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VietGPT 27

I'd like to do pretty much what I did the first time, which is to choose a light-hearted theme. Last time, I talked about death and dying. This time, I'm going to talk about mental illness. But it has to be technological, so I'll talk about electroshock therapy. (Laughter) You know, ever since man had any notion that some of his other people, his colleagues, could be different, could be strange, could be severely depressed or what we now recognize as schizophrenia, he was certain that this kind of illness had to come from evil spirits getting into the body. So, the way of treating these diseases in early times was to, in some way or other, exorcise those evil spirits, and this is still going on, as you know. But it wasn't enough to use the priests. When medicine became somewhat scientific, in about 450 BC, with Hippocrates and those boys, they tried to look for herbs, plants that would literally shake the bad spirits out. So, they found certain plants that could cause convulsions. And the herbals, the botanical books of up to the late Middle Ages, the Renaissance are filled with prescriptions for causing convulsions to shake the evil spirits out. Finally, in about the sixteenth century, a physician whose name was Theophrastus Bombastus Aureolus von Hohenheim, called Paracelsus, a name probably familiar to some people here -- (Laughter) -- good, old Paracelsus found that he could predict the degree of convulsion by using a measured amount of camphor to produce the convulsion. Can you imagine going to your closet, pulling out a mothball, and chewing on it if you're feeling depressed? It's better than Prozac, but I wouldn't recommend it. So what we see in the seventeenth, eighteenth century is the continued search for medications other than camphor that'll do the trick. Well, along comes Benjamin Franklin, and he comes close to convulsing himself with a bolt of electricity off the end of his kite. And so people begin thinking in terms of electricity to produce convulsions. And then, we fast-forward to about 1932, when three Italian psychiatrists, who were largely treating depression, began to notice among their patients, who were also epileptics, that if they had an epileptic -- a series of epileptic fits, a lot of them in a row -- the depression would very frequently lift. Not only would it lift, but it might never return. So they got very interested in producing convulsions, measured types of convulsions. And they thought, "Well, we've got electricity, we'll plug somebody into the wall. That always makes hair stand up and people shake a lot." So, they tried it on a few pigs, and none of the pigs were killed. So, they went to the police and they said, "We know that at the Rome railroad station, there are all these lost souls wandering around, muttering gibberish. Can you bring one of them to us?" Someone who is, as the Italians say, "cagoots." So they found this "cagoots" guy, a 39-year-old man who was really hopelessly schizophrenic, who was known, had been known for months, to be literally defecating on himself, talking nothing that made any sense, and they brought him into the hospital. So these three psychiatrists, after about two or three weeks of observation, laid him down on a table, connected his temples to a very small source of current. They thought, "Well, we'll try 55 volts, two-tenths of a second. That's not going to do anything terrible to him." So they did that. Well, I have the following from a firsthand observer, who told me this about 35 years ago, when I was thinking about these things for some research project of mine. He said, "This fellow" -- remember, he wasn't even put to sleep -- "after this major grand mal convulsion, sat right up, looked at these three fellas and said, 'What the fuck are you assholes trying to do?' " (Laughter) If I could only say that in Italian. Well, they were happy as could be, because he hadn't said a rational word in the weeks of observation. So they plugged him in again, and this time they used 110 volts for half a second. And to their amazement, after it was over, he began speaking like he was perfectly well. He relapsed a little bit, they gave him a series of treatments, and he was essentially cured. But of course, having schizophrenia, within a few months, it returned. But they wrote a paper about this, and everybody in the Western world began using electricity to convulse people who were either schizophrenic or severely depressed. It didn't work very well on the schizophrenics, but it was pretty clear in the '30s and by the middle of the '40s that electroconvulsive therapy was very, very effective in the treatment of depression. And of course, in those days, there were no antidepressant drugs, and it became very, very popular. They would anesthetize people, convulse them, but the real difficulty was that there was no way to paralyze muscles. So people would have a real grand mal seizure. Bones were broken. Especially in old, fragile people, you couldn't use it. And then in the 1950s, late 1950s, the so-called muscle relaxants were developed by pharmacologists, and it got so that you could induce a complete convulsion, an electroencephalographic convulsion -- you could see it on the brain waves -- without causing any convulsion in the body except a little bit of twitching of the toes. So again, it was very, very popular and very, very useful. Well, you know, in the middle '60s, the first antidepressants came out. Tofranil was the first. In the late '70s, early '80s, there were others, and they were very effective. And patients' rights groups seemed to get very upset about the kinds of things that they would witness. And so the whole idea of electroconvulsive, electroshock therapy disappeared, but has had a renaissance in the last 10 years. And the reason that it has had a renaissance is that probably about 10 percent of the people, severe depressives, do not respond, regardless of what is done for them. Now, why am I telling you this story at this meeting? I'm telling you this story, because actually ever since Richard called me and asked me to talk about -- as he asked all of his speakers -- to talk about something that would be new to this audience, that we had never talked about, never written about, I've been planning this moment. This reason really is that I am a man who, almost 30 years ago, had his life saved by two long courses of electroshock therapy. And let me tell you this story. I was, in the 1960s, in a marriage. To use the word bad would be perhaps the understatement of the year. It was dreadful. There are, I'm sure, enough divorced people in this room to know about the hostility, the anger, who knows what. Being someone who had had a very difficult childhood, a very difficult adolescence -- it had to do with not quite poverty but close. It had to do with being brought up in a family where no one spoke English, no one could read or write English. It had to do with death and disease and lots of other things. I was a little prone to depression. So, as things got worse, as we really began to hate each other, I became progressively depressed over a period of a couple of years, trying to save this marriage, which was inevitably not to be saved. Finally, I would schedule -- all my major surgical cases, I was scheduling them for 12, one o'clock in the afternoon, because I couldn't get out of bed before about 11 o'clock. And anybody who's been depressed here knows what that's like. I couldn't even pull the covers off myself. Well, you're in a university medical center, where everybody knows everybody, and it's perfectly clear to my colleagues, so my referrals began to decrease. As my referrals began to decrease, I clearly became increasingly depressed until I thought, my God, I can't work anymore. And, in fact, it didn't make any difference because I didn't have any patients anymore. So, with the advice of my physician, I had myself admitted to the acute care psychiatric unit of our university hospital. And my colleagues, who had known me since medical school in that place, said, "Don't worry, chap. Six weeks, you're back in the operating room. Everything's going to be great." Well, you know what bovine stercus is? That proved to be a lot of bovine stercus. I know some people who got tenure in that place with lies like that. (Laughter) So I was one of their failures. But it wasn't that simple. Because by the time I got out of that unit, I was not functional at all. I could hardly see five feet in front of myself. I shuffled when I walked. I was bowed over. I rarely bathed. I sometimes didn't shave. It was dreadful. And it was clear -- not to me, because nothing was clear to me at that time anymore -- that I would need long-term hospitalization in that awful place called a mental hospital. So I was admitted, in 1973, in the spring of 1973, to the Institute of Living, which used to be called the Hartford Retreat. It was founded in the eighteenth century, the largest psychiatric hospital in the state of Connecticut, other than the huge public hospitals that existed at that time. And they tried everything they had. They tried the usual psychotherapy. They tried every medication available in those days. And they did have Tofranil and other things -- Mellaril, who knows what. Nothing happened except that I got jaundiced from one of these things. And finally, because I was well known in Connecticut, they decided they better have a meeting of the senior staff. All the senior staff got together, and I later found out what happened. They put all their heads together and they decided that there was nothing that could be done for this surgeon who had essentially separated himself from the world, who by that time had become so overwhelmed, not just with depression and feelings of worthlessness and inadequacy, but with obsessional thinking, obsessional thinking about coincidences. And there were particular numbers that every time I saw them, just got me dreadfully upset -- all kinds of ritualistic observances, just awful, awful stuff. Remember when you were a kid, and you had to step on every line? Well, I was a grown man who had all of these rituals, and it got so there was a throbbing, there was a ferocious fear in my head. You've seen this painting by Edvard Munch, The Scream. Every moment was a scream. It was impossible. So they decided there was no therapy, there was no treatment. But there was one treatment, which actually had been pioneered at the Hartford hospital in the early 1940s, and you can imagine what it was. It was pre-frontal lobotomy. So they decided -- I didn't know this, again, I found this out later -- that the only thing that could be done was for this 43-year-old man to have a pre-frontal lobotomy. Well, as in all hospitals, there was a resident assigned to my case. He was 27 years old, and he would meet with me two or three times a week. And of course, I had been there, what, three or four months at the time. And he asked to meet with the senior staff, and they agreed to meet with him because he was very well thought of in that place. They thought he had a really extraordinary future. And he dug in his heels and said, "No. I know this man better than any of you. I have met with him over and over again. You've just seen him from time to time. You've read reports and so forth. I really honestly believe that the basic problem here is pure depression, and all of the obsessional thinking comes out of it. And you know, of course, what'll happen if you do a pre-frontal lobotomy. Any of the results along the spectrum, from pretty bad to terrible, terrible, terrible is going to happen. If he does the best he can, he will have no further obsessions, probably no depression, but his affect will be dulled, he will never go back to surgery, he will never be the loving father that he was to his two children, his life will be changed. If he has the usual result, he will end up like 'One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest.' And you know about that, just essentially in a stupor the rest of his life." Well, he said, "Can't we try a course of electroshock therapy?" And you know why they agreed? They agreed to humor him. They just thought, "Well, we'll give a course of 10. And so we'll lose a little time. Big deal. It doesn't make any difference." So they gave the course of 10, and the first -- the usual course, incidentally, was six to eight and still is six to eight. Plugged me into the wires, put me to sleep, gave me the muscle relaxant. Six didn't work. Seven didn't work. Eight didn't work. At nine, I noticed -- and it's wonderful that I could notice anything -- I noticed a change. And at 10, I noticed a real change. And he went back to them, and they agreed to do another 10. Again, not a single one of them -- I think there are about seven or eight of them -- thought this would do any good. They thought this was a temporary change. But, lo and behold, by 16, by 17, there were demonstrable differences in the way I felt. By 18 and 19, I was sleeping through the night. And by 20, I had the sense, I really had the sense that I could overcome this, that I was now strong enough that by an act of will, I could blow the obsessional thinking away. I could blow the depression away. And I've never forgotten -- I never will forget -- standing in the kitchen of the unit, it was a Sunday morning in January of 1974, standing in the kitchen by myself and thinking, "I've got the strength now to do this." It was as though those tightly coiled wires in my head had been disconnected and I could think clearly. But I need a formula. I need some thing to say to myself when I begin thinking obsessionally, obsessively. Well, the Gilbert and Sullivan fans in this room will remember "Ruddigore," and they will remember Mad Margaret, and they will remember that she was married to a fellow named Sir Despard Murgatroyd. And she used to go nuts, every five minutes or so in the play, and he said to her, "We must have a word to bring you back to reality, and the word, my dear, will be 'Basingstoke.'" So every time she got a little nuts, he would say, "Basingstoke!" And she would say, "Basingstoke, it is." And she would be fine for a little while. Well, you know, I'm from the Bronx. I can't say "Basingstoke." But I had something better. And it was very simple. It was, "Ah, fuck it!" (Laughter) Much better than "Basingstoke," at least for me. And it worked -- my God, it worked. Every time I would begin thinking obsessionally -- again, once more, after 20 shock treatments -- I would say, "Ah, fuck it." And things got better and better, and within three or four months, I was discharged from that hospital, and I joined a group of surgeons where I could work with other people in the community, not in New Haven, but fairly close by. I stayed there for three years. At the end of three years, I went back to New Haven, had remarried by that time. I brought my wife with me, actually, to make sure I could get through this. My children came back to live with us. We had two more children after that. Resuscitated the career, even better than it had been before. Went right back into the university and began to write books. Well, you know, it's been a wonderful life. It's been, as I said, close to 30 years. I stopped doing surgery about six years ago and became a full-time writer, as many people know. But it's been very exciting. It's been very happy. Every once in a while, I have to say, "Ah, fuck it." Every once in a while, I get somewhat depressed and a little obsessional. So, I'm not free of all of this. But it's worked. It's always worked. Why have I chosen, after never, ever talking about this, to talk about it now? Well, those of you who know some of these books know that one is about death and dying, one is about the human body and the human spirit, one is about the way mystical thoughts are constantly in our minds, and they have always to do with my own personal experiences. One might think reading these books -- and I've gotten thousands of letters about them by people who do think this -- that based on my life's history as I've portrayed in the books, my early life's history, I am someone who has overcome adversity. That I am someone who has drunk, drank, drunk of the bitter dregs of near-disaster in childhood and emerged not just unscathed but strengthened. I really have it figured out, so that I can advise people about death and dying, so that I can talk about mysticism and the human spirit. And I've always felt guilty about that. I've always felt that somehow I was an impostor because my readers don't know what I have just told you. It's known by some people in New Haven, obviously, but it is not generally known. So one of the reasons that I have come here to talk about this today is to -- frankly, selfishly -- unburden myself and let it be known that this is not an untroubled mind that has written all of these books. But more importantly, I think, is the fact that a very significant proportion of people in this audience are under 30, and there are many, of course, who are well over 30. For people under 30, and it looks to me like almost all of you -- I would say all of you -- are either on the cusp of a magnificent and exciting career or right into a magnificent and exciting career: anything can happen to you. Things change. Accidents happen. Something from childhood comes back to haunt you. You can be thrown off the track. I hope it happens to none of you, but it will probably happen to a small percentage of you. To those to whom it doesn't happen, there will be adversities. If I, with the bleakness of spirit, with no spirit, that I had in the 1970s and no possibility of recovery, as far as that group of very experienced psychiatrists thought, if I can find my way back from this, believe me, anybody can find their way back from any adversity that exists in their lives. And for those who are older, who have lived through perhaps not something as bad as this, but who have lived through difficult times, perhaps where they lost everything, as I did, and started out all over again, some of these things will seem very familiar. There is recovery. There is redemption. And there is resurrection. There are resurrection themes in every society that has ever been studied, and it is because not just only do we fantasize about the possibility of resurrection and recovery, but it actually happens. And it happens a lot. Perhaps the most popular resurrection theme, outside of specifically religious ones, is the one about the phoenix, the ancient story of the phoenix, who, every 500 years, resurrects itself from its own ashes to go on to live a life that is even more beautiful than it was before. Richard, thanks very much.

Today, I'm going to take you around the world in 18 minutes. My base of operations is in the U.S., but let's start at the other end of the map, in Kyoto, Japan, where I was living with a Japanese family while I was doing part of my dissertational research 15 years ago. I knew even then that I would encounter cultural differences and misunderstandings, but they popped up when I least expected it. On my first day, I went to a restaurant, and I ordered a cup of green tea with sugar. After a pause, the waiter said, "One does not put sugar in green tea." "I know," I said. "I'm aware of this custom. But I really like my tea sweet." In response, he gave me an even more courteous version of the same explanation. "One does not put sugar in green tea." "I understand," I said, "that the Japanese do not put sugar in their green tea, but I'd like to put some sugar in my green tea." (Laughter) Surprised by my insistence, the waiter took up the issue with the manager. Pretty soon, a lengthy discussion ensued, and finally the manager came over to me and said, "I am very sorry. We do not have sugar." (Laughter) Well, since I couldn't have my tea the way I wanted it, I ordered a cup of coffee, which the waiter brought over promptly. Resting on the saucer were two packets of sugar. My failure to procure myself a cup of sweet, green tea was not due to a simple misunderstanding. This was due to a fundamental difference in our ideas about choice. From my American perspective, when a paying customer makes a reasonable request based on her preferences, she has every right to have that request met. The American way, to quote Burger King, is to "have it your way," because, as Starbucks says, "happiness is in your choices." (Laughter) But from the Japanese perspective, it's their duty to protect those who don't know any better -- (Laughter) in this case, the ignorant gaijin -- from making the wrong choice. Let's face it: the way I wanted my tea was inappropriate according to cultural standards, and they were doing their best to help me save face. Americans tend to believe that they've reached some sort of pinnacle in the way they practice choice. They think that choice, as seen through the American lens best fulfills an innate and universal desire for choice in all humans. Unfortunately, these beliefs are based on assumptions that don't always hold true in many countries, in many cultures. At times they don't even hold true at America's own borders. I'd like to discuss some of these assumptions and the problems associated with them. As I do so, I hope you'll start thinking about some of your own assumptions and how they were shaped by your backgrounds. First assumption: if a choice affects you, then you should be the one to make it. This is the only way to ensure that your preferences and interests will be most fully accounted for. It is essential for success. In America, the primary locus of choice is the individual. People must choose for themselves, sometimes sticking to their guns, regardless of what other people want or recommend. It's called "being true to yourself." But do all individuals benefit from taking such an approach to choice? Mark Lepper and I did a series of studies in which we sought the answer to this very question. In one study, which we ran in Japantown, San Francisco, we brought seven- to nine-year-old Anglo- and Asian-American children into the laboratory, and we divided them up into three groups. The first group came in, and they were greeted by Miss Smith, who showed them six big piles of anagram puzzles. The kids got to choose which pile of anagrams they would like to do, and they even got to choose which marker they would write their answers with. When the second group of children came in, they were brought to the same room, shown the same anagrams, but this time Miss Smith told them which anagrams to do and which markers to write their answers with. Now when the third group came in, they were told that their anagrams and their markers had been chosen by their mothers. (Laughter) In reality, the kids who were told what to do, whether by Miss Smith or their mothers, were actually given the very same activity, which their counterparts in the first group had freely chosen. With this procedure, we were able to ensure that the kids across the three groups all did the same activity, making it easier for us to compare performance. Such small differences in the way we administered the activity yielded striking differences in how well they performed. Anglo-Americans, they did two and a half times more anagrams when they got to choose them, as compared to when it was chosen for them by Miss Smith or their mothers. It didn't matter who did the choosing, if the task was dictated by another, their performance suffered. In fact, some of the kids were visibly embarrassed when they were told that their mothers had been consulted. (Laughter) One girl named Mary said, "You asked my mother?" (Laughter) In contrast, Asian-American children performed best when they believed their mothers had made the choice, second best when they chose for themselves, and least well when it had been chosen by Miss Smith. A girl named Natsumi even approached Miss Smith as she was leaving the room and tugged on her skirt and asked, "Could you please tell my mommy I did it just like she said?" The first-generation children were strongly influenced by their immigrant parents' approach to choice. For them, choice was not just a way of defining and asserting their individuality, but a way to create community and harmony by deferring to the choices of people whom they trusted and respected. If they had a concept of being true to one's self, then that self, most likely, [was] composed, not of an individual, but of a collective. Success was just as much about pleasing key figures as it was about satisfying one's own preferences. Or, you could say that the individual's preferences were shaped by the preferences of specific others. The assumption then that we do best when the individual self chooses only holds when that self is clearly divided from others. When, in contrast, two or more individuals see their choices and their outcomes as intimately connected, then they may amplify one another's success by turning choosing into a collective act. To insist that they choose independently might actually compromise both their performance and their relationships. Yet that is exactly what the American paradigm demands. It leaves little room for interdependence or an acknowledgment of individual fallibility. It requires that everyone treat choice as a private and self-defining act. People that have grown up in such a paradigm might find it motivating, but it is a mistake to assume that everyone thrives under the pressure of choosing alone. The second assumption which informs the American view of choice goes something like this. The more choices you have, the more likely you are to make the best choice. So bring it on, Walmart, with 100,000 different products, and Amazon, with 27 million books and Match.com with -- what is it? -- 15 million date possibilities now. You will surely find the perfect match. Let's test this assumption by heading over to Eastern Europe. Here, I interviewed people who were residents of formerly communist countries, who had all faced the challenge of transitioning to a more democratic and capitalistic society. One of the most interesting revelations came not from an answer to a question, but from a simple gesture of hospitality. When the participants arrived for their interview, I offered them a set of drinks: Coke, Diet Coke, Sprite -- seven, to be exact. During the very first session, which was run in Russia, one of the participants made a comment that really caught me off guard. "Oh, but it doesn't matter. It's all just soda. That's just one choice." (Murmuring) I was so struck by this comment that from then on, I started to offer all the participants those seven sodas, and I asked them, "How many choices are these?" Again and again, they perceived these seven different sodas, not as seven choices, but as one choice: soda or no soda. When I put out juice and water in addition to these seven sodas, now they perceived it as only three choices -- juice, water and soda. Compare this to the die-hard devotion of many Americans, not just to a particular flavor of soda, but to a particular brand. You know, research shows repeatedly that we can't actually tell the difference between Coke and Pepsi. Of course, you and I know that Coke is the better choice. (Laughter) For modern Americans who are exposed to more options and more ads associated with options than anyone else in the world, choice is just as much about who they are as it is about what the product is. Combine this with the assumption that more choices are always better, and you have a group of people for whom every little difference matters and so every choice matters. But for Eastern Europeans, the sudden availability of all these consumer products on the marketplace was a deluge. They were flooded with choice before they could protest that they didn't know how to swim. When asked, "What words and images do you associate with choice?" Grzegorz from Warsaw said, "Ah, for me it is fear. There are some dilemmas you see. I am used to no choice." Bohdan from Kiev said, in response to how he felt about the new consumer marketplace, "It is too much. We do not need everything that is there." A sociologist from the Warsaw Survey Agency explained, "The older generation jumped from nothing to choice all around them. They were never given a chance to learn how to react." And Tomasz, a young Polish man said, "I don't need twenty kinds of chewing gum. I don't mean to say that I want no choice, but many of these choices are quite artificial." In reality, many choices are between things that are not that much different. The value of choice depends on our ability to perceive differences between the options. Americans train their whole lives to play "spot the difference." They practice this from such an early age that they've come to believe that everyone must be born with this ability. In fact, though all humans share a basic need and desire for choice, we don't all see choice in the same places or to the same extent. When someone can't see how one choice is unlike another, or when there are too many choices to compare and contrast, the process of choosing can be confusing and frustrating. Instead of making better choices, we become overwhelmed by choice, sometimes even afraid of it. Choice no longer offers opportunities, but imposes constraints. It's not a marker of liberation, but of suffocation by meaningless minutiae. In other words, choice can develop into the very opposite of everything it represents in America when it is thrust upon those who are insufficiently prepared for it. But it is not only other people in other places that are feeling the pressure of ever-increasing choice. Americans themselves are discovering that unlimited choice seems more attractive in theory than in practice. We all have physical, mental and emotional (Laughter) limitations that make it impossible for us to process every single choice we encounter, even in the grocery store, let alone over the course of our entire lives. A number of my studies have shown that when you give people 10 or more options when they're making a choice, they make poorer decisions, whether it be health care, investment, other critical areas. Yet still, many of us believe that we should make all our own choices and seek out even more of them. This brings me to the third, and perhaps most problematic, assumption: "You must never say no to choice." To examine this, let's go back to the U.S. and then hop across the pond to France. Right outside Chicago, a young couple, Susan and Daniel Mitchell, were about to have their first baby. They'd already picked out a name for her, Barbara, after her grandmother. One night, when Susan was seven months pregnant, she started to experience contractions and was rushed to the emergency room. The baby was delivered through a C-section, but Barbara suffered cerebral anoxia, a loss of oxygen to the brain. Unable to breathe on her own, she was put on a ventilator. Two days later, the doctors gave the Mitchells a choice: They could either remove Barbara off the life support, in which case she would die within a matter of hours, or they could keep her on life support, in which case she might still die within a matter of days. If she survived, she would remain in a permanent vegetative state, never able to walk, talk or interact with others. What do they do? What do any parent do? In a study I conducted with Simona Botti and Kristina Orfali, American and French parents were interviewed. They had all suffered the same tragedy. In all cases, the life support was removed, and the infants had died. But there was a big difference. In France, the doctors decided whether and when the life support would be removed, while in the United States, the final decision rested with the parents. We wondered: does this have an effect on how the parents cope with the loss of their loved one? We found that it did. Even up to a year later, American parents were more likely to express negative emotions, as compared to their French counterparts. French parents were more likely to say things like, "Noah was here for so little time, but he taught us so much. He gave us a new perspective on life." American parents were more likely to say things like, "What if? What if?" Another parent complained, "I feel as if they purposefully tortured me. How did they get me to do that?" And another parent said, "I feel as if I've played a role in an execution." But when the American parents were asked if they would rather have had the doctors make the decision, they all said, "No." They could not imagine turning that choice over to another, even though having made that choice made them feel trapped, guilty, angry. In a number of cases they were even clinically depressed. These parents could not contemplate giving up the choice, because to do so would have gone contrary to everything they had been taught and everything they had come to believe about the power and purpose of choice. In her essay, "The White Album," Joan Didion writes, "We tell ourselves stories in order to live. We interpret what we see, select the most workable of the multiple choices. We live entirely by the imposition of a narrative line upon disparate images, by the idea with which we have learned to freeze the shifting phantasmagoria, which is our actual experience." The story Americans tell, the story upon which the American dream depends, is the story of limitless choice. This narrative promises so much: freedom, happiness, success. It lays the world at your feet and says, "You can have anything, everything." It's a great story, and it's understandable why they would be reluctant to revise it. But when you take a close look, you start to see the holes, and you start to see that the story can be told in many other ways. Americans have so often tried to disseminate their ideas of choice, believing that they will be, or ought to be, welcomed with open hearts and minds. But the history books and the daily news tell us it doesn't always work out that way. The phantasmagoria, the actual experience that we try to understand and organize through narrative, varies from place to place. No single narrative serves the needs of everyone everywhere. Moreover, Americans themselves could benefit from incorporating new perspectives into their own narrative, which has been driving their choices for so long. Robert Frost once said that, "It is poetry that is lost in translation." This suggests that whatever is beautiful and moving, whatever gives us a new way to see, cannot be communicated to those who speak a different language. But Joseph Brodsky said that, "It is poetry that is gained in translation," suggesting that translation can be a creative, transformative act. When it comes to choice, we have far more to gain than to lose by engaging in the many translations of the narratives. Instead of replacing one story with another, we can learn from and revel in the many versions that exist and the many that have yet to be written. No matter where we're from and what your narrative is, we all have a responsibility to open ourselves up to a wider array of what choice can do, and what it can represent. And this does not lead to a paralyzing moral relativism. Rather, it teaches us when and how to act. It brings us that much closer to realizing the full potential of choice, to inspiring the hope and achieving the freedom that choice promises but doesn't always deliver. If we learn to speak to one another, albeit through translation, then we can begin to see choice in all its strangeness, complexity and compelling beauty. Thank you. (Applause) Bruno Giussani: Thank you. Sheena, there is a detail about your biography that we have not written in the program book. But by now it's evident to everyone in this room. You're blind. And I guess one of the questions on everybody's mind is: How does that influence your study of choosing because that's an activity that for most people is associated with visual inputs like aesthetics and color and so on? Sheena Iyengar: Well, it's funny that you should ask that because one of the things that's interesting about being blind is you actually get a different vantage point when you observe the way sighted people make choices. And as you just mentioned, there's lots of choices out there that are very visual these days. Yeah, I -- as you would expect -- get pretty frustrated by choices like what nail polish to put on because I have to rely on what other people suggest. And I can't decide. And so one time I was in a beauty salon, and I was trying to decide between two very light shades of pink. And one was called "Ballet Slippers." And the other one was called "Adorable." (Laughter) And so I asked these two ladies, and the one lady told me, "Well, you should definitely wear 'Ballet Slippers.'" "Well, what does it look like?" "Well, it's a very elegant shade of pink." "Okay, great." The other lady tells me to wear "Adorable." "What does it look like?" "It's a glamorous shade of pink." And so I asked them, "Well, how do I tell them apart? What's different about them?" And they said, "Well, one is elegant, the other one's glamorous." Okay, we got that. And the only thing they had consensus on: well, if I could see them, I would clearly be able to tell them apart. (Laughter) And what I wondered was whether they were being affected by the name or the content of the color, so I decided to do a little experiment. So I brought these two bottles of nail polish into the laboratory, and I stripped the labels off. And I brought women into the laboratory, and I asked them, "Which one would you pick?" 50 percent of the women accused me of playing a trick, of putting the same color nail polish in both those bottles. (Laughter) (Applause) At which point you start to wonder who the trick's really played on. Now, of the women that could tell them apart, when the labels were off, they picked "Adorable," and when the labels were on, they picked "Ballet Slippers." So as far as I can tell, a rose by any other name probably does look different and maybe even smells different. BG: Thank you. Sheena Iyengar. Thank you Sheena. (Applause)

I would like to share with you this morning some stories about the ocean through my work as a still photographer for National Geographic magazine. I guess I became an underwater photographer and a photojournalist because I fell in love with the sea as a child. And I wanted to tell stories about all the amazing things I was seeing underwater, incredible wildlife and interesting behaviors. And after even 30 years of doing this, after 30 years of exploring the ocean, I never cease to be amazed at the extraordinary encounters that I have while I'm at sea. But more and more frequently these days I'm seeing terrible things underwater as well, things that I don't think most people realize. And I've been compelled to turn my camera towards these issues to tell a more complete story. I want people to see what's happening underwater, both the horror and the magic. The first story that I did for National Geographic, where I recognized the ability to include environmental issues within a natural history coverage, was a story I proposed on harp seals. The story I wanted to do initially was just a small focus to look at the few weeks each year where these animals migrate down from the Canadian arctic to the Gulf of St. Lawrence in Canada to engage in courtship, mating and to have their pups. And all of this is played out against the backdrop of transient pack ice that moves with wind and tide. And because I'm an underwater photographer, I wanted to do this story from both above and below, to make pictures like this that show one of these little pups making its very first swim in the icy 29-degree water. But as I got more involved in the story, I realized that there were two big environmental issues I couldn't ignore. The first was that these animals continue to be hunted, killed with hakapiks at about eight, 15 days old. It actually is the largest marine mammal slaughter on the planet, with hundreds of thousands of these seals being killed every year. But as disturbing as that is, I think the bigger problem for harp seals is the loss of sea ice due to global warming. This is an aerial picture that I made that shows the Gulf of St. Lawrence during harp seal season. And even though we see a lot of ice in this picture, there's a lot of water as well, which wasn't there historically. And the ice that is there is quite thin. The problem is that these pups need a stable platform of solid ice in order to nurse from their moms. They only need 12 days from the moment they're born until they're on their own. But if they don't get 12 days, they can fall into the ocean and die. This is a photo that I made showing one of these pups that's only about five or seven days old -- still has a little bit of the umbilical cord on its belly -- that has fallen in because of the thin ice, and the mother is frantically trying to push it up to breathe and to get it back to stable purchase. This problem has continued to grow each year since I was there. I read that last year the pup mortality rate was 100 percent in parts of the Gulf of St. Lawrence. So, clearly, this species has a lot of problems going forward. This ended up becoming a cover story at National Geographic. And it received quite a bit of attention. And with that, I saw the potential to begin doing other stories about ocean problems. So I proposed a story on the global fish crisis, in part because I had personally witnessed a lot of degradation in the ocean over the last 30 years, but also because I read a scientific paper that stated that 90 percent of the big fish in the ocean have disappeared in the last 50 or 60 years. These are the tuna, the billfish and the sharks. When I read that, I was blown away by those numbers. I thought this was going to be headline news in every media outlet, but it really wasn't, so I wanted to do a story that was a very different kind of underwater story. I wanted it to be more like war photography, where I was making harder-hitting pictures that showed readers what was happening to marine wildlife around the planet. The first component of the story that I thought was essential, however, was to give readers a sense of appreciation for the ocean animals that they were eating. You know, I think people go into a restaurant, and somebody orders a steak, and we all know where steak comes from, and somebody orders a chicken, and we know what a chicken is, but when they're eating bluefin sushi, do they have any sense of the magnificent animal that they're consuming? These are the lions and tigers of the sea. In reality, these animals have no terrestrial counterpart; they're unique in the world. These are animals that can practically swim from the equator to the poles and can crisscross entire oceans in the course of a year. If we weren't so efficient at catching them, because they grow their entire life, would have 30-year-old bluefin out there that weigh a ton. But the truth is we're way too efficient at catching them, and their stocks have collapsed worldwide. This is the daily auction at the Tsukiji Fish Market that I photographed a couple years ago. And every single day these tuna, bluefin like this, are stacked up like cordwood, just warehouse after warehouse. As I wandered around and made these pictures, it sort of occurred to me that the ocean's not a grocery store, you know. We can't keep taking without expecting serious consequences as a result. I also, with the story, wanted to show readers how fish are caught, some of the methods that are used to catch fish, like a bottom trawler, which is one of the most common methods in the world. This was a small net that was being used in Mexico to catch shrimp, but the way it works is essentially the same everywhere in the world. You have a large net in the middle with two steel doors on either end. And as this assembly is towed through the water, the doors meet resistance with the ocean, and it opens the mouth of the net, and they place floats at the top and a lead line on the bottom. And this just drags over the bottom, in this case to catch shrimp. But as you can imagine, it's catching everything else in its path as well. And it's destroying that precious benthic community on the bottom, things like sponges and corals, that critical habitat for other animals. This photograph I made of the fisherman holding the shrimp that he caught after towing his nets for one hour. So he had a handful of shrimp, maybe seven or eight shrimp, and all those other animals on the deck of the boat are bycatch. These are animals that died in the process, but have no commercial value. So this is the true cost of a shrimp dinner, maybe seven or eight shrimp and 10 pounds of other animals that had to die in the process. And to make that point even more visual, I swam under the shrimp boat and made this picture of the guy shoveling this bycatch into the sea as trash and photographed this cascade of death, you know, animals like guitarfish, bat rays, flounder, pufferfish, that only an hour before, were on the bottom of the ocean, alive, but now being thrown back as trash. I also wanted to focus on the shark fishing industry because, currently on planet Earth, we're killing over 100 million sharks every single year. But before I went out to photograph this component, I sort of wrestled with the notion of how do you make a picture of a dead shark that will resonate with readers You know, I think there's still a lot of people out there who think the only good shark is a dead shark. But this one morning I jumped in and found this thresher that had just recently died in the gill net. And with its huge pectoral fins and eyes still very visible, it struck me as sort of a crucifixion, if you will. This ended up being the lead picture in the global fishery story in National Geographic. And I hope that it helped readers to take notice of this problem of 100 million sharks. And because I love sharks -- I'm somewhat obsessed with sharks -- I wanted to do another, more celebratory, story about sharks, as a way of talking about the need for shark conservation. So I went to the Bahamas because there're very few places in the world where sharks are doing well these days, but the Bahamas seem to be a place where stocks were reasonably healthy, largely due to the fact that the government there had outlawed longlining several years ago. And I wanted to show several species that we hadn't shown much in the magazine and worked in a number of locations. One of the locations was this place called Tiger Beach, in the northern Bahamas where tiger sharks aggregate in shallow water. This is a low-altitude photograph that I made showing our dive boat with about a dozen of these big old tiger sharks sort of just swimming around behind. But the one thing I definitely didn't want to do with this coverage was to continue to portray sharks as something like monsters. I didn't want them to be overly threatening or scary. And with this photograph of a beautiful 15-feet, probably 14-feet, I guess, female tiger shark, I sort of think I got to that goal, where she was swimming with these little barjacks off her nose, and my strobe created a shadow on her face. And I think it's a gentler picture, a little less threatening, a little more respectful of the species. I also searched on this story for the elusive great hammerhead, an animal that really hadn't been photographed much until maybe about seven or 10 years ago. It's a very solitary creature. But this is an animal that's considered data deficient by science in both Florida and in the Bahamas. You know, we know almost nothing about them. We don't know where they migrate to or from, where they mate, where they have their pups, and yet, hammerhead populations in the Atlantic have declined about 80 percent in the last 20 to 30 years. You know, we're losing them faster than we can possibly find them. This is the oceanic whitetip shark, an animal that is considered the fourth most dangerous species, if you pay attention to such lists. But it's an animal that's about 98 percent in decline throughout most of its range. Because this is a pelagic animal and it lives out in the deeper water, and because we weren't working on the bottom, I brought along a shark cage here, and my friend, shark biologist Wes Pratt is inside the cage. You'll see that the photographer, of course, was not inside the cage here, so clearly the biologist is a little smarter than the photographer I guess. And lastly with this story, I also wanted to focus on baby sharks, shark nurseries. And I went to the island of Bimini, in the Bahamas, to work with lemon shark pups. This is a photo of a lemon shark pup, and it shows these animals where they live for the first two to three years of their lives in these protective mangroves. This is a very sort of un-shark-like photograph. It's not what you typically might think of as a shark picture. But, you know, here we see a shark that's maybe 10 or 11 inches long swimming in about a foot of water. But this is crucial habitat and it's where they spend the first two, three years of their lives, until they're big enough to go out on the rest of the reef. After I left Bimini, I actually learned that this habitat was being bulldozed to create a new golf course and resort. And other recent stories have looked at single, flagship species, if you will, that are at risk in the ocean as a way of talking about other threats. One such story I did documented the leatherback sea turtle. This is the largest, widest-ranging, deepest-diving and oldest of all turtle species. Here we see a female crawling out of the ocean under moonlight on the island of Trinidad. These are animals whose lineage dates back about 100 million years. And there was a time in their lifespan where they were coming out of the water to nest and saw Tyrannosaurus rex running by. And today, they crawl out and see condominiums. But despite this amazing longevity, they're now considered critically endangered. In the Pacific, where I made this photograph, their stocks have declined about 90 percent in the last 15 years. This is a photograph that shows a hatchling about to taste saltwater for the very first time beginning this long and perilous journey. Only one in a thousand leatherback hatchlings will reach maturity. But that's due to natural predators like vultures that pick them off on a beach or predatory fish that are waiting offshore. Nature has learned to compensate with that, and females have multiple clutches of eggs to overcome those odds. But what they can't deal with is anthropogenic stresses, human things, like this picture that shows a leatherback caught at night in a gill net. I actually jumped in and photographed this, and with the fisherman's permission, I cut the turtle out, and it was able to swim free. But, you know, thousands of other leatherbacks each year are not so fortunate, and the species' future is in great danger. Another charismatic megafauna species that I worked with is the story I did on the right whale. And essentially, the story is this with right whales, that about a million years ago, there was one species of right whale on the planet, but as land masses moved around and oceans became isolated, the species sort of separated, and today we have essentially two distinct stocks. We have the Southern right whale that we see here and the North Atlantic right whale that we see here with a mom and calf off the coast of Florida. Now, both species were hunted to the brink of extinction by the early whalers, but the Southern right whales have rebounded a lot better because they're located in places farther away from human activity. The North Atlantic right whale is listed as the most endangered species on the planet today because they are urban whales; they live along the east coast of North America, United States and Canada, and they have to deal with all these urban ills. This photo shows an animal popping its head out at sunset off the coast of Florida. You can see the coal burning plant in the background. They have to deal with things like toxins and pharmaceuticals that are flushed out into the ocean, and maybe even affecting their reproduction. They also get entangled in fishing gear. This is a picture that shows the tail of a right whale. And those white markings are not natural markings. These are entanglement scars. 72 percent of the population has such scars, but most don't shed the gear, things like lobster traps and crab pots. They hold on to them, and it eventually kills them. And the other problem is they get hit by ships. And this was an animal that was struck by a ship in Nova Scotia, Canada being towed in, where they did a necropsy to confirm the cause of death, which was indeed a ship strike. So all of these ills are stacking up against these animals and keeping their numbers very low. And to draw a contrast with that beleaguered North Atlantic population, I went to a new pristine population of Southern right whales that had only been discovered about 10 years ago in the sub-Antarctic of New Zealand, a place called the Auckland Islands. I went down there in the winter time. And these are animals that had never seen humans before, and I was one of the first people they probably had ever seen. And I got in the water with them, and I was amazed at how curious they were. This photograph shows my assistant standing on the bottom at about 70 feet and one of these amazingly beautiful, 45-foot, 70-ton whales, like a city bus just swimming up, you know. They were in perfect condition, very fat and healthy, robust, no entanglement scars, the way they're supposed to look. You know, I read that the pilgrims, when they landed at Plymouth Rock in Massachusetts in 1620, wrote that you could walk across Cape Cod Bay on the backs of right whales. And we can't go back and see that today, but maybe we can preserve what we have left. And I wanted to close this program with a story of hope, a story I did on marine reserves as sort of a solution to the problem of overfishing, the global fish crisis story. I settled on working in the country of New Zealand because New Zealand was rather progressive, and is rather progressive in terms of protecting their ocean. And I really wanted this story to be about three things: I wanted it to be about abundance, about diversity and about resilience. And one of the first places I worked was a reserve called Goat Island in Leigh of New Zealand. What the scientists there told me was that when protected this first marine reserve in 1975, they hoped and expected that certain things might happen. For example, they hoped that certain species of fish like the New Zealand snapper would return because they had been fished to the brink of commercial extinction. And they did come back. What they couldn't predict was that other things would happen. For example, these fish predate on sea urchins, and when the fish were all gone, all anyone ever saw underwater was just acres and acres of sea urchins. But when the fish came back and began predating and controlling the urchin population, low and behold, kelp forests emerged in shallow water. And that's because the urchins eat kelp. So when the fish control the urchin population, the ocean was restored to its natural equilibrium. You know, this is probably how the ocean looked here one or 200 years ago, but nobody was around to tell us. I worked in other parts of New Zealand as well, in beautiful, fragile, protected areas like in Fiordland, where this sea pen colony was found. Little blue cod swimming in for a dash of color. In the northern part of New Zealand, I dove in the blue water, where the water's a little warmer, and photographed animals like this giant sting ray swimming through an underwater canyon. Every part of the ecosystem in this place seems very healthy, from tiny, little animals like a nudibrank crawling over encrusting sponge or a leatherjacket that is a very important animal in this ecosystem because it grazes on the bottom and allows new life to take hold. And I wanted to finish with this photograph, a picture I made on a very stormy day in New Zealand when I just laid on the bottom amidst a school of fish swirling around me. And I was in a place that had only been protected about 20 years ago. And I talked to divers that had been diving there for many years, and they said that the marine life was better here today than it was in the 1960s. And that's because it's been protected, that it has come back. So I think the message is clear. The ocean is, indeed, resilient and tolerant to a point, but we must be good custodians. I became an underwater photographer because I fell in love with the sea, and I make pictures of it today because I want to protect it, and I don't think it's too late. Thank you very much.

For the last 10 years, I've been spending my time trying to figure out how and why human beings assemble themselves into social networks. And the kind of social network I'm talking about is not the recent online variety, but rather, the kind of social networks that human beings have been assembling for hundreds of thousands of years, ever since we emerged from the African savannah. So, I form friendships and co-worker and sibling and relative relationships with other people who in turn have similar relationships with other people. And this spreads on out endlessly into a distance. And you get a network that looks like this. Every dot is a person. Every line between them is a relationship between two people -- different kinds of relationships. And you can get this kind of vast fabric of humanity, in which we're all embedded. And my colleague, James Fowler and I have been studying for quite sometime what are the mathematical, social, biological and psychological rules that govern how these networks are assembled and what are the similar rules that govern how they operate, how they affect our lives. But recently, we've been wondering whether it might be possible to take advantage of this insight, to actually find ways to improve the world, to do something better, to actually fix things, not just understand things. So one of the first things we thought we would tackle would be how we go about predicting epidemics. And the current state of the art in predicting an epidemic -- if you're the CDC or some other national body -- is to sit in the middle where you are and collect data from physicians and laboratories in the field that report the prevalence or the incidence of certain conditions. So, so and so patients have been diagnosed with something, or other patients have been diagnosed, and all these data are fed into a central repository, with some delay. And if everything goes smoothly, one to two weeks from now you'll know where the epidemic was today. And actually, about a year or so ago, there was this promulgation of the idea of Google Flu Trends, with respect to the flu, where by looking at people's searching behavior today, we could know where the flu -- what the status of the epidemic was today, what's the prevalence of the epidemic today. But what I'd like to show you today is a means by which we might get not just rapid warning about an epidemic, but also actually early detection of an epidemic. And, in fact, this idea can be used not just to predict epidemics of germs, but also to predict epidemics of all sorts of kinds. For example, anything that spreads by a form of social contagion could be understood in this way, from abstract ideas on the left like patriotism, or altruism, or religion to practices like dieting behavior, or book purchasing, or drinking, or bicycle-helmet [and] other safety practices, or products that people might buy, purchases of electronic goods, anything in which there's kind of an interpersonal spread. A kind of a diffusion of innovation could be understood and predicted by the mechanism I'm going to show you now. So, as all of you probably know, the classic way of thinking about this is the diffusion-of-innovation, or the adoption curve. So here on the Y-axis, we have the percent of the people affected, and on the X-axis, we have time. And at the very beginning, not too many people are affected, and you get this classic sigmoidal, or S-shaped, curve. And the reason for this shape is that at the very beginning, let's say one or two people are infected, or affected by the thing and then they affect, or infect, two people, who in turn affect four, eight, 16 and so forth, and you get the epidemic growth phase of the curve. And eventually, you saturate the population. There are fewer and fewer people who are still available that you might infect, and then you get the plateau of the curve, and you get this classic sigmoidal curve. And this holds for germs, ideas, product adoption, behaviors, and the like. But things don't just diffuse in human populations at random. They actually diffuse through networks. Because, as I said, we live our lives in networks, and these networks have a particular kind of a structure. Now if you look at a network like this -- this is 105 people. And the lines represent -- the dots are the people, and the lines represent friendship relationships. You might see that people occupy different locations within the network. And there are different kinds of relationships between the people. You could have friendship relationships, sibling relationships, spousal relationships, co-worker relationships, neighbor relationships and the like. And different sorts of things spread across different sorts of ties. For instance, sexually transmitted diseases will spread across sexual ties. Or, for instance, people's smoking behavior might be influenced by their friends. Or their altruistic or their charitable giving behavior might be influenced by their coworkers, or by their neighbors. But not all positions in the network are the same. So if you look at this, you might immediately grasp that different people have different numbers of connections. Some people have one connection, some have two, some have six, some have 10 connections. And this is called the "degree" of a node, or the number of connections that a node has. But in addition, there's something else. So, if you look at nodes A and B, they both have six connections. But if you can see this image [of the network] from a bird's eye view, you can appreciate that there's something very different about nodes A and B. So, let me ask you this -- I can cultivate this intuition by asking a question -- who would you rather be if a deadly germ was spreading through the network, A or B? (Audience: B.) Nicholas Christakis: B, it's obvious. B is located on the edge of the network. Now, who would you rather be if a juicy piece of gossip were spreading through the network? A. And you have an immediate appreciation that A is going to be more likely to get the thing that's spreading and to get it sooner by virtue of their structural location within the network. A, in fact, is more central, and this can be formalized mathematically. So, if we want to track something that was spreading through a network, what we ideally would like to do is to set up sensors on the central individuals within the network, including node A, monitor those people that are right there in the middle of the network, and somehow get an early detection of whatever it is that is spreading through the network. So if you saw them contract a germ or a piece of information, you would know that, soon enough, everybody was about to contract this germ or this piece of information. And this would be much better than monitoring six randomly chosen people, without reference to the structure of the population. And in fact, if you could do that, what you would see is something like this. On the left-hand panel, again, we have the S-shaped curve of adoption. In the dotted red line, we show what the adoption would be in the random people, and in the left-hand line, shifted to the left, we show what the adoption would be in the central individuals within the network. On the Y-axis is the cumulative instances of contagion, and on the X-axis is the time. And on the right-hand side, we show the same data, but here with daily incidence. And what we show here is -- like, here -- very few people are affected, more and more and more and up to here, and here's the peak of the epidemic. But shifted to the left is what's occurring in the central individuals. And this difference in time between the two is the early detection, the early warning we can get, about an impending epidemic in the human population. The problem, however, is that mapping human social networks is not always possible. It can be expensive, not feasible, unethical, or, frankly, just not possible to do such a thing. So, how can we figure out who the central people are in a network without actually mapping the network? What we came up with was an idea to exploit an old fact, or a known fact, about social networks, which goes like this: Do you know that your friends have more friends than you do? Your friends have more friends than you do, and this is known as the friendship paradox. Imagine a very popular person in the social network -- like a party host who has hundreds of friends -- and a misanthrope who has just one friend, and you pick someone at random from the population; they were much more likely to know the party host. And if they nominate the party host as their friend, that party host has a hundred friends, therefore, has more friends than they do. And this, in essence, is what's known as the friendship paradox. The friends of randomly chosen people have higher degree, and are more central than the random people themselves. And you can get an intuitive appreciation for this if you imagine just the people at the perimeter of the network. If you pick this person, the only friend they have to nominate is this person, who, by construction, must have at least two and typically more friends. And that happens at every peripheral node. And in fact, it happens throughout the network as you move in, everyone you pick, when they nominate a random -- when a random person nominates a friend of theirs, you move closer to the center of the network. So, we thought we would exploit this idea in order to study whether we could predict phenomena within networks. Because now, with this idea we can take a random sample of people, have them nominate their friends, those friends would be more central, and we could do this without having to map the network. And we tested this idea with an outbreak of H1N1 flu at Harvard College in the fall and winter of 2009, just a few months ago. We took 1,300 randomly selected undergraduates, we had them nominate their friends, and we followed both the random students and their friends daily in time to see whether or not they had the flu epidemic. And we did this passively by looking at whether or not they'd gone to university health services. And also, we had them [actively] email us a couple of times a week. Exactly what we predicted happened. So the random group is in the red line. The epidemic in the friends group has shifted to the left, over here. And the difference in the two is 16 days. By monitoring the friends group, we could get 16 days advance warning of an impending epidemic in this human population. Now, in addition to that, if you were an analyst who was trying to study an epidemic or to predict the adoption of a product, for example, what you could do is you could pick a random sample of the population, also have them nominate their friends and follow the friends and follow both the randoms and the friends. Among the friends, the first evidence you saw of a blip above zero in adoption of the innovation, for example, would be evidence of an impending epidemic. Or you could see the first time the two curves diverged, as shown on the left. When did the randoms -- when did the friends take off and leave the randoms, and [when did] their curve start shifting? And that, as indicated by the white line, occurred 46 days before the peak of the epidemic. So this would be a technique whereby we could get more than a month-and-a-half warning about a flu epidemic in a particular population. I should say that how far advanced a notice one might get about something depends on a host of factors. It could depend on the nature of the pathogen -- different pathogens, using this technique, you'd get different warning -- or other phenomena that are spreading, or frankly, on the structure of the human network. Now in our case, although it wasn't necessary, we could also actually map the network of the students. So, this is a map of 714 students and their friendship ties. And in a minute now, I'm going to put this map into motion. We're going to take daily cuts through the network for 120 days. The red dots are going to be cases of the flu, and the yellow dots are going to be friends of the people with the flu. And the size of the dots is going to be proportional to how many of their friends have the flu. So bigger dots mean more of your friends have the flu. And if you look at this image -- here we are now in September the 13th -- you're going to see a few cases light up. You're going to see kind of blooming of the flu in the middle. Here we are on October the 19th. The slope of the epidemic curve is approaching now, in November. Bang, bang, bang, bang, bang -- you're going to see lots of blooming in the middle, and then you're going to see a sort of leveling off, fewer and fewer cases towards the end of December. And this type of a visualization can show that epidemics like this take root and affect central individuals first, before they affect others. Now, as I've been suggesting, this method is not restricted to germs, but actually to anything that spreads in populations. Information spreads in populations, norms can spread in populations, behaviors can spread in populations. And by behaviors, I can mean things like criminal behavior, or voting behavior, or health care behavior, like smoking, or vaccination, or product adoption, or other kinds of behaviors that relate to interpersonal influence. If I'm likely to do something that affects others around me, this technique can get early warning or early detection about the adoption within the population. The key thing is that for it to work, there has to be interpersonal influence. It cannot be because of some broadcast mechanism affecting everyone uniformly. Now the same insights can also be exploited -- with respect to networks -- can also be exploited in other ways, for example, in the use of targeting specific people for interventions. So, for example, most of you are probably familiar with the notion of herd immunity. So, if we have a population of a thousand people, and we want to make the population immune to a pathogen, we don't have to immunize every single person. If we immunize 960 of them, it's as if we had immunized a hundred [percent] of them. Because even if one or two of the non-immune people gets infected, there's no one for them to infect. They are surrounded by immunized people. So 96 percent is as good as 100 percent. Well, some other scientists have estimated what would happen if you took a 30 percent random sample of these 1000 people, 300 people and immunized them. Would you get any population-level immunity? And the answer is no. But if you took this 30 percent, these 300 people and had them nominate their friends and took the same number of vaccine doses and vaccinated the friends of the 300 -- the 300 friends -- you can get the same level of herd immunity as if you had vaccinated 96 percent of the population at a much greater efficiency, with a strict budget constraint. And similar ideas can be used, for instance, to target distribution of things like bed nets in the developing world. If we could understand the structure of networks in villages, we could target to whom to give the interventions to foster these kinds of spreads. Or, frankly, for advertising with all kinds of products. If we could understand how to target, it could affect the efficiency of what we're trying to achieve. And in fact, we can use data from all kinds of sources nowadays [to do this]. This is a map of eight million phone users in a European country. Every dot is a person, and every line represents a volume of calls between the people. And we can use such data, that's being passively obtained, to map these whole countries and understand who is located where within the network. Without actually having to query them at all, we can get this kind of a structural insight. And other sources of information, as you're no doubt aware are available about such features, from email interactions, online interactions, online social networks and so forth. And in fact, we are in the era of what I would call "massive-passive" data collection efforts. They're all kinds of ways we can use massively collected data to create sensor networks to follow the population, understand what's happening in the population, and intervene in the population for the better. Because these new technologies tell us not just who is talking to whom, but where everyone is, and what they're thinking based on what they're uploading on the Internet, and what they're buying based on their purchases. And all this administrative data can be pulled together and processed to understand human behavior in a way we never could before. So, for example, we could use truckers' purchases of fuel. So the truckers are just going about their business, and they're buying fuel. And we see a blip up in the truckers' purchases of fuel, and we know that a recession is about to end. Or we can monitor the velocity with which people are moving with their phones on a highway, and the phone company can see, as the velocity is slowing down, that there's a traffic jam. And they can feed that information back to their subscribers, but only to their subscribers on the same highway located behind the traffic jam! Or we can monitor doctors prescribing behaviors, passively, and see how the diffusion of innovation with pharmaceuticals occurs within [networks of] doctors. Or again, we can monitor purchasing behavior in people and watch how these types of phenomena can diffuse within human populations. And there are three ways, I think, that these massive-passive data can be used. One is fully passive, like I just described -- as in, for instance, the trucker example, where we don't actually intervene in the population in any way. One is quasi-active, like the flu example I gave, where we get some people to nominate their friends and then passively monitor their friends -- do they have the flu, or not? -- and then get warning. Or another example would be, if you're a phone company, you figure out who's central in the network and you ask those people, "Look, will you just text us your fever every day? Just text us your temperature." And collect vast amounts of information about people's temperature, but from centrally located individuals. And be able, on a large scale, to monitor an impending epidemic with very minimal input from people. Or, finally, it can be more fully active -- as I know subsequent speakers will also talk about today -- where people might globally participate in wikis, or photographing, or monitoring elections, and upload information in a way that allows us to pool information in order to understand social processes and social phenomena. In fact, the availability of these data, I think, heralds a kind of new era of what I and others would like to call "computational social science." It's sort of like when Galileo invented -- or, didn't invent -- came to use a telescope and could see the heavens in a new way, or Leeuwenhoek became aware of the microscope -- or actually invented -- and could see biology in a new way. But now we have access to these kinds of data that allow us to understand social processes and social phenomena in an entirely new way that was never before possible. And with this science, we can understand how exactly the whole comes to be greater than the sum of its parts. And actually, we can use these insights to improve society and improve human well-being. Thank you.

So how would you run a whole country without oil? That's the question that sort of hit me in the middle of a Davos afternoon about four years ago. It never left my brain. And I started playing with it more like a puzzle. The original thought I had: this must be ethanol. So I went out and researched ethanol, and found out you need the Amazon in your backyard in every country. About six months later I figured out it must be hydrogen, until some scientist told me the unfortunate truth, which is, you actually use more clean electrons than the ones you get inside a car, if you use hydrogen. So that is not going to be the path to go. And then sort of through a process of wandering around, I got to the thought that actually if you could convert an entire country to electric cars, in a way that is convenient and affordable, you could get to a solution. Now I started this from a point of view that it has to be something that scales en masse. Not how do you build one car, but how do you scale this so that it can become something that is used by 99 percent of the population? The thought that came to mind is that it needs to be as good as any car that you would have today. So one, it has to be more convenient than a car. And two, it has be more affordable than today's cars. Affordable is not a 40,000 dollar sedan, right? Alright? That's not something that we can finance or buy today. And convenient is not something that you drive for an hour and charge for eight. So we're bound with the laws of physics and the laws of economics. And so the thought that I started with was how do you do this, still within the boundary of the science we know today -- no time for science fair, no time for playing around with things or waiting for the magic battery to show up. How do you do it within the economics that we have today? How do you do it from the power of the consumer up? And not from the power of an edict down. On a random visit to Tesla on some afternoon, I actually found out that the answer comes from separating between the car ownership and the battery ownership. In a sense if you want to think about it this is the classic "batteries not included." Now if you separate between the two, you could actually answer the need for a convenient car by creating a network, by creating a network before the cars show up. The network has two components in them. First component is you charge the car whenever you stop -- ends up that cars are these strange beasts that drive for about two hours and park for about 22 hours. If you drive a car in the morning and drive it back in the afternoon the ratio of charge to drive is about a minute for a minute. And so the first thought that came to mind is, everywhere we park we have electric power. Now it sounds crazy. But in some places around the world, like Scandinavia, you already have that. If you park your car and didn't plug in the heater, when you come back you don't have a car. It just doesn't work. Now that last mile, last foot, in a sense, is the first step of the infrastructure. The second step of the infrastructure needs to take care of the range extension. See we're bound by today's technology on batteries, which is about 120 miles if you want to stay within reasonable space and weight limitations. 120 miles is a good enough range for a lot of people. But you never want to get stuck. So what we added is a second element to our network, which is a battery swap system. You drive. You take your depleted battery out. A full battery comes on. And you drive on. You don't do it as a human being. You do it as a machine. It looks like a car wash. You come into your car wash. And a plate comes up, holds your battery, takes it out, puts it back in, and within two minutes you're back on the road and you can go again. If you had charge spots everywhere, and you had battery swap stations everywhere, how often would you do it? And it ends up that you'd do swapping less times than you stop at a gas station. As a matter of fact, we added to the contract. We said that if you stop to swap your battery more than 50 times a year we start paying you money because it's an inconvenience. Then we looked at the question of the affordability. We looked at the question, what happens when the battery is disconnected from the car. What is the cost of that battery? Everybody tells us batteries are so expensive. What we found out, when you move from molecules to electrons, something interesting happens. We can go back to the original economics of the car and look at it again. The battery is not the gas tank, in a sense. Remember in your car you have a gas tank. You have the crude oil. And you have refining and delivery of that crude oil as what we call petrol or gasoline. The battery in this sense, is the crude oil. We have a battery bay. It costs the same hundred dollars as the gas tank. But the crude oil is replaced with a battery. Just it doesn't burn. It consumes itself step after step after step. It has 2,000 life cycles these days. And so it's sort of a mini well. We were asked in the past when we bought an electric car to pay for the entire well, for the life of the car. Nobody wants to buy a mini well when they buy a car. In a sense what we've done is we've created a new consumable. You, today, buy gasoline miles. And we created electric miles. And the price of electric miles ends up being a very interesting number. Today 2010, in volume, when we come to market, it is eight cents a mile. Those of you who have a hard time calculating what that means -- in the average consumer environment we're in in the U.S. 20 miles per gallon that's a buck 50, a buck 60 a gallon. That's cheaper than today's gasoline, even in the U.S. In Europe where taxes are in place, that's the equivalent to a minus 60 dollar barrel. But e-miles follow Moore's Law. They go from eight cents a mile in 2010, to four cents a mile in 2015, to two cents a mile by 2020. Why? Because batteries life cycle improve -- a bit of improvement on energy density, which reduces the price. And these prices are actually with clean electrons. We do not use any electrons that come from coal. So in a sense this is an absolute zero-carbon, zero-fossil fuel electric mile at two cents a mile by 2020. Now even if we get to 40 miles per gallon by 2020, which is our desire. Imagine only 40 miles per gallon cars would be on the road. That is an 80 cent gallon. An 80 cent gallon means, if the entire Pacific would convert to crude oil, and we'd let any oil company bring it out and refine it, they still can't compete with two cents a mile. That's a new economic factor, which is fascinating to most people. Now this would have been a wonderful paper. That's how I solved it in my head. It was a white paper I handed out to governments. And some governments told me that it's fascinating that the younger generation actually thinks about these things. (Laughter) Until I got to the true young global leader, Shimon Peres, President of Israel, and he ran a beautiful manipulation on me. First he let me go to the prime minister of the country, who told me, if you can find the money you need for this network, 200 million dollars, and if you can find a car company that will build that car in mass volume, in two million cars -- that's what we needed in Israel -- I'll give you country to invest the 200 million into. Peres thought that was a great idea. So we went out, and we looked at all the car companies. We sent letters to all the car companies. Three of them never showed up. One of them asked us if we would stay with hybrids and they would give us a discount. But one of them Carlos Ghosn, CEO of Renault and Nissan, when asked about hybrids said something very fascinating. He said hybrids are like mermaids. When you want a fish you get a woman and when you need a woman you get a fish. (Laughter) And Ghosn came up and said, "I have the car, Mr. Peres; I will build you the cars." And actually true to form, Renault has put a billion and a half dollars in building nine different types of cars that fit this kind of model that will come into the market in mass volume -- mass volume being the first year, 100 thousand cars. It's the first mass-volume electric car, zero-emission electric car in the market. I was running, as Chris said, to be the CEO of a large software company called SAP And then Peres said, "Well won't you run this project?" And I said, "I'm ready for CEO" And he said, "Oh no no no no no. You've got to explain to me, what is more important than saving your country and saving the world, that you would go and do?" And I had to quit and come and do this thing called A Better Place. We then decided to scale it up. We went to other countries. As I said we went to Denmark. And Denmark set this beautiful policy; it's called the IQ test. It's inversely proportional to taxes. They put 180 percent tax on gasoline cars and zero tax on zero-emission cars. So if you want to buy a gasoline car in Denmark, it costs you about 60,000 Euros. If you buy our car it's about 20,000 Euros. If you fail the IQ test they ask you to leave the country. (Laughter) We then were sort of coined as the guys who run only in small islands. I know most people don't think of Israel as a small island, but Israel is an island -- it's a transportation island. If your car is driving outside Israel it's been stolen. (Laughter) If you're thinking about it in terms of islands, we decided to go to the biggest island that we could find, and that was Australia. The third country we announced was Australia. It's got three centers -- in Brisbane, in Melbourne, in Sydney -- and one freeway, one electric freeway that connects them. The next island was not too hard to find, and that was Hawaii. We decided to come into the U.S. and pick the two best places -- the one where you didn't need any range extension. Hawaii you can drive around the island on one battery. And if you really have a long day you can switch, and keep on driving around the island. The second one was the San Francisco Bay Area where Gavin Newsom created a beautiful policy across all the mayors. He decided that he's going to take over the state, unofficially, and then officially, and then created this beautiful Region One policy. In the San Francisco Bay Area not only do you have the highest concentration of Priuses, but you also have the perfect range extender. It's called the other car. As we stared scaling it up we looked at what is the problem to come up to the U.S.? Why is this a big issue? And the most fascinating thing we've learned is that, when you have small problems on the individual level, like the price of gasoline to drive every morning. You don't notice it, but when the aggregate comes up you're dead. Alright? So the price of oil, much like lots of other curves that we've seen, goes along a depletion curve. The foundation of this curve is that we keep losing the wells that are close to the ground. And we keep getting wells that are farther away from the ground. It becomes more and more and more expensive to dig them out. You think, well it's been up, it's been down, its been up, it's going to keep on going up and down. Here is the problem: at 147 dollars a barrel, which we were in six months ago, the U.S. spent a ton of money to get oil. Then we lost our economy and we went back down to 47 -- sometimes it's 40, sometimes it's 50. Now we're running a stimulus package. It's called the trillion-dollar stimulus package. We're going to revive the economy. Hopefully it happens between now and 2015, somewhere in that space. What happens when the economy recovers? By 2015 we would have had at least 250 million new cars even at the pace we're going at right now. That's another 30 percent demand on oil. That is another 25 million barrels a day. That's all the U.S. usage today. In other words at some point when we've recovered we go up to the peak. And then we do the OPEC stimulus package also known as 200 dollars a barrel. We take our money and we give it away. You know what happens at that point? We go back down. It's going to go up and down. And the downs are going to be much longer and the ups are going to be much shorter. And that's the difference between problems that are additive, like CO2, which we go slowly up and then we tip, and problems that are depletive, in which we lose what we have, which oscillate, and they oscillate until we lose everything we've got. Now we actually looked at what the answer would be. Right? Remember in the campaign: one million hybrid cars by 2015. That is 0.5 percent of the U.S. oil consumption. That is oh point oh well percent of the rest of the world. That won't do much difference. We looked at an MIT study: ten million electric cars on the global roads. Ten million out of 500 million we will add between now and then. That is the most pessimistic number you can have. It's also the most optimistic number because it means we will scale this industry from 100 thousand cars is 2011, to 10 million cars by 2016 -- 100 x growth in less than five years. You have to remember that the world today is bringing in so many cars. We have 10 million cars by region. That's an enormous amount of cars. China is adding those cars -- India, Russia, Brazil. We have all these regions. Europe has solved it. They just put a tax on gasoline. They'll be the first in line to get off because their prices are high. China solves it by an edict. At some point they'll just declare that no gasoline car will come into a city, and that will be it. The Indians don't even understand why we think of it as a problem because most people in India fill two or three gallons every time. For them to get a battery that goes 120 miles is an extension on range, not a reduction in range. We're the only ones who don't have the price set right. We don't have the industry set right. We don't have any incentive to go and resolve it across the U.S. Now where is the car industry on that? Very interesting. The car industry has been focused just on themselves. They basically looked at it and said, "Car 1.0 we'll solve everything within the car itself." No infrastructure, no problem. We forgot about the entire chain around us. All this stuff that happens around. We are looking at the emergence of a car 2.0 -- a whole new market, a whole new business model. The business model in which the money that is actually coming in, to drive the car -- the minutes, the miles if you want, that you are all familiar with -- subsidize the price of the car, just like cellphones. You'll pay for the miles. And some of it will go back to the car maker. Some of it will go back to your own pocket. But our cars are actually going to be cheaper than gasoline cars. You're looking at a world where cars are matched with windmills. In Denmark, we will drive all the cars in Denmark from windmills, not from oil. In Israel, we've asked to put a solar farm in the south of Israel. And people said, "Oh that's a very very large space that you're asking for." And we said, "What if we had proven that in the same space we found oil for the country for the next hundred years?" And they said, "We tried. There isn't any." We said, "No no, but what if we prove it?" And they said, "Well you can dig." And we decided to dig up, instead of digging down. These are perfect matches to one another. Now all you need is about 10 percent of the electricity generated. Think of it as a project that spans over about 10 years. That's one percent a year. Now when we're looking at solving big problems, we need to start thinking in two numbers. And those are not 20 percent by 2020. The two numbers are zero -- as in zero footprint or zero oil -- and scale it infinity. And when we go to COP15 at the end of this year we can't stop thinking of padding CO2. We have to start thinking about giving kickers to countries that are willing to go to this kind of scale. One car emits four tons. And actually 700 and change million cars today emit 2.8 billion tons of CO2. That's, in the additive, about 25 percent of our problem. Cars and trucks add up to about 25 percent of the world's CO2 emissions. We have to come and attack this problem with a focus, with an effort that actually says, we're going to go to zero before the world ends. I actually shared that with some legislators here in the U.S. I shared it with a gentleman called Bobby Kennedy Jr., who is one of my idols. I told him one of the reasons that his uncle was remembered is because he said we're going to send a man to the moon, and we'll do it by the end of the decade. We didn't say we're going to send a man 20 percent to the moon. And there will be about a 20 percent chance we'll recover him. (Laughter) He actually shared with me another story, which is from about 200 years ago. 200 years ago, in Parliament, in Great Britain, there was a long argument over economy versus morality. 25 percent -- just like 25 percent emissions today comes from cars -- 25 percent of their energy for the entire industrial world in the U.K. came from a source of energy that was immoral: human slaves. And there was an argument. Should we stop using slaves? And what would it do to our economy? And people said, "Well we need to take time to do it. Let's not do it immediately. Maybe we free the kids and keep the slaves. And after a month of arguments they decided to stop slavery, and the industrial revolution started within less than one year. And the U.K. had 100 years of economic growth. We have to make the right moral decision. We have to make it immediately. We need to have presidential leadership just like we had in Israel that said we will end oil. And we need to do it not within 20 years or 50 years, but within this presidential term because if we don't, we will lose our economy, right after we'd lost our morality. Thank you all very much. (Applause)

I'm very fortunate to be here. I feel so fortunate. I've been so impressed by the kindness expressed to me. I called my wife Leslie, and I said, "You know, there's so many good people trying to do so much good. It feels like I've landed in a colony of angels." It's a true feeling. But let me get to the talk -- I see the clock is running. I'm a public school teacher, and I just want to share a story of my superintendent. Her name is Pam Moran in Albemarle County, Virginia, the foothills of the Blue Ridge Mountains. And she's a very high-tech superintendent. She uses smart boards, she blogs, she Tweets, she does Facebook, she does all this sort of high-tech stuff. She's a technology leader and instructional leader. But in her office, there's this old wooden, weather-worn table, kitchen table -- peeling green paint, it's kind of rickety. And I said, "Pam, you're such a modern, cutting-edge person. Why is this old table in your office?" And she told me, she said, "You know, I grew up in Southwestern Virginia, in the coal mines and the farmlands of rural Virginia, and this table was in my grandfather's kitchen. And we'd come in from playing, he'd come in from plowing and working, and we'd sit around that table every night. And as I grew up, I heard so much knowledge and so many insights and so much wisdom come out around this table, I began to call it the wisdom table. And when he passed on, I took this table with me and brought it to my office, and it reminds me of him. It reminds me of what goes on around an empty space sometimes." The project I'm going to tell you about is called the World Peace Game, and essentially it is also an empty space. And I'd like to think of it as a 21st century wisdom table, really. It all started back in 1977. I was a young man, and I had been dropping in and out of college. And my parents were very patient, but I had been doing intermittent sojourns to India on a mystical quest. And I remember the last time I came back from India -- in my long white flowing robes and my big beard and my John Lennon glasses -- and I said to my father, "Dad, I think I've just about found spiritual enlightenment." He said, "Well there's one more thing you need to find." I said, "What is that, dad?" "A job." (Laughter) And so they pleaded with me to get a degree in something. So I got a degree and it turned out to be education. It was an experimental education program. It could have been dentistry, but the word "experimental" was in it, and so that's what I had to go for. And I went in for a job interview in the Richmond Public Schools in Virginia, the capital city, bought a three-piece suit -- my concession to convention -- kept my long beard and my afro and my platform shoes -- at the time it was the '70s -- and I walked in, and I sat down and had an interview. And I guess they were hard up for teachers because the supervisor, her name was Anna Aro, said I had the job teaching gifted children. And I was so shocked, so stunned, I got up and said, "Well, thank you, but what do I do?" (Laughter) Gifted education hadn't really taken hold too much. There weren't really many materials or things to use. And I said, "What do I do?" And her answer shocked me. It stunned me. Her answer set the template for the entire career I was to have after that. She said, "What do you want to do?" And that question cleared the space. There was no program directive, no manual to follow, no standards in gifted education in that way. And she cleared such a space that I endeavored from then on to clear a space for my students, an empty space, whereby they could create and make meaning out of their own understanding. So this happened in 1978, and I was teaching many years later, and a friend of mine introduced me to a young filmmaker. His name is Chris Farina. Chris Farina is here today at his own cost. Chris, could you stand up and let them see you -- a young, visionary filmmaker who's made a film. (Applause) This film is called "World Peace and Other 4th Grade Achievements." He proposed the film to me -- it's a great title. He proposed the film to me, and I said, "Yeah, maybe it'll be on local TV, and we can say hi to our friends." But the film has really gone places. Now it's still in debt, but Chris has managed, through his own sacrifice, to get this film out. So we made a film and it turns out to be more than a story about me, more than a story about one teacher. It's a story that's a testament to teaching and teachers. And it's a beautiful thing. And the strange thing is, when I watch the film -- I have the eerie sensation of seeing it -- I saw myself literally disappear. What I saw was my teachers coming through me. I saw my geometry teacher in high school, Mr. Rucell's wry smile under his handlebar mustache. That's the smile I use -- that's his smile. I saw Jan Polo's flashing eyes. And they weren't flashing in anger, they were flashing in love, intense love for her students. And I have that kind of flash sometimes. And I saw Miss Ethel J. Banks who wore pearls and high-heels to elementary school every day. And you know, she had that old-school teacher stare. You know the one. (Laughter) "And I'm not even talking about you behind me, because I've got eyes in the back of my head." (Laughter) You know that teacher? I didn't use that stare very often, but I do have it in my repertoire. And Miss Banks was there as a great mentor for me. And then I saw my own parents, my first teachers. My father, very inventive, spatial thinker. That's my brother Malcolm there on the right. And my mother, who taught me in fourth grade in segregated schools in Virginia, who was my inspiration. And really, I feel as though, when I see the film -- I have a gesture she does, like this -- I feel like I am a continuation of her gesture. I am one of her teaching gestures. And the beautiful thing was, I got to teach my daughter in elementary school, Madeline. And so that gesture of my mother's continues through many generations. It's an amazing feeling to have that lineage. And so I'm here standing on the shoulders of many people. I'm not here alone. There are many people on this stage right now. And so this World Peace Game I'd like to tell you about. It started out like this: it's just a four-foot by five-foot plywood board in an inner-city urban school, 1978. I was creating a lesson for students on Africa. We put all the problems of the world there, and I thought, let's let them solve it. I didn't want to lecture or have just book reading. I wanted to have them be immersed and learn the feeling of learning through their bodies. So I thought, well they like to play games. I'll make something -- I didn't say interactive; we didn't have that term in 1978 -- but something interactive. And so we made the game, and it has since evolved to a four-foot by four-foot by four-foot Plexiglass structure. And it has four Plexiglass layers. There's an outer space layer with black holes and satellites and research satellites and asteroid mining. There's an air and space level with clouds that are big puffs of cotton we push around and territorial air spaces and air forces, a ground and sea level with thousands of game pieces on it -- even an undersea level with submarines and undersea mining. There are four countries around the board. The kids make up the names of the countries -- some are rich; some are poor. They have different assets, commercial and military. And each country has a cabinet. There's a Prime Minister, Secretary of State, Minister of Defense and a CFO, or Comptroller. I choose the Prime Minister based on my relationship with them. I offer them the job, they can turn it down, and then they choose their own cabinet. There's a World Bank, arms dealers and a United Nations. There's also a weather goddess who controls a random stock market and random weather. (Laughter) That's not all. And then there's a 13-page crisis document with 50 interlocking problems. So that, if one thing changes, everything else changes. I throw them into this complex matrix, and they trust me because we have a deep, rich relationship together. And so with all these crises, we have -- let's see -- ethnic and minority tensions; we have chemical and nuclear spills, nuclear proliferation. There's oil spills, environmental disasters, water rights disputes, breakaway republics, famine, endangered species and global warming. If Al Gore is here, I'm going to send my fourth-graders from Agnor-Hurt and Venable schools to you because they solved global warming in a week. (Laughter) (Applause) And they've done it several times too. (Laughter) So I also have in the game a saboteur -- some child -- it's basically a troublemaker -- and I have my troublemaker put to use because they, on the surface, are trying to save the world and their position in the game. But they're also trying to undermine everything in the game. And they do it secretly through misinformation and ambiguities and irrelevancies, trying to cause everyone to think more deeply. The saboteur is there, and we also read from Sun Tzu's "The Art of War." Fourth-graders understand it -- nine years old -- and they handle that and use that to understand how to, not follow -- at first they do -- the paths to power and destruction, the path to war. They learn to overlook short-sighted reactions and impulsive thinking, to think in a long-term, more consequential way. Stewart Brand is here, and one of the ideas for this game came from him with a CoEvolution Quarterly article on a peace force. And in the game, sometimes students actually form a peace force. I'm just a clock watcher. I'm just a clarifier. I'm just a facilitator. The students run the game. I have no chance to make any policy whatsoever once they start playing. So I'll just share with you ... (Video) Boy: The World Peace Game is serious. You're actually getting taught something like how to take care of the world. See, Mr. Hunter is doing that because he says his time has messed up a lot, and he's trying to tell us how to fix that problem. John Hunter: I offered them a -- (Applause) Actually, I can't tell them anything because I don't know the answer. And I admit the truth to them right up front: I don't know. And because I don't know, they've got to dig up the answer. And so I apologize to them as well. I say, "I'm so sorry, boys and girls, but the truth is we have left this world to you in such a sad and terrible shape, and we hope you can fix it for us, and maybe this game will help you learn how to do it." It's a sincere apology, and they take it very seriously. Now you may be wondering what all this complexity looks like. Well when we have the game start, here's what you see. (Video) JH: All right, we're going into negotiations as of now. Go. (Chatter) JH: My question to you is, who's in charge of that classroom? It's a serious question: who is really in charge? I've learned to cede control of the classroom over to the students over time. There's a trust and an understanding and a dedication to an ideal that I simply don't have to do what I thought I had to do as a beginning teacher: control every conversation and response in the classroom. It's impossible. Their collective wisdom is much greater than mine, and I admit it to them openly. So I'll just share with you some stories very quickly of some magical things that have happened. In this game we had a little girl, and she was the Defense Minister of the poorest nation. And the Defense Minister -- she had the tank corps and Air Force and so forth. And she was next door to a very wealthy, oil-rich neighbor. Without provocation, suddenly she attacked, against her Prime Minister's orders, the next-door neighbor's oil fields. She marched into the oil field reserves, surrounded it, without firing a shot, and secured it and held it. And that neighbor was unable to conduct any military operations because their fuel supply was locked up. We were all upset with her, "Why are you doing this? This is the World Peace Game. What is wrong with you?" (Laughter) This was a little girl and, at nine years old, she held her pieces and said, "I know what I'm doing." To her girlfriends she said that. That's a breach there. And we learned in this, you don't really ever want to cross a nine year-old girl with tanks. (Laughter) They are the toughest opponents. And we were very upset. I thought I was failing as a teacher. Why would she do this? But come to find out, a few game days later -- and there are turns where we take negotiation from a team -- actually there's a negotiation period with all teams, and each team takes a turn, then we go back in negotiation, around and around, so each turn around is one game day. So a few game days later it came to light that we found out this major country was planning a military offensive to dominate the entire world. Had they had their fuel supplies, they would have done it. She was able to see the vectors and trend lines and intentions long before any of us and understand what was going to happen and made a philosophical decision to attack in a peace game. Now she used a small war to avert a larger war, so we stopped and had a very good philosophical discussion about whether that was right, conditional good, or not right. That's the kind of thinking that we put them in, the situations. I could not have designed that in teaching it. It came about spontaneously through their collective wisdom. (Applause) Another example, a beautiful thing happened. We have a letter in the game. If you're a military commander and you wage troops -- the little plastic toys on the board -- and you lose them, I put in a letter. You have to write a letter to their parents -- the fictional parents of your fictional troops -- explaining what happened and offering your condolences. So you have a little bit more thought before you commit to combat. And so we had this situation come up -- last summer actually, at Agnor-Hurt School in Albemarle County -- and one of our military commanders got up to read that letter and one of the other kids said, "Mr. Hunter, let's ask -- there's a parent over there." There was a parent visiting that day, just sitting in the back of the room. "Let's ask that mom to read the letter. It'll be more realer if she reads it." So we did, we asked her, and she gamely picked up the letter. "Sure." She started reading. She read one sentence. She read two sentences. By the third sentence, she was in tears. I was in tears. Everybody understood that when we lose somebody, the winners are not gloating. We all lose. And it was an amazing occurrence and an amazing understanding. I'll show you what my friend David says about this. He's been in many battles. (Video) David: We've really had enough of people attacking. I mean, we've been lucky [most of] the time. But now I'm feeling really weird because I'm living what Sun Tzu said one week. One week he said, "Those who go into battle and win will want to go back, and those who lose in battle will want to go back and win." And so I've been winning battles, so I'm going into battles, more battles. And I think it's sort of weird to be living what Sun Tzu said. JH: I get chills every time I see that. That's the kind of engagement you want to have happen. And I can't design that, I can't plan that, and I can't even test that. But it's self-evident assessment. We know that's an authentic assessment of learning. We have a lot of data, but I think sometimes we go beyond data with the real truth of what's going on. So I'll just share a third story. This is about my friend Brennan. We had played the game one session after school for many weeks, about seven weeks, and we had essentially solved all 50 of the interlocking crises. The way the game is won is all 50 problems have to be solved and every country's asset value has to be increased above its starting point. Some are poor, some are wealthy. There are billions. The World Bank president was a third-grader one time. He says, "How many zeros in a trillion? I've got to calculate that right away." But he was setting fiscal policy in that game for high school players who were playing with him. So the team that was the poorest had gotten even poorer. There was no way they could win. And we were approaching four o'clock, our cut-off time -- there was about a minute left -- and despair just settled over the room. I thought, I'm failing as a teacher. I should have gotten it so they could have won. They shouldn't be failing like this. I've failed them. And I was just feeling so sad and dejected. And suddenly, Brennan walked over to my chair and he grabbed the bell, the bell I ring to signal a change or a reconvening of cabinets, and he ran back to his seat, rang the bell. Everybody ran to his chair: there was screaming; there was yelling, waving of their dossiers. They get these dossiers full of secret documents. They were gesticulating; they were running around. I didn't know what they were doing. I'd lost control of my classroom. Principal walks in, I'm out of a job. The parents were looking in the window. And Brennan runs back to his seat. Everybody runs back to their seat. He rings the bell again. He says, "We have" -- and there's 12 seconds left on the clock -- "we have, all nations, pooled all our funds together. And we've got 600 billion dollars. We're going to offer it as a donation to this poor country. And if they accept it, it'll raise their asset value and we can win the game. Will you accept it?" And there are three seconds left on the clock. Everybody looks at this prime minister of that country, and he says, "Yes." And the game is won. Spontaneous compassion that could not be planned for, that was unexpected and unpredictable. Every game we play is different. Some games are more about social issues, some are more about economic issues. Some games are more about warfare. But I don't try to deny them that reality of being human. I allow them to go there and, through their own experience, learn, in a bloodless way, how not to do what they consider to be the wrong thing. And they find out what is right their own way, their own selves. And so in this game, I've learned so much from it, but I would say that if only they could pick up a critical thinking tool or creative thinking tool from this game and leverage something good for the world, they may save us all. If only. And on behalf of all of my teachers on whose shoulders I'm standing, thank you. Thank you. Thank you. (Applause)

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

How many of you had to fill out some sort of web form where you've been asked to read a distorted sequence of characters like this? How many of you found it really, really annoying? Okay, outstanding. So I invented that. (Laughter) Or I was one of the people who did it. That thing is called a CAPTCHA. And the reason it is there is to make sure you, the entity filling out the form, are actually a human and not some sort of computer program that was written to submit the form millions and millions of times. The reason it works is because humans, at least non-visually-impaired humans, have no trouble reading these distorted squiggly characters, whereas computer programs simply can't do it as well yet. So for example, in the case of Ticketmaster, the reason you have to type these distorted characters is to prevent scalpers from writing a program that can buy millions of tickets, two at a time. CAPTCHAs are used all over the Internet. And since they're used so often, a lot of times the precise sequence of random characters that is shown to the user is not so fortunate. So this is an example from the Yahoo registration page. The random characters that happened to be shown to the user were W, A, I, T, which, of course, spell a word. But the best part is the message that the Yahoo help desk got about 20 minutes later. Text: "Help! I've been waiting for over 20 minutes, and nothing happens." (Laughter) This person thought they needed to wait. This of course, is not as bad as this poor person. (Laughter) CAPTCHA Project is something that we did here at Carnegie Melllon over 10 years ago, and it's been used everywhere. Let me now tell you about a project that we did a few years later, which is sort of the next evolution of CAPTCHA. This is a project that we call reCAPTCHA, which is something that we started here at Carnegie Mellon, then we turned it into a startup company. And then about a year and a half ago, Google actually acquired this company. So let me tell you what this project started. So this project started from the following realization: It turns out that approximately 200 million CAPTCHAs are typed everyday by people around the world. When I first heard this, I was quite proud of myself. I thought, look at the impact that my research has had. But then I started feeling bad. See here's the thing, each time you type a CAPTCHA, essentially you waste 10 seconds of your time. And if you multiply that by 200 million, you get that humanity as a whole is wasting about 500,000 hours every day typing these annoying CAPTCHAs. So then I started feeling bad. (Laughter) And then I started thinking, well, of course, we can't just get rid of CAPTCHAs, because the security of the Web sort of depends on them. But then I started thinking, is there any way we can use this effort for something that is good for humanity? So see, here's the thing. While you're typing a CAPTCHA, during those 10 seconds, your brain is doing something amazing. Your brain is doing something that computers cannot yet do. So can we get you to do useful work for those 10 seconds? Another way of putting it is, is there some humongous problem that we cannot yet get computers to solve, yet we can split into tiny 10-second chunks such that each time somebody solves a CAPTCHA they solve a little bit of this problem? And the answer to that is "yes," and this is what we're doing now. So what you may not know is that nowadays while you're typing a CAPTCHA, not only are you authenticating yourself as a human, but in addition you're actually helping us to digitize books. So let me explain how this works. So there's a lot of projects out there trying to digitize books. Google has one. The Internet Archive has one. Amazon, now with the Kindle, is trying to digitize books. Basically the way this works is you start with an old book. You've seen those things, right? Like a book? (Laughter) So you start with a book, and then you scan it. Now scanning a book is like taking a digital photograph of every page of the book. It gives you an image for every page of the book. This is an image with text for every page of the book. The next step in the process is that the computer needs to be able to decipher all of the words in this image. That's using a technology called OCR, for optical character recognition, which takes a picture of text and tries to figure out what text is in there. Now the problem is that OCR is not perfect. Especially for older books where the ink has faded and the pages have turned yellow, OCR cannot recognize a lot of the words. For example, for things that were written more than 50 years ago, the computer cannot recognize about 30 percent of the words. So what we're doing now is we're taking all of the words that the computer cannot recognize and we're getting people to read them for us while they're typing a CAPTCHA on the Internet. So the next time you type a CAPTCHA, these words that you're typing are actually words that are coming from books that are being digitized that the computer could not recognize. And now the reason we have two words nowadays instead of one is because, you see, one of the words is a word that the system just got out of a book, it didn't know what it was, and it's going to present it to you. But since it doesn't know the answer for it, it cannot grade it for you. So what we do is we give you another word, one for which the system does know the answer. We don't tell you which one's which, and we say, please type both. And if you type the correct word for the one for which the system already knows the answer, it assumes you are human, and it also gets some confidence that you typed the other word correctly. And if we repeat this process to like 10 different people and all of them agree on what the new word is, then we get one more word digitized accurately. So this is how the system works. And basically, since we released it about three or four years ago, a lot of websites have started switching from the old CAPTCHA where people wasted their time to the new CAPTCHA where people are helping to digitize books. So for example, Ticketmaster. So every time you buy tickets on Ticketmaster, you help to digitize a book. Facebook: Every time you add a friend or poke somebody, you help to digitize a book. Twitter and about 350,000 other sites are all using reCAPTCHA. And in fact, the number of sites that are using reCAPTCHA is so high that the number of words that we're digitizing per day is really, really large. It's about 100 million a day, which is the equivalent of about two and a half million books a year. And this is all being done one word at a time by just people typing CAPTCHAs on the Internet. (Applause) Now of course, since we're doing so many words per day, funny things can happen. And this is especially true because now we're giving people two randomly chosen English words next to each other. So funny things can happen. For example, we presented this word. It's the word "Christians"; there's nothing wrong with it. But if you present it along with another randomly chosen word, bad things can happen. So we get this. (Text: bad christians) But it's even worse, because the particular website where we showed this actually happened to be called The Embassy of the Kingdom of God. (Laughter) Oops. (Laughter) Here's another really bad one. JohnEdwards.com (Text: Damn liberal) (Laughter) So we keep on insulting people left and right everyday. Now, of course, we're not just insulting people. See here's the thing, since we're presenting two randomly chosen words, interesting things can happen. So this actually has given rise to a really big Internet meme that tens of thousands of people have participated in, which is called CAPTCHA art. I'm sure some of you have heard about it. Here's how it works. Imagine you're using the Internet and you see a CAPTCHA that you think is somewhat peculiar, like this CAPTCHA. (Text: invisible toaster) Then what you're supposed to do is you take a screen shot of it. Then of course, you fill out the CAPTCHA because you help us digitize a book. But then, first you take a screen shot, and then you draw something that is related to it. (Laughter) That's how it works. There are tens of thousands of these. Some of them are very cute. (Text: clenched it) (Laughter) Some of them are funnier. (Text: stoned founders) (Laughter) And some of them, like paleontological shvisle, they contain Snoop Dogg. (Laughter) Okay, so this is my favorite number of reCAPTCHA. So this is the favorite thing that I like about this whole project. This is the number of distinct people that have helped us digitize at least one word out of a book through reCAPTCHA: 750 million, which is a little over 10 percent of the world's population, has helped us digitize human knowledge. And it is numbers like these that motivate my research agenda. So the question that motivates my research is the following: If you look at humanity's large-scale achievements, these really big things that humanity has gotten together and done historically -- like for example, building the pyramids of Egypt or the Panama Canal or putting a man on the Moon -- there is a curious fact about them, and it is that they were all done with about the same number off people. It's weird; they were all done with about 100,000 people. And the reason for that is because, before the Internet, coordinating more than 100,000 people, let alone paying them, was essentially impossible. But now with the Internet, I've just shown you a project where we've gotten 750 million people to help us digitize human knowledge. So the question that motivates my research is, if we can put a man on the Moon with 100,000, what can we do with 100 million? So based on this question, we've had a lot of different projects that we've been working on. Let me tell you about one that I'm most excited about. This is something that we've been semi-quietly working on for the last year and a half or so. It hasn't yet been launched. It's called Duolingo. Since it hasn't been launched, shhhhh! (Laughter) Yeah, I can trust you'll do that. So this is the project. Here's how it started. It started with me posing a question to my graduate student, Severin Hacker. Okay, that's Severin Hacker. So I posed the question to my graduate student. By the way, you did hear me correctly; his last name is Hacker. So I posed this question to him: How can we get 100 million people translating the Web into every major language for free? Okay, so there's a lot of things to say about this question. First of all, translating the Web. So right now the Web is partitioned into multiple languages. A large fraction of it is in English. If you don't know any English, you can't access it. But there's large fractions in other different languages, and if you don't know those languages, you can't access it. So I would like to translate all of the Web, or at least most of the Web, into every major language. So that's what I would like to do. Now some of you may say, why can't we use computers to translate? Why can't we use machine translation? Machine translation nowadays is starting to translate some sentences here and there. Why can't we use it to translate the whole Web? Well the problem with that is that it's not yet good enough and it probably won't be for the next 15 to 20 years. It makes a lot of mistakes. Even when it doesn't make a mistake, since it makes so many mistakes, you don't know whether to trust it or not. So let me show you an example of something that was translated with a machine. Actually it was a forum post. It was somebody who was trying to ask a question about JavaScript. It was translated from Japanese into English. So I'll just let you read. This person starts apologizing for the fact that it's translated with a computer. So the next sentence is is going to be the preamble to the question. So he's just explaining something. Remember, it's a question about JavaScript. (Text: At often, the goat-time install a error is vomit.) (Laughter) Then comes the first part of the question. (Text: How many times like the wind, a pole, and the dragon?) (Laughter) Then comes my favorite part of the question. (Text: This insult to father's stones?) (Laughter) And then comes the ending, which is my favorite part of the whole thing. (Text: Please apologize for your stupidity. There are a many thank you.) (Laughter) Okay, so computer translation, not yet good enough. So back to the question. So we need people to translate the whole Web. So now the next question you may have is, well why can't we just pay people to do this? We could pay professional language translators to translate the whole Web. We could do that. Unfortunately, it would be extremely expensive. For example, translating a tiny, tiny fraction of the whole Web, Wikipedia, into one other language, Spanish. Wikipedia exists in Spanish, but it's very small compared to the size of English. It's about 20 percent of the size of English. If we wanted to translate the other 80 percent into Spanish, it would cost at least 50 million dollars -- and this is at even the most exploited, outsourcing country out there. So it would be very expensive. So what we want to do is we want to get 100 million people translating the Web into every major language for free. Now if this is what you want to do, you pretty quickly realize you're going to run into two pretty big hurdles, two big obstacles. The first one is a lack of bilinguals. So I don't even know if there exists 100 million people out there using the Web who are bilingual enough to help us translate. That's a big problem. The other problem you're going to run into is a lack of motivation. How are we going to motivate people to actually translate the Web for free? Normally, you have to pay people to do this. So how are we going to motivate them to do it for free? Now when we were starting to think about this, we were blocked by these two things. But then we realized, there's actually a way to solve both these problems with the same solution. There's a way to kill two birds with one stone. And that is to transform language translation into something that millions of people want to do, and that also helps with the problem of lack of bilinguals, and that is language education. So it turns out that today, there are over 1.2 billion people learning a foreign language. People really, really want to learn a foreign language. And it's not just because they're being forced to do so in school. For example, in the United States alone, there are over five million people who have paid over $500 for software to learn a new language. So people really, really want to learn a new language. So what we've been working on for the last year and a half is a new website -- it's called Duolingo -- where the basic idea is people learn a new language for free while simultaneously translating the Web. And so basically they're learning by doing. So the way this works is whenever you're a just a beginner, we give you very, very simple sentences. There's, of course, a lot of very simple sentences on the Web. We give you very, very simple sentences along with what each word means. And as you translate them, and as you see how other people translate them, you start learning the language. And as you get more and more advanced, we give you more and more complex sentences to translate. But at all times, you're learning by doing. Now the crazy thing about this method is that it actually really works. First of all, people are really, really learning a language. We're mostly done building it, and now we're testing it. People really can learn a language with it. And they learn it about as well as the leading language learning software. So people really do learn a language. And not only do they learn it as well, but actually it's way more interesting. Because you see with Duolingo, people are actually learning with real content. As opposed to learning with made-up sentences, people are learning with real content, which is inherently interesting. So people really do learn a language. But perhaps more surprisingly, the translations that we get from people using the site, even though they're just beginners, the translations that we get are as accurate as those of professional language translators, which is very surprising. So let me show you one example. This is a sentence that was translated from German into English. The top is the German. The middle is an English translation that was done by somebody who was a professional English translator who we paid 20 cents a word for this translation. And the bottom is a translation by users of Duolingo, none of whom knew any German before they started using the site. You can see, it's pretty much perfect. Now of course, we play a trick here to make the translations as good as professional language translators. We combine the translations of multiple beginners to get the quality of a single professional translator. Now even though we're combining the translations, the site actually can translate pretty fast. So let me show you, this is our estimates of how fast we could translate Wikipedia from English into Spanish. Remember, this is 50 million dollars-worth of value. So if we wanted to translate Wikipedia into Spanish, we could do it in five weeks with 100,000 active users. And we could do it in about 80 hours with a million active users. Since all the projects that my group has worked on so far have gotten millions of users, we're hopeful that we'll be able to translate extremely fast with this project. Now the thing that I'm most excited about with Duolingo is I think this provides a fair business model for language education. So here's the thing: The current business model for language education is the student pays, and in particular, the student pays Rosetta Stone 500 dollars. (Laughter) That's the current business model. The problem with this business model is that 95 percent of the world's population doesn't have 500 dollars. So it's extremely unfair towards the poor. This is totally biased towards the rich. Now see, in Duolingo, because while you learn you're actually creating value, you're translating stuff -- which for example, we could charge somebody for translations. So this is how we could monetize this. Since people are creating value while they're learning, they don't have to pay their money, they pay with their time. But the magical thing here is that they're paying with their time, but that is time that would have had to have been spent anyways learning the language. So the nice thing about Duolingo is I think it provides a fair business model -- one that doesn't discriminate against poor people. So here's the site. Thank you. (Applause) So here's the site. We haven't yet launched, but if you go there, you can sign up to be part of our private beta, which is probably going to start in about three or four weeks. We haven't yet launched this Duolingo. By the way, I'm the one talking here, but actually Duolingo is the work of a really awesome team, some of whom are here. So thank you. (Applause)

Basking sharks are awesome creatures. They are just magnificent. They grow 10 meters long. Some say bigger. They might weigh up to two tons. Some say up to five tons. They're the second largest fish in the world. They're also harmless plankton-feeding animals. And they are thought to be able to filter a cubic kilometer of water every hour and can feed on 30 kilos of zoo plankton a day to survive. They're fantastic creatures. And we're very lucky in Ireland, we have plenty of basking sharks and plenty of opportunities to study them. They were also very important to coast communities going back hundreds of years, especially the around the Claddagh, Duff, Connemara region where subsistence farmers used to sail out on their hookers and open boats sometimes way off shore, sometimes to a place called the Sunfish Bank, which is about 30 miles west of Achill Island, to kill the basking sharks. This is an old woodcut from the 17, 1800s. So they were very important, and they were important for the oil out of their liver. A third of the size of the basking shark is their liver, and it's full of oil. You get gallons of oil from their liver. And that oil was used especially for lighting, but also for dressing wounds and other things. In fact, the streetlights in 1742 of Galway, Dublin and Waterford were linked with sunfish oil. And "sunfish" is one of the words for basking sharks. So they were incredibly important animals. They've been around a long time, have been very important to coast communities. Probably the best documented basking shark fishery in the world is that from Achill Island. This is Keem Bay up in Achill Island. And sharks used to come into the bay. And the fishermen would tie a net off the headland, string it out along the other net. And as the shark came round, it would hit the net, the net would collapse on it. It would often drown and suffocate. Or at times, they would row out in their small currachs and kill it with a lance through the back of the neck. And then they'd tow the sharks back to Purteen Harbor, boil them up, use the oil. They used to use the flesh as well for fertilizer and also would fin the sharks. This is probably the biggest threat to sharks worldwide -- it is the finning of sharks. We're often all frightened of sharks thanks to "Jaws." Maybe five or six people get killed by sharks every year. There was someone recently, wasn't there? Just a couple weeks ago. We kill about 100 million sharks a year. So I don't know what the balance is, but I think sharks have got more right to be fearful of us than we have of them. It was a well-documented fishery, and as you can see here, it peaked in the 50s where they were killing 1,500 sharks a year. And it declined very fast -- a classic boom and bust fishery, which suggests that a stock has been depleted or there's low reproductive rates. And they killed about 12,000 sharks in this period, literally just by stringing a manila rope off the tip of Keem Bay at Achill Island. Sharks were still killed up into the mid-80s, especially after places like Dunmore East in County Waterford. And about two and a half, 3,000 sharks were killed up till '85, many by Norwegian vessels. The black, you can't really see this, but these are Norwegian basking shark hunting vessels, and the black line in the crow's nest signifies this is a shark vessel rather than a whaling vessel. The importance of basking sharks to the coast communities is recognized through the language. Now I don't pretend to have any Irish, but in Kerry they were often known as "Ainmhide na seolta," the monster with the sails. And another title would be "Liop an da lapa," the unwieldy beast with two fins. "Liabhan mor," suggesting a big animal. Or my favorite, "Liabhan chor greine," the great fish of the sun. And that's a lovely, evocative name. On Tory Island, which is a strange place anyway, they were known as muldoons, and no one seems to know why. Hope there's no one from Tory here; lovely place. But more commonly all around the island, they were known as the sunfish. And this represents their habit of basking on the surface when the sun is out. There's great concern that basking sharks are depleted all throughout the world. Some people say it's not population decline. It might be a change in the distribution of plankton. And it's been suggested that basking sharks would make fantastic indicators of climate change, because they're basically continuous plankton recorders swimming around with their mouth open. They're now listed as vulnerable under the IUCN. There's also moves in Europe to try and stop catching them. There's now a ban on catching them and even landing them and even landing ones that are caught accidentally. They're not protected in Ireland. In fact, they have no legislative status in Ireland whatsoever, despite our importance for the species and also the historical context within which basking sharks reside. We know very little about them. And most of what we do know is based on their habit of coming to the surface. And we try to guess what they're doing from their behavior on the surface. I only found out last year, at a conference on the Isle of Man, just how unusual it is to live somewhere where basking sharks regularly, frequently and predictably come to the surface to "bask." And it's a fantastic opportunity in science to see and experience basking sharks, and they are awesome creatures. And it gives us a fantastic opportunity to actually study them, to get access to them. So what we've been doing a couple of years -- but last year was a big year -- is we started tagging sharks so we could try to get some idea of sight fidelity and movements and things like that. So we concentrated mainly in North Donegal and West Kerry as the two areas where I was mainly active. And we tagged them very simply, not very hi-tech, with a big, long pole. This is a beachcaster rod with a tag on the end. Go up in your boat and tag the shark. And we were very effective. We tagged 105 sharks last summer. We got 50 in three days off Inishowen Peninsula. Half the challenge is to get access, is to be in the right place at the right time. But it's a very simple and easy technique. I'll show you what they look like. We use a pole camera on the boat to actually film shark. One is to try and work out the gender of the shark. We also deployed a couple of satellite tags, so we did use hi-tech stuff as well. These are archival tags. So what they do is they store the data. A satellite tag only works when the air is clear of the water and can send a signal to the satellite. And of course, sharks, fish, are underwater most of the time. So this tag actually works out the locations of shark depending on the timing and the setting of the sun, plus water temperature and depth. And you have to kind of reconstruct the path. What happens is that you set the tag to detach from the shark after a fixed period, in this case it was eight months, and literally to the day the tag popped off, drifted up, said hello to the satellite and sent, not all the data, but enough data for us to use. And this is the only way to really work out the behavior and the movements when they're under water. And here's a couple of maps that we've done. That one, you can see that we tagged both off Kerry. And basically it spent all its time, the last eight months, in Irish waters. Christmas day it was out on the shelf edge. And here's one that we haven't ground-truthed it yet with sea surface temperature and water depth, but again, the second shark kind of spent most of its time in and around the Irish Sea. Colleagues from the Isle of Man last year actually tagged one shark that went from the Isle of Man all the way out to Nova Scotia in about 90 days. That's nine and a half thousand kilometers. We never thought that happened. Another colleague in the States tagged about 20 sharks off Massachusetts, and his tags didn't really work. All he knows is where he tagged them and he knows where they popped off. And his tags popped off in the Caribbean and even in Brazil. And we thought that basking sharks were temperate animals and only lived in our latitude. But in actual fact, they're obviously crossing the Equator as well. So very simple things like that, we're trying to learn about basking sharks. One thing that I think is a very surprising and strange thing is just how low the genetic diversity of sharks are. Now I'm not a geneticist, so I'm not going to pretend to understand the genetics. And that's why it's great to have collaboration. Whereas I'm a field person, I get panic attacks if I have to spend too many hours in a lab with a white coat on -- take me away. So we can work with geneticists who understand that. So when they looked at the genetics of basking sharks, they found that the diversity was incredibly low. If you look at the first line really, you can see that all these different shark species are all quite similar. I think this means basically that they're all sharks and they've come from a common ancestry. If you look at nucleotide diversity, which is more genetics that are passed on through parents, you can see that basking sharks, if you look at the first study, was an order of magnitude less diversity than other shark species. And you see that this work was done in 2006. Before 2006, we had no idea of the genetic variability of basking sharks. We had no idea, did they distinguish into different populations? Were there subpopulations? And of course, that's very important if you want to know what the population size is and the status of the animals. So Les Noble in Aberdeen kind of found this a bit unbelievable really. So he did another study using microsatellites, which are much more expensive, much more time consuming, and, to his surprise, came up with almost identical results. So it does seem to be that basking sharks, for some reason, have incredibly low diversity. And it's thought maybe it was a bottleneck, a genetic bottleneck thought to be 12,000 years ago, and this has caused a very low diversity. And yet, if you look at whale sharks, which is the other plankton eating large shark, its diversity is much greater. So it doesn't really make sense at all. They found that there was no genetic differentiation between any of the world's oceans of basking sharks. So even though basking sharks are found throughout the world, you couldn't tell the difference genetically from one from the Pacific, the Atlantic, New Zealand, or from Ireland, South Africa. They all basically seem the same. But again, it's kind of surprising. You wouldn't really expect that. I don't understand this. I don't pretend to understand this. And I suspect most geneticists don't understand it either, but they produce the numbers. So you can actually estimate the population size based on the diversity of the genetics. And Rus Hoelzel came up with an effective population size: 8,200 animals. That's it. 8,000 animals in the world. You're thinking, "That's just ridiculous. No way." So Les did a finer study and he found out it came out about 9,000. And using different microsatellites gave the different results. But the average of all these studies came out -- the mean is about 5,000, which I personally don't believe, but then I am a skeptic. But even if you toss a few numbers around, you're probably talking of an effective population of about 20,000 animals. Do you remember how many they killed off Achill there in the 70s and the 50s? So what it tells us actually is that there's actually a risk of extinction of this species because its population is so small. In fact, of those 20,000, 8,000 were thought to be females. There's only 8,000 basking shark females in the world? I don't know. I don't believe it. The problem with this is they were constrained with samples. They didn't get enough samples to really explore the genetics in enough detail. So where do you get samples from for your genetic analysis? Well one obvious source is dead sharks, Dead sharks washed up. We might get two or three dead sharks washed up in Ireland a year, if we're kind of lucky. Another source would be fisheries bycatch. We were getting quite a few caught in surface drift nets. That's banned now, and that'll be good news for the sharks. And some are caught in nets, in trawls. This is a shark that was actually landed in Howth just before Christmas, illegally, because you're not allowed to do that under E.U. law, and was actually sold for eight euros a kilo as shark steak. They even put a recipe up on the wall, until they were told this was illegal. And they actually did get a fine for that. So if you look at all those studies I showed you, the total number of samples worldwide is 86 at present. So it's very important work, and they can ask some really good questions, and they can tell us about population size and subpopulations and structure, but they're constrained by lack of samples. Now when we were out tagging our sharks, this is how we tagged them on the front of a RIB -- get in there fast -- occasionally the sharks do react. And on one occasion when we were up in Malin Head up in Donegal, a shark smacked the side of the boat with his tail, more, I think, in startle to the fact that a boat came near it, rather than the tag going in. And that was fine. We got wet. No problem. And then when myself and Emmett got back to Malin Head, to the pier, I noticed some black slime on the front of the boat. And I remembered -- I used to spend a lot of time out on commercial fishing boats -- I remember fishermen telling me they can always tell when a basking shark's been caught in the net because it leaves this black slime behind. So I was thinking that must have come from the shark. Now we had an interest in getting tissue samples for genetics because we knew they were very valuable. And we would use conventional methods -- I have a crossbow, you see the crossbow in my hand there, which we use to sample whales and dolphins for genetic studies as well. So I tried that, I tried many techniques. All it was doing was breaking my arrows because the shark skin is just so strong. There was no way we were going to get a sample from that. So that wasn't going to work. So when I saw the black slime on the bow of the boat, I thought, "If you take what you're given in this world ..." So I scraped it off. And I had a little tube with alcohol in it to send to the geneticists. So I scraped the slime off and I sent it off to Aberdeen. And I said, "You might try that." And they sat on it for months actually. It was only because we had a conference on the Isle of Man. But I kept emailing, saying, "Have you had a chance to look at my slime yet?" And he was like, "Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Later, later, later." Anyway he thought he'd better do it, because I never met him before and he might lose face if he hadn't done the thing I sent him. And he was amazed that they actually got DNA from the slime. And they amplified it and they tested it and they found, yes, this was actually basking shark DNA, which was got from the slime. And so he was all very excited. It became known as Simon's shark slime. And I thought, "Hey, you know, I can build on this." So we thought, okay, we're going to try to get out and get some slime. So having spent three and a half thousand on satellite tags, I then thought I'd invest 7.95 -- the price is still on it -- in my local hardware store in Kilrush for a mop handle and even less money on some oven cleaners. And I wrapped the oven cleaner around the end of the mop handle and was desperate, desperate to have an opportunity to get some sharks. Now this was into August now, and normally sharks peak at June, July. And you rarely see them. You can only rarely be in the right place to find sharks into August. So we were desperate. So we rushed out to Blasket as soon as we heard there were sharks there and managed to find some sharks. So by just rubbing the mop handle down the shark as it swam under the boat -- you see, here's a shark that's running under the boat here -- we managed to collect slime. And here it is. Look at that lovely, black shark slime. And in about half an hour, we got five samples, five individual sharks, were sampled using Simon's shark slime sampling system. (Laughter) (Applause) I've been working on whales and dolphins in Ireland for 20 years now, and they're kind of a bit more dramatic. You probably saw the humpback whale footage that we got there a month or two ago off County Wexford. And you always think you might have some legacy you can leave the world behind. And I was thinking of humpback whales breaching and dolphins. But hey, sometimes these things are sent to you and you just have to take them when they come. So this is possibly going to be my legacy -- Simon's shark slime. So we got more money this year to carry on collecting more and more samples. And one thing that is kind of very useful is that we use a pole cameras -- this is my colleague Joanne with a pole camera -- where you can actually look underneath the shark. And what you're trying to look at is the males have claspers, which kind of dangle out behind the back of the shark. So you can quite easily tell the gender of the shark. So if we can tell the gender of the shark before we sample it, we can tell the geneticist this was taken from a male or a female. Because at the moment, they actually have no way genetically of telling the difference between a male and a female, which I found absolutely staggering, because they don't know what primers to look for. And being able to tell the gender of a shark has got very important for things like policing the trade in basking shark and other species through societies, because it is illegal to trade any sharks. And they are caught and they are on the market. So as a field biologist, you just want to get encounters with these animals. You want to learn as much as you can. They're often quite brief. They're often very seasonally constrained. And you just want to learn as much as you can as soon as you can. But isn't it fantastic that you can then offer these samples and opportunities to other disciplines, such as geneticists, who can gain so much more from that. So as I said, these things are sent to you in strange ways. Grab them while you can. I'll take that as my scientific legacy. Hopefully I might get something a bit more dramatic and romantic before I die. But for the time being, thank you for that. And keep an eye out for sharks. If you're more interested, we have a basking shark website now just set up. So thank you and thank you for listening. (Applause)

I admit that I'm a little bit nervous here because I'm going to say some radical things, about how we should think about cancer differently, to an audience that contains a lot of people who know a lot more about cancer than I do. But I will also contest that I'm not as nervous as I should be because I'm pretty sure I'm right about this. (Laughter) And that this, in fact, will be the way that we treat cancer in the future. In order to talk about cancer, I'm going to actually have to -- let me get the big slide here. First, I'm going to try to give you a different perspective of genomics. I want to put it in perspective of the bigger picture of all the other things that are going on -- and then talk about something you haven't heard so much about, which is proteomics. Having explained those, that will set up for what I think will be a different idea about how to go about treating cancer. So let me start with genomics. It is the hot topic. It is the place where we're learning the most. This is the great frontier. But it has its limitations. And in particular, you've probably all heard the analogy that the genome is like the blueprint of your body, and if that were only true, it would be great, but it's not. It's like the parts list of your body. It doesn't say how things are connected, what causes what and so on. So if I can make an analogy, let's say that you were trying to tell the difference between a good restaurant, a healthy restaurant and a sick restaurant, and all you had was the list of ingredients that they had in their larder. So it might be that, if you went to a French restaurant and you looked through it and you found they only had margarine and they didn't have butter, you could say, "Ah, I see what's wrong with them. I can make them healthy." And there probably are special cases of that. You could certainly tell the difference between a Chinese restaurant and a French restaurant by what they had in a larder. So the list of ingredients does tell you something, and sometimes it tells you something that's wrong. If they have tons of salt, you might guess they're using too much salt, or something like that. But it's limited, because really to know if it's a healthy restaurant, you need to taste the food, you need to know what goes on in the kitchen, you need the product of all of those ingredients. So if I look at a person and I look at a person's genome, it's the same thing. The part of the genome that we can read is the list of ingredients. And so indeed, there are times when we can find ingredients that [are] bad. Cystic fibrosis is an example of a disease where you just have a bad ingredient and you have a disease, and we can actually make a direct correspondence between the ingredient and the disease. But most things, you really have to know what's going on in the kitchen, because, mostly, sick people used to be healthy people -- they have the same genome. So the genome really tells you much more about predisposition. So what you can tell is you can tell the difference between an Asian person and a European person by looking at their ingredients list. But you really for the most part can't tell the difference between a healthy person and a sick person -- except in some of these special cases. So why all the big deal about genetics? Well first of all, it's because we can read it, which is fantastic. It is very useful in certain circumstances. It's also the great theoretical triumph of biology. It's the one theory that the biologists ever really got right. It's fundamental to Darwin and Mendel and so on. And so it's the one thing where they predicted a theoretical construct. So Mendel had this idea of a gene as an abstract thing, and Darwin built a whole theory that depended on them existing, and then Watson and Crick actually looked and found one. So this happens in physics all the time. You predict a black hole, and you look out the telescope and there it is, just like you said. But it rarely happens in biology. So this great triumph -- it's so good, there's almost a religious experience in biology. And Darwinian evolution is really the core theory. So the other reason it's been very popular is because we can measure it, it's digital. And in fact, thanks to Kary Mullis, you can basically measure your genome in your kitchen with a few extra ingredients. So for instance, by measuring the genome, we've learned a lot about how we're related to other kinds of animals by the closeness of our genome, or how we're related to each other -- the family tree, or the tree of life. There's a huge amount of information about the genetics just by comparing the genetic similarity. Now of course, in medical application, that is very useful because it's the same kind of information that the doctor gets from your family medical history -- except probably, your genome knows much more about your medical history than you do. And so by reading the genome, we can find out much more about your family than you probably know. And so we can discover things that probably you could have found by looking at enough of your relatives, but they may be surprising. I did the 23andMe thing and was very surprised to discover that I am fat and bald. (Laughter) But sometimes you can learn much more useful things about that. But mostly what you need to know, to find out if you're sick, is not your predispositions, but it's actually what's going on in your body right now. So to do that, what you really need to do, you need to look at the things that the genes are producing and what's happening after the genetics, and that's what proteomics is about. Just like genome mixes the study of all the genes, proteomics is the study of all the proteins. And the proteins are all of the little things in your body that are signaling between the cells -- actually, the machines that are operating -- that's where the action is. Basically, a human body is a conversation going on, both within the cells and between the cells, and they're telling each other to grow and to die, and when you're sick, something's gone wrong with that conversation. And so the trick is -- unfortunately, we don't have an easy way to measure these like we can measure the genome. So the problem is that measuring -- if you try to measure all the proteins, it's a very elaborate process. It requires hundreds of steps, and it takes a long, long time. And it matters how much of the protein it is. It could be very significant that a protein changed by 10 percent, so it's not a nice digital thing like DNA. And basically our problem is somebody's in the middle of this very long stage, they pause for just a moment, and they leave something in an enzyme for a second, and all of a sudden all the measurements from then on don't work. And so then people get very inconsistent results when they do it this way. People have tried very hard to do this. I tried this a couple of times and looked at this problem and gave up on it. I kept getting this call from this oncologist named David Agus. And Applied Minds gets a lot of calls from people who want help with their problems, and I didn't think this was a very likely one to call back, so I kept on giving him to the delay list. And then one day, I get a call from John Doerr, Bill Berkman and Al Gore on the same day saying return David Agus's phone call. (Laughter) So I was like, "Okay. This guy's at least resourceful." (Laughter) So we started talking, and he said, "I really need a better way to measure proteins." I'm like, "Looked at that. Been there. Not going to be easy." He's like, "No, no. I really need it. I mean, I see patients dying every day because we don't know what's going on inside of them. We have to have a window into this." And he took me through specific examples of when he really needed it. And I realized, wow, this would really make a big difference, if we could do it, and so I said, "Well, let's look at it." Applied Minds has enough play money that we can go and just work on something without getting anybody's funding or permission or anything. So we started playing around with this. And as we did it, we realized this was the basic problem -- that taking the sip of coffee -- that there were humans doing this complicated process and that what really needed to be done was to automate this process like an assembly line and build robots that would measure proteomics. And so we did that, and working with David, we made a little company called Applied Proteomics eventually, which makes this robotic assembly line, which, in a very consistent way, measures the protein. And I'll show you what that protein measurement looks like. Basically, what we do is we take a drop of blood out of a patient, and we sort out the proteins in the drop of blood according to how much they weigh, how slippery they are, and we arrange them in an image. And so we can look at literally hundreds of thousands of features at once out of that drop of blood. And we can take a different one tomorrow, and you will see your proteins tomorrow will be different -- they'll be different after you eat or after you sleep. They really tell us what's going on there. And so this picture, which looks like a big smudge to you, is actually the thing that got me really thrilled about this and made me feel like we were on the right track. So if I zoom into that picture, I can just show you what it means. We sort out the proteins -- from left to right is the weight of the fragments that we're getting, and from top to bottom is how slippery they are. So we're zooming in here just to show you a little bit of it. And so each of these lines represents some signal that we're getting out of a piece of a protein. And you can see how the lines occur in these little groups of bump, bump, bump, bump, bump. And that's because we're measuring the weight so precisely that -- carbon comes in different isotopes, so if it has an extra neutron on it, we actually measure it as a different chemical. So we're actually measuring each isotope as a different one. And so that gives you an idea of how exquisitely sensitive this is. So seeing this picture is sort of like getting to be Galileo and looking at the stars and looking through the telescope for the first time, and suddenly you say, "Wow, it's way more complicated than we thought it was." But we can see that stuff out there and actually see features of it. So this is the signature out of which we're trying to get patterns. So what we do with this is, for example, we can look at two patients, one that responded to a drug and one that didn't respond to a drug, and ask, "What's going on differently inside of them?" And so we can make these measurements precisely enough that we can overlay two patients and look at the differences. So here we have Alice in green and Bob in red. We overlay them. This is actual data. And you can see, mostly it overlaps and it's yellow, but there's some things that just Alice has and some things that just Bob has. And if we find a pattern of things of the responders to the drug, we see that in the blood, they have the condition that allows them to respond to this drug. We might not even know what this protein is, but we can see it's a marker for the response to the disease. So this already, I think, is tremendously useful in all kinds of medicine. But I think this is actually just the beginning of how we're going to treat cancer. So let me move to cancer. The thing about cancer -- when I got into this, I really knew nothing about it, but working with David Agus, I started watching how cancer was actually being treated and went to operations where it was being cut out. And as I looked at it, to me it didn't make sense how we were approaching cancer, and in order to make sense of it, I had to learn where did this come from. We're treating cancer almost like it's an infectious disease. We're treating it as something that got inside of you that we have to kill. So this is the great paradigm. This is another case where a theoretical paradigm in biology really worked -- was the germ theory of disease. So what doctors are mostly trained to do is diagnose -- that is, put you into a category and apply a scientifically proven treatment for that diagnosis -- and that works great for infectious diseases. So if we put you in the category of you've got syphilis, we can give you penicillin. We know that that works. If you've got malaria, we give you quinine or some derivative of it. And so that's the basic thing doctors are trained to do, and it's miraculous in the case of infectious disease -- how well it works. And many people in this audience probably wouldn't be alive if doctors didn't do this. But now let's apply that to systems diseases like cancer. The problem is that, in cancer, there isn't something else that's inside of you. It's you; you're broken. That conversation inside of you got mixed up in some way. So how do we diagnose that conversation? Well, right now what we do is we divide it by part of the body -- you know, where did it appear? -- and we put you in different categories according to the part of the body. And then we do a clinical trial for a drug for lung cancer and one for prostate cancer and one for breast cancer, and we treat these as if they're separate diseases and that this way of dividing them had something to do with what actually went wrong. And of course, it really doesn't have that much to do with what went wrong because cancer is a failure of the system. And in fact, I think we're even wrong when we talk about cancer as a thing. I think this is the big mistake. I think cancer should not be a noun. We should talk about cancering as something we do, not something we have. And so those tumors, those are symptoms of cancer. And so your body is probably cancering all the time, but there are lots of systems in your body that keep it under control. And so to give you an idea of an analogy of what I mean by thinking of cancering as a verb, imagine we didn't know anything about plumbing, and the way that we talked about it, we'd come home and we'd find a leak in our kitchen and we'd say, "Oh, my house has water." We might divide it -- the plumber would say, "Well, where's the water?" "Well, it's in the kitchen." "Oh, you must have kitchen water." That's kind of the level at which it is. "Kitchen water, well, first of all, we'll go in there and we'll mop out a lot of it. And then we know that if we sprinkle Drano around the kitchen, that helps. Whereas living room water, it's better to do tar on the roof." And it sounds silly, but that's basically what we do. And I'm not saying you shouldn't mop up your water if you have cancer, but I'm saying that's not really the problem; that's the symptom of the problem. What we really need to get at is the process that's going on, and that's happening at the level of the proteonomic actions, happening at the level of why is your body not healing itself in the way that it normally does? Because normally, your body is dealing with this problem all the time. So your house is dealing with leaks all the time, but it's fixing them. It's draining them out and so on. So what we need is to have a causative model of what's actually going on, and proteomics actually gives us the ability to build a model like that. David got me invited to give a talk at National Cancer Institute and Anna Barker was there. And so I gave this talk and said, "Why don't you guys do this?" And Anna said, "Because nobody within cancer would look at it this way. But what we're going to do, is we're going to create a program for people outside the field of cancer to get together with doctors who really know about cancer and work out different programs of research." So David and I applied to this program and created a consortium at USC where we've got some of the best oncologists in the world and some of the best biologists in the world, from Cold Spring Harbor, Stanford, Austin -- I won't even go through and name all the places -- to have a research project that will last for five years where we're really going to try to build a model of cancer like this. We're doing it in mice first, and we will kill a lot of mice in the process of doing this, but they will die for a good cause. And we will actually try to get to the point where we have a predictive model where we can understand, when cancer happens, what's actually happening in there and which treatment will treat that cancer. So let me just end with giving you a little picture of what I think cancer treatment will be like in the future. So I think eventually, once we have one of these models for people, which we'll get eventually -- I mean, our group won't get all the way there -- but eventually we'll have a very good computer model -- sort of like a global climate model for weather. It has lots of different information about what's the process going on in this proteomic conversation on many different scales. And so we will simulate in that model for your particular cancer -- and this also will be for ALS, or any kind of system neurodegenerative diseases, things like that -- we will simulate specifically you, not just a generic person, but what's actually going on inside you. And in that simulation, what we could do is design for you specifically a sequence of treatments, and it might be very gentle treatments, very small amounts of drugs. It might be things like, don't eat that day, or give them a little chemotherapy, maybe a little radiation. Of course, we'll do surgery sometimes and so on. But design a program of treatments specifically for you and help your body guide back to health -- guide your body back to health. Because your body will do most of the work of fixing it if we just sort of prop it up in the ways that are wrong. We put it in the equivalent of splints. And so your body basically has lots and lots of mechanisms for fixing cancer, and we just have to prop those up in the right way and get them to do the job. And so I believe that this will be the way that cancer will be treated in the future. It's going to require a lot of work, a lot of research. There will be many teams like our team that work on this. But I think eventually, we will design for everybody a custom treatment for cancer. So thank you very much. (Applause)

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

In two weeks time, that's the ninth anniversary of the day I first stepped out onto that hallowed "Jeopardy" set. I mean, nine years is a long time. And given "Jeopardy's" average demographics, I think what that means is most of the people who saw me on that show are now dead. (Laughter) But not all, a few are still alive. Occasionally I still get recognized at the mall or whatever. And when I do, it's as a bit of a know-it-all. I think that ship has sailed, it's too late for me. For better or for worse, that's what I'm going to be known as, as the guy who knew a lot of weird stuff. And I can't complain about this. I feel like that was always sort of my destiny, although I had for many years been pretty deeply in the trivia closet. If nothing else, you realize very quickly as a teenager, it is not a hit with girls to know Captain Kirk's middle name. (Laughter) And as a result, I was sort of the deeply closeted kind of know-it-all for many years. But if you go further back, if you look at it, it's all there. I was the kind of kid who was always bugging Mom and Dad with whatever great fact I had just read about -- Haley's comet or giant squids or the size of the world's biggest pumpkin pie or whatever it was. I now have a 10-year-old of my own who's exactly the same. And I know how deeply annoying it is, so karma does work. (Laughter) And I loved game shows, fascinated with game shows. I remember crying on my first day of kindergarten back in 1979 because it had just hit me, as badly as I wanted to go to school, that I was also going to miss "Hollywood Squares" and "Family Feud." I was going to miss my game shows. And later, in the mid-'80s, when "Jeopardy" came back on the air, I remember running home from school every day to watch the show. It was my favorite show, even before it paid for my house. And we lived overseas, we lived in South Korea where my dad was working, where there was only one English language TV channel. There was Armed Forces TV, and if you didn't speak Korean, that's what you were watching. So me and all my friends would run home every day and watch "Jeopardy." I was always that kind of obsessed trivia kid. I remember being able to play Trivial Pursuit against my parents back in the '80s and holding my own, back when that was a fad. There's a weird sense of mastery you get when you know some bit of boomer trivia that Mom and Dad don't know. You know some Beatles factoid that Dad didn't know. And you think, ah hah, knowledge really is power -- the right fact deployed at exactly the right place. I never had a guidance counselor who thought this was a legitimate career path, that thought you could major in trivia or be a professional ex-game show contestant. And so I sold out way too young. I didn't try to figure out what one does with that. I studied computers because I heard that was the thing, and I became a computer programmer -- not an especially good one, not an especially happy one at the time when I was first on "Jeopardy" in 2004. But that's what I was doing. And it made it doubly ironic -- my computer background -- a few years later, I think 2009 or so, when I got another phone call from "Jeopardy" saying, "It's early days yet, but IBM tells us they want to build a supercomputer to beat you at 'Jeopardy.' Are you up for this?" This was the first I'd heard of it. And of course I said yes, for several reasons. One, because playing "Jeopardy" is a great time. It's fun. It's the most fun you can have with your pants on. (Laughter) And I would do it for nothing. I don't think they know that, luckily, but I would go back and play for Arby's coupons. I just love "Jeopardy," and I always have. And second of all, because I'm a nerdy guy and this seemed like the future. People playing computers on game shows was the kind of thing I always imagined would happen in the future, and now I could be on the stage with it. I was not going to say no. The third reason I said yes is because I was pretty confident that I was going to win. I had taken some artificial intelligence classes. I knew there were no computers that could do what you need to do to win on "Jeopardy." People don't realize how tough it is to write that kind of program that can read a "Jeopardy" clue in a natural language like English and understand all the double meanings, the puns, the red herrings, unpack the meaning of the clue. The kind of thing that a three- or four-year-old human, little kid could do, very hard for a computer. And I thought, well this is going to be child's play. Yes, I will come destroy the computer and defend my species. (Laughter) But as the years went on, as IBM started throwing money and manpower and processor speed at this, I started to get occasional updates from them, and I started to get a little more worried. I remember a journal article about this new question answering software that had a graph. It was a scatter chart showing performance on "Jeopardy," tens of thousands of dots representing "Jeopardy" champions up at the top with their performance plotted on number of -- I was going to say questions answered, but answers questioned, I guess, clues responded to -- versus the accuracy of those answers. So there's a certain performance level that the computer would need to get to. And at first, it was very low. There was no software that could compete at this kind of arena. But then you see the line start to go up. And it's getting very close to what they call the winner's cloud. And I noticed in the upper right of the scatter chart some darker dots, some black dots, that were a different color. And thought, what are these? "The black dots in the upper right represent 74-time 'Jeopardy' champion Ken Jennings." And I saw this line coming for me. And I realized, this is it. This is what it looks like when the future comes for you. (Laughter) It's not the Terminator's gun sight; it's a little line coming closer and closer to the thing you can do, the only thing that makes you special, the thing you're best at. And when the game eventually happened about a year later, it was very different than the "Jeopardy" games I'd been used to. We were not playing in L.A. on the regular "Jeopardy" set. Watson does not travel. Watson's actually huge. It's thousands of processors, a terabyte of memory, trillions of bytes of memory. We got to walk through his climate-controlled server room. The only other "Jeopardy" contestant to this day I've ever been inside. And so Watson does not travel. You must come to it; you must make the pilgrimage. So me and the other human player wound up at this secret IBM research lab in the middle of these snowy woods in Westchester County to play the computer. And we realized right away that the computer had a big home court advantage. There was a big Watson logo in the middle of the stage. Like you're going to play the Chicago Bulls, and there's the thing in the middle of their court. And the crowd was full of IBM V.P.s and programmers cheering on their little darling, having poured millions of dollars into this hoping against hope that the humans screw up, and holding up "Go Watson" signs and just applauding like pageant moms every time their little darling got one right. I think guys had "W-A-T-S-O-N" written on their bellies in grease paint. If you can imagine computer programmers with the letters "W-A-T-S-O-N" written on their gut, it's an unpleasant sight. But they were right. They were exactly right. I don't want to spoil it, if you still have this sitting on your DVR, but Watson won handily. And I remember standing there behind the podium as I could hear that little insectoid thumb clicking. It had a robot thumb that was clicking on the buzzer. And you could hear that little tick, tick, tick, tick. And I remember thinking, this is it. I felt obsolete. I felt like a Detroit factory worker of the '80s seeing a robot that could now do his job on the assembly line. I felt like quiz show contestant was now the first job that had become obsolete under this new regime of thinking computers. And it hasn't been the last. If you watch the news, you'll see occasionally -- and I see this all the time -- that pharmacists now, there's a machine that can fill prescriptions automatically without actually needing a human pharmacist. And a lot of law firms are getting rid of paralegals because there's software that can sum up case laws and legal briefs and decisions. You don't need human assistants for that anymore. I read the other day about a program where you feed it a box score from a baseball or football game and it spits out a news article as if a human had watched the game and was commenting on it. And obviously these new technologies can't do as clever or creative a job as the humans they're replacing, but they're faster, and crucially, they're much, much cheaper. So it makes me wonder what the economic effects of this might be. I've read economists saying that, as a result of these new technologies, we'll enter a new golden age of leisure when we'll all have time for the things we really love because all these onerous tasks will be taken over by Watson and his digital brethren. I've heard other people say quite the opposite, that this is yet another tier of the middle class that's having the thing they can do taken away from them by a new technology and that this is actually something ominous, something that we should worry about. I'm not an economist myself. All I know is how it felt to be the guy put out of work. And it was friggin' demoralizing. It was terrible. Here's the one thing that I was ever good at, and all it took was IBM pouring tens of millions of dollars and its smartest people and thousands of processors working in parallel and they could do the same thing. They could do it a little bit faster and a little better on national TV, and "I'm sorry, Ken. We don't need you anymore." And it made me think, what does this mean, if we're going to be able to start outsourcing, not just lower unimportant brain functions. I'm sure many of you remember a distant time when we had to know phone numbers, when we knew our friends' phone numbers. And suddenly there was a machine that did that, and now we don't need to remember that anymore. I have read that there's now actually evidence that the hippocampus, the part of our brain that handles spacial relationships, physically shrinks and atrophies in people who use tools like GPS, because we're not exercising our sense of direction anymore. We're just obeying a little talking voice on our dashboard. And as a result, a part of our brain that's supposed to do that kind of stuff gets smaller and dumber. And it made me think, what happens when computers are now better at knowing and remembering stuff than we are? Is all of our brain going to start to shrink and atrophy like that? Are we as a culture going to start to value knowledge less? As somebody who has always believed in the importance of the stuff that we know, this was a terrifying idea to me. The more I thought about it, I realized, no, it's still important. The things we know are still important. I came to believe there were two advantages that those of us who have these things in our head have over somebody who says, "Oh, yeah. I can Google that. Hold on a second." There's an advantage of volume, and there's an advantage of time. The advantage of volume, first, just has to do with the complexity of the world nowadays. There's so much information out there. Being a Renaissance man or woman, that's something that was only possible in the Renaissance. Now it's really not possible to be reasonably educated on every field of human endeavor. There's just too much. They say that the scope of human information is now doubling every 18 months or so, the sum total of human information. That means between now and late 2014, we will generate as much information, in terms of gigabytes, as all of humanity has in all the previous millenia put together. It's doubling every 18 months now. This is terrifying because a lot of the big decisions we make require the mastery of lots of different kinds of facts. A decision like where do I go to school? What should I major in? Who do I vote for? Do I take this job or that one? These are the decisions that require correct judgments about many different kinds of facts. If we have those facts at our mental fingertips, we're going to be able to make informed decisions. If, on the other hand, we need to look them all up, we may be in trouble. According to a National Geographic survey I just saw, somewhere along the lines of 80 percent of the people who vote in a U.S. presidential election about issues like foreign policy cannot find Iraq or Afghanistan on a map. If you can't do that first step, are you really going to look up the other thousand facts you're going to need to know to master your knowledge of U.S. foreign policy? Quite probably not. At some point you're just going to be like, "You know what? There's too much to know. Screw it." And you'll make a less informed decision. The other issue is the advantage of time that you have if you have all these things at your fingertips. I always think of the story of a little girl named Tilly Smith. She was a 10-year-old girl from Surrey, England on vacation with her parents a few years ago in Phuket, Thailand. She runs up to them on the beach one morning and says, "Mom, Dad, we've got to get off the beach." And they say, "What do you mean? We just got here." And she said, "In Mr. Kearney's geography class last month, he told us that when the tide goes out abruptly out to sea and you see the waves churning way out there, that's the sign of a tsunami, and you need to clear the beach." What would you do if your 10-year-old daughter came up to you with this? Her parents thought about it, and they finally, to their credit, decided to believe her. They told the lifeguard, they went back to the hotel, and the lifeguard cleared over 100 people off the beach, luckily, because that was the day of the Boxing Day tsunami, the day after Christmas, 2004, that killed thousands of people in Southeast Asia and around the Indian Ocean. But not on that beach, not on Mai Khao Beach, because this little girl had remembered one fact from her geography teacher a month before. Now when facts come in handy like that -- I love that story because it shows you the power of one fact, one remembered fact in exactly the right place at the right time -- normally something that's easier to see on game shows than in real life. But in this case it happened in real life. And it happens in real life all the time. It's not always a tsunami, often it's a social situation. It's a meeting or job interview or first date or some relationship that gets lubricated because two people realize they share some common piece of knowledge. You say where you're from, and I say, "Oh, yeah." Or your alma mater or your job, and I know just a little something about it, enough to get the ball rolling. People love that shared connection that gets created when somebody knows something about you. It's like they took the time to get to know you before you even met. That's often the advantage of time. And it's not effective if you say, "Well, hold on. You're from Fargo, North Dakota. Let me see what comes up. Oh, yeah. Roger Maris was from Fargo." That doesn't work. That's just annoying. (Laughter) The great 18th-century British theologian and thinker, friend of Dr. Johnson, Samuel Parr once said, "It's always better to know a thing than not to know it." And if I have lived my life by any kind of creed, it's probably that. I have always believed that the things we know -- that knowledge is an absolute good, that the things we have learned and carry with us in our heads are what make us who we are, as individuals and as a species. I don't know if I want to live in a world where knowledge is obsolete. I don't want to live in a world where cultural literacy has been replaced by these little bubbles of specialty, so that none of us know about the common associations that used to bind our civilization together. I don't want to be the last trivia know-it-all sitting on a mountain somewhere, reciting to himself the state capitals and the names of "Simpsons" episodes and the lyrics of Abba songs. I feel like our civilization works when this is a vast cultural heritage that we all share and that we know without having to outsource it to our devices, to our search engines and our smartphones. In the movies, when computers like Watson start to think, things don't always end well. Those movies are never about beautiful utopias. It's always a terminator or a matrix or an astronaut getting sucked out an airlock in "2001." Things always go terribly wrong. And I feel like we're sort of at the point now where we need to make that choice of what kind of future we want to be living in. This is a question of leadership, because it becomes a question of who leads the future. On the one hand, we can choose between a new golden age where information is more universally available than it's ever been in human history, where we all have the answers to our questions at our fingertips. And on the other hand, we have the potential to be living in some gloomy dystopia where the machines have taken over and we've all decided it's not important what we know anymore, that knowledge isn't valuable because it's all out there in the cloud, and why would we ever bother learning anything new. Those are the two choices we have. I know which future I would rather be living in. And we can all make that choice. We make that choice by being curious, inquisitive people who like to learn, who don't just say, "Well, as soon as the bell has rung and the class is over, I don't have to learn anymore," or "Thank goodness I have my diploma. I'm done learning for a lifetime. I don't have to learn new things anymore." No, every day we should be striving to learn something new. We should have this unquenchable curiosity for the world around us. That's where the people you see on "Jeopardy" come from. These know-it-alls, they're not Rainman-style savants sitting at home memorizing the phone book. I've met a lot of them. For the most part, they are just normal folks who are universally interested in the world around them, curious about everything, thirsty for this knowledge about whatever subject. We can live in one of these two worlds. We can live in a world where our brains, the things that we know, continue to be the thing that makes us special, or a world in which we've outsourced all of that to evil supercomputers from the future like Watson. Ladies and gentlemen, the choice is yours. Thank you very much.

I'm often asked, "What surprised you about the book?" And I say, "That I got to write it." I would have never imagined that. Not in my wildest dreams did I think -- I don't even consider myself to be an author. And I'm often asked, "Why do you think so many people have read this? This thing's selling still about a million copies a month." And I think it's because spiritual emptiness is a universal disease. I think inside at some point, we put our heads down on the pillow and we go, "There's got to be more to life than this." Get up in the morning, go to work, come home and watch TV, go to bed, get up in the morning, go to work, come home, watch TV, go to bed, go to parties on weekends. A lot of people say, "I'm living." No, you're not living -- that's just existing. Just existing. I really think that there's this inner desire. I do believe what Chris said; I believe that you're not an accident. Your parents may not have planned you, but I believe God did. I think there are accidental parents; there's no doubt about that. I don't think there are accidental kids. And I think you matter. I think you matter to God; I think you matter to history; I think you matter to this universe. And I think that the difference between what I call the survival level of living, the success level of living, and the significance level of living is: Do you figure out, "What on Earth am I here for?" I meet a lot of people who are very smart, and say, "But why can't I figure out my problems?" And I meet a lot of people who are very successful, who say, "Why don't I feel more fulfilled? Why do I feel like a fake? Why do I feel like I've got to pretend that I'm more than I really am?" I think that comes down to this issue of meaning, of significance, of purpose. I think it comes down to this issue of: "Why am I here? What am I here for? Where am I going?" These are not religious issues. They're human issues. I wanted to tell Michael before he spoke that I really appreciate what he does, because it makes my life work a whole lot easier. As a pastor, I do see a lot of kooks. And I have learned that there are kooks in every area of life. Religion doesn't have a monopoly on that, but there are plenty of religious kooks. There are secular kooks; there are smart kooks, dumb kooks. There are people -- a lady came up to me the other day, and she had a white piece of paper -- Michael, you'll like this one -- and she said, "What do you see in it?" And I looked at it and I said, "Oh, I don't see anything." And she goes, "Well, I see Jesus," and started crying and left. I'm going, "OK," you know? "Fine." (Laughter) Good for you. When the book became the best-selling book in the world for the last three years, I kind of had my little crisis. And that was: What is the purpose of this? Because it brought in enormous amounts of money. When you write the best-selling book in the world, it's tons and tons of money. And it brought in a lot of attention, neither of which I wanted. When I started Saddleback Church, I was 25 years old. I started it with one other family in 1980. And I decided that I was never going to go on TV, because I didn't want to be a celebrity. I didn't want to be a, quote, "evangelist, televangelist" -- that's not my thing. And all of the sudden, it brought a lot of money and a lot of attention. I don't think -- now, this is a worldview, and I will tell you, everybody's got a worldview. Everybody's betting their life on something. You're betting your life on something, you just better know why you're betting what you're betting on. So, everybody's betting their life on something. And when I, you know, made a bet, I happened to believe that Jesus was who he said he was. And I believe in a pluralistic society, everybody's betting on something. And when I started the church, you know, I had no plans to do what it's doing now. And then when I wrote this book, and all of a sudden, it just took off, and I started saying, now, what's the purpose of this? Because as I started to say, I don't think you're given money or fame for your own ego, ever. I just don't believe that. And when you write a book that the first sentence of the book is, "It's not about you," then, when all of a sudden it becomes the best-selling book in history, you've got to figure, well, I guess it's not about me. That's kind of a no-brainer. So, what is it for? And I began to think about what I call the "stewardship of affluence" and the "stewardship of influence." So I believe, essentially, leadership is stewardship. That if you are a leader in any area -- in business, in politics, in sports, in art, in academics, in any area -- you don't own it. You are a steward of it. For instance, that's why I believe in protecting the environment. This is not my planet. It wasn't mine before I was born, it's not going to be mine after I die, I'm just here for 80 years and then that's it. I was debating the other day on a talk show, and the guy was challenging me and he'd go, "What's a pastor doing on protecting the environment?" And I asked this guy, I said, "Well, do you believe that human beings are responsible to make the world a little bit better place for the next generation? Do you think we have a stewardship here, to take the environment seriously?" And he said, "No." I said, "Oh, you don't?" I said, "Let me make this clear again: Do you believe that as human beings -- I'm not talking about religion -- do you believe that as human beings, it is our responsibility to take care of this planet, and make it just a little bit better for the next generation?" And he said, "No. Not any more than any other species." When he said the word "species," he was revealing his worldview. And he was saying, "I'm no more responsible to take care of this environment than a duck is." Well now, I know a lot of times we act like ducks, but you're not a duck. You're not a duck. And you are responsible -- that's my worldview. And so, you need to understand what your worldview is. The problem is most people never really think it through. They never really ... codify it or qualify it or quantify it, and say, "This is what I believe in. This is why I believe what I believe." I don't personally have enough faith to be an atheist. But you may, you may. Your worldview, though, does determine everything else in your life, because it determines your decisions; it determines your relationships; it determines your level of confidence. It determines, really, everything in your life. What we believe, obviously -- and you know this -- determines our behavior, and our behavior determines what we become in life. So all of this money started pouring in, and all of this fame started pouring in. And I'm going, what do I do with this? My wife and I first made five decisions on what to do with the money. We said, "First, we're not going to use it on ourselves." I didn't go out and buy a bigger house. I don't own a guesthouse. I still drive the same four year-old Ford that I've driven. We just said, we're not going to use it on us. The second thing was, I stopped taking a salary from the church that I pastor. Third thing is, I added up all that the church had paid me over the last 25 years, and I gave it back. And I gave it back because I didn't want anybody thinking that I do what I do for money -- I don't. In fact, personally, I've never met a priest or a pastor or a minister who does it for money. I know that's the stereotype; I've never met one of them. Believe me, there's a whole lot easier ways to make money. Pastors are like on 24 hours-a-day call, they're like doctors. I left late today -- I'd hoped to be here yesterday -- because my father-in-law is in his last, probably, 48 hours before he dies of cancer. And I'm watching a guy who's lived his life -- he's now in his mid-80s -- and he's dying with peace. You know, the test of your worldview is not how you act in the good times. The test of your worldview is how you act at the funeral. And having been through literally hundreds if not thousands of funerals, it makes a difference. It makes a difference what you believe. So, we gave it all back, and then we set up three foundations, working on some of the major problems of the world: illiteracy, poverty, pandemic diseases -- particularly HIV/AIDS -- and set up these three foundations, and put the money into that. The last thing we did is we became what I call "reverse tithers." And that is, when my wife and I got married 30 years ago, we started tithing. Now, that's a principle in the Bible that says give 10 percent of what you get back to charity, give it away to help other people. So, we started doing that, and each year we would raise our tithe one percent. So, our first year of marriage we went to 11 percent, second year we went to 12 percent, and the third year we went to 13 percent, and on and on and on. Why did I do that? Because every time I give, it breaks the grip of materialism in my life. Materialism is all about getting -- get, get, get, get all you can, can all you get, sit on the can and spoil the rest. It's all about more, having more. And we think that the good life is actually looking good -- that's most important of all -- looking good, feeling good and having the goods. But that's not the good life. I meet people all the time who have those, and they're not necessarily happy. If money actually made you happy, then the wealthiest people in the world would be the happiest. And that I know, personally, I know, is not true. It's just not true. So, the good life is not about looking good, feeling good or having the goods, it's about being good and doing good. Giving your life away. Significance in life doesn't come from status, because you can always find somebody who's got more than you. It doesn't come from sex. It doesn't come from salary. It comes from serving. It is in giving our lives away that we find meaning, we find significance. That's the way we were wired, I believe, by God. And so we began to give away, and now after 30 years, my wife and I are reverse tithers -- we give away 90 percent and live on 10. That, actually, was the easy part. The hard part is, what do I do with all this attention? Because I started getting all kinds of invitations. I just came off a nearly month-long speaking tour on three different continents, and I won't go into that, but it was an amazing thing. And I'm going, what do I do with this notoriety that the book has brought? And, being a pastor, I started reading the Bible. There's a chapter in the Bible called Psalm 72, and it's Solomon's prayer for more influence. When you read this prayer, it sounds incredibly selfish, self-centered. He says, "God, I want you to make me famous." That's what he prays. He said, "I want you to make me famous. I want you to spread the fame of my name through every land, I want you to give me power. I want you to make me famous, I want you to give me influence." And it just sounds like the most egotistical request you could make, if you were going to pray. Until you read the whole psalm, the whole chapter. And then he says, "So that the king ..." -- he was the king of Israel at that time, at its apex in power -- "... so that the king may care for the widow and orphan, support the oppressed, defend the defenseless, care for the sick, assist the poor, speak up for the foreigner, those in prison." Basically, he's talking about all the marginalized in society. And as I read that, I looked at it, and I thought, you know, what this is saying is that the purpose of influence is to speak up for those who have no influence. The purpose of influence is not to build your ego. Or your net worth. And, by the way, your net worth is not the same thing as your self-worth. Your value is not based on your valuables. It's based on a whole different set of things. And so the purpose of influence is to speak up for those who have no influence. And I had to admit: I can't think of the last time I thought of widows and orphans. They're not on my radar. I pastor a church in one of the most affluent areas of America -- a bunch of gated communities. I have a church full of CEOs and scientists. And I could go five years and never, ever see a homeless person. They're just not in my pathway. Now, they're 13 miles up the road in Santa Ana. So I had to say, ok, I would use whatever affluence and whatever influence I've got to help those who don't have either of those. You know, there's a story in the Bible about Moses, whether you believe it's true or not, it really doesn't matter to me. But Moses, if you saw the movie, "The Ten Commandments," Moses goes out, and there's this burning bush, and God talks to him, and God says, "Moses, what's in your hand?" I think that's one of the most important questions you'll ever be asked: What's in your hand? Moses says, "It's a staff. It's a shepherd's staff." And God says, "Throw it down." And if you saw the movie, you know, he throws it down and it becomes a snake. And then God says, "Pick it up." And he picks it back up again, and it becomes a staff again. Now, I'm reading this thing, and I'm going, what is that all about? OK. What's that all about? Well, I do know a couple of things. Number one, God never does a miracle to show off. It's not just, "Wow, isn't that cool?" And, by the way, my God doesn't have to show up on cheese bread. You know, if God's going to show up, he's not going to show up on cheese bread. (Laughter) Ok? I just, this is why I love what Michael does, because it's like, if he's debunking it, then I don't have to. But God -- my God -- doesn't show up on sprinkler images. He's got a few more powerful ways than that to do whatever he wants to do. But he doesn't do miracles just to show off. Second thing is, if God ever asks you a question, he already knows the answer. Obviously, if he's God, then that would mean that when he asks the question, it's for your benefit, not his. So he's going, "What's in your hand?" Now, what was in Moses' hand? Well, it was a shepherd's staff. Now, follow me on this. This staff represented three things about Moses' life. First, it represented his identity; he was a shepherd. It's the symbol of his own occupation: I am a shepherd. It's a symbol of his identity, his career, his job. Second, it's a symbol of not only his identity, it's a symbol of his income, because all of his assets are tied up in sheep. In those days, nobody had bank accounts, or American Express cards, or hedge funds. Your assets are tied up in your flocks. So it's a symbol of his identity, and it's a symbol of his income. And the third thing: it's a symbol of his influence. What do you do with a shepherd's staff? Well, you know, you move sheep from point A to point B with it, by hook or by crook. You pull them or you poke them. One or the other. So, he's saying, "You're going to lay down your identity. What's in your hand? You've got identity, you've got income, you've got influence. What's in your hand?" And he's saying, "If you lay it down, I'll make it come alive. I'll do some things you could never imagine possible." And if you've watched that movie, "Ten Commandments," all of those big miracles that happen in Egypt are done through this staff. Last year, I was invited to speak at the NBA All-Stars game. And so, I'm talking to the players, because most of the NBA teams, NFL teams and all the other teams have done this 40 Days of Purpose, based on the book. And I asked them, I said, "What's in your hand? So, what's in your hand?" I said, "It's a basketball. And that basketball represents your identity, who you are: you're an NBA player. It represents your income: you're making a lot of money off that little ball. And it represents your influence. And even though you're only going to be in the NBA for a few years, you're going to be an NBA player for the rest of your life. And that gives you enormous influence. So, what are you going to do with what you've been given?" And I guess that's the main reason I came up here today, to all of you very bright people at TED -- it is to say, "What's in your hand?" What do you have that you've been given? Talent, background, education, freedom, networks, opportunities, wealth, ideas, creativity. What are you doing with what you've been given? That, to me, is the primary question about life. That, to me, is what being purpose-driven is all about. In the book, I talk about how you're wired to do certain things, you're "SHAPED" with -- a little acrostic: Spiritual gifts, Heart, Ability, Personality and Experiences. These things shape you. And if you want to know what you ought to be doing with your life, you need to look at your shape -- "What am I wired to do?" Why would God wire you to do something and then not have you do it? If you're wired to be an anthropologist, you'll be an anthropologist. If you're wired to be an undersea explorer, you'll be an undersea explorer. If you're wired to make deals, you make deals. If you're wired to paint, you paint. Did you know that God smiles when you be you? When my little kids -- when my kids were little -- they're all grown now, I have grandkids -- I used to go in and sit on the side of their bed, and I used to watch my kids sleep. And I just watched their little bodies rise and lower, rise and lower. And I would look at them: "This is not an accident." Rise and lower. And I got joy out of just watching them sleep. Some people have the misguided idea that God only gets excited when you're doing, quote, "spiritual things," like going to church or helping the poor, or, you know, confessing or doing something like that. The bottom line is, God gets pleasure watching you be you. Why? He made you. And when you do what you were made to do, he goes, "That's my boy! That's my girl! You're using the talent and ability that I gave you." So my advice to you is: look at what's in your hand -- your identity, your influence, your income -- and say, "It's not about me. It's about making the world a better place." Thank you.

I'm often asked, what surprises you about the book? And I said, that I got to write it. I would have never imagined that, not in my wildest dreams did I think -- I don't even consider myself to be an author. And I'm often asked, why do you think so many people have read this? This thing's selling still about a million copies a month. And I think it's because spiritual emptiness is a universal disease. I think inside at some point, we put our heads down on the pillow and we go, "There's got to be more to life than this." Get up in the morning, go to work, come home and watch TV, go to bed, get up in the morning, go to work, come home, watch TV, go to bed, go to parties on weekends. A lot of people say, "I'm living." No, you're not living -- that's just existing. Just existing. I really think that's there's this inner desire. I do believe what Chris said. I believe that you're not an accident. Your parents may not have planned you, but I believe God did. I think there are accidental parents; there's no doubt about that. I don't think there are accidental kids. And I think you matter. I think you matter to God; I think you matter to history; I think you matter to this universe. And I think that the difference between what I call the survival level of living, the success level of living and the significant level of living is, do you figure out, what on Earth am I here for? I meet a lot of people who are very smart, and say, "But why can't I figure out my problems?" And I meet a lot of people who are very successful, who say, "Why don't I feel more fulfilled? Why do I feel like a fake? Why do I feel like I've got to pretend that I'm more than I really am?" I think that comes down to this issue of meaning, of significance, of purpose. I think it comes down to this issue of: why am I here? What am I here for? Where am I going? These are not religious issues -- they're human issues. I wanted to tell Michael before he spoke that I really appreciate what he does, because it makes my life work a whole lot easier. As a pastor, I do see a lot of kooks. And I have learned that there are kooks in every area of life. Religion doesn't have a monopoly on that, but there are plenty of religious kooks. There are secular kooks; there are smart kooks, dumb kooks. There are people -- a lady came up to me the other day, and she had a white piece of paper -- Michael, you'll like this one -- and she said, "What do you see in it?" And I looked at it and I said, "Oh, I don't see anything." And she goes, "Well, I see Jesus," and started crying and left. I'm going, OK, you know. Fine. Um. Good for you. (Laughter) When the book became the best-selling book in the world for the last three years, I kind of had my little crisis. And that was: what is the purpose of this? Because it brought in enormous amounts of money. When you write the best-selling book in the world, it's tons and tons of money -- and it brought in a lot of attention, neither of which I wanted. When I started Saddleback Church, I was 25 years old. I started it with one other family in 1980. And I decided that I was never going to go on TV, because I didn't want to be a celebrity, I didn't want to be a, quote, "evangelist, televangelist" -- that's not my thing. And all of a sudden, it brought a lot of money and a lot of attention. I don't think -- now, this is a worldview, and I will tell you, everybody's got a worldview. Everybody's betting their life on something. You're betting your life on something -- you just better know why you're betting what you're betting on. So, everybody's betting their life on something, and when I, you know, made a bet, I happened to believe that Jesus was who he said he was. But everybody's got -- and I believe in a pluralistic society -- everybody's betting on something. And when I started the church, you know, I had no plans to do what it's doing now. And then when I wrote this book, and all of a sudden it just took off, then I started saying, now, what's the purpose of this? Because as I started to say, I don't think you're given money or fame for your own ego, ever. I just don't believe that. And when you write a book that the first sentence of the book is, "It's not about you," then, when all of a sudden it becomes the best-selling book in history, you got to figure, well, I guess it's not about me. That's kind of a no-brainer. So, what is it for? And I began to think about what I call the "stewardship of affluence" and the "stewardship of influence." So I believe, essentially, that leadership is stewardship. That if you are a leader in any area -- in business, in politics, in sports, in art, in academics, in any area -- you don't own it; you are a steward of it. For instance, that's why I believe in protecting the environment. This is not my planet. It wasn't mine before I was born. It's not going to be mine after I die. I'm just here for 80 years and then that's it. I was debating the other day on a talk show, and the guy was challenging me and go, "What's a pastor doing on protecting the environment?" And I asked this guy, I said, "Well, do you believe that human beings are responsible to make the world a little bit better place for the next generation? Do you think we have a stewardship here, to take the environment seriously?" And he said, "No." I said, "Oh, you don't?" I said, "Let me make this clear again. Do you believe that as human beings -- I'm not talking about religion -- do you believe that as human beings, it is our responsibility to take care of this planet and make it just a little bit better for the next generation?" And he said, "No. Not any more than any other species." When he said the word "species," he was revealing his worldview. And he was saying, "I'm no more responsible to take care of this environment than a duck is." Well now, I know a lot of times we act like ducks, but you're not a duck. You're not a duck. And you are responsible -- that's my worldview. And so, you need to understand what your worldview is. The problem is most people never really think it through. They never really codify it or qualify it or quantify it, and say, "This is what I believe in. This is why I believe what I believe." I don't personally have enough faith to be an atheist. But you may, you may. Your worldview, though, does determine everything else in your life, because it determines your decisions; it determines your relationships; it determines your level of confidence. It determines, really, everything in your life. What we believe, obviously -- and you know this -- determines our behavior, and our behavior determines what we become in life. So all of this money started pouring in, and all of this fame started pouring in, and I go, what do I do with this? My wife and I first made five decisions on what to do with the money. We said, "First, we're not going to use it on ourselves." I didn't go out and buy a bigger house. I don't own a guesthouse. I still drive the same four-year-old Ford that I've driven. We just said, we're not going to use it on us. The second thing was, I stopped taking a salary from the church that I pastor. Third thing is, I added up all that the church had paid me over the last 25 years, and I gave it back. And I gave it back because I didn't want anybody thinking that I do what I do for money -- I don't. In fact, personally, I've never met a priest or a pastor or a minister who does it for money. I know that's a stereotype. I've never met one of them. Believe me, there's a whole lot easier ways to make money. Pastors are like on 24-hours-a-day call. They're like doctors. I left late today. I'd hoped to be here yesterday, because my father-in-law is in his last, probably, 48 hours before he dies of cancer. And I'm watching a guy who's lived his life -- he's now in his mid-80s -- and he's dying with peace. You know, the test of your worldview is not how you act in the good times. The test of your worldview is how you act at the funeral. And having been through literally hundreds if not thousands of funerals, it makes a difference. It makes a difference what you believe. So, we gave it all back, and then we set up three foundations, working on some of the major problems of the world: illiteracy, poverty, pandemic diseases -- particularly HIV/AIDS -- and set up these three foundations, and put the money into that. The last thing we did is we became what I call "reverse tithers." And that is, when my wife and I got married 30 years ago, we started tithing. Now, that's a principle in the Bible that says give 10 percent of what you get back to charity, give it away to help other people. So, we started doing that, and each year we would raise our tithe 1 percent. So, our first year of marriage we went to 11 percent, second year we went to 12 percent, and the third year we went to 13 percent, and on and on and on. Why did I do that? Because every time I give, it breaks the grip of materialism in my life. Materialism is all about getting -- get, get, get, get all you can, can all you get, sit on the can and spoil the rest. It's all about more, having more. And we think that the good life is actually looking good -- that's most important of all -- looking good, feeling good and having the goods. But that's not the good life. I meet people all the time who have those, and they're not necessarily happy. If money actually made you happy, then the wealthiest people in the world would be the happiest. And that I know, personally, I know, is not true. It's just not true. So, the good life is not about looking good, feeling good or having the goods; it's about being good and doing good. Giving your life away. Significance in life doesn't come from status, because you can always find somebody who's got more than you. It doesn't come from sex. It doesn't come from salary. It comes from serving. It is in giving our lives away that we find meaning, we find significance. That's the way we were wired, I believe, by God. And so we began to give away, and now after 30 years, my wife and I are reverse tithers -- we give away 90 percent and live on 10. That, actually, was the easy part. The hard part is, what do I do with all this attention? Because I start getting all kinds of invitations. I just came off a nearly month-long speaking tour on three different continents, and I won't go into that, but it was an amazing thing. And I'm going, what do I do with this notoriety that the book has brought? And being a pastor, I started reading the Bible. There's a chapter in the Bible called Psalm 72, and it's Solomon's prayer for more influence. When you read this prayer, it sounds incredibly selfish, self-centered. It sounds like, he says, "God, I want you to make me famous." That's what he prays. He says, "I want you to make me famous. I want you to spread the fame of my name through every land. I want you to give me power. I want you to make me famous. I want you to give me influence." And it just sounds like the most egotistical request you could make if you were going to pray. Until you read the whole psalm, the whole chapter. And then he says, "So that the king" -- he was the king of Israel at that time at its apex in power -- "so that the king may care for the widow and orphan, support depressed, defend the defenseless, care for the sick, assist the poor, speak up for the foreigner, those in prison." Basically, he's talking about all the marginalized in society. And as I read that, I looked at it, and I thought, you know, what this is saying is that the purpose of influence is to speak up for those who have no influence. The purpose of influence is not to build your ego, or your net worth. And, by the way, your net worth is not the same thing as your self-worth. Your value is not based on your valuables; it's based on a whole different set of things. And so the purpose of influence is to speak up for those who have no influence. And I had to admit, I can't think of the last time I thought of widows and orphans. They're not on my radar. I pastor a church in one of the most affluent areas of America -- a bunch of gated communities. I have a church full of CEOs and scientists. And I could go five years and never, ever see a homeless person. They're just not in my pathway. Now, they're 13 miles up the road in Santa Ana. So, I had to say, "OK, I would use whatever affluence and whatever influence I've got to help those who don't have either of those." You know, there's a story in the Bible about Moses. Whether you believe it's true or not -- it really didn't matter to me. But Moses, if you saw the movie, "The Ten Commandments," Moses goes out, and there's this burning bush, and God talks to him. And God says, "Moses, what's in your hand?" I think that's one of the most important questions you'll ever be asked. What's in your hand? Moses says, "It's a staff. It's a shepherd's staff." And God says, "Throw it down." And if you saw the movie, you know, he throws it down and it becomes a snake. And then God says, "Pick it up." And he picks it back up again, and it becomes a staff again. Now, I'm reading this thing, and I'm going, what is that all about? OK. What's that all about? Well, I do know a couple of things. Number one, God never does a miracle to show off. It's not just, "Wow, isn't that cool?" And, by the way, my God doesn't have to show up on cheese bread. You know, if God's going to show up, He's not going to show up on cheese bread. (Laughter) OK? I just, this is why I love what Michael does, because it's like, OK, if he's debunking it, then I don't have to. But God -- my God -- doesn't show up on sprinkler images. He got a few more powerful ways than that to do whatever he wants to do. But He doesn't do miracles just to show off. Second thing is, if God ever asks you a question, He already knows the answer. Obviously, if He's God, then that would mean that when He asks the question, it's for your benefit, not His. So, He's going, "What's in your hand?" Now, what was in Moses' hand? Well, it was a shepherd's staff. Now, follow me on this. This staff represented three things about Moses' life. First, it represented his identity. He was a shepherd. It's the symbol of his own occupation. I am a shepherd. It's a symbol of his identity, his career, his job. Second, it's a symbol of not only his identity; it's a symbol of his income, because all of his assets are tied up in sheep. In those days nobody had bank accounts, or American Express cards, or hedge funds. Your assets are tied up in your flocks. So it's a symbol of his identity, and it's a symbol of his income. And the third thing: it's a symbol of his influence. What do you do with a shepherd's staff? Well, you know, you move sheep from point A to point B with it, by hook or by crook. You pull them or you poke them, one or the other. So, He's saying, "You're going to lay down your identity. What's in your hand? You've got identity; you've got income; you've got influence. What's in your hand?" And He's saying, "If you lay it down, I'll make it come alive. I'll do some things you could never imagine possible." And if you've watched that movie, "Ten Commandments," all of those big miracles that happen in Egypt are done through this staff. Last year, I was invited to speak at NBA All-Stars game. And so, I'm talking to the players, because most of the NBA teams, NFL teams and all the other teams have done this 40 Days of Purpose, based on the book. And I asked them, I said, "What's in your hand? So, what's in your hand?" I said, "It's a basketball, and that basketball represents your identity, who you are. You're an NBA player. It represents your income. You're making a lot of money off that little ball. And it represents your influence. And even though you're only going to be in the NBA for a few years, you're going to be an NBA player for the rest of your life. And that gives with you enormous influence. So, what are you going to do with what you've been given?" And I guess that's the main reason I came up here today, to all of you very bright people at TED, is to say, "What's in your hand?" What do you have that you've been given? Talent, background, education, freedom, networks, opportunities, wealth, ideas, creativity. What are you doing with what you've been given? That, to me, is the primary question about life. That, to me, is what being purpose-driven is all about. In the book I talk about how you're wired to do certain things, you're shaped. This little cross takes spiritual gifts, heart, ability, personality and experiences. These things shape you. And if you want to know what you ought to be doing with your life, you need to look at your shape. What am I wired to do? Why would God wire you to do something and then not have you do it? If you're wired to be an anthropologist, you'll be an anthropologist. If you're wired to be an undersea explorer, you'll be an undersea explorer. If you're wired to make deals, you make deals. If you're wired to paint, you paint. Did you know that God smiles when you be you? When my little kids were little -- they're all grown, now I have grandkids -- I used to go in and sit on the side of their bed, and I used to watch my kids sleep. And I just watched their little bodies rise and lower, rise and lower. And I would look at them -- this is not an accident. Rise and lower -- and I got joy out of just watching them sleep. Some people have the misguided idea that God only gets excited when you're doing, quote, "spiritual things," like going to church or helping the poor, or, you know, confessing or doing something like that. The bottom line is, God gets pleasure watching you be you. Why? He made you. And when you do what you were made to do, He goes, "That's my boy. That's my girl. You're using the talent and ability that I gave you." So my advice to you is, look at what's in your hand -- your identity, your influence, your income -- and say, "It's not about me. It's about making the world a better place." Thank you.

