time, and in 2003, when I was 13 years old, my father became one of them. I saw my father wither away and die. In the same year, my mother disappeared one day, and then my sister told me that she was going to China to earn money, but that she would return with money and food soon. Since we had never been separated, and I thought we would be together forever, I didn't even give her a hug when she left. It was the biggest mistake I have ever made in my life. But again, I didn't know it was going to be a long goodbye. I have not seen my mom or my sister since then. Suddenly, I became an orphan and homeless. My daily life became very hard, but very simple. My goal was to find a dusty piece of bread in the trash. But that is no way to survive. I started to realize, begging would not be the solution. So I started to steal from food carts in illegal markets. Sometimes, I found small jobs in exchange for food. Once, I even spent two months in the winter working in a coal mine, 33 meters underground without any protection for up to 16 hours a day. I was not uncommon. Many other orphans survived this way, or worse. When I could not fall asleep from bitter cold or hunger pains, I hoped that, the next morning, my sister would come back to wake me up with my favorite food. That hope kept me alive. I don't mean big, grand hope. I mean the kind of hope that made me believe that the next trash can had bread, even though it usually didn't. But if I didn't believe it, I wouldn't even try, and then I would die. Hope kept me alive. Every day, I told myself, no matter how hard things got, still I must live. After three years of waiting for my sister's return, I decided to go to China to look for her myself. I realized I couldn't survive much longer this way. I knew the journey would be risky, but I would be risking my life either way. I could die of starvation like my father in North Korea, or at least I could try for a better life by escaping to China. I had learned that many people tried to cross the border to China in the nighttime to avoid being seen. North Korean border guards often shoot and kill people trying to cross the border without permission. Chinese soldiers will catch and send back North Koreans, where they face severe punishment. I decided to cross during the day, first because I was still a kid and scared of the dark, second because I knew I was already taking a risk, and since not many people tried to cross during the day, I thought I might be able to cross without being seen by anyone. I made it to China on February 15, 2006. I was 16 years old. I thought things in China would be easier, since there was more food. I thought more people would help me. But it was harder than living in North Korea, because I was not free. I was always worried about being caught and sent back. By a miracle, some months later, I met someone who was running an underground shelter for North Koreans, and was allowed to live there and eat regular meals for the first time in many years. Later that year, an activist helped me escape China and go to the United States as a refugee. I went to America without knowing a word of English, yet my social worker told me that I had to go to high school. Even in North Korea, I was an F student. (Laughter) And I barely finished elementary school. And I remember I fought in school more than once a day. Textbooks and the library were not my playground. My father tried very hard to motivate me into studying, but it didn't work. At one point, my father gave up on me. He said, "You're not my son anymore." I was only 11 or 12, but it hurt me deeply. But nevertheless, my level of motivation still didn't change before he died. So in America, it was kind of ridiculous that they said I should go to high school. I didn't even go to middle school. I decided to go, just because they told me to, without trying much. But one day, I came home and my foster mother had made chicken wings for dinner. And during dinner, I wanted to have one more wing, but I realized there were not enough for everyone, so I decided against it. When I looked down at my plate, I saw the last chicken wing, that my foster father had given me his. I was so happy. I looked at him sitting next to me. He just looked back at me very warmly, but said no words. Suddenly I remembered my biological father. My foster father's small act of love reminded me of my father, who would love to share his food with me when he was hungry, even if he was starving. I felt so suffocated that I had so much food in America, yet my father died of starvation. My only wish that night was to cook a meal for him, and that night I also thought of what else I could do to honor him. And my answer was to promise to myself that I would study hard and get the best education in America to honor his sacrifice. I took school seriously, and for the first time ever in my life, I received an academic award for excellence, and made dean's list from the first semester in high school. (Applause) That chicken wing changed my life. (Laughter) Hope is personal. Hope is something that no one can give to you. You have to choose to believe in hope. You have to make it yourself. In North Korea, I made it myself. Hope brought me to America. But in America, I didn't know what to do, because I had this overwhelming freedom. My foster father at that dinner gave me a direction, and he motivated me and gave me a purpose to live in America. I did not come here by myself. I had hope, but hope by itself is not enough. Many people helped me along the way to get here. North Koreans are fighting hard to survive. They have to force themselves to survive, have hope to survive, but they cannot make it without help. This is my message to you. Have hope for yourself, but also help each other. Life can be hard for everyone, wherever you live. My foster father didn't intend to change my life. In the same way, you may also change someone's life with even the smallest act of love. A piece of bread can satisfy your hunger, and having the hope will bring you bread to keep you alive. But I confidently believe that your act of love and caring can also save another Joseph's life and change thousands of other Josephs who are still having hope to survive. Thank you. (Applause) Adrian Hong: Joseph, thank you for sharing that very personal and special story with us. I know you haven't seen your sister for, you said, it was almost exactly a decade, and in the off chance that she may be able to see this, we wanted to give you an opportunity to send her a message. Joseph Kim: In Korean? AH: You can do English, then Korean as well. (Laughter) JK: Okay, I'm not going to make it any longer in Korean because I don't think I can make it without tearing up. Nuna, it has been already 10 years that I haven’t seen you. I just wanted to say that I miss you, and I love you, and please come back to me and stay alive. And I -- oh, gosh. I still haven't given up my hope to see you. I will live my life happily and study hard until I see you, and I promise I will not cry again. (Laughter) Yes, I'm just looking forward to seeing you, and if you can't find me, I will also look for you, and I hope to see you one day. And can I also make a small message to my mom? AH: Sure, please. JK: I haven't spent much time with you, but I know that you still love me, and you probably still pray for me and think about me. I just wanted to say thank you for letting me be in this world. Thank you. (Applause)

Living in Africa is to be on the edge, metaphorically, and quite literally when you think about connectivity before 2008. Though many human intellectual and technological leaps had happened in Europe and the rest of the world, but Africa was sort of cut off. And that changed, first with ships when we had the Renaissance, the Scientific Revolution and also the Industrial Revolution. And now we've got the digital revolution. These revolutions have not been evenly distributed across continents and nations. Never have been. Now, this is a map of the undersea fiber optic cables that connect Africa to the rest of the world. What I find amazing is that Africa is transcending its geography problem. Africa is connecting to the rest of the world and within itself. The connectivity situation has improved greatly, but some barriers remain. It is with this context that Ushahidi came to be. In 2008, one of the problems that we faced was lack of information flow. There was a media blackout in 2008, when there was post-election violence in Kenya. It was a very tragic time. It was a very difficult time. So we came together and we created software called Ushahidi. And Ushahidi means "testimony" or "witness" in Swahili. I'm very lucky to work with two amazing collaborators. This is David and Erik. I call them brothers from another mother. Clearly I have a German mother somewhere. And we worked together first with building and growing Ushahidi. And the idea of the software was to gather information from SMS, email and web, and put a map so that you could see what was happening where, and you could visualize that data. And after that initial prototype, we set out to make free and open-source software so that others do not have to start from scratch like we did. All the while, we also wanted to give back to the local tech community that helped us grow Ushahidi and supported us in those early days. And that's why we set up the iHub in Nairobi, an actual physical space where we could collaborate, and it is now part of an integral tech ecosystem in Kenya. We did that with the support of different organizations like the MacArthur Foundation and Omidyar Network. And we were able to grow this software footprint, and a few years later it became very useful software, and we were quite humbled when it was used in Haiti where citizens could indicate where they are and what their needs were, and also to deal with the fallout from the nuclear crisis and the tsunami in Japan. Now, this year the Internet turns 20, and Ushahidi turned five. Ushahidi is not only the software that we made. It is the team, and it's also the community that uses this technology in ways that we could not foresee. We did not imagine that there would be this many maps around the world. There are crisis maps, election maps, corruption maps, and even environmental monitoring crowd maps. We are humbled that this has roots in Kenya and that it has some use to people around the world trying to figure out the different issues that they're dealing with. There is more that we're doing to explore this idea of collective intelligence, that I, as a citizen, if I share the information with whatever device that I have, could inform you about what is going on, and that if you do the same, we can have a bigger picture of what's going on. I moved back to Kenya in 2011. Erik moved in 2010. Very different reality. I used to live in Chicago where there was abundant Internet access. I had never had to deal with a blackout. And in Kenya, it's a very different reality, and one thing that remains despite the leaps in progress and the digital revolution is the electricity problem. The day-to-day frustrations of dealing with this can be, let's just say very annoying. Blackouts are not fun. Imagine sitting down to start working, and all of a sudden the power goes out, your Internet connection goes down with it, so you have to figure out, okay, now, where's the modem, how do I switch back? And then, guess what? You have to deal with it again. Now, this is the reality of Kenya, where we live now, and other parts of Africa. The other problem that we're facing is that communication costs are also still a challenge. It costs me five Kenyan shillings, or .06 USD to call the U.S., Canada or China. Guess how much it costs to call Rwanda, Ghana, Nigeria? Thirty Kenyan shillings. That's six times the cost to connect within Africa. And also, when traveling within Africa, you've got different settings for different mobile providers. This is the reality that we deal with. So we've got a joke in Ushahidi where we say, "If it works in Africa, it'll work anywhere." [Most use technology to define the function. We use function to drive the technology.] What if we could overcome the problem of unreliable Internet and electricity and reduce the cost of connection? Could we leverage the cloud? We've built a crowd map, we've built Ushahidi. Could we leverage these technologies to switch smartly whenever you travel from country to country? So we looked at the modem, an important part of the infrastructure of the Internet, and asked ourselves why the modems that we are using right now are built for a different context, where you've got ubiquitous internet, you've got ubiquitous electricity, yet we sit here in Nairobi and we do not have that luxury. We wanted to redesign the modem for the developing world, for our context, and for our reality. What if we could have connectivity with less friction? This is the BRCK. It acts as a backup to the Internet so that, when the power goes out, it fails over and connects to the nearest GSM network. Mobile connectivity in Africa is pervasive. It's actually everywhere. Most towns at least have a 3G connection. So why don't we leverage that? And that's why we built this. The other reason that we built this is when electricity goes down, this has eight hours of battery left, so you can continue working, you can continue being productive, and let's just say you are less stressed. And for rural areas, it can be the primary means of connection. The software sensibility at Ushahidi is still at play when we wondered how can we use the cloud to be more intelligent so that you can analyze the different networks, and whenever you switch on the backup, you pick on the fastest network, so we'll have multi-SIM capability so that you can put multiple SIMs, and if one network is faster, that's the one you hop on, and if the up time on that is not very good, then you hop onto the next one. The idea here is for you to be able to connect anywhere. With load balancing, this can be possible. The other interesting thing for us -- we like sensors -- is this idea that you could have an on-ramp for the Internet of things. Imagine a weather station that can be attached to this. It's built in a modular way so that you can also attach a satellite module so that you could have Internet connectivity even in very remote areas. Out of adversity can come innovation, and how can we help the ambitious coders and makers in Kenya to be resilient in the face of problematic infrastructure? And for us, we begin with solving the problem in our own backyard in Kenya. It is not without challenge. Our team has basically been mules carrying components from the U.S. to Kenya. We've had very interesting conversations with customs border agents. "What are you carrying?" And the local financing is not part of the ecosystem for supporting hardware projects. So we put it on Kickstarter, and I'm happy to say that, through the support of many people, not only here but online, the BRCK has been Kickstarted, and now the interesting part of bringing this to market begins. I will close by saying that, if we solve this for the local market, it could be impactful not only for the coders in Nairobi but also for small business owners who need reliable connectivity, and it can reduce the cost of connecting, and hopefully collaboration within African countries. The idea is that the building blocks of the digital economy are connectivity and entrepreneurship. The BRCK is our part to keep Africans connected, and to help them drive the global digital revolution. Thank you. (Applause)

Once upon a time we lived in an economy of financial growth and prosperity. This was called the Great Moderation, the misguided belief by most economists, policymakers and central banks that we have transformed into a new world of never-ending growth and prosperity. This was seen by robust and steady GDP growth, by low and controlled inflation, by low unemployment, and controlled and low financial volatility. But the Great Recession in 2007 and 2008, the great crash, broke this illusion. A few hundred billion dollars of losses in the financial sector cascaded into five trillion dollars of losses in world GDP and almost $30 trillion losses in the global stock market. So the understanding of this Great Recession was that this was completely surprising, this came out of the blue, this was like the wrath of the gods. There was no responsibility. So, as a reflection of this, we started the Financial Crisis Observatory. We had the goal to diagnose in real time financial bubbles and identify in advance their critical time. What is the underpinning, scientifically, of this financial observatory? We developed a theory called "dragon-kings." Dragon-kings represent extreme events which are of a class of their own. They are special. They are outliers. They are generated by specific mechanisms that may make them predictable, perhaps controllable. Consider the financial price time series, a given stock, your perfect stock, or a global index. You have these up-and-downs. A very good measure of the risk of this financial market is the peaks-to-valleys that represent a worst case scenario when you bought at the top and sold at the bottom. You can look at the statistics, the frequency of the occurrence of peak-to-valleys of different sizes, which is represented in this graph. Now, interestingly, 99 percent of the peak-to-valleys of different amplitudes can be represented by a universal power law represented by this red line here. More interestingly, there are outliers, there are exceptions which are above this red line, occur 100 times more frequently, at least, than the extrapolation would predict them to occur based on the calibration of the 99 percent remaining peak-to-valleys. They are due to trenchant dependancies such that a loss is followed by a loss which is followed by a loss which is followed by a loss. These kinds of dependencies are largely missed by standard risk management tools, which ignore them and see lizards when they should see dragon-kings. The root mechanism of a dragon-king is a slow maturation towards instability, which is the bubble, and the climax of the bubble is often the crash. This is similar to the slow heating of water in this test tube reaching the boiling point, where the instability of the water occurs and you have the phase transition to vapor. And this process, which is absolutely non-linear -- cannot be predicted by standard techniques -- is the reflection of a collective emergent behavior which is fundamentally endogenous. So the cause of the crash, the cause of the crisis has to be found in an inner instability of the system, and any tiny perturbation will make this instability occur. Now, some of you may have come to the mind that is this not related to the black swan concept you have heard about frequently? Remember, black swan is this rare bird that you see once and suddenly shattered your belief that all swans should be white, so it has captured the idea of unpredictability, unknowability, that the extreme events are fundamentally unknowable. Nothing can be further from the dragon-king concept I propose, which is exactly the opposite, that most extreme events are actually knowable and predictable. So we can be empowered and take responsibility and make predictions about them. So let's have my dragon-king burn this black swan concept. (Laughter) There are many early warning signals that are predicted by this theory. Let me just focus on one of them: the super-exponential growth with positive feedback. What does it mean? Imagine you have an investment that returns the first year five percent, the second year 10 percent, the third year 20 percent, the next year 40 percent. Is that not marvelous? This is a super-exponential growth. A standard exponential growth corresponds to a constant growth rate, let's say, of 10 percent The point is that, many times during bubbles, there are positive feedbacks which can be of many times, such that previous growths enhance, push forward, increase the next growth through this kind of super-exponential growth, which is very trenchant, not sustainable. And the key idea is that the mathematical solution of this class of models exhibit finite-time singularities, which means that there is a critical time where the system will break, will change regime. It may be a crash. It may be just a plateau, something else. And the key idea is that the critical time, the information about the critical time is contained in the early development of this super-exponential growth. We have applied this theory early on, that was our first success, to the diagnostic of the rupture of key elements on the iron rocket. Using acoustic emission, you know, this little noise that you hear a structure emit, sing to you when they are stressed, and reveal the damage going on, there's a collective phenomenon of positive feedback, the more damage gives the more damage, so you can actually predict, within, of course, a probability band, when the rupture will occur. So this is now so successful that it is used in the initial phase of [unclear] the flight. Perhaps more surprisingly, the same type of theory applies to biology and medicine, parturition, the act of giving birth, epileptic seizures. From seven months of pregnancy, a mother starts to feel episodic precursory contractions of the uterus that are the sign of these maturations toward the instability, giving birth to the baby, the dragon-king. So if you measure the precursor signal, you can actually identify pre- and post-maturity problems in advance. Epileptic seizures also come in a large variety of size, and when the brain goes to a super-critical state, you have dragon-kings which have a degree of predictability and this can help the patient to deal with this illness. We have applied this theory to many systems, landslides, glacier collapse, even to the dynamics of prediction of success: blockbusters, YouTube videos, movies, and so on. But perhaps the most important application is for finance, and this theory illuminates, I believe, the deep reason for the financial crisis that we have gone through. This is rooted in 30 years of history of bubbles, starting in 1980, with the global bubble crashing in 1987, followed by many other bubbles. The biggest one was the "new economy" Internet bubble in 2000, crashing in 2000, the real estate bubbles in many countries, financial derivative bubbles everywhere, stock market bubbles also everywhere, commodity and all bubbles, debt and credit bubbles -- bubbles, bubbles, bubbles. We had a global bubble. This is a measure of global overvaluation of all markets, expressing what I call an illusion of a perpetual money machine that suddenly broke in 2007. The problem is that we see the same process, in particular through quantitative easing, of a thinking of a perpetual money machine nowadays to tackle the crisis since 2008 in the U.S., in Europe, in Japan. This has very important implications to understand the failure of quantitative easing as well as austerity measures as long as we don't attack the core, the structural cause of this perpetual money machine thinking. Now, these are big claims. Why would you believe me? Well, perhaps because, in the last 15 years we have come out of our ivory tower, and started to publish ex ante -- and I stress the term ex ante, it means "in advance" — before the crash confirmed the existence of the bubble or the financial excesses. These are a few of the major bubbles that we have lived through in recent history. Again, many interesting stories for each of them. Let me tell you just one or two stories that deal with massive bubbles. We all know the Chinese miracle. This is the expression of the stock market of a massive bubble, a factor of three, 300 percent in just a few years. In September 2007, I was invited as a keynote speaker of a macro hedge fund management conference, and I showed to the conference a prediction that by the end of 2007, this bubble would change regime. There might be a crash. Certainly not sustainable. Now, how do you believe the very smart, very motivated, very informed macro hedge fund managers reacted to this prediction? You know, they had made billions just surfing this bubble until now. They told me, "Didier, yeah, the market might be overvalued, but you forget something. There is the Beijing Olympic Games coming in August 2008, and it's very clear that the Chinese government is controlling the economy and doing what it takes to also avoid any wave and control the stock market." Three weeks after my presentation, the markets lost 20 percent and went through a phase of volatility, upheaval, and a total market loss of 70 percent until the end of the year. So how can we be so collectively wrong by misreading or ignoring the science of the fact that when an instability has developed, and the system is ripe, any perturbation makes it essentially impossible to control? The Chinese market collapsed, but it rebounded. In 2009, we also identified that this new bubble, a smaller one, was unsustainable, so we published again a prediction, in advance, stating that by August 2009, the market will correct, will not continue on this track. Our critics, reading the prediction, said, "No, it's not possible. The Chinese government is there. They have learned their lesson. They will control. They want to benefit from the growth." Perhaps these critics have not learned their lesson previously. So the crisis did occur. The market corrected. The same critics then said, "Ah, yes, but you published your prediction. You influenced the market. It was not a prediction." Maybe I am very powerful then. Now, this is interesting. It shows that it's essentially impossible until now to develop a science of economics because we are sentient beings who anticipate and there is a problem of self-fulfilling prophesies. So we invented a new way of doing science. We created the Financial Bubble Experiment. The idea is the following. We monitor the markets. We identify excesses, bubbles. We do our work. We write a report in which we put our prediction of the critical time. We don't release the report. It's kept secret. But with modern encrypting techniques, we have a hash, we publish a public key, and six months later, we release the report, and there is authentication. And all this is done on an international archive so that we cannot be accused of just releasing the successes. Let me tease you with a very recent analysis. 17th of May, 2013, just two weeks ago, we identified that the U.S. stock market was on an unsustainable path and we released this on our website on the 21st of May that there will be a change of regime. The next day, the market started to change regime, course. This is not a crash. This is just the third or fourth act of a massive bubble in the making. Scaling up the discussion at the size of the planet, we see the same thing. Wherever we look, it's observable: in the biosphere, in the atmosphere, in the ocean, showing these super-exponential trajectories characterizing an unsustainable path and announcing a phase transition. This diagram on the right shows a very beautiful compilation of studies suggesting indeed that there is a nonlinear -- possibility for a nonlinear transition just in the next few decades. So there are bubbles everywhere. From one side, this is exciting for me, as a professor who chases bubbles and slays dragons, as the media has sometimes called me. But can we really slay the dragons? Very recently, with collaborators, we studied a dynamical system where you see the dragon-king as these big loops and we were able to apply tiny perturbations at the right times that removed, when control is on, these dragons. "Gouverner, c'est prévoir." Governing is the art of planning and predicting. But is it not the case that this is probably one of the biggest gaps of mankind, which has the responsibility to steer our societies and our planet toward sustainability in the face of growing challenges and crises? But the dragon-king theory gives hope. We learn that most systems have pockets of predictability. It is possible to develop advance diagnostics of crises so that we can be prepared, we can take measures, we can take responsibility, and so that never again will extremes and crises like the Great Recession or the European crisis take us by surprise. Thank you. (Applause)

Allow me to start this talk with a question to everyone. You know that all over the world, people fight for their freedom, fight for their rights. Some battle oppressive governments. Others battle oppressive societies. Which battle do you think is harder? Allow me to try to answer this question in the few coming minutes. Let me take you back two years ago in my life. It was the bedtime of my son, Aboody. He was five at the time. After finishing his bedtime rituals, he looked at me and he asked a question: "Mommy, are we bad people?" I was shocked. "Why do you say such things, Aboody?" Earlier that day, I noticed some bruises on his face when he came from school. He wouldn't tell me what happened. [But now] he was ready to tell. "Two boys hit me today in school. They told me, 'We saw your mom on Facebook. You and your mom should be put in jail.'" I've never been afraid to tell Aboody anything. I've been always a proud woman of my achievements. But those questioning eyes of my son were my moment of truth, when it all came together. You see, I'm a Saudi woman who had been put in jail for driving a car in a country where women are not supposed to drive cars. Just for giving me his car keys, my own brother was detained twice, and he was harassed to the point he had to quit his job as a geologist, leave the country with his wife and two-year-old son. My father had to sit in a Friday sermon listening to the imam condemning women drivers and calling them prostitutes amongst tons of worshippers, some of them our friends and family of my own father. I was faced with an organized defamation campaign in the local media combined with false rumors shared in family gatherings, in the streets and in schools. It all hit me. It came into focus that those kids did not mean to be rude to my son. They were just influenced by the adults around them. And it wasn't about me, and it wasn't a punishment for taking the wheel and driving a few miles. It was a punishment for daring to challenge the society's rules. But my story goes beyond this moment of truth of mine. Allow me to give you a briefing about my story. It was May, 2011, and I was complaining to a work colleague about the harassments I had to face trying to find a ride back home, although I have a car and an international driver's license. As long as I've known, women in Saudi Arabia have been always complaining about the ban, but it's been 20 years since anyone tried to do anything about it, a whole generation ago. He broke the good/bad news in my face. "But there is no law banning you from driving." I looked it up, and he was right. There wasn't an actual law in Saudi Arabia. It was just a custom and traditions that are enshrined in rigid religious fatwas and imposed on women. That realization ignited the idea of June 17, where we encouraged women to take the wheel and go drive. It was a few weeks later, we started receiving all these "Man wolves will rape you if you go and drive." A courageous woman, her name is Najla Hariri, she's a Saudi woman in the city of Jeddah, she drove a car and she announced but she didn't record a video. We needed proof. So I drove. I posted a video on YouTube. And to my surprise, it got hundreds of thousands of views the first day. What happened next, of course? I started receiving threats to be killed, raped, just to stop this campaign. The Saudi authorities remained very quiet. That really creeped us out. I was in the campaign with other Saudi women and even men activists. We wanted to know how the authorities would respond on the actual day, June 17, when women go out and drive. So this time I asked my brother to come with me and drive by a police car. It went fast. We were arrested, signed a pledge not to drive again, released. Arrested again, he was sent to detention for one day, and I was sent to jail. I wasn't sure why I was sent there, because I didn't face any charges in the interrogation. But what I was sure of was my innocence. I didn't break a law, and I kept my abaya — it's a black cloak we wear in Saudi Arabia before we leave the house — and my fellow prisoners kept asking me to take it off, but I was so sure of my innocence, I kept saying, "No, I'm leaving today." Outside the jail, the whole country went into a frenzy, some attacking me badly, and others supportive and even collecting signatures in a petition to be sent to the king to release me. I was released after nine days. June 17 comes. The streets were packed with police cars and religious police cars, but some hundred brave Saudi women broke the ban and drove that day. None were arrested. We broke the taboo. (Applause) So I think by now, everyone knows that we can't drive, or women are not allowed to drive, in Saudi Arabia, but maybe few know why. Allow me to help you answer this question. There was this official study that was presented to the Shura Council -- it's the consultative council appointed by the king in Saudi Arabia — and it was done by a local professor, a university professor. He claims it's done based on a UNESCO study. And the study states, the percentage of rape, adultery, illegitimate children, even drug abuse, prostitution in countries where women drive is higher than countries where women don't drive. (Laughter) I know, I was like this, I was shocked. I was like, "We are the last country in the world where women don't drive." So if you look at the map of the world, that only leaves two countries: Saudi Arabia, and the other society is the rest of the world. We started a hashtag on Twitter mocking the study, and it made headlines around the world. [BBC News: 'End of virginity' if women drive, Saudi cleric warns] (Laughter) And only then we realized it's so empowering to mock your oppressor. It strips it away of its strongest weapon: fear. This system is based on ultra-conservative traditions and customs that deal with women as if they are inferior and they need a guardian to protect them, so they need to take permission from this guardian, whether verbal or written, all their lives. We are minors until the day we die. And it becomes worse when it's enshrined in religious fatwas based on wrong interpretation of the sharia law, or the religious laws. What's worst, when they become codified as laws in the system, and when women themselves believe in their inferiority, and they even fight those who try to question these rules. So for me, it wasn't only about these attacks I had to face. It was about living two totally different perceptions of my personality, of my person -- the villain back in my home country, and the hero outside. Just to tell you, two stories happened in the last two years. One of them is when I was in jail. I'm pretty sure when I was in jail, everyone saw titles in the international media something like this during these nine days I was in jail. But in my home country, it was a totally different picture. It was more like this: "Manal al-Sharif faces charges of disturbing public order and inciting women to drive." I know. "Manal al-Sharif withdraws from the campaign." Ah, it's okay. This is my favorite. "Manal al-Sharif breaks down and confesses: 'Foreign forces incited me.'" (Laughter) And it goes on, even trial and flogging me in public. So it's a totally different picture. I was asked last year to give a speech at the Oslo Freedom Forum. I was surrounded by this love and the support of people around me, and they looked at me as an inspiration. At the same time, I flew back to my home country, they hated that speech so much. The way they called it: a betrayal to the Saudi country and the Saudi people, and they even started a hashtag called #OsloTraitor on Twitter. Some 10,000 tweets were written in that hashtag, while the opposite hashtag, #OsloHero, there was like a handful of tweets written. They even started a poll. More than 13,000 voters answered this poll: whether they considered me a traitor or not after that speech. Ninety percent said yes, she's a traitor. So it's these two totally different perceptions of my personality. For me, I'm a proud Saudi woman, and I do love my country, and because I love my country, I'm doing this. Because I believe a society will not be free if the women of that society are not free. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) Thank you, thank you, thank you, thank you. (Applause) Thank you. But you learn lessons from these things that happen to you. I learned to be always there. The first thing, I got out of jail, of course after I took a shower, I went online, I opened my Twitter account and my Facebook page, and I've been always very respectful to those people who are opining to me. I would listen to what they say, and I would never defend myself with words only. I would use actions. When they said I should withdraw from the campaign, I filed the first lawsuit against the general directorate of traffic police for not issuing me a driver's license. There are a lot of people also -- very big support, like those 3,000 people who signed the petition to release me. We sent a petition to the Shura Council in favor of lifting the ban on Saudi women, and there were, like, 3,500 citizens who believed in that and they signed that petition. There were people like that, I just showed some examples, who are amazing, who are believing in women's rights in Saudi Arabia, and trying, and they are also facing a lot of hate because of speaking up and voicing their views. Saudi Arabia today is taking small steps toward enhancing women's rights. The Shura Council that's appointed by the king, by royal decree of King Abdullah, last year there were 30 women assigned to that Council, like 20 percent. 20 percent of the Council. (Applause) The same time, finally, that Council, after rejecting our petition four times for women driving, they finally accepted it last February. (Applause) After being sent to jail or sentenced lashing, or sent to a trial, the spokesperson of the traffic police said, we will only issue traffic violation for women drivers. The Grand Mufti, who is the head of the religious establishment in Saudi Arabia, he said, it's not recommended for women to drive. It used to be haram, forbidden, by the previous Grand Mufti. So for me, it's not about only these small steps. It's about women themselves. A friend once asked me, she said, "So when do you think this women driving will happen?" I told her, "Only if women stop asking 'When?' and take action to make it now." So it's not only about the system, it's also about us women to drive our own life, I'd say. So I have no clue, really, how I became an activist. And I don't know how I became one now. But all I know, and all I'm sure of, in the future when someone asks me my story, I will say, "I'm proud to be amongst those women who lifted the ban, fought the ban, and celebrated everyone's freedom." So the question I started my talk with, who do you think is more difficult to face, oppressive governments or oppressive societies? I hope you find clues to answer that from my speech. Thank you, everyone. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause)

I write fiction sci-fi thrillers, so if I say "killer robots," you'd probably think something like this. But I'm actually not here to talk about fiction. I'm here to talk about very real killer robots, autonomous combat drones. Now, I'm not referring to Predator and Reaper drones, which have a human making targeting decisions. I'm talking about fully autonomous robotic weapons that make lethal decisions about human beings all on their own. There's actually a technical term for this: lethal autonomy. Now, lethally autonomous killer robots would take many forms -- flying, driving, or just lying in wait. And actually, they're very quickly becoming a reality. These are two automatic sniper stations currently deployed in the DMZ between North and South Korea. Both of these machines are capable of automatically identifying a human target and firing on it, the one on the left at a distance of over a kilometer. Now, in both cases, there's still a human in the loop to make that lethal firing decision, but it's not a technological requirement. It's a choice. And it's that choice that I want to focus on, because as we migrate lethal decision-making from humans to software, we risk not only taking the humanity out of war, but also changing our social landscape entirely, far from the battlefield. That's because the way humans resolve conflict shapes our social landscape. And this has always been the case, throughout history. For example, these were state-of-the-art weapons systems in 1400 A.D. Now they were both very expensive to build and maintain, but with these you could dominate the populace, and the distribution of political power in feudal society reflected that. Power was focused at the very top. And what changed? Technological innovation. Gunpowder, cannon. And pretty soon, armor and castles were obsolete, and it mattered less who you brought to the battlefield versus how many people you brought to the battlefield. And as armies grew in size, the nation-state arose as a political and logistical requirement of defense. And as leaders had to rely on more of their populace, they began to share power. Representative government began to form. So again, the tools we use to resolve conflict shape our social landscape. Autonomous robotic weapons are such a tool, except that, by requiring very few people to go to war, they risk re-centralizing power into very few hands, possibly reversing a five-century trend toward democracy. Now, I think, knowing this, we can take decisive steps to preserve our democratic institutions, to do what humans do best, which is adapt. But time is a factor. Seventy nations are developing remotely-piloted combat drones of their own, and as you'll see, remotely-piloted combat drones are the precursors to autonomous robotic weapons. That's because once you've deployed remotely-piloted drones, there are three powerful factors pushing decision-making away from humans and on to the weapon platform itself. The first of these is the deluge of video that drones produce. For example, in 2004, the U.S. drone fleet produced a grand total of 71 hours of video surveillance for analysis. By 2011, this had gone up to 300,000 hours, outstripping human ability to review it all, but even that number is about to go up drastically. The Pentagon's Gorgon Stare and Argus programs will put up to 65 independently operated camera eyes on each drone platform, and this would vastly outstrip human ability to review it. And that means visual intelligence software will need to scan it for items of interest. And that means very soon drones will tell humans what to look at, not the other way around. But there's a second powerful incentive pushing decision-making away from humans and onto machines, and that's electromagnetic jamming, severing the connection between the drone and its operator. Now we saw an example of this in 2011 when an American RQ-170 Sentinel drone got a bit confused over Iran due to a GPS spoofing attack, but any remotely-piloted drone is susceptible to this type of attack, and that means drones will have to shoulder more decision-making. They'll know their mission objective, and they'll react to new circumstances without human guidance. They'll ignore external radio signals and send very few of their own. Which brings us to, really, the third and most powerful incentive pushing decision-making away from humans and onto weapons: plausible deniability. Now we live in a global economy. High-tech manufacturing is occurring on most continents. Cyber espionage is spiriting away advanced designs to parts unknown, and in that environment, it is very likely that a successful drone design will be knocked off in contract factories, proliferate in the gray market. And in that situation, sifting through the wreckage of a suicide drone attack, it will be very difficult to say who sent that weapon. This raises the very real possibility of anonymous war. This could tilt the geopolitical balance on its head, make it very difficult for a nation to turn its firepower against an attacker, and that could shift the balance in the 21st century away from defense and toward offense. It could make military action a viable option not just for small nations, but criminal organizations, private enterprise, even powerful individuals. It could create a landscape of rival warlords undermining rule of law and civil society. Now if responsibility and transparency are two of the cornerstones of representative government, autonomous robotic weapons could undermine both. Now you might be thinking that citizens of high-tech nations would have the advantage in any robotic war, that citizens of those nations would be less vulnerable, particularly against developing nations. But I think the truth is the exact opposite. I think citizens of high-tech societies are more vulnerable to robotic weapons, and the reason can be summed up in one word: data. Data powers high-tech societies. Cell phone geolocation, telecom metadata, social media, email, text, financial transaction data, transportation data, it's a wealth of real-time data on the movements and social interactions of people. In short, we are more visible to machines than any people in history, and this perfectly suits the targeting needs of autonomous weapons. What you're looking at here is a link analysis map of a social group. Lines indicate social connectedness between individuals. And these types of maps can be automatically generated based on the data trail modern people leave behind. Now it's typically used to market goods and services to targeted demographics, but it's a dual-use technology, because targeting is used in another context. Notice that certain individuals are highlighted. These are the hubs of social networks. These are organizers, opinion-makers, leaders, and these people also can be automatically identified from their communication patterns. Now, if you're a marketer, you might then target them with product samples, try to spread your brand through their social group. But if you're a repressive government searching for political enemies, you might instead remove them, eliminate them, disrupt their social group, and those who remain behind lose social cohesion and organization. Now in a world of cheap, proliferating robotic weapons, borders would offer very little protection to critics of distant governments or trans-national criminal organizations. Popular movements agitating for change could be detected early and their leaders eliminated before their ideas achieve critical mass. And ideas achieving critical mass is what political activism in popular government is all about. Anonymous lethal weapons could make lethal action an easy choice for all sorts of competing interests. And this would put a chill on free speech and popular political action, the very heart of democracy. And this is why we need an international treaty on robotic weapons, and in particular a global ban on the development and deployment of killer robots. Now we already have international treaties on nuclear and biological weapons, and, while imperfect, these have largely worked. But robotic weapons might be every bit as dangerous, because they will almost certainly be used, and they would also be corrosive to our democratic institutions. Now in November 2012 the U.S. Department of Defense issued a directive requiring a human being be present in all lethal decisions. This temporarily effectively banned autonomous weapons in the U.S. military, but that directive needs to be made permanent. And it could set the stage for global action. Because we need an international legal framework for robotic weapons. And we need it now, before there's a devastating attack or a terrorist incident that causes nations of the world to rush to adopt these weapons before thinking through the consequences. Autonomous robotic weapons concentrate too much power in too few hands, and they would imperil democracy itself. Now, don't get me wrong, I think there are tons of great uses for unarmed civilian drones: environmental monitoring, search and rescue, logistics. If we have an international treaty on robotic weapons, how do we gain the benefits of autonomous drones and vehicles while still protecting ourselves against illegal robotic weapons? I think the secret will be transparency. No robot should have an expectation of privacy in a public place. (Applause) Each robot and drone should have a cryptographically signed I.D. burned in at the factory that can be used to track its movement through public spaces. We have license plates on cars, tail numbers on aircraft. This is no different. And every citizen should be able to download an app that shows the population of drones and autonomous vehicles moving through public spaces around them, both right now and historically. And civic leaders should deploy sensors and civic drones to detect rogue drones, and instead of sending killer drones of their own up to shoot them down, they should notify humans to their presence. And in certain very high-security areas, perhaps civic drones would snare them and drag them off to a bomb disposal facility. But notice, this is more an immune system than a weapons system. It would allow us to avail ourselves of the use of autonomous vehicles and drones while still preserving our open, civil society. We must ban the deployment and development of killer robots. Let's not succumb to the temptation to automate war. Autocratic governments and criminal organizations undoubtedly will, but let's not join them. Autonomous robotic weapons would concentrate too much power in too few unseen hands, and that would be corrosive to representative government. Let's make sure, for democracies at least, killer robots remain fiction. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause)