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) Ah, it worked! A sound that is 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. (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. OK. (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. 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. OK. 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, as 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. OK. 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 equivalent 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 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 US, 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. 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. 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, "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 processing 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. 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, "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. (Laughter) 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 go 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. OK. 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 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) OK. So for 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 antipsychotics. It's the antipsychotics causing the sleep problems," ignoring the fact that for a hundred years previously, sleep disruption had been reported before antipsychotics. So what's going on? 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, 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 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 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)

What I'd like to do is just drag us all down into the gutter, and actually all the way down into the sewer because I want to talk about diarrhea. And in particular, I want to talk about the design of diarrhea. And when evolutionary biologists talk about design, they really mean design by natural selection. And that brings me to the title of the talk, "Using Evolution to Design Disease Organisms Intelligently." And I also have a little bit of a sort of smartass subtitle to this. But I'm not just doing this to be cute. I really think that this subtitle explains what somebody like me, who's sort of a Darwin wannabe, how they actually look at one's role in sort of coming into this field of health sciences and medicine. It's really not a very friendly field for evolutionary biologists. You actually see a great potential, but you see a lot of people who are sort of defending their turf, and may actually be very resistant, when one tries to introduce ideas. So, all of the talk today is going to deal with two general questions. One is that, why are some disease organisms more harmful? And a very closely related question, which is, how can we take control of this situation once we understand the answer to the first question? How can we make the harmful organisms more mild? And I'm going to be talking, to begin with, as I said, about diarrheal disease organisms. And the focus when I'm talking about the diarrheal organisms, as well as the focus when I'm talking about any organisms that cause acute infectious disease, is to think about the problem from a germ's point of view, germ's-eye view. And in particular, to think about a fundamental idea which I think makes sense out of a tremendous amount of variation in the harmfulness of disease organisms. And that idea is that from the germ's-eye point of view, disease organisms have to get from one host to another, and often they have to rely on the well-being of the host to move them to another host. But not always. Sometimes, you get disease organisms that don't rely on host mobility at all for transmission. And when you have that, then evolutionary theory tells us that natural selection will favor the more exploitative, more predator-like organisms. So, natural selection will favor organisms that are more likely to cause damage. If instead transmission to another host requires host mobility, then we expect that the winners of the competition will be the milder organisms. So, if the pathogen doesn't need the host to be healthy and active, and actual selection favors pathogens that take advantage of those hosts, the winners in the competition are those that exploit the hosts for their own reproductive success. But if the host needs to be mobile in order to transmit the pathogen, then it's the benign ones that tend to be the winners. So, I'm going to begin by applying this idea to diarrheal diseases. Diarrheal disease organisms get transmitted in basically three ways. They can be transmitted from person-to-person contact, person-to-food-then-to-person contact, when somebody eats contaminated food, or they can be transmitted through the water. And when they're transmitted through the water, unlike the first two modes of transmission, these pathogens don't rely on a healthy host for transmission. A person can be sick in bed and still infect tens, even hundreds of other individuals. To sort of illustrate that, this diagram emphasizes that if you've got a sick person in bed, somebody's going to be taking out the contaminated materials. They're going to wash those contaminated materials, and then the water may move into sources of drinking water. People will come in to those places where you've got contaminated drinking water, bring things back to the family, may drink right at that point. The whole point is that a person who can't move can still infect many other individuals. And so, the theory tells us that when diarrheal disease organisms are transported by water, we expect them to be more predator-like, more harmful. And you can test these ideas. So, one way you can test is just look at all diarrheal bacteria, and see whether or not the ones that tend to be more transmitted by water, tend to be more harmful. And the answer is -- yep, they are. Now I put those names in there just for the bacteria buffs, but the main point here is that -- (Laughter) there's a lot of them here, I can tell -- the main point here is that those data points all show a very strong, positive association between the degree to which a disease organism is transmitted by water, and how harmful they are, how much death they cause per untreated infection. So this suggests we're on the right track. But this, to me, suggests that we really need to ask some additional questions. Remember the second question that I raised at the outset was, how can we use this knowledge to make disease organisms evolve to be mild? Now, this suggests that if you could just block waterborne transmission, you could cause disease organisms to shift from the right-hand side of that graph to the left-hand side of the graph. But it doesn't tell you how long. I mean, if this would require thousands of years, then it's worthless in terms of controlling of these pathogens. But if it could occur in just a few years, then it might be a very important way to control some of the nasty problems that we haven't been able to control. In other words, this suggests that we could domesticate these organisms. We could make them evolve to be not so harmful to us. And so, as I was thinking about this, I focused on this organism, which is the El Tor biotype of the organism called Vibrio cholerae. And that is the species of organism that is responsible for causing cholera. And the reason I thought this is a really great organism to look at is that we understand why it's so harmful. It's harmful because it produces a toxin, and that toxin is released when the organism gets into our intestinal tract. It causes fluid to flow from the cells that line our intestine into the lumen, the internal chamber of our intestine, and then that fluid goes the only way it can, which is out the other end. And it flushes out thousands of different other competitors that would otherwise make life difficult for the Vibrios. So what happens, if you've got an organism, it produces a lot of toxin. After a few days of infection you end up having -- the fecal material really isn't so disgusting as we might imagine. It's sort of cloudy water. And if you took a drop of that water, you might find a million diarrheal organisms. If the organism produced a lot of toxin, you might find 10 million, or 100 million. If it didn't produce a lot of this toxin, then you might find a smaller number. So the task is to try to figure out how to determine whether or not you could get an organism like this to evolve towards mildness by blocking waterborne transmission, thereby allowing the organism only to be transmitted by person-to-person contact, or person-food-person contact -- both of which would really require that people be mobile and fairly healthy for transmission. Now, I can think of some possible experiments. One would be to take a lot of different strains of this organism -- some that produce a lot of toxins, some that produce a little -- and take those strains and spew them out in different countries. Some countries that might have clean water supplies, so that you can't get waterborne transmission: you expect the organism to evolve to mildness there. Other countries, in which you've got a lot of waterborne transmission, there you expect these organisms to evolve towards a high level of harmfulness, right? There's a little ethical problem in this experiment. I was hoping to hear a few gasps at least. That makes me worry a little bit. (Laughter) But anyhow, the laughter makes me feel a little bit better. And this ethical problem's a big problem. Just to emphasize this, this is what we're really talking about. Here's a girl who's almost dead. She got rehydration therapy, she perked up, within a few days she was looking like a completely different person. So, we don't want to run an experiment like that. But interestingly, just that thing happened in 1991. In 1991, this cholera organism got into Lima, Peru, and within two months it had spread to the neighboring areas. Now, I don't know how that happened, and I didn't have anything to do with it, I promise you. I don't think anybody knows, but I'm not averse to, once that's happened, to see whether or not the prediction that we would make, that I did make before, actually holds up. Did the organism evolve to mildness in a place like Chile, which has some of the most well protected water supplies in Latin America? And did it evolve to be more harmful in a place like Ecuador, which has some of the least well protected? And Peru's got something sort of in between. And so, with funding from the Bosack-Kruger Foundation, I got a lot of strains from these different countries and we measured their toxin production in the lab. And we found that in Chile -- within two months of the invasion of Peru you had strains entering Chile -- and when you look at those strains, in the very far left-hand side of this graph, you see a lot of variation in the toxin production. Each dot corresponds to an islet from a different person -- a lot of variation on which natural selection can act. But the interesting point is, if you look over the 1990s, within a few years the organisms evolved to be more mild. They evolved to produce less toxin. And to just give you a sense of how important this might be, if we look in 1995, we find that there's only one case of cholera, on average, reported from Chile every two years. So, it's controlled. That's how much we have in America, cholera that's acquired endemically, and we don't think we've got a problem here. They didn't -- they solved the problem in Chile. But, before we get too confident, we'd better look at some of those other countries, and make sure that this organism doesn't just always evolve toward mildness. Well, in Peru it didn't. And in Ecuador -- remember, this is the place where it has the highest potential waterborne transmission -- it looked like it got more harmful. In every case there's a lot of variation, but something about the environment the people are living in, and I think the only realistic explanation is that it's the degree of waterborne transmission, favored the harmful strains in one place, and mild strains in another. So, this is very encouraging, it suggests that something that we might want to do anyhow, if we had enough money, could actually give us a much bigger bang for the buck. It would make these organisms evolve to mildness, so that even though people might be getting infected, they'd be infected with mild strains. It wouldn't be causing severe disease. But there's another really interesting aspect of this, and this is that if you could control the evolution of virulence, evolution of harmfulness, then you should be able to control antibiotic resistance. And the idea is very simple. If you've got a harmful organism, a high proportion of the people are going to be symptomatic, a high proportion of the people are going to be going to get antibiotics. You've got a lot of pressure favoring antibiotic resistance, so you get increased virulence leading to the evolution of increased antibiotic resistance. And once you get increased antibiotic resistance, the antibiotics aren't knocking out the harmful strains anymore. So, you've got a higher level of virulence. So, you get this vicious cycle. The goal is to turn this around. If you could cause an evolutionary decrease in virulence by cleaning up the water supply, you should be able to get an evolutionary decrease in antibiotic resistance. So, we can go to the same countries and look and see. Did Chile avoid the problem of antibiotic resistance, whereas did Ecuador actually have the beginnings of the problem? If we look in the beginning of the 1990s, we see, again, a lot of variation. In this case, on the Y-axis, we've just got a measure of antibiotic sensitivity -- and I won't go into that. But we've got a lot of variation in antibiotic sensitivity in Chile, Peru and Ecuador, and no trend across the years. But if we look at the end of the 1990s, just half a decade later, we see that in Ecuador they started having a resistance problem. Antibiotic sensitivity was going down. And in Chile, you still had antibiotic sensitivity. So, it looks like Chile dodged two bullets. They got the organism to evolve to mildness, and they got no development of antibiotic resistance. Now, these ideas should apply across the board, as long as you can figure out why some organisms evolved to virulence. And I want to give you just one more example, because we've talked a little bit about malaria. And the example I want to deal with is, or the idea I want to deal with, the question is, what can we do to try to get the malarial organism to evolve to mildness? Now, malaria's transmitted by a mosquito, and normally if you're infected with malaria, and you're feeling sick, it makes it even easier for the mosquito to bite you. And you can show, just by looking at data from literature, that vector-borne diseases are more harmful than non-vector-borne diseases. But I think there's a really fascinating example of what one can do experimentally to try to actually demonstrate this. In the case of waterborne transmission, we'd like to clean up the water supplies, see whether or not we can get those organisms to evolve towards mildness. In the case of malaria, what we'd like to do is mosquito-proof houses. And the logic's a little more subtle here. If you mosquito-proof houses, when people get sick, they're sitting in bed -- or in mosquito-proof hospitals, they're sitting in a hospital bed -- and the mosquitoes can't get to them. So, if you're a harmful variant in a place where you've got mosquito-proof housing, then you're a loser. The only pathogens that get transmitted are the ones that are infecting people that feel healthy enough to walk outside and get mosquito bites. So, if you were to mosquito proof houses, you should be able to get these organisms to evolve to mildness. And there's a really wonderful experiment that was done that suggests that we really should go ahead and do this. And that experiment was done in Northern Alabama. Just to give you a little perspective on this, I've given you a star at the intellectual center of the United States, which is right there in Louisville, Kentucky. And this really cool experiment was done about 200 miles south of there, in Northern Alabama, by the Tennessee Valley Authority. They had dammed up the Tennessee River. They'd caused the water to back up, they needed electric, hydroelectric power. And when you get stagnant water, you get mosquitoes. They found in the late '30s -- 10 years after they'd made these dams -- that the people in Northern Alabama were infected with malaria, about a third to half of them were infected with malaria. This shows you the positions of some of these dams. OK, so the Tennessee Valley Authority was in a little bit of a bind. There wasn't DDT, there wasn't chloroquines: what do they do? Well, they decided to mosquito proof every house in Northern Alabama. So they did. They divided Northern Alabama into 11 zones, and within three years, about 100 dollars per house, they mosquito proofed every house. And these are the data. Every row across here represents one of those 11 zones. And the asterisks represent the time at which the mosquito proofing was complete. And so what you can see is that just the mosquito-proofed housing, and nothing else, caused the eradication of malaria. And this was, incidentally, published in 1949, in the leading textbook of malaria, called "Boyd's Malariology." But almost no malaria experts even know it exists. This is important, because it tells us that if you have moderate biting densities, you can eradicate malaria by mosquito proofing houses. Now, I would suggest that you could do this in a lot of places. Like, you know, just as you get into the malaria zone, sub-Saharan Africa. But as you move to really intense biting rate areas, like Nigeria, you're certainly not going to eradicate. But that's when you should be favoring evolution towards mildness. So to me, it's an experiment that's waiting to happen, and if it confirms the prediction, then we should have a very powerful tool. In a way, much more powerful than the kind of tools we're looking at, because most of what's being done today is to rely on things like anti-malarial drugs. And we know that, although it's great to make those anti-malarial drugs available at really low cost and high frequency, we know that when you make them highly available you're going to get resistance to those drugs. And so it's a short-term solution. This is a long-term solution. What I'm suggesting here is that we could get evolution working in the direction we want it to go, rather than always having to battle evolution as a problem that stymies our efforts to control the pathogen, for example with anti-malarial drugs. So, this table I've given just to emphasize that I've only talked about two examples. But as I said earlier, this kind of logic applies across the board for infectious diseases, and it ought to. Because when we're dealing with infectious diseases, we're dealing with living systems. We're dealing with living systems; we're dealing with systems that evolve. And so if you do something with those systems, they're going to evolve one way or another. And all I'm saying is that we need to figure out how they'll evolve, so that -- we need to adjust our interventions to get the most bang for the intervention buck, so that we can get these organisms to evolve in the direction we want them to go. So, I don't really have time to talk about those things, but I did want to put them up there, just to give you a sense that there really are solutions to controlling the evolution of harmfulness of some of the nasty pathogens that we're confronted with. And this links up with a lot of the other ideas that have been talked about. So, for example, earlier today there was discussion of, how do you really lower sexual transmission of HIV? What this emphasizes is that we need to figure out how it will work. Will it maybe get lowered if we alter the economy of the area? It may get lowered if we intervene in ways that encourage people to stay more faithful to partners, and so on. But the key thing is to figure out how to lower it, because if we lower it, we'll get an evolutionary change in the virus. And the data really do support this: that you actually do get the virus evolving towards mildness. And that will just add to the effectiveness of our control efforts. So the other thing I really like about this, besides the fact that it brings a whole new dimension into the study of control of disease, is that often the kinds of interventions that you want, that it indicates should be done, are the kinds of interventions that people want anyhow. But people just haven't been able to justify the cost. So, this is the kind of thing I'm talking about. If we know that we're going to get extra bang for the buck from providing clean water, then I think that we can say, let's push the effort into that aspect of the control, so that we can actually solve the problem, even though, if you just look at the frequency of infection, you would suggest that you can't solve the problem well enough just by cleaning up water supply. Anyhow, I'll end that there, and thank you very much. (Applause)

On the 30th of May, 1832, a gunshot was heard ringing out across the 13th arrondissement in Paris. (Gunshot) A peasant, who was walking to market that morning, ran towards where the gunshot had come from, and found a young man writhing in agony on the floor, clearly shot by a dueling wound. The young man's name was Evariste Galois. He was a well-known revolutionary in Paris at the time. Galois was taken to the local hospital where he died the next day in the arms of his brother. And the last words he said to his brother were, "Don't cry for me, Alfred. I need all the courage I can muster to die at the age of 20." It wasn't, in fact, revolutionary politics for which Galois was famous. But a few years earlier, while still at school, he'd actually cracked one of the big mathematical problems at the time. And he wrote to the academicians in Paris, trying to explain his theory. But the academicians couldn't understand anything that he wrote. (Laughter) This is how he wrote most of his mathematics. So, the night before that duel, he realized this possibly is his last chance to try and explain his great breakthrough. So he stayed up the whole night, writing away, trying to explain his ideas. And as the dawn came up and he went to meet his destiny, he left this pile of papers on the table for the next generation. Maybe the fact that he stayed up all night doing mathematics was the fact that he was such a bad shot that morning and got killed. But contained inside those documents was a new language, a language to understand one of the most fundamental concepts of science -- namely symmetry. Now, symmetry is almost nature's language. It helps us to understand so many different bits of the scientific world. For example, molecular structure. What crystals are possible, we can understand through the mathematics of symmetry. In microbiology you really don't want to get a symmetrical object, because they are generally rather nasty. The swine flu virus, at the moment, is a symmetrical object. And it uses the efficiency of symmetry to be able to propagate itself so well. But on a larger scale of biology, actually symmetry is very important, because it actually communicates genetic information. I've taken two pictures here and I've made them artificially symmetrical. And if I ask you which of these you find more beautiful, you're probably drawn to the lower two. Because it is hard to make symmetry. And if you can make yourself symmetrical, you're sending out a sign that you've got good genes, you've got a good upbringing and therefore you'll make a good mate. So symmetry is a language which can help to communicate genetic information. Symmetry can also help us to explain what's happening in the Large Hadron Collider in CERN. Or what's not happening in the Large Hadron Collider in CERN. To be able to make predictions about the fundamental particles we might see there, it seems that they are all facets of some strange symmetrical shape in a higher dimensional space. And I think Galileo summed up, very nicely, the power of mathematics to understand the scientific world around us. He wrote, "The universe cannot be read until we have learnt the language and become familiar with the characters in which it is written. It is written in mathematical language, and the letters are triangles, circles and other geometric figures, without which means it is humanly impossible to comprehend a single word." But it's not just scientists who are interested in symmetry. Artists too love to play around with symmetry. They also have a slightly more ambiguous relationship with it. Here is Thomas Mann talking about symmetry in "The Magic Mountain." He has a character describing the snowflake, and he says he "shuddered at its perfect precision, found it deathly, the very marrow of death." But what artists like to do is to set up expectations of symmetry and then break them. And a beautiful example of this I found, actually, when I visited a colleague of mine in Japan, Professor Kurokawa. And he took me up to the temples in Nikko. And just after this photo was taken we walked up the stairs. And the gateway you see behind has eight columns, with beautiful symmetrical designs on them. Seven of them are exactly the same, and the eighth one is turned upside down. And I said to Professor Kurokawa, "Wow, the architects must have really been kicking themselves when they realized that they'd made a mistake and put this one upside down." And he said, "No, no, no. It was a very deliberate act." And he referred me to this lovely quote from the Japanese "Essays in Idleness" from the 14th century, in which the essayist wrote, "In everything, uniformity is undesirable. Leaving something incomplete makes it interesting, and gives one the feeling that there is room for growth." Even when building the Imperial Palace, they always leave one place unfinished. But if I had to choose one building in the world to be cast out on a desert island, to live the rest of my life, being an addict of symmetry, I would probably choose the Alhambra in Granada. This is a palace celebrating symmetry. Recently I took my family -- we do these rather kind of nerdy mathematical trips, which my family love. This is my son Tamer. You can see he's really enjoying our mathematical trip to the Alhambra. But I wanted to try and enrich him. I think one of the problems about school mathematics is it doesn't look at how mathematics is embedded in the world we live in. So, I wanted to open his eyes up to how much symmetry is running through the Alhambra. You see it already. Immediately you go in, the reflective symmetry in the water. But it's on the walls where all the exciting things are happening. The Moorish artists were denied the possibility to draw things with souls. So they explored a more geometric art. And so what is symmetry? The Alhambra somehow asks all of these questions. What is symmetry? When [there] are two of these walls, do they have the same symmetries? Can we say whether they discovered all of the symmetries in the Alhambra? And it was Galois who produced a language to be able to answer some of these questions. For Galois, symmetry -- unlike for Thomas Mann, which was something still and deathly -- for Galois, symmetry was all about motion. What can you do to a symmetrical object, move it in some way, so it looks the same as before you moved it? I like to describe it as the magic trick moves. What can you do to something? You close your eyes. I do something, put it back down again. It looks like it did before it started. So, for example, the walls in the Alhambra -- I can take all of these tiles, and fix them at the yellow place, rotate them by 90 degrees, put them all back down again and they fit perfectly down there. And if you open your eyes again, you wouldn't know that they'd moved. But it's the motion that really characterizes the symmetry inside the Alhambra. But it's also about producing a language to describe this. And the power of mathematics is often to change one thing into another, to change geometry into language. So I'm going to take you through, perhaps push you a little bit mathematically -- so brace yourselves -- push you a little bit to understand how this language works, which enables us to capture what is symmetry. So, let's take these two symmetrical objects here. Let's take the twisted six-pointed starfish. What can I do to the starfish which makes it look the same? Well, there I rotated it by a sixth of a turn, and still it looks like it did before I started. I could rotate it by a third of a turn, or a half a turn, or put it back down on its image, or two thirds of a turn. And a fifth symmetry, I can rotate it by five sixths of a turn. And those are things that I can do to the symmetrical object that make it look like it did before I started. Now, for Galois, there was actually a sixth symmetry. Can anybody think what else I could do to this which would leave it like I did before I started? I can't flip it because I've put a little twist on it, haven't I? It's got no reflective symmetry. But what I could do is just leave it where it is, pick it up, and put it down again. And for Galois this was like the zeroth symmetry. Actually, the invention of the number zero was a very modern concept, seventh century A.D., by the Indians. It seems mad to talk about nothing. And this is the same idea. This is a symmetrical -- so everything has symmetry, where you just leave it where it is. So, this object has six symmetries. And what about the triangle? Well, I can rotate by a third of a turn clockwise or a third of a turn anticlockwise. But now this has some reflectional symmetry. I can reflect it in the line through X, or the line through Y, or the line through Z. Five symmetries and then of course the zeroth symmetry where I just pick it up and leave it where it is. So both of these objects have six symmetries. Now, I'm a great believer that mathematics is not a spectator sport, and you have to do some mathematics in order to really understand it. So here is a little question for you. And I'm going to give a prize at the end of my talk for the person who gets closest to the answer. The Rubik's Cube. How many symmetries does a Rubik's Cube have? How many things can I do to this object and put it down so it still looks like a cube? Okay? So I want you to think about that problem as we go on, and count how many symmetries there are. And there will be a prize for the person who gets closest at the end. But let's go back down to symmetries that I got for these two objects. What Galois realized: it isn't just the individual symmetries, but how they interact with each other which really characterizes the symmetry of an object. If I do one magic trick move followed by another, the combination is a third magic trick move. And here we see Galois starting to develop a language to see the substance of the things unseen, the sort of abstract idea of the symmetry underlying this physical object. For example, what if I turn the starfish by a sixth of a turn, and then a third of a turn? So I've given names. The capital letters, A, B, C, D, E, F, are the names for the rotations. B, for example, rotates the little yellow dot to the B on the starfish. And so on. So what if I do B, which is a sixth of a turn, followed by C, which is a third of a turn? Well let's do that. A sixth of a turn, followed by a third of a turn, the combined effect is as if I had just rotated it by half a turn in one go. So the little table here records how the algebra of these symmetries work. I do one followed by another, the answer is it's rotation D, half a turn. What I if I did it in the other order? Would it make any difference? Let's see. Let's do the third of the turn first, and then the sixth of a turn. Of course, it doesn't make any difference. It still ends up at half a turn. And there is some symmetry here in the way the symmetries interact with each other. But this is completely different to the symmetries of the triangle. Let's see what happens if we do two symmetries with the triangle, one after the other. Let's do a rotation by a third of a turn anticlockwise, and reflect in the line through X. Well, the combined effect is as if I had just done the reflection in the line through Z to start with. Now, let's do it in a different order. Let's do the reflection in X first, followed by the rotation by a third of a turn anticlockwise. The combined effect, the triangle ends up somewhere completely different. It's as if it was reflected in the line through Y. Now it matters what order you do the operations in. And this enables us to distinguish why the symmetries of these objects -- they both have six symmetries. So why shouldn't we say they have the same symmetries? But the way the symmetries interact enable us -- we've now got a language to distinguish why these symmetries are fundamentally different. And you can try this when you go down to the pub, later on. Take a beer mat and rotate it by a quarter of a turn, then flip it. And then do it in the other order, and the picture will be facing in the opposite direction. Now, Galois produced some laws for how these tables -- how symmetries interact. It's almost like little Sudoku tables. You don't see any symmetry twice in any row or column. And, using those rules, he was able to say that there are in fact only two objects with six symmetries. And they'll be the same as the symmetries of the triangle, or the symmetries of the six-pointed starfish. I think this is an amazing development. It's almost like the concept of number being developed for symmetry. In the front here, I've got one, two, three people sitting on one, two, three chairs. The people and the chairs are very different, but the number, the abstract idea of the number, is the same. And we can see this now: we go back to the walls in the Alhambra. Here are two very different walls, very different geometric pictures. But, using the language of Galois, we can understand that the underlying abstract symmetries of these things are actually the same. For example, let's take this beautiful wall with the triangles with a little twist on them. You can rotate them by a sixth of a turn if you ignore the colors. We're not matching up the colors. But the shapes match up if I rotate by a sixth of a turn around the point where all the triangles meet. What about the center of a triangle? I can rotate by a third of a turn around the center of the triangle, and everything matches up. And then there is an interesting place halfway along an edge, where I can rotate by 180 degrees. And all the tiles match up again. So rotate along halfway along the edge, and they all match up. Now, let's move to the very different-looking wall in the Alhambra. And we find the same symmetries here, and the same interaction. So, there was a sixth of a turn. A third of a turn where the Z pieces meet. And the half a turn is halfway between the six pointed stars. And although these walls look very different, Galois has produced a language to say that in fact the symmetries underlying these are exactly the same. And it's a symmetry we call 6-3-2. Here is another example in the Alhambra. This is a wall, a ceiling, and a floor. They all look very different. But this language allows us to say that they are representations of the same symmetrical abstract object, which we call 4-4-2. Nothing to do with football, but because of the fact that there are two places where you can rotate by a quarter of a turn, and one by half a turn. Now, this power of the language is even more, because Galois can say, "Did the Moorish artists discover all of the possible symmetries on the walls in the Alhambra?" And it turns out they almost did. You can prove, using Galois' language, there are actually only 17 different symmetries that you can do in the walls in the Alhambra. And they, if you try to produce a different wall with this 18th one, it will have to have the same symmetries as one of these 17. But these are things that we can see. And the power of Galois' mathematical language is it also allows us to create symmetrical objects in the unseen world, beyond the two-dimensional, three-dimensional, all the way through to the four- or five- or infinite-dimensional space. And that's where I work. I create mathematical objects, symmetrical objects, using Galois' language, in very high dimensional spaces. So I think it's a great example of things unseen, which the power of mathematical language allows you to create. So, like Galois, I stayed up all last night creating a new mathematical symmetrical object for you, and I've got a picture of it here. Well, unfortunately it isn't really a picture. If I could have my board at the side here, great, excellent. Here we are. Unfortunately, I can't show you a picture of this symmetrical object. But here is the language which describes how the symmetries interact. Now, this new symmetrical object does not have a name yet. Now, people like getting their names on things, on craters on the moon or new species of animals. So I'm going to give you the chance to get your name on a new symmetrical object which hasn't been named before. And this thing -- species die away, and moons kind of get hit by meteors and explode -- but this mathematical object will live forever. It will make you immortal. In order to win this symmetrical object, what you have to do is to answer the question I asked you at the beginning. How many symmetries does a Rubik's Cube have? Okay, I'm going to sort you out. Rather than you all shouting out, I want you to count how many digits there are in that number. Okay? If you've got it as a factorial, you've got to expand the factorials. Okay, now if you want to play, I want you to stand up, okay? If you think you've got an estimate for how many digits, right -- we've already got one competitor here. If you all stay down he wins it automatically. Okay. Excellent. So we've got four here, five, six. Great. Excellent. That should get us going. All right. Anybody with five or less digits, you've got to sit down, because you've underestimated. Five or less digits. So, if you're in the tens of thousands you've got to sit down. 60 digits or more, you've got to sit down. You've overestimated. 20 digits or less, sit down. How many digits are there in your number? Two? So you should have sat down earlier. (Laughter) Let's have the other ones, who sat down during the 20, up again. Okay? If I told you 20 or less, stand up. Because this one. I think there were a few here. The people who just last sat down. Okay, how many digits do you have in your number? (Laughs) 21. Okay good. How many do you have in yours? 18. So it goes to this lady here. 21 is the closest. It actually has -- the number of symmetries in the Rubik's cube has 25 digits. So now I need to name this object. So, what is your name? I need your surname. Symmetrical objects generally -- spell it for me. G-H-E-Z No, SO2 has already been used, actually, in the mathematical language. So you can't have that one. So Ghez, there we go. That's your new symmetrical object. You are now immortal. (Applause) And if you'd like your own symmetrical object, I have a project raising money for a charity in Guatemala, where I will stay up all night and devise an object for you, for a donation to this charity to help kids get into education in Guatemala. And I think what drives me, as a mathematician, are those things which are not seen, the things that we haven't discovered. It's all the unanswered questions which make mathematics a living subject. And I will always come back to this quote from the Japanese "Essays in Idleness": "In everything, uniformity is undesirable. Leaving something incomplete makes it interesting, and gives one the feeling that there is room for growth." Thank you. (Applause)

What I'd like to talk about is really the biggest problems in the world. I'm not going to talk about "The Skeptical Environmentalist" -- probably that's also a good choice. (Laughter) But I am going talk about: what are the big problems in the world? And I must say, before I go on, I should ask every one of you to try and get out pen and paper because I'm actually going to ask you to help me to look at how we do that. So get out your pen and paper. Bottom line is, there is a lot of problems out there in the world. I'm just going to list some of them. There are 800 million people starving. There's a billion people without clean drinking water. Two billion people without sanitation. There are several million people dying of HIV and AIDS. The lists go on and on. There's two billions of people who will be severely affected by climate change -- so on. There are many, many problems out there. In an ideal world, we would solve them all, but we don't. We don't actually solve all problems. And if we do not, the question I think we need to ask ourselves -- and that's why it's on the economy session -- is to say, if we don't do all things, we really have to start asking ourselves, which ones should we solve first? And that's the question I'd like to ask you. If we had say, 50 billion dollars over the next four years to spend to do good in this world, where should we spend it? We identified 10 of the biggest challenges in the world, and I will just briefly read them: climate change, communicable diseases, conflicts, education, financial instability, governance and corruption, malnutrition and hunger, population migration, sanitation and water, and subsidies and trade barriers. We believe that these in many ways encompass the biggest problems in the world. The obvious question would be to ask, what do you think are the biggest things? Where should we start on solving these problems? But that's a wrong problem to ask. That was actually the problem that was asked in Davos in January. But of course, there's a problem in asking people to focus on problems. Because we can't solve problems. Surely the biggest problem we have in the world is that we all die. But we don't have a technology to solve that, right? So the point is not to prioritize problems, but the point is to prioritize solutions to problems. And that would be -- of course that gets a little more complicated. To climate change that would be like Kyoto. To communicable diseases, it might be health clinics or mosquito nets. To conflicts, it would be U.N.'s peacekeeping forces, and so on. The point that I would like to ask you to try to do, is just in 30 seconds -- and I know this is in a sense an impossible task -- write down what you think is probably some of the top priorities. And also -- and that's, of course, where economics gets evil -- to put down what are the things we should not do, first. What should be at the bottom of the list? Please, just take 30 seconds, perhaps talk to your neighbor, and just figure out what should be the top priorities and the bottom priorities of the solutions that we have to the world's biggest issues. The amazing part of this process -- and of course, I mean, I would love to -- I only have 18 minutes, I've already given you quite a substantial amount of my time, right? I'd love to go into, and get you to think about this process, and that's actually what we did. And I also strongly encourage you, and I'm sure we'll also have these discussions afterwards, to think about, how do we actually prioritize? Of course, you have to ask yourself, why on Earth was such a list never done before? And one reason is that prioritization is incredibly uncomfortable. Nobody wants to do this. Of course, every organization would love to be on the top of such a list. But every organization would also hate to be not on the top of the list. And since there are many more not-number-one spots on the list than there is number ones, it makes perfect sense not to want to do such a list. We've had the U.N. for almost 60 years, yet we've never actually made a fundamental list of all the big things that we can do in the world, and said, which of them should we do first? So it doesn't mean that we are not prioritizing -- any decision is a prioritization, so of course we are still prioritizing, if only implicitly -- and that's unlikely to be as good as if we actually did the prioritization, and went in and talked about it. So what I'm proposing is really to say that we have, for a very long time, had a situation when we've had a menu of choices. There are many, many things we can do out there, but we've not had the prices, nor the sizes. We have not had an idea. Imagine going into a restaurant and getting this big menu card, but you have no idea what the price is. You know, you have a pizza; you've no idea what the price is. It could be at one dollar; it could be 1,000 dollars. It could be a family-size pizza; it could be a very individual-size pizza, right? We'd like to know these things. And that is what the Copenhagen Consensus is really trying to do -- to try to put prices on these issues. And so basically, this has been the Copenhagen Consensus' process. We got 30 of the world's best economists, three in each area. So we have three of world's top economists write about climate change. What can we do? What will be the cost and what will be the benefit of that? Likewise in communicable diseases. Three of the world's top experts saying, what can we do? What would be the price? What should we do about it, and what will be the outcome? And so on. Then we had some of the world's top economists, eight of the world's top economists, including three Nobel Laureates, meet in Copenhagen in May 2004. We called them the "dream team." The Cambridge University prefects decided to call them the Real Madrid of economics. That works very well in Europe, but it doesn't really work over here. And what they basically did was come out with a prioritized list. And then you ask, why economists? And of course, I'm very happy you asked that question -- (Laughter) -- because that's a very good question. The point is, of course, if you want to know about malaria, you ask a malaria expert. If you want to know about climate, you ask a climatologist. But if you want to know which of the two you should deal with first, you can't ask either of them, because that's not what they do. That is what economists do. They prioritize. They make that in some ways disgusting task of saying, which one should we do first, and which one should we do afterwards? So this is the list, and this is the one I'd like to share with you. Of course, you can also see it on the website, and we'll also talk about it more, I'm sure, as the day goes on. They basically came up with a list where they said there were bad projects -- basically, projects where if you invest a dollar, you get less than a dollar back. Then there's fair projects, good projects and very good projects. And of course, it's the very good projects we should start doing. I'm going to go from backwards so that we end up with the best projects. These were the bad projects. As you might see the bottom of the list was climate change. This offends a lot of people, and that's probably one of the things where people will say I shouldn't come back, either. And I'd like to talk about that, because that's really curious. Why is it it came up? And I'll actually also try to get back to this because it's probably one of the things that we'll disagree with on the list that you wrote down. The reason why they came up with saying that Kyoto -- or doing something more than Kyoto -- is a bad deal is simply because it's very inefficient. It's not saying that global warming is not happening. It's not saying that it's not a big problem. But it's saying that what we can do about it is very little, at a very high cost. What they basically show us, the average of all macroeconomic models, is that Kyoto, if everyone agreed, would cost about 150 billion dollars a year. That's a substantial amount of money. That's two to three times the global development aid that we give the Third World every year. Yet it would do very little good. All models show it will postpone warming for about six years in 2100. So the guy in Bangladesh who gets a flood in 2100 can wait until 2106. Which is a little good, but not very much good. So the idea here really is to say, well, we've spent a lot of money doing a little good. And just to give you a sense of reference, the U.N. actually estimate that for half that amount, for about 75 billion dollars a year, we could solve all major basic problems in the world. We could give clean drinking water, sanitation, basic healthcare and education to every single human being on the planet. So we have to ask ourselves, do we want to spend twice the amount on doing very little good? Or half the amount on doing an amazing amount of good? And that is really why it becomes a bad project. It's not to say that if we had all the money in the world, we wouldn't want to do it. But it's to say, when we don't, it's just simply not our first priority. The fair projects -- notice I'm not going to comment on all these -- but communicable diseases, scale of basic health services -- just made it, simply because, yes, scale of basic health services is a great thing. It would do a lot of good, but it's also very, very costly. Again, what it tells us is suddenly we start thinking about both sides of the equation. If you look at the good projects, a lot of sanitation and water projects came in. Again, sanitation and water is incredibly important, but it also costs a lot of infrastructure. So I'd like to show you the top four priorities which should be at least the first ones that we deal with when we talk about how we should deal with the problems in the world. The fourth best problem is malaria -- dealing with malaria. The incidence of malaria is about a couple of [million] people get infected every year. It might even cost up towards a percentage point of GDP every year for affected nations. If we invested about 13 billion dollars over the next four years, we could bring that incidence down to half. We could avoid about 500,000 people dying, but perhaps more importantly, we could avoid about a [million] people getting infected every year. We would significantly increase their ability to deal with many of the other problems that they have to deal with -- of course, in the long run, also to deal with global warming. This third best one was free trade. Basically, the model showed that if we could get free trade, and especially cut subsidies in the U.S. and Europe, we could basically enliven the global economy to an astounding number of about 2,400 billion dollars a year, half of which would accrue to the Third World. Again, the point is to say that we could actually pull two to three hundred million people out of poverty, very radically fast, in about two to five years. That would be the third best thing we could do. The second best thing would be to focus on malnutrition. Not just malnutrition in general, but there's a very cheap way of dealing with malnutrition, namely, the lack of micronutrients. Basically, about half of the world's population is lacking in iron, zinc, iodine and vitamin A. If we invest about 12 billion dollars, we could make a severe inroad into that problem. That would be the second best investment that we could do. And the very best project would be to focus on HIV/AIDS. Basically, if we invest 27 billion dollars over the next eight years, we could avoid 28 new million cases of HIV/AIDS. Again, what this does and what it focuses on is saying there are two very different ways that we can deal with HIV/AIDS. One is treatment; the other one is prevention. And again, in an ideal world, we would do both. But in a world where we don't do either, or don't do it very well, we have to at least ask ourselves where should we invest first. And treatment is much, much more expensive than prevention. So basically, what this focuses on is saying, we can do a lot more by investing in prevention. Basically for the amount of money that we spend, we can do X amount of good in treatment, and 10 times as much good in prevention. So again, what we focus on is prevention rather than treatment, at first rate. What this really does is that it makes us think about our priorities. I'd like to have you look at your priority list and say, did you get it right? Or did you get close to what we came up with here? Well, of course, one of the things is climate change again. I find a lot of people find it very, very unlikely that we should do that. We should also do climate change, if for no other reason, simply because it's such a big problem. But of course, we don't do all problems. There are many problems out there in the world. And what I want to make sure of is, if we actually focus on problems, that we focus on the right ones. The ones where we can do a lot of good rather than a little good. And I think, actually -- Thomas Schelling, one of the participants in the dream team, he put it very, very well. One of things that people forget, is that in 100 years, when we're talking about most of the climate change impacts will be, people will be much, much richer. Even the most pessimistic impact scenarios of the U.N. estimate that the average person in the developing world in 2100 will be about as rich as we are today. Much more likely, they will be two to four times richer than we are. And of course, we'll be even richer than that. But the point is to say, when we talk about saving people, or helping people in Bangladesh in 2100, we're not talking about a poor Bangladeshi. We're actually talking about a fairly rich Dutch guy. And so the real point, of course, is to say, do we want to spend a lot of money helping a little, 100 years from now, a fairly rich Dutch guy? Or do we want to help real poor people, right now, in Bangladesh, who really need the help, and whom we can help very, very cheaply? Or as Schelling put it, imagine if you were a rich -- as you will be -- a rich Chinese, a rich Bolivian, a rich Congolese, in 2100, thinking back on 2005, and saying, "How odd that they cared so much about helping me a little bit through climate change, and cared so fairly little about helping my grandfather and my great grandfather, whom they could have helped so much more, and who needed the help so much more?" So I think that really does tell us why it is we need to get our priorities straight. Even if it doesn't accord to the typical way we see this problem. Of course, that's mainly because climate change has good pictures. We have, you know, "The Day After Tomorrow" -- it looks great, right? It's a good film in the sense that I certainly want to see it, right, but don't expect Emmerich to cast Brad Pitt in his next movie digging latrines in Tanzania or something. (Laughter) It just doesn't make for as much of a movie. So in many ways, I think of the Copenhagen Consensus and the whole discussion of priorities as a defense for boring problems. To make sure that we realize it's not about making us feel good. It's not about making things that have the most media attention, but it's about making places where we can actually do the most good. The other objections, I think, that are important to say, is that I'm somehow -- or we are somehow -- positing a false choice. Of course, we should do all things, in an ideal world -- I would certainly agree. I think we should do all things, but we don't. In 1970, the developed world decided we were going to spend twice as much as we did, right now, than in 1970, on the developing world. Since then our aid has halved. So it doesn't look like we're actually on the path of suddenly solving all big problems. Likewise, people are also saying, but what about the Iraq war? You know, we spend 100 billion dollars -- why don't we spend that on doing good in the world? I'm all for that. If any one of you guys can talk Bush into doing that, that's fine. But the point, of course, is still to say, if you get another 100 billion dollars, we still want to spend that in the best possible way, don't we? So the real issue here is to get ourselves back and think about what are the right priorities. I should just mention briefly, is this really the right list that we got out? You know, when you ask the world's best economists, you inevitably end up asking old, white American men. And they're not necessarily, you know, great ways of looking at the entire world. So we actually invited 80 young people from all over the world to come and solve the same problem. The only two requirements were that they were studying at the university, and they spoke English. The majority of them were, first, from developing countries. They had all the same material but they could go vastly outside the scope of discussion, and they certainly did, to come up with their own lists. And the surprising thing was that the list was very similar -- with malnutrition and diseases at the top and climate change at the bottom. We've done this many other times. There's been many other seminars and university students, and different things. They all come out with very much the same list. And that gives me great hope, really, in saying that I do believe that there is a path ahead to get us to start thinking about priorities, and saying, what is the important thing in the world? Of course, in an ideal world, again we'd love to do everything. But if we don't do it, then we can start thinking about where should we start? I see the Copenhagen Consensus as a process. We did it in 2004, and we hope to assemble many more people, getting much better information for 2008, 2012. Map out the right path for the world -- but also to start thinking about political triage. To start thinking about saying, "Let's do not the things where we can do very little at a very high cost, not the things that we don't know how to do, but let's do the great things where we can do an enormous amount of good, at very low cost, right now." At the end of the day, you can disagree with the discussion of how we actually prioritize these, but we have to be honest and frank about saying, if there's some things we do, there are other things we don't do. If we worry too much about some things, we end by not worrying about other things. So I hope this will help us make better priorities, and think about how we better work for the world. Thank you.

So I thought I'd talk about identity. That's sort of an interesting enough topic to me. And the reason was, because when I was asked to do this, I'd just read, in one of the papers, I can't remember, something from someone at Facebook saying, well, "we need to make everybody use their real names." and then that's basically all the problems solved. And that's so wrong, that's such a fundamentally, reactionary view of identity, and it's going to get us into all sorts of trouble. And so what I thought I'd do is I'll explain four sort of problems about it, and then I'll suggest a solution, which hopefully you might find interesting. So just to frame the problem, what does authenticity mean? That's me, that's a camera phone picture of me looking at a painting. [What's the Problem?] That's a painting that was painted by a very famous forger, and because I'm not very good at presentations, I already can't remember the name that I wrote on my card. And he was incarcerated in, I think, Wakefield Prison for forging masterpieces by, I think, French Impressionists. And he's so good at it, that when he was in prison, everybody in prison, the governor and whatever, wanted him to paint masterpieces to put on the walls, because they were so good. And so that's a masterpiece, which is a fake of a masterpiece, and bonded into the canvas is a chip which identifies that as a real fake, if you see what I mean. (Laughter) So when we're talking about authenticity, it's a little more fractal than it appears and that's a good example to show it. I tried to pick four problems that will frame the issue properly. So the first problem, I thought, Chip and PIN, right? [Banking legacies bringing down the system from within] [Offline solutions do not work online] I'm guessing everyone's got a chip and PIN card, right? So why is that a good example? That's the example of how legacy thinking about identity subverts the security of a well-constructed system. That chip and PIN card that's in your pocket has a little chip on it that cost millions of pounds to develop, is extremely secure, you can put scanning electron microscopes on it, you can try and grind it down, blah blah blah. Those chips have never been broken, whatever you read in the paper. And for a joke, we take that super-secure chip and we bond it to a trivially counterfeitable magnetic stripe and for very lazy criminals, we still emboss the card. So if you're a criminal in a hurry and you need to copy someone's card, you can just stick a piece of paper on it and rub a pencil over it just to sort of speed things up. And even more amusingly, and on my debit card too, we print the name and the SALT code and everything else on the front too. Why? There is no earthly reason why your name is printed on a chip and PIN card. And if you think about it, it's even more insidious and perverse than it seems at first. Because the only people that benefit from having the name on the card are criminals. You know what your name is, right? (Laughter) And when you go into a shop and buy something, it's a PIN, he doesn't care what the name is. The only place where you ever have to write your name on the back is in America at the moment. And whenever I go to America, and I have to pay with a mag stripe on the back of the card, I always sign it Carlos Tethers anyway, just as a security mechanism, because if a transaction ever gets disputed, and it comes back and it says Dave Birch, I know it must have been a criminal, because I would never sign it Dave Birch. (Laughter) So if you drop your card in the street, it means a criminal can pick it up and read it. They know the name, from the name they can find the address, and then they can go off and buy stuff online. Why do we put the name on the card? Because we think identity is something to do with names, and because we're rooted in the idea of the identity card, which obsesses us. And I know it crashed and burned a couple of years ago, but if you're someone in politics or the home office or whatever, and you think about identity, you can only think of identity in terms of cards with names on them. And that's very subversive in a modern world. So the second example I thought I'd use is chatrooms. [Chatrooms and Children] I'm very proud of that picture, that's my son playing in his band with his friends for the first-ever gig, I believe you call it, where he got paid. (Laughter) And I love that picture. I like the picture of him getting into medical school a lot better, (Laughter) I like that picture for the moment. Why do I use that picture? Because that was very interesting, watching that experience as an old person. So him and his friends, they get together, they booked a room, like a church hall, and they got all their friends who had bands, and they got them together, and they do it all on Facebook, and then they sell tickets, and the first band on the - I was going to say "menu," that's probably the wrong word for it, isn't it? The first band on the list of bands that appears at some public music performance of some kind gets the sales from the first 20 tickets, then the next band gets the next 20, and so on. They were at the bottom of the menu, they were like fifth, I thought they had no chance. He actually got 20 quid. Fantastic, right? But my point is, that all worked perfectly, except on the web. So they're sitting on Facebook, and they're sending these messages and arranging things and they don't know who anybody is, right? That's the big problem we're trying to solve. If only they were using the real names, Then you wouldn't be worried about them on the internet. And so when he says to me, "oh, I want to go to a chatroom to talk about guitars" or something, I'm like, "oh, well, I don't want you to go into a chatroom to talk about guitars, because they might not all be your friends, and some of the people that are in the chatroom might be perverts and teachers and vicars." (Laughter) I mean, they generally are, when you look in the paper, right? So I want to know who all the people in the chatroom are. So okay, you can go in the chatroom, but only if everybody in the chatroom is using their real names, and they submit full copies of their police report. But of course, if anybody in the chatroom asked for his real name, I'd say no. You can't give them your real name. Because what happens if they turn out to be perverts, and teachers and whatever. So you have this odd sort of paradox where I'm happy for him to go into this space if I know who everybody else is, but I don't want anybody else to know who he is. And so you get this sort of logjam around identity where you want full disclosure from everybody else, but not from yourself. And there's no progress, we get stuck. And so the chatroom thing doesn't work properly, and it's a very bad way of thinking about identity. So on my RSS feed, I saw this thing about - I just said something bad about my RSS feed, didn't I? I should stop saying it like that. For some random reason, I can't imagine, something about cheerleaders turned up in my inbox. And I read this story about cheerleaders, and it's a fascinating story. This happened a couple of years ago in the U.S. There were some cheerleaders in a team at a high school in the U.S., and they said mean things about their cheerleading coach, as I'm sure kids do about all of their teachers all of the time, and somehow the cheerleading coach found out about this. She was very upset. And so she went to one of the girls, and said, "you have to give me your Facebook password." I read this all the time, where even at some universities and places of education, kids are forced to hand over their Facebook passwords. So you've got to give them your Facebook password. She was a kid! What she should have said is, "my lawyer will be calling you first thing in the morning. It's an outrageous imposition on my 4th Amendment right to privacy, and you're going to be sued for all the money you've got." That's what she should have said. But she's a kid, so she hands over the password. The teacher can't log into Facebook, because the school has blocked access to Facebook. So the teacher can't log into Facebook until she gets home. So the girl tells her friends, guess what happened? The teacher logged in, she knows. So the girls just all logged into Facebook on their phones, and deleted their profiles. And so when the teacher logged in, there was nothing there. My point is, those identities, they don't think about them the same way. Identity is, especially when you're a teenager, a fluid thing. You have lots of identities. And you can have an identity, you don't like it, because it's subverted in some way, or it's insecure, or it's inappropriate, you just delete it and get another one. The idea that you have an identity that's given to you by someone, the government or whatever, and you have to stick with that identity and use it in all places, that's absolutely wrong. Why would you want to really know who someone was on Facebook, unless you wanted to abuse them and harass them in some way? And it just doesn't work properly. And my fourth example is there are some cases where you really want to be - In case you're wondering, that's me at the G20 protest. I wasn't actually at the G20 protest, but I had a meeting at a bank on the day of the G20 protest, and I got an email from the bank saying please don't wear a suit, because it'll inflame the protestors. I look pretty good in a suit, frankly, so you can see why it would drive them into an anti-capitalist frenzy. (Laughter) So I thought, well, look. If I don't want to inflame the protestors, the obvious thing to do is go dressed as a protestor. So I went dressed completely in black, you know, with a black balaclava, I had black gloves on, but I've taken them off to sign the visitor's book. (Laughter) I'm wearing black trousers, black boots, I'm dressed completely in black. I go into the bank at 10 o'clock, go, "Hi, I'm Dave Birch, I've got a 3 o'clock with so and so there." Sure. They sign me in. There's my visitor's badge. (Laughter) So this nonsense about you've got to have real names on Facebook and whatever, that gets you that kind of security. That gets you security theater, where there's no actual security, but people are sort of playing parts in a play about security. And as long as everybody learns their lines, everyone's happy. But it's not real security. Especially because I hate banks more than the G20 protestors do, because I work for them. I know that things are actually worse than these guys think. (Laughter) But suppose I worked next to somebody in a bank who was doing something. Suppose I was sitting next to a rogue trader, and I want to report it to the boss of the bank. So I log on to do a little bit of whistleblowing. I send a message, this guy's a rogue trader. That message is meaningless if you don't know that I'm a trader at the bank. If that message just comes from anybody, it has zero information value. There's no point in sending that message. But if I have to prove who I am, I'll never send that message. It's just like the nurse in the hospital reporting the drunk surgeon. That message will only happen if I'm anonymous. So the system has to have ways of providing anonymity there, otherwise we don't get where we want to get to. So four issues. So what are we going to do about it? Well, what we tend to do about it is we think about Orwell space. And we try to make electronic versions of the identity card that we got rid of in 1953. So we think if we had a card, call it a Facebook login, which proves who you are, and I make you carry it all the time, that solves the problem. And of course, for all those reasons I've just outlined, it doesn't, and it might, actually, make some problems worse. The more times you're forced to use your real identity, certainly in transactional terms, the more likely that identity is to get stolen and subverted. The goal is to stop people from using identity in transactions which don't need identity, which is actually almost all transactions. Almost all of the transactions you do are not, who are you? They're, are you allowed to drive the car, are you allowed in the building, are you over 18, etcetera, etcetera. So my suggestion- I, like James, think that there should be a resurgence of interest in R & D. I think this is a solvable problem. It's something we can do about. Naturally, in these circumstances, I turn to Doctor Who. Because in this, as in so many other walks of life, Doctor Who has already shown us the answer. So I should say, for some of our foreign visitors, Doctor Who is the greatest living scientist in England, (Laughter) and a beacon of truth and enlightenment to all of us. And this is Doctor Who with his psychic paper. Come on, you guys must have seen Doctor Who's psychic paper. You're not nerds if you say yes. Who's seen Doctor Who's psychic paper? Oh right, you were in the library the whole time studying I guess. Is that what you're going to tell us? Doctor Who's psychic paper is when you hold up the psychic paper, the person, in their brain, sees the thing that they need to see. So I want to show you a British passport, I hold up the psychic paper, you see a British passport. I want to get into a party, I hold up the psychic paper, I show you a party invitation. You see what you want to see. So what I'm saying is we need to make an electronic version of that, but with one tiny, tiny change, which is that it'll only show you the British passport if I've actually got one. It'll only show you the party invitation if I actually have one. It will only show you that I'm over 18 if I actually am over 18. But nothing else. So you're the bouncer at the pub, you need to know that I'm over 18, instead of showing you my driving license, which shows you I know how to drive, what my name is, my address, all these kind of things, I show you my psychic paper, and all it tells you is am I over 18 or not. Right. Is that just a pipe dream? Of course not, otherwise I wouldn't be here talking to you. So in order to build that and make it work, I'm only going to name these things, I'll not go into them, we need a plan, which is we're going to build this as an infrastructure for everybody to use, to solve all of these problems. We're going to make a utility, the utility has to be universal, you can use it everywhere, I'm just giving you little flashes of the technology as we go along. That's a Japanese ATM, the fingerprint template is stored inside the mobile phone. So when you want to draw money out, you put the mobile phone on the ATM, and touch your finger, your fingerprint goes through to the phone, the phone says yes, that's whoever, and the ATM then gives you some money. It has to be a utility that you can use everywhere. It has to be absolutely convenient, that's me going into the pub. All the device on the door of the pub is allowed is, is this person over 18 and not barred from the pub? And so the idea is, you touch your ID card to the door, and if I am allowed in, it shows my picture, if I'm not allowed in, it shows a red cross. It doesn't disclose any other information. It has to have no special gadgets. That can only mean one thing, following on from Ross's statement, which I agree with completely. If it means no special gadgets, it has to run on a mobile phone. That's the only choice we have, we have to make it work on mobile phones. There are 6.6 billion mobile phone subscriptions. My favorite statistic of all time, only 4 billion toothbrushes in the world. That means something, I don't know what. (Laughter) I rely on our futurologists to tell me. It has to be a utility which is extensible. So it has to be something that anybody could build on. Anybody should be able to use this infrastructure, you don't need permissions, licenses, whatever, anyone should be able to write some code to do this. You know what symmetry is, so you don't need a picture of it. This is how we're going to do it. We're going to do it using phones, and we're going to do it using mobile proximity. I'm going to suggest to you the technology to implement Doctor Who's psychic paper is already here, and if any of you have got one of the new Barclay's debit cards with the contactless interface on it, you've already got that technology. If you've ever been up to the big city, and used an Oyster card at all, does that ring any bells to anybody? The technology already exists. The first phones that have the technology built in, the Google Nexus, the S2, the Samsung Wifi 7.9, the first phones that have the technology built into them are already in the shops. So the idea that the gas man can turn up at my mom's door and he can show my mom his phone, and she can tap it with her phone, and it will come up with green if he really is from British Gas and allowed in, and it'll come up with red if he isn't, end of story. We have the technology to do that. And what's more, although some of those things sounded a bit counter-intuitive, like proving I'm over 18 without proving who I am, the cryptography to do that not only exists, it's extremely well-known and well-understood. Digital signatures, the blinding of public key certificates, these technologies have been around for a while, we've just had no way of packaging them up. So the technology already exists. We know it works, There are a few examples of the technology being used in experimental places. That's London Fashion Week, where we built a system with O2, that's for the Wireless Festival in Hyde Park, you can see the persons walking in with their VIP band, it's just being checked by the Nokia phone that's reading the band. I'm only putting those up to show you these things are prosaic, this stuff works in these environments. They don't need to be special. So finally, I know that you can do this, because if you saw the episode of Doctor Who, the Easter special of Doctor Who, where he went to Mars in a bus, I should say again for our foreign students, that doesn't happen every episode. This was a very special case. So in the episode where he goes to Mars in a London bus, I can't show you the clip, due to the outrageous restrictions of Queen Anne-style copyright by the BBC, but in the episode where he goes to Mars in a London bus, Doctor Who is clearly shown getting on to the bus with the Oyster card reader using his psychic paper. Which proves that psychic paper has an MSE interface. Thank you very much.

Namaste. Good morning. I'm very happy to be here in India. And I've been thinking a lot about what I have learned over these last particularly 11 years with V-Day and "The Vagina Monologues," traveling the world, essentially meeting with women and girls across the planet to stop violence against women. What I want to talk about today is this particular cell, or grouping of cells, that is in each and every one of us. And I want to call it the girl cell. And it's in men as well as in women. I want you to imagine that this particular grouping of cells is central to the evolution of our species and the continuation of the human race. And I want you imagine that at some point in history a group of powerful people invested in owning and controlling the world understood that the suppression of this particular cell, the oppression of these cells, the reinterpretation of these cells, the undermining of these cells, getting us to believe in the weakness of these cells and the crushing, eradicating, destroying, reducing these cells, basically began the process of killing off the girl cell, which was, by the way, patriarchy. I want you to imagine that the girl is a chip in the huge macrocosm of collective consciousness. And it is essential to balance, to wisdom and to actually the future of all of us. And then I want you to imagine that this girl cell is compassion, and it's empathy, and it's passion itself, and it's vulnerability, and it's openness, and it's intensity, and it's association, and it's relationship, and it is intuitive. And then let's think how compassion informs wisdom, and that vulnerability is our greatest strength, and that emotions have inherent logic, which lead to radical, appropriate, saving action. And then let's remember that we've been taught the exact opposite by the powers that be, that compassion clouds your thinking, that it gets in the way, that vulnerability is weakness, that emotions are not to be trusted, and you're not supposed to take things personally, which is one of my favorites. I think the whole world has essentially been brought up not to be a girl. How do we bring up boys? What does it mean to be a boy? To be a boy really means not to be a girl. To be a man means not to be a girl. To be a woman means not to be a girl. To be strong means not to be a girl. To be a leader means not to be a girl. I actually think that being a girl is so powerful that we've had to train everyone not to be that. (Laughter) And I'd also like to say that the irony of course, is that denying girl, suppressing girl, suppressing emotion, refusing feeling has lead thus here. Where we have now come to live in a world where the most extreme forms of violence, the most horrific poverty, genocide, mass rapes, the destruction of the Earth, is completely out of control. And because we have suppressed our girl cells and suppressed our girl-ship, we do not feel what is going on. So, we are not being charged with the adequate response to what is happening. I want to talk a little bit about the Democratic Republic of Congo. For me, it was the turning point of my life. I have spent a lot of time there in the last three years. I feel up to that point I had seen a lot in the world, a lot of violence. I essentially lived in the rape mines of the world for the last 12 years. But the Democratic Republic of Congo really was the turning point in my soul. I went and I spent time in a place called Bukavu in a hospital called the Panzi Hospital, with a doctor who was as close to a saint as any person I've ever met. His name is Dr. Denis Mukwege. In the Congo, for those of you who don't know, there has been a war raging for the last 12 years, a war that has killed nearly six million people. It is estimated that somewhere between 300,000 and 500,000 women have been raped there. When I spent my first weeks at Panzi hospital I sat with women who sat and lined up every day to tell me their stories. Their stories were so horrific, and so mind-blowing and so on the other side of human existence, that to be perfectly honest with you, I was shattered. And I will tell you that what happened is through that shattering, listening to the stories of eight-year-old girls who had their insides eviscerated, who had guns and bayonets and things shoved inside them so they had holes, literally, inside them where their pee and poop came out of them. Listening to the story of 80-year-old women who were tied to chains and circled, and where groups of men would come and rape them periodically, all in the name of economic exploitation to steal the minerals so the West can have it and profit from them. My mind was so shattered. But what happened for me is that that shattering actually emboldened me in a way I have never been emboldened. That shattering, that opening of my girl cell, that kind of massive breakthrough of my heart allowed me to become more courageous, and braver, and actually more clever than I had been in the past in my life. I want to say that I think the powers that be know that empire-building is actually -- that feelings get in the way of empire-building. Feelings get in the way of the mass acquisition of the Earth, and excavating the Earth, and destroying things. I remember, for example, when my father, who was very, very violent, used to beat me. And he would actually say, while he was beating me, "Don't you cry. Don't you dare cry." Because my crying somehow exposed his brutality to him. And even in the moment he didn't want to be reminded of what he was doing. I know that we have systematically annihilated the girl cell. And I want to say we've annihilated it in men as well as in women. And I think in some ways we've been much harsher to men in the annihilation of their girl cell. (Applause) I see how boys have been brought up, and I see this across the planet: to be tough, to be hardened, to distance themselves from their tenderness, to not cry. I actually realized once in Kosovo, when I watched a man break down, that bullets are actually hardened tears, that when we don't allow men to have their girl self and have their vulnerability, and have their compassion, and have their hearts, that they become hardened and hurtful and violent. And I think we have taught men to be secure when they are insecure, to pretend they know things when they don't know things, or why would we be where we are? To pretend they're not a mess when they are a mess. And I will tell you a very funny story. On my way here on the airplane, I was walking up and down the aisle of the plane. And all these men, literally at least 10 men, were in their little seats watching chick flicks. And they were all alone, and I thought, "This is the secret life of men." (Laughter) I've traveled, as I said, to many, many countries, and I've seen, if we do what we do to the girl inside us then obviously it's horrific to think what we do to girls in the world. And we heard from Sunitha yesterday, and Kavita about what we do to girls. But I just want to say that I've met girls with knife wounds and cigarette burns, who are literally being treated like ashtrays. I've seen girls be treated like garbage cans. I've seen girls who were beaten by their mothers and brothers and fathers and uncles. I've seen girls starving themselves to death in America in institutions to look like some idealized version of themselves. I've seen that we cut girls and we control them and we keep them illiterate, or we make them feel bad about being too smart. We silence them. We make them feel guilty for being smart. We get them to behave, to tone it down, not to be too intense. We sell them, we kill them as embryos, we enslave them, we rape them. We are so accustomed to robbing girls of the subject of being the subjects of their lives that we have now actually objectified them and turned them into commodities. The selling of girls is rampant across the planet. And in many places they are worth less than goats and cows. But I also want to talk about the fact that if one in eight people on the planet are girls between the ages of 10 to 24, they are they key, really, in the developing world, as well as in the whole world, to the future of humanity. And if girls are in trouble because they face systematic disadvantages that keep them where society wants them to be, including lack of access to healthcare, education, healthy foods, labor force participation. The burden of all the household tasks usually falls on girls and younger siblings, which ensures that they will never overcome these barriers. The state of girls, the condition of girls, will, in my belief -- and that's the girl inside us and the girl in the world -- determine whether the species survives. And what I want to suggest is that, having talked to girls, because I just finished a new book called "I Am an Emotional Creature: The Secret Life of Girls Around the World," I've been talking to girls for five years, and one of the things that I've seen is true everywhere is that the verb that's been enforced on girl is the verb "to please." Girls are trained to please. I want to change the verb. I want us all to change the verb. I want the verb to be "educate," or "activate," or "engage," or "confront," or "defy," or "create." If we teach girls to change the verb we will actually enforce the girl inside us and the girl inside them. And I have to now share a few stories of girls I've seen across the planet who have engaged their girl, who have taken on their girl in spite of all the circumstances around them. I know a 14-year-old girl in the Netherlands, for example, who is demanding that she take a boat and go around the entire world by herself. There is a teenage girl who just recently went out and knew that she needed 56 stars tattooed on the right side of her face. There is a girl, Julia Butterfly Hill, who lived for a year in a tree because she wanted to protect the wild oaks. There is a girl who I met 14 years ago in Afghanistan who I have adopted as my daughter because her mother was killed. Her mother was a revolutionary. And this girl, when she was 17 years old, wore a burqa in Afghanistan, and went into the stadiums and documented the atrocities that were going on towards women, underneath her burqa, with a video. And that video became the video that went out all over the world after 9/11 to show what was going on in Afghanistan. I want to talk about Rachel Corrie who was in her teens when she stood in front of an Israeli tank to say, "End the occupation." And she knew she risked death and she was literally gunned down and rolled over by that tank. And I want to talk about a girl that I just met recently in Bukavu, who was impregnated by her rapist. And she was holding her baby. And I asked her if she loved her baby. And she looked into her baby's eyes and she said, "Of course I love my baby. How could I not love my baby? It's my baby and it's full of love." The capacity for girls to overcome situations and to move on levels, to me, is mind-blowing. There is a girl named Dorcas, and I just met her in Kenya. Dorcas is 15 years old, and she was trained in self-defense. A few months ago she was picked up on the street by three older men. They kidnapped her, they put her in a car. And through her self-defense, she grabbed their Adam's apples, she punched them in the eyes and she got herself free and out of the car. In Kenya, in August, I went to visit one of the V-Day safe houses for girls, a house we opened seven years ago with an amazing woman named Agnes Pareyio. Agnes was a woman who was cut when she was a little girl, she was female genitally mutilated. And she made a decision as many women do across this planet, that what was done to her would not be enforced and done to other women and girls. So, for years Agnes walked through the Rift valley. She taught girls what a healthy vagina looked like, and what a mutilated vagina looked like. And in that time she saved many girls. And when we met her we asked her what we could do for her, and she said, "Well, if you got me a Jeep I could get around a lot faster." So, we got her a Jeep. And then she saved 4,500 girls. And then we asked her, "Okay, what else do you need?" And she said, "Well, now, I need a house." So, seven years ago Agnes built the first V-Day safe house in Narok, Kenya, in the Masai land. And it was a house where girls could run away, they could save their clitoris, they wouldn't be cut, they could go to school. And in the years that Agnes has had the house, she has changed the situation there. She has literally become deputy mayor. She's changed the rules. The whole community has bought in to what she's doing. When we were there she was doing a ritual where she reconciles girls, who have run away, with their families. And there was a young girl named Jaclyn. Jaclyn was 14 years old and she was in her Masai family and there's a drought in Kenya. So cows are dying, and cows are the most valued possession. And Jaclyn overheard her father talking to an old man about how he was about to sell her for the cows. And she knew that meant she would be cut. She knew that meant she wouldn't go to school. She knew that meant she wouldn't have a future. She knew she would have to marry that old man, and she was 14. So, one afternoon, she'd heard about the safe house, Jaclyn left her father's house and she walked for two days, two days through Masai land. She slept with the hyenas. She hid at night. She imagined her father killing her on one hand, and Mama Agnes greeting her, with the hope that she would greet her when she got to the house. And when she got to the house she was greeted. Agnes took her in, and Agnes loved her, and Agnes supported her for the year. She went to school and she found her voice, and she found her identity, and she found her heart. Then, her time was ready when she had to go back to talk to her father about the reconciliation, after a year. I had the privilege of being in the hut when she was reunited with her father and reconciled. In that hut, we walked in, and her father and his four wives were sitting there, and her sisters who had just returned because they had all fled when she had fled, and her primary mother, who had been beaten in standing up for her with the elders. When her father saw her and saw who she had become, in her full girl self, he threw his arms around her and broke down crying. He said, "You are beautiful. You have grown into a gorgeous woman. We will not cut you. And I give you my word, here and now, that we will not cut your sisters either." And what she said to him was, "You were willing to sell me for four cows, and a calf and some blankets. But I promise you, now that I will be educated I will always take care of you, and I will come back and I will build you a house. And I will be in your corner for the rest of your life." For me, that is the power of girls. And that is the power of transformation. I want to close today with a new piece from my book. And I want to do it tonight for the girl in everybody here. And I want to do it for Sunitha. And I want to do it for the girls that Sunitha talked about yesterday, the girls who survive, the girls who can become somebody else. But I really want to do it for each and every person here, to value the girl in us, to value the part that cries, to value the part that's emotional, to value the part that's vulnerable, to understand that's where the future lies. This is called "I'm An Emotional Creature." And it happened because I met a girl in Watts, L.A. I was asking girls if they like being a girl, and all the girls were like, "No, I hate it. I can't stand it. It's all bad. My brothers get everything." And this girl just sat up and went, "I love being a girl. I'm an emotional creature!" (Laughter) This is for her: I love being a girl. I can feel what you're feeling as you're feeling inside the feeling before. I am an emotional creature. Things do not come to me as intellectual theories or hard-pressed ideas. They pulse through my organs and legs and burn up my ears. Oh, I know when your girlfriend's really pissed off, even though she appears to give you what you want. I know when a storm is coming. I can feel the invisible stirrings in the air. I can tell you he won't call back. It's a vibe I share. I am an emotional creature. I love that I do not take things lightly. Everything is intense to me, the way I walk in the street, the way my momma wakes me up, the way it's unbearable when I lose, the way I hear bad news. I am an emotional creature. I am connected to everything and everyone. I was born like that. Don't you say all negative that it's only only a teenage thing, or it's only because I'm a girl. These feelings make me better. They make me present. They make me ready. They make me strong. I am an emotional creature. There is a particular way of knowing. It's like the older women somehow forgot. I rejoice that it's still in my body. Oh, I know when the coconut's about to fall. I know we have pushed the Earth too far. I know my father isn't coming back, and that no one's prepared for the fire. I know that lipstick means more than show, and boys are super insecure, and so-called terrorists are made, not born. I know that one kiss could take away all my decision-making ability. (Laughter) And you know what? Sometimes it should. This is not extreme. It's a girl thing, what we would all be if the big door inside us flew open. Don't tell me not to cry, to calm it down, not to be so extreme, to be reasonable. I am an emotional creature. It's how the earth got made, how the wind continues to pollinate. You don't tell the Atlantic Ocean to behave. I am an emotional creature. Why would you want to shut me down or turn me off? I am your remaining memory. I can take you back. Nothing's been diluted. Nothing's leaked out. I love, hear me, I love that I can feel the feelings inside you, even if they stop my life, even if they break my heart, even if they take me off track, they make me responsible. I am an emotional, I am an emotional, incondotional, devotional creature. And I love, hear me, I love, love, love being a girl. Can you say it with me? I love, I love, love, love being a girl! Thank you very much. (Applause)

So I thought I'd talk about identity. That's sort of an interesting enough topic to me. And the reason was, because when I was asked to do this, I'd just read, in one of the papers, I can't remember, something from someone at Facebook saying, well, "we need to make everybody use their real names." and then that's basically all the problems solved. And that's so wrong, that's such a fundamentally, reactionary view of identity, and it's going to get us into all sorts of trouble. And so what I thought I'd do is I'll explain four sort of problems about it, and then I'll suggest a solution, which hopefully you might find interesting. So just to frame the problem, what does authenticity mean? That's me, that's a camera phone picture of me looking at a painting. [What's the Problem?] That's a painting that was painted by a very famous forger, and because I'm not very good at presentations, I already can't remember the name that I wrote on my card. And he was incarcerated in, I think, Wakefield Prison for forging masterpieces by, I think, French Impressionists. And he's so good at it, that when he was in prison, everybody in prison, the governor and whatever, wanted him to paint masterpieces to put on the walls, because they were so good. And so that's a masterpiece, which is a fake of a masterpiece, and bonded into the canvas is a chip which identifies that as a real fake, if you see what I mean. (Laughter) So when we're talking about authenticity, it's a little more fractal than it appears and that's a good example to show it. I tried to pick four problems that will frame the issue properly. So the first problem, I thought, Chip and PIN, right? [Banks and legacies bringing down the system from within] [Offline solutions do not work online] I'm guessing everyone's got a chip and PIN card, right? So why is that a good example? That's the example of how legacy thinking about identity subverts the security of a well-constructed system. That chip and PIN card that's in your pocket has a little chip on it that cost millions of pounds to develop, is extremely secure, you can put scanning electron microscopes on it, you can try and grind it down, blah blah blah. Those chips have never been broken, whatever you read in the paper. And for a joke, we take that super-secure chip and we bond it to a trivially counterfeitable magnetic stripe and for very lazy criminals, we still emboss the card. So if you're a criminal in a hurry and you need to copy someone's card, you can just stick a piece of paper on it and rub a pencil over it just to sort of speed things up. And even more amusingly, and on my debit card too, we print the name and the SALT code and everything else on the front too. Why? There is no earthly reason why your name is printed on a chip and PIN card. And if you think about it, it's even more insidious and perverse than it seems at first. Because the only people that benefit from having the name on the card are criminals. You know what your name is, right? (Laughter) And when you go into a shop and buy something, it's a PIN, he doesn't care what the name is. The only place where you ever have to write your name on the back is in America at the moment. And whenever I go to America, and I have to pay with a mag stripe on the back of the card, I always sign it Carlos Tethers anyway, just as a security mechanism, because if a transaction ever gets disputed, and it comes back and it says Dave Birch, I know it must have been a criminal, because I would never sign it Dave Birch. (Laughter) So if you drop your card in the street, it means a criminal can pick it up and read it. They know the name, from the name they can find the address, and then they can go off and buy stuff online. Why do we put the name on the card? Because we think identity is something to do with names, and because we're rooted in the idea of the identity card, which obsesses us. And I know it crashed and burned a couple of years ago, but if you're someone in politics or the home office or whatever, and you think about identity, you can only think of identity in terms of cards with names on them. And that's very subversive in a modern world. So the second example I thought I'd use is chatrooms. [Chatrooms and Children] I'm very proud of that picture, that's my son playing in his band with his friends for the first-ever gig, I believe you call it, where he got paid. (Laughter) And I love that picture. I like the picture of him getting into medical school a lot better, (Laughter) I like that picture for the moment. Why do I use that picture? Because that was very interesting, watching that experience as an old person. So him and his friends, they get together, they booked a room, like a church hall, and they got all their friends who had bands, and they got them together, and they do it all on Facebook, and then they sell tickets, and the first band on the - I was going to say "menu," that's probably the wrong word for it, isn't it? The first band on the list of bands that appears at some public music performance of some kind gets the sales from the first 20 tickets, then the next band gets the next 20, and so on. They were at the bottom of the menu, they were like fifth, I thought they had no chance. He actually got 20 quid. Fantastic, right? But my point is, that all worked perfectly, except on the web. So they're sitting on Facebook, and they're sending these messages and arranging things and they don't know who anybody is, right? That's the big problem we're trying to solve. If only they were using the real names, Then you wouldn't be worried about them on the Internet. And so when he says to me, "Oh, I want to go to a chatroom to talk about guitars" or something, I'm like, "oh, well, I don't want you to go into a chatroom to talk about guitars, because they might not all be your friends, and some of the people that are in the chatroom might be perverts and teachers and vicars." (Laughter) I mean, they generally are, when you look in the paper, right? So I want to know who all the people in the chatroom are. So okay, you can go in the chatroom, but only if everybody in the chatroom is using their real names, and they submit full copies of their police report. But of course, if anybody in the chatroom asked for his real name, I'd say no. You can't give them your real name. Because what happens if they turn out to be perverts, and teachers and whatever. So you have this odd sort of paradox where I'm happy for him to go into this space if I know who everybody else is, but I don't want anybody else to know who he is. And so you get this sort of logjam around identity where you want full disclosure from everybody else, but not from yourself. And there's no progress, we get stuck. And so the chatroom thing doesn't work properly, and it's a very bad way of thinking about identity. So on my RSS feed, I saw this thing about - I just said something bad about my RSS feed, didn't I? I should stop saying it like that. For some random reason, I can't imagine, something about cheerleaders turned up in my inbox. And I read this story about cheerleaders, and it's a fascinating story. This happened a couple of years ago in the U.S. There were some cheerleaders in a team at a high school in the U.S., and they said mean things about their cheerleading coach, as I'm sure kids do about all of their teachers all of the time, and somehow the cheerleading coach found out about this. She was very upset. And so she went to one of the girls, and said, "you have to give me your Facebook password." I read this all the time, where even at some universities and places of education, kids are forced to hand over their Facebook passwords. So you've got to give them your Facebook password. She was a kid! What she should have said is, "my lawyer will be calling you first thing in the morning. It's an outrageous imposition on my 4th Amendment right to privacy, and you're going to be sued for all the money you've got." That's what she should have said. But she's a kid, so she hands over the password. The teacher can't log into Facebook, because the school has blocked access to Facebook. So the teacher can't log into Facebook until she gets home. So the girl tells her friends, guess what happened? The teacher logged in, she knows. So the girls just all logged into Facebook on their phones, and deleted their profiles. And so when the teacher logged in, there was nothing there. My point is, those identities, they don't think about them the same way. Identity is, especially when you're a teenager, a fluid thing. You have lots of identities. And you can have an identity, you don't like it, because it's subverted in some way, or it's insecure, or it's inappropriate, you just delete it and get another one. The idea that you have an identity that's given to you by someone, the government or whatever, and you have to stick with that identity and use it in all places, that's absolutely wrong. Why would you want to really know who someone was on Facebook, unless you wanted to abuse them and harass them in some way? And it just doesn't work properly. And my fourth example is there are some cases where you really want to be - In case you're wondering, that's me at the G20 protest. I wasn't actually at the G20 protest, but I had a meeting at a bank on the day of the G20 protest, and I got an email from the bank saying please don't wear a suit, because it'll inflame the protesters. I look pretty good in a suit, frankly, so you can see why it would drive them into an anti-capitalist frenzy. (Laughter) So I thought, well, look. If I don't want to inflame the protesters, the obvious thing to do is go dressed as a protester. So I went dressed completely in black, you know, with a black balaclava, I had black gloves on, but I've taken them off to sign the visitor's book. (Laughter) I'm wearing black trousers, black boots, I'm dressed completely in black. I go into the bank at 10 o'clock, go, "Hi, I'm Dave Birch, I've got a 3 o'clock with so and so there." Sure. They sign me in. There's my visitor's badge. (Laughter) So this nonsense about you've got to have real names on Facebook and whatever, that gets you that kind of security. That gets you security theater, where there's no actual security, but people are sort of playing parts in a play about security. And as long as everybody learns their lines, everyone's happy. But it's not real security. Especially because I hate banks more than the G20 protesters do, because I work for them. I know that things are actually worse than these guys think. (Laughter) But suppose I worked next to somebody in a bank who was doing something. Suppose I was sitting next to a rogue trader, and I want to report it to the boss of the bank. So I log on to do a little bit of whistleblowing. I send a message, this guy's a rogue trader. That message is meaningless if you don't know that I'm a trader at the bank. If that message just comes from anybody, it has zero information value. There's no point in sending that message. But if I have to prove who I am, I'll never send that message. It's just like the nurse in the hospital reporting the drunk surgeon. That message will only happen if I'm anonymous. So the system has to have ways of providing anonymity there, otherwise we don't get where we want to get to. So four issues. So what are we going to do about it? Well, what we tend to do about it is we think about Orwell space. And we try to make electronic versions of the identity card that we got rid of in 1953. So we think if we had a card, call it a Facebook login, which proves who you are, and I make you carry it all the time, that solves the problem. And of course, for all those reasons I've just outlined, it doesn't, and it might, actually, make some problems worse. The more times you're forced to use your real identity, certainly in transactional terms, the more likely that identity is to get stolen and subverted. The goal is to stop people from using identity in transactions which don't need identity, which is actually almost all transactions. Almost all of the transactions you do are not, who are you? They're, are you allowed to drive the car, are you allowed in the building, are you over 18, etcetera, etcetera. So my suggestion-I, like James, think that there should be a resurgence of interest in R & D. I think this is a solvable problem. It's something we can do about. Naturally, in these circumstances, I turn to Doctor Who. Because in this, as in so many other walks of life, Doctor Who has already shown us the answer. So I should say, for some of our foreign visitors, Doctor Who is the greatest living scientist in England, (Laughter) and a beacon of truth and enlightenment to all of us. And this is Doctor Who with his psychic paper. Come on, you guys must have seen Doctor Who's psychic paper. You're not nerds if you say yes. Who's seen Doctor Who's psychic paper? Oh right, you were in the library the whole time studying I guess. Is that what you're going to tell us? Doctor Who's psychic paper is when you hold up the psychic paper, the person, in their brain, sees the thing that they need to see. So I want to show you a British passport, I hold up the psychic paper, you see a British passport. I want to get into a party, I hold up the psychic paper, I show you a party invitation. You see what you want to see. So what I'm saying is we need to make an electronic version of that, but with one tiny, tiny change, which is that it'll only show you the British passport if I've actually got one. It'll only show you the party invitation if I actually have one. It will only show you that I'm over 18 if I actually am over 18. But nothing else. So you're the bouncer at the pub, you need to know that I'm over 18, instead of showing you my driving license, which shows you I know how to drive, what my name is, my address, all these kind of things, I show you my psychic paper, and all it tells you is am I over 18 or not. Right. Is that just a pipe dream? Of course not, otherwise I wouldn't be here talking to you. So in order to build that and make it work, I'm only going to name these things, I'll not go into them, we need a plan, which is we're going to build this as an infrastructure for everybody to use, to solve all of these problems. We're going to make a utility, the utility has to be universal, you can use it everywhere, I'm just giving you little flashes of the technology as we go along. That's a Japanese ATM, the fingerprint template is stored inside the mobile phone. So when you want to draw money out, you put the mobile phone on the ATM, and touch your finger, your fingerprint goes through to the phone, the phone says yes, that's whoever, and the ATM then gives you some money. It has to be a utility that you can use everywhere. It has to be absolutely convenient, that's me going into the pub. All the device on the door of the pub is allowed is, is this person over 18 and not barred from the pub? And so the idea is, you touch your ID card to the door, and if I am allowed in, it shows my picture, if I'm not allowed in, it shows a red cross. It doesn't disclose any other information. It has to have no special gadgets. That can only mean one thing, following on from Ross's statement, which I agree with completely. If it means no special gadgets, it has to run on a mobile phone. That's the only choice we have, we have to make it work on mobile phones. There are 6.6 billion mobile phone subscriptions. My favorite statistic of all time, only 4 billion toothbrushes in the world. That means something, I don't know what. (Laughter) I rely on our futurologists to tell me. It has to be a utility which is extensible. So it has to be something that anybody could build on. Anybody should be able to use this infrastructure, you don't need permissions, licenses, whatever, anyone should be able to write some code to do this. You know what symmetry is, so you don't need a picture of it. This is how we're going to do it. We're going to do it using phones, and we're going to do it using mobile proximity. I'm going to suggest to you the technology to implement Doctor Who's psychic paper is already here, and if any of you have got one of the new Barclay's debit cards with the contactless interface on it, you've already got that technology. If you've ever been up to the big city, and used an Oyster card at all, does that ring any bells to anybody? The technology already exists. The first phones that have the technology built in, the Google Nexus, the S2, the Samsung Wifi 7.9, the first phones that have the technology built into them are already in the shops. So the idea that the gas man can turn up at my mom's door and he can show my mom his phone, and she can tap it with her phone, and it will come up with green if he really is from British Gas and allowed in, and it'll come up with red if he isn't, end of story. We have the technology to do that. And what's more, although some of those things sounded a bit counter-intuitive, like proving I'm over 18 without proving who I am, the cryptography to do that not only exists, it's extremely well-known and well-understood. Digital signatures, the blinding of public key certificates, these technologies have been around for a while, we've just had no way of packaging them up. So the technology already exists. We know it works, There are a few examples of the technology being used in experimental places. That's London Fashion Week, where we built a system with O2, that's for the Wireless Festival in Hyde Park, you can see the persons walking in with their VIP band, it's just being checked by the Nokia phone that's reading the band. I'm only putting those up to show you these things are prosaic, this stuff works in these environments. They don't need to be special. So finally, I know that you can do this, because if you saw the episode of Doctor Who, the Easter special of Doctor Who, where he went to Mars in a bus, I should say again for our foreign students, that doesn't happen every episode. This was a very special case. So in the episode where he goes to Mars in a London bus, I can't show you the clip, due to the outrageous restrictions of Queen Anne-style copyright by the BBC, but in the episode where he goes to Mars in a London bus, Doctor Who is clearly shown getting on to the bus with the Oyster card reader using his psychic paper. Which proves that psychic paper has an MSE interface. Thank you very much.

So I'm going to talk to you about you about the political chemistry of oil spills and why this is an incredibly important, long, oily, hot summer, and why we need to keep ourselves from getting distracted. But before I talk about the political chemistry, I actually need to talk about the chemistry of oil. This is a photograph from when I visited Prudhoe Bay in Alaska in 2002 to watch the Minerals Management Service testing their ability to burn oil spills in ice. And what you see here is, you see a little bit of crude oil, you see some ice cubes, and you see two sandwich baggies of napalm. The napalm is burning there quite nicely. And the thing is, is that oil is really an abstraction for us as the American consumer. We're four percent of the world's population; we use 25 percent of the world's oil production. And we don't really understand what oil is, until you check out its molecules, And you don't really understand that until you see this stuff burn. So this is what happens as that burn gets going. It takes off. It's a big woosh. I highly recommend that you get a chance to see crude oil burn someday, because you will never need to hear another poli sci lecture on the geopolitics of oil again. It'll just bake your retinas. So there it is; the retinas are baking. Let me tell you a little bit about this chemistry of oil. Oil is a stew of hydrocarbon molecules. It starts of with the very small ones, which are one carbon, four hydrogen -- that's methane -- it just floats off. Then there's all sorts of intermediate ones with middle amounts of carbon. You've probably heard of benzene rings; they're very carcinogenic. And it goes all the way over to these big, thick, galumphy ones that have hundreds of carbons, and they have thousands of hydrogens, and they have vanadium and heavy metals and sulfur and all kinds of craziness hanging off the sides of them. Those are called the asphaltenes; they're an ingredient in asphalt. They're very important in oil spills. Let me tell you a little bit about the chemistry of oil in water. It is this chemistry that makes oil so disastrous. Oil doesn't sink, it floats. If it sank, it would be a whole different story as far as an oil spill. And the other thing it does is it spreads out the moment it hits the water. It spreads out to be really thin, so you have a hard time corralling it. The next thing that happens is the light ends evaporate, and some of the toxic things float into the water column and kill fish eggs and smaller fish and things like that, and shrimp. And then the asphaltenes -- and this is the crucial thing -- the asphaltenes get whipped by the waves into a frothy emulsion, something like mayonnaise. It triples the amount of oily, messy goo that you have in the water, and it makes it very hard to handle. It also makes it very viscous. When the Prestige sank off the coast of Spain, there were big, floating cushions the size of sofa cushions of emulsified oil, with the consistency, or the viscosity, of chewing gum. It's incredibly hard to clean up. And every single oil is different when it hits water. When the chemistry of the oil and water also hits our politics, it's absolutely explosive. For the first time, American consumers will kind of see the oil supply chain in front of themselves. They have a "eureka!" moment, when we suddenly understand oil in a different context. So I'm going to talk just a little bit about the origin of these politics, because it's really crucial to understanding why this summer is so important, why we need to stay focused. Nobody gets up in the morning and thinks, "Wow! I'm going to go buy some three-carbon-to-12-carbon molecules to put in my tank and drive happily to work." No, they think, "Ugh. I have to go buy gas. I'm so angry about it. The oil companies are ripping me off. They set the prices, and I don't even know. I am helpless over this." And this is what happens to us at the gas pump -- and actually, gas pumps are specifically designed to diffuse that anger. You might notice that many gas pumps, including this one, are designed to look like ATMs. I've talked to engineers. That's specifically to diffuse our anger, because supposedly we feel good about ATMs. (Laughter) That shows you how bad it is. But actually, I mean, this feeling of helplessness comes in because most Americans actually feel that oil prices are the result of a conspiracy, not of the vicissitudes of the world oil market. And the thing is, too, is that we also feel very helpless about the amount that we consume, which is somewhat reasonable, because in fact, we have designed this system where, if you want to get a job, it's much more important to have a car that runs, to have a job and keep a job, than to have a GED. And that's actually very perverse. Now there's another perverse thing about the way we buy gas, which is that we'd rather be doing anything else. This is BP's gas station in downtown Los Angeles. It is green. It is a shrine to greenishness. "Now," you think, "why would something so lame work on people so smart?" Well, the reason is, is because, when we're buying gas, we're very invested in this sort of cognitive dissonance. I mean, we're angry at the one hand and we want to be somewhere else. We don't want to be buying oil; we want to be doing something green. And we get kind of in on our own con. I mean -- and this is funny, it looks funny here. But in fact, that's why the slogan "beyond petroleum" worked. But it's an inherent part of our energy policy, which is we don't talk about reducing the amount of oil that we use. We talk about energy independence. We talk about hydrogen cars. We talk about biofuels that haven't been invented yet. And so, cognitive dissonance is part and parcel of the way that we deal with oil, and it's really important to dealing with this oil spill. Okay, so the politics of oil are very moral in the United States. The oil industry is like a huge, gigantic octopus of engineering and finance and everything else, but we actually see it in very moral terms. This is an early-on photograph -- you can see, we had these gushers. Early journalists looked at these spills, and they said, "This is a filthy industry." But they also saw in it that people were getting rich for doing nothing. They weren't farmers, they were just getting rich for stuff coming out of the ground. It's the "Beverly Hillbillies," basically. But in the beginning, this was seen as a very morally problematic thing, long before it became funny. And then, of course, there was John D. Rockefeller. And the thing about John D. is that he went into this chaotic wild-east of oil industry, and he rationalized it into a vertically integrated company, a multinational. It was terrifying; you think Walmart is a terrifying business model now, imagine what this looked like in the 1860s or 1870s. And it also the kind of root of how we see oil as a conspiracy. But what's really amazing is that Ida Tarbell, the journalist, went in and did a big exposé of Rockefeller and actually got the whole antitrust laws put in place. But in many ways, that image of the conspiracy still sticks with us. And here's one of the things that Ida Tarbell said -- she said, "He has a thin nose like a thorn. There were no lips. There were puffs under the little colorless eyes with creases running from them." (Laughter) Okay, so that guy is actually still with us. (Laughter) I mean, this is a very pervasive -- this is part of our DNA. And then there's this guy, okay. So, you might be wondering why it is that, every time we have high oil prices or an oil spill, we call these CEOs down to Washington, and we sort of pepper them with questions in public and we try to shame them. And this is something that we've been doing since 1974, when we first asked them, "Why are there these obscene profits?" And we've sort of personalized the whole oil industry into these CEOs. And we take it as, you know -- we look at it on a moral level, rather than looking at it on a legal and financial level. And so I'm not saying these guys aren't liable to answer questions -- I'm just saying that, when you focus on whether they are or are not a bunch of greedy bastards, you don't actually get around to the point of making laws that are either going to either change the way they operate, or you're going to get around to really reducing the amount of oil and reducing our dependence on oil. So I'm saying this is kind of a distraction. But it makes for good theater, and it's powerfully cathartic as you probably saw last week. So the thing about water oil spills is that they are very politically galvanizing. I mean, these pictures -- this is from the Santa Barbara spill. You have these pictures of birds. They really influence people. When the Santa Barbara spill happened in 1969, it formed the environmental movement in its modern form. It started Earth Day. It also put in place the National Environmental Policy Act, the Clean Air Act, the Clean Water Act. Everything that we are really stemmed from this period. I think it's important to kind of look at these pictures of the birds and understand what happens to us. Here we are normally; we're standing at the gas pump, and we're feeling kind of helpless. We look at these pictures and we understand, for the first time, our role in this supply chain. We connect the dots in the supply chain. And we have this kind of -- as voters, we have kind of a "eureka!" moment. This is why these moments of these oil spills are so important. But it's also really important that we don't get distracted by the theater or the morals of it. We actually need to go in and work on the roots of the problem. One of the things that happened with the two previous oil spills was that we really worked on some of the symptoms. We were very reactive, as opposed to being proactive about what happened. And so what we did was, actually, we made moratoriums on the east and west coasts on drilling. We stopped drilling in ANWR, but we didn't actually reduce the amount of oil that we consumed. In fact, it's continued to increase. The only thing that really reduces the amount of oil that we consume is much higher prices. As you can see, our own production has fallen off as our reservoirs have gotten old and expensive to drill out. We only have two percent of the world's oil reserves; 65 percent of them are in the Persian Gulf. One of the things that's happened because of this is that, since 1969, the country of Nigeria, or the part of Nigeria that pumps oil, which is the delta -- which is two times the size of Maryland -- has had thousands of oil spills a year. I mean, we've essentially been exporting oil spills when we import oil from places without tight environmental regulations. That has been the equivalent of an Exxon Valdez spill every year since 1969. And we can wrap our heads around the spills, because that's what we see here, but in fact, these guys actually live in a war zone. There's a thousand battle-related deaths a year in this area twice the size of Maryland, and it's all related to the oil. And these guys, I mean, if they were in the U.S., they might be actually here in this room. They have degrees in political science, degrees in business -- they're entrepreneurs. They don't actually want to be doing what they're doing. And it's sort of one of the other groups of people who pay a price for us. The other thing that we've done, as we've continued to increase demand, is that we kind of play a shell game with the costs. One of the places we put in a big oil project in Chad, with Exxon. So the U.S. taxpayer paid for it; the World Bank, Exxon paid for it. We put it in. There was a tremendous banditry problem. I was there in 2003. We were driving along this dark, dark road, and the guy in the green stepped out, and I was just like, "Ahhh! This is it." And then the guy in the Exxon uniform stepped out, and we realized it was okay. They have their own private sort of army around them at the oil fields. But at the same time, Chad has become much more unstable, and we are not paying for that price at the pump. We pay for it in our taxes on April 15th. We do the same thing with the price of policing the Persian Gulf and keeping the shipping lanes open. This is 1988 -- we actually bombed two Iranian oil platforms that year. That was the beginning of an escalating U.S. involvement there that we do not pay for at the pump. We pay for it on April 15th, and we can't even calculate the cost of this involvement. The other place that is sort of supporting our dependence on oil and our increased consumption is the Gulf of Mexico, which was not part of the moratoriums. Now what's happened in the Gulf of Mexico -- as you can see, this is the Minerals Management diagram of wells for gas and oil. It's become this intense industrialized zone. It doesn't have the same resonance for us that the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge has, but it should, I mean, it's a bird sanctuary. Also, every time you buy gasoline in the United States, half of it is actually being refined along the coast, because the Gulf actually has about 50 percent of our refining capacity and a lot of our marine terminals as well. So the people of the Gulf have essentially been subsidizing the rest of us through a less-clean environment. And finally, American families also pay a price for oil. Now on the one hand, the price at the pump is not really very high when you consider the actual cost of the oil, but on the other hand, the fact that people have no other transit options means that they pay a large amount of their income into just getting back and forth to work, generally in a fairly crummy car. If you look at people who make $50,000 a year, they have two kids, they might have three jobs or more, and then they have to really commute. They're actually spending more on their car and fuel than they are on taxes or on health care. And the same thing happens at the 50th percentile, around 80,000. Gasoline costs are a tremendous drain on the American economy, but they're also a drain on individual families and it's kind of terrifying to think about what happens when prices get higher. So, what I'm going to talk to you about now is: what do we have to do this time? What are the laws? What do we have to do to keep ourselves focused? One thing is -- we need to stay away from the theater. We need to stay away from the moratoriums. We need to focus really back again on the molecules. The moratoriums are fine, but we do need to focus on the molecules on the oil. One of the things that we also need to do, is we need to try to not kind of fool ourselves into thinking that you can have a green world, before you reduce the amount of oil that we use. We need to focus on reducing the oil. What you see in this top drawing is a schematic of how petroleum gets used in the U.S. economy. It comes in on the side -- the useful stuff is the dark gray, and the un-useful stuff, which is called the rejected energy -- the waste, goes up to the top. Now you can see that the waste far outweighs the actually useful amount. And one of the things that we need to do is, not only fix the fuel efficiency of our vehicles and make them much more efficient, but we also need to fix the economy in general. We need to remove the perverse incentives to use more fuel. For example, we have an insurance system where the person who drives 20,000 miles a year pays the same insurance as somebody who drives 3,000. We actually encourage people to drive more. We have policies that reward sprawl -- we have all kinds of policies. We need to have more mobility choices. We need to make the gas price better reflect the real cost of oil. And we need to shift subsidies from the oil industry, which is at least 10 billion dollars a year, into something that allows middle-class people to find better ways to commute. Whether that's getting a much more efficient car and also kind of building markets for new cars and new fuels down the road, this is where we need to be. We need to kind of rationalize this whole thing, and you can find more about this policy. It's called STRONG, which is "Secure Transportation Reducing Oil Needs Gradually," and the idea is instead of being helpless, we need to be more strong. They're up at NewAmerica.net. What's important about these is that we try to move from feeling helpless at the pump, to actually being active and to really sort of thinking about who we are, having kind of that special moment, where we connect the dots actually at the pump. Now supposedly, oil taxes are the third rail of American politics -- the no-fly zone. I actually -- I agree that a dollar a gallon on oil is probably too much, but I think that if we started this year with three cents a gallon on gasoline, and upped it to six cents next year, nine cents the following year, all the way up to 30 cents by 2020, that we could actually significantly reduce our gasoline consumption, and at the same time we would give people time to prepare, time to respond, and we would be raising money and raising consciousness at the same time. Let me give you a little sense of how this would work. This is a gas receipt, hypothetically, for a year from now. The first thing that you have on the tax is -- you have a tax for a stronger America -- 33 cents. So you're not helpless at the pump. And the second thing that you have is a kind of warning sign, very similar to what you would find on a cigarette pack. And what it says is, "The National Academy of Sciences estimates that every gallon of gas you burn in your car creates 29 cents in health care costs." That's a lot. And so this -- you can see that you're paying considerably less than the health care costs on the tax. And also, the hope is that you start to be connected to the whole greater system. And at the same time, you have a number that you can call to get more information on commuting, or a low-interest loan on a different kind of car, or whatever it is you're going to need to actually reduce your gasoline dependence. With this whole sort of suite of policies, we could actually reduce our gasoline consumption -- or our oil consumption -- by 20 percent by 2020. So, three million barrels a day. But in order to do this, one of the things we really need to do, is we need to remember we are people of the hydrocarbon. We need to keep or minds on the molecules and not get distracted by the theater, not get distracted by the cognitive dissonance of the green possibilities that are out there. We need to kind of get down and do the gritty work of reducing our dependence upon this fuel and these molecules. Thank you. (Applause)

OK. We've heard a lot of people speak at this conference about the power of the human mind. And what I'd like to do today is give you a vivid example of how that power can be unleashed when someone is in a survival situation, how the will to survive can bring that out in people. This is an incident which occurred on Mount Everest; it was the worst disaster in the history of Everest. And when it occurred, I was the only doctor on the mountain. So I'll take you through that and we'll see what it's like when someone really summons the will to survive. OK, this is Mount Everest. It's 29,035 feet high. I've been there six times: Four times I did work with National Geographic, making tectonic plate measurements; twice, I went with NASA doing remote sensing devices. It was on my fourth trip to Everest that a comet passed over the mountain. Hyakutake. And the Sherpas told us then that was a very bad omen, and we should have listened to them. Everest is an extreme environment. There's only one-third as much oxygen at the summit as there is at sea level. Near the summit, temperatures can be 40 degrees below zero. You can have winds 20 to 40 miles an hour. It's actually a wind-chill factor which is lower than a summer day on Mars. I remember one time being up near the summit, I reached into my down jacket for a drink from my water bottle, inside my down jacket, only to discover that the water was already frozen solid. That gives you an idea of just how severe things are near the summit. OK, this is the route up Everest. It starts at base camp, at 17,500 feet. Camp One, 2,000 feet higher. Camp Two, another 2,000 feet higher up, what's called the Western Cwm. CampThree is at the base of Lhotse, which is the fourth highest mountain in the world, but it's dwarfed by Everest. And then Camp Four is the highest camp; that's 3,000 feet short of the summit. This is a view of base camp. This is pitched on a glacier at 17,500 feet. It's the highest point you can bring your yaks before you have to unload. And this is what they unloaded for me: I had four yak loads of medical supplies, which are dumped in a tent, and here I am trying to arrange things. This was our expedition. It was a National Geographic expedition, but it was organized by The Explorers Club. There were three other expeditions on the mountain, an American team, a New Zealand team and an IMAX team. And, after actually two months of preparation, we built our camps all the way up the mountain. This is a view looking up the icefall, the first 2,000 feet of the climb up from base camp. And here's a picture in the icefall; it's a waterfall, but it's frozen, but it moves very slowly, and it actually changes every day. When you're in it, you're like a rat in a maze; you can't even see over the top. This is near the top of the icefall. You want to climb through at night when the ice is frozen. That way, it's less likely to tumble down on you. These are some climbers reaching the top of the icefall just at sun-up. This is me crossing a crevasse. We cross on aluminum ladders with safety ropes attached. That's another crevasse. Some of these things are 10 stories deep or more, and one of my climbing friends says that the reason we actually climb at night is because if we ever saw the bottom of what we're climbing over, we would never do it. Okay. This is Camp One. It's the first flat spot you can reach after you get up to the top of the icefall. And from there we climb up to Camp Two, which is sort of the foreground. These are climbers moving up the Lhotse face, that mountain toward Camp Three. They're on fixed ropes here. A fall here, if you weren't roped in, would be 5,000 feet down. This is a view taken from camp three. You can see the Lhotse face is in profile, it's about a 45 degree angle. It takes two days to climb it, so you put the camp halfway through. If you notice, the summit of Everest is black. There's no ice over it. And that's because Everest is so high, it's in the jet stream, and winds are constantly scouring the face, so no snow gets to accumulate. What looks like a cloud behind the summit ridge is actually snow being blown off the summit. This is on the way up from Camp Three to Camp Four, moving in, up through the clouds. And this is at Camp Four. Once you get to Camp Four, you have maybe 24 hours to decide if you're going to go for the summit or not. Everybody's on oxygen, your supplies are limited, and you either have to go up or go down, make that decision very quickly. This is a picture of Rob Hall. He was the leader of the New Zealand team. This is a radio he used later to call his wife that I'll tell you about. These are some climbers waiting to go to the summit. They're up at Camp Four, and you can see that there's wind blowing off the summit. This is not good weather to climb in, so the climbers are just waiting, hoping that the wind's going to die down. And, in fact, the wind does die down at night. It becomes very calm, there's no wind at all. This looks like a good chance to go for the summit. So here are some climbers starting out for the summit on what's called the Triangular Face. It's the first part of climb. It's done in the dark, because it's actually less steep than what comes next, and you can gain daylight hours if you do this in the dark. So that's what happened. The climbers got on the southeast ridge. This is the view looking at the southeast ridge. The summit would be in the foreground. From here, it's about 1,500 feet up at a 30-degree angle to the summit. But what happened that year was the wind suddenly and unexpectedly picked up. A storm blew in that no one was anticipating. You can see here some ferocious winds blowing snow way high off the summit. And there were climbers on that summit ridge. This is a picture of me in that area taken a year before, and you can see I've got an oxygen mask on with a rebreather. I have an oxygen hose connected here. You can see on this climber, we have two oxygen tanks in the backpack -- little titanium tanks, very lightweight -- and we're not carrying much else. This is all you've got. You're very exposed on the summit ridge. OK, this is a view taken on the summit ridge itself. This is on the way toward the summit, on that 1,500-foot bridge. All the climbers here are climbing unroped, and the reason is because the drop off is so sheer on either side that if you were roped to somebody, you'd wind up just pulling them off with you. So each person climbs individually. And it's not a straight path at all, it's very difficult climbing, and there's always the risk of falling on either side. If you fall to your left, you're going to fall 8,000 feet into Nepal; if you fall to your right, you're going to fall 12,000 feet into Tibet. So it's probably better to fall into Tibet because you'll live longer. (Laughter) But, either way, you fall for the rest of your life. OK. Those climbers were up near the summit, along that summit ridge that you see up there, and I was down here in Camp Three. My expedition was down in Camp Three, while these guys were up there in the storm. The storm was so fierce that we had to lay, fully dressed, fully equipped, laid out on the tent floor to stop the tent from blowing off the mountain. It was the worst winds I've ever seen. And the climbers up on the ridge were that much higher, 2,000 feet higher, and completely exposed to the elements. We were in radio contact with some of them. This is a view taken along the summit ridge. Rob Hall, we heard by radio, was up here, at this point in the storm with Doug Hansen. And we heard that Rob was OK, but Doug was too weak to come down. He was exhausted, and Rob was staying with him. We also got some bad news in the storm that Beck Weathers, another climber, had collapsed in the snow and was dead. There were still 18 other climbers that we weren't aware of their condition. They were lost. There was total confusion on the mountain; all the stories were confusing, most of them were conflicting. We really had no idea what was going on during that storm. We were just hunkered down in our tents at Camp Three. Our two strongest climbers, Todd Burleson and Pete Athans, decided to go up to try to rescue who they could even though there was a ferocious storm going. They tried to radio a message to Rob Hall, who was a superb climber stuck, sort of, with a weak climber up near the summit. I expected them to say to Rob, "Hold on. We're coming." But in fact, what they said was, "Leave Doug and come down yourself. There's no chance of saving him, and just try to save yourself at this point." And Rob got that message, but his answer was, "We're both listening." Todd and Pete got up to the summit ridge, up in here, and it was a scene of complete chaos up there. But they did what they could to stabilize the people. I gave them radio advice from Camp Three, and we sent down the climbers that could make it down under their own power. The ones that couldn't we just sort of decided to leave up at Camp Four. So the climbers were coming down along this route. This is taken from Camp Three, where I was. And they all came by me so I could take a look at them and see what I could do for them, which is really not much, because Camp Three is a little notch cut in the ice in the middle of a 45-degree angle. You can barely stand outside the tent. It's really cold; it's 24,000 feet. The only supplies I had at that altitude were two plastic bags with preloaded syringes of painkiller and steroids. So, as the climbers came by me, I sort of assessed whether or not they were in condition to continue on further down. The ones that weren't that lucid or were not that well coordinated, I would give an injection of steroids to try to give them some period of lucidity and coordination where they could then work their way further down the mountain. It's so awkward to work up there that sometimes I even gave the injections right through their clothes. It was just too hard to maneuver any other way up there. While I was taking care of them, we got more news about Rob Hall. There was no way we could get up high enough to rescue him. He called in to say that he was alone now. Apparently, Doug had died higher up on the mountain. But Rob was now too weak to come down himself, and with the fierce winds and up at that altitude, he was just beyond rescue and he knew it. At that point, he asked to be paged into his wife. He was carrying a radio. His wife was home in New Zealand, seven months pregnant with their first child, and Rob asked to be patched into her. That was done, and Rob and his wife had their last conversation. They picked the name for their baby. Rob then signed off, and that was the last we ever heard of him. I was faced with treating a lot of critically ill patients at 24,000 feet, which was an impossibility. So what we did was, we got the victims down to 21,000 feet, where it was easier for me to treat them. This was my medical kit. It's a tackle box filled with medical supplies. This is what I carried up the mountain. I had more supplies lower down, which I asked to be brought up to meet me at the lower camp. And this was scene at the lower camp. The survivors came in one by one. Some of them were hypothermic, some of them were frostbitten, some were both. What we did was try to warm them up as best we could, put oxygen on them and try to revive them, which is difficult to do at 21,000 feet, when the tent is freezing. This is some severe frostbite on the feet, severe frostbite on the nose. This climber was snow blind. As I was taking care of these climbers, we got a startling experience. Out of nowhere, Beck Weathers, who we had already been told was dead, stumbled into the tent, just like a mummy, he walked into the tent. I expected him to be incoherent, but, in fact, he walked into the tent and said to me, "Hi, Ken. Where should I sit?" And then he said, "Do you accept my health insurance?" (Laughter) He really said that. (Laughter) So he was completely lucid, but he was very severely frostbitten. You can see his hand is completely white; his face, his nose, is burned. First, it turns white, and then when it's completed necrosis, it turns black, and then it falls off. It's the last stage, just like a scar. So, as I was taking care of Beck, he related what had been going on up there. He said he had gotten lost in the storm, collapsed in the snow, and just laid there, unable to move. Some climbers had come by and looked at him, and he heard them say, "He's dead." But Beck wasn't dead; he heard that, but he was completely unable to move. He was in some sort of catatonic state where he could be aware of his surroundings, but couldn't even blink to indicate that he was alive. So the climbers passed him by, and Beck lay there for a day, a night and another day, in the snow. And then he said to himself, "I don't want to die. I have a family to come back to." And the thoughts of his family, his kids and his wife, generated enough energy, enough motivation in him, so that he actually got up. After laying in the snow that long a time, he got up and found his way back to the camp. And Beck told me that story very quietly, but I was absolutely stunned by it. I couldn't imagine anybody laying in the snow that long a time and then getting up. He apparently reversed an irreversible hypothermia. And I can only try to speculate on how he did it. So, what if we had Beck hooked up to a SPECT scan, something that could actually measure brain function? Just very simply, the three parts of the brain: the frontal lobe, where you focus your attention and concentration; you have the temporal lobe, where you form images and keep memories; and the posterior part of your brain, which contains the cerebellum, which controls motion; and the brain stem, where you have your basic maintenance functions, like heartbeat and respiration. So let's take a cut through the brain here, and imagine that Beck was hooked up to a SPECT scan. This measures dynamic blood flow and therefore energy flow within the brain. So you have the prefrontal cortex here, lighting up in red. This is a pretty evenly distributed scan. You have the middle area, where the temporal lobe might be, in here, and the posterior portion, where the maintenance functions are in the back. This is a roughly normal scan, showing equal distribution of energy. Now, you go to this one and you see how much more the frontal lobes are lighting up. This might be what Beck would be experiencing when he realizes he's in danger. He's focusing all his attention on getting himself out of trouble. These parts of the brain are quieting down. He's not thinking about his family or anybody else at this point, and he's working pretty hard. He's trying to get his muscles going and get out of this. OK, but he's losing ground here. He's running out of energy. It's too cold; he can't keep his metabolic fires going, and, you see, there's no more red here; his brain is quieting down. He's collapsed in the snow here. Everything is quiet, there's very little red anywhere. Beck is powering down. He's dying. You go on to the next scan, but, in Beck's case, you can see that the middle part of his brain is beginning to light up again. He's beginning to think about his family. He's beginning to have images that are motivating him to get up. He's developing energy in this area through thought. And this is how he's going to turn thought back into action. This part of the brain is called the anterior cingulate gyrus. It's an area in which a lot of neuroscientists believe the seat of will exists. This is where people make decisions, where they develop willpower. And, you can see, there's an energy flow going from the mid portion of his brain, where he's got images of his family, into this area, which is powering his will. Okay. This is getting stronger and stronger to the point where it's actually going to be a motivating factor. He's going to develop enough energy in that area -- after a day, a night and a day -- to actually motivate himself to get up. And you can see here, he's starting to get more energy into the frontal lobe. He's beginning to focus, he can concentrate now. He's thinking about what he's got to do to save himself. So this energy has been transmitted up toward the front of his brain, and it's getting quieter down here, but he's using this energy to think about what he has to do to get himself going. And then, that energy is sort of spreading throughout his thought areas. He's not thinking about his family now, and he's getting himself motivated. This is the posterior part, where his muscles are going to be moving, and he's going to be pacing himself. His heart and lungs are going to pick up speed. So this is what I can speculate might have been going on had we been able to do a SPECT scan on Beck during this survival epic. So here I am taking care of Beck at 21,000 feet, and I felt what I was doing was completely trivial compared to what he had done for himself. It just shows you what the power of the mind can do. He was critically ill, there were other critically ill patients; luckily, we were able to get a helicopter in to rescue these guys. A helicopter came in at 21,000 feet and carried out the highest helicopter rescue in history. It was able to land on the ice, take away Beck and the other survivors, one by one, and get them off to Kathmandu in a clinic before we even got back to base camp. This is a scene at base camp, at one of the camps where some of the climbers were lost. And we had a memorial service there a few days later. These are Serphas lighting juniper branches. They believe juniper smoke is holy. And the climbers stood around on the high rocks and spoke of the climbers who were lost up near the summit, turning to the mountain, actually, to talk to them directly. There were five climbers lost here. This was Scott Fischer, Rob Hall, Andy Harris, Doug Hansen and Yasuko Namba. And one more climber should have died that day, but didn't, and that's Beck Weathers. He was able to survive because he was able to generate that incredible willpower, he was able to use all the power of his mind to save himself. These are Tibetan prayer flags. These Sherpas believe that if you write prayers on these flags, the message will be carried up to the gods, and that year, Beck's message was answered. Thank you. (Applause)

Good afternoon, good evening, whatever. We can go, jambo, guten Abend, bonsoir, but we can also ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh, ooh. That is the call that chimpanzees make before they go to sleep in the evening. You hear it going from one side of the valley to the other, from one group of nests to the next. And I want to pick up with my talk this evening from where Zeray left off yesterday. He was talking about this amazing, three-year-old Australopithecine child, Selam. And we've also been hearing about the history, the family tree, of mankind through DNA genetic profiling. And it was a paleontologist, the late Louis Leakey, who actually set me on the path for studying chimpanzees. And it was pretty extraordinary, way back then. It's kind of commonplace now, but his argument was -- because he'd been searching for the fossilized remains of early humans in Africa. And you can tell an awful lot about what those beings looked like from the fossils, from the shape of the muscle attachments, something about the way they lived from the various artifacts found with them. But what about how they behaved? That's what he wanted to know. And of course, behavior doesn't fossilize. He argued -- and it's now a fairly common theory -- that if we found behavior patterns similar or the same in our closest living relatives, the great apes, and humans today, then maybe those behaviors were present in the ape-like, human-like ancestor some seven million years ago. And therefore, perhaps we had brought those characteristics with us from that ancient, ancient past. Well, if you look in textbooks today that deal with human evolution, you very often find people speculating about how early humans may have behaved, based on the behavior of chimpanzees. They are more like us than any other living creature, and we've heard about that during this TED Conference. So it remains for me to comment on the ways in which chimpanzees are so like us, in certain aspects of their behavior. Every chimpanzee has his or her own personality. Of course, I gave them names. They can live to be 60 years or more, although we think most of them probably don't make it to 60 in the wild. Mr. Wurzel. The female has her first baby when she's 11 or 12. Thereafter, she has one baby only every five or six years, a long period of childhood dependency when the child is nursing, sleeping with the mother at night, and riding on her back. And we believe that this long period of childhood is important for chimpanzees, just as it is for us, in relation to learning. As the brain becomes ever more complex during evolution in different forms of animals, so we find that learning plays an ever more important role in an individual's life history. And young chimpanzees spend a lot of time watching what their elders do. We know now that they're capable of imitating behaviors that they see. And we believe that it's in this way that the different tool-using behaviors -- that have now been seen in all the different chimpanzee populations studied in Africa -- how these are passed from one generation to the next, through observation, imitation and practice, so that we can describe these tool-using behaviors as primitive culture. Chimpanzees don't have a spoken language. We've talked about that. They do have a very rich repertoire of postures and gestures, many of which are similar, or even identical, to ours and formed in the same context. Greeting chimpanzees embracing. They also kiss, hold hands, pat one another on the back. And they swagger and they throw rocks. In chimpanzee society, we find many, many examples of compassion, precursors to love and true altruism. Unfortunately, they, like us, have a dark side to their nature. They're capable of extreme brutality, even a kind of primitive war. And these really aggressive behaviors, for the most part, are directed against individuals of the neighboring social group. They are very territorially aggressive. Chimpanzees, I believe, more than any other living creature, have helped us to understand that, after all, there is no sharp line between humans and the rest of the animal kingdom. It's a very blurry line, and it's getting more blurry all the time as we make even more observations. The study that I began in 1960 is still continuing to this day. And these chimpanzees, living their complex social lives in the wild, have helped -- more than anything else -- to make us realize we are part of, and not separated from, the amazing animals with whom we share the planet. So it's pretty sad to find that chimpanzees, like so many other creatures around the world, are losing their habitats. This is just one photograph from the air, and it shows you the forested highlands of Gombe. And it was when I flew over the whole area, about 16 years ago, and realized that outside the park, this forest, which in 1960 had stretched almost unbroken along the eastern shore of Lake Tanganyika, which is where the tiny, 30-square-mile Gombe National Park lies, that a question came to my mind. "How can we even try to save these famous chimpanzees, when the people living around the National Park are struggling to survive?" More people are living there than the land could possibly support. The numbers increased by refugees pouring in from Burundi and over the lake from Congo. And very poor people -- they couldn't afford to buy food from elsewhere. This led to a program, which we call TACARE. It's a very holistic way of improving the lives of the people living in the villages around the park. It started small with 12 villages. It's now in 24. There isn't time to go into it, but it's including things like tree nurseries, methods of farming most suitable to this now very degraded, almost desert-like land up in these mountains. Ways of controlling, preventing soil erosion. Ways of reclaiming overused farmland, so that within two years they can again be productive. Working to help the villagers obtain fresh water from wells. Perhaps build some schoolrooms. Most important of all, I believe, is working with small groups of women, providing them with opportunities for micro-credit loans. And we've got, as is the case around the world, about 95 percent of all loans returned. Empowering women, working with education, providing scholarships for girls so they can finish secondary school, in the clear understanding that, all around the world, as women's education improves, family size drops. We provide information about family planning and about HIV/AIDS. And as a result of this program, something's happening for conservation. What's happening for conservation is that the farmers living in these 24 villages, instead of looking on us as a bunch of white people coming to study a whole bunch of monkeys -- and by the way, many of the staff are now Tanzanian -- but when we began the TACARE program, it was a Tanzanian team going into the villages. It was a Tanzanian team talking to the villagers, asking what they were interested in. Were they interested in conservation? Absolutely not. They were interested in health; they were interested in education. And as time went on, and as their situation began to improve, they began to understand ever more about the need for conservation. They began to understand that as the upper levels of the hills were denuded of trees, so you've got this terrible soil erosion and mudslides. Today, we are developing what we call the Greater Gombe Ecosystem. This is an area way outside the National Park, stretching out into all these very degraded lands. And as these villages have a better standard of life, they are actually agreeing to put between 10 percent and 20 percent of their land in the highlands aside, so that once again, as the trees grow back, the chimpanzees will have leafy corridors through which they can travel to interact -- as they must for genetic viability -- with other remnant groups outside the National Park. So TACARE is a success. We're replicating it in other parts of Africa, around other wilderness areas which are faced with extreme population pressure. The problems in Africa, however, as we've been discussing for the whole of these first couple of days of TED, are major problems. There is a great deal of poverty. And when you get large numbers of people living in land that is not that fertile, particularly when you cut down trees, and you leave the soil open to the wind for erosion, as desperate populations cut down more and more trees, so that they can try and grow food for themselves and their families, what's going to happen? Something's got to give. And the other problems -- in not only Africa, but the rest of the developing world and, indeed, everywhere -- what are we doing to our planet? You know, the famous scientist, E. O. Wilson said that if every person on this planet attains the standard of living of the average European or American, we need three new planets. Today, they are saying four. But we don't have them. We've got one. And what's happened? I mean, the question here is, here we are, arguably the most intelligent being that's ever walked planet Earth, with this extraordinary brain, capable of the kind of technology that is so well illustrated by these TED Conferences, and yet we're destroying the only home we have. The indigenous people around the world, before they made a major decision, used to sit around and ask themselves, "How does this decision affect our people seven generations ahead?" Today, major decisions -- and I'm not particularly talking about Africa here, but the developed world -- major decisions involving millions of dollars, and millions of people, are often based on, "How will this affect the next shareholders' meeting?" And these decisions affect Africa. As I began traveling around Africa talking about the problems faced by chimpanzees and their vanishing forests, I realized more and more how so many of Africa's problems could be laid at the door of previous colonial exploitation. So I began traveling outside Africa, talking in Europe, talking in the United States, going to Asia. And everywhere there were these terrible problems. And you know the kind I'm talking about. I'm talking about pollution. The air that we breathe that often poisons us. The earth is poisoning our foods. The water -- water is perhaps one of the most crucial issues that we're going to face in this century -- and everywhere water is being polluted by agricultural, industrial and household chemicals that still are being sprayed around the world, seemingly with the inability to profit from past experience. The mangroves are being cut down; the effects of things like the tsunami get worse. We've talked about the soil erosion. We have the reckless burning of fossil fuels along with other greenhouse gasses, so called, leading to climate change. Finally, all around the world, people have begun to believe that there is something going on very wrong with our climate. All around the world climates are mixed up. And it's the poor people who are affected worse. It's Africa that already is affected. In many parts of sub-Saharan Africa, the droughts are so much worse. And when the rain does come, it so often leads to flooding and added distress, and the cycle of poverty and hunger and disease. And the numbers of people living in an area that the land cannot support, who are too poor to buy food, who can't move away because the whole land is degraded. And so you get desertification -- creeping, creeping, creeping -- as the last of the trees are cut down. And this kind of thing is not just in Africa. It's all over the world. So it wasn't surprising to me that as I was traveling around the world I met so many young people who seemed to have lost hope. We seem to have lost wisdom, the wisdom of the indigenous people. I asked a question. "Why?" Well, do you think there could be some kind of disconnect between this extraordinarily clever brain, the kind of brain that the TED technologies exemplify, and the human heart? Talking about it in the non-scientific term, in terms of love and compassion. Is there some disconnect? And these young people, when I talk to them, basically they were either depressed or apathetic, or bitter and angry. And they said more or less the same thing, "We feel this way because we feel you've compromised our future and there's nothing we can do about it." We have compromised their future. I've got three little grandchildren, and every time I look at them and I think how we've harmed this beautiful planet since I was their age, I feel this desperation. And that led to this program we call Roots and Shoots, which began right here in Tanzania and has now spread to 97 countries around the world. It's symbolic. Roots make a firm foundation. Shoots seem tiny; to reach the sun they can break through a brick wall. See the brick wall as all these problems we've inflicted on the planet, environmental and social. It's a message of hope. Hundreds and thousands of young people around the world can break through and can make this a better world for all living things. The most important message of Roots and Shoots: every single one of us makes a difference, every single day. We have a choice. Every one of us in this room, we have a choice as to what kind of difference we want to make. The very poor have no choice. It's up to us to change things so that the poor have choice as well. The Roots and Shoots groups all choose three projects. It depends on how old they are, and which country, whether they're in a city or rural, as to what kinds of projects. But basically, we have programs now from preschool right through university, with more and more adults starting their own Roots and Shoots groups. And every group chooses, between them, three different kinds of project to make this a better world, recognizing that all these different problems are interconnected and impinge on each other. So one of their projects will be to help their own human community. And then, if they're able, they may raise money to help communities in other parts of the world. One of their projects will be to help animals -- not just wildlife, domestic animals as well. And one of their projects will be to help the environment that we all share. And woven throughout all of this is a message of learning to live in peace and harmony within ourselves, in our families, in our communities, between nations, between cultures, between religions and between us and the natural world. We need the natural world. We cannot go on destroying it at the rate we are. We not do have more than this one planet. Just picking one or two of the projects right here in Africa that the Roots and Shoots groups are doing, one or two projects only -- in Tanzania, in Uganda, Kenya, South Africa, Congo-Brazzaville, Sierra Leone, Cameroon and other groups. And as I say, it's in 97 countries around the world. Of course, they're planting trees. They're growing organic vegetables. They're working in the refugee camps, with chickens and selling the eggs for a little amount of money, or just using them to feed their families, and feeling a sense of pride and empowerment, because they're no longer helpless and depending on others with their vegetables and their chickens. It's being used in Uganda to give some psychological help to ex-child soldiers. Doing projects like this is bringing them out of themselves. Once again, they're useful members of society. We have this program in prisons as well. So, there's no time for more Roots and Shoots now. But -- oh, they're also working on HIV/AIDS. That's a very important component of Roots and Shoots, with older kids talking to younger ones. And unwanted pregnancies and things like that, which young people listen to better from other youth, rather than adults. Hope. That's the question I get asked as I'm going around the world: "Jane, you've seen so many terrible things, you've seen your chimpanzees decrease in number from about one million, at the turn of the century, to no more than 150,000 now, and the same with so many other animals. Forests disappearing, deserts where once there was forest. Do you really have hope?" Well, yes. You can't come to a conference like TED and not have hope, can you? And of course, there's hope. One is this amazing human brain. And I mean, think of the technologies. And I've just been so thrilled, finally, to come to people talking about compost latrines. It's one of my hobbyhorses. We just flush all this water down the lavatory, it's terrible. And then talking about renewable energy -- desperately important. Do we care about the planet for our children? How many of us have children or grandchildren, nieces, nephews? Do we care about their future? And if we care about their future, we, as the elite around the world, we can do something about it. We can make choices as to how we live each day. What we buy. What we wear. And choose to make these choices with the question, how will this affect the environment around me? How will it affect the life of my child when he or she grows up? Or my grandchild, or whatever it is. So the human brain, coupled with the human heart, and we join hands around the world. And that's what TED is helping so well with, and Google who help us, and Esri are helping us with mapping in Gombe National Park. All of these technologies we can use. Now let's link them, and it's beginning to happen, isn't it? You've heard about it this afternoon. It's beginning to happen. This change, this change. To see change that we must have if we care about the future. And the next reason for hope -- nature is amazingly resilient. You can take an area that's absolutely destroyed, with time and perhaps some help it can regenerate. And an example is the TACARE program. I told you, where a seemingly dead tree stump -- if you stop hacking them for firewood, which you don't need to because you have wood lots, then in five years you can have a 30-foot tree. And animals, almost on the brink of extinction, can be given a second chance. That's my next book. It's inspiring. And it brings me to my last category of hope, and we've heard about this so much in the last two days: this indomitable human spirit. This determination of people, the resilience of the human spirit, So that people who you would think would be battered by poverty, or disease, or whatever, can pull themselves up out of it, sometimes with a helping hand, and take their part in society, and take their part in changing the world. And just to think of one or two people out of Africa who are just really inspiring. We could make a very long list, but obviously Nelson Mandela, emerging from 17 years of hard physical labor, 23 years of imprisonment, with this amazing ability to forgive, so that he could lead his nation out the evil regime of apartheid without a bloodbath. Ken Saro-Wiwa, in Nigeria, who took on the giant oil companies, and although people around the world tried their best, was executed. People like this are so inspirational. People like this are the role models we need for young Africans. And we need some environmental role models as well, and I've been hearing some of them today. So I'm really grateful for this opportunity to share this message again, with everyone at TED. And I hope that some of us can get together and talk about some of these things, especially the Roots and Shoots program. And just a last word on that -- the young woman who's running this entire conference center, I met her today. She came up so excited, with her certificate. She was [in] Roots and Shoots. She was in the leadership in Dar es Salaam. She said it's helped her to do what she's doing. And it was very, very exciting for me to meet her and see just one example of how young people, when they are empowered, given the opportunity to take action, to make the world a better place, truly are our hope for tomorrow. Thank you. (Applause)

The first thing I want to do is say thank you to all of you. The second thing I want to do is introduce my co-author and dear friend and co-teacher. Ken and I have been working together for almost 40 years. That's Ken Sharpe over there. (Applause) So there is among many people -- certainly me and most of the people I talk to -- a kind of collective dissatisfaction with the way things are working, with the way our institutions run. Our kids' teachers seem to be failing them. Our doctors don't know who the hell we are, and they don't have enough time for us. We certainly can't trust the bankers, and we certainly can't trust the brokers. They almost brought the entire financial system down. And even as we do our own work, all too often, we find ourselves having to choose between doing what we think is the right thing and doing the expected thing, or the required thing, or the profitable thing. So everywhere we look, pretty much across the board, we worry that the people we depend on don't really have our interests at heart. Or if they do have our interests at heart, we worry that they don't know us well enough to figure out what they need to do in order to allow us to secure those interests. They don't understand us. They don't have the time to get to know us. There are two kinds of responses that we make to this sort of general dissatisfaction. If things aren't going right, the first response is: let's make more rules, let's set up a set of detailed procedures to make sure that people will do the right thing. Give teachers scripts to follow in the classroom, so even if they don't know what they're doing and don't care about the welfare of our kids, as long as they follow the scripts, our kids will get educated. Give judges a list of mandatory sentences to impose for crimes, so that you don't need to rely on judges using their judgment. Instead, all they have to do is look up on the list what kind of sentence goes with what kind of crime. Impose limits on what credit card companies can charge in interest and on what they can charge in fees. More and more rules to protect us against an indifferent, uncaring set of institutions we have to deal with. Or -- or maybe and -- in addition to rules, let's see if we can come up with some really clever incentives so that, even if the people we deal with don't particularly want to serve our interests, it is in their interest to serve our interest -- the magic incentives that will get people to do the right thing even out of pure selfishness. So we offer teachers bonuses if the kids they teach score passing grades on these big test scores that are used to evaluate the quality of school systems. Rules and incentives -- "sticks" and "carrots." We passed a bunch of rules to regulate the financial industry in response to the recent collapse. There's the Dodd-Frank Act, there's the new Consumer Financial Protection Agency that is temporarily being headed through the backdoor by Elizabeth Warren. Maybe these rules will actually improve the way these financial services companies behave. We'll see. In addition, we are struggling to find some way to create incentives for people in the financial services industry that will have them more interested in serving the long-term interests even of their own companies, rather than securing short-term profits. So if we find just the right incentives, they'll do the right thing -- as I said -- selfishly, and if we come up with the right rules and regulations, they won't drive us all over a cliff. And Ken [Sharpe] and I certainly know that you need to reign in the bankers. If there is a lesson to be learned from the financial collapse it is that. But what we believe, and what we argue in the book, is that there is no set of rules, no matter how detailed, no matter how specific, no matter how carefully monitored and enforced, there is no set of rules that will get us what we need. Why? Because bankers are smart people. And, like water, they will find cracks in any set of rules. You design a set of rules that will make sure that the particular reason why the financial system "almost-collapse" can't happen again. It is naive beyond description to think that having blocked this source of financial collapse, you have blocked all possible sources of financial collapse. So it's just a question of waiting for the next one and then marveling at how we could have been so stupid as not to protect ourselves against that. What we desperately need, beyond, or along with, better rules and reasonably smart incentives, is we need virtue. We need character. We need people who want to do the right thing. And in particular, the virtue that we need most of all is the virtue that Aristotle called "practical wisdom." Practical wisdom is the moral will to do the right thing and the moral skill to figure out what the right thing is. So Aristotle was very interested in watching how the craftsmen around him worked. And he was impressed at how they would improvise novel solutions to novel problems -- problems that they hadn't anticipated. So one example is he sees these stonemasons working on the Isle of Lesbos, and they need to measure out round columns. Well if you think about it, it's really hard to measure out round columns using a ruler. So what do they do? They fashion a novel solution to the problem. They created a ruler that bends, what we would call these days a tape measure -- a flexible rule, a rule that bends. And Aristotle said, "Hah, they appreciated that sometimes to design rounded columns, you need to bend the rule." And Aristotle said often in dealing with other people, we need to bend the rules. Dealing with other people demands a kind of flexibility that no set of rules can encompass. Wise people know when and how to bend the rules. Wise people know how to improvise. The way my co-author , Ken, and I talk about it, they are kind of like jazz musicians. The rules are like the notes on the page, and that gets you started, but then you dance around the notes on the page, coming up with just the right combination for this particular moment with this particular set of fellow players. So for Aristotle, the kind of rule-bending, rule exception-finding and improvisation that you see in skilled craftsmen is exactly what you need to be a skilled moral craftsman. And in interactions with people, almost all the time, it is this kind of flexibility that is required. A wise person knows when to bend the rules. A wise person knows when to improvise. And most important, a wise person does this improvising and rule-bending in the service of the right aims. If you are a rule-bender and an improviser mostly to serve yourself, what you get is ruthless manipulation of other people. So it matters that you do this wise practice in the service of others and not in the service of yourself. And so the will to do the right thing is just as important as the moral skill of improvisation and exception-finding. Together they comprise practical wisdom, which Aristotle thought was the master virtue. So I'll give you an example of wise practice in action. It's the case of Michael. Michael's a young guy. He had a pretty low-wage job. He was supporting his wife and a child, and the child was going to parochial school. Then he lost his job. He panicked about being able to support his family. One night, he drank a little too much, and he robbed a cab driver -- stole 50 dollars. He robbed him at gunpoint. It was a toy gun. He got caught. He got tried. He got convicted. The Pennsylvania sentencing guidelines required a minimum sentence for a crime like this of two years, 24 months. The judge on the case, Judge Lois Forer thought that this made no sense. He had never committed a crime before. He was a responsible husband and father. He had been faced with desperate circumstances. All this would do is wreck a family. And so she improvised a sentence -- 11 months, and not only that, but release every day to go to work. Spend your night in jail, spend your day holding down a job. He did. He served out his sentence. He made restitution and found himself a new job. And the family was united. And it seemed on the road to some sort of a decent life -- a happy ending to a story involving wise improvisation from a wise judge. But it turned out the prosecutor was not happy that Judge Forer ignored the sentencing guidelines and sort of invented her own, and so he appealed. And he asked for the mandatory minimum sentence for armed robbery. He did after all have a toy gun. The mandatory minimum sentence for armed robbery is five years. He won the appeal. Michael was sentenced to five years in prison. Judge Forer had to follow the law. And by the way, this appeal went through after he had finished serving his sentence, so he was out and working at a job and taking care of his family and he had to go back into jail. Judge Forer did what she was required to do, and then she quit the bench. And Michael disappeared. So that is an example, both of wisdom in practice and the subversion of wisdom by rules that are meant, of course, to make things better. Now consider Ms. Dewey. Ms. Dewey's a teacher in a Texas elementary school. She found herself listening to a consultant one day who was trying to help teachers boost the test scores of the kids, so that the school would reach the elite category in percentage of kids passing big tests. All these schools in Texas compete with one another to achieve these milestones, and there are bonuses and various other treats that come if you beat the other schools. So here was the consultant's advice: first, don't waste your time on kids who are going to pass the test no matter what you do. Second, don't waste your time on kids who can't pass the test no matter what you do. Third, don't waste your time on kids who moved into the district too late for their scores to be counted. Focus all of your time and attention on the kids who are on the bubble, the so-called "bubble kids" -- kids where your intervention can get them just maybe over the line from failing to passing. So Ms. Dewey heard this, and she shook her head in despair while fellow teachers were sort of cheering each other on and nodding approvingly. It's like they were about to go play a football game. For Ms. Dewey, this isn't why she became a teacher. Now Ken and I are not naive, and we understand that you need to have rules. You need to have incentives. People have to make a living. But the problem with relying on rules and incentives is that they demoralize professional activity, and they demoralize professional activity in two senses. First, they demoralize the people who are engaged in the activity. Judge Forer quits, and Ms. Dewey in completely disheartened. And second, they demoralize the activity itself. The very practice is demoralized, and the practitioners are demoralized. It creates people -- when you manipulate incentives to get people to do the right thing -- it creates people who are addicted to incentives. That is to say, it creates people who only do things for incentives. Now the striking thing about this is that psychologists have known this for 30 years. Psychologists have known about the negative consequences of incentivizing everything for 30 years. We know that if you reward kids for drawing pictures, they stop caring about the drawing and care only about the reward. If you reward kids for reading books, they stop caring about what's in the books and only care about how long they are. If you reward teachers for kids' test scores, they stop caring about educating and only care about test preparation. If you were to reward doctors for doing more procedures -- which is the current system -- they would do more. If instead you reward doctors for doing fewer procedures, they will do fewer. What we want, of course, is doctors who do just the right amount of procedures and do the right amount for the right reason -- namely, to serve the welfare of their patients. Psychologists have known this for decades, and it's time for policymakers to start paying attention and listen to psychologists a little bit, instead of economists. And it doesn't have to be this way. We think, Ken and I, that there are real sources of hope. We identify one set of people in all of these practices who we call canny outlaws. These are people who, being forced to operate in a system that demands rule-following and creates incentives, find away around the rules, find a way to subvert the rules. So there are teachers who have these scripts to follow, and they know that if they follow these scripts, the kids will learn nothing. And so what they do is they follow the scripts, but they follow the scripts at double-time and squirrel away little bits of extra time during which they teach in the way that they actually know is effective. So these are little ordinary, everyday heroes, and they're incredibly admirable, but there's no way that they can sustain this kind of activity in the face of a system that either roots them out or grinds them down. So canny outlaws are better than nothing, but it's hard to imagine any canny outlaw sustaining that for an indefinite period of time. More hopeful are people we call system-changers. These are people who are looking not to dodge the system's rules and regulations, but to transform the system, and we talk about several. One in particular is a judge named Robert Russell. And one day he was faced with the case of Gary Pettengill. Pettengill was a 23-year-old vet who had planned to make the army a career, but then he got a severe back injury in Iraq, and that forced him to take a medical discharge. He was married, he had a third kid on the way, he suffered from PTSD, in addition to the bad back, and recurrent nightmares, and he had started using marijuana to ease some of the symptoms. He was only able to get part-time work because of his back, and so he was unable to earn enough to put food on the table and take care of his family. So he started selling marijuana. He was busted in a drug sweep. His family was kicked out of their apartment, and the welfare system was threatening to take away his kids. Under normal sentencing procedures, Judge Russell would have had little choice but to sentence Pettengill to serious jail-time as a drug felon. But Judge Russell did have an alternative. And that's because he was in a special court. He was in a court called the Veterans' Court. In the Veterans' Court -- this was the first of its kind in the United States. Judge Russell created the Veterans' Court. It was a court only for veterans who had broken the law. And he had created it exactly because mandatory sentencing laws were taking the judgment out of judging. No one wanted non-violent offenders -- and especially non-violent offenders who were veterans to boot -- to be thrown into prison. They wanted to do something about what we all know, namely the revolving door of the criminal justice system. And what the Veterans' Court did, was it treated each criminal as an individual, tried to get inside their problems, tried to fashion responses to their crimes that helped them to rehabilitate themselves, and didn't forget about them once the judgment was made. Stayed with them, followed up on them, made sure that they were sticking to whatever plan had been jointly developed to get them over the hump. There are now 22 cities that have Veterans' Courts like this. Why has the idea spread? Well, one reason is that Judge Russell has now seen 108 vets in his Veterans' Court as of February of this year, and out of 108, guess how many have gone back through the revolving door of justice into prison. None. None. Anyone would glom onto a criminal justice system that has this kind of a record. So here's is a system-changer, and it seems to be catching. There's a banker who created a for-profit community bank that encouraged bankers -- I know this is hard to believe -- encouraged bankers who worked there to do well by doing good for their low-income clients. The bank helped finance the rebuilding of what was otherwise a dying community. Though their loan recipients were high-risk by ordinary standards, the default rate was extremely low. The bank was profitable. The bankers stayed with their loan recipients. They didn't make loans and then sell the loans. They serviced the loans. They made sure that their loan recipients were staying up with their payments. Banking hasn't always been the way we read about it now in the newspapers. Even Goldman Sachs once used to serve clients, before it turned into an institution that serves only itself. Banking wasn't always this way, and it doesn't have to be this way. So there are examples like this in medicine -- doctors at Harvard who are trying to transform medical education, so that you don't get a kind of ethical erosion and loss of empathy, which characterizes most medical students in the course of their medical training. And the way they do it is to give third-year medical students patients who they follow for an entire year. So the patients are not organ systems, and they're not diseases; they're people, people with lives. And in order to be an effective doctor, you need to treat people who have lives and not just disease. In addition to which there's an enormous amount of back and forth, mentoring of one student by another, of all the students by the doctors, and the result is a generation -- we hope -- of doctors who do have time for the people they treat. We'll see. So there are lots of examples like this that we talk about. Each of them shows that it is possible to build on and nurture character and keep a profession true to its proper mission -- what Aristotle would have called its proper telos. And Ken and I believe that this is what practitioners actually want. People want to be allowed to be virtuous. They want to have permission to do the right thing. They don't want to feel like they need to take a shower to get the moral grime off their bodies everyday when they come home from work. Aristotle thought that practical wisdom was the key to happiness, and he was right. There's now a lot of research being done in psychology on what makes people happy, and the two things that jump out in study after study -- I know this will come as a shock to all of you -- the two things that matter most to happiness are love and work. Love: managing successfully relations with the people who are close to you and with the communities of which you are a part. Work: engaging in activities that are meaningful and satisfying. If you have that, good close relations with other people, work that's meaningful and fulfilling, you don't much need anything else. Well, to love well and to work well, you need wisdom. Rules and incentives don't tell you how to be a good friend, how to be a good parent, how to be a good spouse, or how to be a good doctor or a good lawyer or a good teacher. Rules and incentives are no substitutes for wisdom. Indeed, we argue, there is no substitute for wisdom. And so practical wisdom does not require heroic acts of self-sacrifice on the part of practitioners. In giving us the will and the skill to do the right thing -- to do right by others -- practical wisdom also gives us the will and the skill to do right by ourselves. Thanks. (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)

Just a few minutes ago, I took this picture about 10 blocks from here. This is the Grand Cafe here in Oxford. I took this picture because this turns out to be the first coffeehouse to open in England in 1650. That's its great claim to fame, and I wanted to show it to you, not because I want to give you the kind of Starbucks tour of historic England, but rather because the English coffeehouse was crucial to the development and spread of one of the great intellectual flowerings of the last 500 years, what we now call the Enlightenment. And the coffeehouse played such a big role in the birth of the Enlightenment, in part, because of what people were drinking there. Because, before the spread of coffee and tea through British culture, what people drank -- both elite and mass folks drank -- day-in and day-out, from dawn until dusk was alcohol. Alcohol was the daytime beverage of choice. You would drink a little beer with breakfast and have a little wine at lunch, a little gin -- particularly around 1650 -- and top it off with a little beer and wine at the end of the day. That was the healthy choice -- right -- because the water wasn't safe to drink. And so, effectively until the rise of the coffeehouse, you had an entire population that was effectively drunk all day. And you can imagine what that would be like, right, in your own life -- and I know this is true of some of you -- if you were drinking all day, and then you switched from a depressant to a stimulant in your life, you would have better ideas. You would be sharper and more alert. And so it's not an accident that a great flowering of innovation happened as England switched to tea and coffee. But the other thing that makes the coffeehouse important is the architecture of the space. It was a space where people would get together from different backgrounds, different fields of expertise, and share. It was a space, as Matt Ridley talked about, where ideas could have sex. This was their conjugal bed, in a sense -- ideas would get together there. And an astonishing number of innovations from this period have a coffeehouse somewhere in their story. I've been spending a lot of time thinking about coffeehouses for the last five years, because I've been kind of on this quest to investigate this question of where good ideas come from. What are the environments that lead to unusual levels of innovation, unusual levels of creativity? What's the kind of environmental -- what is the space of creativity? And what I've done is I've looked at both environments like the coffeehouse; I've looked at media environments, like the world wide web, that have been extraordinarily innovative; I've gone back to the history of the first cities; I've even gone to biological environments, like coral reefs and rainforests, that involve unusual levels of biological innovation; and what I've been looking for is shared patterns, kind of signature behavior that shows up again and again in all of these environments. Are there recurring patterns that we can learn from, that we can take and kind of apply to our own lives, or our own organizations, or our own environments to make them more creative and innovative? And I think I've found a few. But what you have to do to make sense of this and to really understand these principles is you have to do away with a lot of the way in which our conventional metaphors and language steers us towards certain concepts of idea-creation. We have this very rich vocabulary to describe moments of inspiration. We have the kind of the flash of insight, the stroke of insight, we have epiphanies, we have "eureka!" moments, we have the lightbulb moments, right? All of these concepts, as kind of rhetorically florid as they are, share this basic assumption, which is that an idea is a single thing, it's something that happens often in a wonderful illuminating moment. But in fact, what I would argue and what you really need to kind of begin with is this idea that an idea is a network on the most elemental level. I mean, this is what is happening inside your brain. An idea -- a new idea -- is a new network of neurons firing in sync with each other inside your brain. It's a new configuration that has never formed before. And the question is: how do you get your brain into environments where these new networks are going to be more likely to form? And it turns out that, in fact, the kind of network patterns of the outside world mimic a lot of the network patterns of the internal world of the human brain. So the metaphor I'd like the use I can take from a story of a great idea that's quite recent -- a lot more recent than the 1650s. A wonderful guy named Timothy Prestero, who has a company called ... an organization called Design That Matters. They decided to tackle this really pressing problem of, you know, the terrible problems we have with infant mortality rates in the developing world. One of the things that's very frustrating about this is that we know, by getting modern neonatal incubators into any context, if we can keep premature babies warm, basically -- it's very simple -- we can halve infant mortality rates in those environments. So, the technology is there. These are standard in all the industrialized worlds. The problem is, if you buy a $40,000 incubator, and you send it off to a mid-sized village in Africa, it will work great for a year or two years, and then something will go wrong and it will break, and it will remain broken forever, because you don't have a whole system of spare parts, and you don't have the on-the-ground expertise to fix this $40,000 piece of equipment. And so you end up having this problem where you spend all this money getting aid and all these advanced electronics to these countries, and then it ends up being useless. So what Prestero and his team decided to do is to look around and see: what are the abundant resources in these developing world contexts? And what they noticed was they don't have a lot of DVRs, they don't have a lot of microwaves, but they seem to do a pretty good job of keeping their cars on the road. There's a Toyota Forerunner on the street in all these places. They seem to have the expertise to keep cars working. So they started to think, "Could we build a neonatal incubator that's built entirely out of automobile parts?" And this is what they ended up coming with. It's called a "neonurture device." From the outside, it looks like a normal little thing you'd find in a modern, Western hospital. In the inside, it's all car parts. It's got a fan, it's got headlights for warmth, it's got door chimes for alarm -- it runs off a car battery. And so all you need is the spare parts from your Toyota and the ability to fix a headlight, and you can repair this thing. Now, that's a great idea, but what I'd like to say is that, in fact, this is a great metaphor for the way that ideas happen. We like to think our breakthrough ideas, you know, are like that $40,000, brand new incubator, state-of-the-art technology, but more often than not, they're cobbled together from whatever parts that happen to be around nearby. We take ideas from other people, from people we've learned from, from people we run into in the coffee shop, and we stitch them together into new forms and we create something new. That's really where innovation happens. And that means that we have to change some of our models of what innovation and deep thinking really looks like, right. I mean, this is one vision of it. Another is Newton and the apple, when Newton was at Cambridge. This is a statue from Oxford. You know, you're sitting there thinking a deep thought, and the apple falls from the tree, and you have the theory of gravity. In fact, the spaces that have historically led to innovation tend to look like this, right. This is Hogarth's famous painting of a kind of political dinner at a tavern, but this is what the coffee shops looked like back then. This is the kind of chaotic environment where ideas were likely to come together, where people were likely to have new, interesting, unpredictable collisions -- people from different backgrounds. So, if we're trying to build organizations that are more innovative, we have to build spaces that -- strangely enough -- look a little bit more like this. This is what your office should look like, is part of my message here. And one of the problems with this is that people are actually -- when you research this field -- people are notoriously unreliable, when they actually kind of self-report on where they have their own good ideas, or their history of their best ideas. And a few years ago, a wonderful researcher named Kevin Dunbar decided to go around and basically do the Big Brother approach to figuring out where good ideas come from. He went to a bunch of science labs around the world and videotaped everyone as they were doing every little bit of their job. So when they were sitting in front of the microscope, when they were talking to their colleague at the water cooler, and all these things. And he recorded all of these conversations and tried to figure out where the most important ideas, where they happened. And when we think about the classic image of the scientist in the lab, we have this image -- you know, they're pouring over the microscope, and they see something in the tissue sample. And "oh, eureka," they've got the idea. What happened actually when Dunbar kind of looked at the tape is that, in fact, almost all of the important breakthrough ideas did not happen alone in the lab, in front of the microscope. They happened at the conference table at the weekly lab meeting, when everybody got together and shared their kind of latest data and findings, oftentimes when people shared the mistakes they were having, the error, the noise in the signal they were discovering. And something about that environment -- and I've started calling it the "liquid network," where you have lots of different ideas that are together, different backgrounds, different interests, jostling with each other, bouncing off each other -- that environment is, in fact, the environment that leads to innovation. The other problem that people have is they like to condense their stories of innovation down to kind of shorter time frames. So they want to tell the story of the "eureka!" moment. They want to say, "There I was, I was standing there and I had it all suddenly clear in my head." But in fact, if you go back and look at the historical record, it turns out that a lot of important ideas have very long incubation periods -- I call this the "slow hunch." We've heard a lot recently about hunch and instinct and blink-like sudden moments of clarity, but in fact, a lot of great ideas linger on, sometimes for decades, in the back of people's minds. They have a feeling that there's an interesting problem, but they don't quite have the tools yet to discover them. They spend all this time working on certain problems, but there's another thing lingering there that they're interested in, but they can't quite solve. Darwin is a great example of this. Darwin himself, in his autobiography, tells the story of coming up with the idea for natural selection as a classic "eureka!" moment. He's in his study, it's October of 1838, and he's reading Malthus, actually, on population. And all of a sudden, the basic algorithm of natural selection kind of pops into his head and he says, "Ah, at last, I had a theory with which to work." That's in his autobiography. About a decade or two ago, a wonderful scholar named Howard Gruber went back and looked at Darwin's notebooks from this period. And Darwin kept these copious notebooks where he wrote down every little idea he had, every little hunch. And what Gruber found was that Darwin had the full theory of natural selection for months and months and months before he had his alleged epiphany, reading Malthus in October of 1838. There are passages where you can read it, and you think you're reading from a Darwin textbook, from the period before he has this epiphany. And so what you realize is that Darwin, in a sense, had the idea, he had the concept, but was unable of fully thinking it yet. And that is actually how great ideas often happen; they fade into view over long periods of time. Now the challenge for all of us is: how do you create environments that allow these ideas to have this kind of long half-life, right? It's hard to go to your boss and say, "I have an excellent idea for our organization. It will be useful in 2020. Could you just give me some time to do that?" Now a couple of companies -- like Google -- they have innovation time off, 20 percent time, where, in a sense, those are hunch-cultivating mechanisms in an organization. But that's a key thing. And the other thing is to allow those hunches to connect with other people's hunches; that's what often happens. You have half of an idea, somebody else has the other half, and if you're in the right environment, they turn into something larger than the sum of their parts. So, in a sense, we often talk about the value of protecting intellectual property, you know, building barricades, having secretive R&D labs, patenting everything that we have, so that those ideas will remain valuable, and people will be incentivized to come up with more ideas, and the culture will be more innovative. But I think there's a case to be made that we should spend at least as much time, if not more, valuing the premise of connecting ideas and not just protecting them. And I'll leave you with this story, which I think captures a lot of these values, and it's just wonderful kind of tale of innovation and how it happens in unlikely ways. It's October of 1957, and Sputnik has just launched, and we're in Laurel Maryland, at the applied physics lab associated with Johns Hopkins University. And it's Monday morning, and the news has just broken about this satellite that's now orbiting the planet. And of course, this is nerd heaven, right? There are all these physics geeks who are there thinking, "Oh my gosh! This is incredible. I can't believe this has happened." And two of them, two 20-something researchers at the APL are there at the cafeteria table having an informal conversation with a bunch of their colleagues. And these two guys are named Guier and Weiffenbach. And they start talking, and one of them says, "Hey, has anybody tried to listen for this thing? There's this, you know, man-made satellite up there in outer space that's obviously broadcasting some kind of signal. We could probably hear it, if we tune in." And so they ask around to a couple of their colleagues, and everybody's like, "No, I hadn't thought of doing that. That's an interesting idea." And it turns out Weiffenbach is kind of an expert in microwave reception, and he's got a little antennae set up with an amplifier in his office. And so Guier and Weiffenbach go back to Weiffenbach's office, and they start kind of noodling around -- hacking, as we might call it now. And after a couple of hours, they actually start picking up the signal, because the Soviets made Sputnik very easy to track. It was right at 20 MHz, so you could pick it up really easily, because they were afraid that people would think it was a hoax, basically. So they made it really easy to find it. So these two guys are sitting there listening to this signal, and people start kind of coming into the office and saying, "Wow, that's pretty cool. Can I hear? Wow, that's great." And before long, they think, "Well jeez, this is kind of historic. We may be the first people in the United States to be listening to this. We should record it." And so they bring in this big, clunky analog tape recorder and they start recording these little bleep, bleeps. And they start writing the kind of date stamp, time stamps for each little bleep that they record. And they they start thinking, "Well gosh, you know, we're noticing small little frequency variations here. We could probably calculate the speed that the satellite is traveling, if we do a little basic math here using the Doppler effect." And then they played around with it a little bit more, and they talked to a couple of their colleagues who had other kind of specialties. And they said, "Jeez, you know, we think we could actually take a look at the slope of the Doppler effect to figure out the points at which the satellite is closest to our antennae and the points at which it's farthest away. That's pretty cool." And eventually, they get permission -- this is all a little side project that hadn't been officially part of their job description. They get permission to use the new, you know, UNIVAC computer that takes up an entire room that they'd just gotten at the APL. They run some more of the numbers, and at the end of about three or four weeks, turns out they have mapped the exact trajectory of this satellite around the Earth, just from listening to this one little signal, going off on this little side hunch that they'd been inspired to do over lunch one morning. A couple weeks later their boss, Frank McClure, pulls them into the room and says, "Hey, you guys, I have to ask you something about that project you were working on. You've figured out an unknown location of a satellite orbiting the planet from a known location on the ground. Could you go the other way? Could you figure out an unknown location on the ground, if you knew the location of the satellite?" And they thought about it and they said, "Well, I guess maybe you could. Let's run the numbers here." So they went back, and they thought about it. And they came back and said, "Actually, it'll be easier." And he said, "Oh, that's great. Because see, I have these new nuclear submarines that I'm building. And it's really hard to figure out how to get your missile so that it will land right on top of Moscow, if you don't know where the submarine is in the middle of the Pacific Ocean. So we're thinking, we could throw up a bunch of satellites and use it to track our submarines and figure out their location in the middle of the ocean. Could you work on that problem?" And that's how GPS was born. 30 years later, Ronald Reagan actually opened it up and made it an open platform that anybody could kind of build upon and anybody could come along and build new technology that would create and innovate on top of this open platform, left it open for anyone to do pretty much anything they wanted with it. And now, I guarantee you certainly half of this room, if not more, has a device sitting in their pocket right now that is talking to one of these satellites in outer space. And I bet you one of you, if not more, has used said device and said satellite system to locate a nearby coffeehouse somewhere in the last -- (Laughter) in the last day or last week, right? (Applause) And that, I think, is a great case study, a great lesson in the power, the marvelous, kind of unplanned emergent, unpredictable power of open innovative systems. When you build them right, they will be led to completely new directions that the creators never even dreamed of. I mean, here you have these guys who basically thought they were just following this hunch, this little passion that had developed, then they thought they were fighting the Cold War, and then it turns out they're just helping somebody find a soy latte. (Laughter) That is how innovation happens. Chance favors the connected mind. Thank you very much. (Applause)

I have spent the past few years putting myself into situations that are usually very difficult and at the same time somewhat dangerous. I went to prison -- difficult. I worked in a coal mine -- dangerous. I filmed in war zones -- difficult and dangerous. And I spent 30 days eating nothing but this -- fun in the beginning, little difficult in the middle, very dangerous in the end. In fact, most of my career, I've been immersing myself into seemingly horrible situations for the whole goal of trying to examine societal issues in a way that make them engaging, that make them interesting, that hopefully break them down in a way that make them entertaining and accessible to an audience. So when I knew I was coming here to do a TED Talk that was going to look at the world of branding and sponsorship, I knew I would want to do something a little different. So as some of you may or may not have heard, a couple weeks ago, I took out an ad on eBay. I sent out some Facebook messages, some Twitter messages, and I gave people the opportunity to buy the naming rights to my 2011 TED Talk. (Laughter) That's right, some lucky individual, corporation, for-profit or non-profit, was going to get the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity -- because I'm sure Chris Anderson will never let it happen again -- (Laughter) to buy the naming rights to the talk you're watching right now, that at the time didn't have a title, didn't really have a lot of content and didn't really give much hint as to what the subject matter would actually be. So what you were getting was this: Your name here presents: My TED Talk that you have no idea what the subject is and, depending on the content, could ultimately blow up in your face, especially if I make you or your company look stupid for doing it. But that being said, it's a very good media opportunity. (Laughter) You know how many people watch these TED Talks? It's a lot. That's just a working title, by the way. (Laughter) So even with that caveat, I knew that someone would buy the naming rights. Now if you'd have asked me that a year ago, I wouldn't have been able to tell you that with any certainty. But in the new project that I'm working on, my new film, we examine the world of marketing, advertising. And as I said earlier, I put myself in some pretty horrible situations over the years, but nothing could prepare me, nothing could ready me, for anything as difficult or as dangerous as going into the rooms with these guys. (Laughter) You see, I had this idea for a movie. (Video) Morgan Spurlock: What I want to do is make a film all about product placement, marketing and advertising, where the entire film is funded by product placement, marketing and advertising. So the movie will be called "The Greatest Movie Ever Sold." So what happens in "The Greatest Movie Ever Sold," is that everything from top to bottom, from start to finish, is branded from beginning to end -- from the above-the-title sponsor that you'll see in the movie, which is brand X. Now this brand, the Qualcomm Stadium, the Staples Center ... these people will be married to the film in perpetuity -- forever. And so the film explores this whole idea -- (Michael Kassan: It's redundant.) It's what? (MK: It's redundant.) In perpetuity, forever? I'm a redundant person. (MK: I'm just saying.) That was more for emphasis. It was, "In perpetuity. Forever." But not only are we going to have the brand X title sponsor, but we're going to make sure we sell out every category we can in the film. So maybe we sell a shoe and it becomes the greatest shoe you ever wore ... the greatest car you ever drove from "The Greatest Movie Ever Sold," the greatest drink you've ever had, courtesy of "The Greatest Movie Ever Sold." Xavier Kochhar: So the idea is, beyond just showing that brands are a part of your life, but actually get them to finance the film? (MS: Get them to finance the film.) MS: And actually we show the whole process of how does it work. The goal of this whole film is transparency. You're going to see the whole thing take place in this movie. So that's the whole concept, the whole film, start to finish. And I would love for CEG to help make it happen. Robert Friedman: You know it's funny, because when I first hear it, it is the ultimate respect for an audience. Guy: I don't know how receptive people are going to be to it, though. XK: Do you have a perspective -- I don't want to use "angle" because that has a negative connotation -- but do you know how this is going to play out? (MS: No idea.) David Cohn: How much money does it take to do this? MS: 1.5 million. (DC: Okay.) John Kamen: I think that you're going to have a hard time meeting with them, but I think it's certainly worth pursuing a couple big, really obvious brands. XK: Who knows, maybe by the time your film comes out, we look like a bunch of blithering idiots. MS: What do you think the response is going to be? Stuart Ruderfer: The responses mostly will be "no." MS: But is it a tough sell because of the film or a tough sell because of me? JK: Both. MS: ... Meaning not so optimistic. So, sir, can you help me? I need help. MK: I can help you. MS: Okay. (MK: Good.) Awesome. MK: We've gotta figure out which brands. MS: Yeah. (MK: That's the challenge.) When you look at the people you deal with .. MK: We've got some places we can go. (MS: Okay.) Turn the camera off. MS: I thought "Turn the camera off" meant, "Let's have an off-the-record conversation." Turns out it really means, "We want nothing to do with your movie." MS: And just like that, one by one, all of these companies suddenly disappeared. None of them wanted anything to do with this movie. I was amazed. They wanted absolutely nothing to do with this project. And I was blown away, because I thought the whole concept, the idea of advertising, was to get your product out in front of as many people as possible, to get as many people to see it as possible. Especially in today's world, this intersection of new media and old media and the fractured media landscape, isn't the idea to get that new buzz-worthy delivery vehicle that's going to get that message to the masses? No, that's what I thought. But the problem was, you see, my idea had one fatal flaw, and that flaw was this. Actually no, that was not the flaw whatsoever. That wouldn't have been a problem at all. This would have been fine. But what this image represents was the problem. See, when you do a Google image search for transparency, this is --- (Laughter) (Applause) This is one of the first images that comes up. So I like the way you roll, Sergey Brin. No. (Laughter) This is was the problem: transparency -- free from pretense or deceit; easily detected or seen through; readily understood; characterized by visibility or accessibility of information, especially concerning business practices -- that last line being probably the biggest problem. You see, we hear a lot about transparency these days. Our politicians say it, our president says it, even our CEO's say it. But suddenly when it comes down to becoming a reality, something suddenly changes. But why? Well, transparency is scary -- (Roar) like that odd, still-screaming bear. (Laughter) It's unpredictable -- (Music) (Laughter) like this odd country road. And it's also very risky. (Laughter) What else is risky? Eating an entire bowl of Cool Whip. (Laughter) That's very risky. Now when I started talking to companies and telling them that we wanted to tell this story, and they said, "No, we want you to tell a story. We want you to tell a story, but we just want to tell our story." See, when I was a kid and my father would catch me in some sort of a lie -- and there he is giving me the look he often gave me -- he would say, "Son, there's three sides to every story. There's your story, there's my story and there's the real story." Now you see, with this film, we wanted to tell the real story. But with only one company, one agency willing to help me -- and that's only because I knew John Bond and Richard Kirshenbaum for years -- I realized that I would have to go on my own, I'd have to cut out the middleman and go to the companies myself with all of my team. So what you suddenly started to realize -- or what I started to realize -- is that when you started having conversations with these companies, the idea of understanding your brand is a universal problem. (Video) MS: I have friends who make great big, giant Hollywood films, and I have friends who make little independent films like I make. And the friends of mine who make big, giant Hollywood movies say the reason their films are so successful is because of the brand partners that they have. And then my friends who make small independent films say, "Well, how are we supposed to compete with these big, giant Hollywood movies?" And the movie is called "The Greatest Movie Ever Sold." So how specifically will we see Ban in the film? Any time I'm ready to go, any time I open up my medicine cabinet, you will see Ban deodorant. While anytime I do an interview with someone, I can say, "Are you fresh enough for this interview? Are you ready? You look a little nervous. I want to help you calm down. So maybe you should put some one before the interview." So we'll offer one of these fabulous scents. Whether it's a "Floral Fusion" or a "Paradise Winds," they'll have their chance. We will have them geared for both male or female -- solid, roll-on or stick, whatever it may be. That's the two-cent tour. So now I can answer any of your questions and give you the five-cent tour. Karen Frank: We are a smaller brand. Much like you talked about being a smaller movie, we're very much a challenger brand. So we don't have the budgets that other brands have. So doing things like this -- you know, remind people about Ban -- is kind of why were interested in it. MS: What are the words that you would use to describe Ban? Ban is blank. KF: That's a great question. (Laughter) Woman: Superior technology. MS: Technology's not the way you want to describe something somebody's putting in their armpit. Man: We talk about bold, fresh. I think "fresh" is a great word that really spins this category into the positive, versus "fights odor and wetness." It keeps you fresh. How do we keep you fresher longer -- better freshness, more freshness, three times fresher. Things like that that are more of that positive benefit. MS: And that's a multi-million dollar corporation. What about me? What about a regular guy? I need to go talk to the man on the street, the people who are like me, the regular Joes. They need to tell me about my brand. (Video) MS: How would you guys describe your brand? Man: Um, my brand? I don't know. I like really nice clothes. Woman: 80's revival meets skater-punk, unless it's laundry day. MS: All right, what is brand Gerry? Gerry: Unique. (MS: Unique.) Man: I guess what kind of genre, style I am would be like dark glamor. I like a lot of black colors, a lot of grays and stuff like that. But usually I have an accessory, like sunglasses, or I like crystal and things like that too. Woman: If Dan were a brand, he might be a classic convertible Mercedes Benz. Man 2: The brand that I am is, I would call it casual fly. Woman 2: Part hippie, part yogi, part Brooklyn girl -- I don't know. Man 3: I'm the pet guy. I sell pet toys all over the country, all over the world. So I guess that's my brand. In my warped little industry, that's my brand. Man 4: My brand is FedEx because I deliver the goods. Man 5: Failed writer-alcoholic brand. Is that something? Lawyer: I'm a lawyer brand. Tom: I'm Tom. MS: Well we can't all be brand Tom, but I do often find myself at the intersection of dark glamor and casual fly. (Laughter) And what I realized is I needed an expert. I needed somebody who could get inside my head, somebody who could really help me understand what they call your "brand personality." And so I found a company called Olson Zaltman in Pittsburg. They've helped companies like Nestle, Febreze, Hallmark discover that brand personality. If they could do it for them, surely they could do it for me. (Video) Abigail: You brought your pictures, right? MS: I did. The very first picture is a picture of my family. A: So tell me a little bit how it relates to your thoughts and feelings about who you are. MS: These are the people who shape the way I look at the world. A: Tell me about this world. MS: This world? I think your world is the world that you live in -- like people who are around you, your friends, your family, the way you live your life, the job you do. All those things stemmed and started from one place, and for me they stemmed and started with my family in West Virginia. A: What's the next one you want to talk about? MS: The next one: This was the best day ever. A: How does this relate to your thoughts and feelings about who you are? MS: It's like, who do I want to be? I like things that are different. I like things that are weird. I like weird things. A: Tell me about the "why" phase -- what does that do for us? What is the machete? What pupa stage are you in now? Why is it important to reboot? What does the red represent? Tell me a little bit about that part. ... A little more about you that is not who you are. What are some other metamorphoses that you've had? ... Doesn't have to be fear. What kind of roller coaster are you on? MS: EEEEEE! (A: Thank you.) No, thank you. A: Thanks for you patience. (MS: Great job.) A: Yeah. (MS: Thanks a lot.) All right. MS: Yeah, I don't know what's going to come of this. There was a whole lot of crazy going on in there. Lindsay Zaltman: The first thing we saw was this idea that you had two distinct, but complementary sides to your brand personality -- the Morgan Spurlock brand is a mindful/play brand. Those are juxtaposed very nicely together. And I think there's almost a paradox with those. And I think some companies will just focus on one of their strengths or the other instead of focusing on both. Most companies tend to -- and it's human nature -- to avoid things that they're not sure of, avoid fear, those elements, and you really embrace those, and you actually turn them into positives for you, and it's a neat thing to see. What other brands are like that? The first on here is the classic, Apple. And you can see here too, Target, Wii, Mini from the Mini Coopers, and JetBlue. Now there's playful brands and mindful brands, those things that have come and gone, but a playful, mindful brand is a pretty powerful thing. MS: A playful, mindful brand. What is your brand? If somebody asked you to describe your brand identity, your brand personality, what would you be? Are you an up attribute? Are you something that gets the blood flowing? Or are you more of a down attribute? Are you something that's a little more calm, reserved, conservative? Up attributes are things like being playful, being fresh like the Fresh Prince, contemporary, adventurous, edgy or daring like Errol Flynn, nimble or agile, profane, domineering, magical or mystical like Gandalf. Or are you more of a down attribute? Are you mindful, sophisticated like 007? Are you established, traditional, nurturing, protective, empathetic like the Oprah? Are you reliable, stable, familiar, safe, secure, sacred, contemplative or wise like the Dalai Lama or Yoda? Over the course of this film, we had 500-plus companies who were up and down companies saying, "no," they didn't want any part of this project. They wanted nothing to do with this film, mainly because they would have no control, they would have no control over the final product. But we did get 17 brand partners who were willing to relinquish that control, who wanted to be in business with someone as mindful and as playful as myself and who ultimately empowered us to tell stories that normally we wouldn't be able to tell -- stories that an advertiser would normally never get behind. They enabled us to tell the story about neuromarketing, as we got into telling the story in this film about how now they're using MRI's to target the desire centers of your brain for both commercials as well as movie marketing. We went to San Paulo where they have banned outdoor advertising. In the entire city for the past five years, there's no billboards, there's no posters, there's no fliers, nothing. (Applause) And we went to school districts where now companies are making their way into cash-strapped schools all across America. What's incredible for me is the projects that I've gotten the most feedback out of, or I've had the most success in, are ones where I've interacted with things directly. And that's what these brands did. They cut out the middleman, they cut out their agencies and said, "Maybe these agencies don't have my best interest in mind. I'm going to deal directly with the artist. I'm going to work with him to create something different, something that's going to get people thinking, that's going to challenge the way we look at the world." And how has that been for them? Has it been successful? Well, since the film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, let's take a look. According to Burrelles, the movie premiered in January, and since then -- and this isn't even the whole thing -- we've had 900 million media impressions for this film. That's literally covering just like a two and a half-week period. That's only online -- no print, no TV. The film hasn't even been distributed yet. It's not even online. It's not even streaming. It's not even been out into other foreign countries yet. So ultimately, this film has already started to gain a lot of momentum. And not bad for a project that almost every ad agency we talked to advised their clients not to take part. What I always believe is that if you take chances, if you take risks, that in those risks will come opportunity. I believe that when you push people away from that, you're pushing them more towards failure. I believe that when you train your employees to be risk averse, then you're preparing your whole company to be reward challenged. I feel like that what has to happen moving forward is we need to encourage people to take risks. We need to encourage people to not be afraid of opportunities that may scare them. Ultimately, moving forward, I think we have to embrace fear. We've got to put that bear in a cage. (Laughter) Embrace fear. Embrace risk. One big spoonful at a time, we have to embrace risk. And ultimately, we have to embrace transparency. Today, more than ever, a little honesty is going to go a long way. And that being said, through honesty and transparency, my entire talk, "Embrace Transparency," has been brought to you by my good friends at EMC, who for $7,100 bought the naming rights on eBay. (Applause) EMC: Turning big data into big opportunity for organizations all over the world. EMC presents: "Embrace Transparency." Thank you very much, guys. (Applause) June Cohen: So, Morgan, in the name of transparency, what exactly happened to that $7,100? MS: That is a fantastic question. I have in my pocket a check made out to the parent organization to the TED organization, the Sapling Foundation -- a check for $7,100 to be applied toward my attendance for next year's TED. (Laughter) (Applause)