This will not be a speech like any one I have ever given. I will talk to you today about the failure of leadership in global politics and in our globalizing economy. And I won't provide some feel-good, ready-made solutions. But I will in the end urge you to rethink, actually take risks, and get involved in what I see as a global evolution of democracy. Failure of leadership. What is the failure of leadership today? And why is our democracy not working? Well, I believe that the failure of leadership is the fact that we have taken you out of the process. So let me, from my personal experiences, give you an insight, so that you can step back and maybe understand why it is so difficult to cope with the challenges of today and why politics is going down a blind alley. Let's start from the beginning. Let's start from democracy. Well, if you go back to the Ancient Greeks, it was a revelation, a discovery, that we had the potential, together, to be masters of our own fate, to be able to examine, to learn, to imagine, and then to design a better life. And democracy was the political innovation which protected this freedom, because we were liberated from fear so that our minds in fact, whether they be despots or dogmas, could be the protagonists. Democracy was the political innovation that allowed us to limit the power, whether it was of tyrants or of high priests, their natural tendency to maximize power and wealth. Well, I first began to understand this when I was 14 years old. I used to, to try to avoid homework, sneak down to the living room and listen to my parents and their friends debate heatedly. You see, then Greece was under control of a very powerful establishment which was strangling the country, and my father was heading a promising movement to reimagine Greece, to imagine a Greece where freedom reigned and where, maybe, the people, the citizens, could actually rule their own country. I used to join him in many of the campaigns, and you can see me here next to him. I'm the younger one there, to the side. You may not recognize me because I used to part my hair differently there. (Laughter) So in 1967, elections were coming, things were going well in the campaign, the house was electric. We really could sense that there was going to be a major progressive change in Greece. Then one night, military trucks drive up to our house. Soldiers storm the door. They find me up on the top terrace. A sergeant comes up to me with a machine gun, puts it to my head, and says, "Tell me where your father is or I will kill you." My father, hiding nearby, reveals himself, and was summarily taken to prison. Well, we survived, but democracy did not. Seven brutal years of dictatorship which we spent in exile. Now, today, our democracies are again facing a moment of truth. Let me tell you a story. Sunday evening, Brussels, April 2010. I'm sitting with my counterparts in the European Union. I had just been elected prime minister, but I had the unhappy privilege of revealing a truth that our deficit was not 6 percent, as had been officially reported only a few days earlier before the elections by the previous government, but actually 15.6 percent. But the deficit was only the symptom of much deeper problems that Greece was facing, and I had been elected on a mandate, a mission, actually, to tackle these problems, whether it was lack of transparency and accountability in governance, or whether it was a clientelistic state offering favors to the powerful -- tax avoidance abetted and aided by a global tax evasion system, politics and media captured by special interests. But despite our electoral mandate, the markets mistrusted us. Our borrowing costs were skyrocketing, and we were facing possible default. So I went to Brussels on a mission to make the case for a united European response, one that would calm the markets and give us the time to make the necessary reforms. But time we didn't get. Picture yourselves around the table in Brussels. Negotiations are difficult, the tensions are high, progress is slow, and then, 10 minutes to 2, a prime minister shouts out, "We have to finish in 10 minutes." I said, "Why? These are important decisions. Let's deliberate a little bit longer." Another prime minister comes in and says, "No, we have to have an agreement now, because in 10 minutes, the markets are opening up in Japan, and there will be havoc in the global economy." We quickly came to a decision in those 10 minutes. This time it was not the military, but the markets, that put a gun to our collective heads. What followed were the most difficult decisions in my life, painful to me, painful to my countrymen, imposing cuts, austerity, often on those not to blame for the crisis. With these sacrifices, Greece did avoid bankruptcy and the eurozone avoided a collapse. Greece, yes, triggered the Euro crisis, and some people blame me for pulling the trigger. But I think today that most would agree that Greece was only a symptom of much deeper structural problems in the eurozone, vulnerabilities in the wider global economic system, vulnerabilities of our democracies. Our democracies are trapped by systems too big to fail, or, more accurately, too big to control. Our democracies are weakened in the global economy with players that can evade laws, evade taxes, evade environmental or labor standards. Our democracies are undermined by the growing inequality and the growing concentration of power and wealth, lobbies, corruption, the speed of the markets or simply the fact that we sometimes fear an impending disaster, have constrained our democracies, and they have constrained our capacity to imagine and actually use the potential, your potential, in finding solutions. Greece, you see, was only a preview of what is in store for us all. I, overly optimistically, had hoped that this crisis was an opportunity for Greece, for Europe, for the world, to make radical democratic transformations in our institutions. Instead, I had a very humbling experience. In Brussels, when we tried desperately again and again to find common solutions, I realized that not one, not one of us, had ever dealt with a similar crisis. But worse, we were trapped by our collective ignorance. We were led by our fears. And our fears led to a blind faith in the orthodoxy of austerity. Instead of reaching out to the common or the collective wisdom in our societies, investing in it to find more creative solutions, we reverted to political posturing. And then we were surprised when every ad hoc new measure didn't bring an end to the crisis, and of course that made it very easy to look for a whipping boy for our collective European failure, and of course that was Greece. Those profligate, idle, ouzo-swilling, Zorba-dancing Greeks, they are the problem. Punish them! Well, a convenient but unfounded stereotype that sometimes hurt even more than austerity itself. But let me warn you, this is not just about Greece. This could be the pattern that leaders follow again and again when we deal with these complex, cross-border problems, whether it's climate change, whether it's migration, whether it's the financial system. That is, abandoning our collective power to imagine our potential, falling victims to our fears, our stereotypes, our dogmas, taking our citizens out of the process rather than building the process around our citizens. And doing so will only test the faith of our citizens, of our peoples, even more in the democratic process. It's no wonder that many political leaders, and I don't exclude myself, have lost the trust of our people. When riot police have to protect parliaments, a scene which is increasingly common around the world, then there's something deeply wrong with our democracies. That's why I called for a referendum to have the Greek people own and decide on the terms of the rescue package. My European counterparts, some of them, at least, said, "You can't do this. There will be havoc in the markets again." I said, "We need to, before we restore confidence in the markets, we need to restore confidence and trust amongst our people." Since leaving office, I have had time to reflect. We have weathered the storm, in Greece and in Europe, but we remain challenged. If politics is the power to imagine and use our potential, well then 60-percent youth unemployment in Greece, and in other countries, certainly is a lack of imagination if not a lack of compassion. So far, we've thrown economics at the problem, actually mostly austerity, and certainly we could have designed alternatives, a different strategy, a green stimulus for green jobs, or mutualized debt, Eurobonds which would support countries in need from market pressures, these would have been much more viable alternatives. Yet I have come to believe that the problem is not so much one of economics as it is one of democracy. So let's try something else. Let's see how we can bring people back to the process. Let's throw democracy at the problem. Again, the Ancient Greeks, with all their shortcomings, believed in the wisdom of the crowd at their best moments. In people we trust. Democracy could not work without the citizens deliberating, debating, taking on public responsibilities for public affairs. Average citizens often were chosen for citizen juries to decide on critical matters of the day. Science, theater, research, philosophy, games of the mind and the body, they were daily exercises. Actually they were an education for participation, for the potential, for growing the potential of our citizens. And those who shunned politics, well, they were idiots. You see, in Ancient Greece, in ancient Athens, that term originated there. "Idiot" comes from the root "idio," oneself. A person who is self-centered, secluded, excluded, someone who doesn't participate or even examine public affairs. And participation took place in the agora, the agora having two meanings, both a marketplace and a place where there was political deliberation. You see, markets and politics then were one, unified, accessible, transparent, because they gave power to the people. They serve the demos, democracy. Above government, above markets was the direct rule of the people. Today we have globalized the markets but we have not globalized our democratic institutions. So our politicians are limited to local politics, while our citizens, even though they see a great potential, are prey to forces beyond their control. So how then do we reunite the two halves of the agora? How do we democratize globalization? And I'm not talking about the necessary reforms of the United Nations or the G20. I'm talking about, how do we secure the space, the demos, the platform of values, so that we can tap into all of your potential? Well, this is exactly where I think Europe fits in. Europe, despite its recent failures, is the world's most successful cross-border peace experiment. So let's see if it can't be an experiment in global democracy, a new kind of democracy. Let's see if we can't design a European agora, not simply for products and services, but for our citizens, where they can work together, deliberate, learn from each other, exchange between art and cultures, where they can come up with creative solutions. Let's imagine that European citizens actually have the power to vote directly for a European president, or citizen juries chosen by lottery which can deliberate on critical and controversial issues, a European-wide referendum where our citizens, as the lawmakers, vote on future treaties. And here's an idea: Why not have the first truly European citizens by giving our immigrants, not Greek or German or Swedish citizenship, but a European citizenship? And make sure we actually empower the unemployed by giving them a voucher scholarship where they can choose to study anywhere in Europe. Where our common identity is democracy, where our education is through participation, and where participation builds trust and solidarity rather than exclusion and xenophobia. Europe of and by the people, a Europe, an experiment in deepening and widening democracy beyond borders. Now, some might accuse me of being naive, putting my faith in the power and the wisdom of the people. Well, after decades in politics, I am also a pragmatist. Believe me, I have been, I am, part of today's political system, and I know things must change. We must revive politics as the power to imagine, reimagine, and redesign for a better world. But I also know that this disruptive force of change won't be driven by the politics of today. The revival of democratic politics will come from you, and I mean all of you. Everyone who participates in this global exchange of ideas, whether it's here in this room or just outside this room or online or locally, where everybody lives, everyone who stands up to injustice and inequality, everybody who stands up to those who preach racism rather than empathy, dogma rather than critical thinking, technocracy rather than democracy, everyone who stands up to the unchecked power, whether it's authoritarian leaders, plutocrats hiding their assets in tax havens, or powerful lobbies protecting the powerful few. It is in their interest that all of us are idiots. Let's not be. Thank you. (Applause) Bruno Giussani: You seem to describe a political leadership that is kind of unprepared and a prisoner of the whims of the financial markets, and that scene in Brussels that you describe, to me, as a citizen, is terrifying. Help us understand how you felt after the decision. It was not a good decision, clearly, but how do you feel after that, not as the prime minister, but as George? George Papandreou: Well, obviously there were constraints which didn't allow me or others to make the types of decisions we would have wanted, and obviously I had hoped that we would have the time to make the reforms which would have dealt with the deficit rather than trying to cut the deficit which was the symptom of the problem. And that hurt. That hurt because that, first of all, hurt the younger generation, and not only, many of them are demonstrating outside, but I think this is one of our problems. When we face these crises, we have kept the potential, the huge potential of our society out of this process, and we are closing in on ourselves in politics, and I think we need to change that, to really find new participatory ways using the great capabilities that now exist even in technology but not only in technology, the minds that we have, and I think we can find solutions which are much better, but we have to be open. BG: You seem to suggest that the way forward is more Europe, and that is not to be an easy discourse right now in most European countries. It's rather the other way -- more closed borders and less cooperation and maybe even stepping out of some of the different parts of the European construction. How do you reconcile that? GP: Well, I think one of the worst things that happened during this crisis is that we started a blame game. And the fundamental idea of Europe is that we can cooperate beyond borders, go beyond our conflicts and work together. And the paradox is that, because we have this blame game, we have less the potential to convince our citizens that we should work together, while now is the time when we really need to bring our powers together. Now, more Europe for me is not simply giving more power to Brussels. It is actually giving more power to the citizens of Europe, that is, really making Europe a project of the people. So that, I think, would be a way to answer some of the fears that we have in our society. BG: George, thank you for coming to TED. GP: Thank you very much.BG: Thank you.(Applause)

So what does it mean for a machine to be athletic? We will demonstrate the concept of machine athleticism and the research to achieve it with the help of these flying machines called quadrocopters, or quads, for short. Quads have been around for a long time. The reason that they're so popular these days is because they're mechanically simple. By controlling the speeds of these four propellers, these machines can roll, pitch, yaw, and accelerate along their common orientation. On board are also a battery, a computer, various sensors and wireless radios. Quads are extremely agile, but this agility comes at a cost. They are inherently unstable, and they need some form of automatic feedback control in order to be able to fly. So, how did it just do that? Cameras on the ceiling and a laptop serve as an indoor global positioning system. It's used to locate objects in the space that have these reflective markers on them. This data is then sent to another laptop that is running estimation and control algorithms, which in turn sends commands to the quad, which is also running estimation and control algorithms. The bulk of our research is algorithms. It's the magic that brings these machines to life. So how does one design the algorithms that create a machine athlete? We use something broadly called model-based design. We first capture the physics with a mathematical model of how the machines behave. We then use a branch of mathematics called control theory to analyze these models and also to synthesize algorithms for controlling them. For example, that's how we can make the quad hover. We first captured the dynamics with a set of differential equations. We then manipulate these equations with the help of control theory to create algorithms that stabilize the quad. Let me demonstrate the strength of this approach. Suppose that we want this quad to not only hover but to also balance this pole. With a little bit of practice, it's pretty straightforward for a human being to do this, although we do have the advantage of having two feet on the ground and the use of our very versatile hands. It becomes a little bit more difficult when I only have one foot on the ground and when I don't use my hands. Notice how this pole has a reflective marker on top, which means that it can be located in the space. (Applause) You can notice that this quad is making fine adjustments to keep the pole balanced. How did we design the algorithms to do this? We added the mathematical model of the pole to that of the quad. Once we have a model of the combined quad-pole system, we can use control theory to create algorithms for controlling it. Here, you see that it's stable, and even if I give it little nudges, it goes back to the nice, balanced position. We can also augment the model to include where we want the quad to be in space. Using this pointer, made out of reflective markers, I can point to where I want the quad to be in space a fixed distance away from me. The key to these acrobatic maneuvers is algorithms, designed with the help of mathematical models and control theory. Let's tell the quad to come back here and let the pole drop, and I will next demonstrate the importance of understanding physical models and the workings of the physical world. Notice how the quad lost altitude when I put this glass of water on it. Unlike the balancing pole, I did not include the mathematical model of the glass in the system. In fact, the system doesn't even know that the glass of water is there. Like before, I could use the pointer to tell the quad where I want it to be in space. (Applause) Okay, you should be asking yourself, why doesn't the water fall out of the glass? Two facts: The first is that gravity acts on all objects in the same way. The second is that the propellers are all pointing in the same direction of the glass, pointing up. You put these two things together, the net result is that all side forces on the glass are small and are mainly dominated by aerodynamic effects, which as these speeds are negligible. And that's why you don't need to model the glass. It naturally doesn't spill no matter what the quad does. (Applause) The lesson here is that some high-performance tasks are easier than others, and that understanding the physics of the problem tells you which ones are easy and which ones are hard. In this instance, carrying a glass of water is easy. Balancing a pole is hard. We've all heard stories of athletes performing feats while physically injured. Can a machine also perform with extreme physical damage? Conventional wisdom says that you need at least four fixed motor propeller pairs in order to fly, because there are four degrees of freedom to control: roll, pitch, yaw and acceleration. Hexacopters and octocopters, with six and eight propellers, can provide redundancy, but quadrocopters are much more popular because they have the minimum number of fixed motor propeller pairs: four. Or do they? If we analyze the mathematical model of this machine with only two working propellers, we discover that there's an unconventional way to fly it. We relinquish control of yaw, but roll, pitch and acceleration can still be controlled with algorithms that exploit this new configuration. Mathematical models tell us exactly when and why this is possible. In this instance, this knowledge allows us to design novel machine architectures or to design clever algorithms that gracefully handle damage, just like human athletes do, instead of building machines with redundancy. We can't help but hold our breath when we watch a diver somersaulting into the water, or when a vaulter is twisting in the air, the ground fast approaching. Will the diver be able to pull off a rip entry? Will the vaulter stick the landing? Suppose we want this quad here to perform a triple flip and finish off at the exact same spot that it started. This maneuver is going to happen so quickly that we can't use position feedback to correct the motion during execution. There simply isn't enough time. Instead, what the quad can do is perform the maneuver blindly, observe how it finishes the maneuver, and then use that information to modify its behavior so that the next flip is better. Similar to the diver and the vaulter, it is only through repeated practice that the maneuver can be learned and executed to the highest standard. (Applause) Striking a moving ball is a necessary skill in many sports. How do we make a machine do what an athlete does seemingly without effort? (Applause) This quad has a racket strapped onto its head with a sweet spot roughly the size of an apple, so not too large. The following calculations are made every 20 milliseconds, or 50 times per second. We first figure out where the ball is going. We then next calculate how the quad should hit the ball so that it flies to where it was thrown from. Third, a trajectory is planned that carries the quad from its current state to the impact point with the ball. Fourth, we only execute 20 milliseconds' worth of that strategy. Twenty milliseconds later, the whole process is repeated until the quad strikes the ball. (Applause) Machines can not only perform dynamic maneuvers on their own, they can do it collectively. These three quads are cooperatively carrying a sky net. (Applause) They perform an extremely dynamic and collective maneuver to launch the ball back to me. Notice that, at full extension, these quads are vertical. (Applause) In fact, when fully extended, this is roughly five times greater than what a bungee jumper feels at the end of their launch. The algorithms to do this are very similar to what the single quad used to hit the ball back to me. Mathematical models are used to continuously re-plan a cooperative strategy 50 times per second. Everything we have seen so far has been about the machines and their capabilities. What happens when we couple this machine athleticism with that of a human being? What I have in front of me is a commercial gesture sensor mainly used in gaming. It can recognize what my various body parts are doing in real time. Similar to the pointer that I used earlier, we can use this as inputs to the system. We now have a natural way of interacting with the raw athleticism of these quads with my gestures. (Applause) Interaction doesn't have to be virtual. It can be physical. Take this quad, for example. It's trying to stay at a fixed point in space. If I try to move it out of the way, it fights me, and moves back to where it wants to be. We can change this behavior, however. We can use mathematical models to estimate the force that I'm applying to the quad. Once we know this force, we can also change the laws of physics, as far as the quad is concerned, of course. Here the quad is behaving as if it were in a viscous fluid. We now have an intimate way of interacting with a machine. I will use this new capability to position this camera-carrying quad to the appropriate location for filming the remainder of this demonstration. So we can physically interact with these quads and we can change the laws of physics. Let's have a little bit of fun with this. For what you will see next, these quads will initially behave as if they were on Pluto. As time goes on, gravity will be increased until we're all back on planet Earth, but I assure you we won't get there. Okay, here goes. (Laughter) (Laughter) (Applause) Whew! You're all thinking now, these guys are having way too much fun, and you're probably also asking yourself, why exactly are they building machine athletes? Some conjecture that the role of play in the animal kingdom is to hone skills and develop capabilities. Others think that it has more of a social role, that it's used to bind the group. Similarly, we use the analogy of sports and athleticism to create new algorithms for machines to push them to their limits. What impact will the speed of machines have on our way of life? Like all our past creations and innovations, they may be used to improve the human condition or they may be misused and abused. This is not a technical choice we are faced with; it's a social one. Let's make the right choice, the choice that brings out the best in the future of machines, just like athleticism in sports can bring out the best in us. Let me introduce you to the wizards behind the green curtain. They're the current members of the Flying Machine Arena research team. (Applause) Federico Augugliaro, Dario Brescianini, Markus Hehn, Sergei Lupashin, Mark Muller and Robin Ritz. Look out for them. They're destined for great things. Thank you. (Applause)

The writer George Eliot cautioned us that, among all forms of mistake, prophesy is the most gratuitous. The person that we would all acknowledge as her 20th-century counterpart, Yogi Berra, agreed. He said, "It's tough to make predictions, especially about the future." I'm going to ignore their cautions and make one very specific forecast. In the world that we are creating very quickly, we're going to see more and more things that look like science fiction, and fewer and fewer things that look like jobs. Our cars are very quickly going to start driving themselves, which means we're going to need fewer truck drivers. We're going to hook Siri up to Watson and use that to automate a lot of the work that's currently done by customer service reps and troubleshooters and diagnosers, and we're already taking R2D2, painting him orange, and putting him to work carrying shelves around warehouses, which means we need a lot fewer people to be walking up and down those aisles. Now, for about 200 years, people have been saying exactly what I'm telling you -- the age of technological unemployment is at hand — starting with the Luddites smashing looms in Britain just about two centuries ago, and they have been wrong. Our economies in the developed world have coasted along on something pretty close to full employment. Which brings up a critical question: Why is this time different, if it really is? The reason it's different is that, just in the past few years, our machines have started demonstrating skills they have never, ever had before: understanding, speaking, hearing, seeing, answering, writing, and they're still acquiring new skills. For example, mobile humanoid robots are still incredibly primitive, but the research arm of the Defense Department just launched a competition to have them do things like this, and if the track record is any guide, this competition is going to be successful. So when I look around, I think the day is not too far off at all when we're going to have androids doing a lot of the work that we are doing right now. And we're creating a world where there is going to be more and more technology and fewer and fewer jobs. It's a world that Erik Brynjolfsson and I are calling "the new machine age." The thing to keep in mind is that this is absolutely great news. This is the best economic news on the planet these days. Not that there's a lot of competition, right? This is the best economic news we have these days for two main reasons. The first is, technological progress is what allows us to continue this amazing recent run that we're on where output goes up over time, while at the same time, prices go down, and volume and quality just continue to explode. Now, some people look at this and talk about shallow materialism, but that's absolutely the wrong way to look at it. This is abundance, which is exactly what we want our economic system to provide. The second reason that the new machine age is such great news is that, once the androids start doing jobs, we don't have to do them anymore, and we get freed up from drudgery and toil. Now, when I talk about this with my friends in Cambridge and Silicon Valley, they say, "Fantastic. No more drudgery, no more toil. This gives us the chance to imagine an entirely different kind of society, a society where the creators and the discoverers and the performers and the innovators come together with their patrons and their financiers to talk about issues, entertain, enlighten, provoke each other." It's a society really, that looks a lot like the TED Conference. And there's actually a huge amount of truth here. We are seeing an amazing flourishing taking place. In a world where it is just about as easy to generate an object as it is to print a document, we have amazing new possibilities. The people who used to be craftsmen and hobbyists are now makers, and they're responsible for massive amounts of innovation. And artists who were formerly constrained can now do things that were never, ever possible for them before. So this is a time of great flourishing, and the more I look around, the more convinced I become that this quote, from the physicist Freeman Dyson, is not hyperbole at all. This is just a plain statement of the facts. We are in the middle of an astonishing period. ["Technology is a gift of God. After the gift of life it is perhaps the greatest of God's gifts. It is the mother of civilizations, of arts and of sciences." — Freeman Dyson] Which brings up another great question: What could possibly go wrong in this new machine age? Right? Great, hang up, flourish, go home. We're going to face two really thorny sets of challenges as we head deeper into the future that we're creating. The first are economic, and they're really nicely summarized in an apocryphal story about a back-and-forth between Henry Ford II and Walter Reuther, who was the head of the auto workers union. They were touring one of the new modern factories, and Ford playfully turns to Reuther and says, "Hey Walter, how are you going to get these robots to pay union dues?" And Reuther shoots back, "Hey Henry, how are you going to get them to buy cars?" Reuther's problem in that anecdote is that it is tough to offer your labor to an economy that's full of machines, and we see this very clearly in the statistics. If you look over the past couple decades at the returns to capital -- in other words, corporate profits -- we see them going up, and we see that they're now at an all-time high. If we look at the returns to labor, in other words total wages paid out in the economy, we see them at an all-time low and heading very quickly in the opposite direction. So this is clearly bad news for Reuther. It looks like it might be great news for Ford, but it's actually not. If you want to sell huge volumes of somewhat expensive goods to people, you really want a large, stable, prosperous middle class. We have had one of those in America for just about the entire postwar period. But the middle class is clearly under huge threat right now. We all know a lot of the statistics, but just to repeat one of them, median income in America has actually gone down over the past 15 years, and we're in danger of getting trapped in some vicious cycle where inequality and polarization continue to go up over time. The societal challenges that come along with that kind of inequality deserve some attention. There are a set of societal challenges that I'm actually not that worried about, and they're captured by images like this. This is not the kind of societal problem that I am concerned about. There is no shortage of dystopian visions about what happens when our machines become self-aware, and they decide to rise up and coordinate attacks against us. I'm going to start worrying about those the day my computer becomes aware of my printer. (Laughter) (Applause) So this is not the set of challenges we really need to worry about. To tell you the kinds of societal challenges that are going to come up in the new machine age, I want to tell a story about two stereotypical American workers. And to make them really stereotypical, let's make them both white guys. And the first one is a college-educated professional, creative type, manager, engineer, doctor, lawyer, that kind of worker. We're going to call him "Ted." He's at the top of the American middle class. His counterpart is not college-educated and works as a laborer, works as a clerk, does low-level white collar or blue collar work in the economy. We're going to call that guy "Bill." And if you go back about 50 years, Bill and Ted were leading remarkably similar lives. For example, in 1960 they were both very likely to have full-time jobs, working at least 40 hours a week. But as the social researcher Charles Murray has documented, as we started to automate the economy, and 1960 is just about when computers started to be used by businesses, as we started to progressively inject technology and automation and digital stuff into the economy, the fortunes of Bill and Ted diverged a lot. Over this time frame, Ted has continued to hold a full-time job. Bill hasn't. In many cases, Bill has left the economy entirely, and Ted very rarely has. Over time, Ted's marriage has stayed quite happy. Bill's hasn't. And Ted's kids have grown up in a two-parent home, while Bill's absolutely have not over time. Other ways that Bill is dropping out of society? He's decreased his voting in presidential elections, and he's started to go to prison a lot more often. So I cannot tell a happy story about these social trends, and they don't show any signs of reversing themselves. They're also true no matter which ethnic group or demographic group we look at, and they're actually getting so severe that they're in danger of overwhelming even the amazing progress we made with the Civil Rights Movement. And what my friends in Silicon Valley and Cambridge are overlooking is that they're Ted. They're living these amazingly busy, productive lives, and they've got all the benefits to show from that, while Bill is leading a very different life. They're actually both proof of how right Voltaire was when he talked about the benefits of work, and the fact that it saves us from not one but three great evils. ["Work saves a man from three great evils: boredom, vice and need." — Voltaire] So with these challenges, what do we do about them? The economic playbook is surprisingly clear, surprisingly straightforward, in the short term especially. The robots are not going to take all of our jobs in the next year or two, so the classic Econ 101 playbook is going to work just fine: Encourage entrepreneurship, double down on infrastructure, and make sure we're turning out people from our educational system with the appropriate skills. But over the longer term, if we are moving into an economy that's heavy on technology and light on labor, and we are, then we have to consider some more radical interventions, for example, something like a guaranteed minimum income. Now, that's probably making some folk in this room uncomfortable, because that idea is associated with the extreme left wing and with fairly radical schemes for redistributing wealth. I did a little bit of research on this notion, and it might calm some folk down to know that the idea of a net guaranteed minimum income has been championed by those frothing-at-the-mouth socialists Friedrich Hayek, Richard Nixon and Milton Friedman. And if you find yourself worried that something like a guaranteed income is going to stifle our drive to succeed and make us kind of complacent, you might be interested to know that social mobility, one of the things we really pride ourselves on in the United States, is now lower than it is in the northern European countries that have these very generous social safety nets. So the economic playbook is actually pretty straightforward. The societal one is a lot more challenging. I don't know what the playbook is for getting Bill to engage and stay engaged throughout life. I do know that education is a huge part of it. I witnessed this firsthand. I was a Montessori kid for the first few years of my education, and what that education taught me is that the world is an interesting place and my job is to go explore it. The school stopped in third grade, so then I entered the public school system, and it felt like I had been sent to the Gulag. With the benefit of hindsight, I now know the job was to prepare me for life as a clerk or a laborer, but at the time it felt like the job was to kind of bore me into some submission with what was going on around me. We have to do better than this. We cannot keep turning out Bills. So we see some green shoots that things are getting better. We see technology deeply impacting education and engaging people, from our youngest learners up to our oldest ones. We see very prominent business voices telling us we need to rethink some of the things that we've been holding dear for a while. And we see very serious and sustained and data-driven efforts to understand how to intervene in some of the most troubled communities that we have. So the green shoots are out there. I don't want to pretend for a minute that what we have is going to be enough. We're facing very tough challenges. To give just one example, there are about five million Americans who have been unemployed for at least six months. We're not going to fix things for them by sending them back to Montessori. And my biggest worry is that we're creating a world where we're going to have glittering technologies embedded in kind of a shabby society and supported by an economy that generates inequality instead of opportunity. But I actually don't think that's what we're going to do. I think we're going to do something a lot better for one very straightforward reason: The facts are getting out there. The realities of this new machine age and the change in the economy are becoming more widely known. If we wanted to accelerate that process, we could do things like have our best economists and policymakers play "Jeopardy!" against Watson. We could send Congress on an autonomous car road trip. And if we do enough of these kinds of things, the awareness is going to sink in that things are going to be different. And then we're off to the races, because I don't believe for a second that we have forgotten how to solve tough challenges or that we have become too apathetic or hard-hearted to even try. I started my talk with quotes from wordsmiths who were separated by an ocean and a century. Let me end it with words from politicians who were similarly distant. Winston Churchill came to my home of MIT in 1949, and he said, "If we are to bring the broad masses of the people in every land to the table of abundance, it can only be by the tireless improvement of all of our means of technical production." Abraham Lincoln realized there was one other ingredient. He said, "I am a firm believer in the people. If given the truth, they can be depended upon to meet any national crisis. The great point is to give them the plain facts." So the optimistic note, great point that I want to leave you with is that the plain facts of the machine age are becoming clear, and I have every confidence that we're going to use them to chart a good course into the challenging, abundant economy that we're creating. Thank you very much. (Applause)

I made a film that was impossible to make, but I didn't know it was impossible, and that's how I was able to do it. "Mars et Avril" is a science fiction film. It's set in Montreal some 50 years in the future. No one had done that kind of movie in Quebec before because it's expensive, it's set in the future, and it's got tons of visual effects, and it's shot on green screen. Yet this is the kind of movie that I wanted to make ever since I was a kid, really, back when I was reading some comic books and dreaming about what the future might be. When American producers see my film, they think that I had a big budget to do it, like 23 million. But in fact I had 10 percent of that budget. I did "Mars et Avril" for only 2.3 million. So you might wonder, what's the deal here? How did I do this? Well, it's two things. First, it's time. When you don't have money, you must take time, and it took me seven years to do "Mars et Avril." The second aspect is love. I got tons and tons of generosity from everyone involved. And it seems like every department had nothing, so they had to rely on our creativity and turn every problem into an opportunity. And that brings me to the point of my talk, actually, how constraints, big creative constraints, can boost creativity. But let me go back in time a bit. In my early 20s, I did some graphic novels, but they weren't your usual graphic novels. They were books telling a science fiction story through images and text, and most of the actors who are now starring in the movie adaptation, they were already involved in these books portraying characters into a sort of experimental, theatrical, simplistic way. And one of these actors is the great stage director and actor Robert Lepage. And I just love this guy. I've been in love with this guy since I was a kid. His career I admire a lot. And I wanted this guy to be involved in my crazy project, and he was kind enough to lend his image to the character of Eugène Spaak, who is a cosmologist and artist who seeks relation in between time, space, love, music and women. And he was a perfect fit for the part, and Robert is actually the one who gave me my first chance. He was the one who believed in me and encouraged me to do an adaptation of my books into a film, and to write, direct, and produce the film myself. And Robert is actually the very first example of how constraints can boost creativity. Because this guy is the busiest man on the planet. I mean, his agenda is booked until 2042, and he's really hard to get, and I wanted him to be in the movie, to reprise his role in the movie. But the thing is, had I waited for him until 2042, my film wouldn't be a futuristic film anymore, so I just couldn't do that. Right? But that's kind of a big problem. How do you get somebody who is too busy to star in a movie? Well, I said as a joke in a production meeting -- and this is a true story, by the way — I said, "Why don't we turn this guy into a hologram? Because, you know, he is everywhere and nowhere on the planet at the same time, and he's an illuminated being in my mind, and he's in between reality and virtual reality, so it would make perfect sense to turn this guy into a hologram." Everybody around the table laughed, but the joke was kind of a good solution, so that's what we ended up doing. Here's how we did it. We shot Robert with six cameras. He was dressed in green and he was like in a green aquarium. Each camera was covering 60 degrees of his head, so that in post-production we could use pretty much any angle we needed, and we shot only his head. Six months later there was a guy on set, a mime portraying the body, the vehicle for the head. And he was wearing a green hood so that we could erase the green hood in postproduction and replace it with Robert Lepage's head. So he became like a renaissance man, and here's what it looks like in the movie. (Music) (Video) Robert Lepage: [As usual, Arthur's drawing didn't account for the technical challenges. I welded the breech, but the valve is still gaping. I tried to lift the pallets to lower the pressure in the sound box, but I might have hit a heartstring. It still sounds too low.] Jacques Languirand: [That's normal. The instrument always ends up resembling its model.] (Music) Martin Villeneuve: Now these musical instruments that you see in this excerpt, they're my second example of how constraints can boost creativity, because I desperately needed these objects in my movie. They are objects of desire. They are imaginary musical instruments. And they carry a nice story with them. Actually, I knew what these things would look like in my mind for many, many years. But my problem was, I didn't have the money to pay for them. I couldn't afford them. So that's kind of a big problem too. How do you get something that you can't afford? And, you know, I woke up one morning with a pretty good idea. I said, "What if I have somebody else pay for them?" (Laughter) But who on Earth would be interested by seven not-yet-built musical instruments inspired by women's bodies? And I thought of Cirque du Soleil in Montreal, because who better to understand the kind of crazy poetry that I wanted to put on screen? So I found my way to Guy Laliberté, Cirque du Soleil's CEO, and I presented my crazy idea to him with sketches like this and visual references, and something pretty amazing happened. Guy was interested by this idea not because I was asking for his money, but because I came to him with a good idea in which everybody was happy. It was kind of a perfect triangle in which the art buyer was happy because he got the instruments at a cheaper price, because they weren't even made. He took a leap of faith. And the artist, Dominique Engel, brilliant guy, he was happy too because he had a dream project to work on for a year. And obviously I was happy because I got the instruments in my film for free, which was kind of what I tried to do. So here they are. And my last example of how constraints can boost creativity comes from the green, because this is a weird color, a crazy color, and you need to replace the green screens eventually and you must figure that out sooner rather than later. And I had, again, pretty much, ideas in my mind as to what the world would be, but then again I turned to my childhood imagination and went to the work of Belgian comic book master François Schuiten in Belgium. And this guy is another guy I admire a lot, and I wanted him to be involved in the movie as a production designer. But people told me, you know, Martin, it's impossible, the guy is too busy and he will say no. Well, I said, you know what, instead of mimicking his style, I might as well call the real guy and ask him, and I sent him my books, and he answered that he was interested in working on the film with me because he could be a big fish in a small aquarium. In other words, there was space for him to dream with me. So here I was with one of my childhood heroes, drawing every single frame that's in the film to turn that into Montreal in the future. And it was an amazing collaboration to work with this great artist whom I admire. But then, you know, eventually you have to turn all these drawings into reality. So, again, my solution was to aim for the best possible artist that I could think of. And there's this guy in Montreal, another Quebecois called Carlos Monzon, and he's a very good VFX artist. This guy had been lead compositor on such films as "Avatar" and "Star Trek" and "Transformers," and other unknown projects like this, and I knew he was the perfect fit for the job, and I had to convince him, and, instead of working on the next Spielberg movie, he accepted to work on mine. Why? Because I offered him a space to dream. So if you don't have money to offer to people, you must strike their imagination with something as nice as you can think of. So this is what happened on this movie, and that's how it got made, and we went to this very nice postproduction company in Montreal called Vision Globale, and they lent their 60 artists to work full time for six months to do this crazy film. So I want to tell you that, if you have some crazy ideas in your mind, and that people tell you that it's impossible to make, well, that's an even better reason to want to do it, because people have a tendency to see the problems rather than the final result, whereas if you start to deal with problems as being your allies rather than your opponents, life will start to dance with you in the most amazing way. I have experienced it. And you might end up doing some crazy projects, and who knows, you might even end up going to Mars. Thank you. (Applause)

Well, now we're going to the Bahamas to meet a remarkable group of dolphins that I've been working with in the wild for the last 28 years. Now I'm interested in dolphins because of their large brains and what they might be doing with all that brainpower in the wild. And we know they use some of that brainpower for just living complicated lives, but what do we really know about dolphin intelligence? Well, we know a few things. We know that their brain-to-body ratio, which is a physical measure of intelligence, is second only to humans. Cognitively, they can understand artificially-created languages. And they pass self-awareness tests in mirrors. And in some parts of the world, they use tools, like sponges to hunt fish. But there's one big question left: do they have a language, and if so, what are they talking about? So decades ago, not years ago, I set out to find a place in the world where I could observe dolphins underwater to try to crack the code of their communication system. Now in most parts of the world, the water's pretty murky, so it's very hard to observe animals underwater, but I found a community of dolphins that live in these beautiful, clear, shallow sandbanks of the Bahamas which are just east of Florida. And they spend their daytime resting and socializing in the safety of the shallows, but at night, they go off the edge and hunt in deep water. Now, it's not a bad place to be a researcher, either. So we go out for about five months every summer in a 20-meter catamaran, and we live, sleep and work at sea for weeks at a time. My main tool is an underwater video with a hydrophone, which is an underwater microphone, and this is so I can correlate sound and behavior. And most of our work's pretty non-invasive. We try to follow dolphin etiquette while we're in the water, since we're actually observing them physically in the water. Now, Atlantic spotted dolphins are a really nice species to work with for a couple of reasons. They're born without spots, and they get spots with age, and they go through pretty distinct developmental phases, so that's fun to track their behavior. And by about the age of 15, they're fully spotted black and white. Now the mother you see here is Mugsy. She's 35 years old in this shot, but dolphins can actually live into their early 50s. And like all the dolphins in our community, we photographed Mugsy and tracked her little spots and nicks in her dorsal fin, and also the unique spot patterns as she matured over time. Now, young dolphins learn a lot as they're growing up, and they use their teenage years to practice social skills, and at about the age of nine, the females become sexually mature, so they can get pregnant, and the males mature quite a bit later, at around 15 years of age. And dolphins are very promiscuous, and so we have to determine who the fathers are, so we do paternity tests by collecting fecal material out of the water and extracting DNA. So what that means is, after 28 years, we are tracking three generations, including grandmothers and grandfathers. Now, dolphins are natural acousticians. They make sounds 10 times as high and hear sounds 10 times as high as we do. But they have other communication signals they use. They have good vision, so they use body postures to communicate. They have taste, not smell. And they have touch. And sound can actually be felt in the water, because the acoustic impedance of tissue and water's about the same. So dolphins can buzz and tickle each other at a distance. Now, we do know some things about how sounds are used with certain behaviors. Now, the signature whistle is a whistle that's specific to an individual dolphin, and it's like a name. (Dolphin whistling noises) And this is the best-studied sound, because it's easy to measure, really, and you'd find this whistle when mothers and calves are reuniting, for example. Another well studied sound are echolocation clicks. This is the dolphin's sonar. (Dolphin echolocation noises) And they use these clicks to hunt and feed. But they can also tightly pack these clicks together into buzzes and use them socially. For example, males will stimulate a female during a courtship chase. You know, I've been buzzed in the water. (Laughter) Don't tell anyone. It's a secret. And you can really feel the sound. That was my point with that. (Laughter) So dolphins are also political animals, so they have to resolve conflicts. (Dolphin noises) And they use these burst-pulsed sounds as well as their head-to-head behaviors when they're fighting. And these are very unstudied sounds because they're hard to measure. Now this is some video of a typical dolphin fight. (Dolphin noises) So you're going to see two groups, and you're going to see the head-to-head posturing, some open mouths, lots of squawking. There's a bubble. And basically, one of these groups will kind of back off and everything will resolve fine, and it doesn't really escalate into violence too much. Now, in the Bahamas, we also have resident bottlenose that interact socially with the spotted dolphins. For example, they babysit each other's calves. The males have dominance displays that they use when they're chasing each other's females. And the two species actually form temporary alliances when they're chasing sharks away. And one of the mechanisms they use to communicate their coordination is synchrony. They synchronize their sounds and their body postures to look bigger and sound stronger. (Dolphins noises) Now, these are bottlenose dolphins, and you'll see them starting to synchronize their behavior and their sounds. (Dolphin noises) You see, they're synchronizing with their partner as well as the other dyad. I wish I was that coordinated. Now, it's important to remember that you're only hearing the human-audible parts of dolphin sounds, and dolphins make ultrasonic sounds, and we use special equipment in the water to collect these sounds. Now, researchers have actually measured whistle complexity using information theory, and whistles rate very high relative to even human languages. But burst-pulsed sounds is a bit of a mystery. Now, these are three spectragrams. Two are human words, and one is a dolphin vocalizing. So just take a guess in your mind which one is the dolphin. Now, it turns out burst-pulsed sounds actually look a bit like human phonemes. Now, one way to crack the code is to interpret these signals and figure out what they mean, but it's a difficult job, and we actually don't have a Rosetta Stone yet. But a second way to crack the code is to develop some technology, an interface to do two-way communication, and that's what we've been trying to do in the Bahamas and in real time. Now, scientists have used keyboard interfaces to try to bridge the gap with species including chimpanzees and dolphins. This underwater keyboard in Orlando, Florida, at the Epcot Center, was actually the most sophisticated ever two-way interface designed for humans and dolphins to work together under the water and exchange information. So we wanted to develop an interface like this in the Bahamas, but in a more natural setting. And one of the reasons we thought we could do this is because the dolphins were starting to show us a lot of mutual curiosity. They were spontaneously mimicking our vocalizations and our postures, and they were also inviting us into dolphin games. Now, dolphins are social mammals, so they love to play, and one of their favorite games is to drag seaweed, or sargassum in this case, around. And they're very adept. They like to drag it and drop it from appendage to appendage. Now in this footage, the adult is Caroh. She's 25 years old here, and this is her newborn, Cobalt, and he's just learning how to play this game. (Dolphin noises) She's kind of teasing him and taunting him. He really wants that sargassum. Now, when dolphins solicit humans for this game, they'll often sink vertically in the water, and they'll have a little sargassum on their flipper, and they'll sort of nudge it and drop it sometimes on the bottom and let us go get it, and then we'll have a little seaweed keep away game. But when we don't dive down and get it, they'll bring it to the surface and they'll sort of wave it in front of us on their tail and drop it for us like they do their calves, and then we'll pick it up and have a game. And so we started thinking, well, wouldn't it be neat to build some technology that would allow the dolphins to request these things in real time, their favorite toys? So the original vision was to have a keyboard hanging from the boat attached to a computer, and the divers and dolphins would activate the keys on the keypad and happily exchange information and request toys from each other. But we quickly found out that dolphins simply were not going to hang around the boat using a keyboard. They've got better things to do in the wild. They might do it in captivity, but in the wild -- So we built a portable keyboard that we could push through the water, and we labeled four objects they like to play with, the scarf, rope, sargassum, and also had a bow ride, which is a fun activity for a dolphin. (Whistle) And that's the scarf whistle, which is also associated with a visual symbol. And these are artificially created whistles. They're outside the dolphin's normal repertoire, but they're easily mimicked by the dolphins. And I spent four years with my colleagues Adam Pack and Fabienne Delfour, working out in the field with this keyboard using it with each other to do requests for toys while the dolphins were watching. And the dolphins could get in on the game. They could point at the visual object, or they could mimic the whistle. Now this is video of a session. The diver here has a rope toy, and I'm on the keyboard on the left, and I've just played the rope key, and that's the request for the toy from the human. So I've got the rope, I'm diving down, and I'm basically trying to get the dolphin's attention, because they're kind of like little kids. You have to keep their attention. I'm going to drop the rope, see if they come over. Here they come, and then they're going to pick up the rope and drag it around as a toy. Now, I'm at the keyboard on the left, and this is actually the first time that we tried this. I'm going to try to request this toy, the rope toy, from the dolphins using the rope sound. Let's see if they might actually understand what that means. (Whistle) That's the rope whistle. Up come the dolphins, and drop off the rope, yay. Wow. (Applause) So this is only once. We don't know for sure if they really understand the function of the whistles. Okay, so here's a second toy in the water. This is a scarf toy, and I'm trying to lead the dolphin over to the keyboard to show her the visual and the acoustic signal. Now this dolphin, we call her "the scarf thief," because over the years she's absconded with about 12 scarves. In fact, we think she has a boutique somewhere in the Bahamas. So I'm reaching over. She's got the scarf on her right side. And we try to not touch the animals too much, we really don't want to over-habituate them. And I'm trying to lead her back to the keyboard. And the diver there is going to activate the scarf sound to request the scarf. So I try to give her the scarf. Whoop. Almost lost it. But this is the moment where everything becomes possible. The dolphin's at the keyboard. You've got full attention. And this sometimes went on for hours. And I wanted to share this video with you not to show you any big breakthroughs, because they haven't happened yet, but to show you the level of intention and focus that these dolphins have, and interest in the system. And because of this, we really decided we needed some more sophisticated technology. So we joined forces with Georgia Tech, with Thad Starner's wearable computing group, to build us an underwater wearable computer that we're calling CHAT. [CHAT: Cetacean Hearing And Telemetry] Now, instead of pushing a keyboard through the water, the diver's wearing the complete system, and it's acoustic only, so basically the diver activates the sounds on a keypad on the forearm, the sounds go out through an underwater speaker, if a dolphin mimics the whistle or a human plays the whistle, the sounds come in and are localized by two hydrophones. The computer can localize who requested the toy if there's a word match. And the real power of the system is in the real-time sound recognition, so we can respond to the dolphins quickly and accurately. And we're at prototype stage, but this is how we hope it will play out. So Diver A and Diver B both have a wearable computer and the dolphin hears the whistle as a whistle, the diver hears the whistle as a whistle in the water, but also as a word through bone conduction. So Diver A plays the scarf whistle or Diver B plays the sargassum whistle to request a toy from whoever has it. What we hope will happen is that the dolphin mimics the whistle, and if Diver A has the sargassum, if that's the sound that was played and requested, then the diver will give the sargassum to the requesting dolphin and they'll swim away happily into the sunset playing sargassum for forever. Now, how far can this kind of communication go? Well, CHAT is designed specifically to empower the dolphins to request things from us. It's designed to really be two-way. Now, will they learn to mimic the whistles functionally? We hope so and we think so. But as we decode their natural sounds, we're also planning to put those back into the computerized system. For example, right now we can put their own signature whistles in the computer and request to interact with a specific dolphin. Likewise, we can create our own whistles, our own whistle names, and let the dolphins request specific divers to interact with. Now it may be that all our mobile technology will actually be the same technology that helps us communicate with another species down the road. In the case of a dolphin, you know, it's a species that, well, they're probably close to our intelligence in many ways and we might not be able to admit that right now, but they live in quite a different environment, and you still have to bridge the gap with the sensory systems. I mean, imagine what it would be like to really understand the mind of another intelligent species on the planet. Thank you. (Applause)

I am sorry I cannot show you my face, because if I do, the bad guys will come for me. My journey started 14 years ago. I was a young reporter. I had just come out of college. Then I got a scoop. The scoop was quite a very simple story. Police officers were taking bribes from hawkers who were hawking on the streets. As a young reporter, I thought that I should do it in a different way, so that it has a maximum impact, since everybody knew that it was happening, and yet there was nothing that was keeping it out of the system. So I decided to go there and act as a seller. As part of selling, I was able to document the hard core evidence. The impact was great. It was fantastic. This was what many call immersion journalism, or undercover journalism. I am an undercover journalist. My journalism is hinged on three basic principles: naming, shaming and jailing. Journalism is about results. It's about affecting your community or your society in the most progressive way. I have worked on this for over 14 years, and I can tell you, the results are very good. One story that comes to mind in my undercover pieces is "Spirit Child." It was about children who were born with deformities, and their parents felt that once they were born with those deformities, they were not good enough to live in the society, so they were given some concoction to take and as a result they died. So I built a prosthetic baby, and I went into the village, pretended as though this baby had been born with a deformity, and here was the guys who do the killing. They got themselves ready. In their bids to kill, I got the police on standby, and they came that fateful morning to come and kill the child. I recall how they were seriously boiling the concoction. They put it on fire. It was boiling hot, getting ready to give to the kids. Whilst this was going on, the police I had alerted, they were on standby, and just as the concoction was ready, and they were about to give it to the kids, I phoned the police, and fortunately they came and busted them. As I speak now, they are before the courts. Don't forget the key principles: naming, shaming and jailing. The court process is taking place, and I'm very sure at the end of the day we will find them, and we will put them where they belong too. Another key story that comes to mind, which relates to this spirit child phenomenon, is "The Spell of the Albinos." I'm sure most of you may have heard, in Tanzania, children who are born with albinism are sometimes considered as being unfit to live in society. Their bodies are chopped up with machetes and are supposed to be used for some concoctions or some potions for people to get money -- or so many, many stories people would tell about it. It was time to go undercover again. So I went undercover as a man who was interested in this particular business, of course. Again, a prosthetic arm was built. For the first time, I filmed on hidden camera the guys who do this, and they were ready to buy the arm and they were ready to use it to prepare those potions for people. I am glad today the Tanzanian government has taken action, but the key issue is that the Tanzanian government could only take action because the evidence was available. My journalism is about hard core evidence. If I say you have stolen, I show you the evidence that you have stolen. I show you how you stole it and when, or what you used what you had stolen to do. What is the essence of journalism if it doesn't benefit society? My kind of journalism is a product of my society. I know that sometimes people have their own criticisms about undercover journalism. (Video) Official: He brought out some money from his pockets and put it on the table, so that we should not be afraid. He wants to bring the cocoa and send it to Cote d'Ivoire. So with my hidden intention, I kept quiet. I didn't utter a word. But my colleagues didn't know. So after collecting the money, when he left, we were waiting for him to bring the goods. Immediately after he left, I told my colleagues that since I was the leader of the group, I told my colleagues that if they come, we will arrest them. Second official: I don't even know the place called [unclear]. I've never stepped there before. So I'm surprised. You see a hand counting money just in front of me. The next moment, you see the money in my hands, counting, whereas I have not come into contact with anybody. I have not done any business with anybody. Reporter: When Metro News contacted investigative reporter Anas Aremeyaw Anas for his reaction, he just smiled and gave this video extract he did not use in the documentary recently shown onscreen. The officer who earlier denied involvement pecks a calculator to compute the amount of money they will charge on the cocoa to be smuggled. Anas Aremeyaw Anas: This was another story on anticorruption. And here was him, denying. But you see, when you have the hard core evidence, you are able to affect society. Sometimes these are some of the headlines that come. (Music) [I will curse Anas to death] [Anas Lies] [Alarm Blows Over Anas' News for Cash Video] [Agenda Against Top CEPS Officials Exposed] [Anas Operates with Invisible Powers?] [Gov't Wobbles Over Anas Video] [Hunting the Hunter] [Anas 'Bribe' Men in Court] [15 Heads Roll Over Anas Tape] [Finance Minister Backs Anas] [11 Given Queries Over Anas' Story] [GJA Stands By Anas] [Prez. Mills Storms Tema Harbour Over Anas Video] ["Late Prof. John Evans Atta Mills: Former president of Ghana"] John Evans Atta Mills: What Anas says is not something which is unknown to many of us, but please, those of you who are agents, and who are leading the customs officers into temptation, I'm telling you, Ghana is not going to say any good things to you about this. AAA: That was my president. I thought that I couldn't come here without giving you something special. I have a piece, and I'm excited that I'm sharing it for the first time with you here. I have been undercover in the prisons. I have been there for a long time. And I can tell you, what I saw is not nice. But again, I can only affect society and affect government if I bring out the hard core evidence. Many times, the prison authorities have denied ever having issues of drug abuse, issues of sodomy, so many issues they would deny that it ever happens. How can you obtain the hard core evidence? So I was in the prison. ["Nsawan Prison"] Now, what you are seeing is a pile of dead bodies. Now, I happen to have followed one of my inmates, one of my friends, from his sick bed till death, and I can tell you it was not a nice thing at all. There were issues of bad food being served as I recall that some of the food I ate is just not good for a human being. Toilet facilities: very bad. I mean, you had to queue to get proper toilets to attend -- and that's what I call proper, when four of us are on a manhole. It is something that if you narrate it to somebody, the person wouldn't believe it. The only way that you can let the person believe is when you show hard core evidence. Of course, drugs were abundant. It was easier to get cannabis, heroin and cocaine, faster even, in the prison than outside the prison. Evil in the society is an extreme disease. If you have extreme diseases, you need to get extreme remedies. My kind of journalism might not fit in other continents or other countries, but I can tell you, it works in my part of the continent of Africa, because usually, when people talk about corruption, they ask, "Where is the evidence? Show me the evidence." I say, "This is the evidence." And that has aided in me putting a lot of people behind bars. You see, we on the continent are able to tell the story better because we face the conditions and we see the conditions. That is why I was particularly excited when we launched our "Africa Investigates" series where we investigated a lot of African countries. As a result of the success of the "Africa Investigates" series, we are moving on to World Investigates. By the end of it, a lot more bad guys on our continent will be put behind bars. This will not stop. I'm going to carry on with this kind of journalism, because I know that when evil men destroy, good men must build and bind. Thank you very much. (Applause) Chris Anderson: Thank you. Thank you. I have some questions for you. How did you end up in jail? This was just a few weeks ago, I believe, yeah? AAA: Sure. You know, undercover is all about setting the priorities right, so we got people to take me to court. So I went through the very legal process, because at the end of the day, the prison authorities want to check whether indeed you have been there or not, and that's how I got in there. CA: So someone sued you in court, and they took you there, and you were in remand custody for part of it, and you did that deliberately. AAA: Yes, yes. CA: Talk to me just about fear and how you manage that, because you're regularly putting your life at risk. How do you do that? AAA: You see, undercover is always a last resort. Before we go undercover, we follow the rules. And I'm only comfortable and I'm purged of fear whenever I am sure that all the steps have been taken. I don't do it alone. I have a backup team who help ensure that the safety and all the systems are put in place, but you've got to take very intelligent decisions whenever they are happening. If you don't, you will end up losing your life. So yes, when the backup systems are put in place, I'm okay, I go in. Risky, yes, but it's a hazard of a profession. I mean, everybody has their hazard. And once you say that is yours, you've got to take it, as and when it comes. CA: Well, you're an amazing human and you've done amazing work and you've taught us a story like no story I think any of us have heard before. And we're appreciative. We salute you. Thank you so much, Anas. AAA: Thank you. CA: Thank you. Stay safe. (Applause)

How many of you have checked your email today? Come on, raise your hands. How many of you are checking it right now? (Laughter) And how about finances? Anybody check that today? Credit card, investment account? How about this week? Now, how about your household energy use? Anybody check that today? This week? Last week? A few energy geeks spread out across the room. It's good to see you guys. But the rest of us -- this is a room filled with people who are passionate about the future of this planet, and even we aren't paying attention to the energy use that's driving climate change. The woman in the photo with me is Harriet. We met her on our first family vacation. Harriet's paying attention to her energy use, and she is decidedly not an energy geek. This is the story of how Harriet came to pay attention. This is coal, the most common source of electricity on the planet, and there's enough energy in this coal to light this bulb for more than a year. But unfortunately, between here and here, most of that energy is lost to things like transmission leakage and heat. In fact, only 10 percent ends up as light. So this coal will last a little bit more than a month. If you wanted to light this bulb for a year, you'd need this much coal. The bad news here is that, for every unit of energy we use, we waste nine. That means there's good news, because for every unit of energy we save, we save the other nine. So the question is, how can we get the people in this room and across the globe to start paying attention to the energy we're using, and start wasting less of it? The answer comes from a behavioral science experiment that was run one hot summer, 10 years ago, and only 90 miles from here, in San Marcos, California. Graduate students put signs on every door in a neighborhood, asking people to turn off their air conditioning and turn on their fans. One quarter of the homes received a message that said, did you know you could save 54 dollars a month this summer? Turn off your air conditioning, turn on your fans. Another group got an environmental message. And still a third group got a message about being good citizens, preventing blackouts. Most people guessed that money-saving message would work best of all. In fact, none of these messages worked. They had zero impact on energy consumption. It was as if the grad students hadn't shown up at all. But there was a fourth message, and this message simply said, "When surveyed, 77 percent of your neighbors said that they turned off their air conditioning and turned on their fans. Please join them. Turn off your air conditioning and turn on your fans." And wouldn't you know it, they did. The people who received this message showed a marked decrease in energy consumption simply by being told what their neighbors were doing. So what does this tell us? Well, if something is inconvenient, even if we believe in it, moral suasion, financial incentives, don't do much to move us -- but social pressure, that's powerful stuff. And harnessed correctly, it can be a powerful force for good. In fact, it already is. Inspired by this insight, my friend Dan Yates and I started a company called Opower. We built software and partnered with utility companies who wanted to help their customers save energy. We deliver personalized home energy reports that show people how their consumption compares to their neighbors in similar-sized homes. Just like those effective door hangers, we have people comparing themselves to their neighbors, and then we give everyone targeted recommendations to help them save. We started with paper, we moved to a mobile application, web, and now even a controllable thermostat, and for the last five years we've been running the largest behavioral science experiment in the world. And it's working. Ordinary homeowners and renters have saved more than 250 million dollars on their energy bills, and we're just getting started. This year alone, in partnership with more than 80 utilities in six countries, we're going to generate another two terawatt hours of electricity savings. Now, the energy geeks in the room know two terawatt hours, but for the rest of us, two terawatt hours is more than enough energy to power every home in St. Louis and Salt Lake City combined for more than a year. Two terawatt hours, it's roughly half what the U.S. solar industry produced last year. And two terawatt hours? In terms of coal, we'd need to burn 34 of these wheelbarrows every minute around the clock every day for an entire year to get two terawatt hours of electricity. And we're not burning anything. We're just motivating people to pay attention and change their behavior. But we're just one company, and this is just scratching the surface. Twenty percent of the electricity in homes is wasted, and when I say wasted, I don't mean that people have inefficient lightbulbs. They may. I mean we leave the lights on in empty rooms, and we leave the air conditioning on when nobody's home. That's 40 billion dollars a year wasted on electricity that does not contribute to our well-being but does contribute to climate change. That's 40 billion -- with a B -- every year in the U.S. alone. That's half our coal usage right there. Now thankfully, some of the world's best material scientists are looking to replace coal with sustainable resources like these, and this is both fantastic and essential. But the most overlooked resource to get us to a sustainable energy future, it isn't on this slide. It's in this room. It's you, and it's me. And we can harness this resource with no new material science simply by applying behavioral science. We can do it today, we know it works, and it will save us money right away. So what are we waiting for? Well, in most places, utility regulation hasn't changed much since Thomas Edison. Utilities are still rewarded when their customers waste energy. They ought to be rewarded for helping their customers save it. But this story is much more than about household energy use. Take a look at the Prius. It's efficient not only because Toyota invested in material science but because they invested in behavioral science. The dashboard that shows drivers how much energy they're saving in real time makes former speed demons drive more like cautious grandmothers. Which brings us back to Harriet. We met her on our first family vacation. She came over to meet my young daughter, and she was tickled to learn that my daughter's name is also Harriet. She asked me what I did for a living, and I told her, I work with utilities to help people save energy. It was then that her eyes lit up. She looked at me, and she said, "You're exactly the person I need to talk to. You see, two weeks ago, my husband and I got a letter in the mail from our utility. It told us we were using twice as much energy as our neighbors." (Laughter) "And for the last two weeks, all we can think about, talk about, and even argue about, is what we should be doing to save energy. We did everything that letter told us to do, and still I know there must be more. Now I'm here with a genuine expert. Tell me. What should I do to save energy?" There are many experts who can help answer Harriet's question. My goal is to make sure we are all asking it. Thank you. (Applause)

"Even in purely non-religious terms, homosexuality represents a misuse of the sexual faculty. It is a pathetic little second-rate substitute for reality -- a pitiable flight from life. As such, it deserves no compassion, it deserves no treatment as minority martyrdom, and it deserves not to be deemed anything but a pernicious sickness." That's from Time magazine in 1966, when I was three years old. And last year, the president of the United States came out in favor of gay marriage. (Applause) And my question is, how did we get from there to here? How did an illness become an identity? When I was perhaps six years old, I went to a shoe store with my mother and my brother. And at the end of buying our shoes, the salesman said to us that we could each have a balloon to take home. My brother wanted a red balloon, and I wanted a pink balloon. My mother said that she thought I'd really rather have a blue balloon. But I said that I definitely wanted the pink one. And she reminded me that my favorite color was blue. The fact that my favorite color now is blue, but I'm still gay -- (Laughter) -- is evidence of both my mother's influence and its limits. (Laughter) (Applause) When I was little, my mother used to say, "The love you have for your children is like no other feeling in the world. And until you have children, you don't know what it's like." And when I was little, I took it as the greatest compliment in the world that she would say that about parenting my brother and me. And when I was an adolescent, I thought that I'm gay, and so I probably can't have a family. And when she said it, it made me anxious. And after I came out of the closet, when she continued to say it, it made me furious. I said, "I'm gay. That's not the direction that I'm headed in. And I want you to stop saying that." About 20 years ago, I was asked by my editors at The New York Times Magazine to write a piece about deaf culture. And I was rather taken aback. I had thought of deafness entirely as an illness. Those poor people, they couldn't hear. They lacked hearing, and what could we do for them? And then I went out into the deaf world. I went to deaf clubs. I saw performances of deaf theater and of deaf poetry. I even went to the Miss Deaf America contest in Nashville, Tennessee where people complained about that slurry Southern signing. (Laughter) And as I plunged deeper and deeper into the deaf world, I become convinced that deafness was a culture and that the people in the deaf world who said, "We don't lack hearing, we have membership in a culture," were saying something that was viable. It wasn't my culture, and I didn't particularly want to rush off and join it, but I appreciated that it was a culture and that for the people who were members of it, it felt as valuable as Latino culture or gay culture or Jewish culture. It felt as valid perhaps even as American culture. Then a friend of a friend of mine had a daughter who was a dwarf. And when her daughter was born, she suddenly found herself confronting questions that now began to seem quite resonant to me. She was facing the question of what to do with this child. Should she say, "You're just like everyone else but a little bit shorter?" Or should she try to construct some kind of dwarf identity, get involved in the Little People of America, become aware of what was happening for dwarfs? And I suddenly thought, most deaf children are born to hearing parents. Those hearing parents tend to try to cure them. Those deaf people discover community somehow in adolescence. Most gay people are born to straight parents. Those straight parents often want them to function in what they think of as the mainstream world, and those gay people have to discover identity later on. And here was this friend of mine looking at these questions of identity with her dwarf daughter. And I thought, there it is again: A family that perceives itself to be normal with a child who seems to be extraordinary. And I hatched the idea that there are really two kinds of identity. There are vertical identities, which are passed down generationally from parent to child. Those are things like ethnicity, frequently nationality, language, often religion. Those are things you have in common with your parents and with your children. And while some of them can be difficult, there's no attempt to cure them. You can argue that it's harder in the United States -- our current presidency notwithstanding -- to be a person of color. And yet, we have nobody who is trying to ensure that the next generation of children born to African-Americans and Asians come out with creamy skin and yellow hair. There are these other identities which you have to learn from a peer group. And I call them horizontal identities, because the peer group is the horizontal experience. These are identities that are alien to your parents and that you have to discover when you get to see them in peers. And those identities, those horizontal identities, people have almost always tried to cure. And I wanted to look at what the process is through which people who have those identities come to a good relationship with them. And it seemed to me that there were three levels of acceptance that needed to take place. There's self-acceptance, there's family acceptance, and there's social acceptance. And they don't always coincide. And a lot of the time, people who have these conditions are very angry because they feel as though their parents don't love them, when what actually has happened is that their parents don't accept them. Love is something that ideally is there unconditionally throughout the relationship between a parent and a child. But acceptance is something that takes time. It always takes time. One of the dwarfs I got to know was a guy named Clinton Brown. When he was born, he was diagnosed with diastrophic dwarfism, a very disabling condition, and his parents were told that he would never walk, he would never talk, he would have no intellectual capacity, and he would probably not even recognize them. And it was suggested to them that they leave him at the hospital so that he could die there quietly. And his mother said she wasn't going to do it. And she took her son home. And even though she didn't have a lot of educational or financial advantages, she found the best doctor in the country for dealing with diastrophic dwarfism, and she got Clinton enrolled with him. And in the course of his childhood, he had 30 major surgical procedures. And he spent all this time stuck in the hospital while he was having those procedures, as a result of which he now can walk. And while he was there, they sent tutors around to help him with his school work. And he worked very hard because there was nothing else to do. And he ended up achieving at a level that had never before been contemplated by any member of his family. He was the first one in his family, in fact, to go to college, where he lived on campus and drove a specially-fitted car that accommodated his unusual body. And his mother told me this story of coming home one day -- and he went to college nearby -- and she said, "I saw that car, which you can always recognize, in the parking lot of a bar," she said. (Laughter) "And I thought to myself, they're six feet tall, he's three feet tall. Two beers for them is four beers for him." She said, "I knew I couldn't go in there and interrupt him, but I went home, and I left him eight messages on his cell phone." She said, "And then I thought, if someone had said to me when he was born that my future worry would be that he'd go drinking and driving with his college buddies -- " (Applause) And I said to her, "What do you think you did that helped him to emerge as this charming, accomplished, wonderful person?" And she said, "What did I do? I loved him, that's all. Clinton just always had that light in him. And his father and I were lucky enough to be the first to see it there." I'm going to quote from another magazine of the '60s. This one is from 1968 -- The Atlantic Monthly, voice of liberal America -- written by an important bioethicist. He said, "There is no reason to feel guilty about putting a Down syndrome child away, whether it is put away in the sense of hidden in a sanitarium or in a more responsible, lethal sense. It is sad, yes -- dreadful. But it carries no guilt. True guilt arises only from an offense against a person, and a Down's is not a person." There's been a lot of ink given to the enormous progress that we've made in the treatment of gay people. The fact that our attitude has changed is in the headlines every day. But we forget how we used to see people who had other differences, how we used to see people who were disabled, how inhuman we held people to be. And the change that's been accomplished there, which is almost equally radical, is one that we pay not very much attention to. One of the families I interviewed, Tom and Karen Robards, were taken aback when, as young and successful New Yorkers, their first child was diagnosed with Down syndrome. They thought the educational opportunities for him were not what they should be, and so they decided they would build a little center -- two classrooms that they started with a few other parents -- to educate kids with D.S. And over the years, that center grew into something called the Cooke Center, where there are now thousands upon thousands of children with intellectual disabilities who are being taught. In the time since that Atlantic Monthly story ran, the life expectancy for people with Down syndrome has tripled. The experience of Down syndrome people includes those who are actors, those who are writers, some who are able to live fully independently in adulthood. The Robards had a lot to do with that. And I said, "Do you regret it? Do you wish your child didn't have Down syndrome? Do you wish you'd never heard of it?" And interestingly his father said, "Well, for David, our son, I regret it, because for David, it's a difficult way to be in the world, and I'd like to give David an easier life. But I think if we lost everyone with Down syndrome, it would be a catastrophic loss." And Karen Robards said to me, "I'm with Tom. For David, I would cure it in an instant to give him an easier life. But speaking for myself -- well, I would never have believed 23 years ago when he was born that I could come to such a point -- speaking for myself, it's made me so much better and so much kinder and so much more purposeful in my whole life, that speaking for myself, I wouldn't give it up for anything in the world." We live at a point when social acceptance for these and many other conditions is on the up and up. And yet we also live at the moment when our ability to eliminate those conditions has reached a height we never imagined before. Most deaf infants born in the United States now will receive Cochlear implants, which are put into the brain and connected to a receiver, and which allow them to acquire a facsimile of hearing and to use oral speech. A compound that has been tested in mice, BMN-111, is useful in preventing the action of the achondroplasia gene. Achondroplasia is the most common form of dwarfism, and mice who have been given that substance and who have the achondroplasia gene, grow to full size. Testing in humans is around the corner. There are blood tests which are making progress that would pick up Down syndrome more clearly and earlier in pregnancies than ever before, making it easier and easier for people to eliminate those pregnancies, or to terminate them. And so we have both social progress and medical progress. And I believe in both of them. I believe the social progress is fantastic and meaningful and wonderful, and I think the same thing about the medical progress. But I think it's a tragedy when one of them doesn't see the other. And when I see the way they're intersecting in conditions like the three I've just described, I sometimes think it's like those moments in grand opera when the hero realizes he loves the heroine at the exact moment that she lies expiring on a divan. (Laughter) We have to think about how we feel about cures altogether. And a lot of the time the question of parenthood is, what do we validate in our children, and what do we cure in them? Jim Sinclair, a prominent autism activist, said, "When parents say 'I wish my child did not have autism,' what they're really saying is 'I wish the child I have did not exist and I had a different, non-autistic child instead.' Read that again. This is what we hear when you mourn over our existence. This is what we hear when you pray for a cure -- that your fondest wish for us is that someday we will cease to be and strangers you can love will move in behind our faces." It's a very extreme point of view, but it points to the reality that people engage with the life they have and they don't want to be cured or changed or eliminated. They want to be whoever it is that they've come to be. One of the families I interviewed for this project was the family of Dylan Klebold who was one of the perpetrators of the Columbine massacre. It took a long time to persuade them to talk to me, and once they agreed, they were so full of their story that they couldn't stop telling it. And the first weekend I spent with them -- the first of many -- I recorded more than 20 hours of conversation. And on Sunday night, we were all exhausted. We were sitting in the kitchen. Sue Klebold was fixing dinner. And I said, "If Dylan were here now, do you have a sense of what you'd want to ask him?" And his father said, "I sure do. I'd want to ask him what the hell he thought he was doing." And Sue looked at the floor, and she thought for a minute. And then she looked back up and said, "I would ask him to forgive me for being his mother and never knowing what was going on inside his head." When I had dinner with her a couple of years later -- one of many dinners that we had together -- she said, "You know, when it first happened, I used to wish that I had never married, that I had never had children. If I hadn't gone to Ohio State and crossed paths with Tom, this child wouldn't have existed and this terrible thing wouldn't have happened. But I've come to feel that I love the children I had so much that I don't want to imagine a life without them. I recognize the pain they caused to others, for which there can be no forgiveness, but the pain they caused to me, there is," she said. "So while I recognize that it would have been better for the world if Dylan had never been born, I've decided that it would not have been better for me." I thought it was surprising how all of these families had all of these children with all of these problems, problems that they mostly would have done anything to avoid, and that they had all found so much meaning in that experience of parenting. And then I thought, all of us who have children love the children we have, with their flaws. If some glorious angel suddenly descended through my living room ceiling and offered to take away the children I have and give me other, better children -- more polite, funnier, nicer, smarter -- I would cling to the children I have and pray away that atrocious spectacle. And ultimately I feel that in the same way that we test flame-retardant pajamas in an inferno to ensure they won't catch fire when our child reaches across the stove, so these stories of families negotiating these extreme differences reflect on the universal experience of parenting, which is always that sometimes you look at your child and you think, where did you come from? (Laughter) It turns out that while each of these individual differences is siloed -- there are only so many families dealing with schizophrenia, there are only so many families of children who are transgender, there are only so many families of prodigies -- who also face similar challenges in many ways -- there are only so many families in each of those categories -- but if you start to think that the experience of negotiating difference within your family is what people are addressing, then you discover that it's a nearly universal phenomenon. Ironically, it turns out, that it's our differences, and our negotiation of difference, that unite us. I decided to have children while I was working on this project. And many people were astonished and said, "But how can you decide to have children in the midst of studying everything that can go wrong?" And I said, "I'm not studying everything that can go wrong. What I'm studying is how much love there can be, even when everything appears to be going wrong." I thought a lot about the mother of one disabled child I had seen, a severely disabled child who died through caregiver neglect. And when his ashes were interred, his mother said, "I pray here for forgiveness for having been twice robbed, once of the child I wanted and once of the son I loved." And I figured it was possible then for anyone to love any child if they had the effective will to do so. So my husband is the biological father of two children with some lesbian friends in Minneapolis. I had a close friend from college who'd gone through a divorce and wanted to have children. And so she and I have a daughter, and mother and daughter live in Texas. And my husband and I have a son who lives with us all the time of whom I am the biological father, and our surrogate for the pregnancy was Laura, the lesbian mother of Oliver and Lucy in Minneapolis. (Applause) So the shorthand is five parents of four children in three states. And there are people who think that the existence of my family somehow undermines or weakens or damages their family. And there are people who think that families like mine shouldn't be allowed to exist. And I don't accept subtractive models of love, only additive ones. And I believe that in the same way that we need species diversity to ensure that the planet can go on, so we need this diversity of affection and diversity of family in order to strengthen the ecosphere of kindness. The day after our son was born, the pediatrician came into the hospital room and said she was concerned. He wasn't extending his legs appropriately. She said that might mean that he had brain damage. In so far as he was extending them, he was doing so asymmetrically, which she thought could mean that there was a tumor of some kind in action. And he had a very large head, which she thought might indicate hydrocephalus. And as she told me all of these things, I felt the very center of my being pouring out onto the floor. And I thought, here I had been working for years on a book about how much meaning people had found in the experience of parenting children who are disabled, and I didn't want to join their number. Because what I was encountering was an idea of illness. And like all parents since the dawn of time, I wanted to protect my child from illness. And I wanted also to protect myself from illness. And yet, I knew from the work I had done that if he had any of the things we were about to start testing for, that those would ultimately be his identity, and if they were his identity they would become my identity, that that illness was going to take a very different shape as it unfolded. We took him to the MRI machine, we took him to the CAT scanner, we took this day-old child and gave him over for an arterial blood draw. We felt helpless. And at the end of five hours, they said that his brain was completely clear and that he was by then extending his legs correctly. And when I asked the pediatrician what had been going on, she said she thought in the morning he had probably had a cramp. (Laughter) But I thought how my mother was right. I thought, the love you have for your children is unlike any other feeling in the world, and until you have children, you don't know what it feels like. I think children had ensnared me the moment I connected fatherhood with loss. But I'm not sure I would have noticed that if I hadn't been so in the thick of this research project of mine. I'd encountered so much strange love, and I fell very naturally into its bewitching patterns. And I saw how splendor can illuminate even the most abject vulnerabilities. During these 10 years, I had witnessed and learned the terrifying joy of unbearable responsibility, and I had come to see how it conquers everything else. And while I had sometimes thought the parents I was interviewing were fools, enslaving themselves to a lifetime's journey with their thankless children and trying to breed identity out of misery, I realized that day that my research had built me a plank and that I was ready to join them on their ship. Thank you. (Applause)

So I was trained to become a gymnast for two years in Hunan, China in the 1970s. When I was in the first grade, the government wanted to transfer me to a school for athletes, all expenses paid. But my tiger mother said, "No." My parents wanted me to become an engineer like them. After surviving the Cultural Revolution, they firmly believed there's only one sure way to happiness: a safe and well-paid job. It is not important if I like the job or not. But my dream was to become a Chinese opera singer. That is me playing my imaginary piano. An opera singer must start training young to learn acrobatics, so I tried everything I could to go to opera school. I even wrote to the school principal and the host of a radio show. But no adults liked the idea. No adults believed I was serious. Only my friends supported me, but they were kids, just as powerless as I was. So at age 15, I knew I was too old to be trained. My dream would never come true. I was afraid that for the rest of my life some second-class happiness would be the best I could hope for. But that's so unfair. So I was determined to find another calling. Nobody around to teach me? Fine. I turned to books. I satisfied my hunger for parental advice from this book by a family of writers and musicians.["Correspondence in the Family of Fou Lei"] I found my role model of an independent woman when Confucian tradition requires obedience.["Jane Eyre"] And I learned to be efficient from this book.["Cheaper by the Dozen"] And I was inspired to study abroad after reading these. ["Complete Works of Sanmao" (aka Echo Chan)] ["Lessons From History" by Nan Huaijin] I came to the U.S. in 1995, so which books did I read here first? Books banned in China, of course. "The Good Earth" is about Chinese peasant life. That's just not convenient for propaganda. Got it. The Bible is interesting, but strange. (Laughter) That's a topic for a different day. But the fifth commandment gave me an epiphany: "You shall honor your father and mother." "Honor," I said. "That's so different, and better, than obey." So it becomes my tool to climb out of this Confucian guilt trap and to restart my relationship with my parents. Encountering a new culture also started my habit of comparative reading. It offers many insights. For example, I found this map out of place at first because this is what Chinese students grew up with. It had never occurred to me, China doesn't have to be at the center of the world. A map actually carries somebody's view. Comparative reading actually is nothing new. It's a standard practice in the academic world. There are even research fields such as comparative religion and comparative literature. Compare and contrast gives scholars a more complete understanding of a topic. So I thought, well, if comparative reading works for research, why not do it in daily life too? So I started reading books in pairs. So they can be about people -- ["Benjamin Franklin" by Walter Isaacson]["John Adams" by David McCullough] -- who are involved in the same event, or friends with shared experiences. ["Personal History" by Katharine Graham]["The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life," by Alice Schroeder] I also compare the same stories in different genres -- (Laughter) [Holy Bible: King James Version]["Lamb" by Chrisopher Moore] -- or similar stories from different cultures, as Joseph Campbell did in his wonderful book.["The Power of Myth" by Joseph Campbell] For example, both the Christ and the Buddha went through three temptations. For the Christ, the temptations are economic, political and spiritual. For the Buddha, they are all psychological: lust, fear and social duty -- interesting. So if you know a foreign language, it's also fun to read your favorite books in two languages. ["The Way of Chuang Tzu" Thomas Merton]["Tao: The Watercourse Way" Alan Watts] Instead of lost in translation, I found there is much to gain. For example, it's through translation that I realized "happiness" in Chinese literally means "fast joy." Huh! "Bride" in Chinese literally means "new mother." Uh-oh. (Laughter) Books have given me a magic portal to connect with people of the past and the present. I know I shall never feel lonely or powerless again. Having a dream shattered really is nothing compared to what many others have suffered. I have come to believe that coming true is not the only purpose of a dream. Its most important purpose is to get us in touch with where dreams come from, where passion comes from, where happiness comes from. Even a shattered dream can do that for you. So because of books, I'm here today, happy, living again with a purpose and a clarity, most of the time. So may books be always with you. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause)