I have spent the past few years putting myself into situations that are usually very difficult and at the same time somewhat dangerous. I went to prison -- difficult. I worked in a coal mine -- dangerous. I filmed in war zones -- difficult and dangerous. And I spent 30 days eating nothing but this -- fun in the beginning, little difficult in the middle, very dangerous in the end. In fact, most of my career, I've been immersing myself into seemingly horrible situations for the whole goal of trying to examine societal issues in a way that make them engaging, that make them interesting, that hopefully break them down in a way that make them entertaining and accessible to an audience. So when I knew I was coming here to do a TED Talk that was going to look at the world of branding and sponsorship, I knew I would want to do something a little different. So as some of you may or may not have heard, a couple weeks ago, I took out an ad on eBay. I sent out some Facebook messages, some Twitter messages, and I gave people the opportunity to buy the naming rights to my 2011 TED Talk. (Laughter) That's right, some lucky individual, corporation, for-profit or non-profit, was going to get the once-in-a-lifetime opportunity -- because I'm sure Chris Anderson will never let it happen again -- (Laughter) to buy the naming rights to the talk you're watching right now, that at the time didn't have a title, didn't really have a lot of content and didn't really give much hint as to what the subject matter would actually be. So what you were getting was this: Your name here presents: My TED Talk that you have no idea what the subject is and, depending on the content, could ultimately blow up in your face, especially if I make you or your company look stupid for doing it. But that being said, it's a very good media opportunity. (Laughter) You know how many people watch these TED Talks? It's a lot. That's just a working title, by the way. (Laughter) So even with that caveat, I knew that someone would buy the naming rights. Now if you'd have asked me that a year ago, I wouldn't have been able to tell you that with any certainty. But in the new project that I'm working on, my new film, we examine the world of marketing, advertising. And as I said earlier, I put myself in some pretty horrible situations over the years, but nothing could prepare me, nothing could ready me, for anything as difficult or as dangerous as going into the rooms with these guys. (Laughter) You see, I had this idea for a movie. (Video) Morgan Spurlock: What I want to do is make a film all about product placement, marketing and advertising, where the entire film is funded by product placement, marketing and advertising. So the movie will be called "The Greatest Movie Ever Sold." So what happens in "The Greatest Movie Ever Sold," is that everything from top to bottom, from start to finish, is branded from beginning to end -- from the above-the-title sponsor that you'll see in the movie, which is brand X. Now this brand, the Qualcomm Stadium, the Staples Center ... these people will be married to the film in perpetuity -- forever. And so the film explores this whole idea -- (Michael Kassan: It's redundant.) It's what? (MK: It's redundant.) In perpetuity, forever? I'm a redundant person. (MK: I'm just saying.) That was more for emphasis. It was, "In perpetuity. Forever." But not only are we going to have the brand X title sponsor, but we're going to make sure we sell out every category we can in the film. So maybe we sell a shoe and it becomes the greatest shoe you ever wore ... the greatest car you ever drove from "The Greatest Movie Ever Sold," the greatest drink you've ever had, courtesy of "The Greatest Movie Ever Sold." Xavier Kochhar: So the idea is, beyond just showing that brands are a part of your life, but actually get them to finance the film? (MS: Get them to finance the film.) MS: And actually we show the whole process of how does it work. The goal of this whole film is transparency. You're going to see the whole thing take place in this movie. So that's the whole concept, the whole film, start to finish. And I would love for CEG to help make it happen. Robert Friedman: You know it's funny, because when I first hear it, it is the ultimate respect for an audience. Guy: I don't know how receptive people are going to be to it, though. XK: Do you have a perspective -- I don't want to use "angle" because that has a negative connotation -- but do you know how this is going to play out? (MS: No idea.) David Cohn: How much money does it take to do this? MS: 1.5 million. (DC: Okay.) John Kamen: I think that you're going to have a hard time meeting with them, but I think it's certainly worth pursuing a couple big, really obvious brands. XK: Who knows, maybe by the time your film comes out, we look like a bunch of blithering idiots. MS: What do you think the response is going to be? Stuart Ruderfer: The responses mostly will be "no." MS: But is it a tough sell because of the film or a tough sell because of me? JK: Both. MS: ... Meaning not so optimistic. So, sir, can you help me? I need help. MK: I can help you. MS: Okay. (MK: Good.) Awesome. MK: We've gotta figure out which brands. MS: Yeah. (MK: That's the challenge.) When you look at the people you deal with .. MK: We've got some places we can go. (MS: Okay.) Turn the camera off. MS: I thought "Turn the camera off" meant, "Let's have an off-the-record conversation." Turns out it really means, "We want nothing to do with your movie." MS: And just like that, one by one, all of these companies suddenly disappeared. None of them wanted anything to do with this movie. I was amazed. They wanted absolutely nothing to do with this project. And I was blown away, because I thought the whole concept, the idea of advertising, was to get your product out in front of as many people as possible, to get as many people to see it as possible. Especially in today's world, this intersection of new media and old media and the fractured media landscape, isn't the idea to get that new buzz-worthy delivery vehicle that's going to get that message to the masses? No, that's what I thought. But the problem was, you see, my idea had one fatal flaw, and that flaw was this. Actually no, that was not the flaw whatsoever. That wouldn't have been a problem at all. This would have been fine. But what this image represents was the problem. See, when you do a Google image search for transparency, this is --- (Laughter) (Applause) This is one of the first images that comes up. So I like the way you roll, Sergey Brin. No. (Laughter) This is was the problem: transparency -- free from pretense or deceit; easily detected or seen through; readily understood; characterized by visibility or accessibility of information, especially concerning business practices -- that last line being probably the biggest problem. You see, we hear a lot about transparency these days. Our politicians say it, our president says it, even our CEO's say it. But suddenly when it comes down to becoming a reality, something suddenly changes. But why? Well, transparency is scary -- (Roar) like that odd, still-screaming bear. (Laughter) It's unpredictable -- (Music) (Laughter) like this odd country road. And it's also very risky. (Laughter) What else is risky? Eating an entire bowl of Cool Whip. (Laughter) That's very risky. Now when I started talking to companies and telling them that we wanted to tell this story, and they said, "No, we want you to tell a story. We want you to tell a story, but we just want to tell our story." See, when I was a kid and my father would catch me in some sort of a lie -- and there he is giving me the look he often gave me -- he would say, "Son, there's three sides to every story. There's your story, there's my story and there's the real story." Now you see, with this film, we wanted to tell the real story. But with only one company, one agency willing to help me -- and that's only because I knew John Bond and Richard Kirshenbaum for years -- I realized that I would have to go on my own, I'd have to cut out the middleman and go to the companies myself with all of my team. So what you suddenly started to realize -- or what I started to realize -- is that when you started having conversations with these companies, the idea of understanding your brand is a universal problem. (Video) MS: I have friends who make great big, giant Hollywood films, and I have friends who make little independent films like I make. And the friends of mine who make big, giant Hollywood movies say the reason their films are so successful is because of the brand partners that they have. And then my friends who make small independent films say, "Well, how are we supposed to compete with these big, giant Hollywood movies?" And the movie is called "The Greatest Movie Ever Sold." So how specifically will we see Ban in the film? Any time I'm ready to go, any time I open up my medicine cabinet, you will see Ban deodorant. While anytime I do an interview with someone, I can say, "Are you fresh enough for this interview? Are you ready? You look a little nervous. I want to help you calm down. So maybe you should put some one before the interview." So we'll offer one of these fabulous scents. Whether it's a "Floral Fusion" or a "Paradise Winds," they'll have their chance. We will have them geared for both male or female -- solid, roll-on or stick, whatever it may be. That's the two-cent tour. So now I can answer any of your questions and give you the five-cent tour. Karen Frank: We are a smaller brand. Much like you talked about being a smaller movie, we're very much a challenger brand. So we don't have the budgets that other brands have. So doing things like this -- you know, remind people about Ban -- is kind of why were interested in it. MS: What are the words that you would use to describe Ban? Ban is blank. KF: That's a great question. (Laughter) Woman: Superior technology. MS: Technology's not the way you want to describe something somebody's putting in their armpit. Man: We talk about bold, fresh. I think "fresh" is a great word that really spins this category into the positive, versus "fights odor and wetness." It keeps you fresh. How do we keep you fresher longer -- better freshness, more freshness, three times fresher. Things like that that are more of that positive benefit. MS: And that's a multi-million dollar corporation. What about me? What about a regular guy? I need to go talk to the man on the street, the people who are like me, the regular Joes. They need to tell me about my brand. (Video) MS: How would you guys describe your brand? Man: Um, my brand? I don't know. I like really nice clothes. Woman: 80's revival meets skater-punk, unless it's laundry day. MS: All right, what is brand Gerry? Gerry: Unique. (MS: Unique.) Man: I guess what kind of genre, style I am would be like dark glamor. I like a lot of black colors, a lot of grays and stuff like that. But usually I have an accessory, like sunglasses, or I like crystal and things like that too. Woman: If Dan were a brand, he might be a classic convertible Mercedes Benz. Man 2: The brand that I am is, I would call it casual fly. Woman 2: Part hippie, part yogi, part Brooklyn girl -- I don't know. Man 3: I'm the pet guy. I sell pet toys all over the country, all over the world. So I guess that's my brand. In my warped little industry, that's my brand. Man 4: My brand is FedEx because I deliver the goods. Man 5: Failed writer-alcoholic brand. Is that something? Lawyer: I'm a lawyer brand. Tom: I'm Tom. MS: Well we can't all be brand Tom, but I do often find myself at the intersection of dark glamor and casual fly. (Laughter) And what I realized is I needed an expert. I needed somebody who could get inside my head, somebody who could really help me understand what they call your "brand personality." And so I found a company called Olson Zaltman in Pittsburg. They've helped companies like Nestle, Febreze, Hallmark discover that brand personality. If they could do it for them, surely they could do it for me. (Video) Abigail: You brought your pictures, right? MS: I did. The very first picture is a picture of my family. A: So tell me a little bit how it relates to your thoughts and feelings about who you are. MS: These are the people who shape the way I look at the world. A: Tell me about this world. MS: This world? I think your world is the world that you live in -- like people who are around you, your friends, your family, the way you live your life, the job you do. All those things stemmed and started from one place, and for me they stemmed and started with my family in West Virginia. A: What's the next one you want to talk about? MS: The next one: This was the best day ever. A: How does this relate to your thoughts and feelings about who you are? MS: It's like, who do I want to be? I like things that are different. I like things that are weird. I like weird things. A: Tell me about the "why" phase -- what does that do for us? What is the machete? What pupa stage are you in now? Why is it important to reboot? What does the red represent? Tell me a little bit about that part. ... A little more about you that is not who you are. What are some other metamorphoses that you've had? ... Doesn't have to be fear. What kind of roller coaster are you on? MS: EEEEEE! (A: Thank you.) No, thank you. A: Thanks for you patience. (MS: Great job.) A: Yeah. (MS: Thanks a lot.) All right. MS: Yeah, I don't know what's going to come of this. There was a whole lot of crazy going on in there. Lindsay Zaltman: The first thing we saw was this idea that you had two distinct, but complementary sides to your brand personality -- the Morgan Spurlock brand is a mindful/play brand. Those are juxtaposed very nicely together. And I think there's almost a paradox with those. And I think some companies will just focus on one of their strengths or the other instead of focusing on both. Most companies tend to -- and it's human nature -- to avoid things that they're not sure of, avoid fear, those elements, and you really embrace those, and you actually turn them into positives for you, and it's a neat thing to see. What other brands are like that? The first on here is the classic, Apple. And you can see here too, Target, Wii, Mini from the Mini Coopers, and JetBlue. Now there's playful brands and mindful brands, those things that have come and gone, but a playful, mindful brand is a pretty powerful thing. MS: A playful, mindful brand. What is your brand? If somebody asked you to describe your brand identity, your brand personality, what would you be? Are you an up attribute? Are you something that gets the blood flowing? Or are you more of a down attribute? Are you something that's a little more calm, reserved, conservative? Up attributes are things like being playful, being fresh like the Fresh Prince, contemporary, adventurous, edgy or daring like Errol Flynn, nimble or agile, profane, domineering, magical or mystical like Gandalf. Or are you more of a down attribute? Are you mindful, sophisticated like 007? Are you established, traditional, nurturing, protective, empathetic like the Oprah? Are you reliable, stable, familiar, safe, secure, sacred, contemplative or wise like the Dalai Lama or Yoda? Over the course of this film, we had 500-plus companies who were up and down companies saying, "no," they didn't want any part of this project. They wanted nothing to do with this film, mainly because they would have no control, they would have no control over the final product. But we did get 17 brand partners who were willing to relinquish that control, who wanted to be in business with someone as mindful and as playful as myself and who ultimately empowered us to tell stories that normally we wouldn't be able to tell -- stories that an advertiser would normally never get behind. They enabled us to tell the story about neuromarketing, as we got into telling the story in this film about how now they're using MRI's to target the desire centers of your brain for both commercials as well as movie marketing. We went to San Paulo where they have banned outdoor advertising. In the entire city for the past five years, there's no billboards, there's no posters, there's no flyers, nothing. (Applause) And we went to school districts where now companies are making their way into cash-strapped schools all across America. What's incredible for me is the projects that I've gotten the most feedback out of, or I've had the most success in, are ones where I've interacted with things directly. And that's what these brands did. They cut out the middleman, they cut out their agencies and said, "Maybe these agencies don't have my best interest in mind. I'm going to deal directly with the artist. I'm going to work with him to create something different, something that's going to get people thinking, that's going to challenge the way we look at the world." And how has that been for them? Has it been successful? Well, since the film premiered at the Sundance Film Festival, let's take a look. According to Burrelles, the movie premiered in January, and since then -- and this isn't even the whole thing -- we've had 900 million media impressions for this film. That's literally covering just like a two and a half-week period. That's only online -- no print, no TV. The film hasn't even been distributed yet. It's not even online. It's not even streaming. It's not even been out into other foreign countries yet. So ultimately, this film has already started to gain a lot of momentum. And not bad for a project that almost every ad agency we talked to advised their clients not to take part. What I always believe is that if you take chances, if you take risks, that in those risks will come opportunity. I believe that when you push people away from that, you're pushing them more towards failure. I believe that when you train your employees to be risk averse, then you're preparing your whole company to be reward challenged. I feel like that what has to happen moving forward is we need to encourage people to take risks. We need to encourage people to not be afraid of opportunities that may scare them. Ultimately, moving forward, I think we have to embrace fear. We've got to put that bear in a cage. (Laughter) Embrace fear. Embrace risk. One big spoonful at a time, we have to embrace risk. And ultimately, we have to embrace transparency. Today, more than ever, a little honesty is going to go a long way. And that being said, through honesty and transparency, my entire talk, "Embrace Transparency," has been brought to you by my good friends at EMC, who for $7,100 bought the naming rights on eBay. (Applause) EMC: Turning big data into big opportunity for organizations all over the world. EMC presents: "Embrace Transparency." Thank you very much, guys. (Applause) June Cohen: So, Morgan, in the name of transparency, what exactly happened to that $7,100? MS: That is a fantastic question. I have in my pocket a check made out to the parent organization to the TED organization, the Sapling Foundation -- a check for $7,100 to be applied toward my attendance for next year's TED. (Laughter) (Applause)

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

It's very, very difficult to speak at the end of a conference like this, because everyone has spoken. Everything has been said. So I thought that what may be useful is to remind us of some of the things that have gone on here, and then maybe offer some ideas which we can take away, and take forward and work on. That's what I'd like to try and do. We came here saying we want to talk about "Africa: the Next Chapter." But we are talking about "Africa: the Next Chapter" because we are looking at the old and the present chapter -- that we're looking at, and saying it's not such a good thing. The picture I showed you before, and this picture, of drought, death and disease is what we usually see. What we want to look at is "Africa: the Next Chapter," and that's this: a healthy, smiling, beautiful African. And I think it's worth remembering what we've heard through the conference right from the first day, where I heard that all the important statistics have been given -- about where we are now, about how the continent is doing much better. And the importance of that is that we have a platform to build on. So I'm not going to spend too much time -- just to show you, refresh your memories that we are here for "Africa: the Next Chapter" because for the first time there really is a platform to build on. We really do have it going right that the continent is growing at rates that people had thought would not happen. After decades of 2 percent, we are now at 5 percent, and it's going to -- projected -- 6 and 7 percent even. And inflation has come down. External debt -- something that I can tell you a long story about because I personally worked on one of the biggest debts on the continent -- has come down dramatically. You know, as you can see, from almost 50 billion down to about 12 or 13 billion. Now this is a huge achievement. You know, we've built up reserves. Why is that important? It's because it shows off our economies, shows off our currencies and gives a platform on which people can plan and build, including businesses. We've also seen some evidence that all this is making a difference because private investment flows have increased. I want to remind you again -- I know you saw these statistics before -- from almost 6 billion we are now at about 18 billion. In 2005, remittances -- I just took one country, Nigeria skyrocketing -- skyrocketing is too dramatic, but increasing dramatically. And in many other countries this is happening. Why is this important? Because it shows confidence. People are now confident to bring -- if your people in the diaspora bring their money back, it shows other people that, look, there is emerging confidence in your country. And instead of an outflow, you are now getting a net inflow. Now, why is all this important, to have to go really fast? It's important that we build this platform, that we have the president, Kikwete, and others of our leaders who are saying, "Look, we must do something different." Because we are confronted with a challenge. 62 percent of our population is below the age of 24. What does this mean? This means that we have to focus on how our youth are going to be engaged in productive endeavor in their lives. You have to focus on how to create jobs, make sure they don't fall into disease, and that they get an education. But most of all that they are productively engaged in life, and that they are creating the kind of productive environment in our countries that will make things happen. And to support this, I just recently -- one of the things I've done since leaving government is to start an opinion research organization in Nigeria. Most of our countries don't even have any opinion research. People don't have voice. There is no way you can know what people want. One of the things we asked them recently was what's their top issue. Like in every other country where this has been done, jobs is the top issue. I want to leave this up here and come back to it. But before I get to this slide, I just wanted to run you through this. And to say that for me, the next stage of building this platform that now enables us to move forward -- and we mustn't make light of it. It was only 5, 6, 7 years ago we couldn't even talk about the next chapter, because we were in the old chapter. We were going nowhere. The economies were not growing. We were having negative per capita growth. The microeconomic framework and foundation for moving forward was not even there. So let's not forget that it's taken a lot to build this, including all those things that we tried to do in Nigeria that Dele referred to. Creating our own program to solve problems, like fighting corruption, building institutions, stabilizing the micro economy. So now we have this platform we can build on. And it brings us to the debate that has been going on here: aid versus private sector, aid versus trade, etc. And someone stood up to say that one of the frustrating things is that it's been a simplistic debate. And that's not what the debate should be about. That's engaging in the wrong debate. The issue here is how do we get a partnership that involves government donors, the private sector and ordinary African people taking charge of their own lives? How do we combine all this? To move our continent forward, to do the things that need doing that I talked about -- getting young people employed. Getting the creative juices flowing on this continent, much of what you have seen here. So I'm afraid we've been engaging a little bit in the wrong debate. We need to bring it back to say, what is the combination of all these factors that is going to yield what we want? (Applause) And I want to tell you something. For me, the issue about aid -- I don't think that Africans need to now go all the way over to the other side and feel bad about aid. Africa has been giving the other countries aid. Mo Ibrahim said at a debate we were at that he dreams one day when Africa will be giving aid. And I said, "Mo, you're right. We have -- no, but we've already been doing it! The U.K. and the U.S. could not have been built today without Africa's aid." (Applause) It is all the resources that were taken from Africa, including human, that built these countries today! So when they try to give back, we shouldn't be on the defensive. The issue is not that. The issue is how are we using what has been given back. How are we using it? Is it being directed effectively? I want to tell you a little story. Why I don't mind if we get aid, but we use it well. From 1967 to '70, Nigeria fought a war -- the Nigeria-Biafra war. And in the middle of that war, I was 14 years old. We spent much of our time with my mother cooking. For the army -- my father joined the army as a brigadier -- the Biafran army. We were on the Biafran side. And we were down to eating one meal a day, running from place to place, but wherever we could help we did. At a certain point in time, in 1969, things were really bad. We were down to almost nothing in terms of a meal a day. People, children were dying of kwashiorkor. I'm sure some of you who are not so young will remember those pictures. Well, I was in the middle of it. In the midst of all this, my mother fell ill with a stomach ailment for two or three days. We thought she was going to die. My father was not there. He was in the army. So I was the oldest person in the house. My sister fell very ill with malaria. She was three years old and I was 15. And she had such a high fever. We tried everything. It didn't look like it was going to work. Until we heard that 10 kilometers away there was a doctor, who was looking at people and giving them meds. Now I put my sister on my back -- burning -- and I walked 10 kilometers with her strapped on my back. It was really hot. I was very hungry. I was scared because I knew her life depended on my getting to this woman. We heard there was a woman doctor who was treating people. I walked 10 kilometers, putting one foot in front of the other. I got there and I saw huge crowds. Almost a thousand people were there, trying to break down the door. She was doing this in a church. How was I going to get in? I had to crawl in between the legs of these people with my sister strapped on my back, find a way to a window. And while they were trying to break down the door, I climbed in through the window, and jumped in. This woman told me it was in the nick of time. By the time we jumped into that hall, she was barely moving. She gave a shot of her chloroquine -- what I learned was the chloroquine then -- gave her some -- it must have been a re-hydration -- and some other therapies, and put us in a corner. In about two to three hours, she started to move. And then they toweled her down because she started sweating, which was a good sign. And then my sister woke up. And about five or six hours later, she said we could go home. I strapped her on my back. I walked the 10 kilometers back and it was the shortest walk I ever had. I was so happy -- (Applause) -- that my sister was alive! Today she's 41 years old, a mother of three, and she's a physician saving other lives. Why am I telling that? I'm telling you that because -- when it is you or your person involved -- you don't care where -- whether it's aid. You don't care what it is! (Applause) You just want the person to be alive! And now let me become less sentimental, and say that saving lives -- which some of the aid we get does on this continent -- when you save the life of anyone, a farmer, a teacher, a mother, they are contributing productively into the economy. And as an economist, we can also look at that side of the story. These are people who are productive agents in the economy. So if we save people from HIV/AIDS, if we save them from malaria, it means they can form the base of production for our economy. And by the same token -- as someone said yesterday -- if we don't and they die, their children will become a burden on the economy. So even from an economic standpoint, if we leave the social and the humanitarian, we need to save lives now. So that's one of the reasons, from a personal experience, that I say let's channel these resources we get into something productive. However, I will also tell you that I'm one of those who doesn't believe that this is the sole answer. That's why I said the debate has to get more sophisticated. You know, we have to use it well. What has happened in Europe? Do you all know that Spain -- part of the EU -- got 10 billion dollars in aid from the rest of the EU? Resources that were transferred to them -- and were the Spanish ashamed of this? No! The EU transferred 10 billion. Where did they use it? Have you been to southern Spain lately? There are roads everywhere. Infrastructure everywhere. It is on the back of this that the whole of southern Spain has developed into a services economy. Did you know that Ireland got 3 billion dollars in aid? Ireland is one of the fastest-growing economies in the European Union today. For which many people, even from other parts of the world, are going there to find jobs. What did they do with the 3 billion dollars in aid? They used it to build an information superhighway, gain infrastructure that enables them to participate in the information technology revolution, and to create jobs in their economy. They didn't say, "No, you know, we're not going to take this." Today, the European Union is busy transferring aid. My frustration is if they can build infrastructure in Spain -- which is roads, highways, other things that they can build -- I say then, why do they refuse to use the same aid to build the same infrastructure in our countries? (Applause) When we ask them and tell them what we need, one of my worries today is that we have many foundations now. Now we talk about the World Bank, IMF, and accountability, all that and the EU. We also have private citizens now who have a lot of money -- some of them in this audience, with private foundations. And one day, these foundations have so much money, they will overtake the official aid that is being given. But I fear -- and I'm very grateful to all of them for what they are trying to do on the continent -- but I'm also worried. I wake up with a gnawing in my belly because I see a new set of aid entrepreneurs on the continent. And they're also going from country to country, and many times trying to find what to do. But I'm not really sure that their assistance is also being channeled in the right way. And many of them are not really familiar with the continent. They are just discovering. And many times I don't see Africans working with them. They are just going alone! (Applause) And many times I get the impression that they are not really even interested in hearing from Africans who might know. They want to visit us, see what's happening on the ground and make a decision. And now I'm maybe being harsh. But I worry because this money is so important. Now, who are they accountable to? Are we on their boards when they make decisions about where to channel money? Are we there? Will we make the same mistake that we made before? Have our presidents and our leaders -- everyone is talking about -- have they ever called these people together and said, "Look, your foundation and your foundation -- you have so much money, we are grateful. Let's sit down and really tell you where the money should be channeled and where this aid should go." Have we done that? The answer is no. And each one is making their own individual effort. And then 10 years from now, billions will again have gone into Africa, and we would still have the same problems. This is what gives us the hopeless image. Our inability to take charge and say to all these people bringing their money, "Sit down." And we don't do it because there are so many of us. We don't coordinate. We've not called the Bill Gates, and the Soros, and everybody else who is helping and say, "Sit down. Let's have a conference with you. As a continent, here are our priorities. Here is where we want you to channel this money." Each one should not be an entrepreneur going out and finding what is best. We're not trying to stop them at all! But to help them help us better. And what is disappointing me is that we are not doing this. Ten years from now we will have the same story, and we will be repeating the same things. So our problem right now is, how can we leverage all this good will that is coming towards our way? How can we get government to combine properly with these private foundations, with the international organizations, and with our private sector. I firmly believe in that private sector thing too. But it cannot do it alone. So there might be a few ideas we could think of that could work. They said this is about proliferating and sharing ideas. So why don't we think of using some of this aid? Well, why don't we first say to those helping us out, "Don't be shy about infrastructure. That health that you're working on cannot be sustainable without infrastructure. That education will work better if we've got electricity and railroads, and so on. That agriculture will work better if there are railroads to get the goods to market. Don't be shy of it. Invest some of your resources in that, too." And then we can see that this is one combination of private, international, multilateral money, private sector and the African that we can put together as a partnership, so that aid can be a facilitator. That is all aid can be. Aid cannot solve our problems, I'm firmly convinced about that. But it can be catalytic. And if we fail to use it as catalytic, we would have failed. One of the reasons why China is a bit popular with Africans now -- one of the reasons is not only just that, you know, these people are stupid and China is coming to take resources. It's because there's a little more leverage in terms of the Chinese. If you tell them, "We need a road here," they will help you build it. They don't shy away from infrastructure. In fact, the Chinese minister of finance said to me, when I asked him what are we doing wrong in Nigeria. He said, "There are two things you need only. Infrastructure, infrastructure, infrastructure and discipline. You are undisciplined." (Applause) And I repeat it for the continent. It's the same. We need infrastructure, infrastructure and discipline. So we can make a catalytic to help us provide some of that. Now I realize -- I'm not saying -- health and education -- no, you can also provide that as well. But I'm saying it's not either or. Let's see how aid can be a facilitator in partnership. One idea. Second thing, for the private sector, people are afraid to take risks on the continent. Why can't some of this aid be used as a kind of guarantee mechanisms, to enable people to take risk? (Applause) And finally, because they are both standing at my -- I'm out of time. Am I out of time? OK, so let me not forget my punchline. One of the things I want everybody to collaborate on is to support women, to create jobs. (Applause) A lot has been said here about women, I don't need to repeat it. But there are people -- women -- creating jobs. And we know, studies have shown that when you put resources in the hand of the woman -- in fact, there's an econometric study, the World Bank Review, done in 2000, showing that transfers into the hands of women result in healthier children, more for the household, more for the economy and all that. So I'm saying that one of the takeaways from here -- I'm not saying the men are not important -- obviously, if you leave the husbands out, what will they do? They'll come back home and get disgruntled, and it will result in difficulties we don't want. We don't want men beating their wives because they don't have a job, and so on. But at the margin, we also -- I want to push this, because the reason is the men automatically -- they get -- not automatically, but they tend to get more support. But I want you to realize that resources in the hands of African women is a powerful tool. There are people creating jobs. Beatrice Gakuba has created 200 jobs from her flower business in Rwanda. We have Ibukun Awosika in Nigeria, with the chair company. She wants to expand. She needs another 20 million. She will create another 100, 200 more jobs. So take away from here is how are you going to put together the resources to put money in the hands of women in the middle who are ready -- business people who want to expand and create more jobs. And lastly, what are you going to do to be part of this partnership of aid, government, private sector and the African as an individual? Thank you. (Applause)

I was walking in the market one day with my wife, and somebody stuck a cage in my face. And in between those slits were the saddest eyes I've ever seen. There was a very sick orangutan baby, my first encounter. That evening I came back to the market in the dark and I heard "uhh, uhh," and sure enough I found a dying orangutan baby on a garbage heap. Of course, the cage was salvaged. I took up the little baby, massaged her, forced her to drink until she finally started breathing normally. This is Uce. She's now living in the jungle of Sungai Wain, and this is Matahari, her second son, which, by the way, is also the son of the second orangutan I rescued, Dodoy. That changed my life quite dramatically, and as of today, I have almost 1,000 babies in my two centers. (Applause) No. No. No. Wrong. It's horrible. It's a proof of our failing to save them in the wild. It's not good. This is merely proof of everyone failing to do the right thing. Having more than all the orangutans in all the zoos in the world together, just now like victims for every baby, six have disappeared from the forest. The deforestation, especially for oil palm, to provide biofuel for Western countries is what's causing these problems. And those are the peat swamp forests on 20 meters of peat, the largest accumulation of organic material in the world. When you open this for growing oil palms you're creating CO2 volcanoes that are emitting so much CO2 that my country is now the third largest emitter of greenhouse gasses in the world, after China and the United States. And we don't have any industry at all -- it's only because of this deforestation. And these are horrible images. I'm not going to talk too long about it, but there are so many of the family of Uce, which are not so fortunate to live out there in the forest, that still have to go through that process. And I don't know anymore where to put them. So I decided that I had to come up with a solution for her but also a solution that will benefit the people that are trying to exploit those forests, to get their hands on the last timber and that are causing, in that way, the loss of habitat and all those victims. So I created the place Samboja Lestari, and the idea was, if I can do this on the worst possible place that I can think of where there is really nothing left, no one will have an excuse to say, "Yeah, but ..." No. Everyone should be able to follow this. So we're in East Borneo. This is the place where I started. As you can see there's only yellow terrain. There's nothing left -- just a bit of grass there. In 2002 we had about 50 percent of the people jobless there. There was a huge amount of crime. People spent so much of their money on health issues and drinking water. There was no agricultural productivity left. This was the poorest district in the whole province and it was a total extinction of wildlife. This was like a biological desert. When I stood there in the grass, it's hot -- not even the sound of insects -- just this waving grass. Still, four years later we have created jobs for about 3,000 people. The climate has changed. I will show you: no more flooding, no more fires. It's no longer the poorest district, and there is a huge development of biodiversity. We've got over 1,000 species. We have 137 bird species as of today. We have 30 species of reptiles. So what happened here? We created a huge economic failure in this forest. So basically the whole process of destruction had gone a bit slower than what is happening now with the oil palm. But we saw the same thing. We had slash and burn agriculture; people cannot afford the fertilizer, so they burn the trees and have the minerals available there; the fires become more frequent, and after a while you're stuck with an area of land where there is no fertility left. There are no trees left. Still, in this place, in this grassland where you can see our very first office there on that hill, four years later, there is this one green blop on the Earth's surface ... (Applause) And there are all these animals, and all these people happy, and there's this economic value. So how's this possible? It was quite simple. If you'll look at the steps: we bought the land, we dealt with the fire, and then only, we started doing the reforestation by combining agriculture with forestry. Only then we set up the infrastructure and management and the monetary. But we made sure that in every step of the way the local people were going to be fully involved so that no outside forces would be able to interfere with that. The people would become the defenders of that forest. So we do the "people, profit, planet" principles, but we do it in addition to a sure legal status -- because if the forest belongs to the state, people say, "It belongs to me, it belongs to everyone." And then we apply all these other principles like transparency, professional management, measurable results, scalability, [unclear], etc. What we did was we formulated recipes -- how to go from a starting situation where you have nothing to a target situation. You formulate a recipe based upon the factors you can control, whether it be the skills or the fertilizer or the plant choice. And then you look at the outputs and you start measuring what comes out. Now in this recipe you also have the cost. You also know how much labor is needed. If you can drop this recipe on the map on a sandy soil, on a clay soil, on a steep slope, on flat soil, you put those different recipes; if you combine them, out of that comes a business plan, comes a work plan, and you can optimize it for the amount of labor you have available or for the amount of fertilizer you have, and you can do it. This is how it looks like in practice. We have this grass we want to get rid of. It exudes [unclear]-like compounds from the roots. The acacia trees are of a very low value but we need them to restore the micro-climate, to protect the soil and to shake out the grasses. And after eight years they might actually yield some timber -- that is, if you can preserve it in the right way, which we can do with bamboo peels. It's an old temple-building technique from Japan but bamboo is very fire-susceptible. So if we would plant that in the beginning we would have a very high risk of losing everything again. So we plant it later, along the waterways to filter the water, provide the raw products just in time for when the timber becomes available. So the idea is: how to integrate these flows in space, over time and with the limited means you have. So we plant the trees, we plant these pineapples and beans and ginger in between, to reduce the competition for the trees, the crop fertilizer. Organic material is useful for the agricultural crops, for the people, but also helps the trees. The farmers have free land, the system yields early income, the orangutans get healthy food and we can speed up ecosystem regeneration while even saving some money. So beautiful. What a theory. But is it really that easy? Not really, because if you looked at what happened in 1998, the fire started. This is an area of about 50 million hectares. January. February. March. April. May. We lost 5.5 million hectares in just a matter of a few months. This is because we have 10,000 of those underground fires that you also have in Pennsylvania here in the United States. And once the soil gets dried, you're in a dry season -- you get cracks, oxygen goes in, flames come out and the problem starts all over again. So how to break that cycle? Fire is the biggest problem. This is what it looked like for three months. For three months, the automatic lights outside did not go off because it was that dark. We lost all the crops. No children gained weight for over a year; they lost 12 IQ points. It was a disaster for orangutans and people. So these fires are really the first things to work on. That was why I put it as a single point up there. And you need the local people for that because these grasslands, once they start burning ... It goes through it like a windstorm and you lose again the last bit of ash and nutrients to the first rainfall -- going to the sea killing off the coral reefs there. So you have to do it with the local people. That is the short-term solution but you also need a long-term solution. So what we did is, we created a ring of sugar palms around the area. These sugar palms turn out to be fire-resistant -- also flood-resistant, by the way -- and they provide a lot of income for local people. This is what it looks like: the people have to tap them twice a day -- just a millimeter slice -- and the only thing you harvest is sugar water, carbon dioxide, rain fall and a little bit of sunshine. In principle, you make those trees into biological photovoltaic cells. And you can create so much energy from this -- they produce three times more energy per hectare per year, because you can tap them on a daily basis. You don't need to harvest [unclear] or any other of the crops. So this is the combination where we have all this genetic potential in the tropics, which is still unexploited, and doing it in combination with technology. But also your legal side needs to be in very good order. So we bought that land, and here is where we started our project -- in the middle of nowhere. And if you zoom in a bit you can see that all of this area is divided into strips that go over different types of soil, and we were actually monitoring, measuring every single tree in these 2,000 hectares, 5,000 acres. And this forest is quite different. What I really did was I just followed nature, and nature doesn't know monocultures, but a natural forest is multilayered. That means that both in the ground and above the ground it can make better use of the available light, it can store more carbon in the system, it can provide more functions. But, it's more complicated. It's not that simple, and you have to work with the people. So, just like nature, we also grow fast planting trees and underneath that, we grow the slower growing, primary-grain forest trees of a very high diversity that can optimally use that light. Then, what is just as important: get the right fungi in there that will grow into those leaves, bring back the nutrients to the roots of the trees that have just dropped that leaf within 24 hours. And they become like nutrient pumps. You need the bacteria to fix nitrogen, and without those microorganisms, you won't have any performance at all. And then we started planting -- only 1,000 trees a day. We could have planted many, many more, but we didn't want to because we wanted to keep the number of jobs stable. We didn't want to lose the people that are going to work in that plantation. And we do a lot of work here. We use indicator plants to look at what soil types, or what vegetables will grow, or what trees will grow here. And we have monitored every single one of those trees from space. This is what it looks like in reality; you have this irregular ring around it, with strips of 100 meters wide, with sugar palms that can provide income for 648 families. It's only a small part of the area. The nursery, in here, is quite different. If you look at the number of tree species we have in Europe, for instance, from the Urals up to England, you know how many? 165. In this nursery, we're going to grow 10 times more than the number of species. Can you imagine? You do need to know what you are working with, but it's that diversity which makes it work. That you can go from this zero situation, by planting the vegetables and the trees, or directly, the trees in the lines in that grass there, putting up the buffer zone, producing your compost, and then making sure that at every stage of that up growing forest there are crops that can be used. In the beginning, maybe pineapples and beans and corn; in the second phase, there will be bananas and papayas; later on, there will be chocolate and chilies. And then slowly, the trees start taking over, bringing in produce from the fruits, from the timber, from the fuel wood. And finally, the sugar palm forest takes over and provides the people with permanent income. On the top left, underneath those green stripes, you see some white dots -- those are actually individual pineapple plants that you can see from space. And in that area we started growing some acacia trees that you just saw before. So this is after one year. And this is after two years. And that's green. If you look from the tower -- this is when we start attacking the grass. We plant in the seedlings mixed with the bananas, the papayas, all the crops for the local people, but the trees are growing up fast in between as well. And three years later, 137 species of birds are living here. (Applause) So we lowered air temperature three to five degrees Celsius. Air humidity is up 10 percent. Cloud cover -- I'm going to show it to you -- is up. Rainfall is up. And all these species and income. This ecolodge that I built here, three years before, was an empty, yellow field. This transponder that we operate with the European Space Agency -- it gives us the benefit that every satellite that comes over to calibrate itself is taking a picture. Those pictures we use to analyze how much carbon, how the forest is developing, and we can monitor every tree using satellite images through our cooperation. We can use these data now to provide other regions with recipes and the same technology. We actually have it already with Google Earth. If you would use a little bit of your technology to put tracking devices in trucks, and use Google Earth in combination with that, you could directly tell what palm oil has been sustainably produced, which company is stealing the timber, and you could save so much more carbon than with any measure of saving energy here. So this is the Samboja Lestari area. You measure how the trees grow back, but you can also measure the biodiversity coming back. And biodiversity is an indicator of how much water can be balanced, how many medicines can be kept here. And finally I made it into the rain machine because this forest is now creating its own rain. This nearby city of Balikpapan has a big problem with water; it's 80 percent surrounded by seawater, and we have now a lot of intrusion there. Now we looked at the clouds above this forest; we looked at the reforestation area, the semi-open area and the open area. And look at these images. I'll just run them very quickly through. In the tropics, raindrops are not formed from ice crystals, which is the case in the temperate zones, you need the trees with [unclear], chemicals that come out of the leaves of the trees that initiate the raindrops. So you create a cool place where clouds can accumulate, and you have the trees to initiate the rain. And look, there's now 11.2 percent more clouds -- already, after three years. If you look at rainfall, it was already up 20 percent at that time. Let's look at the next year, and you can see that that trend is continuing. Where at first we had a small cap of higher rainfall, that cap is now widening and getting higher. And if we look at the rainfall pattern above Samboja Lestari, it used to be the driest place, but now you see consistently see a peak of rain forming there. So you can actually change the climate. When there are trade winds of course the effect disappears, but afterwards, as soon as the wind stabilizes, you see again that the rainfall peaks come back above this area. So to say it is hopeless is not the right thing to do, because we actually can make that difference if you integrate the various technologies. And it's nice to have the science, but it still depends mostly upon the people, on your education. We have our farmer schools. But the real success of course, is our band -- because if a baby is born, we will play, so everyone's our family and you don't make trouble with your family. This is how it looks. We have this road going around the area, which brings the people electricity and water from our own area. We have the zone with the sugar palms, and then we have this fence with very thorny palms to keep the orangutans -- that we provide with a place to live in the middle -- and the people apart. And inside, we have this area for reforestation as a gene bank to keep all that material alive, because for the last 12 years not a single seedling of the tropical hardwood trees has grown up because the climatic triggers have disappeared. All the seeds get eaten. So now we do the monitoring on the inside -- from towers, satellites, ultralights. Each of the families that have sold their land now get a piece of land back. And it has two nice fences of tropical hardwood trees -- you have the shade trees planted in year one, then you underplanted with the sugar palms, and you plant this thorny fence. And after a few years, you can remove some of those shade trees. The people get that acacia timber which we have preserved with the bamboo peel, and they can build a house, they have some fuel wood to cook with. And they can start producing from the trees as many as they like. They have enough income for three families. But whatever you do in that program, it has to be fully supported by the people, meaning that you also have to adjust it to the local, cultural values. There is no simple one recipe for one place. You also have to make sure that it is very difficult to corrupt -- that it's transparent. Like here, in Samboja Lestari, we divide that ring in groups of 20 families. If one member trespasses the agreement, and does cut down trees, the other 19 members have to decide what's going to happen to him. If the group doesn't take action, the other 33 groups have to decide what is going to happen to the group that doesn't comply with those great deals that we are offering them. In North Sulawesi it is the cooperative -- they have a democratic culture there, so there you can use the local justice system to protect your system. In summary, if you look at it, in year one the people can sell their land to get income, but they get jobs back in the construction and the reforestation, the working with the orangutans, and they can use the waste wood to make handicraft. They also get free land in between the trees, where they can grow their crops. They can now sell part of those fruits to the orangutan project. They get building material for houses, a contract for selling the sugar, so we can produce huge amounts of ethanol and energy locally. They get all these other benefits: environmentally, money, they get education -- it's a great deal. And everything is based upon that one thing -- make sure that forest remains there. So if we want to help the orangutans -- what I actually set out to do -- we must make sure that the local people are the ones that benefit. Now I think the real key to doing it, to give a simple answer, is integration. I hope -- if you want to know more, you can read more. (Applause)

Now, I've been making pictures for quite a long time, and normally speaking, a picture like this, for me, should be straightforward. I'm in southern Ethiopia. I'm with the Daasanach. There's a big family, there's a very beautiful tree, and I make these pictures with this very large, extremely cumbersome, very awkward technical plate film camera. Does anybody know 4x5 and 10x8 sheets of film, and you're setting it up, putting it on the tripod. I've got the family, spent the better part of a day talking with them. They sort of understand what I'm on about. They think I'm a bit crazy, but that's another story. And what's most important for me is the beauty and the aesthetic, and that's based on the light. So the light's setting on my left-hand side, and there's a balance in the communication with the Daasanach, the family of 30, all ages. There's babies and there's grandparents, I'm getting them in the tree and waiting for the light to set, and it's going, going, and I've got one sheet of film left, and I think, I'm okay, I'm in control, I'm in control. I'm setting it up and I'm setting up, and the light's just about to go, and I want it to be golden, I want it to be beautiful. I want it to be hanging on the horizon so it lights these people, in all the potential glory that they could be presented. And it's about to go and it's about to go, and I put my sheet in the camera, it's all focused, and all of a sudden there's a massive "whack," and I'm looking around, and in the top corner of the tree, one of the girls slaps the girl next to her, and the girl next to her pulls her hair, and all hell breaks loose, and I'm standing there going, "But the light, the light. Wait, I need the light. Stay still! Stay still!" And they start screaming, and then one of the men turns around and starts screaming, shouting, and the whole tree collapses, not the tree, but the people in the tree. They're all running around screaming, and they run back off into the village in this sort of cloud of smoke, and I'm left there standing behind my tripod. I've got my sheet, and the light's gone, and I can't make the picture. Where have they all gone? I had no idea. It took me a week, it took me a week to make the picture which you see here today, and I'll tell you why. (Applause) It's very, very, very simple -- I spent a week going around the village, and I went to every single one: "Hello, can you meet at the tree? What's your story? Who are you?" And it all turned out to be about a boyfriend, for crying out loud. I mean, I have teenage kids. I should know. It was about a boyfriend. The girl on the top, she'd kissed the wrong boy, and they'd started having a fight. And there was a very, very beautiful lesson for me in that: If I was going to photograph these people in the dignified, respectful way that I had intended, and put them on a pedestal, I had to understand them. It wasn't just about turning up. It wasn't just about shaking a hand. It wasn't about just saying, "I'm Jimmy, I'm a photographer." I had to get to know every single one of them, right down to whose boyfriend is who and who is allowed to kiss who. So in the end, a week later, and I was absolutely exhausted, I mean on my knees going, "Please get back up in that tree. It's a picture I need to make." They all came back. I put them all back up in the tree. I made sure the girls were in the right position, and the ones that slapped, one was over there. They did look at each other. If you look at it later, they're staring at each other very angrily, and I've got the tree and everything, and then at the last minute, I go, "The goat, the goat! I need something for the eye to look at. I need a white goat in the middle." So I swapped all the goats around. I put the goats in. But even then I got it wrong, because if you can see on the left-hand side, another little boy storms off because I didn't choose his goat. So the moral being I have to learn to speak Goat as well as Daasanach. But anyway, the effort that goes into that picture and the story that I've just related to you, as you can imagine, there are hundreds of other bizarre, eccentric stories of hundreds of other people around the world. And this was about four years ago, and I set off on a journey, to be honest, a very indulgent journey. I'm a real romantic. I'm an idealist, perhaps in some ways naive. But I truly believe that there are people on the planet that are beautiful. It's very, very simple. It's not rocket science. I wanted to put these people on a pedestal. I wanted to put them on a pedestal like they'd never been seen before. So, I chose about 35 different groups, tribes, indigenous cultures. They were chosen purely because of their aesthetic, and I'll talk more about that later. I'm not an anthropologist, I have no technical study with the subject, but I do have a very, very, very deep passion, and I believe that I had to choose the most beautiful people on the planet in the most beautiful environment that they lived in, and put the two together and present them to you. About a year ago, I published the first pictures, and something extraordinarily exciting happened. The whole world came running, and it was a bizarre experience, because everybody, from everywhere: "Who are they? What are they? How many are they? Where did you find them? Are they real? You faked it. Tell me. Tell me. Tell me. Tell me." Millions of questions for which, to be honest, I don't have the answers. I really didn't have the answers, and I could sort of understand, okay, they're beautiful, that was my intention, but the questions that I was being fired at, I could not answer them. Until, it was quite amusing, about a year ago somebody said, "You've been invited to do a TED Talk." And I said, "Ted? Ted? Who's Ted? I haven't met Ted before." He said, "No, a TED Talk." I said, "But who's Ted? Do I have to talk to him or do we sit with each other on the stage?" And, "No, no, the TED group. You must know about it." And I said, "I've been in a teepee and in a yurt for the last five years. How do I know who Ted is? Introduce me to him." Anyway, to cut a long story short, he said, "We have to do a TED Talk." Researched. Oh, exciting. That's great! And then eventually you're going to go to TEDGlobal. Even more exciting. But what you need to do, you need to teach the people lessons, lessons that you've learned on your travels around the world with these tribes. I thought, lessons, okay, well, what did I learn? Good question. Three. You need three lessons, and they need to be terribly profound. (Laughter) And I thought, three lessons, well, I'm going to think about it. (Applause) So I thought long and hard, and I stood here two days ago, and I had my test run, and I had my cards and my clicker in my hands and my pictures were on the screen, and I had my three lessons, and I started presenting them, and I had this very odd out-of-body experience. I sort of looked at myself standing there, going, "Oh, Jimmy, this is complete loads of codswallop. All these people sitting here, they've had more of these talks, they've heard more lessons in their life. Who are you to tell them what you've learned? Who are you to guide them and who are you to show them what is right, what is wrong, what these people have to say?" And I had a little bit of a, it was very private, a little bit of a meltdown. I went back, and a little bit like the boy walking away from the tree with his goats, very disgruntled, going, that didn't work, It wasn't what I wanted to communicate. And I thought long and hard about it, and I thought, well, the only thing I can communicate is very, very basic. You have to turn it all the way around. There's only one person I know here, and that's me. I'm still getting to know myself, and it's a lifelong journey, and I probably won't have all the answers, but I did learn some extraordinary things on this journey. So what I'm going to do is share with you my lessons. It's a very, as I explained at the beginning, very indulgent, very personal, how and why I made these pictures, and I leave it to you as the audience to interpret what these lessons have meant to me, what they could perhaps mean to you. I traveled enormously as a child. I was very nomadic. It was actually very exciting. All around the world, and I had this feeling that I was pushed off at great speed to become somebody, become that individual, Jimmy. Go off into the planet, and so I ran, and I ran, and my wife sometimes kids me, "Jimmy, you look a bit like Forrest Gump," but I'm, "No, it's all about something, trust me." So I kept running and I kept running, and I sort of got somewhere and I sort of stood there and looked around me and I thought, well, where do I belong? Where do I fit? What am I? Where am I from? I had no idea. So I hope there aren't too many psychologists in this audience. Perhaps part of this journey is about me trying to find out where I belonged. So whilst going, and don't worry, I didn't when I arrived with these tribes, I didn't paint myself yellow and run around with these spears and loincloths. But what I did find were people that belonged themselves, and they inspired me, some extraordinary people, and I'd like to introduce you to some heroes of mine. They're the Huli. Now, the Huli are some of the most extraordinarily beautiful people on the planet. They're proud. They live in the Papua New Guinean highlands. There's not many of them left, and they're called the Huli wigmen. And images like this, I mean, this is what it's all about for me. And you've spent weeks and months there talking with them, getting there, and I want to put them on a pedestal, and I said, "You have something that many people have not seen. You sit in this stunning nature." And it really does look like this, and they really do look like this. This is the real thing. And you know why they're proud? You know why they look like this, and why I broke my back literally to photograph them and present them to you? It's because they have these extraordinary rituals. And the Huli have this ritual: When they're teenagers, becoming a man, they have to shave their heads, and they spend the rest of their life shaving their heads every single day, and what they do with that hair, they make it into a creation, a creation that's a very personal creation. It's their creation. It's their Huli creation. So they're called the Huli wigmen. That's a wig on his head. It's all made out of his human hair. And then they decorate that wig with the feathers of the birds of paradise, and don't worry, there are many birds there. There's very few people living, so nothing to get too upset about, and they spend the rest of their life recreating these hats and getting further and further, and it's extraordinary, and there's another group, they're called the Kalam, and they live in the next valley, but they speak a completely different language, they look completely different, and they wear a hat, and it's built out of scarabs, these fantastic emerald green little scarabs, and sometimes there are 5,000 or 6,000 scarabs in this hat, and they spend the whole of their life collecting these scarabs to build these hats. So the Huli inspired me in that they belong. Perhaps I have to work harder at finding a ritual which matters for me and going back into my past to see where I actually fit. An extremely important part of this project was about how I photograph these extraordinary people. And it's basically beauty. I think beauty matters. We spend the whole of our existence revolving around beauty: beautiful places, beautiful things, and ultimately, beautiful people. It's very, very, very significant. I've spent all of my life analyzing what do I look like? Am I perceived as beautiful? Does it matter if I'm a beautiful person or not, or is it purely based on my aesthetic? And then when I went off, I came to a very narrow conclusion. Do I have to go around the world photographing, excuse me, women between the age of 25 and 30? Is that what beauty is going to be? Is everything before and after that utterly irrelevant? And it was only until I went on a journey, a journey that was so extreme, I still get shivers when I think about it. I went to a part of the world, and I don't know whether any of you have ever heard of Chukotka. Has anybody ever heard of Chukotka? Chukotka probably is, technically, as far as one can go and still be on the living planet. It's 13 hours' flight from Moscow. First you've got to get to Moscow, and then 13 hours' flight nonstop from Moscow. And that's if you get there. As you can see, some people sort of miss the runway. And then when you land there, in Chukotka are the Chukchis. Now, the Chukchis are the last indigenous Inuits of Siberia, and they're people I'd heard about, I'd hardly seen any images of, but I knew they were there, and I'd been in touch with this guide, and this guide said, "There's this fantastic tribe. There's only about 40 of them. You'll be okay. We'll find them." So off we went on this journey. When we arrived there, after a month of traveling across the ice, and we'd got to them, but then I was not allowed to photograph them. They said, "You cannot photograph us. You have to wait. You have to wait until you get to know us. You have to wait until you understand us. You have to wait until you see how we interact with one another." And only then, it was many, many weeks later, I saw a respect. They had zero judgment. They observed one another, from the youth, from the middle aged to the old. They need each other. The children need to chew the meat all day because the adults don't have any teeth, but at the same time, the children take the old aged people out to the toilet because they're infirm, so there's this fantastic community of respect. And they adore and admire one another, and they truly taught me what beauty was. (Applause) Now I'm going to ask for a little bit of audience interaction. This is extremely important for the end of my talk. If you could look at somebody left to the right of you, and I want you to observe them, and I want you to give them a compliment. This is very important. Now, it may be their nose or their hair or even their aura, I don't mind, but please look at each other, give them a compliment. You have to be quick, because I'm running out of time. And you have to remember it. Okay, thank you, thank you, thank you, you've given each other compliments. Hold that compliment very, very tightly. Hold it for later. And the last thing, it was extraordinarily profound, and it happened only two weeks ago. Two weeks ago I went back to the Himba. Now, the Himba live in northern Namibia on the border of Angola, and I'd been there a few times before, and I'd gone back to present this book I'd made, to show them the pictures, to get into a discussion with them, to say, "This is how I saw you. This is how I love you. This is how I respect you. What do you think? Am I right? Am I wrong?" So I wanted this debate. It was very, very, very emotional, and one night we were sitting around the campfire, and I have to be honest, I think I'd had a little bit too much to drink, and I was sort of sitting under the stars going, "This is great, you've seen my pictures, we love each other." (Laughter) And I'm a little bit slow, and I looked around me, and I said, I thought, maybe, the fence is missing. Wasn't there a fence here last time I came? You know, this big protective fence around the village, and they sort of looked at me and go, "Yeah, chief die." And I thought, okay, chief dying, right, you know, look up at the stars again, look at the campfire. Chief die. What on Earth does chief die have to do with the fence? "Chief die. First we destroy, yeah? Then we reflect. Then we rebuild. Then we respect." And I burst out in tears, because my father had only just died prior to this journey, and I didn't ever acknowledge him, I didn't ever appreciate him for the fact that I'm probably standing here today because of him. These people taught me that we are only who we are because of our parents and our grandparents and our forefathers going on and on and on before that, and I, no matter how romantic or how idealistic I am on this journey, I did not know that until two weeks ago. I did not know that until two weeks ago. So what's this all about? Well, there's an image I'd like to show you, quite a special image, and it wasn't essentially the image I wanted to choose. I was sitting there the other day, and I have to finish on a strong image. And somebody said, "You have to show them the picture of the Nenets. The Nenets." I was like, yeah, but that's not my favorite picture. She went, "No no no no no no no. It's an amazing picture. You're in his eyes." I said, "What do you mean I'm in his eyes? It's a picture of the Nenets." She said, "No, look, look closely, you're in his eyes." And when you look closely at this picture, there is a reflection of me in his eyes, so I think perhaps he has my soul, and I'm in his soul, and whilst these pictures look at you, I ask you to look at them. You may not be reflected in his eyes, but there is something extraordinarily important about these people. I don't ultimately have the answers, as I've just shared with you, but you must do. There must be something there. So if you can briefly reflect on what I was discussing about beauty and about belonging and about our ancestors and our roots, and I need you all to stand for me, please. (Laughter) Now you have no excuse. It's almost lunchtime, and this is not a standing ovation, so don't worry, I'm not fishing for compliments. But you were given a compliment a few minutes ago. Now I want you to stand tall. I want you to breathe in. This is what I say. I'm not going to get on my knees for two weeks. I'm not going to ask you to carry a goat, and I know you don't have any camels. Photography's extraordinarily powerful. It's this language which we now all understand. We truly do all understand it, and we have this global digital fireplace, don't we, but I want to share you with the world, because you are also a tribe. You are the TED tribe, yeah? But you have to remember that compliment. You have to stand tall, breathe in through your nose, and I'm going to photograph you. Okay? I need to do a panoramic shot, so it's going to take a minute, so you have to concentrate, okay? Breathe in, stand tall, no laughing. Shh, breathe through your nose. I'm going to photograph. (Clicks) Thank you. (Applause)

How do groups get anything done? Right? How do you organize a group of individuals so that the output of the group is something coherent and of lasting value, instead of just being chaos? And the economic framing of that problem is called coordination costs. And a coordination cost is essentially all of the financial or institutional difficulties in arranging group output. And we've had a classic answer for coordination costs, which is, if you want to coordinate the work of a group of people, you start an institution, right? You raise some resources. You found something. It can be private or public. It can be for profit or not profit. It can be large or small. But you get these resources together. You found an institution, and you use the institution to coordinate the activities of the group. More recently, because the cost of letting groups communicate with each other has fallen through the floor -- and communication costs are one of the big inputs to coordination -- there has been a second answer, which is to put the cooperation into the infrastructure, to design systems that coordinate the output of the group as a by-product of the operating of the system, without regard to institutional models. So, that's what I want to talk about today. I'm going to illustrate it with some fairly concrete examples, but always pointing to the broader themes. So, I'm going to start by trying to answer a question that I know each of you will have asked yourself at some point or other, and which the Internet is purpose-built to answer, which is, where can I get a picture of a roller-skating mermaid? So, in New York City, on the first Saturday of every summer, Coney Island, our local, charmingly run-down amusement park, hosts the Mermaid Parade. It's an amateur parade; people come from all over the city; people get all dressed up. Some people get less dressed up. Young and old, dancing in the streets. Colorful characters, and a good time is had by all. And what I want to call your attention to is not the Mermaid Parade itself, charming though it is, but rather to these photos. I didn't take them. How did I get them? And the answer is: I got them from Flickr. Flickr is a photo-sharing service that allows people to take photos, upload them, share them over the Web and so forth. Recently, Flickr has added an additional function called tagging. Tagging was pioneered by Delicious and Joshua Schachter. Delicious is a social bookmarking service. Tagging is a cooperative infrastructure answer to classification. Right? If I had given this talk last year, I couldn't do what I just did, because I couldn't have found those photos. But instead of saying, we need to hire a professional class of librarians to organize these photos once they're uploaded, Flickr simply turned over to the users the ability to characterize the photos. So, I was able to go in and draw down photos that had been tagged "Mermaid Parade." There were 3,100 photos taken by 118 photographers, all aggregated and then put under this nice, neat name, shown in reverse chronological order. And I was then able to go and retrieve them to give you that little slideshow. Now, what hard problem is being solved here? And it's -- in the most schematic possible view, it's a coordination problem, right? There are a large number of people on the Internet, a very small fraction of them have photos of the Mermaid Parade. How do we get those people together to contribute that work? The classic answer is to form an institution, right? To draw those people into some prearranged structure that has explicit goals. And I want to call your attention to some of the side effects of going the institutional route. First of all, when you form an institution, you take on a management problem, right? No good just hiring employees, you also have to hire other employees to manage those employees and to enforce the goals of the institution and so forth. Secondly, you have to bring structure into place. Right? You have to have economic structure. You have to have legal structure. You have to have physical structure. And that creates additional costs. Third, forming an institution is inherently exclusionary. You notice we haven't got everybody who has a photo. You can't hire everyone in a company, right? You can't recruit everyone into a governmental organization. You have to exclude some people. And fourth, as a result of that exclusion, you end up with a professional class. Look at the change here. We've gone from people with photos to photographers. Right? We've created a professional class of photographers whose goal is to go out and photograph the Mermaid Parade, or whatever else they're sent out to photograph. When you build cooperation into the infrastructure, which is the Flickr answer, you can leave the people where they are and you take the problem to the individuals, rather than moving the individuals to the problem. You arrange the coordination in the group, and by doing that you get the same outcome, without the institutional difficulties. You lose the institutional imperative. You lose the right to shape people's work when it's volunteer effort, but you also shed the institutional cost, which gives you greater flexibility. What Flickr does is it replaces planning with coordination. And this is a general aspect of these cooperative systems. Right. You'll have experienced this in your life whenever you bought your first mobile phone, and you stopped making plans. You just said, "I'll call you when I get there." "Call me when you get off work." Right? That is a point-to-point replacement of coordination with planning. Right. We're now able to do that kind of thing with groups. To say instead of, we must make an advance plan, we must have a five-year projection of where the Wikipedia is going to be, or whatever, you can just say, let's coordinate the group effort, and let's deal with it as we go, because we're now well-enough coordinated that we don't have to take on the problems of deciding in advance what to do. So here's another example. This one's somewhat more somber. These are photos on Flickr tagged "Iraq." And everything that was hard about the coordination cost with the Mermaid Parade is even harder here. There are more pictures. There are more photographers. It's taken over a wider geographic area. The photos are spread out over a longer period of time. And worst of all, that figure at the bottom, approximately ten photos per photographer, is a lie. It's mathematically true, but it doesn't really talk about anything important -- because in these systems, the average isn't really what matters. What matters is this. This is a graph of photographs tagged Iraq as taken by the 529 photographers who contributed the 5,445 photos. And it's ranked in order of number of photos taken per photographer. You can see here, over at the end, our most prolific photographer has taken around 350 photos, and you can see there's a few people who have taken hundreds of photos. Then there's dozens of people who've taken dozens of photos. And by the time we get around here, we get ten or fewer photos, and then there's this long, flat tail. And by the time you get to the middle, you've got hundreds of people who have contributed only one photo each. This is called a power-law distribution. It appears often in unconstrained social systems where people are allowed to contribute as much or as little as they like -- this is often what you get. Right? The math behind the power-law distribution is that whatever's in the nth position is doing about one-nth of whatever's being measured, relative to the person in the first position. So, we'd expect the tenth most prolific photographer to have contributed about a tenth of the photos, and the hundredth most prolific photographer to have contributed only about a hundred as many photos as the most prolific photographer did. So, the head of the curve can be sharper or flatter. But that basic math accounts both for the steep slope and for the long, flat tail. And curiously, in these systems, as they grow larger, the systems don't converge; they diverge more. In bigger systems, the head gets bigger and the tail gets longer, so the imbalance increases. You can see the curve is obviously heavily left-weighted. Here's how heavily: if you take the top 10 percent of photographers contributing to this system, they account for three quarters of the photos taken -- just the top 10 percent most prolific photographers. If you go down to five percent, you're still accounting for 60 percent of the photos. If you go down to one percent, exclude 99 percent of the group effort, you're still accounting for almost a quarter of the photos. And because of this left weighting, the average is actually here, way to the left. And that sounds strange to our ears, but what ends up happening is that 80 percent of the contributors have contributed a below-average amount. That sounds strange because we expect average and middle to be about the same, but they're not at all. This is the math underlying the 80/20 rule. Right? Whenever you hear anybody talking about the 80/20 rule, this is what's going on. Right? 20 percent of the merchandise accounts for 80 percent of the revenue, 20 percent of the users use 80 percent of the resources -- this is the shape people are talking about when that happens. Institutions only have two tools: carrots and sticks. And the 80 percent zone is a no-carrot and no-stick zone. The costs of running the institution mean that you cannot take on the work of those people easily in an institutional frame. The institutional model always pushes leftwards, treating these people as employees. The institutional response is, I can get 75 percent of the value for 10 percent of the hires -- great, that's what I'll do. The cooperative infrastructure model says, why do you want to give up a quarter of the value? If your system is designed so that you have to give up a quarter of the value, re-engineer the system. Don't take on the cost that prevents you from getting to the contributions of these people. Build the system so that anybody can contribute at any amount. So the coordination response asks not, how are these people as employees, but rather, what is their contribution like? Right? We have over here Psycho Milt, a Flickr user, who has contributed one, and only one, photo titled "Iraq." And here's the photo. Right. Labeled, "Bad Day at Work." Right? So the question is, do you want that photo? Yes or no. The question is not, is Psycho Milt a good employee? And the tension here is between institution as enabler and institution as obstacle. When you're dealing with the left-hand edge of one of these distributions, when you're dealing with the people who spend a lot of time producing a lot of the material you want, that's an institution-as-enabler world. You can hire those people as employees, you can coordinate their work and you can get some output. But when you're down here, where the Psycho Milts of the world are adding one photo at a time, that's institution as obstacle. Institutions hate being told they're obstacles. One of the first things that happens when you institutionalize a problem is that the first goal of the institution immediately shifts from whatever the nominal goal was to self-preservation. And the actual goal of the institution goes to two through n. Right? So, when institutions are told they are obstacles, and that there are other ways of coordinating the value, they go through something a little bit like the Kubler-Ross stages -- (Laughter) -- of reaction, being told you have a fatal illness: denial, anger, bargaining, acceptance. Most of the cooperative systems we've seen haven't been around long enough to have gotten to the acceptance phase. Many, many institutions are still in denial, but we're seeing recently a lot of both anger and bargaining. There's a wonderful, small example going on right now. In France, a bus company is suing people for forming a carpool, right, because the fact that they have coordinated themselves to create cooperative value is depriving them of revenue. You can follow this in the Guardian. It's actually quite entertaining. The bigger question is, what do you do about the value down here? Right? How do you capture that? And institutions, as I've said, are prevented from capturing that. Steve Ballmer, now CEO of Microsoft, was criticizing Linux a couple of years ago, and he said, "Oh, this business of thousands of programmers contributing to Linux, this is a myth. We've looked at who's contributed to Linux, and most of the patches have been produced by programmers who've only done one thing." Right? You can hear this distribution under that complaint. And you can see why, from Ballmer's point of view, that's a bad idea, right? We hired this programmer, he came in, he drank our Cokes and played Foosball for three years and he had one idea. (Laughter) Right? Bad hire. Right? (Laughter) The Psycho Milt question is, was it a good idea? What if it was a security patch? What if it was a security patch for a buffer overflow exploit, of which Windows has not some, [but] several? Do you want that patch, right? The fact that a single programmer can, without having to move into a professional relation to an institution, improve Linux once and never be seen from again, should terrify Ballmer. Because this kind of value is unreachable in classic institutional frameworks, but is part of cooperative systems of open-source software, of file sharing, of the Wikipedia. I've used a lot of examples from Flickr, but there are actually stories about this from all over. Meetup, a service founded so that users could find people in their local area who share their interests and affinities and actually have a real-world meeting offline in a cafe or a pub or what have you. When Scott Heiferman founded Meetup, he thought it would be used for, you know, train spotters and cat fanciers -- classic affinity groups. The inventors don't know what the invention is. Number one group on Meetup right now, most chapters in most cities with most members, most active? Stay-at-home moms. Right? In the suburbanized, dual-income United States, stay-at-home moms are actually missing the social infrastructure that comes from extended family and local, small-scale neighborhoods. So they're reinventing it, using these tools. Meetup is the platform, but the value here is in social infrastructure. If you want to know what technology is going to change the world, don't pay attention to 13-year-old boys -- pay attention to young mothers, because they have got not an ounce of support for technology that doesn't materially make their lives better. This is so much more important than Xbox, but it's a lot less glitzy. I think this is a revolution. I think that this is a really profound change in the way human affairs are arranged. And I use that word advisedly. It's a revolution in that it's a change in equilibrium. It's a whole new way of doing things, which includes new downsides. In the United States right now, a woman named Judith Miller is in jail for not having given to a Federal Grand Jury her sources -- she's a reporter for the New York Times -- her sources, in a very abstract and hard-to-follow case. And journalists are in the street rallying to improve the shield laws. The shield laws are our laws -- pretty much a patchwork of state laws -- that prevent a journalist from having to betray a source. This is happening, however, against the background of the rise of Web logging. Web logging is a classic example of mass amateurization. It has de-professionalized publishing. Want to publish globally anything you think today? It is a one-button operation that you can do for free. That has sent the professional class of publishing down into the ranks of mass amateurization. And so the shield law, as much as we want it -- we want a professional class of truth-tellers -- it is becoming increasingly incoherent, because the institution is becoming incoherent. There are people in the States right now tying themselves into knots, trying to figure out whether or not bloggers are journalists. And the answer to that question is, it doesn't matter, because that's not the right question. Journalism was an answer to an even more important question, which is, how will society be informed? How will they share ideas and opinions? And if there is an answer to that that happens outside the professional framework of journalism, it makes no sense to take a professional metaphor and apply it to this distributed class. So as much as we want the shield laws, the background -- the institution to which they were attached -- is becoming incoherent. Here's another example. Pro-ana, the pro-ana groups. These are groups of teenage girls who have taken on Web logs, bulletin boards, other kinds of cooperative infrastructure, and have used it to set up support groups for remaining anorexic by choice. They post pictures of thin models, which they call "thinspiration." They have little slogans, like "Salvation through Starvation." They even have Lance Armstrong-style bracelets, these red bracelets, which signify, in the small group, I am trying to maintain my eating disorder. They trade tips, like, if you feel like eating something, clean a toilet or the litter box. The feeling will pass. We're used to support groups being beneficial. We have an attitude that support groups are inherently beneficial. But it turns out that the logic of the support group is value neutral. A support group is simply a small group that wants to maintain a way of living in the context of a larger group. Now, when the larger group is a bunch of drunks, and the small group wants to stay sober, then we think, that's a great support group. But when the small group is teenage girls who want to stay anorexic by choice, then we're horrified. What's happened is that the normative goals of the support groups that we're used to, came from the institutions that were framing them, and not from the infrastructure. Once the infrastructure becomes generically available, the logic of the support group has been revealed to be accessible to anyone, including people pursuing these kinds of goals. So, there are significant downsides to these changes as well as upsides. And of course, in the current environment, one need allude only lightly to the work of non-state actors trying to influence global affairs, and taking advantage of these. This is a social map of the hijackers and their associates who perpetrated the 9/11 attack. It was produced by analyzing their communications patterns using a lot of these tools. And doubtless the intelligence communities of the world are doing the same work today for the attacks of last week. Now, this is the part of the talk where I tell you what's going to come as a result of all of this, but I'm running out of time, which is good, because I don't know. (Laughter) Right. As with the printing press, if it's really a revolution, it doesn't take us from Point A to Point B. It takes us from Point A to chaos. The printing press precipitated 200 years of chaos, moving from a world where the Catholic Church was the sort of organizing political force to the Treaty of Westphalia, when we finally knew what the new unit was: the nation state. Now, I'm not predicting 200 years of chaos as a result of this. 50. 50 years in which loosely coordinated groups are going to be given increasingly high leverage, and the more those groups forego traditional institutional imperatives -- like deciding in advance what's going to happen, or the profit motive -- the more leverage they'll get. And institutions are going to come under an increasing degree of pressure, and the more rigidly managed, and the more they rely on information monopolies, the greater the pressure is going to be. And that's going to happen one arena at a time, one institution at a time. The forces are general, but the results are going to be specific. And so the point here is not, "This is wonderful," or "We're going to see a transition from only institutions to only cooperative framework." It's going to be much more complicated than that. But the point is that it's going to be a massive readjustment. And since we can see it in advance and know it's coming, my argument is essentially: we might as well get good at it. Thank you very much. (Applause)

Brain magic. What's brain magic all about? Brain magic to me indicates that area of magic dealing with psychological and mind-reading effects. So unlike traditional magic, it uses the power of words, linguistic deception, non-verbal communication and various other techniques to create the illusion of a sixth sense. Now, I'm going to show you all how easy it is to manipulate the human mind once you know how. And I want everybody downstairs also to join in with me and everybody here. I want everybody to put out your hands like this for me, first of all. OK, clap them together, once. OK, reverse your hands. Now, follow my actions exactly. Now about half the audience has their left hand up. Why is that? OK, swap them around, put your right hand up. OK, now, cross your hands over, so your right hand goes over, interlace your fingers like this, then make sure your right thumb is outside your left thumb -- that's very important. Yours is the other way around, so swap it around. Excellent, OK. Extend your fingers like this for me. All right. Tap them together once. OK, now, if you did not allow me to deceive your minds, you would all be able to do this. (Laughter) So, now you can see how easy it is for me to manipulate the human mind, once you know how. (Laughter) Now, I remember when I was about 15, I read a copy of Life magazine, which detailed a story about a 75-year-old blind Russian woman who could sense printed letters -- there's still people trying to do it here -- (Laughter) -- who could sense printed letters and even sense colors, just by touch. And she was completely blind. She could also read the serial numbers on bills when they were placed, face down, on a hard surface. Now, I was fascinated, but at the same time, skeptical. How could somebody read using their fingertips? You know, if you actually think about it, if somebody is totally blind -- a guy yesterday did a demonstration in one of the rooms, where people had to close their eyes and they could just hear things. And it's just a really weird thing to try and figure out. How could somebody read using their fingertips? Now earlier on, as part of a TV show that I have coming up on MTV, I attempted to give a similar demonstration of what is now known as second sight. So, let's take a look. (Video) Man: There we go. I'm going to guide you into the car. Kathryn Thomas: (Laughter) Man: You're OK, keep on going. KT: How are you? Keith Barry: Kathryn, it's Keith here. I'm going to take you to a secret location, OK? Now, Kathryn, there was no way you could see through that blindfold, at all, through all that. KT: OK, but don't say my name like that. KB: No, but you're OK, yes? KT: Yes. KB: There's no way you could have seen through it, agreed? KT: No. KB: OK, I'm just going to take it off. You're OK, you're OK. Do you want to take off the other part of it? Go ahead and take it off, you're OK. We'll just stop for a second. KT: I'm so afraid of what I'm going to see. KB: No, no, you're fine, you're fine, take it off. You're OK. You're safe. Have you ever heard of second sight? KT: No. KB: Second sight is whereby a mind-control expert can see through somebody else's eyes. And I'm going to try that right now. KT: God. KB: Are you ready? Where is it? There's no way ... KT: (Beep) Oh, my God! KB: Don't say anything, I'm trying to see through your eyes. I can't see. KT: There's a wall, there's a wall. KB: Look at the road, look at the road. KT: OK, OK, OK. Oh, my God! KB: Now, anything coming at all? KT: No, no, no, no. KB: Sure there's not? KT: No, no, I'm just still looking at the road. I'm looking at the road, all the time. I'm not taking my eyes off the road. (Beep) (Beep) (Beep) Oh, my God! KB: Where are we? Where are we? We're going uphill, are we going uphill? KT: Look at the road -- (Beep) Still got that goddamn blindfold on. KB: What? KT: How are you doing this? KB: Just don't break my concentration. We're OK, though? KT: Yes. That's so weird. We're nearly there. Oh, my God! Oh, my God! KB: And I've stopped. KT: That is weird. You're like a freak-ass of nature. That was the most scary thing I've ever done in my life! (Applause) KB: Thank you. By the way, two days ago, we were going to film this down there, at the race course, and we got a guy into a car, and we got a camera man in the back, but halfway through the drive, he told me he had a -- I think it was a nine-millimeter or something, stuck to his leg. So, I stopped pretty quick, and that was it. So, do you believe it's possible to see through somebody else's eyes? That's the question. Now, most people here would automatically say no. OK, but I want you to realize some facts. I couldn't see through the blindfold. The car was not gimmicked or tricked in any way. The girl, I'd never met before, all right. So, I want you to just think about it for a moment. A lot of people try to come up with a logical solution to what just happened, all right. But because your brains are not trained in the art of deception, the solutions you come up with will, 99 percent of the time, be way off the mark. This is because magic is all about directing attention. If, for instance, I didn't want you to look at my right hand, well, then, I don't look at it. But if I wanted you to look at my right hand, then I look at it, too. You see, it's very, very simple, once you know how, but very complicated in other ways. Now, I'm going to give you some demonstrations up here, live, right now. I need two people to help me out real quick. Can you come up? And let's see, down at the end, here, can you also come up, real quick? Do you mind? Yes, at the end. OK, give them a round of applause as they come up. You might want to use the stairs, there. (Applause) Now, it's very important for everybody here to realize I haven't set anything up with you guys. You don't know what's about to happen. Is that agreed? OK, would you mind just standing over here for a moment? Your name is? Nicole: Nicole. KB: Nicole, and? (Telephone ringing) KB: OK, oh. Tell them -- actually here's the thing, answer it, answer it, answer it. (Laughter) Is it a girl? Man: They've already gone. KB: Oh, they're gone, OK. I'll tell you what, swap over positions. Can you stand over here? This will just make it a little bit easier. OK, that was a pity. I would have told them it was the ace of spades. OK, a little bit closer. (Laughter) A little bit closer. (Laughter) OK, a little bit closer, come over -- they look really nervous up here. Come in a little bit closer. OK, now, do you believe in witchcraft at all? Nicole: No. KB: Voodoo? Nicole: No. KB: Things that go bump in the night? Nicole: No. KB: Besides, who's next, no, OK. I want you to just stand exactly like this for me, pull up your sleeves, if you don't mind. OK, now, I want you to be aware of all the different sensations around you, because we're going to try a voodoo experiment right now. I want you to be aware of the sensations, but don't say anything until I ask you, and don't open your eyes until I ask you. From this point onwards, close your eyes, do not say anything, do not open them, be aware of the sensations. Yes or no, did you feel anything? Nicole: Yes. KB: You did feel that? What did you feel? Nicole: A touch on my back. KB: How many times did you feel it? Nicole: Twice. KB: Twice. OK, extend your left arm out in front of you. Extend your left arm, OK. OK, keep it there. Be aware of the sensations, don't say anything, don't open your eyes, OK. Did you feel anything, there? Nicole: Yes. KB: What did you feel? Nicole: Three -- KB: Like a tickling sensation? Nicole: Yes. KB: Can you show us where? OK, excellent. Open your eyes. I never touched you. I just touched his back, and I just touched his arm. A voodoo experiment. (Laughter) Yeah, I walk around nightclubs all night like this. (Laughter) You just take a seat over here for a second. I'm going to use you again, in a moment. And can you take a seat right over here for me, if you don't mind. Sit right here. Man: OK. KB: OK, take a seat. Excellent, OK. Now, what I want you to do is look directly at me, OK, just take a deep breath in through your nose, letting it out through your mouth, and relax. Allow your eyes to close, on five, four, three, two, one. Close your eyes right now. OK, now, I'm not hypnotizing you, I'm merely placing you in a heightened state of synchronicity, so our minds are along the same lines. And as you sink and drift and float into this relaxed state of mind, I'm going to take your left hand, and just place it up here. And I want you to hold it there, just for a moment, and I only want you to allow your hand to sink and drift and float back to the tabletop at the same rate and speed as you drift and float into this relaxed state of awareness, and allow it to go all the way down to the tabletop. That's it, all the way down, all the way down, all the way down, and further, and further, and further, and further, and further and further. Excellent. I want you to allow your hand to stick firmly to the tabletop. OK, now, allow it to stay there. OK, now, in a moment, you'll feel a certain pressure, OK, and I want you to be aware of the pressure. Just be aware of the pressure. And I only want you to allow your hand to float slowly back up from the tabletop as you feel the pressure release, but only when you feel the pressure release. Do you understand? Just answer yes or no. Do you understand? Man: Yes. KB: Hold it right there. OK, and only when you feel the pressure go back, I want you to allow your hand to slowly drift back to the tabletop, but only when you feel the pressure. (Laughter) OK, that was wonderfully done. Let's try it again. Excellent. Now that you've got the idea, let's try something even more interesting. Allow it to stick firmly to the tabletop, keep your eyes closed. Can you stand up? OK, just stand, stage forward. I want you to point directly at his forehead, OK. Imagine a connection between you and him. Only when you want the pressure to be released, make an upward gesture, like this, but only when you want the pressure to be released. You can wait as long as you want, but only when you want the pressure released. OK, let's try it again. OK, now, imagine the connection, OK. Point directly at his forehead. Only when you want the pressure released, we'll try it again. OK, it worked that time, excellent. And hold it there, hold it there, both of you, hold it there. Only when you want the pressure to go back, make a downward gesture. You can wait as long as you want. You did it pretty quickly, but it went down, OK. Now, I want you to be aware that in a moment, when I snap my fingers, your eyes will open, again. It's OK to remember to forget, or forget to remember what happened. Most people ask you, "What the hell just happened up here?" But it's OK that even though you're not hypnotized, you will forget everything that happened. (Laughter) On five, four, three, two, one -- open your eyes, wide awake. Give them a round of applause, as they go back to their seats. (Applause) OK, you can go back. I once saw a film called "The Gods Are Crazy." Has anybody here seen that film? Yeah. (Applause) Do you remember when they threw the Coke bottle out of the airplane, and it landed on the ground, and it didn't break? Now, see, that's because Coke bottles are solid. It's nearly impossible to break a Coke bottle. Do you want to try it? Good job. (Laughter) She's not taking any chances. You see, psychokinesis is the paranormal influence of the mind on physical events and processes. For some magicians or mentalists, sometimes the spoon will bend or melt, sometimes it will not. Sometimes the object will slide across the table, sometimes it will not. It depends on how much energy you have that day, so on and so forth. We're going to try an experiment in psychokinesis, right now. Come right over here, next to me. Excellent. Now, have a look at the Coke bottle. Make sure it is solid, there's only one hole, and it's a normal Coke bottle. And you can whack it against the table, if you want. Be careful. Even though it's solid, I'm standing away. OK, I want you to pinch right here with two fingers and your thumb. Excellent. Now, I've got a shard of glass here, OK. I want you to examine the shard of glass. Be careful, because it is sharp. Just hold on to it for a moment. Now, hold it out here. I want you to imagine, right now, a broken relationship from many years ago. I want you to imagine all the negative energy from that broken relationship, from that guy, being imparted into the broken piece of glass, which will represent him, OK. But I want you to take this very seriously. Stare at the glass, ignore everybody right here. In a moment, you'll feel a certain sensation, OK, and when you feel that sensation, I want you to drop the piece of glass into the bottle. Think of that guy, that ba -- that guy. (Laughter) I'm trying to be good here. OK, and when you feel the sensation -- it might take a while -- drop it into the glass. OK, drop it in. Now, imagine all that negative energy in there. Imagine his name and imagine him inside the glass. And I want you to release that negative energy by shaking it from side to side. (Laughter) That was a lot of negative energy, built up in there. (Laughter) (Applause) I also want you to think of his name. Look at me and think of his name. Have you got his name? OK, think of how many letters in the title of his name. Think about how many letters in the title. There's five letters in the title. You didn't react to that, so it's four letters in the title. Think of one of the letters in the title. Think of one of the letters. There's a K in his name, there is a K. See the way I knew that, because my name starts with a K also, but his name doesn't start with a K, it starts with an M. Tell Mike I said hello, the next time you see him. Was that his name? Nicole: Mm-hmm. KB: OK, give her a round of applause. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) I've got one more thing to share with you right now. Actually, Chris, I was going to pick you for this, but instead of picking you, can you hop up here and pick a victim for this next experiment? And it should be a male victim, that's the only thing. Chris Anderson: Oh, OK. KB: I was going to use you for this, but I decided I might want to come back another year. (Laughter) CA: Well, to reward him for saying "eureka," and for selecting Michael Mercil to come and talk to us -- Steve Jurvetson. KB: OK, Steve, come on up here. (Applause) CA: You knew! KB: OK, Steve, I want you to take a seat, right behind here. Excellent. Now, Steve -- oh, you can check underneath. Go ahead, I've no fancy assistants underneath there. They just, they insist that because I was a magician, put a nice, black tablecloth on. There you are, OK. (Laughter) I've got four wooden plinths here, Steve. One, two, three and four. Now, they're all the exact same except this one obviously has a stainless steel spike sticking out of it. I want you to examine it, and make sure it's solid. Happy? Steve Jurvetson: Mmm, yes. KB: OK. Now, Steve, I'm going to stand in front of the table, OK. When I stand in front of the table, I want you to put the cups on the plinths, like this, in any order you want, and then mix them all up, so nobody has any idea where the spike is, all right? SJ: No one in the audience? KB: No one in the audience. And just to help you out, I'll block them from view, so nobody can see what you're doing. I'll also look away. So, go ahead and mix them up, now. OK, and tell me when you're done. (Laughter) You done? SJ: Mmm, almost. KB: Almost, oh. OK, you're making sure that's well hidden. Now -- oh, we've got one here, we've got one here. (Applause) So, all right, we'll leave them like that. (Laughter) I'm going to have the last laugh, though. (Laughter) Now, Steve, you know where the spike is, but nobody else, does? Correct? But I don't want you to know either, so swivel around on your chair. They'll keep an eye on me to make sure I don't do anything funny. No, stay around, OK. Now, Steve, look back. So, now you don't know where the spike is, and I don't know where it is either, OK. Now, is there any way to see through this blindfold? SJ: Put this on? KB: No, just, is there any way to see through it? SJ: Um, um. KB: No? SJ: No, I can't see through it. KB: You can't see through it. Excellent, OK. Now, I'm going to put on the blindfold. Don't stack them up, OK. Give them an extra mix up. Don't move the cups, because I don't want anybody to see where the spike is, but give the plinths an extra mix up, and then line them up, like this, all right? I'll put the blindfold on. Give them an extra mix up. No messing around this time. OK, go ahead, mix them up. My hand is at life, here, so -- at risk. (Laughter) Tell me when you're done. SJ: Done. KB: OK, where are you? Put out your hand. Your right hand. Is that -- no, OK. Tell me when I'm over a cup. SJ: You're over a cup. KB: I'm over a cup, right now? SJ: Mm-hmm. KB: Now, Steve, do you think it's here? Yes or no? SJ: Oh! (Laughter) KB: I told you I'd have the last laugh. (Laughter) SJ: I don't think it's there. KB: No? Good decision. (Laughter) (Applause) Now, if I go this way, is there another cup over here? SJ: Can we do the left hand? KB: Oh, no, no, no. He asked me could he do the left hand. Absolutely not. (Laughter) KB: Now, if I go this way, is there another cup? SJ: There's a cup that way, yes. KB: OK, tell me when to stop. SJ: OK. KB: There? SJ: Yes, there's one. KB: OK. Do you think it's here, yes or no? This is your decision, not mine. (Laughter) SJ: I'm going to say no. KB: Good decision. (Laughter) OK, give me both hands. Now, put them on both cups. Do you think the spike is under your left hand, or under your right hand? SJ: Uh, neither. KB: Neither, oh, OK. But if you were to guess. (Laughter) SJ: I think it's under my right hand. KB: You think it's under your right hand? Now, remember, you made all the decisions all along. Psychologists, figure this out. Have a look. SJ: Oh! (Applause) KB: Thank you. Thank you. If anybody wants to see some sleight of hand later on, I'll be outside. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. Thank you. (Applause)

I am a writer. Writing books is my profession but it's more than that, of course. It is also my great lifelong love and fascination. And I don't expect that that's ever going to change. But, that said, something kind of peculiar has happened recently in my life and in my career, which has caused me to have to recalibrate my whole relationship with this work. And the peculiar thing is that I recently wrote this book, this memoir called "Eat, Pray, Love" which, decidedly unlike any of my previous books, went out in the world for some reason, and became this big, mega-sensation, international bestseller thing. The result of which is that everywhere I go now, people treat me like I'm doomed. Seriously -- doomed, doomed! Like, they come up to me now, all worried, and they say, "Aren't you afraid you're never going to be able to top that? Aren't you afraid you're going to keep writing for your whole life and you're never again going to create a book that anybody in the world cares about at all, ever again?" So that's reassuring, you know. But it would be worse, except for that I happen to remember that over 20 years ago, when I was a teenager, when I first started telling people that I wanted to be a writer, I was met with this same sort of fear-based reaction. And people would say, "Aren't you afraid you're never going to have any success? Aren't you afraid the humiliation of rejection will kill you? Aren't you afraid that you're going to work your whole life at this craft and nothing's ever going to come of it and you're going to die on a scrap heap of broken dreams with your mouth filled with bitter ash of failure?" (Laughter) Like that, you know. The answer -- the short answer to all those questions is, "Yes." Yes, I'm afraid of all those things. And I always have been. And I'm afraid of many, many more things besides that people can't even guess at, like seaweed and other things that are scary. But, when it comes to writing, the thing that I've been sort of thinking about lately, and wondering about lately, is why? You know, is it rational? Is it logical that anybody should be expected to be afraid of the work that they feel they were put on this Earth to do. And what is it specifically about creative ventures that seems to make us really nervous about each other's mental health in a way that other careers kind of don't do, you know? Like my dad, for example, was a chemical engineer and I don't recall once in his 40 years of chemical engineering anybody asking him if he was afraid to be a chemical engineer, you know? "That chemical-engineering block, John, how's it going?" It just didn't come up like that, you know? But to be fair, chemical engineers as a group haven't really earned a reputation over the centuries for being alcoholic manic-depressives. (Laughter) We writers, we kind of do have that reputation, and not just writers, but creative people across all genres, it seems, have this reputation for being enormously mentally unstable. And all you have to do is look at the very grim death count in the 20th century alone, of really magnificent creative minds who died young and often at their own hands, you know? And even the ones who didn't literally commit suicide seem to be really undone by their gifts, you know. Norman Mailer, just before he died, last interview, he said, "Every one of my books has killed me a little more." An extraordinary statement to make about your life's work. But we don't even blink when we hear somebody say this, because we've heard that kind of stuff for so long and somehow we've completely internalized and accepted collectively this notion that creativity and suffering are somehow inherently linked and that artistry, in the end, will always ultimately lead to anguish. And the question that I want to ask everybody here today is are you guys all cool with that idea? Are you comfortable with that? Because you look at it even from an inch away and, you know -- I'm not at all comfortable with that assumption. I think it's odious. And I also think it's dangerous, and I don't want to see it perpetuated into the next century. I think it's better if we encourage our great creative minds to live. And I definitely know that, in my case -- in my situation -- it would be very dangerous for me to start sort of leaking down that dark path of assumption, particularly given the circumstance that I'm in right now in my career. Which is -- you know, like check it out, I'm pretty young, I'm only about 40 years old. I still have maybe another four decades of work left in me. And it's exceedingly likely that anything I write from this point forward is going to be judged by the world as the work that came after the freakish success of my last book, right? I should just put it bluntly, because we're all sort of friends here now -- it's exceedingly likely that my greatest success is behind me. So Jesus, what a thought! That's the kind of thought that could lead a person to start drinking gin at nine o'clock in the morning, and I don't want to go there. (Laughter) I would prefer to keep doing this work that I love. And so, the question becomes, how? And so, it seems to me, upon a lot of reflection, that the way that I have to work now, in order to continue writing, is that I have to create some sort of protective psychological construct, right? I have to sort of find some way to have a safe distance between me, as I am writing, and my very natural anxiety about what the reaction to that writing is going to be, from now on. And, as I've been looking, over the last year, for models for how to do that, I've been sort of looking across time, and I've been trying to find other societies to see if they might have had better and saner ideas than we have about how to help creative people sort of manage the inherent emotional risks of creativity. And that search has led me to ancient Greece and ancient Rome. So stay with me, because it does circle around and back. But, ancient Greece and ancient Rome -- people did not happen to believe that creativity came from human beings back then, OK? People believed that creativity was this divine attendant spirit that came to human beings from some distant and unknowable source, for distant and unknowable reasons. The Greeks famously called these divine attendant spirits of creativity "daemons." Socrates, famously, believed that he had a daemon who spoke wisdom to him from afar. The Romans had the same idea, but they called that sort of disembodied creative spirit a genius. Which is great, because the Romans did not actually think that a genius was a particularly clever individual. They believed that a genius was this, sort of magical divine entity, who was believed to literally live in the walls of an artist's studio, kind of like Dobby the house elf, and who would come out and sort of invisibly assist the artist with their work and would shape the outcome of that work. So brilliant -- there it is, right there, that distance that I'm talking about -- that psychological construct to protect you from the results of your work. And everyone knew that this is how it functioned, right? So the ancient artist was protected from certain things, like, for example, too much narcissism, right? If your work was brilliant, you couldn't take all the credit for it, everybody knew that you had this disembodied genius who had helped you. If your work bombed, not entirely your fault, you know? Everyone knew your genius was kind of lame. (Laughter) And this is how people thought about creativity in the West for a really long time. And then the Renaissance came and everything changed, and we had this big idea, and the big idea was, let's put the individual human being at the center of the universe above all gods and mysteries, and there's no more room for mystical creatures who take dictation from the divine. And it's the beginning of rational humanism, and people started to believe that creativity came completely from the self of the individual. And for the first time in history, you start to hear people referring to this or that artist as being a genius, rather than having a genius. And I got to tell you, I think that was a huge error. You know, I think that allowing somebody, one mere person to believe that he or she is like, the vessel, you know, like the font and the essence and the source of all divine, creative, unknowable, eternal mystery is just a smidge too much responsibility to put on one fragile, human psyche. It's like asking somebody to swallow the sun. It just completely warps and distorts egos, and it creates all these unmanageable expectations about performance. And I think the pressure of that has been killing off our artists for the last 500 years. And, if this is true, and I think it is true, the question becomes, what now? Can we do this differently? Maybe go back to some more ancient understanding about the relationship between humans and the creative mystery. Maybe not. Maybe we can't just erase 500 years of rational humanistic thought in one 18 minute speech. And there's probably people in this audience who would raise really legitimate scientific suspicions about the notion of, basically, fairies who follow people around rubbing fairy juice on their projects and stuff. I'm not, probably, going to bring you all along with me on this. But the question that I kind of want to pose is -- you know, why not? Why not think about it this way? Because it makes as much sense as anything else I have ever heard in terms of explaining the utter maddening capriciousness of the creative process. A process which, as anybody who has ever tried to make something -- which is to say basically everyone here --- knows does not always behave rationally. And, in fact, can sometimes feel downright paranormal. I had this encounter recently where I met the extraordinary American poet Ruth Stone, who's now in her 90s, but she's been a poet her entire life and she told me that when she was growing up in rural Virginia, she would be out working in the fields, and she said she would feel and hear a poem coming at her from over the landscape. And she said it was like a thunderous train of air. And it would come barreling down at her over the landscape. And she felt it coming, because it would shake the earth under her feet. She knew that she had only one thing to do at that point, and that was to, in her words, "run like hell." And she would run like hell to the house and she would be getting chased by this poem, and the whole deal was that she had to get to a piece of paper and a pencil fast enough so that when it thundered through her, she could collect it and grab it on the page. And other times she wouldn't be fast enough, so she'd be running and running, and she wouldn't get to the house and the poem would barrel through her and she would miss it and she said it would continue on across the landscape, looking, as she put it "for another poet." And then there were these times -- this is the piece I never forgot -- she said that there were moments where she would almost miss it, right? So, she's running to the house and she's looking for the paper and the poem passes through her, and she grabs a pencil just as it's going through her, and then she said, it was like she would reach out with her other hand and she would catch it. She would catch the poem by its tail, and she would pull it backwards into her body as she was transcribing on the page. And in these instances, the poem would come up on the page perfect and intact but backwards, from the last word to the first. (Laughter) So when I heard that I was like -- that's uncanny, that's exactly what my creative process is like. (Laughter) That's not at all what my creative process is -- I'm not the pipeline! I'm a mule, and the way that I have to work is I have to get up at the same time every day, and sweat and labor and barrel through it really awkwardly. But even I, in my mulishness, even I have brushed up against that thing, at times. And I would imagine that a lot of you have too. You know, even I have had work or ideas come through me from a source that I honestly cannot identify. And what is that thing? And how are we to relate to it in a way that will not make us lose our minds, but, in fact, might actually keep us sane? And for me, the best contemporary example that I have of how to do that is the musician Tom Waits, who I got to interview several years ago on a magazine assignment. And we were talking about this, and you know, Tom, for most of his life, he was pretty much the embodiment of the tormented contemporary modern artist, trying to control and manage and dominate these sort of uncontrollable creative impulses that were totally internalized. But then he got older, he got calmer, and one day he was driving down the freeway in Los Angeles, and this is when it all changed for him. And he's speeding along, and all of a sudden he hears this little fragment of melody, that comes into his head as inspiration often comes, elusive and tantalizing, and he wants it, it's gorgeous, and he longs for it, but he has no way to get it. He doesn't have a piece of paper, or a pencil, or a tape recorder. So he starts to feel all of that old anxiety start to rise in him like, "I'm going to lose this thing, and I'll be be haunted by this song forever. I'm not good enough, and I can't do it." And instead of panicking, he just stopped. He just stopped that whole mental process and he did something completely novel. He just looked up at the sky, and he said, "Excuse me, can you not see that I'm driving?" (Laughter) "Do I look like I can write down a song right now? If you really want to exist, come back at a more opportune moment when I can take care of you. Otherwise, go bother somebody else today. Go bother Leonard Cohen." And his whole work process changed after that. Not the work, the work was still oftentimes as dark as ever. But the process, and the heavy anxiety around it was released when he took the genie, the genius out of him where it was causing nothing but trouble, and released it back where it came from, and realized that this didn't have to be this internalized, tormented thing. It could be this peculiar, wondrous, bizarre collaboration, kind of conversation between Tom and the strange, external thing that was not quite Tom. When I heard that story, it started to shift a little bit the way that I worked too, and this idea already saved me once. It saved me when I was in the middle of writing "Eat, Pray, Love," and I fell into one of those sort of pits of despair that we all fall into when we're working on something and it's not coming and you start to think this is going to be a disaster, the worst book ever written. Not just bad, but the worst book ever written. And I started to think I should just dump this project. But then I remembered Tom talking to the open air and I tried it. So I just lifted my face up from the manuscript and I directed my comments to an empty corner of the room. And I said aloud, "Listen you, thing, you and I both know that if this book isn't brilliant that is not entirely my fault, right? Because you can see that I am putting everything I have into this, I don't have any more than this. If you want it to be better, you've got to show up and do your part of the deal. But if you don't do that, you know what, the hell with it. I'm going to keep writing anyway because that's my job. And I would please like the record to reflect today that I showed up for my part of the job." (Laughter) Because -- (Applause) Because in the end it's like this, OK -- centuries ago in the deserts of North Africa, people used to gather for these moonlight dances of sacred dance and music that would go on for hours and hours, until dawn. They were always magnificent, because the dancers were professionals and they were terrific, right? But every once in a while, very rarely, something would happen, and one of these performers would actually become transcendent. And I know you know what I'm talking about, because I know you've all seen, at some point in your life, a performance like this. It was like time would stop, and the dancer would sort of step through some kind of portal and he wasn't doing anything different than he had ever done, 1,000 nights before, but everything would align. And all of a sudden, he would no longer appear to be merely human. He would be lit from within, and lit from below and all lit up on fire with divinity. And when this happened, back then, people knew it for what it was, you know, they called it by its name. They would put their hands together and they would start to chant, "Allah, Allah, Allah, God, God, God." That's God, you know. Curious historical footnote: when the Moors invaded southern Spain, they took this custom with them and the pronunciation changed over the centuries from "Allah, Allah, Allah," to "Olé, olé, olé," which you still hear in bullfights and in flamenco dances. In Spain, when a performer has done something impossible and magic, "Allah, olé, olé, Allah, magnificent, bravo," incomprehensible, there it is -- a glimpse of God. Which is great, because we need that. But, the tricky bit comes the next morning, for the dancer himself, when he wakes up and discovers that it's Tuesday at 11 a.m., and he's no longer a glimpse of God. He's just an aging mortal with really bad knees, and maybe he's never going to ascend to that height again. And maybe nobody will ever chant God's name again as he spins, and what is he then to do with the rest of his life? This is hard. This is one of the most painful reconciliations to make in a creative life. But maybe it doesn't have to be quite so full of anguish if you never happened to believe, in the first place, that the most extraordinary aspects of your being came from you. But maybe if you just believed that they were on loan to you from some unimaginable source for some exquisite portion of your life to be passed along when you're finished, with somebody else. And, you know, if we think about it this way, it starts to change everything. This is how I've started to think, and this is certainly how I've been thinking in the last few months as I've been working on the book that will soon be published, as the dangerously, frighteningly over-anticipated follow up to my freakish success. And what I have to sort of keep telling myself when I get really psyched out about that is don't be afraid. Don't be daunted. Just do your job. Continue to show up for your piece of it, whatever that might be. If your job is to dance, do your dance. If the divine, cockeyed genius assigned to your case decides to let some sort of wonderment be glimpsed, for just one moment through your efforts, then "Olé!" And if not, do your dance anyhow. And "Olé!" to you, nonetheless. I believe this and I feel that we must teach it. "Olé!" to you, nonetheless, just for having the sheer human love and stubbornness to keep showing up. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) June Cohen: Olé! (Applause)

My thing with school lunch is, it's a social justice issue. I'm the Director of Nutrition Services for the Berkeley Unified School District. I have 90 employees and 17 locations, 9,600 kids. I'm doing 7,100 meals a day and I've been doing it for two years, trying to change how we feed kids in America. And that's what I want to talk to you a little bit about today. These are some of my kids with a salad bar. I put salad bars in all of our schools when I got there. Everyone says it couldn't be done. Little kids couldn't eat off the salad bar, big kids would spit in it -- neither happened. When I took over this, I tried to really figure out, like, what my vision would be. How do we really change children's relationship to food? And I'll tell you why we need to change it, but we absolutely have to change it. And what I came to understand is, we needed to teach children the symbiotic relationship between a healthy planet, healthy food and healthy kids. And that if we don't do that, the antithesis, although we've heard otherwise, is we're really going to become extinct, because we're feeding our children to death. That's my premise. We're seeing sick kids get sicker and sicker. And the reason this is happening, by and large, is because of our food system and the way the government commodifies food, the way the government oversees our food, the way the USDA puts food on kids' plates that's unhealthy, and allows unhealthy food into schools. And by -- tacitly, all of us send our kids, or grandchildren, or nieces, or nephews, to school and tell them to learn, you know, learn what's in those schools. And when you feed these kids bad food, that's what they're learning. So that's really what this is all about. The way we got here is because of big agribusiness. We now live in a country where most of us don't decide, by and large, what we eat. We see big businesses, Monsanto and DuPont, who brought out Agent Orange and stain-resistant carpet. They control 90 percent of the commercially produced seeds in our country. These are -- 10 companies control much of what's in our grocery stores, much of what people eat. And that's really, really a problem. So when I started thinking about these issues and how I was going to change what kids ate, I really started focusing on what we would teach them. And the very first thing was about regional food -- trying to eat food from within our region. And clearly, with what's going on with fossil fuel usage, or when -- as the fossil fuel is going away, as oil hits its peak oil, you know, we really have to start thinking about whether or not we should, or could, be moving food 1,500 miles before we eat it. So we talked to kids about that, and we really start to feed kids regional food. And then we talk about organic food. Now, most school districts can't really afford organic food, but we, as a nation, have to start thinking about consuming, growing and feeding our children food that's not chock-full of chemicals. We can't keep feeding our kids pesticides and herbicides and antibiotics and hormones. We can't keep doing that. You know, it doesn't work. And the results of that are kids getting sick. One of my big soapboxes right now is antibiotics. Seventy percent of all antibiotics consumed in America is consumed in animal husbandry. We are feeding our kids antibiotics in beef and other animal protein every day. Seventy percent -- it's unbelievable. And the result of it is, we have diseases. We have things like E. coli that we can't fix, that we can't make kids better when they get sick. And, you know, certainly antibiotics have been over-prescribed, but it's an issue in the food supply. One of my favorite facts is that U.S. agriculture uses 1.2 billion pounds of pesticides every year. That means every one of us, and our children, consumes what would equal a five-pound bag -- those bags you have at home. If I had one here and ripped it open, and that pile I would have on the floor is what we consume and feed our children every year because of what goes into our food supply, because of the way we consume produce in America. The USDA allows these antibiotics, these hormones and these pesticides in our food supply, and the USDA paid for this ad in Time magazine. Okay, we could talk about Rachel Carson and DDT, but we know it wasn't good for you and me. And that is what the USDA allows in our food supply. And that has to change, you know. The USDA cannot be seen as the be-all and end-all of what we feed our kids and what's allowed. We cannot believe that they have our best interests at heart. The antithesis of this whole thing is sustainable food. That's what I really try and get people to understand. I really try and teach it to kids. I think it's the most important. It's consuming food in a way in which we'll still have a planet, in which kids will grow up to be healthy, and which really tries to mitigate all the negative impacts we're seeing. It really is just a new idea. I mean, people toss around sustainability, but we have to figure out what sustainability is. In less than 200 years, you know, just in a few generations, we've gone from being 200 -- being 100 percent, 95 percent farmers to less than 2 percent of farmers. We now live in a country that has more prisoners than farmers -- 2.1 million prisoners, 1.9 million farmers. And we spend 35,000 dollars on average a year keeping a prisoner in prison, and school districts spend 500 dollars a year feeding a child. It's no wonder, you know, we have criminals. (Laughter) And what's happening is, we're getting sick. We're getting sick and our kids are getting sick. It is about what we feed them. What goes in is what we are. We really are what we eat. And if we continue down this path, if we continue to feed kids bad food, if we continue not to teach them what good food is, what's going to happen? You know, what is going to happen? What's going to happen to our whole medical system? What's going to happen is, we're going to have kids that have a life less long than our own. The CDC, the Center for Disease Control, has said, of the children born in the year 2000 -- those seven- and eight-year-olds today -- one out of every three Caucasians, one out of every two African-Americans and Hispanics are going to have diabetes in their lifetime. And if that's not enough, they've gone on to say, most before they graduate high school. This means that 40 or 45 percent of all school-aged children could be insulin-dependent within a decade. Within a decade. What's going to happen? Well, the CDC has gone further to say that those children born in the year 2000 could be the first generation in our country's history to die at a younger age than their parents. And it's because of what we feed them. Because eight-year-olds don't get to decide -- and if they do, you should be in therapy. You know, we are responsible for what kids eat. But oops, maybe they're responsible for what kids eat. Big companies spend 20 billion dollars a year marketing non-nutrient foods to kids. 20 billion dollars a year. 10,000 ads most kids see. They spend 500 dollars for every one dollar -- 500 dollars marketing foods that kids shouldn't eat for every one dollar marketing healthy, nutritious food. The result of which is kids think they're going to die if they don't have chicken nuggets. You know that everybody thinks they should be eating more, and more, and more. This is the USDA portion size, that little, tiny thing. And the one over there, that's bigger than my head, is what McDonald's and Burger King and those big companies think we should eat. And why can they serve that much? Why can we have 29-cent Big Gulps and 99-cent double burgers? It's because of the way the government commodifies food, and the cheap corn and cheap soy that are pushed into our food supply that makes these non-nutrient foods really, really cheap. Which is why I say it's a social justice issue. Now, I said I'm doing this in Berkeley, and you might think, "Oh, Berkeley. Of course you can do it in Berkeley." Well, this is the food I found 24 months ago. This is not even food. This is the stuff we were feeding our kids: Extremo Burritos, corn dogs, pizza pockets, grilled cheese sandwiches. Everything came in plastic, in cardboard. The only kitchen tools my staff had was a box cutter. The only working piece of equipment in my kitchen was a can crusher, because if it didn't come in a can, it came frozen in a box. The USDA allows this. The USDA allows all of this stuff. In case you can't tell, that's, like, pink Danish and some kind of cupcakes. Chicken nuggets, Tater Tots, chocolate milk with high fructose, canned fruit cocktail -- a reimbursable meal. That's what the government says is okay to feed our kids. It ain't okay. You know what? It is not okay. And we, all of us, have to understand that this is about us, that we can make a difference here. Now I don't know if any of you out there invented chicken nuggets, but I'm sure you're rich if you did. But whoever decided that a chicken should look like a heart, a giraffe, a star? Well, Tyson did, because there's no chicken in the chicken. And that they could figure it out, that we could sell this stuff to kids. You know, what's wrong with teaching kids that chicken looks like chicken? But this is what most schools serve. In fact, this may be what a lot of parents serve, as opposed to -- this is what we try and serve. We really need to change this whole paradigm with kids and food. We really have to teach children that chicken is not a giraffe. You know, that vegetables are actually colorful, that they have flavor, that carrots grow in the ground, that strawberries grow in the ground. There's not a strawberry tree or a carrot bush. You know, we have to change the way we teach kids about these things. There's a lot of stuff we can do. There's a lot of schools doing farm-to-school programs. There's a lot of schools actually getting fresh food into schools. Now, in Berkeley, we've gone totally fresh. We have no high-fructose corn syrup, no trans fats, no processed foods. We're cooking from scratch every day. We have 25 percent of our -- (Applause) thank you -- 25 percent of our stuff is organic and local. We cook. Those are my hands. I get up at 4 a.m. every day and go cook the food for the kids, because this is what we need to do. We can't keep serving kids processed crap, full of chemicals, and expect these are going to be healthy citizens. You're not going to get the next generation, or the generation after, to be able to think like this if they're not nourished. If they're eating chemicals all the time, they're not going to be able to think. They're not going to be smart. You know what? They're just going to be sick. Now one of the things that -- what happened when I went into Berkeley is I realized that, you know, this was all pretty amazing to people, very, very different, and I needed to market it. I came up with these calendars that I sent home to every parent. And these calendars really started to lay out my program. Now I'm in charge of all the cooking classes and all the gardening classes in our school district. So this is a typical menu. This is what we're serving this week at the schools. And you see these recipes on the side? Those are the recipes that the kids learn in my cooking classes. They do tastings of these ingredients in the gardening classes. They also may be growing them. And we serve them in the cafeterias. If we're going to change children's relationship to food, it's delicious, nutritious food in the cafeterias, hands-on experience -- you're looking in cooking and gardening classes -- and academic curriculum to tie it all together. Now you've probably garnered that I don't love the USDA, and I don't have any idea what to do with their pyramid, this upside-down pyramid with a rainbow over the top, I don't know. You know, run up into the end of the rainbow, I don't know what you do with it. So, I came up with my own. This is available on my website in English and Spanish, and it's a visual way to talk to kids about food. The really tiny hamburger, the really big vegetables. We have to start changing this. We have to make kids understand that their food choices make a big difference. We have cooking classes -- we have cooking classrooms in our schools. And why this is so important is that we now have grown a generation, maybe two, of kids where one out of every four meals is eaten in fast food, one of every four meals is eaten in a car and one out of every last four meals is eaten in front of a TV or computer. What are kids learning? Where is the family time? Where is socialization? Where is discussion? Where is learning to talk? You know, we have to change it. I work with kids a lot. These are kids I work with in Harlem. EATWISE -- Enlightened and Aware Teens Who Inspire Smart Eating. We have to teach kids that Coke and Pop Tarts aren't breakfast. We have to teach kids that if they're on a diet of refined sugar, they go up and down, just like if they're on a diet of crack. And we have to pull it all together. We have composting in all of our schools. We have recycling in all of our schools. You know, the things that we maybe do at home and think are so important, we have to teach kids about in school. It has to be so much a part of them that they really get it. Because, you know what, many of us are sort of at the end of our careers, and we need to be giving these kids -- these young kids, the next generation -- the tools to save themselves and save the planet. One of the things I do a lot is public-private partnerships. I work with private companies who are willing to do R & D with me, who are willing to do distribution for me, who are really willing to work to go into schools. Schools are underfunded. Most schools in America spend less than 7,500 dollars a year teaching a child. That comes down to under five dollars an hour. Most of you spend 10, 15 dollars an hour for babysitters when you have them. So we're spending less than 5 dollars an hour on the educational system. And if we're going to change it, and change how we feed kids, we really have to rethink that. So, public and private partnerships, advocacy groups, working with foundations. In our school district, the way we afford this is our school district allocates .03 percent of the general fund towards nutrition services. And I think if every school district allocated a half to one percent, we could start to really fix this program. We really need to change it. It's going to take more money. Of course, it's not all about food; it's also about kids getting exercise. And one of the simple things we can do is put recess before lunch. It's sort of this "duh" thing. You know, if you have kids coming into lunch and all they're going to do when they get out of lunch is go to have recess, you see them just throw away their lunch so they can run outside. And then, at one in the afternoon, they're totally crashing. These are your children and grandchildren that are totally melting down when you pick them up, because they haven't had lunch. So if the only thing they'd have to do after lunch is go to class, believe me, they're going to sit there and eat their lunch. We need to -- we need to educate. We need to educate the kids. We need to educate the staff. I had 90 employees. Two were supposed to be cooks -- none could. And, you know, I'm not that better off now. But we really have to educate. We have to get academic institutions to start thinking about ways to teach people how to cook again, because, of course, they don't -- because we've had this processed food in schools and institutions for so long. We need 40-minute lunches -- most schools have 20-minute lunches -- and lunches that are time-appropriate. There was just a big study done, and so many schools are starting lunch at nine and 10 in the morning. That is not lunchtime. You know, it's crazy. It's crazy what we're doing. And just remember, at very least tacitly, this is what we're teaching children as what they should be doing. I think if we're going to fix this, one of the things we have to do is really change how we have oversight over the National School Lunch Program. Instead of the National School Lunch Program being under the USDA, I think it should be under CDC. If we started to think about food and how we feed our kids as a health initiative, and we started thinking about food as health, then I think we wouldn't have corn dogs as lunch. Okay, Finance 101 on this, and this -- I'm sort of wrapping it up with this finance piece, because I think this is something we all have to understand. The National School Lunch Program spends 8 billion dollars feeding 30 million children a year. That number probably needs to double. People say, "Oh my God, where are we going to get 8 billion?" In this country, we're spending 110 billion dollars a year on fast food. We spend 100 billion dollars a year on diet aids. We spend 50 billion dollars on vegetables, which is why we need all the diet aids. We spend 200 billion dollars a year on diet-related illness today, with nine percent of our kids having type 2 diabetes. 200 billion. So you know what, when we talk about needing 8 billion more, it's not a lot. That 8 billion comes down to two dollars and 49 cents -- that's what the government allocates for lunch. Most school districts spend two thirds of that on payroll and overhead. That means we spend less than a dollar a day on food for kids in schools -- most schools, 80 to 90 cents. In L.A., it's 56 cents. So we're spending less than a dollar, OK, on lunch. Now I don't know about you, but I go to Starbucks and Pete's and places like that, and venti latte in San Francisco is five dollars. One gourmet coffee, one, is more -- we spend more on than we are spending to feed kids for an entire week in our schools. You know what? We should be ashamed. We, as a country, should be ashamed at that. The richest country. In our country, it's the kids that need it the most, who get this really, really lousy food. It's the kids who have parents and grandparents and uncles and aunts that can't even afford to pay for school lunch that gets this food. And those are the same kids who are going to be getting sick. Those are the same kids who we should be taking care of. We can all make a difference. That every single one of us, whether we have children, whether we care about children, whether we have nieces or nephews, or anything -- that we can make a difference. Whether you sit down and eat a meal with your kids, whether you take your kids, or grandchildren, or nieces and nephews shopping to a farmers' market. Just do tastings with them. Sit down and care. And on the macro level, we're in what seems to be a 19-month presidential campaign, and of all the things we're asking all of these potential leaders, what about asking for the health of our children? Thank you.

So I think data can actually make us more human. We're collecting and creating all kinds of data about how we're living our lives, and it's enabling us to tell some amazing stories. Recently, a wise media theorist Tweeted, "The 19th century culture was defined by the novel, the 20th century culture was defined by the cinema, and the culture of the 21st century will be defined by the interface." And I believe this is going to prove true. Our lives are being driven by data, and the presentation of that data is an opportunity for us to make some amazing interfaces that tell great stories. So I'm going to show you a few of the projects that I've been working on over the last couple years that reflect on our lives and our systems. This is a project called Flight Patterns. What you're looking at is airplane traffic over North America for a 24-hour period. As you see, everything starts to fade to black, and you see people going to sleep. Followed by that, you see on the West coast planes moving across, the red-eye flights to the East coast. And you'll see everybody waking up on the East coast, followed by European flights coming in the upper right-hand corner. Everybody's moving from the East coast to the West coast. You see San Francisco and Los Angeles start to make their journeys down to Hawaii in the lower left-hand corner. I think it's one thing to say there's 140,000 planes being monitored by the federal government at any one time, and it's another thing to see that system as it ebbs and flows. This is a time-lapse image of that exact same data, but I've color-coded it by type, so you can see the diversity of aircraft that are in the skies above us. And I started making these, and I put them into Google Maps and allow you to zoom in and see individual airports and the patterns that are occurring there. So here we can see the white represents low altitudes, and the blue are higher altitudes. And you can zoom in. This is taking a look at Atlanta. You can see this is a major shipping airport, and there's all kinds of activity there. You can also toggle between altitude for model and manufacturer. See again, the diversity. And you can scroll around and see some of the different airports and the different patterns that they have. This is scrolling up the East coast. You can see some of the chaos that's happening in New York with the air traffic controllers having to deal with all those major airports next to each other. So zooming back out real quick, we see, again, the U.S. -- you get Florida down in the right-hand corner. Moving across to the West coast, you see San Francisco and Los Angeles -- big low-traffic zones across Nevada and Arizona. And that's us down there in L.A. and Long Beach on the bottom. I started taking a look as well at different perimeters, because you can choose what you want to pull out from the data. This is looking at ascending versus descending flights. And you can see, over time, the ways the airports change. You see the holding patterns that start to develop in the bottom of the screen. And you can see, eventually the airport actually flips directions. So this is another project that I worked on with the Sensible Cities Lab at MIT. This is visualizing international communications. So it's how New York communicates with other international cities. And we set this up as a live globe in the Museum of Modern Art in New York for the Design the Elastic Mind exhibition. And it had a live feed with a 24-hour offset, so you could see the changing relationship and some demographic info coming through AT&T's data and revealing itself. This is another project I worked on with Sensible Cities Lab and CurrentCity.org. And it's visualizing SMS messages being sent in the city of Amsterdam. So you're seeing the daily ebb and flow of people sending SMS messages from different parts of the city, until we approach New Year's Eve, where everybody says, "Happy New Year!" (Laughter) So this is an interactive tool that you can move around and see different parts of the city. This is looking at another event. This is called Queen's Day. So again, you get this daily ebb and flow of people sending SMS messages from different parts of the city. And then you're going to see people start to gather in the center of the city to celebrate the night before, which happens right here. And then you can see people celebrating the next day. And you can pause it and step back and forth and see different phases. So now on to something completely different. Some of you may recognize this. This is Baron Wolfgang von Kempelen's mechanical chess playing machine. And it's this amazing robot that plays chess extremely well, except for one thing: it's not a robot at all. There's actually a legless man that sits in that box and controls this chess player. This was the inspiration for a web service by Amazon called the Mechanical Turk -- named after this guy. And it's based on the premise that there are certain things that are easy for people, but really difficult for computers. So they made this web service and said, "Any programmer can write a piece of software and tap into the minds of thousands of people." The nerdy side of me thought, "Wow, this is amazing. I can tap into thousands of people's minds." And the other nerdy side of me thought, "This is horrible. This is completely bizarre. What does this mean for the future of mankind, where we're all plugged into this borg?" I was probably being a little extreme. But what does this mean when we have no context for what it is that we're working on, and we're just doing these little labors? So I created this drawing tool. I asked people to draw a sheep facing to the left. And I said, "I'll pay you two cents for your contribution." And I started collecting sheep. And I collected a lot, a lot of different sheep. Lots of sheep. I took the first 10,000 sheep that I collected, and I put them on a website called TheSheepMarket.com where you can actually buy collections of 20 sheep. You can't pick individual sheep, but you can buy a single plate block of stamps as a commodity. And juxtaposed against this grid, you see actually, by rolling over each individual one, the humanity behind this hugely mechanical process. I think there's something really interesting to watching people as they go through this creative toil -- something we can all relate to, this creative process of trying to come up with something from nothing. I think it was really interesting to juxtapose this humanity versus this massive distributed grid. Kind of amazing what some people did. So here's a few statistics from the project. Approximate collection rate of 11 sheep per hour, which would make a working wage of 69 cents per hour. There were 662 rejected sheep that didn't meet "sheep-like" criteria and were thrown out of the flock. (Laughter) The amount of time spent drawing ranged from four seconds to 46 minutes. That gives you an idea of the different types of motivations and dedication. And there were 7,599 people that contributed to the project, or were unique IP addresses -- so about how many people contributed. But only one of them out of the 7,599 said this. (Laughter) Which I was pretty surprised by. I expected people to be wondering, "Why did I draw a sheep?" And I think it's a pretty valid question. And there's a lot of reasons why I chose sheep. Sheep were the first animal to be raised from mechanically processed byproducts, the first to be selectively bred for production traits, the first animal to be cloned. Obviously, we think of sheep as followers. And there's this reference to "Le Petit Prince" where the narrator asks the prince to draw a sheep. He draws sheep after sheep. The narrator's only appeased when he draws a box. And he says, "It's not about a scientific rendering of a sheep. It's about your own interpretation and doing something different." And I like that. So this is a clip from Charlie Chaplin's "Modern Times." It's showing Charlie Chaplin dealing with some of the major changes during the Industrial Revolution. So there were no longer shoe makers, but now there are people slapping soles on people's shoes. And the whole idea of one's relationship to their work changed a lot. So I thought this was an interesting clip to divide into 16 pieces and feed into the Mechanical Turk with a drawing tool. This basically allowed -- what you see on the left side is the original frame, and on the right side you see that frame as interpreted by 16 people who have no idea what it is they're doing. And this was the inspiration for a project that I worked on with my friend Takashi Kawashima. We decided to use the Mechanical Turk for exactly what it was meant for, which is making money. So we took a hundred dollar bill and divided it into 10,000 teeny pieces, and we fed those into the Mechanical Turk. We asked people to draw what it was that they saw. But here there was no sheep-like criteria. People, if they drew a stick figure or a smiley face, it actually made it into the bill. So what you see is actually a representation of how well people did what it was they were asked to do. So we took these hundred dollar bills, and we put them on a website called TenThousandsCents.com, where you can browse through and see all the individual contributions. And you can also trade real hundred-dollar bills for fake hundred-dollar bills and make a donation to the Hundred Dollar Laptop Project, which is now known as One Laptop Per Child. This is again showing all the different contributions. You see some people did beautiful stipple renderings, like this one on top -- spent a long time making realistic versions. And other people would draw stick figures or smiley faces. Here on the right-hand side in the middle you see this one guy writing, "$0.01!!! Really?" That's all I'm getting paid for this? (Laughter) So the last Mechanical Turk project I'm going to talk to you about is called Bicycle Built for 2000. This is a collaboration with my friend Daniel Massey. You may recognize these two guys. This is Max Mathews and John Kelly from Bell Labs in the '60s, where they created the song "Daisy Bell," which was the world's first singing computer. You may recognize it from "2001: A Space Odyssey." When HAL's dying at the end of the film he starts singing this song, as a reference to when computers became human. So we resynthesized this song. This is what that sounded like. We broke down all the individual notes in the singing as well as the phonemes in the singing. Daisy Bell: ♫ Daisy, Daisy ... ♫ Aaron Koblin: And we took all of those individual pieces, and we fed them into another Turk request. This is what it would look like if you went to the site. You type in your code, but you first test your mic. You'd be fed a simple audio clip. (Honk) And then you'd do your best to recreate that with your own voice. After previewing it and confirming it's what you submitted, you could submit it into the Mechanical Turk with no other context. And this is what we first got back from the very first set of submissions. Recording: ♫ Daisy, Daisy ♫ ♫ give me your answer do ♫ ♫ I'm half crazy ♫ ♫ all for the love of you ♫ ♫ It can't be a stylish marriage ♫ ♫ I can't afford a carriage ♫ ♫ But you'll look sweet upon the seat ♫ ♫ of a bicycle built for two ♫ AK: So James Surowieki has this idea of the wisdom of crowds, that says that a whole bunch of people are smarter than any individual. We wanted to see how this applies to collaborative, distributed music making, where nobody has any idea what it is they're working on. So if you go to the BicycleBuiltforTwoThousand.com you can actually hear what all this sounds like together. I'm sorry for this. (Noise) Chorus: ♫ Daisy, Daisy ♫ ♫ Give me your answer do ♫ ♫ I'm half crazy ♫ ♫ all for the love of you ♫ ♫ It can't be a stylish marriage ♫ ♫ I can't afford a carriage ♫ ♫ But you'd look sweet upon the seat ♫ ♫ of a bicycle built for two ♫ AK: So stepping back for a quick second, when I was at UCLA going to grad school, I was also working at a place called the Center for Embedded Network Sensing. And I was writing software to visualize laser scanners. So basically motion through 3D space. And this was seen by a director in L.A. named James Frost who said, "Wait a minute. You mean we can shoot a music video without actually using any video?" So we did exactly that. We made a music video for one of my favorite bands, Radiohead. And I think one of my favorite parts of this project was not just shooting a video with lasers, but we also open sourced it, and we made it released as a Google Code project, where people could download a bunch of the data and some source code to build their own versions of it. And people were making some amazing things. This is actually two of my favorites: the pin-board Thom Yorke and a LEGO Thom Yorke. A whole YouTube channel of people submitting really interesting content. More recently, somebody even 3D-printed Thom Yorke's head, which is a little creepy, but pretty cool. So with everybody making so much amazing stuff and actually understanding what it was they were working on, I was really interested in trying to make a collaborative project where people were working together to build something. And I met a music video director named Chris Milk. And we started bouncing around ideas to make a collaborative music video project. But we knew we really needed the right person to kind of rally behind and build something for. So we put the idea on the back burner for a few months. And he ended up talking to Rick Rubin, who was finishing up Johnny Cash's final album called "Ain't No Grave." The lyrics to the leading track are "Ain't no grave can hold my body down." So we thought this was the perfect project to build a collaborative memorial and a virtual resurrection for Johnny Cash. So I teamed up with my good friend Ricardo Cabello, also known as Mr. doob, who's a much better programmer than I am, and he made this amazing Flash drawing tool. As you know, an animation is a series of images. So what we did was cross-cut a bunch of archival footage of Johnny Cash, and at eight frames a second, we allowed individuals to draw a single frame that would get woven into this dynamically changing music video. So I don't have time to play the entire thing for you, but I want to show you two short clips. One is the beginning of the music video. And that's going to be followed by a short clip of people who have already contributed to the project talking about it briefly. (Music) (Video) Johnny Cash: ♫ There ain't no grave ♫ ♫ can hold my body down ♫ ♫ There ain't no grave ♫ ♫ can hold body down ♫ ♫ When I hear the trumpet sound ♫ ♫ I'm going to ride right out of the ground ♫ ♫ Ain't no grave ♫ ♫ can hold my body ... ♫ (Applause) AK: What better way to pay tribute to the man than to make something for one of his songs. Collaborator: I felt really sad when he died. And I just thought it'd be wonderful, it'd be really nice to contribute something to his memory. Collaborator Two: It really allows this last recording of his to be a living, breathing memorial. Collaborator Three: For all of the frames to be drawn by fans, each individual frame, it's got a very powerful feeling to it. Collaborator Four: I've seen everybody from Japan, Venezuela, to the States, to Knoxville, Tennessee. Collaborator Five: As much as is different from frame to frame, it really is personal. Collaborator Six: Watching the video in my room, I could see me not understanding at the beginning of it. And I just worked and worked through problems, until my little wee battles that I was fighting within the picture all began to resolve themselves. You can actually see the point when I know what I'm doing, and a lot of light and dark comes into it. And in a weird way, that's what I actually like about Johnny Cash's music as well. It's the sum total of his life, all the things that had happened -- the bad things, the good things. You're hearing a person's life. AK: So if you go to the website JohnnyCashProject.com, what you'll see is the video playing above. And below it are all the individual frames that people have been submitting to the project. So this isn't finished at all, but it's an ongoing project where people can continue to collaborate. If you roll over any one of those individual thumbnails, you can see the person who drew that individual thumbnail and where they were located. And if you find one that you're interested in, you can actually click on it and open up an information panel where you're able to rate that frame, which helps it bubble up to the top. And you can also see the way that it was drawn. Again, you can get the playback and personal contribution. In addition to that, it's listed, the artist's name, the location, how long they spent drawing it. And you can pick a style. So this one was tagged "Abstract." But there's a bunch of different styles. And you can sort the video a number of different ways. You can say, "I want to see the pointillist version or the sketchy version or the realistic version. And then this is, again, the abstract version, which ends up getting a little bit crazy. So the last project I want to talk to you about is another collaboration with Chris Milk. And this is called "The Wilderness Downtown." It's an online music video for the Arcade Fire. Chris and I were really amazed by the potential now with modern web browsers, where you have HTML5 audio and video and the power of JavaScript to render amazingly fast. And we wanted to push the idea of the music video that was meant for the Web beyond the four-by-three or sixteen-by-nine window and try to make it play out and choreograph throughout the screen. But most importantly, I think, we really wanted to make an experience that was unlike the Johnny Cash Project, where you had a small group of people spending a lot of time to contribute something for everyone. What if we had a very low commitment, but delivered something individually unique to each person who contributed? So the project starts off by asking you to enter the address of the home where you grew up. And you type in the address -- it actually creates a music video specifically for you, pulling in Google maps and Streetview images into the experience itself. So this should really be seen at home with you typing in your own address, but I'm going to give you a little preview of what you can expect. (Video) Win Butler: ♫ Now our lives are changing fast ♫ ♫ Now our lives are changing fast ♫ ♫ Hope that something pure can last ♫ ♫ Hope that something pure can last ♫ ♫ Ooh we used to wait ♫ ♫ Ooh we used to wait ♫ ♫ Ooh we used to wait ♫ ♫ Sometimes it never came ♫ ♫ Sometimes it never came ♫ ♫ Still moving through the pain ♫ ♫ We used to wait for it ♫ ♫ We used to wait for it ♫ ♫ We used to wait for it ♫ AK: So I think, if there's one thing to take away from my talk today, it's that an interface can be a powerful narrative device. And as we collect more and more personally and socially relevant data, we have an opportunity, and maybe even an obligation, to maintain the humanity and tell some amazing stories as we explore and collaborate together. Thanks a lot. (Applause)

I thought in getting up to my TED wish I would try to begin by putting in perspective what I try to do and how it fits with what they try to do. We live in a world that everyone knows is interdependent, but insufficient in three major ways. It is, first of all, profoundly unequal: half the world's people still living on less than two dollars a day; a billion people with no access to clean water; two and a half billion no access to sanitation; a billion going to bed hungry every night; one in four deaths every year from AIDS, TB, malaria and the variety of infections associated with dirty water -- 80 percent of them under five years of age. Even in wealthy countries it is common now to see inequality growing. In the United States, since 2001 we've had five years of economic growth, five years of productivity growth in the workplace, but median wages are stagnant and the percentage of working families dropping below the poverty line is up by four percent. The percentage of working families without health care up by four percent. So this interdependent world which has been pretty good to most of us -- which is why we're all here in Northern California doing what we do for a living, enjoying this evening -- is profoundly unequal. It is also unstable. Unstable because of the threats of terror, weapons of mass destruction, the spread of global disease and a sense that we are vulnerable to it in a way that we weren't not so many years ago. And perhaps most important of all, it is unsustainable because of climate change, resource depletion and species destruction. When I think about the world I would like to leave to my daughter and the grandchildren I hope to have, it is a world that moves away from unequal, unstable, unsustainable interdependence to integrated communities -- locally, nationally and globally -- that share the characteristics of all successful communities: a broadly shared, accessible set of opportunities, a shared sense of responsibility for the success of the common enterprise and a genuine sense of belonging. All easier said than done. When the terrorist incidents occurred in the United Kingdom a couple of years ago, I think even though they didn't claim as many lives as we lost in the United States on 9/11, I think the thing that troubled the British most was that the perpetrators were not invaders, but homegrown citizens whose religious and political identities were more important to them than the people they grew up with, went to school with, worked with, shared weekends with, shared meals with. In other words, they thought their differences were more important than their common humanity. It is the central psychological plague of humankind in the 21st century. Into this mix, people like us, who are not in public office, have more power to do good than at any time in history, because more than half the world's people live under governments they voted in and can vote out. And even non-democratic governments are more sensitive to public opinion. Because primarily of the power of the Internet, people of modest means can band together and amass vast sums of money that can change the world for some public good if they all agree. When the tsunami hit South Asia, the United States contributed 1.2 billion dollars. 30 percent of our households gave. Half of them gave over the Internet. The median contribution was somewhere around 57 dollars. And thirdly, because of the rise of non-governmental organizations. They, businesses, other citizens' groups, have enormous power to affect the lives of our fellow human beings. When I became president in 1993, there were none of these organizations in Russia. There are now a couple of hundred thousand. None in India. There are now at least a half a million active. None in China. There are now 250,000 registered with the government, probably twice again that many who are not registered for political reasons. When I organized my foundation, and I thought about the world as it is and the world that I hope to leave to the next generation, and I tried to be realistic about what I had cared about all my life that I could still have an impact on. I wanted to focus on activities that would help to alleviate poverty, fight disease, combat climate change, bridge the religious, racial and other divides that torment the world, but to do it in a way that would either use whatever particular skills we could put together in our group to change the way some public good function was performed so that it would sweep across the world more. You saw one reference to that in what we were able to do with AIDS drugs. And I want to say that the head of our AIDS effort, and the person who also is primarily active in the wish I'll make tonight, Ira Magaziner, is here with me and I want to thank him for everything he's done. He's over there. (Applause) When I got out of office and was asked to work, first in the Caribbean, to try to help deal with the AIDS crisis, generic drugs were available for about 500 dollars a person a year. If you bought them in vast bulks, you could get them at a little under 400 dollars. The first country we went to work in, the Bahamas, was paying 3,500 dollars for these drugs. The market was so terribly disorganized that they were buying this medicine through two agents who were gigging them sevenfold. So the very first week we were working, we got the price down to 500 dollars. And all of a sudden, they could save seven times as many lives for the same amount of money. Then we went to work with the manufacturers of AIDS medicines, one of whom was cited in the film, and negotiated a whole different change in business strategy, because even at 500 dollars, these drugs were being sold on a high-margin, low-volume, uncertain-payment basis. So we worked on improving the productivity of the operations and the supply chain, and went to a low-margin, high-volume, absolutely certain-payment business. I joked that the main contribution we made to the battle against AIDS was to get the manufacturers to change from a jewelry store to a grocery store strategy. But the price went to 140 dollars from 500. And pretty soon, the average price was 192 dollars. Now we can get it for about 100 dollars. Children's medicine was 600 dollars, because nobody could afford to buy any of it. We negotiated it down to 190. Then, the French imposed their brilliantly conceived airline tax to create a something called UNITAID, got a bunch of other countries to help. That children's medicine is now 60 dollars a person a year. The only thing that is keeping us from basically saving the lives of everybody who needs the medicine to stay alive are the absence of systems necessary to diagnose, treat and care for people and deliver this medicine. We started a childhood obesity initiative with the Heart Association in America. We tried to do the same thing by negotiating industry-right deals with the soft drink and the snack food industry to cut the caloric and other dangerous content of food going to our children in the schools. We just reorganized the markets. And it occurred to me that in this whole non-governmental world, somebody needs to be thinking about organizing public goods markets. And that is now what we're trying to do, and working with this large cities group to fight climate change, to negotiate huge, big, volume deals that will enable cities which generate 75 percent of the world's greenhouse gases, to drastically and quickly reduce greenhouse gas emissions in a way that is good economics. And this whole discussion as if it's some sort of economic burden, is a mystery to me. I think it's a bird's nest on the ground. When Al Gore won his well-deserved Oscar for the "Inconvenient Truth" movie, I was thrilled, but I had urged him to make a second movie quickly. For those of you who saw "An Inconvenient Truth," the most important slide in the Gore lecture is the last one, which shows here's where greenhouse gases are going if we don't do anything, here's where they could go. And then there are six different categories of things we can do to change the trajectory. We need a movie on those six categories. And all of you need to have it embedded in your brains and to organize yourselves around it. So we're trying to do that. So organizing these markets is one thing we try to do. Now we have taken on a second thing, and this gets to my wish. It has been my experience in working in developing countries that while the headlines may all be -- the pessimistic headlines may say, well, we can't do this, that or the other thing because of corruption -- I think incapacity is a far bigger problem in poor countries than corruption, and feeds corruption. We now have the money, given these low prices, to distribute AIDS drugs all over the world to people we cannot presently reach. Today these low prices are available in the 25 countries where we work, and in a total of 62 countries, and about 550,000 people are getting the benefits of them. But the money is there to reach others. The systems are not there to reach the people. So what we have been trying to do, working first in Rwanda and then in Malawi and other places -- but I want to talk about Rwanda tonight -- is to develop a model for rural health care in a very poor area that can be used to deal with AIDS, TB, malaria, other infectious diseases, maternal and child health, and a whole range of health issues poor people are grappling with in the developing world, that can first be scaled for the whole nation of Rwanda, and then will be a model that could literally be implemented in any other poor country in the world. And the test is: one, will it do the job? Will it provide high quality care? And two, will it do it at a price that will enable the country to sustain a health care system without foreign donors after five to 10 years? Because the longer I deal with these problems, the more convinced I am that we have to -- whether it's economics, health, education, whatever -- we have to build systems. And the absence of systems that function break the connection which got you all in this seat tonight. You think about whatever your life has been, however many obstacles you have faced in your life, at critical junctures you always knew there was a predictable connection between the effort you exerted and the result you achieved. In a world with no systems, with chaos, everything becomes a guerilla struggle, and this predictability is not there. And it becomes almost impossible to save lives, educate kids, develop economies, whatever. The person, in my view, who has done the best job of this in the health care area, of building a system in a very poor area, is Dr. Paul Farmer, who, many of you know, has worked for now 20 years with his group, Partners in Health, primarily in Haiti where he started, but they've also worked in Russia, in Peru and other places around the world. As poor as Haiti is, in the area where Farmer's clinic is active -- and they serve a catchment area far greater than the medical professionals they have would indicate they could serve -- since 1988, they have not lost one person to tuberculosis, not one. And they've achieved a lot of other amazing health results. So when we decided to work in Rwanda on trying to dramatically increase the income of the country and fight the AIDS problem, we wanted to build a healthcare network, because it had been totally destroyed during the genocide in 1994, and the per capita income was still under a dollar a day. So I rang up, asked Paul Farmer if he would help. Because it seemed to me if we could prove there was a model in Haiti and a model in Rwanda that we could then take all over the country, number one, it would be a wonderful thing for a country that has suffered as much as any on Earth in the last 15 years, and number two, we would have something that could then be adapted to any other poor country anywhere in the world. And so we have set about doing that. Now, we started working together 18 months ago. And we're working in an area called Southern Kayonza, which is one of the poorest areas in Rwanda, with a group that originally includes about 400,000 people. We're essentially implementing what Paul Farmer did in Haiti: he develops and trains paid community health workers who are able to identify health problems, ensure that people who have AIDS or TB are properly diagnosed and take their medicine regularly, who work on bringing about health education, clean water and sanitation, providing nutritional supplements and moving people up the chain of health care if they have problems of the severity that require it. The procedures that make this work have been perfected, as I said, by Paul Farmer and his team in their work in rural Haiti over the last 20 years. Recently we did an evaluation of the first 18 months of our efforts in Rwanda. And the results were so good that the Rwandan government has now agreed to adopt the model for the entire country, and has strongly supported and put the full resources of the government behind it. I'll tell you a little bit about our team because it's indicative of what we do. We have about 500 people around the world working in our AIDS program, some of them for nothing -- just for transportation, room and board. And then we have others working in these other related programs. Our business plan in Rwanda was put together under the leadership of Diana Noble, who is an unusually gifted woman, but not unusual in the type of people who have been willing to do this kind of work. She was the youngest partner at Schroder Ventures in London in her 20s. She was CEO of a successful e-venture -- she started and built Reed Elsevier Ventures -- and at 45 she decided she wanted to do something different with her life. So she now works full-time on this for very little pay. She and her team of former business people have created a business plan that will enable us to scale this health system up for the whole country. And it would be worthy of the kind of private equity work she used to do when she was making a lot more money for it. When we came to this rural area, 45 percent of the children under the age of five had stunted growth due to malnutrition. 23 percent of them died before they reached the age of five. Mortality at birth was over two-and-a-half percent. Over 15 percent of the deaths among adults and children occurred because of intestinal parasites and diarrhea from dirty water and inadequate sanitation -- all entirely preventable and treatable. Over 13 percent of the deaths were from respiratory illnesses -- again, all preventable and treatable. And not a single soul in this area was being treated for AIDS or tuberculosis. Within the first 18 months, the following things happened: we went from zero to about 2,000 people being treated for AIDS. That's 80 percent of the people who need treatment in this area. Listen to this: less than four-tenths of one percent of those being treated stopped taking their medicine or otherwise defaulted on treatment. That's lower than the figure in the United States. Less than three-tenths of one percent had to transfer to the more expensive second-line drugs. 400,000 pregnant women were brought into counseling and will give birth for the first time within an organized healthcare system. That's about 43 percent of all the pregnancies. About 40 percent of all the people -- I said 400,000. I meant 40,000. About 40 percent of all the people who need TB treatment are now getting it -- in just 18 months, up from zero when we started. 43 percent of the children in need of an infant feeding program to prevent malnutrition and early death are now getting the food supplements they need to stay alive and to grow. We've started the first malaria treatment programs they've ever had there. Patients admitted to a hospital that was destroyed during the genocide that we have renovated along with four other clinics, complete with solar power generators, good lab technology. We now are treating 325 people a month, despite the fact that almost 100 percent of the AIDS patients are now treated at home. And the most important thing is because we've implemented Paul Farmer's model, using community health workers, we estimate that this system could be put into place for all of Rwanda for between five and six percent of GDP, and that the government could sustain that without depending on foreign aid after five or six years. And for those of you who understand healthcare economics you know that all wealthy countries spend between nine and 11 percent of GDP on health care, except for the United States, we spend 16 -- but that's a story for another day. (Laughter) We're now working with Partners in Health and the Ministry of Health in Rwanda and our Foundation folks to scale this system up. We're also beginning to do this in Malawi and Lesotho. And we have similar projects in Tanzania, Mozambique, Kenya and Ethiopia with other partners trying to achieve the same thing: to save as many lives as quickly as we can, but to do it in a systematic way that can be implemented nationwide and then with a model that can be implemented in any country in the world. We need initial upfront investment to train doctors, nurses, health administration and community health workers throughout the country, to set up the information technology, the solar energy, the water and sanitation, the transportation infrastructure. But over a five- to 10-year period, we will take down the need for outside assistance and eventually it will be phased out. My wish is that TED assist us in our work and help us to build a high-quality rural health system in a poor country, Rwanda, that can be a model for Africa, and indeed, for any poor country anywhere in the world. My belief is that this will help us to build a more integrated world with more partners and fewer terrorists, with more productive citizens and fewer haters, a place we'd all want our kids and our grandchildren to grow up in. It has been an honor for me, particularly, to work in Rwanda where we also have a major economic development project in partnership with Sir Tom Hunter, the Scottish philanthropist, where last year we, using the same thing with AIDS drugs, cut the cost of fertilizer and the interest rates on microcredit loans by 30 percent and achieved three- to four-hundred percent increases in crop yields with the farmers. These people have been through a lot and none of us, most of all me, helped them when they were on the verge of destroying each other. We're undoing that now, and they are so over it and so into their future. We're doing this in an environmentally responsible way. I'm doing my best to convince them not to run the electric grid to the 35 percent of the people that have no access, but to do it with clean energy. To have responsible reforestation projects, the Rwandans, interestingly enough, have been quite good, Mr. Wilson, in preserving their topsoil. There's a couple of guys from southern farming families -- the first thing I did when I went out to this place was to get down on my hands and knees and dig in the dirt and see what they'd done with it. We have a chance here to prove that a country that almost slaughtered itself out of existence can practice reconciliation, reorganize itself, focus on tomorrow and provide comprehensive, quality health care with minimal outside help. I am grateful for this prize, and I will use it to that end. We could use some more help to do this, but think of what it would mean if we could have a world-class health system in Rwanda -- in a country with a less-than-one-dollar-a-day-per-capita income, one that could save hundreds of millions of lives over the next decade if applied to every similarly situated country on Earth. It's worth a try and I believe it would succeed. Thank you and God bless you. (Applause)

A year ago, I spoke to you about a book that I was just in the process of completing, that has come out in the interim, and I would like to talk to you today about some of the controversies that that book inspired. The book is called "The Blank Slate," based on the popular idea that the human mind is a blank slate, and that all of its structure comes from socialization, culture, parenting, experience. The "blank slate" was an influential idea in the 20th century. Here are a few quotes indicating that: "Man has no nature," from the historian Jose Ortega y Gasset; "Man has no instincts," from the anthropologist Ashley Montagu; "The human brain is capable of a full range of behaviors and predisposed to none," from the late scientist Stephen Jay Gould. There are a number of reasons to doubt that the human mind is a blank slate, and some of them just come from common sense. As many people have told me over the years, anyone who's had more than one child knows that kids come into the world with certain temperaments and talents; it doesn't all come from the outside. Oh, and anyone who has both a child and a house pet has surely noticed that the child, exposed to speech, will acquire a human language, whereas the house pet won't, presumably because of some innate different between them. And anyone who's ever been in a heterosexual relationship knows that the minds of men and the minds of women are not indistinguishable. There are also, I think, increasing results from the scientific study of humans that, indeed, we're not born blank slates. One of them, from anthropology, is the study of human universals. If you've ever taken anthropology, you know that it's a -- kind of an occupational pleasure of anthropologists to show how exotic other cultures can be, and that there are places out there where, supposedly, everything is the opposite to the way it is here. But if you instead look at what is common to the world's cultures, you find that there is an enormously rich set of behaviors and emotions and ways of construing the world that can be found in all of the world's 6,000-odd cultures. The anthropologist Donald Brown has tried to list them all, and they range from aesthetics, affection and age statuses all the way down to weaning, weapons, weather, attempts to control, the color white and a worldview. Also, genetics and neuroscience are increasingly showing that the brain is intricately structured. This is a recent study by the neurobiologist Paul Thompson and his colleagues in which they -- using MRI -- measured the distribution of gray matter -- that is, the outer layer of the cortex -- in a large sample of pairs of people. They coded correlations in the thickness of gray matter in different parts of the brain using a false color scheme, in which no difference is coded as purple, and any color other than purple indicates a statistically significant correlation. Well, this is what happens when you pair people up at random. By definition, two people picked at random can't have correlations in the distribution of gray matter in the cortex. This is what happens in people who share half of their DNA -- fraternal twins. And as you can see, large amounts of the brain are not purple, showing that if one person has a thicker bit of cortex in that region, so does his fraternal twin. And here's what happens if you get a pair of people who share all their DNA -- namely, clones or identical twins. And you can see huge areas of cortex where there are massive correlations in the distribution of gray matter. Now, these aren't just differences in anatomy, like the shape of your ear lobes, but they have consequences in thought and behavior that are well illustrated in this famous cartoon by Charles Addams: "Separated at birth, the Mallifert twins meet accidentally." As you can see, there are two inventors with identical contraptions in their lap, meeting in the waiting room of a patent attorney. Now, the cartoon is not such an exaggeration, because studies of identical twins who were separated at birth and then tested in adulthood show that they have astonishing similarities. And this happens in every pair of identical twins separated at birth ever studied -- but much less so with fraternal twins separated at birth. My favorite example is a pair of twins, one of whom was brought up as a Catholic in a Nazi family in Germany, the other brought up in a Jewish family in Trinidad. When they walked into the lab in Minnesota, they were wearing identical navy blue shirts with epaulettes; both of them liked to dip buttered toast in coffee, both of them kept rubber bands around their wrists, both of them flushed the toilet before using it as well as after, and both of them liked to surprise people by sneezing in crowded elevators to watch them jump. Now -- the story might seem to good to be true, but when you administer batteries of psychological tests, you get the same results -- namely, identical twins separated at birth show quite astonishing similarities. Now, given both the common sense and scientific data calling the doctrine of the blank slate into question, why should it have been such an appealing notion? Well, there are a number of political reasons why people have found it congenial. The foremost is that if we're blank slates, then, by definition, we are equal, because zero equals zero equals zero. But if something is written on the slate, then some people could have more of it than others, and according to this line of thinking, that would justify discrimination and inequality. Another political fear of human nature is that if we are blank slates, we can perfect mankind -- the age-old dream of the perfectibility of our species through social engineering. Whereas, if we're born with certain instincts, then perhaps some of them might condemn us to selfishness, prejudice and violence. Well, in the book, I argue that these are, in fact, non sequiturs. And just to make a long story short: first of all, the concept of fairness is not the same as the concept of sameness. And so when Thomas Jefferson wrote in the Declaration of Independence, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal," he did not mean "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are clones." Rather, that all men are equal in terms of their rights, and that every person ought to be treated as an individual, and not prejudged by the statistics of particular groups that they may belong to. Also, even if we were born with certain ignoble motives, they don't automatically lead to ignoble behavior. That is because the human mind is a complex system with many parts, and some of them can inhibit others. For example, there's excellent reason to believe that virtually all humans are born with a moral sense, and that we have cognitive abilities that allow us to profit from the lessons of history. So even if people did have impulses towards selfishness or greed, that's not the only thing in the skull, and there are other parts of the mind that can counteract them. In the book, I go over controversies such as this one, and a number of other hot buttons, hot zones, Chernobyls, third rails, and so on -- including the arts, cloning, crime, free will, education, evolution, gender differences, God, homosexuality, infanticide, inequality, Marxism, morality, Nazism, parenting, politics, race, rape, religion, resource depletion, social engineering, technological risk and war. And needless to say, there were certain risks in taking on these subjects. When I wrote a first draft of the book, I circulated it to a number of colleagues for comments, and here are some of the reactions that I got: "Better get a security camera for your house." "Don't expect to get any more awards, job offers or positions in scholarly societies." "Tell your publisher not to list your hometown in your author bio." "Do you have tenure?" (Laughter) Well, the book came out in October, and nothing terrible has happened. I -- I like -- There was indeed reason to be nervous, and there were moments in which I did feel nervous, knowing the history of what has happened to people who've taken controversial stands or discovered disquieting findings in the behavioral sciences. There are many cases, some of which I talk about in the book, of people who have been slandered, called Nazis, physically assaulted, threatened with criminal prosecution for stumbling across or arguing about controversial findings. And you never know when you're going to come across one of these booby traps. My favorite example is a pair of psychologists who did research on left-handers, and published some data showing that left-handers are, on average, more susceptible to disease, more prone to accidents and have a shorter lifespan. It's not clear, by the way, since then, whether that is an accurate generalization, but the data at the time seemed to support that. Well, pretty soon they were barraged with enraged letters, death threats, ban on the topic in a number of scientific journals, coming from irate left-handers and their advocates, and they were literally afraid to open their mail because of the venom and vituperation that they had inadvertently inspired. Well, the night is young, but the book has been out for half a year, and nothing terrible has happened. None of the dire professional consequences has taken place -- I haven't been exiled from the city of Cambridge. But what I wanted to talk about are two of these hot buttons that have aroused the strongest response in the 80-odd reviews that The Blank Slate has received. I'll just put that list up for a few seconds, and see if you can guess which two -- I would estimate that probably two of these topics inspired probably 90 percent of the reaction in the various reviews and radio interviews. It's not violence and war, it's not race, it's not gender, it's not Marxism, it's not Nazism. They are: the arts and parenting. (Laughter) So let me tell you what aroused such irate responses, and I'll let you decide if whether they -- the claims are really that outrageous. Let me start with the arts. I note that among the long list of human universals that I presented a few slides ago are art. There is no society ever discovered in the remotest corner of the world that has not had something that we would consider the arts. Visual arts -- decoration of surfaces and bodies -- appears to be a human universal. The telling of stories, music, dance, poetry -- found in all cultures, and many of the motifs and themes that give us pleasure in the arts can be found in all human societies: a preference for symmetrical forms, the use of repetition and variation, even things as specific as the fact that in poetry all over the world, you have lines that are very close to three seconds long, separated by pauses. Now, on the other hand, in the second half of the 20th century, the arts are frequently said to be in decline. And I have a collection, probably 10 or 15 headlines, from highbrow magazines deploring the fact that the arts are in decline in our time. I'll give you a couple of representative quotes: "We can assert with some confidence that our own period is one of decline, that the standards of culture are lower than they were 50 years ago, and that the evidences of this decline are visible in every department of human activity." That's a quote from T. S. Eliot, a little more than 50 years ago. And a more recent one: "The possibility of sustaining high culture in our time is becoming increasing problematical. Serious book stores are losing their franchise, nonprofit theaters are surviving primarily by commercializing their repertory, symphony orchestras are diluting their programs, public television is increasing its dependence on reruns of British sitcoms, classical radio stations are dwindling, museums are resorting to blockbuster shows, dance is dying." That's from Robert Brustein, the famous drama critic and director, in The New Republic about five years ago. Well, in fact, the arts are not in decline. I don't think this will as a surprise to anyone in this room, but by any standard they have never been flourishing to a greater extent. There are, of course, entirely new art forms and new media, many of which you've heard over these few days. By any economic standard, the demand for art of all forms is skyrocketing, as you can tell from the price of opera tickets, by the number of books sold, by the number of books published, the number of musical titles released, the number of new albums and so on. The only grain of truth to this complaint that the arts are in decline come from three spheres. One of them is in elite art since the 1930s -- say, the kinds of works performed by major symphony orchestras, where most of the repertory is before 1930, or the works shown in major galleries and prestigious museums. In literary criticism and analysis, probably 40 or 50 years ago, literary critics were a kind of cultural hero; now they're kind of a national joke. And the humanities and arts programs in the universities, which by many measures, indeed are in decline. Students are staying away in droves, universities are disinvesting in the arts and humanities. Well, here's a diagnosis. They didn't ask me, but by their own admission, they need all the help that they can get. And I would like to suggest that it's not a coincidence that this supposed decline in the elite arts and criticism occurred in the same point in history in which there was a widespread denial of human nature. A famous quotation can be found -- if you look on the web, you can find it in literally scores of English core syllabuses -- "In or about December 1910, human nature changed." A paraphrase of a quote by Virginia Woolf, and there's some debate as to what she actually meant by that. But it's very clear, looking at these syllabuses, that -- it's used now as a way of saying that all forms of appreciation of art that were in place for centuries, or millennia, in the 20th century were discarded. The beauty and pleasure in art -- probably a human universal -- were -- began to be considered saccharine, or kitsch, or commercial. Barnett Newman had a famous quote that "the impulse of modern art is the desire to destroy beauty" -- which was considered bourgeois or tacky. And here's just one example. I mean, this is perhaps a representative example of the visual depiction of the female form in the 15th century; here is a representative example of the depiction of the female form in the 20th century. And, as you can see, there -- something has changed in the way the elite arts appeal to the senses. Indeed, in movements of modernism and post-modernism, there was visual art without beauty, literature without narrative and plot, poetry without meter and rhyme, architecture and planning without ornament, human scale, green space and natural light, music without melody and rhythm, and criticism without clarity, attention to aesthetics and insight into the human condition. (Laughter) Let me give just you an example to back up that last statement. But here, there -- one of the most famous literary English scholars of our time is the Berkeley professor, Judith Butler. And here is an example of one of her analyses: "The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from the form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects ..." Well, you get the idea. By the way, this is one sentence -- you can actually parse it. Well, the argument in "The Blank Slate" was that elite art and criticism in the 20th century, although not the arts in general, have disdained beauty, pleasure, clarity, insight and style. People are staying away from elite art and criticism. What a puzzle -- I wonder why. Well, this turned out to be probably the most controversial claim in the book. Someone asked me whether I stuck it in in order to deflect ire from discussions of gender and Nazism and race and so on. I won't comment on that. But it certainly inspired an energetic reaction from many university professors. Well, the other hot button is parenting. And the starting point is the -- for that discussion was the fact that we have all been subject to the advice of the parenting industrial complex. Now, here is -- here is a representative quote from a besieged mother: "I'm overwhelmed with parenting advice. I'm supposed to do lots of physical activity with my kids so I can instill in them a physical fitness habit so they'll grow up to be healthy adults. And I'm supposed to do all kinds of intellectual play so they'll grow up smart. And there are all kinds of play -- clay for finger dexterity, word games for reading success, large motor play, small motor play. I feel like I could devote my life to figuring out what to play with my kids." I think anyone who's recently been a parent can sympathize with this mother. Well, here's some sobering facts about parenting. Most studies of parenting on which this advice is based are useless. They're useless because they don't control for heritability. They measure some correlation between what the parents do, how the children turn out and assume a causal relation: that the parenting shaped the child. Parents who talk a lot to their kids have kids who grow up to be articulate, parents who spank their kids have kids who grow up to be violent and so on. And very few of them control for the possibility that parents pass on genes for -- that increase the chances a child will be articulate or violent and so on. Until the studies are redone with adoptive children, who provide an environment but not genes to their kids, we have no way of knowing whether these conclusions are valid. The genetically controlled studies have some sobering results. Remember the Mallifert twins: separated at birth, then they meet in the patent office -- remarkably similar. Well, what would have happened if the Mallifert twins had grown up together? You might think, well, then they'd be even more similar, because not only would they share their genes, but they would also share their environment. That would make them super-similar, right? Wrong. Identical twins, or any siblings, who are separated at birth are no less similar than if they had grown up together. Everything that happens to you in a given home over all of those years appears to leave no permanent stamp on your personality or intellect. A complementary finding, from a completely different methodology, is that adopted siblings reared together -- the mirror image of identical twins reared apart, they share their parents, their home, their neighborhood, don't share their genes -- end up not similar at all. OK -- two different bodies of research with a similar finding. What it suggests is that children are shaped not by their parents over the long run, but in part -- only in part -- by their genes, in part by their culture -- the culture of the country at large and the children's own culture, namely their peer group -- as we heard from Jill Sobule earlier today, that's what kids care about -- and, to a very large extent, larger than most people are prepared to acknowledge, by chance: chance events in the wiring of the brain in utero; chance events as you live your life. So let me conclude with just a remark to bring it back to the theme of choices. I think that the sciences of human nature -- behavioral genetics, evolutionary psychology, neuroscience, cognitive science -- are going to, increasingly in the years to come, upset various dogmas, careers and deeply-held political belief systems. And that presents us with a choice. The choice is whether certain facts about humans, or topics, are to be considered taboos, forbidden knowledge, where we shouldn't go there because no good can come from it, or whether we should explore them honestly. I have my own answer to that question, which comes from a great artist of the 19th century, Anton Chekhov, who said, "Man will become better when you show him what he is like." And I think that the argument can't be put any more eloquently than that. Thank you very much. (Applause)

Sheryl Shade: Hi, Aimee. Aimee Mullins: Hi. SS: Aimee and I thought we'd just talk a little bit, and I wanted her to tell all of you what makes her a distinctive athlete. AM: Well, for those of you who have seen the picture in the little bio -- it might have given it away -- I'm a double amputee, and I was born without fibulas in both legs. I was amputated at age one, and I've been running like hell ever since, all over the place. SS: Well, why don't you tell them how you got to Georgetown -- why don't we start there? Why don't we start there? AM: I'm a senior in Georgetown in the Foreign Service program. I won a full academic scholarship out of high school. They pick three students out of the nation every year to get involved in international affairs, and so I won a full ride to Georgetown and I've been there for four years. Love it. SS: When Aimee got there, she decided that she's, kind of, curious about track and field, so she decided to call someone and start asking about it. So, why don't you tell that story? AM: Yeah. Well, I guess I've always been involved in sports. I played softball for five years growing up. I skied competitively throughout high school, and I got a little restless in college because I wasn't doing anything for about a year or two sports-wise. And I'd never competed on a disabled level, you know -- I'd always competed against other able-bodied athletes. That's all I'd ever known. In fact, I'd never even met another amputee until I was 17. And I heard that they do these track meets with all disabled runners, and I figured, "Oh, I don't know about this, but before I judge it, let me go see what it's all about." So, I booked myself a flight to Boston in '95, 19 years old and definitely the dark horse candidate at this race. I'd never done it before. I went out on a gravel track a couple of weeks before this meet to see how far I could run, and about 50 meters was enough for me, panting and heaving. And I had these legs that were made of a wood and plastic compound, attached with Velcro straps -- big, thick, five-ply wool socks on -- you know, not the most comfortable things, but all I'd ever known. And I'm up there in Boston against people wearing legs made of all things -- carbon graphite and, you know, shock absorbers in them and all sorts of things -- and they're all looking at me like, OK, we know who's not going to win this race. And, I mean, I went up there expecting -- I don't know what I was expecting -- but, you know, when I saw a man who was missing an entire leg go up to the high jump, hop on one leg to the high jump and clear it at six feet, two inches ... Dan O'Brien jumped 5'11" in '96 in Atlanta, I mean, if it just gives you a comparison of -- these are truly accomplished athletes, without qualifying that word "athlete." And so I decided to give this a shot: heart pounding, I ran my first race and I beat the national record-holder by three hundredths of a second, and became the new national record-holder on my first try out. And, you know, people said, "Aimee, you know, you've got speed -- you've got natural speed -- but you don't have any skill or finesse going down that track. You were all over the place. We all saw how hard you were working." And so I decided to call the track coach at Georgetown. And I thank god I didn't know just how huge this man is in the track and field world. He's coached five Olympians, and the man's office is lined from floor to ceiling with All America certificates of all these athletes he's coached. He's just a rather intimidating figure. And I called him up and said, "Listen, I ran one race and I won ..." (Laughter) "I want to see if I can, you know -- I need to just see if I can sit in on some of your practices, see what drills you do and whatever." That's all I wanted -- just two practices. "Can I just sit in and see what you do?" And he said, "Well, we should meet first, before we decide anything." You know, he's thinking, "What am I getting myself into?" So, I met the man, walked in his office, and saw these posters and magazine covers of people he has coached. And we got to talking, and it turned out to be a great partnership because he'd never coached a disabled athlete, so therefore he had no preconceived notions of what I was or wasn't capable of, and I'd never been coached before. So this was like, "Here we go -- let's start on this trip." So he started giving me four days a week of his lunch break, his free time, and I would come up to the track and train with him. So that's how I met Frank. That was fall of '95. But then, by the time that winter was rolling around, he said, "You know, you're good enough. You can run on our women's track team here." And I said, "No, come on." And he said, "No, no, really. You can. You can run with our women's track team." In the spring of 1996, with my goal of making the U.S. Paralympic team that May coming up full speed, I joined the women's track team. And no disabled person had ever done that -- run at a collegiate level. So I don't know, it started to become an interesting mix. SS: Well, on your way to the Olympics, a couple of memorable events happened at Georgetown. Why don't you just tell them? AM: Yes, well, you know, I'd won everything as far as the disabled meets -- everything I competed in -- and, you know, training in Georgetown and knowing that I was going to have to get used to seeing the backs of all these women's shirts -- you know, I'm running against the next Flo-Jo -- and they're all looking at me like, "Hmm, what's, you know, what's going on here?" And putting on my Georgetown uniform and going out there and knowing that, you know, in order to become better -- and I'm already the best in the country -- you know, you have to train with people who are inherently better than you. And I went out there and made it to the Big East, which was sort of the championship race at the end of the season. It was really, really hot. And it's the first -- I had just gotten these new sprinting legs that you see in that bio, and I didn't realize at that time that the amount of sweating I would be doing in the sock -- it actually acted like a lubricant and I'd be, kind of, pistoning in the socket. And at about 85 meters of my 100 meters sprint, in all my glory, I came out of my leg. Like, I almost came out of it, in front of, like, 5,000 people. And I, I mean, was just mortified -- because I was signed up for the 200, you know, which went off in a half hour. (Laughter) I went to my coach: "Please, don't make me do this." I can't do this in front of all those people. My legs will come off. And if it came off at 85 there's no way I'm going 200 meters. And he just sat there like this. My pleas fell on deaf ears, thank god. Because you know, the man is from Brooklyn; he's a big man. He says, "Aimee, so what if your leg falls off? You pick it up, you put the damn thing back on, and finish the goddamn race!" (Laughter) (Applause) And I did. So, he kept me in line. He kept me on the right track. SS: So, then Aimee makes it to the 1996 Paralympics, and she's all excited. Her family's coming down -- it's a big deal. It's now two years that you've been running? AM: No, a year. SS: A year. And why don't you tell them what happened right before you go run your race? AM: Okay, well, Atlanta. The Paralympics, just for a little bit of clarification, are the Olympics for people with physical disabilities -- amputees, persons with cerebral palsy, and wheelchair athletes -- as opposed to the Special Olympics, which deals with people with mental disabilities. So, here we are, a week after the Olympics and down at Atlanta, and I'm just blown away by the fact that just a year ago, I got out on a gravel track and couldn't run 50 meters. And so, here I am -- never lost. I set new records at the U.S. Nationals -- the Olympic trials -- that May, and was sure that I was coming home with the gold. I was also the only, what they call "bilateral BK" -- below the knee. I was the only woman who would be doing the long jump. I had just done the long jump, and a guy who was missing two legs came up to me and says, "How do you do that? You know, we're supposed to have a planar foot, so we can't get off on the springboard." I said, "Well, I just did it. No one told me that." So, it's funny -- I'm three inches within the world record -- and kept on from that point, you know, so I'm signed up in the long jump -- signed up? No, I made it for the long jump and the 100-meter. And I'm sure of it, you know? I made the front page of my hometown paper that I delivered for six years, you know? It was, like, this is my time for shine. And we're at the trainee warm-up track, which is a few blocks away from the Olympic stadium. These legs that I was on, which I'll take out right now -- I was the first person in the world on these legs. I was the guinea pig., I'm telling you, this was, like -- talk about a tourist attraction. Everyone was taking pictures -- "What is this girl running on?" And I'm always looking around, like, where is my competition? It's my first international meet. I tried to get it out of anybody I could, you know, "Who am I running against here?" "Oh, Aimee, we'll have to get back to you on that one." I wanted to find out times. "Don't worry, you're doing great." This is 20 minutes before my race in the Olympic stadium, and they post the heat sheets. And I go over and look. And my fastest time, which was the world record, was 15.77. Then I'm looking: the next lane, lane two, is 12.8. Lane three is 12.5. Lane four is 12.2. I said, "What's going on?" And they shove us all into the shuttle bus, and all the women there are missing a hand. (Laughter) So, I'm just, like -- they're all looking at me like 'which one of these is not like the other,' you know? I'm sitting there, like, "Oh, my god. Oh, my god." You know, I'd never lost anything, like, whether it would be the scholarship or, you know, I'd won five golds when I skied. In everything, I came in first. And Georgetown -- that was great. I was losing, but it was the best training because this was Atlanta. Here we are, like, crème de la crème, and there is no doubt about it, that I'm going to lose big. And, you know, I'm just thinking, "Oh, my god, my whole family got in a van and drove down here from Pennsylvania." And, you know, I was the only female U.S. sprinter. So they call us out and, you know -- "Ladies, you have one minute." And I remember putting my blocks in and just feeling horrified because there was just this murmur coming over the crowd, like, the ones who are close enough to the starting line to see. And I'm like, "I know! Look! This isn't right." And I'm thinking that's my last card to play here; if I'm not going to beat these girls, I'm going to mess their heads a little, you know? (Laughter) I mean, it was definitely the "Rocky IV" sensation of me versus Germany, and everyone else -- Estonia and Poland -- was in this heat. And the gun went off, and all I remember was finishing last and fighting back tears of frustration and incredible -- incredible -- this feeling of just being overwhelmed. And I had to think, "Why did I do this?" If I had won everything -- but it was like, what was the point? All this training -- I had transformed my life. I became a collegiate athlete, you know. I became an Olympic athlete. And it made me really think about how the achievement was getting there. I mean, the fact that I set my sights, just a year and three months before, on becoming an Olympic athlete and saying, "Here's my life going in this direction -- and I want to take it here for a while, and just seeing how far I could push it." And the fact that I asked for help -- how many people jumped on board? How many people gave of their time and their expertise, and their patience, to deal with me? And that was this collective glory -- that there was, you know, 50 people behind me that had joined in this incredible experience of going to Atlanta. So, I apply this sort of philosophy now to everything I do: sitting back and realizing the progression, how far you've come at this day to this goal, you know. It's important to focus on a goal, I think, but also recognize the progression on the way there and how you've grown as a person. That's the achievement, I think. That's the real achievement. SS: Why don't you show them your legs? AM: Oh, sure. SS: You know, show us more than one set of legs. AM: Well, these are my pretty legs. (Laughter) No, these are my cosmetic legs, actually, and they're absolutely beautiful. You've got to come up and see them. There are hair follicles on them, and I can paint my toenails. And, seriously, like, I can wear heels. Like, you guys don't understand what that's like to be able to just go into a shoe store and buy whatever you want. SS: You got to pick your height? AM: I got to pick my height, exactly. (Laughter) Patrick Ewing, who played for Georgetown in the '80s, comes back every summer. And I had incessant fun making fun of him in the training room because he'd come in with foot injuries. I'm like, "Get it off! Don't worry about it, you know. You can be eight feet tall. Just take them off." (Laughter) He didn't find it as humorous as I did, anyway. OK, now, these are my sprinting legs, made of carbon graphite, like I said, and I've got to make sure I've got the right socket. No, I've got so many legs in here. These are -- do you want to hold that actually? That's another leg I have for, like, tennis and softball. It has a shock absorber in it so it, like, "Shhhh," makes this neat sound when you jump around on it. All right. And then this is the silicon sheath I roll over, to keep it on. Which, when I sweat, you know, I'm pistoning out of it. SS: Are you a different height? AM: In these? SS: In these. AM: I don't know. I don't think so. I may be a little taller. I actually can put both of them on. SS: She can't really stand on these legs. She has to be moving, so ... AM: Yeah, I definitely have to be moving, and balance is a little bit of an art in them. But without having the silicon sock, I'm just going to try slip in it. And so, I run on these, and have shocked half the world on these. (Applause) These are supposed to simulate the actual form of a sprinter when they run. If you ever watch a sprinter, the ball of their foot is the only thing that ever hits the track. So when I stand in these legs, my hamstring and my glutes are contracted, as they would be had I had feet and were standing on the ball of my feet. (Audience: Who made them?) AM: It's a company in San Diego called Flex-Foot. And I was a guinea pig, as I hope to continue to be in every new form of prosthetic limbs that come out. But actually these, like I said, are still the actual prototype. I need to get some new ones because the last meet I was at, they were everywhere. You know, it's like a big -- it's come full circle. Moderator: Aimee and the designer of them will be at TEDMED 2, and we'll talk about the design of them. AM: Yes, we'll do that. SS: Yes, there you go. AM: So, these are the sprint legs, and I can put my other... SS: Can you tell about who designed your other legs? AM: Yes. These I got in a place called Bournemouth, England, about two hours south of London, and I'm the only person in the United States with these, which is a crime because they are so beautiful. And I don't even mean, like, because of the toes and everything. For me, while I'm such a serious athlete on the track, I want to be feminine off the track, and I think it's so important not to be limited in any capacity, whether it's, you know, your mobility or even fashion. I mean, I love the fact that I can go in anywhere and pick out what I want -- the shoes I want, the skirts I want -- and I'm hoping to try to bring these over here and make them accessible to a lot of people. They're also silicon. This is a really basic, basic prosthetic limb under here. It's like a Barbie foot under this. (Laughter) It is. It's just stuck in this position, so I have to wear a two-inch heel. And, I mean, it's really -- let me take this off so you can see it. I don't know how good you can see it, but, like, it really is. There're veins on the feet, and then my heel is pink, and my Achilles' tendon -- that moves a little bit. And it's really an amazing store. I got them a year and two weeks ago. And this is just a silicon piece of skin. I mean, what happened was, two years ago this man in Belgium was saying, "God, if I can go to Madame Tussauds' wax museum and see Jerry Hall replicated down to the color of her eyes, looking so real as if she breathed, why can't they build a limb for someone that looks like a leg, or an arm, or a hand?" I mean, they make ears for burn victims. They do amazing stuff with silicon. SS: Two weeks ago, Aimee was up for the Arthur Ashe award at the ESPYs. And she came into town and she rushed around and she said, "I have to buy some new shoes!" We're an hour before the ESPYs, and she thought she'd gotten a two-inch heel but she'd actually bought a three-inch heel. AM: And this poses a problem for me, because it means I'm walking like that all night long. SS: For 45 minutes. Luckily, the hotel was terrific. They got someone to come in and saw off the shoes. (Laughter) AM: I said to the receptionist -- I mean, I am just harried, and Sheryl's at my side -- I said, "Look, do you have anybody here who could help me? Because I have this problem ... " You know, at first they were just going to write me off, like, "If you don't like your shoes, sorry. It's too late." "No, no, no, no. I've got these special feet that need a two-inch heel. I have a three-inch heel. I need a little bit off." They didn't even want to go there. They didn't even want to touch that one. They just did it. No, these legs are great. I'm actually going back in a couple of weeks to get some improvements. I want to get legs like these made for flat feet so I can wear sneakers, because I can't with these ones. So... Moderator: That's it. SS: That's Aimee Mullins. (Applause)