When I was a young boy, I used to gaze through the microscope of my father at the insects in amber that he kept in the house. And they were remarkably well preserved, morphologically just phenomenal. And we used to imagine that someday, they would actually come to life and they would crawl out of the resin, and, if they could, they would fly away. If you had asked me 10 years ago whether or not we would ever be able to sequence the genome of extinct animals, I would have told you, it's unlikely. If you had asked whether or not we would actually be able to revive an extinct species, I would have said, pipe dream. But I'm actually standing here today, amazingly, to tell you that not only is the sequencing of extinct genomes a possibility, actually a modern-day reality, but the revival of an extinct species is actually within reach, maybe not from the insects in amber -- in fact, this mosquito was actually used for the inspiration for "Jurassic Park" — but from woolly mammoths, the well preserved remains of woolly mammoths in the permafrost. Woollies are a particularly interesting, quintessential image of the Ice Age. They were large. They were hairy. They had large tusks, and we seem to have a very deep connection with them, like we do with elephants. Maybe it's because elephants share many things in common with us. They bury their dead. They educate the next of kin. They have social knits that are very close. Or maybe it's actually because we're bound by deep time, because elephants, like us, share their origins in Africa some seven million years ago, and as habitats changed and environments changed, we actually, like the elephants, migrated out into Europe and Asia. So the first large mammoth that appears on the scene is meridionalis, which was standing four meters tall weighing about 10 tons, and was a woodland-adapted species and spread from Western Europe clear across Central Asia, across the Bering land bridge and into parts of North America. And then, again, as climate changed as it always does, and new habitats opened up, we had the arrival of a steppe-adapted species called trogontherii in Central Asia pushing meridionalis out into Western Europe. And the open grassland savannas of North America opened up, leading to the Columbian mammoth, a large, hairless species in North America. And it was really only about 500,000 years later that we had the arrival of the woolly, the one that we all know and love so much, spreading from an East Beringian point of origin across Central Asia, again pushing the trogontherii out through Central Europe, and over hundreds of thousands of years migrating back and forth across the Bering land bridge during times of glacial peaks and coming into direct contact with the Columbian relatives living in the south, and there they survive over hundreds of thousands of years during traumatic climatic shifts. So there's a highly plastic animal dealing with great transitions in temperature and environment, and doing very, very well. And there they survive on the mainland until about 10,000 years ago, and actually, surprisingly, on the small islands off of Siberia and Alaska until about 3,000 years ago. So Egyptians are building pyramids and woollies are still living on islands. And then they disappear. Like 99 percent of all the animals that have once lived, they go extinct, likely due to a warming climate and fast-encroaching dense forests that are migrating north, and also, as the late, great Paul Martin once put it, probably Pleistocene overkill, so the large game hunters that took them down. Fortunately, we find millions of their remains strewn across the permafrost buried deep in Siberia and Alaska, and we can actually go up there and actually take them out. And the preservation is, again, like those insects in [amber], phenomenal. So you have teeth, bones with blood which look like blood, you have hair, and you have intact carcasses or heads which still have brains in them. So the preservation and the survival of DNA depends on many factors, and I have to admit, most of which we still don't quite understand, but depending upon when an organism dies and how quickly he's buried, the depth of that burial, the constancy of the temperature of that burial environment, will ultimately dictate how long DNA will survive over geologically meaningful time frames. And it's probably surprising to many of you sitting in this room that it's not the time that matters, it's not the length of preservation, it's the consistency of the temperature of that preservation that matters most. So if we were to go deep now within the bones and the teeth that actually survived the fossilization process, the DNA which was once intact, tightly wrapped around histone proteins, is now under attack by the bacteria that lived symbiotically with the mammoth for years during its lifetime. So those bacteria, along with the environmental bacteria, free water and oxygen, actually break apart the DNA into smaller and smaller and smaller DNA fragments, until all you have are fragments that range from 10 base pairs to, in the best case scenarios, a few hundred base pairs in length. So most fossils out there in the fossil record are actually completely devoid of all organic signatures. But a few of them actually have DNA fragments that survive for thousands, even a few millions of years in time. And using state-of-the-art clean room technology, we've devised ways that we can actually pull these DNAs away from all the rest of the gunk in there, and it's not surprising to any of you sitting in the room that if I take a mammoth bone or a tooth and I extract its DNA that I'll get mammoth DNA, but I'll also get all the bacteria that once lived with the mammoth, and, more complicated, I'll get all the DNA that survived in that environment with it, so the bacteria, the fungi, and so on and so forth. Not surprising then again that a mammoth preserved in the permafrost will have something on the order of 50 percent of its DNA being mammoth, whereas something like the Columbian mammoth, living in a temperature and buried in a temperate environment over its laying-in will only have 3 to 10 percent endogenous. But we've come up with very clever ways that we can actually discriminate, capture and discriminate, the mammoth from the non-mammoth DNA, and with the advances in high-throughput sequencing, we can actually pull out and bioinformatically re-jig all these small mammoth fragments and place them onto a backbone of an Asian or African elephant chromosome. And so by doing that, we can actually get all the little points that discriminate between a mammoth and an Asian elephant, and what do we know, then, about a mammoth? Well, the mammoth genome is almost at full completion, and we know that it's actually really big. It's mammoth. So a hominid genome is about three billion base pairs, but an elephant and mammoth genome is about two billion base pairs larger, and most of that is composed of small, repetitive DNAs that make it very difficult to actually re-jig the entire structure of the genome. So having this information allows us to answer one of the interesting relationship questions between mammoths and their living relatives, the African and the Asian elephant, all of which shared an ancestor seven million years ago, but the genome of the mammoth shows it to share a most recent common ancestor with Asian elephants about six million years ago, so slightly closer to the Asian elephant. With advances in ancient DNA technology, we can actually now start to begin to sequence the genomes of those other extinct mammoth forms that I mentioned, and I just wanted to talk about two of them, the woolly and the Columbian mammoth, both of which were living very close to each other during glacial peaks, so when the glaciers were massive in North America, the woollies were pushed into these subglacial ecotones, and came into contact with the relatives living to the south, and there they shared refugia, and a little bit more than the refugia, it turns out. It looks like they were interbreeding. And that this is not an uncommon feature in Proboscideans, because it turns out that large savanna male elephants will outcompete the smaller forest elephants for their females. So large, hairless Columbians outcompeting the smaller male woollies. It reminds me a bit of high school, unfortunately. (Laughter) So this is not trivial, given the idea that we want to revive extinct species, because it turns out that an African and an Asian elephant can actually interbreed and have live young, and this has actually occurred by accident in a zoo in Chester, U.K., in 1978. So that means that we can actually take Asian elephant chromosomes, modify them into all those positions we've actually now been able to discriminate with the mammoth genome, we can put that into an enucleated cell, differentiate that into a stem cell, subsequently differentiate that maybe into a sperm, artificially inseminate an Asian elephant egg, and over a long and arduous procedure, actually bring back something that looks like this. Now, this wouldn't be an exact replica, because the short DNA fragments that I told you about will prevent us from building the exact structure, but it would make something that looked and felt very much like a woolly mammoth did. Now, when I bring up this with my friends, we often talk about, well, where would you put it? Where are you going to house a mammoth? There's no climates or habitats suitable. Well, that's not actually the case. It turns out that there are swaths of habitat in the north of Siberia and Yukon that actually could house a mammoth. Remember, this was a highly plastic animal that lived over tremendous climate variation. So this landscape would be easily able to house it, and I have to admit that there [is] a part of the child in me, the boy in me, that would love to see these majestic creatures walk across the permafrost of the north once again, but I do have to admit that part of the adult in me sometimes wonders whether or not we should. Thank you very much. (Applause) Ryan Phelan: Don't go away. You've left us with a question. I'm sure everyone is asking this. When you say, "Should we?" it feels like you're reticent there, and yet you've given us a vision of it being so possible. What's your reticence? Hendrik Poinar: I don't think it's reticence. I think it's just that we have to think very deeply about the implications, ramifications of our actions, and so as long as we have good, deep discussion like we're having now, I think we can come to a very good solution as to why to do it. But I just want to make sure that we spend time thinking about why we're doing it first. RP: Perfect. Perfect answer. Thank you very much, Hendrik. HP: Thank you. (Applause)

I'm going to share with you a paradigm-shifting perspective on the issues of gender violence -- sexual assault, domestic violence, relationship abuse, sexual harassment, sexual abuse of children. That whole range of issues that I'll refer to in shorthand as "gender violence issues," they've been seen as women's issues that some good men help out with, but I have a problem with that frame and I don't accept it. I don't see these as women's issues that some good men help out with. In fact, I'm going to argue that these are men's issues, first and foremost. (Applause) Now obviously, they're also women's issues, so I appreciate that, but calling gender violence a women's issue is part of the problem, for a number of reasons. The first is that it gives men an excuse not to pay attention. Right? A lot of men hear the term "women's issues" and we tend to tune it out, and we think, "Hey, I'm a guy. That's for the girls," or "That's for the women." And a lot of men literally don't get beyond the first sentence as a result. It's almost like a chip in our brain is activated, and the neural pathways take our attention in a different direction when we hear the term "women's issues." This is also true, by the way, of the word "gender," because a lot of people hear the word "gender" and they think it means "women." So they think that gender issues is synonymous with women's issues. There's some confusion about the term gender. And actually, let me illustrate that confusion by way of analogy. So let's talk for a moment about race. In the U.S., when we hear the word "race," a lot of people think that means African-American, Latino, Asian-American, Native American, South Asian, Pacific Islander, on and on. A lot of people, when they hear the word "sexual orientation" think it means gay, lesbian, bisexual. And a lot of people, when they hear the word "gender," think it means women. In each case, the dominant group doesn't get paid attention to. Right? As if white people don't have some sort of racial identity or belong to some racial category or construct, as if heterosexual people don't have a sexual orientation, as if men don't have a gender. This is one of the ways that dominant systems maintain and reproduce themselves, which is to say the dominant group is rarely challenged to even think about its dominance, because that's one of the key characteristics of power and privilege, the ability to go unexamined, lacking introspection, in fact being rendered invisible in large measure in the discourse about issues that are primarily about us. And this is amazing how this works in domestic and sexual violence, how men have been largely erased from so much of the conversation about a subject that is centrally about men. And I'm going to illustrate what I'm talking about by using the old tech. I'm old school on some fundamental regards. I work with -- I make films -- and I work with high tech, but I'm still old school as an educator, and I want to share with you this exercise that illustrates on the sentence structure level how the way that we think, literally the way that we use language, conspires to keep our attention off of men. This is about domestic violence in particular, but you can plug in other analogues. This comes from the work of the feminist linguist Julia Penelope. It starts with a very basic English sentence: "John beat Mary." That's a good English sentence. John is the subject. Beat is the verb. Mary is the object. Good sentence. Now we're going to move to the second sentence, which says the same thing in the passive voice. "Mary was beaten by John." And now a whole lot has happened in one sentence. We've gone from "John beat Mary" to "Mary was beaten by John." We've shifted our focus in one sentence from John to Mary, and you can see John is very close to the end of the sentence, well, close to dropping off the map of our psychic plain. The third sentence, John is dropped, and we have, "Mary was beaten," and now it's all about Mary. We're not even thinking about John. It's totally focused on Mary. Over the past generation, the term we've used synonymous with "beaten" is "battered," so we have "Mary was battered." And the final sentence in this sequence, flowing from the others, is, "Mary is a battered woman." So now Mary's very identity -- Mary is a battered woman -- is what was done to her by John in the first instance. But we've demonstrated that John has long ago left the conversation. Now, those of us who work in the domestic and sexual violence field know that victim-blaming is pervasive in this realm, which is to say, blaming the person to whom something was done rather than the person who did it. And we say things like, why do these women go out with these men? Why are they attracted to these men? Why do they keep going back? What was she wearing at that party? What a stupid thing to do. Why was she drinking with that group of guys in that hotel room? This is victim blaming, and there are numerous reasons for it, but one of them is that our whole cognitive structure is set up to blame victims. This is all unconscious. Our whole cognitive structure is set up to ask questions about women and women's choices and what they're doing, thinking, and wearing. And I'm not going to shout down people who ask questions about women, okay? It's a legitimate thing to ask. But's let's be clear: Asking questions about Mary is not going to get us anywhere in terms of preventing violence. We have to ask a different set of questions. You can see where I'm going with this, right? The questions are not about Mary. They're about John. The questions include things like, why does John beat Mary? Why is domestic violence still a big problem in the United States and all over the world? What's going on? Why do so many men abuse, physically, emotionally, verbally, and other ways, the women and girls, and the men and boys, that they claim to love? What's going on with men? Why do so many adult men sexually abuse little girls and little boys? Why is that a common problem in our society and all over the world today? Why do we hear over and over again about new scandals erupting in major institutions like the Catholic Church or the Penn State football program or the Boy Scouts of America, on and on and on? And then local communities all over the country and all over the world, right? We hear about it all the time. The sexual abuse of children. What's going on with men? Why do so many men rape women in our society and around the world? Why do so many men rape other men? What is going on with men? And then what is the role of the various institutions in our society that are helping to produce abusive men at pandemic rates? Because this isn't about individual perpetrators. That's a naive way to understanding what is a much deeper and more systematic social problem. You know, the perpetrators aren't these monsters who crawl out of the swamp and come into town and do their nasty business and then retreat into the darkness. That's a very naive notion, right? Perpetrators are much more normal than that, and everyday than that. So the question is, what are we doing here in our society and in the world? What are the roles of various institutions in helping to produce abusive men? What's the role of religious belief systems, the sports culture, the pornography culture, the family structure, economics, and how that intersects, and race and ethnicity and how that intersects? How does all this work? And then, once we start making those kinds of connections and asking those important and big questions, then we can talk about how we can be transformative, in other words, how can we do something differently? How can we change the practices? How can we change the socialization of boys and the definitions of manhood that lead to these current outcomes? These are the kind of questions that we need to be asking and the kind of work that we need to be doing, but if we're endlessly focused on what women are doing and thinking in relationships or elsewhere, we're not going to get to that piece. Now, I understand that a lot of women who have been trying to speaking out about these issues, today and yesterday and for years and years, often get shouted down for their efforts. They get called nasty names like "male-basher" and "man-hater," and the disgusting and offensive "feminazi." Right? And you know what all this is about? It's called kill the messenger. It's because the women who are standing up and speaking out for themselves and for other women as well as for men and boys, it's a statement to them to sit down and shut up, keep the current system in place, because we don't like it when people rock the boat. We don't like it when people challenge our power. You'd better sit down and shut up, basically. And thank goodness that women haven't done that. Thank goodness that we live in a world where there's so much women's leadership that can counteract that. But one of the powerful roles that men can play in this work is that we can say some things that sometimes women can't say, or, better yet, we can be heard saying some things that women often can't be heard saying. Now, I appreciate that that's a problem. It's sexism. But it's the truth. And so one of the things that I say to men, and my colleagues and I always say this, is we need more men who have the courage and the strength to start standing up and saying some of this stuff, and standing with women and not against them and pretending that somehow this is a battle between the sexes and other kinds of nonsense. We live in the world together. And by the way, one of the things that really bothers me about some of the rhetoric against feminists and others who have built the battered women's and rape crisis movements around the world is that somehow, like I said, that they're anti-male. What about all the boys who are profoundly affected in a negative way by what some adult man is doing against their mother, themselves, their sisters? What about all those boys? What about all the young men and boys who have been traumatized by adult men's violence? You know what? The same system that produces men who abuse women produces men who abuse other men. And if we want to talk about male victims, let's talk about male victims. Most male victims of violence are the victims of other men's violence. So that's something that both women and men have in common. We are both victims of men's violence. So we have it in our direct self-interest, not to mention the fact that most men that I know have women and girls that we care deeply about, in our families and our friendship circles and every other way. So there's so many reasons why we need men to speak out. It seems obvious saying it out loud. Doesn't it? Now, the nature of the work that I do and my colleagues do in the sports culture and the U.S. military, in schools, we pioneered this approach called the bystander approach to gender violence prevention. And I just want to give you the highlights of the bystander approach, because it's a big thematic shift, although there's lots of particulars, but the heart of it is, instead of seeing men as perpetrators and women as victims, or women as perpetrators, men as victims, or any combination in there. I'm using the gender binary. I know there's more than men and women, there's more than male and female. And there are women who are perpetrators, and of course there are men who are victims. There's a whole spectrum. But instead of seeing it in the binary fashion, we focus on all of us as what we call bystanders, and a bystander is defined as anybody who is not a perpetrator or a victim in a given situation, so in other words friends, teammates, colleagues, coworkers, family members, those of us who are not directly involved in a dyad of abuse, but we are embedded in social, family, work, school, and other peer culture relationships with people who might be in that situation. What do we do? How do we speak up? How do we challenge our friends? How do we support our friends? But how do we not remain silent in the face of abuse? Now, when it comes to men and male culture, the goal is to get men who are not abusive to challenge men who are. And when I say abusive, I don't mean just men who are beating women. We're not just saying a man whose friend is abusing his girlfriend needs to stop the guy at the moment of attack. That's a naive way of creating a social change. It's along a continuum, we're trying to get men to interrupt each other. So, for example, if you're a guy and you're in a group of guys playing poker, talking, hanging out, no women present, and another guy says something sexist or degrading or harassing about women, instead of laughing along or pretending you didn't hear it, we need men to say, "Hey, that's not funny. You know, that could be my sister you're talking about, and could you joke about something else? Or could you talk about something else? I don't appreciate that kind of talk." Just like if you're a white person and another white person makes a racist comment, you'd hope, I hope, that white people would interrupt that racist enactment by a fellow white person. Just like with heterosexism, if you're a heterosexual person and you yourself don't enact harassing or abusive behaviors towards people of varying sexual orientations, if you don't say something in the face of other heterosexual people doing that, then, in a sense, isn't your silence a form of consent and complicity? Well, the bystander approach is trying to give people tools to interrupt that process and to speak up and to create a peer culture climate where the abusive behavior will be seen as unacceptable, not just because it's illegal, but because it's wrong and unacceptable in the peer culture. And if we can get to the place where men who act out in sexist ways will lose status, young men and boys who act out in sexist and harassing ways towards girls and women, as well as towards other boys and men, will lose status as a result of it, guess what? We'll see a radical diminution of the abuse. Because the typical perpetrator is not sick and twisted. He's a normal guy in every other way. Isn't he? Now, among the many great things that Martin Luther King said in his short life was, "In the end, what will hurt the most is not the words of our enemies but the silence of our friends." In the end, what will hurt the most is not the words of our enemies but the silence of our friends. There's been an awful lot of silence in male culture about this ongoing tragedy of men's violence against women and children, hasn't there? There's been an awful lot of silence. And all I'm saying is that we need to break that silence, and we need more men to do that. Now, it's easier said than done, because I'm saying it now, but I'm telling you it's not easy in male culture for guys to challenge each other, which is one of the reasons why part of the paradigm shift that has to happen is not just understanding these issues as men's issues, but they're also leadership issues for men. Because ultimately, the responsibility for taking a stand on these issues should not fall on the shoulders of little boys or teenage boys in high school or college men. It should be on adult men with power. Adult men with power are the ones we need to be holding accountable for being leaders on these issues, because when somebody speaks up in a peer culture and challenges and interrupts, he or she is being a leader, really, right? But on a big scale, we need more adult men with power to start prioritizing these issues, and we haven't seen that yet, have we? Now, I was at a dinner a number of years ago, and I work extensively with the U.S. military, all the services. And I was at this dinner and this woman said to me -- I think she thought she was a little clever -- she said, "So how long have you been doing sensitivity training with the Marines?" And I said, "With all due respect, I don't do sensitivity training with the Marines. I run a leadership program in the Marine Corps." Now, I know it's a bit pompous, my response, but it's an important distinction, because I don't believe that what we need is sensitivity training. We need leadership training, because, for example, when a professional coach or a manager of a baseball team or a football team -- and I work extensively in that realm as well -- makes a sexist comment, makes a homophobic statement, makes a racist comment, there will be discussions on the sports blogs and in sports talk radio. And some people will say, "Well, he needs sensitivity training." And other people will say, "Well get off it. You know, that's political correctness run amok, and he made a stupid statement. Move on." My argument is, he doesn't need sensitivity training. He needs leadership training, because he's being a bad leader, because in a society with gender diversity and sexual diversity -- (Applause) — and racial and ethnic diversity, you make those kind of comments, you're failing at your leadership. If we can make this point that I'm making to powerful men and women in our society at all levels of institutional authority and power, it's going to change, it's going to change the paradigm of people's thinking. You know, for example, I work a lot in college and university athletics throughout North America. We know so much about how to prevent domestic and sexual violence, right? There's no excuse for a college or university to not have domestic and sexual violence prevention training mandated for all student athletes, coaches, administrators, as part of their educational process. We know enough to know that we can easily do that. But you know what's missing? The leadership. But it's not the leadership of student athletes. It's the leadership of the athletic director, the president of the university, the people in charge who make decisions about resources and who make decisions about priorities in the institutional settings. That's a failure, in most cases, of men's leadership. Look at Penn State. Penn State is the mother of all teachable moments for the bystander approach. You had so many situations in that realm where men in powerful positions failed to act to protect children, in this case, boys. It's unbelievable, really. But when you get into it, you realize there are pressures on men. There are constraints within peer cultures on men, which is why we need to encourage men to break through those pressures. And one of the ways to do that is to say there's an awful lot of men who care deeply about these issues. I know this. I work with men, and I've been working with tens of thousands, hundreds of thousands of men for many, many decades now. It's scary, when you think about it, how many years. But there's so many men who care deeply about these issues, but caring deeply is not enough. We need more men with the guts, with the courage, with the strength, with the moral integrity to break our complicit silence and challenge each other and stand with women and not against them. By the way, we owe it to women. There's no question about it. But we also owe it to our sons. We also owe it to young men who are growing up all over the world in situations where they didn't make the choice to be a man in a culture that tells them that manhood is a certain way. They didn't make the choice. We that have a choice have an opportunity and a responsibility to them as well. I hope that, going forward, men and women, working together, can begin the change and the transformation that will happen so that future generations won't have the level of tragedy that we deal with on a daily basis. I know we can do it. We can do better. Thank you very much. (Applause)

I'm almost like a crazy evangelical. I've always known that the age of design is upon us, almost like a rapture. If the day is sunny, I think, "Oh, the gods have had a good design day." Or, I go to a show and I see a beautiful piece by an artist, particularly beautiful, I say he's so good because he clearly looked to design to understand what he needed to do. So I really do believe that design is the highest form of creative expression. That's why I'm talking to you today about the age of design, and the age of design is the age in which design is still cute furniture, is still posters, is still fast cars, what you see at MoMA today. But in truth, what I really would like to explain to the public and to the audiences of MoMA is that the most interesting chairs are the ones that are actually made by a robot, like this beautiful chair by Dirk Vander Kooij, where a robot deposits a toothpaste-like slur of recycled refrigerator parts, as if he were a big candy, and makes a chair out of it. Or good design is digital fonts that we use all the time and that become part of our identity. I want people to understand that design is so much more than cute chairs, that it is first and foremost everything that is around us in our life. And it's interesting how so much of what we're talking about tonight is not simply design but interaction design. And in fact, interaction design is what I've been trying to insert in the collection of the Museum of Modern Art for a few years, starting not very timidly but just pointedly with works, for instance, by Martin Wattenberg -- the way a machine plays chess with itself, that you see here, or Lisa Strausfeld and her partners, the Sugar interface for One Laptop Per Child, Toshio Iwai's Tenori-On musical instruments, and Philip Worthington's Shadow Monsters, and John Maeda's Reactive Books, and also Jonathan Harris and Sep Kamvar's I Want You To Want Me. These were some of the first acquisitions that really introduced the idea of interaction design to the public. But more recently, I've been trying really to go even deeper into interaction design with examples that are emotionally really suggestive and that really explain interaction design at a level that is almost undeniable. The Wind Map, by Wattenberg and Fernanda Viégas, I don't know if you've ever seen it -- it's really fantastic. It looks at the territory of the United States as if it were a wheat field that is procured by the winds and that is really giving you a pictorial image of what's going on with the winds in the United States. But also, more recently, we started acquiring video games, and that's where all hell broke loose in a really interesting way. (Laughter) There are still people that believe that there's a high and there's a low. And that's really what I find so intriguing about the reactions that we've had to the anointment of video games in the MoMA collection. We've -- No, first of all, New York Magazine always gets it. I love them. So we are in the right quadrant. We are in the Highbrow -- that's daring, that's courageous -- and Brilliant, which is great. Timidly, we've been higher on the diagonal in other situations, but it's okay. It's good. It's good. It's good. (Laughter) But here comes the art critic. Oh, that was fantastic. So the first was Jonathan Jones from The Guardian. "Sorry, MoMA, video games are not art." Did I ever say they were art? I was talking about interaction design. Excuse me. "Exhibiting Pac-Man and Tetris alongside Picasso and Van Gogh" -- They're two floors away. (Laughter) — "will mean game over for any real understanding of art." I'm bringing in the end of the world. You know? We were talking about the rapture? It's coming. And Jonathan Jones is making it happen. So the same Guardian rebuts, "Are video games art: the debate that shouldn't be. Last week, Guardian art critic blah blah suggested that games cannot qualify as art. But is he right? And does it matter?" Thank you. Does it matter? You know, it's like once again there's this whole problem of design being often misunderstood for art, or the idea that is so diffuse that designers want to aspire to, would like to be called, artists. No. Designers aspire to be really great designers. Thank you very much. And that's more than enough. So my knight in shining armor, John Maeda, without any prompt, came out with this big declaration on why video games belong in the MoMA. And that was fantastic. And I thought that was it. But then there was another wonderfully pretentious article that came out in The New Republic, so pretentious, by Liel Leibovitz, and it said, "MoMA has mistaken video games for art." Again. "The museum is putting Pac-Man alongside Picasso." Again. "That misses the point." Excuse me. You're missing the point. And here, look, the above question is put bluntly: "Are video games art? No. Video games aren't art because they are quite thoroughly something else: code." Oh, so Picasso is not art because it's oil paint. Right? So it's so fantastic to see how these feathers that were ruffled, and these reactions, were so vehement. And you know what? The International Cat Video Film Festival didn't have that much of a reaction. (Laughter) I think this was truly fantastic. We were talking about dancing ponies, but I was really jealous of the Walker Arts Center for putting up this festival, because it's very, very wonderful. And there's this Flaubert quote that I love: "I have always tried to live in an ivory tower, but a tide of shit is beating at its walls, threatening to undermine it." I consider myself the tide of shit. (Laughter) (Applause) You know, we have to go through that. Even in the 1930s, my colleagues that were trying to put together an abstract art show had all of these works stopped by the customs officers that decided they were not art. So it's happened before, and it will happen in the future, but right now I can tell you that I am so, so proud to be able to call Pac-Man part of the MoMA collection. And the same with, for instance, Tetris, original version, the Soviet one. And you know, the amount of work -- yeah, Alexey Pajitnov was working for the Soviet government and that's how he developed Tetris, and Alexey himself reconstructed the whole game and even gave us a simulation of the cathode ray tube that makes it look slightly bombed. And it's fantastic. So behind these acquisitions is an enormous amount of work, because we're still the Museum of Modern Art, so even when we tackle popular culture, we tackle it as a form of interaction design and as something that has to go into the collection at MoMA, therefore, has to be researched. So to get to choosing Eric Chahi's wonderful Another World, amongst others, we put together a panel of experts, and we worked on this acquisition, and it's mostly myself and Kate Carmody and Paul Galloway. We worked on it for a year and a half. So many people helped us — designers of games, you might know Jamin Warren and his collaborators at Kill Screen magazine, and you know, Kevin Slavin. You name it. We bugged everybody, because we knew that we were ignorant. We were not real gamers enough, so we had to really talk to them. And so we decided, of course, to have Sim City 2000, not the other Sim City, that one in particular, so the criteria that we developed along the way were really strong, and were not only criteria of selection. They were also criteria of exhibition and of preservation. That's what makes this acquisition more than a little game or a little joke. It's truly a way to think of how to preserve and show artifacts that will more and more become part of our lives in the future. We live today, as you know very well, not in the digital, not in the physical, but in the kind of minestrone that our mind makes of the two. And that's really where interaction lies, and that's the importance of interaction. And in order to explain interaction, we need to really bring people in and make them realize how interaction is part of their lives. So when I talk about it, I don't talk only about video games, which are in a way the purest form of interaction, unadulterated by any kind of function or finality. I also talk about the MetroCard vending machine, which I consider a masterpiece of interaction. I mean, that interface is beautiful. It looks like a burly MTA guy coming out of the tunnel. You know, with your mitt you can actually paw the MetroCard, and I talk about how bad ATM machines usually are. So I let people understand that it's up to them to know how to judge interaction so as to know when it's good or when it's bad. So when I show The Sims, I try to make people really feel what it meant to have an interaction with The Sims, not only the fun but also the responsibility that came with the Tamagotchi. You know, video games can be truly deep even when they're completely mindless. I'm sure that all of you know Katamari Damacy. It's about rolling a ball and picking up as many objects as you can in a finite amount of time and hopefully you'll be able to make it into a planet. I've never made it into a planet, but that's it. Or, you know, Vib-Ribbon was not distributed here in the United States. It was a PlayStation game, but mostly for Japan. And it was one of the first video games in which you could choose your own music. So you would put into the PlayStation, you would put your own CD, and then the game would change alongside your music. So really fantastic. Not to mention Eve Online. Eve Online is an artificial universe, if you wish, but one of the diplomats that was killed in Benghazi, not Ambassador Stevens, but one of his collaborators, was a really big shot in Eve Online, so here you have a diplomat in the real world that spends his time in Eve Online to kind of test, maybe, all of his ideas about diplomacy and about universe-building, and to the point that the first announcement of the bombing was actually given on Eve Online, and after his death, several parts of the universe were named after him. And I was just recently at the Eve Online fan festival in Reykjavík that was quite amazing. I mean, we're talking about an experience that of course can seem weird to many, but that is very educational. Of course, there are games that are even more educational. Dwarf Fortress is like the holy grail of this kind of massive multiplayer online game, and in fact the two Adams brothers were in Reykjavík, and they were greeted by a standing ovation by all the Eve Online fans. It was amazing to see. And it's a beautiful game. So you start seeing here that the aesthetics that are so important to a museum collection like MoMA's are kept alive also by the selection of these games. And you know, Valve -- you know, Portal -- is an example of a video game in which you have a certain type of violence which also leads me to talk about one of the biggest issues that we had to discuss when we acquired the video games, what to do with violence. Right? We had to make decisions. At MoMA, interestingly, there's a lot of violence depicted in the art part of the collection, but when I came to MoMA 19 years ago, and as an Italian, I said, "You know what, we need a Beretta." And I was told, "No. No guns in the design collection." And I was like, "Why?" Interestingly, I learned that it's considered that in design and in the design collection, what you see is what you get. So when you see a gun, it's an instrument for killing in the design collection. If it's in the art collection, it might be a critique of the killing instrument. So it's very interesting. But we are acquiring our critical dimension also in design, so maybe one day we'll be able to acquire also the guns. But here, in this particular case, we decided, you know, with Kate and Paul, that we would have no gratuitous violence. So we have Portal because you shoot walls in order to create new spaces. We have Street Fighter II, because martial arts are good. (Laughter) But we don't have GTA because, maybe it's my own reflection, I've never been able to do anything but crashing cars and shooting prostitutes and pimps. So it was not very constructive. (Laughter) So, I'm making fun of it, but we discussed this for so many days. You have no idea. And to this day, I am ambivalent, but when you have instead games like Flow, there's no doubt. It's like, it's about serenity and it's about sublime. It's about experiencing what it means to be a sea creature. Then we have a few also side-scrollers -- classical ones. So it's quite a hefty collection. And right now, we started with the first 14, but we have several that are coming up, and the reason why we haven't acquired them yet is because you don't acquire just the game. You acquire the relationship with the company. What we want, what we aspire to, is the code. It's very hard to get, of course. But that's what would enable us to preserve the video games for a really long time, and that's what museums do. They also preserve artifacts for posterity. In absence of the code, because, you know, video game companies are not very forthcoming in some cases, in absence of that, we acquire the relationship with the company. We're going to stay with them forever. They're not going to get rid of us. And one day, we'll get that code. (Laughter) But I want to explain to you the criteria that we chose for interaction design. Aesthetics are really important. And I'm showing you Core War here, which is an early game that takes advantage aesthetically of the limitations of the processor. So the kind of interferences that you see here that look like beautiful barriers in the game are actually a consequence of the processor's limitedness, which is fantastic. So aesthetics is always important. And so is space, the spatial aspect of games. You know, I feel that the best video games are the ones that have really savvy architects that are behind them, and if they're not architects, bona fide trained in architecture, they have that feeling. But the spatial evolution in video games is extremely important. Time. The way we experience time in video games, as in other forms of interaction design, is really quite amazing. It can be real time or it can be the time within the game, as is in Animal Crossing, where seasons follow each other at their own pace. So time, space, aesthetics, and then, most important, behavior. The real core issue of interaction design is behavior. Designers that deal with interaction design behaviors that go to influence the rest of our lives. They're not just limited to our interaction with the screen. In this case, I'm showing you Marble Madness, which is a beautiful game in which the controller is a big sphere that vibrates with you, so you have a sphere that's moving in this landscape, and the sphere, the controller itself, gives you a sense of the movement. In a way, you can see how video games are the purest aspect of interaction design and are very useful to explain what interaction is. We don't want to show the video games with the paraphernalia. No arcade nostalgia. If anything, we want to show the code, and here you see Ben Fry's distellamap of Pac-Man, of the Pac-Man code. So the way we acquired the games is very interesting and very unorthodox. You see them here displayed alongside other examples of design, furniture and other parts, but there's no paraphernalia, no nostalagia, only the screen and a little shelf with the controllers. The controllers are, of course, part of the experience, so you cannot do away with it. But interestingly, this choice was not condemned too vehemently by gamers. I was afraid that they would kill us, and instead they understood, especially when I told them that I was trying to apply the same stratagem that Philip Johnson applied in 1934 when he wanted to make people understand the importance of design, and he took propeller blades and pieces of machinery and in the MoMA galleries he put them on white pedestals against white walls, as if they were Brancusi sculptures. He created this strange distance, this shock, that made people realize how gorgeous formally, and also important functionally, design pieces were. I would like to do the same with video games. By getting rid of the sticky carpets and the cigarette butts and everything else that we might remember from our childhood, I want people to understand that those are important forms of design. And in a way, the video games, the fonts and everything else lead us to make people understand a wider meaning for design. One of my dream acquisitions, which has been on hold for a few years but now will come back on the front burner, is a 747. I would like to acquire it, but without owning it. I don't want it to be at MoMA and possessed by MoMA. I want it to keep flying. So it's an acquisition where MoMA makes an arrangement with an airline and keeps the Boeing 747 flying. And the same with the "@" sign that we acquired a few years ago. It was the first example of an acquisition of something that is in the public domain. And what I say to people, it's almost as if a butterfly were flying by and we captured the shadow on the wall, and just we're showing the shadow. So in a way, we're showing a manifestation of something that is truly important and that is part of our identity but that nobody can have. And it's too long to explain the acquisition, but if you want to go on the MoMA blog, there's a long post where I explain why it's such a great example of design. Along the way, I've had to burn a few chairs. You know? I've had to do away with a few concepts of design past. But I see that people are coming along, that the audiences, paradoxically, are much more responsive and much more understanding of this expansion of design than some of my colleagues are. Design is truly everywhere, and design is as important as anything, and I'm so glad that, because of its diversity and because of its centrality to our lives, many more people are coming to it as a profession, as a passion, and as, very simply, part of their own culture. Thank you very much. (Applause)

(Music) (Applause) Thank you. Hi, everybody. Ban-gap-seum-ni-da. I'd like to share with you a little bit of me playing my life. I might look successful and happy being in front of you today, but I once suffered from severe depression and was in total despair. The violin, which meant everything to me, became a grave burden on me. Although many people tried to comfort and encourage me, their words sounded like meaningless noise. When I was just about to give everything up after years of suffering, I started to rediscover the true power of music. (Music) In the midst of hardship, it was the music that gave me -- that restored my soul. The comfort the music gave me was just indescribable, and it was a real eye-opening experience for me too, and it totally changed my perspective on life and set me free from the pressure of becoming a successful violinist. Do you feel like you are all alone? I hope that this piece will touch and heal your heart, as it did for me. (Music) (Applause) Thank you. Now, I use my music to reach people's hearts and have found there are no boundaries. My audience is anyone who is here to listen, even those who are not familiar with classical music. I not only play at the prestigious classical concert halls like Carnegie Hall and Kennedy Center, but also hospitals, churches, prisons, and restricted facilities for leprosy patients, just to mention a few. Now, with my last piece, I'd like to show you that classical music can be so much fun, exciting, and that it can rock you. Let me introduce you to my brand new project, "Baroque in Rock," which became a golden disc most recently. It's such an honor for me. I think, while I'm enjoying my life as a happy musician, I'm earning a lot more recognition than I've ever imagined. But it's now your turn. Changing your perspectives will not only transform you but also the whole world. Just play your life with all you have, and share it with the world. I really look forward to witnessing a transforming world by you, TEDsters. Play your life, and stay tuned. (Music) (Applause)