I am a writer. Writing books is my profession but it's more than that, of course. It is also my great lifelong love and fascination. And I don't expect that that's ever going to change. But, that said, something kind of peculiar has happened recently in my life and in my career, which has caused me to have to recalibrate my whole relationship with this work. And the peculiar thing is that I recently wrote this book, this memoir called "Eat, Pray, Love" which, decidedly unlike any of my previous books, went out in the world for some reason, and became this big, mega-sensation, international bestseller thing. The result of which is that everywhere I go now, people treat me like I'm doomed. Seriously -- doomed, doomed! Like, they come up to me now, all worried, and they say, "Aren't you afraid you're never going to be able to top that? Aren't you afraid you're going to keep writing for your whole life and you're never again going to create a book that anybody in the world cares about at all, ever again?" So that's reassuring, you know. But it would be worse, except for that I happen to remember that over 20 years ago, when I first started telling people -- when I was a teenager -- that I wanted to be a writer, I was met with this same kind of, sort of fear-based reaction. And people would say, "Aren't you afraid you're never going to have any success? Aren't you afraid the humiliation of rejection will kill you? Aren't you afraid that you're going to work your whole life at this craft and nothing's ever going to come of it and you're going to die on a scrap heap of broken dreams with your mouth filled with bitter ash of failure?" (Laughter) Like that, you know. The answer -- the short answer to all those questions is, "Yes." Yes, I'm afraid of all those things. And I always have been. And I'm afraid of many, many more things besides that people can't even guess at, like seaweed and other things that are scary. But, when it comes to writing, the thing that I've been sort of thinking about lately, and wondering about lately, is why? You know, is it rational? Is it logical that anybody should be expected to be afraid of the work that they feel they were put on this Earth to do. And what is it specifically about creative ventures that seems to make us really nervous about each other's mental health in a way that other careers kind of don't do, you know? Like my dad, for example, was a chemical engineer and I don't recall once in his 40 years of chemical engineering anybody asking him if he was afraid to be a chemical engineer, you know? It didn't -- that chemical-engineering block, John, how's it going? It just didn't come up like that, you know? But to be fair, chemical engineers as a group haven't really earned a reputation over the centuries for being alcoholic manic-depressives. (Laughter) We writers, we kind of do have that reputation, and not just writers, but creative people across all genres, it seems, have this reputation for being enormously mentally unstable. And all you have to do is look at the very grim death count in the 20th century alone, of really magnificent creative minds who died young and often at their own hands, you know? And even the ones who didn't literally commit suicide seem to be really undone by their gifts, you know. Norman Mailer, just before he died, last interview, he said "Every one of my books has killed me a little more." An extraordinary statement to make about your life's work. But we don't even blink when we hear somebody say this because we've heard that kind of stuff for so long and somehow we've completely internalized and accepted collectively this notion that creativity and suffering are somehow inherently linked and that artistry, in the end, will always ultimately lead to anguish. And the question that I want to ask everybody here today is are you guys all cool with that idea? Are you comfortable with that? Because you look at it even from an inch away and, you know ... I'm not at all comfortable with that assumption. I think it's odious. And I also think it's dangerous, and I don't want to see it perpetuated into the next century. I think it's better if we encourage our great creative minds to live. And I definitely know that, in my case -- in my situation -- it would be very dangerous for me to start sort of leaking down that dark path of assumption, particularly given the circumstance that I'm in right now in my career. Which is -- you know, like check it out, I'm pretty young, I'm only about 40 years old. I still have maybe another four decades of work left in me. And it's exceedingly likely that anything I write from this point forward is going to be judged by the world as the work that came after the freakish success of my last book, right? I should just put it bluntly, because we're all sort of friends here now -- it's exceedingly likely that my greatest success is behind me. So Jesus, what a thought! That's the kind of thought that could lead a person to start drinking gin at nine o'clock in the morning, and I don't want to go there. (Laughter) I would prefer to keep doing this work that I love. And so, the question becomes, how? And so, it seems to me, upon a lot of reflection, that the way that I have to work now, in order to continue writing, is that I have to create some sort of protective psychological construct, right? I have to sort of find some way to have a safe distance between me, as I am writing, and my very natural anxiety about what the reaction to that writing is going to be, from now on. And, as I've been looking over the last year for models for how to do that I've been sort of looking across time, and I've been trying to find other societies to see if they might have had better and saner ideas than we have about how to help creative people, sort of manage the inherent emotional risks of creativity. And that search has led me to ancient Greece and ancient Rome. So stay with me, because it does circle around and back. But, ancient Greece and ancient Rome -- people did not happen to believe that creativity came from human beings back then, O.K.? People believed that creativity was this divine attendant spirit that came to human beings from some distant and unknowable source, for distant and unknowable reasons. The Greeks famously called these divine attendant spirits of creativity "daemons." Socrates, famously, believed that he had a daemon who spoke wisdom to him from afar. The Romans had the same idea, but they called that sort of disembodied creative spirit a genius. Which is great, because the Romans did not actually think that a genius was a particularly clever individual. They believed that a genius was this, sort of magical divine entity, who was believed to literally live in the walls of an artist's studio, kind of like Dobby the house elf, and who would come out and sort of invisibly assist the artist with their work and would shape the outcome of that work. So brilliant -- there it is, right there, that distance that I'm talking about -- that psychological construct to protect you from the results of your work. And everyone knew that this is how it functioned, right? So the ancient artist was protected from certain things, like, for example, too much narcissism, right? If your work was brilliant you couldn't take all the credit for it, everybody knew that you had this disembodied genius who had helped you. If your work bombed, not entirely your fault, you know? Everyone knew your genius was kind of lame. And this is how people thought about creativity in the West for a really long time. And then the Renaissance came and everything changed, and we had this big idea, and the big idea was let's put the individual human being at the center of the universe above all gods and mysteries, and there's no more room for mystical creatures who take dictation from the divine. And it's the beginning of rational humanism, and people started to believe that creativity came completely from the self of the individual. And for the first time in history, you start to hear people referring to this or that artist as being a genius rather than having a genius. And I got to tell you, I think that was a huge error. You know, I think that allowing somebody, one mere person to believe that he or she is like, the vessel, you know, like the font and the essence and the source of all divine, creative, unknowable, eternal mystery is just a smidge too much responsibility to put on one fragile, human psyche. It's like asking somebody to swallow the sun. It just completely warps and distorts egos, and it creates all these unmanageable expectations about performance. And I think the pressure of that has been killing off our artists for the last 500 years. And, if this is true, and I think it is true, the question becomes, what now? Can we do this differently? Maybe go back to some more ancient understanding about the relationship between humans and the creative mystery. Maybe not. Maybe we can't just erase 500 years of rational humanistic thought in one 18 minute speech. And there's probably people in this audience who would raise really legitimate scientific suspicions about the notion of, basically fairies who follow people around rubbing fairy juice on their projects and stuff. I'm not, probably, going to bring you all along with me on this. But the question that I kind of want to pose is -- you know, why not? Why not think about it this way? Because it makes as much sense as anything else I have ever heard in terms of explaining the utter maddening capriciousness of the creative process. A process which, as anybody who has ever tried to make something -- which is to say basically everyone here --- knows does not always behave rationally. And, in fact, can sometimes feel downright paranormal. I had this encounter recently where I met the extraordinary American poet Ruth Stone, who's now in her 90s, but she's been a poet her entire life and she told me that when she was growing up in rural Virginia, she would be out working in the fields, and she said she would feel and hear a poem coming at her from over the landscape. And she said it was like a thunderous train of air. And it would come barreling down at her over the landscape. And she felt it coming, because it would shake the earth under her feet. She knew that she had only one thing to do at that point, and that was to, in her words, "run like hell." And she would run like hell to the house and she would be getting chased by this poem, and the whole deal was that she had to get to a piece of paper and a pencil fast enough so that when it thundered through her, she could collect it and grab it on the page. And other times she wouldn't be fast enough, so she'd be running and running and running, and she wouldn't get to the house and the poem would barrel through her and she would miss it and she said it would continue on across the landscape, looking, as she put it "for another poet." And then there were these times -- this is the piece I never forgot -- she said that there were moments where she would almost miss it, right? So, she's running to the house and she's looking for the paper and the poem passes through her, and she grabs a pencil just as it's going through her, and then she said, it was like she would reach out with her other hand and she would catch it. She would catch the poem by its tail, and she would pull it backwards into her body as she was transcribing on the page. And in these instances, the poem would come up on the page perfect and intact but backwards, from the last word to the first. (Laughter) So when I heard that I was like -- that's uncanny, that's exactly what my creative process is like. (Laughter) That's not at all what my creative process is -- I'm not the pipeline! I'm a mule, and the way that I have to work is that I have to get up at the same time every day, and sweat and labor and barrel through it really awkwardly. But even I, in my mulishness, even I have brushed up against that thing, at times. And I would imagine that a lot of you have too. You know, even I have had work or ideas come through me from a source that I honestly cannot identify. And what is that thing? And how are we to relate to it in a way that will not make us lose our minds, but, in fact, might actually keep us sane? And for me, the best contemporary example that I have of how to do that is the musician Tom Waits, who I got to interview several years ago on a magazine assignment. And we were talking about this, and you know, Tom, for most of his life he was pretty much the embodiment of the tormented contemporary modern artist, trying to control and manage and dominate these sort of uncontrollable creative impulses that were totally internalized. But then he got older, he got calmer, and one day he was driving down the freeway in Los Angeles he told me, and this is when it all changed for him. And he's speeding along, and all of a sudden he hears this little fragment of melody, that comes into his head as inspiration often comes, elusive and tantalizing, and he wants it, you know, it's gorgeous, and he longs for it, but he has no way to get it. He doesn't have a piece of paper, he doesn't have a pencil, he doesn't have a tape recorder. So he starts to feel all of that old anxiety start to rise in him like, "I'm going to lose this thing, and then I'm going to be haunted by this song forever. I'm not good enough, and I can't do it." And instead of panicking, he just stopped. He just stopped that whole mental process and he did something completely novel. He just looked up at the sky, and he said, "Excuse me, can you not see that I'm driving?" (Laughter) "Do I look like I can write down a song right now? If you really want to exist, come back at a more opportune moment when I can take care of you. Otherwise, go bother somebody else today. Go bother Leonard Cohen." And his whole work process changed after that. Not the work, the work was still oftentimes as dark as ever. But the process, and the heavy anxiety around it was released when he took the genie, the genius out of him where it was causing nothing but trouble, and released it kind of back where it came from, and realized that this didn't have to be this internalized, tormented thing. It could be this peculiar, wondrous, bizarre collaboration kind of conversation between Tom and the strange, external thing that was not quite Tom. So when I heard that story it started to shift a little bit the way that I worked too, and it already saved me once. This idea, it saved me when I was in the middle of writing "Eat, Pray, Love," and I fell into one of those, sort of pits of despair that we all fall into when we're working on something and it's not coming and you start to think this is going to be a disaster, this is going to be the worst book ever written. Not just bad, but the worst book ever written. And I started to think I should just dump this project. But then I remembered Tom talking to the open air and I tried it. So I just lifted my face up from the manuscript and I directed my comments to an empty corner of the room. And I said aloud, "Listen you, thing, you and I both know that if this book isn't brilliant that is not entirely my fault, right? Because you can see that I am putting everything I have into this, I don't have any more than this. So if you want it to be better, then you've got to show up and do your part of the deal. O.K. But if you don't do that, you know what, the hell with it. I'm going to keep writing anyway because that's my job. And I would please like the record to reflect today that I showed up for my part of the job." (Laughter) Because -- (Applause) in the end it's like this, O.K. -- centuries ago in the deserts of North Africa, people used to gather for these moonlight dances of sacred dance and music that would go on for hours and hours, until dawn. And they were always magnificent, because the dancers were professionals and they were terrific, right? But every once in a while, very rarely, something would happen, and one of these performers would actually become transcendent. And I know you know what I'm talking about, because I know you've all seen, at some point in your life, a performance like this. It was like time would stop, and the dancer would sort of step through some kind of portal and he wasn't doing anything different than he had ever done, 1,000 nights before, but everything would align. And all of a sudden, he would no longer appear to be merely human. He would be lit from within, and lit from below and all lit up on fire with divinity. And when this happened, back then, people knew it for what it was, you know, they called it by its name. They would put their hands together and they would start to chant, "Allah, Allah, Allah, God, God, God." That's God, you know. Curious historical footnote -- when the Moors invaded southern Spain, they took this custom with them and the pronunciation changed over the centuries from "Allah, Allah, Allah," to "Olé, olé, olé," which you still hear in bullfights and in flamenco dances. In Spain, when a performer has done something impossible and magic, "Allah, olé, olé, Allah, magnificent, bravo," incomprehensible, there it is -- a glimpse of God. Which is great, because we need that. But, the tricky bit comes the next morning, for the dancer himself, when he wakes up and discovers that it's Tuesday at 11 a.m., and he's no longer a glimpse of God. He's just an aging mortal with really bad knees, and maybe he's never going to ascend to that height again. And maybe nobody will ever chant God's name again as he spins, and what is he then to do with the rest of his life? This is hard. This is one of the most painful reconciliations to make in a creative life. But maybe it doesn't have to be quite so full of anguish if you never happened to believe, in the first place, that the most extraordinary aspects of your being came from you. But maybe if you just believed that they were on loan to you from some unimaginable source for some exquisite portion of your life to be passed along when you're finished, with somebody else. And, you know, if we think about it this way it starts to change everything. This is how I've started to think, and this is certainly how I've been thinking in the last few months as I've been working on the book that will soon be published, as the dangerously, frighteningly over-anticipated follow up to my freakish success. And what I have to, sort of keep telling myself when I get really psyched out about that, is, don't be afraid. Don't be daunted. Just do your job. Continue to show up for your piece of it, whatever that might be. If your job is to dance, do your dance. If the divine, cockeyed genius assigned to your case decides to let some sort of wonderment be glimpsed, for just one moment through your efforts, then "Olé!" And if not, do your dance anyhow. And "Olé!" to you, nonetheless. I believe this and I feel that we must teach it. "Olé!" to you, nonetheless, just for having the sheer human love and stubbornness to keep showing up. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) June Cohen: Olé! (Applause)

My story is a little bit about war. It's about disillusionment. It's about death. And it's about rediscovering idealism in all of that wreckage. And perhaps also, there's a lesson about how to deal with our screwed-up, fragmenting and dangerous world of the 21st century. I don't believe in straightforward narratives. I don't believe in a life or history written as decision "A" led to consequence "B" led to consequence "C" -- these neat narratives that we're presented with, and that perhaps we encourage in each other. I believe in randomness, and one of the reasons I believe that is because me becoming a diplomat was random. I'm colorblind. I was born unable to see most colors. This is why I wear gray and black most of the time, and I have to take my wife with me to chose clothes. And I'd always wanted to be a fighter pilot when I was a boy. I loved watching planes barrel over our holiday home in the countryside. And it was my boyhood dream to be a fighter pilot. And I did the tests in the Royal Air Force to become a pilot, and sure enough, I failed. I couldn't see all the blinking different lights, and I can't distinguish color. So I had to choose another career, and this was in fact relatively easy for me, because I had an abiding passion all the way through my childhood, which was international relations. As a child, I read the newspaper thoroughly. I was fascinated by the Cold War, by the INF negotiations over intermediate-range nuclear missiles, the proxy war between the Soviet Union and the U.S. in Angola or Afghanistan. These things really interested me. And so I decided quite at an early age I wanted to be a diplomat. And I, one day, I announced this to my parents -- and my father denies this story to this day -- I said, "Daddy, I want to be a diplomat." And he turned to me, and he said, "Carne, you have to be very clever to be a diplomat." (Laughter) And my ambition was sealed. In 1989, I entered the British Foreign Service. That year, 5,000 people applied to become a diplomat, and 20 of us succeeded. And as those numbers suggest, I was inducted into an elite and fascinating and exhilarating world. Being a diplomat, then and now, is an incredible job, and I loved every minute of it -- I enjoyed the status of it. I bought myself a nice suit and wore leather-soled shoes and reveled in this amazing access I had to world events. I traveled to the Gaza Strip. I headed the Middle East Peace Process section in the British Foreign Ministry. I became a speechwriter for the British Foreign Secretary. I met Yasser Arafat. I negotiated with Saddam's diplomats at the U.N. Later, I traveled to Kabul and served in Afghanistan after the fall of the Taliban. And I would travel in a C-130 transport and go and visit warlords in mountain hideaways and negotiate with them about how we were going to eradicate Al Qaeda from Afghanistan, surrounded by my Special Forces escort, who, themselves, had to have an escort of a platoon of Royal Marines, because it was so dangerous. And that was exciting -- that was fun. It was really interesting. And it's a great cadre of people, incredibly close-knit community of people. And the pinnacle of my career, as it turned out, was when I was posted to New York. I'd already served in Germany, Norway, various other places, but I was posted to New York to serve on the U.N. Security Council for the British delegation. And my responsibility was the Middle East, which was my specialty. And there, I dealt with things like the Middle East peace process, the Lockerbie issue -- we can talk about that later, if you wish -- but above all, my responsibility was Iraq and its weapons of mass destruction and the sanctions we placed on Iraq to oblige it to disarm itself of these weapons. I was the chief British negotiator on the subject, and I was steeped in the issue. And anyway, my tour -- it was kind of a very exciting time. I mean it was very dramatic diplomacy. We went through several wars during my time in New York. I negotiated for my country the resolution in the Security Council of the 12th of September 2001 condemning the attacks of the day before, which were, of course, deeply present to us actually living in New York at the time. So it was kind of the best of time, worst of times kind of experience. I lived the high-life. Although I worked very long hours, I lived in a penthouse in Union Square. I was a single British diplomat in New York City; you can imagine what that might have meant. (Laughter) I had a good time. But in 2002, when my tour came to an end, I decided I wasn't going to go back to the job that was waiting for me in London. I decided to take a sabbatical, in fact, at the New School, Bruce. In some inchoate, inarticulate way I realized that there was something wrong with my work, with me. I was exhausted, and I was also disillusioned in a way I couldn't quite put my finger on. And I decided to take some time out from work. The Foreign Office was very generous. You could take these special unpaid leave, as they called them, and yet remain part of the diplomatic service, but not actually do any work. It was nice. And eventually, I decided to take a secondment to join the U.N. in Kosovo, which was then under U.N. administration. And two things happened in Kosovo, which kind of, again, shows the randomness of life, because these things turned out to be two of the pivots of my life and helped to deliver me to the next stage. But they were random things. One was that, in the summer of 2004, the British government, somewhat reluctantly, decided to have an official inquiry into the use of intelligence on WMD in the run up to the Iraq War, a very limited subject. And I testified to that inquiry in secret. I had been steeped in the intelligence on Iraq and its WMD, and my testimony to the inquiry said three things: that the government exaggerated the intelligence, which was very clear in all the years I'd read it. And indeed, our own internal assessment was very clear that Iraq's WMD did not pose a threat to its neighbors, let alone to us. Secondly, the government had ignored all available alternatives to war, which in some ways was a more discreditable thing still. The third reason, I won't go into. But anyway, I gave that testimony, and that presented me with a crisis. What was I going to do? This testimony was deeply critical of my colleagues, of my ministers, who had, in my view had perpetrated a war on a falsehood. And so I was in crisis. And this wasn't a pretty thing. I moaned about it, I hesitated, I went on and on and on to my long-suffering wife, and eventually I decided to resign from the British Foreign Service. I felt -- there's a scene in the Al Pacino movie "The Insider," which you may know, where he goes back to CBS after they've let him down over the tobacco guy, and he goes, "You know, I just can't do this anymore. Something's broken." And it was like that for me. I love that movie. I felt just something's broken. I can't actually sit with my foreign minister or my prime minister again with a smile on my face and do what I used to do gladly for them. So took a running leap and jumped over the edge of a cliff. And it was a very, very uncomfortable, unpleasant feeling. And I started to fall. And today, that fall hasn't stopped; I'm still falling. But, in a way, I've got used to the sensation of it. And in a way, I kind of like the sensation of it a lot better than I like actually standing on top of the cliff, wondering what to do. A second thing happened in Kosovo, which kind of -- I need a quick gulp of water, forgive me. A second thing happened in Kosovo, which kind of delivered the answer, which I couldn't really answer, which is, "What do I do with my life?" I love diplomacy -- I have no career -- I expected my entire life to be a diplomat, to be serving my country. I wanted to be an ambassador, and my mentors, my heroes, people who got to the top of my profession, and here I was throwing it all away. A lot of my friends were still in it. My pension was in it. And I gave it up. And what was I going to do? And that year, in Kosovo, this terrible, terrible thing happened, which I saw. In March 2004, there were terrible riots all over the province -- as it then was -- of Kosovo. 18 people were killed. It was anarchy. And it's a very horrible thing to see anarchy, to know that the police and the military -- there were lots of military troops there -- actually can't stop that rampaging mob who's coming down the street. And the only way that rampaging mob coming down the street will stop is when they decide to stop and when they've had enough burning and killing. And that is not a very nice feeling to see, and I saw it. And I went through it. I went through those mobs. And with my Albanian friends, we tried to stop it, but we failed. And that riot taught me something, which isn't immediately obvious and it's kind of a complicated story. But one of the reasons that riot took place -- those riots, which went on for several days, took place -- was because the Kosovo people were disenfranchised from their own future. There were diplomatic negotiations about the future of Kosovo going on then, and the Kosovo government, let alone the Kosovo people, were not actually participating in those talks. There was this whole fancy diplomatic system, this negotiation process about the future of Kosovo, and the Kosovars weren't part of it. And funnily enough, they were frustrated about that. Those riots were part of the manifestation of that frustration. It wasn't the only reason, and life is not simple, one reason narratives. It was a complicated thing, and I'm not pretending it was more simple than it was. But that was one of the reasons. And that kind of gave me the inspiration -- or rather to be precise, it gave my wife the inspiration. She said, "Why don't you advise the Kosovars? Why don't you advise their government on their diplomacy?" And the Kosovars were not allowed a diplomatic service. They were not allowed diplomats. They were not allowed a foreign office to help them deal with this immensely complicated process, which became known as the Final Status Process of Kosovo. And so that was the idea. That was the origin of the thing that became Independent Diplomat, the world's first diplomatic advisory group and a non-profit to boot. And it began when I flew back from London after my time at the U.N. in Kosovo. I flew back and had dinner with the Kosovo prime minister and said to him, "Look, I'm proposing that I come and advise you on the diplomacy. I know this stuff. It's what I do. Why don't I come and help you?" And he raised his glass of raki to me and said, "Yes, Carne. Come." And I came to Kosovo and advised the Kosovo government. Independent Diplomat ended up advising three successive Kosovo prime ministers and the multi-party negotiation team of Kosovo. And Kosovo became independent. Independent Diplomat is now established in five diplomatic centers around the world, and we're advising seven or eight different countries, or political groups, depending on how you wish to define them -- and I'm not big on definitions. We're advising the Northern Cypriots on how to reunify their island. We're advising the Burmese opposition, the government of Southern Sudan, which -- you heard it here first -- is going to be a new country within the next few years. We're advising the Polisario Front of the Western Sahara, who are fighting to get their country back from Moroccan occupation after 34 years of dispossession. We're advising various island states in the climate change negotiations, which is suppose to culminate in Copenhagen. There's a bit of randomness here too because, when I was beginning Independent Diplomat, I went to a party in the House of Lords, which is a ridiculous place, but I was holding my drink like this, and I bumped into this guy who was standing behind me. And we started talking, and he said -- I told him what I was doing, and I told him rather grandly I was going to establish Independent Diplomat in New York. At that time there was just me -- and me and my wife were moving back to New York. And he said, "Why don't you see my colleagues in New York?" And it turned out he worked for an innovation company called ?What If!, which some of you have probably heard of. And one thing led to another, and I ended up having a desk in ?What If! in New York, when I started Independent Diplomat. And watching ?What If! develop new flavors of chewing gum for Wrigley or new flavors for Coke actually helped me innovate new strategies for the Kosovars and for the Saharawis of the Western Sahara. And I began to realize that there are different ways of doing diplomacy -- that diplomacy, like business, is a business of solving problems, and yet the word innovation doesn't exist in diplomacy; it's all zero sum games and realpolitik and ancient institutions that have been there for generations and do things the same way they've always done things. And Independent Diplomat, today, tries to incorporate some of the things I learned at ?What If!. We all sit in one office and shout at each other across the office. We all work on little laptops and try to move desks to change the way we think. And we use naive experts who may know nothing about the countries we're dealing with, but may know something about something else to try to inject new thinking into the problems that we try to address for our clients. It's not easy, because our clients, by definition, are having a difficult time, diplomatically. There are, I don't know, some lessons from all of this, personal and political -- and in a way, they're the same thing. The personal one is falling off a cliff is actually a good thing, and I recommend it. And it's a good thing to do at least once in your life just to tear everything up and jump. The second thing is a bigger lesson about the world today. Independent Diplomat is part of a trend which is emerging and evident across the world, which is that the world is fragmenting. States mean less than they used to, and the power of the state is declining. That means the power of others things is rising. Those other things are called non-state actors. They may be corporations, they may be mafiosi, they may be nice NGOs, they may anything, any number of things. We are living in a more complicated and fragmented world. If governments are less able to affect the problems that affect us in the world, then that means, who is left to deal with them, who has to take greater responsibility to deal with them? Us. If they can't do it, who's left to deal with it? We have no choice but to embrace that reality. What this means is it's no longer good enough to say that international relations, or global affairs, or chaos in Somalia, or what's going on in Burma is none of your business, and that you can leave it to governments to get on with. I can connect any one of you by six degrees of separation to the Al-Shabaab militia in Somalia. Ask me how later, particularly if you eat fish, interestingly enough, but that connection is there. We are all intimately connected. And this isn't just Tom Friedman, it's actually provable in case after case after case. What that means is, instead of asking your politicians to do things, you have to look to yourself to do things. And Independent Diplomat is a kind of example of this in a sort of loose way. There aren't neat examples, but one example is this: the way the world is changing is embodied in what's going on at the place I used to work -- the U.N. Security Council. The U.N. was established in 1945. Its charter is basically designed to stop conflicts between states -- interstate conflict. Today, 80 percent of the agenda of the U.N. Security Council is about conflicts within states, involving non-state parties -- guerillas, separatists, terrorists, if you want to call them that, people who are not normal governments, who are not normal states. That is the state of the world today. When I realized this, and when I look back on my time at the Security Council and what happened with the Kosovars, and I realize that often the people who were most directly affected by what we were doing in the Security Council weren't actually there, weren't actually invited to give their views to the Security Council, I thought, this is wrong. Something's got to be done about this. So I started off in a traditional mode. Me and my colleagues at Independent Diplomat went around the U.N. Security Council. We went around 70 U.N. member states -- the Kazaks, the Ethiopians, the Israelis -- you name them, we went to see them -- the secretary general, all of them, and said, "This is all wrong. This is terrible that you don't consult these people who are actually affected. You've got to institutionalize a system where you actually invite the Kosovars to come and tell you what they think. This will allow you to tell me -- you can tell them what you think. It'll be great. You can have an exchange. You can actually incorporate these people's views into your decisions, which means your decisions will be more effective and durable." Super-logical, you would think. I mean, incredibly logical. So obvious, anybody could get it. And of course, everybody got it. Everybody went, "Yes, of course, you're absolutely right. Come back to us in maybe six months." And of course, nothing happened -- nobody did anything. The Security Council does its business in exactly the same way today that it did X number of years ago, when I was there 10 years ago. So we looked at that observation of basically failure and thought, what can we do about it. And I thought, I'm buggered if I'm going to spend the rest of my life lobbying for these crummy governments to do what needs to be done. So what we're going to do is we're actually going to set up these meetings ourselves. So now, Independent Diplomat is in the process of setting up meetings between the U.N. Security Council and the parties to the disputes that are on the agenda of the Security Council. So we will be bringing Darfuri rebel groups, the Northern Cypriots and the Southern Cypriots, rebels from Aceh, and awful long laundry list of chaotic conflicts around the world. And we will be trying to bring the parties to New York to sit down in a quiet room in a private setting with no press and actually explain what they want to the members of the U. N. Security Council, and for the members of the U.N. Security Council to explain to them what they want. So there's actually a conversation, which has never before happened. And of course, describing all this, any of you who know politics will think this is incredibly difficult, and I entirely agree with you. The chances of failure are very high, but it certainly won't happen if we don't try to make it happen. And my politics has changed fundamentally from when I was a diplomat to what I am today, and I think that outputs is what matters, not process, not technology, frankly, so much either. Preach technology to all the Twittering members of all the Iranian demonstrations who are now in political prison in Tehran, where Ahmadinejad remains in power. Technology has not delivered political change in Iran. You've got to look at the outputs, and you got to say to yourself, "What can I do to produce that particular output?" That is the politics of the 21st century, and in a way, Independent Diplomat embodies that fragmentation, that change, that is happening to all of us. That's my story. Thanks.

Chris Anderson: You were something of a mathematical phenom. You had already taught at Harvard and MIT at a young age. And then the NSA came calling. What was that about? Jim Simons: Well the NSA -- that's the National Security Agency -- they didn't exactly come calling. They had an operation at Princeton, where they hired mathematicians to attack secret codes and stuff like that. And I knew that existed. And they had a very good policy, because you could do half your time at your own mathematics, and at least half your time working on their stuff. And they paid a lot. So that was an irresistible pull. So, I went there. CA: You were a code-cracker. JS: I was. CA: Until you got fired. JS: Well, I did get fired. Yes. CA: How come? JS: Well, how come? I got fired because, well, the Vietnam War was on, and the boss of bosses in my organization was a big fan of the war and wrote a New York Times article, a magazine section cover story, about how we would win in Vietnam. And I didn't like that war, I thought it was stupid. And I wrote a letter to the Times, which they published, saying not everyone who works for Maxwell Taylor, if anyone remembers that name, agrees with his views. And I gave my own views ... CA: Oh, OK. I can see that would -- JS: ... which were different from General Taylor's. But in the end, nobody said anything. But then, I was 29 years old at this time, and some kid came around and said he was a stringer from Newsweek magazine and he wanted to interview me and ask what I was doing about my views. And I told him, "I'm doing mostly mathematics now, and when the war is over, then I'll do mostly their stuff." Then I did the only intelligent thing I'd done that day -- I told my local boss that I gave that interview. And he said, "What'd you say?" And I told him what I said. And then he said, "I've got to call Taylor." He called Taylor; that took 10 minutes. I was fired five minutes after that. CA: OK. JS: But it wasn't bad. CA: It wasn't bad, because you went on to Stony Brook and stepped up your mathematical career. You started working with this man here. Who is this? JS: Oh, [Shiing-Shen] Chern. Chern was one of the great mathematicians of the century. I had known him when I was a graduate student at Berkeley. And I had some ideas, and I brought them to him and he liked them. Together, we did this work which you can easily see up there. There it is. CA: It led to you publishing a famous paper together. Can you explain at all what that work was? JS: No. (Laughter) JS: I mean, I could explain it to somebody. (Laughter) CA: How about explaining this? JS: But not many. Not many people. CA: I think you told me it had something to do with spheres, so let's start here. JS: Well, it did, but I'll say about that work -- it did have something to do with that, but before we get to that -- that work was good mathematics. I was very happy with it; so was Chern. It even started a little sub-field that's now flourishing. But, more interestingly, it happened to apply to physics, something we knew nothing about -- at least I knew nothing about physics, and I don't think Chern knew a heck of a lot. And about 10 years after the paper came out, a guy named Ed Witten in Princeton started applying it to string theory and people in Russia started applying it to what's called "condensed matter." Today, those things in there called Chern-Simons invariants have spread through a lot of physics. And it was amazing. We didn't know any physics. It never occurred to me that it would be applied to physics. But that's the thing about mathematics -- you never know where it's going to go. CA: This is so incredible. So, we've been talking about how evolution shapes human minds that may or may not perceive the truth. Somehow, you come up with a mathematical theory, not knowing any physics, discover two decades later that it's being applied to profoundly describe the actual physical world. How can that happen? JS: God knows. (Laughter) But there's a famous physicist named [Eugene] Wigner, and he wrote an essay on the unreasonable effectiveness of mathematics. Somehow, this mathematics, which is rooted in the real world in some sense -- we learn to count, measure, everyone would do that -- and then it flourishes on its own. But so often it comes back to save the day. General relativity is an example. [Hermann] Minkowski had this geometry, and Einstein realized, "Hey! It's the very thing in which I can cast general relativity." So, you never know. It is a mystery. It is a mystery. CA: So, here's a mathematical piece of ingenuity. Tell us about this. JS: Well, that's a ball -- it's a sphere, and it has a lattice around it -- you know, those squares. What I'm going to show here was originally observed by [Leonhard] Euler, the great mathematician, in the 1700s. And it gradually grew to be a very important field in mathematics: algebraic topology, geometry. That paper up there had its roots in this. So, here's this thing: it has eight vertices, 12 edges, six faces. And if you look at the difference -- vertices minus edges plus faces -- you get two. OK, well, two. That's a good number. Here's a different way of doing it -- these are triangles covering -- this has 12 vertices and 30 edges and 20 faces, 20 tiles. And vertices minus edges plus faces still equals two. And in fact, you could do this any which way -- cover this thing with all kinds of polygons and triangles and mix them up. And you take vertices minus edges plus faces -- you'll get two. Here's a different shape. This is a torus, or the surface of a doughnut: 16 vertices covered by these rectangles, 32 edges, 16 faces. Vertices minus edges comes out to be zero. It'll always come out to zero. Every time you cover a torus with squares or triangles or anything like that, you're going to get zero. So, this is called the Euler characteristic. And it's what's called a topological invariant. It's pretty amazing. No matter how you do it, you're always get the same answer. So that was the first sort of thrust, from the mid-1700s, into a subject which is now called algebraic topology. CA: And your own work took an idea like this and moved it into higher-dimensional theory, higher-dimensional objects, and found new invariances? JS: Yes. Well, there were already higher-dimensional invariants: Pontryagin classes -- actually, there were Chern classes. There were a bunch of these types of invariants. I was struggling to work on one of them and model it sort of combinatorially, instead of the way it was typically done, and that led to this work and we uncovered some new things. But if it wasn't for Mr. Euler -- who wrote almost 70 volumes of mathematics and had 13 children, who he apparently would dandle on his knee while he was writing -- if it wasn't for Mr. Euler, there wouldn't perhaps be these invariants. CA: OK, so that's at least given us a flavor of that amazing mind in there. Let's talk about Renaissance. Because you took that amazing mind and having been a code-cracker at the NSA, you started to become a code-cracker in the financial industry. I think you probably didn't buy efficient market theory. Somehow you found a way of creating astonishing returns over two decades. The way it's been explained to me, what's remarkable about what you did wasn't just the size of the returns, it's that you took them with surprisingly low volatility and risk, compared with other hedge funds. So how on earth did you do this, Jim? JS: I did it by assembling a wonderful group of people. When I started doing trading, I had gotten a little tired of mathematics. I was in my late 30s, I had a little money. I started trading and it went very well. I made quite a lot of money with pure luck. I mean, I think it was pure luck. It certainly wasn't mathematical modeling. But in looking at the data, after a while I realized: it looks like there's some structure here. And I hired a few mathematicians, and we started making some models -- just the kind of thing we did back at IDA [Institute for Defense Analyses]. You design an algorithm, you test it out on a computer. Does it work? Doesn't it work? And so on. CA: Can we take a look at this? Because here's a typical graph of some commodity. I look at that, and I say, "That's just a random, up-and-down walk -- maybe a slight upward trend over that whole period of time." How on earth could you trade looking at that, and see something that wasn't just random? JS: In the old days -- this is kind of a graph from the old days, commodities or currencies had a tendency to trend. Not necessarily the very light trend you see here, but trending in periods. And if you decided, OK, I'm going to predict today, by the average move in the past 20 days -- maybe that would be a good prediction, and I'd make some money. And in fact, years ago, such a system would work -- not beautifully, but it would work. You'd make money, you'd lose money, you'd make money. But this is a year's worth of days, and you'd make a little money during that period. It's a very vestigial system. CA: So you would test a bunch of lengths of trends in time and see whether, for example, a 10-day trend or a 15-day trend was predictive of what happened next. JS: Sure, you would try all those things and see what worked best. Trend-following would have been great in the '60s, and it was sort of OK in the '70s. By the '80s, it wasn't. CA: Because everyone could see that. So, how did you stay ahead of the pack? JS: We stayed ahead of the pack by finding other approaches -- shorter-term approaches to some extent. The real thing was to gather a tremendous amount of data -- and we had to get it by hand in the early days. We went down to the Federal Reserve and copied interest rate histories and stuff like that, because it didn't exist on computers. We got a lot of data. And very smart people -- that was the key. I didn't really know how to hire people to do fundamental trading. I had hired a few -- some made money, some didn't make money. I couldn't make a business out of that. But I did know how to hire scientists, because I have some taste in that department. So, that's what we did. And gradually these models got better and better, and better and better. CA: You're credited with doing something remarkable at Renaissance, which is building this culture, this group of people, who weren't just hired guns who could be lured away by money. Their motivation was doing exciting mathematics and science. JS: Well, I'd hoped that might be true. But some of it was money. CA: They made a lot of money. JS: I can't say that no one came because of the money. I think a lot of them came because of the money. But they also came because it would be fun. CA: What role did machine learning play in all this? JS: In a certain sense, what we did was machine learning. You look at a lot of data, and you try to simulate different predictive schemes, until you get better and better at it. It doesn't necessarily feed back on itself the way we did things. But it worked. CA: So these different predictive schemes can be really quite wild and unexpected. I mean, you looked at everything, right? You looked at the weather, length of dresses, political opinion. JS: Yes, length of dresses we didn't try. CA: What sort of things? JS: Well, everything. Everything is grist for the mill -- except hem lengths. Weather, annual reports, quarterly reports, historic data itself, volumes, you name it. Whatever there is. We take in terabytes of data a day. And store it away and massage it and get it ready for analysis. You're looking for anomalies. You're looking for -- like you said, the efficient market hypothesis is not correct. CA: But any one anomaly might be just a random thing. So, is the secret here to just look at multiple strange anomalies, and see when they align? JS: Any one anomaly might be a random thing; however, if you have enough data you can tell that it's not. You can see an anomaly that's persistent for a sufficiently long time -- the probability of it being random is not high. But these things fade after a while; anomalies can get washed out. So you have to keep on top of the business. CA: A lot of people look at the hedge fund industry now and are sort of ... shocked by it, by how much wealth is created there, and how much talent is going into it. Do you have any worries about that industry, and perhaps the financial industry in general? Kind of being on a runaway train that's -- I don't know -- helping increase inequality? How would you champion what's happening in the hedge fund industry? JS: I think in the last three or four years, hedge funds have not done especially well. We've done dandy, but the hedge fund industry as a whole has not done so wonderfully. The stock market has been on a roll, going up as everybody knows, and price-earnings ratios have grown. So an awful lot of the wealth that's been created in the last -- let's say, five or six years -- has not been created by hedge funds. People would ask me, "What's a hedge fund?" And I'd say, "One and 20." Which means -- now it's two and 20 -- it's two percent fixed fee and 20 percent of profits. Hedge funds are all different kinds of creatures. CA: Rumor has it you charge slightly higher fees than that. JS: We charged the highest fees in the world at one time. Five and 44, that's what we charge. CA: Five and 44. So five percent flat, 44 percent of upside. You still made your investors spectacular amounts of money. JS: We made good returns, yes. People got very mad: "How can you charge such high fees?" I said, "OK, you can withdraw." But "How can I get more?" was what people were -- (Laughter) But at a certain point, as I think I told you, we bought out all the investors because there's a capacity to the fund. CA: But should we worry about the hedge fund industry attracting too much of the world's great mathematical and other talent to work on that, as opposed to the many other problems in the world? JS: Well, it's not just mathematical. We hire astronomers and physicists and things like that. I don't think we should worry about it too much. It's still a pretty small industry. And in fact, bringing science into the investing world has improved that world. It's reduced volatility. It's increased liquidity. Spreads are narrower because people are trading that kind of stuff. So I'm not too worried about Einstein going off and starting a hedge fund. CA: You're at a phase in your life now where you're actually investing, though, at the other end of the supply chain -- you're actually boosting mathematics across America. This is your wife, Marilyn. You're working on philanthropic issues together. Tell me about that. JS: Well, Marilyn started -- there she is up there, my beautiful wife -- she started the foundation about 20 years ago. I think '94. I claim it was '93, she says it was '94, but it was one of those two years. (Laughter) We started the foundation, just as a convenient way to give charity. She kept the books, and so on. We did not have a vision at that time, but gradually a vision emerged -- which was to focus on math and science, to focus on basic research. And that's what we've done. Six years ago or so, I left Renaissance and went to work at the foundation. So that's what we do. CA: And so Math for America is basically investing in math teachers around the country, giving them some extra income, giving them support and coaching. And really trying to make that more effective and make that a calling to which teachers can aspire. JS: Yeah -- instead of beating up the bad teachers, which has created morale problems all through the educational community, in particular in math and science, we focus on celebrating the good ones and giving them status. Yeah, we give them extra money, 15,000 dollars a year. We have 800 math and science teachers in New York City in public schools today, as part of a core. There's a great morale among them. They're staying in the field. Next year, it'll be 1,000 and that'll be 10 percent of the math and science teachers in New York [City] public schools. (Applause) CA: Jim, here's another project that you've supported philanthropically: Research into origins of life, I guess. What are we looking at here? JS: Well, I'll save that for a second. And then I'll tell you what you're looking at. Origins of life is a fascinating question. How did we get here? Well, there are two questions: One is, what is the route from geology to biology -- how did we get here? And the other question is, what did we start with? What material, if any, did we have to work with on this route? Those are two very, very interesting questions. The first question is a tortuous path from geology up to RNA or something like that -- how did that all work? And the other, what do we have to work with? Well, more than we think. So what's pictured there is a star in formation. Now, every year in our Milky Way, which has 100 billion stars, about two new stars are created. Don't ask me how, but they're created. And it takes them about a million years to settle out. So, in steady state, there are about two million stars in formation at any time. That one is somewhere along this settling-down period. And there's all this crap sort of circling around it, dust and stuff. And it'll form probably a solar system, or whatever it forms. But here's the thing -- in this dust that surrounds a forming star have been found, now, significant organic molecules. Molecules not just like methane, but formaldehyde and cyanide -- things that are the building blocks -- the seeds, if you will -- of life. So, that may be typical. And it may be typical that planets around the universe start off with some of these basic building blocks. Now does that mean there's going to be life all around? Maybe. But it's a question of how tortuous this path is from those frail beginnings, those seeds, all the way to life. And most of those seeds will fall on fallow planets. CA: So for you, personally, finding an answer to this question of where we came from, of how did this thing happen, that is something you would love to see. JS: Would love to see. And like to know -- if that path is tortuous enough, and so improbable, that no matter what you start with, we could be a singularity. But on the other hand, given all this organic dust that's floating around, we could have lots of friends out there. It'd be great to know. CA: Jim, a couple of years ago, I got the chance to speak with Elon Musk, and I asked him the secret of his success, and he said taking physics seriously was it. Listening to you, what I hear you saying is taking math seriously, that has infused your whole life. It's made you an absolute fortune, and now it's allowing you to invest in the futures of thousands and thousands of kids across America and elsewhere. Could it be that science actually works? That math actually works? JS: Well, math certainly works. Math certainly works. But this has been fun. Working with Marilyn and giving it away has been very enjoyable. CA: I just find it -- it's an inspirational thought to me, that by taking knowledge seriously, so much more can come from it. So thank you for your amazing life, and for coming here to TED. Thank you. Jim Simons! (Applause)

The Internet, the Web as we know it, the kind of Web -- the things we're all talking about -- is already less than 5,000 days old. So all of the things that we've seen come about, starting, say, with satellite images of the whole Earth, which we couldn't even imagine happening before, all these things rolling into our lives, just this abundance of things that are right before us, sitting in front of our laptop, or our desktop. This kind of cornucopia of stuff just coming and never ending is amazing, and we're not amazed. It's really amazing that all this stuff is here. (Laughter) It's in 5,000 days, all this stuff has come. And I know that 10 years ago, if I had told you that this was all coming, you would have said that that's impossible. There's simply no economic model that that would be possible. And if I told you it was all coming for free, you would say, this is simply -- you're dreaming. You're a Californian utopian. You're a wild-eyed optimist. And yet it's here. The other thing that we know about it was that 10 years ago, as I looked at what even Wired was talking about, we thought it was going to be TV, but better. That was the model. That was what everybody was suggesting was going to be coming. And it turns out that that's not what it was. First of all, it was impossible, and it's not what it was. And so one of the things that I think we're learning -- if you think about, like, Wikipedia, it's something that was simply impossible. It's impossible in theory, but possible in practice. And if you take all these things that are impossible, I think one of the things that we're learning from this era, from this last decade, is that we have to get good at believing in the impossible, because we're unprepared for it. So, I'm curious about what's going to happen in the next 5,000 days. But if that's happened in the last 5,000 days, what's going to happen in the next 5,000 days? So, I have a kind of a simple story, and it suggests that what we want to think about is this thing that we're making, this thing that has happened in 5,000 days -- that's all these computers, all these handhelds, all these cell phones, all these laptops, all these servers -- basically what we're getting out of all these connections is we're getting one machine. If there is only one machine, and our little handhelds and devices are actually just little windows into those machines, but that we're basically constructing a single, global machine. And so I began to think about that. And it turned out that this machine happens to be the most reliable machine that we've ever made. It has not crashed; it's running uninterrupted. And there's almost no other machine that we've ever made that runs the number of hours, the number of days. 5,000 days without interruption -- that's just unbelievable. And of course, the Internet is longer than just 5,000 days; the Web is only 5,000 days. So, I was trying to basically make measurements. What are the dimensions of this machine? And I started off by calculating how many billions of clicks there are all around the globe on all the computers. And there is a 100 billion clicks per day. And there's 55 trillion links between all the Web pages of the world. And so I began thinking more about other kinds of dimensions, and I made a quick list. Was it Chris Jordan, the photographer, talking about numbers being so large that they're meaningless? Well, here's a list of them. They're hard to tell, but there's one billion PC chips on the Internet, if you count all the chips in all the computers on the Internet. There's two million emails per second. So it's a very big number. It's just a huge machine, and it uses five percent of the global electricity on the planet. So here's the specifications, just as if you were to make up a spec sheet for it: 170 quadrillion transistors, 55 trillion links, emails running at two megahertz itself, 31 kilohertz text messaging, 246 exabyte storage. That's a big disk. That's a lot of storage, memory. Nine exabyte RAM. And the total traffic on this is running at seven terabytes per second. Brewster was saying the Library of Congress is about twenty terabytes. So every second, half of the Library of Congress is swooshing around in this machine. It's a big machine. So I did something else. I figured out 100 billion clicks per day, 55 trillion links is almost the same as the number of synapses in your brain. A quadrillion transistors is almost the same as the number of neurons in your brain. So to a first approximation, we have these things -- twenty petahertz synapse firings. Of course, the memory is really huge. But to a first approximation, the size of this machine is the size -- and its complexity, kind of -- to your brain. Because in fact, that's how your brain works -- in kind of the same way that the Web works. However, your brain isn't doubling every two years. So if we say this machine right now that we've made is about one HB, one human brain, if we look at the rate that this is increasing, 30 years from now, there'll be six billion HBs. So by the year 2040, the total processing of this machine will exceed a total processing power of humanity, in raw bits and stuff. And this is, I think, where Ray Kurzweil and others get this little chart saying that we're going to cross. So, what about that? Well, here's a couple of things. I have three kind of general things I would like to say, three consequences of this. First, that basically what this machine is doing is embodying. We're giving it a body. And that's what we're going to do in the next 5,000 days -- we're going to give this machine a body. And the second thing is, we're going to restructure its architecture. And thirdly, we're going to become completely codependent upon it. So let me go through those three things. First of all, we have all these things in our hands. We think they're all separate devices, but in fact, every screen in the world is looking into the one machine. These are all basically portals into that one machine. The second thing is that -- some people call this the cloud, and you're kind of touching the cloud with this. And so in some ways, all you really need is a cloudbook. And the cloudbook doesn't have any storage. It's wireless. It's always connected. There's many things about it. It becomes very simple, and basically what you're doing is you're just touching the machine, you're touching the cloud and you're going to compute that way. So the machine is computing. And in some ways, it's sort of back to the kind of old idea of centralized computing. But everything, all the cameras, and the microphones, and the sensors in cars and everything is connected to this machine. And everything will go through the Web. And we're seeing that already with, say, phones. Right now, phones don't go through the Web, but they are beginning to, and they will. And if you imagine what, say, just as an example, what Google Labs has in terms of experiments with Google Docs, Google Spreadsheets, blah, blah, blah -- all these things are going to become Web based. They're going through the machine. And I am suggesting that every bit will be owned by the Web. Right now, it's not. If you do spreadsheets and things at work, a Word document, they aren't on the Web, but they are going to be. They're going to be part of this machine. They're going to speak the Web language. They're going to talk to the machine. The Web, in some sense, is kind of like a black hole that's sucking up everything into it. And so every thing will be part of the Web. So every item, every artifact that we make, will have embedded in it some little sliver of Web-ness and connection, and it will be part of this machine, so that our environment -- kind of in that ubiquitous computing sense -- our environment becomes the Web. Everything is connected. Now, with RFIDs and other things -- whatever technology it is, it doesn't really matter. The point is that everything will have embedded in it some sensor connecting it to the machine, and so we have, basically, an Internet of things. So you begin to think of a shoe as a chip with heels, and a car as a chip with wheels, because basically most of the cost of manufacturing cars is the embedded intelligence and electronics in it, and not the materials. A lot of people think about the new economy as something that was going to be a disembodied, alternative, virtual existence, and that we would have the old economy of atoms. But in fact, what the new economy really is is the marriage of those two, where we embed the information, and the digital nature of things into the material world. That's what we're looking forward to. That is where we're going -- this union, this convergence of the atomic and the digital. And so one of the consequences of that, I believe, is that where we have this sort of spectrum of media right now -- TV, film, video -- that basically becomes one media platform. And while there's many differences in some senses, they will share more and more in common with each other. So that the laws of media, such as the fact that copies have no value, the value's in the uncopiable things, the immediacy, the authentication, the personalization. The media wants to be liquid. The reason why things are free is so that you can manipulate them, not so that they are "free" as in "beer," but "free" as in "freedom." And the network effects rule, meaning that the more you have, the more you get. The first fax machine -- the person who bought the first fax machine was an idiot, because there was nobody to fax to. But here she became an evangelist, recruiting others to get the fax machines because it made their purchase more valuable. Those are the effects that we're going to see. Attention is the currency. So those laws are going to kind of spread throughout all media. And the other thing about this embodiment is that there's kind of what I call the McLuhan reversal. McLuhan was saying, "Machines are the extensions of the human senses." And I'm saying, "Humans are now going to be the extended senses of the machine," in a certain sense. So we have a trillion eyes, and ears, and touches, through all our digital photographs and cameras. And we see that in things like Flickr, or Photosynth, this program from Microsoft that will allow you to assemble a view of a touristy place from the thousands of tourist snapshots of it. In a certain sense, the machine is seeing through the pixels of individual cameras. Now, the second thing that I want to talk about was this idea of restructuring, that what the Web is doing is restructuring. And I have to warn you, that what we'll talk about is -- I'm going to give my explanation of a term you're hearing, which is a "semantic Web." So first of all, the first stage that we've seen of the Internet was that it was going to link computers. And that's what we called the Net; that was the Internet of nets. And we saw that, where you have all the computers of the world. And if you remember, it was a kind of green screen with cursors, and there was really not much to do, and if you wanted to connect it, you connected it from one computer to another computer. And what you had to do was -- if you wanted to participate in this, you had to share packets of information. So you were forwarding on. You didn't have control. It wasn't like a telephone system where you had control of a line: you had to share packets. The second stage that we're in now is the idea of linking pages. So in the old one, if I wanted to go on to an airline Web page, I went from my computer, to an FTP site, to another airline computer. Now we have pages -- the unit has been resolved into pages, so one page links to another page. And if I want to go in to book a flight, I go into the airline's flight page, the website of the airline, and I'm linking to that page. And what we're sharing were links, so you had to be kind of open with links. You couldn't deny -- if someone wanted to link to you, you couldn't stop them. You had to participate in this idea of opening up your pages to be linked by anybody. So that's what we were doing. We're now entering to the third stage, which is what I'm talking about, and that is where we link the data. So, I don't know what the name of this thing is. I'm calling it the one machine. But we're linking data. So we're going from machine to machine, from page to page, and now data to data. So the difference is, is that rather than linking from page to page, we're actually going to link from one idea on a page to another idea, rather than to the other page. So every idea is basically being supported -- or every item, or every noun -- is being supported by the entire Web. It's being resolved at the level of items, or ideas, or words, if you want. So besides physically coming out again into this idea that it's not just virtual, it's actually going out to things. So something will resolve down to the information about a particular person, so every person will have a unique ID. Every person, every item will have a something that will be very specific, and will link to a specific representation of that idea or item. So now, in this new one, when I link to it, I would link to my particular flight, my particular seat. And so, giving an example of this thing, I live in Pacifica, rather than -- right now Pacifica is just sort of a name on the Web somewhere. The Web doesn't know that that is actually a town, and that it's a specific town that I live in, but that's what we're going to be talking about. It's going to link directly to -- it will know, the Web will be able to read itself and know that that actually is a place, and that whenever it sees that word, "Pacifica," it knows that it actually has a place, latitude, longitude, a certain population. So here are some of the technical terms, all three-letter things, that you'll see a lot more of. All these things are about enabling this idea of linking to the data. So I'll give you one kind of an example. There's like a billion social sites on the Web. Each time you go into there, you have to tell it again who you are and all your friends are. Why should you be doing that? You should just do that once, and it should know who all your friends are. So that's what you want, is all your friends are identified, and you should just carry these relationships around. All this data about you should just be conveyed, and you should do it once and that's all that should happen. And you should have all the networks of all the relationships between those pieces of data. That's what we're moving into -- where it sort of knows these things down to that level. A semantic Web, Web 3.0, giant global graph -- we're kind of trying out what we want to call this thing. But what's it's doing is sharing data. So you have to be open to having your data shared, which is a much bigger step than just sharing your Web page, or your computer. And all these things that are going to be on this are not just pages, they are things. Everything we've described, every artifact or place, will be a specific representation, will have a specific character that can be linked to directly. So we have this database of things. And so there's actually a fourth thing that we have not get to, that we won't see in the next 10 years, or 5,000 days, but I think that's where we're going to. And as the Internet of things -- where I'm linking directly to the particular things of my seat on the plane -- that that physical thing becomes part of the Web. And so we are in the middle of this thing that's completely linked, down to every object in the little sliver of a connection that it has. So, the last thing I want to talk about is this idea that we're going to be codependent. It's always going to be there, and the closer it is, the better. If you allow Google to, it will tell you your search history. And I found out by looking at it that I search most at 11 o'clock in the morning. So I am open, and being transparent to that. And I think total personalization in this new world will require total transparency. That is going to be the price. If you want to have total personalization, you have to be totally transparent. Google. I can't remember my phone number, I'll just ask Google. We're so dependent on this that I have now gotten to the point where I don't even try to remember things -- I'll just Google it. It's easier to do that. And we kind of object at first, saying, "Oh, that's awful." But if we think about the dependency that we have on this other technology, called the alphabet, and writing, we're totally dependent on it, and it's transformed culture. We cannot imagine ourselves without the alphabet and writing. And so in the same way, we're going to not imagine ourselves without this other machine being there. And what is happening with this is some kind of AI, but it's not the AI in conscious AI, as being an expert, Larry Page told me that that's what they're trying to do, and that's what they're trying to do. But when six billion humans are Googling, who's searching who? It goes both ways. So we are the Web, that's what this thing is. We are going to be the machine. So the next 5,000 days, it's not going to be the Web and only better. Just like it wasn't TV and only better. The next 5,000 days, it's not just going to be the Web but only better -- it's going to be something different. And I think it's going to be smarter. It'll have an intelligence in there, that's not, again, conscious. But it'll anticipate what we're doing, in a good sense. Secondly, it's become much more personalized. It will know us, and that's good. And again, the price of that will be transparency. And thirdly, it's going to become more ubiquitous in terms of filling your entire environment, and we will be in the middle of it. And all these devices will be portals into that. So the single idea that I wanted to leave with you is that we have to begin to think about this as not just "the Web, only better," but a new kind of stage in this development. It looks more global. If you take this whole thing, it is a very big machine, very reliable machine, more reliable than its parts. But we can also think about it as kind of a large organism. So we might respond to it more as if this was a whole system, more as if this wasn't a large organism that we are going to be interacting with. It's a "One." And I don't know what else to call it, than the One. We'll have a better word for it. But there's a unity of some sort that's starting to emerge. And again, I don't want to talk about consciousness, I want to talk about it just as if it was a little bacteria, or a volvox, which is what that organism is. So, to do, action, take-away. So, here's what I would say: there's only one machine, and the Web is its OS. All screens look into the One. No bits will live outside the Web. To share is to gain. Let the One read it. It's going to be machine-readable. You want to make something that the machine can read. And the One is us. We are in the One. I appreciate your time. (Applause)

In 1962, with Rachel Carson's "Silent Spring," I think for people like me in the world of the making of things, the canary in the mine wasn't singing. And so the question that we might not have birds became kind of fundamental to those of us wandering around looking for the meadowlarks that seemed to have all disappeared. And the question was, were the birds singing? Now, I'm not a scientist, that'll be really clear. But, you know, we've just come from this discussion of what a bird might be. What is a bird? Well, in my world, this is a rubber duck. It comes in California with a warning -- "This product contains chemicals known by the State of California to cause cancer and birth defects or other reproductive harm." This is a bird. What kind of culture would produce a product of this kind and then label it and sell it to children? I think we have a design problem. Someone heard the six hours of talk that I gave called "The Monticello Dialogues" on NPR, and sent me this as a thank you note -- "We realize that design is a signal of intention, but it also has to occur within a world, and we have to understand that world in order to imbue our designs with inherent intelligence, and so as we look back at the basic state of affairs in which we design, we, in a way, need to go to the primordial condition to understand the operating system and the frame conditions of a planet, and I think the exciting part of that is the good news that's there, because the news is the news of abundance, and not the news of limits, and I think as our culture tortures itself now with tyrannies and concerns over limits and fear, we can add this other dimension of abundance that is coherent, driven by the sun, and start to imagine what that would be like to share." That was a nice thing to get. That was one sentence. Henry James would be proud. This is -- I put it down at the bottom, but that was extemporaneous, obviously. The fundamental issue is that, for me, design is the first signal of human intentions. So what are our intentions, and what would our intentions be -- if we wake up in the morning, we have designs on the world -- well, what would our intention be as a species now that we're the dominant species? And it's not just stewardship and dominion debate, because really, dominion is implicit in stewardship -- because how could you dominate something you had killed? And stewardship's implicit in dominion, because you can't be steward of something if you can't dominate it. So the question is, what is the first question for designers? Now, as guardians -- let's say the state, for example, which reserves the right to kill, the right to be duplicitous and so on -- the question we're asking the guardian at this point is are we meant, how are we meant, to secure local societies, create world peace and save the environment? But I don't know that that's the common debate. Commerce, on the other hand, is relatively quick, essentially creative, highly effective and efficient, and fundamentally honest, because we can't exchange value for very long if we don't trust each other. So we use the tools of commerce primarily for our work, but the question we bring to it is, how do we love all the children of all species for all time? And so we start our designs with that question. Because what we realize today is that modern culture appears to have adopted a strategy of tragedy. If we come here and say, "Well, I didn't intend to cause global warming on the way here," and we say, "That's not part of my plan," then we realize it's part of our de facto plan. Because it's the thing that's happening because we have no other plan. And I was at the White House for President Bush, meeting with every federal department and agency, and I pointed out that they appear to have no plan. If the end game is global warming, they're doing great. If the end game is mercury toxification of our children downwind of coal fire plants as they scuttled the Clean Air Act, then I see that our education programs should be explicitly defined as, "Brain death for all children. No child left behind." (Applause) So, the question is, how many federal officials are ready to move to Ohio and Pennsylvania with their families? So if you don't have an endgame of something delightful, then you're just moving chess pieces around, if you don't know you're taking the king. So perhaps we could develop a strategy of change, which requires humility. And in my business as an architect, it's unfortunate the word "humility" and the word "architect" have not appeared in the same paragraph since "The Fountainhead." So if anybody here has trouble with the concept of design humility, reflect on this -- it took us 5,000 years to put wheels on our luggage. So, as Kevin Kelly pointed out, there is no endgame. There is an infinite game, and we're playing in that infinite game. And so we call it "cradle to cradle," and our goal is very simple. This is what I presented to the White House. Our goal is a delightfully diverse, safe, healthy and just world, with clean air, clean water, soil and power -- economically, equitably, ecologically and elegantly enjoyed, period. (Applause) What don't you like about this? Which part of this don't you like? So we realized we want full diversity, even though it can be difficult to remember what De Gaulle said when asked what it was like to be President of France. He said, "What do you think it's like trying to run a country with 400 kinds of cheese?" But at the same time, we realize that our products are not safe and healthy. So we've designed products and we analyzed chemicals down to the parts per million. This is a baby blanket by Pendleton that will give your child nutrition instead of Alzheimer's later in life. We can ask ourselves, what is justice, and is justice blind, or is justice blindness? And at what point did that uniform turn from white to black? Water has been declared a human right by the United Nations. Air quality is an obvious thing to anyone who breathes. Is there anybody here who doesn't breathe? Clean soil is a critical problem -- the nitrification, the dead zones in the Gulf of Mexico. A fundamental issue that's not being addressed. We've seen the first form of solar energy that's beat the hegemony of fossil fuels in the form of wind here in the Great Plains, and so that hegemony is leaving. And if we remember Sheikh Yamani when he formed OPEC, they asked him, "When will we see the end of the age of oil?" I don't know if you remember his answer, but it was, "The Stone Age didn't end because we ran out of stones." We see that companies acting ethically in this world are outperforming those that don't. We see the flows of materials in a rather terrifying prospect. This is a hospital monitor from Los Angeles, sent to China. This woman will expose herself to toxic phosphorous, release four pounds of toxic lead into her childrens' environment, which is from copper. On the other hand, we see great signs of hope. Here's Dr. Venkataswamy in India, who's figured out how to do mass-produced health. He has given eyesight to two million people for free. We see in our material flows that car steels don't become car steel again because of the contaminants of the coatings -- bismuth, antimony, copper and so on. They become building steel. On the other hand, we're working with Berkshire Hathaway, Warren Buffett and Shaw Carpet, the largest carpet company in the world. We've developed a carpet that is continuously recyclable, down to the parts per million. The upper is Nylon 6 that can go back to caprolactam, the bottom, a polyolephine -- infinitely recyclable thermoplastic. Now if I was a bird, the building on my left is a liability. The building on my right, which is our corporate campus for The Gap with an ancient meadow, is an asset -- its nesting grounds. Here's where I come from. I grew up in Hong Kong, with six million people in 40 square miles. During the dry season, we had four hours of water every fourth day. And the relationship to landscape was that of farmers who have been farming the same piece of ground for 40 centuries. You can't farm the same piece of ground for 40 centuries without understanding nutrient flow. My childhood summers were in the Puget Sound of Washington, among the first growth and big growth. My grandfather had been a lumberjack in the Olympics, so I have a lot of tree karma I am working off. I went to Yale for graduate school, studied in a building of this style by Le Corbusier, affectionately known in our business as Brutalism. If we look at the world of architecture, we see with Mies' 1928 tower for Berlin, the question might be, "Well, where's the sun?" And this might have worked in Berlin, but we built it in Houston, and the windows are all closed. And with most products appearing not to have been designed for indoor use, this is actually a vertical gas chamber. When I went to Yale, we had the first energy crisis, and I was designing the first solar-heated house in Ireland as a student, which I then built -- which would give you a sense of my ambition. And Richard Meier, who was one of my teachers, kept coming over to my desk to give me criticism, and he would say, "Bill, you've got to understand- -- solar energy has nothing to do with architecture." I guess he didn't read Vitruvius. In 1984, we did the first so-called "green office" in America for Environmental Defense. We started asking manufacturers what were in their materials. They said, "They're proprietary, they're legal, go away." The only indoor quality work done in this country at that time was sponsored by R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Company, and it was to prove there was no danger from secondhand smoke in the workplace. So, all of a sudden, here I am, graduating from high school in 1969, and this happens, and we realize that "away" went away. Remember we used to throw things away, and we'd point to away? And yet, NOAA has now shown us, for example -- you see that little blue thing above Hawaii? That's the Pacific Gyre. It was recently dragged for plankton by scientists, and they found six times as much plastic as plankton. When asked, they said, "It's kind of like a giant toilet that doesn't flush." Perhaps that's away. So we're looking for the design rules of this -- this is the highest biodiversity of trees in the world, Irian Jaya, 259 species of tree, and we described this in the book, "Cradle to Cradle." The book itself is a polymer. It is not a tree. That's the name of the first chapter -- "This Book is Not a Tree." Because in poetics, as Margaret Atwood pointed out, "we write our history on the skin of fish with the blood of bears." And with so much polymer, what we really need is technical nutrition, and to use something as elegant as a tree -- imagine this design assignment: Design something that makes oxygen, sequesters carbon, fixes nitrogen, distills water, accrues solar energy as fuel, makes complex sugars and food, creates microclimates, changes colors with the seasons and self-replicates. Well, why don't we knock that down and write on it? (Laughter) So, we're looking at the same criteria as most people -- you know, can I afford it? Does it work? Do I like it? We're adding the Jeffersonian agenda, and I come from Charlottesville, where I've had the privilege of living in a house designed by Thomas Jefferson. We're adding life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Now if we look at the word "competition," I'm sure most of you've used it. You know, most people don't realize it comes from the Latin competere, which means strive together. It means the way Olympic athletes train with each other. They get fit together, and then they compete. The Williams sisters compete -- one wins Wimbledon. So we've been looking at the idea of competition as a way of cooperating in order to get fit together. And the Chinese government has now -- I work with the Chinese government now -- has taken this up. We're also looking at survival of the fittest, not in just competition terms in our modern context of destroy the other or beat them to the ground, but really to fit together and build niches and have growth that is good. Now most environmentalists don't say growth is good, because, in our lexicon, asphalt is two words: assigning blame. But if we look at asphalt as our growth, then we realize that all we're doing is destroying the planetary's fundamental underlying operating system. So when we see E equals mc squared come along, from a poet's perspective, we see energy as physics, chemistry as mass, and all of a sudden, you get this biology. And we have plenty of energy, so we'll solve that problem, but the biology problem's tricky, because as we put through all these toxic materials that we disgorge, we will never be able to recover that. And as Francis Crick pointed out, nine years after discovering DNA with Mr. Watson, that life itself has to have growth as a precondition -- it has to have free energy, sunlight and it needs to be an open system of chemicals. So we're asking for human artifice to become a living thing, and we want growth, we want free energy from sunlight and we want an open metabolism for chemicals. Then, the question becomes not growth or no growth, but what do you want to grow? So instead of just growing destruction, we want to grow the things that we might enjoy, and someday the FDA will allow us to make French cheese. So therefore, we have these two metabolisms, and I worked with a German chemist, Michael Braungart, and we've identified the two fundamental metabolisms. The biological one I'm sure you understand, but also the technical one, where we take materials and put them into closed cycles. We call them biological nutrition and technical nutrition. Technical nutrition will be in an order of magnitude of biological nutrition. Biological nutrition can supply about 500 million humans, which means that if we all wore Birkenstocks and cotton, the world would run out of cork and dry up. So we need materials in closed cycles, but we need to analyze them down to the parts per million for cancer, birth defects, mutagenic effects, disruption of our immune systems, biodegradation, persistence, heavy metal content, knowledge of how we're making them and their production and so on. Our first product was a textile where we analyzed 8,000 chemicals in the textile industry. Using those intellectual filters, we eliminated [7,962.] We were left with 38 chemicals. We have since databased the 4000 most commonly used chemicals in human manufacturing, and we're releasing this database into the public in six weeks. So designers all over the world can analyze their products down to the parts per million for human and ecological health. (Applause) We've developed a protocol so that companies can send these same messages all the way through their supply chains, because when we asked most companies we work with -- about a trillion dollars -- and say, "Where does your stuff come from?" They say, "Suppliers." "And where does it go?" "Customers." So we need some help there. So the biological nutrients, the first fabrics -- the water coming out was clean enough to drink. Technical nutrients -- this is for Shaw Carpet, infinitely reusable carpet. Here's nylon going back to caprolactam back to carpet. Biotechnical nutrients -- the Model U for Ford Motor, a cradle to cradle car -- concept car. Shoes for Nike, where the uppers are polyesters, infinitely recyclable, the bottoms are biodegradable soles. Wear your old shoes in, your new shoes out. There is no finish line. The idea here of the car is that some of the materials go back to the industry forever, some of the materials go back to soil -- it's all solar-powered. Here's a building at Oberlin College we designed that makes more energy than it needs to operate and purifies its own water. Here's a building for The Gap, where the ancient grasses of San Bruno, California, are on the roof. And this is our project for Ford Motor Company. It's the revitalization of the River Rouge in Dearborn. This is obviously a color photograph. These are our tools. These are how we sold it to Ford. We saved Ford 35 million dollars doing it this way, day one, which is the equivalent of the Ford Taurus at a four percent margin of an order for 900 million dollars worth of cars. Here it is. It's the world's largest green roof, 10 and a half acres. This is the roof, saving money, and this is the first species to arrive here. These are killdeer. They showed up in five days. And we now have 350-pound auto workers learning bird songs on the Internet. We're developing now protocols for cities -- that's the home of technical nutrients. The country -- the home of biological. And putting them together. And so I will finish by showing you a new city we're designing for the Chinese government. We're doing 12 cities for China right now, based on cradle to cradle as templates. Our assignment is to develop protocols for the housing for 400 million people in 12 years. We did a mass energy balance -- if they use brick, they will lose all their soil and burn all their coal. They'll have cities with no energy and no food. We signed a Memorandum of Understanding -- here's Madam Deng Nan, Deng Xiaoping's daughter -- for China to adopt cradle to cradle. Because if they toxify themselves, being the lowest-cost producer, send it to the lowest-cost distribution -- Wal-Mart -- and then we send them all our money, what we'll discover is that we have what, effectively, when I was a student, was called mutually assured destruction. Now we do it by molecule. These are our cities. We're building a new city next to this city; look at that landscape. This is the site. We don't normally do green fields, but this one is about to be built, so they brought us in to intercede. This is their plan. It's a rubber stamp grid that they laid right on that landscape. And they brought us in and said, "What would you do?" This is what they would end up with, which is another color photograph. So this is the existing site, so this is what it looks like now, and here's our proposal. (Applause) So the way we approached this is we studied the hydrology very carefully. We studied the biota, the ancient biota, the current farming and the protocols. We studied the winds and the sun to make sure everybody in the city will have fresh air, fresh water and direct sunlight in every single apartment at some point during the day. We then take the parks and lay them out as ecological infrastructure. We lay out the building areas. We start to integrate commercial and mixed use so the people all have centers and places to be. The transportation is all very simple, everybody's within a five-minute walk of mobility. We have a 24-hour street, so that there's always a place that's alive. The waste systems all connect. If you flush a toilet, your feces will go to the sewage treatment plants, which are sold as assets, not liabilities. Because who wants the fertilizer factory that makes natural gas? The waters are all taken in to construct the wetlands for habitat restorations. And then it makes natural gas, which then goes back into the city to power the fuel for the cooking for the city. So this is -- these are fertilizer gas plants. And then the compost is all taken back to the roofs of the city, where we've got farming, because what we've done is lifted up the city, the landscape, into the air to -- to restore the native landscape on the roofs of the buildings. The solar power of all the factory centers and all the industrial zones with their light roofs powers the city. And this is the concept for the top of the city. We've lifted the earth up onto the roofs. The farmers have little bridges to get from one roof to the next. We inhabit the city with work/live space on all the ground floors. And so this is the existing city, and this is the new city. (Applause)

Tonight, I'm going to try to make the case that inviting a loved one, a friend or even a stranger to record a meaningful interview with you just might turn out to be one of the most important moments in that person's life, and in yours. When I was 22 years old, I was lucky enough to find my calling when I fell into making radio stories. At almost the exact same time, I found out that my dad, who I was very, very close to, was gay. I was taken completely by surprise. We were a very tight-knit family, and I was crushed. At some point, in one of our strained conversations, my dad mentioned the Stonewall riots. He told me that one night in 1969, a group of young black and Latino drag queens fought back against the police at a gay bar in Manhattan called the Stonewall Inn, and how this sparked the modern gay rights movement. It was an amazing story, and it piqued my interest. So I decided to pick up my tape recorder and find out more. With the help of a young archivist named Michael Shirker, we tracked down all of the people we could find who had been at the Stonewall Inn that night. Recording these interviews, I saw how the microphone gave me the license to go places I otherwise never would have gone and talk to people I might not otherwise ever have spoken to. I had the privilege of getting to know some of the most amazing, fierce and courageous human beings I had ever met. It was the first time the story of Stonewall had been told to a national audience. I dedicated the program to my dad, it changed my relationship with him, and it changed my life. Over the next 15 years, I made many more radio documentaries, working to shine a light on people who are rarely heard from in the media. Over and over again, I'd see how this simple act of being interviewed could mean so much to people, particularly those who had been told that their stories didn't matter. I could literally see people's back straighten as they started to speak into the microphone. In 1998, I made a documentary about the last flophouse hotels on the Bowery in Manhattan. Guys stayed up in these cheap hotels for decades. They lived in cubicles the size of prison cells covered with chicken wire so you couldn't jump from one room into the next. Later, I wrote a book on the men with the photographer Harvey Wang. I remember walking into a flophouse with an early version of the book and showing one of the guys his page. He stood there staring at it in silence, then he grabbed the book out of my hand and started running down the long, narrow hallway holding it over his head shouting, "I exist! I exist." (Applause) In many ways, "I exist" became the clarion call for StoryCorps, this crazy idea that I had a dozen years ago. The thought was to take documentary work and turn it on its head. Traditionally, broadcast documentary has been about recording interviews to create a work of art or entertainment or education that is seen or heard by a whole lot of people, but I wanted to try something where the interview itself was the purpose of this work, and see if we could give many, many, many people the chance to be listened to in this way. So in Grand Central Terminal 11 years ago, we built a booth where anyone can come to honor someone else by interviewing them about their life. You come to this booth and you're met by a facilitator who brings you inside. You sit across from, say, your grandfather for close to an hour and you listen and you talk. Many people think of it as, if this was to be our last conversation, what would I want to ask of and say to this person who means so much to me? At the end of the session, you walk away with a copy of the interview and another copy goes to the American Folklife Center at the Library of Congress so that your great-great-great-grandkids can someday get to know your grandfather through his voice and story. So we open this booth in one of the busiest places in the world and invite people to have this incredibly intimate conversation with another human being. I had no idea if it would work, but from the very beginning, it did. People treated the experience with incredible respect, and amazing conversations happened inside. I want to play just one animated excerpt from an interview recorded at that original Grand Central Booth. This is 12-year-old Joshua Littman interviewing his mother, Sarah. Josh has Asperger's syndrome. As you may know, kids with Asperger's are incredibly smart but have a tough time socially. They usually have obsessions. In Josh's case, it's with animals, so this is Josh talking with his mom Sarah at Grand Central nine years ago. (Video) Josh Littman: From a scale of one to 10, do you think your life would be different without animals? Sarah Littman: I think it would be an eight without animals, because they add so much pleasure to life. JL: How else do you think your life would be different without them? SL: I could do without things like cockroaches and snakes. JL: Well, I'm okay with snakes as long as they're not venomous or constrict you or anything. SL: Yeah, I'm not a big snake person -- JL: But cockroach is just the insect we love to hate. SL: Yeah, it really is. JL: Have you ever thought you couldn't cope with having a child? SL: I remember when you were a baby, you had really bad colic, so you would just cry and cry. JL: What's colic? SL: It's when you get this stomach ache and all you do is scream for, like, four hours. JL: Even louder than Amy does? SL: You were pretty loud, but Amy's was more high-pitched. JL: I think it feels like everyone seems to like Amy more, like she's the perfect little angel. SL: Well, I can understand why you think that people like Amy more, and I'm not saying it's because of your Asperger's syndrome, but being friendly comes easily to Amy, whereas I think for you it's more difficult, but the people who take the time to get to know you love you so much. JL: Like Ben or Eric or Carlos? SL: Yeah -- JL: Like I have better quality friends but less quantity? (Laughter) SL: I wouldn't judge the quality, but I think -- JL: I mean, first it was like, Amy loved Claudia, then she hated Claudia, she loved Claudia, then she hated Claudia. SL: Part of that's a girl thing, honey. The important thing for you is that you have a few very good friends, and really that's what you need in life. JL: Did I turn out to be the son you wanted when I was born? Did I meet your expectations? SL: You've exceeded my expectations, sweetie, because, sure, you have these fantasies of what your child's going to be like, but you have made me grow so much as a parent, because you think -- JL: Well, I was the one who made you a parent. SL: You were the one who made me a parent. That's a good point. (Laughter) But also because you think differently from what they tell you in the parenting books, I really had to learn to think outside of the box with you, and it's made me much more creative as a parent and as a person, and I'll always thank you for that. JL: And that helped when Amy was born? SL: And that helped when Amy was born, but you are so incredibly special to me and I'm so lucky to have you as my son. (Applause) David Isay: After this story ran on public radio, Josh received hundreds of letters telling him what an amazing kid he was. His mom, Sarah, bound them together in a book, and when Josh got picked on at school, they would read the letters together. I just want to acknowledge that two of my heroes are here with us tonight. Sarah Littman and her son Josh, who is now an honors student in college. (Applause) You know, a lot of people talk about crying when they hear StoryCorps stories, and it's not because they're sad. Most of them aren't. I think it's because you're hearing something authentic and pure at this moment, when sometimes it's hard to tell what's real and what's an advertisement. It's kind of the anti-reality TV. Nobody comes to StoryCorps to get rich. Nobody comes to get famous. It's simply an act of generosity and love. So many of these are just everyday people talking about lives lived with kindness, courage, decency and dignity, and when you hear that kind of story, it can sometimes feel like you're walking on holy ground. So this experiment in Grand Central worked, and we expanded across the country. Today, more than 100,000 people in all 50 states in thousands of cities and towns across America have recorded StoryCorps interviews. It's now the largest single collection of human voices ever gathered. (Applause) We've hired and trained hundreds of facilitators to help guide people through the experience. Most serve a year or two with StoryCorps traveling the country, gathering the wisdom of humanity. They call it bearing witness, and if you ask them, all of the facilitators will tell you that the most important thing they've learned from being present during these interviews is that people are basically good. And I think for the first years of StoryCorps, you could argue that there was some kind of a selection bias happening, but after tens of thousands of interviews with every kind of person in every part of the country -- rich, poor, five years old to 105, 80 different languages, across the political spectrum -- you have to think that maybe these guys are actually onto something. I've also learned so much from these interviews. I've learned about the poetry and the wisdom and the grace that can be found in the words of people all around us when we simply take the time to listen, like this interview between a betting clerk in Brooklyn named Danny Perasa who brought his wife Annie to StoryCorps to talk about his love for her. (Audio) Danny Perasa: You 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. Annie Perasa: If I don't have a note on the kitchen table, I think there's something wrong. You write a love letter to me every morning. DP: Well, the only thing that could possibly be wrong is I couldn't find a silly pen. AP: To my princess: The weather outside today is extremely rainy. I'll call you at 11:20 in the morning. DP: It's a romantic weather report. AP: And I love you. I love you. I love you. DP: When a guy is happily married, no matter what happens at work, no matter what happens in the rest of the day, there's a shelter when you get home, there's a knowledge knowing that you can hug somebody without them throwing you downstairs and saying, "Get your hands off me." Being married is like having a color television set. You never want to go back to black and white. (Laughter) DI: Danny was about five feet tall with crossed eyes and one single snaggletooth, but Danny Perasa had more romance in his little pinky than all of Hollywood's leading men put together. What else have I learned? I've learned about the almost unimaginable capacity for the human spirit to forgive. I've learned about resilience and I've learned about strength. Like an interview with Oshea Israel and Mary Johnson. When Oshea was a teenager, he murdered Mary's only son, Laramiun Byrd, in a gang fight. A dozen years later, Mary went to prison to meet Oshea and find out who this person was who had taken her son's life. Slowly and remarkably, they became friends, and when he was finally released from the penitentiary, Oshea actually moved in next door to Mary. This is just a short excerpt of a conversation they had soon after Oshea was freed. (Video) Mary Johnson: My natural son is no longer here. I didn't see him graduate, and now you're going to college. I'll have the opportunity to see you graduate. I didn't see him get married. Hopefully one day, I'll be able to experience that with you. Oshea Israel: Just to hear you say those things and to be in my life in the manner in which you are is my motivation. It motivates me to make sure that I stay on the right path. You still believe in me, and the fact that you can do it despite how much pain I caused you, it's amazing. MJ: I know it's not an easy thing to be able to share our story together, even with us sitting here looking at each other right now. I know it's not an easy thing, so I admire that you can do this. OI: I love you, lady. MJ: I love you too, son. (Applause) DI: And I've been reminded countless times of the courage and goodness of people, and how the arc of history truly does bend towards justice. Like the story of Alexis Martinez, who was born Arthur Martinez in the Harold Ickes projects in Chicago. In the interview, she talks with her daughter Lesley about joining a gang as a young man, and later in life transitioning into the woman she was always meant to be. This is Alexis and her daughter Lesley. (Audio) Alexis Martinez: One of the most difficult things for me was I was always afraid that I wouldn't be allowed to be in my granddaughters' lives, and you blew that completely out of the water, you and your husband. One of the fruits of that is, in my relationship with my granddaughters, they fight with each other sometimes over whether I'm he or she. Lesley Martinez: But they're free to talk about it. AM: They're free to talk about it, but that, to me, is a miracle. LM: You don't have to apologize. You don't have to tiptoe. We're not going to cut you off, and that's something I've always wanted you to just know, that you're loved. AM: You know, I live this every day now. I walk down the streets as a woman, and I really am at peace with who I am. I mean, I wish I had a softer voice maybe, but now I walk in love and I try to live that way every day. DI: Now I walk in love. I'm going to tell you a secret about StoryCorps. It takes some courage to have these conversations. StoryCorps speaks to our mortality. Participants know this recording will be heard long after they're gone. There's a hospice doctor named Ira Byock who has worked closely with us on recording interviews with people who are dying. He wrote a book called "The Four Things That Matter Most" about the four things you want to say to the most important people in your life before they or you die: thank you, I love you, forgive me, I forgive you. They're just about the most powerful words we can say to one another, and often that's what happens in a StoryCorps booth. It's a chance to have a sense of closure with someone you care about -- no regrets, nothing left unsaid. And it's hard and it takes courage, but that's why we're alive, right? So, the TED Prize. When I first heard from TED and Chris a few months ago about the possibility of the Prize, I was completely floored. They asked me to come up with a very brief wish for humanity, no more than 50 words. So I thought about it, I wrote my 50 words, and a few weeks later, Chris called and said, "Go for it." So here is my wish: that you will help us take everything we've learned through StoryCorps and bring it to the world so that anyone anywhere can easily record a meaningful interview with another human being which will then be archived for history. How are we going to do that? With this. We're fast moving into a future where everyone in the world will have access to one of these, and it has powers I never could have imagined 11 years ago when I started StoryCorps. It has a microphone, it can tell you how to do things, and it can send audio files. Those are the key ingredients. So the first part of the wish is already underway. Over the past couple of months, the team at StoryCorps has been working furiously to create an app that will bring StoryCorps out of our booths so that it can be experienced by anyone, anywhere, anytime. Remember, StoryCorps has always been two people and a facilitator helping them record their conversation, which is preserved forever, but at this very moment, we're releasing a public beta version of the StoryCorps app. The app is a digital facilitator that walks you through the StoryCorps interview process, helps you pick questions, and gives you all the tips you need to record a meaningful StoryCorps interview, and then with one tap upload it to our archive at the Library of Congress. That's the easy part, the technology. The real challenge is up to you: to take this tool and figure out how we can use it all across America and around the world, so that instead of recording thousands of StoryCorps interviews a year, we could potentially record tens of thousands or hundreds of thousands or maybe even more. Imagine, for example, a national homework assignment where every high school student studying U.S. history across the country records an interview with an elder over Thanksgiving, so that in one single weekend an entire generation of American lives and experiences are captured. (Applause) Or imagine mothers on opposite sides of a conflict somewhere in the world sitting down not to talk about that conflict but to find out who they are as people, and in doing so, begin to build bonds of trust; or that someday it becomes a tradition all over the world that people are honored with a StoryCorps interview on their 75th birthday; or that people in your community go into retirement homes or hospitals or homeless shelters or even prisons armed with this app to honor the people least heard in our society and ask them who they are, what they've learned in life, and how they want to be remembered. (Applause) Ten years ago, I recorded a StoryCorps interview with my dad who was a psychiatrist, and became a well-known gay activist. This is the picture of us at that interview. I never thought about that recording until a couple of years ago, when my dad, who seemed to be in perfect health and was still seeing patients 40 hours a week, was diagnosed with cancer. He passed away very suddenly a few days later. It was June 28, 2012, the anniversary of the Stonewall riots. I listened to that interview for the first time at three in the morning on the day that he died. I have a couple of young kids at home, and I knew that the only way they were going to get to know this person who was such a towering figure in my life would be through that session. I thought I couldn't believe in StoryCorps any more deeply than I did, but it was at that moment that I fully and viscerally grasped the importance of making these recordings. Every day, people come up to me and say, "I wish I had interviewed my father or my grandmother or my brother, but I waited too long." Now, no one has to wait anymore. At this moment, when so much of how we communicate is fleeting and inconsequential, join us in creating this digital archive of conversations that are enduring and important. Help us create this gift to our children, this testament to who we are as human beings. I hope you'll help us make this wish come true. Interview a family member, a friend or even a stranger. Together, we can create an archive of the wisdom of humanity, and maybe in doing so, we'll learn to listen a little more and shout a little less. Maybe these conversations will remind us what's really important. And maybe, just maybe, it will help us recognize that simple truth that every life, every single life, matters equally and infinitely. Thank you very much. (Applause) Thank you. Thank you. (Applause) 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)

Well, as Alexander Graham Bell famously said on his first successful telephone call, "Hello, is that Domino's Pizza?" (Laughter) I just really want to thank you very much. As another famous man, Jerry Garcia, said, "What a strange, long trip." And he should have said, "What a strange, long trip it's about to become." At this very moment, you are viewing my upper half. My lower half is appearing at a different conference (Laughter) in a different country. You can, it turns out, be in two places at once. But still, I'm sorry I can't be with you in person. I'll explain at another time. And though I'm a rock star, I just want to assure you that none of my wishes will include a hot tub. But what really turns me on about technology is not just the ability to get more songs on MP3 players. The revolution -- this revolution -- is much bigger than that. I hope, I believe. What turns me on about the digital age, what excites me personally, is that you have closed the gap between dreaming and doing. You see, it used to be that if you wanted to make a record of a song, you needed a studio and a producer. Now, you need a laptop. If you wanted to make a film, you needed a mass of equipment and a Hollywood budget. Now, you need a camera that fits in your palm, and a couple of bucks for a blank DVD. Imagination has been decoupled from the old constraints. And that really, really excites me. I'm excited when I glimpse that kind of thinking writ large. What I would like to see is idealism decoupled from all constraints. Political, economic, psychological, whatever. The geopolitical world has got a lot to learn from the digital world. From the ease with which you swept away obstacles that no one knew could even be budged. And that's actually what I'd like to talk about today. First, though, I should probably explain why, and how, I got to this place. It's a journey that started 20 years ago. You may remember that song, "We Are the World," or, "Do They Know It's Christmas?" Band Aid, Live Aid. Another very tall, grizzled rock star, my friend Sir Bob Geldof, issued a challenge to "feed the world." It was a great moment, and it utterly changed my life. That summer, my wife, Ali, and myself went to Ethiopia. We went on the quiet to see for ourselves what was going on. We lived in Ethiopia for a month, working at an orphanage. The children had a name for me. They called me, "The girl with the beard." (Laughter) Don't ask. Anyway, we found Africa to be a magical place. Big skies, big hearts, big, shining continent. Beautiful, royal people. Anybody who ever gave anything to Africa got a lot more back. Ethiopia didn't just blow my mind; it opened my mind. Anyway, on our last day at this orphanage a man handed me his baby and said, "Would you take my son with you?" He knew, in Ireland, that his son would live, and that in Ethiopia, his son would die. It was the middle of that awful famine. Well, I turned him down. And it was a funny kind of sick feeling, but I turned him down. And it's a feeling I can't ever quite forget. And in that moment, I started this journey. In that moment, I became the worst thing of all: I became a rock star with a cause. (Laughter) Except this isn't the cause, is it? Six-and-a-half thousand Africans dying every single day from AIDS -- a preventable, treatable disease -- for lack of drugs we can get in any pharmacy. That's not a cause. That's an emergency. 11 million AIDS orphans in Africa, 20 million by the end of the decade. That's not a cause. That's an emergency. Today, every day, 9,000 more Africans will catch HIV because of stigmatization and lack of education. That's not a cause. That's an emergency. So what we're talking about here is human rights. The right to live like a human. The right to live, period. And what we're facing in Africa is an unprecedented threat to human dignity and equality. The next thing I'd like to be clear about is what this problem is, and what this problem isn't. Because this is not all about charity. This is about justice. Really. This is not about charity. This is about justice. That's right. And that's too bad, because we're very good at charity. Americans, like Irish people, are good at it. Even the poorest neighborhoods give more than they can afford. We like to give, and we give a lot. Look at the response to the tsunami -- it's inspiring. But justice is a tougher standard than charity. You see, Africa makes a fool of our idea of justice. It makes a farce of our idea of equality. It mocks our pieties. It doubts our concern. It questions our commitment. Because there is no way we can look at what's happening in Africa, and if we're honest, conclude that it would ever be allowed to happen anywhere else. As you heard in the film, anywhere else, not here. Not here, not in America, not in Europe. In fact, a head of state that you're all familiar with admitted this to me. And it's really true. There is no chance this kind of hemorrhaging of human life would be accepted anywhere else other than Africa. Africa is a continent in flames. And deep down, if we really accepted that Africans were equal to us, we would all do more to put the fire out. We're standing around with watering cans, when what we really need is the fire brigade. You see, it's not as dramatic as the tsunami. It's crazy, really, when you think about it. Does stuff have to look like an action movie these days to exist in the front of our brain? The slow extinguishing of countless lives is just not dramatic enough, it would appear. Catastrophes that we can avert are not as interesting as ones we could avert. Funny, that. Anyway, I believe that that kind of thinking offends the intellectual rigor in this room. Six-and-a-half thousand people dying a day in Africa may be Africa's crisis, but the fact that it's not on the nightly news, that we in Europe, or you in America, are not treating it like an emergency -- I want to argue with you tonight that that's our crisis. I want to argue that though Africa is not the front line in the war against terror, it could be soon. Every week, religious extremists take another African village. They're attempting to bring order to chaos. Well, why aren't we? Poverty breeds despair. We know this. Despair breeds violence. We know this. In turbulent times, isn't it cheaper, and smarter, to make friends out of potential enemies than to defend yourself against them later? "The war against terror is bound up in the war against poverty." And I didn't say that. Colin Powell said that. Now when the military are telling us that this is a war that cannot be won by military might alone, maybe we should listen. There's an opportunity here, and it's real. It's not spin. It's not wishful thinking. The problems facing the developing world afford us in the developed world a chance to re-describe ourselves to the world. We will not only transform other people's lives, but we will also transform the way those other lives see us. And that might be smart in these nervous, dangerous times. Don't you think that on a purely commercial level, that anti-retroviral drugs are great advertisements for Western ingenuity and technology? Doesn't compassion look well on us? And let's cut the crap for a second. In certain quarters of the world, brand EU, brand USA, is not at its shiniest. The neon sign is fizzing and cracking. Someone's put a brick through the window. The regional branch managers are getting nervous. Never before have we in the west been so scrutinized. Our values: do we have any? Our credibility? These things are under attack around the world. Brand USA could use some polishing. And I say that as a fan, you know? As a person who buys the products. But think about it. More anti-retrovirals make sense. But that's just the easy part, or ought to be. But equality for Africa -- that's a big, expensive idea. You see, the scale of the suffering numbs us into a kind of indifference. What on earth can we all do about this? Well, much more than we think. We can't fix every problem, but the ones we can, I want to argue, we must. And because we can, we must. This is the straight truth, the righteous truth. It is not a theory. The fact is that ours is the first generation that can look disease and extreme poverty in the eye, look across the ocean to Africa, and say this, and mean it: we do not have to stand for this. A whole continent written off -- we do not have to stand for this. (Applause) And let me say this without a trace of irony -- before I back it up to a bunch of ex-hippies. Forget the '60s. We can change the world. I can't; you can't, as individuals; but we can change the world. I really believe that, the people in this room. Look at the Gates Foundation. They've done incredible stuff, unbelievable stuff. But working together, we can actually change the world. We can turn the inevitable outcomes, and transform the quality of life for millions of lives who look and feel rather like us, when you're up close. I'm sorry to laugh here, but you do look so different than you did in Haight-Ashbury in the '60s. (Laughter) But I want to argue that this is the moment that you are designed for. It is the flowering of the seeds you planted in earlier, headier days. Ideas that you gestated in your youth. This is what excites me. This room was born for this moment, is really what I want to say to you tonight. Most of you started out wanting to change the world, didn't you? Most of you did, the digital world. Well, now, actually because of you, it is possible to change the physical world. It's a fact. Economists confirm it, and they know much more than I do. So why, then, are we not pumping our fists into the air? Probably because when we admit we can do something about it, we've got to do something about it. It is a pain in the arse. This equality business is actually a pain in the arse. But for the first time in history, we have the technology; we have the know-how; we have the cash; we have the life-saving drugs. Do we have the will? I hope this is obvious, but I'm not a hippie. And I'm not really one for the warm, fuzzy feeling. I do not have flowers in my hair. Actually, I come from punk rock. The Clash wore big army boots, not sandals. But I know toughness when I see it. And for all the talk of peace and love on the West Coast, there was muscle to the movement that started out here. You see, idealism detached from action is just a dream. But idealism allied with pragmatism, with rolling up your sleeves and making the world bend a bit, is very exciting. It's very real. It's very strong. And it's very present in a crowd like you. Last year at DATA, this organization I helped set up, we launched a campaign to summon this spirit in the fight against AIDS and extreme poverty. We're calling it the ONE Campaign. It's based on our belief that the action of one person can change a lot, but the actions of many coming together as one can change the world. Well, we feel that now is the time to prove we're right. There are moments in history when civilization redefines itself. We believe this is one. We believe that this could be the time when the world finally decides that the wanton loss of life in Africa is just no longer acceptable. This could be the time that we finally get serious about changing the future for most people who live on planet Earth. Momentum has been building. Lurching a little, but it's building. This year is a test for us all, especially the leaders of the G8 nations, who really are on the line here, with all the world in history watching. I have been, of late, disappointed with the Bush Administration. They started out with such promise on Africa. They made some really great promises, and actually have fulfilled a lot of them. But some of them they haven't. They don't feel the push from the ground, is the truth. But my disappointment has much more perspective when I talk to American people, and I hear their worries about the deficit, and the fiscal well being of their country. I understand that. But there's much more push from the ground than you'd think, if we got organized. What I try to communicate, and you can help me if you agree, is that aid for Africa is just great value for money at a time when America really needs it. Putting it in the crassest possible terms, the investment reaps huge returns. Not only in lives saved, but in goodwill, stability and security that we'll gain. So this is what I hope that you will do, if I could be so bold, and not have it deducted from my number of wishes. (Laughter) What I hope is that beyond individual merciful acts, that you will tell the politicians to do right by Africa, by America and by the world. Give them permission, if you like, to spend their political capital and your financial capital, your national purse on saving the lives of millions of people. That's really what I would like you to do. Because we also need your intellectual capital: your ideas, your skills, your ingenuity. And you, at this conference, are in a unique position. Some of the technologies we've been talking about, you invented them, or at least revolutionized the way that they're used. Together you have changed the zeitgeist from analog to digital, and pushed the boundaries. And we'd like you to give us that energy. Give us that kind of dreaming, that kind of doing. As I say, there're two things on the line here. There's the continent Africa. But there's also our sense of ourselves. People are starting to figure this out. Movements are springing up. Artists, politicians, pop stars, priests, CEOs, NGOs, mothers' unions, student unions. A lot of people are getting together, and working under this umbrella I told you about earlier, the ONE Campaign. I think they just have one idea in their mind, which is, where you live in the world should not determine whether you live in the world. (Applause) History, like God, is watching what we do. When the history books get written, I think our age will be remembered for three things. Really, it's just three things this whole age will be remembered for. The digital revolution, yes. The war against terror, yes. And what we did or did not do to put out the fires in Africa. Some say we can't afford to. I say we can't afford not to. Thank you, thank you very much. (Applause) Okay, my three wishes. The ones that TED has offered to grant. You see, if this is true, and I believe it is, that the digital world you all created has uncoupled the creative imagination from the physical constraints of matter, this should be a piece of piss. (Laughter) I should add that this started out as a much longer list of wishes. Most of them impossible, some of them impractical and one or two of them certainly immoral. (Laughter) This business, it gets to be addictive, you know what I mean, when somebody else is picking up the tab. Anyway, here's number one. I wish for you to help build a social movement of more than one million American activists for Africa. That is my first wish. I believe it's possible. A few minutes ago, I talked about all the citizens' campaigns that are springing up. You know, there's lots out there. And with this one campaign as our umbrella, my organization, DATA, and other groups, have been tapping into the energy and the enthusiasm that's out there from Hollywood into the heartland of America. We know there's more than enough energy to power this movement. We just need your help in making it happen. We want all of you here, church America, corporate America, Microsoft America, Apple America, Coke America, Pepsi America, nerd America, noisy America. We can't afford to be cool and sit this one out. I do believe if we build a movement that's one million Americans strong, we're not going to be denied. We will have the ear of Congress. We'll be the first page in Condi Rice's briefing book, and right into the Oval Office. If there's one million Americans -- and I really know this -- who are ready to make phone calls, who are ready to be on email, I am absolutely sure that we can actually change the course of history, literally, for the continent of Africa. Anyway, so I'd like your help in getting that signed up. I know John Gage and Sun Microsystems are already on board for this, but there's lots of you we'd like to talk to. Right, my second wish, number two. I would like one media hit for every person on the planet who is living on less than one dollar a day. That's one billion media hits. Could be on Google, could be on AOL. Steve Case, Larry, Sergey -- they've done a lot already. It could be NBC. It could be ABC. Actually we're talking to ABC today about the Oscars. We have a film, produced by Jon Kamen at Radical Media. But you know, we want, we need some airtime for our ideas. We need to get the math; we need to get the statistics out to the American people. I really believe that old Truman line, that if you give the American people the facts, they'll do the right thing. And, the other thing that's important is that this is not Sally Struthers. This has to be described as an adventure, not a burden. (Video): One by one they step forward, a nurse, a teacher, a homemaker, and lives are saved. The problem is enormous. Every three seconds one person dies. Another three seconds, one more. The situation is so desperate in parts of Africa, Asia, even America, that aid groups, just as they did for the tsunami, are uniting as one, acting as one. We can beat extreme poverty, starvation, AIDS. But we need your help. One more person, letter, voice will mean the difference between life and death for millions of people. Please join us by working together. Americans have an unprecedented opportunity. We can make history. We can start to make poverty history. One, by one, by one. Please visit ONE at this address. We're not asking for your money. We're asking for your voice. Bono: All right. I wish for TED to truly show the power of information, its power to rewrite the rules and transform lives, by connecting every hospital, health clinic and school in one African country. And I would like it to be Ethiopia. I believe we can connect every school in Ethiopia, every health clinic, every hospital -- we can connect to the Internet. That is my wish, my third wish. I think it's possible. I think we have the money and brains in the room to do that. And that would be a mind-blowing wish to come true. I've been to Ethiopia, as I said earlier. It's actually where it all started for me. The idea that the Internet, which changed all of our lives, can transform a country -- and a continent that has hardly made it to analog, let alone digital -- blows my mind. But it didn't start out that way. The first long-distance line from Boston to New York was used in 1885 on the phone. It was just nine years later that Addis Ababa was connected by phone to Harare, which is 500 kilometers away. Since then, not that much has changed. The average waiting time to get a landline in Ethiopia is actually about seven or eight years. But wireless technology wasn't dreamt up then. Anyway, I'm Irish, and as you can see, I know how important talking is. Communication is very important for Ethiopia -- will transform the country. Nurses getting better training, pharmacists being able to order supplies, doctors sharing their expertise in all aspects of medicine. It's a very, very good idea to get them wired. And that is my third and final wish for you at the TED conference. Thank you very much once again. (Applause)

Chris Anderson: Elon, what kind of crazy dream would persuade you to think of trying to take on the auto industry and build an all-electric car? Elon Musk: Well, it goes back to when I was in university. I thought about, what are the problems that are most likely to affect the future of the world or the future of humanity? I think it's extremely important that we have sustainable transport and sustainable energy production. That sort of overall sustainable energy problem is the biggest problem that we have to solve this century, independent of environmental concerns. In fact, even if producing CO2 was good for the environment, given that we're going to run out of hydrocarbons, we need to find some sustainable means of operating. CA: Most of American electricity comes from burning fossil fuels. How can an electric car that plugs into that electricity help? EM: Right. There's two elements to that answer. One is that, even if you take the same source fuel and produce power at the power plant and use it to charge electric cars, you're still better off. So if you take, say, natural gas, which is the most prevalent hydrocarbon source fuel, if you burn that in a modern General Electric natural gas turbine, you'll get about 60 percent efficiency. If you put that same fuel in an internal combustion engine car, you get about 20 percent efficiency. And the reason is, in the stationary power plant, you can afford to have something that weighs a lot more, is voluminous, and you can take the waste heat and run a steam turbine and generate a secondary power source. So in effect, even after you've taken transmission loss into account and everything, even using the same source fuel, you're at least twice as better off charging an electric car, then burning it at the power plant. CA: That scale delivers efficiency. EM: Yes, it does. And then the other point is, we have to have sustainable means of power generation anyway, electricity generation. So given that we have to solve sustainable electricity generation, then it makes sense for us to have electric cars as the mode of transport. CA: So we've got some video here of the Tesla being assembled, which, if we could play that first video -- So what is innovative about this process in this vehicle? EM: Sure. So, in order to accelerate the advent of electric transport, and I should say that I think, actually, all modes of transport will become fully electric with the ironic exception of rockets. There's just no way around Newton's third law. The question is how do you accelerate the advent of electric transport? And in order to do that for cars, you have to come up with a really energy efficient car, so that means making it incredibly light, and so what you're seeing here is the only all-aluminum body and chassis car made in North America. In fact, we applied a lot of rocket design techniques to make the car light despite having a very large battery pack. And then it also has the lowest drag coefficient of any car of its size. So as a result, the energy usage is very low, and it has the most advanced battery pack, and that's what gives it the range that's competitive, so you can actually have on the order of a 250-mile range. CA: I mean, those battery packs are incredibly heavy, but you think the math can still work out intelligently -- by combining light body, heavy battery, you can still gain spectacular efficiency. EM: Exactly. The rest of the car has to be very light to offset the mass of the pack, and then you have to have a low drag coefficient so that you have good highway range. And in fact, customers of the Model S are sort of competing with each other to try to get the highest possible range. I think somebody recently got 420 miles out of a single charge. CA: Bruno Bowden, who's here, did that, broke the world record.EM: Congratulations. CA: That was the good news. The bad news was that to do it, he had to drive at 18 miles an hour constant speed and got pulled over by the cops. (Laughter) EM: I mean, you can certainly drive -- if you drive it 65 miles an hour, under normal conditions, 250 miles is a reasonable number. CA: Let's show that second video showing the Tesla in action on ice. Not at all a dig at The New York Times, this, by the way. What is the most surprising thing about the experience of driving the car? EM: In creating an electric car, the responsiveness of the car is really incredible. So we wanted really to have people feel as though they've almost got to mind meld with the car, so you just feel like you and the car are kind of one, and as you corner and accelerate, it just happens, like the car has ESP. You can do that with an electric car because of its responsiveness. You can't do that with a gasoline car. I think that's really a profound difference, and people only experience that when they have a test drive. CA: I mean, this is a beautiful but expensive car. Is there a road map where this becomes a mass-market vehicle? EM: Yeah. The goal of Tesla has always been to have a sort of three-step process, where version one was an expensive car at low volume, version two is medium priced and medium volume, and then version three would be low price, high volume. So we're at step two at this point. So we had a $100,000 sports car, which was the Roadster. Then we've got the Model S, which starts at around 50,000 dollars. And our third generation car, which should hopefully be out in about three or four years will be a $30,000 car. But whenever you've got really new technology, it generally takes about three major versions in order to make it a compelling mass-market product. And so I think we're making progress in that direction, and I feel confident that we'll get there. CA: I mean, right now, if you've got a short commute, you can drive, you can get back, you can charge it at home. There isn't a huge nationwide network of charging stations now that are fast. Do you see that coming, really, truly, or just on a few key routes? EM: There actually are far more charging stations than people realize, and at Tesla we developed something called a Supercharging technology, and we're offering that if you buy a Model S for free, forever. And so this is something that maybe a lot of people don't realize. We actually have California and Nevada covered, and we've got the Eastern seaboard from Boston to D.C. covered. By the end of this year, you'll be able to drive from L.A. to New York just using the Supercharger network, which charges at five times the rate of anything else. And the key thing is to have a ratio of drive to stop, to stop time, of about six or seven. So if you drive for three hours, you want to stop for 20 or 30 minutes, because that's normally what people will stop for. So if you start a trip at 9 a.m., by noon you want to stop to have a bite to eat, hit the restroom, coffee, and keep going. CA: So your proposition to consumers is, for the full charge, it could take an hour. So it's common -- don't expect to be out of here in 10 minutes. Wait for an hour, but the good news is, you're helping save the planet, and by the way, the electricity is free. You don't pay anything. EM: Actually, what we're expecting is for people to stop for about 20 to 30 minutes, not for an hour. It's actually better to drive for about maybe 160, 170 miles and then stop for half an hour and then keep going. That's the natural cadence of a trip. CA: All right. So this is only one string to your energy bow. You've been working on this solar company SolarCity. What's unusual about that? EM: Well, as I mentioned earlier, we have to have sustainable electricity production as well as consumption, so I'm quite confident that the primary means of power generation will be solar. I mean, it's really indirect fusion, is what it is. We've got this giant fusion generator in the sky called the sun, and we just need to tap a little bit of that energy for purposes of human civilization. What most people know but don't realize they know is that the world is almost entirely solar-powered already. If the sun wasn't there, we'd be a frozen ice ball at three degrees Kelvin, and the sun powers the entire system of precipitation. The whole ecosystem is solar-powered. CA: But in a gallon of gasoline, you have, effectively, thousands of years of sun power compressed into a small space, so it's hard to make the numbers work right now on solar, and to remotely compete with, for example, natural gas, fracked natural gas. How are you going to build a business here? EM: Well actually, I'm confident that solar will beat everything, hands down, including natural gas. (Applause)CA: How? EM: It must, actually. If it doesn't, we're in deep trouble. CA: But you're not selling solar panels to consumers. What are you doing? EM: No, we actually are. You can buy a solar system or you can lease a solar system. Most people choose to lease. And the thing about solar power is that it doesn't have any feed stock or operational costs, so once it's installed, it's just there. It works for decades. It'll work for probably a century. So therefore, the key thing to do is to get the cost of that initial installation low, and then get the cost of the financing low, because that interest -- those are the two factors that drive the cost of solar. And we've made huge progress in that direction, and that's why I'm confident we'll actually beat natural gas. CA: So your current proposition to consumers is, don't pay so much up front. EM: Zero.CA: Pay zero up front. We will install panels on your roof. You will then pay, how long is a typical lease? EM: Typical leases are 20 years, but the value proposition is, as you're sort of alluding to, quite straightforward. It's no money down, and your utility bill decreases. Pretty good deal. CA: So that seems like a win for the consumer. No risk, you'll pay less than you're paying now. For you, the dream here then is that -- I mean, who owns the electricity from those panels for the longer term? I mean, how do you, the company, benefit? EM: Well, essentially, SolarCity raises a chunk of capital from say, a company or a bank. Google is one of our big partners here. And they have an expected return on that capital. With that capital, SolarCity purchases and installs the panel on the roof and then charges the homeowner or business owner a monthly lease payment, which is less than the utility bill. CA: But you yourself get a long-term commercial benefit from that power. You're kind of building a new type of distributed utility. EM: Exactly. What it amounts to is a giant distributed utility. I think it's a good thing, because utilities have been this monopoly, and people haven't had any choice. So effectively it's the first time there's been competition for this monopoly, because the utilities have been the only ones that owned those power distribution lines, but now it's on your roof. So I think it's actually very empowering for homeowners and businesses. CA: And you really picture a future where a majority of power in America, within a decade or two, or within your lifetime, it goes solar? EM: I'm extremely confident that solar will be at least a plurality of power, and most likely a majority, and I predict it will be a plurality in less than 20 years. I made that bet with someone —CA: Definition of plurality is? EM: More from solar than any other source. CA: Ah. Who did you make the bet with? EM: With a friend who will remain nameless. CA: Just between us. (Laughter) EM: I made that bet, I think, two or three years ago, so in roughly 18 years, I think we'll see more power from solar than any other source. CA: All right, so let's go back to another bet that you made with yourself, I guess, a kind of crazy bet. You'd made some money from the sale of PayPal. You decided to build a space company. Why on Earth would someone do that? (Laughter) EM: I got that question a lot, that's true. People would say, "Did you hear the joke about the guy who made a small fortune in the space industry?" Obviously, "He started with a large one," is the punchline. And so I tell people, well, I was trying to figure out the fastest way to turn a large fortune into a small one. And they'd look at me, like, "Is he serious?" CA: And strangely, you were. So what happened? EM: It was a close call. Things almost didn't work out. We came very close to failure, but we managed to get through that point in 2008. The goal of SpaceX is to try to advance rocket technology, and in particular to try to crack a problem that I think is vital for humanity to become a space-faring civilization, which is to have a rapidly and fully reusable rocket. CA: Would humanity become a space-faring civilization? So that was a dream of yours, in a way, from a young age? You've dreamed of Mars and beyond? EM: I did build rockets when I was a kid, but I didn't think I'd be involved in this. It was really more from the standpoint of what are the things that need to happen in order for the future to be an exciting and inspiring one? And I really think there's a fundamental difference, if you sort of look into the future, between a humanity that is a space-faring civilization, that's out there exploring the stars, on multiple planets, and I think that's really exciting, compared with one where we are forever confined to Earth until some eventual extinction event. CA: So you've somehow slashed the cost of building a rocket by 75 percent, depending on how you calculate it. How on Earth have you done that? NASA has been doing this for years. How have you done this? EM: Well, we've made significant advances in the technology of the airframe, the engines, the electronics and the launch operation. There's a long list of innovations that we've come up with there that are a little difficult to communicate in this talk, but -- CA: Not least because you could still get copied, right? You haven't patented this stuff. It's really interesting to me. EM: No, we don't patent.CA: You didn't patent because you think it's more dangerous to patent than not to patent. EM: Since our primary competitors are national governments, the enforceability of patents is questionable.(Laughter) (Applause) CA: That's really, really interesting. But the big innovation is still ahead, and you're working on it now. Tell us about this. EM: Right, so the big innovation— CA: In fact, let's roll that video and you can talk us through it, what's happening here. EM: Absolutely. So the thing about rockets is that they're all expendable. All rockets that fly today are fully expendable. The space shuttle was an attempt at a reusable rocket, but even the main tank of the space shuttle was thrown away every time, and the parts that were reusable took a 10,000-person group nine months to refurbish for flight. So the space shuttle ended up costing a billion dollars per flight. Obviously that doesn't work very well for — CA: What just happened there? We just saw something land? EM: That's right. So it's important that the rocket stages be able to come back, to be able to return to the launch site and be ready to launch again within a matter of hours. CA: Wow. Reusable rockets.EM: Yes. (Applause) And so what a lot of people don't realize is, the cost of the fuel, of the propellant, is very small. It's much like on a jet. So the cost of the propellant is about .3 percent of the cost of the rocket. So it's possible to achieve, let's say, roughly 100-fold improvement in the cost of spaceflight if you can effectively reuse the rocket. That's why it's so important. Every mode of transport that we use, whether it's planes, trains, automobiles, bikes, horses, is reusable, but not rockets. So we must solve this problem in order to become a space-faring civilization. CA: You asked me the question earlier of how popular traveling on cruises would be if you had to burn your ships afterward.EM: Certain cruises are apparently highly problematic. CA: Definitely more expensive. So that's potentially absolutely disruptive technology, and, I guess, paves the way for your dream to actually take, at some point, to take humanity to Mars at scale. You'd like to see a colony on Mars. EM: Yeah, exactly. SpaceX, or some combination of companies and governments, needs to make progress in the direction of making life multi-planetary, of establishing a base on another planet, on Mars -- being the only realistic option -- and then building that base up until we're a true multi-planet species. CA: So progress on this "let's make it reusable," how is that going? That was just a simulation video we saw. How's it going? EM: We're actually, we've been making some good progress recently with something we call the Grasshopper Test Project, where we're testing the vertical landing portion of the flight, the sort of terminal portion which is quite tricky. And we've had some good tests. CA: Can we see that?EM: Yeah. So that's just to give a sense of scale. We dressed a cowboy as Johnny Cash and bolted the mannequin to the rocket. (Laughter) CA: All right, let's see that video then, because this is actually amazing when you think about it. You've never seen this before. A rocket blasting off and then -- EM: Yeah, so that rocket is about the size of a 12-story building. (Rocket launch) So now it's hovering at about 40 meters, and it's constantly adjusting the angle, the pitch and yaw of the main engine, and maintaining roll with coal gas thrusters. CA: How cool is that? (Applause) Elon, how have you done this? These projects are so -- Paypal, SolarCity, Tesla, SpaceX, they're so spectacularly different, they're such ambitious projects at scale. How on Earth has one person been able to innovate in this way? What is it about you? EM: I don't know, actually. I don't have a good answer for you. I work a lot. I mean, a lot. CA: Well, I have a theory.EM: Okay. All right. CA: My theory is that you have an ability to think at a system level of design that pulls together design, technology and business, so if TED was TBD, design, technology and business, into one package, synthesize it in a way that very few people can and -- and this is the critical thing -- feel so damn confident in that clicked-together package that you take crazy risks. You bet your fortune on it, and you seem to have done that multiple times. I mean, almost no one can do that. Is that -- could we have some of that secret sauce? Can we put it into our education system? Can someone learn from you? It is truly amazing what you've done. EM: Well, thanks. Thank you. Well, I do think there's a good framework for thinking. It is physics. You know, the sort of first principles reasoning. Generally I think there are -- what I mean by that is, boil things down to their fundamental truths and reason up from there, as opposed to reasoning by analogy. Through most of our life, we get through life by reasoning by analogy, which essentially means copying what other people do with slight variations. And you have to do that. Otherwise, mentally, you wouldn't be able to get through the day. But when you want to do something new, you have to apply the physics approach. Physics is really figuring out how to discover new things that are counterintuitive, like quantum mechanics. It's really counterintuitive. So I think that's an important thing to do, and then also to really pay attention to negative feedback, and solicit it, particularly from friends. This may sound like simple advice, but hardly anyone does that, and it's incredibly helpful. CA: Boys and girls watching, study physics. Learn from this man. Elon Musk, I wish we had all day, but thank you so much for coming to TED. EM: Thank you. CA: That was awesome. That was really, really cool. Look at that. (Applause) Just take a bow. That was fantastic. Thank you so much.

Chris Anderson: Elon, what kind of crazy dream would persuade you to think of trying to take on the auto industry and build an all-electric car? Elon Musk: Well, it goes back to when I was in university. I thought about, what are the problems that are most likely to affect the future of the world or the future of humanity? I think it's extremely important that we have sustainable transport and sustainable energy production. That sort of overall sustainable energy problem is the biggest problem that we have to solve this century, independent of environmental concerns. In fact, even if producing CO2 was good for the environment, given that we're going to run out of hydrocarbons, we need to find some sustainable means of operating. CA: Most of American electricity comes from burning fossil fuels. How can an electric car that plugs into that electricity help? EM: Right. There's two elements to that answer. One is that, even if you take the same source fuel and produce power at the power plant and use it to charge electric cars, you're still better off. So if you take, say, natural gas, which is the most prevalent hydrocarbon source fuel, if you burn that in a modern General Electric natural gas turbine, you'll get about 60 percent efficiency. If you put that same fuel in an internal combustion engine car, you get about 20 percent efficiency. And the reason is, in the stationary power plant, you can afford to have something that weighs a lot more, is voluminous, and you can take the waste heat and run a steam turbine and generate a secondary power source. So in effect, even after you've taken transmission loss into account and everything, even using the same source fuel, you're at least twice as better off charging an electric car, then burning it at the power plant. CA: That scale delivers efficiency. EM: Yes, it does. And then the other point is, we have to have sustainable means of power generation anyway, electricity generation. So given that we have to solve sustainable electricity generation, then it makes sense for us to have electric cars as the mode of transport. CA: So we've got some video here of the Tesla being assembled, which, if we could play that first video -- So what is innovative about this process in this vehicle? EM: Sure. So, in order to accelerate the advent of electric transport, and I should say that I think, actually, all modes of transport will become fully electric with the ironic exception of rockets. There's just no way around Newton's third law. The question is how do you accelerate the advent of electric transport? And in order to do that for cars, you have to come up with a really energy efficient car, so that means making it incredibly light, and so what you're seeing here is the only all-aluminum body and chassis car made in North America. In fact, we applied a lot of rocket design techniques to make the car light despite having a very large battery pack. And then it also has the lowest drag coefficient of any car of its size. So as a result, the energy usage is very low, and it has the most advanced battery pack, and that's what gives it the range that's competitive, so you can actually have on the order of a 250-mile range. CA: I mean, those battery packs are incredibly heavy, but you think the math can still work out intelligently -- by combining light body, heavy battery, you can still gain spectacular efficiency. EM: Exactly. The rest of the car has to be very light to offset the mass of the pack, and then you have to have a low drag coefficient so that you have good highway range. And in fact, customers of the Model S are sort of competing with each other to try to get the highest possible range. I think somebody recently got 420 miles out of a single charge. CA: Bruno Bowden, who's here, did that, broke the world record.EM: Congratulations. CA: That was the good news. The bad news was that to do it, he had to drive at 18 miles an hour constant speed and got pulled over by the cops. (Laughter) EM: I mean, you can certainly drive -- if you drive it 65 miles an hour, under normal conditions, 250 miles is a reasonable number. CA: Let's show that second video showing the Tesla in action on ice. Not at all a dig at The New York Times, this, by the way. What is the most surprising thing about the experience of driving the car? EM: In creating an electric car, the responsiveness of the car is really incredible. So we wanted really to have people feel as though they've almost got to mind meld with the car, so you just feel like you and the car are kind of one, and as you corner and accelerate, it just happens, like the car has ESP. You can do that with an electric car because of its responsiveness. You can't do that with a gasoline car. I think that's really a profound difference, and people only experience that when they have a test drive. CA: I mean, this is a beautiful but expensive car. Is there a road map where this becomes a mass-market vehicle? EM: Yeah. The goal of Tesla has always been to have a sort of three-step process, where version one was an expensive car at low volume, version two is medium priced and medium volume, and then version three would be low price, high volume. So we're at step two at this point. So we had a $100,000 sports car, which was the Roadster. Then we've got the Model S, which starts at around 50,000 dollars. And our third generation car, which should hopefully be out in about three or four years will be a $30,000 car. But whenever you've got really new technology, it generally takes about three major versions in order to make it a compelling mass-market product. And so I think we're making progress in that direction, and I feel confident that we'll get there. CA: I mean, right now, if you've got a short commute, you can drive, you can get back, you can charge it at home. There isn't a huge nationwide network of charging stations now that are fast. Do you see that coming, really, truly, or just on a few key routes? EM: There actually are far more charging stations than people realize, and at Tesla we developed something called a Supercharging technology, and we're offering that if you buy a Model S for free, forever. And so this is something that maybe a lot of people don't realize. We actually have California and Nevada covered, and we've got the Eastern seaboard from Boston to D.C. covered. By the end of this year, you'll be able to drive from L.A. to New York just using the Supercharger network, which charges at five times the rate of anything else. And the key thing is to have a ratio of drive to stop, to stop time, of about six or seven. So if you drive for three hours, you want to stop for 20 or 30 minutes, because that's normally what people will stop for. So if you start a trip at 9 a.m., by noon you want to stop to have a bite to eat, hit the restroom, coffee, and keep going. CA: So your proposition to consumers is, for the full charge, it could take an hour. So it's common -- don't expect to be out of here in 10 minutes. Wait for an hour, but the good news is, you're helping save the planet, and by the way, the electricity is free. You don't pay anything. EM: Actually, what we're expecting is for people to stop for about 20 to 30 minutes, not for an hour. It's actually better to drive for about maybe 160, 170 miles and then stop for half an hour and then keep going. That's the natural cadence of a trip. CA: All right. So this is only one string to your energy bow. You've been working on this solar company SolarCity. What's unusual about that? EM: Well, as I mentioned earlier, we have to have sustainable electricity production as well as consumption, so I'm quite confident that the primary means of power generation will be solar. I mean, it's really indirect fusion, is what it is. We've got this giant fusion generator in the sky called the sun, and we just need to tap a little bit of that energy for purposes of human civilization. What most people know but don't realize they know is that the world is almost entirely solar-powered already. If the sun wasn't there, we'd be a frozen ice ball at three degrees Kelvin, and the sun powers the entire system of precipitation. The whole ecosystem is solar-powered. CA: But in a gallon of gasoline, you have, effectively, thousands of years of sun power compressed into a small space, so it's hard to make the numbers work right now on solar, and to remotely compete with, for example, natural gas, fracked natural gas. How are you going to build a business here? EM: Well actually, I'm confident that solar will beat everything, hands down, including natural gas. (Applause)CA: How? EM: It must, actually. If it doesn't, we're in deep trouble. CA: But you're not selling solar panels to consumers. What are you doing? EM: No, we actually are. You can buy a solar system or you can lease a solar system. Most people choose to lease. And the thing about solar power is that it doesn't have any feed stock or operational costs, so once it's installed, it's just there. It works for decades. It'll work for probably a century. So therefore, the key thing to do is to get the cost of that initial installation low, and then get the cost of the financing low, because that interest -- those are the two factors that drive the cost of solar. And we've made huge progress in that direction, and that's why I'm confident we'll actually beat natural gas. CA: So your current proposition to consumers is, don't pay so much up front. EM: Zero.CA: Pay zero up front. We will install panels on your roof. You will then pay, how long is a typical lease? EM: Typical leases are 20 years, but the value proposition is, as you're sort of alluding to, quite straightforward. It's no money down, and your utility bill decreases. Pretty good deal. CA: So that seems like a win for the consumer. No risk, you'll pay less than you're paying now. For you, the dream here then is that -- I mean, who owns the electricity from those panels for the longer term? I mean, how do you, the company, benefit? EM: Well, essentially, SolarCity raises a chunk of capital from say, a company or a bank. Google is one of our big partners here. And they have an expected return on that capital. With that capital, SolarCity purchases and installs the panel on the roof and then charges the homeowner or business owner a monthly lease payment, which is less than the utility bill. CA: But you yourself get a long-term commercial benefit from that power. You're kind of building a new type of distributed utility. EM: Exactly. What it amounts to is a giant distributed utility. I think it's a good thing, because utilities have been this monopoly, and people haven't had any choice. So effectively it's the first time there's been competition for this monopoly, because the utilities have been the only ones that owned those power distribution lines, but now it's on your roof. So I think it's actually very empowering for homeowners and businesses. CA: And you really picture a future where a majority of power in America, within a decade or two, or within your lifetime, it goes solar? EM: I'm extremely confident that solar will be at least a plurality of power, and most likely a majority, and I predict it will be a plurality in less than 20 years. I made that bet with someone —CA: Definition of plurality is? EM: More from solar than any other source. CA: Ah. Who did you make the bet with? EM: With a friend who will remain nameless. CA: Just between us. (Laughter) EM: I made that bet, I think, two or three years ago, so in roughly 18 years, I think we'll see more power from solar than any other source. CA: All right, so let's go back to another bet that you made with yourself, I guess, a kind of crazy bet. You'd made some money from the sale of PayPal. You decided to build a space company. Why on Earth would someone do that? (Laughter) EM: I got that question a lot, that's true. People would say, "Did you hear the joke about the guy who made a small fortune in the space industry?" Obviously, "He started with a large one," is the punchline. And so I tell people, well, I was trying to figure out the fastest way to turn a large fortune into a small one. And they'd look at me, like, "Is he serious?" CA: And strangely, you were. So what happened? EM: It was a close call. Things almost didn't work out. We came very close to failure, but we managed to get through that point in 2008. The goal of SpaceX is to try to advance rocket technology, and in particular to try to crack a problem that I think is vital for humanity to become a space-faring civilization, which is to have a rapidly and fully reusable rocket. CA: Would humanity become a space-faring civilization? So that was a dream of yours, in a way, from a young age? You've dreamed of Mars and beyond? EM: I did build rockets when I was a kid, but I didn't think I'd be involved in this. It was really more from the standpoint of what are the things that need to happen in order for the future to be an exciting and inspiring one? And I really think there's a fundamental difference, if you sort of look into the future, between a humanity that is a space-faring civilization, that's out there exploring the stars, on multiple planets, and I think that's really exciting, compared with one where we are forever confined to Earth until some eventual extinction event. CA: So you've somehow slashed the cost of building a rocket by 75 percent, depending on how you calculate it. How on Earth have you done that? NASA has been doing this for years. How have you done this? EM: Well, we've made significant advances in the technology of the airframe, the engines, the electronics and the launch operation. There's a long list of innovations that we've come up with there that are a little difficult to communicate in this talk, but -- CA: Not least because you could still get copied, right? You haven't patented this stuff. It's really interesting to me. EM: No, we don't patent.CA: You didn't patent because you think it's more dangerous to patent than not to patent. EM: Since our primary competitors are national governments, the enforceability of patents is questionable.(Laughter) (Applause) CA: That's really, really interesting. But the big innovation is still ahead, and you're working on it now. Tell us about this. EM: Right, so the big innovation— CA: In fact, let's roll that video and you can talk us through it, what's happening here. EM: Absolutely. So the thing about rockets is that they're all expendable. All rockets that fly today are fully expendable. The space shuttle was an attempt at a reusable rocket, but even the main tank of the space shuttle was thrown away every time, and the parts that were reusable took a 10,000-person group nine months to refurbish for flight. So the space shuttle ended up costing a billion dollars per flight. Obviously that doesn't work very well for — CA: What just happened there? We just saw something land? EM: That's right. So it's important that the rocket stages be able to come back, to be able to return to the launch site and be ready to launch again within a matter of hours. CA: Wow. Reusable rockets.EM: Yes. (Applause) And so what a lot of people don't realize is, the cost of the fuel, of the propellant, is very small. It's much like on a jet. So the cost of the propellant is about .3 percent of the cost of the rocket. So it's possible to achieve, let's say, roughly 100-fold improvement in the cost of spaceflight if you can effectively reuse the rocket. That's why it's so important. Every mode of transport that we use, whether it's planes, trains, automobiles, bikes, horses, is reusable, but not rockets. So we must solve this problem in order to become a space-faring civilization. CA: You asked me the question earlier of how popular traveling on cruises would be if you had to burn your ships afterward.EM: Certain cruises are apparently highly problematic. CA: Definitely more expensive. So that's potentially absolutely disruptive technology, and, I guess, paves the way for your dream to actually take, at some point, to take humanity to Mars at scale. You'd like to see a colony on Mars. EM: Yeah, exactly. SpaceX, or some combination of companies and governments, needs to make progress in the direction of making life multi-planetary, of establishing a base on another planet, on Mars -- being the only realistic option -- and then building that base up until we're a true multi-planet species. CA: So progress on this "let's make it reusable," how is that going? That was just a simulation video we saw. How's it going? EM: We're actually, we've been making some good progress recently with something we call the Grasshopper Test Project, where we're testing the vertical landing portion of the flight, the sort of terminal portion which is quite tricky. And we've had some good tests. CA: Can we see that?EM: Yeah. So that's just to give a sense of scale. We dressed a cowboy as Johnny Cash and bolted the mannequin to the rocket. (Laughter) CA: All right, let's see that video then, because this is actually amazing when you think about it. You've never seen this before. A rocket blasting off and then -- EM: Yeah, so that rocket is about the size of a 12-story building. (Rocket launch) So now it's hovering at about 40 meters, and it's constantly adjusting the angle, the pitch and yaw of the main engine, and maintaining roll with cold gas thrusters. CA: How cool is that? (Applause) Elon, how have you done this? These projects are so -- Paypal, SolarCity, Tesla, SpaceX, they're so spectacularly different, they're such ambitious projects at scale. How on Earth has one person been able to innovate in this way? What is it about you? EM: I don't know, actually. I don't have a good answer for you. I work a lot. I mean, a lot. CA: Well, I have a theory.EM: Okay. All right. CA: My theory is that you have an ability to think at a system level of design that pulls together design, technology and business, so if TED was TBD, design, technology and business, into one package, synthesize it in a way that very few people can and -- and this is the critical thing -- feel so damn confident in that clicked-together package that you take crazy risks. You bet your fortune on it, and you seem to have done that multiple times. I mean, almost no one can do that. Is that -- could we have some of that secret sauce? Can we put it into our education system? Can someone learn from you? It is truly amazing what you've done. EM: Well, thanks. Thank you. Well, I do think there's a good framework for thinking. It is physics. You know, the sort of first principles reasoning. Generally I think there are -- what I mean by that is, boil things down to their fundamental truths and reason up from there, as opposed to reasoning by analogy. Through most of our life, we get through life by reasoning by analogy, which essentially means copying what other people do with slight variations. And you have to do that. Otherwise, mentally, you wouldn't be able to get through the day. But when you want to do something new, you have to apply the physics approach. Physics is really figuring out how to discover new things that are counterintuitive, like quantum mechanics. It's really counterintuitive. So I think that's an important thing to do, and then also to really pay attention to negative feedback, and solicit it, particularly from friends. This may sound like simple advice, but hardly anyone does that, and it's incredibly helpful. CA: Boys and girls watching, study physics. Learn from this man. Elon Musk, I wish we had all day, but thank you so much for coming to TED. EM: Thank you. CA: That was awesome. That was really, really cool. Look at that. (Applause) Just take a bow. That was fantastic. Thank you so much.

The oceans cover some 70 percent of our planet. And I think Arthur C. Clarke probably had it right when he said that perhaps we ought to call our planet Planet Ocean. And the oceans are hugely productive, as you can see by the satellite image of photosynthesis, the production of new life. In fact, the oceans produce half of the new life every day on Earth as well as about half the oxygen that we breathe. In addition to that, it harbors a lot of the biodiversity on Earth, and much of it we don't know about. But I'll tell you some of that today. That also doesn't even get into the whole protein extraction that we do from the ocean. That's about 10 percent of our global needs and 100 percent of some island nations. If you were to descend into the 95 percent of the biosphere that's livable, it would quickly become pitch black, interrupted only by pinpoints of light from bioluminescent organisms. And if you turn the lights on, you might periodically see spectacular organisms swim by, because those are the denizens of the deep, the things that live in the deep ocean. And eventually, the deep sea floor would come into view. This type of habitat covers more of the Earth's surface than all other habitats combined. And yet, we know more about the surface of the Moon and about Mars than we do about this habitat, despite the fact that we have yet to extract a gram of food, a breath of oxygen or a drop of water from those bodies. And so 10 years ago, an international program began called the Census of Marine Life, which set out to try and improve our understanding of life in the global oceans. It involved 17 different projects around the world. As you can see, these are the footprints of the different projects. And I hope you'll appreciate the level of global coverage that it managed to achieve. It all began when two scientists, Fred Grassle and Jesse Ausubel, met in Woods Hole, Massachusetts where both were guests at the famed oceanographic institute. And Fred was lamenting the state of marine biodiversity and the fact that it was in trouble and nothing was being done about it. Well, from that discussion grew this program that involved 2,700 scientists from more than 80 countries around the world who engaged in 540 ocean expeditions at a combined cost of 650 million dollars to study the distribution, diversity and abundance of life in the global ocean. And so what did we find? We found spectacular new species, the most beautiful and visually stunning things everywhere we looked -- from the shoreline to the abyss, form microbes all the way up to fish and everything in between. And the limiting step here wasn't the unknown diversity of life, but rather the taxonomic specialists who can identify and catalog these species that became the limiting step. They, in fact, are an endangered species themselves. There are actually four to five new species described everyday for the oceans. And as I say, it could be a much larger number. Now, I come from Newfoundland in Canada -- It's an island off the east coast of that continent -- where we experienced one of the worst fishing disasters in human history. And so this photograph shows a small boy next to a codfish. It's around 1900. Now, when I was a boy of about his age, I would go out fishing with my grandfather and we would catch fish about half that size. And I thought that was the norm, because I had never seen fish like this. If you were to go out there today, 20 years after this fishery collapsed, if you could catch a fish, which would be a bit of a challenge, it would be half that size still. So what we're experiencing is something called shifting baselines. Our expectations of what the oceans can produce is something that we don't really appreciate because we haven't seen it in our lifetimes. Now most of us, and I would say me included, think that human exploitation of the oceans really only became very serious in the last 50 to, perhaps, 100 years or so. The census actually tried to look back in time, using every source of information they could get their hands on. And so anything from restaurant menus to monastery records to ships' logs to see what the oceans looked like. Because science data really goes back to, at best, World War II, for the most part. And so what they found, in fact, is that exploitation really began heavily with the Romans. And so at that time, of course, there was no refrigeration. So fishermen could only catch what they could either eat or sell that day. But the Romans developed salting. And with salting, it became possible to store fish and to transport it long distances. And so began industrial fishing. And so these are the sorts of extrapolations that we have of what sort of loss we've had relative to pre-human impacts on the ocean. They range from 65 to 98 percent for these major groups of organisms, as shown in the dark blue bars. Now for those species the we managed to leave alone, that we protect -- for example, marine mammals in recent years and sea birds -- there is some recovery. So it's not all hopeless. But for the most part, we've gone from salting to exhausting. Now this other line of evidence is a really interesting one. It's from trophy fish caught off the coast of Florida. And so this is a photograph from the 1950s. I want you to notice the scale on the slide, because when you see the same picture from the 1980s, we see the fish are much smaller and we're also seeing a change in terms of the composition of those fish. By 2007, the catch was actually laughable in terms of the size for a trophy fish. But this is no laughing matter. The oceans have lost a lot of their productivity and we're responsible for it. So what's left? Actually quite a lot. There's a lot of exciting things, and I'm going to tell you a little bit about them. And I want to start with a bit on technology, because, of course, this is a TED Conference and you want to hear something on technology. So one of the tools that we use to sample the deep ocean are remotely operated vehicles. So these are tethered vehicles we lower down to the sea floor where they're our eyes and our hands for working on the sea bottom. So a couple of years ago, I was supposed to go on an oceanographic cruise and I couldn't go because of a scheduling conflict. But through a satellite link I was able to sit at my study at home with my dog curled up at my feet, a cup of tea in my hand, and I could tell the pilot, "I want a sample right there." And that's exactly what the pilot did for me. That's the sort of technology that's available today that really wasn't available even a decade ago. So it allows us to sample these amazing habitats that are very far from the surface and very far from light. And so one of the tools that we can use to sample the oceans is acoustics, or sound waves. And the advantage of sound waves is that they actually pass well through water, unlike light. And so we can send out sound waves, they bounce off objects like fish and are reflected back. And so in this example, a census scientist took out two ships. One would send out sound waves that would bounce back. They would be received by a second ship, and that would give us very precise estimates, in this case, of 250 billion herring in a period of about a minute. And that's an area about the size of Manhattan Island. And to be able to do that is a tremendous fisheries tool, because knowing how many fish are there is really critical. We can also use satellite tags to track animals as they move through the oceans. And so for animals that come to the surface to breathe, such as this elephant seal, it's an opportunity to send data back to shore and tell us where exactly it is in the ocean. And so from that we can produce these tracks. For example, the dark blue shows you where the elephant seal moved in the north Pacific. Now I realize for those of you who are colorblind, this slide is not very helpful, but stick with me nonetheless. For animals that don't surface, we have something called pop-up tags, which collect data about light and what time the sun rises and sets. And then at some period of time it pops up to the surface and, again, relays that data back to shore. Because GPS doesn't work under water. That's why we need these tools. And so from this we're able to identify these blue highways, these hot spots in the ocean, that should be real priority areas for ocean conservation. Now one of the other things that you may think about is that, when you go to the supermarket and you buy things, they're scanned. And so there's a barcode on that product that tells the computer exactly what the product is. Geneticists have developed a similar tool called genetic barcoding. And what barcoding does is use a specific gene called CO1 that's consistent within a species, but varies among species. And so what that means is we can unambiguously identify which species are which even if they look similar to each other, but may be biologically quite different. Now one of the nicest examples I like to cite on this is the story of two young women, high school students in New York City, who worked with the census. They went out and collected fish from markets and from restaurants in New York City and they barcoded it. Well what they found was mislabeled fish. So for example, they found something which was sold as tuna, which is very valuable, was in fact tilapia, which is a much less valuable fish. They also found an endangered species sold as a common one. So barcoding allows us to know what we're working with and also what we're eating. The Ocean Biogeographic Information System is the database for all the census data. It's open access; you can all go in and download data as you wish. And it contains all the data from the census plus other data sets that people were willing to contribute. And so what you can do with that is to plot the distribution of species and where they occur in the oceans. What I've plotted up here is the data that we have on hand. This is where our sampling effort has concentrated. Now what you can see is we've sampled the area in the North Atlantic, in the North Sea in particular, and also the east coast of North America fairly well. That's the warm colors which show a well-sampled region. The cold colors, the blue and the black, show areas where we have almost no data. So even after a 10-year census, there are large areas that still remain unexplored. Now there are a group of scientists living in Texas, working in the Gulf of Mexico who decided really as a labor of love to pull together all the knowledge they could about biodiversity in the Gulf of Mexico. And so they put this together, a list of all the species, where they're known to occur, and it really seemed like a very esoteric, scientific type of exercise. But then, of course, there was the Deep Horizon oil spill. So all of a sudden, this labor of love for no obvious economic reason has become a critical piece of information in terms of how that system is going to recover, how long it will take and how the lawsuits and the multi-billion-dollar discussions that are going to happen in the coming years are likely to be resolved. So what did we find? Well, I could stand here for hours, but, of course, I'm not allowed to do that. But I will tell you some of my favorite discoveries from the census. So one of the things we discovered is where are the hot spots of diversity? Where do we find the most species of ocean life? And what we find if we plot up the well-known species is this sort of a distribution. And what we see is that for coastal tags, for those organisms that live near the shoreline, they're most diverse in the tropics. This is something we've actually known for a while, so it's not a real breakthrough. What is really exciting though is that the oceanic tags, or the ones that live far from the coast, are actually more diverse at intermediate latitudes. This is the sort of data, again, that managers could use if they want to prioritize areas of the ocean that we need to conserve. You can do this on a global scale, but you can also do it on a regional scale. And that's why biodiversity data can be so valuable. Now while a lot of the species we discovered in the census are things that are small and hard to see, that certainly wasn't always the case. For example, while it's hard to believe that a three kilogram lobster could elude scientists, it did until a few years ago when South African fishermen requested an export permit and scientists realized that this was something new to science. Similarly this Golden V kelp collected in Alaska just below the low water mark is probably a new species. Even though it's three meters long, it actually, again, eluded science. Now this guy, this bigfin squid, is seven meters in length. But to be fair, it lives in the deep waters of the Mid-Atlantic Ridge, so it was a lot harder to find. But there's still potential for discovery of big and exciting things. This particular shrimp, we've dubbed it the Jurassic shrimp, it's thought to have gone extinct 50 years ago -- at least it was, until the census discovered it was living and doing just fine off the coast of Australia. And it shows that the ocean, because of its vastness, can hide secrets for a very long time. So, Steven Spielberg, eat your heart out. If we look at distributions, in fact distributions change dramatically. And so one of the records that we had was this sooty shearwater, which undergoes these spectacular migrations all the way from New Zealand all the way up to Alaska and back again in search of endless summer as they complete their life cycles. We also talked about the White Shark Cafe. This is a location in the Pacific where white shark converge. We don't know why they converge there, we simply don't know. That's a question for the future. One of the things that we're taught in high school is that all animals require oxygen in order to survive. Now this little critter, it's only about half a millimeter in size, not terribly charismatic. But it was only discovered in the early 1980s. But the really interesting thing about it is that, a few years ago, census scientists discovered that this guy can thrive in oxygen-poor sediments in the deep Mediterranean Sea. So now they know that, in fact, animals can live without oxygen, at least some of them, and that they can adapt to even the harshest of conditions. If you were to suck all the water out of the ocean, this is what you'd be left behind with, and that's the biomass of life on the sea floor. Now what we see is huge biomass towards the poles and not much biomass in between. We found life in the extremes. And so there were new species that were found that live inside ice and help to support an ice-based food web. And we also found this spectacular yeti crab that lives near boiling hot hydrothermal vents at Easter Island. And this particular species really captured the public's attention. We also found the deepest vents known yet -- 5,000 meters -- the hottest vents at 407 degrees Celsius -- vents in the South Pacific and also in the Arctic where none had been found before. So even new environments are still within the domain of the discoverable. Now in terms of the unknowns, there are many. And I'm just going to summarize just a few of them very quickly for you. First of all, we might ask, how many fishes in the sea? We actually know the fishes better than we do any other group in the ocean other than marine mammals. And so we can actually extrapolate based on rates of discovery how many more species we're likely to discover. And from that, we actually calculate that we know about 16,500 marine species and there are probably another 1,000 to 4,000 left to go. So we've done pretty well. We've got about 75 percent of the fish, maybe as much as 90 percent. But the fishes, as I say, are the best known. So our level of knowledge is much less for other groups of organisms. Now this figure is actually based on a brand new paper that's going to come out in the journal PLoS Biology. And what is does is predict how many more species there are on land and in the ocean. And what they found is that they think that we know of about nine percent of the species in the ocean. That means 91 percent, even after the census, still remain to be discovered. And so that turns out to be about two million species once all is said and done. So we still have quite a lot of work to do in terms of unknowns. Now this bacterium is part of mats that are found off the coast of Chile. And these mats actually cover an area the size of Greece. And so this particular bacterium is actually visible to the naked eye. But you can imagine the biomass that represents. But the really intriguing thing about the microbes is just how diverse they are. A single drop of seawater could contain 160 different types of microbes. And the oceans themselves are thought potentially to contain as many as a billion different types. So that's really exciting. What are they all doing out there? We actually don't know. The most exciting thing, I would say, about this census is the role of global science. And so as we see in this image of light during the night, there are lots of areas of the Earth where human development is much greater and other areas where it's much less, but between them we see large dark areas of relatively unexplored ocean. The other point I'd like to make about this is that this ocean's interconnected. Marine organisms do not care about international boundaries; they move where they will. And so the importance then of global collaboration becomes all the more important. We've lost a lot of paradise. For example, these tuna that were once so abundant in the North Sea are now effectively gone. There were trawls taken in the deep sea in the Mediterranean, which collected more garbage than they did animals. And that's the deep sea, that's the environment that we consider to be among the most pristine left on Earth. And there are a lot of other pressures. Ocean acidification is a really big issue that people are concerned with, as well as ocean warming, and the effects they're going to have on coral reefs. On the scale of decades, in our lifetimes, we're going to see a lot of damage to coral reefs. And I could spend the rest of my time, which is getting very limited, going through this litany of concerns about the ocean, but I want to end on a more positive note. And so the grand challenge then is to try and make sure that we preserve what's left, because there is still spectacular beauty. And the oceans are so productive, there's so much going on in there that's of relevance to humans that we really need to, even from a selfish perspective, try to do better than we have in the past. So we need to recognize those hot spots and do our best to protect them. When we look at pictures like this, they take our breath away, in addition to helping to give us breath by the oxygen that the oceans provide. Census scientists worked in the rain, they worked in the cold, they worked under water and they worked above water trying to illuminate the wondrous discovery, the still vast unknown, the spectacular adaptations that we see in ocean life. So whether you're a yak herder living in the mountains of Chile, whether you're a stockbroker in New York City or whether you're a TEDster living in Edinburgh, the oceans matter. And as the oceans go so shall we. Thanks for listening. (Applause)

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

Whoa, dude. Check out those killer equations. Sweet. (Laughter) Actually, for the next 18 minutes I'm going to do the best I can to describe the beauty of particle physics without equations. It turns out there's a lot we can learn from coral. Coral is a very beautiful and unusual animal. Each coral head consists of thousand of individual polyps. These polyps are continually budding and branching into genetically identical neighbors. If we imagine this to be a hyper-intelligent coral, we can single out an individual and ask him a reasonable question. We can ask how exactly he got to be in this particular location compared to his neighbors -- if it was just chance, or destiny, or what? Now, after admonishing us for turning the temperature up too high, he would tell us that our question was completely stupid. These corals can be quite kind of mean, you see, and I have surfing scars to prove that. But this polyp would continue and tell us that his neighbors were quite clearly identical copies of him. That he was in all these other locations as well, but experiencing them as separate individuals. For a coral, branching into different copies is the most natural thing in the world. Unlike us, a hyper-intelligent coral would be uniquely prepared to understand quantum mechanics. The mathematics of quantum mechanics very accurately describes how our universe works. And it tells us our reality is continually branching into different possibilities, just like a coral. It's a weird thing for us humans to wrap our minds around, since we only ever get to experience one possibility. This quantum weirdness was first described by Erwin Schrödinger and his cat. The cat likes this version better. (Laughter) In this setup, Schrödinger is in a box with a radioactive sample that, by the laws of quantum mechanics, branches into a state in which it is radiated and a state in which it is not. (Laughter) In the branch in which the sample radiates, it sets off a trigger that releases poison and Schrödinger is dead. But in the other branch of reality, he remains alive. These realities are experienced separately by each individual. As far as either can tell, the other one doesn't exist. This seems weird to us, because each of us only experiences an individual existence, and we don't get to see other branches. It's as if each of us, like Schrödinger here, are a kind of coral branching into different possibilities. The mathematics of quantum mechanics tells us this is how the world works at tiny scales. It can be summed up in a single sentence: Everything that can happen, does. That's quantum mechanics. But this does not mean everything happens. The rest of physics is about describing what can happen and what can't. What physics tells us is that everything comes down to geometry and the interactions of elementary particles. And things can happen only if these interactions are perfectly balanced. Now I'll go ahead and describe how we know about these particles, what they are and how this balance works. In this machine, a beam of protons and anti-protons are accelerated to near the speed of light and brought together in a collision, producing a burst of pure energy. This energy is immediately converted into a spray of subatomic particles, with detectors and computers used to figure out their properties. This enormous machine -- the large Hadron Collider at CERN in Geneva -- has a circumference of 17 miles and, when it's operating, draws five times as much power as the city of Monterey. We can't predict specifically what particles will be produced in any individual collision. Quantum mechanics tells us all possibilities are realized. But physics does tell us what particles can be produced. These particles must have just as much mass and energy as is carried in by the proton and anti-proton. Any particles more massive than this energy limit aren't produced, and remain invisible to us. This is why this new particle accelerator is so exciting. It's going to push this energy limit seven times beyond what's ever been done before, so we're going to get to see some new particles very soon. But before talking about what we might see, let me describe the particles we already know of. There's a whole zoo of subatomic particles. Most of us are familiar with electrons. A lot of people in this room make a good living pushing them around. (Laughter) But the electron also has a neutral partner called the neutrino, with no electric charge and a very tiny mass. In contrast, the up-and-down quarks have very large masses, and combine in threes to make the protons and neutrons inside atoms. All of these matter particles come in left- and right-handed varieties, and have anti-particle partners that carry opposite charges. These familiar particles also have less familiar second and third generations, which have the same charges as the first but have much higher masses. These matter particles all interact with the various force particles. The electromagnetic force interacts with electrically charged matter via particles called photons. There is also a very weak force called, rather unimaginatively, the weak force, that interacts only with left-handed matter. The strong force acts between quarks which carry a different kind of charge, called color charge, and come in three different varieties: red, green and blue. You can blame Murray Gell-Mann for these names -- they're his fault. Finally, there's the force of gravity, which interacts with matter via its mass and spin. The most important thing to understand here is that there's a different kind of charge associated with each of these forces. These four different forces interact with matter according to the corresponding charges that each particle has. A particle that hasn't been seen yet, but we're pretty sure exists, is the Higgs particle, which gives masses to all these other particles. The main purpose of the Large Hadron Collider is to see this Higgs particle, and we're almost certain it will. But the greatest mystery is what else we might see. And I'm going to show you one beautiful possibility towards the end of this talk. Now, if we count up all these different particles using their various spins and charges, there are 226. That's a lot of particles to keep track of. And it seems strange that nature would have so many elementary particles. But if we plot them out according to their charges, some beautiful patterns emerge. The most familiar charge is electric charge. Electrons have an electric charge, a negative one, and quarks have electric charges in thirds. So when two up quarks and a down quark are combined to make a proton, it has a total electric charge of plus one. These particles also have anti-particles, which have opposite charges. Now, it turns out the electric charge is actually a combination of two other charges: hypercharge and weak charge. If we spread out the hypercharge and weak charge and plot the charges of particles in this two-dimensional charge space, the electric charge is where these particles sit along the vertical direction. The electromagnetic and weak forces interact with matter according to their hypercharge and weak charge, which make this pattern. This is called the Unified Electroweak Model, and it was put together back in 1967. The reason most of us are only familiar with electric charge and not both of these is because of the Higgs particle. The Higgs, over here on the left, has a large mass and breaks the symmetry of this electroweak pattern. It makes the weak force very weak by giving the weak particles a large mass. Since this massive Higgs sits along the horizontal direction in this diagram, the photons of electromagnetism remain massless and interact with electric charge along the vertical direction in this charge space. So the electromagnetic and weak forces are described by this pattern of particle charges in two-dimensional space. We can include the strong force by spreading out its two charge directions and plotting the charges of the force particles in quarks along these directions. The charges of all known particles can be plotted in a four-dimensional charge space, and projected down to two dimensions like this so we can see them. Whenever particles interact, nature keeps things in a perfect balance along all four of these charge directions. If a particle and an anti-particle collide, it creates a burst of energy and a total charge of zero in all four charge directions. At this point, anything can be created as long as it has the same energy and maintains a total charge of zero. For example, this weak force particle and its anti-particle can be created in a collision. In further interactions, the charges must always balance. One of the weak particles could decay into an electron and an anti-neutrino, and these three still add to zero total charge. Nature always keeps a perfect balance. So these patterns of charges are not just pretty. They tell us what interactions are allowed to happen. And we can rotate this charge space in four dimensions to get a better look at the strong interaction, which has this nice hexagonal symmetry. In a strong interaction, a strong force particle, such as this one, interacts with a colored quark, such as this green one, to give a quark with a different color charge -- this red one. And strong interactions are happening millions of times each second in every atom of our bodies, holding the atomic nuclei together. But these four charges corresponding to three forces are not the end of the story. We can also include two more charges corresponding to the gravitational force. When we include these, each matter particle has two different spin charges, spin-up and spin-down. So they all split, and give a nice pattern in six-dimensional charge space. We can rotate this pattern in six dimensions, and see that it's quite pretty. Right now, this pattern matches our best current knowledge of how nature is built at the tiny scales of these elementary particles. This is what we know for certain. Some of these particles are at the very limit of what we've been able to reach with experiments. From this pattern, we already know the particle physics of these tiny scales. The way the universe works with these tiny scales is very beautiful. But now I'm going to discuss some new and old ideas about things we don't know yet. We want to expand this pattern using mathematics alone, and see if we can get our hands on the whole enchilada. We want to find all the particles and forces that make a complete picture of our universe. And we want to use this picture to predict new particles that we'll see when experiments reach higher energies. So there's an old idea in particle physics that this known pattern of charges, which is not very symmetric, could emerge from a more perfect pattern that gets broken -- similar to how the Higgs particle breaks the electroweak pattern to give electromagnetism. In order to do this, we need to introduce new forces with new charge directions. When we introduce a new direction, we get to guess what charges the particles have along this direction, and then we can rotate it in with the others. If we guess wisely, we can construct the standard charges in six charge dimensions as a broken symmetry of this more perfect pattern in seven charge dimensions. This particular choice corresponds to a grand unified theory introduced by Pati and Salam in 1973. When we look at this new unified pattern, we can see a couple of gaps where particles seem to be missing. This is the way theories of unification work. A physicist looks for larger, more symmetric patterns that include the established pattern as a subset. The larger pattern allows us to predict the existence of particles that have never been seen. This unification model predicts the existence of these two new force particles, which should act a lot like the weak force, only weaker. Now we can rotate this set of charges in seven dimensions and consider an odd fact about the matter particles: the second and third generations of matter have exactly the same charges in six-dimensional charge space as the first generation. These particles are not uniquely identified by their six charges. They sit on top of one another in the standard charge space. However, if we work in eight-dimensional charge space, then we can assign unique new charges to each particle. Then we can spin these in eight dimensions, and see what the whole pattern looks like. Here we can see the second and third generations of matter now related to the first generation by a symmetry called "triality." This particular pattern of charges in eight dimensions is actually part of the most beautiful geometric structure in mathematics. It's a pattern of the largest exceptional Lie group, E8. This Lie group is a smooth, curved shape with 248 dimensions. Each point in this pattern corresponds to a symmetry of this very complex and beautiful shape. One small part of this E8 shape can be used to describe the curved space-time of Einstein's general relativity, explaining gravity. Together with quantum mechanics, the geometry of this shape could describe everything about how the universe works at the tiniest scales. The pattern of this shape living in eight-dimensional charge space is exquisitely beautiful, and it summarizes thousands of possible interactions between these elementary particles, each of which is just a facet of this complicated shape. As we spin it, we can see many of the other intricate patterns contained in this one. And with a particular rotation, we can look down through this pattern in eight dimensions along a symmetry axis and see all the particles at once. It's a very beautiful object, and as with any unification, we can see some holes where new particles are required by this pattern. There are 20 gaps where new particles should be, two of which have been filled by the Pati-Salam particles. From their location in this pattern, we know that these new particles should be scalar fields like the Higgs particle, but have color charge and interact with the strong force. Filling in these new particles completes this pattern, giving us the full E8. This E8 pattern has very deep mathematical roots. It's considered by many to be the most beautiful structure in mathematics. It's a fantastic prospect that this object of great mathematical beauty could describe the truth of particle interactions at the smallest scales imaginable. And this idea that nature is described by mathematics is not at all new. In 1623, Galileo wrote this: "Nature's grand book, which stands continually open to our gaze, is written in the language of mathematics. Its characters are triangles, circles and other geometrical figures, without which it is humanly impossible to understand a single word of it; without these, one is wandering around in a dark labyrinth." I believe this to be true, and I've tried to follow Galileo's guidance in describing the mathematics of particle physics using only triangles, circles and other geometrical figures. Of course, when other physicists and I actually work on this stuff, the mathematics can resemble a dark labyrinth. But it's reassuring that at the heart of this mathematics is pure, beautiful geometry. Joined with quantum mechanics, this mathematics describes our universe as a growing E8 coral, with particles interacting at every location in all possible ways according to a beautiful pattern. And as more of the pattern comes into view using new machines like the Large Hadron Collider, we may be able to see whether nature uses this E8 pattern or a different one. This process of discovery is a wonderful adventure to be involved in. If the LHC finds particles that fit this E8 pattern, that will be very, very cool. If the LHC finds new particles, but they don't fit this pattern -- well, that will be very interesting, but bad for this E8 theory. And, of course, bad for me personally. (Laughter) Now how bad would that be? Well, pretty bad. (Laughter) But predicting how nature works is a very risky game. This theory and others like it are long shots. One does a lot of hard work knowing that most of these ideas probably won't end up being true about nature. That's what doing theoretical physics is like: there are a lot of wipeouts. In this regard, new physics theories are a lot like start-up companies. As with any large investment, it can be emotionally difficult to abandon a line of research when it isn't working out. But in science, if something isn't working, you have to toss it out and try something else. Now, the only way to maintain sanity and achieve happiness in the midst of this uncertainty is to keep balance and perspective in life. I've tried the best I can to live a balanced life. (Laughter) I try to balance my life equally between physics, love and surfing -- my own three charge directions. (Laughter) This way, even if the physics I work on comes to nothing, I still know I've lived a good life. And I try to live in beautiful places. For most of the past ten years I've lived on the island of Maui, a very beautiful place. Now it's one of the greatest mysteries in the universe to my parents how I managed to survive all that time without engaging in anything resembling full-time employment. (Laughter) I'm going to let you in on that secret. This was a view from my home office on Maui. And this is another, and another. And you may have noticed that these beautiful views are similar, but in slightly different places. That's because this used to be my home and office on Maui. (Laughter) I've chosen a very unusual life. But not worrying about rent allowed me to spend my time doing what I love. Living a nomadic existence has been hard at times, but it's allowed me to live in beautiful places and keep a balance in my life that I've been happy with. It allows me to spend a lot of my time hanging out with hyper-intelligent coral. But I also greatly enjoy the company of hyper-intelligent people. So I'm very happy to have been invited here to TED. Thank you very much. (Applause) Chris Anderson: I probably understood two percent of that, but I still absolutely loved it. So I'm going to sound dumb. Your theory of everything -- Garrett Lisi: I'm used to coral. CA: That's right. The reason it's got a few people at least excited is because, if you're right, it brings gravity and quantum theory together. So are you saying that we should think of the universe, at its heart -- that the smallest things that there are, are somehow an E8 object of possibility? I mean, is there a scale to it, at the smallest scale, or ...? GL: Well, right now the pattern I showed you that corresponds to what we know about elementary particle physics -- that already corresponds to a very beautiful shape. And that's the one that I said we knew for certain. And that shape has remarkable similarities -- and the way it fits into this E8 pattern could be the rest of the picture. And these patterns of points that I've shown for you actually represent symmetries of this high-dimensional object that would be warping and moving and dancing over the space time that we experience. And that would be what explains all these elementary particles that we see. CA: But a string theorist, as I understand it, explains electrons in terms of much smaller strings vibrating -- I know you don't like string theory -- vibrating inside it. How should we think of an electron in relation to E8? GL: No, it would be one of the symmetries of this E8 shape. So what's happening is, as the shape is moving over space-time, it's twisting. And the direction it's twisting as it moves is what particle we see. So it would be -- CA: The size of the E8 shape, how does that relate to the electron? I kind of feel like I need that for my picture. Is it bigger? Is it smaller? GL: Well, as far as we know electrons are point particles, so this would be going down to the smallest possible scales. So the way these things are explained in quantum field theory is, all possibilities are expanding and developing at once. And this is why I use the analogy to coral. And in this way, the way that E8 comes in is it will be as a shape that's attached at each point in space-time. And, as I said, the way the shape twists -- the directional along which way the shape is twisting as it moves over this curved surface -- is what the elementary particles are, themselves. So through quantum field theory, they manifest themselves as points and interact that way. I don't know if I'll be able to make this any clearer. (Laughter) CA: It doesn't really matter. It's evoking a kind of sense of wonder, and I certainly want to understand more of this. But thank you so much for coming. That was absolutely fascinating. (Applause)

So if you've been following the news, you've heard that there's a pack of giant asteroids headed for the United States, all scheduled to strike within the next 50 years. Now I don't mean actual asteroids made of rock and metal. That actually wouldn't be such a problem, because if we were really all going to die, we would put aside our differences, we'd spend whatever it took, and we'd find a way to deflect them. I'm talking instead about threats that are headed our way, but they're wrapped in a special energy field that polarizes us, and therefore paralyzes us. Last March, I went to the TED conference, and I saw Jim Hansen speak, the NASA scientist who first raised the alarm about global warming in the 1980s, and it seems that the predictions he made back then are coming true. This is where we're headed in terms of global temperature rises, and if we keep on going the way we're going, we get a four- or five-degree-Centigrade temperature rise by the end of this century. Hansen says we can expect about a five-meter rise in sea levels. This is what a five-meter rise in sea levels would look like. Low-lying cities all around the world will disappear within the lifetime of children born today. Hansen closed his talk by saying, "Imagine a giant asteroid on a collision course with Earth. That is the equivalent of what we face now. Yet we dither, taking no action to deflect the asteroid, even though the longer we wait, the more difficult and expensive it becomes." Of course, the left wants to take action, but the right denies that there's any problem. All right, so I go back from TED, and then the following week, I'm invited to a dinner party in Washington, D.C., where I know that I'll be meeting a number of conservative intellectuals, including Yuval Levin, and to prepare for the meeting, I read this article by Levin in National Affairs called "Beyond the Welfare State." Levin writes that all over the world, nations are coming to terms with the fact that the social democratic welfare state is turning out to be untenable and unaffordable, dependent upon dubious economics and the demographic model of a bygone era. All right, now this might not sound as scary as an asteroid, but look at these graphs that Levin showed. This graph shows the national debt as a percentage of America's GDP, and as you see, if you go all the way back to the founding, we borrowed a lot of money to fight the Revolutionary War. Wars are expensive. But then we'd pay it off, pay it off, pay it off, and then, oh, what's this? The Civil War. Even more expensive. Borrow a lot of money, pay it off, pay it off, pay it off, get down to near zero, and bang! -- World War I. Once again, the same process repeats. Now then we get the Great Depression and World War II. We rise to an astronomical level, around 118 percent of GDP, really unsustainable, really dangerous. But we pay it off, pay it off, pay it off, and then, what's this? Why has it been rising since the '70s? It's partly due to tax cuts that were unfunded, but it's due primarily to the rise of entitlement spending, especially Medicare. We're approaching the levels of indebtedness we had at World War II, and the baby boomers haven't even retired yet, and when they do, this is what will happen. This is data from the Congressional Budget Office showing its most realistic forecast of what would happen if current situations and expectations and trends are extended. All right, now what you might notice is that these two graphs are actually identical, not in terms of the x- and y-axes, or in terms of the data they present, but in terms of their moral and political implications, they say the same thing. Let me translate for you. "We are doomed unless we start acting now. What's wrong with you people on the other side in the other party? Can't you see reality? If you won't help, then get the hell out of the way." We can deflect both of these asteroids. These problems are both technically solvable. Our problem and our tragedy is that in these hyper-partisan times, the mere fact that one side says, "Look, there's an asteroid," means that the other side's going to say, "Huh? What? No, I'm not even going to look up. No." To understand why this is happening to us, and what we can do about it, we need to learn more about moral psychology. So I'm a social psychologist, and I study morality, and one of the most important principles of morality is that morality binds and blinds. It binds us into teams that circle around sacred values but thereby makes us go blind to objective reality. Think of it like this. Large-scale cooperation is extremely rare on this planet. There are only a few species that can do it. That's a beehive. That's a termite mound, a giant termite mound. And when you find this in other animals, it's always the same story. They're always all siblings who are children of a single queen, so they're all in the same boat. They rise or fall, they live or die, as one. There's only one species on the planet that can do this without kinship, and that, of course, is us. This is a reconstruction of ancient Babylon, and this is Tenochtitlan. Now how did we do this? How did we go from being hunter-gatherers 10,000 years ago to building these gigantic cities in just a few thousand years? It's miraculous, and part of the explanation is this ability to circle around sacred values. As you see, temples and gods play a big role in all ancient civilizations. This is an image of Muslims circling the Kaaba in Mecca. It's a sacred rock, and when people circle something together, they unite, they can trust each other, they become one. It's as though you're moving an electrical wire through a magnetic field that generates current. When people circle together, they generate a current. We love to circle around things. We circle around flags, and then we can trust each other. We can fight as a team, as a unit. But even as morality binds people together into a unit, into a team, the circling blinds them. It causes them to distort reality. We begin separating everything into good versus evil. Now that process feels great. It feels really satisfying. But it is a gross distortion of reality. You can see the moral electromagnet operating in the U.S. Congress. This is a graph that shows the degree to which voting in Congress falls strictly along the left-right axis, so that if you know how liberal or conservative someone is, you know exactly how they voted on all the major issues. And what you can see is that, in the decades after the Civil War, Congress was extraordinarily polarized, as you would expect, about as high as can be. But then, after World War I, things dropped, and we get this historically low level of polarization. This was a golden age of bipartisanship, at least in terms of the parties' ability to work together and solve grand national problems. But in the 1980s and '90s, the electromagnet turns back on. Polarization rises. It used to be that conservatives and moderates and liberals could all work together in Congress. They could rearrange themselves, form bipartisan committees, but as the moral electromagnet got cranked up, the force field increased, Democrats and Republicans were pulled apart. It became much harder for them to socialize, much harder for them to cooperate. Retiring members nowadays say that it's become like gang warfare. Did anybody notice that in two of the three debates, Obama wore a blue tie and Romney wore a red tie? Do you know why they do this? It's so that the Bloods and the Crips will know which side to vote for. (Laughter) The polarization is strongest among our political elites. Nobody doubts that this is happening in Washington. But for a while, there was some doubt as to whether it was happening among the people. Well, in the last 12 years it's become much more apparent that it is. So look at this data. This is from the American National Elections Survey. And what they do on that survey is they ask what's called a feeling thermometer rating. So, how warm or cold do you feel about, you know, Native Americans, or the military, the Republican Party, the Democratic Party, all sorts of groups in American life. The blue line shows how warmly Democrats feel about Democrats, and they like them. You know, ratings in the 70s on a 100-point scale. Republicans like Republicans. That's not a surprise. But when you look at cross-party ratings, you find, well, that it's lower, but actually, when I first saw this data, I was surprised. That's actually not so bad. If you go back to the Carter and even Reagan administrations, they were rating the other party 43, 45. It's not terrible. It drifts downwards very slightly, but now look what happens under George W. Bush and Obama. It plummets. Something is going on here. The moral electromagnet is turning back on, and nowadays, just very recently, Democrats really dislike Republicans. Republicans really dislike the Democrats. We're changing. It's as though the moral electromagnet is affecting us too. It's like put out in the two oceans and it's pulling the whole country apart, pulling left and right into their own territories like the Bloods and the Crips. Now, there are many reasons why this is happening to us, and many of them we cannot reverse. We will never again have a political class that was forged by the experience of fighting together in World War II against a common enemy. We will never again have just three television networks, all of which are relatively centrist. And we will never again have a large group of conservative southern Democrats and liberal northern Republicans making it easy, making there be a lot of overlap for bipartisan cooperation. So for a lot of reasons, those decades after the Second World War were an historically anomalous time. We will never get back to those low levels of polarization, I believe. But there's a lot that we can do. There are dozens and dozens of reforms we can do that will make things better, because a lot of our dysfunction can be traced directly to things that Congress did to itself in the 1990s that created a much more polarized and dysfunctional institution. These changes are detailed in many books. These are two that I strongly recommend, and they list a whole bunch of reforms. I'm just going to group them into three broad classes here. So if you think about this as the problem of a dysfunctional, hyper-polarized institution, well, the first step is, do what you can so that fewer hyper-partisans get elected in the first place, and when you have closed party primaries, and only the most committed Republicans and Democrats are voting, you're nominating and selecting the most extreme hyper-partisans. So open primaries would make that problem much, much less severe. But the problem isn't primarily that we're electing bad people to Congress. From my experience, and from what I've heard from Congressional insiders, most of the people going to Congress are good, hard-working, intelligent people who really want to solve problems, but once they get there, they find that they are forced to play a game that rewards hyper-partisanship and that punishes independent thinking. You step out of line, you get punished. So there are a lot of reforms we could do that will counteract this. For example, this "Citizens United" ruling is a disaster, because it means there's like a money gun aimed at your head, and if you step out of line, if you try to reach across the aisle, there's a ton of money waiting to be given to your opponent to make everybody think that you are a terrible person through negative advertising. But the third class of reforms is that we've got to change the nature of social relationships in Congress. The politicians I've met are generally very extroverted, friendly, very socially skillful people, and that's the nature of politics. You've got to make relationships, make deals, you've got to cajole, please, flatter, you've got to use your personal skills, and that's the way politics has always worked. But beginning in the 1990s, first the House of Representatives changed its legislative calendar so that all business is basically done in the middle of the week. Nowadays, Congressmen fly in on Tuesday morning, they do battle for two days, then they fly home Thursday afternoon. They don't move their families to the District. They don't meet each other's spouses or children. There's no more relationship there. And trying to run Congress without human relationships is like trying to run a car without motor oil. Should we be surprised when the whole thing freezes up and descends into paralysis and polarization? A simple change to the legislative calendar, such as having business stretch out for three weeks and then they get a week off to go home, that would change the fundamental relationships in Congress. So there's a lot we can do, but who's going to push them to do it? There are a number of groups that are working on this. No Labels and Common Cause, I think, have very good ideas for changes we need to do to make our democracy more responsive and our Congress more effective. But I'd like to supplement their work with a little psychological trick, and the trick is this. Nothing pulls people together like a common threat or a common attack, especially an attack from a foreign enemy, unless of course that threat hits on our polarized psychology, in which case, as I said before, it can actually pull us apart. Sometimes a single threat can polarize us, as we saw. But what if the situation we face is not a single threat but is actually more like this, where there's just so much stuff coming in, it's just, "Start shooting, come on, everybody, we've got to just work together, just start shooting." Because actually, we do face this situation. This is where we are as a country. So here's another asteroid. We've all seen versions of this graph, right, which shows the changes in wealth since 1979, and as you can see, almost all the gains in wealth have gone to the top 20 percent, and especially the top one percent. Rising inequality like this is associated with so many problems for a democracy. Especially, it destroys our ability to trust each other, to feel that we're all in the same boat, because it's obvious we're not. Some of us are sitting there safe and sound in gigantic private yachts. Other people are clinging to a piece of driftwood. We're not all in the same boat, and that means nobody's willing to sacrifice for the common good. The left has been screaming about this asteroid for 30 years now, and the right says, "Huh, what? Hmm? No problem. No problem." Now, why is that happening to us? Why is the inequality rising? Well, one of the largest causes, after globalization, is actually this fourth asteroid, rising non-marital births. This graph shows the steady rise of out-of-wedlock births since the 1960s. Most Hispanic and black children are now born to unmarried mothers. Whites are headed that way too. Within a decade or two, most American children will be born into homes with no father. This means that there's much less money coming into the house. But it's not just money. It's also stability versus chaos. As I know from working with street children in Brazil, Mom's boyfriend is often a really, really dangerous person for kids. Now the right has been screaming about this asteroid since the 1960s, and the left has been saying, "It's not a problem. It's not a problem." The left has been very reluctant to say that marriage is actually good for women and for children. Now let me be clear. I'm not blaming the women here. I'm actually more critical of the men who won't take responsibility for their own children and of an economic system that makes it difficult for many men to earn enough money to support those children. But even if you blame nobody, it still is a national problem, and one side has been more concerned about it than the other. The New York Times finally noticed this asteroid with a front-page story last July showing how the decline of marriage contributes to inequality. We are becoming a nation of just two classes. When Americans go to college and marry each other, they have very low divorce rates. They earn a lot of money, they invest that money in their kids, some of them become tiger mothers, the kids rise to their full potential, and the kids go on to become the top two lines in this graph. And then there's everybody else: the children who don't benefit from a stable marriage, who don't have as much invested in them, who don't grow up in a stable environment, and who go on to become the bottom three lines in that graph. So once again, we see that these two graphs are actually saying the same thing. As before, we've got a problem, we've got to start working on this, we've got to do something, and what's wrong with you people that you don't see my threat? But if everybody could just take off their partisan blinders, we'd see that these two problems actually are best addressed together. Because if you really care about income inequality, you might want to talk to some evangelical Christian groups that are working on ways to promote marriage. But then you're going to run smack into the problem that women don't generally want to marry someone who doesn't have a job. So if you really care about strengthening families, you might want to talk to some liberal groups who are working on promoting educational equality, who are working on raising the minimum wage, who are working on finding ways to stop so many men from being sucked into the criminal justice system and taken out of the marriage market for their whole lives. So to conclude, there are at least four asteroids headed our way. How many of you can see all four? Please raise your hand right now if you're willing to admit that all four of these are national problems. Please raise your hands. Okay, almost all of you. Well, congratulations, you guys are the inaugural members of the Asteroids Club, which is a club for all Americans who are willing to admit that the other side actually might have a point. In the Asteroids Club, we don't start by looking for common ground. Common ground is often very hard to find. No, we start by looking for common threats because common threats make common ground. Now, am I being naive? Is it naive to think that people could ever lay down their swords, and left and right could actually work together? I don't think so, because it happens, not all that often, but there are a variety of examples that point the way. This is something we can do. Because Americans on both sides care about the decline in civility, and they've formed dozens of organizations, at the national level, such as this one, down to many local organizations, such as To The Village Square in Tallahassee, Florida, which tries to bring state leaders together to help facilitate that sort of working together human relationship that's necessary to solve Florida's problems. Americans on both sides care about global poverty and AIDS, and on so many humanitarian issues, liberals and evangelicals are actually natural allies, and at times they really have worked together to solve these problems. And most surprisingly to me, they sometimes can even see eye to eye on criminal justice. For example, the incarceration rate, the prison population in this country has quadrupled since 1980. Now this is a social disaster, and liberals are very concerned about this. The Southern Poverty Law Center is often fighting the prison-industrial complex, fighting to prevent a system that's just sucking in more and more poor young men. But are conservatives happy about this? Well, Grover Norquist isn't, because this system costs an unbelievable amount of money. And so, because the prison-industrial complex is bankrupting our states and corroding our souls, groups of fiscal conservatives and Christian conservatives have come together to form a group called Right on Crime. And at times they have worked with the Southern Poverty Law Center to oppose the building of new prisons and to work for reforms that will make the justice system more efficient and more humane. So this is possible. We can do it. Let us therefore go to battle stations, not to fight each other, but to begin deflecting these incoming asteroids. And let our first mission be to press Congress to reform itself, before it's too late for our nation. Thank you. (Applause)

I want to talk a little bit today about labor and work. When we think about how people work, the naive intuition we have is that people are like rats in a maze -- that all people care about is money, and the moment we give them money, we can direct them to work one way, we can direct them to work another way. This is why we give bonuses to bankers and pay in all kinds of ways. And we really have this incredibly simplistic view of why people work, and what the labor market looks like. At the same time, if you think about it, there's all kinds of strange behaviors in the world around us. Think about something like mountaineering and mountain climbing. If you read books of people who climb mountains, difficult mountains, do you think that those books are full of moments of joy and happiness? No, they are full of misery. In fact, it's all about frostbite and having difficulty walking, and difficulty breathing -- cold, challenging circumstances. And if people were just trying to be happy, the moment they would get to the top, they would say, "This was a terrible mistake. I'll never do it again." (Laughter) "Instead, let me sit on a beach somewhere drinking mojitos." But instead, people go down, and after they recover, they go up again. And if you think about mountain climbing as an example, it suggests all kinds of things. It suggests that we care about reaching the end, a peak. It suggests that we care about the fight, about the challenge. It suggests that there's all kinds of other things that motivate us to work or behave in all kinds of ways. And for me personally, I started thinking about this after a student came to visit me. This was one of my students from a few years earlier, and he came one day back to campus. And he told me the following story: He said that for more than two weeks, he was working on a PowerPoint presentation. He was working in a big bank, and this was in preparation for a merger and acquisition. And he was working very hard on this presentation -- graphs, tables, information. He stayed late at night every day. And the day before it was due, he sent his PowerPoint presentation to his boss, and his boss wrote him back and said, "Nice presentation, but the merger is canceled." And the guy was deeply depressed. Now at the moment when he was working, he was actually quite happy. Every night he was enjoying his work, he was staying late, he was perfecting this PowerPoint presentation. But knowing that nobody would ever watch it made him quite depressed. So I started thinking about how do we experiment with this idea of the fruits of our labor. And to start with, we created a little experiment in which we gave people Legos, and we asked them to build with Legos. And for some people, we gave them Legos and we said, "Hey, would you like to build this Bionicle for three dollars? We'll pay you three dollars for it." And people said yes, and they built with these Legos. And when they finished, we took it, we put it under the table, and we said, "Would you like to build another one, this time for $2.70?" If they said yes, we gave them another one, and when they finished, we asked them, "Do you want to build another one?" for $2.40, $2.10, and so on, until at some point people said, "No more. It's not worth it for me." This was what we called the meaningful condition. People built one Bionicle after another. After they finished every one of them, we put them under the table. And we told them that at the end of the experiment, we will take all these Bionicles, we will disassemble them, we will put them back in the boxes, and we will use it for the next participant. There was another condition. This other condition was inspired by David, my student. And this other condition we called the Sisyphic condition. And if you remember the story about Sisyphus, Sisyphus was punished by the gods to push the same rock up a hill, and when he almost got to the end, the rock would roll over, and he would have to start again. And you can think about this as the essence of doing futile work. You can imagine that if he pushed the rock on different hills, at least he would have some sense of progress. Also, if you look at prison movies, sometimes the way that the guards torture the prisoners is to get them to dig a hole, and when the prisoner is finished, they ask him to fill the hole back up and then dig again. There's something about this cyclical version of doing something over and over and over that seems to be particularly demotivating. So in the second condition of this experiment, that's exactly what we did. We asked people, "Would you like to build one Bionicle for three dollars?" And if they said yes, they built it. Then we asked them, "Do you want to build another one for $2.70?" And if they said yes, we gave them a new one, and as they were building it, we took apart the one that they just finished. And when they finished that, we said, "Would you like to build another one, this time for 30 cents less?" And if they said yes, we gave them the one that they built and we broke. So this was an endless cycle of them building, and us destroying in front of their eyes. Now what happens when you compare these two conditions? The first thing that happened was that people built many more Bionicles -- eleven in the meaningful condition, versus seven in the Sisyphus condition. And by the way, we should point out that this was not big meaning. People were not curing cancer or building bridges. People were building Bionicles for a few cents. And not only that, everybody knew that the Bionicles would be destroyed quite soon. So there was not a real opportunity for big meaning. But even the small meaning made a difference. Now we had another version of this experiment. In this other version of the experiment, we didn't put people in this situation, we just described to them the situation, much as I am describing to you now, and we asked them to predict what the result would be. What happened? People predicted the right direction but not the right magnitude. People who were just given the description of the experiment said that in the meaningful condition, people would probably build one more Bionicle. So people understand that meaning is important, they just don't understand the magnitude of the importance, the extent to which it's important. There was one other piece of data we looked at. If you think about it, there are some people who love Legos, and some people who don't. And you would speculate that the people who love Legos would build more Legos, even for less money, because after all, they get more internal joy from it. And the people who love Legos less would build less Legos because the enjoyment that they derive from it is lower. And that's actually what we found in the meaningful condition. There was a very nice correlation between the love of Legos and the amount of Legos people built. What happened in the Sisyphic condition? In that condition, the correlation was zero -- there was no relationship between the love of Legos, and how much people built, which suggests to me that with this manipulation of breaking things in front of people's eyes, we basically crushed any joy that they could get out of this activity. We basically eliminated it. Soon after I finished running this experiment, I went to talk to a big software company in Seattle. I can't tell you who they were, but they were a big company in Seattle. This was a group within the software company that was put in a different building, and they asked them to innovate, and create the next big product for this company. And the week before I showed up, the CEO of this big software company went to that group, 200 engineers, and canceled the project. And I stood there in front of 200 of the most depressed people I've ever talked to. And I described to them some of these Lego experiments, and they said they felt like they had just been through that experiment. And I asked them, I said, "How many of you now show up to work later than you used to?" And everybody raised their hand. I said, "How many of you now go home earlier than you used to?" Everybody raised their hand. I asked them, "How many of you now add not-so-kosher things to your expense reports?" And they didn't raise their hands, but they took me out to dinner and showed me what they could do with expense reports. And then I asked them, I said, "What could the CEO have done to make you not as depressed?" And they came up with all kinds of ideas. They said the CEO could have asked them to present to the whole company about their journey over the last two years and what they decided to do. He could have asked them to think about which aspect of their technology could fit with other parts of the organization. He could have asked them to build some next-generation prototypes, and see how they would work. But the thing is that any one of those would require some effort and motivation. And I think the CEO basically did not understand the importance of meaning. If the CEO, just like our participants, thought the essence of meaning is unimportant, then he [wouldn't] care. And he would say, "At the moment I directed you in this way, and now that I'm directing you in this way, everything will be okay." But if you understood how important meaning is, then you would figure out that it's actually important to spend some time, energy and effort in getting people to care more about what they're doing. The next experiment was slightly different. We took a sheet of paper with random letters, and we asked people to find pairs of letters that were identical next to each other. That was the task. People did the first sheet, then we asked if they wanted to do another for a little less money, the next sheet for a little bit less, and so on and so forth. And we had three conditions. In the first condition, people wrote their name on the sheet, found all the pairs of letters, gave it to the experimenter, the experimenter would look at it, scan it from top to bottom, say "Uh huh," and put it on the pile next to them. In the second condition, people did not write their name on it. The experimenter looked at it, took the sheet of paper, did not look at it, did not scan it, and simply put it on the pile of pages. So you take a piece, you just put it on the side. In the third condition, the experimenter got the sheet of paper, and put it directly into a shredder. (Laughter) What happened in those three conditions? In this plot I'm showing you at what pay rate people stopped. So low numbers mean that people worked harder. They worked for much longer. In the acknowledged condition, people worked all the way down to 15 cents. At 15 cents per page, they basically stopped these efforts. In the shredder condition, it was twice as much -- 30 cents per sheet. And this is basically the result we had before. You shred people's efforts, output -- you get them not to be as happy with what they're doing. But I should point out, by the way, that in the shredder condition, people could have cheated. They could have done not so good work, because they realized people were just shredding it. So maybe the first sheet you'd do good work, but then you see nobody is really testing it, so you would do more and more and more. So in fact, in the shredder condition, people could have submitted more work and gotten more money, and put less effort into it. But what about the ignored condition? Would the ignored condition be more like the acknowledged or more like the shredder, or somewhere in the middle? It turns out it was almost like the shredder. Now there's good news and bad news here. The bad news is that ignoring the performance of people is almost as bad as shredding their effort in front of their eyes. Ignoring gets you a whole way out there. The good news is that by simply looking at something that somebody has done, scanning it and saying "Uh huh," that seems to be quite sufficient to dramatically improve people's motivations. So the good news is that adding motivation doesn't seem to be so difficult. The bad news is that eliminating motivations seems to be incredibly easy, and if we don't think about it carefully, we might overdo it. So this is all in terms of negative motivation, or eliminating negative motivation. The next part I want to show you is something about positive motivation. So there is a store in the U.S. called IKEA. And IKEA is a store with kind of okay furniture that takes a long time to assemble. (Laughter) I don't know about you, but every time I assemble one of those, it takes me much longer, it's much more effortful, it's much more confusing, I put things in the wrong way -- I can't say I enjoy those pieces. I can't say I enjoy the process. But when I finish it, I seem to like those IKEA pieces of furniture more than I like other ones. (Laughter) And there's an old story about cake mixes. So when they started cake mixes in the '40s, they would take this powder and they would put it in a box, and they would ask housewives to basically pour it in, stir some water in it, mix it, put it in the oven, and -- voila -- you had cake. But it turns out they were very unpopular. People did not want them, and they thought about all kinds of reasons for that. Maybe the taste was not good? No, the taste was great. What they figured out was that there was not enough effort involved. It was so easy that nobody could serve cake to their guests and say, "Here is my cake." No, it was somebody else's cake, as if you bought it in the store. It didn't really feel like your own. So what did they do? They took the eggs and the milk out of the powder. (Laughter) Now you had to break the eggs and add them, you had to measure the milk and add it, mixing it. Now it was your cake. Now everything was fine. (Laughter) (Applause) Now, I think a little bit like the IKEA effect, by getting people to work harder, they actually got them to love what they're doing to a higher degree. So how do we look at this question experimentally? We asked people to build some origami. We gave them instructions on how to create origami, and we gave them a sheet of paper. And these were all novices, and they built something that was really quite ugly -- nothing like a frog or a crane. But then we told them, "Look, this origami really belongs to us. You worked for us, but I'll tell you what, we'll sell it to you. How much do you want to pay for it?" And we measured how much they were willing to pay for it. And we had two types of people: We had the people who built it, and the people who did not build it, and just looked at it as external observers. And what we found was that the builders thought that these were beautiful pieces of origami -- (Laughter) and they were willing to pay five times more for them than the people who just evaluated them externally. Now you could say -- if you were a builder, do you think [you'd say], "Oh, I love this origami, but I know that nobody else would love it?" Or "I love this origami, and everybody else will love it as well?" Which one of those two is correct? Turns out the builders not only loved the origami more, they thought that everybody would see the world in their view. They thought everybody else would love it more as well. In the next version, we tried to do the IKEA effect. We tried to make it more difficult. So for some people, we gave the same task. For some people, we made it harder by hiding the instructions. At the top of the sheet, we had little diagrams of how you fold origami. For some people, we just eliminated that. So now this was tougher. What happened? Well in an objective way, the origami now was uglier, it was more difficult. Now when we looked at the easy origami, we saw the same thing -- builders loved it more, evaluators loved it less. When you looked at the hard instructions, the effect was larger. Why? Because now the builders loved it even more. (Laughter) They put all this extra effort into it. And evaluators? They loved it even less. Because in reality, it was even uglier than the first version. (Laughter) Of course, this tells you something about how we evaluate things. Now think about kids. Imagine I asked you, "How much would you sell your kids for?" Your memories and associations and so on. Most people would say for a lot, a lot of money. (Laughter) On good days. (Laughter) But imagine this was slightly different. Imagine if you did not have your kids. And one day you went to the park and you met some kids. They were just like your kids, and you played with them for a few hours, and when you were about to leave, the parents said, "Hey, by the way, just before you leave, if you're interested, they're for sale." (Laughter) How much would you pay for them now? Most people say not that much. And this is because our kids are so valuable, not just because of who they are, but because of us, because they are so connected to us, and because of the time and connection. By the way, if you think IKEA instructions are not good, what about the instructions that come with kids, those are really tough. (Laughter) By the way, these are my kids, which, of course, are wonderful and so on. Which comes to tell you one more thing, which is, much like our builders, when they look at the creature of their creation, we don't see that other people don't see things our way. Let me say one last comment. If you think about Adam Smith versus Karl Marx, Adam Smith had a very important notion of efficiency. He gave an example of a pin factory. He said pins have 12 different steps, and if one person does all 12 steps, production is very low. But if you get one person to do step one, and one person to do step two and step three and so on, production can increase tremendously. And indeed, this is a great example, and the reason for the Industrial Revolution and efficiency. Karl Marx, on the other hand, said that the alienation of labor is incredibly important in how people think about the connection to what they are doing. And if you do all 12 steps, you care about the pin. But if you do one step every time, maybe you don't care as much. I think that in the Industrial Revolution, Adam Smith was more correct than Karl Marx. But the reality is that we've switched, and now we're in the knowledge economy. You can ask yourself, what happens in a knowledge economy? Is efficiency still more important than meaning? I think the answer is no. I think that as we move to situations in which people have to decide on their own about how much effort, attention, caring, how connected they feel to it, are they thinking about labor on the way to work, and in the shower and so on, all of a sudden Marx has more things to say to us. So when we think about labor, we usually think about motivation and payment as the same thing, but the reality is that we should probably add all kinds of things to it -- meaning, creation, challenges, ownership, identity, pride, etc. The good news is that if we added all of those components and thought about them -- how do we create our own meaning, pride, motivation, and how do we do it in our workplace, and for the employees -- I think we could get people to be both more productive and happier. Thank you very much. (Applause)

I don't know your name. Audience Member: Howard. Howard. Thom Mayne: Howard? I'm sitting next to Howard. I don't know Howard, obviously, and he's going, I hope you're not next. (Laughter) Amazing. Amazing performance. I kind of erased everything in my brain to follow that. Let me start some place. I'm interested -- I kind of do the same thing, but I don't move my body. (Laughter) And instead of using human figures to develop ideas of time and space, I work in the mineral world. I work with more or less inert matter. And I organize it. And, well, it's also a bit different because an architect versus, let's say, a dance company finally is a negotiation between one's private world, one's conceptual world, the world of ideas, the world of aspirations, of inventions, with the relationship of the exterior world and all the limitations, the naysayers. Because I have to say, for my whole career, if there's anything that's been consistent, it's been that you can't do it. No matter what I've done, what I've tried to do, everybody says it can't be done. And it's continuous across the complete spectrum of the various kind of realities that you confront with your ideas. And to be an architect, somehow you have to negotiate between left and right, and you have to negotiate between this very private place where ideas take place and the outside world, and then make it understood. I can start any number of places, because this process is also -- I think -- very different from some of the morning sessions, which you had such a kind of very clear, such a lineal idea, like the last one, say, with Howard, that I think the creative process in architecture, the design process, is extremely circuitous. It's labyrinthine. It's Calvino's idea of the quickest way between two points is the circuitous line, not the straight line. And definitely my life has been part of that. I'm going to start with some simple kind of notions of how we organize things. But basically, what we do is, we try to give coherence to the world. We make physical things, buildings that become a part in an accretional process; they make cities. And those things are the reflection of the processes, and the time that they are made. And what I'm doing is attempting to synthesize the way one sees the world and the territories which are useful as generative material. Because, really, all I'm interested in, always, as an architect, is the way things are produced because that's what I do. Right? And it's not based on an a priori notion. I have no interest at all in conceiving something in my brain and saying, "This is what it looks like." In fact, somebody mentioned -- Ewan, maybe it was you in your introduction -- about this is what architects -- did somebody say it's what business people come to, it's what the corporate world comes to when they want to make it look like something at the end of the line? Huh. Wow. It doesn't work that way for me at all. I have no interest in that whatsoever. Architecture is the beginning of something, because it's -- if you're not involved in first principles, if you're not involved in the absolute, the beginning of that generative process, it's cake decoration. And I've nothing wrong with cake decoration and cake decorators, if anybody's involved in cake decorations -- it's not what I'm interested in doing. (Laughter) And so, in the formation of things, in giving it form, in concretizing these things, it starts with some notion of how one organizes. And I've had for 30 years an interest in a series of complexities where a series of forces are brought to bear, and to understand the nature of the final result of that, representing the building itself. There's been a continual relationship between inventions, which are private, and reality, which has been important to me. A project which is part of an exhibition in Copenhagen 10 years ago, which was the modeling of a hippocampus -- the territory of the brain that records short-term memory -- and the documentation of that, the imaginative and documentation of that through a series of drawings which literally attempt to organize that experience. And it had to do with the notion of walking a kilometer, observing every kilometer a particular object of desire, and then placing that within this. And the notion was that I could make an organization not built on normal coherencies, but built on non-sequiturs, built on randomness. And I'd been extremely interested in this notion of randomness as it produces architectural work and as it definitely connects to the notion of the city, an accretional notion of the city, and that led to various ideas of organization. And then this led to broader ideas of buildings that come together through the multiplicity of systems. And it's not any single system that makes the work. It's the relationship -- it's the dynamics between the systems -- which have the power to transform and invent and produce an architecture that is -- that would otherwise not exist. And those systems could be identified, and they could be grouped together. And of course, today, with the technology of the computer and with the rapid prototyping, etc., we have the mechanisms to understand and to respond to these systems, and to allow them to adjust to the various accommodations of functionalities because that's all we do. We're producing spaces that accommodate human activity. And what I'm interested in is not the styling of that, but the relationship of that as it enhances that activity. And that directly connects to ideas of city-making. This is a project that we just finished in Penang for a very, very large city project that came directly out of this process, which is the result of the multiplicity of forces that produce it. And the project -- again, enormous, enormous competition -- on the Hudson River and in New York that we were asked to do three years ago, which uses these processes. And what you're looking at are possibilities that have to do with the generation of the city as one applies a methodology that uses notions of these multiple forces, that deals with the enormity of the problem, the complexity of the problem, when we're designing cities at larger and larger aggregates. Because one of the issues today is that the economic aggregate is driving the development aggregate, and as the aggregates get larger we require more and more complex investigation processes to solve these problems. And that led us directly to the Olympic Village. I was in New York on Monday presenting it to the IOC. We won the competition -- what was it, nine months ago? Again, a direct reflection from using these processes to develop extremely complicated, very large-scale organisms. And then, also, was working with broad strategies. In this case, we only used 15 of the 60 acres of land, and the 45 acres was a park and would become the legacy of the Olympic Village. And it would become the second largest park in the boroughs, etc. Its position, of course, in the middle of Manhattan -- it's on Hunter's Point. And then the broader ideas of city-making start having direct influences on architecture, on the elements that make up the broader scheme, the buildings themselves, and start guiding us. Architecture for me has been an investigation of a multiplicity of forces that could come from literally any place. And so I can start this discussion in any number of places, and I've chosen three or four to talk about. And it has also to do with an interest in the vast kind of territory that architecture touches. It literally is connected to anything in terms of knowledge base. There's just no place that it doesn't somehow have a connective tissue to. This is Jim Dine, and it's the absence of presence, etc. It's the clothing, the skin, without the presence of the character. It became kind of an idea for the notion of the surface of a work, and it was used in a project where we could unravel that surface, and it was a figurative idea that was going to be folded and made into a very, kind of complex space. And the idea was the relationship of the space, which was made up of the fold of the image, and the dialectic or the conflict between the figuration, and the clarity of the image and the complexity of the space, which were in dialog. And it made us rethink the whole notion of how we work and how we make things, and it led us to ideas that were closer to fashion design as we flattened out surfaces, and then brought them back together as they could make spatial combinations. And this was the first prototype in Korea, as we're dealing with a dynamic envelope, and then the same characteristic of the fabric. It has a material identity and it's translucent and it's porous, and it allows us for a very different notion of what a skin of a building is. And that turned right away into another project. This is the Caltrans building in Los Angeles. And now we're seeing as the skin and the body is differentiated. Again, it's a very, very simple notion. If you look at most buildings, what you look at is the building, the facade, and it is the building. And all of a sudden we're kind of moving away, and we're separating the skin from the body, and that's going to lead to broader performance criteria, which I'm going to talk about in a minute. And you're looking at how it drapes over and differentiates from the body. And then, again, the building itself, middle of Los Angeles, right across from City Hall. And as it moves, it takes pieces of the earth with it. It bends up. It's part of a sign system, which was part of the kind of legacy of Los Angeles -- the two-dimension, three-dimension signing, etc. And then it allows one to penetrate the work itself. It's transparent, and it allows you to understand, I think, what is always the most interesting thing in any building, which is the actual constructional processes that make it. And it's probably the most intense kind of territory of the work, which is not occupied, because architecture is always the most interesting in some mechanism when it's separated from function, and this is an area that allows for that. And then the skin starts transforming into other materials. We're using light as a building material in this case. We're working with Keith Sonnier in New York, and we're making this large outside room, which is possible in Los Angeles, and which is very much reflective of the urban, the contemporary urban environments that you would find in Shibuya or you'd find in Mexico City or Sao Paulo, etc., that have to do with activating the city over a longer span of time. And that was very much part of the notion of the urban objective of this project in Los Angeles. And, again, all of it promoting transparency. And an image which may be closest talks about the use of light as a medium, that light becomes literally a building material. Well, that immediately turned into something much broader, and as a scope. And again, we're looking at an early sketch where I'm understanding now that the skin can be a transition between the ground and the tower. This is a building in San Francisco which is under construction. And now it turned into something much, much broader as a problem, and it has to do with performance. This will be the first building in the United States that took -- well, I can't say it took the air conditioning out. It's a hybrid. I wanted a pure thing, and I can't get it. It's a wrong attitude, actually, because the hybrid is probably more interesting. But we took the air conditioning out of the tower. There's some air conditioning left in the base, but the skin now moves on hydraulics. It forces air through a Venturi force if there's no wind. It adjusts continually. And we removed the air conditioning. Huge, huge thing. Half a million dollars a year delta. 10 of these -- it's just under a million square feet -- 800 and some thousand square feet -- 10 of these would power Sausalito -- the delta on this. And so now what we're looking at, as the projects get larger in scale, as they interface with broader problems, that they expand the capabilities in terms of their performance. Well, I could also start here. We could talk about the relationship at a more biological sense of the relationship of building and ground. Well, our research -- my generation for sure, people who were going to school in the late '60s -- made very much a shift out of the internal focus of architecture, looking at architecture within its own territory, and we were much more affected by film, by what was going on in the art world, etc. This is, of course, Michael Heizer. And when I saw this, first an image and then visited, it completely changed the way I thought after that point. And I understood that building really could be the augmentation of the Earth's surface, and it completely shifted the notion of building ground in the most basic sense. And then -- well, he was probably looking at this -- this is Nazca; this is 700 years ago -- the most amazing four-kilometer land sculptures. They're just totally incredible. And that led us to then completely rethinking how we draw, how we work. This is the first sketch of a high school in Pomona -- well, whatever it is, a model, a conceptual, kind of idea. And it's the reshaping of the Earth to make it occupiable. So it puts 200,000 square feet of stuff that make a high school work in the surface of that Earth. There it is modeled as it was developing into a piece of work. And there it is, again, as it's starting to get resolved tectonically, and then there's the school. And, of course, we're interested in participating with education. I have absolutely no interest in producing a building that just accommodates X, Y and Z function. What I'm interested in are how these ideas participate in the educational process of young people. It demands some sort of notion of inquiry because it's a system that's developed not sculpturally. It's an idea that started from my first discussion. It has to do with a broad, consistent logic, and that logic could be understood as one occupies the building. And there's an overt -- at least, there's an attempt to make a very overt notion of a building that connects to the land in a very different way because I was interested in a very didactic approach to the problem, as one would understand that. And the second project that was just finished in Los Angeles that uses some of the same ideas. It uses landscape as a major idea. Then, again, we're doing the headquarters for NOAA -- National Oceanographic and Atmospheric Agency -- outside of Washington in Maryland. And this is how they see the world. They have 22 satellites zipping around at plus or minus 100 miles, and the site's in red. And what we really want to do -- well, the architects, if there are architects out there, this is the Laugier Hut; this is the primitive hut that's been around for so long -- and what we wanted to do is really build this, because they see themselves as the caretakers of the world, and we wanted them to look down at their satellite, how they see their own site, that eight-acre site, and we wanted nothing left. We wanted it to stay green. There's actually three baseball fields on it right now, and they're going to stay there. We put one piece directly north-south, and it holds the dishes at the ears, right? And then right below that the processing, and the mission lift, and the mission control room, and all the other spaces are underground. And what you look at is an aircraft carrier that's performance-driven by the cone vision of these satellite dishes. And that the building itself is occupied in the lower portion, broken up by a series of courts, and it's five acres of uninterrupted, horizontal space for their administrative offices. And then that, in turn, propelled us to look at larger-scale projects where this notion of landscape building interface becomes a connective tissue. The new capital competition for Berlin, four years ago. And again we just finished the ECB -- actually Coop Himmelblau in Vienna just won this project, where the building was separated into a series of landscape elements that became part of a connective tissue of a park, which is parallel to the river, and develops ideas of the buildings themselves and becomes part of the connective fabric -- the social, cultural and the landscape, recreational fabric of the city. And the building is no longer seen as an autonomous thing, but something that's only inextricably connected to this city and this place at this time. And a project that was realized in Austria, the Hooper Bank, which again used this idea of connecting typology, the traditional buildings, and morphology, or the relationship of the development of land as an idea, into a complex, which is a piece of a city where we can see part of it is literally just this augmenting, this movement of the land that's a very simple idea of just lifting it up and occupying it, and other parts are much more energetic and intense. And talk about that intensity in terms of the collisions of the kind of events they make that have to do with putting a series of systems together, and then where part of it is in the ground, part of it is oppositional lifts. One enters the building as it lifts off the ground, and it becomes part of the idea. And then the skin -- the edges of this -- all promote the dynamic, the movement of the building as a series of seismic shifts, geologic shifts. Right? And it makes for event space and then it breaks in places that allow you to peer into the interior, and those interiors, again, are promoting transparency for the workplace, which has been a continual interest of ours. And then, again, in a more, kind of traditional setting, this is a graduate student housing in Toronto, and it's very much about the relationship of a building as it makes a connective tissue to the city. The main idea was the gateway, where it breaks the site, and the building occupies both the public space and the private space. And it's that territory of -- it's this thing. I visited the site many times, and everybody, kind of -- you can see this from two kilometers away; it's an exact center of the street, and the whole notion is to engage the public, to engage buildings as part of the public tissue of the city. And finally, one of the most interesting projects -- it's a courthouse. And what I want to talk about -- this is the Supreme Court, of course -- and, well, I'm dealing with Michael Hogan, the Chief Justice of Oregon. You could not proceed without making this negotiation between one's own values and the relationship of the character you're working with and how he understands the court, because I'm showing him, of course, Corbusier at Savoy, which is 1928, which is the beginning of modern architecture. Well, then we get to this image. And this is where the project started. Because I'm going, I'm interested in the phenomenon that's taking place in here. And really what we're talking about is constructing reality. And I'm a character that's extremely interested in understanding the nature of that constructed reality because there's no such thing as nature any more. Nature is gone. Nature in the 19th-century sense, alright? Nature is only a cultural edifice today, right? We construct it and we construct those ideas. And then of course, this one, our governor at the moment. And we spent some time with Conan, believe it or not, and then that led us to, kind of, the very differences of our worlds from a legal and an artistic, architectural. And it forced us to talk about notions of how we work, and the dynamics of that, and what other sources of the work is. And it led us to the project, the courthouse, which is absolutely a part of a negotiation between tradition and pieces of the traditional courthouse. You'll find a stair that's the same length as the Supreme Court. Here's a piano nobile, which is a device used in the Renaissance. The courts were made of that. The skin is this series of layers that reflect even rusticated stonework, but which were embedded with fragments of the Constitution, which were part of the little process, all set on a plinth that defined it from the community. Thank you so much. (Applause)

Like many of you, I'm one of the lucky people. I was born to a family where education was pervasive. I'm a third-generation PhD, a daughter of two academics. In my childhood, I played around in my father's university lab. So it was taken for granted that I attend some of the best universities, which in turn opened the door to a world of opportunity. Unfortunately, most of the people in the world are not so lucky. In some parts of the world, for example, South Africa, education is just not readily accessible. In South Africa, the educational system was constructed in the days of apartheid for the white minority. And as a consequence, today there is just not enough spots for the many more people who want and deserve a high quality education. That scarcity led to a crisis in January of this year at the University of Johannesburg. There were a handful of positions left open from the standard admissions process, and the night before they were supposed to open that for registration, thousands of people lined up outside the gate in a line a mile long, hoping to be first in line to get one of those positions. When the gates opened, there was a stampede, and 20 people were injured and one woman died. She was a mother who gave her life trying to get her son a chance at a better life. But even in parts of the world like the United States where education is available, it might not be within reach. There has been much discussed in the last few years about the rising cost of health care. What might not be quite as obvious to people is that during that same period the cost of higher education tuition has been increasing at almost twice the rate, for a total of 559 percent since 1985. This makes education unaffordable for many people. Finally, even for those who do manage to get the higher education, the doors of opportunity might not open. Only a little over half of recent college graduates in the United States who get a higher education actually are working in jobs that require that education. This, of course, is not true for the students who graduate from the top institutions, but for many others, they do not get the value for their time and their effort. Tom Friedman, in his recent New York Times article, captured, in the way that no one else could, the spirit behind our effort. He said the big breakthroughs are what happen when what is suddenly possible meets what is desperately necessary. I've talked about what's desperately necessary. Let's talk about what's suddenly possible. What's suddenly possible was demonstrated by three big Stanford classes, each of which had an enrollment of 100,000 people or more. So to understand this, let's look at one of those classes, the Machine Learning class offered by my colleague and cofounder Andrew Ng. Andrew teaches one of the bigger Stanford classes. It's a Machine Learning class, and it has 400 people enrolled every time it's offered. When Andrew taught the Machine Learning class to the general public, it had 100,000 people registered. So to put that number in perspective, for Andrew to reach that same size audience by teaching a Stanford class, he would have to do that for 250 years. Of course, he'd get really bored. So, having seen the impact of this, Andrew and I decided that we needed to really try and scale this up, to bring the best quality education to as many people as we could. So we formed Coursera, whose goal is to take the best courses from the best instructors at the best universities and provide it to everyone around the world for free. We currently have 43 courses on the platform from four universities across a range of disciplines, and let me show you a little bit of an overview of what that looks like. (Video) Robert Ghrist: Welcome to Calculus. Ezekiel Emanuel: Fifty million people are uninsured. Scott Page: Models help us design more effective institutions and policies. We get unbelievable segregation. Scott Klemmer: So Bush imagined that in the future, you'd wear a camera right in the center of your head. Mitchell Duneier: Mills wants the student of sociology to develop the quality of mind ... RG: Hanging cable takes on the form of a hyperbolic cosine. Nick Parlante: For each pixel in the image, set the red to zero. Paul Offit: ... Vaccine allowed us to eliminate polio virus. Dan Jurafsky: Does Lufthansa serve breakfast and San Jose? Well, that sounds funny. Daphne Koller: So this is which coin you pick, and this is the two tosses. Andrew Ng: So in large-scale machine learning, we'd like to come up with computational ... (Applause) DK: It turns out, maybe not surprisingly, that students like getting the best content from the best universities for free. Since we opened the website in February, we now have 640,000 students from 190 countries. We have 1.5 million enrollments, 6 million quizzes in the 15 classes that have launched so far have been submitted, and 14 million videos have been viewed. But it's not just about the numbers, it's also about the people. Whether it's Akash, who comes from a small town in India and would never have access in this case to a Stanford-quality course and would never be able to afford it. Or Jenny, who is a single mother of two and wants to hone her skills so that she can go back and complete her master's degree. Or Ryan, who can't go to school, because his immune deficient daughter can't be risked to have germs come into the house, so he couldn't leave the house. I'm really glad to say -- recently, we've been in correspondence with Ryan -- that this story had a happy ending. Baby Shannon -- you can see her on the left -- is doing much better now, and Ryan got a job by taking some of our courses. So what made these courses so different? After all, online course content has been available for a while. What made it different was that this was real course experience. It started on a given day, and then the students would watch videos on a weekly basis and do homework assignments. And these would be real homework assignments for a real grade, with a real deadline. You can see the deadlines and the usage graph. These are the spikes showing that procrastination is global phenomenon. (Laughter) At the end of the course, the students got a certificate. They could present that certificate to a prospective employer and get a better job, and we know many students who did. Some students took their certificate and presented this to an educational institution at which they were enrolled for actual college credit. So these students were really getting something meaningful for their investment of time and effort. Let's talk a little bit about some of the components that go into these courses. The first component is that when you move away from the constraints of a physical classroom and design content explicitly for an online format, you can break away from, for example, the monolithic one-hour lecture. You can break up the material, for example, into these short, modular units of eight to 12 minutes, each of which represents a coherent concept. Students can traverse this material in different ways, depending on their background, their skills or their interests. So, for example, some students might benefit from a little bit of preparatory material that other students might already have. Other students might be interested in a particular enrichment topic that they want to pursue individually. So this format allows us to break away from the one-size-fits-all model of education, and allows students to follow a much more personalized curriculum. Of course, we all know as educators that students don't learn by sitting and passively watching videos. Perhaps one of the biggest components of this effort is that we need to have students who practice with the material in order to really understand it. There's been a range of studies that demonstrate the importance of this. This one that appeared in Science last year, for example, demonstrates that even simple retrieval practice, where students are just supposed to repeat what they already learned gives considerably improved results on various achievement tests down the line than many other educational interventions. We've tried to build in retrieval practice into the platform, as well as other forms of practice in many ways. For example, even our videos are not just videos. Every few minutes, the video pauses and the students get asked a question. (Video) SP: ... These four things. Prospect theory, hyperbolic discounting, status quo bias, base rate bias. They're all well documented. So they're all well documented deviations from rational behavior. DK: So here the video pauses, and the student types in the answer into the box and submits. Obviously they weren't paying attention. (Laughter) So they get to try again, and this time they got it right. There's an optional explanation if they want. And now the video moves on to the next part of the lecture. This is a kind of simple question that I as an instructor might ask in class, but when I ask that kind of a question in class, 80 percent of the students are still scribbling the last thing I said, 15 percent are zoned out on Facebook, and then there's the smarty pants in the front row who blurts out the answer before anyone else has had a chance to think about it, and I as the instructor am terribly gratified that somebody actually knew the answer. And so the lecture moves on before, really, most of the students have even noticed that a question had been asked. Here, every single student has to engage with the material. And of course these simple retrieval questions are not the end of the story. One needs to build in much more meaningful practice questions, and one also needs to provide the students with feedback on those questions. Now, how do you grade the work of 100,000 students if you do not have 10,000 TAs? The answer is, you need to use technology to do it for you. Now, fortunately, technology has come a long way, and we can now grade a range of interesting types of homework. In addition to multiple choice and the kinds of short answer questions that you saw in the video, we can also grade math, mathematical expressions as well as mathematical derivations. We can grade models, whether it's financial models in a business class or physical models in a science or engineering class and we can grade some pretty sophisticated programming assignments. Let me show you one that's actually pretty simple but fairly visual. This is from Stanford's Computer Science 101 class, and the students are supposed to color-correct that blurry red image. They're typing their program into the browser, and you can see they didn't get it quite right, Lady Liberty is still seasick. And so, the student tries again, and now they got it right, and they're told that, and they can move on to the next assignment. This ability to interact actively with the material and be told when you're right or wrong is really essential to student learning. Now, of course we cannot yet grade the range of work that one needs for all courses. Specifically, what's lacking is the kind of critical thinking work that is so essential in such disciplines as the humanities, the social sciences, business and others. So we tried to convince, for example, some of our humanities faculty that multiple choice was not such a bad strategy. That didn't go over really well. So we had to come up with a different solution. And the solution we ended up using is peer grading. It turns out that previous studies show, like this one by Saddler and Good, that peer grading is a surprisingly effective strategy for providing reproducible grades. It was tried only in small classes, but there it showed, for example, that these student-assigned grades on the y-axis are actually very well correlated with the teacher-assigned grade on the x-axis. What's even more surprising is that self-grades, where the students grade their own work critically -- so long as you incentivize them properly so they can't give themselves a perfect score -- are actually even better correlated with the teacher grades. And so this is an effective strategy that can be used for grading at scale, and is also a useful learning strategy for the students, because they actually learn from the experience. So we now have the largest peer-grading pipeline ever devised, where tens of thousands of students are grading each other's work, and quite successfully, I have to say. But this is not just about students sitting alone in their living room working through problems. Around each one of our courses, a community of students had formed, a global community of people around a shared intellectual endeavor. What you see here is a self-generated map from students in our Princeton Sociology 101 course, where they have put themselves on a world map, and you can really see the global reach of this kind of effort. Students collaborated in these courses in a variety of different ways. First of all, there was a question and answer forum, where students would pose questions, and other students would answer those questions. And the really amazing thing is, because there were so many students, it means that even if a student posed a question at 3 o'clock in the morning, somewhere around the world, there would be somebody who was awake and working on the same problem. And so, in many of our courses, the median response time for a question on the question and answer forum was 22 minutes. Which is not a level of service I have ever offered to my Stanford students. (Laughter) And you can see from the student testimonials that students actually find that because of this large online community, they got to interact with each other in many ways that were deeper than they did in the context of the physical classroom. Students also self-assembled, without any kind of intervention from us, into small study groups. Some of these were physical study groups along geographical constraints and met on a weekly basis to work through problem sets. This is the San Francisco study group, but there were ones all over the world. Others were virtual study groups, sometimes along language lines or along cultural lines, and on the bottom left there, you see our multicultural universal study group where people explicitly wanted to connect with people from other cultures. There are some tremendous opportunities to be had from this kind of framework. The first is that it has the potential of giving us a completely unprecedented look into understanding human learning. Because the data that we can collect here is unique. You can collect every click, every homework submission, every forum post from tens of thousands of students. So you can turn the study of human learning from the hypothesis-driven mode to the data-driven mode, a transformation that, for example, has revolutionized biology. You can use these data to understand fundamental questions like, what are good learning strategies that are effective versus ones that are not? And in the context of particular courses, you can ask questions like, what are some of the misconceptions that are more common and how do we help students fix them? So here's an example of that, also from Andrew's Machine Learning class. This is a distribution of wrong answers to one of Andrew's assignments. The answers happen to be pairs of numbers, so you can draw them on this two-dimensional plot. Each of the little crosses that you see is a different wrong answer. The big cross at the top left is where 2,000 students gave the exact same wrong answer. Now, if two students in a class of 100 give the same wrong answer, you would never notice. But when 2,000 students give the same wrong answer, it's kind of hard to miss. So Andrew and his students went in, looked at some of those assignments, understood the root cause of the misconception, and then they produced a targeted error message that would be provided to every student whose answer fell into that bucket, which means that students who made that same mistake would now get personalized feedback telling them how to fix their misconception much more effectively. So this personalization is something that one can then build by having the virtue of large numbers. Personalization is perhaps one of the biggest opportunities here as well, because it provides us with the potential of solving a 30-year-old problem. Educational researcher Benjamin Bloom, in 1984, posed what's called the 2 sigma problem, which he observed by studying three populations. The first is the population that studied in a lecture-based classroom. The second is a population of students that studied using a standard lecture-based classroom, but with a mastery-based approach, so the students couldn't move on to the next topic before demonstrating mastery of the previous one. And finally, there was a population of students that were taught in a one-on-one instruction using a tutor. The mastery-based population was a full standard deviation, or sigma, in achievement scores better than the standard lecture-based class, and the individual tutoring gives you 2 sigma improvement in performance. To understand what that means, let's look at the lecture-based classroom, and let's pick the median performance as a threshold. So in a lecture-based class, half the students are above that level and half are below. In the individual tutoring instruction, 98 percent of the students are going to be above that threshold. Imagine if we could teach so that 98 percent of our students would be above average. Hence, the 2 sigma problem. Because we cannot afford, as a society, to provide every student with an individual human tutor. But maybe we can afford to provide each student with a computer or a smartphone. So the question is, how can we use technology to push from the left side of the graph, from the blue curve, to the right side with the green curve? Mastery is easy to achieve using a computer, because a computer doesn't get tired of showing you the same video five times. And it doesn't even get tired of grading the same work multiple times, we've seen that in many of the examples that I've shown you. And even personalization is something that we're starting to see the beginnings of, whether it's via the personalized trajectory through the curriculum or some of the personalized feedback that we've shown you. So the goal here is to try and push, and see how far we can get towards the green curve. So, if this is so great, are universities now obsolete? Well, Mark Twain certainly thought so. He said that, "College is a place where a professor's lecture notes go straight to the students' lecture notes, without passing through the brains of either." (Laughter) I beg to differ with Mark Twain, though. I think what he was complaining about is not universities but rather the lecture-based format that so many universities spend so much time on. So let's go back even further, to Plutarch, who said that, "The mind is not a vessel that needs filling, but wood that needs igniting." And maybe we should spend less time at universities filling our students' minds with content by lecturing at them, and more time igniting their creativity, their imagination and their problem-solving skills by actually talking with them. So how do we do that? We do that by doing active learning in the classroom. So there's been many studies, including this one, that show that if you use active learning, interacting with your students in the classroom, performance improves on every single metric -- on attendance, on engagement and on learning as measured by a standardized test. You can see, for example, that the achievement score almost doubles in this particular experiment. So maybe this is how we should spend our time at universities. So to summarize, if we could offer a top quality education to everyone around the world for free, what would that do? Three things. First it would establish education as a fundamental human right, where anyone around the world with the ability and the motivation could get the skills that they need to make a better life for themselves, their families and their communities. Second, it would enable lifelong learning. It's a shame that for so many people, learning stops when we finish high school or when we finish college. By having this amazing content be available, we would be able to learn something new every time we wanted, whether it's just to expand our minds or it's to change our lives. And finally, this would enable a wave of innovation, because amazing talent can be found anywhere. Maybe the next Albert Einstein or the next Steve Jobs is living somewhere in a remote village in Africa. And if we could offer that person an education, they would be able to come up with the next big idea and make the world a better place for all of us. Thank you very much. (Applause)

The "Dirty Jobs" crew and I were called to a little town in Colorado, called Craig. It's only a couple dozen square miles. It's in the Rockies. And the job in question was sheep rancher. My role on the show, for those of you who haven't seen it -- it's pretty simple. I'm an apprentice, and I work with the people who actually do the jobs in question. And my responsibilities are to simply try and keep up and give an honest account of what it's like to be these people, for one day in their life. The job in question: herding sheep. Great. We go to Craig and we check in to a hotel and I realize the next day that castration is going to be an absolute part of this work. So, normally, I never do any research at all. But, this is a touchy subject, and I work for the Discovery Channel, and we want to portray accurately whatever it is we do, and we certainly want to do it with a lot of respect for the animals. So I called the Humane Society and I say, "Look, I'm going to be castrating some lambs, Can you tell me the deal?" And they're like, "Yeah, it's pretty straightforward." They use a band -- basically a rubber band, like this, only a little smaller. This one was actually around the playing cards I got yesterday, but it had a certain familiarity to it. And I said, "Well, what exactly is the process?" And they said, "The band is applied to the tail, tightly. And then another band is applied to the scrotum, tightly. Blood flow is slowly retarded; a week later the parts in question fall off. "Great -- got it." OK, I call the SPCA to confirm this -- they confirm it. I also call PETA, just for fun, and they don't like it -- but they confirm it. OK, that's basically how you do it. So the next day I go out. And I'm given a horse and we go get the lambs and we take them to a pen that we built, and we go about the business of animal husbandry. Melanie is the wife of Albert. Albert is the shepherd in question. Melanie picks up the lamb -- two hands -- one hand on both legs on the right, likewise on the left. Lamb goes on the post, she opens it up. Alright. Great. Albert goes in, I follow Albert, the crew is around. I always watch the process done the first time before I try it. Being an apprentice, you know, you do that. Albert reaches in his pocket to pull out, you know, this black rubber band but what comes out instead is a knife. And I'm like that's not rubber at all, you know. And he kind of flicked it open in a way that caught the sun that was just coming over the Rockies, it was very -- it was, it was impressive. In the space of about two seconds, Albert had the knife between the cartilage of the tail, right next to the butt of the lamb, and very quickly the tail was gone and in the bucket that I was holding. A second later, with a big thumb and a well calloused forefinger, he had the scrotum firmly in his grasp. And he pulled it toward him, like so, and he took the knife and he put it on the tip. Now you think you know what's coming, Michael -- you don't, OK? He snips it, throws the tip over his shoulder, and then grabs the scrotum and pushes it upward, and then his head dips down, obscuring my view, but what I hear is a slurping sound, and a noise that sounds like Velcro being yanked off a sticky wall and I am not even kidding. Can we roll the video? No I'm kidding -- we don't -- (Laughter) I thought it best to talk in pictures. So, I do something now I've never ever done on a "Dirty Jobs" shoot, ever. I say, "Time out. Stop." You guys know the show, we use take one, we don't do take two. There's no writing, there's no scripting, there's no nonsense. We don't fool around, we don't rehearse -- we shoot what we get! I said, "Stop. This is nuts." I mean, you know. (Laughter) "This is crazy. We can't do this." And Albert's like, "What?" And I'm like, "I don't know what just happened, but there are testicles in this bucket and that's not how we do it." And he said "Well, that's how we do it." And I said, "Why would you do it this way?" And before I even let him explain, I said, "I want to do it the right way, with the rubber bands." And he says, "Like the Humane Society?" And I said, "Yes, like the Humane Society. Let's do something that doesn't make the lamb squeal and bleed -- we're on in five continents, dude. We're on twice a day on the Discovery Channel -- we can't do this." He says, "OK." He goes to his box and he pulls out a bag of these little rubber bands. Melanie picks up another lamb, puts it on the post, band goes on the tail, band goes on the scrotum. Lamb goes on the ground, lamb takes two steps, falls down, gets up, shakes a little, takes another couple steps, falls down. I'm like, this is not a good sign for this lamb, at all. Gets up, walks to the corner, it's quivering, and it lies down and it's in obvious distress. And I'm looking at the lamb and I say, "Albert, how long? When does he get up?" He's like, "A day." I said, "A day! How long does it take them to fall off?" "A week." Meanwhile, the lamb that he had just did his little procedure on is, you know, he's just prancing around, bleeding stopped. He's, you know, nibbling on some grass, frolicking. And I was just so blown away at how wrong I was, in that second. And I was reminded how utterly wrong I am, so much of the time. (Laughter) And I was especially reminded of what an ridiculously short straw I had that day because now I had to do what Albert had just done, and there are like 100 of these lambs in the pen, and suddenly this whole thing's starting to feel like a German porno, and I'm like ... (Laughter) Melanie picks up the lamb, puts it on the post, opens it up. Albert hands me the knife. I go in, tail comes off. I go in, I grab the scrotum, tip comes off. Albert instructs, "Push it way up there." I do. "Push it further." I do. The testicles emerge -- they look like thumbs, coming right at you -- and he says, "Bite 'em. Just bite 'em off." And I heard him, I heard all the words. (Laughter) Like, how did -- how did I get here? How did -- you know -- I mean -- how did I get here? (Laughter) It's just -- it's one of those moments where the brain goes off on it's own: and suddenly, I'm standing there, in the Rockies, and all I can think of is the Aristotelian definition of a tragedy. You know, Aristotle says a tragedy is that moment when the hero comes face to face with his true identity. (Laughter) And I'm like, "What is this jacked-up metaphor? I don't like what I'm thinking right now." And I can't get this thought out of my head, and I can't get that vision out of my sight, so I did what I had to do. I went in and I took them. I took them like this, and I yanked my face back. And I'm standing there with two testicles on my chin. (Laughter) And now I can't get -- I can't shake the metaphor. OK, I'm still in "Poetics," in Aristotle, and I'm thinking -- out of nowhere, two terms come crashing into my head that I haven't heard since my classics professor in college drilled them there. And they are anagnorisis and peripeteia. Anagnorisis and peripeteia. Anagnorisis is the Greek word for discovery. Literally, the transition from ignorance to knowledge is anagnorisis. It's what our network does; it's what "Dirty Jobs" is. And I'm up to my neck in anagnorises every single day. Great. The other word, peripeteia, that's the moment in the great tragedies, you know -- Euripides and Sophocles -- the moment where Oedipus has his moment, where he suddenly realizes that hot chick he's been sleeping with and having babies with is his mother. OK. That's peripety or peripeteia. And this metaphor in my head -- I got anagnorisis and peripetia on my chin. (Laughter) I got to tell you, it's such a great device though. When you start to look for peripetia, you find it everywhere. I mean, Bruce Willis in "The Sixth Sense," right? Spends the whole movie trying to help the little kid who sees dead people, and then, boom -- "Oh, I'm dead" -- peripetia. You know? It's crushing when the audience sees it the right way. Neo in "The Matrix," you know? "Oh, I'm living in a computer program" -- that's weird. These discoveries that lead to sudden realizations; and I've been having them, over 200 dirty jobs, I have them all the time, but that one -- that one drilled something home in a way that I just wasn't prepared for. And, as I stood there, looking at the happy lamb that I had just defiled -- but it looked OK. Looking at that poor other little thing that I'd done it the right way on, and I just was struck by if I'm wrong about that and if I'm wrong so often, in a literal way, what other peripatetic misconceptions might I be able to comment upon? Because, look, I'm not a social anthropologist but I have a friend who is. And I talk to him. (Laughter) And he says, "Hey Mike. Look, I don't know if your brain is interested in this sort of thing or not, but do you realize you've shot in every state? You've worked in mining, you've worked in fishing, you've worked in steel, you've worked in every major industry. You've had your back shoulder to shoulder with these guys that our politicians are desperate to relate to every four years, right?" I can still see Hillary doing the shots of rye, dribbling down her chin, with the steel workers. I mean, these are the people that I work with every single day. "And if you have something to say about their thoughts, collectively, it might be time to think about it. Because, dude, you know, four years." You know, that's in my head, testicles are on my chin, thoughts are bouncing around. And, after that shoot, Dirty Jobs really didn't change, in terms of what the show is, but it changed for me, personally. And now, when I talk about the show, I no longer just tell the story you heard and 190 like it. I do, but I also start to talk about some of the other things I got wrong, some of the other notions of work that I've just been assuming are sacrosanct, and they're not. People with dirty jobs are happier than you think. As a group, they're the happiest people I know. And I don't want to start whistling "Look for the Union Label," and all that happy worker crap. I'm just telling you that these are balanced people who do unthinkable work. Roadkill picker-uppers whistle while they work. I swear to God -- I did it with them. They've got this amazing sort of symmetry to their life. And I see it over and over and over again. So I started to wonder what would happen if we challenged some of these sacred cows. Follow your passion -- we've been talking about it here for the last 36 hours. Follow your passion -- what could possibly be wrong with that? Probably the worst advice I ever got. (Laughter) You know, follow your dreams and go broke, right? I mean, that's all I heard growing up. I didn't know what to do with my life, but I was told if you follow your passion, it's going to work out. I can give you 30 examples, right now -- Bob Combs, the pig farmer in Las Vegas who collects the uneaten scraps of food from the casinos and feeds them them to his swine. Why? Because there's so much protein in the stuff we don't eat his pigs grow at twice the normal speed, and he is one rich pig farmer, and he is good for the environment, and he spends his days doing this incredible service, and he smells like hell, but God bless him. He's making a great living. You ask him, "Did you follow your passion here?" and he'd laugh at you. The guy's worth -- he just got offered like 60 million dollars for his farm and turned it down, outside of Vegas. He didn't follow his passion. He stepped back and he watched where everybody was going and he went the other way. And I hear that story over and over. Matt Froind, a dairy farmer in New Canaan, Connecticut, who woke up one day and realized the crap from his cows was worth more than their milk, if he could use it to make these biodegradable flower pots. Now, he's selling them to Walmart. Follow his passion? The guy's -- come on. So I started to look at passion, I started to look at efficiency versus effectiveness -- as Tim talked about earlier, that's a huge distinction. I started to look at teamwork and determination, and basically all those platitudes they call "successories" that hang with that schmaltzy art in boardrooms around the world right now. That stuff -- it's suddenly all been turned on its head. Safety -- safety first? Going back to, you know, OSHA and PETA and the Humane Society: what if OSHA got it wrong? I mean -- this is heresy, what I'm about to say -- but what if it's really safety third? Right? (Laughter) No, I mean really. What I mean to say is I value my safety on these crazy jobs as much as the people that I'm working with, but the ones who really get it done, they're not out there talking about safety first. They know that other things come first -- the business of doing the work comes first, the business of getting it done. And I'll never forget, up in the Bering Sea, I was on a crab boat with the "Deadliest Catch" guys -- which I also work on -- in the first season. We're about 100 miles off the coast of Russia: 50-foot seas, big waves, green water coming over the wheelhouse, right? Most hazardous environment I'd ever seen, and I was back with a guy, lashing the pots down. So, I'm 40 feet off the deck, which is like looking down at the top of your shoe, you know, and it's doing this in the ocean. Unspeakably dangerous. I scamper down, I go into the wheelhouse and I say, with some level of incredulity, "Captain, OSHA." And he says, "OSHA? Ocean." And he points out there. (Laughter) But in that moment, what he said next can't be repeated in the lower 48. It can't be repeated on any factory floor or any construction site. But he looked at me, and he said, "Son" -- he's my age, by the way, he calls me son, I love that -- he says, "Son, I'm a captain of a crab boat. My responsibility is not to get you home alive. My responsibility is to get you home rich." (Laughter) You want to get home alive, that's on you. And for the rest of that day, safety first. I was like -- So, the idea that we create this false -- this sense of complacency when all we do is talk about somebody else's responsibility as though it's our own, and vice versa. Anyhow, a whole lot of things. I could talk at length about the many little distinctions we made and the endless list of ways that I got it wrong. But, what it all comes down to is this. I formed a theory, and I'm going to share it now in my remaining two minutes and 30 seconds. It goes like this -- we've declared war on work, as a society, all of us. It's a civil war. It's a cold war, really. We didn't set out to do it and we didn't twist our mustache in some Machiavellian way, but we've done it. And we've waged this war on at least four fronts, certainly in Hollywood. The way we portray working people on TV -- it's laughable. If there's a plumber, he's 300 pounds and he's got a giant butt crack. Admit it. You see him all the time. That's what plumbers look like, right? We turn them into heroes, or we turn them into punch lines. That's what TV does. We try hard on "Dirty Jobs" not to do that, which is why I do the work and I don't cheat. But, we've waged this war on Madison Avenue. I mean, so many of the commercials that come out there -- in the way of a message, what's really being said? Your life would be better if you could work a little less, if you didn't have to work so hard, if you could get home a little earlier, if you could retire a little faster, if you could punch out a little sooner -- it's all in there, over and over, again and again. Washington? I can't even begin to talk about the deals and policies in place that affect the bottom line reality of the available jobs because I don't really know. I just know that that's a front in this war. And right here guys, Silicon Valley, I mean -- how many people have an iPhone on them right now? How many people have their Blackberries? We're plugged in; we're connected. I would never suggest for a second that something bad has come out of the tech revolution. Good grief, not to this crowd. (Laughter) But I would suggest that innovation without imitation is a complete waste of time. And nobody celebrates imitation the way "Dirty Jobs" guys know it has to be done. Your iPhone without those people making the same interface, the same circuitry, the same board, over and over? All of that? That's what makes it equally as possible as the genius that goes inside of it. So, we've got this new toolbox, you know. Our tools today don't look like shovels and picks. They look like the stuff we walk around with. And so the collective effect of all of that has been this marginalization of lots and lots of jobs. And I realized, probably too late in this game -- I hope not, because I don't know if I can do 200 more of these things -- but we're going to do as many as we can. And to me the most important thing to know and to really come face to face with, is that fact that I got it wrong about a lot of things, not just the testicles on my chin. I got a lot wrong. So, we're thinking -- by we, I mean me -- that the thing to do is to talk about a PR campaign for work, manual labor, skilled labor. Somebody needs to be out there talking about the forgotten benefits. I'm talking about grandfather stuff, the stuff a lot us probably grew up with but we've kind of -- you know, kind of lost a little. Barack wants to create two and a half million jobs. The infrastructure is a huge deal. This war on work, that I suppose exists, has casualties like any other war. The infrastructure's the first one; declining trade-school enrollments are the second one. Every single year: fewer electricians, fewer carpenters, fewer plumbers, fewer welders, fewer pipefitters, fewer steamfitters. The infrastructure jobs that everybody is talking about creating are those guys -- the ones that have been in decline, over and over. Meanwhile, we've got two trillion dollars -- at a minimum, according to the American Society of Civil Engineers -- that we need to expend to even make a dent in the infrastructure, which is currently rated at a D minus. So, if I were running for anything, and I'm not, I would simply say that the jobs we hope to make and the jobs we hope to create aren't going to stick unless they're jobs that people want. And I know the point of this conference is to celebrate things that are near and dear to us, but I also know that clean and dirty aren't opposites. They're two sides of the same coin, just like innovation and imitation, like risk and responsibility, like peripetia and anagnorisis, like that poor little lamb, who I hope isn't quivering anymore, and like my time that's gone. It's been great talking to you and get back to work, will you? (Applause)

I'm going to speak today about the relationship between science and human values. Now, it's generally understood that questions of morality -- questions of good and evil and right and wrong -- are questions about which science officially has no opinion. It's thought that science can help us get what we value, but it can never tell us what we ought to value. And, consequently, most people -- I think most people probably here -- think that science will never answer the most important questions in human life: questions like, "What is worth living for?" "What is worth dying for?" "What constitutes a good life?" So, I'm going to argue that this is an illusion -- that the separation between science and human values is an illusion -- and actually quite a dangerous one at this point in human history. Now, it's often said that science cannot give us a foundation for morality and human values, because science deals with facts, and facts and values seem to belong to different spheres. It's often thought that there's no description of the way the world is that can tell us how the world ought to be. But I think this is quite clearly untrue. Values are a certain kind of fact. They are facts about the well-being of conscious creatures. Why is it that we don't have ethical obligations toward rocks? Why don't we feel compassion for rocks? It's because we don't think rocks can suffer. And if we're more concerned about our fellow primates than we are about insects, as indeed we are, it's because we think they're exposed to a greater range of potential happiness and suffering. Now, the crucial thing to notice here is that this is a factual claim: This is something that we could be right or wrong about. And if we have misconstrued the relationship between biological complexity and the possibilities of experience well then we could be wrong about the inner lives of insects. And there's no notion, no version of human morality and human values that I've ever come across that is not at some point reducible to a concern about conscious experience and its possible changes. Even if you get your values from religion, even if you think that good and evil ultimately relate to conditions after death -- either to an eternity of happiness with God or an eternity of suffering in hell -- you are still concerned about consciousness and its changes. And to say that such changes can persist after death is itself a factual claim, which, of course, may or may not be true. Now, to speak about the conditions of well-being in this life, for human beings, we know that there is a continuum of such facts. We know that it's possible to live in a failed state, where everything that can go wrong does go wrong -- where mothers cannot feed their children, where strangers cannot find the basis for peaceful collaboration, where people are murdered indiscriminately. And we know that it's possible to move along this continuum towards something quite a bit more idyllic, to a place where a conference like this is even conceivable. And we know -- we know -- that there are right and wrong answers to how to move in this space. Would adding cholera to the water be a good idea? Probably not. Would it be a good idea for everyone to believe in the evil eye, so that when bad things happened to them they immediately blame their neighbors? Probably not. There are truths to be known about how human communities flourish, whether or not we understand these truths. And morality relates to these truths. So, in talking about values we are talking about facts. Now, of course our situation in the world can be understood at many levels -- from the level of the genome on up to the level of economic systems and political arrangements. But if we're going to talk about human well-being we are, of necessity, talking about the human brain. Because we know that our experience of the world and of ourselves within it is realized in the brain -- whatever happens after death. Even if the suicide bomber does get 72 virgins in the afterlife, in this life, his personality -- his rather unfortunate personality -- is the product of his brain. So the contributions of culture -- if culture changes us, as indeed it does, it changes us by changing our brains. And so therefore whatever cultural variation there is in how human beings flourish can, at least in principle, be understood in the context of a maturing science of the mind -- neuroscience, psychology, etc. So, what I'm arguing is that value's reduced to facts -- to facts about the conscious experience of conscious beings. And we can therefore visualize a space of possible changes in the experience of these beings. And I think of this as kind of a moral landscape, with peaks and valleys that correspond to differences in the well-being of conscious creatures, both personal and collective. And one thing to notice is that perhaps there are states of human well-being that we rarely access, that few people access. And these await our discovery. Perhaps some of these states can be appropriately called mystical or spiritual. Perhaps there are other states that we can't access because of how our minds are structured but other minds possibly could access them. Now, let me be clear about what I'm not saying. I'm not saying that science is guaranteed to map this space, or that we will have scientific answers to every conceivable moral question. I don't think, for instance, that you will one day consult a supercomputer to learn whether you should have a second child, or whether we should bomb Iran's nuclear facilities, or whether you can deduct the full cost of TED as a business expense. (Laughter) But if questions affect human well-being then they do have answers, whether or not we can find them. And just admitting this -- just admitting that there are right and wrong answers to the question of how humans flourish -- will change the way we talk about morality, and will change our expectations of human cooperation in the future. For instance, there are 21 states in our country where corporal punishment in the classroom is legal, where it is legal for a teacher to beat a child with a wooden board, hard, and raising large bruises and blisters and even breaking the skin. And hundreds of thousands of children, incidentally, are subjected to this every year. The locations of these enlightened districts, I think, will fail to surprise you. We're not talking about Connecticut. And the rationale for this behavior is explicitly religious. The creator of the universe himself has told us not to spare the rod, lest we spoil the child -- this is in Proverbs 13 and 20, and I believe, 23. But we can ask the obvious question: Is it a good idea, generally speaking, to subject children to pain and violence and public humiliation as a way of encouraging healthy emotional development and good behavior? (Laughter) Is there any doubt that this question has an answer, and that it matters? Now, many of you might worry that the notion of well-being is truly undefined, and seemingly perpetually open to be re-construed. And so, how therefore can there be an objective notion of well-being? Well, consider by analogy, the concept of physical health. The concept of physical health is undefined. As we just heard from Michael Specter, it has changed over the years. When this statue was carved the average life expectancy was probably 30. It's now around 80 in the developed world. There may come a time when we meddle with our genomes in such a way that not being able to run a marathon at age 200 will be considered a profound disability. People will send you donations when you're in that condition. (Laughter) Notice that the fact that the concept of health is open, genuinely open for revision, does not make it vacuous. The distinction between a healthy person and a dead one is about as clear and consequential as any we make in science. Another thing to notice is there may be many peaks on the moral landscape: There may be equivalent ways to thrive; there may be equivalent ways to organize a human society so as to maximize human flourishing. Now, why wouldn't this undermine an objective morality? Well think of how we talk about food: I would never be tempted to argue to you that there must be one right food to eat. There is clearly a range of materials that constitute healthy food. But there's nevertheless a clear distinction between food and poison. The fact that there are many right answers to the question, "What is food?" does not tempt us to say that there are no truths to be known about human nutrition. Many people worry that a universal morality would require moral precepts that admit of no exceptions. So, for instance, if it's really wrong to lie, it must always be wrong to lie, and if you can find an exception, well then there's no such thing as moral truth. Why would we think this? Consider, by analogy, the game of chess. Now, if you're going to play good chess, a principle like, "Don't lose your Queen," is very good to follow. But it clearly admits some exceptions. There are moments when losing your Queen is a brilliant thing to do. There are moments when it is the only good thing you can do. And yet, chess is a domain of perfect objectivity. The fact that there are exceptions here does not change that at all. Now, this brings us to the sorts of moves that people are apt to make in the moral sphere. Consider the great problem of women's bodies: What to do about them? Well this is one thing you can do about them: You can cover them up. Now, it is the position, generally speaking, of our intellectual community that while we may not like this, we might think of this as "wrong" in Boston or Palo Alto, who are we to say that the proud denizens of an ancient culture are wrong to force their wives and daughters to live in cloth bags? And who are we to say, even, that they're wrong to beat them with lengths of steel cable, or throw battery acid in their faces if they decline the privilege of being smothered in this way? Well, who are we not to say this? Who are we to pretend that we know so little about human well-being that we have to be non-judgmental about a practice like this? I'm not talking about voluntary wearing of a veil -- women should be able to wear whatever they want, as far as I'm concerned. But what does voluntary mean in a community where, when a girl gets raped, her father's first impulse, rather often, is to murder her out of shame? Just let that fact detonate in your brain for a minute: Your daughter gets raped, and what you want to do is kill her. What are the chances that represents a peak of human flourishing? Now, to say this is not to say that we have got the perfect solution in our own society. For instance, this is what it's like to go to a newsstand almost anywhere in the civilized world. Now, granted, for many men it may require a degree in philosophy to see something wrong with these images. (Laughter) But if we are in a reflective mood, we can ask, "Is this the perfect expression of psychological balance with respect to variables like youth and beauty and women's bodies?" I mean, is this the optimal environment in which to raise our children? Probably not. OK, so perhaps there's some place on the spectrum between these two extremes that represents a place of better balance. (Applause) Perhaps there are many such places -- again, given other changes in human culture there may be many peaks on the moral landscape. But the thing to notice is that there will be many more ways not to be on a peak. Now the irony, from my perspective, is that the only people who seem to generally agree with me and who think that there are right and wrong answers to moral questions are religious demagogues of one form or another. And of course they think they have right answers to moral questions because they got these answers from a voice in a whirlwind, not because they made an intelligent analysis of the causes and condition of human and animal well-being. In fact, the endurance of religion as a lens through which most people view moral questions has separated most moral talk from real questions of human and animal suffering. This is why we spend our time talking about things like gay marriage and not about genocide or nuclear proliferation or poverty or any other hugely consequential issue. But the demagogues are right about one thing: We need a universal conception of human values. Now, what stands in the way of this? Well, one thing to notice is that we do something different when talking about morality -- especially secular, academic, scientist types. When talking about morality we value differences of opinion in a way that we don't in any other area of our lives. So, for instance the Dalai Lama gets up every morning meditating on compassion, and he thinks that helping other human beings is an integral component of human happiness. On the other hand, we have someone like Ted Bundy; Ted Bundy was very fond of abducting and raping and torturing and killing young women. So, we appear to have a genuine difference of opinion about how to profitably use one's time. (Laughter) Most Western intellectuals look at this situation and say, "Well, there's nothing for the Dalai Lama to be really right about -- really right about -- or for Ted Bundy to be really wrong about that admits of a real argument that potentially falls within the purview of science. He likes chocolate, he likes vanilla. There's nothing that one should be able to say to the other that should persuade the other." Notice that we don't do this in science. On the left you have Edward Witten. He's a string theorist. If you ask the smartest physicists around who is the smartest physicist around, in my experience half of them will say Ed Witten. The other half will tell you they don't like the question. (Laughter) So, what would happen if I showed up at a physics conference and said,"String theory is bogus. It doesn't resonate with me. It's not how I chose to view the universe at a small scale. I'm not a fan." (Laughter) Well, nothing would happen because I'm not a physicist; I don't understand string theory. I'm the Ted Bundy of string theory. (Laughter) I wouldn't want to belong to any string theory club that would have me as a member. But this is just the point. Whenever we are talking about facts certain opinions must be excluded. That is what it is to have a domain of expertise. That is what it is for knowledge to count. How have we convinced ourselves that in the moral sphere there is no such thing as moral expertise, or moral talent, or moral genius even? How have we convinced ourselves that every opinion has to count? How have we convinced ourselves that every culture has a point of view on these subjects worth considering? Does the Taliban have a point of view on physics that is worth considering? No. (Laughter) How is their ignorance any less obvious on the subject of human well-being? (Applause) So, this, I think, is what the world needs now. It needs people like ourselves to admit that there are right and wrong answers to questions of human flourishing, and morality relates to that domain of facts. It is possible for individuals, and even for whole cultures, to care about the wrong things, which is to say that it's possible for them to have beliefs and desires that reliably lead to needless human suffering. Just admitting this will transform our discourse about morality. We live in a world in which the boundaries between nations mean less and less, and they will one day mean nothing. We live in a world filled with destructive technology, and this technology cannot be uninvented; it will always be easier to break things than to fix them. It seems to me, therefore, patently obvious that we can no more respect and tolerate vast differences in notions of human well-being than we can respect or tolerate vast differences in the notions about how disease spreads, or in the safety standards of buildings and airplanes. We simply must converge on the answers we give to the most important questions in human life. And to do that, we have to admit that these questions have answers. Thank you very much. (Applause) Chris Anderson: So, some combustible material there. Whether in this audience or people elsewhere in the world, hearing some of this, may well be doing the screaming-with-rage thing, after as well, some of them. Language seems to be really important here. When you're talking about the veil, you're talking about women dressed in cloth bags. I've lived in the Muslim world, spoken with a lot of Muslim women. And some of them would say something else. They would say, "No, you know, this is a celebration of female specialness, it helps build that and it's a result of the fact that" -- and this is arguably a sophisticated psychological view -- "that male lust is not to be trusted." I mean, can you engage in a conversation with that kind of woman without seeming kind of cultural imperialist? Sam Harris: Yeah, well I think I tried to broach this in a sentence, watching the clock ticking, but the question is: What is voluntary in a context where men have certain expectations, and you're guaranteed to be treated in a certain way if you don't veil yourself? And so, if anyone in this room wanted to wear a veil, or a very funny hat, or tattoo their face -- I think we should be free to voluntarily do whatever we want, but we have to be honest about the constraints that these women are placed under. And so I think we shouldn't be so eager to always take their word for it, especially when it's 120 degrees out and you're wearing a full burqa. CA: A lot of people want to believe in this concept of moral progress. But can you reconcile that? I think I understood you to say that you could reconcile that with a world that doesn't become one dimensional, where we all have to think the same. Paint your picture of what rolling the clock 50 years forward, 100 years forward, how you would like to think of the world, balancing moral progress with richness. SH: Well, I think once you admit that we are on the path toward understanding our minds at the level of the brain in some important detail, then you have to admit that we are going to understand all of the positive and negative qualities of ourselves in much greater detail. So, we're going to understand positive social emotion like empathy and compassion, and we're going to understand the factors that encourage it -- whether they're genetic, whether they're how people talk to one another, whether they're economic systems, and insofar as we begin to shine light on that we are inevitably going to converge on that fact space. So, everything is not going to be up for grabs. It's not going to be like veiling my daughter from birth is just as good as teaching her to be confident and well-educated in the context of men who do desire women. I mean I don't think we need an NSF grant to know that compulsory veiling is a bad idea -- but at a certain point we're going to be able to scan the brains of everyone involved and actually interrogate them. Do people love their daughters just as much in these systems? And I think there are clearly right answers to that. CA: And if the results come out that actually they do, are you prepared to shift your instinctive current judgment on some of these issues? SH: Well yeah, modulo one obvious fact, that you can love someone in the context of a truly delusional belief system. So, you can say like, "Because I knew my gay son was going to go to hell if he found a boyfriend, I chopped his head off. And that was the most compassionate thing I could do." If you get all those parts aligned, yes I think you could probably be feeling the emotion of love. But again, then we have to talk about well-being in a larger context. It's all of us in this together, not one man feeling ecstasy and then blowing himself up on a bus. CA: Sam, this is a conversation I would actually love to continue for hours. We don't have that, but maybe another time. Thank you for coming to TED. SH: Really an honor. Thank you. (Applause)

There is an ancient proverb that says it's very difficult to find a black cat in a dark room, especially when there is no cat. I find this a particularly apt description of science and how science works -- bumbling around in a dark room, bumping into things, trying to figure out what shape this might be, what that might be, there are reports of a cat somewhere around, they may not be reliable, they may be, and so forth and so on. Now I know this is different than the way most people think about science. Science, we generally are told, is a very well-ordered mechanism for understanding the world, for gaining facts, for gaining data, that it's rule-based, that scientists use this thing called the scientific method and we've been doing this for 14 generations or so now, and the scientific method is a set of rules for getting hard, cold facts out of the data. I'd like to tell you that's not the case. So there's the scientific method, but what's really going on is this. (Laughter) [The Scientific Method vs. Farting Around] And it's going on kind of like that. [... in the dark] (Laughter) So what is the difference, then, between the way I believe science is pursued and the way it seems to be perceived? So this difference first came to me in some ways in my dual role at Columbia University, where I'm both a professor and run a laboratory in neuroscience where we try to figure out how the brain works. We do this by studying the sense of smell, the sense of olfaction, and in the laboratory, it's a great pleasure and fascinating work and exciting to work with graduate students and post-docs and think up cool experiments to understand how this sense of smell works and how the brain might be working, and, well, frankly, it's kind of exhilarating. But at the same time, it's my responsibility to teach a large course to undergraduates on the brain, and that's a big subject, and it takes quite a while to organize that, and it's quite challenging and it's quite interesting, but I have to say, it's not so exhilarating. So what was the difference? Well, the course I was and am teaching is called Cellular and Molecular Neuroscience - I. (Laughs) It's 25 lectures full of all sorts of facts, it uses this giant book called "Principles of Neural Science" by three famous neuroscientists. This book comes in at 1,414 pages, it weighs a hefty seven and a half pounds. Just to put that in some perspective, that's the weight of two normal human brains. (Laughter) So I began to realize, by the end of this course, that the students maybe were getting the idea that we must know everything there is to know about the brain. That's clearly not true. And they must also have this idea, I suppose, that what scientists do is collect data and collect facts and stick them in these big books. And that's not really the case either. When I go to a meeting, after the meeting day is over and we collect in the bar over a couple of beers with my colleagues, we never talk about what we know. We talk about what we don't know. We talk about what still has to get done, what's so critical to get done in the lab. Indeed, this was, I think, best said by Marie Curie who said that one never notices what has been done but only what remains to be done. This was in a letter to her brother after obtaining her second graduate degree, I should say. I have to point out this has always been one of my favorite pictures of Marie Curie, because I am convinced that that glow behind her is not a photographic effect. (Laughter) That's the real thing. It is true that her papers are, to this day, stored in a basement room in the Bibliothèque Française in a concrete room that's lead-lined, and if you're a scholar and you want access to these notebooks, you have to put on a full radiation hazmat suit, so it's pretty scary business. Nonetheless, this is what I think we were leaving out of our courses and leaving out of the interaction that we have with the public as scientists, the what-remains-to-be-done. This is the stuff that's exhilarating and interesting. It is, if you will, the ignorance. That's what was missing. So I thought, well, maybe I should teach a course on ignorance, something I can finally excel at, perhaps, for example. So I did start teaching this course on ignorance, and it's been quite interesting and I'd like to tell you to go to the website. You can find all sorts of information there. It's wide open. And it's been really quite an interesting time for me to meet up with other scientists who come in and talk about what it is they don't know. Now I use this word "ignorance," of course, to be at least in part intentionally provocative, because ignorance has a lot of bad connotations and I clearly don't mean any of those. So I don't mean stupidity, I don't mean a callow indifference to fact or reason or data. The ignorant are clearly unenlightened, unaware, uninformed, and present company today excepted, often occupy elected offices, it seems to me. That's another story, perhaps. I mean a different kind of ignorance. I mean a kind of ignorance that's less pejorative, a kind of ignorance that comes from a communal gap in our knowledge, something that's just not there to be known or isn't known well enough yet or we can't make predictions from, the kind of ignorance that's maybe best summed up in a statement by James Clerk Maxwell, perhaps the greatest physicist between Newton and Einstein, who said, "Thoroughly conscious ignorance is the prelude to every real advance in science." I think it's a wonderful idea: thoroughly conscious ignorance. So that's the kind of ignorance that I want to talk about today, but of course the first thing we have to clear up is what are we going to do with all those facts? So it is true that science piles up at an alarming rate. We all have this sense that science is this mountain of facts, this accumulation model of science, as many have called it, and it seems impregnable, it seems impossible. How can you ever know all of this? And indeed, the scientific literature grows at an alarming rate. In 2006, there were 1.3 million papers published. There's about a two-and-a-half-percent yearly growth rate, and so last year we saw over one and a half million papers being published. Divide that by the number of minutes in a year, and you wind up with three new papers per minute. So I've been up here a little over 10 minutes, I've already lost three papers. I have to get out of here actually. I have to go read. So what do we do about this? Well, the fact is that what scientists do about it is a kind of a controlled neglect, if you will. We just don't worry about it, in a way. The facts are important. You have to know a lot of stuff to be a scientist. That's true. But knowing a lot of stuff doesn't make you a scientist. You need to know a lot of stuff to be a lawyer or an accountant or an electrician or a carpenter. But in science, knowing a lot of stuff is not the point. Knowing a lot of stuff is there to help you get to more ignorance. So knowledge is a big subject, but I would say ignorance is a bigger one. So this leads us to maybe think about, a little bit about, some of the models of science that we tend to use, and I'd like to disabuse you of some of them. So one of them, a popular one, is that scientists are patiently putting the pieces of a puzzle together to reveal some grand scheme or another. This is clearly not true. For one, with puzzles, the manufacturer has guaranteed that there's a solution. We don't have any such guarantee. Indeed, there are many of us who aren't so sure about the manufacturer. (Laughter) So I think the puzzle model doesn't work. Another popular model is that science is busy unraveling things the way you unravel the peels of an onion. So peel by peel, you take away the layers of the onion to get at some fundamental kernel of truth. I don't think that's the way it works either. Another one, a kind of popular one, is the iceberg idea, that we only see the tip of the iceberg but underneath is where most of the iceberg is hidden. But all of these models are based on the idea of a large body of facts that we can somehow or another get completed. We can chip away at this iceberg and figure out what it is, or we could just wait for it to melt, I suppose, these days, but one way or another we could get to the whole iceberg. Right? Or make it manageable. But I don't think that's the case. I think what really happens in science is a model more like the magic well, where no matter how many buckets you take out, there's always another bucket of water to be had, or my particularly favorite one, with the effect and everything, the ripples on a pond. So if you think of knowledge being this ever-expanding ripple on a pond, the important thing to realize is that our ignorance, the circumference of this knowledge, also grows with knowledge. So the knowledge generates ignorance. This is really well said, I thought, by George Bernard Shaw. This is actually part of a toast that he delivered to celebrate Einstein at a dinner celebrating Einstein's work, in which he claims that science just creates more questions than it answers. ["Science is always wrong. It never solves a problem without creating 10 more."] I find that kind of glorious, and I think he's precisely right, plus it's a kind of job security. As it turns out, he kind of cribbed that from the philosopher Immanuel Kant who a hundred years earlier had come up with this idea of question propagation, that every answer begets more questions. I love that term, "question propagation," this idea of questions propagating out there. So I'd say the model we want to take is not that we start out kind of ignorant and we get some facts together and then we gain knowledge. It's rather kind of the other way around, really. What do we use this knowledge for? What are we using this collection of facts for? We're using it to make better ignorance, to come up with, if you will, higher-quality ignorance. Because, you know, there's low-quality ignorance and there's high-quality ignorance. It's not all the same. Scientists argue about this all the time. Sometimes we call them bull sessions. Sometimes we call them grant proposals. But nonetheless, it's what the argument is about. It's the ignorance. It's the what we don't know. It's what makes a good question. So how do we think about these questions? I'm going to show you a graph that shows up quite a bit on happy hour posters in various science departments. This graph asks the relationship between what you know and how much you know about it. So what you know, you can know anywhere from nothing to everything, of course, and how much you know about it can be anywhere from a little to a lot. So let's put a point on the graph. There's an undergraduate. Doesn't know much but they have a lot of interest. They're interested in almost everything. Now you look at a master's student, a little further along in their education, and you see they know a bit more, but it's been narrowed somewhat. And finally you get your Ph.D., where it turns out you know a tremendous amount about almost nothing. (Laughter) What's really disturbing is the trend line that goes through that because, of course, when it dips below the zero axis, there, it gets into a negative area. That's where you find people like me, I'm afraid. So the important thing here is that this can all be changed. This whole view can be changed by just changing the label on the x-axis. So instead of how much you know about it, we could say, "What can you ask about it?" So yes, you do need to know a lot of stuff as a scientist, but the purpose of knowing a lot of stuff is not just to know a lot of stuff. That just makes you a geek, right? Knowing a lot of stuff, the purpose is to be able to ask lots of questions, to be able to frame thoughtful, interesting questions, because that's where the real work is. Let me give you a quick idea of a couple of these sorts of questions. I'm a neuroscientist, so how would we come up with a question in neuroscience? Because it's not always quite so straightforward. So, for example, we could say, well what is it that the brain does? Well, one thing the brain does, it moves us around. We walk around on two legs. That seems kind of simple, somehow or another. I mean, virtually everybody over 10 months of age walks around on two legs, right? So that maybe is not that interesting. So instead maybe we want to choose something a little more complicated to look at. How about the visual system? There it is, the visual system. I mean, we love our visual systems. We do all kinds of cool stuff. Indeed, there are over 12,000 neuroscientists who work on the visual system, from the retina to the visual cortex, in an attempt to understand not just the visual system but to also understand how general principles of how the brain might work. But now here's the thing: Our technology has actually been pretty good at replicating what the visual system does. We have TV, we have movies, we have animation, we have photography, we have pattern recognition, all of these sorts of things. They work differently than our visual systems in some cases, but nonetheless we've been pretty good at making a technology work like our visual system. Somehow or another, a hundred years of robotics, you never saw a robot walk on two legs, because robots don't walk on two legs because it's not such an easy thing to do. A hundred years of robotics, and we can't get a robot that can move more than a couple steps one way or the other. You ask them to go up an inclined plane, and they fall over. Turn around, and they fall over. It's a serious problem. So what is it that's the most difficult thing for a brain to do? What ought we to be studying? Perhaps it ought to be walking on two legs, or the motor system. I'll give you an example from my own lab, my own particularly smelly question, since we work on the sense of smell. But here's a diagram of five molecules and sort of a chemical notation. These are just plain old molecules, but if you sniff those molecules up these two little holes in the front of your face, you will have in your mind the distinct impression of a rose. If there's a real rose there, those molecules will be the ones, but even if there's no rose there, you'll have the memory of a molecule. How do we turn molecules into perceptions? What's the process by which that could happen? Here's another example: two very simple molecules, again in this kind of chemical notation. It might be easier to visualize them this way, so the gray circles are carbon atoms, the white ones are hydrogen atoms and the red ones are oxygen atoms. Now these two molecules differ by only one carbon atom and two little hydrogen atoms that ride along with it, and yet one of them, heptyl acetate, has the distinct odor of a pear, and hexyl acetate is unmistakably banana. So there are two really interesting questions here, it seems to me. One is, how can a simple little molecule like that create a perception in your brain that's so clear as a pear or a banana? And secondly, how the hell can we tell the difference between two molecules that differ by a single carbon atom? I mean, that's remarkable to me, clearly the best chemical detector on the face of the planet. And you don't even think about it, do you? So this is a favorite quote of mine that takes us back to the ignorance and the idea of questions. I like to quote because I think dead people shouldn't be excluded from the conversation. And I also think it's important to realize that the conversation's been going on for a while, by the way. So Erwin Schrodinger, a great quantum physicist and, I think, philosopher, points out how you have to "abide by ignorance for an indefinite period" of time. And it's this abiding by ignorance that I think we have to learn how to do. This is a tricky thing. This is not such an easy business. I guess it comes down to our education system, so I'm going to talk a little bit about ignorance and education, because I think that's where it really has to play out. So for one, let's face it, in the age of Google and Wikipedia, the business model of the university and probably secondary schools is simply going to have to change. We just can't sell facts for a living anymore. They're available with a click of the mouse, or if you want to, you could probably just ask the wall one of these days, wherever they're going to hide the things that tell us all this stuff. So what do we have to do? We have to give our students a taste for the boundaries, for what's outside that circumference, for what's outside the facts, what's just beyond the facts. How do we do that? Well, one of the problems, of course, turns out to be testing. We currently have an educational system which is very efficient but is very efficient at a rather bad thing. So in second grade, all the kids are interested in science, the girls and the boys. They like to take stuff apart. They have great curiosity. They like to investigate things. They go to science museums. They like to play around. They're in second grade. They're interested. But by 11th or 12th grade, fewer than 10 percent of them have any interest in science whatsoever, let alone a desire to go into science as a career. So we have this remarkably efficient system for beating any interest in science out of everybody's head. Is this what we want? I think this comes from what a teacher colleague of mine calls "the bulimic method of education." You know. You can imagine what it is. We just jam a whole bunch of facts down their throats over here and then they puke it up on an exam over here and everybody goes home with no added intellectual heft whatsoever. This can't possibly continue to go on. So what do we do? Well the geneticists, I have to say, have an interesting maxim they live by. Geneticists always say, you always get what you screen for. And that's meant as a warning. So we always will get what we screen for, and part of what we screen for is in our testing methods. Well, we hear a lot about testing and evaluation, and we have to think carefully when we're testing whether we're evaluating or whether we're weeding, whether we're weeding people out, whether we're making some cut. Evaluation is one thing. You hear a lot about evaluation in the literature these days, in the educational literature, but evaluation really amounts to feedback and it amounts to an opportunity for trial and error. It amounts to a chance to work over a longer period of time with this kind of feedback. That's different than weeding, and usually, I have to tell you, when people talk about evaluation, evaluating students, evaluating teachers, evaluating schools, evaluating programs, that they're really talking about weeding. And that's a bad thing, because then you will get what you select for, which is what we've gotten so far. So I'd say what we need is a test that says, "What is x?" and the answers are "I don't know, because no one does," or "What's the question?" Even better. Or, "You know what, I'll look it up, I'll ask someone, I'll phone someone. I'll find out." Because that's what we want people to do, and that's how you evaluate them. And maybe for the advanced placement classes, it could be, "Here's the answer. What's the next question?" That's the one I like in particular. So let me end with a quote from William Butler Yeats, who said "Education is not about filling buckets; it is lighting fires." So I'd say, let's get out the matches. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause)

You know, culture was born of the imagination, and the imagination -- the imagination as we know it -- came into being when our species descended from our progenitor, Homo erectus, and, infused with consciousness, began a journey that would carry it to every corner of the habitable world. For a time, we shared the stage with our distant cousins, Neanderthal, who clearly had some spark of awareness, but -- whether it was the increase in the size of the brain, or the development of language, or some other evolutionary catalyst -- we quickly left Neanderthal gasping for survival. By the time the last Neanderthal disappeared in Europe, 27,000 years ago, our direct ancestors had already, and for 5,000 years, been crawling into the belly of the earth, where in the light of the flickers of tallow candles, they had brought into being the great art of the Upper Paleolithic. And I spent two months in the caves of southwest France with the poet Clayton Eshleman, who wrote a beautiful book called "Juniper Fuse." And you could look at this art and you could, of course, see the complex social organization of the people who brought it into being. But more importantly, it spoke of a deeper yearning, something far more sophisticated than hunting magic. And the way Clayton put it was this way. He said, "You know, clearly at some point, we were all of an animal nature, and at some point, we weren't." And he viewed proto-shamanism as a kind of original attempt, through ritual, to rekindle a connection that had been irrevocably lost. So, he saw this art not as hunting magic, but as postcards of nostalgia. And viewed in that light, it takes on a whole other resonance. And the most amazing thing about the Upper Paleolithic art is that as an aesthetic expression, it lasted for almost 20,000 years. If these were postcards of nostalgia, ours was a very long farewell indeed. And it was also the beginning of our discontent, because if you wanted to distill all of our experience since the Paleolithic, it would come down to two words: how and why. And these are the slivers of insight upon which cultures have been forged. Now, all people share the same raw, adaptive imperatives. We all have children. We all have to deal with the mystery of death, the world that waits beyond death, the elders who fall away into their elderly years. All of this is part of our common experience, and this shouldn't surprise us, because, after all, biologists have finally proven it to be true, something that philosophers have always dreamt to be true. And that is the fact that we are all brothers and sisters. We are all cut from the same genetic cloth. All of humanity, probably, is descended from a thousand people who left Africa roughly 70,000 years ago. But the corollary of that is that, if we all are brothers and sisters and share the same genetic material, all human populations share the same raw human genius, the same intellectual acuity. And so whether that genius is placed into -- technological wizardry has been the great achievement of the West -- or by contrast, into unraveling the complex threads of memory inherent in a myth, is simply a matter of choice and cultural orientation. There is no progression of affairs in human experience. There is no trajectory of progress. There's no pyramid that conveniently places Victorian England at the apex and descends down the flanks to the so-called primitives of the world. All peoples are simply cultural options, different visions of life itself. But what do I mean by different visions of life making for completely different possibilities for existence? Well, let's slip for a moment into the greatest culture sphere ever brought into being by the imagination, that of Polynesia. 10,000 square kilometers, tens of thousands of islands flung like jewels upon the southern sea. I recently sailed on the Hokulea, named after the sacred star of Hawaii, throughout the South Pacific to make a film about the navigators. These are men and women who, even today, can name 250 stars in the night sky. These are men and women who can sense the presence of distant atolls of islands beyond the visible horizon, simply by watching the reverberation of waves across the hull of their vessel, knowing full well that every island group in the Pacific has its unique refractive pattern that can be read with the same perspicacity with which a forensic scientist would read a fingerprint. These are sailors who in the darkness, in the hull of the vessel, can distinguish as many as 32 different sea swells moving through the canoe at any one point in time, distinguishing local wave disturbances from the great currents that pulsate across the ocean, that can be followed with the same ease that a terrestrial explorer would follow a river to the sea. Indeed, if you took all of the genius that allowed us to put a man on the moon and applied it to an understanding of the ocean, what you would get is Polynesia. And if we slip from the realm of the sea into the realm of the spirit of the imagination, you enter the realm of Tibetan Buddhism. And I recently made a film called "The Buddhist Science of the Mind." Why did we use that word, science? What is science but the empirical pursuit of the truth? What is Buddhism but 2,500 years of empirical observation as to the nature of mind? I travelled for a month in Nepal with our good friend, Matthieu Ricard, and you'll remember Matthieu famously said to all of us here once at TED, "Western science is a major response to minor needs." We spend all of our lifetime trying to live to be 100 without losing our teeth. The Buddhist spends all their lifetime trying to understand the nature of existence. Our billboards celebrate naked children in underwear. Their billboards are manuals, prayers to the well-being of all sentient creatures. And with the blessing of Trulshik Rinpoche, we began a pilgrimage to a curious destination, accompanied by a great doctor. And the destination was a single room in a nunnery, where a woman had gone into lifelong retreat 55 years before. And en route, we took darshan from Rinpoche, and he sat with us and told us about the Four Noble Truths, the essence of the Buddhist path. All life is suffering. That doesn't mean all life is negative. It means things happen. The cause of suffering is ignorance. By that, the Buddha did not mean stupidity; he meant clinging to the illusion that life is static and predictable. The third noble truth said that ignorance can be overcome. And the fourth and most important, of course, was the delineation of a contemplative practice that not only had the possibility of a transformation of the human heart, but had 2,500 years of empirical evidence that such a transformation was a certainty. And so, when this door opened onto the face of a woman who had not been out of that room in 55 years, you did not see a mad woman. You saw a woman who was more clear than a pool of water in a mountain stream. And of course, this is what the Tibetan monks told us. They said, at one point, you know, we don't really believe you went to the moon, but you did. You may not believe that we achieve enlightenment in one lifetime, but we do. And if we move from the realm of the spirit to the realm of the physical, to the sacred geography of Peru -- I've always been interested in the relationships of indigenous people that literally believe that the Earth is alive, responsive to all of their aspirations, all of their needs. And, of course, the human population has its own reciprocal obligations. I spent 30 years living amongst the people of Chinchero and I always heard about an event that I always wanted to participate in. Once each year, the fastest young boy in each hamlet is given the honor of becoming a woman. And for one day, he wears the clothing of his sister and he becomes a transvestite, a waylaka. And for that day, he leads all able-bodied men on a run, but it's not your ordinary run. You start off at 11,500 feet. You run down to the base of the sacred mountain, Antakillqa. You run up to 15,000 feet, descend 3,000 feet. Climb again over the course of 24 hours. And of course, the waylakama spin, the trajectory of the route, is marked by holy mounds of Earth, where coke is given to the Earth, libations of alcohol to the wind, the vortex of the feminine is brought to the mountaintop. And the metaphor is clear: you go into the mountain as an individual, but through exhaustion, through sacrifice, you emerge as a community that has once again reaffirmed its sense of place in the planet. And at 48, I was the only outsider ever to go through this, only one to finish it. I only managed to do it by chewing more coca leaves in one day than anyone in the 4,000-year history of the plant. But these localized rituals become pan-Andean, and these fantastic festivals, like that of the Qoyllur Rit'i, which occurs when the Pleiades reappear in the winter sky. It's kind of like an Andean Woodstock: 60,000 Indians on pilgrimage to the end of a dirt road that leads to the sacred valley, called the Sinakara, which is dominated by three tongues of the great glacier. The metaphor is so clear. You bring the crosses from your community, in this wonderful fusion of Christian and pre-Columbian ideas. You place the cross into the ice, in the shadow of Ausangate, the most sacred of all Apus, or sacred mountains of the Inca. And then you do the ritual dances that empower the crosses. Now, these ideas and these events allow us even to deconstruct iconic places that many of you have been to, like Machu Picchu. Machu Picchu was never a lost city. On the contrary, it was completely linked in to the 14,000 kilometers of royal roads the Inca made in less than a century. But more importantly, it was linked in to the Andean notions of sacred geography. The intiwatana, the hitching post to the sun, is actually an obelisk that constantly reflects the light that falls on the sacred Apu of Machu Picchu, which is Sugarloaf Mountain, called Huayna Picchu. If you come to the south of the intiwatana, you find an altar. Climb Huayna Picchu, find another altar. Take a direct north-south bearing, you find to your astonishment that it bisects the intiwatana stone, goes to the skyline, hits the heart of Salcantay, the second of the most important mountains of the Incan empire. And then beyond Salcantay, of course, when the southern cross reaches the southernmost point in the sky, directly in that same alignment, the Milky Way overhead. But what is enveloping Machu Picchu from below? The sacred river, the Urubamba, or the Vilcanota, which is itself the Earthly equivalent of the Milky Way, but it's also the trajectory that Viracocha walked at the dawn of time when he brought the universe into being. And where does the river rise? Right on the slopes of the Koariti. So, 500 years after Columbus, these ancient rhythms of landscape are played out in ritual. Now, when I was here at the first TED, I showed this photograph: two men of the Elder Brothers, the descendants, survivors of El Dorado. These, of course, are the descendants of the ancient Tairona civilization. If those of you who are here remember that I mentioned that they remain ruled by a ritual priesthood, but the training for the priesthood is extraordinary. Taken from their families, sequestered in a shadowy world of darkness for 18 years -- two nine-year periods deliberately chosen to evoke the nine months they spend in the natural mother's womb. All that time, the world only exists as an abstraction, as they are taught the values of their society. Values that maintain the proposition that their prayers, and their prayers alone, maintain the cosmic balance. Now, the measure of a society is not only what it does, but the quality of its aspirations. And I always wanted to go back into these mountains, to see if this could possibly be true, as indeed had been reported by the great anthropologist, Reichel-Dolmatoff. So, literally two weeks ago, I returned from having spent six weeks with the Elder Brothers on what was clearly the most extraordinary trip of my life. These really are a people who live and breathe the realm of the sacred, a baroque religiosity that is simply awesome. They consume more coca leaves than any human population, half a pound per man, per day. The gourd you see here is -- everything in their lives is symbolic. Their central metaphor is a loom. They say, "Upon this loom, I weave my life." They refer to the movements as they exploit the ecological niches of the gradient as "threads." When they pray for the dead, they make these gestures with their hands, spinning their thoughts into the heavens. You can see the calcium buildup on the head of the poporo gourd. The gourd is a feminine aspect; the stick is a male. You put the stick in the powder to take the sacred ashes -- well, they're not ashes, they're burnt limestone -- to empower the coca leaf, to change the pH of the mouth to facilitate the absorption of cocaine hydrochloride. But if you break a gourd, you cannot simply throw it away, because every stroke of that stick that has built up that calcium, the measure of a man's life, has a thought behind it. Fields are planted in such an extraordinary way, that the one side of the field is planted like that by the women. The other side is planted like that by the men. Metaphorically, you turn it on the side, and you have a piece of cloth. And they are the descendants of the ancient Tairona civilization, the greatest goldsmiths of South America, who in the wake of the conquest, retreated into this isolated volcanic massif that soars to 20,000 feet above the Caribbean coastal plain. There are four societies: the Kogi, the Wiwa, the Kankwano and the Arhuacos. I traveled with the Arhuacos, and the wonderful thing about this story was that this man, Danilo Villafane -- if we just jump back here for a second. When I first met Danilo, in the Colombian embassy in Washington, I couldn't help but say, "You know, you look a lot like an old friend of mine." Well, it turns out he was the son of my friend, Adalberto, from 1974, who had been killed by the FARC. And I said, "Danilo, you won't remember this, but when you were an infant, I carried you on my back, up and down the mountains." And because of that, Danilo invited us to go to the very heart of the world, a place where no journalist had ever been permitted. Not simply to the flanks of the mountains, but to the very iced peaks which are the destiny of the pilgrims. And this man sitting cross-legged is now a grown-up Eugenio, a man who I've known since 1974. And this is one of those initiates. No, it's not true that they're kept in the darkness for 18 years, but they are kept within the confines of the ceremonial men's circle for 18 years. This little boy will never step outside of the sacred fields that surround the men's hut for all that time, until he begins his journey of initiation. For that entire time, the world only exists as an abstraction, as he is taught the values of society, including this notion that their prayers alone maintain the cosmic balance. Before we could begin our journey, we had to be cleansed at the portal of the Earth. And it was extraordinary to be taken by a priest. And you see that the priest never wears shoes because holy feet -- there must be nothing between the feet and the Earth for a mamo. And this is actually the place where the Great Mother sent the spindle into the world that elevated the mountains and created the homeland that they call the heart of the world. We traveled high into the paramo, and as we crested the hills, we realized that the men were interpreting every single bump on the landscape in terms of their own intense religiosity. And then of course, as we reached our final destination, a place called Mamancana, we were in for a surprise, because the FARC were waiting to kidnap us. And so we ended up being taken aside into these huts, hidden away until the darkness. And then, abandoning all our gear, we were forced to ride out in the middle of the night, in a quite dramatic scene. It's going to look like a John Ford Western. And we ran into a FARC patrol at dawn, so it was quite harrowing. It will be a very interesting film. But what was fascinating is that the minute there was a sense of dangers, the mamos went into a circle of divination. And of course, this is a photograph literally taken the night we were in hiding, as they divine their route to take us out of the mountains. We were able to, because we had trained people in filmmaking, continue with our work, and send our Wiwa and Arhuaco filmmakers to the final sacred lakes to get the last shots for the film, and we followed the rest of the Arhuaco back to the sea, taking the elements from the highlands to the sea. And here you see how their sacred landscape has been covered by brothels and hotels and casinos, and yet, still they pray. And it's an amazing thing to think that this close to Miami, two hours from Miami, there is an entire civilization of people praying every day for your well-being. They call themselves the Elder Brothers. They dismiss the rest of us who have ruined the world as the Younger Brothers. They cannot understand why it is that we do what we do to the Earth. Now, if we slip to another end of the world, I was up in the high Arctic to tell a story about global warming, inspired in part by the former Vice President's wonderful book. And what struck me so extraordinary was to be again with the Inuit -- a people who don't fear the cold, but take advantage of it. A people who find a way, with their imagination, to carve life out of that very frozen. A people for whom blood on ice is not a sign of death, but an affirmation of life. And yet tragically, when you now go to those northern communities, you find to your astonishment that whereas the sea ice used to come in in September and stay till July, in a place like Kanak in northern Greenland, it literally comes in now in November and stays until March. So, their entire year has been cut in half. Now, I want to stress that none of these peoples that I've been quickly talking about here are disappearing worlds. These are not dying peoples. On the contrary, you know, if you have the heart to feel and the eyes to see, you discover that the world is not flat. The world remains a rich tapestry. It remains a rich topography of the spirit. These myriad voices of humanity are not failed attempts at being new, failed attempts at being modern. They're unique facets of the human imagination. They're unique answers to a fundamental question: what does it mean to be human and alive? And when asked that question, they respond with 6,000 different voices. And collectively, those voices become our human repertoire for dealing with the challenges that will confront us in the ensuing millennia. Our industrial society is scarcely 300 years old. That shallow history shouldn't suggest to anyone that we have all of the answers for all of the questions that will confront us in the ensuing millennia. The myriad voices of humanity are not failed attempts at being us. They are unique answers to that fundamental question: what does it mean to be human and alive? And there is indeed a fire burning over the Earth, taking with it not only plants and animals, but the legacy of humanity's brilliance. Right now, as we sit here in this room, of those 6,000 languages spoken the day that you were born, fully half aren't being taught to children. So, you're living through a time when virtually half of humanity's intellectual, social and spiritual legacy is being allowed to slip away. This does not have to happen. These peoples are not failed attempts at being modern -- quaint and colorful and destined to fade away as if by natural law. In every case, these are dynamic, living peoples being driven out of existence by identifiable forces. That's actually an optimistic observation, because it suggests that if human beings are the agents of cultural destruction, we can also be, and must be, the facilitators of cultural survival. Thank you very much.

Khan Academy is most known for its collection of videos, so before I go any further, let me show you a little bit of a montage. (Video) Salman Khan: So the hypotenuse is now going to be five. This animal's fossils are only found in this area of South America -- a nice clean band here -- and this part of Africa. We can integrate over the surface, and the notation usually is a capital sigma. National Assembly: They create the Committee of Public Safety, which sounds like a very nice committee. Notice, this is an aldehyde, and it's an alcohol. Start differentiating into effector and memory cells. A galaxy. Hey! There's another galaxy. Oh, look! There's another galaxy. And for dollars, is their 30 million, plus the 20 million dollars from the American manufacturer. If this does not blow your mind, then you have no emotion. (Laughter) (Applause) (Live) SK: We now have on the order of 2,200 videos, covering everything from basic arithmetic, all the way to vector calculus, and some of the stuff that you saw up there. We have a million students a month using the site, watching on the order of 100 to 200,000 videos a day. But what we're going to talk about in this is how we're going to the next level. But before I do that, I want to talk a little bit about really just how I got started. And some of you all might know, about five years ago, I was an analyst at a hedge fund, and I was in Boston, and I was tutoring my cousins in New Orleans, remotely. And I started putting the first YouTube videos up, really just as a kind of nice-to-have, just kind of a supplement for my cousins, something that might give them a refresher or something. And as soon as I put those first YouTube videos up, something interesting happened. Actually, a bunch of interesting things happened. The first was the feedback from my cousins. They told me that they preferred me on YouTube than in person. (Laughter) And once you get over the backhanded nature of that, there was actually something very profound there. They were saying that they preferred the automated version of their cousin to their cousin. At first it's very unintuitive, but when you think about it from their point of view, it makes a ton of sense. You have this situation where now they can pause and repeat their cousin, without feeling like they're wasting my time. If they have to review something that they should have learned a couple of weeks ago, or maybe a couple of years ago, they don't have to be embarrassed and ask their cousin. They can just watch those videos; if they're bored, they can go ahead. They can watch at their own time and pace. Probably the least-appreciated aspect of this is the notion that the very first time that you're trying to get your brain around a new concept, the very last thing you need is another human being saying, "Do you understand this?" And that's what was happening with the interaction with my cousins before, and now they can just do it in the intimacy of their own room. The other thing that happened is -- I put them on YouTube just -- I saw no reason to make it private, so I let other people watch it, and then people started stumbling on it, and I started getting some comments and some letters and all sorts of feedback from random people around the world. These are just a few. This is actually from one of the original calculus videos. Someone wrote it on YouTube, it was a YouTube comment: "First time I smiled doing a derivative." (Laughter) Let's pause here. This person did a derivative, and then they smiled. (Laughter) In response to that same comment -- this is on the thread, you can go on YouTube and look at the comments -- someone else wrote: "Same thing here. I actually got a natural high and a good mood for the entire day, since I remember seeing all of this matrix text in class, and here I'm all like, 'I know kung fu.'" (Laughter) We get a lot of feedback along those lines. This clearly was helping people. But then, as the viewership kept growing and kept growing, I started getting letters from people, and it was starting to become clear that it was more than just a nice-to-have. This is just an excerpt from one of those letters: "My 12 year-old son has autism, and has had a terrible time with math. We have tried everything, viewed everything, bought everything. We stumbled on your video on decimals, and it got through. Then we went on to the dreaded fractions. Again, he got it. We could not believe it. He is so excited." And so you can imagine, here I was, an analyst at a hedge fund -- it was very strange for me to do something of social value. (Laughter) (Applause) But I was excited, so I kept going. And then a few other things started to dawn on me; that not only would it help my cousins right now, or these people who were sending letters, but that this content will never grow old, that it could help their kids or their grandkids. If Isaac Newton had done YouTube videos on calculus, I wouldn't have to. (Laughter) Assuming he was good. We don't know. (Laughter) The other thing that happened -- and even at this point, I said, "OK, maybe it's a good supplement. It's good for motivated students. It's good for maybe home-schoolers." But I didn't think it would somehow penetrate the classroom. Then I started getting letters from teachers, and the teachers would write, saying, "We've used your videos to flip the classroom. You've given the lectures, so now what we do --" And this could happen in every classroom in America tomorrow -- "what I do is I assign the lectures for homework, and what used to be homework, I now have the students doing in the classroom." And I want to pause here -- (Applause) I want to pause here, because there's a couple of interesting things. One, when those teachers are doing that, there's the obvious benefit -- the benefit that now their students can enjoy the videos in the way that my cousins did, they can pause, repeat at their own pace, at their own time. But the more interesting thing -- and this is the unintuitive thing when you talk about technology in the classroom -- by removing the one-size-fits-all lecture from the classroom, and letting students have a self-paced lecture at home, then when you go to the classroom, letting them do work, having the teacher walk around, having the peers actually be able to interact with each other, these teachers have used technology to humanize the classroom. They took a fundamentally dehumanizing experience -- 30 kids with their fingers on their lips, not allowed to interact with each other. A teacher, no matter how good, has to give this one-size-fits-all lecture to 30 students -- blank faces, slightly antagonistic -- and now it's a human experience, now they're actually interacting with each other. So once the Khan Academy -- I quit my job, and we turned into a real organization -- we're a not-for-profit -- the question is, how do we take this to the next level? How do we take what those teachers were doing to its natural conclusion? And so, what I'm showing over here, these are actual exercises that I started writing for my cousins. The ones I started were much more primitive. This is a more competent version of it. But the paradigm here is, we'll generate as many questions as you need, until you get that concept, until you get 10 in a row. And the Khan Academy videos are there. You get hints, the actual steps for that problem, if you don't know how to do it. The paradigm here seems like a very simple thing: 10 in a row, you move on. But it's fundamentally different than what's happening in classrooms right now. In a traditional classroom, you have homework, lecture, homework, lecture, and then you have a snapshot exam. And that exam, whether you get a 70 percent, an 80 percent, a 90 percent or a 95 percent, the class moves on to the next topic. And even that 95 percent student -- what was the five percent they didn't know? Maybe they didn't know what happens when you raise something to the zeroth power. Then you build on that in the next concept. That's analogous to -- imagine learning to ride a bicycle. Maybe I give you a lecture ahead of time, and I give you a bicycle for two weeks, then I come back after two weeks, and say, "Well, let's see. You're having trouble taking left turns. You can't quite stop. You're an 80 percent bicyclist." So I put a big "C" stamp on your forehead -- (Laughter) and then I say, "Here's a unicycle." (Laughter) But as ridiculous as that sounds, that's exactly what's happening in our classrooms right now. And the idea is you fast forward and good students start failing algebra all of the sudden, and start failing calculus all of the sudden, despite being smart, despite having good teachers, and it's usually because they have these Swiss cheese gaps that kept building throughout their foundation. So our model is: learn math the way you'd learn anything, like riding a bicycle. Stay on that bicycle. Fall off that bicycle. Do it as long as necessary, until you have mastery. The traditional model, it penalizes you for experimentation and failure, but it does not expect mastery. We encourage you to experiment. We encourage you to fail. But we do expect mastery. This is just another one of the modules. This is trigonometry. This is shifting and reflecting functions. And they all fit together. We have about 90 of these right now. You can go to the site right now, it's all free, not trying to sell anything. But the general idea is that they all fit into this knowledge map. That top node right there, that's literally single-digit addition, it's like one plus one is equal to two. The paradigm is, once you get 10 in a row on that, it keeps forwarding you to more and more advanced modules. Further down the knowledge map, we're getting into more advanced arithmetic. Further down, you start getting into pre-algebra and early algebra. Further down, you start getting into algebra one, algebra two, a little bit of precalculus. And the idea is, from this we can actually teach everything -- well, everything that can be taught in this type of a framework. So you can imagine -- and this is what we are working on -- from this knowledge map, you have logic, you have computer programming, you have grammar, you have genetics, all based off of that core of, if you know this and that, now you're ready for this next concept. Now that can work well for an individual learner, and I encourage you to do it with your kids, but I also encourage everyone in the audience to do it yourself. It'll change what happens at the dinner table. But what we want to do is use the natural conclusion of the flipping of the classroom that those early teachers had emailed me about. And so what I'm showing you here, this is data from a pilot in the Los Altos school district, where they took two fifth-grade classes and two seventh-grade classes, and completely gutted their old math curriculum. These kids aren't using textbooks, or getting one-size-fits-all lectures. They're doing Khan Academy, that software, for roughly half of their math class. I want to be clear: we don't view this as a complete math education. What it does is -- this is what's happening in Los Altos -- it frees up time -- it's the blocking and tackling, making sure you know how to move through a system of equations, and it frees up time for the simulations, for the games, for the mechanics, for the robot-building, for the estimating how high that hill is based on its shadow. And so the paradigm is the teacher walks in every day, every kid works at their own pace -- this is actually a live dashboard from the Los Altos school district -- and they look at this dashboard. Every row is a student. Every column is one of those concepts. Green means the student's already proficient. Blue means they're working on it -- no need to worry. Red means they're stuck. And what the teacher does is literally just say, "Let me intervene on the red kids." Or even better, "Let me get one of the green kids, who are already proficient in that concept, to be the first line of attack, and actually tutor their peer." (Applause) Now, I come from a very data-centric reality, so we don't want that teacher to even go and intervene and have to ask the kid awkward questions: "What don't you understand? What do you understand?" and all the rest. So our paradigm is to arm teachers with as much data as possible -- data that, in any other field, is expected, in finance, marketing, manufacturing -- so the teachers can diagnose what's wrong with the students so they can make their interaction as productive as possible. Now teachers know exactly what the students have been up to, how long they've spent each day, what videos they've watched, when did they pause the videos, what did they stop watching, what exercises are they using, what have they focused on? The outer circle shows what exercises they were focused on. The inner circle shows the videos they're focused on. The data gets pretty granular, so you can see the exact problems the student got right or wrong. Red is wrong, blue is right. The leftmost question is the first one the student attempted. They watched the video over there. And you can see, eventually they were able to get 10 in a row. It's almost like you can see them learning over those last 10 problems. They also got faster -- the height is how long it took them. When you talk about self-paced learning, it makes sense for everyone -- in education-speak, "differentiated learning" -- but it's kind of crazy, what happens when you see it in a classroom. Because every time we've done this, in every classroom we've done, over and over again, if you go five days into it, there's a group of kids who've raced ahead and a group who are a little bit slower. In a traditional model, in a snapshot assessment, you say, "These are the gifted kids, these are the slow kids. Maybe they should be tracked differently. Maybe we should put them in different classes." But when you let students work at their own pace -- we see it over and over again -- you see students who took a little bit extra time on one concept or the other, but once they get through that concept, they just race ahead. And so the same kids that you thought were slow six weeks ago, you now would think are gifted. And we're seeing it over and over again. It makes you really wonder how much all of the labels maybe a lot of us have benefited from were really just due to a coincidence of time. Now as valuable as something like this is in a district like Los Altos, our goal is to use technology to humanize, not just in Los Altos, but on a global scale, what's happening in education. And that brings up an interesting point. A lot of the effort in humanizing the classroom is focused on student-to-teacher ratios. In our mind, the relevant metric is: student-to-valuable-human-time- with-the-teacher ratio. So in a traditional model, most of the teacher's time is spent doing lectures and grading and whatnot. Maybe five percent of their time is sitting next to students and working with them. Now, 100 percent of their time is. So once again, using technology, not just flipping the classroom, you're humanizing the classroom, I'd argue, by a factor of five or 10. As valuable as that is in Los Altos, imagine what it does to the adult learner, who's embarrassed to go back and learn stuff they should have known before going back to college. Imagine what it does to a street kid in Calcutta, who has to help his family during the day, and that's the reason he or she can't go to school. Now they can spend two hours a day and remediate, or get up to speed and not feel embarrassed about what they do or don't know. Now imagine what happens where -- we talked about the peers teaching each other inside of a classroom. But this is all one system. There's no reason why you can't have that peer-to-peer tutoring beyond that one classroom. Imagine what happens if that student in Calcutta all of the sudden can tutor your son, or your son can tutor that kid in Calcutta. And I think what you'll see emerging is this notion of a global one-world classroom. And that's essentially what we're trying to build. Thank you. (Applause) Bill Gates: I'll ask about two or three questions. Salman Khan: Oh, OK. (Applause continues) (Applause ends) BG: I've seen some things you're doing in the system, that have to do with motivation and feedback -- energy points, merit badges. Tell me what you're thinking there. SK: Oh yeah. No, we have an awesome team working on it. I have to be clear, it's not just me anymore. I'm still doing all the videos, but we have a rock-star team doing the software. We've put a bunch of game mechanics in there, where you get badges, we're going to start having leader boards by area, you get points. It's actually been pretty interesting. Just the wording of the badging, or how many points you get for doing something, we see on a system-wide basis, like tens of thousands of fifth-graders or sixth-graders going one direction or another, depending what badge you give them. (Laughter) BG: And the collaboration you're doing with Los Altos, how did that come about? SK: Los Altos, it was kind of crazy. Once again, I didn't expect it to be used in classrooms. Someone from their board came and said, "What would you do if you had carte Blanche in a classroom?" I said, "Well, every student would work at their own pace, on something like this, we'd give a dashboard." They said, "This is kind of radical. We have to think about it." Me and the rest of the team were like, "They're never going to want to do this." But literally the next day they were like, "Can you start in two weeks?" (Laughter) BG: So fifth-grade math is where that's going on right now? SK: It's two fifth-grade classes and two seventh-grade classes. They're doing it at the district level. I think what they're excited about is they can follow these kids, not only in school; on Christmas, we saw some of the kids were doing it. We can track everything, track them as they go through the entire district. Through the summers, as they go from one teacher to the next, you have this continuity of data that even at the district level, they can see. BG: So some of those views we saw were for the teacher to go in and track actually what's going on with those kids. So you're getting feedback on those teacher views to see what they think they need? SK: Oh yeah. Most of those were specs by the teachers. We made some of those for students so they could see their data, but we have a very tight design loop with the teachers themselves. And they're saying, "Hey, this is nice, but --" Like that focus graph, a lot of the teachers said, "I have a feeling a lot of the kids are jumping around and not focusing on one topic." So we made that focus diagram. So it's all been teacher-driven. It's been pretty crazy. BG: Is this ready for prime time? Do you think a lot of classes next school year should try this thing out? SK: Yeah, it's ready. We've got a million people on the site already, so we can handle a few more. (Laughter) No, no reason why it really can't happen in every classroom in America tomorrow. BG: And the vision of the tutoring thing. The idea there is, if I'm confused about a topic, somehow right in the user interface, I'd find people who are volunteering, maybe see their reputation, and I could schedule and connect up with those people? SK: Absolutely. And this is something I recommend everyone in this audience do. Those dashboards the teachers have, you can go log in right now and you can essentially become a coach for your kids, your nephews, your cousins, or maybe some kids at the Boys and Girls Club. And yeah, you can start becoming a mentor, a tutor, really immediately. But yeah, it's all there. BG: Well, it's amazing. I think you just got a glimpse of the future of education. BG: Thank you. SK: Thank you. (Applause)

I want to talk a little bit today about labor and work. When we think about how people work, the naive intuition we have is that people are like rats in a maze -- that all people care about is money, and the moment we give people money, we can direct them to work one way, we can direct them to work another way. This is why we give bonuses to bankers and pay in all kinds of ways. And we really have this incredibly simplistic view of why people work and what the labor market looks like. At the same time, if you think about it, there's all kinds of strange behaviors in the world around us. Think about something like mountaineering and mountain climbing. If you read books of people who climb mountains, difficult mountains, do you think that those books are full of moments of joy and happiness? No, they are full of misery. In fact, it's all about frostbite and difficulty to walk and difficulty of breathing -- cold, challenging circumstances. And if people were just trying to be happy, the moment they would get to the top, they would say, "This was a terrible mistake. I'll never do it again." (Laughter) "Instead, let me sit on a beach somewhere drinking mojitos." But instead, people go down, and after they recover, they go up again. And if you think about mountain climbing as an example, it suggests all kinds of things. It suggests that we care about reaching the end, a peak. It suggests that we care about the fight, about the challenge. It suggests that there's all kinds of other things that motivate us to work or behave in all kinds of ways. And for me personally, I started thinking about this after a student came to visit me. This was a student that was one of my students a few years earlier. And he came one day back to campus. And he told me the following story: He said that for more than two weeks, he was working on a PowerPoint presentation. He was working in a big bank. This was in preparation for a merger and acquisition. And he was working very hard on this presentation -- graphs, tables, information. He stayed late at night every day. And the day before it was due, he sent his PowerPoint presentation to his boss, and his boss wrote him back and said, "Nice presentation, but the merger is canceled." And the guy was deeply depressed. Now at the moment when he was working, he was actually quite happy. Every night he was enjoying his work, he was staying late, he was perfecting this PowerPoint presentation. But knowing that nobody would ever watch that made him quite depressed. So I started thinking about how do we experiment with this idea of the fruits of our labor. And to start with, we created a little experiment in which we gave people Legos, and we asked them to build with Legos. And for some people, we gave them Legos and we said, "Hey, would you like to build this Bionicle for three dollars? We'll pay you three dollars for it." And people said yes, and they built with these Legos. And when they finished, we took it, we put it under the table, and we said, "Would you like to build another one, this time for $2.70?" If they said yes, we gave them another one. And when they finished, we asked them, "Do you want to build another one?" for $2.40, $2.10, and so on, until at some point people said, "No more. It's not worth it for me." This was what we called the meaningful condition. People built one Bionicle after another. After they finished every one of them, we put them under the table. And we told them that at the end of the experiment, we will take all these Bionicles, we will disassemble them, we will put them back in the boxes, and we will use it for the next participant. There was another condition. This other condition was inspired by David, my student. And this other condition we called the Sisyphic condition. And if you remember the story about Sisyphus, Sisyphus was punished by the gods to push the same rock up a hill, and when he almost got to the end, the rock would roll over, and he would have to start again. And you can think about this as the essence of doing futile work. You can imagine that if he pushed the rock on different hills, at least he would have some sense of progress. Also, if you look at prison movies, sometimes the way that the guards torture the prisoners is to get them to dig a hole and when the prisoner is finished, they ask him to fill the hole back up and then dig again. There's something about this cyclical version of doing something over and over and over that seems to be particularly demotivating. So in the second condition of this experiment, that's exactly what we did. We asked people, "Would you like to build one Bionicle for three dollars?" And if they said yes, they built it. Then we asked them, "Do you want to build another one for $2.70?" And if they said yes, we gave them a new one, and as they were building it, we took apart the one that they just finished. And when they finished that, we said, "Would you like to build another one, this time for 30 cents less?" And if they said yes, we gave them the one that they built and we broke. So this was an endless cycle of them building and us destroying in front of their eyes. Now what happens when you compare these two conditions? The first thing that happened was that people built many more Bionicles -- they built 11 versus seven -- in the meaningful condition versus the Sisyphus condition. And by the way, we should point out that this was not a big meaning. People were not curing cancer or building bridges. People were building Bionicles for a few cents. And not only that, everybody knew that the Bionicles would be destroyed quite soon. So there was not a real opportunity for big meaning. But even the small meaning made a difference. Now we had another version of this experiment. In this other version of the experiment, we didn't put people in this situation, we just described to them the situation, much as I am describing to you now, and we asked them to predict what the result would be. What happened? People predicted the right direction but not the right magnitude. People who were just given the description of the experiment said that in the meaningful condition people would probably build one more Bionicle. So people understand that meaning is important, they just don't understand the magnitude of the importance, the extent to which it's important. There was one other piece of data we looked at. If you think about it, there are some people who love Legos and some people who don't. And you would speculate that the people who love Legos will build more Legos, even for less money, because after all, they get more internal joy from it. And the people who love Legos less will build less Legos because the enjoyment that they derive from it is lower. And that's actually what we found in the meaningful condition. There was a very nice correlation between love of Lego and the amount of Legos people built. What happened in the Sisyphic condition? In that condition the correlation was zero. There was no relationship between the love of Lego and how much people built, which suggests to me that with this manipulation of breaking things in front of people's eyes, we basically crushed any joy that they could get out of this activity. We basically eliminated it. Soon after I finished running this experiment, I went to talk to a big software company in Seattle. I can't tell you who they were, but they were a big company in Seattle. And this was a group within this software company that was put in a different building. And they asked them to innovate and create the next big product for this company. And the week before I showed up, the CEO of this big software company went to that group, 200 engineers, and canceled the project. And I stood there in front of 200 of the most depressed people I've ever talked to. And I described to them some of these Lego experiments, and they said they felt like they had just been through that experiment. And I asked them, I said, "How many of you now show up to work later than you used to?" And everybody raised their hand. I said, "How many of you now go home earlier than you used to?" And everybody raised their hand. I asked them, "How many of you now add not-so-kosher things to your expense reports?" And they didn't really raise their hands, but they took me out to dinner and showed me what they could do with expense reports. And then I asked them, I said, "What could the CEO have done to make you not as depressed?" And they came up with all kinds of ideas. They said the CEO could have asked them to present to the whole company about their journey over the last two years and what they decided to do. He could have asked them to think about which aspect of their technology could fit with other parts of the organization. He could have asked them to build some prototypes, some next-generation prototypes, and seen how they would work. But the thing is that any one of those would require some effort and motivation. And I think the CEO basically did not understand the importance of meaning. If the CEO, just like our participants, thought the essence of meaning is unimportant, then he [wouldn't] care. And he would tell them, "At the moment I directed you in this way, and now that I am directing you in this way, everything will be okay." But if you understood how important meaning is, then you would figure out that it's actually important to spend some time, energy and effort in getting people to care more about what they're doing. The next experiment was slightly different. We took a sheet of paper with random letters, and we asked people to find pairs of letters that were identical next to each other. That was the task. And people did the first sheet. And then we asked them if they wanted to do the next sheet for a little bit less money and the next sheet for a little bit less money, and so on and so forth. And we had three conditions. In the first condition, people wrote their name on the sheet, found all the pairs of letters, gave it to the experimenter. The experimenter would look at it, scan it from top to bottom, say "uh huh" and put it on the pile next to them. In the second condition, people did not write their name on it. The experimenter looked at it, took the sheet of paper, did not look at it, did not scan it, and simply put it on the pile of pages. So you take a piece, you just put it on the side. And in the third condition, the experimenter got the sheet of paper and directly put it into a shredder. What happened in those three conditions? In this plot I'm showing you at what pay rate people stopped. So low numbers mean that people worked harder. They worked for much longer. In the acknowledged condition, people worked all the way down to 15 cents. At 15 cents per page, they basically stopped these efforts. In the shredder condition, it was twice as much -- 30 cents per sheet. And this is basically the result we had before. You shred people's efforts, output, you get them not to be as happy with what they're doing. But I should point out, by the way, that in the shredder condition, people could have cheated. They could have done not so good work, because they realized that people were just shredding it. So maybe the first sheet you would do good work, but then you see nobody is really testing it, so you would do more and more and more. So in fact, in the shredder condition, people could have submitted more work and gotten more money and put less effort into it. But what about the ignored condition? Would the ignored condition be more like the acknowledged or more like the shredder, or somewhere in the middle? It turns out it was almost like the shredder. Now there's good news and bad news here. The bad news is that ignoring the performance of people is almost as bad as shredding their effort in front of their eyes. Ignoring gets you a whole way out there. The good news is that by simply looking at something that somebody has done, scanning it and saying "uh huh," that seems to be quite sufficient to dramatically improve people's motivations. So the good news is that adding motivation doesn't seem to be so difficult. The bad news is that eliminating motivations seems to be incredibly easy, and if we don't think about it carefully, we might overdo it. So this is all in terms of negative motivation or eliminating negative motivation. The next part I want to show you is something about the positive motivation. So there is a store in the U.S. called IKEA. And IKEA is a store with kind of okay furniture that takes a long time to assemble. (Laughter) And I don't know about you, but every time I assemble one of those, it takes me much longer, it's much more effortful, it's much more confusing. I put things in the wrong way. I can't say enjoy those pieces. I can't say I enjoy the process. But when I finish it, I seem to like those IKEA pieces of furniture more than I like other ones. And there's an old story about cake mixes. So when they started cake mixes in the '40s, they would take this powder and they would put it in a box, and they would ask housewives to basically pour it in, stir some water in it, mix it, put it in the oven, and -- voila! -- you had cake. But it turns out they were very unpopular. People did not want them. And they thought about all kinds of reasons for that. Maybe the taste was not good. No, the taste was great. What they figured out was that there was not enough effort involved. It was so easy that nobody could serve cake to their guests and say, "Here is my cake." No, no, no, it was somebody else's cake. It was as if you bought it in the store. It didn't really feel like your own. So what did they do? They took the eggs and the milk out of the powder. (Laughter) Now you had to break the eggs and add them. You had to measure the milk and add it, mixing it. Now it was your cake. Now everything was fine. (Applause) Now I think a little bit like the IKEA effect, by getting people to work harder, they actually got them to love what they're doing to a higher degree. So how do we look at this question experimentally? We asked people to build some origami. We gave them instructions on how to create origami, and we gave them a sheet of paper. And these were all novices, and they built something that was really quite ugly -- nothing like a frog or a crane. But then we told them, we said, "Look, this origami really belongs to us. You worked for us, but I'll tell you what, we'll sell it to you. How much do you want to pay for it?" And we measured how much they were willing to pay for it. And we had two types of people. We had the people who built it, and we had the people who did not build it and just looked at it as external observers. And what we found was that the builders thought that these were beautiful pieces of origami, and they were willing to pay for them five times more than the people who just evaluated them externally. Now you could say, if you were a builder, do you think that, "Oh, I love this origami, but I know that nobody else would love it?" Or do you think, "I love this origami, and everybody else will love it as well?" Which one of those two is correct? Turns out the builders not only loved the origami more, they thought that everybody would see the world in their view. They thought everybody else would love it more as well. In the next version we tried to do the IKEA effect. We tried to make it more difficult. So for some people we gave the same task. For some people we made it harder by hiding the instructions. At the top of the sheet, we had little diagrams of how do you fold origami. For some people we just eliminated that. So now this was tougher. What happened? Well in an objective way, the origami now was uglier, it was more difficult. Now when we looked at the easy origami, we saw the same thing: Builders loved it more, evaluators loved it less. When you looked at the hard instructions, the effect was larger. Why? Because now the builders loved it even more. They put all this extra effort into it. And evaluators? They loved it even less. Because in reality it was even uglier than the first version. Of course, this tells you something about how we evaluate things. Now think about kids. Imagine I asked you, "How much would you sell your kids for?" Your memories and associations and so on. Most people would say for a lot, a lot of money -- on good days. (Laughter) But imagine this was slightly different. Imagine if you did not have your kids, and one day you went to the park and you met some kids, and they were just like your kids. And you played with them for a few hours. And when you were about to leave, the parents said, "Hey, by the way, just before you leave, if you're interested, they're for sale." (Laughter) How much would you pay for them now? Most people say not that much. And this is because our kids are so valuable, not just because of who they are, but because of us, because they are so connected to us and because of the time and connection. And by the way, if you think that IKEA instructions are not good, think about the instructions that come with kids. Those are really tough. (Laughter) By the way, these are my kids, which, of course, are wonderful and so on. Which comes to tell you one more thing, which is, much like our builders, when they look at the creature of their creation, we don't see that other people don't see things our way. Let me say one last comment. If you think about Adam Smith versus Karl Marx, Adam Smith had the very important notion of efficiency. He gave an example of a pin factory. He said pins have 12 different steps, and if one person does all 12 steps, production is very low. But if you get one person to do step one and one person to do step two and step three and so on, production can increase tremendously. And indeed, this is a great example and the reason for the Industrial Revolution and efficiency. Karl Marx, on the other hand, said that the alienation of labor is incredibly important in how people think about the connection to what they are doing. And if you make all 12 steps, you care about the pin. But if you make one step every time, maybe you don't care as much. And I think that in the Industrial Revolution, Adam Smith was more correct than Karl Marx, but the reality is that we've switched and now we're in the knowledge economy. And you can ask yourself, what happens in a knowledge economy? Is efficiency still more important than meaning? I think the answer is no. I think that as we move to situations in which people have to decide on their own about how much effort, attention, caring, how connected they feel to it, are they thinking about labor on the way to work and in the shower and so on, all of a sudden Marx has more things to say to us. So when we think about labor, we usually think about motivation and payment as the same thing, but the reality is that we should probably add all kinds of things to it -- meaning, creation, challenges, ownership, identity, pride, etc. And the good news is that if we added all of those components and thought about them, how do we create our own meaning, pride, motivation, and how do we do it in our workplace and for the employees, I think we could get people to both be more productive and happier. Thank you very much. (Applause)

It's wonderful to be back. I love this wonderful gathering. And you must be wondering, "What on Earth? Have they put up the wrong slide?" No, no. Look at this magnificent beast and ask the question -- who designed it? This is TED. This is Technology, Entertainment, Design and there's a dairy cow. It's a quite wonderfully designed animal. And I was thinking, how do I introduce this? And I thought, well, maybe that old doggerel by Joyce Kilmer, you know: "Poems are made by fools like me, but only God can make a tree." And you might say, "Well, God designed the cow." But, of course, God got a lot of help. This is the ancestor of cattle. This is the Oryx. And it was designed by natural selection, the process of natural selection, over many millions of years. And then it became domesticated thousands of years ago. And human beings became its stewards, and, without even knowing what they were doing, they gradually redesigned it and redesigned it and redesigned it. And then, more recently, they really began to do sort of reverse engineering on this beast and figure out just what the parts were, how they worked and how they might be optimized -- how they might be made better. Now why am I talking about cows? Because I want to say that much the same thing is true of religions. Religions are natural phenomena. They're just as natural as cows. They have evolved over millennia. They have a biological base, just like the Oryx. They have become domesticated, and human beings have been redesigning their religions for thousands of years. This is TED, and I want to talk about design. Because what I've been doing for the last four years, really since the first time you saw me -- some of you saw me at TED when I was talking about religion, and in the last four years I've been working just about non-stop on this topic. And you might say it's about the reverse engineering of religions. Now that very idea, I think, strikes terror in many people, or anger, or anxiety of one sort or another. And that is the spell that I want to break. I want to say, no, religions are an important natural phenomenon. We should study them with the same intensity that we study all the other important natural phenomena, like global warming, as we heard so eloquently last night from Al Gore. Today's religions are brilliantly designed -- brilliantly designed. They're immensely powerful social institutions and many of their features can be traced back to earlier features that we can really make sense of by reverse engineering. And, as with the cow, there's a mixture of evolutionary design, designed by natural selection itself, and intelligent design -- more or less intelligent design -- and redesigned by human beings who are trying to redesign their religions. You don't do book talks at TED, but I'm going to have just one slide about my book, because there is one message in it which I think this group really needs to hear. And I would be very interested to get your responses to this. It's the one policy proposal that I make in the book, at this time when I claim not to know enough about religion to know what other policy proposals to make. And it's one that echoes remarks that you've heard already today. Here's my proposal. I'm going to just take a couple of minutes to explain it -- education in world religions, on world religions, for all of our children in primary school, in high school, in public schools, in private schools and in home schooling. So what I'm proposing is, just as we require reading, writing, arithmetic, American history, so we should have a curriculum on facts about all the religions of the world -- about their history, about their creeds, about their texts, their music, their symbolisms, their prohibitions, their requirements. And this should be presented factually, straightforwardly, with no particular spin, to all of the children in the country. And as long as you teach them that, you can teach them anything else you like. That, I think, is maximal tolerance for religious freedom. As long as you inform your children about other religions, then you may -- and as early as you like and whatever you like -- teach them whatever creed you want them to learn. But also let them know about other religions. Now why do I say that? Because democracy depends on an informed citizenship. Informed consent is the very bedrock of our understanding of democracy. Misinformed consent is not worth it. It's like a coin flip; it doesn't count really. Democracy depends on informed consent. This is the way we treat people as responsible adults. Now, children below the age of consent are a special case. I'm going to use a word that Pastor Rick just used -- parents are stewards of their children. They don't own them. You can't own your children. You have a responsibility to the world, to the state, to them, to take care of them right. You may teach them whatever creed you think is most important, but I say you have a responsibility to let them be informed about all the other creeds in the world, too. The reason I've taken this time is I've been fascinated to hear some of the reactions to this. One reviewer for a Roman Catholic newspaper called it "totalitarian." It strikes me as practically libertarian. Is it totalitarian to require reading, writing and arithmetic? I don't think so. All I'm saying is -- facts. Facts only. No values, just facts about all the world's religions. Another reviewer called it "hilarious." Well, I'm really bothered by the fact that anybody would think that was hilarious. It seems to me to be such a plausible, natural extension of the democratic principles we already have, that I'm shocked to think anybody would find that just ridiculous. I know many religions are so anxious about preserving the purity of their faith among their children that they are intent on keeping their children ignorant of other faiths. I don't think that's defensible, but I'd really be pleased to get your answers on that -- any reactions to that -- later. But now I'm going to move on. Back to the cow. This picture, which I pulled off the web -- the fellow on the left is really an important part of this picture. That's the steward. Cows couldn't live without human stewards -- they're domesticated. They're a sort of ectosymbiont. They depend on us for their survival. And Pastor Rick was just talking about sheep. I'm going to talk about sheep, too. There's a lot of serendipitous convergence here. How clever it was of sheep to acquire shepherds! Think of what this got them. They could outsource all their problems -- protection from predators, food finding, health maintenance. The only cost in most flocks is a loss of free mating. What a deal. "How clever of sheep!" you might say. Except, of course, it wasn't the sheep's cleverness. We all know sheep are not exactly rocket scientists -- they're not very smart. It wasn't the cleverness of the sheep at all. They were clueless. But it was a very clever move. Whose clever move was it? It was a clever move of natural selection itself. Francis Crick, the co-discoverer of the structure of DNA with Jim Watson, once joked about what he called Orgel's Second Rule. Leslie Orgel is still a molecular biologist, brilliant guy, and Orgel's Second Rule is: Evolution is cleverer than you are. Now, that is not Intelligent Design -- not from Francis Crick. Evolution is cleverer than you are. If you understand Orgel's Second Rule, then you understand why the Intelligent Design movement is basically a hoax. The designs discovered by the process of natural selection are brilliant, unbelievably brilliant. Again and again biologists are fascinated with the brilliance of what's discovered. But the process itself is without purpose, without foresight, without design. When I was here four years ago, I told the story about an ant climbing a blade of grass. And why was the ant doing it? Well, it's because its brain had been infected with a lancet fluke that was -- needed to get into the belly of a sheep or a cow in order to reproduce. It was sort of a spooky story. And I think some people may have misunderstood. Lancet flukes aren't smart. I submit that the intelligence of a lancet fluke is down there somewhere between petunia and carrot. They're not really bright. They don't have to be. The lesson we learn from this is you don't have to have a mind to be a beneficiary. The design is there in nature, but it's not in anybody's head. It doesn't have to be. That's the way evolution works. The question -- was domestication good for sheep? It was great for their genetic fitness. And here I want to remind you of a wonderful point that Paul MacCready made at TED three years ago. Here's what he said. 10,000 years ago at the dawn of agriculture, human population, plus livestock and pets, was approximately a tenth of one per cent of the terrestrial vertebrae landmass. That was just 10,000 years ago. Yesterday, in biological terms. What is it today? Does anybody remember what he told us? 98 percent. That is what we have done on this planet. Now, I talked to Paul afterwards. I wanted to check to find out how he'd calculated this, and get the sources and so forth. And he gave me a paper that he had written on this. There was a passage in it which he did not present here and I think it is so good I'm going to read it to you. "Over billions of years on a unique sphere, chance has painted a thin covering of life: complex, improbable, wonderful and fragile. Suddenly, we humans, a recently arrived species no longer subject to the checks and balances inherent in nature, have grown in population, technology and intelligence to a position of terrible power. We now wield the paintbrush." We heard about the atmosphere as a thin layer of varnish. Life itself is just a thin coat of paint on this planet. And we're the ones that hold the paintbrush. And how can we do that? The key to our domination of the planet is culture, and the key to culture is religion. Suppose Martian scientists came to Earth. They would be puzzled by many things. Anybody know what this is? I'll tell you what it is. This is a million people gathering on the banks of the Ganges in 2001, perhaps the largest single gathering of human beings ever, as seen from satellite photograph. Here's a big crowd. Here's another crowd in Mecca. Martians would be amazed by this. They'd want to know how it originated, what it was for and how it perpetuates itself. Actually, I'm going to pass over this. The ant isn't alone. There's all sorts of wonderful cases of species. In that case, a parasite gets into a mouse and it needs to get into the belly of a cat. And it turns the mouse into Mighty Mouse -- it makes it fearless, so it runs out in the open, where it'll be eaten by a cat. True story. In other words, we have these hijackers -- you've seen this slide before, from four years ago -- a parasite that infects the brain and induces even suicidal behavior on behalf of a cause other than one's own genetic fitness. Does that ever happen to us? Yes, it does -- quite wonderfully. The Arabic word "Islam" means "submission." It means "surrender of self-interest to the will of Allah." But I'm not just talking about Islam. I'm talking also about Christianity. This is a parchment music page that I found in a Paris bookstall 50 years ago. And on it it says, in Latin: "Semen est verbum Dei. Sator autem Christus. The word of God is the seed and the sower of the seed is Christ." Same idea! Well, not quite. But in fact, Christians, too, glory in the fact that they have surrendered to God. I'll give you a few quotes. "The heart of worship is surrender. Surrendered people obey God's words, even if it doesn't make sense." Those words are by Rick Warren. Those are from "The Purpose Driven Life." And I want to turn now, briefly, to talk about that book, which I've read. You've all got a copy. You've just heard the man. And what I want to do now is say a bit about this book from the design standpoint, because I think it's actually a brilliant book. First of all, the goal. And you heard just now what the goal is. It's to bring purpose to the lives of millions, and he has succeeded. Is it a good goal? In itself, I'm sure we all agree, it is a wonderful goal. He's absolutely right. There are lots of people out there who don't have purpose in their life, and bringing purpose to their life is a wonderful goal. I give him an A+ on this. Is the goal achieved? Yes. 30 million copies of this book. Al Gore, eat your heart out. (Laughter) Just exactly what Al is trying to do, Rick is doing. This is a fantastic achievement. And, the means -- how does he do it? It's a brilliant redesign of traditional religious themes -- updating them, quietly dropping obsolete features, putting new interpretations on other features. This is the evolution of religion that's been going on for thousands of years, and he's just the latest brilliant practitioner of it. I don't have to tell you this. You've just heard the man. Excellent insights into human psychology, wise advice on every page. Moreover, he invites us to look under the hood. I really appreciated that. For instance, he has an appendix where he explains his choice of translations of different Bible verses. The book is clear, vivid, accessible, beautifully formatted. Just enough repetition. That's really important. Every time you read it or say it, you make another copy in your brain. Every time you read it or say it, you make another copy in your brain. (Laughter) With me, everybody -- every time you read it or say it, you make another copy in your brain. Thank you. And now we come to my problem. Because I'm absolutely sincere in my appreciation of all that I've said about this book. But I wish it were better. I have some problems with the book. And it would just be insincere of me not to address those problems. I wish he could do this with a revision, a Mark 2 version of his book. "The truth will set you free" -- that's what it says in the Bible, and it's something that I want to live by, too. My problem is, some of the bits in it I don't think are true. Now some of this is a difference of opinion, and that's not my main complaint. That's worth mentioning. Here's a passage -- it's very much what he said, anyway. "If there was no God we would all be accidents, the result of astronomical random chance in the Universe. You could stop reading this book because life would have no purpose or meaning or significance. There would be no right or wrong and no hope beyond your brief years on Earth." Now, I just do not believe that. By the way, I find Homer Groening's film presented a beautiful alternative to that very claim. Yes, there is meaning and a reason for right or wrong. We don't need a belief in God to be good or to have meaning in us. But that is just a difference of opinion. That's not what I'm really worried about. How about this -- "God designed this planet's environment just so we could live in it." I'm afraid that a lot of people take that sentiment to mean that we don't have to do the sorts of things that Al Gore is trying so hard to get us to do. I'm not happy with that sentiment at all. And then I find this -- "All the evidence available in the biological sciences supports the core proposition that the cosmos is especially designed whole with life and mankind as its fundamental goal and purpose, a whole in which all facets of reality have their meaning and explanation in this central fact." Well, that's Michael Denton. He's a creationist. And here I think, "Wait a minute." I read this again. I read it three or four times and I think, "Is he really endorsing intelligent design? Is he endorsing creationism here?" And you can't tell. So I'm sort of thinking, "Well, I don't know, I don't know if I want to get upset with this yet." But then I read on and I read this: "First, Noah had never seen rain, because prior to the flood God irrigated the earth from the ground up." I wish that sentence weren't in there, because I think it is false. And I think that thinking this way about the history of the planet, after we've just been hearing about the history of the planet over millions of years, discourages people from scientific understanding. Now, Rick Warren uses scientific terms and scientific factoids and information in a very interesting way. Here's one: "God deliberately shaped and formed you to serve him in a way that makes your ministry unique. He carefully mixed the DNA cocktail that created you." I think that's false. Now maybe we want to treat it as metaphorical. Here's another one -- "For instance, your brain can store 100 trillion facts. Your mind can handle 15,000 decisions a second." Well, it would be interesting to find the interpretation where I would accept that. There might be some way of treating that as true. "Anthropologists have noted that worship is a universal urge, hardwired by God into the very fiber of our being, an inbuilt need to connect with God." Well, there's a sense which I agree with him, except I think it has an evolutionary explanation. And what I find deeply troubling in this book is that he seems to be arguing that if you want to be moral, if you want to have meaning in your life, you have to be an Intelligent Designer -- you have to deny the theory of evolution by natural selection. And I think, on the contrary, that it is very important to solving the world's problems that we take evolutionary biology seriously. Whose truth are we going to listen to? Well, this from "The Purpose Driven Life" -- "The Bible must become the authoritative standard for my life, the compass I rely on for direction, the counsel I listen to for making wise decisions and the benchmark I use for evaluating everything." Well maybe, OK, but what's going to follow from this? And here's one that does concern me. Remember I quoted him before with this line -- "Surrendered people obey God's word, even if it doesn't make sense." And that's a problem. "Don't ever argue with the Devil. He's better at arguing than you are, having had thousands of years to practice." Now Rick Warren didn't invent this clever move. It's an old move. It's a very clever adaptation of religions. It's a wildcard for disarming any reasonable criticism. "You don't like my interpretation? You've got a reasonable objection to it? Don't listen, don't listen! That's the Devil speaking." This discourages the sort of reasoning citizenship it seems to me that we want to have. I've got one more problem, then I'm through. And I'd really like to get a response if Rick is able to do it. "In the Great Commission, Jesus said, 'Go to all people of all nations and make them my disciples. Baptize them in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, and teach them to do everything I've told you.'" The Bible says Jesus is the only one who can save the world. Now here we've seen many wonderful maps of the world in the last day or so. Here's one, not as beautiful as the others. It simply shows the religions of the world. And here's one that shows the sort of current breakdown of the different religions. Now do we really want to commit ourselves to engulfing all the other religions when their holy books are telling them, "Don't listen to the other side, that's just Satan talking!" It seems to me that that's a very problematic ship to get on for the future. I found this sign as I was driving to Maine recently, in front of a church -- "Good without God becomes zero." Sort of cute. A very clever little meme. I don't believe it and I think this idea, popular as it is -- not in this guise but in general -- is itself one of the main problems that we face. If you are like me, you know many wonderful, committed, engaged atheists, agnostics, who are being very good without God. And you also know many religious people who hide behind their sanctity instead of doing good works. So, I wish we could drop this meme. I wish this meme would go extinct. Thanks very much for your attention. (Applause)

Sergey Brin: I want to discuss a question I know that's been pressing on many of your minds. We spoke to you last several years ago. And before I get started today, since many of you are wondering, I just wanted to get it out of the way. The answer is boxers. Now I hope all of you feel better. Do you know what this might be? Does anyone know what that is? Audience: Yes. SB: What is it? Audience: It's people logging on to Google around the world. SB: Wow, OK. I didn't really realize what it was when I first saw it. But this is what helped me see it. This is what we run at the office, that actually runs real time. Here it's slightly logged. But here you can see around the world how people are using Google. And every one of those rising dots represents probably about 20, 30 searches, or something like that. And they're labeled by color right now, by language. So you can see: here we are in the U.S., and they're all coming up red. There we are in Monterey -- hopefully I can get it right. You can see that Japan is busy at night, right there. We have Tokyo coming in in Japanese. There's a lot of activity in China. There's a lot of activity in India. There's some in the Middle East, the little pockets. And Europe, which is right now in the middle of the day, is going really strong with a whole wide variety of languages. Now you can also see, if I turn this around here -- hopefully I won't shake the world too much. But you can also see, there are places where there's not so much. Australia, because there just aren't very many people there. And this is something that we should really work on, which is Africa, which is just a few trickles, basically in South Africa and a few other urban cities. But basically, what we've noticed is these queries, which come in at thousands per second, are available everywhere there is power. And pretty much everywhere there is power, there is the Internet. And even in Antarctica -- well, at least this time of year -- we from time to time will see a query rising up. And if we had it plotted correctly, I think the International Space Station would have it, too. So this is some of the challenge that we have here, is you can see that it's actually kind of hard to get the -- there we go. This is how we have to move the bits around to actually get the people the answers to their questions. You can see that there's a lot of data running around. It has to go all over the world: through fibers, through satellites, through all kinds of connections. And it's pretty tricky for us to maintain the latencies as low as we try to. Hopefully your experience is good. But you can see also, once again -- so some places are much more wired than others, and you can see all the bandwidth across the U.S., going up over to Asia, Europe in the other direction, and so forth. Now what I would like to do is just to show you what one second of this activity would look like. And if we can switch to slides -- all right, here we go. So this is slowed down. This is what one second looks like. And this is what we spend a lot of our time doing, is just making sure that we can keep up with this kind of traffic load. Now, each one of those queries has an interesting life and tale of its own. I mean, it could be somebody's health, it could be somebody's career, something important to them. And it could potentially be something as important as tomato sauce, or in this case, ketchup. So this is a query that we had -- I guess it's a popular band that was more popular in some parts of the world than others. You can see that it got started right here. In the U.S. and Spain, it was popular at the same time. But it didn't have quite the same pickup in the U.S. as it did in Spain. And then from Spain, it went to Italy, and then Germany got excited, and maybe right now the U.K. is enjoying it. And so I guess the U.S. finally, finally started to like it, too. And I just wanted to play it for you. Anyway, you can all enjoy it for yourselves -- hopefully that search will work. As a part of -- you know, part of what we want to do to grow our company is to have more searches. And what that means is we want to have more people who are healthy and educated. More animals, if they start doing searches as well. But partly, we want to make the world a better place, and so one thing that we're embarking upon is the Google Foundation, and we're in the process of setting that up. We also have a program already called Google Grants that now serves over 150 different charities around the world, and these are some of the charities that are on there. And it's something I'm very excited to be a part of. In fact, many of the organizations that are here -- the Acumen Fund, I think ApproTEC we have running, I'm not sure if that one's up yet -- and many of the people who have presented here are running through Google Grants. They run Google ads, and we just give them the ad credit so they can let organizations know. One of the earlier results that we got -- we have a Singaporean businessman who is now sponsoring a village of 25 Vietnamese girls for their education, and that was one of the earliest results. And as I said, now there have been many, many stories that have come in, because we do have hundreds of charities in there, and the Google Foundation will be an even broader endeavor. Now does anybody know who this is? A-ha! Audience: Orkut. SB: Yes! Somebody got it. This is Orkut. Is anybody here on Orkut? Do we have any? Okay, not very many people know about it. I'll explain it in a second. This is one of our engineers. We find that they work better when they're submerged and covered with leaves. That's how we churn those products out. Orkut had a vision to create a social network. I know all of you are thinking, "Yet another social network." But it was a dream of his, and we, basically, when people really want to do something, well, we generally let them. So this is what he built. We just released it in a test phase last month, and it's been taking off. This is our VP of Engineering. You can see the red hair, and I don't know if you can see the nose ring there. And these are all of his friends. So this is how -- we just deployed it -- we just decided that people would send each other invitations to get into the service, and so we just had the people in our company initially send them out. And now we've grown to over 100,000 members. And they spread, actually, very quickly, even outside the U.S. You can see, even though the U.S. is still the majority here -- though, by the way, search-wise, it's only about 30 percent of our traffic -- but it's already going to Japan, and the U.K., and Europe, and all the rest of the countries. So it's a fun little project. There are a variety of demographics. I won't bore you with these. But it's just the kind of thing that we just try out for fun and see where it goes. And -- well, I'll leave you in suspense. Larry, you can explain this one. Larry Page: Thank you, Sergey. So one of the things -- both Sergey and I went to a Montessori school, and I think, for some reason, this has been incorporated in Google. And Sergey mentioned Orkut, which is something that, you know, Orkut wanted to do in his time, and we call this -- at Google, we've embodied this as "the 20 percent time," and the idea is, for 20 percent of your time, if you're working at Google, you can do what you think is the best thing to do. And many, many things at Google have come out of that, such as Orkut and also Google News. And I think many other things in the world also have come out of this. Mendel, who was supposed to be teaching high-school students, actually, you know, discovered the laws of genetics -- as a hobby, basically. So many, many useful things come out of this. And News, which I just mentioned, was started by a researcher. And he just -- he -- after 9/11, he got really interested in the news. And he said, "Why don't I look at the news better?" And so he started clustering it by category, and then he started using it, and then his friends started using it. And then, besides just looking cute on a baby's bottom, we made it a Googlette, which is basically a small project at Google. So it'd be like three people, or something like that, and they would try to make a product. And we wouldn't really be sure if it's going to work or not. And in News' case, you know, they had a couple of people working on it for a while, and then more and more people started using it, and then we put it out on the Internet, and more and more people started using it. And now it's a real, full-blown project with more people on it. And this is how we keep our innovation running. I think usually, as companies get bigger, they find it really hard to have small, innovative projects. And we had this problem, too, for a while, and we said, "Oh, we really need a new concept." You know, the Googlettes -- that's a small project that we're not quite sure if it's going to work or not, but we hope it will, and if we do enough of them, some of them will really work and turn out, such as News. But then we had a problem because then we had over 100 projects. And I don't know about all of you, but I have trouble keeping 100 things in my head at once. And we found that if we just wrote all of them down and ordered them -- and these are kind of made up. Don't really pay attention to them. For example, the "Buy Iceland" was from a media article. We would never do such a crazy thing, but -- in any case, we found if we just basically wrote them all down and ordered them, that most people would actually agree what the ordering should be. And this was kind of a surprise to me, but we found that as long as you keep the 100 things in your head, which you did by writing them down, that you could do a pretty good job deciding what to do and where to put your resources. And so that's basically what we've done since we instituted that a few years ago, and I think it has really allowed us to be innovative and still stay reasonably well-organized. The other thing we discovered is that people like to work on things that are important, and so naturally, people sort of migrate to the things that are high priorities. I just wanted to highlight a couple of things that are new, or you might not know about. And the top thing, actually, is the Deskbar. So this is a new -- how many of you use the Google Toolbar? Raise your hands. How many of you use the Deskbar? All right, see? You guys should try it out. But if you go to our site and search for "Deskbar," you'll get this. And the idea is, instead of a toolbar, it's just present all the time on your screen on the bottom, and you can do searches really easily. And it's sort of like a better version of the toolbar. Thank you, Sergey. This is another example of a project that somebody at Google was really passionate about, and they just, they got going, and it's really, really a great product, and really taking off. Google Answers is something we started, which is really cool, which lets you -- for five to 100 dollars, you can type a question in, and then there's a pool of researchers that go out and research it for you, and it's guaranteed and all that, and you can get actually very good answers to things without spending all that time yourself. Froogle lets you search shopping information, and Blogger lets you publish things. But all of these -- well, these were all sort of innovative things that we did that -- you know, we try many, many different things in our company. We also like to innovate in our physical space, and we noticed in meetings, you know, you have to wait a long time for projectors to turn on and off, and they're noisy, so people shut them off. And we didn't like that, so we actually, in maybe a couple of weeks, we built these little enclosures that enclosed the projectors, and so we can leave them on all the time and they're completely silent. And as a result, we were able to build some software that also lets us manage a meeting, so when you walk into a meeting room now, it lists all the meetings that are happening, you can very easily take notes, and they just get emailed automatically to all the people that were present in the meeting. And as we become more of a global company, we find these things really affect us -- you know, can we work effectively with people who aren't in the room? And things like that. And simple things like this can really make a big difference. We also have a lot of engineers in those meetings, and they don't always do their laundry as much as they should. And so we found it was pretty helpful to have laundry machines, for our younger employees especially, and ... we also allow dogs and things like that, and we've had, I think, a really fun culture at our company, which helps people work and enjoy what they're doing. This is actually our "cult picture." I just wanted to show quickly. We had this on our website for a while, but we found that after we put it on our website, we didn't get any job applications anymore. But anyway, every year we've taken the whole company on a ski trip. A lot of work happens in companies from people knowing each other, and informally. And I think we've done a good job encouraging that. It makes it a really fun place to work. Along with our logos, too, which I think really embody our culture when we change things. In the early days, we were actually advised we should never change our logo because we should establish our brand, you know, because, you know, you'd never want to change your logo. You want it to be consistent. And we said, "Well, that doesn't sound so much fun. Why don't we try changing it every day?" One of the things that really excites me about what we're doing now is we have this thing called AdSense, and this is a little bit foreshadowing -- this is from before Dean dropped out. But the idea is, like, on a newspaper, for example, we show you relevant ads. And this is hard to read, but this says "Battle for New Hampshire: Howard Dean for President" -- articles on Howard Dean. And these ads are generated automatically -- like in this case, on the Washington Post -- from the content on the site. And so we use our over 150,000 advertisers and millions of advertisements, so we pick the one that's most relevant to what you're actually looking at, much as we do on search. So the idea is we can make advertising useful, not just annoying, right? And the nice thing about this, we have a self-serve program, and many thousands of websites have signed up, and this let's them really make money. And I -- you know, there's a number of people I met -- I met this guy who runs a conservation site at a party, and he said, "You know, I wasn't making any money. I just put this thing on my site and I'm making 10,000 dollars a month. And, you know, thank you. I don't have to do my other job now." And I think this is really important for us, because it makes the Internet work better. It makes content get better, it makes searching work better, when people can really make their livelihood from producing great content. So this session is supposed to be about the future, so I'd thought I'd talk at least briefly about it. And the idea behind this is to do the perfect job doing search, you really have to be smart. Because you can type, you know, any kind of thing into Google, and you expect an answer back, right? But finding things is tricky, and so you really want intelligence. And in fact, the ultimate search engine would be smart. It would be artificial intelligence. And so that's something we work on, and we even have some people who are excited enough and crazy enough to work on it now, and that's really their goal. So we always hope that Google will be smart, but we're always surprised when other people think that it is. And so I just wanted to give a funny example of this. This is a blog from Iraq, and it's not really what I'm going to talk about, but I just wanted to show you an example. Maybe, Sergey, you can highlight this. So we decided -- actually, the highlight's right there. Oh, thank you. So, "related searches," right there. You can't see it that well, but we decided we should put in this feature into our AdSense ads, called "related searches." And so we'd say, you know, "Did you mean 'search for'" -- what is this, in this case, "Saddam Hussein," because this blog is about Iraq -- and you know, in addition to the ads, and we thought this would be a great idea. And so there is this blog of a young person who was kind of depressed, and he said, "You know, I'm sleeping a lot." He was just kind of writing about his life. And our algorithms -- not a person, of course, but our algorithms, our computers -- read his blog and decided that the related search was, "I am bored." And he read this, and he thought a person had decided that he was boring, and it was very unfortunate, and he said, "You know, what are these, you know, bastards at Google doing? Why don't they like my blog?" And so then we read his blog, which was getting -- you know, sort of going from bad to worse, and we said the related search was, "Retards." And then, you know, he got even more mad, and he wrote -- like, started swearing and so on. And then we produced "You suck." And finally, it ended with "Kiss my ass." And so basically, he thought he was dealing with something smart, and of course, you know, we just sort of wrote this program and we tried it out, and it didn't quite work, and we don't have this feature anymore. So with that, maybe I can switch back to the world. I wanted to end just by saying that there's a couple things that really make me excited to be involved with Google, and one of those is that we're able to make money largely through advertising, and one of the benefits that I didn't expect from that was that we're able to serve everyone in the world without worrying about, you know, places that don't have as much money. So we don't have to worry about our products being sold, for example, for less money in places that are poor, and then they get re-imported into the U.S. -- for example, with the drug industry. And I think we're really lucky to have that kind of business model because everyone in the world has access to our search, and I think that's a tremendous, tremendous benefit. The other thing I wanted to mention just briefly is that we have a tremendous ability and responsibility to provide people the right information, and we view ourselves like a newspaper or a magazine -- that we should provide very objective information. And so in our search results, we never accept payment for our search results. We accept payment for advertising, and we mark it as such. And that's unlike many of our competitors. And I think decisions we're able to make like that have a tremendous impact on the world, and it makes me really proud to be involved with Google. So thank you.