When we use the word "architect" or "designer," what we usually mean is a professional, someone who gets paid, and we tend to assume that it's those professionals who are going to be the ones to help us solve the really big, systemic design challenges that we face like climate change, urbanization and social inequality. That's our kind of working presumption. And I think it's wrong, actually. In 2008, I was just about to graduate from architecture school after several years, and go out and get a job, and this happened. The economy ran out of jobs. And a couple of things struck me about this. One, don't listen to career advisers. And two, actually this is a fascinating paradox for architecture, which is that, as a society, we've never needed design thinking more, and yet architecture was literally becoming unemployed. It strikes me that we talk very deeply about design, but actually there's an economics behind architecture that we don't talk about, and I think we need to. And a good place to start is your own paycheck. So, as a bottom-of-the-rung architecture graduate, I might expect to earn about 24,000 pounds. That's about 36,000, 37,000 dollars. Now in terms of the whole world's population, that already puts me in the top 1.95 richest people, which raises the question of, who is it I'm working for? The uncomfortable fact is that actually almost everything that we call architecture today is actually the business of designing for about the richest one percent of the world's population, and it always has been. The reason why we forgot that is because the times in history when architecture did the most to transform society were those times when, actually, the one percent would build on behalf of the 99 percent, for various different reasons, whether that was through philanthropy in the 19th century, communism in the early 20th, the welfare state, and most recently, of course, through this inflated real estate bubble. And all of those booms, in their own various ways, have now kicked the bucket, and we're back in this situation where the smartest designers and architects in the world are only really able to work for one percent of the population. Now it's not just that that's bad for democracy, though I think it probably is, it's actually not a very clever business strategy, actually. I think the challenge facing the next generation of architects is, how are we going to turn our client from the one percent to the 100 percent? And I want to offer three slightly counterintuitive ideas for how it might be done. The first is, I think we need to question this idea that architecture is about making buildings. Actually, a building is about the most expensive solution you can think of to almost any given problem. And fundamentally, design should be much, much more interested in solving problems and creating new conditions. So here's a story. The office was working with a school, and they had an old Victorian school building. And they said to the architects, "Look, our corridors are an absolute nightmare. They're far too small. They get congested between classes. There's bullying. We can't control them. So what we want you to do is re-plan our entire building, and we know it's going to cost several million pounds, but we're reconciled to the fact." And the team thought about this, and they went away, and they said, "Actually, don't do that. Instead, get rid of the school bell. And instead of having one school bell that goes off once, have several smaller school bells that go off in different places and different times, distribute the traffic through the corridors." It solves the same problem, but instead of spending several million pounds, you spend several hundred pounds. Now, it looks like you're doing yourself out of a job, but you're not. You're actually making yourself more useful. Architects are actually really, really good at this kind of resourceful, strategic thinking. And the problem is that, like a lot of design professions, we got fixated on the idea of providing a particular kind of consumer product, and I don't think that needs to be the case anymore. The second idea worth questioning is this 20th-century thing that mass architecture is about big -- big buildings and big finance. Actually, we've got ourselves locked into this Industrial Era mindset which says that the only people who can make cities are large organizations or corporations who build on our behalf, procuring whole neighborhoods in single, monolithic projects, and of course, form follows finance. So what you end up with are single, monolithic neighborhoods based on this kind of one-size-fits-all model. And a lot of people can't even afford them. But what if, actually, it's possible now for cities to be made not just by the few with a lot but also by the many with a bit? And when they do, they bring with them a completely different set of values about the place that they want to live. And it raises really interesting questions about, how will we plan cities? How will finance development? How will we sell design services? What would it mean for democratic societies to offer their citizens a right to build? And in a way it should be kind of obvious, right, that in the 21st century, maybe cities can be developed by citizens. And thirdly, we need to remember that, from a strictly economic point of view, design shares a category with sex and care of the elderly -- mostly it's done by amateurs. And that's a good thing. Most of the work takes place outside of the monetary economy in what's called the social economy or the core economy, which is people doing it for themselves. And the problem is that, up until now, it was the monetary economy which had all the infrastructure and all the tools. So the challenge we face is, how are we going to build the tools, the infrastructure and the institutions for architecture's social economy? And that began with open-source software. And over the last few years, it's been moving into the physical world with open-source hardware, which are freely shared blueprints that anyone can download and make for themselves. And that's where 3D printing gets really, really interesting. Right? When suddenly you had a 3D printer that was open-source, the parts for which could be made on another 3D printer. Or the same idea here, which is for a CNC machine, which is like a large printer that can cut sheets of plywood. What these technologies are doing is radically lowering the thresholds of time and cost and skill. They're challenging the idea that if you want something to be affordable it's got to be one-size-fits-all. And they're distributing massively really complex manufacturing capabilities. We're moving into this future where the factory is everywhere, and increasingly that means that the design team is everyone. That really is an industrial revolution. And when we think that the major ideological conflicts that we inherited were all based around this question of who should control the means of production, and these technologies are coming back with a solution: actually, maybe no one. All of us. And we were fascinated by what that might mean for architecture. So about a year and a half ago, we started working on a project called WikiHouse, and WikiHouse is an open-source construction system. And the idea is to make it possible for anyone to go online, access a freely shared library of 3D models which they can download and adapt in, at the moment, SketchUp, because it's free, and it's easy to use, and almost at the click of a switch they can generate a set of cutting files which allow them, in effect, to print out the parts from a house using a CNC machine and a standard sheet material like plywood. And the parts are all numbered, and basically what you end up with is a really big IKEA kit. (Laughter) And it goes together without any bolts. It uses wedge and peg connections. And even the mallets to make it can be provided on the cutting sheets as well. And a team of about two or three people, working together, can build this. They don't need any traditional construction skills. They don't need a huge array of power tools or anything like that, and they can build a small house of about this size in about a day. (Applause) And what you end up with is just the basic chassis of a house onto which you can then apply systems like windows and cladding and insulation and services based on what's cheap and what's available. Of course, the house is never finished. We're shifting our heads here, so the house is not a finished product. With the CNC machine, you can make new parts for it over its life or even use it to make the house next door. So we can begin to see the seed of a completely open-source, citizen-led urban development model, potentially. And we and others have built a few prototypes around the world now, and some really interesting lessons here. One of them is that it's always incredibly sociable. People get confused between construction work and having fun. But the principles of openness go right down into the really mundane, physical details. Like, never designing a piece that can't be lifted up. Or, when you're designing a piece, make sure you either can't put it in the wrong way round, or, if you do, it doesn't matter, because it's symmetrical. Probably the principal which runs deepest with us is the principal set out by Linus Torvalds, the open-source pioneer, which was that idea of, "Be lazy like a fox." Don't reinvent the wheel every time. Take what already works, and adapt it for your own needs. Contrary to almost everything that you might get taught at an architecture school, copying is good. Which is appropriate, because actually, this approach is not innovative. It's actually how we built buildings for hundreds of years before the Industrial Revolution in these sorts of community barn-raisings. The only difference between traditional vernacular architecture and open-source architecture might be a web connection, but it's a really, really big difference. We shared the whole of WikiHouse under a Creative Commons license, and now what's just beginning to happen is that groups around the world are beginning to take it and use it and hack it and tinker with it, and it's amazing. There's a cool group over in Christchurch in New Zealand looking at post-earthquake development housing, and thanks to the TED city Prize, we're working with an awesome group in one of Rio's favelas to set up a kind of community factory and micro-university. These are very, very small beginnings, and actually there's more people in the last week who have got in touch and they're not even on this map. I hope next time you see it, you won't even be able to see the map. We're aware that WikiHouse is a very, very small answer, but it's a small answer to a really, really big question, which is that globally, right now, the fastest-growing cities are not skyscraper cities. They're self-made cities in one form or another. If we're talking about the 21st-century city, these are the guys who are going to be making it. You know, like it or not, welcome to the world's biggest design team. So if we're serious about problems like climate change, urbanization and health, actually, our existing development models aren't going to do it. As I think Robert Neuwirth said, there isn't a bank or a corporation or a government or an NGO who's going to be able to do it if we treat citizens only as consumers. How extraordinary would it be, though, if collectively we were to develop solutions not just to the problem of structure that we've been working on, but to infrastructure problems like solar-powered air conditioning, off-grid energy, off-grid sanitation -- low-cost, open-source, high-performance solutions that anyone can very, very easily make, and to put them all into a commons where they're owned by everyone and they're accessible by everyone? A kind of Wikipedia for stuff? And once something's in the commons, it will always be there. How much would that change the rules? And I think the technology's on our side. If design's great project in the 20th century was the democratization of consumption -- that was Henry Ford, Levittown, Coca-Cola, IKEA — I think design's great project in the 21st century is the democratization of production. And when it comes to architecture in cities, that really matters. Thank you very much. (Applause)

What would be a good end of life? And I'm talking about the very end. I'm talking about dying. We all think a lot about how to live well. I'd like to talk about increasing our chances of dying well. I'm not a geriatrician. I design reading programs for preschoolers. What I know about this topic comes from a qualitative study with a sample size of two. In the last few years, I helped two friends have the end of life they wanted. Jim and Shirley Modini spent their 68 years of marriage living off the grid on their 1,700-acre ranch in the mountains of Sonoma County. They kept just enough livestock to make ends meet so that the majority of their ranch would remain a refuge for the bears and lions and so many other things that lived there. This was their dream. I met Jim and Shirley in their 80s. They were both only children who chose not to have kids. As we became friends, I became their trustee and their medical advocate, but more importantly, I became the person who managed their end-of-life experiences. And we learned a few things about how to have a good end. In their final years, Jim and Shirley faced cancers, fractures, infections, neurological illness. It's true. At the end, our bodily functions and independence are declining to zero. What we found is that, with a plan and the right people, quality of life can remain high. The beginning of the end is triggered by a mortality awareness event, and during this time, Jim and Shirley chose ACR nature preserves to take their ranch over when they were gone. This gave them the peace of mind to move forward. It might be a diagnosis. It might be your intuition. But one day, you're going to say, "This thing is going to get me." Jim and Shirley spent this time letting friends know that their end was near and that they were okay with that. Dying from cancer and dying from neurological illness are different. In both cases, last days are about quiet reassurance. Jim died first. He was conscious until the very end, but on his last day he couldn't talk. Through his eyes, we knew when he needed to hear again, "It is all set, Jim. We're going to take care of Shirley right here at the ranch, and ACR's going to take care of your wildlife forever." From this experience I'm going to share five practices. I've put worksheets online, so if you'd like, you can plan your own end. It starts with a plan. Most people say, "I'd like to die at home." Eighty percent of Americans die in a hospital or a nursing home. Saying we'd like to die at home is not a plan. A lot of people say, "If I get like that, just shoot me." This is not a plan either; this is illegal. (Laughter) A plan involves answering straightforward questions about the end you want. Where do you want to be when you're no longer independent? What do you want in terms of medical intervention? And who's going to make sure your plan is followed? You will need advocates. Having more than one increases your chance of getting the end you want. Don't assume the natural choice is your spouse or child. You want someone who has the time and proximity to do this job well, and you want someone who can work with people under the pressure of an ever-changing situation. Hospital readiness is critical. You are likely to be headed to the emergency room, and you want to get this right. Prepare a one-page summary of your medical history, medications and physician information. Put this in a really bright envelope with copies of your insurance cards, your power of attorney, and your do-not-resuscitate order. Have advocates keep a set in their car. Tape a set to your refrigerator. When you show up in the E.R. with this packet, your admission is streamlined in a material way. You're going to need caregivers. You'll need to assess your personality and financial situation to determine whether an elder care community or staying at home is your best choice. In either case, do not settle. We went through a number of not-quite-right caregivers before we found the perfect team led by Marsha, who won't let you win at bingo just because you're dying but will go out and take videos of your ranch for you when you can't get out there, and Caitlin, who won't let you skip your morning exercises but knows when you need to hear that your wife is in good hands. Finally, last words. What do you want to hear at the very end, and from whom would you like to hear it? In my experience, you'll want to hear that whatever you're worried about is going to be fine. When you believe it's okay to let go, you will. So, this is a topic that normally inspires fear and denial. What I've learned is if we put some time into planning our end of life, we have the best chance of maintaining our quality of life. Here are Jim and Shirley just after deciding who would take care of their ranch. Here's Jim just a few weeks before he died, celebrating a birthday he didn't expect to see. And here's Shirley just a few days before she died being read an article in that day's paper about the significance of the wildlife refuge at the Modini ranch. Jim and Shirley had a good end of life, and by sharing their story with you, I hope to increase our chances of doing the same. Thank you. (Applause)

So, when I was in art school, I developed a shake in my hand, and this was the straightest line I could draw. Now in hindsight, it was actually good for some things, like mixing a can of paint or shaking a Polaroid, but at the time this was really doomsday. This was the destruction of my dream of becoming an artist. The shake developed out of, really, a single-minded pursuit of pointillism, just years of making tiny, tiny dots. And eventually these dots went from being perfectly round to looking more like tadpoles, because of the shake. So to compensate, I'd hold the pen tighter, and this progressively made the shake worse, so I'd hold the pen tighter still. And this became a vicious cycle that ended up causing so much pain and joint issues, I had trouble holding anything. And after spending all my life wanting to do art, I left art school, and then I left art completely. But after a few years, I just couldn't stay away from art, and I decided to go to a neurologist about the shake and discovered I had permanent nerve damage. And he actually took one look at my squiggly line, and said, "Well, why don't you just embrace the shake?" So I did. I went home, I grabbed a pencil, and I just started letting my hand shake and shake. I was making all these scribble pictures. And even though it wasn't the kind of art that I was ultimately passionate about, it felt great. And more importantly, once I embraced the shake, I realized I could still make art. I just had to find a different approach to making the art that I wanted. Now, I still enjoyed the fragmentation of pointillism, seeing these little tiny dots come together to make this unified whole. So I began experimenting with other ways to fragment images where the shake wouldn't affect the work, like dipping my feet in paint and walking on a canvas, or, in a 3D structure consisting of two-by-fours, creating a 2D image by burning it with a blowtorch. I discovered that, if I worked on a larger scale and with bigger materials, my hand really wouldn't hurt, and after having gone from a single approach to art, I ended up having an approach to creativity that completely changed my artistic horizons. This was the first time I'd encountered this idea that embracing a limitation could actually drive creativity. At the time, I was finishing up school, and I was so excited to get a real job and finally afford new art supplies. I had this horrible little set of tools, and I felt like I could do so much more with the supplies I thought an artist was supposed to have. I actually didn't even have a regular pair of scissors. I was using these metal shears until I stole a pair from the office that I worked at. So I got out of school, I got a job, I got a paycheck, I got myself to the art store, and I just went nuts buying supplies. And then when I got home, I sat down and I set myself to task to really try to create something just completely outside of the box. But I sat there for hours, and nothing came to mind. The same thing the next day, and then the next, quickly slipping into a creative slump. And I was in a dark place for a long time, unable to create. And it didn't make any sense, because I was finally able to support my art, and yet I was creatively blank. But as I searched around in the darkness, I realized I was actually paralyzed by all of the choices that I never had before. And it was then that I thought back to my jittery hands. Embrace the shake. And I realized, if I ever wanted my creativity back, I had to quit trying so hard to think outside of the box and get back into it. I wondered, could you become more creative, then, by looking for limitations? What if I could only create with a dollar's worth of supplies? At this point, I was spending a lot of my evenings in -- well, I guess I still spend a lot of my evenings in Starbucks — but I know you can ask for an extra cup if you want one, so I decided to ask for 50. Surprisingly, they just handed them right over, and then with some pencils I already had, I made this project for only 80 cents. It really became a moment of clarification for me that we need to first be limited in order to become limitless. I took this approach of thinking inside the box to my canvas, and wondered what if, instead of painting on a canvas, I could only paint on my chest? So I painted 30 images, one layer at a time, one on top of another, with each picture representing an influence in my life. Or what if, instead of painting with a brush, I could only paint with karate chops? (Laughter) So I'd dip my hands in paint, and I just attacked the canvas, and I actually hit so hard that I bruised a joint in my pinkie and it was stuck straight for a couple of weeks. (Laughter) (Applause) Or, what if instead of relying on myself, I had to rely on other people to create the content for the art? So for six days, I lived in front of a webcam. I slept on the floor and I ate takeout, and I asked people to call me and share a story with me about a life-changing moment. Their stories became the art as I wrote them onto the revolving canvas. (Applause) Or what if instead of making art to display, I had to destroy it? This seemed like the ultimate limitation, being an artist without art. This destruction idea turned into a yearlong project that I called Goodbye Art, where each and every piece of art had to be destroyed after its creation. In the beginning of Goodbye Art, I focused on forced destruction, like this image of Jimi Hendrix, made with over 7,000 matches. (Laughter) Then I opened it up to creating art that was destroyed naturally. I looked for temporary materials, like spitting out food -- (Laughter) — sidewalk chalk and even frozen wine. The last iteration of destruction was to try to produce something that didn't actually exist in the first place. So I organized candles on a table, I lit them, and then blew them out, then repeated this process over and over with the same set of candles, then assembled the videos into the larger image. So the end image was never visible as a physical whole. It was destroyed before it ever existed. In the course of this Goodbye Art series, I created 23 different pieces with nothing left to physically display. What I thought would be the ultimate limitation actually turned out to be the ultimate liberation, as each time I created, the destruction brought me back to a neutral place where I felt refreshed and ready to start the next project. It did not happen overnight. There were times when my projects failed to get off the ground, or, even worse, after spending tons of time on them the end image was kind of embarrassing. But having committed to the process, I continued on, and something really surprising came out of this. As I destroyed each project, I was learning to let go, let go of outcomes, let go of failures, and let go of imperfections. And in return, I found a process of creating art that's perpetual and unencumbered by results. I found myself in a state of constant creation, thinking only of what's next and coming up with more ideas than ever. When I think back to my three years away from art, away from my dream, just going through the motions, instead of trying to find a different way to continue that dream, I just quit, I gave up. And what if I didn't embrace the shake? Because embracing the shake for me wasn't just about art and having art skills. It turned out to be about life, and having life skills. Because ultimately, most of what we do takes place here, inside the box, with limited resources. Learning to be creative within the confines of our limitations is the best hope we have to transform ourselves and, collectively, transform our world. Looking at limitations as a source of creativity changed the course of my life. Now, when I run into a barrier or I find myself creatively stumped, I sometimes still struggle, but I continue to show up for the process and try to remind myself of the possibilities, like using hundreds of real, live worms to make an image, using a pushpin to tattoo a banana, or painting a picture with hamburger grease. (Laughter) One of my most recent endeavors is to try to translate the habits of creativity that I've learned into something others can replicate. Limitations may be the most unlikely of places to harness creativity, but perhaps one of the best ways to get ourselves out of ruts, rethink categories and challenge accepted norms. And instead of telling each other to seize the day, maybe we can remind ourselves every day to seize the limitation. Thank you. (Applause)

There's something that I'd like you to see. (Video) Reporter: It's a story that's deeply unsettled millions in China: footage of a two-year-old girl hit by a van and left bleeding in the street by passersby, footage too graphic to be shown. The entire accident is caught on camera. The driver pauses after hitting the child, his back wheels seen resting on her for over a second. Within two minutes, three people pass two-year-old Wang Yue by. The first walks around the badly injured toddler completely. Others look at her before moving off. Peter Singer: There were other people who walked past Wang Yue, and a second van ran over her legs before a street cleaner raised the alarm. She was rushed to hospital, but it was too late. She died. I wonder how many of you, looking at that, said to yourselves just now, "I would not have done that. I would have stopped to help." Raise your hands if that thought occurred to you. As I thought, that's most of you. And I believe you. I'm sure you're right. But before you give yourself too much credit, look at this. UNICEF reports that in 2011, 6.9 million children under five died from preventable, poverty-related diseases. UNICEF thinks that that's good news because the figure has been steadily coming down from 12 million in 1990. That is good. But still, 6.9 million is 19,000 children dying every day. Does it really matter that we're not walking past them in the street? Does it really matter that they're far away? I don't think it does make a morally relevant difference. The fact that they're not right in front of us, the fact, of course, that they're of a different nationality or race, none of that seems morally relevant to me. What is really important is, can we reduce that death toll? Can we save some of those 19,000 children dying every day? And the answer is, yes we can. Each of us spends money on things that we do not really need. You can think what your own habit is, whether it's a new car, a vacation or just something like buying bottled water when the water that comes out of the tap is perfectly safe to drink. You could take the money you're spending on those unnecessary things and give it to this organization, the Against Malaria Foundation, which would take the money you had given and use it to buy nets like this one to protect children like this one, and we know reliably that if we provide nets, they're used, and they reduce the number of children dying from malaria, just one of the many preventable diseases that are responsible for some of those 19,000 children dying every day. Fortunately, more and more people are understanding this idea, and the result is a growing movement: effective altruism. It's important because it combines both the heart and the head. The heart, of course, you felt. You felt the empathy for that child. But it's really important to use the head as well to make sure that what you do is effective and well-directed, and not only that, but also I think reason helps us to understand that other people, wherever they are, are like us, that they can suffer as we can, that parents grieve for the deaths of their children, as we do, and that just as our lives and our well-being matter to us, it matters just as much to all of these people. So I think reason is not just some neutral tool to help you get whatever you want. It does help us to put perspective on our situation. And I think that's why many of the most significant people in effective altruism have been people who have had backgrounds in philosophy or economics or math. And that might seem surprising, because a lot of people think, "Philosophy is remote from the real world; economics, we're told, just makes us more selfish, and we know that math is for nerds." But in fact it does make a difference, and in fact there's one particular nerd who has been a particularly effective altruist because he got this. This is the website of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, and if you look at the words on the top right-hand side, it says, "All lives have equal value." That's the understanding, the rational understanding of our situation in the world that has led to these people being the most effective altruists in history, Bill and Melinda Gates and Warren Buffett. (Applause) No one, not Andrew Carnegie, not John D. Rockefeller, has ever given as much to charity as each one of these three, and they have used their intelligence to make sure that it is highly effective. According to one estimate, the Gates Foundation has already saved 5.8 million lives and many millions more, people, getting diseases that would have made them very sick, even if eventually they survived. Over the coming years, undoubtably the Gates Foundation is going to give a lot more, is going to save a lot more lives. Well, you might say, that's fine if you're a billionaire, you can have that kind of impact. But if I'm not, what can I do? So I'm going to look at four questions that people ask that maybe stand in the way of them giving. They worry how much of a difference they can make. But you don't have to be a billionaire. This is Toby Ord. He's a research fellow in philosophy at the University of Oxford. He became an effective altruist when he calculated that with the money that he was likely to earn throughout his career, an academic career, he could give enough to cure 80,000 people of blindness in developing countries and still have enough left for a perfectly adequate standard of living. So Toby founded an organization called Giving What We Can to spread this information, to unite people who want to share some of their income, and to ask people to pledge to give 10 percent of what they earn over their lifetime to fighting global poverty. Toby himself does better than that. He's pledged to live on 18,000 pounds a year -- that's less than 30,000 dollars -- and to give the rest to those organizations. And yes, Toby is married and he does have a mortgage. This is a couple at a later stage of life, Charlie Bresler and Diana Schott, who, when they were young, when they met, were activists against the Vietnam War, fought for social justice, and then moved into careers, as most people do, didn't really do anything very active about those values, although they didn't abandon them. And then, as they got to the age at which many people start to think of retirement, they returned to them, and they've decided to cut back on their spending, to live modestly, and to give both money and time to helping to fight global poverty. Now, mentioning time might lead you to think, "Well, should I abandon my career and put all of my time into saving some of these 19,000 lives that are lost every day?" One person who's thought quite a bit about this issue of how you can have a career that will have the biggest impact for good in the world is Will Crouch. He's a graduate student in philosophy, and he's set up a website called 80,000 Hours, the number of hours he estimates most people spend on their career, to advise people on how to have the best, most effective career. But you might be surprised to know that one of the careers that he encourages people to consider, if they have the right abilities and character, is to go into banking or finance. Why? Because if you earn a lot of money, you can give away a lot of money, and if you're successful in that career, you could give enough to an aid organization so that it could employ, let's say, five aid workers in developing countries, and each one of them would probably do about as much good as you would have done. So you can quintuple the impact by leading that kind of career. Here's one young man who's taken this advice. His name is Matt Weiger. He was a student at Princeton in philosophy and math, actually won the prize for the best undergraduate philosophy thesis last year when he graduated. But he's gone into finance in New York. He's already earning enough so that he's giving a six-figure sum to effective charities and still leaving himself with enough to live on. Matt has also helped me to set up an organization that I'm working with that has the name taken from the title of a book I wrote, "The Life You Can Save," which is trying to change our culture so that more people think that if we're going to live an ethical life, it's not enough just to follow the thou-shalt-nots and not cheat, steal, maim, kill, but that if we have enough, we have to share some of that with people who have so little. And the organization draws together people of different generations, like Holly Morgan, who's an undergraduate, who's pledged to give 10 percent of the little amount that she has, and on the right, Ada Wan, who has worked directly for the poor, but has now gone to Yale to do an MBA to have more to give. Many people will think, though, that charities aren't really all that effective. So let's talk about effectiveness. Toby Ord is very concerned about this, and he's calculated that some charities are hundreds or even thousands of times more effective than others, so it's very important to find the effective ones. Take, for example, providing a guide dog for a blind person. That's a good thing to do, right? Well, right, it is a good thing to do, but you have to think what else you could do with the resources. It costs about 40,000 dollars to train a guide dog and train the recipient so that the guide dog can be an effective help to a blind person. It costs somewhere between 20 and 50 dollars to cure a blind person in a developing country if they have trachoma. So you do the sums, and you get something like that. You could provide one guide dog for one blind American, or you could cure between 400 and 2,000 people of blindness. I think it's clear what's the better thing to do. But if you want to look for effective charities, this is a good website to go to. GiveWell exists to really assess the impact of charities, not just whether they're well-run, and it's screened hundreds of charities and currently is recommending only three, of which the Against Malaria Foundation is number one. So it's very tough. If you want to look for other recommendations, thelifeyoucansave.com and Giving What We Can both have a somewhat broader list, but you can find effective organizations, and not just in the area of saving lives from the poor. I'm pleased to say that there is now also a website looking at effective animal organizations. That's another cause that I've been concerned about all my life, the immense amount of suffering that humans inflict on literally tens of billions of animals every year. So if you want to look for effective organizations to reduce that suffering, you can go to Effective Animal Activism. And some effective altruists think it's very important to make sure that our species survives at all. So they're looking at ways to reduce the risk of extinction. Here's one risk of extinction that we all became aware of recently, when an asteroid passed close to our planet. Possibly research could help us not only to predict the path of asteroids that might collide with us, but actually to deflect them. So some people think that would be a good thing to give to. There's many possibilities. My final question is, some people will think it's a burden to give. I don't really believe it is. I've enjoyed giving all of my life since I was a graduate student. It's been something fulfilling to me. Charlie Bresler said to me that he's not an altruist. He thinks that the life he's saving is his own. And Holly Morgan told me that she used to battle depression until she got involved with effective altruism, and now is one of the happiest people she knows. I think one of the reasons for this is that being an effective altruist helps to overcome what I call the Sisyphus problem. Here's Sisyphus as portrayed by Titian, condemned by the gods to push a huge boulder up to the top of the hill. Just as he gets there, the effort becomes too much, the boulder escapes, rolls all the way down the hill, he has to trudge back down to push it up again, and the same thing happens again and again for all eternity. Does that remind you of a consumer lifestyle, where you work hard to get money, you spend that money on consumer goods which you hope you'll enjoy using? But then the money's gone, you have to work hard to get more, spend more, and to maintain the same level of happiness, it's kind of a hedonic treadmill. You never get off, and you never really feel satisfied. Becoming an effective altruist gives you that meaning and fulfillment. It enables you to have a solid basis for self-esteem on which you can feel your life was really worth living. I'm going to conclude by telling you about an email that I received while I was writing this talk just a month or so ago. It's from a man named Chris Croy, who I'd never heard of. This is a picture of him showing him recovering from surgery. Why was he recovering from surgery? The email began, "Last Tuesday, I anonymously donated my right kidney to a stranger. That started a kidney chain which enabled four people to receive kidneys." There's about 100 people each year in the U.S. and more in other countries who do that. I was pleased to read it. Chris went on to say that he'd been influenced by my writings in what he did. Well, I have to admit, I'm also somewhat embarrassed by that, because I still have two kidneys. But Chris went on to say that he didn't think that what he'd done was all that amazing, because he calculated that the number of life-years that he had added to people, the extension of life, was about the same that you could achieve if you gave 5,000 dollars to the Against Malaria Foundation. And that did make me feel a little bit better, because I have given more than 5,000 dollars to the Against Malaria Foundation and to various other effective charities. So if you're feeling bad because you still have two kidneys as well, there's a way for you to get off the hook. Thank you. (Applause)

Okay, it's great to be back at TED. Why don't I just start by firing away with the video? (Music) (Video) Man: Okay, Glass, record a video. Woman: This is it. We're on in two minutes. Man 2: Okay Glass, hang out with The Flying Club. Man 3: Google "photos of tiger heads." Hmm. Man 4: You ready? You ready? (Barking) Woman 2: Right there. Okay, Glass, take a picture. (Child shouting) Man 5: Go! Man 6: Holy [beep]! That is awesome. Child: Whoa! Look at that snake! Woman 3: Okay, Glass, record a video! Man 7: After this bridge, first exit. Man 8: Okay, A12, right there! (Applause) (Children singing) Man 9: Google, say "delicious" in Thai. Google Glass: อร่อยMan 9: Mmm, อร่อย. Woman 4: Google "jellyfish." (Music) Man 10: It's beautiful. (Applause) Sergey Brin: Oh, sorry, I just got this message from a Nigerian prince. He needs help getting 10 million dollars. I like to pay attention to these because that's how we originally funded the company, and it's gone pretty well. Though in all seriousness, this position that you just saw me in, looking down at my phone, that's one of the reasons behind this project, Project Glass. Because we ultimately questioned whether this is the ultimate future of how you want to connect to other people in your life, how you want to connect to information. Should it be by just walking around looking down? But that was the vision behind Glass, and that's why we've created this form factor. Okay. And I don't want to go through all the things it does and whatnot, but I want to tell you a little bit more about the motivation behind what led to it. In addition to potentially socially isolating yourself when you're out and about looking at your phone, it's kind of, is this what you're meant to do with your body? You're standing around there and you're just rubbing this featureless piece of glass. You're just kind of moving around. So when we developed Glass, we thought really about, can we make something that frees your hands? You saw all of the things people are doing in the video back there. They were all wearing Glass, and that's how we got that footage. And also you want something that frees your eyes. That's why we put the display up high, out of your line of sight, so it wouldn't be where you're looking and it wouldn't be where you're making eye contact with people. And also we wanted to free up the ears, so the sound actually goes through, conducts straight to the bones in your cranium, which is a little bit freaky at first, but you get used to it. And ironically, if you want to hear it better, you actually just cover your ear, which is kind of surprising, but that's how it works. My vision when we started Google 15 years ago was that eventually you wouldn't have to have a search query at all. You'd just have information come to you as you needed it. And this is now, 15 years later, sort of the first form factor that I think can deliver that vision when you're out and about on the street talking to people and so forth. This project has lasted now, been just over two years. We've learned an amazing amount. It's been really important to make it comfortable. So our first prototypes we built were huge. It was like cell phones strapped to your head. It was very heavy, pretty uncomfortable. We had to keep it secret from our industrial designer until she actually accepted the job, and then she almost ran away screaming. But we've come a long way. And the other really unexpected surprise was the camera. Our original prototypes didn't have cameras at all, but it's been really magical to be able to capture moments spent with my family, my kids. I just never would have dug out a camera or a phone or something else to take that moment. And lastly I've realized, in experimenting with this device, that I also kind of have a nervous tic. The cell phone is -- yeah, you have to look down on it and all that, but it's also kind of a nervous habit. Like if I smoked, I'd probably just smoke instead. I would just light up a cigarette. It would look cooler. You know, I'd be like -- But in this case, you know, I whip this out and I sit there and look as if I have something very important to do or attend to. But it really opened my eyes to how much of my life I spent just secluding away, be it email or social posts or whatnot, even though it wasn't really -- there's nothing really that important or that pressing. And with this, I know I will get certain messages if I really need them, but I don't have to be checking them all the time. Yeah, I've really enjoyed actually exploring the world more, doing more of the crazy things like you saw in the video. Thank you all very much. (Applause)

Hey guys. It's funny, someone just mentioned MacGyver, because that was, like, I loved it, and when I was seven, I taped a fork to a drill and I was like, "Hey, Mom, I'm going to Olive Garden." And -- (Drilling noise) (Laughter) And it worked really well there. And you know, it had a profound effect on me. It sounds silly, but I thought, okay, the way the world works can be changed, and it can be changed by me in these small ways. And my relationship to especially human-made objects which someone else said they work like this, well, I can say they work a different way, a little bit. And so, about 20 years later, I didn't realize the full effect of this, but I went to Costa Rica and I stayed with these Guaymí natives there, and they could pull leaves off of trees and make shingles out of them, and they could make beds out of trees, and they could -- I watched this woman for three days. I was there. She was peeling this palm frond apart, these little threads off of it, and she'd roll the threads together and make little thicker threads, like strings, and she would weave the strings together, and as the materiality of this exact very bag formed before my eyes over those three days, the materiality of the way the world works, of reality, kind of started to unravel in my mind, because I realized that this bag and these clothes and the trampoline you have at home and the pencil sharpener, everything you have is made out of either a tree or a rock or something we dug out of the ground and did some process to, maybe a more complicated one, but still, everything was made that way. And so I had to start studying, who is it that's making these decisions? Who's making these things? How did they make them? What stops us from making them? Because this is how reality is created. So I started right away. I was at MIT Media Lab, and I was studying the maker movement and makers and creativity. And I started in nature, because I saw these Guaymís doing it in nature, and there just seems to be less barriers. So I went to Vermont to Not Back to School Camp, where there's unschoolers who are just kind of hanging out and willing to try anything. So I said, "Let's go into the woods near this stream and just put stuff together, you know, make something, I don't care, geometrical shapes, just grab some junk from around you. We won't bring anything with us. And, like, within minutes, this is very easy for adults and teens to do. Here's a triangle that was being formed underneath a flowing stream, and the shape of an oak leaf being made by other small oak leaves being put together. A leaf tied to a stick with a blade of grass. The materiality and fleshiness and meat of the mushroom being explored by how it can hold up different objects being stuck into it. And after about 45 minutes, you get really intricate projects like leaves sorted by hue, so you get a color fade and put in a circle like a wreath. And the creator of this, he said, "This is fire. I call this fire." And someone asked him, "How do you get those sticks to stay on that tree?" And he's like, "I don't know, but I can show you." And I'm like, "Wow, that's really amazing. He doesn't know, but he can show you." So his hands know and his intuition knows, but sometimes what we know gets in the way of what could be, especially when it comes to the human-made, human-built world. We think we already know how something works, so we can't imagine how it could work. We know how it's supposed to work, so we can't suppose all the things that could be possible. So kids don't have as hard of a time with this, and I saw in my own son, I gave him this book. I'm a good hippie dad, so I'm like, "Okay, you're going to learn to love the moon. I'm going to give you some building blocks and they're nonrectilinear cactus building blocks, so it's totally legit." But he doesn't really know what to do with these. I didn't show him. And so he's like, "Okay, I'll just mess around with this." This is no different than the sticks are to the teens in the forest. Just going to try to put them in shapes and push on them and stuff. And before long, he's kind of got this mechanism where you can almost launch and catapult objects around, and he enlists us in helping him. And at this point, I'm starting to wonder, what kind of tools can we give people, especially adults, who know too much, so that they can see the world as malleable, so they see themselves as agents of change in their everyday lives. Because the most advanced scientists are really just kind of pushing the way the world itself works, pushing what matter can do, the most advanced artists are just pushing the medium, and any sufficiently complicated task, whether you're a cook or a carpenter or you're raising a child -- anything that's complicated -- comes up with problems that aren't solved in the middle of it, and you can't do a good job getting it done unless you can say, "Okay, well we're just going to have to refigure this. I don't care that pencils are supposed to be for writing. I'm going to use them a different way." So let me show you a little demo. This is a little piano circuit right in here, and this is an ordinary paintbrush that I smashed it together with. (Beeping) And so, with some ketchup, — (musical notes) — and then I can kind of — (musical notes) — (Laughter) (Applause) And that's awesome, right? But this is not what's awesome. What's awesome is what happens when you give the piano circuit to people. A pencil is not just a pencil. Look what it has in the middle of it. That's a wire running down the middle, and not only is it a wire, if you take that piano circuit, you can thumbtack into the middle of a pencil, and you can lay out wire on the page, too, and get electrical current to run through it. And so you can kind of hack a pencil, just by thumbtacking into it with a little piano electrical circuit. And the electricity runs through your body too. And then you can take the little piano circuit off the pencil. You can make one of these brushes just on the fly. All you do is connect to the bristles, and the bristles are wet, so they conduct, and the person's body conducts, and leather is great to paint on, and then you can start hooking to everything, even the kitchen sink. The metal in the sink is conductive. Flowing water acts like a theremin or a violin. (Musical notes) And you can even hook to the trees. Anything in the world is either conductive or not conductive, and you can use those together. So — (Laughter) — I took this to those same teens, because those teens are really awesome, and they'll try things that I won't try. I don't even have access to a facial piercing if I wanted to. And this young woman, she made what she called a hula-looper, and as the hula hoop traveled around her body, she has a circuit taped to her shirt right there. You can see her pointing to it in the picture. And every time the hula hoop would smush against her body, it would connect two little pieces of copper tape, and it would make a sound, and the next sound, and it would loop the same sounds over and over again. I ran these workshops everywhere. In Taiwan, at an art museum, this 12-year-old girl made a mushroom organ out of some mushrooms that were from Taiwan and some electrical tape and hot glue. And professional designers were making artifacts with this thing strapped onto it. And big companies like Intel or smaller design firms like Ideo or startups like Bump, were inviting me to give workshops, just to practice this idea of smashing electronics and everyday objects together. And then we came up with this idea to not just use electronics, but let's just smash computers with everyday objects and see how that goes over. And so I just want to do a quick demo. So this is the MaKey MaKey circuit, and I'm just going to set it up from the beginning in front of you. So I'll just plug it in, and now it's on by USB. And I'll just hook up the forward arrow. You guys are facing that way, so I'll hook it to this one. And I'll just hook up a little ground wire to it. And now, if I touch this piece of pizza, the slides that I showed you before should go forward. And now if I hook up this wire just by connecting it to the left arrow, I'm kind of programming it by where I hook it up, now I have a left arrow and a right arrow, so I should be able to go forwards and backwards and forwards and backwards. Awesome. And so we're like, "We gotta put a video out about this." Because no one really believed that this was important or meaningful except me and, like, one other guy. So we made a video to prove that there's lots of stuff you can do. You can kind of sketch with Play-Doh and just Google for game controllers. Just ordinary Play-Doh, nothing special. And you can literally draw joysticks and just find Pacman on your computer and then just hook it up. (Video game noises) And you know the little plastic drawers you can get at Target? Well, if you take those out, they hold water great, but you can totally cut your toes, so yeah, just be careful. You know the Happiness Project, where the experts are setting up the piano stairs, and how cool that is? Well, I think it's cool, but we should be doing that stuff ourselves. It shouldn't be a set of experts engineering the way the world works. We should all be participating in changing the way the world works together. Aluminum foil. Everybody has a cat. Get a bowl of water. This is just Photo Booth on your Mac OS. Hover the mouse over the "take a photo" button, and you've got a little cat photo booth. And so we needed hundreds of people to buy this. If hundreds of people didn't buy this, we couldn't put it on the market. And so we put it up on Kickstarter, and hundreds of people bought it in the first day. And then 30 days later, 11,000 people had backed the project. And then what the best part is, we started getting a flood of videos in of people doing crazy things with it. So this is "The Star-Spangled Banner" by eating lunch, including drinking Listerine. And we actually sent this guy materials. We're like, "We're sponsoring you, man. You're, like, a pro maker." Okay, just wait for this one. This is good. (Laughter) (Applause) And these guys at the exploratorium are playing house plants as if they were drums. And dads and daughters are completing circuits in special ways. And then this brother -- look at this diagram. See where it says "sister"? I love when people put humans on the diagram. I always add humans to any technical -- if you're drawing a technical diagram, put a human in it. And this kid is so sweet. He made this trampoline slideshow advancer for his sister so that on her birthday, she could be the star of the show, jumping on the trampoline to advance the slides. And this guy rounded up his dogs and he made a dog piano. And this is fun, and what could be more useful than feeling alive and fun? But it's also very serious because all this accessibility stuff started coming up, where people can't use computers, necessarily. Like this dad who wrote us, his son has cerebral palsy and he can't use a normal keyboard. And so his dad couldn't necessarily afford to buy all these custom controllers. And so, with the MaKey MaKey, he planned to make these gloves to allow him to navigate the web. And a huge eruption of discussion around accessibility came, and we're really excited about that. We didn't plan for that at all. And then all these professional musicians started using it, like at Coachella, just this weekend Jurassic 5 was using this onstage, and this D.J. is just from Brooklyn, right around here, and he put this up last month. And I love the carrot on the turntable. (Music: Massive Attack — "Teardrop") Most people cannot play them that way. (Laughter) And when this started to get serious, I thought, I'd better put a really serious warning label on the box that this comes in, because otherwise people are going to be getting this and they're going to be turning into agents of creative change, and governments will be crumbling, and I wouldn't have told people, so I thought I'd better warn them. And I also put this little surprise. When you open the lid of the box, it says, "The world is a construction kit." And as you start to mess around this way, I think that, in some small ways, you do start to see the landscape of your everyday life a little bit more like something you could express yourself with, and a little bit more like you could participate in designing the future of the way the world works. And so next time you're on an escalator and you drop an M&M by accident, you know, maybe that's an M&M surfboard, not an escalator, so don't pick it up right away. Maybe take some more stuff out of your pockets and throw it down, and maybe some chapstick, whatever. I used to want to design a utopian society or a perfect world or something like that. But as I'm kind of getting older and kind of messing with all this stuff, I'm realizing that my idea of a perfect world really can't be designed by one person or even by a million experts. It's really going to be seven billion pairs of hands, each following their own passions, and each kind of like a mosaic coming up and creating this world in their backyards and in their kitchens. And that's the world I really want to live in. Thank you. (Applause)