You know, one of the things that I'd like to say upfront is that I'm really here by accident. And what I mean -- not at TED -- that I'm -- at this point in my life, truly my set of circumstances I would truly consider an accident. But what I'd like to talk to you about today is perhaps a way in which we could use technology to make those accidents happen often. Because I really think, when I look back at how I actually ended up in this accident, technology played a big role in that. So, what I'd like to do today is tell you a little bit about myself, because I'd like to put in context what I'm going to tell you. And I think you will see why the two greatest passions in my life today are children and education. And once I put that in context, I'd like to tell you a little bit about technology: why I believe technology is a tremendous enabler; a very powerful tool to help address some of these challenges. Then, about the initiative that Chris mentioned, that we decided to launch at AMD that we call 50x15. And then I'll come back to the beginning, and tell you a little bit more -- hopefully convince you -- that I believe that in today's world, it is really important for business leaders not only to have an idea of what their business is all about, but to have a passion for something that is meaningful. So, with that in mind, first of all let me tell you, I'm one of five children. I'm the oldest, the other four are women. So I grew up in a family of women. I learned a lot about how to deal with that part of the world. (Laughter) And, as you can imagine, if you can picture this: I was born in a very small village in Mexico, in, unfortunately, very poor surroundings, and my parents did not have a college education. But I was fortunate to be able to have one, and so were my four sisters. That kind of tells you a little bit of an idea of the emphasis that my parents placed on education. My parents were fanatics about learning, and I'll come back to that a little bit later. But one of the things that exposed me early to learning, and a tremendous curiosity that was instilled in me as a child, was through a technology which is on the screen -- is a Victrola. My father found that in a junkyard, and was able to repair it and make it work. And somehow -- to this day, I frankly don't know how he was so aware of what was going on in the world -- but, by inviting me to sit down with him when I was only a few years old, and playing records in this Victrola by Mozart, and he would tell me how Mozart was the most romantic of all the classic composers ever, and how Claire de Lune, which was one of his favorites, was a real exposure to me to classical music. He explained to me about Johann Strauss, and how he created the waltzes that became so famous in the world. And would tell me a little bit about history too, when he'd play the 1812 Overture by Tchaikovsky on this little Victrola, and he would tell me about Russia and all the things that were happening in Russia at those times and why this music, in some way, represented a little bit of that history. And even as a child, he was able to instill in me a lot of curiosity. And perhaps to you this product may not look like high tech, but if you can imagine the time when this occurred -- it was in the mid '40s -- this was really, in his view, a pretty piece of high tech. Well, one of the things that is really critical to try to distill from that experience is that in addition to that, people ask me and say, "Well, how did your parents treat you when you were a child?" And I always said that they were really tough on me. And not tough in the sense that most people think of, where your parents yell at you or hit you or whatever. They were tough in the sense that, as I grew up, both my mother and father would always say to me, it's really important that you always remember two things. First of all, when you go to bed at night, you've got to look back on the day and make sure that you felt the day was a day which you contributed something, and that you did everything you could to do it the best way you could. And the second thing they said: and we trust you, that no matter where you are or where you go, you will always do the right thing. Now, I don't know how many of you have ever done that with your kids, but if you do, please trust me, it's the most pressure you can put on a child, to say -- (Laughter) -- we trust you that you will always do the right thing. When I was out with my friends drinking beer, I always was very aware of those words -- (Laughter) -- and very careful. One of the things that has happened with technology is that it can only be helpful if it is useful, of course, but it can only be helpful too if it's accessible, and it can only be helpful if it's affordable. And in today's world, being useful, affordable and accessible is not necessarily what happens in a lot of the technology that is done today. So, one of our passions in our company, and now one of my personal passions, is to be able to really work hard at making the technology useful, accessible and affordable. And to me, that is very, very critical. Now, technology has changed a lot since the Victrola days. You know, we now have, of course, incredibly powerful computers. A tremendous thing that people refer to as a killer app is called the Internet. Although frankly speaking, we don't believe the Internet is the killer app. What we believe is that the Internet, frankly, is a connection of people and ideas. The Internet happens to be just the medium in which those people and ideas get connected. And the power of connecting people and ideas can be pretty awesome. And so, we believe that through all the changes that have occurred, that we're faced today with a tremendous opportunity. If we can connect people and ideas more intensely -- and although you've seen a plethora and a myriad of products that have come to the market today, the key to me is how many of these products are able to provide people connectivity, in a useful way, accessibility, in an easy manner, and also affordability, that regardless of the economic status that a person could have, that they could have the opportunity to afford this technology. So, when you look at that, we said, well, we would like to, then, enable that a little bit. We would like to create an initiative. And a couple of years ago at AMD, we came up with this idea of saying, what if we create this initiative we call 50x15, where we are going to aim, that by the year 2015, half of the world will be connected to the Internet so that people and ideas can get connected. We knew we couldn't do it by ourselves, and by no means did we ever intend to imply that we at AMD could do it alone. We always felt that this was something that could be done through partnerships with governments, industry, educational institutions, a myriad of other companies and, frankly, even competitors. So, it is really a rather lofty initiative, if you want to think that way, but we felt that we had to put a real stake up in the years ahead, that was bold enough and courageous enough that it would force us all to think of ways to do things differently. And I'll come back to that in a minute, because I think the results so far have been remarkable, and I can only anticipate and get real excited about what I think is going to happen in the next eight years, while we get to the 2015 initiative. Where are we today? That's year by year. This comes from our friends at Gapminder.com. Those of you who've never looked at their website, you should look at it. It's really impressive. And you can see how the Internet penetration has changed over the years. And so when we gave ourselves this scorecard to say well, where are we related to our goal towards 2015, the thing that becomes apparent is three pieces. One is the Western world, defined mostly by Western Europe and the United States, has made an awful lot of progress. The connectivity in these parts of the world are really truly phenomenal and continue to increase. As a matter of fact, we think reaching 100 percent is very doable, even before the 2015 timeframe. In other parts of emerging countries, such as India and China, the progress has been good -- has been solid, has been good. But in places that are not as developed, places like Africa, Latin America and other places in the world, the progress has been rather slow. As a matter of fact, I was just recently visiting South Africa. I had the opportunity to have a discussion with President Mbeki, and one of the things that we talked about is, what is it that's keeping this connectivity goal from moving ahead faster? And one of the reasons is, in South Africa, it costs 100 dollars a month to have a broadband connectivity. It is impossible, even in the United States, for that cost, to be able to enable the connectivity that we're all trying to reach. So, we talked about ways in which perhaps one could partner to be able to bring the cost of this technology down. So, when you look at this chart, you look at the very last -- it's a logarithmic chart on a horizontal scale -- you look at the very end: we've got quite a long way to go to get to the 2015 goal of 50 percent. But we're excited in our company; we're motivated. We really think it's a phenomenal driver of things, to force us to do things differently, and we look forward to being able to actually, working with so many partners around the world, to be able to reach that goal. Now, one of the things I'd like to explain [about] 50x15, which I think is really critical, is that it is not a charity. It is actually a business venture. Let's take a small segment of this, of this unconnected world, and call it the education market. When you look at elementary-school children, we have hundreds and hundreds of millions of children around the world that could benefit tremendously from being able to be connected to the Internet. Therefore, when we see that, we see an opportunity to have a business that addresses the need of that segment. And when we embarked in this initiative, from the very beginning we said it very clearly: this is not a charity. This is really a business venture, one that addresses a very challenging segment of the market. Because what we have learned in the last three years is that this segment of the market, whether it's education or under-developed nations, either way, it's a segment that demands incredibly high quality, incredibly high reliability, tremendous low cost and access, and a lot of challenges that frankly, without actually doing it, it would be very difficult to understand, and I'll explain that in just a minute. It is an initiative that is focused on simple, accessible and human-centric solutions. What we mean by that is, you know, frankly, the PC was invented in 1980, roughly speaking more or less, and for 20-odd years, it hasn't changed. It is still, in most places, a gray or black box, and it looks the same. And frankly -- and I know that sometimes I offend some of my customers when I say this, but I truly mean it -- if you could take the name of the computer off the top of it, it would be very difficult to judge who made it, because they're all highly commoditized but they're all different. So, there has not been a human-centric approach to addressing this segment of the market, so we really believe it is critical to think of it. It reminded me a lot of the talk we heard this morning, about this operating room machinery that was designed specifically for Africa. We're talking about something very similar here. And it has to be based on a geo-sensitive approach. What I mean by that is that in some parts of the world, the government plays a key role in the development of technology. In other parts, it doesn't. In other parts of the world, you have an infrastructure that allows for manufacturing to take place. In other parts, it doesn't. And then we have to be sensitive about how this technology can be developed and put into action in those regions. And the last piece, which is really important -- and this is an opinion that we have, not shared by many, this is one where we seem to stand alone, on this one -- is that we really believe that the greatest success of this initiative can come by fostering local, integrated, end-to-end ecosystems. What I mean by that, and let me use this example, the country of South Africa, because I was just there, therefore I'm a little bit familiar with some of the challenges they have. It's a country of 45 million people. It's an economy that's emerging. It's beginning to grow tremendously. They have an objective to lowering the cost of connectivity. They have a computer company that makes computers in South Africa. They're developing a software-training environment in their universities. What a place, what an ideal place to create an ecosystem that could build the hardware and the software needed for their schools. And to my surprise, I learned in South Africa they have 18 dialects, I always thought they only had two -- English and Afrikaans -- but it turns out they have 18 dialects. And to be able to meet the needs of this rather complex educational system, it could only be done from inside. I don't think this segment of the market can be addressed by companies parachuting from another place of the world, and just dumping product and selling into the markets. So, we believe that in those regions of the world where the population is large, and there's an infrastructure that can provide it, that a local, integrated, end-to-end system is really critical for its success. This is a picture of a classroom that we outfitted with computers in Mexico, in my home country. This particular classroom happens to be in the state of Michoacan. Those of you that might be familiar with Mexico -- Michoacan is a very colorful state. Children dress with very colorful, colorful clothes, and it is incredible to see the power that this has in the hands of kids, in a computer. And I have to tell you that it's so easy to appreciate the impact that access to technology and connectivity can have in the lives and education of these kids. We just recently opened a learning laboratory in a school in the West Cape in South Africa, in a school that's called Nelson Mandela School, and when you see the faces and activities of these children being able to access computers, it's just phenomenal. And recently, they've written us letters, telling us how excited they are about the impact that this has had on their lives, on their educational dreams, on their capabilities, and it's just phenomenal. We have now deployed 30 different technologists in 18 different countries, and we have been able to connect millions of people in an effort to continue to learn what this particular segment of the market needs and demands. And I have to tell you that although millions doesn't sound like a lot in terms of the billions that need to be connected, it's a start. And we are learning a lot. And we're learning a tremendous amount about what we believe this segment needs to be able to be effective. One example of this has been the One Laptop per Child. Some of you are familiar with this. This is a partnership between MIT and a group of companies -- Google is involved, Red Hat -- and AMD is a key player. The electronics behind the One Laptop per Child are based on AMD technology; it's a microprocessor. But to give you an idea how creative this group of people can be, one of the objectives of the One Laptop per Child is to be able to achieve a 10-hour battery life. Because it was felt that a school day would last at least eight hours, and you wanted the child to have the ability to use the laptop for at least one full day without having to recharge it. The engineers have done a phenomenal amount of innovation on this part, and battery life on this product is now 15 hours -- just through a lot of innovative work people have done because they're passionate and motivated to be able to do this. We expect this to be deployed towards the end of this year, and we're very excited at the opportunities that this is going to offer in the field of education. It's a highly focused product aimed at strictly the education market, not only in the developing countries, but actually in the developed regions as well, because there are parts of the United States where this can have also a huge impact on the ability to make education more fun and more efficient. We also have partnered with TED in this project, with Architecture for Humanity, and along with the TED Prize winner Cameron Sinclair, we're having a contest that we have issued to the architectural community to come up with the best design for a computer lab for an emerging region. And we're really thrilled about the opportunity to be part of this, and can't wait to see what comes out of this exciting, exciting activity. Let me come back to the beginning, to end this presentation. I'll tell you that one of the things that I feel is really critical for us in industry, in business, is to be able to be passionate about solving these problems. I don't think it's enough to be able to put them on a spreadsheet, and look at numbers and say, yes, that's a good business. I really believe that you have to have a passion for it. And one of the things that I learned, too, from my parents -- and I'll give you a little anecdote -- especially from my father. And it took me a while to understand it, but he said to me, when I went to college, he said, "You're the first person in the family to go to college. And it's really important you understand that for civilization to make progress, each generation has to do better than the last one. And therefore, this is your opportunity to do better than my generation." Frankly, I don't know that I really understood what he told me at the time. I was eager to go off to college, and go find girls, and study, and girls, and study, but then I finished college and I fell in love. I graduated. I decided to get married. And on my wedding day, my father came to me again and said, "You know, I'm going to remind you again, that each generation has to do better than the last one. You have to be a better husband than I was, because that's how you make progress." And now he began to make sense. Because I knew what a great husband he was, and now he was once again beginning to put pressure on me, like he did when I was a little kid. And then a few years later, I had a child, my first child, and again, my father comes to the hospital, and we're looking at the glass, and see all the children on the other side, and he said, "I've got to remind you again, that for each generation to do better, you're going to have to be a better father than I was." That's when it dawned on me the tremendous challenge that he was placing on me, because he was a great father. But the key is that he instilled in me a passion to really get up every day in the morning and want to do better, to really get up and think that my role in life is not just to be the CEO of a Fortune 500 company. It's got to be that someday I can look back, and this place is truly better through some small contribution that perhaps each of us could make. Thank you very much. (Applause)

So, I want to start out with this beautiful picture from my childhood. I love the science fiction movies. Here it is: "This Island Earth." And leave it to Hollywood to get it just right. Two-and-a-half years in the making. (Laughter) I mean, even the creationists give us 6,000, but Hollywood goes to the chase. And in this movie, we see what we think is out there: flying saucers and aliens. Every world has an alien, and every alien world has a flying saucer, and they move about with great speed. Aliens. Well, Don Brownlee, my friend, and I finally got to the point where we got tired of turning on the TV and seeing the spaceships and seeing the aliens every night, and tried to write a counter-argument to it, and put out what does it really take for an Earth to be habitable, for a planet to be an Earth, to have a place where you could probably get not just life, but complexity, which requires a huge amount of evolution, and therefore constancy of conditions. So, in 2000 we wrote "Rare Earth." In 2003, we then asked, let's not think about where Earths are in space, but how long has Earth been Earth? If you go back two billion years, you're not on an Earth-like planet any more. What we call an Earth-like planet is actually a very short interval of time. Well, "Rare Earth" actually taught me an awful lot about meeting the public. Right after, I got an invitation to go to a science fiction convention, and with all great earnestness walked in. David Brin was going to debate me on this, and as I walked in, the crowd of a hundred started booing lustily. I had a girl who came up who said, "My dad says you're the devil." You cannot take people's aliens away from them and expect to be anybody's friends. Well, the second part of that, soon after -- and I was talking to Paul Allen; I saw him in the audience, and I handed him a copy of "Rare Earth." And Jill Tarter was there, and she turned to me, and she looked at me just like that girl in "The Exorcist." It was, "It burns! It burns!" Because SETI doesn't want to hear this. SETI wants there to be stuff out there. I really applaud the SETI efforts, but we have not heard anything yet. And I really do think we have to start thinking about what's a good planet and what isn't. Now, I throw this slide up because it indicates to me that, even if SETI does hear something, can we figure out what they said? Because this was a slide that was passed between the two major intelligences on Earth -- a Mac to a PC -- and it can't even get the letters right -- (Laughter) -- so how are we going to talk to the aliens? And if they're 50 light years away, and we call them up, and you blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, and then 50 years later it comes back and they say, Please repeat? I mean, there we are. Our planet is a good planet because it can keep water. Mars is a bad planet, but it's still good enough for us to go there and to live on its surface if we're protected. But Venus is a very bad -- the worst -- planet. Even though it's Earth-like, and even though early in its history it may very well have harbored Earth-like life, it soon succumbed to runaway greenhouse -- that's an 800 degrees [Fahrenheit] surface -- because of rampant carbon dioxide. Well, we know from astrobiology that we can really now predict what's going to happen to our particular planet. We are right now in the beautiful Oreo of existence -- of at least life on Planet Earth -- following the first horrible microbial age. In the Cambrian explosion, life emerged from the swamps, complexity arose, and from what we can tell, we're halfway through. We have as much time for animals to exist on this planet as they have been here now, till we hit the second microbial age. And that will happen, paradoxically -- everything you hear about global warming -- when we hit CO2 down to 10 parts per million, we are no longer going to have to have plants that are allowed to have any photosynthesis, and there go animals. So, after that we probably have seven billion years. The Sun increases in its intensity, in its brightness, and finally, at about 12 billion years after it first started, the Earth is consumed by a large Sun, and this is what's left. So, a planet like us is going to have an age and an old age, and we are in its golden summer age right now. But there's two fates to everything, isn't there? Now, a lot of you are going to die of old age, but some of you, horribly enough, are going to die in an accident. And that's the fate of a planet, too. Earth, if we're lucky enough -- if it doesn't get hit by a Hale-Bopp, or gets blasted by some supernova nearby in the next seven billion years -- we'll find under your feet. But what about accidental death? Well, paleontologists for the last 200 years have been charting death. It's strange -- extinction as a concept wasn't even thought about until Baron Cuvier in France found this first mastodon. He couldn't match it up to any bones on the planet, and he said, Aha! It's extinct. And very soon after, the fossil record started yielding a very good idea of how many plants and animals there have been since complex life really began to leave a very interesting fossil record. In that complex record of fossils, there were times when lots of stuff seemed to be dying out very quickly, and the father/mother geologists called these "mass extinctions." All along it was thought to be either an act of God or perhaps long, slow climate change, and that really changed in 1980, in this rocky outcrop near Gubbio, where Walter Alvarez, trying to figure out what was the time difference between these white rocks, which held creatures of the Cretaceous period, and the pink rocks above, which held Tertiary fossils. How long did it take to go from one system to the next? And what they found was something unexpected. They found in this gap, in between, a very thin clay layer, and that clay layer -- this very thin red layer here -- is filled with iridium. And not just iridium; it's filled with glassy spherules, and it's filled with quartz grains that have been subjected to enormous pressure: shock quartz. Now, in this slide the white is chalk, and this chalk was deposited in a warm ocean. The chalk itself's composed by plankton which has fallen down from the sea surface onto the sea floor, so that 90 percent of the sediment here is skeleton of living stuff, and then you have that millimeter-thick red layer, and then you have black rock. And the black rock is the sediment on the sea bottom in the absence of plankton. And that's what happens in an asteroid catastrophe, because that's what this was, of course. This is the famous K-T. A 10-kilometer body hit the planet. The effects of it spread this very thin impact layer all over the planet, and we had very quickly the death of the dinosaurs, the death of these beautiful ammonites, Leconteiceras here, and Celaeceras over here, and so much else. I mean, it must be true, because we've had two Hollywood blockbusters since that time, and this paradigm, from 1980 to about 2000, totally changed how we geologists thought about catastrophes. Prior to that, uniformitarianism was the dominant paradigm: the fact that if anything happens on the planet in the past, there are present-day processes that will explain it. But we haven't witnessed a big asteroid impact, so this is a type of neo-catastrophism, and it took about 20 years for the scientific establishment to finally come to grips: yes, we were hit; and yes, the effects of that hit caused a major mass extinction. Well, there are five major mass extinctions over the last 500 million years, called the Big Five. They range from 450 million years ago to the last, the K-T, number four, but the biggest of all was the P, or the Permian extinction, sometimes called the mother of all mass extinctions. And every one of these has been subsequently blamed on large-body impact. But is this true? The most recent, the Permian, was thought to have been an impact because of this beautiful structure on the right. This is a Buckminsterfullerene, a carbon-60. Because it looks like those terrible geodesic domes of my late beloved '60s, they're called "buckyballs." This evidence was used to suggest that at the end of the Permian, 250 million years ago, a comet hit us. And when the comet hits, the pressure produces the buckyballs, and it captures bits of the comet. Helium-3: very rare on the surface of the Earth, very common in space. But is this true? In 1990, working on the K-T extinction for 10 years, I moved to South Africa to begin work twice a year in the great Karoo desert. I was so lucky to watch the change of that South Africa into the new South Africa as I went year by year. And I worked on this Permian extinction, camping by this Boer graveyard for months at a time. And the fossils are extraordinary. You know, you're gazing upon your very distant ancestors. These are mammal-like reptiles. They are culturally invisible. We do not make movies about these. This is a Gorgonopsian, or a Gorgon. That's an 18-inch long skull of an animal that was probably seven or eight feet, sprawled like a lizard, probably had a head like a lion. This is the top carnivore, the T-Rex of its time. But there's lots of stuff. This is my poor son, Patrick. (Laughter) This is called paleontological child abuse. Hold still, you're the scale. (Laughter) There was big stuff back then. Fifty-five species of mammal-like reptiles. The age of mammals had well and truly started 250 million years ago ... ... and then a catastrophe happened. And what happens next is the age of dinosaurs. It was all a mistake; it should have never happened. But it did. Now, luckily, this Thrinaxodon, the size of a robin egg here: this is a skull I've discovered just before taking this picture -- there's a pen for scale; it's really tiny -- this is in the Lower Triassic, after the mass extinction has finished. You can see the eye socket and you can see the little teeth in the front. If that does not survive, I'm not the thing giving this talk. Something else is, because if that doesn't survive, we are not here; there are no mammals. It's that close; one species ekes through. Well, can we say anything about the pattern of who survives and who doesn't? Here's sort of the end of that 10 years of work. The ranges of stuff -- the red line is the mass extinction. But we've got survivors and things that get through, and it turns out the things that get through preferentially are cold bloods. Warm-blooded animals take a huge hit at this time. The survivors that do get through produce this world of crocodile-like creatures. There's no dinosaurs yet; just this slow, saurian, scaly, nasty, swampy place with a couple of tiny mammals hiding in the fringes. And there they would hide for 160 million years, until liberated by that K-T asteroid. So, if not impact, what? And the what, I think, is that we returned, over and over again, to the Pre-Cambrian world, that first microbial age, and the microbes are still out there. They hate we animals. They really want their world back. And they've tried over and over and over again. This suggests to me that life causing these mass extinctions because it did is inherently anti-Gaian. This whole Gaia idea, that life makes the world better for itself -- anybody been on a freeway on a Friday afternoon in Los Angeles believing in the Gaia theory? No. So, I really suspect there's an alternative, and that life does actually try to do itself in -- not consciously, but just because it does. And here's the weapon, it seems, that it did so over the last 500 million years. There are microbes which, through their metabolism, produce hydrogen sulfide, and they do so in large amounts. Hydrogen sulfide is very fatal to we humans. As small as 200 parts per million will kill you. You only have to go to the Black Sea and a few other places -- some lakes -- and get down, and you'll find that the water itself turns purple. It turns purple from the presence of numerous microbes which have to have sunlight and have to have hydrogen sulfide, and we can detect their presence today -- we can see them -- but we can also detect their presence in the past. And the last three years have seen an enormous breakthrough in a brand-new field. I am almost extinct -- I'm a paleontologist who collects fossils. But the new wave of paleontologists -- my graduate students -- collect biomarkers. They take the sediment itself, they extract the oil from it, and from that they can produce compounds which turn out to be very specific to particular microbial groups. It's because lipids are so tough, they can get preserved in sediment and last the hundreds of millions of years necessary, and be extracted and tell us who was there. And we know who was there. At the end of the Permian, at many of these mass extinction boundaries, this is what we find: isorenieratene. It's very specific. It can only occur if the surface of the ocean has no oxygen, and is totally saturated with hydrogen sulfide -- enough, for instance, to come out of solution. This led Lee Kump, and others from Penn State and my group, to propose what I call the Kump Hypothesis: many of the mass extinctions were caused by lowering oxygen, by high CO2. And the worst effect of global warming, it turns out: hydrogen sulfide being produced out of the oceans. Well, what's the source of this? In this particular case, the source over and over has been flood basalts. This is a view of the Earth now, if we extract a lot of it. And each of these looks like a hydrogen bomb; actually, the effects are even worse. This is when deep-Earth material comes to the surface, spreads out over the surface of the planet. Well, it's not the lava that kills anything, it's the carbon dioxide that comes out with it. This isn't Volvos; this is volcanoes. But carbon dioxide is carbon dioxide. So, these are new data Rob Berner and I -- from Yale -- put together, and what we try to do now is track the amount of carbon dioxide in the entire rock record -- and we can do this from a variety of means -- and put all the red lines here, when these -- what I call greenhouse mass extinctions -- took place. And there's two things that are really evident here to me, is that these extinctions take place when CO2 is going up. But the second thing that's not shown on here: the Earth has never had any ice on it when we've had 1,000 parts per million CO2. We are at 380 and climbing. We should be up to a thousand in three centuries at the most, but my friend David Battisti in Seattle says he thinks a 100 years. So, there goes the ice caps, and there comes 240 feet of sea level rise. I live in a view house now; I'm going to have waterfront. All right, what's the consequence? The oceans probably turn purple. And we think this is the reason that complexity took so long to take place on planet Earth. We had these hydrogen sulfide oceans for a very great long period. They stop complex life from existing. We know hydrogen sulfide is erupting presently a few places on the planet. And I throw this slide in -- this is me, actually, two months ago -- and I throw this slide in because here is my favorite animal, chambered nautilus. It's been on this planet since the animals first started -- 500 million years. This is a tracking experiment, and any of you scuba divers, if you want to get involved in one of the coolest projects ever, this is off the Great Barrier Reef. And as we speak now, these nautilus are tracking out their behaviors to us. But the thing about this is that every once in a while we divers can run into trouble, so I'm going to do a little thought experiment here. This is a Great White Shark that ate some of my traps. We pulled it up; up it comes. So, it's out there with me at night. So, I'm swimming along, and it takes off my leg. I'm 80 miles from shore, what's going to happen to me? Well now, I die. Five years from now, this is what I hope happens to me: I'm taken back to the boat, I'm given a gas mask: 80 parts per million hydrogen sulfide. I'm then thrown in an ice pond, I'm cooled 15 degrees lower and I could be taken to a critical care hospital. And the reason I could do that is because we mammals have gone through a series of these hydrogen sulfide events, and our bodies have adapted. And we can now use this as what I think will be a major medical breakthrough. This is Mark Roth. He was funded by DARPA. Tried to figure out how to save Americans after battlefield injuries. He bleeds out pigs. He puts in 80 parts per million hydrogen sulfide -- the same stuff that survived these past mass extinctions -- and he turns a mammal into a reptile. "I believe we are seeing in this response the result of mammals and reptiles having undergone a series of exposures to H2S." I got this email from him two years ago; he said, "I think I've got an answer to some of your questions." So, he now has taken mice down for as many as four hours, sometimes six hours, and these are brand-new data he sent me on the way over here. On the top, now, that is a temperature record of a mouse who has gone through -- the dotted line, the temperatures. So, the temperature starts at 25 centigrade, and down it goes, down it goes. Six hours later, up goes the temperature. Now, the same mouse is given 80 parts per million hydrogen sulfide in this solid graph, and look what happens to its temperature. Its temperature drops. It goes down to 15 degrees centigrade from 35, and comes out of this perfectly fine. Here is a way we can get people to critical care. Here's how we can bring people cold enough to last till we get critical care. Now, you're all thinking, yeah, what about the brain tissue? And so this is one of the great challenges that is going to happen. You're in an accident. You've got two choices: you're going to die, or you're going to take the hydrogen sulfide and, say, 75 percent of you is saved, mentally. What are you going to do? Do we all have to have a little button saying, Let me die? This is coming towards us, and I think this is going to be a revolution. We're going to save lives, but there's going to be a cost to it. The new view of mass extinctions is, yes, we were hit, and, yes, we have to think about the long term, because we will get hit again. But there's a far worse danger confronting us. We can easily go back to the hydrogen sulfide world. Give us a few millennia -- and we humans should last those few millennia -- will it happen again? If we continue, it'll happen again. How many of us flew here? How many of us have gone through our entire Kyoto quota just for flying this year? How many of you have exceeded it? Yeah, I've certainly exceeded it. We have a huge problem facing us as a species. We have to beat this. I want to be able to go back to this reef. Thank you. (Applause) Chris Anderson: I've just got one question for you, Peter. Am I understanding you right, that what you're saying here is that we have in our own bodies a biochemical response to hydrogen sulfide that in your mind proves that there have been past mass extinctions due to climate change? Peter Ward: Yeah, every single cell in us can produce minute quantities of hydrogen sulfide in great crises. This is what Roth has found out. So, what we're looking at now: does it leave a signal? Does it leave a signal in bone or in plant? And we go back to the fossil record and we could try to detect how many of these have happened in the past. CA: It's simultaneously an incredible medical technique, but also a terrifying ... PW: Blessing and curse.

I'm going to take you on a journey very quickly. To explain the wish, I'm going to have to take you somewhere where many people haven't been, and that's around the world. When I was about 24 years old, Kate Stohr and myself started an organization to get architects and designers involved in humanitarian work, not only about responding to natural disasters, but involved in systemic issues. We believe that where the resources and expertise are scarce, innovative, sustainable design can really make a difference in people's lives. So I started my life as an architect, or training as an architect, and I was always interested in socially responsible design, and how you can really make an impact. But when I went to architecture school, it seemed that I was a black sheep in the family. Many architects seemed to think that when you design, you design a jewel, and it's a jewel that you try and crave for; whereas I felt that when you design, you either improve or you create a detriment to the community in which you're designing. So you're not just doing a building for the residents or for the people who are going to use it, but for the community as a whole. And in 1999, we started by responding to the issue of the housing crisis for returning refugees in Kosovo. And I didn't know what I was doing -- like I said, mid-20s -- and I'm the Internet generation, so we started a website. We put a call out there, and to my surprise, in a couple of months, we had hundreds of entries from around the world. That led to a number of prototypes being built and really experimenting with some ideas. Two years later we started doing a project on developing mobile health clinics in sub-Saharan Africa, responding to the HIV/AIDS pandemic. That led to 550 entries from 53 countries. We also have designers from around the world that participate. And we had an exhibit of work that followed that. 2004 was the tipping point for us. We started responding to natural disasters and getting involved in Iran, in Bam, also following up on our work in Africa. Working within the United States -- most people look at poverty and they see the face of a foreigner. But I live in Bozeman, Montana -- go up to the north plains on the reservations, or go down to Alabama or Mississippi, pre-Katrina, and I could have shown you places that have far worse conditions than many developing countries that I've been to. So we got involved in and worked in inner cities and elsewhere; and also, I will go into some more projects. 2005: Mother Nature kicked our ass. I think we can pretty much assume that 2005 was a horrific year when it comes to natural disasters. And because of the Internet, and because of connections to blogs and so forth, within literally hours of the tsunami, we were already raising funds, getting involved, working with people on the ground. We run from a couple of laptops, and in the first couple of days, I had 4,000 emails from people needing help. So we began to get involved in projects there, and I'll talk about some others. And then of course, this year we've been responding to Katrina, as well as following up on our reconstruction work. So this is a brief overview. In 2004, I really couldn't manage the number of people who wanted to help, or the number of requests that I was getting. It was all coming into my laptop and cell phone. So we decided to embrace an open-source model of business -- so that anyone, anywhere in the world, could start a local chapter, and they can get involved in local problems. Because I believe there is no such thing as Utopia. All problems are local. All solutions are local. So that means, you know, somebody who's based in Mississippi knows more about Mississippi than I do. So what happened is, we used Meetup and all these other Internet tools, and we ended up having 40 chapters starting up, thousands of architects in 104 countries. So the bullet point -- sorry, I never do a suit, so I knew that I was going to take this off. OK, because I'm going to do it very quick. This isn't just about nonprofit. What it showed me is that there's a grassroots movement going on, of socially responsible designers who really believe that this world has got a lot smaller, and that we have the opportunity -- not the responsibility, but the opportunity -- to really get involved in making change. (Laughter) (Laughter) I'm adding that to my time. (Laughter) So what you don't know is, we've got these thousands of designers working around the world, connected basically by a website, and we have a staff of three. The fact that nobody told us we couldn't do it, we did it. And so there's something to be said about naïveté. So seven years later, we've developed so that we've got advocacy, instigation and implementation. We advocate for good design, not only through student workshops and lectures and public forums, op-eds; we have a book on humanitarian work; but also disaster mitigation and dealing with public policy. We can talk about FEMA, but that's another talk. Instigation, developing ideas with communities and NGOs, doing open-source design competitions. Referring, matchmaking with communities. And then implementing -- actually going out there and doing the work, because when you invent, it's never a reality until it's built. So it's really important that if we're designing and trying to create change, we build that change. So here's a select number of projects. Kosovo. This is Kosovo in '99. We did an open design competition, like I said. It led to a whole variety of ideas. And this wasn't about emergency shelter, but transitional shelter that would last five to 10 years, that would be placed next to the land the resident lived in, and that they would rebuild their own home. This wasn't imposing an architecture on a community; this was giving them the tools and the space to allow them to rebuild and regrow the way they want to. We had from the sublime to the ridiculous, but they worked. This is an inflatable hemp house. It was built; it works. This is a shipping container. Built and works. And a whole variety of ideas that not only dealt with architectural building, but also the issues of governance, and the idea of creating communities through complex networks. So we've engaged not just designers, but also a whole variety of technology-based professionals. Using rubble from destroyed homes to create new homes. Using straw bale construction, creating heat walls. And then something remarkable happened in '99. We went to Africa originally to look at the housing issue. Within three days, we realized the problem was not housing; it was the growing pandemic of HIV/AIDS. And it wasn't doctors telling us this; it was actual villagers that we were staying with. And so we came up with the bright idea that instead of getting people to walk 10, 15 kilometers to see doctors, you get the doctors to the people. And we started engaging the medical community, and you know, we thought we were real bright sparks -- "We've come up with this great idea: mobile health clinics, widely distributed throughout sub-Saharan Africa." And the medical community there said, "We've said this for the last decade. We know this. We just don't know how to show this." So in a way, we had taken pre-existing needs and shown solutions. And so again, we had a whole variety of ideas that came in. This one I personally love, because the idea is that architecture is not just about solutions, but about raising awareness. This is a kenaf clinic. You get seed and you grow it in a plot of land, and it grows 14 feet in a month. And on the fourth week, the doctors come and they mow out an area, put a tensile structure on the top, and when the doctors have finished treating and seeing patients and villagers, you cut down the clinic and you eat it. It's an eat-your-own-clinic. So it's dealing with the fact that if you have AIDS, you also need to have nutrition rates, and the idea of nutrition is as important as getting antiretrovirals out there. So you know, this is a serious solution. This one I love. The idea is it's not just a clinic, it's a community center. This looked at setting up trade routes and economic engines within the community, so it can be a self-sustaining project. Every one of these projects is sustainable. That's not because I'm a tree-hugging green person. It's because when you live on four dollars a day, you're living on survival and you have to be sustainable. You have to know where your energy is coming from, you have to know where your resource is coming from, and you have to keep the maintenance down. So this is about getting an economic engine, and then at night, it turns into a movie theater. So it's not an AIDS clinic. It's a community center. So you can see ideas. And these ideas developed into prototypes, and they were eventually built. And currently, as of this year, there are clinics rolling out in Nigeria and Kenya. From that, we also developed Siyathemba. The community came to us and said, "The problem is that the girls don't have education." And we're working in an area where young women between the ages of 16 and 24 have a 50 percent HIV/AIDS rate. And that's not because they're promiscuous, it's because there's no knowledge. And so we decided to look at the idea of sports, and create a youth sports center that doubled as an HIV/AIDS outreach center, and the coaches of the girls' team were also trained doctors. So that there would be a very slow way of developing confidence in health care. And we picked nine finalists, and then those nine finalists were distributed throughout the entire region, and then the community picked their design. They said, this is our design, because it's not only about engaging a community; it's about empowering a community, and about getting them to be a part of the rebuilding process. So, the winning design is here. And then, of course, we actually go and work with the community and the clients. So this is the designer. He's out there working with the first ever women's soccer team in KwaZulu-Natal, Siyathemba. And they can tell it better. (A cappella singing in a South African language) Video: Well, my name is Cee Cee Mkhonza. I work at the Africa Centre, I'm an IT user consultant. I'm also the national football player for South Africa, Banyana Banyana. And I also play in the Vodacom League, for the team called Tembisa, which has now changed to Siyathemba. This is our home ground. Cameron Sinclair: I'm going to show that later because I'm running out of time. I can see Chris looking at me slyly. This was a connection, just a meeting with somebody who wanted to develop Africa's first telemedicine center, in Tanzania. And we met, literally, a couple of months ago. We've already developed a design. The team is over there, working in partnership. This was a matchmaking, thanks to a couple of TEDsters -- Sun [Microsystems], Cheryl Heller and Andrew Zolli, who connected me with this amazing African woman. And we start construction in June, and it will be opened by TEDGlobal. So when you come to TEDGlobal, you can check it out. But what we're known probably most for is dealing with disasters and development, and we've been involved in a lot of issues, such as the tsunami and also things like Hurricane Katrina. This is a 370-dollar shelter that can be easily assembled. This is a community-designed community center. And what that means is we actually live and work with the community, and they're part of the design process. The kids actually get involved in mapping out where the community center should be. And then eventually, the community, through skills training, end up building the building with us. Here is another school. This is what the UN gave these guys for six months -- 12 plastic tarps. This was in August. This was the replacement; that's supposed to last for two years. When the rain comes down, you can't hear a thing, and in the summer, it's about 140 degrees inside. So we said, if the rain's coming down, let's get fresh water. So every one of our schools has a rainwater collection system. Very low cost: three classrooms and rainwater collection is 5,000 dollars. This was raised by hot chocolate sales in Atlanta. It's built by the parents of the kids. The kids are out there on-site, building the buildings. And it opened a couple of weeks ago, and there's 600 kids that are now using the schools. (Applause) So, disaster hits home. We see the bad stories on CNN and Fox and all that, but we don't see the good stories. Here is a community that got together, and they said "no" to waiting. They formed a partnership, a diverse partnership of players, to actually map out East Biloxi, to figure out who's getting involved. We've had over 1,500 volunteers rebuilding, rehabbing homes. Figuring out what FEMA regulations are, not waiting for them to dictate to us how you should rebuild. Working with residents, getting them out of their homes, so they don't get ill. This is what they're cleaning up on their own. Designing housing. This house is going in in a couple of weeks. This is a rehabbed home, done in four days. This is a utility room for a woman who is on a walker. She's 70 years old. This is what FEMA gave her. 600 bucks, happened two days ago. We put together, very quickly, a washroom. It's built, it's running and she just started a business today, where she's washing other people's clothes. These are the Calhouns. They're photographers who had documented the Lower Ninth for the last 40 years. That was their home, and these are the photographs they took. And we're helping, working with them to create a new building. Projects we've done. Projects we've been a part of, support. Why don't aid agencies do this? This is the UN tent. This is the new UN tent, just introduced this year. Quick to assemble. It's got a flap -- that's the invention. It took 20 years to design this and get it implemented in the field. I was 12 years old. There's a problem here. Luckily, we're not alone. There are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of architects and designers and inventors around the world that are getting involved in humanitarian work. More hemp houses -- it's a theme in Japan, apparently. I'm not sure what they're smoking. (Laughter) This is a Grip Clip, designed by somebody who said, "All you need is some way to attach membrane structures to physical support beams." This guy designed for NASA, is now doing housing. I'm going to whip through this quickly, because I know I've got only a couple of minutes. So this is all done in the last two years. I showed you something that took 20 years to do. And this is just a selection of things that were built in the last couple of years. From Brazil to India, Mexico, Alabama, China, Israel, Palestine, Vietnam. The average age of a designer who gets involved in this project is 32 -- that's how old I am. So it's a young -- I just have to stop here, because Arup is in the room, and this is the best-designed toilet in the world. If you're ever, ever in India, go use this toilet. (Laughter) Chris Luebkeman will tell you why. I'm sure that's how he wanted to spend the party. But the future is not going to be the sky-scraping cities of New York, but this. And when you look at this, you see crisis. What I see is many, many inventors. One billion people live in abject poverty. We hear about them all the time. Four billion live in growing but fragile economies. One in seven live in unplanned settlements. If we do nothing about the housing crisis that's about to happen, in 20 years, one in three people will live in an unplanned settlement or a refugee camp. Look left, look right: one of you will be there. How do we improve the living standards of five billion people? With 10 million solutions. So I wish to develop a community that actively embraces innovative and sustainable design to improve the living conditions for everyone. Chris Anderson: Wait a sec -- that's your wish? CS: That's my wish. CA: That's his wish! (Applause) CS: We started Architecture for Humanity with 700 dollars and a website. So Chris somehow decided to give me 100,000. So why not this many people? Open-source architecture is the way to go. You have a diverse community of participants -- and we're not just talking about inventors and designers, but we're talking about the funding model. My role is not as a designer; it's as a conduit between the design world and the humanitarian world. And what we need is something that replicates me globally, because I haven't slept in seven years. (Laughter) Secondly, what will this thing be? Designers want to respond to issues of humanitarian crisis, but they don't want some company in the West taking their idea and basically profiting from it. So Creative Commons has developed the Developing Nations license. And what that means is that a designer can -- The Siyathemba project I showed was the first ever building to have a Creative Commons license on it. As soon as that is built, anyone in Africa or any developing nation can take the construction documents and replicate it for free. (Applause) So why not allow designers the opportunity to do this, but still protect their rights here? We want to have a community where you can upload ideas, and those ideas can be tested in an earthquake, in flood, in all sorts of austere environments. The reason that's important is I don't want to wait for the next Katrina to find out if my house works. That's too late, we need to do it now. So doing that globally -- and I want this whole thing to work multi-lingually. When you look at the face of an architect, most people think a gray-haired white guy. I don't see that; I see the face of the world. So I want everyone from all over the planet to be able to be a part of this design and development. The idea of needs-based competitions -- XPRIZE for the other 98 percent, if you want to call it that. We also want to look at ways of matchmaking and putting funding partners together, and the idea of integrating manufacturers -- fab labs in every country. When I hear about the $100 laptop and it's going to educate every child -- educate every designer in the world. Put one in every favela, every slum settlement. Because you know what? Innovation will happen. And I need to know that. It's called the leap-back. We talk about leapfrog technologies. I write with Worldchanging, and the one thing we've been talking about is, I learn more on the ground than I've ever learned here. So let's take those ideas, adapt them, and we can use them. These ideas are supposed to be adaptable; they should have the potential for evolution; they should be developed by every nation in the world and useful for every nation in the world. What will it take? There should be a sheet. I don't have time to read this, because I'm going to be yanked off. CA: Let's just leave it up for a sec. CS: Well, what will it take? You guys are smart. So it's going to take a lot of computing power, because I want the idea that any laptop anywhere in the world can plug into the system and be able to not only participate in developing these designs, but utilize the designs. Also, a process of reviewing the designs. I want every Arup engineer in the world to check and make sure that we're doing stuff that's standing, because those guys are the best in the world. Plug. And so, you know, I want these -- I just should note: I have two laptops and one of them is there, and that has 3000 designs on it. If I drop that laptop ... What happens? So it's important to have these proven ideas put up there, easy to use, easy to get ahold of. My mom once said, "There's nothing worse than being all mouth and no trousers." (Laughter) I'm fed up of talking about making change. You only make it by doing it. We've changed FEMA guidelines; we've changed public policy; we've changed international response -- based on building things. So for me, it's important that we create a real conduit for innovation, and that it's free innovation. Think of free culture -- this is free innovation. Somebody said this a couple of years back. I will give points for those who know it. But I think the man was maybe 25 years too early. So let's do it. Thank you. (Applause)

It's wonderful to be back. I love this wonderful gathering. And you must be wondering, "What on earth? Have they put up the wrong slide?" No, no. Look at this magnificent beast, and ask the question: Who designed it? This is TED; this is Technology, Entertainment, Design, and there's a dairy cow. It's a quite wonderfully designed animal. And I was thinking, how do I introduce this? And I thought, well, maybe that old doggerel by Joyce Kilmer, you know: "Poems are made by fools like me, but only God can make a tree." And you might say, "Well, God designed the cow." But, of course, God got a lot of help. This is the ancestor of cattle. This is the aurochs. And it was designed by natural selection, the process of natural selection, over many millions of years. And then it became domesticated, thousands of years ago. And human beings became its stewards, and, without even knowing what they were doing, they gradually redesigned it and redesigned it and redesigned it. And then more recently, they really began to do reverse engineering on this beast and figure out just what the parts were, how they worked and how they might be optimized -- how they might be made better. Now, why am I talking about cows? Because I want to say that much the same thing is true of religions. Religions are natural phenomena -- they're just as natural as cows. They have evolved over millennia. They have a biological base, just like the aurochs. They have become domesticated, and human beings have been redesigning their religions for thousands of years. This is TED, and I want to talk about design. Because what I've been doing for the last four years -- really since the first time you saw me -- some of you saw me at TED when I was talking about religion -- and in the last four years, I've been working just about non-stop on this topic. And you might say it's about the reverse engineering of religions. Now that very idea, I think, strikes terror in many people, or anger, or anxiety of one sort or another. And that is the spell that I want to break. I want to say, no, religions are an important natural phenomenon. We should study them with the same intensity that we study all the other important natural phenomena, like global warming, as we heard so eloquently last night from Al Gore. Today's religions are brilliantly designed -- brilliantly designed. They are immensely powerful social institutions and many of their features can be traced back to earlier features that we can really make sense of by reverse engineering. And, as with the cow, there's a mixture of evolutionary design -- designed by natural selection itself -- and intelligent design -- more or less intelligent design -- and redesigned by human beings who are trying to redesign their religions. You don't do book talks at TED, but I'm going to have just one slide about my book, because there is one message in it which I think this group really needs to hear. And I would be very interested to get your responses to this. It's the one policy proposal that I make in the book, at this time, when I claim not to know enough about religion to know what other policy proposals to make. And it's one that echoes remarks that you've heard already today. Here's my proposal, I'm going to just take a couple of minutes to explain it: Education on world religions for all of our children -- in primary school, in high school, in public schools, in private schools and in home schooling. So what I'm proposing is, just as we require reading, writing, arithmetic, American history, so we should have a curriculum on facts about all the religions of the world -- about their history, about their creeds, about their texts, their music, their symbolisms, their prohibitions, their requirements. And this should be presented factually, straightforwardly, with no particular spin, to all of the children in the country. And as long as you teach them that, you can teach them anything else you like. That, I think, is maximal tolerance for religious freedom. As long as you inform your children about other religions, then you may -- and as early as you like and whatever you like -- teach them whatever creed you want them to learn. But also let them know about other religions. Now, why do I say that? Because democracy depends on an informed citizenship. Informed consent is the very bedrock of our understanding of democracy. Misinformed consent is not worth it. It's like a coin flip; it doesn't count, really. Democracy depends on informed consent. This is the way we treat people as responsible adults. Now, children below the age of consent are a special case. Parents -- I'm going to use a word that Pastor Rick just used -- parents are stewards of their children. They don't own them. You can't own your children. You have a responsibility to the world, to the state, to them, to take care of them right. You may teach them whatever creed you think is most important, but I say you have a responsibility to let them be informed about all the other creeds in the world, too. The reason I've taken this time is I've been fascinated to hear some of the reactions to this. One reviewer for a Roman Catholic newspaper called it "totalitarian." It strikes me as practically libertarian. Is it totalitarian to require reading, writing and arithmetic? I don't think so. All I'm saying is -- and facts, facts only; no values, just facts -- about all the world's religions. Another reviewer called it "hilarious." Well, I'm really bothered by the fact that anybody would think that was hilarious. It seems to me to be such a plausible, natural extension of the democratic principles we already have that I'm shocked to think anybody would find that just ridiculous. I know many religions are so anxious about preserving the purity of their faith among their children that they are intent on keeping their children ignorant of other faiths. I don't think that's defensible. But I'd really be pleased to get your answers on that -- any reactions to that -- later. But now I'm going to move on. Back to the cow. This picture, which I pulled off the web -- the fellow on the left is really an important part of this picture. That's the steward. Cows couldn't live without human stewards -- they're domesticated. They're a sort of ectosymbiont. They depend on us for their survival. And Pastor Rick was just talking about sheep. I'm going to talk about sheep, too. There's a lot of serendipitous convergence here. How clever it was of sheep to acquire shepherds! (Laughter) Think of what this got them. They could outsource all their problems: protection from predators, food-finding ... (Laughter) ... health maintenance. (Laughter) The only cost in most flocks -- not even this -- a loss of free mating. What a deal! "How clever of sheep!" you might say. Except, of course, it wasn't the sheep's cleverness. We all know sheep are not exactly rocket scientists -- they're not very smart. It wasn't the cleverness of the sheep at all. They were clueless. But it was a very clever move. Whose clever move was it? It was the clever move of natural selection itself. Francis Crick, the co-discoverer of the structure of DNA with Jim Watson, once joked about what he called Orgel's Second Rule. Leslie Orgel is a molecular biologist, brilliant guy, and Orgel's Second Rule is: Evolution is cleverer than you are. Now, that is not Intelligent Design -- not from Francis Crick. Evolution is cleverer than you are. If you understand Orgel's Second Rule, then you understand why the Intelligent Design movement is basically a hoax. The designs discovered by the process of natural selection are brilliant, unbelievably brilliant. Again and again biologists are fascinated with the brilliance of what's discovered. But the process itself is without purpose, without foresight, without design. When I was here four years ago, I told the story about an ant climbing a blade of grass. And why the ant was doing it was because its brain had been infected with a lancet fluke that was needed to get into the belly of a sheep or a cow in order to reproduce. So it was sort of a spooky story. And I think some people may have misunderstood. Lancet flukes aren't smart. I submit that the intelligence of a lancet fluke is down there, somewhere between petunia and carrot. They're not really bright. They don't have to be. The lesson we learn from this is: you don't have to have a mind to be a beneficiary. The design is there in nature, but it's not in anybody's head. It doesn't have to be. That's the way evolution works. Question: Was domestication good for sheep? It was great for their genetic fitness. And here I want to remind you of a wonderful point that Paul MacCready made at TED three years ago. Here's what he said: "Ten thousand years ago, at the dawn of agriculture, human population, plus livestock and pets, was approximately a tenth of one percent of the terrestrial vertebrate landmass." That was just 10,000 years ago. Yesterday, in biological terms. What is it today? Does anybody remember what he told us? 98 percent. That is what we have done on this planet. Now, I talked to Paul afterwards -- I wanted to check to find out how he'd calculated this, and get the sources and so forth -- and he also gave me a paper that he had written on this. And there was a passage in it which he did not present here and I think it is so good, I'm going to read it to you: "Over billions of years on a unique sphere, chance has painted a thin covering of life: complex, improbable, wonderful and fragile. Suddenly, we humans -- a recently arrived species no longer subject to the checks and balances inherent in nature -- have grown in population, technology and intelligence to a position of terrible power. We now wield the paintbrush." We heard about the atmosphere as a thin layer of varnish. Life itself is just a thin coat of paint on this planet. And we're the ones that hold the paintbrush. And how can we do that? The key to our domination of the planet is culture. And the key to culture is religion. Suppose Martian scientists came to Earth. They would be puzzled by many things. Anybody know what this is? I'll tell you what it is. This is a million people gathering on the banks of the Ganges in 2001, perhaps the largest single gathering of human beings ever, as seen from satellite photograph. Here's a big crowd. Here's another crowd in Mecca. Martians would be amazed by this. They'd want to know how it originated, what it was for and how it perpetuates itself. Actually, I'm going to pass over this. The ant isn't alone. There's all sorts of wonderful cases of species which -- in that case -- A parasite gets into a mouse and needs to get into the belly of a cat. And it turns the mouse into Mighty Mouse, makes it fearless, so it runs out in the open, where it'll be eaten by a cat. True story. In other words, we have these hijackers -- you've seen this slide before, from four years ago -- a parasite that infects the brain and induces even suicidal behavior, on behalf of a cause other than one's own genetic fitness. Does that ever happen to us? Yes, it does -- quite wonderfully. The Arabic word "Islam" means "submission." It means "surrender of self-interest to the will of Allah." But I'm not just talking about Islam. I'm talking also about Christianity. This is a parchment music page that I found in a Paris bookstall 50 years ago. And on it, it says, in Latin: "Semen est verbum Dei. Sator autem Christus." The word of God is the seed and the sower of the seed is Christ. Same idea. Well, not quite. But in fact, Christians, too ... glory in the fact that they have surrendered to God. I'll give you a few quotes. "The heart of worship is surrender. Surrendered people obey God's words, even if it doesn't make sense." Those words are by Rick Warren. Those are from "The Purpose Driven Life." And I want to turn now, briefly, to talk about that book, which I've read. You've all got a copy, and you've just heard the man. And what I want to do now is say a bit about this book from the design standpoint, because I think it's actually a brilliant book. First of all, the goal -- and you heard just now what the goal is -- it's to bring purpose to the lives of millions, and he has succeeded. Is it a good goal? In itself, I'm sure we all agree, it is a wonderful goal. He's absolutely right. There are lots of people out there who don't have purpose in their life, and bringing purpose to their life is a wonderful goal. I give him an A+ on this. (Laughter) Is the goal achieved? Yes. Thirty million copies of this book. Al Gore, eat your heart out. (Laughter) Just exactly what Al is trying to do, Rick is doing. This is a fantastic achievement. And the means -- how does he do it? It's a brilliant redesign of traditional religious themes -- updating them, quietly dropping obsolete features, putting new interpretations on other features. This is the evolution of religion that's been going on for thousands of years, and he's just the latest brilliant practitioner of it. I don't have to tell you this; you just heard the man. Excellent insights into human psychology, wise advice on every page. Moreover, he invites us to look under the hood. I really appreciated that. For instance, he has an appendix where he explains his choice of translations of different Bible verses. The book is clear, vivid, accessible, beautifully formatted. Just enough repetition. That's really important. Every time you read it or say it, you make another copy in your brain. Every time you read it or say it, you make another copy in your brain. (Laughter) With me, everybody -- (Audience and Dan Dennett) Every time you read it or say it, you make another copy in your brain. Thank you. And now we come to my problem. Because I'm absolutely sincere in my appreciation of all that I said about this book. But I wish it were better. I have some problems with the book. And it would just be insincere of me not to address those problems. I wish he could do this with a revision, a Mark 2 version of his book. "The truth will set you free." That's what it says in the Bible, and it's something that I want to live by, too. My problem is, some of the bits in it I don't think are true. Now some of this is a difference of opinion. And that's not my main complaint, that's worth mentioning. Here's a passage -- it's very much what he said, anyway: "If there was no God we would all be accidents, the result of astronomical random chance in the Universe. You could stop reading this book because life would have no purpose or meaning or significance. There would be no right or wrong and no hope beyond your brief years on Earth." Now, I just do not believe that. By the way, I find -- Homer Groening's film presented a beautiful alternative to that very claim. Yes, there is meaning and a reason for right or wrong. We don't need a belief in God to be good or to have meaning in us. But that, as I said, is just a difference of opinion. That's not what I'm really worried about. How about this: "God designed this planet's environment just so we could live in it." I'm afraid that a lot of people take that sentiment to mean that we don't have to do the sorts of things that Al Gore is trying so hard to get us to do. I am not happy with that sentiment at all. And then I find this: "All the evidence available in the biological sciences supports the core proposition that the cosmos is a specially designed whole with life and mankind as its fundamental goal and purpose, a whole in which all facets of reality have their meaning and explanation in this central fact." Well, that's Michael Denton. He's a creationist. And here, I think, "Wait a minute." I read this again. I read it three or four times and I think, "Is he really endorsing Intelligent Design? Is he endorsing creationism here?" And you can't tell. So I'm sort of thinking, "Well, I don't know, I don't know if I want to get upset with this yet." But then I read on, and I read this: "First, Noah had never seen rain, because prior to the Flood, God irrigated the earth from the ground up." I wish that sentence weren't in there, because I think it is false. And I think that thinking this way about the history of the planet, after we've just been hearing about the history of the planet over millions of years, discourages people from scientific understanding. Now, Rick Warren uses scientific terms and scientific factoids and information in a very interesting way. Here's one: "God deliberately shaped and formed you to serve him in a way that makes your ministry unique. He carefully mixed the DNA cocktail that created you." I think that's false. Now, maybe we want to treat it as metaphorical. Here's another one: "For instance, your brain can store 100 trillion facts. Your mind can handle 15,000 decisions a second." Well, it would be interesting to find the interpretation where I would accept that. There might be some way of treating that as true. "Anthropologists have noted that worship is a universal urge, hardwired by God into the very fiber of our being -- an inbuilt need to connect with God." Well, the sense of which I agree with him, except I think it has an evolutionary explanation. And what I find deeply troubling in this book is that he seems to be arguing that if you want to be moral, if you want to have meaning in your life, you have to be an Intelligent Designer, you have to deny the theory of evolution by natural selection. And I think, on the contrary, that it is very important to solving the world's problems that we take evolutionary biology seriously. Whose truth are we going to listen to? Well, this is from "The Purpose Driven Life": "The Bible must become the authoritative standard for my life: the compass I rely on for direction, the counsel I listen to for making wise decisions, and the benchmark I use for evaluating everything." Well maybe, OK, but what's going to follow from this? And here's one that does concern me. Remember I quoted him before with this line: "Surrendered people obey God's word, even if it doesn't make sense." And that's a problem. (Sighs) "Don't ever argue with the Devil. He's better at arguing than you are, having had thousands of years to practice." Now, Rick Warren didn't invent this clever move. It's an old move. It's a very clever adaptation of religions. It's a wild card for disarming any reasonable criticism. "You don't like my interpretation? You've got a reasonable objection to it? Don't listen, don't listen! That's the Devil speaking." This discourages the sort of reasoning citizenship it seems to me that we want to have. I've got one more problem, then I'm through. And I'd really like to get a response if Rick is able to do it. "In the Great Commission, Jesus said, 'Go to all people of all nations and make them my disciples. Baptize them in the name of the Father, the Son and the Holy Spirit, and teach them to do everything I've told you.'" The Bible says Jesus is the only one who can save the world. We've seen many wonderful maps of the world in the last day or so. Here's one, not as beautiful as the others; it simply shows the religions of the world. Here's one that shows the sort of current breakdown of the different religions. Do we really want to commit ourselves to engulfing all the other religions, when their holy books are telling them, "Don't listen to the other side, that's just Satan talking!"? It seems to me that that's a very problematic ship to get on for the future. I found this sign as I was driving to Maine recently, in front of a church: "Good without God becomes zero." Sort of cute. A very clever little meme. I don't believe it and I think this idea, popular as it is -- not in this guise, but in general -- is itself one of the main problems that we face. If you are like me, you know many wonderful, committed, engaged atheists, agnostics, who are being very good without God. And you also know many religious people who hide behind their sanctity instead of doing good works. So, I wish we could drop this meme. I wish this meme would go extinct. Thanks very much for your attention. (Applause)

I study ants, and that's because I like to think about how organizations work. And in particular, how the simple parts of organizations interact to create the behavior of the whole organization. So, ant colonies are a good example of an organization like that, and there are many others. The web is one. There are many biological systems like that -- brains, cells, developing embryos. There are about 10,000 species of ants. They all live in colonies consisting of one or a few queens, and then all the ants you see walking around are sterile female workers. And all ant colonies have in common that there's no central control. Nobody tells anybody what to do. The queen just lays the eggs. There's no management. No ant directs the behavior of any other ant. And I try to figure out how that works. And I've been working for the past 20 years on a population of seed-eating ants in southeastern Arizona. Here's my study site. This is really a picture of ants, and the rabbit just happens to be there. And these ants are called harvester ants because they eat seeds. This is the nest of the mature colony, and there's the nest entrance. And they forage maybe for about 20 meters away, gather up the seeds and bring them back to the nest, and store them. And every year I go there and make a map of my study site. This is just a road. And it's not very big: it's about 250 meters on one side, 400 on the other. And every colony has a name, which is a number, which is painted on a rock. And I go there every year and look for all the colonies that were alive the year before, and figure out which ones have died, and put all the new ones on the map. And by doing this I know how old they all are. And because of that, I've been able to study how their behavior changes as the colony gets older and larger. So I want to tell you about the life cycle of a colony. Ants never make more ants; colonies make more colonies. And they do that by each year sending out the reproductives -- those are the ones with wings -- on a mating flight. So every year, on the same day -- and it's a mystery exactly how that happens -- each colony sends out its virgin, unmated queens with wings, and the males, and they all fly to a common place. And they mate. And this shows a recently virgin queen. Here's her wings. And she's in the process of mating with this male, and there's another male on top waiting his turn. Often the queens mate more than once. And after that, the males all die. That's it for them. (Laughter) And then the newly mated queens fly off somewhere, drop their wings, dig a hole and go into that hole and start laying eggs. And they will live for 15 or 20 years, continuing to lay eggs using the sperm from that original mating. So the queen goes down in there. She lays eggs, she feeds the larvae -- so an ant starts as an egg, then it's a larva. She feeds the larvae by regurgitating from her fat reserves. Then, as soon as the ants -- the first group of ants -- emerge, they're larvae. Then they're pupae. Then they come out as adult ants. They go out, they get the food, they dig the nest, and the queen never comes out again. So this is a one-year-old colony -- this happens to be 536. There's the nest entrance, there's a pencil for scale. So this is the colony founded by a queen the previous summer. This is a three-year-old colony. There's the nest entrance, there's a pencil for scale. They make a midden, a pile of refuse -- mostly the husks of the seeds that they eat. This is a five-year-old colony. This is the nest entrance, here's a pencil for scale. This is about as big as they get, about a meter across. And then this is how colony size and numbers of worker ants changes -- so this is about 10,000 worker ants -- changes as a function of colony age, in years. So it starts out with zero ants, just the founding queen, and it grows to a size of about 10 or 12 thousand ants when the colony is five. And it stays that size until the queen dies and there's nobody to make more ants, when she's about 15 or 20 years old. And it's when they reach this stable size, in numbers of ants, that they start to reproduce. That is, to send more winged queens and males to that year's mating flight. And I know how colony size changes as a function of colony age because I've dug up colonies of known age and counted all the ants. (Laughter) So that's not the most fun part of this research, although it's interesting. (Laughter) Really the question that I think about with these ants is what I call task allocation. That's not just how is the colony organized, but how does it change what it's doing? How is it that the colony manages to adjust the numbers of workers performing each task as conditions change? So, things happen to an ant colony. When it rains in the summer, it floods in the desert. There's a lot of damage to the nest, and extra ants are needed to clean up that mess. When extra food becomes available -- and this is what everybody knows about picnics -- then extra ants are allocated to collect the food. So, with nobody telling anybody what to do, how is it that the colony manages to adjust the numbers of workers performing each task? And that's the process that I call task allocation. And in harvester ants, I divide the tasks of the ants I see just outside the nest into these four categories: where an ant is foraging, when it's out along the foraging trail, searching for food or bringing food back. The patrollers -- that's supposed to be a magnifying glass -- are an interesting group that go out early in the morning before the foragers are active. They somehow choose the direction that the foragers will go, and by coming back -- just by making it back -- they tell the foragers that it's safe to go out. Then the nest maintenance workers work inside the nest, and I wanted to say that the nests look a lot like Bill Lishman's house. That is, that there are chambers inside, they line the walls of the chambers with moist soil and it dries to a kind of an adobe-like surface in it. It also looks very similar to some of the cave dwellings of the Hopi people that are in that area. And the nest maintenance workers do that inside the nest, and then they come out of the nest carrying bits of dry soil in their mandibles. So you see the nest maintenance workers come out with a bit of sand, put it down, turn around, and go back in. And finally, the midden workers put some kind of territorial chemical in the garbage. So what you see the midden workers doing is making a pile of refuse. On one day, it'll all be here, and then the next day they'll move it over there, and then they'll move it back. So that's what the midden workers do. And these four groups are just the ants outside the nest. So that's only about 25 percent of the colony, and they're the oldest ants. So, an ant starts out somewhere near the queen. And when we dig up nests we find they're about as deep as the colony is wide, so about a meter deep for the big old nests. And then there's another long tunnel and a chamber, where we often find the queen, after eight hours of hacking away at the rock with pickaxes. I don't think that chamber has evolved because of me and my backhoe and my crew of students with pickaxes, but instead because when there's flooding, occasionally the colony has to go down deep. So there's this whole network of chambers. The queen's in there somewhere; she just lays eggs. There's the larvae, and they consume most of the food. And this is true of most ants -- that the ants you see walking around don't do much eating. They bring it back and feed it to the larvae. When the foragers come in with food, they just drop it into the upper chamber, and other ants come up from below, get the food, bring it back, husk the seeds, and pile them up. There are nest maintenance workers working throughout the nest. And curiously, and interestingly, it looks as though at any time about half the ants in the colony are just doing nothing. So, despite what it says in the Bible, about, you know, "Look to the ant, thou sluggard," in fact, you could think of those ants as reserves. That is to say, if something happened -- and I've never seen anything like this happen, but I've only been looking for 20 years -- if something happened, they might all come out if they were needed. But in fact, mostly they're just hanging around in there. And I think it's a very interesting question -- what is there about the way the colony is organized that might give some function to a reserve of ants who are doing nothing? And they sort of stand as a buffer in between the ants working deep inside the nest and the ants working outside. And if you mark ants that are working outside, and dig up a colony, you never see them deep down. So what's happening is that the ants work inside the nest when they're younger. They somehow get into this reserve. And then eventually they get recruited to join this exterior workforce. And once they belong to the ants that work outside, they never go back down. Now ants -- most ants, including these, don't see very well. They have eyes, they can distinguish between light and dark, but they mostly work by smell. So just to reinforce that what you might have thought about ant queens isn't true -- you know, even if the queen did have the intelligence to send chemical messages through this whole network of chambers to tell the ants outside what to do, there is no way that such messages could make it in time to see the shifts in the allocation of workers that we actually see outside the nest. So that's one way that we know the queen isn't directing the behavior of the colony. So when I first set out to work on task allocation, my first question was, "What's the relationship between the ants doing different tasks? Does it matter to the foragers what the nest maintenance workers are doing? Does it matter to the midden workers what the patrollers are doing?" And I was working in the context of a view of ant colonies in which each ant was somehow dedicated to its task from birth and sort of performed independently of the others, knowing its place on the assembly line. And instead I wanted to ask, "How are the different task groups interdependent?" So I did experiments where I changed one thing. So for example, I created more work for the nest maintenance workers by putting out a pile of toothpicks near the nest entrance, early in the morning when the nest maintenance workers are first active. This is what it looks like about 20 minutes later. Here it is about 40 minutes later. And the nest maintenance workers just take all the toothpicks to the outer edge of the nest mound and leave them there. And what I wanted to know was, "OK, here's a situation where extra nest maintenance workers were recruited -- is this going to have any effect on the workers performing other tasks?" Then we repeated all those experiments with the ants marked. So here's some blue nest maintenance workers. And lately we've gotten more sophisticated and we have this three-color system. And we can mark them individually so we know which ant is which. We started out with model airplane paint and then we found these wonderful little Japanese markers, and they work really well. And so just to summarize the result, well it turns out that yes, the different tasks are interdependent. So, if I change the numbers performing one task, it changes the numbers performing another. So for example, if I make a mess that the nest maintenance workers have to clean up, then I see fewer ants out foraging. And this was true for all the pair-wise combinations of tasks. And the second result, which was surprising to a lot of people, was that ants actually switch tasks. The same ant doesn't do the same task over and over its whole life. So for example, if I put out extra food, everybody else -- the midden workers stop doing midden work and go get the food, they become foragers. The nest maintenance workers become foragers. The patrollers become foragers. But not every transition is possible. And this shows how it works. Like I just said, if there is more food to collect, the patrollers, the midden workers, the nest maintenance workers will all change to forage. If there's more patrolling to do -- so I created a disturbance, so extra patrollers were needed -- the nest maintenance workers will switch to patrol. But if more nest maintenance work is needed -- for example, if I put out a bunch of toothpicks -- then nobody will ever switch back to nest maintenance, they have to get nest maintenance workers from inside the nest. So foraging acts as a sink, and the ants inside the nest act as a source. And finally, it looks like each ant is deciding moment to moment whether to be active or not. So, for example, when there's extra nest maintenance work to do, it's not that the foragers switch over. I know that they don't do that. But the foragers somehow decide not to come out. And here was the most intriguing result: the task allocation. This process changes with colony age, and it changes like this. When I do these experiments with older colonies -- so ones that are five years or older -- they're much more consistent from one time to another and much more homeostatic. The worse things get, the more I hassle them, the more they act like undisturbed colonies. Whereas the young, small colonies -- the two-year-old colonies of just 2,000 ants -- are much more variable. And the amazing thing about this is that an ant lives only a year. It could be this year, or this year. So, the ants in the older colony that seem to be more stable are not any older than the ants in the younger colony. It's not due to the experience of older, wiser ants. Instead, something about the organization must be changing as the colony gets older. And the obvious thing that's changing is its size. So since I've had this result, I've spent a lot of time trying to figure out what kinds of decision rules -- very simple, local, probably olfactory, chemical rules could an ant could be using, since no ant can assess the global situation -- that would have the outcome that I see, these predictable dynamics, in who does what task. And it would change as the colony gets larger. And what I've found out is that ants are using a network of antennal contact. So anybody who's ever looked at ants has seen them touch antennae. They smell with their antennae. When one ant touches another, it's smelling it, and it can tell, for example, whether the other ant is a nest mate because ants cover themselves and each other, through grooming, with a layer of grease, which carries a colony-specific odor. And what we're learning is that an ant uses the pattern of its antennal contacts, the rate at which it meets ants of other tasks, in deciding what to do. And so what the message is, is not any message that they transmit from one ant to another, but the pattern. The pattern itself is the message. And I'll tell you a little bit more about that. But first you might be wondering: how is it that an ant can tell, for example, I'm a forager. I expect to meet another forager every so often. But if instead I start to meet a higher number of nest maintenance workers, I'm less likely to forage. So it has to know the difference between a forager and a nest maintenance worker. And we've learned that, in this species -- and I suspect in others as well -- these hydrocarbons, this layer of grease on the outside of ants, is different as ants perform different tasks. And we've done experiments that show that that's because the longer an ant stays outside, the more these simple hydrocarbons on its surface change, and so they come to smell different by doing different tasks. And they can use that task-specific odor in cuticular hydrocarbons -- they can use that in their brief antennal contacts to somehow keep track of the rate at which they're meeting ants of certain tasks. And we've just recently demonstrated this by putting extract of hydrocarbons on little glass beads, and dropping the beads gently down into the nest entrance at the right rate. And it turns out that ants will respond to the right rate of contact with a glass bead with hydrocarbon extract on it, as they would to contact with real ants. So I want now to show you a bit of film -- and this will start out, first of all, showing you the nest entrance. So the idea is that ants are coming in and out of the nest entrance. They've gone out to do different tasks, and the rate at which they meet as they come in and out of the nest entrance determines, or influences, each ant's decision about whether to go out, and which task to perform. This is taken through a fiber optics microscope. It's down inside the nest. In the beginning you see the ants just kind of engaging with the fiber optics microscope. But the idea is that the ants are in there, and each ant is experiencing a certain flow of ants past it -- a stream of contacts with other ants. And the pattern of these interactions determines whether the ant comes back out, and what it does when it comes back out. You can also see this in the ants just outside the nest entrance like these. Each ant, then, as it comes back in, is contacting other ants. And the ants that are waiting just inside the nest entrance to decide whether to go out on their next trip, are contacting the ants coming in. So, what's interesting about this system is that it's messy. It's variable. It's noisy. And, in particular, in two ways. The first is that the experience of the ant -- of each ant -- can't be very predictable. Because the rate at which ants come back depends on all the little things that happen to an ant as it goes out and does its task outside. And the second thing is that an ant's ability to assess this pattern must be very crude because no ant can do any sophisticated counting. So, we do a lot of simulation and modeling, and also experimental work, to try to figure out how those two kinds of noise combine to, in the aggregate, produce the predictable behavior of ant colonies. Again, I don't want to say that this kind of haphazard pattern of interactions produces a factory that works with the precision and efficiency of clockwork. In fact, if you watch ants at all, you end up trying to help them because they never seem to be doing anything exactly the way that you think that they ought to be doing it. So it's not really that out of these haphazard contacts, perfection arises. But it works pretty well. Ants have been around for several hundred million years. They cover the earth, except for Antarctica. Something that they're doing is clearly successful enough that this pattern of haphazard contacts, in the aggregate, produces something that allows ants to make a lot more ants. And one of the things that we're studying is how natural selection might be acting now to shape this use of interaction patterns -- this network of interaction patterns -- to perhaps increase the foraging efficiency of ant colonies. So the one thing, though, that I want you to remember about this is that these patterns of interactions are something that you'd expect to be closely connected to colony size. The simplest idea is that when an ant is in a small colony -- and an ant in a large colony can use the same rule, like "I expect to meet another forager every three seconds." But in a small colony, it's likely to meet fewer foragers, just because there are fewer other foragers there to meet. So this is the kind of rule that, as the colony develops and gets older and larger, will produce different behavior in an old colony and a small young one. Thank you. (Applause)

I bet you're worried. (Laughter) I was worried. That's why I began this piece. I was worried about vaginas. I was worried what we think about vaginas and even more worried that we don't think about them. I was worried about my own vagina. It needed a context, a culture, a community of other vaginas. There is so much darkness and secrecy surrounding them. Like the Bermuda Triangle, nobody ever reports back from there. (Laughter) In the first place, it's not so easy to even find your vagina. Women go days, weeks, months, without looking at it. I interviewed a high-powered businesswoman; she told me she didn't have time. "Looking at your vagina," she said, "is a full day's work." (Laughter) "You've got to get down there on your back, in front of a mirror, full-length preferred. You've got to get in the perfect position with the perfect light, which then becomes shadowed by the angle you're at. You're twisting your head up, arching your back, it's exhausting." She was busy; she didn't have time. So I decided to talk to women about their vaginas. They began as casual vagina interviews, and they turned into vagina monologues. I talked with over 200 women. I talked to older women, younger women, married women, lesbians, single women. I talked to corporate professionals, college professors, actors, sex workers. I talked to African-American women, Asian-American women, Native-American women, Caucasian women, Jewish women. OK, at first women were a little shy, a little reluctant to talk. Once they got going, you couldn't stop them. Women love to talk about their vaginas, they do. Mainly because no one's ever asked them before. (Laughter) Let's just start with the word "vagina" -- vagina, vagina. It sounds like an infection, at best. Maybe a medical instrument. "Hurry, nurse, bring the vagina!" (Laughter) Vagina, vagina, vagina. It doesn't matter how many times you say the word, it never sounds like a word you want to say. It's a completely ridiculous, totally un-sexy word. If you use it during sex, trying to be politically correct, "Darling, would you stroke my vagina," you kill the act right there. (Laughter) I'm worried what we call them and don't call them. In Great Neck, New York, they call it a Pussycat. A woman told me there her mother used to tell her, "Don't wear panties, dear, underneath your pajamas. You need to air out your Pussycat." (Laughter) In Westchester, they call it a Pooki, in New Jersey, a twat. There's Powderbox, derriere, a Pooky, a Poochi, a Poopi, a Poopelu, a Pooninana, a Padepachetchki, a Pal, and a Piche. (Laughter) There's Toadie, Dee Dee, Nishi, Dignity, Coochi Snorcher, Cooter, Labbe, Gladys Seagelman, VA, Wee wee, Horsespot, Nappy Dugout, Mongo, Ghoulie, Powderbox, a Mimi in Miami, a Split Knish in Philadelphia ... (Laughter) and a Schmende in the Bronx. (Laughter) I am worried about vaginas. This is how the "Vagina Monologues" begins. But it really didn't begin there. It began with a conversation with a woman. We were having a conversation about menopause, and we got onto the subject of her vagina, which you'll do if you're talking about menopause. And she said things that really shocked me about her vagina -- that it was dried-up and finished and dead -- and I was kind of shocked. So I said to a friend casually, "Well, what do you think about your vagina?" And that woman said something more amazing, and then the next woman said something more amazing, and before I knew it, every woman was telling me I had to talk to somebody about their vagina because they had an amazing story, and I was sucked down the vagina trail. (Laughter) And I really haven't gotten off of it. I think if you had told me when I was younger that I was going to grow up, and be in shoe stores, and people would scream out, "There she is, the Vagina Lady!" I don't know that that would have been my life ambition. (Laughter) But I want to talk a little bit about happiness, and the relationship to this whole vagina journey, because it has been an extraordinary journey that began eight years ago. I think before I did the "Vagina Monologues," I didn't really believe in happiness. I thought that only idiots were happy, to be honest. I remember when I started practicing Buddhism 14 years ago, and I was told that the end of this practice was to be happy, I said, "How could you be happy and live in this world of suffering and live in this world of pain?" I mistook happiness for a lot of other things, like numbness or decadence or selfishness. And what happened through the course of the "Vagina Monologues" and this journey is, I think I have come to understand a little bit more about happiness. There are three qualities I want to talk about. One is seeing what's right in front of you, and talking about it, and stating it. I think what I learned from talking about the vagina and speaking about the vagina, is it was the most obvious thing -- it was right in the center of my body and the center of the world -- and yet it was the one thing nobody talked about. The second thing is that what talking about the vagina did is it opened this door which allowed me to see that there was a way to serve the world to make it better. And that's where the deepest happiness has actually come from. And the third principle of happiness, which I've realized recently: Eight years ago, this momentum and this energy, this "V-wave" started -- and I can only describe it as a "V-wave" because, to be honest, I really don't understand it completely; I feel at the service of it. But this wave started, and if I question the wave, or try to stop the wave or look back at the wave, I often have the experience of whiplash or the potential of my neck breaking. But if I go with the wave, and I trust the wave and I move with the wave, I go to the next place, and it happens logically and organically and truthfully. And I started this piece, particularly with stories and narratives, and I was talking to one woman and that led to another woman and that led to another woman. And then I wrote those stories down, and I put them out in front of other people. And every single time I did the show at the beginning, women would literally line up after the show, because they wanted to tell me their stories. And at first I thought, "Oh great, I'll hear about wonderful orgasms, and great sex lives, and how women love their vaginas." But in fact, that's not what women lined up to tell me. What women lined up to tell me was how they were raped, and how they were battered, and how they were beaten, and how they were gang-raped in parking lots, and how they were incested by their uncles. And I wanted to stop doing the "Vagina Monologues," because it felt too daunting. I felt like a war photographer who takes pictures of terrible events, but doesn't intervene on their behalf. And so in 1997, I said, "Let's get women together. What could we do with this information that all these women are being violated?" And it turned out, after thinking and investigating, that I discovered -- and the UN has actually said this recently -- that one out of every three women on this planet will be beaten or raped in her lifetime. That's essentially a gender; that's essentially the resource of the planet, which is women. So in 1997 we got all these incredible women together and we said, "How can we use the play, this energy, to stop violence against women?" And we put on one event in New York City, in the theater, and all these great actors came -- from Susan Sarandon, to Glenn Close, to Whoopi Goldberg -- and we did one performance on one evening, and that catalyzed this wave, this energy. And within five years, this extraordinary thing began to happen. One woman took that energy and she said, "I want to bring this wave, this energy, to college campuses," and so she took the play and she said, "Let's use the play and have performances once a year, where we can raise money to stop violence against women in local communities all around the world." And in one year, it went to 50 colleges, and then it expanded. And over the course of the last six years, it's spread and it's spread and it's spread around the world. What I have learned is two things: one, that the epidemic of violence towards women is shocking; it's global; it is so profound and it is so devastating, and it is so in every little pocket of every little crater, of every little society that we don't even recognize it, because it's become ordinary. This journey has taken me to Afghanistan, where I had the extraordinary honor and privilege to go into parts of Afghanistan under the Taliban. I was dressed in a burqa and I went in with an extraordinary group, called the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan. And I saw firsthand how women had been stripped of every single right that was possible to strip women of -- from being educated, to being employed, to being actually allowed to eat ice cream. For those of you who don't know, it was illegal to eat ice cream under the Taliban. And I actually saw and met women who had been flogged for being caught eating vanilla ice cream. I was taken to the secret ice cream-eating place in a little town, where we went to a back room, and women were seated and a curtain was pulled around us, and they were served vanilla ice cream. And women lifted their burqas and ate this ice cream. And I don't think I ever understood pleasure until that moment, and how women have found a way to keep their pleasure alive. It has taken me, this journey, to Islamabad, where I have witnessed and met women with their faces melted off. It has taken me to Juarez, Mexico, where I was a week ago, where I have literally been there in parking lots, where bones of women have washed up and been dumped next to Coca-Cola bottles. It has taken me to universities all over this country, where girls are date-raped and drugged. I have seen terrible, terrible, terrible violence. But I have also recognized, in the course of seeing that violence, that being in the face of things and seeing actually what's in front of us is the antidote to depression, and to a feeling that one is worthless and has no value. Because before the "Vagina Monologues," I will say that 80 percent of my consciousness was closed off to what was really going on in this reality, and that closing-off closed off my vitality and my life energy. What has also happened is in the course of these travels -- and it's been an extraordinary thing -- is that every single place that I have gone to in the world, I have met a new species. And I really love hearing about all these species at the bottom of the sea. And I was thinking about how being with these extraordinary people on this particular panel, that it's beneath, beyond and between, and the vagina kind of fits into all those categories. (Laughter) But one of the things I've seen is this species -- and it is a species, and it is a new paradigm, and it doesn't get reported in the press or in the media because I don't think good news ever is news, and I don't think people who are transforming the planet are what gets the ratings on TV shows. But every single country I have been to -- and in the last six years, I've been to about 45 countries, and many tiny little villages and cities and towns -- I have seen something what I've come to call "vagina warriors." A "vagina warrior" is a woman, or a vagina-friendly man, who has witnessed incredible violence or suffered it, and rather than getting an AK-47 or a weapon of mass destruction or a machete, they hold the violence in their bodies; they grieve it; they experience it; and then they go out and devote their lives to making sure it doesn't happen to anybody else. I have met these women everywhere on the planet, and I want to tell a few stories, because I believe that stories are the way that we transmit information, where it goes into our bodies. And I think one of the things about being at TED that's been very interesting is that I live in my body a lot, and I don't live in my head very much anymore. And this is a very heady place. And it's been really interesting to be in my head for the last two days; I've been very disoriented -- (Laughter) because I think the world, the V-world, is very much in your body. It's a body world, and the species really exists in the body. And I think there's a real significance in us attaching our bodies to our heads, that that separation has created a divide that is often separating purpose from intent. And the connection between body and head often brings those things into union. I want to talk about three particular people that I've met, vagina warriors, who really transformed my understanding of this whole principle and species, and one is a woman named Marsha Lopez. Marsha Lopez was a woman I met in Guatemala. She was 14 years old, and she was in a marriage and her husband was beating her on a regular basis. And she couldn't get out, because she was addicted to the relationship, and she had no money. Her sister was younger than her, and she applied -- we had a "Stop Rape" contest a few years ago in New York -- and she applied, hoping that she would become a finalist and she could bring her sister. She did become a finalist; she brought Marsha to New York. And at that time, we did this extraordinary V-Day at Madison Square Garden, where we sold out the entire testosterone-filled dome -- 18,000 people standing up to say "Yes" to vaginas, which was really a pretty incredible transformation. And she came, and she witnessed this, and she decided that she would go back and leave her husband, and that she would bring V-Day to Guatemala. She was 21 years old. I went to Guatemala and she had sold out the National Theater of Guatemala. And I watched her walk up on stage in her red short dress and high heels, and she stood there and said, "My name is Marsha. I was beaten by my husband for five years. He almost murdered me. I left and you can, too." And the entire 2,000 people went absolutely crazy. There's a woman named Esther Chávez who I met in Juarez, Mexico. And Esther Chávez was a brilliant accountant in Mexico City. She was 72 years old and she was planning to retire. She went to Juarez to take care of an ailing aunt, and in the course of it, she began to discover what was happening to the murdered and disappeared women of Juarez. She gave up her life; she moved to Juarez. She started to write the stories which documented the disappeared women. 300 women have disappeared in a border town because they're brown and poor. There has been no response to the disappearance, and not one person has been held accountable. She began to document it. She opened a center called Casa Amiga, and in six years, she has literally brought this to the consciousness of the world. We were there a week ago, when there were 7,000 people in the street, and it was truly a miracle. And as we walked through the streets, the people of Juarez, who normally don't even come into the streets, because the streets are so dangerous, literally stood there and wept, to see that other people from the world had showed up for that particular community. There's another woman, named Agnes. And Agnes, for me, epitomizes what a vagina warrior is. I met her three years ago in Kenya. And Agnes was mutilated as a little girl; she was circumcised against her will when she was 10 years old, and she really made a decision that she didn't want this practice to continue anymore in her community. So when she got older, she created this incredible thing: it's an anatomical sculpture of a woman's body, half a woman's body. And she walked through the Rift Valley, and she had vagina and vagina replacement parts, where she would teach girls and parents and boys and girls what a healthy vagina looks like, and what a mutilated vagina looks like. And in the course of her travel -- she walked literally for eight years through the Rift Valley, through dust, through sleeping on the ground, because the Maasai are nomads, and she would have to find them, and they would move, and she would find them again -- she saved 1,500 girls from being cut. And in that time, she created an alternative ritual, which involved girls coming of age without the cut. When we met her three years ago, we said, "What could V-Day do for you?" And she said, "Well, if you got me a jeep, I could get around a lot faster." (Laughter) So we bought her a jeep. And in the year that she had the jeep, she saved 4,500 girls from being cut. So we said to her, "What else could we do for you?" She said, "Well, Eve, if you gave me some money, I could open a house and girls could run away, and they could be saved." And I want to tell this little story about my own beginnings, because it's very interrelated to happiness and Agnes. When I was a little girl -- I grew up in a wealthy community; it was an upper-middle class white community, and it had all the trappings and the looks of a perfectly nice, wonderful, great life. And everyone was supposed to be happy in that community, and, in fact, my life was hell. I lived with an alcoholic father who beat me and molested me, and it was all inside that. And always as a child I had this fantasy that somebody would come and rescue me. And I actually made up a little character whose name was Mr. Alligator. I would call him up when things got really bad, and say it was time to come and pick me up. And I would pack a little bag and wait for Mr. Alligator to come. Now, Mr. Alligator never did come, but the idea of Mr. Alligator coming actually saved my sanity and made it OK for me to keep going, because I believed, in the distance, there would be someone coming to rescue me. Cut to 40-some odd years later, we go to Kenya, and we're walking, we arrive at the opening of this house. And Agnes hadn't let me come to the house for days, because they were preparing this whole ritual. I want to tell you a great story. When Agnes first started fighting to stop female genital mutilation in her community, she had become an outcast, and she was exiled and slandered, and the whole community turned against her. But being a vagina warrior, she kept going, and she kept committing herself to transforming consciousness. And in the Maasai community, goats and cows are the most valued possession. They're like the Mercedes-Benz of the Rift Valley. And she said two days before the house opened, two different people arrived to give her a goat each, and she said to me, "I knew then that female genital mutilation would end one day in Africa." Anyway, we arrived, and when we arrived, there were hundreds of girls dressed in red homemade dresses -- which is the color of the Maasai and the color of V-Day -- and they greeted us. They had made up these songs that they were singing, about the end of suffering and the end of mutilation, and they walked us down the path. It was a gorgeous day in the African sun, and the dust was flying and the girls were dancing, and there was this house, and it said, "V-Day Safe House for the Girls." And it hit me in that moment that it had taken 47 years, but that Mr. Alligator had finally shown up. And he had shown up, obviously, in a form that it took me a long time to understand, which is that when we give in the world what we want the most, we heal the broken part inside each of us. And I feel, in the last eight years, that this journey -- this miraculous vagina journey -- has taught me this really simple thing, which is that happiness exists in action; it exists in telling the truth and saying what your truth is; and it exists in giving away what you want the most. And I feel that knowledge and that journey has been an extraordinary privilege, and I feel really blessed to have been here today to communicate that to you. Thank you very much. (Applause)

So I want to start by offering you a free no-tech life hack, and all it requires of you is this: that you change your posture for two minutes. But before I give it away, I want to ask you to right now do a little audit of your body and what you're doing with your body. So how many of you are sort of making yourselves smaller? Maybe you're hunching, crossing your legs, maybe wrapping your ankles. Sometimes we hold onto our arms like this. Sometimes we spread out. (Laughter) I see you. So I want you to pay attention to what you're doing right now. We're going to come back to that in a few minutes, and I'm hoping that if you learn to tweak this a little bit, it could significantly change the way your life unfolds. So, we're really fascinated with body language, and we're particularly interested in other people's body language. You know, we're interested in, like, you know — (Laughter) — an awkward interaction, or a smile, or a contemptuous glance, or maybe a very awkward wink, or maybe even something like a handshake. Narrator: Here they are arriving at Number 10. This lucky policeman gets to shake hands with the President of the United States. Here comes the Prime Minister -- No. (Laughter) (Applause) (Laughter) (Applause) Amy Cuddy: So a handshake, or the lack of a handshake, can have us talking for weeks and weeks and weeks. Even the BBC and The New York Times. So obviously when we think about nonverbal behavior, or body language -- but we call it nonverbals as social scientists -- it's language, so we think about communication. When we think about communication, we think about interactions. So what is your body language communicating to me? What's mine communicating to you? And there's a lot of reason to believe that this is a valid way to look at this. So social scientists have spent a lot of time looking at the effects of our body language, or other people's body language, on judgments. And we make sweeping judgments and inferences from body language. And those judgments can predict really meaningful life outcomes like who we hire or promote, who we ask out on a date. For example, Nalini Ambady, a researcher at Tufts University, shows that when people watch 30-second soundless clips of real physician-patient interactions, their judgments of the physician's niceness predict whether or not that physician will be sued. So it doesn't have to do so much with whether or not that physician was incompetent, but do we like that person and how they interacted? Even more dramatic, Alex Todorov at Princeton has shown us that judgments of political candidates' faces in just one second predict 70 percent of U.S. Senate and gubernatorial race outcomes, and even, let's go digital, emoticons used well in online negotiations can lead to you claim more value from that negotiation. If you use them poorly, bad idea. Right? So when we think of nonverbals, we think of how we judge others, how they judge us and what the outcomes are. We tend to forget, though, the other audience that's influenced by our nonverbals, and that's ourselves. We are also influenced by our nonverbals, our thoughts and our feelings and our physiology. So what nonverbals am I talking about? I'm a social psychologist. I study prejudice, and I teach at a competitive business school, so it was inevitable that I would become interested in power dynamics. I became especially interested in nonverbal expressions of power and dominance. And what are nonverbal expressions of power and dominance? Well, this is what they are. So in the animal kingdom, they are about expanding. So you make yourself big, you stretch out, you take up space, you're basically opening up. It's about opening up. And this is true across the animal kingdom. It's not just limited to primates. And humans do the same thing. (Laughter) So they do this both when they have power sort of chronically, and also when they're feeling powerful in the moment. And this one is especially interesting because it really shows us how universal and old these expressions of power are. This expression, which is known as pride, Jessica Tracy has studied. She shows that people who are born with sight and people who are congenitally blind do this when they win at a physical competition. So when they cross the finish line and they've won, it doesn't matter if they've never seen anyone do it. They do this. So the arms up in the V, the chin is slightly lifted. What do we do when we feel powerless? We do exactly the opposite. We close up. We wrap ourselves up. We make ourselves small. We don't want to bump into the person next to us. So again, both animals and humans do the same thing. And this is what happens when you put together high and low power. So what we tend to do when it comes to power is that we complement the other's nonverbals. So if someone is being really powerful with us, we tend to make ourselves smaller. We don't mirror them. We do the opposite of them. So I'm watching this behavior in the classroom, and what do I notice? I notice that MBA students really exhibit the full range of power nonverbals. So you have people who are like caricatures of alphas, really coming into the room, they get right into the middle of the room before class even starts, like they really want to occupy space. When they sit down, they're sort of spread out. They raise their hands like this. You have other people who are virtually collapsing when they come in. As soon they come in, you see it. You see it on their faces and their bodies, and they sit in their chair and they make themselves tiny, and they go like this when they raise their hand. I notice a couple of things about this. One, you're not going to be surprised. It seems to be related to gender. So women are much more likely to do this kind of thing than men. Women feel chronically less powerful than men, so this is not surprising. But the other thing I noticed is that it also seemed to be related to the extent to which the students were participating, and how well they were participating. And this is really important in the MBA classroom, because participation counts for half the grade. So business schools have been struggling with this gender grade gap. You get these equally qualified women and men coming in and then you get these differences in grades, and it seems to be partly attributable to participation. So I started to wonder, you know, okay, so you have these people coming in like this, and they're participating. Is it possible that we could get people to fake it and would it lead them to participate more? So my main collaborator Dana Carney, who's at Berkeley, and I really wanted to know, can you fake it till you make it? Like, can you do this just for a little while and actually experience a behavioral outcome that makes you seem more powerful? So we know that our nonverbals govern how other people think and feel about us. There's a lot of evidence. But our question really was, do our nonverbals govern how we think and feel about ourselves? There's some evidence that they do. So, for example, we smile when we feel happy, but also, when we're forced to smile by holding a pen in our teeth like this, it makes us feel happy. So it goes both ways. When it comes to power, it also goes both ways. So when you feel powerful, you're more likely to do this, but it's also possible that when you pretend to be powerful, you are more likely to actually feel powerful. So the second question really was, you know, so we know that our minds change our bodies, but is it also true that our bodies change our minds? And when I say minds, in the case of the powerful, what am I talking about? So I'm talking about thoughts and feelings and the sort of physiological things that make up our thoughts and feelings, and in my case, that's hormones. I look at hormones. So what do the minds of the powerful versus the powerless look like? So powerful people tend to be, not surprisingly, more assertive and more confident, more optimistic. They actually feel they're going to win even at games of chance. They also tend to be able to think more abstractly. So there are a lot of differences. They take more risks. There are a lot of differences between powerful and powerless people. Physiologically, there also are differences on two key hormones: testosterone, which is the dominance hormone, and cortisol, which is the stress hormone. So what we find is that high-power alpha males in primate hierarchies have high testosterone and low cortisol, and powerful and effective leaders also have high testosterone and low cortisol. So what does that mean? When you think about power, people tended to think only about testosterone, because that was about dominance. But really, power is also about how you react to stress. So do you want the high-power leader that's dominant, high on testosterone, but really stress reactive? Probably not, right? You want the person who's powerful and assertive and dominant, but not very stress reactive, the person who's laid back. So we know that in primate hierarchies, if an alpha needs to take over, if an individual needs to take over an alpha role sort of suddenly, within a few days, that individual's testosterone has gone up significantly and his cortisol has dropped significantly. So we have this evidence, both that the body can shape the mind, at least at the facial level, and also that role changes can shape the mind. So what happens, okay, you take a role change, what happens if you do that at a really minimal level, like this tiny manipulation, this tiny intervention? "For two minutes," you say, "I want you to stand like this, and it's going to make you feel more powerful." So this is what we did. We decided to bring people into the lab and run a little experiment, and these people adopted, for two minutes, either high-power poses or low-power poses, and I'm just going to show you five of the poses, although they took on only two. So here's one. A couple more. This one has been dubbed the "Wonder Woman" by the media. Here are a couple more. So you can be standing or you can be sitting. And here are the low-power poses. So you're folding up, you're making yourself small. This one is very low-power. When you're touching your neck, you're really protecting yourself. So this is what happens. They come in, they spit into a vial, for two minutes, we say, "You need to do this or this." They don't look at pictures of the poses. We don't want to prime them with a concept of power. We want them to be feeling power. So two minutes they do this. We then ask them, "How powerful do you feel?" on a series of items, and then we give them an opportunity to gamble, and then we take another saliva sample. That's it. That's the whole experiment. So this is what we find. Risk tolerance, which is the gambling, we find that when you are in the high-power pose condition, 86 percent of you will gamble. When you're in the low-power pose condition, only 60 percent, and that's a whopping significant difference. Here's what we find on testosterone. From their baseline when they come in, high-power people experience about a 20-percent increase, and low-power people experience about a 10-percent decrease. So again, two minutes, and you get these changes. Here's what you get on cortisol. High-power people experience about a 25-percent decrease, and the low-power people experience about a 15-percent increase. So two minutes lead to these hormonal changes that configure your brain to basically be either assertive, confident and comfortable, or really stress-reactive, and feeling sort of shut down. And we've all had the feeling, right? So it seems that our nonverbals do govern how we think and feel about ourselves, so it's not just others, but it's also ourselves. Also, our bodies change our minds. But the next question, of course, is, can power posing for a few minutes really change your life in meaningful ways? This is in the lab, it's this little task, it's just a couple of minutes. Where can you actually apply this? Which we cared about, of course. And so we think where you want to use this is evaluative situations, like social threat situations. Where are you being evaluated, either by your friends? For teenagers, it's at the lunchroom table. For some people it's speaking at a school board meeting. It might be giving a pitch or giving a talk like this or doing a job interview. We decided that the one that most people could relate to because most people had been through, was the job interview. So we published these findings, and the media are all over it, and they say, Okay, so this is what you do when you go in for the job interview, right? (Laughter) You know, so we were of course horrified, and said, Oh my God, no, that's not what we meant at all. For numerous reasons, no, don't do that. Again, this is not about you talking to other people. It's you talking to yourself. What do you do before you go into a job interview? You do this. You're sitting down. You're looking at your iPhone -- or your Android, not trying to leave anyone out. You're looking at your notes, you're hunching up, making yourself small, when really what you should be doing maybe is this, like, in the bathroom, right? Do that. Find two minutes. So that's what we want to test. Okay? So we bring people into a lab, and they do either high- or low-power poses again, they go through a very stressful job interview. It's five minutes long. They are being recorded. They're being judged also, and the judges are trained to give no nonverbal feedback, so they look like this. Imagine this is the person interviewing you. So for five minutes, nothing, and this is worse than being heckled. People hate this. It's what Marianne LaFrance calls "standing in social quicksand." So this really spikes your cortisol. So this is the job interview we put them through, because we really wanted to see what happened. We then have these coders look at these tapes, four of them. They're blind to the hypothesis. They're blind to the conditions. They have no idea who's been posing in what pose, and they end up looking at these sets of tapes, and they say, "We want to hire these people," all the high-power posers. "We don't want to hire these people. We also evaluate these people much more positively overall." But what's driving it? It's not about the content of the speech. It's about the presence that they're bringing to the speech. Because we rate them on all these variables related to competence, like, how well-structured is the speech? How good is it? What are their qualifications? No effect on those things. This is what's affected. These kinds of things. People are bringing their true selves, basically. They're bringing themselves. They bring their ideas, but as themselves, with no, you know, residue over them. So this is what's driving the effect, or mediating the effect. So when I tell people about this, that our bodies change our minds and our minds can change our behavior, and our behavior can change our outcomes, they say to me, "It feels fake." Right? So I said, fake it till you make it. It's not me. I don't want to get there and then still feel like a fraud. I don't want to feel like an impostor. I don't want to get there only to feel like I'm not supposed to be here. And that really resonated with me, because I want to tell you a little story about being an impostor and feeling like I'm not supposed to be here. When I was 19, I was in a really bad car accident. I was thrown out of a car, rolled several times. I was thrown from the car. And I woke up in a head injury rehab ward, and I had been withdrawn from college, and I learned that my IQ had dropped by two standard deviations, which was very traumatic. I knew my IQ because I had identified with being smart, and I had been called gifted as a child. So I'm taken out of college, I keep trying to go back. They say, "You're not going to finish college. Just, you know, there are other things for you to do, but that's not going to work out for you." So I really struggled with this, and I have to say, having your identity taken from you, your core identity, and for me it was being smart, having that taken from you, there's nothing that leaves you feeling more powerless than that. So I felt entirely powerless. I worked and worked, and I got lucky, and worked, and got lucky, and worked. Eventually I graduated from college. It took me four years longer than my peers, and I convinced someone, my angel advisor, Susan Fiske, to take me on, and so I ended up at Princeton, and I was like, I am not supposed to be here. I am an impostor. And the night before my first-year talk, and the first-year talk at Princeton is a 20-minute talk to 20 people. That's it. I was so afraid of being found out the next day that I called her and said, "I'm quitting." She was like, "You are not quitting, because I took a gamble on you, and you're staying. You're going to stay, and this is what you're going to do. You are going to fake it. You're going to do every talk that you ever get asked to do. You're just going to do it and do it and do it, even if you're terrified and just paralyzed and having an out-of-body experience, until you have this moment where you say, 'Oh my gosh, I'm doing it. Like, I have become this. I am actually doing this.'" So that's what I did. Five years in grad school, a few years, you know, I'm at Northwestern, I moved to Harvard, I'm at Harvard, I'm not really thinking about it anymore, but for a long time I had been thinking, "Not supposed to be here." So at the end of my first year at Harvard, a student who had not talked in class the entire semester, who I had said, "Look, you've gotta participate or else you're going to fail," came into my office. I really didn't know her at all. She came in totally defeated, and she said, "I'm not supposed to be here." And that was the moment for me. Because two things happened. One was that I realized, oh my gosh, I don't feel like that anymore. I don't feel that anymore, but she does, and I get that feeling. And the second was, she is supposed to be here! Like, she can fake it, she can become it. So I was like, "Yes, you are! You are supposed to be here! And tomorrow you're going to fake it, you're going to make yourself powerful, and, you know -- (Applause) And you're going to go into the classroom, and you are going to give the best comment ever." You know? And she gave the best comment ever, and people turned around and were like, oh my God, I didn't even notice her sitting there. (Laughter) She comes back to me months later, and I realized that she had not just faked it till she made it, she had actually faked it till she became it. So she had changed. And so I want to say to you, don't fake it till you make it. Fake it till you become it. Do it enough until you actually become it and internalize. The last thing I'm going to leave you with is this. Tiny tweaks can lead to big changes. So, this is two minutes. Two minutes, two minutes, two minutes. Before you go into the next stressful evaluative situation, for two minutes, try doing this, in the elevator, in a bathroom stall, at your desk behind closed doors. That's what you want to do. Configure your brain to cope the best in that situation. Get your testosterone up. Get your cortisol down. Don't leave that situation feeling like, oh, I didn't show them who I am. Leave that situation feeling like, I really feel like I got to say who I am and show who I am. So I want to ask you first, you know, both to try power posing, and also I want to ask you to share the science, because this is simple. I don't have ego involved in this. (Laughter) Give it away. Share it with people, because the people who can use it the most are the ones with no resources and no technology and no status and no power. Give it to them because they can do it in private. They need their bodies, privacy and two minutes, and it can significantly change the outcomes of their life. Thank you. (Applause)

My work is play. And I play when I design. I even looked it up in the dictionary, to make sure that I actually do that, and the definition of play, number one, was engaging in a childlike activity or endeavor, and number two was gambling. And I realize I do both when I'm designing. I'm both a kid and I'm gambling all the time. And I think that if you're not, there's probably something inherently wrong with the structure or the situation you're in, if you're a designer. But the serious part is what threw me, and I couldn't quite get a handle on it until I remembered an essay. And it's an essay I read 30 years ago. It was written by Russell Baker, who used to write an "Observer" column in the New York Times. He's a wonderful humorist. And I'm going to read you this essay, or an excerpt from it because it really hit home for me. Here is a letter of friendly advice. Be serious, it says. What it means, of course, is, be solemn. Being solemn is easy. Being serious is hard. Children almost always begin by being serious, which is what makes them so entertaining when compared with adults as a class. Adults, on the whole, are solemn. In politics, the rare candidate who is serious, like Adlai Stevenson, is easily overwhelmed by one who is solemn, like Eisenhower. That's because it is hard for most people to recognize seriousness, which is rare, but more comfortable to endorse solemnity, which is commonplace. Jogging, which is commonplace, and widely accepted as good for you, is solemn. Poker is serious. Washington, D.C. is solemn. New York is serious. Going to educational conferences to tell you anything about the future is solemn. Taking a long walk by yourself, during which you devise a foolproof scheme for robbing Tiffany's, is serious. (Laughter) Now, when I apply Russell Baker's definition of solemnity or seriousness to design, it doesn't necessarily make any particular point about quality. Solemn design is often important and very effective design. Solemn design is also socially correct, and is accepted by appropriate audiences. It's what right-thinking designers and all the clients are striving for. Serious design, serious play, is something else. For one thing, it often happens spontaneously, intuitively, accidentally or incidentally. It can be achieved out of innocence, or arrogance, or out of selfishness, sometimes out of carelessness. But mostly, it's achieved through all those kind of crazy parts of human behavior that don't really make any sense. Serious design is imperfect. It's filled with the kind of craft laws that come from something being the first of its kind. Serious design is also -- often -- quite unsuccessful from the solemn point of view. That's because the art of serious play is about invention, change, rebellion -- not perfection. Perfection happens during solemn play. Now, I always saw design careers like surreal staircases. If you look at the staircase, you'll see that in your 20s the risers are very high and the steps are very short, and you make huge discoveries. You sort of leap up very quickly in your youth. That's because you don't know anything and you have a lot to learn, and so that anything you do is a learning experience and you're just jumping right up there. As you get older, the risers get shallower and the steps get wider, and you start moving along at a slower pace because you're making fewer discoveries. And as you get older and more decrepit, you sort of inch along on this sort of depressing, long staircase, leading you into oblivion. (Laughter) I find it's actually getting really hard to be serious. I'm hired to be solemn, but I find more and more that I'm solemn when I don't have to be. And in my 35 years of working experience, I think I was really serious four times. And I'm going to show them to you now, because they came out of very specific conditions. It's great to be a kid. Now, when I was in my early 20s, I worked in the record business, designing record covers for CBS Records, and I had no idea what a great job I had. I thought everybody had a job like that. And what -- the way I looked at design and the way I looked at the world was, what was going on around me and the things that came at the time I walked into design were the enemy. I really, really, really hated the typeface Helvetica. I thought the typeface Helvetica was the cleanest, most boring, most fascistic, really repressive typeface, and I hated everything that was designed in Helvetica. And when I was in my college days, this was the sort of design that was fashionable and popular. This is actually quite a lovely book jacket by Rudy de Harak, but I just hated it, because it was designed with Helvetica, and I made parodies about it. I just thought it was, you know, completely boring. (Laughter) So -- so, my goal in life was to do stuff that wasn't made out of Helvetica. And to do stuff that wasn't made out of Helvetica was actually kind of hard because you had to find it. And there weren't a lot of books about the history of design in the early 70s. There weren't -- there wasn't a plethora of design publishing. You actually had to go to antique stores. You had to go to Europe. You had to go places and find the stuff. And what I responded to was, you know, Art Nouveau, or deco, or Victorian typography, or things that were just completely not Helvetica. And I taught myself design this way, and this was sort of my early years, and I used these things in really goofy ways on record covers and in my design. I wasn't educated. I just sort of put these things together. I mixed up Victorian designs with pop, and I mixed up Art Nouveau with something else. And I made these very lush, very elaborate record covers, not because I was being a post-modernist or a historicist -- because I didn't know what those things were. I just hated Helvetica. (Laughter) And that kind of passion drove me into very serious play, a kind of play I could never do now because I'm too well-educated. And there's something wonderful about that form of youth, where you can let yourself grow and play, and be really a brat, and then accomplish things. By the end of the '70s, actually, the stuff became known. I mean, these covers appeared all over the world, and they started winning awards, and people knew them. And I was suddenly a post-modernist, and I began a career as -- in my own business. And first I was praised for it, then criticized for it, but the fact of the matter was, I had become solemn. I didn't do what I think was a piece of serious work again for about 14 years. I spent most of the '80s being quite solemn, turning out these sorts of designs that I was expected to do because that's who I was, and I was living in this cycle of going from serious to solemn to hackneyed to dead, and getting rediscovered all over again. So, here was the second condition for which I think I accomplished some serious play. There's a Paul Newman movie that I love called "The Verdict." I don't know how many of you have seen it, but it's a beaut. And in the movie, he plays a down-and-out lawyer who's become an ambulance chaser. And he's taken on -- he's given, actually -- a malpractice suit to handle that's sort of an easy deal, and in the midst of trying to connect the deal, he starts to empathize and identify with his client, and he regains his morality and purpose, and he goes on to win the case. And in the depth of despair, in the midst of the movie, when it looks like he can't pull this thing off, and he needs this case, he needs to win this case so badly. There's a shot of Paul Newman alone, in his office, saying, "This is the case. There are no other cases. This is the case. There are no other cases." And in that moment of desire and focus, he can win. And that is a wonderful position to be in to create some serious play. And I had that moment in 1994 when I met a theater director named George Wolfe, who was going to have me design an identity for the New York Shakespeare Festival, then known, and then became the Public Theater. And I began getting immersed in this project in a way I never was before. This is what theater advertising looked like at that time. This is what was in the newspapers and in the New York Times. So, this is sort of a comment on the time. And the Public Theater actually had much better advertising than this. They had no logo and no identity, but they had these very iconic posters painted by Paul Davis. And George Wolf had taken over from another director and he wanted to change the theater, and he wanted to make it urban and loud and a place that was inclusive. So, drawing on my love of typography, I immersed myself into this project. And what was different about it was the totality of it, was that I really became the voice, the visual voice, of a place in a way I had never done before, where every aspect -- the smallest ad, the ticket, whatever it was -- was designed by me. There was no format. There was no in-house department that these things were pushed to. I literally for three years made everything -- every scrap of paper, everything online, that this theater did. And it was the only job, even though I was doing other jobs. I lived and breathed it in a way I haven't with a client since. It enabled me to really express myself and grow. And I think that you know when you're going to be given this position, and it's rare, but when you get it and you have this opportunity, it's the moment of serious play. I did these things, and I still do them. I still work for the Public Theater. I'm on their board, and I still am involved with it. The high point of the Public Theater, I think, was in 1996, two years after I designed it, which was the "Bring in 'da Noise, Bring in 'da Funk" campaign that was all over New York. But something happened to it, and what happened to it was, it became very popular. And that is a kiss of death for something serious because it makes it solemn. And what happened was that New York City, to a degree, ate my identity because people began to copy it. Here's an ad in the New York Times somebody did for a play called "Mind Games." Then "Chicago" came out, used similar graphics, and the Public Theater's identity was just totally eaten and taken away, which meant I had to change it. So, I changed it so that every season was different, and I continued to do these posters, but they never had the seriousness of the first identity because they were too individual, and they didn't have that heft of everything being the same thing. Now -- and I think since the Public Theater, I must have done more than a dozen cultural identities for major institutions, and I don't think I ever -- I ever grasped that seriousness again -- I do them for very big, important institutions in New York City. The institutions are solemn, and so is the design. They're better crafted than the Public Theater was, and they spend more money on them, but I think that that moment comes and goes. The best way to accomplish serious design -- which I think we all have the opportunity to do -- is to be totally and completely unqualified for the job. That doesn't happen very often, but it happened to me in the year 2000, when for some reason or another, a whole pile of different architects started to ask me to design the insides of theaters with them, where I would take environmental graphics and work them into buildings. I'd never done this kind of work before. I didn't know how to read an architectural plan, I didn't know what they were talking about, and I really couldn't handle the fact that a job -- a single job -- could go on for four years because I was used to immediacy in graphic design, and that kind of attention to detail was really bad for somebody like me, with ADD. So, it was a rough -- it was a rough go, but I fell in love with this process of actually integrating graphics into architecture because I didn't know what I was doing. I said, "Why can't the signage be on the floor?" New Yorkers look at their feet. And then I found that actors and actresses actually take their cues from the floor, so it turned out that these sorts of sign systems began to make sense. They integrated with the building in really peculiar ways. They ran around corners, they went up sides of buildings, and they melded into the architecture. This is Symphony Space on 90th Street and Broadway, and the type is interwoven into the stainless steel and backlit with fiber optics. And the architect, Jim Polshek, essentially gave me a canvas to play typography out on. And it was serious play. This is the children's museum in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, made out of completely inexpensive materials. Extruded typography that's backlit with neon. Things I never did before, built before. I just thought they'd be kind of fun to do. Donors' walls made out of Lucite. And then, inexpensive signage. (Laughter) I think my favorite of these was this little job in Newark, New Jersey. It's a performing arts school. This is the building that -- they had no money, and they had to recast it, and they said, if we give you 100,000 dollars, what can you do with it? And I did a little Photoshop job on it, and I said, Well, I think we can paint it. And we did. And it was play. And there's the building. Everything was painted -- typography over the whole damn thing, including the air conditioning ducts. I hired guys who paint flats fixed on the sides of garages to do the painting on the building, and they loved it. They got into it -- they took the job incredibly seriously. They used to climb up on the building and call me and tell me that they had to correct my typography -- that my spacing was wrong, and they moved it, and they did wonderful things with it. They were pretty serious, too. It was quite wonderful. By the time I did Bloomberg's headquarters my work had begun to become accepted. People wanted it in big, expensive places. And that began to make it solemn. Bloomberg was all about numbers, and we did big numbers through the space and the numbers were projected on a spectacular LED that my partner, Lisa Strausfeld, programmed. But it became the end of the seriousness of the play, and it started to, once again, become solemn. This is a current project in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, where I got to be goofy. I was invited to design a logo for this neighborhood, called the North Side, and I thought it was silly for a neighborhood to have a logo. I think that's rather creepy, actually. Why would a neighborhood have a logo? A neighborhood has a thing -- it's got a landmark, it's got a place, it's got a restaurant. It doesn't have a logo. I mean, what would that be? So I had to actually give a presentation to a city council and neighborhood constituents, and I went to Pittsburgh and I said, "You know, really what you have here are all these underpasses that separate the neighborhood from the center of town. Why don't you celebrate them, and make the underpasses landmarks?" So I began doing this crazy presentation of these installations -- potential installations -- on these underpass bridges, and stood up in front of the city council -- and was a little bit scared, I have to admit. But I was so utterly unqualified for this project, and so utterly ridiculous, and ignored the brief so desperately that I think they just embraced it with wholeheartedness, just completely because it was so goofy to begin with. And this is the bridge they're actually painting up and preparing as we speak. It will change every six months, and it will become an art installation in the North Side of Pittsburgh, and it will probably become a landmark in the area. John Hockenberry told you a bit about my travail with Citibank, that is now a 10-year relationship, and I still work with them. And I actually am amused by them and like them, and think that as a very, very, very, very, very big corporation they actually keep their graphics very nice. I drew the logo for Citibank on a napkin in the first meeting. That was the play part of the job. And then I spent a year going to long, tedious, boring meetings, trying to sell this logo through to a huge corporation to the point of tears. I thought I was going to go crazy at the end of this year. We made idiotic presentations showing how the Citi logo made sense, and how it was really derived from an umbrella, and we made animations of these things, and we came back and forth and back and forth and back and forth. And it was worth it, because they bought this thing, and it played out on such a grand scale, and it's so internationally recognizable, but for me it was actually a very, very depressing year. As a matter of fact, they actually never bought onto the logo until Fallon put it on its very good "Live Richly" campaign, and then everybody accepted it all over the world. So during this time I needed some kind of counterbalance for this crazy, crazy existence of going to these long, idiotic meetings. And I was up in my country house, and for some reason, I began painting these very big, very involved, laborious, complicated maps of the entire world, and listing every place on the planet, and putting them in, and misspelling them, and putting things in the wrong spot, and completely controlling the information, and going totally and completely nuts with it. They would take me about six months initially, but then I started getting faster at it. Here's the United States. Every single city of the United States is on here. And it hung for about eight months at the Cooper-Hewitt, and people walked up to it, and they would point to a part of the map and they'd say, "Oh, I've been here." And, of course, they couldn't have been because it's in the wrong spot. (Laughter) But what I liked about it was, I was controlling my own idiotic information, and I was creating my own palette of information, and I was totally and completely at play. One of my favorites was this painting I did of Florida after the 2000 election that has the election results rolling around in the water. I keep that for evidence. (Laughter) Somebody was up at my house and saw the paintings and recommended them to a gallery, and I had a first show about two-and-a-half years ago, and I showed these paintings that I'm showing you now. And then a funny thing happened -- they sold. And they sold quickly, and became rather popular. We started making prints from them. This is Manhattan, one from the series. This is a print from the United States which we did in red, white and blue. We began doing these big silkscreen prints, and they started selling, too. So, the gallery wanted me to have another show in two years, which meant that I really had to paint these paintings much faster than I had ever done them. And I -- they started to become more political, and I picked areas that sort of were in the news or that I had some feeling about, and I began doing these things. And then this funny thing happened. I found that I was no longer at play. I was actually in this solemn landscape of fulfilling an expectation for a show, which is not where I started with these things. So, while they became successful, I know how to make them, so I'm not a neophyte, and they're no longer serious -- they have become solemn. And that's a terrifying factor -- when you start something and it turns that way -- because it means that all that's left for you is to go back and to find out what the next thing is that you can push, that you can invent, that you can be ignorant about, that you can be arrogant about, that you can fail with, and that you can be a fool with. Because in the end, that's how you grow, and that's all that matters. So, I'm plugging along here -- (Laughter) and I'm just going to have to blow up the staircase. Thank you very much.

This is me. My name is Ben Saunders. I specialize in dragging heavy things around cold places. On May 11th last year, I stood alone at the North geographic Pole. I was the only human being in an area one-and-a-half times the size of America, five-and-a-half thousand square miles. More than 2,000 people have climbed Everest. 12 people have stood on the moon. Including me, only four people have skied solo to the North Pole. And I think the reason for that -- (Applause) -- thank you -- I think the reason for that is that it's -- it's -- well, it's as Chris said, bonkers. It's a journey that is right at the limit of human capability. I skied the equivalent of 31 marathons back to back. 800 miles in 10 weeks. And I was dragging all the food I needed, the supplies, the equipment, sleeping bag, one change of underwear -- everything I needed for nearly three months. (Laughter) What we're going to try and do today, in the 16 and a bit minutes I've got left, is to try and answer three questions. The first one is, why? The second one is, how do you go to the loo at minus 40? "Ben, I've read somewhere that at minus 40, exposed skin becomes frostbitten in less than a minute, so how do you answer the call of nature?" I don't want to answer these now. I'll come on to them at the end. Third one: how do you top that? What's next? It all started back in 2001. My first expedition was with a guy called Pen Hadow -- enormously experienced chap. This was like my polar apprenticeship. We were trying to ski from this group of islands up here, Severnaya Zemlya, to the North Pole. And the thing that fascinates me about the North Pole, geographic North Pole, is that it's slap bang in the middle of the sea. This is about as good as maps get, and to reach it you've got to ski literally over the frozen crust, the floating skin of ice on the Artic Ocean. I'd spoken to all the experts. I'd read lots of books. I studied maps and charts. But I realized on the morning of day one that I had no idea exactly what I'd let myself in for. I was 23 years old. No one my age had attempted anything like this, and pretty quickly, almost everything that could have gone wrong did go wrong. We were attacked by a polar bear on day two. I had frostbite in my left big toe. We started running very low on food. We were both pretty hungry, losing lots of weight. Some very unusual weather conditions, very difficult ice conditions. We had decidedly low-tech communications. We couldn't afford a satellite phone, so we had HF radio. You can see two ski poles sticking out of the roof of the tent. There's a wire dangling down either side. That was our HF radio antenna. We had less than two hours two-way communication with the outside world in two months. Ultimately, we ran out of time. We'd skied 400 miles. We were just over 200 miles left to go to the Pole, and we'd run out of time. We were too late into the summer; the ice was starting to melt; we spoke to the Russian helicopter pilots on the radio, and they said, "Look boys, you've run out of time. We've got to pick you up." And I felt that I had failed, wholeheartedly. I was a failure. The one goal, the one dream I'd had for as long as I could remember -- I hadn't even come close. And skiing along that first trip, I had two imaginary video clips that I'd replay over and over again in my mind when the going got tough, just to keep my motivation going. The first one was reaching the Pole itself. I could see vividly, I suppose, being filmed out of the door of a helicopter, there was, kind of, rock music playing in the background, and I had a ski pole with a Union Jack, you know, flying in the wind. I could see myself sticking the flag in a pole, you know -- ah, glorious moment -- the music kind of reaching a crescendo. The second video clip that I imagined was getting back to Heathrow airport, and I could see again, vividly, the camera flashbulbs going off, the paparazzi, the autograph hunters, the book agents coming to sign me up for a deal. And of course, neither of these things happened. We didn't get to the Pole, and we didn't have any money to pay anyone to do the PR, so no one had heard of this expedition. And I got back to Heathrow. My mum was there; my brother was there; my granddad was there -- had a little Union Jack -- (Laughter) -- and that was about it. I went back to live with my mum. I was physically exhausted, mentally an absolute wreck, considered myself a failure. In a huge amount of debt personally to this expedition, and lying on my mum's sofa, day in day out, watching daytime TV. My brother sent me a text message, an SMS -- it was a quote from the "Simpsons." It said, "You tried your hardest and failed miserably. The lesson is: don't even try." (Laughter) Fast forward three years. I did eventually get off the sofa, and start planning another expedition. This time, I wanted to go right across, on my own this time, from Russia, at the top of the map, to the North Pole, where the sort of kink in the middle is, and then on to Canada. No one has made a complete crossing of the Arctic Ocean on their own. Two Norwegians did it as a team in 2000. No one's done it solo. Very famous, very accomplished Italian mountaineer, Reinhold Messner, tried it in 1995, and he was rescued after a week. He described this expedition as 10 times as dangerous as Everest. So for some reason, this was what I wanted to have a crack at, but I knew that even to stand a chance of getting home in one piece, let alone make it across to Canada, I had to take a radical approach. This meant everything from perfecting the sawn-off, sub-two-gram toothbrush, to working with one of the world's leading nutritionists in developing a completely new, revolutionary nutritional strategy from scratch: 6,000 calories a day. And the expedition started in February last year. Big support team. We had a film crew, a couple of logistics people with us, my girlfriend, a photographer. At first it was pretty sensible. We flew British Airways to Moscow. The next bit in Siberia to Krasnoyarsk, on a Russian internal airline called KrasAir, spelled K-R-A-S. The next bit, we'd chartered a pretty elderly Russian plane to fly us up to a town called Khatanga, which was the sort of last bit of civilization. Our cameraman, who it turned out was a pretty nervous flyer at the best of times, actually asked the pilot, before we got on the plane, how long this flight would take, and the pilot -- Russian pilot -- completely deadpan, replied, "Six hours -- if we live." (Laughter) We got to Khatanga. I think the joke is that Khatanga isn't the end of the world, but you can see it from there. (Laughter) It was supposed to be an overnight stay. We were stuck there for 10 days. There was a kind of vodka-fueled pay dispute between the helicopter pilots and the people that owned the helicopter, so we were stuck. We couldn't move. Finally, morning of day 11, we got the all-clear, loaded up the helicopters -- two helicopters flying in tandem -- dropped me off at the edge of the pack ice. We had a frantic sort of 45 minutes of filming, photography; while the helicopter was still there, I did an interview on the satellite phone; and then everyone else climbed back into the helicopter, wham, the door closed, and I was alone. And I don't know if words will ever quite do that moment justice. All I could think about was running back up to the door, banging on the door, and saying, "Look guys, I haven't quite thought this through." (Laughter) To make things worse, you can just see the white dot up at the top right hand side of the screen; that's a full moon. Because we'd been held up in Russia, of course, the full moon brings the highest and lowest tides; when you're standing on the frozen surface of the sea, high and low tides generally mean that interesting things are going to happen -- the ice is going to start moving around a bit. I was, you can see there, pulling two sledges. Grand total in all, 95 days of food and fuel, 180 kilos -- that's almost exactly 400 pounds. When the ice was flat or flattish, I could just about pull both. When the ice wasn't flat, I didn't have a hope in hell. I had to pull one, leave it, and go back and get the other one. Literally scrambling through what's called pressure ice -- the ice had been smashed up under the pressure of the currents of the ocean, the wind and the tides. NASA described the ice conditions last year as the worst since records began. And it's always drifting. The pack ice is always drifting. I was skiing into headwinds for nine out of the 10 weeks I was alone last year, and I was drifting backwards most of the time. My record was minus 2.5 miles. I got up in the morning, took the tent down, skied north for seven-and-a-half hours, put the tent up, and I was two and a half miles further back than when I'd started. I literally couldn't keep up with the drift of the ice. (Video): So it's day 22. I'm lying in the tent, getting ready to go. The weather is just appalling -- oh, drifted back about five miles in the last -- last night. Later in the expedition, the problem was no longer the ice. It was a lack of ice -- open water. I knew this was happening. I knew the Artic was warming. I knew there was more open water. And I had a secret weapon up my sleeve. This was my little bit of bio-mimicry. Polar bears on the Artic Ocean move in dead straight lines. If they come to water, they'll climb in, swim across it. So we had a dry suit developed -- I worked with a team in Norway -- based on a sort of survival suit -- I suppose, that helicopter pilots would wear -- that I could climb into. It would go on over my boots, over my mittens, it would pull up around my face, and seal pretty tightly around my face. And this meant I could ski over very thin ice, and if I fell through, it wasn't the end of the world. It also meant, if the worst came to the worst, I could actually jump in and swim across and drag the sledge over after me. Some pretty radical technology, a radical approach --but it worked perfectly. Another exciting thing we did last year was with communications technology. In 1912, Shackleton's Endurance expedition -- there was -- one of his crew, a guy called Thomas Orde-Lees. He said, "The explorers of 2012, if there is anything left to explore, will no doubt carry pocket wireless telephones fitted with wireless telescopes." Well, Orde-Lees guessed wrong by about eight years. This is my pocket wireless telephone, Iridium satellite phone. The wireless telescope was a digital camera I had tucked in my pocket. And every single day of the 72 days I was alone on the ice, I was blogging live from my tent, sending back a little diary piece, sending back information on the distance I'd covered -- the ice conditions, the temperature -- and a daily photo. Remember, 2001, we had less than two hours radio contact with the outside world. Last year, blogging live from an expedition that's been described as 10 times as dangerous as Everest. It wasn't all high-tech. This is navigating in what's called a whiteout. When you get lots of mist, low cloud, the wind starts blowing the snow up. You can't see an awful lot. You can just see, there's a yellow ribbon tied to one of my ski poles. I'd navigate using the direction of the wind. So, kind of a weird combination of high-tech and low-tech. I got to the Pole on the 11th of May. It took me 68 days to get there from Russia, and there is nothing there. (Laughter). There isn't even a pole at the Pole. There's nothing there, purely because it's sea ice. It's drifting. Stick a flag there, leave it there, pretty soon it will drift off, usually towards Canada or Greenland. I knew this, but I was expecting something. Strange mixture of feelings: it was extremely warm by this stage, a lot of open water around, and of course, elated that I'd got there under my own steam, but starting to really realize that my chances of making it all the way across to Canada, which was still 400 miles away, were slim at best. The only proof I've got that I was there is a blurry photo of my GPS, the little satellite navigation gadget. You can just see -- there's a nine and a string of zeros here. Ninety degrees north -- that is slap bang in the North Pole. I took a photo of that. Sat down on my sledge. Did a sort of video diary piece. Took a few photos. I got my satellite phone out. I warmed the battery up in my armpit. I dialed three numbers. I dialed my mum. I dialed my girlfriend. I dialed the CEO of my sponsor. And I got three voicemails. (Laughter) (Video): Ninety. It's a special feeling. The entire planet is rotating beneath my feet. The -- the whole world underneath me. I finally got through to my mum. She was at the queue of the supermarket. She started crying. She asked me to call her back. (Laughter) I skied on for a week past the Pole. I wanted to get as close to Canada as I could before conditions just got too dangerous to continue. This was the last day I had on the ice. When I spoke to the -- my project management team, they said, "Look, Ben, conditions are getting too dangerous. There are huge areas of open water just south of your position. We'd like to pick you up. Ben, could you please look for an airstrip?" This was the view outside my tent when I had this fateful phone call. I'd never tried to build an airstrip before. Tony, the expedition manager, he said, "Look Ben, you've got to find 500 meters of flat, thick safe ice." The only bit of ice I could find -- it took me 36 hours of skiing around trying to find an airstrip -- was exactly 473 meters. I could measure it with my skis. I didn't tell Tony that. I didn't tell the pilots that. I thought, it'll have to do. (Video): Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh. It just about worked. A pretty dramatic landing -- the plane actually passed over four times, and I was a bit worried it wasn't going to land at all. The pilot, I knew, was called Troy. I was expecting someone called Troy that did this for a living to be a pretty tough kind of guy. I was bawling my eyes out by the time the plane landed -- a pretty emotional moment. So I thought, I've got to compose myself for Troy. I'm supposed to be the roughty toughty explorer type. The plane taxied up to where I was standing. The door opened. This guy jumped out. He's about that tall. He said, "Hi, my name is Troy." (Laughter). The co-pilot was a lady called Monica. She sat there in a sort of hand-knitted jumper. They were the least macho people I've ever met, but they made my day. Troy was smoking a cigarette on the ice; we took a few photos. He climbed up the ladder. He said, "Just -- just get in the back." He threw his cigarette out as he got on the front, and I climbed in the back. (Laughter) Taxied up and down the runway a few times, just to flatten it out a bit, and he said, "Right, I'm going to -- I'm going to give it a go." And he -- I've now learned that this is standard practice, but it had me worried at the time. He put his hand on the throttle. You can see the control for the engines is actually on the roof of the cockpit. It's that little bar there. He put his hand on the throttle. Monica very gently put her hand sort of on top of his. I thought, "God, here we go. We're, we're -- this is all or nothing." Rammed it forwards. Bounced down the runway. Just took off. One of the skis just clipped a pressure ridge at the end of the runway, banking. I could see into the cockpit, Troy battling the controls, and he just took one hand off, reached back, flipped a switch on the roof of the cockpit, and it was the "fasten seat belt" sign you can see on the wall. (Laughter) And only from the air did I see the big picture. Of course, when you're on the ice, you only ever see one obstacle at a time, whether it's a pressure ridge or there's a bit of water. This is probably why I didn't get into trouble about the length of my airstrip. I mean, it really was starting to break up. Why? I'm not an explorer in the traditional sense. I'm not skiing along drawing maps; everyone knows where the North Pole is. At the South Pole there's a big scientific base. There's an airstrip. There's a cafe and there's a tourist shop. For me, this is about exploring human limits, about exploring the limits of physiology, of psychology and of technology. They're the things that excite me. And it's also about potential, on a personal level. This, for me, is a chance to explore the limits -- really push the limits of my own potential, see how far they stretch. And on a wider scale, it amazes me how people go through life just scratching the surface of their potential, just doing three or four or five percent of what they're truly capable of. So, on a wider scale, I hope that this journey was a chance to inspire other people to think about what they want to do with their potential, and what they want to do with the tiny amount of time we each have on this planet. That's as close as I can come to summing that up. The next question is, how do you answer the call of nature at minus 40? The answer, of course, to which is a trade secret -- and the last question, what's next? As quickly as possible, if I have a minute left at the end, I'll go into more detail. What's next: Antarctica. It's the coldest, highest, windiest and driest continent on Earth. Late 1911, early 1912, there was a race to be the first to the South Pole: the heart of the Antarctic continent. If you include the coastal ice shelves, you can see that the Ross Ice Shelf -- it's the big one down here -- the Ross Ice Shelf is the size of France. Antarctica, if you include the ice shelves, is twice the size of Australia -- it's a big place. And there's a race to get to the Pole between Amundsen, the Norwegian -- Amundsen had dog sleds and huskies -- and Scott, the British guy, Captain Scott. Scott had sort of ponies and some tractors and a few dogs, all of which went wrong, and Scott and his team of four people ended up on foot. They got to the Pole late January 1912 to find a Norwegian flag already there. There was a tent, a letter to the Norwegian king. And they turned around, headed back to the coast, and all five of them died on the return journey. Since then, no one has ever skied -- this was 93 years ago -- since then, no one has ever skied from the coast of Antarctica to the Pole and back. Every South Pole expedition you may have heard about is either flown out from the Pole or has used vehicles or dogs or kites to do some kind of crossing -- no one has ever made a return journey. So that's the plan. Two of us are doing it. That's pretty much it. One final thought before I get to the toilet bit, is -- is, I have a -- and I meant to scan this and I've forgotten -- but I have a -- I have a school report. I was 13 years old, and it's framed above my desk at home. It says, "Ben lacks sufficient impetus to achieve anything worthwhile." (Laughter) (Applause) I think if I've learned anything, it's this: that no one else is the authority on your potential. You're the only person that decides how far you go and what you're capable of. Ladies and gentlemen, that's my story. Thank you very much.

This is me. My name is Ben Saunders. I specialize in dragging heavy things around cold places. On May 11th last year, I stood alone at the North geographic Pole. I was the only human being in an area one-and-a-half times the size of America, five-and-a-half thousand square miles. More than 2,000 people have climbed Everest. 12 people have stood on the moon. Including me, only four people have skied solo to the North Pole. And I think the reason for that -- (Applause) -- thank you -- I think the reason for that is that it's -- it's -- well, it's as Chris said, bonkers. It's a journey that is right at the limit of human capability. I skied the equivalent of 31 marathons back to back. 800 miles in 10 weeks. And I was dragging all the food I needed, the supplies, the equipment, sleeping bag, one change of underwear -- everything I needed for nearly three months. (Laughter) What we're going to try and do today, in the 16 and a bit minutes I've got left, is to try and answer three questions. The first one is, why? The second one is, how do you go to the loo at minus 40? "Ben, I've read somewhere that at minus 40, exposed skin becomes frostbitten in less than a minute, so how do you answer the call of nature?" I don't want to answer these now. I'll come on to them at the end. Third one: how do you top that? What's next? It all started back in 2001. My first expedition was with a guy called Pen Hadow -- enormously experienced chap. This was like my polar apprenticeship. We were trying to ski from this group of islands up here, Severnaya Zemlya, to the North Pole. And the thing that fascinates me about the North Pole, geographic North Pole, is that it's slap bang in the middle of the sea. This is about as good as maps get, and to reach it you've got to ski literally over the frozen crust, the floating skin of ice on the Artic Ocean. I'd spoken to all the experts. I'd read lots of books. I studied maps and charts. But I realized on the morning of day one that I had no idea exactly what I'd let myself in for. I was 23 years old. No one my age had attempted anything like this, and pretty quickly, almost everything that could have gone wrong did go wrong. We were attacked by a polar bear on day two. I had frostbite in my left big toe. We started running very low on food. We were both pretty hungry, losing lots of weight. Some very unusual weather conditions, very difficult ice conditions. We had decidedly low-tech communications. We couldn't afford a satellite phone, so we had HF radio. You can see two ski poles sticking out of the roof of the tent. There's a wire dangling down either side. That was our HF radio antenna. We had less than two hours two-way communication with the outside world in two months. Ultimately, we ran out of time. We'd skied 400 miles. We were just over 200 miles left to go to the Pole, and we'd run out of time. We were too late into the summer; the ice was starting to melt; we spoke to the Russian helicopter pilots on the radio, and they said, "Look boys, you've run out of time. We've got to pick you up." And I felt that I had failed, wholeheartedly. I was a failure. The one goal, the one dream I'd had for as long as I could remember -- I hadn't even come close. And skiing along that first trip, I had two imaginary video clips that I'd replay over and over again in my mind when the going got tough, just to keep my motivation going. The first one was reaching the Pole itself. I could see vividly, I suppose, being filmed out of the door of a helicopter, there was, kind of, rock music playing in the background, and I had a ski pole with a Union Jack, you know, flying in the wind. I could see myself sticking the flag in a pole, you know -- ah, glorious moment -- the music kind of reaching a crescendo. The second video clip that I imagined was getting back to Heathrow airport, and I could see again, vividly, the camera flashbulbs going off, the paparazzi, the autograph hunters, the book agents coming to sign me up for a deal. And of course, neither of these things happened. We didn't get to the Pole, and we didn't have any money to pay anyone to do the PR, so no one had heard of this expedition. And I got back to Heathrow. My mum was there; my brother was there; my granddad was there -- had a little Union Jack -- (Laughter) -- and that was about it. I went back to live with my mum. I was physically exhausted, mentally an absolute wreck, considered myself a failure. In a huge amount of debt personally to this expedition, and lying on my mum's sofa, day in day out, watching daytime TV. My brother sent me a text message, an SMS -- it was a quote from the "Simpsons." It said, "You tried your hardest and failed miserably. The lesson is: don't even try." (Laughter) Fast forward three years. I did eventually get off the sofa, and start planning another expedition. This time, I wanted to go right across, on my own this time, from Russia, at the top of the map, to the North Pole, where the sort of kink in the middle is, and then on to Canada. No one has made a complete crossing of the Arctic Ocean on their own. Two Norwegians did it as a team in 2000. No one's done it solo. Very famous, very accomplished Italian mountaineer, Reinhold Messner, tried it in 1995, and he was rescued after a week. He described this expedition as 10 times as dangerous as Everest. So for some reason, this was what I wanted to have a crack at, but I knew that even to stand a chance of getting home in one piece, let alone make it across to Canada, I had to take a radical approach. This meant everything from perfecting the sawn-off, sub-two-gram toothbrush, to working with one of the world's leading nutritionists in developing a completely new, revolutionary nutritional strategy from scratch: 6,000 calories a day. And the expedition started in February last year. Big support team. We had a film crew, a couple of logistics people with us, my girlfriend, a photographer. At first it was pretty sensible. We flew British Airways to Moscow. The next bit in Siberia to Krasnoyarsk, on a Russian internal airline called KrasAir, spelled K-R-A-S. The next bit, we'd chartered a pretty elderly Russian plane to fly us up to a town called Khatanga, which was the sort of last bit of civilization. Our cameraman, who it turned out was a pretty nervous flier at the best of times, actually asked the pilot, before we got on the plane, how long this flight would take, and the pilot -- Russian pilot -- completely deadpan, replied, "Six hours -- if we live." (Laughter) We got to Khatanga. I think the joke is that Khatanga isn't the end of the world, but you can see it from there. (Laughter) It was supposed to be an overnight stay. We were stuck there for 10 days. There was a kind of vodka-fueled pay dispute between the helicopter pilots and the people that owned the helicopter, so we were stuck. We couldn't move. Finally, morning of day 11, we got the all-clear, loaded up the helicopters -- two helicopters flying in tandem -- dropped me off at the edge of the pack ice. We had a frantic sort of 45 minutes of filming, photography; while the helicopter was still there, I did an interview on the satellite phone; and then everyone else climbed back into the helicopter, wham, the door closed, and I was alone. And I don't know if words will ever quite do that moment justice. All I could think about was running back up to the door, banging on the door, and saying, "Look guys, I haven't quite thought this through." (Laughter) To make things worse, you can just see the white dot up at the top right hand side of the screen; that's a full moon. Because we'd been held up in Russia, of course, the full moon brings the highest and lowest tides; when you're standing on the frozen surface of the sea, high and low tides generally mean that interesting things are going to happen -- the ice is going to start moving around a bit. I was, you can see there, pulling two sledges. Grand total in all, 95 days of food and fuel, 180 kilos -- that's almost exactly 400 pounds. When the ice was flat or flattish, I could just about pull both. When the ice wasn't flat, I didn't have a hope in hell. I had to pull one, leave it, and go back and get the other one. Literally scrambling through what's called pressure ice -- the ice had been smashed up under the pressure of the currents of the ocean, the wind and the tides. NASA described the ice conditions last year as the worst since records began. And it's always drifting. The pack ice is always drifting. I was skiing into headwinds for nine out of the 10 weeks I was alone last year, and I was drifting backwards most of the time. My record was minus 2.5 miles. I got up in the morning, took the tent down, skied north for seven-and-a-half hours, put the tent up, and I was two and a half miles further back than when I'd started. I literally couldn't keep up with the drift of the ice. (Video): So it's day 22. I'm lying in the tent, getting ready to go. The weather is just appalling -- oh, drifted back about five miles in the last -- last night. Later in the expedition, the problem was no longer the ice. It was a lack of ice -- open water. I knew this was happening. I knew the Artic was warming. I knew there was more open water. And I had a secret weapon up my sleeve. This was my little bit of bio-mimicry. Polar bears on the Artic Ocean move in dead straight lines. If they come to water, they'll climb in, swim across it. So we had a dry suit developed -- I worked with a team in Norway -- based on a sort of survival suit -- I suppose, that helicopter pilots would wear -- that I could climb into. It would go on over my boots, over my mittens, it would pull up around my face, and seal pretty tightly around my face. And this meant I could ski over very thin ice, and if I fell through, it wasn't the end of the world. It also meant, if the worst came to the worst, I could actually jump in and swim across and drag the sledge over after me. Some pretty radical technology, a radical approach --but it worked perfectly. Another exciting thing we did last year was with communications technology. In 1912, Shackleton's Endurance expedition -- there was -- one of his crew, a guy called Thomas Orde-Lees. He said, "The explorers of 2012, if there is anything left to explore, will no doubt carry pocket wireless telephones fitted with wireless telescopes." Well, Orde-Lees guessed wrong by about eight years. This is my pocket wireless telephone, Iridium satellite phone. The wireless telescope was a digital camera I had tucked in my pocket. And every single day of the 72 days I was alone on the ice, I was blogging live from my tent, sending back a little diary piece, sending back information on the distance I'd covered -- the ice conditions, the temperature -- and a daily photo. Remember, 2001, we had less than two hours radio contact with the outside world. Last year, blogging live from an expedition that's been described as 10 times as dangerous as Everest. It wasn't all high-tech. This is navigating in what's called a whiteout. When you get lots of mist, low cloud, the wind starts blowing the snow up. You can't see an awful lot. You can just see, there's a yellow ribbon tied to one of my ski poles. I'd navigate using the direction of the wind. So, kind of a weird combination of high-tech and low-tech. I got to the Pole on the 11th of May. It took me 68 days to get there from Russia, and there is nothing there. (Laughter). There isn't even a pole at the Pole. There's nothing there, purely because it's sea ice. It's drifting. Stick a flag there, leave it there, pretty soon it will drift off, usually towards Canada or Greenland. I knew this, but I was expecting something. Strange mixture of feelings: it was extremely warm by this stage, a lot of open water around, and of course, elated that I'd got there under my own steam, but starting to really realize that my chances of making it all the way across to Canada, which was still 400 miles away, were slim at best. The only proof I've got that I was there is a blurry photo of my GPS, the little satellite navigation gadget. You can just see -- there's a nine and a string of zeros here. Ninety degrees north -- that is slap bang in the North Pole. I took a photo of that. Sat down on my sledge. Did a sort of video diary piece. Took a few photos. I got my satellite phone out. I warmed the battery up in my armpit. I dialed three numbers. I dialed my mum. I dialed my girlfriend. I dialed the CEO of my sponsor. And I got three voicemails. (Laughter) (Video): Ninety. It's a special feeling. The entire planet is rotating beneath my feet. The -- the whole world underneath me. I finally got through to my mum. She was at the queue of the supermarket. She started crying. She asked me to call her back. (Laughter) I skied on for a week past the Pole. I wanted to get as close to Canada as I could before conditions just got too dangerous to continue. This was the last day I had on the ice. When I spoke to the -- my project management team, they said, "Look, Ben, conditions are getting too dangerous. There are huge areas of open water just south of your position. We'd like to pick you up. Ben, could you please look for an airstrip?" This was the view outside my tent when I had this fateful phone call. I'd never tried to build an airstrip before. Tony, the expedition manager, he said, "Look Ben, you've got to find 500 meters of flat, thick safe ice." The only bit of ice I could find -- it took me 36 hours of skiing around trying to find an airstrip -- was exactly 473 meters. I could measure it with my skis. I didn't tell Tony that. I didn't tell the pilots that. I thought, it'll have to do. (Video): Oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh. It just about worked. A pretty dramatic landing -- the plane actually passed over four times, and I was a bit worried it wasn't going to land at all. The pilot, I knew, was called Troy. I was expecting someone called Troy that did this for a living to be a pretty tough kind of guy. I was bawling my eyes out by the time the plane landed -- a pretty emotional moment. So I thought, I've got to compose myself for Troy. I'm supposed to be the roughty toughty explorer type. The plane taxied up to where I was standing. The door opened. This guy jumped out. He's about that tall. He said, "Hi, my name is Troy." (Laughter). The co-pilot was a lady called Monica. She sat there in a sort of hand-knitted jumper. They were the least macho people I've ever met, but they made my day. Troy was smoking a cigarette on the ice; we took a few photos. He climbed up the ladder. He said, "Just -- just get in the back." He threw his cigarette out as he got on the front, and I climbed in the back. (Laughter) Taxied up and down the runway a few times, just to flatten it out a bit, and he said, "Right, I'm going to -- I'm going to give it a go." And he -- I've now learned that this is standard practice, but it had me worried at the time. He put his hand on the throttle. You can see the control for the engines is actually on the roof of the cockpit. It's that little bar there. He put his hand on the throttle. Monica very gently put her hand sort of on top of his. I thought, "God, here we go. We're, we're -- this is all or nothing." Rammed it forwards. Bounced down the runway. Just took off. One of the skis just clipped a pressure ridge at the end of the runway, banking. I could see into the cockpit, Troy battling the controls, and he just took one hand off, reached back, flipped a switch on the roof of the cockpit, and it was the "fasten seat belt" sign you can see on the wall. (Laughter) And only from the air did I see the big picture. Of course, when you're on the ice, you only ever see one obstacle at a time, whether it's a pressure ridge or there's a bit of water. This is probably why I didn't get into trouble about the length of my airstrip. I mean, it really was starting to break up. Why? I'm not an explorer in the traditional sense. I'm not skiing along drawing maps; everyone knows where the North Pole is. At the South Pole there's a big scientific base. There's an airstrip. There's a cafe and there's a tourist shop. For me, this is about exploring human limits, about exploring the limits of physiology, of psychology and of technology. They're the things that excite me. And it's also about potential, on a personal level. This, for me, is a chance to explore the limits -- really push the limits of my own potential, see how far they stretch. And on a wider scale, it amazes me how people go through life just scratching the surface of their potential, just doing three or four or five percent of what they're truly capable of. So, on a wider scale, I hope that this journey was a chance to inspire other people to think about what they want to do with their potential, and what they want to do with the tiny amount of time we each have on this planet. That's as close as I can come to summing that up. The next question is, how do you answer the call of nature at minus 40? The answer, of course, to which is a trade secret -- and the last question, what's next? As quickly as possible, if I have a minute left at the end, I'll go into more detail. What's next: Antarctica. It's the coldest, highest, windiest and driest continent on Earth. Late 1911, early 1912, there was a race to be the first to the South Pole: the heart of the Antarctic continent. If you include the coastal ice shelves, you can see that the Ross Ice Shelf -- it's the big one down here -- the Ross Ice Shelf is the size of France. Antarctica, if you include the ice shelves, is twice the size of Australia -- it's a big place. And there's a race to get to the Pole between Amundsen, the Norwegian -- Amundsen had dog sleds and huskies -- and Scott, the British guy, Captain Scott. Scott had sort of ponies and some tractors and a few dogs, all of which went wrong, and Scott and his team of four people ended up on foot. They got to the Pole late January 1912 to find a Norwegian flag already there. There was a tent, a letter to the Norwegian king. And they turned around, headed back to the coast, and all five of them died on the return journey. Since then, no one has ever skied -- this was 93 years ago -- since then, no one has ever skied from the coast of Antarctica to the Pole and back. Every South Pole expedition you may have heard about is either flown out from the Pole or has used vehicles or dogs or kites to do some kind of crossing -- no one has ever made a return journey. So that's the plan. Two of us are doing it. That's pretty much it. One final thought before I get to the toilet bit, is -- is, I have a -- and I meant to scan this and I've forgotten -- but I have a -- I have a school report. I was 13 years old, and it's framed above my desk at home. It says, "Ben lacks sufficient impetus to achieve anything worthwhile." (Laughter) (Applause) I think if I've learned anything, it's this: that no one else is the authority on your potential. You're the only person that decides how far you go and what you're capable of. Ladies and gentlemen, that's my story. Thank you very much.

I was basically concerned about what was going on in the world. I couldn't understand the starvation, the destruction, the killing of innocent people. Making sense of those things is a very difficult thing to do. And when I was 12, I became an actor. I was bottom of the class. I haven't got any qualifications. I was told I was dyslexic. In fact, I have got qualifications. I got a D in pottery, which was the one thing that I did get -- which was useful, obviously. And so concern is where all of this comes from. And then, being an actor, I was doing these different kinds of things, and I felt the content of the work that I was involved in really wasn't cutting it, that there surely had to be more. And at that point, I read a book by Frank Barnaby, this wonderful nuclear physicist, and he said that media had a responsibility, that all sectors of society had a responsibility to try and progress things and move things forward. And that fascinated me, because I'd been messing around with a camera most of my life. And then I thought, well maybe I could do something. Maybe I could become a filmmaker. Maybe I can use the form of film constructively to in some way make a difference. Maybe there's a little change I can get involved in. So I started thinking about peace, and I was obviously, as I said to you, very much moved by these images, trying to make sense of that. Could I go and speak to older and wiser people who would tell me how they made sense of the things that are going on? Because it's obviously incredibly frightening. But I realized that, having been messing around with structure as an actor, that a series of sound bites in itself wasn't enough, that there needed to be a mountain to climb, there needed to be a journey that I had to take. And if I took that journey, no matter whether it failed or succeeded, it would be completely irrelevant. The point was that I would have something to hook the questions of -- is humankind fundamentally evil? Is the destruction of the world inevitable? Should I have children? Is that a responsible thing to do? Etc., etc. So I was thinking about peace, and then I was thinking, well where's the starting point for peace? And that was when I had the idea. There was no starting point for peace. There was no day of global unity. There was no day of intercultural cooperation. There was no day when humanity came together, separate in all of those things and just shared it together -- that we're in this together, and that if we united and we interculturally cooperated, then that might be the key to humanity's survival. That might shift the level of consciousness around the fundamental issues that humanity faces -- if we did it just for a day. So obviously we didn't have any money. I was living at my mom's place. And we started writing letters to everybody. You very quickly work out what is it that you've got to do to fathom that out. How do you create a day voted by every single head of state in the world to create the first ever Ceasefire Nonviolence Day, the 21st of September? And I wanted it to be the 21st of September because it was my granddad's favorite number. He was a prisoner of war. He saw the bomb go off at Nagasaki. It poisoned his blood. He died when I was 11. So he was like my hero. And the reason why 21 was the number is 700 men left, 23 came back, two died on the boat and 21 hit the ground. And that's why we wanted it to be the 21st of September as the date of peace. So we began this journey, and we launched it in 1999. And we wrote to heads of state, their ambassadors, Nobel Peace laureates, NGOs, faiths, various organizations -- literally wrote to everybody. And very quickly, some letters started coming back. And we started to build this case. And I remember the first letter. One of the first letters was from the Dalai Lama. And of course we didn't have the money; we were playing guitars and getting the money for the stamps that we were sending out all of [this mail]. A letter came through from the Dalai Lama saying, "This is an amazing thing. Come and see me. I'd love to talk to you about the first ever day of peace." And we didn't have money for the flight. And I rang Sir Bob Ayling, who was CEO of BA at the time, and said, "Mate, we've got this invitation. Could you give me a flight? Because we're going to go see him." And of course, we went and saw him and it was amazing. And then Dr. Oscar Arias came forward. And actually, let me go back to that slide, because when we launched it in 1999 -- this idea to create the first ever day of ceasefire and non-violence -- we invited thousands of people. Well not thousands -- hundreds of people, lots of people -- all the press, because we were going to try and create the first ever World Peace Day, a peace day. And we invited everybody, and no press showed up. There were 114 people there -- they were mostly my friends and family. And that was kind of like the launch of this thing. But it didn't matter because we were documenting, and that was the thing. For me, it was really about the process. It wasn't about the end result. And that's the beautiful thing about the camera. They used to say the pen is mightier than the sword. I think the camera is. And just staying in the moment with it was a beautiful thing and really empowering actually. So anyway, we began the journey. And here you see people like Mary Robinson, I went to see in Geneva. I'm cutting my hair, it's getting short and long, because every time I saw Kofi Annan, I was so worried that he thought I was a hippie that I cut it, and that was kind of what was going on. (Laughter) Yeah, I'm not worried about it now. So Mary Robinson, she said to me, "Listen, this is an idea whose time has come. This must be created." Kofi Annan said, "This will be beneficial to my troops on the ground." The OAU at the time, led by Salim Ahmed Salim, said, "I must get the African countries involved." Dr. Oscar Arias, Nobel Peace laureate, president now of Costa Rica, said, "I'll do everything that I can." So I went and saw Amr Moussa at the League of Arab States. I met Mandela at the Arusha peace talks, and so on and so on and so on -- while I was building the case to prove whether this idea would make sense. And then we were listening to the people. We were documenting everywhere. 76 countries in the last 12 years, I've visited. And I've always spoken to women and children wherever I've gone. I've recorded 44,000 young people. I've recorded about 900 hours of their thoughts. I'm really clear about how young people feel when you talk to them about this idea of having a starting point for their actions for a more peaceful world through their poetry, their art, their literature, their music, their sport, whatever it might be. And we were listening to everybody. And it was an incredibly thing, working with the U.N. and working with NGOs and building this case. I felt that I was presenting a case on behalf of the global community to try and create this day. And the stronger the case and the more detailed it was, the better chance we had of creating this day. And it was this stuff, this, where I actually was in the beginning kind of thinking no matter what happened, it didn't actually matter. It didn't matter if it didn't create a day of peace. The fact is that, if I tried and it didn't work, then I could make a statement about how unwilling the global community is to unite -- until, it was in Somalia, picking up that young girl. And this young child who'd taken about an inch and a half out of her leg with no antiseptic, and that young boy who was a child soldier, who told me he'd killed people -- he was about 12 -- these things made me realize that this was not a film that I could just stop. And that actually, at that moment something happened to me, which obviously made me go, "I'm going to document. If this is the only film that I ever make, I'm going to document until this becomes a reality." Because we've got to stop, we've got to do something where we unite -- separate from all the politics and religion that, as a young person, is confusing me. I don't know how to get involved in that process. And then on the seventh of September, I was invited to New York. The Costa Rican government and the British government had put forward to the United Nations General Assembly, with 54 co-sponsors, the idea of the first ever Ceasefire Nonviolence Day, the 21st of September, as a fixed calendar date, and it was unanimously adopted by every head of state in the world. (Applause) Yeah, but there were hundreds of individuals, obviously, who made that a reality. And thank you to all of them. That was an incredible moment. I was at the top of the General Assembly just looking down into it and seeing it happen. And as I mentioned, when it started, we were at the Globe, and there was no press. And now I was thinking, "Well, the press it really going to hear this story." And suddenly, we started to institutionalize this day. Kofi Annan invited me on the morning of September the 11th to do a press conference. And it was 8:00 AM when I stood there. And I was waiting for him to come down, and I knew that he was on his way. And obviously he never came down. The statement was never made. The world was never told there was a day of global ceasefire and nonviolence. And it was obviously a tragic moment for the thousands of people who lost their lives, there and then subsequently all over the world. It never happened. And I remember thinking, "This is exactly why, actually, we have to work even harder. And we have to make this day work. It's been created; nobody knows. But we have to continue this journey, and we have to tell people, and we have to prove it can work." And I left New York freaked, but actually empowered. And I felt inspired by the possibilities that if it did, then maybe we wouldn't see things like that. I remember putting that film out and going to cynics. I was showing the film, and I remember being in Israel and getting it absolutely slaughtered by some guys having watched the film -- that it's just a day of peace, it doesn't mean anything. It's not going to work; you're not going to stop the fighting in Afghanistan; the Taliban won't listen, etc., etc. It's just symbolism. And that was even worse than actually what had just happened in many ways, because it couldn't not work. I'd spoken in Somalia, Burundi, Gaza, the West Bank, India, Sri Lanka, Congo, wherever it was, and they'd all tell me, "If you can create a window of opportunity, we can move aid, we can vaccinate children. Children can lead their projects. They can unite. They can come together. If people would stop, lives will be saved." That's what I'd heard. And I'd heard that from the people who really understood what conflict was about. And so I went back to the United Nations. I decided that I'd continue filming and make another movie. And I went back to the U.N. for another couple of years. We started moving around the corridors of the U.N. system, governments and NGOs, trying desperately to find somebody to come forward and have a go at it, see if we could make it possible. And after lots and lots of meetings obviously, I'm delighted that this man, Ahmad Fawzi, one of my heroes and mentors really, he managed to get UNICEF involved. And UNICEF, God bless them, they said, "Okay, we'll have a go." And then UNAMA became involved in Afghanistan. It was historical. Could it work in Afghanistan with UNAMA and WHO and civil society, etc., etc., etc.? And I was getting it all on film and I was recording it, and I was thinking, "This is it. This is the possibility of it maybe working. But even if it doesn't, at least the door is open and there's a chance." And so I went back to London, and I went and saw this chap, Jude Law. And I saw him because he was an actor, I was an actor, I had a connection to him, because we needed to get to the press, we needed this attraction, we needed the media to be involved. Because if we start pumping it up a bit maybe more people would listen and there'd be more -- when we got into certain areas, maybe there would be more people interested. And maybe we'd be helped financially a little bit more, which had been desperately difficult. I won't go into that. So Jude said, "Okay, I'll do some statements for you." While I was filming these statements, he said to me, "Where are you going next?" I said, "I'm going to go to Afghanistan." He said, "Really?" And I could sort of see a little look in his eye of interest. So I said to him, "Do you want to come with me? It'd be really interesting if you came. It would help and bring attention. And that attention would help leverage the situation, as well as all of the other sides of it." I think there's a number of pillars to success. One is you've got to have a great idea. The other is you've got to have a constituency, you've got to have finance, and you've got to be able to raise awareness. And actually I could never raise awareness by myself, no matter what I'd achieved. So these guys were absolutely crucial. So he said yes, and we found ourselves in Afghanistan. It was a really incredible thing that when we landed there, I was talking to various people, and they were saying to me, "You've got to get everybody involved here. You can't just expect it to work. You have to get out and work." And we did, and we traveled around, and we spoke to elders, we spoke to doctors, we spoke to nurses, we held press conferences, we went out with soldiers, we sat down with ISAF, we sat down with NATO, we sat down with the U.K. government. I mean, we basically sat down with everybody -- in and out of schools with ministers of education, holding these press conferences, which of course, now were loaded with press, everybody was there. There was an interest in what was going on. This amazing woman, Fatima Gailani, was absolutely instrumental in what went on as she was the spokesperson for the resistance against the Russians. And her Afghan network was just absolutely everywhere. And she was really crucial in getting the message in. And then we went home. We'd sort of done it. We had to wait now and see what happened. And I got home, and I remember one of the team bringing in a letter to me from the Taliban. And that letter basically said, "We'll observe this day. We will observe this day. We see it as a window of opportunity. And we will not engage. We're not going to engage." And that meant that humanitarian workers wouldn't be kidnapped or killed. And then suddenly, I obviously knew at this point, there was a chance. And days later, 1.6 million children were vaccinated against polio as a consequence of everybody stopping. (Applause) And like the General Assembly, obviously the most wonderful, wonderful moment. And so then we wrapped the film up and we put it together because we had to go back. We put it into Dari and Pashto. We put it in the local dialects. We went back to Afghanistan, because the next year was coming, and we wanted to support. But more importantly, we wanted to go back, because these people in Afghanistan were the heroes. They were the people who believed in peace and the possibilities of it, etc., etc. -- and they made it real. And we wanted to go back and show them the film and say, "Look, you guys made this possible. And thank you very much." And we gave the film over. Obviously it was shown, and it was amazing. And then that year, that year, 2008, this ISAF statement from Kabul, Afghanistan, September 17th: "General Stanley McChrystal, commander of international security assistance forces in Afghanistan, announced today ISAF will not conduct offensive military operations on the 21st of September." They were saying they would stop. And then there was this other statement that came out from the U.N. Department of Security and Safety saying that, in Afghanistan, because of this work, the violence was down by 70 percent. 70 percent reduction in violence on this day at least. And that completely blew my mind almost more than anything. And I remember being stuck in New York, this time because of the volcano, which was obviously much less harmful. And I was there thinking about what was going on. And I kept thinking about this 70 percent. 70 percent reduction in violence -- in what everyone said was completely impossible and you couldn't do. And that made me think that, if we can get 70 percent in Afghanistan, then surely we can get 70 percent reduction everywhere. We have to go for a global truce. We have to utilize this day of ceasefire and nonviolence and go for a global truce, go for the largest recorded cessation of hostilities, both domestically and internationally, ever recorded. That's exactly what we must do. And on the 21st of September this year, we're going to launch that campaign at the O2 Arena to go for that process, to try and create the largest recorded cessation of hostilities. And we will utilize all kinds of things -- have a dance and social media and visiting on Facebook and visit the website, sign the petition. And it's in the six official languages of the United Nations. And we'll globally link with government, inter-government, non-government, education, unions, sports. And you can see the education box there. We've got resources at the moment in 174 countries trying to get young people to be the driving force behind the vision of that global truce. And obviously the life-saving is increased, the concepts help. Linking up with the Olympics -- I went and saw Seb Coe. I said, "London 2012 is about truce. Ultimately, that's what it's about." Why don't we all team up? Why don't we bring truce to life? Why don't you support the process of the largest ever global truce? We'll make a new film about this process. We'll utilize sport and football. On the Day of Peace, there's thousands of football matches all played, from the favelas of Brazil to wherever it might be. So, utilizing all of these ways to inspire individual action. And ultimately, we have to try that. We have to work together. And when I stand here in front of all of you, and the people who will watch these things, I'm excited, on behalf of everybody I've met, that there is a possibility that our world could unite, that we could come together as one, that we could lift the level of consciousness around the fundamental issues, brought about by individuals. I was with Brahimi, Ambassador Brahimi. I think he's one of the most incredible men in relation to international politics -- in Afghanistan, in Iraq. He's an amazing man. And I sat with him a few weeks ago. And I said to him, "Mr. Brahimi, is this nuts, going for a global truce? Is this possible? Is it really possible that we could do this?" He said, "It's absolutely possible." I said, "What would you do? Would you go to governments and lobby and use the system?" He said, "No, I'd talk to the individuals." It's all about the individuals. It's all about you and me. It's all about partnerships. It's about your constituencies; it's about your businesses. Because together, by working together, I seriously think we can start to change things. And there's a wonderful man sitting in this audience, and I don't know where he is, who said to me a few days ago -- because I did a little rehearsal -- and he said, "I've been thinking about this day and imagining it as a square with 365 squares, and one of them is white." And it then made me think about a glass of water, which is clear. If you put one drop, one drop of something, in that water, it'll change it forever. By working together, we can create peace one day. Thank you TED. Thank you. (Applause) Thank you. (Applause) Thanks a lot. (Applause) Thank you very much. Thank you.

What I want to do today is to spend some time talking about some stuff that's sort of giving me a little bit of existential angst, for lack of a better word, over the past couple of years, and basically, these three quotes tell what's going on. "When God made the color purple, God was just showing off," Alice Walker wrote in "The Color Purple," and Zora Neale Hurston wrote in "Dust Tracks On A Road," "Research is a formalized curiosity. It's poking and prying with a purpose." And then finally, when I think about the near future, you know, we have this attitude, well, whatever happens, happens. Right? So that goes along with the Chesire Cat saying, "If you don't care much where you want to get to, it doesn't much matter which way you go." But I think it does matter which way we go, and what road we take, because when I think about design in the near future, what I think are the most important issues, what's really crucial and vital is that we need to revitalize the arts and sciences right now in 2002. (Applause) If we describe the near future as 10, 20, 15 years from now, that means that what we do today is going to be critically important, because in the year 2015, and the year 2020, 2025, the world our society is going to be building on, the basic knowledge and abstract ideas, the discoveries that we came up with today, just as all these wonderful things we're hearing about here at the TED conference that we take for granted in the world right now, were really knowledge and ideas that came up in the '50s, the '60s, and the '70s. That's the substrate that we're exploiting today, whether it's the internet, genetic engineering, laser scanners, guided missiles, fiber optics, high-definition television, sensing, remote-sensing from space and the wonderful remote-sensing photos that we see in 3D weaving, TV programs like Tracker, and Enterprise, CD rewrite drives, flatscreen, Alvin Ailey's Suite Otis, or Sarah Jones' "Your Revolution Will Not Be Between These Thighs," which by the way was banned by the FCC, or ska, all of these things without question, almost without exception, are really based on ideas and abstract and creativity from years before, so we have to ask ourselves, what are we contributing to that legacy right now? And when I think about it, I'm really worried. To be quite frank, I'm concerned. I'm skeptical that we're doing very much of anything. We're, in a sense, failing to act in the future. We're purposefully, consciously being laggards. We're lagging behind. Frantz Fanon, who was a psychiatrist from Martinique, said, "Each generation must, out of relative obscurity, discover its mission, and fulfill or betray it." What is our mission? What do we have to do? I think our mission is to reconcile, to reintegrate science and the arts, because right now there's a schism that exists in popular culture. You know, people have this idea that science and the arts are really separate. We think of them as separate and different things, and this idea was probably introduced centuries ago, but it's really becoming critical now, because we're making decisions about our society every day that, if we keep thinking that the arts are separate from the sciences, and we keep thinking it's cute to say, "I don't understand anything about this one, I don't understand anything about the other one," then we're going to have problems. Now I know no one here at TED thinks this. All of us, we already know that they're very connected, but I'm going to let you know that some folks in the outside world, believe it or not, they think it's neat when they say, "You know, scientists and science is not creative. Maybe scientists are ingenious, but they're not creative. And then we have this tendency, the career counselors and various people say things like, "Artists are not analytical. They're ingenious, perhaps, but not analytical," and when these concepts underly our teaching and what we think about the world, then we have a problem, because we stymie support for everything. By accepting this dichotomy, whether it's tongue-in-cheek, when we attempt to accommodate it in our world, and we try to build our foundation for the world, we're messing up the future, because, who wants to be uncreative? Who wants to be illogical? Talent would run from either of these fields if you said you had to choose either. Then they're going to go to something where they think, "Well, I can be creative and logical at the same time." Now I grew up in the '60s and I'll admit it, actually, my childhood spanned the '60s, and I was a wannabe hippie and I always resented the fact that I wasn't really old enough to be a hippie. And I know there are people here, the younger generation who want to be hippies, but people talk about the '60s all the time, and they talk about the anarchy that was there, but when I think about the '60s, what I took away from it was that there was hope for the future. We thought everyone could participate. There were wonderful, incredible ideas that were always percolating, and so much of what's cool or hot today is really based on some of those concepts, whether it's, you know, people trying to use the prime directive from Star Trek being involved in things, or again that three-dimensional weaving and fax machines that I read about in my weekly readers that the technology and engineering was just getting started. But the '60s left me with a problem. You see, I always assumed I would go into space, because I followed all of this, but I also loved the arts and sciences. You see, when I was growing up as a little girl and as a teenager, I loved designing and making dogs' clothes and wanting to be a fashion designer. I took art and ceramics. I loved dance. Lola Falana. Alvin Ailey. Jerome Robbins. And I also avidly followed the Gemini and the Apollo programs. I had science projects and tons of astronomy books. I took calculus and philosophy. I wondered about the infinity and the Big Bang theory. And when I was at Stanford, I found myself, my senior year, chemical engineering major, half the folks thought I was a political science and performing arts major, which was sort of true because I was Black Student Union President and I did major in some other things, and I found myself the last quarter juggling chemical engineering separation processes, logic classes, nuclear magnetic resonance spectroscopy, and also producing and choreographing a dance production, and I had to do the lighting and the design work, and I was trying to figure out, do I go to New York City to try to become a professional dancer, or do I go to medical school? Now, my mother helped me figure that one out. (Laughter) But when I went into space, when I went into space I carried a number of things up with me. I carried a poster by Alvin Ailey, which you can figure out now, I love the dance company. An Alvin Ailey poster of Judith Jamison performing the dance "Cry," dedicated to all black women everywhere. A Bundu statue, which was from the Women's Society in Sierra Leone, and a certificate for the Chicago Public School students to work to improve their science and math, and folks asked me, "Why did you take up what you took up?" And I had to say, "Because it represents human creativity, the creativity that allowed us, that we were required to have to conceive and build and launch the space shuttle, springs from the same source as the imagination and analysis it took to carve a Bundu statue, or the ingenuity it took to design, choreograph, and stage "Cry." Each one of them are different manifestations, incarnations, of creativity, avatars of human creativity, and that's what we have to reconcile in our minds, how these things fit together. The difference between arts and sciences is not analytical versus intuitive, right? E=MC squared required an intuitive leap, and then you had to do the analysis afterwards. Einstein said, in fact, "The most beautiful thing we can experience is the mysterious. It is the source of all true art and science." Dance requires us to express and want to express the jubilation in life, but then you have to figure out, exactly what movement do I do to make sure that it comes across correctly? The difference between arts and sciences is also not constructive versus deconstructive, right? A lot of people think of the sciences as deconstructive. You have to pull things apart. And yeah, sub-atomic physics is deconstructive. You literally try to tear atoms apart to understand what's inside of them. But sculpture, from what I understand from great sculptors, is deconstructive, because you see a piece and you remove what doesn't need to be there. Biotechnology is constructive. Orchestral arranging is constructive. So in fact we use constructive and deconstructive techniques in everything. The difference between science and the arts is not that they are different sides of the same coin, even, or even different parts of the same continuum, but rather they're manifestations of the same thing. Different quantum states of an atom? Or maybe if I want to be more 21st century I could say that they are different harmonic resonances of a superstring. But we'll leave that alone. (Laughter) They spring from the same source. The arts and sciences are avatars of human creativity. It's our attempt as humans to build an understanding of the universe, the world around us. It's our attempt to influence things, the universe internal to ourselves and external to us. The sciences, to me, are manifestations of our attempt to express or share our understanding, our experience, to influence the universe external to ourselves. It doesn't rely on us as individuals. It's the universe, as experienced by everyone, and the arts manifest our desire, our attempt to share or influence others through experiences that are peculiar to us as individuals. Let me say it again another way: science provides an understanding of a universal experience, and arts provides a universal understanding of a personal experience. That's what we have to think about, that they're all part of us, they're all part of a continuum. It's not just the tools, it's not just the sciences, you know, the mathematics and the numerical stuff and the statistics, because we heard, very much on this stage, people talked about music being mathematical. Right? Arts don't just use clay, aren't the only ones that use clay, light and sound and movement. They use analysis as well. So people might say, well, I still like that intuitive versus analytical thing, because everybody wants to do the right brain, left brain thing, right? We've all been accused of being right-brained or left-brained at some point in time, depending on who we disagreed with. (Laughter) You know, people say intuitive, you know that's like you're in touch with nature, in touch with yourself and relationships. Analytical: you put your mind to work, and I'm going to tell you a little secret. You all know this though, but sometimes people use this analysis idea, that things are outside of ourselves, to be, say, that this is what we're going to elevate as the true, most important sciences, right? And then you have artists, and you all know this is true as well, artists will say things about scientists because they say they're too concrete, they're disconnected with the world. But, we've even had that here on stage, so don't act like you don't know what I'm talking about. (Laughter) We had folks talking about the Flat Earth Society and flower arrangers, so there's this whole dichotomy that we continue to carry along, even when we know better. And folks say we need to choose either or. But it would really be foolish to choose either one, right? Intuitive versus analytical? That's a foolish choice. It's foolish, just like trying to choose between being realistic or idealistic. You need both in life. Why do people do this? I'm just gonna quote a molecular biologist, Sydney Brenner, who's 70 years old so he can say this. He said, "It's always important to distinguish between chastity and impotence." Now... (Laughter) I want to share with you a little equation, okay? How do understanding science and the arts fit into our lives and what's going on and the things that we're talking about here at the design conference, and this is a little thing I came up with, understanding and our resources and our will cause us to have outcomes. Our understanding is our science, our arts, our religion, how we see the universe around us, our resources, our money, our labor, our minerals, those things that are out there in the world we have to work with. But more importantly, there's our will. This is our vision, our aspirations of the future, our hopes, our dreams, our struggles and our fears. Our successes and our failures influence what we do with all of those, and to me, design and engineering, craftsmanship and skilled labor, are all the things that work on this to have our outcome, which is our human quality of life. Where do we want the world to be? And guess what? Regardless of how we look at this, whether we look at arts and sciences are separate or different, they're both being influenced now and they're both having problems. I did a project called S.E.E.ing the Future: Science, Engineering and Education, and it was looking at how to shed light on most effective use of government funding. We got a bunch of scientists in all stages of their careers. They came to Dartmouth College, where I was teaching, and they talked about with theologians and financiers, what are some of the issues of public funding for science and engineering research? What's most important about it? There are some ideas that emerged that I think have really powerful parallels to the arts. The first thing they said was that the circumstances that we find ourselves in today in the sciences and engineering that made us world leaders is very different than the '40s, the '50s, and the '60s and the '70s when we emerged as world leaders, because we're no longer in competition with fascism, with Soviet-style communism, and by the way that competition wasn't just military, it included social competition and political competition as well, that allowed us to look at space as one of those platforms to prove that our social system was better. Another thing they talked about was the infrastructure that supports the sciences is becoming obsolete. We look at universities and colleges, small, mid-sized community colleges across the country, their laboratories are becoming obsolete, and this is where we train most of our science workers and our researchers, and our teachers, by the way, and then that there's a media that doesn't support the dissemination of any more than the most mundane and inane of information. There's pseudo-science, crop circles, alien autopsy, haunted houses, or disasters. And that's what we see. And this isn't really the information you need to operate in everyday life and figure out how to participate in this democracy and determine what's going on. They also said that there's a change in the corporate mentality. Whereas government money had always been there for basic science and engineering research, we also counted on some companies to do some basic research, but what's happened now is companies put more energy into short-term product development than they do in basic engineering and science research. And education is not keeping up. In K through 12, people are taking out wet labs. They think if we put a computer in the room it's going to take the place of actually, we're mixing the acids, we're growing the potatoes. And government funding is decreasing in spending and then they're saying, let's have corporations take over, and that's not true. Government funding should at least do things like recognize cost-benefits of basic science and engineering research. We have to know that we have a responsibility as global citizens in this world. We have to look at the education of humans. We need to build our resources today to make sure that they're trained so that they understand the importance of these things, and we have to support the vitality of science, and that doesn't mean that everything has to have one thing that's going to go on, or we know exactly what's going to be the outcome of it, but that we support the vitality and the intellectual curiosity that goes along, and if you think about those parallels to the arts, the competition with the Bolshoi Ballet spurred the Joffrey and the New York City Ballet to become better. Infrastructure museums, theaters, movie houses across the country are disappearing. We have more television stations with less to watch, we have more money spent on rewrites to get old television programs in the movies. We have corporate funding now that, when it goes to some company, when it goes to support the arts, it almost requires that the product be part of the picture that the artist draws, and we have stadiums that are named over and over again by corporations. In Houston, we're trying to figure out what to do with that Enron Stadium thing. (Laughter) And fine arts and education in the schools is disappearing, and we have a government that seems like it's gutting the NEA and other programs, so we have to really stop and think, what are we trying to do with the sciences and the arts? There's a need to revitalize them. We have to pay attention to it. I just want to tell you really quickly what I'm doing. (Applause) I want to tell you what I've been doing a little bit since... I feel this need to sort of integrate some of the ideas that I've had and run across over time. One of the things that I found out is that there's a need to repair the dichotomy between the mind and body as well. My mother always told me, you have to be observant, know what's going on in your mind and your body, and as a dancer I had this tremendous faith in my ability to know my body, just as I knew how to sense colors. Then I went to medical school, and I was supposed to just go on what the machine said about bodies. You know, you would ask patients questions and some people would tell you, "Don't, don't, don't listen to what the patients said." We know that patients know and understand their bodies better, but these days we're trying to divorce them from that idea. We have to reconcile the patient's knowledge of their body with physician's measurements. We had someone talk about measuring emotions and getting machines to figure out what, to keep us from acting crazy. Right? No, we shouldn't measure, we shouldn't use machines to measure road rage and then do something to keep us from engaging in it. Maybe we can have machines help us to recognize that we have road rage and then we need to know how to control that without the machines. We even need to be able to recognize that without the machines. What I'm very concerned about is how do we bolster our self-awareness as humans, as biological organisms? Michael Moschen spoke of having to teach and learn how to feel with my eyes, to see with my hands. We have all kinds of possibilities to use our senses by, and that's what we have to do. That's what I want to do, is to try to use bioinstrumentation, those kind of things to help our senses in what we do, and that's the work I've been doing now as a company called BioSentient Corporation. I figured I'd have to do that ad, because I'm an entrepreneur, because entrepreneur says that that's somebody who does what they want to do because they're not broke enough that they have to get a real job. (Laughter) But that's the work I'm doing with BioSentient Corporation trying to figure out how do we integrate these things? Let me finish by saying that my personal design issue for the future is really about integrating, to think about that intuitive and that analytical. The arts and sciences are not separate. High school physics lesson before you leave. High school physics teacher used to hold up a ball. She would say this ball has potential energy, but nothing will happen to it, it can't do any work until I drop it and it changes states. I like to think of ideas as potential energy. They're really wonderful, but nothing will happen until we risk putting them into action. This conference is filled with wonderful ideas. We're going to share lots of things with people, but nothing's going to happen until we risk putting those ideas into action. We need to revitalize the arts and sciences of today, we need to take responsibility for the future. We can't hide behind saying it's just for company profits, or it's just a business, or I'm an artist or an academician. Here's how you judge what you're doing. I talked about that balance between intuitive, analytical. Fran Lebowitz, my favorite cynic, she said the three questions of greatest concern, now I'm going to add on to design, is, "Is it attractive?" That's the intuitive. "Is it amusing?" The analytical. "And does it know its place?" The balance. Thank you very much. (Applause)

I'm going to take you on a journey very quickly. To explain the wish, I'm going to have to take you somewhere which many people haven't been, and that's around the world. When I was about 24 years old, Kate Store and myself started an organization to get architects and designers involved in humanitarian work. Not only about responding to natural disasters, but involved in systemic issues. We believed that where the resources and expertise are scarce, innovative, sustainable design can really make a difference in people's lives. So I started my life as an architect, or training as an architect, and I was always interested in socially responsible design, and how you can really make an impact. But when I went to architectural school, it seemed that I was the black sheep in the family. Many architects seemed to think that when you design, you design a jewel, and it's a jewel that you try and crave for. Whereas I felt that when you design, you either improve or you create a detriment to the community in which you're designing in. So you're not just doing a building for the residents or for the people who are going to use it, but for the community as a whole. And in 1999, we started by responding to the issue of the housing crisis for returning refugees in Kosovo and I didn't know what I was doing; like I say, mid-20s, and I'm the, I'm the Internet generation, so we started a website. We put a call out there, and to my surprise in a couple of months we had hundreds of entries from around the world. That led to a number of prototypes being built and really experimenting with some ideas. Two years later we started doing a project on developing mobile health clinics in sub-Saharan Africa, responding to the HIV/AIDS pandemic. That led to 550 entries from 53 countries. We also have designers from around the world that participate. And we had an exhibit of work that followed that. 2004 was the tipping point for us. We started responding to natural disasters and getting involved in Iran and Bam, also following up on our work in Africa. Working within the United States, most people look at poverty and they see the face of a foreigner, but go live -- I live in Bozeman, Montana -- go up to the north plains on the reservations, or go down to Alabama or Mississippi pre-Katrina, and I could have shown you places that have far worse conditions than many developing countries I've been to. So we got involved in and worked in inner cities and elsewhere. And then also I will go into some more projects. 2005 Mother Nature kicked our arse. I think we can pretty much assume that 2005 was a horrific year when it comes to natural disasters. And because of the Internet, and because of connections to blogs and so forth, within literally hours of the tsunami, we were already raising funds, getting involved, working with people on the ground. We run from a couple of laptops in the first couple of days, I had 4,000 emails from people needing help. So we began to get involved in projects there, and I'll talk about some others. And then of course, this year we've been responding to Katrina, as well as following up on our reconstruction works. So this is a brief overview. In 2004, I really couldn't manage the number of people who wanted to help, or the number of requests that I was getting. It was all coming into my laptop and cell phone. So we decided to embrace an open source model of business -- that anyone, anywhere in the world, could start a local chapter, and they can get involved in local problems. Because I believe there is no such thing as Utopia. All problems are local. All solutions are local. So, and that means, you know, somebody who is based in Mississippi knows more about Mississippi than I do. So what happened is, we used MeetUp and all these other kind of Internet tools, and we ended up having 40 chapters starting up, thousands of architects in 104 countries. So the bullet point -- sorry, I never do a suit, so I knew that I was going to take this off. OK, because I'm going to do it very quick. So in the past seven years -- this isn't just about nonprofit. What it showed me is that there's a grassroots movement going on of socially responsible designers who really believe that this world has got a lot smaller, and that we have the opportunity -- not the responsibility, but the opportunity -- to really get involved in making change. (Laughter) I'm adding that to my time. So what you don't know is, we've got these thousands of designers working around the world, connected basically by a website, and we have a staff of three. By doing something, the fact that nobody told us we couldn't do it, we did it. And so there's something to be said about naivete. So seven years later, we've developed so that we've got advocacy, instigation and implementation. We advocate for good design, not only through student workshops and lectures and public forums, op-eds; we have a book on humanitarian work; but also disaster mitigation and dealing with public policy. We can talk about FEMA, but that's another talk. Instigation, developing ideas with communities and NGOs doing open-source design competitions. Referring, matchmaking with communities and then implementing -- actually going out there and doing the work, because when you invent, it's never a reality until it's built. So it's really important that if we're designing and trying to create change, we build that change. So here's a select number of projects. Kosovo. This is Kosovo in '99. We did an open design competition, like I said. It led to a whole variety of ideas, and this wasn't about emergency shelter, but transitional shelter that would last five to 10 years, that would be placed next to the land the resident lived in, and that they would rebuild their own home. This wasn't imposing an architecture on a community; this was giving them the tools and, and the space to allow them to rebuild and regrow the way they want to. We have from the sublime to the ridiculous, but they worked. This is an inflatable hemp house. It was built; it works. This is a shipping container. Built and works. And a whole variety of ideas that not only dealt with architectural building, but also the issues of governance and the idea of creating communities through complex networks. So we've engaged not just designers, but also, you know, a whole variety of technology-based professionals. Using rubble from destroyed homes to create new homes. Using straw bale construction, creating heat walls. And then something remarkable happened in '99. We went to Africa, originally to look at the housing issue. Within three days, we realized the problem was not housing; it was the growing pandemic of HIV/AIDS. And it wasn't doctors telling us this; it was actual villagers that we were staying with. And so we came up with the bright idea that instead of getting people to walk 10, 15 kilometers to see doctors, you get the doctors to the people. And we started engaging the medical community. And I thought, you know, we thought we were real bright, you know, sparks -- we've come up with this great idea, mobile health clinics widely distributed throughout sub-Saharan Africa. And the community, the medical community there said, "We've said this for the last decade. We know this. We just don't know how to show this." So in a way, we had taken a pre-existing need and shown solutions. And so again, we had a whole variety of ideas that came in. This one I personally love, because the idea that architecture is not just about solutions, but about raising awareness. This is a kenaf clinic. You get seed and you grow it in a plot of land, and then once -- and it grows 14 feet in a month. And on the fourth week, the doctors come and they mow out an area, put a tensile structure on the top and when the doctors have finished treating and seeing patients and villagers, you cut down the clinic and you eat it. It's an Eat Your Own Clinic. (Laughter) So it's dealing with the fact that if you have AIDS, you also need to have nutrition rates, and the idea that the idea of nutrition is as important as getting anti-retrovirals out there. So you know, this is a serious solution. This one I love. The idea is it's not just a clinic -- it's a community center. This looked at setting up trade routes and economic engines within the community, so it can be a self-sustaining project. Every one of these projects is sustainable. That's not because I'm a tree-hugging green person. It's because when you live on four dollars a day, you're living on survival and you have to be sustainable. You have to know where your energy is coming from. You have to know where your resource is coming from. And you have to keep the maintenance down. So this is about getting an economic engine, and then at night it turns into a movie theater. So it's not an AIDS clinic. It's a community center. So you can see ideas. And these ideas developed into prototypes, and they were eventually built. And currently, as of this year, there are clinics rolling out in Nigeria and Kenya. From that we also developed Siyathemba, which was a project -- the community came to us and said, the problem is that the girls don't have education. And we're working in an area where young women between the ages of 16 and 24 have a 50 percent HIV/AIDS rate. And that's not because they're promiscuous, it's because there's no knowledge. And so we decided to look at the idea of sports and create a youth sports center that doubled as an HIV/AIDS outreach center, and the coaches of the girls' team were also trained doctors. So that there would be a very slow way of developing kind of confidence in health care. And we picked nine finalists, and then those nine finalists were distributed throughout the entire region, and then the community picked their design. They said, this is our design, because it's not only about engaging a community; it's about empowering a community and about getting them to be a part of the rebuilding process. So the winning design is here, and then of course, we actually go and work with the community and the clients. So this is the designer. He's out there working with the first ever women's soccer team in Kwa-Zulu Natal, Siyathemba, and they can tell it better. Video: Well, my name is Sisi, because I work at the African center. I'm a consultant and I'm also the national football player for South Africa, Bafana Bafana, and I also play in the Vodacom League for the team called Tembisa, which has now changed to Siyathemba. This is our home ground. Cameron Sinclair: So I'm going to show that later because I'm running out of time. I can see Chris looking at me slyly. This was a connection, just a meeting with somebody who wanted to develop Africa's first telemedicine center, in Tanzania. And we met, literally, a couple of months ago. We've already developed a design, and the team is over there, working in partnership. This was a matchmaking thanks to a couple of TEDsters: [unclear] Cheryl Heller and Andrew Zolli, who connected me with this amazing African woman. And we start construction in June, and it will be opened by TEDGlobal. So when you come to TEDGlobal, you can check it out. But what we're known probably most for is dealing with disasters and development, and we've been involved in a lot of issues, such as the tsunami and also things like Hurricane Katrina. This is a 370-dollar shelter that can be easily assembled. This is a community-designed community center. And what that means is we actually live and work with the community, and they're part of the design process. The kids actually get involved in mapping out where the community center should be, and then eventually, the community is actually, through skills training, end up building the building with us. Here is another school. This is what the U.N. gave these guys for six months -- 12 plastic tarps. This was in August. This was the replacement, and it's supposed to last for two years. When the rain comes down, you can't hear a thing, and in the summer it's about 140 degrees inside. So we said, if the rain's coming down, let's get fresh water. So every one of our schools have rain water collection systems, very low cost. A class, three classrooms and rainwater collection is 5,000 dollars. This was raised by hot chocolate sales in Atlanta. It's built by the parents of the kids. The kids are out there on-site, building the buildings. And it opened a couple of weeks ago, and there's 600 kids that are now using the schools. (Applause) So, disaster hits home. We see the bad stories on CNN and Fox and all that, but we don't see the good stories. Here is a community that got together and they said no to waiting. They formed a partnership, a diverse partnership of players to actually map out East Biloxi, to figure out who is getting involved. We've had over 1,500 volunteers rebuilding, rehabbing homes. Figuring out what FEMA regulations are, not waiting for them to dictate to us how you should rebuild. Working with residents, getting them out of their homes, so they don't get ill. This is what they're cleaning up on their own. Designing housing. This house is going to go in in a couple of weeks. This is a rehabbed home, done in four days. This is a utility room for a woman who is on a walker. She's 70 years old. This is what FEMA gave her. 600 bucks, happened two days ago. We put together very quickly a washroom. It's built; it's running and she just started a business today, where she's washing other peoples clothes. This is Shandra and the Calhouns. They're photographers who have documented the Lower Ninth for the last 40 years. That was their home, and these are the photographs they took. And we're helping, working with them to create a new building. Projects we've done. Projects we've been a part of, support. Why don't aid agencies do this? This is the U.N. tent. This is the new U.N. tent, just introduced this year. Quick to assemble. It's got a flap, that's the invention. It took 20 years to design this and get it implemented in the field. I was 12 years old. There's a problem here. Luckily, we're not alone. There are hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of architects and designers and inventors around the world that are getting involved in humanitarian work. More hemp houses -- it's a theme in Japan apparently. I'm not sure what they're smoking. This is a grip clip designed by somebody who said, all you need is some way to attach membrane structures to physical support beams. This guy designed for NASA, is now doing housing. I'm going to whip through this quickly, because I know I've got only a couple of minutes. So this is all done in the last two years. I showed you something that took 20 years to do. And this is just a selection of things that were built in the last couple of years. From Brazil to India, Mexico, Alabama, China, Israel, Palestine, Vietnam. The average age of a designer who gets involved in this project is 32 -- that's how old I am. So it's a young -- I just have to stop here, because Arup is in the room and this is the best-designed toilet in the world. If you're ever, ever in India, go use this toilet. (Laughter) Chris Luebkeman will tell you why. I'm sure that's how he wanted to spend the party. But the future is not going to be the sky-scraping cities of New York, but this. And when you look at this, you see crisis. What I see is many, many inventors. One billion people live in abject poverty. We hear about them all the time. Four billion live in growing but fragile economies. One in seven live in unplanned settlements. If we do nothing about the housing crisis that's about to happen, in 20 years, one in three people will live in an unplanned settlement or a refugee camp. Look left, look right: one of you will be there. How do we improve the living standards of five billion people? With 10 million solutions. So I wish to develop a community that actively embraces innovative and sustainable design to improve the living conditions for everyone. Chris Anderson: Wait a second. Wait a second. That's your wish? CS: That's my wish. CA: That's his wish! (Applause) CS: We started Architecture for Humanity with 700 dollars and a website. So Chris somehow decided to give me 100,000. So why not this many people? Open-source architecture is the way to go. You have a diverse community of participants -- and we're not just talking about inventors and designers, but we're talking about the funding model. My role is not as a designer; it's as a conduit between the design world and the humanitarian world. And what we need is something that replicates me globally, because I haven't slept in seven years. (Laughter) Secondly, what will this thing be? Designers want to respond to issues of humanitarian crisis, but they don't want some company in the West taking their idea and basically profiting from it. So Creative Commons has developed the developing nations license. And what that means is that a designer can -- the Siyathemba project I showed was the first ever building to have a Creative Commons license on it. As soon as that is built, anyone in Africa or any developing nation can take the construction documents and replicate it for free. (Applause) So why not allow designers the opportunity to do this, but still protecting their rights here? We want to have a community where you can upload ideas, and those ideas can be tested in earthquake, in flood, in all sorts of austere environments. The reason that's important is I don't want to wait for the next Katrina to find out if my house works. That's too late. We need to do it now. So doing that globally. And I want this whole thing to work multi-lingually. When you look at the face of an architect, most people think a gray-haired white guy. I don't see that. I see the face of the world. So I want everyone from all over the planet, to be able to be a part of this design and development. The idea of needs-based competitions -- X-Prize for the other 98 percent, if you want to call it that. We also want to look at ways of matchmaking and putting funding partners together. And the idea of integrating manufacturers -- fab labs in every country. When I hear about the $100 laptop and it's going to educate every child -- educate every designer in the world. Put one in every favela, every slum settlement, because you know what, innovation will happen. And I need to know that. It's called the leap-back. We talk about leapfrog technologies. I write with Worldchanging, and the one thing we've been talking about is, I learn more on the ground than I've ever learned here. So let's take those ideas, adapt them and we can use them. These ideas are supposed to have adaptable; they should have the potential for evolution; they should be developed by every nation on the world and useful for every nation on the world. What will it take? There should be a sheet. I don't have time to read this, because I'm going to be yanked off. CA: Just leave it up there for a sec. CS: Well, what will it take? You guys are smart. So it's going to take a lot of computing power, because I want the idea that any laptop anywhere in the world can plug into the system and be able to not only participate in developing these designs, but utilize the designs. Also, a process of reviewing the designs. I want every Arup engineer in the world to check and make sure that we're doing stuff that's standing, because those guys are the best in the world. Plug. And so you know, I want these -- and I just should note, I have two laptops and one of them there, is there and that has 3000 designs on it. If I drop that laptop, what happens? So it's important to have these proven ideas put up there, easy to use, easy to get a hold of. My mom once said, there's nothing worse than being all mouth and no trousers. (Laughter) I'm fed up of talking about making change. You only make it by doing it. We've changed FEMA guidelines. We've changed public policy. We've changed international response -- based on building things. So for me, it's important that we create a real conduit for innovation, and that it's free innovation. Think of free culture -- this is free innovation. Somebody said this a couple of years back. I will give points for those who know it. I think the man was maybe 25 years too early, so let's do it. Thank you. (Applause)

So the first question is, why do we need to even worry about a pandemic threat? What is it that we're concerned about? When I say "we," I'm at the Council on Foreign Relations. We're concerned in the national security community, and of course in the biology community and the public health community. While globalization has increased travel, it's made it necessary that everybody be everywhere, all the time, all over the world. And that means that your microbial hitchhikers are moving with you. So a plague outbreak in Surat, India becomes not an obscure event, but a globalized event -- a globalized concern that has changed the risk equation. Katrina showed us that we cannot completely depend on government to have readiness in hand, to be capable of handling things. Indeed, an outbreak would be multiple Katrinas at once. Our big concern at the moment is a virus called H5N1 flu -- some of you call it bird flu -- which first emerged in southern China, in the mid-1990s, but we didn't know about it until 1997. At the end of last Christmas only 13 countries had seen H5N1. But we're now up to 55 countries in the world, have had this virus emerge, in either birds, or people or both. In the bird outbreaks we now can see that pretty much the whole world has seen this virus except the Americas. And I'll get into why we've so far been spared in a moment. In domestic birds, especially chickens, it's 100 percent lethal. It's one of the most lethal things we've seen in circulation in the world in any recent centuries. And we've dealt with it by killing off lots and lots and lots of chickens, and unfortunately often not reimbursing the peasant farmers with the result that there's cover-up. It's also carried on migration patterns of wild migratory aquatic birds. There has been this centralized event in a place called Lake Chenghai, China. Two years ago the migrating birds had a multiple event where thousands died because of a mutation occurring in the virus, which made the species range broaden dramatically. So that birds going to Siberia, to Europe, and to Africa carried the virus, which had not previously been possible. We're now seeing outbreaks in human populations -- so far, fortunately, small events, tiny outbreaks, occasional clusters. The virus has mutated dramatically in the last two years to form two distinct families, if you will, of the H5N1 viral tree with branches in them, and with different attributes that are worrying. So what's concerning us? Well, first of all, at no time in history have we succeeded in making in a timely fashion, a specific vaccine for more than 260 million people. It's not going to do us very much good in a global pandemic. You've heard about the vaccine we're stockpiling. But nobody believes it will actually be particularly effective if we have a real outbreak. So one thought is: after 9/11, when the airports closed, our flu season was delayed by two weeks. So the thought is, hey, maybe what we should do is just immediately -- we hear there is H5N1 spreading from human to human, the virus has mutated to be a human-to-human transmitter -- let's shut down the airports. However, huge supercomputer analyses, done of the likely effectiveness of this, show that it won't buy us much time at all. And of course it will be hugely disruptive in preparation plans. For example, all masks are made in China. How do you get them mobilized around the world if you've shut all the airports down? How do you get the vaccines moved around the world and the drugs moved, and whatever may or not be available that would work. So it turns out that shutting down the airports is counterproductive. We're worried because this virus, unlike any other flu we've ever studied, can be transmitted by eating raw meat of the infected animals. We've seen transmission to wild cats and domestic cats, and now also domestic pet dogs. And in experimental feedings to rodents and ferrets, we found that the animals exhibit symptoms never seen with flu: seizures, central nervous system disorders, partial paralysis. This is not your normal garden-variety flu. It mimics what we now understand about reconstructing the 1918 flu virus, the last great pandemic, in that it also jumped directly from birds to people. We had evolution over time, and this unbelievable mortality rate in human beings: 55 percent of people who have become infected with H5N1 have, in fact, succumbed. And we don't have a huge number of people who got infected and never developed disease. In experimental feeding in monkeys you can see that it actually downregulates a specific immune system modulator. The result is that what kills you is not the virus directly, but your own immune system overreacting, saying, "Whatever this is so foreign I'm going berserk." The result: most of the deaths have been in people under 30 years of age, robustly healthy young adults. We have seen human-to-human transmission in at least three clusters -- fortunately involving very intimate contact, still not putting the world at large at any kind of risk. Alright, so I've got you nervous. Now you probably assume, well the governments are going to do something. And we have spent a lot of money. Most of the spending in the Bush administration has actually been more related to the anthrax results and bio-terrorism threat. But a lot of money has been thrown out at the local level and at the federal level to look at infectious diseases. End result: only 15 states have been certified to be able to do mass distribution of vaccine and drugs in a pandemic. Half the states would run out of hospital beds in the first week, maybe two weeks. And 40 states already have an acute nursing shortage. Add on pandemic threat, you're in big trouble. So what have people been doing with this money? Exercises, drills, all over the world. Let's pretend there's a pandemic. Let's everybody run around and play your role. Main result is that there is tremendous confusion. Most of these people don't actually know what their job will be. And the bottom line, major thing that has come through in every single drill: nobody knows who's in charge. Nobody knows the chain of command. If it were Los Angeles, is it the mayor, the governor, the President of the United States, the head of Homeland Security? In fact, the federal government says it's a guy called the Principle Federal Officer, who happens to be with TSA. The government says the federal responsibility will basically be about trying to keep the virus out, which we all know is impossible, and then to mitigate the impact primarily on our economy. The rest is up to your local community. Everything is about your town, where you live. Well how good a city council you have, how good a mayor you have -- that's who's going to be in charge. Most local facilities would all be competing to try and get their hands on their piece of the federal stockpile of a drug called Tamiflu, which may or may not be helpful -- I'll get into that -- of available vaccines, and any other treatments, and masks, and anything that's been stockpiled. And you'll have massive competition. Now we did purchase a vaccine, you've probably all heard about it, made by Sanofi-Aventis. Unfortunately it's made against the current form of H5N1. We know the virus will mutate. It will be a different virus. The vaccine will probably be useless. So here's where the decisions come in. You're the mayor of your local town. Let's see, should we order that all pets be kept indoors? Germany did that when H5N1 appeared in Germany last year, in order to minimize the spread between households by household cats, dogs and so on. What do we do when we don't have any containment rooms with reverse air that will allow the healthcare workers to take care of patients? These are in Hong Kong; we have nothing like that here. What about quarantine? During the SARS epidemic in Beijing quarantine did seem to help. We have no uniform policies regarding quarantine across the United States. And some states have differential policies, county by county. But what about the no-brainer things? Should we close all the schools? Well then what about all the workers? They won't go to work if their kids aren't in school. Encouraging telecommuting? What works? Well the British government did a model of telecommuting. Six weeks they had all people in the banking industry pretend a pandemic was underway. What they found was, the core functions -- you know you still sort of had banks, but you couldn't get people to put money in the ATM machines. Nobody was processing the credit cards. Your insurance payments didn't go through. And basically the economy would be in a disaster state of affairs. And that's just office workers, bankers. We don't know how important hand washing is for flu -- shocking. One assumes it's a good idea to wash your hands a lot. But actually in scientific community there is great debate about what percentage of flu transmission between people is from sneezing and coughing and what percentage is on your hands. The Institute of Medicine tried to look at the masking question. Can we figure out a way, since we know we won't have enough masks because we don't make them in America anymore, they're all made in China -- do we need N95? A state-of-the-art, top-of-the-line, must-be-fitted-to-your-face mask? Or can we get away with some different kinds of masks? In the SARS epidemic, we learned in Hong Kong that most of transmission was because people were removing their masks improperly. And their hand got contaminated with the outside of the mask, and then they rubbed their nose. Bingo! They got SARS. It wasn't flying microbes. If you go online right now, you'll get so much phony-baloney information. You'll end up buying -- this is called an N95 mask. Ridiculous. We don't actually have a standard for what should be the protective gear for the first responders, the people who will actually be there on the front lines. And Tamiflu. You've probably heard of this drug, made by Hoffmann-La Roche, patented drug. There is some indication that it may buy you some time in the midst of an outbreak. Should you take Tamiflu for a long period of time, well, one of the side effects is suicidal ideations. A public health survey analyzed the effect that large-scale Tamiflu use would have, actually shows it counteractive to public health measures, making matters worse. And here is the other interesting thing: when a human being ingests Tamiflu, only 20 percent is metabolized appropriately to be an active compound in the human being. The rest turns into a stable compound, which survives filtration into the water systems, thereby exposing the very aquatic birds that would carry flu and providing them a chance to breed resistant strains. And we now have seen Tamiflu-resistant strains in both Vietnam in person-to-person transmission, and in Egypt in person-to-person transmission. So I personally think that our life expectancy for Tamiflu as an effective drug is very limited -- very limited indeed. Nevertheless most of the governments have based their whole flu policies on building stockpiles of Tamiflu. Russia has actually stockpiled enough for 95 percent of all Russians. We've stockpiled enough for 30 percent. When I say enough, that's two weeks worth. And then you're on your own because the pandemic is going to last for 18 to 24 months. Some of the poorer countries that have had the most experience with H5N1 have built up stockpiles; they're already expired. They are already out of date. What do we know from 1918, the last great pandemic? The federal government abdicated most responsibility. And so we ended up with this wild patchwork of regulations all over America. Every city, county, state did their own thing. And the rules and the belief systems were wildly disparate. In some cases all schools, all churches, all public venues were closed. The pandemic circulated three times in 18 months in the absence of commercial air travel. The second wave was the mutated, super-killer wave. And in the first wave we had enough healthcare workers. But by the time the second wave hit it took such a toll among the healthcare workers that we lost most of our doctors and nurses that were on the front lines. Overall we lost 700,000 people. The virus was 100 percent lethal to pregnant women and we don't actually know why. Most of the death toll was 15 to 40 year-olds -- robustly healthy young adults. It was likened to the plague. We don't actually know how many people died. The low-ball estimate is 35 million. This was based on European and North American data. A new study by Chris Murray at Harvard shows that if you look at the databases that were kept by the Brits in India, there was a 31-fold greater death rate among the Indians. So there is a strong belief that in places of poverty the death toll was far higher. And that a more likely toll is somewhere in the neighborhood of 80 to 100 million people before we had commercial air travel. So are we ready? As a nation, no we're not. And I think even those in the leadership would say that is the case, that we still have a long ways to go. So what does that mean for you? Well the first thing is, I wouldn't start building up personal stockpiles of anything -- for yourself, your family, or your employees -- unless you've really done your homework. What mask works, what mask doesn't work. How many masks do you need? The Institute of Medicine study felt that you could not recycle masks. Well if you think it's going to last 18 months, are you going to buy 18 months worth of masks for every single person in your family? We don't know -- again with Tamiflu, the number one side effect of Tamiflu is flu-like symptoms. So then how can you tell who in your family has the flu if everybody is taking Tamiflu? If you expand that out to think of a whole community, or all your employees in your company, you begin to realize how limited the Tamiflu option might be. Everybody has come up to me and said, well I'll stockpile water or, I'll stockpile food, or what have you. But really? Do you really have a place to stockpile 18 months worth of food? Twenty-four months worth of food? Do you want to view the pandemic threat the way back in the 1950s people viewed the civil defense issue, and build your own little bomb shelter for pandemic flu? I don't think that's rational. I think it's about having to be prepared as communities, not as individuals -- being prepared as nation, being prepared as state, being prepared as town. And right now most of the preparedness is deeply flawed. And I hope I've convinced you of that, which means that the real job is go out and say to your local leaders, and your national leaders, "Why haven't you solved these problems? Why are you still thinking that the lessons of Katrina do not apply to flu?" And put the pressure where the pressure needs to be put. But I guess the other thing to add is, if you do have employees, and you do have a company, I think you have certain responsibilities to demonstrate that you are thinking ahead for them, and you are trying to plan. At a minimum the British banking plan showed that telecommuting can be helpful. It probably does reduce exposure because people are not coming into the office and coughing on each other, or touching common objects and sharing things via their hands. But can you sustain your company that way? Well if you have a dot-com, maybe you can. Otherwise you're in trouble. Happy to take your questions. (Applause) Audience member: What factors determine the duration of a pandemic? Laurie Garret: What factors determine the duration of a pandemic, we don't really know. I could give you a bunch of flip, this, that, and the other. But I would say that honestly we don't know. Clearly the bottom line is the virus eventually attenuates, and ceases to be a lethal virus to humanity, and finds other hosts. But we don't really know how and why that happens. It's a very complicated ecology. Audience member: What kind of triggers are you looking for? You know way more than any of us. To say ahh, if this happens then we are going to have a pandemic? LG: The moment that you see any evidence of serious human-to-human to transmission. Not just intimately between family members who took care of an ailing sister or brother, but a community infected -- spread within a school, spread within a dormitory, something of that nature. Then I think that there is universal agreement now, at WHO all the way down: Send out the alert. Audience member: Some research has indicated that statins can be helpful. Can you talk about that? LG: Yeah. There is some evidence that taking Lipitor and other common statins for cholesterol control may decrease your vulnerability to influenza. But we do not completely understand why. The mechanism isn't clear. And I don't know that there is any way responsibly for someone to start medicating their children with their personal supply of Lipitor or something of that nature. We have absolutely no idea what that would do. You might be causing some very dangerous outcomes in your children, doing such a thing. Audience member: How far along are we in being able to determine whether someone is actually carrying, whether somebody has this before the symptoms are full-blown? LG: Right. So I have for a long time said that what we really needed was a rapid diagnostic. And our Centers for Disease Control has labeled a test they developed a rapid diagnostic. It takes 24 hours in a very highly developed laboratory, in highly skilled hands. I'm thinking dipstick. You could do it to your own kid. It changes color. It tells you if you have H5N1. In terms of where we are in science with DNA identification capacities and so on, it's not that far off. But we're not there. And there hasn't been the kind of investment to get us there. Audience member: In the 1918 flu I understand that they theorized that there was some attenuation of the virus when it made the leap into humans. Is that likely, do you think, here? I mean 100 percent death rate is pretty severe. LG: Um yeah. So we don't actually know what the lethality was of the 1918 strain to wild birds before it jumped from birds to humans. It's curious that there is no evidence of mass die-offs of chickens or household birds across America before the human pandemic happened. That may be because those events were occurring on the other side of the world where nobody was paying attention. But the virus clearly went through one round around the world in a mild enough form that the British army in World War I actually certified that it was not a threat and would not affect the outcome of the war. And after circulating around the world came back in a form that was tremendously lethal. What percentage of infected people were killed by it? Again we don't really know for sure. It's clear that if you were malnourished to begin with, you had a weakened immune system, you lived in poverty in India or Africa, your likelihood of dying was far greater. But we don't really know. Audience member: One of the things I've heard is that the real death cause when you get a flu is the associated pneumonia, and that a pneumonia vaccine may offer you 50 percent better chance of survival. LG: For a long time, researchers in emerging diseases were kind of dismissive of the pandemic flu threat on the grounds that back in 1918 they didn't have antibiotics. And that most people who die of regular flu -- which in regular flu years is about 360,000 people worldwide, most of them senior citizens -- and they die not of the flu but because the flu gives an assault to their immune system. And along comes pneumococcus or another bacteria, streptococcus and boom, they get a bacterial pneumonia. But it turns out that in 1918 that was not the case at all. And so far in the H5N1 cases in people, similarly bacterial infection has not been an issue at all. It's this absolutely phenomenal disruption of the immune system that is the key to why people die of this virus. And I would just add we saw the same thing with SARS. So what's going on here is your body says, your immune system sends out all its sentinels and says, "I don't know what the heck this is. We've never seen anything even remotely like this before." It won't do any good to bring in the sharpshooters because those antibodies aren't here. And it won't do any good to bring in the tanks and the artillery because those T-cells don't recognize it either. So we're going to have to go all-out thermonuclear response, stimulate the total cytokine cascade. The whole immune system swarms into the lungs. And yes they die, drowning in their own fluids, of pneumonia. But it's not bacterial pneumonia. And it's not a pneumonia that would respond to a vaccine. And I think my time is up. I thank you all for your attention. (Applause)

I bet you're worried. (Laughter) I was worried. That's why I began this piece. I was worried about vaginas. I was worried what we think about vaginas, and even more worried that we don't think about them. I was worried about my own vagina. It needed a context, a culture, a community of other vaginas. There is so much darkness and secrecy surrounding them. Like the Bermuda Triangle, nobody ever reports back from there. (Laughter) In the first place, it's not so easy to even find your vagina. Women go days, weeks, months, without looking at it. I interviewed a high-powered businesswoman; she told me she didn't have time. "Looking at your vagina," she said, "is a full day's work." (Laughter) "You've got to get down there on your back, in front of a mirror, full-length preferred. You've got to get in the perfect position, with the perfect light, which then becomes shadowed by the angle you're at. You're twisting your head up, arching your back, it's exhausting." She was busy; she didn't have time. So I decided to talk to women about their vaginas. They began as casual vagina interviews, and they turned into vagina monologues. I talked with over 200 women. I talked to older women, younger women, married women, lesbians, single women; I talked to corporate professionals, college professors, actors, sex workers; I talked to African-American women, Asian-American women, Native-American women, Caucasian women, Jewish women. OK, at first women were a little shy, a little reluctant to talk. Once they got going, you couldn't stop them. Women love to talk about their vaginas -- they do. Mainly because no one's ever asked them before. (Laughter) Let's just start with the word "vagina" -- vagina, vagina. It sounds like an infection at best. Maybe a medical instrument. "Hurry, nurse, bring the vagina." (Laughter) Vagina, vagina, vagina. It doesn't matter how many times you say the word, it never sounds like a word you want to say. It's a completely ridiculous, totally un-sexy word. If you use it during sex, trying to be politically correct, "Darling, would you stroke my vagina," you kill the act right there. (Laughter) I'm worried what we call them and don't call them. In Great Neck, New York, they call it a "pussy-cat." A woman told me there, her mother used to tell her, "Don't wear panties, dear, underneath your pajamas. You need to air out your pussy-cat." (Laughter) In Westchester they call it a "pooky," in New Jersey a "twat." There's powder-box, derriere, a pooky, a poochy, a poopy, a poopaloo, a pooninana, a padepachetchki, a pow, and a peach. (Laughter) There's toadie, dee dee, nishi, dignity, coochie snorcher, cooter, labi, gladis siegelman, va, wee-wee, whore-spot, nappy dugout, mungo, ghoulie, powder-box, a "mimi" in Miami, a "split knish" in Philadelphia, and a "schmende" in the Bronx. (Laughter) I am worried about vaginas. This is how the "Vagina Monologues" begins. But it really didn't begin there; it began with a conversation with a woman. We were having a conversation about menopause, and we got onto the subject of her vagina -- which you'll do if you're talking about menopause. And she said things that really shocked me about her vagina -- that it was dried-up and finished and dead -- and I was kind of shocked. And so I said to a friend casually, "Well, what do you think about your vagina?" And that woman said something more amazing, and then the next woman said something more amazing, and before I knew it, every woman was telling me I had to talk to somebody about their vagina because they had an amazing story, and I was sucked down the vagina trail. (Laughter) And I really haven't gotten off it. I think if you had told me when I was younger that I was going to grow up, and be in shoe stores, and people were going to scream out, "There she is, the Vagina Lady!" I don't know that that would have been my life ambition. (Laughter) But I want to talk a little bit about happiness and the relationship to this whole vagina journey because it has been an extraordinary journey that began eight years ago. I think before I did the "Vagina Monologues" I didn't really believe in happiness. I thought that only idiots were happy, to be honest. I remember when I started practicing Buddhism 14 years ago, and I was told that the end of this practice was to be happy, I said, "How could you be happy and live in this world of suffering and live in this world of pain?" I mistook happiness for a lot of other things, like numbness or decadence or selfishness. And what happened through the course of the "Vagina Monologues" and this journey is I think I have come to understand a little bit more about happiness. There're three qualities I want to talk about. One is seeing what's right in front of you, and talking about it, and stating it. I think what I learned from talking about the vagina, and speaking about the vagina, is it was the most obvious thing -- it was right in the center of my body and the center of the world -- and yet it was the one thing nobody talked about. The second thing is that what talking about the vagina did is it opened this door which allowed me to see that there was a way to serve the world to make it better. And that's where the deepest happiness has actually come from. And the third principle of happiness, which I've realized recently. Eight years ago, this momentum and this energy, this "V-wave" started -- and I can only describe it as a "V-wave" because, to be honest, I really don't understand it completely; I feel at the service of it. But this wave started, and if I question the wave, or try to stop the wave or look back at the wave, I often have the experience of whiplash or the potential of my neck breaking. But if I go with the wave, and I trust the wave and I move with the wave, I go to the next place, and it happens logically and organically and truthfully. And I started this piece, particularly with stories and narratives, and I was talking to one woman and that led to another woman and that led to another woman, and then I wrote those stories down and I put them out in front of other people. And every single time I did the show at the beginning, women would literally line up after the show because they wanted to tell me their stories. And at first I thought, "Oh great, I'll hear about wonderful orgasms, and great sex lives, and how women love their vaginas." But in fact, that's not what women lined up to tell me. What women lined up to tell me was how they were raped, and how they were battered, and how they were beaten, and how they were gang-raped in parking lots, and how they were incested by their uncles. And I wanted to stop doing the "Vagina Monologues" because it felt too daunting. I felt like a war photographer who takes pictures of terrible events, but doesn't intervene on their behalf. And so in 1997, I said, "Let's get women together. What could we do with this information that all these women are being violated?" And it turned out, after thinking and investigating, that I discovered -- and the UN has actually said this recently -- that one out of every three women on this planet will be beaten or raped in her lifetime. That's essentially a gender; that's essentially a resource of the planet, which is women. So in 1997 we got all these incredible women together and we said, "How can we use the play, this energy, to stop violence against women?" And we put on one event in New York City, in the theater, and all these great actors came -- from Susan Sarandon, to Glenn Close, to Whoopi Goldberg -- and we did one performance on one evening, and that catalyzed this wave, this energy. And within five years, this extraordinary thing began to happen. One woman took that energy and she said, "I want to bring this wave, this energy, to college campuses," and so she took the play and she said, "Let's use the play and have performances of the play once a year, where we can raise money to stop violence against women in local communities all around the world." And in one year, it went to 50 colleges, and then it expanded. And over the course of the last six years, it's spread and it's spread and it's spread and it's spread around the world. What I have learned is two things. One: that the epidemic of violence towards women is shocking; it's global; it is so profound and it is so devastating, and it is so in every little pocket of every little crater, of every little society, that we don't even recognize it because it's become ordinary. This journey has taken me to Afghanistan, where I had the extraordinary honor and privilege to go into parts of Afghanistan under the Taliban -- I was dressed in a burqa -- and I went in with an extraordinary group called the Revolutionary Association of the Women of Afghanistan, and I saw firsthand how women had been stripped of every single right that was possible to strip women of -- from being educated, to being employed, to being actually allowed to eat ice cream. For those of you who don't know it, it was illegal to eat ice cream under the Taliban. And I actually saw and met women who had been flogged by being caught eating vanilla ice cream. And I was taken to the secret ice cream-eating place in a little town, where we went to a back room, and women were seated and a curtain was pulled around us, and they were served vanilla ice cream. And women lifted their burqas and ate this ice cream, and I don't think I ever understood pleasure until that moment, and how women have found a way to keep their pleasure alive. It has taken me, this journey, to Islamabad, where I have witnessed and met women with their faces melted off. It has taken me to Juarez, Mexico, where I was a week ago, where I have literally been there in parking lots where bones of women have washed up and been dumped next to Coca-Cola bottles. It has taken me to universities all over this country where girls are date-raped and drugged. I have seen terrible, terrible, terrible violence. But I have also recognized, in the course of seeing that violence, that being in the face of things and seeing actually what's in front of us is the antidote to depression and to a feeling that one is worthless and has no value. Because before the "Vagina Monologues," I will say that 80 percent of my consciousness was closed off to what was really going on in this reality. And that closing-off closed off my vitality and my life energy. What has also happened is in the course of these travels -- and it's been an extraordinary thing -- is that every single place that I have gone to in the world, I have met a new species. And I really love hearing about all these species at the bottom of the sea. And I was thinking about how being with these extraordinary people on this particular panel that it's beneath, beyond, and between, and the vagina kind of fits into all those categories. (Laughter) But one of the things I've seen is this species -- and it is a species, and it is a new paradigm, and it doesn't get reported in the press or in the media because I don't think good news ever is news, and I don't think people who are transforming the planet are what gets the ratings on TV shows. But every single country I have been to -- and in the last six years I've been to about 45 countries, and many tiny little villages and cities and towns -- I have seen something what I've come to call "vagina warriors." A "vagina warrior" is a woman, or a vagina-friendly man, who has witnessed incredible violence or suffered it, and rather than getting an AK-47 or a weapon of mass destruction or a machete, they hold the violence in their bodies; they grieve it; they experience it; and then they go out and devote their lives to making sure it doesn't happen to anybody else. I have met these women everywhere on the planet. And I want to tell a few stories because I believe that stories are the way that we transmit information, where it goes into our bodies. And I think that one of the things about being at TED that's been very interesting is that I live in my body a lot, and I don't live in my head very much anymore. And this is a very heady place. And it's been really interesting to be in my head for the last two days; I've been very disoriented -- (Laughter) because I think the world, the V-world, is very much in your body. It's a body world, and the species really exists in the body, and I think there's a real significance in us attaching our bodies to our heads -- that that separation has created a divide that is often separating purpose from intent. And the connection between body and head often brings those things into union. I want to talk about three particular people that I've met, vagina warriors, who really transformed my understanding of this whole principle and species, and one is a woman named Marsha Lopez. Marsha Lopez was a woman I met in Guatemala. She was 14 years old, and she was in a marriage and her husband was beating her on a regular basis, and she couldn't get out because she was addicted to the relationship and she had no money. Her sister was younger than her and she applied -- we had a "stop rape" contest a few years ago in New York -- and she applied, hoping that she would become a finalist and she could bring her sister. She did become a finalist; she brought Marsha to New York. And at that time we did this extraordinary V-Day at Madison Square Garden where we sold out the entire testosterone-filled dome, 18,000 people standing up to say "yes" to vaginas, which was really a pretty incredible transformation. And she came, and she witnessed this, and she decided that she would go back and leave her husband, and that she would bring V-Day to Guatemala. She was 21 years old. I went to Guatemala and she had sold out the National Theater of Guatemala. And I watched her walk up on stage in her red short dress, and high heels, and she stood there and she said, "My name is Marsha. I was beaten by my husband for five years. He almost murdered me. I left and you can too." And the entire 2,000 people went absolutely crazy. There's a woman named Esther Chavez who I met in Juarez, Mexico. And Esther Chavez was a brilliant accountant in Mexico City; she was 72 years old; and she was planning to retire. She went to Juarez to take care of an ailing aunt, and over the course of it, she began to discover what was happening to the murdered and disappeared women of Juarez. She gave up her life; she moved to Juarez; she started to write the stories which documented the disappeared women. 300 women have disappeared in a border town because they're brown and poor. There has been no response to the disappearance, and not one person has been held accountable. She began to document it; she opened a center called Casa Amiga; and in six years, she has literally brought this to the consciousness of the world. We were there a week ago, when there were 7,000 people on the street, and it was truly a miracle. And as we walked through the streets, the people of Juarez, who normally don't even come into the streets because the streets are so dangerous, literally stood there and wept to see that other people from the world had showed up for that particular community. There's another woman named Agnes. And Agnes, for me, epitomizes what a vagina warrior is. I met her three years ago in Kenya. And Agnes was mutilated as a little girl, she was circumcised against her will when she was 10 years old, and she really made a decision that she didn't want this practice to continue anymore in her community. So when she got older she created this incredible thing: it's an anatomical sculpture of a woman's body; it's half a woman's body. And she walked through the Rift Valley, and she had vagina and vagina replacement parts where she would teach girls and parents and boys and girls what a healthy vagina looks like, and what a mutilated vagina looks like. And in the course of her travel she walked literally for eight years through the Rift Valley, through dust, through sleeping on the ground -- because the Masais are nomads, and she would literally have to find them, and they would move, and she would find them again. She saved 1,500 girls from being cut. And in that time she created an alternative ritual which involved girls coming of age without the cut. When we met her three years ago, we said, "What could V-Day do for you?" And she said, "Well, if you got me a Jeep, I could get around a lot faster." (Laughter) So we bought her a Jeep. And in the year that she had the Jeep, she saved 4,500 girls from being cut. So then we said to her, "Agnes, well, what else could we do for you?" And she said, "Well, Eve, you know, if you gave me some money, I could open a house and girls could run away and they could be saved." And I want to tell this little story about my own beginnings because it's very interrelated to happiness and Agnes. When I was a little girl -- and I grew up in a wealthy community; it was an upper-middle class white community, and it had all the trappings and the looks of a perfectly nice, wonderful, great life. And everyone was supposed to be happy in that community and, in fact, my life was hell. I lived with an alcoholic father who beat me and molested me, and it was all inside that. And always as a child I had this fantasy that somebody would come and rescue me. And I actually made up a little character whose name was Mr. Alligator, and I would call him up when things got really bad, and I would say it was time to come and pick me up. And I would go and pack a little bag and I would wait for Mr. Alligator to come. Now, Mr. Alligator never did come, but the idea of Mr. Alligator coming actually saved my sanity and made it OK for me to keep going because I believed, in the distance, there would be someone coming to rescue me. Cut to 40-some-odd years later, we go to Kenya, and we're walking, we arrive at the opening of this house -- and Agnes hadn't let me come to the house for days because they were preparing this whole ritual. And I want to tell you a great story. When Agnes first started fighting to stop female genital mutilation in her community, she had become an outcast, and she was exiled and she was slandered, and the whole community turned against her. But, being a vagina warrior, she kept going, and she kept committing herself to transforming consciousness. And in the Masai community, goats and cows are the most valued possession. They're like the Mercedes-Benz of the Rift Valley. And she said, two days before the house opened, two different people arrived to give her a goat each, and she said to me, "I knew then that female genital mutilation would end one day in Africa." Anyway, we arrived, and when we arrived, there were hundreds of girls dressed in red, homemade dresses -- which is the color of the Masai and the color of V-Day -- and they greeted us, and they had made up these songs that they were singing about the end of suffering, and the end of mutilation, and they walked us down the path. And it was a gorgeous day in the African sun, and the dust was flying and the girls were dancing, and there was this house, and it said, "V-Day Safe House for the Girls." And it hit me in that moment that it had taken 47 years, but that Mr. Alligator had finally shown up. And he'd show up obviously in a form that it took me a long time to understand, which is that when we give in the world what we want the most, we heal the broken part inside each of us. And I feel, in the last eight years, that this journey, this miraculous vagina journey, has taught me this really simple thing, which is that happiness exists in action; it exists in telling the truth and saying what your truth is; and it exists in giving away what you want the most. And I feel that knowledge and that journey has been an extraordinary privilege, and I feel really blessed to have been here today to communicate that to you. Thank you very much. (Applause)

I want to share with you over the next 18 minutes a pretty incredible idea. Actually, it's a really big idea. But to get us started, I want to ask if everyone could just close your eyes for two seconds and try and think of a technology or a bit of science that you think has changed the world. Now I bet, in this audience, you're thinking of some really incredible technology, some stuff that I haven't even heard of, I'm absolutely sure. But I'm also sure, pretty sure, that absolutely nobody is thinking of this. This is a polio vaccine. And it's a great thing actually that nobody's had to think about it here today because it means that we can take this for granted. This is a great technology. We can take it completely for granted. But it wasn't always that way. Even here in California, if we were to go back just a few years, it was a very different story. People were terrified of this disease. They were terrified of polio, and it would cause public panic. And it was because of scenes like this. In this scene, people are living in an iron lung. These are people who were perfectly healthy two or three days before, and then two days later, they can no longer breathe, and this polio virus has paralyzed not only their arms and their legs, but also their breathing muscles. And they were going to spend the rest of their lives, usually, in this iron lung to breathe for them. This disease was terrifying. There was no cure, and there was no vaccine. The disease was so terrifying that the president of the United States launched an extraordinary national effort to find a way to stop it. Twenty years later, they succeeded and developed the polio vaccine. It was hailed as a scientific miracle in the late 1950s. Finally, a vaccine that could stop this awful disease, and here in the United States it had an incredible impact. As you can see, the virus stopped, and it stopped very, very fast. But this wasn't the case everywhere in the world. And it happened so fast in the United States, however, that even just last month Jon Stewart said this: (Video) Jon Stewart: Where is polio still active? Because I thought that had been eradicated in the way that smallpox had been eradicated. Bruce Aylward: Oops. Jon, polio's almost been eradicated. But the reality is that polio still exists today. We made this map for Jon to try to show him exactly where polio still exists. This is the picture. There's not very much left in the world. But the reason there's not very much left is because there's been an extraordinary public/private partnership working behind the scenes, almost unknown, I'm sure to most of you here today. It's been working for 20 years to try and eradicate this disease, and it's got it down to these few cases that you can see here on this graphic. But just last year, we had an incredible shock and realized that almost just isn't good enough with a virus like polio. And this is the reason: in two countries that hadn't had this disease for more than probably a decade, on opposite sides of the globe, there was suddenly terrible polio outbreaks. Hundreds of people were paralyzed. Hundreds of people died -- children as well as adults. And in both cases, we were able to use genetic sequencing to look at the polio viruses, and we could tell these viruses were not from these countries. They had come from thousands of miles away. And in one case, it originated on another continent. And not only that, but when they came into these countries, then they got on commercial jetliners probably and they traveled even farther to other places like Russia, where, for the first time in over a decade last year, children were crippled and paralyzed by a disease that they had not seen for years. Now all of these outbreaks that I just showed you, these are under control now, and it looks like they'll probably stop very, very quickly. But the message was very clear. Polio is still a devastating, explosive disease. It's just happening in another part of the world. And our big idea is that the scientific miracle of this decade should be the complete eradication of poliomyelitis. So I want to tell you a little bit about what this partnership, the Polio Partnership, is trying to do. We're not trying to control polio. We're not trying to get it down to just a few cases, because this disease is like a root fire; it can explode again if you don't snuff it out completely. So what we're looking for is a permanent solution. We want a world in which every child, just like you guys, can take for granted a polio-free world. So we're looking for a permanent solution, and this is where we get lucky. This is one of the very few viruses in the world where there are big enough cracks in its armor that we can try to do something truly extraordinary. This virus can only survive in people. It can't live for a very long time in people. It doesn't survive in the environment hardly at all. And we've got pretty good vaccines, as I've just showed you. So we are trying to wipe out this virus completely. What the polio eradication program is trying to do is to kill the virus itself that causes polio everywhere on Earth. Now we don't have a great track record when it comes to doing something like this, to eradicating diseases. It's been tried six times in the last century, and it's been successful exactly once. And this is because disease eradication, it's still the venture capital of public health. The risks are massive, but the pay-off -- economic, humanitarian, motivational -- it's absolutely huge. One congressman here in the United States thinks that the entire investment that the U.S. put into smallpox eradication pays itself off every 26 days -- in foregone treatment costs and vaccination costs. And if we can finish polio eradication, the poorest countries in the world are going to save over 50 billion dollars in the next 25 years alone. So those are the kind of stakes that we're after. But smallpox eradication was hard; it was very, very hard. And polio eradication, in many ways, is even tougher, and there's a few reasons for that. The first is that, when we started trying to eradicate polio about 20 years ago, more than twice as many countries were infected than had been when we started off with smallpox. And there were more than 10 times as many people living in these countries. So it was a massive effort. The second challenge we had was -- in contrast to the smallpox vaccine, which was very stable, and a single dose protected you for life -- the polio vaccine is incredibly fragile. It deteriorates so quickly in the tropics that we've had to put this special vaccine monitor on every single vial so that it will change very quickly when it's exposed to too much heat, and we can tell that it's not a good vaccine to use on a child -- it's not potent; it's not going to protect them. Even then, kids need many doses of the vaccine. But the third challenge we have -- and probably even bigger one, the biggest challenge -- is that, in contrast to smallpox where you could always see your enemy -- every single person almost who was infected with smallpox had this telltale rash. So you could get around the disease; you could vaccinate around the disease and cut it off. With polio it's almost completely different. The vast majority of people who are infected with the polio virus show absolutely no sign of the disease. So you can't see the enemy most of the time, and as a result, we've needed a very different approach to eradicate polio than what was done with smallpox. We've had to create one of the largest social movements in history. There's over 10 million people, probably 20 million people, largely volunteers, who have been working over the last 20 years in what has now been called the largest internationally-coordinated operation in peacetime. These people, these 20 million people, vaccinate over 500 million children every single year, multiple times at the peak of our operation. Now giving the polio vaccine is simple. It's just two drops, like that. But reaching 500 million people is much, much tougher. And these vaccinators, these volunteers, they have got to dive headlong into some of the toughest, densest urban slums in the world. They've got to trek under sweltering suns to some of the most remote, difficult to reach places in the world. And they also have to dodge bullets, because we have got to operate during shaky cease-fires and truces to try and vaccinate children, even in areas affected by conflict. One reporter who was watching our program in Somalia about five years ago -- a place which has eradicated polio, not once, but twice, because they got reinfected. He was sitting outside of the road, watching one of these polio campaigns unfold, and a few months later he wrote: "This is foreign aid at its most heroic." And these heroes, they come from every walk of life, all sorts of backgrounds. But one of the most extraordinary is Rotary International. This is a group whose million-strong army of volunteers have been working to eradicate polio for over 20 years. They're right at the center of the whole thing. Now it took years to build up the infrastructure for polio eradication -- more than 15 years, much longer than it should have -- but once it was built, the results were striking. Within a couple of years, every country that started polio eradication rapidly eradicated all three of their polio viruses, with the exception of four countries that you see here. And in each of those, it was only part of the country. And then, by 1999, one of the three polio viruses that we were trying to eradicate had been completely eradicated worldwide -- proof of concept. And then today, there's been a 99 percent reduction -- greater than 99 percent reduction -- in the number of children who are being paralyzed by this awful disease. When we started, over 20 years ago, 1,000 children were being paralyzed every single day by this virus. Last year, it was 1,000. And at the same time, the polio eradication program has been working to help with a lot of other areas. It's been working to help control pandemic flu, SARS for example. It's also tried to save children by doing other things -- giving vitamin A drops, giving measles shots, giving bed nets against malaria even during some of these campaigns. But the most exciting thing that the polio eradication program has been doing has been to force us, the international community, to reach every single child, every single community, the most vulnerable people in the world, with the most basic of health services, irrespective of geography, poverty, culture and even conflict. So things were looking very exciting, and then about five years ago, this virus, this ancient virus, started to fight back. The first problem we ran into was that, in these last four countries, the strongholds of this virus, we just couldn't seem to get the virus rooted out. And then to make the matters even worse, the virus started to spread out of these four places, especially northern India and northern Nigeria, into much of Africa, Asia, and even into Europe, causing horrific outbreaks in places that had not seen this disease for decades. And then, in one of the most important, tenacious and toughest reservoirs of the polio virus in the world, we found that our vaccine was working half as well as it should have. In conditions like this, the vaccine just couldn't get the grip it needed to in the guts of these children and protect them the way that it needed to. Now at that time, there was a great, as you can imagine, frustration -- let's call it frustration -- it started to grow very, very quickly. And all of a sudden, some very important voices in the world of public health started to say, "Hang on. We should abandon this idea of eradication. Let's settle for control -- that's good enough." Now as seductive as the idea of control sounds, it's a false premise. The brutal truth is, if we don't have the will or the skill, or even the money that we need to reach children, the most vulnerable children in the world, with something as simple as an oral polio vaccine, then pretty soon, more than 200,000 children are again going to be paralyzed by this disease every single year. There's absolutely no question. These are children like Umar. Umar is seven years old, and he's from northern Nigeria. He lives in a family home there with his eight brothers and sisters. Umar also has polio. Umar was paralyzed for life. His right leg was paralyzed in 2004. This leg, his right leg, now takes an awful beating because he has to half-crawl, because it's faster to move that way to keep up with his friends, keep up with his brothers and sisters, than to get up on his crutches and walk. But Umar is a fantastic student. He's an incredible kid. As you probably can't see the detail here, but this is his report card, and you'll see, he's got perfect scores. He got 100 percent in all the important things, like nursery rhymes, for example there. But you know I'd love to be able to tell you that Umar is a typical kid with polio these days, but it's not true. Umar is an exceptional kid in exceptional circumstances. The reality of polio today is something very different. Polio strikes the poorest communities in the world. It leaves their children paralyzed, and it drags their families deeper into poverty, because they're desperately searching and they're desperately spending the little bit of savings that they have, trying in vain to find a cure for their children. We think children deserve better. And so when the going got really tough in the polio eradication program about two years ago, when people were saying, "We should call it off," the Polio Partnership decided to buckle down once again and try and find innovative new solutions, new ways to get to the children that we were missing again and again. In northern India, we started mapping the cases using satellite imaging like this, so that we could guide our investments and vaccinator shelters, so we could get to the millions of children on the Koshi River basin where there are no other health services. In northern Nigeria, the political leaders and the traditional Muslim leaders, they got directly involved in the program to help solve the problems of logistics and community confidence. And now they've even started using these devices -- speaking of cool technology -- these little devices, little GIS trackers like this, which they put into the vaccine carriers of their vaccinators. And then they can track them, and at the end of the day, they look and see, did these guys get every single street, every single house. This is the kind of commitment now we're seeing to try and reach all of the children we've been missing. And in Afghanistan, we're trying new approaches -- access negotiators. We're working closely with the International Committee of the Red Cross to ensure that we can reach every child. But as we tried these extraordinary things, as people went to this trouble to try and rework their tactics, we went back to the vaccine -- it's a 50-year-old vaccine -- and we thought, surely we can make a better vaccine, so that when they finally get to these kids, we can have a better bang for our buck. And this started an incredible collaboration with industry, and within six months, we were testing a new polio vaccine that targeted, just two years ago, the last two types of polio in the world. Now June the ninth, 2009, we got the first results from the first trial with this vaccine, and it turned out to be a game-changer. The new vaccine had twice the impact on these last couple of viruses as the old vaccine had, and we immediately started using this. Well, in a couple of months we had to get it out of production. And it started rolling off the production lines and into the mouths of children around the world. And we didn't start with the easy places. The first place this vaccine was used was in southern Afghanistan, because it's in places like that where kids are going to benefit the most from technologies like this. Now here at TED, over the last couple of days, I've seen people challenging the audience again and again to believe in the impossible. So this morning at about seven o'clock, I decided that we'd try to drive Chris and the production crew here berserk by downloading all of our data from India again, so that you could see something that's just unfolding today, which proves that the impossible is possible. And only two years ago, people were saying that this is impossible. Now remember, northern India is the perfect storm when it comes to polio. Over 500,000 children are born in the two states that have never stopped polio -- Uttar Pradesh and Bihar -- 500,000 children every single month. Sanitation is terrible, and our old vaccine, you remember, worked half as well as it should have. And yet, the impossible is happening. Today marks exactly six months -- and for the first time in history, not a single child has been paralyzed in Uttar Pradesh or Bihar. (Applause) India's not unique. In Umar's home country of Nigeria, a 95 percent reduction in the number of children paralyzed by polio last year. And in the last six months, we've had less places reinfected by polio than at any other time in history. Ladies and gentlemen, with a combination of smart people, smart technology and smart investments, polio can now be eradicated anywhere. We have major challenges, you can imagine, to finish this job, but as you've also seen, it's doable, it has great secondary benefits, and polio eradication is a great buy. And as long as any child anywhere is paralyzed by this virus, it's a stark reminder that we are failing, as a society, to reach children with the most basic of services. And for that reason, polio eradication: it's the ultimate in equity and it's the ultimate in social justice. The huge social movement that's been involved in polio eradication is ready to do way more for these children. It's ready to reach them with bed nets, with other things. But capitalizing on their enthusiasm, capitalizing on their energy means finishing the job that they started 20 years ago. Finishing polio is a smart thing to do, and it's the right thing to do. Now we're in tough times economically. But as David Cameron of the United Kingdom said about a month ago when he was talking about polio, "There's never a wrong time to do the right thing." Finishing polio eradication is the right thing to do. And we are at a crossroads right now in this great effort over the last 20 years. We have a new vaccine, we have new resolve, and we have new tactics. We have the chance to write an entirely new polio-free chapter in human history. But if we blink now, we will lose forever the chance to eradicate an ancient disease. Here's a great idea to spread: End polio now. Help us tell the story. Help us build the momentum so that very soon every child, every parent everywhere can also take for granted a polio-free life forever. Thank you. (Applause) Bill Gates: Well Bruce, where do you think the toughest places are going to be? Where would you say we need to be the smartest? BA: The four places where you saw, that we've never stopped -- northern Nigeria, northern India, the southern corner of Afghanistan and bordering areas of Pakistan -- they're going to be the toughest. But the interesting thing is, of those three, India's looking real good, as you just saw in the data. And Afghanistan, Afghanistan, we think has probably stopped polio repeatedly. It keeps getting reinfected. So the tough ones: going to get the top of Nigeria finished and getting Pakistan finished. They're going to be the tough ones. BG: Now what about the money? Give us a sense of how much the campaign costs a year. And is it easy to raise that money? And what's it going to be like the next couple of years? BA: It's interesting. We spend right now about 750 million to 800 million dollars a year. That's what it costs to reach 500 million children. It sounds like a lot of money; it is a lot of money. But when you're reaching 500 million children multiple times -- 20, 30 cents to reach a child -- that's not very much money. But right now we don't have enough of that. We have a big gap in that money. We're cutting corners, and every time we cut corners, more places get infected that shouldn't have, and it just slows us down. And that great buy costs us a little bit more. BG: Well, hopefully we'll get the word out, and the governments will keep their generosity up. So good luck. We're all in this with you. Thank you. (BA: Thank you.) (Applause)

I've always wanted to be a cyborg. One of my favorite shows as a kid was "The Six Million Dollar Man," and this is a little bit closer to the 240 dollar man or so, but -- (Laughter) At at any rate. I would normally feel very self-conscious and geeky wearing this around, but a few days ago I saw one world-renowned statistician swallowing swords on stage here, so I figure it's OK amongst this group. But that's not what I want to talk about today. I want to talk about toys, and the power that I see inherent in them. When I was a kid, I attended Montessori school up to sixth grade in Atlanta, Georgia. And at the time I didn't think much about it, but then later, I realized that that was the high point of my education. From that point on, everything else was pretty much downhill. And it wasn't until later, as I started making games, that -- I really actually think of them more as toys. People call me a game designer, but I really think of these things more as toys. But I started getting very interested in Maria Montessori and her methods, and the way she went about things, and the way she thought it very valuable for kids to kind of discover things on their own rather than being taught these things overtly. And she would design these toys, where kids in playing with the toys would actually come to understand these deep principles of life and nature through play. And since they discovered those things, it really stuck with them so much more, and also they would experience their own failures; there was a failure-based aspect to learning there. It was very important. And so, the games that I do, I think of really more as modern Montessori toys. And I really kind of want them to be presented in a way to where kids can kind of explore and discover their own principles. So a few years ago, I actually started getting very interested in the SETI program. And that's the way I work. I get interested in different kinds of subjects, I dive in, I research them, and then I try to figure out how to craft a toy around that, so that other people can kind of experience the same sense of discovery as I did as I was learning that subject. And it kind of led me to astrobiology, which is the study of possible life in the universe. And then Drake's Equation, which is looking at the probability of life arising on planets, how long it might last, how many planets are out there, stuff like that. And I started looking at how interesting Drake's Equation was, because it spanned all these different subjects -- physics, chemistry, sociology, economics, astronomy. And another thing that really impressed me a long time ago was "Powers of Ten," Charles and Ray Eames' film. And I started putting those two together and wondering, could I build a toy where kids would kind of trip across all these interesting principles of life, as it exists and as it might go in the future. Things where you might trip across things like the Copernican Principle, the Fermi Paradox, the Anthropic Principle, the origin of life. And so I'm going to show you a toy today that I've been working on, that I think of more than anything else as kind of a philosophy toy. In playing this toy, you kind of -- this will bring up philosophical questions in you. This game's called "Spore." I've been working on it for several years. It's getting pretty close to finished now. It occurs at all these different scales, first of all, from very, very small to very, very large. I'm just going to pop in at the start of the game. And you actually start this game in a drop of water, as a very, very small single-cell creature, and right off the bat you basically just have to live, survive, reproduce. So here we are, at a very microscopic scale, swimming around. And I actually realize that cells don't have eyes, but it helps to make it cute. The players are going to play through every generation of this species, and as you play the game the creature is actually growing bit by bit. And as we start growing the camera will actually start zooming out, and things that you see in the background there will actually start slowly pulling into the foreground, showing you a little bit of what you'll be interacting with as you grow. So as we eat, the camera starts pulling out, and then we start interacting with kind of larger and larger organisms. Now, we actually play through many generations here, at the cellular scale. I'm going to skip ahead here. At some point we get larger, and we actually get to a macro-evolution scale. Now at this point we're leaving the water, and one thing that's kind of important about this game is that, at every level, the player is designing their creature, and that's a fundamental aspect of this. Now, in the evolution game here, the creature scale, basically you have to eat, survive, and then reproduce. You know, very Darwinian. One thing we noticed with "The Sims," which is a game I did earlier, is that players love making stuff. When they were able to make stuff in the game they had a tremendous amount of empathy in connection to it. Even if it wasn't as pretty as what other people would make it -- as a professional artist would make for games -- it really stuck with them and they really cared about what would happen to it. So at this point, we've left the water, and now with this little creature -- we could bring up the volume a little bit -- and now we might try to eat. We might sneak up on this little guy over here maybe, and try and eat him. OK, well, we fight. OK, we got him. Now we get a meal. So really, at this part of the game, what we're doing is we're running around and surviving, and also getting to the next generation, because we're going to play through every generation of this creature. We can mate, so I'm going to see if one of these creatures wants to mate with me. Yeah. We didn't want to replay actual evolution with humans and all that, because it's almost more interesting to look at alternate possibilities in evolution. Evolution is usually presented as this one path that we took through, but really it represents this huge set of possibilities. Now once we mate, we click on the egg. And this is where the game starts getting interesting, because one of the things we really focused on here was giving the players very high-leverage tools, so that for a very small amount of effort the player can make something very cool. And it involves a lot of intelligence on the tool side. But basically, this is the editor where we're going to design the next generation of our creature. So it has a little spine. I can move around here. I can extend. I can also inflate or deflate it with the mouse wheel, so you sculpt it like clay. We have parts here that I can put on or pull off. The idea is that the player can basically design anything they can think of in this editor, and we'll basically bring it to life. So, for instance, I might put some limbs on the character here. I'll inflate them kind of large. And in this case I might decide I'm going to put -- I'll put mouths on the limbs. So pretty much players are encouraged to be very creative in the game. Here, I'll give it one eye in the middle, maybe scale it up a bit. Point it down. And I'll also give it a few legs. So in some sense we want this to feel like an amplifier for the player's imagination, so that with a very small number of clicks a player can create something that they didn't really think was possible before. You know, this is almost like designing something like Maya that an eight-year-old can use. But really the goal here was, within about a minute, I wanted somebody to replicate what typically takes a pictorial artist several weeks to create. OK, now I'll put some hands on it. OK, so here I've basically thrown together a little creature. Let me give it a little weapon on the tail here, so it can fight. OK, so that's the complete model. Now we can actually go to the painting phase. Now, at this phase, the program actually has some understanding of the topology of this creature. It kind of knows where the backbone is, where the spine, the limbs are. It kind of knows how stripes should run, how it should be shaded. And so we're procedurally generating the texture map, and this is something a texture artist would take many, many days to work on. And then we can test it out, once we've done that, and see how it would move around. And so at this point the computer is procedurally animating this creature. It's looking at whatever I've designed. It will actually bring it to life. And I can see how it might dance. (Laughter) how it might show emotions, how it might fight. So it's acting with its two mouths there. I can even have it pose for a photo. Snap a little photo of it. (Laughter) So at any rate, then I bring this back into the game. It's born, and I play the next generation of my creature through evolution. Now again, the empathy that the players have when they create the content is tremendous. Now, when players create content in this game, it's automatically sent up to a server and then redistributed to all the other players transparently. So in fact, as I'm interacting in this world with other creatures, these creatures are transparently coming from other players as they play. So the process of playing the game is a process of building up this huge database of content. And pretty much everything you're going to see in this game, there's an editor for in the game that the player can create, all the way up through civilization. This is my baby. When I eat, I'll actually start growing. This is the next generation. But I'm going to skip way ahead here. Now, normally what would happen is these creatures would work their way up, eventually become intelligent. I'd start dealing with tribes, cities and civilizations of them over time. I'm going to skip way ahead here to the space phase. Eventually they would go out into space, and start colonizing and exploring the universe. Now really, in some sense, I want the players to be building this world in their imagination, and then extracting it from them with the least amount of pain. So that's kind of what these tools are about, are: how do we make the game play the player's imagination-amplifier? And how do we make these tools, these editors, something that are just as fun as the game itself? So this is the planet that we've been playing on up to this point in the game. So far the entire game has been played on the surface of this little world here. Now, at this point we're actually dealing with a very little toy planet. Almost, again, like the Montessori toy idea. You know, what happens if you give somebody a toy planet, and let them play with a lot of dynamics on it, what could they discover? What might they learn on this? This world was actually extracted from the player's imagination. So, this is the planet that the player evolved on. Things like the buildings, and the vehicles, the architecture, civilizations were all designed by the player up to this point. So here's a little city with some of our guys kind of walking around in it. And most games kind of put the player in the role of Luke Skywalker, this protagonist playing through this story. Really, this is more about putting the player in the role of George Lucas, you know? I want them, after they've played this game, to have extracted an entire world that they're now interacting with. Now, as we pull down here, we still have a whole set of creatures living on the surface of the planet. There are all these different dynamics going on here. In fact, I can look over here, and this is kind of a little simplified food web that's going on with the creatures. I can open this up and then scan what exists on the surface, and get some sense of the diversity of creatures that were brought in. Some of these were created by the player, others by other players and automatically sent over here. But there's a very simple little kind of calculation of what's required, how much plants are required for the herbivores to live, how many herbivores for the carnivores to eat, etc., that you actually have to balance actively. Now also with this phase, we're getting more and more God-like powers for the player, and you can kind of experiment with this planet again as a toy. So I can come in and I can do things, and just treat this planet as a lump of clay. We have very simple little weather systems you see here, very simple geology. For instance, I could open one of my tools here and then carve out rivers. So this whole thing is kind of like a big lump of clay, a sculpture. I can also play with the dynamics of this world over time. So one of the things I can do is start pumping more CO2 gases into the atmosphere, and so that's what I'm doing here. There's actually a little read out down there of our planetary atmosphere, pressure and temperature. So as I start pumping in more atmosphere, we're going to start pushing up the greenhouse gases here and if you'll start noticing, we start seeing the ocean levels rise over time. And our cities are going to be at risk too, because a lot of these are coastal cities. You can see the ocean levels are rising now and as they encroach upon the cities, I'll start losing cities here. So basically, I want the players to be able to experiment and explore a huge amount of failure space. So there goes one city. Now over time, this is actually going to heat up the planet. So at first what we're going to see is a global ocean rise here on this little toy planet, but then over time -- I can speed it up just a little bit -- we'll actually see the heat impact of that as well. So not only will it get hotter, but at some point it's going to get so hot the oceans will entirely evaporate. So at first they'll go up, and then they'll evaporate, and that'll be my planet. So basically, what we're getting here is the sequel to "An Inconvenient Truth," in about two minutes, and that actually brings up an interesting point about games. Now here, our entire oceans are evaporating off the surface, and as it keeps getting hotter at some point the entire planet's going to melt down. Here it goes. So we're not only simulating biological dynamics -- food webs and all that -- but also geologic, you know, on a very simple core scale. And what's interesting to me about games, in some sense, is that I think we can take a lot of long-term dynamics and compress them into very short-term kind of experiences. Because it's so hard for people to think 50 or 100 years out, but when you can give them a toy, and they can experience these long-term dynamics in just a few minutes, I think it's an entirely different kind of point of view, where we're actually mapping, using the game to re-map our intuition. It's almost in the same way that a telescope or microscope recalibrates your eyesight; I think computer simulations can recalibrate your instinct across vast scales of both space and time. So here's our little solar system, as we pull away from our melted planet here. We actually have a couple of other planets in this solar system. Let's fly to another one. So in fact, we're going to have this unlimited number of worlds you can kind of explore here. Now, as we move into the future, and we start going out in this space and doing stuff, we're drawing a lot from things like science fiction. And all my favorite science fiction movies I want to basically play out here as different dynamics. So this planet actually has some life on it. Here it is, some indigenous life down here. Now one of the tools I can eventually earn for my UFO is a monolith that I can drop down. (Laughter) Now as you can see, these guys are actually starting to go up and bow to it, and over time, once they touch it, they will become intelligent. So I can actually pick a species on a planet and then make them sentient. You see, now they've actually gone to tribal dynamics. And now, because I'm actually the one here, I can, if I want to, get out of the UFO and walk up, and they should be worshipping me at this point as a god. (Laughter) At first they're a little freaked out. OK, well maybe they're not worshipping me. (Laughter) I think I'll leave before they get hostile. But we basically want a diversity of activities the players can play through this. Basically, I want to be able to play, "The Day the Earth Stood Still," "2001: A Space Odyssey," "Star Trek," "War Of the Worlds." Now as we pull away from this world -- we're going to keep pulling away from the star now. One of the things that always frustrated me a little bit about astronomy when I was a kid is how it was always presented so two-dimensionally and so static. As we pull away from the star here, we're actually going now out into interstellar space, and we're getting a sense of the space around our home star. Now what I really wanted to do is to present this, basically as wonderfully 3D as it is actually is. And not only that, but also show the dynamics, and a lot of the interesting objects that you might find, maybe like in the Hubble, at pretty much realistic frequencies and scales. So most people have no idea of the difference between like, an emission nebula and a planetary nebula. But these are the things that we can kind of put in this little galaxy here. So we're flying over here to what looks like a black hole. I want to basically have the entire zoo of Hubble objects that people can kind of interact with and play with, again, as toys. So here's a little black hole that we probably don't want to get too close to. But we also have stars and things as well. If we pull all the way back, we start seeing the entire galaxy here, kind of slowly in motion. And this is another thing where, typically when people present galaxies, it's always been these very beautiful photos, but they're always static. And when you actually bring it forward in time and start animating it, it's actually kind of amazing, what a galaxy would look like, fast forwarded. This would be about one million years a second, because you have about roughly one supernova every century or so. And so you'd have this wonderful sparkling thing, with the disk slowly rotating, and this is roughly what it would look like. And so really, part of this is about bringing the beauty of this, of the natural world, to somebody in a very imaginative way, so that they can start calibrating their instinct across these vast scales of space and time. Chris was wondering what kind of gods that the players would become. Because if you think about it, you're going to have 15-year-olds, 20-year-olds, whatever, flying around this universe. And they might be a nurturing god. They might be boot-strapping life on planets, trying to terra-form and spread civilization. You might be a vengeful god and going out and conquesting, because you actually can do that, you can go in and attack other intelligent races. You might be a networking god, building alliances, which you can also do in the game, or just curious, going around and wanting to explore as much as you possibly can. But basically, the reason why I make toys like this is because I think if there's one difference I could possibly make in the world, that I would choose to make, it's that I would like to somehow give people just a little bit better calibration on long-term thinking. Because I think most of the problems that our world is facing right now is the result of short-term thinking, and the fact that it is so hard for us to think 50, 100, or 1,000 years out. And I think by giving kids toys like this and letting them replay dynamics, very long-term dynamics over the short term, and getting some sense of what we're doing now, what it's going to be like in 100 years, I think probably is the most effective thing I can be doing to help the world. And so that's why I think, personally, that toys can change the world. Thank you.

Today, I'd like to talk with you about something that should be a totally uncontroversial topic. But, unfortunately, it's become incredibly controversial. This year, if you think about it, over a billion couples will have sex with one another. Couples like this one, and this one, and this one, and, yes, even this one. (Laughter) And my idea is this -- all these men and women should be free to decide whether they do or do not want to conceive a child. And they should be able to use one of these birth control methods to act on their decision. Now, I think you'd have a hard time finding many people who disagree with this idea. Over one billion people use birth control without any hesitation at all. They want the power to plan their own lives and to raise healthier, better educated and more prosperous families. But, for an idea that is so broadly accepted in private, birth control certainly generates a lot of opposition in public. Some people think when we talk about contraception that it's code for abortion, which it's not. Some people -- let's be honest -- they're uncomfortable with the topic because it's about sex. Some people worry that the real goal of family planning is to control populations. These are all side issues that have attached themselves to this core idea that men and women should be able to decide when they want to have a child. And as a result, birth control has almost completely and totally disappeared from the global health agenda. The victims of this paralysis are the people of sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. Here in Germany, the proportion of people that use contraception is about 66 percent. That's about what you'd expect. In El Salvador, very similar, 66 percent. Thailand, 64 percent. But let's compare that to other places, like Uttar Pradesh, one of the largest states in India. In fact, if Uttar Pradesh was its own country, it would be the fifth largest country in the world. Their contraception rate -- 29 percent. Nigeria, the most populous country in Africa, 10 percent. Chad, 2 percent. Let's just take one country in Africa, Senegal. Their rate is about 12 percent. But why is it so low? One reason is that the most popular contraceptives are rarely available. Women in Africa will tell you over and over again that what they prefer today is an injectable. They get it in their arm -- and they go about four times a year, they have to get it every three months -- to get their injection. The reason women like it so much in Africa is they can hide it from their husbands, who sometimes want a lot of children. The problem is every other time a woman goes into a clinic in Senegal, that injection is stocked out. It's stocked out 150 days out of the year. So can you imagine the situation -- she walks all this way to go get her injection. She leaves her field, sometimes leaves her children, and it's not there. And she doesn't know when it's going to be available again. This is the same story across the continent of Africa today. And so what we've created as a world has become a life-and-death crisis. There are 100,000 women [per year] who say they don't want to be pregnant and they die in childbirth -- 100,000 women a year. There are another 600,000 women [per year] who say they didn't want to be pregnant in the first place, and they give birth to a baby and her baby dies in that first month of life. I know everyone wants to save these mothers and these children. But somewhere along the way, we got confused by our own conversation. And we stopped trying to save these lives. So if we're going to make progress on this issue, we have to be really clear about what our agenda is. We're not talking about abortion. We're not talking about population control. What I'm talking about is giving women the power to save their lives, to save their children's lives and to give their families the best possible future. Now, as a world, there are lots of things we have to do in the global health community if we want to make the world better in the future -- things like fight diseases. So many children today die of diarrhea, as you heard earlier, and pneumonia. They kill literally millions of children a year. We also need to help small farmers -- farmers who plow small plots of land in Africa -- so that they can grow enough food to feed their children. And we have to make sure that children are educated around the world. But one of the simplest and most transformative things we can do is to give everybody access to birth control methods that almost all Germans have access to and all Americans, at some point, they use these tools during their life. And I think as long as we're really clear about what our agenda is, there's a global movement waiting to happen and ready to get behind this totally uncontroversial idea. When I grew up, I grew up in a Catholic home. I still consider myself a practicing Catholic. My mom's great-uncle was a Jesuit priest. My great-aunt was a Dominican nun. She was a schoolteacher and a principal her entire life. In fact, she's the one who taught me as a young girl how to read. I was very close to her. And I went to Catholic schools for my entire childhood until I left home to go to university. In my high school, Ursuline Academy, the nuns made service and social justice a high priority in the school. Today, in the [Gates] Foundation's work, I believe I'm applying the lessons that I learned in high school. So, in the tradition of Catholic scholars, the nuns also taught us to question received teachings. And one of the teachings that we girls and my peers questioned was is birth control really a sin? Because I think one of the reasons we have this huge discomfort talking about contraception is this lingering concern that if we separate sex from reproduction, we're going to promote promiscuity. And I think that's a reasonable question to be asked about contraception -- what is its impact on sexual morality? But, like most women, my decision about birth control had nothing to do with promiscuity. I had a plan for my future. I wanted to go to college. I studied really hard in college, and I was proud to be one of the very few female computer science graduates at my university. I wanted to have a career, so I went on to business school and I became one of the youngest female executives at Microsoft. I still remember, though, when I left my parents' home to move across the country to start this new job at Microsoft. They had sacrificed a lot to give me five years of higher education. But they said, as I left home -- and I literally went down the front steps, down the porch at home -- and they said, "Even though you've had this great education, if you decide to get married and have kids right away, that's OK by us, too." They wanted me to do the thing that would make me the very happiest. I was free to decide what that would be. It was an amazing feeling. In fact, I did want to have kids -- but I wanted to have them when I was ready. And so now, Bill and I have three. And when our eldest daughter was born, we weren't, I would say, exactly sure how to be great parents. Maybe some of you know that feeling. And so we waited a little while before we had our second child. And it's no accident that we have three children that are spaced three years apart. Now, as a mother, what do I want the very most for my children? I want them to feel the way I did -- like they can do anything they want to do in life. And so, what has struck me as I've travelled the last decade for the foundation around the world is that all women want that same thing. Last year, I was in Nairobi, in the slums, in one called Korogocho -- which literally means when translated, "standing shoulder to shoulder." And I spoke with this women's group that's pictured here. And the women talked very openly about their family life in the slums, what it was like. And they talked quite intimately about what they did for birth control. Marianne, in the center of the screen in the red sweater, she summed up that entire two-hour conversation in a phrase that I will never forget. She said, "I want to bring every good thing to this child before I have another." And I thought -- that's it. That's universal. We all want to bring every good thing to our children. But what's not universal is our ability to provide every good thing. So many women suffer from domestic violence. And they can't even broach the subject of contraception, even inside their own marriage. There are many women who lack basic education. Even many of the women who do have knowledge and do have power don't have access to contraceptives. For 250 years, parents around the world have been deciding to have smaller families. This trend has been steady for a quarter of a millennium, across cultures and across geographies, with the glaring exception of sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. The French started bringing down their family size in the mid-1700s. And over the next 150 years, this trend spread all across Europe. The surprising thing to me, as I learned this history, was that it spread not along socioeconomic lines but around cultural lines. People who spoke the same language made that change as a group. They made the same choice for their family, whether they were rich or whether they were poor. The reason that trend toward smaller families spread was that this whole way was driven by an idea -- the idea that couples can exercise conscious control over how many children they have. This is a very powerful idea. It means that parents have the ability to affect the future, not just accept it as it is. In France, the average family size went down every decade for 150 years in a row until it stabilized. It took so long back then because the contraceptives weren't that good. In Germany, this transition started in the 1880s, and it took just 50 years for family size to stabilize in this country. And in Asia and Latin America, the transition started in the 1960s, and it happened much faster because of modern contraception. I think, as we go through this history, it's important to pause for a moment and to remember why this has become such a contentious issue. It's because some family planning programs resorted to unfortunate incentives and coercive policies. For instance, in the 1960s, India adopted very specific numeric targets and they paid women to accept having an IUD placed in their bodies. Now, Indian women were really smart in this situation. When they went to get an IUD inserted, they got paid six rupees. And so what did they do? They waited a few hours or a few days, and they went to another service provider and had the IUD removed for one rupee. For decades in the United States, African-American women were sterilized without their consent. The procedure was so common it became known as the Mississippi appendectomy -- a tragic chapter in my country's history. And as recently as the 1990s, in Peru, women from the Andes region were given anesthesia and they were sterilized without their knowledge. The most startling thing about this is that these coercive policies weren't even needed. They were carried out in places where parents already wanted to lower their family size. Because in region after region, again and again, parents have wanted to have smaller families. There's no reason to believe that African women have innately different desires. Given the option, they will have fewer children. The question is: will we invest in helping all women get what they want now? Or, are we going to condemn them to some century-long struggle, as if this was still revolutionary France and the best method was coitus interruptus? Empowering parents -- it doesn't need justification. But here's the thing -- our desire to bring every good thing to our children is a force for good throughout the world. It's what propels societies forward. In that same slum in Nairobi, I met a young businesswoman, and she was making backpacks out of her home. She and her young kids would go to the local jeans factory and collect scraps of denim. She'd create these backpacks and resell them. And when I talked with her, she had three children, and I asked her about her family. And she said she and her husband decided that they wanted to stop having children after their third one. And so when I asked her why, she simply said, "Well, because I couldn't run my business if I had another child." And she explained the income that she was getting out of her business afforded her to be able to give an education to all three of her children. She was incredibly optimistic about her family's future. This is the same mental calculus that hundreds of millions of men and women have gone through. And evidence proves that they have it exactly right. They are able to give their children more opportunities by exercising control over when they have them. In Bangladesh, there's a district called Matlab. It's where researchers have collected data on over 180,000 inhabitants since 1963. In the global health community, we like to say it's one of the longest pieces of research that's been running. We have so many great health statistics. In one of the studies, what did they do? Half the villagers were chosen to get contraceptives. They got education and access to contraception. Twenty years later, following those villages, what we learned is that they had a better quality of life than their neighbors. The families were healthier. The women were less likely to die in childbirth. Their children were less likely to die in the first thirty days of life. The children were better nourished. The families were also wealthier. The adult women's wages were higher. Households had more assets -- things like livestock or land or savings. Finally, their sons and daughters had more schooling. So when you multiply these types of effects over millions of families, the product can be large-scale economic development. People talk about the Asian economic miracle of the 1980s -- but it wasn't really a miracle. One of the leading causes of economic growth across that region was this cultural trend towards smaller families. Sweeping changes start at the individual family level -- the family making a decision about what's best for their children. When they make that change and that decision, those become sweeping regional and national trends. When families in sub-Saharan Africa are given the opportunity to make those decisions for themselves, I think it will help spark a virtuous cycle of development in communities across the continent. We can help poor families build a better future. We can insist that all people have the opportunity to learn about contraceptives and have access to the full variety of methods. I think the goal here is really clear: universal access to birth control that women want. And for that to happen, it means that both rich and poor governments alike must make contraception a total priority. We can do our part, in this room and globally, by talking about the hundreds of millions of families that don't have access to contraception today and what it would do to change their lives if they did have access. I think if Marianne and the members of her women's group can talk about this openly and have this discussion out amongst themselves and in public, we can, too. And we need to start now. Because like Marianne, we all want to bring every good thing to our children. And where is the controversy in that? Thank you. (Applause) Chris Anderson: Thank you. I have some questions for Melinda. (Applause ends) Thank you for your courage and everything else. So, Melinda, in the last few years I've heard a lot of smart people say something to the effect of, "We don't need to worry about the population issue anymore. Family sizes are coming down naturally all over the world. We're going to peak at nine or 10 billion. And that's it." Are they wrong? Melinda Gates: If you look at the statistics across Africa, they are wrong. And I think we need to look at it, though, from a different lens. We need to look at it from the ground upwards. I think that's one of the reasons we got ourselves in so much trouble on this issue of contraception. We looked at it from top down and said we want to have different population numbers over time. Yes, we care about the planet. Yes, we need to make the right choices. But the choices have to be made at the family level. And it's only by giving people access and letting them choose what to do that you get those sweeping changes that we have seen globally -- except for sub-Saharan Africa and those places in South Asia and Afghanistan. CA: Some people on the right in America and in many conservative cultures around the world might say something like this: "It's all very well to talk about saving lives and empowering women and so on. But, sex is sacred. What you're proposing is going to increase the likelihood that lots of sex happens outside marriage. And that is wrong." What would you say to them? MG: I would say that sex is absolutely sacred. And it's sacred in Germany, and it's sacred in the United States, and it's sacred in France and so many places around the world. And the fact that 98 percent of women in my country who are sexually experienced say they use birth control doesn't make sex any less sacred. It just means that they're getting to make choices about their lives. And I think in that choice, we're also honoring the sacredness of the family and the sacredness of the mother's life and the childrens' lives by saving their lives. To me, that's incredibly sacred, too. CA: So what is your foundation doing to promote this issue? And what could people here and people listening on the web -- what would you like them to do? MG: I would say this -- join the conversation. We've listed the website up here. Join the conversation. Tell your story about how contraception has either changed your life or somebody's life that you know. And say that you're for this. We need a groundswell of people saying, "This makes sense. We've got to give all women access -- no matter where they live." And one of the things that we're going to do is do a large event July 11 in London, with a whole host of countries, a whole host of African nations, to all say we're putting this back on the global health agenda. We're going to commit resources to it, and we're going to do planning from the bottom up with governments to make sure that women are educated -- so that if they want the tool, they have it, and that they have lots of options available either through their local healthcare worker or their local community rural clinic. CA: Melinda, I'm guessing that some of those nuns who taught you at school are going to see this TED Talk at some point. Are they going to be horrified, or are they cheering you on? MG: I know they're going to see the TED Talk because they know that I'm doing it and I plan to send it to them. And, you know, the nuns who taught me were incredibly progressive. I hope that they'll be very proud of me for living out what they taught us about social justice and service. I have come to feel incredibly passionate about this issue because of what I've seen in the developing world. And for me, this topic has become very close to heart because you meet these women and they are so often voiceless. And yet they shouldn't be -- they should have a voice, they should have access. And so I hope they'll feel that I'm living out what I've learned from them and from the decades of work that I've already done at the foundation. CA: So, you and your team brought together today an amazing group of speakers to whom we're all grateful. Did you learn anything? (Laughter) MG: Oh my gosh, I learned so many things. I have so many follow-up questions. And I think a lot of this work is a journey. You heard the discussion about the journey through energy, or the journey through social design, or the journey in the coming and saying, "Why aren't there any women on this platform?" And I think for all of us who work on these development issues, you learn by talking to other people. You learn by doing. You learn by trying and making mistakes. And it's the questions you ask. Sometimes it's the questions you ask that helps lead to the answer the next person that can help you answer it. So I have lots of questions for the panelists from today. And I thought it was just an amazing day. CA: Melinda, thank you for inviting all of us on this journey with you. Thank you so much. MG: Great. Thanks, Chris.

We really need to put the best we have to offer within reach of our children. If we don't do that, we're going to get the generation we deserve. They're going to learn from whatever it is they have around them. And we, as now the elite, parents, librarians, professionals, whatever it is, a bunch of our activities are, in fact, in trying to get the best we have to offer within reach of those around us, or as broadly as we can. I'm going to start and end this talk with a couple things that are carved in stone. One is what's on the Boston Public Library. Carved above their door is, "Free to All." It's kind of an inspiring statement, and I'll go back at the end of this. I'm a librarian, and what I'm trying to do is bring all of the works of knowledge to as many people as want to read it. And the idea of using technology is perfect for us. I think we have the opportunity to one-up the Greeks. It's not easy to one-up the Greeks. But with the industriousness of the Egyptians, they were able to build the Library of Alexandria -- the idea of a copy of every book of all the peoples of the world. The problem was you actually had to go to Alexandria to go to it. On the other hand, if you did, then great things happened. I think we can one-up the Greeks and achieve something. And I'm going to try to argue only one point today: that universal access to all knowledge is within our grasp. So if I'm successful, then you'll actually come away thinking, yeah, we could actually achieve the great vision of everything ever published, everything that was ever meant for distribution, available to anybody in the world that's ever wanted to have access to it. Yes, there's issues about how money should be distributed, and that's still being refigured out. But I'd say there's plenty of money, and there's plenty of demand, so we can actually achieve that. But I'm going to go over the technological, social and sort of where are we as a whole, trying to get to that particular vision. And the way I'm going to try to do this is do it like the Amazon.com website, the books, music, video and just go step -- media type by media type, just go and say, all right, how're we doing on this? So if we start with books, you know, sort of where are we? Well, first you have to, as an engineer, scope the problem. How big is it? If you wanted to put all of the published works online so that anybody could have it available, well, how big a problem is it? Well, we don't really know, but the largest print library in the world is the Library of Congress. It's 26 million volumes, 26 million volumes. It is, by far and away, the largest print library in the world. And a book, if you had a book, is about a megabyte, so -- you know, if you had it in Microsoft Word. So a megabyte, 26 million megabytes is 26 terabytes -- it goes mega-, giga-, tera-. 26 terabytes. 26 terabytes fits in a computer system that's about this big, on spinning Linux drives, and it costs about 60,000 dollars. So for the cost of a house -- or around here, a garage -- you can put, you can have spinning all of the words in the Library of Congress. That's pretty neat. Then the question is, what do you get? You know, is it worth trying to get there? Do you actually want it online? Some of the first things that people do is they make book readers that allow you to search inside the books, and that's kind of fun. And you can download these things, and look around them in new and different ways. And you can get at them remotely, if you happen to have a laptop. There's starting to be some of these sort of page turn-y interfaces that look a whole lot like books in certain ways, and you can search them, make little tabs, and it's kind of cute -- still very book-like -- on your laptop. But I don't know, reading things on a laptop -- whenever I pull up my laptop, it always feels like work. I think that's one of the reasons why the Kindle is so great. I don't have to feel like I'm at work to read a Kindle. It's starting to be a little bit more specified. But I have to say that there's older technologies that I tend to like. I like the physical book. And I think we can go and use our technology to go and digitize things, put them on the Net, and then download, print them and bind them, and end up with books again. And we sort of said, well, how hard is this? And it turns out to not be very hard. We actually went off to make a bookmobile. And a bookmobile -- the size of a van with a satellite dish, a printer, binder and cutter, and kids make their own books. It costs about three dollars to download, print and bind a normal, old book. And they actually come out kind of nice looking. You can actually get really good-looking books for on the order of one penny per page, sort of the parts cost for doing this. So the idea of -- this technology actually may end up putting books back in people's hands again. There are some other bookmobiles running around. This is Eric Eldred making books at Walden Pond -- Thoreau's works. This is just before he got kicked out by the Parks Services, for competing with the bookstore there. In India, they've got another couple bookmobiles running around. And this is the opening day at the Library of Alexandria, the new Library of Alexandria, in Egypt. It was quite popularly attended. And kids starting to make their own books, and a happy kid with the first book that he's ever owned. So the idea of being able to use this technology to end up with paper where I can handle sort of sounds a little retro, but I think it still has its place. And being from the Silicon Valley, sort of utopian sort of world, we thought, if we can make this technology work in rural Uganda, we might have something. So we actually got some funding from the World Bank to try it out. And we found in about 30 days we could go and take a couple folks from Silicon Valley, fly them to Uganda, buy a car, set up the first Internet connection at the National Library of Uganda, figure out what they wanted, and get a program going making books in rural Uganda. And it actually -- so technologically, it works. What we found out of this is we didn't have the right books. So the books were in the library. We could get it to people, if they're digitized, but we didn't know how to quite get them digitized. Everybody thought the answer is, send things to India and China. And so we've tried that, and I'll go over that in a moment. There are some newer technologies for delivering that have happened that are actually quite exciting as well. One is a print-on-demand machine that looks like a Rube Goldberg machine. We have one of these things now. It's completely cool. It's all conveyor belt, and it makes a book. And it's called the "Espresso Book Machine," and in about 10 minutes, you can press a button and make a book. Something else I'm quite excited about in this particular domain, beyond these sort of kiosk-y things where you can get books on demand, is some of these new little screens that are coming out. And one of my favorites in this is the $100 laptop. And I don't mean to steal any thunder here, but we've gone and used one of these things to be an e-book reader. So here's one of the beta units and you can -- it actually turns out to be a really good-looking e-book reader. And we have a quick hack that we did to try to put one of our books on it, and it turns out that 200 dots per inch means that you can put scanned books on them that look really good. At 200 dots per inch, it's kind of the equivalent of a 300 dot print laser printer. We're in good enough shape. You actually can go and read scanned books quite easily. So the idea of electronic books is starting to come about. But how do you go about doing all this scanning? So we thought, okay, well, let's try out this send books to India thing. And there was a project with, funded by the National Science Foundation -- sent a bunch of scanners, and the American libraries were supposed to send books. Well, they didn't. They didn't want to send their books. So we bought 100,000 books and sent them to India. And then we learned why you don't want to send books to India. The lesson we learned out of this is, scan your own books. If you really care about books, you're going to scan them better, especially if they're valuable books. If they're new books and you can just, you know, butcher them, because you could just buy another one, that's not such a big deal in terms of doing high-quality scanning. But do things that you love. But the Indians have been scanning a lot of their own books -- about 300,000 now -- doing very well. The Chinese did over a million, and the Egyptians are about 30,000. But we sent -- thought, OK, if we're going to need to do this, let's do it in-library. How do we go and do this, and how do we get it down so that it's a cost point that we could afford? And we sort of picked the price point of 10 cents a page. If it's basically the cost of xeroxing to basically digitize, OCR, package it up, make it so that you could download, print and bind it -- the whole shebang -- we would have achieved something. So we started out trying to figure out. How do we get to 10 cents? And we tried these robot things, and they worked pretty well -- sort of these auto-page-turning things. If we can have Mars Rovers, you'd think you could turn pages. But it actually turns out to be pretty hard to turn pages, and the volume isn't there. So anyway -- so we ended up making our own book scanner, and with two digital, high-grade, professional digital cameras, controlled museum lighting, so even if it's a black and white book, you can go and get the proper intonation. So you basically do a beautiful, respectful job. This is not a fax, this is -- the idea is to do a beautiful job as you're going through these libraries. And we've been able to achieve 10 cents a page if we run things in volume. This is what it looks like at the University of Toronto. And actually, it turns out to, you know, pay a living wage. People seem to love it. Yes, it's a little boring, but some people kind of get into the Zen of it. (Laughter) And especially if it's kind of interesting books that you care about, in languages that you can read. We actually have been able to do a pretty good job of this, at getting 10 cents a page. So 10 cents a page, 300 pages in your average book, 30 dollars a book. The Library of Congress, if you did the whole darn thing -- 26 million books -- is about 750 million dollars, right? But a million books, I think, actually would be a pretty good start, and that would cost 30 million dollars. That's not that big a bill. And what we've been able to do is get into libraries. We've now got eight of these scanning centers in three countries, and libraries are up for having their books scanned. The Getty here is moving their books to the UCLA, which is where we have one these scanning centers, and scanning their out-of-copyright books, which is fabulous. So we're starting to get the institutional responsibility. The thing we're missing is the 10 cents. If we can get the 10 cents, all the rest of it flows. We've scanned about 200,000 books. Now we're scanning about 15,000 books a month, and it's starting to gear up another factor of two from there. So all in all, that's going very well. And we're starting to move out of the just out-of-copyright into the out-of-print world. So I think of -- we're kind of going from the out-of-copyright, library stuff, and Amazon.com is coming from the in-print world. And I think we'll meet in the middle some place, and have the classic thing that you have, which is a publishing system and a library system working in parallel. And so we're starting up a program to do out-of-print works, but loaning them. Exactly what loaning means, I'm not quite sure. But anyway, loaning out-of-print works from the Boston Public Library, the Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute and a few other libraries that are starting to participate in this program, to try out this model of where does a library stop and where does the bookstore take over. So all in all, it's possible to do this in large scale. We're also going back over microfilm and getting that online. So, we can do 10 cents a page, we're going 15,000 books a month and we've got about 250,000 books online, counting all the other projects that are starting to add in. So what I wanted to argue is, books are within our grasp. The idea of taking on the whole ball of wax is not that big a deal. Yes, it costs tens of millions, low hundreds of millions, but one time shot and we've got basically the history of printed literature online. And then, there's business model issues about how to try to effectively market it and get it to people. But it is within our grasp, technologically and law-wise, at least for the out of print and out of copyright, we suggest, to be able to get the whole darn thing online. Now let's go for audio, and I'm going to go through these. So how much is there? Well, as best we can tell, there are about two to three million disks having been published -- so 78s, long-playing records and CDs -- or at least that's the largest archives of published materials we've been able to sort of point at. It costs about 10 dollars a piece to go and take a disk and put it online, if you're doing things in volume. But we've found that the rights issues are really quite thorny. This is a fairly heavily litigated area, so we've found that there are niches in the music world that aren't served terribly well by the classic commercial publishing system. And we've been starting to make these available by going and offering shelf space on the Net. In the United States, it doesn't cost you to give something away. Right? If you give something to a charity or to the public, you get a pat on the back and a tax donation -- except on the Net, where you can go broke. If you put up a video of your garage band, and it starts getting heavily accessed, you can lose your guitars or your house. This doesn't make any sense. So we've offered unlimited storage, unlimited bandwidth, forever, for free, to anybody that has something to share that belongs in a library. And we've been getting a lot of takers. One is the rock 'n' rollers. The rock 'n' rollers had a tradition of sharing, as long as nobody made any money. You could -- concert recordings, it's not the commercial recordings, but concert recordings, started by the Grateful Dead. And we get about two or three bands a day signing up. They give permission, and we get about 40 or 50 concerts a day. We have about 40,000 concerts, everything the Grateful Dead ever did, up on the Net, so that people can see it and listen to this material. So audio is possible to put up, but the rights issues are really pretty thorny. We've got a lot of collections now -- a couple hundred thousand items -- and it's growing over time. Moving images: if you think of theatrical releases, there are not that many of them. As best we can tell, there are about 150,000 to 200,000 movies ever that are really meant for a large-scale theatrical distribution. It's just not that many. But half of those were Indian. But anyway, it's doable, but we've only found about a thousand of these things that -- to be out of copyright. So we've digitized those and made those available. But we've found that there's lots of other types of movies that haven't really seen the light of day -- archival films. We've found, also, a lot of political films, a lot of amateur films, all sorts of things that are basically needing a home, a permanent home. So we've been starting to make these available and it's grown to be very popular. We're not quite a YouTube. We tended towards longer-term things and also things that people can reuse and make into new movies, which has just been great fun. Television comes quite a bit larger. We started recording 20 channels of television 24 hours a day. It's sort of the biggest TiVo box you've ever seen. It's about a petabyte, so far, of worldwide television -- Russian, Chinese, Japanese, Iraqi, Al Jazeera, BBC, CNN, ABC, CBS, NBC -- 24 hours a day. We only put one week up, which is mostly for cost reasons, which is the 9/11, sort of from 9/11/2001. For one week, what did the world see? CNN was saying that Palestinians were dancing in the streets. Were they? Let's look at the Palestinian television and find out. How can we have critical thinking without being able to quote and being able to compare what happened in the past? And television is dreadfully unrecorded and unquotable, except by Jon Stewart, who does a fabulous job. So anyway, television is, I would suggest, within our grasp. So 15 dollars per video hour, and also about 100 dollars to 150 dollars per celluloid hour, we're able to go and get materials online very inexpensively and have them up on the Net. And we've got, now, a lot of these materials. So we've got about 100,000 pieces up there. So books, music, video, software. There's only 50,000 titles of it. Mostly the issues there are legal issues and breaking copy protections. But we've worked through some of those, but we've still got real problems in Washington. Well, we're best known as the World Wide Web. We've been archiving the World Wide Web since 1996. We take a snapshot of every website and all of the pages on it, every two months. And actually, it's really been pioneered by Alexa Internet, which donates this collection to the Internet Archive. And it's been growing along for the last 11 years, and it's a fantastic resource. And we've made a Wayback Machine that you can then go and see old websites kind of the way they were. If you go and search on something -- this is Google.com, the different versions of it that we have, this is what it looks like when it was an alpha release, and this is what it looked like at Stanford. So anyway, you've got basically an idea of where things came from. Mostly, people want to see their old stuff out of this. If there's one thing that we want to learn from the Library of Alexandria version one, which is probably best known for burning, is, don't just have one copy. So we've started to -- we've made another copy of all of this and we actually put it back in the Library of Alexandria. So this is a picture of the Internet Archive at the Library of Alexandria. And we now have also another copy building up in Amsterdam. So, we should put it in the San Andreas Fault Line in San Francisco, flood zone in Amsterdam and in the Middle East. Right, so anyway ... so we're hedging our bets here. If we go and put it in a couple more places, I think we'll be in good shape. There's a political and social question out of this. Is all of this, as we go digital, is it going to be public or private? There's some large companies that have seen this vision, that are doing large-scale digitization, but they're locking up the public domain. The question is, is that the world that we really want to live in? What's the role of the public versus the private as things go forward? How do we go and have a world where we both have libraries and publishing in the future, just as we basically benefited as we were growing up? So universal access to all knowledge -- I think it can be one of the greatest achievements of humankind, like the man on the moon, or the Gutenberg Bible, or the Library of Alexandria. It could be something that we're remembered for, for millennia, for having achieved. And as I said before, I'll end with something that's carved above the door of the Carnegie Library. Carnegie -- one of the great capitalists of this country -- carved above his legacy, "Free to the People." Thank you very much.

Is E.T. out there? Well, I work at the SETI Institute. That's almost my name. SETI: Search for Extraterrestrial Intelligence. In other words, I look for aliens, and when I tell people that at a cocktail party, they usually look at me with a mildly incredulous look on their face. I try to keep my own face somewhat dispassionate. Now, a lot of people think that this is kind of idealistic, ridiculous, maybe even hopeless, but I just want to talk to you a little bit about why I think that the job I have is actually a privilege, okay, and give you a little bit of the motivation for my getting into this line of work, if that's what you call it. This thing — whoops, can we go back? Hello, come in, Earth. There we go. All right. This is the Owens Valley Radio Observatory behind the Sierra Nevadas, and in 1968, I was working there collecting data for my thesis. Now, it's kinda lonely, it's kinda tedious, just collecting data, so I would amuse myself by taking photos at night of the telescopes or even of myself, because, you know, at night, I would be the only hominid within about 30 miles. So here are pictures of myself. The observatory had just acquired a new book, written by a Russian cosmologist by the name of Joseph Shklovsky, and then expanded and translated and edited by a little-known Cornell astronomer by the name of Carl Sagan. And I remember reading that book, and at 3 in the morning I was reading this book and it was explaining how the antennas I was using to measure the spins of galaxies could also be used to communicate, to send bits of information from one star system to another. Now, at 3 o'clock in the morning when you're all alone, haven't had much sleep, that was a very romantic idea, but it was that idea -- the fact that you could in fact prove that there's somebody out there just using this same technology -- that appealed to me so much that 20 years later I took a job at the SETI Institute. Now, I have to say that my memory is notoriously porous, and I've often wondered whether there was any truth in this story, or I was just, you know, misremembering something, but I recently just blew up this old negative of mine, and sure enough, there you can see the Shklovsky and Sagan book underneath that analog calculating device. So it was true. All right. Now, the idea for doing this, it wasn't very old at the time that I made that photo. The idea dates from 1960, when a young astronomer by the name of Frank Drake used this antenna in West Virginia, pointed it at a couple of nearby stars in the hopes of eavesdropping on E.T. Now, Frank didn't hear anything. Actually he did, but it turned out to be the U.S. Air Force, which doesn't count as extraterrestrial intelligence. But Drake's idea here became very popular because it was very appealing — and I'll get back to that — and on the basis of this experiment, which didn't succeed, we have been doing SETI ever since, not continuously, but ever since. We still haven't heard anything. We still haven't heard anything. In fact, we don't know about any life beyond Earth, but I'm going to suggest to you that that's going to change rather soon, and part of the reason, in fact, the majority of the reason why I think that's going to change is that the equipment's getting better. This is the Allen Telescope Array, about 350 miles from whatever seat you're in right now. This is something that we're using today to search for E.T., and the electronics have gotten very much better too. This is Frank Drake's electronics in 1960. This is the Allen Telescope Array electronics today. Some pundit with too much time on his hands has reckoned that the new experiments are approximately 100 trillion times better than they were in 1960, 100 trillion times better. That's a degree of an improvement that would look good on your report card, okay? But something that's not appreciated by the public is, in fact, that the experiment continues to get better, and, consequently, tends to get faster. This is a little plot, and every time you show a plot, you lose 10 percent of the audience. I have 12 of these. (Laughter) But what I plotted here is just some metric that shows how fast we're searching. In other words, we're looking for a needle in a haystack. We know how big the haystack is. It's the galaxy. But we're going through the haystack no longer with a teaspoon but with a skip loader, because of this increase in speed. In fact, those of you who are still conscious and mathematically competent, will note that this is a semi-log plot. In other words, the rate of increase is exponential. It's exponentially improving. Now, exponential is an overworked word. You hear it on the media all the time. They don't really know what exponential means, but this is exponential. In fact, it's doubling every 18 months, and, of course, every card-carrying member of the digerati knows that that's Moore's Law. So this means that over the course of the next two dozen years, we'll be able to look at a million star systems, a million star systems, looking for signals that would prove somebody's out there. Well, a million star systems, is that interesting? I mean, how many of those star systems have planets? And the facts are, we didn't know the answer to that even as recently as 15 years ago, and in fact, we really didn't know it even as recently as six months ago. But now we do. Recent results suggest that virtually every star has planets, and more than one. They're like, you know, kittens. You get a litter. You don't get one kitten. You get a bunch. So in fact, this is a pretty accurate estimate of the number of planets in our galaxy, just in our galaxy, by the way, and I remind the non-astronomy majors among you that our galaxy is only one of 100 billion that we can see with our telescopes. That's a lot of real estate, but of course, most of these planets are going to be kind of worthless, like, you know, Mercury, or Neptune. Neptune's probably not very big in your life. So the question is, what fraction of these planets are actually suitable for life? We don't know the answer to that either, but we will learn that answer this year, thanks to NASA's Kepler Space Telescope, and in fact, the smart money, which is to say the people who work on this project, the smart money is suggesting that the fraction of planets that might be suitable for life is maybe one in a thousand, one in a hundred, something like that. Well, even taking the pessimistic estimate, that it's one in a thousand, that means that there are at least a billion cousins of the Earth just in our own galaxy. Okay, now I've given you a lot of numbers here, but they're mostly big numbers, okay, so, you know, keep that in mind. There's plenty of real estate, plenty of real estate in the universe, and if we're the only bit of real estate in which there's some interesting occupants, that makes you a miracle, and I know you like to think you're a miracle, but if you do science, you learn rather quickly that every time you think you're a miracle, you're wrong, so probably not the case. All right, so the bottom line is this: Because of the increase in speed, and because of the vast amount of habitable real estate in the cosmos, I figure we're going to pick up a signal within two dozen years. And I feel strongly enough about that to make a bet with you: Either we're going to find E.T. in the next two dozen years, or I'll buy you a cup of coffee. So that's not so bad. I mean, even with two dozen years, you open up your browser and there's news of a signal, or you get a cup of coffee. Now, let me tell you about some aspect of this that people don't think about, and that is, what happens? Suppose that what I say is true. I mean, who knows, but suppose it happens. Suppose some time in the next two dozen years we pick up a faint line that tells us we have some cosmic company. What is the effect? What's the consequence? Now, I might be at ground zero for this. I happen to know what the consequence for me would be, because we've had false alarms. This is 1997, and this is a photo I made at about 3 o'clock in the morning in Mountain View here, when we were watching the computer monitors because we had picked up a signal that we thought, "This is the real deal." All right? And I kept waiting for the Men in Black to show up. Right? I kept waiting for -- I kept waiting for my mom to call, somebody to call, the government to call. Nobody called. Nobody called. I was so nervous that I couldn't sit down. I just wandered around taking photos like this one, just for something to do. Well, at 9:30 in the morning, with my head down on my desk because I obviously hadn't slept all night, the phone rings and it's The New York Times. And I think there's a lesson in that, and that lesson is that if we pick up a signal, the media, the media will be on it faster than a weasel on ball bearings. It's going to be fast. You can be sure of that. No secrecy. That's what happens to me. It kind of ruins my whole week, because whatever I've got planned that week is kind of out the window. But what about you? What's it going to do to you? And the answer is that we don't know the answer. We don't know what that's going to do to you, not in the long term, and not even very much in the short term. I mean, that would be a bit like asking Chris Columbus in 1491, "Hey Chris, you know, what happens if it turns out that there's a continent between here and Japan, where you're sailing to, what will be the consequences for humanity if that turns out to be the case?" And I think Chris would probably offer you some answer that you might not have understood, but it probably wouldn't have been right, and I think that to predict what finding E.T.'s going to mean, we can't predict that either. But here are a couple things I can say. To begin with, it's going to be a society that's way in advance of our own. You're not going to hear from alien Neanderthals. They're not building transmitters. They're going to be ahead of us, maybe by a few thousand years, maybe by a few millions years, but substantially ahead of us, and that means, if you can understand anything that they're going to say, then you might be able to short-circuit history by getting information from a society that's way beyond our own. Now, you might find that a bit hyperbolic, and maybe it is, but nonetheless, it's conceivable that this will happen, and, you know, you could consider this like, I don't know, giving Julius Caesar English lessons and the key to the library of Congress. It would change his day, all right? That's one thing. Another thing that's for sure going to happen is that it will calibrate us. We will know that we're not that miracle, right, that we're just another duck in a row, we're not the only kids on the block, and I think that that's philosophically a very profound thing to learn. We're not a miracle, okay? The third thing that it might tell you is somewhat vague, but I think interesting and important, and that is, if you find a signal coming from a more advanced society, because they will be, that will tell you something about our own possibilities, that we're not inevitably doomed to self-destruction. Because they survived their technology, we could do it too. Normally when you look out into the universe, you're looking back in time. All right? That's interesting to cosmologists. But in this sense, you actually can look into the future, hazily, but you can look into the future. So those are all the sorts of things that would come from a detection. Now, let me talk a little bit about something that happens even in the meantime, and that is, SETI, I think, is important, because it's exploration, and it's not only exploration, it's comprehensible exploration. Now, I gotta tell you, I'm always reading books about explorers. I find exploration very interesting, Arctic exploration, you know, people like Magellan, Amundsen, Shackleton, you see Franklin down there, Scott, all these guys. It's really nifty, exploration. And they're just doing it because they want to explore, and you might say, "Oh, that's kind of a frivolous opportunity," but that's not frivolous. That's not a frivolous activity, because, I mean, think of ants. You know, most ants are programmed to follow one another along in a long line, but there are a couple of ants, maybe one percent of those ants, that are what they call pioneer ants, and they're the ones that wander off. They're the ones you find on the kitchen countertop. You gotta get them with your thumb before they find the sugar or something. But those ants, even though most of them get wiped out, those ants are the ones that are essential to the survival of the hive. So exploration is important. I also think that exploration is important in terms of being able to address what I think is a critical lack in our society, and that is the lack of science literacy, the lack of the ability to even understand science. Now, look, a lot has been written about the deplorable state of science literacy in this country. You've heard about it. Well, here's one example, in fact. Polls taken, this poll was taken 10 years ago. It shows like roughly one third of the public thinks that aliens are not only out there, we're looking for them out there, but they're here, right? Sailing the skies in their saucers and occasionally abducting people for experiments their parents wouldn't approve of. Well, that would be interesting if it was true, and job security for me, but I don't think the evidence is very good. That's more, you know, sad than significant. But there are other things that people believe that are significant, like the efficacy of homeopathy, or that evolution is just, you know, sort of a crazy idea by scientists without any legs, or, you know, evolution, all that sort of thing, or global warming. These sorts of ideas don't really have any validity, that you can't trust the scientists. Now, we've got to solve that problem, because that's a critically important problem, and you might say, "Well, okay, how are we gonna solve that problem with SETI?" Well, let me suggest to you that SETI obviously can't solve the problem, but it can address the problem. It can address the problem by getting young people interested in science. Look, science is hard, it has a reputation of being hard, and the facts are, it is hard, and that's the result of 400 years of science, right? I mean, in the 18th century, in the 18th century you could become an expert on any field of science in an afternoon by going to a library, if you could find the library, right? In the 19th century, if you had a basement lab, you could make major scientific discoveries in your own home. Right? Because there was all this science just lying around waiting for somebody to pick it up. Now, that's not true anymore. Today, you've got to spend years in grad school and post-doc positions just to figure out what the important questions are. It's hard. There's no doubt about it. And in fact, here's an example: the Higgs boson, finding the Higgs boson. Ask the next 10 people you see on the streets, "Hey, do you think it's worthwhile to spend billions of Swiss francs looking for the Higgs boson?" And I bet the answer you're going to get, is, "Well, I don't know what the Higgs boson is, and I don't know if it's important." And probably most of the people wouldn't even know the value of a Swiss franc, okay? And yet we're spending billions of Swiss francs on this problem. Okay? So that doesn't get people interested in science because they can't comprehend what it's about. SETI, on the other hand, is really simple. We're going to use these big antennas and we're going to try to eavesdrop on signals. Everybody can understand that. Yes, technologically, it's very sophisticated, but everybody gets the idea. So that's one thing. The other thing is, it's exciting science. It's exciting because we're naturally interested in other intelligent beings, and I think that's part of our hardwiring. I mean, we're hardwired to be interested in beings that might be, if you will, competitors, or if you're the romantic sort, possibly even mates. Okay? I mean, this is analogous to our interest in things that have big teeth. Right? We're interested in things that have big teeth, and you can see the evolutionary value of that, and you can also see the practical consequences by watching Animal Planet. You notice they make very few programs about gerbils. It's mostly about things that have big teeth. Okay, so we're interested in these sorts of things. And not just us. It's also kids. This allows you to pay it forward by using this subject as a hook to science, because SETI involves all kinds of science, obviously biology, obviously astronomy, but also geology, also chemistry, various scientific disciplines all can be presented in the guise of, "We're looking for E.T." So to me this is interesting and important, and in fact, it's my policy, even though I give a lot of talks to adults, you give talks to adults, and two days later they're back where they were. But if you give talks to kids, you know, one in 50 of them, some light bulb goes off, and they think, "Gee, I'd never thought of that," and then they go, you know, read a book or a magazine or whatever. They get interested in something. Now it's my theory, supported only by anecdotal, personal anecdotal evidence, but nonetheless, that kids get interested in something between the ages of eight and 11. You've got to get them there. So, all right, I give talks to adults, that's fine, but I try and make 10 percent of the talks that I give, I try and make those for kids. I remember when a guy came to our high school, actually, it was actually my junior high school. I was in sixth grade. And he gave some talk. All I remember from it was one word: electronics. It was like Dustin Hoffman in "The Graduate," right, when he said "plastics," whatever that means, plastics. All right, so the guy said electronics. I don't remember anything else. In fact, I don't remember anything that my sixth grade teacher said all year, but I remember electronics. And so I got interested in electronics, and you know, I studied to get my ham license. I was wiring up stuff. Here I am at about 15 or something, doing that sort of stuff. Okay? That had a big effect on me. So that's my point, that you can have a big effect on these kids. In fact, this reminds me, I don't know, a couple years ago I gave a talk at a school in Palo Alto where there were about a dozen 11-year-olds that had come to this talk. I had been brought in to talk to these kids for an hour. Eleven-year-olds, they're all sitting in a little semi-circle looking up at me with big eyes, and I started, there was a white board behind me, and I started off by writing a one with 22 zeroes after it, and I said, "All right, now look, this is the number of stars in the visible universe, and this number is so big there's not even a name for it." And one of these kids shot up his hand, and he said, "Well, actually there is a name for it. It's a sextra-quadra-hexa-something or other." Right? Now, that kid was wrong by four orders of magnitude, but there was no doubt about it, these kids were smart. Okay? So I stopped giving the lecture. All they wanted to do was ask questions. In fact, my last comments to these kids, at the end I said, "You know, you kids are smarter than the people I work with." Now — (Laughter) They didn't even care about that. What they wanted was my email address so they could ask me more questions. (Laughter) Let me just say, look, my job is a privilege because we're in a special time. Previous generations couldn't do this experiment at all. In another generation down the line, I think we will have succeeded. So to me, it is a privilege, and when I look in the mirror, the facts are that I really don't see myself. What I see is the generation behind me. These are some kids from the Huff School, fourth graders. I talked there, what, two weeks ago, something like that. I think that if you can instill some interest in science and how it works, well, that's a payoff beyond easy measure. Thank you very much. (Applause)

I'm Jane McGonigal. I'm a game designer. I've been making games online now for 10 years, and my goal for the next decade is to try to make it as easy to save the world in real life as it is to save the world in online games. Now, I have a plan for this, and it entails convincing more people, including all of you, to spend more time playing bigger and better games. Right now we spend three billion hours a week playing online games. Some of you might be thinking, "That's a lot of time to spend playing games. Maybe too much time, considering how many urgent problems we have to solve in the real world." But actually, according to my research at the Institute for the Future, actually the opposite is true. Three billion hours a week is not nearly enough game play to solve the world's most urgent problems. In fact, I believe that if we want to survive the next century on this planet, we need to increase that total dramatically. I've calculated the total we need at 21 billion hours of game play every week. So, that's probably a bit of a counter-intuitive idea, so I'll say it again, let it sink in: If we want to solve problems like hunger, poverty, climate change, global conflict, obesity, I believe that we need to aspire to play games online for at least 21 billion hours a week, by the end of the next decade. (Laughter) No. I'm serious. I am. Here's why. This picture pretty much sums up why I think games are so essential to the future survival of the human species. (Laughter) Truly. This is a portrait by photographer Phil Toledano. He wanted to capture the emotion of gaming, so he set up a camera in front of gamers while they were playing. And this is a classic gaming emotion. Now, if you're not a gamer, you might miss some of the nuance in this photo. You probably see the sense of urgency, a little bit of fear, but intense concentration, deep, deep focus on tackling a really difficult problem. If you are a gamer, you will notice a few nuances here: the crinkle of the eyes up, and around the mouth is a sign of optimism, and the eyebrows up is surprise. This is a gamer who's on the verge of something called an "epic win." (Laughter) Oh, you've heard of that. OK, good, so we have some gamers among us. An epic win is an outcome that is so extraordinarily positive, you had no idea it was even possible until you achieved it. It was almost beyond the threshold of imagination, and when you get there, you're shocked to discover what you're truly capable of. That's an epic win. This is a gamer on the verge of an epic win. And this is the face that we need to see on millions of problem-solvers all over the world as we try to tackle the obstacles of the next century -- the face of someone who, against all odds, is on the verge of an epic win. Now, unfortunately this is more of the face that we see in everyday life now as we try to tackle urgent problems. This is what I call the "I'm Not Good At Life" face. This is actually me making it. Can you see? Yes. Good. This is me making the "I'm Not Good At Life" face. This is a piece of graffiti in my old neighborhood in Berkeley, California, where I did my PhD on why we're better in games than we are in real life. And this is a problem that a lot of gamers have. We feel that we are not as good in reality as we are in games. I don't mean just good as in successful, although that's part of it. We do achieve more in game worlds. But I also mean good as in motivated to do something that matters -- inspired to collaborate and to cooperate. And when we're in game worlds, I believe that many of us become the best version of ourselves -- the most likely to help at a moment's notice, the most likely to stick with a problem as long at it takes, to get up after failure and try again. And in real life, when we face failure, when we confront obstacles, we often don't feel that way. We feel overcome, we feel overwhelmed, we feel anxious, maybe depressed, frustrated or cynical. We never have those feelings when we're playing games, they just don't exist in games. So that's what I wanted to study when I was a graduate student. What about games makes it impossible to feel that we can't achieve everything? How can we take those feelings from games and apply them to real-world work? So I looked at games like World of Warcraft, which is really the ideal collaborative problem-solving environment. And I started to notice a few things that make epic wins so possible in online worlds. The first thing is whenever you show up in one of these online games, especially in World of Warcraft, there are lots and lots of different characters who are willing to trust you with a world-saving mission, right away. But not just any mission, it's a mission that is perfectly matched with your current level in the game. Right? So you can do it. They never give you a challenge you can't achieve. But it is on the verge of what you're capable of, so you have to try hard. But there's no unemployment in World of Warcraft; no sitting around, wringing your hands -- there's always something specific and important to be done. There are also tons of collaborators. Everywhere you go, hundreds of thousands of people ready to work with you to achieve your epic mission. That's not something we have in real life that easily, this sense that at our fingertips are tons of collaborators. And there's this epic story, this inspiring story of why we're there, and what we're doing, and we get all this positive feedback. You guys have heard of leveling up, +1 strength, +1 intelligence. We don't get that kind of constant feedback in real life. When I get off this stage, I'm not going to have +1 speaking, and +1 crazy idea, +20 crazy idea. I don't get that feedback in real life. Now, the problem with collaborative online environments like World of Warcraft is that it's so satisfying to be on the verge of an epic win all the time, we decide to spend all our time in these game worlds. It's just better than reality. So, so far, collectively all the World of Warcraft gamers have spent 5.93 million years solving the virtual problems of Azeroth. Now, that's not necessarily a bad thing. It might sound like it's a bad thing. But to put that in context: 5.93 million years ago was when our earliest primate human ancestors stood up. That was the first upright primate. So when we talk about how much time we're currently investing in playing games, the only way it makes sense to even think about it is to talk about time at the magnitude of human evolution, which is an extraordinary thing. But it's also apt, because it turns out that by spending all this time playing games, we're actually changing what we are capable of as human beings. We're evolving to be a more collaborative and hearty species. This is true. I believe this. So, consider this really interesting statistic; it was recently published by a researcher at Carnegie Mellon University: The average young person today in a country with a strong gamer culture will have spent 10,000 hours playing online games by the age of 21. Now 10,000 hours is a really interesting number for two reasons. First of all, for children in the United States, 10,080 hours is the exact amount of time you will spend in school, from fifth grade to high school graduation, if you have perfect attendance. (Laughter) So, we have an entire parallel track of education going on, where young people are learning as much about what it takes to be a good gamer as they're learning about everything else in school. Some of you have probably read Malcolm Gladwell's new book "Outliers," so you would have heard of his theory of success, the "10,000 hours" theory of success. It's based on this great cognitive-science research that says if we can master 10,000 hours of effortful study at anything by the age of 21, we will be virtuosos at it. We will be as good at whatever we do as the greatest people in the world. And so, now what we're looking at is an entire generation of young people who are virtuoso gamers. So, the big question is, "What exactly are gamers getting so good at?" Because if we could figure that out, we would have a virtually unprecedented human resource on our hands. This is how many people we now have in the world who spend at least an hour a day playing online games. These are our virtuoso gamers, 500 million people who are extraordinarily good at something. And in the next decade, we're going to have another billion gamers who are extraordinarily good at whatever that is. If you don't know it already, this is coming. The game industry is developing consoles that are low-energy and that work with the wireless phone networks instead of broadband Internet, so that gamers all over the world, particularly in India, China, Brazil, can get online. They expect one billion more gamers in the next decade. It will bring us up to 1.5 billion gamers. So I've started to think about what these games are making us virtuosos at. Here are the four things I came up with. The first is urgent optimism. OK, think of this as extreme self-motivation. Urgent optimism is the desire to act immediately to tackle an obstacle, combined with the belief that we have a reasonable hope of success. Gamers always believe that an epic win is possible, and that it's always worth trying, and trying now. Gamers don't sit around. Gamers are virtuosos at weaving a tight social fabric. There's a lot of interesting research that shows we like people better after we play a game with them, even if they've beaten us badly. And the reason is, it takes a lot of trust to play a game with someone. We trust that they will spend their time with us, that they will play by the same rules, value the same goal, stay with the game until it's over. And so, playing a game together actually builds up bonds and trust and cooperation. And we actually build stronger social relationships as a result. Blissful productivity. I love it. You know, there's a reason why the average World of Warcraft gamer plays for 22 hours a week -- kind of a half-time job. It's because we know, when we're playing a game, that we're actually happier working hard than we are relaxing, or hanging out. We know that we are optimized as human beings, to do hard and meaningful work. And gamers are willing to work hard all the time, if they're given the right work. Finally: epic meaning. Gamers love to be attached to awe-inspiring missions to human planetary-scale stories. So, just one bit of trivia that helps put that into perspective: So, you all know Wikipedia, biggest wiki in the world. Second biggest wiki in the world, with nearly 80,000 articles, is the World of Warcraft wiki. Five million people use it every month. They have compiled more information about World of Warcraft on the Internet than any other topic covered on any other wiki in the world. They are building an epic story. They are building an epic knowledge resource about the World of Warcraft. Okay, so these are four superpowers that add up to one thing: Gamers are super-empowered hopeful individuals. These are people who believe that they are individually capable of changing the world. And the only problem is, they believe that they are capable of changing virtual worlds and not the real world. That's the problem that I'm trying to solve. There's an economist named Edward Castronova. His work is brilliant. He looks at why people are investing so much time and energy and money in online worlds. And he says, "We're witnessing what amounts to no less than a mass exodus to virtual worlds and online game environments." And he's an economist, so he's rational. And he says -- (Laughter) Not like me, I'm a game designer; I'm exuberant. But he says that this makes perfect sense, because gamers can achieve more in online worlds than they can in real life. They can have stronger social relationships in games than they can have in real life; they get better feedback and feel more rewarded in games than they do in real life. So he says, for now it makes perfect sense for gamers to spend more time in virtual worlds than the real world. Now, I also agree that that is rational, for now. But it is not, by any means, an optimal situation. We have to start making the real world work more like a game. I take my inspiration from something that happened 2,500 years ago. These are ancient dice, made out of sheep's knuckles. Before we had awesome game controllers, we had sheep's knuckles. And these represent the first game equipment designed by human beings, and if you're familiar with the work of the ancient Greek historian Herodotus, you might know this history, which is the history of who invented games and why. Herodotus says that games, particularly dice games, were invented in the kingdom of Lydia, during a time of famine. Apparently, there was such a severe famine that the king of Lydia decided they had to do something crazy. People were suffering. People were fighting. It was an extreme situation, they needed an extreme solution. So, according to Herodotus, they invented dice games, and they set up a kingdom-wide policy: On one day, everybody would eat, and on the next day, everybody would play games. And they would be so immersed in playing the dice games, because games are so engaging, and immerse us in such satisfying, blissful productivity, they would ignore the fact that they had no food to eat. And then on the next day, they would play games; and on the next day, they would eat. And according to Herodotus, they passed 18 years this way, surviving through a famine, by eating on one day, and playing games on the next. Now, this is exactly, I think, how we're using games today. We're using games to escape real-world suffering -- we're using games to get away from everything that's broken in the real environment, everything that's not satisfying about real life, and we're getting what we need from games. But it doesn't have to end there. This is really exciting. According to Herodotus, after 18 years the famine wasn't getting better, so the king decided they would play one final dice game. They divided the entire kingdom in half. They played one dice game, and the winners of that game got to go on an epic adventure. They would leave Lydia, and they would go out in search of a new place to live, leaving behind just enough people to survive on the resources that were available, and hopefully to take their civilization somewhere else where they could thrive. Now, this sounds crazy, right? But recently, DNA evidence has shown that the Etruscans, who then led to the Roman Empire, actually share the same DNA as the ancient Lydians. And so, recently, scientists have suggested that Herodotus' crazy story is actually true. And geologists have found evidence of a global cooling that lasted for nearly 20 years, that could have explained the famine. So this crazy story might be true. They might have actually saved their culture by playing games, escaping to games for 18 years, and then been so inspired, and knew so much about how to come together with games, that they actually saved the entire civilization that way. Okay, we can do that. (Laughter) We've been playing Warcraft since 1994. That was the first real-time strategy game from the World of Warcraft series. That was 16 years ago. They played dice games for 18 years, we've been playing Warcraft for 16 years. I say we are ready for our own epic game. Now, they had half the civilization go off in search of a new world, so that's where I get my 21 billion hours a week of game-play from. Let's get half of us to agree to spend an hour a day playing games, until we solve real-world problems. Now, I know you're asking, "How are we going to solve real-world problems in games?" Well, that's what I've devoted my work to over the past few years, at the Institute for the Future. We have this banner in our offices in Palo Alto, and it expresses our view of how we should try to relate to the future. We do not want to try to predict the future. What we want to do is make the future. We want to imagine the best-case scenario outcome, and then we want to empower people to make that outcome a reality. We want to imagine epic wins, and then give people the means to achieve the epic win. I'm just going to very briefly show you three games that I've made that are an attempt to give people the means to create epic wins in their own futures. This is World Without Oil. We made this game in 2007. This is an online game in which you try to survive an oil shortage. The oil shortage is fictional, but we put enough online content out there for you to believe that it's real, and to live your real life as if we've run out of oil. So when you come to the game, you sign up, tell us where you live, and then we give you real-time news videos, data feeds that show you exactly how much oil costs, what's not available, how food supply is being affected, how transportation is being affected, if schools are closed, if there's rioting, and you have to figure out how you would live your real life as if this were true. And then we ask you to blog about it, to post videos, to post photos. We piloted this game with 1,700 players in 2007, and we've tracked them for the three years since. And I can tell you that this is a transformative experience. Nobody wants to change how they live, just because it's good for the world, or because we're supposed to. But if you immerse them in an epic adventure and tell them, "We've run out of oil. This is an amazing story and adventure for you to go on. Challenge yourself to see how you would survive," most of our players have kept up the habits that they learned in this game. So for the next world-saving game, we decided to aim higher -- bigger problem than just peak oil. We did a game called Superstruct at the Institute for the Future. And the premise was, a supercomputer has calculated that humans have only 23 years left on the planet. This supercomputer was called the Global Extinction Awareness System, of course. We asked people to come online -- almost like a Jerry Bruckheimer movie. You know Jerry Bruckheimer movies, you form a dream team -- you've got the astronaut, the scientist, the ex-convict, and they all have something to do to save the world. (Laughter) But in our game, instead of just having five people on the dream team, we said, "Everybody's on the dream team, and it's your job to invent the future of energy, the future of food, the future of health, the future of security and the future of the social safety net." We had 8,000 people play that game for eight weeks. They came up with 500 insanely creative solutions that you can go online, Google "Superstruct," and see. So, finally, the last game, we're launching it March 3rd. This is a game done with the World Bank Institute. If you complete the game, you will be certified by the World Bank Institute as a Social Innovator, class of 2010. Working with universities all over sub-Saharan Africa, and we are inviting them to learn social innovation skills. We've got a graphic novel, we've got leveling up in skills like local insight, knowledge networking, sustainability, vision and resourcefulness. I would like to invite all of you to please share this game with young people, anywhere in the world, particularly in developing areas, who might benefit from coming together to try to start to imagine their own social enterprises to save the world. So, I'm going to wrap up now. I want to ask a question. What do you think happens next? We've got all these amazing gamers, we've got these games that are kind of pilots of what we might do, but none of them have saved the real world yet. Well I hope you will agree with me that gamers are a human resource that we can use to do real-world work, that games are a powerful platform for change. We have all these amazing superpowers: blissful productivity, the ability to weave a tight social fabric, this feeling of urgent optimism and the desire for epic meaning. I really hope that we can come together to play games that matter, to survive on this planet for another century. That's my hope, that you will join me in making and playing games like this. When I look forward to the next decade, I know two things for sure: that we can make any future we can imagine, and we can play any games we want, so I say: Let the world-changing games begin. Thank you. (Applause)

Suppose that two American friends are traveling together in Italy. They go to see Michelangelo's "David," and when they finally come face to face with the statue, they both freeze dead in their tracks. The first guy -- we'll call him Adam -- is transfixed by the beauty of the perfect human form. The second guy -- we'll call him Bill -- is transfixed by embarrassment, at staring at the thing there in the center. So here's my question for you: which one of these two guys was more likely to have voted for George Bush, which for Al Gore? I don't need a show of hands because we all have the same political stereotypes. We all know that it's Bill. And in this case, the stereotype corresponds to reality. It really is a fact that liberals are much higher than conservatives on a major personality trait called openness to experience. People who are high in openness to experience just crave novelty, variety, diversity, new ideas, travel. People low on it like things that are familiar, that are safe and dependable. If you know about this trait, you can understand a lot of puzzles about human behavior. You can understand why artists are so different from accountants. You can actually predict what kinds of books they like to read, what kinds of places they like to travel to, and what kinds of food they like to eat. Once you understand this trait, you can understand why anybody would eat at Applebee's, but not anybody that you know. (Laughter) This trait also tells us a lot about politics. The main researcher of this trait, Robert McCrae says that, "Open individuals have an affinity for liberal, progressive, left-wing political views" -- they like a society which is open and changing -- "whereas closed individuals prefer conservative, traditional, right-wing views." This trait also tells us a lot about the kinds of groups people join. So here's the description of a group I found on the Web. What kinds of people would join a global community welcoming people from every discipline and culture, who seek a deeper understanding of the world, and who hope to turn that understanding into a better future for us all? This is from some guy named Ted. (Laughter) Well, let's see now, if openness predicts who becomes liberal, and openness predicts who becomes a TEDster, then might we predict that most TEDsters are liberal? Let's find out. I'm going to ask you to raise your hand, whether you are liberal, left of center -- on social issues, we're talking about, primarily -- or conservative, and I'll give a third option, because I know there are a number of libertarians in the audience. So, right now, please raise your hand -- down in the simulcast rooms, too, let's let everybody see who's here -- please raise your hand if you would say that you are liberal or left of center. Please raise your hand high right now. OK. Please raise your hand if you'd say you're libertarian. OK, about a -- two dozen. And please raise your hand if you'd say you are right of center or conservative. One, two, three, four, five -- about eight or 10. OK. This is a bit of a problem. Because if our goal is to understand the world, to seek a deeper understanding of the world, our general lack of moral diversity here is going to make it harder. Because when people all share values, when people all share morals, they become a team, and once you engage the psychology of teams, it shuts down open-minded thinking. When the liberal team loses, as it did in 2004, and as it almost did in 2000, we comfort ourselves. (Laughter) We try to explain why half of America voted for the other team. We think they must be blinded by religion, or by simple stupidity. (Laughter) (Applause) So, if you think that half of America votes Republican because they are blinded in this way, then my message to you is that you're trapped in a moral matrix, in a particular moral matrix. And by the matrix, I mean literally the matrix, like the movie "The Matrix." But I'm here today to give you a choice. You can either take the blue pill and stick to your comforting delusions, or you can take the red pill, learn some moral psychology and step outside the moral matrix. Now, because I know -- (Applause) -- OK, I assume that answers my question. I was going to ask you which one you picked, but no need. You're all high in openness to experience, and besides, it looks like it might even taste good, and you're all epicures. So anyway, let's go with the red pill. Let's study some moral psychology and see where it takes us. Let's start at the beginning. What is morality and where does it come from? The worst idea in all of psychology is the idea that the mind is a blank slate at birth. Developmental psychology has shown that kids come into the world already knowing so much about the physical and social worlds, and programmed to make it really easy for them to learn certain things and hard to learn others. The best definition of innateness I've ever seen -- this just clarifies so many things for me -- is from the brain scientist Gary Marcus. He says, "The initial organization of the brain does not depend that much on experience. Nature provides a first draft, which experience then revises. Built-in doesn't mean unmalleable; it means organized in advance of experience." OK, so what's on the first draft of the moral mind? To find out, my colleague, Craig Joseph, and I read through the literature on anthropology, on culture variation in morality and also on evolutionary psychology, looking for matches. What are the sorts of things that people talk about across disciplines? That you find across cultures and even across species? We found five -- five best matches, which we call the five foundations of morality. The first one is harm/care. We're all mammals here, we all have a lot of neural and hormonal programming that makes us really bond with others, care for others, feel compassion for others, especially the weak and vulnerable. It gives us very strong feelings about those who cause harm. This moral foundation underlies about 70 percent of the moral statements I've heard here at TED. The second foundation is fairness/reciprocity. There's actually ambiguous evidence as to whether you find reciprocity in other animals, but the evidence for people could not be clearer. This Norman Rockwell painting is called "The Golden Rule," and we heard about this from Karen Armstrong, of course, as the foundation of so many religions. That second foundation underlies the other 30 percent of the moral statements I've heard here at TED. The third foundation is in-group/loyalty. You do find groups in the animal kingdom -- you do find cooperative groups -- but these groups are always either very small or they're all siblings. It's only among humans that you find very large groups of people who are able to cooperate, join together into groups, but in this case, groups that are united to fight other groups. This probably comes from our long history of tribal living, of tribal psychology. And this tribal psychology is so deeply pleasurable that even when we don't have tribes, we go ahead and make them, because it's fun. (Laughter) Sports is to war as pornography is to sex. We get to exercise some ancient, ancient drives. The fourth foundation is authority/respect. Here you see submissive gestures from two members of very closely related species. But authority in humans is not so closely based on power and brutality, as it is in other primates. It's based on more voluntary deference, and even elements of love, at times. The fifth foundation is purity/sanctity. This painting is called "The Allegory Of Chastity," but purity's not just about suppressing female sexuality. It's about any kind of ideology, any kind of idea that tells you that you can attain virtue by controlling what you do with your body, by controlling what you put into your body. And while the political right may moralize sex much more, the political left is really doing a lot of it with food. Food is becoming extremely moralized nowadays, and a lot of it is ideas about purity, about what you're willing to touch, or put into your body. I believe these are the five best candidates for what's written on the first draft of the moral mind. I think this is what we come with, at least a preparedness to learn all of these things. But as my son, Max, grows up in a liberal college town, how is this first draft going to get revised? And how will it end up being different from a kid born 60 miles south of us in Lynchburg, Virginia? To think about culture variation, let's try a different metaphor. If there really are five systems at work in the mind -- five sources of intuitions and emotions -- then we can think of the moral mind as being like one of those audio equalizers that has five channels, where you can set it to a different setting on every channel. And my colleagues, Brian Nosek and Jesse Graham, and I, made a questionnaire, which we put up on the Web at www.YourMorals.org. And so far, 30,000 people have taken this questionnaire, and you can too. Here are the results. Here are the results from about 23,000 American citizens. On the left, I've plotted the scores for liberals; on the right, those for conservatives; in the middle, the moderates. The blue line shows you people's responses on the average of all the harm questions. So, as you see, people care about harm and care issues. They give high endorsement of these sorts of statements all across the board, but as you also see, liberals care about it a little more than conservatives -- the line slopes down. Same story for fairness. But look at the other three lines. For liberals, the scores are very low. Liberals are basically saying, "No, this is not morality. In-group, authority, purity -- this stuff has nothing to do with morality. I reject it." But as people get more conservative, the values rise. We can say that liberals have a kind of a two-channel, or two-foundation morality. Conservatives have more of a five-foundation, or five-channel morality. We find this in every country we look at. Here's the data for 1,100 Canadians. I'll just flip through a few other slides. The U.K., Australia, New Zealand, Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Latin America, the Middle East, East Asia and South Asia. Notice also that on all of these graphs, the slope is steeper on in-group, authority, purity. Which shows that within any country, the disagreement isn't over harm and fairness. Everybody -- I mean, we debate over what's fair -- but everybody agrees that harm and fairness matter. Moral arguments within cultures are especially about issues of in-group, authority, purity. This effect is so robust that we find it no matter how we ask the question. In one recent study, we asked people to suppose you're about to get a dog. You picked a particular breed, you learned some new information about the breed. Suppose you learn that this particular breed is independent-minded, and relates to its owner as a friend and an equal? Well, if you are a liberal, you say, "Hey, that's great!" Because liberals like to say, "Fetch, please." (Laughter) But if you're conservative, that's not so attractive. If you're conservative, and you learn that a dog's extremely loyal to its home and family, and doesn't warm up quickly to strangers, for conservatives, well, loyalty is good -- dogs ought to be loyal. But to a liberal, it sounds like this dog is running for the Republican nomination. (Laughter) So, you might say, OK, there are these differences between liberals and conservatives, but what makes those three other foundations moral? Aren't those just the foundations of xenophobia and authoritarianism and Puritanism? What makes them moral? The answer, I think, is contained in this incredible triptych from Hieronymus Bosch, "The Garden of Earthly Delights." In the first panel, we see the moment of creation. All is ordered, all is beautiful, all the people and animals are doing what they're supposed to be doing, where they're supposed to be. But then, given the way of the world, things change. We get every person doing whatever he wants, with every aperture of every other person and every other animal. Some of you might recognize this as the '60s. (Laughter) But the '60s inevitably gives way to the '70s, where the cuttings of the apertures hurt a little bit more. Of course, Bosch called this hell. So this triptych, these three panels portray the timeless truth that order tends to decay. The truth of social entropy. But lest you think this is just some part of the Christian imagination where Christians have this weird problem with pleasure, here's the same story, the same progression, told in a paper that was published in Nature a few years ago, in which Ernst Fehr and Simon Gachter had people play a commons dilemma. A game in which you give people money, and then, on each round of the game, they can put money into a common pot, and then the experimenter doubles what's in there, and then it's all divided among the players. So it's a really nice analog for all sorts of environmental issues, where we're asking people to make a sacrifice and they themselves don't really benefit from their own sacrifice. But you really want everybody else to sacrifice, but everybody has a temptation to a free ride. And what happens is that, at first, people start off reasonably cooperative -- and this is all played anonymously. On the first round, people give about half of the money that they can. But they quickly see, "You know what, other people aren't doing so much though. I don't want to be a sucker. I'm not going to cooperate." And so cooperation quickly decays from reasonably good, down to close to zero. But then -- and here's the trick -- Fehr and Gachter said, on the seventh round, they told people, "You know what? New rule. If you want to give some of your own money to punish people who aren't contributing, you can do that." And as soon as people heard about the punishment issue going on, cooperation shoots up. It shoots up and it keeps going up. There's a lot of research showing that to solve cooperative problems, it really helps. It's not enough to just appeal to people's good motives. It really helps to have some sort of punishment. Even if it's just shame or embarrassment or gossip, you need some sort of punishment to bring people, when they're in large groups, to cooperate. There's even some recent research suggesting that religion -- priming God, making people think about God -- often, in some situations, leads to more cooperative, more pro-social behavior. Some people think that religion is an adaptation evolved both by cultural and biological evolution to make groups to cohere, in part for the purpose of trusting each other, and then being more effective at competing with other groups. I think that's probably right, although this is a controversial issue. But I'm particularly interested in religion, and the origin of religion, and in what it does to us and for us. Because I think that the greatest wonder in the world is not the Grand Canyon. The Grand Canyon is really simple. It's just a lot of rock, and then a lot of water and wind, and a lot of time, and you get the Grand Canyon. It's not that complicated. This is what's really complicated, that there were people living in places like the Grand Canyon, cooperating with each other, or on the savannahs of Africa, or on the frozen shores of Alaska, and then some of these villages grew into the mighty cities of Babylon, and Rome, and Tenochtitlan. How did this happen? This is an absolute miracle, much harder to explain than the Grand Canyon. The answer, I think, is that they used every tool in the toolbox. It took all of our moral psychology to create these cooperative groups. Yes, you do need to be concerned about harm, you do need a psychology of justice. But it really helps to organize a group if you can have sub-groups, and if those sub-groups have some internal structure, and if you have some ideology that tells people to suppress their carnality, to pursue higher, nobler ends. And now we get to the crux of the disagreement between liberals and conservatives. Because liberals reject three of these foundations. They say "No, let's celebrate diversity, not common in-group membership." They say, "Let's question authority." And they say, "Keep your laws off my body." Liberals have very noble motives for doing this. Traditional authority, traditional morality can be quite repressive, and restrictive to those at the bottom, to women, to people that don't fit in. So liberals speak for the weak and oppressed. They want change and justice, even at the risk of chaos. This guy's shirt says, "Stop bitching, start a revolution." If you're high in openness to experience, revolution is good, it's change, it's fun. Conservatives, on the other hand, speak for institutions and traditions. They want order, even at some cost to those at the bottom. The great conservative insight is that order is really hard to achieve. It's really precious, and it's really easy to lose. So as Edmund Burke said, "The restraints on men, as well as their liberties, are to be reckoned among their rights." This was after the chaos of the French Revolution. So once you see this -- once you see that liberals and conservatives both have something to contribute, that they form a balance on change versus stability -- then I think the way is open to step outside the moral matrix. This is the great insight that all the Asian religions have attained. Think about yin and yang. Yin and yang aren't enemies. Yin and yang don't hate each other. Yin and yang are both necessary, like night and day, for the functioning of the world. You find the same thing in Hinduism. There are many high gods in Hinduism. Two of them are Vishnu, the preserver, and Shiva, the destroyer. This image actually is both of those gods sharing the same body. You have the markings of Vishnu on the left, so we could think of Vishnu as the conservative god. You have the markings of Shiva on the right, Shiva's the liberal god. And they work together. You find the same thing in Buddhism. These two stanzas contain, I think, the deepest insights that have ever been attained into moral psychology. From the Zen master Seng-ts'an: "If you want the truth to stand clear before you, never be for or against. The struggle between for and against is the mind's worst disease." Now unfortunately, it's a disease that has been caught by many of the world's leaders. But before you feel superior to George Bush, before you throw a stone, ask yourself, do you accept this? Do you accept stepping out of the battle of good and evil? Can you be not for or against anything? So, what's the point? What should you do? Well, if you take the greatest insights from ancient Asian philosophies and religions, and you combine them with the latest research on moral psychology, I think you come to these conclusions: that our righteous minds were designed by evolution to unite us into teams, to divide us against other teams and then to blind us to the truth. So what should you do? Am I telling you to not strive? Am I telling you to embrace Seng-ts'an and stop, stop with this struggle of for and against? No, absolutely not. I'm not saying that. This is an amazing group of people who are doing so much, using so much of their talent, their brilliance, their energy, their money, to make the world a better place, to fight -- to fight wrongs, to solve problems. But as we learned from Samantha Power, in her story about Sergio Vieira de Mello, you can't just go charging in, saying, "You're wrong, and I'm right." Because, as we just heard, everybody thinks they are right. A lot of the problems we have to solve are problems that require us to change other people. And if you want to change other people, a much better way to do it is to first understand who we are -- understand our moral psychology, understand that we all think we're right -- and then step out, even if it's just for a moment, step out -- check in with Seng-ts'an. Step out of the moral matrix, just try to see it as a struggle playing out, in which everybody does think they're right, and everybody, at least, has some reasons -- even if you disagree with them -- everybody has some reasons for what they're doing. Step out. And if you do that, that's the essential move to cultivate moral humility, to get yourself out of this self-righteousness, which is the normal human condition. Think about the Dalai Lama. Think about the enormous moral authority of the Dalai Lama -- and it comes from his moral humility. So I think the point -- the point of my talk, and I think the point of TED -- is that this is a group that is passionately engaged in the pursuit of changing the world for the better. People here are passionately engaged in trying to make the world a better place. But there is also a passionate commitment to the truth. And so I think that the answer is to use that passionate commitment to the truth to try to turn it into a better future for us all. Thank you. (Applause)

I'd like to talk today about the two biggest social trends in the coming century, and perhaps in the next 10,000 years. But I want to start with my work on romantic love, because that's my most recent work. What I and my colleagues did was put 32 people, who were madly in love, into a functional MRI brain scanner. 17 who were madly in love and their love was accepted; and 15 who were madly in love and they had just been dumped. And so I want to tell you about that first, and then go on into where I think love is going. (Laughter) "What 'tis to love?" Shakespeare said. I think our ancestors -- I think human beings have been wondering about this question since they sat around their campfires or lay and watched the stars a million years ago. I started out by trying to figure out what romantic love was by looking at the last 45 years of the psychological research and as it turns out, there's a very specific group of things that happen when you fall in love. The first thing that happens is, a person begins to take on what I call, "special meaning." As a truck driver once said to me, "The world had a new center, and that center was Mary Anne." George Bernard Shaw said it differently. "Love consists of overestimating the differences between one woman and another." And indeed, that's what we do. (Laughter) And then you just focus on this person. You can list what you don't like about them, but then you sweep that aside and focus on what you do. As Chaucer said, "Love is blind." In trying to understand romantic love, I decided I would read poetry from all over the world, and I just want to give you one very short poem from eighth-century China, because it's an almost perfect example of a man who is focused totally on a particular woman. It's a little bit like when you are madly in love with somebody and you walk into a parking lot -- their car is different from every other car in the parking lot. Their wine glass at dinner is different from every other wine glass at the dinner party. And in this case, a man got hooked on a bamboo sleeping mat. And it goes like this. It's by a guy called Yuan Zhen. "I cannot bear to put away the bamboo sleeping mat. The night I brought you home, I watched you roll it out." He became hooked on a sleeping mat, probably because of elevated activity of dopamine in his brain, just like with you and me. But anyway, not only does this person take on special meaning, you focus your attention on them. You aggrandize them. But you have intense energy. As one Polynesian said, "I felt like jumping in the sky." You're up all night. You're walking till dawn. You feel intense elation when things are going well; mood swings into horrible despair when things are going poorly. Real dependence on this person. As one businessman in New York said to me, "Anything she liked, I liked." Simple. Romantic love is very simple. You become extremely sexually possessive. You know, if you're just sleeping with somebody casually, you don't really care if they're sleeping with somebody else. But the moment you fall in love, you become extremely sexually possessive of them. I think there's a Darwinian purpose to this. The whole point of this is to pull two people together strongly enough to begin to rear babies as a team. But the main characteristics of romantic love are craving: an intense craving to be with a particular person, not just sexually, but emotionally. It would be nice to go to bed with them, but you want them to call you on the telephone, to invite you out, etc., to tell you that they love you. The other main characteristic is motivation. The motor in the brain begins to crank, and you want this person. And last but not least, it is an obsession. Before I put these people in the MRI machine, I would ask them all kinds of questions. But my most important question was always the same. It was: "What percentage of the day and night do you think about this person?" And indeed, they would say, "All day. All night. I can never stop thinking about him or her." And then, the very last question -- I would always have to work myself up to this question, because I'm not a psychologist. I don't work with people in any kind of traumatic situation. My final question was always the same. I would say, "Would you die for him or her?" And, indeed, these people would say "Yes!" as if I had asked them to pass the salt. I was just staggered by it. So we scanned their brains, looking at a photograph of their sweetheart and looking at a neutral photograph, with a distraction task in between. So we could look at the same brain when it was in that heightened state and when it was in a resting state. And we found activity in a lot of brain regions. In fact, one of the most important was a brain region that becomes active when you feel the rush of cocaine. And indeed, that's exactly what happens. I began to realize that romantic love is not an emotion. In fact, I had always thought it was a series of emotions, from very high to very low. But actually, it's a drive. It comes from the motor of the mind, the wanting part of the mind, the craving part of the mind. The kind of part of the mind when you're reaching for that piece of chocolate, when you want to win that promotion at work. The motor of the brain. It's a drive. And in fact, I think it's more powerful than the sex drive. You know, if you ask somebody to go to bed with you, and they say, "No, thank you," you certainly don't kill yourself or slip into a clinical depression. But certainly, around the world, people who are rejected in love will kill for it. People live for love. They kill for love. They die for love. They have songs, poems, novels, sculptures, paintings, myths, legends. In over 175 societies, people have left their evidence of this powerful brain system. I have come to think it's one of the most powerful brain systems on Earth for both great joy and great sorrow. And I've also come to think that it's one of three basically different brain systems that evolved from mating and reproduction. One is the sex drive: the craving for sexual gratification. W.H. Auden called it an "intolerable neural itch," and indeed, that's what it is. It keeps bothering you a little bit, like being hungry. The second of these three brain systems is romantic love: that elation, obsession of early love. And the third brain system is attachment: that sense of calm and security you can feel for a long-term partner. And I think that the sex drive evolved to get you out there, looking for a whole range of partners. You can feel it when you're just driving along in your car. It can be focused on nobody. I think romantic love evolved to enable you to focus your mating energy on just one individual at a time, thereby conserving mating time and energy. And I think that attachment, the third brain system, evolved to enable you to tolerate this human being at least long enough to raise a child together as a team. So with that preamble, I want to go into discussing the two most profound social trends. One of the last 10,000 years and the other, certainly of the last 25 years, that are going to have an impact on these three different brain systems: lust, romantic love and deep attachment to a partner. The first is women working, moving into the workforce. I've looked at 130 societies through the demographic yearbooks of the United Nations. Everywhere in the world, 129 out of 130 of them, women are not only moving into the job market -- sometimes very, very slowly, but they are moving into the job market -- and they are very slowly closing that gap between men and women in terms of economic power, health and education. It's very slow. For every trend on this planet, there's a counter-trend. We all know of them, but nevertheless -- the Arabs say, "The dogs may bark, but the caravan moves on." And, indeed, that caravan is moving on. Women are moving back into the job market. And I say back into the job market, because this is not new. For millions of years, on the grasslands of Africa, women commuted to work to gather their vegetables. They came home with 60 to 80 percent of the evening meal. The double income family was the standard. And women were regarded as just as economically, socially and sexually powerful as men. In short, we're really moving forward to the past. Then, women's worst invention was the plow. With the beginning of plow agriculture, men's roles became extremely powerful. Women lost their ancient jobs as collectors, but then with the industrial revolution and the post-industrial revolution they're moving back into the job market. In short, they are acquiring the status that they had a million years ago, 10,000 years ago, 100,000 years ago. We are seeing now one of the most remarkable traditions in the history of the human animal. And it's going to have an impact. I generally give a whole lecture on the impact of women on the business community. I'll say just a couple of things, and then go on to sex and love. There's a lot of gender differences; anybody who thinks men and women are alike simply never had a boy and a girl child. I don't know why they want to think that men and women are alike. There's much we have in common, but there's a whole lot that we do not have in common. We are -- in the words of Ted Hughes, "I think that we are like two feet. We need each other to get ahead." But we did not evolve to have the same brain. And we're finding more and more gender differences in the brain. I'll only just use a couple and then move on to sex and love. One of them is women's verbal ability. Women can talk. Women's ability to find the right word rapidly, basic articulation goes up in the middle of the menstrual cycle, when estrogen levels peak. But even at menstruation, they're better than the average man. Women can talk. They've been doing it for a million years; words were women's tools. They held that baby in front of their face, cajoling it, reprimanding it, educating it with words. And, indeed, they're becoming a very powerful force. Even in places like India and Japan, where women are not moving rapidly into the regular job market, they're moving into journalism. And I think that the television is like the global campfire. We sit around it and it shapes our minds. Almost always, when I'm on TV, the producer who calls me, who negotiates what we're going to say, is a woman. In fact, Solzhenitsyn once said, "To have a great writer is to have another government." Today 54 percent of people who are writers in America are women. It's one of many, many characteristics that women have that they will bring into the job market. They've got incredible people skills, negotiating skills. They're highly imaginative. We now know the brain circuitry of imagination, of long-term planning. They tend to be web thinkers. Because the female parts of the brain are better connected, they tend to collect more pieces of data when they think, put them into more complex patterns, see more options and outcomes. They tend to be contextual, holistic thinkers, what I call web thinkers. Men tend to -- and these are averages -- tend to get rid of what they regard as extraneous, focus on what they do, and move in a more step-by-step thinking pattern. They're both perfectly good ways of thinking. We need both of them to get ahead. In fact, there's many more male geniuses in the world. And there's also many more male idiots in the world. (Laughter) When the male brain works well, it works extremely well. And what I really think that we're doing is, we're moving towards a collaborative society, a society in which the talents of both men and women are becoming understood and valued and employed. But in fact, women moving into the job market is having a huge impact on sex and romance and family life. Foremost, women are starting to express their sexuality. I'm always astonished when people come to me and say, "Why is it that men are so adulterous?" "Why do you think more men are adulterous than women?" "Well, men are more adulterous!" And I say, "Who do you think these men are sleeping with?" (Laughter) And -- basic math! Anyway. In the Western world, women start sooner at sex, have more partners, express less remorse for the partners that they do, marry later, have fewer children, leave bad marriages in order to get good ones. We are seeing the rise of female sexual expression. And, indeed, once again we're moving forward to the kind of sexual expression that we probably saw on the grasslands of Africa a million years ago, because this is the kind of sexual expression that we see in hunting and gathering societies today. We're also returning to an ancient form of marriage equality. They're now saying that the 21st century is going to be the century of what they call the "symmetrical marriage," or the "pure marriage," or the "companionate marriage." This is a marriage between equals, moving forward to a pattern that is highly compatible with the ancient human spirit. We're also seeing a rise of romantic love. 91 percent of American women and 86 percent of American men would not marry somebody who had every single quality they were looking for in a partner, if they were not in love with that person. People around the world, in a study of 37 societies, want to be in love with the person that they marry. Indeed, arranged marriages are on their way off this braid of human life. I even think that marriages might even become more stable because of the second great world trend. The first one being women moving into the job market, the second one being the aging world population. They're now saying that in America, that middle age should be regarded as up to age 85. Because in that highest age category of 76 to 85, as much as 40 percent of people have nothing really wrong with them. So we're seeing there's a real extension of middle age. For one of my books, I looked at divorce data in 58 societies. And as it turns out, the older you get, the less likely you are to divorce. So the divorce rate right now is stable in America, and it's actually beginning to decline. It may decline some more. I would even say that with Viagra, estrogen replacement, hip replacements and the incredibly interesting women -- women have never been as interesting as they are now. Not at any time on this planet have women been so educated, so interesting, so capable. And so I honestly think that if there really was ever a time in human evolution when we have the opportunity to make good marriages, that time is now. However, there's always kinds of complications in this. These three brain systems -- lust, romantic love and attachment -- don't always go together. They can go together, by the way. That's why casual sex isn't so casual. With orgasm you get a spike of dopamine. Dopamine's associated with romantic love, and you can just fall in love with somebody who you're just having casual sex with. With orgasm, then you get a real rush of oxytocin and vasopressin -- those are associated with attachment. This is why you can feel such a sense of cosmic union with somebody after you've made love to them. But these three brain systems: lust, romantic love and attachment, aren't always connected to each other. You can feel deep attachment to a long-term partner while you feel intense romantic love for somebody else, while you feel the sex drive for people unrelated to these other partners. In short, we're capable of loving more than one person at a time. In fact, you can lie in bed at night and swing from deep feelings of attachment for one person to deep feelings of romantic love for somebody else. It's as if there's a committee meeting going on in your head as you are trying to decide what to do. So I don't think, honestly, we're an animal that was built to be happy; we are an animal that was built to reproduce. I think the happiness we find, we make. And I think, however, we can make good relationships with each other. So I want to conclude with two things. I want to conclude with a worry, and with a wonderful story. The worry is about antidepressants. Over 100 million prescriptions of antidepressants are written every year in the United States. And these drugs are going generic. They are seeping around the world. I know one girl who's been on these antidepressants, SSRIs, serotonin-enhancing antidepressants -- since she was 13. She's 23. She's been on them ever since she was 13. I've got nothing against people who take them short term, when they're going through something horrible. They want to commit suicide or kill somebody else. I would recommend it. But more and more people in the United States are taking them long term. And indeed, what these drugs do is raise levels of serotonin. And by raising levels of serotonin, you suppress the dopamine circuit. Everybody knows that. Dopamine is associated with romantic love. Not only do they suppress the dopamine circuit, but they kill the sex drive. And when you kill the sex drive, you kill orgasm. And when you kill orgasm, you kill that flood of drugs associated with attachment. The things are connected in the brain. And when you tamper with one brain system, you're going to tamper with another. I'm just simply saying that a world without love is a deadly place. So now -- (Applause) Thank you. I want to end with a story. And then, just a comment. I've been studying romantic love and sex and attachment for 30 years. I'm an identical twin; I am interested in why we're all alike. Why you and I are alike, why the Iraqis and the Japanese and the Australian Aborigines and the people of the Amazon River are all alike. And about a year ago, an Internet dating service, Match.com, came to me and asked me if I would design a new dating site for them. I said, "I don't know anything about personality. You know? I don't know. Do you think you've got the right person?" They said, "Yes." It got me thinking about why it is that you fall in love with one person rather than another. That's my current project; it will be my next book. There's all kinds of reasons that you fall in love with one person rather than another. Timing is important. Proximity is important. Mystery is important. You fall in love with somebody who's somewhat mysterious, in part because mystery elevates dopamine in the brain, probably pushes you over that threshold to fall in love. You fall in love with somebody who fits within what I call your "love map," an unconscious list of traits that you build in childhood as you grow up. And I also think that you gravitate to certain people, actually, with somewhat complementary brain systems. And that's what I'm now contributing to this. But I want to tell you a story, to illustrate. I've been carrying on here about the biology of love. I wanted to show you a little bit about the culture of it, too, the magic of it. It's a story that was told to me by somebody who had heard it just from one -- probably a true story. It was a graduate student -- I'm at Rutgers and my two colleagues -- Art Aron is at SUNY Stony Brook. That's where we put our people in the MRI machine. And this graduate student was madly in love with another graduate student, and she was not in love with him. And they were all at a conference in Beijing. And he knew from our work that if you go and do something very novel with somebody, you can drive up the dopamine in the brain, and perhaps trigger this brain system for romantic love. (Laughter) So he decided he'd put science to work. And he invited this girl to go off on a rickshaw ride with him. And sure enough -- I've never been in one, but apparently they go all around the buses and the trucks and it's crazy and it's noisy and it's exciting. He figured that this would drive up the dopamine, and she'd fall in love with him. So off they go and she's squealing and squeezing him and laughing and having a wonderful time. An hour later they get down off of the rickshaw, and she throws her hands up and she says, "Wasn't that wonderful?" And, "Wasn't that rickshaw driver handsome!" (Laughter) (Applause) There's magic to love! (Applause) But I will end by saying that millions of years ago, we evolved three basic drives: the sex drive, romantic love and attachment to a long-term partner. These circuits are deeply embedded in the human brain. They're going to survive as long as our species survives on what Shakespeare called "this mortal coil." Thank you. Chris Anderson: Helen Fisher! (Applause)