Liu Bolin: By making myself invisible, I try to question the inter-canceling relationship between our civilization and its development. Interpreter: By making myself invisible, I try to explore and question the contradictory and often inter-canceling relationship between our civilization and its development. LB: This is my first work, created in November 2005. And this is Beijing International Art Camp where I worked before the government forcibly demolished it.I used this work to express my objection. I also want to use this work to let more people pay attention to the living condition of artists and the condition of their creative freedom. In the meantime, from the beginning, this series has a protesting, reflective and uncompromising spirit. When applying makeup, I borrow a sniper's method to better protect myself and to detect the enemy, as he did. (Laughter) After finishing this series of protests, I started questioning why my fate was like this, and I realized that it's not just me -- all Chinese are as confused as I am. As you can see, these works are about family planning, election in accordance with the law and propaganda of the institution of the People's Congress. This work is called Xia Gang ("leaving post"). "Xia Gang" is a Chinese euphemism for "laid off". It refers to those people who lost their jobs during China's transition from a planned economy to a market economy. From 1998 to 2000, 21.37 million people lost their jobs in China. The six people in the photo are Xia Gang workers. I made them invisible in the deserted shop wherethey had lived and worked all their lives. On the wall behind them is the slogan of the Cultural Revolution: "The core force leading our cause forward is the Chinese Communist Party." For half a month I looked for these 6 people to participate in my work. We can only see six men in this picture,but in fact, those who are hidden here are all people who were laid off. They have just been made invisible. This piece is called The Studio. This spring, I happened to have an opportunity during my solo exhibition in Paris to shoot a work in the news studio of France 3 -- I picked the news photos of the day. One is about the war in the Middle East, and another one is about a public demonstration in France. I found that any culture has its irreconcilable contradictions. This is a joint effort between me and French artist JR. Interpreter: This is a joint effort between me and French artist JR. (Applause) LB: I tried to disappear into JR's eye, but the problem is JR only uses models with big eyes. So I tried to make my eyes bigger with my fingers. But still they are not big enough for JR, unfortunately. Interpreter: So I tried to disappear into JR's eye, but the problem is JR uses only models with big eyes. So I tried to make my eyes bigger with this gesture. But it doesn't work, my eyes are still small. LB: This one is about 9/11 memories. This is an aircraft carrier moored alongside the Hudson River. Kenny Scharf's graffiti. (Laughter) This is Venice, Italy. Because global temperatures rise, the sea level rises, and it is said thatVenice will disappear in the coming decades. This is the ancient city of Pompeii. Interpreter: This is the ancient city of Pompeii. LB: This is the Borghese Gallery in Rome. When I work on a new piece, I pay more attention to the expression of ideas. For instance, why would I make myself invisible? What will making myself invisible here cause people to think? This one is called Instant Noodles. Interpreter: This one is called Instant Noodles. (Laughter) LB: Since August 2012, harmful phosphors have been found in the instant noodle package cups from every famous brand sold in China's supermarkets. These phosphors can even cause cancer. To create this artwork, I bought a lot of packaged instant noodle cups and put them in my studio, making it look like a supermarket. And my task is to stand there, trying to be still, setting up the camera position and coordinating with my assistant and drawing the colors and shapes that are behind my body on the front of my body. If the background is simple, I usually have to stand for three to four hours. The background of this piece is more complex, so I need three to four days in advance for preparation. This is the suit I wore when I did the supermarket shoot. There is no Photoshop involved. Interpreter: This is the suit I [was] wearing when I did the supermarket shoot. There is no Photoshop involved. (Laughter) LB: These works are on China's cultural memories. And this one, this is about food safety in China. Unsafe food can harm people's health, and a deluge of magazines can confuse people's minds. (Laughter) The next pieces of work show how I made myself invisible in magazines of different languages, in different countries and at different times. I think that in art, an artist's attitude is the most important element. If an artwork is to touch someone, it must be the result of not only technique, but also the artist's thinking and struggle in life. And the repeated struggles in life create artwork, no matter in what form. (Music) That's all I want to say. Thank you. (Applause)

"Don't talk to strangers." You have heard that phrase uttered by your friends, family, schools and the media for decades. It's a norm. It's a social norm. But it's a special kind of social norm, because it's a social norm that wants to tell us who we can relate to and who we shouldn't relate to. "Don't talk to strangers" says, "Stay from anyone who's not familiar to you. Stick with the people you know. Stick with people like you." How appealing is that? It's not really what we do, is it, when we're at our best? When we're at our best, we reach out to people who are not like us, because when we do that, we learn from people who are not like us. My phrase for this value of being with "not like us" is "strangeness," and my point is that in today's digitally intensive world, strangers are quite frankly not the point. The point that we should be worried about is, how much strangeness are we getting? Why strangeness? Because our social relations are increasingly mediated by data, and data turns our social relations into digital relations, and that means that our digital relations now depend extraordinarily on technology to bring to them a sense of robustness, a sense of discovery, a sense of surprise and unpredictability. Why not strangers? Because strangers are part of a world of really rigid boundaries. They belong to a world of people I know versus people I don't know, and in the context of my digital relations, I'm already doing things with people I don't know. The question isn't whether or not I know you. The question is, what can I do with you? What can I learn with you? What can we do together that benefits us both? I spend a lot of time thinking about how the social landscape is changing, how new technologies create new constraints and new opportunities for people. The most important changes facing us today have to do with data and what data is doing to shape the kinds of digital relations that will be possible for us in the future. The economies of the future depend on that. Our social lives in the future depend on that. The threat to worry about isn't strangers. The threat to worry about is whether or not we're getting our fair share of strangeness. Now, 20th-century psychologists and sociologists were thinking about strangers, but they weren't thinking so dynamically about human relations, and they were thinking about strangers in the context of influencing practices. Stanley Milgram from the '60s and '70s, the creator of the small-world experiments, which became later popularized as six degrees of separation, made the point that any two arbitrarily selected people were likely connected from between five to seven intermediary steps. His point was that strangers are out there. We can reach them. There are paths that enable us to reach them. Mark Granovetter, Stanford sociologist, in 1973 in his seminal essay "The Strength of Weak Ties," made the point that these weak ties that are a part of our networks, these strangers, are actually more effective at diffusing information to us than are our strong ties, the people closest to us. He makes an additional indictment of our strong ties when he says that these people who are so close to us, these strong ties in our lives, actually have a homogenizing effect on us. They produce sameness. My colleagues and I at Intel have spent the last few years looking at the ways in which digital platforms are reshaping our everyday lives, what kinds of new routines are possible. We've been looking specifically at the kinds of digital platforms that have enabled us to take our possessions, those things that used to be very restricted to us and to our friends in our houses, and to make them available to people we don't know. Whether it's our clothes, whether it's our cars, whether it's our bikes, whether it's our books or music, we are able to take our possessions now and make them available to people we've never met. And we concluded a very important insight, which was that as people's relationships to the things in their lives change, so do their relations with other people. And yet recommendation system after recommendation system continues to miss the boat. It continues to try to predict what I need based on some past characterization of who I am, of what I've already done. Security technology after security technology continues to design data protection in terms of threats and attacks, keeping me locked into really rigid kinds of relations. Categories like "friends" and "family" and "contacts" and "colleagues" don't tell me anything about my actual relations. A more effective way to think about my relations might be in terms of closeness and distance, where at any given point in time, with any single person, I am both close and distant from that individual, all as a function of what I need to do right now. People aren't close or distant. People are always a combination of the two, and that combination is constantly changing. What if technologies could intervene to disrupt the balance of certain kinds of relationships? What if technologies could intervene to help me find the person that I need right now? Strangeness is that calibration of closeness and distance that enables me to find the people that I need right now, that enables me to find the sources of intimacy, of discovery, and of inspiration that I need right now. Strangeness is not about meeting strangers. It simply makes the point that we need to disrupt our zones of familiarity. So jogging those zones of familiarity is one way to think about strangeness, and it's a problem faced not just by individuals today, but also by organizations, organizations that are trying to embrace massively new opportunities. Whether you're a political party insisting to your detriment on a very rigid notion of who belongs and who does not, whether you're the government protecting social institutions like marriage and restricting access of those institutions to the few, whether you're a teenager in her bedroom who's trying to jostle her relations with her parents, strangeness is a way to think about how we pave the way to new kinds of relations. We have to change the norms. We have to change the norms in order to enable new kinds of technologies as a basis for new kinds of businesses. What interesting questions lie ahead for us in this world of no strangers? How might we think differently about our relations with people? How might we think differently about our relations with distributed groups of people? How might we think differently about our relations with technologies, things that effectively become social participants in their own right? The range of digital relations is extraordinary. In the context of this broad range of digital relations, safely seeking strangeness might very well be a new basis for that innovation. Thank you. (Applause)

When I was in my 20s, I saw my very first psychotherapy client. I was a Ph.D. student in clinical psychology at Berkeley. She was a 26-year-old woman named Alex. Now Alex walked into her first session wearing jeans and a big slouchy top, and she dropped onto the couch in my office and kicked off her flats and told me she was there to talk about guy problems. Now when I heard this, I was so relieved. My classmate got an arsonist for her first client. (Laughter) And I got a twentysomething who wanted to talk about boys. This I thought I could handle. But I didn't handle it. With the funny stories that Alex would bring to session, it was easy for me just to nod my head while we kicked the can down the road. "Thirty's the new 20," Alex would say, and as far as I could tell, she was right. Work happened later, marriage happened later, kids happened later, even death happened later. Twentysomethings like Alex and I had nothing but time. But before long, my supervisor pushed me to push Alex about her love life. I pushed back. I said, "Sure, she's dating down, she's sleeping with a knucklehead, but it's not like she's going to marry the guy." And then my supervisor said, "Not yet, but she might marry the next one. Besides, the best time to work on Alex's marriage is before she has one." That's what psychologists call an "Aha!" moment. That was the moment I realized, 30 is not the new 20. Yes, people settle down later than they used to, but that didn't make Alex's 20s a developmental downtime. That made Alex's 20s a developmental sweet spot, and we were sitting there blowing it. That was when I realized that this sort of benign neglect was a real problem, and it had real consequences, not just for Alex and her love life but for the careers and the families and the futures of twentysomethings everywhere. There are 50 million twentysomethings in the United States right now. We're talking about 15 percent of the population, or 100 percent if you consider that no one's getting through adulthood without going through their 20s first. Raise your hand if you're in your 20s. I really want to see some twentysomethings here. Oh, yay! Y'all's awesome. If you work with twentysomethings, you love a twentysomething, you're losing sleep over twentysomethings, I want to see — Okay. Awesome, twentysomethings really matter. So I specialize in twentysomethings because I believe that every single one of those 50 million twentysomethings deserves to know what psychologists, sociologists, neurologists and fertility specialists already know: that claiming your 20s is one of the simplest, yet most transformative, things you can do for work, for love, for your happiness, maybe even for the world. This is not my opinion. These are the facts. We know that 80 percent of life's most defining moments take place by age 35. That means that eight out of 10 of the decisions and experiences and "Aha!" moments that make your life what it is will have happened by your mid-30s. People who are over 40, don't panic. This crowd is going to be fine, I think. We know that the first 10 years of a career has an exponential impact on how much money you're going to earn. We know that more than half of Americans are married or are living with or dating their future partner by 30. We know that the brain caps off its second and last growth spurt in your 20s as it rewires itself for adulthood, which means that whatever it is you want to change about yourself, now is the time to change it. We know that personality changes more during your 20s than at any other time in life, and we know that female fertility peaks at age 28, and things get tricky after age 35. So your 20s are the time to educate yourself about your body and your options. So when we think about child development, we all know that the first five years are a critical period for language and attachment in the brain. It's a time when your ordinary, day-to-day life has an inordinate impact on who you will become. But what we hear less about is that there's such a thing as adult development, and our 20s are that critical period of adult development. But this isn't what twentysomethings are hearing. Newspapers talk about the changing timetable of adulthood. Researchers call the 20s an extended adolescence. Journalists coin silly nicknames for twentysomethings like "twixters" and "kidults." It's true. As a culture, we have trivialized what is actually the defining decade of adulthood. Leonard Bernstein said that to achieve great things, you need a plan and not quite enough time. Isn't that true? So what do you think happens when you pat a twentysomething on the head and you say, "You have 10 extra years to start your life"? Nothing happens. You have robbed that person of his urgency and ambition, and absolutely nothing happens. And then every day, smart, interesting twentysomethings like you or like your sons and daughters come into my office and say things like this: "I know my boyfriend's no good for me, but this relationship doesn't count. I'm just killing time." Or they say, "Everybody says as long as I get started on a career by the time I'm 30, I'll be fine." But then it starts to sound like this: "My 20s are almost over, and I have nothing to show for myself. I had a better résumé the day after I graduated from college." And then it starts to sound like this: "Dating in my 20s was like musical chairs. Everybody was running around and having fun, but then sometime around 30 it was like the music turned off and everybody started sitting down. I didn't want to be the only one left standing up, so sometimes I think I married my husband because he was the closest chair to me at 30." Where are the twentysomethings here? Do not do that. Okay, now that sounds a little flip, but make no mistake, the stakes are very high. When a lot has been pushed to your 30s, there is enormous thirtysomething pressure to jump-start a career, pick a city, partner up, and have two or three kids in a much shorter period of time. Many of these things are incompatible, and as research is just starting to show, simply harder and more stressful to do all at once in our 30s. The post-millennial midlife crisis isn't buying a red sports car. It's realizing you can't have that career you now want. It's realizing you can't have that child you now want, or you can't give your child a sibling. Too many thirtysomethings and fortysomethings look at themselves, and at me, sitting across the room, and say about their 20s, "What was I doing? What was I thinking?" I want to change what twentysomethings are doing and thinking. Here's a story about how that can go. It's a story about a woman named Emma. At 25, Emma came to my office because she was, in her words, having an identity crisis. She said she thought she might like to work in art or entertainment, but she hadn't decided yet, so she'd spent the last few years waiting tables instead. Because it was cheaper, she lived with a boyfriend who displayed his temper more than his ambition. And as hard as her 20s were, her early life had been even harder. She often cried in our sessions, but then would collect herself by saying, "You can't pick your family, but you can pick your friends." Well one day, Emma comes in and she hangs her head in her lap, and she sobbed for most of the hour. She'd just bought a new address book, and she'd spent the morning filling in her many contacts, but then she'd been left staring at that empty blank that comes after the words "In case of emergency, please call ... ." She was nearly hysterical when she looked at me and said, "Who's going to be there for me if I get in a car wreck? Who's going to take care of me if I have cancer?" Now in that moment, it took everything I had not to say, "I will." But what Emma needed wasn't some therapist who really, really cared. Emma needed a better life, and I knew this was her chance. I had learned too much since I first worked with Alex to just sit there while Emma's defining decade went parading by. So over the next weeks and months, I told Emma three things that every twentysomething, male or female, deserves to hear. First, I told Emma to forget about having an identity crisis and get some identity capital. By get identity capital, I mean do something that adds value to who you are. Do something that's an investment in who you might want to be next. I didn't know the future of Emma's career, and no one knows the future of work, but I do know this: Identity capital begets identity capital. So now is the time for that cross-country job, that internship, that startup you want to try. I'm not discounting twentysomething exploration here, but I am discounting exploration that's not supposed to count, which, by the way, is not exploration. That's procrastination. I told Emma to explore work and make it count. Second, I told Emma that the urban tribe is overrated. Best friends are great for giving rides to the airport, but twentysomethings who huddle together with like-minded peers limit who they know, what they know, how they think, how they speak, and where they work. That new piece of capital, that new person to date almost always comes from outside the inner circle. New things come from what are called our weak ties, our friends of friends of friends. So yes, half of twentysomethings are un- or under-employed. But half aren't, and weak ties are how you get yourself into that group. Half of new jobs are never posted, so reaching out to your neighbor's boss is how you get that un-posted job. It's not cheating. It's the science of how information spreads. Last but not least, Emma believed that you can't pick your family, but you can pick your friends. Now this was true for her growing up, but as a twentysomething, soon Emma would pick her family when she partnered with someone and created a family of her own. I told Emma the time to start picking your family is now. Now you may be thinking that 30 is actually a better time to settle down than 20, or even 25, and I agree with you. But grabbing whoever you're living with or sleeping with when everyone on Facebook starts walking down the aisle is not progress. The best time to work on your marriage is before you have one, and that means being as intentional with love as you are with work. Picking your family is about consciously choosing who and what you want rather than just making it work or killing time with whoever happens to be choosing you. So what happened to Emma? Well, we went through that address book, and she found an old roommate's cousin who worked at an art museum in another state. That weak tie helped her get a job there. That job offer gave her the reason to leave that live-in boyfriend. Now, five years later, she's a special events planner for museums. She's married to a man she mindfully chose. She loves her new career, she loves her new family, and she sent me a card that said, "Now the emergency contact blanks don't seem big enough." Now Emma's story made that sound easy, but that's what I love about working with twentysomethings. They are so easy to help. Twentysomethings are like airplanes just leaving LAX, bound for somewhere west. Right after takeoff, a slight change in course is the difference between landing in Alaska or Fiji. Likewise, at 21 or 25 or even 29, one good conversation, one good break, one good TED Talk, can have an enormous effect across years and even generations to come. So here's an idea worth spreading to every twentysomething you know. It's as simple as what I learned to say to Alex. It's what I now have the privilege of saying to twentysomethings like Emma every single day: Thirty is not the new 20, so claim your adulthood, get some identity capital, use your weak ties, pick your family. Don't be defined by what you didn't know or didn't do. You're deciding your life right now. Thank you. (Applause)

Thank you very much. I moved to America 12 years ago with my wife Terry and our two kids. Actually, truthfully, we moved to Los Angeles -- (Laughter) -- thinking we were moving to America, but anyway, it's a short plane ride from Los Angeles to America. I got here 12 years ago, and when I got here, I was told various things, like, "Americans don't get irony." Have you come across this idea? It's not true. I've traveled the whole length and breadth of this country. I have found no evidence that Americans don't get irony. It's one of those cultural myths, like, "The British are reserved." I don't know why people think this. We've invaded every country we've encountered. (Laughter) But it's not true Americans don't get irony, but I just want you to know that that's what people are saying about you behind your back. You know, so when you leave living rooms in Europe, people say, thankfully, nobody was ironic in your presence. But I knew that Americans get irony when I came across that legislation No Child Left Behind. Because whoever thought of that title gets irony, don't they, because -- (Laughter) (Applause) — because it's leaving millions of children behind. Now I can see that's not a very attractive name for legislation: Millions of Children Left Behind. I can see that. What's the plan? Well, we propose to leave millions of children behind, and here's how it's going to work. And it's working beautifully. In some parts of the country, 60 percent of kids drop out of high school. In the Native American communities, it's 80 percent of kids. If we halved that number, one estimate is it would create a net gain to the U.S. economy over 10 years of nearly a trillion dollars. From an economic point of view, this is good math, isn't it, that we should do this? It actually costs an enormous amount to mop up the damage from the dropout crisis. But the dropout crisis is just the tip of an iceberg. What it doesn't count are all the kids who are in school but being disengaged from it, who don't enjoy it, who don't get any real benefit from it. And the reason is not that we're not spending enough money. America spends more money on education than most other countries. Class sizes are smaller than in many countries. And there are hundreds of initiatives every year to try and improve education. The trouble is, it's all going in the wrong direction. There are three principles on which human life flourishes, and they are contradicted by the culture of education under which most teachers have to labor and most students have to endure. The first is this, that human beings are naturally different and diverse. Can I ask you, how many of you have got children of your own? Okay. Or grandchildren. How about two children or more? Right. And the rest of you have seen such children. (Laughter) Small people wandering about. I will make you a bet, and I am confident that I will win the bet. If you've got two children or more, I bet you they are completely different from each other. Aren't they? Aren't they? (Applause) You would never confuse them, would you? Like, "Which one are you? Remind me. Your mother and I are going to introduce some color-coding system, so we don't get confused." Education under No Child Left Behind is based on not diversity but conformity. What schools are encouraged to do is to find out what kids can do across a very narrow spectrum of achievement. One of the effects of No Child Left Behind has been to narrow the focus onto the so-called STEM disciplines. They're very important. I'm not here to argue against science and math. On the contrary, they're necessary but they're not sufficient. A real education has to give equal weight to the arts, the humanities, to physical education. An awful lot of kids, sorry, thank you — (Applause) — One estimate in America currently is that something like 10 percent of kids, getting on that way, are being diagnosed with various conditions under the broad title of attention deficit disorder. ADHD. I'm not saying there's no such thing. I just don't believe it's an epidemic like this. If you sit kids down, hour after hour, doing low-grade clerical work, don't be surprised if they start to fidget, you know? (Laughter) (Applause) Children are not, for the most part, suffering from a psychological condition. They're suffering from childhood. (Laughter) And I know this because I spent my early life as a child. I went through the whole thing. Kids prosper best with a broad curriculum that celebrates their various talents, not just a small range of them. And by the way, the arts aren't just important because they improve math scores. They're important because they speak to parts of children's being which are otherwise untouched. The second, thank you — (Applause) The second principle that drives human life flourishing is curiosity. If you can light the spark of curiosity in a child, they will learn without any further assistance, very often. Children are natural learners. It's a real achievement to put that particular ability out, or to stifle it. Curiosity is the engine of achievement. Now the reason I say this is because one of the effects of the current culture here, if I can say so, has been to de-professionalize teachers. There is no system in the world or any school in the country that is better than its teachers. Teachers are the lifeblood of the success of schools. But teaching is a creative profession. Teaching, properly conceived, is not a delivery system. You know, you're not there just to pass on received information. Great teachers do that, but what great teachers also do is mentor, stimulate, provoke, engage. You see, in the end, education is about learning. If there's no learning going on, there's no education going on. And people can spend an awful lot of time discussing education without ever discussing learning. The whole point of education is to get people to learn. A friend of mine, an old friend -- actually very old, he's dead. (Laughter) That's as old as it gets, I'm afraid. But a wonderful guy he was, wonderful philosopher. He used to talk about the difference between the task and achievement senses of verbs. You know, you can be engaged in the activity of something, but not really be achieving it, like dieting. It's a very good example, you know. There he is. He's dieting. Is he losing any weight? Not really. Teaching is a word like that. You can say, "There's Deborah, she's in room 34, she's teaching." But if nobody's learning anything, she may be engaged in the task of teaching but not actually fulfilling it. The role of a teacher is to facilitate learning. That's it. And part of the problem is, I think, that the dominant culture of education has come to focus on not teaching and learning, but testing. Now, testing is important. Standardized tests have a place. But they should not be the dominant culture of education. They should be diagnostic. They should help. (Applause) If I go for a medical examination, I want some standardized tests. I do. You know, I want to know what my cholesterol level is compared to everybody else's on a standard scale. I don't want to be told on some scale my doctor invented in the car. "Your cholesterol is what I call Level Orange." "Really? Is that good?""We don't know." But all that should support learning. It shouldn't obstruct it, which of course it often does. So in place of curiosity, what we have is a culture of compliance. Our children and teachers are encouraged to follow routine algorithms rather than to excite that power of imagination and curiosity. And the third principle is this: that human life is inherently creative. It's why we all have different résumés. We create our lives, and we can recreate them as we go through them. It's the common currency of being a human being. It's why human culture is so interesting and diverse and dynamic. I mean, other animals may well have imaginations and creativity, but it's not so much in evidence, is it, as ours? I mean, you may have a dog. And your dog may get depressed. You know, but it doesn't listen to Radiohead, does it? (Laughter) And sit staring out the window with a bottle of Jack Daniels. (Laughter) And you say, "Would you like to come for a walk?" He says, "No, I'm fine. You go. I'll wait. But take pictures." We all create our own lives through this restless process of imagining alternatives and possibilities, and what one of the roles of education is to awaken and develop these powers of creativity. Instead, what we have is a culture of standardization. Now, it doesn't have to be that way. It really doesn't. Finland regularly comes out on top in math, science and reading. Now, we only know that's what they do well at because that's all that's being tested currently. That's one of the problems of the test. They don't look for other things that matter just as much. The thing about work in Finland is this: they don't obsess about those disciplines. They have a very broad approach to education which includes humanities, physical education, the arts. Second, there is no standardized testing in Finland. I mean, there's a bit, but it's not what gets people up in the morning. It's not what keeps them at their desks. And the third thing, and I was at a meeting recently with some people from Finland, actual Finnish people, and somebody from the American system was saying to the people in Finland, "What do you do about the dropout rate in Finland?" And they all looked a bit bemused, and said, "Well, we don't have one. Why would you drop out? If people are in trouble, we get to them quite quickly and help them and we support them." Now people always say, "Well, you know, you can't compare Finland to America." No. I think there's a population of around five million in Finland. But you can compare it to a state in America. Many states in America have fewer people in them than that. I mean, I've been to some states in America and I was the only person there. (Laughter) Really. Really. I was asked to lock up when I left. (Laughter) But what all the high-performing systems in the world do is currently what is not evident, sadly, across the systems in America -- I mean, as a whole. One is this: They individualize teaching and learning. They recognize that it's students who are learning and the system has to engage them, their curiosity, their individuality, and their creativity. That's how you get them to learn. The second is that they attribute a very high status to the teaching profession. They recognize that you can't improve education if you don't pick great people to teach and if you don't keep giving them constant support and professional development. Investing in professional development is not a cost. It's an investment, and every other country that's succeeding well knows that, whether it's Australia, Canada, South Korea, Singapore, Hong Kong or Shanghai. They know that to be the case. And the third is, they devolve responsibility to the school level for getting the job done. You see, there's a big difference here between going into a mode of command and control in education -- That's what happens in some systems. You know, central governments decide or state governments decide they know best and they're going to tell you what to do. The trouble is that education doesn't go on in the committee rooms of our legislative buildings. It happens in classrooms and schools, and the people who do it are the teachers and the students, and if you remove their discretion, it stops working. You have to put it back to the people. (Applause) There is wonderful work happening in this country. But I have to say it's happening in spite of the dominant culture of education, not because of it. It's like people are sailing into a headwind all the time. And the reason I think is this: that many of the current policies are based on mechanistic conceptions of education. It's like education is an industrial process that can be improved just by having better data, and somewhere in, I think, the back of the mind of some policy makers is this idea that if we fine-tune it well enough, if we just get it right, it will all hum along perfectly into the future. It won't, and it never did. The point is that education is not a mechanical system. It's a human system. It's about people, people who either do want to learn or don't want to learn. Every student who drops out of school has a reason for it which is rooted in their own biography. They may find it boring. They may find it irrelevant. They may find that it's at odds with the life they're living outside of school. There are trends, but the stories are always unique. I was at a meeting recently in Los Angeles of -- they're called alternative education programs. These are programs designed to get kids back into education. They have certain common features. They're very personalized. They have strong support for the teachers, close links with the community and a broad and diverse curriculum, and often programs which involve students outside school as well as inside school. And they work. What's interesting to me is, these are called "alternative education." You know? And all the evidence from around the world is, if we all did that, there'd be no need for the alternative. (Applause) So I think we have to embrace a different metaphor. We have to recognize that it's a human system, and there are conditions under which people thrive, and conditions under which they don't. We are after all organic creatures, and the culture of the school is absolutely essential. Culture is an organic term, isn't it? Not far from where I live is a place called Death Valley. Death Valley is the hottest, driest place in America, and nothing grows there. Nothing grows there because it doesn't rain. Hence, Death Valley. In the winter of 2004, it rained in Death Valley. Seven inches of rain fell over a very short period. And in the spring of 2005, there was a phenomenon. The whole floor of Death Valley was carpeted in flowers for a while. What it proved is this: that Death Valley isn't dead. It's dormant. Right beneath the surface are these seeds of possibility waiting for the right conditions to come about, and with organic systems, if the conditions are right, life is inevitable. It happens all the time. You take an area, a school, a district, you change the conditions, give people a different sense of possibility, a different set of expectations, a broader range of opportunities, you cherish and value the relationships between teachers and learners, you offer people the discretion to be creative and to innovate in what they do, and schools that were once bereft spring to life. Great leaders know that. The real role of leadership in education -- and I think it's true at the national level, the state level, at the school level -- is not and should not be command and control. The real role of leadership is climate control, creating a climate of possibility. And if you do that, people will rise to it and achieve things that you completely did not anticipate and couldn't have expected. There's a wonderful quote from Benjamin Franklin. "There are three sorts of people in the world: Those who are immovable, people who don't get it, they don't want to get it, they're not going to do anything about it; there are people who are movable, people who see the need for change and are prepared to listen to it; and there are people who move, people who make things happen." And if we can encourage more people, that will be a movement. And if the movement is strong enough, that's, in the best sense of the word, a revolution. And that's what we need. Thank you very much. (Applause) Thank you very much. (Applause)

When I was 27 years old, I left a very demanding job in management consulting for a job that was even more demanding: teaching. I went to teach seventh graders math in the New York City public schools. And like any teacher, I made quizzes and tests. I gave out homework assignments. When the work came back, I calculated grades. What struck me was that I.Q. was not the only difference between my best and my worst students. Some of my strongest performers did not have stratospheric I.Q. scores. Some of my smartest kids weren't doing so well. And that got me thinking. The kinds of things you need to learn in seventh grade math, sure, they're hard: ratios, decimals, the area of a parallelogram. But these concepts are not impossible, and I was firmly convinced that every one of my students could learn the material if they worked hard and long enough. After several more years of teaching, I came to the conclusion that what we need in education is a much better understanding of students and learning from a motivational perspective, from a psychological perspective. In education, the one thing we know how to measure best is I.Q., but what if doing well in school and in life depends on much more than your ability to learn quickly and easily? So I left the classroom, and I went to graduate school to become a psychologist. I started studying kids and adults in all kinds of super challenging settings, and in every study my question was, who is successful here and why? My research team and I went to West Point Military Academy. We tried to predict which cadets would stay in military training and which would drop out. We went to the National Spelling Bee and tried to predict which children would advance farthest in competition. We studied rookie teachers working in really tough neighborhoods, asking which teachers are still going to be here in teaching by the end of the school year, and of those, who will be the most effective at improving learning outcomes for their students? We partnered with private companies, asking, which of these salespeople is going to keep their jobs? And who's going to earn the most money? In all those very different contexts, one characteristic emerged as a significant predictor of success. And it wasn't social intelligence. It wasn't good looks, physical health, and it wasn't I.Q. It was grit. Grit is passion and perseverance for very long-term goals. Grit is having stamina. Grit is sticking with your future, day in, day out, not just for the week, not just for the month, but for years, and working really hard to make that future a reality. Grit is living life like it's a marathon, not a sprint. A few years ago, I started studying grit in the Chicago public schools. I asked thousands of high school juniors to take grit questionnaires, and then waited around more than a year to see who would graduate. Turns out that grittier kids were significantly more likely to graduate, even when I matched them on every characteristic I could measure, things like family income, standardized achievement test scores, even how safe kids felt when they were at school. So it's not just at West Point or the National Spelling Bee that grit matters. It's also in school, especially for kids at risk for dropping out. To me, the most shocking thing about grit is how little we know, how little science knows, about building it. Every day, parents and teachers ask me, "How do I build grit in kids? What do I do to teach kids a solid work ethic? How do I keep them motivated for the long run?" The honest answer is, I don't know. (Laughter) What I do know is that talent doesn't make you gritty. Our data show very clearly that there are many talented individuals who simply do not follow through on their commitments. In fact, in our data, grit is usually unrelated or even inversely related to measures of talent. So far, the best idea I've heard about building grit in kids is something called "growth mindset." This is an idea developed at Stanford University by Carol Dweck, and it is the belief that the ability to learn is not fixed, that it can change with your effort. Dr. Dweck has shown that when kids read and learn about the brain and how it changes and grows in response to challenge, they're much more likely to persevere when they fail, because they don't believe that failure is a permanent condition. So growth mindset is a great idea for building grit. But we need more. And that's where I'm going to end my remarks, because that's where we are. That's the work that stands before us. We need to take our best ideas, our strongest intuitions, and we need to test them. We need to measure whether we've been successful, and we have to be willing to fail, to be wrong, to start over again with lessons learned. In other words, we need to be gritty about getting our kids grittier. Thank you. (Applause)

(Music) ♪ You with the sad eyes ♪ ♪ Don't be discouraged ♪ ♪ Oh, I realize ♪ ♪ It’s hard to take courage ♪ ♪ In a world full of people ♪ ♪ You can lose sight of it all ♪ ♪ And the darkness inside you ♪ ♪ Can make you feel so small ♪ ♪ But I see your true colors ♪ ♪ Shining through ♪ ♪ I see your true colors ♪ ♪ And that's why I love you ♪ ♪ So don't be afraid to let them show ♪ ♪ Your true colors ♪ ♪ True colors are beautiful ♪ ♪ Like a rainbow ♪ ♪ Show me a smile, then ♪ ♪ Don't be unhappy ♪ ♪ Can't remember when ♪ ♪ I last saw you laughing ♪ ♪ If this world makes you crazy ♪ ♪ And you've taken all you can bear ♪ ♪ You can call me up ♪ ♪ Because you know I'll be there ♪ ♪ And I'll see your true colors ♪ ♪ Shining through ♪ ♪ I see your true colors ♪ ♪ And that's why I love you ♪ ♪ So don't be afraid to let them show ♪ ♪ Your true colors ♪ ♪ True colors are beautiful ♪ ♪ Like a rainbow ♪ ♪ If this world makes you crazy ♪ ♪ And you've taken all you can bear ♪ ♪ You can call me up ♪ ♪ Because you know I'll be there ♪ ♪ And I'll see your true colors ♪ ♪ Shining through ♪ ♪ I see your true colors ♪ ♪ And that's why I love you ♪ ♪ So don't be afraid to let them show ♪ ♪ Your true colors ♪ ♪ True colors are beautiful ♪ ♪ Like a rainbow ♪ ♪ So don't be afraid to let them show ♪ ♪ True colors ♪ ♪ True colors ♪ ♪ True colors ♪ ♪ True colors are beautiful ♪ ♪ Like a rainbow ♪ (Applause)