So I want to start by offering you a free no-tech life hack, and all it requires of you is this: that you change your posture for two minutes. But before I give it away, I want to ask you to right now do a little audit of your body and what you're doing with your body. So how many of you are sort of making yourselves smaller? Maybe you're hunching, crossing your legs, maybe wrapping your ankles. Sometimes we hold onto our arms like this. Sometimes we spread out. (Laughter) I see you. (Laughter) So I want you to pay attention to what you're doing right now. We're going to come back to that in a few minutes, and I'm hoping that if you learn to tweak this a little bit, it could significantly change the way your life unfolds. So, we're really fascinated with body language, and we're particularly interested in other people's body language. You know, we're interested in, like, you know — (Laughter) — an awkward interaction, or a smile, or a contemptuous glance, or maybe a very awkward wink, or maybe even something like a handshake. Narrator: Here they are arriving at Number 10, and look at this lucky policeman gets to shake hands with the President of the United States. Oh, and here comes the Prime Minister of the — ? No. (Laughter) (Applause) (Laughter) (Applause) Amy Cuddy: So a handshake, or the lack of a handshake, can have us talking for weeks and weeks and weeks. Even the BBC and The New York Times. So obviously when we think about nonverbal behavior, or body language -- but we call it nonverbals as social scientists -- it's language, so we think about communication. When we think about communication, we think about interactions. So what is your body language communicating to me? What's mine communicating to you? And there's a lot of reason to believe that this is a valid way to look at this. So social scientists have spent a lot of time looking at the effects of our body language, or other people's body language, on judgments. And we make sweeping judgments and inferences from body language. And those judgments can predict really meaningful life outcomes like who we hire or promote, who we ask out on a date. For example, Nalini Ambady, a researcher at Tufts University, shows that when people watch 30-second soundless clips of real physician-patient interactions, their judgments of the physician's niceness predict whether or not that physician will be sued. So it doesn't have to do so much with whether or not that physician was incompetent, but do we like that person and how they interacted? Even more dramatic, Alex Todorov at Princeton has shown us that judgments of political candidates' faces in just one second predict 70 percent of U.S. Senate and gubernatorial race outcomes, and even, let's go digital, emoticons used well in online negotiations can lead to you claim more value from that negotiation. If you use them poorly, bad idea. Right? So when we think of nonverbals, we think of how we judge others, how they judge us and what the outcomes are. We tend to forget, though, the other audience that's influenced by our nonverbals, and that's ourselves. We are also influenced by our nonverbals, our thoughts and our feelings and our physiology. So what nonverbals am I talking about? I'm a social psychologist. I study prejudice, and I teach at a competitive business school, so it was inevitable that I would become interested in power dynamics. I became especially interested in nonverbal expressions of power and dominance. And what are nonverbal expressions of power and dominance? Well, this is what they are. So in the animal kingdom, they are about expanding. So you make yourself big, you stretch out, you take up space, you're basically opening up. It's about opening up. And this is true across the animal kingdom. It's not just limited to primates. And humans do the same thing. (Laughter) So they do this both when they have power sort of chronically, and also when they're feeling powerful in the moment. And this one is especially interesting because it really shows us how universal and old these expressions of power are. This expression, which is known as pride, Jessica Tracy has studied. She shows that people who are born with sight and people who are congenitally blind do this when they win at a physical competition. So when they cross the finish line and they've won, it doesn't matter if they've never seen anyone do it. They do this. So the arms up in the V, the chin is slightly lifted. What do we do when we feel powerless? We do exactly the opposite. We close up. We wrap ourselves up. We make ourselves small. We don't want to bump into the person next to us. So again, both animals and humans do the same thing. And this is what happens when you put together high and low power. So what we tend to do when it comes to power is that we complement the other's nonverbals. So if someone is being really powerful with us, we tend to make ourselves smaller. We don't mirror them. We do the opposite of them. So I'm watching this behavior in the classroom, and what do I notice? I notice that MBA students really exhibit the full range of power nonverbals. So you have people who are like caricatures of alphas, really coming into the room, they get right into the middle of the room before class even starts, like they really want to occupy space. When they sit down, they're sort of spread out. They raise their hands like this. You have other people who are virtually collapsing when they come in. As soon they come in, you see it. You see it on their faces and their bodies, and they sit in their chair and they make themselves tiny, and they go like this when they raise their hand. I notice a couple of things about this. One, you're not going to be surprised. It seems to be related to gender. So women are much more likely to do this kind of thing than men. Women feel chronically less powerful than men, so this is not surprising. But the other thing I noticed is that it also seemed to be related to the extent to which the students were participating, and how well they were participating. And this is really important in the MBA classroom, because participation counts for half the grade. So business schools have been struggling with this gender grade gap. You get these equally qualified women and men coming in and then you get these differences in grades, and it seems to be partly attributable to participation. So I started to wonder, you know, okay, so you have these people coming in like this, and they're participating. Is it possible that we could get people to fake it and would it lead them to participate more? So my main collaborator Dana Carney, who's at Berkeley, and I really wanted to know, can you fake it till you make it? Like, can you do this just for a little while and actually experience a behavioral outcome that makes you seem more powerful? So we know that our nonverbals govern how other people think and feel about us. There's a lot of evidence. But our question really was, do our nonverbals govern how we think and feel about ourselves? There's some evidence that they do. So, for example, we smile when we feel happy, but also, when we're forced to smile by holding a pen in our teeth like this, it makes us feel happy. So it goes both ways. When it comes to power, it also goes both ways. So when you feel powerful, you're more likely to do this, but it's also possible that when you pretend to be powerful, you are more likely to actually feel powerful. So the second question really was, you know, so we know that our minds change our bodies, but is it also true that our bodies change our minds? And when I say minds, in the case of the powerful, what am I talking about? So I'm talking about thoughts and feelings and the sort of physiological things that make up our thoughts and feelings, and in my case, that's hormones. I look at hormones. So what do the minds of the powerful versus the powerless look like? So powerful people tend to be, not surprisingly, more assertive and more confident, more optimistic. They actually feel that they're going to win even at games of chance. They also tend to be able to think more abstractly. So there are a lot of differences. They take more risks. There are a lot of differences between powerful and powerless people. Physiologically, there also are differences on two key hormones: testosterone, which is the dominance hormone, and cortisol, which is the stress hormone. So what we find is that high-power alpha males in primate hierarchies have high testosterone and low cortisol, and powerful and effective leaders also have high testosterone and low cortisol. So what does that mean? When you think about power, people tended to think only about testosterone, because that was about dominance. But really, power is also about how you react to stress. So do you want the high-power leader that's dominant, high on testosterone, but really stress reactive? Probably not, right? You want the person who's powerful and assertive and dominant, but not very stress reactive, the person who's laid back. So we know that in primate hierarchies, if an alpha needs to take over, if an individual needs to take over an alpha role sort of suddenly, within a few days, that individual's testosterone has gone up significantly and his cortisol has dropped significantly. So we have this evidence, both that the body can shape the mind, at least at the facial level, and also that role changes can shape the mind. So what happens, okay, you take a role change, what happens if you do that at a really minimal level, like this tiny manipulation, this tiny intervention? "For two minutes," you say, "I want you to stand like this, and it's going to make you feel more powerful." So this is what we did. We decided to bring people into the lab and run a little experiment, and these people adopted, for two minutes, either high-power poses or low-power poses, and I'm just going to show you five of the poses, although they took on only two. So here's one. A couple more. This one has been dubbed the "Wonder Woman" by the media. Here are a couple more. So you can be standing or you can be sitting. And here are the low-power poses. So you're folding up, you're making yourself small. This one is very low-power. When you're touching your neck, you're really protecting yourself. So this is what happens. They come in, they spit into a vial, we for two minutes say, "You need to do this or this." They don't look at pictures of the poses. We don't want to prime them with a concept of power. We want them to be feeling power, right? So two minutes they do this. We then ask them, "How powerful do you feel?" on a series of items, and then we give them an opportunity to gamble, and then we take another saliva sample. That's it. That's the whole experiment. So this is what we find. Risk tolerance, which is the gambling, what we find is that when you're in the high-power pose condition, 86 percent of you will gamble. When you're in the low-power pose condition, only 60 percent, and that's a pretty whopping significant difference. Here's what we find on testosterone. From their baseline when they come in, high-power people experience about a 20-percent increase, and low-power people experience about a 10-percent decrease. So again, two minutes, and you get these changes. Here's what you get on cortisol. High-power people experience about a 25-percent decrease, and the low-power people experience about a 15-percent increase. So two minutes lead to these hormonal changes that configure your brain to basically be either assertive, confident and comfortable, or really stress-reactive, and, you know, feeling sort of shut down. And we've all had the feeling, right? So it seems that our nonverbals do govern how we think and feel about ourselves, so it's not just others, but it's also ourselves. Also, our bodies change our minds. But the next question, of course, is can power posing for a few minutes really change your life in meaningful ways? So this is in the lab. It's this little task, you know, it's just a couple of minutes. Where can you actually apply this? Which we cared about, of course. And so we think it's really, what matters, I mean, where you want to use this is evaluative situations like social threat situations. Where are you being evaluated, either by your friends? Like for teenagers it's at the lunchroom table. It could be, you know, for some people it's speaking at a school board meeting. It might be giving a pitch or giving a talk like this or doing a job interview. We decided that the one that most people could relate to because most people had been through was the job interview. So we published these findings, and the media are all over it, and they say, Okay, so this is what you do when you go in for the job interview, right? (Laughter) You know, so we were of course horrified, and said, Oh my God, no, no, no, that's not what we meant at all. For numerous reasons, no, no, no, don't do that. Again, this is not about you talking to other people. It's you talking to yourself. What do you do before you go into a job interview? You do this. Right? You're sitting down. You're looking at your iPhone -- or your Android, not trying to leave anyone out. You are, you know, you're looking at your notes, you're hunching up, making yourself small, when really what you should be doing maybe is this, like, in the bathroom, right? Do that. Find two minutes. So that's what we want to test. Okay? So we bring people into a lab, and they do either high- or low-power poses again, they go through a very stressful job interview. It's five minutes long. They are being recorded. They're being judged also, and the judges are trained to give no nonverbal feedback, so they look like this. Like, imagine this is the person interviewing you. So for five minutes, nothing, and this is worse than being heckled. People hate this. It's what Marianne LaFrance calls "standing in social quicksand." So this really spikes your cortisol. So this is the job interview we put them through, because we really wanted to see what happened. We then have these coders look at these tapes, four of them. They're blind to the hypothesis. They're blind to the conditions. They have no idea who's been posing in what pose, and they end up looking at these sets of tapes, and they say, "Oh, we want to hire these people," -- all the high-power posers -- "we don't want to hire these people. We also evaluate these people much more positively overall." But what's driving it? It's not about the content of the speech. It's about the presence that they're bringing to the speech. We also, because we rate them on all these variables related to competence, like, how well-structured is the speech? How good is it? What are their qualifications? No effect on those things. This is what's affected. These kinds of things. People are bringing their true selves, basically. They're bringing themselves. They bring their ideas, but as themselves, with no, you know, residue over them. So this is what's driving the effect, or mediating the effect. So when I tell people about this, that our bodies change our minds and our minds can change our behavior, and our behavior can change our outcomes, they say to me, "I don't -- It feels fake." Right? So I said, fake it till you make it. I don't -- It's not me. I don't want to get there and then still feel like a fraud. I don't want to feel like an impostor. I don't want to get there only to feel like I'm not supposed to be here. And that really resonated with me, because I want to tell you a little story about being an impostor and feeling like I'm not supposed to be here. When I was 19, I was in a really bad car accident. I was thrown out of a car, rolled several times. I was thrown from the car. And I woke up in a head injury rehab ward, and I had been withdrawn from college, and I learned that my I.Q. had dropped by two standard deviations, which was very traumatic. I knew my I.Q. because I had identified with being smart, and I had been called gifted as a child. So I'm taken out of college, I keep trying to go back. They say, "You're not going to finish college. Just, you know, there are other things for you to do, but that's not going to work out for you." So I really struggled with this, and I have to say, having your identity taken from you, your core identity, and for me it was being smart, having that taken from you, there's nothing that leaves you feeling more powerless than that. So I felt entirely powerless. I worked and worked and worked, and I got lucky, and worked, and got lucky, and worked. Eventually I graduated from college. It took me four years longer than my peers, and I convinced someone, my angel advisor, Susan Fiske, to take me on, and so I ended up at Princeton, and I was like, I am not supposed to be here. I am an impostor. And the night before my first-year talk, and the first-year talk at Princeton is a 20-minute talk to 20 people. That's it. I was so afraid of being found out the next day that I called her and said, "I'm quitting." She was like, "You are not quitting, because I took a gamble on you, and you're staying. You're going to stay, and this is what you're going to do. You are going to fake it. You're going to do every talk that you ever get asked to do. You're just going to do it and do it and do it, even if you're terrified and just paralyzed and having an out-of-body experience, until you have this moment where you say, 'Oh my gosh, I'm doing it. Like, I have become this. I am actually doing this.'" So that's what I did. Five years in grad school, a few years, you know, I'm at Northwestern, I moved to Harvard, I'm at Harvard, I'm not really thinking about it anymore, but for a long time I had been thinking, "Not supposed to be here. Not supposed to be here." So at the end of my first year at Harvard, a student who had not talked in class the entire semester, who I had said, "Look, you've gotta participate or else you're going to fail," came into my office. I really didn't know her at all. And she said, she came in totally defeated, and she said, "I'm not supposed to be here." And that was the moment for me. Because two things happened. One was that I realized, oh my gosh, I don't feel like that anymore. You know. I don't feel that anymore, but she does, and I get that feeling. And the second was, she is supposed to be here! Like, she can fake it, she can become it. So I was like, "Yes, you are! You are supposed to be here! And tomorrow you're going to fake it, you're going to make yourself powerful, and, you know, you're gonna — " (Applause) (Applause) "And you're going to go into the classroom, and you are going to give the best comment ever." You know? And she gave the best comment ever, and people turned around and they were like, oh my God, I didn't even notice her sitting there, you know? (Laughter) She comes back to me months later, and I realized that she had not just faked it till she made it, she had actually faked it till she became it. So she had changed. And so I want to say to you, don't fake it till you make it. Fake it till you become it. You know? It's not — Do it enough until you actually become it and internalize. The last thing I'm going to leave you with is this. Tiny tweaks can lead to big changes. So this is two minutes. Two minutes, two minutes, two minutes. Before you go into the next stressful evaluative situation, for two minutes, try doing this, in the elevator, in a bathroom stall, at your desk behind closed doors. That's what you want to do. Configure your brain to cope the best in that situation. Get your testosterone up. Get your cortisol down. Don't leave that situation feeling like, oh, I didn't show them who I am. Leave that situation feeling like, oh, I really feel like I got to say who I am and show who I am. So I want to ask you first, you know, both to try power posing, and also I want to ask you to share the science, because this is simple. I don't have ego involved in this. (Laughter) Give it away. Share it with people, because the people who can use it the most are the ones with no resources and no technology and no status and no power. Give it to them because they can do it in private. They need their bodies, privacy and two minutes, and it can significantly change the outcomes of their life. Thank you. (Applause) (Applause)

So my grandfather told me when I was a little girl, "If you say a word often enough, it becomes you." And having grown up in a segregated city, Baltimore, Maryland, I sort of use that idea to go around America with a tape recorder -- thank God for technology -- to interview people, thinking that if I walked in their words -- which is also why I don't wear shoes when I perform -- if I walked in their words, that I could sort of absorb America. I was also inspired by Walt Whitman, who wanted to absorb America and have it absorb him. So these four characters are going to be from that work that I've been doing for many years now, and well over, I don't know, a couple of thousand people I've interviewed. Anybody out here old enough to know Studs Terkel, that old radio man? So I thought he would be the perfect person to go to to ask about a defining moment in American history. You know, he was "born in 1912, the year the Titanic sank, greatest ship every built. Hits the tip of an iceberg, and bam, it went down. It went down and I came up. Wow, some century." (Laughter) So this is his answer about a defining moment in American history. "Defining moment in American history, I don't think there's one; you can't say Hiroshima, that's a big one -- I can't think of any one moment I would say is a defining moment. The gradual slippage -- 'slippage' is the word used by the people in Watergate, moral slippage -- it's a gradual kind of thing, combination of things. You see, we also have the technology. I say, less and less the human touch. "Oh, let me kind of tell you a funny little play bit. The Atlanta airport is a modern airport, and they should leave the gate there. These trains that take you out to a concourse and on to a destination. And these trains are smooth, and they're quiet and they're efficient. And there's a voice on the train, you know the voice was a human voice. You see in the old days we had robots, robots imitated humans. Now we have humans imitating robots. So we got this voice on this train: Concourse One: Omaha, Lincoln. Concourse Two: Dallas, Fort Worth. Same voice. Just as a train is about to go, a young couple rush in and they're just about to close the pneumatic doors. And that voice, without losing a beat, says, 'Because of late entry, we're delayed 30 seconds.' Just then, everybody's looking at this couple with hateful eyes and the couple's going like this, you know, shrinking. Well, I'd happened to have had a couple of drinks before boarding -- I do that to steel my nerves -- and so I imitate a train call, holding my hand on my -- 'George Orwell, your time has come,' you see. Well, some of you are laughing. Everybody laughs when I say that, but not on this train. Silence. And so suddenly they're looking at me. So here I am with the couple, the three of us shrinking at the foot of Calvary about to be up, you know. "Just then I see a baby, a little baby in the lap of a mother. I know it's Hispanic because she's speaking Spanish to her companion. So I'm going to talk to the baby. So I say to the baby, holding my hand over my mouth because my breath must be 100 proof, I say to the baby, 'Sir or Madam, what is your considered opinion of the human species?' And the baby looks, you know, the way babies look at you clearly, starts laughing, starts busting out with this crazy little laugh. I say, 'Thank God for a human reaction, we haven't lost yet.' "But you see, the human touch, you see, it's disappearing. You know, you see, you've got to question the official truth. You know the thing that was so great about Mark Twain -- you know we honor Mark Twain, but we don't read him. We read 'Huck Finn,' of course, we read 'Huck Finn' of course. I mean, Huck, of course, was tremendous. Remember that great scene on the raft, remember what Huck did? You see, here's Huck; he's an illiterate kid; he's had no schooling, but there's something in him. And the official truth, the truth was, the law was, that a black man was a property, was a thing, you see. And Huck gets on the raft with a property named Jim, a slave, see. And he hears that Jim is going to go and take his wife and kids and steal them from the woman who owns them, and Huck says, 'Ooh, oh my God, ooh, ooh -- that woman, that woman never did anybody any harm. Ooh, he's going to steal; he's going to steal; he's going to do a terrible thing.' Just then, two slavers caught up, guys chasing slaves, looking for Jim. 'Anybody up on that raft with you?' Huck says, 'Yeah.' 'Is he black or white?' 'White.' And they go off. And Huck said, 'Oh my God, oh my God, I lied, I lied, ooh, I did a terrible thing, did a terrible thing -- why do I feel so good?' "But it's the goodness of Huck, that stuff that Huck's been made of, you see, all been buried; it's all been buried. So the human touch, you see, it's disappearing. So you ask about a defining moment -- ain't no defining moment in American history for me. It's an accretion of moments that add up to where we are now, where trivia becomes news. And more and more, less and less awareness of the pain of the other. Huh. You know, I don't know if you could use this or not, but I was quoting Wright Morris, a writer from Nebraska, who says, 'We're more and more into communications and less and less into communication.' Okay, kids, I got to scram, got to go see my cardiologist." And that's Studs Terkel. (Applause) So, talk about risk taking. I'm going to do somebody that nobody likes. You know, most actors want to do characters that are likeable -- well, not always, but the notion, especially at a conference like this, I like to inspire people. But since this was called "risk taking," I'm doing somebody who I never do, because she's so unlikeable that one person actually came backstage and told me to take her out of the show she was in. And I'm doing her because I think we think of risk, at a conference like this, as a good thing. But there are certain other connotations to the word "risk," and the same thing about the word "nature." What is nature? Maxine Greene, who's a wonderful philosopher who's as old as Studs, and was the head of a philosophy -- great, big philosophy kind of an organization -- I went to her and asked her what are the two things that she doesn't know, that she still wants to know. And she said, "Well, personally, I still feel like I have to curtsey when I see the president of my university. And I still feel as though I've got to get coffee for my male colleagues, even though I've outlived most of them." And she said, "And then intellectually, I don't know enough about the negative imagination. And September 11th certainly taught us that that's a whole area we don't investigate." So this piece is about a negative imagination. It raises questions about what nature is, what Mother Nature is, and about what a risk can be. And I got this in the Maryland Correctional Institute for Women. Everything I do is word for word off a tape. And I title things because I think people speak in organic poems, and this is called "A Mirror to Her Mouth." And this is an inmate named Paulette Jenkins. "I began to learn how to cover it up, because I didn't want nobody to know that this was happening in my home. I want everybody to think we were a normal family. I mean we had all the materialistic things, but that didn't make my children pain any less; that didn't make their fears subside. I ran out of excuses about how we got black eyes and busted lips and bruises. I didn't had no more excuses. And he beat me too. But that didn't change the fact that it was a nightmare for my family; it was a nightmare. And I failed them dramatically, because I allowed it to go on and on and on. "But the night that Myesha got killed -- and the intensity just grew and grew and grew, until one night we came home from getting drugs, and he got angry with Myesha, and he started beating her, and he put her in a bathtub. Oh, he would use a belt. He had a belt because he had this warped perverted thing that Myesha was having sex with her little brother and they was fondling each other -- that would be his reason. I'm just talking about the particular night that she died. And so he put her in the bathtub, and I was in the bedroom with the baby. "And four months before this happened, four months before Myesha died, I thought I could really fix this man. So I had a baby by him -- insane -- thinking that if I gave him his own kid, he would leave mine alone. And it didn't work, didn't work. And I ended up with three children, Houston, Myesha and Dominic, who was four months old when I came to jail. "And I was in the bedroom. Like I said, he had her in the bathroom and he -- he -- every time he hit her, she would fall. And she would hit her head on the tub. It happened continuously, repeatedly. I could hear it, but I dared not to move. I didn't move. I didn't even go and see what was happening. I just sat there and listened. And then he put her in the hallway. He told her, just set there. And so she set there for about four or five hours. And then he told her, get up. And when she got up, she says she couldn't see. Her face was bruised. She had a black eye. All around her head was just swollen; her head was about two sizes of its own size. I told him, 'Let her go to sleep.' He let her go to sleep. "The next morning she was dead. He went in to check on her for school, and he got very excited. He says, 'She won't breathe.' I knew immediately that she was dead. I didn't even want to accept the fact that she was dead, so I went in and I put a mirror to her mouth -- there was no thing, nothing, coming out of her mouth. He said, he said, he said, 'We can't, we can't let nobody find out about this.' He say, 'You've got to help me.' I agree. I agree. "I mean, I've been keeping a secret for years and years and years, so it just seemed like second hand to me, just to keep on keeping it a secret. So we went to the mall and we told a police that we had, like, lost her, that she was missing. We told a security guard that she was missing, though she wasn't missing. And we told the security guard what we had put on her and we went home and we dressed her in exactly the same thing that we had told the security guard that we had put on her. "And then we got the baby and my other child, and we drove out to, like, I-95. I was so petrified and so numb, all I could look was in the rear-view mirror. And he just laid her right on the shoulder of the highway. My own child, I let that happen to." So that's an investigation of the negative imagination. (Applause) When I started this project called "On the Road: A Search For an American Character" with my tape recorder, I thought that I was going to go around America and find it in all its aspects -- bull riders, cowboys, pig farmers, drum majorettes -- but I sort of got tripped on race relations, because my first big show was a show about a race riot. And so I went to both -- two race riots, one of which was the Los Angeles riot. And this next piece is from that. Because this is what I would say I've learned the most about race relations, from this piece. It's a kind of an aria, I would say, and in many tapes that I have. Everybody knows that the Los Angeles riots happened because four cops beat up a black man named Rodney King. It was captured on videotape -- technology -- and it was played all over the world. Everybody thought the four cops would go to jail. They did not, so there were riots. And what a lot of people forget, is there was a second trial, ordered by George Bush, Sr. And that trial came back with two cops going to jail and two cops declared innocent. I was at that trial. And I mean, the people just danced in the streets because they were afraid there was going to be another riot. Explosion of joy that this verdict had come back this way. So there was a community that didn't -- the Korean-Americans, whose stores had been burned to the ground. And so this woman, Mrs. Young-Soon Han, I suppose will have taught me the most that I have learned about race. And she asks also a question that Studs talks about: this notion of the "official truth," to question the "official truth." So what she's questioning here, she's taking a chance and questioning what justice is in society. And this is called, "Swallowing the Bitterness." "I used to believe America was the best. I watched in Korea many luxurious Hollywood lifestyle movie. I never saw any poor man, any black. Until 1992, I used to believe America was the best -- I still do; I don't deny that because I am a victim. But at the end of '92, when we were in such turmoil, and having all the financial problems, and all the mental problems, I began to really realize that Koreans are completely left out of this society and we are nothing. Why? Why do we have to be left out? We didn't qualify for medical treatment, no food stamp, no GR, no welfare, anything. Many African-Americans who never work got minimum amount of money to survive. We didn't get any because we have a car and a house. And we are high taxpayer. Where do I find justice? "OK. OK? OK. OK. Many African-Americans probably think that they won by the trial. I was sitting here watching them the morning after the verdict, and all the day they were having a party, they celebrated, all of South Central, all the churches. And they say, 'Well, finally justice has been done in this society.' Well, what about victims' rights? They got their rights by destroying innocent Korean merchants. They have a lot of respect, as I do, for Dr. Martin King. He is the only model for black community; I don't care Jesse Jackson. He is the model of non-violence, non-violence -- and they would all like to be in his spirit. "But what about 1992? They destroyed innocent people. And I wonder if that is really justice for them, to get their rights in that way. I was swallowing the bitterness, sitting here alone and watching them. They became so hilarious, but I was happy for them. I was glad for them. At least they got something back, OK. Let's just forget about Korean victims and other victims who were destroyed by them. They fought for their rights for over two centuries, and maybe because they sacrifice other minorities, Hispanic, Asian, we would suffer more in the mainstream. That's why I understand; that's why I have a mixed feeling about the verdict. "But I wish that, I wish that, I wish that I could be part of the enjoyment. I wish that I could live together with black people. But after the riot, it's too much difference. The fire is still there. How do you say it? [Unclear]. Igniting, igniting, igniting fire. Igniting fire. It's still there; it can burst out anytime." Mrs. Young-Soon Han. (Applause) The other reason that I don't wear shoes is just in case I really feel like I have to cuddle up and get into the feet of somebody, walking really in somebody else's shoes. And I told you that in -- you know, I didn't give you the year, but in '79 I thought that I was going to go around and find bull riders and pig farmers and people like that, and I got sidetracked on race relations. Finally, I did find a bull rider, two years ago. And I've been going to the rodeos with him, and we've bonded. And he's the lead in an op-ed I did about the Republican Convention. He's a Republican -- I won't say anything about my party affiliation, but anyway -- so this is my dear, dear Brent Williams, and this is on toughness, in case anybody needs to know about being tough for the work that you do. I think there's a real lesson in this. And this is called "Toughness." "Well, I'm an optimist. I mean basically I'm an optimist. I mean, you know, I mean, it's like my wife, Jolene, her family's always saying, you know, you ever think he's just a born loser? It seems like he has so much bad luck, you know. But then when that bull stepped on my kidney, you know, I didn't lose my kidney -- I could have lost my kidney, I kept my kidney, so I don't think I'm a born loser. I think that's good luck. (Laughter) "And, I mean, funny things like this happen. I was in a doctor's office last CAT scan, and there was a Reader's Digest, October 2002. It was like, 'seven ways to get lucky.' And it says if you want to get lucky, you know, you've got to be around positive people. I mean, like even when I told my wife that you want to come out here and talk to me, she's like, 'She's just talking; she's just being nice to you. She's not going to do that.' "And then you called me up and you said you wanted to come out here and interview me and she went and looked you up on the Internet. She said, 'Look who she is. You're not even going to be able to answer her questions.' (Laughter) And she was saying you're going to make me look like an idiot because I've never been to college, and I wouldn't be talking professional or anything. I said, 'Well look, the woman talked to me for four hours. You know, if I wasn't talking -- you know, like, you know, she wanted me to talk, I don't think she would even come out here.' "Confidence? Well, I think I ride more out of determination than confidence. I mean, confidence is like, you know, you've been on that bull before; you know you can ride him. I mean, confidence is kind of like being cocky, but in a good way. But determination, you know, it's like just, you know, 'Fuck the form, get the horn.' (Laughter) That's Tuff Hedeman, in the movie '8 Seconds.' I mean, like, Pat O'Mealey always said when I was a boy, he say, 'You know, you got more try than any kid I ever seen.' And try and determination is the same thing. Determination is, like, you're going to hang on that bull, even if you're riding upside down. Determination's like, you're going to ride till your head hits the back of the dirt. "Freedom? It would have to be the rodeo. "Beauty? I don't think I know what beauty is. Well, you know, I guess that'd have to be the rodeo too. I mean, look how we are, the roughy family, palling around and shaking hands and wrestling around me. It's like, you know, racking up our credit cards on entry fees and gas. We ride together, we, you know, we, we eat together and we sleep together. I mean, I can't even imagine what it's going to be like the last day I rodeo. I mean, I'll be alright. I mean, I have my ranch and everything, but I actually don't even want to think the day that comes. I mean, I guess it just be like -- I guess it be like the day my brother died. "Toughness? Well, we was in West Jordan, Utah, and this bull shoved my face right through the metal shoots in a -- you know, busted my face all up and had to go to the hospital. And they had to sew me up and straighten my nose out. And I had to go and ride in the rodeo that night, so I didn't want them to put me under anesthesia, or whatever you call it. And so they sewed my face up. And then they had to straighten out my nose, and they took these rods and shoved them up my nose and went up through my brains and felt like it was coming out the top of my head, and everybody said that it should have killed me, but it didn't, because I guess I have a high tolerance for pain. (Laughter) But the good thing was, once they shoved those rods up there and straightened my nose out, I could breathe, and I hadn't been able to breathe since I broke my nose in the high school rodeo." Thank you. (Applause)

I want you to imagine two couples in the middle of 1979 on the exact same day, at the exact same moment, each conceiving a baby -- okay? So two couples each conceiving one baby. Now I don't want you to spend too much time imagining the conception, because if you spend all that time imagining that conception, you're not going to listen to me. So just imagine that for a moment. And in this scenario, I want to imagine that, in one case, the sperm is carrying a Y chromosome, meeting that X chromosome of the egg. And in the other case, the sperm is carrying an X chromosome, meeting the X chromosome of the egg. Both are viable; both take off. We'll come back to these people later. So I wear two hats in most of what I do. As the one hat, I do history of anatomy. I'm a historian by training, and what I study in that case is the way that people have dealt with anatomy -- meaning human bodies, animal bodies -- how they dealt with bodily fluids, concepts of bodies; how have they thought about bodies. The other hat that I've worn in my work is as an activist, as a patient advocate -- or, as I sometimes say, as an impatient advocate -- for people who are patients of doctors. In that case, what I've worked with is people who have body types that challenge social norms. So some of what I've worked on, for example, is people who are conjoined twins -- two people within one body. Some of what I've worked on is people who have dwarfism -- so people who are much shorter than typical. And a lot of what I've worked on is people who have atypical sex -- so people who don't have the standard male or the standard female body types. And as a general term, we can use the term intersex for this. Intersex comes in a lot of different forms. I'll just give you a few examples of the types of ways you can have sex that isn't standard for male or female. So in one instance, you can have somebody who has an XY chromosomal basis, and that SRY gene on the Y chromosome tells the proto-gonads, which we all have in the fetal life, to become testes. And so in the fetal life the testes are pumping out testosterone. But because this individual lacks receptors to hear that testosterone, the body doesn't react to the testosterone. And this is a syndrome called androgen insensitivity syndrome. So lots of levels of testosterone, but no reaction to it. As a consequence, the body develops more along the female typical path. When the child is born, she looks like a girl. She is a girl. She is raised as a girl. And it's often not until she hits puberty and she's growing and developing breasts, but she's not getting her period, that somebody figures out something's up here. And they do some tests and figure out that, instead of having ovaries inside and a uterus, she actually has testes inside, and she has a Y chromosome. Now what's important to understand is you may think of this person as really being male, but they're really not. Females, like males, have in our bodies something called the adrenal glands. They're in the back of our body. And the adrenal glands make androgens, which are a masculinizing hormone. Most females like me -- I believe myself to be a typical female -- I don't actually know my chromosomal make-up but I think I'm probably typical -- most females like me are actually androgen-sensitive. We're making androgen, and we're responding to androgens. The consequence is that somebody like me has actually had a brain exposed to more androgens than the woman born with testes who has androgen insensitivity syndrome. So sex is really complicated; it's not just that intersex people are in the middle of all the sex spectrum -- in some ways, they can be all over the place. Another example: a few years ago I got a call from a man who was 19 years old, who was born a boy, raised a boy, had a girlfriend, had sex with his girlfriend, had a life as a guy and had just found out that he had ovaries and a uterus inside. What he had was an extreme form of a condition called congenital adrenal hyperplasia. He had XX chromosomes, and in the womb, his adrenal glands were in such high gear that it created, essentially, a masculine hormonal environment. And as a consequence, his genitals were masculinzed, his brain was subject to the more typical masculine component of hormones. And he was born looking like a boy -- nobody suspected anything. And it was only when he had reached the age of 19 that he began to have enough medical problems actually from menstruating internally, that doctors figured out that, in fact, he was female internally. Okay, so just one more quick example of a way you can have intersex. Some people who have XX chromosomes develop what are called ovotestis, which is when you have ovarian tissue with testicular tissue wrapped around it. And we're not exactly sure why that happens. So sex can come in lots of different varieties. The reason that children with these kinds of bodies -- whether it's dwarfism, or it's conjoined twinning, or it's an intersex type -- are often normalized by surgeons is not because it actually leaves them better off in terms of physical health. In many cases, people are actually perfectly healthy. The reason they're often subject to various kinds of surgeries is because they threaten our social categories. Or system has been based typically on the idea that a particular kind of anatomy comes with a particular identity. So we have the concept that what it means to be a woman is to have a female identity; what it means to be a black person is, allegedly, is to have an African anatomy in terms of your history. And so we have this terribly simplistic idea. And when we're faced with a body that actually presents us something quite different, it startles us in terms of those categorizations. So we have a lot of very romantic ideas in our culture about individualism. And our nation's really founded on a very romantic concept of individualism. Well you can imagine how startling then it is when you have children that are born who are two people inside of one body. Where I ran into the most heat from this most recently was last year the South African runner, Caster Semenya, had her sex called into question at the International Games in Berlin. I had a lot of journalists calling me, asking me, "Which is the test they're going to run that will tell us whether or not Caster Semenya is male or female?" And I had to explain to the journalists there isn't such a test. In fact, we now know that sex is complicated enough that we have to admit nature doesn't draw the line for us between male and female, or between male and intersex and female and intersex; we actually draw that line on nature. So what we have is a sort of situation where the farther our science goes, the more we have to admit to ourselves that these categories that we thought of as stable anatomical categories that mapped very simply to stable identity categories are a lot more fuzzy than we thought. And it's not just in terms of sex. It's also in terms of race, which turns out to be vastly more complicated than our terminology has allowed. As we look, we get into all sorts of uncomfortable areas. We look, for example, about the fact that we share at least 95 percent of our DNA with chimpanzees. What are we to make of the fact that we differ from them only really by a few nucleotides? And as we get farther and farther with our science, we get more and more into a discomforted zone where we have to acknowledge that the simplistic categories we've had are probably overly simplistic. So we're seeing this in all sorts of places in human life. One of the places we're seeing it, for example, in our culture today, in the United States today, is battles over the beginning of life and the end of life. We have difficult conversations about at what point we decide a body becomes a human, such that it has a different right than a fetal life. We have very difficult conversations nowadays -- probably not out in the open as much as within medicine -- about the question of when somebody's dead. In the past, our ancestors never had to struggle so much with this question of when somebody was dead. At most, they'd stick a feather on somebody's nose, and if it twitched, they didn't bury them yet. If it stopped twitching, you bury them. But today, we have a situation where we want to take vital organs out of beings and give them to other beings. And as a consequence, we're stuck with having to struggle with this really difficult question about who's dead, and this leads us to a really difficult situation where we don't have such simple categories as we've had before. Now you might think that all this breaking-down of categories would make somebody like me really happy. I'm a political progressive, I defend people with unusual bodies, but I have to admit to you that it makes me nervous. Understanding that these categories are really much more unstable than we thought makes me tense. And it makes me tense from the point of view of thinking about democracy. So in order to tell you about that tension, I have to first admit to you that I'm a huge fan of the Founding Fathers. I know they were racists, I know they were sexist, but they were great. I mean, they were so brave and so bold and so radical in what they did that I find myself watching that cheesy musical "1776" every few years, and it's not because of the music, which is totally forgettable. It's because of what happened in 1776 with the Founding Fathers. The Founding Fathers were, for my point of view, the original anatomical activists, and this is why. What they rejected was an anatomical concept and replaced it with another one that was radical and beautiful and held us for 200 years. So as you all recall, what our Founding Fathers were rejecting was a concept of monarchy, and the monarchy was basically based on a very simplistic concept of anatomy. The monarchs of the old world didn't have a concept of DNA, but they did have a concept of birthright. They had a concept of blue blood. They had the idea that the people who would be in political power should be in political power because of the blood being passed down from grandfather to father to son and so forth. The Founding Fathers rejected that idea, and they replaced it with a new anatomical concept, and that concept was all men are created equal. They leveled that playing field and decided the anatomy that mattered was the commonality of anatomy, not the difference in anatomy, and that was a really radical thing to do. Now they were doing it in part because they were part of an Enlightenment system where two things were growing up together. And that was democracy growing up, but it was also science growing up at the same time. And it's really clear, if you look at the history of the Founding Fathers, a lot of them were very interested in science, and they were interested in a concept of a naturalistic world. They were moving away from supernatural explanations, and they were rejecting things like a supernatural concept of power, where it transmitted because of a very vague concept of birthright. They were moving towards a naturalistic concept. And if you look, for example, in the Declaration of Independence, they talk about nature and nature's God. They don't talk about God and God's nature. They're talking about the power of nature to tell us who we are. So as part of that, they were coming to us with a concept that was about anatomical commonality. And in doing so, they were really setting up in a beautiful way the Civil Rights movement of the future. They didn't think of it that way, but they did it for us, and it was great. So what happened years afterward? What happened was women, for example, who wanted the right to vote, took the Founding Fathers' concept of anatomical commonality being more important than anatomical difference and said, "The fact that we have a uterus and ovaries is not significant enough in terms of a difference to mean that we shouldn't have the right to vote, the right to full citizenship, the right to own property, etc., etc." And women successfully argued that. Next came the successful Civil Rights movement, where we found people like Sojourner Truth talking about, "Ain't I a woman?" We find men on the marching lines of the Civil Rights movement saying, "I am a man." Again, people of color appealing to a commonality of anatomy over a difference of anatomy, again, successfully. We see the same thing with the disability rights movement. The problem is, of course, that, as we begin to look at all that commonality, we have to begin to question why we maintain certain divisions. Now mind you, I want to maintain some divisions, anatomically, in our culture. For example, I don't want to give a fish the same rights as a human. I don't want to say we give up entirely on anatomy. I don't want to say five-year-olds should be allowed to consent to sex or consent to marry. So there are some anatomical divisions that make sense to me and that I think we should retain. But the challenge is trying to figure out which ones they are and why do we retain them and do they have meaning. So let's go back to those two beings conceived at the beginning of this talk. We have two beings, both conceived in the middle of 1979 on the exact same day. Let's imagine one of them, Mary, is born three months prematurely, so she's born on June 1, 1980. Henry, by contrast, is born at term, so he's born on March 1, 1980. Simply by virtue of the fact that Mary was born prematurely three months, she comes into all sorts of rights three months earlier than Henry does -- the right to consent to sex, the right to vote, the right to drink. Henry has to wait for all of that, not because he's actually any different in age, biologically, except in terms of when he was born. We find other kinds of weirdness in terms of what their rights are. Henry, by virtue of being assumed to be male -- although I haven't told you that he's the XY one -- by virtue of being assumed to be male is now liable to be drafted, which Mary does not need to worry about. Mary, meanwhile, cannot in all the states have the same right that Henry has in all the states, namely, the right to marry. Henry can marry in every state a woman, but Mary can only marry today in a few states a woman. So we have these anatomical categories that persist that are in many ways problematic and questionable. And the question to me becomes: What do we do, as our science gets to be so good in looking at anatomy, that we reach the point where we have to admit that a democracy that's been based on anatomy might start falling apart? I don't want to give up the science, but at the same time it kind of feels sometimes like the science is coming out from under us. So where do we go? It seems like what happens in our culture is a sort of pragmatic attitude: "Well, we have to draw the line somewhere, so we will draw the line somewhere." But a lot of people get stuck in a very strange position. So for example, Texas has at one point decided that what it means to marry a man is to mean that you don't have a Y chromosome, and what it means to marry a woman means you do have a Y chromosome. Now in practice they don't actually test people for their chromosomes. But this is also very bizarre, because of the story I told you at the beginning about androgen insensitivity syndrome. If we look at one of the founding fathers of modern democracy, Dr. Martin Luther King, he offers us something of a solution in his "I have a dream" speech. He says we should judge people "based not on the color of their skin, but on the content of their character," moving beyond anatomy. And I want to say, "Yeah, that sounds like a really good idea." But in practice, how do you do it? How do you judge people based on the content of character? I also want to point out that I'm not sure that is how we should distribute rights in terms of humans, because, I have to admit, that there are some golden retrievers I know that are probably more deserving of social services than some humans I know. I also want to say there are probably also some yellow Labradors that I know that are more capable of informed, intelligent, mature decisions about sexual relations than some 40-year-olds that I know. So how do we operationalize the question of content of character? It turns out to be really difficult. And part of me also wonders, what if content of character turns out to be something that's scannable in the future -- able to be seen with an fMRI? Do we really want to go there? I'm not sure where we go. What I do know is that it seems to be really important to think about the idea of the United States being in the lead of thinking about this issue of democracy. We've done a really good job struggling with democracy, and I think we would do a good job in the future. We don't have a situation that Iran has, for example, where a man who's sexually attracted to other men is liable to be murdered, unless he's willing to submit to a sex change, in which case he's allowed to live. We don't have that kind of situation. I'm glad to say we don't have the kind of situation with -- a surgeon I talked to a few years ago who had brought over a set of conjoined twins in order to separate them, partly to make a name for himself. But when I was on the phone with him, asking why he was going to do this surgery -- this was a very high-risk surgery -- his answer was that, in this other nation, these children were going to be treated very badly, and so he had to do this. My response to him was, "Well, have you considered political asylum instead of a separation surgery?" The United States has offered tremendous possibility for allowing people to be the way they are, without having them have to be changed for the sake of the state. So I think we have to be in the lead. Well, just to close, I want to suggest to you that I've been talking a lot about the fathers. And I want to think about the possibilities of what democracy might look like, or might have looked like, if we had more involved the mothers. And I want to say something a little bit radical for a feminist, and that is that I think that there may be different kinds of insights that can come from different kinds of anatomies, particularly when we have people thinking in groups. Now for years, because I've been interested in intersex, I've also been interested in sex difference research. And one of the things that I've been really interested in is looking at the differences between males and females in terms of the way they think and operate in the world. And what we know from cross-cultural studies is that females, on average -- not everyone, but on average -- are more inclined to be very attentive to complex social relations and to taking care of people who are basically vulnerable within the group. And so if we think about that, we have an interesting situation on our hands. Years ago, when I was in graduate school, one of my graduate advisers who knew I was interested in feminism -- I considered myself a feminist, as I still do -- asked a really strange question. He said, "Tell me what's feminine about feminism." And I thought, "Well that's the dumbest question I've ever heard. Feminism is all about undoing stereotypes about gender, so there's nothing feminine about feminism." But the more I thought about his question, the more I thought there might be something feminine about feminism. That is to say, there might be something, on average, different about female brains from male brains that makes us more attentive to deeply complex social relationships and more attentive to taking care of the vulnerable. So whereas the fathers were extremely attentive to figuring out how to protect individuals from the state, it's possible that if we injected more mothers into this concept, what we would have is more of a concept of, not just how to protect, but how to care for each other. And maybe that's where we need to go in the future, when we take democracy beyond anatomy, is to think less about the individual body, in terms of the identity, and think more about those relationships. So that as we the people try to create a more perfect union, we're thinking about what we do for each other. Thank you. (Applause)

I had requested slides, kind of adamantly, up till the -- pretty much, last few days, but was denied access to a slide projector. (Laughter) I actually find them a lot more emotional -- (Laughter) -- and personal, and the neat thing about a slide projector is you can actually focus the work, unlike PowerPoint and some other programs. Now, I agree that you have to -- yeah, there are certain concessions and, you know, if you use a slide projector, you're not able to have the bad type swing in from the back or the side, or up or down, but maybe that's an O.K. trade-off, to trade that off for a focus. (Laughter) It's a thought. Just a thought. And there's something nice about slides getting stuck. And the thing you really hope for is occasionally they burn up, which we won't see tonight. So. With that, let's get the first slide up here. This, as many of you have probably guessed, is a recently emptied beer can in Portugal. (Laughter) This -- I had just arrived in Barcelona for the first time, and I thought -- you know, fly all night, I looked up, and I thought, wow, how clean. You come into this major airport, and they simply have a B. I mean, how nice is that? Everything's gotten simpler in design, and here's this mega airport, and God, I just -- I took a picture. I thought, God, that is the coolest thing I've ever seen at an airport. Till a couple months later, I went back to the same airport -- same plane, I think -- and looked up, and it said C. (Laughter) It was only then that I realized it was simply a gate that I was coming into. (Laughter) I'm a big believer in the emotion of design, and the message that's sent before somebody begins to read, before they get the rest of the information; what is the emotional response they get to the product, to the story, to the painting -- whatever it is. That area of design interests me the most, and I think this for me is a real clear, very simplified version of what I'm talking about. These are a couple of garage doors painted identical, situated next to each other. So, here's the first door. You know, you get the message. You know, it's pretty clear. Take a look at the second door and see if there's any different message. O.K., which one would you park in front of? (Laughter) Same color, same message, same words. The only thing that's different is the expression that the individual door-owner here put into the piece -- and, again, which is the psycho-killer here? (Laughter) Yet it doesn't say that; it doesn't need to say that. I would probably park in front of the other one. I'm sure a lot of you are aware that graphic design has gotten a lot simpler in the last five years or so. It's gotten so simple that it's already starting to kind of come back the other way again and get a little more expressive. But I was in Milan and saw this street sign, and was very happy to see that apparently this idea of minimalism has even been translated by the graffiti artist. (Laughter) And this graffiti artist has come along, made this sign a little bit better, and then moved on. (Laughter) He didn't overpower it like they have a tendency to do. (Laughter) This is for a book by "Metropolis." I took some photos, and this is a billboard in Florida, and either they hadn't paid their rent, or they didn't want to pay their rent again on the sign, and the billboard people were too cheap to tear the whole sign down, so they just teared out sections of it. And I would argue that it's possibly more effective than the original billboard in terms of getting your attention, getting you to look over that way. And hopefully you don't stop and buy those awful pecan things -- Stuckey's. This is from my second book. The first book is called, "The End of Print," and it was done along with a film, working with William Burroughs. And "The End of Print" is now in its fifth printing. (Laughter) When I first contacted William Burroughs about being part of it, he said no; he said he didn't believe it was the end of print. And I said, well, that's fine; I just would love to have your input on this film and this book, and he finally agreed to it. And at the end of the film, he says in this great voice that I can't mimic but I'll kind of try, but not really, he says, "I remember attending an exhibition called, 'Photography: The End of Painting.'" And then he says, "And, of course, it wasn't at all." So, apparently when photography was perfected, there were people going around saying, that's it: you've just ruined painting. People are just going to take pictures now. And of course, that wasn't the case. So, this is from "2nd Sight," a book I did on intuition. I think it's not the only ingredient in design, but possibly the most important. It's something everybody has. It's not a matter of teaching it; in fact, most of the schools tend to discount intuition as an ingredient of your working process because they can't quantify it: it's very hard to teach people the four steps to intuitive design, but we can teach you the four steps to a nice business card or a newsletter. So it tends to get discounted. This is a quote from Albert Einstein, who says, "The intellect has little to do on the road to discovery. There comes a leap in consciousness -- call it intuition or what you will -- and the solution just comes to you, and you don't know from where or why." So, it's kind of like when somebody says, Who did that song? And the more you try to think about it, the further the answer gets from you, and the minute you stop thinking about it, your intuition gives you that answer, in a sense. I like this for a couple of reasons. If you've had any design courses, they would teach you you can't read this. I think you eventually can and, more importantly, I think it's true. "Don't mistake legibility for communication." Just because something's legible doesn't means it communicates. More importantly, it doesn't mean it communicates the right thing. So, what is the message sent before somebody actually gets into the material? And I think that's sometimes an overlooked area. This is working with Marshall McLuhan. I stayed and worked with his wife and son, Eric, and we came up with close to 600 quotes from Marshall that are just amazing in terms of being ahead of the times, predicting so much of what has happened in the advertising, television, media world. And so this book is called "Probes." It's another word for quotes. And it's -- a lot of them are never -- have never been published before, and basically, I've interpreted the different quotes. So, this was the contents page originally. When I got done it was 540 pages, and then the publisher, Gingko Press, ended up cutting it down considerably: it's just under 400 pages now. But I decided I liked this contents page -- I liked the way it looks -- so I kept it. (Laughter) It now has no relevance to the book whatsoever, but it's a nice spread, I think, in there. (Laughter) So, a couple spreads from the book: here McLuhan says, "The new media are not bridges between Man and Nature; they are Nature." "The invention of printing did away with anonymity, fostering ideas of literary fame and the habit of considering intellectual effort as private property," which had never been done before printing. "When new technologies impose themselves on societies long habituated to older technologies, anxieties of all kinds result." "While people are engaged in creating a totally different world, they always form vivid images of the preceding world." I hate this stuff. It's hard to read. (Laughter) (Applause) "People in the electronic age have no possible environment except the globe, and no possible occupation except information gathering." That was it. That's all he saw as the options. And not too far off. So, this is a project for Nine Inch Nails. And I only show it because it seemed like it got all this relevancy all of a sudden, and it was done right after 9/11. And I had recently discovered a bomb shelter in the backyard of a house I had bought in LA that the real estate person hadn't pointed out. (Laughter) There was some bomb shelter built, apparently in the '60s Cuban missile crisis. And I asked the real estate guy what it was as we were walking by, and he goes, "It's something to do with the sewage system." I was, O.K.; that's fine. I finally went down there, and it was this old rusted circular thing, and two beds, and very kind of creepy and weird. And also, surprisingly, it was done in kind of a cheap metal, and it had completely rusted through, and water everywhere, and spiders. And I thought, you know, what were they thinking? You'd think maybe cement, possibly, or something. But anyway, I used this for a cover for the Nine Inch Nails DVD, and I've also now fixed the bomb shelter with duct tape, and it's ready. I think I'm ready. So. This is an experiment, really, for a client, Quicksilver, where we were taking what was a six-shot sequence and trying to use print as a medium to get people to the Web. So, this is a six-shot sequence. I've taken one shot; I cropped it a few different ways. And then the tiny line of copy says, If you want to see this entire sequence -- how this whole ride was -- go to the website. And my guess is that a lot of the surf kids did go to the site to get this entire picture. Got no way of tracking it, so I could be totally wrong. (Laughter) I don't have the site. It's just the piece itself. This is a group in New York called the Coalition for a Smoke-free Environment -- asked me to do these posters. They were wild-posted around New York City. You can't really -- well, you can't see it at all -- but the second line is really the more kind of payoff, in a sense. It says, "If the cigarette companies can lie, then so can we." But -- (Laughter) (Applause) -- but I did. These were literally wild-posted all over New York one night, and there were definitely some heads turning, you know, people smoking and, "Huh!" (Laughter) And it was purposely done to look fairly serious. It wasn't some, you know, weird grunge type or something; it looked like they might be real. Anyway. Poster for Atlantic Center for the Arts, a school in Florida. This amazes me. This is a product I just found out. I was in the Caribbean at Christmas, and I'm just blown away that in this day and age they will still sell -- not that they will sell -- that there is felt a need for people to lighten the color of their skin. This was either an old product with new packaging, or a brand-new package, and I just thought, Yikes! How's that still happening? I do a lot of workshops all over the world, really, and this particular assignment was to come up with new symbols for the restroom doors. (Laughter) I felt this was one of the more successful solutions. The students actually cut them up and put them up around bars and restaurants that night, and I just always have this vision of this elderly couple going to use the restroom ... (Laughter) I did some work for Microsoft a few years back. It was a worldwide branding campaign. And it was interesting to me -- my background is in sociology; I had no design training, and sometimes people say, well, that explains it -- but it was a very interesting experiment because there's no product that I had to sell; it was simply the image of Microsoft they were trying to improve. They thought some people didn't like them. (Laughter) I found out that's very true, working on this campaign worldwide. And our goal was to try to humanize them a bit, and what I did was add type and people to the ad, which the previous campaign had not had, and nobody remembered them, and nobody referenced them. And we were trying to say that, hey, some of these guys that work there are actually OK; some of them actually have friends and family, and they're not all awful people. And the umbrella campaign was "Thank God it's Monday." So, we tried to take this -- what was perceived as a negative: their over-competitiveness, their, you know, long working hours -- and turn it into a positive and not run from it. You know: Thank God it's Monday -- I get to go back to that little cubicle, those fake gray walls, and hear everybody else's conversations f or 10 hours and then go home. But anyway, this is one of the ads I was most pleased with, because they were all elaborately art-directed, and this one I thought actually felt like the girl was looking at the computer. It says, "Wonder Around." And then it's a piece of the software. And this is how the ad ran around the world. In Germany, they made one small change without checking with me -- nor did they have to, because it was done through agencies -- but see if you can tell the difference. This is how the ad ran throughout the world; Germany made one slight change in the ad. (Laughter) Now, there's kind of two issues here. If you're going to put a kid in the ad, pick one that looks alive. (Laughter) I just have a feeling this kid's been there for a week, you know. He's just really hoping that boots up and, you know ... (Laughter) And then as the agency explained to me, they said, "Look, we don't have little green people in our country; why would we put little green people in our ads, for instance?" So, I understand their logic. I totally disagree with it; I think it's a very small-minded approach, the world is certainly much more global, and I certainly think the people of Germany could have handled a little black girl sitting in front of a computer, though we'll never know. This is some work from Ray Gun. And the point of this magazine was to read the articles, listen to the music, and try to interpret it. There's no grid, there's no system, there's nothing set up in advance. This is an opener for Brian Eno, and it's just kind of my personal interpretation of the music. This is rockstars talking about teachers they had lusted after in school. There's a lot of great writing in "Ray Gun." And I was fortunate to find a photograph of a teacher sitting on some books. (Laughter) Article on Bryan Ferry -- just really boring article -- so I set the whole article in Dingbat. (Laughter) You could -- you could highlight it; you could make it Helvetica or something: it is the actual article. I suppose you could eventually decode it, but it's really not very well written; it really wouldn't be worthwhile. (Laughter) Having done a lot of magazines, I'm very curious how big magazines handle big stories, and I was very curious to see how Time and Newsweek would handle 9/11. And I was basically pretty disappointed to see that they had chosen to show the photo we'd already seen a million times, which was basically the moment of impact. And People magazine, I thought, got probably the best shot. It's kind of horsey type, but the texture -- the second plane not quite hitting: there was something more enticing, if that's the right -- it's not the right word -- but in this cover than Time or Newsweek. But when I got into this magazine, there's something kind of disturbing, and this continued. On the left we see people dying; we see people running for their lives. And on the right we learn that there's a new way to support your breast. The coveted right-hand page was not given up to the whole issue. Look at the image of this lady -- who knows what she's going through? -- and the copy says: "He knows just how to give me goosebumps." Yeah, he jumps out of buildings. It's -- unfortunately, this one works, kind of, as a spread. And this continued through the entire magazine. It did not let up. This says: "One clean fits all." . There were a lot of orphans made this day, and here's a dead body being brought out. It just seems to me possibly even a blank page would have been more appropriate. And this one I think is possibly the worst: two ladies, both facing the same way, both wearing jeans. One -- who knows what she's going through; the other one is worried about model behavior and milk. And -- I gave a talk in New York a couple months after this, and afterwards somebody came up to me and they said that -- they actually emailed me -- and they said that they appreciated the talk, and when they got back to their car, they found a note on their car that made them think maybe New York was getting back to being New York again after this event -- it had been a few months. This was what they found on their car. (Laughter) There's very few times you'd be happy to find this on your car, but it did seem to indicate that we were coming back. This is my desktop. Somebody told me today there was this thing called folders, but I don't know what they are. These are my notes for the talk -- there might be a correlation here. We are wrapping up. This I saw on the plane, flying in, for hot new products. I'm not sure this is an improvement, or a good idea, because, like, if you don't spend quite enough time in front of your computer, you can now get a plate in the keyboard, so there's no more faking it -- that you don't really sit at your desk all day and eat and work anyway. Now there's a plate, and it would be really, really convenient to get a piece of pizza, then type a little bit, then ... I'm just not sure this is improvement. If you ever doubt the power of graphic design, this is a very generic sign that literally says, "Vote for Hitler." It says nothing else. And this to me is an extreme case of the power of emotion, of graphic design, even though, in fact, was a very generic poster at the time. What's next? What's next is going to be people. As we get more technically driven, the importance of people becomes more than it's ever been before. You have to utilize who you are in your work. Nobody else can do that: nobody else can pull from your background, from your parents, your upbringing, your whole life experience. If you allow that to happen, it's really the only way you can do some unique work, and you're going to enjoy the work a lot more as well. This is -- I like found art; hand lettering's coming back in a big way, and I thought this was a great example of both. This lady's advertising for her lost pit bull. It's friendly -- she's underlined friendly -- that's probably why she calls it Hercules or Hercles. She can't spell. (Laughter) But more importantly, she's willing to give you 20 bucks to go find this lost pit bull. And I'm thinking, yeah, right, I'll go look for a lost pit bill for 20 bucks. I have visions of people going down alleyways yelling out for Hercles, and you get charged by this thing and you go, oh, please be Hercles; please be the friendly one. (Laughter) I'm sure she never found the dog, because I took the sign. (Laughter) But I was asked to give a talk at a conference in Sacramento a few years back. And the theme was courage, and they asked me to talk about how courageous it is to be a graphic designer. And I remembered seeing this photograph of my father, who was a test pilot, and he told me that when you signed up to become a test pilot, they told you that there was a 40 to 50 percent chance of death on the job. That's pretty high for most occupations. (Laughter) But, you know, the government would make a plane; they'd say, go see if that one flies, would you? Some of them did; some of them didn't. And I started thinking about some of these decisions I have to make between, like, serif versus san-serif. (Laughter) And for the most part, they're not real life-threatening. Why not experiment? Why not have some fun? Why not put some of yourself into the work? And when I was teaching, I used to always ask the students, What's the definition of a good job? And as teachers, after you get all the answers, you like to give them the correct answer. And the best one I've heard -- I'm sure some of you have heard this -- the definition of a good job is: If you could afford to -- if money wasn't an issue -- would you be doing that same work? And if you would, you've got a great job. And if you wouldn't, what the heck are you doing? You're going to be dead a really long time. Thank you very much.

So I'm going to talk today about collecting stories in some unconventional ways. This is a picture of me from a very awkward stage in my life. You might enjoy the awkwardly tight, cut-off pajama bottoms with balloons. Anyway, it was a time when I was mainly interested in collecting imaginary stories. So this is a picture of me holding one of the first watercolor paintings I ever made. And recently I've been much more interested in collecting stories from reality -- so, real stories. And specifically, I'm interested in collecting my own stories, stories from the Internet, and then recently, stories from life, which is kind of a new area of work that I've been doing recently. So I'll be talking about each of those today. So, first of all, my own stories. These are two of my sketchbooks. I have many of these books, and I've been keeping them for about the last eight or nine years. They accompany me wherever I go in my life, and I fill them with all sorts of things, records of my lived experience: so watercolor paintings, drawings of what I see, dead flowers, dead insects, pasted ticket stubs, rusting coins, business cards, writings. And in these books, you can find these short, little glimpses of moments and experiences and people that I meet. And, you know, after keeping these books for a number of years, I started to become very interested in collecting not only my own personal artifacts, but also the artifacts of other people. So, I started collecting found objects. This is a photograph I found lying in a gutter in New York City about 10 years ago. On the front, you can see the tattered black-and-white photo of a woman's face, and on the back it says, "To Judy, the girl with the Bill Bailey voice. Have fun in whatever you do." And I really loved this idea of the partial glimpse into somebody's life. As opposed to knowing the whole story, just knowing a little bit of the story, and then letting your own mind fill in the rest. And that idea of a partial glimpse is something that will come back in a lot of the work I'll be showing later today. So, around this time I was studying computer science at Princeton University, and I noticed that it was suddenly possible to collect these sorts of personal artifacts, not just from street corners, but also from the Internet. And that suddenly, people, en masse, were leaving scores and scores of digital footprints online that told stories of their private lives. Blog posts, photographs, thoughts, feelings, opinions, all of these things were being expressed by people online, and leaving behind trails. So, I started to write computer programs that study very, very large sets of these online footprints. One such project is about a year and a half old. It's called "We Feel Fine." This is a project that scans the world's newly posted blog entries every two or three minutes, searching for occurrences of the phrases "I feel" and "I am feeling." And when it finds one of those phrases, it grabs the full sentence up to the period and also tries to identify demographic information about the author. So, their gender, their age, their geographic location and what the weather conditions were like when they wrote that sentence. It collects about 20,000 such sentences a day and it's been running for about a year and a half, having collected over 10 and a half million feelings now. This is, then, how they're presented. These dots here represent some of the English-speaking world's feelings from the last few hours, each dot being a single sentence stated by a single blogger. And the color of each dot corresponds to the type of feeling inside, so the bright ones are happy, and the dark ones are sad. And the diameter of each dot corresponds to the length of the sentence inside. So the small ones are short, and the bigger ones are longer. "I feel fine with the body I'm in, there'll be no easy excuse for why I still feel uncomfortable being close to my boyfriend," from a twenty-two-year-old in Japan. "I got this on some trading locally, but really don't feel like screwing with wiring and crap." Also, some of the feelings contain photographs in the blog posts. And when that happens, these montage compositions are automatically created, which consist of the sentence and images being combined. And any of these can be opened up to reveal the sentence inside. "I feel good." "I feel rough now, and I probably gained 100,000 pounds, but it was worth it." "I love how they were able to preserve most in everything that makes you feel close to nature -- butterflies, man-made forests, limestone caves and hey, even a huge python." So the next movement is called mobs. This provides a slightly more statistical look at things. This is showing the world's most common feelings overall right now, dominated by better, then bad, then good, then guilty, and so on. Weather causes the feelings to assume the physical traits of the weather they represent. So the sunny ones swirl around, the cloudy ones float along, the rainy ones fall down, and the snowy ones flutter to the ground. You can also stop a raindrop and open the feeling inside. Finally, location causes the feelings to move to their spots on a world map, giving you a sense of their geographic distribution. So I'll show you now some of my favorite montages from "We Feel Fine." These are the images that are automatically constructed. "I feel like I'm diagonally parked in a parallel universe." (Laughter) "I've kissed numerous other boys and it hasn't felt good, the kisses felt messy and wrong, but kissing Lucas feels beautiful and almost spiritual." "I can feel my cancer grow." "I feel pretty." "I feel skinny, but I'm not." "I'm 23, and a recovering meth and heroin addict, and feel absolutely blessed to still be alive." "I can't wait to see them racing for the first time at Daytona next month, because I feel the need for speed." (Laughter) "I feel sassy." "I feel so sexy in this new wig." As you can see, "We Feel Fine" collects very, very small-scale personal stories. Sometimes, stories as short as two or three words. So, really even challenging the notion of what can be considered a story. And recently, I've become interested in diving much more deeply into a single story. And that's led me to doing some work with the physical world, not with the Internet, and only using the Internet at the very last moment, as a presentation medium. So these are some newer projects that actually aren't even launched publicly yet. The first such one is called "The Whale Hunt." Last May, I spent nine days living up in Barrow, Alaska, the northernmost settlement in the United States, with a family of Inupiat Eskimos, documenting their annual spring whale hunt. This is the whaling camp here, we're about six miles from shore, camping on five and a half feet of thick, frozen pack ice. And that water that you see there is the open lead, and through that lead, bowhead whales migrate north each springtime. And the Eskimo community basically camps out on the edge of the ice here, waits for a whale to come close enough to attack. And when it does, it throws a harpoon at it, and then hauls the whale up under the ice, and cuts it up. And that would provide the community's food supply for a long time. So I went up there, and I lived with these guys out in their whaling camp here, and photographed the entire experience, beginning with the taxi ride to Newark airport in New York, and ending with the butchering of the second whale, seven and a half days later. I photographed that entire experience at five-minute intervals. So every five minutes, I took a photograph. When I was awake, with the camera around my neck. When I was sleeping, with a tripod and a timer. And then in moments of high adrenaline, like when something exciting was happening, I would up that photographic frequency to as many as 37 photographs in five minutes. So what this created was a photographic heartbeat that sped up and slowed down, more or less matching the changing pace of my own heartbeat. That was the first concept here. The second concept was to use this experience to think about the fundamental components of any story. What are the things that make up a story? So, stories have characters. Stories have concepts. Stories take place in a certain area. They have contexts. They have colors. What do they look like? They have time. When did it take place? Dates -- when did it occur? And in the case of the whale hunt, also this idea of an excitement level. The thing about stories, though, in most of the existing mediums that we're accustomed to -- things like novels, radio, photographs, movies, even lectures like this one -- we're very accustomed to this idea of the narrator or the camera position, some kind of omniscient, external body through whose eyes you see the story. We're very used to this. But if you think about real life, it's not like that at all. I mean, in real life, things are much more nuanced and complex, and there's all of these overlapping stories intersecting and touching each other. And so I thought it would be interesting to build a framework to surface those types of stories. So, in the case of "The Whale Hunt," how could we extract something like the story of Simeon and Crawford, involving the concepts of wildlife, tools and blood, taking place on the Arctic Ocean, dominated by the color red, happening around 10 a.m. on May 3, with an excitement level of high? So, how to extract this order of narrative from this larger story? I built a web interface for viewing "The Whale Hunt" that attempts to do just this. So these are all 3,214 pictures taken up there. This is my studio in Brooklyn. This is the Arctic Ocean, and the butchering of the second whale, seven days later. You can start to see some of the story here, told by color. So this red strip signifies the color of the wallpaper in the basement apartment where I was staying. And things go white as we move out onto the Arctic Ocean. Introduction of red down here, when whales are being cut up. You can see a timeline, showing you the exciting moments throughout the story. These are organized chronologically. Wheel provides a slightly more playful version of the same, so these are also all the photographs organized chronologically. And any of these can be clicked, and then the narrative is entered at that position. So here I am sleeping on the airplane heading up to Alaska. That's "Moby Dick." This is the food we ate. This is in the Patkotak's family living room in their house in Barrow. The boxed wine they served us. Cigarette break outside -- I don't smoke. This is a really exciting sequence of me sleeping. This is out at whale camp, on the Arctic Ocean. This graph that I'm clicking down here is meant to be reminiscent of a medical heartbeat graph, showing the exciting moments of adrenaline. This is the ice starting to freeze over. The snow fence they built. And so what I'll show you now is the ability to pull out sub-stories. So, here you see the cast. These are all of the people in "The Whale Hunt" and the two whales that were killed down here. And we could do something as arbitrary as, say, extract the story of Rony, involving the concepts of blood and whales and tools, taking place on the Arctic Ocean, at Ahkivgaq camp, with the heartbeat level of fast. And now we've whittled down that whole story to just 29 matching photographs, and then we can enter the narrative at that position. And you can see Rony cutting up the whale here. These whales are about 40 feet long, and weighing over 40 tons. And they provide the food source for the community for much of the year. Skipping ahead a bit more here, this is Rony on the whale carcass. They use no chainsaws or anything; it's entirely just blades, and an incredibly efficient process. This is the guys on the rope, pulling open the carcass. This is the muktuk, or the blubber, all lined up for community distribution. It's baleen. Moving on. So what I'm going to tell you about next is a very new thing. It's not even a project yet. So, just yesterday, I flew in here from Singapore, and before that, I was spending two weeks in Bhutan, the small Himalayan kingdom nestled between Tibet and India. And I was doing a project there about happiness, interviewing a lot of local people. So Bhutan has this really wacky thing where they base most of their high-level governmental decisions around the concept of gross national happiness instead of gross domestic product, and they've been doing this since the '70s. And it leads to just a completely different value system. It's an incredibly non-materialistic culture, where people don't have a lot, but they're incredibly happy. So I went around and I talked to people about some of these ideas. So, I did a number of things. I asked people a number of set questions, and took a number of set photographs, and interviewed them with audio, and also took pictures. I would start by asking people to rate their happiness between one and 10, which is kind of inherently absurd. And then when they answered, I would inflate that number of balloons and give them that number of balloons to hold. So, you have some really happy person holding 10 balloons, and some really sad soul holding one balloon. But you know, even holding one balloon is like, kind of happy. (Laughter) And then I would ask them a number of questions like what was the happiest day in their life, what makes them happy. And then finally, I would ask them to make a wish. And when they made a wish, I would write their wish onto one of the balloons and take a picture of them holding it. So I'm going to show you now just a few brief snippets of some of the interviews that I did, some of the people I spoke with. This is an 11-year-old student. He was playing cops and robbers with his friends, running around town, and they all had plastic toy guns. His wish was to become a police officer. He was getting started early. Those were his hands. I took pictures of everybody's hands, because I think you can often tell a lot about somebody from how their hands look. I took a portrait of everybody, and asked everybody to make a funny face. A 17-year-old student. Her wish was to have been born a boy. She thinks that women have a pretty tough go of things in Bhutan, and it's a lot easier if you're a boy. A 28-year-old cell phone shop owner. If you knew what Paro looked like, you'd understand how amazing it is that there's a cell phone shop there. He wanted to help poor people. A 53-year-old farmer. She was chaffing wheat, and that pile of wheat behind her had taken her about a week to make. She wanted to keep farming until she dies. You can really start to see the stories told by the hands here. She was wearing this silver ring that had the word "love" engraved on it, and she'd found it in the road somewhere. A 16-year-old quarry worker. This guy was breaking rocks with a hammer in the hot sunlight, but he just wanted to spend his life as a farmer. A 21-year-old monk. He was very happy. He wanted to live a long life at the monastery. He had this amazing series of hairs growing out of a mole on the left side of his face, which I'm told is very good luck. He was kind of too shy to make a funny face. A 16-year-old student. She wanted to become an independent woman. I asked her about that, and she said she meant that she doesn't want to be married, because, in her opinion, when you get married in Bhutan as a woman, your chances to live an independent life kind of end, and so she had no interest in that. A 24-year-old truck driver. There are these terrifyingly huge Indian trucks that come careening around one-lane roads with two-lane traffic, with 3,000-foot drop-offs right next to the road, and he was driving one of these trucks. But all he wanted was to just live a comfortable life, like other people. A 24-year-old road sweeper. I caught her on her lunch break. She'd built a little fire to keep warm, right next to the road. Her wish was to marry someone with a car. She wanted a change in her life. She lives in a little worker's camp right next to the road, and she wanted a different lot on things. An 81-year-old itinerant farmer. I saw this guy on the side of the road, and he actually doesn't have a home. He travels from farm to farm each day trying to find work, and then he tries to sleep at whatever farm he gets work at. So his wish was to come with me, so that he had somewhere to live. He had this amazing knife that he pulled out of his gho and started brandishing when I asked him to make a funny face. It was all good-natured. A 10-year-old. He wanted to join a school and learn to read, but his parents didn't have enough money to send him to school. He was eating this orange, sugary candy that he kept dipping his fingers into, and since there was so much saliva on his hands, this orange paste started to form on his palms. (Laughter) A 37-year-old road worker. One of the more touchy political subjects in Bhutan is the use of Indian cheap labor that they import from India to build the roads, and then they send these people home once the roads are built. So these guys were in a worker's gang mixing up asphalt one morning on the side of the highway. His wish was to make some money and open a store. A 75-year-old farmer. She was selling oranges on the side of the road. I asked her about her wish, and she said, "You know, maybe I'll live, maybe I'll die, but I don't have a wish." She was chewing betel nut, which caused her teeth over the years to turn very red. Finally, this is a 26-year-old nun I spoke to. Her wish was to make a pilgrimage to Tibet. I asked her how long she planned to live in the nunnery and she said, "Well, you know, of course, it's impermanent, but my plan is to live here until I'm 30, and then enter a hermitage." And I said, "You mean, like a cave?" And she said, "Yeah, like a cave." And I said, "Wow, and how long will you live in the cave?" And she said, "Well, you know, I think I'd kind of like to live my whole life in the cave." I just thought that was amazing. I mean, she spoke in a way -- with amazing English, and amazing humor, and amazing laughter -- that made her seem like somebody I could have bumped into on the streets of New York, or in Vermont, where I'm from. But here she had been living in a nunnery for the last seven years. I asked her a little bit more about the cave and what she planned would happen once she went there, you know. What if she saw the truth after just one year, what would she do for the next 35 years in her life? And this is what she said. Woman: I think I'm going to stay for 35. Maybe -- maybe I'll die. Jonathan Harris: Maybe you'll die? Woman: Yes. JH: 10 years? Woman: Yes, yes. JH: 10 years, that's a long time. Woman: Yes, not maybe one, 10 years, maybe I can die within one year, or something like that. JH: Are you hoping to? Woman: Ah, because you know, it's impermanent. JH: Yeah, but -- yeah, OK. Do you hope -- would you prefer to live in the cave for 40 years, or to live for one year? Woman: But I prefer for maybe 40 to 50. JH: 40 to 50? Yeah. Woman: Yes. From then, I'm going to the heaven. JH: Well, I wish you the best of luck with it. Woman: Thank you. JH: I hope it's everything that you hope it will be. So thank you again, so much. Woman: You're most welcome. JH: So if you caught that, she said she hoped to die when she was around 40. That was enough life for her. So, the last thing we did, very quickly, is I took all those wish balloons -- there were 117 interviews, 117 wishes -- and I brought them up to a place called Dochula, which is a mountain pass in Bhutan, at 10,300 feet, one of the more sacred places in Bhutan. And up there, there are thousands of prayer flags that people have spread out over the years. And we re-inflated all of the balloons, put them up on a string, and hung them up there among the prayer flags. And they're actually still flying up there today. So if any of you have any Bhutan travel plans in the near future, you can go check these out. Here are some images from that. We said a Buddhist prayer so that all these wishes could come true. You can start to see some familiar balloons here. "To make some money and to open a store" was the Indian road worker. Thanks very much. (Applause)

The Khan Academy is most known for its collection of videos, so before I go any further, let me show you a little bit of a montage. (Video) Salman Khan: So the hypotenuse is now going to be five. This animal's fossils are only found in this area of South America -- a nice clean band here -- and this part of Africa. We can integrate over the surface, and the notation usually is a capital sigma. National Assembly: They create the Committee of Public Safety, which sounds like a very nice committee. Notice, this is an aldehyde, and it's an alcohol. Start differentiating into effector and memory cells. A galaxy. Hey, there's another galaxy. Oh look, there's another galaxy. And for dollars, is their 30 million, plus the 20 million dollars from the American manufacturer. If this does not blow your mind, then you have no emotion. (Laughter) (Applause) SK: We now have on the order of 2,200 videos covering everything from basic arithmetic all the way to vector calculus and some of the stuff you saw there. We have a million students a month using the site, watching on the order of 100 to 200,000 videos a day. But what we're going to talk about in this is how we're going to the next level. But before I do that, I want to talk a little bit about really just how I got started. And some of you all might know, about five years ago I was an analyst at a hedge fund, and I was in Boston, and I was tutoring my cousins in New Orleans, remotely. And I started putting the first YouTube videos up really just as a kind of nice-to-have, just a supplement for my cousins -- something that might give them a refresher or something. And as soon as I put those first YouTube videos up, something interesting happened -- actually a bunch of interesting things happened. The first was the feedback from my cousins. They told me that they preferred me on YouTube than in person. (Laughter) And once you get over the backhanded nature of that, there was actually something very profound there. They were saying that they preferred the automated version of their cousin to their cousin. At first, it's very unintuitive, but when you actually think about it from their point of view, it makes a ton of sense. You have this situation where now they can pause and repeat their cousin, without feeling like they're wasting my time. If they have to review something that they should have learned a couple of weeks ago, or maybe a couple of years ago, they don't have to be embarrassed and ask their cousin. They can just watch those videos. If they're bored, they can go ahead. They can watch it at their own time, at their own pace. And probably the least appreciated aspect of this is the notion that the very first time, the very first time that you're trying to get your brain around a new concept, the very last thing you need is another human being saying, "Do you understand this?" And that's what was happening with the interaction with my cousins before, and now they can just do it in the intimacy of their own room. The other thing that happened is -- I put them on YouTube just -- I saw no reason to make it private, so I let other people watch it, and then people started stumbling on it, and I started getting some comments and some letters and all sorts of feedback from random people from around the world. And these are just a few. This is actually from one of the original calculus videos. And someone wrote just on YouTube -- it was a YouTube comment: "First time I smiled doing a derivative." (Laughter) And let's pause here. This person did a derivative and then they smiled. And then in a response to that same comment -- this is on the thread. You can go on YouTube and look at these comments -- someone else wrote: "Same thing here. I actually got a natural high and a good mood for the entire day. Since I remember seeing all of this matrix text in class, and here I'm all like, 'I know kung fu.'" (Laughter) And we get a lot of feedback all along those lines. This clearly was helping people. But then, as the viewership kept growing and kept growing, I started getting letters from people, and it was starting to become clear that it was actually more than just a nice-to-have. This is just an excerpt from one of those letters. "My 12 year-old son has autism and has had a terrible time with math. We have tried everything, viewed everything, bought everything. We stumbled on your video on decimals and it got through. Then we went on to the dreaded fractions. Again, he got it. We could not believe it. He is so excited." And so you can imagine, here I was an analyst at a hedge fund. It was very strange for me to do something of social value. (Laughter) (Applause) But I was excited, so I kept going. And then a few other things started to dawn on me. That, not only would it help my cousins right now, or these people who are sending letters, but that this content will never go old, that it could help their kids or their grandkids. If Isaac Newton had done YouTube videos on calculus, I wouldn't have to. (Laughter) Assuming he was good. We don't know. (Laughter) The other thing that happened -- and even at this point, I said, "Okay, maybe it's a good supplement. It's good for motivated students. It's good for maybe home schoolers." But I didn't think it would be something that would somehow penetrate the classroom. But then I started getting letters from teachers. And the teachers would write, saying, "We've used your videos to flip the classroom. You've given the lectures, so now what we do ... " -- and this could happen in every classroom in America tomorrow -- " ... what I do is I assign the lectures for homework, and what used to be homework, I now have the students doing in the classroom." And I want to pause here for -- (Applause) I want to pause here for a second, because there's a couple of interesting things. One, when those teachers are doing that, there's the obvious benefit -- the benefit that now their students can enjoy the videos in the way that my cousins did. They can pause, repeat at their own pace, at their own time. But the more interesting thing is -- and this is the unintuitive thing when you talk about technology in the classroom -- by removing the one-size-fits-all lecture from the classroom and letting students have a self-paced lecture at home, and then when you go to the classroom, letting them do work, having the teacher walk around, having the peers actually be able to interact with each other, these teachers have used technology to humanize the classroom. They took a fundamentally dehumanizing experience -- 30 kids with their fingers on their lips, not allowed to interact with each other. A teacher, no matter how good, has to give this one-size-fits-all lecture to 30 students -- blank faces, slightly antagonistic -- and now it's a human experience. Now they're actually interacting with each other. So once the Khan Academy -- I quit my job and we turned into a real organization -- we're a not-for-profit -- the question is, how do we take this to the next level? How do we take what those teachers are doing to their natural conclusion? And so what I'm showing you over here, these are actual exercises that I started writing for my cousins. The ones I started were much more primitive. This is a more competent version of it. But the paradigm here is, we'll generate as many questions as you need until you get that concept, until you get 10 in a row. And the Khan Academy videos are there. You get hints, the actual steps for that problem, if you don't know how to do it. But the paradigm here, it seems like a very simple thing: 10 in a row, you move on. But it's fundamentally different than what's happening in classrooms right now. In a traditional classroom, you have a couple of homework, homework, lecture, homework, lecture, and then you have a snapshot exam. And that exam, whether you get a 70 percent, an 80 percent, a 90 percent or a 95 percent, the class moves on to the next topic. And even that 95 percent student, what was the five percent they didn't know? Maybe they didn't know what happens when you raise something to the zero power. And then you go build on that in the next concept. That's analogous to imagine learning to ride a bicycle, and maybe I give you a lecture ahead of time, and I give you that bicycle for two weeks. And then I come back after two weeks, and I say, "Well, let's see. You're having trouble taking left turns. You can't quite stop. You're an 80 percent bicyclist." So I put a big C stamp on your forehead and then I say, "Here's a unicycle." But as ridiculous as that sounds, that's exactly what's happening in our classrooms right now. And the idea is you fast forward and good students start failing algebra all of a sudden and start failing calculus all of a sudden, despite being smart, despite having good teachers, and it's usually because they have these Swiss cheese gaps that kept building throughout their foundation. So our model is learn math the way you'd learn anything, like the way you would learn a bicycle. Stay on that bicycle. Fall off that bicycle. Do it as long as necessary until you have mastery. The traditional model, it penalizes you for experimentation and failure, but it does not expect mastery. We encourage you to experiment. We encourage you to failure. But we do expect mastery. This is just another one of the modules. This is trigonometry. This is shifting and reflecting functions. And they all fit together. We have about 90 of these right now. And you can go to the site right now. It's all free. Not trying to sell anything. But the general idea is that they all fit into this knowledge map. That top node right there, that's literally single digit addition. It's like one plus one is equal to two. And the paradigm is, once you get 10 in a row on that, it keeps forwarding you to more and more advanced modules. So if you keep further down the knowledge map, we're getting into more advanced arithmetic. Further down, you start getting into pre-algebra and early algebra. Further down, you start getting into algebra one, algebra two, a little bit of precalculus. And the idea is, from this we can actually teach everything -- well, everything that can be taught in this type of a framework. So you can imagine -- and this is what we are working on -- is from this knowledge map you have logic, you have computer programming, you have grammar, you have genetics, all based off of that core of, if you know this and that, now you're ready for this next concept. Now that can work well for an individual learner, and I encourage, one, for you to do it with your kids, but I also encourage everyone in the audience to do it yourself. It'll change what happens at the dinner table. But what we want to do is to use the natural conclusion of the flipping of the classroom that those early teachers had emailed me about. And so what I'm showing you here, this is actually data from a pilot in the Los Altos school district, where they took two fifth grade classes and two seventh grade classes and completely gutted their old math curriculum. These kids aren't using textbooks, they're not getting one-size-fits-all lectures. They're doing Khan Academy, they're doing that software, for roughly half of their math class. And I want to make it clear, we don't view this as the complete math education. What it does is -- and this is what's happening in Los Altos -- it frees up time. This is the blocking and tackling, making sure you know how to move through a system of equations, and it frees up time for the simulations, for the games, for the mechanics, for the robot building, for the estimating how high that hill is based on its shadow. And so the paradigm is the teacher walks in every day, every kid works at their own pace -- and this is actually a live dashboard from Los Altos school district -- and they look at this dashboard. Every row is a student. Every column is one of those concepts. Green means the student's already proficient. Blue means they're working on it -- no need to worry. Red means they're stuck. And what the teacher does is literally just say, "Let me intervene on the red kids." Or even better, "Let me get one of the green kids who are already proficient in that concept to be the first line of attack and actually tutor their peer." (Applause) Now I come from a very data-centric reality, so we don't want that teacher to even go and intervene and have to ask the kid awkward questions: "Oh, what do you not understand?" or "What do you do understand?" and all of the rest. So our paradigm is to really arm the teachers with as much data as possible -- really data that, in almost any other field, is expected, if you're in finance or marketing or manufacturing -- and so the teachers can actually diagnose what's wrong with the students so they can make their interaction as productive as possible. So now the teachers know exactly what the students have been up to, how long they have been spending every day, what videos have they been watching, when did they pause the videos, what did they stop watching, what exercises are they using, what have they been focused on? The outer circle shows what exercises they were focused on. The inner circle shows the videos they're focused on. And the data gets pretty granular so you can see the exact problems that the student got right or wrong. Red is wrong, blue is right. The leftmost question is the first question that the student attempted. They watched the video right over there. And then you can see, eventually, they were able to get 10 in a row. It's almost like you can see them learning over those last 10 problems. They also got faster. The height is how long it took them. So when you talk about self-paced learning, it makes sense for everyone -- in education-speak, differentiated learning -- but it's kind of crazy when you see it in a classroom. Because every time we've done this, in every classroom we've done, over and over again, if you go five days into it, there's a group of kids who've raced ahead and there's a group of kids who are a little bit slower. And in a traditional model, if you did a snapshot assessment, you say, "These are the gifted kids, these are the slow kids. Maybe they should be tracked differently. Maybe we should put them in different classes." But when you let every student work at their own pace -- and we see it over and over and over again -- you see students who took a little bit [of] extra time on one concept or the other, but once they get through that concept, they just race ahead. And so the same kids that you thought were slow six weeks ago, you now would think are gifted. And we're seeing it over and over and over again. And it makes you really wonder how much all of the labels maybe a lot of us have benefited from were really just due to a coincidence of time. Now as valuable as something like this is in a district like Los Altos, our goal is to use technology to humanize, not just in Los Altos, but on a global scale, what's happening in education. And actually, that kind of brings an interesting point. A lot of the effort in humanizing the classroom is focused on student-to-teacher ratios. In our mind, the relevant metric is student-to-valuable-human-time- with-the-teacher ratio. So in a traditional model, most of the teacher's time is spent doing lectures and grading and whatnot. Maybe five percent of their time is actually sitting next to students and actually working with them. Now 100 percent of their time is. So once again, using technology, not just flipping the classroom, you're humanizing the classroom, I'd argue, by a factor of five or 10. And as valuable as that is in Los Altos, imagine what that does to the adult learner who's embarrassed to go back and learn stuff that they should have before, before going back to college. Imagine what it does to a street kid in Calcutta who has to help his family during the day, and that's the reason why he or she can't go to school. Now they can spend two hours a day and remediate, or get up to speed and not feel embarrassed about what they do or don't know. Now imagine what happens where -- we talked about the peers teaching each other inside of a classroom. But this is all one system. There's no reason why you can't have that peer-to-peer tutoring beyond that one classroom. Imagine what happens if that student in Calcutta all of a sudden can tutor your son, or your son can tutor that kid in Calcutta? And I think what you'll see emerging is this notion of a global one-world classroom. And that's essentially what we're trying to build. Thank you. (Applause) Bill Gates: I've seen some things you're doing in the system that have to do with motivation and feedback -- energy points, merit badges. Tell me what you're thinking there. SK: Oh yeah. No, we have an awesome team working on it. And I have to make it clear, it's not just me anymore. I'm still doing all the videos, but we have a rockstar team doing the software. Yeah, we've put a bunch of game mechanics in there where you get these badges, we're going to start having leader boards by area, and you get points. It's actually been pretty interesting. Just the wording of the badging or how many points you get for doing something, we see on a system-wide basis, like tens of thousands of fifth graders or sixth graders going one direction or another, depending what badge you give them. (Laughter) BG: And the collaboration you're doing with Los Altos, how did that come about? SK: Los Altos, it was kind of crazy. Once again, I didn't expect it to be used in classrooms. Someone from their board came and said, "What would you do if you had carte blanche in a classroom?" And I said, "Well, I would just, every student work at their own pace on something like this and we'd give a dashboard." And they said, "Oh, this is kind of radical. We have to think about it." And me and the rest of the team were like, "They're never going to want to do this." But literally the next day they were like, "Can you start in two weeks?" (Laughter) BG: So fifth grade math is where that's going on right now? SK: It's two fifth grade classes and two seventh grade classes. And they're doing it at the district level. I think what they're excited about is they can now follow these kids. It's not an only-in-school thing. We've even, on Christmas, we saw some of the kids were doing it. And we can track everything. So they can actually track them as they go through the entire district. Through the summers, as they go from one teacher to the next, you have this continuity of data that even at the district level they can see. BG: So some of those views we saw were for the teacher to go in and track actually what's going on with those kids. So you're getting feedback on those teacher views to see what they think they mean? SK: Oh yeah. Most of those were specs by the teachers. We made some of those for students so they could see their data, but we have a very tight design loop with the teachers themselves. And they're literally saying, "Hey, this is nice, but ... " Like that focus graph, a lot of the teachers said, "I have a feeling that a lot of the kids are jumping around and not focusing on one topic." So we made that focus diagram. So it's all been teacher-driven. It's been pretty crazy. BG: Is this ready for prime time? Do you think a lot of classes next school year should try this thing out? SK: Yeah, it's ready. We've got a million people on the site already, so we can handle a few more. (Laughter) No, no reason why it really can't happen in every classroom in America tomorrow. BG: And the vision of the tutoring thing. The idea there is, if I'm confused about a topic, somehow right in the user interface I'd find people who are volunteering, maybe see their reputation, and I could schedule and connect up with those people? SK: Absolutely. And this is something that I recommend everyone in this audience to do. Those dashboards the teachers have, you can go log in right now and you can essentially become a coach for your kids, or nephews, or cousins, or maybe some kids at the Boys and Girls Club. And yeah, you can start becoming a mentor, a tutor, really immediately. But yeah, it's all there. BG: Well, it's amazing. I think you just got a glimpse of the future of education. Thank you. (SK: Thank you.) (Applause)

One of the most common ways of dividing the world is into those who believe and those who don't -- into the religious and the atheists. And for the last decade or so, it's been quite clear what being an atheist means. There have been some very vocal atheists who've pointed out, not just that religion is wrong, but that it's ridiculous. These people, many of whom have lived in North Oxford, have argued -- they've argued that believing in God is akin to believing in fairies and essentially that the whole thing is a childish game. Now I think it's too easy. I think it's too easy to dismiss the whole of religion that way. And it's as easy as shooting fish in a barrel. And what I'd like to inaugurate today is a new way of being an atheist -- if you like, a new version of atheism we could call Atheism 2.0. Now what is Atheism 2.0? Well it starts from a very basic premise: of course, there's no God. Of course, there are no deities or supernatural spirits or angels, etc. Now let's move on; that's not the end of the story, that's the very, very beginning. I'm interested in the kind of constituency that thinks something along these lines: that thinks, "I can't believe in any of this stuff. I can't believe in the doctrines. I don't think these doctrines are right. But," a very important but, "I love Christmas carols. I really like the art of Mantegna. I really like looking at old churches. I really like turning the pages of the Old Testament." Whatever it may be, you know the kind of thing I'm talking about -- people who are attracted to the ritualistic side, the moralistic, communal side of religion, but can't bear the doctrine. Until now, these people have faced a rather unpleasant choice. It's almost as though either you accept the doctrine and then you can have all the nice stuff, or you reject the doctrine and you're living in some kind of spiritual wasteland under the guidance of CNN and Walmart. So that's a sort of tough choice. I don't think we have to make that choice. I think there is an alternative. I think there are ways -- and I'm being both very respectful and completely impious -- of stealing from religions. If you don't believe in a religion, there's nothing wrong with picking and mixing, with taking out the best sides of religion. And for me, atheism 2.0 is about both, as I say, a respectful and an impious way of going through religions and saying, "What here could we use?" The secular world is full of holes. We have secularized badly, I would argue. And a thorough study of religion could give us all sorts of insights into areas of life that are not going too well. And I'd like to run through a few of these today. I'd like to kick off by looking at education. Now education is a field the secular world really believes in. When we think about how we're going to make the world a better place, we think education; that's where we put a lot of money. Education is going to give us, not only commercial skills, industrial skills, it's also going to make us better people. You know the kind of thing a commencement address is, and graduation ceremonies, those lyrical claims that education, the process of education -- particularly higher education -- will make us into nobler and better human beings. That's a lovely idea. Interesting where it came from. In the early 19th century, church attendance in Western Europe started sliding down very, very sharply, and people panicked. They asked themselves the following question. They said, where are people going to find the morality, where are they going to find guidance, and where are they going to find sources of consolation? And influential voices came up with one answer. They said culture. It's to culture that we should look for guidance, for consolation, for morality. Let's look to the plays of Shakespeare, the dialogues of Plato, the novels of Jane Austen. In there, we'll find a lot of the truths that we might previously have found in the Gospel of Saint John. Now I think that's a very beautiful idea and a very true idea. They wanted to replace scripture with culture. And that's a very plausible idea. It's also an idea that we have forgotten. If you went to a top university -- let's say you went to Harvard or Oxford or Cambridge -- and you said, "I've come here because I'm in search of morality, guidance and consolation; I want to know how to live," they would show you the way to the insane asylum. This is simply not what our grandest and best institutes of higher learning are in the business of. Why? They don't think we need it. They don't think we are in an urgent need of assistance. They see us as adults, rational adults. What we need is information. We need data, we don't need help. Now religions start from a very different place indeed. All religions, all major religions, at various points call us children. And like children, they believe that we are in severe need of assistance. We're only just holding it together. Perhaps this is just me, maybe you. But anyway, we're only just holding it together. And we need help. Of course, we need help. And so we need guidance and we need didactic learning. You know, in the 18th century in the U.K., the greatest preacher, greatest religious preacher, was a man called John Wesley, who went up and down this country delivering sermons, advising people how they could live. He delivered sermons on the duties of parents to their children and children to their parents, the duties of the rich to the poor and the poor to the rich. He was trying to tell people how they should live through the medium of sermons, the classic medium of delivery of religions. Now we've given up with the idea of sermons. If you said to a modern liberal individualist, "Hey, how about a sermon?" they'd go, "No, no. I don't need one of those. I'm an independent, individual person." What's the difference between a sermon and our modern, secular mode of delivery, the lecture? Well a sermon wants to change your life and a lecture wants to give you a bit of information. And I think we need to get back to that sermon tradition. The tradition of sermonizing is hugely valuable, because we are in need of guidance, morality and consolation -- and religions know that. Another point about education: we tend to believe in the modern secular world that if you tell someone something once, they'll remember it. Sit them in a classroom, tell them about Plato at the age of 20, send them out for a career in management consultancy for 40 years, and that lesson will stick with them. Religions go, "Nonsense. You need to keep repeating the lesson 10 times a day. So get on your knees and repeat it." That's what all religions tell us: "Get on you knees and repeat it 10 or 20 or 15 times a day." Otherwise our minds are like sieves. So religions are cultures of repetition. They circle the great truths again and again and again. We associate repetition with boredom. "Give us the new," we're always saying. "The new is better than the old." If I said to you, "Okay, we're not going to have new TED. We're just going to run through all the old ones and watch them five times because they're so true. We're going to watch Elizabeth Gilbert five times because what she says is so clever," you'd feel cheated. Not so if you're adopting a religious mindset. The other things that religions do is to arrange time. All the major religions give us calendars. What is a calendar? A calendar is a way of making sure that across the year you will bump into certain very important ideas. In the Catholic chronology, Catholic calendar, at the end of March you will think about St. Jerome and his qualities of humility and goodness and his generosity to the poor. You won't do that by accident; you will do that because you are guided to do that. Now we don't think that way. In the secular world we think, "If an idea is important, I'll bump into it. I'll just come across it." Nonsense, says the religious world view. Religious view says we need calendars, we need to structure time, we need to synchronize encounters. This comes across also in the way in which religions set up rituals around important feelings. Take the Moon. It's really important to look at the Moon. You know, when you look at the Moon, you think, "I'm really small. What are my problems?" It sets things into perspective, etc., etc. We should all look at the Moon a bit more often. We don't. Why don't we? Well there's nothing to tell us, "Look at the Moon." But if you're a Zen Buddhist in the middle of September, you will be ordered out of your home, made to stand on a canonical platform and made to celebrate the festival of Tsukimi, where you will be given poems to read in honor of the Moon and the passage of time and the frailty of life that it should remind us of. You'll be handed rice cakes. And the Moon and the reflection on the Moon will have a secure place in your heart. That's very good. The other thing that religions are really aware of is: speak well -- I'm not doing a very good job of this here -- but oratory, oratory is absolutely key to religions. In the secular world, you can come through the university system and be a lousy speaker and still have a great career. But the religious world doesn't think that way. What you're saying needs to be backed up by a really convincing way of saying it. So if you go to an African-American Pentecostalist church in the American South and you listen to how they talk, my goodness, they talk well. After every convincing point, people will go, "Amen, amen, amen." At the end of a really rousing paragraph, they'll all stand up, and they'll go, "Thank you Jesus, thank you Christ, thank you Savior." If we were doing it like they do it -- let's not do it, but if we were to do it -- I would tell you something like, "Culture should replace scripture." And you would go, "Amen, amen, amen." And at the end of my talk, you would all stand up and you would go, "Thank you Plato, thank you Shakespeare, thank you Jane Austen." And we'd know that we had a real rhythm going. All right, all right. We're getting there. We're getting there. (Applause) The other thing that religions know is we're not just brains, we are also bodies. And when they teach us a lesson, they do it via the body. So for example, take the Jewish idea of forgiveness. Jews are very interested in forgiveness and how we should start anew and start afresh. They don't just deliver us sermons on this. They don't just give us books or words about this. They tell us to have a bath. So in Orthodox Jewish communities, every Friday you go to a Mikveh. You immerse yourself in the water, and a physical action backs up a philosophical idea. We don't tend to do that. Our ideas are in one area and our behavior with our bodies is in another. Religions are fascinating in the way they try and combine the two. Let's look at art now. Now art is something that in the secular world, we think very highly of. We think art is really, really important. A lot of our surplus wealth goes to museums, etc. We sometimes hear it said that museums are our new cathedrals, or our new churches. You've heard that saying. Now I think that the potential is there, but we've completely let ourselves down. And the reason we've let ourselves down is that we're not properly studying how religions handle art. The two really bad ideas that are hovering in the modern world that inhibit our capacity to draw strength from art: The first idea is that art should be for art's sake -- a ridiculous idea -- an idea that art should live in a hermetic bubble and should not try to do anything with this troubled world. I couldn't disagree more. The other thing that we believe is that art shouldn't explain itself, that artists shouldn't say what they're up to, because if they said it, it might destroy the spell and we might find it too easy. That's why a very common feeling when you're in a museum -- let's admit it -- is, "I don't know what this is about." But if we're serious people, we don't admit to that. But that feeling of puzzlement is structural to contemporary art. Now religions have a much saner attitude to art. They have no trouble telling us what art is about. Art is about two things in all the major faiths. Firstly, it's trying to remind you of what there is to love. And secondly, it's trying to remind you of what there is to fear and to hate. And that's what art is. Art is a visceral encounter with the most important ideas of your faith. So as you walk around a church, or a mosque or a cathedral, what you're trying to imbibe, what you're imbibing is, through your eyes, through your senses, truths that have otherwise come to you through your mind. Essentially it's propaganda. Rembrandt is a propagandist in the Christian view. Now the word "propaganda" sets off alarm bells. We think of Hitler, we think of Stalin. Don't, necessarily. Propaganda is a manner of being didactic in honor of something. And if that thing is good, there's no problem with it at all. My view is that museums should take a leaf out of the book of religions. And they should make sure that when you walk into a museum -- if I was a museum curator, I would make a room for love, a room for generosity. All works of art are talking to us about things. And if we were able to arrange spaces where we could come across works where we would be told, use these works of art to cement these ideas in your mind, we would get a lot more out of art. Art would pick up the duty that it used to have and that we've neglected because of certain mis-founded ideas. Art should be one of the tools by which we improve our society. Art should be didactic. Let's think of something else. The people in the modern world, in the secular world, who are interested in matters of the spirit, in matters of the mind, in higher soul-like concerns, tend to be isolated individuals. They're poets, they're philosophers, they're photographers, they're filmmakers. And they tend to be on their own. They're our cottage industries. They are vulnerable, single people. And they get depressed and they get sad on their own. And they don't really change much. Now think about religions, think about organized religions. What do organized religions do? They group together, they form institutions. And that has all sorts of advantages. First of all, scale, might. The Catholic Church pulled in 97 billion dollars last year according to the Wall Street Journal. These are massive machines. They're collaborative, they're branded, they're multinational, and they're highly disciplined. These are all very good qualities. We recognize them in relation to corporations. And corporations are very like religions in many ways, except they're right down at the bottom of the pyramid of needs. They're selling us shoes and cars. Whereas the people who are selling us the higher stuff -- the therapists, the poets -- are on their own and they have no power, they have no might. So religions are the foremost example of an institution that is fighting for the things of the mind. Now we may not agree with what religions are trying to teach us, but we can admire the institutional way in which they're doing it. Books alone, books written by lone individuals, are not going to change anything. We need to group together. If you want to change the world, you have to group together, you have to be collaborative. And that's what religions do. They are multinational, as I say, they are branded, they have a clear identity, so they don't get lost in a busy world. That's something we can learn from. I want to conclude. Really what I want to say is for many of you who are operating in a range of different fields, there is something to learn from the example of religion -- even if you don't believe any of it. If you're involved in anything that's communal, that involves lots of people getting together, there are things for you in religion. If you're involved, say, in a travel industry in any way, look at pilgrimage. Look very closely at pilgrimage. We haven't begun to scratch the surface of what travel could be because we haven't looked at what religions do with travel. If you're in the art world, look at the example of what religions are doing with art. And if you're an educator in any way, again, look at how religions are spreading ideas. You may not agree with the ideas, but my goodness, they're highly effective mechanisms for doing so. So really my concluding point is you may not agree with religion, but at the end of the day, religions are so subtle, so complicated, so intelligent in many ways that they're not fit to be abandoned to the religious alone; they're for all of us. Thank you very much. (Applause) Chris Anderson: Now this is actually a courageous talk, because you're kind of setting up yourself in some ways to be ridiculed in some quarters. AB: You can get shot by both sides. You can get shot by the hard-headed atheists, and you can get shot by those who fully believe. CA: Incoming missiles from North Oxford at any moment. AB: Indeed. CA: But you left out one aspect of religion that a lot of people might say your agenda could borrow from, which is this sense -- that's actually probably the most important thing to anyone who's religious -- of spiritual experience, of some kind of connection with something that's bigger than you are. Is there any room for that experience in Atheism 2.0? AB: Absolutely. I, like many of you, meet people who say things like, "But isn't there something bigger than us, something else?" And I say, "Of course." And they say, "So aren't you sort of religious?" And I go, "No." Why does that sense of mystery, that sense of the dizzying scale of the universe, need to be accompanied by a mystical feeling? Science and just observation gives us that feeling without it, so I don't feel the need. The universe is large and we are tiny, without the need for further religious superstructure. So one can have so-called spiritual moments without belief in the spirit. CA: Actually, let me just ask a question. How many people here would say that religion is important to them? Is there an equivalent process by which there's a sort of bridge between what you're talking about and what you would say to them? AB: I would say that there are many, many gaps in secular life and these can be plugged. It's not as though, as I try to suggest, it's not as though either you have religion and then you have to accept all sorts of things, or you don't have religion and then you're cut off from all these very good things. It's so sad that we constantly say, "I don't believe so I can't have community, so I'm cut off from morality, so I can't go on a pilgrimage." One wants to say, "Nonsense. Why not?" And that's really the spirit of my talk. There's so much we can absorb. Atheism shouldn't cut itself off from the rich sources of religion. CA: It seems to me that there's plenty of people in the TED community who are atheists. But probably most people in the community certainly don't think that religion is going away any time soon and want to find the language to have a constructive dialogue and to feel like we can actually talk to each other and at least share some things in common. Are we foolish to be optimistic about the possibility of a world where, instead of religion being the great rallying cry of divide and war, that there could be bridging? AB: No, we need to be polite about differences. Politeness is a much-overlooked virtue. It's seen as hypocrisy. But we need to get to a stage when you're an atheist and someone says, "Well you know, I did pray the other day," you politely ignore it. You move on. Because you've agreed on 90 percent of things, because you have a shared view on so many things, and you politely differ. And I think that's what the religious wars of late have ignored. They've ignored the possibility of harmonious disagreement. CA: And finally, does this new thing that you're proposing that's not a religion but something else, does it need a leader, and are you volunteering to be the pope? (Laughter) AB: Well, one thing that we're all very suspicious of is individual leaders. It doesn't need it. What I've tried to lay out is a framework and I'm hoping that people can just fill it in. I've sketched a sort of broad framework. But wherever you are, as I say, if you're in the travel industry, do that travel bit. If you're in the communal industry, look at religion and do the communal bit. So it's a wiki project. (Laughter) CA: Alain, thank you for sparking many conversations later. (Applause)

I think I'll start out and just talk a little bit about what exactly autism is. Autism is a very big continuum that goes from very severe -- the child remains non-verbal -- all the way up to brilliant scientists and engineers. And I actually feel at home here, because there's a lot of autism genetics here. You wouldn't have any... (Applause) It's a continuum of traits. When does a nerd turn into Asperger, which is just mild autism? I mean, Einstein and Mozart and Tesla would all be probably diagnosed as autistic spectrum today. And one of the things that is really going to concern me is getting these kids to be the ones that are going to invent the next energy things, you know, that Bill Gates talked about this morning. OK. Now, if you want to understand autism, animals. And I want to talk to you now about different ways of thinking. You have to get away from verbal language. I think in pictures, I don't think in language. Now, the thing about the autistic mind is it attends to details. OK, this is a test where you either have to pick out the big letters, or pick out the little letters, and the autistic mind picks out the little letters more quickly. And the thing is, the normal brain ignores the details. Well, if you're building a bridge, details are pretty important because it will fall down if you ignore the details. And one of my big concerns with a lot of policy things today is things are getting too abstract. People are getting away from doing hands-on stuff. I'm really concerned that a lot of the schools have taken out the hands-on classes, because art, and classes like that, those are the classes where I excelled. In my work with cattle, I noticed a lot of little things that most people don't notice would make the cattle balk. Like, for example, this flag waving, right in front of the veterinary facility. This feed yard was going to tear down their whole veterinary facility; all they needed to do was move the flag. Rapid movement, contrast. In the early '70s when I started, I got right down in the chutes to see what cattle were seeing. People thought that was crazy. A coat on a fence would make them balk, shadows would make them balk, a hose on the floor ... people weren't noticing these things -- a chain hanging down -- and that's shown very, very nicely in the movie. In fact, I loved the movie, how they duplicated all my projects. That's the geek side. My drawings got to star in the movie too. And actually it's called "Temple Grandin," not "Thinking In Pictures." So, what is thinking in pictures? It's literally movies in your head. My mind works like Google for images. Now, when I was a young kid I didn't know my thinking was different. I thought everybody thought in pictures. And then when I did my book, "Thinking In Pictures," I start interviewing people about how they think. And I was shocked to find out that my thinking was quite different. Like if I say, "Think about a church steeple" most people get this sort of generalized generic one. Now, maybe that's not true in this room, but it's going to be true in a lot of different places. I see only specific pictures. They flash up into my memory, just like Google for pictures. And in the movie, they've got a great scene in there where the word "shoe" is said, and a whole bunch of '50s and '60s shoes pop into my imagination. OK, there is my childhood church, that's specific. There's some more, Fort Collins. OK, how about famous ones? And they just kind of come up, kind of like this. Just really quickly, like Google for pictures. And they come up one at a time, and then I think, "OK, well maybe we can have it snow, or we can have a thunderstorm," and I can hold it there and turn them into videos. Now, visual thinking was a tremendous asset in my work designing cattle-handling facilities. And I've worked really hard on improving how cattle are treated at the slaughter plant. I'm not going to go into any gucky slaughter slides. I've got that stuff up on YouTube if you want to look at it. But, one of the things that I was able to do in my design work is I could actually test run a piece of equipment in my mind, just like a virtual reality computer system. And this is an aerial view of a recreation of one of my projects that was used in the movie. That was like just so super cool. And there were a lot of kind of Asperger types and autism types working out there on the movie set too. (Laughter) But one of the things that really worries me is: Where's the younger version of those kids going today? They're not ending up in Silicon Valley, where they belong. (Laughter) (Applause) Now, one of the things I learned very early on because I wasn't that social, is I had to sell my work, and not myself. And the way I sold livestock jobs is I showed off my drawings, I showed off pictures of things. Another thing that helped me as a little kid is, boy, in the '50s, you were taught manners. You were taught you can't pull the merchandise off the shelves in the store and throw it around. Now, when kids get to be in third or fourth grade, you might see that this kid's going to be a visual thinker, drawing in perspective. Now, I want to emphasize that not every autistic kid is going to be a visual thinker. Now, I had this brain scan done several years ago, and I used to joke around about having a gigantic Internet trunk line going deep into my visual cortex. This is tensor imaging. And my great big internet trunk line is twice as big as the control's. The red lines there are me, and the blue lines are the sex and age-matched control. And there I got a gigantic one, and the control over there, the blue one, has got a really small one. And some of the research now is showing is that people on the spectrum actually think with primary visual cortex. Now, the thing is, the visual thinker's just one kind of mind. You see, the autistic mind tends to be a specialist mind -- good at one thing, bad at something else. And where I was bad was algebra. And I was never allowed to take geometry or trig. Gigantic mistake: I'm finding a lot of kids who need to skip algebra, go right to geometry and trig. Now, another kind of mind is the pattern thinker. More abstract. These are your engineers, your computer programmers. Now, this is pattern thinking. That praying mantis is made from a single sheet of paper -- no scotch tape, no cuts. And there in the background is the pattern for folding it. Here are the types of thinking: photo-realistic visual thinkers, like me; pattern thinkers, music and math minds. Some of these oftentimes have problems with reading. You also will see these kind of problems with kids that are dyslexic. You'll see these different kinds of minds. And then there's a verbal mind, they know every fact about everything. Now, another thing is the sensory issues. I was really concerned about having to wear this gadget on my face. And I came in half an hour beforehand so I could have it put on and kind of get used to it, and they got it bent so it's not hitting my chin. But sensory is an issue. Some kids are bothered by fluorescent lights; others have problems with sound sensitivity. You know, it's going to be variable. Now, visual thinking gave me a whole lot of insight into the animal mind. Because think about it: An animal is a sensory-based thinker, not verbal -- thinks in pictures, thinks in sounds, thinks in smells. Think about how much information there is there on the local fire hydrant. He knows who's been there, when they were there. Are they friend or foe? Is there anybody he can go mate with? There's a ton of information on that fire hydrant. It's all very detailed information, and, looking at these kind of details gave me a lot of insight into animals. Now, the animal mind, and also my mind, puts sensory-based information into categories. Man on a horse and a man on the ground -- that is viewed as two totally different things. You could have a horse that's been abused by a rider. They'll be absolutely fine with the veterinarian and with the horseshoer, but you can't ride him. You have another horse, where maybe the horseshoer beat him up and he'll be terrible for anything on the ground, with the veterinarian, but a person can ride him. Cattle are the same way. Man on a horse, a man on foot -- they're two different things. You see, it's a different picture. See, I want you to think about just how specific this is. Now, this ability to put information into categories, I find a lot of people are not very good at this. When I'm out troubleshooting equipment or problems with something in a plant, they don't seem to be able to figure out, "Do I have a training people issue? Or do I have something wrong with the equipment?" In other words, categorize equipment problem from a people problem. I find a lot of people have difficulty doing that. Now, let's say I figure out it's an equipment problem. Is it a minor problem, with something simple I can fix? Or is the whole design of the system wrong? People have a hard time figuring that out. Let's just look at something like, you know, solving problems with making airlines safer. Yeah, I'm a million-mile flier. I do lots and lots of flying, and if I was at the FAA, what would I be doing a lot of direct observation of? It would be their airplane tails. You know, five fatal wrecks in the last 20 years, the tail either came off or steering stuff inside the tail broke in some way. It's tails, pure and simple. And when the pilots walk around the plane, guess what? They can't see that stuff inside the tail. You know, now as I think about that, I'm pulling up all of that specific information. It's specific. See, my thinking's bottom-up. I take all the little pieces and I put the pieces together like a puzzle. Now, here is a horse that was deathly afraid of black cowboy hats. He'd been abused by somebody with a black cowboy hat. White cowboy hats, that was absolutely fine. Now, the thing is, the world is going to need all of the different kinds of minds to work together. We've got to work on developing all these different kinds of minds. And one of the things that is driving me really crazy, as I travel around and I do autism meetings, is I'm seeing a lot of smart, geeky, nerdy kids, and they just aren't very social, and nobody's working on developing their interest in something like science. And this brings up the whole thing of my science teacher. My science teacher is shown absolutely beautifully in the movie. I was a goofball student. When I was in high school I just didn't care at all about studying, until I had Mr. Carlock's science class. He was now Dr. Carlock in the movie. And he got me challenged to figure out an optical illusion room. This brings up the whole thing of you've got to show kids interesting stuff. You know, one of the things that I think maybe TED ought to do is tell all the schools about all the great lectures that are on TED, and there's all kinds of great stuff on the Internet to get these kids turned on. Because I'm seeing a lot of these geeky nerdy kids, and the teachers out in the Midwest, and the other parts of the country, when you get away from these tech areas, they don't know what to do with these kids. And they're not going down the right path. The thing is, you can make a mind to be more of a thinking and cognitive mind, or your mind can be wired to be more social. And what some of the research now has shown in autism is there may by extra wiring back here, in the really brilliant mind, and we lose a few social circuits here. It's kind of a trade-off between thinking and social. And then you can get into the point where it's so severe you're going to have a person that's going to be non-verbal. In the normal human mind language covers up the visual thinking we share with animals. This is the work of Dr. Bruce Miller. And he studied Alzheimer's patients that had frontal temporal lobe dementia. And the dementia ate out the language parts of the brain, and then this artwork came out of somebody who used to install stereos in cars. Now, Van Gogh doesn't know anything about physics, but I think it's very interesting that there was some work done to show that this eddy pattern in this painting followed a statistical model of turbulence, which brings up the whole interesting idea of maybe some of this mathematical patterns is in our own head. And the Wolfram stuff -- I was taking notes and I was writing down all the search words I could use, because I think that's going to go on in my autism lectures. We've got to show these kids interesting stuff. And they've taken out the autoshop class and the drafting class and the art class. I mean art was my best subject in school. We've got to think about all these different kinds of minds, and we've got to absolutely work with these kind of minds, because we absolutely are going to need these kind of people in the future. And let's talk about jobs. OK, my science teacher got me studying because I was a goofball that didn't want to study. But you know what? I was getting work experience. I'm seeing too many of these smart kids who haven't learned basic things, like how to be on time. I was taught that when I was eight years old. You know, how to have table manners at granny's Sunday party. I was taught that when I was very, very young. And when I was 13, I had a job at a dressmaker's shop sewing clothes. I did internships in college, I was building things, and I also had to learn how to do assignments. You know, all I wanted to do was draw pictures of horses when I was little. My mother said, "Well let's do a picture of something else." They've got to learn how to do something else. Let's say the kid is fixated on Legos. Let's get him working on building different things. The thing about the autistic mind is it tends to be fixated. Like if a kid loves racecars, let's use racecars for math. Let's figure out how long it takes a racecar to go a certain distance. In other words, use that fixation in order to motivate that kid, that's one of the things we need to do. I really get fed up when they, you know, the teachers, especially when you get away from this part of the country, they don't know what to do with these smart kids. It just drives me crazy. What can visual thinkers do when they grow up? They can do graphic design, all kinds of stuff with computers, photography, industrial design. The pattern thinkers, they're the ones that are going to be your mathematicians, your software engineers, your computer programmers, all of those kinds of jobs. And then you've got the word minds. They make great journalists, and they also make really, really good stage actors. Because the thing about being autistic is, I had to learn social skills like being in a play. It's just kind of -- you just have to learn it. And we need to be working with these students. And this brings up mentors. You know, my science teacher was not an accredited teacher. He was a NASA space scientist. Now, some states now are getting it to where if you have a degree in biology, or a degree in chemistry, you can come into the school and teach biology or chemistry. We need to be doing that. Because what I'm observing is the good teachers, for a lot of these kids, are out in the community colleges, but we need to be getting some of these good teachers into the high schools. Another thing that can be very, very, very successful is there is a lot of people that may have retired from working in the software industry, and they can teach your kid. And it doesn't matter if what they teach them is old, because what you're doing is you're lighting the spark. You're getting that kid turned on. And you get him turned on, then he'll learn all the new stuff. Mentors are just essential. I cannot emphasize enough what my science teacher did for me. And we've got to mentor them, hire them. And if you bring them in for internships in your companies, the thing about the autism, Asperger-y kind of mind, you've got to give them a specific task. Don't just say, "Design new software." You've got to tell them something a lot more specific: "Well, we're designing a software for a phone and it has to do some specific thing. And it can only use so much memory." That's the kind of specificity you need. Well, that's the end of my talk. And I just want to thank everybody for coming. It was great to be here. (Applause) Oh, you've got a question for me? OK. (Applause) Chris Anderson: Thank you so much for that. You know, you once wrote, I like this quote, "If by some magic, autism had been eradicated from the face of the Earth, then men would still be socializing in front of a wood fire at the entrance to a cave." Temple Grandin: Because who do you think made the first stone spears? The Asperger guy. And if you were to get rid of all the autism genetics there would be no more Silicon Valley, and the energy crisis would not be solved. (Applause) CA: So, I want to ask you a couple other questions, and if any of these feel inappropriate, it's okay just to say, "Next question." But if there is someone here who has an autistic child, or knows an autistic child and feels kind of cut off from them, what advice would you give them? TG: Well, first of all, you've got to look at age. If you have a two, three or four year old you know, no speech, no social interaction, I can't emphasize enough: Don't wait, you need at least 20 hours a week of one-to-one teaching. You know, the thing is, autism comes in different degrees. There's going to be about half the people on the spectrum that are not going to learn to talk, and they're not going to be working Silicon Valley, that would not be a reasonable thing for them to do. But then you get the smart, geeky kids that have a touch of autism, and that's where you've got to get them turned on with doing interesting things. I got social interaction through shared interest. I rode horses with other kids, I made model rockets with other kids, did electronics lab with other kids, and in the '60s, it was gluing mirrors onto a rubber membrane on a speaker to make a light show. That was like, we considered that super cool. CA: Is it unrealistic for them to hope or think that that child loves them, as some might, as most, wish? TG: Well let me tell you, that child will be loyal, and if your house is burning down, they're going to get you out of it. CA: Wow. So, most people, if you ask them what are they most passionate about, they'd say things like, "My kids" or "My lover." What are you most passionate about? TG: I'm passionate about that the things I do are going to make the world a better place. When I have a mother of an autistic child say, "My kid went to college because of your book, or one of your lectures," that makes me happy. You know, the slaughter plants, I've worked with them in the '80s; they were absolutely awful. I developed a really simple scoring system for slaughter plants where you just measure outcomes: How many cattle fell down? How many cattle got poked with the prodder? How many cattle are mooing their heads off? And it's very, very simple. You directly observe a few simple things. It's worked really well. I get satisfaction out of seeing stuff that makes real change in the real world. We need a lot more of that, and a lot less abstract stuff. (Applause) CA: When we were talking on the phone, one of the things you said that really astonished me was you said one thing you were passionate about was server farms. Tell me about that. TG: Well the reason why I got really excited when I read about that, it contains knowledge. It's libraries. And to me, knowledge is something that is extremely valuable. So, maybe, over 10 years ago now our library got flooded. And this is before the Internet got really big. And I was really upset about all the books being wrecked, because it was knowledge being destroyed. And server farms, or data centers are great libraries of knowledge. CA: Temple, can I just say it's an absolute delight to have you at TED. TG: Well thank you so much. Thank you. (Applause)

I think I'll start out and just talk a little bit about what exactly autism is. Autism is a very big continuum that goes from very severe -- the child remains non-verbal -- all the way up to brilliant scientists and engineers. And I actually feel at home here, because there's a lot of autism genetics here. You wouldn't have any... (Applause) It's a continuum of traits. When does a nerd turn into Asperger, which is just mild autism? I mean, Einstein and Mozart and Tesla would all be probably diagnosed as autistic spectrum today. And one of the things that is really going to concern me is getting these kids to be the ones that are going to invent the next energy things, you know, that Bill Gates talked about this morning. OK. Now, if you want to understand autism, animals. And I want to talk to you now about different ways of thinking. You have to get away from verbal language. I think in pictures, I don't think in language. Now, the thing about the autistic mind is it attends to details. OK, this is a test where you either have to pick out the big letters, or pick out the little letters, and the autistic mind picks out the little letters more quickly. And the thing is, the normal brain ignores the details. Well, if you're building a bridge, details are pretty important because it will fall down if you ignore the details. And one of my big concerns with a lot of policy things today is things are getting too abstract. People are getting away from doing hands-on stuff. I'm really concerned that a lot of the schools have taken out the hands-on classes, because art, and classes like that, those are the classes where I excelled. In my work with cattle, I noticed a lot of little things that most people don't notice would make the cattle balk. Like, for example, this flag waving, right in front of the veterinary facility. This feed yard was going to tear down their whole veterinary facility; all they needed to do was move the flag. Rapid movement, contrast. In the early '70s when I started, I got right down in the chutes to see what cattle were seeing. People thought that was crazy. A coat on a fence would make them balk, shadows would make them balk, a hose on the floor ... people weren't noticing these things -- a chain hanging down -- and that's shown very, very nicely in the movie. In fact, I loved the movie, how they duplicated all my projects. That's the geek side. My drawings got to star in the movie too. And actually it's called "Temple Grandin," not "Thinking In Pictures." So, what is thinking in pictures? It's literally movies in your head. My mind works like Google for images. Now, when I was a young kid I didn't know my thinking was different. I thought everybody thought in pictures. And then when I did my book, "Thinking In Pictures," I start interviewing people about how they think. And I was shocked to find out that my thinking was quite different. Like if I say, "Think about a church steeple" most people get this sort of generalized generic one. Now, maybe that's not true in this room, but it's going to be true in a lot of different places. I see only specific pictures. They flash up into my memory, just like Google for pictures. And in the movie, they've got a great scene in there where the word "shoe" is said, and a whole bunch of '50s and '60s shoes pop into my imagination. OK, there is my childhood church, that's specific. There's some more, Fort Collins. OK, how about famous ones? And they just kind of come up, kind of like this. Just really quickly, like Google for pictures. And they come up one at a time, and then I think, "OK, well maybe we can have it snow, or we can have a thunderstorm," and I can hold it there and turn them into videos. Now, visual thinking was a tremendous asset in my work designing cattle-handling facilities. And I've worked really hard on improving how cattle are treated at the slaughter plant. I'm not going to go into any gucky slaughter slides. I've got that stuff up on YouTube if you want to look at it. But, one of the things that I was able to do in my design work is I could actually test run a piece of equipment in my mind, just like a virtual reality computer system. And this is an aerial view of a recreation of one of my projects that was used in the movie. That was like just so super cool. And there were a lot of kind of Asperger types and autism types working out there on the movie set too. (Laughter) But one of the things that really worries me is: Where's the younger version of those kids going today? They're not ending up in Silicon Valley, where they belong. (Laughter) (Applause) Now, one of the things I learned very early on because I wasn't that social, is I had to sell my work, and not myself. And the way I sold livestock jobs is I showed off my drawings, I showed off pictures of things. Another thing that helped me as a little kid is, boy, in the '50s, you were taught manners. You were taught you can't pull the merchandise off the shelves in the store and throw it around. Now, when kids get to be in third or fourth grade, you might see that this kid's going to be a visual thinker, drawing in perspective. Now, I want to emphasize that not every autistic kid is going to be a visual thinker. Now, I had this brain scan done several years ago, and I used to joke around about having a gigantic Internet trunk line going deep into my visual cortex. This is tensor imaging. And my great big internet trunk line is twice as big as the control's. The red lines there are me, and the blue lines are the sex and age-matched control. And there I got a gigantic one, and the control over there, the blue one, has got a really small one. And some of the research now is showing is that people on the spectrum actually think with primary visual cortex. Now, the thing is, the visual thinker's just one kind of mind. You see, the autistic mind tends to be a specialist mind -- good at one thing, bad at something else. And where I was bad was algebra. And I was never allowed to take geometry or trig. Gigantic mistake: I'm finding a lot of kids who need to skip algebra, go right to geometry and trig. Now, another kind of mind is the pattern thinker. More abstract. These are your engineers, your computer programmers. Now, this is pattern thinking. That praying mantis is made from a single sheet of paper -- no scotch tape, no cuts. And there in the background is the pattern for folding it. Here are the types of thinking: photo-realistic visual thinkers, like me; pattern thinkers, music and math minds. Some of these oftentimes have problems with reading. You also will see these kind of problems with kids that are dyslexic. You'll see these different kinds of minds. And then there's a verbal mind, they know every fact about everything. Now, another thing is the sensory issues. I was really concerned about having to wear this gadget on my face. And I came in half an hour beforehand so I could have it put on and kind of get used to it, and they got it bent so it's not hitting my chin. But sensory is an issue. Some kids are bothered by fluorescent lights; others have problems with sound sensitivity. You know, it's going to be variable. Now, visual thinking gave me a whole lot of insight into the animal mind. Because think about it: An animal is a sensory-based thinker, not verbal -- thinks in pictures, thinks in sounds, thinks in smells. Think about how much information there is there on the local fire hydrant. He knows who's been there, when they were there. Are they friend or foe? Is there anybody he can go mate with? There's a ton of information on that fire hydrant. It's all very detailed information, and, looking at these kind of details gave me a lot of insight into animals. Now, the animal mind, and also my mind, puts sensory-based information into categories. Man on a horse and a man on the ground -- that is viewed as two totally different things. You could have a horse that's been abused by a rider. They'll be absolutely fine with the veterinarian and with the horseshoer, but you can't ride him. You have another horse, where maybe the horseshoer beat him up and he'll be terrible for anything on the ground, with the veterinarian, but a person can ride him. Cattle are the same way. Man on a horse, a man on foot -- they're two different things. You see, it's a different picture. See, I want you to think about just how specific this is. Now, this ability to put information into categories, I find a lot of people are not very good at this. When I'm out troubleshooting equipment or problems with something in a plant, they don't seem to be able to figure out, "Do I have a training people issue? Or do I have something wrong with the equipment?" In other words, categorize equipment problem from a people problem. I find a lot of people have difficulty doing that. Now, let's say I figure out it's an equipment problem. Is it a minor problem, with something simple I can fix? Or is the whole design of the system wrong? People have a hard time figuring that out. Let's just look at something like, you know, solving problems with making airlines safer. Yeah, I'm a million-mile flyer. I do lots and lots of flying, and if I was at the FAA, what would I be doing a lot of direct observation of? It would be their airplane tails. You know, five fatal wrecks in the last 20 years, the tail either came off or steering stuff inside the tail broke in some way. It's tails, pure and simple. And when the pilots walk around the plane, guess what? They can't see that stuff inside the tail. You know, now as I think about that, I'm pulling up all of that specific information. It's specific. See, my thinking's bottom-up. I take all the little pieces and I put the pieces together like a puzzle. Now, here is a horse that was deathly afraid of black cowboy hats. He'd been abused by somebody with a black cowboy hat. White cowboy hats, that was absolutely fine. Now, the thing is, the world is going to need all of the different kinds of minds to work together. We've got to work on developing all these different kinds of minds. And one of the things that is driving me really crazy, as I travel around and I do autism meetings, is I'm seeing a lot of smart, geeky, nerdy kids, and they just aren't very social, and nobody's working on developing their interest in something like science. And this brings up the whole thing of my science teacher. My science teacher is shown absolutely beautifully in the movie. I was a goofball student. When I was in high school I just didn't care at all about studying, until I had Mr. Carlock's science class. He was now Dr. Carlock in the movie. And he got me challenged to figure out an optical illusion room. This brings up the whole thing of you've got to show kids interesting stuff. You know, one of the things that I think maybe TED ought to do is tell all the schools about all the great lectures that are on TED, and there's all kinds of great stuff on the Internet to get these kids turned on. Because I'm seeing a lot of these geeky nerdy kids, and the teachers out in the Midwest, and the other parts of the country, when you get away from these tech areas, they don't know what to do with these kids. And they're not going down the right path. The thing is, you can make a mind to be more of a thinking and cognitive mind, or your mind can be wired to be more social. And what some of the research now has shown in autism is there may by extra wiring back here, in the really brilliant mind, and we lose a few social circuits here. It's kind of a trade-off between thinking and social. And then you can get into the point where it's so severe you're going to have a person that's going to be non-verbal. In the normal human mind language covers up the visual thinking we share with animals. This is the work of Dr. Bruce Miller. And he studied Alzheimer's patients that had frontal temporal lobe dementia. And the dementia ate out the language parts of the brain, and then this artwork came out of somebody who used to install stereos in cars. Now, Van Gogh doesn't know anything about physics, but I think it's very interesting that there was some work done to show that this eddy pattern in this painting followed a statistical model of turbulence, which brings up the whole interesting idea of maybe some of this mathematical patterns is in our own head. And the Wolfram stuff -- I was taking notes and I was writing down all the search words I could use, because I think that's going to go on in my autism lectures. We've got to show these kids interesting stuff. And they've taken out the autoshop class and the drafting class and the art class. I mean art was my best subject in school. We've got to think about all these different kinds of minds, and we've got to absolutely work with these kind of minds, because we absolutely are going to need these kind of people in the future. And let's talk about jobs. OK, my science teacher got me studying because I was a goofball that didn't want to study. But you know what? I was getting work experience. I'm seeing too many of these smart kids who haven't learned basic things, like how to be on time. I was taught that when I was eight years old. You know, how to have table manners at granny's Sunday party. I was taught that when I was very, very young. And when I was 13, I had a job at a dressmaker's shop sewing clothes. I did internships in college, I was building things, and I also had to learn how to do assignments. You know, all I wanted to do was draw pictures of horses when I was little. My mother said, "Well let's do a picture of something else." They've got to learn how to do something else. Let's say the kid is fixated on Legos. Let's get him working on building different things. The thing about the autistic mind is it tends to be fixated. Like if a kid loves racecars, let's use racecars for math. Let's figure out how long it takes a racecar to go a certain distance. In other words, use that fixation in order to motivate that kid, that's one of the things we need to do. I really get fed up when they, you know, the teachers, especially when you get away from this part of the country, they don't know what to do with these smart kids. It just drives me crazy. What can visual thinkers do when they grow up? They can do graphic design, all kinds of stuff with computers, photography, industrial design. The pattern thinkers, they're the ones that are going to be your mathematicians, your software engineers, your computer programmers, all of those kinds of jobs. And then you've got the word minds. They make great journalists, and they also make really, really good stage actors. Because the thing about being autistic is, I had to learn social skills like being in a play. It's just kind of -- you just have to learn it. And we need to be working with these students. And this brings up mentors. You know, my science teacher was not an accredited teacher. He was a NASA space scientist. Now, some states now are getting it to where if you have a degree in biology, or a degree in chemistry, you can come into the school and teach biology or chemistry. We need to be doing that. Because what I'm observing is the good teachers, for a lot of these kids, are out in the community colleges, but we need to be getting some of these good teachers into the high schools. Another thing that can be very, very, very successful is there is a lot of people that may have retired from working in the software industry, and they can teach your kid. And it doesn't matter if what they teach them is old, because what you're doing is you're lighting the spark. You're getting that kid turned on. And you get him turned on, then he'll learn all the new stuff. Mentors are just essential. I cannot emphasize enough what my science teacher did for me. And we've got to mentor them, hire them. And if you bring them in for internships in your companies, the thing about the autism, Asperger-y kind of mind, you've got to give them a specific task. Don't just say, "Design new software." You've got to tell them something a lot more specific: "Well, we're designing a software for a phone and it has to do some specific thing. And it can only use so much memory." That's the kind of specificity you need. Well, that's the end of my talk. And I just want to thank everybody for coming. It was great to be here. (Applause) Oh, you've got a question for me? OK. (Applause) Chris Anderson: Thank you so much for that. You know, you once wrote, I like this quote, "If by some magic, autism had been eradicated from the face of the Earth, then men would still be socializing in front of a wood fire at the entrance to a cave." Temple Grandin: Because who do you think made the first stone spears? The Asperger guy. And if you were to get rid of all the autism genetics there would be no more Silicon Valley, and the energy crisis would not be solved. (Applause) CA: So, I want to ask you a couple other questions, and if any of these feel inappropriate, it's okay just to say, "Next question." But if there is someone here who has an autistic child, or knows an autistic child and feels kind of cut off from them, what advice would you give them? TG: Well, first of all, you've got to look at age. If you have a two, three or four year old you know, no speech, no social interaction, I can't emphasize enough: Don't wait, you need at least 20 hours a week of one-to-one teaching. You know, the thing is, autism comes in different degrees. There's going to be about half the people on the spectrum that are not going to learn to talk, and they're not going to be working Silicon Valley, that would not be a reasonable thing for them to do. But then you get the smart, geeky kids that have a touch of autism, and that's where you've got to get them turned on with doing interesting things. I got social interaction through shared interest. I rode horses with other kids, I made model rockets with other kids, did electronics lab with other kids, and in the '60s, it was gluing mirrors onto a rubber membrane on a speaker to make a light show. That was like, we considered that super cool. CA: Is it unrealistic for them to hope or think that that child loves them, as some might, as most, wish? TG: Well let me tell you, that child will be loyal, and if your house is burning down, they're going to get you out of it. CA: Wow. So, most people, if you ask them what are they most passionate about, they'd say things like, "My kids" or "My lover." What are you most passionate about? TG: I'm passionate about that the things I do are going to make the world a better place. When I have a mother of an autistic child say, "My kid went to college because of your book, or one of your lectures," that makes me happy. You know, the slaughter plants, I've worked with them in the '80s; they were absolutely awful. I developed a really simple scoring system for slaughter plants where you just measure outcomes: How many cattle fell down? How many cattle got poked with the prodder? How many cattle are mooing their heads off? And it's very, very simple. You directly observe a few simple things. It's worked really well. I get satisfaction out of seeing stuff that makes real change in the real world. We need a lot more of that, and a lot less abstract stuff. (Applause) CA: When we were talking on the phone, one of the things you said that really astonished me was you said one thing you were passionate about was server farms. Tell me about that. TG: Well the reason why I got really excited when I read about that, it contains knowledge. It's libraries. And to me, knowledge is something that is extremely valuable. So, maybe, over 10 years ago now our library got flooded. And this is before the Internet got really big. And I was really upset about all the books being wrecked, because it was knowledge being destroyed. And server farms, or data centers are great libraries of knowledge. CA: Temple, can I just say it's an absolute delight to have you at TED. TG: Well thank you so much. Thank you. (Applause)

This is a play called "Sell/Buy/Date." It's my first since "Bridge and Tunnel," which I did on Broadway, and this one, I -- thank you -- I've excerpted it just for you, so here we go. Right. Class, let's be absolutely certain all electronic devices are switched off before we begin. So class, hopefully you'll recognize what you just heard me say as the -- ? Very good, the cellular phone announcement. Right? This was also known as a mobile phone. So you'll remember, people of that era would have had an external electronic device, right, something like this, and they all would have carried one of these around with them, and amongst their biggest fears was the sheer mortification that one of these might ring at some inopportune moment. Right? So a bit of trivia about that era for you. (Laughter) So the format of today's class is I will be presenting multiple BERT modules today from that period in history, right, so starting circa 2016. And remember, this was the very first year of the BERT program. So we've got quite a few of these to get through. Bear in mind, I will be living into various different bodies, different ages, also what were then called races, or ethnic groups, as you'll remember from Unit 1. And -- (Laughter) -- and along the gender continuum, I will be living into males as well. It was quite binary at that time. (Laughter) Also, don't forget, we are reading the book module for next week's focus on gender. Now, I know some of you have requested the book in pill form. I know people still believe ingesting it is better for retention, but since we are trying to experience what our forebears did, right, let's please just consider doing the actual ocular reading, okay? And also, how many people have your emotional shunts engaged? Right. Please toggle them off. Okay? I know it's challenging, but I want you to be able to feel the entire natural emo range, all right? It is essential to this part of the syllabus. Yes, Macy? All right. I understand. If you're unwilling to -- All right, well, we can discuss that after class. All right, we will discuss your concerns. Just relax. Nobody's died and gone to composting. Okay. After class. Okay? After class. Let's just get started, okay. This first subject identified as a middle-class homemaker. Remember, these early modules in these people's full identities were protected, and this allowed them to speak more freely on our topic, which for many of them was taboo. Okay honey, now, I'm ready when you are. No, sweetheart, I said, I'm ready when you are. I'm freezing. It's like a meat locker in here in this recording studio. I should have brought a shmata. All this fancy technology but they can't afford heat. What is he saying? I can't hear you! I can't hear you through the glass, honey! There you are in my ear. Oh, you can hear me? The whole time. Oh, yes, I am a little chilly. Yes, oh the cold is for the machines, the new technology. Okay. Yes, now remind me again, you're recording not only my voice but my feelings and my memories? Right. Yes, BERT, yes, I read about it. Bio-Empathetic Resonant Technology. Right, right, so people will be able to feel my experience and my memory? Okay. No, right, I'm ready. I just thought you were going to give me a test to see how my memory's doing. I was going to tell you you're too late, it's already bad news. No, no, go ahead, honey. Oh, that's the first question? What do I think of prostitution? Are you soliciting me, young man? I've heard of May-December romances, but what are you, about 20 years old? Eighteen? Eighteen years. I think I have candies in my purse older than 18 years old. (Laughter) I'm teasing you, sweetheart. No, I'm comfortable with any question. Sure. So about the prostitution -- oh, sex worker, sex worker. No, just in my day, they called it prostitution, not sex work. Oh, because it includes pornography also? Okay. No, well, I guess when I was a girl, we didn't really have a name for that either. We would have said dirty magazines, I suppose, or dirty movies. Well, it's not like what you have with the Internet. No, well, I don't mind sharing. My late husband and I, we were a very romantic couple. Lots of tenderness, you understand. Well, as you get older, you know, at one point I thought my husband might be helped by using some of the pills men can take, but he wasn't interested in those, so I thought, what about maybe watching an adult movie on the Internet? Just for inspiration, you understand. Well, at the time, neither of us were very good on the computer, so usually, if we needed help with the Internet, we would just call our children or our grandchildren, but obviously, in this case, that wasn't an option, so I thought, I'll have a look myself, just to see. How difficult could it be? You search for certain key words and you look -- Oh wow is right, young man. You can't imagine what I saw. Well, first of all, I was just trying to find, you know, couples, normal couples making love, but this, so many people together at one time. You couldn't tell which part belonged to which body. How they even got the cameras to capture some of this, I couldn't tell you. But the one thing they didn't capture was making love. There was lots of making of something, but they took the love part right out of it, you know, the fun. It was all very extreme, you know? Like you would say, with the extreme sports. Lots of endurance, but never tenderness. So anyway, needless to say, that was $19.95 I'll never get back again, but it only showed up on the credit card as "entertainment services," so my husband was never the wiser, and after all of that, well, you could say it turned out he didn't need the extra inspiration after all. Right, so next subject is a young woman -- (Applause) -- Next subject, class, is a young woman called Bella, a university student interviewed in 2016 during what was called an Intro to Feminist Porn class as part of her major in sex work at a college in the Bay Area. (Laughter) Yeah, I just want to, like, get a recording of, like, you guys recording me, like a meta recording, or whatever. It's just like this whole experience is just, like, really amazing, and I'd like to capture that for, like, Instagram and my Tumblr. So, like, hi guys, it's me, Bella, and I am, like, being interviewed right now for this, like, really amazing Bio-Empathetic Resonance Technology, which is, like, basically where they are, like, recording, as you can see from these, whatever, like, electrodes, the formation of, like, neuropeptides in my hippocampus, or whatever. They will later be able to reconstitute these as, like, my own actual memory, like actual experiences, so other people can, like, actually feel what I'm feeling right now. Okay. Okay. So, like, hello, BERT person of the future who is experiencing me. This is what it feels like to be, like, a college freshman, and also the, like, headache that you are experiencing through me is the, like, residual effect of the Jell-O shots which I had last night at the bi-weekly feminist pole dancing party which I cohost on Wednesdays. It's called "Don't Get All Pole-emical" -- (Laughter) -- and it's in Beekman Hall, and, what else, like, non-Jell-O shots are also available for vegans, and, oh, okay, yeah, totally, yeah, we should also focus on your questions also. So for your record, I am, like, a sex work studies major but minoring in social media with a concentration on notable YouTube memes. (Laughter) Yes, well, of course, like, I consider myself to be, like, obviously, like, a feminist. I was named for Bella Abzug, who was, like, a famous, like, feminist from history, and, like, also I feel that it is, like, important to, like, represent women who are, like, sex-positive feminists. What is sex-negative? Well, like, I guess I would ask, like, what do you think sex-negative is? (Laughter) Yeah, because, like, the terms that we use are, like, so important, because, like, we call it sex work because it helps people understand that, like, it's work, and, like, you know, just like there are, like, healthcare providers and, like, insurance providers, like, we think of these workers as, like, sex care providers. Yeah, but like, I don't think of myself like, providing direct sex care services per se as, like, being a requirement for me to be, like, an advocate. Like, I support other women's right to choose it voluntarily, like, if they enjoy it. Yeah, but, like, I see myself going forward as more likely, like, protecting sex workers', like, legal freedoms and rights. Yeah, so, like, basically, I'm planning on becoming a lawyer. Right, class. (Laughter) (Applause) So these next two modules are also circa 2016. One subject is an Irishwoman with a particularly noteworthy relationship to this issue, but first will be a West Indian woman, a self-described escort who was recorded at a sex workers' rights rally and parade. She was interviewed whilst marching in full carnival headdress and very little else. All right, you want me to start talking now. Yeah, I told you, you can put those wires anywhere you want to as long as it don't get in the way. Yeah, no, but, tell me again what the name of -- BERT? BERT. Yeah, I was telling you, you know, I think I have in all my time I have had at least one client with that name, so this won't be the first time I had BERT all over me. Oh, I'm sorry, but you got to get into the spirit of it if you're going to interview me. All right? You can say it. No justice, no piece! No justice, no piece! But you see the sign? You get it? P-I-E-C-E. No justice, no piece of us. You understand? Right, so that's the part where I was telling you is that when I first came to this country, I worked every job I could find. I was a nanny; I was a home care attendant for all these different old people, and then I said, child, if I have to touch another white man's backside, I might as well get paid a lot more money for it than this, you understand? Pshh, you know how hard it is being a domestic worker? Some of these men, they're heavy. You have to pick them up and flip them over. Now, I let them pick me up and flip me over, you understand? Well, you have to have a sense of humor about it, that's what I think. No, but see, listen, you find me somebody who don't hate some part of their job. I mean, there's a lot of things about this job that I hate, but the money is not one of them, and I will tell you, as long as this is the best possibility for me to make real money, I am going to be Jamaican-No-Fakin' if that's what they want to call me. No, I'm not even from Jamaica. That's how they market me. My family is from Trinidad and the Virgin Islands. They don't know what I do, but you know what? My children, they know that their school fees are paid, they have their books and their computer, and this way, I know that they have a chance. So I'm not going to tell you that what I do, it's easy, I'm not going to tell you that I feel -- what's that you said, liberated? But I'm going to tell you that I feel paid. Right. (Applause) Thanks, that's lovely, and just the cup of tea, love, and just a splash of the whiskey. It's perfect, that's grand. Just a drop more. A splash. Perfect. What was your name? Peter? Is that right, so, Peter? Right. So that, that is the unique part of it for me, right, is that I ended up in both, first in the convent, and then in the prostitution after. That's right. (Laughter) So one woman at the university here in Dublin, she wrote about me. She said, Maureen Fitzroy is the living embodiment of the whore-virgin dichotomy. Right? (Laughter) Doesn't it sound like something you need to go into hospital? Well, I've got this terrible dichotomy. Doesn't it. Right. Well, for me though, it was, as a girl, it started with me dad. I mean, half the time, when he spoke to us, it was just a sort of tell us we were all useless rotten idiots and we had no morals, that type of thing. And I certainly didn't do myself any favors. By the time I was 16, I had started messing about with this older fella, and he wanted it to be our little secret, and I did as I was told, didn't I, and when that got back to me dad, he had me sent straightaway to the convent. Well no, that older fella, he would still come to find me in the convent. Yeah, he'd leave me notes tucked into the holes in the brick at the back of the charity shop so we could meet. And he'd tell me how he's leaving his wife, and I believed him, until I got pregnant. I did, Peter, and I left him a note about it in our special place there, and I never did hear from him again. No, I gave it up for adoption so it could have a decent life, and then they wouldn't let me back into the convent. No, my one sister Virginia gave me a fiver for the coach to Dublin, and that's how I ended up here. Well, surprise, surprise, I fell in love with another fella much older than me, and I always say I was just so happy because he didn't drink, I married the bastard. Well, he didn't drink, but he did have just the wee heroin problem, didn't he, and -- That's right, and before I knew it, he was the one who turned me on to the prostitution, my own husband. He had me supporting the both of us. I was 18. Well, it wasn't Pretty Woman, I can tell you that. That Julia Roberts, if she'd ever had to sleep with a man to put a few pounds in her pocket, I don't think she'd ever have made that film. Well, for your record, my opinion of the legalization, I'd say I'm against it. I just, I don't care what these young girls say. You know, living like that, you're just lost, and, you know, I'm 63 years old. I'm still trying to find who I am. You know, I never was a wife or a nun, or a prostitute even, really, not really. Nobody ever asked who I wanted to be. They just told me, and if you legalize it, then you're really telling these girls, "Go on and get lost for a living," and a lot of them, they'll do as they're told. All right, so four perspectives from four quite -- (Applause) -- four quite different voices there, right? One woman saying sex itself is natural but the sex industry seems to mechanize or industrialize it. Then the second woman considered sex work to be empowering, liberating, and feminist, though she, herself, notably, did not seem keen to do it. The third woman, who actually was a so-called sex worker did not agree that it was liberating but she wanted the right to the economic empowerment, and then we hear the fourth woman saying not only prostitution itself but proscribed roles for women in general prevented her from ever finding who she was, right? So another fact most people did not know was the average age of an at-risk girl being introduced to the sex industry was 12 or 13. Also consider that the age when all girls in that society first became exposed to sexualized images of women was quite a bit earlier, right? This was a doll called Barbie, right? I initially thought she was an educational tool for anorexia prevention -- (Laughter) -- but actually she was considered by many to be a wholesome symbol of femininity, and often young girls began what was called dieting. Remember this? This was restricting food intake on purpose by the age of six, and defining themselves based on attractiveness by around that same time. Right? Yes? Right, Bradley, okay, excellent point. So there was a lucrative market in that society in convincing all people they had to look a certain way to even have a sex life, right? But girls, especially, were expected to be "sexy" while avoiding being perceived as "sluts" for being sexual. Right? So there's that shame piece we've heard about. Yes. Valerie, right? Okay, very good. Of course, men were having sex as well, but you'll remember from the reading, what were male sluts called? Very good, they were called men. (Laughter) (Applause) So not easy living in a world like that, right? Though it was not all bad news either. Most women in the early 2000s considered themselves empowered, and men generally felt they were also evolved in this area, and, in fact, most people would have been aware of issues like human trafficking, for example, but they would have seen that as quite separate from more recreational adult entertainment. And so we'll just very briefly, class -- we don't have a lot of time -- we'll just very briefly hear from a man on our topic at this stage. So this next subject was interviewed on the night of his bachelor party. Dude, can you, all right, can you just keep it down? I'm trying to talk to BERT right now. Oh, your name's not BERT. BERT's the name of the, oh, all right. No, no, no, totally, it's totally fine. I'm mostly sober, so I just want to be helpful. Yeah, and I totally believe in causes, yeah, like, all that stuff. (Laughter) And actually, I'm wearing Toms right now. Yeah, Toms, like, the shoes, like, you buy a pair and then a kid in Africa gets clean water. Yeah. Totally. But what was the question again? Sorry. Of course I believe in women's rights. I'm marrying a woman. (Laughter) No, but I mean, like, just because I'm in a strip club parking lot doesn't mean that I'm, like, a sexist or whatever. My fiancee is totally amazing, she's totally a strong girl, woman, smart woman, like, the whole thing. Yeah, she knows I'm here. She's probably at a strip club herself right now, like, as a joke, same as me. My best man, I told him he could surprise me, and he thought this would be hilarious, but this is not something. Yeah, we all went to B school together. Wharton. (Laughter) Yeah, so, dude, can you guys -- All right, but it's my bachelor party, and I can spend it in the parking lot with Anderson Cooper if I want to. All right, I'll see you in there. All right, okay, so Anderson, so, like, first of all, stripping, but then, like, all the other things you're talking about, prostitution and all that stuff, that's, like, not the same thing at all. You know? Like, you keep calling it the sex industry or whatever, but it's like, if the girl wants to be an exotic dancer and she's 18, like, that's her right. Whoa, whoa, I hear what you're saying, but I just feel like people, they just want to make it seem like all dudes are just, like, predators, that we would just automatically go to a prostitute, or whatever. Even, like, when I pledged, you know, like when I rushed my fraternity. My brothers who I'm close to, those guys, they're all like me. We're just normal people, but, like, there's this myth that you must be that guy who is kind of an asshole, and like, all bros before hos or whatever. And actually, like, bros before hos, it doesn't mean like what it sounds like. It's actually just like a joking way of saying that you care about your brothers and you put them first. Yeah, but, you can't blame the media, either. I mean, like, if you go watch "Hangover 2," and you think that's an instruction manual for your life, like, I don't know what to tell you. You know? You don't watch "Bourne Identity" and go drive your car over a gondola in Venice. (Laughter) Well, yeah, okay, like, if you're a little kid or whatever, of course it's different, but -- Yeah, all right, I remember one thing like that. I was at this kid's house one time playing GTA, uh, Grand Theft Auto? Dude, are you from Canada? (Laughter) So, like, whatever, with Grand Theft Auto, you're this kid, like, you're this guy walking around or whatever, and you can basically, like, the more cops you kill, the more points you get, and stuff like that. But also, you can find prostitutes and obviously you can do sexual stuff with them, but you can, like, kill them and take your money back. Yeah, this kid, I remember he ran over a couple of them a few times with his car and he got all these points. We were, like, 10, I think. It felt pretty terrible, actually. No, I don't think I said anything, I just finished playing and went home. All right class, so then there were men who had more than just a passing relationship to this issue. (Laughter) The next subject described himself as a reformed and remorseful pimp turned motivational speaker, life coach and therapist, but if you want to know more about him, you'll have to come to the entire play. Thank you so much, you beautiful TED audience. I will see you for "Sell/Buy/Date." (Applause)

I'm Jane McGonigal. I'm a game designer. I've been making games online now for 10 years, and my goal for the next decade is to try to make it as easy to save the world in real life as it is to save the world in online games. Now, I have a plan for this, and it entails convincing more people, including all of you, to spend more time playing bigger and better games. Right now we spend three billion hours a week playing online games. Some of you might be thinking, "That's a lot of time to spend playing games. Maybe too much time, considering how many urgent problems we have to solve in the real world." But actually, according to my research at The Institute For The Future, it's actually the opposite is true. Three billion hours a week is not nearly enough game play to solve the world's most urgent problems. In fact, I believe that if we want to survive the next century on this planet, we need to increase that total dramatically. I've calculated the total we need at 21 billion hours of game play every week. So, that's probably a bit of a counterintuitive idea, so I'll say it again, let it sink in: If we want to solve problems like hunger, poverty, climate change, global conflict, obesity, I believe that we need to aspire to play games online for at least 21 billion hours a week, by the end of the next decade. (Laughter) No. I'm serious. I am. Here's why. This picture pretty much sums up why I think games are so essential to the future survival of the human species. (Laughter) Truly. This is a portrait by a photographer named Phil Toledano. He wanted to capture the emotion of gaming, so he set up a camera in front of gamers while they were playing. And this is a classic gaming emotion. Now, if you're not a gamer, you might miss some of the nuance in this photo. You probably see the sense of urgency, a little bit of fear, but intense concentration, deep, deep focus on tackling a really difficult problem. If you are a gamer, you will notice a few nuances here: the crinkle of the eyes up, and around the mouth is a sign of optimism, and the eyebrows up is surprise. This is a gamer who is on the verge of something called an epic win. (Laughter) Oh, you've heard of that. OK, good, so we have some gamers among us. An epic win is an outcome that is so extraordinarily positive you had no idea it was even possible until you achieved it. It was almost beyond the threshold of imagination. And when you get there you are shocked to discover what you are truly capable of. That is an epic win. This is a gamer on the verge of an epic win. And this is the face that we need to see on millions of problem-solvers all over the world as we try to tackle the obstacles of the next century -- the face of someone who, against all odds is on the verge of an epic win. Now, unfortunately this is more of the face that we see in everyday life now as we try to tackle urgent problems. This is what I call the "I'm Not Good At Life" face, and this is actually me making it. Can you see? Yes. Good. This is actually me making the "I'm Not Good At Life" face. This is a piece of graffiti in my old neighborhood in Berkeley, California, where I did my PhD on why we're better in games than we are in real life. And this is a problem that a lot of gamers have. We feel that we are not as good in reality as we are in games. And I don't mean just good as in successful, although that's part of it. We do achieve more in game worlds. But I also mean good as in motivated to do something that matters, inspired to collaborate and to cooperate. And when we're in game worlds I believe that many of us become the best version of ourselves, the most likely to help at a moment's notice, the most likely to stick with a problem as long at it takes, to get up after failure and try again. And in real life, when we face failure, when we confront obstacles, we often don't feel that way. We feel overcome, we feel overwhelmed, we feel anxious, maybe depressed, frustrated or cynical. We never have those feelings when we're playing games, they just don't exist in games. So, that's what I wanted to study when I was a graduate student. What about games makes it impossible to feel that we can't achieve everything? How can we take those feelings from games and apply them to real-world work? So, I looked at games like World of Warcraft, which is really the ideal collaborative problem-solving environment. And I started to notice a few things that make epic wins so possible in online worlds. So, the first thing is whenever you show up in one of these online games, especially in World of Warcraft, there are lots and lots of different characters who are willing to trust you with a world-saving mission, right away. But not just any mission, it's a mission that is perfectly matched with your current level in the game. Right? So, you can do it. They never give you a challenge that you can't achieve. But it is on the verge of what you're capable of. So, you have to try hard, but there's no unemployment in World of Warcraft. There is no sitting around wringing your hands, there's always something specific and important to be done. And there are also tons of collaborators. Everywhere you go, hundreds of thousands of people ready to work with you to achieve your epic mission. That's not something that we have in real life that easily, this sense that at our fingertips are tons of collaborators. And also there is this epic story, this inspiring story of why we're there, and what we're doing. And then we get all this positive feedback. You guys have heard of leveling up and plus-one strength, and plus-one intelligence. We don't get that kind of constant feedback in real life. When I get off this stage I'm not going to have plus-one speaking, and plus-one crazy idea, plus-20 crazy idea. I don't get that feedback in real life. Now, the problem with collaborative online environments like World of Warcraft is that it's so satisfying to be on the verge of an epic win all the time that we decide to spend all our time in these game worlds. It's just better than reality. So, so far, collectively all the World of Warcraft gamers have spent 5.93 million years solving the virtual problems of Azeroth. Now, that's not necessarily a bad thing. It might sound like it's a bad thing. But to put that in context: 5.93 million years ago was when our earliest primate human ancestors stood up. That was the first upright primate. Okay, so when we talk about how much time we're currently investing in playing games, the only way it makes sense to even think about it is to talk about time at the magnitude of human evolution, which is an extraordinary thing. But it's also apt. Because it turns out that by spending all this time playing games, we're actually changing what we are capable of as human beings. We are evolving to be a more collaborative and hearty species. This is true. I believe this. So, consider this really interesting statistic; it was recently published by a researcher at Carnegie Mellon University: The average young person today in a country with a strong gamer culture will have spent 10,000 hours playing online games by the age of 21. Now 10,000 hours is a really interesting number for two reasons. First of all, for children in the United States 10,080 hours is the exact amount of time you will spend in school from fifth grade to high school graduation if you have perfect attendance. So, we have an entire parallel track of education going on where young people are learning as much about what it takes to be a good gamer as they are learning about everything else in school. And some of you have probably read Malcolm Gladwell's new book "Outliers." So, you would have heard of his theory of success, the 10,000 hour theory of success. It's based on this great cognitive science research that if we can master 10,000 hours of effortful study at anything by the age of 21, we will be virtuosos at it. We will be as good at whatever we do as the greatest people in the world. And so, now what we're looking at is an entire generation of young people who are virtuoso gamers. So, the big question is, "What exactly are gamers getting so good at?" Because if we could figure that out, we would have a virtually unprecedented human resource on our hands. This is how many people we now have in the world who spend at least an hour a day playing online games. These are our virtuoso gamers, 500 million people who are extraordinarily good at something. And in the next decade we're going to have another billion gamers who are extraordinarily good at whatever that is. If you don't know it already, this is coming. The game industry is developing consoles that are low energy and that work with the wireless phone networks instead of broadband Internet so that gamers all over the world, particularly in India, China, Brazil, can get online. They expect one billion more gamers in the next decade. It will bring us up to 1.5 billion gamers. So, I've started to think about what these games are making us virtuosos at. Here are the four things I came up with. The first is urgent optimism. OK, think of this as extreme self-motivation. Urgent optimism is the desire to act immediately to tackle an obstacle, combined with the belief that we have a reasonable hope of success. Gamers always believe that an epic win is possible, and that it is always worth trying, and trying now. Gamers don't sit around. Gamers are virtuosos at weaving a tight social fabric. There's a lot of interesting research that shows that we like people better after we play a game with them, even if they've beaten us badly. And the reason is, it takes a lot of trust to play a game with someone. We trust that they will spend their time with us, that they will play by the same rules, value the same goal, they'll stay with the game until it's over. And so, playing a game together actually builds up bonds and trust and cooperation. And we actually build stronger social relationships as a result. Blissful productivity. I love it. You know there's a reason why the average World of Warcraft gamer plays for 22 hours a week, kind of a half-time job. It's because we know, when we're playing a game, that we're actually happier working hard than we are relaxing, or hanging out. We know that we are optimized, as human beings, to do hard meaningful work. And gamers are willing to work hard all the time, if they're given the right work. Finally: epic meaning. Gamers love to be attached to awe-inspiring missions to human planetary-scale stories. So, just one bit of trivia that helps put that into perspective: So, you all know Wikipedia, biggest wiki in the world. Second biggest wiki in the world, with nearly 80,000 articles, is the World of Warcraft wiki. Five million people use it every month. They have compiled more information about World of Warcraft on the Internet than any other topic covered on any other wiki in the world. They are building an epic story. They are building an epic knowledge resource about the World of Warcraft. Okay, so these are four superpowers that add up to one thing: Gamers are super-empowered, hopeful individuals. These are people who believe that they are individually capable of changing the world. And the only problem is that they believe that they are capable of changing virtual worlds and not the real world. That's the problem that I'm trying to solve. There's an economist named Edward Castronova. His work is brilliant. He looks at why people are investing so much time and energy and money in online worlds. And he says, "We're witnessing what amounts to no less than a mass exodus to virtual worlds and online game environments." And he's an economist. So, he's rational. And he says ... (Laughter) Not like me -- I'm a game designer; I'm exuberant. But he says that this makes perfect sense, because gamers can achieve more in online worlds than they can in real life. They can have stronger social relationships in games than they can have in real life; they get better feedback and feel more rewarded in games than they do in real life. So, he says for now it makes perfect sense for gamers to spend more time in virtual worlds than the real world. Now, I also agree that that is rational, for now. But it is not, by any means, an optimal situation. We have to start making the real world more like a game. So, I take my inspiration from something that happened 2,500 years ago. These are ancient dice, made out of sheep's knuckles. Right? Before we had awesome game controllers, we had sheep's knuckles. And these represent the first game equipment designed by human beings. And if you're familiar with the work of the ancient Greek historian Herodotus, you might know this history, which is the history of who invented games and why. Herodotus says that games, particularly dice games, were invented in the kingdom of Lydia during a time of famine. Apparently, there was such a severe famine that the king of Lydia decided that they had to do something crazy. People were suffering. People were fighting. It was an extreme situation, they needed an extreme solution. So, according to Herodotus, they invented dice games and they set up a kingdom-wide policy: On one day, everybody would eat, and on the next day, everybody would play games. And they would be so immersed in playing the dice games because games are so engaging, and immerse us in such satisfying blissful productivity, they would ignore the fact that they had no food to eat. And then on the next day, they would play games; and on the next day, they would eat. And according to Herodotus, they passed 18 years this way, surviving through a famine by eating on one day and playing games on the next. Now, this is exactly, I think, how we're using games today. We're using games to escape real-world suffering. We're using games to get away from everything that's broken in the real environment, everything that's not satisfying about real life, and we're getting what we need from games. But it doesn't have to end there. This is really exciting. According to Herodotus, after 18 years the famine wasn't getting better, so the king decided they would play one final dice game. They divided the entire kingdom in half. They played one dice game, and the winners of that game got to go on an epic adventure. They would leave Lydia, and they would go out in search of a new place to live, leaving behind just enough people to survive on the resources that were available, and hopefully to take their civilization somewhere else where they could thrive. Now, this sounds crazy, right? But recently, DNA evidence has shown that the Etruscans, who then led to the Roman Empire, actually share the same DNA as the ancient Lydians. And so, recently, scientists have suggested that Herodotus' crazy story is actually true. And geologists have found evidence of a global cooling that lasted for nearly 20 years that could have explained the famine. So, this crazy story might be true. They might have actually saved their culture by playing games, escaping to games for 18 years, and then been so inspired, and knew so much about how to come together with games, that they actually saved the entire civilization that way. Okay, we can do that. We've been playing Warcraft since 1994. That was the first real-time strategy game from the World of Warcraft series. That was 16 years ago. They played dice games for 18 years, we've been playing Warcraft for 16 years. I say we are ready for our own epic game. Now, they had half the civilization go off in search of a new world, so that's where I get my 21 billion hours a week of game-play from. Let's get half of us to agree to spend an hour a day playing games, until we solve real-world problems. Now, I know you're asking, "How are we going to solve real world problems in games?" Well, that's what I have devoted my work to over the past few years, at The Institute For The Future. We have this banner in our offices in Palo Alto, and it expresses our view of how we should try to relate to the future. We do not want to try to predict the future. What we want to do is make the future. We want to imagine the best-case scenario outcome, and then we want to empower people to make that outcome a reality. We want to imagine epic wins, and then give people the means to achieve the epic win. I'm just going to very briefly show you three games that I've made that are an attempt to give people the means to create epic wins in their own futures. So, this is World Without Oil. We made this game in 2007. This is an online game in which you try to survive an oil shortage. The oil shortage is fictional, but we put enough online content out there for you to believe that it's real, and to live your real life as if we've run out of oil. So when you come to the game, you sign up, you tell us where you live, and then we give you real-time news, videos, data feeds that show you exactly how much oil costs, what's not available, how food supply is being affected, how transportation is being affected, if schools are closed, if there is rioting, and you have to figure out how you would live your real life as if this were true. And then we ask you to blog about it, to post videos, to post photos. We piloted this game with 1,700 players in 2007, and we've tracked them for the three years since. And I can tell you that this is a transformative experience. Nobody wants to change how they live just because it's good for the world, or because we're supposed to. But if you immerse them in an epic adventure and tell them, "We've run out of oil. This is an amazing story and adventure for you to go on. Challenge yourself to see how you would survive," most of our players have kept up the habits that they learned in this game. So, for the next world-saving game, we decided to aim higher: bigger problem than just peak oil. We did a game called Superstruct at The Institute For The Future. And the premise was a supercomputer has calculated that humans have only 23 years left on the planet. This supercomputer was called the Global Extinction Awareness System, of course. We asked people to come online almost like a Jerry Bruckheimer movie. You know Jerry Bruckheimer movies, you form a dream team -- you've got the astronaut, the scientist, the ex-convict, and they all have something to do to save the world. (Laughter) But in our game, instead of just having five people on the dream team, we said, "Everybody's on the dream team, and it's your job to invent the future of energy, the future of food, the future of health, the future of security and the future of the social safety net." We had 8,000 people play that game for eight weeks. They came up with 500 insanely creative solutions that you can go online, if you Google "Superstruct," and see. So, finally, the last game, we're launching it March 3rd. This is a game done with the World Bank Institute. If you complete the game you will be certified by the World Bank Institute, as a Social Innovator, class of 2010. Working with universities all over sub-Saharan Africa, and we are inviting them to learn social innovation skills. We've got a graphic novel, we've got leveling up in skills like local insight, knowledge networking, sustainability, vision and resourcefulness. I would like to invite all of you to please share this game with young people, anywhere in the world, particularly in developing areas, who might benefit from coming together to try to start to imagine their own social enterprises to save the world. So, I'm going to wrap up now. I want to ask a question. What do you think happens next? We've got all these amazing gamers, we've got these games that are kind of pilots of what we might do, but none of them have saved the real world yet. Well I hope that you will agree with me that gamers are a human resource that we can use to do real-world work, that games are a powerful platform for change. We have all these amazing superpowers: blissful productivity, the ability to weave a tight social fabric, this feeling of urgent optimism and the desire for epic meaning. I really hope that we can come together to play games that matter, to survive on this planet for another century. And that's my hope, that you will join me in making and playing games like this. When I look forward to the next decade, I know two things for sure: that we can make any future we can imagine, and we can play any games we want. So, I say: Let the world-changing games begin. Thank you. (Applause)