I'm a little nervous, because my wife Yvonne said to me, she said, "Geoff, you watch the TED Talks." I said, "Yes, honey, I love TED Talks." She said, "You know, they're like, really smart, talented -- " I said, "I know, I know." (Laughter) She said, "They don't want, like, the angry black man." (Laughter) So I said, "No, I'm gonna be good, Honey, I'm gonna be good. I am." But I am angry. (Laughter) And the last time I looked, I'm -- (Applause) So this is why I'm excited but I'm angry. This year, there are going to be millions of our children that we're going to needlessly lose, that we could -- right now, we could save them all. You saw the quality of the educators who were here. Do not tell me they could not reach those kids and save them. I know they could. It is absolutely possible. Why haven't we fixed this? Those of us in education have held on to a business plan that we don't care how many millions of young people fail, we're going to continue to do the same thing that didn't work, and nobody is getting crazy about it -- right? -- enough to say, "Enough is enough." So here's a business plan that simply does not make any sense. You know, I grew up in the inner city, and there were kids who were failing in schools 56 years ago when I first went to school, and those schools are still lousy today, 56 years later. And you know something about a lousy school? It's not like a bottle of wine. Right? (Laughter) Where you say, like, '87 was like a good year, right? That's now how this thing -- I mean, every single year, it's still the same approach, right? One size fits all, if you get it, fine, and if you don't, tough luck. Just tough luck. Why haven't we allowed innovation to happen? Do not tell me we can't do better than this. Look, you go into a place that's failed kids for 50 years, and you say, "So what's the plan?" And they say, "We'll, we're going to do what we did last year this year." What kind of business model is that? Banks used to open and operate between 10 and 3. They operated 10 to 3. They were closed for lunch hour. Now, who can bank between 10 and 3? The unemployed. They don't need banks. They got no money in the banks. Who created that business model? Right? And it went on for decades. You know why? Because they didn't care. It wasn't about the customers. It was about bankers. They created something that worked for them. How could you go to the bank when you were at work? It didn't matter. And they don't care whether or not Geoff is upset he can't go to the bank. Go find another bank. They all operate the same way. Right? Now, one day, some crazy banker had an idea. Maybe we should keep the bank open when people come home from work. They might like that. What about a Saturday? What about introducing technology? Now look, I'm a technology fan, but I have to admit to you all I'm a little old. So I was a little slow, and I did not trust technology, and when they first came out with those new contraptions, these tellers that you put in a card and they give you money, I was like, "There's no way that machine is going to count that money right. I am never using that, right?" So technology has changed. Things have changed. Yet not in education. Why? Why is it that when we had rotary phones, when we were having folks being crippled by polio, that we were teaching the same way then that we're doing right now? And if you come up with a plan to change things, people consider you radical. They will say the worst things about you. I said one day, well, look, if the science says -- this is science, not me -- that our poorest children lose ground in the summertime -- You see where they are in June and say, okay, they're there. You look at them in September, they've gone down. You say, whoo! So I heard about that in '75 when I was at the Ed School at Harvard. I said, "Oh, wow, this is an important study." Because it suggests we should do something. (Laughter) Every 10 years they reproduce the same study. It says exactly the same thing: Poor kids lose ground in the summertime. The system decides you can't run schools in the summer. You know, I always wonder, who makes up those rules? For years I went to -- Look, I went the Harvard Ed School. I thought I knew something. They said it was the agrarian calendar, and people had — but let me tell you why that doesn't make sense. I never got that. I never got that, because anyone knows if you farm, you don't plant crops in July and August. You plant them in the spring. So who came up with this idea? Who owns it? Why did we ever do it? Well it just turns out in the 1840s we did have, schools were open all year. They were open all year, because we had a lot of folks who had to work all day. They didn't have any place for their kids to go. It was a perfect place to have schools. So this is not something that is ordained from the education gods. So why don't we? Why don't we? Because our business has refused to use science. Science. You have Bill Gates coming out and saying, "Look, this works, right? We can do this." How many places in America are going to change? None. None. Okay, yeah, there are two. All right? Yes, there'll be some place, because some folks will do the right thing. As a profession, we have to stop this. The science is clear. Here's what we know. We know that the problem begins immediately. Right? This idea, zero to three. My wife, Yvonne, and I, we have four kids, three grown ones and a 15-year-old. That's a longer story. (Laughter) With our first kids, we did not know the science about brain development. We didn't know how critical those first three years were. We didn't know what was happening in those young brains. We didn't know the role that language, a stimulus and response, call and response, how important that was in developing those children. We know that now. What are we doing about it? Nothing. Wealthy people know. Educated people know. And their kids have an advantage. Poor people don't know, and we're not doing anything to help them at all. But we know this is critical. Now, you take pre-kindergarten. We know it's important for kids. Poor kids need that experience. Nope. Lots of places, it doesn't exist. We know health services matter. You know, we provide health services and people are always fussing at me about, you know, because I'm all into accountability and data and all of that good stuff, but we do health services, and I have to raise a lot of money. People used to say when they'd come fund us, "Geoff, why do you provide these health services?" I used to make stuff up. Right? I'd say, "Well, you know a child who has cavities is not going to, uh, be able to study as well." And I had to because I had to raise the money. But now I'm older, and you know what I tell them? You know why I provide kids with those health benefits and the sports and the recreation and the arts? Because I actually like kids. I actually like kids. (Laughter) (Applause) But when they really get pushy, people really get pushy, I say, "I do it because you do it for your kid." And you've never read a study from MIT that says giving your kid dance instruction is going to help them do algebra better, but you will give that kid dance instruction, and you will be thrilled that that kid wants to do dance instruction, and it will make your day. And why shouldn't poor kids have the same opportunity? It's the floor for these children. (Applause) So here's the other thing. I'm a tester guy. I believe you need data, you need information, because you work at something, you think it's working, and you find out it's not working. I mean, you're educators. You work, you say, you think you've got it, great, no? And you find out they didn't get it. But here's the problem with testing. The testing that we do -- we're going to have our test in New York next week — is in April. You know when we're going to get the results back? Maybe July, maybe June. And the results have great data. They'll tell you Raheem really struggled, couldn't do two-digit multiplication -- so great data, but you're getting it back after school is over. And so, what do you do? You go on vacation. (Laughter) You come back from vacation. Now you've got all of this test data from last year. You don't look at it. Why would you look at it? You're going to go and teach this year. So how much money did we just spend on all of that? Billions and billions of dollars for data that it's too late to use. I need that data in September. I need that data in November. I need to know you're struggling, and I need to know whether or not what I did corrected that. I need to know that this week. I don't need to know that at the end of the year when it's too late. Because in my older years, I've become somewhat of a clairvoyant. I can predict school scores. You take me to any school. I'm really good at inner city schools that are struggling. And you tell me last year 48 percent of those kids were on grade level. And I say, "Okay, what's the plan, what did we do from last year to this year?" You say, "We're doing the same thing." I'm going to make a prediction. (Laughter) This year, somewhere between 44 and 52 percent of those kids will be on grade level. And I will be right every single time. So we're spending all of this money, but we're getting what? Teachers need real information right now about what's happening to their kids. The high stakes is today, because you can do something about it. So here's the other issue that I just think we've got to be concerned about. We can't stifle innovation in our business. We have to innovate. And people in our business get mad about innovation. They get angry if you do something different. If you try something new, people are always like, "Ooh, charter schools." Hey, let's try some stuff. Let's see. This stuff hasn't worked for 55 years. Let's try something different. And here's the rub. Some of it's not going to work. You know, people tell me, "Yeah, those charter schools, a lot of them don't work." A lot of them don't. They should be closed. I mean, I really believe they should be closed. But we can't confuse figuring out the science and things not working with we shouldn't therefore do anything. Right? Because that's not the way the world works. If you think about technology, imagine if that's how we thought about technology. Every time something didn't work, we just threw in the towel and said, "Let's forget it." Right? You know, they convinced me. I'm sure some of you were like me -- the latest and greatest thing, the PalmPilot. They told me, "Geoff, if you get this PalmPilot you'll never need another thing." That thing lasted all of three weeks. It was over. I was so disgusted I spent my money on this thing. Did anybody stop inventing? Not a person. Not a soul. The folks went out there. They kept inventing. The fact that you have failure, that shouldn't stop you from pushing the science forward. Our job as educators, there's some stuff we know that we can do. And we've got to do better. The evaluation, we have to start with kids earlier, we have to make sure that we provide the support to young people. We've got to give them all of these opportunities. So that we have to do. But this innovation issue, this idea that we've got to keep innovating until we really nail this science down is something that is absolutely critical. And this is something, by the way, that I think is going to be a challenge for our entire field. America cannot wait another 50 years to get this right. We have run out of time. I don't know about a fiscal cliff, but I know there's an educational cliff that we are walking over right this very second, and if we allow folks to continue this foolishness about saying we can't afford this — So Bill Gates says it's going to cost five billion dollars. What is five billion dollars to the United States? What did we spend in Afghanistan this year? How many trillions? (Applause) When the country cares about something, we'll spend a trillion dollars without blinking an eye. When the safety of America is threatened, we will spend any amount of money. The real safety of our nation is preparing this next generation so that they can take our place and be the leaders of the world when it comes to thinking and technology and democracy and all that stuff we care about. I dare say it's a pittance, what it would require for us to really begin to solve some of these problems. So once we do that, I'll no longer be angry. (Laughter) So, you guys, help me get there. Thank you all very much. Thank you. (Applause) John Legend: So what is the high school dropout rate at Harlem Children's Zone? Geoffrey Canada: Well, you know, John, 100 percent of our kids graduated high school last year in my school. A hundred percent of them went to college. This year's seniors will have 100 percent graduating high school. Last I heard we had 93 percent accepted to college. We'd better get that other seven percent. So that's just how this goes. (Applause) JL: So how do you stick with them after they leave high school? GC: Well, you know, one of the bad problems we have in this country is these kids, the same kids, these same vulnerable kids, when you get them in school, they drop out in record numbers. And so we've figured out that you've got to really design a network of support for these kids that in many ways mimics what a good parent does. They harass you, right? They call you, they say, "I want to see your grades. How'd you do on that last test? What are you talking about that you want to leave school? And you're not coming back here." So a bunch of my kids know you can't come back to Harlem because Geoff is looking for you. They're like, "I really can't come back." No. You'd better stay in school. But I'm not kidding about some of this, and it gets a little bit to the grit issue. When kids know that you refuse to let them fail, it puts a different pressure on them, and they don't give up as easy. So sometimes they don't have it inside, and they're, like, "You know, I don't want to do this, but I know my mother's going to be mad." Well, that matters to kids, and it helps get them through. We try to create a set of strategies that gets them tutoring and help and support, but also a set of encouragements that say to them, "You can do it. It is going to be hard, but we refuse to let you fail." JL: Well, thank you Dr. Canada. Please give it up for him one more time. (Applause)

At 7:45 a.m., I open the doors to a building dedicated to building, yet only breaks me down. I march down hallways cleaned up after me every day by regular janitors, but I never have the decency to honor their names. Lockers left open like teenage boys' mouths when teenage girls wear clothes that covers their insecurities but exposes everything else. Masculinity mimicked by men who grew up with no fathers, camouflage worn by bullies who are dangerously armed but need hugs. Teachers paid less than what it costs them to be here. Oceans of adolescents come here to receive lessons but never learn to swim, part like the Red Sea when the bell rings. This is a training ground. My high school is Chicago, diverse and segregated on purpose. Social lines are barbed wire. Labels like "Regulars" and "Honors" resonate. I am an Honors but go home with Regular students who are soldiers in territory that owns them. This is a training ground to sort out the Regulars from the Honors, a reoccurring cycle built to recycle the trash of this system. Trained at a young age to capitalize, letters taught now that capitalism raises you but you have to step on someone else to get there. This is a training ground where one group is taught to lead and the other is made to follow. No wonder so many of my people spit bars, because the truth is hard to swallow. The need for degrees has left so many people frozen. Homework is stressful, but when you go home every day and your home is work, you don't want to pick up any assignments. Reading textbooks is stressful, but reading does not matter when you feel your story is already written, either dead or getting booked. Taking tests is stressful, but bubbling in a Scantron does not stop bullets from bursting. I hear education systems are failing, but I believe they're succeeding at what they're built to do -- to train you, to keep you on track, to track down an American dream that has failed so many of us all. (Applause)

So I grew up in East Los Angeles, not even realizing I was poor. My dad was a high-ranking gang member who ran the streets. Everyone knew who I was, so I thought I was a pretty big deal, and I was protected, and even though my dad spent most of my life in and out of jail, I had an amazing mom who was just fiercely independent. She worked at the local high school as a secretary in the dean's office, so she got to see all the kids that got thrown out of class, for whatever reason, who were waiting to be disciplined. Man, her office was packed. So, see, kids like us, we have a lot of things to deal with outside of school, and sometimes we're just not ready to focus. But that doesn't mean that we can't. It just takes a little bit more. Like, I remember one day I found my dad convulsing, foaming at the mouth, OD-ing on the bathroom floor. Really, do you think that doing my homework that night was at the top of my priority list? Not so much. But I really needed a support network, a group of people who were going to help me make sure that I wasn't going to be a victim of my own circumstance, that they were going to push me beyond what I even thought I could do. I needed teachers, in the classroom, every day, who were going to say, "You can move beyond that." And unfortunately, the local junior high was not going to offer that. It was gang-infested, huge teacher turnover rate. So my mom said, "You're going on a bus an hour and a half away from where we live every day." So for the next two years, that's what I did. I took a school bus to the fancy side of town. And eventually, I ended up at a school where there was a mixture. There were some people who were really gang-affiliated, and then there were those of us really trying to make it to high school. Well, trying to stay out of trouble was a little unavoidable. You had to survive. You just had to do things sometimes. So there were a lot of teachers who were like, "She's never going to make it. She has an issue with authority. She's not going to go anywhere." Some teachers completely wrote me off as a lost cause. But then, they were very surprised when I graduated from high school. I was accepted to Pepperdine University, and I came back to the same school that I attended to be a special ed assistant. And then I told them, "I want to be a teacher." And boy, they were like, "What? Why? Why would you want to do that?" So I began my teaching career at the exact same middle school that I attended, and I really wanted to try to save more kids who were just like me. And so every year, I share my background with my kids, because they need to know that everyone has a story, everyone has a struggle, and everyone needs help along the way. And I am going to be their help along the way. So as a rookie teacher, I created opportunity. I had a kid one day come into my class having been stabbed the night before. I was like, "You need to go to a hospital, the school nurse, something." He's like, "No, Miss, I'm not going. I need to be in class because I need to graduate." So he knew that I was not going to let him be a victim of his circumstance, but we were going to push forward and keep moving on. And this idea of creating a safe haven for our kids and getting to know exactly what they're going through, getting to know their families -- I wanted that, but I couldn't do it in a school with 1,600 kids, and teachers turning over year after year after year. How do you get to build those relationships? So we created a new school. And we created the San Fernando Institute for Applied Media. And we made sure that we were still attached to our school district for funding, for support. But with that, we were going to gain freedom: freedom to hire the teachers that we knew were going to be effective; freedom to control the curriculum so that we're not doing lesson 1.2 on page five, no; and freedom to control a budget, to spend money where it matters, not how a district or a state says you have to do it. We wanted those freedoms. But now, shifting an entire paradigm, it hasn't been an easy journey, nor is it even complete. But we had to do it. Our community deserved a new way of doing things. And as the very first pilot middle school in all of Los Angeles Unified School District, you better believe there was some opposition. And it was out of fear -- fear of, well, what if they get it wrong? Yeah, what if we get it wrong? But what if we get it right? And we did. So even though teachers were against it because we employ one-year contracts -- you can't teach, or you don't want to teach, you don't get to be at my school with my kids. (Applause) So in our third year, how did we do it? Well, we're making school worth coming to every day. We make our kids feel like they matter to us. We make our curriculum rigorous and relevant to them, and they use all the technology that they're used to. Laptops, computers, tablets -- you name it, they have it. Animation, software, moviemaking software, they have it all. And because we connect it to what they're doing — For example, they made public service announcements for the Cancer Society. These were played in the local trolley system. Teaching elements of persuasion, it doesn't get any more real than that. Our state test scores have gone up more than 80 points since we've become our own school. But it's taken all stakeholders, working together -- teachers and principals on one-year contracts, working over and above and beyond their contract hours without compensation. And it takes a school board member who is going to lobby for you and say, "Know, the district is trying to impose this, but you have the freedom to do otherwise." And it takes an active parent center who is not only there, showing a presence every day, but who is part of our governance, making decisions for their kids, our kids. Because why should our students have to go so far away from where they live? They deserve a quality school in their neighborhood, a school that they can be proud to say they attend, and a school that the community can be proud of as well, and they need teachers to fight for them every day and empower them to move beyond their circumstances. Because it's time that kids like me stop being the exception, and we become the norm. Thank you. (Applause)

I teach chemistry. (Explosion) All right, all right. So more than just explosions, chemistry is everywhere. Have you ever found yourself at a restaurant spacing out just doing this over and over? Some people nodding yes. Recently, I showed this to my students, and I just asked them to try and explain why it happened. The questions and conversations that followed were fascinating. Check out this video that Maddie from my period three class sent me that evening. (Clang) (Laughs) Now obviously, as Maddie's chemistry teacher, I love that she went home and continued to geek out about this kind of ridiculous demonstration that we did in class. But what fascinated me more is that Maddie's curiosity took her to a new level. If you look inside that beaker, you might see a candle. Maddie's using temperature to extend this phenomenon to a new scenario. You know, questions and curiosity like Maddie's are magnets that draw us towards our teachers, and they transcend all technology or buzzwords in education. But if we place these technologies before student inquiry, we can be robbing ourselves of our greatest tool as teachers: our students' questions. For example, flipping a boring lecture from the classroom to the screen of a mobile device might save instructional time, but if it is the focus of our students' experience, it's the same dehumanizing chatter just wrapped up in fancy clothing. But if instead we have the guts to confuse our students, perplex them, and evoke real questions, through those questions, we as teachers have information that we can use to tailor robust and informed methods of blended instruction. So, 21st-century lingo jargon mumbo jumbo aside, the truth is, I've been teaching for 13 years now, and it took a life-threatening situation to snap me out of 10 years of pseudo-teaching and help me realize that student questions are the seeds of real learning, not some scripted curriculum that gave them tidbits of random information. In May of 2010, at 35 years old, with a two-year-old at home and my second child on the way, I was diagnosed with a large aneurysm at the base of my thoracic aorta. This led to open-heart surgery. This is the actual real email from my doctor right there. Now, when I got this, I was -- press Caps Lock -- absolutely freaked out, okay? But I found surprising moments of comfort in the confidence that my surgeon embodied. Where did this guy get this confidence, the audacity of it? So when I asked him, he told me three things. He said first, his curiosity drove him to ask hard questions about the procedure, about what worked and what didn't work. Second, he embraced, and didn't fear, the messy process of trial and error, the inevitable process of trial and error. And third, through intense reflection, he gathered the information that he needed to design and revise the procedure, and then, with a steady hand, he saved my life. Now I absorbed a lot from these words of wisdom, and before I went back into the classroom that fall, I wrote down three rules of my own that I bring to my lesson planning still today. Rule number one: Curiosity comes first. Questions can be windows to great instruction, but not the other way around. Rule number two: Embrace the mess. We're all teachers. We know learning is ugly. And just because the scientific method is allocated to page five of section 1.2 of chapter one of the one that we all skip, okay, trial and error can still be an informal part of what we do every single day at Sacred Heart Cathedral in room 206. And rule number three: Practice reflection. What we do is important. It deserves our care, but it also deserves our revision. Can we be the surgeons of our classrooms? As if what we are doing one day will save lives. Our students our worth it. And each case is different. (Explosion) All right. Sorry. The chemistry teacher in me just needed to get that out of my system before we move on. So these are my daughters. On the right we have little Emmalou -- Southern family. And, on the left, Riley. Now Riley's going to be a big girl in a couple weeks here. She's going to be four years old, and anyone who knows a four-year-old knows that they love to ask, "Why?" Yeah. Why. I could teach this kid anything because she is curious about everything. We all were at that age. But the challenge is really for Riley's future teachers, the ones she has yet to meet. How will they grow this curiosity? You see, I would argue that Riley is a metaphor for all kids, and I think dropping out of school comes in many different forms -- to the senior who's checked out before the year's even begun or that empty desk in the back of an urban middle school's classroom. But if we as educators leave behind this simple role as disseminators of content and embrace a new paradigm as cultivators of curiosity and inquiry, we just might bring a little bit more meaning to their school day, and spark their imagination. Thank you very much. (Applause)

Everyone needs a coach. It doesn't matter whether you're a basketball player, a tennis player, a gymnast or a bridge player. (Laughter) My bridge coach, Sharon Osberg, says there are more pictures of the back of her head than anyone else's in the world. (Laughter) Sorry, Sharon. Here you go. We all need people who will give us feedback. That's how we improve. Unfortunately, there's one group of people who get almost no systematic feedback to help them do their jobs better, and these people have one of the most important jobs in the world. I'm talking about teachers. When Melinda and I learned how little useful feedback most teachers get, we were blown away. Until recently, over 98 percent of teachers just got one word of feedback: Satisfactory. If all my bridge coach ever told me was that I was "satisfactory," I would have no hope of ever getting better. How would I know who was the best? How would I know what I was doing differently? Today, districts are revamping the way they evaluate teachers, but we still give them almost no feedback that actually helps them improve their practice. Our teachers deserve better. The system we have today isn't fair to them. It's not fair to students, and it's putting America's global leadership at risk. So today I want to talk about how we can help all teachers get the tools for improvement they want and deserve. Let's start by asking who's doing well. Well, unfortunately there's no international ranking tables for teacher feedback systems. So I looked at the countries whose students perform well academically, and looked at what they're doing to help their teachers improve. Consider the rankings for reading proficiency. The U.S. isn't number one. We're not even in the top 10. We're tied for 15th with Iceland and Poland. Now, out of all the places that do better than the U.S. in reading, how many of them have a formal system for helping teachers improve? Eleven out of 14. The U.S. is tied for 15th in reading, but we're 23rd in science and 31st in math. So there's really only one area where we're near the top, and that's in failing to give our teachers the help they need to develop their skills. Let's look at the best academic performer: the province of Shanghai, China. Now, they rank number one across the board, in reading, math and science, and one of the keys to Shanghai's incredible success is the way they help teachers keep improving. They made sure that younger teachers get a chance to watch master teachers at work. They have weekly study groups, where teachers get together and talk about what's working. They even require each teacher to observe and give feedback to their colleagues. You might ask, why is a system like this so important? It's because there's so much variation in the teaching profession. Some teachers are far more effective than others. In fact, there are teachers throughout the country who are helping their students make extraordinary gains. If today's average teacher could become as good as those teachers, our students would be blowing away the rest of the world. So we need a system that helps all our teachers be as good as the best. What would that system look like? Well, to find out, our foundation has been working with 3,000 teachers in districts across the country on a project called Measures of Effective Teaching. We had observers watch videos of teachers in the classroom and rate how they did on a range of practices. For example, did they ask their students challenging questions? Did they find multiple ways to explain an idea? We also had students fill out surveys with questions like, "Does your teacher know when the class understands a lesson?" "Do you learn to correct your mistakes?" And what we found is very exciting. First, the teachers who did well on these observations had far better student outcomes. So it tells us we're asking the right questions. And second, teachers in the program told us that these videos and these surveys from the students were very helpful diagnostic tools, because they pointed to specific places where they can improve. I want to show you what this video component of MET looks like in action. (Music) (Video) Sarah Brown Wessling: Good morning everybody. Let's talk about what's going on today. To get started, we're doing a peer review day, okay? A peer review day, and our goal by the end of class is for you to be able to determine whether or not you have moves to prove in your essays. My name is Sarah Brown Wessling. I am a high school English teacher at Johnston High School in Johnston, Iowa. Turn to somebody next to you. Tell them what you think I mean when I talk about moves to prove. I've talk about -- I think that there is a difference for teachers between the abstract of how we see our practice and then the concrete reality of it. Okay, so I would like you to please bring up your papers. I think what video offers for us is a certain degree of reality. You can't really dispute what you see on the video, and there is a lot to be learned from that, and there are a lot of ways that we can grow as a profession when we actually get to see this. I just have a flip camera and a little tripod and invested in this tiny little wide-angle lens. At the beginning of class, I just perch it in the back of the classroom. It's not a perfect shot. It doesn't catch every little thing that's going on. But I can hear the sound. I can see a lot. And I'm able to learn a lot from it. So it really has been a simple but powerful tool in my own reflection. All right, let's take a look at the long one first, okay? Once I'm finished taping, then I put it in my computer, and then I'll scan it and take a peek at it. If I don't write things down, I don't remember them. So having the notes is a part of my thinking process, and I discover what I'm seeing as I'm writing. I really have used it for my own personal growth and my own personal reflection on teaching strategy and methodology and classroom management, and just all of those different facets of the classroom. I'm glad that we've actually done the process before so we can kind of compare what works, what doesn't. I think that video exposes so much of what's intrinsic to us as teachers in ways that help us learn and help us understand, and then help our broader communities understand what this complex work is really all about. I think it is a way to exemplify and illustrate things that we cannot convey in a lesson plan, things you cannot convey in a standard, things that you cannot even sometimes convey in a book of pedagogy. Alrighty, everybody, have a great weekend. I'll see you later. [Every classroom could look like that] (Applause) Bill Gates: One day, we'd like every classroom in America to look something like that. But we still have more work to do. Diagnosing areas where a teacher needs to improve is only half the battle. We also have to give them the tools they need to act on the diagnosis. If you learn that you need to improve the way you teach fractions, you should be able to watch a video of the best person in the world teaching fractions. So building this complete teacher feedback and improvement system won't be easy. For example, I know some teachers aren't immediately comfortable with the idea of a camera in the classroom. That's understandable, but our experience with MET suggests that if teachers manage the process, if they collect video in their own classrooms, and they pick the lessons they want to submit, a lot of them will be eager to participate. Building this system will also require a considerable investment. Our foundation estimates that it could cost up to five billion dollars. Now that's a big number, but to put it in perspective, it's less than two percent of what we spend every year on teacher salaries. The impact for teachers would be phenomenal. We would finally have a way to give them feedback, as well as the means to act on it. But this system would have an even more important benefit for our country. It would put us on a path to making sure all our students get a great education, find a career that's fulfilling and rewarding, and have a chance to live out their dreams. This wouldn't just make us a more successful country. It would also make us a more fair and just one, too. I'm excited about the opportunity to give all our teachers the support they want and deserve. I hope you are too. Thank you. (Applause)

Growing up in Taiwan as the daughter of a calligrapher, one of my most treasured memories was my mother showing me the beauty, the shape and the form of Chinese characters. Ever since then, I was fascinated by this incredible language. But to an outsider, it seems to be as impenetrable as the Great Wall of China. Over the past few years, I've been wondering if I can break down this wall, so anyone who wants to understand and appreciate the beauty of this sophisticated language could do so. I started thinking about how a new, fast method of learning Chinese might be useful. Since the age of five, I started to learn how to draw every single stroke for each character in the correct sequence. I learned new characters every day during the course of the next 15 years. Since we only have five minutes, it's better that we have a fast and simpler way. A Chinese scholar would understand 20,000 characters. You only need 1,000 to understand the basic literacy. The top 200 will allow you to comprehend 40 percent of basic literature -- enough to read road signs, restaurant menus, to understand the basic idea of the web pages or the newspapers. Today I'm going to start with eight to show you how the method works. You are ready? Open your mouth as wide as possible until it's square. You get a mouth. This is a person going for a walk. Person. If the shape of the fire is a person with two arms on both sides, as if she was yelling frantically, "Help! I'm on fire!" -- This symbol actually is originally from the shape of the flame, but I like to think that way. Whichever works for you. This is a tree. Tree. This is a mountain. The sun. The moon. The symbol of the door looks like a pair of saloon doors in the wild west. I call these eight characters radicals. They are the building blocks for you to create lots more characters. A person. If someone walks behind, that is "to follow." As the old saying goes, two is company, three is a crowd. If a person stretched their arms wide, this person is saying, "It was this big." The person inside the mouth, the person is trapped. He's a prisoner, just like Jonah inside the whale. One tree is a tree. Two trees together, we have the woods. Three trees together, we create the forest. Put a plank underneath the tree, we have the foundation. Put a mouth on the top of the tree, that's "idiot." (Laughter) Easy to remember, since a talking tree is pretty idiotic. Remember fire? Two fires together, I get really hot. Three fires together, that's a lot of flames. Set the fire underneath the two trees, it's burning. For us, the sun is the source of prosperity. Two suns together, prosperous. Three together, that's sparkles. Put the sun and the moon shining together, it's brightness. It also means tomorrow, after a day and a night. The sun is coming up above the horizon. Sunrise. A door. Put a plank inside the door, it's a door bolt. Put a mouth inside the door, asking questions. Knock knock. Is anyone home? This person is sneaking out of a door, escaping, evading. On the left, we have a woman. Two women together, they have an argument. (Laughter) Three women together, be careful, it's adultery. So we have gone through almost 30 characters. By using this method, the first eight radicals will allow you to build 32. The next group of eight characters will build an extra 32. So with very little effort, you will be able to learn a couple hundred characters, which is the same as a Chinese eight-year-old. So after we know the characters, we start building phrases. For example, the mountain and the fire together, we have fire mountain. It's a volcano. We know Japan is the land of the rising sun. This is a sun placed with the origin, because Japan lies to the east of China. So a sun, origin together, we build Japan. A person behind Japan, what do we get? A Japanese person. The character on the left is two mountains stacked on top of each other. In ancient China, that means in exile, because Chinese emperors, they put their political enemies in exile beyond mountains. Nowadays, exile has turned into getting out. A mouth which tells you where to get out is an exit. This is a slide to remind me that I should stop talking and get off of the stage. Thank you. (Applause)

In this talk today, I want to present a different idea for why investing in early childhood education makes sense as a public investment. It's a different idea, because usually, when people talk about early childhood programs, they talk about all the wonderful benefits for participants in terms of former participants, in preschool, they have better K-12 test scores, better adult earnings. Now that's all very important, but what I want to talk about is what preschool does for state economies and for promoting state economic development. And that's actually crucial because if we're going to get increased investment in early childhood programs, we need to interest state governments in this. The federal government has a lot on its plate, and state governments are going to have to step up. So we have to appeal to them, the legislators in the state government, and turn to something they understand, that they have to promote the economic development of their state economy. Now, by promoting economic development, I don't mean anything magical. All I mean is, is that early childhood education can bring more and better jobs to a state and can thereby promote higher per capita earnings for the state's residents. Now, I think it's fair to say that when people think about state and local economic development, they don't generally think first about what they're doing about childcare and early childhood programs. I know this. I've spent most of my career researching these programs. I've talked to a lot of directors of state economic development agencies about these issues, a lot of legislators about these issues. When legislators and others think about economic development, what they first of all think about are business tax incentives, property tax abatements, job creation tax credits, you know, there are a million of these programs all over the place. So for example, states compete very vigorously to attract new auto plants or expanded auto plants. They hand out all kinds of business tax breaks. Now, those programs can make sense if they in fact induce new location decisions, and the way they can make sense is, by creating more and better jobs, they raise employment rates, raise per capita earnings of state residents. So there is a benefit to state residents that corresponds to the costs that they're paying by paying for these business tax breaks. My argument is essentially that early childhood programs can do exactly the same thing, create more and better jobs, but in a different way. It's a somewhat more indirect way. These programs can promote more and better jobs by, you build it, you invest in high-quality preschool, it develops the skills of your local workforce if enough of them stick around, and, in turn, that higher-quality local workforce will be a key driver of creating jobs and creating higher earnings per capita in the local community. Now, let me turn to some numbers on this. Okay. If you look at the research evidence -- that's extensive -- on how much early childhood programs affect the educational attainment, wages and skills of former participants in preschool as adults, you take those known effects, you take how many of those folks will be expected to stick around the state or local economy and not move out, and you take research on how much skills drive job creation, you will conclude, from these three separate lines of research, that for every dollar invested in early childhood programs, the per capita earnings of state residents go up by two dollars and 78 cents, so that's a three-to-one return. Now you can get much higher returns, of up to 16-to-one, if you include anti-crime benefits, if you include benefits to former preschool participants who move to some other state, but there's a good reason for focusing on these three dollars because this is salient and important to state legislators and state policy makers, and it's the states that are going to have to act. So there is this key benefit that is relevant to state policy makers in terms of economic development. Now, one objection you often hear, or maybe you don't hear it because people are too polite to say it, is, why should I pay more taxes to invest in other people's children? What's in it for me? And the trouble with that objection, it reflects a total misunderstanding of how much local economies involve everyone being interdependent. Specifically, the interdependency here is, is that there are huge spillovers of skills -- that when other people's children get more skills, that actually increases the prosperity of everyone, including people whose skills don't change. So for example, numerous research studies have shown if you look at what really drives the growth rate of metropolitan areas, it's not so much low taxes, low cost, low wages; it's the skills of the area. Particularly, the proxy for skills that people use is percentage of college graduates in the area. So when you look, for example, at metropolitan areas such as the Boston area, Minneapolis-St. Paul, Silicon Valley, these areas are not doing well economically because they're low-cost. I don't know if you ever tried to buy a house in Silicon Valley. It's not exactly a low-cost proposition. They are growing because they have high levels of skills. So when we invest in other people's children, and build up those skills, we increase the overall job growth of a metro area. As another example, if we look at what determines an individual's wages, and we do statistical exploration of that, what determines wages, we know that the individual's wages will depend, in part, on that individual's education, for example whether or not they have a college degree. One of the very interesting facts is that, in addition, we find that even once we hold constant, statistically, the effect of your own education, the education of everyone else in your metropolitan area also affects your wages. So specifically, if you hold constant your education, you stick in percentage of college graduates in your metro area, you will find that has a significant positive effect on your wages without changing your education at all. In fact, this effect is so strong that when someone gets a college degree, the spillover effects of this on the wages of others in the metropolitan area are actually greater than the direct effects. So if someone gets a college degree, their lifetime earnings go up by a huge amount, over 700,000 dollars. There's an effect on everyone else in the metro area of driving up the percentage of college graduates in the metro area, and if you add that up -- it's a small effect for each person, but if you add that up across all the people in the metro area, you actually get that the increase in wages for everyone else in the metropolitan area adds up to almost a million dollars. That's actually greater than the direct benefits of the person choosing to get education. Now, what's going on here? What can explain these huge spillover effects of education? Well, let's think about it this way. I can be the most skilled person in the world, but if everyone else at my firm lacks skills, my employer is going to find it more difficult to introduce new technology, new production techniques. So as a result, my employer is going to be less productive. They will not be able to afford to pay me as good wages. Even if everyone at my firm has good skills, if the workers at the suppliers to my firm do not have good skills, my firm is going to be less competitive competing in national and international markets. And again, the firm that's less competitive will not be able to pay as good wages, and then, particularly in high-tech businesses, they're constantly stealing ideas and workers from other businesses. So clearly the productivity of firms in Silicon Valley has a lot to do with the skills not only of the workers at their firm, but the workers at all the other firms in the metro area. So as a result, if we can invest in other people's children through preschool and other early childhood programs that are high-quality, we not only help those children, we help everyone in the metropolitan area gain in wages and we'll have the metropolitan area gain in job growth. Another objection used sometimes here to invest in early childhood programs is concern about people moving out. So, you know, maybe Ohio's thinking about investing in more preschool education for children in Columbus, Ohio, but they're worried that these little Buckeyes will, for some strange reason, decide to move to Ann Arbor, Michigan, and become Wolverines. And maybe Michigan will be thinking about investing in preschool in Ann Arbor, Michigan, and be worried these little Wolverines will end up moving to Ohio and becoming Buckeyes. And so they'll both underinvest because everyone's going to move out. Well, the reality is, if you look at the data, Americans aren't as hyper-mobile as people sometimes assume. The data is that over 60 percent of Americans spend most of their working careers in the state they were born in, over 60 percent. That percentage does not vary much from state to state. It doesn't vary much with the state's economy, whether it's depressed or booming, it doesn't vary much over time. So the reality is, if you invest in kids, they will stay. Or at least, enough of them will stay that it will pay off for your state economy. Okay, so to sum up, there is a lot of research evidence that early childhood programs, if run in a high-quality way, pay off in higher adult skills. There's a lot of research evidence that those folks will stick around the state economy, and there's a lot of evidence that having more workers with higher skills in your local economy pays off in higher wages and job growth for your local economy, and if you calculate the numbers for each dollar, we get about three dollars back in benefits for the state economy. So in my opinion, the research evidence is compelling and the logic of this is compelling. So what are the barriers to getting it done? Well, one obvious barrier is cost. So if you look at what it would cost if every state government invested in universal preschool at age four, full-day preschool at age four, the total annual national cost would be roughly 30 billion dollars. So, 30 billion dollars is a lot of money. On the other hand, if you reflect on that the U.S.'s population is over 300 million, we're talking about an amount of money that amounts to 100 dollars per capita. Okay? A hundred dollars per capita, per person, is something that any state government can afford to do. It's just a simple matter of political will to do it. And, of course, as I mentioned, this cost has corresponding benefits. I mentioned there's a multiplier of about three, 2.78, for the state economy, in terms of over 80 billion in extra earnings. And if we want to translate that from just billions of dollars to something that might mean something, what we're talking about is that, for the average low-income kid, that would increase earnings by about 10 percent over their whole career, just doing the preschool, not improving K-12 or anything else after that, not doing anything with college tuition or access, just directly improving preschool, and we would get five percent higher earnings for middle-class kids. So this is an investment that pays off in very concrete terms for a broad range of income groups in the state's population and produces large and tangible benefits. Now, that's one barrier. I actually think the more profound barrier is the long-term nature of the benefits from early childhood programs. So the argument I'm making is, is that we're increasing the quality of our local workforce, and thereby increasing economic development. Obviously if we have a preschool with four-year-olds, we're not sending these kids out at age five to work in the sweatshops, right? At least I hope not. So we're talking about an investment that in terms of impacts on the state economy is not going to really pay off for 15 or 20 years, and of course America is notorious for being a short term-oriented society. Now one response you can make to this, and I sometimes have done this in talks, is people can talk about, there are benefits for these programs in reducing special ed and remedial education costs, there are benefits, parents care about preschool, maybe we'll get some migration effects from parents seeking good preschool, and I think those are true, but in some sense they're missing the point. Ultimately, this is something we're investing in now for the future. And so what I want to leave you with is what I think is the ultimate question. I mean, I'm an economist, but this is ultimately not an economic question, it's a moral question: Are we willing, as Americans, are we as a society still capable of making the political choice to sacrifice now by paying more taxes in order to improve the long-term future of not only our kids, but our community? Are we still capable of that as a country? And that's something that each and every citizen and voter needs to ask themselves. Is that something that you are still invested in, that you still believe in the notion of investment? That is the notion of investment. You sacrifice now for a return later. So I think the research evidence on the benefits of early childhood programs for the local economy is extremely strong. However, the moral and political choice is still up to us, as citizens and as voters. Thank you very much. (Applause)

I have spent my entire life either at the schoolhouse, on the way to the schoolhouse, or talking about what happens in the schoolhouse. Both my parents were educators, my maternal grandparents were educators, and for the past 40 years I've done the same thing. And so, needless to say, over those years I've had a chance to look at education reform from a lot of perspectives. Some of those reforms have been good. Some of them have been not so good. And we know why kids drop out. We know why kids don't learn. It's either poverty, low attendance, negative peer influences. We know why. But one of the things that we never discuss or we rarely discuss is the value and importance of human connection, relationships. James Comer says that no significant learning can occur without a significant relationship. George Washington Carver says all learning is understanding relationships. Everyone in this room has been affected by a teacher or an adult. For years, I have watched people teach. I have looked at the best and I've look at some of the worst. A colleague said to me one time, "They don't pay me to like the kids. They pay me to teach a lesson. The kids should learn it. I should teach it. They should learn it. Case closed." Well, I said to her, "You know, kids don't learn from people they don't like." (Laughter) (Applause) She said, "That's just a bunch of hooey." And I said to her, "Well, your year is going to be long and arduous, dear." Needless to say it was. Some people think that you can either have it in you to build a relationship or you don't. I think Stephen Covey had the right idea. He said you ought to just throw in a few simple things, like seeking first to understand as opposed to being understood, simple things like apologizing. You ever thought about that? Tell a kid you're sorry, they're in shock. I taught a lesson once on ratios. I'm not real good with math, but I was working on it. And I got back and looked at that teacher edition. I'd taught the whole lesson wrong. (Laughter) So I came back to class the next day, and I said, "Look, guys, I need to apologize. I taught the whole lesson wrong. I'm so sorry." They said, "That's okay, Ms. Pierson. You were so excited, we just let you go." (Laughter) (Applause) I have had classes that were so low, so academically deficient that I cried. I wondered, how am I going to take this group in nine months from where they are to where they need to be? And it was difficult. It was awfully hard. How do I raise the self-esteem of a child and his academic achievement at the same time? One year I came up with a bright idea. I told all my students, "You were chosen to be in my class because I am the best teacher and you are the best students, they put us all together so we could show everybody else how to do it." One of the students said, "Really?" (Laughter) I said, "Really. We have to show the other classes how to do it, so when we walk down the hall, people will notice us, so you can't make noise. You just have to strut." And I gave them a saying to say: "I am somebody. I was somebody when I came. I'll be a better somebody when I leave. I am powerful, and I am strong. I deserve the education that I get here. I have things to do, people to impress, and places to go." And they said, "Yeah!" You say it long enough, it starts to be a part of you. And so — (Applause) I gave a quiz, 20 questions. A student missed 18. I put a "+2" on his paper and a big smiley face. He said, "Ms. Pierson, is this an F?" I said, "Yes." He said, "Then why'd you put a smiley face?" I said, "Because you're on a roll. You got two right. You didn't miss them all." I said, "And when we review this, won't you do better?" He said, "Yes, ma'am, I can do better." You see, "-18" sucks all the life out of you. "+2" said, "I ain't all bad." (Laughter) (Applause) For years I watched my mother take the time at recess to review, go on home visits in the afternoon, buy combs and brushes and peanut butter and crackers to put in her desk drawer for kids that needed to eat, and a washcloth and some soap for the kids who didn't smell so good. See, it's hard to teach kids who stink. And kids can be cruel. And so she kept those things in her desk, and years later, after she retired, I watched some of those same kids come through and say to her, "You know, Ms. Walker, you made a difference in my life. You made it work for me. You made me feel like I was somebody, when I knew, at the bottom, I wasn't. And I want you to just see what I've become." And when my mama died two years ago at 92, there were so many former students at her funeral, it brought tears to my eyes, not because she was gone, but because she left a legacy of relationships that could never disappear. Can we stand to have more relationships? Absolutely. Will you like all your children? Of course not. And you know your toughest kids are never absent. (Laughter) Never. You won't like them all, and the tough ones show up for a reason. It's the connection. It's the relationships. And while you won't like them all, the key is, they can never, ever know it. So teachers become great actors and great actresses, and we come to work when we don't feel like it, and we're listening to policy that doesn't make sense, and we teach anyway. We teach anyway, because that's what we do. Teaching and learning should bring joy. How powerful would our world be if we had kids who were not afraid to take risks, who were not afraid to think, and who had a champion? Every child deserves a champion, an adult who will never give up on them, who understands the power of connection, and insists that they become the best that they can possibly be. Is this job tough? You betcha. Oh God, you betcha. But it is not impossible. We can do this. We're educators. We're born to make a difference. Thank you so much. (Applause)

All right, so let's take four subjects that obviously go together: big data, tattoos, immortality and the Greeks. Right? Now, the issue about tattoos is that, without a word, tattoos really do shout. [Beautiful] [Intriguing] So you don't have to say a lot. [Allegiance] [Very intimate] [Serious mistakes] (Laughter) And tattoos tell you a lot of stories. If I can ask an indiscreet question, how many of you have tattoos? A few, but not most. What happens if Facebook, Google, Twitter, LinkedIn, cell phones, GPS, Foursquare, Yelp, Travel Advisor, all these things you deal with every day turn out to be electronic tattoos? And what if they provide as much information about who and what you are as any tattoo ever would? What's ended up happening over the past few decades is the kind of coverage that you had as a head of state or as a great celebrity is now being applied to you every day by all these people who are Tweeting, blogging, following you, watching your credit scores and what you do to yourself. And electronic tattoos also shout. And as you're thinking of the consequences of that, it's getting really hard to hide from this stuff, among other things, because it's not just the electronic tattoos, it's facial recognition that's getting really good. So you can take a picture with an iPhone and get all the names, although, again, sometimes it does make mistakes. (Laughter) But that means you can take a typical bar scene like this, take a picture, say, of this guy right here, get the name, and download all the records before you utter a word or speak to somebody, because everybody turns out to be absolutely plastered by electronic tattoos. And so there's companies like face.com that now have about 18 billion faces online. Here's what happened to this company. [Company sold to Facebook, June 18, 2012...] There are other companies that will place a camera like this — this has nothing to do with Facebook — they take your picture, they tie it to the social media, they figure out you really like to wear black dresses, so maybe the person in the store comes up and says, "Hey, we've got five black dresses that would just look great on you." So what if Andy was wrong? Here's Andy's theory. [In the future, everybody will be world famous for 15 minutes.] What if we flip this? What if you're only going to be anonymous for 15 minutes? (Laughter) Well, then, because of electronic tattoos, maybe all of you and all of us are very close to immortality, because these tattoos will live far longer than our bodies will. And if that's true, then what we want to do is we want to go through four lessons from the Greeks and one lesson from a Latin American. Why the Greeks? Well, the Greeks thought about what happens when gods and humans and immortality mix for a long time. So lesson number one: Sisyphus. Remember? He did a horrible thing, condemned for all time to roll this rock up, it would roll back down, roll back up, roll back down. It's a little like your reputation. Once you get that electronic tattoo, you're going to be rolling up and down for a long time, so as you go through this stuff, just be careful what you post. Myth number two: Orpheus, wonderful guy, charming to be around, great partier, great singer, loses his beloved, charms his way into the underworld, only person to charm his way into the underworld, charms the gods of the underworld, they release his beauty on the condition he never look at her until they're out. So he's walking out and walking out and walking out and he just can't resist. He looks at her, loses her forever. With all this data out here, it might be a good idea not to look too far into the past of those you love. Lesson number three: Atalanta. Greatest runner. She would challenge anybody. If you won, she would marry you. If you lost, you died. How did Hippomenes beat her? Well, he had all these wonderful little golden apples, and she'd run ahead, and he'd roll a little golden apple. She'd run ahead, and he'd roll a little golden apple. She kept getting distracted. He eventually won the race. Just remember the purpose as all these little golden apples come and reach you and you want to post about them or tweet about them or send a late-night message. And then, of course, there's Narcissus. Nobody here would ever be accused or be familiar with Narcissus. (Laughter) But as you're thinking about Narcissus, just don't fall in love with your own reflection. Last lesson, from a Latin American: This is the great poet Jorge Luis Borges. When he was threatened by the thugs of the Argentine military junta, he came back and said, "Oh, come on, how else can you threaten, other than with death?" The interesting thing, the original thing, would be to threaten somebody with immortality. And that, of course, is what we are all now threatened with today because of electronic tattoos. Thank you. (Applause)

I'm not sure that every person here is familiar with my pictures. I want to start to show just a few pictures to you, and after I'll speak. I must speak to you a little bit of my history, because we'll be speaking on this during my speech here. I was born in 1944 in Brazil, in the times that Brazil was not yet a market economy. I was born on a farm, a farm that was more than 50 percent rainforest [still]. A marvelous place. I lived with incredible birds, incredible animals, I swam in our small rivers with our caimans. It was about 35 families that lived on this farm, and everything that we produced on this farm, we consumed. Very few things went to the market. Once a year, the only thing that went to the market was the cattle that we produced, and we made trips of about 45 days to reach the slaughterhouse, bringing thousands of head of cattle, and about 20 days traveling back to reach our farm again. When I was 15 years old, it was necessary for me to leave this place and go to a town a little bit bigger -- much bigger -- where I did the second part of secondary school. There I learned different things. Brazil was starting to urbanize, industrialize, and I knew the politics. I became a little bit radical, I was a member of leftist parties, and I became an activist. I [went to] university to become an economist. I [did] a master's degree in economics. And the most important thing in my life also happened in this time. I met an incredible girl who became my lifelong best friend, and my associate in everything that I have done till now, my wife, Lélia Wanick Salgado. Brazil radicalized very strongly. We fought very hard against the dictatorship, in a moment it was necessary to us: Either go into clandestinity with weapons in hand, or leave Brazil. We were too young, and our organization thought it was better for us to go out, and we went to France, where I did a PhD in economics, Léila became an architect. I worked after for an investment bank. We made a lot of trips, financed development, economic projects in Africa with the World Bank. And one day photography made a total invasion in my life. I became a photographer, abandoned everything and became a photographer, and I started to do the photography that was important for me. Many people tell me that you are a photojournalist, that you are an anthropologist photographer, that you are an activist photographer. But I did much more than that. I put photography as my life. I lived totally inside photography doing long term projects, and I want to show you just a few pictures of -- again, you'll see inside the social projects, that I went to, I published many books on these photographs, but I'll just show you a few ones now. In the '90s, from 1994 to 2000, I photographed a story called Migrations. It became a book. It became a show. But during the time that I was photographing this, I lived through a very hard moment in my life, mostly in Rwanda. I saw in Rwanda total brutality. I saw deaths by thousands per day. I lost my faith in our species. I didn't believe that it was possible for us to live any longer, and I started to be attacked by my own Staphylococcus. I started to have infection everywhere. When I made love with my wife, I had no sperm that came out of me; I had blood. I went to see a friend's doctor in Paris, told him that I was completely sick. He made a long examination, and told me, "Sebastian, you are not sick, your prostate is perfect. What happened is, you saw so many deaths that you are dying. You must stop. Stop. You must stop because on the contrary, you will be dead." And I made the decision to stop. I was really upset with photography, with everything in the world, and I made the decision to go back to where I was born. It was a big coincidence. It was the moment that my parents became very old. I have seven sisters. I'm one of the only men in my family, and they made together the decision to transfer this land to Léila and myself. When we received this land, this land was as dead as I was. When I was a kid, it was more than 50 percent rainforest. When we received the land, it was less than half a percent rainforest, as in all my region. To build development, Brazilian development, we destroyed a lot of our forest. As you did here in the United States, or you did in India, everywhere in this planet. To build our development, we come to a huge contradiction that we destroy around us everything. This farm that had thousands of head of cattle had just a few hundreds, and we didn't know how to deal with these. And Léila came up with an incredible idea, a crazy idea. She said, why don't you put back the rainforest that was here before? You say that you were born in paradise. Let's build the paradise again. And I went to see a good friend that was engineering forests to prepare a project for us, and we started. We started to plant, and this first year we lost a lot of trees, second year less, and slowly, slowly this dead land started to be born again. We started to plant hundreds of thousands of trees, only local species, only native species, where we built an ecosystem identical to the one that was destroyed, and the life started to come back in an incredible way. It was necessary for us to transform our land into a national park. We transformed. We gave this land back to nature. It became a national park. We created an institution called Instituto Terra, and we built a big environmental project to raise money everywhere. Here in Los Angeles, in the Bay Area in San Francisco, it became tax deductible in the United States. We raised money in Spain, in Italy, a lot in Brazil. We worked with a lot of companies in Brazil that put money into this project, the government. And the life started to come, and I had a big wish to come back to photography, to photograph again. And this time, my wish was not to photograph anymore just one animal that I had photographed all my life: us. I wished to photograph the other animals, to photograph the landscapes, to photograph us, but us from the beginning, the time we lived in equilibrium with nature. And I went. I started in the beginning of 2004, and I finished at the end of 2011. We created an incredible amount of pictures, and the result -- Lélia did the design of all my books, the design of all my shows. She is the creator of the shows. And what we want with these pictures is to create a discussion about what we have that is pristine on the planet and what we must hold on this planet if we want to live, to have some equilibrium in our life. And I wanted to see us when we used, yes, our instruments in stone. We exist yet. I was last week at the Brazilian National Indian Foundation, and only in the Amazon we have about 110 groups of Indians that are not contacted yet. We must protect the forest in this sense. And with these pictures, I hope that we can create information, a system of information. We tried to do a new presentation of the planet, and I want to show you now just a few pictures of this project, please. Well, this — (Applause) — Thank you. Thank you very much. This is what we must fight hard to hold like it is now. But there is another part that we must together rebuild, to build our societies, our modern family of societies, we are at a point where we cannot go back. But we create an incredible contradiction. To build all this, we destroy a lot. Our forest in Brazil, that antique forest that was the size of California, is destroyed today 93 percent. Here, on the West Coast, you've destroyed your forest. Around here, no? The redwood forests are gone. Gone very fast, disappeared. Coming the other day from Atlanta, here, two days ago, I was flying over deserts that we made, we provoked with our own hands. India has no more trees. Spain has no more trees. And we must rebuild these forests. That is the essence of our life, these forests. We need to breathe. The only factory capable to transform CO2 into oxygen, are the forests. The only machine capable to capture the carbon that we are producing, always, even if we reduce them, everything that we do, we produce CO2, are the trees. I put the question -- three or four weeks ago, we saw in the newspapers millions of fish that die in Norway. A lack of oxygen in the water. I put to myself the question, if for a moment, we will not lack oxygen for all animal species, ours included -- that would be very complicated for us. For the water system, the trees are essential. I'll give you a small example that you'll understand very easily. You happy people that have a lot of hair on your head, if you take a shower, it takes you two or three hours to dry your hair if you don't use a dryer machine. Me, one minute, it's dry. The same with the trees. The trees are the hair of our planet. When you have rain in a place that has no trees, in just a few minutes, the water arrives in the stream, brings soil, destroying our water source, destroying the rivers, and no humidity to retain. When you have trees, the root system holds the water. All the branches of the trees, the leaves that come down create a humid area, and they take months and months under the water, go to the rivers, and maintain our source, maintain our rivers. This is the most important thing, when we imagine that we need water for every activity in life. I want to show you now, to finish, just a few pictures that for me are very important in that direction. You remember that I told you, when I received the farm from my parents that was my paradise, that was the farm. Land completely destroyed, the erosion there, the land had dried. But you can see in this picture, we were starting to construct an educational center that became quite a large environmental center in Brazil. But you see a lot of small spots in this picture. In each point of those spots, we had planted a tree. There are thousands of trees. Now I'll show you the pictures made exactly in the same point two months ago. (Applause) I told you in the beginning that it was necessary for us to plant about 2.5 million trees of about 200 different species in order to rebuild the ecosystem. And I'll show you the last picture. We are with two million trees in the ground now. We are doing the sequestration of about 100,000 tons of carbon with these trees. My friends, it's very easy to do. We did it, no? By an accident that happened to me, we went back, we built an ecosystem. We here inside the room, I believe that we have the same concern, and the model that we created in Brazil, we can transplant it here. We can apply it everywhere around the world, no? And I believe that we can do it together. Thank you very much. (Applause)

Well, I have a big announcement to make today, and I'm really excited about this. And this may be a little bit of a surprise to many of you who know my research and what I've done well. I've really tried to solve some big problems: counterterrorism, nuclear terrorism, and health care and diagnosing and treating cancer, but I started thinking about all these problems, and I realized that the really biggest problem we face, what all these other problems come down to, is energy, is electricity, the flow of electrons. And I decided that I was going to set out to try to solve this problem. And this probably is not what you're expecting. You're probably expecting me to come up here and talk about fusion, because that's what I've done most of my life. But this is actually a talk about, okay -- (Laughter) — but this is actually a talk about fission. It's about perfecting something old, and bringing something old into the 21st century. Let's talk a little bit about how nuclear fission works. In a nuclear power plant, you have a big pot of water that's under high pressure, and you have some fuel rods, and these fuel rods are encased in zirconium, and they're little pellets of uranium dioxide fuel, and a fission reaction is controlled and maintained at a proper level, and that reaction heats up water, the water turns to steam, steam turns the turbine, and you produce electricity from it. This is the same way we've been producing electricity, the steam turbine idea, for 100 years, and nuclear was a really big advancement in a way to heat the water, but you still boil water and that turns to steam and turns the turbine. And I thought, you know, is this the best way to do it? Is fission kind of played out, or is there something left to innovate here? And I realized that I had hit upon something that I think has this huge potential to change the world. And this is what it is. This is a small modular reactor. So it's not as big as the reactor you see in the diagram here. This is between 50 and 100 megawatts. But that's a ton of power. That's between, say at an average use, that's maybe 25,000 to 100,000 homes could run off that. Now the really interesting thing about these reactors is they're built in a factory. So they're modular reactors that are built essentially on an assembly line, and they're trucked anywhere in the world, you plop them down, and they produce electricity. This region right here is the reactor. And this is buried below ground, which is really important. For someone who's done a lot of counterterrorism work, I can't extol to you how great having something buried below the ground is for proliferation and security concerns. And inside this reactor is a molten salt, so anybody who's a fan of thorium, they're going to be really excited about this, because these reactors happen to be really good at breeding and burning the thorium fuel cycle, uranium-233. But I'm not really concerned about the fuel. You can run these off -- they're really hungry, they really like down-blended weapons pits, so that's highly enriched uranium and weapons-grade plutonium that's been down-blended. It's made into a grade where it's not usable for a nuclear weapon, but they love this stuff. And we have a lot of it sitting around, because this is a big problem. You know, in the Cold War, we built up this huge arsenal of nuclear weapons, and that was great, and we don't need them anymore, and what are we doing with all the waste, essentially? What are we doing with all the pits of those nuclear weapons? Well, we're securing them, and it would be great if we could burn them, eat them up, and this reactor loves this stuff. So it's a molten salt reactor. It has a core, and it has a heat exchanger from the hot salt, the radioactive salt, to a cold salt which isn't radioactive. It's still thermally hot but it's not radioactive. And then that's a heat exchanger to what makes this design really, really interesting, and that's a heat exchanger to a gas. So going back to what I was saying before about all power being produced -- well, other than photovoltaic -- being produced by this boiling of steam and turning a turbine, that's actually not that efficient, and in fact, in a nuclear power plant like this, it's only roughly 30 to 35 percent efficient. That's how much thermal energy the reactor's putting out to how much electricity it's producing. And the reason the efficiencies are so low is these reactors operate at pretty low temperature. They operate anywhere from, you know, maybe 200 to 300 degrees Celsius. And these reactors run at 600 to 700 degrees Celsius, which means the higher the temperature you go to, thermodynamics tells you that you will have higher efficiencies. And this reactor doesn't use water. It uses gas, so supercritical CO2 or helium, and that goes into a turbine, and this is called the Brayton cycle. This is the thermodynamic cycle that produces electricity, and this makes this almost 50 percent efficient, between 45 and 50 percent efficiency. And I'm really excited about this, because it's a very compact core. Molten salt reactors are very compact by nature, but what's also great is you get a lot more electricity out for how much uranium you're fissioning, not to mention the fact that these burn up. Their burn-up is much higher. So for a given amount of fuel you put in the reactor, a lot more of it's being used. And the problem with a traditional nuclear power plant like this is, you've got these rods that are clad in zirconium, and inside them are uranium dioxide fuel pellets. Well, uranium dioxide's a ceramic, and ceramic doesn't like releasing what's inside of it. So you have what's called the xenon pit, and so some of these fission products love neutrons. They love the neutrons that are going on and helping this reaction take place. And they eat them up, which means that, combined with the fact that the cladding doesn't last very long, you can only run one of these reactors for roughly, say, 18 months without refueling it. So these reactors run for 30 years without refueling, which is, in my opinion, very, very amazing, because it means it's a sealed system. No refueling means you can seal them up and they're not going to be a proliferation risk, and they're not going to have either nuclear material or radiological material proliferated from their cores. But let's go back to safety, because everybody after Fukushima had to reassess the safety of nuclear, and one of the things when I set out to design a power reactor was it had to be passively and intrinsically safe, and I'm really excited about this reactor for essentially two reasons. One, it doesn't operate at high pressure. So traditional reactors like a pressurized water reactor or boiling water reactor, they're very, very hot water at very high pressures, and this means, essentially, in the event of an accident, if you had any kind of breach of this stainless steel pressure vessel, the coolant would leave the core. These reactors operate at essentially atmospheric pressure, so there's no inclination for the fission products to leave the reactor in the event of an accident. Also, they operate at high temperatures, and the fuel is molten, so they can't melt down, but in the event that the reactor ever went out of tolerances, or you lost off-site power in the case of something like Fukushima, there's a dump tank. Because your fuel is liquid, and it's combined with your coolant, you could actually just drain the core into what's called a sub-critical setting, basically a tank underneath the reactor that has some neutrons absorbers. And this is really important, because the reaction stops. In this kind of reactor, you can't do that. The fuel, like I said, is ceramic inside zirconium fuel rods, and in the event of an accident in one of these type of reactors, Fukushima and Three Mile Island -- looking back at Three Mile Island, we didn't really see this for a while — but these zirconium claddings on these fuel rods, what happens is, when they see high pressure water, steam, in an oxidizing environment, they'll actually produce hydrogen, and that hydrogen has this explosive capability to release fission products. So the core of this reactor, since it's not under pressure and it doesn't have this chemical reactivity, means that there's no inclination for the fission products to leave this reactor. So even in the event of an accident, yeah, the reactor may be toast, which is, you know, sorry for the power company, but we're not going to contaminate large quantities of land. So I really think that in the, say, 20 years it's going to take us to get fusion and make fusion a reality, this could be the source of energy that provides carbon-free electricity. Carbon-free electricity. And it's an amazing technology because not only does it combat climate change, but it's an innovation. It's a way to bring power to the developing world, because it's produced in a factory and it's cheap. You can put them anywhere in the world you want to. And maybe something else. As a kid, I was obsessed with space. Well, I was obsessed with nuclear science too, to a point, but before that I was obsessed with space, and I was really excited about, you know, being an astronaut and designing rockets, which was something that was always exciting to me. But I think I get to come back to this, because imagine having a compact reactor in a rocket that produces 50 to 100 megawatts. That is the rocket designer's dream. That's someone who is designing a habitat on another planet's dream. Not only do you have 50 to 100 megawatts to power whatever you want to provide propulsion to get you there, but you have power once you get there. You know, rocket designers who use solar panels or fuel cells, I mean a few watts or kilowatts -- wow, that's a lot of power. I mean, now we're talking about 100 megawatts. That's a ton of power. That could power a Martian community. That could power a rocket there. And so I hope that maybe I'll have an opportunity to kind of explore my rocketry passion at the same time that I explore my nuclear passion. And people say, "Oh, well, you've launched this thing, and it's radioactive, into space, and what about accidents?" But we launch plutonium batteries all the time. Everybody was really excited about Curiosity, and that had this big plutonium battery on board that has plutonium-238, which actually has a higher specific activity than the low-enriched uranium fuel of these molten salt reactors, which means that the effects would be negligible, because you launch it cold, and when it gets into space is where you actually activate this reactor. So I'm really excited. I think that I've designed this reactor here that can be an innovative source of energy, provide power for all kinds of neat scientific applications, and I'm really prepared to do this. I graduated high school in May, and -- (Laughter) (Applause) — I graduated high school in May, and I decided that I was going to start up a company to commercialize these technologies that I've developed, these revolutionary detectors for scanning cargo containers and these systems to produce medical isotopes, but I want to do this, and I've slowly been building up a team of some of the most incredible people I've ever had the chance to work with, and I'm really prepared to make this a reality. And I think, I think, that looking at the technology, this will be cheaper than or the same price as natural gas, and you don't have to refuel it for 30 years, which is an advantage for the developing world. And I'll just say one more maybe philosophical thing to end with, which is weird for a scientist. But I think there's something really poetic about using nuclear power to propel us to the stars, because the stars are giant fusion reactors. They're giant nuclear cauldrons in the sky. The energy that I'm able to talk to you today, while it was converted to chemical energy in my food, originally came from a nuclear reaction, and so there's something poetic about, in my opinion, perfecting nuclear fission and using it as a future source of innovative energy. So thank you guys. (Applause)

What you're doing, right now, at this very moment, is killing you. More than cars or the Internet or even that little mobile device we keep talking about, the technology you're using the most almost every day is this, your tush. Nowadays people are sitting 9.3 hours a day, which is more than we're sleeping, at 7.7 hours. Sitting is so incredibly prevalent, we don't even question how much we're doing it, and because everyone else is doing it, it doesn't even occur to us that it's not okay. In that way, sitting has become the smoking of our generation. Of course there's health consequences to this, scary ones, besides the waist. Things like breast cancer and colon cancer are directly tied to our lack of physical [activity], Ten percent in fact, on both of those. Six percent for heart disease, seven percent for type 2 diabetes, which is what my father died of. Now, any of those stats should convince each of us to get off our duff more, but if you're anything like me, it won't. What did get me moving was a social interaction. Someone invited me to a meeting, but couldn't manage to fit me in to a regular sort of conference room meeting, and said, "I have to walk my dogs tomorrow. Could you come then?" It seemed kind of odd to do, and actually, that first meeting, I remember thinking, "I have to be the one to ask the next question," because I knew I was going to huff and puff during this conversation. And yet, I've taken that idea and made it my own. So instead of going to coffee meetings or fluorescent-lit conference room meetings, I ask people to go on a walking meeting, to the tune of 20 to 30 miles a week. It's changed my life. But before that, what actually happened was, I used to think about it as, you could take care of your health, or you could take care of obligations, and one always came at the cost of the other. So now, several hundred of these walking meetings later, I've learned a few things. First, there's this amazing thing about actually getting out of the box that leads to out-of-the-box thinking. Whether it's nature or the exercise itself, it certainly works. And second, and probably the more reflective one, is just about how much each of us can hold problems in opposition when they're really not that way. And if we're going to solve problems and look at the world really differently, whether it's in governance or business or environmental issues, job creation, maybe we can think about how to reframe those problems as having both things be true. Because it was when that happened with this walk-and-talk idea that things became doable and sustainable and viable. So I started this talk talking about the tush, so I'll end with the bottom line, which is, walk and talk. Walk the talk. You'll be surprised at how fresh air drives fresh thinking, and in the way that you do, you'll bring into your life an entirely new set of ideas. Thank you. (Applause)

I've noticed something interesting about society and culture. Everything risky requires a license, so learning to drive, owning a gun, getting married. (Laughter) That's true in everything risky except technology. For some reason, there's no standard syllabus, there's no basic course. They just sort of give you your computer and then kick you out of the nest. You're supposed to learn this stuff how? Just by osmosis. Nobody ever sits down and tells you, "This is how it works." So today I'm going to tell you 10 things that you thought everybody knew, but it turns out they don't. All right, first of all, on the web, when you're on the web and you want to scroll down, don't pick up the mouse and use the scroll bar. That's a terrible waste of time. Do that only if you're paid by the hour. Instead, hit the space bar. The space bar scrolls down one page. Hold down the Shift key to scroll back up again. So space bar to scroll down one page. It works in every browser on every kind of computer. Also on the web, when you're filling in one of these forms like your addresses, I assume you know that you can hit the Tab key to jump from box to box to box. But what about the pop-up menu where you put in your state? Don't open the pop-up menu. That's a terrible waste of calories. Type the first letter of your state over and over and over. So if you want Connecticut, go, C, C, C. If you want Texas, go T, T, and you jump right to that thing without even opening the pop-up menu. Also on the web, when the text is too small, what you do is hold down the Control key and hit plus, plus, plus. You make the text larger with each tap. It works on every computer, every web browser, or minus, minus, minus to get smaller again. If you're on the Mac, it might be Command instead. When you're typing on your Blackberry, Android, iPhone, don't bother switching layouts to the punctuation layout to hit the period and then a space and then try to capitalize the next letter. Just hit the space bar twice. The phone puts the period, the space, and the capital for you. Go space, space. It is totally amazing. Also when it comes to cell phones, on all phones, if you want to redial somebody that you've dialed before, all you have to do is hit the call button, and it puts the last phone number into the box for you, and at that point you can hit call again to actually dial it. So you don't need to go into the recent calls list, so if you're trying to get through to somebody, just hit the call button again. Here's something that drives me crazy. When I call you and leave a message on your voicemail, I hear you saying, "Leave a message," and then I get these 15 seconds of frickin' instructions, like we haven't had answering machines for 45 years! (Laughter) I'm not bitter. So it turns out there's a keyboard shortcut that lets you jump directly to the beep like this. Answering machine: At the tone, please — BEEP. David Pogue: Unfortunately, the carriers didn't adopt the same keystroke, so it's different by carrier, so it devolves upon you to learn the keystroke for the person you're calling. I didn't say these were going to be perfect. Okay, so most of you think of Google as something that lets you look up a webpage, but it is also a dictionary. Type the word "define" and then the word you want to know. You don't even have to click anything. There's the definition as you type. It's also a complete FAA database. Type the name of the airline and the flight. It shows you where the flight is, the gate, the terminal, how long till it lands. You don't need an app for that. It's also a unit and currency conversion. Again, you don't have to click one of the results. Just type it into the box, and there's your answer. While we're talking about text, when you want to highlight -- this is just an example. (Laughter) When you want to highlight a word, please don't waste your life dragging across it with the mouse like a newbie. Double click the word. Watch 200. I go double click. It neatly selects just that word. Also, don't delete what you've highlighted. You can just type over it. This is in every program. Also, you can go double click, drag to highlight in one-word increments as you drag. Much more precise. Again, don't bother deleting. Just type over it. (Laughter) Shutter lag is the time between your pressing the shutter button and the moment the camera actually snaps. It's extremely frustrating on any camera under 1,000 dollars. (Camera click) (Laughter) So that's because the camera needs time to calculate the focus and the exposure, but if you pre-focus with a half-press, leave your finger down, no shutter lag! You get it every time. I've just turned your $50 camera into a $1,000 camera with that trick. And finally, it often happens that you're giving a talk, and for some reason the audience is looking at the slide instead of at you! (Laughter) So when that happens, this works in Keynote, PowerPoint, it works in every program, all you do is hit the letter B key, B for blackout, to black out the slide and make everybody look at you, and then when you're ready to go on, you hit B again, and if you're really on a roll, you can hit the W key for whiteout, and you white out the slide, and then you can hit W again to unblank it. So I know I went super fast. If you missed anything, I'll be happy to send you the list of these tips. In the meantime, congratulations. You all get your California technology license. Have a great day. (Applause)

Let's face it: Driving is dangerous. It's one of the things that we don't like to think about, but the fact that religious icons and good luck charms show up on dashboards around the world betrays the fact that we know this to be true. Car accidents are the leading cause of death in people ages 16 to 19 in the United States -- leading cause of death -- and 75 percent of these accidents have nothing to do with drugs or alcohol. So what happens? No one can say for sure, but I remember my first accident. I was a young driver out on the highway, and the car in front of me, I saw the brake lights go on. I'm like, "Okay, all right, this guy is slowing down, I'll slow down too." I step on the brake. But no, this guy isn't slowing down. This guy is stopping, dead stop, dead stop on the highway. It was just going 65 -- to zero? I slammed on the brakes. I felt the ABS kick in, and the car is still going, and it's not going to stop, and I know it's not going to stop, and the air bag deploys, the car is totaled, and fortunately, no one was hurt. But I had no idea that car was stopping, and I think we can do a lot better than that. I think we can transform the driving experience by letting our cars talk to each other. I just want you to think a little bit about what the experience of driving is like now. Get into your car. Close the door. You're in a glass bubble. You can't really directly sense the world around you. You're in this extended body. You're tasked with navigating it down partially-seen roadways, in and amongst other metal giants, at super-human speeds. Okay? And all you have to guide you are your two eyes. Okay, so that's all you have, eyes that weren't really designed for this task, but then people ask you to do things like, you want to make a lane change, what's the first thing they ask you do? Take your eyes off the road. That's right. Stop looking where you're going, turn, check your blind spot, and drive down the road without looking where you're going. You and everyone else. This is the safe way to drive. Why do we do this? Because we have to, we have to make a choice, do I look here or do I look here? What's more important? And usually we do a fantastic job picking and choosing what we attend to on the road. But occasionally we miss something. Occasionally we sense something wrong or too late. In countless accidents, the driver says, "I didn't see it coming." And I believe that. I believe that. We can only watch so much. But the technology exists now that can help us improve that. In the future, with cars exchanging data with each other, we will be able to see not just three cars ahead and three cars behind, to the right and left, all at the same time, bird's eye view, we will actually be able to see into those cars. We will be able to see the velocity of the car in front of us, to see how fast that guy's going or stopping. If that guy's going down to zero, I'll know. And with computation and algorithms and predictive models, we will be able to see the future. You may think that's impossible. How can you predict the future? That's really hard. Actually, no. With cars, it's not impossible. Cars are three-dimensional objects that have a fixed position and velocity. They travel down roads. Often they travel on pre-published routes. It's really not that hard to make reasonable predictions about where a car's going to be in the near future. Even if, when you're in your car and some motorcyclist comes -- bshoom! -- 85 miles an hour down, lane-splitting -- I know you've had this experience -- that guy didn't "just come out of nowhere." That guy's been on the road probably for the last half hour. (Laughter) Right? I mean, somebody's seen him. Ten, 20, 30 miles back, someone's seen that guy, and as soon as one car sees that guy and puts him on the map, he's on the map -- position, velocity, good estimate he'll continue going 85 miles an hour. You'll know, because your car will know, because that other car will have whispered something in his ear, like, "By the way, five minutes, motorcyclist, watch out." You can make reasonable predictions about how cars behave. I mean, they're Newtonian objects. That's very nice about them. So how do we get there? We can start with something as simple as sharing our position data between cars, just sharing GPS. If I have a GPS and a camera in my car, I have a pretty precise idea of where I am and how fast I'm going. With computer vision, I can estimate where the cars around me are, sort of, and where they're going. And same with the other cars. They can have a precise idea of where they are, and sort of a vague idea of where the other cars are. What happens if two cars share that data, if they talk to each other? I can tell you exactly what happens. Both models improve. Everybody wins. Professor Bob Wang and his team have done computer simulations of what happens when fuzzy estimates combine, even in light traffic, when cars just share GPS data, and we've moved this research out of the computer simulation and into robot test beds that have the actual sensors that are in cars now on these robots: stereo cameras, GPS, and the two-dimensional laser range finders that are common in backup systems. We also attach a discrete short-range communication radio, and the robots talk to each other. When these robots come at each other, they track each other's position precisely, and they can avoid each other. We're now adding more and more robots into the mix, and we encountered some problems. One of the problems, when you get too much chatter, it's hard to process all the packets, so you have to prioritize, and that's where the predictive model helps you. If your robot cars are all tracking the predicted trajectories, you don't pay as much attention to those packets. You prioritize the one guy who seems to be going a little off course. That guy could be a problem. And you can predict the new trajectory. So you don't only know that he's going off course, you know how. And you know which drivers you need to alert to get out of the way. And we wanted to do -- how can we best alert everyone? How can these cars whisper, "You need to get out of the way?" Well, it depends on two things: one, the ability of the car, and second the ability of the driver. If one guy has a really great car, but they're on their phone or, you know, doing something, they're not probably in the best position to react in an emergency. So we started a separate line of research doing driver state modeling. And now, using a series of three cameras, we can detect if a driver is looking forward, looking away, looking down, on the phone, or having a cup of coffee. We can predict the accident and we can predict who, which cars, are in the best position to move out of the way to calculate the safest route for everyone. Fundamentally, these technologies exist today. I think the biggest problem that we face is our own willingness to share our data. I think it's a very disconcerting notion, this idea that our cars will be watching us, talking about us to other cars, that we'll be going down the road in a sea of gossip. But I believe it can be done in a way that protects our privacy, just like right now, when I look at your car from the outside, I don't really know about you. If I look at your license plate number, I don't really know who you are. I believe our cars can talk about us behind our backs. (Laughter) And I think it's going to be a great thing. I want you to consider for a moment if you really don't want the distracted teenager behind you to know that you're braking, that you're coming to a dead stop. By sharing our data willingly, we can do what's best for everyone. So let your car gossip about you. It's going to make the roads a lot safer. Thank you. (Applause)

Growth is not dead. (Applause) Let's start the story 120 years ago, when American factories began to electrify their operations, igniting the Second Industrial Revolution. The amazing thing is that productivity did not increase in those factories for 30 years. Thirty years. That's long enough for a generation of managers to retire. You see, the first wave of managers simply replaced their steam engines with electric motors, but they didn't redesign the factories to take advantage of electricity's flexibility. It fell to the next generation to invent new work processes, and then productivity soared, often doubling or even tripling in those factories. Electricity is an example of a general purpose technology, like the steam engine before it. General purpose technologies drive most economic growth, because they unleash cascades of complementary innovations, like lightbulbs and, yes, factory redesign. Is there a general purpose technology of our era? Sure. It's the computer. But technology alone is not enough. Technology is not destiny. We shape our destiny, and just as the earlier generations of managers needed to redesign their factories, we're going to need to reinvent our organizations and even our whole economic system. We're not doing as well at that job as we should be. As we'll see in a moment, productivity is actually doing all right, but it has become decoupled from jobs, and the income of the typical worker is stagnating. These troubles are sometimes misdiagnosed as the end of innovation, but they are actually the growing pains of what Andrew McAfee and I call the new machine age. Let's look at some data. So here's GDP per person in America. There's some bumps along the way, but the big story is you could practically fit a ruler to it. This is a log scale, so what looks like steady growth is actually an acceleration in real terms. And here's productivity. You can see a little bit of a slowdown there in the mid-'70s, but it matches up pretty well with the Second Industrial Revolution, when factories were learning how to electrify their operations. After a lag, productivity accelerated again. So maybe "history doesn't repeat itself, but sometimes it rhymes." Today, productivity is at an all-time high, and despite the Great Recession, it grew faster in the 2000s than it did in the 1990s, the roaring 1990s, and that was faster than the '70s or '80s. It's growing faster than it did during the Second Industrial Revolution. And that's just the United States. The global news is even better. Worldwide incomes have grown at a faster rate in the past decade than ever in history. If anything, all these numbers actually understate our progress, because the new machine age is more about knowledge creation than just physical production. It's mind not matter, brain not brawn, ideas not things. That creates a problem for standard metrics, because we're getting more and more stuff for free, like Wikipedia, Google, Skype, and if they post it on the web, even this TED Talk. Now getting stuff for free is a good thing, right? Sure, of course it is. But that's not how economists measure GDP. Zero price means zero weight in the GDP statistics. According to the numbers, the music industry is half the size that it was 10 years ago, but I'm listening to more and better music than ever. You know, I bet you are too. In total, my research estimates that the GDP numbers miss over 300 billion dollars per year in free goods and services on the Internet. Now let's look to the future. There are some super smart people who are arguing that we've reached the end of growth, but to understand the future of growth, we need to make predictions about the underlying drivers of growth. I'm optimistic, because the new machine age is digital, exponential and combinatorial. When goods are digital, they can be replicated with perfect quality at nearly zero cost, and they can be delivered almost instantaneously. Welcome to the economics of abundance. But there's a subtler benefit to the digitization of the world. Measurement is the lifeblood of science and progress. In the age of big data, we can measure the world in ways we never could before. Secondly, the new machine age is exponential. Computers get better faster than anything else ever. A child's Playstation today is more powerful than a military supercomputer from 1996. But our brains are wired for a linear world. As a result, exponential trends take us by surprise. I used to teach my students that there are some things, you know, computers just aren't good at, like driving a car through traffic. (Laughter) That's right, here's Andy and me grinning like madmen because we just rode down Route 101 in, yes, a driverless car. Thirdly, the new machine age is combinatorial. The stagnationist view is that ideas get used up, like low-hanging fruit, but the reality is that each innovation creates building blocks for even more innovations. Here's an example. In just a matter of a few weeks, an undergraduate student of mine built an app that ultimately reached 1.3 million users. He was able to do that so easily because he built it on top of Facebook, and Facebook was built on top of the web, and that was built on top of the Internet, and so on and so forth. Now individually, digital, exponential and combinatorial would each be game-changers. Put them together, and we're seeing a wave of astonishing breakthroughs, like robots that do factory work or run as fast as a cheetah or leap tall buildings in a single bound. You know, robots are even revolutionizing cat transportation. (Laughter) But perhaps the most important invention, the most important invention is machine learning. Consider one project: IBM's Watson. These little dots here, those are all the champions on the quiz show "Jeopardy." At first, Watson wasn't very good, but it improved at a rate faster than any human could, and shortly after Dave Ferrucci showed this chart to my class at MIT, Watson beat the world "Jeopardy" champion. At age seven, Watson is still kind of in its childhood. Recently, its teachers let it surf the Internet unsupervised. The next day, it started answering questions with profanities. Damn. (Laughter) But you know, Watson is growing up fast. It's being tested for jobs in call centers, and it's getting them. It's applying for legal, banking and medical jobs, and getting some of them. Isn't it ironic that at the very moment we are building intelligent machines, perhaps the most important invention in human history, some people are arguing that innovation is stagnating? Like the first two industrial revolutions, the full implications of the new machine age are going to take at least a century to fully play out, but they are staggering. So does that mean we have nothing to worry about? No. Technology is not destiny. Productivity is at an all time high, but fewer people now have jobs. We have created more wealth in the past decade than ever, but for a majority of Americans, their income has fallen. This is the great decoupling of productivity from employment, of wealth from work. You know, it's not surprising that millions of people have become disillusioned by the great decoupling, but like too many others, they misunderstand its basic causes. Technology is racing ahead, but it's leaving more and more people behind. Today, we can take a routine job, codify it in a set of machine-readable instructions, and then replicate it a million times. You know, I recently overheard a conversation that epitomizes these new economics. This guy says, "Nah, I don't use H&R Block anymore. TurboTax does everything that my tax preparer did, but it's faster, cheaper and more accurate." How can a skilled worker compete with a $39 piece of software? She can't. Today, millions of Americans do have faster, cheaper, more accurate tax preparation, and the founders of Intuit have done very well for themselves. But 17 percent of tax preparers no longer have jobs. That is a microcosm of what's happening, not just in software and services, but in media and music, in finance and manufacturing, in retailing and trade -- in short, in every industry. People are racing against the machine, and many of them are losing that race. What can we do to create shared prosperity? The answer is not to try to slow down technology. Instead of racing against the machine, we need to learn to race with the machine. That is our grand challenge. The new machine age can be dated to a day 15 years ago when Garry Kasparov, the world chess champion, played Deep Blue, a supercomputer. The machine won that day, and today, a chess program running on a cell phone can beat a human grandmaster. It got so bad that, when he was asked what strategy he would use against a computer, Jan Donner, the Dutch grandmaster, replied, "I'd bring a hammer." (Laughter) But today a computer is no longer the world chess champion. Neither is a human, because Kasparov organized a freestyle tournament where teams of humans and computers could work together, and the winning team had no grandmaster, and it had no supercomputer. What they had was better teamwork, and they showed that a team of humans and computers, working together, could beat any computer or any human working alone. Racing with the machine beats racing against the machine. Technology is not destiny. We shape our destiny. Thank you. (Applause)